How Is Easy, Why Is Hard

Giancarlo De Carlo exhorts architects to not be hasty and irresponsible in determining ‘how’ at the expense of truly understanding ‘why’.  It is easier to ask (and answer) ‘how’ we can: use less space, earn more money, make this widget faster, make that widget cost less, increase the bottom line, maximize units/building, etc.  It is much harder to ask ‘why’ we feel the need to do that, and to honestly answer that more difficult question.  De Carlo argues that it is not for preservation of materials.  Instead, it is for preservation of the status of the elite.  Asking ‘why’ is too dangerous, because it humanizes those that money and power subjugate. “The priority scale established by the power structures has no sense except that of its own self-preservation.” 

I don’t quite share as pessimistic a view as Giancarlo De Carlo, but he has encouraged me to think about the distinction between ‘how’ and ‘why’, and how (and why) this is important to architecture.  In some senses, these two words may be interchangeable, but when they are not, there is a grand rift between the two meanings.  ‘How’ is a regard to the behavior or processes of an object or an action. “How does a carpenter build a chair?”  ‘Why’ primarily deals with a concern for meaning, or a justification of a conscious decision. “Why does a carpenter build a chair?” One could look at the sketches, construction documents, scraps of wood, and examine the chair to discover how it was made.  But without the carpenter present, one can only speculate why he or she chose to make a chair.  Proper seating might be a satisfactory answer, but a superficial one at that, telling nothing about desire for craftsmanship, a sense of accomplishment, individual and specific tastes, etc. 

A master-craftsman explaining "why?".

The architect not only needs to know ‘how’ a building works, but ‘why’ it works too.  Unless we are able to say ‘why’ a design works rather than just ‘how,’ we are selling ourselves short.  ‘How,’ in an effort to simplify, handicaps.  Alone, ‘how’ devalues.  ‘Why’ is the sustainable question, and rather than promising “more,” it provides “better”.