making stuff: a neurological/cognitive argument for the experience of making in the education of an architect PAUL PETTIGREW

“I would argue that any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function, the historic origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans, is grossly misleading and sterile.”1

I find it odd, that architecture students are required to take 150+ credit hours to graduate with a professional architecture degree and not a single credit hour requires students to conceptualize, design develop, construction document, fabricate and/or use a project from start to finish. The ultimate goal of most architects is to build. Oddly, students might never build as part of the educational “process”, that leads to the “product” we call architecture graduates.

For 24 years I have been fabricating site specific functional objects in my architectural practice. For the past 8 years, I have been exploring the possibility that “making” is as important as “thinking” and “drawing”. I have been documenting the historic tradition of “craft” in schools and education. I have been researching neurological/cognitive studies that support the importance of “making” in the education of an architecture student. Most importantly, for 8 years, I’ve been working alongside my students to conceptualize, develop, draw, model, mock-up and fabricate at full scale and in real materials the relationship between the human hand, body, mind, form and function.

My contribution to Dichotomy is a selection of observations, research and projects made by me and my students as evidence to support our thesis that physically making an idea from concept to functional object is a unique and critical experience in the education of an architecture student.

NO SMOKING GUN

Someday I hope that we are able to place an architect in an MRI machine and figure out what is going on between hand and bra in as the a rch i tec t conceptualizes, design develops through drawing and then ultimately construction documents their proposed design. These MRI readings would be compared to the architect placed in an MRI scanner who not only conceptualizes, design develops through drawing, and construction documents their proposed design, but also physically builds at full scale in real materials their design intentions. Would any difference in brain activity and development be observed? Would differences in brain activity and development be temporary or might there be long term, retained, brain development applicable to similar design problems in the future? My research has yet to uncover architects sliding in and out of MRI scanners. In the mean time, tests have been administered that hint at what we might find in the architect MRI scans of the future.

The hands of the architect are extensions of and a means for communication with the creative brain. We architects are constantly moving our design ideas back and forth between what our mind and brain imagine and what our hands are able to translate to paper and hard drive. What is the difference between the hand brain connection of the drawing architect vs. the constructing architect?

“The behaviors involved in complex human tool use cut across boundaries traditionally drawn between social, cognitive, perceptual and motor processes. Long-standing neuropsychological evidence suggests a distinction between brain systems responsible for representing: (1) semantic knowledge about familiar tools and their uses, and (2) the acquired skills necessary for performing these actions. Contemporary findings in functional neuroimaging support and refine this distinction by revealing the distributed neural systems that support these processes and the conditions under which they interact. Together, these findings indicate that behaviors associated with complex tool use arise from functionally specialized networks involving temporal, parietal and frontal areas within the left cerebral hemisphere.” 2

Intuitively we suspect that there is a difference between designing and not knowing or caring which tools and techniques will be used to build our designs vs. knowing and caring what tools and techniques will be used to build our designs and/or having physically worked with all or some of the tools and techniques

Figure 1: “Modular Meandering Bench” Architecture & Furniture group project originally designed to be site specific to IIT’’s Crown Hall adapted & modified as part of Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry Smart Home exhibition

that will be used to construct our design. The hand-brain connection between the dominant sketching, drawing and mousing hand in tandem with the non-dominant hand at rest or keyboarding hand must be very different than the hand-brain connection of the dominant and non-dominant hands of the architect lifting and supporting material as it makes its way out of the wood pile, onto the table saw, under the drill press, in an out of clamps gripping and un-gripping as boards or sheets of material are systematically assembled into a functioning whole.

