Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect

This revised edition of Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect is full of new content, building on the success of the previous edition. All theoriginal exercises have been revised and new ones added, with the format changingto allow the inclusion of more supplementary material. The aim remains the same,to help pre- or early-course architecture students begin and develop their abilityto think as architects.

Learning  to do architecture is tricky. It involves awakening abilities that  remain dormant in most people. It is like learning language for the  first time; a task made more mystifying by the fact that architecture  deals not in words but in places: places to stand, to walk, to sit, to  hide, to sleep, to cook, to eat, to work, to play, to worship…

This  book was written for those who want to be architects. It suggests a  basis for early experiences in a school of architecture; but it could  also be used in secondary schools and colleges, or as self-directed  preparation for students in the months before entering professional  education.

Exercises in Architecture builds on and  supplements the methodology for architectural analysis presented in the  author’s previous book Analysing Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-Making (fifth edition, 2021) and demonstrated in his Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2015). Together, the three books, deal with the three aspects of learning any creative discipline: 1. Analysing Architecture provides a methodology for analysis that develops an understanding of the way architecture works; 2. Twenty-Five Buildings explores and extends that methodology through analysis of examples as case studies; and 3. Exercises in Architecture offers  a way of expanding understanding and developing fluency by following a  range of rudimentary and more sophisticated exercises.

Those  who wish to become professional architects (wherever in the world they  might be) must make a conscious effort to learn the universal language  of architecture as place-making, to explore its powers and how they  might be used. The exercises in this book are designed to help.