Triking

It's pissing down Nr Hunstanton, Norfolk. Why are we here? To get away from it all, and get away from it you do on a trike. I wake these mornings often as not thinking about the Odyssey, as dawn's long fingers splice their way into strange rooms, and a new set of trials await. I want to feel heroic about it. I do that for comfort, because most of the time when you are on the road on a trike you get so disappointed for the rest of the world.
Even with it pissing with rain we had to get to a fishmonger this morning, and even this simple task involves a good deal of meticulous thought and care; I mean you don't want to mangle this piece of machinery up, and you don't want to drop things or loose things or leave anything unlocked. You want the beast to start and you want her to grunt (but that isn't guaranteed) whatever the conditions; you don't want anything falling off. Well so there is a good deal of girding of loins; we even had an argument about the towel I'd got from the bathroom to try and dry the important bits off.
When we got to this fishmonger, part of a small farmers market operation near Thornham just up the coast, I was standing there soaking whilst a lady breezed up in her white 4x4 (I find the white ones particularly offensive) dismounted, and cheerly asked, in one of those very posh, highly mannered voices belonging to the superior and older class, for two fishcakes (total cost less than £3.00). Then she equally breezed off in to the rain, the ever present rain. I doubt she was thinking about anything but her two fishcakes she had commissioned her ghastly vehicle to get. She was cosy, warm and dry, perhaps even soothed by Pachelbel. She didn't care where she parked the bloody thing and she might as well have been wearing her pyjamas, she didn't care about other road users (they never do, those 4x4 owners are the worst!) nor about the woeful extravagance she had just thoughtlessly demonstrated to the peculiar looking witness she had just breezed past. She was certainly not interested in her engine, she was just entitled, the world was at her disposal, and this part of North Norfolk is full of such types, as well of course, as those in their painful servitude.
On board a trike you are entitled to nothing except the occasional joyful waves of truckers. You get by via the selfless help of others who might know the local roads, and by a certain mental strength that sees grit in your expression and eyes ever on the look out. The experience of 'getting away from it all' is pretty extreme. But there is a point to that, especially if you are somebody like me who would normally by happy just reading a book or sitting in the pub.
Because of course, just as in the Odyssey, when your day is at it's end, and you are safely welcomed in some strange place, you get to feast. You have, of course, earn't your rewards, just as those ancient texts demonstrate; there is a morality to it, and that is genuine satisfaction.

Preparing a Lecture

A.J.P. Taylor famously used to prepare his lectures in the taxi on the way to the BBC. The image of him sitting in the back of a black cab ruminating away captured my imagination a long time ago. To have such knowledge stashed way! To be that good at it! I still admire Taylor, his essay style is equally as relaxed, a pleasure to read as well as on the money, but that piece of information held a lot of consequence for me.
Many people might think lecturing is easy, performing the same old thing year after year must be a doddle. They think that a course, once prepared, is run identically for years. Nothing could be further from the truth; over the twenty seven years I've been lecturing, I don't think I've ever given the same lecture twice.
It may be worth reflecting on the process, and the Philip Guston painting above came straight to mind. That's the bit around four in the morning. Guston hits that on the money.
Implementation, putting the images together, happens later, or earlier, in which case it's like cooking stock. When I first started out the images always drove the process, spread out across a big light box. Pre Google Image, the slide images were your own and they were precious to you; weekly trips to the photographic studio and Joe's Basement in Soho, all the pleasure and palaver of mounting the slides up; sorting and checking the order and that they were the right way around in the carousel; thats all gone now. But more images means more effort in choosing; more composing in the dead of night.
It always takes time, days rather than hours to think a lecture over, but once you've thought about it, actually putting it together takes no time at all.
And I don't prepare or use notes. They would get in the way these days; it's not a script, it's stand up. I don't like 'guides' and instructions either. I say to the students; 'you don't need an instruction manual to write about your breakfast, you need an instruction manual to fix your Harley Davidson'. In cultural terms Architecture is much closer to breakfast. A lecture is a 'live', unique,  thing; don't try and kill it.
I'm always early. there are many reasons for this. Mainly, you have to iron out all the things that might catch you out, because there are so many risks to the task at hand. Getting on an easier bus is a no brainer. Anyway, there are still things to do.
I don't have never given a lecture in the afternoon without going to the pub first- that is not the case in the morning; you have to have boundaries.
That bit of 'green room' is suddenly when you have no idea what you are going to talk about. It just desserts you. I stare in to space. I have no idea why this happens, but experience tells me it's OK. It's part of it and it's my job to hang in there and play with it all a little more, feeling stupid. I try to laugh at myself; 'what a dickhead I am!- all this fuss over a little thing like this'. But you still have to come up with a first line; how are you going to break them in? That has to come from somewhere even if you forget it once your in the room.
I've already checked my pocket for my memory stick twenty times since leaving the house. I leave the pub on the second. I've counted down every minute.
And once your up on the stage, you hardly think about it, and it's as close to rock n' roll as I will ever get.
Twenty seven years and I'm still doing it like this.
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We Don't Need No Education?

A student pointed out to me the other day, after the fourth lecture on the 'Reputations' of modern architects, that 'none' of the eight exemplars so far discussed was formally educated in 'the academy'. A background in watchmaking or stonemasonry come to mind (just as they would have to Vitruvius- his tenth chapter was on sundials). The student wasn't entirely correct (and that was probably my fault) but what a heroic idea; stepping outside the academy!

His concern, beneath his interest in the architects of course, was as to why his generation were paying for the ticket to success when, empirically, it appeared the ticket to 'success' (at least in the twentieth century) lay outside the academy, and was indeed antagonistic to it. This seemed a pretty good point; the traditional academies were bankrupt given the imminent 'new age'.

Is it possible 'the academies' have lost the plot once again? These days most of the students I teach within architecture don't have much of a clue about 'building'; there are far more interesting things to think about, usually involving words rather than stones. We used to call this radical, but I have disagreed that it is in any way radical for some time. As 'choice' and 'interest' mechanisms work their way down to teaching at even entry level, one of the things you might think is essential to the subject; building (or at least 'the means of production') can get lost altogether. Instead students are asked to demonstrate almost Jesuitical stamina in their pursuit the unreasonable.

Meanwhile changing the means of production is essential to the creating any 'new age' (which is clearly something we might enjoy) and the lack of such change was something the moderns found to their cost.

Alternatively it is possible, perhaps, that the building industry is now so de-skilled that all this doesn't matter, and perhaps the schools are reacting appropriately in casting aside prosaic interests (if they are indeed prosaic, and that those which have replaced them are indeed 'more interesting'). But whatever the case it is likely that todays students know as little about about the machinations of the academy as they do stonework or drains. For myriad reasons, they are just doing what they are told, and late capitalist institutions, like Stalinist ones, take a very dim view of dissent (they are so busy championing themselves) even though, paradoxically, this is the motor for the change they need.

Regulation is required when you give everybody a chance and want everybody to be treated fairly. This is as much neoliberal law as well something one would think of as common sense. Since any 'new' institution still has to engage with endless regulation, perhaps stepping outside the academy is no longer possible! As a consequence, and within, it would seem necessary to synthesise that eccentricity- otherwise there is no change! So an institution that cultivates it's own eccentricity in the face of more and more rules and regulations is rather a paradox, but it's where we are.