What Does a Good Question Do?

By Anies Salomie Nivetha Gnanaraj and Laura Kiti Kirby

Most workshops begin with a brief. Ours began with a question about ourselves.

When Nicholas Bewick walked into our studio at Yacademy for a workshop of Transcendence and Design: the dimension of the object in spirituality. We expected the usual: a site, a set of constraints, a deadline, and an architect who would appear for mid guidance and at the final review to tell us what we had got wrong. What we got instead was someone who wanted to know who we were first, not our portfolios, but “Us”. Where we came from, what we noticed, what kind of architects we thought, we wanted to become and whether we had any idea, why!!

It sounds like a soft way to start. It wasn't. It turned out to be the brief.

The room before the project

From the first stretch of the workshop, the conversation refused to stay in one place. We would be talking about faith, and then about material. About where we grew up, and then about thresholds. About what was happening in the world that week, and then about what a building is actually for. Nicholas moved between these without ever announcing a transition, and because he did, so did we.

The strange effect of this was that we began to hear each other. We had been in the same studio and knew each other's work far better than we knew each other's reasoning. In those sessions, we found out what our classmate’s idea on spirituality was, what they believed, what they had inherited and what they were trying to put down. Someone would speak about what a particular flooring material made them feel, or how spirituality was perceived and experienced within their culture, and the room would go quiet in a way that studio rooms rarely do.We were, without quite realising it, assembling the only research that the project would need.

When the talking turned into a brief

The task was to design a spiritual, inter-religious installation/object in a space that had to hold more than one way of believing without flattening any of them into the same thing. On paper, that is a very hard problem. It invites the worst kind of architectural answer: something smooth and neutral and empty, a lowest common denominator with good lighting.

What saved us from that was that we had spent days talking about ourselves. By the time we started drawing, we were not designing for an abstract plural public. We were designing for the people sitting around the table, whose beliefs we now knew were genuinely different from ours and genuinely held. The difference stopped being a design problem to be smoothed over and became the actual material of the thing.

For one of us, it felt like looking at a peak of your own self , the project turning out to be a fairly direct read of what you had said out loud a week earlier and not fully understood at the time. We had been circling spirituality for weeks by then. The reflection wasn't new but what was new was that a few hours of conversation made it clear. Nothing was added nor things were taken away. The ideas we had been carrying around in a loose pile got streamlined into something we could actually draw from, and we could suddenly see the perspective we had been standing in without knowing it. Not every mentor can do that. Plenty can start a conversation. Far fewer can help you finish one.

That is what good mentorship and good questions does. Nobody handed us a concept. He just kept asking, and eventually we heard our own answers clearly enough to build with them. By the end of the conversation we had our concept ,a design that came, wholly and unmistakably, out of what each of us believed a spiritual object to be.

The same method, in his own words

After our workshop, we had the chance to interview Nicholas. For the Yacademy podcast called Voices Beyond Architecture, after the conversation with him we felt the workshop makes even more sense. His answers describe exactly what he had been trying to express to us during the workshop.

When we asked him, what young architects most need, he didn't say good design skills, or a portfolio, or an internship, he just smilingly said: “Be curious”. He continued to say develop your sensibilities, observe what is going on around you. He said “Sometimes the work is dedicated ‘round-the-clock passion’; sometimes, he said, it is a question of listening, sometimes just of observing.” 

“I saw architecture as a broad field that brings together many different areas. It wasn't limited to designing buildings. It allowed me to be creative, think about different problems, work at different scales, and use different materials. I liked the idea that being a creative thinker could allow me to work across many different fields. That freedom and variety appealed to me, and it is probably one of the main reasons I continued with architecture.” – Nicolas Biwick

The line that has stayed with us most is what he said about outcomes. Building the thing, seeing it realised that isn't the important aspect. What is interesting is the process, and where ideas come from like something you saw, something you read, something you dreamt, something you would never have thought possible.

For students, that is an unexpectedly generous thing to hear from someone with a long journey as a Designer and as an Architect. Because most of the anxiety in architecture school is about the object at the end. He was pointing at the part we were actually in.

What we're taking with us

We left that day with more than just a project. We left with a question: What kind of architects do we want to become?

Nicholas never gave us a direct answer. Instead, he gave us the space to question ourselves. Through conversations about our experiences, beliefs, observations and ideas, we began to understand that these things are not separate from the architecture we create. They shape it.

What stayed with us most was the idea that architecture begins with curiosity. To ask why something is the way it is, to observe what is around us, to listen to other people, and to remain open to ideas from places we may not normally look.

We also realised that architecture does not have to be a fixed path. It can move between different scales, materials, disciplines and ways of thinking. Perhaps being an architect is not about knowing exactly what we want to become, but about remaining curious enough to keep discovering it.

We are still working on our answers….

And perhaps that was the point of the workshop. We came looking for a project but left with better questions.