The How-To Issue

After our earlier celebrations of architecture’s mystique and particular fetishes—the inside of the Black Box, as we put it in Issue 3—FM decided to explore a more transparent or user-friendly aspect of the field, a side we’ll call the “How-To.” A deceptively simple tool, the How-To offers opportunities well beyond checking off boxes or getting things done. For us, it taps into architecture’s unique power to coordinate: to embed cultural ideas into formal operations or to distill a complex project into a set of directives. Harnessing this power—to make what’s hard look easy, and vice versa—is key if we want to organize the world around us as designers, critics, or in whatever role we take on after graduation.