The Way Things Are by Martin_Tite

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The Things Are .

Quixotic Editions

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The Things Are .

(What I think about when I think about architecture - from Air to Zombies.)

Every book about architecture is a form of fiction.

This book was designed and produced with the kind support of Provencher_Roy, which is not responsible for its content.

Quixotic Editions , Ottawa 2025

First published in hard copy as a limited edition.

The Way Things Are

Martin Tite

Introduction

Martin Tite

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’ Joan Didion

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’

Introduction

I wrote a book . This sounds preposterous to me, but there you go…

Joan Didion

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’ Joan Didion

I wrote it because it pleased me to do so, or maybe for the reasons noted by Joan Didion. But also because it felt necessary to do so, and you are reading this because it felt necessary to actualize these thoughts by sharing them.

I wrote a book . This sounds preposterous to me, but there you go…

There are no particular claims to originality, as I know the ground covered here will have been felt or observed by most practitioners of architecture and written about by others. I hope the subjects are presented in an interesting way that can be enjoyed because it is well written, in the same way I read the restaurant reviews in The New Yorker.

Having collected this writing in bits and pieces over time, I realized that this diary of confessions, thoughts and remembrances all relate to the ‘operating conditions’ of architecture; and that together they constitute a map describing the phenomena of architectur al culture at this moment . Not as it was, not as we think it should be, not as we wish it would be, but as it seems to be now.

Maybe as well, because design is dead, writing is a way to make an architectural statement that doesn’t depend on desig n , at this moment when knowing how to design (in the ways

Martin Tite

alized that this diary of confessions, thoughts and remembrances all relate to the ‘operating conditions’ of architecture; and that together they constitute a map describing the phenomena of architectur al culture at this moment . Not as it was, not as we think it should be, not as we wish it would be, but as it seems to be now.

Maybe as well, because design is dead, writing is a way to make an architectural statement that doesn’t depend on desig n , at this moment when knowing how to design (in the ways

The Way Things Are we do) seems to be an impediment to doing what is necessary in architecture

And, finally, I have stopped pining to be the kind of architect that I simply can’t be in this time and place. Instead - this book is what I can do - here and now

Martin Tite 2020 - 2025

The Way Things Are a

Martin Tite

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Air

When you think about it, buildings are mostly air. They look solid from the outside, but they are in fact honeycombs designed to encapsulate volumes of air that people can fit inside of. Like a space capsule!

Some architectures make something of this fact, with lots of glass, exposed floor slabs and the like; facades that are skins stretched over a structure; like a soap bubble. Some architectures are essentially cellular, as in traditional load bearing wall construction. But in both cases, they are still mostly air.

Very rarely, architectures have no air, as in the case of temples and monuments. They are solid; and inhabitation of these buildings consists of climbing them, like pre-Columbian temples in Mexico and Central America. Or they are almost solid, like Egyptian pyramids pierced with passages and chambers.

Sometimes the air in a building is delimited by an overhanging roof or courtyard walls that claim a territory of air; an invisible force-field that you can only feel.

For us, today, the practical point of creating all of these volumes of air and delimiting their bounds with something solid is that building volumes delineate legally definable areas, conditioned to moderate the environment, and leased or sold, or supportive of the agendas of institutions.

So that the value of architecture is, in large part, based on the volume of air the building captures. Like the way a container is

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really about the space it creates, rather than its sides; this compared to our collective fixation on what the vessel looks like in lieu of what it can hold.

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Alex and Tony

On the occasion of the death of Tony Griffiths. Tony died last week, and Alex died 5 years ago. They had a lot in common.

• They grew up as architects in London, working together for a time at Powell and Moya.

• They both emigrated to Canada and came to Ottawa, for different reasons.

• They thought that teaching architecture was a noble profession.

• They were never able to accept the idea that a poorly made building was acceptable in any way and continued to think of Europe as a place where high quality buildings were possible - compared to ‘North American crap’.

• They didn’t pay much attention to money - because they felt that what we were doing was more important than making money.

• They thought that people were more important than money.

• They thought poetry was something valuable and worth knowing.

• They thought highly of art and artists - as people that could show you things and touched what was important in life.

• They were passionate.

• They believed in things and fought for the architecture they believed in.

• They were principled.

• They helped other architects who were sometimes their competitors.

• They believed in the profession and made significant contributions to the profession through volunteer work .

• They spoke up for the things they believed in.

• They were not calculating in their opinions.

• They thought that architects had a special role to make the world a better place.

• They worked best for people that had the same outlooks.

• They managed to make a place in practice that survived and succeeded in spite of a generalized hostility to their values.

• They often saw a commission as a battle against the mediocre.

• They valued handmade drawings, and beautifully made things.

• They admired youthful innovators.

• They saw the practice as a kind of family.

• They were against the corporatization of the profession.

• They enjoyed laughter in the office.

These kinds of architects aren’t around anymore.

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Always already an architect

I somehow stumbled into this profession but I was always already an architect.

Insights and feelings from childhood make my becoming an architect seemingly inevitable in hindsight.

My first aesthetic experience. Driving up a mountain with my father on a gravel road to the top where a radar dome was located. This was 1962. Everything absolutely new and white and as foreign to its setting as the moon lander at Tranquility Base. All around hills for as far as I could see - all covered in trees - evergreens - so green - without sign of human effect. And somehow that feeling of the gravel road, the long view, and the pure white walls, and the white geodesic dome and the silence - all of that experience never forgotten - why?

And the fascination with making spaces that could be inhabited. Snow forts, tents, hiding places amongst tall reeds; and building steps and platforms between the towers of drying wood at my uncles’ lumber mill. And being fascinated by the idea of a tree house as big as a house - with platforms, and trunks and views of the world around. And Lego... making models of houses and imagining how you go from one place to another.

And the B asilica in St. John’s - seemingly a whole world cont ained inside; arcaded spaces mysterious and with purpose that I didn’t understand but felt. The feeling of being completely alone in this space of exploration.

A warm summer evening, I am probably 3 years old. I wake up and go to my parents’ bedroom. They’re not there. I go downstairs looking for them - not there either. I conclude that they must be outside - so I leave the house from the front door - looking around - going to the back of the house - looking around. Lying in the damp grass, waiting - it’s quiet - maybe a train in the distance, the streetlights. A feeling that is full of the mysterious quality of being alive, being a witness to what is, alone but not afraid at all.

And being fascinated by the spaces between things - the point where chemistry becomes biology.

And always being interested in many different things; science, art, landscapes, ships.

And the German pavilion at EXPO 67 - a thing like no other.

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Architects and Engineers

Some of my best friends are engineers!

We work hand in hand - but we’re very different.

Architects tend to make their concerns on a project as big and complicated as the client will tolerate. Engineers tend to make their concerns as small as can be calculated with certainty.

Architects have wants - that sometimes conflict with the wants of clients. Engineers just want to get the job done.

Architects want to be famous. Engineers don’t think about that.

Architects are activists. Engineers are usually passive - they react to a technical challenge posited by others (and when they are more than passive calculators, they irritate architects).

Clients don’t challenge engineers - because clients don’t understand the math. Architects’ math is grade 8 level and ‘anyone’ can judge architecture.

Engineers are more or less satisfied with their professional lot in life. Architects are always more or less dissatisfied.

Engineers are all about things that are practical. Architects ’ worst failing is being impractical.

Engineers can be dispassionate about the work and free from design ego. This is a position to be envied.

Architecture or revolution

When Le Corbusier said ‘architecture or revolution’ he identified a profound fact, that there is a relationship between architecture and society. But for Le Corbusier, instead of architecture being a product of a social/political realm, the social/political realm is a product of architecture!

Someone once told me that if you want to change your work you need to change where you work.

Architecture is conditioned by its environment. Certain kinds of architecture are possible in New York, but not possible in Ottawa. And the reverse is true. These conditions are external to architecture; the imperative of profitability, the systems that govern architecture, the strictures of professional associations, zoning by-laws, client base, cultural outlooks, etc.

The kind of architect I am and the kind of architect I have been made into is, in part, a function of the fact that I work in Ottawa. Actions that have been successful in Ottawa (success being repeatable) have continued and others have not survived to be repeated.

I don’t want to denigrate the agency of the individual architect or firm, or the possibility that there can be exceptions to the rule, but the overarching fact of an environment exerts a constant force on architectural practices in that environment.

Environment is not entirely a phenomenon of physical location, for example, there is a cultural environment that the ‘big-name’

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firms practice in, made up of client groups that seek to obtain status for their projects by hiring signature architects to create novelties, hence BIG.

If we want to change architecture, we have to change the environmental conditions for architecture. This might mean political action or fulminating revolutions that will alter the conditions that precede architecture. There are examples where this has happened; the sustainable design movement, and the regulations of the built environment that enabled accessibility.

Small revolutions in architecture are possible and necessary and achieved incrementally.

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Art and Architecture

Architecture is plumbing. Richard Serra

The American sculptor Richard Serra has abruptly pulled out of a project to design a massive and much-debated Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Mr. Serra, who had joined with the American architect Peter Eisenmann to submit a design that was strongly favored by Germany's Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, said he had quit for ''personal and professional reasons'' that ''had nothing to do the merits of the project.’ New York Times, June 4, 1998

Sometimes architects aspire to be artists, and sometimes artists want to make architecture, and sometimes the two of them shouldn’t get mixed up with each other.

Maybe because I am an architect, it seems to me that architecture is often a companion of art; as either a subject, the situation for making art (the studio), the places for displaying art, or art practices that create spaces and places.

There are any number of significant exceptions to this notion of art’s companionship with architecture (Offhand I can’t think of any work by Picasso that encounters architecture.) but it seems that, for many artists, architecture is present in some way.

I am thinking of people like:

• Ed Rushea, who inspired Robert Venturi,

• Ed Ruscha, who inspired Robert Venturi,

• And obvious examples like Richard Serra who created conditions that are architectural (because they involve the relationship of the body to space),

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 Or the application of art practices to the design of buildings - like Vito Acconti,

 Or the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude,

 Or the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher,

 Or the building projects Donald Judd made in Marfa Texas,

 Or Andy Warhol’s movie of the Empire State Building,

 Or Gordon Matta-Clark’s actions,

 Or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,

 Or Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés,

 Or the paper spaces of Thomas Demand,

 Or ‘City’ by Michael Heizer,

 And the work of James Turrell,

 And there are many others….

Now, to be sure, an artist’s engagement with architecture rarely includes grappling with the multitude of ways of thinking and making that architecture involves. And so, almost always, artist’s idea of architecture is selective, almost never dealing with plumbing, or other practicalities of accommodation and durability and cost and weather tightness and engineering that are associated with building projects larger than gazebos. In this regard, perhaps Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work comes closest to the condition of architecture, given the machinations of engineering, public meetings, financing and approvals his work attracted.

So, while architecture is a kindred of art, it is only so in some limited and specific ways. Art is not architecture, as architecture is not art.

If I think back, it seems that the phenomena of the artist as architect might be a feature of art of the last 60 or 70 years. Certainly landscapes, cityscapes, buildings and interiors are historically, in themselves, an important subject for painting and graphics, when not being the setting for renderings of Kings and Queens and dignitaries and families and angels and the denizens of paintings by Edward Hopper. And historically, figures such as Michelangelo practiced in both domains, but I don’t think artists thought about architecture/environments as something they would make or comment on as artists until maybe sometime around Kurt Schweitzer’s “Merzbau”,1923-37, or the gallery installation by Marcel Duchamp, “Sixteen Miles of String”, 1942, which can be seen as examples of some sort of collective realization of the potential of art to explore the condition of person in environment.

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Assholes

I would have been a more ‘successful’ architect if I had been more of an asshole.

But it’s just not in me to be the kind of person that forces my will and wants onto a client - to the detriment of my career.

Those headstrong, I don’t give a shit what you want, bridge burning, alienating, misery making, demanding, insulting architects that operate with a bullheaded tenacity, sometimes get some pretty good stuff done – compared to what my ‘easy to get along with’ accommodations yield.

There are some architects that see a project as a battle between their wants and everyone that might thwart those wants. Conflict as design process. And this strategy sort of works for them. The work is ‘pure’ and garners awards and speaks to the personality of ‘the famous architect,’ who gets then more work out of this strategy.

But in my experience, there’s lots of times when the creative tension with the client makes the solution better than I would have made myself. And oddly, the more I honour the specifics of a project, the more it looks like a work from my hand.

I have had the unpleasant experience of encountering the occasional architect/asshole. And I’ve got to say they give me the creeps – and they’re always awful to work with! The odd thing is that these assholes are typically very successful - which is puzzling as I can’t imagine who on earth can stand working with

them - or pay them money for the opportunity to hang around them through the design process.

But I suppose there are clients that simply don’t care about that, or they are assholes themselves and can understand and identify with the unwholesome motivations of the asshole.

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Authorship in architecture

Neil Armstrong was always very clear that the achievement he participated in was not his, but rather the product of the work of thousands.

But we continue to pretend (for some reason, marketing?) that architecture is the product of singular genius, contrary to the reality that it is typically the product of thousands of people, and processes, and all sorts of conventions and methods.

Some architecture is ‘supposed’ to be the product of a genius. After all, that’s what museums and other status seeking entities are buying. But the vast majority of buildings are the result of forces and mechanisms completely separate from the ‘author’ and to think of them as the product of an author is a kind of blindness, and not very useful.

The credit roll ending movies is the way authorship in building production actually works. The producers, directors, show runners, actors, best boys, craft services, etc.; all have analogous existences in the practice of architecture.

Design can also be a sort of relay race, moving from the napkin sketch to the preliminary design to design development, to contract documents, to construction, to commissioning, handing off from person to person as the work progresses; each stage authored by a different person or team.

And the increasing number of specializations in architecture makes authorship even less clear. Lighting, acoustics, building

code, door hardware, envelope, security, programming, sust ainability, heritage, law, spec writing, BIM, interiors, campus planning, project management, (I could go on….) occupy a territory once exclusively held by architects. Every one of them has a degree of agency in the design. Over time, there has been a progressive devolution of building authorship from the individual towards a network of areas of expertise that come together to realize a building, and then dissolve.

I think that ‘I’ designed the building, that ‘I’ was its author, but really what occurred was different from that. (Buddhists know that there is no ‘I’.) My actions were conditioned by environment, including history, the indoctrinations of architectural culture, the things we think we know. If this was not the case, I would be able to design something completely independent of these environmental conditions. But I can’t. As much as Christopher Wren couldn’t design the Barcelona Pavilion.

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Autobiography of a building

I came into being – I don’t know how or why.

Water was my constant enemy. I shielded myself from it as I was able, and for the most part I was successful. But the threat was always there. Water was always able to find a way to penetrate my defenses and so my insides and outsides suffered stains and rust and various degradations in its wake.

I was always at risk of other calamities – being set on fire, tossed around by winds or shaken to my core by the movement of the earth I stood on.

Over time, I suffered various amputations and extensions –which altered my personality as much as a lobotomy might. But I was also cared for and sometimes loved.

They would make me whole, the beings that occupied my inside. I needed them as much as they needed me.

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cho i ces

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Choices

Design is a matter of making choices. For even a modestly scaled project, a design involves thousands of choices, the size and arrangement of spaces, the finishing of the door hardware, the make-up of the roof, the selection of the toilet, etc. I can tell you from experience, it’s exhausting! And amongst the thousands of choices made, a few are bound to be wrong, either discovered during construction – or by the occupant post-construction.

The odd predicament of design is that we must make choices in the absence of a logical path towards arriving at a conclusion. And the design process is full of non sequiturs; for example, we might need to choose between good windows or an elevator.

There is almost no way of knowing if the choices we make are right or wrong. If we’re lucky we realize wrong choices have led to a dead end, if we’re not lucky, they get built.

There is a kind of designer that is self - assured, and confident in their choices . They take their wants and ideas to be selfevidently correct because they themselves thought of them. They will use expressions like, ‘it seems to me that….’, or ‘I wanted to ….’. In these cases, the design is really about the mentality of the designer. Design as the product of the irrational. Interior designers are comfortable in this realm.

There is another kind of designer that feels the need to distance themselves from their choices. And to argue that the design is a pure consequence of factors external to the designer. A lot of

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modernist architecture was about this logic of design. Design as a product of the rational.

And there is a kind of hybrid designer that has their wants, but achieves them by stealth, wrapping up choices in the cloak of reason. A lot of so-called ‘high-tech’ architecture was like this, where apparently rational thinking somehow inevitably ended up making something that looked really cool.

These comments are not a criticism of these architects or kinds of architecture, but rather a taxonomy of the procedures enabling design.

Martin

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Collaboration is a word architects use to make everyone feel good about obeying them.

Colour in architecture

Architecture has always had a tangled relationship with colour – which is often nervously considered by architects because it has the power to obfuscate form (like spangle painting of battleships) . Form is presumed to be the actual stuff of architecture - factual and objective compared to perceptual and subjective. (Interestingly, Le Corbusier employed colour throughout his oeuvre – for example the chapels at La Tourette – which is not surprising since his architecture always considered subjective experience.)

One of the reasons that modern architects had ‘a hard time’ with colour was that the books promulgating ‘the modern movement’ mostly used black and white pictures so - for ‘second’ and ‘third’ generation modernists - colour wasn’t part of the mental landscape of ‘good design’. Colour was also ideological and associated with ‘honestly’ portraying the ‘nature of materials’. This meant that individual functional elements (wall, structure, roof, glazing etc.) were distinctly hued and ‘coded’ according to the material used for each function. This logic in contrast to the use of decorative materials – like wallpaper.

I visited my friends’ project (Atelier Big City) and realized that they used colour as an integral part of architecture, in service of tectonic identity. This being different from:

• colour as a consequence of material (green copper, red brick, buff stone, grey concrete, silver shingles etc.

• colour as a choice for a building (Mies using black or white)

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• colour forced on the architect (the way that some materials like spandrel glass don’t have a ‘natural’ colour –forcing the architect to pick one)

• colour applied after the fact of design and construction (the way that any number of brutalist buildings have been brutalized by paint!)

Looking at most cityscapes, the pallet of most buildings sits in a range between the buff/grey tones of stone and concrete to dull brick reds and browns. This compared to the thrilling moment when buildings are, for a few weeks, bright green or pink because of the colour of sheathing or insulation. I wonder what cities would look like if every building was permanently so coloured –and I wonder what would have happened if by some quirk of physics concrete was – say – lavender.

Compliance

In order to be built, every design must be compliant.

Designs that are non-compliant do not get built.

Compliance has many dimensions:

• Compliance with functional requirements (such as the area and organization of spaces or the provisions of various fitments),

• Compliance with social expectations (houses are ‘supposed’ to have three bedrooms, a kitchen and living room and 1.5 baths and look like houses),

• Compliance with the financial means of the client,

• Compliance with laws and regulations,

• Compliance with contemporary aesthetic standards,

• Compliance with architectural mores regarding ‘good design’ (the way architecture is ‘supposed’ to be),

• Compliance with physics (gravity, material strengths, flow dynamics etc.),

• Compliance with the whims of important people,

• Compliance with the capacities and norms of the construction industry,

• Compliance with the ideology of the entity that is sponsoring the building.

I could go on.

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In a sense then, a building is a model of the conditions within which it came to be. And its realization is a validation of these conditions. The authority of the fact of a building’s existence and its physical presence asserts the legitimacy of these conditions.

In this way, buildings are fundamentally conservative, because they validate the status quo of power structures and the networks controlling building production.

Of course, compliance is sensible and practical, and it makes life as an architect a lot easier. I am struck though by the unquestioning willingness of some practicing architects to simply comply with whatever strictures are placed on them. This is not surprising for old architects invested in the status quo and with bills to pay, but puzzling in young architects who decline their opportunity to be revolutionaries.

We can compare our contemporary conservatism to the tendency of previous generations of architects to resist compliance. This was done through writing, exhibitions, paper architecture (as it was called), hypothetical projects and the occasional experimental building (supported by an ‘enlightened’ client with a willingness to put money into a building the likes of which never seen before in the hope of realizing a situation not possible by complying with accepted norms). In this later case I am thinking of Paolo Solari/Arcosanti, the Eames house, early Foster projects, Stirling’s Olivetti building and the like, but that rebellion is over.

Resistance against compliance is possible but typically marginal. It still happens today, but is largely a performative gesture, without any expectation of provoking actual change.

Consciousness

Consciousness is a consequence of lived experience.

Lived experience is (partly) a consequence of the situations and conditions engendered by architecture.

Architecture is a device that constructs states of consciousness.

Control (my way or the highway)

Our architecture is infected with the ambition to achieve perfection (compared to the Chinese idea that 80% right is economically optimal because of the effect of diminishing returns).

One of the occupational hazards of being an architect is the habit of continuously and perpetually searching for flaws whenever observing a building; the unresolved detail, a lack of consideration, shoddy workmanship, and the like; which make it hard to simply enjoy what is right about a building.

The ideal of perfection (the expertly resolved detail, the smooth and unblemished surfaces, the elegance of the plan, and the like; endlessly strived for, and almost impossible to achieve) comes along with the need of the architect to have complete and absolute control of the architecture of their building.

 Control over the design

 Control over its detailing

 Control over its inhabitation (through the selection of furniture for example)

 Control of the presentation of the architecture

 Control of the narrative about the project

This logic of control extends into the photography of architecture, where the image is perfectly balanced, the light and shadows artful, nothing is misplaced, and elements extraneous to the message of the image are eliminated; the children’s toys,

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the unwashed dishes, the laundry etc. (Our idea of ‘good architecture’ is, in part, an idea about good photography.)

For some architects, being in a position of control is the most appealing thing about the profession. The controlling personality is common in a certain kind of architect, necessary to realize the singularity of vision that makes a project notable. Consequently, the egotistical, demanding, unreasonable, architect is often a creature of ‘good design’.

But, to have absolutely everything in a building conform to the way it’s ‘supposed to be’ when it’s finally built is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Our instruments of control are remarkably crude, some drawings and specifications for a completely unique assemblage of parts, the exact like of which ha s never been realized, sponsored by someone most concerned about time and cost, designed by a team that may not share the same goals, put out to tender and awarded to the lowest bidder, with trades that are competent, or not, while trying to ensure your firm doesn’t go bankrupt. This is not a recipe for success! Like trying to paint a miniature with a mop.

I have been practicing for decades and I’m still not good at achieving perfection! But then again, is perfection worth aspiring to?

Perfection also means the elimination of the contingent, the arbitrary, the temporary, and the accidental, which are in fact necessary features of life.

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Craft

Crafted things are almost always beautiful and if they are not, they are at least interesting to contemplate.

In an economy dominated by machine made things, hand crafted things are mostly seen today in shops that sell expensive amusements - divorced from the ordinary use value / economic logic that objects commonly have For example, the ceramic piece that can’t practically hold anything and is difficult to clean - priced 500 times what a bowl might cost in a shopping centre.

There is a category of architecture that has been entranced by the idea of craft – the unique, material focused, perfectly resolved work that aspires to be a beautifully crafted building. I am thinking here of architects such as Shim-Sutcliffe or Tod Williams/ Billie Tsien and the like.

Architects’ idea of craft is limited to what they can conceive of during the design phase, so when we talk about craft in architecture, it is as if craft is entirely the domain of the designer’s interest in finicky details and beautiful materials, rather than the capacity of a trade to execute - or the potential of trade’s craft skills to contribute to the project.

And what never gets reported about beautifully crafted buildings is that they are extremely expensive. Expensive to build and expensive to operate and expensive to design. ( A well - known architect told me that he realized to his horror that the fees that he charges for custom houses are about the same, on a square foot basis, as what most people expect to pay for a house.)

I’m conflicted. On one hand, “What an amazing and wonderful building !” On the other hand, “ Is this really where money should go?”

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decadence decadence

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Decadence

It must be a legacy of Catholic guilt - but I’m very uncomfortable with the endless proliferation of magazine spreads on luxury houses and apartments. The bespoke projects that require years of attention by teams of expert designers engaged at an enormous cost, flown in to attend to the site wherever it might be, and budgeted at 10 or 20 or 100 times more than a ‘typical dwelling’ might cost. (Curiously – these bespoke projects rarely possess original thinking. The same beautiful, glassy, woody, concrete, exposed structure, nice-millwork, Architectural Digest stuff that keeps circling us like the great pacific plastic dump.)

At some point – I think this is undeniable – the cost and intellectual labour that goes into an architectural project slides into decadence. It’s just wrong - isn’t it?

Maybe luxury houses might be ‘forgiven’ for their cost when they somehow advance the culture of architecture - or teach us about some hitherto unknown formal invention - or achieve the status of WORK OF ART - or their beauty alone justifies their existence, or if they serve as a testing ground for ideas that might have more general value

But we’re architects - we like nice stuff, and we admire the boldness of clients and the skill of their architects, and the capacity of a building industry to realize these amazing fripperies. And we enjoy the audacious. And we are titillated by t he unconventional. Most buildings aren’t extraordinary - nor can they be - and maybe they shouldn’t be. But we get bored with all of that.

Design as commodity

There used to be something called a ‘nickel plan’, which was a simple plan diagram that would show how program could be accommodated on a floor plate, with a fee based – you guessed it – on five cents a square foot. This is design as commodity.

There are two poles to design - as we understand it today. The kind that is customized, ‘innovative’, expensive, unique, that we typically think of as ‘architecture’; and the kind that applies standardized solutions using proven and familiar technologies, cost effective and representative of common practice, that we think of as ‘not-architecture’ or just ‘building’.

The former is taught in schools, the latter is not.

In general, architects feel like they are ‘doing architecture’ when they are working on the expensive bits of a building, and simply grinding away on standard solutions for the parts of the building that should be as cheap as possible - say the loading docks or the janitor’s closets - that are virtually identical no matter the building. In this later case, design becomes a commodity because there is no particular reason to select one designer or another, except cost and some basic reassurance that the architect knows what they are doing.

Every building employs elements of ‘architecture’ and ‘commodity design’. For example, the elaborate lobby that creates an image for the apartment building that is otherwise totally generic. Or the museum project that uses a conventional roof assembly. Or the warehouse that, despite its prosaic nature, is somehow infected with architecture.

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In the former case of ‘architecture’, professional fees are relatively high; as necessitated by the need to spend lots of time doing product research, the cost of developing and testing dozens of options, the embracement of complexity, and detailing everything to a high level. In the latter case of ‘commodity design’, professional fees are relatively low, and design work trends towards standard solutions that are well understood by the construction industry.

Commoditization has entered the procurement of professional services – so that we regularly see requests for proposals that consider fee as 30% or 50% or even 100% of the evaluation. And while this is dispiriting to architects, because it says that we don’t add anything of value to a project, it is perhaps an accurate model of the client’s outlook. The client doesn’t need or want ‘architecture’.

And it seems worth noting that there is generally more money for the architects ‘doing architecture’ rather than doing ‘commodity design’. And I wonder how much of the continual striving to make ‘architecture’, that most architects are burdened with, is also a way to achieve strategic objectives outside of the project, or architecture itself, making more money, establishing and maintaining brand, developing the portfolio for the office, achieving some notoriety/status, etc.

Design is dead

I am bored with the predictability of even the very best architecture we make. The ‘interesting moves’, the promise of a wonderful world, the skill of the execution.

Design is dead. Of course as a practical matter there will be a continuing need for buildings and objects to be configured to suit various demands. But what I mean here is that design as a force for liberation or becoming has been supplanted by design as signal. A signal of the presence of the designer. A signal of taste. A signal of status. A signal within culture by the players in the game. A disguise of the reality of a project. Forms that are designed to be ogled by people ignorant of architecture (a populism of a sort).

Design used to be the solution. Now it’s the problem.

By this I mean that there is something wrong with the way architectural design culture is currently configured or at least as it is popularly represented. ‘Design’ per se, is no longer the prime affective plane for architecture – having been taken over by various crisis – environmental, social (housing), medical (COVID) –that have impacted architecture in profound ways outside of what we traditionally think of as the territory of ‘design’.

The culture of design - as currently configured - is problematic in a way that threatens its legitimacy as a practice. Design is no longer a challenging or enabling force in culture; but rather now, amid these crises, a plaything for bored architects, or a spectacle, or the validation of the status quo. Design is no longer a

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subject for civil engagement or the result of intelligent thinking - but rather the action of a personality who isn’t interested in me, and who I in turn couldn’t care less about.

We attend to various dimensions of architecture, ‘good design’, sustainable design and the like, and sometimes we advocate for social justice in architecture. But these are fragmentary and reactive to conditions ‘outside’ of architecture (is there an inside?).

All of these ‘good’ and ‘interesting’ and socially responsible architects, and the architecture they make, seem to me in some way irrelevant to this moment.

We operate with comfortable presumptions that make things easy for everyone involved, the designer, the client, the builder, the authority, etc. Everyone. We exist in a system of thinking. We are largely unaware of this fact of our mentality, and therefore unable to act on it.

But further, the way our design culture is configured is part of the indoctrination I assimilated about how to think about architecture. And so, I am disabled from any ability to ‘get past’ design, as much as a writer can’t get past words.

Am I saying I don’t want to be an architect anymore?

Dirt

Buildings are made from dirt, or rather, they are made from things extracted from dirt. Stone, mud, lime, iron, silica turned into glass, limestone into cement, and the trees that grow in dirt that give us wood.

Vegetable mineral animal. Buildings come from the first two but almost never from the later. (Although I remember being amazed to hear of Siberians using the tusks of woolly mammoths to build dwellings, and Philip Johnston’s bathroom finished in leather.)

Buildings are remarkably crude - at least as material artifactscompared to the sophistication that we see in contemporary technologies. The chips that will hold a million transistors. The promise of quantum computing. The incredible works measured in the size of atoms. All the things created in laboratories and clean rooms, whose existence is almost invisible to lived experience.

