Architecture &, No. 4, Winter 2019

Ideas from the Royal Academy’s Architecture Programme No. 04 • Winter 2019

Architecture& This serial publication is called Architecture&. The ampersand represents the idea that architecture is always connected – to arts and culture, to society and politics, and to everyday experience. Architecture& is published both as a bound-in supplement to RA Magazine and as a stand-alone publication. The RA’s Architecture Programme aims to inspire fresh thinking about the discipline through exhibitions, events, awards and publications.

The RA Architecture Programme is supported by Rocco Forte Hotels 2

P H OTO N I C K K A N E

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OPINION BUILDINGS BIND US OVER TIME Architect Níall McLaughlin RA revisits a housing block he designed to reflect on how it links the generations

Opposite page: Darbishire Place, in Whitechapel, London, designed by Níall McLaughlin, was completed in 2014

I often return to one particular building that I designed in London. It is a small housing block, Darbishire Place, in Whitechapel. Sometimes I go there when the attrition of daily practice wears me down. I like to sit in the enclosed square alongside the building and watch life going on.

Our design concentrated on doing simple things well without any obvious demonstration of architectural virtuosity. This seemed appropriate for an ordinary block of flats. Most rooms have windows looking onto at least two aspects, and balconies are tucked into the open corners.

The kitchens are positioned to allow parents to overlook the playground while cooking. It is nice to go there and see folk calling up and down to each other from window to square.

There are Bengalis, Somalis, Syrians, Poles, English and Afghans. After people moved in, I visited every dwelling and it was lovely to see how each one had been furnished.

Some were almost bare, others heaving with possessions; one was blacked out with heavy curtains at midday and a beautiful, decoratively bound copy of the Koran lay presented on a sideboard.

The block replaced a vacant bomb site where 78 people were killed during the Blitz in 1940. A plaque on a building nearby lists the dead – mostly Irish and English names, and it is especially sad to see the repetition of certain surnames on the engraving, marking the loss of whole families.

The buildings on our site were part of the Peabody Estate, which had been built in the 19th century for the ‘respectable’ urban working class. The site had been acquired by the Metropolitan Board of Works for slum clearance and the development of model housing. The Peabody Estate’s architect, Henry Darbishire, designed the square and the tenements. Only eleven tenants returned to the new buildings, as presumably the thousands of previous inhabitants were not respectable enough to afford the higher rents. These lost citizens were described

by Henry Mayhew in the 1850s as ‘poor Irish: dredgers, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, watermen… slop workers and sweaters’. Buildings on and around this site housed the poorest immigrants over the centuries: Huguenot weavers, dirt-poor rural English, Irish fleeing famine, Jews from the East, Bengalis and now Syrians and Somalis. Each wave stayed a while before moving on to aspirational suburbs to the north. The buildings on the site rose and fell, holding families and complex lives. They created a link between generations who shared the same space at different times.

Perhaps, beyond light, warmth and shelter, this is what architecture really is: a thread that binds the dead to the as-yet unborn. A frame that holds people together over generations and so situates all of us in time.

— Níall McLaughlin was elected to the RA in May. Darbishire Place is one of his three projects nominated for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

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COURTESY RICHARD SENNET T AND SASKIA SASSEN

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CONVERSATION SASKIA SASSEN AND RICHARD SENNETT In an RA event in October, the influential sociologists talked about the future of the city in our era of climate emergency. Here the architect Eric Parry RA introduces an edited extract of their discussion

Opposite page, from top: Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett

Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett are two giants of urban sociology, intertwined as husband and wife, as well as through their mutual, obsessive desire for understanding, engagement and change in cities.

Their conversation for the RA’s inaugural MacCormac Dialogue – established in memory of my fellow Academician, the enlightened architect Richard MacCormac – represented, for me personally, the tip of a profound body of thought. At the time of the so-called Oil Crisis of the late 1970s, I was a student of art and architecture in London, faced with following the prevailing bleak formalist choices of Rationalism, Postmodernism, Deconstruction or Neo-Suprematism. An alternative to which I gravitated with relief was that of an architectural and urban agenda rooted in a European cultural tradition.

