Architect Answers Architecture Questions

Hi, I'm Dr. Sally Mackereth,

I'm an architect.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Architecture Support.

[upbeat music]

Asnowballinhell.

Is there a science to window placement?

When we design projects, you know, there are guidelines

for the amount of sunlight that comes in.

Overlooking, there are privacy aspects to consider

and daylight can be measured

and there is this software to be able

to optimize the natural light that comes into a building.

As always, with architecture,

there's the science and there's the art.

We don't always just design from the diagram

of the guidelines.

Obviously there's an interplay

between those sets of data if you like.

I mean, recently I designed a project on an island

just off of Sicily.

I introduced these very small windows

or wind eyes, as I call them.

They were a sort of reference to Polyphemus,

the one-eyed giant who would stride

around Sicily gobbling up humans.

And the purpose of those windows in that climate

was to create a cross ventilation arrangement.

So they didn't have glass in the windows,

it's just mosquito netting.

What was very interesting was once they were installed

because of the hum of the Aeolian wind

that comes through, I'd suddenly realized

that there was this eerie sound passing through the house

that was like the sirens whispering incantations

through the holes that are mentioned in Homer's book,

The Odyssey.

So what I'd done was I'd actually turned the house

into a musical instrument, an Aeolian harp,

because this is an instrument that actually plays itself

through the wind.

So it's very interesting that it's not just the science of

where you optimally might position a window,

but there's a whole other set of things that come into play

and how you counter that.

Kurebranko.

Is there a theoretical limit of

how tall a building can be on Earth without collapsing?

After the Burj Khalifa, Saudi Arabia is looking

to do a building over a kilometer high.

I mean, in theory, tall buildings are built

and they're made to move.

They sway in the wind.

It's rather like a tree, the roots, the pile foundations

that go into the ground, you need like

a kind of spreader plate effect

so that you can actually stop the thing toppling over.

Obviously, there's ways to make a frame building

like a wedding cake going up

to a point at the top as the Burj Khalifa does.

It's more about elevators.

Elevators restrict the height of a building.

Tall buildings you have to get out of one into another.

So that's the kind of limiting factor.

Ultra Saurus.

Today I learned that there's a London skyscraper

that melted cars and set buildings on fire in 2013.

That's fondly, fondly known

as the walkie talkie 'cause of the shape of it.

It also got named as the walkie scorchy

because of the setting fire to things.

What happened was the angle of the sun on the glass,

it becomes almost like a magnifying glass.

It was increasing the power of the sun's rays

and so yes, it was melting cars

and in the end they had to fix like a breeze sole,

which is a series of fins.

You can't necessarily predict something like this.

Of course there are guidelines

and typically if you're going to step out

of the traditional way of buildings,

you have to have the stomach for the fact

that there may be issues down the line

that you need to deal with.

They found a solution, but yeah, it's not ideal.

Jesusscript.

One of the biggest architectural challenges

you've ever faced?

There's a few, I worked on a project

that was on an island in a volcano crater.

It was a 15 minute walk from the nearest road

down a narrow path.

How on earth was I going to deliver building materials?

In the old days, they used to use donkeys,

but they don't do that anymore.

And I'd also designed this huge pivoting arched window

and the answer was to do helicopter drops.

What I hadn't necessarily figured out

was the weight restriction of the helicopter.

So the steel pivoting arch

and the glass had to be loaded up on the road

and then come around the mountain

and be dropped into place, perfectly into place with a team

of guys waiting on site.

Actually, I couldn't bear to be there at the time.

I did ask them to film it so I could see it afterwards,

but it was quite a hair raising moment.

Huadpe says, change my view.

Brutalist architecture is ugly.

Brutalism, it's associated obviously with raw concrete.

It comes from the French beton brut.

It's raw, it's unadorned, it's heavy.

It's usually hammered concrete.

Typically it's not very well maintained,

so it's small windows

and big, heavy concrete streaked with stains

of leaking pipes.

So it can be pretty depressing.

I mean, funnily enough, they're becoming trendy again,

I think it's the way that people view these kind of monsters

and then insert something soft and emotional into them.

It's quite an interesting juxtaposition in a way.

Take for instance, the Barbican.

It's right in the heart of the city of London,

bush hammered concrete.

It does have gardens,

but it was a utopian vision of how Londoners would live.

There are those that loathe it.

It's quite a complicated piece

of urban residential design to navigate.

There are two types of lifts.

Often you go to see a theater piece there

and if you get in the wrong lift,

you're not on the right floor.

Some would say that that the sort of arrogance

of the architecture that is quite off-putting.

Obviously, for the people that live there

and it is full of architects,

there's a kind of raw spirit about it.

Brutalist architecture is almost like

it's not wearing makeup.

If you compare the enhanced the Kardashian approach versus

Pamela Anderson's no makeup look,

I mean I think there's something quite interesting.

It's just much more honest and truthful.

Is that ugly?

I'm not so sure.

So from the Architecture Subreddit,

does the climate of a city affect

how architecture is built?

