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If you wish to contact us hit our DMs or email us on info@designprinciplespod.com
Hello and welcome. You're back with the Design Principal podcast with myself, gerard from Gerard Dabrowski Workshop, ben Bear Architecture, sam from Aret. Today we're trying to venture into the topic of design. It's a big, large, weird, wonderful conversation which is kind of a consistent thread, namely at the Design Principles podcast. So today we're going to talk about it in slightly more focus, starting off with sort of like a chronological overview, I guess, of how we went through education and sort of our own stories and what we focus on and things that we want to focus on, I guess.
Speaker 2:Nice, do you want to kick us off, then? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess we all went to university together in the same class, so that's good context for everyone listening.
Speaker 3:Victoria University, Wellington.
Speaker 1:Good old days, simple times, one might say.
Speaker 2:Take me back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, Ben, what do you reckon university sort of sets you up for in terms of design approaches?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I loved it. I had a lot of fun. I was coming out of a building apprenticeship so when I started I was slightly older than everyone else, maybe 20. So yeah, it had been four years or something since I'd been at school and just really enjoyed the challenge and the design side of things. I guess it just got me thinking about how to be creative again kind of lose that as a young age. So, yeah, I had a good time. I learned a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember it being like heavily conceptual from the start. It took me half a year to sort of figure out the expectation of the ideas that were expected.
Speaker 3:It's not. It's interesting because, well, I think that's also Vic's approach, in the sense that it's quite a conceptually focused school, whereas Unitec, for instance, is more technically focused. But I think one thing it teaches you probably the main thing it teaches you is how to think critically. That's what I felt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, university architecture, university students are famously critical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:And a lot of feedback was you know you kind of get from those universities probably Vic especially is they don't really prepare you for practice and that's all. That's all kind of you know understandable. However, do you really want to be prepared for practice? I guess like there's some interesting things that would have been great to know, maybe on the more business side of things, but in terms of like design, it's really just about getting those creative juices flowing and coming up with your own design process. You know so when you you are expected to develop a concept, you kind of have some idea of how to start and how to go about it.
Speaker 3:So I guess the fundamentals were there interesting what you're saying, ben, about. Well, you know, it teaches you how to how to design. And then, obviously, talking about moving into practice, and I think university it teaches you good design skills, it teaches you to think critically and it gives you the opportunity of freedom. Uh, you know there's very little parameters and then for many of us not all, but for many of us you leave university and you go and work in a firm of varying scales and that design I guess freedom is quashed a little bit, depending on what role you move into I've said firm and then all you almost have to retrain yourself how to design again. And, gerard, I think, based on my conversation points that you've outlined for today, that's going to be a big talking point for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of like a roll of the dice for a lot of people what autonomy they get within their practice or what sort of reign they get. University is super theoretical and like allows you to think of crazy awesome, exciting ideas. But it's kind of also I've found it kind of suffers from lack of parameters and sometimes like parameters are seen as like a negative thing.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I'm too strained in, but I think more often than not, parameters are what leads to like exciting design maneuvers, like ways around things it was good for certainly good for deadlines anyway yeah, by having parameters or not having parameters nah, nah, just like university in general, I feel like my memory of university is just like so many deadlines and everything kind of being less left to the last minute and and put together in a hurry to get across the line and all your presentations. You've had like no sleep the night before, or only a few hours, and everyone was basically in the same same boat, which was kind of hilarious. Considering the amount of work we actually had to do was sweet in comparison to now yeah.
Speaker 1:Each year you look back and you're like, oh, that was pretty manageable.
Speaker 2:It sounds like oh, I wish I could do it again, so I could clean it up.
Speaker 3:To be fair, those last-minute deadline rushes still continue into professional practice. Maybe I think it's just our character is that we leave everything to the last minute?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, the old adage you know if you leave it to the last minute, it only takes a minute.
Speaker 2:Well, I kind of know that about myself now. That's why I set the deadlines with such a tight time frame, so it forces me into that last minute. Get it done.
Speaker 1:Stress yeah, if you do it, then it's done get it done, then it's done time management's a whole another uh podcast that we should do sometime I kind of need to set deadlines, otherwise like, yeah, you kind of need that bit of urgency, a little carrot and a Speaking of deadlines, Gerard, how's that door going for Rob Is? That powder coat mate. Oh good, Sweet, I was there today.
Speaker 3:It's on the critical path, mate, so we've got to get that thing in.
Speaker 1:It's one of the tidiest things I've built. Oh cool, nice. Like usually, I don't use a file, I'm just. You know all power tools, but I've been I've been filing that.
Speaker 2:That's not. You helped me build my house.
