Architects: Portraits of a Practice

By Thomas Yarrow

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.

Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501738517

Book preview

Architects

Portraits of a Practice

Thomas Yarrow

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

For Joe and Chantal Conneller

And to the memory of Gresham Dodd

Contents

Before the Beginning

Part 1 The Office

Arrival

Spaces Between

Understanding Architecture

A Particular Kind of Practice

Openings

Listen: First Impressions of the Office

Part 2 Lives

Between Person and Profession

Questions of Vocation

Listen: The Greedy Profession

Personal Vision

Listen: Myths of Origin

Designing and Making

Building Friendship

Starting to Doubt

Reflection: Architectural Lives

Part 3 Designs

A Feel for Place

Sites of Design

Dripping with History

Site Stories

Between Reality and Possibility

Between Intuition and Exploration

Acts of Design

Design Tools

Digital Romantics

Between Architect and Client

Listen: Channeling or Imposing Ideas?

Between One and One Another

Friends, Colleagues, Competitors

Deadlines

Magic Moments

Listen: Creative Time

Reflection: Creativity and Its Limits

Interlude: Two Kinds of Uncertainty

Listen: Angst in Architecture

Part 4 Pragmatics

Petrified Drawing

Between Concept and Plan

Coming into Focus

Listen: Cost and Design

Where Knowledge Meets

Problem Solving

Formality and Informality

At the Limits of the Contract

Disentanglement

Safe Hands

Professionalism

Listen: Control and Creativity

Time Frame

Rhythms of Work

Listen: Blocked

Reflection: Making Things as They Are

Part 5 Practical Completion

Knowledge at Its Limits

Architectural Expertise

Everyday Possibilities

Coda: An Argument for Description

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Before the Beginning

Starting with Friendship

Tomas has been a persistently interesting presence in my life. We first met at about age four, though neither of us remembers this. Our parents were friends before we were. He has a quiet charisma emanating from a desire to embrace what he doesn’t know. He has always been naturally curious and speaks with the slowness and deliberation of someone aware of how little he understands about the world, even the parts of it that relate to his area of expertise: architecture. During the period of my fieldwork he is in his late thirties and has a beard and slightly unkempt hair.

My first day of research is also the first time I visit him in his new house. He tells me about it before we get there, excited by it as a space but also ambivalent about living in it. He had scoped out the building a while ago: a Victorian corrugated tin prefab in need of complete renovation and extending. It had a dilapidated romance. He had put in an offer but was outbid. Somebody else bought it, employed another local architect, and completed the renovation. Soon, Tomas learned the completed house was for rent, arranged to see it, and fell in love. This was galling; he was an architect living not just in the creation of another architect but in the house he had coveted and imagined converting to his own design.

It’s uncanny seeing familiar possessions rearranged in this unfamiliar space. The new context makes me see them afresh, like a museum to the life they objectify: a huge ultra-real oil portrait of his grandfather; photographic self-portraits by an artist friend; a partly decaying architectural model; some joiner photographs taken by his father (also an architect) in the fragmented photo-montage style pioneered by David Hockney. It occurs to me that his minimalist design aesthetic is in an uneasy relationship with the untidiness generated through the various creative projects he has on the go. On display shelves, mixed with ceramic sculptures made by his artist partner, Anna, are various bits and pieces of remote-controlled models, the remainders of an obsession going back to his early teens. Bluntly speaking, it’s a bit of a mess! Anna is imminently expecting twins, their first children. A cot (crib), buggy, and baby-bouncers have already been acquired, objects that are strange harbingers of lives to come. In about two weeks my life is going to be totally different, and I just can’t imagine how! Tomas reflects, as we sit talking over late-night drinks.

Some of the things in his house elicit specific memories, others the houses that have provided the stage for earlier periods of his life: the traditional Cotswold terrace house where his parents still live in a neighboring village; the down-at-heel grandeur of a shared student tenement in Edinburgh; and the various houses he has rented in his adult life, in general progressively bigger but always inhabited with what I have found a strange lack of interest or attachment for somebody so interested in buildings. I wonder aloud if this might be a way of avoiding the professional judgments of fellow architects, or because he is more interested in the process of design than in the outcome, or even the fear of failure? His own more prosaic explanation may not be the whole truth but conveys another: I’ve never made enough money to buy or build the kind of house I want to live in!

