Dalhousie University worked too. So they’re very similar in that way and to be quite honest, Brian does have his grammar, his way of working things out. But we rarely have a preconceived idea of anything — there is no image. And there isn’t an image for a long time actually, right through programming and pre-design. Brian actually shies away from an image because he doesn’t want to be influenced by them. He wants to tease the concept as long as he can, until it’s right. I can draw a little axo and it’s,‘don’t draw that right now. I don’t want to be seduced by your drawing’. We stick to the diagram or the concept ‘til it’s right and I don’t think that’s any different for a house, or a public building. Tom: So there hasn’t been a dramatic need to change the way the office operates? Talbot: No, not at all. Between Brian and I, we did the ARC exactly the same way we’d do a house: we sit down and we draw it. All that’s different is a big support group — that’s the key. Tom:You hold onto the program for really a long time before you move into what the form is going to be. Talbot: I’ll tell you about the process. Brian pushed, right in the middle of the interview [with the U of T], for participatory design. It’s what we do with houses. They come in, we meet ‘em on the site, in the office, we design with them. We don’t go away and do options to show them and then come back later and say ‘here’s what you’re getting’. Our first meeting after we were awarded
the job, we said ‘here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do four workshops, the first one is called site, the second program, the third is called form, last material and technology’.They were a month apart from each other and we put together a committee of eight people that would remain constant throughout the process. Then we organized the workshops around the people with a vested interest in the future of this place. Tom:What would you do in a programming work- shop? Talbot: We built a game. I got a student to build the program in three dimensions — blocks coded by colour and wood species and they fit into a module. We already had the module figured out. So we made three of these games, gave them a site map of foam core to play with and the three teams all designed different schemes. Each team of six or seven people had a project architect from our firm or our associate firm head - ing it. It was in the main meeting space of the university where people pass by; could join in or comment — Brian, Jim Sykes amd Rob Lyco floated in between. That went on for about three hours and then we picked a person from each team, but not the project architect, to present their schemes to everybody. Then what Brian did, like a magician, was synthesize all three into one, taking the good from all three. That’s wild. Think about what that actually does in the process of design. He took
Tom: So, this is your second large building, your office is changing, you’re moving into a new space. How has what you guys have learned from doing houses influenced what you do now — larger buildings — or has it been able to? Talbot: Oh absolutely. We treat little houses as public buildings. Brian designs in one sense at the beginning almost without scale, designing grammar, like Mies would do. But very fast, it becomes programmatically scaled. One of the main things we practice is participatory design, that’s getting all the content of the buildings from clients. You know Brian has this amazing ability to get content from people. He has a way to tease out what people really want, right? He’ll look for key buzzwords and basically he’ll sit down and start drawing. This goes right back to Charles Moore — rooms, machines, dreams. ‘What do you need? You need rooms? you need a kitchen? you need a lecture hall?’ Very fast it’s right down to programme. Tom: Which is the way clients think too. Talbot: Machines are how’s it going to function, how’s it going to work. The dream is the key. What’s the dream? ‘I want to wake up and walk out onto the deck and have a view of the ocean’, or, talking about Robert Campbell (the client at the University of Toronto) ‘I want a place that’s not hierarchical. You know — bumping into people, where circumstances are allowed to arise’. That’s the way the Computer Science Building (CSB) at How to build an ARC Talbot Sweetapple and Tom Strickland
T his is part of a conversation between two young architects who gradu- ated from TUNS (now Dalhousie) in 1997: Talbot Sweetapple, who works with Brian Mackay-Lyons Architecture and Urban Design in Halifax and Tom Stickland, who is slowly working his way west, having worked with BML in Halifax, KPMB in Toronto and Jenkins and Associates in Calgary. The discussion was about the Academic Resources Centre at the University of Toronto which, when recently tendered, came in 15% under budget — this from a firm known for its precious, beautiful houses and its reinvestment in vernacular traditions. How did they do this?
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O n S ite review
T ransformations
I ssue 7 2002
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