Cultural appreciation versus appropriation —borrowing, copying, and being influenced. I believe that there is no architecture without a careful understanding of precedent. Being Swiss, I was early-on made aware that one of the country’s strengths was that the concept of originality lays in the practice of reinventing rather than inventing new ideas.

Question of section, Part 1. Swiss born architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) wrote in his book Vers Une Architecture (Towards A New Architecture, 1929) in the chapter titled Three reminders to architects [mass, surface, and plan], that:

How to think spatially. I remember as a first-year student during my studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL), having a number of questions that kept me awake countless nights, leaving me often without tangible answers.

John Hejduk and Cooper Union. Ask any architect, faculty member, student, or layperson to define architecture, and you will get countless individual responses. I am always astonished by the diversity of the answers, in particular with laypeople who have strong impressions often based on personal memories and stories about family members who are architects. However diverse all these conversations are, I have come to appreciate each of the answers. Collectively, they renew my love of architecture.

Model Sketching, Part 1. In a digital world, sketching as a process of iteration is too often relegated to the past. Coordinating the mind, hand and pencil was once an activity essential to the education of an architect and remained important in order to represent ideas rapidly and concisely. I teach in an architecture school where we still impart these skills because we collectively believe in the act of sketching as a foundation prior to introducing students to the many 3D Modeling Software programs.

Kahn’s poetry between wall and column. As a young architecture student, I remember being awestruck the first time a faculty member introduced me to Kahn’s question: “You say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’”