Remember I'm the Bloody Architect

The End

2011-11-08T09:38:00.000Z

After several years tapping away at this blog, I am afraid I simply do not have the time to continue. I will put the blog on hold for a while, maybe I'll be back, maybe not....

Alice says Thanks to all her followers, all the thoughtful, provoking, interesting, funny and informative comments.

To my police readers... Take care, stay safe

To my architect readers... things may not be as bad as the press likes to make you believe

To my other readers... thanks for taking an interest

Lots of love

Alice

Keep Off!

2011-07-30T09:08:00.000+01:00

My last post, about Faffing, was hi-jacked by some annoying Greek bod who put loads of links to his incomprehensible blog at the bottom of mine. I therefore deleted the post and have replaced it without the links.

Whoever you are, don't do it again otherwise I will only allow registered readers access. And it won't include you.

Faff and Faff and Faff Some More

2011-07-30T09:02:00.001+01:00

I love being an architect. I hope that has come through in most of my posts, although I am aware I sound like a grumpy old woman in several of them, there is still no job I would rather do. The satisfaction when I finally crack that knotty design problem and go and put the kettle on with a smug little smile on my face and have a biscuit as a reward. That calm pleasure I feel walking around a previously grotty old building I have turned into something that is comfortable, beautiful and will please the owner for many years to come. The feeling that all is well with the world when watching good tradesmen producing beautifully finished plaster, paintwork, joinery or brickwork. The feel of a lovely turned stair newel in my hand. The smell of fresh timber. The grinding of mortar mixers, the shouts of the builders, the deep rumble of the delivery lorry, the slap of wet concrete falling into a trench, the hammering and sawing - I love it all.

Notice that the pleasure comes from the real and practical things, the concrete (!) and the physical. The irritations mainly come from the unreal and virtual, the nebulous and the unnecessary.

I received a new Word document the other day attached to an email, which I could not open. After a good deal of annoying to-ing and fro-ing with the sender and digging around on the internet, I discovered that my version of Word would not talk to his version of Word. Why not? Because he had the latest upgrade and Microsoft wanted everyone to buy it so they made damn sure that the two were incompatable. This is where a whole new industry is created - that of constant upgrades of computer software to keep you spending money. I use the word industry in its loosest possible sense - to me it defines something useful, whereas this kind of thing is just patently infuriating.

For many, many years I used a huge double elephant drawing board on a stand - it has a lovely German drafting machine attached and is heavy, accurate, smooth, easy and satisfying to use. I love it, and it must have earned me tens of thousands of pounds. It never broke down, never came up with an irritating box that said 'This board has encountered a fatal error and has to close - sorry for the inconvenience'. It never needed and expensive and incomprehensible upgrade. It was totally intuative, there was no training manual full of gobbledegook and no three day £2000 courses in London, in some horrible windowless office with a fridge cold sandwich lunch and a boring little fat man droning on, on and on before you could even think of drawing a line. Now, I use a drafting programme and I absolutely hate the damn thing. Where is the joy? Where is the lovely fresh sheet of paper, waiting for that first pitch black line of Rotring ink? Where is the style, the beautiful drawing so easy to read and use? Well, I am not saying my CAD drawings are bad, but being one more removal from the mind that creates them, they are no longer a thing of satisfaction and beauty.
These things seem to be absolutely necessary now to create a building, but let us look away from the screen for a moment and consider the beautiful and extraordinary buildings of the past. How were these designed? What did William of Sens use? How about Sir Christopher Wren? Or Antoni Gaudi, or Frank Llyod Wright, or Brunel, Morris, Lutyens or Pugin? They did it all with a rod, tape, rule, set square and plumb line. Oh yes, BIM, VectorWorks, Revit, AutoCAD, Sketchup and the rest, you are all just a means to an end and hopeless in a power cut.

Building and all things related is for some of us addictive, could be worse I suppose. I'm spending my 'free weekend' working on some gothic finials...I need to get alife.

6:41 PM

Von said...

How good to read this and know there are still people who care about craftpersonship and a job properly done.If it's done well it does involve listening to the drop of wet cement, the littel details that make it a real, living process.

I suspect Gaudi made it up as he went along but dare say he needed some basic tools!That's not a criticism by the way, love his work!

4:07 AM

Margaux @ Insyncmarketing said...

The difference between a real architect and a "DIY Idiot" is design itself. Even if there are tons of people out there pretending to be architects, you can never fool those who 'really understands and appreciate 'the Art', there's something about an "architect's touch" pretenders simply cannot match. Do you have an idea what that it?

12:08 PM

Alain said...

How sad is this? I worked in a Paris practise back in the early eighties when Cad was coming in, and the partners asked us to draw as 'mechanically' as we could to give the impression the competition entry was prepared on computer! We drew twice scale and reduced, took huge efforts to draw neatly, all to lose the very thing that set the practise apart, which was the huge artistic talent of the french/belgian/swiss/icelandic/polish architects (we were a mixed bag) who worked there.

Makes you weep.

Alain

7:39 PM

Von said...

How very tragic!!

11:49 PM

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Gold Medal

2011-02-21T19:21:00.000Z

The RIBA gold gong this year went to David Chipperfield. Having sympathised with his every anguished word, I was glad to see he is keeping the traditional sartorial elegance of the architect well and truely alive. Just check out that black polo-neck, the black jacket, black trousers, specs and slightly mad hair.

You can admire him here

Mass Production

2011-01-30T11:59:00.000Z

Over Christmas, I went to look at a show house in a local new build estate. Not that I wanted to buy a house, but I was curious, as an architect, to see the latest thing in mass housing design. I followed the signs around some very confusing bits of hard landscaping that did not know if they were roads or footways or cycle paths. They were paved in that herringbone pattern concrete block beloved of the 1980s refurbishers, and there was no definition between the road and the pavement. They curved this way and that way, meaning that a confused pedestrian could not be seen by the confused car driver until it was almost too late.

The show house was a three storey end of terrace, called a 'town house' by the developer. Why? It wasn't in the town, but a good mile away from the shops, doctors', school or pub, anything that in my mind defines the word 'town'. The front elevation was dressed in the local style, or rather the developers interpretation of it, meaning it was totally regionless. There were the usual plastic windows, plastic doors, plastic gutters and downpipes which fall to bits after five years and those awful plastic fascias and bargeboards. The brickwork was poor to the point where I would have insisted on a rebuild, with the mortar joints far too wide and the perpends - well, not perpendicular. Mortar splashes all over the facework showed where the scaffold boards had been left down in the rain and the pointing was atrocious. The effect was rather sad and scruffy in the dreary light of the winter's day - so much for the kerb appeal so beloved of the volume housebuilder.

I pulled into the parking space which was much too far from the front door. My car (which I'll admit is enormous) overhung the mean space into the street. I squeezed out of the car door, which opened directly onto the cheapo, toffee coloured, panelled garden fence.

The saleswoman opened the door and invited me to look around at our leisure. 'We've sold nearly all of them!' she breezed, giving me a sheaf of brochures. I looked out of the window behind her. 'Where's the garden?' I asked. 'Well, you will get the visitor's parking as well,' she said. That was the single tiny space I had managed to shoehorn my car into earlier. 'That will double the size of the garden then' I said.

The brochure stated that the house 'boasts' five bedrooms. There was nothing I could see to boast about. Yes, there were five bedrooms, and surprisingly, they were reasonably large - it was possible to get a bed, wardrobe and bedside tables into all of them which is rare in the Scrooge like spaces usually found in volume housing. But each window looked straight at another house, and worse, straight into someone else's bedroom. The non existant garden meant that the next house was close enough to play ping pong with the neighbour through the upstairs windows, and the curly wirly street pattern meant that every single part of every single garden and house was overlooked by several others.

The living room was on the first floor, and as I walked across it, I wondered 'Am I drunk?' The floor dipped towards one corner. Being able to build something straight and level is one of the most fundemental aspects of being a builder, so this was a cause for enormous concern. Had it been built by cowboys, or was the building already subsiding?

I counted five rooms with a loo - bathrooms, showers, en suites, cloakrooms - who really needs that many? Maybe everyone is going to get food poisoning at once. I imagined the faff every Saturday cleaning the multiplication of the things and felt ... challenged. Of course, there were no cupboards, the only one I spotted had yet another loo in it.

The front of the building had a bay, an attempt to make the facade look more interesting. We architects call it 'the articulation of the facade' or corners, if you want to be less complicated. Bizzarely, the partitions of the rooms inside did not match the position of the bay inside, leaving a really awkward and annoying niche with a window half way across it, about two feet square, that was just the right size to be totally useless.

'Did you use an architect?' I asked the saleswoman. Oh yes, she grinned, a very good one, in house you know. With a bit more conversation, I discovered what you already knew, dear reader - the 'architect' was an 'architectural designer' with no more design training or acumen than my hamster.

I walked out into the street/ cycle path/ footpath. For a moment I could see the barley field the whole sorry affair had been built on. I was walking around it looking at the oak trees in the woods in the distance in the early summer, watching the waves of barley, listening to that bird I could never see that goes 'chinka chinka chinka' and a distant tractor. All gone. Now, views of terrible, horrible, badly built trash and no distant view of anything. That's progress.

Building Myths 2: Dry Rot Timber Treatment

2010-11-29T12:08:00.000Z

'Hello, Sir - Madam. Please sit down' (smiles with mouth closed and a slightly strained expression).

'What is it? Is it serious?' (with an anxious look at each other)

'I'm afraid so. Our tests confirm its dry rot.'

'Oh, no! Does that mean...?'

'Yes, I'm afraid it does. Fortunately, with emergencies such as this, our waiting list is very short. We can come next week'.

'Oh, thank goodness! Er.. how much will it cost?'

'Well, we can discuss it in detail tomorrow, but we're looking at a major operation, I'm afraid - all the bad stuff has to be cut out, then we're into the chemotherapy. I am pleased to say this is usually 100% successful'.

This may sound familiar to many unfortunate people who have had the misfortune to be exposed to a dodgy timber treatment 'expert'. Like the damp 'expert', many of these companies exist for the sole purpose of selling you timber treatment and associated builders' work. If they don't charge for their report, (and lets face it, if you want expert opinion you must expect to pay for it) you can almost certainly expect a recommendation for timber treatment. There are of course firms who will not try and sell you something you don't need, and advise you properly, so it is essential to obtain a recommendation from an expert, such as an architect or surveyor, before going to one.

So, what does this entail, exactly, as you breathlessly sign the agreement? Well, it depends where the rot is, but most often, it is found in timber structures which are inaccessible, such as roof voids, underfloor spaces or if you are really unlucky, behind your beautiful, decorative, Victorian wall panelling. Many timber treatment firms recommend removing all the affected timber to at least one metre (one metre!) into sound wood and destroying it. Any plaster or render in the area must also be removed, and floor boards taken up, panelling removed, roof voids accessed so that a thoroughly nasty chemical can be sprayed all over anything made of timber to kill the dry rot fungus. Once you can get into the building again without being asphyxiated, the repairs can start. The whole business can be extremely disruptive, destructive and expensive. It is not something to be undertaken lightly or without some very good advice.

If you have read my essay on damp proofing, you will probably know what is coming next.

Dry rot chemical treatment is almost always unnecessary. Yes, it is a waste of money to cover everything in poisonous chemicals. Why? Because it doesn't address the cause of dry rot, only the symptom. Without addressing the cause, the dry rot will come galloping back again, gleefully creeping into any tiny little areas missed by the original treatment, into the new timber and, given long enough, into the treated timber - and it is a nasty beast. Dry rot loves poorly ventilated, damp, dark voids, preferably near plaster, where it can grow, and spread, and turn your roof into dust, a ghost of a structure that can only stand up by force of habit. If you want to know how bad it can get, read this. No wonder people panic.

Without the right conditions, it is impossible for dry rot to exist. It is essential to treat the cause first, that is the damp, the lack of ventilation and most often, poorly considered DIY, which prevents the old building from breathing. And we all know that if we cannot breathe, we die and rot.

The Myths and Legends of Buildings Part 1: Rising Damp

2010-11-13T11:49:00.001Z

Once upon a time, there were no damp proof courses. Buildings were made of soft, pliable, squidgy materials which soaked up damp and condensation from the atmosphere and exuded it out again, all as part of a lovely natural process some of us more romantic architects refer to as 'breathing'. Of course, during a time of rain and storms, a place did become rather uncomfortable so various low tech solutions were used. In farmhouses, you can often find a lovely boarded timber dado, with ventilation holes (or just gaps in the boards) to allow air circulation and natural drying when the weather improved. In ancient castles, drapes and tapestries hid any damp patches percolating through the massive stonework. Georgian houses had hessian stretched over battens, covered with plaster or, if you had serious amounts of money, timber panelling from top to bottom. The ground floors of old buildings are most often quarry tiles or stone, laid on chalk or rammed earth, and as long as the site was reasonably well drained, the damp would evaporate from a vast floor area without causing anyone too many problems.

Later on, a suspended timber floor was even better; a good draught underneath it kept it from going rotten and the joist ends were sat on pieces of slate, acting as a physical barrier to any damp from high soil levels or water penetration through the base of the walls.

Modern buildings used a similar technology, a physical damp proof course (DPC) made of slate, engineering brick or tarred material. The damp course was taken underneath the floor as well, effectively creating a tank to stop any water.

So far, so good.

Now children, we come to that knotty old problem of refurbishing old buildings. As we know, many of them did not have a DPC and the whole building breathed naturally. Enter Mr Mortage Surveyor and his anxious client, Mr DIY Bodgit, who likes the pretty house but wants it to behave exactly like the Barret Home he has just left - no moisture anywhere, no, not ever. Mr Mortgage Surveyor throws up his hands when his damp meter goes off the scale. 'won't lend the money' he says, 'unless you do something about the damp'.

Mr Bodgit decides to do a full refurb. Up come the quarry tiles, in goes a concrete floor with a polythene DPC. Along comes Mr Damp Surveyor, whose main purpose in life is to sell DPCs but calls himself an expert in damp problems. He attempts to inject a chemical DPC into a flint rubble wall. All seems well. Mr Bodget carries on with his ignorant refurb work and ends up with a house he likes, and rather touchingly tells friends 'we kept everything in character!'

Five years later, and what is happening to the walls? Odd fluffy white stuff is appearing on the new gypsum plaster he coated all the old lime render with and some of it is falling off. Mr Damp Surveyor's firm has long gone, and so has his insurance policy. A new damp proofer appears, and tries the same thing. Guess what? It fails, the damp is worse than ever!

What has actually happened?

The flint rubble wall never had a DPC. The quarry tiles were laid straight onto the earth. The exterior ground levels were low. The rainwater drainage was cast iron and working well.

Mr Bodgit installed an impermeable ground floor. The moisture could not dry through the floor, it was forced up into the walls. A wet wall is cold, so condensation forms on the surface, staining the plaster.

The new patio was of concrete flags, built right up against the old walls, raising the ground level and trapping water beneath it. Of course, the damp penetrated through the wall and ended up inside.

The cast iron gutters were replaced with cheap plastic, poorly jointed where it adjoined the old cast iron system at ground level. More water, concentrated in a small area, penetrates the wall.

Chemical DPCs are ineffective in flint or many types of stone or rubble walls. They do not work. Never mind what the salesmen tell you. They. Do. Not. Work. It is often the hard plaster put on the interior that keeps the damp out for a while, but how many buildings have you seen with a tide mark at the junction with the old and new plaster? Yep - that is penetrating damp and is nothing to do with the DPC.

So the damp gets into the wall and as it dries into the nice, centrally heated interior, leaves salt deposits from the masonry, (that fluffy white stuff) and damages the plaster.

Notice I have not mentioned rising damp once. There is no such thing. The causes of damp in cases like these are high ground levels, poor drainage, condensation and ignorant DIY.

The only way to treat damp is to treat the causes of the damp.

In the Bleak Midwinter

2010-10-16T09:33:00.000+01:00

Winter's coming, oh joy! For my entire career, winter has meant surveys, and I have never really understood why. Most small projects take roughly a year from my first visit to see the client and take the brief, to signing the practical completion form and leaving the delighted (with one or two notable exceptions) client happily dancing around their new building. So, if I do a survey in the winter, it will mean construction in the winter, which is, of course, not the best time of year to be doing anything apart from hiding under the duvet and drinking hot tea. Many clients think that a winter survey will lead to a summer completion, but no.

Last winter was the coldest, longest and hardest I can remember (apart from 1987) and of course, it was the survey season. There are basically two kinds an architect tends to do, the measured survey from which I produce drawings of the building and its grounds, and the conditions survey, which is a report into, well, the condition of the building.

There is a little lodge near the centre of a large park, which was used for the gamekeeper originally, but had been let out by the owner to some rather posh people with oodles of money. The building was small, charming, decorative and built somewhere in the late 19th century. It had candy twist chimneys, a Gothic arched doorway, beautiful little panels of stained glass in oak moulded frames and a deep and complicated plain tiled roof, with both square and fishtail shaped tiles. The walls were of brick, and were covered in string courses, corbel courses, moulded panels, diaper work and moulded plinths. It was a little gem of high Victorian architecture, in the middle of a deer park, in the middle of nowhere. Lovely, but the forecast was sleet with a wind chill of minus seven. I dressed as well as I could - huge coat, thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, but...if you stand still long enough in weather like that, you are going to feel it.

I was staying in a small guest house near the park gates, and by the time I reached the site, I was quite warm from the half mile walk. Things went downhill from then on. I did the interior first. The heating had not been on for about a month as this, of course, was not the occupiers' only residence. Victorian buildings being what they are, it had that deathly, still, morgue like cold and I couldn't even make a cuppa as the water had been turned off. By the time I had finished the interior, my fingers and toes were beginning to feel nipped.

Outside, the wind was driving sharp, stinging needles of sleet into my face every time I looked up to check the upper levels. I was using a dictaphone, a little recording device, but the switches were tiny, and not suitable for operating with thick gloves on. Eventually, I had to take one glove off and my nails turned blue. I had my huge and heavy site boots on, which are great for gripping icy or muddy surfaces, but as my leg muscles froze, it became more and more difficult to lift my feet clear of the snow. Icy water started to leak through the lace holes.

As the light faded, I completed the survey and began to walk back to the gates. Each step was difficult. My legs wouldn't work properly, the boots weighed a ton each and I could barely see through the sleet and the scarf I had wrapped around my face. My lips froze and I could hardly speak to the guest house people to ask them for some tea. I sounded very, very drunk.

In my room, I could not undo my bootlaces. I took off my overcoat, gloves, scarf, hat and the top jumper, and collapsed on the bed with my feet hanging over the side. Later I managed to remove my boots, and the top pair of socks. It took me two hours to recover and warm up and the aches and pains the next morning made me feel as if I had been in a fight with three guys armed with lump hammers.

When I downloaded my recording, I could not understand the last few comments - they were burbled gibberish. Luckily, I had plenty of photographs.

Does anyone think being an architect is easy?

Death of the Profession

2010-09-13T08:21:00.000+01:00

Looking at the car crash that is the economy at the moment, I have come to the horrible realisation that architecture as a profession is in its death throes. With each recession, the profession becomes further eroded by others, and is now a tiny island within the sea of chaos that is the construction industry. We used to be an entire continent, but due to rising waters, we have become isolated, marginalised, shattered and insulted. It won't take much for the waters to rise above our heads and eliminate us entirely.

Without going into enormous detail, and quite frankly I don't have the energy, consider the following:

1. Badly informed mouth on a stick politicians who think we are all on the make, such as Michael Gove and his comment that architects were creaming off huge fees for the Building Schools for the Future programme.

2. No protection of function, so every Tom, Dick and Harry who can lift a pencil start 'designing', with no training, no insurance, no skill of any kind and produce crap buildings. Who gets the blame for these awful boxes and crap sheds that litter our cities? Architects!

3. Education that is becoming more and more irrelevant to what the job of an architect actually is.

4. No support from that airy fairy institute of ours the RIBA. No promoting us as good value for money, and hiding behind the fact that they are a charity to promote that nebulous concept 'architecture' therefore they cannot promote the services of its members.

5. Structural engineers, quantity surveyors, landscape architects, estate agents, ecologists, CDM co-ordinators, interior designers, CAD technicians, technologists, mechanical engineers - all eroding what should be part of our job, part of our services. Not that I blame them, I blame us for being lazy and letting it happen.

6. The desire of most architects to be boss, what I call the 'I vant to be alone!' syndrome. I have tried on several occasions to link up with other architects who seem to be like minded and do they want to? Like hell. The profession fractures into a million pieces, each one struggling and suspicious of each other.

I may be painting a very black picture - are there any other architects out there who feel the same? I would just love to be wrong.

Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof in Danger!

2010-08-07T09:28:00.000+01:00

Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof is due to be butchered to provide an underground station. I had a worried email from a very concerned lover of early modernist German architecture, who is trying to publicise its forthcoming destruction, and I must admit, it is a rather fine, if a rather overpowering building. Here is the exterior and there are many other images and a history of the building on Wiki. Rather grand, in my humble opinion. The proposed new building, 'Stuttgart 21' will completely ruin it. There are many links to the story - just Google it for an idea of the strength of feeling that this project should be scrapped.

What do all you architecture lovers out there think?

Blue Monday

2010-07-19T19:20:00.000+01:00

Underneath the office of 2010 there lies the ghost of my old studio. As I walk in to my old workplace, I can see it, separated by nothing but a thin membrane of time. For a moment, the veil dissolves and I see...

The computer room is the pride of the place, with a huge cabinet in an air conditioned cubicle, feeding at least three, yes! We have three! terminals elsewhere in the building. The door is kept shut, as the funny little geek who keeps it running does not like any dust getting in. He is sat at one of the terminals, round specs on the end of his nose, his long pony tail neatly placed down the centre of his narrow back, tapping away as white letters and symbols appear onto a black screen. There is no mouse, and the system is already becoming antiquated but the Apple MAC is still a little way in the future. He turns and grins, whipping off his glasses as he does so. The printer clacks into action, a huge thing which pulls an AO sheet of paper this way and that, with a whooshing, buzzing noise punctuated by clatters as it changes pens. One print can take an hour? More? I can't remember as I don't use a computer yet. My Rotring pens and the Dyeline machine are much faster. I laugh at him, saying it will never catch on for anything other than Space Invader updates.

In the drawing office, each architect or technician has several acres of layout space - flush doors laid on trestles, in our case - and a huge, wonderful, double elephant sized drawing board. As I said in the last post, I am particularly proud of mine, that wonderful draughting machine with its pulleys and counterweights is a glory of precision engineering. A few years from now, I will rescue the lovely thing from a skip.

At the end of the room there are numerous filing cabinets, as well as several plan chests holding current jobs, each with many shallow drawers and a field of formica on the top. Ours is covered with little cardboard models, little sketches, not meant to impress, merely as a natural thought process.

The window sills are high so that we all have plenty of wall space. Personalised work areas have pictures of buildings, family, pets, wallpaper samples, notes and scrawled sketches pinned to them. The sketches change frequently as they are translated into something buildable, or go into the bin.

On the shelves, desks and layout areas samples of building stones of all colours, shiny, matt, chalky or hard are used as paperweights or cup stands. A roof tile lies across my colleagues desk - he was very excited by it when it arrived as it was just what he was looking for - a glazed, black pantile, a rare thing.

The curtain drops and I am back in 2010. There are no drawing boards. Instead, rows of desks all face one way, each one with a computer keyboard and a large screen. There are twice as many people in the space as before. It is tidy and clean. No-one is standing holding a model and pondering with a smile on their face and glue on their shirt. There are no photographs - the management thinks they are distracting. There are very few samples lying around - if anyone wants one, it arrives as a stream of bits onto their screen at the click of a mouse. There are no large, blue-grey prints smelling faintly of ammonia. It all goes onto discs or is sent via email. In the old computer room, there is a large format photocopier and a small printer. Computers are no longer looked after by one strange little guy - it is outsourced to a company and you never see the same person twice. No-one is talking to anyone else. They all email, even if they are sat three yards apart.

Once upon a time, an architects' office was a visually fascinating and stimulating place to be. Anyone walking into this one would ask, is it an accountants', an engineers', an insurance office or a the conveyancing section of a large lawyers' practice?

It is quiet, dismal and dull. The colour has drained away.

Fun to Funky

2010-06-06T13:05:00.001+01:00

After the fantasy fall off the scaffolding, I find myself somewhere in the 80s. I am wearing the old Army jacket I bought from a friend against the cold, and I am cycling to the offices of the large architectural practice where I trained and spent a small but formative proportion of my early career. It might be November, or just after Christmas. I lock the bike to the fence round the back as the partners do not like bikes at the front of the building, as they look untidy. I run up the steps of the scruffy building and kick through the leaves gathered around the front door from the tree in the yard. The maintenance man, a semi retired ex soldier is getting too old to keep clearing them away.

The front hall is furnished in black Habitat desks and the rattle of the word processor comes through the open door of the studio. I walk in and my colleague, mentor and friend shouts 'Hello Alice!'. He is stone deaf and always shouts, but has not been deaf for long enough to realise it yet. Happy and enthusiastic, full of energy and a wonderful designer and draghtsman, he is busy on a barn conversion, that mainstay of the Small Works department, as farmers sold off their uneconomic old farm buildings with planning permission for conversion to housing. He always stands up to draw, the huge drawing board set almost vertical, 2B pencil in hand, talking to himself as he goes through one idea after another. The layout bench next to him is covered in bits of tracing paper, all full of little perspective sketches of interiors, gardens and fireplaces.

Across the room, the senior partner is standing holding a rough little cardboard model of a new building for the university. The model is not one of those marvellous things for display, it is a sketch to help him think, and to work out the difficult roof angles. The pungent smell of Uhu glue wafts over. There is a squashed tube of it on his bench, next to a penknife on a cutting mat, a steel ruler and scissors. His floppy blond hair is all over the place, and there is glue on his black shirt where it bulges over his ample belly. He holds the model up to eye level and slowly rotates it. He is smiling. I think he must have worked it out at last, the final uncompromisingly modern roof design he has been working on for a month.

I throw my bag down on the floor next to my own work area. The layout bench has some A1 tracing paper sheets laid on it, cockled from water damage but now dry - one of my jobs this week, I remember, was to scratch out the worst of the stains with a razor blade and redraw the washed out lines. The flat roof used to leak regularly and woe betide anyone who had left a drawing out overnight in the wrong place.

The tea lady brings me a cuppa, with two custard creams on the side. The hunch backed church architect is on the phone. He is always on the phone, discussing the technical problems of repair with a builder, a church warden, the vicar in the most minute detail. He will eventually get time to lift a pencil and start drawing, then five minutes later the phone willl ring again. It takes him months to complete a drawing.

I sit at my drawing board and pull the draughting machine towards me. It makes a discreet, smooth, precise rumble as the wheels run over the metal rails attached to the side of the board and the pulleys and counterweights move the two rulers. It is a wonderful thing and I love using it. I carry on with the drawing I am so painstakingly producing - a long section of the barn my colleague is working on, showing every stud, post, brace and purlin in tiny detail, using a precision ink pen. I can do this for hours, days and weeks, looking at the thing from a few inches away, then standing back to check the setting out. At the end a beautiful technical drawing is born. I take it to the print room and give it to the elderly man who feeds it into the dyeline machine on top of a sheet of diazo paper. The whole is developed in ultra violet light, then the paper is fumed with ammonia, a smell I grew to love, producing the wonderful, accurate prints to be sent to the client, builder, engineer... I joke with the print man for a while, telling him he is getting high on ammonia fumes. He laughs, all the time feeding in drawings, pulling out prints, folding, filing...

All gone.