There is another dimension to my sense of uncanny. Seeing his life through the professional vision of an ethnographer, I find myself analyzing and objectifying it in a way that is doubly disconcerting: I am aware of seeing him differently, and aware of his awareness of this. This book is the outcome of an exploration with, and of, a friendship. To borrow an architectural term, this friendship is the negative space at the heart of the book. The idea for the project emerged from it. The field in which I explored these questions was profoundly shaped by it. During and after fieldwork, the friendship gave me access to thoughts shared with a level of intimacy and with understanding born of conversations stretching decades back. With trust came access to people, places, and working environments that might otherwise have remained off-limits. As open and generous as other people in the practice were, and even though many independently would become my friends, it was their knowledge of my friendship with Tomas that shaped the possibilities and constraints through which my research unfolded.

If the friendship made the book possible, the book also made the friendship differently possible. An interest with him, about the world, became more an interest in him and his world. In some respects research involved exploration that enriched and deepened the relationship, allowed me to explore the daily reality of a significant part of his life, previously only glimpsed through his summary descriptions of it. In others the process of critical reflection seemed to introduce an asymmetry, even a distance. Conversations about his work displaced conversations we might have had, ones more interesting to him because less directly about him.

A Note on Structure and Approach

The book is written with a broad range of readers in mind. This section, an explanation of the book’s structure and narrative approach, is followed by a brief overview of my conceptual orientations, inspirations, and points of departure (Approaching Architectural Practice). Depending on your interests, these sections may be read selectively, or not at all. Either way, they are a prelude to the main account, which begins with Part One.

This book describes the lives of ten architects working at Millar Howard Workshop (MHW), the practice that Tomas codirects. Specific as these lives are, they also speak of the difficulties and rewards of creative endeavor, of the meaning of work and its relationship to lives beyond, of friendship, of efforts to live good lives where contradictory imperatives make this hard, and of what it means to claim to know with authority.

I have written as an anthropologist, an approach oriented to understanding other people’s lives on their own terms, what they do and think in their everyday lives. It is an orientation that seeks to illuminate the manifold complexities and intersecting concerns through which lives are lived, without reducing these to singular explanations. More specifically my approach is ethnographic in the sense described by Les Back. It aims to be an augmentation of the real … turning up the background, enlarging the unremarked upon and making it remarkable.¹ The book contains descriptions of architectural practice, attuned, focused, and understood through ideas drawn from a range of literatures but does not assume a readership with prior knowledge of the concepts and perspectives I build on. For reasons I elaborate below, I have either folded these ideas into my descriptions implicitly or placed them in notes at the end of the book. I hope this enables a wide readership to follow the account, while allowing academic readers to see how it builds on existing work.

Oriented by a commitment to ethnographic description that stays close to the unfolding moments of architectural practice, the account is structured episodically. It is mostly ordered around events, situations, and conversations. Collectively these episodes are intended to evoke the experience of architectural practice. They are loosely themed but not resolved as a chapter might be. Overall they trace the teleological logic of design, from conception to plan to building, but complicate and trouble the flow, showing how everyday working practice unfolds along specific, less linear trajectories, as architects move between different projects and phases. In the office one thing happens after another, sometimes connected but often in unresolved adjacency.

As far as possible I have tried to emphasize the logic of these happenings on their own terms. I hope that any loss of thematic clarity comes with the gain of a better understanding of architectural practice as a space of intersecting interests and complex negotiations. The structure is consistent with an understanding of architecture less as a series of abstract principles or technical competencies than, as Donald Schon describes of professional practice more generally, an artful practice of the unique case.² Focusing on these cases and this art, the point is to highlight how knowing happens through doing; how what these architects know relates necessarily to where, when, and with whom. Replicating my own process of research, analytic reflections are closely related to the moments from which they arose, rather than as a connecting logic over and above them. Consistent with the architectural practices I observed, some of these descriptions are more resolved than others, just as some are more extended.

Throughout the text, I include photographs as a parallel strand of the description. Deliberately untitled, they are related to but not simply illustrative of the adjacent written accounts, an invitation for readers to make their own connections. Since the images were often germane to my textual descriptions, one might even think of the text as a series of extended captions. I took the photographs during research, initially intended only for my own purposes as an aide-mémoire, an accompaniment to my written field notes, focusing especially on things I found difficult to convey in words: gestures, facial expressions, bodily comportment, the spatial contexts and choreography of these social encounters. I took them hastily with my camera phone, juggling notepads and recording equipment, sometimes during interviews or with my mind on other things. I hope their technical deficiencies are compensated, at least to some degree, by an immediate proximity to these moments. Though framed by my interests, they captured more than I knew or was able to see at the time: details familiar to the point I stopped noticing them; spaces, tools, and materials that become more visible when you take the focus of words away; fleeting gestures visible only when the action is stopped.

