Final lecture in the series.
If architectural education is the answer, what was the question? This talk will review how architects and architecture operate in environments that are simultaneously global/general and local/specific, and where professional silos appear to be shrinking, expanding, stiffening and collapsing simultaneously.
Paul Finch is deputy chairman of the UK Design Council and chairman of Design Council CABE. He is Director of the World Architecture Festival; Inside: World Festival of Interiors annual events; and editorial director of Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. He was chair of the Olympic Design Review (2006–10). Among many honours he was awarded an OBE for services to architecture in 2002.
Lecture Transcription:
[Video is momentarily cut at some points]
Brett Steele introduces Paul Finch.
PAUL FINCH: I’m going to do a quick A to Z of certain architecture education issues, and then we’ll look at some slides dealing with London’s past and present, mainly AA alumnus or former AA teachers.
Let me start by answering this question: is architecture education is the answer, what was the question? let me give a journalist proposition: the question is how do we set about creating better futures, which we know will be different to the present, when all we have to go on is the past? My “A” is for the “architect” which is very much about the past, because the condition of architecture today is entirely dependent on the history of what happened at the end of 18th century. What happened in Britain is pretty much a simulacrum of what happened elsewhere, because it happened here first. At that time, organizations where all looking for what today we’d call single point responsibility, they didn't trust the “Wren” figure, who is the genius designer who miraculously, not only can he understand geometry and mathematics and philosophy and physics, but also knew all about the organization of people hammering nails into wood and so on. At the end of the 18th century you get a rise of the main contractor, the family builder, usually specialist in joinery or some other subcontract activity, who suddenly claims they would organise the site and the construction and they know more about that than the designer. To cut the long story short, the emergence of architecture as a profession, and a discrete activity, and something reinforced by caste, class and education, is an economic response to the challenge of contractors to the hegemony of the master builder, in reality a master architect. By the 1830s, when the profession in this country institutionalized itself, and forms in 1834 what becomes eventually the RIBA. By that stage you see the emergence of these family contractors, as shown in the records of the ministry of defense, specially around gentleman’s clubs around Pall Mall and in St. James’. We have to understand that economic competition had a very profound part in the emergence of the architecture profession, because architects in response to the changing economic conditions had to establish their own unique role first, because the client shouldn’t trust tradesmen, and then because they, the new professions where subjects of economic competition. So the architects claim, reinforced by the professional codes, that the architect should never compete in price: you pay the same fee whoever you get. A system, incidentally, which lasted for about 160 years. However, trade, would always be appointed as the result of the most ruthless economic condition, encouraged and controlled by the architect. Not only did the architect encouraged that economic competition, but the architect was judge and jury in all the buildings throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, because they had quasi legal controls over the contract. So, if there was a dispute, it was the architect who resolved the dispute, not a judge, nor an arbitrator. The architects what is such a position, that if the client was god, the architect was the archangel Gabriel, while everyone else in the world were lower angels. This then becomes reinforced because of the inevitable education consequences of professionalization, which restricts the entry into the profession by examination. That’s a different story, which I don’t want to go into, because, in theory, the AA shouldn’t be started by students, it should have been started by their bosses.
However, by the end of the 19th century what we have is a situation where, to become an architect you have to pass examinations, often, for middle class families who are essentially bossing about working class tradesman on building sites. This is a caricature, but it’s not so far from the truth, the position that we have today is quite different, because the dismantling of all those structures, partly as a result of Thatcherism, but it pre-dates it, because even before - she won the elections in 1979 - we had the dismantling of fee scales, as the result of the monopoly’s permission, and the office of their trading, who assumed, that even advisory fee scales by any professional institution is in fact, as George Bernard said, and he was quoting Adam Smith, “a conspiracy against the public, or against the laity.” That long line of thought which says that if it’s a range, then it’s a cartel, and it must be bad. The lucky thing about the people who said that, they never had to go back afterwards and check, whether their advice, and the ripping up of professional scales was or not in the public interest. It was assumed not to be so. Now we find that architects are not only no king of the castle, they are part of what you might call flat pyramids, or in some instances, they are beneath the contractor: what an extraordinary turnaround! where contractors are negotiating the price with the client, and architects have to compete to get the work on the basis of fee bids! This extraordinary social and political turnaround, I think we hardly got to grips with it, because simultaneously, there are still plenty of contracts out there being run in the old model, where the architect is the client’s will holder, and you do assume, that if the architect is not in the contractors and the subcontractors, the client is highly likely to get ripped off, and you will notice that the regulation of architecture, another characteristic of all professions, but these days you cannot leave it to the profession institutes, you have to have a state body, and this is true pretty much throughout the world, in our case the architects registration board, but, is there a board that regulates builders? Certainly not! The public has to sue a builder, but everywhere else in the world you can mess the architect around by making complaints to some sort of professional board, which, generally speaking do extremely little for a extremely large amounts of money.