The two texts I found myself absorbed by were Joseph Rykwert’s The Idea of a Town (1963) and Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1977). In a brief note about Sennett, the publisher set out his agenda: ‘The Fall of Public Man brings together Sennett’s interests in the psychology of urban life and the sociology of performing.’ These remain some of his driving agendas, and indeed some my own. Both Sennett and Sassen, who is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, have initiated many ‘gatherings’ but none more intense than those under the aegis of Theatrum Mundi.

TM, as it is loosely known, has brought together artistic practices including choreography, music, the visual arts and speculative fiction to consider the generally unrequited potential of their contribution to the design of the public realm. The American theorist Hannah Arendt, whose work I discovered through reading Sennett, wrote that ‘our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence.’

Sennett’s professorial appointment at the London School of Economics Cities programme, which was established through the will of, among others, the economist Max Steuer and theorist Ricky Burdett, allowed him to bridge the divide of theory and practice. Together he and Burdett helped persuade Deutsche Bank, through its Alfred Herrhausen Society, to support the idea of Urban Age – a research project that explores ‘how the physical and social are interconnected in cities’, influencing students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers. It is a pioneering initiative through which the parallel thinking of Sassen and Sennett has flourished, in what is now the most distinguished centre for the study of, in Sassen’s words, ‘cityness’.

— Eric Parry RA is an architect and Editorial Advisor to RA Magazine and Architecture& 5

Saskia Sassen Let me start by saying that cities are complex but open systems. But in many cases their dynamics have been destroyed by their never-ending expansion. Like in Argentina, where I grew up, or in Brazil, where you have cities that go on and on, which means that the poor are at the edges, and that they have an endless trip to work. That is not good for those people, and you can barely call these places cities. They are more like zones in which you think more of despair, and need, and what is missing. So a question I have is: do we need new language to capture this type of modernity that we are seeing?

I do think that there is something to be captured with the term ‘cityness’, which is about people living together, often with increasingly complex forms of difference. In that sense, ‘cityness’ does not just describe a residential zone, it’s not just about buildings, it’s not just about inhabiting, it’s not just about traffic. Number one, a working city is never going to be perfect; there’s no such thing. But number two, a working city has ‘speech’. ‘Speech’ in that classic sense of the term: voice. Its voice shapes you and organises elements of your daily life in ways which you probably aren’t even aware of.

Richard Sennett There’s one element of the climate change project that I’m working on at the UN that segués into what Saskia is talking about. Because, with issues around the environment, often cities have a kind of ‘speech’ which nation states don’t have. That’s particularly true in the US, in Brazil, in Australia where you have national governments that pay lip service to climate issues, appointing ineffectual committees to study them, while things get worse and worse in cities. One solution to this is to give cities more presence and more speech about issues of climate change, particularly in countries that deny them that speech. The thing that makes it difficult is: can we practise climate change democratically, in the sense of working from the bottom up, from communities? My own experience as an urbanist is that working from the bottom up is a very slow process, and we haven’t much time left for the work of climate change. The other kind of dissonant element is that if you practise democracy from the bottom up, you get differences from community to community, and it becomes difficult to arrive at a coordinated uniform result. I want to believe that the only way we can really address climate change is to address it democratically, but because of the plurality of responses to it, in the urban context it’s problematic.

SS What agency do we really have, then, as citizens living in democratic cities? We can choose not to drive, we can choose not to do things that damage the environment.

But what are the positive things we can do? One of them is to protest. There have been a lot of protests in London, over a thousand people have been arrested, which is pretty extraordinary, but I also sense a kind of hardening of the establishment position against Extinction Rebellion. How do you see it?

RS Well, agency comes in two forms: one is the desire to do something; the other is whether what you are going to do will make a difference. About the first, movements like Extinction Rebellion seem to me wonderful because they provoke a sense of the need for agency in the first place.

That’s alright then, if the establishment position hardens.

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DAV I D R . F R A Z I E R P H OTO L I B R A RY, I N C . /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO

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Above: Aerial view of crowded favela housing in São Paulo, Brazil

That’s the prelude to real political engagement. I’m all for Extinction Rebellion. I shouldn’t be – they’re not sober, they don’t engage in dialogue, they’re confrontational. People like them, or the wonderful 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, are disorienting and discomforting people.

