Witold Rybczynski: Coming to terms with architecture.

Architecture and the crisis of meaning

0:00Hello. Rejecting Nicholas Pevner's axiom about cathedrals versus bus shelters, in my youth it became de rigueur to preach the mantra that anything built is architecture, because architecture is that which is built. My eyes tell me that this idea abides. This might seem quite a generous position, egalitarian, and a bit easier than having to be selective, conscientious, and even perhaps principled. But where has this openness got us? Well, away from certain strains of Western intelligentsia's exceptionalism, perhaps, and that's good, but also towards a crisis of meaning and common identity, spatial ambivalence, and banality, threats which historically architecture has stood us a bullock against.

In this episode of the Heirs for Architecture podcast, Totem, Canadian-American architect, professor, and writer, Vitold Rybczynski, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with me about his forthcoming book, What Architecture Is, published by Yale University Press this year. Rather than the perhaps more expected question, what is architecture, Vitold turns it, and us around.

0:57What architecture is, is composed of seven chapters, riffing on John Ruskin's Seven Lamps, exploring the value of history, order, ornament, meaning beauty, drawing, and place, but answering, too, to the critics of his 2013, How Architecture Works, a humanist's toolkit, giving us, the readers, the framework to judge buildings and not just to explain them. Grappling with these, perhaps, architecture can find its public and speak to it, becoming, again, the home of our collective memory, meaning, and experience. Vitold tells his story, which is a good one, and we approach, after a manner, the what and the why of his book's propositions, sploshing around in his lovely prose.

1:35A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

Growing up with an odd background

1:42Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted, honoured, and very privileged today to be talking to the eminent writer, scholar, architect, Vitold Rybczynski. Professor, thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, I mean, the pleasure is all mine, really. We're going to be talking about your very recent book, What Architecture Is, which you published with Yale University Press this year, and features your own drawings, before we get to that, because it's a very interesting book.

2:20I think it's a very timely book as well, and hopefully we'll get to dance around in its pages a while. Before we get to that, Vitold, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Well, I'm a mixture of many things. My parents were Poles. They ended up in Edinburgh, which is where I was born, during the Second World War.

2:50There were a lot of Poles. The Polish army was basically in Edinburgh after Dunkirk. And so I was born there. I was raised in England. I went to school in London. And then when I was 10 years old, my parents emigrated to Canada. So I grew up in Montreal, went to school there and worked there. I have an odd background for an architect, because I've sort of done everything. I've been a registered architect. I've designed houses for people.

3:22I built my own house, which some architects do and some pointedly don't. But I've also been involved in architectural research at the university. I was working for many years on minimum cost housing, which was really third world housing, as it was called then. And this was the tail end of the 60s, sort of the whole earth catalog, geodesic domes. All that gets mixed up in it.

3:53And at one point, I was an expert in composting toilets. And then I started writing. And the writing, I enjoyed the writing. And I had a small success in it. So I continued. And so I brought kind of the different experience to writing, not exclusively about architecture. And my writing was never academic. I had my academic research, and that was separate. And the writing was like a hobby, something to get away from academic writing.

4:27And which, as you know, is very intentionally objective, kind of cool, fact-driven. And so the writing I could do outside the university was the opposite. And it was personal. I could tell stories about my experiences, both of architecture and of life. And so I really enjoyed that. And I've spent most of my time, spare time, outside the university doing that.

4:59And because it wasn't tied to my specialty, I ended up writing about many subjects. My first books, actually, were not about architecture. They were about technology. And I sort of drifted into architecture.

Drifting into writing about trade subjects

5:16Architecture, outside of a very small, specialized field of architectural books, is not really a subject that most publishers are much interested in. Because people don't buy books about architecture. They're barely, sadly, barely aware of it. As architectures, when I meet people and they ask me that I'm an architect, they're always amazed, but also kind of speechless. They don't know what to say. They've never met an architect. They're not completely sure what an architect does.

5:50And so it's an odd field, which has a kind of, it's a mysterious field for most people. And I think, so because I was writing trade books, I wasn't writing academic books. I had to write, I wanted to write books that people actually bought. And a friend, as a friend of mine, a biographer once told me that the real challenge for a writer is to get people to turn the page.

6:20And that is what writing is about. And of course, academic writing is not about turning the page, because you've got a kind of captive, very small captive audience who is going to read whatever you write, because that's maybe the field that they're interested in or specialize in. But writing for the, for, for, in the sort of trade books is very different. And so I kind of drifted into architecture. Home was a book which wasn't really about architecture. It was about domestic life.

6:52And it was, it was my attempt to get closer to architecture, but deal with things that people were actually interested in. I was interested in. I, I've always written books about things I don't know much about. And it's been a way of learning about things. And I'm old enough that when I started, you just went to the library if you wanted to find out information. And the trick was always to find the shelf with the books on the subject that you were interested in. And once you got to the shelf, then you could start going through the books.

7:26And I was writing about subjects that I knew nothing about. So I was discovering, by reading bibliographies and footnotes and things, you know, who was writing about this. I wrote a book about the weekend, for instance. I got, I was just interested in the, the, what, where did this come from? This, we all have weekends, we take them for granted. And I realized that in those days, you looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, that it was a very new word. It wasn't, didn't have an ancient history that, you know, the Romans didn't have weekends and the Middle Ages didn't have weekends.

7:58And it's all comes very recently. So learning about subjects that I didn't know much about was, was part of the sort of process of discovery and searching and, and, and hanging out in, in libraries, which I always enjoyed in the stacks of libraries. Uh, McGill, where I went to school in Montreal, had a, had open stacks. So you could actually go and wander around the stacks and find things that way. You didn't have to know ahead of time.

8:30And, you know, card indexes are not terrifically useful unless you actually know the book that you're looking for, but they're not organized in a way that, that makes it easy to find things. But stacks are, because the subjects are grouped. And so that, that became a way of, for me, of doing research. All, again, always in these fields that were, tended to be either outside architecture or, or connected to architecture, but not in, not directly.

Building a house and understanding architects

9:02And then, of course, eventually I did finally get to write about architecture itself. Well, I can't remember, well, I wrote a book about the house, my wife and I built a house ourselves. This was in Canada. And, uh, I wrote a book about that. And, uh, it was, all, all books for me start at different places. And this was, I was on a, on a research trip with, which my wife accompanied me on in China. And I remember in those days, this would have been in the eighties, I guess, you, you, you didn't, it wasn't very open.

9:38So you ended up hanging out in the university a lot, wherever you were visiting. And I remember telling a story to a, I think it was a Belgian engineer who was, who was also a visitor. And I, and I told him the story of our house, which is a convoluted and interesting story. And he said, oh, that's, that's wonderful. You should write about that. That's an interesting story. And I had never thought about it. And that was my first kind of architecture book, because it was a book about, partly about building a house, but not so much about the nuts and bolts of building a house, but how an architect thinks about a house.

