Conference Report

The international keynote speakers proved to be a talented bunch, while the locals seemed a bit nervous about presenting their work from the 6m high glowing pulpit that was the (really beautiful) stage. It wasn't that our guys weren't interesting, it was just that they showed so many slides of buildings.

Erik van Egeraat, who comes from Rotterdam via buildings in Hungary, Germany, Ireland and England, had decided he was going to get things started with a bang and proceeded to dazzle the audience with images of baroque decoration, flowers and, just in case somebody wasn't paying attention, a bit of porn.

He started with everyone right behind him as he called for architecture that sustained with the rich taste of good food and not the frugality of vitamin pills, yet he was sailing a bit closer to the wind when he declared that structure was boring and that architecture should be skin-deep and fashionable. He maintained that it was OK for an initial concept to be based upon nothing more than a whim and could architects please grow a sense of humour. At the end of his talk the audience had just about come around to his point of view and were feeling a bit naughty for it.

Of course since he came on straight after Erik, Pat Clifford didn't have time to rewrite his talk. He titled it Density and it was. Patrick showed some gorgeous buildings and public space design but by this time the audience were wanting some singing and dancing too.

This arrived in the form of Will Bruder. Will hails from Little River, Arizona where he balances poetry and pragmatism in the desert. And he did seem to have a poetic sensibility that went straight to the particular. He spoke about certain ordinary extraordinary people who were his clients and specific episodes that had happened to him. He made places to drink a cup of coffee in the morning and places to take a nap and he choreographed the movements of people in his buildings. All good stuff for a bunch of architects to hear and he soon earned the title of Jesus from the audience.

So after a bit of preaching by the yank-with-integrity the audience were won back to the side of Good and Erik was relegated to architectural whore.

Pip Cheshire was next up and presented some thoughts on practising architecture that came across as personal and real. He mused on the role of technology and computers in architecture and gave examples of international collaboration using the internet. The fact that Pip was game enough to talk on these aspects even though they had not all been successful was appreciated by the audience.

Dribbling right along were Dominic Papa and Jonathon Woodroffe of Studio 333. These were the show's soccer boys who used to play for the England team but had now transferred to the Netherlands where there is $16 billion spent every year on new construction. There was an extremely high jargon count in their talk and at one stage they managed to spin out, for about 20 minutes, the single idea of bringing the landscape into a building development while neglecting to inform how they were actually going to achieve it. But then, they sounded impressive and the endless beautiful drawings showed some sort of devotion that would be expected to be embodied in their buildings - although surprisingly they did not show their built work.

Wellington's vision for the future of its waterfront has been hijacked by some vocal opponents as of late and so there was plenty of talk at the panel discussion about what made a good city. The overseas participants had not been in town for long so they had difficulty talking about the specifics of the Wellington waterfront fight and Variation 17, but Will Bruder had a funny glint in his eye.

Next day Bill Corker of Denton Corker Marshall talked about how they had been given 48 hours to come up with and present a scheme for the Melbourne Gateway project for their design/build clients. Although they didn't realise it at the time this piece of design swung a $2 billion infrastructure project to their clients. DCM proceeded with a specification of intent and the presentation drawings to tender the documentation and building of the project. Big red sticks have never looked so good.

Felicity Wallace spoke briefly of her early work before going on to explain how she now worked in a more intuitive way. There was a strong implication that she was rediscovering her feminine side by not concerning herself with style or structure and was now attempting to create buildings with more familiarity for the clients. This had nihilistic overtones though, and the amazement expressed at the wonder of light and shade and working through details sounded suspiciously like a type of introspection that may not expand clients' horizons let alone an audience of practice-weary architects. The beautiful architecture of her earlier projects seemed to be more "super real" than the "super ordinary" hipped concrete tile roof of the latter hospice.