We need that. I think that’s true about a lot of left-wing politics. It shouldn’t be burdened with policy formation or pragmatism necessarily. It should be provocative, it should be disorienting. That’s what the Left is there for.

SS To unsettle the existing mode of thinking, and to make visible the voices of those with whom we disagree profoundly. That’s what the city is there for, all these different voices.

RS The speech that some people are finding, to me, is a kind of fascism, and that’s very dangerous. This is a 7

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question I want to ask you, Saskia: would it be a different kind of city that would allow people to speak without descending into that kind of aggression?

SS I think that we must hear very right-wing concepts and engage. To say, ‘Oh it’s fascist’, is not enough – that’s too easy. We have this presumption that ‘we are the good ones’, but we have produced a situation in our major cities in the West where privileged scholars and intellectuals will never have experienced the everyday desperation that exists in many urban settings. We have not given voice to, say, the modest working classes or the unemployed, or the homeless, and so we speak from a certain angle. We have holes in our knowledge and so what we might read as right wing might actually be the articulation of a survival mechanism. I have an analysis, you have an analysis, and we have our own versions of what is right and what is wrong. However, our formulations will break down when you confront the reality of a favela, where you might discover right-wing language. The reason they’re using it makes more sense than for us middle classes to use that language.

RS I don’t really agree with you. I’m sort of sick of the verbal side of a lot of politics. My concern is how to translate what are verbal ideas of politics into things that are physical and bodily and built. There is as much politics built into the way a building is articulated as there is in a political declaration. I think that, for instance, getting people of different races or religions actually to occupy the same space – as in Indian cities where I’ve worked – is more politically consequent than discourse about toleration. I’m looking for ways to practise politics physically, both in how the city is built and how people in their physical non-verbal behaviour dwell in it. A good public space which is dense and diverse is more political than a policy about integration.

That’s what interests me abstractly about climate change. A lot of the discourse about dealing with climate change uses, rather casually, two words; ‘adaptation’ and ‘modification’. That has a very class character to it. In New York, the city is putting a huge amount of money into a sea wall to protect Wall Street. But there happen to be 8

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Opposite page: The shopping arcade at One New York Plaza in Manhattan, submerged by flood waters after Hurricane Sandy in 2012

P H OTO R I C H A R D L E V I N E /A L A M Y. S H U T T E RS TO C K

This page: Supporters of the Extinction Rebellion climate change movement march along the Embankment in London in 2018

people living on the other shores around that part of the Hudson River who are expected to adapt by moving. On a larger scale desertification in the Sahel is going to produce between 60 and 85 million climate migrants, refugees.

They’ll have to adapt. That is in the language of a lot of climate science. Rather than simply talk about class and justice, we should be talking about ways in which poor people are not thrown onto the scrapheap of ‘adaptation’ and we need to think about a different kind of ethics in which adaptation is something that we resist, because it’s infused with class character. We should be focusing on the object itself – how somebody living in, say, a poor barrio in Mexico City can get access to electricity or water.

SS The city is also the material space from where you can track immaterial problems, such as global finance.

Global finance is an abstraction, a system of algorithmic mathematics. I have been tracking the work of big financial firms, and how during the subprime mortgage crisis a decade ago in the US, around 10 million households basically lost their homes. What happened there? Who was interested in those modest homes? Global finance was. Why? Not because they were homes, but because they were material assets. We might see a building, but the system sees assets. And it’s better for this system if the building has no people. These luxury towers in Manhattan – they’re basically empty and these are residential towers.

Recently, in a very rich neighbourhood in Manhattan, an underground sewer sort of exploded over a lot of very fancy buildings. That’s a bit of reality that invites us to think a bit differently. We are finding the limits of our modus operandi in big cities. I think that we are confronting limits. The big city worked – it worked and it worked – and now, it’s beginning to degrade. And if you look at long histories, why should any form of power or of management last forever?

None has, really.

