Pure Process

At the very beginning of my training as an architect, I remember studying a list of definitions of what architecture has meant throughout history; definitions that implicitly foregrounded the social acceptance of architects as professionals who were entitled to comment or influence matters outside of their own field. Architecture was taught as a discipline defined by its results. While the notion of process was loudly asserted in many other parts of my education, the history of Architecture (with capital A) was always led by the final outcomes, even in unbuilt or utopic examples of architecture. The history of architectural labor, means and tools was never told. In that context it was easy to see the architect as a one-man-band who was capable of solving almost everything that they aim for. The power that was given to these ‘brave’ characters, blackboxing all the complexities and struggle to achieve results, set the perfect environment for a top-to-bottom definition of architecture. These streamlined messages diminish certain aspects of the field for the sake of a clear narrative. Still, the process bears the intentions behind a particular end, the humans involved in the design with the tools they use, the negotiations with counterparts, legislation, the political system where it sits (or which they unwittingly reproduce), among other factors. I always made the wrong questions like: ‘How do they divide the work in this studio?’; ‘How do they know that this is the final stage?’, ‘Have they talked to the neighbours?’, ‘Why don’t they say what they want?’, ‘Why the way they describe things sound so universal?’, ‘Who is the architect addressing this to?’, ‘How is the user like?’.

Architectural discourse many times happens as a post-production device, making a list of effects, rather than making the most of the intermediate stages. It was right after I finished my studies, along with a couple of short experiences in the professional side, that I realised that architecture (lowercase ‘a’) work for me didn’t resemble much what I was taught; it rather was a caricature, or extracted detail of all the possible things I thought we were ready to do. While my colleagues started accepting the situation—probably many of them were considerably more happy than I was with that scenario—doing repetitive tasks in large architecture offices, or working extenuating unpaid extra-hours in small studios, I decided to look out to something that had already accompanied my work for a long time, and which gave me a bigger control over the whole project: graphic design. Having, at that time, few literacy on the technicalities of graphic design, but well trained eyes and hands from all the worked hours in the field, I got into a much quieter discipline. Graphic design seemed a field that was one with its own techniques, pure process. It is a discipline that clearly answers those wrong questions that Architecture only answers off the record. It was easy to trace back to intentions, or to foreground the intermediate stages of any project.

While architectural objects (let’s say buildings, although they are not the sole example of architects production) were proxies of their design—detached once they are accomplished—graphic design objects foreground techniques and methods. Graphic design, as many other professions, after embracing the digital, and more recently with the advent of automation, has reduced the time spent in technical practicalities. Being liberated from it’s technicalities, the prosaic processes seem to be very close in terms of methodology and matters of concern to architecture. At this point it seems right to ask: ‘What if we are, in the end, doing the same?’, ‘What if we are looking at the same thing from different angles?’. I have been making these questions to myself for years, having many difficulties discerning issues such as working materials, techniques, authorities or scope that could be exclusive to graphic design or architecture. Having done extensive research, interviews and putting into practice many ideas of possible connections between graphic design and architecture, the dots are still difficult to connect. For this reason, and out of the most sincere naiveté, here follows an open list of provocations to encourage a bottom-up bridging between architecture and graphic design processes →