“The range of functions that hands serve arguably exceeds any part of the body. Hands sense like eyes, but they also speak, sculpt, spar, and shape our world. They are both input systems and output systems. They allow us to survive as individuals, and they link us together socially. Hands are integral to who we are as a species, as members of groups and as individuals.” 3

EPIPHANIES 1 & 2

My first epiphany occurred, just out of graduate school, working on my first set of large scale wall sections. Looking back and forth between the offices previously drawn wall sections and the new wall sections I was drawing, my brain only registered lines, numbers and words. Simultaneously, I was “moonlighting”, designing and fabricating Donald Judd inspired furniture for my first apartment using hand tools and hand held power tools in my parent’s garage. After completion of my first functioning furniture pieces, it was as if a switch was shifted from off to on. I no longer saw lines, numbers and words in my wall sections. I now saw materials, connections, connectors and the relationship between the collection of materials and the physical demands the collection of materials was being asked to perform. In retrospect my naivety is embarrassing, but the difference in what I saw from one day to what I understood the next was unforgettable.

My second epiphany occurred when I started teaching first year design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Fall 1999, I entered into an architecture program that

had remained true to its Bauhaus roots in the sense that all first year architecture students were required to spend a portion of their studio instruction time inside the Crown Hall shop. All architecture students were required to learn how to use hand and power tools and build with materials needed for modeling throughout their 5 years of architectural studies at IIT.

As first year instructors we tapped into this “shop knowledge base” by incorporating a sequence of assignments that required students to design and build with real materials at full scale individually and in groups. Today, 15 years later IIT Architecture still incorporates first year design projects that allow students an opportunity to design and build using real materials at full scale.

ALBERTI’S ARCHITECT

“Before I go any further, however, I think I should explain exactly whom I mean by architect: for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines; the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect.” 4

Alberti is not the first architect nor the last to write about and actively pursue the separation of architect and builder. There is evidence throughout architecture’s history to support the gentleman or professional architect actively distancing himself from the not so gentlemanly or professional builder, craftsman, workman and/or laborer.

Comparing architectural drawings for buildings prior to Alberti’s time with architectural drawings made by today’s gentleman architect, an odd inversion has taken place. Antique drawings include far fewer details, specifications and/or technical information than drawing sets today. Master Builders knew how to build what had been drawn and what had not been drawn. As architecture evolved into an arrangement that

Figure 3: First year IIT design “Habitable Wall” project incorporating styrofoam cups as a habitable vertical surface and sand filled wax coated paper drinking cups as a horizontal walkable surface.

Figure 2: Donald Judd inspired table built in authors parent’s garage using hand tools and hand held power tools including: circular saw, drill, random orbit sander & screwdriver

includes the gentleman architect and the general contractor with his team of sub-contractors, the number of drawings needed and the level of technical detail in a set of drawings has increased. In other words, as the architect has become less of a builder, the architect has been asked to know more about how buildings are put together and builders, the guys actually making the buildings, have been put in the position of building from a set of drawings put together by Alberti’s architect who has spent little or no time actually building.

Architects and architectural educators have been pushing back against Alberti’s notion of carpenter vs. architect since before Alberti. Walter Gropius and the legacy of the Bauhaus are perhaps the most well known proponents of “making” in the schools. Walter Gropius was clear in his support of making during his presentation at an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) conference in 1959.

“…Knowledge will only come by individual experience. At the start, basic design and shop practice combined should introduce to the students the elements of design, surface, volume, space, color, and simultaneously the ideas of construction, of building, by developing three-dimensional exercises to be carried out with materials and tools. In succeeding years of training, the design and construction studio, supplemented by field experience during summer vacations, will coordinate further experience with the broadening of knowledge. Construction should be taught as part of design, for they are directly interdependent…” 5

“Design Build” as an educational tool for young architects followed on the tradition of Gropius’ Bauhaus educational theory with interpretations and polemics that can be read or understood as both regional and unique to the voices of the educators who have sought to describe and/or justify Design Build’s importance as Christopher Alexander explained.

