Internet

Internet 

I've been a rather early user of the Internet. Having the advantage of working at a major university, I had access to it even before the web was invented but never expected it to be that big a thing. If one had asked me back then, I would have asserted that it would be a nice thing at universities, a tool and plaything of the higher education and research world. Professional or social applications were completely out of my field of vision. This didn't change even after I started putting my courses on the Internet, having students present their work online (also in progress) and realising how valuable the Internet could be as a dissemination and communication environment.

When the extent of my teaching was reduced, my professional interest in the Internet waned, exactly at the time that it became a big thing in society in general, subsequently triggering interest in academic research and education. With raised eyebrows I saw how my colleagues became fascinated by a sequence of Internet vogues and vowed never to become involved in such matters. As a result, one may say that I've missed a lot but at the same time I was spared much. Keeping a low profile on the Internet may not be a bad thing, after all, especially for people who know they don't have something substantial to communicate to the world every hour of the day.

Sketching

Sketching

Sketches may be sacrosanct in architecture but I never managed to see them like that. Sketching may be a great way to externalise design ideas and one can learn a lot from correlating these ideas to the sketches but in the end they remain a temporary product, an intermediate state in the production of a building design. So, I fully concur with interest or even fascination in sketching but I also refuse to revere them more than the design or the building.

For years I'd been working on the automated recognition of drawings (something that deserves far more attention than it's given) and every time I presented some part of that work, there was someone who pointed out that of course these recognition approaches did not apply to sketches. Without much thought I agreed with such remarks, until one peaceful summer afternoon in the garden, when I was doodling on a piece of paper. Suddenly, the inquisitive researcher in me finally woke up and asked the obvious question: it is so? Are sketches that different from drawings?

I've spent some time on that question and the brief answer is that from a representational point of view there may be fewer differences and more similarities than assumed. Sketches are fuzzier and compound but at the paradigmatic level (the level of symbols and primitives), they often come close to drawings. I just hope that I'll be able to test this hypothesis at a large scale in the future.

The moral of the story is not about sketching or representation; it's about insisting on questioning established prejudices and conventions. It may seem silly, fractious and obstinate at times but if done with real curiosity and interest in learning, it can be a source of great pleasure to the researcher. Why do research for anything less?

Naked architecture

Naked architecture 

As a young architect, I've spent many hours trying to take impressive photographs of famous buildings: well lit, from an interesting viewpoint that afforded some attempt at clever composition and always devoid of people. That last thing was often the most time-consuming, as I had to play a waiting game with passers-by.

Even when I switched to just taking informative photographs, reminders of what I'd seen and felt at this or that part of a building (not necessarily famous), it took me some time before I was ready to accept people in the photographs. That's how I'd learned it: the photographs of buildings should be free from clutter that obscured the architectural features. It was alright to have a single human figure somewhere in the periphery as an indication of scale but that was all.

More recently, this has been turned around: I have become more and more interested in the interaction of humans and buildings, so I'm taking an increasing number of photographs and films exploring just this interaction - registering how people interfere with architecture in their daily activities.

I was reminded of the old habits when a colleague has a problem with a memory bar and asked me to recover its content on my computer. Many photographs were indeed recovered, so I put them back on the memory bar and handed it back to him saying "Here's your porn". He was puzzled and shocked: what did I mean? Well, I explained, the photographs were mostly of buildings devoid of people - naked buildings.

We laughed about it but later I thought there was more to it: architectural photography has some pornographic traits, like nudity and exaggeration. We are taught to lust after famous buildings and their forms. They may remain unattainable to most of us but they are what we would love to possess. Well, at least we have the photographs.

The cool cats

The cool cats 

Some time ago I watched Melville's Le Samouraï again after a long time. I enjoyed as much as the first, second, third or ... time (how many, actually?) but probably with more detachment than when I was young. At that time, the atmosphere had a different meaning; the tragic heroism of the story permeated every aspect of the film. The magical, then unknown environment of Paris was as strong as the hero's character; it had a charm that attracted and inspired. Now I smile when I realise how Melville made everything look cool. The people are cool; their dress is cool; they listen to cool kaxx; they drove cool cars (Jeff only steals cools Citroën DSs - one of the reasons why I love the film); the criminals are not miserable low-lifes but cool, silent types; even Jeff's filthy apartment looks cool in the film's dark photography.

