Australian Architecture – Peter Raisbeck: surviving the design studio

The Final Act of the Lacrosse Building Opera

September 9, 2019Peter Raisbeck

Lacrosse the Opera

When something catastrophic goes wrong, there are usually smaller incremental events leading up to the devastating event. However, the aggregation of small events may point to systemic problems.

The current Australian architectural landscape continues to be turmoil. One component of this turmoil is the result of the VCAT determination regarding the Lacrosse building. Even the state Premier Daniel Andrews has been talking about it.

For smaller practitioners, as a result of the flammable cladding issue, PI premiums may rise 20-30%. Many of these small practitioners would only dream of the $3.9 Million in fees, as stated in the VCAT report, that the architects signed up for in June 2007 on Lacrosse. For larger practices who are carrying more risk, it could be even more.

It’s incredible that when Jean-Francois went to have a smoke on a balcony, that he would set in train a series of events, that would have long-lasting ramifications for Australian architects.

VCAT, Predator and Bucky’s Tensegrity.

As the VCAT report notes, this was around 7 and half years after the first design meeting concerning the Lacrosse project was held on May 2007. As the VCAT ruling states the architect:

“described the design intent at around this time as comprising two towers with a futuristic visual appeal incorporating design features such as tensegrity screens. The intention was that the buildings have “a focus on technology” and to be perceived as being buildings for the future.“

In the architects Lacrosse media kit, (if still available online) the architects describe the influences that shaped the scheme:

“influences as diverse as Predator, ancient urban design, origami and the natural world could come together to create this response, but like all of our projects, the answer lies with process rather than design.”

Lot’s of great concepts in the above quote and to think all these things are integrated with the process. The practice responsible for the scheme emerged from a particular scene and context centred on RMIT Architecture school in the early 2000s. What else could there except concepts and process. You undoubtedly didn’t need theory. This was a social milieux that in architectural terms combined a fashionable social elitism with sound-byte concepts and digital techniques.

Getting it on with the Developers.

The architects of Lacrosse were selected to exhibit their work at Venice in the 2008 Abundant Exhibition. Around this time there were quite a few articles by notable architectural critics, in the Australian Architectural press about the Lacrosse architects. Only a very few critics, in these predominantly puff pieces, made an effort to assess this work in relation to critical theory or any sense of ambivalence. Most critics seemed to praise the architect’s engagement with developers and celebrated the architectural language of the architect’s facades in several projects. After all, it was all about the facade.

If architects couldn’t do much else, because of developer constraints, at least they could do the facades. Right? This was conceptual architecture with a capital C. Architecture formed in the furnace of a seemingly talented, fashionable and pedigreed circle. The facade concepts of this architecture would shine through the developer and contractor dross. Architects were now going to serve up a shit load of funky facade architecture to the developers. Architects were going to force-feed the developers with architectural ideas and concepts and black polo-necked glamour. In one interview in Architecture Australia, the architects of Lacrosse stated that:

“our architecture is read in the round. The effect of the building as one moves through it, as one walks around it, is composited and layered. It is not a hero shot, it is cinematic architecture.”

A Visit to Lacrosse

Yet, when we cross the railyards over Latrobe street Melbourne and look at the Lacrosse building, it seems more like it has been designed as four elevations. Plus, I am clueless as I don’t really get the whole predator thing. There is a bit of shape to the plan, particularly at the south end with an extruded curve a pattern of randomly placed windows that suggested some kind of architectural artifice. The gap between the East and West slabs doesn’t look like a ravine, or an ancient urban design (inspired by that Northern Summer trip to Petra?). These slabs look more like an effort to cram two slab blocks together and get as many units in. Of course, the architect has typically no choice but to maximise the number of units.

This two slab plan has been extruded and placed onto a black podium. And maybe that is the “Predator” bit. As a compositional or tectonic unit, the podium has been butchered by various pragmatic additions. It’s hard to know which of these bits are either intentional or unintentional or added later.

The idea of triangular tensegrity is I think far removed from Buckminster Fuller’s original tensegrity concept. The tensegrity screen, if we can call it that, is little more than a hollow decoration, an additive melange of aluminium and mesh that veils what is underneath a pretty ordinary building. I am not sure what Buckminster Fuller would think of this.

Some of these parts of the tensegrity screen simply collide landing at the endpoints of balconies and vertical panels. There is no elegance in the construction detailing. Being ignorant of such matter, I have no idea how the screen works in terms of sun-shading or heat loading. There is no sense in any way that the triangular screens may have interacted or given some sense of meagre humanity to the inhabitants of this building. When Jean-Francois went out for a fag if he was looking at the tensegrity screen, he probably didn’t have an architectural epiphany.

I love architectural irony because, in situations like this, it can help save the architect and turn a bad situation into a better one. But, there is no sense of irony in the use of the materials in this developer-driven context. There is no joyous sense of craft when one material meets another. There is not even the most limited sense of material play with different light, shade, texture, construction jointing or colour. I don’t want to start sounding like some kind of Carlo Scarpa inspired sap here. There is no struggle with how these materials might be bought together and might work in any kind of light. This is a kit of product-parts-approach strung together in the hope the marketers will get the job done and sell the product.

Given the location of the building as it faces back to the grid of the city, the opportunity to mirror and comment on that grid is lost, this façade just looks at us blankly as we walk over the Latrobe street bridge. It’s like the building is saying there is nothing to see here, so just move along.

When I look at Lacrosse now, I wonder what went wrong with all the glistening hope and ambition of the fashionable scene and milieux that gave birth to it. The idea that architects could have concepts, mix it up with developers, and do something. Perhaps, the fire exemplifies the broader failure of a particular kind of architectural culture. This is the failure of a system to engage with the necessity of creating an authentic public language of architecture.

Where did it all go so wrong?

I never want to sound overly strident in my observations, but how did, we as architects, sacrifice our sense of materials? When did we debate all of this loss, this loss of control over construction technique? When did we debate or theorise this not seeing, this blindness in the gap between the money, developers and the aesthetics of architecture?

What we see here is the result of a socio-cultural system that produces, not merely a specific building failure. But also a systems crash of architectural production in relation to architectural theory, aesthetic knowledge, patronage, publication and provincial celebrity. We can hardly blame the architects of this building for all of that.

When will architects stop seeing the vacuity of conceptual spin, stop seeing the ways to use materials is more than just product deployment and smeared on curtain wall systems. Hey, hit me up with some more super tall CTBUH Carbon monuments.

If I had the opportunity to write the Lacrosse opera, I would call it The Jean-Francois balcony smoking scene, would be the final act of an opera centred on architectural vanity and hubris. We are all responsible for that and perhaps we should not be too harsh in our blame.

Surviving the Design Studio: Why are architects so fucking serious?

October 2, 2018Peter Raisbeck

I went to an advertising function a few days ago, the Moet was flowing amongst the producers, copywriters and account service people I ran into an ex-architect now working in advertising and he looked me in the eye and exclaimed: why are architects in Melbourne so fucking serious? Good point I thought, and I had to agree as the verbal case was laid out over the champagne. And my agreeance, was not merely politeness because this claim struck me as the truth. So, I thought given the amount of auto-ethnography I had done concerning architects in Melbourne, in one way or another, I thought I would accept the claim and then try and develop a theoretical model around it.

Melbourne Architecture is probably the epi-centre of architectural seriousness. I guess I can’t talk about Sydney but maybe the model developed below can also be generalised to encompass other places.

Serious Architectural Insects

The first lot of serious architectural insects I met were at the tail end of the early seventies mud-brick, alternative living, roll your own spliff movement. This time was a kind of cross between the post 68 countercultures, Alastair Knox’s mud-brick houses and the Sunbury rock festival. It was a kind of blues and roots and Whitlam thang. Everyone hated Malcolm Fraser. My shared house flatmates got busted for growing marijuana. At Archi school we had self-assessment, my first project was a long essay on alternative energy sources, my second I learnt how to design in the style of MLTW’s sea-ranch (think, planimetric chamfers). At archi-school our orientation camp was at a monastery where a guy played the bongos and as I listened my head span around and around and mesmerised by the sound I vomited. It was a serious vomit and set the tone for the rest of my architectural education.

No need to shed tears of nostalgia for this long lost era. Funnily enough, I think a lot of it is now back in fashion, and the common denominator is and has always been, the seriousness. For the earnest or humanistic architect, the architect without irony wanting to do good in the world, the seriousness is a natural state of being. However, this too often masks a desire for economic gain or a proclamation of egocentric vanity. For seriousness, the parametric architects are the worst and take the cake. Since when was coding a computer to make Bucky Fuller like domes, and their squishy variants, ever considered to be in any way fantastic.

