Opinion 24: Tactile Practice
- archigrammelbourne
- 18 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Alec Montana Rosen
Being an architect today demands vision, creativity, and precision, but it no longer seems to demand actually living. Firsthand experience has somehow become optional. Too often, architects design for places they have never stood in, drafting details for environments that remain completely foreign to them. Perspective is gained from walking into distant cathedrals, staying in unfamiliar towns, or listening to strangers’ stories.
Throughout practice, awards are given for precision and mastery of software. But little recognition for living. This has left us with a generation of architects who are fluent in tools but perhaps lack perspective.
Today, we risk practicing a more hollow version of architecture: one that is detached and somewhat devoid of meaning. The next generation of great architecture will not come from a screen, but from those who walk the streets, touch the stones, and truly see.
Historically, the architect looked to Hemingway: restless, with a sketchbook always in hand. The architect gathered experience over time and transformed it into built form.
Think of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose prairie houses and later works carried the unmistakable imprint of his travels to Japan. Or Corb, who credited his Voyage d’Orient as the foundation of his architectural imagination.
Architects didn’t just study architecture; they lived it. They experienced markets and watched the light shift across the stone walls. Their perspective was not an accessory; it was the very foundation of it.
To explore these ideas further, I spoke with Scott Woods, founder of Venice Studio. His background helps explain the origins of this studio. Scott studied architecture in Tasmania with only a few dozen students. He described the experience as close-knit but isolated.
“In Tasmania, I was always looking outward,” he told me. “The Dutch scene of the 1990s OMA, early MVRDV carried a radical energy. Koolhaas’s ‘Fuck Concepts! Context!, first published in 1995 (later republished in San Rocco), demonstrated to me that architecture could exist independently of its site. Reading that from the far edge of the world was electrifying.” That impulse shaped Venice Studio, giving students direct access to architecture as a lived experience rather than a distant abstraction.
When I asked Scott if schools have lost the soul of lived experience, his answer was nuanced. “Large schools lose intimacy. Design often occurs without ever setting foot on a site. But in Venice, what had been treated as ‘surplus’ became a foundation of the program. That value is powerful.” He also stated that the experience, however, does not necessarily give you access to a more substantial design.
On the subject of travel, Woods resisted the cliché. “It’s not about bucket lists. The world is already at your door. What matters is disruption letting difference unsettle you.” He recalled a long study of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, only to find the actual visit disappointing. “The revelation never came.” Also mentioning Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote that difference is always already at the threshold.
When I asked how he resists today’s culture of efficiency and polish, he was blunt. “I’ve never been interested in efficiency. Too much of the profession rewards speed and functional tropes. The best architects create pockets of resistance, slower, stranger experimentation. Venice Studio was meant to be one of those pockets.”
Finally, I asked him for advice on what he would give to emerging architects. Every architect should keep two books on the nightstand: one on architecture and one of pure fiction. One grounds you in discipline, the other lets you disappear.”
For Woods, travel is about an analog approach, whether by walking through a city, stepping into a novel, or opening yourself to disruption. Venice Studio became a part of that philosophy.
Given my luck, with the help of AGM, I was able to interview John Wardle, based in Melbourne, whose work is grounded in local craft and lived experience, showing how the surplus of place can be translated into buildings of cultural significance.
A foundational pillar of Wardle’s is craft, and he spoke of it as a record of place. What interested me was the way he emphasized how time and context shape craft. Craft, for him, is evidence of what technologies were available, of the cultural limits that brought a community together, and conditions that shaped it. In his words, they “record the moments in time… artifacts that are emblematic and do record the characteristics of a particular place, community, and time.” The interplay between materiality and memory reinforces the idea of a lived record.
His process follows the same logic. He resists depth, describing his knowledge as “very broad, rather shallow… enough that I can talk about ceramics to a ceramicist or steel to a fabricator.” What struck me was the clarity with which he framed the role of the architect, not responsible for every craft, but someone who can open conversations across industries. In that sense, the architect becomes a translator, creating the conditions for making it happen.
When we asked him about milestones, he spoke of the moments that defined his practice were often the “firsts”: the first library, first gallery, first high-rise. He talked about the Phoenix Central Park commission by Judith Neilson as one of those high points, but it was less about prestige and more about what new territory it allowed the practice to explore.
Wardle was also pragmatic about software and engagement. He doesn’t dismiss technology; his office uses “really high-end computer software,” but he cautions that if you only design through one mode, “you are working with a very reduced potential.” For him, the digital must remain in dialogue with the handmade. Otherwise, as he put it, “you lack that connectivity with the process of making.”
BIM (Building Information Modeling) drives the work in firms we admire, such as SOM and BIG Architects, which operate as machines. Their principal’s vision drives the work. However, within the lower rungs, young designers mainly focus on refining details and models.
What often emerges in this context are buildings that come together well but can fall short in terms of presence. In pursuit of efficiency, we tend to overlook the analog and lived knowledge.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian professionals spend over 90% of their time indoors, whether or not they are architects. Similarly, in the National Recreation and Park Association in the U.S., more than 58% of adults spend less than an hour outside each day, and over a third spend only 30 minutes or less. Architectural practice mirrors this reality. Junior architects often spend eight to ten hours a day behind a screen…
We as professionals, tasked with shaping built environments for life, are often out of touch with it. The distance between architects and the environments they shape is widening, leaving us with spaces that resemble simulations more than lived places.
The industry has never been more digital. Entire workflows are now embedded in scripts, focusing mainly on improving efficiency. While tools facilitate the process, they leave with a dangerous state of complacency.
Tools are only as powerful as the perspective of the person wielding them. As architecture progresses, those who will carry the profession forward will balance mastery with experience. There needs to be an emphasis on the tangible and intangible experiences that influence design, in the hope that architecture’s essence is never lost to speed alone.
Our lived experiences should set the terms for tomorrow's built environment. The next great generation of architects will be those who design with purpose and allow the world around us to enhance the work they dedicate themselves to. To quote John Wardle, “the pressures on the world are to be more and more conventional, and the only way to resist is to step away from architecture, to be influenced by what lies beyond it."
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Interviews:
Scott Woods Venice Studio
John Wardle with Isabella Etna
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Citation:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994.
Koolhaas, Rem. S, M, L, XL. Monacelli Press, 1995.
“Call: San Rocco 4, Fuck Concepts! Context!” San Rocco, 2011, https://www.scribd.com/document/355703509/Call-SANROCCO-4-Fuck-Concept.
National Recreation and Park Association. “U.S. Adults Value Time Spent Outside, Survey Finds.” NRPA Press Room, 2020, https://www.nrpa.org/about-national-recreation-and-park-association/press-room/u.s.-adults-value-time-spent-outside-survey-finds/
Rem Koolhaas. “The Context Complex.” Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), 2012, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/28/with-and-within/74490/the-context-complex
MPavilion. “Venice Studio.” MPavilion, 2018, https://mpavilion.org/venicestudio/.
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Image credit:
Alec Rosen
John Wardle Architects
Yuyao Che, Georgia Mentzines, Andy An & Ashley Concannon
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Alec Rosen is an architectural designer from Miami Beach currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. Throughout his architectural training, he became interested in how lived experiences and interactions with the built environment shape design. This passion stems from growing up in an international city, and having the opportunity to travel and see different environments. Alec spends most of his time designing and exploring how built contexts can be reworked not replaced. Recently he was awarded 1st place in the 2025 ACSA CMU Competition. When he is not focused on architecture, Alec is probably skiing or searching for new vinyl. He is now based in New York City, working on projects that push him to step outside his comfort zone and be ambitious.
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