Archiblog Error

2010-06-06T12:29:00.000+01:00

The portal of blogs about Architecture lists Alice as originating from the United States. Several thoughts came to mind.

1. Why?
2. I am English, all the way through.
3. I have never been to the USA in my life and have no desire whatsoever to go there.
4. Did they get me mixed up with that well known non - architect, Alice Cooper?

I have several American readers whose comments I enjoy, being from a totally different culture to this one. Hello to all of you, and does my blog sound American?

Ashes to Ashes, Brick Dust to Brick Dust....

2010-05-22T15:54:00.003+01:00

It is Monday afternoon, a short time from now or many years ago, and I am looking at a piece of reset decorative Victorian brickwork half way up a six storey industrial building. I am not amused. The joints are far too big and I have a suspicion that cement has been used, not the brick dust I so carefully specified. The bricks are the originals, carefully taken down so that some steel ties could be inserted into the body of the crumbling structure, and hopefully keep the thing sound for another 30 years or so. The old bricks could be replaced, and no-one would see the difference. The building is at the end of its life, a glorious mass of terra cotta, moulded and rubbed brickwork and pink Dorset stone all decaying and crumbling every time the wind blows, but we try, we really do. I try to breathe new life into the enormous decaying body, using modern technology carefully hidden away, coupled with the best of modern craftsmanship. Unfortunately, the latter is very hard to find as most of the old boys either retired or got out of it during the last recession. The youngsters are keen, but not experienced enough and there is no-one in the middle of their career to teach them.

The new patch of brickwork does not look anything like the original. The joints are 9mm wide, when the Victorian bricklayers managed the thinnest line you can imagine. The new mortar is that bright, grey colour, indicating the use of cement mortar 'just a bit to help it go off' as they used to say. This same mortar will rot the bricks after a few years and once it is set, will tear the edges off the bricks if you try and take it out.

I start arguing with the foreman. The brickwork must be redone before the mortar sets. I am not going to be fobbed off with excuses. He is aware of the end of the contract rapidly approaching, time is money and the building firm is struggling in the recession. They are cutting corners, I know it and lack the courage to tell him - he knows it and won't admit it. We argue in the cold and the rain and I have been on my feet all morning. My site boots leak. I am very cold right to my core, and my knees hurt from the climb up the ladders. The opening in the scaffold rail to that same, long, wet, dirty ladder is behind me and I am not looking forward to the slow and painful climb back down. The foreman is also cold. He took his coat off earlier as the physical work warmed him up, and now he has stood for half an hour talking to me. I can see him starting to shiver. It is three in the afternoon and the light is fading. He wants his tea break. Neither of us are at our best.

I gesture with my clipboard at the new brickwork. He swears. I indicate the new brickwork and tell him to compare it - not the same, is it? In the heat of the moment, I break my own rule. Never move without looking where you are putting your feet. I tread on a scaffolding clip and fall through the gap in the rail at the top of the ladder. At least I won't have to climb down it.

Episode 2 follows shortly - Alice in the 80s!

*******

The last paragraph is pure fantasy, but it is something I nearly did when I was young and foolish. The bricklayer saved my life by putting his arm out, saying in a matter of fact way 'I don't think you want to go down that way!'

Right On!

2010-04-24T19:10:00.001+01:00

The Architects' Registration Board, the regulatory body responsible for slapping naughty architects, is currently recruiting new legal eagles for its PCC. That is of course the Professional Conduct Committee, the actual slapper of the architects, separate from the Board itself and judge, jury and executioner rolled into one. (Rather like Judge Dredd, they are the law).

The link is on the left hand side - just have a look at the application form. The first five pages are the fairly normal kind of questions you would expect for such an august and important post, but Page 6 had me in hysterics. This is the kind of thing that used to be funny about 20 years or so ago, when Not the Nine O Clock News had a sketch about people being 'stoutist'. It just shows the ridiculous lengths such government quangos will go to to try and prove it is not being sex-race-age-hermaphrodite-religion-disabledist. As they roll over and whimper and pant, showing their belly to the liberal PC brigade (who are the most intolerant and nasty people I have ever met), I expect they realise that asking all these questions will make sure they have all the knowledge they need to discriminate in any form they choose.

By the way, where is the section for me to put down 'red hair and freckles' - or should it go in the Disability section?

How to Sack Your Client - Part 2

2010-04-03T15:34:00.000+01:00

The lady was quite insistant on the phone. 'But this is what I want!' she said, at the end of a very long and exhausting conversation where I tried to explain that, even if she did own the land, the Planning Act still applied. I was absolutely kn*ackered, so to get rid of her I agreed to meet her and her husband at the house she was interested in buying for a further discussion. She would get an hour of my time and advice for my usual fee.

It was an ordinary 1930's house on the outskirts of a rather nice town not far from here. A real town, with no wretched 1960's shopping centre and only a small, apologetic Sainsbury's on the bypass. I could see why she wanted to move there. Unfortunately, like many of my female clients who have wealthy husbands and too much time on their hands, she was rather hysterical. 'I've prepared drawings!' she shrieked, thrusting a sheaf of papers at me. Her husband was very quiet and looked completely fed up. I toured the house with them. In my opinion, it was a pleasant, well designed, rather charming place with a generous garden and a useful collection of well maintained outbuildings. The large bay fronted windows had lovely Art Nouveau stained glass panels with a tulip motif. The living and bedrooms were large and light. The staircase had a beautiful heart and clover pattern cut into the balustrade and the interior doors were weighty, panelled, serious objects leavened with little leaded peepholes. Like many of its type, it was one of a long row of similar, peaceful looking places well set back from the road, with mature trees and an air of comfort without ostentation. It was not Architecture with a capital A, but I would have liked it for myself. Now there's a complement!

Her scheme for the 'improvements', like those of many people who think they can do my job, were the absolute gorilla's armpits. She wanted an extension so large, it would have covered half the garden and swallowed all the outbuildings. The staircase would go, in favour of that awful relic from the 1970s, open plan living. The new staircase stuck two fingers up to practicality, legality and any kind of useful contribution to circulation. Worse, two of the bedrooms had no external windows ('I want seven bedrooms!'). The whole edifice would create a damp, north facing courtyard ('I want a courtyard house!') which would effectively cut the living areas off from what was left of the garden. There would be nowhere to park a car except in right in front of the front door. I felt that this lovely but humble building was being violated.

Of course, I could not say all this. Being a professional person I could not shriek 'Rapist! Vandal!' at her or advise her husband to find a more practical wife. Instead, I explained gently that planning law and the building regulations simply would not allow it. I offered to design something much more practical, but a lot smaller. She then tried to tell me that she had read the planning laws and all would be perfectly acceptable (although she had not been to see a planning officer, interestingly). I very politely said I was not the architect for them, but if they looked on the RIBA webside she might find someone more attuned to her way of thinking (like hell!).

That is where I sacked my client.

Her husband shook my hand and looked me in the eye for the first time. 'It has been a pleasure meeting you' he said.

How To Sack Your Client - Part 1

2010-02-21T11:43:00.000Z

I should add to this, 'without getting sued'. It is a sad fact that if anything at all goes wrong whilst you are in a relationship with a client, you are first in the line of fire of blame. It doesn't matter that you didn't build the thing that is leaking like a sieve, it is still somehow your fault. My theory is that a client thinks of the architect as 'theirs' and that miracles are not only possible, but expected. Even experienced clients often believe the architect can do the impossible. Obviously, you are only as good as your last miracle, and the fallout from a tiny mistake can be very stressful and possibly costly. The most important skill any architect possesses is that of diplomacy, coupled with a good relationship with the building contractor. It is amazing how much can be achieved with a quiet word with a friendly contractor to sort out a problem before it gets anywhere near a lawyer.

A client will blame you for any, all or a combination of the following:

1. Planning permission is refused due to the client insisting on a project design which is against all the local development control guidance. The best thing to do here is to walk away from the project before you get past the briefing stage - if you have a feeling it will end in tears, it probably will.

2. The client keeps adding extra bits and pieces whilst the builders are on site. It usually is along the lines of 'while you are here, can you just...' This is where good and open communication with your builder is essential. Make sure they tell you everything the client has said. The builder must refer the client to the architect first, otherwise those little extras will add up to a massive overspend on the final account.

3. The client does not like what you have designed. This can be despite all the drawings and sketches you have produced, and going around the site with them endlessly, telling them what it will be like. I have even made a model and had a client do this at the last minute, usually once they have received planning permission. Occasionally it is because the client is incapable of reading drawings. More often it is because they have found a cheap plans jockey down the road who offers to see to the rest of the project for peanuts and don't want to pay your fee.

4. The client finds a tiny mistake in the design, such as a boundary in the wrong place. Often boundaries are hard to define and you have to rely on the client to provide accurate information based on their deeds or the advice of their lawyer. It amazes me how a client feels they can blame the architect for such misinformation, but they do. I usually offer to put it right and rejig the design for either a nominal extra fee or if it won't take too long and there is a slight doubt about whose fault it is, for nothing. The client either accepts, or more often, won't let you anywhere near the site to find out how to correct your mistake. This is usually interpreted as the client has found a cheapo service elsewhere and doesn't want to pay your fee.

5. Working on existing buildings is always risky. There are too many unknowns, which are only discovered once the structure is opened up and work is well under way, as I have already mentioned in this blog. Of course, it incurs extra costs. I always warn a client at the outset if their building was a heap of rubbish and may require major repair, not all of it obvious or capable of being priced at the start. You tell the client to keep a contingency sum available. They don't. They blame you.

6. The client is happy with your service so far, which includes obtaining planning permission and preparing construction drawings for building regulations. Then they decide you are 'too expensive' and decide to sort out their own builder and carry on without you. Often, this is fine, but with an inexperienced client they make a pig's ear of a fairly major element, such as fitting the stairs or getting a decent heating engineer to size the radiators correctly and appropriately for the rooms. They ring you and blame the drawings. You turn up on site, to find the stairs the wrong way round and radiators positioned half way across the windows. The client threatens to sue.

7. The client's father / wife / sister / second cousin twice removed is a plumber's mate and thinks that the windows you have specified are 'wrong'. The client wants to change them and you spend hours trying to explain why ... Then the irritating relative turns up once you have left and scrawls red pen all over your drawings, which your client then returns to you, saying 'What about all this then? What am I paying you for? You don't know what you are talking about!' or words to that effect.

8. Against all your advice, the client engages the builder of his choice who is half the price of all the rest, and is a well known cowboy. If they wore spurs, a Stetson and a fringed jacket, the client still won't see it. Disaster inevitably looms.

9. The client wants a huge amount of work done but won't tell you what their budget is. You design something according to the brief, you give them a budget figure, they love it, it gets priced up by several builders and guess what? They can't afford it!

I could go on and on. Most of these relate to small domestic projects, but I have had businesses behave like this as well. You architects out there could probably think of many others and I would be interested to hear them. In my next posts, I will go into ways of sacking your client in the way least likely to see you sued (although of course, no guarantees!)

One of my many tutors (a construction lawyer) said to me, 'Stay out of the courts. The only people who make money out of going to court are lawyers.'

Adverts!

2010-02-10T17:49:00.000Z

There are no adverts on this blog, and I won't accept adverts in the comments. Comments from people who are interested in the content are more than welcome, as a way of advertising - no.

Gone Off

2010-01-18T20:07:00.000Z

Yes, it has been cold and the snow has been ... a damn nuisence or beautiful and fun, or both. For works on site, or partially completed buildings, it is the former. It is impossible to carry out any 'wet' trades in freezing weather. Anyone spotted bricklaying, plastering or rendering in the last few weeks is not a tradesman, but a cowboy. Mortar is strange stuff - it doesn't dry' as many people think, it 'goes off'. A chemical reaction starts, which turns the mortar from wet and gloopy to nice, clean, hard, and dry pointing, rendering, and plastering; it sticks the bricks together, lines the walls or seals joints. Below a certain temperature, the reaction cannot take place properly, at least not with traditional mortars that contain lime.

Another time, another lengthy period of freezing weather, snow and ice. I crept along the road at 15 miles an hour, trying to see the track in front of me where another vehicle had passed to avoid going into the ditches I knew were each side of the road but were invisibly clogged with snow. My client had rung me, screaming his head off about some problem at his new house, which had to be sorted out RIGHT NOW otherwise he would report me to the ARB, tell the press, and all the other threats hyserical clients tend to come up with. He had attempted to organise the work himself, using hired trades, didn't need an architect, cost too much don't they, and of course had got into a mess and wanted me to sort it out. Alice being such a nice natured person.... here I was out in the freezing cold in the middle of nowhere, again, instead of drinking tea and doing some filing in my nice, cosy office.

The building was half finished, with part of the roof tiled, the rest covered in black sarking felt (it was a long time ago and I don't specify that any more) - piles of materials, a sea of mud, the site hut and store in the middle of the garden, the little builders' loo set over the nearest convenient drain. Except, today, all was covered in about three inches of snow. The normally ugly and noisy place had a strange, almost ethereal beauty. Snow had drifted against the pile of bricks, leaving some poking out, bright red against the white. There was a large hump of snow over the pile of new pipes, the roof was a complete blanket of white, giving the impression of completeness. The mud was hidden under a smooth sweep of glittering snow. The site huts all had hats of white, making them look as if they belonged to the finished building next to them. The place was homogeneous and beautiful.

I left the car in the road and walked onto the drive, all was absolutely silent. Snow is a marvellous insulator against sound. I could not hear a thing.

Sighing, I realised I would not be able to see the building at all, but might be able to see the interior, I opened the door to find a single plasterer, happily boshing away at the first coat. It was so cold ice had formed on his bucket of water where he would wash his tools. I asked him what he thought he was going to achieve in that weather. Without a pause in his efforts, he said he was self employed and time was money. What happens when all that render falls off? I asked. He didn't care. 'Customer wants it finished' he said. He had another job to go to. He would be long gone.

I took a photo of the beautiful scene and left. There was nothing I could do for a client who thought cheap, fast and good could be used in the same sentence.

Tis the Season...

2009-12-21T11:20:00.003Z

...for that last minute rush, where everyone wants everything done before Christmas. Why? No idea. No-one at the Council is going to do anything at all with that planning application until next year, so what's the point?

...for freezing my toes and other extremities off whilst unburying the car from ice and snow, then driving at 15 miles an hour everywhere.

...to cost money. Spend, spend, spend, then wait for January's bills.

...to go to interminable 'networking' lunches, where I inevitably get sat next to the middle aged drunk who doesn't like females in business. Why anyone should be astonished to meet a female architect in 2009 beats me!

...to knock off early, light the fire, open the ginger wine, settle down with the cats stretched out across my cold feet and play some daft DVD.

...to wish you all a health, wealth and peace of mind.

Have a good one, where-ever you are and thanks for supporting this little blog!

Bad

2009-12-12T19:10:00.003Z

I am both touched and surprised by the comments you all left on my last post. So you like my blog, then? That's great! Thanks for the support and I'll keep writing (if only sporadically) if you keep reading.

Trawling through the links to various other architectural sites, I found this gem, Bad British Architecture. Just take a look at what some of the profession are designing and calling 'architecture'. What is it with some people? No sense of beauty, humility, scale or place. I am not a famous architect, or even a particularly good one, but I do know my limits. Unfortunately many architects who should stick to loo extensions don't.

Oh dear. I have criticised my fellow professionals again. Sackcloth and ashes for a month, I'm afraid.

Archi-blogs

2009-12-05T19:49:00.002Z

There are relatively few architectural blogs or websites I read. This is partly due to lack of time, but mainly because many of them are so far removed from my own little, tiny, provincial architectural pool they read more like fiction. One of my favourites was Part IV, about what happens after you complete the Part 3 examination which covers practice and management. For most of us, it means tiny little extensions, conversions and the occasional new house or office. For those in large firms - well, they don't have any idea, generally, of how 80% of the profession survives and probably don't bother to read such things. Actually, it might be good for them if they did, for who knows when the axe will fall, and that P45 lands on your desk? Then what? You join the silent majority. For personal reasons, Part IV ceased some time ago, leaving a big hole in my reading material.

Mr B2A, of whose blog I am particularly fond, has stopped rattling his keyboard (according to his recent post, anyway) and I will miss his sparkling wit and 'the Emperor has no clothes' insight onto the dark and murky world of the architectural profession. He believes a blog is pointless unless it ismaintained on a weekly basis (difficult unless you are a professional journalist) and should keep attracting new readers. That puts my blog into the 'pointless' category. Oh, well. I'll keep at it, then, otherwise there will be no blogs from the depths of the archi-pool, the 'pond life', as the RIBA Chief Executive called us.

God?

2009-10-25T19:25:00.010Z

Four thousand six hundred years ago, King Djoser of the Two Lands of Egypt instructed his architect to design and build his burial place. The result was this enormous, powerful monument, standing in the desert about three hours by horseback from Cairo. It is the first great stone building in history, the first to use the step design and the first tomb of anything like this size in Egypt. Riding towards it, there is no real concept of the size until you are quite close, it is vast. The design is an innovation - previously, Pharoahs were buried in 'mastaba' tombs - the word literally means 'bench' - a low, square or oblong structure often not much larger than the size of the body beneath it. Here, several of the mastaba shapes have been stacked one on top of another, forming this imposing monument to the greatness of Djoser the King.

Unusally for the times, the architect is well documented and known by name - Imhotep. He had the envious titles of Doctor, First in line after the King of Upper Egypt, Chancellor of the King of Egypt, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary nobleman, High Priest of Heliopolis, Builder, Chief Carpenter, Chief Sculptor and Maker of Vases in Chief. A very important man indeed, and a true polymath as many architects are (or were, until we started giving away our skills to all and sundry - more later).

As a doctor, he was known for a treatise on medicine that did not make any mention of magic and could be the first true medical book. His bravery in cutting out the mumbo jumbo is astonishing. In many periods in history, he would have been strung up as a heritic, but amazingly, he was revered both during his life and after his death.

Two thousand years after he died, he was deified as the god of medicine and worshipped until well into Ptolemaic times.

Architect as God.

I'll keep trying hard at my little extensions and houses. You never know.

Down the Pan

2009-09-03T19:38:00.003+01:00

My fellow blogger, the excellent Mr B*******s to Architecture, has already poked fun at this one, but having looked at the RIBA Crapper of the Future competition myself, I could not resist some further derision. For some reason, the RIBA is fascinated with various methods of enclosing the space to point percy at the porcelain and decided that what we need in the middle of a wretched and miserable recession is a competition for reinventing the wheel - that is, a totally new design for a bog.

Surprise, surprise, the big boys have all come out on top - although I wonder if any of us pond life actually had the time to piss around and enter what must be the competition of the year when we are desperately trying to keep the bank from demolishing our businesses.

If I was going to enter, what would I consider the ultimate in bog experience? What would be toilet heaven? As a female, my perspective is slightly different from you men, so please forgive me if this doesn't appeal to you.

1. Whatever shape it is, whatever silly blob or shard shaped shed it is housed in, it must be clean. To be clean, surfaces must be easily wipeable, therefore shiny. No cutting cash corners by using bare block. It has to be tiles.

2. A comfy seat. To me, it has to be timber, as it tends to be warm when sat on.

3. A damn good flush. None of those wretched things sat right on top of the pan - I like high level cisterns which deliver a good 'whoosh!'

4. No evidence that anyone has ever used it before me. This means a little room to house an attendant, the sort who keeps the place so clean you feel you should take your shoes off before entering, and no I don't mind leaving a few coins for her (not him - I cannot stand male cleaners in that most female of places - a ladies' loo)

5. Warm water and soap, and the kind of hand driers that nearly blow your skin off. Or clean towels - what is the use of those things that puff airy fairy amounts of luke warm air at you, leaving you to either wipe your hands on your trousers, or grab loads of loo roll to dry off properly?

6. Industrial amounts of loo roll in huge rollers that don't run out by the minutes.

7. Cubicles sealed from top to bottom - I don't want to hear next door's efforts, thanks.

8. Lots and lots and lots of cubicles. Whoever designs women's bogs just doesn't understand that two cubicles for an entire cinema audience just won't do it. Why are there never any queues outside mens' loos? Because they don't have to get undressed to pee. Think about it.

Notice I have not mentioned the building once. The best loos are not these sad stand alone things that just ask vandals to give them a good kicking, they are incorporated within another building. As for daft boxes shaped like Hercules, or with coloured flaps on the top - what is the point of that? Just a nice door within a warm public building, supermarket, railway station, cinema - etc with a big sign saying 'TOILET' will do.

As for our glorious president, where's his head at? Up his bum? He certainly ain't listening to us.

Swine Flu

2009-07-31T20:08:00.003+01:00

Ha! That got your attention! No, I have not had the relatively mild and hysteria inducing illness that is infecting the entire country and is going to wipe out what is left of the economy. It does make me laugh, though - whatever would happen if a really serious disease arrived here?

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the winter of 1349 and 1350. That is the year the Black Death crept into a population weakened by war and bad harvests. There was no Tamiflu, no paracetemol, no aspirin and no comfort or relief from a truely awful and disgusting illness - where all the lymph nodes in the armpits, neck and groin swelled up grotesquely with huge, black, pus laden buboes. The only relief came in the form of a swift death, between four and seven days after infection. Between a quarter and a third of the entire population of Europe died. Imagine the horror - think of all the people you know and love, then take a third of them away.

Of course you all know that the 14th century was a great period for building, when some of the greatest cathedrals and a huge number of parish churches were either under construction or were being enhanced, extended or generally showered with gifts from rich benefactors. There were huge numbers of skilled tradesmen, stonemasons being the top of the heap, with carpenters, glaziers, painters and metal smiths all busy producing the best of their crafts.

The great cathedral at Wells in Somerset is covered with sculpture,, the skill and care of the masons is breathtaking. Inside, the capitals are decorated with what is known as 'stiff leaf' carving, a stylised form of foliage which has the roots of its tradition in classical architecture, as shown in the photo above. These capitals can be seen all the way down the nave... hold on. As we walk towards the west, following the sequence of building, the capitals become mere buds, malformed and ill favoured. You can probably guess. The skilled masons had the Black Death, there were few of them left to carve capitals and the job was given to the boy. With the economy in such a poor way, it is likely that there was little money to pay for such luxuries anyway.

This is only one tiny visible part of the scything effect on the population of such a dreadful disease. The consequences for the economy, the Church, the law and family life were permanent. And we're worried about swine flu. Puts it in perspective, doesn't it?

Client Appreciation

2009-06-24T19:12:00.003+01:00

My client wanted to know how much his refurbishment and new outbuildings would cost. It was a large-ish job for me, about £400,000 worth of loving repairs and alterations to a huge Victorian rectory in a small village in the middle of this rural county. I estimated as best I could, and told him that some things could not be valued as it was impossible to know until work started. This sounds odd to a layman – how can building works not have a fixed price? We know what we want to do, don’t we?

Well, yes, but it isn’t as simple as that.

I am standing in the loft space. The work entails major repairs so that the whole lot doesn’t collapse, leak or blow off, or do anything other than do what a good roof should do and keep the rain off. The roof has already had a good deal of work and a bad partial conversion from Mr Bodgit about 8 years ago, without the benefit of building regulations approval, drawings, or knowing what he was doing.

The foreman has just taken up the floor in a particular area and found that the main trusses are rotten at the feet, and worse, there is no wall plate. Double worse, the wall is a very poor soft brick construction, with an outside skin of posh bricks. This is fairly common in buildings of this age, but in this case, the two skins of brickwork had no ties to speak of holding the external, load bearing and very important bit of wall together. What do I do? says the foreman.

Now, I could do one of two things. I could solve the problem there and then, and the builders get on with the work with no delays, but of course there is a cost involved which will not be quantified immediately. The work is essential and will have to go ahead otherwise the place will collapse. I could tell the foreman to wait, whilst I write a specification for the work and get the contractor to price it. This could take up to a week. Meanwhile, the builders are kicking their heels, unable to get on. Why? Because until the structure is complete, the roof tiles cannot be put on. Until the tiles are on and the building is watertight, the plaster finishes and fittings cannot be done. The delay has to be paid for to cover the contractors ‘loss and expense’ which are costs to keep the site running, insurance, wages, portable loo, etc, etc. It can run into hundreds, if not thousands of pounds a week. So I solve the problem there and then and there are no delays - mitigating the loss, I think insurers call it.

Enter the client, furious that there is an extra cost. He gives me a very nasty time on the phone, telling me I should have told him how much it would be first and accusing me of not doing my job. Would he have halted the work with the roof half off for the sake of the (relatively small) extra cost? Would he have done the project at all had he known the cost at the outset? Is there scope for savings on his fancy bathroom with the silly Japanese leaky bath and the even sillier energy guzzling American fridge?

Whereas bathrooms and kitchens and furniture are ephemeral and will go out of fashion in a few years, structure, the thing it all sticks to, does not. Yes, Mr Client, I am doing my job – not that you appreciate it. I am currently expecting a letter from his lawyer, in response to a complaint made by my client from his lovely, new, dry, structurally sound holiday home.

Into the Abyss

2009-06-07T19:52:00.006+01:00

I am furious. Really, really spitting with rage. I have been this way for some time, since those lunatics running the asylum have managed to smash the economy into tiny bits in order to feed the monster that is the financial services 'industry'. My own beloved industry actually produces something useful rather than convoluted balance sheets and dodgy investment vehicles, but the government does not see fit to pump billions of my money and yours into it to stop it falling flat on its face.

Of course, I have been through all this before, and the sheer inevitability of it all is particulary galling. First, there is a government inspired financial disaster, which results in the sources of money drying up. As you all know, building something cost a lot of money, and it is very rare indeed to find anyone, private or corporate, who can just dip into their pockets to fund such a project. The money has to be borrowed, granted or cashed in from selling something else. Last time, it was the high interest rates that stuffed us all. This time it is the fecklessness of the nits in the City, and the limp wristed regulation perpetrated by the lawyers and bean counters running the country. The end result is the same - no money for you and me.

From no money comes no construction. Big projects are mothballed half way through as the finance dries up. Small projects never get out of the ground. Big architectural practices, who have whole teams of architects, technologists and admin staff suddenly find their people have nothing to do. After desperate attempts to breathe life into stalling projects, and cutting fees to the bone, they have no choice but to sack 30, 50 or more.

The small practioner has one project which does not go ahead and has to go to the bank to help with cashflow. Although of course the bank is no longer lending, not to the little people, anyway.

Other consultants also rely on the construction industry, such as engineers, mechanical consultants, bat specialists, landscape architects and those bods who calculate carbon emissions. None of these are getting enquiries either.

The contractors are no longer getting tenders to price. The sub contractors, electricians, plumbers, painters, heating engineers, do not get asked by the contractors for prices for packages of work. Hundreds, thousands of skilled tradesmen are thrown out of their jobs.

Desperate, and knowing only one industry, many buy vans with their redundancy pay and scratch a living doing jobbing work. Architects and technologists set up their own practices, tiny little one man bands, operating from the spare room or a corner of the living room. They make a living from loo extensions and tiny little alterations. The profession fractures into a thousand small peices.

Many skilled tradesmen move into other sectors, their skills lost to an ancient and noble industry on its knees. Come the time things improve, many tradesmen decide not to go back to the long hours and the possibility of yet another crash. Quality suffers as there are no longer enough skilled people to carry out conservation work or high quality new build.

As for those little practices, they tend to stay little, realising that the only way to survive is to stay independent with as few overheads and responsibilities as possible. Just like Alice. We are the ones referred to as 'bottom feeders' by our own RIBA Director of Practice not so long ago. Nice. Charming attitude towards those who pay his salary. Of course, he knows not what he says as he is not at the coal face of the industry as we are, but sits in a nice, protected, well paid cocoon - rather like those bankers who started it all.

