RIBA Books: Blog

Professor John Dyson, co-author of Design to Value, shares his thoughts on…

Are projects complicated or complex and does it matter?

Designing a building is a technical affair however the function and the context of a building is social, environmental, political; therefore complex. The building details may be complicated but there is an empiricism to them, with the right expertise, modelling and calculations you can come to sound solution.

What is complexity? Complex system theory has been studied in depth since the mid 20^th Century. Complex systems are all around us. For hundreds of years we were seduced by the ideas of amazing individuals like Newton, that the universe around us ran like clockwork. It may be that the metaphorical cogs are huge in number and linked in many ways but if we spend the time to study, analyse and calculate the whole system can be predicted. What has dawned since is that although some aspects of the universe are predictable, much is not. When systems have multiple interconnected parts and the relationships are not linear, they become complex and the rules change.

Caption: Patterns of interference showing peaks and troughs in a complex system by Bryden Wood

Outcomes become unpredictable at any level of detail e.g. no amount of measurement, study or analysis can predict where and when an earthquake will strike.
An intervention into a system can have hugely unpredictable consequences e.g. the introduction of cane toads into Australia to control the cane beetle, ended up with a plague of toads with no impact on the cane beetle population.
Flow is irreversible, if you introduce a change, backing out will not put the system back e.g. look at the response of economic markets to changes and reversal of economic policy.
An intervention which worked before will probably not work again next time the same way e.g. if you take the same route into a city every day the outcome can be very different.
The overall performance of the system is not the summation of the performance of its parts. Reductive approaches, dividing the work into chunks and ensuring each is done well will not mean the whole is good. The interconnections are key. Recycling in US was working very well, there was a supply chain from disposer to recycling where all parties made money including the local government. The government therefore decided to incentivise householders to recycle more. Great? As the material went up the quality went down, much more contaminated. The end recycler could no longer process it and the whole chain broke down; the economics reversed with each party in the chain having to pay for the material to be taken away.

Projects which need to deliver multiple outcomes for multiple stakeholders within a whole host of constraints are complex systems. Pretending they are simple or controllable, if only we try hard enough and bang the table enough is wasted energy and stress.

Working with complex systems means keeping a handle on the whole system and its purpose; it means working adaptably with it, trying and testing ideas, looking for patterns and connections. This cannot be done by individual silos of design or work but through collaboration. It means that the processes for the last project will not work for this one.

The Design to Value approach embraces these concepts, it accepts and delights in the complexity as you would watching a flock of birds swirl in the sky. The opportunity is always to find and deliver something extraordinary.

The Design to Value by Mark Bryden, John Dyson, Jaimie Johnston and Martin Wood is available online from RIBA Books or visit RIBA bookshop.

21ST CENTURY HOUSES – DEFINING A DREAM

The idea of building a home of your own, fully tailored to the way that you and your family want to live, is a dream that many hold and cherish. As the depth and breadth of new houses featured in the annual RIBA Awards suggests, it is a dream that is increasingly being turned from a dream into reality. Houses have always featured prominently in the regional and national RIBA Awards, yet looking back over the past few years it feels as though we are now entering something of a golden age for the bespoke, architect-designed modern home.

21^st Century Houses: RIBA Award-Winning Homes is a new book celebrating some of the most accomplished and original houses from the past five years of the awards cycle. The new title, written by Dominic Bradbury and released by RIBA Publishing this autumn, features residential projects from all thirteen RIBA regions, including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as houses within a wide range of different contexts covering both town and country.

21^st Century Houses includes the work of some of the best and most accomplished architects from all of our four home nations, including Tonkin Liu, James Gorst, Anthony Hudson, Chris Dyson, McLean Quinlan, Mary Arnold-Forster and many more. But the book is, importantly, also a celebration of those who commissioned these extraordinary houses in the first place, realising their own ambitions but also setting in motion a unique, creative collaboration quite unlike any other working relationship that we might cherish across our lifetimes.

The relationship between architect and client has often been compared to the connection between doctor and patient. Yet, while this comparison might point to the intensity of such a relationship, it doesn’t quite suggest its creative potential, with positive dialogue leading towards a building that is not only functional, sustainable and efficient but also crafted, characterful and considered. Such a conversation needs to establish as clearly as possible not only the programme for the project, including the rooms and spaces required, but also the parameters of the relationship and who will be responsible for what. Just as importantly, there are also complex questions of architectural taste, style and aesthetics to talk about.

‘An experienced client who can give you a full set of information that explains exactly what they want to achieve is really rare,’ says Meredith Bowles, principal of Mole Architects, who designed – among others – Marsh Hill in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, featured in the new book. ‘But clarity and common understanding are key to progressing the project and if you don’t have that then there could be a misunderstanding. Building a new house can be a three to five year project so you do have to get along and regular contact and checking in is a very important thing. It’s important to stay on top of all of the issues and think about things from the clients’ perspective.’

