As a part of the Talks on The City Talk series for the Year of The Built Environment, last Tuesday evening saw Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina (whom I keep wanting to call Condaleeza Rice) and Elizabeth Farelly waxing lyrical on Architecture + Media + Fashion.

It was nice to have have such luminaries as Wigley et Colimina talking in Sydney and the steps of the Town Hall were packed with theory groupies, young and old all itching to hear what the intellectual leaders of two of the worlds most prestigious architecture schools had to say. It all got off to a nearly embarrassing start when attendees were greeted at the top of the stairs by two lunatics wearing giant novelty effigies of the opera house and the harbour bridge on their heads leaving no mistake what city we’re living. For the next talk, I propose a couple of Sydney’s architects up the ante and give the use of novelty head gear a more contemporary flava.

As for the talks themselves, Wigley was in broad brush-stroke territory, labelling engineers as boring and heterosexual whereas Architects are creative and possibly able to incorporate elements of gay culture. His point it seems is that Engineers are interested the boring bits of builidings; the columns and the concrete and stuff. Architects however are Creative and interested in supposedly “weird” things like surfaces… This argument was supported by the Town Hall building where timber columns are painted to look like stone and decoration adorns every nook and cranny. (Wigley was also backed up by a disgruntled engineer who during question time felt the need to defend the engineers as creatives by relating a joke that was not funny and had no punchline.) Hardly compelling and indeed when later he talked about Sydney’s obsession with its Opera House, he did not apply the same logic and talk about how it was the perfect marriage between the twin creative minds of Engineer and Architect rather he merely referred to it as clothing for Sydney. Had the talk been about the body in space perhaps some conclusions could be drawn concerning how we occupy and move through architectural space rather than merely being left with a series of thin metaphors for architecture as clothing something we wear.

Beatriz Colomina on the other hand used architecture to talk about architecture and was wonderfully unintelligable. Her thick spanish accent had me confused and playing aural catchup like I had not had to do since the days of a Gevork Hartoonian lecture. Colomina’s talk centred on the role of the media in the cultivation of avant-garde architecture, in particular how exhibitions, expositions, magazines and editors have embraced new ideas long before built examples have surfaced. It was refreshing to hear architecture talked about in the language of architecture. If these city talks are meant to engage the general public in the discourse of architecture then they need to be in language of architecture. You do not educate people in mathematics by teaching them portueguese. Likewise, talking about architecture as clothing may be entertaining but it is not going to help to lay the groundwork in giving the great unwashed a better understanding on what makes good architecture, what makes for great cities. Being exposed to some of the great modernist houses, I feel will help to raise architectural literacy levels.

There has been some discussion in our office about the deficiences of Microstation as a CAD package. It is Gravestmor’s position that it is a poor tradesman that blames his tools for his poor handiwork. Wednesday’s update will explore this provocation in a little more detail.