learning architecture
"The one thing I know, and believe most deeply, about learning architecture, is that it is an act of making. To learn it, you must gradually develop, in yourself, an appreciation of a building as something you make, in very much the same sense that you make a tiny carving with a penknife. To grasp this, deeply, and to make it work and come alive in you, you have to make tiny things which get bigger, then make parts of buildings like doors, shelves, counters, with your own hands, then make your first tiny building with your own hands, then begin to understand what it means to take resposibility when others are involved in the making process for a slightly bigger building, learn how to co-ordinate them and form a team, learn how to manage money in the context of making art, then to do this at larger and larger scales, progressing finally to neighbourhoods and very large buildings, where the problems are once again different.
In the course of this personal evolution a student moves through an early period which is self-discovery - largely emotional, and to some degree to do with craft and skill, as he or she learns to make a tiny satisfying thing, perhaps a cup, that has deep feeling in it, and is well and truly made. Then to a more intellectual version where the problems of small buildings are grappled with and the profession of architecture takes an entirely new form. And finally to those larger projects where everything that is done is in the nature of research - because, in our time, for big buildings and neighbourhoods, none of it has been done in the way that is required and every undertaking is an adventure and an experiment in financing, in ecology, in engineering or in construction management."
christopher alexander - the prince of wales's institute of architecture