10:13And this is home, a short history of an idea, which came out in 1986, didn't it? Home was in 86 or 87. And the book about my house was called The Most Beautiful House in the World. And that was, that was this book about, partly about how architects think and how architects, I had kept all these sketchbooks when I was designing the house. And without having any thought of writing about it, I just, it was just, they were sketchbooks. That's what architects do. And so, so I had, I, I had this huge kind of research material, which was my own sketchbooks.

10:50And then, and was also partly trying to understand what was I actually doing? Why was I making this decision or that decision? What was, what was going on? And, and so it was a book that people could relate to because it was about, people understand houses. They don't understand buildings. They're too complicated. But houses, everybody in America, especially, the majority of people still live in houses. And so, a house is something familiar. And so, that book did reasonably well.

11:23And then I did other books.

The biography of a building

11:25I, I ended up writing a book, which took me to England a lot, which was about Norman Foster and the Sainsburys. And they were his first major clients. And he designed that, an art museum at University of East Anglia or, yes, East Anglia. And so, this, and that was an attempt to understand, to kind of, it was called the biography of a building. And it was an attempt to follow, starting with the clients, how does a building actually take place?

11:58Especially in an exceptional building, which that is, how does it, how does it happen? What, what, I mean, architecture books always put the architect at center stage, but of course, he isn't really at center stage because the client is where it all starts. And what goes on in the building isn't the architect's decision. It's whatever the, the brief is, the program that the client, in this case, there was the Sainsburys who collected art, but there was also the university, which is where, what they were donating the art and the building to.

12:34And so, it was an interesting book. And it was interesting to write about because most of the people, not everybody, but most of the people involved were still alive. So, I could interview people and talk to people.

12:46Even Norman Foster, although he was kind of wary at the beginning, he wasn't sure what I was doing. And architecture is an interesting profession to write about because the, the architects have clients and all sorts of things happen during the design of a building. But many of them are, are not the things that the architect wants to talk about because the architect is in a position always of thinking about where's the next client going to come from?

13:18It's not, it's not, it's not like making consumer products where if you get a good consumer products, you sort of hit the jackpot and then you, you sell a lot of them and that, and then you just keep selling them and improving it. But an architect works, it's an, it's a very unusual profession because every building is a new beginning. There's a new client, there's a new client, a new building site, a new location, a new program. And so the, the architect doesn't mass produce anything, even if he would want to mass produce, he doesn't mass.

13:53So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of, he's like a, a couturier who designs dresses one at a time and for, for individuals. It's so, so it's a very old fashioned profession in a way. It has nothing to do with mass production. It uses mass production pieces to, to make buildings. But the way buildings happen, there's so many actors, there's so many contingencies, there's so many things going on, uh, and which are very rarely written about because either a, everybody's dead.

14:29It's a, you're running about Palladio, which I once did. So you can't interview anybody and, and, and the, the architects don't record the problems of a building. They, they, they, they want to forget that. And they don't want future clients to know about things that went wrong or things that didn't really work out. And, and so the architects don't really talk about what happened to the building after it was built. And there are always periods where people talk about, you know, post-occupancy surveys, how important that would be.

15:05But nobody wants to do them. First of all, nobody wants to pay for them. And really nobody wants to know the problems of building and encounters because the, the owners of the building don't want to know because they, they've just bought, paid a lot of money for this building. And they don't want people to, to think that they made mistakes. And then the architect doesn't want people to know that it was, everything didn't work out perfectly because it might scare them off. And so, so you, you don't really learn much about the ins and outs and architecture is, is really, you know, if you read books about architecture, it always sounds so simple.

15:44The architect goes A, B, C, D, and it, it creates this perfect thing. And in reality, it's not like that at all. It's, there's lots of accidents. There's, uh, many people involved. There's, there are difficult clients. There's supportive clients. I mean, there's a whole range of situations. Uh, building codes have to be dealt with and all, all sorts of, I mean, the architect doesn't actually build the building. The builder builds the building.

16:15So the builder becomes another actor. And so there's so many people involved. It is, it's almost a miracle that architecture actually succeeds when it does succeed. That's why it's so rare. It's not an easy thing.

Organizing a mob of craftsmen

16:28Uh, there's a wonderful quote from, uh, I'm blanking on his name now, but he said, architecture is the craft of organizing a mob of craftsmen. The art of organizing a mob of craftsmen. And that's really what the architect does. He doesn't do the building, but he, he has to organize all these people who do the building. And of course, he has an idea that he's trying to achieve, but he has to communicate it to the, to the people who are actually doing the work. And he has to make sure it actually can, can happen.

17:01And I mean, if he's trying something new, that's also a problem. He has to explain it to people. And he's not usually in a position to experiment ahead of time, which is also a challenge for architects. I recently wrote a book about car design. And the thing about car design is that there's an awful lot of testing that goes on ahead of time because you're going to build hundreds, thousands, whatever the number is of the car. So you have, you have a kind of period ahead of time where you're trying things out and, and this, you can, and you can even test the market.

17:38You can ask people what they think of this design and, and architects can't really do that. They're, they're, they're paid to produce the building. They're not paid to do tests about it ahead of time. And they don't, they don't have the sort of, mostly, they don't have the large scale organization that can sort of build mock-ups and try out things. And so independently, they, they have a contract to deliver a building. And so there are many cases where architects have tried to experiment in that process and often have come to the grief because it's, it's not the place to try things out because you just don't have the resources.

18:18And the, the, the kind of situation, it's not like General Motors designing a car and experimenting ahead of time. So it's, and again, the, the, there are talented architects who somehow are able nevertheless to invent things and to, to do things that nobody has quite done before, even technical things. And so that does happen. And it doesn't happen often, and it's a relatively rare, and it's, it's partly the result of, of just the, the way that buildings are built one at a time, which is in a way, the, the wonderful thing about a building is that the, the architect is the perennial optimist because he's, he's always given a next chance to try and succeed.

19:07It's not, it's not, it is, and it isn't like building a car because if a car fails, the whole company may go down the drain and you never get to design a car again. Whereas buildings are one at a time and one might not quite work right, but I've been writing about Louis Kahn for, for other reasons. And he, you know, the, the first great building he did was a laboratory building that really didn't work functionally for part, not, not completely his reason, his fault was partly the client's fault.

19:42The client wasn't clear about what they really needed. And he, he had a certain idea of what, how scientists work, but it was a university building and they didn't actually let him talk to the scientists. They, they had a committee that he had to deal with and the whole thing was very interesting architecturally, but it was not functionally very, very good. But on the other hand, within five or six years, he built another building, the Salk Laboratories in La Jolla, which was a great success, both architecturally and functionally, because he had a very good client who knew exactly what a laboratory should be.

