A hundred weeks of curiosity.
This is the 100th edition of Thoughts for the Weekend.
When I started in June 2023, there wasn’t a grand plan — more a marketing push after launching a new website, an effort to explain what I do a bit more clearly.
The idea was to shed some light on what an architect does, talk about some past projects and link into other marketing efforts. And I guess that’s kind of what it is — though I imagine that to a new reader, when I’ve gone off on one about milk in European countries, smart motorways or even writing a pop song it must provoke a: ‘what the hell is this’.
You might think that even if you’ve read a few!
At various times I’ve tried to reel it in and get back on the obvious topic, but this architect’s mind can’t be constrained to simply building or extending houses. And there likely lies the difference between an architect, an engineer, or an architectural technician. Architects are the weird outliers in the construction industry.
I blame the education system. In a good way.
Architecture is taught as a philosophy about making places, spaces and the society that inhabits them. Unlike the design or construction of a, say, steel frame, it’s a wider cultural activity. It is one of the arts after all.
The difficulty is that art must meet science to turn ideas into reality, and whilst a few architects stick to writing and academia, most of us want to get things built.
In architecture, drawing is our language — not pictures but instruction. Each line translates an idea formed with a client into something that can be built, bridging the space between imagination, regulation, and physics.
I’ve given a lecture this week on drawing. I used a recent new-build house as a case study to show how drawings produced by many different disciplines over the life of a project ultimately lead to a dream home. From the measuring surveyor through the various engineering disciplines and specialist manufacturers to the landscape designer, all are coordinated by the architect, mostly through drawings, to enable the builder to deliver the vision.
And that takes us back to the bigger picture.
Architecture is informed by everything around us. How places work, how technology changes, and how people use and inhabit places. It is a lifelong exercise in careful observation and understanding translated into physical form.
This needs a creative mind —one that doesn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of a single discipline but can interpret broader societal influences. An architect is a curious generalist. Someone who needs to understand how AI is changing media, why milk is the way it is and what we can learn from stone circles.
If TFTW has wandered, it’s only followed the same path my mind takes when designing — from curiosity to connection to construction. That same curiosity builds ideas for places and buildings — ideas that, even in small ways, find their way into what gets built.
If you’ve been here from the beginning or just a few weeks, thanks for reading.
Have a good weekend.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
A link to last week’s design video on my YouTube channel.
A vision from Portsmouth from TFTW 32.
Is ‘medievalcore’ the next big thing in interiors?
Circular Mexican house as “solar clock”
Main Image credit: A peek inside an architect’s head — where ideas climb ladders between drawings, trains, and ancient stones. (MidJourney)