This represents a great divergence from a time when construction technologies were on par with those of science and engineering.

So, what to make of this dumb stuff we mush around with our hands? Unlike the most sophisticated technologies we have, the stuff made from dirt still has the ability to configure the way our bodies situate themselves in a place.

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Do-gooders

Q. Did you think we were going to change the world? A. Yes

We were trained to be ‘do -gooders’; people that understood things (the importance of context, the history of architecture, the social value of design etc.) and as a result could and would act correctly and do good in the world.

And once we got into practice, we tried and tried, every time, and over and over, to ‘do the right thing’; even if our clients didn’t want us to.

This ethic of doing the very best you can for the good of the world - is somehow embedded in the idea of being an architect. Every project a chance to make the world better through the means presented by the opportunity of the project. T his ‘do - gooder’ ethic i s related to William Morris , echoing into the present.

In some projects there’s no expectation that the building should make things better ( at least in the way architects want ) and maybe there’s something to learn here - but it’s a scary notion! If we aren’t doing ‘good’, are we doing ‘bad’?

Certainly, for many practices and for most projects, the question of ‘the good’ in a project is what the client thinks the good is; making a profit, complying with regulations, creating useable space, or complying with social expectations as necessary for the building to be accepted. There are many rebuttals to this line of thinking, but these are typically in the territory of the

‘demonstration project’ or acts of subsidized design charity. But the occasional school in Africa designed and realized with good intentions will not alter the fundamental geometry of the production of building construction in that part of the world, nor the need for education there.

Notwithstanding all this - I can’t imagine not being a ‘do-gooder’ architect. It’s the way I think about things.

There is a class of types of architecture that don’t concern themselves with doing good, namely the formalisms that are about giving expression to an abstract design idea, or an intellectually interesting proposition. This outlook on architecture has resided with any number of architects, whose design practices are, on the surface, unrelated; the New York Five, Aldo Rossi, Herzog & de Meuron, Valerio Olgiat and others, where architecture is an autonomous/self-referential practice, in some ways independent of time or place - which is liberating, but is it good?

Dream Home

What a strange idea. As if somehow this aspiration - sometimes realized - exists somewhere other than waking reality.

How many times have stories about the dream home been repeated? The story of the dream home occupied for a matter of a year or two - or not at all. Or the story of the dream home built for love Or the story of the dream home that becomes an obsession. Or the dream home that’s a comical rebuttal to the idea of perfection (leaky roofs, cold rooms, hot rooms, doors that won’t open or close, the battle that Edith Farnsworth had with Mies).

The dream home occupies the territory of imaginary places. Where, for once, everything is good and right forever, where the home somehow meets your every want, where you are finally at peace, where you finally get the good thing s you deserve , where you become yourself ; all in all , a stand - in for heaven, another imaginary place.

The dream home is never a typical apartment, or one half of a duplex. It is almost always in a remote location (or at least a location that is very private) - away from the possibility of interference from neighbors. So, dream homes are often built on islands of land, preferably actual islands, or hundreds of feet above the street. Remoteness, to be able to be completely alone, seems to come along with the notion of the dream home.

The dream home idea also seems bound up with the idea of luxury - or a certain idea of luxury. The large, the expansive, the

showy, the costly, the perfectly realized. A modest and affordable apartment, no matter how well it is designed, can be loved, but it’s never a ‘dream home’.

The idea of house in popular culture is tied up with the wish that somehow the house will be a dream home, as manifest by the pitiful advertisements in newspapers that suggest that each and every one of those track houses contains some part of the essence of the dream home, or the contests offering as a winning prize ‘your very own dream home!’

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efficiency

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Efficiency

Not to denigrate the real ways that different contemporary cultures promote building projects and engage with architecture, but you would think that different political and economic systems (say American, Russian, Chinese, or those of other democracies and dictatorships) would engender substantively different kinds of architecture, as different as vertebrates are to invertebrates, but they don’t.

They are all bound together with a logic of efficiency, and technologies that are international in scope and application. In some fundamental way , they are all the same because they are all rooted in realizing the most economically efficient way to achieve a practical end. Of course, there are exceptions – for example when decorum or marketing considerations demand conspicuous ‘waste’ - or when a client wants to elevate their status by patronizing the list of 40 or 50 ‘signature’ architects hawking their wares around the globe. But for the most part the key design driver is cost efficiency , which tends to push designs into shoe boxes (decorated as need be - as Robert Venturi observed).

This ideology of efficiency infects ‘common sense’ views about the ways buildings should be. (‘Wasted space’ is a common phrase that carries this presumption.) It is self-evident to most that ‘efficiency’ is good, and ‘inefficiency’ is bad. That it is not only stupid to be inefficient - it is also somehow profoundly wrong.

This ideology also ties into the logic of commercial development whose purpose is to make profit or the logic of public works

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which demand that limited financial resources be husbanded with care. A climate of scarcity that demands we get ‘bang for your buck’.

I am not arguing that we ‘waste’ money. But for an ethic of architecture that understands cost efficiency as a practical requirement of architecture, rather than the purpose of architecture.

And looking forward, we are heading to a future of ultimate efficiency that removes the slowness and desires and pleasures of human labour – software deciding what should be built, software deciding how it should be designed, robots producing buildings – all untouched by human hands.

Our ultimate desire is for the world to proceed without the necessity of our presence.

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Everyone’s a teacher

Architecture is a team sport.

It requires a diversity of skills, knowledge and kinds of intelligence, and ages too.

When I was in school, the faculty at the school of architecture seemed invested in being authorities, whose authority rested in age or education. They spoke - we listened.

I don’t feel that way. To me , a n architectural practice is like a baseball team where the roles of the team members are very different - but each one is essential to the success of the team.

And of course, it’s commonplace that the younger you are the more savvy you have regarding software - the great leveling where the old depend on the young.

As a principal in my firm, I enjoy the capacity of each person in the office to contribute to our collective enterprise, but also each person’s ability to be a teacher for all.

It could be simply a matter of knowing more about a project than anyone else does, it could be a matter of showing others how to engage with clients, it could be leadership by example (the person that comes in on a weekend without being asked), it could be a kind and friendly attitude brought to a business that is often tough.

And we should be prepared to admit that others – outside of ‘the fold’ of architecture – can be teachers too . The client that challenges you – the ‘civilian’ from the public that has a fresh perspective.

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Expensive paint

A colleague once referred to the application of different kinds of facade treatment on a building as ‘expensive paint’. This was a smart observation of the recent tendency to animate facades with arbitrary fragments of building fabric.

The design strategy I am describing is the form of decoration that uses fragments of the stuff buildings are made of to animate designs (rather than the decorative programs employed in premodern design) a chuck of curtain wall here – some metal cladding there – brick elsewhere. It’s also decoration of a purposeful aimlessness that attempts to simulate the effects of time, seeking the pleasing variety of traditional urban environments.

Of course, the purpose of all this frenetic ‘animation’ is to disguise the fact that the offices are all the same, the apartments are all the same and that our buildings are fundamentally about multiplying the value of real estate.

This phenomena of ‘expensive paint’ exists because we lack design vocabulary (based on tradition or pragmatism) that will enable the ordering an otherwise flat façade in a satisfying manner; compared to pre-modern architectures based on tradition, load bearing elements and materials that - at least to some degree - were inherent to expression.

Older buildings had decorative ‘programs’ that developed a coherence of beginning and middle and end; or moods solemn, glorious, calm, playful, restrained or exuberant; or with allegorical/symbolic resonance through reference to tradition or nature;

often organized through the principle of symmetry. This was a serious task, not a matter of throwing stuff at an elevation. But it also depended (my untested hypothesis) on a collective that could ‘read’ architecture; compar ed to our current situation; which understands the meaning of architecture to be found in deviation from shoe-box buildings.

The curious thing about these buildings using ‘expensive paint’ is that they appropriate the actu ality of the tectonics of architecture, walls, structure, encl osure, openings (that used to be based on ‘facts’ or ‘function’) and apply them randomly, thereby divorced from use value. This design strategy is a parody of architecture where the appearance of things is exaggerated to effect. For example, sunshades applied to opaque portions of facades.

This all is enabled by the contemporary logic of detailing. A rain screen over an airspace can be metal, wood, glass, brick; anything you like. There’s almost nothing in principles of decorum or the technical requirements of a facade design that tells you what it should look like. A wad of brick can be applied to the 40th floor of an office building if that’s what you want to do. It’s just a rain screen.

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Extract from a (failed) proposal

for the rehabilitation of the Carleton University School of Architecture (Building 22)

We will be working with people that will be passionate about this project, in part because they are architects, in part because they are students of architecture, in part because the stakeholders that use the building have universally understood the positive effect that the design of the original school has had on the culture of learning and life in the school.

In this context the conversations will be charged and perhaps have a political dimension.

The design matters in a profound way to life and learning at the school - and the prospect of altering the status quo comes with the risk of ‘not getting it right’ or destroying the attributes that have make the school an icon to several generations.

The project has the exciting potential to re-vivify the building facility in ways which will positively impact the culture and pedagogy of the school as much as the original Carmen Corneil design did.

Part of the work should be directed towards the question of the value of restoring features of the original building, such as its original lighting, or concrete surfaces marked by paint. Building 22 was fragile in some senses, and vulnerable to changes that compromised the character and quality of the environment, perhaps in part because the industrial expression of the building

was mis-understood to be a evidence that ‘design’ was not a concern because the building was apparently utilitarian, and perhaps as a mark of the relative status of the school of architecture within the administration of the university.

Building 22 is grounded in ethics. An ethic about the beauty of the ordinary. An ethic about frankness of expression that grounded the building into the reality of how buildings are made. An ethic about fostering community and the street as the nexus of community. An ethic about spontaneous use, happy accidents, impromptu meetings. An ethic about the project of a building making the spaces around it better. An ethic about enabling connections. An ethic that says that exposing the ‘truth’ about construction is a moral obligation.

These ethics are also perhaps the evidence of a way of thinking - but one whose origins are from the past. Life and architecture have changed in 50 years. We are compelled and obligated to test the validity of the values the school was designed around. Are they universal and timeless? If not, how should we update them?

A humble attitude will be required by those contemplating changing the design of the school - which offers so many lessons to generations of students and practitioners.

The project will be a time to raise and address questions. The original design envisaged a program built around day lit studios with drafting boards. If these conditions no longer exist as they were, what is the idea of a studio today?

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Judging the past by the standards of the present is unreasonable. Building 22 comes from an era of cheap energy and ignorance of the impending climate crisis. The risk of achieving the sensible goal of improved energy efficiency for Building 22 is the potential to destroy the cultural value of the building artifact and the (still) novel character of the building that attracts and retains students.

The design emerged as well from the 1960’s, a time that was willing to take risks, desirous of challenging orthodoxies, expansive and optimistic. The school is evidence of that time. What is the right attitude today? Is it possible to have one?

The project is about potentials. The latent potentials inherent to the structure and building fabric, the potential to integrate forward looking technologies to support the work and living environment of the school, the potential to create new and exciting approaches, the potential for our studies to precipitate gifting and financial support by founders, the potential to align the facility design (conceived as a building for baby boomers) to the needs and ambitions of today’s generation, the potential to realize aspects of the building (such as the clerestory window over the street, originally conceived but not executed), the potential to right some wrongs that have been imposed ad hoc on the building over 50 years of inhabitation, the potential for the project to integrate itself with the students own studies on the building, the potential for students to learn from our work and our work processes and the potential that we will learn by working with students and faculty.

The situation/opportunity is inherently challenging - in an exciting way. We need to attend simultaneously to urbanism, building technologies, spatial requirements, the ideology of expression of architectural technology, the rehabilitation of a significant piece of architecture, the social/political dynamic of working with the university administration, faculty, students and other stakeholders, the need to plan for phased implementation, the need for solutions to align with a viable financial model, and the obligation for the design to be a statement about architecture that specifically addresses itself to architects and students of architecture.

There are fascinating opportunities for the project to actively engage with the learning that students do - in fact this is essential. The school building was conceived of as a platform for learning about architecture and this rehabilitation project is an opportunity to be a platform to learn about engagement, the design processes (which we intend to make transparent to students - perhaps they can be invited to attend coordination meetings which would ordinarily be held in camera), contemporary building systems, sustainability, and heritage rehabilitation.

The idea of the ‘unfinished’ building that is open to change and the agency of students is important. It raises the question of how to rehabilitate a heritage building whose ethic was based on the need to be an open-ended solution - the school never ‘finished’ or embalmed in a fixed state - but a continuing cultural/pedagogical project. The idea of extending this ethic forward and enabling the active occupation by students and faculty will be crucial. So, the building is an armature, and this attitude may be the beginnings of an idea of what is to be done.

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fam oussss

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Famous architects

Thinking about the ‘famous’ architects that I have had occasion to meet…

They almost always - at some point in the conversation - note that they have just won an award or that they are on track to win one. It seems odd - surely - after all their success they don’t need the validation of another award - but they seem to. I find it touching that they put any stock at all in these things.

It bears noting that one does not become a ‘famous architect’ by accident - or simply with talent. You must want to be famous - as much as an athlete must want to win a gold medal at the Olympics. 80-hour work weeks - tireless self-promotion - speaking at conferences - endless miles in airplanes - bad hotel food - getting published - social media... It’s a lot of work! But work that doesn’t have much to do with the value of being an architect.

To me at least, this striving for power within the culture of architecture is demeaning to architecture itself. As if you and your wants are more important than architecture. And you willingly participate in the charade that maintains your status; where ambitions for oneself swamp whatever ambitions you might have ever had for architecture.

Maybe these ‘blindnesses’ are a prerequisite to becoming a ‘famous ’architect. If they understood the futility of this game, would they still play it? If they understood that their building was after all, really, and only, just a building, would they be so invested in it being exactly the way they want it?

What are famous architects like?

• They are sometimes quite incurious about other architects. Their thinking and their practices are totally centred on themselves and what they personally think about architecture. Is self-centredness necessary to join the pantheon of the great ones? I don’t think so. The very best architects are fans of lots of other architects.

• They sometimes see themselves as the heroes of the story.

• They see everything through the lens of architecture. As if everything can be understood as a kind of architecture. Bu t there is a strange innocence to the fact they are incapable of seeing otherwise.

• Some of them are cynical manipulators - I am sad to say.

• Some of them are true and earnest believers, thinking that they have somehow found ‘the right way’ - not understanding (or maybe they do) that the only reason they get work is because social or political decorum demands that they – or another of their type - be hired to conjure a bobble for the edification / entertainment / seduction of their audience.

• They are always supported by a variety of un-famous ‘backroom’ players. But they rarely speak of them as collaborators or contributors.

Those of us who have been in the profession long enough, know who these ‘back-room’ players are - and we give them the complete and deserved respect that comes from the fact that:

• They have to be highly skilled to somehow realize these projects.

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• They have to be highly skilled to somehow realize these projects.

• They go about this work without the slightest hope of personal recognition.

These ‘un-famous’ people give honour to the profession.

First job after school

At my interview for my first job after school:

Barry (trying to make me less nervous): “We have a minimum height requirement.”

Me: Too nervous to laugh.

At the same interview.

Barry: 'What salary are you looking for?'

Me: "Well, Alex Rankin is paying a classmate $10 an hour." Barry offers me $8 and I gladly accept it.

Me trying to help Gord - insisting that I could detail a window into a wall. Gord fixing it after my attempt.

Barry gave me a small addition to do. One day the owners call up. I t doesn’t look like the picture!” Anxious call with the builder, Al Bateman, I think. We go to the site. Barry looks at the roof line and then gets up on the roof with a chain saw and cuts back the offending part, assuring the owners it will look fine. In the car on the way back, Barry explaining to me the fundamentals of the geometry of sloping roofs. No anger.

Working with Gord in the little space we shared. Me incessantly complaining about how messed up everything was in practice. Gord explaining to me that the sharp edges in school get rounded in practice.

Barry giving me a series of tasks to complete at city hall - assuming - wrongly - that I have a grasp of the workings of plan examiners and the planning branch. At that moment City staff were

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in some temporary space - I think on Nicholas street - and they were faced with a somewhat clueless kid asking questions that he didn’t understand. Then me coming back to the office…

Barry: Did you get x?

Me: No.

Barry: Did you see y?

Me: No, he wasn’t there.

Barry: What about z?

Me: I’m not sure.

Barry: They’re on Nicholas?

Me: I went to the right building!

Barry: Laughter.

Me working on the site plan for Rideau Gate. There are two surveys and at some point, I discover that the survey I was using was the wrong one. Barry calling the client and explaining. Lesson learned.

Some small little thing comes into the office. I think a fluff up of a pizza place entrance. Me screwing up somehow but excusing myself because ‘it’s not an important job’. Barry: "Every job is an important job."

Nancy suddenly softening when she found out that I had a tumor that I needed to go to the hospital for. “Are you okay hon?”

Found Design

Why is it the designs we find always seem better than the designs we decide to do? Why is it that some designer’s favorite things are not designed?

I am thinking of the way modernist architects were inspired by designs free from the guile of culture and felt to be perfect because of this; The Bell helicopter in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Frank G ehr y wondering why the tract houses looked so good before they were finished, Jim Stirling referencing images of warehouses, Le Corbusier and grain elevators, etc.

The appealing and exciting naturalism of modernism seems to come from the possibility of a direct connection to the world as it is, untainted by any want to style, an authenticity that came from the way things are.

Compare to the present moment, where designs are anchored by the wants of the designer as author, or, alternatively, the product of ‘objective’ analysis that no matter how ‘objective’ somehow always leads to a design more or less conventional in their application of design principles, design organization and styling.

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Frank

It’s odd to me, these quibbles about Frank Gehry’s stuff. He is who he is, he does the things he does. The work is completely enmeshed with him as a person. The thing that I enjoy about his architecture is the way the work is the product of a completely unique sensibility . Only Frank does Frank. And in a way, if you don’t like the work, you don’t like him. Maybe this is why a reporter got the one finger salute!

To expect that he is going to change somehow in response to criticism seems wrongheaded. If you want him to change his design approach, you’re asking him to change his own humanity.

He seems authentically himself as a person and an architect and I think his work achieves an authenticity because of this fact.

His work is often about a feeling, a sort of interior narrative. Things that make you wonder and imagine.

They have personalities. The chunky forms, the shimmering surfaces, the joy of materials, the oddly matter-of-fact treatment of certain elements, the whirling sheets and complex geometries, the compositions of forms… all come together in a way that only he can do.

And he is endearingly open about things, the screw - ups, the clients, the budgets. Maybe because he’s sort of untouchable? Us mortals are not able to say these things out loud.

While the notion of ‘schools’ or tendencies in architectural thought seems to have dissolved, I don’t see any evidence of a school of design following on from Frank Gehry the way that the ‘heroes’ of modernism, left in their wake hundreds of acolytes emulating ‘the masters’. It is almost impossible to imagine Ghery’s firm continuing in any meaningful way following his passing. He is sui generis. There are no followers. His unique design sensibility seemed to come out of nowhere, except maybe the character of Frank Ghery or Los Angeles itself.

Great architects are the ones that show us new ways of making architecture, and by that measure Frank Gehry is a great architect.

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From the extraordinary to the ordinary

It’s really kind of inevitable, that every firm founded by a design leader seems to suffer.

Amongst ‘good’ architects, the identity of the firm is traditionally synonymous with the identity of the design leader. Witness the examples of Rem Koolha a s, R ichard Meier, Zaha Hadid , Norman Foster, Richard Rogers (Whereas many contemporary firms are now named in ways that speak to themselves as corporate entities independent of individuals, firms with names like Core or UN Studio.)

Within the past decade or so, many of these ‘name’ firms have gone through a transition from the absolute control of their namesake founders to a more widely held responsibility for design within the eponymous firms that have corporatized their practices. This is a practical feature of the transition from the small firm doing ‘interesting’ work to the large firm, doing perhaps less interesting work that is infinitely more ambitious in scale and requires the discipline of management structures to operate effectively and profitably.

This pattern of transition is also necessitated by the fact that people don’t live forever, and because the ‘name’ firms need to migrate to a dispersed ownership in order to attract and retain competent senior architects. Unlike firms such as that operated by Le Corbusier which vanished with the death of the sole owner.

In some cases, design leadership has passed on to a new design leader, in other cases design leadership has become diversified amongst a wider retinue of leaders - often operating with some autonomy, notably in the case of OMA.

A pattern of these transitions is that design quality tends to drift from the extraordinary towards normal sensible ordinary professional competency, or rote repetition of past successes, as it is diluted by the weakening influence of the living personality of ‘the master’. In the worst cases, the architecture parodies the work that the firm became known for.

Clearly the hand of ‘the master’ matters to some firms and is not readily transferable. (This contradicts the assertion, held by people that think about management, that all we need is a good process to create good results.) This is a problem when the subjective quality of the design firm’s work is bound up with the subjective character of the aforementioned persons.

The three letter firms (HOK, IBI, SOM, HDR, KPF) and the like (Gensler, Perkins & Will etc.) do not suffer this condition because they were never really about the qualities or character of an individual design personality - with the design leadership in these companies - founded in the first instance as partnerships - widely distributed and readily replaceable with equivalent competencies. In these firms ‘the designer’ (3 or 4 steps below the CEO) Is brought out like a trained bear to perform and to assure the client that ‘good design’ is at work, proven by the ample application of ‘features’ extraneous to the actual purpose of the building, supported and validated by the narratives

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‘ the designer ’ c oncocts, populated by ‘ inspiration s’ a nd diagrams that coerce acceptance by making the solution appear necessary and inevitable.

Fuck all

As a student, everything seemed to be a kind of architecture or had some parallel to architecture. Obviously, this outlook had a lot to do with my own myopias and complete immersion in the school environment.

Notwithstanding my personal and lifelong commitment to architecture, I came to realize that there are many things in the world, many truly important things, that have fuck all to do with architecture. Say for example, the love of a mother for a child.

And, as well, I came to realize that my ideas about architecture were very different from the many people I engaged with. I saw every project through the lens of making a ‘good’ design - or at least one that was sufficiently different from the norm that it would hold my interest.

I thought everyone should already know that design was important (and that the ones that didn’t were somehow ignorant or morally defective) , and slowly realized that others thought other considerations were equally or more important, and that these outlooks were entirely reasonable and valid; the cost that made the building affordable, the schedule that demanded the project be ready on time, or other considerations that meant that my design wants often really truly had fuck all to do with the actual drivers of the project.

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Martin Tite

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Gold plated toilets

I remember a colleague remarking on the dilapidated condition of a federal minister’s office. It was a relic of the 1970’s, because each new minister was afraid to be criticized for the cost of a renovation; the attention the subject would attract inversely proportional to its cost

Buildings are very expensive. But most people don’t understand how expensive they are. We regularly embark on projects that cost one hundred million dollars and more - which is amazing compared to my daily life that is concerned about paying more than $100 for a nice meal.

I remember as a recent graduate being shocked at the thought of a cost of $100 a square foot for a house, imagining a room covered in 100-dollar bills spaced 12 inches apart. And today that rate is comically low. Even a modest home requires decades of work to pay off, and while the press is a-twitter with the cost of big - budget movies, there’s probably 4 or 5 similarly costly building projects going on at any time in my mid-sized city.

I understand why our public clients are nervous about endorsing projects that cost anything more than the cheapest conceivable first cost for a structure that complies with code. Almost every time they do so, someone will say it costs too much, the press will leap on it, and politicians get asked awkward questions. The result is a fear of the quality that a well-made building costs, and endless discussions within the bureaucracy on how to ‘message’ initiatives so as to avoid criticism.

This problem seems to be mostly a feature of projects that are of a scale that most people can understand. A service building on a nationally significant site for $8 million - all costs included - a horror! (Meanwhile civil engineering projects that cost 100 times as much and go 50% over budget get done without notice or comment.)

Public buildings are the playthings of politicians trying to score points - enabled by a ‘gotcha’ press that enjoys this sort of thing because it attracts eyeballs. (One of the most common tropes in the popular press’s relationship to architecture is the story about overspending on publicly funded construction.) The irony is also that the public bodies that care about culture and design and the public servants that want to do well for citizens are the ones that get the grief. So, we are in this absurd condition where no good deed in architecture is unpunished.

The Way Things Are

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

Handmade drawings

It will be difficult for many to comprehend how we actually accomplished this, but until about 1990 we made all our drawings by hand, aided by a variety of tools and mechanical devices.

This craft-based production of drawings (each a unique original that had to be safeguarded because it was simply the only one there was) has been entirely replaced by our current regime of infinite reproducibility, changeability, and transmissibility, accompanying a logic of ‘information management’ as design.

Making drawings by hand came along with a whole retinue of devices that constituted a universe of things of architecture that are no longer needed, but that I still miss.

Set squares (transparent plastic triangles, in colours clear or orange).

French curves with fascinating geometries.

Scales of various increments that came in various three-sided rules that had six scales (1:100/1:10, 1:50/1:25, 1:20/1:5 for example). These would usually be marked by the owners’ initials, because we were expected to supply all of our own drafting tools, like trades people.

Adjustable set squares.

Deep green Faber-Castell pencils ranging from 8B (really only useful for sketching because it was so soft) up to 9H (which was hard as a nail) inclusive most commonly of 2B, B, HB, F, H, 2H and so on. I liked F, probably because it had the oddball name.

And mechanical pencils using thin leads that you could buy ten at a time held in plastic cases. For these I only recall us using leads between 2B and 2H.

And plastic leads for Mylar. (Plastic because the tooth of the Mylar meant that a graphite pencil lead would be quickly converted into dust covering and smudging the surface, which was sometimes made a feature of a rendering on Mylar, but it wasn’t a practical professional tool.)

I hated the plastic leads; they were always cracking.

And the little hand-held sharpeners for those mechanical pencils, which you would rotate the pencil in.

And the various erasers, little white rubbery slabs to erase pencil, but I can’t remember what we did for ink, except the office did have an electric eraser that would hold pencil sized cylinders of white rubber, (maybe a different colour to erase ink) that we would use on Mylar.

All this erasing necessitated a wooden brush with straw-coloured bristles to sweep the shavings off the drafting board.

We also used ‘mice’ that kept pencil drawings clean. (A small cloth bag full of erasure shavings that removed the fine graphite film that would accumulate as you made a drawing because the graphite would smudge as your hands and tools rubbed over the page.)

The set squares sometimes featured little bumps so that the surface of the set square wouldn’t contact and smudge the drawing sheet.

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

Paper was important in a way that it isn’t now. 1000H Velum, tracing paper, 20x26 Sheets of Mayfair, and the beige masking tape we used to hold them in place. Tracing paper was a particularly important tool because it enabled iterative development of a design, and an ability to go backwards in design development to reconsider ideas. For a time, we were particularly enamored by yellow trace, because it was used by Michael Graves and we wanted to imitate famous architects. (Speaking of copying architects, I had a shaky ink sketch phase, because I liked the drawings that Rob Krier did.)

Mylar replaced paper on occasion in the professional world, because of its inherent durability. And Mylar did have its own pleasures, when drawing on it with ink or graphite or coloured pencil, but on the whole, it was a bother to use.

Mylar enabled pin - bar drafting (a mechanical layering system where punched holes at the edge of the Mylar sheet were restrained in the drawing board with a studded metal bar, allowing prints to be constituted by 2 or more layers of Mylar - say a layer/sheet for grid lines applied to all of the layer/sheets for the floor plans).

Drafting boards. Initially when at school just a sheet of plywood we would prop up on a table to achieve a comfortable angle and later in the office we used purpose made drafting boards that came on a very heavy metal base with a lever on the underside that would hold the board at any angle or height desired. Sometimes people drafted standing up.

Drafting boards were topped with mint green ‘Borco board’ to make a smooth surface.

Mayline parallel rules and drafting stools.

T-squares, still sometimes used, but at that time an anachronism, replaced by the Maylines.

Compasses that would hold pencils and pens, and beam compasses for really big arcs.

Adjustable curves (soft blue plastic rods with an edge that would be used to make a smooth irregular curve to guide a pen).

Markers that would dry up if you weren’t careful - or in the middle of the night while you were trying to complete a drawing.

Coloured pencils by Prismacolor.

Lettraset - which was expensive - so we didn’t use much of it.

Various sticky films and tapes that would make areas of tone and colour, or lines of varying character (dashed, hatched , dotted, etc.)

Rapid-o-graphs in different sizes, to create a variety of fat lines, medium lines, fine lines and some incredibly fine lines. (I once made a drawing with a .18mm pen which was so fine it wouldn’t reproduce).

The Rapid-o-graph pens were also used with Leroy stencils that enabled tidy ink lettering for drawing titles.

Printing machines with glowing blue light and motors.

The sheets of print paper with a yellow coating that disappeared when exposed to light.

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

And sometimes we made sepia prints which created brown lines on a semi-transparent blue paper that you could use to make prints, the sepia print occasionally used for presentations when brown was a cool colour for architects.

And the print shops that were serviced by couriers who would pick up our originals and deliver rolls of prints back to us.

And knowing little tricks, like how to divide any length on a drawing into equal increments.

All of these things gave me pleasure. I loved going to art supply and stationary stores, and I still do.

A tactile universe of things and smells, that meant your hands would get dirty and things would stick to your clothes and the electric eraser that would grind off the surface of the Mylar so that drawing on that polished surface was impossible. The smell of the blueprint machine and it’s chemicals, the odours of ink and graphite. The motions of feeding drawings, one by one, into the print machine.

And a whole discipline about cleaning things, especially the rapid-o-graph pens which would clog up with dried ink, leading to trips to the sink to wash them, or later in the office a dunking of the nib into an ultrasonic cleaner.

