Architecture, and the making of architecture, can be accounted for in endless ways. Buckminster Fuller once asked Norman Foster, “How much does your building weigh?”—a simple question at once easy or impossible to answer, containing values, critique, and a challenge. Taking stock involves rigor and attention to detail—a rehearsal of simultaneously broad and narrow perspectives that can reveal complex systems of many scales and kinds. To take stock is to question how things work in theory by attending to how they unfold in practice. Such accounting may be data-driven, narrative, and/or visual and, as technique, can guide one to a project’s conceptual site: loopholes, overlooked opportunities, and alternative ways of working. Accounting is also often a trick, as all accounts contain erasures and the biases of authorship. This studio takes stock and explores accounting as a mode of research and a starting point and method for design.
