aite well if you havent read my post on my manifesto, then pls read that first, for some background, before u read this....
now, back to point 3 of my disclaimer
3) i do not discourage fancy ideas... neither do i condemn paper architecture. dreaming is good. but to realize your dream to built form and to get the world believing in your idea and willing to build it... now that's something. so yes, good architects are good negotiators in this prospect... (well, i will start a new post on this area...i'm in the mood..XD..)
yea ppl worship legends like mies, khan....jean utzon, libeskind....
but quite frankly, i feel pity for em... i seriously do... not that i have anything against them...but i feel that they deserve so much better than what they doing to themselves, that's all...
lemme tell u their story if u havent already know
louis khan... the great architect of light and sound... died a broke man... he died a broke man because he spent half his life financing his own ideas and getting them built... clients didnt wanna pay... so he foot the bill himself... yes yes, everyone in bangladesh loves the parliament house he built for them... yes yes, it was a great piece of architecture... yes yes, years later his son travelled the world to find his father's identity and made a documentary in the end... but so what? all that work... all that toil.... but you funded everything... yes a noble cause... a noble death... to be martyhered for architecture... but dont u think he deserved better? i mean if only he had the capacity to actually saw thru his designs without getting into debt.. wouldn't tht be much greater? dont u think he would have achieved more?
now lets move on to jean utzon... the amazing architect that designed the sydney opera house... but we all know (i hope u know) that he quit half way thru the project... why? because he didnt know how to handle the authorities... lost his power as architect of the project... the local council intervened... didnt wanna build what he designed... in the end his beautiful interior of the opera house didnt fall thru... what a shame.... seriously.... dun u think it would have been great that if he knew how to handle the authorities? and do you know that it is a breach of rights when the authorities behaved that way? he could have done something... but he didnt do much... or rather he wasnt prepared to avoid such things in the first place... sad isnt it? one of the greatest modern icon of the world.. yours but not yours... your design but you pulled out... your design but not entirely... your project but got stole over to some cheap architect who does not know how to appreciate your work and changes the interior...
now lets talk about libeskind... the high and mighty libeskind that everyone at Taylor's adore, thanks to architectural theory classes.... do u know the story behind freedom tower? do u know that the crappy design that is being build right now is not his design at all? he had a wonderful design... he won... but politics got in the way... he didnt anticipate that... wasnt ready for the heat... got bumped around by his client... had to fake smiles and shake cold hands in front of the media... working with a 'partner' who had no intention on working with him at all... neither had he had any intention on integrating his design with libeskind's...in the end the 'partner' won.... poor libeskind had no say in the end... sad, isnt it??
but hey, this is the very nature of our field... architects have the least protection rights in the professional world... look into it and u will find that our copyrights are super grey and not properly defined...
i have no problems with fancy ideas... i mean, ppl like Greg Lynn, Reiser Umemoto, Zaha Hadid, Tom Wiscombe, MAD Architects.... they are all fantastic architects... with fantastic design ideas... no doubt... but if u cant get it built... i find it a pity.. really...
and hence why i say studio should always emulate the real world... i have no problems tutors getting us to design crazy ideas... but i have a problem when students design with no idea how the design is going to be built.... i find it pointless sometimes, to spend so much time developing a dream building and scheme studio after studio, but then when u go out to the real world...OH... real world time, time to be 'real'...OH...kenot do crazy stuff now, 'real' world already...tone down tone down...be real be real... studio is studio practice is practice....honestly, it's nonsense...
if studio cant teach u to make ur fancy ideas a reality then to me, u are just (i want to say wasting time... but i do recognise the creative juice that happens here...)..... but yes, in a way, u are wasting time..... why not channel all that creative juice towards something buildable... it can be equally responsive and fantastic and still buildable.... OR if you wanna explore this fancy ideas..by all means go ahead.... but dont stop at designing... find out how to realize it....
cos unfortunately, that is usually the case... ppl will have fancy ideas... nice to look at... but then u look closer... u will realize that the designer had no idea how to really make it happen... again another paper architecture.... not that there is anything wrong.... just a bit pointless sometimes....
(but of cos, one can always argue that these are still ideas, yada yada yada... in near future, technology may allow for it to happen and so on... yea well ok.... but lets discover how to live peacefully on earth first before we look at the possibility of living on the moon, shall we?)
but in the end what i am trying to say is, parallel studio with practice... they are in fact the same thing... whatever u do now is almost the same as what u do in the future... and as u can see from the utzon and libeskind examples... it is more complicated when politics and legislations come into play...
i just feel that we can do better than keeping the 'purity' of students at school before they get tainted by the criterias of the real world... to me it's kinda naive... students needs to be aware of the circumstances ahead of em... they need to be aware that if they wanna explore, they gotta be ready to defend it... by all means go crazy, but know how to defend ur craziness... know how to carry it thru to the end... even in practice... then oni its worth while...
so in this respect i hope u understand what i mean when i say 'if your building dun get built then wats the point'....
and as u can clearly see in my manifesto, i am more than just getting the building built... (and in the spirit of transformers) there is more than meets the eye with me...=)
Dedicated to learning how to appreciate architecture and design buildings. Ian is an architect and tutor at various universities.