Could they be related?

Winter of Discontent

2009-03-28T18:36:00.004Z

During such a long and dreary winter... in the middle of what looks like the winter of the UK economy, I could hardly raise my little digits to the keyboard to write. However, now the daffs are all out and looking joyful, Alice's spirits are rising along with the sap. This is despite the wretched state of the construction industry which, I fear, still has a long way to fall.

Let us not be downhearted! Among the little joys of archi-life recently, I was delighted to receive a press release from the Architects' Registration Board (ARB), that esteemed body who guards the title 'architect' with all the might and tenacity of a Jack Russell. To explain, an architect can only call themselves 'architect' if they are registered with the ARB. Our function is not protected - any Tom, Dick or Crispin can carry out all the labyrinthine tasks of an architect without any penalty at all, but call themselves an architect and the full fury of the ARB descends upon them.

The ARB also disciplines naughty architects, and can reprimand, fine or even erase a bad boy from the register. Erasure (or striking off, if you want the old fashioned term) will not stop one of these miscreants from practising - just as long as they don't call themselves an architect, and the general public will be none the wiser.

A most interesting press release from ARB dropped into Alice's inbox lately. That esteemed great classicist, Quinlan Terry , has just been hauled up in front of the Professional Conduct Committee for demolishing two Grade 2 listed buildings in Westminster. A rather odd thing to do, I thought, for such a great man and fan of all things old and classically formed. It is a criminal offence to damage or destroy listed buildings, and it is no doubt that Terry was most embarrassed to come away from court with a criminal record and an eye watering fine of £25,000. Breathless, I read on, wondering if the classical world was about to be deprived of the wonderous Quinlan for good, as architects convicted of a crime relating to the very heart of our profession do not tend to curry much favour with the ARB . Alice need not have worried. The Committee made the brave and most correct decision to implement the full might of their law and gave him a reprimand. As they rightly said, whilst making him stand in the naughty corner for five minutes, he is an architect of some standing, and the world would be a poorer place if he had to call himself an 'architectural designer'.

I wonder what would have happened if it had been Alice instead?

Answers on a postage stamp, please.

Prunes

2009-01-08T19:58:00.003Z

Although it was a lovely June day, there was no-one sitting in the garden. There was a lovely old beech tree for shade, a seat around the trunk, a sunny stretch of lawn, a patio and veranda in front of the large Edwardian house. But no-one was out there enjoying it. Odd, I thought – old people in homes often like to get outside for a while, in the sun.

I parked on the shingled drive and knocked on the door. I was there to carry out a survey with a view to putting a large extension on the back, for more bedrooms. The house itself was an old rectory, and had already been extended piecemeal with rather ugly flat roofed boxes, which were in poor repair and difficult to heat. The idea was to demolish all these and build anew.

The hall was painted in lurid pink, very badly done, over wood chip paper designed to hide the poor plaster underneath. The hall carpet was violently patterned in red and gold, and there were little tables with rubbishy trinkets on everywhere. The whole effect was tatty, tacky and made me want to put on my sunglasses. I was simultaneously hit by the smell. When you think of how much people pay to be looked after in these places, you would think the least that would happen is that they would be kept clean. Oh, no – that seemed far too much to ask. The fusty, mouldy, dead smell of unwashed flesh and incontinence enveloped me, accentuated by the high temperature from central heating backed up with an electric fan heater. Notes of burning dust and an underlying smell of dry rot and boiled cabbage completed the aroma.

I started in the bedrooms, most of which were empty as the residents were downstairs. One woman had refused to leave, and was being persuaded by the carer – ‘Come downstairs! Come downstairs!’ The old woman’s eyes were cloudy, she was nearly blind and obviously very deaf. On her bedside table was a framed photo of what must have been herself and her husband, taken fifty years or even longer ago – two proud, smart and smiling people in spotless military uniform.

The rooms were odd shapes, made from partitioning off larger rooms, in what must once have been a very grand house. The partitions were rickety and it was possible to hear what was going on several rooms away. The furnishings were old and tatty and the paintwork dreadful – all violent purples and violets and screaming greens. The en suites were horrible little hovels of broken tiles, dirty, spider-lurking corners and stained avocado sanitary ware. Above all, that pervading smell.

The ‘living’ room was as usual in these places; many upright chairs with tiny little women in them, crumpled under blankets, bundled up in many cardigans and with the ‘cotton wool’ hair style which seems to be the only thing hairdressers are capable of when doing ‘seniors’. There was only one man I could see, his gaunt face and light blue eyes brightened into a smile when he saw me. He spoke, but it was incomprehensible. I think he was from Newcastle.

The dining area had no windows, and the glaring colours were made worse by the ghastly fluorescent lighting. I was offered tea, and a plate of broken biscuits accompanied it. I was just about to pick one, when a flabby man with a sink plunger in his hand grabbed some and rushed off, saying ‘This job makes you hungry!’ I picked an undisturbed biscuit from the very edge of the plate. My caution was well advised – I found out he had been unblocking the loo with that sink plunger only moments before.

A nurse hurried up to me. She had on pancake make up. She asked if I was going into all the rooms? When I said I was, she pursed her lips and said ‘Well, Mr George is in his room with his cat and may not want to be disturbed – I’ll have to accompany you anyway’. Although I had already told them it was fine, and I expected to be escorted for security reasons (in case one of the residents accused me of taking their handbag) she seemed doubtful. Eventually, she gave in, I had the feeling she just couldn't be bothered, in the same way that no-one could be bothered to help the residents outside to enjoy the sunshine.

Mr George’s room had once been the sun room. It had glass on three sides, and was the kind of room suitable for occasional sitting or eating on a warm day, whilst admiring the garden. Unfortunately for the residents, the tight fisted, parsimonious and uncaring owners had decided it was yet another room from which they could squeeze silly money every week. The windows were running with water from condensation and it was cold. There was black mould in the corners of the ceiling and a big stain from the leaking flat roof. Mr George struggled towards me on two sticks, shouting ‘Hello there!’ and smiling, all gums. His tatty clothes bulged over rolls of fat. In the corner there was a litter tray, full of cat droppings. It had not been emptied for several days and the smell added another dimension to the general overall pong. On the narrow bed a cat crouched, his paws tucked underneath and his plume of a tail wrapped against his flank, all neat like cats are. He was all bright ginger and white; a huge set of white whiskers set forwards at this stranger in his room and his huge yellow eyes were wide. ‘He’s my friend!’ shouted Mr George.

In this dreadful place, the bright, healthy and beautiful creature shone like the sun.

*Part of the 'Five a Day' series inspired by Which End Bites

Its CHRIIII-IIISMAAAAAAAS!

2008-12-21T14:53:00.003Z

Once again, the pre-Christmas rush has me racing around like a headless turkey. There is the predictable cacophony of requests to 'do it before the holidays' or downright orders like 'we want to start on site at New Year' and even 'I suppose you are having the WHOLE of Christmas off?'

To these I answer: no, tough, and yes I bloody well am.

Mince pies, obscene amounts of ginger wine and lots of telly with a warm cat on my knee, here I come.

Nuts

2008-12-13T19:45:00.004Z

For most of my career, which is longer than I like to recall, I have been fighting the labyrinthine and convoluted planning system on behalf of my clients. As you know, dear reader, most of Alice’s jobs consist of small extensions and alterations to existing buildings, mainly for the people who are going to live and work in them and want something to make their lives a bit easier, their buildings look better or their businesses to prosper. In a sane society, a planning system (if it existed at all, as the words ‘planning’ and ‘sane’ do not appear to compliment each other) would be a simple question and answer, going something like this:

Alice: ‘Dear Planning Officer, can I build this minute and insignificant building/extension/alteration here?’ (Alice attaches drawings).

Mr Planner: ‘Have you notified the neighbours’?

Alice: ‘Yes’

Mr Planner: ‘Do any of the immediate neighbours object?’

Alice: ‘No’

Mr Planner: ‘Is nit picking the fine details of the project in the public interest?’

Alice: ‘No.’

Mr Planner ‘Is the building listed?’

Alice ‘No’

Mr Planner ‘Go ahead with our blessing. Next!’

Notice I have made no reference to silly and badly informed comments about design or good taste, which planners know little about; no requests for the positions of every tree on the site and the neighbour’s gardens, no requests for Design and Access statements, no finicky requests for the size of bricks to the nearest fraction of a millimetre, the position of door knobs, or whether the whole thing should be moved four inches to the left. There are no woolly phrases used in refusals such as ‘not in keeping with the existing building’ (why should it be in keeping? Isn’t that the choice of the owner?) or ‘Must be subservient to the existing building in accordance with the policy HMO/009856352/F/2008 (please see document which we will charge you £4.50 to photocopy and isn’t on the website)’ and no reference to things completely outside planning and into the realm of structural engineering, building regulations, interior design or gardening. All these are often necessary to submit a simple application for a tiny, single storey extension to house a new loo.

One of the sillier hoops I have to jump through involves the Design and Access statement. This is worthy of the film ‘Brazil’ where beaurocracy proliferates at the expense of common sense. If a house is in a conservation area, a Design and Access statement must be submitted along with the application. I used to give a brief explanation of how I arrived at the design in my covering letter, but now it has to be in a separate document and cover landscape, setting, appearance, scale and how difficult or easy it is to reach by bus, and whether or not someone in a wheelchair can get in and use the loo in question. Never mind that the building already exists and most of these requests become superfluous and ridiculous. The whole thing was shown up recently for the idiocy it is by Carlisle Jessop http://www.carlislejessop.co.uk/ in their design for a new agricultural shed. It went around the various archi-blogs, and then into the mainstream press. You can read it here.

Recently, the government announced it is going to ‘streamline’ the planning system. Well, I remember that the last ‘streamlining’, much trumpeted by the government, lead directly to such paper pushing nonsense as the Design and Access Statement. I wait with baited breath to see what happens next, but I can be absolutely sure it will mean another forest’s worth of trees being pulped in order to provide yet more irrelevant and nonsensical documents.

Part of the 'Five A Day' series inspired by Which End Bites

Bananas

2008-11-26T19:38:00.002Z

I could have called this post ‘batty’, but as WhichEndBites said, I have to have my five a day and ‘Bananas’ follows on nicely from the pears I had earlier.

Some time ago, I was in the early stages of a nice big project (large for Alice, that is) and was rubbing my hands together with the thought of enjoyable, muddy site visits, arguing with the builder about money, earning lots of fees and delighting the client once all the dust had settled. The long, low, pink washed, oak framed house was on the edge of a small village of thatched cottages, surrounded by ancient trees and was really pleasant – there was a pond in the garden with water lilies, a paddock with two elderly ponies, a swathe of lawn studded with daisies and bluebells in the shady parts. Just down the road was a nice little shop, which sold home made pasties, and a posh fishmongers with such delicacies as smoked eel and salmon pate. I am going to enjoy this, I thought. And so I did, until I received a phone call from the builder.

‘Er.. ‘ he said. ‘There’s a problem. We’ve disturbed some bats’.

Some years ago, I would have said ‘so what?’, and so would everyone else. These days, thanks to a draconian law brought about by people with beards wearing tweeds and sandals, lobbying the government on a day the government just wanted something to do, disturbing a single bat is a crime worthy of hanging. Well, not quite that bad, you understand, but a severe fine and a criminal record is more than enough to make someone think twice about waking the little critters from their daily slumber.

I notified English Nature, as the law dictates, and they sent a ‘bat worker’ round to spend the evening monitoring. The builders continued to work elsewhere, away from the roof, as quietly as possible (digging a foundation, if you must know). Despite charming assurances from the Bat People on the telephone, I received a horrible letter saying that all work must cease at once, and could not start again until the bat season was over, and how dare we even consider repairing the roof when the bats needed it. (There was no mention of the people who also happened to live there, and for whom the building was actually constructed).

Disaster! The worst thing that can happen to a building contract, in terms of extra costs, are delays. The contractor is within his rights to claim loss and expense for the extra time he has to spend on site, insuring it, providing a site hut and loo, transport, pushing paper around the office labelled 'Health and Safety'... all this means, of course, extra money. It is not the kind of news you want to give a new client in the first month of the work to his house.

Enter Batman to the rescue! Or rather, a plain, short, shiny little man in an aged Volvo who was an expert on bats and was, more importantly, engaged independently to advise my client. Eventually, after a short delay, the bats had finished making lots and lots of little bats and had flown the roost. Work proceeded, and a bat box installed on the chimney, as you are simply not allowed to remove your bats without a licence in triplicate and alternative accommodation for their next breeding session.

We got off lightly. There are some kinds of bats that are so rare, that some buildings are simply not allowed to be worked on at all (according to a colleague who this happened to) even if it is listed and in danger of falling down. There are some people with colonies of 300 bats in their roof, all peeing and pooing into the insulation. Despite what the nicey nicey literature on English Nature’s website says about bat poo being ambrosia from heaven, it actually stinks. Many churches have bats, and whilst in some parts of the building they do not cause much of a problem (the belfry!) bat droppings all over the ancient furnishings are not particularly desirable. English Nature’s advice? Put cloths over everything.

With laws like this, bats can certainly make a lot of enemies.

Back to Reality

2008-11-19T08:18:00.004Z

I lost one job, but thank goodness, I have just picked up another. It is a nice listed building in the city centre, a Georgian house set back in a courtyard with lots of potted plants standing outside on the mellow flagstones.

There is an arched window, a round window and a square window. Which one shall we look through today, children?

The loo window! I have the perfectly enormous and intellectually stretching task of moving a partition to make it into a bigger loo.

Ah, well. It's all grist to the mill.

Pears

2008-11-09T18:47:00.002Z

One of my biggest jobs have gone the shape of a popular autumn fruit. As I am but a micro practise, this equates to roughly three quarters of my projected income over the next six months. I have turned other work away in anticipation and am now twiddling my fingers on this keyboard, with very little to do apart from breathe faltering life into this neglected blog.

Some time ago, a businessman approached me who had bought a run down property about a hundred yards from his own place. He had hopes of expanding, and the new property was ideal – a large site, good road access, an attractive listed building forming the frontage and room to build three houses behind.

Excitedly, I produced a scheme for converting the building into his new showrooms, restoring the lovely, curly, guilded Victorian shopfront and creating offices on the first floor. I designed three little town houses behind it, facing a small yard and communal garden with all the usual Planner friendly ‘green’ touches – secure bike storage, recycling store, insulation worthy of the Space Shuttle and draught sealed up as tight as a duck’s bottom. I went through the whole programme of the RIBA recommended work stages* – chatted up the conservation officer, chatted up building control; arranged an archaeological dig, got brick, tile, paint and stone samples; all very enjoyable.

I drew joinery details, showing every aspect of sash windows and doors in the Victorian style. I went through endless meetings with the structural engineer. I produced hundreds of pages of specifications, preliminaries and schedules of works, ironmongery, paint, doors and sanitary ware. I had lengthy discussions with the quantity surveyor and the mechanical engineer over how to incorporate modern services into the old structure. I worked 60 hours a week to get documents together for the best builders in the area to price (known in building speak as ‘tender documents’). I checked the tenders, negotiated with the chosen builder, arranged a contract. The client was that rare ideal who just let me get on with it and wrote the cheques - it was wonderful.

I worked 60 hours a week to meet my client’s schedule. I anticipated, with glee, the large project to come, which would not only give me a generous income but would hopefully get my name around to similar businesses, lead to more work and… fortune and fame for Alice?

He rang me two weeks before work was due to start on site. ‘We can’t go ahead’, he said. Aaaaaaagh!’ I thought, and sat down. Credit crunch? I wondered. ‘I’m emigrating to Australia’ he said ‘I’ve sold up and the new owners don’t want to do anything with the building at the moment’. They didn't want my services. And that was that. Not only has it left me with a serious cash flow problem, but I am truly disappointed at being bereft of my best job. No-one, to my knowledge, becomes an architect for the money – it is the joy of seeing your design translated by good craftsmen into a real, living, breathing and useful object.

I feel robbed.

*I'll explain in a further blog

Honoured!

2008-10-04T19:47:00.002+01:00

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I expect I will slide back from the banks of the archi-pool, where I have a distant view of the great world of glittering mega-practises, into the warm slime at the bottom with all the other archi-ameobae shortly, and then it will be back to blogging.

Look for me again at Christmas.

The Price of Fame

2008-09-24T19:33:00.003+01:00

No... not famous, not yet. But I do seem to be in demand, more and more these days. This is either very flattering, or I am not charging enough money for my fabulous services.

I am so busy I throw files and drawings on the floor rather than put them away, because I don't have time to walk to the filing cabinet to put them in it before the phone rings again. The filing cabinet is two steps from this computer. The plan chest is just behind me. That is how busy I am.

What I am trying to say is that I no longer have the time to blog. A sad state of affairs in one way, good in another, a bit like being famous, I expect.

I will leave this blog here for all you lovely people to read, but for now, it's goodbye from Alice. Keep commenting if you like, I will always answer. Should I descend the slippery slope from A class celeb into the Z class again, it's back to blogging.

So much to do, so little time.

Lots of love to y'all.

Reasons to be Cheerful... Part 3

2008-09-07T19:29:00.002+01:00

After the lengthy, painful, often demoralising and always brain crushing Parts 1 and 2 of architectural education, comes Part 3. This is where you prove you can do the job, by working on the job, so to speak. First - yes, you've guessed it - find an architects' practise who will

1. Take on a complete novice
2. Trust you to design a real building, see a real client, cope with a real builder and talk about real money (or the gap between what the builder wants and what the client wants to pay)
3. Pay you.

Not easy. Although from the practise's point of view, a Part 3 student is:

1. Keen
2. Desperate
3. Cheap.

In between working for said practise, who will want their money's worth and keep you grafting for at least 10 hours more per week that they actually pay you for, you will have to attend the university and

1. Take exams and write a dissertation
2. Go to lessons on contract law
3. Listen to a Quantity Surveyor for three hours without falling asleep
4. Try in vain to get feedback on how you are doing.

For me, number 4 was the strangest part of the whole thing. Once I did an exam, I expected to be told the results, but apparently this was not possible. The conversation with my tutor was surreal.

'Is it possible to know how I am doing, at least?' I asked, breathlessly.
'No,' came the reply, 'you might gain an unfair advantage.'
'But if you told everyone,' I said, 'then there would be no unfairness of any kind.'
'No', he said, folding his arms and looking smug, 'That is not how we do things'.

So I went though over a year of exams, working, more exams, lectures on quantity surveying, law and other things I could not stay awake for, without having a clue as to whether I was bumping along the bottom or flying high in the clear blue sky. Obviously, this kind of information would have been very useful.

At the end of the Part 3 comes the final interview. An external examiner (often from a large practise) comes in and sits with your tutor and grills you for an hour. You can be asked questions on absolutely anything to do with any of the stages of Being and Architect, from initial briefing from the client, all the way to dealing with complaints when the thing is finished. Mine seemed fine, the chap was friendly and we had a rapport, and yes, I passed it. I was lucky. When I left the room, I realised my clothes were sticky with sweat and I had torn one of my nails off without even noticing.

My friend did not fare so well - she came out of the interview in tears. They found a weakness and went for her like two Rottweilers. Interestingly, her exam results were better than mine, although neither of us found out until much, much later.

Is this the way to educate someone? Keep them in the dark until the final moment? How were we supposed to know whether or not to even put down for the interview?

Damn stupid, I call it - what do you think, dear reader?

Happy Holiday

2008-08-02T13:18:00.002+01:00

I have had to remove the site meter from this blog as it was failing to open with Internet Explorer. Hopefully, all those who have had trouble recently will be able to enjoy Alice's adventures in Archi-land once again. However, expect no posts for the rest of August - Alice is on holiday! Yes, even the self employed go nuts and have a break every twenty years!

I will be back in September with more anecdotes and comments; meanwhile, happy hols to all my readers.

Oasis

2008-07-24T19:11:00.004+01:00

From the overhead railway, all I could see was an intensly urban landscape of looping railways and roads, weeds, battered and stained tower blocks, dark canals and traffic, all glistening in the hazy, dusty sunshine of a London summer afternoon. The train stank of BO and I was strap hanging, with my face uncomfortably close to the bare, hairy armpit of an exhausted labourer. He kept staggering against me as the train lurched, muttering 'sorry...' 'sorry...' as he stood on my feet for the nth time.

I don't often go to London, or a city of any kind. Alice is a country girl, and occupies a small part of rural England many miles from the concrete jungle. I had been contracted by one of the big practices (Alice on the way up? You never know!) to carry out a survey on a large, sad and worn out building in the City. No, I can't tell you which one, but it was listed, and must have been grand, before the occupiers covered absolutely everything with white gloss paint. Exhausted, I was on the way back to my hotel. The landscape was at once fascinating and depressing. From my carriage high up, I saw a car scrap yard with two young black men pulling the bumper off a wreck, surrounded by barbed wire and corrugated steel fencing. A basketball pitch with weeds around the edges was full of children of any colour you like except white, all running around - their shouts passed fleetingly into the train. Concrete, dogs, old cars, satellite discs, washing flapping in the filthy wind, bright colours of the Indian women's sarees, pure white of the Muslim men's robes - all glanced and left behind, a sequence of snapshots of East London life.

The train jerked to a halt to an announcement of 'minor delays'. My feet hurt. It was hot. Enough said. I looked down into the yard behind a large block of flats of the usual stained concrete beloved of the Utopian views of 1960's architects (may they rot in Archi-hell and have to produce drawings for the great God of twee housing estates for eternity). In a slip of land angled between the concrete abutment of the railway and the access road to the car park, an Indian man was tilling the soil. His head was beaded with sweat under the little wisps of black hair as he weeded a magnificent crop of onions. Cucumber and tomato plants were supported by the remains of old pallets. A net of wire protected a vivid green crop of peas and beans. Chilli and pepper plants, vigorously growing in old boxes promised an autumn feast. Kudu and coriander, beets, and exotics I could not identify pushed each other for space in urgent, sappy growth.

All along the edge of this little bit of land, this wonderful soul had planted marigolds, bright orange and red nastertiums as a border to his own private oasis.

Alice in the 21st Century

2008-07-19T13:31:00.002+01:00

Relatively recently, I started using Computer Aided Design to produce drawings. Quite honestly, I was reluctant to give up the drawing board as I find the act of drawing strangely theraputic in the way a computer can never be. But - most of my colleagues use CAD, the industry is geared towards it (when making planning applications for example) and it does seem to save a bit of storage space. It is supposed to be faster, produce neater drawings, easy to alter and generally made in heaven for a busy architect. My own plan chest was becoming full, the attic and shed is also bursting at the seams with old files and huge bits of paper, so I decided the time had come to lay down the Rotring precision ink pen of the past and pick up the mouse of the future.

It is always irritating having to learn a new skill when your old ones have been perfectly adequate for the job for most of your career. My drawing skills were (are) finely honed, neat and above all, fast. Now here I am, limping along the ground where I once could fly. After a quick, extremely intensive and mind bogglingly dull course on AutoCAD, I decided the only way to learn properly was to do a real job using it. Hours and hours, days, weeks later, I am still struggling with the thing, and the client is having kittens because I am so late producing his design. Eventually, I finish it and send the drawings to him.

He was generally pleased, but wanted a few changes. Now, allegedly, comes the advantage of CAD over traditional drawing. According to the anoraks, it is really simple to change a CAD drawing with a few clicks of the mouse. As I have explained before altering an ink drawing on tracing paper involves scratching it out with a razor blade, using a rubber to smooth the paper down and then drawing over it. There are only so many changes you can make and still keep it looking reasonably tidy, and without going right through the paper.

Here I go, I thought. I will at last earn back the money the programme cost me (an astonishing amount, since you ask). I had to change some of the doorways, and yes, it took far longer than it would have done on tracing paper. Worse, my computer crashed before I saved the changes (all right – I’ll know another time). Of course, I was still at such an early stage of learning AutoCAD I did not know of the little tricks which would have enabled me to change the lot with a couple of clicks.

Six months on, and I am much better at it. Just for a change, I decided to do a small extension on tracing paper, to see if I could still produce a technical drawing. It took roughly half the time it would have done on the computer. But it does save storage space…. Cold comfort indeed.

Live in the Moment

2008-06-28T20:03:00.003+01:00

My job takes me to each pole of the world of the ordinary; from the dirt and squalor described in numerous posts below, to the most wonderful and beautiful places, soothing to the soul; some of them make me sigh with happiness and the joy of being alive in that particular moment. It can happen in the most unexpected of places.

My client, a successful businessman and rather a difficult character to deal with, wanted a new building to cover his swimming pool. We had already been through numerous designs and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever produce something he liked, when he sent me a magazine with a photo of a beautiful oak framed studio in it. He wanted something just like it – could I go and speak to the timber people – sort it out – get him a quote for the timber and a design by the end of the month. Pleased that he had made some kind of a decision, but anxious that I would not get it finished in time, I rang the timber yard. They were specialists in the area and built new structures of oak and made furniture and fittings of any timber you care to name, as long as it was from a ‘sustainable source – we feel very strongly about that’, said the man on the phone. His accent was curious – I was used to local accents of all kinds when ringing suppliers or builders, but his was odd in its correct BBC received pronounciation. He sounded like one of the older newsreaders. He was not just any old carpenter. To cut a long story short, I was invited to look around the yard.

Very early in the morning, I drove down some tiny lanes and a track to a collection of sheds and barns in the middle of the county. It was slightly chilly, full of the scents of early flowers and the sounds of birds shouting their heads off; there was that clear, cold, crystalline light of a sunny morning in the spring, the kind that promises a beautiful day but often deteriorates into showers.

I parked the car next to a fence made of chestnut palings and walked through a covered gateway, like a lych gate, made from small roundings of timber with the bark removed – the waste from felling and preparing a trunk of timber for use. The main office housed the design team, all sat at computers or poring over drawings, producing designs for timber frames of oak, chestnut and laminated timber, in all styles from medieval cruck frames to the space frames similar to those over the Eden project. Every computer was leaning slightly one way or another – the desks were made from huge planks of oak, seasoned in situ and warped out of shape. They were polished by use only – there was no kind of wax or other finish on them. One man sat tapping away on the keyboard with a mug of tea next to him. I watched him pick it up and noticed that the coaster was a thin sliver from a round branch, with a little split in it like a pie slice, where it had dried out.

In the conference room, I met the director across a table made from a single huge slab of elm, from what must have been a giant of a tree. We sat on benches, huge and rustic with great pegs of oak holding them together. The floor was of planks of ash, the window frames were green oak, the roof was of A frames, beautifully jointed. Everything was slightly or greatly warped and nothing was level. I have never seen such a woody, wonky place; all useful, all strangely beautiful.

We went out into the framing yard. A tall man was cutting a complicated joint into the end of a great piece of oak, as part of an enormous wall frame, all laid out flat and numbered, ready to be taken apart and packed onto a lorry to take to the site. The low sun glittered off the drops of dew and the bright blade of the chisel; picked out the saw marks on the sides of the great timbers; cast stripes of deep shade across a pile of bright, honey coloured new timber lying in stick, ready to be cut and shaped. A light wind brought that wonderful sharp smell of freshly cut timber across the yard, coupled with a whiff of good coffee from the canteen.

I sighed with contentment. It was one of those moments.

Human Monstrosity

2008-06-12T19:53:00.004+01:00

Well, I was going to stay out of this topic as it has been the subject of much heated debate and angst amongst fellow architects lately, but here goes.

This is Robin Hood Gardens, a large block of flats designed by the Smithsons in the late Sixties. I won't bore you with the history of the Modern movement, but let us just say it is one of the last gasps of a kind of architecture that seemed a good idea at the time, and thoroughly up-to-the-minute in the early 20th century. It started with the likes of Le Corbusier and other, well known and feted architects who were very good at designing chairs and houses made of concrete slabs with floor to ceiling glass windows. I know I'm being simplistic, but a history of modern architecture is not the point of this post.

