In architecture there are a lot of facts.
Whether its acquiring benchmarks and making decisions based on those facts
or whether its tried and tested means of accomplishing said tasks.
An architect is likely to be aware of many facts and has the means to discover them, exercise them or communicate them.
Within the factual world though, there is an unknown quantity, known as intuition.
Many years ago, I worked with a contractor (Paul) in the networking line. I used to prepare the technical diagrams for networks (3 years of my life was in draughting).
As part of my job, I would go onsite and measure the buildings and help plan the networks through those buildings. As I became bored with the work, I got more and more into the pulling of cables and helping with the overall installation.
Paul knew his facts very well, but he had something else that pulled it all together. While others were feverishly using the signal testers to ascertain what was wrong, he had it solved. He seemed to just know.
He had intuition, he could not explain why he knew things.
Its kind of like my wife - who can within reasonable error be extremely accurate with measurements, by just looking at it.
I recently wanted to know the length of our garden fence for replacement.
I was on my own, and was tangling between the brush and the bends, getting frustrated.
Zita came out and simply declared the length as she suspected it. Once I was done, refusing to accept the non factual guess, she turned out to be only 10cm off the mark.
Measuring it again accurately with her help, she was 11cm off in total. For a 12m fence, the error is irrelevant.
I did draughting, so did she - but I did not pull my knowledge together to come up with a good guess - my guess was 14.5m. Somehow she could pull it off.
Architecture like any skill, has a lot of facts, but intuition is just as important. Intuition though without a level of fact would be just as useless.
I am reminded of a bright colleague who accomplished his MSCD, passing extremely well. His knowledge at that time of COM+ was great, as he could rattle off the facts contained within his learning material easily.
However putting it together to make a good solution took a lot of time. You can know a lot of facts, but need the unknown quantity.
In my opinion the word "Experience" is separated into two categories, "Applied", "UnApplied".
Applied - is when you have tried and tested a technique enough to know its pitfalls and benefits. UnApplied - is when you can migrate experience to a new situation and still get it right within reasonable error.
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