Daily Routines

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Bernard Tschumi

Morning routine: Because of the travel, I always have a week when I am really waking up early. I get up and start to work very quietly. I make the coffee. Then have breakfast. I get to the office before 9 a.m.

Evening routine: My wife and I will watch political shows. We are political junkies. We will eat while watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and end with Stephen Colbert's program on Comedy Central. Then to bed.

Procrastination technique: I work best either under pressure or by emptying my brain over the weekend. That blank state is helpful. It is like an athlete before a competition.

The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 2008

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier’s working hours were implacably regular. During my four years at the atelier, he worked at the rue de Sévres from two in the afternoon to around seven. The hour of 2:00 P.M., I soon learned, was holy. If you were a minute late you risked a reprimand. At first Corbu arrived either by subway (a convenient, direct metro line connected his Michel-Ange- Molitor station with the atelier’s Sévres-Babylone) or by taxi. Later on he started driving his old pistachio-green Simca Fiat convertible. In his last years it would be the taxi again. The process of returning home revealed quite a lot about Le Corbusier’s character. If the work went well, if he enjoyed his own sketching and was sure of what he intended to do, then he forgot about the hour and might be home late for dinner. But if things did not go too well, if he felt uncertain of his ideas and unhappy with his drawings, then Corbu became jittery. He would fumble with his wristwatch – a small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw – and finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon the project and me -- and us -- in a predicament.

During these early August days, I learned quite a bit about Le Corbusier’s daily routine. His schedule was rigidly organized. I remember how touched I was by his Boy Scout earnestness: at 6 A.M., gymnastics and . . . painting, a kind of fine-arts calisthenics; at 8 A.M., breakfast. Then Le Corbusier entered into probably the most creative part of his day. He worked on the architectural and urbanistic sketches to be transmitted to us in the afternoon. Outlines of his written work would also be formulated then, along with some larger parts of the writings. Spiritually nourished by the preceding hours of physical and visual gymnastics, the hours of painting, he would use the main morning time for his most inspired conceptualization. A marvelous phenomenon indeed, this creative routine, implemented with his native Swiss regularity, harnessing and channeling what is most elusive. Corbu himself acknowledged the importance of this regimen. “If the generations come”, he wrote, “attach any importance to my work as an architect, it is to these unknown labors that one as to attribute its deeper meaning.” It is wrong to assume, I believe, as [others] have suggested, that Le Corbusier was devoting this time to the conceptualization of shapes to be applied directly in his architecture; rather, it was for him a period of concentration during which his imagination, catalyzed by the activity of painting, could probe most deeply into his subconscious.

ArchSociety: "Working with Corbusier"

Gio Ponti

A decade after Ponti's death his daughter, Lisa Licitra Ponti, summarised his career as: "Sixty years of work, buildings in thirteen countries, lectures in twenty-four, twenty-five years of teaching, fifty years of editing, articles in every one of the five hundred and sixty issues of his magazines, two thousand five hundred letters dictated, two thousand letters drawn, designs for a hundred and twenty enterprises, one thousand architectural sketches."

It was, as she concluded, "a great deal, and all from one man." Lisa also described the daily routine which enabled her father to achieve so much. It began between 5am and 6am when he wrote thirty letters mostly to friends and collaborators telling them that he had decided to change this or that detail of a project. Ponti then left his family home for his nearby studio, a converted garage so big that, in the early days, his draftsmen rode their scooters right up to their desks, where he worked from 7am to 8pm. He sketched and wrote so frenziedly that his daughter recalled his hands being stained "black with graphite and ink" by the middle of the afternoon. Ponti then carried on working after returning home for dinner: often drawing silently after the lights had gone out, his sketches illuminated by the lights in other houses. Lisa calculated that he typically squeezed sixty hours into an ordinary day.

Design Museum

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Morning routine
SCOTT BROWN: I get up at 5 a.m. and call my mother's caregivers. Then we have breakfast.
VENTURI: I get up almost that early, to look at the TV and get dressed. And I take a lot of notes in the middle of the night, so I get those organized.

Evening routine
VENTURI: We get home at around 6:30 p.m., put on British sitcoms, BBC News and then I do a crossword puzzle.

The New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2003

Peter Eisenman

Morning routine: I get up around 5:30 or 6. I read. My best time to think and read is between 5:30 and 7. I take a shower at 7 and make my son's breakfast at 7:15. Then I walk my younger son to school and get to work by 8.

The New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2003

Daniel Libeskind

Morning routine: I get up anywhere from 6 to 7 a.m. I kiss my daughter and exercise at the house for an hour. Then I have a cup of coffee and listen to classical music. I just sit and listen to music. It sets the day.

How he ends his day: Dinner with the family. We do that late, around 10 o'clock. We always set up the candles, eat, relax and talk about things other than work. My wife, Nina, cooks.

The New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006