in pursuit of a writing practice
recycling two reviews, with some minor updates
Architectural education traditionally concentrates only on drawing, which is one skill. Until recently, all spatial imagination was addressed through this lens. As technology develops, mapping is made necessary. Computational design requires coding as an addition, and now, there is writing to tie everything together. How Architects Write is a good record of a disciplinary past, and Writer’s Practice guides processes for the future. Spatial culture is a language to unpack. Listening, reading, writing, and speaking about it are the needs of the times. Manifestoes, conversations, reflections or project descriptors are all forms that worked in the past, but these must be updated.
Much was packed into drawing as subskills, which is what How Architects Write represents. Not many wrote manifestos or other texts in college, especially before the internet. Writing then was part of drawing practices. With the disciplinary landscape shifting faster than we can track, an urgency exists to help articulate the various dialects into which spatial discourses evolve. According to Warner, non-fictional writing begins as a telling of a lived experience; as our experiences change, so must its form. Unlike in the past when only very polished work was put out, social media has made the rough an accepted format. How a public practice evolves is an experience to unpack.
How do you listen architecture, how do you read architecture, how do you write architecture, and therefore, how do you speak architecture are investigations to pursue. If the present is understood, what the past was may be apparent. The role of writing on feeds is to locate reactions to the now-in session. Architectural writing as practice on social media is not the same as what it was when the blogs were in vogue. My reading of both books is to try and get to a position, which I must confess is still in the works. The observation in this miniature investigation is that the body of knowledge known as writing in architecture does not offer much; the answers desired lie in language cultures.
essential internet architectural writing skills are research writing, grammar, editing, and writing copy
- a review of John Warner’s Writer’s Practice
The next phase of generative AI, in addition to its embedding on devices, is in-app copilots. We have come a long way from writing just on a processor. Even if Word looks the same, several bells and whistles are added, like a new paste feature, which matches the document format and tone. Relearning how to use dated software is the first stage of achieving efficiency. Unlike the practice of writing, which focussed only on the craft, today, there is a need for an additional tool management habit formation to streamline older creation processes. Warner’s treatise of practice is of sorts, dated for 2024.
Writing with machined texts is not the same as it was two years ago. The getting started section needs revision. The writing experience is different because we have social media and Claude. All writing describes an event in the past and is an excellent way to begin thinking about what happens when the bubbling words manifest on paper or screen. If everything we do is a type of travel, to write about it is the time we reflect on the journey we just took. Detail our learnings from these experiences and, in extension, advice or caution to those planning to travel on the same path.
A practice is a continuing process and problem-solving framework. It comprises the practitioner’s attitudes, skills, mental habits, and knowledge. What does the writer believe and value in the act of writing? What can the writer do? How does the writer think? And what does the writer know? As a result, what does each of these looks like in practising practice? Attitudes are the only ones that remain the same. The internet changes the skills that a writer requires; this updates the mental habits and, therefore, knowledge created because of these. The more posts you read, the more books, especially guides such as these, come off as dated.
But I would not dissuade you from reading it. Just that making of every practice is very personal and does not replicate especially on the very personal world wide web in the making. Learning and relearning how to write and remaking practice is lifelong. Writing processes come in two flavours: the very long and the just right. Going with just right is the norm in the age of mandatory automation. Since Warner talks a lot about experience, I combine the prewriting stage and drafting into a {reflection} phase. From there, you go to {drafting}, {revision} and {editing}, which includes proofing.
The rest of the book situates the process in varying cases, displaying skill, critique, argument, and others. The writer then had to tailor writing based on the audience the text was meant to cater to. Today, a community develops around your notes. I have rewritten the phases for my use as {Collect, Outline, Edit and Proof}. Collection packs the research process as problem formulation, literature review, data collection, and analysis. Coding, when required, is a part of this phase. Writing proceeds in the Outline, Edit and Proof phases. Hallucinations in generative AI make evaluating past skills and processes necessary. Social media requires copyediting as an essential part of the practice.
