How Designers Think

How designers think? Wrong question: they think like everybody else. How designers think when they design is the correct one. I am afraid, the works of Cross, Rowe and Lawson answer the first question. Kant, Fiedler and Philippe Junod answer the right one which is much more complex, I'm afraid again.

Architecture, politics and sex

Liebeskind skyscraper Milan, (Archinet)

The politicy of “putting cities in the map” through iconic buildings (gherkins) has finally bumped into an awkward subject for urbanism and architecture: sex. The problem starts when politicians think of architecture as a source of meanings (individual and collective), and not as a chance of constructing artistically.

The polemic on the “impotent” (Berlusconi) skyscraper of Daniel Liebeskind in Milan is the result of forcing architecture to represent almost literally what the public should see: “the meaning of the Holocaust” in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the “globe shattered into fragments” in the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, an “open book” in the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and “the Orion Constellation” in the London Metropolitan University.

The paradox is that the impulse of being represented by buildings is precisely what keeps architecture alive. Alejandro de la Sota was a expert in doing architecture while people only asked him to do a house, a school or a Council Hall. Konrad Fiedler used to say that "the form, which is the content, does not represent but itself": every architect should remember that when taking the briefing form politicians. This link opens the article "Not manly enough" Berlusconi´s verdict on Libeskind work, by Arifa Akbar in The Independent.