Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wiesenthal.
Joe, you know I spend a lot of my time doing interior design.
Yes.
I've bored you, I'm sure, with a lot of thoughts on this topic. But then it struck me recently that actually what I'm doing is not really interior design. It's actually just interior decorating. Because I'm not really changing the structure of a particular house. I don't like doing that in part because I'm lazy and I hate
construction mess, but also because it's a lot harder to change the particular design of a house than it is to just get new fabric for the windows or a new paint color. There are more real world constraints.
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Chapter 2: How do constraints influence architectural design?
I mean, Shanghai is 50%, Beijing, 50% green. That's happened over the last few decades. And And in terms of connectivity, just over 54,000 kilometers of high-speed train. 220 miles an hour, 350 kilometers an hour. Connecting, by this, 97% of Chinese cities. On a big day, 13 million travelers. Achieved in 16 years. And in the UK, they gave up on the London to Manchester.
It goes as far as Birmingham, short-termism. They have a department for leveling up. The ultimate leveling up is connectivity. They just didn't get it. And that 54,000 kilometers is more than the rest of the world put together by a huge margin.
Why do you think certain countries, and you brought up the UK there, but you could possibly say the same for the US as well, why do you think certain countries struggle with big infrastructure?
Because at every stage in the emergence of a nation, whether that is the United Kingdom In its empire days, the Industrial Revolution, it led the world. We're still trading right now on that. I mean, the Thames Embankment was a response to cholera. It created, if you like, systems thinking and doing more with less. It also introduced below-ground high-speed public transport.
It cleaned up the Thames. So that period you had the expression of that civic pride. I started work at the age of 16 in Manchester Town Hall, which was the ultimate statement of civic pride. And it was a competition. And Waterhouse won that competition. That was my first experience of architecture. Took me a little longer to eventually discover that I could study architecture.
So I was a late starter at the age of 21. But I can remember vividly right now details of that building. I mean, that really lifted my spirit. So whether it was the great train stations, and of course, today, it's the great airports. So if you really want to see the most advanced airports in the world, where do you go? I mean, it's obvious.
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Chapter 3: What makes a building successful in the long run?
We know where you go.
There's a mock-up right behind you.
There's a huge model immediately behind us here. We're looking at a Beijing airport. Beijing airport was built in five years. Now, at the same time, I drew a parallel with Terminal 5, which I think took 20 years and was a fraction of the size and is really a sort of band-aid on top of Heathrow, which is still embedded in the heart of, you know, you overfly metropolis together.
So there are a lot of messages, perhaps, mixed up in these analogies and comparisons.
No, it makes sense. And I didn't necessarily expect the interview to go in this direction, but I'm actually just going to press you further on this specific point, which is, what is your diagnosis of why certain countries do seem to have given up? Was there a moment when you felt it, for example, okay, in the UK? Was there a moment where you felt... the ambition is not the same as it once was.
It's interesting. I'm working on a project right now. And so I'm with a team of relatively young architects. And so I'm saying, well, in terms of domes, of course, it would be interesting to make a comparison with a particular dome in the Festival of Britain, 1951. And everybody looked at me quizzically and I said, but you've never heard of it because nobody ever heard of it.
So I said, well, check it out and the next meeting we'll talk about it. The next meeting they came back and said, why didn't we know about that? This was 1951. It was the biggest dome in the world. It was demolished for political reasons, interestingly. So they were in awe and the images, I mean, are extraordinary. So 1951, was it more or less hard on the heels of World War II.
And Britain was in true austerity mode. You still had rationing. So you had a little book and when you went to buy food or clothes, then You could only buy depending on the number of coupons, like postage stamps, that you'd got left. But that period was the first nuclear power station, was the first commercial jet. It was the de Havilland Comet, was...
in terms of cars, created the R-Type Bentley, 120 miles an hour, hour on hour. It cost twice two houses at that time, the semi-detached. So this was an extraordinary era. Now, since then, for a whole variety of reasons, many of them political, it's no longer. the leading at that level of innovation, manufacturing and so on. And the factors are quite complex.
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Chapter 4: Why do some countries excel in mega-projects while others struggle?
Sustainability was at the core of the practice when it emerged in the 1960s. You could argue the rest of the world has finally caught up with that. But many of the things that we were doing back then were fringe activity. Now they're mainstream. They're in everybody's front page headline. And if artificial intelligence is the accumulation of everything that has gone before,
then some of the most interesting things that we've done architecturally have not gone before. So the points that I was making about creating a tower without a central core and taking that central core, artificial intelligence is not gonna tell you about that. It's gonna tell you everything that it knows about central core buildings. It's backward looking.
So artificial intelligence is accumulated history. What is history? It's the past. So that is going to make it even more important for those who use all the advantages of artificial intelligence but are not inhibitedly dependent on it. Maybe it's a bit like going into the home of Steve Jobs and finding a rare book on a pedestal. The rare book becomes even more valuable in the digital age.
I have one last question. I have no idea if you like the term or find the term Starkitect annoying or not, but when you see a list of them, you're one of them. But there is a generation of them, the people who are called Starkitects, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of new names. And I'm curious if you perceive... The next century, could there be another person?
To the extent that anyone ever knows the names of architects, it's always going to be somewhat narrow. But will there be architects who emerge in the next century that everyone knows the name of? Or has something changed such that that individual won't be a pop culture figure in the same way?
I'm often invoking buildings from the past. for their importance, not just in terms of nostalgia, but for the lessons that we can learn from them. So if I take the solar-powered community of an educational institute like Masdar, which is totally solar-powered in the desert, that was only made possible by applying the lessons from an architecture of the past, which didn't have access to instant
electrical energy to power air conditioning so it was about scaling streets for people and not cars creating shadow orientation it was about evaporative cooling which meant bringing in vegetation it was about colonnades for shade it was about layering a building it was about capturing the cool air at a at a height above and funneling it through wind towers and so on.
Applying all of those lessons and then the technology of our age. So able to demonstrate that we can have the living qualities that we take for granted, but solar powered in a very, very hostile environment. So that is learning from an architecture without architects. Obviously those architects were there. They didn't have a name.
It was more anonymous if you fast-forward Yes names are known I think your star architect really inevitably some architects do the kinds of buildings that that attract attention but also if I take a And you're looking at me when you're using that word. Sure. I can't help it. But I would like to take you to a little building in Manchester called Maggie's, which is a cancer research station.
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Chapter 5: How do budgets impact the architectural process?
What a reference. We'll have to tell Dan about that. Yeah. Well, the other thing I was thinking, going back to the interview we did with Allentown Mayor Matt Turk, was this idea of small-scale manufacturing.
Yeah.
I don't think he used this specific term dignity at work, but this idea of, you know, making things and then making the job of making things desirable by allowing people to like be close to where they're working and things like that. And you could see some parallels with the construction industry today, right?
Like you want people to feel proud of making things and you want the process of making things to actually be an enjoyable one.
Everybody wants those glistening Shenzhen skylands, but nobody wants to allocate the societal resources to be part of the construction crew that does that. That seems like one of the big challenges of our time.
Yeah. Shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway.
And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com slash oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes.
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