CREATION STORY

We are not taught the story of creation.

As I have said before in these pages, when we are taught about famous buildings, is it a flashcard mentality. We are taught to recognize the piece. We are taught to match the floor plan with the picture.  We are not taught the creation story.

While reading The One Device, I came upon the passage inset below.  A general thread of the book is that much of the iPhone technology was around decades before it was used by Apple.  For example, Gorilla Glass was first invented by Corning in the 1950s.  And the touch screen as a capacitive digital input device has been around since the early 1970s.

‘”The thing that concerns me about the Steve Jobs and Edison complex-and there are a lot of people in between and those two are just two of the masters-what worries me is that young people who are being trained as innovators or designers are being sold the Edison myth, the genius designer, the great innovator, the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, or whatever,” Buxton says.  “They’re never being taught the notion of the collective, the team, the history.”‘ P. 72

The quote is by Bill Buxton, who in the early 80s, developed a multi-touch tablet for musicians to control digital instruments.  He worked at XexoxPARC.  And he states that his group was not the first to develop a working multi-touch capacitive technology.  Various entities in the 70s created touch screens, for example,  that helped coordinate air traffic control.

Yet Jobs, as he introduced the iPhone, essentially said that Apple had created the multi-touch screen.  While Apple advanced the multi-touch technology, they did not invent it.  This history of invention/design should be the way that we teach iconic pieces, be they iPhones or Chandigarhs.

Just as young innovators and digital designers should be taught the history of how these iconic devices came into being, architectural designers should be taught an analogous history of creation 0f the iconic buildings that we worship.

Transparent Drawing Spin Off Project.  If you are looking for something to do, for a building that you really like, put together a research paper about how, for example, Corb came up with the Assembly building in Chandigarh.  Look thru all of the sketches that are available.  Look thru all of the correspondence.  And see if a creation story about the building can be assembled. 

1.  Merchant, Brian. The One Device. Little Brown and Company. New York. 2017.