Writing Architecture

A Practical Guide to Clear Communication about the Built Environment

Carter Wiseman

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781595341501
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Professional Practice in Architecture

Writing Architecture considers the process, methods, and value of architecture writing based on Wiseman’s 30 years of experience in writing, editing, and teaching young architects how to write. This book creatively tackles a problematic issue that Wiseman considers crucial to successful architecture writing: clarity of thinking and expression. He argues that because we live our lives within the built environment, architecture is the most comprehensive and complex of all art forms. Written as a primer for both college-level students and practitioners, Writing Architecture acknowledges and explores the boundaries between different techniques of architecture writing from myriad perspectives and purposes. Using excerpts from writers in different genres and from different historical periods, Wiseman offers a unique and authoritative perspective on the comprehensible writing skills needed for success.

–[ ONE ]–

STRUCTURE

Getting Your Thoughts in a Row

LIKE THE ARCHITECTURAL design process itself, writing about architecture requires students and practitioners to concentrate on essentials and organize them in a coherent fashion. But most writers on architecture—or any other subject—tend to start typing in hopes of finding out what they want to say. Worse, they may persuade themselves that if they wait long enough, or do enough research, inspiration will strike and carry them to a successful conclusion by sheer momentum. Not a chance!

Every experienced writer learns at some point that disciplined application is the key to success. The Germans have a wonderfully expressive term to encourage students to apply themselves. It is Sitzfleisch, which can be roughly translated as “keeping one’s butt in the chair.”

The challenge for the butt’s owner is to overcome the anxiety that inevitably accompanies the beginning of any serious writing. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said during the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The same might be said of writing. In a foreword to The Elements of Style—that slim classic of instruction in English usage—the veteran New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell reminds us that “writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.”¹

Our educational system has made writing harder. We are all natural storytellers. When meeting a friend after an interesting day at work, we usually start with something like “You’ll never believe what happened at the office!” Then we will fill in some background, move on to describing the events of the day, and wrap up with a conclusion about their impact. That represents the basic structure of any piece of nonfiction. However, when we turn to our own writing, our innate narrative skills are often frustrated by “rubrics,” “prompts,” departmental “guidelines,” “accepted practice,” and other restrictions that often specify too much (“five paragraphs,” “two quotes per paragraph,” “one-inch margins,” “MLA style”) without supporting the main mission of getting one’s point across. If writing strikes fear into your brain and your fingers, you are in good company. But there are ways to overcome this fear and take some control of the process out of the hands of mechanical teachers, petty editors, and meddlesome bosses. An important first step is to realize that those teachers, editors, and bosses are not necessarily any smarter than you are. They have been on the job longer than you have, which means they are more familiar with the material, but there is no guarantee that their skills at architectural analysis or presentation are naturally any better than yours.

Most writers will admit that after they have resharpened all their pencils, rearranged all the furniture in their rooms, and reorganized all the books on their shelves in order to avoid touching the keyboard, they play a few psychological games with themselves to get the creative process moving. One of the simplest games is to take the number of words the project requires and divide it by the amount of time available to write it. If you are facing a ten-page academic paper, journal article, or presentation to a client, you may be looking at about 2,500 words, assuming 250 words to a double-spaced page. If you have two weeks in which to write the piece, and you take the weekends off, you have ten days available for writing. Dividing 2,500 words by ten days means that all you have to do is to write a page a day! (If you write more, you can reward yourself with a breather. If you write less, add an hour next time.)

But suppose, you say, what you write is murky and disorganized. What seemed brilliant at bedtime may seem lame in the morning. Not to worry. At least you have something to fix, and the process of fixing—or editing—will quickly take your mind off the fear that threatened to paralyze you at the outset. And no matter how much you have written, you get a regular (if small) reward. That reward is checking the number of words you have put down since you started the session, a calculation that computers can make at a stroke. If your final goal is 2,500 words, and you have written one page, you are one-tenth of the way home! And you can be secure in the knowledge that if you keep the pace, you will inevitably get to where you are going in the time allotted. But you can never get there by standing still and waiting for the muse to appear.

