Author: Peter Raisbeck

I am an architect, design tutor and a researcher. I have been at Melbourne University teaching architectural practice and design since 2006. Prior to this I worked in architectural offices, research organizations and in my own practice. I have taught design at RMIT and Melbourne University. I currently research and write across architecture urban design, technology, financial systems, procurement and architectural history. I see architecture as a domain which requires research that is future driven and yet realistic and practical in its outcomes. I have published research related to employing quantitative methods to measure design, procurement systems, the aesthetics of BIM, as well as the relationship between 1960s avante-garde architects, such as Robin Boyd and the Metabolists and technology futures. I have also presented papers on biometrics and agent based technologies. My PhD thesis on the Marine and Underwater City movement of the 1960s identified Bertalanffy's systems theory as the core idea underpinning these utopian schemes. In 2010 I collaborated with others to exhibit a project called Mould City as a part of the Australian Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale. More recently, in 2015, I formed a collaborative group based in MSD which entered an entry in the Planetary Urbanisation competition sponsored by the journal ARCH+. The entry proposed the remediation of the Whaleback iron ore site in the Pilbara whilst giving primacy to indigenous ownership and governance in that region. In 2010 and 2012 I led postgraduate MSD students to Monterrey Mexico. This work involved to working with people in informal settlements. Recently, as an architect I have worked with the Port Phillip Community Housing Group and the Quaker Society of Friends. In 2016 I will teach a new elective called Design Activism which will teach MArch students the skills needed to position design thinking and design research into protest campaigns.
Is BIM as good as it looks ? What Deleuze can teach us about BIM

Is BIM as good as it looks ? What Deleuze can teach us about BIM

Peter Raisbeck

In the Building Information Modelling (BIM) utopia representations of time are linear and easily progresses into a future where BIM enables seamless collaboration across the full gamut of design orientated disciplines. The viewpoint presented in the various BIM representations and advertising that litter the internet is often that of an eagle, or angel, freed of all earthly constraints and propelled towards a future BIM revolution. But unlike the critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s iconic image of an angel looking back on the wreckage of progress these images of BIM do not indicate a reflexivity that recognises that not every technical innovation succeeds or that technology has a social-technical dimension.

In theory, BIM project models paired with collaboration tools offer a number of significant improvements and benefits over traditional design, delivery and supply chain processes. Proponents of the BIM utopia claim that the BIM will change and be linked to augmented reality, enhance lean construction, scheduling, safety management, trade scheduling, progress measurement, design visualization and even architectural design studios.

But as some researchers have noted the BIM dream is not all it seems to be. For example the IFC’s, which are at the heart of BIM collaboration often “fails to provide complete interoperability.” 

BIM careerists, proponents and evangelicals claim that BIM is a new mode of visualization. Someone once said to me you can tell a BIM building because of the limitations of form that seem to be built into BIM software. Nonetheless, emerging from and circulating in BIM research discourse and the public domain the above claims are supported by a plethora of BIM representations. These often include strategic and operational diagrams, screenshot images and animations available in research papers, publications, reports, various how to do BIM manuals and numerous animations across the internet.

As the BIM industry has arisen as numerous, and in some ways glamorous, case studies and screenshot images are published and promoted as examples of successful BIM operation. The colours employed are seductive and colour is the key feature in numerous BIM screenshots. For example, a shimmering green is a often contrasted with yellows for services and purple. The viewpoint is often from a point looking above or below and is positioned to emphasise the layering of different systems and suggests a layered complexity constituted by the overlapping of many different small scale construction elements. With these highly seductive images it is argued that BIM can improve workflows through clash detection and management, better two dimensional drawing extraction, automated quantity take-offs, supply chain integration and facilities management integration.

bim-4

The French Philosopher Gille Deleuze’s encounter with cinema is a useful, although to some it might seem surprising, critical framework in the BIM context. Deleuze wrote two philosophical books about cinema. Deleuze saw cinema as a “new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.” Deleuze’s concern is not a philosophical investigation of cinema’s essential nature. Unlike the proponents of BIM Deleuze did not simply proclaim cinema as a technological revolution. Rather, he was interested in interrogating the cinema for its possibilities about what it might become. Deleuze argues that cinema establishes the problems of traditional subject orientated epistemologies. Deleuze cites Henri Bergson as a philosopher who opposed a view of the world that is predicated on a static and centred viewpoint or subject. Deleuze sees in Bergson a philosophy that accounts for the early technological advances of cinema as well as anticipating its later developments. But, Deleuze also saw the cinema as constituting a language of images. Deleuze’s conception of image is something which is neither representation, secondary copy, imitation or mimesis.

These perspectives suggest that BIM research R&D should oppose a concept of BIM that privilidges linear sequences, singular perspectives and robotic notions of construction that ignore the randomness of craft.

The above considerations suggest that new methodological approaches are needed in the area of architecture and BIM R&D. If BIM is to reach it’s full potential as a tool which saves resources and allows better architectural design outcomes. Future BIM research needs recognise the power of different representational modes, stochatsic and random events, social milieu and avoid seeing a building as a simplistic digital-technical object or diagram linked to a database.

Stochastic processes which are random and are capable of using agents and swarms to predict what will happen within BIM models may reveal more than the static and mechanical models which seem to plague BIM research today. Notions of time should be seen as being multi-layered and interdependent of sequential BIM animations and screenshots. BIM models should be seen as entities which develop over time from the beginning of the design process where there is a iterative transfer of information between designers, teams, and 3D representations of buildings built in computers.

In BIM research critical theory should be employed to ensure that the architects of the future do not relinquish their canon of knowledge regarding the craft of building to mindless databases.

Surviving the design studio: 6 golden rules for architecture students and architects. 

Surviving the design studio: 6 golden rules for architecture students and architects. 

Peter Raisbeck

You are half way through the design project or the semester and things are dragging. A few weeks or months ago you were enthused about the project and now it doesn’t seem like things are good. You are worried about your own skills, your research is going on and on, you don’t understand where your are headed and the studio leader, or your boss, or client, keeps looking at you quizzically. Most of all the design is stuck and you are running out of time.

This is not an uncommon situation.

It is important to understand how to avoid this malaise both from the perspective of studio or team leader as well as from your own viewpoint. Everyone can take heart that architectural teams are potentially the most creative, productive and innovative teams on the planet. Why would I say that? Firstly, archi-teams are able to conceptualise and visualise things in three dimensions. Secondly, these teams are not afraid to to conduct processes of creative destruction in order to reiterate or refine a concept or element of a design. That is why the design studios are great laboratories of design. Thirdly, in an architectural studio you can tolerate high degrees of ambiguity; in other words, you can work along multiple and possibly contradictory lines of design. To achieve all this however requires effective leadership and committed team members.

Architectural teams or architectural school design studios are not about sequential or linear lines of thought. It is not about ticking the boxes in sequence. Or swiping right or left on an app. Sometimes, this is not easy for the rest of the world to comprehend. Sometimes this is not easy for architectural students to comprehend as they undertake their first studios at graduate school.

To survive and prosper there are a number of golden rules for both architecture students, design architects, project architects and architects leading or teaching those teams.

1.Studio leaders are human and every team member is different.

It’s a good idea to get to know your design studio leader or the architect leading your team. What are their interests? What are they passionate about? Where do they think the cutting edge of architectural practice is? What kind of design research are they involved in? More importantly, how do they propose to approach the projects design. What is the design pattern or structured process that they seem to be advocating? What characterizes this pattern? Is it orderly or more chaotic and intuitive?

For studio leaders this means sharing and imparting with students or team members the travails of your professional life. What are your points of view on the most recent urban controversies? Who has inspired you as an architect? What are your areas of expertise? How would you characterise your own education and what would should have been different about this? All of this requires a proactive approach to the design process and recognising diversity in the team. Everyone in the studio or team will have a different style of communicating it is up to the studio leader to recognise this in order to foster an ongoing culture of design discussion across the project.

