Do You Read Me? (2): Definitional Divergence: Architects vs. Everyone Else

Definitional Divergence: Architects vs. Everyone Else

Studio, noun.

Architects

• A design course;
• A location where design work for said course is executed;
• The group of people peculiarly disposed to taking such a course, who never seem to call it a “course.” (Courses are for Everyone Else.)

Everyone Else

• A room in which various forms of artistic expression are undertaken by amateurs and, rarely, by professionals;

Variations include:

• A room that employs full-length mirrors to convey the troublesome reality that humans are, in fact, embodied, and not all such bodies are good dancers;
• A room with walls that have an uncanny ability to broadcast widely the sound of a child learning a string instrument;
• In the real estate vernacular, a type of apartment with prodigious modifiers such as “sunny” and “spacious” which serve to dazzle the prospective tenant into signing a lease for a mid-size closet.

Model, noun.

Architects

• A smaller version of a design proposal which represents a given project in three dimensions. Frivolous details like material and structure may be abrogated in favor of photogenic foamcore.

Everyone Else

• In the capitalist vernacular, a particular version of a device that must be repeatedly discarded and repurchased to earn the critical designation “latest”;
• A data set arranged in an appealing array, thereby enabling statisticians to conclude unequivocally that they do, in fact, need more data;
• A financial analysis typically constructed in Excel by MBAs to divert attention from their ultimate pursuit of world dominance;
• A person seen only in photographs whose appearance prompts a polite questioning of one’s own ID photo.

Space, noun.

Architects

• The three-dimensional result, built by Others, of two-dimensional ideas, drawn by Architects.

Everyone Else

• The ever-widening universe;
• The gap between two text characters which may be widened ad infinitum to meet the minimum page requirements of a term paper;
• A respectful recommendation to retreat before the person needing said space goes postal.