So yeah, went to the Chipperfield talk the other night. He pretty much ran through half the El Croquis that has just been published and called it a night. Every project was prefaced with a description of how truly awful, how exceptionally ugly the site was. Let me just say; if you own a block of land on the Spanish coastline in a little fishing village overlooking the sea and neighboured on one side by a charming black and white checkerboard facade and if in fact you are not a Spanish fisherman but are an English architect who happens to own a weekender with marble benches on the roof, please don’t come to Sydney and lecture us on how ugly the site is/was. Seriously, we are not going to be sympathetic.
Judging by the houselights that turned on towards the end of the talk, time was a limiting factor on the talk and so rather than focus on fewer projects in more depth, we got all of them at lightspeed - the Reader’s Digest version. All delivered in a matter of fact English drone. Luckily the drone was droning on about some exceptional buildings but as I said earlier, we have seen all of this gear before. A deeper examination on design process and methodology and themes and ideas would have provided a more illuminating evening.
That or he could have employed the following three methods to spice up his onstage performance:
- 01 - Describe and demonstrate how bananas divide into three equal wedges.
- 02 - Show Nick Knight’s timelapse photography of one of his houses in London. Or. Of course, skin a horse while a live lion prances about with models wearing Gaultier and Dior.
- 03 - Read out spam