Summer Reads Wrap-up

So, aside from these last few entries, I did a summer reading list for architects with hardly any book about architecture, didn’t I? Loads of them were poetry, some were non-fiction on anthropology and personal reflections, there have been novels on ruins, memory, rooms.

I want to close, though, on something broader than a recap, because a month of doing this convinced me of a claim I always like to defend: an architect who only reads technical books, or — God forbid — self-help shit about productivity and leadership, is not becoming a better professional. They’re becoming a narrower one.

I understand the appeal, because a book about time-blocking or the seven habits of effective whatever promises a direct, extractable return: read this, apply the framework, measure the improvement. Technical literature promises something even more reliable: read this, know the code clause, cite it correctly. Sometimes they’re legitimate, necessary categories of reading, and neither one, on its own or even in combination, will teach you the thing that actually separates a competent set of drawings from a building somebody actually wants to be inside. That thing doesn’t have a framework. It has to be built the slow way, out of material that has to do with philosophy, sociology and yes, poetry.

What a month of poets and novelists actually gave us, technically speaking, is not a single usable detail, a single project management insight. What it gave us instead was vocabulary for conditions we deal with constantly and have no good language for: Rilke’s patience, Dillard’s insistence that seeing has to be learned, Machado’s nine lines about the road.

This is what the non-technical shelf is actually for, and it’s not decoration, and it’s not enrichment in the vague, brochure sense of the word.

Judgment — the thing you’re actually being paid for, past a certain point in a career, more than any specific technical competence — gets built out of exposure to how other disciplines have already solved the problems you’re looking at, problems of describing ambiguity, loss, attention, time, and materials. Architecture runs into all five of those constantly, and its own internal literature is, frankly, not where the best thinking about them has historically happened. I hope you enjoyed our journey, and I’ll see you with the next seasonal selection (hopefully some Gothic in October).