The cult of the seriousness tars even those Australian architects who appear, on the surface at least, to pursue irony and absurdity. Just have a look at the northern end of Swanston Street in Melbourne. An entire block of very very serious architecture and perhaps it would have been better if WB looked happier. Nowadays all the universities are getting into their very own Archi-serious capital works programs. The serious architectural sensibility too often about branding of one kind or another; the branded pomposity of neoliberal and market-driven clients.

And surely the absurd gymnastics of super serious architecture without whimsy is a terrible and empty thing to behold. Paradoxically, architectural seriousness has always had its darker hues. All this seriousness is serious. But what would I know as I am really really serious too?

But hey these days you would be fooled into thinking seriousness never really exists. This situation is the case if you looked at architects and social media, it all seems light and fluffy, and oh so we don’t need theory we are just doing what we do. Little arches, trellises and meshes. However, even this frivolity seems too serious especially when it is aligned with the torrent of nostalgia around the history of Melbourne architecture. This is too often a history all about the cute little 1950s housing boxes; Boyd in all his Brahmin caste politeness; the sanitised and domestic machines of the Small Homes Service; the little follies and gems of architecture recycled as serious doodoos. In Melbourne, there were lots of serious insect architects in the 1950s: Neil Clerehan, John Mockridge, James Earle, David McGlashan, Peter Jorgenson, Ken Hardcastle, Geoffrey Woodfall, Peter Burns and David Godsell. In posh Toorak, there was Guilford Bell, Rosenthal and Holgar and Holgar. Hit me up with a bit of Mid-Century Modern nostalgia insulin.

So what is the unhappy dynamic driving this seriousness and what is its pathology? Below are a few thoughts towards developing an all too slight model that might explain all of this architectural seriousness.

Insularity

Insularity the idea that nothing exists outside of the autonomous culture of architecture is the first factor. The realm and boundaries of this culture are strictly reinforced. A larger scale of geography often determines the insularity. For example, a Melbourne School or a Sydney school. However, other factors may define the boundaries of each of the clubs, clans tribes and influence networks that each city has; different ideological and theoretical ideas formed at architecture school, and even at secondary schools, may also determine these different clubs and clans and sets within the larger geographic realm.

Jargon

A peculiar language often emerges in the different architectural tribes. The utterances, aphorisms and codes often emanating from these groups often constitutes a private language. As someone remarked to me if you met these people at the dinner table, it’s difficult for an outsider to understand the lingo. Within each group, this language might evolve a little over time. Rarely is there any thought that this way of speaking might be a real bore at dinner.

The group’s jargonistic expressions will ensure that its central tenets will remain stable over time. To the initiated, some of these words and sayings seem to have magical and talismanic powers. To the outsider, this private language is instead of explicit communication and plain English. As many architectural websites attest to plain English is not often pursued. To the outsider. Let alone the client, and this results in an impenetrable language that can only be deciphered if you are in the favoured circle.

Abstract Language

A key feature of seriousness is a verbal language of abstraction based on logic. As if to say, either reasoning and abstraction confer authority (I prefer the ravings of Artaud any day). Eisenman was good at this as was Colin Rowe and perhaps this way of speaking has its sources in the late 1980s and early days of the American architectural journal Assemblage. In any case, any of the Architectural engagement with continental philosophy since the 1970s has not helped this. Anyone reading this who may have heard Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari’s translator, speak about architecture should know this.

Pecking Order

Within the circle of seriousness, the pecking usually determines who has the most power over language. Many architects will be familiar with the traits of these orders. Pecking orders are primarily determined by pedigree. Class, school of origin, architecture school, or whom you did studios with and the office you may have worked for. Alpha males win out most of the time in these orders. Having independent wealth may also help. Combine both of these attributes and will do better than most. Architects are fascinated by genealogies: Who worked for whom, who can trace their family tree back to a master or a heroic figure. Even I have claims to tracing myself back to Robin Boyd. Ridiculous, I know.

Deification

Within this system, some are architects, or deities, are bestowed with power. This endowment may or may not translate into commissions or a legacy in the canon. Usually, only men are deified, and they can then determine who the enemies are. There are always perceived enemies in the cult of seriousness, and the idolised gods have a number of tactics to relegate you to the enemy camp. We have all be written off by those helicoptered in well-pedigreed leaders who only recognise their own kind. That’s how architecture works I guess.

Maybe the above is because the notion of the enemy has a long history in the creation of modernist architectural history. From CIAM onwards there was always an enemy for modern architects to fight against. Across the globe, in the provincial market-towns of architectural culture making and remaking enemies is a constant sport.

Lack of Fluidity

In this ecosystem of seriousness, architectural experiment and the fluidity that goes with it is often abandoned. This move is in order to maintain power. Creating design knowledge is secondary and expanding the stock of architectural knowledge is secondary to maintaining a status quo. In other words, all of the above, all this seriousness, is not there to enhance the discipline or to create new knowledge and promote an engaged discourse or think about architecture as an evolving and dynamic field of expertise. No, architectural design is posed as something to defend, an inviolable territory of privilege. This defensiveness is, for the most part, a ruse to maintain and enforce power in whatever local architectural culture that power is claimed and employed.

Masculinity

All of these processes emphasise norms of masculinity within the profession. The single architectural voice with all of its mystifications, contrariness, rationalisations and self-importance has no interest in more fluid notions of identity.

This gendered voice seeks influence, authority, power and sometimes a pathetic kind of social notoriety and deification. This voice continually seeks to prescribe and fix its own identity. Perhaps, we have all wanted to be there and have saught this. In contrast, collective notions of design, or architectural theory, that questions fixed identities is belittled or relegated. Consequently, the design process itself is ring-fenced and quarantined in a way that always links it to fixed architectural identities. As a result intersectionality and its attendant approaches are never something that comes into play. Any suggestion by anyone that points out the jargon, mystifications, influence, and deification that result in this seriousness is overlooked and at worse silenced.

The paradox is that architectural whimsy, a lightness of being, has a more significant potential for emotional and political nuance than the strictures of seriousness. And I don’t mean a whimsy devoid of politics. Perhaps all we can hope for an architectural culture that embraces a collective lightness and openness, as much as any other sentiment. But hey, who am I to talk when I am also so serious. But anything is better than vainglorious seriousness and insane pomposity that characterises much of the profession. Architecture as a genuinely collective endeavour and a contested field of knowledge deserves more.

Due to work commitments, I have not been able to get the blog out as much as I would like. I did manage to get to ARCOM in Belfast, and my co-author Loren Adams and we won a prize for the most innovative paper! Read it here if you dare. However, more about that in later blogs. For those of you in my own special identity cult don’t worry too much: I am alive, but only just.

Always a bit crap: The Repair exhibit in the Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale.

August 3, 2018August 3, 2018Peter Raisbeck

There is so much at stake in this year’s Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale that it is really hard to know where to start. What is at stake here is the question of how Australian architecture represents itself to the world. Maybe I am overthinking it, and perhaps the glittering spectacle that is the Architecture Biennale shouldn’t mean so much. And I don’t mean to sound overtly nationalistic — which seems to be a profoundly unfashionable position to some — even as the project of globalism in architecture, is fading and facing a period of uncertainty. But to ask this question, of how a nation-state like Australia with all its layers of race, gender, class and professional apparatus represents its architecture in a global forum is I think necessary.

The concept for the Australian Pavilion is Repair. You can read a bit about it here.

Indeed, the manifesto of Freespace ably curated by Farrell and McNamara in this 2018 Biennale certainly points to the cracks in considering architecture as a global system of centres, peripheries, pedigrees and stars. A great thing about Freespace as a theme and the manifesto that goes with it its focus on the regional and local architectural practices. It is by and large a celebration of the enmeshing of architects with both modernity but also local communities, cultures and the traces of the morphologies of settlements. Such sentiments are aptly conveyed in the Japanese, French and Spanish exhibits.

This all very nice, and this will sound like a kind of spoiler alert: in this age of blandish boosterism and uncritical praise anything even slightly critical risks danger and the silence of the bland boosters and Instagram influencers of contemporary architecture.

The primary criticism of past Australian architecture Biennale’s has been that the official curated theme of the Biennale is always set after the curators for the Australian pavilion have been selected. This time appears to be different, and the curators seem to have connected to the Biennale’s Freespace theme

Always a bit crap

Nevertheless, as a friend said, the Australian architectural exhibits are always a bit crap. And after visiting this year’s Biennale, my first reaction was yep that’s right.

The Australian Pavilions are always a bit crap, and we could blame the committee structure that seems to exist to promote mediocrity, the Australia Council, the AIA, and of course the usual coterie of pedigreed and “representative” curators. There have been some spectacular failures in this selection process in the past. Why Justine Clarke and Rory Hyde never got their gig a few tears back points to the mediocrity and perhaps small minded political treachery of the selection process. Look, I don’t really know but this is what I suspect. Mostly, the efforts have been mediocre and there have been few stinkers. For some people, like my anonymous friend, this year will seem no different to previous years.

