What am I thinking about today? Details – not just literal architectural details, but I’m thinking about how we as architects imagine and plan for multiple events, components and at times relationships coming together – beautifully. It does not just happen.

For the most part, we spend our time on the literal details. This is exhausting. By the way, all these photos are purposely included of incomplete projects to illustrate that we need to sweat the details before the project is complete in order to achieve the seemingly effortless details – that takes tremendous effort. Sadly, I’m finding that modern, minimalistic details require far more time, energy and money than what we have come to accept as “acceptable” in our modern society.

This will make me your friend or your enemy.

It seems there are two kinds of people in this world (wait for it, you’ve heard this joke). People who sweat the details and people who do not even know there are details to sweat. Perhaps that’s unkind or unfair. However, watching details ignored is more exhausting.

Too often we gloss over details in the fury of the functional, not wanting to be excessive or wasteful flawed in the thinking that details are superfluous. That they’re gratuitous. Let me let you in on a secret. They’re neither. I believe our friend Charles said it best.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” ~Charles Eames

If you notice the links to previous posts, you’ll see I’ve written about this multiple times – because it’s important.