And all of this also came along with the need to develop the skills required to use all of these tools - which are no longer needed. (I am continually surprised how poorly architects draw free hand these days.) Knowing that you had to twirl the pencil as you were making a line to maintain an even width and that a

pencil line should end with a little bit of extra pressure so that the line would have a clear end. Knowing that you had to plan out your set of drawings in advance. (A blue lead was used to set up guidelines because they wouldn’t print.) Knowing how to letter drawings in that particular style that architects all seemed to use, and which I was never able to master.

All of these features constitut ed a craft - based productiondestroyed by the imperatives of electronic production.

All of this constituted a way of doing things that was part and parcel of a way of being an architect and a culture of architecture.

All of this enmeshed in the nature of the architecture we made.

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

Hidden from view

All of the things that no one outside the profession knows, both ugly and beautiful.

Things Ugly:

• The award-winning firm that gets work by lowballing fees.

• The Fellow of the Institute who stole my staff.

• The firm that got the job because they promised to bring in donations.

• The architect that refused to acknowledge our contribution to the project

• The cold-hearted bastard that fired my friend because he ‘ran out of work’ and then hired one of my staff the next day

• The award-winning firm that does a lot of crap no one ever hears about.

• The former employee who stole intellectual property from us.

• The architect who stole his partner’s clients, starting an office while the man was on holiday.

Things Beautiful:

• The amazing architect who made great projects happen - but never sought the limelight.

• The kind architect who made a place in the office for someone who needed some experience

• The dedication that meant that a project from impossible circumstances turned out great.

Martin Tite The Way Things Are

• The mentor to so many architects.

• The dedicated staff that cared about the office.

• The choices made to serve the project, in spite of fee.

• The volunteer work that made our city better

How should we live?

A house tells you how you are supposed to live in it. The types of rooms and how they are arranged and appointed delineate a way of being in the world.

I remember moving into the apartment I designed – you would think that I would already have anticipated life there – but for a number of days I had to ‘learn’ how to adapt myself to the place, where morning coffee was to be had - the location of utensilsthe new rhythms of life.

There is something fascinating about being in an empty house; rooms whose purpose is suggested – but not absolutely determined; the emptiness being the moment when all you see is the building and a whole series of possibilities of how to inhabit the house. And then the conditioning of the architecture by the occupant; where to put the furniture, who gets which bedroom.

What if we considered what it means to live and what kind of place would honour living?

If you think about the term ‘living room’ - what exactly is a room for living supposed to be? Isn’t every room in a home for living?

And why do bedrooms - places where we are mostly unconscious - take up so much space?

And what is the point of a one-bedroom apartment? There’s no particular need for privacy since the occupants are there themselves, alone.

And still today, I see house plans that include tiny ‘living rooms’ by the front door whose function is to be a formal reception area (forbidden territory for the children of the household); a withered remnant of an idea of house.

If we step back from the more or less standardized components of a house or apartment and think for a minute about the reason for these categories of space, it is possible that we would decide that the standard retinue of living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom could be reconsidered and reimagined.

The idea of home is not static.

The COVID ‘experiment’ of working at home exposed the need for the work-place to be integrated with the domestic-place. (For the time being home offices have found themselves situated in bedrooms, dining rooms and basements.)

And larger homes now include ‘family rooms’ and ‘great rooms’ that did not exist 50 years ago.

And some apartments don’t include ovens because people now use microwaves and Uber-Eats.

And the traditional English pub was a community space for socializing.

So, the compartmentalization of the home and the vocation of the home is malleable.

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

Today, this malleability is largely based on market forces, since almost every home is constructed to be sold or rented. But at the same time what sells is what people think a home is supposed to have, if not for themselves, for some future pros pective buyer - hence the childless couple that insists on a three- bedroom home. This is exacerbated by the fact that the homeowner is inherently conservative since their home is their largest financial holding and is typically considered to be a profit centre. Re - sale potential matters.

To rethink what the home really, truly, should be, in a way that actually and authentically responds to the present and future circumstances is tough. But here’s a clue. If you think about the ‘purpose’ of home – every need addressed by a home can be satisfied in a situation outside of home (restaurant, church/ mosque/temple, hotel, gym, etc.); excepting the need to have a place that belongs to you, that you alone control.

How to realize a successful project, a primer for clients

1. Set a realistic budget, based on some initial design work that validates its feasibility. Do not use an unrealistically low budget to get the project greenlighted . Do not make this unrealistic budget a problem for your consultants to solve.

2. Set a realistic timeframe. Recognize that the risks of an unrealistic time frame are your risks. Your lack of planning and forethought is not your consultant’s problem to solve.

3. Pick your builder carefully. Selecting the lowest price will garner delays, conflicts and additional work for your consulting team that had no means to accurately budget for your choice.

4. Don’t attempt to pass all your risks onto your consulting team. Ultimately, if there’s a problem, it’s your problem, no matter how much the contract can beat up your consultant.

5. Hire a project manager that is invested in the success of your project, rather than someone invested in proving they are delivering value to you by squeezing your consultants.

6. Speak truthfully and openly.

7. Understand that professionals are not perfect. (It’s called professional practice for a reason.)

8. Be responsible for your part of project success. Just because you hired a consultant, it doesn’t mean you are absolved of helping the project succeed.

9. Create the conditions for success. Onerous contracts or ‘murder clauses’ do not create success – and will not stop bad things from happening.

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

10. Minimize the need for paperwork and meetings and reporting. Project processes, and the documentation of them are important, but they are not the purpose of your project. A team focused on meetings, minutes, schedules and reports is not focused on your project.

11. Write a good request for proposal: comprehensive, customized for the project, forthcoming with information, with submission requirements suited to the project , and a realistic deadline.

12. Use standard forms of contract with an absolute minimum of supplementary conditions. Lots of supplementary conditions confuse the market and do not start the work from a position of trust.

13. Understand that when professional fee offerings deviate by 50% it means that the scope of the requirement was not clear.

14. Consider that we put in a ‘high’ fee not because we were stupid about the market or that we were greedy. Consider that we put in the fee we did because our professionalism dictated we allocate enough money to act responsibly in your interest.

15. Understand that if fee is a basis for awarding work, we do not and cannot build in contingencies for the things we ‘should have’ anticipated might possibly come up.

I can ’t

The

Way Things Are The Way Things Are

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy

Everything I feel is necessary to do in architecture is somehow hampered by everything I ‘know’ about architecture. As if you know you need to bake a cake, but you have the supplies and training of an auto mechanic. An impossible and ridiculous, and maybe comical situation. But architecture is full of these nonsequiturs that we have to somehow make sense of.

Thinking back on school

All the passionate debates, all the socalled ‘Critical Issues’, all the thoughts that framed thinking. These animating forces that made the work come to be, but really were directed at nothing except the mirage we lived in, created by faculty and the books we read, and sustained by our limited understandings and our innocent arrogance.

None the less, even while I recognize, dimly, its limitations, the indoctrinations of school still structure the way I think and actbut little of it is of consequence now. Everyone has moved past the questions and issues that consumed us, even though the questions and issues never came to any resolution. Maybe it’s always been this way.

It’s very odd - at this point in my life I feel that I have finally achieved proficiency as an architect/designer. And at this point I feel like everything I know how to do and the way to do it is not an aid to my work, but an impediment to its development -

Martin Tite

or maybe more properly said - an impediment to making buildings that are somehow authentically engaged with their contemporary situations.

Somehow the things that seemed central to architecture are no longer central, or at least that’s how it seems in the face of trivialities published monthly. All of it simply doesn’t actually matter - like debating the correct colour of the gun that might end a life. Can’t anyone else see this too?

There is a new situation, and we have to build the tools to engage with it, like trying to build an airplane as you hurtle to earth.

Somehow the character of this moment, for me, is that I’m only able to continue on in the way I know how to, and unable to continue on the way I’ve continued on for some time. As if all I know how to do is make poems that rhyme, but the situation needs the text for an operating manual. Is the problem that architecture simply can’t do what I want it to do?

Every building is a borrowing from what we know about other buildings. As if what to say is determined by what was spoken. But at this moment, it seems that this isn’t and can’t be enough. The tools given by my education and by the examples of my peers are not the right ones to address what is here, what is real, what is necessary, now.

Notwithstanding all this ruminating, clients still come to us to get things done. They can’t wait for us to come to our senses. And so we press forward to do the best we can. And this is a blessing that helps us go on.

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

I have, sometimes, the apprehension of a faint scent of what I want to feel my way towards, that’s in some way beyond my own comprehension of ‘architecture’.

I don’t know what it is, but I feel it’s out there.

I feel lost, but hopeful and excited for what I might discover.

I Ching

In general, and for good reasons, we lean into rational thinking when we design, but rational thinking will never tell you everything you need to know to complete a design.

Some things can only be determined by a feeling or an intuition of meaning.

Ask the I Ching what the design should be. It’s as good as attempting to reason a solution.

Martin Tite

The Way

I guess I just wasn't made for these times

I keep lookin' for a place to fit in

Where I can speak my mind

And I've been tryin' hard to find the people That I won't leave behind

They say I got brains

But they ain't doin' me no good I wish they could

Chorus

Each time things start to happen again I think I got somethin' good goin' for myself

But what goes wrong

… Sometimes I feel very sad

Sometimes I feel very sad

(Ain't found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)

Sometimes I feel very sad

(Ain't found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)

… I guess I just wasn't made for these times

Every time I get the inspiration

To go change things around

No one wants to help me look for places Where new things might be found

Where can I turn when my fair weather friends cop out

What's it all about

Chorus

Brian Wilson / Tony Asher, I Guess I Just Wasn’t Made for these Times

Martin Tite

I wonder sometimes whether certain kinds of people are naturally disposed, by virtue of their personalities or outl ook on things, to succeed or fail in different times or places in architecture.

I can’t imagine a taciturn personality like that of Mies succeeding today. And look how different his architecture became after moving to Chicago.

And I wonder about myself, if I had been in a different time or place, what kind of an architect would I have become?

Martin Tite

In praise of ordinary buildings

Most of what we do is of no interest to our peers or writers or academics or the public. This is the natural course of things as they are.

What bothers me about accounts of architecture - is that they are ‘news’ focused or have predetermined that the architect is praiseworthy. And consequently, these reports give attention to the beautiful consumable photos and writing that inevitably tells us about a job well done; all of which supports a form of ignorance of things.

At the moment, the situation we have is like trying to understand the ecology of a forest by looking at the butterfliesbecause they are remarkable, unusual and novel in form and colour - compared to the totality of the environment - made mostly out of many other things found with much greater frequency.

The ‘butterfly’ architecture that subscribes to this discipline is the couturier fashion that operates in culture almost entirely to signal to observers ‘in the know’; distinct from the larger category of clothing whose purpose is to keep you warm, or dry, or modest in some way, albeit with some degree of affordability, visual appeal or comfort as desired - like most buildings.

Our architectural culture is focused on the extraordinary, so that 1% of extraordinary architects and buildings is intensively studied and 99% remains a terra incognito, almost all of which is ‘not architecture’. It is not something we are supposed to aspire to, it is not innovative, it is often dumb - or stupid, and it

is often clumsy because it does not assume an obligation to be refined. But it is the way it is.

I am frustrated by my ignorance of the actuality of buildings here and now. Rather than looking at the remarkable and unusual and novel in architecture we might also look at the ordinary, the common, and typical. This could be the basis for developing an understanding of the ecology of building production that might (or not?) precipitate the possibility of engaging with projects with an eye to doing something other than trying to win an award or to ‘get published’.

So - perhaps we might start by studying, for example, the economic, social, cultural conditions of the apartment building. Or how it is that big box stores have developed, and the kinds of environments they engender. Or the logic of the office building as both icon and investment vehicle.

Or we develop a Linnaean taxonomy for buildings and architectural practices; the sole practitioner who does private houses; the large corporation that is publicly traded; the international award-winning practice etc.

Robert Venturi had the idea of looking at the ugly and the ordinary, in an attempt to understand the basis for a legitimate American architecture emerging from the way things actually were. (But this was yet another attempt to find a universal basis for architecture founded in ‘not architecture’; in the way that modernists looked at factory buildings, or Wright looked at nature.) I am inspired by Venturi’s willingness to consider and study the facts of things as they are, towards a hypothesis of how architects could act authentically.

When we think about architecture, we enter a fantasy world occupied by people and firms that have achieved some sort of recognition - entering the territory of visibility that serves as the fodder for contemplation and writing about architecture.

So, this note is a plea for everyone to get out of your offices and studios and classrooms and books and magazines and podcasts and Instagram and to look and see for yourself what is actually going on ‘out there’. Consider the totality of a larger ecology of building production - of which ‘architecture’ is a particular species.

Infinite architecture

I accept that this infinite profession will never be known in its entirety, by me, or anyone else. It’s simply not possible, but the surviving feature of the discipline is our ability to factor an impossibly large field of knowledge into actionable decisions.

And I now understand that I practice in a very small niche within an enormous ecology of building production. And that my practice has adapted to this environment as a means of survival.

And that ‘the way things are’, is really just the way things seem to be at this time and place.

My knowledge increases every year, additively, but my awareness of the size of my ignorance increases exponentially.

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

Interior Design versus Architecture

I think I liked it better when interior designers were happy to be called interior decorators.

Why they wanted to get involved with space planning and specs for systems furniture I’ll never know. So, today’s interior designers are increasingly like architects - and this isn’t a good thing. They assume the poses and attitudes of architects and abandon most of what the practice of interior decorating has traditionally brought to lives lived.

There has been, and continues to be, a tension between the domains of ‘interior design’ and ‘architecture’, with both domains struggling to assert supremacy regarding the spaces inside buildings.

The division between architecture and interior decorating is unfortunate. I am thinking here about architect/decorators like Gio Ponti, who would not be ‘allowed’ to exist today.

There was a time when a decorative program for a building or a room was the subject of serious consideration by a mature architect. Not child’s play, or a triviality, or an unnecessary expense, but an important expression of the relationship between a space and those that engage with it.

And, interior designers today seem to covet the legal authority of architects, wanting to be not ‘just decorators’ but ‘designers’; in other words, people that don’t deal in trivialities. And so, they now want to attend to application of the building code, and fire

ratings, and that sort of thing. But this is as if choices about comfort, colour, pattern, style and detail are somehow trivial. I delight in interior decorating magazines because the projects often display a form of knowledge about how to combine things, how to be pleasing, and the capacity of colour, form and detail to create character – which we architects could learn from I enjoy the bold choices that interior decorators make that are completely outside of the constraining orthodoxies of architects, or that escape the attention of architects.

To their credit, interior decorators are quite able and happy to consider the work of architects, like Wright or Paul Rudolph or Mies or Charles Macintosh as part of the family of histories of interiors - whereas architects are never able to accept the work of interior decorators as part of the histories of architecture. One is ‘serious, significant, profound’; the other is ‘temporary, superficial, childish’.

There is a fundamental difference between the thought process of architecture and interior decorating. In the case of architecture, everything (allegedly) has a basis in reality, the light is there to make light, the door is there to make an opening between spaces, the wall separates inside and outside. And as a result, architecture is diagrammatic in a way, with the (impossible) goal of a one-to-one relationship between purpose (however it might be defined) and form. This imposes a demand that buildings be made from the elements buildings are made of, structure, walls, windows, doors, roofs etc.; manipulated in ways that render them interesting (and thereby effectively decorative) but still arguably rooted in function.

Martin Tite Martin Tite

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

In the case of interior decorating these practicalities become a starting point for embellishment and a setting for an ambiguous relationship with practical realities, so the door might be considered to be a grand portal, a wall the setting for a mural, or it might be a pattern of paneling, the desk as a visual accent; the arch might be either structure, or a curve that alludes to structure.

Then - a question of the relationship to reality. In one casearchitecture - everything is validated by a ‘correct/authentic’ relationship to reality. In the other case - interior decoratingthings are validated by moods/impressions that support (or posit) a way of being in the world - a fiction maybe, but a pleasurable one, and not a small matter.

Is that all there is?

The expertly rendered design. The fine details. The supportive client. The beautiful pictures. The magazine spread. The awards.

Why does all of this feel like it’s not enough?

After all, a building is just a building. And that’s all there is.

I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up In his arms and raced through the Burning building out on the pavement And I stood there shivering in my pajamas And watched the whole world go up in flames And when it was all over I said to myself Is that all there is to a fire?

Chorus:

Is that all there is, is that all there is?

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is

And when I was twelve years old

My daddy took me to the circus, the greatest show on Earth

There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads And as I sat there watching I had the feeling that something was missing

I don't know what, but when it was over I said to myself

Is that all there is to the circus?

Chorus

And then I fell in love

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

With the most wonderful boy in the world

We'd take long walks by the river or Just sit for hours gazing into each other's eyes

We were so very much in love

Then one day he went away and I thought I'd die, but I didn't

And when I didn't I said to myself

Is that all there is to love?

Chorus

I know what you must be saying to yourselves

If that's the way she feels about it why doesn't she just end it all?

Oh, no, not me, I'm not ready for that final disappointment

Because I know just as well as I'm standing here talking to you

That when that final moment comes and I'm Breathing my last breath, I'll be saying to myself

Is that all there is, is that all there is?

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is

Is that all there is? Leiber and Stoller

It hurts to be an architect

Every day, I see the evidence, in built form, of greed, ineptitude, vanity, small mindedness and squandered opportunities.

I can’t tell you how often I see design solutions that could be massively improved with only a small alteration costing no money. All that wasted opportunity gets on my nerves! My more equanimous colleagues accept this as the natural course of things and if I did too, I’d probably feel a lot better as I go about my business.

Imagine something that you appreciate - a good meal, a great sports play, a beautiful car. Now imagine that everyone around you thinks there’s no difference between these things and the worst legally permitted version of them. The fact is that many people can’t see the difference between something very good and complete crap; yet these same people sometimes decide what will be built.

The Way Things Are j

Martin Tite

j anitors

The Way Things Are

Janitors

I once painted my studio apartment and realized after doing so that my hands and eyes had considered every wall surface in detail, and that I had acquired a knowledge of the apartment very different from the one I started with.

I think it’s fair to say that janitors (as they used to be called) have a knowledge of architecture that is inaccessible to architects.

Another thing we architects never think about, amongst many, is the unseen/invisible workers whose work lives are tied up with making sure the buildings we make continue to be inhabitable. I’m thinking about the cleaners and the maintainers and operators that have access to various spaces hidden from the ordinary view of ‘users’ (as they are called); penthouses, service rooms, machine rooms, various closets, roof tops. And I wonder how much of this segregation of these workers from the class of people that have the privilege of use of the building is less an attribute of practicalities and more a delineation of social class in built form.

I’m ashamed of my thoughtless unappreciation of the fact that floors are clean, toilets work and that the heat is on. All this is supposed to happen and to be that way, but we never think of the people that make it happen; the workers, often new immigrants, or tradespeople who work out of sight, or in our absence, to sustain a building that would be rendered useless in a matter of days without their care and attention. All of these people whose names we don’t know.

Of course, they can, and will, impose their own ideas on architecture when it suits their needs, the salt box by the front door, the photocopied notice taped to the wall, the placement of a new paper towel dispenser. Which makes architects crazy, because their design is ‘ruined’ by the fact that someone has to keep the building going and doesn’t subscribe to the same design values; a revenge on architects who didn’t want to think about the things janitors and operators think about.

I remember working on a project at Erickson’s Bank of Canada, an absolutely amazing building, at least before it was renovated. Speaking to the building operators, you would have thought they were in some sort of hellhole, because the building was a pain in the ass to operate and maintain. I thought this was unfair, like complaining about the fact that your Lamborghini takes a lot of maintenance and is expensive to run, but it was strong evidence of the fact that buildings can be understood in many different ways outside of the mental decorum of architects.

Including the lives of those dedicated to maintaining buildings, there is a history of lives intertwined with buildings. The story of the architect killed by the king/patron to ensure that the secrets embodied in the design would never be revealed. The prisoner who occup ied a space for twenty years, the official residences of political leaders. But also, when you think about it, almost everyone has their life mixed up with the condition of just two or three buildings; the place you live, the place you work, maybe a church or temple or a favorite place to eat.

Just a building

Buildings get dirty, abused by alterations, leak, and eventually collapse, through entropy or demolition.

They are lumps of stuff extracted from the planet and configured as humans wish in order to serve their ends. The great majority of buildings are profoundly common in their materiality and arrangement and almost always have some prosaic reason for being.

I am sometimes amazed by the freight of words and ideas that get attached to buildings by ‘interesting’ and ‘important’ architects. I am thinking of the long exegesis on buildings by people like Zumthor or Lewerentz or others of that ilk, and the status attributed to these works by flattering references to philosophy, that somehow forget that after all what they are talking about is ‘just’ a building.

To impose this intellectual cargo on a building is almost cruel to th at building. It also seems unfair and unreasonable to attach these expectations and demands on a building that simply has no hope of satisfying them. A building doesn’t know or care that it is the product of greed, or thwarted ambitions, or not enough time, or the wants of an architect, or the application of petty judgements. A building just sits there, on its own, minding its own business, with no particular need to be explained to those that engage with it. The explaining we do towards the elevation of buildings to ‘architecture’ seems a mis-guided way to engage with and understand buildings. Buildings don’t come with, or need, museum guides that are strapped to the heads of occupants or observers.

I sometimes wish, looking at some architect’s desperate effort to be interesting, that they would remember that a building is a building first, and that everything else, your wants, the client’s demands, the photographs, and maybe even what you thought about while making the design, are secondary to the building itself, as it is.

I recall trying to write about a building by someone famous, forget who, and feeling that I was somehow struggling to scrape off enough content to fill a few pages. These words, maybe a few hundred, seemed to say pretty much all there was to say. Of course, this mirrors the narrow band of concerns that writing about architecture is/was supposed to have, namely the moments of transcendence, or historic significance within the narratives circling architecture. This logic of consideration is completely unable to describe the many facets of a building that make it what it actually is.

All to say, a building is not the same as ideas about a building or words about a building. At some level ideas and words are inadequate to the task of grappling with a building, as much as a book would have a hard time with a wrestler.

Just the facts

A lot of recent architecture is remarkably severe, stripped down to the least possible means of expression (often using the most convoluted and expensive detailing you can imagine). I suppose after the gyrations that have attracted a lot of attention in the recent past, a desire to turn away from all that noise towards something calmer may be an antidote to the mandatory wackiness that has infected architecture.

I am thinking about the kind of minimalism - à la Chipperfieldwhich in weaker hands leads to a poverty of expression that thwarts the possibility of architecture revealing or celebrating or even accommodating human purpose.

But this architecture is really just about the elemental facts of architecture; wall, window, column, slab, door, and the elimination of details extraneous to the expression of these facts (grilles, switches, appliances etc.). We also often see in this kind of architecture the maniacal repetition of the grid which is a ‘truthful’ representation of the fact many buildings (apartments, schools, offices) are often themselves all about the repetition of program, or the multiplication of real estate. So, building that is truthful in a way, but also, at least in the versions that get published, remarkably stylish.

But I wonder if this reductionism (an ethic? a style?) has a fully rounded capacity to engage with life as it is, the children’s toys scattered about the floor, the mismatched furniture that you collect over time, the mess in the kitchen, the lamp wire and outlet. At what point does reduction become zero? The fact that

it may be possible to live in a house doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a house fit to live in. And this thought makes me think of those fashion shows that display wonderful creations, that are just barely possible to wear, without being garments you would choose to wear any given day.

Oddly, this contemporary version of minimalism strongly echoes the corporate architecture of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, like that of I.M. Pei. Different impulses in different eras leading to the same place. In one case reduction being evidence of discovering the essence of ‘the problem’, as architects used to call design opportunities. In the case today … What? A want to display extreme control? A demonstration of (costly) refinement? A desire to return architecture to a ‘pure’ state? (Where the ‘essence’ of architecture, it’s capacity to demarcate space, its material presence, is the subject that a building contemplates.)

Architecture about architecture.

The Way Things Are

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Martin Tite

Lansdowne Park - 5 years later…

I thought, maybe, after all the hullabaloo died down and there was a bit of distance, I’d come around to thinking that the Landsdowne Park project was maybe okay, or at least I’d become reconciled to it. I was wrong. I still think it’s awful, and I can’t reconcile myself to it.

Someone said to me, ‘at least it’s better than it was before’. But it isn’t. If the city had done nothing at all with Landsdowne it would have preserved the possibility of doing something good. The development has baked in shitty mediocrity for three generations .

And then another said, ‘at least Landsdowne is better than the parking lot it was’. I submit that ‘better than a parking lot’ is not an aspiration worthy of the site or this City.

An architect noted to me that notwithstanding my elitist grumbling, the site was successful because it was sometimes busy. The fact that this site is sometimes busy isn’t a sign that it’s good. It’s a sign of the huge latent demand for something to happen at this site - no matter how awful the environment.

Many publicly endorsed the project, but of course, many of them had something to be gained by saying so; the potential to get some work, some obligation to a client, some favour owed, some hope of future work.

And the project was endorsed by politicians, who didn’t understand the potential of the site, or even the potential of the site

Martin Tite Martin Tite

to make money for Ottawa. The support came from suburban and rural councillors - who lived far from the site - and apparently assumed that commercial development was equivalent to city building - as it often is in the suburbs.

I am still amazed that no one understood the conflict of interest the city was in. It was the landowner, the sponsor, the business partner, and the authority having jurisdiction. Citizens were left to their own feeble devices to protest what the city would never have ordinarily approved.

Given the site, and the amazing value it had, it is something of a wonder to me that the development has floundered. The developers got the land for free and they still couldn’t figure out how to do something that could make money. They had everything; a spectacular location, a huge urban site, a compliant sponsor, political will, free land, public want; and they still fucked it up. And now we’re supposed to entrust them to do more of it.

So-called Landsdowne 2.0 promises a reset by the same people that brought us Landsdowne 1.0. I am not optimistic. For starters, the ‘public consultation’ process was only a performative matter of giving the public a chance to complain about decisions already made without consultation. What could possibly change as a result of this so-called ‘consultation’?

This site absolutely could have / should have been a roaring success and a nationally significant place, attracting visitors from all over Canada and the rest of the world. A place that was busy all the time. An asset for the City. A success story. And a huge money maker.

But the ambitions were much smaller, namely, off-loading the property, and getting rid of a political headache for as little money as possible.

So, to say again things that have been said many times by many others, here’s what’s wrong:

The public was lied to. What are we to make of the promise that the site would be populated with local businesses and unique offerings? On opening day; a Winners, an LCBO, and any number of chain retail and chain restaurants, nothing different than might be found in any big box mall, except for a football field; and the green space that was stuck onto the end of the project to make it politically saleable.

The urban design is banal. I have the impression that the people that developed and approved this dull mess, in some profound way, didn’t know what was at stake and what they were doing. They didn’t actually understand what needed to be done , or the potential they were gifted. The challenge was to design a piece of city that would realize high value and that people would want to use and visit. The challenge was not to promote commercial interests.

The architecture is mostly terrible, with bits of lipstick here and there to make the buildings look as if they were ‘designed’. I would bet good money that most of the retail design was by a thirty something architect who never visited the site and felt this was their big chance to do something ‘interesting’. And their boss didn’t care.

I have a litany of other complaints.

• The salt poured on the trees that killed them.

• The horrible mall Muzak.

• The construction that didn’t comply with the approved site plan (as reported to me by one of the consultants).

• The fact they built what amounts to a big box mall.

• The disconnection of the park space from the community, its location in ‘left-over’ space determined after the fact of the commercial development.

• The compromise of the heritage value of the historic horticulture building by its relocation. (The heritage status of the building did not permit its relocation – so the city simply delisted the building so it could be moved.)

• The ridiculous ‘TD Bank’ billboard advertisement on Queen Elizabeth Drive. (What happened to the promise to recognize Frank Clair?)

• The ‘Landsdowne’ sign on Queen Elizabeth Drive used to advertise commercial interests with an illuminated sign promoting restaurants, upcoming concerts, football games, hockey games, soccer games etc. How did it come to be that the NCC offered its land for the apparent purpose of spoiling Queen Elizabeth Drive?

• The utilitarian development of Bank Street, with municipal standard concrete curbs and concrete islands.

• The lighting of the football stadium that blinds when crossing the Bank Street bridge.

• The higglety piggelty massing and facades that are intended to be ‘interesting’, in an attempt to deny the banal reality of thousands of square metres of space to rent.

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• The design of the Holmwood Street facades with balcony projections that need edge protection to stop your head from injury.

• The 4-lane intersection at Bank and Exhibition Way that prioritizes cars over people - as if moving lots of cars in a hurry a few dozen times a year is the most important thing about a street.

• The president of the university called and told that she needed to shut up the business professor that had the temerity to question (correctly as it turns out) the financial model the scheme was premised on.

• The journalist who didn’t parrot whatever they were told, then taken to task because the advertiser was angry, and then fired.

• And any number of ‘unforced errors’, as they call them in baseball. For example, the north facing dark glass that makes it almost impossible to see what’s inside the stores and restaurants.

And it’s not so much that it is 100% awful. Some fragments are actually good. But on the whole the commercial development and urban design is emblematic of the worst of an Ottawa mentality that is afraid of excellence.

And the really weird thing to me is that most people don’t get (or don’t care?) how lousy it is.

And we will continue with more of the same, in some form or another, at Landsdowne 2.0.

Tite

Language

The language we use delimits what we are able to say, and probably as well, what we are able to think.

There is an entire vocabulary – current now – that has been rendered useless through its meaningless application – or because it is used with an intent to deceive.

Luxury Award winning Sustainable City building Design

Good design

You will be easily able to add to this list.