Speaker 1:That's not what I want to hear, and my chairs and tables, oh yeah, but you ground, you grounded those. That's why they're so good. Easily the best. Uh, finishing on some of my children. You're hired, mate. You're here full time for the next week. Yeah, I think another thing that, like university attempts to like educate you, I keep saying like history, and um sort of looking at other architects as reference points or which, yeah, there's two conversations there history and then looking at other artist models.
Speaker 1:I guess History is one that I wasn't overly interested in in architecture school, but nowadays it's something I'm getting super interested in. I think there's like such a wealth of reference points that you can look to to inform your architecture and contextualize your architecture. Every site has its own tangible history, and it might even be the family history of your client or your history.
Speaker 3:I wonder if it's the way, gerard, that they teach history at university. It's a long time ago now, but I feel like when they were teaching it it was very classically focused or formally focused, kind of looking at actual built form and looking at stylistic history and things like that, rather than you're talking about a little bit more of a non-tangible history, which I think is probably more important yeah, and some of it was probably just a bit dry.
Speaker 1:To be fair, get a little sleep.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to think if I've got any of like the old history books sitting above me and in my office here, but I think I might have came in pretty handy when I was in rome, because I could name all five columns still.
Speaker 1:That's about all I got out of five steps ahead of me. Heritage architect right there, I think, like that. The other one is in design class. They'll tell you to go get a bunch of precedents and when I was tutoring at university, I saw some shocking examples of plagiarism. It's like direct carbon copy of Zipfor's mine buildings plastered onto another site. Well, I guess it's a good place to go through the plagiarism education route whilst you're in school, rather than smashing out a building and realising it's the exact copy of somebody else's.
Speaker 3:It's interesting, though. I've definitely heard professionals say that there are no new ideas. There's just ways that you build upon ones from the past, which I think is quite an interesting take, and you know, there's architects out there that have built their careers off that concept.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and architects build their careers off. You know trying to rebuttal that concept. Exactly, yeah, do you guys remember that building? And uh, topo, it's like a pretty much carbon copy of one of the patchwork projects yes, I remember that that lit up on instagram for a while, but direct copy pretty crazy, but like a poorly executed copy.
Speaker 3:Do you know if there was any acceptance there, or was it with the people from Patchwork? Did they agree to them to use that same concept, or do you reckon it was?
Speaker 1:just a story. No, it was controversial. It was being said on Instagram, right, but I think the people it was like a little lodge thing, but they took down their instagram page at the time. Maybe they stuck it back up interesting. But yeah, it's like a pretty bold move. I well, new zealand maybe just has a loose relationship with respecting design in the first place, but to go and copy somebody's buildings is pretty extreme I guess it's a benefit of us being bound by a code of ethics.
Speaker 3:Right, we can't do that professionally, but we're not the only people that contribute to the built environment in New Zealand and other people aren't beholden to such high standards.
Speaker 1:Can't imagine.
Speaker 3:It was an architect. That project no high standards.
Speaker 1:Can't imagine it was an architect that project. No, ben, how did your thesis build project? Because that was some pretty early sort of design build experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was kind of that kind of came from the thesis subject, which was, you know, efficiency in design or digital manufacturing and my experience in construction, which kind of pointed out how inefficient traditional construction is, and so that was kind of process-led. So I kind of worked a little bit backwards on that. I wasn't really like, okay, cool, there's this opportunity to design the 65 square meter studio, let's, you know, let's design it and then figure out how to make it. I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the building efficiently before the job kind of fell on my lap and we had designed it, and so I kind of worked backwards on that and designed it to suit the construction methodology. And also that was the first CLT building in the country. That was for residential anyway, I'm not sure about commercial. So it was kind of like an untested material and that material allowed for, you know, cnc manufacturing, which was awesome. So that became a part of the process and the design kind of came into fruition from that.
Speaker 2:So kind of a little bit backwards. I guess that's what's great about university it allows you especially, like the thesis here allows you just to test a whole bunch of crazy stuff and figure out a way to put it together, but I remember spending a heck of a long time on the actual details and making sure it goes together together as clean as and as efficient as possible, as opposed to like making sure that it's the most beautiful, elegant building in the world, I guess. So in terms of aesthetics although, like you know don't get me wrong I was really happy with the design outcome and it. I went through the standard design process of site inspection and you know that sort of thing sun orientation, all those good things. So the design definitely wasn't lacking. It was more driven by the process though, which I guess in a lot of ways has has kind of become a lot of my design ethos even to this day that practicality in construction. I like cleanliness and I like details that really, really work.
Speaker 3:It's interesting being that it's interesting being that something that you developed that long ago a decade ago or longer now ago that you're still implementing. I was going to ask you that Do you still design in that manner? And maybe you don't design in first principles in that manner, but it clearly seems like it's still a large focus of you in your design approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it definitely is. I really enjoy that sort of simplicity in the design. But it's kind of got into a point now, with a little bit more experience, that I know there's really not much I can't build or, you know, get to that level of of practicality. So it's it's kind of less prominent.
