Branching out

i've always been interested in how architects find their calling. sometimes they start out pursuing completely different career tracks such as dentistry (richard rogers), boxing (tadao ando), film making (koolhaas), or psychology (jim polshek)... something interesting occurs when people change course and bring different perspectives to architecture. Einstein labeled the thought process that facilitated his creativity “combinatory play.” Similar to a child experimenting with a new Lego set, Einstein would combine and recombine seemingly unrelated ideas, concepts, and images to produce new, original discoveries. Think about it: All new ideas are merely the combination of existing ideas in one form or another. E=mc² is a great example. Einstein was not the first to discover the concepts of energy, mass or the speed of light; rather, he combined them in a novel way, and in the process altered how we view the universe.

in studying masters in combinatory play to refine my own learning process i became interested in how one particular nobel laureate physicist, steven chu, branched from physics to biology. you'll often hear him quote yankees catcher, yogi berra to disarm the audience to start off lectures. "Well, Yogi is one of my heroes. He's the great American philosopher of the twentieth century. One of the things he said is, "You can see a lot by watching." He said other wonderful things like, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Or, "We may be lost, but we're making great time."

but don't let chu's humor fool you. there's something serious to his playful learning process. In one such lecture, chu spoke about why some people achieve more than others "I've always been curious what separates students in graduate school. At graduate school at Stanford, you have some of the best students in the world, who you can see are going to go on and become world-class scientists, and who are very smart and are going to be good. But the thing that really differentiates among them is this passion to find out what the answer is: "I'm not going to quit." After those prerequisites, the thing that separates the people who are going to excel from people who are good and not, is that internal drive.

"Maybe it goes back to my high school days, when I was not such a good student. In actual fact, if one wants to go into a new area beyond your school days, you can pick up a classic textbook and begin to read, and begin to read in the literature; but it's not as much fun. When I was going into biology maybe a dozen years ago, I did try that. I picked up a big, fat tome called Biochemistry, a classic textbook. I started reading; it was 1,500 pages. I got to page 150, and I was deciding, "Well, it's beginning to slip out of my head as fast as it's going in now." I reached a "steady state!" So I said, "Well, this isn't going to work." So I would look around, and I had some knowledge from reading newspapers and magazines such as Science, Science Times, The New York Times, Scientific American, things of that nature. I had an interest in these biological problems, and I would pick something that I was interested in. But, of course, since I wasn't an expert in biology, I didn't know, "Is this a stupid question? Is this a deep question? What?" I would say, "Well, I think I can do something here and I have some interest." So I'd trot over to the biology department or medical school and say, "Is this something we're studying? I think I want to do this." And they would tell me sometimes, "No, no, it's silly," or "It's been done before." Or sometimes they'd say, "This is a central problem in biology." That rarely happened.

"But what happened is then I would start to collaborate with these people who spent their career in this specialty, and who grew up in this culture. They would say, "You should read this article, and that article, and that article." We would talk, and it was wonderful to learn that way. So you could sort of leapfrog over the years of school. Now to be sure, I'm not pretending I have as broad or deep as knowledge of that. But you start with a little, thin sliver of a particular problem, and you start to build knowledge around that thin sliver. By the time you've done the experiment and you're starting to write the paper, you better have some knowledge of what's around, because you won't even get to publish in the paper if you haven't referenced the right people or the precursors before you. But it's learning in that way.