Today, Panfilocastaldi turns 3. We have survived another full year of blogging. We have narrowed our focus somewhat, engaging more deeply with events in Melbourne. We are writing less about art and photography, and more about architecture and architectural practice.

Our posts have become less frequent, but also longer and, we hope, more insightful. We were pleased this year to have our first articles published in other online outlets and print media. Our favourites from the past 12 months:

• Chutzpah. The first of 10 things one needs to start an architecture practice.
• Sharing is better than hoarding. A rallying call to the architecture profession to get better at sharing knowledge, processes and resources.
• The invisible profession. Generated contact from the legal department of the Australian Institute of Architects, identifying our unauthorised use of the AIA logo and instructing its removal. A plea to Victorian Chapter Manager and national CEO was to no avail. We removed the image and remain bemused that our first official contact was a legal sanction.
• Dear Sir or Madam. An open letter to architecture graduates revealing how to write a better job application. Useful too: we now direct all hopeful applicants to read and learn from it.
• The legacy of Robin Boyd. Our first commissioned article, for the March 2013 issue of Architecture Australia. Republished here 7 months later unedited and in full.
• Pretoria travelling studio. Our first article by a guest contributor, Jake Taylor.
• Out of Practice and Small projects. Reviews of lectures from inspiring international architects, Gregg Pasquarelli of New York and Kevin Low of Kuala Lumpur.
• Material 2013: An overview. The AIA 2013 architecture conference in review.
• Vote Flinders Street: conclusion. The last of many articles examining the much hyped Flinders Street Station international design competition.
• Bad architecture drives out good. A treatise on the demise of the built environment, and what we can do about it.

Once again, we have synthesised this year’s key statistics into a series of infographics:

And some highlights in plain English:

• 43 new posts, with a maximum of 11 in April of this year.
• 19 current post categories, up from 18 last year. 7 categories received no new articles, evidence of our shift in writing focus, while Architecture and Architecture practice, the 1 new category, each received 22.
• 139 new tags, bringing the total to 1,122 and ranging from Stalinism (1 post) to Australia (26 posts).
• 135 new comments, up from 84 last year and bringing the total to 331.
• An exponentially increasing 13,605 new spam comments, up from 2,055 last year and 408 the year before. This represents 98% of all comments making their way onto Panfilocastaldi.
• 40,479 new page views, bringing the total a touch past the magic 100,000 to 103,398.
• A slight reduction in our readership from last year, down from 120 to 111 page views a day. Our busiest month this year was surprisingly January, which has previously been amongst our quietest, with 5,534 page views or an average of 179 per day.
• Visitors from 154 different countries, ranging from Papua New Guinea (1 page view) to Australia (13,649 page views). Australia now outranks the United States as our number 1 source of visitors by a significant margin.
• 25,188 referrals from search engines, comprising thousands of unique terms predominantly in English, but also in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Dutch. Our favourite, surely based on spoken words misheard, was, miss van dero.
• 3,582 referrals from 210 other websites, with a maximum of 881 of Twitter, supplanting Facebook as our primary social media platform.
• 83 blog followers, more than doubling our count of 39 this time last year, with a further 14 comment followers and 296 Twitter followers.

Thank you for your support this year. Who knows what 2014 will bring for us, or how Panfilocastaldi will evolve? For now, it continues to be a labour of love, self-sustaining because it is enjoyable for its own sake. If you promise to keep reading and commenting, we’ll promise to keep posting and replying.

Yours sincerely,
Warwick Mihaly, Erica Slocombe and Dew Stewart.

San Sebastian Kindergarten, Münster 2013

What was it?

A national lecture tour presented by the Australian Institute of Architects‘ 2013 Gold Medal recipient, Peter Wilson. In eloquent symmetry, Wilson returned last month to his alma mater the University of Melbourne to present the final lecture of his 10 day tour. The Carillo Gantner theatre was filled with a respectable though not overwhelming audience, the front row of past medallists and dignitaries most notable for its abundance of middle aged men.

Wilson delivered his lecture in an accent more non-specific European than Australian, a symptom no doubt of his late 1960s gap year to Europe that has never ended. He finished his studies at the Architectural Association in London in 1974, then went on to teach there for 16 years. He was Rem Koolhaas’ first teaching assistant, an intense experience it appears, as Wilson still recalls Koolhaas’ indomitable personality, “When you are with Rem, there is no room big enough for a second ego.”

In 1989, Wilson and his wife, Julia Bolles, won a design competition for their celebrated Münster City Library and moved to Germany to establish their practice, Bolles + Wilson. Though we see from their website that they entered this year’s Lodge on the Lake competition in Canberra and have completed a multi-residential project in inner Sydney (Victoria Park, 2006), we wonder how often Wilson returns to Melbourne and whether he still identifies with the much-altered built fabric of his home city.

The early competition win for the Münster Library has evolved to underpin much of Bolles + Wilson’s work, with libraries featuring heavily amongst their finished projects and competition entries still representing 80% of their portfolio. The Gold Medal jury acknowledged “that it’s not easy to gain commissions in Europe, however Wilson’s firm’s ongoing success with international competitions has intensified his reputation and further supplements his powerful collection of architectural works.”

Prime Minister’s Lodge, Canberra 2013

What do we think?

Bolles + Wilson’s projects share a DNA of formal invention, or as Sir Peter Cook has described it, recognisable armatures and “ship shapes”. In his introduction to the AS Hook Address, AIA Victorian Chapter president, Jon Clements, remarked on this quality as particularly Australian. At first we couldn’t see it, the projects, like Wilson’s accent, striking us as non-specific European in their urbanism and detailing. But further consideration has made us rethink this early impression: their often exuberant forms would happily snuggle up against the cerebral works of ARM or Lyons, and their bold materials and palette of primary colours have more than a little of artist Jeffrey Smart about them.

If anything, the Australian-ness of Bolles + Wilson’s projects lies in their playfulness, the gentle good humour they share with Wilson himself. Most illustrative is Suzuki House (Tokyo, 1993), an asymmetrical composition in concrete punctuated by unusual protuberances and described by Wilson as “a house glanced by a passing ninja.” In this instance the protuberances comprise a series of uneven windows and a small gantry crane to permit the delivery of furniture, however these design gestures reoccur at all scales of their work, fine details supersized to match the size and context of even their largest projects.

Wilson related an encounter he had with the daughter of his clients for Suzuki House some years after its construction. He was interested to discover if she had “suffered any psychological trauma as the result of growing up in the house,” but was bemused to discover that to her adolescent mind, the black ninja blob was the eye patch of a giant panda. To us, the eye patch, window protuberances and leg columns recall the fantastical creatures of Perth children’s book illustrator, Shaun Tan. We imagine Wilson would welcome this reading, his good humour masking a deep interest in layered narratives and unexpected interpretations.

Beyond questions of form and identity, Wilson spoke extensively of architecture’s relationship to urbanism. He described the Japanese city whose entire DNA is contained within every fragment; the impact of digital technologies on the centralised, European city; and of sequential planning, buildings that reference their context in turn becoming the context for yet other buildings. Here Wilson spoke with great authority, a result no doubt of his built experience across a dozen or so European countries.

New Luxor Theatre, Rotterdam 2001

Of the projects presented, the New Luxor Theatre remains for us one of Bolles + Wilson’s most engaging urban interventions. Located close to their earlier Bridgewatchers House (Rotterdam, 1996), it began life as part of a masterplan for the waterfront district of Rotterdam, its amorphous shape earning it the affectionate title, The Blob (or in Dutch, The Bloob). Formally, the red motif that defines the project begins with the flytower, in many ways the functional heart of any theatre, and wraps around all facades. Wilson remarked that the New Luxor is unique for having no back end, it is all front. Its organisation is in fact ordered around truck access, which for acoustic reasons is separated from the auditorium by a deep atrium. A ceremonial stair follows the truck ramp and atrium, a strategy that relates to Wilson’s “bottom up pragmatism, the design originating from the pragmatics of its context.”

Less urban but more fanciful are the executive offices for German furniture chain, RS+Yellow (Münster, 2009), a project Wilson revealed with canny showmanship and careful choreography. First he showed images of an elegant pavilion nestled within a large lake, an idyllic rural setting for an office building. Soon though came the big reveal: the lake is only a few hundred millimetres deep, spanning the 60 x 66m rooftop of a conventional warehouse building, “the Mekong Delta brought to the German suburbs.” A great deal of attention was paid to infinity edge detailing and compartmentalisation of the water, together intended to prevent wind-driven water from creating artificial tsunamis across the roofscape.

Finally, Wilson presented ideas of material, space and light, all tied together by what he termed operative beauty. In the Münster City Library, light is channeled down from the roof via long skylights, bounced off internal white walls and along the angled outer wall, clad in acoustic timber panels. The further one moves away from the timber wall and towards the depths of the library, the darker and more intimate the reading spaces become. Wilson explained that Bolles + Wilson developed from 3 to 12 people during the design and construction of this project. In addition to shaping their future expertise in competitions and libraries, its 3 year documentation period also defined their “entire language of details”, all the way down to custom cast-aluminium bookshelf legs that they continue to use today.

What did we learn?

During his address, Wilson presented a large number of projects, touching all too briefly on the significant elements of each. Covering so much territory, we found it difficult to draw out the essential themes of his architecture: Wilson’s ideas of bottom-up pragmatism and operative beauty could and perhaps should have filled the entire lecture. On the one hand, we suppose the very mandate of the AS Hook Address is to display a life’s work, but on the other, we feel it should also be an opportunity for self-reflection: to not just summarise, but analyse.

Assessing Wilson’s small drawing of Water House, Sir Cook notes that he has “yet to see a more evocative depiction of water and stream in any human-produced drawing.” We would have liked to learn more of Wilson’s attitude towards the drawings for which he is rightly famous, or the influence his expatriate identity has on his work, or Bolles + Wilson’s approach to winning competition entries and their general mode of practice.

This criticism aside, the extensive oeuvre of Bolles + Wilson is impressive, in both its typological and geographical diversity. We are keen to visit some of their projects as we imagine them to be even better in the flesh than they are on celluloid. Peter Wilson is a worthy recipient of the Gold Medal, another in the long line of Australian artists flourishing overseas and rightly recognised for his long career of important architectural contributions.

Water House, 1976

In the early 1960s, during construction of the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon and his office designed and documented his own house in Bayview, 30km north of Sydney (1965, unbuilt). Utzon agonised over the extent of windows facing a particularly beautiful view. Should the wall be fully glazed or only partially?

After many weeks of indecision, he summoned his staff into the bush and down onto the beach. Utzon had them sit between two large sand dunes, facing towards the water. Their entire field of view comprised the straight line of the sea and curving lines of the dunes. “Watch and wait,” they were instructed. Presently, a seagull flew into sight from behind one dune, across their view corridor, and disappeared behind the other.

Utzon turned to his staff and said, “Only show a part, never show it all. The imagination can fill out the picture more powerfully than reality ever could.”

Palm Garden House, 1976

Who is he?

One of Australia’s most important architects, and also one of the most private, Leplastrier graduated from Sydney University in 1963 and worked with Jørn Utzon then Kenzo Tange prior to establishing his own practice in 1970. He works from his house and studio in Lovett Bay on small, intensely crafted projects. He draws by hand and builds 1:20 scale models detailed enough to be the blueprints off which his designs are built. He is a national treasure who was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1999 and made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2011.

Leplastrier presented the final lecture of the Zeitgeist series at Walsh Street last week, a collaboration between the Robin Boyd Foundation and Centre for Cultural Materials Preservation. The series sought to understand the consequences of making and conserving works of architecture, and to what extent their physical fabric is a measure of design intent. I discussed the first lecture of the series, given by Brian Donovan in February, here.

To wind down the last of the early evening light, Leplastrier began his talk without slides, reflecting on half a century in architecture. He spoke of his university years and the lasting influence of Lloyd Rees, with whom he and his fellow students drew and painted every Wednesday afternoon for five years. He spoke of his apprenticeship in Utzon’s office, still proud that he worked on the Opera House, if only for three weeks, and still disgusted that Utzon was exiled from the project and the country. He discussed his time in Japan, and life lessons learned under Tomoya Masuda, the subtlety of that culture mingling with the brashness of his own middle-class Australian upbringing.

When afternoon eventually graduated to dusk, Leplastrier segued into his visual presentation, beginning with photos of the people by whom he has been most influenced: Rees, Utzon and Masuda principle among them. Then, a selection of slides from around the world that are to him archetypes of sustainability, beauty and cultural value: the Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen, a masterpiece in brickwork so perfect that no brick was cut in its construction; the Ise Naikū Shrine in Japan, that has been rebuilt every twenty years for almost two millennia; and the Stick Shed on the Wimmera, an enduring legacy of Australian wartime ingenuity.

What do I think?

Leplastrier structured his presentation around four projects: his own house and studio, and three houses for private clients spanning forty years. This was a fascinating way of revealing the development in his philosophy of architecture, from the intricate and expensive detailing of Palm Garden House (Sydney, 1976) through to the humble forms of Cloudy Bay Retreat (Bruny Island, 1996) and a recent cottage for an elderly couple, the name of which I have forgotten. Unlike many architects, whose budgets and design ambition expand as their reputations grow, Leplastrier seems to have achieved the reverse. His projects are simpler now, more modest, more direct in their crafting.

I can only speculate, but I imagine this trajectory is reflected in his fees and the cost of his buildings also: they are made from fine materials, but they are small and assembled with a deeply efficient understanding of structure and construction. Leplastrier is not interested in architecture for the money (though as previously discussed, who amongst us are?). Instead, he works for remarkable clients with remarkable briefs on remarkable sites. They all have their own stories, cultural capital from which Leplastrier draws his inspiration. The relationships with the people around him and the land his designs touch, these are the things he cherishes.

Leplastrier is not the sort of architect to whom one goes for a quick bathroom renovation or back verandah extension. To him, architecture is “symphonic, every part crucial to the completeness of the whole. It is more than building, realised through a thorough understanding of place, space, light and structure. Launched into life, such works do not need owners but custodians.” Leplastrier’s clients are his patrons, passionate about the natural environments they inhabit and his vision for their dwellings. He spoke of his first visit to the Palm Garden House site, a piece of land covered end to end by a tropical profusion of palm trees. His future client asked what he had in mind for  the house, to which he answered, “You already have the house, it’s here under the canopy of these trees.” His client said, “I think we can work together.”

He built many of his early projects himself, Palm Garden House and Lovett Bay amongst them, though readily defers to the abilities of master craftsmen. It was clear from his slides that some of his oldest and closest friends are the builders with whom he has worked. Growing up around boats, and the “great boat builders of southern Tasmania,” Leplastrier developed a lasting passion for timber. Synthetic materials, he explained, are remarkable in their own way, but no other material can match the versatility and beauty of timber. He still marvels at the diversity of this naturally-grown material, each species with its own qualities and purposes.

Cloudy Bay Retreat, 1996

What did I learn?

Much in keeping with Leplastrier’s approach to architecture, he does not have a website. Printed publications of Leplastrier’s work are also scarce: there is only one that I have come across, in honour of the 2004 Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award, and it has been out of print for years. A small selection of his work can be viewed on the Architecture Foundation Australia website: hopefully this will lead the way in the near future to a much-needed monograph.

The AFA is an organisation that, among other activities, runs annual Student Summer Schools on the Pittwater north of Sydney, a masterclass I was fortunate to attend in early 2008. Leplastrier, together with fellow architects, Peter Stutchbury, Lindsay Johnston and Glenn Murcutt, acted as guide, mentor and critic during an indelible week of collaborative design, drawing, thinking and making.

Even in that setting, surrounded by architects of extraordinary integrity, Leplastrier stood out. His approach to architecture is legendary: he camps for days or weeks on a site prior to commencing design work; his understanding of timber and its characteristics is unparalleled; he eschews fixed price contracts and the detailed documentation they require, working instead within cost plus frameworks and resolving most of his detailing on site; he does not work with ordinary builders, but master craftsmen; he is, and has been for forty-three years, a sole practitioner. Leplastrier is as close to the architectural version of the Bush Tucker Man we have.

Despite not having seen him for five years, Leplastrier recognised me when I greeted him prior to the Zeitgeist lecture, commenting that the audience (whose tickets were all purchased within a day of going on sale) comprised many of his past students. It came as no surprise that the devotion Leplastrier pays to his craft was returned with such enthusiasm. He is a wonderful man and a powerful reminder that architecture can offer something beyond building contracts, marketing and office systems: he is the embodiment of that oft-cited but rarely equalled claim of Frank Lloyd Wright, that architecture is the mother art, without which our civilisation has no soul.

Lovett Bay House, 1994

Chai Viticole (Vauvert, 1998)

What was it?

A lecture held late last year as part of the Australian Institute of Architect‘s International Speaker Series. French architect, Gilles Perraudin of Perraudin Architectes, discussed his works and search for a timeless architecture. The lecture was attended by a sparse audience at sponsor Austral Bricks‘ Brick Studio and hosted by Peter Mallatt of Six Degrees.

Perraudin travelled extensively after his graduation in the mid-1970s, spending time living in Ghardaia, a city in the Sahara without any form of industry or access to external resources. The vernacular urban fabric, made entirely from materials sourced locally, left a lasting impression, the processes and aesthetics of building in stone finding their way many years later into his work.

Perraudin established his practice in 1980 and at first explored lightweight construction techniques and materials. Maison Ceyzérieu (1980, unbuilt) was his first project, a competition entry that promoted an architecture of minimal energy consumption. Designed around the concept of a house within a house within a house, the environmental isolation of the central core permitted energy-independent temperature control. Perraudin noted wryly that the client didn’t understand his design, wanting a normal house with solar panels on the roof, while his design originated from a more fundamental idea of a house requiring no energy at all.

Perraudin’s own house, Maison Individuelle (Lyon Vaise, 1987), continued this early exploration into lightness and thin skins. Mobile, nomadic and deconstructible, it reminded us strongly of Richard Rogers’ work of the preceding decades. Unlike Rogers however, Perraudin abandoned this experiment, arguing that the lightness of its materials was a lie: steel, canvas and aluminium might have appeared economical but they consumed exorbitant energy in their production.

This realisation led Perraudin to the architectural language he continues to use today. Chai Viticole (Vauvert, 1998), a winery he built for himself, was his first project in stone. Looking towards the Roman aqueduct for inspiration, the project employed very large blocks of stone uncut beyond their extraction from the ground. The stone had little embodied energy and promised great efficiency in its use, performing holistically as structure, skin, waterproofing, thermal mass and linings. This economy of material is central to Perraudin’s design philosophy, as are the project’s rhythm, proportion and light, tenants he asserted are at the centre of architectural expression.

