THE PLEIN AIR STUDIO

For architecture students, the city is the most profound classroom. Its buildings, streets, and public spaces hold lessons no model or textbook can fully capture. This is why traveling studios and study abroad programs are so transformative—they immerse us in both the artistry and the mechanics of design, while teaching us to read the architecture that speaks volumes.

Drawing as a Way of Reading

In my European travel studio, one of our courses was devoted entirely to sketching. Armed with pencils, ink, charcoal, pastel, and watercolors, we spent our days on site, translating cities into marks on paper. Each medium became a different voice: the precision of ink, the softness of charcoal, the immediacy of watercolor.

Sketching trained us to read architecture like a text—the rhythm of windows, the weight of stone, the cadence of light across a façade. Each line became a sentence; each shadow, a paragraph. To sketch was to enter into dialogue with buildings, to discover how architecture speaks if we slow down enough to listen.

Technology as Translation

Running parallel to sketching, our second course explored building technologies. Here, we learned to decode the structural and material systems behind the spaces we admired: masonry vaults, thermal mass, glazing, spans. If sketching taught us to hear the poetry, technology revealed the grammar—the framework that makes meaning possible.

This dual focus—art and science, hand and detail—reminded us that architecture is both language and logic, expression and execution.

Learning in Context

The studio experience extended beyond coursework. Traveling together through unfamiliar cities, we learned collaboration in its most organic form: critiquing sketches at café tables, passing charcoal across a piazza, or discussing systems and spans on a train ride between stops. Each city became a new chapter to interpret, each sketchbook page a translation of what we saw and felt.

Why It Endures

Traveling studios teach us that architecture is not abstract—it is lived narrative. To sketch by hand is to hear its voice; to study technologies is to understand how that voice is carried. Together, these courses revealed that the built environment is never silent. If you know how to look, every building, every street, every material speaks.

When I look back at our final presentation—a plethora of mixed media sketches distilled from weeks of travel—I see more than drawings. I see the first attempts at fluency in the very language that defines my practice: Architecture Speaks Volumes.

A Call to Future Architects

If the chance comes to join a traveling studio, take it. You will return not only with a sketchbook and technical knowledge, but with the ability to read architecture as text, as voice, as memory.

Because architecture does not whisper. Architecture Speaks Volumes.

STEEL, SHADOWS AND SILENCE

I graduated from IIT Chicago, where I spent three formative years studying inside S.R. Crown Hall, a temple of steel and glass designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. I didn’t realize it then, but spending that much time within such disciplined space — stripped to its essence — would shape how I move through the world, how I see, and how I design.

In my final semester, I joined a month-long study abroad program across Europe in 2011. One of our stops was Bauhaus Dessau, the birthplace of an ideology — the Bauhaus movement — that would ripple through time, continents, and cities like Chicago. It was there that I encountered, in person, an icon I had only known through books: the Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer.

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Seeing the Chair in Its Element

The moment was quiet.

Afternoon light slanted through the glass block wall, casting soft, diffused shadows across the concrete floor. There, against the rhythm of translucent geometry, sat the Wassily Chair — lean, self-contained, unapologetically modern.

It didn’t ask for attention. It simply was.

Its tubular steel frame, its taut leather straps — all so precise, so resolved. Designed in 1925, this chair wasn’t trying to be beautiful in a traditional sense. It was built to be logical. And in that logic, it became something profound.

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What Makes the Wassily Chair Significant?

The Wassily Chair — originally known as the Model B3 — was designed by Marcel Breuer while he was at the Bauhaus. He was inspired by the frame of a bicycle, captivated by the possibilities of tubular steel, a material not yet used in residential furniture at the time.

Its significance lies in what it represents:

• Material Innovation: Breuer took an industrial material — chromium-plated steel tubing — and introduced it to domestic interiors. This was radical. The steel was strong, light, hygienic, and modern.

• Bauhaus Principles Embodied: The chair represents everything the Bauhaus stood for — honesty in materials, the merging of art and industry, and the pursuit of pure form and function. Nothing is decorative. Everything serves a purpose.

• Transparency + Structure: Unlike the heavy upholstered furniture of the past, the Wassily Chair feels almost like a line drawing in space. It’s open, it breathes. It frames the human body instead of engulfing it.

• Timeless Relevance: A century later, the chair still feels contemporary. It doesn’t age, because it’s not rooted in fashion — it’s rooted in intention.

Breuer later said: “I thought that perhaps I could design chairs that would be built on the same principle as bicycles.” That line has stayed with me. It reframes design as engineering, poetry, and vision — all at once.

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From Dessau to Chicago, from Breuer to Mies

Standing in that room at Dessau, I was struck by the continuity. I had spent years immersed in Miesian clarity, working and sketching beneath the floating roof of Crown Hall. And here I was, at the source — surrounded by the work of Breuer, Gropius, Kandinsky — the very figures who laid the foundation that Mies would later refine and export.

The Wassily Chair felt like a kind of bridge.

It connected art to function, Europe to America, past to present, and material to idea. It reminded me that architecture doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives through objects, through spaces, through moments of stillness where design simply speaks.

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What This Moment Taught Me

Design doesn’t have to shout to be powerful.

Sometimes, the most enduring work is the most restrained — the kind that’s been reduced to only what’s essential, nothing more. The Wassily Chair is not just a chair. It’s a manifesto in steel and leather. A quiet rebellion against ornament. A declaration that beauty can be engineered.

It’s the kind of object that asks you to look closer. To notice the way materials come together. To think about how things are made — and why.

That’s why this chair, this space, and this moment are my Feature Friday.

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Photo taken at Bauhaus Dessau, Germany — 2011.