Book Review: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

In the range of enumerative design books, Matthew Fredrick's just-published 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School falls nicely between the tangible, utility of Universal Principles of Design, and the theoretical, philosophy of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity.

101 TILiAS is a pocket sized book that communicates principles of architecture and architectural education and practice through simple explanations, quotes and illustrations.  It can be a quick read, but can also be re-read several times, with each of the topics taking roughly between ten and sixty seconds to digest.

While many of the ideas are specific to architecture - for example "How to make architectural hand lettering" (#22) or "Careful anchor placement can generate an active building interior" (#87) - a good number of the topics are directly applicable to other fields of design, particularly industrial design.  For example, "Any design decision should be justified in at least two ways" (#18) is a terrific principle, considering some design decisions lack any justification at all.  And "Limitations encourage creativity" (#97) is a common way of life in the ID studio.  There are also several fundamental recommendations on 3D sketching (e.g. draw hierarchically, use soft lines for soft ideas, hard lines for hard ideas), which are certainly applicable to industrial design sketching,

And even the seemingly more architectural-specific principles can be related to by swapping out "architect" for "designer" as in a pair of my favorite, and quite direct observations:

• "Engineers tend to be concerned with physical things in and of themselves.  Architects are more directly concerned with the human interface with physical things." (#20)
• "An architect knows something about everything.  An engineer knows everything about one thing." (#21)

Above all, Frederick emphasizes the role of process over just following rules and as he elaborates "the design process is often structured and methodical, but it is not a mechanical process.  Mechanical processes have predetermined outcomes, but the creative process strives to produce something that has not existed before" (excerpt from #81).