“……….My architectural education when it came, served me well.  ……….The work I had done for my final year project in the school had been successful; I had won the RIBA Design prize (previously and latterly the President’s Silver Medal) but though rewarding it had all been intuitive, and I was no more able to articulate a criticism of the architectural world that I now inhabited, than I had been able to do as a teenage rookie.  Architectural criticism needed to be more than a subjective response; it had to be more informed.  Having won my spurs I now had the freedom to pursue the questions independently.  Living in London I started to attend each and every lecture that I could find on the subject of architecture or related discipline, I was reading avidly, borrowing books from five or six different libraries at the same time and searching to formulate a coherent viable position in architecture.  My inner teenage pendulum was the only armature against which I was able to measure the ideas on offer, an armature I later understood to have been forged largely in childhood play; demanding adventurous play within Nature.  Every spare hour as a child I had been out in the fields digging traps, making huts, cutting trees or building dams, though unaware of this at the time, this close engagement with Nature would be a guide in my search for this new direction.  These early years of research were to be important and laid solid foundations for the future but it would be many years before I would start to clearly articulate a wholly coherent position. 

Raindrops on Nasturtium Leaves:

In those early days I was pursuing one simple question, ….what constituted good design?  The contemporary architectural world in the late sixties, early seventies was breaking up into a variety of seemingly disparate strands.  Modernism was seen to have failed and post modernism was being heralded as the new way forward.  This must surely be the answer that I had been searching for, but the more I explored the post modern as presented in those early days within the world of architecture the emptier it seemed, it had let go of the reductive certainty of modernism but replaced it with a philosophy that ‘anything goes’.  Wobbly technology, the new vernacular or classical elements were being layered into modern designs, it was presented as a potpourri of form which rendered any piece of work as valid as the next.  Of course in the art world the same thing was happening, bricks could be piled in a variety of configurations in the Tate, bed’s could be unmade and paper screwed up to make art.  In theory everything could be art and everybody an artist, just as any builder could pile up some bricks and call it architecture, could this post-modern direction really be sustainable?  By what means could one piece be distinguished from another?  In this situation the high priests of the art world assumed positions of extreme importance, as they became the final arbiters, just as the tailors and courtiers within the Emperor’s Court judged his invisible suit to be the most beautiful in the land.  Fortunately the child inside me, like the child at the Emperor’s parade saw that the post modern package did not offer an answer to my question, certain buildings done in the post modern language were successful but too few to validate the movement, for the answers to my question I would have to look deeper. 

My hunger reluctantly drove me back into the universities and to my first great teacher.  I was introduced to Geoffrey Baker and for four or five years we were to work together in a perfect creative relationship.  We shared a passion for design.  Geoffrey had developed a way of examining buildings that opened up the complexities of a contemporary building without destroying its integrity or layering it with superfluous historical interpretations.  The building was allowed to stand alone within its own context and the analyses explored it within the building’s own terms.  In this sense the methodology accommodated a post-modern posture at a much deeper level than that described above.  Within this methodology the building could be examined against its own criteria and if necessary against those of the building’s context.  For me this became the perfect tool, I felt like one of Galileo assistant’s must have felt when he invented the telescope, suddenly I was able to open up the delights of a building, exploring how one set of ideas could be reinforced in innumerable ways within a design, finding layers of consistencies supportive of the whole.  This way of working led beyond the superficial ‘image’ of glossy magazines and into the integrated reality of the building.  The methodology became the tool that took me back to my primary quest; my desire to understand the basis of good design.

  Cream Squirls in Barszcz: Tasty and Visually Delicious

After I had been on this task for some months and after I given up the day job for a 50% cut in salary, it dawned on me that my question … “What is Good Design?” was not dissimilar to the perennial question that had preoccupied philosophers for millennia  “What is Beauty?”  Feeling very foolish, I was immediately tempted to give up, if philosophers could devote years to this question, why should I be spending my time stumbling around in this area.  Was this not one of the great mysteries of life?  Had I not burnt my bridges, I would have run back onto firmer ground but then some days later a simple observation struck me?  A good building and a bad building could stand in front of me with equal reality; I could bang my head on a beautiful building just as easily as I could bang my head on a bad one.  They were both very real yet one could leave me cold and the other move me to tears.  This thought kept me going, how could you bump your head against a mystery.  If the building in front of me is beautiful, then beauty cannot be magic or mystery, it must be present in the very fabric of the building.  ………”

Silent Lion

I am attaching another section of the piece I wrote about Henryk Skolimowski’s influence on my work.  In this section I am describing the early days of the ‘Humane Architecture’ programme that I created at the University of Plymouth, School of Architecture.  The photographs are of Henryk and his wife Juanita on one of the occasions they visited the school, and some of the student work that was done on the programme.  The ideas developed in the ‘Humane Architecture’ programme went on to influence the philosophy of my architectural practice.