Sometimes it’s easy to see how and why a car crashes. In this particular car crash, it’s hard to know at what point the entire exhibition started to drift off. The sentiments underlining it a fine. The central conceptual idea of Repair, in theory at least is well-meaning, but then it seems to go all wrong. It’s like none of the bits of this exhibition connects or come together as a whole. This is not to say that I want my exhibitions to be big and larger than life themes (for example the British exhibit with its theme of Island). Nor do I expect there is anything wrong with presenting fragments. But in this instance, each fragment seems isolated, and it’s difficult to make the interpretive connection between the different parts of the exhibit.

The Pavilion

The new Australian pavilion seems to be better this time I visited it. It is certainly a building that is not kicking us in the head with some kind of spat out chewing gum masticated and parametric forms. Sure, it’s a little conservative and neat, but it is undoubtedly a vast improvement on the previous pavilion with its monomaniacal focus on all things shed. I think we can all be glad that our collective shame has been erased with its demolition.

The grass is dying

Yes, the western grassland plants in the exhibit are dying, and no one really knows what this means. Were they intended to die or not? Nonetheless, this is the great sorrow of this exhibit.

Yet, what saves this pavilion are the grasslands themselves. That was a brilliant idea. Their materiality is palpable and as one person said to me it was great to see the spiders crawling over these plants. I don’t know the back story, but I fear that the ambitions of the curators may have been foiled by committee structure and then difficulties of procurement in Italy. A country not known for the efficiency and rationality of its logistical supply chains. To be more generous this was a dangerous experiment which like all such endeavours needed to be perfected and refined. Dealing with anything living is bound to be a problem.

The associated projects

Aside from the grasslands, there are fifteen or sixteen (is it eleven?) architectural projects are featured in this mélange. There eleven projects represented in the entire show are ok. But you wouldn’t think they were even a part of what is exhibited in the pavilion. I stumbled across them in the broadsheet catalogue and apparently each one has its own video. But in the pavilion, annoyingly, you have to wait a long time to see them. It would have been better if the projects were presented in different media. Anything else would have been better. As it is not clear that they are a part of the exhibit at all.

The one movie I saw projected in the space was execrable. An unfortunate combination of interpretative dance, cult yoga pants in a building that looked like an Australian brown brick version of a Jodorowsky set. It was actually the Featherston House (I feel we have now reached peak Boyd) and it all looked a bit too much like people doing River Dance. I presume the other films were better.

By and large, these ancillary projects — and I am not sure if they are meant to be only incidental — do appear to pursue the notion of Repair. Most seem to proclaim their heart on the sleeve greenness and naïve ecological goodness. Of the 15 in the broadsheet, I think three do not deserve to be there. They seem gratuitous and connect nothing, and even detract from, the concept of Repair.

Curatorial Approach

The curators try and bring all of this home by arguing for a transdisciplinary approach regarding architectural practice one that encompasses a broader range of practice the curators argue that:

We don’t have any definitive solutions, but believe there is a role for architecture to actively engage with the repair of the places it is part of, the soil, hydrology, habitat, connections, overland water flow, microorganisms, vegetation and so on, and that this type of repair is critical to enacting other wider types of social, economic and cultural repair.

Consequently, the broader team supporting the curators is impressive: includes architect Paul Memmott, landscape architect Chris Sawyer, landscape architect and urban designer Tim O’Loan, ecologist David Freudenberger, curatorial advisor Catherine Murphy, architect Lance van Maanen and a graduate of architecture Jonathan Ware.

Yes, transdisciplinary knowledge and its practices are mainly lacking in Australian architectural research, strategy organisational practice and design. Landscape architects and urbanists would claim that the ideas presented in this exhibit, are not new, and already form the theoretical background of landscape architecture in Australia and elsewhere. Of course architects, research academics (including myself) love to pay lip service to and generate spin around transdisciplinary ideals. But these days it is not the transdisciplinary architects, or architectural researchers, who are getting the commissions or research funds or all of the research metrics. Design research that most transdisciplinary of practices is still a second-class citizen in many forums.

So, from this perspective the aspirations of the curators are admirable. But paradoxically, the misplaced outcomes of this exhibit suggest how much further architects need to go in pursuing transdisciplinarity as real practice.

The next one

As for me well I am already thinking about the next one. This time I am going to put a pitch in for the gig. I have an idea for a team of architectural misfits. I even have a concept in mind. The space needs to be filled again with the craziness that is the best of Australian architecture. Tight-lipped and po-faced conceptual pieces need to be banished forever (as well as the bad curator portraits that go with them). No more bad conceptual abstractions that can only be used with difficulty. Plus, the interpretive material really needs to be of a better standard. It’s just rude to make visitors guess, WTF or what on earth, is going on.

I really love the grasslands

I love them because they speak to a lost landscape and country, they make of the other 71 curated exhibitors by the Farrell and McNamara look like earnest, well-meaning self-congratulatory bores. But these grasslands are really different to the self-congratulatory patter of Farrell and McNamara’s presentation of the regional practices of Europe. These wilting and dying grasslands with their ridiculous felt containers point to the need for architects to theorise a new relationship between natural history, ecology and immanent notions of cultural landscapes. Whilst, the idea of Repair, does have much in common with the Freespace manifesto the grasslands themselves point to the triviality of thinking Architecture is all about the cultures and histories of the European City.

Species death

The idea of using the grasslands could have been great. But I think it was hampered by the conceptual regime of Repair combined with the worst techniques and artifices of an abstract curatorial method. I shudder to think of the “Repair” ideas workshop: “hey, what do we mean by Repair” and “let’s try and really understand it deeply” etc etc. Unfortunately, and too often abstraction and conceptual artifice are somehow seen as being cool. In this case, I feel this worked against the material and the animistic and cultural presence of the grasslands. In response, all these species could do was die.

Seeing the grasslands dying in the pavilion in Venice reminded me of this story of horror. There is a monument in Reading cemetery for a Wotjobaluk boy, who came from the beautifully crafted and managed lands of the Wimmera. He lost his mother and drifted to the muddy metropolis of Melbourne, where he was adopted by an Anglican cleric from Reading and ended up in England where he died in 1852.

The grasslands in this pavilion reminded me of that story, and I think the great moment in the exhibition are the missing indigenous names for these plants. Its subtle and the curators don’t hit you in the face with it. But who knows if they meant to do that or not? After all, what can you do after a genocide, after a crime of crimes, and crimes of extinction? Yes, the curators seem to be saying: we seek to Repair what we will, and we will never mention the horror. Let’s wash it all clean with some new green. For me, and others may disagree, this position is so lacking in rage that it points to an underlying and empty politics.

Yes, the grasslands are the real stars of this exhibit. Their seeds have been dislocated and nurtured, but now they are dying. Spiders are crawling over the grass in a far country. The grasslands, for those who wish to listen to them deeply, are a different kind of city which cannot be ignored. But that lost city has nothing to do with the notion of Repair.

Boom times but Australian Architects still facing Mutually Assured Destruction

June 22, 2018Peter Raisbeck

Shaun Carter’s recent piece on architects fees and money is something I think everyone should read. You can find the full article here at ArchitetcureAU. Shaun is a past president of the NSW Institute of Architects Chapter. I thought it would be worth commenting on some of the questions and issues that he raises. Everyone architect in the country should read this article.

The old joke

He starts with an old blokey architects joke.

Did you hear the one about the architect who won the lottery? They kept on working until they were broke. This was my introduction to architecture. I thought it was a joke. Now I’m not so sure.

This was a fine joke thirty years ago. It has a little bit of the boom-bust mentality about it. Plus a tone of altruism. In other words, architects get money and then spend it on architecture. They get money and spend it on design hours. They do this because of a love and passion for architecture and society. But as a joke it implies architects always go back to zero, or square one, when they go broke.

The usual catastrophe

However, while the joke might contain some sublte truths, the problem is as that architects don’t just go broke to the point of zero dollars. They go negative, and the financial and emotional toll on themselves their families and their profession is enormous. No adequate superannuation, no assets no worth in their small businesses when they retire, its worse I guess for employee architects who are inadequately prepared for their later years. Working from contract to contract, below award wages, no paid overtime, moving from poorly managed firm to poorly managed firm isn’t really a recipe once you are past 50 or 60 for a comfortable grey life.

Exploiting the talent

Last week a graduate came to me and said he had been offered a casual job at 17 bucks on a kind of “training” basis. Anyone reading this can look up the award. Sometimes I wonder if one of the best things that could happen to the profession is that the Fair Work commission starts to prosecute architectural employers for not paying award rates. Under the award, a graduate architect on a casual rate should get $31.09 an hour and if full time or part-time. $24.87.

