Category: architectural design

When architects fail they usually seem to fail big time. The tabloid media loves to jump on that large, or prestigious, or prominent architectural project that blew the budget, or leaked, or fell down or little fragments of it fell off into someone’s batch brew. I am sure we can all think of something like that. Then of course there are the Foxy news tabloids aligned with the small minded burghers who declare a building is “ugly.”

Of course, not all of these so-called headline failures are the actual fault of the architects. More often than not it is the people driven by the cheaper, faster and crappier mantra who love to blame architects.

For the most part architects spend their life trying not to fail. There is a lot of pressure on architects to get it right. As system integrators, perhaps the pre-eminent system integrators in the AEC industry, we are often too busy connecting, juggling and generally trying to avoid the fails. Think of all of the things we architects need to consider, adjust and integrate: planning, regulations, contracts and the whims of client.

But, one of the things we should remember is the necessity of failure. Architects need failure to innovate and failure is an essential factor in both design, and dare I say it research and development.

Radical design innovation or new design research knowledge, knowledge that questions the status quo, doesn’t come about by playing it safe.

1. Good architects know when to fail.

Designers know when they need to explore the, deliberately bad or ugly and even less optimal option. They know when to be deliberately perverse. They know that by relaxing the process of their own design logic they can produce a design option that is less optimal. They can learn from this. Great architects now when a less optimal design option or design pathway can help the further iteration of the next design option.

There might even be aspects to the deliberately perverse or failed design option that could be salvaged. It might even be really amazing.

2. Beware of architects who never fail.

For these architects, everything is a relentless pursuit of the ‘perfect” solution. This is because everything the bad designer does, every gesture, flourish and design utterance is perfect. These are the sorts of architects who will have you sitting around watching their every flourish of the pencil.

3. Architectural design is not about controlling every step.

Architectural design is not about getting it right all the time. An overt focus on a design logics of correct sequencing and conceptual ideation ultimately leads to boredom. Sure, we all need to think straight as designers, but making that the only goal of the design process leads to a cult of academicism with little room to advance.

By generating failed design solutions, you will have, for comparison and analysis, more elements in that design portfolio part of your brain. The aim is to build a bank, even if it is only tacit info in your own brain. Your design brain should be full of design practices, approaches, methods, norms and concepts.

A less than optimal design approach, design element, or design solution may not be suitable for one project, but could be well suited to another project. It might even prompt a few more ideas.

The kind of failure I am describing, encourages the development of a range of design solutions.

4. Design Research should not always need a “purpose” or be of some instrumental use.

This goes for any type of research actually. But, design research is a risky enterprise. It wouldn’t be research if we already knew the answers or the outcomes. Often as architects we are so intent on making the trade-offs we need to make in the design process that we forget about the notion of disruptive designing.

Sometimes we need to pushback against the clients, the planners, and the contractors. This may mean that we are in a situation where we risk failure. But unless we do this our design research and the resulting innovations may be little more than orthodoxies. The same old same old.

Radical design research and design innovation risks and then manages the potential of failure.

5. If you are always getting it right as a designer then rethink.

Pursuing failure avoids design hubris. There is always the post-rationalization impulse as a designer, the confidence to never admit a mistake, to always have a reason; but you don’t always need a reason.

It’s possible that impeccable design logic, you learnt at that architecture school, may be preventing you from pursuing your design research to its maximum limit. As suggested above, Design logic may actually impede you and tie you up in critical negative knots to the point where you are unable to do anything.

You may just be re-problematizing the same problems. Or worse still, just trying to impress the underlings in your studio.

6. Speculate

• Do a competition.
• Target an area of interest and design a theoretical project.
• Design something totally wacky.
• Try and design a crap project.
• Find a weird location or site and propose something for it.
• Invent a new building type. Or at least try to.
• Deliberately screw up that parametric model.

Paradoxically, pursuing design failure means that architects will fail less. It means we are pushing back, testing the limits and boundaries of our discipline. It might give your practice an edge in the future. It means that the design knowledge we produce is not simply packaged up and then commoditized. Instead it is knowledge whose limits and effectiveness has been tested with the blow torch of failure.

