whitewater rafting

This is the most often told story in the office, used to illustrate the concept of leadership. Just as soon as we were back from our whitewater rafting holidays in Chiengmai Thailand, we were enlightened, that indeed there can be only one man to guide the raft, for if there were more than one, not only will our heads go a bleeding and a banging against the rocks, we’d all be rolling in the rapids! Imagine the captain saying “to the left!”, and then at the same time, our smart Alec says, “to the right!” [There can be no imaginable disaster bigger than this.] Ultimately there can be only one direction to take, no matter how numerously involved we are in the our design expedition, we hold to only one philosophy.

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rocket man

The story of the rocket man is told to reflect on processes and logistics, as to the importance of having a checklist. For all intents and purposes, it is told to illuminate the young mind, on why the man who went to the moon never made it back with evidence, because the key was forgotten, and had been left behind, or indeed it was assumed that it was with the other chap, and the other chap thought the other chap had it. So rocket man did go the moon but he couldn’t get out of the capsule. He didn’t have a checklist, and didn’t use one before he launched himself into space.

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getting paid

Not too log ago, I remembered the occasion of how one man told me he was taking the day off, to “reflect”, it seems. This angered his employer who expected him to sit in the meeting and not go running around looking at things. Now I thought this was most illuminating, because we architects do that all the time, “running around” to reflect and contemplate on our work, a necessary part of our research or discourse. But our angry Clients expect that we must always be ‘doing’ something for their money, as otherwise our hours in contemplation cannot be remunerated? Isn’t it necessary that we pause and venture deeply into recesses of our minds in order to derive solutions or make considered propositions?

“I will now spend a bit of the time sitting in to organising the engagement of my work, but the rest of the time I shall be reflecting on what I’ve done, or need to do, and I ought be paid doing just that “, Huat LIM says. Getting paid while we go away to think about things is surely not unlawful, but it would certainly be if we didn’t get paid because of this “contemplation” time, or because we simply took time off to pause to reflect.

Supposedly our reduced fees places limits on our time accorded to our projects, as if to cut back on time we take off to contemplate and reflect on our work.

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brueghel and rothko

“The story of Brueghel [Pieter] the Younger and Mark Rothko is told to illustrate the better use of our keen eyes, to try see more than the untrained person. Not quite a demonstration of our ability to imagine, we take the work of our two gifted men to illuminate: B sees a thousand things at a go, whereas R chooses to reflect on a tiny part of what he sees best, a ‘thing’ defined by colour alone. I propose, if we take the possibility further and perhaps with more seriousness, there is, I say, a Rothko can be seen in many a Brueghel, and a Brueghel inside of nearly all Rothkos [a microscopic device or a trained eye with an illuminated mind comes in handy at this point]. All it really takes is employing a technique I would call ‘zooming in, or out’, a concept beautifully captured on film by Charles [and Ray] Eames, in his 9- minute documentary Powers of Ten.“

This concept has been shared with colleagues who find themselves stuck with an image or a design. For want of making it more infinitely possible, we propose that solving design problems might engage this method. Framing an image to convey a certain message, or drawing on a specific part of our buildings at the right scale would be akin, spiritually speaking, to “powers of ten”, an application of the concept of b and r.

See also other thoughts and pilosophical ramblings on designmatters

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dinosaur bone collector

Our illustrious and diligent Barnum Brown [there is already now an Imax film depicting his adventures and findings, most famously, the bones of T-Rex in 1902] collects ancient million year-old bones [--and some are very tiny] and he puts them together with the great passion of an artist, the unwavering patience of a monk and with the meticulous precision of an engineer to reconstruct his incredible paleontological find. Architects on the other hand, indeed often frown upon failing to locate his 2-day old document, much to the dismay of his paying client, let alone his loyal consultants. A bit of this bone collector discipline and industry should go a long way to make us more of a Barnum Brown, and we architects should really take our hats off to the that gentleman for his method.

To dinosaur lovers, Brown’s greatest achievement was likely his discovery of Tyrannosaurus Rex, “King of the tyrant lizards” in Hell Creek, Montana. He discovered the first skeleton in 1902, and found a better-preserved skeleton in 1908. Both skeletons were put on display in the American Museum.

[image courtesy of american natural history @ paleo.amnh.org]

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