20:21And Dr. Salk and Jonas Salk was, was the ideal client because he was interested in architecture, but he knew exactly what he wanted and what would work and what wouldn't work. And so they ended up building a really terrific building functionally and aesthetically, which is, which is a challenge always. Thank you for that. That's very interesting. Could, could we come back to something that you said, which I think is really important.

Volume house building and non-architecture

20:46You've talked about architecture and building and you've kind of interchanged those words, like casually. And in your discussion around buildings, not being like cars, well, there is a whole range of buildings that are produced more or less like cars, which is volume house building from Levittown all the way through to contemporary things, which is, they quite clearly are built around a quite carefully tested model. They are designed within, you know, from a material perspective to within an inch of their life.

21:16Windows are a certain number of brick sizes, you know, wet trades are limited on site by careful quantity surveying work and assessment. And the materials are obviously put through themselves, put through rigorous testing in the background to ensure their performance so that the funders of these large scale housing developments can rely on certain financial metrics. So I think there is increasingly that, and this seems to come to how I interpret the motivation for your book, and you can correct me if I'm wrong,

21:48which is that there seems to be this strange emergence of sort of non-architecture, which isn't vernacular, and it isn't sheds, you know, just large warehousing, that it sort of pertains to architecture, but is somehow entirely failing to be architectural. Yes, I think there's, I don't think it's disconnected from vernacular, because vernacular, even in the sort of pre-industrial age, there was an awful lot of standardization,

22:25kind of standard solutions to things, you know, roof tiles, elements that had developed over a long time that became a kind of standard language, even though the building wasn't, was more or less built by hand. So I'm not sure if it's, if it's as disconnected as you suggest, but, but it is, it is, it is the application of essentially industrialization to vernacular building.

22:55And it, it does become a vernacular, also, it shares with vernacular, I should say, the notion that there's a kind of standard way of doing something. And it's not, every time you build a building, you don't start from scratch. And just as, I mean, if an Eskimo is building an igloo, they know what it's going to turn out like. And it's not about designing a new type of igloo, it's building this thing that you know ahead of time what you're aiming for.

23:29And I think, in that sense, they share that quality of, of predictability and, and, and a certain kind of uniformity.

23:44I mean, I've never been a huge critic of, of suburban tract housing, partly because I grew up in it, and it was fine. It wasn't a terrible experience. And, and partly because, and partly, at least in the United States and Canada, it was, it was, it was a market that people agreed to. I mean, people buy these houses because they, nobody's forcing them into it. Social housing is a little bit different, but certainly market housing is, and, and I've written, I wrote a whole, a couple of books about the real estate part of, of, of housing.

24:28And, and, and, and one of the things I discovered is enormously risky, because if you're the builder, you don't really know if people are going to like what you're building. The houses may be more or less standardized, but there's always the question of the location, the price, the neighbors, I mean, the whole thing. And so it's, it's, it's a very risky business, high risk business. And, you know, often it's, it's, it's a lot of people get into it because it's easy to get into.

24:59It's not, it's not a complicated, it's not like building cars. And, but on the other hand, it's, it's, it's very, very competitive for that reason. There's always somebody, so you're always looking over your shoulders because somebody is coming up behind you.

25:16And, and it, in the end, I mean, I wrote this book where I, I followed a project sort of from day one through all the stages. And there was this stage when they finally built some model homes and essentially just then waited. Somebody had to show up and look at these homes, but there was no way you could, you couldn't even advertise because you're not sure where these people are coming from. And they're probably not local because that's why they're buying a new house.

25:48So where are they coming from? You, it's not like selling sneakers or running shoes or something. And so there was this really interesting moment where these houses are built, the model homes, the salespeople are sitting there and they're just waiting. There's nothing, there's not anything they can do. And then slowly sort of people drive around on weekends visiting these places. And some of them are shoppers. Some of them are just interested to see whatever, it's just something to do.

26:20But it's a very, it's a very interesting process because it's not like a market as we normally think of marketing things. And the whole sort of prejudice where people are being forced to buy something type of attitude, that's completely different. And nobody's forcing these people. And it's only very slowly after a few months, the builders, the home builder is discovering who is actually coming.

26:54Are they the young people or the old people? They actually don't know that ahead of time. And they thought it would be one, but it turned out maybe it was the other. Maybe it was retired people who were really interested in this particular place, in this particular group of housing. And so it's a very, very interesting to look at that on the one hand, the home builders, the people actually building the houses, because they were national home builders, big American companies that build all over the country.

27:27But on the other hand, they're building in a very particular place. And they're building for specific people in the end who actually have to make this big decision of buying a house and getting a mortgage and all of that stuff. And so it is an interesting business. And it's, I mean, I was writing about home builders.

27:57But in some ways, the same thing happens with office buildings. And in some ways, it happens with things like shopping centers and supermarkets. It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's even those buildings, there's still, they have to be built in places. And the places are always different. And the building codes are different. And the, the local issues, the political issues or social issues are different. So, and, and, you know, somebody who's good at shopping centers is not, doesn't build houses.

28:32They don't know anything about housing. They know about shopping centers and they do shopping centers, which is, which is why you tend to get these specialized, you know, only shopping or only apartments or only offices. It's, it's a kind of, urbanists are very critical of it correctly because it creates a very sterile kind of city of these individual uses. But there are reasons why it turned out that way. It's, it's, it's very few people are good at several things.

29:04I mean, there's a lot of, urbanists talk a lot about mixing uses, but that means you have to be good at housing and offices and shopping. And there are very few people that actually understand all three things. Most of them are, if they're lucky, they're good at one of those things.

What architecture is and dam buildings

29:21So what would you say was the motivation behind writing what architecture is? Because I like the inversion in the title. There's an implicit inversion rather than asking the question, what is architecture? Which you've already sort of explained is a complex thing that many people don't understand. And even as you were just speaking, you know, a housing architect might not really understand cultural buildings. They might not be a good builder of schools or whatever it is. But rather than that, you've changed it around and you've made it a kind of assertion.

29:54This is what architecture is. So why, why do we get to the point where Vitold Rybczynski, esteemed professor, feels the need to state what it is? Because also implicit in there is that some buildings are not architecture. To be honest about it, this is one of the rare cases where the title was not my choice particularly. It was a title, my, Yale had published a book called What Art Is. And so they were interested, they wanted to publish a book called What Architecture Is.

30:27And I had not, I had started the book without necessarily thinking of that. I had spoken to my editor at Yale about it, but I wasn't particularly thinking. And I actually had a different title. It was called Architecture and Dam Buildings. And it was from a quote of Frank Gehry's. Frank Gehry was in Spain. He was receiving an award from the Spanish, I don't know, from the Spanish government probably. And he, he, he was jet lagged, I think.