Bowles uses a bespoke schedule of services that sets out very clearly the commitments of architect and client, but he also stresses the importance of following RIBA’s initial Stage 0 of its suggested ‘Plan of Work’, which aims to establish the direction of the project and the design approach before the design stage even begins. This is not only a way of getting to know one another, but clearly sets out a series of early steps that are more to do with communication and setting out a clear direction of travel. Stage 0 includes agreeing the clients’ requirements and appraising the site and budget, before moving onto the following stages of the project, including preparing the project brief (stage 1) and then concept design (stage 2).

‘Long conversations are held with the clients discussing various day to day scenarios and long term family life scenarios,’ says Anthony Hudson, principal of Hudson Architects, which designed – among other projects – the award-winning Le Petit Fort in Jersey. ‘These are all recorded by us and from this develops a layout and arrangement. We also ask the clients to write down their brief and send images of things they like, as well as setting up a Pinterest board. They need to think realistically about the budget and how they would like their house to operate from an energy point of view. Even more important is that you have the right match and that both clients and architects are on the same wavelength.’

Hudson’s clients at Le Petit Fort, for example, had a very particular set of priorities that needed to be discussed in detail, including relating the house to its coastal context, catering for the needs of a young family and making the most of the sea vista by placing the main living spaces upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs. Like Bowles, Hudson stresses the need to manage clients’ expectations from the very beginning, while also keeping them engaged throughout what will be a long but ultimately rewarding design and build process. As well as inspirational homes, 21^st Century Houses includes a section of practical advice for potential clients, while suggesting how crucial these early collaborative stages are within the journey towards a fully tailored, modern home.

21^st Century Houses: RIBA Award-Winning Homes by Dominic Bradbury is available online from RIBA Books or visit RIBA bookshop.

Why sexism, racism and environmental catastrophe are interdependent

‘When intersectionality is understood as a subset of identity politics, the ideological conflicts can seem distracting from more pressing global issues, such as the nested crises we call climate change and the radical new paradigms such crises require.’^{^[1]}V. Mitch McEwen

Post-apocalyptic visions of the future conceive an architecture in ruins. Here, the ‘forest floor’ is moribund. However, in the ‘Binary-Free Zone’, it is alive and fecund – ripe for reproduction. Credit: Harriet Harriss and Severn Eaton.

Functionally extinct koalas. Starving polar bears. Ecosystem collapse. Mass species die-off. Rapid desertification. Multi-dimensional flood risk. Arctic sea ice decline. Ocean acidification. Extreme weather mortalities. Speciesism. Climate feminism. Environmental racism. While these terms are becoming increasingly familiar, the sum of their meaning and impact is not.

You do not need to own a naughty yet loving dog, binge on TV shows about octopus educators nor cheer on the interspecies adoptions that are routinely ranked among the most-watched YouTube videos to understand that humans are not the only creatures capable of empathy. Compassion, justice and ethics are elevated as virtues we have been encouraged to associate with the most altruistic aspects of our humanity, as many of the animal rights and ecological organisations evidence through how they choose to identify – Compassionin World Farming, Greenpeace, PETA(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Union of Concerned Scientists, Earth Alliance, Earth Justice, Friends of the Earth, to name only a few – reinforcing the notion that caring for others – other humans or other species – is required in order to at least acknowledge, if not react to, their suffering.

Pollinators Pavilion at Old Mud Creek Farm, Hudson, NY, 2020 by Harrison Atelier. The form is intended to recall a spiky grain of pollen and a bee’s bristling compound eye, highlighting the manner in which bringing a species into greater visibility may generate greater ethical regard. Credit: Harrison Atelier.

Until relatively recently animal suffering, human suffering and climate collapse were studied separately, thanks to systems of partitioning knowledge into epistemologies (knowledge frameworks) and disciplines. As a direct consequence, policy responses have been inclined to speak to each ‘problem’ individually, but not collectively, or intersectionally. Instead, the many different struggles taking place are not challenged to compete, clash or cancel but, when combined, to amplify. Whether you are a koala burning alive in an Australian bushfire,^{^[2]} a farmer starving to death in Madagascar^{^[3]} or a 60-year-old Black woman in Brooklyn dying in a heatwave,^{^[4]} intersectionality explains why these experiences of climate collapse are not only related, but statistically likely to be more acute than if you were a koala in a city zoo, a farmer in Canada or a white woman living at the gentrified end of the same block in Brooklyn, but with the means to afford air-conditioning.

Interactions involving sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, isolation and environmental catastrophe are entirely interdependent. The solution to one cannot be found without confronting the other. We must expose blinkered perspectives in education and professional practice, and set the table for a more inclusive engagement of the role of architecture in a global environment circumscribed by pandemic, climate change and conservative politics.