“Quite apart from my desire to work as a builder, quite apart from my desire to see buildings with this quality built, and quite apart from my belief that architects should be builders, there is just the simple, plain, ordinary fact of the necessity for having first-hand acquaintance with building and making things. And it seems ridiculous to have to mention it except for the fact that most architects today do not understand this. In a woodworking shop, one of the distinctions between somebody who understands working with tools and somebody who does not is to realize that the process of sharpening or sweeping up are absolutely fundamental to the activity of making something. Most people do not really understand tools properly, you realize that sharpening the tool is an integral part of its use. For example, I used to spend day after day, out on the site in Martinez, trying our gannet experiments. It is the love of making, and the instinct for making, which has led me in the right direction.” 6

The body of knowledge necessary to put together a successful set of construction drawings and specifications is dependent on experience not only making or drawing drawings, but ideally the experience of seeing first hand a set of drawings translated into real material, full scale, constructions. There is a kind of chicken and egg, situation to this arrangement, i.e. that experience making construction drawings is necessary to make successful fabrications and successful fabrications are dependent on either the experience of the architect making the drawings or the experience of the contractor in building or fabricating similar designs encountered on previous projects.

Both architect and contractor are dependent on “previous” experience. The contractor’s experience comes from constructing or fabricating their understanding of a set of architectural drawings. The experience of Alberti’s architect comes from studying previous constructions or fabrications of a similar nature and reinterpreting that information into the unique design circumstances of their current project and design.

“What we lack in the way of past visual experiences can be compensated for by the way our senses have been processed in other learning experiences.” 7

When we draw a wood structural member whether that member is drawn in 2d as a section/elevation or rendered in 3d with photo-realistic color, texture, shade and shadow, we are essentially activating a single sense, i.e. our sense of sight. This activation is dependent upon a previous visual experience with a piece of wood in order for our visual system to recognize the connection between the real piece of wood and the wood depicted in drawn form.

When we handle a piece of wood, that we intend as a component in a project we are taking from concept to full scale prototype, we activate site, sound, smell, touch and if you are so inclined, taste. Cut a piece of cherry wood and you smell cherries, which is distinct from the smell of freshly cut walnut, red oak, white oak, maple and pine all of which can be identified with eyes closed by an amateur craftsman or woodworker.

Figure 4: Architecture & Furniture student project translating “blobs” drawn so easily using parametric software into a not so easily detailed and fabricated functional “blob”

Picking up a piece of basswood and white oak of equal dimensions we immediately sense and recognize their different densities. Sanding, chiseling and/or planing a piece of walnut and piece of hard maple we immediately recognize a difference in workability and resistance to hand and blade.

Grab a piece of aluminum and a piece of wood at room temperature and we understand that one is cool to the touch and the other is warm just as visually we would describe the aluminum as cool and the wood as warm. Grab a piece of aluminum and a piece of wood left out in the sun on a hot summer’s day or sand pieces of wood and aluminum on a disc sander and you understand within seconds how differently each material responds to temperature changes from exposure and/or friction.

“The brain’s raw material is information: the length of light waves hitting the retina; the duration of sound waves pulsating the ear; the effect of a molecule in the olfactory canal. From this the sensory areas of the brain create an idea of what lies outside. But, the final construct is a perception that is invested with meaning. The meanings we attach to our perceptions are usually useful: they transform mere patterns of light into

objects we can use, people we can love; places we can go.” 8

Once we are professional architects, and we are fortunate enough to complete the process of working from concept, through schematic design, design development, construction documents, construction, punch lists and finally walk through and witness the physicality of our design, the “mere patterns of light” are finally allowed the opportunity of being transformed from data into meaning and use. In the small firm, a young architect might experience this full process within the first year or two of their employment. In a medium or large firm it is usually years and sometimes never that the young architect gets to be involved in a project from start to finish. Can or should the “complete” education of the architect wait this long?

HANDS & TOOLS

Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Thinking Hand and Harry Francis Mallgrave’s The Architect’s Brain offer architects/readers, interested in the relationship between hand and brain, philosophical, psychological and physiological outlines of the relationship between the drawing hand and the brain of the architect, artist and/or designer. But what of the relationship between the brain and the building/making hand of the architect?