Speaker 1:Now I'm really focusing on my design process more of it in a traditional sense, to try and build up those skills a little bit more so I can kind of combine them a little bit more successfully yeah, I think that was like a pretty epic little project and quite a beautiful silhouette, to be fair, and I think it's one of those maybe slightly rarer projects that nowadays that blends like a line of inquiry, like a conceptual thinking of even if that is around construction, it's at the time still conceptual and it kind of blends that mind frame of university conceptual with practice practicality, which is, yeah, like a pretty good exemplar of like a good design process yeah, that's an interesting point.
Speaker 2:I never really thought of it that way, but I think we all went to um kirsten thompson's lecture the other day. She talked a lot about that line of inquiry and it's so, it's such, and I found, I just found, found her design process that she has is just so much more in depth than what I'm currently capable of and it definitely makes me feel like a kind of like a surface architecture or designer, you know. So there's just so much more. Yeah, I think there's just so much more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's just so much more to do in that area I think everybody left that architecture, that sorry that talk, been feeling like they could be a better architect. To be fair, yeah, for listeners out there, I'm pretty sure it was recorded. If you look at the Fortuna Lecture 2024 with Kirsten Thompson, give that a view, it's pretty mind-blowing yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah she's done some epic work Also she was awarded the Australian gold medal, so she's a pretty epic architect, yeah deservingly so. Yeah, and you do that quite a bit yourself, don't you Gerard? Deservingly so. Yeah, and you do that quite a bit yourself, don't you Gerard? I mean, even the piccolo was kind of from a similar sort of thing. Your brief was like a mix art with architecture.
Speaker 1:It seems to come more natural to you. I don't know about that. I think the line of inquiry thing is quite big for me. Like when I first went into practice I was, we were just that practice. We're just sort of making buildings. There's no like deeper thing. You're searching for no bigger wave that you're picking out of the set. So like I quite like to focus on projects that are contributing something to what I find valuable within my practice. So, like the piccolo, I've been looking into instinctive architecture, like pottery. Sometimes you like you've cut out a bit of clay and you throw it on your wheel and you might change your mind. Or it's instinctive and there's tactility and you're working with the material and you're molding it as you go.
Speaker 1:So the idea with the pixel was that, yes, everything's for free and there's very strict, these are your materials. So I had to scrounge forage for materials, but the idea was that I wasn't really going to draw anything, I was just going to materials. But the idea was that I wasn't really going to draw anything, I was just going to start building. I kind of broke that rule and did a, did a thumbnail, but it's was. It was a thumbnail, so there's no details on a notepad I broke the cardinal's cardinal rule.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that kind of birthed out of this idea around an instinctive decision making, trying to train yourself to design came out of like a frustration with the first office there not being any like architectural intent other than enclosure and maybe some loose aesthetic. We want to make something pretty, but for me I wanted like a like a deeper line of inquiry. Like your house and designing backwards via construction is a far deeper line of inquiry than just aesthetic or fulfilling a program brief and may I just ask why do you find that so important?
Speaker 1:I think it focuses. I think I'm pretty big on viewing my work as a body of work. So my furniture or my architecture, I want it all to well, it's all mine, so I bring myself to it. So I think design is inherently part of the designer and I think to detach ourselves fully from what we're designing so that's one very clear thread in all my work is that my work and being a sole practitioner that sits in a shed by themselves and chips away, it becomes like at some point it would be a deep thought.
Speaker 1:You catch me just thinking yeah, I do a lot of thinking when I first got my little workshop, I used to just sit there and think, and I had to like I'd have this motto don't think, do, because otherwise I'd just sit there and like look at the chair that I was making. So I used to be a lot slower and thoughtful. Now, when I make furniture, it's like all right, let's make a chair bam.
Speaker 3:Do you find that instinctive, kind of more knee-jerk response Like? Better is not necessarily the right term, but maybe, I don't know, does it breed more interesting things, more interesting designs? Yes.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Ask a satan in 20 years Because it's.
Speaker 3:I think you can definitely overthink things right in design in general and there's always a point where and you never quite know where it is but there's that point of you've gone too far with certain designs. You know you can spend way too long on them and you can almost ruin them by overthinking the hell out of that. Working on stage two of my house and I've redesigned that thing like 11 times now and it's getting to the point where I'm like just commit to something, you know what I mean like just do it and just go, that's it done yeah don't change your mind yeah, definitely not that cut and dry, but there's a.
Speaker 1:There's a wonderful little window in there somewhere.
Speaker 3:I guess there's that sweet spot, but it's really hard to find where does the iterative process lie within that?