“………………….In the programme I defined ‘Humane Architecture’ as …. “architecture that displays a reverence for life and the environment.”  Those of you familiar with Henryk Skolimowski’s work will recognise immediately that I had borrowed the word ‘reverence’ from his writing.  I loved the way that he had made this transfer of language across disciplines thereby bringing spiritual values into the secular world without talking about spiritual issues per se.  Henryk’s way of describing the world as a ‘sanctuary’, similarly flavours the discussion; moving it out of a purely scientific ecology into a more spiritually responsible position.  In structuring the new programme Henryk’s work was to feature highly.  Somehow I had managed to incorporate a module entitled ‘Architecture and Self-Awareness’, into the programme and yet another called ‘Eco-philosophy,’ the latter directly designed to address Henryk’s philosophical works.  It proved a popular module and underpinned the work in other parts of the course, the ideas about ‘eco-philosophy’ and ‘participatory mind’ were challenging yet accessible to the students.  We read his books together, ran seminars and wrote lengthy essays about them.  The students were quick to appreciate the ideas and started to learn how to make connections between the philosophical ideas and architecture.  His words gave us a way of making distinctions between humane and inhumane buildings.  The manner by which Henryk had expressed his thoughts presented us with a way to articulate our views about architecture.  Many seeds were planted at this time and many students took an extended responsibility back into the world with them when they left the school.

 

The design studio that ran in parallel with the theoretical modules encouraged the students to apply the humane principles to their own design work; we called it the ‘Zen Studio’.  The ‘Humane Architecture’ programme placed strong emphasis on the tactile and experiential dimensions of architecture which contrasted with the conceptual approach that the old architecture maintained.  Henryk’s philosophy was making the same distinction, condemning the objective and detached view of the world in favour of a committed engagement with it.  Strange as it may seem, the old architecture that to a large extent is still the dominant architecture of today, is more concerned with the idea of the building than with the experience of the building.  For these architects, buildings are seen as pure form uncompromised by the context or even the environment.  The drawings used to represent this sort of architecture will generally speak of those values.  For example they will often be drawn from above in a bird’s eye perspective.  Such drawings detach the building from its experienced context as seen from street level and they will usually be rendered with ethereal finishes that do not define the materials.  People will not normally be displayed on the drawings and few furnishings that indicate use will be shown.  Within this old architecture the face of a building will be seen as a conceptual surface, as such it is its qualities as a concept that are important rather than the materials from which it is made.  As a concept, a surface is there to make a division in absolute space, in its most pure form it extends to infinity and has no need of depth or texture.  For these reasons glass, the immaterial material is often the chosen material for a surface or if it must be opaque, it will be detailed without reveals, overhangs, drips or junctions so that its conceptual reality is not disturbed.  Of course the omission of these construction details leads to the failure of the surface.  There is no such thing as a pure surface, no material can deliver it, all materials must show their age which is why so much of the old architecture ages so badly and after a few years looks like the aged Hollywood star a few months after plastic surgery. 

In contrast with the conceptual approach of the old architecture the application of ‘Humane Architecture’ principles generated projects that celebrated both the formal and conceptual clarity of a design and the building’s materiality.  We encouraged students to make parts of their buildings in the workshop; we even ran projects in which the students made pieces of furniture; very small architecture.   Such projects were purposely chosen to put attention onto the materials and the making of the artefact.  In these projects the students were quick to pick up on Henryk’s concept of frugality to save money within their meagre budgets and would build their tables out of drift wood or recycled found materials.  The projects were so experiential and tactile that by the end of a day in the workshops the students would be physically tired.  I quietly used to take delight in their exhaustion because it pointed so clearly to the fact that they were using their bodies as well as their minds to create their architecture; a feature so different to the one-sided conceptual approach adopted in many schools of architecture.  Such small scale architecture became a characteristic of our work.  The smallness presented an opportunity for the highest attention to be applied to the work.  ‘Care’, became one of the watch words of the ‘Zen Studio’.  By applying care to every act, raised our level of awareness of the work we were doing and such a raising of awareness lifted our own levels of consciousness and seemed to be a way of introducing the spiritual back into architecture. 

 

The students thrived in this environment when they were given the opportunity in Henryk’s words to engage in a ‘Quest for Quality’.  They loved the opportunity to get close to their task and in the process made some really beautiful pieces of work.  Other projects were run with similar intentions, we had the students make measured drawings of some of the best Arts and Crafts buildings that we have in Britain.  These drawings had to be drawn with the utmost care, each student taking just one part of the building.  The drawings were then rendered in watercolour.  We introduced this request because it slowed down the drawing process and contrasted greatly with the instant drawings that at other times they were making on computers.  The students were shown how to stretch watercolour paper on a board and then over a number of days or weeks shown how to build up layers of colour in the painting.  The process again had the effect of introducing care and physicality into the work but also allowed time to be folded into the painting.  This was such an effective technique that it generated some very beautiful pieces of work. 

The shorthand distinctions that I have been making here between the conceptual and the experiential which loosely paralleled Henryk’s contrast between objective detachment and a committed engagement with life can be taken much deeper.  ……………..”

 

Part of the student group on Bodmin Moor: Marcus Toop, John Pace, with Henryk and Juanita Skolimowski, Flora Samuel, Mike Westley and Frank Lyons

 Silent Lion