Misconception #2
“Architecture is subjective”
This article is part of The Second Studio Podcast hosted by FAME Architecture & Design.
Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner - Photography ©MatthewMillman
“Another misconception is that architecture and design are subjective. You hear this pretty often. Actually, I hear this from architects sometimes. If we look at our list of form, space, material, tectonics, sustainability, function, and light, it’s pretty easy to rank a building and rank it on a scale of 1 to 10 for each of those categories. This gets a nine, a nine, a five, and a two. Not subjective. It's actually really easy to quantify such things as function.
Everyone has their opinion. But I can't have an opinion about science just because I don't understand the equation I’m looking at. If I look at a really complicated physics equation, I understand that it is what it is. I can't have any opinion about whether it's good or bad. Yet when it comes to aesthetics and visual things, it’s easy to have an opinion right? Because we have eyes and we've lived with our eyes for 40 years and we know what things look like and we compare it to other things. But that doesn’t mean there isn't a scientific process or science behind creating beautiful things. This is also why there's a lot of theory, philosophy, critics, and discourse in architecture school and among architects in the profession.
Now, just because it takes half an hour to talk about something—to determine whether or not it's good or bad—does not mean it's subjective. If people can see clearly within two seconds that it's this way or that way, then people think the subject is objectively good or bad, but if it takes half an hour to talk about, then people think it's subjective. No, that's not the case. That is a flaw in the way to think about things in general. It’s a misconception that architecture is subjective. It might take some time for an architect to explain and elaborate all the reasons why something is good or bad, but no, it’s not subjective.
The other component of this topic is going back to the idea of a concept. There are some fundamental principles of architecture that would make it good or bad. For example, if architecture falls down, probably bad architecture, or in that case, that's more to do with structural engineering and not the architect’s role because we don't do structures, engineers do. Or if the building's causing harm and it's a hospital, well, that's probably bad, right? So there are some fundamental things in that regard. But the other way to critique architecture to know if it's good or bad is if it expresses the central idea that it proposed. An analogy would be if a person writes a story about something. Yes, there are probably fundamental principles to story writing and we could say that those determine if the story good or bad. But really it's all about what was your idea and whether or not the story conveys the idea or does it have a few chapters in there that have nothing to do with anything and don't follow the structure of the thesis? If the structure of the thesis is unclear, then it's a problem. So in terms of architecture, one of the first things you would do in terms of a critique is to understand what the architecture is trying to achieve and how well it achieves it. This rules out the subjective versus objective. So, it's not a matter of whether or not you like something, which is a childish thing to say, but a tendency that I think people fall into.” - David Bruce Lee
Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner - Photography ©MatthewMillman