Perraudin built the winery himself, with little help but from a small mobile crane to lift the blocks into place. The careful nature of the project’s masonry construction earned him the local nickname, The Egyptian, a fitting title for an architect whose contemporary works so closely resemble those of our ancient past.

Cave des Aurelles (Nizas, 2001)

What did we think?

Perraudin’s work is elegant but rudimentary, the scale of his stone blocks rendering everything else inconsequential. Inhabiting Maison et Galerie d’Art (Lyon, 2010) would be like inhabiting a landscape: walls are cliffs and corridors are canyons. The human scale is lost or ignored, very little operating within reach of, or of a size that can be touched and manipulated by, a person’s hand. This manipulation of the rudimentary occurs in his planning also: the Musee du Vin (Patrimonio, 2011) has open pergolas running around enclosed museum spaces designed to support the growth of canopy vines and encourage an outdoor microclimate. Instead of artificially managing diverse internal heating and cooling needs, Perraudin elected to simply push the museum’s corridors outside, letting nature do the cooling for him.

Perraudin eschews the millennia of materials development that has permitted new forms, fine detailing and the spanning of large distances. He has also disengaged with modernity at a cultural level: the heaviness of his structures do not lend themselves to a long life / loose fit understanding of occupation, nor do they facilitate activated street edges or contemporary living that moves easily between inside and out. By employing mass material assembled like supersized LEGO blocks, his walls become very thick, his openings are necessarily small, and columns are required at regular intervals.

This might seem an unusual direction to take, though in quoting French philosopher Roland Barthes, Perraudin clarified his position, “Suddenly I realised it didn’t bother me not to be modern.” Arguing also that “the evolution of technology is not a good focus for an architect,” Perraudin has, as his nickname suggests, firmly anchored himself and his work into a methodology thousands of years old.

Maison et Galerie d’Art (Lyon, 2010)

What did we learn?

Perraudin spoke at length about values-driven architecture. Rejecting the image-driven discipline of post-modernism and contemporary architecture, he criticised the world’s architectural schools for graduating their students without an understanding of material and making. He argued that “schools mask their conceptual ignorance by guiding their students into various forms of extreme formalism. Architecture should be about satisfying a social need, not about addressing a financial condition.” When the latter is pursued, “architects are transformed into the stooge of speculation. It is not a question of talent, but ethics. Using natural materials will escape the constraints of speculative industries, and return to a socially-alert, environmentally sustainable architecture.”

This admirable position reminded us of Moshe Safdie’s oration we attended in late 2012, where Safdie reflected on his dedication to place-making, contextualisation and the ethical practice of architecture. Unfortunately, it also revealed the disconnection between the way both architects spoke about their work and the work itself.

Central to this disconnection was Perraudin’s use of stone. While he praised its recyclability, economy and capacity for adaptation and future flexibility, we could see none of these claims in the work he presented.

• Recyclability. Each block of stone is the size and weight of a small car. Who would move them, how would they do so and why? The Romans built in massive stone not so it could be recut and repurposed, but so it would last thousands of years.
• Economy. Perraudin used stone for his Logements Sociaux Collectifs (Cornebarrieu, 2011), a social housing project, but this economy appears to be the exception not the rule in his work. Typically, his projects are expensive and exclusive. The client for his Chai Viticole in Lebanon (halted indefinitely due to the war in Syria) was so particular about the stone to be used, he bought the whole quarry.
• Adaptation. The stone could be cut to accommodate new openings and services, but would it ever be? Each column and wall is load bearing: cutting new openings would require new concrete footings, steel columns and lintels.

Perraudin might like to think his projects are recyclable, economical and adaptable, but these are all qualities far more aligned with his earliest work in lightweight construction, or in the ongoing oeuvre of Rogers, who continues to explore this ideology with real success. It would be more apt for him to discuss the idea of sustainability through durability: an idea discussed recently by Gregg Pasquarelli, where sustainability is achieved by building architecture that people love, “the don’t get torn down every 10 – 20 years.”

Is Perraudin’s work interesting or is the very nature of his past-modernism merely a process of reprising the forms, spatial relationships and techniques of past eras? There appears to be no theoretical overlay to his work, just performance and craft, so it is hard to argue that the work acts as a commentary on wastefulness. The buildings are expensive and exclusive, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems he is working hard to contradict his own agenda. In using such heavy materials, in such ancient patterns, his work is in denial of the modern condition. Our lasting impression of Perraudin’s work is not that they are timeless but out of their time.

Chai Viticole (Romania, due 2014)

What is it?

An unsolicited project our architecture practice, Mihaly Slocombe, recently completed. We redesigned a segment of Drummond Street in Carlton North, the street where we live and practice.

The project began with conversations with around two thirds of our neighbours, who helped us understand the cross section of the community for whom we were designing, as well as providing specific project briefing requirements. We published (and continue to maintain) a blog that tracked our research and design activities, and facilitated ongoing feedback to the community. The blog can be viewed here.

Our essential agenda for Streets Without Cars is best summed up by the opening remarks on the project blog:

Around 50% of all developed land in Melbourne is consumed by space for vehicles, most of which is streets.[1] The characteristics of a street, its dimensions, footpaths and traffic volume, all contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of the people who live along it. Drummond Street boasts a generous green median strip, but of its 28m width, 14m is reserved for car traffic and car parking. For the 130m between Curtain and Fenwick Streets, that’s a total of 1,820sqm, or around 15 typical Carlton North terraces. Also consider how little of the time this space is in use: on average, people are either entering, exiting or driving their vehicles for only 14 minutes in every hour.[2] So not only does Drummond Street dedicate a lot of its valuable space to the car, this space is left unused most of the time.

Imagine if there were no cars: no need for car parking or wide moats of asphalt reserved for car traffic. What could we do with the space and how might we foster new ways of living together as a community?

Once we began work on the project, it became clear that while removing all cars was a romantic proposition, it was not viable. We elected instead to explore a shared or living street philosophy. This is an idea that requires a street to be designed for walking first, cycling second and driving third. It slows down bicycle and car traffic; removes the traditionally separate zones for people, bicycles and cars; replaces asphalt with materials typically associated with parks and plazas; and encourages communal engagement between all streets users. We discussed aspects of this idea here.

What did we design?

We have just published our full design proposal to the Streets Without Cars blog, which can be viewed here. An animated flythrough of the project can be viewed on our Vimeo page.

We also presented the project at Volume 22 of the Pecha Kucha Melbourne series earlier this month. The 20 slides x 20 seconds format of Pecha Kucha offered the productive opportunity to distil the project down to its essential aims and qualities. Also relevant was the theme of the event, Members Only. It asked presenters to consider the value of clubs, their members, why and how we gain access, and what we do once we’re in. We titled our presentation, Getting Back into the Players Club.

The visual and spoken content of our presentation was as follows:

Good evening. I’m Warwick Mihaly, a principal architect of Mihaly Slocombe. Every year we like to work on a speculative project that engages in questions of urban design. I’m going to present our 2014 project to you tonight via my presentation, Getting Back into The Players Club.

Who are the current members of the Players Club? They’re the people and corporations shaping the future fabric of our cities. Once upon a time they used to be architects and urban designers, but this is less and less the case. These days, they’re mostly project managers, developers, even bankers.

There are now whole cities springing up from the desert sands whose core focus is not livability but investment opportunity.

Recent approvals for very large towers in the city, coupled with the poor urban outcome of the Docklands and dubious planning strategy for Fishermen’s Bend, shows that this is happening in Melbourne also. Do we really want our city to be corrupted by money?

The traditional procurement model looks like the top line. A big investment company commissions a building design, then markets it to smaller investors who aim to lease out individual apartments. How the inhabitants are involved in this process is not clear. What we’d like to do is explore the bottom line, where design and community consultation drive the development process.

Which brings me to our project, Streets Without Cars. The premise of the project is this: we wanted to redesign the street where we live and practice as a shared space, with pedestrians as its highest priority. We also wanted to engage our local community, so we spoke with as many of our neighbours as we could to understand how they would like the street to work.

This is the site. It’s a 120m long section of Drummond Street in Carlton North, running between Curtain and Fenwick Streets. It’s 28m wide, 14m of which is currently covered in asphalt to provide room for north- and southbound car lanes. It has a central grass strip that is already reasonably well utilised.

We were able to interview 22 of our 39 neighbours within the site zone and received rich feedback containing both concrete and aspirational design direction. One of our neighbours, James, gave us the phrase that ended up guiding our entire design process, “Like a big backyard for everyone.”

We discovered a lot about the demographics of our neighbours. We now know there are 2.6 bicycles per household, that around 72% of our street works within a 5km radius, and most households have limited access to private open space. We were also able to collate the many briefing comments into groups of activities to design for: living, eating, socialising and play.

So we came up with a design that removed the southbound car lane and used the space for a 17m wide strip of activity space bordered by a narrower strip of paving to be shared by bicycles, cars and pedestrians. A series of small pavilions runs down the length of the site, providing shelter and gathering.

Our material palette is robust and urban. We used Bluestone paving on the ground, steel structure for the pavilion roofs, hit and miss brickwork and timber battening for the pavilions themselves. The four mature trees on site were retained and added to.

At the heart of the site are the living and dining rooms, terraced spaces that can be used for just about anything. Gentle slopes in the terraced platforms allow us to catch pools of water for play and cooling. The roof over the dining room kicks up to support a solar panel array. All roofs collect water for irrigation.

The dining room is loosely divided into four sub-spaces, some of which are undercover and others in the open. They are bordered by an open weave of brickwork that permits air movement, and down the track, trained vines.

Running the full length of the site is a community vegetable patch. There’s also a fruit orchard embedded into the side of one of the pavilions. Our hope is that these would become activity centres to strengthen the local community. It would be pretty handy to harvest a few extra apples and a sprig of coriander too.

A big part of our design thinking revolved around transport. We decided to retain around 80% of the existing carparking, then added a couple of carshare spaces and 96 bicycle parking spaces within secure storage sheds. These anchor the ends of the site, free up valuable space within peoples’ homes, and encourage more integrated use of the street.

The kitchen is a small cafeteria located adjacent to the dining and living rooms. Its operator would also act as caretaker for the vegetable patch and orchard, to keep them from getting unruly and providing an opportunity for the enjoyment of local produce.

We met with the sustainable transport group at the City of Yarra today to present the project. They didn’t exactly front up a few million cash to build it, but they were very enthusiastic about the community consultation and radical, for Melbourne, urban design strategy. Our vision is that this sort of project could be rolled out across an entire municipality, small insertions designed to decrease our reliance on the automobile and increase our shared use of our streets. They could be spaced out so every resident has access to one within walking distance: another, finer layer of public parkland.

That’s a 20-slide tip of the iceberg. We’ve been engaging with our neighbours via a dedicated project blog. If you’d like to find out a bit more about us, you can look us up on our website, design blog or twitter feed. Thank you.

Where to from here?

Our design may be finished, but the project is far from over. As mentioned above, we are now embarking on consultation with the local council to investigate ways we might implement this project. With some considerable determination and a bit of luck, future funding earmarked for the Carlton North area as part of the City of Yarra’s Local Area Traffic Management scheme might very well find its way towards Drummond Street and Streets Without Cars.[3]

Who is he?

An italian architect and “urban change agent”[1] who divides his time between Carlo Ratti Associati, the innovation and design studio he runs from Torino, and SENSEable City Lab, the research laboratory he leads out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. Ratti’s design and research work overlap significantly, both focussing on the transformative effect of new technologies on our built environment and daily lives.[2] The scope of his projects is incredibly wide, ranging from drone-based wayfinding to experimental furniture to citywide data mining.

Ratti was in Melbourne last month for a week of programs courtesy of the International Specialised Skills Institute. We attended the lunchtime seminar he presented at the University of Melbourne entitled, Decalogue for a [smart] SENSEable city. It was hosted in conjunction by the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning and the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

What did we think?

Ratti began his seminar by quoting controversial American activist, George Gilder, who in 1995 claimed that “cities are leftover baggage of the industrial era… We are headed for the death of cities.” More moderately, fellow MIT scholar, Nicholas Negroponte, wrote in 1996 that “the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time.”[3] Far from the death of cities however, Ratti observed that the past twenty years have instead witnessed their unparalleled prosperity. Global urbanisation is more widespread now than at any other time in history, with just over half of the world’s 7.1 billion population living in urban areas.[4]

Cities are thriving, but so is the penetration of digital technology into their fabric. “The digital revolution did not end up killing our cities, but neither did it leave them unaffected. A layer of networked digital elements has blanketed our environment, blending bits and atoms together in a seamless way.”[5] Evidence of this physical and digital conversion – the cyberphysical – is everywhere: from the 4 billion smartphones in circulation globally and the infiltration of social media into daily work habits, to the proliferation of remotely controlled security systems and transport infrastructure.

For Ratti, the exciting extrapolation of this process is our ability to use digital technology to learn from cities in order to improve them. Many of his projects involve crowdsourcing tiny fragments of data that are in themselves meaningless but when gathered together form very large sets of useful intelligence. He seeks to convert the city into a realtime control system, with inbuilt feedback loops that improve its economic, social and environmental sustainability. A difficult undertaking with a simple justification: while the physical layers of the city – roads, buildings, services – are expensive to build and respond slowly to change, the digital layers are cheap to implement and able to evolve very quickly to changing circumstances. In essence, Ratti wants the digital to allow us to better use what we already have of the physical.

Ratti structured his presentation around a series of diverse themes of urban engagement, including Smart phone smart city, i-Mobility, New universities, and Living together. The projects employed a compelling cocktail of skill sets, involving among others architectural design, graphic design, algorithmic computing, electrical engineering and web app development. Intervening in the emerging overlap between the physical and digital space of the city, they convincingly capture Ratti’s inexhaustible inventiveness and hunger for urban change.

Though Ratti covered a lot of ground during his hour-long seminar, we will focus here on three projects only, the ones that struck us as most clearly demonstrating his multi-disciplinary approach to urban problem solving.

170 million annual taxi trips in New York City

Journey from West 15th to East 54th Street

HubCab
www.hubcab.org
Project video via YouTube
i-Mobility
2014

HubCab is an interactive visualisation that allows users to explore every taxi trip taken within the City of New York in a year: a network of journeys that leave no lasting trace but nevertheless stitch the whole city together. Like many of SENSEable City Lab’s projects, the seduction of the visualisation masks an extraordinary backend algorithm processing vast quantities of information. According to the HubCab website, the basis of the project is “a data set of over 170 million taxi trips of all 13,500 medallion taxis in New York City in 2011. The data set contains GPS coordinates of all pick up and drop off points and corresponding times.”[6]

Employing an efficiency concept developed by Ratti’s team, shareability networks, the data set is analysed for potential redundancies i.e. whether a taxi trip travelling from point A to point B can be combined with a second trip travelling from point C to point D, thereby eliminating one trip entirely. When we click on a nominal trip, say from West 15th to East 54th Street (see above image), we can see that it forms part of a route with annual savings of $3.1m, 1.6m kilometres and 445,000kg of CO2. Ratti explained that employing shareability networks within a large, dense city like New York has the capacity to reduce the number of taxi trips in a year by a staggering 40%.

Map of Singapore where the scale is not measured in kilometres but travel time

Maps of central Singapore comparing mobile phone usage on typical days (left) and during the Singapore Grand Prix (right)

LIVE Singapore!
www.senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/
Project video via YouTube
Public engagement 2.0
2010

LIVE Singapore! is an exercise in citywide mapping, establishing “a feedback loop between people, their actions, and the city.”[7] It gathers useful information like temperature, mobile phone usage, rainfall, taxi availability and traffic, and maps them with localised detail in realtime. The project team curated the mapping process, for instance juxtaposing taxi availability against rainfall, or mobile phone usage against a popular sporting event.

The selection of information types and process of juxtaposition reflect the true agenda of this project: “giving people visual and tangible access to realtime information about their city enables them to make their decisions in sync with their environment, with what is actually happening around them.”[8] If traffic congestion mapping can accurately tell us how long it will take to get somewhere, we can leave early enough to arrive on time. If we know that taxis are likely to get snapped up whenever it rains, we can take the train (or authorities can ensure greater supply).

The tracking device used in TrashTrack

Movement of waste after two months

TrashTrack
www.senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/
Project video via YouTube
Waste tracking
2009

This project asks the question, “why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain?”[9] It suggests that our interest in the supply of local produce does not extend to waste processes in large part due to our lack of awareness of them. TrashTrack seeks to highlight the movement of our waste products from household bins to final destinations.

Using a simplified version of technology found within mobile phones, Ratti’s team developed a tracking and broadcasting device that could be attached to pieces of waste. The team then invited 500 volunteers to tag regular pieces of household rubbish, 3,000 items in total ranging from old sneakers, to empty cans, banana peels and dead batteries. Once the volunteers went home and threw out their tagged waste items, the tags started reporting their locations and establishing tracking vectors of their movement.

The tags, or smart dust as Ratti referred to them, established a network of tiny locatable electromechanical systems. The video of the mapping process is astounding: items of waste found their way from Seattle to every corner of the United States, in the case of some alkaline batteries not coming to a rest for two months.

What did we learn?

To understand Ratti’s work, we must consider the way he views the major forces affecting contemporary urban environments. The rapid growth in global urbanisation is his first and perhaps most important influence: Ratti does not deny the decentralising tendencies of digital technology, but attributes the city’s survival despite these tendencies to our deep need for social contact: people want to live together. His works are inherently social, interested in enhancing the connections between people and their environments. Rather than permitting digital technologies to alienate the inhabitants of a city, he wants to empower them with new and unprecedented control.

Second, and essentially the core area of Ratti’s interventions, is the aforementioned and ever-expanding blanket of networked digital elements. He is impatient with the slowness of hard infrastructure, far more interested in the opportunities presented by new digital technologies: data, networks, connections and apps that have the power to reach and affect millions of people at a time. He reasons that a city is not such a big place nor such a mysterious creature to understand, not when millions of people are already walking around in it, already absorbing and transmitting data about their environments.

For us, we are most impressed with the clear DNA of Ratti’s projects. They tackle issues of environmental sustainability, quality of life, resource use, cultural engagement and social spaces. If these questions seem familiar it’s because they are: they’re the same questions architects face. What the architecture profession traditionally addresses via urban and building design, Ratti addresses with digital, scaleable technologies. His is an exciting new world, one where the practice of architecture retains its worldview, but expands to encompass whatever tools and skills are necessary to get the job done.