The uncommunicative or passive-aggressive team leader or team member who is reacting and lurching from crisis to crisis is everyone’s worse nightmare. Communication is the key. If you cant do anything else else talk to your friends about the project. The more you talk about a design project during the process the better it will be at its outcome.

2.No two studios are alike. 

Architectural Studios on the inside never seem like the brochure or presentation. So don’t be dissapointed. The particular dynamics of  every studio is different. Different leaders, people with different skills, different styles of leadership and a conception of architectural design. Every design team is different and every design studio experience is different.

Don’t think all because your last studio or project was great the next one will be as well. My rule of thumb is for every 5 studios you teach one will be great, 3 will be ok and one will be a disaster. A few years back I set up a new syllabus for a studio. A lot of research and peer consultation went into it. In the first semester of teaching it was great. The second time it was ok and the results were almost as good. The third time it ran it was a total disaster. The students hated it, my peers were not convinced and the admin staff thought it sucked.

So, don’t expect it to be the same as last time. As a team member its good to clarify to yourself what you think the design process will be. Ask yourself, is it linear problem solving or is it about producing a series of varied solutions? What is the tone of conceptual thinking that is being promoted in the studio? Is it about historical or typological analysis, urban analysis, semantic meaning, abstraction or the technicalities of parametric design? What weighting in the studio is given to aesthetics and graphic communication? A key question to ask an understand is what model of design generation is being promoted in the studio or team? How are you expected to produce design solutions?

3.Engage by asking dumb questions.

Ask dumb questions. This is the easiest way I know how to start the process of communication in a design team or studio. Because the obvious and seemingly dumb question is the question that usually needs to be asked in the design team. Designing is about testing, and indeed stress testing, propositions, arrangements, aesthetics, processes and details. Usually this is done via the question. Usually, it is the obvious question that everyone’s as been thinking that really needs to be articulated.

Admittedly not everyone is an extravert and some people find it difficult to ask questions. For design leaders this means encouraging questions, as they are asked, and not being dismissive. I like to ask my own dumb questions. This helps to break down any barriers of communication between team leader and team members. I know it may sound trite but encouraging or developing a feedback loop of dumb questions speeds up the evolution of the design. It also increases the ability of team members to feel comfortable in voicing their opinions and again this contributes to a design culture within the group.

More often than not it is the seemingly dumb question that can unlock the key issues and complexities of a design concept.

4.It’s not about the mark and nor, is it about winning the award.

Its not about the mark, and in the real world it is probably fair to say it is not about winning the award. Unfortunately, architecture schools have been corrupted by university fee regimes and the brand cache of a degree. Architects as a global profession have been corrupted by the peer distinction and star architect system.

A focus on the marks or awards never really got any one anywhere. I think it’s about packing as much design thought into a design project as you can. The design thinking embedded in the project needs to be robust enough to weather the storms and criticism of conceptual logic, value management, client whims, regulations, constructibility, politics and peer criticism. Trying to appease –by balancing out and juggling too many different factors–the awards judges or your tutors in terms of a imagined assessment regime only gets you in a mess. It usually only leads to design indecision and not knowing what is important amongst a range of factors.

For studio leaders it means getting the team members to focus on the process of the design research, design generation and production as the primary goal. Peer review juries and competition panels are notoriously fickle. Of course, regimes exist in architecture schools for marking and should be thought about and taken seriously. But, an incessant focus on trying to second guess a marking regime or a jury always detracts from the design process.

The good news is that anyone focusing on the design as a foremost priority never really loses out. Even if you don’t win the billion dollar project through a competition it’s still great to have a design that embodies your own design values.

5.When stuck get unstuck and hack yourself and burn your computer 

Let’s face it any design project can get stuck. We all get stuck for ideas or are unsure about the outcomes as a design evolves or progresses. All it means is that you need a fresh perspective. If you re stuck you can usually try anything. Have a break from the project for a day. Get your friends or others in tothe studio crit. Design an alternative concept and compare it to what you have. Throw around a few new crazy idea. What is the most bizarre and idiosyncratic idea of concept you can throw at the project. Is there something new you have not tried?

Hack your own design. You can do this by changing media: making a model, doing a sketch a different style of drawing; a section instead of a plan. Burn your computer and do some sketches. Take a stick and draw in the sand.

Hack yourself, to get out of the design studio grind. Go to a party and think. Take the road trip option. After you have undertaken some of the above methods you can reassess.

For studio leaders getting your students or team members to try out new ideas or new approaches when they are stuck is critical to successful outcomes. Usually designers get stuck when they find the path forward limited by pragmatic considerations or they are overwhelmed by their own self criticism. Designers are usually their own worse critics. A good team leader will understand this and support those team members prone to endless self criticism.

 6.Leaving it to the last minute doesn’t really cut it.

This is probably the most important golden rule and point. This is a real trap for the unwary, for those leading and for those being led. I call it the: a lot of research and too little design syndrome. Studio leaders should be constantly challenging team members to avoid procrastination and design via physical or digital means. research takes place in paralell with research. Make diagrams of your research instead of just reading it or writing about it. Design is not about thinking and researching and thinking and researching and hoping that a spatial entity will all come together in your head and then then translate exactly into the computer.

Design is about trial and error. For this reason designing a project is a race. The more trial and errors the more you can iterate a design. I can tell when I am in a building where the elements have only only been designed once. The second or third pass is where great design happens.

Architecture is too important to leave to the last minute.

 

The Next Commodities Boom: Defetishising Australian cities policy.

The Next Commodities Boom: Defetishising Australian cities policy.

Peter Raisbeck

The word on the street is that Australia’s Prime Minister is about to ramp up Cities policy. Not only that, but both sides of politics in Australia are keen to showcase cities policy. Not since the ill fated Multi-Function Polis has urban policy been on the agenda in a Federal election year. Now that the price of Iron Ore has bottomed out  it is the city that has become the hope for the future. In a country beset by booms and busts it is the city that is, and will be the next boom. This boom will be presaged by and indistinguishable from a boom in city orientated policy.

But this current fashion for arguing that the best and most sustainable way to develop is via continual city growth needs to be seriously questioned. In Australia I think these questions are crucial. How big should Australian cities be and where should they be? How should populations, and resources, across the continent be dispersed? Australian cities are obviously cities of the new world and the developed world. In some ways Australian cities don’t have the same problem’s characteristic of larger older cities built on mediaeval or ancient foundations in the developing world. Perhaps this is why it is easy to conceive of Australian cities as greenfield sites engines of a new boom; a primary means to leverage and improve productivity (whatever that might mean). Much of the architectural, urban and policy discourse around Australian cities presumes that their continual survival and growth is the most efficient and sustainable way forward. But in its current formulations cities policy in Australia does not ask the fundamental and basic questions related to cities. Cities concerning distribution, size, structure, social governance and relation to country all need to be addressed before the cities boom becomes the next bust.

In urban discourse across the globe their has been a lot of talk around the notion of the anthropocene. The idea as it is defined is that the “earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.” We are all in the Anthropocene discourse nowadays. The vibrant and energetic discourse around the anthropocene appears to be inextricably linked to the idea of the city and the urban.  As the sponsors of a forthcoming seminar at University  of Westminster put it:

The discursive rise of the anthropocene has been accompanied by the normalisation of the idea of the ‘urban age’. The city has come to constitute a powerful imaginary, simultaneously the locus of all manner of contemporary crises – ecological and otherwise – and the focus for our hopes of their resolution. While earlier visions of urban sustainability disrupted the nature/culture divide, the goal remained one of ‘balance’, to be achieved through intentional agency.  Such aspirations are increasingly augmented, or framed, by notions of ‘resilience’ and ‘smartness’, in which human agency becomes at best reactive, or even dissolves within a process of recursive co-adaptation.