^{^[1]} V Mitch McEwen, ‘A brief architectural history of intersectionality’, Working at the Intersection – Architecture After the Anthropocene, Harriet Harriss and Naomi House, eds., London, RIBA Publishing, 2022

^{^[2]} ‘Hundreds of koalas feared burned alive in out-of-control bushfire near Port Macquarie’, The Guardian, 30 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/30/hundreds-of-koalas-feared-burned-alive-in-out-of-control-bushfire-near-port-macquarie.

^{^[3]} Kaamil Ahmed and Rivonala Razafison, ‘At least 1m people facing starvation as Madagascar’s drought worsens’, The Guardian, 10 May 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/may/10/at-least-1m-people-facing-starvation-madagascar-drought-worsens.

^{^[4]} Ese Olumhense and Clifford Michel, ‘Looking for relief as summer heat wave hits black and brown neighborhoods hardest’, The City, 15 September 2021, https://www.thecity.nyc/health/2020/7/29/21347387/new-york-city-summer-heat-wave-black-neighborhoods-pandemic.

How to give your practice a Spring clean

By Clare Nash, author of Design your life: An architect’s guide to achieving a work/life balance

It’s Spring, and for architects the start of the busiest time of year. Sunshine means more enquiries and languishing projects suddenly spring into action. But despite the apparent urgency of these pressures, it’s important to keep the business side sparkly. Juggling that with increasing workload can be done but requires prioritising and organising (boring sounding I know, but very effective in practice).

Marketing Mondays

I used to leave marketing until Friday as a nice way to end the week. But all too often, deadlines took over and it was postponed for another week. Now I prioritise this work, along with business vision and organising the week ahead. Because it’s a priority I schedule it on a Monday. Starting my week in this way sets me up for the rest of it. Marketing is intrinsically linked to business vision and your goals – what better way to start the week and bring some motivation to the treadmill! Thinking about the type of work and clients that CNA really wants adds a spring in my step during the more challenging work that follows. It all feels worth it, because I know where I’m going.

The 90-day plan

This is in all the business books; you may be bored of hearing about it. But it works. Big, important pieces of work, such as updating your website, switching software, writing a book, diversifying, etc. are all easily procrastinated because they loom so large. Broken down into teeny, tiny steps these mammoth tasks get done. The trouble with a daily to-do list vs the 90-day plan is there’s too much pressure to get it all done, today. An impossible task.

Choose your goals

So how to do a simple 90-day plan? First, choose your goals and always include a personal one - it should never be all about work. Second, make sure they’re ambitious enough: they should feel a bit scary. For example, 1. Win more self-build projects, 2. Double my income, 3. Run 5k twice a week. I would say a maximum of 5 is best. SMART goals (google this) are a useful way to check you’re being clear and specific enough.

Then for each one, break it down into 5 or so chunks that need completing to achieve that goal. For the first goal it could be:

Write a blog about saving money on your self-build
Post on Instagram twice a week with pictures of self-builds
Build my email list
Attend networking events and pitch about self-builds
Write case studies about self-builds

Then for each of those 5, write tiny steps towards each one: e.g. research nearby networking events, write bullet points for a blog, decide on a case study to write about, collect some pictures for a case study, write two lines of a case study, ask website person about adding a newsletter sign up to the website, and so on.

Lastly, spread out your tiny steps over 3 months or 90 days. Each week you should only have a handful of tiny tasks to achieve.

For women, you can add some extra magic by planning tasks according to your cycle. It’s like a superpower because everything is much easier with your hormones working with you rather than hindering you.

As an extra tip - including marketing tasks in your 90-day plan will help to avoid the feast and famine cycle. Because being consistent will lead to consistent enquiries.

Celebrate!

When you reach the end of the 90 days, celebrate your achievements, and plan out the next 90. This important work should now feel more manageable and will ensure the business ticks along nicely all year round, not just in quiet times. Now your to-do list is more exciting. Not just filled with any old task, these are tasks aligned with your goals. Ticking these off feels extra good!

For more insights from Clare Nash, why not get your hands on a copy of her book?

Clare will be presenting a webinar on 28 April around the content of her book, honing in on niching and creating a happy remote working team. She will explain how these enabled her to achieve higher fees, work on fulfilling projects and enjoy a good work/life balance. Register to attend the event.

President’s Picks: Simon Allford’s favourite architecture books

RIBA President Simon Allford shares his love of browsing bookshops and his recommended reading list

Have you ever had the pleasure of visiting the RIBA bookshop in person?

As happy as I am to browse websites for my online purchases, with books, as with clothes, one needs to touch, smell and ‘wear’ a book. Too many books are, of course, too heavy to be worn by anything but a coffee table! For this reason, I still harbour a fondness for pocket books that I can dip into – and bookshops that stock them.

