Tag: Sydney

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

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

Peter 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?

 

 

 

Hair Wars: Hair and Australian Architects or why I never made the grade as a star architect.

Hair Wars: Hair and Australian Architects or why I never made the grade as a star architect.

Peter Raisbeck

One of my most popular posts in 2016 was the one about Bjarke Ingels being evil because he had hair. But then I thought what about Australian architects. How much hair do they have? What about their hair? How is Australian Architectural hair portrayed in the media and across social media? As a result, I decided to conduct a few Google experiments. With the research aim to explore how the hair of Australian architects is portrayed on the web. Like all good researchers I needed a hypothesis a methodology and a few methods. My hypothesis is that architects with hair get more hits on social media. My  broad methodology is to focus on notions of identity and how these are constructed within architectural discourse. As for methods a bit of Google Image search combined with a visual analysis. In doing this I referred to some diagrams about male pattern baldness (myself being a prime example).

pattern-hair-loss

Google Search: Australian Architects (searched 170217 1.31pm

  1. Glenn Murcutt
  2. Jorn Utzon
  3. Robin Boyd
  4. Harry Seidler
  5. Roy Grounds
  6. Nonda Katsalidis
  7. Walter Burley Griffin
  8. Francis Greenaway
  9. Philip Cox

It was a relief to me as they pretty much all had hair undergoing various stages of Male Pattern Baldness. Numbers 5 and Numbers 6 seemed to have the most hair. It goes without saying that its shockingly amazing that even Google doesnt include female Australian architects when you do this kind of search.

Google search: Top 10 Australian Architects (searched 170217 1.40pm)

  1. Glenn Murcutt
  2. Sean Godsell
  3. Philip Cox
  4. Robin Boyd
  5. Harry Seidler
  6. Jorn Utzon
  7. Nick Murcutt
  8. frederik Romberg
  9. Roy Grounds
  10. Edmund Blacket

and with this search something weird  happened. Suddenly an insurgent with lots of hair jumped up to second place on the list.

I then decided to search just in Google Images  (searched 170217 2.30pm) rather than Google.

Google Image search: Best Australian Architects (searched 170217 3.00pm)

In this search you get a lot of buildings but of course only one Australian architect features and that is Peter Stutchbury who admittedly has a pretty good ahead of hair (as does his comrade Richard Leplastrier)

leplastrier-and-stutchbury

These are of course Sydney architects. Before I write any more I need to make a disclaimer which is this: At my tribal architecture school in the 80s one of the first things we learnt was to hate, and I mean really HATE, Sydney architects. Despite my biases a kind of Roland Barthes semiotic analysis seems appropriate here. There is certainly no sign of Brylcreem or Hair  Dye in this image. These architects are in some ways proto-hipsters. These men appear to be the very negative of the urbane, metropolitan, Don Draper suited 50s and 60s architect like Gary Cooper in the Fountainhead or indeed some of the architects in the above lists like Robin Boyd, Harry Seidler or the seemingly avuncular Roy Grounds.

Nup these guys are wild architects with all that hair: Raw, mountain men, lumberjack architects, with natural poetic instincts and urges, the very antithesis of the cosmopolitan architect; they appear to be flaunting an organic and seemingly natural sexuality and masculinity. Satyrs in the woodland with set squares. Its all a bit too Norsca Soap like for me, and even the work of these architects is kind of entwined with the myths of Scandanavia and the scarves, for some unknown reason, start to remind me of the columns in Alvar Aalto’s Villa Maireia. 

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When he was younger Stutchbury, who was born in 1954, looked like this (what is he looking at?). I  was surprised to find this image so easily on the web.

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Stutchbury 

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Raisbeck 

I had hair as well when I was young as you can see from the above comparative photo of me in the 70s at my outer suburban high school. So its interesting to wonder why our own practice never got up and running. I mean I had long hair as well. But actually the reason is probably very obvious. Firstly, I lost my hair and I was also confused about the semiotic identity I wanted to portray as an architect. This is fairly obvious in this picture of me below from architecture school in the mid to late 80s. Little wonder I never made the top 10 Google list.

raisbeck_2

I was already loosing my hair then. Plus, I had obvious aligned my self with the cosmopolitan urban intellectual types rather than the organic FLW loving mountain men. But the tie was all wrong. No wonder I never got into the club. At night I wonder if our practice had done better if I had retained my hair and somehow gone the long hair silver mountain man foxy route. Or worn a straighter tie.

As my friends will now I have kind of re-invented myself a few times now. And as I noted last time our wrote about this kind of stuff in the Bjarke blog: The construction of the architectural identity should be regarded as being problematic and contested rather than being seen as a singular, holistic and a stable domain. As architects in this age of, oh so awful, celebrity we need to foster debates around the real laws, and dilemmas of architectural design our cities.

It perhaps goes without saying, but it keeps needing to be said, that the identities that we privilege in architectural discourse need to be more inclusive of difference. The recognition of collaborative practice is one way forward. But in the swamplands of social media a constant critique and dismantling of the rhetorical images that are presented to us is essential and necessary. Otherwise, the rhetorical idealisation of the architectural identity will continue to corrupt our discipline and architectural education. It’s time for the the cult of architectural celebrity to die. The mountain men architects like to think they are poets but they are really just celebrities.