This thinking has been recently manifested in a project not discussed by Ratti in his presentation but already receiving a lot of attention online and now available for pre-ordering, the Copenhagen Wheel. An electric motor that attaches to the rear wheel of a bicycle, it “transforms the bicycle into a hybrid e-bike that also provides feedback on pollution, traffic congestion and road conditions in realtime.”[10] This project is an exciting development within Ratti’s work, one that shifts his practice beyond demonstration into application. We look forward to seeing more of it.

1. Carlo Ratti in Melbourne; ArchitectureAU; 13th March 2014
2. Studio synopsis; Carlo Ratti Associati; accessed 20th April 2014
3. Nicholas Negroponte; Being Digital; Hodder and Stoughton; 1996
4. In 2011, 52.1% of the world population lived in urban areas. By 2050, this is projected to grow to 67.2%. Source: World Population Prospects; Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat; 2011
5. Carlo Ratti; Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design; Wired; 2nd October 2009
6. Project description; HubCab; accessed 27th April 2014
7. Project description; LIVE Singapore!; accessed 27th April 2014
8. Ibid.
9. Project description; TrashTrack; accessed 28th April 2014
10. Project description; Copenhagen Wheel; accessed 29th April 2014

Image credits:

1. Carlo Ratti. MIT Technology Review, author unknown.
2. Annual taxi trips, for HubCab; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; New York City; 2014
3. Journey from West 15th to East 54th Street, for HubCab; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; New York City; 2014
4. Isochronic Singapore, for LIVE Singapore!; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; Singapore; 2010
5. Formula One City, for LIVE Singapore!; SENSEable City Lab; MIT; Singapore; 2010
6. Trash tag v2.0, the tracking device used in TrashTrack; SENSEable City Lab, MIT; Seattle; October 2009
7. Trash tagging map, for TrashTrack; SENSEable City Lab, MIT; Seattle; October 2009

What was it?

The Australian Institute of Architects’ national architecture conference, held last month at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. Creatively directed by Sam Crawford, Adam Haddow and Helen Norrie, it explored the “act of making; in the dirtiness, directness and honesty of architecture… both the machinations of the process, and the beauty, delight and surprise of excellence.”[1]

This was the tenth conference since Kerstin Thompson was appointed the first creative director in 2005, and addressed a decade of recent history that saw international speakers drawn predominantly from Europe, North America and Japan. In their opening address, Crawford, Haddow and Norrie showed map overlays of this tendency, revealing a sizable hole in our own backyard. Thus they explained the strong regional focus of Making, with most speakers selected from Asia.

The directors noted that the conference location in Perth – another first in a decade – was unanticipated when they were appointed, but serendipitous. The city’s position on the west coast of Australia is closer to some of our regional neighbours than it is Melbourne and Sydney. With the world’s epicentre shifting to China and India, this is a timely and welcome acknowledgement of the architectural value to be found in Asia, one for which the directors should be applauded.

The conference was divided into four subthemes that sought to extend an intuitive definition of making: an exploration of not just the physical act of building, but its more ephemeral effects. Making culture, making life, making connections and making impact were each anchored by an Australian architect, who presented their own work, introduced the international speakers, and chaired thematically driven discussion panels. This division of duties had the curious side effect of reducing the prominence of the Australian voice within the broader discussion. We were interviewers, not interviewees.

Making culture
Andrew Burns, Australia (anchor)
Richard Hassell, Singapore
David Adjaye, England

Making life
Elizabeth Watson-Brown, Australia (anchor)
Wen Hsia and BC Ang, Malaysia
Cazú Zegers, Chile
Vo Trong Nghia, Vietnam
Marina Tabassum, Bangladesh

Making connections
Emma Williamson, Australia (anchor)
Sek San Ng, Malaysia
Gurjit Singh Matharoo, India
Andra Matin, Indonesia
Lyndon Neri, China

Making impact
Timothy Horton, Australia (anchor)
Justine Clark and Naomi Stead, Australia
Beth Miller, United States of America
Alejandro Echeverri, Colombia
Jo Noero, South Africa

What did I think?

While website descriptions of the way each subtheme would be explored were clear enough, overlap between all but the making impact theme had the unfortunate side effect of rendering them essentially indistinguishable from one another. This would have been less confusing if all the speakers reflected on their work with reference to the conference themes, but a few resorted to cookie-cutter lectures that failed to address them in any meaningful way.

For instance, Lyndon Neri was very entertaining, but his image-heavy lecture was light on insights. Andra Matin was invited to speak thanks to his role in establishing a network of young architects in Indonesia, but neglected to discuss this entirely, offering little more than walkthrough descriptions of his projects. This was a disappointing distraction that had me questioning the wisdom in including the subthemes at all.

In a thoughtful and detailed email response sent to me after the conference, Norrie explained that the subthemes were however never meant to establish a rigid thesis or architectural taxonomy. The intent was to develop a “curatorial framework” that would broaden the scope of making and provide direction for discussion and audience reflection. Programming the conference was a fluid task, with speakers constantly moved between themes: the directors went through twenty-one iterations before settling on the final programme.[2] Even then there was crossover, with some speakers presenting under one subtheme and participating in the discussion of another.

Retrospectively assessing the conference, it is clear how this approach encouraged debate amongst the delegates and interrogation of making. One colleague commented that architecture cannot make life or culture: life and culture make architecture. I suspect Crawford, Haddow and Norrie were interested however in exploring the role architecture plays within these fields, both as a recipient of and agent for change. Tabassum’s sublime Independence Monument and Liberation War Museum was a good example of this duality. A tribute to the tens of millions of people killed or forcibly displaced during the Bangladesh Liberation War, it is a project both shaped by political events of the past and able to influence a country’s sense of identity in the future.

What were the highlights?

The best speakers were those able to provide meaningful self-reflection and an analysis of their work within the broader contexts of not only the conference themes, but architectural production and national identity also. Richard Hassell was fascinating, the prodigal Perth son whose casual demeanour is a mask for extraordinary success across Asia. Wen Hsia and BC Ang presented a portfolio populated by small projects in concrete and timber, each executed with delightful creativity. And Sek San Ng’s irreverent humour aligned perfectly with his resourceful and honest design work.

Above all, the making impact subtheme stood out, differing from the other three in the clarity of its purpose and focus of its speakers. Populated by individuals operating outside the traditional territory of architecture practice, it was interested in outcomes beyond the built form, like gender equity and community wellbeing.[3]

Timothy Horton’s wide-ranging experience as a political operator made him an excellent choice for anchor. In his introduction he made reference to Rory Hyde’s impressive book, Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, a pioneering series of short interviews exploring similar questions of architectural territory. He recalled some of Hyde’s descriptive titles for contemporary practitioners operating on the edge, titles like the Urban Activist and the Community Enabler, suggesting an exciting world of new opportunities for a profession in crisis.[4]

The presentations of both Alejandro Echeverri and Jo Noero demonstrated the positive influence of high quality public buildings on the informal settlements of Medellin in Columbia and Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Their carefully considered architectural interventions inspire urban and social change in cities with deeply segregated populations. They slow the progress of downwards-economic spirals and act as foundation stones from which disadvantaged communities might begin to rebuild themselves.

The Community Design Collaborative in Philadelphia, of which Beth Miller is executive director, matchmakes deserving community projects with architects who work pro-bono to prepare sketch design proposals and seek financial backing. The CDC believes that good design is not a luxury but a public right, and since 1991 “have coordinated the donation of 100,000 hours of volunteer design work to a portfolio of 600 not-for-profit organisations.”

Finally, Justine Clark and Naomi Stead’s research through Parlour into gender equity has established a far-reaching and invaluable tool for understanding the current state of Australian architecture practice. Broadening the scope of their findings from women specifically to an entire profession, they argued that, “women architects are like the canary in the coalmine,” their equity issues indicative of much more widespread problems. Positive change to this status quo is to be sought from “pragmatic, collective and sustained advocacy.” The conference coincided with the release of their Guides to Equitable Practice, an important milestone towards a fairer Australian architecture profession.

The making impact theme was exceptional for two important reasons. First, more than any of the others, it demonstrated that architecture is not only influenced by its various contexts but can in fact exert influence over them. And second, it was most expressive of the conference’s aspirations, expanding the realm of architectural activity beyond buildings. For Australia, where the services offered by the architecture profession are continuously marginalised, we need to be proactive about uncovering new ones. Making impact offered substantial proof that our profession can be more than mere beautifiers of facades, more than a luxury service affordable only to the wealthy.

The work of Parlour strikes me as most radical in this respect. It is unprecedented for the architecture profession, not just for Australia but possibly the world. Could the Parlour research team generate sufficient expertise to start exporting its services? Could it transcend its scope as an auditor of an industry to an industry in its own right? In the battle for new territory, this is as good evidence as I have ever seen of the architecture profession creating new value from our unique and often underappreciated worldview.

What did I learn?

During the making impact discussion session, the outspoken Jo Noero memorably broadsided Dutch architecture studio OMA for designing a media headquarters for “one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.” He added that, “arguing China will develop a more moderate approach to freedom of speech in 25 years isn’t good enough. As architects, we need to do it now.” Noero has a well-earned reputation for unwavering and polemical morality, inspiring more than one of his fellow presenters to confess their feelings of guilt over the wealth of their clients.

Noero’s comment raised a provocative and enduring question in my mind, one that was accentuated by the choice of speakers for the conference and the region they represent. According to the World Bank’s index of per capita gross national income, Australia is the eleventh wealthiest country in the world. China is ranked 83^rd, Indonesia 109^th and India 118^th, their combined GNI measuring just over half of our own.[5] By focussing on Asia, South America and Africa, the conference inevitably targeted speakers from some of the poorest countries on the planet.

This disparity was not explicitly addressed by the conference themes, but it was implied everywhere: from the costly burden of air-conditioning in tropical climates, and consequent necessity of natural ventilation; to the opportunities provided by materials-light but labour-intensive construction techniques; to the repeated celebration of resourceful architecture. This commentary established a fifth and not-so-subtle subtheme running through every presentation and discussion: making money. The genius of the creative directors, intended or otherwise, was to ensure that the entire socio-economic spectrum be represented, from Sek San’s orphanage built entirely from donated funds and village labour, to Wen Hsia and BC Ang’s work on both private housing and social projects for indigenous Malaysian tribes, to the extraordinary lavishness of Matharoo’s pivoting marble-clad walls.

Noero was provocative, declaring his refusal to design any private house larger than 150sqm, but he was only pointing out the obvious elephant in the room. What role do architects have to play in addressing inequality? When Matharoo or Matin or Neri accept a commission for another expensive mansion, what responsibility do they have to the welfare of the millions of their countrymen and women irrevocably unable to afford their services? What responsibility does an Australian architect have to the same (though less extreme) divide here?

For me, this was the most striking subject to be drawn from the conference. It was not the first time such issues have been raised in public forums and nor will it be the last. I can’t say with any certainty what responsibility architects have in challenging poverty or deep economic segregation, but I hope that future conferences continue to focus their gaze on our region and on the great inequality that continues to exist here. Such a focus is an essential extension of the questions explored by the making theme and one I would like to think is given significant attention by our profession in coming decades.

Overall, Making 2014 was an engaging, contextually relevant and at times inspiring conference. The creative directors successfully curated a selection of speakers producing meaningful work far outside the starchitecture with which we are otherwise bombarded on a daily basis. Above all, it was a rewarding opportunity to recharge my batteries, to step back from the daily activities of being an architect and remind myself of the bigger picture.

I look forward to next year’s conference, Risk 2015, to be held in Melbourne and explore the troubled nexus “between the professional necessity to take calculated and creative risks and a world incapacitated by risk minimisation.” It will look backwards at humanity’s historical architectural achievements and will, I hope, show how we can rediscover our preparedness to take risks for the sake of great rewards.

I can’t wait.

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Sam Crawford, Adam Haddow, Helen Norrie, creative directors; Overview, Making 2014 National Architecture Conference; accessed 11th May 2014
2. Helen Norrie, Making 2014 creative director; private correspondence with author; May 2014
3. Even Jo Noero, the only practitioner within the making impact subtheme, is arguably a political activist first and architect second.
4. Dr. Rory Hyde; Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture; Routledge; London; 2012
5. In 2012, the GNI of Australia was $42,540, of China was $10,900, of Indonesia was $8,750 and of India was $5,080. These figures are in international dollars and based on the gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity i.e. taking into consideration the relative strengths of the listed countries’ currency to achieve a more realistic comparison. Source: GNI per capita, PPP; The World Bank Databank; accessed 20^th May 2014

Images sources:

1. Perth from the air; modified from the original photo by Kristian Maley
2. Sekeping Serendah by Seksan Design; image courtesy of Sekeping Serendah resort; author unknown
3. Chempenai House by WHBC; modified from the original photo by Aina Liyana
4. Red Location Museum by Noero Architects; image courtesy of Noero Architects via Abi Millar‘s insightful article, Architecture of Necessity

Wen Hsia Ang and BC Ang are the two halves of WHBC Architects, a young studio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As they explained in their presentation at the recent National Architecture Conference, they regard architecture as an exercise in problem solving. Each project demands a singular idea that can define and carry it. To attest to this philosophy, their website catalogues their projects according to simple sketches: if they can’t draw a single sketch to explain the core idea of a project, then the idea isn’t strong enough.

I had the pleasure of interviewing them after their conference presentation, and found much in common with their passion for ideas, craft and the making of buildings.

Durian Shed, Negeri Sembilan

Thank you for your lecture, it was very engaging.

Wen Hsia: Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Even though I was familiar with a number of your projects, the discussion of your thinking behind them offered new insights. Can you describe your work in its geographical context, whether you see it as particularly Malaysian?

BC: We believe geographical boundaries are man-made, so we relate first of all to the climate, which is pretty similar in Malaysia, Indonesia or other Asian countries. But on another layer, when you look at the construction context in Malaysia we have a combination of migrant and local workers. These different kinds of craftspeople make a big difference to the design. The climate, the people making the buildings and the people we are making them for all influence us. For us, there is no Malaysian design per se.

WH: Yes, we are always constrained by our tropical climate, the budget and the way our buildings are made. Certain materials may be cheap in Australia, but expensive in Malaysia. We do a lot of our projects in concrete because in Malaysia it is cheaper to build with concrete than steel or timber.

BC: Labour is cheap in Malaysia.

That was my next comment actually. Labour is cheap, concrete is cheap because it’s essentially just dirt, but steel is expensive.

BC: Yes, we have a labour-intensive culture, of building with wet works, reinforced concrete frames, bricks and mortar. This culture has existed in Malaysia for thirty to forty years and is cheaper than doing for instance a steel building.

As an Australian architect, I’m envious of the possibilities inherent in that culture. Here, the labour component of a project may be 60% of the construction budget, so we make decisions that use less labour but more materials.

WH: Yes, this affects our design decisions, but the other way around.

BC: We use concrete whenever it is appropriate as a way of responding to the Malaysian construction industry. Even when we are doing our early design work, we are already thinking about who can build it, which craftspeople have the skill to do it. If they are not available, we might have to relook at it…

WH: We might have to simplify some of the details, so the details evolve with the job. We have to think about how the builders will work and try and adjust our designs accordingly.

At last year’s national conference, Yosuke Hayano from MAD Architects in China discussed the challenge of building very large, highly technical buildings with old-fashioned construction techniques and labourers. Does this issue affect the way your ideas find their way into your projects? Do your ideas sit in the details or, knowing that the details aren’t necessarily going to be executed the way you want, in the bigger picture?

WH: That’s a very interesting question. We like our design concepts to be very strong. If our idea is strong enough, even if the details are not what we expect, the idea can carry the whole weight of the project.

BC: We like to be very pragmatic. On any project no matter its scale, the important component for us is still to have a good idea that solves a good problem. If our project can solve that problem, we go into the project with our eyes open, knowing that execution might not be as good as we really want it to be. We believe that doing good things is more important than crafting them perhaps.

WH: We do believe that all buildings should be well executed, and we try to be very particular about that aspiration, but in order to achieve it then we have to really think about how the building is going to be carried out and then work backwards.

So we struggle with exactly the same issues, no matter which country we are practicing in! Sometimes a project comes along with a very low budget and you know that you are not going to be able to execute it to the level of craftsmanship that you would like, so you make design decisions that can be achieved by a lower quality of craftsperson on site. It’s not ideal, but it’s a job and you do it…

WH: As long as the idea is achieved, that is something that we cannot compromise.

BC: If a project comes to us and we are just supposed to build the building, without adding any value or solving any problems, then there is no point doing it.

Do you say no to many projects?

WH: Yes, yes we do.

Is it hard to say no? It takes a lot of confidence to turn down a project…

BC: (Laughs) Even after we start working on a project, if we find it not working out then we will just have to move on.

That’s great. One of Glenn Murcutt’s pieces of wisdom that has always struck with me is that the future of our lives as architects is defined more by the projects we reject than the projects we accept.

WH: Exactly, yes.

Dog Hotel, Negeri Sembilan

What I think is interesting about your work is that there is actually much more than pragmatism, there’s also whimsy and humour. Like the skylights in your dog hotel, why wouldn’t a dog want some skylights? Is this a conscious process for you?

WH: (Laughs) Well, we love to have some sense of humour in all our projects. We tend to not take ourselves too seriously. We try and have fun with our projects.

BC: We have fun if the clients are good. With most projects, with the pole house and dog hotel, we become good friends with our clients.

WH: We know that we only have so much time, if we waste time on a project that we’re not happy about, then we can’t do really good work.

Yes, and then you start getting a reputation for doing bad work and all of a sudden more opportunities for bad work come to you.

BC: It’s like a vicious cycle.

Telegraph Pole House, Langkawi

You are partners in life as well as in business. Do you have complementary skills; do you share the roles on a project?

WH: It is actually quite good; we complement each other because we are two very different people in terms of architecture and in terms of thinking. The way BC thinks is quite German.

BC: We think in nationalities, I’m German or Japanese, very logical.

WH: And I’m more French (laughs), more intuitive and passionate. If I don’t like something, I’ll just come out and say what’s on my mind. We started working together seven or eight years ago and found very early on that we can be completely honest with each other. In Malaysia, people can be quite shy. But we have a partnership that works well because of our honesty with each other. We can tell each other off, I can tell BC that his scheme is really bad.

BC: So we have a fight about it (laughs), but then we get over it.Sometimes we both try to work on a design for one project, and will come out with different proposals. Whoever has the best idea leads the project, or whoever gets on best with the client.

WH: It changes from project to project.

Having been in practice together for a while now, do you know what you want for your future? Do you want your practice to stay the size it is now or grow? One of the issues with a small practice is being limited in the scale of projects you can take on.

BC: We are happy with the scale of our office now, just the two of us, but I disagree, I think a two-person office can do a very large project, but only one at a time.

That’s interesting. There are some strong similarities there with fellow Malaysian architect, Kevin Low. Has he influenced your approach at all?

