At tonight's lecture, they announced to a standing room only auditorium (this is the really popular lecture of the season), that I would be taking signatures for the previous lecture which I'd missed. There were probably a few high ranking faculty who made a mental note about the lacking professional VP. My lack of appearances at meetings which I should be attending but havn't been because my email wasn't registered is also probably not building up a case of the most excellent VP of professional the school has ever seen. And then I dumped an entire cup of tea on tonight's lecture sign up sheet, so I was able to professionally hand AIA members a crumpled, slightly damp, slightly stained sheet of paper.
But actually, nobody really cares and it doesn't really matter.
Tonight's lecture, which is the exciting bit, was Gregg Pasquarelli, of SHoP architects out of New York.
I'd vaguely heard of SHoP but honestly it could have been any of the times that they announced the lecture series. Many people had heard of it. My fellow students were very excited and the auditorium was, as I said before, packed to the point of people standing in the back. Maybe its an east cost thing.
Aside- when I came here, my conception of the relationship between St.Louis and the Southwest was of this dying rustbelt city in the middle of nowhere. The southwest was where people were going, where there was new opportunity for business, culture, industry, and design and St.Louis is the decaying city they're coming from. Since living here, and surrounded mostly by east coasters, I've been picking up this new reference of St.Louis as the frontier hick country boondocks of the east coast, which is the only culturally significant place in America. So, the only architects people lionize out here are the east coasters, predominantly New York architects. And the idolization flows both ways. I'd never even heard of Wash U before I applied here.The lecture was really good. Nobody in SHoP came to architecture with a background in architecture. One of the biggest ideas that Pasquarelli repeated was the notion that contemporary architecture practice has given away entire fields as we strive to specialize, and that we've not only marginalized ourselves as a profession, but also necessarily set ourselves up in opposition to clients and contractors, which has led to a profession paralyzed and terrified of legal repercussion, risk taking, leadership, or expansion out of a very, very tiny box.
His point was that, as architects, we need to embrace all aspects of what goes into a building, to make it part of what we do: finance, politics, fabrication, construction, ownership. He made it a point to say that architecture is the last of the great generalists professions- and that ability to work across fields and synthesize is the asset that we bring to the table, and that we should not be limiting ourselves to just what he called "creating the image of the object".
Accordingly, I was less impressed with the images of the architecture he put up and more enamored with the methodology- SHoP was essentially doing building information modeling before the term was even coined. As young architects without much experience realizing that they would only be given limited funding, they reasoned that their architecture would have to be based on prefabrication. Accordingly, their work is largely prefabricated, and a lot of the prefabrication they do themselves. The construction drawings have no dimensions because every part fits together and arrives on the site in a prefabricated or modular form. Pasquarelli described it as assembling the most kick-ass piece of Ikea furniture ever. Really beautiful pictoral drawings of assemblies. Unstated was the reality that labor is the largest cost in America, and that field labor is extra expensive, and filled with mistakes, errors, and simply crappy construction. The people who build in the US are not craftsmen, and while I was working, we were encouraged to make our details as graphically explicit as possible. This drove the push to prefabrication, which can be controlled by computers and carried out in cheaper, safer, controlled indoor conditions.
Anyway the other thing I really admired about the company is their say, horizontal and vertical expansions. SHoP is really six companies- one designs BIM software, one is a fabricator, one is a construction company, one does sustainable adaptive reuse, one is a developer.
Pasquarelli exhibited restrained exasperation at the US construction industry, to suppliers, and even the AIA. I have a feeling the AIA got his ire from its antiquated and adversarial standards of practice. He showed one slide with three touching circles- client, architect, general contractor, and said that this is the worst architectural drawing in the world. He then told us that it was the only drawing in the AIA forms and manuals of practice. The way that SHoP works varies considerably- sometimes they are their own client, often they share a financial stake with the client, and take on substantial portions historically in the realm of the general contractor.
My favorite illustration of this methodology of practice occurred realtively early in SHoP's career. They wanted to use zinc as an rain screen and approached some US manufacturers. They were told that the zinc would cost 40% more than something more standard, like painted metal. When SHoP asked why it should cost more based on the nearly same cost of raw material and labor, it sounded like the US manufacturers simply shrugged and said it cost 40% more. So, they went to France, bought the material themselves to bring back, found workshops that could mill and cut and bend the material, financed it, insured it, and produced their own exterior cladding. The pieces were so precisely milled and installed that when they wrapped all the way around the building, the two final pieces were within 1/32".
Anyway, it was the best lecture I'd heard really in two semesters. I mean, sure, you can slap some pretty pictures up on the wall and everyone can marvel at what an interesting form it is, but at the end of the day, you're a talented trained monkey on a chain, and really, we're only talking about how long your chain is. SHoP, at least how it was presented to us, presents itself as a way to get beyond the chains.
1 comment:
So disappointed that I missed this one (although I have seen him twice before, but is so engaging I'd hear him more). from what my prof here says about him, he is a interesting person to work with on a project.
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