We architects often have difficulty communicating with non-architects.  We seemed to have developed a language that only works among ourselves.  If we’d just let the rest of you in on the game I think we’d produce much better results.  I was recently in a meeting half-way around the world in Dhaka, Bangladesh where this idea was underscored for me.

This was a conference room full of engineers and business people, or so I thought.  The meeting was being conducted in English, but it was not the natural language for most of the people in the room.  I had become very animated in describing the (5) essential elements of the Parti (architecture speak for “the big idea”) when one person, who had previously been fairly quiet, stepped forward and made it clear he wanted to debate.  The very next thing he did was turn to the rest of the room and said:  “you guys just won’t understand”.  He proceeded to quiz me on the validity of my argument about the relationship of the essential elements of the plan in a manner that I could easily understand, but didn’t make a lot of sense to the rest of the room.  It turns out this guy was a construction manager educated in an American school of architecture.

The whole incident made me wonder why we insist on making communication, already stressed by barriers of language and culture, more complex with jargon that is only understood by members of our club.  We could produce more quickly and with better results if we were more precise about our communication.  This brings me to the simple concept of Archetypes.  If you’re reading this and you’re an architect you now have an image of prototypical spaces, if you’re not an architect you are immediately thinking of stereotypical personalities from literature.  This is where we get into trouble.

To an architect when we’re trying to develop a grand idea to organize space we think of archetypes as quick shorthand.  It’s similar to the literary tradition, but different in just enough ways to confuse the rest of you.  The most universal example I can think of is the Roman Basilica.   We architects were educated that a Roman Basilica was a grand hall flanked by two smaller side aisles.  It was used for large public meetings.   This archetype was adopted by many of our first architects as the pattern for a church naive.  Any of you that have been in a church that was designed before Vatican II now instantly understand both a Basilica and the concept of an archetype in my world.  Once I plant the image in your mind there is no need to spend more time discussing how tall, how wide or what the finish should be.  I tell you it’s like a Basilica and you understand.

I don’t design a lot of churches, but every time we design a new building we have the ability to help our clients understand through the concept of archetypes.  In the pharmaceutical manufacturing world these may be much more mundane spaces like Gowning portals, secondary packaging, cGMP corridors or quality control labs, but the reference can be hugely useful to quickly get everybody on the same page if you simply take the time to communicate.

Posted in Architecture, People