31:00And he was, they had a press conference and they had some rather sort of naughty journalists who were pressing him on things and asking like what, what he was designing these buildings that were so weird. And, and why, why, what did they really have to do with, with other people? They were, they were taunting him and he got really upset. That, as I said, he was probably jet lagged. And he, he said, you know, in this world, 90% of buildings are just shit.

31:34And he said, we're trying to do buildings that are, are human, that they, that people can relate to. Uh, and most buildings are just produced for purely functional reasons or financial reasons. And they're just damn buildings. And I thought that was, that's, that's what, that's not what started me writing the book. But when I came across the quote, I sort of, I liked that, his separation. And it was not inaccurate. I mean, most buildings are built thoughtlessly.

32:04And the architects who build them are thoughtless architects. They're not interested in anything except churning it out.

32:13Um, one of my teachers at McGill was Peter Collins, who was a historian, British, is by, born in Britain. And, uh, taught at McGill. He taught the history of, in those days, students of architecture learned the history of architecture, even though they were modern schools. They were modern architecture schools. But we learned, we spent two or three years learning about the past. And he wrote a book where he made a comparison between architecture and gastronomy.

32:45Because he said, architecture and building is like cuisine and ordinary cooking. I mean, there is a difference between, uh, a Escoffier and a person just building a barn. And, and in some ways, that is the difference that still exists in architecture. And that, you could, uh, you can't even argue that it's disappearing. Because while the, the sort of ordinary cooking part of building gets bigger and bigger,

33:20it's not like architecture is disappearing. If anything, I would, you could argue that in the last few decades, it's probably higher profile than it's been for some years. When I was a student, there were three famous architects in the world. And most people didn't even know their names. They weren't household names. It's Corbusier, Mies, and let's say Alto.

33:42And now you've got dozens of architects who are celebrities. And they're, they're, they're worth real money. I mean, if you build a building, you, you can advertise, this was designed by Gary. There's a building in New York called something, I can't remember the full name, but it, but Gary is in the title of the building. And you can charge higher rents for that because people know who Gary is. And there's a kind of prestige attached to it. That was never true in the 1960s when I entered architecture. So, so the, the, the, the, the gastronomical part of architecture is, is, is very healthy or at least active and existent.

34:21And, and, and, and Peter Collins' parallel analogy was very interesting because, you know, cooking and, and cuisine both use the same ingredients. And they both have, I mean, the cuisine has clients who have to eat the food. They have to, they have to, they have to like the food. You can't just cook anything and serve it. I mean, people have to enjoy it. So there's a question of taste comes in and, and it, it does tend to cost more to, you know, McDonald's doesn't cost as much because it's mass produced.

34:56And if you're cooking one dish at a time, you have, it takes a lot of people. And so it tends to cost more. So there are lots of interesting analogies between the two.

35:10And, and I think in some ways that's what the difference is between ordinary building and architecture. The architecture, for instance, in my opinion, it's not really about solving problems. It does solve problems. And a building, I mean, John Ruskin said, I mean, architecture requires good building. So you don't separate architecture from building. You, the building has to function well, but that's really not what architecture is about.

35:41And that's not what separates the good architects from the architects who really are just churning it out because architects ask questions and the questions have nothing to do with solving problems. They're, they're questions that interest the architect at that moment. And depending who he is or she, the question might be of interest to other people. I mean, Gaudi asked questions.

36:12Problem wasn't, people were not that interested in his questions. They were weird questions. And it was much, much later that people kind of appreciated that these were interesting questions that he was asking. But at the time, they were just unusual, odd questions. So, so the questions may or may not resonate with the public in a way. But it's obvious that the questions that Frank Gehry asked, when he's successful, they do resonate with the public. Like, these buildings are extremely popular, which is important for, to, to know, because we're sort of used to the idea that avant-garde architecture, nobody understands it.

36:50And, and it takes years for people to, but that's not true with, with him. And it wasn't true with Palladio either. And Palladio, I wrote a book about it, and so it comes to mind, but he, for instance, he asked the question, how do I take a farmhouse and make it kind of Roman? And, and, and so he sticks, and his solution, a very practical solution was to stick a temple front on a farmhouse. So, so it was a farmhouse, but it had these columns and a pediment and at the front.

37:23The rest of it was very conventional, but it was not, he wasn't solving a problem. Nobody said, nobody had a problem with, with villas in the Veneto and how do you make them Roman? And that was a question he asked, and it was very popular. I mean, he built 40 of these things and it would sort of, it got him out of the Veneto and into Venice. And then he got to do the churches, which was what architects really wanted to do in the Renaissance. That was the sort of pinnacle was, the pinnacle was the Pope, but a cardinal would do.

37:58And, and a church is where you could really practice the great art of architecture, because it, it, you had the means and, but, but he started with something much more modest. And so, so asking questions is what separates. And I, I, I don't know enough about gastronomy to know, but my guess is that, you know, what if you combine Malayan cooking with French cooking? What do you, what happens? I mean, there is a question. And I mean, some, sometimes it's an interesting answer.

38:31Sometimes it isn't, but the question is not problem solving. It's something else. And I think that's what identifies or separates architecture from ordinary building. Not that it's, it's not that we don't need ordinary building because we, we always have. And vernacular architecture has always existed. And the, the, the farmhouses that Palladio sort of modified or converted are all the result of vernacular building, the way the roofs, the roof tiles, the, the, the brick construction

39:05for the walls and all of that stuff is, he's not inventing anything. He's just using what, what anybody would use, whatever they were building in, in a sort of rural situation that he found himself in. So I can't remember the question anymore, but it has, it, it's, there is a sort of, I don't know if it's a demand, but there's something about architecture that, that keeps, keeps,

39:40keeps it alive. And I mentioned this in the book.

Architecture as the art of asking questions

39:44I mean, there are many reasons for building architecture. Impressing people is one reason that people build architecture, commemorating things, creating an environment of, I mean, if you're, if you're designing a concert hall, it really doesn't need to, functionally doesn't need to be as, as fancy as they usually are, but it, it's because you're celebrating a special event for the concert goers. That evening is going out, dressing up, and, and the building somehow has to support all

40:19that. And the, the, the challenge for the modern architect is, is how do I, how do I make that celebratory atmosphere and still make a modern building, you know, without necessarily reproducing the atmosphere of a 18th century, 19th century opera house? Can I do that? And so, so there, again, it's a, it's not a problem solving in the sense of there's acoustical

40:50problems. That's probably, but there are specialists who do that, not architects. Architects rely on acousticians to do that, and they, they work together with them, but they're not, it's, they're not solving that problem, the architectural problem, and I write this in the book at one point, talking about green building, that green building is not a bad thing, it's a good thing, but it's not an architectural thing. It's not, doesn't make architecture, just as wrought iron didn't make architecture.