As a final component of my portrait of these architects, I share with the reader some of their conversations. Entitled Listen, the conversations were self-recorded by their participants after my fieldwork ended, as responses to first drafts I shared but on topics of the architects’ own choosing: issues they found interesting, frustrating, compelling, and wanted to collectively explore. I have edited the transcripts lightly and added contextualization, where the meaning seemed to lie beyond the transcribed word. Otherwise I have tried to leave them unanalyzed: a chance to eavesdrop, to hear what captures their imagination, the texture of the language they use among themselves, as they seek to explain themselves to themselves, half aware of the digital recorder and an unknown audience of possible listeners.

Throughout the text, I have used the actual names of architects, as they wished to appear, other than Roisin, a pseudonym. The names of all other people, of sites and of projects, are pseudonyms.

The remainder of this section is a brief explanation of how and why I have removed some of the academic armature that scholars generally expect to find. Readers with no such expectation may wish to skip forward. The next section, an account of my approach and the inspirations behind this, may also be passed over if you are more interested in the lives of architects than in how I have tried to make sense of these.

Architects’ comments on early drafts were not encouraging. A bit dense, as one of them put it; my eyes slightly glazed over. Another used architectural imagery to highlight a linked problem: It’s as though you’ve constructed a building and left the scaffolding on, he remarked. The academic scaffold, by which he meant conceptual reflections and theorized arguments, seemed a distraction from the descriptive passages he found most engaging. The metaphor of scaffold is drawn from his own professional practice and is also a reflection of the sensibilities that orient it. Architects, at least in this practice, spend a lot of time discussing precedents, drawing influences and inspiration from other designs, but in the final instance they are clear: a building cannot be explained; it has to speak for itself.

Admittedly from a very specific readership, these responses stayed with me, made me question how and for whom I was writing, and provided the stimulus for an experiment in ethnographic form. The analogy of text and building breaks down in various respects but got me thinking: What would a description look like if conceptual engagements with other scholars were treated as scaffold: enabling the construction of a descriptive object in which readers can imaginatively dwell, even and indeed because the conceptual framework is not visibly on show?

The imagery of scaffold is suggestive of the way in which a framework is needed to structure an object, in this case descriptive, being integral to the process of construction but ultimately invisible.

On the analogy of scaffold, the first plank I have sought to remove is theory, in the specific sense of externally derived explanatory frameworks of a singular kind. Writing is an exercise in humility, writes Nigel Rapport:

Theory is proud in its claims at comprehension. But theory would nevertheless appear to be the principal means of misrecognition—not the reverse—in its making of the other into an object whose point is to prove that theory’s assumptions. Academia would seem prone to theoretical pride: trafficking in coherent stories and plausible interpretations. But … this is to bring an artificial order to a wild world.³

By implication his target is grand theory and its claims to what Boyer et al.⁴ elsewhere characterize as a monopolising epistemic authority, an inherent asymmetry of knower and known.⁵ Rapport advocates the antidote to this, in writing that eschews theory for a return to the everyday.⁶ Arguably, he presents the relationship between academic theory and everyday life in overly binary terms: all descriptions must tame to some degree, simplifying even if only enough to bring particular forms of complexity into focus; all are oriented by more or less stated interpretive approaches, ideas drawn from other scholars or examples, that open up ways of seeing, even as they may close down others.⁷ Marilyn Strathern’s insistence that theory and description occupy the same conceptual plane highlights how good descriptions arise through the comparative lens of other people and places, and how, in turn, other people’s ideas and practice must force us to rethink our own.⁸ Theory, from this perspective, is not a fixed set of ideas, but the conceptual remainder of the descriptive act: the ways in which concepts are changed and extended in the act of describing particular circumstances, and the broader implications that expand from the specific case. Still, the thrust of Rapport’s argument has resonance in the current moment: pulled toward the assumptions and expectations of fellow professionals, anthropologists, like other academics, are routinely drawn into explanation that moves away from the concerns that animate the lives of those we seek to understand.⁹ Even those approaches emphasizing the interdependence of theory and description have more often emphasized the theoretical implications of descriptions than the descriptive implications of theory.¹⁰ My account moves in the other direction: scaling back argument as a frame and focus of description, I hope to amplify understanding of the complexity of architectural lived reality, to give more attention to those aspects that remain specific and inchoate, to dwell in architects’ own explanations of what they do and why, and so to refuse the kinds of exegesis that would render these details as epiphenomena of my own explanatory theory.