As they argue:

But where does this leave our ability to ‘plan’ our (urban) future? And is this imagined ‘city’ in fact a multiple construct? Might its rhetorical singularity across different discourses be holding us back from reimagining the future in more productive ways?

This pretty much sums up the urban policy debate in Australia. The Australian city is also now a rhetorical singularity. A discursive construct which is a open and malleable site for the forces that have a vested interest in shaping it. A neoliberal imaginary. The Whitlam agenda of focusing on cities, but also suburbs and regions, was an aberration quickly extinguished. But Australians have been witness to the cities rise over the past 25 years which perhaps started with Hawke’s Building Better Cities program. The cities rise over this time frame is easily discerned in a number of developments: in the discourse of architects, who have abandoned the house, and social housing, as a object of intellectual pursuit, in the rise of the urban design profession, and the emergence of landscape urbanism. Fuelling this rise and impending boom, young hipsters flock to see Jan Gehl and his particular brand of cities for people spin. An entire industry has grown up around state government and local councils fostering green cities, resilient cities and so called smart cities.

A boom focused on the discourse of the urban now exists, and also includes developers, all levels of government, the consulting class, policy specialists, academics, architects and urban designers. There are a number of key groups with different agendas and views which circulate around the cities policy pond. A few of these are worth mentioning. These include: Infrastructure Australia an independent statutory body poorly funded and yet somehow still beholden to whoever is in power in Canberra. Alongside sits lobby groups like the Property Council of Australia and quasi-lobby groups like the Green Building Council of Australia  which has made a virtue of legitimising , and marketing, mediocre green initiatives and passing them off as radical. Even the conservative think tank the IPA  is on the case with housing in cities.

There has also been recent work from the Grattan Institute with its City Limits: Why Australia’s cities are broken and how we can fix them. A report, which identifies issues but elides notions of design and community perhaps because its research is rooted in the corporatist methods of the Boston Consulting Group. More admirably groups like AHURI struggle on limited funds to gather data and produce research around cities. At our architecture school at MSD great groups like VEIL offer unique bottom up insights into community and distributed infrastructure systems. AURIN offers insight into the data throw up and produced by urban agglomerations.

For many of these actors the city is seen as the integrative platform through which various wicked problems can be solved. This integration, both imagined and real, drives the new boom in cities and city policy.  This boom is based on the idea that problems are economic and the city is seen as a place where economic functions can be integrated. It is not about addressing ecological damage or income equality. It is about place and productivity. For example, the  Deloitte Economist Professor Ian Harper has recently espoused the centrality of place in economic theory. It is suprising for someone trained in architecture and urban design to see the mantras of place, innovation, creativity, knowledge capital as these have long been discussed in architecture. As Harper proclaims “crowd’s accelerate” the process of value creation in a services economy moving from manufacturing towards the digital utopia.

Of course transforming place in cities will require the most advanced modelling: Urban research datasets (so called big data), combined spatial and statistical modelling, VR simulation and digital visualisation, as well as Carbon accounting and heat sink modelling. Alongside these tools new urban methodologies will also be needed and employed including AI, complex adaptive urbanism, digital ethnography, systems dynamics and agent based modelling. All of the above is supported by the hardware of mobile computing, the internet of things, wireless and sensor networks and drones.

This theatre of actors and set of technologies associated with this boom will accelerate , once the political apparatchiks, fresh faced minisiterial advisers and pedigreed policy mavens accelerate city policy. Events, media releases, showcases of excellence and the ever tightening noose between the discourses of design and innovation will be a part of it. Complicating this is the fact that Australians forgot to establish  a sovereign wealth fund during the commodity boom years. As a result there will be always be a mismatch between the boom in policy needs and the volatility of global financial markets. Policy mavens will always try and catch up and explain away market volatility or alternatively align policy with the markets. But, as the proponents of the Westminster  Centre for the Study of Democracy suggest, the idea of setting policy around cities, without radically rethinking settlement patterns, political governance, technology futures, infrastructure, procurement pathways and community participation in development may only lead to the further degradation and implosion of Australian cities. Isolating any one of these factors for example technology futures or procurement (via new methods of financing) will only lead to further disfunction.

Even a simple dialectal or dichotomous approach is better than seeing cities and place as a localised, simplistic, unified, all encompassing, wholisitic singularity or imaginary. I suspect a whole-of-continent approach is preferable. The problems of the Murray Darling Basin and the remote communities in the West would suggest that.

Before we think about cities we need to defetishise the way we think about them. Let’s hope its not too late to forestall the next boom.

 

Against the porn of lifestyle houses: four houses to dream about when you design a house.

Against the porn of lifestyle houses: four houses to dream about when you design a house.

Peter Raisbeck

The first house I designed was in second semester of second year and I didn’t really now what I was doing. How could you? Thankfully, thanks to my tutor I was slowly led through the process of how to design something as complex as a house. My tutor (who is now a colleague) wisely got me to look at numerous examples of houses, the AJ metric handbooks, and I did look a lot at all the houses that won awards for a few years in the magazine Progressive Architecture. I examined house plans. I spent a lot of time at home measuring things. How high was a bench, how wide was a door, how deep was a cupboard? What where the dimensions of a bed and how much room was needed to navigate around it. Of course in first year the time I was inspired by the work of MLTW and Sea Ranch, I liked the flow of the forms as they cascaded down the hill on the coast of California it seemed a far cry form the flat gable and hip tiled suburb I grew up in.

These days there is a lot of what I call house porn which seems to be incessantly streamed across social media. Big windows, a bit of cedar, white walls, long linear kitchens, minimal kind of Mediterranean bathrooms. These houses seem to be perfect and idealised settings for bourgeois lifestyles devoid of reflection, memory or dare I say it melancholy. Watching the reality television shows, either the cooking ones ( I am partial to MKR), or even the building and renovation ones, I get the impression that houses are simply containers for, and expressions of, lifestyle and nothing more.

Lifestyle houses are always different. They are always filled with “features” and customised to the whims of their clients. They both brand the owners identity, and help to form that identity. I am tired of seeing houses planned around an open spatiality, linear vistas leading to large windows; more and more the bourgeois house looks like a real estate marketing brochure. More and more I fear architects succumbing to this as the exemplar. In a way great houses are difficult and monstrously empty creatures. As an antidote to this I try and describe my impressions of four houses below which, for me at least, avoid the lifestyle paradigm.

Villa La Roche

The American architect John Hejduk in his book Mask of Medusa relates how he set up an exhibition in Corbusier’s Villa La Roche in Paris. The power of his prose is compelling but as he was hammering in nails to set up his 1972 exhibition to the house he remarkably found red dust coming out of the white walls. He states:

Villa La Roche is house with other qualities beyond the simple white cubed functionalism that we assign to works in the twenties. It is a house where the functional elements  suggest other uses such as some kind of dark religious ceremony or ritual. Hedjuk was convinced that the house was used by english spiritualists who came to the continent for ceremonies in the 1920s. He argued that the houses main sitting room was configured like a church. It suggests that houses must always refer to something like this, that functional elements have double readings, and that every house must have its own kind of  alchemy.

Ottolenghi House

This is another house that has always fascinated me, and whilst I have visited quite of few of scraps works in Venice and the great theatrical Castelvecchio in Verona an like many people who have visited Scarpa’s work in Venice I have yet to get the opportunity to visit this house.

Scarpa was quoted as saying I am “A man of Byzantium who came to Venice by way of Greece.” Again this is a house, like Villa-La Roche, suggests places outside of itself. The rusticated columns made of discs of stone and concrete are both monumental and yet made of a series of fragments suggesting ruins. The travertine floor, and the ponds which adjoin the house, as well as evoking the Venetian lagoon, are reminiscent of Scarpa’s influence in the gardens of the East. As a result of its compositional fragmentation, the house is also like Venice in other ways, itself constructed from fragments of plunder from the Levantine world.