In my architecture & furniture class, students are encouraged to work along parallel paths. The traditional design path moves from concept, through schematic design and design development to fabrication using drawings both sketched and measured. The non-traditional design path moves from concept to fabrication with little in the way of drawing and nothing in the way of measured drawing. The lack of measured drawing is either a conscious decision on the part of the student or a result of “not being able to draw what I want to make”. Architect, industrial designer and craftsman David Pye refers to these two paths as projects without risk and projects at risk.

“If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘The workmanship of risk’: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.” 9

“With the workmanship of risk we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its pure state in full automation. In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single sale-able thing is made. In less developed forms of it the

Figure 5: Architecture & Furniture student project incorporating ash wood & aluminum. Aluminum is used to isolate wood functions & is paired with wood dowel pins as a fastener system which intentionally excludes the use of mechanical fasteners

result of each operation done during production is predetermined.” 10

Recent developments in neuroimaging offer explanations of what might be happening between hand and brain during various controlled activities. Neuromimaging experiments suggest how this information or data might be used to develop or shape the way architects go about their education and/or educating.

“Simple clenching of one versus the other hand increases the neuronal activity of the frontal lobe in the oppos i t e ( con t r a l a t e r a l ) hem i sphe re . EEG (Electroencephalographic) measures demonstrate that a mere 90 seconds of left hand clenching increases right hemisphere activity, and similar right hand clenching increases left hemisphere activity.” 11

“Following the notion of relative importance of the right hemisphere (RH) in creative thinking, we explored the possibility of enhancing creative problem solving by artificially activating the RH ahead of time using uni- lateral hand contractions. Participants attempted to complete the Remote Associates Test after squeezing a ball with either their left or right hand. As predicted, participants who contracted their left hand (thus activating the RH) achieved higher scores than those who used their right hand and those who did not contract either hand. Our findings indicate that tilting the hemispheric balance toward the processing mode of one hemisphere by motor activation can greatly influence the outcome of thought processes.” 12

My interest in neuroimaging experiments such as these is a search for a “more scientific” explanation for what I have learned intuitively either by watching my students work or analyzing my own process of making. Drawing with a pencil, mouse and/or keyboard is a much different experience than cutting, sanding and planing. Cutting, sanding and planing require the use of both hands clenching and unclenching continuously for sometimes hours at a time. The sense of sight does not work in isolation from touching, hearing and smelling. Right and left hemispheres are constantly be ing bombarded w i th in fo rmat ion that i s simultaneously rational/logical and experiential/intuitive.

I am particularly interested in the long term effects hinted at in the two experiments described above. Short term gain is of course interesting and important to the project at hand. What I am interested in is the long term retention of hand brain experience and the

Figure 6: Architecture & Furniture student project for “One-of-a-Kind” cooking utensils Inspired by the ethnic/culinary diversity of West Chicago residents/restaurants. Utensils were designed and fabricated without drawings. Final function and/or form were revealed by hand gouging, band sawing and machine/hand sanding…their outcome aesthetically & functionally was “continually at risk”

Figure 7: “Crochet Bench” Noticing that a student was constantly crocheting and/or knitting in my classes, I proposed a challenge to create a functional object that depended structurally on crochet work. The result was a bench that used crocheted twine to bind its two halves about an existing column

ability of the brain to translate specific experience into a more general reference for the future.

Jacob Bronowski suggests the beginning of art is an archaeological artifact which is by definition a knife, however, this knife is bigger and/or ornamented in such a way as to suggest it is about more that just cutting. Tool transitions into art and it makes it’s transition via the hand. The hand is what crafted the tool/art object and it is the hand that uses the tool to perform a function, a ritual or perhaps to fabricate another tool.