The Scourge of Fee Cutting

However, as Shaun says the real problem is price competition and fee cutting:

I talk to architects all the time and in almost every conversation hear stories of outrageously low fees and cutthroat fee gazundering. Economics 101 taught me that when a good or a service is in high demand and the supply is limited, the cost goes up. So why is it, then, in this boom time for architects, that we have managed to slash our fees in a desperate race to the bottom? He then goes on to say: If we are to achieve major reforms and be respected as a profession, we need to be not only financially viable, but financially successful. Otherwise, how are we to achieve gender equality? How do we stop our practices becoming sweatshops of juniors working long and late hours?

Shaun Carter proposes four areas where he feels that architects need to change. These are architects, clients, regulation and cheap overseas labour (WTF?).

Idolising the creepy architects

Shaun argues that architects need to be better at business and that being poor at it is “just plain dumb.” I agree with this but to change this architects really need to shift their culture around. As architects, we have to stop idolising and revering “bad boy” designers. These guys are mostly creeps and yet they are the ones that get all the symbolic capital in our profession. Plus they know nothing about business or management. Or for that matter anything really. But hey does it matter when you get all the street cred.

Sludge

However, he argues that architects need to collectively bargain minimum rates of fees and architects need a “strict ethical and moral code to prevent rogue architects from damaging our profession.” Fair enough, but try telling that to the AIA which as an organisation appears to have governance and decision making processes that are slow bureaucratic and easily hi-jacked by ego-driven personalities. Witness the recent hoohaa around the AACA vs. the AIA. Hence reaching any consensus that might translate into policy or advocacy approaches for architects is like wading through sludge.

Going for the Mandate

Carter calls for minimum fee guidelines for the entire profession. He argues that governments should then follow these guides as well. However, I am not entirely sure how this might work in practice, and I am concerned in legal terms it might be seen as being anti-competitive. But hey if you are starting a practice, it would be great to get an idea of what you should be charging. I think one thing that all of our professional groups and associations could get behind is the idea (suggested to me by Vanessa Bird previous president of the Victorian Chapter). This is the idea that it should be mandated that every building project in Australia, over a certain amount, should have an architect. I am not sure how this kind of regulation would work in detail. But as Shaun Carter argues:

Regulation has been a dirty word these past 30 years of neoliberal and trickle-down economics. What we know of this period is that the failed economic model has advantaged the few at the expense of the many. Economic literature has thoroughly documented the failure of loose and limited regulation and the way this has run down professions and reputations.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Shaun’s third notion for saving the profession from the “existential cliff” and “Mutually Assured Destruction” as he calls it is to limit university places in architecture degrees linking this to the outsourcing of architectural work offshore. As he says:

“If the profession is going to send our future architects’ jobs offshore, then let’s stop the cruel practice of offering them meaningful employment with one hand and ripping it from them with the other.”

He then goes on to say:

Perhaps the most controversial reason for the erosion of fees is firms employing cheap overseas labour to undercut the market. I believe that this is the emperor’s new clothes of business school management. It drives down fee expectations that will be difficult to claw back, while limiting employment opportunities for our young architects because their jobs are being sent overseas, all at a time when we are enrolling and graduating architects at record rates.

Protectionism?

I am not sure about this line of argument because it starts to sound a little “protectionist” and raising the spectre of “cheap overseas labour” suggests stereotyped images of what that labour looks like. Think, call centres full of Revit CAD monkeys in large second-order centres full in South, South East or North Asia. Nonetheless, I certainly dont think that Shaun Carter is intending to cross the lines into Trump Tariff and Immigration territory. But really what is being suggested here does raise questions about some of the current dynamics in practice. This includes the globalisation of competition between architects and the commodification of architectural services with the rise of new technologies. Despite all the BIM hoopla are we really ahead of the technology game?

Too many at Architecture School?

As for the numbers of architecture students in the Universities and how many graduates are produced in Australia I might leave that to a later blog. But needless to say in 2015, the universities made $225 million bucks out of architecture (Check that out here). I also doubt that very much of that goes back into research of direct benefit to the profession. On the plus side, the Architecture Schools do support the professions with lots of sessional teaching contracts. However, is that enough given how much money the Universities are making out of architecture? For Australian Universities, Architecture Schools are a valuable cash cow. However, Architecture Schools are by no means the largest of their international education cash cows. The universities also love architects, and they love architecture schools because it all adds to their branding, reputation status and symbolic capital.

However, I don’t see many of the 18 schools of Architecture joining these debates about the value of the profession and its worth. Most architecture schools and faculties are struggling to manage the strictures imposed on them by central university executives who think that having an architecture school, in the portfolio, is a bit valuable and kind of quaint. If that is the case, maybe those same executives can give architecture some more research money.

We are family

To overcome the malaise that architects find themselves in the architecture schools, the professional associations, and the AACA need to lobby for the worth of architecture collectively. A fragmented and ungovernable architectural community will not solve the problems architects face. As Shaun Carter argues fee cutting is a recipe for Mutually Assured Destruction.

I am almost on annual leave between semesters. In the next few weeks expect to see a few more relaxed beach blogs and tweets from Italy and the Biennale. If you want to know more about our RASP research project you can find it here.

Rising and Falling Stars: Australian vs. Global architectural firms

May 23, 2018May 23, 2018Peter Raisbeck

This last week or so at my graduate school of architecture the students were lining up for selfies with Bjarke when he came as a part of the Beulah International competition. It was quite a commotion. Initially, I wanted to puke, there was a lot of black, and I mean a lot. Black tees, black jackets and black horn-rimmed glasses. Everyone looked liked gangsters on a Eurovision set. Most people who read this blog know how jealous I am of Bjarke’s hairstyle.

After my initial revulsion, I calmed down and realised that Bjarke was here for the Beulah International competition to design a mixed-use high rise complex on Southbank in my City of Melbourne. For Beulah quite a few of the local firms got together with the stars.

Beulah Competition: The Local-Star Match-Ups

Bjarke Ingels Group with Fender Katsalidis Architects
Coop Himmelblau with Architectus
Mad Architects with Elenberg Fraser
MVRDV with Woods Bagot
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Conrad Gargett
UN Studio with Cox Architecture

In December the South Australian government announced the shortlist for the Adelaide Contemporary Art gallery. This list was as follows:

Adjaye Associates (UK) and BVN with Steensen Varming, McGregor Coxall, Barbara Flynn and Yvonne Koolmatrie
Bjarke Ingels Group (Denmark) and JPE Design Studio with United Natures, Arketype and BuildSurv
David Chipperfield Architects (UK) and SJB Architects with Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture and Arup
Diller Scofidio and Renfro (USA) and Woods Bagot with Oculus, Pentagram, Katnich Dodd, Rider Levett Bucknall, Arup, WSP, Deloitte, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Klynton Wanganeen, James Sanders, Dustin Yellin, Right Angle Studio and Garry Stewart
Hassell and SO-IL (USA) with Fabio Ongarato Design, Mosbach Paysagistes and Fiona Hall
Khai Liew, Office of Ryue Nishizawa (Japan) and Durbach Block Jaggers (Australia) with Masako Yamazaki, Mark Richardson, Arup and Irma Boom

Rant Free Zone

Firstly, I will try and avoid a rant about how much I hate the star system and the paucity of risk-taking on the part of our institutional decision makers. Yes, it was great to see some emerging practices and voices in the Adelaide lineups and a focus on indigenous narratives for some of these teams. As time goes on, I think this focus will increasingly have to be a consideration for public commissions. But what does the overall inclusion of so many stars say about architecture in Australia? Have we lost our nerve?

Local Grunt with Super Star Strategy

In strategic terms what do these collaborations say about global competition, competitive advantage and the branding of architects in Australia and Australian architecture as a brand across the globe.

What struck me was that there is no single stand-alone Australian architect in this bunch. In both of these competitions, the short-listed firms are Australian architects aligned with the so-called star architects. Now far be it for me to preach some kind of little Aussie battler nationalist bias. But it is nonetheless vital to ask a few more questions about this situation:

As a strategy is it wise for local architectural firms in Australia to collaborate with these so-called stars architects? The old aphorism is that the local partner brings along well needed local expertise and on the ground knowledge. In other words, the international star designs and the local, seemingly domestic, partner implements.

Are Australian architects the documentation drudges of the global system? In these competitions have the Australian firms, in these collaborations, become global lackeys. The so-called second rate “drafties” of the global system? But is it really as simple as this? And in an increasingly media driven international marketplace for architectural services perhaps this strategic rationale is only partially valid.

Outsourcing

In this context, one could argue that the Australian firms might provide the local technical grunt. This is in line with the overall trend towards the global outsourcing of documentation services. Across the global system, privatisation policies, and shareholder value practices have led to a situation where there has been a rise in outsourcing for architectural and building documentation.

