Peter Wilson (Bolles+Wilson) 2013 RAIA Gold Medal Presentation.

Fragments from Libraries / Small Buildings / Zombies.
07.10.2013  State Library of Western Australia.

"It seems that to receive an RAIA Gold Medal one must leave Australia and stay away for 40 years."

"I am nervous of belonging. I am required to be able to continually step into new cultures which develops skills of assessing what is actually at work."

"I have 40 minutes to present this talk. In Sydney I recall Buckmiester Fuller once spoke for 4 hours. The students left to get pizza and when they got back he was still talking." 

"I am a product of the AA (Architectural Association): Dealing with an Architecture of incident, complexity and urban context...

…a sensibility developed within a generation of contextualism - the study of the city - contextual but with a language of the time."

"We don't have a style."

"An architecture that gets up the nose of German Architects who ask, "What is your rule system?", our reply," It depends what day of the week it is!"

"Muenster Library is somewhat our signature…and a dangerous yardstick"

"A building of many small narratives…a long story but one which is a joy to tell."

"We were given 3 years to plan…in the end we detailed, detailed and detailed. The fees ran out after 1 year. Other competition wins paid to keep us going. In the end it was built under budget…which surprised everyone. For the last 20 years it has been ranked 1 or 2 in the list of best public libraries -  a validation of some sorts. It suggests that good architecture is not about money but a the amount of time willing to be given to it."

"I advise students to visit a site at night. To not be distracted by detail and to see only the morphology."

"There is precedent in our work. But architecture of a different time and building method prevents direct references. One must think on your feet for a project specific strategy."

Dutch Competitions: "To get around strict EU competition rules the Dutch process sometimes asks for a 'vision'. The vision could be 'purple'…or a sketch. A german Architect once submitted a written statement. He proposed for a participatory scheme whereby he would engage and work with the local Dutch community. He won…but he then had to learn how to speak Dutch."

Dutch Language. "We called our scheme a 'blob'. This was before the word was degraded by parametric geometry. The Dutch however didnt call it a blob. They kept calling it a bloop! (We which also liked)."

Dutch Context: "Having being designed to a context a fire then burnt down the adjoining building and the context disappeared" 

21mins 15seconds: "I apologise for racing through this but I must get to the zombies."

Suzuki House: "We recently met the daughter who grew up in the house. We wanted to know if she had psychological damage."

"How did she describe the black blob to her Japanese school girl friends?"
"Oh thats easy: the house is a Panda!"

"We can't actually describe where this building is…it is floating somewhere in the Tokyo soup."

"There appears to be no need for proximity in a modern city anymore. Germany is like Tokyo…but spread out over 100's of kilometres."

Sustainability Regulations: "Typically one is required to make a building airtight…it is almost a crime to open a window in Germany."

Luxor Theatre: "Theatre is about the event. Its not about the Architecture. The building should work best when the lights go out and everyone focuses on the stage…but moments before the lights go out when the theatre is buzzing architecture has a foreground role."

A showroom to test jacuzzis: "An interesting sociological experiment. People go into a public building and take their clothes off…this is not something we do everyday. A discovery was made that Germans required freshwater to be refilled into each bath tested however if a busload of Belgians arrived…"

"I think our architecture is made up of solving these sorts of pragmatic problems. We don't sit there everyday discussing formal, theoretical or compositional problems. We basically discuss how do we solve each problem (as the brief and project limits shift in time)."

"In this building it is possible to put on your gumboots and wander out to the end of the lake. A surreal moment like a flat-earth view (looking off the edge of the world). What one actually sees though is German suburbia."

"If you designed the building below ground you killed all the trees. We designed the building to sail between the trees - the judges didn't share the same 'sublime' logic - we are sensitive architects."

"A german fundamentalist thinks our architecture is irresponsible. As a jury member he pushed our building from first to second place. I found a eucalyptus tree last time I visited London. I collected its seeds and now I have my own gorilla gardening campaign throwing eucalyptus seeds over his fence."

"A sketch which looks naive can get past every committee. A trick: Stay childlike!"

"It can be a very painful process. I think one doesn't do architecture to make money. A friend always laughs at the amount of unpaid work we as architects do. But there is a pleasure in doing a scheme….and finally seeing it get built and occupied by people." 

Zombies: "Lost competitions and the unbuilt. The undead that never reach closure."

Unbuilt Milan: "It took 10 years to complete the design process…it now sits on a shelf somewhere. It is the story of an Architect's life: So much effort and the project can still become a zombie."

"A mobile showroom. An inflatable skin. A building so light it needed 40 tonne of ballast just to hold it down. The transport costs of the ballast made it uneconomical. Sometimes you can do your job to well…Zombie."

"Theoretical projects are an exploration of the poetics of architecture. An engineer once told me (regarding The Waterhouse Project) that you wouldn't have the head of water required to get the fountains to do that…but thats not the point of narrative architecture…its a statement."

Peter Wilson. http://bolles-wilson.com


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