Speaker 2:you know obviously your furniture, for example. You have a quick idea, maybe a quick sketch, you go and build the thing and then the next one is probably the next iteration of the last one. That's the iterative process for furniture in some way. But what about for architecture, for example? Sean Godsell, he is adamant that he comes up with a concept and then he tries to stick with that initial concept as much as possible. Is there any room for iteration prior to, you know, construction or completion, or throughout the process?
Speaker 3:Or is it building to building, are you saying?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think my theory on that is probably more back to that sort of pottery analogy as you get closer to finishing the pot, you're kind of moulding down into a finer level of detail and you're making smaller design moves.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But if you're then going to build half a house, crush it, start again. I think that's a different kettle of fish Interesting yeah.
Speaker 1:I think, if I just give a little bit more context to how that intuitive design thought came around for me, I think it was like at the initial job everything was very linear, which is pretty common and expected within architecture, like clients need to know what they're building, councils need to know what they're building, etc. Etc. But within me there's like this desire to think of a more interesting or alternative way. Maybe I am somebody who likes to reinvent wheels slightly. So my first chair that I built kind of came out of that frustration. I brought a shipping container and started a tiny little workshop in lyle bay. In the first year I challenged myself not to not to draw anything. There's another rule that I broke slightly was a couple of sketches, but this chair that I made is on my website.
Speaker 1:I think it's cow and basket came out of four little pull apart canvas, steel sort of fold away chairs and I chopped them up and then just kind of held them in place and tack welded them together. I hadn't welded before. I had to go to bunnings and buy a little welder. That's how I learned how to weld, but out of that process came a couple of shedbears. In a chat with a good friend of mine, pat, who makes awesome push bikes, and we were talking about if you could train yourself to make good design decisions by following first instinct principles, like if you, this is what I'm going to do then, and then you start with it Within the context of furniture and small-scale projects where you're not ruining anybody's lives but you can finish the project, look back, critique and then on your next one. Then you follow Ideally. Hopefully you make better and better decisions. I kind of worked on that for probably five years before I now probably weigh things up a bit more.
Speaker 3:Do you reckon, though, gerard, that, working through that first instinct just design it, learn from the last one, sorry, and it will apply to the next one evolve you sort of hard on a visual thing, but it's like a weaving stream, right, and you're kind of meandering your way down trying to find, like that, that main body of water. Do you think you've just said, five years on, now you're a little bit more, I guess, focused? Do you think that all of that iterative work has eventually now molded itself into like a good design approach and philosophy that you can now apply more confidently?
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely Like. I don't think I was a terrible designer at university, but my main designing learning came when I got the workshop and worked on that. I kind of thought of it for a long time as the gym for design. If you could smash out a few chairs within half a year or something, then that's a lot more design learning that you've just given yourself than one building and a two-year-long process. I just thought the feedback loop of architecture is so long that it's really hard to well, there's just a lag time for feedback before you realise you did something good or bad, yeah. And then I think much like how Ben's probably building apprenticeship led him to have a good enough awareness of construction to be able to design backwards, whereas most university kids probably wouldn't be able to pull that off. I think building stuff in the workshop with furniture allowed me to play and experiment with materials and maybe understand how they come together slightly better.
Speaker 2:It's not quite a building, but and is there a correlation between that, what you've learned through that process of developing and building furniture, to say, your architecture now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think as I go I've kind of been in this conversation with myself on art and architecture, so like a chair becomes too chair-like for me, so then I counter it with a chair.
Speaker 1:that's very helpful when you can't sit on it and then it's like so I think with an architecture as much of an explorer. So you're wanting to create something beautiful that works for your client and that they can be stoked with, but at the same time you're trying to I personally am trying to experiment a little bit and come up with new ways of doing things. Like Sam was saying, maybe that's impossible and we're using the same old toolkit, but much like designing a chair over and over again. There's so much fun to be had in designing something over and over again, so I don't think I'd ever get bored of the toolkit. And it's interesting because that something over and over again, so I don't think I'd ever get bored of the toolkit.
Speaker 3:And it's interesting because that designing over and over again thing even if you're designing the same thing over and over again, which a lot of us end up doing through the iterative process, be it project to project or within a project every single time you put pen to paper or maybe not in your case, gerard or even just think about a design, you're always tackling it slightly differently. You're not redoing the same thing every single time. So even those little minute changes or adjustments can lead themselves to a good iterative process. I've found oh, definitely.
Speaker 1:That's probably the epitome of iteration there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we'll get better and better at these things, or maybe we'll look back and the first one we made was the most pure and most beautiful. Everything else was Well that's so true, right.
Speaker 3:Like you know you talk about that like just design, immediately, first principles, instinctive design, and you know there's always that old adage, you know there's always that old adage, you know your first answer is always right. Maybe that is the case and you just spend a long time hopefully not a whole career making everything slightly worse Maybe.