My “B” is for “building”. Building information systems, building information management is I think, inevitable, it’s growing, and if I was to make a prediction, I would say that the change in the way that professions work together to create buildings will be as profound in the next 10 years, as it has been in the last 10, and that’s because collaboration is, more or less, going to become compulsory, and it’s going to be easy, because it’s going to be on the basis of digital technologies.
“C” is for “cities”. Until about 20 years ago, few people, outside the realms of United Nation’s experts would have predicted that by the middle of this century most people on the planet would be living in urban environments. This was great news for architects, because the more urban things become, the more you need people who can civilized the buildings, who can civilize the spaces, and the landscape so that we don’t all go mad. On the other hand, especially in Britain, there is still the dream, that actually an Englishman’s real place is that cottage in the countryside. (...) We have to remember that this business is about cities and people, and it doesn’t mean that the world is covered in cities! The density of Singapore, for instance… half of it is jungle! Let’s not get confused between cities, the architect’s new natural province, and open and natural space, they are not opposites, they are going to exist also.
“D” is for “design and build”. (...) The question is how do architects establish relations with clients, which allow that the question of quality does not become the province of the contractor, but remains the province of the designer. This critical point, I think, it’s crucial to the future of professional design. There are plenty of people out there, who are actually making a living out of doing worst versions of what a good architect designed. (...) The contractor’s claim to authorities is that they speak the same language as the client, but they don’t, they speak their own language, and it’s a very odd language indeed.
“E” is for “education” itself. Education: critical to the creation of architecture as a profession, because it’s a defining moment; it defines entry into the profession in the first place. Now, every single professional has to undertake something called lifelong learning or continuing professional development which is immaculately tick-boxed by box-tickers in various places. So, you read a magazine, you answer the questions and then you fill in the answers and you tick a little box in your CPD, it says nothing about that you can design nothing at all. What do you know is not independently validated, is a little of hocus pocus, but it is part of the necessary ideology of order which is a plague on architecture construction and many other activities.
“F” is for “finance and fees”. There is a probably exaggerated dystopia around this, how architects are going to be working for builders and not be able to charge for anything… Happily, there are other models, my lord Foster, for instance, who’s just buying at the cost of 30 million dollars, the summerhouse and grounds where president Obama used to enjoy summers, until Norman decided he liked it quite a lot himself. You can make money out of architecture, there is no question about that, you have to think about what services you are offering, who to, and how you are charging for it. This is stuff, by an is not taught at architecture schools, but I think it’s essential, because you can not think anymore “mm… 6% of that contract, sounds like it should keep me in the fish and chips for a few weeks”. It doesn’t work like that anymore, and the brutal realities of commercial life, I suggest, mean it never will again.
“G” is for “government”. Generally, I think it’s not a huge friend of the professions, because no sooner do professions establish themselves, in this country, actually, in 1688, as part of the Glorious Revolution, when knowledge ceases to be a province of the crown and instead becomes, as if it were, neither the church, nor the state, and they claim to represent knowledge, and independence. That is why whenever you get a fascist takeover, let’s say in Portugal, when general Salazar came in, what was the first thing he did? to shutdown professional institutes, included the architects. Dictators are very concerned about what architects get up to, because they understand how symbolically powerful design is, they want to control it, and particularly, they do not want independent knowledge, and certainly, they do not want independent organizations of any description. There have been plenty of radical architects in the twentieth century who combined architecture and politics, eventually very successfully.
“H” is for “history”. From observation, I think, architectural history doesn’t get as good a run in architectural education as it ought, and I think this is understandable, after all, if you had a completely successful history of architecture, it does start to look as a history of everything. Where precisely do you stop? Should art be in it? Yes, it should rather. But then, science? yes, it should rather… Any building, however modest, and try to understand the circumstances of who wanted it, and designed it, where it is, why is it there, how was it made… you’ve actually got a complete search of history of an entire area and an entire economic structure. Somehow, architecture tends to shy away from this a bit, I suggest it shouldn’t.
“I” is for “infrastructure”. In the new world of cities, isn’t it the case that in the master section, it becomes more significant than the masterplan? After all, you look at the Olympic site, what are the significant things there? It’s all below the ground! It’s the sewage, the diversion of water, it’s sorting out pollution and poisoning of the ground. Once you do that, once you’ve sorted out where the tube lines are going to stop, the disposition of the buildings quite often speaks for itself. The masterplan is a wonderful sort of work for architects: everything below ground, eventually comes up above ground, and there, and where flows stop at an underground station, at a sewage outlet, at vents, etc, we need design. Thames tideway, Jubilee line, greatest civil architecture project in London in the 20th century… what are the characteristic of all these? architects! and long may it last.