The house is buried and Scarpa uses this as a means to introduce light into the interior spaces of the house in an extremely controlled way. This is done via a compositional incision on one side of the house. This incision is not unlike a Venetian street or Calle. Whilst no where near the Venetian lagoon the house still evokes this city. The combined effects of fragmented plan, entrance with adjoining ponds, the steps up and changes in level, and the dividing fireplace with its intense hard-plastered blue all suggest that this is a city within a house. It is the idea that the house can itself be a city

Villa Muller

Adolf Loos designed and built many houses. But Villa Muller is probably the best of these, perhaps because it is well documented, and perhaps because Hejduk (him again) wrote such beautiful words around it. The window grills with there hint of the orient, the exquisite Delft tiles at the entrance, the stone that adorns the house. More alarmingly, their are pictures of Loos in the house with his bride in his final years racked by Syphilis. It sits in a suburb on the outskirts of Prague overlooking that city.

There is nothing automatic or unconscious about this house. Every gesture of composition is tightly planned:  this is a house that is seems to defer canonical notions of style. Is it modernist or is it a classical building. A tomb perhaps? I have been to the house but never inside. I suspect it is one of those houses that desire impels you to enter and experience. But, once inside, the desire only heightens as you realise you are in an empty tomb.

Villa Malaparte

Probably one of the great Villas of the 20th Century it is on the isle of Capri not far from Tiberius’s Villa where he ruled the empire. The villa is famous for  a number of reasons, design by Libera, who aside from Terragni, was probably the  best of the Italian fascist architects and its owner  Curzio Malaparte at first a fascist sympathiser and later a communist his most famous novel was Kaputt written in 1944. The novel is one of the few novels to authentically describe the banality of evil. It located at Capo Massullo, on the Isle of Capri. It was the central location in Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Le Mepris. The cinematic version, as compared to the house in reality,  gives evokes arcane rituals across ancient landscapes. It is a place where the limestone crags and shards of Capri meet the horizons of the Tyrrenhenian sea. Somehow in my mind Villa Malaparte seems to evoke all of these intertwined aspects of both the 20th C and antiquity.

All of the above houses evoke and suggest other places and indeed states of being. They are not overly saturated with light, reduced to nothing through minimalism, mock joined to the landscape or overly inscribed with parametric techniques. In some way each of these houses suggest that the house is still a site of poetry, a site where archetypal forms, memories and historical associations merge. These days the house is too often seen as lifestyle porn. A home for Kardashian luxury sometimes with a little bit of materiality  and craft thrown in to demonstrate authenticity.

The architectural tradition of the Australian house leaves a lot to be desired. The appeals to unifying landscape and environment, touch the earth lightly lifestyles, well meaning sustainabiltiy and the mannered stylistic traditions of the 20th C are all to noisy for my liking. As Hejduk suggests, in his foreword to the little book I have on Villa Muller it is the tone of the house which the architect must determine before anything else. The house is a setting for the theatre of life. Simultaneously, a place of where desire, loss and dreaming mingles. A house is ideally a place of silence that respects country rather than one that fills over country’s destruction with an endless stream of features. Better to speak into the void.

 

 

 

Design Activism: Expanding architecture as advocacy after #Occupy.

Design Activism: Expanding architecture as advocacy after #Occupy.

Peter Raisbeck

This last week or so I have been teaching a new intensive subject just at MSD, the Melbourne School of Design. As a subject Design Activism explores the dynamics and effectiveness of architecture in relation to the politics of advocacy, activism and protest. The discussions in class linked architectural and urban design to critical theory, activism and community development. We discussed many case studies in class and the students themselves bought in examples in order to begin to understand the strategies and governing principles which guide activist campaigns.

The case studies included perspectives from both international and local contexts, as well as from the virtual world.

One of the most exciting aspects of the subject was that it bought together various activists, academics and practitioners involved in the interfaces between alternative architecture, protest and community organisations. This time around our guests included:

Bev Polzin and Dr. Wendy Salter of the AVP movement.  Who discussed non violent protest and alternatives to violence.

Peter Hogg  who discussed inner city urban planning activism in Melboirne.

Cathy Alexander who sketched out the mechanics and dynamics of the Australian media.

Lorel Thomas National Convenor of Safeground who discussed how to best lobby politicians.

Gary Muratore of Burger Off. Who discussed one of Australia’s most succsefu

Dave Phillips of Mccann who graciously explained the inner workings of advertising campaigns and the advertising industry.

Leandro Caputto of TOMA. A collaborative group of architects working in Santiago Chile recently represented at the 2016 Chicago architecture biennale.

and Derrick Jensen of the Deep Green Resistance movement. Derrick shared his own journey with students explaining his views on militancy.

Mirjana Ristic now of TU Berlin who demonstrated how concepts of spatial urbanism can be used to map conflict.

Design Activism goes against traditional models of architectural practice normally taught in architecture schools. There are usually two views of architecture as a career. In the first view architects graduate and then find a internship or find a reasonable firm to work in. Slowly but surely we gain experience and get to the decision point of staying in someone one else firm or starting practice yourself. Both of these career pathways are based on the traditional model of practice. In other words, the model in which architects are paid by clients to design and deliver buildings. As time has gone on this model has come under increasing pressure, from other competitors who claim to do what architects do, and the traditional model of practice, with all of its uncertainties and has been called into question as a viable and satisfying career path. Often the architects who subscribe to the traditional model of practice either as employees or owners of firms are confined and limited in their ability to act due to issues of patronage, politics and funding.

As a subject Design Activism was designed to explore the ways out of the above traditional nexus and associated conundrums. With the demise of the Occupy movement it is timely for architects to now reflect on architecture’s role as a vehicle for political protest. Thinking about Design Activism, in terms of both theory and practice, is a good vehicle to do this.

Moreover, in recent years, in architecture schools across the globe, community development or “global design” design studios have been all the rage. For many students and architects this has been seen as the prevailing way to make architecture more relevant to global concerns of injustice. These studios usually have a simple formula: Take a group of architecture students to an island or developing country and get them to do stuff. As I found during the studio I ran in Mexico these types of studios raise ethical concerns about the architects relationship in networks of colonialism. Sometimes a FIFO (Fly in Fly out) mentality reigns supreme and perhaps it is not effective. What happens after the architectural experts fly out? How do we as architects decolonise our practices? A recent book by Clare Land based on her thesis begins to suggest how we might begin to do this in relation to indigenous issues. Architects have along way to go.

The Design Activism course allowed the students space to explore and discuss the contradictions of power across the interfaces of urban infrastructure, architecture and the territories of political protest. In future blogs I will discuss and present more of their work. Design Activism is an attempt to expand the domain of architectural design into the realm of advocacy and political activism. Exploring where the interfaces and fault lines are between architecture and the politics of protest is important if architecture is to evolve as a discourse.

Of course, I don’t want to be overly critical of the FIFO studios; not all of them are bad; although I decry the often woeful design aesthetics produced by these studios; however, I do think we need to ask: how, as architects we can be activists? It shouldn’t simply be a matter of taking a trip, or as Derrick Jensen suggests putting a green roof on a building, and then feeling warm and fuzzy because as architects we are thinking that we are doing good. That may not be enough.

 

The Four Syndromes: How not to choose your design studio at architecture school

The Four Syndromes: How not to choose your design studio at architecture school

Peter Raisbeck

Yes, it is almost that time of year (at least in the Southern Hemisphere) when architecture students begin class and go about the business of choosing a design studio. This short blog is specifically aimed at that curious class of human beings known as architecture students.  I think in some ways it would be better if the studio leaders interviewed and then selected the students rather than the other way around. I am told that this is the case at some school’s of architecture and I think it avoids the popularity contests that seems to characterise the studio teaching systems in many architecture schools.

