If a Tree Falls in the Wood

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it fall, did it make any sound?

When I was in high school my friends and I would actually argue about this statement. Needless to say, we never reached a resolution. Was the glass half full or half empty? The other evening a similar dilemma occurred to me, if you have an idea and you never tell anyone or write it down, did you have the idea?

This came to me after a meeting with the Penn State Development Office. My wife and I are endowing a traveling scholarship for the Architecture Department and were asked to consider a legacy statement for the scholarship. Apparently, they ask for this so the recipients of the scholarship, after we are long gone, have a connection back to the folks who made it possible. I hadn’t considered this, but was intrigued. Robin, one of the development folks I have been meeting with for several years, has read some of my blog posts and suggested that this legacy statement might be in a similar vein to some of my posts. She reminded me of one particular post she recalled about ties, ‘Can good architecture ever fall out of fashion,’ which I wrote in February of 2015 – 25 posts in the past! What surprised me was that she remember the content much better than I did. Which I guess should not surprise me given all the ideas things rolling around in my head at any given time. But thankfully, I wrote it down. If I hadn’t, I would have moved on from that moment of inspiration and without the blog post, lost the idea.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

Other than a few notable exceptions, architects are, for the most part, not great writers. Having spent ten years in Bob Venturi’s office, I witnessed an enormously talented architect who was almost always writing about what he thought. His writing is a huge “legacy statement” of sorts that, for better or worse, will give future generations an unbelievable insight into what made Bob tick. In that sense, he’s a role model I unfortunately ignored for many years, not that my ravings are nearly as interesting as Mr. Venturi’s. So, as a design professional yourself, look around, do you see any of your compatriots writing down what and or why they do what they do? Or, is design supposed to be a mysterious black box, without any transparency of process. That’s the “a take it or leave it, trust me I know best” mentality. I would like to think that as a profession, we have moved beyond this approach and the design process is more collaborative and inclusive. However, I still think we do a poor job of articulating our design ideas beyond telling people we design light filled buildings that work well for the users.

Which gets me back to falling trees. Ironically, I have already started my legacy statement of sorts by writing for the PAYETTE blog over the past four years, which I must confess, was not my original intention. Forcing oneself to write ideas down in a coherent manner focuses your thinking. So now it occurs to me, if you want to understand what a particular architect in his early 60’s, sitting in Boston thought about design, the environment and it’s place in our culture, there is source material you can find, assuming you’re interested. For better or worse, I have put my ideas on paper and on the internet. So herein lies the challenge to you, dear reader. Do you have any ideas of your own, presumably you do, and do you record them? Yes? No? Maybe?

It took me 35 years to start in earnest and maybe I needed that amount of time to figure out what I thought, after all, I was always a little slow on the uptake. But I wish I had started a little earlier, there are all those silently falling trees from my younger self that I can’t hear anymore.

So take it from me, you might want to start recording your ideas so that in the future you will remember that you had them.