Night White Skies

Today’s conversation is with Jeffrey Nesbit about his book ‘Nature of Enclosure’.  So much of our architectural education and practice is reliant on the idea of control. Take representation for example. Without being able to quantify information about a site, materials or even people, how can we be expected to make decisions about what we ultimately build. If you can’t quantify it in a representation of some sort, how can you be expected to design with it. How can you be expected to make creative and informed choices? I'm confident in saying that’s the prevailing opinion. If we play this forward, there’s the assumption that if an architect or landscape architect knows enough to represent it in drawing, diagram or statistics, then we can also reasonably understand the implications of those decisions. But that simply isn't the case. Either because we willfully exclude information (representations are of course by nature a kind of filter) or because our understanding of the information at hand was inherentl