Today we have the ability to use machines to make architecture, furniture, tools, art, other machines and probably perform many or all of the functions that our primitive ancestors performed with their hands and handmade tools. At some point we need to address the question of whether we should still learn to make things and do things with our hands not because we have to but because we want to maintain from one generation to the next the memory and methods of our past as a way of insuring their possibility in the future?

As tools evolved from rock, to rock used to make a tool, to tool used to make tools, to tools used to design tools made by machines capable of making tools, our evolutionary development from Lucy to the present hits a fork in the road and typically with forks in the road we make a choice, mythologies tell us the correct choice is the more difficult path, but I wonder if in this case the choice needs to be both paths.

MONKEY MUSCLES MICE MECHANIC & MUSIC

“Originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas, and originality of labor, and although it it the first kind that we get agitated about, we should honor the second kind still more. There is wit made in the head and spun out into life, and work, created mostly by fingers egging tools as various as tenor saxes and computer keyboards. It is an oddity of our civilization, and has been since the Renaissance, to honor wit more than work, to think that the new idea “contributed” by the work matters more than the work itself.” 13

Figure 8: Author’s project for a “Clamp Lamp” inspired by gas lanterns carried by train conductors fabricated without drawings using shop hand clamps as inspiration and locally sourced components for a light that could be moved throughout various architectural spaces thereby becoming infinitely “site specific”

Figure 9: Student designed and fabricated “Museum Donation Box” elicited patron donations by creating visual interest and curiosity about how money would move from hand to collection box. This project used the bare minimum of drawing depending almost exclusively on experimentation with materials and techniques to arrive at its final form and function.

Until we are able to slide architects in and out of MRI machines to monitor brain activity while drawing vs. making, evidence to support making as part of an educational curriculum needs to be sourced and discovered outside the field of architecture. Often, it is instinct that leads to investigation. So whether it is macaque monkeys, wrestling, bicycle riding, musicians or mice, research into the hand brain relationship in my world is unrestricted.

Many of the projects conceptualized, developed and fabricated in my class place a heavy emphasis on what Adam Gopnik describes above as the “originality of labor”. None of the best projects began and ended as a “brilliant” concept, i.e. an original idea. All of the best projects began as an idea, often a not so good idea, and it was through labor that originality and excellence revealed themselves. Often a prompt on my part will push the student in a direction that eventually becomes their own path.

I don’t teach students how to make joints and I don’t teach students how to use the various machines and tools available in our shop until we are well into the semester and students have had a chance to figure out what they “want to make”. Once students figure out what they want to make, we sit down for one on one reviews and discuss appropriate joints, connections, materials and the machines and tools that make the most sense as part of their fabrication process.

MONKEYS

“…Umiltà and colleagues registered the activities of premotor cortex neurons of macaque monkeys performing a task using a pair of pliers. The authors observed that the majority of recorded neurons did not fire following the mere act of opening or closing the pliers, but fired only when the tool was used to grasp bits of food.” 14

As an architect, teacher and as architecture students, we are not interested in learning how to open and close a pair of pliers, nor are we interested in designing and fabricating cooler looking pliers, bigger, smaller

and/or variously ornamented pliers. We are interested in conceptualizing, designing and fabricating a solution for grasping bits of food.

Matteo Baccarini and Angelo Maravita reference the macaque monkey data to refine their definition of tool. “…tools are objects with particular functional properties that are used intentionally with the aim of improving, or even making possible, the execution of a given task” 15

I am interested in tools at all scales, i.e. buildings as tools for living and working, furniture as tools for sitting, resting, supporting and storing, functional objects as tools for lighting, carrying and hanging, drawing tools for making ideas visible and crafting tools for bringing conceptual ideas to functional physical life.

MUSCLES

As a former wrestler and now wrestling coach, I know from personal experience that instincts are “raw”. Instincts can be developed and improved through experience. “What to do next?” can be scientific, i.e. follow a set of rules or procedures, but it can also be instinctive, i.e. follow activities, routines, movements that have proven previously successful.