The four worst reasons for choosing to be in a design studio are related to a cluster of syndromes: “running with the pack” syndrome, “charisma” syndrome,  “interesting project” syndrome and worst of all the “sounds easy” syndrome.

Running with the pack syndrome. 

Popularity is the most misleading reason to choose a studio on. Don’t succumb to  peer group pressure or groupthink. All because a potential studio seems popular amongst your friends that doesn’t in any way guarantee that the studio will be right for you. A studio which is popular at the beginning of semester may or may not achieve good outcomes at the end of semester. Besides who really wants to be in a studio full of your friends? It might make you feel safe and warm and fuzzy but the studio, its tutors, the project and the skills you will learn may not match your own educational needs as an aspiring architect. Being in a studio with your friends doesn’t really foster what I like call design resilience.

Its great to get into a popular studio and “run with the pack with your friends” at the beginning for the semester. It is not so great at the end of the semester when you realise how unsuited that studio was for you. It’s even worse when the studio outcomes of the most popular studio at the beginning of the semester end up being the most mediocre at the end of semester.All because it is popular doesn’t mean the studio will be good.

Charisma sydnrome

Charismatic architects do not necessarily make good studio leaders or teachers. Of course they looked great at the studio presentation, they have been published a lot, won a few awards and have a great website. But, that charismatic architect or the person who gives a great presentation to students about the studio may in fact be one of those woefully inadequate studio teachers. Woeful studio teachers are the ones that are potentially narcissistic, lack the humility needed to teach, mismanage your criticism time, develop favorites in the class and give contrary and contradictory advice to students from week to week. The seemingly charismatic tutor or architect may not be the tutor that you need to foster and build your design confidence.

Interesting project syndrome. 

This is when students choose because it seems like an interesting project. It might be a museum in a far flung and exotic corner of the world, it might seem like a real project with real life clients, it might seem funky because part of the project is to use the robots to fabricate one of those domey things; worse still, it seems interesting because you have always wanted to design a pop-up barista coffee cart.

What architectural or studio project isn’t potentially interesting? Good architects are the people who  make mundane and ordinary programs and problems into something cogent and culturally powerful. So just choosing a studio because it sounds like an interesting project is a really unthinking way to chose.  I learnt the most from the worst and least interesting projects that I did at architecture school. The bourgeois house, the outer suburban primary school, the kindergarten the social housing on the large site. You don’t need an exotic landscape, location or intricate program to learn in a studio.

Of course, its not so great when you get into the “interesting project” studio and find there is no established brief and you spend so many weeks researching the project that you don’t get enough time to design it at the end.

Sounds easy syndrome 

The sounds easy syndrome is usually the choice where the design studio student feels they don’t have to work that hard. The brief is established, the typological complexity of the building is something the student has done before, they know the tutor and they know they are not a hard arse. The student knows other students who have previously taken the studio and they all know that it is not terribly challenging. You can easily tick the box.

Unfortunately, it is easy for students to think they are learning something when they are having a great time in a design studio. In fact the converse is probably true. When the student is challenged by a tutor or a design problem that is probably when they are actually learning something. By doing studios that are personally challenging an aspiring architect is able to learn resilience, not just in the face of critical indifference or negative criticism, but also learn how to pursue a design proposal from start finish with all the various steps and missteps that this normally involves.

After all, once outside of architecture school, the aspiring architect must rely on their own reserves in the face of trenchant indifference to architecture.

Diversity 

A great post graduate, or Masters level, architecture school will present to its students a range of studios. The portfolio of the studios offered in the school should be diverse. It should not be centred around any particular fashion or ideological cause. A range of contexts, projects as well as a range of design teaching styles should be presented to students. Thats pretty much what is on offer each semester at the architecture school where I work at MSD. A school which is only devoted to parametric studios, or is aligned with the particular outlook of the school’s professors I think is a very conservative school. It goes without saying that diversity in both teaching staff and projects on offer is extremely important (I still know of architecture schools where the  design tutors each semester are predominantly male).

Choosing a studio for  a postgraduate architecture student is a personal one. In choosing a studio students should firstly ask themselves the following questions. The primary aim of these questions is to help you figure out what your learning objectives are.

  1. What technical skills do I have and what skills do I still need? Which studio or studio leader help me develop those skills.
  2. What am I yet to do at architecture school? What projects or types or scales of problem should I get experience in?
  3. What do I need to learn about in relation to design processes. Do I have the confidence to experiment? Should I do a studio that allows me to do this and is right outside of my comfort zone?
  4. What do I need to learn or in what kind of studio do I need to be in to grow in confidence as an aspiring architect?

Of course all these questions, or variants thereof, should also be asked by practicing architects with their own studios as well. If as a student you can answer these questions you are half way there. All you need to do then is find out as much as you can about the studios on offer that you think best match your learning objectives. That may mean asking around regarding the tutors teaching abilities and design expertise, and maybe, just maybe, actually talking to the tutors running the studio and asking them questions. If you can it is also good to see what was produced by the studio leaders in their studios in previous semesters.

You cannot rely on Architecture school to learn what you need to learn. Learning and then becoming an architect is kind of like any race in many respects. Preparation is important, practicing on different types of tracks, constantly refining your own training regime and above all taking responsibility for your own education is vital. The global trends that have led to the academicisation and privatisation of architecture education now leaves a lot to be desired. The best architects in the future will always be those architects who are self taught.

 

 

 

 

Schumacher vs Aravena’s Pritzker: Slugging it out in Monterrey Mexico.

Schumacher vs Aravena’s Pritzker: Slugging it out in Monterrey Mexico.

Peter Raisbeck

Now that Aravena has won the 2015 Pritzker prize it might be worth discussing the current fault lines in architecture that run between the technologists and what Patrik Schumacher declaims as a “safe and comforting validation of humanitarian concern”. To do this I want to briefly analyse two projects by these very different architects in Monterrey Mexico. Just after Aravena won the prize there was an unusual outburst via Facebook and across social media from Schumacher:

“The PC takeover of architecture is complete: Pritzker Prize mutates into a prize for humanitarian work. The role of the architect is now “to serve greater social and humanitarian needs” and the new Laureate is hailed for “tackling the global housing crisis” and for his concern for the underprivileged. Architecture loses its specific societal task and responsibility, architectural innovation is replaced by the demonstration of noble intentions and the discipline’s criteria of success and excellence dissolve in the vague do-good-feel-good pursuit of ‘social justice’. 

When I read proclamations about political correctness I instantly associate this with a neoliberal and regressive politics. A politics intent on discounting social difference. Please forgive my skepticism but I am an academic after all. But an architecture focused on “specific societal tasks” might just mean: important big projects. For “responsibility” the cynical might read: more big projects designed by Patrik and Zaha and “architectural innovation” could refer to an architecture driven by all of the new technologies: drones, 3D scanning, 3D printing, AI and above all parametrics; and all of this innovation is promulgated through the new digital media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TED talks and Linked-in-Profiles (I should talk) and maybe even Snapchat. Social media is nowadays the new collective imagination of architecture.

A more clear sighted and less cynical analysis might ask if Schumacher is correct in his stance and is Aravena’s position any more worthy? Is it any more innovative and to what extent does it lose any sense of societal tasking and responsibility? Does the work of Elemental, Aravena’s firm, posit itself as a credible and alternative architecture?Schumacher goes on to directly criticise Aravena suggesting that it is a kind of comforting opiate for the “humanitarian” set. Perhaps he might just be right?