By the time we reach the late Sixties and start that decade that taste forgot, the Seventies, such buildings were beginning to look a little.... dated. They were built to house a lot of people, as cheaply as possible; mainly at the expense of small, normal sized houses, each with little gardens, which of course were simply not on if you were a) a member of a right on London council, or b) an architect. Put these two together and...

The architect produces wonderful drawings and models, colourwashed perspectives showing a glowing building on a sunny day, with shiny happy people skipping and leaping along the 'streets in the sky' (the police officers among you will know them as booby traps for perps to chuck bricks from). Around the foot of the great edifice are swathes of green lawns, public gardens, trees and even a little pond. The architect puffs up, full to the brim with the vigour that the Modernist religion gives him, whilst his supplicants, the Council officers, gasp with astonishment at such vision.

The following year, the Council finish their 'consultation', where they ask locals whether or not they want their little terraced houses destroyed to make way for the monolith in the picture. Whether they do or not, the outcome is predetermined. Everything is levelled and construction begins in earnest, the thing built quickly out of huge slabs of concrete and shortly, the residents are moved in. At first, all is well. Running water! A bathroom! A window with a view! Light!

Skip forwards to our own dark times.

The British weather is not kind to concrete, and it is stained with dark streaks from rain and dirt. Bits are beginning to deteriorate and the wet is getting to the reinforcement, blowing off the concrete cover, causing more damage. The gardens, maintained for only a couple of years by the council before the budget was spent on Diversity Awareness Officers, are now havens for fly tippers, perverts and gangs of hoodies. The dark, graffitted corridors and stairwells stink of wee, and shifty looking men and youths push drugs, knives and guns. The windows leak and the place is impossible to heat effectively. The lifts are never working, and the young mother has to pull her childs buggy, shopping and baby up five floors - she daren't leave something behind for another trip as it will be stolen the minute she turns her back. Most of the front doors have bars across them. The streets in the sky are great for yobs to throw things at the neighbours, the police, the ambulance staff, the postman and whoever else is trying to carry out their normal business.

The very form of such buildings does not exactly encourage crime, as it is people, not architecture, who perpetrate it, but the design does make it a lot easier for those whose main mission in life is to make things miserable for others, or who think of nothing but their next fix and their next miserable little petty crime.

This building was due to be demolished and there was an outcry from the architectural profession (not all of them, I hasten to add) and a campaign to get the horrible thing listed. Listed! As an important architectural statement, as something to be held up as a good example of its kind! English Heritage carried out an inspection and report and decided that no, it is not a good example of its kind.

I think it should be recorded in a film or animated 'fly through' to warn architecture students how not to do it. Whether they will listen or not remains to be seen.

Human Monsters

2008-05-25T19:19:00.003+01:00

There is much breast beating in government and in the press about so called ‘sink’ estates, where the occupants leave a great deal to be desired and are the subject of many resigned or despairing blogs from police officers (see TUPC and Inspector Gadget). Of course, given the right architecture, all these problems would disappear, as inhuman places make human monsters.* It is the fault of arrogant, self important and puffed up architects that the estates, low rise, high rise, suburban or city centre, are full of druggers, muggers and the perverted doings of old men in overcoats.

I absolutely disagree. I have seen so many occupants of ‘nice’ places who are quite capable of having everything thrown at them and still manage to create a fetid hell hole of their own environment. Rich, poor, thick or bright, it doesn’t seem to matter. They have this mental block that does not seem to see filth.

My new client lived in a small terraced house in the middle of the Victorian part of the city – the kind of street you see all over the country, red brick, cars parked each side, quite a few students, young families and first time buyers. Although the street was narrow, and the houses small, it was generally pleasant. Most of the little front gardens showed signs of typically British pride: a little stone or brick path up to the front door, a neat square of grass or gravel, a bright border of plants and occasionally a show specimen of Pampas or miniature fruit tree.

Each doorway had reconstituted stone surround with a decorative keystone, the upper window lintels matched and the little bay window of the front parlour had variously heavy curtains, rattan blinds or nets, depending on the occupants (curtains – old people or students whose curtains came from the Salvation Army; blinds – modern young couples or students; nets – more old people).

When the big, spongy looking man opened the door, that familiar puff of fusty air enveloped me. Not again, I thought. Dirt, unwashed bodies, dirty clothes, the sink full of unwashed dishes – yes, it was all there. The house was tiny, one of those very small narrow terraces with two main rooms leading off each other on the ground floor, a narrow kitchen at the back with a modern bathroom extension; then a steep staircase up to a bedroom back and front, and a box room off the back bedroom. Small though they are, I have seen some beautifully kept ones, modernised or not, but they all have owners who are proud of them.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, as I measured the tiny dining room, falling over one of several cardboard boxes on the floor. ‘Oh, about four years’ he said listlessly, scratching his crotch. The odd thing was, he did not strike me as uneducated or poor. He wasn’t old, either, and he had a wife (many men who live alone are totally disgusting at home, however smart they look in the local wine bar). Later, he told me he was a doctor of environmental science. I wondered if he was studying the ecosystem of sink estates.

He wanted to knock the kitchen through into the dining room and to rebuild the bathroom, as his wife wanted a baby. ‘We can’t really settle in until that’s done’, he told me. I thought that was why the place was so uncared for, and really put my skates on and completed the planning application, building regulations; obtained prices from a builder and got the work under way at double speed. Finally, it was finished, just in time for the baby’s arrival. The contractors did what is known as a ‘builders clean’ where all the dust and dirt is polished off, the carpets shampooed, the sanitary ware cleaned, the floors washed and all left reasonably spick and span but would not necessarily pass one of your grandmother’s strict inspections.

Six months later I returned to do the defects inspection. As I entered the front room, I nearly fell over a cardboard box. There were dirty clothes all over the dining room table. The sink was covered with last night’s – no, last week’s washing up. Grey dust filled the corners of the room and the stair carpet was dark in the middle from dirty feet. The loo below the water line was black, and the sink had a tidemark of grey scum around it.

Whatever you do, whatever they are given, some people are just dirty, lazy, apathetic and disgusting.

*to paraphrase Steven King.

Architectural Edjicashun

2008-05-05T19:33:00.004+01:00

If anyone wants to know what the 'crit' is like, then just see this posting from Norman Blogster. If you don't want to navigate from this page at the moment, it is a video of a student presenting her project to the usual audience of other students, her tutor and, unfortunately for her, a visiting starchitect. This dinosaur, in the sunset (no, twilight) of his career and credibility, decides that it is impossible to teach Architecture (note the capital 'A'). He does not have the basic good manners to address her directly, but discusses her in the third person with (I presume) the fawning t*sser who I think may be her tutor. He implies, in the rudest possible manner, that her work is the pits.

Watch it, then remember this.

She has spent many weeks, possibly months, on the project. She has spent late nights and early mornings researching materials, structure, services and the site. The fancy drawings, so beloved of tutors, have taken hours to produce and of course, the University's large format printers are either broken or busy with twenty other students' prints. She has obtained samples of materials, made models in various scales with paper, card, wire, glue and anything else she can get hold of. Her tutor has rubbished her efforts at every crit so far, and after each one, she changes the design in accordance with his advice. Come the next crit, he rubbishes it again. The course is costing her time, money and a great deal of effort. Her earning years lay several years before her; meanwhile she exists on a bank loan, her father's generosity or a bum job in the Pizza Hut, or all three.

Now comes a very important stage, there is a visiting starchitect to impress as well as her tutor. She has spent at least three, probably six years (if this is her part 2) getting to this stage. And what does the great man impart? What are his words of wisdom to the next generation of architects? That it is impossible to teach architecture. So she has wasted all that time. I bet she feels awful.

No, I don't know who he is, either. He may be very famous at bamboo skyscrapers for all I know, but he is basically a rude, nasty old sod, with nothing to say worth listening to, whose time has long gone and who has completely forgotten his own youth and eagerness to learn from his peers and elders.

God help me if I ever get like that. Just strike me dead.

Obesity and the Built Environment

2008-04-27T07:53:00.003+01:00

Sounds silly, doesn't it, to link being fat with buildings? Well, this is exactly the name of a conference from the Association for the Study of Obesity, an organisation that has been a'round' for a surprisingly long time - since 1967 in fact. Now that 25% of our population resembles Mr Blobby, they must be very busy indeed.

One thing they have come up with is that, in a nutshell, buildings can make you fat. It is nothing whatsoever down to eating too much and not taking enough exercise, it is the fault of the designer of the building you live in. So, before I get sued by a 35 stone eating machine, I must look to my designs, and make sure I am tough on fat and tough on the causes of fat. I thought I would do a little brainstorming for a new office design, and here are some of the results...

1. Very, very, very, very long corridors - more walking, less fat.
2 Loos in an outbuilding on the other side of the carpark. Caught short? Try a 500 yard dash first!
3. No heating, so they can shiver it off in winter.
4. No ventilation or opening windows, so they can sweat it off in the summer.
5. No lift and a very steep staircase.
6. Treadmills in front of every workstation linked to the computer's electricity supply.

If you, dear readers, can think of any more suggestions for a home or workplace, I would be glad to hear them!

Remember I'm the Bloody Bottom Feeder

2008-04-24T19:50:00.004+01:00

On the RIBA architects' forum, members' feathers have been well and truely ruffled by some comments in Building Design from none other than the Executive* Director of Practice. He writes a regular article in Building Design under the heading 'Ask Us a Question'. In it, some tiny practice asks for advice on competing for work against the unregulated 'plans draw-ers' and the like. Mr Executive suggested getting out of the lowest of the low market, ie small extensions, and going for bigger fish, such as housing association work. Ever tried to get the larger jobs for the big clients? No? Well, the larger publicly funded clients are rarely interested unless you've done it before, or have stupendously huge amounts of insurance (with gasp inducing premiums) and if you have not done it before - no chance, mate. We'll go to the large practice thanks.

Competition for work can be tough, especially for the micro-practice in the modern climate of 'biggest is best' and 'cheapest is best'. Basically, architects have no protection of function, only of title. And what's in a name? No money, certainly, if you are one of those in the 'bottom feeding market' our dear Mr Executive mentioned in the article. There are many, many others out there, with very little training, design acumen, technical knowledge or integrity, who will draw 'plans' of extensions, or whole houses, or entire estates complete with shops and offices, and do it a lot cheaper than an architect can with their mandatory professional indemnity insurance and their specialist seven year training. Cheap as chips, on to the next one, never mind if there's a problem down the line, they don't care because they are not insured, they can't get struck off as they are not on any register, they can close one limited company and set up another tomorrow, disappear completely and sod you, the client.

You would think, wouldn't you, that an institute paid for by its members would attempt to support those same members by promoting them to the world in general? Well... yes, that is exactly what the RIBA does, but some members are more equal than others. Eighty per cent of the membership are tiny little people like Alice here, one of the 'bottom feeders', and serves us right if we have to make a living out of small extensions. Well, Mr Executive, at least we design damn good extensions. How about marketing us as ten notches above the rest?

This has been a real blow to the morale of the small practicioner. The postings fly on RIBAnet, and watching from the sidelines, Alice witnesses Mr Executive wriggling under the prods and pokes and squawks. Referring to the article, he says the views are his own and not necessarily the RIBA's. Then he states his views are unlikely to contradict those of the RIBA. So it does not take a rocket scientist (or even an architect) to work out that his views and the RIBA’s might possibly be one and the same.

Nice to know we’re appreciated and valued by our own institute. I've a good mind to ask for my £200 membership fee back.

*Just what does the word 'executive' mean, anyway? When I hear this word, I think of the film 'Brazil' and those creepy, suited and booted officials with their endless form filling.

Muse

2008-04-20T15:18:00.003+01:00

My muse (or one of them, anyway) Sir Norman Blogster, appears to be back, but at the moment is a wisp of his former self and isn't posting very often. He spoke of football, one of the things I just don't understand, in his recent post, rather than architecture, which I aspire to understanding even if I continue to scratch my head every week over the blobs and shards and puffed up sheds in Building Design.

Another of Alice's muses (I can have up to nine, if I want to be classical) is Mr B*******, or B2A, who lately accused me of being quiet. Well, yes. I admit, I havn't been strictly blogging in the true sense of the word, ie regularly. Why? I'm tired. Not of blogging, no - but just that dragging, all-over knackeredness that overcomes everything else, until all I want to do is shout at everyone to leave me alone before curling up in a ball on the sofa sucking my thumb, which means I need a rest. This is one of the problems of working for yourself - the fact that a holiday of any kind is akin to planning a military campaign. I have to arrange a colleague to cover for me, otherwise I am not insured. I have to tell Tom, Dick and Harry and the rest of the world that I am having a week off. I have to brief my colleague on each of my jobs in case he gets a phone call from a panicky builder, panicking client or the Council. I have to put diverters and messages on my telephones, plus an 'out of office, get lost' message on my emails. This is just for one measily week - I cannot remember the last time I was able to take two weeks off - it would just be too much aggravation.

During the week off, I do all the things I simply have no time for otherwise, such as shopping for black clothes and hard hats, getting my hair cut so I can see properly again, de-gunking the fridge, servicing the car, cleaning the car, washing the car, cleaning the house properly, going to the dentist....

Then its back to work. I open the office door, to a huge pile of post, several of which are marked 'urgent' and need to be dealt with now. The answering machine is full of messages, asking me to ring immediately, despite the message referring them to my colleague. My email inbox is absolutely stuffed full of 'where are you ?' messages with attachments marked 'urgent'. When I ring my colleague, he has been on site to sort out a major problem and is busy putting a large and juicy invoice together for his time.

I have never yet worked out why, in all my years of experience, and despite the most careful preparation, the poo well and truly hits the fan the minute I walk out of the door for my first few days' rest in six months. Of course, by the time I have got through the first days' work, I am completely shattered - again - and wish I hadn't bothered going away in the first place. I lose money, I have to work twice as hard to catch up, it takes a real effort to organise....

Why did I become an architect? I could have stopped at the Part 1 and gone off and done something a lot easier.

Many years ago, at the beginning of my lengthy education, I was standing in a large, cold, medieval cathedral with a small, fresh faced and equally cold seminar group. Our lecturer started telling us about the building, with quiet enthusiasm and in an easily understood manner. Basically, his message was 'Look. Really look and see - isn't it marvellous?' At that moment I looked, then realised I had never, ever really seen a building before - they were just big things to live in, shop in, drink in - that was it. This time, I felt as if I had a giant magnifying glass, and could examine every detail. It was a wonderful Eureka moment and I often think of it when I am tired and jaded, such as now. The man was a true muse, a real inspiration.

I met him again recently, and the moment came to my mind once again. I was so overwhelmed, I kissed him.

To The Devil With The Detail!

2008-04-03T19:37:00.006+01:00

As I was riffling through my plan chest yesterday, I unearthed an old job and stopped for a moment to look at the yellowing drawings. Nice, I thought. One of my finer moments. It was a design for a house on a lovely rural site on the edge of a village not far away. I remember meeting my client at the village shop and following his car down an uneven lane, with old trees leaning over it casting deep stripes of shade; and verdant fields of young barley and meadows dotted with sheep each side. The car window was open and the strong, sweet smell of the new grass and the spring countryside occasionally overpowered the acrid smell of diesel fumes from my client's van in front.

He was a builder, and had bought a small site at the end of the lane for his own family house. There was a wood and a stream; a large, uneven patch of grass with a sad looking cottage slumping slowly into the subsoil in the middle. The cottage was to be demolished, and he wanted a new, traditional house with four bedrooms for himself and his girlfriend. 'Something special'.. he said. 'Not the stuff I build for sale - its got to be good. Do you know what I mean?'

Firstly, I had to translate 'traditional'. Traditional to what? Northern Scotland? Estonia? Brutalist architecture of the 1920's? I jest. When most people (who are not architects) say 'traditional' they mean Victorian-y Geogian-y Elizabethesque. A kind of mish mash of historical styles, the kind done so badly by the volume housebuilders, firmly rooted in no historical period at all. The translation of 'good' is fairly easy. No plastic windows. Decent bricks. Bespoke joinery. Those frilly little extras that make all the difference between the rubbish on the new housing estates and Alice Architect's houses - individual, lovingly thought out, designed for a particular site and a particular client - a one-off.

I decided on a simple box for the sake of my client's limited purse, but decorated in an exuberant manner not normally found in the modern trash. In particular, I included decorative bargeboards, of a kind similar to the charming little station in the picture above. They are the frilly white things at the edge of the roof - really pretty, like a lace doily peeping over the edge of a rather nice Victorian tea table. They have a ladylike, dignified yet pretty charm and suit small buildings very well. I designed a little finial (the spike on the top) all nicely turned in timber, to carry each end of the lacey bargeboards. Then I did a lovely brick dogtooth moulding all around the eaves, and around the tops of the chimneys. At the bottom of the wall, I stepped it out with plinth in moulded brickwork, which had the visual effect of cutting down the height and gave the impression that the house was standing on a firm foot; it had a good grip of the ground.*

In short, the new house was simple, decorative, functional and charming, and my clients loved it. I obtained planning permission, then they decided they would proceed alone. This happens all too often - clients decide money is too tight for the services of an architect (even though, as on Grand Designs, they end up wasting enormous amounts of money during the build due to complete and utter inexperience and total inability to read drawings - oh, Alice, you're so arrogant). However, this chap was a builder, and I assumed all would be well. I heard nothing more. Several years later, I found the drawings and decided, next time I was passing, to go and look at it.

Well, the lane was the same, shady and quiet. I drove slowly past the site. The horror! Where was my design? It was the right general shape and size, but....

The gutters and rainwater pipes were all that wretched square section plastic, already warped out of line. The bricks were cheap, uniform in colour and shape, with none of the little variations in colour and texture which make all the difference. My client had made an effort with the main elevation by using partly salvaged bricks, the sort covered in mortar splashes and paint, of dubious quality and the pointing was awful - huge joints, hideously finished in what is known as 'struck' pointing. Awful, awful. The plinth was simply stepped out brickwork, exposing the edge to the frost; the dogtooth moulding had been replaced with a horrible double dentil course, badly done and grossly out of proportion.

All this was bad enough, but what really hurt, what was the final straw? The dreadful bargeboards. They were not the lacy, frilly, meringue-y confections I lovingly designed, but a lumpen effort with a jigsaw which produced a parody of the decorative edge - it was simply a wiggly line cut, very badly, into an oversized lump of inferior softwood. I stopped the car and gawped, then tears came to my eyes. It was painful to behold. There is a phrase, common among architects, that God is in the detail. The Devil had taken these details and given them a good mauling before spitting them out as this shameful satire of my work.

My client wasn't in. I wanted to grap him by the lapels and shake him, and say 'Are you blind? have you no taste at all? How could you!' before dissolving into a hysterical puddle. I drove home and dissolved into an alcoholic puddle instead.

*This phrase is often used by old countrymen when implying a horse has big feet for its size.

Discontinue?

2008-03-25T19:52:00.001Z

Two of my fave bloggers have decided to rest from venting their spleen on their very different, but riveting, subjects. The first is Totally-Un PC, that Gene Hunt reincarnation, whose lust for life comes through every post; who loves and hates his job in equal measure, who behind the uniform, tan, shouty personality and grey hair is so very… human. Its as bad as Gene Hunt hanging up his camel hair overcoat and selling the Cortina and the Quattro and buying an early 90’s Skoda. Although (I believe) I have nothing whatsoever in common with TUPC, I would very much like to join him for an evening have a good, down to earth rant and a shout about the world in general over a pint or two of good beer in a noisy, sweaty, battered Victorian pub.

The second is Norman Blogster and Part IV, that commentator on architecture, life and everything; which I like to read when I am bored to tears with my own tiny little architectural gene pool. His understanding and insight are many levels above mine, due I expect to his gliding on snow white wings high above the sea of architecture rather than grovelling around on the bottom, like me. Occasionally I lift my primeval snout from the sediment and peer upwards, in wonder, at the world of architecture beyond loo extensions and filthy surveys. After an evening with TUPC, I could spend the day with Norm, whilst he explained the wonders of Starchitecture to me over a glass of perspective in a suitably lit and artistic wine bar.

I will miss these two and hope they haven’t given up entirely.

I, too, have very good reasons to discontinue this blog, but for now? I’m thinking about it!

Mystery

2008-03-14T20:29:00.001Z

I met my new client in his drive. It was a lovely sunny day, and as my car drew up, he opened the front door and walked towards me, beaming all over his face. I shook his hand and couldn’t help beaming back. ‘Come and see the place!’ he said, gesturing towards the door, at the same time as gripping my hand in a very enthusiastic handshake.

The house was a range of converted outbuildings, which once belonged to the adjoining rectory. They were low, long, mellow brick, with steeply pitched, slightly uneven roofs of various angles, there were a couple of little porches under catslide roofs over the entrance doors and a dinky little scrabble of open cart lodges bordering the shingled drive. A high, old brick wall separated the house and garden from its neighbour, with vines and Virginia creeper, beginning to turn that lovely shade of red, covering large areas of brickwork.

We walked around the house to the rear, where a long, shady lawn, with some huge mature beech trees, stretched down to the river bank, where there were reeds, water lilies and willows. The afternoon sun turned everything golden and the little man beside me chatted away, telling me about the move from the other side of the country to be near his grown up children. It was very pleasant.

He introduced me to his wife, a tired looking but friendly woman. She walked with a limp and had a bent back. Her husband told me she was disabled, and my brief was to make some adaptations to the house to enable her to use it.

As we toured the building, I began to wonder why he had bought it. He was quite elderly, a retired vet, and from the sounds of his wheezing breath, I thought he either had asthma or emphysema. The house was charming, but the garden was huge, and would take a great deal of maintenance, just to keep the lawns in check. The rooms were not all on one level, there were little steps in every doorway; in one corridor you took three steps up, turned a very tight corner and took two steps down. The kitchen was in a tiny lean to, most inconvenient and several rooms away from the dining room. One bedroom was in the roof space, up a dog-leg of a staircase and you had to duck to miss the tie beam stretching across the landing. There was only one bathroom, in a most inconvenient place. From the main bedroom, you would have to go down the stairs, then up another separate staircase to reach it.

There was a vast conservatory in poor repair, which would be cold in the winter, but obscured the view from the sitting room. There was a hallway with no natural light, and a huge study overlooking the drive, which could only be reached through the kitchen.

I very gently suggested that this house would take a lot of altering to suit his wife, and it would not be possible to do some of the things he might wish.

‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘You’re an architect! I’m sure you will come up with something!’. Well, I tried. I prepared a sketch showing some alterations, which he was very pleased with. What concerned him more than anything else was putting a door onto the open cart lodges. He became quite obsessed with it, sending me stacks of brochures of different (and wildly unsuitable) doors. I couldn’t get cross with him, he was so cheerful.

He and his wife left for his old house to prepare it for sale. While they were away, I did a little more work and emailed him, but heard nothing.

After a couple of weeks, his wife rang me. He had gone for a walk in the local woods and hanged himself. She was distraught. No note, no nothing.

Why?

Medieval Manoevers in the Dark Ages

2008-03-04T19:42:00.007Z

Just before one in the morning, a few days ago, a rumbling sound awoke me. ‘Blasted Air Force’ I thought – there had been numerous very large transport aircraft coming over earlier, flying low enough for me to shake hands with the pilot if I felt so inclined. Actually, after the fourth or fifth of these things nearly took my chimney pots with them, I felt more inclined to punch his lights out. I digress. It was not an aircraft of course, it was The Earthquake – the biggest thing to hit Market Raison since… well, ever. The rumble grew louder, then all the crockery in the dresser began to rattle – ‘chingchingchingching’ – and my bed trembled. I lay awake in wonder at this fundamental force, more primitive than even the weather, emerging from the very bowels of our planet.

The next morning I had a quick check around the house – no damage. We are quite some way from the epicentre, and apart from a few smashed chimneys in Market Raison, and shrieking from the press, that was it.

Market Raison is in Lincolnshire, a flat, dull county for the most part, with a grid of windswept arable fields defined by deep, water filled dykes to drain what was once marshland. Nothing much happens in Lincolnshire (relatively speaking). A few illegal immigrants are occasionally arrested for illegal cauliflower cutting - and that's all there is. They might have a decent branch of Sainsbury's, but nothing to set the world on fire. Lincoln itself is very slightly more exciting – a small city built on what used to be an island in the surrounding swamp. The island is now a very steep hill, surrounded by a flat plain.

Some time ago, when I was a very immature and wet-behind-the-ears student, our tutor took a group of us to visit Lincoln cathedral. After a long and boring drive through vast flat lands with no hedges and acre upon acre of indeterminate leafy crops, the minibus toiled up the immensely steep hill and halted not far from the top. Crowning the hill was the most enormous, gob-smackingly vast Gothic cathedral I had ever seen (and even by then, I had seen quite a few). It can be seen for miles around, and dwarfs everything around it. As you can see, it is a mountain of ornate carved stone and glass, gigantic flying buttresses arching out like tentacles to anchor themselves deep in the surrounding lawn or on top of an impossibly slender wall; pinnacled, frilled and decorated stone towers reaching over two hundred and seventy feet into the air; vast glittering fields of glass in thousands of separate pieces, each uniquely shaped, set into tiny tracks of lead. Inside, the giddy height of the nave leads to a highly decorative vaulted choir, the light sparkling through the vast windows, light and shadow showing off the richly moulded, huge piers supporting the stone arches, all weighing thousands of tons but seeming as light as air. I could go on and on. Oh, it was beautiful.

Something like that, of course, is not built in a day, or even a few years. It took several hundred years to create the building we see now. Just look at the west front. Something not quite right? Does something look odd? See those great, masculine, round arches? Why the change to the much more feminine, smaller pointed arches? Did the architect die in the middle of the site works?

In 1092 the foundation was dug, and a smaller, but still impressive building with the three arches was partly completed and in use 50 years or so later, built in the style of the time known as ‘Romanesque’.

One of the numerous British earthquakes struck Lincoln in 1185. Not only was it strong enough to demolish a few chimneys, it damaged the cathedral so badly the whole lot had to be taken down and rebuilt, all apart from the three arches of the western entrance, which was so massive it withstood the shaking. In less than 100 years, the new ‘Gothic’ style of architecture had overtaken that old fashioned Romanesque. It is the medieval equivalent of our putting a modern glass and concrete box onto a Victorian rectory. Is it still beautiful, or an architectural mess?

The Heart of Darkness

2008-02-17T19:04:00.006Z

I glanced up at the first floor and paused as I trotted up the steps. Alice is ready to go into Wonderland. This one looked promising, I thought, I will enjoy this. It had an unremarkable front, a narrow, dark shop window with a door to one side, empty for years, boarded up and now used as storage. Like so many people, it becomes more interesting the deeper you go and the better you get to know it. All right, it is not a person, it does not have a soul, it is an inanimate thing - but the minds that conceived it and the hands that made it so long ago had bodies and souls, and built it lovingly, with skill and care, and it remains as a monument to their ruined age; hundreds of years ago. In some ways, it does have a soul.

Behind the ordinary Victorian shop front on the main street, it stretches back, and back - a large house built around 1600 for a merchant's family, his business and his goods. One side faces its own city yard, with private access to the river and the vanished barges full of goods, the other blind, massive stone wall guards the occupants from the neighbours. The ground floor and gable is all severe stone and tiny little bricks, worn by the weather, the many chips out of the quoins speaking of carts and wagons passing a little too close - but even the damage has worn down with the years. The upper floors are brick, with moulded brick window mullions ten bays long, some with the remains of lead cames and glass in them, set into wrought iron frames. An uneven, steeply pitched, dormered tiled roof frowns over the whole.