The rise of digital technologies and the labour rates in the so-called global south have led to an increase in digital outsourcing for documentation. The late Bharat Dave in his own work noted the rise of offshoring architectural services which began in the late 90. Outsourcing has coalesced in places where there is an ICT infrastructure aligned with skilled workforces and low labour costs. Dave noted in 2010 a situation, that is now commonplace, where designs in one country are modelled in another, documented in yet another and then fabricated in another. It is not hard to concur with his conclusion that this situation necessitates the need for the “reconfiguration of practice in the long term.” ⁠

This situation has only accelerated in recent years, and it is perhaps naïve to think that the reconfiguration of practice is solely about the outsourcing and subsequent commodification of the services, such as technical documentation that designers seem to loathe in the first place.

The problem with partial services

In these matchups, local architectural firms ruled by economic survival might find some comfort in being more easily able to modify the range of services they provide; being able to provide the technical grunt. Yet this flexibility poses a dilemma: to be more profitable, these firms need to offer a complete range of services. But as a result of changes in technology, partial services are less profitable and also readily supplied by non-architectural competitors. Consequently, many middle-ranking and larger firms have no choice but to provide limited or partial services despite the fact that this only encourages, and leads to, further disintermediation, and commodification in their markets. Providing partial services may be unsustainable in the longer term. For the local collaborating firms it might be a vicious cycle.

Mapping Strategy

There is another issue that these two competitions point to, and that is the role of the internet and media to shape perceptions and the branding of architects. The following strategy diagrams map media impacts of the collaborations in these two competitions. I charted media hits (as measured by Google) of the stars against the reach of the local firms (number of Australian plus Internationaloffices of the local partner). I will let you make your own analysis of what all this means. My take is that clearly for some offices the match-ups appear to be ad-hoc and without any strategic intent. For other practices, the diagram shows who might gain or lose from the collaboration.

Clearly, it also suggests who might win these competitions if this was the only criteria. It also shows which local firms may be using the collaboration to either extend their range or extend their brand by being attached to a star architect.

For many Australian architects or any firm on the periphery of the global media starchitect system, such collaborations are perhaps necessary. Since the early 2000s if not before, architects are no longer grounded in a particular office or geographical location. Competition amongst architects is global in the intense global competition for architectural services, arguably Australian firms need to extract value from networks and systems of patronage no matter how distant they may be. The star architects are better able to do this because they operate from larger economic centres.

Commodification of Design

In any case, this all points to the ongoing commodification of design services. Perhaps the local/star matchups, point to the dumbing down of design into seductively drawn products with market signals that scream out “star-designer.” This is regardless of the fact that these designer products, seem to retain a threadbare relationship to what might have formerly been regarded as a traditional design process. Many of these designer products, indicate no interest in the memory of city or any sense of freedom and politics to be found in local communities.

Taken together, Australian firms need a renewed emphasis on strategic thinking, better management, a recognition of the media landscape, and internal research to gain competitive advantage. Otherwise, Australian firms will be doomed to be secondary actors, and lackeys, swilling around in the global system of architecture.

Advocacy not Awards: The awards categories you won’t see.

March 29, 2018March 29, 2018Peter Raisbeck

My local branch of the AIA had its awards jury presentations last weekend. I wanted to go and have a look at few categories. Sadly, an impending conference paper deadline prevented me from attending. I might go to the awards ceremony I am hoping they will get out the red carpet this year and then there might be a few protests like the one above at the Baftas.

But like all good awards punters I had a look at the form guide. It was ok as far as lists of architecture go. As someone reminded me during the week the culture of architectural practice in my city is vibrant and well developed with its own legacies, tribal distinctions and pecking orders. The stability of this pecking order never fails to amaze/annoy me. I remember when I went to the awards presentations one year after a significant absence and felt like I was returning to my old high school. I wondered, what has really changed in 20 years since I left architecture school. Same principal, same deputy principal, same prefects and house captain’s same acolytes and lackeys. Same old, same old, so called “rebels” and other people on the outer. Which was actually just about everyone else who wasn’t in the principals group. Everyone in their place, certainly not a lot of difference and inclusion, as Roy Grounds was reputed to say: “Melbourne is a rich smug city.” There is a downside to existing in a city with a strong practice culture.

I love this chart by Deb Verhoven mapping the awards in the Australian film industry. I am sure this the same in the architecture awards networks.

Even so despite my misgivings and raw cynicism, even though I couldn’t go to the presentations this year I had a look through the categories there is really a lot of very impressive architecture in each category. The small category for small and micro projects was a stand out.

Anyway the categories for the Australian National and Victorian awards go like this and both have pretty much the same structure: Public Architecture, Educational Architecture Residential Architecture – Houses (New), Residential Architecture – Houses (Alterations & Additions), Residential Architecture – Multiple Housing, Commercial Architecture, Heritage, Urban Design, Small Project Architecture, Sustainable Architecture, Enduring Architecture (What is this exactly?), International Architecture And of course that great anti Trump Tariff award: Category A1: Colorbond® Award for Steel Architecture.

Yada, Yada, Yada.

Raisbeck’s Form Guide

So after checking out the categories I set up my Ladbrokes account app on my phone, where you can bet on the wards, and decided to put my money on the following in the Victorian Architects for the Awards. So here is my quick guide to the firm.

In Small I like Brickface Austin Maynard Residential its kooky and small should be kooky. I am sucker for the cute brickwork.

In Residential Alts and Additions I like Templeton Architecture’s Merriwee. Those bricks are fantastic. So Yassss !! maybe I am a real sucker for the brickwork If architects cant do great brickwork who can? I wouldnt give any of my awards to Rob Mills because everytime I open the internet I am delivered a targeted ad for this firm. Mills should check his advertising algorithms.

In New Housing: Compound House, (although I like the Panopticon but maybe it’s just the name and the Foucault reference). In Public Architecture: I like the cop shop for Melbourne’s most disadvantaged outer suburb.

In education I was worried this category was going to be full of middle brow aluminium external panelled with sanitised teaching spaces. But I was relieved to see 18 Innovation Walk Revitalisation Project by Kosloff Architecture, Callum Morton and MAP (Monash Art Projects). Maybe these guys don’t deserve it because they have been such baddasses with form, but hey why not. In multi residential my pick is: Nightingale 1 by Breathe Architecture It would be criminal if this did not get the award. There rest of the category is train wreck that deserves a dissertation on it own about the corrupting influence of developers on architects.

So after placing a few bets, I am thinking all of these award categories don’t really do architects justice. There awards system in this country is too object focused. It’s remarkable that for the professional bodies to devote so much of their marketing efforts on the awards for architect design buildings.

Even Architeam has an award for unbuilt projects and an award entitled contribution. I think that is great idea. I was judge for them in 2013 and they never asked me back. They have a slightly different system to the other professional body. One jury to judge all the categories. That can be ok. The year I did it here were 3 or 4 of us. Last year there were seven on the jury and of course, it is said that, the egos came out and the project I was involved with as a client, I think, was shafted. I think the let’s be precious and not give out too many award’s brigade held sway. Architects need to give out more awards rather than less.

More is More and not Less

So it goes without saying architects need broader categories of awards if we are to successfully market the profession in the new millennia. So it would be great to give out awards each year for contributions to research, architectural education, public advocacy (the anti-Apple crew), or one for sustainable advocacy, or design leadership and of course business leadership, or maybe just leadership in the profession. How about an award for Parlour ? Or an award for architectural media? Or an award to someone who has done a lot to promote Melbourne Architecture to the world ( I am thinking of you know who)? By this strategy you might even get some people from outside of the profession of architecture to participate in the judging.

Or maybe, you could also do critical negative awards. I am thinking best hot-shot firm from overseas who gets the commission, fees, publicity and then leaves town. Leaving the town looking, and living with a dog of a public building (will this be Apple?). In parochial parlance this award could be called the Wombat award. Or maybe, a Weinstein like award for the best octopus like local star architect or director and then you can have awards for the most exploited student, or recent graduate, or most underpaid mid-career female architect. I won’t go on.

Is the profession so moribund and stuck in its parochial awards culture that it can’t get out of the rut of only thinking about buildings? There are a lot of architect’s out there who aren’t architect’s in the narrow and traditional sense and their contributions should be recognised. Plus, we need to recognise both architects and firms at all stages of their careers.

Maybe if we had more categories and more vision, I would stop thinking, in my more cynical moments, that the awards systems is just replicating a favoured circle and narrow canon of bourgeois, liveable and sustainable slop and that only the chosen few will ever get the prizes for.

The featured image above was taken by Hannah Mckay of Reuters.

10 things Architects learnt from the Apple at Federation Square Debate

February 20, 2018February 21, 2018Peter Raisbeck

All that remains of the Western Shard at Federation Square is an imprint on my Shard protest t-shirt.

In case you missed it the Open House Melbourne debate regarding the Apple store at Federation Square took place last week. I watched the live stream at home on my Apple iPad. I couldn’t get a ticket and something else was on at work at the same time. But I decided to stick it out and settled down with my APPLE Gold iPad Mini (yes, terrible I know to admit, obviously I am some kind of unwitting sucked in APPLE consumer; Oh, and I should say I am typing this on an Apple Power Book that is owned by my University).

