During your post jury mortem today you might have realised that I was doing the rounds assessing the final work while the respective jury panels were saying their piece. That’s what you’d find me doing at all the final juries for the studios I’m involved in. Today however, I was especially eager to get my marking done fast because, as some of you have noticed, I’ve just had my hair cut and for some reason I thought it was a good idea to use my son’s hair spray to maintain it’s body; but it turned out to not affect me well at all under today’s heat.
Anyway, I was scarcely paying much attention to what was said even though I couldn’t help noticing most of the remarks amplified through the gallery. I did not pay much heed to those remarks because as I was randomly marking the works, I could not see the validity of such remarks in the works I was assessing – I really could not see how anyone could come up with those comments if they saw the same work that I was marking. So I was hardly affected by what was said, scathing though it may have sounded. After all, this was such a normal occurrence for me even in juries at others places like LimKokWing, Taylors, and even UM; which would probably make another interesting thing to write about at some point.
Nevertheless, after all was said and done, and I was asked to address the studio in the aftermath, it was heart rending to see the enthusiastic and eager sea of familiar faces of this morning turn into a sea of zombies. I do apologise if I appeared nonchalant or insensitive to the whole thing; I never realised how much emotional immunity I have acquired over the years from such phenomena until I was faced with half the cast of Zombieland just now. Even though I have addressed you on the matter, I did still have a long hard think over the drive back on what was really wrong for such a thing to keep happening over all these years – and here, in a nutshell, is my theory; and it also applies to my students of the past who can still recall similar incidents.
You are simply the victim of design by codes, which is the prevalent modus operandi of most practitioners and the preoccupation of most architectural ‘preachers’. I won’t elaborate this in theory form because I wouldn’t know where to start nor where to stop. So I’ll do it by examples, especially on those still fresh with you from today.
Architectural codes are those elements that are being applied to denote some things, such as a porch to denote an entry point, a whooping big door to denote main entrance, a corridor to denote circulation, a guard house denotes security, walls around a floor to denote a space, and so forth – you get the idea. Of course, these do have a function in the course of denotation but after a while, those functions are taken for granted and the form then becomes codes. For example, the porch does not necessarily provide shade or shelter for entry but becomes a index or symbol for entry and are used as such even if the entry does not need to be shaded or sheltered from the sun or rain. A whooping big door is necessary if large amounts of people enter through it regularly but after awhile it becomes a symbol of main entrance or even welcoming even if only a few people go through it sporadically.
If you can grasp that brief introduction to architectural codes, then I trust you can begin to see how wrong your schemes could appear to some, because most of your designs don’t have them – and that is because I never wanted you to rely on them. But don’t get me wrong, I made sure the functions of those codes were fulfilled in your schemes during tutorials– it’s just that I got you to be creative about how you designed them under the special circumstances of your design development. Some of you even had problems incorporating those codes into your design and I distinctly remember helping you fulfill those functions without the codes in more idiosyncratic and innovative ways. That’s why I don’t see that fault in your design. But to some, the absence of such familiar codes was akin to an architectural crime hence the overly strong and unnecessarily harsh remarks against your efforts. The most unfortunate part was that it never got across how you solved or fulfilled those functions without the use of familiar codes. The question of competency then is not yours, unless you can see your own fault in neglecting to explain it to the panel.
Just off the top of my head, these are some further examples based on what happened today:
- you would not have the typical layout of an office because you did not have the clear demarcation of function of an office like the corridor for circulation nor did you lay out in clear blocks the rooms for functions, or the space saving service core of an office tower. The reason you did not have them is because those are for huge corporate offices with an impersonal amount of staffing pigeonholed in more departments that what you have; or for offices to be rented out to persons or parties yet unknown. But yours was only a 25 people office with varying departments which ultimately serve the same service; hence the opportunity to be more casual about inter-spatial and personnel relationships.
- For someone who relies on space being defined by walls to create a room entered only by a door, a lot of your plans were messy. That’s because you enlarged corridors to accommodate more informal casual discussion spaces, staff lounges, rest areas, etc. So you can imagine the horror when these people see that you do not provide rooms to put those functions in – never mind that with only 25 full-time staff, it would be such a dead office building if everyone of them were tucked nicely away into rooms even when they relax. So for someone whose idea of design is extruded bubble diagrams, your layout would not even be considered covering basic design. [Strange how ‘basic’ seems to be the way a lot of jurors insist on seeing in a design jury even for the 3rd year.]
