New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Lost in Translation
DECIPHERING THE DESIGN JARGON WITH AN ARCHITECT
Every profession develops a language. Lawyers and doctors have terms of art and technicalities that are inscrutable to the rest of us. Their special knowledge is why we must use them. Designers are different. Everyone has a home, but often the words used by architects and designers are intentionally obtuse, simulating the value of other professions whose expertise carries with it an obscure syntax.
Why make the most elemental reality, our home, a place of posturing pretense? I think that some architects and designers pose as oracles of cool, hiding their preconceptions in language that is hard to understand, but, they hope, will confer wisdom, insight and value. I think its analogous to food. We all eat, but on The Food Channel, the chefs talk about “mouth feel” (instead of texture) or the “unforgettable bite” (instead of a great taste) or “needing acidity” (instead of being sweet).
As an architect I have been accused of serving up “word salad” when I try to describe a building, or another architect’s work. It easy to fall into the fine arts lingo, using a language where rooms are “zones,” windows and doors are “openings” or even worse, “fenestration.” Trim becomes “datum.” Walls become “planes” and doorways become “voids.” Seeing outside becomes “transparency” and spending less on heat is “sustainable.”
A decade ago, a great writer and architect Witold Rybcznski wrote a piece “A Discourse on Emerging Tectonic Visualization and the Effects of Materiality on Praxis – or an essay on the ridiculous way architects talk.” Before that article was published, architecture professor Tom Porter wrote the book “Archispeak” because he was a critic in a design class where students had “an outpouring of architectural terms including ‘co-mingling space,’ ‘layering,’ ‘articulate’ and ‘transition’” to the point where a fellow critic declared ‘Fine, but what does all of this mean?’”
Peter Chapman has worked at The Taunton Press for over 30 years and is currently the executive editor for Taunton Books focusing on residential design. He was once asked to be on a design jury with architects, judging projects that were submitted for an awards program. Sitting with the architects, Chapman relates “I didn’t know what they were talking about. The experience brought it home to me that I didn’t understand them, and that they were trying to impress me, and themselves.”
The language of design is easily mocked, and it may have its recent origins to a larger cultural evolution. Kurt Andersen is a writer and was the design critic for The New Yorker, New York and Time Magazine, and has an insight on the origins of “archispeak;” “I think it happened a lot in the 1980’s and 1990’s when so-called ‘Theory,’ with a capital T, was taking over academic humanities. There’s no reason that artists or visual artists or architects shouldn’t write well, but bad writing in architecture is one of the reasons I started to write about it.”
Gina Calabro is the executive director/CEO of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA Connecticut). She is more optimistic. Having worked with architects over the last decade, Calabro notes “When I first started with AIA in Connecticut, there were words thrown out at me that I had not heard before. Even when working with the home builders, I found myself saying ‘you have to speak to me in English.’ But I'm seeing more and more of the younger generation who understand that they
need to speak understandably.”
The conventional wisdom is that architects design only 2% of all the new homes in America. Connecticut only requires an architect on buildings that are larger than 5,000 square feet. When stock designs are offered for little or no money in states that do not require an architect, the cost and time that any designer might create is viewed as a liability. If that liability is coupled with intentional obscurity, the benefits of using a design
professional are lost.
Unlike food where simply tasting your dinner or having a glass of wine cuts through any of the language used to describe it, design requires a great deal of time and money to create a building. However the internet has changed the way we think about design. Architects or designers are judged by what their images on their websites reveal. But that is like tasting food by looking at the pictures in a cookbook. If you think that your home needs a rethinking, or just that you
need to express yourself in your home, the images on those websites are just the start.
Outcomes that we can see are only what architects present, and if you need to use a professional to rethink your home, the next step after the Internet scroll is a conversation. If the words that are used confuse you, it may be a good idea to keep looking for the right partner in your home’s evolution.