I hate getting on bandwagons no matter the cause. Cause orientated bandwagons always seem too cultish and clubbish for my liking. But hey, at least I was involved with the effort to Save the Shard. I still have my T-Shirt to prove it. What worries me now are the echoes of that debate in this one.

I watched it on the live stream for more than the entire 2 hours. I am thinking the whole thing is going to make a great case study for my Design Activism course in September.

Its great Open House Melbourne organised this debate. It was seen by many as a mature debate around issues of urban design and public in our city. But, if the debate was mature, then we can also ask, how nuanced was this debate ?

So here is everything you need to know about the debate at Federation Square in 10 easy to digest points.

1. Let’s face it the Yarra Building at Fed Square became a bit awkward.

As hinted at by Donald Bates one of the architects of Federation Square, in his debate speech. The Yarra building never was the best bit of Federation Square, it was worth a try at the time, as a commercial space, so why not change it now? Why not redesign the Square? Or should we just keep the Yarra Building as a piece of so-called heritage?

2. Some people like to say the word Activation a lot.

I must have done my post-graduate urban design degree so long ago at RMIT that it was before this activation word came into vogue. Donald Bates mentioned it a few times but Ron Jones on the Anti-Apple side mentioned it a lot. It even made the internet tabloids.

Its zombie urbanism concepts like this that a sliming (or slimeing?) our cities with low-grade commerce. Does “activating an edge” mean putting in little coffee shop, or kripsy kreme, tenancies all along a so-called urban “edge”.

3.Politicians still need to figure out that community consultation processes for large-scale projects are needed.

I think Cr. Ron Leppert was able to set out the case for the failure amongst our political class (the non-greens class) to adequately consult and to be transparent. It was great when he kept saying something along the lines of “I am not an architect”, but I am still going to tell you how to plan the city. That was so “plannersplain.” Designing planning schemes without an architectural perspective = more zombie urbanism. Read about it here.

4.The Committee of Melbourne elites have yet to develop a more nuanced argument than the zombie concepts of Melbourne 4.0.

The Committee for Melbourne CEO Martine Letts, ably outlined the standard neoliberal position: more change, more disruptive technologies and get ready for more global competition. We are all on this hamster wheel. But maybe the Committee for Melbourne might have more success in these matters if it wasn’t full of so called “movers and shakers.” Let’s see a few “bogans” on their board. This is definitely a group that could do with a dose of real people and learn about community development and consultation. God help us when F2, (neo-liberal speak for Federation Square East) gets going.

5. The Victorian Government Architects Office needs more funding and independence.

Yes ! That might help get some transparency back into these processes. When will politicians stop listening to Treasury and listen more to architects?

All too obviously, this situation is the product of the autocracy, elitism and lack of transparency when it comes to the procurement of major civic projects in our nation. Architecture is too often sidelined. But something like this is bound to get a backlash. When will our political classes and neo-liberal elites figure this out? It was the same at Sirius in Sydney and there will be other examples in the future.

6. No one from Foster’s office or evil Apple seemed to be at the debate.

I have written about the Foster design for Apple HQ here. As someone noted in the Open House debate when these stars come to our great southern land they don’t necessarily do the best job. Usually they just do second rate job then fuck off back to whence they came (Lab Architecture Studio was actually an amazing exception to this).

7. The design of Federation Square didn’t just happen

I fear that many in the audience didn’t know this (maybe the audience was packed out with too many of Ron Leppert’s Green’s party planner mates and that’s why I couldn’t get a ticket), but the design actually evolved and emerged over time. Yes, architects actually design things through iteration. Designs don’t just pop out of architectural heads fully formed. Donald Bates said something like this and its worth quoting from my rough debate notes:

“This is a Drawing showing one tenth of all the iterations of the design process. The design developed by iteration and possibilities emerging. It is about a design of relationships and not specific objects. The fixation on objects is not embedded in the DNA of the Square

8. It is a hate the big brand thing

It is correct to say Fed Square is not retail Chaddy or Bunnings. But it doesn’t matter because according to the no case, Apple, will make Fed square into a giant Shopping Mall. A huge giant giant shopping mall. Just like they have in the suburban badlands. They will sell you stuff and every Insta photo in Fed Square will feature them. It’s a brand thing the No-Apple side is fighting against.

In response to the Apple proposal its easy to rail against the perceived evils of the big brands. Apple’s personal consumerism, its awful tax regimes, its blind technological march to the singularity. But what does that have to do with site specific architectural arguments in this instance?

9. The Koori Heritage Trust gets a much better deal out of this proposal.

Shouldn’t that be the highest priority for Federation Square as a public and civic space? If it was me I would put KHT where the Apple store is supposed to go and Apple into the Deakin building. I would, if I could, decolonise the square and let KHT own all of it ! Maybe thats what we should be thinking about rather than the populism of big brand hatred.

10. Its train wreck

This issue is a train wreck of big brands, naive and not so naive political populism. Not to mention, architectural ignorance, conflicting theories of architecture, planning and urban design in our civic politics. Space prevents me from writing how we got to this point. It may sound strange but I partly blame that huckster Jan Gehl and his slippery urban design populism for watering down our urban theories and analytical instruments. I think the crazy comitteeee for Melbourne has a lot to answer for. Check out what they thought about the minimum apartment standards. A veiled attack on those standards in the name of a pro-development flexibility. Yet, this is a group that claims to be all about sustainability and future liveability.

Outrage cycles and populism

It’s so easy to be populist in this social media age. Easy to rev up the shock jocks and the tabloids. Perhaps this is why it’s the No-Apple bandwagon that also worries me in this debate. In embracing populist notions of public space, architecture and urban theory are too easily erased from the public discourse. This has what has happened in regards to this issue. Digitised Outrage and Outrage and Outrage that blunts any real analysis of the plight of our civic spaces. Paradoxical when all the genuine and self serving outrage is facilitated by Apple devices. Architecture and any deeper architectural and urban arguments get swamped.

The architectural and urban arguments for Apple, as presented in the debate, were analytical, nuanced and refined (to echo the Victorian Government Architect) and actually grounded in architectural process. Arguably, it is the architectural argument that bridges the complexities between architecture, urban design and the social realities of the mercantile.

Having said that, we also need to recognise that the position underlying the Pro-Apple argument, and indeed the original scheme, is based on a stream of architectural theory that has never really resisted, and always accommodated capital. There never was a secret about that in this city. So why are people upset now? No one screamed when QV was pillaged and privatised. Of course its because we all love Federation Square so why don’t we now listen to one of its architect? But do we really care about pursuing real public space and architecture?

Campaign 2016 Debate — Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, right, shakes hands with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

It’s way too much like Hilary versus Donald.

It seems ironic to me but in a strange way the Pro-Apple team was a bit Hilary-like (actual experts, politicians and neo-liberals) whereas the Anti-Apple team employed Trump-like (or maybe John Howard) populism. A populist backlash that seems to be saying: we are the people, we are angry with the neoliberal and global elites, we are angry about the public spaces in our city, we hate the outer suburban shopping centres, and so WE should get to decide who comes to our Federation Square shores.

What a train wreck the whole thing is and I am not even sure the punters care that much. Because, after all is said and done, Federation Square has free Wi-Fi.

Architects & Badass Clients: The perennial moral question?

November 22, 2017November 23, 2017Peter Raisbeck

There has always been a debate in architecture about patronage and politics. The central question of this debate, which I am sure many architects are familiar with, is should architects work for those with no morals? This becomes a dilemma and does it really matter who architects work for as long as they make good, or even great, architecture?

The bad and sometimes evil clients.

All architects have had clients we don’t like, or we don’t particularly want to work for, or we are worried that they will rip us off by not paying. We refused a client once because he looked like Catweazle. But what happens when the client is a demagogue or a war criminal?

Usually, when this debate gets going, the old hero icons of modern architecture get trotted out: Gropius and Mies and the Nazi and the Reichsbank competition. Le Corbusier and Vichy, and the break up with his Marxist cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. Phillip Johnson, that most subversive of architects and the actual Nazis. For a brief moment, in the late 20s the constructivist worker architects and artists had the same problem, should they work for Stalin? However, by 1932 it was too late for them and most were killed in the Terror or went to the Gulag’s.