On my most recent visit to the RIBA bookshop, I enjoyed a great conversation with the manager, met two old friends and reacquainted myself with some favourite books – some of which I hadn’t held in my hands for quite some time. These kind of felicitous chance encounters are what makes a physical bookshop so much more special.

Below are some of my best-loved architecture books, each of which I admire for different reasons.

There is no order to the list beyond the sequence in which I found them. Most of them are available from the RIBA Bookshop online or in store.

1. Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture

The master architect and builder in his own words – creating a classical vernacular of poetry addressing practicality.

The Four Books on Architecture | RIBA Books

2. Detlef Mertins, Mies

Like Palladio, Mies also introduced a whole new architectural vocabulary. Recently I have been reading Mies’ own words also – but he was a man of so few. This tome proves Ludwig Mies van de Rohe’s enduring legacy and relevance. For me he was the inventor of 20^th-century vernacular. His work stands the test of time.
(Out of print at the time of writing, for information on current availability email: sales@ribabooks.com)

3. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

This text entertains. It is, however, the fantastical drawings by the supremely talented, personable and engaging Madelon Vriesendorp that makes the book.

Delirious New York | RIBA Books

4. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History

I recently discovered, through a flurry of emails with the author, Corringham in Craven Hill Gardens. The block of flats in Bayswater by the young Frampton inspired me to re-read this excellent history.

Modern Architecture: A Critical History | RIBA Books

5. El Croquis monograph series

Whether they are a much loved architect or a practice as yet undiscovered by you, either way, the representation of other professionals and their architectural work – in interviews, studies of process, models and architectural photography – is always a delight. This leading Spanish publication, which captures that joy of discovery, is published six times a year.

El Croquis | RIBA Books

6. Peter Sulzer, Jean Prouvé – Complete Works

A hero of mine for many years, Prouvé was a maker-architect: economical, elegant and committed to improving the human condition.

Jean Prouve - xuvre complete / Complete Works: Volume 1: 1917-1933 | RIBA Books

7. Le Corbusier, A Little House

A pocket book from Corb that is manifesto light. It is a tale of a mother and son and a house with a view.

A Little House | RIBA Books

8. Le Corbusier, The Modulor and Modulor 2

I love Le Corbusier’s use of the six-foot-tall English detective as the ideal by which to define an anthropomorphic system of proportion. I have never actually believed in it . . . but the books are so beautiful.

Le Corbusier: Modular & Modular 2 Slipcase | RIBA Books

9. Catherine Ince and Lotte Johnson, The World of Charles and Ray Eames

The work of these two geniuses across all forms of design brings a West Coast sensibility to what can at times seem to be a somewhat pompous European world.

The World of Charles and Ray Eames | RIBA Books

10. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Freedom of Use

Another pocket book, in this case a write up of a 2015 Harvard lecture, by another husband and wife team, Lacaton and Vassal.
I had the pleasure of introducing Anne Lacaton’s keynote lecture at the RIBA Smart Practice Conference: Stepping up to the Climate Challenge in September 2021.

Watch the keynote here

Lacaton’s story of their work was a poignant reminder that architecture as a social art can – and must – address the carbon challenge, and the challenge of constructing a delightful new model of domestic life.

Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal - Freedom of Use | RIBA Books

11. Pinakothek der Moderne, Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil’s Alternative Path to Modernism

An architect of style, wit and humanity, whose works are a brilliant illustration of economy and delight. This publication was issued alongside an exhibition at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne in 2014 to mark the centenary of Lina Bo Bardi’s birth.

Pinakothek der Moderne, Lino Bo Bardi 100: Brazil's Alternative Path to Modernism| RIBA Books

12. Pitiot et al, Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect

I discovered modern architecture for myself when leaving school; I worked as a waiter in the south of France. It was there that I stumbled upon Gray’s E. 1027 House (of which I knew nothing) – in a state of magnificent decay – but the vision and the weather ensured it made lasting impression upon me.

Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect | RIBA Books

Environmental Design Essentials

For my favourite speculations on the design philosophy behind the imperative that is environmental design, I revert to Buckminster Fuller’s and Stewart Brand’s classic books. But now we need numbers, to set targets, to learn from exemplars in use and understand construction, so I have recommended two further more current books that provide guides for action.

13. Buckminster Fuller, An Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth

The brilliant title says it all. Thereafter it is simultaneously opaque and transparent – just like the man himself.

(For information on current availability, email: sales@ribabooks.com)

14. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

Looks at how buildings operate through the dimension of time as well as space, as they are adapted to meet the needs of their occupants. Urges architects to engage with the temporal as well as the spatial.

(For information on current availability, email: sales@ribabooks.com)

15. Simon Sturgis, Targeting Zero: Embodied and Whole Life Carbon Explained

Explains the concepts of embodied and whole life carbon to give architects the tools to take the lead in redefining how buildings are designed to achieve a low carbon future.