I approached the yard door, a studded, oak-planked affair in a heavy, moulded frame with a merchant's mark on a plaque above it. I unlocked the padlock and shoved the door open - it moved reluctantly against grit and debris on the floor. The smell of damp puffed out, with an undercurrent of dry rot, the cancer of old buildings, or so many believe. If you have never smelt dry rot, it is difficult to describe - it is a dead, rotten, composting smell, with a note of mushrooms and absolutely unmistakeable. A huge number of buildings have it, mainly due to inappropriate modern methods of repair and maintenance - carry out DIY repairs to an old building at your peril!

There is something about decaying old wrecks I adore. The faded magnificence. The redundancy of the huge fireplaces, the tall broken chimneys in every possible pattern of brick - octagonal, hexagonal, patterned with scrolls, diamonds, candy twists - ending in tops blackened from four hundred years of wood smoke - then the fires went out and the stacks got cold, moved slightly as they did so and created new and fascinating crack patterns in the massive walls below. I love examining the structure exposed by the patches of lime plaster fallen out, heavy as ceramic pottery, smashed to dust on the oak flooring. Looking up into one of these holes, I can see the guts of the building; moulded joists, which were covered by plaster as fashion changed in the 18th century. I am the first person to see them for two hundred and fifty years. I love the thought that this is the low point, and I am here to make the first resuscitation attempts to bring the thing back to usefulness and life.

Standing there gawping, of course, is a chilly business, and I had a survey to finish. It was cold outside, but like a fridge in there - the damp, still air had not been disturbed for years and the massive masonry seemed to exude cold. And another thing - the smell of dry rot was getting stronger.

I moved up the staircase to the top floor, the attic rooms built originally for children and servants, all exposed oak framing and dusty plaster. The dormer windows had been boarded up, so I put my head torch on, and shuffled slowly forwards, making notes on the condition of the oak framing. The roof has diminished principals and clasped purlins, a labour intensive 16th century method of roof support. I pondered over it lovingly, admiring the tight pegs holding the joint together, still good after all this time.

The next room joins the much later, Victorian roof of the shop at the front. There is an awkward junction between the two, some 19th century Mr Bodgit has had a good time in here - bits of oak, softwood and bolts everywhere, a clashing cacophony after the harmony of the beautiful structure behind me. As I ducked through the low opening, I gagged. The smell was appalling - powerful, overwhelming, of dead, rotten, damp timber. It was so strong I hardly dared to breathe.

I moved forward, carefully. The light of my head torch feebly lit the front of the attic space, and where the slope of the roof met the flat floor I could see a mound of something. I approached, cautiously. My torch shone on the biggest fruiting body of dry rot fungus I had ever seen. It must have been two feet across, and hung off the rafters and joined the floor in the angle of the roof. Dry rot usually looks like a brown stain, with a lighter border spreading over the floor, or forms cuboidal cracks in timber which it turns into dust, but this, this was something else! The very words, 'fruiting body' described the swollen, spore ridden, glistening thing perfectly. I was at once repelled and fascinated. The hairs on my arms prickled and I began to feel sick, but I simply had to get closer. I fully expected the thing to leap up and grab me, but it just sat there, a quiet menace. It reminded me of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, the remnants of the melted reactor at the heart of the concrete sarcophagus that encases the awful ruin.

What had caused this semi-sentient thing? Simply, lack of fresh air. The eaves of old roofs are open, to allow air to flow over the roof timbers and out the other side. Stick your head into a loft space, and it should smell fresh. Someone, a few years ago, had blocked the airflow. Warm air from the rooms below condensed in the attic, making the timber slightly damp. Not wet, just a little damp. There is nothing dry rot likes better than damp coupled with stagnant air. Given that, it will grow, and grow....feeding on the timber structure until all that is left is dust.

My nerve broke. In my haste to get out before the fruiting body 'saw' me* I grasped one of the rafters. There was nothing to hold. It disintegrated into foul smelling dust. The whole roof was a ghost of a structure, no strength left, still standing by habit alone. I fled.

*I know, I know! Daft isn't it? But alone in a large, empty, ancient, dark place with a living, almost alien thing, my imagination ran riot.

Ladies Who Don't Lunch

2008-02-10T19:40:00.001Z

A rare weekend off - by that I mean I didn't spend any of it working, looking at buildings or thinking about buildings. Instead, I indulged my second love, food. Like Guvnor Gadget I enjoy cooking, especially with the added pleasure of a nice bottle of Aussie wine on the side.

Duck a la Alice

Slow roasted duck (courtesy of a local farmer), the skin pricked and rubbed with salt; served with orange sauce (OK - very 1970's - but I was thinking of Gene Hunt as I was cooking it). The bottle behind the duck contains a very nice Masala, great for adding to hot roasting tins to get of all those lovely gloopy cooked-on bits; the soul of any sauce or gravy. On the side, I did sprouts, spiced roast parsnips, roast potatoes in duck fat, carrots with cumin and butter and another bottle of Aussie Merlot. Heaven. Sheer bliss.

Some time ago, I was on the road with two colleagues, I will call them Jim and Rob, going to survey several buildings a client was thinking of buying. We were in three separate cars, as Rob, the 'boss' had a dog, and simply would not leave the damn thing at home, and the last thing Jim and I wanted was to end up stinking of dog and covered in hair. He wasn't really the boss, but we were helping him out. As the client was his, and we were most likely going to make a suitable amount of money, he called the tune, if you like.

The morning dragged on, it was cold although at least it wasn't peeing with rain. As you know from past posts, dear reader, winter means surveys. Summer means stuck to a computer in the office with the blinds down.

After visiting two buildings with a lengthy journey in between on the dreadful tracks they call roads in this part of the country, I suggested we break for lunch. Jim agreed.

'Oh, I don't do lunch' said Rob. So, no lunch, not even a cuppa. I finally arrived home, desperate for a cup of tea and large amounts of food, at five thirty, when it was too dark to continue surveying.

The following day, Jim and I insisted we stopped for lunch - it was cold, wet and depressing so we practically threatened strike action unless we were fed. We stopped at a really lovely country pub, with proper armchairs to flop in whilst reading the menu, and a real fire. The food was lovely; simple pub food of the best kind. I had ham, egg and chips - the ham was thick, juicy and cut off a real joint; the egg had a deep yellow yolk which spoke of happy hens scratching in the grass under some trees; the chips were fat, chunky, uneven, golden and made from King Edwards or some other proper, floury, chipping potato. Jim had a mackeral with mustard sauce, and from the silence whilst he ate it, it must have been sublime. Rob decided on fried haddock and chips. He kept up a constant mutter about how he 'never did lunch' and 'he wouldn't be awake during the afternoon' and 'I am a quarter of a stone overweight, and this will ruin the diet'. I looked up from the delicious ham for a moment. 'Quarter of a stone?' I said, looking at his belly protruding from his jacket. More like three stone I said with my expression. Then I looked pointedly at his plate. And why have fish and chips when there is salad on the menu.

At lunchtime the following day, which happily was the last, Rob drove off and told us he would meet us at the next site in an hour. Jim and I had another nice lunch, not quite as good as the last one, but satisfying none the less.

There is nothing more miserable than those who 'don't do lunch' on a cold, wet, winter's day.

What Not to Wear

2008-02-05T19:11:00.001Z

Tight jeans and wellies? No. But if not, why not? What can an architect wear, bearing in mind all the different roles we play?

Consider for a moment, a normal day in the life of Alice.

8.30am (earlier in the summer - I tend to hibernate in the winter).

Switch on computer, still chewing a bit of breakfast toast and jam. Go through all the messages. Does it matter what I am wearing? No, as no-one can see me down the telephone or through the computer. Jeans, faded sweatshirt and slippers are the norm; with loo-brush hair and no socks. Comfy, slutty and absolutely no effort expended.

9.30 am

Time to visit a prospective client. On goes the client-impressor clothes, the posh, shiny boots, the black, pinstriped Gap trousers, the white embroidered blouse I got three years ago from Next and of course, the black jumper. On top of that, my smart black jacket. I complete the outfit with a clipboard, pen and black, Architect On Site shoulder bag. I wash the car. Nice and shiny, but not too flashy, if you know what I mean.

One thing I am always aware of is that seeing a male client on my own carries certain risks. I am as careful as I can be, but make sure I look smart but not in any way provocative - no tight trousers, no make up, poloneck jumper or shirt well done up without a hint of cleavage, smart and rather severe jacket (or coat, if it's cold). So far, I have only had a very few uncomfortable moments, and have managed to extricate myself without being seriously mauled. A cold, slightly arrogant and professional manner usually helps in these circumstances.

11.30 am

Time for the site inspection - the building has been topped out and I must inspect the roof tiling. I know it is going to be muddy, it is raining and I will have to climb a ladder and crawl through a window opening to get to the first floor. I pull off posh trousers and jacket, and don black jeans (baggy ones, not tight, please note), a heavy waterproof coat, my wipe-clean shoulder bag and gloves. Once there, I take off the posh boots and put on my huge, heavy and filthy site boots with the steel toecaps; the ones you cannot drive a car whilst wearing. On top of the coat goes a fluorescent tabard; a hard hat completes the rather fetching ensemble.

Many years ago, as a baby architect, I was visiting a site with an older colleague during the builders' lunch break. It wasn't our site, but my colleague had a crate of beer for the builders, a gift from a grateful client they finished working for the month before. We were offered tea and mince pies (it was near Christmas), and settled down on an assortment of chairs in the warm, comfortable, steamy mess room. It was actually the front room of a very large building in the city centre, in the process of being renovated and turned into offices, and it had a huge fireplace, all ornate curly stone and a vast, black, spiky grate and dog. The builders had lit a fire, using offcuts of timber, to warm the room and it was at once soporific, very cosy and difficult to leave. Yes, it was freezing outside, and we had spent the morning taking levels on a vast area of broken concrete, soon to be new apartments, not far away. We were in no hurry. Both of us were wearing the usual site gear as described above and were thoroughly muddy and dishevelled.

Half way through the second mince pie, a young woman came in, looking like a page from Vogue. She was wearing a very smart coat that is like a cloak (don't ask me what they are called) with a brooch fastening at the front; a shining fall of polished hair and high heeled boots. She was an architectural technician, and was followed by the architect, a ginger, pallid fop in tan cords and long black coat. Silence fell. The foreman lumbered to his feet, wiping his hands on his trousers, before leaving the room with them.

Ten minutes later they were back, covered in muck and dust, the woman looking like a frightened hare. Her boots were filthy and there was a great splat of mud up her front. She had fallen over whilst being told by the foreman to get her site boots on. Everyone gaped at her and shifted uncomfortably. I stifled a laugh - the contrast in so short a time was extraordinary. She fled in the wake of the architect, almost in tears and dropping bits of paper on the way. One young bricklayer carefully gathered them up and left them on the table. 'She'll learn, this time, I'm sure...' he muttered. Apparently it wasn't the first time she had arrived in completely unsuitable clothes. So there is the lesson - dress for the job.

12.30 pm

Soaked, cold, dirty and knackered, I am back in the office with a mountain of paperwork to fire at the builders I have just seen. Throw off the wet jeans and put on posh trousers again - I have to see a colleague later and although he would quite understand me wearing jeans, they are just covered in red brick dust and wet as well.

****************

As you can see, dear reader, I have changed my clothes three times, and it is only just lunchtime. I have to be all things, smart, workmanlike, professional, ready to climb scaffolding, stand in the wet and cold, meet new clients, meet colleages and sit at a desk all in one day. You may have noticed that the one thing I havn't mentioned amongst all the clothing is a skirt.

Well, no. Try climbing scaffolding in one. Or standing around in the horizontal sleet, trying to take measurements. Or keeping a male client's eyes on your face, rather than your legs or chest. There is no place for a skirt in Alice's world!

Us and Them

2008-01-31T19:24:00.001Z

Musing over a cuppa and a biscuit, as I often do, I wondered why I have so few architect readers – or at least, architects who are willing to leave comments. I have collected quite a few police officers, either serving, wannabe or retired, an American piano tuner, a supermarket operative, a nature watcher, a PhD student, a couple of architects who can put keyboard to screen and one of my faves, B2A – who I believe is an architect but never leaves comments. I am honoured any of you even bother - and delighted.

I considered some of my colleagues – by that I mean architects who are in a similar situation to myself, working alone or in micro practises. They are a sombre and silent lot, and will only speak freely to other architects, usually in the form of a good old moan over a lunch provided by a seminar organiser which comes free before the afternoon plug of some product they will never use. Why? Because their jobs consist of tiny loo extensions, which do not warrant the latest in glass staircases. So why go to the seminars? Even architects need company occasionally, and the prospect of a free lunch and a good moan will often tempt even Alice here away from the drawing board.

These micro architects sit in a tiny office or at home, alone in the coldest room, with a steam -driven old computer for company, running an outdated version of AutoCAD salvaged from their previous employment. They sit on an ancient adjustable office chair from Viking Direct, which has lost its adjustability, surrounded by 1970’s office furniture and second hand filing cabinets, scratching a living from tiny loo extensions. They are terrified of the ARB, the RIBA and their insurance company, and live in fear of being sued and struck off. Many look forward to retirement, counting the days before they can tell the clients to find some other miserable, black clad, worn-out professional depressive.

Pink Floyd were architecture students – need I say more?

Those who work for the mega practises, such as Rogers, Foster and other starchitects, are so far up themselves - er - in the stratosphere that they can hardly see the architectural bacilli on the earth below, and even if they do use a microscope occasionally and peer at the swarming pond life, they wonder how such bottom feeders can possibly survive. In any case, they won't find Alice's blog remotely touches their world of huge sheets of bonded aluminium sheeting, granite floors or glass staircases.

On the other hand, police officers seem to have no trouble at all stringing a few words together. Just look at some of the police blogs – hundreds of comments, some of them paragraphs long, little novelettes in their own right. If you don’t believe me, have a look at TUPC’s comment on this post.

Of course, not all architects are mute. This one isn’t, anyway.

*With thanks to Sutherland Lyall, writer for Architectural Review (a glossy with lots of good pictures - just what architects like) and inspiration for this post.

Deca- gone.

2008-01-24T10:09:00.002Z

Sorry to keep banging on about Grand Designs, but I can't help it after seeing last night's episode. The whole thing was based on a lot of 'decagons', except where they wouldn't fit. As the owner said 'you can't stack decagons' because you get empty spaces. Well, as an architect, I would either use the 'empty spaces' as cupboards, or loos; or I would use a shape which would stack, such as a hexagon. I may even use 'gasp!' a square, so the furniture will fit.

The whole thing cost one and a half million quid including the overpriced and titchy site in the middle of Oxford and ended up looking like a conservatory builder's show room.

Mea Maxima Culpa

2008-01-20T19:38:00.000Z

What happens if I make a mistake?

Here is the lesson from the Bible of Reality TV:

Squinty Specs*, the black suited and booted architect, has just designed the ultimate in modern living for Him ‘n’ Her and two sprogs, a house in the back garden of a listed Regency house in the posh part of Cheltenham, in the space where they usually park the second four by four. Because there have been so many complaints and planning difficulties, Squinty Specs designs the house to be mainly underground. Of course, concrete, huge expanses of ultra expensive glass and impossible–to–clean cooker hoods which look like chandeliers are de riguer, as well as living in a cellar with the bedrooms opening nicely onto the ‘outside space’ on the upper floors. Shame you spend most of your time in the bedroom asleep, in the dark. Come morning, you can go down to the ‘family living space’ and sit in the cellar. 'Lovely', says Squinty Specs to Him 'n' Her. 'its the latest thing - and you won't be able to see all those nasty, complaining neighbours'.

Along comes Kevin McCleod and an ernest Grand Designs TV crew. The architect is either sacked or buried in the huge pit currently being formed in the garden. Anyway, he does not appear in the programme at all, for reasons unknown but Cynical Alice here suspects money is the root of all absent architects.

The contractor starts work on the concrete, which of course, is super duper waterproof, vermin proof, cold proof, everything proof and does not appear to need tanking. Except, of course, it does. Oh, dear – in front of Kevin, the thing leaks like a colender and has to be sealed with resin. Exit contractor, after quarrel with Him over extra costs. (note – an architect running a contract would, most likely, say that the leaky concrete was the contractors fault, and must be put right at his own cost). Oh dear.

After one or two other eensy weensy problemettes and a no doubt expensive few sessions with a planning consultant, Kevin is touring the new building with the usual ‘oooh’s and ‘aahs’, but is rather more muted than normal. The only criticism he seems to have is that there should have been two slabs of glass in the ceiling, rather than one. He could have added that a bit more light might have made it more bearable to live in. Cost, says Him, was the issue. Never mind, says Her, we’ve got two cooker hoods costing three and a half grand each, as well as his ‘n’ her ovens and hobs. Yes, two ovens and hobs, all in the name of symmetry. Quite frankly, when I want symmetry, I put just one in the middle. That is what seven years' training does. As an architect, I am used to giving the client a bit of a ‘wow’ factor without completely busting the bank with unnecessary extra ovens. I wonder what His ‘n’ Her bathroom was like? Does it have two loos, for the sake of symmetry? Hmmm.

I looked at Grand Designs website for the architect’s name. I was interested to see his other work, to see if this double-oven-double-hob-double-cost motif was a kind of signature, but a quick search of the Architects’ Registration Board reveals that this 'architect' Clint Jones*
is not registered.

If you’re not in the ARB, you’re not an architect. Simple as that.
If you’re not an architect, you don’t have to obey the professional code.
If you don’t have to obey the professional code, you don’t have to have indemnity insurance.
If you don’t have to fork out for the truly mind boggling indemnity insurance premiums, you can undercut the real architects’ fees.
If you are el cheapo, the client thinks they can save money for that all important double vision.
If you are not regulated or insured, and practice from a limited company, you can design leaky cellars and double oven heaven to your heart’s content, knowing you are not worth sueing and cannot get struck off.

So, what happens if Alice and her brethren make a mistake?

I am insured of course, for gasp-inducing premiums every year, after filling in a huge and complicated renewal form. I fear the ARB and the possibility of being found professionally incompetant. I abase myself before the alter of my professional code.

Therefore, if things go wrong, I try and put things right, without charge. I am as careful as I can be with the design and do not tend to specify wacky concrete or right on roofing materials. Boring, but safe. I hope.

*I am just stereotyping of course. I don’t actually know he’s got squinty specs and wears black. How un-PC of me!

*I am not saying this chap is incompetent - just that he is not an architect. If Him 'n' Her had used a proper architect, a proper main contractor and carried on with their own business of stirring non existant soup and showing the kids the laptop, all would have had a much smoother ride. But would it make good TV?

* My fellow bloggers, B2A and Norman Blogster have written excellent posts, much better than mine, on this episode of Grand Designs - see the links on the sidebar.

But the Money's No Good

2008-01-12T17:30:00.000Z

The man on the phone sounded quite reasonable - he wanted a large extension at the back of his house and was not in too much of a hurry. Almost always, I will go and look at a possible new job - even one which sounds far too small to make any kind of a profit can turn into something wonderful. This one sounded good, large enough to make a nice little bag of money for Alice, but not so large I would not be able to fit it into the rest of my rather packed programme, and it was not too far away. Besides, smallish, bread and butter work is always good for the cash flow - at that time I had a couple of large projects on, which would pay good money eventually.... eventually. I needed money now.

I washed the car, as I do not like to approach a new client with the caked filth from the muddy farm tracks laughingly labelled 'drives' by their owners, and set off. It was in a pretty village not far from here, all little cottages with a beautiful, ancient church and a long, low, gabled red brick pub, the sort which serves large portions of British comfort food such as braised lamb, chicken pie and mash, mackeral with mustard sauce....

I digress, but with these thoughts in mind, I was in a good mood when I began to look for the turn off to my new client's house. As I drove down the lane, the houses were spaced further apart, and as is often the case in villages, terminated in a row of large, 1930's council houses just before the speed limit sign and the parish boundary. I crossed the railway and turned off immediately past the end council house. There was a narrow, potholed and muddy lane, with some smaller, rather less pleasant council houses on one side. They had obviously been sold off to their tenants as they were no longer homogenous in style - some had new plastic windows, some with hideous 'Georgian' glazing bars; all had new front doors, some had new porches... the effect was messy and tacky.

I found my new client's house, on the end of the row, with a large patch of land (I hesitate to use the word 'garden') fenced with anything he could find - from old sheep enclosures to bits of timber, logs, sleepers, wire and baler twine. A huge pair of high gates and timber fencing enclosed God knew what on one side. There was a BMW and a huge, almost new, pick up truck parked outside. My good mood began to evaporate as I got out of the car to find it caked in mud from the puddles and holes I had just driven through.

He answered the door, a beefy man in his fifties, wearing a suit, and shook my hand in a huge paw. 'My wife' he said, indicating the bottle blond beside him. She grinned, showing smoker's teeth and said 'I've done some drawings! We know what we want!' My heart sank. Almost always this ends in tears. I have to explain why the sketches they have slaved over simply cannot be built, usually because they would contravene every planning and building regulation on the statute book. Sure enough, I looked at a badly designed, poorly proportioned proposal for an enormous extension which would have covered a plot the size of an airfield.

Ever so gently, I suggested I might be able to save them money by designing something a little smaller. They looked at each other and then at me - 'Of course!' said the man. 'That's why we want an architect, isn't it?'

Feeling very slightly more positive, I asked them to show me around. The house was not too bad, but a little small. I asked to look from the back garden and the woman looked nervous. 'I'll stay here' she said. The man glared at her.

He opened the back door and I noticed she had disappeared into the living room and shut the door. I soon found out why. The door opened into the fenced enclosure, a filthy yard covered with pieces of meat, bones and dogs' doings. The smell was incredible, even in the open air. A cacophony of barking started - yes, dogs. Huge black ones with those disgusting, tan coloured, exposed bottoms. Five - five! Dobermanns.

I am not fond of dogs, as anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows. I believe that a dog is a working animal and not a pet. I also believe that most people who have them do not train them properly, and have the strange delusion that everyone in the world must love their dear doggies as much as they do. I believe a dog can never be trusted, no matter what its owner may say (unless they are in a police uniform and have a highly trained Alsation, well under control, on a lead). I believe the Devil makes work for idle dogs, namely barking, pooing, peeing, smelling, biting, jumping up people and ripping small children into pieces of stewing steak. Almost everyone who has a dog like this calls them 'guard dogs'.

I froze with horror. The wretched animals were loose, and there was nothing between me and them.

'Oh, they're all right as long as I'm here' shouted the man above the din, drawing himself up and puffing his chest out. What is it with some men? Do they think they have to prove their manhood by having enormous and semi wild dogs? Do they all have tiny... well, anyway.

'They're guard dogs' he said. 'My wife isn't keen, but living out here, what do you do?'

I wondered if he thought he was somewhere in the wild west, and had a shotgun tucked away somewhere. 'I think I've seen what I need to see, thank you', I said, hurriedly backing away as one of the foul beasts advanced, glaring at me, barking and spitting. After some more small talk that I could not remember afterwards, I left and sat in the car, trying to calm down. I was literally in a cold sweat. I would have to survey the building, inside and outside, and it would have been impossible, completely impossible, with a pack of slavering hell-hounds baying for Alice's blood. Even if he shut them out, I would have to walk all over that filthy yard in my nice new boots and end up transferring dog poo into my car.

Back in the office, I considered taking on the job for about two nanoseconds. I wrote a letter saying I had 'reviewed my workload' and 'had too many other commitments at present' and 'felt unable to provide a service at present'.

One advantage of working for myself is I can just say 'No'.

Se7en Things

2008-01-07T19:24:00.001Z

Another New Year, and don't we all just love making lists? I read the Seven Things post on Random Acts of Reality and just could not resist doing my own. It beats a list of New Year resolutions by a mile, because although the list of resolutions will be broken and obsolete by March, the Seven Things will remain true for the rest of 2008 and beyond. Basically, just put down seven things about yourself which are true but not normally known by others, even your best friend.

As posted on Random Acts... here they are:

1. Long ago, I walked into the Queen Mother. Literally.
2. I am terrified, to the point of frozen immobility, of wasps.
3. Coriander was put on this earth just for me. Thank you God, even if you don't exist.
4. I really, really hate most modern architecture, and I am an architect. What went wrong? 5. I love the film 'Performance' but can only watch it on my own, when everyone else is out or asleep, with the same guilty feelings I get when eating chocolate.
6. Although I'm a laydee, I don't like shoes.
7. When it snows, I have a strange compulsion to make a snow penis.

Now, dear reader, do confide in Alice. What are your Seven Things?*

Keep it clean. Yes, that means you.

Ding Dong

2007-12-21T10:42:00.001Z

Usually this is the time of year when I receive bad news, often just before I am due to get my nose off the grindstone for a few days. It is now 10.45am on the day I finish work at noon, and yes, I have had a complaint from a client. They want me to do something about it. Now. So they can have a relaxing Christmas. Never mind that I'll be tearing around trying to sort it out with a builder who is just about to knock off himself for two weeks and couldn't give a rat's backside at the moment, or that the traffic is terrible and it will take me at least an hour and a half to get there to look at this 'problem'.

There was a time, years ago, when I was young, keen and thought my clients could do no wrong, that I would have worked on Christmas Day itself to sort something out.

So what's different about this year? I'm older, wiser and more cynical and I am sure they will manage. Nope. Sorry. Closed for business. At noon today I will be indulging my love of mince pies and ginger wine, with my feet up, a warm, sleepy cat on my knee, watching some daft Christmassy thing on the telly.

Problems? They'll keep, I'm sure. And a very Merry Christmas to my faithful readers, health, wealth and peace of mind, where-ever you are.

Christmas Post

2007-12-16T19:05:00.001Z

Many, many hours of sweating over the drawing board later, and I am pinning up my project in the corner of the L shaped room ready for the examinations board. I was already in a bad mood as once again, I had been given the worst spot in the room – tucked into a corner, with part of ‘my’ space obscured by another board set at right angles. When I arrived, loaded down with rolls of drawings, boxes of models and files, there was a pile of architectural flotsam all over the floor, right where I wanted to throw everything before sorting it out. I cleared the old chairs, bits of cardboard, newspaper, old drawings, bits of sheet steel and light bulbs out of the way (the remains of some students' 'installation') and began sorting my stuff into some semblence of order.

It was ten in the evening, and I still hadn't finished. I decided to have a break and went looking for refreshment, preferably alcoholic. Almost unbelievably, there was no late night cafe on the campus, and for some inexplicable reason, the pub was shut. I was reduced to crisps, Fanta and chocolate from a vending machine, but there is nothing like a massive dose of salt and sugar to pep you up, is there?

Finally, finally, at around midnight, I finished pinning up my drawings and arranging models. I stood back, to admire the fruit of many hours labour and unspeakably awful crits. I looked at mine, I looked at the other students' work. Suddenly, I had a terrible revelation. I did not like my project. It looked silly and dull at the same time, an unusual combination of my ideas, the tutor's ideas, the other students' ideas and every other Tom, Dick and Harry's ideas all mashed together in the mixing bowl which gets labelled 'Pigswill'. It wasn't even silly enough to emerge from the other side of crapdom as 'blob' architecture, the latest fashion and bound to get a good mark.

'Sod it', I thought, and walked back to my friend's house, who was kindly putting me up for the night. She was still up when I arrived, and even more kindly opened a couple of ice cold lagers. then another couple.