41:20You had to, you had to find a way to use wrought iron, say, your building in the 19th century, you know, to, to make a crystal palace or a Eiffel Tower, it wasn't, it wasn't, just using wrought iron didn't produce anything, you, you had to, an architect in, in both cases, or Paxton wasn't really an architect, but he had an architectural intelligence, certainly, but you had to find a way to use it that created something that was, in the case of Crystal Palace, I mean, something

41:52that was both very traditional, because it's basically a basilica, but it's, it's made out of glass. I mean, nobody had ever done that before, and it, again, it wasn't solving a problem of how do you, we want to build a glass building, it was, it was a discovery that you could build a glass building, and if you wanted to build a glass building, you know, how would you do it? And, and Paxton was just smart enough to figure out these, the technical ways that you could actually do it, with, with not terribly advanced technology at that point.

42:27I do like this idea of architecture being the, the art of asking questions, but it seems to me to suggest that, well, it gives the architect a lot of authority, it also becomes complicated because, in a way, who are they to ask questions? So I'm trying to think about, what this does in terms of our topography of architects, right? There are the architects that ask questions, the Rem Koolhauses, the Frank Gehrys, the Paxtons, and then there is the other ones. So we kind of create this strange issue, which is that, because most people are

43:01solving problems, quite simple technical problems about putting an extension on the back of a house, or getting enough light into a new roof extension, or even in terms of schools, for example, how do you make sure 1000 children can move every 40 minutes around a building? Do they become not architects? In a way, I would say yes. I once wrote an article about a Walt Disney theme park. And I met these, what do they call the, the Mouseketeers, not the Mouseketeers, but the Imagineers. The Imagineers were

43:35the people who actually design and build the theme parks. And they include architects, but they also included all kinds of engineers, artists, and the amount, I mean, they knew so much about, they could, about solving the problems that you would, that you just brought up. How do you move thousands of people through, how do you get them out of their cars and into the theme park, so they're still happy people when they get to the theme park and not frustrated and angry? And how do you design,

44:06how do you design a gate that, you know, has to open and close thousands of times a day, and it doesn't fall apart? I mean, they had an enormous fountain of knowledge about what they were doing. And, and as I said, there were, there were certainly architects among them, but there were also many, many other people. And, and the, so there is a problem, I suppose, in just calling everybody an architect. And, you know, the engineers solved this problem because they, they started out

44:44as they were all engineers, but now you have electrical engineers and mechanical engineers and civil engineers, and they, they, they split it all up. And architects always resisted that. They always, so when you graduate from the school of, from a school of architecture and then you get registered, you pass an exam and you, theoretically, you're supposed to be able to design anything, but of course you can't. I mean, I, I was a licensed architect at one point. I couldn't design a high rise building. I didn't know enough about it. I didn't have any experience in that at all. I could

45:16design houses for people, which is what I did. And yet, theoretically, I was, I was a licensed architect. So the, the law said I could, I could stamp drawings for a 40-story building. That was perfectly legal. So, so maybe architecture kind of dug itself into a hole by, by having this single classification. But, you know, you talk about kinds of architects, but you know, when they, when they graduate from school, they're all the same, you know, they're all young, ambitious people who are, you know,

45:54starting out, they have, some of them have, it helps to have rich parents, because the parents are your first clients, usually, or, or friends of your parents. So it helps if they are the kind of people that can spend money on an architect. But, you know, Norman Foster came out of a very modest background, and Richard Rogers didn't. So they made it, so they had a partnership. That was their first firm, was the two of them. So they were both talented. So it wasn't that Rogers wasn't as

46:27talented, but he had these other contacts. He had, you know, the uncle who was a famous architect. He had, he had social connections that Norman Foster simply didn't have. So when Norman Foster went on his own, he built factories, essentially, because that was, architects didn't want to do that. Suburban factories was the bottom of the pile. And regular architects that you didn't make much money, it wasn't high profile, it was no prestige. So that's what he did, because that, that was what his position,

47:01he was, his position enabled, his, just that his fact, they were very beautiful. He, he found a way to make them into architecture, truly architecture. And that's how he got his first job doing other things, because somebody saw this beautiful, it was a, it was a kind of loading dock at a, on a, on a, on a wharf for, for, for, for ships. And it, but it was so beautifully designed that, that Sainsbury

47:31looked at it and said, this is the man I want. I mean, he could do a museum. I mean, he's never done a museum, but he could, if it's as good as this, that's what I want. And so they all start at the bottom. All architects start at the same place. And, but, but you're absolutely right that, that the architect is very different from an artist, because if I want, if I'm a novelist, I write a novel, if people don't like it, they don't buy it. And I, I have to get another job, basically, if I,

48:06if I can't find publishers to do it. And whereas the architect is in his own different position, because the questions that he asks are not necessarily the questions that the client has asked. The client just is not an architect. So even if they're sympathetic, they're not necessarily thinking of the same things. So I think it's, it's reasonable to ask sort of what gives him the right to do that. And, uh, I think one of the things that an architect has to be able to do is to convince clients

48:43of things. Uh, he has to be a extremely good salesman, basically. And most, it's very difficult to find an architect, successful architect, and particularly a, a, a good successful architect, who doesn't have, in some ways, that skill. It's not, it's not always the same, but, uh, Louis Kahn could mesmerize people. He, there was something about him when he started talking about what this

49:13building was going to be and how he saw it. And he had very poetic imagery. He could convince clients. And were, uh, Mies van der Rohe was not that kind of person at all, but he, he was, he was somehow in, in his kind of weird way. He was very charismatic. He was, he was, uh, kind of a, he didn't speak much, but when he spoke, he had something to say. And he was this kind of very solid person. So you, you believe that if he did it, it would stand up because he was just such a kind of,

49:48he was very, he was a very big, very masculine sort of presence. And it was, it was, it convinced people. And in fact, he was, his buildings did stand up. He, there are probably some exceptions, but he's not known for failures, building failures the way some architects are. I mean, uh, James Sterling, when he started it, he did a lot of buildings, which really failed functionally, you know, leaked and stuff, embarrassing stuff like that. Partly it was because the British were not very

50:18good builders. And when he started building in Germany, he built some wonderful buildings that didn't fail because the Germans just had better craftsmen that could deal with his kind of building. And, uh, I think his most, many of his most successful buildings were German for that reason. And then the, it wasn't, and it wasn't just that the Germans sort of liked his architecture. I think they, they really were able to build the buildings. It maybe had to, maybe they spent more on them.