A few years back I was invited to do a poster, so I made a kind of comic which I then turned into a larger collaged piece within a frame. Given my total, and in some ways perverse, avoidance of digital skills I have always been more comfortable creating with photocopied images from books using crude collage techniques. My brain is a library of all the images and memories of architecture I have consumed in life. Some of these are in the Gloop narrative.

When I produced the Gloop collage it had been quite some time since I had actually done anything creative. This was because in some ways being creative was beaten out of me at architecture school. Firstly, I wasn’t good looking or charming or genteel enough to get a High Distinction for my architecture thesis. The High Distinction in my year went to the taller, good looking architect, who then went to the east coast graduate school. I was pretty annoyed that my tutors gave him an extra two weeks to do his work. Arguably, my special brand of thesis craziness, evidence by my drawings, was never going to get the big mark. But nonetheless, it certainly wasn’t a level playing field and that is probably why to this day I feel that studio jury and moderation processes in architecture schools need to be absolutely transparent and fair. The masculine clubs, networks and pedigrees that seem to confer design authority on some and not others has always repulsed me.

Architecture Thesis 1986: Federal Court of Australia 

When I did my Masters of Design after my Bachelor of Architecture I tried to design a few things but was beaten down by the tutors whose idea of architecture was so precious, and dare I say it anal, that every fucking line had to be argued and justified. I certainly didn’t think that designing was about drawing the same line over and over again, until you break out into a sweat,  and then finally, and inexorably, draw an oblique line; or get some banal insight into a typological context or history that propels you to draw more of the same lines again. Or worse still, draw the lines over and over again, waiting around for some second-rate “Master” or auteur to tell you what to do when they get back from the client meeting.

Even when I was in practice there were only a few things I felt I had actually designed. Mostly, these were competitions which were always won by the usual suspects, and lists of big networked firms, who had lots of infrastructure and staff. Everyone else seemed to win these except for our practice. Well thats how it felt at the time. We did about four or five competitions over about  2 years and no-one who mattered really took much notice. Doing these competitions killed the practice because of the resources they depleted.

None of our competitions were published and I had to grovel to get a sessional teaching job from the local overseas implanted head of the architecture school. The comic aesthetic didn’t really help. Nor, did it help that we weren’t in the boys club of that time. I drove cabs and my partner did planning gigs. Although, during this time in practice I did manage to design one thing that still exists today and I was relatively happy with. Even though the client wanted to sue me. After a while I ended up leaving architecture. I was so sick of it and the lack of opportunity and generosity and the clubbiness.

Nowadays, I really think we, all of us in the cult and discourse architecture, need to encourage small practices and emerging architects. We need more competitions, we need more enlightened larger clients who take risks with smaller practices and we need larger firms to mentor smaller firms. We need more mentoring and authentic career pathways in architecture. We need professional associations that actively foster and mentor small young practices. We need more inclusiveness. We need exhibitions that show what emerging prcatices are doing. We need to save and archive the outputs of the studios led by young and emerging architects. We need to look after each other.

By the time I did the Gloop collage I had come back to the fold of architecture. It was probably the first creative thing that I had done for many years. I did the collage in the space of two days. The collage and the images quickly came tumbling out. In my conceit, I felt like Ranier Maria Rilke at Dunio near Trieste when he wrote Duino Elegies, after not writing any poetry for a long time. Maybe, I should change my name to, or name my next child, Rilke Raisbeck.

But the real point of this is that it doesn’t matter how unksilled or messy we feel we might be as architects. As architects, we are all struggling in systems, or contexts, that do not seem to value our efforts. Despite my bloggy cynicisms, I think that even when we are unable to design or build, or we lose the competitions, or we go bankrupt, or the clients want to sue us, or we are discriminated against, we should never let go of our own ideas or sacrifice our continued learning and development as architects.

I hope you enjoy the story of the Gloop.