Speaker 1:I think to develop this thinking self-critique is massively important and critique where you can find it and trust it. I think for anybody, if you can find somebody that you respect that will offer you critique is invaluable, I think, to your own design development, because so often universities kind ofened the rein on the crit.
Speaker 3:But I think that's where we learn so much, when somebody with more knowledge than you can sort of feed into your, into your life, like you're getting more out of it out of that than they are, even if it's hurting your feelings well, yeah, I mean at university you can be reduced to tears by in a critique, but in the professional realm it doesn't really happen anymore, not and like not saying that it's a good or bad thing, but there isn't really that mechanism for really involved, truthful and critical response within the design process in practice.
Speaker 1:You, you know what I mean, yeah, I think Kirsten in her lecture mentioned that her office does design crits and I think probably a handful of offices do that internally and it's probably super beneficial within their work. You're out of by yourself, yeah, in your shed how about you say yourself, sam, have you?
Speaker 2:have you got like a an interesting process, or is it more just experience that you've acquired over time?
Speaker 3:yeah, we're sort of it's interesting hearing both you guys talk and my process, I guess, or I guess our practices process now sort of falls into the camp of two things that you guys have discussed.
Speaker 3:I mean, we've got, we're really championing, a certain product or a material which helps with modular construction, and so we're using that as or that module, like a 1200 by 2400 module, as a design driver and seeing how far we can push that and how creative we can be with a material size that's universal and therefore means that under construction is going to be super low waste.
Speaker 3:So that sort of like I guess leans into what you've talked about, ben, with your process, and then also gerard, I think I don't know if I've met, if it's necessarily an instinctive decision, but I've found that in the last sort of three or four buildings that I've designed or completed, there's a clear lineage through them and I wouldn't say that they look the same, but they're definitely siblings, if you know what I mean and my approach each time very different sites, very different constraints from terms of budget and constructability and things like that, but ultimately the outcome's very similar and, just for want of a better term, I'd like to really summarize it in sort of the most basic form is.
Speaker 3:I've just looked at stacking, really, and just the way that you can stack elements together, be that entire building modules or be that materials, and stacking has kind of been like a big focus and it's clearly visible through the last sort of several designs that I've done. But I still haven't landed on what works 100% and I think we're all very young designers and it will take a long time, a whole career, to realize what your golden egg is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, often only done in absolute hindsight, probably by somebody else, exactly right.
Speaker 3:I don't think you'll ever know, because you're always going to be seeking something else or seeking something different. Or you know right at the start of the podcast we talked about precedent and outside you know external influence and every you'll see something that will pique your interest. Or you know a design that you'll want to know more about and you'll go into into it in depth and find out what the processes were behind that, and then you adopt some of that into your own design and therefore it's going to influence it. So it's a complete, it's a constantly evolving practice it's a little bit like surfing.
Speaker 1:You know, we're out there in search of something, in search of the next wave. That's that little need in there to like keep searching and keep looking, I think is a core tenet to design, in my opinion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's funny. It'd be interesting to see what your thoughts are on this. But, having designed my own house, you like to think that the design that you've done for your own house where you're your, you have your own brief and you're kind of unconstrained in a way means that you'd be able to put all of your design learning together and produce your best design.
Speaker 2:But it's definitely not the case like, yeah, but you're always testing a little bit more with your own stuff because you can get away with it, you know. But yeah, it's definitely not the case for me as well, unfortunately. There's a whole bunch of stuff I would go back and change. However, I think somehow I'm not sure how, but I think like one of the hard things about architecture is you don't really generally get to spend a hell of a lot of time on site. So for your own house, like for mine especially and I lived there for years before I built a house on it so I knew exactly where everything was, where the prominent wind direction was the trees, the contours, what I could get away with moving the sun, especially in a place like Wellington, I guess, like mine, kind of what Gerard was talking about just came out instinctively, just based on the amount of time that I'd actually spent on that site.
Speaker 2:So like, if I would go back, I wouldn't actually change the general design of my house, it would just be some of that fine-tuning stuff, polishing it around the edges. But yeah, so that's not a big deal, but it is quite interesting going through the process now where you don't really get to spend a hell of a lot of time on site. You know you might do like a quick site investigation, take some photos etc. But you it's so much harder to really just get those instinctive thoughts and and about the site when you, when you haven't actually like experienced it for even a day, you know. So yeah, I think that's quite interesting. It's hard to design photos or a site analysis.
Speaker 1:Your house is like. In terms of sunshine it's pretty epic, like such a nice space to hang out in and the timber ceiling and the beams.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Down to the details of your hidden steel plates to make your portal frame. I think it's a pretty well executed house.
Speaker 2:Thanks, mate.