Martin

Le Corbusier and the ineffable

You work with stone, with wood, with concrete; you make them into houses and palaces; this is construction. Ingenuity is at work.

But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy, I say: "It is beautiful." This is architecture. Art is present.

My house is practical. Thank you, as I thank the engineers of the railroad and the telephone company. You have not touched my heart.

But the walls rise against the sky in an order such that I am moved. I sense your intentions. You were gentle, brutal, charming, or dignified. Your stones tell me so. You rivet me to this spot and my eyes look. My eyes look at something that states a thought. A thought that clarifies itself without words or sounds, but only through prisms that have relationships with one another. These prisms are such that the light reveals them clearly. These relationships don't necessarily have anything to do with what is practical or descriptive. They are a mathematical creation of your mind. They are the language of architecture. With inert materials, based on a more or less utilitarian program that you go beyond, you have established relationships that moved me. It is architecture.

From ‘Towards an Architecture’, Le Corbusier

I am fascinated by this passage, that speaks to the ineffable quality of buildings, everything outside their means of becoming buildings, the engineering, the program and the attendance to the utilitarian.

The text asserts the necessity of the autonomy of architecture as the foundation of its meaning in lived experience.

And thinking again about this assertion, I will confess both that I feel it is a good description of what architecture should be, and utterly disconnected from the mood of things at this moment.

Life work balance

I can remember us working all night in the office to get projects completed for a deadline, or volunteering time to work on a competition because I knew the office wasn’t getting money to do it. This happened because I was really, really excited by architecture. It was also a continuation of the work ethic we inhabited as students.

A while ago I stayed late at the office to meet an architect who was visiting town. Around 7:30 the meeting ended, and the office was empty because everyone had gone home.

He wondered out loud, “Where is everyone? When I started, we were so into it, the whole place would be busy every night. But now everyone wants ‘work-life balance.’” he said derisively. I said “I know what you mean. Where’s the passion?”

The culture of practice has changed. Perhaps in ways better. In other ways maybe worse.

Better

• The relationships we have with staff are much more structured and professional. People have employment agreements for example. It used to be, “You can start Monday, and we’ll pay you $30k.”

• There’s no tolerance for yelling at people.

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Worse

• The presumption of some staff that our relationship with them is transactional. “If I do ‘X’ you pay me ‘Y’”.

One of the reasons I started in architecture was because I wanted to have a work life where I didn’t want to need a holiday to get away from work. I wanted to love what I did so much that I’d never want to get away from it. In the work-life equation I wanted work and life to be synonymous not opposites on a fulcrum. Work as a way of living.

Loose Screws

I must have a screw loose. I’m perfectly happy to work on any kind of design problem as long as it’s something that I don’t know what the answer will be. So, figuring out how to plan a simple washroom or how to detail a parapet is engrossing to me. I can happily spend hours doing this kind of work. I am free of a covetousness of ‘prestigious’ work.

Why are some kinds of design work considered more worthy of our collective interest? Do we really believe that some design challenges are more ‘important’ than others?

For example, the $40 million penthouse versus the design of a roof assembly. The $40 million penthouse has the capacity to be an actor in the spectacle of architectural culture, and the roof doesn’t, even when it’s a responsible act in aid of carbon neutrality.

It’s as if the only kind of design work that merits our collective interest is the architecture of museums, private homes and rich institutions.

Most architects are infected with the idea that some clients or projects are ‘good’ - meaning that they have lots of money and are desirous of awards. But most of what is valuable about what architects do is their ability to respond to circumstances in a way that is intelligent, knowledgeable, and ethical. Most of the time this means simply following the ordinary logic of design, without heroics or extraordinary measures, as the doctors say.

The Way Things Are

manifest o

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are

Manifesto for urban actions

I see, every day and every way, terrible inefficiencies in the way parts of the city are organized, and unrealized opportunities that continue to exist because Canadian society doesn’t have the means to sponsor projects would leverage the latent value of these opportunities.

The way cities come to be - as a series of sponsored projectsmeans that all sorts of projects, potentially beneficial to the populace as a whole (and economically desirable and practically viable) are impossible to realize because of legal or administrative impediments, or because of the lack of a sponsor. An example would be the way the private ownership of a few properties in a strategic location might thwart the reordering of parts of the city even if doing so would result in higher value and quality for all concerned, or the long-term interests of society.

Each decision about the design of the city (a building, a road, a park, zoning, a sewer etc.) is made to suit the limited interests of a project sponsor. This means that the highest and best use for any site is the highest and best, from the perspective of the sponsor at the particular time they approve the project. It is not necessarily the highest and best for the city as a whole or the city in the long term. As a result, we end up with ridiculous inefficiencies and lost opportunities because each project is enabled by a sponsor only concerned with their own interests, and the considerations that enable the project ( capital , opportunity , profit, control). As well the duration of interest of the sponsor is almost always limited to a short horizon.

Every client thinks the building is for them, but a building is also for any number of others, not born yet. Our system of city building is incapable of recognizing this fact. Hence the proliferation of garbage buildings that society eventually pays to demolish or repair. A profound reality of architecture is that buildings persist. A building that costs 50% more than what it is ‘supposed’ to cost might be an asset to seven generations A building that costs as little as possible might be a liability to society in less than 10 years. And because the sponsor has a limited duration of interest in a building (almost always less time than a building will actually last) we see a proliferation of buildings only suitable for their first purpose.

City building (that horrible cliché) should be a matter of working to collective benefit – with projects initiated and sponsored because they will make life better for seven generations – even if they do not have a return on investment measurable in money. For example, every new building should have a plausible afterlife once the immediate interests of the sponsor have been satisfied. An office building should be able to become an apartment building or a school or a store.

But the way things should be is not the way they are.

Mind games

The way that we conceive of architecture is disconnected from the way we receive it. And the way I understand architecture is through drawings rather than through my own eyes. My knowledge of architecture is largely limited to what is happening in my mind.

I know how to design things, and I know how to detail them, and I have some theoretical knowledge of topics such as vapor diffusion and I have an awareness of the capacities of various technologies. But I have no idea, to be honest, about how one would go about making a building , organizing the trades, pouring the concrete, putting on the roof, etc. It would be a comedy if I tried to do any of it ! And almost any sort of manual skill - except sketching - is a mystery to me.

I know what should happen and what should be able to happen, but I have no idea how to make it happen. This is maybe the distinction between so-called ‘design professionals’ and ‘builders’. And maybe a reason for architects’ fascination with drawing or modeling or rendering, in favour of a fascination for actual buildings , is because drawing and modeling and rendering is what we do.

This condition of architectural practice is quite unlike other professions - where for example a surgeon’s knowledge is an amalgam of theoretical ‘book learning’ and the practical skills of the operating room; how to make an incision, knowing your way around the abdominal cavity. This may be a feature of the fact that buildings are almost never the work of one. They require

the contribution of many, with the making of a building segmented into specializations of all sorts . If a sizable building could be physically realized by a single person, then things would be much different.

The mind game of the organization of a plan ( how to aggregate various areas in an efficient and productive manner) is a valuable skill and fundamental to a building - but curiously - it is not readily perceptible in built form. After all, being in one space doesn’t necessarily inform you about what’s in another space - or how it is conjoined with where you are. So, the things architects make - like floor plans - are both fundamental to life as lived and largely invisible to our ordinary common p lace reception of a building as we go about shopping or working or walking.

When you are in an elevator it feels like you are inside a very small room that is moving, it does not feel like you are in a shaft that contains a metal box hooked up to cables or a hydraulically powered rod. The want of architects to expose things like elevator shafts by exposing them to atria or rendering them in glass is maybe a way to make visible to the user the actuality of the situation they are in. More largely , the want of architects to expose structure, and ductwork and the like (when not done to save cost) is an attempt to demonstrate to the person inter acting with a building - in whatever manner - the actuality of architecture ; a s if an education on architecture is necessary to impose on people.

The

Money

‘Money Ruins Everything’. The Smiths

We inhabit a capitalist society, and so we architects are compelled to respect this particular order of things in order to be able to continue practice, and to behave like capitalists, even if we hate doing so. The ultimate penalty for not behaving correctly is bankruptcy.

In our culture it is commonly presumed that the purpose of doing anything at all is to make money , or to save money, or to distract yourself with entertainments and objects that cost money. For clients of architects this is manifest as an extreme interest in the cost of our fees, and the capital cost of the buildings we design (ignoring the hard to quantify matter of value). It is also manifest in the presumption (amongst many architects and clients) that the purpose of an architectural practice is to make money, not understanding that profitability is a necessity – not a purpose. I hate that kind of thinking.

Money has a hardening effect on people. When you hang around with it too much you start to see everything through its lens.

Like other professions, architecture is increasingly manipulated by the demand to operate as if it is a business. To some it is selfevident that an architectural practice is firstly a business. To others, not so much. For me at least, money is like the gas that keeps the engine of the practice running, like a car; 100% necessary and scary if it looks like the needle is heading to

empty, but the gas doesn’t tell you where you want to go, or why you want to go there.

Sometimes architects will work for free (competitions for example) but this is either a choice borne from passion, or a luxury for those that can afford to amuse themselves in that way.

In the modern and contemporary city, every privately sponsored building has been created in order to make profit. So, the character of things in urban life is largely driven by this feature of building production. The city as a product of financial interests. I suspect this differs from the pre-modern city - where a building was created in order to serve a need.

My architecture

Every architect operates with an idea of what architecture is, whether they know it or not. And I think most of them don’t know it, having internalized ways of working that have proven to be successful.

My idea of architecture, or more correctly, my bias towards architecture, is that it is essentially and primarily a matter of conditioning experience through the arrangement of materials; solids and voids, doors and windows; really no more advanced than maybe the architecture of the Romans.

As a consequence of this belief, lots of important and necessary matters: Code compliance, building technologies, green building and the like, act in support of this idea of architecture. All of these, to me, practicalities that are prerequisites for any building but not the purpose of architecture

I recognize others will (and should) feel differently, as determined by their own circumstances and history. There is no single privileged viewpoint.

My unrequited love

I'm a fool to want you

To want a love that can't be true

A love that's there for others too

I'm a fool to hold you

Such a fool to hold you

To seek a kiss not mine alone

To share a kiss the Devil has known

Time and time again I said I'd leave you

Time and time again I went away

But then would come the time when I would need you

And once again these words I'll have to say

Take me back, I love you

Pity me, I need you

I know it's wrong, it must be wrong

But right or wrong I can't get along

Without you

I’m a Fool to Want You, Frank Sinatra, Jack Wolf, Joel Herron

My relationship with you - Architecture - was like an un requited love.

I kept on giving and giving because I loved you so much - but only rarely did you love me back.

I thought about you, talked about you, all the time, for almost my whole life, but you rarely spoke directly to me.

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I was saddened that you gave yourself so willingly to the base desires of those that paid for you.

I wanted to bend you to my will, but you wanted to be the way you wanted to be. I can see now that there were ways that you quietly resisted and asserted yourself as nature intended.

All of my misunderstandings, my weaknesses, my thwarted ambitions, my ignorance of you. It’s clear I wasn’t good enough for you, or maybe I never understood you. It’s not you, it’s me.

And maybe I expected too much. After all, I thought that you would be able to make the world right.

And I’ll freely acknowledge that my disappointments in you were unfair. Your expression of your inner nature could only be rendered as a dumb building. But then again maybe I wasn’t good enough for you. There are others that could make you sing in a way I couldn’t.

But now it’s time to move on. To forget all the arguments, and struggles, to reconcile ourselves; the games we played, comfortable in their familiarity. At this moment it seems that we shouldn’t be together anymore. It’s time to move on to some place new that I haven’t been before. A place that doesn’t yet have a name.

But there’s a cost. Everything about you that I ‘know’ about you, how to make a plan, how to resolve a detail, how to land a job, how to design - all of this needs to be jettisoned to allow me to move on - and to be free of you.

All of these things that used to enable our relationship now seem like anchors that make it impossible to get where I feel I need to go - some unknown destination.

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are

Mystery

It’s still all kind of a mystery to me - this architecture thing.

There is so much I will never understand about this boundless enterprise. And the simplest things - like how some lines on a page turn into a thing that evokes a mood - still seem elusive and amazing.

The things I wondered about in school I still wonder about. There is something at the centre of it all which I can only orbit, and never touch. A quality if things that can only be perceived but never described in words - like the character of a colour.

I will concede that I have more knowledge of certain kinds than I did when I started this game, but I am, in some profound way, no wiser. There’s a mysterious heart to architecture that I feel I’ll never grasp - as fleeting as the present moment.

Architecture is a mystery that I’ll never demystify.

The Way Things Are

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

National Arts Centre renovations and addition

The recently completed renovations to the National Arts Centre, designed by Diamond Schmitt, have been, for the most part, well appreciated and frequently praised. In the time that the project has been opened, it seems to have achieved the goal of a better integration of the institution with the life of the city. New settings for public presentation and performance, less formal than the three auditoria originally created for the National Arts Centre, open up possibilities for events that are engaged with the city - rather than being fit into three silos of ‘concert hall’, ‘theatre’ and ‘black box’ that the original building conceptualized as the dimensions of performing arts.

In keeping with the idea of engagement with the city, the renovation design creates a ‘front door’ pedestrian entrance on Elgin Street and integrates new foyer / multipurpose areas with this entrance and the original plan so that visitors are comfortably guided into the original foyer and its associated theatres. The original canal facing entrance has been expanded to create a more convivial foyer environment including built-in seating and amenities such as coffee/snack bars. Resolving the plan would have been a difficult design challenge, and it has been successfully addressed.

Much of the design of the new foyer area off of Elgin Street is carried off with great sophistication and panache, with spaces vertically integrated, commodious environments, interesting ceiling and floor designs (which pay homage to the original in their geometry and materials), and large areas of glass enabling

new views to the city - rendered with a wood structure and perforated anodized aluminum fins on the exterior face which gives the composition a grain and sense of design purpose. The ‘official’ photography of the project has captured all of this.

One happy feature of the project was that the relentless hexagonal/triangular geometry of the original design for the National Arts Centre forced a demand to positively engage with the original and forced the designers to jettison design attitudes and details that would otherwise have been applied by rote. So , there is something fresh and engaging in the character of many spaces that feels authentic.

All of this realized as we might expect from the Diamond Schmitt design team, and even predictable in some ways; the tiered seating linking floor levels perhaps now a cliché, but if it works, who’s to argue? Given the portfolio of performing arts centres and the relationship with the NAC founded in other works for the institution it would have been surprising if the NAC had picked someone other than Diamond Schmitt.

The perplexing part about the project is a whole series of odd conditions in its execution. These are perhaps the result of not enough time (it was reputedly a ‘rush job’) and not enough money (for example, skylights that were not installed due to cost), or the result of design 'blind spots' - it’s hard to say. And, of course, none of these conditions have been ever captured in the ‘official’ photography (specifically designed and promulgated to flatter the project - and taken on at face value by magazines and awards programs – as always the case).

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

A lot of the points I will now grumble on about hinge on the relationship of new to old. Clearly there was an intent for the project to be transformative, but also, deferential to the original, since a wholesale renovation was not practical, or particularly desirable as a cultural statement. Don Schmitt referred to the original building as a ‘bunker’- a standard put-down for brutalism - and so the new is glassy where the original was opaque. (It should be noted that the Elgin Street side of the building ( now occupied by the ‘Forth Stage’ - a new popular music venue) was once occupied by a bookstore - which precisely enabled the city/institution integration that the new interventions seek to engender.)

And now for my list of grumbles, in no particular order…

At the opera, new doors have been added to create a vestibule, I imagine the intent being to mitigate the acoustic interference between the lobby and opera. However, the new doors have the demeanor of double doors leading to a high school gym - ignoring the design logic of the original that treats openings into significant spaces as full height panels recessed into masses.

In a similar way, the theatre lobby - originally delineated from the main lobby by plate glass (which enabled views into the theatre lobby) has had the glass removed and again replaced with double doors rendered in solid wood. This is presumably to mitigate the effects of noise leaking into the theatre - but having attended at least a hundred performances in the theatre - it’s never been a problem that I noticed. So - an alteration that ‘improved’ (compromised) the original - but to what end?

The material lesson of the original National Arts Centre is its vocabulary of precast concrete, terrazzo, bronze anodized aluminum and oak, stained tobacco brown. There were some white painted plaster surfaces - typically in less prominent locations or in secondary positions - but in the new NAC painted drywall occupies significant and prominent locations - such as a red gypsum board wall replacing what was a glass wall at the secondfloor banquet area. It looks a bit sad - tarted up with photos of notables - and with very ordinary doors punched into the wallalmost as if it was intended to be temporary.

The official photography of the project is telling. There are no views from the canal side - which - with respect to composition and detailing - is a jumbled mess of access ladders, random openings, forms and details – with finish materials simply pasted onto the mass of the building as need be. All of this not improved by the National Arts Centre’s recent decision to construct a glass enclosure (in chocolate brown paint rather than something related to the building) adjacent to the restaurant (did the Federal Heritage Building Review Office approve this addition too?).

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There seems to have been an ambition to reconceive the canal side entrance as a kind of ‘plaza’ that allowed for the co-mingling of pedestrians, cars and short-term parking - but it doesn’t work at all, and the staff at the National Arts Centre have consequently imposed ‘corrections’; planters directing traffic, various signs, the addition of a gate and stop sign to slow cars, yellow lines delineating parking spaces, etc.

The street facing Elgin entrance seems to have been deemed the ‘correct’ way to enter the building (on foot), and the canal entrance is now exclusively car oriented, with no particular accommodation for the needs of pedestrians and bikers. The latent opportunities to make stronger and more convivial pedestrian and bike connections between the Rideau canal and Elgin Street have been not only ignored, but thwarted, by design or by accident - it’s hard to tell. For example, the sidewalk along the driveway ramp taking you from the canal entrance to Elgin, could have been retained – but it is disabled by the interruption of perforated vertical screens that compromise head room. The National Arts Centre has placed a series of planters along the sidewalk to thwart this natural desire line, which if blindly followed would lead to head injury. People ignore all of this and simply walk up the driveway or through the adjoining park space in fair weather. In winter there is no other way to get from the canal to Elgin Street except along the car ramp and so pedestrians are forced during these months to walk up the ramp driveway, which feels uncomfortable, if not unsafe. So a blind spot in either the conception or scope of the project.

And other grumbles, the roof access ladders littering the skyline of the new; the detailing of glass balustrades at the new roof terrace; pop rivets used to anchor siding; the fact that the most

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One outcome of the renovation is that it enabled my realization of how disciplined the original design was - employing a restricted vocabulary and universal design strategy that informed everything - with a minimalism almost trending towards ignoring in this case complexity. The new design for the NAC jettisoned this design philosophy for a more heterogeneous and opportunistic vocabulary of elements and strategies - sometimes for the better. But this came along with an abandonment of the original discipline. So that where the original strove to subsume absolutely everything with a design model of solids and voids and 60degree geometry - the new simply wraps volumes in varying materials that abut each other without the massing being inflected - in an arbitrary collage of materials, punctured by doors and louvres as practicalities demand. Maybe this approach to the design was intended to be part of a narrative of transformation - but I don’t think so.

One of the key defining characteristics of the original National Arts Centre was the roof-scape, optimistically designed to enable use (which never really happened as the roof-scape was not supported by complementary functions). But where developed with vegetation, roof areas made explicit the idea of the entire building as a kind of a landscape to be explored. The new roof design, surprisingly, ignores this feature of the original and is unvegetated. This seems to be an omission, rather than a deliberate design choice with purpose. Results are uneven. It appears the project was designed by an ‘A’ team, a ‘B’ team, and a ‘C’ team - each assigned different bits of the project. This is perhaps

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a symptom of not having enough time, or not enough money, or a ‘challenging’ client - who knows?

And then the decisions taken by the institution itself, including the previously noted ‘corrections’ imposed by the National Arts Centre on the canal entrance. A curious example, a wheelchair ramp rendered in pressure treated wood – which I presume was not designed by Diamond Schmitt.

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And to continue in this vein, as part of the transformation of the National Arts Centre, the institution has abandoned the original corporate identity mark of interlocking hexagons for a stylized ‘N’/spotlight logo, a s if this fragment of Canadian graphic design history/culture was not worth retaining or revisiting as part of our cultural heritage. As usual, institutions abandon their corporate design programs at the moment when they are the most interesting.

Nobody knows anything

Scientists realized a while ago that they have no idea what constitutes most of the universe. It is currently thought that 69% is dark energy, 26% is dark matter and 5% is what we know some things about. The ratios are about the same in architecture.

I remember, starting out on my architectural education, feeling very confused about what architecture was. Even the professors at school didn’t seem to have a consensus view. But after a while I was able to start to detect patterns that gave me the impression that I knew things about architecture. But these patterns were really just a mental structure that I constructed, not facts.

And then, after a few years in an office, the strange sensation that when I said things about architecture, all I was really doing was repeating bits and pieces of things that I had heard others say, mouthed by myself as if I was articulating truths. But I didn’t ‘know’ anything at all. I was just repeating, repeating, repeating. But somehow these… Myths? Half-truths? Suppositions? gave me a means to proceed - even if in fact they were not directly attached to reality.

We’re just floating around, reacting, doing, repeating, but never truly connecting to the actual.

All these things we think we ‘know’ are stand-ins that enable action. Not facts.

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We think that space and time are facts, but they are really just phenomena of our perception.

We know the purpose of architecture as much as we know the purpose of life.

Novelty

We lost a competition once because we used orthogonal geometries (perceived to be boring and uncreative) and the winner used curves (perceived to be interesting and creative). Novelty of form was the design strategy that won the competition.

One of the defining characteristics of the recent past of architecture is the conflation of novelty, design quality and creativity in the public mind (creativity understood almost entirely as a matter of novelty of geometry and finish).

But…

• Novelty is rarely a response to novel conditions.

• Novelty is primarily related to the commercial or institutional demand that each project be distinctive in some way.

• Novelty is designed to titillate or entertain the ‘consumers’ of architecture.

• Novelty is designed to pander to the dumbest possible idea of ‘good’ architecture.

• Novelty is news.

• Novelty is implicated with the ‘publishing and awards industrial complex’.

• Novelty is the new orthodoxy of architecture.

• Novelty is not radical.

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obsessions obsessions obsessions obsessions

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Obsessions

Architects have been, for a long time now, obsessed with two ideas:

• Glass buildings, and

• Buildings that move

(This short list of two obsessions is not complete. There are others - grids and their relation to mass, for example.)

These obsessions point to the space between what architects’ think is interesting and what projects practically need to be. Maybe this space is what we call architecture.

Glass buildings

Every architect wants, at some point in their career, to make a building entirely from glass (or at least as much as physics and finances will allow).

Glass, as an architectural material in its own right, comes into play around the 1920’s with the speculative designs of Mies for glass office towers. This history continues with Johnson’s glass house and the Farnsworth house, which inspired a generation or two to create any number of houses that riff off on them ; e volving in the present with projects such as the National Library in Doha (by OMA ) and numerous projects by Sanna ( including a glass museum with facades made entirely from glass, naturally ) .

The thing about a glass building is that in many ways it’s a dumb idea :

• It’s a poor insulator.

• It’s uncomfortable (too hot/too cold).

• You can’t change it (in the way you can change a wall by painting it or mounting something on it).

• It creates glare.

• It often needs blinds or curtains that obviate the whole point of the material - its transparency.

• And it kills birds.

And the way we use glass is also sometimes just out of laziness. When you really have no idea what to do with a façade, you make it out of glass! (The horrible shop fronts that you see in strip malls come to mind.) And one of the reasons we see so many condominiums using all glass window-wall facades is that this technology is just about the cheapest way to skin a building, dovetailing with the seductive image of the floor to ceiling view.

Part of the seduction of glass is the promise to connect inside and outside seamlessly and its capacity to reveal things ( the structure expressed without being obscured by walls, the inner workings of places normally hidden) with a literal transparency

– all of this best revealed in photography (and here I wonder how much of the use of glass is because of its performance in photography).

Glass also has a curious character, both heavy and transparent, there and not there, its appearance mutable depending on the condition of natural and artificial light, extremely durable in some applications and fragile in others. It’s fascinating stuff!

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This want of architects to use glass has engendered any number of technologies designed to enable extensive applications of glass: float glass, tinted glass, double glazing, triple glazing, low - e coatings and curtain walls, structural silicon, glass beams, fittings of all types, heat strengthened glass, laminated glass, tempered glass, fire rated glass (replacing wired glass), varieties of sealants and gaskets, etchings and frits applied to achieve various ends, etc.

If architects weren’t so keen on glass buildings, I doubt anyone would have bothered to create all these solutions for a material that often doesn’t want to do the things we want it to do.

Buildings that move

Every building must move. Doors swing, windows open, curtains are drawn, and handles rotate. Without movement a building cannot be inhabited – excepting things like bandstands.

At some point in modernism, architects became interested in the idea of a building that was not static – but rather a building that was mutable. This took four forms:

• the building whose function was flexible (like the various sheds Mies created),

• the building that was movable – like a transformer toy (the Reitveld House),

• the building that revealed itself in movement (Promenade Architectural) and

• the building designed to be changeable (how often that actually happened is another matter).

In the 1960’s the idea of the mutable building took its most extreme form with the ‘Walking City’ project by Ron Herron (and many others by Archigram), and the Pompidou Centrewhich is a flexible shed, designed to be changeable, originally designed to have movable floors, accessed by escalator – all four kinds of mutability!

The idea of a mutable architecture continues to obsess us. For example, the Taipei Performing Arts Center by OMA (where - as claimed by the architects - the literal movability of the building enables “New possibilities of theater configurations and stage settings [to] inspire productions in unimagined and spontaneous forms.”

But it must be said – almost always – mutable architecture reverts to a more or less static condition - because after all - who wants to re-invent the idea of theatre every time you put on a play? In the end mutability is one of those ideas that obsess architects –with only limited practical application – but it’s fun for them to think about.

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Old Urbanism / New Urbanism

I remember visiting Phoenix, a sprawl city sustained by unsustainable supplies of water and energy. Recognizing that this cannot last, and is not a model for a future city, the interesting thing about Phoenix is that it is urbane, but not urban. I could imagine living there quite happily (putting aside one’s participation in an environmental collapse, and assuming water and gas continued to be available).

The irony of so-called ‘new urbanism’ was that it was a movement to impose features of ‘old urbanism’ on the contemporary city, within limited and commercially determined pockets. ‘New urbanism’ has subsequently developed into a powerful consensus, orthodoxy, ideology amongst planners and architects and civic authorities which believes that features of ‘old urbanism’ are simply ‘good design’. For example, notions such as:

• Buildings should be built to lot lines in urban settings.

• Walkable environments are always good.

• A variety of massing and facade treatments are necessary .

• Ground floors should have public uses, etc.

All of this is an attempt to replicate the character of the parts of traditional cities like Paris that we visit on holiday, as if cities are supposed to be that way everywhere and all the time – forever - and the purpose of the city is to entertain us with charming vistas and experiences.

And to be truthful, although I can think of many examples that contradict these mores, I sort of agree with them, or more accurately I don’t have a good rebuttal to this lazy thinking. But the problem with ‘new urbanism’ is that its principles are applied by rote (like a sauce dripped over the pro-forma) and often don’t align well with the technologies and economics of big box stores, parking lots, arterial roads and developer housing that makes up much of the contemporary city.

I feel irritated by the swooning over places like Greenwich Village, always everywhere ‘activated’ and interesting 24 hours a day and full of small shops and cafes on tree lined streets with apartments above those shops inhabited by families and plumbers and university professors who walk to work. The contemporary city we are making isn’t like that.

One of the marvels of modernism was that it created the possibility of being in the world differently, and in a way not possible in an urbanism made from streets and blocks and cellular buildings of rooms. An obvious example being the glass house that made the natural environment part of the experience of domestic life. This kind of architecture is not possible with either traditional urbanism or ‘new urbanism’.

Three questions:

1. What would the city look like if we were able to realize it in a way that enabled the way we want to be in the world?

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2. Does an idealized image of the traditional city map accurately with the way we actually live today, or even the way we aspire to live?

3. What would contemporary urbanism look like if it was not based in traditional patterns, but addressed imperatives such as sustainable design?

1% of architects talking about 1% of buildings made for 1% of clients.

One in a million odds.

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Per sis tence

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Persistence

Buildings last longer than the ideas and circumstances that made them possible.

It’s expensive to make buildings, it’s expensive to change buildings, and it’s expensive to get rid of buildings; and so, buildings tend to persist. This fact of architecture seems fundamental to its nature.

Making buildings is slow. Even a modestly scaled building takes a year to be realized – and big ones can take more than a decade. In the latter case, by the time of the ribbon cutting, the architect doesn’t design the same way they did at the start of the project.

Compared to the pace of change in culture, buildings are glacial. So that there is a natural discordance between the pace of culture and the pace of buildings – nanoseconds on the internet compared to centuries in buildings.

Pigs

Architecture follows money like a pig sniffing out truffles.

At one time there was no ‘architecture’ to speak of in China.

Once China got money, there was lots of ‘architecture’ in China.

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Plumbing

Sustainable design is very important. Our lives literally depend on it. Everyone knows this now. We must work with increasing efforts and sophistication towards achieving buildings that are at the very least benign, and ideally repairing.

This is eminently necessary - but necessity is not purpose.

Technical innovations - such as indoor plumbing and sewage treatment - have been essential to the quality of life we enjoy, and without exaggeration, have saved millions of lives. I am glad that our buildings have indoor plumbing, and I am glad that building codes require it - but I never thought that achieving indoor plumbing was the purpose of architecture.

The same can be said about every technology or control used in architecture.

But the question begged… what is this mysterious ‘purpose’ I’m talking about?

