john latham
Joined: 15 May 2008
Posts: 5
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 Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 1:38 am Post subject: STUDENTS, BE GOOD BUT NOT GREAT ARCHITECTS ... that way ... |
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Naturally, an architect is very likely to open doors in design and implementation for residential developments, which enhance the potentials beyond your own horizons and existing three-planed-corners. And conversely it is true that your presence in the designs may in ways enhance it beyond the architect’s horizons, in that you are the dweller with lively idiosyncrasies and nous; with personal attentions and attitudes. No architect is an island. Tune up with your architect who may or may not tend to prefer that you take some of his own design attentions; those attentions cultured by his professional growth, and/or those which should remain out of your picture. Your personal attention may rightly be absorbed by a weatherboard cottage full of bookshelves and other accumulation; whilst an architectonically avant-garde, slick, well proportioned, steel and glass, cantilevered delight won’t hold you but for a moment of obtuse admiration. In this instance your personal attention is held by your accumulation, its accessibility and companionships. The architecture that contains it for you, rather than be a focal addition to your accumulation, may be incidental, over-bearing or even distraction – “Architect, please make it quiet and let my accumulation dance fantastic.” “Certainly madam. At your service madam” … thinking, “There’ll be no award in this one.” In fact there was.
Architects seek the motivation behind the client’s design requests and reinvent the client’s visions. People may love to think something is their own design. If their own design is built, they may never realise that an architect’s design may have been better, whilst just as much their own. The same goes for architects who fancy their own designs. Their client’s or colleague’s designs may be best and in acknowledging this they will own them too. It’s a tough work-a-day call at times. In today’s cultural climate of commercial packaging psychologies, it may behove an architect to provide highest priority to a certain ‘look’ or ‘appeal’ ... and in fact the client may demand that the packaging take a higher profile in the budget than the goods. The goods being ecopicalities and practical amenities. The ‘look’ may make a popular trend whilst leaving behind the function that formed it - hollow, pastiche, sweet painted lady, perhaps an ultra Classic.
The devoted architect today - for less than 1% of the world - more than ever, must sharpen his pencil like a spear, to defend the ethics of the day, whilst cajoling the enemy for bread and butter. The megamonster battles are often lost. Yes it can be a battle to break a bit of convention, and architects may prefer to treat every project as a new innovation, up-to-date with technology, current affairs, current conventions, current fantasies and the avant-garde. In the late
1930’s as conventions were reviewed; an Austrophile student-architects’ ball made comment in song on community attitude to architectural newness and change of the time, as enshrined by their now eminent Robin Boyd: - “There’s a bright vermilion door, with chromium plated handle. We create a little scandal, when we build a modern home. There’s a cantilever sun porch, with green and yellow awning, where we sun-bathe in the morning, when we build a modern home. There’s some concrete and some steel-work, but most of all the walls are glass. But the painter does the real work and the rest keep off the grass. We’ll have rubber on the floor and sound absorbent ceiling. There’s contemporary, feeling in our very modern home.” The architects’ torch lighting the frontier and
the change-over to Modernism. Bear in mind though that Architecture as a university discipline has developed only over the last couple of centuries – a bit like the saxophone.
Behind the frontier, it’s business as usual. If it’s a dwelling-contraption you want, an architect can do it. A client makes up his own mind as to whether the architect can deliver in accord with his own cultural circumstance. It’s part of his fandango. Architects are susceptible to a version of dodo cultural cliché and frozen thinking, as are their clients. The pressures of the tunnel-vision effect, of years in some niche in the ‘noblest profession’, may make it difficult for the architect to appreciate good spontaneous or ‘untrained’ design. They may be afflicted with the goading of what is deemed unprofessional by their colleagues whilst endeavouring to break this orthodoxy for the clients economic or design benefit. The word ‘professional’ is frequently heard highbrow. It means, simply; expert, thorough, fully informed, efficient and complete; and of course kosher. It doesn’t mean indisputably perfect; but an architect who acknowledges his fallibility and responds to any challenge is pretty good – even in the face of one who may be better, albeit only better in the area of the challenge. The notion of a quality quotient style of assessment of architects, as distinct from assessment of buildings, is interesting but impractical, so we go with our intuition and hope. Circumstances surrounding the client and the client’s requirements may necessitate an unorthodox approach within the professional process. The approach may be similar to that used by the farmer who successfully uses rocks rather than nails to hold down his barn roof.
Architects manage design and administer construction contracts for built contraptions other than houses as well and are involved in public urban matters also. Generally they must earn a living. They are not necessarily a luxury. Their design may save you money. Yet also, they may at times see the necessity to persuade you to spend more. Within design cost-effectiveness, assessing the real cost of the architect may become difficult. A lower budget means possible savings become less and the architect may find more work than his normal fee justifies. Often time-consuming complexities in house design are not covered by money available from the client, especially when compared to income from other larger or simpler projects. That’s why Bobby Dazzler’s grandfather calls the profession ‘noble’.