Second, and relatedly, my approach involves the deliberate attenuation of explicit argument. Focusing on Godfrey Lienhardt’s ethnography of the Dinka, Michael Carrithers elucidates some of the elements that made the classic monographs of the middle of the twentieth century so compelling:

Lienhardt devotes his effort throughout to the knotty labour of finding the most felicitous way of characterising the Dinka themselves, rather than adopting the established conceptual coinage of professional anthropology or engaging argumentatively with established professional opinions. He leaves us to infer his understanding of those other voices and how they might err.¹¹

His point echoes Rapport’s, though he also makes another: the vivid qualities of Lienhardt’s writing were as much a function of what he did not say as what he did. Literary theorist Wolfgang Iser develops this point discussing Virginia Woolf’s exposition of the role of readers’ imagination in the work of Jane Austen:

[The reader] is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said. What is said only appears to take on significance as a reference to what is not said; it is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to the meaning. But as the unsaid comes to life in the reader’s imagination, so the said expands to take on greater significance than might have been supposed; even trivial scenes can seem surprisingly profound.¹²

Imagination works through language as an interplay between explicit and implicit, revelation and concealment. Many good examples of this interplay exist in ethnographic writing, Lienhardt’s included, alongside a number of more recent accounts, but the general shift to explication and argument have tended to leave less implicit. I hope that a less conceptually scaffolded, less argumentatively focused text might in this way lead to a richer and more evocative account of architectural practice because, as it were, readers are given more imaginative space to provide their own images.

A third and final form of textual attenuation, also linked, relates to analysis. In her introduction to Women and Wanderers, Strathern explains: In [Reay’s] book analysis remains very largely off stage … , and the pride of place is given to descriptions of people’s doings, as they apparently occurred, in story-like form. Comparing this to ethnographic writing of a more conventional kind, she notes: Much ethnography is seemingly written of the moment. Yet the moment in which the ethnographer writes is also turned to the ends of exposition, and conveying a sense of immediacy has to compete with that. The trade-off between immediacy and reflection, between what is observed and what is analysed seems inevitable. If observation and analysis are inherently connected, Strathern highlights how minimization of the latter has amplifying effects with respect to the former: without the framing post facto analysis of the observer, description captures quick changes from moment to moment, replicating the unpredictable qualities of social interactions: an element in any ‘encounter’ is its unpredictability: people try to guess what will happen, watch how others behave, see how this or that person will react. The dynamic of the relationship makes everything for a moment unknown. Analysis of course is needed, among other reasons to spell out what is meant from what is said (or not), the more or less proximate contexts through which words and actions acquire significance, what is specific and what is more general in any given interaction. Beyond these contextualizations, connections, and comparisons, I have sought, in places, to explain what is happening and to reflect on how these circumstances are of more than local interest. Rejoining my preceding point, however, I have tried to keep explicit analysis to a minimum: staying close to the moment, anticipating readers’ own connecting analysis, opening out in multiple directions from the immediate circumstances described.

Approaching Architectural Practice: Between the How, Who, and What of Knowledge

Centrally this book is about architecture as a way of knowing the world in order to shape it. Relatedly it is about the way in which the architectural self both shapes and is shaped through these ways of knowing. Rather than focusing on knowledge as a set of abstract propositional claims, technical competencies, and overarching philosophies, I am interested in the various daily practices through which knowing takes place. The forms this takes are many, and so, accordingly, are the literatures that inform my account.

In the office of MHW is a large bookshelf. Along with technical guides and manuals, an extensive library contains many of the canonical works that include discussions of the key conceptual strands that have shaped the professional practice of architecture both historically and more recently. One way of thinking of this book is as an account of how these principles and approaches are put to work in the daily lives of architects, the myriad forms of application, interpretation, and extension that render them relevant to specific contexts and circumstances. I draw selectively on these architectural literatures to illustrate and exemplify the broader conceptual frameworks in which these architects’ own explanations arise. In other words, architectural scholarship figures in the book as an extension of the field, rather than as theories or explanations of it.

Almost two decades ago Garry Stevens wrote: The little sociological work conducted on architecture falls into three broad areas: studies of practice, historical theoretical studies, and gender studies. The entire literature could be read in a day.¹³ His and subsequent accounts have expanded understanding of the social life of professional architects considerably, but even today the field is relatively small. A quick reader might not be able to read it in a week but would probably get the gist. Mostly driven by a critically deconstructive agenda, these accounts have a focus significantly different from my own more ethnographic account, in which the primary interest is in the everyday practical negotiations of specific individuals. Even so, these works have generated insights about the professional practice of architecture that I build on. In particular, Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends and Russell Ellis and Dana Cuff’s Architects’ People relate to the central themes of my book and have helped me understand the broader field in which these practices take shape.