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Q & A

Q. What is architecture? A. Waste.

We commonly understand ‘architecture’ to be a defiant contrariness towards the ordinary.

But most buildings want to be ordinary and so most buildings don’t want to be ‘architecture’. Or more accurately - they only want to be ‘architecture’ as much as their sponsors require to achieve conformance with decorum, or in support of marketing.

Sometimes ‘architecture’ emerges out of the want of the architect. You often see some very modest building program, a warehouse or pumping station, that an architect has invested with ‘architecture’, signaled by ‘interesting’ shapes or surfaces or the like. These willful design choices are inserted by the architect to ensure everyone knows that they were there, and that their choices actually mattered. These willful design choices are also evidence of a want to emulate the ‘good architecture’ promulgated in magazines; or they are the result of a need to ventilate the creativity that the architect thought was supposed to come along with the job of being an architect. As a rule, these choices don’t cost enough for the client to object to them.

And at the opposite end - a modest building program that is directly and authentically addressed with a minimum of fussoften as dumb and ‘ugly’ as th e program it accommodates. I appreciate these buildings, rare as they are.

But every architect always wants to ‘do’ ‘architecture’. And this, almost always, in essence, is a form of styling, because what the

architect does cannot interfere with the fundamental conception of the building promoted by its sponsor. ( F or example , speculative office buildings are designed as non-particularized space, able to accommodate any kind of potential user, and organized to facilitate leasing. A design solution with varying floor heights, or attributes unique to certain locales within the building is much less likely to happen because it creates friction with the proforma.) For some buildings at the ‘high end’ (meaning here expensive or high status), there is a rational argument to ‘do’ ‘architecture’ because that will result in a higher yield for the sponsor or conform with decorum.

So then, what is this ‘architecture’ I am talking about? It almost always involves conspicuous consumption - the willful application of extra stuff or ‘wasted space’, or a deviation from the simplest way of addressing practical demands; all of this is necessarily expressed in a manner accessible to the viewing audience. ‘Architecture’ functions as a visual statement in culture that signals or speaks to those that witness it – usually in photographs. It is unlike the kind of modern architecture created by people like Louis Kahn, which was focused on articulating fundamentals such as structure, light, space, materiality - at the expense of the image making that would make these buildings easily understood or assimilated in popular culture.

So, if we think about what we mean by the word ‘architecture’ today - one word - ‘waste’.

This includes intentional inefficiencies such as; materials more costly than they need to be, thousands of hours spent on the

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design of one house, detailing like watch making, extreme cantilevers, buildings that are about their own shape , and other rhetorical flourishes. In short, as many deviations from sensible ordinary conventional practices as possible.

Qualitative judgement

The qualitative resists the quantitative.

Our society, and specifically those that sponsor publicly funded building projects, is afraid of qualitative judgement because we only trust the things that can be ‘objectively’ measured.

The ‘objective’ - rendered in numbers and tables - becomes the standardized datum for civil discourse - where we’re all talking about the same thing – once it’s turned somehow into numbers. This is the ‘comfort zone’ of most project sponsors and their managers. Unless something can be substantiated by a numerical metric of efficiency or return on investment, it occupies a nether realm of ‘taste’, or ‘personal opinion’. Consequently, we operate in a climate of fear of aesthetic quality because ‘aesthetics’ is taken as a code word for ‘unnecessary cost’. (We once had a project awarded under budget, and in the midst of construction, when the project manager realized that the lobby looked ‘too good’, they demanded we issue a change order to delete the offending parts, that had already been built, of course at some new additional cost to the project.)

Because it is difficult (pointless?) to quantify subjective judgement, the quality of buildings (the way they feel when you participate in them) is a minority partner in determinations about architecture. While 98% of a project typically complies with the quantitative, decorum will demand that 2% complies with the qualitative, as necessary to make a building appear satisfactory to purchasers, or to stop the architects from complaining.

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There is a corollary to the typical situation, where the qualitative trumps the quantitative, namely the instances where famous architects are given (some degree of) free reign to express their design personalities.

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Rende r i ngs

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Renderings

We have reached the point where a high-quality rendering can simulate a photograph, and so -called ‘Photo -realistic’ renderings are often stipulated as a deliverable The intent of this requirement is to assimilate the authority of photography, for clients that don’t understand that knowing what a building looks like in a photo is not the same as understanding that same building.

In the old days, a rendering was understood as an approximation of proposed results, but it was also a creative statement in its own right, which demanded interpretation. The rendering communicated something about the architecture beyond its three-dimensional appearance. The style of rendering and what it included, or left out, or what aspirations it alluded to, contained a knowledge of the thing, and its values and outlook; and because of this, renderings were an important dimension of architectural culture. I am thinking, for example, of the work Hugh Ferris did.

The manner in which a drawing was executed told you something about the soul of the design. Perhaps hard edged/machine made with ink and plastic film (Archigram), or softly described in charcoal delineating light and shadow (Lou Kahn), or a collage incorporating photography (Mies). This compared to the present moment where renderings are increasingly generic, with image making following the behaviors proscribed by software.

This ‘standardization’ of rendering develops from a want to be ‘photorealistic’ and as a result, the meaning and ‘extra’ information about the nature of the architecture that used to be contained in the way the building was rendered has been stripped away so that the ‘photo-realistic’ rendering actually tells you less than a handmade rendering used to.

There was a space between the rendering, the building and the photographs of the building that mattered, and now it doesn’t. Th e space between them has collapsed , so that rendering , building and photograph have almost equivalent effect in architectural culture. With actual buildings becoming ‘bit-players’ in an architectural culture of images. It’s not hard to imagine a successful award-winning practice based entirely on photo-realistic renderings of imaginary buildings.

The space between rendering and building was important because it made you continuously aware that there was an actual thing out there somewhere that the rendering was referring to. And that that thing out there was the authoritative statement of the architecture. The gap forced you to interpret and imagine the consequences of the building.

Somehow the effects of photo-realistic renderings have implicated themselves into the materiality of architecture. I recall looking at a building in person and feeling the building had the same demeanor as a photo-realistic rendering. This created the odd sensation that the building was a representation of a rendering, rather than the reverse.

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Of course, renderings do not operate, in fact, the same as actual buildings. Actual buildings are implicated with ethics, environment, social arrangements, and gravity. Buildings matter in ways very different from the ways renderings matter.

The big problem is that we assimilate architecture almost entirely through pictures - and we have come to see these pictures as one and the same as the buildings they portray. This is a falsehood, which should seem obvious to everyone, but it’s not.

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Sameness

Every architect wants to be interesting and unique in exactly the same way.

I am struck by the curious sameness of designs that we see promulgated in magazines and awards (the country house that is glassy and looks into nature, the concrete house that is very abstract ; I could go on ). These various modalities of design are proficiently executed but are essentially applications of proven formulas.

Scale matters

Design operates at scales and these scales are associated with dimensions.

The smaller an object is, the easier it is to be four dimensional (an object that moves).

If larger becomes a mostly static three-dimensional object (like a building).

Still larger it is likely to be two dimensional (civil engineering, planning).

If transcontinental, one dimensional, like an undersea telecommunications line.

From the smallest to the largest scale, a number of transitions:

• From 4D to 3D to 2D to 1D, as noted already

• From the artisanal work of one to the organized work of dozens to the bureaucratic work of hundreds

• From the individual author to a team to a division to a bureaucracy

• From COMPLETE CONTROL to limited control to the strategic . As scale increases, control decreases; as scale decreases, control increases. A master plan exercises only limited control.

• From the static to the evolving.

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Scale is also associated with the capacity to resolve detail, like the difference between a watch and a highway. This question regarding scale comes to mind when looking at the various works designed by BIG; buildings that are objects of a type you might find decorating a coffee table, blown up in size and only incidentally accommodating people.

Scale attracts controls and permissions, because big scale means big bucks and big consequences, so the making of buildings becomes enmeshed in approvals processes, the endorsement of clients, the facility of engineers; that together give various permissions for projects to be realized. This isn’t the case with ‘small scale’ projects, like the chair made in a basement workshop, that permit failures and experiments and the possibility that they are made simply for the pleasure of the maker.

Scarcity

Our idea of ‘architecture’ is based on its relative scarcity.

Notwithstanding architects’ declarations about the importance of ‘good design’ and the ostensible want for it to permeate the entirety of human existence, in truth our idea of ‘good design’ and ‘architecture’ is based on the fact that it is scarce. Its laudability comes from the fact that it isn’t like regular commercial dreck. And in this way, ‘good design’ wants to be scarce. This scarcity can be achieved by the filter of cost, or less commonly, the filter of violation of expectations (for example, exposed raw plywood in a lawyer’s office.)

The effect of this cultural logic is that our self-imposed idea of ‘architecture’ (as scarce building) means we don’t have the apparatus to consider and engage with the meaning and effects of the 99% of buildings that aren’t scarce.

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Seventies buildings

When I was a kid, a TV show ‘Here come the Seventies’ was on CTV. Apart from the opening credits, which featured the nude backside of a woman walking into the ocean (thrilling at the time) the program is memorable because it reminds me that we used to look forward to the future with excitement.

Ottawa, in the 1960‘s and 70’s was transformed by a large number of office buildings. These buildings are possibly the most important kind of ‘sites’ we have to work with today. As an architect - this is both an interesting (because of the variety of creative and technical challenges we are able to work with) and exciting moment in the city (as we witness its transformation).

This patrimony of construction is often both problematic (lousy energy performance, and B grade design quality) and of very high value. A tally of the areas of commercially owned buildings built between 1960 and 1980 in downtown Ottawa comes to almost 7 million square feet and if we add federally owned properties perhaps 10 million square feet, or to put it another way, 50 acres of territory in the process of redevelopment

When I was in school, these were the buildings we loved to hate, but we’re at a moment when ‘70s buildings can be appreciated for their own merits. Here is why we should appreciate them.

They have a very high latent value which we are collectively realizing. For example: they are often very well situated, and they are environmentally friendly because don’t impose the

need to expend energy and resources to construct their structures. In the first instance, by rehabilitating a ‘70s building we’re ‘recycling’ it, so that much of the energy and carbon emissions expended 50 years ago on producing concrete and steel can be left in place.

The federal government and private industry have been involved with any number of projects that entail the need to reconsider buildings dating from the 1960’s and 70’s. These include the Lester B. Pearson building, the Bank of Canada, the National Arts Centre, and Place du Portage, to name a few that will be familiar to all. A lot of these projects have to do with addressing practical needs - such as correcting failing facades, ventilation systems and the imperative for sustainable design. Given the magnitude of the technical issues they face, these rehabilitation projects can be very extensive and demand that the building as a whole be reconsidered all at once. An extreme make-over if you will…

But beyond these practicalities - these projects come along with very exciting opportunities to imagine how the way we live and work today might influence the concepts we employ to transform them.

There is a continuing risk to the design integrity of these buildings, because they don’t look like ‘heritage’ buildings that demand care and respect; and so, these sites are vulnerable to wellmeaning interventions that attempt to ‘improve ’them. I am thinking of the number of times I have seen raw concrete painted over in pink or beige colours.

These buildings do have aesthetic merit - often recognized by the Federal Heritage Building Review Office (FHBRO) - and so on

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because they don’t look like ‘heritage’ buildings that demand care and respect; and so, these sites are vulnerable to wellmeaning interventions that attempt to ‘improve ’them. I am thinking of the number of times I have seen raw concrete painted over in pink or beige colours.

These buildings do have aesthetic merit - often recognized by the Federal Heritage Building Review Office (FHBRO) - and so on The Way Things Are top of the practicalities of a rehabilitation project – there is a fascinating cultural opportunity to engage with their design in ways that both respect and challenge the tenets they were based on. (It’s counterintuitive but raw concrete is actually a fragile material because its surface is sensitive to permanent stains and markings.)

Today, many building projects are obsessed with novelty as a design principle. This gives us an opportunity to appreciate the restraint and design discipline that was put into ‘70’s buildings - which often come across as ‘boring’ - but in fact are very accomplished in their own manner. A calm background to work and life that they create can be appreciated in our contemporary visual and mental environment , filled with visual and mental ‘noise’.

I admire the boldness of vision these buildings embody – enabled by architects that had the courage of strong convictions and had the means and opportunities to realize them. It is almost impossible to imagine any of the buildings I have cited (often influencing the organization of the surrounding city) being realized today.

Also - architects have also learned things since the ‘70’s. For example, we appreciate the need for convivial pedestrian environments and the merits of traditional streets, in ways that were outside the domain of interest of the architecture of that time.

Specialists

You can easily find someone who is a specialist attending to some aspect of architecture. Somehow or another, buildings, very large and complicated buildings, used to get done without specialists, but today even a relatively modest project seems to demand a retinue of them.

• Wayfinding

• Ergonomics

• Accessibility

• Acoustics

• Wind and snow

• Building code

• Environmental

• Hardware

• Heritage

• Cost estimating

• Project management

• Programming

• Planning

• Envelope engineering

• Design management

• Security

• Signage

• Roofing

• Theatre

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• Curtain wall

• Elevator

• Accessibility

• Energy

• Lighting

• Laboratory

• Specialists in the various regimes of sustainable design (LEED, WELL, Green Globes, One Planet etc.)

• And the list goes on…

The entirety of this list used to be the domain of the work of architects, who, in their innocence, would attend to these various dimensions of architecture. The culling of all of these specialties from the ‘normal’ practice of architecture has lessened the range of work that the typical architectural practice will directly attend to. But it may have also cemented the role of the architect as ‘ master design coordinator ’. (I was going to say ‘master coordinator’ but that seems to have been taken over by project managers.)

Why did things change? Some hypotheses:

• Clients what to be served by specialists instead of ‘jackof-all-trades’ architects. There’s something impressive about being attended to by an expert.

• Risk - averse clients want to be 100% certain that they have ‘covered all of the bases’. When in doubt add another specialist.

• Things are more complicated (the actual necessity of all this complexity is a separate topic) and so you

need people with a depth of knowledge to attend to complexity.

• Specialists always get paid more than those who are ‘just’ architects and as a result there is an economic logic that pushes towards specialization.

Martin Tite

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

Spectrum

Every architecture occupies a position on a spectrum that ranges from the poetic to the pragmatic, with virtually every building somewhere in the vicinity of the middle of the bell curve.

This reality is in contrast to the idea that some buildings are ‘architecture’ and some are ‘not architecture’.

Standard plan

“The plan is the generator” Le Corbusier

A paradigm for apartment planning dominates the market, and as a result virtually every apartment building floor plan produced today follows the same formula. Both ‘good’ architects and ‘bad’ architects use the same plan arrangements. Plans in any particular building only vary as a result of the number of bedrooms, with the mix of units determined by cash flow, construction cost efficiency and rent-ability/sale-ability

Apartments are almost always made of the same basic components, that constitute more or less ‘standard plans’:

1. Bedrooms (1, 2, 3 or none for ‘studio’ units) - which have a window aspect.

2. Living rooms which also have a window aspect.

3. A dining area/kitchen (almost always combined).

4. Guest bathroom.

5. Master bath (sometimes).

6. Closet in each bedroom and at entry.

7. Some spaces dedicated to utilities and washing machines.

8. Usually, a balcony that is too small or ill proportioned to be anything more than a place to have a smoke.

9. A ‘study’ - which is a code word for a room without a window that enables a deeper floor plate and can be sold as a bedroom.

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I wonder if the ‘standard plan’ is a feature of consumer presumptions regarding the necessities of apartment arrangements; or the inherent conservatism of developers who don’t see much to be gained by deviating from the things they already know ‘work’ ; or the ‘ standard plan ’ perpetuates because it’s the way that most lifestyles align with contemporary domestic accommodation

It is striking that regardless the price of the apartment, the room areas and their relationships to each other are similar. What distinguishes an apartment unit is not its general arrangement but rather; location within the city, position in the apartment block, finish and detail and fixtures (the latter often the work of interior designers that specialize in servicing this aspect of projects).

While the history of modern and contemporary architecture is full of examples that contradict the ‘standard plan’; these are exceptions, which prove the validity of the rule of the ‘standard plan’.

I wonder if this formulaic programming of apartments still makes sense if we think deeply about what a home should be today. Is the ‘standard plan’ true to the way we live? For example, what is the purpose of a bedroom in a one-bedroom apartment? To create a space for a bed? To separate guests from the ‘private’ area of the apartment? You don’t need a room to do either of these things.

A thought experiment: put the various standard plan components into a blender to make hybrid spaces - a bedroom/kitchen, a closet/living room. (Already the dining room/home office is commonplace.)

Or maybe we need to invent new kinds of spaces.

Martin Tite

The

Sucking in the seventies

‘Sucking in the Seventies’ was the name of a compilation LP from The Rolling Stones, released in 1981 and including a variety of cuts from albums and B sides released in the last half of the 1970’s. An ironic title. But I digress…

It’s hard to remember now... but there was a time, in the 1970’s, when the non plus ultra of every building design was a kind of minimalism based on some sort of formal and repeatable strategy, aligned with the logic of mass production, that directed the entirety of the design.

This was often seen at buildings that used pre-cast concrete cladding. This approach to design, combined with market pressures and the logic of uni - functional buildings (such as spec office buildings) meant that the actual complexity of a building was almost always suppressed.

Of course, not all of this was driven by forces outside of architecture - it included a belief in the elegance of the repeatable, which was a validation of the authenticity of a design idea. A ‘fact’ based architecture. But when the fact of a project is an office building whose purpose is the multiplication of the area of real estate, then what else was there to do? It seemed difficult to justify making anything except shoeboxes wrapped in various riffs on grids.

Anyway - we hated that stuff when we were in school. It was predictable , corporate (serving the agents of money and power), and boring (and now I like it!). We were dying for ways

to ‘juice’ designs to make them look less boring - while also hoping that this animation would somehow be rooted in realities, because we were still modernists (perhaps here the origins of the ‘high-tech’ in design and architecture, which blurs the line between pragmatism and styling, between the actual and the appearance of things).

Post-modernism blew that design logic up. We are still experiencing its echoes. Except, while post-modernism was (partly) about reveling in the joys of applied historicist decoration (and upsetting the ponderousness of ‘serious’ architecture with humour), much of contemporary architecture ‘decorates’ buildings with patterns, titillating shapes, complex massing and the like that use architecture itself as decoration.

Martin Tite

Systems of architecture

Systems of architecture Part 1 - Regularity

It used to be that regularity, as the result of the application of a system, was an aspiration for architecture. Regularity was the way things were ‘supposed to be’ and taken as evidence of ‘good design’. This came out of a design ethic that said good design was a matter of distilling a truthful essence. If something was truthful it would have general applicability to the project and ‘solve’ it. The repeatability of certain design moments applied to the general case was evidence of rightness. ( This train of thinking is related to 1960’s architect’s interest in systems theory.)

This design ethic didn’t come from nowhere. It mirrored the reality that there was limited complexity in contemporary building programs, with a high degree of repetition, as seen in hotels, apartment buildings, or speculative office buildings (All of these (in a sense) buildings without a program because they were amenable to many kinds of unique occupants.) As well, large scale buildings demanded some degree of repetition to either achieve economy of scale, or to accommodate the limits of the designer’s imagination. This ethic of regularity was also in lockstep with the logic of mass production - with the building made out of standardized components - as in pre-cast panels.

Behind the locked doors of mechanical rooms and loading docks were the things that enabled the useability of buildings, hiding somewhere behind the screen of ‘good design’. These thingsnot part of the design ‘system’ - were the things that actually made these buildings inhabitable. (Erickson’s Bank of Canada

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required three basement levels below grade, loaded with an ad hoc collection of machine rooms, generators, boilers, vaults, kitchens, storage rooms etc. all hidden like the part of an iceberg below water that enabled the regularity of the ‘perfect’ resolution of the ‘tree’ structural module above the grade surface.)

This attitude to design suppressed actual differences of need and complexity of program in the interest of achieving uniformity of appearance; with results often leading to a kind of minimalism - which seemed, to many observers at the time, mechanistic, or boring, or unimaginative, apart from the fact that it was also sometimes dysfunctional. Much of the brutalist architecture of the era hovers in this territory.

Systems of architecture Part 2 - Design Systems

A related topic is the case where architects developed design systems intended to have general application to project types (schools and houses most commonly). In this context, the design of a building was essentially a matter of designing a system, with as few parts as possible, able to address the demands of the project in an elegant way; a system that told you about the details, the mass, the facade, the plan logic - everything you needed to know!

A lot of energy in modernist architecture was devoted to the want to design the system that would design, of which the progeny buildings were ‘proof of concept’ - for example the ‘Case Study’ houses. The irony is that these systems never had the wide-ranging influence they sought to assert; compared to the actual influence of standard design and construction techniques . Even though these systems had, at root, a desire to be

The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

infinitely repeatable they were rarely applied to more than one building.

The design of the system was the ‘holy grail’ for architects. Where d id this quixotic work come from? Perhaps the unstated motivation behind this impulse was to assert a design for the world, beyond the capacity of the individual designer to realize buildings, or the want to be influential within architectural culture.

Systems of architecture Part 3 - Organizing Principles

It’s almost impossible to design something without having some general organizing principle - even if this principle is not conscious in the mind of the designer. This can take many forms. It can be an instructive narrative, a logic of structure, a drive to minimize cost, a want to create a mood, the need to place uses adjacent to each other, etc.

It is unlikely that any one particular organizing principle can tell you everything you need to know to create a fully realized design. In practice, a number of them will combine in different proportions, but they will never tell you everything you need to know to complete a design.

And as well, some dimensions of architecture are difficult to be determined by ‘organizing principles’. The colour of the bathroom tile, the proportion of a column, the shape of the window, might be determined by feelings about the rightness of choices rather than ‘Principles’ with a capital ‘P’.

Oddly, it’s both impossible to design a building without organizing principles, and impossible to design entirely with them.

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Oddly, it’s both impossible to design a building without organizing principles, and impossible to design entirely with them

Systems of architecture Part 4 – Modernism

The iconic modernist architects (Wright, Mies, Le Corbusier and others) each developed a system of making architecture that was comprehensive and integrated (from the city to furniture) with each building a demonstration of the application of that system. This approach enabled any number of ‘followers’ of ‘the masters’ (as they were referred to) to do their own takes on the system . T he graduates of Taliesen, or José Luis Sert, or Philip Johnson exemplified this architectural culture of positions, in relation to other architects or the issues of the time. This architectural culture has long passed into the present situation, where each building project follows a logic (apparently and preferably) independent of the precedents established by other architects.

Systems of architecture Part 5 – Insanity

Every system, when followed with absolute rigour, generates insane results.

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tai nted

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Tainted by architecture

Years ago, a Request for Proposal (RFP) noted, very specifically, that aesthetic architectural effects were prohibited in the prospective design. I have always been interested in this idea because it was an impossible direction to follow, even though it also seemed eminently practical.

The pure functionalism advocated by the RFP has never existed in design Every design is preordained in some way by the image - memory of other designs, and ‘tainted’ b y 'architecture' and the culture of design. (As an aside, not even the 'designs' of nature are purely functional – because they are only the result of random mutations that perpetuate as long as they don’t impinge on the viability of the species.)

At this moment, award-winning architecture (or 'good design') largely consists of unconventional forms and surfaces, operating as signals in a cultural ecology of images. In this context, ‘architecture’ is a matter of aesthetic effects pointlessly invested in buildings; emerging from either ego-driven desires, or the excess demanded by social convention or the want of the client.

The injunction of the RFP to avoid aesthetic effects posed an important question. Is it possible to make a great building that is not 'architecture'? If we simply tried to respond to the practical demands and ethics of the assignment and forget about 'architecture' (as if that’s possible) what would our buildings be like?

I think we should believe in the utterly conventional as a start. This means respecting the collective intelligence embodied in

the conventional. I feel inspired by the fantastic military architecture of fortresses, hangers and barracks that has perfect indifference to aesthetic judgement and may be a guide on how to think.

We are currently working on a project that will remain secret, whose inner workings are disguised, that will never ever be photographed for the delectation of an audience, for people whose names I will never know, for people who will never know who we were, and that will have meaning and value only in so far as it serves these people.

Somehow, this must be correct.

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The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

talk talk talk

All that talk talk talk and writing and research about architecture - does it matter that it’s of virtually no consequence to what happens when a project happens? I suppose not. It is what it is.

Learning about architecture, knowing about it, working in it, living in it… All of this knowledge about architecture still doesn’t provide any more agency to the architect than the circumstances of the project, including the client, is able or willing to grant. And all of this knowledge is of little help, when you are faced with the pressures of any particular project. (Like Mike Tyson said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.)

In the end we work at the pleasure of the people that pay us. And so the grinding reality of economic logic or the various agendas of project sponsors will continue on, no matter what we think or what we talk talk talk about architecture.

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The agency of architecture

I am confident that what we think of as ‘Design’ is over, and that it’s time to prepare the death certificate for an estate without a beneficiary.

We were taught that design was ‘it’. The thing to study, admire, emulate. The thing that would make you cool amongst your peers. The thing that would get you published. And design wasn’t just a means to become admired, ‘Good design’ was going to save the world, building by building.

No one thinks like that anymore.

‘Design’ is no longer a plane of action substantively consequential to architecture. (And here I am talking about ‘design’ as (commonly) understood and reduced to beautiful things that comply with the dictates of novelty and prejudices whose sources are barely understood.)

Design in common ‘ordinary’ practice is essentially a matter of styling – the role of which is to assert the agency of architecture and its fundamental autonomy as a practice. But design can’t change the raison d’être of a project, or where it is, or how much it cost, or what it ’ s for. Someone else has written the script which we must try to render in a satisfactory way - good looking, waterproof, on time, on budget. The architect is an actor who has to follow the script. The actor can be good, or bad, but the script remains.

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The Way Things Are The Way Things Are

This is not to say design is totally without agency. Design can sometimes enable or prescribe ways of being in the world, but this occurs in only a limited fashion; almost invisible to people when they engage with buildings; backdrops to life whose constancy in time makes them invisible.

The ant nest

I thought that I would eventually become as smart as the architects I admired.

But I feel - in some basic way - just as ignorant of architecture as I always was. The same questions I had as a student remain unanswered.

• What are we supposed to be doing in architecture?

• How are we supposed to do it?

• How is a drawing different from a building?

Maybe these questions aren’t meant to be answered.

It only occurred to me, late in the game, how little I knew, and that the little I knew had already been grasped (almost self-evidently) by many of my peers sometime in second year.

We architects ‘know’ what we are doing as much as ants ‘know’ what they are doing while building a nest. We progress in architecture like the way an ant follows its innate programming, without any idea how it fits into an ecology, or its setting in reality.

We work within systems and environments we barely understand, if at all; doing work whose ultimate purpose we don’t fathom; ignorant of our position within the ecology of the natural world and society; performing tasks mostly by rote.

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The architects

You were a genial person, friendly and reliable. But there was a cold hard centre to your heart. Were you born that way, or did years of practice create it?

You were a Christian, but you worked for money, not God.

You were so naïve. You believed the things you were taught in school.

You were always very cagey with me, in the way politicians are, as if telling me things meant I’d have some sort of edge over you.

You sat there in the crits - not saying a word for the whole afternoon – just observing. I took this oddly memorable in-action as a rebuttal to the noise every other professor was making.

It took decades for you to understand truths that many in your class already knew in first year.

Your ideas about architecture are so boring.

Your parents were alcoholics. Somehow the drive you had as an architect was fueled by that history.

I wonder, as you approach the end, if you feel the compromises and the money and the sacrifices were all worth it. But maybe this isn’t the right question, because your way of being in the world was to be an architect, and whatever happened because of this fact was preordained.

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You were a father figure to me.

People mistook your arrogance for competence and so they trusted you to do whatever you wanted.

I like working with you! Every time we connect, I get energized!

You left your homeland that was in a state of turmoil to work in another country, leaving your wife and children to fend for themselves.

You had appointments at Ivy League schools and ran an ‘innovative’ practice in a big city. You became the kind of architect you aspired to be.

You sacrificed everything for your architecture. And faced, at the end of it all, the realization that maybe you weren’t actually a very good architect.

You somehow survived divorce, scandal, murders and the fire that destroyed your office.

Your pragmatism drives me nuts! Is there any demand that you will not acquiesce to?

It’s clear you were a genius - and I wonder why you had such meagre opportunities. Why wasn’t it obvious to everyone that you should have gotten all the work?

You got where you did by virtue of your ambitions for yourself, not by having original or valuable ideas, or ambitions for architecture.

It is truly astounding, your sense of self - importance. As if every little turd that falls out of your head should be interesting to others.

I wonder if your interest in making drawings and paintings and writing and poems and imaginary designs come from the fact that your creative desires were thwarted in professional practice.

You were titillated and impressed by the new, the revolutionary, the ‘intellectual’ - like most university students are. And you followed trends, and went to the right graduate school, and you won a competition, and you became proficient at aping the language of the ‘leaders’ of the profession.

I respect you so much. I wish I could be more like the thoughtful and kind and driven architect that you are.

It saddens me that you were not able to see your way through the difficulties of the project. I wish you could realize it was just a building and that you were not responsible for what was wrong with it.

I miss your innocence. You were so young. I loved the energy and excitement you exuded with the opportunity to work on a project. And then as you became older and wiser, that innocence evolved into a kind of professional demeanor that was perhaps a natural evolution, but I can’t help but feel that something was lost to architecture.

I think it was always a business for you. A way to garner an income. You did what was necessary to get and keep clients. But

surely if an income was the goal, architecture was a hard way to get there. Why did you do it?

For you, the appeal of being an architect is the capacity to assert your will on the form of the world, so as to condition the terms of life lived for the unwitting beneficiaries of your genius.