BC: Yes, Kevin influences us a lot; he used to teach us both at school. I also worked with him at GDP Architects [a large Malaysian architecture office] before he set up his own practice. So yes, Kevin does influence us but the context of where he operates and where we operate is the same

Is the architecture community close in Malaysia? Is it knitted together across the whole country or if you’re practicing in Kuala Lumpur you don’t really know what’s happening in other cities?

WH: I think everyone does influence each other…

BC: But we are very quiet people so we don’t really go out and mingle. What’s more important is the craftspeople, the materials and the climate: they are the same problems that all architects in our region will face.

As you were saying earlier, it’s important to have the right craftspeople on a project. This reminds me actually of Low’s approach to construction, where he has developed an attitude where errors in construction are not necessary bad, and shouldn’t be replaced and covered over.

BC: I don’t entirely agree with that. I believe that you can’t start with the attitude on site that there are going to be errors. If you start with that attitude you will breed complacency. The industry will not improve; it will keep deteriorating.

How are your relationships with the builders and craftspeople on site established then? Do you deal only with the head builder, or deal directly with each trade?

BC: We normally engage each trade separately.

Is that typical?

BC: No, it’s not very typical. We used to practice by engaging the main contractor, and they would have their own sub-contractors. But then we started finding that the preferred sub-contractors would be busy and we would get someone less competent instead. This created whole kinds of trouble on site, so we started engaging directly with the trades.

WH: We request our clients to trust us while we are doing their project, and we trust our builders as well. In order to build that trust we need time to do the project our way. If a client can’t give us that trust, they will have to go to someone else.

So you are closely involved in construction, not just as observers?

BC: We don’t manage the site, but we are closely engaged in it. When we draw, say, concrete formwork using 8 x 4ft sheets of plywood, this equates roughly but not exactly to 2.4 x 1.2m. If we draw our lines at this distance apart, the builders have to spend their time cutting 20mm from every sheet that comes to site. So the builders speak to us about the materials they are using and we are able to save a lot of time, resources and money. Simple things like this engage us in the construction process. They allow us to change things to make building our designs easier not harder.

WH: This conversation doesn’t just happen on site, it happens while we are designing as well. When we design we are quite clear of the ideas that we want to have in our projects, but we are relaxed about the small things.

So we finish where we started: architecture is an exercise in problem solving. The central idea, as represented by the simple sketches you make for each project, is most important.

WH: Yes, that’s right.

Thank you both very much for your time.

Chempenai House, Kuala Lumpur

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Durian Shed, WHBC Architects. This and subsequent images courtesy of the architect.
2. Dog Hotel, WHBC Architects.
3. Telegraph Pole House, WHBC Architects.
4. Chempenai House, WHBC Architects.

What was it?

A series of recent lectures by Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto, touring Australia as a guest of the excellent C + A journal. Fujimoto presented his philosophy of architecture together with a tailored collection of his projects, including the building for which he is best known, the 2013 Serpentine Galleries pavilion in London. Not only did the Serpentine commission elevate him into the rarefied air of the likes of Zumthor, Koolhaas, Nouvel and Gehry, at the age of 42 he became the youngest architect to have achieved this honour.

Fujimoto began his lecture by contrasting the place where he grew up – a small rural town in Hokkaido, the north island of Japan – with the place where he studied to become an architect – Tokyo. Despite the apparent differences between the two environments, Fujimoto explained that he has always felt at home in Tokyo. For him, the forest and city are compositionally similar: immense spaces made up of many smaller pieces. Natural and artificial artefacts – leaves and branches or street signs and window panes – operate in both places at the human scale.

As the title of his lecture suggests, the natural world has long been a fascination for Fujimoto. Indeed, the forest and city anecdote underpins two related themes that drive all his work and were the subject of his lecture. First is his exploration of field architecture, or the fuzzy zone that exists between fixed states. Second is his interest in the contrast and collision of opposites: natural / artificial, inside / outside, simplicity / complexity, small / large.

The projects presented ranged in scale from the very small to the very large; from a single toilet in Ichihara, Japan, to a 1.5km long shopping strip in the Middle East. The two themes wove their way through all of them, finding expression in the cloud-like edges of the Serpentine pavilion, the fragmented floor plates of NA House, or the undulating canopy of jutting balconies in the White Tree Tower.

Serpentine Galleries pavilion, 2013

Fujimoto seemed in awe of the Serpentine Galleries and their investment in the annual pavilion programme. He noted the ambition of their commissioning body, who each year seek to recreate the spirit of inventiveness of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. With some whimsy he also described the designs that were rejected, first for being too Fujimoto-like and then for being too not-Fujimoto-like. The successful design proposal managed to stay connected to, but was still a departure from, his existing canon.

It is remarkable that both he and his client could have such confidence and self-awareness to be able to appreciate and direct this process. Insightful self-reflection is not often a trait associated with architects, though perhaps the international speaking circuit has pushed Fujimoto into understanding and articulating the trajectory of his work. It is clear also that the Serpentine is no ordinary commissioning body. They seek out and attract some of the best architects in the world, demand enormous creativity and effort from them (highly experimental pavilions executed from commission to construction in just three months), and have achieved a lineage of follies that are covered by architectural and mainstream media in every corner of the globe.

Fujimoto’s winning proposal started from the idea of a continuous surface wrapping around the core cafe function of the pavilion, a simple sketch that looked a bit like a rolling wave. But both surface and programme were dissolved and deconstructed into a repetitive matrix of 20mm white steel pipes, assembled across a combination of 400 x 400mm and 800 x 800mm grids. From a distance the pavilion resembles a soft white cloud, a carefully determined shape that somehow resists a determined form. Constantly shifting, from one angle (the first photo, above) it mimics the roofline and window reveals of the Serpentine Galleries behind, from another it becomes tree-like, from yet another the rolling wave reasserts itself.

Drawing the design in two dimensions was unhelpful, nothing more than fields of dots on a page. Even the three dimensions of a digital modelling environment lacked the depth and nuance the project required. So Fujimoto’s studio built a 1:10 model and the design development process saw him stalking it with a pair of scissors in hand, pruning a stick here and there as though the model were a topiary hedge. A staff member would trot after him, attaching coloured tape to the modified areas so the minute changes could be fed back into the computer-based documentation.

In this project, the field is strongly evident. The pavilion’s form is somehow both finite and constantly shifting, its programme is intimate yet undefined. Even furniture has an opportunity to unravel the order of the grid: standard cafe furniture create plinths for the “bottom parts of the body, their charming quality offseting the clarity of the grid.” The spacing of the grids permits further disruption: by dogs that walk through them and children who climb into them. The pavilion is a symphony of opposites: simple grids of sticks achieve great formal complexity; inside and outside are indistinguishable from each other; the traditional tectonics of buildings (walls and roofs, stairs and seats) are playfully dissolved.

NA House, 2011

In a hip, lively part of Tokyo, NA House is located on a typically small Japanese parcel of land measuring just 6 x 9m. Fujimoto felt that a large room on this site was not possible: it could only ever support a large small room. Fortunately, the clients were a young couple enthusiastic about (and presumably wealthy enough to take a risk on) an experimental house.

Fujimoto’s response was based on two radical gestures: first, the front and side facades are almost entirely transparent (even curtains appear to have been avoided); second, the floor plates are split across many levels, dissolved into small parts.

Fujimoto spoke mostly of the floor plates, describing them as mini platforms operating at the scale of furniture. They are separated vertically according to the heights of chairs, tables and benches – the dimensions of the human body. In some instances, ceilings are as low as 1500mm, creating nooks to be crawled into. Life is distributed fluidly across the platforms, a nebulous field that expands and contracts to fit the activity and size of gathering at hand. There is nothing as prosaic as a living room, meals area or bedroom in NA House. The platforms become whatever is needed: a bench seat now, a work surface later. This intent is revealed by photos that show bags, books and computers strewn freely across the floor. The house is full of edges, each creating temporary territories that its residents configure and reconfigure as required.

Though he didn’t discuss it, the transparency of NA House is truly bizarre, particularly in a city as dense as Tokyo. It is far more common to see Japanese architecture that carefully orchestrates views into and out of the interior volumes (indeed, last week Dezeen published a 2009 project by Hiroshima-based UID Architects that incorporates a solid floating fence that wraps the site in a privacy screen). The interior life is entirely on show here, as much a part of the streetscape as Tokyo’s famous Omotesando flagship retail stores. Not unlike Fujimoto’s glass toilet in Ichihara, private space is pushed right up to the edge of public space. We wonder what it would be like to live here at night, with each window a glowing billboard of one’s life? Would the house’s residents feel exposed, or would they feel protected by the anonymity of the street?

If anything, NA House is as clear a demonstration of the experimental quality of Sou Fujimoto’s work as the Serpentine pavilion. In a typology generally defined by conservative, risk-averse commissions (a topic we have previously discussed here), it is a radical redefinition of the programming, tectonics and urbanity of inner city living.

White Tree Tower, 2014

Fujimoto won the White Tree Tower project following the aptly named Architectural Folly of the 21st Century design competition. It is perhaps no surprise that a competition so named would be won by an architect who wraps toilets and inner city houses in glass. It is a multi-residential tower located amongst the good food, good weather and good life of the Mediterranean, with an undulating facade sprouting a dense canopy of deeply cantilevered balconies.

The interior volumes of the apartments look much like any other contemporary apartment design, but the balconies are a clever and formally evocative gesture that responds well to the local climate. Fujimoto observed that the majority of Mediterranean life is spent outdoors, is indeed the defining characteristic of the region: why should living in an apartment not provide the same opportunities? The building not only functions like it belongs in a warm climate, its tree-like form makes it look like it does too.

The balconies are this project’s expression of the fuzzy field. In Australia, we are used to seeing facades designed parametrically to obscure unwanted sun, with each window carefully finessed to achieve maximum thermal performance. Fujimoto is not interested in performance-driven architecture though (the balconies wrap 360 degrees around the building, despite the fact that the north face will not receive much direct sunlight): for him, narrative and social context are more valuable. The randomly jutting balconies and roofs will provide shade in an unpredictable pattern; a true intersection of natural and artificial constructs. The tower’s residents will live at the edge of a built forest, shifting positions on their (sometimes multi-storey) balconies to catch the last rays of sun or find relief in the last square inches of shade.

Like NA House, White Tree Tower pushes the most intimate of residential spaces to the very edge of the building. Life is put on display, the building energised by the activity within it. The exciting parts of the building are at its edges, precisely where the field likes to operate. Fujimoto has juxtaposed the public and the private, but big and small, inside and outside, climate and climate-control also.

What did we think?

We recall studying the theory of field architecture during our Bachelor of Architecture degrees, but until hearing Fujimoto speak, have never encountered a practicing architect who proactively explores it in his or her work. It’s not just rhetoric either: Fujimoto’s buildings are genuinely strong expressions of the undefined area between opposites. Edges of roofs are slowly dispersed to blur the boundary between inside and out; deterministic room types are dissolved in favour of platforms that support shifting regions of activities; balconies provide shade without symmetry.

Across all scales, Fujimoto is deeply experimental. Even the 1.5km long Souk Mirage masterplanning project explores the juxtaposition of natural and artificial orders, and the possibilities of undefined, field behaviours that can be found in the zone between. This is an impressive trajectory that reinforces the clarity in Fujimoto’s self awareness: each project teases out the issues further, finds new formal expression for old ideas.

He is also a great distiller: a project is reduced to its core idea, which is then expanded to cover all facets of a design. This is of course true of his formal gestures: for instance, a grid of sticks to makes walls, roofs, stairs and furniture. It is also true of his ideas: he “thinks about nature simply,” proceeding step by step to deepen the relationship between the architectural and natural environments.

Our lasting impression of Sou Fujimoto is a man of embedded contradictions. Like his work, he is the result of the contrast and collisions of opposites. He is confident in himself and his work, but he is also modest. He is playing on a world stage against architects pushing into their 70s, but he is still young. He makes serious architectural enquiries but retains a sense of lightness and humour.

It is easy to overlook his predominantly pristine, white work in a country of highly creative architects producing pristine, white work. But to our pleasure, we discovered that his architecture becomes much more interesting below the surface. It is inventive, rich and complex. Even the whiteness contains a story. When asked whether he’s ever thought about using colour, Fujimoto responded by saying, “I hate white. It is a very powerful colour, it grabbed me and doesn’t like to let me go.”

And why should it indeed?

Jo Noero is the principal architect of Noero Architects, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Noero is renown for his work within the shack settlements of South African cities, and is as outspoken on issues of ethics, professionalism and the built environment as his projects are engaging.

Noero visited Australia recently to present a lecture for the National Architecture Conference. I had the pleasure of interviewing him after his presentation, and enjoyed a conversation that touched on many and varied subjects.

Thank you for your spirited presentation today. A central part of your work is the importance of quality buildings within disadvantaged contexts, and the possibility they present of influencing the surrounding built environment.

Exactly, this is very important.

Can you talk about how this relates to your Red Location project in Port Elizabeth.

I’ll tell you how it all started. Many years ago when I was teaching, I felt quite alienated from mainstream architectural practices in South Africa, and I was looking for somewhere where I could locate both my research and practice interests. The places that I was drawn to were the informal shack settlements on the periphery of the city. I figured at that time in the country they were the only places where people acted with unfettered freedom in shaping their environment, even accounting for their extreme poverty. I have always held the idea that authentic culture grows from the bottom up: the people living in the shack settlements were outside government control and were just building for themselves, so I went and had a look to understand how they were building, and ended up spending two years researching the settlements while I was teaching.

Out of that experience grew an interest in taking the structural systems and materials that were in use in those areas, and formalising them through my work. I hoped to show local people a connection with what they were already doing themselves. It shows great resilience and energy to build something from nothing, and by incorporating this spirit into my own buildings I was also showing respect to the people living in the neighbourhoods around them.

I’ve read interviews with you where you discussed using packing crates from car manufacturing factories in your projects, a material already being used in the shack settlements.

You saw my talk this morning?

Yes.

And the reading room I did at the Red Location library, clad in timber?

Yes.

That’s the same timber that people use on their shacks, except that we took it, sanded it down, fixed it properly and varnished it. It’s the same material but we used it to clad the most important building in the project and in the neighbourhood.

Do you know whether that more refined material is now used within vernacular construction techniques?

I’m not sure. My sense is that people appreciate what I do, but I haven’t seen much evidence of whether they are actively trying to take those systems and develop them in the same way I have. The opposite does occur though: the timber cladding I used on the Red Location Library is now starting to find its way into rich houses, built by master craftsman in a shabby-chic style for a tremendous amount of money.

Really, I’m not even sure whether I want people to follow what I’m doing. It’s just me saying that I honour the people living in the shack settlements, I’m honoured to work in their space, so I look at how they build and work in the same kind of way. It’s simply that.

The shabby-chic style is curious. There was a bit of Twitter activity following your discussion.

Oh there was Twitter activity, good! Was it positive or negative?

Both sides of the fence were represented. Somebody said they really like the shabby-chic look.

(Laughs)

Others suggested it’s a very dishonest architecture, cladding wealth in a surface of poverty.

Exactly, it’s an architectural camouflage. It’s saying, “I’m rich but I identify myself with the poor, I’m a comrade in arms…”

Is it dishonest then, or just a less sophisticated form of honouring the context?

I think it’s a style, that’s all. Some stylists have got hold of the idea and suddenly shack-chic has become fashionable and people follow it. But the connection between the style and the people in the poorer parts of the city is usually lost in translation. I like to think that at the very least there is some residual subconscious sense of the discrepancy.

There is a man called Neil Leach who has written about this process. Around fifteen years ago he wrote a book called The Anaesthetics of Architecture that describes two things that happen in the world. First, is that the greater the flows of information, the smaller the knowledge base. This particularly affects students, who have a tendency to place predominance on the image over everything else, without understand its context.

Because the issue with the modern day is not that there’s not enough information, there’s too much.

Yes, and I don’t think we’ve learnt how to filter it effectively yet.

No.

The second thing that Leach describes is that capitalism depends upon novelty; it’s what sells things. Novelty is as much image based as it is commodity based, and architecture has fallen victim to that. We have to be novel; we have to produce new things. But the problem with new things is that once they are consumed they are no longer of use any longer. So we abandon images as quickly as we consume them. We have this lumbering machine called architecture which takes five or ten years to get a building from inception to completion, and it’s held victim to these lightning fast movements of novelty, images and consumption. I don’t think architects have done a good job of managing or understanding it, or trying to find ways of countering it through other means.

That’s a very fascinating idea. I’ve always thought that architects are largely opportunistic; we do the work that is offered to us. Flipping that status quo around and seeking work out is immensely difficult to do, particularly when we have to make a living off our labour.

Let me talk about what it’s like to be in practice. I get offered lots of houses, and usually they’re these big McMansion briefs, 1000sqm on the beach, all cantilevered, and I just say no. Houses like these are unethical. I don’t think you need anything more than 150sqm to live comfortably. We have limited space in the world and many people with nowhere to live at all, so how can you be given the right to waste resources?

The two or three people who have agreed with that philosophy have been the clients for the two or three best houses I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think we do enough of that, enough proselytising. We are so stripped of any self-esteem or dignity as architects that we see ourselves as an industry there to serve public. But the public kick us around and tell us what to do. They’re not prepared to take wise advice from us, and I don’t understand why that should be the case.

I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse that this is happening to you in South Africa as well. In Australia, there are so many other voices competing for attention within the built environment, and most of them are focused on all the wrong things. Clients regularly have a real estate agent or builder mate whispering in their ear, saying, “You’ve got to do this because this is what the market wants.”

Absolutely. But I think there are useful ways of dealing with that situation. When I was in Peru about six or seven years ago, I spoke with a lot of architects practicing in Lima. It’s a tough city hit by civil war, but what a lot of the good ones do is build as well.

Architect-builders…

Yes. And in Buenos Aires in Argentina, the three to four storey, middle class apartment buildings are all built by architects.

Is that legislated or is it just how it works?

No. It’s just how it works. What they do is they find groups of people online who are willing to put money together to build something. It’s an opportunity to get a tailor-made apartment, even if it’s very small, because you are talking face-to-face with the architect rather than having to buy something that some developer has made.

So apartment buildings crowd funded by the end users?

Yes. Some of the best architects in Lima said to me they make money out of the building side of things. They build their own projects and the money they make is used to support them while they enter competitions. So they get the one good project to do, rather than running around after awful people doing shit that they don’t like.

My wife and I are starting to build speculative houses ourselves, tiny little ones. I’ve worked for so many people who make money out of my efforts, I thought, why don’t I put my money in the bloody ground and build something myself? We have two houses that are coming out of the ground now. I think there are lots of new and different ways that we can imagine working as architects in the world.