50:50I'm not sure. I remember going to see Daniel Liebeskind talking about the Freedom Tower, post 9-11. And I didn't want to like him, but my God, was he persuasive? Yes. He was brilliant. I went in there thinking, feeling a bit, you know, well, I was in my early 20s. I was feeling a bit, um, you know, confident. Came out thinking, yeah, go for it. Make it bigger. No, I think, I mean, charm is something that an architect can never have enough of. It's not that

51:20all architects are charming, but, but it, it will make up for a lot of other things. And, uh, I remember I was, I was, I gave a talk once at the, at the library in Salt Lake City, because, because they were building a new library. And so they were inviting, they had a sort of lecture series about architecture before the building was built to kind of, to, to make the public more aware of architecture. And that I was talking to the librarians about how they chose their architect. And they had, they had,

51:55they had a, they ended up with a short list of about five or six architects, and then they would interview them. They, they weren't designing buildings. They were just interviewing the architects. And they said, well, one of the architects was Moshe Safdie. And they said, he, he came and they interviewed him and they talked about, you know, again, no design, just about how, how would he imagine a library and what, what would he do? And what was, he had, he had built some libraries before, I think it's Vancouver, he had built a library. But she told me, the librarian said that at one

52:32point, he took out a pen and started drawing. And it was this kind of hush that fell over the room, because he was doing what people think architects do, which is draw. And no, no architect had done that, that they talked to. But he, and he's, he's a, he's a skillful draftsman. Most architects are, not all, but many, most, many architects, Foster's a wonderful draftsman. And Moshe is too. And so he started drawing and it was like, they hired him. I mean, he built them a very beautiful library because,

53:06because that's what they thought architects do. And that's what they should do. And, and nobody had done it before. Yes. They spoke to.

Themes of history, ornament, and place

53:16We've been talking almost for an hour already, and we've barely touched on the book, which is composed of seven chapters, seven themes. The first one essentially being history. And you talk about order, you talk about ornament, you talk about semiotics or the way that buildings communicate. You touch on beauty and ornament. Chapter six is on drawing. And then the last chapter is, I suppose, the position of architecture within places. This is the place the chapter is called. And there's a really interesting spread. It's a very broad spread. We can't obviously talk to

53:47all of them. To come to the broad scale into which architecture sits, this idea of the sense, perhaps, and perhaps this is just me imposing my own character here, but the sense that there is an anxiety around the contemporary city, that it is not there, that we are losing to a certain extent, a sort of placidness in contemporary architecture as, as this amorphous beast architecture becomes more and more technical, driven by very technical regulation and criteria, driven by very tight specifications

54:22around materials, that there's a kind of anonymity and an inherent alienation emerging. Am I right in thinking that? Dr. Peter Robinson Perhaps. I hadn't thought of it that way. I started because architects talk a lot about place and about creating a sense of place and so on. And I started also, there are paradoxes like the fact that, you know, when the Greeks built Greek temples, they were identical,

54:54more or less, wherever they were. If they were building a Greek temple in Sicily, it was still a Greek Greek temple. They didn't change it because it was in Sicily or Syria or somewhere else. And so there is this, and that, in a sense, applies to classical architecture too. It was, in the periods when it was popular, it didn't change regionally. And at the same time, there are architects who have tried specifically to respond to something to make their buildings different,

55:33because they're local. And I gave the example of Paul Rudolph, who built a lot of buildings in Asia at the end of his career. And he actually says, I would never have done this in New York. This is a building that doesn't belong in New York. It belongs in Kuala Lumpur or wherever he was building.

55:56I think the notion of place is in some ways exaggerated today, the lack of place. You know, when

56:07Gertrude Stein said, there's no there, there, she wasn't actually talking about Oakland. It's because she was raised in a kind of rural part of Oakland, outside Oakland. And when she went there, the house where she was raised was gone. The place had been subdivided and cut up into smaller lots. And the garden that she remembers was gone. And she said, there's no there, there. That's what she was talking about. It wasn't really about putting down Oakland, which is how it's remembered today.

56:39It was the absence. It was like, it was the same place, but everything that meant something to her was gone. And so there was no there, there for her. And I think there's, if you live in a place, it might not look like much to a visitor, but there's, it's your place. And you do have, you do relate to things because, you know, there's the corner where you, where something happened that

57:16you know about. The visitor comes and they know nothing about the place. So of course, Venice is more interesting than other places, because there's canals and water and, and these beautiful old churches. And, but if you live in an ordinary place that doesn't look like much, it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean much to you. It just doesn't mean much to a visitor. And so I'm, I'm not completely convinced about the idea of a sense of place. I think, I think all places have a sense of place. And it has to do with

57:49what happened there, what, you know, happened there, what you, what you've experienced there. And so, so if the architect's job in that particular sense, when not dealing with, say, for example, extremely wealthy clients, where you've got very extensive budgets, and the kind of freedom to imagine here, is the architect's job to try and get to that social meaning of what the place is. And I guess this comes back to some of the other parts of your book that you mentioned

58:23in chapter one, around the past, but also in relation to things like ornament, also the way that buildings communicate in the chapter on language, and also in the chapter on beauty. There's this sense that the architect has a role in relation to common taste,

58:41the way that people want things to be. I don't know if that's just my interpretation, but that's kind of how I read it, that actually good architecture, it's sort of inherently embedded into its history, references its heritage, its, its forebears, its, its patronage in a way, doesn't issue issues around beauty, doesn't issue issues around ornamentation, for example, because it needs to speak to the people it is to serve, because it has, to a certain extent,

59:12a populist mandate or requirement, a democratic obligation. I think that's true for some buildings, and more true for some buildings, particularly public buildings, civic buildings. It's less true for residences, because in some ways a residence could be almost as, a private house can be as eccentric and private as the owner wants it to be. And then if

59:46the owner wants it to be bland, it can be bland, it can be very neutral, or it can be, it can be kind of outlandish and, and strange the way Gaudi, Gaudi did several houses for people which are very strange on the outside. So I, it does depend on the sort of building, and I think an architect doing a civic building has a kind of responsibility to, to find a wider audience, perhaps. But it's also hard to,

1:00:22to, the thing about architecture is that it has an immediate audience, but it also has a very long-term audience, because buildings last such a long time. So it, it makes it more conservative, I think, than most arts, because it has to serve many people down the road. You know, the, the typical, a person builds a house, they don't usually build a house when they're in their twenties, they're, they're not in a position to do it. So they, they build it when

1:00:56they've achieved a certain success in life economically. And so generally they live in the house 20 to 30 years at the most, but the house might last hundreds of years. So, so you have many, many subsequent people living in the house. And I mean, Louis Kahn talks about, about this, that he, he's designing a house for the owner, but he's also designing it for people in the future. And so he, he wants to give the house qualities which will last, as well as immediate