- Most of you devised staggered security systems that allowed for common spaces to be open out of office hours while the office spaces be secured. It’s just a shame that this was missed because you did not have a single entry point to everything that can be locked up at one go. Nor did you have PGFs [Pak Guard Facilities].
- For someone visiting the offices for the first time, wavy corridors might be a bit daunting. But if you work there 8/5, you must be such a moron if you still trip over these corridors everyday at work.
- Personally I prefer parking in basements because they reduce open carbon emissions and surface temperature. It would have been worth more with energy saving venting devices and encouraging natural light funnels rather than dismissing it altogether. [Remember, some of your green precedents had basement parking.]
So I hope with those few examples you will believe there was no real negative issue with your output overall; and I’m not saying it just because I’m your tutor and blindly defending your work. I have my reasons and my logic. The logic that someone said was missing from your work is probably the logic of codes, which is what I mentioned as conventional logic, which does not necessarily encapsulate design logic, i.e., the logic we were trying to instill into you.
If however you are worried that you are missing something by not going through the design by code method, no worries, it really does not take more than 1 or 2 weeks to come up with such a design. If you have ever seen the typical way a 5 storey office is laid out you’d understand why. You could have wrapped the layout in 2 weeks, than spend the rest of the 8-10 weeks working on its form and presentation. To prove this point, think back to some early sketches you presented in tutorials – they were based on what were typical office layouts. If we let you go with them, you could have started presenting in mid-term if you got the form you want. But I personally refuse to allow you to be that mindless and shallow about design – that has always been my personal preference for which I make no apologies or excuses for.
Besides, there were still some of you who did present design by code schemes and they were much favoured by the panel. It’s just those of you who pushed the envelopes of convention that were vilified. This does make me wonder, what does innovation really mean to some people?
Anyway, as you’ve been told, you’re not ready for UPM 4th year. Well, I hope with what you can see for yourselves, now you can choose the direction you want to take after this and decide where or when you want to continue the next years of your architectural education. But that’s just one person from 4th year’s opinion. As for me, my objective has always been to ensure you have a portfolio worthy of applying to any school even out of here. So you figure for yourselves then your own worthiness.
On a final note, I thought you dudes and dudesses were collectively rather smart today. So who were the motley crew that got you a remark on having to dress well? Someone thought it was her because of her t-shirt, but she looked nice even if it was a collarless shirt. I guess that’s just one code I can’t tutor on simply because I wouldn’t know how – the dress code.
good that you as the lecturer have taken the role of clarifying what sounded like a demoralising experience for the students.
i wonder if the external assessor were briefed about the different design process / criteria for this particular project? and do you think that this type of design exercise is more suited for the earlier projects instead of an end-of-the-year major assignment?
Thank you for your comments, though you’d have to pardon my tardiness in responding.
As to the the jurors being briefed on the design approach – yes they most definitely were, and I’d stand behind this unequivocally as that was a first for me to do the briefing myself despite not being the one in charge. My briefing was based on the 3-Es, Empowering, Exploration, Expression; where Empowering was about getting the students to embolden their response or reaction to the project for design intentions; Exploration is to discover the methodologies, approaches and technologies to develop and realise their design intentions as architecture; and finally Expression which is simply to present the product of the previous two.
But I guess it wasn’t enough that I explain the underlying fundamentals as I realise now that I should have also outlined what the jurors should expect to see. I just grossly overestimated their design acumen and sensibilities.
As for when to apply this approach I’d have to say that I always implement it from the beginning of the year through all the various scales of projects. But of course I have to make sure that they would have the basics of procedural or systematic design processes. The way I see it is that in the 1st year they should discover the freedom of creative ideas. In the 2nd year they should be aware of the confines or architectural framework of creative ideas. So in the 3rd year, I’d want them to discover the creative freedom within that architectural framework. So throughout their 3rd year with me this will be the modus operandi for the students. The objective is not so much about the heroics of it all in the end – but what they picked up along the way to qualify such heroics as architecture.
And they did well. They always do.