Talking to a management consultant at a holiday party, I was asked about the benefits teaching architecture has for my resume, qualifications, image, etc. “There are zero career impacts beyond the effort,” I responded. The pay is, by far, a net negative cash flow; the three afternoons and 20 hours a week mean I work seven days a week, and, as with any human endeavor, outcomes do not always meet hopes. But, at 68, I knew it was time to use teaching to figure out what I had been doing in architecture these last 50 years.

Teaching design at the University of Hartford has forced me to understand the way I design things. Unlike the tradition of employing the fine arts canon to my work, using abstracted definitions and the application of conceptual things like “space,” “form,” “line,” and “plane,” I create work in real time and culture, including the people who will live with what I help create.

Architecture is a human creation that discovers the joy of beauty. That experience may be described in canon, but that is not how I create things. If I teach what I know, I have to understand how I design, how I discover beauty. I had taught before—stints at Roger Williams University and Yale College—earlier in my career, but after 40 years, what I do had to be what I taught: the ethic of adjunct faculty teaching.

I took the task seriously. I started by defining my mindset, as noted in Common Edge a year ago. But after a year, I knew that understanding what I do in the making of architecture is a way to teach how beauty is discovered, rather than described.

For most architects and academic exercises, buildings are studied as found objects, finished and done. Many students search for that perfect building, for a product to polish. But how I create things starts with listening rather than inventing a singularity of form and space that is easy to promote (and teach). I listen, share, evolve, to discover the possibilities of design. It is not a didactic, intellectual, or fine arts process. Design is our best guess at catching life in the body of our mind. And, for me that starts with listening. How can anyone teach listening without a fundamental focus on what you are hearing? So I defined my instinctive, reactionary, and guileless process into a chain of responses rather than assertions.

I offered up to my students six sequential frames for applying perception and action for everyone in any design process. Each way of perceiving these opportunities narrows the breadth of its predecessor, and the process is both open and leads to resolution in architectural expression:

Connection: I begin by asking, What connection does any design make to the place, the culture, the people it serves? Unless a design is functionally, visually and emotionally tied to its context, it falls short of its potential. Without connection, architecture is just sculpture. For most architects it’s all too easy to connect to our own mind to invent justification for our designs, rather than listen to the connections possible on any site. A “school” of design merely rationalizes our need to retroactively control outcomes and define the reasons we create.

Ascension: Connection without a purpose is mute. Once the context of any problem is understood, there is an imperative in architecture to go beyond meeting the minimum requirements needed for a building’s safe utility. That hope for more than the minimum is, to me, the attitude of Ascension, a loaded word. It’s easy for architects to ascribe geometry to ideas (“symmetry” is “safe,” “biophilic” is “natural”). The traditional translation of “ascendance” in architecture is to apply a vertical geometric outcome to a design. But that knee-jerk reaction misses the potential to express architecture beyond the geometric. A flagpole is ascendant, but it’s an object, one and done. Buildings can be ascendant by the shapes, spaces and light we form them with—but if the design goes beyond problem solving into expressing possibilities, architecture happens. Ascension in architecture is the beauty of touch, the reward of expectation that’s as tangible as the protection buildings offer.

Welcome: Every place has a way to it. The places we make greet us, even from afar. Regardless of the context—landscape, cityscape, wall—buildings are used and thus have to be accessed, so buildings have the potential to welcome you. The building’s wave of recognition to the visitor, the promise of harbor, the handshake of acceptance and the hug of safety—these are the ways buildings welcome us, even if just in its presence in the community or the landscape. Welcome is the first social connection, the promise of humanity, the hope of harbor for those approaching. It greets, protects, and reveals the world within the place you enter.

Order: Everything we make has essential parts that are combined to create a new whole. These essentials are formed by the Order of their necessities. In buildings, that Order is sometimes only lightly perceived in how its necessary systems (mechanical, structural, movement, etc.) are used. I think these necessities should be seen, felt, and expressed; they should become part of the architecture that we create. These systems are not necessary evils. Whether arrayed in orientations that are linear, radial, gridded, or balanced, Order expresses design beyond rote accommodation of the necessary. It can make beauty a resonance of necessities: the essence of architecture.

Thresholds & Rewards: Every one of us follows a path of perception. Buildings are theaters for these experiences. The unavoidable path of human experience is defined by Thresholds & Rewards. You move into, through, and around buildings, and those experiences have a beginning, middle, and end. Thresholds may just be a portal, unfocused beyond transition. They are scaled to the human who uses them, but Rewards can be tiny or huge: a place to sit, a view of the ocean, a nice room. Whether a view, a place, a thing, or an experience, Rewards are at every scale, made human by the Thresholds designs provide. 

Balance: After the first five ways of understanding the opportunities of any design, the choreography of Balance is applied to all these manifestations to create a building that attracts, harbors, inspires, and nourishes its community, culture, and uses. Architects like to call this “hierarchy” because it sounds substantial. Balance can be found in the combination and resolution of shapes, spaces, patterns, compositions—anything we can conceive in architecture. The antithesis of Balance is random, chaotic, careless happenstance, and arbitrary contrivances. Gratuitous pandering to “style” preempts listening and thought. 

These six steps have nothing to do with “style,” which is at the center of our profession’s obsession with fine arts outcomes. None of them is based on a canon’s abstract analysis, morality, or technological outcome. Understanding happens only when you listen. Accepting the need to listen reveals that creativity transcends the designer. Architects desperately try to avoid the danger of their own inadequacies by imitating what we are told is legitimate in design. In school, the copying of the “correct” is called “using precedents.” Listening to Connections that are possible in every design, including “precedents,” precludes mind-numbing copying if the possibilities of Ascendance, Welcome, Order, Threshold & Reward are resolved in Balance.

The retroactive rationalizations that make our designs defendable can deny the truth of our experience. Our communal goal is to open minds, to reveal perceptions and experiences before rationalizing them in “precedents,” “theory,” or “canon.” I hope to clear a path to Beauty. That is teaching.

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.