Speaker 1:Props, props.
Speaker 2:Props given, it's the hour to build it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's why it's so good. Exactly, I think education has a little misstep, I think in that it perhaps teaches you to not do things instinctively. One of the key learning moments I had in uni was when a tutor was like I'm not sure why I did this, I just did it. And he was like you do, you've done it. You've done it for a reason. You just don't know what the reason is. It's within you somewhere. And that's when I started to change my view on design a little bit and start to have a little bit more courage to back myself and think about what my input was, versus looking for external influence from a mid-century architect that I really liked and picking bits out of their building to put in mine.
Speaker 3:It's interesting. Sorry, Joe, continue.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's kind of it really, just learning to back yourself a little bit and then then from there you start to build up your own body of work and start to figure out your design identity. I guess what you're interested in, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's interesting you make that comment about having to justify yourself or justify a design decision, because I don't know about you guys, but I've so often just done something, and be it an epiphany, be it just sort of some deep-seated influence that's manifested somehow or whatever, or even just doodling on a piece of paper, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that looks like it works, and but every single time, particularly when it comes to presenting to clients, I've always felt that I've had to justify that somehow, and be that try and connect it to site or try and connect it to a precedent or try and connect it to some line of thinking, and so often you're trying to post-rationalize something that just really has no backing. It's like doing a maths test and getting the right answer but having no working behind it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I I completely agree.
Speaker 2:In fact, I'd definitely prefer that than you know turn up to site and find this shell and be like oh, the contours of the shell mimic the site and that's why I've created this circular ceiling structure but also that's also a beautiful way to design.
Speaker 3:It's just not the only way to design. I guess it's kind of what we're getting to in the crux of this conversation. Right is that there is no right answer, there's just lots of different approaches I personally find that can be very cringy sometimes.
Speaker 2:I will never be the type of person that says any of that shit to a client, so this show I think.
Speaker 3:Can you remember? Oh, it's a great, it's a great video. It's a video of frank gary designing and he's basically like sitting in a chair and he's got some lackey scrunching up bits of paper for him and sticking them on a thing and he's like, oh, now cut that up, now pull that off, now scrunch that bit of paper up, yeah, that'll do kind of approach. It's interesting. It's just a different way of tackling a problem, right, yeah, some very clear. And I mean it's interesting. It's just a different way of tackling a problem, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:Bianca makes some very clear and you know, design changes kind of like that, in a similar way though his, I think are a lot more kind of practical but also just using a heck of a lot of common sense.
Speaker 1:So it can be done successfully as well. Yeah, I think university taught everyone in our year anyway to to hate frank gary. There's a massive like misunderstanding there because the guy has got some of the gnarliest, most complex buildings built. Yeah, like he's got them across the gnarliest, most complex buildings built, he's got them across the line. That guy must be one hell of a communicator in a meeting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think he's remarkable. I think the buildings are remarkable. They're not necessarily to everyone's taste but it's incredible architecture.
Speaker 1:The commitment to process and then the technical understanding to get that built. I mean they used to develop software around that bloody office. That's just truly. Epic RSS. And then the technical understanding to get that built. I mean they used to develop software around that bloody office. That's just truly epic.
Speaker 1:Basically the reason Rhino exists, right, yeah, the guy's wild. I think influence from other architects is a big thing for me because I view myself and my practice and it's like what sort of work am I trying to do? What you know, these themes that we're talking about, quite influenced by other architects, which I much like everyone, I think. I kind of think at the moment there's a whole generation of mini Zimthors making like very beautiful, elegant, elegant, elemental architecture, sort of all across Australia and New Zealand, I think at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, is anyone influenced by another architect's or firm's process, as opposed to just their building?
Speaker 1:Yes, much like Zumthor being elemental and very refined material architect, I think Thomas sorry, ann Holtrop is another one making beautifully refined buildings that are super material and process rich, and somebody that I've taken like big influence from within, like the material exploration side of things. So that's just playing with materials is something that's becoming massive for me and Holtrop, like, for example, made a column. I think it was a fabric sleeve that then cast the column inside.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen that, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:More fabric quality to it.
Speaker 2:It's a product now. Did you know that?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Epic One of the most interesting architects, I think, of the time at the moment and the exploration with glass casting and then aluminium casting, then making these wall concrete panels by just digging in the ground seemingly haphazardly and then casting like a very crisp panel over top of it and just tilting it up, and then that texture becoming the finished face of the wall. Yeah well, so that's awesome. I think that that process and that connection to material and structure is super important how much do you think that?
