The reality of the building One day I went to my study at Taliesen to sit down and rest. I picked up a little book just received from the ambassador to America from Japan. It was called The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. I wonder how many of you have read it? Well, in that little book I came upon quotations from the great Chinese poet-prophet Laotze, things he had said five hundred years before Jesus. As I turned the pages I suddenly came across this: "The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in..." The answer is, reality is the space within, into which you can put something. In other words, the idea. And so it is with architecture; so it is with your lives; and so it is with everything you can experience as reality. You will soon find out for yourselves if you begin to work with this principle in mind, that things will open to you...Therein lies the secret of great peace, missing in Western Civilization today. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Book of Tea space
The situation talks back As the designer shapes the situation in accordance with his initial presentation of it, the situation “talks back” and he responds to the situation’s back-talk. In a good process of design, this conversation with the situation is reflexive. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner What's wrong with the rational modelWhat the prototype tells youExpressing ideas helps to form themThe idea grows as they workDrawing as a means of thinkingFour principlesWriting, Briefly design