Its been crazy here as I prepare for the students and substantially revamp my Architectural Practice course which starts in two weeks. Notably, I have prerecorded 9 lectures and have another 9 to do. It will be an interesting experiment in online teaching models. This will give me more time to run an actual tutorial in the subject and organise the guest lectures. This year we will also have a number of Q&A style panel sessions which we will advertise here and elsewhere. 

The Horror of Barangaroo: Lousy bastard architecture as industrial design.

The Horror of Barangaroo: Lousy bastard architecture as industrial design.

Peter Raisbeck

Having time away from home often helps one to see things in a new light. The grind of normal routine falls away and more reflective demeanour takes its place. For the academic such reflection helps to fuel ideas and suggest further things that can be written about in venues such as this. Hence, I am a bit later in doing this weekly post.

In my city the media in certain instances has all too easily attacked large infrastructure projects and urban design projects. Federation Square in Melbourne and also Southern Cross Station have both been the victim of campaigns that have sought to know better than the architects who have designed these projects. Federation square is now one of the most successful urban and public spaces in Australia. Southern Cross Station works pretty well. However at the time of their design and construction they were excoriated in the tabloid media.

As I tell the practice students it’s always easy to blame the bloody architect.

Maybe this is why sentiments against architectural expertise, opinion and knowledge are easy to drum up in the tabloid media. Sometimes these sentiments are used to promote inappropriate development as much as they are used to attack fine architecture. A case in point is the design of the Crown Resorts Barangaroo tower development in Sydney which in many ways exemplifies the relationship of architecture to the mainstream media.  Arguably, this tower, and I am loathe to condemn something until it is actually built, represents the whole catastrophe and horror of the current state of public procurement in Australian cities.

The whole saga of Barangaroo started in 2003 and in 2005 an international urban design competition was won by Hills Thalis with a winning concept plan that divide the site up in a way that would, in theory at least, encourage diversity of development. As set out in this  article by my colleague at MSD Dr. Jillian Walliss the concept of the original competition entry for the headland park has been butchered. The Lend Lease development along and behind this headland park has, as documented by numerous critics, been a site of controversy and debate since at least 2010 as exemplified in this article by Elizabeth Farrelly.

354937-barangaroo

The current design for the Barangaroo tower has been supported by an adhoc alliance of the media, developer, gambling interests and no less a personage than the former prime minster Paul Keating. In the past Keating has been a friend of architecture supporting projects such as Federation Square and providing AusAid money to help plan and maintain the heritage of values as old Hanoi. Noble stuff. How an acolyte of the hard old men of the Labour Party such as Jack Lang and Rex Conner became an aesthete I have no idea. But, I do know that politicians, no matter how esteemed, should be wary of employing their dark arts in a fluid and as a contestable territory as architecture.

There is not a lot that can be said about the “pinnacle tower” in the quay  designed by the English firm Wilkinson Eyre (a firm with 9 male directors). Maybe this is why the tower is the worst kind of big dick sculptural architecture you can imagine. Reportedly, the new tower was described by Keating as Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space (L’Oiseau dans l’espace) created in 1923.

The tower is also described like this:

The concept takes its inspiration from nature, composed of an elegant, curved geometry. The tower’s form emanates from three petals that twist and rise together, and its sculptural shape maximises the opportunity for accommodation to make the most of the views of Sydney’s famous bridge and harbour.

A sketch of the the curtain wall facade of the tower adorns the cover of a book of Chris Wilkinson’s recently published sketchbooks. In the sketchbooks the conceptual and annotated sketches for the tower suggest a concept around the idea of petals. It’s the whole catastrophe of making architecture seemingly natural and organic: “sculptural forms”, “leaves and petals”, “spiral geometry” which is all meant to contrast with the towers oh so boring and ugly “rectangular surroundings.” I am not sure if Sydney and its waterfront edge was ever that rectangular.

Stab me in the eye with a biro mate; the crude simplicity and the final form of this concept is astounding. This is nothing like the complex initial sketches of Utzon’s Opera house with it’s shifting and ambiguous shells and its podium related to Chinese temple architecture. Utzon’s original sketches are more frenetic, chaotic and ambiguous. This is part of their power and this is perhaps why Utzon got into trouble with the parochial naysayers and bean counters of the time as he developed them into architecture.

A sketch is something you work from towards a constructed and designed reality. Modernist superstars such as Le Corbusier, Kahn and Mies Van der Rohe all understood this. The Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza understands this. Frank Gehry understands this. A sketch is not something that should be oh-so-easily translated to the digital and parametric realm as the case with the Barangaroo tower. Sadly, many of Wilkinson’s public sketches are like this. There is no sense of searching for any emergent ideas in these sketches. They are overdetermined and over annotated attempts to depict and translate an idea to a final reality rather than exploring that reality. You end up asking if these sketches represent architecture or are they more about industrial design? They seem to be all about control of the final product. Product being the operative word in this equation.

Whilst on holiday, as the revelations about the torture of indigenous children in the NT came out, I was reading Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country. It won the Miles Franklin award in 1975 and was reprinted in a new edition in to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its publication. In part the novel inspired Baz Luhrman’s unfortunate film Australia. Intensely anti-colonial and anti-British the novel depicts Australia as a community of kowtowers, thieves, drunks, and lousy bastards. I suppose a lack of generosity has always been a theme in Australian public life and in the design of our cities. At Barangaroo the transfer of public land to private interests and the tower development seems to exemplify these underlying cultural torrents. We deserve more than billion dollar developments built on a couple of quick sketches. I think the original Cammeraygal inhabitants of these harbour headlands certainly deserve more as well.