In wrestling, similar to many sports, we do calisthenics to make the body stronger and more flexible. We introduce new techniques and drill or practice these techniques in isolation to connect or coordinate our brain, eyes, bodies and senses in such a way that we don’t have to “think about” what we are doing. Finally we wrestle, allowing the strength, flexibility and technique training to be used intuitively, spontaneously, i.e without “thinking about it”. Although the body may lose strength and flexibility without training and/or use, the body and brain remember. The body & brain retain

Figure 10: “Bench of Scraps” Student designed and fabricated bench began as a concept, i.e. to use all of the other student’s wood scraps to make something. The function of bench, its final form and scale were all dependent on the waste of classmates.

Figure 11: “Chopsticks & Holder” Student designed and fabricated project began with an interest in precious stones and the cuts used to reveal their variety of facets. Ash wood was cut at various angles to reveal ash’s many and varied facets. The various angles and facets eventually revealed the possible function, i.e. chopsticks and chopstick holders.

what is sometimes referred to as muscle memory. The notion of muscle memory ls very real to me each time I ask my 40+ year old body and brain to “remember” during practice the techniques that my 17 year old body and brain “memorized” long ago.

MICE

“One way to pull neurons into the network, however, is to learn something. In a 2007 study, new brain cells in mice became looped into the animals’ neural networks if the mice learned to navigate a water maze…But these brain cells were very limited in what they could do. When the researchers studied brain activity afterward, they found that the newly wired cells fired only when the animals navigated the maze again, not when they practiced other cognitive tasks. The learning encoded in those cells did not transfer to other types of rodent thinking. Exercise, on the other hand, seems to make neurons nimble. When researchers in a separate study had mice run, the animals’ brains readily wired many new neurons into the neural network. But those neurons didn’t fire later only during running. They also lighted up when the animals practiced cognitive skills, like exploring unfamiliar environments. In the mice, running, unlike learning, had created brain cells that could multitask.” 16

The wrestler and wrestling coach in me views the teaching and practice of drawing details or proposing how to put a building together as the same combination of training, drilling, experience and intuition possessed by wrestlers wrestling. We as architects are as comfortable recognizing that a previously used detail will work again in a current project as we are designing and drawing a completely new detail based on circumstances unique to a project’s climate, site and/or circumstance. In fact we are typically capable of designing and drawing multiple solutions to the same problem which we are then able

to evaluate for ease of fabrication, cost and/or effectiveness.

Architects come up with a design on paper, a sketch, a 3d model, a set of dimensioned and noted construction documents and in the process use their imagination to mentally construct their design. Imagination relies on a mental library of exposure and experience. Imagination is dependent on the structures that architects have encountered, used, tested and documented on previous projects. Imagination is dependent on the materials the architect has witnessed, researched and worked with in previous designs. Construction details and methods of assembly depend not only on past observations and experience in the process of making, but also observations and experience of functional objects in use, their success and failure. Imagination, our mental library, is populated with observational/mental and physical/practical experiences. One’s mental library, the reservoir from which we as designers consult, is limited only by what we have done in our lives to populate it’s shelves.

MECHANIC

“What we were interested in was finding out how memories are encoded in the brain. We found that there is a cell which structures the signal output from the cerebellum into a particular code that is engraved as memory for a newly learned motor skill.” 17

150+ credit hours studying bicycle history/theory, bicycle physics, making drawings of bicycles and watching cyclists ride bicycles without ever riding a bicycle, taking a bicycle apart, putting a bicycle back together, and/or designing and fabricating a custom bicycle sounds unusual at best and incomplete at worst. After 150+ hours studying bicycle history/theory & bicycle physics, there is a pretty good chance that

Figure 12: “Electrical Plan” Student designed and fabricated project began with the idea of using architectural components typically concealed on a job-site and making them visible while simultaneously relieving the electrical components of their usual role and allowing conduit and electrical boxes to function as legs, structure & serving trays.