I respect was Alejandro Aravena is doing and his “half a good house” developments are an intelligent response. However, this is not the frontier where architecture and urban design participate in advancing the next stage of our global high density urban civilisation. I would not object to this year’s choice half as much if this safe and comforting validation of humanitarian concern was not part of a wider trend in contemporary architecture that in my view signals an unfortunate confusion, bad conscience, lack of confidence, vitality and courage about the discipline’s own unique contribution to the world.”

Reading this I was intrigued by what Schumacher meant by the terms “frontier” and  “our global high density civilisation.” It starts to conjure up images of John Ford’s film The Searchers.  Interestingly, I found that both architects have produced schemes in Monterrey Mexico which in its own way is a frontier city. A city where narcotics, capital and America’s free trade agreement with Mexico collide. I know Monterrey reasonably well having visited a few times with post graduate MSD students in 2010 and 2012.

Monterrey is a city that has little planning regulation, has grown in a adhoc manner and contains extremely rich suburbs along side informal settlements.  It is a city full of contradictions it is a large industrial city with many factories supplying the United States whose border is only 3 or so hours away by truck. The total amount of Nuevo Leon’s exports, the state in which Monterrey sits, in 2012 were 35 Billion USD, 11% of Mexico’s total exports.  The city is home to one of the most important universities in Mexico and Latin America: Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM). It is even home to a large Lego factory. It contains both the richest and poorest suburbs in Latin America. It is where   Narco-Mansions are sited near informal settlements with no sewerage or drainage exist within close proximity of each other.

Don’t get me wrong I love Monterrey and would go back anytime. But it is an example of what happens to a city when global capital is allowed to run wild. It is in many respects a test bed of free market urbanism

Aravena’s and his firm Elemental’s 2009 project in Monterrey Mexico sums up a lot about their approach to affordable housing. The housing is designed to be incremental, in the sense that the inhabitants can add to the housing themselves as personal economics allow. It is an open ended approach and adhoc approach. A relinquishment of architectural agency in a sense. The final form of the housing appears to respect the surrounding grid pattern and typology of Monterrey. I don’t want to impose a european reading on this work but the project arguably sits formally in a European canon. The flat roof and form of the housing seems to have its precedents in Corbusier’s Pessac project and even seems to evoke the urban morphologies of a Rob Krier or a Latin American version of  Taut’s housing in Weimar. In other words it is affordable housing with an aesthetic and tectonic edge. It is an effort, I think, to forge a frontier in the gap between ordinary lives and high architecture.

In contrast Hadid and Schumacher’s scheme for Monterrey there is nothing adhoc about this project; there is not doubt that it has been designed with a capital D; nothing has been left to the residents to design; its hive like cells and sinuous and curvilinear forms are at odds with the cities surrounding typology. The central landscaped space is full of nice people enjoying the sun. The renders have a lot of gym action and treadmills in them. This is another Monterrey development that proclaims its wealth. A project made to take advantage of Monterrey’s low cost wage structure and labour intensive concrete technologies. Complete with 981 units that look like they could be anywhere in the global and urbanised civilisation that Schumacher aspires to cover the earth with.

I remember as a young naive architecture student, in the dinosaur age, Eisenman coming to visit my architecture school. Replete with Brooks brothers button down shirt and braces he proclaimed that architecture was “autonomous” and in no way political. Architecture could only do what it could do. Schumacher’s position is not dissimilar but it is perhaps more dangerous because it is driven by the new technologies, with scant regard to the politics of the neoliberal frontier. The contradiction, of course is that Hadid’s early work seemed to claim a political position via the use and reference in it to the Russian Constructivists. It has morphed into something else now.

In contrast Aravena’s work speaks of the small architect. Aravena’s work clearly positions itself on the margins and in the cracks of cities. After all when everything is said and done we are all small architects trying to fill the gap between high architecture and ordinary lives.

 

 

 

 

The Australia Day Hangover: Architecture, sovereignty, Hitler and Australian democracy

The Australia Day Hangover: Architecture, sovereignty, Hitler and Australian democracy

Peter Raisbeck

Driving around my city on Australia Day and watching all of the people picnicking in their green and gold outfits, Aussie flag eskies, stubby holders and other bits of Aussie slightly Springtime-for-Hitler kitsch, got me thinking about this year’s lamb ad with its militaristic overtones and last year’s lamb ad with Ritchie Benaud and Cookie in it. Any serious reflection regarding all of this Australia Day merchandising and marketing must lead to the notion of indigenous sovereignty and the transient nature of our so called democracy.

A few years ago I collaborated with my friend Alan Chan, a MSD graduate, on a competition for the Prime Ministers residence. The brief was to design a Prime Minister’s residence on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. I would like to congratulate the University of Canberra and the judges for conducting this competition. It was entitled The Lodge on the Lake design competition and was sponsored by the University of Canberra. Thankfully the website is still up. The designs of the finalists, including our entry, was exhibited at the Gallery of Australian Design from 15 August to 19 October 2013. It was a great initiative. But like many architectural competitions and initiatives it seems to have got lost in the bottom drawers of the web.

Whilst the competition was held over 2 years ago in 2013 the 242 entries, including the judged winners, are worth briefly discussing as they point to a number of prevailing views about the notion of Australia, its histories, myths and architecture’s complicity in promoting these.

The location for the new Prime Ministers Lodge was Attunga Point, a peninsula with a northern outlook over Lake Burley Griffin (perhaps it should be Lake Marion Mahony Burley Griffin ) towards Black Mountain. The winning scheme, by Jack Davies and team members Nicholas Roberts and Henry Stephens, evoked a kind of up market holiday house you might find in a coastal suburb. The architects of this scheme draw on the well worn trope of the relationship between the architectural artefact and the so called Australian landscape. Claiming Griffin and Mahony’s plan for Canberra as an exemplar they argue that the scheme is both a “critique and a development of the relationship between Australian landscape and dwelling. An intersection of public assembly, intimate domesticity and ground plane.” There is no mention here of the Australian landscape as a violent frontier; although, the scheme does look a little defensive. It encircles a courtyard and is partially embedded in a slope and it is not without it’s predictable delights and nuances. But for the most part it depicts a relaxed and comfortable nation inhabited by citizens without fault-lines or class strata. A people who no longer need to expand outwards across the frontier. A people enjoying themselves, with a PM in a nice holiday house, with no self loathing bogan supremacists to be seen anywhere.

Some of the other schemes, are a little more cautious in resolving and recirculating the myths of the Australian landscape and its attendant histories. For example, Entry 6744 by  John de Manincor, Imogene Tudor, Christopher McDonald and Adam Russe produced a scheme overtly critical of Australia’s immigration detention policies. As they note, “Lake Burley-Griffin will offer our leader and their family security and beauty. However they will, at times, require some force for additional protection from intruders.” Another scheme of interest was the second prize winner by Alan Pert, NORD and Atelier 10 which evokes a kind of Athenian temple on the peninsula, I am not sure if this iconography is meant to be ironic or not; or to give some authentic nobility to the office of Prime Minister. The landscaped courtyard, with a single tree, is also conceptually akin to the winning scheme.

I liked the ugly schemes the best as these seemed to be more confident and in contrast to the mannered modernism of many entries. The Bird, Spooner and Fahey entry appears to epitomise a kind of suburban baroque. Suburban iconography is of course evident in the Edmond and Corrigan scheme. This is a rambunctious scheme and in some ways reminds me of extremely palatial footy oval toilet block. Entry 6920, Milbourne, Laura Martires and John Doyle, produced a scheme that dealt with the issues of landscape using abstract and rational process of generating geometry. The end result, evokes the work of Claude Parent, and seems to be a better approach to the Australian landscape problem than the winning scheme.