“J” is for “just in time”. Unfortunately, the culture of architecture - to stay up all night working in that competition entry in the belief that it’s bound to be better, because your brain is functioning more efficiently at 2 am, that what it would have been at 2 pm the previous afternoon - may be true, but the evidence for this is scant. However, it’s now become fashionable, after all, the delivery of retail goods - where is the warehouse? you don’t need a warehouse, the warehouse is the lorry in which the stuff is being transported until it arrives in one of these stores on Oxford street, eliminate the building, get everything on the move. Architects, simultaneously: why haven’t you done all the building details? Actually, the contractors don’t want all the detail design in case there is a legal dispute: what they want you to do is to have enough design to get going, and then design as you go, and be infinitely flexible. This business of flows, rather than the stop star of conventional architectural production from the last century, think it’s a very interesting kind of parallel to the world of flows, marvelously analyzed by digital technologies.
“K” is for “Koolhaas”, the only architect in this A to Z. I mention him because he had a wonderful phrase “Architecture is stuck between megalomania and impotence”. He was referring to on the one hand to starchitects, all the stuff in Southern China, and yet, on the other hand, not begin to get anything built. And I noticed that the OMA exhibition of the Barbican… their hitting rate on getting stuff built - of designs for a winning competition is not great, it’s about 20-25%, the rest of it is a vast array of, depending on your point of view, waste of time, or research for the next one. The other thing about Rem Koolhaas is Delirious New York, a wonderful psychological exploration of architectural history in a unique, unrepeated form. Incidentally, if you re-read it now, the phrase “PC” comes out a lot, and you think, did Rem come up with “politically correct” about 20 years before the phrase came into popular culture? Actually, no, it’s paranoid-critical, which is a condition.
“L” is for “liability” in an increasingly litigious world. What I would say is that all architects get sued eventually. When you get sued it’s like a journalist who is sued for libel, that is to say, you are supposed to be innocent to prove guilty. It really doesn’t work like that, if you are at the wrong end of a negligent action, you are going to have to show everything properly. That is why those boring bits of Part III and educational practice is so significant: if your files aren’t in order, you are going to get done, and that’s all that there is to it. It’s one of the characteristics of professional life, there will be much higher standards on what’s expected from you that what’s expected of great subcontractors. You have got to be immaculate.
“M” is for “media”, and it does strike me that actually, communication and architecture become more and more entangled. People are designing information systems that happen to be a building. An understanding of all those new media technologies, which may be a problem for older clients or older members of the profession. i simply observe that there is an assumption that media takes care of itself in the schools. Perhaps it does, but it may be worth looking at.
“N” is for new technology. The biggest change, since I started on Building Design, in 1972, you coul dhave walked in an architect’s office then, it would have looked quite familiar to Thomas Hardy: t-squares, dust… what a change ! we are utterly changed. When you look at what archigram did with that very crude technologies… it’s incredibly sophisticated now, that’s why they were really good. But the reality was that architecture production was really out of the art until very recently.
My “O” is for organizations because one of the things that I know is taught occasionally, but that artists need to completely understand, is the nature of organizations themselves. How generically do they operate? How do the power structures flow through them? This is very interesting material for schools of architecture, again about flows, empowered by authority and responsibility. That’s about decision making and about where the money comes from. If you want a local example, I just read in The Standard this evening that Tottenham Hotspur just managed to get themselves out by paying a £16m contribution to the regeneration of Tottenham, on the back of their £400m redevelopment of their ground, because they say they can’t afford it. The major is picking up the tab because there was a riot, and if you look at all the interest groups and say, why should Tottenham Hotspur get away with that? Now, public money is going to be used to pay for that social housing, and then there are other people say: why is Tottenham going to pay for social housing? why is Tottenham going to renew the tube stop, isn’t that a public obligation? So, you get this mix of money, and power, and politics, and the election - which side, what’s Boris (Johnson) going to say, and Ken (Livingstone)... This is a fascinating territory for architects to understand.
“P” is for “planning”. Inherent and ubiquitous in the world of architecture, yet, unfortunately, too often dismissed as a solo activity, and in Britain, the RIBA has successfully got rid of all the surveyors, and all the money people in the 1870s, then sloughed off planning as a separate institute in the early part of the 20th century, in the same way they later sloughed off interior design, and facade design… I wonder if there is anything left. Anyway, that is bad news. If you look at something like Abercrombie, one of the first presidents of the town planning institute, for him the distinction between architecture and planning is non existent. If you read marvelous books on London, with his plans for London from 1943, the language, the illustrations, it is holistic - unfortunately a lot of his predictions were wrong within 10 or 15 years of its publication. But in this school, I think, it never went away because of that tradition of master planning and a lot of the things being done with landscape in an urban context as well as rural.
