“……….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