Speaker 3:and, yeah, how much do you think that you need the right clients to be able to kind of embark on that experimentation, or do you think that it's the practice, a practice's responsibility to experiment sort of on their own time? That's something that we've discussed in our practice is like one of our business goals for this year, or practice goals for this year, is to spend more time on rmd, basically, and just yeah, design processes and things.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think 100 practice like it has to be an intention or a goal of yours to outwork these things rather than waiting for a client to come and say hey, I want you to do something extravagant with concrete till panels.
Speaker 3:You need to go and find that yourself is what you get yeah, so you start designing it in yeah yeah, you get an overly specific brief asking for a concrete panel carved in the ground.
Speaker 3:But I look dirty yeah, but I argue that's been a shortcoming of ours has been not affording ourselves that time to be experimental and sort of wait, hoping for a, for a project that will let you do that, yeah, and if we realize that and be like oh shit, we've kind of done ourselves a discredit here. We need to be more proactive. But I feel like that's something, gerard, that you've been doing for a while now yeah, off the theory that you get the work you're seen doing.
Speaker 1:So that's one of the reasons why I take time to document everything that I do. Is that adds to this body of work that hopefully the right people that like to explore and come up with strange ideas see. And then you attract those type of clients. That's the theory. Ask me in 20 years whether that works. You attract those type of clients. That's the theory. Ask me in 20 years whether that works. I think the notion that I'm waiting for the perfect client is also a big driving force in the way I do things. That was the attitude of the previous office and so I thought if I could flip that business model and be kind of particular about the work I did with the idea that you might get the work you're seeing doing Ambitious Again, we'll see. But yeah, I think it's the role of the architect to explore what they're inherently interested in, even if it's a retaining wall in a garden, and that's what you're getting to.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then I guess it's a retaining wall in the garden and that's what you're getting to, yeah things out. And then I guess it's a matter of being confident in being able to implement that into any project. Like you said, start small, for clients, I'm sure and then build bigger and bigger and bigger, right, yeah?
Speaker 3:you need to be confident in yourself to employ that into designs, because so often I feel like we're reticent too, because we're like, oh, they might not like that, maybe tried is it acceptable to take the other route and just build, just get a lot built? Of course I mean everything's acceptable. These are just different ways of skinning a cat.
Speaker 1:There's a few ways to skin the old cat, a few ways to skin a stone, yeah, yeah, I think one allows you to start now and one allows you to maybe start in 10 years. For me, experimentation and playing is super important to me, so I kind of put that above making money at this stage of my career. There's a quote from a little video Daniel Liebenskin did Vice to the Young. That I've taken far too seriously and implemented far too rigorously in my life was that do what you love and take risks while you're young and you will never be a loser.
Speaker 1:I used to repeat it in the office that I was sharing a space in over and over again You'll never be a loser.
Speaker 2:Made me no sense, I don't see why it can't be one and the same. I don't see why you can't make money and have fun creating the type of architecture you want to create.
Speaker 3:I think that comes back down to the confidence in your ability as well. Right, you know you need to be able to and this is sorry to harken back to the Kirsten Thompson lecture, but this is something that she really drove home was you need to be able to promote yourself well, and not just yourself, but the role of the architect well, and you really need to kind of go into bat for each other in the built realm, and there's far too much that's done out there that is generic and boring because architects aren't involved. But it's our role to make the built environment interesting and therefore, like we should be involved at all stages. So, yeah, we could definitely still make money and be creative and experimental.
Speaker 1:Yeah, architects definitely need to advocate for architecture a little bit more vocally. I think thomas heatherwick's humanize campaign have just launched a for studies by scientists people into the correlation between your brain self-esteem well-being and the correlation between your brain self-esteem well-being and the quality of your built environment. I don't know if that's overly been done in such a direct way before, so that'll be an interesting thing to get a quote on what's the outcome Hopefully positive.
Speaker 3:The formal studies have just been like last week or something on there I think we could all I think we could all agree, without the study being even being undertaken, that your environment, the environment in which you exist, and be that your home, be that your work environment, social environment, whatever does directly influence your health, both mentally and physically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it would be a pretty awesome study. We should do something on that campaign at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, Sam, just going back to what you were talking about before regarding the R&D, what kind of things have you been thinking about?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess this comes back to this sort of I've talked about it before this citrus concept, where last year we were frustrated and concerned about the lack of work coming in and we're like we need to front foot this. And we're like, well, what's something that's super important to us as a practice and we see as being critical, and particularly the residential built environment, and that's high performance and quality, but also efficiency. And so that's where we came up with the idea to take 1200 by 24 module and then just try and design buildings purely based on that 100. So you're essentially looking at zero wastage. So that's been an r&d process for us and for us and we've we've designed six buildings, full packages, prospectus, everything. We've put in huge amounts of work in that realm for zero financial gain so far. But but what that's enabled us to do is it's enabled us to be super experimental and we've learned a lot in that process. We've learned, holy shit, you can do a lot with a simple module and formally and aesthetically you're not really that constrained, you just have to be clever. So that's been a really good process.
