Quote of the week

“The future is not what it used to be: We were promised jetpacks and instead received e-bikes.” Jack Murphy in the Architect’s Newspaper reviews the MOMA exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the rise of Environmentalism, highlighted in Design Notes 180.

Think in a circle, not a square

Increasingly, architecture is based on four C’’s:

Collaboration. Co-operation. Consultation. Communication.

On all but the smallest projects, architects need work with colleagues, other professionals, and a wide range of consultants. The era of the architect as ego-artist is vanishing, not that you’d know it from the curriculum in some architecture schools. Elsewhere, group work is increasingly common, sometimes good, often bad. The experience of two Australian schools is instructive.

School ONE experimented with breaking down the all-too-common faculty siloes twelve years ago. Sponsored by the state government, three professors offered a course for senior students from several disciplines (architecture, sustainability and two strands of engineering), to jointly design a complex project. Groups had at least one of each discipline, as well as a mix of ethnicities and sexes.

The course ran for eight years, only coming undone when the Architects’ Accreditation Panel insisted that no more than 15% of a student’s work could be done in groups, even if a student was able to be assessed individually. The course morphed, and partly declined. But collaborative work is still undertaken in senior studios.

Given that background, school ONE evolved a set of robust rules to ensure two factors: that the role played by an individual student in the group work could be identified, and assessed; and enabling a group to address the issue of a member not participating to the extent they could, or should.

By contrast School TWO appears to use group work to overcome a shortage of funds and staff, using them to meet the reduced teaching and assessment time available. Groups of three are the norm, with the same mark given for every member of the group for the semester’s work.

Students accuse the school of not organising the group work in a transparent or fair way, and failing to have rules to discern the effort or contribution of students in the group. Consequently, students complain that some skate through an entire course, not participating, doing very little work, yet getting a master's degree. It verges on the fraudulent that a student's work is not examined.

The whole situation is complicated by the higher education issue that dare not speak its name: poor English comprehension and communication. Prior to Covid, when enrolments were buoyant, the quality of English required was increasingly raised. More recently, with underfunding of universities by the previous federal government, (despite their dodgy statistics), unlikely to be corrected by the Labor administration, the need for more OS students sees the situation reversed and deteriorated.

There are groups in School TWO where a member has no verbal communication skills in English, none, and cannot participate in the group in any meaningful way, and appears to be learning very little. On the flipside, one mature age student, more attuned to the issues, told me that there is an incipient problem of mental health for these ‘isolated and stranded’ students.

There is one giant conundrum here. Without doubt, future design will follow the four C’s. Practitioners need to learn to collaborate in a group, far more than they have in the past. But universities are based on individual achievement. How to square that circle, or rather, circle that square.

Courses need to have more group and collaborative work, with better systems to assess individual contributions. Teachers in masters’ courses need to be drawn from practice, with real-world experience, not recent graduates doing a higher degree. And the old ego-architects, whether professors or accreditors, should be shown the door.

Tesla keeps on trucking

For sheer political comedy you can’t go past Michaelia Cash who memorably said that the “electric ute was going to ruin you weekend”. Well, here’s something to make her weekend even worse, the Tesla SEMI (trailer hauler). I photographed the ‘SEMI ALPHA’ prototype in the Petersen Museum in LA, where it has the following information.

Tesla ALPHA SEMI prototype. Top speed, 65 miles an hour (105km/hr). Range, 300 to 500 miles (480-800 km). 0 to 60 miles per hour (100km/hr), 20 seconds. Targeting a vehicle segment that accounts for 18% of all vehicle emissions (in the USA), Tesla debuted the All-Electric SEMI in 2017. Like the company's electric passenger vehicles, SEMI features an aerodynamic design, which gives it a long range.

Unlike conventional diesel power industrial trucks, SEMI’s trim motor design makes it capable of maintaining a highway speed of 65 miles per hour when hauling a full load up a 5% grade. Subjected to a variety of tests, this SEMI ALPHA prototype withstood temperatures as low as - 40 degrees C in Alaska during cold weather, durability, and vehicle control testing, and completed a 5,000 mile endurance run along Route 66 (No doubt listening to Bobby Troup’s Get your kicks on Route 66, or maybe The Grateful Dead’s Truckin’).

Dan Andrews trips again

In a Tone on Tuesday late last year I examined the Murdoch newspapers obsession with Dan Andrews, and the extraordinary opprobrium it spewed about his fall down a set of stairs at a holiday house. We ran a rule over the photo and, as best as we could see, they missed the vital point that the stairs themselves were illegal. Uneven risers, too open, shallow goings. No doubt contributing to the accident. Political fanboy meets design geek.

To celebrate Dan Andrew's retirement, you can read the full account of my measured report here. Moreover, the Murdoch Press, despite their obsession, never laid a glove on him. Repeatedly called out, as in this Media Watch segment about the steps incident, the power of the Mainstream Press, or MSM, is clearly waning. Which gives the YES side a glimmer of hope in 10 days’ time.

More reflections

As promised last week, more favourite high rise glazed tower reflective designs, these from the USA. Above are two from New York, New York (so good they named it twice, just like getting two for one in reflections). The two below are from Las Vegas, Nevada (L) and Phoenix, Arizona (R). Amongst the hottest places in the USA, where mirrored glass is the go-to solution.

Bookends

Two books to help collaborative work: The Universal Traveller is as the cover suggests, a hippy manual from 1974. Also, the most useful guide I found for teaching collaboration, particularly the section on giving a crit (1. Identify the key issues with the project so that you are on the designer’s wavelength 2. Praise the good ideas or parts of the design. 3. Insert the key criticism. 4. Show how the good ideas can be used to ameliorate the deficiencies.) Simply really. Wish I could always stick to it.

The second is the standard book on collaboration. The fly cover puts it best: “The really big sustainability challenges for your business can’t be solved by your business. But they can be solved by your business working in collaboration with others… Collaboration means sharing decisions, resources, risks... and control. It means trusting others, sharing your weaknesses as well as your strengths…”

Signs off

In New Zealand, a Walkabout is called a Tiki Tour. I doubt this Gold Coast motel was referencing that. Mind you, the Kiwis are good at sailing, although their yacht design is a bit better than this one.

Errata

In last week's Design Notes, I misspoke about the Regional Architecture Association or RAA, and their upcoming weekend seminar CPD event called Beginnings: First Peoples Architecture. Let me be clearer: the RAA is a national organisation (not just NSW, although that’s where their event is) and my reference to ‘sponsor’ for the previous event at Bundanon was meant to be shorthand for they invented and ran it. Ignore my clumsy words –check it out here.

Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his.

These Design Notes are Tone on Tuesday #182.

Past Tone on Tuesday columns can be found here

Past A&D Another Thing columns can be found here

You can contact TW at [email protected]