I recently went to a talk by New York-based landscape architect Ken Smith in the architecture faculty at the University of Toronto. Ken’s produced some great work. Lately it’s environmentally-aware, sustainable, healthy and community-driven. This is all good. However, it felt a little self-congratulatory. There was no sense of struggle, no need to consider alternative options, no compromises. There was also a distinct lack of audience Qs in the Q&A that followed. It felt like everything had been answered. It lacked, well, life.
Why could his projects not have been even better, more useful and accomplished?
What I want to know is, why do we not hear from the people behind the projects that fail, or, at least, aren’t completely satisfactory? The seating in the lecture hall (of the Architecture faculty, no less) in which we sat for the talk was barely adequate. Nearby, at OCAD (a well known and highly regarded art college), the newly built structure provides little of the space and light that is required to provide the optimum environment in which to draw and paint, whilst the ceiling of its Grand Hall features a recessed, red cross shape of (misplaced?) aesthetic value yet no apparent utility.
I had an art history teacher at school who told us how he gave up being an Architect when the projects he was planning had to be so functionally dumbed down (due mostly to a lack of funding) that they started to create rather than solve problems. This grey area between intention and completion is a key ingredient in learning about both projects and people. We can learn as much from failure as we can from triumph. Why is it that people are either unwilling to stand up and enter into discourse with people about their failures and/or stuggles, or to organise these events as they believe no one would care to listen?
Tags: architecture, debate, design, failure