The following morning I was sat in the dismal and dirty hall with no windows, waiting to be called for the final crit, the last hurdle for my Part 2. I had a slight hangover - well, quite a large hangover, and I was sipping mint tea to try and settle my stomach. I won't regale you with the horrible experience of the final exam, and the meeting with the wretched external examiner afterwards. Dreadful, devil's spawn of a woman. Made me feel like dirt. Her parting shot as I was leaving, totally demolished, was 'Well, no-one said it would be easy...' I turned and looked her up and down (she was short, plump and yes, had squinty specs) and had an almost overwhelming urge to grab the lapels of her black Dior jacket and slam her against the wall, a la Gene Hunt. Instead, I gave her my best cat-hiss and stalked out of the room.

I was so tired from the long hours and the stress it took about a week to recover. On the 23rd December I received a letter, the envelope marked with the University crest. I opened it with a feeling of inevitable dread.

'The examiners considered most carefully.... difficult decision.... needs a little more work....

FAIL

May we wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and hope to see you in the New Year'

I took the model I had spent so many hours making into the garden, and committed arson.

Bah, Humbug!

What Alice Did Next

2007-12-04T13:30:00.001Z

My tutor slowly rotated my cardboard model at squinty specs level and pursed his lips slightly. I sat next to him, trying to stop the shakes from too much coffee, waiting for the axe to fall.

‘Josh!’ he called, over my head, to the tutor he shared his large, white painted and thoroughly nonchalant office, sorry! studio, with. Both of them peered at my model, making little noises like ‘Hm’ and ‘Mmf’. I needed the loo, but stayed put, fiddling with my watch strap. Finally, my tutor put the model on the desk, and turned to me, raising his eyebrows. Josh immediately picked it up again, and balanced it on one hand whilst clasping his jaw pensively with the other.

‘Well,’ said my tutor ‘The interior is wonderful, with those curved perforated vanes dropping down through the space. Josh?’

‘Mmmff’ said Josh, adjusting his specs. ‘mmmmmmm - Lose the top, and we’re there’.

‘Yes’ said my tutor. ‘The exterior… didn’t we discuss the outer extrusion when we last met?’

‘Er-‘ I said, shakily, drawing breath for the first time in about five minutes, ‘you told me to put something on top to finish it.’

I had just spent about a week, including the bank holiday, reworking the thing to include the ‘upper massing’ my tutor wanted.

‘Well, I don’t think it works’ said my tutor. ‘Josh?’ I had visions of popping him out of the open window, four storeys up, behind us, but satisfied myself with a Paddington stare.

‘Mmm hmmm’ said Josh, putting the model down.

‘There’ said my tutor. ‘He agrees. I’ll see you next week.’

I stuffed the model back into the box, with a resignation born of many, many hours spent changing the design and changing it back again. Keep your eye on the ball, Alice.

Let Me Eat Cake...

2007-12-03T20:22:00.001Z

Sorry about the last two posts – as Which End Bites says, I sound as if I’ve had bad news. Let's not get downhearted! I’ll lighten up a bit.

Joy, oh joy when I enter a client's house to a gentle symphony of cooking smells, especially when it’s cold outside. I am quite happy to sit and discuss their project at the greatest length, wallowing in the heavy scented air, if there is baking going on.

My new client was a very tall and very beautiful woman, who had probably been a model in her youth. Although no longer young, she was still stunning, like a white version of Grace Jones - powerfully built, cropped blond hair and cheekbones you could stand a drink on. (No, I’m not gay). Amazingly and unusually for someone of her physique, she was a very good cook and an enthusiastic eater.

I was there with the builder, who sat slumped in the armchair, gazing at her rapturously and nodding slowly whenever she spoke to him. ‘Would you like some cake?’ she asked, standing up. She was wearing shorts, and I wished my legs were half as good as hers.

It was the stickiest of ginger cakes, laced with a liqueur, totally evil and no good for the waistline. Watching her tuck into a large slice of it, I could not understand why she wasn’t ten feet around the middle.

Every site meeting during the lengthy conversion of her outbuildings into an annex, there was some delicious morsel – scones, mince pies, fruit cake, shortbread….my weight started to increase and some of the builders were obviously finding work straight after the morning break difficult. They were almost always full of cake.

I found out, after several months, the lady was a kick boxer. When she was not doing that, she enjoyed cycle road racing. Although I was sorry when the work was finished, I doubt I would have been able to get into any of my clothes if it had gone on much longer. Oh, but the cakes... heaven.

Why?

2007-11-29T13:47:00.001Z

My fellow blogger, B*****s to Architecture (Mr Architecture? Or Mr Bollocks?) mentions I seem to have a depressing story to tell in his latest post. Do I really come across that way? Is the lot of the one man band so terrible? Was the painful training and lengthy, drawn out emergence as a full blown architect all worth it?

Grovelling around in a disgusting bumhole of a place for the nth time, in the cold and dark, alone more likely as not, or in the company of something David Attenborough would find interesting, I sometimes wonder - how did it come to this?

Is arguing with people to pay me what they owe me any fun? Is dealing with the taxman, VATman, book - keeping, office sorting, filing, insurance and yards and yards of red tape designed to stop businesses earning money, life enhancing? How about threading my way through all the fuss caused by Building Control, numerous vociferous and ill informed pressure groups, English Heritage, the planning departments, the Health and Safety Executive and the endless arguements about money before one brick gets laid upon another?

Jeez, this sounds bad. Why do I do it? Tell me, someone. Or is it because of this, this and this?

SALE!!

2007-11-16T19:23:00.001Z

ARCHITECTS!!

Sale price - get yours before the Christmas rush!*

Pack of 2 - £4.99.

Buy two packs and get 1 FREE!

*Discontinued specs. Upgrade from round to squinty specs for the bargain price of and extra £2.99 per pack!!
Polo neck jumpers an option - colours black, charcoal or clouds at midnight

HURRY - THIS GREAT OFFER CAN'T LAST FOREVER!

Stamping on the Chrysalis

2007-11-12T17:53:00.001Z

As part of my job, I have to produce drawings which are legible, clear, attractive to the client, planning officer and builder, and easily explained. For a new project, I produce some sketches according to the brief, then meet the client to go through them. I leave them with my clients so they can chew over them for a few days, before meeting them again to discuss amendments and answer questions. I then prepare final design drawings, which go to the council for planning approval (or not – but that’s another story).

However, this is real life, which differs from the architectural school experience by a long way.

First, the sketch design, based on a hypothetical project from an even more unlikely client, made up by the university to ‘stretch’ you a bit. I have had a fire station, a hostel for battered wimmin, a shopping centre for wedding services only (yeah, really realistic) and workshops for new manufacturing businesses (manufacturing? In Britain? !!) and the inevitable visitor centre for a nondescript attraction, among others.

After numerous soul searching sessions with the tutor and a lot of scribbling and fiddling with bits of card and wire, you are allowed to develop the design into a presentation for the ‘crit’ – a rather unpleasant experience which, thankfully, I won’t have to go through again.

I sat in the grimy reception area, absolutely exhausted. It had taken me two hours to get here, on public transport, lugging a huge portfolio and a box containing a model of my magnum opus. For the past two weeks, I had been working silly hours trying to get my presentation together. In those days, I didn’t use a computer much, and drew everything by hand. This is a fine and noble way to do things, but takes a long time to get perfect. Of course, it is obvious where the amendments are as you can see scuff marks, rubber marks etc, so I had to produce a new one every time I wanted to change something, or if I made a mistake. The more tired I got, the more mistakes I made, until it was midnight the day before and the floor was covered with crunched up bits of paper and I was tearing my hair out.

Drawings, of course, are only part of the presentation. We were expected to produce models, photographs of the site of our new building, concept sketches, technical appraisals… Doing the photographs was a real pain, as I had a film camera and had to scan in all the photos using an ancient scanner with clunky software, then try and arrange them into something like a professional document.

Finally, I was ready. The crit is a basically a presentation to the 'clients' - consisting of your tutor, plus others such as the building services lecturer, the head of studies, other students, the cleaner, and whoever else happens to be walking past and wants to see a public execution. You pin up your work, set out your model, and read a script saying how wonderful your project is, then answer questions. Sounds like fun? No, it’s awful.

I hauled all my stuff up the stairs to the fifth floor as the lift wasn’t working. The School of Architecture was an unbelievably depressing building at the best of times and my spirits plummeted when I saw the space I had been allotted to ‘pin up’. It was stuffed into a corner, using the most tatty old wall boards of the type you can’t stick drawing pins into. I suspected I wasn't flavour of the month with my tutors after the last time. I hammered the pins in using the heel of my shoe. Most of them bent. There were shoe scuffs on the corner of one of my perfect drawings.

Tutors and students gathered. I started my presentation..

‘Hold on,’ said one tutor. ‘Why are you using stone? Did you consider larch cladding?’

‘er’ I said, completely thrown, as I had been talking about the solar heating.

‘What about the roof form?’ said another. ‘It looks a bit… old fashioned.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, I thought it would keep the rain off…’

‘Oh, really!’ snapped the tutor. ‘I think you’ve missed a golden opportunity here to do something interesting with the roof, and all you can talk about is weather resistance!’

‘What about the wall materials?’ said the first tutor. ‘Why stone?’

I began to explain that the project was supposed to be low maintenance and stand the test of time. ‘Stone’ I explained ‘is a very long lived material…’

‘Well, you should explore the possibilities of larch cladding in this context’ he snapped. 'And why are there so many female toilets?'

And so on. They pulled everything apart, absolutely everything, in the most agressive manner. I was utterly crushed. All that work…

Later, my main tutor, I will call him Mike, told me that I should have defended my project and been more assertive. But, he said, ‘take their comments on board, for the next crit’.

So, dear reader, what do you think I did for the next one?

Awakening

2007-11-08T13:33:00.001Z

Let us imagine for a moment you have persuaded a university to allow you to study architecture. You’re 18? Parents reasonably flush with cash? Then you can immerse yourself full time in ephemeral architectural theory, and play with bits of card and wood for three years, with some time out at Sainsbury’s to earn that all important beer money. You may even have got into one of the stellar architectural schools which will guarantee you that edge when applying for jobs.

On the other hand, it is more likely you are mature, and have to make do with a part time course at one of the newer (dare I say it, lesser) places who want to build up their reputation, numbers and cashflow. They are more likely to allow you to study part time, and earn that all important dosh to keep your mortgage happy.

The first year is spent realising that there is more to buildings than bricks and mortar (or steel and glass, if you want to be modern). You thought you were going to learn how to design buildings that will stand up and be slightly useful? Or explore the legal side such as planning law and the building regulations? Don’t be impatient! You will learn what Le Corbusier's real name was, what Mies Van Der Rohe liked for lunch and how Frank Lloyd Wright designed Falling Water in ten minutes on the back of a fag packet. You will learn that the word ‘clay plain tile’ is bad language, and that ‘larch cladding’ gets you brownie points. You will take your camera out for lengthy walks, photographing contexts and spatial anomalies. You will sit in front of a computer and tear your hair out teaching yourself the immeasurably irritating drawing programme AutoCAD, as nothing drawn by hand will get you a job, no matter how much your tutor likes your charcoal concept sketches. You will mess around endlessly with bits of card, wood, wire and glue in the workshop, preparing concepts and installations.

Then, at last, you will get a simple project. All by yourself. With no help. And within a ridiculously tiny time frame. Then… your first…. CRIT.

The horror, the horror…

The Chrysalis - Year One

2007-11-02T20:40:00.001Z

From a chrysalis comes a beautiful butterfly, as WhichEndBites so rightly says. The time spent as a chrysalis varies from species to species, for example, a the Plumber Butterfly takes about three months pupating in a nice warm vivarium of a college, then is further nurtured by an experienced plumber on the job before soaring to the skies, a mature Greater Plumber Bum Butterfly.

The Police Chrysalis spends 20 weeks at Hendon, or other boot camp, being thrashed into atoms by the instructors, before being reconstructed as a nervous emerging adult, and sent as a probationer for two years to mature into the Large Blue Traffic Nuisance Police Butterfly (apologies to my police readers).

Ah, but the Architect Butterfly has a much longer and slower maturing period. When you go for that first interview at the university of your choice (more of that later), clutching your sheaf of prospective A levels and your shiny new portfolio, they will tell you it will take seven years before emerging as that magnificent, black spangled Starchitect Butterfly. Seven years! You gulp, and think, well – it will be worth it! Designing cathedrals or huge hotels in Dubai in seven years’ time, lots of money – not bad!

If only. Seven years is a conservative estimate. Many chrysalises never emerge at all.

The first hurdle, if you are 18 and fresh faced, is to make sure you do Art A level. Never mind anything else – Art is it. And you must have parents with deep pockets.

If you are a mature man, with means and no kids, fine – your life experience will stand in place of A levels. But make sure you like Art, and have a portfolio to prove it.

Are you a man with a wife and kids? OK, but make sure your wife has a well paid job, such as a lawyer or a doctor, and doesn't mind your changing fashion sense of black clothes, shaven head and silly glasses.

What do you mean, you’re a woman with kids and no husband? Forget it! Or say goodbye to your health and sanity.

So, assuming those first steps have been taken, be prepared for the University interview. Take that bulging portfolio and make sure you have photos of your ‘installations’ because, as we all know, you simply cannot make sense of an installation out of its context. During your interview, drop in the words ‘Architectonic’ and ‘Richard Rogers’ and ‘post modernism’. Do not under any circumstances mention the words ‘classical’, ‘Quinlan Terry’ or ‘load bearing masonry’.

All with me so far?

The Chrysalis Part 1

2007-10-30T18:12:00.001Z

The police officers among you are used to such revolting conditions as those I encountered below; no doubt a great deal of your 'customers' are just like the man I described, with added knives/guns/drugs/massive fists*. Of course, when joining the police, you are not usually shown those photographs, the recruitment bumf tends to show rather fanciable blokes or girls dressed in immaculate uniforms, smiling fondly at a small child and his mother as they calmly give them directions to the post office. Or there are exciting piccies of the brill hardware, such as fast cars, whacking great batons, belts similar to Batman's and massive horses dressed up for battle. Once you start the job... oh dear. Not quite what you expected?

When I decided to become an architect, the last thing I expected was ending up, several years later, dodging poo in a house where the windows were covered in slime and the smell so strong you could taste and feel it. The contrast between the pretty, well kept exterior and the rotten interior was as shocking as biting into a ripe peach and finding a maggot and rot inside. I have had many similar experiences, some I would rather not think about, especially in the run up to dinner time.

So, you may ask, avid readers, how does one become an architect, to sample such delights as this? It's a very, very long story. Get settled comfortably, ask me questions you may like me to answer, and await the next post.

*Delete or add your own as appropriate

Squalor

2007-10-18T20:06:00.001+01:00

I knocked on the smart blue door with the little number ‘73’ in nice ceramic letters and waited. The wind sighed in the trees surrounding the charming little building, one of a row of modest Victorian cottages, punctuated by this one, a little newsagents’ and sweet shop. Across the lane there was a cricket ground, in the distance there were young lads in whites, their faint shouts carried to me in the warm air, members of the very expensive, fee paying Church of England school in the distance, all understated Georgian grandeur and incomprehensible traditions. It was summer, early July I think, and very warm. A distant rattle of china came from a nearby house.There was that quiet feeling a modest street has at certain times of the year, usually just after lunch.

The blue door opening caught the sun on the immaculate paintwork. A wizened man stood on the threshold, looking up at me with rheumy eyes. He was wearing a shirt, jumper and trousers all that same shade of dark beige that clothes go when they haven’t been washed for a while – or a month, I thought, taking in the tracks of ancient stains running from his collar to his crotch.

I introduced myself – Alice the Architect, sent by his landlord to carry out a structural survey. He stood aside, muttering. I tried to enter and hit a wall of pong so strong I stopped dead. The stink was unbelievable – a mixture of urine, drains, decay, damp, dry rot (a hell of a stink just on its own) and poo, all mixed into a sharp, potent and almost visible fug. In fact, I could barely see the other side of the hall, but that may have been because my eyes were watering.

The floor was tiled and slippery with a black slime which dotted the lower parts of the walls. I risked a breath through my mouth, I daren’t use my nose. I could still taste it, though, the acidic stink metallic on my tongue. ‘I’ll start upstairs’ I gasped at him. He lead me up a narrow curved stairway which would have been charming if it had not been strewn with faeces and toilet paper. He started a low muttering, complaining about the landlord, his newsagency, his children and everything imaginable, not loudly but just loudly enough to be picked up by my tape recorder, making it difficult to type up later.

The bedroom… a large double bed with grey sheets thrown aside, stained from months of bodily fluids with clusters of hair visible in the folds. There was a hideous 1970s padded bed head and attached side tables. Plates, old food, filthy underwear and old newspapers were all over the place. The walls were spotted with black mould, and I could not decide which were cracks and which were blackened spiders’ webs. Needless to say, the smell in here was even worse, if that was possible. The horrible thought of unwashed underparts occurred to me as I was saying into the tape recorder ‘ window seized shut, decorations poor’.. and I tried to stifle a snort of disgust.

Oh, the toilet. Oh… how is it possible to miss something as large and obvious as a toilet, not just once but many, many times? And what, just what is that in the basin? ‘Sanitary ware stained’ I intoned. ‘Floor covering vinyl, cracked and worn…’

In the kitchen there was a large, black, elderly and utterly disgusting smelly dog, toothlessly drooling as it tried to eat something unspeakable off the table, incontinently urinating as it did so. The smell was accentuated with that of the rotting contents of a dustbin left in the sun. Slime covered the bottom of the windows and filtered the sunlight slightly green. The cooker rings were buried in grease from innumerable fat spills, and the frying pan, left on the counter, had fur growing in it.

Lastly, the living room. The carpet was rucked and had a track worn around the middle of it. There was no need to ask what had caused it – a young boy was riding a bicycle round and round, round and round… ‘Can you hang on a minute?’ I said.
‘Don’t speak to my son like that!’ snapped the old man. Son! The man looked about seventy. I later learned he had eight children, some living with him, some with his ex wife.

I suggested he take up any problems with my carrying out the survey with his landlord. The man spat on the floor. ‘Him? Just look at the state he leaves the place in!’ he whined.

I gasped for breath as I stepped outside. I carried the awful scent with me all day, trapped in the fibres of my clothes and in the hairs of my nostrils. Its a glamorous job, being an architect.

Renovating Alice

2007-10-16T18:01:00.001+01:00

Schedule of Works for Emergency Repairs and Temporary Works on Alice the Architect

1. Install Accrow props under the rotting beam ends (note - beams very broad. Check all dimensions on site).
2. Provide temporary shore to bulging structural wall.
3. Grout separating masonry. Stitch cracks and fill with lime mortar and Botox.
4. Strip out redundant wiring, make safe the rest by regular visits to the psychologist for duration of the works.
5. Remove boiler and drain heating and water systems, ready for installation of new Aga and wind generator.
6. Carry out full camera drains survey, submit report. Cap off unused drains at both ends, after filling with concrete.
7. Remove tatty cladding, provide temporary Vivienne Westwood sheeting.
8. Provide tilts over leaks in roof in the shape of a nice hat.
9. Board up openings, fence off little round specs and leave Alice secure until further funds are available.

Alice is not inhabitable yet, but further decay has been arrested. She is functioning as a structure, but only just.

To cheer her up, the excellent Sir Norman Blogster has included Alice’s blog in his unofficial archiblog poll. See Part IV to vote!

A Gentle Collapsing

2007-10-06T18:58:00.001+01:00

Alice the Architect is unwell.

Structural integrity is failing and she has slumped onto her props. Her underground services are leaking and washing out the foundations under the old brick footings.

Cracks in her structural walls are due to thermal movement and too many mind games.

Her joinery is parting and rotten at the joints. Her tenons are loose due to the pegs rotting. The sealer between the brickwork and the joinery has denatured and is falling out.

Her cladding, fashionable when it was installed, is now old and tatty and reacting with the latest fashion in squinty specs.

Her wiring is not earthed and often sparks dangerously; it does not come up to modern standards.

Her sensors are set far too high for this corrosive architectural environment and often crash and shut down. Swiching her on again is becoming more and more difficult.

Recommend complete refurbishment, saving as much of her historic structure as possible, although some beam bearings may have to be remade. This may not be economically possible in the current climate so careful cost analysis must be carried out first. Demolition may be cheaper in the long run.

Champagne Supernova

2007-09-27T19:52:00.001+01:00

Of course, in Alice’s wonderland of architecture there are many starchitects, but alas Alice isn’t one of them. Of course, I may poke fun those who, with a lot of shouting, fanfare, RIBA awards ceremonies and champagne, unveil their latest way of putting up a structure which looks almost, but not quite, nothing like a building. Odd really, that they have to make such a fuss of putting a roof over the heads of a thousand or so computer drones. Even odder, it has to be the shape of a penis, or a sponge (see below) or something they found on the bottom of their shoe whilst strolling to the new restaurant to eat something that is almost, but not totally, unlike food.

I am not totally cynical, however. One of my fave raves is a Starchitect - no, the word is too small. He is a whole nebula in one rather unpreprosessing elderly man, a Supernova of an architect. He is Frank Gehry. What? You’ve never heard of him? Shame on you, you who call yourselves fans of deconstructivism!

The picture above shows part of his pavilion for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic games. Looks like a fish? Well, yes. Didn’t I mention that the true megaliths of architecture never design buildings to look like buildings? So, of course! A fish.

Not content with that, Frank Gehry smashes up a load of Formica (that’s the deconstructivist bit) and forms it into – yes, another fish. But a bit smaller this time, and he puts a light bulb in it. Lo! A lamp! This is the architect ‘thinking outside the box’ – and as you know, this is very important to us modern thinkers.

Well, Frank was strolling along one day, looked on the bottom of his shoe as he sat on a bench in the sun, and came up with a new range of jewellery. Here it is. What do you mean, it looks like a fish? Are we still stuck on that motif? Where’s the universe – spanning imagination? Well, nothing like milking a good idea - sorry! Creating a brand!

Sponge

2007-09-25T14:33:00.001+01:00

Strange. No sooner than TUPC mentioned 'sponge architecture' than a good example turns up in the architectural press. Keen student of architecture that he is, when he is not apprehending perpetrators of crime, I think he has just come up with the new 'big thing' in architecture.

Well, it certainly is full of holes.

Serious critiques only please, to the usual address.

Story of a Landmark

2007-09-21T13:50:00.001+01:00

Yes, it is a building. Selfridges new store in Birmingham, to be precise. But of course, you keen students of modern architecture knew that.

Ever wondered how architects such as these design their magnum opus? I have a feeling their inspiration comes from this

I may be wrong. If so, forgive me, o great Starchitects! I only wish my own work was so up to the minute!

Seriously folks, this building was feted in the press (the architectural press, at any rate) as a wonderful innovation in the latest style of 'blob' architecture.

In a about 20 years, it will be vilified as an eyesore, an expensive gimmick that costs a fortune to maintain. In 60 years (if it lasts that long) a newspaper will report that this wonderful landmark is about to be demolished by its desperate owners, who cannot find any commercial reason to keep repairing it and want to be rid of it before they go bankrupt. To the background music of protest groups and ernest BBC reporters, the local council will list it grade 2 star, as an important contribution to the history of architecture. Its owners sell up anyway, getting far less than they would have done if the site had been ready for redevelopment. The new owners are a pension fund, who are quite happy to leave the land gathering value for the forseeable future and don't give a damn about the place, even if they knew where it was.

It will sit empty for another 20 years until Griff Rhys Jones Junior starts a new series of 'Restoration' and raises a million quid.

Ten years after that, and it will still be empty, the million quid sitting gathering dust in a trust account, no-one wanting to take any responsibility at all for deciding which bit of it to repair first.

Ten more years, and it is no longer feasible to repair it, so it is demolished as a dangerous structure.

The End

Aga Syndrome

2007-09-16T19:44:00.001+01:00

Why do people who don’t cook always ask me for an Aga? Many of my clients are from the affluent middle class who want their house remodelled. This usually includes a new kitchen, either within my nice new extension or in the existing building. They are busy people, often working all hours as lawyers, doctors, accountants and other high paying professions (not architects, alas), who come home so exhausted they can just about heat a pizza or boil in the bag Tesco curry. The even have an electric kettle, rather than an Aga friendly one which sits on the hob and whistles when it’s ready.

As you probably know, Agas are a hangover from the old cooking range, which was made of cast iron and needed blacking every day, continuous stoking with wood, coal, Grandma’s underwear or the kids’ toys; or anything else inflammable in order to keep the thing hot. Let it go out and get cold, and you won’t be eating for another five or six hours after putting the first match to the old newspapers and sticks inside. Of course, they died out pretty quickly once gas and electric cookers became available – clean, ready to use at a touch, no need for vast coal cellars or wood sheds. Women just did not want the hassle with a range any more, especially when they started going out to work. And who can blame them?

But – Aga carries on making something very similar to the old range. They look great – all deep coloured enamel, shiny bits, huge, heavy and just the thing to fill that annoying gap under the chimney breast where the fireplace used to be (or the old range, if this is still the kitchen). Nowadays, they can be fired by coal (messy) oil (large and ugly tank in the garden) or gas (running out and soon to be prohibitively expensive). But, and it’s a big but, they have to be left on all the time. They are basically a very large and heavy piece of cast iron, which takes forever to warm up, and that of course is essential for cooking your roast beef and Yorkshire. Yes, on all the time. Just imagine a summer’s day – windows open, cool breeze blowing through, moving the flower arrangement in an attractive manner – boiling hot Aga. Many people switch it off over the summer and have a normal cooker installed. Come the winter, they realise just how much fuel they have saved and the Aga gets left as a kind of decorative architectural feature.

These things guzzle so much fuel you are on first name terms with the oil tanker driver, who sits permanently at the end of your drive filling the tank. If you have a coal fired one, then you develop muscles like Arnie Swartzenegger humping sacks of it in from the coal shed (which is the size of your garage). As for natural gas, well, why do you think the Russian gas suppliers are so rich?

So, why have an Aga?

One lady client, who had brought up four children and now had seven grandchildren and assorted nieces and nephews constantly visiting, loved her Aga. She was almost always cooking, you see – and it makes sense to have a cooker which is always on, so you can put a pot a jam or soup on it, go out and leave it for three hours. She made her own bread, early in the morning, so there was the Aga, ready and waiting, at the right temperature.

When I visited to carry out a survey of the outbuildings, she asked me in for a cup of tea (it was freezing, as it usually is when I carry out a survey). I walked into the kitchen and breathed deeply of the scented, warm, moist air and sighed with pleasure. The smell was so rich and good I felt as if I were eating it. There was the intense, sweet and sour smell of rasperry jam and sugar. Under it was a string quartet of cinnamon, butter, sugar and lemons. Earthy bass notes came from roasting chicken and potatoes. Oh, heaven.

Tea arrived and with it, a huge plate of lemon thins, the most delicious biscuits, manna which melted in the mouth. I watched her busying with the oven gloves and listened to her chatting, and felt completely at home, and completely at peace. I could have sat there forever.

This is the person an Aga was made for. Not an up tight professional who can’t even heat baked beans without blowing a fuse.

Floodland

2007-09-08T19:39:00.001+01:00

Building on floodplains is a stupid idea, scream the newspapers. Hundreds of homes to be built on floodplains, says the 'serious' reporter from the BBC, standing in front of a street scene with buildings up to their windowsills in water.

The trouble with banning building on floodplains is that almost all our cities are built on flood plains, so this would mean no more building within or next to our cities. Why? Hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago, our ancestors stopped running around naked, painting themselves blue and spearing bull Aurochs; put down their spears, picked up hoes and built little wooden, thatched settlements next to rivers.