In contrast Ian Moore of Engelen Moore was a bloke, an Aussie engineer bloke at that. There was a very strong sense of continuity in his practice's beautifully crisp work. He said houses and apartments are easy, and he certainly made them look easy in his slides. He designs from a simple colour coding system whereby everything that is cheap is white (gib and paint) and everything that is expensive is silver (aluminium joinery, taps, etc). Ironically the 99.9% of white looked great - who knows what will happen as he gets bigger budgets to work with.

Erik the pop star (see his photo in the programme if you weren't there) decided to up the ante in his second address and claim that not only was structure boring but in fact the whole of 20th century architecture was just plain boring. He developed his theme of skin being something that is interesting in its expression and not in its technical workings. He then proceeded to blow the audience away with a short film produced by his students showing the virtual apartment of the virtual newsreader Ananova.

Ken Yeang then gave everybody a lesson about ecological design for tall buildings. He admitted right from the beginning that tall buildings are high energy buildings but that the world being what it was the demand for them wasn't going to go away. "It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it" he smiled.

The soccer boys second address was much more well received because they stopped the tough-guy stuff and thrilled the audience with tales of their (abundant) urban design exploits around the world from Samarkand to Tallin to Cairo and fessed up that they hadn't actually built anything yet. They also scored points by showing a town planning scheme where, after their first attempt, keeping the clients at arms-length and failing to convince the city, they knuckled under and drove a huge public consultation exercise to get things moving.

Andy Bow, a partner at Foster's office in London spoke about the some of their enormous projects in London and Berlin but mostly he talked in a refreshing way (and with a heavy Scottish accent) about people and people in cities and how he was working on various projects to make London a better place to walk around.

Brendan MacFarlane is a Kiwi expat who has picked up the French language and a French partner (Dominique Jakob) along the way. In fact he now speaks English with a pronounced Gaulish accent. The couple showed a series of projects whose common thread seemed to be a Ôfolded' aesthetic. This culminated in the amazing fitout of the Pompidou Centre's restaurant. Showing no fear of the Piano Rogers icon they proceeded to take the only part of the existing building over which they had any jurisdiction - the tiled floor - and bulged the surface up to form the required enclosed spaces. These contorted soap bubbles required boat builders to construct and seemed otherworldly in the larger regular grided space.

When Jesus came back on for his second address he threw away the notes for his advertised lecture and proceeded to talk to slides that he had photographed around the Wellington waterfront. He discussed how he drove around with Mohamed his taxi driver trying to find access to the water, he talked about the axis to the water that was blocked by something called New World, and as his contribution to the debate he proposed three possible scenarios for taking the Wellington waterfront debate onwards using competitions. A sigh was heard from those in the audience who have worked with public consultation over the last two years to get a master plan for the waterfront only to fall at the last hurdle.

Last up was Ath who single-handedly attempted to make up for the lack of humour in the Kiwi camp. Tommy Honey (who was fantastic in the role of MC) gave Athfield a minute for each year he had been in business and away we went on a ride from times when houses were made of recycled bricks and concrete drainpipes to more recently when they were constructed of zinc and Hinuera stone. The photos of the groovy-baby parties within organic interiors left no doubt that Athfield and his friends knew the difference between pot and pot belly.

Any architect who had the opportunity to attend the conference and didn't, should be ashamed of themselves. Although simplistically recounted here, it was in fact four days of rich discussion that pulled the audience this way and that. Attendees left more able to perceive different paths of practice available to them. As the conference ended there was also a small piece of fear in the stomachs of many who had been carried along by the incredible enthusiasm of Will Bruder and the other speakers, but who now would have to actually take up the challenge and reassess their own work.

lines:

Soccer boys - "this is an allusion to spatial generosity within the constraints of the budget" (referring to a sloping ceiling in a very small apartment bedroom).

Will Bruder - "the most important tool for an architect is the wastepaper basket and it is the hardest to use"

Bill Corker - "this wall is going to spend half its life in the dark so it could be lit"

Felicity Wallace - "I love this building because it is almost impossible to know that an architect has been involved."

Erik van Eggeraat - "don't be so snobbish to think you have to educate the public, just work harder to produce good buildings" (in answer to the question about how we can educate people about the value of architects).

Aaron Sills