Among this sociological literature, ethnographic accounts of architecture remain scarce, perhaps for the reasons noted by Dana Cuff in Architecture,¹⁴ the first, now classic, study of this kind: access is often difficult, and architects can be resistant to the kinds of representation that might challenge their own presentations of professional practice.

Most directly my account is influenced by ethnographies highlighting, as Albena Yaneva puts it, architecture in the making.¹⁵ Her work,¹⁶ along with other ethnographies of architecture,¹⁷ provides direct inspiration, revealing how architects know things through doing things. In line with ethnographies of design practice,¹⁸ these accounts challenge the ideal of the creative individual, showing how ideas are produced—as people relate to other people, including through interactions with designers, clients, and others; and through their interactions with tools, materials, sites, and places. As various authors have stressed, these media do more than simply represent the already existing ideas of designers:¹⁹ they are ways of creating and transforming these. Design and creativity are not, from this perspective, subjective projections from the mind to the world; architects know the world by manipulating and transforming it, and their own ideas are extended in the process. More generally, accounts of creative practice in anthropology (for example Murphy’s Swedish Design, Wilf’s School for Cool, and Pandian’s Reel World) and beyond (particularly Sennett’s The Craftsman) provide critical insights into the dynamics through which people shape and are shaped through acts of making. The key point I take from these books is that what people know is necessarily a function of where, with what, and with whom they know.

Further inspiration comes from approaches focusing more directly on the who of knowing, including some from early, more straightforwardly sociological, perspectives on architecture. Written from a socially constructivist perspective, Cuff’s pioneering work from the 1980s has less to say about the tools, materials, and places through which designs are shaped. Even so, it provides inspiration, playing close and thoughtful attention to architects’ narratives of their personal and professional lives. Cuff does not use the phrase, but as an extension of Yaneva’s architecture in the making, this attention might be characterized as a focus on architects in the making. In particular, Cuff highlights how they realize and imagine themselves through various forms of narrative. Lily Chumley’s 2016 ethnography of Chinese design classes,²⁰ Anand Pandian’s account of Indian film production,²¹ and Eitan Wilf’s work on jazz²² variously highlight how creative activities implicate the self, personally, professionally, and as a specific way of framing the relationship between these domains. More broadly, accounts of life history and personal narrative tune attention to the various ways in which people are constructed through the stories they tell about themselves.²³ This focus is consistent with Boyer’s calls to humanise the expert.²⁴ Against the grain of much recent work he explains: The expert may occupy or perform a ‘social role’ as a particular kind of ‘modern subject,’ but foremost s/he is enmeshed in all the complexities anthropology acknowledges human life to entail… . The anthropology of expertise needs to push harder in every direction to make experts not solely the creatures of expertise that the ideologies and institutions of intellectual professionalism encourage us to recognise and make visible.²⁵ Inspired by his and other ethnographic accounts of expertise,²⁶ I seek to show how architects are not straightforwardly creatures of knowledge; how they live lives with all the complexities, contradictions, and dilemmas of people who have been the more traditional focus of ethnography. Relatedly, anthropological research²⁷ helps to foreground the everyday ethical dilemmas these architects face as they seek to negotiate the contradictory imperatives that frame their work.

Situated between these approaches, the book seeks to connect the post-human impulse to interrogate the more than social nature of these interactions, with a humanist orientation to architecture as a way of being in the world. At the intersection of these perspectives, I highlight how architectural practice involves various forms of relationship between the how and the who of knowing. Descriptions explore the relationship between what is said and done: how words are ways of doing things,²⁸ and how everyday happenings are verbally narrated as a way of meaningfully reflecting on that practice.²⁹ While suspicious of the essentializing discourses of individual creativity and sympathetic to thinking that challenges this, I aim to avoid the reduction of being to doing, and so, in terms outlined by Tom Boellstorff, to consider how things work through how they are, and how they are through how they work.³⁰ This is consistent with a focus on the various ways architects attribute explanatory value to ideas of creative individuality, and on how this ideal is realized as manifold practices and orientations.

Whether focused on what architects do, or on who they are, the thrust of existing work on architectural practice focuses centrally on design and creativity: how architects engage with