Architects have always written for other architects. As the internet evolves, the future of writing in the discipline is revisited. Frank Lloyd Wright published his plans in women’s journals, but what he wrote is predominantly read and discussed in the discipline. Only those interested in pursuing a public discussion of their practice required themselves to extend their work with text. The appendix exercises in the book help aid thinking when implementing a writing practice. Dated as they are, the opportunity is to use the work to build on Warner’s framework for the niche architects and everyone else interested in architecture operates in.
react, observe, analyse, synthesise extending John Warner’s Writer’s Practice
- a review of How Architects Write 1st edition by Tom Spector and Rebecca Damron
Architects are lazy writers. They write for other architects knowing very well, but few read. We do thoroughly flip through all the books we buy since we are trained to read drawings and images predominately. There are two states thereof: reading to draw and reading to write. Only those who want to write read texts for everyone else flips through books. I had this file for a while, and it’s been updated to a second edition that I haven’t bothered to look up. You could say this is a review of a dated work. I have read the text; therefore, revisiting the markups brings back all the latent notes. Rereading it to build on the narrative from the previous post gives the exercise new meaning.
A productivity hack to note is flipping a Kindle on a large screen, which is faster than leafing a physical book. Sentences, too, especially the highlights, have new meaning. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from getting that printed copy, though. The larger the font size, the faster you can read volumes of structured text. Productivity gains aside, building on the practice discourse from Warner’s treatise, my first problem with the book is its title. It is not a complete guide, almost an in-between textbook for undergraduates and a probable addition to the office library. There are exercises after each chapter that can aid in finding a direction for what may be considered architectural writing.
The contents contain eight chapters but could fall under three themes. The first is a purpose, how (and why) Architects Write, and the second is the need to maintain a design journal. The remaining may be restructured as academic and professional deliverables. I reorganised to think out an alternate perspective to read the material and how the present structure aids in reading each section as standalone narratives. The second edition, to interject, has an additional bit on online writing and other updates. My interest is in the first two chapters, in which I guide writing in architecture as a site to deconstruct, even if it is unclear what the author intends.
The necessity to write in architecture is a very social-media-induced anxiety and, hence, generational. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, architecture was moving out of the convoluted arts-inspired French philosophy, whose access was limited to blogs on the web. Then comes Mark Zuckerberg with his apps as a service. Simple writing in tech originates in the Plain Writing Act of 2010, which advocates “clear communications that the public can understand and use”. The statue eventually trickles down to architecture thanks to the many tech services we subscribe to. A combination of early internet culture and frustration drives a drive for disciplinary textual clarity.
How Architects Write is a misleading title because it does not indicate practice but terms of engagement in working with types of knowledge products. The authors’ four kinds of writing knowledge, subject matter, rhetorical, process, and genre do not lead anywhere. Their notes are from practice, and this gap indicates how writing in architecture is an appendix, not an integral part. The following section reinforces this disjunct, where the purpose of writing servers is in one part of the fraternity, and the other is in a community that provides building coordination services. There is a particular fallacy, I argue, that is promoted with the position that writing well is somehow an indicator of smartness.
Events of reaction, observations, analysis, and synthesis make writing practice instead of the types Spector and Damron insist exist. A well-written text is always the work of a collective, which includes the author, at times, a proofreader and an editor. Any well-crafted body of work always has multiple stakeholders and cannot be ordered by an individual. The beginning of writing as part of architectural practice is deciding what you want writing as an activity to do for you. It is not about making term papers, project descriptions, reports, documents or anything else. Keeping a journal is the best way to start; once a rhythm builds, how, as an architect, you should write, you can make it from there.
Two parts make up architecture: the art and the science. Writing can contribute to both frames. When one is a discourse, the other is an activity. The practice of writing in architecture is an extension of the art. Providing building services can lead to architectural making, or text can be built into a spatial discourse. The ends of writing have changed, which the book misses out on. Although generative AI is here, even the second edition seems outdated. Social media is now a paid subscription service and needs unpacking for the future. Video instead of text is the new communication medium trending on the internet. That said, {What} Architects Write seems like a fun project proposal to compensate for all the gaps.
