ARTICLE 26
Be Water: Why Architecture Should Stay Fluid
Bruce Lee had a philosophy that has always stuck with me:
“Be water, my friend.”
The larger idea was that water does not insist on one shape. Put it in a cup and it takes the shape of the cup. Put it in a bottle and it responds to the bottle. It adapts to what is around it while still remaining water.
Although if you pour it onto your desk, it mostly just becomes a problem.
But there is something about that idea that I think applies directly to architecture.
Why does an architect need to have one predetermined style?
Why can't we take something from here, something from there, learn from different periods, cultures, places, construction methods and designers, then allow all of that knowledge to become something new?
Maybe that becomes a style of its own.
Not a style defined by one roof form, one material palette or one kind of window.
A style defined by adaptability.
The more I think about it, this is really my design philosophy.
It is not about committing to one architectural style. It is about learning as much as possible from architecture, construction, engineering, people, places, history and experience, then bringing those lessons together and adapting them to the problem in front of you.
Maybe I Was Always Going to Think This Way
Maybe part of the reason fighting and architecture get connected in my head is personal.
I am a fourth-generation architect.
My grandfather was both a boxer and an architect.
Those two things might seem completely unrelated, but I think our environment influences the way we see the world more than we realize.
Architecture was around me.
So was this idea of fighting, adapting, studying what is in front of you, understanding distance, knowing when to move and knowing when to change your approach.
Maybe that is why I naturally see a connection between the two.
Neither architecture nor fighting is really about memorizing one move and applying it forever.
You build a foundation.
You study what came before you.
You develop instincts.
Then you respond to the situation in front of you.
My Career Has Worked the Same Way
The more I think about it, this is not just how I approach design.
It is how I have approached my career.
I have always wanted to learn different things because I believed each one could somehow make me better at the next thing.
Some experiences were obviously connected to architecture.
Architecture itself.
Construction.
Engineering.
Understanding how buildings are actually put together.
Working through details.
Seeing the difference between what looks good on paper and what actually works in the field.
Other experiences might seem completely unrelated.
I have swept floors in a gas station.
I have worked with my hands, tinkered with things and figured out how to fix them.
I have bartended and waited tables.
What does any of that have to do with architecture?
More than I probably realized at the time.
Working with your hands teaches you to respect how things are made.
Fixing something teaches you to understand how the pieces relate to each other instead of only looking at the finished product.
Construction teaches you that a line on a drawing eventually has to become something somebody can actually build.
Engineering teaches you to think about forces, systems, constraints and why things work.
Bartending and waiting tables teach you something completely different but just as important.
People.
You learn how to listen.
How to communicate.
How to read a situation.
How to explain something differently depending on who is standing in front of you.
How to deal with different personalities.
How to keep moving when ten things are happening at once.
Those skills may never show up on an architectural rendering, but they absolutely show up in the practice of architecture.
Maybe becoming a better designer is not just about studying design.
Maybe it is about collecting experiences.
Learning from different people.
Understanding different disciplines.
Getting your hands dirty.
Being curious about how things work.
Then carrying all of it with you into the next problem.
Take what you learn.
Adapt it.
Add it to what you already know.
Keep evolving.
Style Comes From Knowing More, Not Less
Look at mixed martial arts.
A well-rounded fighter does not train only one discipline.
Boxing.
Wrestling.
Jiu-jitsu.
Muay Thai.
Kickboxing.
Movement.
Distance.
Defense.
The evolution of MMA itself showed what happens when different fighting disciplines meet. Each offers different tools, different strengths and different ways of solving a problem.
A fighter may eventually become known for one particular strength or develop a style that looks completely their own.
But that individual style does not have to come from knowing less.
It can come from knowing more.
Even within boxing, think about someone like Floyd Mayweather.
He became famous in part for an extremely effective defensive approach, including his use of the shoulder roll.
But great defense is not one position or one trick.
Timing matters.
Distance matters.
Footwork matters.
Counters matter.
Movement matters.
The opponent matters.
A great fighter understands those relationships and adapts them to the situation in front of them.
Eventually the combination becomes recognizable as their way of doing it.
Why should architecture be any different?
Nothing Comes From Nowhere
We sometimes talk about architecture as if truly original design appears out of thin air.
I am not sure anything really works that way.
No architect works in a vacuum.
We are responding to something.
A building we saw.
A city we traveled through.
A drawing.
A detail.
A material.
A historical style.
An architect we studied.
Something we loved.
Something we hated.