Tessenow and Speer and Krier

Inevitably this argument cycles around to Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, the gargantuan and ham fisted classicist and pioneer of modern managerialism. Speer was no Plecnik or Lutyens. As an architecture student Speer was reputedly thrown out of Poelzig’s studio and then ended up in Heinrich Tessenow’s studio. What would have happened to Speer if he had stayed with the early expressionistic Poelzig who later embraced New Objectivity rather than the classically orientated Tessenow. As most know, Speer was later to be admired so much by Leon Krier, who published the monograph on Speer, once Krier himself escaped the clutches of James Stirling. In the 1980s as students we once interviewed Tadao Ando through a Japanese translator and asked him what he thought of Krier, the response in Japanese, was opaque, long winded and incomprehensible and surprisingly animated. However, in this perplexing outburst there was one word that we could discern through the rush of Japanese: Fascist. Yes, Ando thought Leon Krier was a fascist. As Paul Davies has noted Giorgio Grassi would rehabilitate Tessenow; and Leon Krier, Speer.

Patrik Comes to Town

Hot on the heels of Rem Koolhaas, all of this history, came back to me when we had a new star architect visitor these weeks past. Yes, in my small city on the architectural periphery, it was none other than Patrik Schumacher. Suddenly, my Archienemy Instagram social media feeds were full of people I know doing selfies with Patrik. Rather than going all out I chose to get a photo of his ear. He even spoke at Rem and David G’s MPavilion, which I am yet to visit, with the Victorian State Government Architect.

Perhaps I was a little jealous, I asked myself, I was not invited to the Pavilion, nor was I invited to the jury sessions where Patrik appeared. Had I through some character flaw and self-sabotage avoided the great man and celebrity. Had they read all the bad stuff I had written in the obscure conference papers about Parametricism. I had already avoided the Remmy Koolhaas festival when he came. Should I have lurched into Patrik’s field of vision to get a selfie? I did at least manage to get a picture of his ear.

Patrik and the Mayfair Development

Regular readers of the blog will recall Patrik’s statements about Aravena winning the big Pritzker prize in an earlier blog.

“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.”

ZHA architecture, in which Patrik is a partner leads, has also designed a “vase” shaped tower in my city intended to be housed by the Mandarin Oriental hotel. In Brisbane ZHA has also designed a “champagne flute” tower development. Nothing like a metaphor to motivate the sales team.

Chin-chin in Brisvegas.

The Mayfair

More interestingly, there is also the Mayfair sited on a prominent corner on St Kilda Road, for those not familiar with Melbourne this is the boulevard leading into the cities central grid. The developers UEM Sunrise are employing the ZHA brand to sell the apartments off. This one has the soft flowing curvy butterfly metaphor attached to it. Apparently, the design is based on the “Lorenz attractor – a mathematical set of equations that, when plotted, resemble a figure eight or butterfly.”

There is also great Zaha Hadid exhibition associated with the sale of units in the development and the website is pretty slick. All the apartments look great on the inside and are full of well designed and exquisitely fabricated ZHA designed wall finishes, furniture and fittings.

Bris-Vegas?

Amongst all the signature suite excitement of the interior there is the exterior. In contrast to the interior, the exterior does seem a bit, how shall I say it, Bris Vegas with its predominant horizontal blades and glazed balconies. Perhaps, the Mayfair, and other luxury apartment types in general, are more about the exquisite luxury interiors and less to do with the exterior. I am not sure how the facade might contribute to a high density urban civilisation?

Perhaps this is the danger the architectural fascination with CNC fabrication and digitally enabled supply chains. Perhaps, all we will get to do as architects in the future, are the luxury interiors: the product marketing types and planners will design the exteriors.

Maybe we are already at the point where we are no longer architects but in fact strategic product designers and marketers. Architecture is a key element in the marketing material for Mayfair:

“Mayfair is unmistakably Zaha Hadid. A mastery of scientific precision and artistic integrity, its soft, organic form pays tribute to St Kilda Road’s leafy streetscape, and the context within which it exists.”

I don’t really know what to say about the “soft organic form” line.

The local connections

With such international collaborations there is always a local architectural connection. With the apartments on St Kilda road, branded as the Mayfair, it is that notable firm of high rise apartment architects Elenberg Fraser.With the ZHA Mandarin Oriental tower it is Plus Architecture. On face value across the liveable city of Melbourne these two firms, Plus and Elenberg Fraser, seem to have cornered the market for apartments design. Interestingly Plus’s 4248 scheme looks a bit like the ZHA Mayfair. These are architects who seem happy to surf the real estate free market. No doubt in doing so they are ensuring their fee for service regimes are commensurate with the excellent plan-façade combos they are producing.

Follow the money

Of course, in the modern age all architects immersed in the free market no longer need worry about the Nazis or Stalinists to work for or fight against. Arguably, it is the kleptocrats and big sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and Panama Paper style investors who provide the juice for the luxury housing fragmenting our cities.

The Mayfair development is being developed by UEM Sunrise. UEM Sunrise is wholly-owned by Khazanah, an investment holding arm of the Malaysian Government. A few years back the sovereign wealth find of the Malaysian government was the subject of a financial investigation. You can follow this here and even search for Khazanah and UEM Sunrise at the Panama Papers. You can also read about some the advanced urban civilisation stuff Malaysia has done for Palm Oil and Penan people.

It would be monstrous to suggest that the architects, or anyone else associated with these current projects, are in any way implicated in illicit financial flows of capital. But the point is that we are all connected in this new digital age via 6 virtual degrees of separation. The landscape in this new global system no longer resembles the past. The old empires and their classical icons have gone and it is the oscillations of distributed capital propelled through conduits of digital finance that now shape the monumental vistas.

Subversion

Spare a thought for the other architects, more distant from luxury housing and the celebrity system of architetcure. The local architects who ponder the vicissitudes of the NDIS roll out, informal settlements and the possibilties of producing new housing types driving by financial structures that enable a range of demographics, typologies and ownership.

Perhaps it will always be a perennial question for architects: Does it matter who we work for and who our patrons are? Does it matter where the money comes from? But, maybe the even greater sin for architects is not so much where the money comes from, or the issues around patronage, but whether or not the project is simply trash for cash.

Lets hope that there is a subversive sentiment somewhere in that approach.

Architects versus the barbarians: Saving Sirius in the housing policy dead zone.

November 1, 2017July 18, 2021Peter Raisbeck

In Australia most architects design housing. In some ways, it is the last bastion of architectural control. But only just. Since the 70s housing has increasingly come under the control of developers, project managers and builders. Single interest groups, none of whom have the slightest interest in design, who see policy as being about their own profits, have dominated housing policy and as a result government’s have done little to develop housing policies.

Since abandoning the Public Work Departments in the 1980s state and bureaucratic actors have left it up to the market. The last gasp of the Victorian Public Works Department can be seen in my own suburb which is littered with small well-designed houses by architects. You can read about it here. These buildings still stand, fit into their streetscapes, and despite impoverished State Government maintenance regimes they still look great.

The Privatisation Experiment

So where has housing privatisation actually got us? There answer is this: homelessness for the vulnerable, a casino type mentality in our property markets, inner cities turning into swamps of unsustainable cheap curtain wall ugliness and intergenerational inequity. The Australian dream of home ownership has gone.

Let me repeat that: The Australian dream of home ownership has gone. It no longer exists, but Australians still cling to it. Because we are still clinging to the dream, this is exploited by a consortium and class of people who do not give a shit. The real dream is that Australia has always been a property developers paradise. Let’s hear it for the beautiful tower products of Central Equity.

So now our cities are a ticking time bomb as climate change and two degree warming, or more, kicks in. Alongside this failure of policy, housing in our cities, has lapsed into a miasma of deteriorating public assets, a new ageing and impoverished demographic, and a generation of young home buyers locked out of housing markets. Capital flows have led to the housing being valued more as an asset class, and hence subject to speculation, rather than as a right. Is it too little to ask for a actual policy: given the newly minted crap towers in our inner cities and the “cheap as chips” suburbs, where builders are too mean to build houses with no eaves, because a bit of extra framing is expensive?

London

This situation is, not just an Australian problem but a global problem. Arguably, London is a city where we can begin to see what will happen to Australian cities, and suburbs, if we persist with our current dead zone policies. In London the Grenfell tower fire has perhaps focused the debate around these issues and what some call the colonial politics of space. Three new books on housing suggest the range of approaches, and type of research advocacy, that is missing here in Australia.

Saving Sirius

In Sydney the battle over the Sirius building is a case in point. For architects the brutalist aesthetic in architecture came at a time when architects still had control over projects. Sirius exemplifies this, housing containing, and allowing for a range of family demographics along with the inclusion of collective functions. Housing made through participation. A building designed to engender a sense of, wait for it, community. A housing development that was actually designed and its delivery controlled by an actual architect instead of few corporate marketing types aligned with the UDIA.

“A drab relic of union power”

Meet the Barbarian

Sadly for Sirius, this last week, the Land and Environment Court in NSW denied it heritage status. This was probably helped along by NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet who unleashed a vitriolic diatribe via the Daily Telegraph on 28 July, dismissing the Sirius building as “a boxy blight on The Rocks,” made from “towering slabs of grimy concrete,” that stands as a “drab relic of union power.” He went on to say:

“Sirius represents the destructive, dehumanizing vandalism of the modernist movement; the legacy of the likes of architect Le Corbusier, high priest of the cult of ugliness, who was determined to demolish the stunning heritage of downtown Paris in favour of utilitarian concrete skyscrapers,” he proclaimed. “You might say it’s brutal: the epitome of the out of touch left, putting ideology before people.”