In Denmark, the roof pitches, they're very steep.

They're dealing with snow.

So the vernacular

of the local architecture takes on

a particular form for that reason.

The other end of the scale, when I was in India recently

for this project, I was struck by the university

that I visited.

It's very heavy thermal mass,

smaller windows, not really glass

in those windows, they've paid attention

to passive solar gain

and the way that you can use natural ventilation

to cool spaces

and the orientation of those spaces to create shade

and comfort cooling.

That said, it's strange also in India

to be witnessing high rise going up with air conditioning,

sealed windows

and not the same fundamental intelligent approach to

how we should be building.

Polite Architecture asks,

can architecture influence human decisions or behavior?

You've asked me whether architecture affects

humans' behavior.

I mean, when I was a young architect, I was a massive fan

of the penguin pool at London Zoo, which is designed

by Berthold Lubetkin.

It's this fabulous double helix ramp.

The penguins could jump off and play and jump into the pool

and architecturally it's absolutely exquisite.

The interesting thing is the penguins became very sad

in that environment and the zoo keepers decided

that they would create something on a different site,

simple timber buildings, a pool where they could interact,

and they weren't straight jacketed

into this sort of geometric form.

Fascinating.

All the penguins started being more playful,

having baby penguins.

It's really interesting how a kind of beautiful piece

of architectural modernism can actually literally

have that effect on living creatures.

SecondnameIA is asking do people really build

mini models of buildings like they show in movies

for new projects?

Models are really useful things.

Certainly there are models that are made for show,

made out of beautiful wood often or acrylic.

We use models in a slightly different way, we can use them

as like little maquettes, usually make them out of cardboard

or balsa wood and glue,

and that can be everything from a small part of a city

where you can actually pop in the actual proposal,

that might be the fragment of a building.

It's really good

to break off from drawings in two dimensions

and to actually use your hands to explore something.

It's typically very useful when you have meetings with,

for example, a planning committee where you're trying

to convey the narrative of

how you arrived at this particular massing.

There's a gallery roof building we designed in Mayfair.

The whole idea was

to create these uninterrupted floor spaces,

so no columns.

We used the roof structure.

Little like when you fold origami paper,

you know that it has an inherent strength.

So we started to explore how we could actually use that.

What you're seeing on the outside is not necessarily

what you're seeing on the inside.

So we had to figure out how the structure

and the installation and all of that would work.

Playing with the geometry in your hands

is just quite a useful thing to do.

A Quora user asks,

why doesn't Zaha Hadid believe in using right angles?

So Zaha was a friend of mine.

She came many times to inspire my students.

Zaha was very much an artist.

I think that her sense of space, voluptuous space was

so inspiring, like almost on a cosmic level that the sense

that as humans, there's something very humbling

to be not registering the story heights of buildings,

but just to be in this kind of wonderfully abstract,

amorphous form.

I mean super futuristic in terms of

when they're built, they're like amazing.

But you know, it was radical, radical what she was doing,

but it took her many, many years to actually build anything,

and it's not easy to build her forms, not at all.

Straight lines are much cheaper.

Spruxed is asking, can someone explain the difference

between an architecture designer versus an architect?

An architect is a legal title.

It's protected as a professional title.

It takes many, many years to qualify.

An architectural designer is typically someone

who can produce conceptual ideas,

but they don't have any accountability for the drawings

that they might produce for you.

Architects typically produce hundreds of drawings.

It depends on the scale of the project,

but those are all very technically resolved

details of buildings.

So you'll know that it won't leak and it'll stand up.

Freetimephotography asks design versus final product.

If you come up with an idea

and then you actually, it goes through all these processes

and then it's made, amazing,

but it's the process

that is how the design actually evolves.

So if you're very rigid

and you just go, well, this is my idea

and that's how it must be, actually, you're missing a trick

because often things happen along the way

almost by accident rather than design.

We did a project with an arcade,

and what I hadn't understood was how the light would enter

that space and be refracted in two ways,

and it was like this magical moment when the beams

of sunshine shone in before we'd finished the actual design

and we went, okay, actually let's keep it like that.

Not in the way that we intended to do it.

So yeah, I think it's good to be quite open

to an element of chance and change.

Iridescentlight, why is Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture

a big deal?

The most iconic masterpiece

of American architectural houses has gotta be Falling Water.

It was pretty radical, this idea of this

kind of extraordinary intervention in nature

that actually almost embraces the waterfall

with the water coming from beneath the terraces.

It's powerful and it's that terrible word, iconic.

It's a motif almost that people go,

that sums up architecture.

In fact, it was very much of its time.

I think if one was to commission today's Frank Lloyd Wright,

he wouldn't have done it in quite such a monumental,

modernist way.

It would've been a lot more sensitive

and thoughtful about the location.

If you look at Guggenheim, that was an amazing building.

It's effectively a spiraling ramp.

So instead of passing through a series of galleries,

the gallery is on the ramp.

