Hello. Welcome to a new [clears throat] … brand new channel here on YouTube …” In the summer and fall of 2019, I spent months trying to read a single short script to a camera. At the time, I had no idea this awkward hobby would grow into a long-term project making videos, nor could I have imagined how soon and abruptly the practice would become ubiquitous for everyone, as communication shifted largely to Zoom during the pandemic lockdowns.

Public speaking—particularly speaking to a camera—does not come naturally to me. Over several years and countless hours of doing it, I gradually pieced together a phrase to help myself achieve the right mindset for performing the task effectively. That phrase has become surprisingly powerful, challenging many of my long-standing assumptions about architectural knowledge, its pedagogy, and its dissemination. This broader application is what I aim to share here, if it also serves as a helpful camera-speaking tip, consider that a bonus. The phrase is: 

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend about something they’ll want to talk about at a party.

At first glance, the grammar might feel a bit clumsy and the sentiment somewhat crass, as if architectural knowledge is reduced to cocktail chatter. But beneath the surface, I’ve found unexpected depth. Let’s unpack it, beginning with “pretend.”

Pretend …

Pretending can reveal new truths by creating a hypothetical space where reality is tested, stretched, and reframed. Yet, ironically, pretending is also fundamental to empathy and sincerity. Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the “alienation effect,” or the deliberate distancing of the performer from their role to deepen critical awareness, is useful here. In Brecht’s terms, pretending allows the actor to be both inside and outside the character simultaneously, creating a double consciousness that makes authenticity legible.

Architecture itself involves significant pretending: imagining spaces, projecting into future scenarios, crafting models as if they are, or will become, reality. Architects, therefore, should be predisposed to this mode of thinking and adept at harnessing its benefits. Pretending helps craft meaningful connections, tectonic and human.

Pretend you’re speaking …

Speech is more than written text with sound; it adds new layers of discrete meaning. In an episode of HBO’s Barry, two acting students perform an entire conversation using only the phrase “I love you.” With each repetition, the meaning shifts dramatically. First, with anger—“I LOVE you!”—shouted to demand belief. Then, with disbelief—“I love YOU?”—questioning the other’s worthiness. And, finally, spoken barely above a whisper—“I love you”—with exhaustion, heartbreak, and resignation. Tone, timing, posture, and context become part of the message, often more powerfully than the words themselves.

Architects are routinely asked to express their ideas aloud in reviews, critiques, client meetings, and lectures. Yet surprisingly little attention in architectural discourse directly addresses the gap between conceptual language and embodied communication. Instead, we rely on clichés: “Your buildings need to stand on their own because you won’t be there to explain them.” But this disregards that speech itself is essential to how architecture is understood and valued.

The design studio is one of the most unique and expensive aspects of architectural education and is fundamentally structured around the belief that spoken performance matters. As a facilities administrator, I’ve had to justify the spatial footprint of the studio model many times. From a university’s viewpoint, studios are profoundly inefficient. A lecture hall can serve eight classes a day, while a studio might serve only one. The same square footage generates far less tuition revenue. Yet we fight to keep these rituals of speaking alive: the off-hour exchanges, desk critiques, pinups, and juried reviews, all integral to our discipline’s culture and the evaluation of architectural ideas.

Speech has fascinated psychoanalysts, structuralists, and post-structuralists in ways that echo architectural concerns, yet differ in crucial respects. Like built form, speech exists between categories: part material, part ephemeral, a signifier that disappears as it emerges. Is speech the carrier of thought, or thought itself? Is it personal, private, an extension of self? Or is it impersonal, communal, filtered through linguistic structures that precede and exceed us? Is “my voice” really mine, or merely an audible trace of systems I inhabit?

Even spatially, sound behaves differently from the light we so frequently represent in drawings and renderings. Sound reflects and penetrates, lingering and leaking through walls. (Speaking of leaks, our school’s facilities do plenty of that, too.)

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend …

Imagining an audience of a friend creates a context for calibrating tone, language, and physicality. Speaking to a camera is not like lecturing in a hall. These days, and particularly on social media, it’s experienced intimately by one person, alone, on a small screen. Overperforming in this context by speaking too loudly or gesturing too broadly feels alienating. Shouting doesn’t translate when the audience is holding you in their hand. The editor Walter Murch famously created miniature paper cutouts of people watching his editing console’s TV-size screen to help him imagine the film received in a theater. Perhaps I should create a giant cutout to turn my computer monitor into a smartphone.

Either way, speaking to a friend about something you genuinely care about involves a heightened level of commitment and authenticity. With a friend, you’re comfortable and familiar. They might not share your expertise, but they’re likely smart, curious, and open. You don’t condescend or talk down to them; you speak honestly and clearly, inviting dialogue and connection.

