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Architect Dr. Sally Mackereth joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about architecture. Is Brutalist architecture really ugly? Is there a theoretical limit of how tall a building can be on Earth? Does the climate of a city affect how architecture is built? Answers to these questions and many more await on Architecture Support.
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00:00Hi, I'm Dr. Sally McCarrath. I'm an architect.
00:03I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet. This is Architecture Support.
00:11A snowball in hell? Is there a science to window placement?
00:17When we design projects, you know, there are guidelines for the amount of sunlight
00:21that comes in, overlooking, there are privacy aspects to consider, and daylight can be measured.
00:27And there is this software to be able to optimize the natural light that comes into a building.
00:33As always with architecture, there's the science and there's the art.
00:36We don't always just design from the diagram of the guidelines.
00:40Obviously, there's an interplay between those sets of data, if you like.
00:45I mean, recently I designed a project on an island just off of Sicily.
00:51I introduced these very small windows or wind eyes, as I call them.
00:55They were a sort of reference to Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant who would stride around Sicily,
01:03gobbling up humans. And the purpose of those windows in that climate was to create a cross-ventilation
01:09arrangement, so they didn't have glass in the wind eyes. It's just mosquito netting.
01:14What was very interesting was, once they were installed, because of the hum of the Aeolian wind
01:23that comes through, I'd suddenly realized that there was this eerie sound passing through the house
01:29that was like the sirens whispering incantations through the holes that are mentioned in Homer's book,
01:37The Odyssey. So what I'd done was, I'd actually turned the house into a musical instrument,
01:43an Aeolian harp, because this is an instrument that actually plays itself through the wind.
01:49So it's very interesting that it's not just the science of where you optimally might position a
01:54window, but there's a whole other set of things that come into play and how you counter that.
02:01Cure Branco. Is there a theoretical limit of how tall a building can be on Earth without collapsing?
02:09After the Burj Khalif, Saudi Arabia is looking to do a building over a kilometer high.
02:15I mean, in theory, tall buildings are built and they're made to move. They sway in the wind.
02:22It's rather like a tree. The roots, the pile foundations that go into the ground,
02:26you need like a kind of spreader plate effect so that you can actually stop the thing toppling over.
02:32Obviously, there's ways to make a frame building, like a wedding cake going up to a point at the top,
02:39as the Burj Khalif does. It's more about elevators. Elevators restrict the height of a building.
02:46In tall buildings, you have to get out of one into another. So that's the kind of limiting factor.
02:53Ultrasaurus. Today I learned that there's a London skyscraper
02:56that melted cars and set buildings on fire in 2013. That's fondly, fondly known as the walkie-talkie
03:04because of the shape of it. It also got named as the walkie-scorchy because of the setting fire to
03:11things. What happened was the angle of the sun on the glass becomes almost like a magnifying glass.
03:17It was increasing the power of the sun's rays. And so, yes, it was melting cars. And in the end,
03:24they had to fix like a Brise Soleil, which is a series of fins. You can't necessarily predict
03:30something like this. Of course, there are guidelines. And typically, if you're going to
03:35step out of the traditional way of buildings, you have to have the stomach for the fact that
03:40there may be issues down the line that you need to deal with. They found a solution, but yeah,
03:45it's not ideal. Jesus Script. What are the biggest architectural challenges you've ever faced?
03:53There's a few. I worked on a project that was on an island in a volcano crater. It was a
04:0115-minute walk
04:02from the nearest road down a narrow path. How on earth was I going to deliver building materials? In the
04:10old days, they used to use donkeys, but they don't do that anymore. And I'd also designed this huge
04:16pivoting arched window. And the answer was to do helicopter drops. What I hadn't necessarily figured
04:24out was the weight restriction of the helicopter. So the steel pivoting arch and the glass had to be
04:33loaded up on the road and then come around the mountain and be dropped into place, perfectly
04:41into place with a team of guys waiting on site. Actually, I couldn't bear to be there at the time.
04:47I did ask them to film it so I could see it afterwards, but it was quite a hair-raising
04:51moment.