Targeting Zero: Embodied and Whole Life Carbon Explained | RIBA Books

16. Judit Kimpian, Hattie Hartman and Sofie Pelsmakers, Energy/People/ Buildings: Making Sustainable Buildings Work

A book for everyone who wants to better understand how energy is used in building and how to drive down operational energy use.

Energy/People/Buildings: Making sustainable architecture work | RIBA Books

Special mentions …

A few final recommendations, which may now only be available second hand, include:

Osbert Lancaster’s Pillar to Post: the Pocket Lamp of Architecture: Another brilliant pocket sized masterpiece and one of many that he wrote and illustrated.
AJ Liebling’s Chicago, the Second City with illustrations by Saul Steinberg: Steinberg was another master draughtsman and had considerable wit. There are too many books of his to choose from, but I will go for this one, not written by, but illustrated by him.
Salvatore Licitra et al, Gio Ponti: While I’m not keen on oversized books, rules are there to be broken . . . This volume, published by Taschen, is huge, but Ponti was a prolific genius and every page is a joy.

A Closing Quirky Read

17. Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

These Tales of life in a Parisian apartment block always evoke for me a world where filmmaker Jacques Tati coincides with Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline books, in a stage-set not dissimilar to that wonderful apartment block Auguste Perret designed at 25 bis rue Benjamin Franklin.

Life: A User's Manual | RIBA Books

On another day all these books could be replaced by other favourites – but that is the pleasure of making a current list!

If you want to buy any of the books featured here, you can shop the collection on the RIBA Books site.

Studying architecture - let's get started!

Dr Robert Schmidt III is a Reader in Architectural Design and the Head of Architecture at Loughborough University. In his guest blog, he introduces us to the RIBA Part 1 course, and showcases a suggested architecture reading list for students.

As you are about to embark on a lifelong journey of exploration, creativity and critical thought into the spaces that we craft around us, this is a tremendously exciting time in your life.
Architectural education will challenge and push you to think creatively in ways you would never imagine about society’s biggest problems.

But most importantly, you can’t simply assume we, society, are asking the right questions. Your first challenge is to start by asking your own questions and consider how we might be able to reframe or reimagine our world. Designers too often automatically jump into solution mode. You however should be prepared to dream – you have the chance to imagine a future iteration of our world that doesn’t exist yet. What could be more exciting? Fuel your design thinking with your most imaginative ideas. It’s of the utmost importance to be critical and reflective of contemporary society and how we can improve the systems, experiences and products that define it.

Be prepared to be uncomfortable (in your work). The design process can be messy and it can be unknown. Some students struggle with the uncertainty, but you have to trust in the process and be open to where it may take you. You will likely do things that you have never done before (and may never do again!). This may seem counter-intuitive, but you also need to become comfortable with failing – failure can be the quickest pathway to success. It is important to learn through doing, to get ideas out quickly, to feel comfortable in learning through a process of trial and error.

Architecture school at its best will excite you with the possibilities of what you can achieve – it should drive your curiosity of the unknown and propel a raw enthusiasm and inquisitiveness for life, art and the built as well as the natural environments. Make sure you bring a sketch book and set of pencils/pens to wherever you go, observe your surroundings and sketch daily. A key skill for an architect is to be able to quickly and visually absorb the spaces they have experienced and to be able to visually document and communicate them. Remember you have the power of the pen – don’t let go!

I’m always surprised by how many students think architectural education doesn’t involve much reading. Believe it or not, it’s still a good idea to read as much as it pains many of my students; opening your mind to new ways of thinking and seeing the world is crucial for architects; as well as having crucial reference books that support the further development of an idea. The books suggested below can be of special help as you are starting your journey. The number of references may seem overwhelming, but everyone starts in a uniquely different place, thus it’s important to consider which books might be best suited to your interests and development.

A relatively new book by Neil Spiller, How to Thrive at Architecture School: A student guide provides an excellent overview of the typical stages of architectural education identifying key learning opportunities and potential challenges. It can be a great reference to supplement the entirety of your journey, but it’s especially useful when everything is new and you’re going through particular activities for the first time. Just as important, there are a handful of books that we suggest to students that provoke thought on and reflection of their personal experiences, values, behaviours and understanding of our environments – Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor, In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, The Craftsman by Richard Sennett and The Feeling of Things by Adam Caruso. These books (and others) can be very useful to open our thinking and approach to design – our designs are often grounded in our experiences.

There are also great introductory reference books that will reinforce and/or broaden your understanding of fundamental architecture principles or ‘rules’: 101 Things I learned in architecture school by Matthew Frederick, Lessons for Students in Architecture by Herman Hertzberger, The Architecture Concept Book by James Tait and 101 Rules of Thumb for Sustainable Buildings and Cities by Huw Heywood. In addition, Will McLean and Peter Silver’s books provide an excellent introduction and encyclopaedic overview of the more technical side of architecture with their staple publication Introduction to Architectural Technology and their newly published Environmental Design Sourcebook. In addition to understanding the choices you have, it’s important to contextualise those choices to make informed decisions when you are faced with competing influences. Seetal Solanki and Liz Cordbin’s Why Materials Matter: Responsible Design for a Better World is a good introduction for considering material decisions.