I wonder what made you so bitter and angry. If you had been able to stomach all the nonsense maybe you would have been among the great designers, but that wasn’t to be.

You were raised by a single mother - and made it through all of that craziness into a school of architecture, and through the craziness of the school, and eventually into your own practice, doing thoughtful things. I’m proud of the society that made that possible and proud to know you.

You were too young to know that what you were trying to do was impossible - and then you got it done.

I am continually amazed by the nonsense that comes out of your mouth. The endless repetition of conventional thoughts . The solemn pronouncements about the vocation of architecture. It’s sad; a career of wasted time and ruined students.

Your spouse was an alcoholic, who never understood the significance of your work, and somehow you continued through that life in all its rage and chaos to make truly great buildings and great books. And when she died you were disconsolate.

You don’t understand the magnitude of your profound ignorance of architecture.

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I can’t figure out why your work never got more attention.

It’s not so surprising that your practice is based on falsitiesmany are. What is surprising is that clients still haven’t realized this - or maybe they do, and they don’t care.

You told a lighting agent that you expected free fixtures for your house, and that if the supplier refused, their product would never be specified again.

I admire your intelligence and kindness and wisdom.

You made something that pleases me every single time I see it. You’ll never know me and I’ll never know who you were, but I am sending a thank you out to the universe.

You made something that offends me. It is the personification, in built form, of greed, ignorance and ineptitude.

Most of what you did was a desperate attempt to be noticed.

I wonder if those expensive cars and piles of fine art were your reward to yourself because the act of practicing architecture was not enough of a reward.

When you speak, I realize how much more I have to learn about architecture.

In some weird way, you had no idea why clients thought certain things were important, you only knew that to be successful you had to structure your practice and your being as an architect to comply with these wants.

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I wish I knew the things that you know about architecture that enables these amazing buildings. It’s all somehow beyond my comprehension.

You didn’t want to be an architect because you were interested in architecture, but rather, because you were interested in control. The guy at the top of the pile who decided.

You thought of yourself as ‘important’, and along with this notion came an ego, ill proportioned and comical in its size.

You were an architectural hero; throwing everything you had into the project; putting your practice in financial harm’s way; and all for people who would never understand what you did for them.

I wonder if you feel badly about what you did. Or maybe not.

Why did you let your situation in architecture torment you? There was no practical way it could be changed.

Your ambition frightens me. The only thing that’s stopping you from harming me in pursuit of your ambition is your fear of getting caught.

You’re a nationally recognized architect who has made amazing buildings, but for the millionaires and billionaires that hire you, you’re just the help that they are entitled to abuse.

I understand now that you did the very best you could.

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The arrogance of the plan

Le Corbusier famously said, ‘the plan is the generator’. And I still think in some way this is true. The plan is still, for me at least, the most important section of a building, because the plan largely establishes our capacity to move through space.

Plans and maps have always held a fascination for me, firstly because maps and well-considered plans are almost always things of beauty. Secondly, the map and the plan always allude to the potential of a place, the ‘what will it be like when I get there?’

If we think of a plan as a form of mapping, it is a prospective mapping of a place to be, which aspires to become a place that is, which then assumes the status of all the other things subjected to the regime of plans.

A tendency of mind infecting architects, and others, is to conceive of the plan as synonymous with the design of a building, as if the plan tells you everything important about the design. (I realize in many cases the plan does describe what you need to know to understand a design. For example, floor plans for rental apartments, or the commercial market where space is leased on a dollar per square foot basis.)

There are many other examples where the plan only reveals a fragment of a design and doesn’t tell you what is important about a building. Examples would include the profoundly four-dimensional work of Wright, or the elaboration of interiors that you see in the traditional architecture of palaces and churches.

A plan is only fragmentary evidence. It never reveals the movement and actions that will take place in the space it delineates, just the potential for these actions. It never reveals all of the stuff that occupies a space that is consequent to its character, say the selection of a carpet or a paint colour, or the multitude of objects that are necessary to make a space inhabitable; furniture, lamps, bedding, cutlery, appliances etc.; none of which are subject to the plan.

In the world, only a minuscule portion has been, or can be mapped or captured in a plan. At any moment the earth is covered in clouds, and sounds, and colours and flowers and other things that will never and can never be mapped or captured in a plan. Yet we continue to have faith in the significance of the plan that asserts, arrogantly, that it is the truth of things.

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The client decides

“Never talk to a client about architecture. Talk to him about his children. That is simply good politics. He will not understand what you have to say about architecture most of the time.” Mies van der Rohe

Notwithstanding the quotation above, never forget that when you see some amazing project there was an amazing client behind it.

But also, know that every building comes to be because a client decided they wanted a building. Every building is commissioned by a client. No client, no building. We do what is asked of us by the client and in return we are paid.

A building doesn’t happen unless a client wants it to happen; compared to art produced to satisfy the desire of the artist. I can’t suddenly decide one day, ‘I know! I’m going to make a skyscraper!’ A client can.

Amongst the many voids in our thinking and knowledge about architecture, the place of the client seems a significant one. Clients make buildings happen, yet we often treat clients as if they are inconsequential to architecture.

A fundamental of every building is that the client sponsors and endorses the design. Architects advise. Clients decide. We architects serve their wants, failure to do so means you’re fired.

I have spent most of my life thinking and deciding about architecture , b ut the client’s judgement is more consequential

than mine, because the client has the ultimate power over the project.

The client decides what the building is going to be for, where the building will be, how much it will cost, when it will be realized, who will design it (hopefully me!) and who will build it. What remains for the architect is to render a solution that organizes materials and systems in some manner that complies with these strictures. This isn’t to say that architects don’t add value. The organizing of a design is not a trivial or simple task. But let’s understand our position in the scheme of things

I sometimes feel that what we refer to as ‘architecture’ is all of the extra ‘sauce’ we pour into the project when the client:

• has decided it’s not worth arguing about anymore,

• doesn’t care about it,

• doesn’t understand it enough to debate us, or

• wants (capital A) Architecture.

In many cases (most obviously office buildings) once client determined conditions are satisfied, our work is a matter of decorating something that has already been fundamentally pre-determined. (A friend of mine calls it gift wrapping.)

One of the characteristics of any project is the tension in the relationship between the client and the architect. If the architect attempts to diffuse this tension by simply acquiescing to whatever notion pops into the clients’ head, they are failing their duty to the client. Both client and architect should realize tension can improve projects - like the grit that makes the pearl.

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We should embrace the tension - even if it irritates the hell out of the client.

One advantage to being ‘a famous architect’ is that the client tends (to some degree, never 100%) to be deferential to the architect. This means that the tension slackens, and this can be really, really bad for the building! Without the architect being challenged by the client, designs can lose sight of their reason for being. (I am thinking here of the projects that need to be renovated shortly after the fact of construction to correct designs that were thrilling to the architect, but deficient in some way that made them unusable. Example: the Vitra fire station by Zaha Hadid was abandoned as a fire station and turned into an exhibition/event space.)

When you are not ‘a famous architect’ then you must be very persuasive to get the client to agree to do what you think is right, failing this you are forced to eventually capitulate in order to - somehow - get through the job without losing your shirt.

And remember! Clients often have good ideas! We architects should appreciate that design intelligence is not a one-way street. I have had the privilege of many great clients; patrons, supporters, partners, colleagues, challengers, collaborators, and sometimes when the job is done, friends. These clients make you realize that being a good client is actually a skill that can add value to a project.

We, sometimes, have to deal with ‘bad clients’ who issue random non-sequiturs, ill-informed opinions, arbitrary restrictions, nonsensical demands, and more. When this happens, we have to try to somehow weave a path forward in a situation where

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the client is, apparently, trying to shoot themselves in the footover and over. This is why a ‘good client’ is a blessing and someone you want to hang onto for dear life!

Clients can also make architects crazy. (“Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without ‘em.”) No matter the capacity to judge well, the client is the one who decides about architecture. The client decides, but, sometimes the client:

• doesn’t understand the subject they are deciding about, or

• the client is poorly informed, or

• doesn’t trust the architect, or

• believes they know better, or

• wants to do the design themselves, or

• thinks that architects are guarantors of perfection, or

• thinks that our job is to do whatever they want (because they are after all ‘the client’), or

• resents that the law makes them hire us, or

• resents that they have to pay us, or

• is intellectually incapable of making decisions, or

• is afraid to decide, or

• creates impediments that don’t serve the project, or

• is motivated by one or more of the seven deadly sins.

For these clients, we get the job done as best we can, in spite of the client.

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The Way Things Are The coercive

The coercive diagram

diagram

Diagrams seem to be a feature of modernism, I am thinking, for example, of the various arrows and words that Le Corbusier populated chalk boards with, example below.

The way we use diagrams today is a problem. Here’s why:

Diagrams can’t actually explain architecture. It is common , amongst some architects, notably BIG, and people that want to be like BIG, to use diagrams to ‘explain’ projects. I put the word ‘explain’ in quotation marks because the stated purpose of the diagram - to explain - is not the actual purpose - which is to obtain consent, by any means necessary. This is different than the objective of the modernist diagram, which is focused on explanation as a means of education

Diagrams are not equivalent to buildings. The clarity visible in the diagram is a powerful persuasive device, but the result of a building’s identical conformance with the diagram leads to a diagrammatic building ( enabled by the ability of those detailing the building to make it look like the mandate of the diagram). And so, the built work contains only as much ‘information’ as the diagram can contain. Considerations that cannot be captured in the diagram, such as the resolution of the intersections of materials, or the haptic dimensions of architecture are simply not attended to. A minimalism ensues because the diagram doesn’t provide enough ‘information’ to elaborate the design further.

The diagram is a form of coercion. Here’s how it’s done. You start with a cube, matching the volume of the required accommodation, you then stretch it/twist it/slice it and repeat as needed to create a little narrative about how the design got to be the way it is, and then you illustrate the narrative with simplified images of the building mass, numbered in order. The purpose of this ‘explanation’ of the design is to give the client a means to understand the design. Once the client has ‘learned’ how to ‘understand’ the design in the manner determined by the architect, the client is like a lobster in a trap. Resistance is futile - the building must be the way it is because the logic of the exposition is apparently irrefutable. This form of coercion serves the purpose of the architect, which is to shut down the possibility of arguments about other ways of organizing the design. (All of this not as nefarious as I may be implying, persuasion is a fundamental prerequisite for any project to become real.)

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The diagram is a false narrative. Diagrams are always constructed after the fact of the design process and have nothing to do with how the design actually evolved, even though the tidy presentation of Step 1, Step 2, Step 3… suggests otherwise. In reality, the design process is full of false starts, dead ends, variations, explorations, interior monologues, feelings, guesses, mistakes, discoveries; all in a muddled mess that progresses in a convoluted path towards resolution. All of this would be almost impossible to describe and would probably frighten lay clients that expect that their architects know what they are doing!

And in the midst of the confusion of the design process , it is sometimes helpful to reduce the design back to a diagram; so that you can see what is actually relevant, or what is just noise, or what is the product of a restless mind. So diagrams aren’t all bad!

The concept

When I was in school faculty often demanded we have a concept for our design. ‘What’s your concept?’ would be a question that was asked. The stronger the concept (i.e. the more directive it was) the better.

So - called ‘concepts’ in architecture are imaginary structures that are used to justify and guide decision making. The concept being the engine that generates the answer to any question you might have about the way the building is supposed to be. A concept is the thing you tell a client to facilitate an understanding that will garner endorsement from those that will decide our design fate.

The problem with concepts is that they are a very limited way to engage with buildings.

Concepts are a substitute for dealing with the actual. Concepts can’t tell you everything you need to know about your design. And concepts reside entirely in the realm of words and diagrams. And sometimes the ambiguous, the inconsistent, the things that are resistant to conceptualization, that can’t be captured in words or diagrams, need to be embraced to act appropriately.

Concepts are often the product of apophenia - which is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas). This tendency is often a trait of architects grasping for a handhold at the outset of a design. This occurs with an (imaginary) conceptual

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‘insight’ that establishes a basis for design development – or when architects post-rationalize where they have arrived at in the design process with a tidy ‘concept’ for the approbation of the client.

Paradoxically the thing that organizes a design – the concept - is only tangentially connected to the reality of the design process or the actual. A design concept is a framework constructed to organize thoughts. But thoughts are just thoughts and not actual.

The conscious observer

Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. Walter Benjamin ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’.

We are rarely conscious of architecture. We mostly exist in a state of un-seeing regarding architecture.

The way we consider buildings, when we take the time to do so, is fundamentally different from the unconscious looking-without - seeing that usually characterizes our engagement with buildings. I’m talking about the difference between statically contemplating a building (as you might consider a painting in a gallery) and simply going about your business in or around a building .

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Architecture is different from other arts (is it an art?) in that it is always around - and so everyone’s brains soon learn not to see this background to life at all - except in the ways practically necessary – like perceiving a space well enough to walk through the door rather than into the wall. Interior designers call it being ‘house blind’. This condition of not-seeing is our normal way of being in the world.

Perhaps the point of things like cathedrals and museums, in the way they demand the appreciation of the observer, is that they shake us out of this condition of not-seeing. But even then, you can only be awed for so long.

This state of non-seeing is actually the way most of us - including architects - actually and normally engage with architecture, in an unconscious manner, rather than the appreciative or judgmental scrutinization engaged by those that are interested in architecture. My worry is that the way we consider architecture when we think or write about architecture (almost entirely through an optical lens) is poorly aligned with the way we actually perceive and engage with it.

I wonder if knowing all of the above might change the way we make and receive architecture. And if it does – how?

The core

Broadly, the core of architecture, as a discipline today, is in the delineation of the arrangement of plans and spaces and the materials that describe them; what we call ‘architectural design’.

There are many parallel disciplines like interior design and landscape architecture and planning that also occupy themselves with similar concerns, but to date at least, ‘design’ is still the part of the discipline of architecture that has not yet been taken over by experts in detailing, building codes, acoustics, lighting, etc.

The other key attribute of the discipline of architecture is the capacity to assimilate and integrate the myriads of other dimensions of buildings necessary for them to work. For example, structure, ventilation, power, lighting, etc. The power of the architect is the ability to be the great generalist who understands all the dimensions of a building and how to integrate them. We can trace out a path through a web of relationships, to describe what I am talking about.

An architect understands how area affects furniture, how furniture affects acoustics, how acoustics affects comfort, how comfort affects lease-ability, how lease-ability affects approvals, how approvals affect schedule, how schedule affects material selection, how material selection affects aesthetics, how aesthetics affects cultural value, how cultural value affects quality of life, how quality of life is associated with a place… etc.

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All of this ‘core’ skill currently resides in the brains of people, but it’s very easy to imagine a facsimile of being largely transposed to Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI – you read it here first). Architecture and the engineering disciplines would be particularly susceptible, as most of the work we do is a matter of applying precedent knowledge. I fully expect clients, empowered by ADI, will soon have software prepare designs to their liking using inputs and criteria ( existing site characteristics, style, program, code, energy performance, LEED accreditation, etc.). And I see no reason in principle why software would not be able to prepare contract documents. Nor why documentation could not be the basis for automated building production. There is an enormous quantity of source data that could be put to the use of ADI; plans, typical details, the building code, stylistic parameters and the like. All completely independent of the licensed profession, the current formulation of which will wither.

In this way, most of what we used to do by virtue of experience and know-how will be ‘outsourced’ to software. A time will come when ‘wet - brain’ design will seem as old fashioned as drawing with pencils and vellum; a kind of quaint craft based practice with some small part of market share or a relic of how we used to do things.

It is also plausible that ADI will generate kinds of architecture that we have not conceived of yet – in the same way that the software taught to play GO developed unprecedented strategies that defeated its human opponent.

But software has no wants of its own. It is without initiative or agency. It ‘plays back’ what we tell it to do. Which suggests there will be a special and continuing necessity for those that set the parameters for design using ADI – and those people might still be called architects – or not…

But then, we are human, and creative thinking is fun to do, and part of being human, so we might continue to do it even when it’s ‘easier’ to let the software generate solutions. (In the same way I might choose to make a loaf of bread even if it’s much easier to simply buy it.) And on occasion, a situation may demand solutions for which there are no precedents that can be scraped from the internet. ADI by its nature is profoundly derivative, unless evolutionary randomness becomes part of its parameters .

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The disgruntled architect

To cultivate real self-control, a real patience with the world, and a philosophical acceptance of things as they are, rather than striving to make things as I would have them be - surely different writing would come out of that than this turbulence and confusion. Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti

When we architects happen to meet - maybe friends from s chool or someone you’ve met in practice - and we start talking, w e almost never talk about design or architecture. I wonder why?

Maybe the mechanics of the profession is all we have in common - like the weather.

Maybe it’s because most architects don’t think much about design, or when you get to a certain age the mechanics of the profession become absorbing.

Maybe it’s because design is something too personal or too important to talk about during the intermissions of an annual conference.

Rather, when we talk, all we do is complain about the mechanics of the profession; low fees, unreasonable contracts, bad clients, legalities and lawyers, local politics, the stupid actions of our peers, the deleterious behavior of staff or authorities or licensing bodies; and the like.

We are a disgruntled lot.

But this dissatisfaction seems to be the one thing that we have in common, and maybe even part of the history of architecture. Le Corbusier was dissatisfied with the way architecture was conceived and sought to change it. As an old man he reportedly thought his life’s work had been a failure - which I suppose it was - compared to his ambition to alter the entirety of the circumstances of human existence on earth.

Some of this disgruntlement is built into the situation of the profession, where our job is to imagine a wonderful world that might come to be - only to see it compromised by things that we cannot control. (This being said, I’m also always worried by architects that are satisfied with their lot or completely compliant with the wants of clients, as if giving up striving (for something - what is it?) is the same as not caring.

This psychological condition may be tied up with the outlook of a previous generation bent on promulgating the truths of modernism, thereby making the world better. They saw every project as an opportunity to educate people to the power and value of architecture - with some successes and notable failures – with the struggle itself validation of the worth of architecture.

It would be a lot easier to be an architect if I had no particular want for things to be one way or another; for things to be done ‘right’, as opposed to the way they inevitably turn out, sort of okay, but compromised in some fashion. Our collective misery is a product of the inevitable confrontation between the project as we imagine it in an idealized form, and the actuality of materials that are stained, or made good with caulking, or entrances defaced by garbage cans and saltboxes. The gap between the

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ideal and the real that always feels like failure. I realize how silly this mental trap may seem.

I remember completing a project - the design praised by a number of the people I worked with as something special. All I could see were the dozens of unresolved conditions and poorly executed construction. Of course, the imagined project was somehow ‘perfect’ and the actual was not ‘perfect’ - all ‘problems’ invisible to most. I failed in my attempt to achieve a perfection that was simply not possible, or maybe even desirable.

All of this is exacerbated by the photography of buildings, in which architects are continually attempting to emulate in built form something that can only be realized in photography.

Pictures can be perfect, and life isn’t.

The end of ‘isms’

The 20th century was a time of ‘isms’; functionalism, futurism, neoplasticism, neoclassicism, expressionism, abstract expressionism, modernism, post modernism, etc. We don’t live in such times, and attempting to group architects this way, today, might be possible, but almost of no use to understand the motivations of the players on the field.

The shift from ‘isms’ to now (however we might describe it) is emblematic of a collective change in outlook. For example, at this moment, there really isn’t any way to say one building design is better than another, assuming they tick off practicality, sustainability, aesthetic investment, some degree of ethical thinking, and the like. They are simply different - and difference is probably their most important attribute.

It might be possible to write a manifesto or develop an intellectual framework to attempt to guide right action, but again, this would be a relic of a way of thinking. And in any case, today, no one is actually interested in listening to what others say - we’re just competing with each other at increasing volumes. It is impossible to write something that is going to be assimilated by others in a manner that effects change.

House design by the 20th century architect is often best understood as a model for others to emulate; the embodiment of a compelling design logic that has general validity, proven by the example of the building itself. This compared to today where there is little sense that individual architects are part of a collec-

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tive creative/architectural program that has ambitions that extend beyond the demands of an individual project or an individual architect.

There are certainly points of collective consensus or orthodoxy, such as those around sustainable design and accessibility, and the like. However, these describe design requirements rather than a design purpose.

(There are also other orthodoxies, maybe ideologies, that are not well understood as such. The divisions of labor in the realization of a building, the ‘hidden’ architectures of the building code, the mentalities that we inhabit.)

The eternal present / Forever young

The use of modernist furnishings, the houses that copy-cat the case study houses, the love of so-called ‘mid-century’ design; there’s something odd going on here…

How is it possible that houses from the 1930’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s can seem as contemporary as anything you might see today? Or - the obverse - how is it possible that we are still making buildings that are, really, no more ‘advanced’ than projects from a hundred years ago? For example, Mies van der Rohe’s – Project for a Brick Country House.

I’ve got many questions about the meaning of these ‘copy-cat’ projects.

• Are they different from their historic models by virtue of their situation in time?

• Are they simply accomplished ‘knockoffs’?

• Are they an unintended parody of modernism?

• Are they a demonstration that modernism ultimately was, in fact, only a style?

• Are they a demonstration that the ways of life envisaged by modernism finally found a wide audience?

• Are they a marker of good taste?

• Did modern architecture actually and finally arrive at an end point?

There are architects who are making houses today that would have been difficult for modern architects to conceive of. I am

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thinking of people like Valerio Olgiati. But more commonly we see luxury homes that employ various tropes of modernism, namely:

• The large expanses of glass.

• The large property.

• The finely (over?) wrought detailing.

• The knowing choices of furniture and art.

• The beautiful cabinet work.

• The expensive materials.

Modernism has become a style that everyone ‘knows’ how to render.

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The future of architecture

I know speculating about the future is a fool’s game. But I’ll do it anyway.

I occasionally get a hint of the perfume of a kind of architecture that doesn’t exist yet. An architecture as unknowable to us as the desert is unknowable to a fish, irreconcilable with what we ‘know’ now. Like the square can’t be the circle.

It is something of another time or another place. Ineffablemore of a feeling about things than a thinking about things. The shadow of a tree on a wall. I have no idea how it will manifest, but I know this:

• I probably won’t recognize it when I see it.

• I might dislike it - or not understand it.

• It is not about profit or control. It is animated by other forces.

• It has always been here - and it is here now in some form - we just don’t recognize it.

• It is coming.

The hot house

I remember…

Starting at the school of architecture, my first year of university, a combination of excitement (because we were the chosen few amongst the thousand or so who applied to the school) and confusion because everything was new.

In the first weeks, realizing that every professor had a different idea of what architecture was - and wondering how this could possibly be. And there weren’t any textbooks that described in an organized manner the subject of our studies; ‘architecture’.

Being very green, being confused for ages about what exactly a ‘general contractor’ was.

Making naïve assertions about all sorts of things I was ignorant of.

Going drinking with my classmates at the Prescott or Grad House (now burnt down) and having long conversations about architecture. It’s amazing how much we had to say about it, considering how little we knew about it! But perhaps talking was the way we had to try to sort things out, and to learn amongst ourselves.

Looking at 5th year projects while in 1st year and being impressed, because their projects looked like real buildings, while I was still confused about realistic wall thicknesses.

It was tough in some ways, demanding course loads along with the unpredictability of success in the studio program.

A former classmate referred to the school as a ‘meatgrinder’.

Some people sort of ‘got’ what they needed to do to get their studio project accomplished with a moderate degree of success - and others struggled because they thought that great and original thinking was required, and that architecture was very hard.

In many ways we were self-taught; learning by trying things out and by copying the things we admired.

The work ethic was strong - and many felt ‘all - nighters’ were proof of commitment to the work, a feeling we reveled in. Sunrise and going for breakfast in the university cafeteria.

The school was a small, temporary and insular society. Various schoolmates collected around each other in groups of 3 or 4 or 5 that would hang out together. Hani Rashid attracted a group of other students – collectively and derisively referred to as ‘The Hani Five’ - in reference to the ‘New York Five’.

The school of architecture was a hot house. A controlled and intensive environment that we paid a fee to enter; with our designs like orchids that wouldn’t survive the climate outside in the so-called ‘real world’. But we were mostly unaware that our work inhabited an imaginary place.

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The odd thing is that today, decades later, the projects that students make are not remarkably different from the things we made. They still occupy the same imaginary place. I would have thought by now that I’d be confused or made angry or challenged by contemporary student work, but I’m not.

School was, in hindsight, primarily a long period of indoctrination into a set of values, imprinted on me like those of a duckling. But this wasn’t the case for all students, some of which had, already at this time, a sense of the school being a necessary hurdle on the way to a successful career.

Lots of my peers became the kinds of architects we aspired to be, tenured professors at ‘important’ universities, living in big, interesting cities, the kind of people that would be invited to give lectures, running our own firms, making an impact, recognized for doing ‘interesting’ work - in some cases memorialized in monographs.

We were at the moment when modernism - or at least the kind of modernism that was concerned with ‘functionalism’ and ‘honesty’ and the like - were considered tired orthodoxiesand we ‘woke up’ to history and the possibilities exposed by ‘paper architecture’. (What an amazing moment, seeing that first monograph on Libeskind. What was this stuff!? So mysterious and thrilling.)

A lot of the faculty came from England, part of the ‘60’s braindrain from that part of the world to Canada. And so, we were anglophiles, who looked to people like Jim Stirling, and the Architectural Association. And later on, Italian architecture

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became important to us - people like Rossi and the rationalists from the 1930’s. American architecture was important to us too, especially after the arrival of Dan Hoffman who brought the outlook of Cooper Union to a setting that was primed to receive him.

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We were mostly ignorant of many other architects and architectures. From South America, a few; from Africa, none; from Asia and Central Asia and South Asia, almost none; and maybe two or three from Japan. We liked the Constructivists but had no exposure to Russian architecture, and none from behind the ‘iron curtain’ in Eastern Europe.

Another characteristic of that time was that information about architecture was scarce, compared to the overload that we have to sort through today. For example, it wasn’t always easy to find out where well-known buildings were located so you could visit them. And I wondered where it would be possible to buy the furniture I saw in pictures – because there was none available locally. Our knowledge of architecture was largely received in two ways – the things faculty and visitors to the school told us –and whatever was written on paper So books and magazines and lectures were important to us in a way that they are no longer important. We only knew about Canadian architecture through the Canadian magazines, and lectures by visiting speakers. Occasional field trips to places like New York and Boston, and reports from friends who had worked in offices supplemented our knowledge. This was a time when it was possible for groupings of architects in different locales to have very different outlooks – or to operate within particular ‘schools of thought’.

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Many of the faculty were amateur academics - or more accurately the university system had not assimilated them. They would have sabbaticals that yielded almost nothing, and I don’t recall anyone publishing or leading academic conferences. At that time, amongst faculty, only Stan Loten had a PhD. Some others were masters prepared from Philadelphia or other American schools, and a few had only a bachelor’s degree and some limited work experience. Many of them were interesting people with insights that stick with me still. And in my view, a few were profoundly ignorant of the subject architecture.

The faculty were also often very concerned about being ‘right’ or the authority figure and I wonder why that was. Crits sometimes involved inquisitions regarding consistency of argument. And there were sometimes tears following harsh reviews - that in hindsight were often completely misguided.

The human presence

I saw a broom leaning against a wall and suddenly realized it was a stand-in for a person. The cylindrical bar, about shoulder height, sized so that it could be grasped by hands, and the brush anticipating its useful vocation as enabled by a person.

Every object intended for human engagement is marked by the implied presence of a person. This can be a matter (most obviously) of ergonomics. For example, the chair that is ready to receive a bum.

Another evidence of the conflation of humanity and design is the way things in furniture assume the names of anatomy; hand, seat, arm, leg, head, etc.

This can also be a matter of the things that exist with the presumption they will be perceived by a person. A traffic light, a piece of art, a tasty dish, a piece of music. These things would be meaningless without people to perceive them.

Objects of art and design are inherently connected to the human body; its dimensionality, its muscular capacities, its ability to sense things. Some kinds of creative design, say that applied to the guts of a computer or the mechanics of a pum-ping station, do not operate in the same territory. They process things. They create profit. They are not intended to engage with humanity. Perhaps this fact delineates a distinction.

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An empty room carries the ghost of persons that were there, or persons that will be there, like the crease on the cushion developed by a body. The pathos of a building or implement that is damaged beyond usefulness comes from the impos-sibility of it being blessed and actualized by the actions and life of a person.

One of the pleasures of nature (everything that would / could exist without the need or presence of humanity) is that it isn’t designed to be perceived.

But with global warming, pollutions of all types, mining, forestry, extractions, farming, genetics and other exploitive modifications of the world, the human presence asserts itself on nature in manners that are almost always with purpose and intent, and destructive.

The ideal and the actual

Every architect is animated by the possibility of the ideal . A world somehow made perfect by an intervention, a design solution, an exact geometry, and other means you might notice and name.

Of course this is the source of much unhappiness for architects, because the world is actual, not ideal. A design, no matter how well done, is really only a tiny thing in the universe of things made by people and God and can only affect life just a little; and every design has within it internal contradictions that can never be resolved - or gaps exposed only when the building is inhabited. Exacting geometries are inevitably humbled by the rough rendering of them in materials

And buildings can only be as good as the lowest priced contractor is willing to make them.

This being said, there are many architectures that don’t seem to suffer this ailment. Architectures founded on the knowledge of how things are made, an understanding of the place of architecture in society, and tolerant of the vicissitudes of the process of a building coming into being. An architecture that is accepting, but not complacent either.

Am I describing traditional building practice?

The multiplicities of architecture

One of the very most interesting things about architecture, and probably why I got into this game, is that it seems to touch almost everything - somehow or another.

It’s a big field! almost as big as the world, because it engages with almost every aspect of human life. Everything that happens inside is happening in a building (excepting places like caves, submarines, mineshafts and spaceships).