But the important message from my lecture today was that whatever strategies we put in place to survive have got to support the ideal of architecture. We can’t just want to become project managers because project managers are making money. I’m only interested in finding alternative ways of making buildings because maybe I’m being thwarted in one respect. In the end, I just want to make good architecture, it’s what gives me pleasure, and to make a bit of money out of it as well if I can.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to change subject back to the Red Location project. You talked today about how long it has taken, but also how good architecture takes time to get right. For the design and construction of one project to be spread across a generation, I feel that maybe the building is not the only end product, that there’s something even more meaningful to be achieved. Is there value in such a lengthy process?

Well, the project brief set up in the competition has changed over time. I’m still doing work on the project and it’s still seen as part of the competition, but it’s different from where we started. There was lots of community participation up front to formulate the competition brief, after which we built the museum. But then there was a hiatus when we started to talk to people again about the new buildings, and the brief changed and time got gobbled up. There were also issues of funding, and there was a change in local government, so it just took a long time to get things done.

It can be frustrating because the bureaucracy in South Africa works slowly, but having the luxury of a couple of years to work on a library is fantastic. I can design very fast, but then I can take it and show it to people in the community and adjust it if I need to. Buildings just get better when you have time to work on them, that’s all it is.

How important was the community consultation process?

I’m not a great one for upfront community participation. People don’t know what they want. If you just ask, you’ll find that everyone wants a three-bedroom house with two cars on a nice site overlooking the ocean. I find that the best way of getting people involved is to provoke. I make a proposition, present it and then kick it around. I think people feel much more comfortable with that as well. They don’t feel that they are being put on the line to make big decisions. It’s only through an interactive design process that you can reach some kind of consensus.

So when you present the initial concept on a project, which I presume is already a fairly resolved building…

Yes.

Do you find it changes in response to the community commentary you receive?

Yes, it does. Look, when I talk about participation, I mean talking to all the different groups who are involved in a building, from the local people who use it, to city officials, politicians, community representatives, the architects, library services, gallery services etc. So there are all these layers to the process and the design gets filtered through all of it. A project can take years to work its way through every group, and at every stage adjustments have got to be made.

That’s for me what community participation is. The common idea that you sit down with a group of people and they tell you how their grandmothers lived in the UK isn’t what community consultation is at all. You need to sit down with the people who are actually going to use your building, the workers and the visitors and the cleaners. Why should this be any different when we deal with poor people or rich people? People get strange ideas when you talk to a poor community, that the process is somehow special. But I don’t see any difference between talking to a community or a family or a business. It’s just briefing.

One of the things I thought about when you were presenting was the earlier lecture by Beth Miller from Philadelphia’s Community Design Collaborative. I felt quite anxious when she was talking about architects working pro bono. There has been a lot of controversy in Australia recently about architects working for free when the whole profession is struggling to make a living.

I never work pro bono, ever. I had a clear lesson on this when I first started working in Johannesburg. I did some work for the Anglican Church under Desmond Tutu. The first church I worked on I did for nothing. You know, I thought that’s the thing to do when you work for really poor people, but all I got was trouble from everyone. I went to speak to Desmond and I said, “Look, I don’t know what the problem is, but these people don’t respect a thing I do.” And he asked, “Are you charging them fees? Make sure you charge them money.”

People respect what they pay for.

Absolutely. From that time onwards it was their money on the line and they listened to everything I had to say. We shouldn’t ever have to work for nothing. I believe strongly in the dignity of labour. It’s like these architects who have interns but pay them nothing. I find that insulting.

That’s the controversy in Australia actually.

Well, I think anyone who takes someone on without paying them should be deregistered as architects. It’s immoral and unethical. What you’re saying to that person is that the value of their labour is worth zilch.

The immediate past president of the Victorian Chapter of the AIA, Jon Clements, made an impressive speech on that recently. I also read that RIBA has established a protocol that removes an architect’s accreditation if he or she is found to be employing someone without pay.

They did that in the US as well.

It will be a challenge to see whether or not there is enough steel within the Australian profession to do the same thing.

Look, I think the work Beth Miller does is great, but one of the things I’m interested in is the difference between architecture and social work.

Yes, you made that comment at the end of your speech.

I think there’s a distinction between being a professional architect and maintaining active citizenship. I mean, I’m actively involved in my country, but I don’t believe that through my architecture I’m going to create political change. If I wanted to do that I’d join a political party and I’d go out there and change things. Architecture doesn’t work like that. So it’s about understanding the limitations of architecture. Once you understand what architecture can and can’t do, you can be much more effective as an architect.

When I went to the last Venice Biennale, the American exhibition was essentially social work. It was about helping people learn to grow vegetable gardens in their back yards. I mean for fuck’s sake, that’s not what I want to do as an architect. That’s not stuff architects do, it’s what social workers do. We do other things. I think we’ve got to be a bit careful that the pendulum on social accountability doesn’t swing too far and we lose sight of everything.

In the end, the best thing we can do is make purposeful space that’s beautiful, which is bloody difficult to do as it is. If poor people get richer or sick people get healthier in my buildings, then that’s great, but I don’t think it’s a predictable outcome.

You know, I don’t go and look at any buildings I’ve done, I really don’t. When I hand a building over to my clients, it’s theirs and they must do with it as they see fit. I’m not going to go and sniff around and find out what they’ve changed, it’s their right to do whatever they like. For God’s sake, knock a hole in the wall, change the front doors, change the roof, it’s your building, do with it what you want.

Interesting. It’s an understanding that architecture involves the dignity of exchange.

Obviously, the client has paid for it. There’s a famous essay by Adolf Loos called The Poor Little Rich Man, it’s exactly this criticism. This poor little rich man, he went to the architect who designed anything, and then whenever he wanted to change a painting in his house he would have to ring up the architect to get his permission, and to get his advice. Is that what architecture is? That’s not architecture; it’s something else, control beyond any reasonable limits.

I agree, and I really think this shows in your well-built but humble work. Thank you for your lecture today and your candid discussion.

My pleasure.

This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in, Architecture AU.

1. Red Location Museum entrance, Noero Architects. This and subsequent images courtesy of the architect.
2. Red Location Archive reading room, Noero Architects.
3. House Sapieka front, Noero Architects.
4. House Sapieka courtyard, Noero Architects.
5. House Sapieka interior, Noero Architects.
6. Red Location Museum interior, Noero Architects.
7. Red Location Gallery, Noero Architects.

Today, Panfilocastaldi turns 4. We have survived another full year of blogging. The focus we developed last year on architecture and architecture practice has continued to deepen, with these subjects representing the lion’s share of this year’s articles.

We are now publishing on average one post every week and a half, and have had articles co-published in Parlour and ArchitectureAU. Our favourites of the past 12 months:

• Why working for free is not okay. What are the costs of unpaid staff? An in-depth study into the complicated issue of unpaid internships. Co-published with Parlour.
• Richard Leplastrier. A tribute to the great Australian architect.
• The ideal client. What ingredients make a great client? Analysis of the ideal client, and exploration of how we might go about getting more of them.
• You can’t sell an idea. Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. An article that explores the recipe to success in the architecture profession.
• Interviews with WHBC Architects (Malaysia) and Jo Noero (South Africa), speakers from the Australian Institute of Architects 2014 architecture conference. Commissioned by ArchitectureAU.
• Our work is all about you. The first of 10 reasons to engage an architect.

Once again, we’ve synthesised this year’s key statistics into a series of infographics:

And some highlights in plain English:

• 38 new posts, with a maximum of 8 in April and June of this year.
• 19 post categories, the same number as last year. 12 categories received no new articles, continuing evidence of our shift in writing focus. Our most prolific category, Architecture practice, received 30.
• 118 new tags, bringing the total to 1,240 and ranging from The Fountainhead (1 post) to Australian Institute of Architects (28 posts).
• 116 new comments, bringing the total to 447.
• 9,228 new spam comments, bringing the total to 25,296.
• 37,521 new page views, bringing the total to 140,919.
• An average of 103 page views per day. Our busiest month this year was April with 3,868 page views or an average of 129 per day.
• Visitors from 153 different countries, ranging from Yemen (1 page view) to Australia (13,503 page views).
• 20,856 referrals from search engines, comprising thousands of unique terms. Some great practice-related long tail search terms this year included what to ask for when visiting a builder for tender and should australian architects charge for doing a fee proposal.
• 3,705 referrals from 144 other websites, with a maximum of 512 from Facebook, pipping Twitter by 7 referrals as our primary social media platform.
• 135 blog followers, increasing our count by 52 over this time last year, with a further 23 comment followers and 542 Twitter followers.

Thank you for your support this year. Who knows what 2015 will bring for us, or how Panfilocastaldi will evolve? For now, it continues to be a labour of love, self-sustaining because it is enjoyable for its own sake. If you promise to keep reading and commenting, we’ll promise to keep posting and replying.

Yours sincerely,
Warwick Mihaly, Erica Slocombe and Dew Stewart.

Copyright Nils Koenning

Three years ago, I reviewed an exhibition of John Wardle Architects and NADAAA‘s new Melbourne School of Design. Even at that early stage in its development, I was captivated by their proposal. It felt like it would respond well to Melbourne University’s urban campus, would engage meaningfully in its architects’ aspirations for a built pedagogy, and was sure to be finished with all of JWA’s usual flair for detail.

Then last year, I watched with keen interest as the building rose rapidly out of the ground, and in November was able to experience it finished and firsthand during presentations for my 2014 Design Thesis studio.

Construction was in fact only due for completion by the start of this year, but thanks to the efficiency of its builder, Brookfield Multiplex, it wound up a miraculous five months ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, the faculty wasn’t quite ready to return to its new home, so the building spent most of that time sitting idle, patiently waiting for students to fill its walls. The faculty is at last ready however, and the new Melbourne School of Design is now fully operational.

Copyright Nils Koenning

A couple of weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure of touring the building with John Wardle himself, at his softly-spoken yet enigmatic best, as part of an Australian Architecture Association Short Black tour.[1] Prior to the tour, Wardle gave an incredibly insightful glimpse into the design thinking that shaped the MSD. No doubt well polished by many outings, his slideshow flew along at a cracking pace, bursting at the seams with the richness of the design.

I was particularly interested in Wardle’s characterisation of his studio’s relationship with its American counterparts, NADAAA. Unlike many global / local ventures, where the local studio plays lapdog to the other’s design genius, this was a truly equal partnership. Throughout the design process, input from the two studios was 50:50, with conscientious effort going into preserving this balance. Even during documentation and construction, NADAAA maintained an active role in the project, contributing to the documentation package and flying staff in to visit site.

No doubt this arrangement played a substantial role in helping the partnership win the commission in the first place. As Wardle noted, at the very least it gave them a distinct strategic advantage during the limited timeframe of the project’s initial open design competition phase, allowing them to work around the clock.[2]

Also fascinating was the contractual relationship between university, architect and builder. For such a finely crafted building, I was surprised to discover that it was built under a novated contract. Typically used within the cut-throat world of speculative developments, novated contracts aim to deliver projects on budget but are infamous for expedient design results. But then Wardle added the punchline: the novation occurred only once the documentation was 100% complete. I didn’t get the chance to question him further, but I do wonder whether there was much to gain from such an arrangement.

Copyright Nils Koenning

So what do I think of the building?

As construction was nearing completion, I remember being struck by the seriousness of it. Even with hoarding still up, I could not help but be impressed by its ambition. It is a large, powerful and expensive institutional building, and weighing in at $125m is poles apart from its predecessor, which was built on a shoestring budget stretched to breaking point.

I have encountered criticism of the MSD budget, and the political role the building plays within the university’s never-ending bid to attract foreign investment. But to lament the role new infrastructure plays in a university’s marketing campaigns is to disregard the realities of the increasing financial pressures placed on tertiary education in this country. RMIT has the Swanston Academic Building and Design Hub, Melbourne University now has the Melbourne School of Design.

More concentrated criticism comes from staff whom appear to have been swapped from generous office space in the temporary faculty building on Swanston Street to more cramped quarters. One tenured professor also made the insightful observation that the new building is larger than its predecessor, yet its gross floor area is smaller. In other words, $125m for a bigger building with less in it.

As a sessional tutor without a dedicated office space, I suppose I have less skin in the game on these issues. I can stand at arms length from the faculty and assess the building with less bias. And really, I think the MSD is a very good building.

Copyright Nils Koenning

Despite its size, the complexity of its programme and its diverse structural, construction, environmental and finishing systems, the MSD is a holistic work of architecture. In both JWA and NADAAA’s transition from boutique houses to much larger institutional buildings, the studios have demonstrated their capacity to retain this quality in their work. The MSD is all the better for this focus, a whole entity greater than the sum of its parts.

Copyright Nils Koenning

Outside

Its monumental exterior is finely attuned to the environmental demands of the cartesian grid. The southern facade is the bluntest, polished precast concrete panels punctuated by an abstract composition of windows. Wardle showed an early design section looking at this facade from inside the building, revealing how fenestration was designed from the inside out to vary the feel of identically sized teaching spaces ranged along its length.

The northern, eastern and western facades are more filigreed, each draped in perforated zinc veils to block unwanted summer sun. Early iterations of these veils were motorised and automated, each piece puffing in and out in response to seasonal changes, but budget cuts meant true movement gave way to parametricism. This is an approach to design in which I confess to have little interest, but the result is a fine thing. Intricately stamped and seamed zinc sheets protrude from an irregular steel frame, both their density and opacity controlled by the computer to achieve desired solar outcomes. It’s worth noting also that zinc was chosen as the material for the veils after research into embodied energy found it to perform better than both steel and aluminium.

Copyright Nils Koenning

The base of the building is clad predominantly in glass, and is discrete from the upper reaches of each facade. It is transparent but not overwhelmingly porous. I suspect this is largely a university requirement for campus security, but I hope some of the more dynamic edge conditions will enrich the open spaces immediately surrounding them: an open amphitheatre to the northeast; galleries to the west; and a paved area to the north that is to be used by the adjacent timber workshop. This is a critical piece of the contextual puzzle and, until faculty programmes get fully up to speed, is for me still missing.

The urban transition between the Swanston Street tram depot and Union House, the most heavily trafficked entry route into the campus, is smooth. The angular protrusions of the east elevation are a welcoming embrace to passers-through. Wardle noted the importance of capturing this desire line, reflecting on the “largely unremarkable buildings at Melbourne University” that are contrasted by the “outstanding open spaces between them”. The internal street at ground level, designed to manage this flow of students, therefore establishes a new open space within the building. Its sloping concrete floor and joinery were conceived as a dry river bed, its edges activated by timber workshops and digital fabrication labs, the library and gallery spaces. Here is a more successful attempt at street-level public activation, and an opportunity to present to the many non-architecture students on campus the best that the faculty has to offer. Wardle even noted a secret agenda here, not to convert stray students into budding architects, but to instil in them an interest in its delights, and who knows, create future patrons of our art.

Copyright Nils Koenning

Inside

While the outside of the building enjoys an austere material palette, the list of internal materials is long: concrete, steel, aluminium, timber, plywood, glass, mesh, plasterboard, pinboard, vinyl, foam, melamine. But even here the monumentality of the building is preserved, with very little applied pigment anywhere in the building. If the riotous colour of the aforementioned Swanston Academic Building represents the epitome of RMIT, then the honesty of materiality within the MSD does the same for Melbourne.

Copyright Nils Koenning

The teaching spaces running along the south edge of the building open onto the atrium via cleverly rotating walls that engage in 21st Century thinking on tertiary learning. Gone are the old buildings’ acreage of drafting tables, which from my experience were alienating and rarely used. In their place are rooms that respond to what Wardle referred to as “nomads and settlers”, or the wide spectrum of spatial inhabitation particular to students. The teaching spaces therefore form eddies in the currents of circulation that wrap the atrium, encouraging engagement and, I would hope, the cross-polination of ideas.

The upper level corridors are activated by a morphing series of individual desks, benches and study tables. In some instances, these are little more than flat surfaces on which to rest a laptop, and in others are communal tables for spreading out and settling in. Further informal spaces litter the building, each picked out with its own personality, and all of them well-patronised during our tour. At once conspicuous and invisible, the stainless steel mesh that gift-wraps the atrium provides fall safety while doing away with more opaque balustrades.

Of all the communal rooms within the building, I am most fond of the grand scissor stair that connects the four floor levels from the atrium up. With its collegiate 1:3 gradient and criss crossing pattern, it is a natural social incubator. It is so gentle that it almost enforces a meandering pace and scholarly dialogue. It also addresses one of the major gripes I have with many institutional buildings, whose stairs are timidly tucked inside musty, unwelcoming fire shafts. The MSD has these as well, but the grand stair is so good to use I can’t see why anyone would bother with the lifts.

Copyright Nils Koenning

Built pedagogy

All elements of the MSD, both inside and out, have been designed to maximise the opportunities for a built pedagogy. In other words, JWA and NADAAA designed the building to play a role in the education of its students. The layers of construction, from primary structure all the way through to finished linings, are pulled back and revealed, their relationships explained. The steel trusses that run along the base of the grand stair for example are left fully exposed, machine markings and all. Each corner of the building expresses a unique way to execute junctions between materials. Timber panels in the coffered ceiling and hanging studio are, as Wardle puts it, in turns “raw and cooked”: structural members are left in their unfinished state while room linings are sealed and polished. Even the structural piles running around the perimeter of the building are visible thanks to carefully placed windows in the basement.

History plays a role too, with the Bank of New South Wales facade now incorporated into the west edge of the building. What used to be several floors of administration offices behind the facade are now a void, a curious strategic move that both relinquishes valuable gross floor area and accentuates the heritage engagement of the new building. Nostalgia over pragmatism? Heroism over sustainability? Perhaps this too is an opportunity for teaching through experiencing.

Such a sustained focus on built pedagogy will provide systemic benefits to the way curricula are devised and classes are taught. Construction tutorials will tour the building in search for structural members in tension and compression; environmental sustainability classes will study the solar paths that shape the zinc veils; and dreary lectures on services will now be enlivened by visiting actual services in use around the building.

Copyright Nils Koenning

The Melbourne School of Design is a highly accomplished building. Its holistic, singular vision is its greatest strength and will certainly lead to a host of deserved accolades. It does what most buildings do not, closing the gap between the process and outcome of making, telling the story of its genesis through the layering of its skin. Its spaces are for the most part generous and collegiate, (almost) making me wish I could go back and learn how to be an architect again. At the very least, I am pleased to be on the other side of the learning fence, and look forward to teaching within its walls next semester.

