Craig Dykers Architecture Lessons

Architect Craig Dykers, co-prinicpal of Snohetta (Library of Alexandria, Oslo Opera House, World Trade Center Memorial Museum) is teaching a studio this semester, and he also delivered a lecture on his firm and work tonight. There were several valuable lessons we gleaned:

1. (courtesy of Anita) Put a beer tap in your architecture office.
2. It's pretty freakin' awesome to work for Snøhetta.
3. Also put in a fruit bowl to make it look healthier.
4. Hire a chef to come make healthy lunches for your staff every day. This may sound really expensive, but as Dykers pointed out, the American 'lunch hour' is really closer to two or three once you factor in thinking about where to go and what you're going to eat, getting there, eating, coming back, and then zoning out for a bit when you get back from lunch. At Snohetta, their lunches last 20 minutes. Since profitability, especially in architecture is directly a product of productivity, you've just effectively gotten an extra hour of productive work out everyone in your office for the cost of lunch.
5. transdisciplinary > multidisciplinary
6. The balls of the bronze bull on wall street are shiny from being handled so much. People aren't perverse, they're just human.
7. Architecture should provide structure when people need it, and unpredictability when people need it.
8. Architecture should be a verb- it does stuff. For example, a building may attract someone's view, and then pull it through to show them a part of the city they haven't seen before.
9. Do lots of competitions. Snøhetta was pulled together out of a bunch of 20-somethings who happened to win a competition. The competition happened to be designing the $220 million Alexandria Library in Egypt. So now they can do things like install beer taps in the office.
10. The 'gift' of architecture is that we can take large spaces and make them seem intimate.
11. Ownership of a thing = being able to put your dirty boots on its surface.
12. Wild reindeer mating is a pretty big tourist draw in Norway.
13. Questions drive projects much more than answers. The key is to find the right question [and to ask it at the right time]

After the lecture, we went to the lecture dinner with Dykers, which was at a classmate's house. We got a huge platter of food from Pappy's Smokehouse, which is one of the top-ranked BBQ restaurants in the city. They were apparently sold out of ribs (happens often) but there was plenty of chicken, brisket, pulled pork, and their amazing barbecue beans. We polished it off and I quietly grabbed a beer for the road to take back to studio.