That was what they were selling to us back then: cool. Delon was cool, McQueen was cool, Newman was cool. That weren't the strongest or invincible or whatever they have been selling to us before or after. They were just cool - as detached, as ironic as I feel now watching them. Reality was a game to them but a game with principles - their own, eclectic and idiosyncratic principles, as Jeff's pointless death illustrates: what was he trying to achieve? And so we tried to be as cool as that by putting on similarly cool clothes, listening to cool music, watching these cool films, feeling cool by proxy. We didn't have to achieve much, be or become something. All we had to do was adopt the style. Easy.

Architecture in comedy

Architecture in comedy

Architecture is serious business and architects do their best to radiate seriousness. This is probably why architects and architecture are not among the favourite subjects of comedy, together with all other pompous professions - or maybe it's because architects, despite their desire for gentrification, never managed to become real authority figures, so they do not attract (or merit) ridicule as much.

If you ask an architect what their favourite film on architecture is, they'll probably say The Fountainhead or something similarly earnest or artistic. Mine has to be a comedy: Mr Blandings builds his dream house. It has everything: city folks desirous of living in the country; an architect powerless to control clients or builders; a builder who's a bit of a cheat - and all the trimmings of a clever American comedy of the 1940s.

There are two parts that really make me laugh. The first is when Mr Blandings gets advice from various builders as to what to do with the house he has just bought in the country. In a sequence of quick cuts everybody tells him to tear it down - I love it when experts agree. The second is when Mrs Blandings meticulously specifies the colours of the interiors by reference to all kinds of stuff including a specific kind of butter; the builder just nods, accepts samples and when she leaves he turns to his painter and says: "White, green, yellow ...".

The same had happened to me when I was a student and had taken a job with a construction firm that was building a factory for a Japanese company. The Japanese engineers who were supervising the project were quite precise; one day they insisted that some railings should be painted in a particular RAL value. My boss was mystified and asked me to find out what the colour was (and what RAL was). I explained it was a yellow hue, so he summarily decided on the standard yellow colour the firm was using in all projects. The result made the Japanese happy. Proudly they told me that it was thanks to them insisting on using RAL. Standardization helps communication, they said.

An architect

An architect

Education

The subject is architecture, my profession. I went to study architecture with the modest ambition of becoming a competent professional architect, one who designs and produces decent buildings. Achieving greatness or fame, changing the history of architecture or other lofty ideas weren't even remotely in my thoughts. Understanding how to design was what motivated me and getting accepted by fellow professionals, clients and users was probably all that mattered in terms of success.

My teachers told me about this or that landmark in architectural history and however clever, beautiful or inspiring they were, I couldn't really tell what made them so important or more important than other buildings. Quite often it was just a first: the first block of flats in reinforced concrete, the first steel frame construction, the first open-plan office etc. They also told me of this or that prominent local architect and I would visit their buildings but, although there was something to be learned from practically each one, once again I couldn't tell what made them more significant than the building next door.

I soon realised that inspiration and beauty could be found even in anonymous, humble architecture (and by this I don't mean the vernacular buildings so patronisingly and sometimes hypocritically admired by great architects and critics). So, maybe because of my inability to perceive greatness in architecture, I ended up becoming more interested in other sensibilities, for which there were few ready solutions. When it came to functionality, architectural textbooks taught me enough to be cleverer than most lay people but how people (the users) might relate to a building aesthetically was far from clear.

Research

Opportunity and curiosity turned me into a researcher (with teaching becoming more and more a consequence of research). Looking back at my career, I've designed little, constructed even less and the last thing I did as a professional architect was a long time ago. Still, by training and interest I remain an architect and persist in looking at the world from an architect's perspective, with respect to what architects know or ignore. I'm still delighted by buildings that appear to work well; they make me feel proud of my profession. I'm also irritated by things that don't work, buildings poorly designed or constructed, instantly keen to understand how I might be able to rectify them or generally improve an environment or the processes leading to it.

Research is not about publications, projects or grants; primarily, it's a great way of learning. One has first to understand what is already known. This means a lot of critical reading (literature research), accompanied by attempts to synthesise what one learns from reading. That's what every academic should be doing. Teaching without it is merely repeating what others have said or presenting arbitrary, untested opinions. Unfortunately, there's a lot of ideas one gets from reading or just thinking, without ever managing to process it through reals research. They end up on scraps of paper, in journals and all kinds of notes to oneself. The purpose of this blog is to collect them and see what emerges then. So, bear with me while the plot hopefully thickens.