Curiously, the MSD’s singular vision may also be its greatest weakness. As one colleague remarked to me after the tour, I wonder if Melbourne University will now start churning out battalions of mini John Wardles? Even if they want to, can the students resist the design influence this building will have on them? In a roundabout way, this question leads straight back to RMIT, whose simultaneous investment in the minimalism of Godsell and exuberance of Lyons offers a more inclusive conversation about design. Clearly, Melbourne University has built (and is building) a host of other substantial works around campus, but as far as the architecture faculty goes, the MSD is more or less it.

For now, I can only say that I very much like this building. It is a worthy addition to Melbourne University’s beautiful campus, and I’m sure will become a valued environment for learning. It’s clear the students already feel this way: even at 8pm at night, the atrium space was abuzz with them. As we disbanded after the AAA tour, I discovered with some humour though that most weren’t studying architecture at all. They were medical students, who have apparently taken to the warmth of the building with zeal. Perhaps among them were Wardle’s future patrons, already alive with the spirit of fine architecture.

What was it?

The Australian Institute of Architects‘ annual architecture conference, held two weeks ago in Melbourne. Creatively directed by Donald Bates, Hamish Lyon and Andrew Mackenzie, it explored the changing role of risk in architecture. The directors framed the discussion by observing that “No one wants to be a safe architect. Safety assumes the conventional and the predictable. Who wants that? Unless of course you want to stay in business… This conference will explore the troubled nexus between the architectural necessity of risk-taking and a building environment predicated on the minimisation of risk.”[1]

This was the third conference in three years that I’ve attended, continuity that has allowed me to start detecting both trends and innovations across their formats.[2] Gone were the subthemes that distinguished the speakers for Making 2014, replaced by a more filigreed thematic engagement. Gone also was the regional specificity of Making, the list this year having more in common with the internationalism of Material 2013. And in contrast to both was an invigorating series of panel discussions, with concurrent sessions providing respite between the more serious keynote addresses.

Though Bates, Lyon and Mackenzie eschewed the limelight somewhat, their curatorial hand in both speaker selection and discussion topics was firmly evident. Their combined experience across large practice, education, media and procurement flowed cleanly into a conference that looked pleasingly beyond the usual parochialism of the architecture profession.

Educators, journalists and emerging practitioners shared as much of the stage as established architects. And in a worthwhile first, the Planning and Architecture panel discussion was a collaboration with the Planning Institute of Australia’s Planning Congress 2015. Delivered to a packed house of both architects and planners, in many ways this session epitomised the broad agenda of the conference, positioning the practice of architecture within its larger, more ambitious and multi-disciplinary context.

With the concurrent panel discussions expanding the usual eight sessions to fourteen, the list of speakers this year was necessarily long:

Keynote speakers
Gregg Pasquarelli, SHoP Architects, United States of America
Carline Bos, UN Studio, the Netherlands
Deborah Saunt, DSDHA, United Kingdom
David Gianotten, OMA, the Netherlands
Amanda Levete, AL_A, United Kingdom
Jeremy Till, Central Saint Martins, United Kingdom
Cynthia Davidson, Anyone Corporation, United States of America
Kasper Jensen, 3XN / GXN, Denmark

Local practitioners
Suzannah Waldron, Searle x Waldron, Melbourne
John Choi, CHROFI, Sydney
Camilla Block, Durbach Block Jaggers, Sydney
Paul Morgan, Paul Morgan Architects, Melbourne
Finn Pedersen, Iredale Pedersen Hook, Perth
Kristen Green, Kristin Green Architecture, Melbourne
Ben Hewett, NSW Government Architect, Sydney
Jeremy McLeod, Breathe Architecture, Melbourne
Juliet Moore, Edwards Moore, Melbourne
Charles Wright, Charles Wright Architects, Cairns
Thomas Bailey, Room 11, Hobart
Hanna Tribe, Tribe Studio, Sydney

Panellists
John Daley, Grattan Institute, Australia
Mitchel Silver, New York City Parks Commissioner, United States of America
Cheong Koon Hean, Housing and Development Board, Singapore
Manfred Grohmann, Bollinger Grohman, Germany
Ian McDougall, Ashton Raggatt McDougall, Australia
Vivian Mitsogianni, RMIT, Australia
Anthony Burke, UTS, Australia

What did I think?

While Material and Making were inspiring and engaging conferences, it must be said that the timelessness of their subjects dulled their urgency.[3] Risk suffered no such problems. Firmly rooted in what is surely the biggest challenge facing contemporary architecture practice, the dangers and rewards of risk-taking are at the very heart of the crisis that beleaguers our profession.

As Till noted in his address, “it used to be that the entire architectural project was a zone of invention and risk, but this has now been narrowed down to the slimmest of opportunities.” We were once a profession of risk-takers, driving the development of new building typologies, technologies and structural systems. In the golden age of the early 20th Century, architects were rewarded with the power to shape entire cities. But recent decades have witnessed the rise of the project manager and the novated contract, of suburban sprawl and foreign wealth. Our influence has been eroded to the point of superfluousness. It could be argued that we have never before been so close to the brink of our own demise.

Thankfully, amidst the debris there are glimmers of hope, embryonic opportunities opening up to new generations of savvy risk-takers. In New York, Pasquarelli is forging joint venture alliances with developers and fabricators, investing sweat equity in return for a stake of the profits. In London, Saunt is “placing herself in the path of luck,” leveraging a string of boutique projects into a startling array of significant commissions. And in Copenhagen, Jensen is pursuing non-traditional commissions for non-financial reward.

The Australian engagement with risk-taking is less dramatic but equally well articulated. In Melbourne, Waldron is tackling the often criticised competitions pathway to win new projects, “worthwhile wagers” that have nourished her emerging practice. In Hobart, Bailey is shaking off the conservative need for “architecture to be all things for all people,” creating a string of remarkable, almost sculptural projects. And in Sydney, Tribe is designing “house portraits” that test the poorly understood relationship between architecture as luxury and commodity.

So we are at a crossroads, or to reach for a more suitable metaphor, in the depths of a valley. If recent decades have unravelled the visionary agenda of the modernist era, then the opening years of the 21st Century are suggesting they might ravel it back up again. Risk positioned itself right at the nadir of this transition, capitalising on both the precariousness of the profession’s position, as well as our new enthusiasm for risk-taking.

What were the highlights?

Even before the first speakers took to the stage, we were treated with a rare, and I must say, profoundly encouraging opening statement from new Victorian planning minister, Richard Wynne. As he announced the return of the OVGA into the Department of Premier and Cabinet, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement run through me. For those of you who weren’t there, you’ll just have to imagine it: a politician announcing a new government initiative, not to an audience of farmers or miners or teachers, but to a room full of architects! There couldn’t have been a better or more contextually appropriate beginning to the conference.

Across the two days that followed, it became clear that although risk most commonly conjures images of leaking roofs and insurance claims, there are many (much more interesting) ways to define, engage with and respond to risk in architecture. Particularly prevalent was the attempt to define different loci for risk:

• New business development
• Extending the boundaries of traditional practice
• Experimental projects

By exploring new avenues for where risks can be taken, the speakers foreshadowed Till’s recommendation at the conclusion of his presentation, to “radically engage with risk… and redescribe what practice can be.” They may have each pursued different strategies in their engagement, but they all possessed a shared dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was this restlessness that separated the most riveting speakers from the least, and, I think, underpinned the true value to be taken from the conference.

The panel discussions I attended, Planning and Architecture on the Friday and Pedagogy on the Saturday, were lively debates that looked beyond architecture practice to bigger and essential questions of urban planning and education. But for fear of bloating this already lengthy article, I won’t address either discussion here. I did however have the highly rewarding opportunity to interview John Daley, chair of the Planning and Architecture panel and CEO of the Grattan Institute, after the conference, and will reproduce the interview in weeks to come.

New business development

In his presentation, Gianotten undertook a commendably open dissection of the history of OMA. The majority of his slides weren’t glossy pictures, but charts: charts that analysed the relationship between risk and profit on construction projects; charts that looked at the annual growth in OMA‘s insurance premiums; charts that revealed the startlingly small number of their commissions that result in built projects; and charts that plotted the past and future development of the OMA business model.

One remark struck me in particular. While working through all the material that would combine to become S,M,L,XL, a weighty tomb that should (and probably does) sit on every architect’s shelf, OMA almost went bankrupt. They had committed so many resources to it that anything other than resounding success would have ruined them. It was an enormously risky leap, but one that allowed them to relaunch their office into the global powerhouse it is today.

Waldron presented a similar appetite for taking calculated risks, discussing the procurement process for the Ballarat Art Annexe. She understood that Searle x Waldron lacked the experience of their more established competitors, so went well beyond the requirements of the brief to craft a particular story for the project. She reflected, “what if the client didn’t like our idea? But actually, it allowed the client to buy into our idea right from the start.” It was a gamble that paid off: the idea reflected the client’s own ambitions for the project, they won the commission, and their entire practice was launched into existence.

Extending the boundaries of traditional practice

I have written before about the work of Pasquarelli’s studio, SHoP Architects (here and here among others). Once again I was impressed by the creativity with which they manipulate the architectural process. From embracing 3D documentation technologies long before they were popularised; to extending their involvement beyond architecture to fabrication, construction and finance; to developing new technologies and software that reshape the limits of practice.

Most importantly, Pasquarelli explained how all of SHoP‘s initiatives are grounded by an absolutely fundamental insight, that “design should be seen as a profit centre, not a cost centre.” In other words, design has an extraordinary capacity to deliver more than the low risk, conventionally designed strategies employed by much of the construction industry, and architects are uniquely equipped to both define and deliver this value.

One recent project was captivating, as much for the skills it required of SHoP as the ideas it embodied. Envelope is a web application that distills the contents of New York’s hefty 1,000 page planning code into an interactive plug and play questionnaire: enter the details of your site and the software spits out its maximum building envelope. The data can then be downloaded in a digital model or spreadsheet format, reducing a process “that normally takes many, many hours to one that takes under 60 seconds.”

Experimental projects

The first session on the second day was a pre-recorded video by the absent Levete. At first skeptical (isn’t the whole joy of conferences to actually have the speakers in the room?), I was swiftly won over by the effort she had put into its production. What followed was a densely packed tour of the Future Systems cum AL_A opus, each project its own thesis on materials, construction and structure. Thankfully, Levete managed to avoid the pitfalls of a portfolio presentation, constantly weaving the conference issues into her discussion.

Each project seemed more outrageous than the last: from the Spencer Dock Bridge, whose fluid concrete form was achieved using CNC routed polystyrene formwork, to the Lord’s Media Centre, built by yacht builders and the first semi-monocoque building in the world, to the Victoria and Albert Museum renovation, which pushed the technical capacity of ceramics to their limits. The languid Levete was the embodiment of the starchitect: no country was too remote, no brief too challenging, no law of physics too immutable.

Choi’s commentary on CHROFI‘s Lune de Sang offered an interesting counterpart to Levete’s superhuman projects. He observed that, “architecture is the opposite of mass production, where you design it, break it, and design it again. Architecture needs to be perfect first time, built by people who have never built it before, and meet everyone’s expectations.” It was an important reminder that all architecture, no matter the scale of its ambition, is at its heart experimental. Lune de Sang is a stunning project, but it wasn’t built by yacht builders, nor did it retrofit an entire ceramics factory for its production. It nevertheless demonstrated the same, and indeed more accessible, commitment to experimentation.

What did I learn?

Returning to work on the Monday following Risk was an inevitable anticlimax. The very reasons I love attending the conference each year – to take a break, remind myself of the big picture, be inspired – made it hard to return to the daily grind of practice. This got me thinking. I’m regularly inspired by the conferences, lectures and seminars I attend, but what am I to do with this inspiration? How do I translate new knowledge into productive outcomes?

More so than either of the previous conferences I’ve attended, Risk left me with a number of valuable and, most importantly, actionable lessons:

• To stay healthy, the architecture profession needs to take the occasional irretrievable leap, an all or nothing risk where both dangers and rewards are high. As a finance friend advised me recently, businesses need to constantly reinvent themselves to remain competitive. If the deaths of MySpace, Kodak, Nokia, Lonely Planet and countless other seemingly unshakeable juggernauts can teach us anything, it’s that businesses (and make no mistake, architects, the AIA and the profession at large are all businesses) are like sharks: we must keep moving or we drown.
• Architects need to become more courageous in testing the boundaries of our daily existence. There are any number of ways we can do this: we can offer a broader service to our clients; we can become builders, or fabricators or suppliers; we can get involved with politics. The good news is that it isn’t as hard as it sounds: SHoP have already shown us the way. You see, the best thing about their various initiatives are their scaleability: not how easily the scale up, but how easily they scale down. My small practice is hardly in a position to enter into sweat equity arrangements on multi-residential towers, but we can embrace new technologies, digital fabrication and smart materials thinking on even the most humble of residential projects.
• And finally, true reform in the architecture profession needs to start with our educational institutions. It was once the tradition for practicing architects to remain heavily involved with teaching throughout their lives. This is sadly on the decline, yet the relationship between education and practice is as important as ever. Practitioners bring great wealth to our schools, which in turn have the freedom to experiment and assume much needed positions of leadership.

The conference successfully captured the current zeitgeist of the profession, both the shortcomings that have lead to our diminished state and the opportunities that a greater appetite for risk can bring. Bates, Lyon and Mackenzie are to be applauded for tackling this herculean subject, a task that also happened to include a substantial evolution of the traditional AIA conference model.

The bigger Australian picture is changing, with an array of important regulatory reforms shifting the landscape of architecture practice. Among others, a recently implemented Competitive Design Policy in Sydney exchanges greater floor area for a quantifiable investment in design excellence, while in Melbourne, successful lobbying has resulted in a new State government promising positive changes to apartment design.

We need to take the lessons of Risk 2015 to heart, and collectively seize this moment of opportunity by the scruff of its neck.

1. Donald Bates, Hamish Lyon and Andrew Mackenzie, creative directors; Overview; Risk 2015 National Architecture Conference; accessed 17th May 2015
2. A full list of reviews and interviews from past conferences can be accessed here.
3. The exception being the making impact subtheme last year, which critically analysed the opportunities of architecture beyond traditional practice.

Image sources:

1. Schmukler House by Tribe Studio, photograph by Brett Boardman.
2. Art Annexe by Searle x Waldron, photograph by John Gollings.
3. Lune de Sang Shed 1 by CHROFI, photograph by Brett Boardman.
4. GASP Stage 2 by Room 11, photograph by Ben Hosking.

Local House by Make Architecture

The Robin Boyd Foundation‘s winter open day was held last month, with ten recent Australian Institute of Architects award winning projects open to visit. The unseasonably warm August Sunday was filled with at least 600 architects and architecture lovers roving around Melbourne, enjoying houses and apartments converted for the day into temporary museums. With our 3 year old and 7 month old in tow, my wife and I were grateful to at least make it to three of them:

• Local House by Make Architecture
• House 3 by Coy Yiontis
• Mexican Contemporary House by Andrés Casillas and Evolva Architects

Local House and House 3 firmly belong to a Melbourne way of making architecture, in their use of space, materiality and detailing. They felt familiar to visit, perhaps because the design challenges they address – a temperate climate, tight sites, ResCode, the changing needs of growing families – are the ones I face everyday in our practice. Sometimes these challenges are inspiring, sometimes they’re painful, but they always imbue a project with a certain Melbourne DNA.

As I nosed around each house, I found myself nodding in agreement. I could understand their design moves, the intent beneath the surface. I recognised both the challenges Make Architecture and Coy Yiontis would have faced and their accomplished solutions.

Each is a clear example of doing plenty with little. Local House cleverly matches a simple form with rich detailing, concentrating the money where it can do most good. House 3 seems hindered less by a limited budget than limited space, tiny bedrooms exchanged for a generous and varied living environment. They are both Melbourne in a nutshell, strong contemporary expressions of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism.

Mexican Contemporary House is, in contrast, an exercise in otherness. Commissioned by an Australian Mexican couple after living for a time in Mexico, it was designed by a protégé of the great Luis Barragán and then documented and administered locally. That it is located in Melbourne seems more of a coincidence than a catalyst. It pays scant heed to climate, planning controls or even the desire for comfortable living. Its DNA is international, even its house-ness is questionable – as much a monastery as a family home.

These are not criticisms, just observations. I loved it. I loved the voyeuristic quality of visiting it, witnessing how the other half live. I loved the quality of its materials and strangeness of its details. I was amazed and delighted to discover that it even smelled like overseas (I still can’t figure this one out: was it the enormous Pine timber floorboards, the Cedar timber joinery, the concrete walls? Whichever, the scent reminded me nostalgically of the convent where I lodged in Rome as a student).

Finishing on this alien masterpiece put the familiar concerns of Local House and House 3 in context. It highlighted how important place, culture and shared experiences are in shaping our regional language. It also reminded me that there are many other ways to execute a building, and much more to domestic architecture than what we make here.

House 3 by Coy Yiontis Architects

There is a second taxonomy that groups Local House and House 3 together on one hand and Mexican Contemporary House on the other. As the title of this article indicates, it is the way in which compromise influences an architectural outcome.

Irrespective of whether a client has a few hundred thousand or a few million to spend on her house, it is a universal truth that she inevitably wants more than she can afford. I’ve discussed the tense relationship between budget and brief before, but what it boils down to is that somewhere during the design process the two need to be reconciled. Sometimes (rarely) this means swelling the budget until it matches the brief, sometimes (just as rarely) it means cutting the brief until it matches the budget. Most commonly, the two meet somewhere in the middle.

Such a compromise does not necessarily infer an undesirable outcome, quite the opposite. Managing this process is one of the things that architects do best. Compromise is just another way of saying balance, a quality to which every project should aspire. How can the design solution maximise the most variables? How far can the budget be stretched? Which goals should be prioritised and which sacrificed?

Visiting another architect’s project is a unique opportunity to analyse how she achieves this balance. I imagine my experience in this regard is much like a director watching someone else’s film. Instead of an action-packed chase sequence, she sees the number of stuntmen involved, the cars that were destroyed, the technical requirements of camera angles. Likewise, because I understand how architecture is conceived and executed, I am able to see some of the machinery that lies beneath the skin.

Make Architecture are particularly savvy in understanding how to spend money well, to strategically sacrifice parts of a building in order to spend up big in others. I don’t mean to say that they employ Boyd’s hated featurism here, rather that a modest building can punch above its weight when focussed parts of it have more going on.

Local House has done this through a very clever juxtaposition of expensive materials (the off-form concrete fireplace and benches, the elaborate timber screen) and humble ones (inexpensive bricks, routed MDF cupboards in the wardrobe, site painted cupboards in the kitchen). It is also much smaller, and its rooms more sparsely furnished, than I had expected. There is commendable economy here: tucked behind the kitchen, where you might normally find a generous butler’s pantry, there is not just a pantry, but a laundry and a study nook also. The payoff is the grandness of the double height space, the intimacy of the fireplace and concrete surrounds, the beauty of the timber screen.