— The MacCormac Dialogues are annual conversations held at the Royal Academy of Arts that explore the social purpose of architecture 9

INFLUENCING

From top: Maison de Verre, in Paris, 1932,

by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet; Shinsegae International Headquarters, in Seoul, 2015, by Olson Kundig

P H OTO M A R K LYO N . P H OTO DW I G H T E S C H L I M A N . P H OTO: K E V I N S C OT T/O L S O N K U N D I G

From left: Frey House II, in Palm Springs, 1964,

by Albert Frey; The Pierre, in Washington State, 2010, by Olson Kundig

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INSPIRATION TOM KUNDIG ON TWO HOUSES THAT SHAPED HIS ARCHITECTURE

I have been influenced throughout my career by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s Maison de Verre in Paris (1932) and Albert Frey’s Frey House II in Palm Springs (1964). They represent the most important, impactful kind of design: architecture that is of its context and landscape rather than simply placed in a location.

The Maison de Verre (or ‘House of Glass’; opposite top) is a complete urban masterpiece. It fits naturally within the historic context of the older buildings that surround it, and its measured response to constraints and challenges resulted in iconic design moves, including steel columns that were originally installed to support a separate upper unit during construction. The materials are honest and tactile. The façade of glass block is static, but inside perforated metal screens slide or fold or rotate. You can rearrange the proportions of the rooms, block the light from outside or invite it in.

My design for the Shinsegae International Headquarters building in South Korea (2015; opposite centre) is a much different project – an office tower rather than a family home – but like Maison de Verre, it incorporates movement that defies expectations.

Responding to manually operated, eight-foot-diameter wheels, exterior panels open and close to modulate daylight. This enables the façade to be dynamic; it changes throughout the course of the day, altering the building’s presence with each adjustment.

Likewise, Frey House II (opposite centre) doesn’t shy away from engaging with its surrounding landscape. It’s a harsh desert environment, but Frey wanted to honour it with his design. He spent years studying the site, learning about how the sun moved across it and revising his design based on what he learned. Ultimately the right spot for the house included a huge boulder that juts into the living space. The home literally embraces the context. The Pierre (opposite bottom), a home I designed in northwestern Washington State in 2010, celebrates its surroundings in a similar way by drawing a stone outcropping into the interior of the home. Like Frey, I couldn’t imagine getting to know that special site and not celebrating it with my design.

— Tom Kundig is an owner and design principal of Seattlebased architects Olson Kundig. In an RA event in September, Kundig discussed the value of unloved American buildings such as strip malls and warehouses.

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DISCUSSING

INTERVIEW DANNA WALKER The founder and director of Built By Us, a social enterprise that champions inclusion in architecture and the construction sector, is convinced that diversity is about far more than recruitment. Lois Innes reports

P H OTO: A L A S TA I R L E V Y

‘Are we not due to meet at 11.30?’ Danna Walker asks me, arching a perplexed eyebrow above her trademark, black-rimmed cat eye glasses.

I load up the Google calendar invite on my phone to confirm that we were due for an 11am start. She apologises, but there is no need: she has squeezed me into what is a full day’s schedule of consultations and meetings at her Brixton-based workspace. Walker is Director of the

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social enterprise Built By Us. Its objective? That by 2030, the company will have been influential in changing the face of the architecture and construction sector, so that it ‘reflects the society it serves and draws on the talents of a diverse workforce’. Clearly, she is on a mission.

In a place like London – a vibrant microcosm of the UK’s multi-cultural society – diversity enhances pretty much everything it touches: culture, conversation and the city as a whole. And as ever-increasing demands are placed on our built environment – from the quality of homes and public spaces to the promotion of ecologically sustainable materials and processes – the need to attract talent from a broader range of backgrounds is greater than ever. However, women and people from black and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds, as well as those from LGBT+ and disabled communities, remain underrepresented in the world of architecture; and attempts to model, understand and champion diversity are unacceptably slow. Heads of firms are still engaged in a cautious game of Jenga, working out where best to place their diversity initiatives within their corporate pyramid, so that it doesn’t somehow cave in on itself.

For Walker, it’s very simple: ‘It’s about acceptance.’