“Q” is for “quality”. How do you quantify the qualitative? The government is busy asking himself, how can you justify the study of English literature at University? How do you prove it has any value? These are extremely difficult questions to answer. Architecture can be simpler, but you always have to beware, and say: people get better, quicker, in designing hospitals, and they say, how do you know? - because I have the evidence. (...) If quality goes out of the window, on what basis can you say you are providing something that can’t be provided by the builder, and employing some designers in the back room who can get through building regs, and then the users can suffer for the next 30 or 40 years. There have to be ways of proving a point about quality and, actually, at an emotional level you can do this, simply by asking that politician, would you want to design a bad school for your child? When you frame it like that, they will say, ‘well, of course not’ and then you say ‘well, let us advise you in that case on what a good one is. When you flip that back, it’s not what the benefits of good design are, what are the costs of bad design? There are many examples of how bad environments have had millenia effects on individuals
“R”, “research”. Is a building a piece of research? It often is, but research as academics understand it. (...) You have to say it in an ingenuous way: how many ways might there be of solving it. And you use the method of other buildings, so you get into this strange spiral, where - it’s easy for lawyers to get all the brownie points on the research academic assessment, yet, all their work is about precedent, everything they ever talk about happened in the past ! When architects say: I’m going to make a building, and I’m going to solve that problem about how you span that thing, etc, these are inspirations, experiments. At a crude level, its experimental research and the profession has to fight its way round it as it does and is with higher education institutions and their funding thereof, which try to pretend that it isn’t research at all.
“Sustainability” is a fantastic thing for architecture, because it becomes like functionalism before it: one of this self-justifying mantras that modernism used to validate its activities for today. So the answer to why should it be like that, would be: because it functions better. Now, it is: ‘it uses less energy’ ‘there is less embedded carbon’ why shouldn’t we put that down? ‘because we’ve done the calculations and you should keep the structure and re-clad it’ etc. You can use this stuff anyway you like, wonderful mantra: long life, low energy. My only other book recommendation here is ‘How Buildings Learn’ by Stewart Brand, about some building types that have survived on and on, it’s not mysterious, it can be analyzed.
“T” is for “training” this is a practical profession, and I was thinking about Hooke park: making, doing, assembling, and understanding how that works seem to me really critical as a distinguishing feature of an architectural education, as opposed to studying architectural history, or structural geometry. Absolutely critical in understanding the nature of materials, assembly, construction, detail, and gravity. This requires collaboration, one of the hallmarks of this profession.
“U” is for “urban design”. Wren described urban design as authoritarian scriptures, so that was a quite unnecessary new profession, you should do it if you are an architect. But, they have to make their case, and if people decide that is a discipline that they like, then they would buy it. The question for architecture schools is whether one absorbs it or makes it a separate thing, under the great umbrella called architecture.
“V” is for “vagueness theory”. We’ll come back to it if we have time. Well, it’s the Sorites paradox: a mound of sand, you take a grain away, you still have a mound. At what point, taking grains away, does it cease to be a mound? This has something to do with the joys of imprecision, or calculated uncertainty. The difference between tolerant and fit, this is something architects do understand: the big thing and the small thing, and their kind of roughness. There is something in there of real value.
“W” is for “winning work”, that is essential, never taught in schools, but you can learn it outside, happily. In a way, the best learning is that crit where you have to stand out for your own design, when you have some people on the client that are quasi clients, because they can be more generous about the design, but harsher about the clarity of the presentation.
“X” is the x factor, what is implicit in architecture education is that x of architects to … the unwritten contract, the unknown user. The architect that is designing the school has some sort of relation to someone in 20 years time that is using the building. It doesn’t go away when the contract ends. (...) In architecture education this is transmitted in values, attitudes, absolutely the opposite of the contract led, self interested link which typifies much of the construction sector.
“Y” is for “Young’s modulus”. I love this - I don’t know if they teach you this in architecture schools - but it’s a measure of the elasticity, and the quick formula for Young’s modulus is stress/strain, and I think it’s almost a perfect description of professional life, both for individual architects, and finally for practices.
My “Z” relates to a former president of this institution, that is Roger Zogolovitch. This should be taught in all schools of architecture, because this is about the architect who gets a commission, and gives the client something that is out with their budget, having known the budget in advance, and then spent all their time doing a worse version, and rumbling about the client being a philistine, etc. Zogolovitch said: “you should find out what the client’s budget is, and then give them the best keeper they ever tasted.” I like the economy of thought there.
We are going to see a set of London slides. Let me start with this Louis Hellman cartoon [shown]. [Goes on with presentation of images].
[Questions follow].
Transcription by María José Orihuela, Architect, MA HCT at the Architectural Association.