To supplement your thirst for architecture, there are several architecture news feeds, for example, ArchDaily and Dezeen, which can provide you with a daily dose of new, quality architecture projects. There are also interesting blogs on Architecture such as Archinect and Design Milk as well as more skill-orientated blog’s like Alex Hogrefe’s Visualizing Architecture.

Like any challenging endeavour, architectural education can also be stressful. It’s important to be mindful of your well-being, to talk to others and to find activities that replenish your mental and physical health. You have selected an education that is like no other and while it does have its challenges it is full of experiences that will foster close friendships, warmth and mutual support to make the successes and failures of learning through problem-based explorations, not just engaging but life forming. Becoming an architect is not a short journey, so inevitably it will have its ups and downs, but most importantly, it will all seem trivial when you step foot inside the first building you designed.

Dr Robert Schmidt III is a Reader in Architectural Design and the Head of Architecture at Loughborough University. He has collected varied academic, industry and personal experiences exploring the built environment across a broad range of cultural and physical territories establishing two key strands of expertise - designing for adaptability and the development of digital co-practices for design. His work has resulted in several funded UK Research Council grants and publications including the book Adaptable Architecture: Theory and Practice. He has served on many international research committees and currently leads the Adaptable Futures international research group.

I do like to be beside the seaside!

Will Wiles takes us on a local, UK holiday, with this selection of books on British seasides and their architecture.

The pleasure pier is such an established part of the scenery of the British seaside that we forget their fantastical nature. They are “the most precarious and transitory of built structures”, writes Fred Gray in The Architecture of British Seaside Piers. It is, in some ways, “ludicrous” to build over the hostile margin of land and sea. A pier straddles three different types of environment: dry land, open ocean, and the ever-changing tidal zone of soft sand and pounding waves. The strand is inhabited by creatures including shipworms and gribbles, which feast on wood, while water, oxygen and salt energetically corrode iron.

The Architecture of British Seaside Piers, Fred Gray

So why build in these outrageous conditions? For fun, of course. Piers evolved out of utilitarian structures: harbour arms, jetties, landing stages and so on. And while some retained transport functions, helping passengers reach boats even at low tides, their purpose was primarily pleasure. Not bound by precedent, pleasure piers were able to innovate to a remarkable degree, testing out new structural techniques and outlandish architectural forms. Brighton’s chain pier, built at the early date of 1823, carried itself like a suspension bridge with pyramidal towers modelled on the pylon gateways of the Temple of Karnak in Egypt. Prolific pier designer Eugenius Birch’s structure at Bournemouth featured a pinnacled gothic entrance pavilion. Orientalism was a persistent favourite: advanced iron structures sprouted pagodas, domes, minarets and geometric screens. Everything about piers seems gaudy, including their ends: hammered by storms, smashed into by ships, destroyed in war, engulfed by fire.

The seaside pier was a broadly Victorian phenomenon – of the 100 or so built, only a handful date from before or after Victoria’s reign. In the 1890s, piers were being built at such a pace that a commentator remarked that it would soon “be necessary to alter the map of England, and represent it as a huge creature of the porcupine type, with gigantic piers instead of quills.” “The beach” is a relatively recent attraction – 19th-century holidaymakers went to the seaside for contact with the sea and the air, and the pier offered an abundance of both. “[Piers] enable the seaside to be experienced in a more intense manner than simply being on the shore or a seafront promenade,” Gray writes. “The senses – including touch and feel, sound, taste and smell – are all assailed more vividly away from the land. Piers transport people to other environments and, at their most powerful, may suggest other worlds, places and times.”

West Pier, Brighton. Trevor Crone / RIBA Collections

Gray was historian and archivist for the Brighton West Pier Trust, and is the author of a history of seaside architecture in general. The Architecture of British Seaside Piers occasionally over-explains and repeats itself. But it is crammed with detail and interest, and richly illustrated, including many photographs from the author’s personal collection. It promises to be the definitive work on a fascinating topic.

Come the inter-war years of the 20th century, the British seaside was losing its ability to attract better-off visitors, who were drifting to sunnier shores. Once again, architecture was used to try to lure people back. Art Deco by the Sea was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. However, that exhibition opened in February 2020, just as the pandemic was taking hold. Fortunately, we have this interesting book, edited by Ghislaine Wood, deputy director of the centre and curator of the exhibition.