As a consequence, there are as many ways to be an architect as there are architects. The diversity of aptitudes, knowledges and skills, is enormous; ranging from those passionately interested in:

• the technical behavior of roofs,

• the history of housing in Britain in the 1950’s,

• the beautifying of interiors,

• the machinations of professional contracts,

• the programming of spaces,

• the education of architects,

• various softwares,

• the management of projects and firms, the preparation of specifications, and of course

• the traditional task of delineating the form and nature of a building,

to note a few examples of what is a much longer and continually growing list.

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This feature of the multiplicity of architecture is one of the reasons it takes a long time to get a basic proficiency in its practice. (As one architect said to me; ‘It’s an old man’s game.’)

The increasing diversity of kinds of work in architecture begs questions Is there actually a core expertise to the discipline ‘architecture’? If there is a core expertise, does this mean that some kinds of expertise are only supporting this core expertise? When we use the term ‘architecture,’ are we grouping together things that are not actually part of the same class of things? Or is everything having to do with buildings ‘architecture’?

It seems the boundaries of ‘architecture’ are very fuzzy, and the boundaries between aspects of architecture are fluid and can intersect, like the way some technical innovation enables a new way of living.

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The natural

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

Oscar Wilde

The reason I like nature is that it just is what it is. There’s no intent, no purpose, no money. It exists without being designed. It’s not architecture, but it’s what I’d like architecture to be.

Most buildings respect the natural economy of simple closed forms. Some don’t, but there are facts about architecture - that if not determining architecture - act strongly on it - and condition the character of buildings:

• Gravity is a force perpendicular to the earth,

• Some forms aggregate with spatial efficiency,

• Water will find the path of least resistance,

• There is an inside and outside (almost always, the exception being monuments),

• Scale matters.

Some contemporary architecture, of a type, challenges these facts through the application of extraordinary technical or financial means in order to countervail the natural economy of buildings. These exceptions to ‘law s of nature ’ almost invariably occur in settings where desire, decorum or economic interest mandate them and there are the means available to defy the facts of architecture. These ‘spectacular’ buildings often pander to an audience ignorant of architecture.

Many modernists (of a type) believed a legitimate architecture had to have some practical relationship to the actualities of material, economy, program, place. All of this was blown up to thrilling effect by people like Coop Himmelb( l )au and Zaha Hadid, where a building became a launching pad for an architecture that approached autonomy from the facts of material, economy, program, place.

In ‘the old days’, architects referred to ‘the nature of materials’ and Kahn famously asked ‘what does a brick want to be?’. I realize this ethic is hopelessly out of date, but still, there seems to be a truth in it, at least to me. Stuff wants to be what stuff wants to be. You can go along with it - or you can fight it. It’s cheaper and easier to go along with it. (For example - as a very general rule - materials want to come in straight lines because materials are often made by extrusions and saws and planes and rollers, and because the force of gravity makes floors want to be flat and columns vertical, and because of the natural economy of geometries able to aggregate closely – as with 2x4’s cut from a log or rooms made from rectangles.)

Today, this conversation/argument between ‘the natural’ and ‘the un-natural’ continues to play out in architecture. In the case of Libeskind’s ‘un-natural’ Royal Ontario Museum, a huge amount of the budget was spent fighting both gravity and the want of curators for spaces to display things.

Where does this want to make ‘un-natural’ architecture come from? It seems this willfulness is part and parcel of the ‘signature’ architect phenomena. If the building wasn’t ‘strange’ in some way, then the client would be disappointed because they are paying for the waste that attracts status – as in high fashion.

While I know that there is no such thing as a truly ‘natural’ architecture, these types of ‘un-natural’ architectures are decidedly and purposely that way. As if we can bend the facts of the world as much as we wish to. Or that resources can be and should be expended on such wants.

The entropy of collapsed buildings is a hint of what happens when the world we wanted returns to the world as it naturally is.

The Ottawa problem

Ottawa is a place full of beautiful moments. Most of which were conceived of more than 50 years ago. What happened in the meantime?

It’s a boring place in respect to public life - but full of interesting people who somehow aren’t squashed by it all.

I’ve never felt any particular pride about being from Ottawa, but then again, the city never aspired to elicit that feeling.

Ottawa can be a disappointing place for an architect. Over and over and every day - seeing in built form, the evidence of greed, ignorance and dull thinking. It’s tough to take!

And it isn’t that we can’t afford great things. We are actually afraid of greatness in public expenditure because it is commonly presumed that something great is evidence of a waste of money – or that greatness isn’t worth the money it costs. So, we are left with projects that congregate, more or less, around the targets of mediocrity and the marginally acceptable

The problems we have in Ottawa (admittedly not comparable to the struggles of many cities) are almost entirely related to the mental outlooks of the various segments of its inhabitants.

The mentality of Ottawa can be illustrated with some examples.

When we did the study for the first phase of the light rail system in Ottawa, the scheme proposed that the stretch from the

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Queensway to downtown would be buried. When the project was executed, the city decided to put the rail at grade to save money - permanently blighting the vicinity with an industrial installation of cables and poles and gravel and noise parallel to the main entrance to the capital – when it could have been a linear park. On the one hand, a sensible cost cutting measure, on the other, a degradation of the place we live in.

Some other examples of the mentality of Ottawa:

• A conviction that the ultimate authority for any decision is money.

• A former mayor’s vision for the city amounted to keeping the finances in order and doing the stuff mayors are supposed to do, like cutting ribbons and opening libraries .

• The common opinion that ‘business knows best’ and that anything that gets in the way of that logic is a political problem to be managed.

• The belief that quantifiable parameters (speed, schedule, money etc.) are ‘real’, and trump parameters that are difficult to quantify (justice, culture, quality etc.).

• A conviction that governments are always wasteful and stupid, and politicians are only looking out to get reelected and that the only thing you can really hope for is that they don’t raise taxes.

• And that the main purpose of government is to build more roads and facilitate private development.

• And that any restrictions on private interests are bad, even if done for the common good.

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• And that city hall is just a pain - an entity that needs to be battled with, rather than the curator and protector of our commonly held values and public lands.

• And endless complaining about the National Capital Commission, while the NCC is the entity responsible for many of the very best places in Ottawa. And that the NCC asserting its responsibility to make the capital a better place is somehow unreasonable.

• The corrosive opinion that city hall is run by developers. (True or not true is irrelevant - the fact that many reasonable people believe this is a huge problem in itself.)

• And the countervailing opinion that the city is full o f people that just want it to stay the same old boring place.

• Anyone who objects to their neighborhoods being unrecognizably altered to suit a commercial interest is a selfcentred nimby.

• The belief that land is worthless, unless you paid money for it.

• Undeveloped lands held in public trust are subject to hostile takeovers enabled by political expediency – witness the takeovers of Landsdowne Park or the landscape of the Central Experimental Farm.

• The idea that making money is doing something, but doing anything else is essentially entertainment or a private matter irrelevant to others.

• The belief that, somehow, it’s the city’s job to enable profit by making privately funded projects cheaper to build or easier to operate - even if it compromises the patrimony of citizens.

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The new official plan recognized that the legal perimeter of Ottawa in actuality encompasses three cities. The original city of Ottawa within the green belt, the suburban city outside the green belt, and the rural ‘city’ beyond. (This amalgamated city is a relic of Mike Harris, and the idea of amalgamation can be understood as a strategy of a conservative government supported by rural and suburban voters to dominate the more liberally minded urban centres, and thereby forcing cities to be compliant with the ethos of conservative values. This played out most notably by the fact that rural communities have a disproportionate voting power on council.) The urban city subsidizes the suburban and rural communities that are inherently inefficient in the cost it takes to provide services. In addition to this problematic financial imbalance, the values of each of these three communities, and their idea of ‘city’ are fundamentally different.

And so, the city lacks a common sense of purpose and identity; with important decisions pertaining to the urban centre decided by councilors whose electorate has no practical interest in the urban centre, other than keeping taxes as low as possible. One effect of this situation is that ‘intensification’ becomes the enabling justification for all sorts of horrid projects that no rural or suburban councilor would support if it was in their ward - but can be force fed to urban wards (largely in the interest of supporting developers wants ) . Th is outlook amongst suburban councilors regarding development is not surprising, as the suburban city is essentially a city built for the interests of developers.

A borough system might be an answer that at least provides some agency to the urban councilors and hopefully funding proportionate to the tax base.

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The performative

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others. Groucho Marx

Does it matter to clients if their architects actually believe the things they say? I think, on the whole not.

It is difficult to remember that once upon a time architects believed in things. I mean really, truly, actually, believed in things. They believed in ‘good design’, they believed in the sanctity of architecture.

The things we say today are largely just performances. We assume ‘positions’ and ‘values’ but these public performances are often read from the script of a marketing department.

Do clients know they are being sold the product of voice coaches and a marketing strategy? I think so, but I also think they don’t care. Like Deng Xioapeng who said, in relation to economic systems, that he didn’t care if the cat was black or white, just as long as it caught mice.

As long as the architect sort of sounds the way an architect is supposed to sound, the necessary decorum has been satisfied. Original thinking is not necessary, and in fact discouraged , because an original thought would confuse the audience and stray from what architects are supposed say and the way they are supposed to speak.

Almost every time I see a pronouncement from an architect (‘the importance of design’, ‘the future of architecture’ etc.)

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I am struck by the fact that these pronouncements are almost always a regurgitation of ideas that have been floating around for years, promulgated (towards potential clients or the public) as if they are new thoughts. And the pronouncement has the desired effect because the client/public is not savvy to the conversations within the profession, and presumes the pronouncement is actually a new thought.

In a similar vein, I am also struck by the fact that almost every report or study related to architecture or planning substitutes performative renderings of re - tread ideas in lieu of actual thinking that authentically connects with the reality of the project situation. Most such documents are simply the result of grinding out product, with enough alterations to make them seem crafted to respond to the assignment, but (to get it done cheaply) as similar to the last report as possible. These ‘deliverables’ (as they are called) are accepted by clients because they serve the intended purpose ( of receiving approval and acceptance by authorities ) in large part because they compl y with accepted ‘truths’, such as:

• ‘Density is good’

• ‘Traditional city form is best’

• ‘Boring buildings are bad’

• ‘We must be practical’

• ‘Cost is the ultimate decider’

• ‘Building massing should be articulated’

• ‘We must be sensitive to context’

• ‘Good Design matters’

• Etc.

The real-world consequences arrive when these rote ‘truths’ are applied to situations that they shouldn’t apply to. Per force the various attempts to impose traditional urban patterns on contemporary developments - when the economies that realize the contemporary city are completely mis-aligned with the traditional forms of cities.

The problem with awards

Another year, another parade of pointless beauties in a performative pageant; another boring litany of pictures and words. It all keeps going, but no one seems to realize there is no point in keeping going.

Most award-winning work is profoundly dull. The reworking of ideas that are nine decades old, the latest design craze repeated ad nauseum, the formulaic thoughts and strategies.

An alien coming to earth, if they only had access to award winning buildings as exemplars of human shelter, would conclude we mostly inhabit museums, concert halls and country houses.

Let’s acknowledge, truthfully, that for the most part, architecture awards are for staged photos of expensive buildings made for ambitious clients by architects from big cities that specialize in that sort of thing. Most architects don’t specialize in that sort of thing.

The logic of awards means that they are incapable of recognizing the fact that, for most clients and situations, buildings involve a myriad of important concerns outside of those that awards programs concern themselves with. Awards are for the bestlooking flowers, and most of us are growing the potatoes that feed people. In this way awards validate the idea that ‘good architecture’ is by definition scarce – notwithstanding the claim of awards programs that they are helping ‘good architecture’ to become ubiquitous.

Looking at past award winners, I’m struck, overall, by the sameness of the work - or at least the representation of it. The staged ‘portrait’ photographs (including the obligatory evening shot with the lights on, the pretty detail, the elevation shot, and the inevitable lobby shot) which are all very beautiful - in their way - I suppose as much as fashion photography is. But weren’t we supposed to be dealing with bigger issues? And isn’t architecture more important than all this noise?

The choice of winners often betrays a shared and implicit and lazy acceptance of flaccid ideas about what architecture is. This worries me, because they are false; and the propagation of falsehoods threaten architecture’s legitimacy as a discipline, and its ability to actually and truly deal with things as they should be dealt with. Examples of this problematic include:

• The notion that architecture is about interesting forms artfully composed,

• The same old cliches trotted out as evidence of good design,

• The fact that award winning projects are almost always implicated with wealth and the ambitions for status amongst institutions; earned through the vigorous application of talent from those that work in that ‘market’.

I’m not questioning the choices of juries. Within the accepted parameters and presumptions of what constitutes ‘good design’ I am confident they choose well. And maybe all architecture has ever been is decorating rich people’s stuff.

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I rarely feel award winning projects teach me anything. Or at least it’s almost impossible to really understand the significance of them through their representation by awards programs. Maybe there are works of staggering genius in there somewhere - who knows? For the most part I do not feel elevated or inspired by them. The choices are predictable; same old, same old. These architectures are sad, in their desperate want to be noticed and admired; as evidenced by various gyrations, extreme cantilevers, unconventional materials and details, and unconventional forms, that are as far away as they can be from shoeboxes and conventional practice, and that photograph well.

For me at least, the idea of awards is somehow demeaning to the profession. In the same way that beauty contests are demeaning to women. As if the only buildings worthy of notice are pretty somehow in some predictable way, and exhibit some ‘talents’ and proficiently parody rote attributes (for example, the virtue signaling associated with sustainable design) that prove they aren’t just pretty facades.

There is an alarming tendency in recent requests for proposals to specifically stipulate we list the number of awards we have won. It appears clients have (finally?) recognized that ‘good design’ is important (who can knock that?); but they assume that the number of pointless awards garnered is a marker of talent and capabilities, or something… Not having the capacity to judge what is good or bad in architecture, clients resort to awards as an irrefutable proxy for quality. This is a problem; and one of the reasons I’m getting so worked up!

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And - have you noticed? - a small business/industry of award programs seems to have developed to satisfy the demand of the architecture industry for awards that prove to clients who the good designers are and what good design is supposed to look like. But it’s often ‘pay to play’, with entry fees being the way the operators of these enterprises pay themselves. What nonsense.

And, actually, what are awards?

• A pat on the back from your peers to acknowledge that you have somehow passed through the gauntlet of budgets and client whims and approvals to make something good

• A cynical strategy to increase market share.

• A form of validation for those that feel the need.

• A form of publicity.

• A means to perpetuate falsehoods about architecture (but to serve whose interests?).

• A strategy to maintain the status quo of power and money .

• An example of what architects and clients should aspire to .

• A pandering to the idea of appearance as a measure of worth.

• Clues to how to win awards.

• A form of dis-information that distorts what is actually important about architecture.

• A way to hide what is actually going on with the majority of building production.

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• A way to satisfy the profession’s desire for validation.

• A way to prove to society that ‘architecture matters’.

• A way to prove to clients that you are a ‘good designer’

• An endorsement of what we already believe to be true.

I know what they are not:

• A way to improve our understanding of architecture.

• A forum to grapple with contemporary issues.

• A way to inform and enlighten the public.

To be clear, I freely acknowledge that the buildings that get awards are often truly extraordinary, in their way. Like the way ballet is extraordinary. Precise, demanding, beautiful, graceful - an amazing accomplishment. But most buildings are incapable of being like that - like most people are incapable of being ballet dancers - as it is - and as it should be. And so, there are entire classes of buildings and classes of types of valuable work in architecture that are pretty much excluded from serious consideration as part of the domain of ‘architecture’.

And, I’ll freely admit, I’m conflicted. If I got more awards, I’d probably feel different! I might have been happy to have been the architect for any one of these projects. And maybe I’m just jealous of the skill and tenacity and opportunities and recognition that others seem to have and that I don’t seem to possess. So be it. We have work to do and we’re doing it the best we can. To expect awards to validate our work seems as silly as the awards themselves.

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I am always surprised when award winning architects tell me how many awards they have won. Don’t they know they are good enough not to care?

At this moment, in the midst of various social / political / health / economic cris es, it’s hard to imagine that any of these award-winning buildings will ultimately matter much, except to the architects and their clients for a few months, and I guess that’s okay. But let’s not pretend that they are of much actual importance.

And finally, I wonder, is it even ethical to participate in award programs that contribute to the trivialization of the profession and the maintenance of false narratives about architecture?

We need to imagine and consider the architectures that don’t look or act like the way awards say architecture is ‘supposed’ to be.

The

The problem with Daniel

Daniel Libeskind is the strangest ‘big name’ architect around.

I remember in school seeing the first monograph, a skinny paper bound book of his student projects, which were thrilling to us.

And then some classmates went to Cranbrook and studied with him. But we were already primed by the idea of Cooper Union, an amazing mysterious place in New York City full of giants like John Hydjuk.

Libeskind then subsequently made an amazing first building in Berlin - which was followed by a series of museums and monuments - and shopping centres - and condominiums - that became to feel like self-mockery. Who knew that all that reading of Heidegger was ultimately going to be in service of making banal buildings with quirky shapes?

He is not really a designer as we think of them. He compiles symbols (This = That) as if the significance of a building is what it signifies, not what it enables.

I remember seeing coverage of his apartment in New York City. The ‘design’ of the apartment was simply a random collection of modernist furniture piled into rooms.

I was trying to figure out why his buildings have such a peculiar quality. And then I realized they are almost exactly like the kind of building you see students make in second year architecture. All bombast, no subtlety, no understanding of material quality,

the desperate want to do something interesting, and oversized pride in the authorship of the building.

The AGO extension bothered me - a lot. This is because the enormous cost of the structural gyrations sucked up almost all the design budget ‘air’ and so the interiors were a mess of unresolved details - made from lots of gypsum board. And it didn’t actually do a good job of being a museum. (But then I thought… Mies’ National Gallery in Berlin is sort of the same; enormous cost and effort expended on achieving a structure that is also not especially accommodating of being a museum (at least the top half). But I like it - a lot. So, I’m conflicted in my opinion.)

But all of this bitching about Libeskind is somewhat pointless. Does anyone care about his stuff anymore?

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The problem with pictures

F or us, a building only becomes architecture after it is photographed.

I recall as a student an odd feeling. Having been educated by looking at pictures of certain famous buildings, and finally getting to see them, and then being vaguely disappointed on arrival. The buildings were, in some peculiar way, not as ‘good’ as the pictures. I had been expecting to be transported by a witnessing of staggering genius, falling to my knees in wonder! But they were in some fundamental way, just buildings. They suffered dirt and dust, pattern stains, cracks, trash cans, insolent candy wrappers, photocopied announcements taped to glass, delaminated baseboards, odd smells and echoes, and the indifference of their occupants who had long ceased to be amazed by the architecture.

This experience of mine was because almost everything we see about architecture is literally through the lens of a photographer, who selects and crops and lights the building to remove the intrusions of life.

To state what should be obvious and understood by all, pictures of buildings are not the same as buildings, but the problem is we assimilate architecture as if they are. Looking at pictures of buildings to learn about architecture is like looking at Vogue magazine to learn about women. Contemporary architectural photography is essentially a form of fashion photography, perniciously creating impossible standards - as fashion photography does.

When you are somewhere – anywhere - what you see and feel about that place is personally and absolutely unique to you. No one amongst the 8 billion people on this planet shares this position (physically, psychologically etc.). Your position and viewpoint is absolutely privileged at any moment in time.

This compares to photography, where the viewpoint is decided by a static rectangle composed by a photographer. Consequently, this form of witnessing architecture is not privileged. It is fixed and the same for every person, anywhere, anytime.

I am putting aside the question of the interpretation of pictures (and reality) - which can be singular to an individual - but is typically not - because of the orthodoxies of mentality that compress the reality of what you are witnessing into ‘ready-made’ frames of interpretation. You see what you are ‘supposed to see’ as determined by cultural indoctrinations - increasingly the domain of commercial interests.

Photos have only a weak or tangential relationship to architecture, arguably less than the plans sections and elevations that accurately describe the make-up of construction. Like Plato’s cave, photographs are shadow images that can only hint at an underlying reality. This edited and filtered sampling of the reality of a building is minuscule compared to the material reality of a building and the quantity and character of information sensed when you are in a place.

In some profound way the horizon of our understanding of architecture is set by photography because this is almost entirely the

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medium by which we receive it. Photos are surfaces that become the plane of understanding architecture. But a photograph is always firstly a photograph and just wants to be a photograph. It is largely incapable of capturing many facets of architecture as a loved experience (I wrote ‘lived’ but the autocorrect decided ‘loved’ - which might be better), nor the economic and technical and administrative realities that make a building possible to become. A consequence is that much of our architecture is a stage set that is designed to be the subject of photographylike Thomas Demand. And the attributes that make ‘interesting’ pictures ( the juxtaposition of forms and materials, the transparency of glass and the purism that omits the unwashed dinner plates, scuffs, stinks, and the normal chaos of life) become the desirable attributes of architecture.

We all know the falsity of photography, but we keep behaving, contrary to what we know to be true, that they are ‘the real thing’ rather than poor - or insidious - imitations, cropped filtered lit and posed as much as any portrait is. And note that (post 1900 or so) virtually every photograph of new architecture was commissioned by its architect and so it serves as a form of portraiture designed to flatter - rather than an attempt to document the reality of a building.

Over time, photography has elevated itself from being pictures of architecture (second place to ‘the real thing’) intending to help describe the reality of a thing - to a place where the photograph is the thingness of architecture. As if a building is the scaffolding for the true purpose of architecture, the making of seductive images.

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But ‘the problem with pictures’ is not limited to photography. Architectural culture has functioned as a place for the exchange of images since the time of Palladio - whose authority and influence as an architect largely rests on the production of images of buildings - often only loosely based on actual buildings. Le Corbusier is another example of this modality of practice.

And given that a building is always some place, and it’s not always easy to get to that place - modern (post 1700 or so) pan-national western architectural culture has depended on the representation of buildings. Engravings circulated in publications such as Vitruvius Britannicus in times past also communicated about architecture through images, but as an attempt to communicate the reality and logic of a building design, these ‘poor’ images forced you to engage with the design and extrapolate its consequences - rather than assuming the role of a consumer of images .

Photography is no longer a valid way to describe architecture because the entire medium has been compromised by its function as hagiography. There is no one able/willing to sponsor a documentary/critical approach to the photography of architecture, that critically engages with the actuality of buildings and communicates ideas. Magazines and awards programs get their pictures from the architects. Architects get their pictures from the photographers they pay to flatter their buildings.

M aybe we should declare a moratorium on photographs of buildings.

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Or we should refuse to allow our buildings to be photographed.

Or we advocate for a radically local idea of architecture that is known and understood by virtue of the actual witnessing of it without pictures, but with eyes and ears and bodies (as most outside of the practice of architecture come to know and engage with buildings).

Architecture without pictures.

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The problem with procurement

We should not be surprised that artistic excellence goes unrecognized because of public ignorance of it; but we should be extremely indignant when, as often happens, networking at social gatherings seduces men away from a disinterested evaluation [of artistic talent] in favour of baseless approbation [of worthless art]. Therefore if, as Socrates wanted, thoughts, opinions and knowledge enhanced by study were clear and transparent, neither sycophancy nor intrigue would have any effect, but commissions would automatically be assigned to those who had arrived at the summit of their professions by valid and demonstrable attention to their studies. But since these qualities are not clear and in plain view as we think they should be, and since I notice that the uneducated rather than the educated gain favour, I have decided not to compete with the pushiness of ignoramuses, but rather to demonstrate the great value of our discipline by publishing this body of instructions.

Vitruvius, On Architecture (Richard Sochfield trans)

One of my partners calls Requests For Proposals (RFPs) ‘essay writing contests’. This is exactly right.

Procurement (a word that I never actually understood until years into my career) has become one of the most important problems that architecture faces, at least for those that work for the public. This problem ‘outside’ of architecture is a problem for architecture, unlike problems ‘inside’ architecture, like how we should design buildings.

The problem with procurement is that it, unintentionally, distorts architecture in ways that are counter-productive to everyone involved, and more broadly to society. I do not believe that the

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people that are concerned with procurement understand its collateral effects.

• It has a very strong effect on the nature of the results of the work of architects (example, lowest fee = commodity grade design).

• It has created (in large firms at least) entire departments organized to play the game created by each RFP, costing the Canadian economy millions each year.

• It conditions the offerings that architects make (don’t pick the best engineer for the job, pick the one that will score well).

• It uses a methodology for decision making that no rational person would employ in their own life. (Let me put it this way… If you had to make a very, very important decision, say who to marry, would you create a scoring matrix to decide?)

• It is also horribly cost inefficient. (About five percent of our labour cost in the office is directly associated with the cost of responding to RFPs, now multiply that by 10, the number of proposals that might be submitted in regard to some appealing job. Of course, this cost is invisible to the client, who perceives all this effort as ‘free’, but the cost to the profession as a whole is approaching the fee to do the whole job! And we wonder why productivity in the construction industry is going down.)

• It favors those with the greatest powers of persuasion, not the most suitable.

• The methodology of procurement is designed to replace intelligent judgement.

• It intentionally disables the ability of those that score proposals to use their own knowledge of things; only what is written on the page, that designed to persuade, is allowed to count.

• Responders focus on what will score points with the use of stock answers to stock questions; with the stock answers re-tuned following each debriefing.

• It falsely presumes that the quality of a proposal is an accurate proxy for the suitability of the proponent.

Increasing sophistication has developed in responding to RFPs. For example, RFPs are scrutinized for key words that are repeated throughout the offering to maximize points – and Artificial Intelligence has now joined the hunt for points, with RFPs evaluated by software to maximize scoring, with the text itself written by a machine. Of course – in short order – clients will start to use software to evaluate proposals – and human consideration will be eliminated from procurement – with computers from competing firms preparing answers for computers that will score them. Robots versus robots.

The system decides who wins, not one individual, which is in some sense ‘fair’. In fact, one of the defining features of the public procurement processes we are subjected to is the concept of ‘fairness’.

At first blush ‘fairness’ seems to be an obvious good. But in reality, ‘fairness’ in procurement isn’t about doing the right thing, it’s about protecting the careers of those that procure things,

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and the reputation of politicians, by making the procurement process ‘bullet proof’ from the challenges of failed proponents who will challenge the fairness of the procurement process by latching on to some technicality of the procurement process as being ‘unfair’.

We recently lost a job because the rfp said we could only submit 9 pages in response, and we submitted a proposal that came to 11 pages, including a cover page and table of contents. We understood the requirement limiting the content of our proposal to have its commonsense meaning; that the content of the submission was limited to 9 pages. The sponsor of the procurement insisted the totality of the submission was required to be nine pages, and so the last two pages of our submission were not considered, and we lost the project. This ruling was technically ‘fair’ to other proponents who provided a 9-page submission; but it begs the question, was it fair to us that this requirement was buried in the fine print amongst dozens of pages of other technicalities? Or that the common ordinary sense meaning of the page limitation was ignored? Or more importantly, was it fair to the citizens paying for the project that this triviality was the basis for the rejection of our proposal, especially in the context of an RFP in which it was explicitly stated that the sponsor had the right to use its discretion in these matters? Excluding us was the easy way out for the procurement people.

This notion of ‘fairness’ to ‘bidders’ guides everything, as if ‘fairness’ to tax payers is not a concern. I think it might be better if we were treated less ‘fairly’, if ‘fairness’ results in this insanity.

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The psychological condition of the architect

There is a psychology that comes along with being an architect. My friend Terry van Elslander pointed this out to me.

There are some basic conditions that we inhabit:

• We want to control - but we are not in control

• We can envisage how the ideal can be achieved - but are frequently thwarted by circumstances

• We want to be famous and respected (why more so than engineers want for themselves?) but we feel unappreciated

• We see things that others don’t.

• We are narcissists; thinking that everything right and wrong about the project is because of us.

• We value things in ways that our clients and the public don’t.

• We expect our work to be creatively rewarding, even when most of our work is about the mechanics of getting the job done.

• We rarely understand the lives of most people but we design for them.

• We feel responsible for things we are not responsible for.

• We have an unhealthy identification with the projects we design.

• The buildings we create are subjected to changes that damage their quality.

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• We are forced accept things as they are, while our calling in life is to make things the way they should be.

Hence, a surprisingly common level of disgruntlement amongst people who have earned the exciting privilege of imagining the world as it might be.

Martin Tite

The purpose of contemporary buildings

The prime purpose of any building is to serve the interests of its sponsor.

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The purpose of the contemporary city

The prime purpose of the contemporary city is to enable profit or control.

The random

Randomness in architectural design is one of the most common tropes we see today. What I am describing are all the various ways we see the arbitrary applied to design – ranging from a stadium with seat colours arranged in some graphical pattern –or volumes stacked higgledy-piggledy. This is a feature of the culture of image consumption we inhabit.

What is the meaning of a gesture designed to be meaningless?

• The arbitrary and random are ways for the architect to assert their agency in a design; reduced to inconsequential pattern making which is allowed as long as it does not interfere with the logic of procurement and ordinary construction practices.

• The arbitrary and random are signs of ‘creativity’ – on the premise that regularity is ‘boring’ – and that willful gestures are part and parcel of creativity.

• The arbitrary and random are deployed when an identifiable personality for a building is needed to market it.

• The arbitrary and the random have value as evidence of ‘Architecture’; with unnecessary complexity added like a sauce to designs, when there is actually none of it in the program or the circumstances of the project.

