Thickening (a design)

Take a cup of hot soup stock and add a teaspoon of flour to make a paste, blending well until the flour is absorbed.  Add the paste back into the boiling soup while stirring constantly.  Simmer for a while before adding other ingredients.                                 

Joy of Cooking (1975, 168)

There is a point in the design process when it is time to thicken it. Continuing the cooking metaphor, if the stock represents the raw ideas of a schematic design from which you want to extract and trap every vestige of flavor, than the thickening agent can be thought of as whatever the productive imagination uses to advance and develop the design. Schematic explorations need to be distilled, and doing so concentrates and reinforces whatever is good and gets rid of what doesn’t work well.

There are ways to do this. The strategic selection of building materials for a consistent design vocabulary will unify the various elements. Selecting allows the implications and scales of specific materials to inform design elements. Further, allowing a sense of measure that all materials have means that vague suggestions of forms become precise declarations where materials with exact characteristics fit together. It is time to drop the guiding lines that establish programmatic alignments, orientations and spatial relationships. While these lines show the “why” of design decisions, they are distracting from final drawings meant for building permit review, bidding and construction, in other words, design execution.

For example, thinking through a material such as brick means that the hand-scaled nature of that material implies ways to build with it. All designed objects have planes, edges, corners and openings. Thinking through a particular material tells the designer in what way those aspects of a design may be considered. Building materials have such different characteristics that it is impossible to consider them interchangeably. And their selection can contribute to the design intent through association. Different impressions are perceived when seeing a brick house, or one made of stone, wood or metal. Expressions of permanence or portability, or of containment or release become clear more so than through decisions about size or detailing although these, of course, eventually contribute.

Whichever type of material is chosen to thicken the soup, it is important to remember that invention is not a matter of making something new. Rather, it is acts of separating distinct moments of intention and assigning them physical presence, and of combining these parts into a harmonious composition. This activity depends on capitalizing on many things: the inherent character of each material, the possibilities and limitations of structural systems, as well as geometric form and arrangement. Doing so well is the difference between chicken noodle soup and consommé. As the names reveal, one tells you everything and the other alludes to the alchemical methods of combining specific materials in certain proportions, and simmering to allow time for reactions and for ingredient flavors to intensify. Exploring choices of materials to find your preferred thickening agent leads to naming, and this helps distinguish what kind of soup – or design – you are making.