Effortful plans

Affinities

- Ellis Woodman

Selected by Ellis Woodman

We asked Ellis Woodman to choose our first three buildings for the Affinities section. Ellis is the director of the Architecture Foundation, a widely published architecture critic, and the author of a number of monographic publications, the most recent of which is Temples and Tombs: The Sacred and Monumental Architecture of Craig Hamilton (Lund Humphries, London 2019).

Fundamental as the act of drafting a plan may be to the practice of architecture, the purposes to which architects direct that task vary significantly. On the one hand, there are architects - and surely the vast majority - for whom the plan is essentially a record of previously settled agreements. Such drawings may go through multiple iterations but that process is essentially one of ironing out unforeseen glitches. The aim is a sense of effortlessness, a reclamation of the clarity that the project presented before the first line was drawn.