Speaker 3:And then I think what we've just started doing a little bit more, something that we've always wanted to do but never afforded ourselves the time to do, is model, just 3d model and just play. I mean, gerard, I'm sure that you do that a lot, but so often in practice, concept design, work, what have you? It's not people don't. People don't model like they did at university or or whatever. And I think that's because it's seen people don't. People don't model like they did at university or or whatever. And I think that's because it's seen as taking a long time. Are you talking?
Speaker 3:about like messing or what in particular yep, messing materiality details, you know like one-to-one scale stuff, anything just be more. Just focus on like more tangible and physical 3d design development we so quickly move into like a computer or a digital realm or what have you.
Speaker 2:When's the last time you built a model like a physical model? Me, yeah, maybe like two weeks ago. Oh nice, that's good I score.
Speaker 3:I don't want to yes, I need to build more models, but before then it was probably two years, and that's because I've made a conscious decision to try and do it more, you know.
Speaker 2:What do you go for, like polystyrene or clay? What's your media?
Speaker 3:What's your media of choice? I'm just a classic white card kind of guy. Ah yep, victoria nice.
Speaker 1:What mill are we talking about?
Speaker 3:We're talking like 1.2.
Speaker 1:How sharp's your scalpel?
Speaker 3:Here's some card. Oh yeah, good, yeah, buddy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay and did you find it useful?
Speaker 3:Absolutely Like formerly. I was able to test so many different things that would have spent me ages trying to work out how to draw or model on a computer very quickly, like within half an hour, 45 minutes. It was a roof form that I was trying to work out and I was trying to work out the proportions of it and the angles of it and within like like 45 minutes I'd maybe done 10, 12 different iterations and landed on one that looked correct. And then, basically, I took something that was this big and went and scaled it up to the size of a building.
Speaker 1:Quick one-to-one mock-up.
Speaker 2:What about you, Gerard? Do you do any mock-up modeling?
Speaker 3:Steel, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Fold the steel. I have made some steel, uh architectural models, oh awesome.
Speaker 1:That's also like a big, a big site mesh. So I think only till that tar pits project where they all had council and everyone had a whinge and wanted more actual renders. Previous to that he would only take photos of models and put a little bit of photoshopping to chuck a couple of people in there or something cool. So their office make massive, massive models. So like their internal renders are photographs of models, so then you can like kind of get a more natural light quality and that's awesome yeah, I think that's a pretty epic way to work.
Speaker 1:I think I haven't haven't gone to that extent.
Speaker 3:R&D man, afford yourself the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah hard.
Speaker 2:What about you, Ben? Definitely inspired by that. Yeah, and Makers obviously used to do a bit more but had a nice workshop, so not so much at the moment.
Speaker 1:You used to do lots of one-to-one mock-ups, didn't you? They just happen to have building consents on them. Yeah, yeah, I'll make you a model we used to get into making them out of just CNCing them.
Speaker 2:It seemed like a fun thing to do when you've got a CNC machine and no clients coming in. That was definitely early stages, but nah, nah, I haven't for a while. But I've been thinking a lot about it recently and I think I'm going to do one. I think I'm going to do one. I'm going to do one within the next two weeks by the time the next episode comes out.
Speaker 3:I'm not all done. Show and tell for the next episode is your little model, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of pressure. My niece actually has some plaster, so maybe I bust that out Nice.
Speaker 1:I think just using your hands is pretty epic. There's a lot to be benefited from that. Perhaps after university you go through practice and economics get in the way and you have to smash stuff out pretty quickly, unless your office has a model-making budget. But I think making is epic and to making is the design gym.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's your saying. Busy fingers.
Speaker 1:What is it? Oh, there was a little quote which sort of validated my whole thing was Renzo Piano, the OG building workshop guy, had this quote happy hands, happy mind, Nice, yeah, that's good. If you're building stuff, then it's ultimately good for your morale self-esteem.
Speaker 3:Is that a good place to end things? Yeah, I've got a model to make yeah.
Speaker 1:I think I just want a little sum up of.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go for it, mate.
Speaker 1:That people should give things a go, give it a crack Again. We've just done a chair exhibition in Christchurch with object space a pretty awesome thing to be included in. But within that you have chats with some people and they're like, oh, I could never design a chair or you need to design all these other bits of furniture before you design a chair. But something like that is essentially a small building. I think people shouldn't feel that barrier and they should just give things a crack and you might surprise yourself.
Speaker 2:Just get into it let's get it done, then it's done. Cool, if you do it, then it's done. Speaking of doing it, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and leave a review or leave a comment. Even better, feel free just to send a comment, and if you have anything interesting that you want us to talk about, we'd love to know about it.
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