On Action and Thought

I am bulimic for action. I say this without pride, because it is not a quality, it is a temperament. I have never known how to think for long while seated. I think while walking, while drawing, while speaking, while beginning to conceive before knowing where I'm going. Immobile thought exhausts me. Action, on the other hand, reassures me. It gives me the sensation, perhaps illusory but necessary, of moving forward.

I read three books at the same time. Not out of scatteredness, but by method. When one absorbs me for too long, I move to another, and it is in this passage that my mind recovers its vivacity. Changing books does not disperse my attention, it concentrates it. Returning to the first book, after a detour through the second, makes me read it better than if I had endured it without interruption. It is a paradoxical mechanism: the jump produces depth, the gap produces memory. I believe that many minds like mine function this way without admitting it, because culture has taught us that linear concentration is the only legitimate kind. Yet there exists another concentration, one that feeds on the jump, one that requires the passage from one object to another so as not to be extinguished.

While I read, I think about my work as an architect. While I draw, I think about my readings. The two activities do not oppose each other, they irrigate each other. A sentence from an essay encountered in the morning reappears in the afternoon in a sketch, without my having needed to write it down. An intuition about a plan, laid down the day before, finds its answer in the novel I open the next day. My brain does not store things in watertight boxes. It superimposes, it mixes, it makes work together what rationality would want to separate. And it is from these collisions that the best ideas I have had are born.

I daydream a lot. It is an important part of my profession that architects rarely admit. Reverie is not the opposite of action, it is its combustion chamber. It is in moments when I am doing nothing apparent—a car journey, waiting at the airport, a moment of fatigue when I let my mind drift—that the most useful associations form. Disciplined thought solves known problems. Reverie, on the other hand, invents problems that no one had posed and proposes, in passing, their solutions. Every architect who has ever had a good idea knows it: it almost never came in a meeting or in front of a plan. It came elsewhere, when one was not looking for it.

Collisions do not bother me much, I have made them my method. This is why my way of conceiving privileges collage. I bring together images with no apparent connection, texts read in opposite contexts, concepts coming from disciplines foreign to one another. A Japanese typology next to a Haussmannian section. An ecology essay placed on a minimal art book. A photograph of a brutalist construction site collaged to a landscape. Collage is not decoration, it is a method of thought. It makes appear, through forced proximity, what no linear reasoning would have found. Two objects that did not know each other begin to speak to each other when placed next to one another, and it is in this unexpected dialogue that an architecture is sometimes born. Arbre Blanc, Mille Arbres, Ecotone were not born from calmly deduced programs. They were born from collisions between images, desires, constraints, ideas, references that had no business being together and that found themselves, on the work table, next to one another. Collage is the material form of associative thought. It makes visible what, without it, would remain in the author's head.

But reverie and collage alone produce nothing. They remain layers of possibilities as long as one does not give them the knife of action. This is why I became an architect rather than a theorist, or rather than a writer. I would never have been able to bear living solely in the idea. I need the construction site, the technical drawing, the meeting with the engineer, the model that is retouched at two in the morning. Action is what transforms reverie into architecture. Without it, my ideas would remain intuitions polished by myself, never confronted with reality. With it, they become buildings, that is to say objects that others can contradict, inhabit, transform, demolish.

Action also has another role, more discreet but essential. It protects me from anguish. When I work on an architecture, I no longer think about all those I am not doing, about all the books I am not reading, about all the lives I am not living. The work in progress occupies the mental space that, left to itself, would go off in all directions. Many architects I know are anxious people who have found in the profession a socially acceptable outlet. We are called hyperactive, creative, prolific. Often, we are simply people who cannot bear immobility because it leaves us alone with our heads.

My children often reproach me for it. They call me out when I am suspended to this screen that has become my work desk, my window on the world, the place where my architectures under construction live. They are right. The screen has replaced a part of the presence I owe them, and I know it. But I have also understood, with time, that this screen is not only an escape. It is also the only tool that allows me to handle twenty projects at once, to respond in a few minutes to an engineer in Tokyo and to a client in Casablanca, to keep the thread of everything I start without abandoning a single one. The honest truth is that I am caught between two loyalties, and that I have not yet found the right balance.

I mess up regularly. It is a direct consequence of my temperament. When one starts before having calculated everything, when one opens three tracks in parallel, when one superimposes readings and work, one necessarily makes mistakes more often than someone who takes their time. I lose weeks on an intuition that proves false. I commit to clients I should have known better before signing. And then I start again. Because it is the other side of bulimic action: it accepts error as an acceptable cost of speed. The inverse, infallible slowness, seems even more sterile to me. Better to make mistakes while moving forward than to never make mistakes while staying still.

I know well what is objected today to this mode of functioning. Multitasking would be a myth, fragmented attention would be the disease of our time, single concentration would be the path of wisdom. I do not think this is false, but I think it is partial. There is a passive fragmentation, that of the ringing phone, of notifications that interrupt, of the media flow that devours, and there is an active fragmentation, chosen, organized. The first dilutes the mind. The second multiplies it. The entire difference lies in who decides on the jump. When it is the phone, I lose. When it is me, I win.

With age, I have learned a few disciplines to channel this bulimia without betraying it. I work late in the evening, when the noise of the day has subsided and no one expects anything more from me. I leave my mornings free of appointments, so that reverie has space. I force myself to finish an architecture before accepting three new ones, even if the desire burns me. I have not cured my impatience, I do not wish to anyway. I have organized it better. The method remains the same, but it has learned to breathe.

I do not know if my mode of functioning is generalizable, I do not think it is recommendable to all. Some work better in single concentration, in prolonged silence, in slow maturation. I admire them and sometimes envy their tranquility. But it is not my path. My path is that of thought through action, of reading through jumping, of creation through collage. It is a disorderly discipline, a rigor that resembles chaos to those who watch me work. But it is my way, and after twenty-five years of practice, I know that it produces something. It produces architectures, it produces ideas, it produces errors from which I draw lessons. It makes me move forward. And moving forward, for me, is not a comfort. It is a condition of survival.

There are things one does not learn to tame. One just learns to stop apologizing for them.

— Manal Rachdi