1:01:28qualities which are a response to the person that is, is the client. So, so I think good architects do both of those things. They, they actually, they are aware that the building is not just there for opening day. It's going to be there for an awful long time, depending on,

1:01:49in most cases, and not, I mean, I live, Philadelphia, where I live is an old city, it's full of old buildings. I mean, the hundreds of years old, ordinary buildings that are hundreds of years old. And, and, and some of them are, I mean, the funny kind of arts and crafts buildings from the late 19th century, which have odd ornaments and, you know, next to buildings that are more Georgian and more sort of polite. And it's, it, it makes for a wonderful mixture, all these different things. So it's, I think that's part of the,

1:02:24the, the allure of architecture is that it lasts such a long time so that, and everybody enjoys it. It's not, especially if it's in a city or in a, in a place that, you know, not hidden away somewhere, it belongs to everybody. There's a wonderful quote in the, I've been working on a book by American architect from the sixties. And he said, architecture is very peculiar art because it has no audience. Unlike a book or an opera or, or it's that only participants and it belongs to everybody.

1:03:02And, and for, if you're designing a building on a, on a public street, on the one hand, it belongs to anybody who walks by it. They look at it. And, and there is no audience because the, even the people living in the house, for instance, if you go to a, if you go to a music hall, you go to listen to the music, you don't go to look at the hall. So, so in a funny way, it doesn't really have an audience the way a painting does, or if you, you either look at a painting or you don't look at it. Whereas a building, you, you use it and then you're aware of it and then you forget about

1:03:37it. Then you, you sit down and you think, oh, this is very nice here. And then you forget about that. So it's a very odd sort of art. As he said, it's a peculiar art. It does get an audience if it becomes famous. I mean, definitely Gaudi's building have an audience because people go just to look at the building. So it, at one point, a building can acquire an audience and it can even lose the participants. So a house museum has, nobody lives in it anymore, but it has an audience. People come to

1:04:10see the house because it's either a beautiful house or it's an important house. Somebody lived there that was important or whatever it was. So it, it is a very different sort of art. And most buildings, of course, don't have an audience. They don't become famous. They, but they're used by people and they're enjoyed. And, and, but, but it's, it is peculiar in that way. It's an art, but it doesn't have an audience. It's just has people who use it and kind of react to it. They

1:04:44look up and they say, oh, there's the Chrysler building. That's nice. And then it's, then they keep walking down the sidewalk. So it's, it, it's a very, it is an odd art. And I think, I think good architects understand that and, and they understand the limits of what they're doing. And, and yet, you know, unlike if you, if you're the designer of an iPhone, you're designing something that has a life of, you know, five years, 10 years, it disappears. Nobody will remember it. But if you're designing a

1:05:20building, when you're old, the building is still there and people are still using it. And that's a kind of different satisfaction than, than a designer of something that's very transitory, even a car that, you know, if you're a car designer and you're an old man like me, you look back and you don't see any of your cars on the road. They're gone. They, they only last 20, 25 years at the very most. And, and,

1:05:50and so you, you kind of, you remember them, but you don't see them. Whereas an architect, you know, can walk down the street and see buildings that they, he did as a young man. And I think that's a very particular kind of satisfaction that is, is in a different category

Where architecture is headed

1:06:08than, than in other arts. I guess to finish, it would be interesting to hear what you think your book suggests about where architecture is headed, where it should try and head. It is in a state of crisis at the moment. And I, I think that's very, without wishing to sound patronizing, because that would be very rude and absurd, but very intuitive idea that architecture, by retaining its kind of comprehensiveness has in a way kind of damaged itself, unlike engineering.

1:06:40But where architecture lives in the state of perma crisis, it's now being challenged by, obviously artificial intelligence. It's been challenged by the rise and rise of regulation, particularly on practices who find it more and more onerous to produce anything in relation to regulation. How do we get out of this impasse? What does the learning of your book suggest that might be a way? How can we be designally or architectural now, given particularly in our cities, the financialization of so much building?

1:07:14I mean, I, I don't know what, what the future, what the future holds. And I, I have no idea what the solution would be, but I do know that from looking at history, architecture has all, has had ups and downs. And, and what usually happens, which is the best kind of thing I can suggest as a remedy, because it's, what, what usually has happened is that somebody comes along, an architect comes along

1:07:44and does something, builds something, not says something, not draws something, but actually builds something. And that points in a new direction. In other words, basically, the architect asks a question that nobody has quite thought to ask before, or at the time. And that kind of pushes the people who are less talented, less imaginative, less daring, perhaps. And they all say, ah, that's,

1:08:16that's what we need to think about. I mean, that's what, that's what Bramante did in the Renaissance. He built this little building, the Tempietto, and it just showed something that kept us going for several hundred years. You know, how to make a dome, which is not a classical feature, but how to combine that with the classical features that they all admired and wanted to emulate. And so, you know, that takes you all the way to the U.S. Capitol and Christopher Wren and all the domes, all those

1:08:48domes. So, one, one thought I had was, one is that it's an individual, because, because it's the nature of the art. And it has to be a building, and it's probably about space as much as anything else, because that's really what architecture, what distinguishes architecture from the other arts. It's, we create spaces. I mean, and then the, but then I had, the other thought I had is sometimes this, the individual is somebody from the past. I mean, some people look back, and they say, oh,

1:09:26that Gaudi, he really had something, and that we could learn something from him. Nobody has said that up to now. Except, I just read this book somebody gave me by Thomas Heatherwick, who really starts with Gaudi, and how do you make architecture that's not boring? And he looks at Gaudi and says, look, he did it, and we can, so it could be that. It doesn't have to be a present day. It could be a rediscovery of something, because that has happened several times architecturally. And because buildings last a long time, you know, the Gaudi buildings are still there, and

1:10:04these buildings, those old examples, I gave the example of Louis Kahn, because I think Louis Kahn still has many lessons to teach us. His buildings do. He's just too obscure most of the time in his pronouncements, but his buildings are not obscure. His buildings are, he's a very inventive architect. He's a very careful architect about the way he builds and sort of interesting things that he's trying to do. So it could be kind of a recent past. It could be somebody from relatively recent past,

1:10:40because he died unexpectedly, and he died at a terrible time, because it was just at the time that postmodernism was sort of taking our interest. And so his architecture kind of disappeared, simply because he died. He wasn't there anymore. And it was replaced by this very frivolous kind of thing that didn't last very long. But by the time it sort of ran out of steam, we'd already forgotten about Kahn, and Kahn was old hat and so on. So it could be that. It could be something like that. Or I also gave

1:11:14the example of how architecture is sometimes sort of jerked by somebody who's actually not an architect. So Vanborough was not trained as an architect. He was a theatre person completely. And yet he pushed British architecture in a new direction with this sort of theatrical approach, which was unusual simply because his background was so unusual. And he wasn't trained as an architect at all. He worked with architects.