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The school and the profession

The architect's professional knowledge is enriched by contributions from many disciplines and different fields of knowledge and all the works produced by these other arts are subject to the architect's scrutiny. This expertise derives from practice and theory. Practice consists of the ceaseless and repeated use of a skill by which any work to be produced is completed by working manually with the appropriate materials according to a predetermined design. Theory, by contrast, is the ability to elucidate and explain works created by such manual dexterity in terms of their technical accomplishment and their proportions. So architects who have struggled to achieve practical proficiency without an education have not been able to achieve recognition commensurate with their efforts: by contrast, those who have relied only on theory and book-learning were evidently chasing shadows rather than reality. But those who have mastered both, like men supplied with all the necessary weapons, have achieved recognition and fulfilled their ambitions more quickly.

Vitruvius, On Architecture (Richard Schofield trans.)

In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice they’re not. Yogi Bera

Imagine for a moment if medical students were taught surgery by people who had read lots of books about it, but had never worked in a hospital, or operated on a patient.

Between the school and the profession, we see two varieties of ignorance of the same subject - architecture.

I think it’s a fact that a knowledge of things is not the same as the knowledge of how to make these things. (This is why studios in

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art school are taught by people that have their own artistic practices, rather than art historians.) And I think it is a fact that the knowledge of how to make a building is much larger than the knowledge of how to make a schematic design for a building , as done in schools. And I think it’s a fact that without the contemplative knowledge of the sort that is produced through study and research in schools of architecture, the profession is diminished. (To be clear, I don’t see academia as an instrument for the use of architects.) And I think it’s a fact that knowledge of architecture and its situation does not create agency for the architect.

Schools and the profession currently operate within fundamentally different and separate institutional structures; with different objectives and means A more conscientious relationship between academia and the profession of architecture is important to the viability and authenticity of both. We need to contaminate each other.

A model more akin to medicine might be useful - where the training of professionals is integrated with the practice of medicine - for example teaching hospitals. In the medical setting, leaders in education also are leaders in practices of medicine. It would be great if there were such a thing as ‘teaching offices’, supported with public money - as teaching hospitals are. Or at the least it would be great if we could create situations where professional work activities occur alongside or in conjunction with research and teaching.

The profession as a collectivity of knowledge has virtually no research or study agendas to attend to, nor the mechanisms to do so. (This being said, I am aware that the very largest firms do

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do so. (This being said, I am aware that the very largest firms do engage in design research, but this is focused on achieving commercial objectives.)

One of the structural issues with schools of architecture is that they operate in university settings and success in these settings depends on research, publishing and various forms of sucking up to the right people (amongst other things like knowledge, intelligence and an aptitude for teaching). A serious career in academia depends on a PhD, which means that the owner of this status has committed 10 or more years to life in post-secondary education - with the consequence of having limited or tangential contacts with professionals and the ugly realities of practice.

And let’s be honest, a lot of those that teach are there because they sampled life in the office and found it wanting. The school becomes a refuge for the malcontent, so it’s not surprising that there is distance between academics and the profession, because the profession is what academics were trying to get away from. (As a student I thought that the school was somehow at the top of a pyramid of knowledge about architecture.)

And a lot of those that grind their way through school, want to get away from it as fast as they can – because it was a miserable experience, or because they decide they have better things to do – like making buildings, or because they have no academic inclinations, or because they are just not that smart.

T here is something very different from having the kinds of knowledge about architecture that can be gleaned from study and research; and an understanding architecture as a practice

that realizes buildings. There are fundamental competencies , and joys, and thoughts and forms of knowledge about architecture that are simply not accessible to you unless you have had the experience of actually grappling with the multitude of tasks associated with realizing either building or teaching.

Unless the school and profession are profoundly engaged, they will lose their raison d’être as institutions connected to architecture - and its capacity to reveal things that are pertinent to the world - assuming of course that the purpose of architecture is to affect the shape of the world.

Martin Tite

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The sum

The sum of all buildings imagined is greater than

The sum of all buildings delineated is greater than

The sum of all buildings built is greater than

The sum of all buildings used is greater than

The sum of all buildings photographed is greater than

The sum of all buildings published is greater than

The sum of all buildings studied Is greater than

The sum of all buildings understood.

The technocracy and architecture

The practice of architecture is governed by an increasingly large swarm of design standards, regulations, best practices, procedures, laws, by-laws, review committees, and the like, that form a technocracy, attended to by armies of experts and consultants who possess the specialist expertise to attend to its demands.

It can be argued that each new requirement instituted by the technocracy is (sometimes) an improvement on things (who is against an accessibility standard that is better than the last one?), but it comes at a price.

Cost

Within the technocracy, each administration’s first purpose is to ensure its own survival. The issues they manage are secondary to this first purpose. Increased complexity and entrenchment within the processes of making a building is a good thing for the army of specialists and administrators because it represents job security and profit. This army is expensive, and at some pointpresuming that the cost of a project matters - we need to agree that value for money is a reasonable question.

Purpose

The operations of the technocracy foster a forgetting of purpose for architects and clients alike. Addressing and surviving the technocracy becomes the focus of the project, and the primary purpose of the participants in the project, rather than the design of the building itself.

Focus

LEED has created entire departments in larger firms, and specialist sustainability firms who provide advice that is primarily focused on how to run the gauntlet of administration associated with getting a project LEED certified. And more recently, the forprofit WELL business has infiltrated practices with a checklist that promotes a culture of design focused on accumulating points. Few actually care about the actual reasons for using WELL, but they do actually care about getting certified, because certification is the goal, not making a humane environment.

Scalability

Is the complexity that the technocracy presumes actually aligned with the actual complexity of a building? Of course, those who are invested in their careers as experts and the administrators of the experts will say yes.

Many wonderful, sustainable, humane and well-made buildings have been realized without this noise, and now they get done in spite of the technocracy.

The Truth

Tom Cruise: ‘I want the truth!’

Jack Nicholson: ‘You can ’t handle the truth!’

A Few Good Men

To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said. Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti

Post-Trump it is apparent that ‘truth’ is not necessarily so easy to get a hold of.

Architects used to believe in things. They believed in ‘good design’, they believed in the sanctity of architecture. The incantations of Lou Kahn are somehow impossible now. We know too much

I gave a talk at the school and afterwards someone remarked that I had been ‘very honest’. Which seemed odd as something to remark on, until I realized that the normative condition was that the architect is ‘not honest’, or at least, that the architect will be only as frank as circumstances will permit.

Witness the hapless world-famous architect in the promotional video saying things to help sell the condominium, or the ‘community building’ that had nothing to do with a community. I know it’s bullshit, they know it’s bullshit, the client doesn’t care if it’s bullshit, I think even the public knows it’s bullshit, but bullshit seems to be needed. This performative language never touches the actual and the pertinent.

And not to say that architects always lie on purpose. I think more often they simply propagate received knowledge, that is

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plausibly or tangentially related to the conditions of the project in some way.

So, we speak in a language that is maybe sometimes parallel to the truth, and sometimes perpendicular to it. Parallel to the truth because it’s somehow impossible to say in words what can only be said in a building. Perpendicular when it is at odds with reality.

One of the challenges of communicating the truths about the present reality of architecture is that those that are embedded in ‘the system’, who witness for themselves the vagaries of practice and understand them (in some ways), are the ones least able to speak frankly about them - because this means that they risk alienating colleagues, clients, and authorities of various types.

We need to speak truth; bravely, critically, honestly and with kindness.

The un-buildable

A few years ago, I saw a student project for an inhabited bridge. And another project for the renovation of a big box mall to make it suitable for intensification.

What struck me was that these good ideas were eminently buildable, and they were interesting things to contemplate, but they could not be built because they wouldn’t survive the gauntlet of the administration of architecture across all sorts of legal and economic silos.

And then the realization that the un-buildable has little to do with what is technically possible, because the impediment to realizing these kinds of projects (that remain speculative) is the fact that built form is restricted and enmeshed in legal and contractual and economic boundaries, that together constitute a metaarchitecture within which almost all buildings are p roduced. Her are some examples of buildings that are unbuildable.

Example 1 - A project that is indeterminate in function, and whose first purpose is unknown, is impossible to do, because no one would sponsor it, and the building code demands we know what the building is to be used for, and other reasons. (Recognizing that almost any kind of building can be revised to serve almost any use and many buildings come to serve new uses in time.)

Example 2 - A building whose design evolves as it is being made is almost impossible as a plan of attack for a project (but it does happen when clients change their minds!).

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Example 3 - A building construction process (for anything larger than a house) that requires the manual labour of the architect is impossible because this trespass would interfere with any number of constraints, including union rights, liabilities, pricing, responsibility for construction quality, etc.

The why and the what

We architects almost never concern ourselves with the why and the what, to ask ourselves, together, “What should our buildings be? And why should they be like that?”

Rather, our work in the office, day to day, is almost entirely concerned with the mechanics of projects; the how, the when, the contract, the meeting, the minutes, the cost, the schedule; person-years of effort associated with procedural matters, on even a smallish job. These are the necessities of realizing a project, but not the purpose of a project.

Often, necessities become confused with purpose, as if the purpose of doing a project is to stay on budget. And virtually all of the energy of a project goes into dealing with the necessary. Like a book publisher being most concerned about the cost of paper - rather than the words of authors.

Part of this is because most of the people we encounter in the process of realizing a building, project managers for example, want to achieve their own limited objectives, namely keeping the project on time and on budget, because that is their responsibility, and by nature, they are usually most comfortable with the ‘facts’, of compliance with requirements.

But, again, compliance with requirements is a necessary feature of a project, not its purpose. The individuals driving projects have purpose/needs that are distinct from those of the project itself and the former dominates the latter because no one, except sometimes an architect, is the advocate for achieving the

sibility, and by nature, they are usually most comfortable with the ‘facts’, of compliance with requirements.

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The Way Things Are purpose of the project, which, in my view, can be much more than achieving practical ends in an acceptable manner.

‘This land is your land, this land is my land’

Woody Guthrie

Over and over again in Ottawa, I see private businesses take over public land for their own purposes. And instead of the government of the City fighting this, the City often enables corporate squatters . Once that land is gone, it’s gone forever, silence is acceptance.

Here are some examples:

• Frieman Street taken over by a shopping centre.

• The Rideau Street mall enclosure, built to placate business owners.

• The claiming of Dalhousie Street by the Andaz Hotel.

• The way the World Exchange Plaza took over public streets for parking garage ramps.

• The handover of Landsdowne Park to private interests (a hostile takeover enabled by the City).

• The claiming of Colonel By Drive by the Westin Hotel. (I used to complain to Ottawa traffic control about the tour buses parked on Colonel By, as the area was marked no stopping. And the tour buses had the effect of blocking busy morning traffic (for 15 or 20 minutes at times), and it all seemed a bit dangerous because it forced bikes and cars to merge into a single lane of cars. This all notwithstanding the fact that the hotel already had a bus loading zone on its own property - used by the hotel to park cars in lieu of its designed purpose. I complained

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to the hotel to no avail and continued to get traffic cops to give the buses tickets. But the problem was eventually solved by the City. Instead of telling the hotel to use their own bus parking area on their own property, the city changed the no stopping sign to one allowing bus parking!)

There are probably other examples.

We don’t seem to have a sense of ownership of our own city. It is as if, because everyone (or ‘the government’) owns public lands, no one does, and lacking this sense of ownership we passively tolerate incursions, because no direct harm is done to any one individual.

Almost no one in Ottawa actually cares much about this problem - which is a symptom of a lack of identification with the city as the land owned in common by each and every citizen. The city as the thing that we own and share together. If citizens identified with public space in a way that aligned with the fact that it actually belongs to them - they would be as upset by corporate squatters as if their neighbour built a fence 6 inches onto their property.

Time passing

The passage of time Is flicking dimly up on the screen I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between Golden Hours – Eno

It’s funny how no one really, truly, actually, knows anything about architecture. Of course, we make things, and they sort of do the things we want them to do - so we sort of know something - but to me - if I’m honest, design is a kind of guess, or a wandering in a dimly understood realm, or an unconscious cribbing from another architect.

On this basis, I’ve got little confidence in my ability to say anything to others that is actual.

Maybe I could say some things that will seem true to you in a few years, or not… or will seem true to you forever, but no one knows what part of what I say will be that ‘true’ part. What is written here will seem in time - if I dare a prediction - wrongheaded, or beside the point, or not relevant, or just old and boring, or evidence of the way people used to think.

And, in my experience, the things we architects say to each other today, that seem so important to us, in due course, will seem somehow unimportant. And the things we said in the past about architecture emerged from a moment when it was possible to have certain outlooks and thoughts, that are somehow impossible to have at this moment. (For example, the way it was

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self-evident at one time that architecture was the fulcrum that would change the world - and the new was a way to clear out the oppressive clutter and stifling decorum of the Victorian / Edwardian ages that had defined the character of life.)

Ideas that are unsayable and unknowable to me, here today, will soon enough be the currency of thought. I will be as unable to understand you as you will be unable to understand me.

I feel like becoming an architect was like getting on a train. You get on the architecture train, and encounter a bunch of people, some of them have been on the train for years, some just got on at the last stop; and they are all talking to each other about things that are confusing at first because you’re entering a conversation that started a long time ago, the subject of which you can only slowly glean after a few years on the train. And all the while the landscape keeps changing and we encounter things never seen before and the old riders remember and know of the places we had been, while the new riders are able to see new things, never seen before.

So, we are all on this train together, talking away, travelling together towards the future, and in time, each of us gets off.

Tropes in architecture

Thanks to the endless parade of renderings and photos of buildings that we are subjected to, it’s easy to perceive from this large sample a pattern of design strategies that constitute tropes within architectural culture.

It’s strange - these virus-like infections that contaminate our thinking on architecture - or makes them possible. The ‘combover’, the stacked blocks, the rotated/sliced/ twisted object, the balconies that create shapely condos, any number of fetishized homages to Neutra and Scarpa, perforated screens, the glowing facade, randomized patterns and a literature of words and phrases that emerge and fade, ‘deconstruction’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-modern’, ‘timeless’, etc., etc., etc.

To be clear and in the interest of full disclosure, I am as ‘guilty’ of using these tropes as anyone, enmeshed as I am within a culture that both makes it possible to act in architecture and blinds one to alternatives.

It’s maybe useful to think about why this is happening by looking at the possible functions the trope serves.

1. A ‘readymade’ way to organize a design (that sits in the architects’ ‘toolbox’ to be employed when suitable, or when you run out of time, or when you have run out of ideas),

2. A way of demonstrating familiarity with current trends,

3. A way of being cool (this is especially important for younger architects)

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4. A form of imitation/flattery,

5. A homage to a system of design or an exploration of it.

So, the trope has utility, and maybe it is almost impossible to make architecture without engaging with tropes. And perhaps what we think of as ‘important’ architecture is really the architecture that has been most successful in becoming a trope.

What is worrying about the trope is while it makes it possible to start thinking about a design, the trope can divert design from authentically engaging with its situation.

Tropes can also be a strange form of self-parody, where the original and authentic design gesture, created for a project, is ‘re - deployed’ in situations where it doesn’t actually make sense – functioning in culture as a sign of design currency –or a decorative bobble that satisfies the demand of cities for built trophies.

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Martin Tite

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

We are hostages

Collectively, a rchitects are held hostage by software and the popularization of the notion that computers have made improvements to the results of design disciplines and the construction industry.

Let’s acknowledge some facts.

• To prepare a set of drawings and specifications today, it takes as much time as it did in the 1980’s.

• The documentation of design has become bloated, because the capacity of Revit to detail every single fastener has evolved into an obligation for designers to do so.

• Construction takes at least as long, and generally longer, than it used to.

• We are less efficient than we used to be.

Wasn’t Building Information Modelling supposed to have some sort of effect on time efficiency, cost efficiency and quality?

And computer hardware and software is expensive. For what an office of 25 persons spends on hardware and software and training and the managing of the system, and factoring the down times the system randomly imposes, that office could easily hire another two people. Probably about the same productivity - if not more - at the same cost.

And the drawings we make with Revit are worse than the ones we made with CADD. And the ones made with CADD were worse than the ones done by hand.

I have witnessed the end of the making of beautiful and intelligent drawings, crafted with pride and the love of the well-made thing. The canceling of drawing as a form of knowledge of architecture was the price paid for fictitious promises. The intelligence that used to be embodied in the drawing, and the crafting of it as an imagining of construction has been lost. Design intelligence now resides in a server - somewhere - rather than in the mind of an architect.

We have learned it is possible to make designs with computers, like it’s possible to teach a bear how to dance, but why would you want to? And even if it was faster, who said that a few weeks matter in the life of a building that should last many decades? It is as if the mechanics and scheduling of design production is a more important issue than design itself.

We want to act faster, but we need to think slower.

And I, increasingly, have the uncomfortable feeling that we work for the software industry - rather than the reverse. The programs we use have been created by companies that are much larger than most architecture firms, and these companies have the power to set the parameters and conditions for the practice of architecture, in the manner that suits their purpose, which is to make money.

The presupposition that new kinds of architecture are enabled by software is false. I’ll table four rebuttals; amongst many others I could cite:

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• Borrimini’s San Carlo Quattro Fontaine,

• almost anything by Gaudi,

• Saarinen’s TWA terminal,

• Scharoun’s concert hall in Berlin.

All of these buildings embody levels of formal complexity, design resolution, creative imagination and depth of thinking that we seem incapable of. And think about the massive infrastructures at regional and national scales that were all somehow designed, documented and managed up to the 1990’s with paper and pencils and ink and slide rules.

Software doesn’t unlock imagination - it limits it. Our collective indifference to the fact that the tools we use to design engender the kind of buildings we make, threatens the meaning and value of architecture; with the agency of design located in software rather than the minds of architects.

In fact, what is enabled by software, is a standardization of process, representation and, at a fundamental level, design. Design that is readily assimilated within a logic of economics and control and the wider ecology of design professionals.

Only a naive person (or the various resellers) would deny that the buildings we make take on the character of the computers we use to design them. The truth of this can be witnessed with the curious sensation of buildings that look like the software used to develop them; CADD, Sketch-Up, Rhino or Revit; I can tell which one was used when I look at a building. The various actions of cutting, stretching, copying, pasting; the application of commands and parameters; all visible in built form.

If, ‘the medium is the message’, then, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, ‘the program is the design’. What’s the message of computers?

• Complex geometries are good (because software invites them) .

• T here is value in the ability (and cost) to continuously model a project from design conception to maintenance and operation.

• The continuous planned obsolescence of software is normal and acceptable (failure to comply with a demand to upgrade rendering continuing practice impossible).

• D esign is a matter of figuring out how to document construction.

• It is important to assert a single point of control (the BIM model) through the entire life of the project.

• Design and human purpose are merely inputs.

• Design is essentially information management.

• The virtual and the actual can be and should be identical.

All of this profoundly different from conceiving of architecture as a means to enable human being in the world.

When good architects do bad things

I’m really not sure what to make of that building. They are an award-winning firm, but they’ve dumped a truly awful piece of garbage on our city. The detailing is unbelievably bad - but these folks - I know - are completely capable of making the perfectly rendered museums, concert halls and private homes that are the fodder of awards and magazines.

How did this happen? The culprit could be a lousy budget or an obstreperous client or the comfort of knowing that none of your peers in Toronto will ever see the project. The awfulness might be blamed on circumstances out of the control of the architect, but fundamentals of the design are remarkably ham - fisted, awkward massing choices for example. Did the client insist on these stupidities?

All to say, it proves that ‘good’ architects are not impervious to doing bad things.

And then there are what a well - known architect calls ‘Dog Projects’. This is the stuff that architects do to make money, that will never be publicized and is not invested with the want to make ‘good architecture’ - because the client actually doesn’t want ‘good architecture’.

And maybe, unseemlier , are the projects that contradict the public ‘personas’ of firms. I am thinking of the ‘urbanists’ who designed the project that destroyed a neighbourhood.

Why are cities the way they are?

‘Urban design’ is a discipline without an actual subject to act on.

This is because the modern city in its general arrangement is organized in order to facilitate the sale of parcels of land; linked by public rights of way. There is no such thing as ‘urban design’ because the city is not designed in the way we architects think about design, except in isolated fragments, with all things considered in a coordinated manner for the best possible result for the sponsor and occupants.

The contemporary city is an accumulation of innumerable independent and uncoordinated actions, works and decisions by independent agents, to realize short term profit or long-term control for their sponsors; and that have survived a regulatory process. It is a collection of expertly resolved puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. That’s why the contemporary city is the way it is.

It seems to me that there was a rupture in the early 1950’s between the traditional city (the product of organic growth or the metrics of land surveyors) and the suburban city of todaysubjected to various regimes of control and efficiency and scrutinized by the good intentions of planners.

The irony of the contemporary city is that it is intensively governed (by economic models and authorities) and consequently the most highly controlled and organized city ever, but as an experience, it is a cacophony of non sequiturs, each of which is often spectacularly ugly, enabled and held together by a matrix

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of infrastructure. And the suburban city - the most controlled ever - is in many ways the least practical (for example, its terrible walkability and costly infrastructure) and to top it off it is the least pleasurable. But the pleasure of its inhabitants was never its goal.

Why aren’t I famous?

I realize that this is a profoundly fucked up question, based on a false premise, but we operate in a culture that confuses notoriety with quality.

In my naïveté, starting in my first year at the school of architecture, I had no idea at all that one could become famous by being an architect - except knowing that Frank Lloyd Wright was a famous architect. But I also had absolutely no sense that fame was a desirable goal.

At some point becoming famous, or at least well known, became important to me. It happened in school, where I learned, by implication, that the ‘great’ architects were also the famous ones. And I wanted to be a great one.

A while ago (I am embarrassed how recent) it occurred to me that there was no practical way that I would ever become famous – or at least well known outside my circle. But it wasn’t exactly fame I desired. The want was something more like a desire for a fawning over every thought emanating from the genius of my brain! Fame as a means to acquire the authority that enables my wants to be manifest. A world where things come to be simply because that’s what I want!

Of course, my first mistake - if I wanted to be famous - was to situate myself in a smallish/mid-sized city - whose citizens and managers really didn’t give a damn about me getting famousand rightly so. And as I grow older - I am sincerely grateful that Martin Tite things played out that way - instead of getting stuck in the ridiculous parade of infantile ambitions, false praises and one-upman-ship that I witness from afar.

The strange thing isn’t that I’m not going to be famous (although

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things played out that way - instead of getting stuck in the ridiculous parade of infantile ambitions, false praises and one-upman-ship that I witness from afar.

The strange thing isn’t that I’m not going to be famous (although in my heart of hearts that should have been the natural course of events!) but that I ever thought that this would be necessary to validate my work (or validate me!). Why did I have such a thought? Why was it so important to me to be recognized as the genius I thought I was? Wait... why the hell did I ever think I was a genius? (It probably came from my mother, who referred to me, as a child, in French, as ‘petit Jésus’.)

Why don’t we think it’s good enough just to get the job done right? What’s all this grasping for attention about? Marketing?

How odd this all is.

Our architectural culture seems to be structured around a series of ‘stars’ in the sky - some brighter than others, and some - like Rem Koolhaas – white hot suns that have the power to obliterate. This is enabled by a conspiracy of magazines and photography and breathless praise, which establishes the terms and conditions for ‘architecture’, promulgated to the masses of journeymen practitioners and students.

I remember years ago a friend presuming that the firm I was joining was aiming ‘to get published’. And even then, I realized that this objective was silly and that there might be other things to aim at as an architect. And going on further, finding this grasping for ‘success’ somehow distasteful, I continually sabotaged any hope of becoming famous. I told the magazine that

wanted me to write for them that their magazine was not very good. I didn’t take up golf. I spoke plainly to clients. I didn’t cultivate powerful friends.

When I think back to when I started this game, all I really wanted to do was to be involved with realizing environments that people would inhabit. And in that way, I achieved exactly what I wanted.

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Workers

It seems strange to me how little attention we architects pay to the people that realize our designs for buildings. There are tens of thousands of hours of construction activities on even a smallish job - mostly done by people whose names I will never know.

Every time you see a brick in a wall, think of the person, probably a man, who lifted the brick, with his hands, applied the mortar, set it into place level and true and tooled the joint; this done over and over, thousands of times.

It is to be expected that a musical score by a composer might be rendered well, or poorly, or interpreted with understanding or ignorance. And that this interpretation is fundamental to the experience of music. So that a musician has a degree of agency, whereas in our construction practices today, workers, for the most part, do not. And the fact of craft - knowing in your arms and fingers and brain and experience how to do your trade - is sort of beside the point. Some boundaries around quality are crudely captured in specifications, but the fact is that if someone doesn’t know or care about their craft, the specs won’t help.

As architects our job seems to be to define requirements, on A0 drawings and reams of specifications, that are largely focused on giving the client a legal basis to sue either the architect or the general contractor.

And those that realize the physical result we are describing are simply required to follow our orders. It is as if the workers that make buildings contribute nothing of consequence to their qual-

ities and value. If you have spent more than an hour on a construction site you will know this isn’t the case. And I think we should recognize that the trades working on our buildings spend months and sometimes years looking at our designs, seeing them emerge, working with them, and considering them. We should acknowledge that trades possess a form of knowledge about buildings that we architects don’t have. Good trades will ask good questions or offer opinions on how to achieve the desires implicit in the design. Of course, the contractual and cultural structures we are bound by, do not encourage or even permit this ‘interference’ in the work of the designer class by the worker class.

It would be interesting to understand how we got here. It seems (just a hypothesis) that things were different at one time. The working drawings for the original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa reportedly consisted of six sheets. Somewhere between these six sheets and the building was the skill of builders and their collaboration with the architect.

A recent restoration of the Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright is an interesting case. A challenge of this restoration was that there were no drawings describing the intricacies of the detailing of the woodwork, because (I hypothesize again) the purpose of the drawing was to describe the finished result, not the multitude of joints and members and fasteners required to achieve it. So, in order to realize the restoration, the woodwork had to be dismantled in order to understand how to reconstruct it . And it seems to me (another hypothesis) implicit in this situation was the idea that the domain of the builder was to apply their knowledge of detailing and ‘how to build buildings’. I hypothesize again that there was a shared idea of the quality

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achieve it. So, in order to realize the restoration, the woodwork had to be dismantled in order to understand how to reconstruct it . And it seems to me (another hypothesis) implicit in this situation was the idea that the domain of the builder was to apply their knowledge of detailing and ‘how to build buildings’. I hypothesize again that there was a shared idea of the quality

of results, since not everything had been described by the design documents.

Another story. Alex Rankin told me that when he did the administration building at Carleton University, there was an omission in the specifications; the architects didn’t specify washroom floor tile. He got a call from the successful bidder shortly after award of the contract, asking what kind of tile he wanted in the washrooms. The call wasn’t to inform him that a change order was required, but to get the information needed to execute the project since the builder knew that tile would be required in the washrooms and had made a reasonable allowance in the bid for it.

In a low bid world, we have lost something. Builders are hired to deliver the absolute minimum quality that can be conceivably contemplated by a lawyer’s interpretation of the contract, at the lowest possible price. As a result, to protect clients and design integrity, every single detail of contemporary design must be exhaustively determined and as a result, workers loose agency, treated as if they are mindless and completely interchangeable, except for the price determinate. The effect has been to ‘dumb down’ what trades are allowed to contribute, resulting in a general denigration of the role of workers as interpreters of design, and the potential of workers to add value to design. Perhaps all of this is a feature of profit-motivated work in a capitalist society.

And we architects hardly ever engage with trades. In a stipulated sum contract, we’re not even supposed to do so. And architects (at least this one) are mostly ignorant of what it takes to actually fabricate a building component. I have occasionally

The Way Things Are been lucky enough to talk to a fabricator and to describe in words what we are looking for , and usually they have been happy to humour me - but this has always been a gift to me and the project (Notwithstanding standard contract terms that denigrate collaboration, there is a lingering human ethic about doing your best.) because nothing actually compels them to pay me any attention, in fact they aren’t supposed to make any kind of a change without a change order.

A number of years ago, we worked on a recreation centre. The masonry contractor, McGonigal Construction , had done a wonderful job and helped with sourcing a special mortar. After the job was finished, I called the owner, Rob McGonigal, and left a voice mail saying; ‘You don’t need to call back, but I wanted to let you know how much we appreciated the work your team did’.

We never spoke about it, but he later noted to one of my staff that in the entirety of his career that was the first time anyone had said something like that to him.

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Martin Tite

The Way Things Are Martin Tite

Zombie Architecture

Philosophers, when thinking about consciousness, have a thought experiment that goes like this: ‘What would be the status of a person that acted exactly the same as a person with consciousness - but was not conscious?’ This is the ‘zombie’ problem.

There is a lot of architecture that is zombie architecture. That is, architecture that looks like it is architecture - by virtue of the skillful application of ‘ticks’ that signal ‘architecture’ - but is devoid of an animating moral consciousness that wants the world to be one way, or another. It is not ‘bad’, but it’s also not ‘good’. The zombie is reactive, and compliant to the demands of its environment. So, if the client wants ‘good’ architecture, the zombie firm hires experts in that area, as need be to satisfy this demand. If the client is not interested in ‘good’ architecture, then the zombie is not. Zombie architecture is neither a force of evil, nor a force for good. It is a neutral mirror of the vanities and economics of society.

It is immensely frustrating to me that this ‘compliant’ zombie architecture is so successful, but why wouldn’t it be? It is identically mapped against the interests of those who hire architects - and compliant with law - so isn’t this what’s supposed to happen - and the way of the commercial world? What are you complaining about Martin?

In contemporary practice, ‘resistance’ to the wants of clients is a self-defeating activity. The Rem Koolhaus trick is to do exactly

what the client says it wants, interpreted in the most extreme and provocative manner possible, thus creating ‘architecture’.

At some point, I believe that pragmatic acquiescence becomes immoral, but for the zombie firm, morality and architecture are two different things. Morality being the domain of priests and philosophers - not a dimension of architecture.