One of the assignments for sophomore architecture students was developed over three related projects. The first part was to draw a Roman letter, most often an initial from the student's first or last name. This letter would be drawn on a 10" x 10" sheet of heavy paper. The objective was perfection. Research online would reveal the geometric construction of the chosen letter based on a historical standard. There was little expectation of creativity at this point, but the stude

In Support of Procrastination In professional baseball, when a batter would come to the plate and obliterate the back chalk line of the batter’s box with his cleats, the odds were good that the the hitter was a student of Charley Lau. He advised his hitters to stand back as far as possible in the box to give themselves a fraction of a second more to evaluate a pitch. That’s procrastination. They would still have to make the decision but they had a slight advantage over those

I've noticed a subtle shift in some of the board games that have made their way into our house. But what seems subtle while we're playing, actually upends the paradigm of the way we think about games and subsequently ties into the discussion of "architectural" vs. "engineering" thinking. In engineering there is a "correct" answer and a metric to prove it. A solution can be the least expensive, the shallowest, the strongest, etc. All of these can be verified through calculatio

Years ago I visited the Adirondacks and met Caleb Davis. He conducted a class on making a wooden canoe paddle. I hadn't signed up for the class, but at breakfast the next day I had a chance to sit across from him and he explained why he did what he did in creating his paddles. His description struck me as a template for good design: A single piece of wood is shaped as a response to needs, both physical and environmental. The result is a tool that lets someone move a canoe t