With House 3, Coy Yiontis had a different challenge to address: how to fit a family with four teenage children on a tight Balaclava block. Space is the primary commodity here. Providing generous bedrooms would have inevitably compromised the living areas, so the reverse compromise has been made instead. All five bedrooms are crammed in upstairs, much smaller than is typical, with the entire ground floor left for living.

The planning of this living environment is intriguing, with the front door pushed back into the centre of the block. Sandwiched between new and old is a courtyard and swimming pool that are the house’s welcome mat, a source of light, and the centre of communal living. Ranged around the courtyard are the living rooms, each with its own character: a sunken family room, cool meals area, plush carpeted library (an adult space recently appropriated by the children, as evidenced by the games console poking out from under the television), and my favourite, a corridor that counter-intuitively doubles as day bed and retreat.

I appreciate the decision making here, and the clear order of priorities: 1) courtyard 2) living 3) sleeping. Coy Yiontis would have had to work hard to make sense of these priorities, negotiating the strict planning limitations of suburban building. The house is consequently a triumphant expression of its design process.

Mexican Contemporary House by Andrés Casillas and Evolva Architects

In stark contrast, Mexican Contemporary House is entirely uncompromised, and the result of an unwaveringly singular vision. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it possesses such a powerfully monolithic form, austere material palette and reductive detailing. It is an epic manipulation of form, space and light with direct lineage back to Le Corbusier. A 2.1m high entry corridor opens onto a triple height living room; corridors and staircases are barely shoulder-width and loop over and around each other to create continuous circulation routes through the house; every detail is stripped back to its most minimal form.

Digging below the surface, I discovered that everything about this project seems unlikely, or as Walt Disney liked to put it, plausibly impossible.

Its design architect is an 80 year old protégé of one of the great 20th Century architects, perhaps one of the last living connections to that golden era of hope. Its design was undertaken entirely in Mexico, without Casillas ever visiting site or even setting foot in Australia. Its construction techniques and detailing are fastidiously monolithic. Its unapologetic design demanded a nationwide search for an agreeable energy rating consultant. It is located in an unremarkable suburban street on a flat plot whose main quality is a land area large enough to render issues of neighbourhood character moot.

It was a truly mesmerising building to visit, the be-socked crowd of architecture lovers hushed and in utter awe of its majesty. But it is also completely alien to the local demands of Melbourne architecture.

If Local House and House 3 are superb examples of contemporary Australia art, then Mexican Contemporary House is a Caravaggio. The former are rich, engaging, intelligent and accessible. The latter is stark, powerful and unquantifiable. In retrospect, I’m glad I visited it last because the reverse order would have unjustly diminished the others. Life is generally such a negotiated experience that when true freedom comes along, it comes as a surprise. I suppose this is the nature of compromise: its absence exerts a reality distortion field on everything around it.

Villa Marittima by Robin Williams Architect

Such freedom in architecture is rare, occasionally witnessed in projects like Mexican Contemporary House when a client evolves into a patron, or more commonly when architects design houses for themselves. Villa Marittima by Robin Williams Architect is such a project, a multi-level house entirely without stairs. In their place is a continuous ramp that zigzags back and forth from the front door to the rooftop. The entire floor of the house is sloped, including everything from bedroom and bathroom to kitchen and swimming pool. From what I’ve seen in photos, it’s a truly bizarre building and a forceful experiment in the fuzziness of field architecture.

Happily, the Robin Boyd Foundation winter open day extends to include a visit to Villa Marittima in early November, along with Sawmill House by Archier a few weeks later. The Villa Marittima visit will coincide with an Australian Architecture Association event, At Home with the Architect. Williams will be in attendance late in the afternoon, providing what I’m sure will be engrossing insight into the thought processes that underpin his project.

Stay tuned for further discussion.

1. Local House, Make Architecture. Photography by Peter Bennetts
2. House 3, Coy and Yiontis. Photography by Peter Clarke
3. Mexican Contemporary House, Andrés Casillas and Evolva Architects. Photography by John Gollings
4. Villa Marittima, Robin Williams Architect. Photography by Dean Bradley

The Australian Institute of Architects‘ annual national conference, How Soon Is Now?,  was held last month in Adelaide. Creatively directed by Cameron Bruhn, Sam Spurr and Ben Hewett, it explored the “agency of architecture to make real changes in the world.”[1] The directors identified the expansive conversation of last year’s conference, Risk, as a precursor, and proposed to “empower architects to actively participate in the massive transformations occurring to our cities, societies and the sustainability of our planet.”[2]

Around 1,100 delegates attended this year, almost all of whom arrived from interstate. The usual crowd of familiar Melbourne faces made the city feel like home, with the Pink Moon Saloon by Sans-Arc Studio (of recent Architecture Australia fame) frequented well into each night. I was also fortunate to meet some of the local contingent, and be taken out for drinks and late night yum cha. It was an energising reintroduction to a city I haven’t visited for years, and like the Making conference in 2014, a reminder that good Australian architecture, food and culture extend well beyond the parochial borders of Melbourne and Sydney.

How Soon Is Now? developed many patterns of its recent predecessors.[3] Once again, there was a clear delineation between Australian and international speakers, with the former confined predominantly to roles of commentary or criticism. Indeed, none of the keynote speakers were both Australian and working in Australia.[4] And true to Bruhn, Spurr and Hewett’s focus on agency, a sizeable number of speakers weren’t architects at all, but allied professionals engaging with the built environment through non-traditional models.

28th Street Apartments by Koning Eizenberg, Los Angeles

In focussing on agency and change, How Soon Is Now? paid real tribute to the themes of risk and reward covered last year. There are similarities with Alejandro Aravena’s Venice Biennale too, which has just kicked off and runs until November. All three events demonstrate a keen interest in the social, political and economic contexts of architectural practice.[5]

Hewett neatly summarised the directors’ very broad agenda in their opening address, promising that the conference would ask “how architecture is dealing with tomorrow’s problems today.” The two days that followed revealed a diverse interpretation of what these problems might be. Climate change, population growth, overcrowding, refugees, transport, gender inequality and the widening gap between rich and poor all put in appearances.

To curate this diversity, the conference was split into two days of distinctly different ambitions. Day 1 examined what’s happening now, while Day 2 speculated on what happens next: the present then the future; evidence then strategy. The conference title, derived from The Smiths’ powerful 1985 rock ballad, shed further light on the directors’ intentions. It imbued the discussion with a sense of urgency, even panic.

When you say it’s gonna happen now
Well, when exactly do you mean?
See I’ve already waited too long
And all my hope is gone[6]

How soon is now? Never soon enough.

Safari Roof House by Kevin Low, Kuala Lumpur

The prevalence of non-architect speakers, together with panel discussions at regular intervals, had what I imagine was an intended side-effect: the glossy image was firmly sidelined in favour of critical conversation. Indeed, barely a handful of actual buildings were presented across both days. This focus away from built form was not received universally well by the delegates, one of whom bailed on the conference entirely and spent Day 2 touring a local wine region instead. The more I reflect on the experience however, the more I realise that Bruhn, Spurr and Hewett crafted a remarkably well choreographed event of two acts. Evidence and strategy; present and future; context and closure. Too many pretty pictures would have distracted from the central themes, and neither day made sense without the other.

Day 1 – Evidence
Keynote speakers
Nasrine Seraji, France
Vicente Guallart, Spain
Sadie Morgan, England
Jeffrey Schumaker, United States of America
Julie Eizenberg, United States of America
Amica Dall, England
David Sanderson, New South Wales
Panellists
John Wardle, Victoria
Greg Mackie, South Australia
Andrew Beer, South Australia
Sharon Mackay, South Australia
Abbie Galvin, New South Wales
Gabrielle Kelly, South Australia
Nick Tridente, South Australia
Maree Grenfell, Victoria
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, Queensland
Charles Rice, New South Wales

Day 2 – Strategy
Keynote speakers
Astrid Klein, Japan
Urtzi Grau and Cristina Goberna Pesudo, Australia
Kevin Low, Malaysia
Thomas Fisher, United States of America
Panellists
Angelique Edmonds, South Australia
Ken Maher, South Australia
Tim Williams, New South Wales
Matt Davis, South Australia
Karl Winda Telfer, South Australia
Timothy Hill, Queensland
Kerstin Thompson, Victoria

To further explore the above, the conference program can be downloaded here.

Glamis Adventure Playground, London

Day 1 – Evidence

As an exercise in context, Day 1 cast an unexpectedly depressing light on the shortsighted decision-making that plagues Australia. Guallart, Morgan and Shumaker were particularly brutal. Each shared insight into exemplar major infrastructure projects happening elsewhere, unhappy reminders of the positive outcomes achievable when city planning is divorced from politics.

The UK is investing in a high speed rail link that will eventually connect its entire southern half, and has placed Morgan in a central role to ensure that good design is at the heart of its implementation. She observed that the massive size of the project and the billions of pounds that will be spent on it don’t obviate the need for good design. Big things still need to bring small moments of joy to the everyday. Barcelona meanwhile is currently demolishing an elevated highway that runs through the centre of the city, one built only 25 years ago. Despite this emerging as a trend amongst some cities eager to undo the damage done by the car-obsessed 20th Century, to even suggest such a thing here is unimaginable.

These examples of foreign ingenuity were simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking. It’s all Melbourne can do to get a new metro built, whether or not its design is any good is barely part of the conversation.

Every theme that emerged seemed only to hold up an unflattering light to its local counterpart. Eizenberg presented a glimpse into her studio’s extensive portfolio of social housing projects, anchoring her discussion in broader ideals of social benefit and civic duty, “We’re not saints, we’re just income blind. It doesn’t matter how much money someone has, we believe they still deserve a house.” In Los Angeles, only 20% of the housing stock can be afforded by people on the median wage. I imagine a similar statistic would hold for Melbourne and Sydney, where housing is treated as a commodity not essential infrastructure.

From the panel discussion I attended after lunch, Culture and Development, I was interested to hear Beer discuss the idea of disintermediation, or the erasure of the middle-man. It’s a role already under substantial threat in many markets, will architecture be next? He asked casually who will become the Amazon of architecture, as though this manifestation lies somewhere in the future, though alarmingly I suggest it’s already happening.

Across Day 1, the speakers championed architecture beyond or even without form, a fundamental idea that to me was at the very centre of the entire conference. Morgan discussed the politics of good design outcomes; Eizenberg proposed that design should begin from social function; Dall peeled back the skin of form entirely; and Sanderson urged architects to think beyond the naïve form-making that dominates most disaster relief housing.

There was great value in much of this content, though it was hard to find hopefulness in it. Dall and her fellow Assemble Studios director, Giles Smith, in some ways encapsulated this despair with their highly critical assessment of the carefully designed Granary Square in London, and contrasting enthusiasm for the evolved or undesigned chaos of Glamis Adventure Playground. I couldn’t help but feel that architects are no longer in a position to be champions of the built environment, doomed instead to faff about at the edges while the real business of our cities gets done elsewhere.

I trudged out of the conference centre feeling pretty glum.

OE House by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and Aixopluc, Tarragona

Day 2 – Strategy

Mercifully, the morning session of Day 2 was a refreshing antidote. Klein opened with a burst of cheerful pragmatism, calling her lecture “More than architecture” and discussing opportunities for value creation in what were otherwise pretty unremarkable commissions.[7] Grau and Pesudo followed with a handful of relentlessly conceptual projects, including some insightful discussion of their shortlisted Helsinki Guggenheim competition entry. I was particularly taken by Pesudo’s characterisation of the Finnish sauna as one of the most sophisticated civic institutions of our era: a group of naked, sweating strangers beat each other with branches in the dark, and reach consensus on the sauna’s ideal ambient temperature.[8]

Low closed out the morning session with a repeat of his superb Australian lecture tour in 2013, an act of laziness that at first made me question his inclusion in the conference program. Surrounded on all sides by architects with eyes firmly focussed on the future, Low’s work is sublime but anachronistic. He spoke of the sacred and the profane, of embracing imperfect construction, of subtlety, nuance and richness in the built form. He is the embodiment of the 20th Century architect, the sole-practitioner, the master craftsman. I felt he would have been perfectly at home amongst the speakers at Making, but what on earth was he doing at How Soon is Now?

Three important things, as I discovered.

First, he was the typist sitting in a room full of computer scientists. At times grumpy, he pushed and prodded and complained. It was fun to watch his panel discussion, Advocating Futures, and I’m pretty sure he deliberately provoked Pesudo with a scathing critique of the value of contemporary architecture. He was an important addition to the discussion, not so his nostalgic position might triumph, but to provide a critical lens through which to examine the alternatives.

Second, he offered the most sensible target for architectural advocacy I’ve ever encountered. In a brief respite during the Advocating Futures panel, where Hewett facilitated Twitter questions from the audience, I asked the panellists how and where they thought advocacy should be directed. Low said simply, “Education”. In a world changing under our feet, with scarce resources to impact public opinion, and architects regressing in our capacity to contribute to the city, how better to prepare for the future? By teaching architecture students how to be something other (and more) than an architect. The right word in the ears of the thousands of architecture students who graduate each year might yield our profession’s Steve Jobs, Larry Page or Elon Musk.

And third, Low’s entire lecture revolved around the opposition of form versus content. He argued that the best architecture derives from content, from narrative, and eschews the glossiness of perfect form. It was a familiar position that resonated with much of the discussion on Day 1, but took the important step of explaining why the profession’s obsession with starchitecture, formalism and the consumption of the glossy image are impoverishing the built environment.

I interpreted the narrative-driven craft of Low’s work as a metaphor for the need to develop a similarly narrative-driven commitment to the entire profession’s output. We need to reign in our adulation of the newest chunk of self-indulgent formalism and establish new territory as essential agents in the development of cities, economies and culture.

The two panels I attended on Day 2, Transforming Populations and Advocating Futures, further explored these themes. In particular, Guallart lamented that “Architecture is suffering because it has more to do with fashion than with building the city. The Bilbao model hurts the built environment – governments now think that they just need to deliver an icon, no further discussion needed.” From many angles and in many discussions, both days criticised the shallowness of form and praised the delivery of content.

Leaf Chapel by Klein Dytham, Tokyo

Agency and the future

During afternoon tea on Day 2, energised by the Advocating Futures panel, a few colleagues and I enjoyed a vigorous discussion on the subject of the future. We spoke about the traditional role of the architect, and pushing beyond its boundaries. Rory Hyde’s excellent book on the subject, Future Practice, got a mention. We discussed computer coding, and its role in the frontier of new economies, in disrupting seemingly unshakeable markets from books to taxis to holidays. We touched on the sophisticated problem solving performed by architects and its relevance in activities beyond the making of buildings. And we discussed education – if the scope of the traditional architect is diminishing, and there are as yet unformulated roles ripe for our involvement, how should the universities prepare graduates today for the opportunities of tomorrow?

It was an exciting conversation, feverish even. It gathered together all the many threads covered in the preceding two days and narrowed my focus to a single question: what is the architect of tomorrow?

A moment later, I was sitting down for the final keynote of the conference. Thomas Fisher took to the stage, and in a truly cosmic reflection of our casual conversation, set out to answer this very question. “There are a lot of opportunities for architects to continue to design buildings. But there are many, many more non-physical systems that would benefit from an architect’s design attention. We could all have more work than we could ever address in our lifetimes.”

He argued strongly for an expansion of the role of the architect, speculating we could become, “Public intellectuals, provocateurs, visualisers, unsolicited strategic thinkers, generalists, holistic thinkers, strategists, pragmatic futurists.” As part of the making of buildings, we might proactively shift our services to the savings side of the spreadsheet, servicing “the economic structures that surround and facilitate architecture.” And beyond buildings, we might engage with the sharing economy, actively designing for initiatives like AirBnB that make more intensive use of a city’s scarce spatial resources.

It was a much-needed conclusion to a conference that had just spent two days ripping apart the value of architectural activity.

So despite the rocky start to How Soon Is Now?, I’m glad I hung around for the punchline. I enjoy attending the conference each year for a number of reasons. It’s an opportunity to take a step away from the minutiae of life as a practicing architect. I catch up with people I don’t see all that often and chat avidly about architecture with them. I learn some things, and get inspired to do some others. Low’s contribution to the conference might have crystallised the parameters of the debate on form versus content, but it was Fisher who made the most interesting suggestions on how to act on this acknowledgement.

Heading home after any good architecture event, I struggle with the concept of inspiration. What do I do with the things I learn? How can I internalise and act on them, make use of the event beyond the silo of its own neat calendar slot in my life?

Last year, Risk compelled me to take on more risks in my business. After five years of running Mihaly Slocombe from our spare bedroom, we finally moved into a proper office that now doubles as a profit-making coworking environment. Well, almost profit-making, it’s early days yet. Still, the key ingredient was to exploit our skills as architects in crafting a working environment for others, a small yet successful instance of speculative agency.

How Soon Is Now? has left me with a similar itch.

I find myself eager to seek opportunities outside the traditional model of architecture practice. What can I do that will buffer our studio against the storm that’s approaching? How can we use our carefully honed skills in creative thinking, systems design and problem solving to benefit the world beyond our small collection of private clients?

We stand at an important moment in time, with the threat of great change in our profession, the built environment and even the planet looming in front of us. How Soon Is Now? captured this moment perfectly, imparting both desperation and hope.

In particular, the agency of architects is under threat. Our traditional model of practice is tied strongly to the old way of doing things, and continues to steadily diminish in its scope and opportunity. Global markets, the sharing economy, the internet of things, disintermediation are all poison pills for the profession, yet most of us continue to blithely practice in the way we always have. If the current generation of architects continues on our current path, will there even be a profession for the next?

Image sources:

1. Adelaide by Andy Steven; image sourced from Skyscraper City.
2. 28th Street Apartments by Koning Eizenberg; image sourced from Detail.
3. Safari Roof House by Kevin Low of Small Projects; image sourced from Small Projects.
4. Glamis Playground; image sourced from Play by Nature.
5. OE House by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and Aixopluc; image sourced from Dezeen.
6. Leaf Chapel by Klein Dytham; image sourced from Klein Dytham.
7. Adelaide Convention Centre theatre; author’s own image.

In July last year, ArchiTeam launched a working group tasked to find ways it might “educate the public about the value of architects through marketing and public outreach”. This endeavour proposes to engage in both marketing and advocacy activities, a canny mix of pragmatism and altruism that I believe has the power to simultaneously promote our profession and protect the built environment.