Our scheme also explored the dichotomy the planned city and the natural landscape. In much the same way that Walter Burley Griffin’s plan for Canberra was an extrinsic and extraneous intervention on the indigenous landscape, our scheme for the Lodge was based on a grid which has been laid onto the Attunga Point site. But this is done without pretension to the myths of uniting the landscape with architecture. We saw this as a departure point of conflict. We arranged chaotic and monumental rammed earth skylights and associated garden beds across a regular grid in order to contrast with the undulating topography of the site. We saw the Lodge as much as an extrinsic object to Attunga Point as the plan for Canberra is to the landscape; as the Australian Capital Territory entity is to the state of New South Wales in 1908; and as extrinsic as a population of migrants – colonial and recent – to Australia.

The primary rammed earth extrusions house the private rooms of the PM’s residence and function centre, with the visible external protrusion acting as skylights to allow natural daylighting. Underground, the rammed earth extrusions continue and demarcate the private rooms from the semi-public circulation spaces. The extrusions – the Lodge’s rooms – act metaphorically to anchor the building to the surface. The placement of the building’s functions underground allows the surface to be completely accessible by the public. The citizen can weave through the entire complex and its gardens, and down the terraces to Lake Burley Griffin, without compromising security. It is possible to approach the rammed earth extrusions, and up close one could observe and look into the glazed perforations in the rammed earth walls.

By being underground our scheme is a bit like Parliament House itself. Which, as we all know, is partially underground. Our scheme is more underground and more bunker like. We did this knowingly, and thought it would contrast with Parliament house: with its supposedly integrated landscape, seemingly, accessible to the public hilltop, a building open to the possibilities of democracy: yet, an artifice ignorant of country. In contrast we proposed that the Lodge would be open to the public as an art museum and gallery much like the Lyons House museum in Melbourne. The private lives of the Lodge’s occupants are safely secured inside their rammed-earth rooms when the main floor is opened to the public.

Our project was predicated on two underlying ideas. Firstly, the questionable nature of Australian sovereignty and the fragility of its democracy. An inspiration for the design was Sokurov’s cinematic masterpiece of 2000 about Hitler and Evan Braun called Moloch. This has always been a favourite movie of mine. The film’s setting is a kind of mirky bluestone and dark granite castle. It is shot on very grainy film stock. In the film, there are no open views from the castle to the external landscape over Obersalzberg. I wondered if we could design something with a similiar tone for our Australian politicians.

The project took considerable time to undertake. It involved considerable design research as we sifted through various options and discussed how we could try and dismantle, or at least contend with, the prevailing myths of the Australian landscape, democracy, and contemporary executive government. We made some study models and the project was exhibited along with the winners of the competition. No one rang us up, least of all the Prime Minister.

Our project was exhibited and published in the exhibition catalogue but I didn’t manage to get any RBP’s (Research Brownie Points for it) for it. Certainly, the work involved was equivalent to a journal article or a conference paper. The project indicates the dilemmas faced by both architects and academics in Architecture schools who collaborate on these types of projects and enter competitions. You get nothing for it (at least Alan got a job after he graduated). Most competition entries go to waste. It is not counted towards your research quantum and the research administrators don’t really get it if you tell them its a design for an architectural competition (Let alone telling them you are contesting notions of what underpins Australian nationhood). The category these things get lumped into is Creative Works or Non Traditional Research Outputs. I am not sure anyone really knows what that is. It would be better if there was simple, separate category, under the Australian Research Council’s publication system, for architectural works (built and unbuilt) that contribute to knowledge. A single specific category and one not muddled up with other creative works. Architects would then have more reasons to produce work that prompted the kind of public debates only architects can prompt. Such a category in the ARC system would really disrupt the status quo and set the cat amongst the pigeons. Now that would be disruptive innovation.

 

 

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll: Online Culture, Universities and the Architecture School.  

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll: Online Culture, Universities and the Architecture School.  

Peter Raisbeck

Bowie is dead and this made me think about the rock and roll life style. I just thought great maybe I should listen a bit to his Berlin trilogy of albums and ponder the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle. Questions rang in my head. Why couldn’t I be more like Bowie? Is 69 the new 27 0r 28? Naturally, these thoughts made me think about my experiences at architecture school 30 years ago. Then I saw an article in the Harvard Business Review which argued that developing a organisational culture is critical if an organisation or enterprise is to be successful. In my grieving Bowie mind it all seemed to link up and this got me thinking about the context I work in and how the issue of culture is currently playing itself out in Architecture schools and more broadly universities via social media.

Teaching and research academics, like myself are increasingly regulated, measured and administered. I concur with the article in the HBR that play is an important part of developing a organisational culture. Organisations that are constantly monitored, managed and measured end up being crap organisations with a transactional culture of individuals incentivised to blame, use sticks on each other and amass brownie points rather than contributing to a collective culture of ideas (Or as the HBR article summarises it more politely, “emotional and economic pressure combined with inertia” erode motivation).  Organisational culture is all too often managed out of the equation. I once had to explain to a university manager why it was a good idea to buy a few dips and have a few bottles of wine for cohort function for new architecture students. They kept saying: “why would you bother to do that?”

The reputation of a school like the AA in Bedford Square London is famously said to be built around its bar. The architecture school I attended, which will remain nameless here, quickly built its reputation as one of the best architecture schools in Australia on similiar factors.  Firstly, it developed a culture around the rituals of the end of semester drinking fest, opening night parties and long alcohol soaked dinners with local architects. It became a hot bed of gossip and trivial scandal. It appointed a Head of Department who appeared to want to do nothing more than party with the local architects and put on great parties for the students. Of course as a young graduate teaching at the place I took all of this ethic on wholeheartedly. This was until I got into trouble for standing in front of a group of prospective students and their prim parents and said that attending architecture school was all about sex and drugs and rock and roll.

It was a highly effective strategy by the HOD. All of this activity, quickly drew in practitioners, decision makers, graduates and students. It wasn’t too long before the discussions, debates, controversies, and alliances engendered by this activity resulted in the school being seen as the centre of the known architectural universe. The parties were the places where business was done: where the school’s students formed their career networks, where recent graduates found jobs and where industry did deals. It became a culture where architectural ideas were promulgated and debated and this culture inevitably became associated with the school itself. Quickly the school gained an international reputation as a place to be. The product’s of the school’s vibrant culture became associated with the schools brand and this contributed to the school’s reputation. A reputation which it still holds today 30 years after its formation. Building a culture within any tertiary program adds to the student experience, helps to foster links with industry and position a school as a place of disciplinary leadership.

As an architectural academic who now works at a university I am conscious of the technological differences between today and when I was taught. The web and social media now reign supreme. Building a culture in an architecture school, or in any university cohort for that matter is now very different. All of the activities of student experience are often programmed and managed via web interfaces. Relationships to industry are fostered by industry nights and public lectures managed though online ticketing. Alumni are managed via databases and contact software. It’s all pretty boring.

Web pages abound for every graduate architecture school in Australia but when I look at these many seem to be stale and lacking in interactivity. Few, if at all any, seem to contribute to building an online culture or a community of interest around a school. Yet,  it seems that social media, in addition to the parties, is one critical way that a school or university department could build its reputation as a place of intellectual excitement and controversy. Digital content needs to be actively produced, and social media should be used to both foster and connect students to the events and architectural culture of the school.

So along with having more cocktail parties, exhibition openings, public seminars and lectures. I offer the following suggestions:

  1. Forget print. Develop a digital platform and a governing architecture for this platform. All faculties should have a sub-Dean responsible for digital policy and delivery. Other organisations in the Industry have digital CEOs.
  2. Build a community of influence centred the school. Get recent and distinguished alumni, members of industry and students themselves to influence and write short pieces or blogs on issues of interest to both student and industry (my friends at Parlour have been able to do this very cleverly with few resources).
  3.  Tweet and Instagram and Snapchat all the time. One way to do this is to get a different academic, distinguished alumni, student or staff member to take on this role each week.
  4. Connect social media to real time events. Use the real time social media channels such as Tweet and Instagram and Snapchat (and I forgot to mention Tumblr).  Use these to follow and stay in touch with exhibitions, events and the student lifecycle.
  5. Communicate to cohort segments via the most ubiquitous platforms such as Facebook. 
  6. Publish the selected work of every studio each semester on the web.
  7. Use a central web page that directs and connects to all of the other digital points of connection.
  8. Forget the corporate branding and get the web graphics right. The best design schools have the best graphics. Change the look every two to three years.
  9. Publish multimedia and rich content on the web: simulations of projects, cartoons, interviews with architects and architectural presentations and guest lectures.
  10. Send out a monthly newsletter to all alumni who want it. Use it as away to get alumni to contact each other.

