Drawing Is Easy, Building Is Hard
A real-world relationship with building materials and processes makes architects better at their jobs.

By Keith Moskow, Robert Linn, and William Morgan
Each architect has a slightly different introduction to the trades. For example, one of the three of us grew up with an intimate knowledge of tools and construction provided by a father who was a builder, while another had never so much as built a tree-house floor (his father was a professor of art). While a building background is not necessarily superior to a design background, we have found that the act of building something provides a designer with valuable insight that can’t be learned in a classroom. Architects learn about materials and tools in a theoretical setting, but a real-world relationship with building materials and processes does, in fact, make architects better able to understand and visualize the construction of a structure, and therefore makes them better at their job.
Keith Moskow, FAIA, Robert Linn, AIA, and William Morgan are frequent collaborators at Boston-based Moskow Linn Architects. Click below to read the full article.
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