"Matthew Frederick is an architect and urban designer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Boston Architectural College and Wentworth Institute of Technology."
101 Things I Learned, in Architectural School
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
Certainties for architecture students are few. The architecture curriculum is a perplexing
and unruly beast, involving long hours, dense texts, and frequently obtuse
instruction. If the lessons of architecture are fascinating (and they are), they are also
fraught with so many exceptions and caveats that students can easily wonder if
there is anything concrete to learn about architecture at all.
The nebulousness of architectural instruction is largely necessary. Architecture is,
after all, a creative fi eld, and it is understandably diffi cult for instructors of design to
concretize lesson plans out of fear of imposing unnecessary limits on the creative
process. The resulting open-endedness provides students a ride down many fascinating
new avenues, but often with a feeling that architecture is built on quicksand
rather than on solid earth.
This book aims to fi rm up the foundation of the architecture studio by providing
rallying points upon which the design process may thrive. The following lessons
in design, drawing, creative process, and presentation fi rst came to me as barely discernible glimmers through the fog of my own education. But in the years I have
spent since as a practitioner and educator, they have become surely brighter and
clearer. And the questions they address have remained the central questions of
architectural education: my own students show me again and again that the questions
and confusions of architecture school are near universal.
I invite you to leave this book open on the desktop as you work in the studio, to
keep in your coat pocket to read on public transit, and to peruse randomly when in
need of a jump-start in solving an architectural design problem. Whatever you do
with the lessons that follow, be that grateful I am not around to point out the innumerable
exceptions and caveats to each of them.
Matthew Frederick, Architect
August 2007