Failure
How do we make sense of failure? Most of our projects will be stymied or interrupted. Near bankruptcy seems endemic to a new architecture practice. Is there a method to connect these incessant disruptions into an intelligent pattern?
As a young studio, we survive because of our bias towards relentless action. Our work makes more associations than we can realistically handle. We are hungry for a “very odd family of deer,” as Dr. Seuss wrote “whose horns are connected, from one to the other, whose horns are so mixed they can’t tell them apart, can’t tell where they end and can’t tell where they start! Each deer is mighty puzzled. He’s never yet found if his horns are hers, or the other way’round”
The last few years in our studio have resulted in the accumulation of a lot of drawing. We produce more iterations and more studies in the hope that this accretion of architectural work amounts to a kind of tacit knowledge of the places we work in and the clients we service. Drawing is our form of professional mindfulness. It allows us to aggregate matter and exercise a physical transformation upon reality. Drawing enables us to adopt an orientation and disentangle our odd affair with failure. It represents our archaic conviction in projection as a form of magic.
We have charted maps, traced vectors, exploded plans and unfolded all sorts of complex volumes. While working on these drawings, the world outside tumbled through a barrage of vertiginous crises: financial meltdown, environmental catastrophe and incessant global warfare.
How is our practice related to this volatility?
We have consultants breathing down our throats, regulations tying our hands and purveyors suffocating our vision. Markets favor a resolved sleekness in super-sonic speed. And yet our environment is defined by erratic bursts of new information. Autonomy is no longer a valid stance– our practice is nested in other disciples and systems of thought.
Our advantage as a new practice is in our inability to envision a project without holes—something between relaxation and efficiency. We cannot produce perfect machines with a hard armature. Our work must be slow and intimate in recognition of the fact that our bodies exist as uncontrollable and incomplete ecologies ravaged by the capricious winds of late-capitalism.
Our curse, as a new practice, is that once we have figured how to do something, we must go on to something else seeking the joy and pain of our misadventures. We must keep up the illusion that we can build what we don’t truly know. We must keep on drawing madly, studying our scraps for lessons of what is yet to come and staying hungry for that “very odd family of deer.”
