Who is the book for?
The book is for anyone who has been through architecture or design school.
Many successful graduates of architecture and design schools are not licensed professionals.
This is significant. You can feel the stirring of the passion for the art of architecture and design without crowning your achievements with licensure or registration. You can be steeped in the traditions of the studio and the culture of critique without having any legal claim to the title, and without seeking one.
The unregistered and unlicensed professional with design qualifications can respond to their provisional status in a number of ways. I am interested in two of them.
One - they can choose to feel inadequate and only half-formed, lacking as they are in the official title and status that is in accordance with their university or college qualifications, and, quite possibly their professional experience. They can feel like four-fifths of the genuine article. In this formulation, with this attitude, they may consider themselves to be critically limited by their lack of formal title.
Two - and needless to say, this is my preferred option - they can choose to see titles like architect as fundamentally limiting in themselves, and to be avoided. Instead, they may connect the passion for design to the potentially limitless possibilities of an applied and always evolving personal, and professional, creativity.
If this is the case, then what and who are you, if you are not a titled professional like an architect? Who are you if you are not a licensed interior designer?
By being nothing, you gain access to the possibility of being potentially anything, almost anything you might wish to be. This is because when nothing has been defined, nothing has been ruled out. This position - the glass half full - is an advantageous and powerful position to find oneself in.
In this schema the undefined status of the individual is not evidence of an absence or a void: it is the essential precondition of a future, currently unknown, definition of identity. This definition of identity carries within it the many potentials of the uncertain and the unexpected.
I’m interested in the individual’s fervour: the desire for the act of making and design that propelled the individual through many years of vulnerability and exposure to critique in the study of design. So in this formulation, it is not the subjects of architecture or interiors that are significant directly: it is the emotional impetus, the passion and the desire that emerges in the subject’s presence.
So: what is the price of entry to the experience outlined in this book? Attendance at architecture or design school. Not the title or formal attainment of the licencesd or registered professional. But of course, if you happen to be an architect - that is ok too.
If you endured architecture school, for five, six, or more years, this book is for you. The book is a blueprint for the harnessing of your passion for design in a new, transposed medium. Same passion, same burning desire to make, even the same subjects - architecture and design - but a new medium of expression.
This new medium doesn’t displace architecture, drawing, making, or design. It just adds another layer, another dimension.
In the book, we will reacquaint you with desire to make, and transpose it into another medium: language, writing and text.
Together, we will explore what it means to draw with words.
