A Designer’s Mind: Reflections on Architectural Design
(Speed of Working: ‘Capturing the Violence of the Idea’)
Hussain Varawalla
Senior Architect: HOSMAC (India) Private Limited
Hospital Planners, Architects & Management Consultants M u m b a I
The French designer and architect, Philippe Starck, has a reputation for working extraordinarily
quickly. He claims that while travelling by plane on one occasion he designed a chair during the
period the seatbelt signs were on for takeoff. He says working at this speed allows him to ‘capture
the violence of the idea’.
In my experience of plane journeys, when the seatbelt signs are on for takeoff, the only thought in
my mind is that of the discomfort and boredom of the journey ahead. Mr. Starck must be travelling
first class, a design opportunity I have yet to experience. Having said that, I too subscribe to the
idea of the design process at its best happening in a creative rush. I recently described the
experience to a client (a psychiatrist) as akin to a cocaine trip. I think it made him just a little bit
nervous as to who was (or would be) using whose professional services.
It is commonly held that creative work is characterized by periods of intense activity interspersed
with times of quieter, more reflective contemplation. I confirm this as being my experience too.
Some architects have described the periods of intense activity as being like juggling. They speak
of the need to oscillate very quickly between the many issues with which an architect must be
concerned. To take your mental eye off any of these issues is the equivalent of dropping a ball.
This kind of concentration is extremely intense and difficult to maintain for long periods. I agree.
Every evening, after a hard day’s design, I feel the need to contemplate seventies and eighties
rock and roll, best seen through the bottom of a glass.
As Richard MacCormac (of MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard, Architects, fame) puts it “one
couldn’t juggle slowly over a long period”. This analogy, I think, describes the skill perfectly. I
have found this to be one of the skills young architects find most difficult to acquire. However,
they excel at endlessly debating within themselves a minor facet of the design. Each to their own,
as I have always said.
Richard Burton, of the architectural firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, shares this view. He feels
the design process must work very quickly, this follows from his insistence that no one aspect of
the problem should dominate. From his teaching and examining experience he identifies a failure
to work quickly enough as one of the problems facing students trying to develop their own design
process.
Michael Wilford, (previously James Stirling’s partner) refers to the “skill of prioritizing the stages at
which certain inputs are valuable as distinct from an impediment to the process”. Creative inputs
on design issues when construction documents are being prepared are not always welcome to
those preparing the construction documents, and these fine people too are critical to the overall
scheme of things, and must be kept happy. It’s not just about juggling, but also about knowing
which balls to pick up, and when!
There is also the need to contrast the intensity of working in the group within the office with
quieter periods of solitary contemplation. The need for longer periods of quiet reflection as well as
the intense periods explains why the design process cannot be hurried and compressed without
considerable loss of quality. Certainly, it has not been my experience that the quickest and
cheapest design process will give rise to the most desirable result. (Imagine trying to juggle too
many eggs too fast). (Undesirable results!).
In fact, bearing in mind the small part of the total cost of a building that goes on the design
process, this is an entirely fallacious and counter-productive notion!
Dr. Santiago Calatrava, one of an extremely rare breed of architect-engineers (he studied
architecture at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valencia in the Spanish region of
Valencia and then moved to Switzerland to study civil engineering in Zurich), believes that design
should have a ‘freshness and spontaneity’. He says this comes from working rapidly and
intensively at certain stages of the design process. He talks about the tensions between the
intense and relaxed periods of design and between the need to fight for the idea and yet allow
criticism of it. ‘On the one hand it needs a lot of spontaneity and on the other it needs
perseverance.’ We discussed this need for focused thought and a sense of humor being two
sides of the designer’s coin in the last article.
Dr. Calatrava has been awarded the Gold Medal by the Institute of Civil and Structural Engineers.
Way to go, Doctor! They need to be shown the light.
Although Dr. Calatrava is undoubtedly a great artist and his work is highly personal he is not
frustrated, as might be expected by a process which necessarily involves so many other people.
He thinks the architect should transmit a vision of something. I think it is very much about seeing
and showing the Path, the Way, something like Gautama Buddha. Great design is about seeing
the Light. And it’s not like it needs to be approached with the seriousness of a religion. As I have
said before, and intend to keep saying, it is all about having fun.
The Boss, Bruce Springstein, wrote a song, which was made famous by Manfred Mann and his
Earth Band. I don’t know what it’s called, but somewhere in the middle it goes like this:
“Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun…” There is a pregnant pause in the
music and then the next line goes:
“But Mama-a-a, that’s where the fun is…”
The refrain goes “Blinded by the light…” Oh well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s just a casual
aside, lyrics from a song I heard years back. Our circumstance has changed since then. Do you
think half-forgotten rock ‘n roll lyrics can define a vantage point from which to view the world? The
first ten correct answers will get their originators a CD of the Grateful Dead titled “American
Beauty” as a prize. So think hard.
To get back to Dr. Calatrava; he too speaks of the idea being not inside but outside him as some
sort of distant light which offers a target or focus for the process. For him the design process is
largely linear. He does not normally believe in exploring alternatives and seems to arrive at the
basic idea of a scheme fairly early on. For him this starting point can be remarkably fundamental.
“Sometimes it is just a gesture or an idea perhaps about equilibrium, for example.’
I like to think that maybe sometimes it could be a funny thing that happened to him on his way to
the office, for example.
Santiago Calatrava then represents a fusion of the worlds of the civil engineer and the architect.
He claims that his imaginative structures do not necessarily cost more to build but admits they
might take longer to design. He feels that to design too quickly and only to look for the cheapest
solution is both short-sighted in that this can destroy important landscapes, and is often not an
economical policy in terms of lifecycle costs. Most of his work has been commissioned by public
authorities who have been convinced by these arguments.
What I think he is saying is that you can make a good omelet without necessarily breaking (or
juggling) a whole lot of eggs, if you do it with care and cook it over a low flame.
Present and potential clients please note. Let us designers simmer.
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