Figure 13: “Split” Student designed and fabricated project began with the donated board and the crack or split that the student wanted to incorporate and/or drive all of the decision making from concept through execution/fabrication.

we will forget some or much of what we read and/or learned. But once we learn to ride a bicycle we don’t forget. Acquiring a new physical skill, like riding a bicycle, sets into motion body-brain connections as they process information and produce and store memories.

Breaks, gears, handlebars and pedals may or may not be understandable, to some degree, through observation and drawing but they definitely become understandable to many degrees as we ride uphill on a windy day along a path filled with large rocks, puddles, pedestrians and unleashed poodles.

MUSIC

“Musical expertise is an important model for investigating training-related functional and structural alterations in the human brain. Musical training on most musical instruments involves the interaction between precise bimanual hand coordination and higher cognitive functions (Wan and Schlaug, 2010; Herholz and Zatorre, 2012) that typically requires fine-tuning over years of practice. Apart from functional brain changes as a consequence of musical training, several studies provide compelling evidence for structural and neurophysiological differences between musicians and non-musician controls” 18

Intuitively or through experience, we know there is a difference between listening to and playing music. Intuitively we know there is a difference between just drawing vs. drawing & fabricating a functional object.

Oddly, neurological studies investigating the difference between music listening and music playing are numerous while neurological studies investigating the difference between designing vs. designing & making are, to my knowledge, non-existent.

“From an early age, musicians learn complex motor and auditory skills (e.g., the translation of visually perceived musical symbols into motor commands with simultaneous auditory monitoring of output), which they practice extensively from childhood throughout their ent ire careers. Using a voxel-by-voxel morphometric technique, we found gray matter volume differences in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial brain regions when comparing professional musicians (keyboard players) with a matched group of amateur musicians and non-musicians. Although some of these multi-regional differences could be attributable to innate predisposition, we believe they may represent structural adaptations in response to long-term skill acquisition and the repetitive rehearsal of those skills. This hypothesis is supported by the strong association we found between structural differences, musician status, and practice intensity, as well as the wealth of supporting animal data showing structural changes in response to long-term motor training.” 19

An architectural education limited solely to the study of history, theory, precedent and observation limits our sensorial experience and mental library to connections between eyes and brain. An architectural education limited solely to sketching, drawing and physically modeling our designs limits the eyes, hand & brain connections to a mental library in abstract, i.e., “a word denoting an idea, quality, or state rather than a concrete object.” 20

Figure 14: Student designed and fabricated project combining an interest in bicycle riding, repairing and making with an interest in a work surface which changes definition by way of a top that changes height, i.e. table, desk and/or counter…just rotate the bicycle wheel and the top goes up and down changing from one function to another & then back again.

Figure 15: Author designed and fabricated class project using locally sourced wood to produce “local” sound by way of an acoustic/electric ukulele paired with a belt clip supported portable amplifier allowing the player to transport his or her local sounds to places local, not so local and/or global.

The argument should not be either vs. or when it comes to an architect’s education being solely drawing and modeling vs. full scale real material fabrication and/or design-build. Intuition and circumstantial evidence are a strong enough argument for erring on the safe side and incorporating some number of, physical making of ideas, course credits into the already jam packed schedule of the student architect. Physically making an idea from concept to functional object is a unique and arguably critical experience in the education of an architect and architecture student.