Crucially, friendship also allows for excitement—authentic excitement that risks potential ridicule or rejection. Perhaps that’s why it is so uncommon in traditional architectural contexts. The payoff is that it invites others to care alongside you. Otherwise, it’s a lot to ask of your audience to care more than you do. 

Furthermore, imagining a friend makes it easier to explore ideas you haven’t fully mastered. You can admit your uncertainties, test half-formed notions, and strengthen or shift your perspective through dialogue. This framework isn’t about establishing authority; it fosters mutually rewarding exchanges that enrich and deepen everyone involved. As a generalist discipline, required to know a little about everything, this too is a critical skill for exploring architectural ideas of all kinds.

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend about something …

The word something has a precise kind of vagueness and a subtle promise embedded within it. Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty argue that consciousness is always oriented toward something—a thing perceived before naming, before categorizing. It occupies the world as we encounter it, still fuzzy around the edges, existing before we say explicitly, “there’s a thing here.”

This pre-naming condition matters deeply in spaces such as YouTube, where every engagement is initially decided upon with only limited information at hand, namely a title and a thumbnail image. Something needs to be concrete enough to suggest a clear understanding, yet open-ended enough to intrigue, inviting the audience into the co-construction of meaning. If too ambiguous, it repels; if too concrete, it doesn’t spark curiosity. The best “something” strikes a balance, offering a compelling entry point while leaving space for exploration, interpretation, and discovery.

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend about something they want …

This section focuses on audience desire. What you’re delivering is something your friend, or your viewer, actively wants to know, not merely something you want to tell them. (I’m looking at you, AIA.) Why will they want to know this? What element speaks directly to them? While “want” isn’t the same as “need,” it expresses a felt absence, a yearning toward something that will complete or extend them. “Want” points forward, signaling agency and momentum.

It is tempting to confuse what we wish people cared about with what genuinely captures their interest. Understanding desire requires empathy: actively imagining the other’s perspective and aspirations. In architecture, this means not just sharing knowledge, but crafting it to resonate with what truly engages someone by capturing their imagination, sparking their curiosity, or addressing their concerns. It’s about identifying and articulating that gap between what is currently known and what might be known, explored, or even transformed by what you offer.

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend about something they want to talk about …

This part is about transmission. Not just what an audience wants to know, but what they want to repeat. The idea should be clear and sticky, so they can bring it up later. That’s the logic behind “building new audiences.” This goal is something you hear stated often by architects, critics, and cultural institutions. 

Virality is the mechanistic model of how audiences are constructed via sharing. An idea’s effectiveness is based on how easily it moves and the percentage of people capable of receiving it. This kind of sharing accepts mutation through its replication, challenging notions of authorship. The most effective ideas in this model are compressed low-friction expressions of high-friction feelings such as anxiety, irony, shame, joy. Their success also lies in their precision and ambiguity, familiar enough to feel true and strange enough to feel novel. 

Clarity, compression, and resonance allows ideas to move and be retold.

Pretend you’re speaking to a friend about something they will want to talk about at a party.

This final bit of the phrase shapes how a thought is structured to survive distraction—structured to linger for someone to recall inexactly and still pass on faithfully. This doesn’t mean repeating your point over and over or dumbing things down. In fact, both are unwelcome in spaces like YouTube. Repetition flattens rhythm, and conveying pre-existing knowledge alienates knowing audiences. But revisiting ideas by building on them, recontextualizing them, and adding layers does work well.

While it is the imaginary friend I’m referring to attending this imaginary party in my phrase, party language deserves its own consideration. After all, it is the gift you’re offering. So it’s important to understand the practice. Party language is not quite a lecture, nor is it small talk. It is performative, improvisational, and semi-sincere. You’re meant to be yourself, but not too much. You’re performing familiarity and spontaneity, authenticity and artifice. This is what Erving Goffman called the presentation of self in everyday life. At a party, one curates a legible, likeable, drinkable version with a rotating display of story fragments that are calibrated to the room. This looseness allows people to test ideas and try on roles dictated by the spatial logic of clustering that shifts in dynamic relationship with the arrangement of rooms. Each microclimate carries its own cocktail of norms, requiring ideas to be moldable to suit. Inside this complexity, thought becomes social, casual, and alive—a great entry point for one’s first steps into thinking about how the world works with buildings as active participants. 

And then there’s the exit. Party conversations don’t conclude; they drift, dissolve, and get hijacked. You’re meant to glide in and out. 

Featured photo by Robert Becker.