1:11:47And so it's also possible that if it's an individual, that the individual comes from something else. Like he's a filmmaker, or he's something else, and who just looks at it all differently and pushed sort of... Sterling once said something about architecture was stuck. He was talking about the 70s in his particular period. But I think that's a good way of looking at it, is where

1:12:18either people keep asking the same question, so they're getting the same answer, and they're just going in circles, or they don't know what to ask, and they're kind of literally stuck where new questions are not being asked. And then, you know, our architecture today, I completely agree with you about your prognosis. We're sort of at the mercy of manufacturers. So they keep inventing new ways to use glass, so you get more and more glass buildings. It's not that the architects, one,

1:12:53are interested in glass. It's just that that's what's being produced, and it's convenient, and you don't have to worry as much about mixing materials. But it's not being driven by the architects. It's being driven by the manufacturers of glass curtain walls. And that's not good for architecture. I did a podcast a while back. I can't remember who I was with, but they talked about the high-tech movement, to go back to Foster and Rogers, as probably the most significant architectural movement

1:13:23of the last long time. I mean, outside Geary's Bilbao effect. And I do think that that was an extraordinary, again, one person transformed architectural practice, brought real excitement to it in many different ways. But I think the way that the high-tech tried to integrate technology into architectural design in an ornamental and spatial and pleasurable way, though I didn't see it when I was studying, and I thought they were a bit fusty. I can see it now. And I wonder whether we

1:13:54need someone to take on this litany of regulatory and technical hyperproduction of new types of glass and new types of cladding and new types of insulation and new types of damp-proof courses and so on and so forth. And it actually works out how to make it architectural. As you said in that rather wonderful point about ecological architecture not being an architectural thing. And then the other side for me is how do you make hybrid architecture? How do you encounter social and cultural hybridity,

1:14:26which has become commonplace, and actually make an architecture that responds to that? I think I totally agree with you about high-tech. And the thing about high-tech, it highlights an

High-tech and architectural contingencies

1:14:39aspect of architecture, which is there's so much contingency in architecture. Because high-tech really only worked in England. And the reason it worked in England is because by complete accident, in England you had a tradition, but you had this moment where you had architects like Foster and Rogers who were interested in engineering. They didn't have much skill in it, but they were actually interested in it. And then you had engineers who were interested in architecture. And that was not something that was

1:15:13very common. That was very British. And I forget now. There's a reason for it. It probably goes back to Arab and the fact that this Dane happened to end up in London. But it was very unusual. So the two things came together. The engineers who were interested in architecture, but were real engineers. And then you had the architects who were sort of open to engineering. And so they started talking

1:15:43together, which they never do, generally. And so you got this real blossoming. It didn't last. So there's always the question of why these things don't last, whether they run out of steam, or they're too difficult, or the people just get old and retire, or whatever happens. But I agree with you. But it was very unusual. And it really depended on a lot of serendipity. It wasn't just the result of

1:16:13having a few. And there was at least a half a dozen architects who were in that category. It wasn't just their presence. It was all these other elements that came together that enabled it. And the question of why these things run out of steam is a whole other question, because that's also interesting.

1:16:38There are these styles that sort of, or ways of building that start, and then they run on for a hundred and something years. They have really long, a lot of long periods. And then there are other things, I mean, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Art Wonderfuls. They sort of, they have, they explode, and then they disappear very quickly. Yeah. Because, either because something else comes along, or that they, I think in the case of Art Deco, it was like the mood of people was not ready for that anymore. They

1:17:13wanted something more serious, more, less frivolous, less fun, not, which Art Deco tends to be. Yeah. And so it kind of disappeared. It just, because, because, and it was replaced, of course, by modernism, of a more kind of severe sort. So it's, it, it's, these contingencies are what

1:17:43complicates everything, because buildings are expensive. So you need money, but you also need people, the engineers and the architects, in the case of high tech, that could work on it, or you need clients that are open to it. So it's an awful lot of things have to come together. You know, when, when Foster designed the, the Hong Kong bank, he had never built a building over three stories. And they had an actual competition. I mean, they interviewed, you know, they had half

1:18:15a dozen people, and some of them were extremely experienced in tall buildings. And he wasn't at all, but there was a sort of unusual person in charge of the, picking the architect, who, you know, just took a, took a chance on him. And that's a wonderful building. It's a, but it's, it's also, maybe it's too complicated that you, that you can't pull it off. You can't base a practice on building that kind of building. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is, because certainly,

1:18:48I can see a Foster building outside through the window, and it's a, it's very different. And it's, it's, it's not, it's hard to see it as a kind of evolution from the Hong Kong bank. It's just a very different, much more mainstream, much less, much simpler to build, and kind of less adventurous in, in many ways. So maybe it was just, maybe it was a style that was just too complicated to, to do. And you had to be very young and very energetic to sort of pull it off. I don't, I don't

1:19:27know. I just don't know. I do know about the, because I wrote this whole book about the Sainsbury Center at UEA. And I mean, there was a huge amount, I mean, they basically, every, every problem, they, everything they came up against, they would ask the question, like, can we do it another way? Is there a better way we could do this? And so it's an extremely innovative building, but it sort of required innovation almost at every step, so that nothing was standardized. And, and they did

1:20:00run into problems, too. I wasn't, it wasn't all easy. Because inevitably, if you try new things, things are just not going to work. Not everything is going to work perfectly. Which is, again, it's, it's, it requires either a sort of risk taking architect who's willing to try something or risk taking client, usually both together. Otherwise, architecture is, for good reasons, very conservative and risk averse. It's just, it's too many, too many things can go wrong without innovating. So if you

1:20:37innovate, you're adding a whole layer of, of unpredictability to something which is already risky enough as it is. Indeed it is. I think this is a good point to finish on. Vitold, thank you so very much for speaking with me. Well, I've enjoyed it. Thank you. Vitold. He just finished eating dinner and stepped outside the cave to smoke a cigarette he made from rolled-up photo paper. There were pictures of things back on Earth. He looked out on a greyish-white expanse of uninhabited terrain he now called home. He'd seen plenty of mirages

1:21:09and imaginary visitors up until then, so he wasn't sure what to think when he saw swans. And they were wading on the shores of a pale white lake that he'd never seen there before. And it was quite beautiful, and it was far away, because everything beautiful is far away. That's from granddaddy's everything beautiful is far away. True, man, and truer here. Thank you to Vitold for the generous chat and to Lizzie Curtin at Yale University Press for all the back work. See the podcast description for links to it all. And thanks for listening.