Theory of models – The art of questioning / Go Hasegawa

For me, the greatest motivation for making a model is finding a “good question”. […] 

There are a variety of givens in an architectural design and you start out with the sense that there are already some problems that need to be solved. But a question is different from an existing condition. To get beyond your responses to a set of conditions, I believe it is essential to ask yourself new questions or look at things in terms of integrated questions and answers. A question is something that has not already been prepared and it’s not something that originally existed within you – it is something that rises up between you and the project.

Posing questions is not at all a philosophical exercise; you might say it’s an assertion of what should be done in a certain situation. At some point, I realized that whether I am having a meeting with my staff about design or commenting on a student’s plan at the university, I have a habit of repeatedly asking things like, “what’s the problem” and “what’s important here?” Whatever the project or aspect is, you should ask questions of yourself, and try to figure out what should be done […]

Information technology might be useful in arriving at a “good answer” or “a previously unseen answer”, but that alone only poses known questions. Human beings are the only ones who can struggle to come up with new questions. If we don’t try to ask questions, architecture will go no further than responding to set conditions.