04:52Huard Pei says, change my view. Brutalist architecture is ugly. Brutalism,
05:00it's associated obviously with raw concrete. It comes from the French beton-brue. It's raw,
05:06it's unadorned, it's heavy, it's usually hammered concrete. Typically, it's not very well maintained,
05:14so it's small windows and big heavy concrete streaked with stains of leaking pipes. So it can be pretty
05:22depressing. I mean, funnily enough, they're becoming trendy again. I think it's the way that people view
05:28these kind of monsters and then insert something soft and emotional into them. It's quite an
05:35interesting juxtaposition in a way. Take, for instance, the Barbican. It's right in the heart
05:40of the city of London, bush hammered concrete. It does have gardens, but it was a utopian vision
05:45of how Londoners would live. There are those that loathe it. It's quite a complicated piece of urban
05:52residential design to navigate. There are two types of lifts. Often you go to see a theater piece
05:58there and if you get in the wrong lift, you're not on the right floor. Some would say that the
06:02sort
06:02of arrogance of the architecture that is quite off-putting. Obviously for the people that live
06:07there, and it is full of architects, there's a kind of raw spirit about it. Brutalist architecture is
06:14almost like it's not wearing makeup. If you compare the enhanced, the Kardashian approach versus
06:20Pamela Anderson's no makeup look, I mean, I think there's something quite interesting. It's just much
06:26more honest and truthful. Is that ugly? I'm not so sure. So from the architecture subreddit, does the
06:34climate of a city affect how architecture is built? In Denmark, the roof pitches, they're very steep.
06:40They're dealing with snow. So the vernacular of the local architecture takes on a particular form for
06:47that reason. The other end of the scale, when I was in India recently for this project, I was struck
06:53by the university that I visited. It's very heavy thermal mass, smaller windows, not really glass in
07:00those windows. They've paid attention to passive solar gain and the way that you can use natural
07:06ventilation to cool spaces and the orientation of those spaces to create shade and comfort cooling.
07:14That said, it's strange also in India to be witnessing high rise going up with air conditioning,
07:21sealed windows, and not the same fundamental intelligent approach to how we should be building.
07:28Polite Architecture asks, can architecture influence human decisions or behaviour? You've asked me
07:36whether architecture affects humans' behaviour. I mean, when I was a young architect, I was a massive
07:42fan of the penguin pool at London Zoo, which is designed by Bertolt de Beckian. It's this fabulous
07:49double helix ramp. The penguins could jump off and play and jump into the pool. Architecturally, it's
07:56absolutely exquisite. The interesting thing is, the penguins became very sad in that environment,
08:03and the zookeepers decided that they would create something on a different site. Simple timber buildings,
08:10a pool where they could interact, and they weren't straightjacketed into this sort of geometric form.
08:17Fascinating. All the penguins started being more playful, having baby penguins. It's really
08:23interesting how a kind of beautiful piece of architectural modernism can actually literally
08:29have that effect on on living creatures. Second Name A is asking, do people really build mini models of
08:39buildings like they show in movies for new projects? Models are really useful things. Certainly, there are
08:47models that are made for show, made out of beautiful wood often, or acrylic. We use models in a slightly
08:54different way. We can use them as like little maquettes, usually make them out of cardboard or balsa wood and
09:01glue. That can be everything from a small part of a city where you can actually pop in the actual
09:08proposal.
09:09That might be the fragment of a building. It's really good to break off from drawings in two dimensions,
09:16and to actually use your hands to explore something. It's typically very useful when you have meetings
09:22with, for example, a planning committee where you're trying to convey the narrative of how you arrived at
09:28this particular massing. There's a gallery roof building we designed in Mayfair. The whole idea was to
09:36create these uninterrupted floor spaces, so no columns. We used the roof structure. A little like
09:43when you fold origami paper, you know that it has an inherent strength, so we started to explore how we
09:50could actually use that. What you're seeing on the outside is not necessarily what you're seeing on the
09:55inside, so we had to figure out how the structure and the insulation and all of that would work.