Something that made us stop and ask, Why did they do that?
Sometimes the inspiration does not even come from architecture.
It comes from art.
Nature.
Engineering.
Fashion.
Music.
Machines.
Culture.
Everyday life.
We study something.
We question it.
We react to it.
We borrow from it.
We remove something.
We exaggerate something else.
We combine it with another idea.
Eventually something new begins to appear.
That does not make the work less creative.
That is creativity.
It happens in art.
It happens in music.
It happens in food.
It happens in fighting.
Someone learns what came before, reacts to it, changes it and adds something of their own.
Then eventually somebody else studies what they did and the process starts again.
Architecture is no different.
Even Rebellion Depends on What Came Before
Look at the transition from heavily ornamented traditional architecture into Modernism.
Many Modernist architects rejected applied ornament and historical decoration. New materials and construction methods were embraced. Buildings became more abstract. Efficiency, function and the possibilities of the machine became powerful influences.
But architecture did not suddenly forget everything that came before.
Proportion still existed.
Rhythm still existed.
Hierarchy still existed.
Order still existed.
Geometry still existed.
Structure still existed.
Relationships between solid and void still existed.
The vocabulary changed dramatically, but many of the fundamental questions architects had been wrestling with for centuries remained.
You can remove a column capital, cornice and carved ornament and still organize a facade through proportion and rhythm.
You can reject classical decoration without rejecting architectural order.
Even an architectural movement that essentially says, “We don't want to do what they did” is still responding to what they did.
The rebellion cannot exist without the thing it is rebelling against.
We Have an Enormous Library
That is what makes architectural history so fascinating to me.
We have thousands of years of built experiments sitting in front of us.
Classical architecture.
Gothic.
Renaissance.
Baroque.
Art Nouveau.
Art Deco.
Craftsman.
Modernism.
Brutalism.
Postmodernism.
Regional and vernacular traditions.
Industrial buildings.
Indigenous building traditions.
Contemporary architecture.
And countless things that do not fit neatly into any category.
That is an incredible library.
Why would we deliberately close most of the books?
Architecture seems to move in generations where eventually someone new arrives and essentially says:
No. You did it wrong.
One generation adds ornament.
Another strips it away.
One celebrates craftsmanship.
Another celebrates the machine.
One searches for order.
Another wants to break it.
One generation wants new buildings to fit within their historic surroundings.
Another wants them to clearly announce that they belong to a new era.
Those disagreements have produced some extraordinary architecture.
But eventually I think we have to ask:
Does believing in one idea really require rejecting everything on the other side?
What's Wrong With Ornament?
Take ornament.
Humans have decorated the things we build for thousands of years.
We carve stone.
Pattern brick.
Shape metal.
Work with wood.
Paint walls.
Create mosaics.
Use color.
Manipulate texture, shadow and light.
Sometimes ornament communicates culture.
Sometimes it demonstrates craftsmanship.
Sometimes it tells a story.
Sometimes it creates identity.
And sometimes somebody simply wanted to make something beautiful.
What's wrong with that?
At the same time, there is nothing inherently wrong with removing it.
Modern architecture taught us enormous lessons about structure, light, space, efficiency, technology and abstraction.
A simple wall can be beautiful too.
So why does one have to invalidate the other?
Maybe the more useful question is not:
Which one is right?
Maybe it is:
What does this project need?
Are We Designing or Choosing Sides?
Architecture can sometimes start to feel like choosing teams.
Traditional versus modern.
Ornament versus minimalism.
Historic versus contemporary.
Old versus new.
But buildings are more complicated than that.
When we immediately reject an entire architectural language because it does not match the one we personally prefer, I think we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:
Are we actually thinking critically, or have we simply developed another form of closed-mindedness?
If someone loves ornament, why?
If someone loves minimalism, why?
If a community wants a building that feels connected to its history, why?
If another wants something completely new, why?
Understanding does not mean accepting every idea.
It means understanding enough to make an informed decision about what belongs and what does not.
Architecture should be an exploration, not a purity test.
Don't Copy It. Don't Reject It. Translate It.
This becomes especially interesting when a client brings an architectural style to the table.
Suppose someone tells me:
“I want a classical building.”
Or maybe someone is building in Montana and tells me:
“I love Mediterranean architecture.”
Those sound like completely different conversations, but I think the architectural question is actually the same.
What do you love about it?
Maybe the person drawn to classical architecture loves symmetry, proportion, hierarchy, ornament, craftsmanship or a feeling of permanence.