2 comments:
"but dont u think he deserved better? i mean if only he had the capacity to actually saw thru his designs without getting into debt.. wouldn't tht be much greater? dont u think he would have achieved more?"(louis khan)
-if he were a person who cared about money, who cared about getting it built for sake of somewhat enforcing (or convincing) the idea on someone else to buy it, he would've followed your footsteps. obviously he knew his way wasnt the best, if he could've done it any way else u think he wouldnt? u think he was a first year student who just didnt know how to convince? dont u think he was a LITTLE smarter than that? funding himself wasnt pride, show casing his architecture and sharing his gold with the world was.
"your project but got stole over to some cheap architect who does not know how to appreciate your work and changes the interior..."(utzon)
-like you said, whos to judge whats great and whats not. wasnt it always a subjective matter? whos to say he didnt know how to appreciate, and came up with a worse design, if he knew utzon was great (which there isnt a criteria list to prove so; neither am i saying he isnt).would u think he would've changed it anyway? if YOU were put in his position, would just give all authority back to utzon and say "carry on with what u're doing. im just a nobdoy" that cheap architect is a person too mind you. he's got values of his own, and it certainly doesnt have to coincide with the world.. and in his defense, its not like ppl who went in said "yuck"
"but i have a problem when students design with no idea how the design is going to be built.... i find it pointless sometimes" i still think u've got to open the hell up. no offense, but when u were in studio 1. did u know exactly how to get your building built? did u know the exact nuts and bolts and weight capacity of upholding ur building? in the industry, in most cases, construction is left to the CNS and the engineers etc etc.. YES we need to know the fundamentals and the plausibility - hence the model making to learn SIMPLE laws of physics. leave out the students who draws plain pictures and say "this is a building" becuase a proper building would've obviously thought out some form of materials.. nothing is impossible to build - a rocket to fly into space? a car to travel 600kmph? a building to rise 1000m high?, and its not the technology problem. IF u had the money and resources to get it built, it will be built.
"to me it's kinda naive... students needs to be aware of the circumstances ahead of em"
still still still not wanting to give up. i've got to tell u why. IF u laid all these rules to a Design Studio 1 student, all these regulations, all this 'truth' to the real world about negotiations, about politics, about authority and laws... who the hell still cares about building something nice and artsy? they'd b so worried sick, they start to memorize the UBBL and AJ Metrics Handbook... the reason why its a Design Studio, is because we learn to design, if its much too early to care about buildability, let it be, if they havent even learnt their potential of design qualities what are they going to result to when they attend to all these regulations and feasibility study? the difference between a student and a real architect is the very responsibility they hold, i agree they should be AWARE, but it's got to stop there, unless the brief states u have a budget and u should have constructional drawings, i think understanding the plausibility of your design is enough; u go so deep about the real world before coming to the real world, u might as well give 12 years to study architecture. and u cant merely understand these true hectic moments if u were never in one. telling a person how dangerous it is to fight a tiger wouldnt necessarily prevent him from dying nonetheless. it is up to the person him/herself to handle such situations to their own personal values and beliefs to lead them to the end - nobody else has a say in it. what all the architects did, satisfied or not, they had to admit to the fate of the project in the end, regret only brings you weakness. dont think just because you are more 'aware' of it makes u any better at the negotiations..
reply to (2) "because we complicate it by looking at other things while in fact it has everything to do with our culture. tackle that then sustainability will not be an issue anymore."
-what is this other thing unrelated to culture? culture is so widespread it goes into who eats what sort of carbohydrates for diet. and if you meant culture in an absolute term, and it was possible to solve this (whatever the problem u thought it was) then we would never have to end up with new problems anymore. i'm afraid u've slowly faded into a Hitler mind... please, for your own sake, open up.
reply to (4) hey friend, pls read my post carefully, i didnt say you said 'not to critic at all' i merely said, not critizing enough wouldnt leave you to ur best solution. if the solution were to be simple, more critizism wouldnt have made a difference anyway! if anything, it only strengthens ur solution basis.
i have yet to read and digest ur manifesto so i'll leave comments on that for later. in the time being, i dont hate you but i honestly think u have to open up and not be so congested on influencing ur mindset into the rest of the world. difference is beautiful.
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