Bartlett Year Out Certificate RIBA Stage 1 2012-13 Monday 4th February 2013 Lecture Matt Springett 5.30-6.30pm Seminar Kit Allsopp 6.30-7.15pm Drinks 7.15pm Small could be beautiful

Matt does small because he hasn’t (yet) been offered BIG. What would happen if he was (and did) ? Would everything change? He does, and has done beautiful small where detail counts for a lot – particular juxtapositions, connections, atmosphere. pool house, parents house.

How to sustain that while doing BIG?

BIG is rarely a collection of smalls where lots of little bits are knitted, or dovetailed together. It takes too long and costs too much. Some new (ish) functions demand BIG – trading floors, auto warehouses, supermarkets, super stores, and they often appear banal through sheer size. What you get, at best, is a structural grid or human scale rhythms addressing the public realm - a kind of lie because behind the façade is an endless acreage of fitted carpet, and a forest of junction boxes and strip lights. What kind of work environment is this? Do we want it? Must we have it?

However beautiful small may be it is often virtually invisible – PRIVATE. However beautiful big might aspire to be it is usually impossible to disguise and is generally PUBLIC.

It’s no accident that Corbusiers Villa Savoie is beautiful but the Unite d’Habitation is not (quite). Aalto did manage both scales but he was a Finn.

We would be delighted if the public realm was as beautiful as the private. It has been in the distant past when we understood the collective idea of urbanism and we could express both that BIG notion and the feel of the hand on the doorknocker. Bloomsbury, Bath and Edinburgh all managed it but we have lost the knack.

It would appear to have something to do with scale and intensity. If it’s small you can reach out and touch it, you can see it in close up. As it gets bigger it loses that immediacy, that articulation of the small parts, it has less shape and

definition. Unless of course it is Canterbury Cathedral but that is all about time and devotion.

Also when you are drawing or designing you can see it all at once if it’s small enough but when it’s BIG it tends to drift away and can get lost. A good example might be a Paul Smith shop compared with IKEA – each is a shopping experience but the experience, and the architecture, are wildly different. The Paul Smith shop is small and beautiful and everything is expensive. The IKEA store is BIG and banal but everything is cheap.

This is a pity because not everything which is small is by definition expensive nor is everything BIG cheap.

There is also the question how these big and small things are designed and made.

Small things can be designed in every aspect by one person – 100% individual control of every decision from the macro to the micro scale. And personal commitment and love. The builders too get closer to the action, they can see the whole thing happening in a short space of time.They are closer to the tools and the materials.

Big things on the other hand cannot be designed by one person, they need divisions of labour, teams of specialists, packages. The initial concept may be the brainchild of one person but subsequently the detailed implementation will be devolved throughout the organisation until it reaches the most junior assistant who will be assigned one of the toilet packages. (S)he will have access to the interfaces between the toilets and the adjoining accommodation but will probably never be aware of the whole project in anything other than a cursory manner. It is just too BIG and too remote.

So with any luck from Matt we shall get who does what and how, successful projects and those that don’t quite make it and why, and what it’s like to be an architect NOW. Being small does not guarantee beauty nor is big always ugly. It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it.

Kit Allsopp 28th January 2013