“Understanding or reengineering the brain will not save us; neither will sitting our children in front of computers when they are three years old so that they can skip the ‘pointless’ experiences of childhood during which they find out what a baseball, or a puppet, or a toy car, or a swing can do to their body, and vice versa. We have no idea what will happen to the child who watches eye-catching imitations of juggling over the Internet if that child never gets around to trying a three-ball toss himself or herself. Since kids are turning out to be better and better computer users—and hackers!—at younger and younger ages, we must be prepared to accept that their ideas of baseball, excitement, and partnership will be something new, not at all like ours. We can thank Plotkin’s secondary heuristic for that certainty. The fully computerized kid may turn out to be just like us or strikingly different, as a consequence of having replaced haptics with vision as the primary arbiter of reality and having substituted virtual baseball for the old-fashioned kind at an age when the brain’s sensorimotor system hasn’t settled on the time constants it will use for its own perceptual-motor operations. There really is something quite new about bonding very early in life with keyboard, mouse, and 3-D graphics, and it will be very interesting to see what it produces by way of new heuristics (problem-solving

behaviors) in adult life. I am not surprised that we are so eager as a society to welcome the Internet into our public schools. I am a little surprised that we are so ready to say goodbye to the playground and the books in the school library.” 21

Figure 16: “Cocoon” Student designed and fabricated project began with the faculty of special needs children describing their desire for “something that would allow children to be held but not by another human being” “Cocoon” is either a loose or tight hug depending on how far inside you climb.

Wilson, Frank R. (2010-10-27). The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage) 1

(Kindle Locations 206-208). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Neural Bases of Complex Tool Use in Humans, Scott H. Johnson-Frey, Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 8 No.2, 2

February 2004

The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, Zdravko Radman Editor, MIT Press, 2013, Foreward p.xvii3

Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, tr. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p 34

Walter Gropius, Proceedings (ACSA Press, July 1959), p 59.5

Stephen Grabow, Christopher Alexander-The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture (Oriel Press, 1983), p 1086

John P. Eberhard, Architecture and the Brain: A New Knowledge Base From Neuroscience, Ostberg/Greenway 7

Communications, Atalanta, 2007, p86

Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind, Chapter 5: A World of One’s Own8

David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship, (Cambridge University Press, 1968), The Craft Reader, Berg, Oxford, 9

2010, p. 341-342

David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship, (Cambridge University Press, 1968), The Craft Reader, Berg, Oxford, 10

2010, p. 341-342 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, (Cambridge University Press, 1968), The Craft Reader, Berg, Oxford, 2010, p. 342

Getting a Grip on Memory: Unilateral Hand Clenching Alters Episodic Recall, Ruth E. Propper, Sean E. McGraw, Tad T. 11

Brunyé, Michael Weiss, Published: April 24, 2013, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.006247

Unilateral muscle contractions enhance creative thinking, AbrAhAm Goldstein, Ketty revivo, michAl Kreitler, And nili 12

metuKi Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2010, 17 (6), 895-899 doi:10.3758/PBR.17.6.895

Adam Gopnik, Two Bands, The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013, p121-12613

Matteo Baccani and Angelo Maravita, Beyond the Boundaries of the Hand, The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, Zdravko 14

Radman Editor, MIT Press, 2013, p.80

Matteo Baccani and Angelo Maravita, Beyond the Boundaries of the Hand, The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, Zdravko 15

Radman Editor, MIT Press, 2013, p.81

Gretchen Reynolds, How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain, New York Times Magazine, April 18, 201216

The University of Aberdeen News, 17 July 2009, Dr. Peer Wulff quote describing his research team’s work , 17

Parvalbumin-positive CA1 interneurons are required for spatial working but not for reference memory, Andrew J Murray, Jonas-Frederic Sauer, Gernot Riedel, Christina McClure, Laura Ansel, Lesley Cheyne, Marlene Bartos, William Wisden & Peer Wulff, Nature Neuroscience 14, 297–299 (2011)

Jäncke, 2009)” Frontiers In Behavioral Neuroscience, 2014; 8: 245. 18

Brain Structures Differ between Musicians and Non-MusiciansChristian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, The Journal of 19

Neuroscience, 8 October 2003, 23(27): 9240-9245;

Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition, December 201120

Wilson, Frank R. (2010-10-27). The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage) 21

(Kindle Locations 5626-5638). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.