There are two other sources of anxiety that tend to handicap writers on architecture at the very beginning. One has to do with the people you are writing for—your audience. Students often ask if they should have an academic or professional readership in mind. Every field has some level of specialty, and readers familiar with it expect to be addressed with respect for that knowledge. Lawyers, doctors, and other professionals all have their own “lingo,” but that is merely a matter of terminology. What is “dispositive” for an attorney is simply “conclusive” for the rest of us. My recommendation is that you write for yourself—an intelligent, literate person with a strong interest in the material. You can always dress up the language as you edit, but no amount of dressing up will compensate for a lack of clear thinking and organization.

Another source of concern is style. After Ernest Hemingway began to write his lean stories of lonely heroes demonstrating grace under pressure, his use of short words and his lack of standard punctuation spawned generations of imitators. But the key to Hemingway’s success was the clarity of his message about the relationship of his characters to their fate, not the prose through which he expressed it. In the end, style emerges naturally because each of us chooses words differently from everyone else based on our own experience with language. Without realizing it, you will develop a style that reflects your own personality; you should never try to be someone else.

Once these sources of fear are under control, the planning begins. The process should start with thinking through the issues and looking for an idea or argument. That should lead to an effective first step: creating a working title. This is not as easy as it might seem. If your assignment is to write about a new interpretation of Le Corbusier, your first reaction might be to title the paper “Le Corbusier Reconsidered.” This may be factually accurate, but it is not particularly helpful, since finding an original approach to major architects is the goal of most scholars and critics. While something merely descriptive may be suitable for an encyclopedia entry, something more inviting usually is a better way to engage the reader.

An example is Frank Lloyd Wright—the Lost Years, 1910–1922: A Study of Influence, written by the architectural historian Anthony Alofsin. The focus is Wright’s travels in Europe, which the architect was careful not to document lest he leave a record that critics might use to suggest he was not quite the original genius he claimed to be. The title not only describes the book’s contents, but also provides an invitation to find out how Wright was influenced during those “lost years.” Another good example is Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Written by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, the book recorded their groundbreaking analysis of what they saw as the positive architectural lessons provided by the much-maligned Nevada “strip.” The title tells readers what they can expect to get (information), but also that it is coming from a source from which no one expected to learn anything about high design. Don’t worry about making a commitment by inventing a title before you begin writing. It is merely a device to focus your thinking, and it will almost always change as your research and analysis proceed.

Even though you are writing nonfiction, you can call on your creative imagination to help you get started. Indeed, having made up a title, you can actually accomplish a great deal by mocking up the rest of your piece in advance. This may sound heretical—or even dishonest—to some students, but just remember that the final product will be altered and verified by facts. Just be sure to identify your sources. The ease with which computers now allow writers to cut and paste documents has exposed even Pulitzer Prize–winners to charges of plagiarism, though the cause was usually inattention rather than deliberate theft of intellectual property.

A surprisingly useful tool in this initial creative process is the old-fashioned three-by-five-inch index card. While these low-tech items have lost much of their appeal since the arrival of the computer—and several computer programs provide a similar approach—the cards retain tactile virtues that digitization cannot duplicate. To illustrate this, consider the proposed paper about Le Corbusier. A common first step in writing such a piece would be to develop a basic bibliography, something many academic courses require even before you do an outline. The problem is that hundreds of books and dissertations have been written on Le Corbusier, and no writer can expect to absorb all of them without panicking. Instead, arm yourself with a deck of index cards and start putting down on each of them in a few words all the things a reader (such as you) might want to know about the subject. Those could include such fundamental information as the architect’s birth and death dates, the design philosophies that influenced him, the aesthetic climate in which he matured, his critics, his admirers, his role in the design for the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and his expressive use of concrete.