Too often universities and the managers see a digital platform as a way to market the school rather than as a means to build a culture. Filling web pages with pictures of the brightest looking students and recent graduates doesn’t really do it for me. Too often the managerial class sees regulation and administrative rules as the solution to everything.  As noted in the HBR article by Lindsay McGregor “A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage.” As universities move to, and impose, online modes of teaching it would be a tragedy if  the old ways and culture of the architecture school was erased.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Managing Creative Teams: 5 lessons from the architectural design studio

Managing Creative Teams: 5 lessons from the architectural design studio

Peter Raisbeck

Architectural design studios exist in a highly complex industry sector with multiple stakeholders and numerous financial pressures. Architects must both educate and guide their clients through a highly complex and risky process. For the most part the property and construction industry is one of the most brutal industries that a firm can compete in. This is primarily because most property development and work in the sector is driven by the economics of price competition. Apart from architects, and perhaps interior designers, few other actors in the industry really care about design and design outcomes. Certainly not in the same way, or the same extent, that architects do. As a result the design studio, the team which creates the theories concepts and ideas driving a project, needs to be effectively nurtured and fostered. This team needs to be led in a way that fosters its capabilities to generate ideas but also to ensure that those ideas are robust. It’s no good leading a team in a way that prevents it from producing ideas or generating ideas that are easily diminished as soon as the cost cutters and value managers turn up.

 1. Be Diverse

Of course it goes without saying that gender and ethnic diversity is essential in any creative team. I like teams where everyone is different. Good leadership should be able to harness the difference’s between team members rather than turning difference into conflict. Clone teams are boring for those who work in them and I think clone like teams only ever aspire to mediocre results. Celebrating, fostering and supporting difference, enables a team to produce design knowledge that has the ability to produce a range of options. It also enables a team to critique a design from a multitude of perspectives.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest mistakes architecture students make is to form into groups and teams with their friends. They all live in the same area, or come form the same town or have the same skills. They don’t often realise that once they are in the real world they will work in teams full of strangers and people with diverse expertise and even age groups. One year I tried to change this and I selected the groups in my subject. I got the architects together with the landscape architects in order to do the assessment tasks. The idea was to try and simulate the kind of disciplinary exchanges that take place. The result was high degrees of conflict against me and within the groups. The architecture students resented not being with their friends. The next year I set up a whole lot of group formation exercises in order to facilitate students forming groups with complementary skills. There was less conflict and I thought it was working until I realised, despite my efforts, they had all got into their same old groups with their peer groups. After that I gave up and now my students self select their groups. The problem is that students then dot stay in these groups for the duration of the course poorly performing groups always perform poorly and better groups always do better.

My colleagues at the Parlour web site have written a lot about gender, diversity and equity and it is certainly worth looking at their site. Notions of diversity can of course make a difference to the outcome. A building I am familiar with ended up being mediocre, rather than great, because the culture of the office and the project team that produced it did not actively pursue diverse thinking.

The team itself needs to be diverse. Recruiting clones is fine if you want everyone to agree with you or produce nuances of the same idea. Worse still is a team where everyone has the same skill set or the same way of thinking. Diversity means having people in a team with different skills and ways of perceiving. In architectural teams, or any creative team for that matter, it is really important to have people who can thing in 3 Dimensions; who can think spatially.

2. Form a team culture 

The first 5 minutes of a team meeting are the most important. This is when the culture of the creative team is formed. In these crucial minutes do the team leaders suggest that the culture is collaborative? Do they espouse the highest conceptual and design aspirations for the project? Do they suggest that people in the team can make mistakes and take risks without recrimination? Do they suggest it is important for the team to have a sense of its won identity? Is difference and diversity in the team acknowledged and accepted? Will  contributions be acknowledged and praised? Or is it one of those teams where the slightest  misstep leads to censure and underlying and unspoken criticism.

3. Foster and tolerate ambiguity

The design process is highly ambigous. Often there are no right answers to a given scenario or problem. I think we have all heard or read about wicked problems. For architects, the design outcome is not exactly or precisely prescribed or understood at the beginning of the process. Nor can the design process be described as a logical sequence of precise actions (architectural thought is different to engineering). Moreover, sometimes the team, or some members of the team, might generate or pursue options that seem bizarre or unrealistic. All of the factors tend to mean that their is a high degree of ambiguity in the design decision making process.

It is the role of the team leader to know when to hold open and tolerate the ambiguity and risks of the generative design process and when to conclude various lines of flight. In other words there are times when ambiguity needs to be tolerated in order to pursue new lines of thought or ideas, that do not accord with a prevailing line, that just might be worthwhile. These ideas may not seem immediately instrumental or pragmatic. But they need to be pursued and their possibilities held open as strategic options or design options. A good design leader or architect will lead his team in a way that ensures there is a range of  different options being pursued and considered at any one moment in time. This should be done in a way that is systematic and considered. In contrast, the not so great design leader, creative  or architect will suddenly have a new idea out of the blue and make everyone change the design, or bits of the design, at a whim and usually at an inopportune time.

4. Increase the feedback speed 

Ever wondered what those thousands of interns do at the star architect firms. Well they often produce options and lots of them for any given scheme. I remember seeing thousands of options for the CCTV building in Shanghai at a OMA exhibition in Berlin. For those interested, Optioneering processes have been written about by my colleague Dr. Dominik Holzer and at CIFE at Stanford 

Option generation and then feedback in a team needs to be frank, honest and open. It needs to be delivered without conflict. Teams members need to understand there is no such thing as a dumb question; another common mistake of architecture students is to be afraid to ask dumb questions.  Communication needs to take place in an environment that is supportive. Team members should not feel that there are no wrong answers or a sense of criticism or censure.

Things will of course, and inevitably, do go wrong. the more open the channels of communication within the team the quicker ideas can be generated and problems solved as these ideas are defined. Open communication will also ensure that the connections and linkages needed between each step in the workflow are seamless rather than dysfunctional.

The quicker feedback can be incorporated into the design process and the greater the ability of the team to reiterate processes and provide recursive solutions the more robust the team is. Again one of the great mistakes architecture students make is to produce a design that has never gone through any iterations or its elements have never been explored in a recursive way.

5. Excellence in team leadership is critical

Team leadership is critical in the above mix. Studio leaders and the leaders of creative teams need to support difference, tolerate ambiguity, foster continuous feedback, build a team culture and do things quickly. Strong creative teams well led will produce great ideas. The best teams produce ideas that are well integrated with and closely matched to their project circumstances. As a result, great designs or campaigns are resilient to the travails and sniping of cost cutting, project risks and the mindless search for profits over the value of design.

All of the above are attributes arise out of and are taught in the best architectural design studios. To produce great graduates these attributes must be allowed to flourish in architecture schools.  In the university system, an emphasis on rigid policies and processes over fostering studio culture – or any kind of culture for that matter – loading up staff student ratios and cost cutting has eroded this culture.  I worry that the proponents who dream of a new higher education system, based around technology and virtual reality, are eroding what really counts because it cheaper or faster or better. At the moment I think that what really counts can only be taught face to face and that the architectural studio can teach us a lot about managing high performance in creative teams across many disciplines.