What I LIKE about being an architect
The 10% inspiration / inspiring clients / challenging briefs (they’re related) / yellow trace truth / being on site, any site / structural engineers / my open-ended architectural education / architectural teaching / giving lectures to the young and enthusiastic / L+E court hearings we win, 25 off / ticking off invoices.
What I HATE about being an architect
The 90% perspiration / explaining stupid decisions by councils to clients / explaining egregious variations by builders to clients / project managers / MEP engineers / being lectured by jaded panellists / trying to get a project started / trying to get a project finished / L+E court hearings we lose, 2 off / writing fees proposals and invoices.
Non architects doing architecture: Christopher Alexander
Last week we looked at William Hollingsworth (Holly) White and his influence as a sociologist on urban design. This week, in a similar vein, Christopher Alexander, a mathematician who had a profound influence on design process thinking in the second half of the 20th C. Just before WW2, when a very young child, his family fled his native Austria for Oxford in the UK.
A brilliant student he read physics, chemistry and mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge, getting a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a masters in mathematics, and then the first PhD ever awarded in architecture at Harvard.
So yes, he was an architect, but he was first, and foremost in theory, a mathematician with a scientist’s mind for analysis. His doctorate, published as Notes on the Synthesis of Form, influenced a generation of computer scientists, and has been claimed to be the foundation idea for a ‘wiki’, the basis of Wikipedia.
Expanding this erudite work on software and sociology into architecture during his 40-year tenure at UC Berkeley, he developed the idea of ‘patterns’ that could be discerned in all aspects of systems, and he set about systematising the architectural process with his senior students. Several connected books resulted, laying out the theory (The timeless Way of Building) and the practice (The Pattern language).
The idea of patterns infuriated the ‘creativists’, who thought of it as dogma (as if theirs wasn’t), but generations of students came to appreciate the advice that would make buildings more attuned to their occupants. My advice is to eschew the first 20 or so patterns on city planning, and most of the last 20 on very hippy building technologies, but that leaves over 200 absorbing ideas for good design. It’s a masterwork, and if you don’t use it, you should (see below). Alexander died at 85 in March last year.
Glad she’s gone
Quite frankly, I don’t care that Gladys Berejiklian was found guilty of ‘serious corrupt conduct’ by the ICAC (its strongest finding, short of prosecution). I had long decided she was a dud premier. She presided over howlers in environment and planning. The utter waste of the Sydney Football Stadium: the utter stupidity of moving the Powerhouse Museum (both inherited from the intransigent Mike Baird); after three years in power there was not one extra social, affordable public housing scheme built.
We won’t miss her or her government; but sadly, she’ll be right mate, just like other LNP ICAC reprobates. Arthur Sinodinos, ambassador to the United States, Barry O’Farrell, High Commissioner to India, Nick Greiner, Australia’s consul-general in New York. Like those before her, she’ll land on her feet in few years when the LNP is back in power, even if the finding was worse than her predecessors.
Bookends: Two ends of Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander, discussed above, wrote two key texts. Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) has been described by Industrial Design Magazine as “"one of the most important contemporary books about the art of design, what it is, and how to go about it." Pattern Language (1977) has been one of the most celebrated and vilified books on the architectural design process. Both stand up well today.
Signs Off: Glad gets the axe
Gladys Berejiklian was never as popular as the liberal glad-handlers would have you believe. This sign is from March 2018 on Dacey Avenue in Moore Park, near where she pushed ahead with Mike Baird’s idea to rip out dozens of 100-year-old fig trees rather than route the light rail through Randwick Racecourse. Gambling trumps trees. Environmental vandal AND corrupt.
Reference: A&D Another Thing week 26/2023
Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his.
Long columns are Tone on Tuesday, short shots every Friday in A&D Another Thing.
You can contact TW at [email protected]