Not up mountains, where it was cold, the weather awful, the terrain rough, water scarce and wild beasts roamed; but next to rivers and the sea, near water, fish, warmth, fertile land, ready made defences and ease of travel (the river) and easily traversed flat(ish) terrain.

The Romans arrived, who were many things but above all practical. They were not about to move the established settlements up mountains. They far preferred the convenience of the river for their viaducts and heating, the fertile land for their crops, the water for their ports and the flat land for their amphitheatres. Town defences often consisted of a ditch and walls, all patrolled by the salaried and well organised army.

Along came William the Conquerer. Ready made cities, river for transport, flat fertile land - was he going to build up mountains? No, of course not. New castles were built on natural outcrops ( such as Edinburgh) or on man made mounds (such as Norwich).

And so on. Yes, flooding was occasionally a problem, but did not happen often enough to make it worth moving up mountains.

Of course, there is the little problem these days of rising sea levels, partly due to global warming and partly due to the south part of England sinking, as Scotland rises - the whole island is still returning to its natural levels now that the weight of ice from the last ice age has stopped pressing Scotland, and the bit of Earth's crust it sits on, into the magma. Sinking land in the south means we either take rising water seriously and put in some stonking great flood barriers, or we do not build on the Thames corridor. This is rather more than a flood plain, it is the mother of all marshes. Building here really is rather silly. How many ancient settlements can you see on it? Er...

Loathing

2007-09-03T17:33:00.001+01:00

Another day, another survey of an ancient house, one of many owned by a city landlord.

I get mixed reactions when I visit - from joy to complete indifference, but very rarely do I get the feeling that a tenant actually hates me. Usually at worst I am just a nuisance, or a slight inconvenience: at best I am the only visitor the elderly tenant has had for a month, and out comes the tea, scones, buscuits and comfy chair.

The house was one of a terrace, a particularly gracious, rendered Georgian house, four storeys high with those tall sash windows and beautiful traced fanlight above the door. The render on the facade was formed into quoins and traced with horizontal and vertical lines to suggest stone, a common feature of a time when brick was still considered humble but stone was simply too expensive for its builder. At each storey there was a fancy cornice, with lead weathering, and a parapet hid the slate roof behind. Arched lead covered dormers punctuated the roof, all perfectly lined up with the windows below them.

I reached the white front steps and considered the curly railings and the broad, panelled front door. The knocker was an old brass lion with a ring in its mouth; there was an old fashioned bell pull and a wide brass letterbox. Two elegant fluted columns sat either side of the door, holding an arched pediment, which beautifully matched the dormers. It was the kind of house that makes you feel a quiet peace, everything from its chimneys to its basement windows looked so right, so perfect and in exactly the right place.

I knocked on the door. Heavy footsteps approached and, after scraping of chains, locks, latches and bolts, the door opened. I was looking at a squat woman in an apron, rolls of flab bulging over the top of her grubby trousers with a strong odour of stale sweat. 'Architect?' she said. 'I suppose you'd better come in' and she stomped off.

I followed her wobbling bottom and trodden down shoes down the wide hall, through the ornate doorway at the end. She turned suddenly 'I suppose you want to go into all the rooms!' she snapped. I don't know if the Countess will want you in her bedroom!'

Realising that this rude object was the housekeeper, I suggested I introduced myself to the Countess. She glared at me and stomped off again. I followed her as she opened a door, said something to someone inside, then jerked her thumb at me. 'Go in' she snapped.

The room was beautifully panelled in shades of white and cream. Antique furniture and oil paintings complimented it perfectly. Long windows looked onto the garden and the sun streamed in.

'Hello' I said to the elderly lady sat in the chair.
'Oh, come to do the snooping?' she said.
I told her I was going to carry out a survey on the direction of her landlord.
'Yes, then you can bugger off!' she snapped.

I made sure I took absolutely ages doing the survey. I asked to go into the attic and asked the fat housekeeper to find me a ladder. I poked into every nook, cranny, loo and boudoir. I wanted the keys for the shed, garage, wood store and cellar. I got her to move the lawnmower, the desk, the chairs and kitchen table. I decided the best time to survey the kitchen was during lunch preparations. At last, I asked the housekeeper to move her car so I could lift a drain cover.

'Oh - arn't you a nuscience!' she shouted, putting the cleaning gear aside for the umpteenth time.

Yes, I thought. And serves you right.

Fear

2007-08-22T19:57:00.001+01:00

A vast field of code 8 lead stretched either side and above me, the perspective accentuated by the regular lines of the wood cored rolls at each joint. The roof looked so insignificant from the ground, but churches are often deceptive, in a way the religion they serve can be. I was training to survey churches, a specialist field hedged around with little pressure groups, each clamouring for attention and each believing theirs is the only way to conserve these simple and ancient buildings. So I was seconded to a much older colleague, who had been working on churches almost since they were built.

He was standing above me, one foot raised on the shallow slope of the roof, laughing, the builder puffing his way up in front of him towards the ridge. ‘You’ve gone white!’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling dizzy. We had just climbed a very long ladder, all three sections of it extended to its fullest length; even so the top end only just reached the parapet. I had scrambled over it, trying not to look down. The worn stone felt gritty under my hands, and I was covered in white, chalky dust. Once over the parapet, I stood upright in the slimy gutter, and felt ill. The parapet was at knee height and I felt the drop pulling me towards it as iron to the magnet. Breathing heavily and sweating, I began to climb up the roof. Like many lead roofs, it had a shallow pitch and would have been simple to climb if it had been at ground level, but up here I was expending energy in fear more suited to the steeper parts of Ben Nevis.

I managed to get half way, to the background of my colleague’s gentle monologue on the history of lead roofing in general and the repairs to this one in particular, then the clammy fog of vertigo closed around me. Trying to keep my balance, I kneeled on the roof, then put my hands on the pitted surface and slowly lay face down. My colleague’s voice faded as he breached the ridge and started down the other side.

The lead was warm from the sun, and I was close enough to see tiny imperfections in the surface. Under my hand, I felt a regular pattern of holes and lifted my head to look. There was a pattern of tiny marks, as if done using the end of a nail, forming the outline of the sole of a sizable boot. ‘G S’ was inscribed within it. Two hundred years ago, the plumber had proudly signed his work. I wonder if I was the first person to see it since?

Happy Birthday!

2007-08-10T17:50:00.001+01:00

Many thanks to TUPC for nominating my post, ‘Cat People’ for the Rising Blogger. When I first started this weblog, almost a year ago, I did not think I would get any readers at all, let alone regular readers. How many people, when told that there is a blog about an architect’s job, would show the slightest interest? It is more likely they would run away screaming, thinking it is all about being arrogant and wearing little 'Gok Wan' style specs, whilst earning squillions of pounds of money for scribbling incomprehensible designs. Of course, there are some of my colleagues who do just that, but unfortunately for my stress levels and bank balance, I ain’t one of them.

Believe it or not, this job can be extremely stressful; writing is a very good way of releasing some of the pressure and damn it, I enjoy it!

To celebrate my newly found fame, and the blog’s first birthday, ask me anything you like (keep it clean – yes, that means you too) and within reason I will try and give a considered and interesting answer in a week’s time.

I raise a metaphorical pint of Everards Tiger to all my readers – look forward to hearing from you.

Demolition

2007-07-26T20:13:00.001+01:00

What does ‘demolition’ mean? When I was a child I pictured a scene with a huge JCB swinging a wrecking ball on a long chain, bricks flying everywhere, crashing noise, dust and a pile of broken rubble at the end of the day being shifted slowly by bulldozers; all very similar to illustrations in ‘The Beano’, usually ending in one of the Bash Street Kids pinching the JCB and aiming it at the school.

Another film clip from my mind library involves a huge and ugly concrete tower block, standing in a wasteland of rubbish, a man in a hard hat with a plunger fixed to a box and a long wire. ‘3, 2, 1!’ and he presses the plunger. Puffs of smoke issue in carefully placed patterns from the tower, and it gracefully collapses within its own footprint, to the cheers of the watching crowd. A TV crew interviews some rather rough looking woman with tattoos and a fag, and lank hair who says ‘It weren’t that bad. I were born there. You could leave your door open.’

Then there is Fred Dibnah and his method of lighting fires under massive brick chimneys, standing right underneath it whilst it begins to move, then running like hell whilst it measures its 200 foot length on the ground and shatters into a million bits.

Demolition to an architect can be a bit of a shame, especially if it is your tower block being blown up.

Most of my own projects involve a little demolition, usually of an ugly appendage to a perfectly decent house, so that my client can build something to fulfil their needs for a huge kitchen, massive conservatory or whatever to Alice’s design. Of course, demolishing something attached to something else is a bit of a ticklish job. You don’t want to lose the whole lot.

I was involved in a particularly difficult project of repairing and extending a very pretty and very old workshop building some years ago. It was three storeys high, with loading doors in the middle of each storey and winching gear on the top floor – all untouched for years by anything except the weather (bad) and pidgeons (worse) and loaded with stored junk (suicidal). Whilst the front was not too bad, the back was a teetering forty foot wall of cracked brick, rotten timber, no mortar and was not attached to the rest of the building. It was only staying up by virtue of habit, and the residual strength of the render, which had so many cracks it resembled a thousand piece jigsaw.

Carefully, so carefully, the builders shored it up, to the squawks from the engineer and terrified silence from me. Brick by brick, they took the back wall and part of the chimney out, propping as they went. The weekend came, and large tarpaulins were spread over the back to keep the weather out and the dust in. Then the gales came. The tarpaulins acted like sails, until they burst under the pressure. The wind rushed in, which with no rear wall resembled a stack of open boxes, lifted it about an inch, and dropped the whole lot onto the scaffold.

The engineer reckoned the place lost three inches in height over the next few days, and became a web of steel, balks of timber and ply membrane walls to keep it standing. Oh, yes, we managed it – it is still there and you cannot see any of the rather radical strengthening works. I gave a thick folder to the owner with strict instructions not to touch certain walls, beams or steels.

He promptly lost the file. Cut the wrong timbers, cut a new door in the wrong wall, and the whole lot will go.

Let me hope it will be long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Now Hear the Word of the Lord

2007-07-13T20:13:00.001+01:00

Roof structures are a major part of any building, but how often do you actually get to see them? From the outside, there is a vast acreage of tiles or slates, lead or copper, thatch or pintiles - but what holds it all up? How often do you visit your loft? Climb through that rather small hatch, into the dusty interior, lit (if you are lucky) by one feeble light bulb and look around you. No, not at the junk you store up there, the old Christmas decorations and forgotten toys, look up.

Most people, including estate agents, call all the pieces of wood you can see beams. But they are not pieces of wood, they are timbers, and most of them are not beams, they go by many other names. Look right up at the top, where the two sides of the roof meet. How old is your house? If it is modern, you may find your view restricted by many, many pieces of timber, a system known as trussed rafters. There is a diagram of the various patterns at the top of this post. These use very small sections of timber, are made in a factory or joiners, and are favoured by the major housebuilders because... well, they're quick to put in place using a crane, you don't need trained carpenters and therefore, you scholars of building technology say, they are cheap.

Of course, there is a very big minus to rough sawn, mean little trussed rafters - you cannot use your loft for anything but rather limited storage. Want a loft conversion? Sorry, not possible.

A building of quality, or any kind of age, usually has what is known as a 'cut' roof. The timbers are made especially for that building and are usually trimmed and fitted on site by a tradesman. Although they are sometimes not seen in the finished building, some of them are truly wonderful.

The photograph shows the roof of Hadleigh Guildhall in Suffolk, built in the 15th century. It is a 'crown post' roof, named for the upright posts with the spreading 'crown' of curved braces in the centre of the photo.

Beautiful, isn't it? All this just to give a slope to the outside surface, to keep the rain off. Of course, a roof this fine was built to be seen, and for its sponsor to show he was a man of wealth and taste. All the timbers are adzed smooth, cut with little chamfers, either stopped or run out, sometimes the larger timbers have roll mouldings or are shaped into octagonal sections.

So, the horizontal timber at the bottom is call the tie beam. The tie beam connects to the crown post. The crown post connects to the curved braces. The braces connect to the collars and the collar purlin. The collars connect to the common rafters. The common rafters are lap jointed at the top; at the bottom they are connected to the wall plates.

All are lovingly hand cut in English oak, with numbered joints so they could be assembled on the ground in the joiner's yard then transported to the site and put together, like a giant Meccano set, to form the crowning glory of the Guildhall. Every timber is tenoned and morticed and then pegged in place with a lovingly formed, round, tapered, good hard oak dowel.

If this is the word of the Lord, what does it make trussed rafters?

Cat People

2007-07-01T17:06:00.001+01:00

Builders tend to be rough and ready, physical types who inhabit one of the few masculine worlds left in this country.

They arrive in an aged van with the company logo on the site and a couple of beaten up old cars on a wet, filthy building site at 7.30 in the morning in all weathers. After a bit of shouty good humour at seeing the contracts manager, they grab huge power tools and wield them in a manly fashion, to the sounds of Radio 1, until the first break at 10.00.

In the steamy and rather smelly site hut they enjoy the cultural merits of The Sun and the culinary joys of a doorstep cheese and pickle sandwich. Mugs of hot, strong, sweet tea are carefully placed on top of the architect’s drawings, adding to the pattern of rings obscuring the details she slaved over so lovingly. All are hungry, this being the first break of the day and the best; the banter peters out to be supplanted by the sounds of munching.

Having extended the 15 minute break to half an hour, its back to the tools and a bit of noisy angle grinding, more Radio 1 and banter with the skip lorry driver. It starts to warm up after the chilly start to the day and off come the tee shirts, exposing massive chest and upper arm muscles of varying degrees of hairiness, tattoos and a paunch. Bending over the saw horse, the carpenter proudly shows off his magnificent builder's bum, complete with little tuft of hair accentuating the top of the cleft.

Architect arrives and the level of banter reduces to a background mutter, and the foreman turns the radio off. Eyes slide right as she passes, resplendent and regal in hard hat, fluorescent jacket and boots, attended by the foreman and a small flotilla of sub contractors. Women on site! What is the world coming to? All heave a sigh of relief when she leaves, and out come the fags despite the ‘no smoking’ clause in the contract which none of them have read.

Five to one? Must be lunch time. Back to the site hut and a noisier break than before as hunger is not the major driving force. This is the time for a leisurely go at The Sun crossword, or a discussion about motorbikes, Arsenal or their pay, accompanied by a few moans about the weather. Back to the tools. Half the day over!

A cat limps slowly from the hedge, obviously in distress, trying to run but unable to, part of it’s white front leg and chest stained red. Hammering and banter hiccups to a stop as each tradesman spots the cat. They all look at each other, then as one, put their tools down as the foreman approaches the cat, holding an old towel. He asks for a box – the carpenter finds an old crate. Carefully, gently, the foreman calls the cat and manages to take hold of it. It screams and very gently, with his rough and dirty hands, he lays her into the crate, muttering words of comfort.

He holds the crate whilst the bricklayer drives the van towards the nearby town. On the way the foreman rings the office, asking the secretary to look up the name of the local vet, and warn him that they are on the way.

No more banter that day, apart from worried, whispered asides – ‘How is the cat doing? Do you think she’ll be all right?’

On site the following morning and all is hushed. The foreman tells me about the cat. ‘Touch and go’, he says, unable to look me in the eye. ‘We’re waiting to hear’. I notice the work has almost come to a halt, but I cannot bring myself to ask them to get on with it.

A week later and all is back to normal. ‘The cat is fine!’ the foreman told me, grinning from ear to ear. She was more than fine. Every day at ten she visited the site hut, knowing she would be spoilt rotten with scraps from the builders’ sandwiches, and sit on the table afterwards, on my drawings, washing herself.

Under the rough exterior beats a heart of gold.

See this

Drip, Drip, Drip

2007-06-26T19:58:00.001+01:00

I looked at the wonderful, text-book structural fault and could hardly contain my glee. Of course, such a thing is bad news for the owner of the building, but looking at this brought all the problems of the past ten years into sharp focus. I was standing two storeys up on the scaffolding, flapping debris sheet behind me, grit blowing along the rough scaffold boards and the sun shining brightly, with a dark cloud on its way over. I wanted to see this and photograph it before the next load of rain was dumped on the city and made us dash for the site hut. Traffic rumbled on the street below, or was that thunder?

It had been grand, once. A rich merchant in the 1540s had spent a lot of money building it. The oak frame was made of huge timbers from trees of a stature that would have put today’s great oaks to shame. The spaces between the timbers were filled with mellow, irregular red brick, beautifully laid in a herringbone pattern. Each window was made of large, elaborate roll moulded oak sections with little, diamond-paned, leaded glazing. The opening windows were of wrought iron with lovely curly, time worn stays and catches. The interior had oak panelling, each panel made to show off the rippling grain of the timber and each muntin and rail had a little chamfer, stopped at the corners. The enormous fireplaces were so wide you could lie down in them, and had beautiful two-centred brick arches holding the chimney breast above. The firebacks were of patterned, basket weave and herringbone brick, stained with hundreds of years worth of soot. In the Victorian era, a new wing and some alterations had been done, unusually tastefully, by a well known local architect. So beautiful, so old. So badly damaged it had been deserted for five years and was full of filth, debris, pigeons and druggers’ paraphanalia.

The last tenant had been sitting in the living room in the flat over the shops one evening when a particularly large lorry went by. As usual, the building shook. More unusually, he could suddenly see a shaft of light hitting the floor from the streetlamp outside. It was not coming through one of the windows, but through a large, jagged and newly formed crack in one of the walls. The following day, more cracks snaked up the chimney breast and the floor had distorted. Some hefty Accrow props were installed by a structural engineer, who labelled it as dangerous and began a lengthy drain investigation, leading to a court case.

Five years later, and the case was settled, after protracted wrangling, out of court. Meanwhile, this lovely building was empty, leaking and continuing to slump onto its props. The drains were relaid, but the damage, according to the engineers, was done.

Forward another three years and I am standing on the scaffolding. The builder had taken down part of the brickwork over the shopfront and exposed a huge oak beam, a foot wide and eighteen inches deep, from an oak of such a size I felt disappointed in our modern oak trees for months afterwards. Even more amazing was that this huge thing, so strong you could have supported a bridge with it, had been almost completely rotted through. Oak does eventually go rotten, of course, but often only around the outside, whilst the centre becomes harder and stronger with age. It has naturally occurring tannic acid in it which prevents rot and insect attack, so I rarely see a member of this size in this condition. This beam supported the Victorian brickwork over, where the first crack appeared. The problem was not the drains at all, but lack of support over the shopfront.

I looked up at the cast iron gutter. A drip was forming slowly at the bolted joint, glittering in the sun. As I watched, it fell onto the lead flashing over the projecting face of the shopfront. Instead of being directed off the building, as it should be, it ran back into a tiny hole in the lead, and into the gap where the beam should be.

One drip. Another drip. Over how many years? I wondered. If the owners ten years ago had mended the gutter and the tiny hole in the lead, a repair costing less than £200, all would be well. Now the cost was somewhat more. Such a tiny fault, such a huge and catastrophic effect.

Bricks Are Really Interesting...

2007-06-17T19:42:00.001+01:00

The humble brick, that wonderful hand sized polyhedron made from nothing more than fired dirt, which has built everything from Roman aquaducts, to castles, to your outside privy; what a wonderful thing it is. I can’t understand why peoples’ eyes glaze over when I mention my brick collection, or why they remember all sorts of pressing appointments and leave when I offer them a tour. Even some other architects find it strange, but they tend to be from the glass, steel and concrete faction.

It makes me want to weep when I see poorly laid or badly repaired brickwork. It’s only too common, unfortunately.

Picture the scene: a woman opens the door to a rough looking man who has just stepped out of his unmarked white Transit – ‘Your house needs pointing, luv – you don't want damp walls! I’ll do it for you – with the real thing, cement and none of that dirty old lime mortar’. She agrees, of course, who wants damp all over their nice new stencilling? After discussing it with her husband, who becomes worried about his perfectly good, if old, brickwork, they agree to pay the exorbitant cost.

Two weeks later, the damage is done, and the brickwork is now traced with the sharp, hard, ruled lines of blueish cement mortar, with added splash marks and a stain on the patio where the cowboys have mixed the wretched stuff without putting some protective boards down. Cement mortar is very hard, sets quickly and is made from Portland cement. You can buy it in little bags from B&Q and it is a grey blue powder. Mix it with water and sand and Bob’s your uncle – a wet, sloppy substance which the cowboy builders swear by (among other nasty things).

Five years later, and the cement is fine, but the bricks are not. They are turning into brick dust and with every rain, more and more is washed away until the damp penetrates inside and ruins the nice new wallpaper. Why? I hear you students of architecture ask. Well, brick walls are supposed to absorb rain and act a bit like an overcoat – the top surface gets wet, then dries out once it stops raining. Most of the drying out takes place through the joints, which in old walls, are made of lime mortar which is softer than the bricks. Over time – and we’re talking about many years, sometimes hundreds, the joints erode, but that is relatively simple to repair – you just bung in some more lime mortar.

If you use mortar which is harder and more impermeable than the bricks, such as cement – guess what? The wall will dry out through each brick and not the joints. That means the joints stay pristine and as good looking as the day they were done by the wretched man with the tattoos and the Transit, and your precious little bricks, the wonderful little darlings that are holding your house up, start eroding. Just look at the photograph. The bricks are over 140 years old. The remains of the modern cement mortar are no more than about 30 years old.

Be warned!

Rain

2007-06-13T16:29:00.001+01:00

Church surveys – ah, yes. A wonderful building all to myself; access to all the parts no other worshippers can reach; the unexpected beauty of a bronze bell glowing in the dusty light; dipped stone steps curving out of sight, worn by countless feet; a sudden dazzling flash of coloured light through stained glass as the sun bursts through outside, or a half hidden, ancient painting, faded hues softly showing though many years of white, chalky limewash. I could go on, but as I have a job to do, and am usually being watched by the churchwardens, these little pleasures are fleeting.

It was warm, with storm clouds gathering as I drew up at another large and ornate country church in the middle of nowhere. Two people lumbered towards the car. In some parts of this rural county, there are some rather strange folk. The words ‘inbred’ spring to mind, as they tell me they and their family have been living within five miles of this church for the last three hundred years. This place was no exception. There was a short, rough looking blond man of between 40 and 60 – it was impossible to tell. His weatherbeaten face was mummified by years of exposure to the sun and wind. A younger man, with a cigarette clenched between his teeth, squinted at me.

‘Eh!’ he said. I noticed he had a withered arm and an expressionless face.
‘My son’ said the older man.
‘Eh!’ said the son.

They both manoeuvred a ladder into place so I could examine the gutters and eaves, as it started to rain. I climbed the ladder up the high warm wall and grasped the iron gutter. Large, warm raindrops, a few at first then a few more, then suddenly a drenching downpour almost bent my knees with its weight. The lead roof shone and the gutters gurgled with water. At least I could check them properly for leaks, I thought, as the water found its way down my neck and began to soak through my jacket. Water gushed over the top of the gutter and down the walls - there was a blockage.

Slightly to one side there was the opening to the ornate iron hopper and downpipe. Growing beautifully in the hopper, in the dirt of years as if in a pot, was a flowering plant. I grasped it and pulled. With a plop! it came out, soil and all, and I dropped it. There was a wet splat sound as it hit the paving and splattered dirt all over the two men. ‘Sorry’ I shouted, above the drumming rain. They didn’t flinch – they were both looking up, faces running with water, the young man’s cigarette a drooping, drenched, soggy piece of paper.

Climbing down, I was wet through and I still had to do the inside. I dripped all the way around the building, then made my way to the bottom of the tower. The two men stayed at ground level. ‘Don’t think we ever bin up there’ said the older one. ‘Eh!’ said his son, grimacing.

Up the worn stone stairs, no ladder this time as it was a large church with richer benefactors during its building than the one I described in the last post. Chalky limewash rubbed off onto my drenched clothes as I climbed, and climbed. Up through the silence chamber; noting the cracks. Past the bell frame and the disused bells. A ladder this time, ancient and polished smooth with use, although it was obvious no-one had been up there since the last inspection, five years ago.

I pushed open the heavy lead covered hatch. There was an explosion of flapping pigeons. I pulled myself up onto the lead roof, my clothes dripping water onto the bells below.. It had stopped raining and as I inspected the castellated parapet, the sun came out. The view of the glittering country around was illuminated in sharp light and shadow and was spectacular. I was on top of the world.

Empty Religion

2007-06-03T19:36:00.001+01:00

The large key turned easily in the lock, the iron smoothed with many years use and polished by many hands. As I shouldered the studded oak door open, that smell of church wafted out; candle wax, dry earth, damp and flowers combining into that familiar scent. I was alone, the best wayto be when doing a survey. I wondered down the nave, no hurry as there was no one to see me lingering. I pondered over the remnants of stained glass, salvaged from Cromwell, which formed a centrepiece to each of the huge windows. Fragments of faces, hands, soft yellows, reds and blue traced with black lead, casting coloured shadows onto the worn stone floor. Dust motes caught in the beams of sunlight, disturbed by my passing.

I leant on the alter rail, admiring the huge flower arrangements either side of the alter, and the vast brass candlesticks on the white cloth. Sighing happily, I wandered back down one of the aisles. There is nowhere more peaceful than an empty church. But I had work to do; I was commissioned to survey the bell frame, at the top of the tower.

I unlocked the door in the screen to the base of the tower, and paused, contemplating the religious lumber inside. Old masks, from a play. Boxes of candles. The Nativity scene in wheat straw. A dusty paining of Jesus, opening his hands to show the wounds. Did he really have a beard and long hair? I thought. How do they know? Five bell ropes dangled, brightly coloured, in the dusty air.

The ladder stretched up and up without restraint to the floor 25 feet above. There was no handrail, and as I reached the middle, the thing flexed alarmingly with each step. I don’t like heights – which is rather difficult in my job, as I have to climb ladders and scaffolding almost every day. I clung to the ladder, and tried to break my step to stop it oscillating.

Reaching the hatch, I pushed hard. It was heavy and difficult to move. I heaved myself up into the silence chamber with some difficulty – there was no handrail and the top of the ladder ended flush with the hatch. Another ladder, attached vertically to the wall this time, showed dimly in the light from the filthy, tiny windows on each side of the tower. There were two huge cracks in the stonework, opposite each other – but these were not my business today. I stepped out into the room and the board I stood on upended itself. I caught myself just in time, with my foot dangling over the drop, and was smacked in the face by the short board as it fell. I made a note: warn the next surveyor that the boards of the silence chamber were not nailed down.

I was in the bell chamber. The bell frame was in front of me, five bronze bells glowed in the slatted light of the large sound openings. The wind hissed though the louvres. Each bell had an inscription round it – ‘J Turner Made Me 1592. Glory to God’ - some too faint to read. Carefully, carefully, I edged around the frame on the narrow walkway to inspect each joint. Bells are very, very heavy and swing almost 180 degrees when being rung. Rhythmic swaying eases out the joints, rocks the tower and over time cause damage and catastrophic collapse, if one does not inspect regularly (every five years is the norm). Church towers are massively built for this reason. The bell frame is a fine thing, Elizabethen, and is made of huge timbers, braced and pegged, marked with I, II, III onwards by the carpenters at each joint, so it could be made in a timber yard and reassembled at the site, hundreds of years ago. Curved braces keep the frame square. I inspected the huge wheels with the ropes attached, looking for shrinkage. I checked the bearings for wear and the clappers and bells for cracks. All seems well. One bell is ‘clocked’ meaning that the rope is attached directly to the clapper, rather than the wheel, meaning that it is not swung to ring it. This can be a bad thing, as wear occurs on one part of the bell only, and can change its tone or crack it.

