The Grand Work of Fiction: The Detail as Narrative

A practising architect and Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Edward Ford is the leading expert on the architectural detail and the author of three seminal books on the subject. Here Ford explains that, though the decision ‘to abstract or to articulate’ architecture ‘may be largely subconscious’, it is never ‘arbitrary’. For ‘in the well-designed building, it is done in the service of the creation of a larger narrative, a unity of vision’.     

All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers

In the mid-1950s, a group of young faculty at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin - aka the Texas Rangers - entertained themselves with weekly sessions of a sophisticated, collective drawing game, ‘Dot-the-Dot’, in which there was an emphasis on inventive fluency in hand drawing as well as an innate knowledge of historic European city plans. What happened when Mark Morris , Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, decided in a design studio to ask present-day students to revive the game?