Less than five percent of houses in the West are designed by architects. Building firms are responsible for a greater fraction of houses today, and along with builder-design, owner-design, direct copy, ‘architectural’ designers, ‘building’ designers and draftspersons they make up the remaining ninety-five percent. The difference between an architect and a building designer? An architect has an objective wholistic basis to design and the building designer will be basing his design on merely trends and conventions set by the architects and regulations; or some lesser avenue. If he does more, he’s becoming an architect. There are special practitioners who may in circumstance and talent outshine the best architects whilst having no right to call themselves an architect. Frank Wright, in fact a revolutionary in architectural design and once a shining light for many aspiring architects, was ‘qualified’ only as a civil engineer. The reverse applies too. Some achieve architect status and for various reasons and, possibly only in various circumstances, fall short.
The architecture curriculum is very broad; sociology, engineering, aesthetics, building technique, contract management, materials, industry, salesmanship, drawing and on it goes, and so some are more expert in some areas than others. As we have noted architects are not a divine masterplanner and they may resist doing things the ordinary, conventional, way. Often, tendering and contract administration is not requested by the client as part of the architect’s services; though to request it may be valuable in safeguarding design through construction. A draftsperson is sometimes a better option, in that he may work totally within convention. The architect can coordinate the draftsperson. In such a case it may or may not be worth avoiding the architect.
Architects are not all the same. Philosophies vary. Maybe the broad demands of the job suggest to some of them that we ought to be arrogant. Some treat clients like children. Others encourage them to take a strong hand in design. Both attitudes can produce satisfying buildings. On the other hand, the dweller should make her best choice. The architects who have spent their entire expertise accrual in multi-storey buildings and may flounder - not founder - if moved straight onto the business end of house design.
An educated eye may observe, in their products, that a swag of local architects have attended the same school. Their work is cultured by the school and locale. This is potentially a birth of some vernacular. It may be stuffy. It may be refreshing. Like artists they will all exercise their own natural ability and talent, giving various legitimate accents and character to their work. Some may be less experienced but not necessarily less competent for a particular job. But they may at any time need to be advised as to some knowledge held only by their client. The architect’s client is a microcosm, like his local community, whether in the Bronx, Patagonia or outside Sydney.
Trends begun by architects are adapted, mistreated, misunderstood, developed, degenerated and copied. The influence of the architect upon the seas of housing is but mild against the influence of the vernaculars and the locusts of the modern consumer orthodox.
Is the architect;
An EPHEMERAL NOMAD, so as to be nature’s earthy nurtures landscape-designing the interior, and
♥ A SOCIAL BEING, so as to be tweaking the synthetic address and the regulations, and
◙ A PERENNIAL SETTLER, so as to facilitate hallowed halling and fruitful continuum?
tHAT WAS FROM MY book
I have a book to list. Can you help?
Currently the best web view is at www.bookstore.bookpod.com.au ‘wow hows the house now’
I can send more info.
And Amazon (due for update)
some more;
"The covered wagons loaded with settler people and their embryonic residential accumulations, rattling through Sitting Bull’s nomadic indigenous heaven, dangerously threatened his livelihood, as their noise and numbers scuttled away the buffalo. The railway brought it on heavier and the opportunity for mutual nomurbic togetherness, incorporating ecopian townships, in lieu of a fight for survival, was gone – a faint hope that it might come right one day. Give me a house; rather give me no more than a tipi-village with horses – and perhaps a gentle trading neighbour in an ecopian town.
Modern times and urban ways have grown a megamonster. It sounds like kid stuff, but look behind the name tag. It is the commonly acknowledged untamed unecologic giant multinational current pragmatic of industrial society which harms more than just the nomads. The deeply urban individuals are plagued with unfortunate mindsets, from the dodo that creeps into their unwitting thoughts. Undoubtedly, without a blast from the sun, the rampant city end of potentially ecopian lifestyle would swing round and swallow the nomad whole – as it does currently, still.
The dodo is urban deviance caused by ignorance, apathy, greed and desperation. The dodo feeds its decisions to the megamonster. In turn, the monster spawns the orthogonal houselocusts – the machinemarked grid of boxed domestic-contraptions. The houselocusts, with their theodolite-surveyed industry, consume the wonderful world of the nomad, the land, the country; and the resources too - the playdough of the Earth. The dodo is responsible for pale people, boulevard excess and deceptive opulence.
I believe my book is of value to artists, architects, sociologists, environmentalists, psychologists, economists, dwellers, builders, planners etc. People tend to think; "House”is architecture. This is a fallacy, it is more, as is clear from the book. This work combats the 'silo effect' - the lack of connection among educational subjects and also among government departments.
‘Where is the wholistic order? At work these people are miles apart locked into work-a-day silos. At home they are all with the active interface of their dwelling contraption. This book is a nexus of information and creativity in housing. It clears the windscreen for the dweller in the driver’s seat. It assists the student and the architect from being caught up and blinkered in the separated silo-like structures of topics and portfolios into which our lives and universe are categorised. The values around housing are central if not wholistic to the settlers’ syndrome. The author has been a long time in and around the environmental design professions and the bureaucracies. He shares perception of the silo effect as a fundamental flaw (professionals, experts, role players, subject designers, position holders commonly blinkered by their own streams of focus, making decisions based on understandings that are not wholistically ventilated) - perhaps a parallel is the introduction of naturopathy into medicine and feng shui into architecture; silos blending. Consequently this book addresses various reader categories; architecture, sociology, lifestyle etc.
Alas settlers are not alone. The indigenous and the nomad have held us in their hand eons ago but today we plough them in.
John |
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