Regardless of what you write about Le Corbusier, you will need to address most of these topics, as well as many others. However, you probably will not want to do that in the same random sequence in which the topics occurred to you. By putting them on cards and then spreading them out on a desk—or the floor—you will be able to shift them around according to which ones seem related to each other. For instance, the card for critics might go best with the one about Le Corbusier’s work in India. Or it might go better with the aesthetic reception of his designs. His role in the UN project would mean nothing if you had not prepared the reader with some discussion of Le Corbusier’s history in urban planning, especially the 1925 “Voisin Plan” for Paris, which would have eliminated much of the Marais district.

Moving the cards around based on these affinities will inevitably create a sequence for your essay. It would make no sense to include Le Corbusier’s birth date at the end of the paper, and you would not be able to discuss his “Voisin Plan” without describing his contacts with industrialists. These are mere mechanical adjustments to make sure your cart is not in front of your horse. A more important outcome of this card game is that it tends to provoke thinking about the direction of the paper as a whole. For instance, if you find yourself drawn to the UN/urban-planning aspect of Le Corbusier’s career, you may want to do enough research on the topic to find out what is, and is not, in the literature. If you are interested in the architect’s activities during the Second World War, you might want to look into the way other artists (Pablo Picasso, Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier) dealt with the collaborationist government in power at the time. Without your noticing it, a theme is likely to emerge, and that in turn is likely to provoke a change in the working title. The original “Le Corbusier Reconsidered” might become “Le Corbusier and the Morality of Art under the Nazis,” or “Le Corbusier’s Urbanism and the American City.”

A useful result of this process is that you will begin to sense how much research you will need to do on a particular aspect of the paper. This not only means that you will not have to read everything on your subject before you start writing, which is impossible; it also means you can avoid a dangerous trap. Since few writers actually look forward to the moment when they set the first words down on the page or the screen, many use research as a way to procrastinate. Generations of writers have persuaded themselves that if they read just one more book or article, they will be ready to write. But when the deadline is suddenly upon them, they realize that they have actually been putting off the main event. The hazard is that, while doing research is indeed part of the writing process (unlike watching television or reading mystery novels), doing too much of it is a waste of time, no matter how defensible it might seem.

At this point, you are ready to transfer the information from the cards to the computer screen. Writers who have never had to work with typewriters and carbon paper have no idea what a blessing the computer—briefly known as a word processor—has become. In times past, even a few changes to the text meant retyping much or all of a paper. Major changes, such as transposing paragraphs or otherwise altering the sequence of the writing, meant physically cutting the manuscript into pieces with scissors, reshuffling them, and then taping the fragments together before the retyping could even begin. Now, of course, these maneuvers can be done with a few taps of the computer keys. One disadvantage of the process is that we no longer have paper records to show how a piece of writing developed. So we have lost the opportunity to go back through drafts of a writer’s work to see how it was polished and improved. But that is a problem more for scholars than for writers, who will never again have to deal with the physical burdens of editing on paper.

Writers who experienced the pain of revision through successive drafts had one advantage, though: they tended to think more before they wrote. That is different from writing and hoping that thinking will catch up. Seasoned teachers have told me that the quality of the writing they see has gone down at about the same rate as computer use has increased. This is because too many writers have come to believe that the computer can do it all—not just check spelling and grammar; adjust fonts, margins, and spacing; but actually think. Many of my own students have confessed that their process of writing a paper involved putting it off as long as possible, and then, when the deadline loomed, typing until the required length was achieved, correcting errors flagged by the computer, and turning in the result. Since the computer makes a paper look perfect (as it does some design proposals), the writer can be seduced into thinking that it is perfect. Not so! No amount of fiddling with fonts will compensate for advance planning and clarity of expression, just as in the design of a good building.

The key to success at this point is structure: how the piece is put together. If you have used the index cards (or a comparable computer program) to identify a logical sequence for your information, you are already in a strong position.

Many years of writing in various media on a multitude of topics have persuaded me that virtually all good nonfiction has certain basic components. A good prose essay will begin with something that brings readers in and encourages them to read further. There are many terms for this component, such as “hook” or “lead,” but I prefer “invitation,” because that describes to me the real mission of the writing at the outset. Most often, the invitation involves some measure of tension that must be resolved by the rest of the piece. An article on the nineteenth-century architect Frank Furness might begin this way: “At ...