10:00Playing with the geometry in your hands is just quite a useful thing to do.
10:06A Quora user asks, why doesn't Zaha Hadid believe in using right angles? Zaha was a friend of mine. She
10:12came many times to inspire my students. Zaha was very much an artist. I think that her sense of space,
10:21voluptuous space, was so inspiring, like almost on a cosmic level. The sense that as humans there's
10:28something very humbling to be not registering the story heights of buildings, but just to be in this
10:34kind of wonderfully abstract, amorphous form. I mean, super futuristic in terms of when they're built,
10:40they're like amazing. But you know, it was radical, radical what she was doing. But it took her many,
10:47many years to actually build anything, and it's not easy to build her forms. Not at all. Straight lines are
10:56much cheaper. Spruxt is asking, can someone explain the difference between an architecture designer
11:03versus an architect? An architect is a legal title. It's protected as a professional title. It takes many,
11:11many years to qualify. An architectural designer is typically someone who can produce conceptual ideas,
11:19but they don't have any accountability for the drawings that they might produce for you. Architects
11:26typically produce hundreds of drawings. It depends on the scale of the project. But those are all very
11:31technically resolved details of buildings. So you'll know that it won't leak, and it'll stand up.
11:38Free Time Photography asks, design versus final product. If you come up with an idea, and then you
11:45actually, it goes through all these processes, and then it's made. Amazing. But it's the process
11:51that is how the design actually evolves. So if you're very rigid and you just go, well, this is my
11:57idea,
11:58and that's how it must be. Actually, you're missing a trick because often things happen along the way,
12:05almost by accident rather than design. We did a project with an arcade, and what I hadn't understood was
12:12how the light would enter that space and be refracted in two ways. And it was like this magical moment
12:18when the beams of sunshine shone in before we'd finished the actual design, and we went,
12:23okay, actually, let's keep it like that, not in the way that we intended to do it. So yeah,
12:28I think it's good to be quite open to an element of chance and change.
12:34Iridescent light. Why is Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture a big deal? The most iconic masterpiece
12:42of American architectural houses has got to be Falling Water. It was pretty radical. This idea of
12:49this kind of extraordinary intervention in nature that actually almost embraces the waterfall with the
12:56water coming from beneath the terraces. It's powerful, and it's that terrible word iconic. It's a
13:03motif almost that people go, that sums up architecture. In fact, it was very much of its time. I think
13:10if
13:11one was to commission today's Frank Lloyd Wright, he wouldn't have done it in quite such a monumental
13:18modernist way. It would have been a lot more sensitive and thoughtful about the location. If you look
13:24at the Guggenheim, that was an amazing building. It's effectively a spiraling ramp. So instead of passing
13:30through a series of galleries, the gallery is on the ramp. So you're seeing a linear exhibition
13:36from top to bottom or bottom to top, depending on how you want to view the show. From the architecture
13:43sub Reddit, do I need to be good at drawing to be an architect? If you can't draw, you can't
13:49really
13:49communicate. When you're talking through ideas with a client, it's just really quite useful to be able to
13:56pull out a pencil and then quickly sketch. I mean, these can be very simple doodles. It's not about
14:02being good at drawing and doing watercolors. There's a lot of clients who would ask for a CAD rendering so
14:10that you can have a kind of fly through of a project. These have a slightly weird, like a hyperreal
14:15quality. They're slightly bizarre. So what we tend to do is we might build a computer model of a building,
14:20but we will by hand sort of draw the spaces. And there's a sort of level of trust between architect
14:29and client, let's say, that I think comes across when you have hand drawings. It's different because
14:37if you present a client with, this is exactly what it's going to look like. Whereas I think something
14:43that's kind of loose, it's a little more friendly. It's a little more uncertain. And actually, if you can
14:49talk and you can draw, great. That's what you need. Cheetos 08. Why do we not build ornate buildings
14:58anymore? If you look up as you walk through the streets of a city, there were extraordinary freezes,
15:04skilled, amazing brickwork on Victorian buildings. These trades are disappearing. And the reason is
15:11that it's expensive to do that. The other thing, of course, is this all happened on the back of modernism
15:17in, I think it was 1910, Adolf Loos wrote an essay, which was the foundations of the Bauhaus studio,
15:25which was, Ornament is a Crime. That's because the modernists were saying that once you add ornament
15:34to everyday objects, they go out of style and then you throw them away. And we should actually think
15:39about the form follows the function. With the advent of the machine age, buildings were no longer
15:48typically made by stonemasons with beautiful carved gargoyles or whatever. They're often machine-made
15:54offsite and then they come and they get fixed into place. So there's not necessarily the same
16:00regard for ornament, which is a shame. AlternativeBig6493 is asking, how do architects know that their designs
16:12are feasible, engineerable and structurally sound? It's not entirely down to the architect. Obviously,
16:18buildings are made with a series of experts who you rely upon in order to actually put together
16:26all the ideas in a way that is truly buildable. It's quite loose at the beginning. It might be
16:31shapes and forms. I don't like to go straight to the computer because that is very restricting.