Succinct and resolute, she is an individual who emanates a conviction that only great advocates have. Her curiously varied career spans 25 years. Once a shop floor electrician, she progressed into construction by becoming an architect and strategic project lead for the Construction Industry Council. She is also the former chair of RIBA’s equality, diversity and inclusion advisory group – Architects for Change – as well as being a former trustee of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. More recently, she became Board Director for Public Practice, a social enterprise that aims to reinvigorate the powers of the public sector by brokering placements for experts in the built environment within local authorities.

Since 2016, Built By Us has championed what Walker calls ‘untapped talent’ through a programme of workshops and mentoring schemes. She was inspired to set up the company after witnessing years of inertia, and also from a personal history of exclusion. When she proposed a vocation in the arts, at the age of 16, a careers advisor suggested she consider working in a bank, or for slightly more pay, become a despatch driver. ‘I can remember thinking, “I have no clue, no idea of who I am,”’ she says.

‘The things I thought I could do, I was being told I couldn’t.’

‘So,’ she continues, ‘I thought that if I could get into a trade, becoming an electrician, that could support me financially, but also act as a springboard into something else.’ Her two years as an apprentice were marked by a fresh set of prejudices and opportunities alike. ‘The guys certainly didn’t take me seriously,’ she says, ‘but I enjoyed learning from them all the same.’ When that springboard moment came in 1993 – via an access course to study architecture at university – there were similar barriers. ‘I was faced with all these new assumptions of how I should behave, and in both of those early experiences, there were particular lines around education and around expectations depending on class, gender and race.’

Those lines haven’t budged much since – in fact, they may have hardened. Gender (in the binary form 13

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we traditionally understand it) and equal pay have long been the focus of campaigns within architecture. The recently RIBA-launched #CloseTheGap pledge reflects changes to UK law, encouraging practices to consider the improvement of their gender pay gap performance as a ‘top priority’. But only 14 practices this year were legally required to report, based on a stipulation of having 250 employees or more – with the rest free to disclose data voluntarily. The move might also have been more convincing had RIBA’s own gender pay gap not increased by 5 per cent last year.

Race is not a new issue either, but it drew attention again in May, when Architects’ Journal published the results of its first race diversity survey – actually it was the first of its kind in architecture, anywhere. It was conducted in partnership with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust close to the 25th anniversary of Lawrence’s raciallymotivated murder. The survey reveals a catalogue of disquieting statistics. Of almost 900 surveyed, a third identified as BAME, 23.4 per cent of whom believed racism to be ‘widespread’ in the architecture profession (compared to 9 per cent of white respondents); 24 per cent of BAME respondents claimed to have been victims of racism at their workplace, with one claiming to have witnessed colleagues dressing up in blackface for an event; and 7 out of 10 BAME surveyees believed their ethnicity created barriers to career progression.

Throw the growing inequalities of financial class into the mix, and the profession is faced with a problem tantamount to crisis. ‘Now we have the high fees of higher education in place, there’s a language of not having, of poverty,’ Walker explains. ‘We’re not talking about minorities in difficulty anymore, we’re talking about the majority.’

The problem with many workplace gender and diversity reports is in the choice of measurement: employee percentage ratios, which are a poor barometer. ‘You can choose to employ as many x, y, z people as you like, but if you don’t cultivate an environment that’s comfortable for them, they will simply leave,’ Walker says. The missing ingredient, therefore, has to be inclusion. In the context of the workplace, inclusion isn’t just installing a genderneutral toilet. It’s a top-down, transformative programme that involves, empowers and values all employees. How easily can that be implemented in architecture, a profession whose gatekeepers are still resoundingly white and male?

Built By Us believes that if we see diversity solely as an issue of recruitment, separate from workplace culture, we just speed up the revolving door of talent. ‘This is a foundational and structural issue,’ Walker explains. ‘If firms want to retain and sustain talented architects, a much more holistic approach is going to be required.’