Art Deco by the Sea, Ghislaine Wood

Art Deco was never a dominant style in the UK, outside a few limited typologies such as cinema chains, but it did develop a particular association with the seaside, which continues to this day. Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelson’s De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, completed in 1935, was one of the first modernist public buildings in the country. Widely disliked at the time, and closed and neglected for many years in the later 20th century, it is now once again the town’s most significant attraction. Just a short distance down the road, the small town of St Leonards-on-Sea is still dominated by Marine Court, a shining 14-storey modern slab designed by Kenneth Dalgliesh and Roger Pullen and completed in 1938. These buildings are still vastly important landmarks, and so distinct from their surroundings that one wonders at how they came to be.

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. Martin Charles / RIBA Collections

Art Deco by the Sea hints that the peripheral nature of the seaside might have helped – it was not closely watched by centralised institutions. But the style also owed a great deal to the ocean itself. Marine Court, with its curved end balconies borrowed from the liner Queen Mary, it was a piece of luxurious transatlantic high technology dragged up onto the shore. The expansive glazing and shining ferroconcrete of these buildings played to a new interest in the health-giving properties of sunlight and air. Moreover, they were simply new and different, at a time when the Victorian and Edwardian architecture around them was tired and unfashionable.

Marine Court, St Leonards on Sea. Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

As well as editing, Wood contributes half of the essays. Bruce Peter writes the essay on architecture, and another showing how sleek and advanced planes, trains, ships and motor coaches gave the style its associations with modernity, prosperity and comfort. This association was aided by the contemporaneous emergence of the poster as a distinct art form, as Gill Saunders explores, creating memorable pieces of graphic art that are still copied and loved today. Other essays look at art, crafts, furniture and – a particular highlight – amusement design. Thorough and detailed, with meticulous naming and dating, the texts are sometimes a little dry, but that doesn’t detract from an immensely valuable guide to a brief and distinctive moment in British design. It is splendidly illustrated with contemporary material, including large fold-out reproductions of some posters.

Bringing us to the present day is Funland: A Visual Tour of the British Seaside, a large-format collection of photographs by Rob Ball, published by Hoxton Mini Press, purveyor of nostalgic picture books to every arty coffee table east of King’s Cross. This is a colourful but forlorn trip around the coast, a terrain of slot machines, unappetising menus and garish, patched carpets. Neon and vinyl promises seem unlikely to be fulfilled in the dispiriting clutter beneath. The palette is of course unspeakable, with every colour unknown to nature, all fixed in a slightly saturated sunlight. It’s all rather shabby, but life is ubiquitous. There’s a wry edge throughout: we’re in the documentary mode established by Martin Parr in the 1980s and 90s, with its sympathetic but unsparing eye.

Funland, Rob Ball

That’s familiar territory, but Ball brings something new. The seaside vernacular is a kind of collage, frantic yet tired, with buildings, landscape, signage, fittings and moveable objects all seeming to emanate from different eras and different levels of prosperity. Ball has a splendid eye for exquisite corpses and bizarre architectural mismarriages. All through Funland are Victorian, Edwardian and more recent buildings, sometimes quite grand and sometimes on the plain scale found on any high street, that have been parasitised by the neon, rippling lights and elaborate frontages of mid-century Las Vegas.

For Lucy Davies, who contributes Funland’s introduction, this contrast speaks of “a nagging undercurrent of melancholy and dereliction, the feeling of something past its best”. Seaside towns rank among the most deprived paces in the country. But it would be a mistake to regard this dilapidation as inevitable, especially when the nation’s habits of living, working and holidaying are changing. A better way to see the seaside would be to look at the shore itself, and the play of ocean, sky and tide: an environment of constant change and reinvention. What all three of these books show is how the edge of the land has been a curious zone of architectural experimentation shomehow exempted from the rules that apply everywhere else.

Continue to explore our Seaside Architecture collection.

Review of "Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency" by Barnabas Calder – an energetic global history of architecture

By Will Wiles

When the great pyramid of Khufu was built, it was faced with pale, smooth limestone, covering up the massive, rough stones that can still be visited today. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing 2,000 years after the pyramid was built and 2,500 years before our own age, the limestone bore inscriptions recording some of the stupendous effort that went into the project. Forty tonnes of silver was used to buy ‘prodigious quantities’ of radishes, onions and leeks to augment the diet of the workforce. This was the immense tomb’s energy component: Egyptian sunlight, captured as chemical energy in root vegetables, being used to fuel thousands of sweating labourers.

And so it was for thousands of years, as the constructive capabilities of civilisation were fundamentally limited by how much food could be grown to support human and animal muscle mass, with land still devoted to wood for materials and charcoal. This hard limit on the human ability to build still permitted prodigies of scale and artistry, from the pyramids to St Peter’s in Rome, which today cast piercing light on the societies that built them. Then, not so long ago, humanity began to make large-scale use of concentrated fossil energy dug up from the ground, transforming the whole planet. Today, as Barnabas Calder notes, ‘the average American family disposes of an amount of energy comparable with the greatest rulers of the ancient world’.

