Tools for the architect’s studio

Architecture is caught in a conundrum. The motivation for building architecture is usually to satisfy someone’s desire to do something in a specific place. The architect professes to know how to facilitate that something yet knows that the architectural programme is reductive and does not cover the range and extent of likely and unlikely things that might take place in and around a built work. As a result, architects are caught between legitimizing their practice (and livelihood) to others through a rational exposition of explicit thoughts about how something can be accomplished while simultaneously knowing that what they really do has other unpredictable dimensions that are hard to grasp and harder to articulate.