Built By Us strongly promotes its mentoring schemes to these ends. ‘The way we learn is often derived from individual relationships, or from little bits of advice we’re given in unlikely places,’ Walker stresses. I can attest to that from my own experience of the exorbitant, multi-year long exercise of becoming an architect. Our education is obtained from universities, our industry experience from on-the-job learning, and our final accreditation from an ability to memorise the complete works of the Approved Documents. Seldom in this lengthy process do we learn 14

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architectural savvy, that is: to know the difference between worthwhile projects and more onerous ones; how to market and promote yourself effectively without a portfolio of completed projects; how to win those projects in the first place; or even who in the industry to call when you need a favour or two. This is where the benefits of increased personal exchange – with industry professionals, or simply those with valuable insights to share – could play its part.

I ask Walker what the resistance to change reveals about who’s at the top, and what they believe they’ll stand to lose. ‘Whenever there’s a challenge to the status quo, people treat it as a perceived threat,’ she replies.

‘Actually, I don’t see it as a zero sum game. Diversity is genuinely good for business models and that has been more than well documented.’ In 2017, leading management consultancy firm McKinsey & Co examined over 1,000 companies in 12 countries. Their report found that firms in the top quartile for gender diversity are 21 per cent more likely to see above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile. Meanwhile, those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity were 33 per cent more likely to have financial returns above their industry average.

Walker is adamant that architecture firms unwilling to infuse their operations with a broader set of individuals, who have a broader set of skills, will ultimately fail in the competitive market as we enter a new era of innovation.

‘The thinking of the past was to be protective, but it never truly is, is it?’ Walker says. ‘Despite all the efforts to protect, we still end up with new disciplines and challenges.’ True. An architect has more work to do than ever before: services have extended way beyond the traditional remit, to include anything from fashion design to the latest VR technology. What skills then, does an architect qualifying in 2050 need? Would they even be called an architect? Diversity offers a clear departure point from which to engage with these questions. ‘Someone who comes from a different background will always ask the best question, which is, “Why?”’ As our conversation widens, I divulge some of my own sentiments on diversity. As someone who outwardly represents the underrepresented face of the architectural profession – I am black and a woman – diversity can often feel like some sort of perceived raison d’être, a pedestal I must take to proclaim all of the profession’s ills, while simultaneously being subject to them. I ask Danna if she has ever felt the same way, and whether being a spearhead for change produces any problems for her self-esteem. ‘“Yes” is the short answer. But then I can remember not being in these positions and feeling underrepresented,’ she recalls, half-smiling. ‘With the energy and drive for change finally here, we need to have patience with those who want to understand. From being 16 and starting that apprenticeship and having no-one to speak to, to now being that person who someone can approach – for me that’s a privilege and honour.’

— Danna Walker spoke as part of the RA’s symposium ‘Breaking Boundaries’ in June. Lois Innes is an architect and journalist; she has contributed to the Architect’s Journal and is a member of the Architecture Foundation’s New Architecture Writers programme 15

STIMULATING

PROVOCATION PHINEAS HARPER ON THE VALUE OF CAIRNS

Above: Cairn, SaintMichel-de-Dèze, Lozère, 2019, by Phineas Harper

Since prehistory, cairns have stood as collectively built pieces of wayfinding infrastructure. Simple columns of rocks made and maintained organically by travellers to mark paths in remote places. In fine weather, walkers pick up nearby rocks and place them on the cairn, constantly maintaining the humble structure as they pass.

As fog descends, cairns stand out from the gloom, allowing the lost to find their way to safety. There is no exchange of money and no commissioning client. Yet from nothing, useful, even life-saving architectural elements emerge. In monetary terms cairns are worthless but what could be more valuable?

— This text and image was on display in ‘What is Radical Today?’, an RA Architecture Studio show (6 Sep–7 Nov) that featured 40 responses to the question in the show’s title. Phineas Harper is Chief Curator of the Oslo Triennale and Deputy Director of the Architecture Foundation.

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Editors Kate Goodwin and Sam Phillips Deputy Editor Imogen Greenhalgh Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Design and Art Direction S-T Contributors Phineas Harper, Lois Innes, Tom Kundig, Alastair Levy, Níall McLaughlin RA, Eric Parry RA, Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett Special thanks Justin McGuirk, chair of the conversation between Sassen and Sennett Cover image Maison de Verre, Paris (detail of exterior), 1927–32, by Pierre Chareau Photo: Michael Halberstadt © Arcaid 2019