Calder has written an energetic global history of architecture – energetic both in the vim he brings to a colossal subject, and in its particular focus. Energy is a handy universal currency that measures our capacity to do anything: sunlight, food, human sweat, and the outputs of wood stove, steam engine and nuclear power plant can all be expressed in the same units of joule or kilowatt per hour. Human states and societies are energy systems, and architecture is one of their most important outputs, embodying the social, cultural and intellectual norms that govern how energy is harnessed and deployed.

The greatest periods of construction have accompanied ‘energy booms’, when a single authority has been able to harness greater energy resources under its control, or efficiency has improved, producing surpluses that are turned into architecture. This gives Calder a consistent way of looking at a vast number of different human societies scattered across history, and understanding what they built, why, and how.

The ‘how’ is consistently the most interesting thread running through this expansive tapestry. Energy booms tending to drive specialisation in work, as a smaller percentage of available labour is devoted to the grunt work of survival. Craft traditions, such as the reconstruction of the Shinto shrine at Ise every twenty years, are the product of sustained stability – a proud boast for the societies that maintain them. Some of the paperwork from the construction of the Parthenon in Athens survives, providing us with the first recorded instance of subcontracting, with different teams competing for different parcels of work, and being subject to penalty clauses. Indeed, construction-related bureaucracy could be onerous: so many receipts were generated by the Great Mosque in Damascus that eighteen camels were required to carry them.

Calder stresses continuities through these diverse traditions: even the Parthenon, regarded as the wellhead of the classical tradition, drew on ancient precedents. He is at his most interesting when he draws arching comparisons between ages – for instance, that the Victorian St George’s Hall in Liverpool had a workforce about the same size as that of the Parthenon. But as the scale of building has exploded, precedents have buckled and mutated, unable to keep up. This is often much to the distress of architects, who are not the eager, forgetful blank-slate aficionados of popular myth. ‘If we had a distinctive architecture of our own day worthy of the greatness of our age, I should be content to follow it; but we have not,’ said George Gilbert Scott with regret. And what botched bit of historicist compromise was he referring to? The gothic Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station, today regarded as something of a success.

A paradox recurs throughout the story. Energetic advances led to efficiencies, such as standardised and prefabricated components and mechanisation replacing muscle. But they also led to waste as this newfound abundance was splashed about. Calder is even-handed when it comes to the profligacy of our own age, making plain the incalculable benefits fossil fuel use has brought, while spelling out the phenomenal waste involved. The canonical images of the Bauhaus in Dessau do not include the mountain of coal stored at its rear, as a team of three boilermen worked continuously to provide heat for the building, much of which disappeared through the floor-to-ceiling windows and into the atmosphere. These details are fascinating; it is typical of this book’s distinctive approach that the environmental problems of the Villa Savoye get more space than the Second World War.

The builders of the 20th century did not know the harm they were causing, but we do, and the question at the end of Calder’s book is what we do with that knowledge on a disastrously heating Earth. An energy transformation no less ambitious than the industrial revolution awaits, and at least we can go into it with our eyes open, understanding what we’re doing and why. But we must also make better use of the buildings we have, preferring adaptation to new build where possible. A parallel track of this history is what happens when energy availability subsides: recycling, generally, as buildings are repurposed or their ready-made materials are put to other uses.

The book is at its weakest when it reaches for un-illuminating generalisation to smooth out its leaps from subject to subject, but that’s easily forgiven in a narrative this ambitious. It is at its best when it bathes in rich detail of construction and how the art of building flowed into aesthetics. It is generously illustrated, including scaled line drawings which allow size comparisons of buildings through the eras – a lovely touch. For the general reader, it’s an entertaining and original introduction to the history of architecture. For the architect, it helpfully sets the daunting challenges of our day in lively and inspiring context.

Barnabas Calder, Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency, Pelican, £20. Available from RIBABooks.com.

Will Wiles is an architecture and design journalist and novelist. Novels include Care of Wooden Floors. He is a regular contributor to The RIBA Journal.

How to get your head round being an architect

There’s more to architecture than knowing how to design. Randy Deutsch’s new book Think Like An Architect: How to develop critical, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills has lessons on many of the other skills you need to work in practice says Elle Thompson in RIBAJ.

Lives in Architecture: Terry Farrell

Lives in Architecture: Terry Farrell is a compelling personal account of Terry Farrell’s life in architecture, as an influential Postmodern designer, architect-planner and principal of a leading global practice.

Farrell reflects on his most important and most enjoyable projects, satisfaction, obstacles and his greatest treasure in a new series capturing lessons from some of the profession’s best known and experienced practitioners.

Pamela Buxton interviews Terry Farrel for RIBAJ.