‘Hello?’ comes a small voice, up from below. ‘I want to ring the Angelus’.
‘S***!’ I thought. ‘Please don’t, not until I’m out of the way’ I shouted.

A bell swinging around would leave no room at all in the narrow chamber, and it would not stop if it hit me but splatter my innards all over the stone wall. Then I thought – if it’s the clocked one, that’s OK.

‘Oh, I don’t know’ she said when I asked her, ‘but I’ve got to do it now otherwise it will be late’.

Ringing a bell, it seems, is more important than mashing an architect. Luckily for me, it was the clocked one. Unluckily – have you ever been in a belfry when the bell is ringing? The noise vibrated through my entire body and I was still vibrating and almost stone deaf when I made it to the ground level. Churches don’t have silence chambers between bellringers and their bells for nothing.

Lifts that Smell of Wee

2007-05-26T18:55:00.001+01:00

Why do architects design shiny new leviathons, 50 storeys high, which look good for a few weeks then end up with lifts smelling of pee and home to all the crack addicts? Good question.

Multi storey living has been around for hundreds of years. In ancient Rome there were tenements which were five storeys high, a great achievement for the ancient world, and filled with families living two to a room. It seemed like a good idea at the time - Rome was the biggest city in the known world, people came from all parts of the empire to live there, make money and benefit from being a Roman citizen (bread and circuses, plus work to be had). Of course, land was at a premium, landlords would make far more money out of a small patch of desirable real estate in the shadow of the Colosseum (then called the 'Flavian Amphitheatre') if they built high, or as high as technology would allow in those times. You could draw parallels between Rome and any large city of our own times. Land is expensive. Demand is high. A city needs grunts to do the dirty work. The only way to house them cheaply is to stick them into huge towers, and call it Utopia, open it to a press fanfare and tell them it is the latest thing to keep them quiet.

Most of the buildings of the past have disappeared because they were badly built slums which could not be adapted to modern living standards (running water was a real challenge, for example). Of course, once the hovels had been demolished, the workers had to be rehoused, and some political ideology was necessary to justify uprooting them from their houses. Unfortunately, this ideology did not stop at demolishing the bad housing, but continued until recently in the form of Two Jags Prescott's wretched 'Pathfinder' scheme, and acres of perfectly good, human sized terraced houses were levelled in favour of a developers' bonanza of noddy flats and poky apartments. Of course, I may be being cynical, and these places will become the charming old worlde buildings of the future, but...

Many old buildings in use today are still with us because they have been maintained by successive owners throughout their life. Why? Because they are so adaptable to new uses, and so well built, that demolishing them does not make sense.

There is a great deal of sense in using traditional materials, simply because they have been proven to last. New materials are all very well, and often are announced to a fanfare and large spreads in the architectural magazines, but as TUPC says, ten years down the line just look at the state of them.

The picture above is The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, completed in 1978 and designed by one of the Big Two in architecture, Sir Norman Foster. Yes, it is innovative. Yes, it is interesting to be in, with its huge windows at each end. Yes, it looks like an aircraft hanger... The panels which clad the outside were factory made and are a sandwich of insulation between two bits of pressed steel. Great! All Praise Sir Norman! Except, after ten years, yes - only ten years, all the panels had to be replaced. Why? I hear you aspiring architecture students cry. Because, my dears, the insulation reacted with the steel and corroded it.

Stone, anyone?

The Big Guys

2007-05-18T17:04:00.001+01:00

This is a funky new design for a 23 storey student residence for Leeds Metropolitan University on the site of the old BBC. Although it looks like a heap of cardboard boxes stacked in a wonky fashion by a two year old child, it is being feted in ‘Architect’s Journal’. According to the article, the architects ‘carried out extensive research on the façade to optimise daylight within the blocks’. I believe they mean they put some windows in it.

Cowering in its shadow is the old BBC building, (the white one) which is a listed building. This means that planners must give careful consideration its setting, to avoid a proposal which is 'detrimental' (see 'Planning Chaos' below). Here, the monster has opened its huge maw and is about to swallow the poor little thing. It seems the bigger the eyesore, the more likely it is to get planning and listed building consent, and the little guy who wants a shed doesn't have a snowflake's hope in Hell.

Once upon a time I was shown around Essex university campus, which also houses its students in towers although these were built in the 1960s (Different, but just as ugly). The young guide relished telling us that the patch of new concrete paving slabs in the form of a splat mark were a replacement for the blood stains from the latest suicide.

If I was resident in one of those fearful towers, new or old, I might toy with the idea of doing the same.

Planning Chaos

2007-05-15T09:31:00.001+01:00

‘But all I want is a store and place for the kids to play’, said my client, raising his eyes to heaven. He’s a carpenter, a very good one who works for a good local building firm. I met him on site on one of my jobs and we got talking about the relative merits of oak and steel as structural elements. He is in his thirties with two young (and lively) children and lives in a small cottage in a pleasant village. He is uncomplicated, tall, good looking, slightly weatherbeaten, hard working, honest and a thoroughly good egg.

For two years now he has been trying to get planning permission for an outbuilding. His cottage is tiny, but for some reason best known to the drunken Hooray who did the inspection, it is listed Grade 2. This means that it is proving impossible to get anything past the local council, who keep coming back with the mantra ‘...Detrimental to the setting of the listed building…’ and refusing permission. The idiotic comments from the Parish Council would make me laugh if it wasn’t so tragic just how ignorant these micro politicians are. Their suggestion that we set a new building back behind the existing one is hilarious. For a start, my client doesn’t own the land, secondly there is a whacking great ditch in the way. Are they blind, stupid, deaf and dead, these people? Yes, I think they are.

I produced yet another design and arranged to meet the planning officer, whose name was on the correspondence, to discuss it. Local councils welcome discussion, they say. It means that we can submit a design, which may (although not certainly) get planning permission. I drive all the way to the council’s huge and ugly offices which cost the council tax payers a fortune to build a few years ago and is now inadequate. The planning officer is late, as they usually are. Eventually, this pimpled, speccy, reed thin youth appears, complete with badly fitting shirt and nervous tic. We go through the design and it is obvious that he simply cannot read drawings. He tells me he would have to consult colleagues and that he cannot comment. In disbelief, I ask what his qualifications are, expecting ‘Town Planner’ or ‘Architect’ (Huh!) or at least something worth driving 25 miles for. ‘Er – I’m going to do a course in planning’. I ask him what his degree was. ‘Geography’, he said, proudly.

Having had my and my client's time completely and utterly wasted, I am going to appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. At least that will mean a properly qualified and experienced planning inspector will look at the thing and we may actually make some progress. I have told the local council we are appealing – it does tend to concentrate their tiny minds. Hopefully the latest set of drawings will suddenly look more appealing to them than having to deal with the warehouse full of paperwork that an appeal generates.

Polymath

2007-05-09T19:49:00.001+01:00

Is this an architect? I’ve had it all, today.

Financial advisor. Taxwoman. VATwoman. Delivery girl. Postwoman. Technician. Artist. Shoulder to cry on. Kitchen designer. Chef. Vetrinary nurse. Building control officer. Energy use calculator. Heating engineer. Judge. Jury. Executioner. Business advisor. Admin assistant. Typist. Invoice clerk. Book-keeper. Photocopier emergency maintenance callout. IT instructor. Surveyor. Valuer. Marriage guidance counsellor.

In my spare time I design buildings.

Gully Gush

2007-05-06T19:05:00.001+01:00

It is strange, but true, that many of my male clients are fascinated by drains. Take a typical example - a largish project for me, but a nice one involving a listed building, which needed a thorough overhaul, an extension and bringing the comfort levels into the 21st century. Well, in this case, even the 19th would have been an improvement.

The client was a single, middle aged, wealthy man who wanted to turn it into a small hotel. It was the perfect candidate, in that it had about five acres of grounds planted about 100 years ago with specimen trees, it was in the middle of some lovely peaceful countryside but not too far from a large town and the local tourist spots. The building was part 17th century, part 19th, but whoever extended it in the 19th century appeared to have died in the middle of the project. It was so obviously unfinished it looked lopsided, magnificent at one end, tapering to a shambolic collection of sheds at the other. Alice to the rescue!

The job was difficult, not only because the building was a mess and almost impossible to live in, but the amount of money the client wanted to spend on it was almost enough, but not quite, to do the garage. Of course, he neglected to tell me his budget until we obtained tenders*, then he exploded. I explained the roof was full of holes. I told him the heating system was coal fired and the boiler was one of the first of its kind ever and belonged in a museum. I comiserated with him about the state of the drive and the extra money you always have to spend on a listed building. Nothing made much impression, until I said 'And where the drains go, is anybody's guess, but I think they discharge directly into that pond over there - '

His expression softened and his eyes, popping out of his head until this point, lowered. 'Ah', he said, gently. 'Come with me'. He then gave me a tour of the drains, both foul and rainwater. He told me the history of the drainage in the village. He mentioned the new pump the water board put in 30 years ago. He showed me the sump in the cellar. In a nutshell, or sump, rather - I had his confidence.

Throughout the entire, difficult, protracted and hair tearing site works that followed, I could always calm him down by mentioning how well the new drains were looking and showing him the latest inspection chamber.

I always try mentioning drains from now on to male clients - the effect is remarkable.

*Competitive prices from builders, see How Much?!!! below, 15.10.06 for a brief explanation.

Garabaldi

2007-04-29T19:19:00.001+01:00

TUPC asked me to ‘Design me up a packet of Garibaldis’. Reminded me of the days when I worked for a large architectural practice before the bean counters got hold of working life and put a price on everything, whilst knowing the value of nothing.* The practice had these little things that make life worth living, like an office curry twice a year, a Christmas party with a band, but the best little extra was the tea lady.

The morning coffee (or tea) was served in china cups and saucers by a soft, pleasant, doughnut of a woman, who came round in the mornings at 11.00 with proper brewed tea and biscuits, including Garabaldis. Never put a foot wrong, until one day she handed me the tea across my drawing board. Of course, it was an accident waiting to happen, and sure enough, it did. Tea all over the huge sheet of tracing paper I had spent the last week filling with the most absorbing and tiny details of a timber framed barn. God knows what tea would have done to a computer, had I been using one.

I went white, then red (according to my colleague). She started crying. I couldn’t shout at her as she was so nice, so we cried over each other. I told her not to worry, I could easily draw it again, I had only just started the drawing, thinking Oh Christ! I stayed at work late, and drew the whole thing again – I was there until midnight, and back again at six in the morning.

I told nobody so she did not get into trouble – one thing you don’t do is alienate the tea lady. I got double helpings of biscuits from then on, until the recession hit and she was made redundant, along with the afternoon tea lady, two technologists, the man who looked after the stationerly and print room, the yard man, a partner, three architects and yours truly.

*To paraphrase The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

Vicious Garden Gnome

2007-04-24T19:53:00.001+01:00

Deb's comment on my last post reminded me of a particularly nasty client, of the kind I usually manage to drop like it's hot these days. I was more innocent, then.

I like builders, on the whole. They are a much maligned breed, often unfairly. Most of those I work with are decent, straight up and down uncomplicated blokes who like a nice, quality, trouble free job and a happy client at the end of it. Same as me, really, except I'm not a bloke. Anyway, I digress. The point is, quite a few of my clients are recommended to me through their builder. This particular builder asked me if he could give my name to someone who wanted an extension. He had been asked to price the work but needed drawings first; would I mind?

I rang the prospective client and arranged to see him. The house was fairly new, one of those described as 'executive' by Persimmon, Bovis, Wimpey and the like. It was typical of its kind - boxy, lots of rooms but all of them much too small, toilet at every turn, next to no garden on a badly laid out estate which meant that every house overlooked everyone else's garden. Dreadful.

I digress, again. I rang the executive doorbell and this slap-head with a scowl and a green jumper answered it. I am not that tall, (Kate Moss height) but I towered over this teeny weeny man. I looked down onto his shiny red head through my thicket of hair and tried not to laugh. He reminded me of a garden gnome without his hat on. 'You're late' he snarled. Actually I was five minutes late, and that five minutes had been spent manoevering my rather large car into his tiny, cramped executive drive full of his gigantic four by four and his wife's Peugeot people carrier. 'Great' I thought. 'I'm going to enjoy this one'. However, his wife was charming, and he thawed out slightly as our meeting progressed. He gave me a sketch and told me that although this was roughly what he wanted, he was open to suggestions. I accepted the job.

I sketched, scratched, erased, sketched again, came up with a great design which would do everything he wanted and sent it to him. Silence. Then the most vitriolic letter arrived, saying I had wasted his precious time, and why couldn't I follow instructions, especially as he had already done half the job for me by drawing it himself? The letter was signed by both him and his wife, who I began to feel rather sorry for, although she shouldn't have been so pathetic as to marry him. Thoroughly miffed, I rang him up. He rattled on about having his time wasted, then made the fatal mistake of saying the F word to me - and that, my dears, is red rag to Alice. I charged. I pounded the little sod into the dust with my great hooves and spiked him with my horns. Actually, I told him exactly what I thought of him, his house, his sketch and his manners and put the phone down.

Some time later the builder rang me in a fury - he had been round to see this little bald twat and had been accused of wasting time by sending him to a crap architect. The builder exploded - he is the sort who is usually easy going, but when he does lose his temper - watch out. 'I just grabbed my stuff', he ranted down the phone to me, 'And told him to find someone else. I don't like little men anyway!" The builder theorised that little men are compensating for their lack of inches in height and other areas.

I think that lack of height combined with a fly's skating rink on top of his head was just too much. I wonder how he felt when he looked in the mirror?

Could I do Your Job?

2007-04-23T17:06:00.001+01:00

Compromise happens all the time in my job - I have a totally brilliant idea then it gets wittled away and nibbled at by planners, clients, Building Control, English Heritage; every man and his dog has something to say. In the last few years, I seem to have developed a different attitude to compromise. Although it is unavoidable in some cases, I have got far less willing to just say 'yes'. I think it's because I go through a Very. Thorough. Thought. Process. before even submitting my sketch design to the client. Then they say - 'have you thought of this?' Well, yes! Of course I have! But I rejected it as being crap!

Although I put it a little more diplomatically than that.

Lately, I went to see a woman nearby who was recommended me by another (satisfied) client. She wanted an extension on one side of her house, I suggested putting it on the other side and moving the conservatory, where there is more room, better sunlight, better access, better....just everything. Wonderful, she said. I sent her a fee quote and a summary of the brief. Later, I got a message on the answering machine - she had been 'working' on the layout, and couldn't see how it would work out... (of course you can't, you ignorant layman - why do you think you can do my job? Could I do yours? Huh? Huh?) She carried on: Could I send a sketch of my ideas? (no mention of my fee, of course...). Basically she wants a freebie so she can pass it to the unqualified plan jockey down the road. I left her a message in return, saying 'sod off' or words to that effect. Havn't heard anything back... No compromise, you see!

Am I going to go bankrupt?

Bumps and Bruises

2007-04-18T13:17:00.001+01:00

Banging my head on yet another low doorway in the ancient and warped attic of the house I surveyed yesterday got me thinking about the dreaded Health and Safety. Not other peoples’, which I have to consider to the nth degree or else go to prison, but my own. Is an architect’s job dangerous, in the same way as, say, a policeman’s? Of course not, but although I don’t tend to end up with stab wounds* I am frequently covered with bruises and occasionally look like a GBH victim.

Measured surveys are exhausting, as they can take hours, or days. I often have to contort myself into all sorts of strange yoga like positions in order to get into a tight corner; or squint up into a roof space whilst walking backwards to get a better view, with the very real danger of falling down the stairs. As time goes on, I get tired then start walking into things and tripping over, hence the bruises. Occasionally things get more serious.

On a very cold day in February a few years ago (winter = surveys, for some unknown reason) I was measuring up a collection of barns at an isolated farm for conversion into housing. The farmhouse had one very weird woman living in it who offered me tea and seemed quite friendly when I arrived, despite odd nasal twitches, but then watched me all afternoon from various windows. Whenever I looked in her direction, she dodged out of sight. She was not my client so I ignored her as best I could and carried on.

It was getting dark early, the sky was full of snow and I was cold and tired. Although some of the barns had electric light, this one did not. It was partly boarded up and black as the devil's doorknob inside. I walked in with my head torch on, and went from room to room, photographing and measuring. Snow crystals blew through the gaps between the tiles and drifted, sparkling, through my torch beam. At the far end of the long and rambling building there was the black oblong of a doorway with a high threshold. I stepped through it, looking up to shine my torch on the brickwork over the lintel, which was exhibiting some interesting crack patterns, and fell flat on my face into a shallow pit full of dried cow muck on the other side. Winded, I listened to the retreating scurry of several rats. My head torch had come off and gone out, and my clipboard was God knows where in the blackness. My ankle felt odd, and when I tried to stand on it… well, the pain. I had to crawl out of there through the unspeakable muck on the floor, luckily finding my possessions on the way, and out into the freezing yard.

The woman saw me from an upstairs window, then ducked out of sight. Although I called, there was no answer, so I had to hop and crawl to the car before collapsing into it, cow muck and all. Driving home was an experience in itself – I couldn’t use the clutch so had to go 15 miles back home in first gear. I have rarely felt as exposed and lonely as I did that day. Cue The Smiths...

*Crossing my fingers as I write this, as I sometimes deal with some real slimeballs from the bottom of the heap when inspecting rented properties.

Great

2007-04-11T19:27:00.002+01:00

This, as I am sure most of you know, is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, probably the greatest engineer that ever lived, the son of another great engineer and the founder of the modern public transport system. Even to list his achievements here would probably take up more space than Blogspot allows, but look him up here. He designed bridges, ships, tunnels, railways, engines and the adjustable operating table (yes, really). Nothing was too great a task for his imagination or his endurance. He worked constantly, and somehow managed to find the time for a family as well.

I have admired him ever since a trip to Bristol as a skinny ten year old, when I stood looking over the rail of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, awed by the dizzying height of the towers and the cavernous depth of the Severn gorge; later I walked on the vast and rusting* deck of the Great Britain and around the hull, gazing up in wonder at the vast, five bladed propeller.

This photograph is the most famous image of Brunel, standing next to the launching chain of his largest and most ostentatious project, the Great Eastern. It was a ship of such titanic size that it could not be launched into the Thames end on, as is normal, but sideways. Why so big? Brunel realised that such a large ship would use proportionally less coal than two of half the size. The Great Eastern was built to sail to the Far East without refuelling, but there was just not the amount of passenger trade at the time to make it economic, and this eventually resulted in its downfall, although it did have the honour of being the only thing large enough to carry and lay the trans atlantic telephone cables. Nothing as large was built for another 50 years.

At the time this photo was taken, everything was rosy. Just look at Brunel, a little man with great ideas, proud in his stovepipe hat and thick woollen coat; chest stuck out like a bantam cock, head up as he surveys his great ship. See the mud on his trousers? Brunel was a hands – on engineer, spending time at the site encouraging the workforce. You want a large ship? Brunel’s your man, with one twice the size of anything on the water at the time. Slight smile on his face as, with the world at his feet, he enjoys a cigar. Brunel smoked almost as constantly as he worked, 40 a day, it is said.

Smoking was as common in the 1850’s as it was until recently, and passed without remark until the PC brigade started lecturing everyone about the evils of smoking. OK, it’s bad for you, but if you want to muck your own lungs up, whose business is it but your own? Just don’t inflict it on other people in enclosed spaces.

This famous photograph was used to illustrate a childrens’ school book "The life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel" by Leonie Bennett. Same photo – but hang on. Where’s his cigar?

The PC brigade frequently sanitise history to suit their own wierd agenda, a very dangerous practice which George Orwell covered in his terrifying novel ‘1984’. Apparently, seeing Brunel – gasp! smoking might corrupt young minds. Quite frankly, if all they do is have the odd fag then there is little to worry about. Of course, there is the danger that the kids might start designing huge and economically disastrous ships as well. And that would never do.

*At that time, the Great Britain had only just been brought back from the Falkland Islands, where it had been abandoned. I have never seen such an enormous amount of rust in the shape of a ship in my life.

Easter Thoughts

2007-04-08T19:35:00.001+01:00

It’s Easter, and I’m taking a few days off. Of course, that isn't easy for the self employed, but if you are a harpsichord plectrum trimmer you can at least get out of sight of the focus of your work life, as harpsichord plectra are not that common (unless you see some crows – I believe their feathers make good plectra).

Imagine for a moment what it is like being an architect. By definition, you work with the built environment; and it is all around you, from the smallest terrace to the largest cathedral – all designed by someone, whether yesterday or 400 years ago. Try and get away from buildings and you find its impossible. There’s always something there to remind you… in fact I never really feel as if I am on holiday. Try coming with me…

Let’s to to a large agricultural show in the middle of the countryside. Oh, look! A brick built arena stand. Looking at the bricks, I’d say 1950’s. Bit basic, could do with repainting and better toilets.

Later, how about a curry with friends in a local country town. We drive past a church – wow! Pre conquest belfry! Could do with a bit of pointing – can I see some loose stones at the top?…..There’s a house on the main street which has a brick front and could it be? Yes! Mathematical tiles! The curry house – oh dear. A seventeenth century building with some very poor modern cement repairs. That’ll give them damp problems.

Off to the coast for that blow of fresh Easter air along the beach – that new estate just there, oooooh, looks like its on a flood plain! What a silly place to build! What were the planners thinking of?

Off to a friends house. Cursory glance, date the house, date the street, could there be problems with drains? What’s that crack – oh, yes. Lintel failing. Shame about next door's extension, obviously didn't employ a qualified architect.

One day, I will work myself to death, or just end up under a bus. My spirit will float off up through the stratosphere until it comes to the pearly gates, sat on those puffy white clouds tinged with rose pink with the blue sky above. An old man with a flowing white beard and robe will approach through the sunshine.

‘Hello, you must be St Peter’ I will say.
‘Yes, my daughter’ the old man will say, clinking his bunch of golden keys at his belt. ‘And why should I open these gates and let you, an architect, into the Kingdom of Heaven, where the Lord is the Great Architect of the Universe himself?’
‘Well, Sir’, I will say. ‘I see that lock on the gates is of laquered brass, to render it shiny for ever and ever Amen without the drudgery of polishing it.’
‘Yes, and so, my daughter?’
‘I humbly suggest satinised stainless steel, as it will not weather quite so badly once the laquer wears off (as it inevitably will) and is far more fashionable at the moment.’
‘My daugher, the Lord requires good surveyors, but not arrogant bloody architects. Down you go!’

Maybe I should lie about the laquered brass, or just take more camping holidays?

Tagged

2007-04-04T19:08:00.001+01:00

I think 'tagged' means someone has put someone else's link on their website. According to Totallyun-PC I am 'Alice the Angry Architect'. It seems customary to provide a list like the one following, so here goes:

A - Available/Single? – Unavailable, tho’ window shopping is pleasant. It doesn’t mean I have to make a purchase.
B - Best Friend? – What friends?
C - Cake or Pie? – Pie. Steak and kidney on a cold day, fish pie in the summer; although if cake is offered later, I wouldn’t say no.
D - Drink Of Choice? – Tea, tea and more tea; with added tea. White no sugar, Assam for preference. In a mug. With scones, cakes or biscuits, I’m not fussy.
E – Essential Item You Use Everyday? – My large, boring and comfortable car. Not very green, but try getting to some of my rural jobs by bus.
F - Favourite Colour? – Black, of course. I’m an architect, what did you expect?
G - Gummy Bears Or Worms? – Worms are far more interesting but I wouldn’t try eating them unless I was very hungry. Although given the choice, the worms would win hands down.
H - Hometown? – None to speak of. Child of the British Isles, and I look it.
I - Indulgence? – Jellied eels.
J - January Or February? - February, because it’s nearer spring than January although both months are a bummer if you are standing around on site holding a clipboard in the sleet.
K - Kids & Their Names? – Kids are pests, whatever they’re called.
L - Life Is Incomplete Without? – Coriander.
M - Marriage date? – Donkey’s years ago. Even I’ve forgotten.
N - Number Of Siblings? – One, not seen very often. ‘Who’s that, Mum?’ ‘It’s your brother, dear.’ ‘Oh.’
O - Oranges Or Apples? – Apples – oranges are too messy and they’re orange, a nasty colour.
P - Phobias/Fears? – Wasps, spots, dogs, rats, mental horses, Siamese cats, the fruiting bodies of dry rot, rustles in places that shouldn’t be rustling, loud noise, quiet noise, intermediate noise, people.
Q - Favourite Quote? – I fear no man (RAF 74 Squadron motto)
R - Reason to Smile? – A very large cheque.
S - Season? – Don’t mind as long as it isn’t peeing down, dark, windy or cold. That doesn’t leave much in this country.
T - Tag people? – See my sidebar. More to come.
U - Unknown Fact About Me? – If I told you, it wouldn’t be unknown.
V - Vegetable you don’t like? – Kale. Yuk!
W - Worst Habit? – Exploding.
X - X-rays You’ve Had? – Teeth (ache), knee (sprained), spine (hurts), neck (whiplash), lung (cough, cough, cough)
Y - Your Favourite Food? – That’s difficult. Good food of any kind is more than welcome.
Z – Zodiac Sign? – The best one.

So, now you know Alice!

This Charming Man

2007-03-29T16:16:00.001+01:00

My last post described the typical Dickensian landlord – devoid of feeling, grasping, on the make and arrogant – although in this case it was a company rather than an individual. I have dealt with innumerable landlords in my time as surveyor, architect, residential tenant and owner of a business lease and generally they are just like that. Some of them have better manners than others, but under the smooth veneer lies a festering pit of greed.

I met one glowing exception. He was quite elderly, but had a liberal and youthful attitude coupled with an old fashioned charm, which is rare, and a taste for interesting shirts and ties. He was sharply intelligent, artistic and was a good bloke to have a pint with – do you know what I mean?

I met him in a pub, (he was dancing in the pub courtyard) with a friend who worked for him and he mentioned to me that he had a wreck of a building that needed attention. At the time, I was a young and very poor architect, desperate for work and slightly frayed around the edges. Well, to cut a long story short, this nice man more or less kept me in business for the best part of three years. I found out during the course of many rambles through his puzzle of buildings and yards that he often gave the poor, young or struggling accommodation at very reasonable rates, or work, or both without injuring anybody’s pride. He also had quite a few ‘difficult’ tenants, who I don’t think knew quite how lucky they were.

The place was full of little one - roomed businesses, artists’s studios, musicians and two of the smallest houses I have ever seen – literally one up and one down, with a tiny bathroom and kitchenette added on. There were people everywhere – in every attic room, every cellar; in a shed in the yard and the stores at the back. The landlord had his own office within this heaving mass, and frequently moved to another room when that part of the building needed work, or started to leak, or someone else fancied taking it on. I never knew when I called where exactly he would be; he would pop out from behind some creaking, badly fitting door or lean out of one of the windows and call ‘Hello! I’m in here for now!’ Then he would put the kettle on and make weak tea in large mismatched mugs for us both.

One of the buildings was too derelict and dangerous even to go upstairs, and whilst I geared up for repairs, he rented the ground floor out as storage. When I turned up one day, two large blokes in a Luton were unloading mattresses wrapped in polythene. I nodded to them and carried on into the yard. My client appeared and offered to help them unload, but they declined politely.

About a month later, there was a big hoo ha in the local paper. The police had raided the building and arrested the two men. My client told me the place had been watched for weeks; and the mattresses were full of blow (hash, weed, cannabis, whatever you choose to call it). ‘If only I had known’, he said to me, laughing ‘Shame!’ I didn't ask him to explain.

I expect my photo is somewhere on the police files labelled Suspect 8, or some such. If I turn up somewhere else which is under surveillance, will I be 'collared'?