Oh yeah Paris in 1925 is so so so like the Rocks in Sydney. Maybe Dominic should tell the late President Nehru or the proud Punjabis that the pride they take in Chandigarh is misplaced because Corbusier designed it. Not sure Sirius is actually a skyscraper and maybe Dominic P should look out the window and notice the “utilitarian concrete skyscrapers” mostly apartments, now emerging on our skylines, but I guess they are ok, because whilst being made of concrete, they are covered in shiny shiny glass. Lets shout it out. Dominic: they too are made of concrete. Is he proposing that Sirius should be chopped down a few stories and covered in glass to make it all ok? He definitely needs a Bex.

There is not a lot more I can say about his diatribe. It’s just plain wrong and completely ignorant of 20^th Century architectural history. Maybe a staffer wrote it. How do people like this get into our parliaments?

All this says to me that Dominic is a true Barbarian. Mate, FFS dont take take the name of Corbu in vain. Calling , long dead architects names, only coarsens our political culture. Yet, Dominc is not alone, another of the political class, another lawyer who has had no architectural training in either architectural history or visual arts training. I am not sure if he, or others like him, are then qualified to talk about aesthetic ugliness and I don’t see why, as architects, we have to put up with these ignorant barbarians who want to inflict their own personal tastes onto the public. The Korean guy does that as well. Remember when Joe Hockey said wind turbines were ugly?

You can read Dominic’s maiden speech here especially the bit where he says:

“My second ideal is generosity”, but there is nothing generous in his comments about Sirius with their tinge of vindictiveness towards Corbusier (WTF?). Also, there is nothing like holding a grudge against the unions after a few thousand years since the BLF green bans. He is a really generous guy.

As he also stated in his maiden speech:

I strongly support the principles of free markets–we are the party of small business, of enterprise and of wealth creation. And I agree with Churchill when he calls the socialist model the equal distribution of poverty, not wealth. I oppose plans for more social engineering, more welfare handouts and the continual obsession with our rights at the expense of our responsibilities. These toxic ideas signal the death of the opportunity society.

Oh yeah, that’s right let’s not put out of touch ideology before people. This guy really hates architects now, and maybe any educated so-called elite, for that matter. Just like Trump. Only problem is, with a Law and Commerce degrees he is an elite as well, not to mention his Tom Ford City of London Chambers style glasses, or the fact that he is the Treasurer of NSW.

Calling out the Barbarians

When this happens architects need to call out this kind of talk out, draw a line in the sand, and assert our knowledge and expertise in the public domain. Thankfully, it appears they have indeed done this.

All I want for Christmas is for the political a class to craft some decent housing policies. Is it too much to ask? Is that too socialist and ideological?

At the MSD this semester there are about 9 different design studios exploring different aspects of housing all across the spectrum of housing. Architects have always been involved in and actively exploring housing, and housing policies, for other Australians. You can come and visit at our annual exhibition and see for yourself.

Maybe the political class types need to come see what architects actually do before they mouth off about Corbusier. Until then there is no reason why architects shouldn’t name and shame our politicians as the cultural and policy barbarians that some of them seem intent on being.

Phillip Room, photo by Barton Taylor. You can also help the Save our Sirius Campaign here. I might even go to the book launch which I would urge you to attend.

Enough of the Parametric and BIM Stuff: Why we need to teach Excel in Archi-School

August 16, 2017August 16, 2017Peter Raisbeck

The Salon on Standards

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a NSW Registration Board a panel discussion called the Salon on Standards. For those reading this blog from outside of Australia, the national accreditation board, or the AACA, administers the standards of practice. In other words, the knowledge and skill set that architects are required to learn at architetcure schools:

“The Standard describes what is reasonably expected of a person who can demonstrate the standard of skill, care and diligence widely accepted in Australia as a competent professional Architectural practitioner.”

On the panel we all decided that we love the standards and that they are an important element in the setting the territory of what architecture is as a discipline.

Firstly, a few acknowledgments.

Professor Kirsten Orr of UTAS was also on the panel and her history of the AACA has been ably and deftly researched, You can find her paper here. Plus, I also had the pleasure of being on the panel with Melonie Bayl-Smyth a Sydney architect and NSW board member. All of this was ably presided over by registrar Timothy Horton. Byron Kinnaird facilitated the discussion and Professor Gerard Reinmuth of UTS was there and was generous enough to be gracious towards me. As well and as Martin Bryant head of the Architetcure School at UTS

What should we teach ?

So, what do we need to teach in the architectural curriculum? At the panel, I really shot my mouth off and blurted out all the things I think we need to teach architecture students: strategy, finance, research methods, negotiations, innovation and leadership. I may even have said ecology; as compared to that sustainability greenwash policy Kool-Aid we currently make the students drink.

In other words, money, (finance), management, (organisational sciences) and research methods, are mostly what is missing from our standards. These are all the things I think should be taught in architecture school but don’t teach. But then I wondered if we should make greater efforts to teach these things through the design studio rather than via various add-on subjects.

The Primacy of the Design Studio

When I was a wretched student, the people who taught, me were obsessed with design. I think it was partly a reaction to their own training in the dark ages when hard-core pragmatics and necessity ruled the day in the design studios. So, at my Archi-school in those heady post-modern years, it was about being free, it all became about conceptual design and design and design and design and design. It was all about the primacy of the design studio as a place where architectural knowledge is transmitted. As pointed out by Angers Bergstorm, Donald Schon in his seminal work The Reflective Practitioner identified the primacy of the design studio but Schon also argued against a design studio culture cut off and isolated from either practice itself or other knowledge domains.

Balance

So maybe Schon is now right and the balance has gone too far the other way. Maybe the Design Studio has so over swamped and taken up space in architectural education for the last 30 million years that it has now become isolationist. Sure, we all love our design studios. We all like to talk about them and use them to reach out to other disciplines and be trans-disciplinary. But are we as trans-disciplinary as we make out? Should other knowledge be inscribed into the competencies we need to learn? Maybe what architects and architectural educators, are really doing too often, is importing knowledge into the studio for quick and easy adaptation. Maybe, this process is too often too token.

I think in the past building types and programmatic typology was seen as the stable point of architectural education. It was thus easy to design an architecture course around types. Architecture schools kinda went like this. In first year, they messed with your mind, in second year you designed a house, then in third housing and then, maybe a school, and then in final year a grand institutional building. I guess in many places this is still how it is done.

Data overload

But with new technologies alongside the fragmentation of cities into smaller and smaller bits, that can be plugged in to other bits to make money, the typological understanding of buildings and the city no longer seems relevant.

As architects, we are confronted with a never-ending flow of fragmented, variable, disjointed and seemingly disconnected data. In saying all of this, I am not tryng to argue, the old chestnut of, what we teach at Archi-school is too theoretical, or not pragmatic enough, or is not making the instantly graduates “employment ready.”

What I am saying is this, we really need to have this debate as a profession: What is that we should be teaching in the architecture schools? What should we be teaching in our offices as young architects leave universities. I guess if you never learn about money, managing stuff or organisations at Archi-school you don’t often think about the need for career pathways for young architects.

The problem of specialisation

Fragmentation and specialisation within our discipline is a problem when we have to teach design. The problem is everyone in architecture thinks their own specialisation or field is the design studio: The architects with construction knowledge, think their subject is what a design studio should be all about; the architectural historians think their subject what the design studio; the sustainability architects think their subject are what the design studio should be all about; The workshop digital fabricator types think subject are what the design studio should be all about.

But actually, the design studio is a place where all these things are supposed to come together. Not as add-ons, not as a few guests, but a place where different knowledge territories are debated, analysed and then synthesised into the design process. That’s what design studios are about. About getting the balance right. Design is design and should never be beholden to one specialisation.

Finally

The Salon on Standards was great. They even took me out for dinner afterwards and I thought that they had developed a great sense of community between the profession the NSW registration board and the school at UTS. We need more of that and now that the Australian Institute of Architects and the Registration boards appear to have parted ways its great to see what the NSW board is doing. It even runs the Sydney Architetcure Festival.

But next time I run a studio, I might just get the students to design something using an Excel Spreadsheet. Maybe some Discounted Cash Flows or some funky Population Ecology Dynamics. Yip, as well as ecology we might even discuss money in the studio. Think what might happen if we actually had architectural graduates who knew how to use Excel as well as the all consuming Revit?

Lacrosse the Opera

VCAT, Predator and Bucky’s Tensegrity.

Getting it on with the Developers.

A Visit to Lacrosse

Where did it all go so wrong?

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