One of the first projects I assign to students is also one of the most difficult concepts in design to grasp. Once understood, however, this concept proves to be the single most important tool in the architect's arsenal. The mastery of this tool is what separates the boring and mundane from the moving and inspirational. It is the Tool of Carving Away. It is Subtractive Design.
This is the project given to students:
2. Write a brief story that delineates arrival, movement, rhythm, crescendo, climax, anti-climax and exit through conceptual space. In your mind's eye, envision what you want the visitor to see, to touch, to hear, to feel. Describe the emotions the visitor feels moving through the space. Write down what the visitor sees, touches, hears and feels.
4. Again, in your mind's eye, reduce your body size to one and one half inches high. (That's 1/4" = 1'-0" scale.) First, work only on the four left hand cubes, touching. You will enter your space from the left. You will move through your space to the right, until you exit your space on the right hand side of the first four cubes.
5. Draw on the first four cubes the arrival space (big, grand, scary or small, tight, foreboding). Draw the floor plane (up, down, inclined, stepped, up then down, expanding, contracting). Draw the ceiling plane corresponding to the floor plane. Draw the crescendo. Draw the climax space and the de-crescendo to the exit space.
6. Draw exactly the same thing on the other four cubes. Imagine that the two cubes on the right will be lifted and sandwiched with the four on the left. Your created space happens between them.
Most probably, nobody reading this Monday with Marley will take the time to actually do this project. I don't mind because if you followed it close enough in your mind, you'll get it, sort-of.
Michelangelo, when asked how he carved David so perfectly, said something to this effect: "The David was always in the stone. I have simply removed the stone that did not belong."
The Tool of Carving Away is Subtractive Design. Spaces created subtractively can be powerful and moving, filled with meaning. These are the narthex and the nave and the baldequino of the cathedral. These are the rising Gothic arches into ever more dematerialized mass, into heavens of stain glass and light. These are the catacombs below, the compressive, the claustrophobic, the dark sepulchers of the dead. These are the spaces that grab and pull and push and intrigue, spaces that lift or depress or expulse or explode or entomb, these are spaces that slide, that dance, that move us. These are real spaces.
Too much of architecture today is two dimensional. Architecture is flat and boring. It is a sign, nothing more, to the car speeding by. "Hey! Stop, come in, buy, thanks, now get out. The architecture stops at the front facade. This is the Act of Facadomy.
Earlier, I asked you to create a space in your mind. Now, go stand in front of the mirror. Get the knife out. Start carving.
You are the Architect of the Person in the Mirror.