So you're seeing a linear exhibition from top to bottom

or bottom to top, depending on how you want

to view the show.

From the Architecture Subreddit,

do I need to be good at drawing

to be an architect?

If you can't draw, you can't really communicate.

When you're talking through ideas with a client,

it's just really quite useful to be able

to pull out a pencil and then quickly sketch.

I mean, these can be very simple doodles.

It's not about being good at drawing and doing watercolors.

There's a lot of clients who would ask for a CAD rendering

so that you can have a kind of fly through of a project.

These have a slightly weird, like a hyper real quality.

They're slightly bizarre.

So what we tend to do is we might build a computer model

of a building, but we will by hand sort of draw the spaces

and there's a sort of level of trust between architect

and client, let's say.

That I think comes across when you have hand drawings.

It's different because if you present a client

with this is exactly what it's gonna look like.

Whereas I think something that's kind of loose,

it's a little more friendly, it's a little more uncertain.

And actually if you can talk

and you can draw, great, that's what you need.

Chetoos08, why do we not build ornate buildings anymore?

If you look up as you walk through the streets of a city,

there were extraordinary friezes,

skilled amazing brickwork on Victorian buildings.

These trades are disappearing

and the reason is that it's expensive to do that.

The other thing of course is this all happened on the back

of modernism in, I think it was 1910,

Adolf Loos wrote an essay, which was the foundations

of the Bauhaus Studio, which was ornament is a crime.

That's because the modernists were saying

that once you add ornament to everyday objects, they go out

of style and then you throw them away.

And we should actually think about the form

follows the function, with the advent

of the machine age, buildings were no longer typically made

by stone masons with beautiful carved gargoyles, whatever.

They're often machine made offsite and then they come

and they get fixed into place.

So there's not necessarily the same regard

for ornament, which is a shame.

Alternative-Big-6493 is asking

how do architects know that their designs are feasible,

engineerable and structurally sound?

It's not entirely down to the architect.

Obviously buildings are made with a series of experts

who you rely upon in order

to actually put together all the ideas in a way

that is truly buildable.

It's quite loose at the beginning.

It might be shapes and forms.

I don't like to go straight to the computer

because that is very restricting.

We don't just do drawings.

We'll also make exploratory maquettes.

It's very much an exploratory process.

So as the design develops, we will test it.

So an EnglishmaninParis says,

Pompidou or pompidon't?

Pompidou, of course, it's that 1970s optimism

and spirit about it.

It's also very interesting that the architects chose

to really reinvent the gallery space, turning it inside out.

As we know, there's a legibility about the services

of the buildings which are normally hidden.

So each color is for a different thing.

The water's in green, the electricity's in yellow

or however it works, but it's all on the outside.

So the guts are on the outside.

I think what was also very interesting was the space

adjacent to the Pompidou Center.

It's a very free and easy

and lovely place for people to gather.

So sometimes it's not the architecture itself

as an iconic form,

but it's the space in between that iconic form

and the rest of the square.

Ahmqur asks how difficult is it to build

a bare concrete home?

Concrete is a liquid thing that sets, it needs

to then be finished.

You have to create form work, so you pour the concrete in,

but you also need insulation

and the concrete needs to dry out.

It's very, very specialist stuff.

So although concrete itself isn't expensive,

it's basically something that is, it's like a moment

and then you strike the form work and you take it away.

But you have very little opportunity to make mistakes

and as a result, it's quite expensive to do,

so absolutely it's possible, but it isn't easy.

Then-Feeling-7989 is asking,

how true is architect's dream

is an engineer's worst nightmare.

It's very much a collaboration.

The spirit and the vision has to be a shared thing.

And for a structural engineer to work well

with an architect, there's this kind of balance

of pragmatism on the one hand and fantasm on the other.

And when that's in good dialogue,

that's when great things come out.

I mean, I've been lucky enough to work with some

of the world's greatest structural engineers

and they make a huge difference

to the outcome of the building.

Sanandrios asks, why does the Louvre pyramid get a pass?

And I think what's extraordinary about

that place is there's definitely a tension

between the sleek glass versus the old stone buildings

that surround it.

A lot of Parisians despise it.

Parisians can be quite conservative about these things,

and yet, very interestingly,

it's more than a pyramid shaped roof light.

The juxtaposition of the old with the new.

It's a place where people feel excited

and I think it's quite special.

It's a difficult thing to pull off, but I think he did.

A Quora user asks,

why don't most architects live in self-designed homes?

It might be a cost thing.

It's very expensive to build your own home.

Architects' homes are typically a laboratory

for their ideas.

My own realization is

that I can't live in a home designed by somebody else.

So my last house had an oculus in the roof open

to let the snow fall in, apparently into the bedrooms.

It had brick doors that swing open.

So I mean, there's a lots of opportunity

when you're doing your own house

to actually introduce magic and excitement

and mysticism, at the same time,

if there's problems, you gotta live with them.

This is everything for today.

I hope you learned something.

I hope you enjoyed it.

This has been Architecture Support.

[upbeat music]