16:38We don't just do drawings. We'll also make exploratory maquettes. It's very much an exploratory
16:44process. So as the design develops, we will test it. So an Englishman in Paris says,
16:52Pompidou or Pompidou? Pompidou, of course. It's that 1970s optimism and spirit about it.
16:59It's also very interesting that the architects chose to really reinvent the gallery space,
17:06turning it inside out, as we know. There's a legibility about the services of the buildings,
17:11which are normally hidden. So each color is for a different thing. The water's in green,
17:16the electricity's in yellow or however it works, but it's all on the outside. So the guts are on the
17:21outside. I think what was also very interesting was that it's space adjacent to the Pompidou Center.
17:26It's a very free and easy and lovely place for people to gather. So sometimes it's not the
17:32architecture itself as an iconic form, but it's the space in between that iconic form and the rest of
17:40the square. Armcure asks, how difficult is it to build a bare concrete home? Concrete is a liquid
17:49thing that sets. It needs to then be finished. You have to create formwork. So you pour the concrete in,
17:55but you also need insulation and the concrete needs to dry out. It's very, very specialist stuff. So
18:02although concrete itself isn't expensive, it's basically something that is, it's like a moment
18:09and then you strike the formwork and you take it away, but you have very little opportunity to make
18:14mistakes. And as a result, it's quite expensive to do. So absolutely it's possible, but it isn't easy.
18:24Thenfeelings7989 is asking, how true is architect's dream is an engineer's worst nightmare? It's very much
18:32a collaboration. The spirit and the vision has to be a shared thing. And for a structural engineer
18:40to work well with an architect, there's this kind of balance of pragmatism on the one hand and fantasism
18:49on the other. And when that's in good dialogue, that's when great things come out. I mean, I've
18:55been lucky enough to work with some of the world's greatest structural engineers and they make a huge
19:01difference to the outcome of the building. San Andreas asks, why does the Louvre pyramid get a pass?
19:08I think what's extraordinary about that place is there's definitely a tension between the sleek glass
19:16glass versus the old stone buildings that surround it. A lot of Parisians despise it. Parisians can be
19:23quite conservative about these things. And yet, very interestingly, it's more than a pyramid shaped
19:29roof light. The juxtaposition of the old with the new, it's a place where people feel excited. And I think
19:37it's quite special. It's a difficult thing to pull off, but I think he did.
19:42A Cora user asks, why don't most architects live in self-designed homes? It might be a cost thing.
19:50It's very expensive to build your own home. Architects' homes are typically a laboratory for
19:54their ideas. My own realization is that I can't live in a home designed by somebody else. So my last
20:01house had an Oculus in the roof open to let the snow fall in, apparently into the bedrooms. It had
20:08brick
20:09doors that swing open. So, I mean, there's lots of opportunity when you're doing your own house to
20:16actually introduce magic and excitement and mysticism. At the same time, if there's problems,
20:25you've got to live with them. This is everything for today. I hope you learned something. I hope
20:28you enjoyed it. This has been Architecture Support.
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