But before I elaborate, it’s worthwhile asking the question, why?

There are at least a dozen different organisations competing for a slice of the Melbourne architectural advocacy pie, and ArchiTeam is far from the largest, best funded, most widely known or most experienced in the sector. These are pretty compelling reasons not to get involved with the often poor rewards of architectural advocacy. However, they hardly paint a full picture of the importance of this work, nor the role ArchiTeam might have to play.

Why get involved?

As I have discussed previously (here, here and here), the built environment has too many enemies reaping profits from it at any cost for the architecture profession not to have a go at stemming the tide. Increasing housing unaffordability, ever-present developer greed, the emerging effects of climate change, and a conspicuous lack of planning leadership from government are all hacking away at the future legacy of contemporary architectural production.

Confronting these challenges can seem a mountainous task, but as Gregg Pasquarelli has poignantly described, the architecture profession is guardian of the built environment. Our often lonely role in pursuing quality over quantity demands that we enter the fray whenever and however possible.

This means it’s not enough to just produce the built environment, we need to proactively defend it as well. Lawyers have successfully achieved this within the legal system by exploiting case law, an area they know best. Doctors have done it too, setting up referral systems between general practitioners and specialists that support the entire profession. Architects must do the same.

And indeed, there’s no time like the present. In Melbourne, Daniel Andrews is proving to be far more open to engagement than his predecessor, who infamously met with the Australian Institute of Architects only once during his tenure. In Sydney, the proposal to demolish the Sirius Apartments has met with considerable and coordinated public resistance. And in both cities, festival calendars are overflowing with architecture and design events attended by audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Now might also be the best time to address a rarely voiced truth: it’s not just the built environment that needs help, the architectural profession could do with a hand also. We are losing the fight for Darwinian supremacy, with any number of rival professions beating us at our own game. Have you ever heard of a cheaper version of a lawyer? Of course not.[1] Architects meanwhile must fend off competition from every project manager, building designer, draftsperson and real estate agent thinking they can do it better. If we don’t start protecting our territory with the necessary ferocity, we will soon find ourselves filling a curious yet extinct ecological niche.

So it isn’t really a question of why ArchiTeam should compete for a slice of the advocacy pie, but how.

How to get involved?

Fortunately, there are some shining examples of successful advocacy already at work in Melbourne. They operate at different scales and with different forms of agency, but all share the common goal of promoting architecture and architects. Some have been in action for many years, laying the groundwork for an increasingly design-aware public.

It’s important to distinguish here between public advocacy and government lobbying. The latter is a more procedural endeavour, with all manner of special interest groups clamouring for the same rarefied airspace. There are lots of special interests, but not so many politicians, so lobbying needs to be focussed and internally consistent. As our peak professional body, the Australian Institute of Architects has already assumed this role of government liaison, and should be supported in presenting a unified position to Canberra and Spring Street.

Public advocacy is in many ways the opposite of government lobbying. It is grassroots not topdown, generalised not specialised, conversational not dogmatic, and has room for diversity. The millions of individuals that comprise the general public all have their own interests and passions, and are constantly forming and reforming into tribes searching for chiefs. Want to knit some scarves for trees? There’s a society for that. Can’t get enough parmigiano reggiano? There’s a collective for that too.

So there’s room within the public advocacy domain for ArchiTeam to find its own voice, and its own tribe. To my mind, the organisations that have already carved their own successful niches and are undertaking the best public advocacy work in Melbourne right now are:

• Melbourne Open House attracts hundreds of thousands of participants each year to its behind-the-scenes tour of the city. It captures the voyeur in everyone, inspiring intense curiosity in buildings and architecture.
• The Robin Boyd Foundation has allowed a somewhat smaller but perhaps even more passionate audience to discover many of Melbourne’s best private houses. The Spring open day of residential award winners in particular gives a glimpse into the amazing things made possible by working with an architect.
• Pecha Kucha is a global network of public presentations with architecture at its heart. It’s short, sharp and unpredictable, the diversity of speakers ensuring an equally diverse audience.
• Nightingale Housing is an alternative housing development model that aims to disrupt the profit-incentivised status quo. Primarily an organisation that builds apartment buildings, it has dramatically altered the conversation around affordable housing within the profession and beyond.
• Parlour has demonstrated that it is possible to affect positive systemic reform where business as usual is both entrenched and harmful. It has successfully injected gender equity into the centre of design, practice and leadership decision-making.

It’s also worthwhile mentioning the excellent Save Our Sirius campaign in Sydney, which is fighting to retain the brutalist Sirius building on the Sydney Rocks. Tracing its lineage to the Green Bans of the 1970s, this is an incredible example of smart advocacy that utilises a rich mixture of crowdfunding, legal action and public events to further its cause.

These and other examples can act as touchstones by which ArchiTeam shapes its own approach to public outreach. They catalogue the forms of agency already covered, or even saturated, and reveal the mechanisms by which other organisations are getting it right.

Small but powerful

So how does ArchiTeam fit into this heady cocktail?

Well, first and foremost it is unique in being a Melbourne-centric member organisation for small practice architecture. 80% of its 500 or so member practices are concentrated in Melbourne and rural Victoria, and almost all have fewer than five staff. This is in contrast to the AIA for instance, whose 11,000 + members are spread across every State and Territory, and work within every size and type of architecture practice.

Second, ArchiTeam members are pragmatists, and already positioned at the coalface of public advocacy. Fooi-Ling Khoo, a sole practitioner and director of ArchiTeam, observed to me that “we’re typically the first architects people work with, or even meet, and are often the ones who convince them they need an architect at all.” Crucial advocacy work is done on this one-on-one level, through an extensive collection of invisible and laborious interactions.

In the context of public advocacy work, small and pragmatic may in fact be better. The AIA was noticeably absent from the powerful anti-tollway sentiment that grew up around the Napthine Government’s doomed East-West Link. It was perhaps prevented from taking a strong stance by having to wrangle with the political implications of large practice members who were involved in the project.[2] The much smaller Australian Institute of Landscape Architects faced the same conflict-of-interest dilemma, but felt no qualms in taking a position and advocating loudly for it.

While larger organisations must somehow grapple with the conflicting and regularly mutually exclusive demands of a diverse membership, ArchiTeam is largely homogenous. It represents predominantly small studios, most of whom work on residential projects. These qualities make ArchiTeam more focussed, more nimble, less stymied by governance red tape, and better able to jump on an advocacy opportunity when presented.

Being small should allow ArchiTeam to concentrate on initiatives that resonate across its membership, to craft a singular voice on issues of interest to the general public, and to react rapidly when opportunities erupt from nowhere and evolve quickly. In time, this will allow ArchiTeam to become a public authority on small practice architecture, and contribute meaningfully on issues where small practice has a qualified opinion. This is an important ambition, and one that honours the member interest that sparked ArchiTeam’s decision to engage in advocacy work in the first place.

As a member of ArchiTeam’s advocacy working group, I’m excited to see where the energy of the membership will lead. The working group has now met a number of times over the second half of last year. These preliminary sessions were aimed at working out the why, the how and the what of advocacy, and have arrived at some inspiring conclusions.

I’ll cover my experience of this process in a subsequent post, but will leave you for now with this pertinent observation from Noam Chomsky:

“If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to a better world.”

1. Conveyancers perform a similar role to lawyers on simple property transactions, but there is no confusing them for the real McCoy.
2. The AIA did release a position paper on the proposal, but avoided wading into the political battle. It instead focussed only on the proposal’s design qualities.

Image sources:

1. ArchiTeam logo, sourced from ArchiTeam.
2. Corkman Pub, sourced from Consulado España Melbourne.
3. Advocacy logos, sourced from Nightingale Housing, Parlour, Pecha Kucha, Open House Melbourne and the Robin Boyd Foundation.
4. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, sourced from HBO.

This article is co-published with ArchiTeam.

Inspired by member interest, ArchiTeam decided last year to initiate a public outreach program that will advocate for architects and architecture.

I covered the broad context of this development here, exploring why ArchiTeam might want to take on such a challenging role. I observed that the built environment has many enemies plundering it for its riches, and that the architecture profession has a moral responsibility to not only produce that environment but defend it too. I concluded that a nimble and tightly knit organisation like ArchiTeam is perfectly placed to become the authority on issues around small practice architecture.

But there’s more to this story. How will ArchiTeam repurpose the skills it already has in order to undertake this new form of work? How will it develop an advocacy platform that remains authentic to the organisation’s mission and membership? And how can it engage in activities that promote not just architecture but architects too?

Let me start at the beginning

ArchiTeam was formed in response to the recession and associated building industry collapse in the early 1990s.[1] New legislation requiring all architects to carry professional indemnity insurance became a burden for hundreds of suddenly unemployed architects, so a buyers cooperative was formed to purchase that insurance more cheaply.

As the years passed, and the economy shifted from bust back to boom, ArchiTeam took on additional roles. In 2003 it started sponsoring professional development events, in 2005 it launched an awards programme, and in 2009 it commissioned a series of practice management tools.[2] Most recently, a simple Facebook forum has evolved into a rich and utterly invaluable resource for knowledge sharing between members.

When the subject of advocacy came up at the 2015 ArchiTeam AGM, and received strong support from those members present, it was a natural step for the board to add advocacy to their activities portfolio. Fast forward to June last year, and ArchiTeam director Zoë Geyer returned to the membership with a simple survey, asking us to choose between three possible courses of advocacy action:

• Lobby the government to introduce mandatory use of architects for large projects.
• Educate the public about the value of architects through marketing and public outreach.
• Help improve how architects work by campaigning for industry change on flexible hours, pay rates etc.

It came as no surprise that option 2 was the overwhelming favourite, receiving twice the votes of options 1 and 3 combined.[3] To my mind, this signalled implicit agreement amongst members about the value ArchiTeam might bring to advocacy work.

Indeed, the desire to engage with the public and promote the role of the architect is consistent with the DNA of ArchiTeam itself. At heart a grassroots organisation, we are a gathering of like-minded people interested in cooperation. We comprise architects working predominantly with home owners, a subset of the broader community not generally well acquainted with the architectural process. We are pragmatists and already positioned at the coalface of public engagement.

Demystifying architects and promoting architecture to the public simply scales up the advocacy work we do on a daily basis, spreading the good word client by client. A formal advocacy programme will, I think, be an exciting opportunity to strengthen and expand latent skills that already exist within the ArchiTeam membership.

The first workshop

Armed with a mandate, a modest budget, and a dozen or so architects willing to attend a monthly series of workshops, Zoë convened the advocacy working group in July last year. Its task was to nut out how best to tackle ArchiTeam’s own brand of advocacy, and had six meetings over the second half of the year to do so.

I was one of the members who volunteered to join the group, and was keen to discover what magical ideas might emerge from two hours of conversation around some steadily emptying pizza boxes. Privately, I was also curious to see whether a bunch of forthright architects could possibly reach consensus on anything.

Indeed, our first meeting was equal parts inspiring and bewildering. Zoë requested each of us to introduce ourselves, and share examples of successful advocacy either within architecture or beyond. I was amazed by the diversity and strength of ideas that flowed: from pushing opinion pieces into local papers and encouraging members to join local traders groups, to revisiting Robin Boyd’s Small Homes Service and collaborating with Open House Melbourne.

Yet despite brisk and efficient moderation, by the time the introductions were finished so were our two hours. Let me repeat… Our. Introductions. Consumed. The. Entire. Meeting.

There were eleven people sitting around the table that evening and at least twice as many ideas. Many of them had merit, but they were impossible to compare. Some would require time and resources, but had potentially huge impact. Others were less ambitious, but would be quick and easy to execute. Some exploited members’ strengths, others were way outside our comfort zone. I wondered, How can we choose between them?

Enter Capire

The working group met again in August for a second workshop, one that aimed to drill down into the grand statements of the first, into the how of ArchiTeam’s advocacy programme. But despite best intentions, the discussion became mired in familiar frustration.

If the first workshop had been uplifting, full of hope, the second was dogged by helplessness. Architects are so damn important, so why doesn’t the rest of the world care? Tackling such an impossible challenge loomed immutably, as though we were trying to shift a mountain one pebble at a time.

It dawned on me then that an elephant had joined us in the room, as familiar as the conversation itself. Architects are trained to be excellent at many things, which erroneously leads us to believe we are excellent at all things. Business, marketing, graphic design, lobbying, advocacy, you name it, we think we can do it ourselves.

Wrong.

If consensus were the goal of the advocacy working group, an expert was needed to help us get there. We needed structure to our conversations, and help from someone who could coalesce our varied ideas into something both meaningful and actionable.

Fortunately, I had seen someone do just this once before. During my involvement in the Liveable Yarra initiative by the City of Yarra’s strategic planning department, I witnessed as community engagement specialist Capire corralled 60 people towards a series of shared outcomes. Perhaps this was what and who we needed.

So we met with Capire and listened as they unpacked the ambitions for our working group. We discovered they could help moderate our workshops, keeping them on topic and on schedule, and use their impartiality to extract key insights. More importantly, they would facilitate a deep conversation about advocacy, connecting it to ArchiTeam’s mission statement and core values.

The working group’s budget would have stretched to a lot of pizza, but this was better. We signed them on.

Advocacy is giving

Capire ran two workshops for us in November, and helped us articulate the shape that successful advocacy might take. As a group, we acknowledged that ArchiTeam’s advocacy work will need to survive beyond the individuals involved today, and we fleshed out the beginnings of a framework that future advocacy committees can use to sort through diverse advocacy possibilities.

Getting to the nuts and bolts of this framework is in some ways the whole reason for these articles on advocacy, and I’ll discuss it in detail in my next (and final!) instalment, but I first want to reflect on an important insight the Capire experience offered.

Chris Robinson, the founder of Capire, asked whether the point of advocacy is to convince the public that architects are worthwhile. Perhaps this is possible, or perhaps our fact-resistant era will prove that no one can be convinced of anything anymore. An alternative philosophy, Chris suggested, might instead be to work to add value to people’s lives and allow them to discover our merit for themselves.

I like this idea a lot.

ArchiTeam is a cooperative, with 25 years experience in helping architects help themselves. Treating advocacy as an opportunity to give to the broader community, to add value, is an authentic extension of this mission. What’s more, giving tackles both sides of the advocacy equation: it is altruistic in its fundamental intent, and entrepreneurial in its possible effects.

Dogs rule

History is littered with organisations that have nailed the balance of this equation, and often transformed their industry in the process.

Since their 2007 advert that replaced happy, glossy dogs bounding through fields with their sadder-looking cousins languishing behind bars, Pedigree have run their evolving Dogs Rule campaign.[4] That first ad ended with the promise, “When you buy Pedigree, we make a donation to help shelter dogs find loving homes.” It was an instant hit, and in just two days raised $500,000 in pledges to dog shelters.

Over the past 10 years, engaging at this “emotional level with consumers has been most successful for Pedigree. When we moved from direct product messaging to sharing our brand beliefs through adoption, we saw a 40% increase in advertising effectiveness.”[5] The Dogs Rule campaign is both altruistic and entrepreneurial: it helps unwanted dogs find new homes, and it leads to more dog owners who need to buy dog food.

The Michelin Guide

Another example (and my favourite) is the Michelin Guide. While most people are aware the guide is an annual catalogue of the world’s best restaurants, few realise that it’s not published by a travel bureau or group of food critics, but by the Michelin Tyre Company.

In 1895, when the Michelin brothers invented the world’s first air-filled tyre, France had only around 350 cars. Though the car was invented 10 years prior, automobiles remained a rare luxury, “rich men’s toys… unable to stray very far from the vicinity of a reliable car show.”[6] With exceptional foresight, the brothers understood that directly advertising their new tyre would not be much use. Instead, they created a guidebook that would encourage people to travel more, drive more, and thus buy more cars.

In the late 19th Century, driving was a precarious activity. Highways did not yet have street lights, petrol stations did not exist, and only a fraction of mechanics remained open beyond the end of summer. So in addition to listing restaurants and hotels around the country, the guide helped ease the pain of driving. It included timetables that listed when the sun set, maps of pharmacies that sold petrol, and opening times for mechanics. The brothers also lobbied hotels to provide parking spaces and governments to put up road signs, and used advertising campaigns to promote the car as a new way of life.

As we well know the car soon became ubiquitous, and both the Michelin Guide and Michelin Tyre Company have thrived for over a century.

There is an invaluable lesson in this and the Pedigree stories: typical consumer advertising might have helped each organisation grow their slice of the pie, but working to nourish the bigger picture helped them grow the pie. The Michelin brothers promoted travel to sell tyres, and Pedigree promoted dog ownership to sell dog food. In both cases, they worked simultaneously to help the community, their industry and themselves.

I believe ArchiTeam can do the same for architecture and architects.

The Capire experience made me realise that there’s great power in giving generously, of utilising the skills of ArchiTeam members to contribute to our local communities. This is an advocacy pathway that is simultaneously for the greater good and for the good of architects, both altruistic and entrepreneurial.

What’s more, it will engage the imaginations of the membership, will remain true to the grassroots qualities of our cooperative, and will result in tangible benefits to the built environment. It will also establish enormous goodwill within the communities that we assist, and position ArchiTeam as the facilitator of positive action and authority in small practice architecture.

Stay tuned for one more look at what ArchiTeam is doing and will do to achieve greatness.

1. Greg Strickland; The origins of ArchiTeam: a retrospective; ArchiTeam; January 2017.
2. Via email correspondence with Peter Finn, current director of ArchiTeam; May 2017
3. Via email correspondence with Zoë Geyer, current director of ArchiTeam; May 2017. Option 1 received 26% of the vote, option 2 received 68% and option 3 received 6%.
4. Jeff Beer; How Pedigree turned doing good for dogs into good marketing for dog food; Fast Company; May 2015
5. Ibid. Quote from Chris Mondzelewski, vice president of marketing for Pedigree.
6. Alex Mayyasi; Why does a tyre company publish the Michelin Guide?; Priceonomics; June 2016.

Image sources:

1. ArchiTeam logo, sourced from ArchiTeam.
2. The Big Bang, author unknown.
3. Pizza boxes, sourced from PRI article, “Where does the perfect pizza box come from? Try India”.
4. Capire logo, sourced from Capire.
5. Advocacy workshop, author’s own image.
6. Dogs Rule, sourced from Fast Company.
7. Michelin guide, sourced from Michelin Tyre Company.

The Australian Institute of Architects' annual national conference, Praxis, was held last month in Sydney. Breaking with the twelve year old tradition of appointing creative directors via open competition, it was curated by AIA National President Ken Maher and UNSW Built Environment Dean Helen Lochhead. The conference sought to "explore processes of thought, engagement and action,"... Continue Reading →