Maybe the person drawn to Mediterranean architecture loves courtyards, masonry, arches, texture, warmth or the relationship between interior and exterior space.
Now we have something to design with.
My first response should not automatically be:
“No. That doesn't belong here.”
But it also should not be to blindly reproduce an image from another time or another part of the world.
The job is to translate it.
How can classical proportion inform a building constructed today?
How can ornament be produced using contemporary materials or fabrication?
How can traditional masonry work with a modern building envelope?
How can a Mediterranean-inspired courtyard be adapted to a Montana winter?
Maybe that courtyard becomes more protected.
Maybe an outdoor room becomes partially enclosed so it works through more of the year.
Maybe the roof changes because snow exists whether our Mediterranean inspiration likes it or not.
Maybe regional materials replace others.
Maybe the proportions remain while the details evolve.
Maybe what started as one recognizable style changes so much through climate, place, technology and the client's needs that the finished building no longer fits neatly into that original category.
Good.
Maybe we created something new.
The Place Gets a Vote
Travel makes this hard to ignore.
Different places develop recognizable architectural languages for a reason.
Climate matters.
Materials matter.
Culture matters.
History matters.
Technology matters.
The way people live matters.
Here in Montana, for example, there is a recognizable contemporary language to what many people think of as the mountain home.
Timber.
Stone.
Sloped roofs.
Deep overhangs.
Large openings toward the landscape.
Some of those elements have practical relationships to climate and site. Others have become part of the cultural image of what mountain architecture is supposed to look like.
Go somewhere else and another architectural language may make just as much sense there.
But responding to place should not become another stylistic prison.
If every mountain community decides every new building needs to resemble our current idea of a "mountain building," have we really remained responsive?
Or did we just create another rule?
Context should inform architecture.
It should not imprison it.
Who Is the Architecture Actually For?
That leads to what may be the most important question in this entire discussion:
Is the client and the place getting what they actually want and need, or is the designer pushing an agenda?
Maybe there needs to be some of both.
An architect should bring something to the project.
We should challenge assumptions.
We should introduce possibilities the client may never have considered.
We should use our knowledge and experience to make the project better.
If all we do is draw exactly what someone tells us to draw, then we are not really doing our job either.
But architecture can go too far in the other direction.
The designer can become so concerned with expressing their own philosophy that the people using the building and the place where it will exist become secondary.
I do not think the architect should disappear.
But I also do not think the architect always needs to be the main character.
There should be a conversation between three things:
The client.
The place.
The architect.
Maybe great architecture exists somewhere in the tension between them.
Maybe Adaptability Becomes the Style
This brings me back to Bruce Lee.
Being adaptable does not mean having no identity.
A great fighter can understand many approaches and eventually develop something unmistakably their own.
Architects can do the same thing.
Study classical architecture.
Study Modernism.
Study vernacular buildings.
Study ornament.
Study minimalism.
Study cities.
Study rural buildings.
Study historic construction.
Study new technology.
Study things you love.
Study things you cannot stand.
And figure out why.
But I would add something else.
Study people.
Study construction.
Study engineering.
Learn how things are made.
Learn how things break.
Learn how to fix something.
Learn how to communicate with someone who sees the world completely differently than you do.
Not every lesson that makes you a better architect has to come from architecture.
Take an idea from one place.
A proportion from another.
A lesson from a job you had twenty years ago.
A material from the region.
A construction technique from today.
A conversation with someone who will actually build it.
A spatial idea that may be hundreds of years old.
Something completely new.
Put those things together thoughtfully.
At some point, the combination becomes your own.
Maybe that is how architectural styles have always evolved.
Maybe that is how designers evolve too.
The Tools Change
I have watched this cycle happen more than once.
Every generation seems to confuse the tool it mastered with the skill itself.
When Photoshop started becoming part of photography, I remember my sister, who was a photographer, being completely against it. There was a feeling that manipulating an image somehow made the work less legitimate. Meanwhile, I was already using Photoshop as a hybrid tool for art and architecture.
Today, nobody thinks twice about it.
I understand why new technology can make people uncomfortable. Someone can spend years becoming extremely good at a particular skill, and then a new tool appears that can suddenly do part of that work faster. That can feel threatening.
But the skill was never really the tool.
I saw the same thing happen as architecture moved from 2D drafting into 3D modeling.
I started my career in AutoCAD, and moving into Revit changed the way I designed. A plan or sketch can hide things. You can fudge a relationship, ignore an awkward condition or draw something that looks convincing without ever completely resolving how it works.
Once you start building the idea in three dimensions, those problems become much harder to avoid.
But something else happened too.
The software started shaping the architecture.
When the same tool we use to document a building also becomes the environment where we design it, we can slowly begin designing around what the software makes easy. If an idea takes five minutes to model, it gets explored. If it takes five hours, maybe it does not.
In a way, we started producing what I think of as “BIM buildings.”
Architecture shaped not only by the client, the site, the climate or the designer, but by what the software makes easy to model, document and repeat.
The question can quietly shift from:
“What should this building be?”
to:
“What can I efficiently make this software do?”
That is not a criticism of BIM. BIM is an incredibly powerful tool.
But the tool should serve the idea.
The idea should not have to serve the tool.
That is why I find the current moment with artificial intelligence so interesting.
I do not see AI as a button that designs a building. I see it as another kind of sketching partner.
Sketch something.
Test it.
Change it.
Push it through AI.
React to what comes back.
Draw over it.
Reject most of it.
Keep something unexpected.
Take the useful ideas back into the architectural model, or take the architectural model back into AI, and keep moving between the two until the idea begins to hold together.
The process is not fundamentally different.
The conversation is just happening faster.
In some ways, AI feels less like replacing the architect and more like giving the architect an extraordinarily fast design assistant. It can generate possibilities almost instantly, but someone still has to understand the problem, recognize what is good, see what is wrong and decide where to go next.
When I hear the argument that using new technology somehow makes the work less legitimate, I think about architects who came long before any of these tools existed.
Think about Brunelleschi.
He was confronted with an architectural and engineering problem that the conventional methods of his time could not easily solve. His response was not to protect the limitations of those methods.
His attitude was essentially:
“The existing tools and methods can't build what I want to build, so I'll develop new ones.”
If you handed Brunelleschi structural analysis software, parametric modeling, BIM, CNC fabrication, robotics and artificial intelligence, do we really think he would say:
“No thanks. That is cheating.”
I doubt it.
I think he would ask:
“How much farther can we go?”
Maybe respecting the great designers who came before us does not mean preserving the limitations they were forced to work within.
Maybe it means sharing their willingness to push beyond them.
That is not abandoning the craft.
That is the craft evolving.
And maybe that is the pattern with every new tool.
The architect's value was never the ability to draw a line, operate a piece of software or make an image.
It was knowing which line to draw.
The tools change.
The responsibility to think does not.
What Are We Really Trying to Do?
Maybe the first question should not be:
What style should this building be?
Maybe it should be:
What does this building need to be?
What does the client need?
What are they actually responding to when they show us an image?
What does the place need?
What does the climate demand?
What does history have to teach us?
What did previous generations get right?
What can we question?
What can new technology improve?
What can we borrow?
What should we preserve?
What can we reinterpret?
And what happens when we combine things that supposedly do not belong together?
No architect starts with a blank history.
And no architect arrives at a project as a blank person either.
We bring our education.
Our work.
Our mistakes.
Our travels.
Our jobs.
Our conversations.
The things we have built.
The things we have fixed.
The people we have met.
The places we have lived.
All of it becomes part of the way we see a problem.
We can ignore that library.
Or we can use it.
Study it.
Question it.
React to it.
Take from it.
Add to it.
And hopefully leave something useful for the next person to question too.
Design. Evolve. Make. Inspire.
When I started DEMI Architecture, those four words became the idea behind the name:
Design. Evolve. Make. Inspire.
The more I think about it, the word evolve may be the most important one.
Design should evolve.
Architecture should evolve.
And designers should evolve.
An idea should be allowed to change when the client, the place, the climate, the history, the materials or the process teach us something new.
We should be allowed to change too when experience teaches us something.
That does not mean abandoning principles.
It means being confident enough in those principles that they can adapt.
For DEMI, I do not want a project to start with the question:
How do we make this look like a DEMI building?
I would rather start with:
Who are we designing for?
Where are we designing?
What can we learn from what came before?
What can everything we have learned so far bring to this problem?
And what can this become?
Then design it.
Let it evolve.
Figure out how to make it real.
And hopefully create something that inspires the people who experience it.
Design. Evolve. Make. Inspire.
People ask me sometimes:
“So what is your architectural style?”
Maybe after all of this, the answer is actually pretty simple.
Be water, my friend.
Michael Demetrios Frudakis, AIA, NCARB
Principal Architect