038 RADICAL THINKING
Left Kestelier is inspired by the way Elon Musk and SpaceX are transforming the engineering process
I think best with … (e.g. my hands/a pencil/ with a computer)
Talking and sketching with my team. My drawing skills aren’t great, so I need to talk while I sketch.
I think best … (e.g. fi rst thing in the morning/ last thing at night)
Late at night when the children have gone to bed and the house is quiet.
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I think best when… (e.g. in a gallery/at home/ outside/over drinks/with friends/on the bus) I do stand-up paddle boarding through the many inner-city London canals and rivers. T ose long paddles are a great way to clear my mind, get focussed and think clearly without the usual distractions.
or fabricators. Standard procurement processes create a disconnect between designer and fabricator. T at connection is technically possible as both the design process (e.g BIM or computational design) and the fabrication processes (e.g. fi ve axis milling or waterjet cutting) have been digitised. T e digital world has made the connection between design and making easier than ever. Unfortunately, antiquated procurement is restricting the collaboration between fabricators and designers. I would argue that we need to return to the model of the master builder of the renaissance, but now in an open source and collaborative digital world.
Could you recommend a book/article/blog that inspired your thinking? It would probably be a rare and hard to fi nd book from 1995: An Evolutionary Architecture by John Frazer. In the 1960s Frazer was one of the fi rst to use computers in architectural design. Instead of seeing the computer as a way to replace drafting tables with desktop computers, he set out to completely replace
Left An Evolutionary Architecture by John Frazer, one of the first architects to use computers in his design process
the designer themselves. T e tools he developed were not designed to help the architect, the computation and digital tools were the architecture. T e book illustrates some of John Frazer’s earlier work and the work of the students from the Diploma Unit II, which he led at the Architectural Association in the 1990s. T is book became my source of inspiration while studying at T e Bartlett and sparked my initial interests in computational design.
Could you name two buildings/ pieces of furniture that you consider radical designs of their time, or perhaps still to this day? I would choose two projects from the late 1960s. T e fi rst project would be Centre Pompidou by Rogers and Piano. T ey designed a building that was designed inside out and placed it in the middle of the historical Beaubourg in Paris! Walking around it a couple of years ago, I was still amazed by the fact that this piece of radical architecture was built in the middle of a classic Parisian neighbourhood. T e second one is a small conceptual project by David Green from Archigram: LogPlug&Rokplug. T e project imagines natural objects such as a rock or a log that house embedded services. T ese are services such as data, power and water, anything a modern human might need to live off ‘the land’. Both projects question architecture in a radical way. One through a bold architectural statement, the other through having a minimal architectural footprint.
T e thought that keeps me up at night is… I am a very deep sleeper, so few things keep me awake! However, one of my concerns for humankind is the climate emergency, and in particular how much architecture and construction accounts for 40% of carbon emissions. In our industry I see a lot of greenwashing but not enough action; as an industry we have a responsibility to address this.
T e thought that gets me out of bed each day is…
Collaborating with people from other discipline - scientists, engineers, fashion designers, programmers, artists, fabricators. Anybody I can learn from.
Do you like to think with, or think against? I like a good argument, so I’ll always start with against.
If you weren’t a designer/architect, where do you think your way of thinking would have led you?
I like to be creative within technically constrained environments: designing yachts, space habitats, etc. So one science I’ve always been really fascinated by is theoretical physics. It seems to be a fi eld that is extremely technical but requires loads of imagination and creativity. Unfortunately I am far from clever enough to go anywhere near it!
Could you describe radical thinking in three words?
First principal thinking.
What’s the most radical thing you’ve come across today or this week?
SpaceX Spaceship SN10 doing a vertical landing. T e footage looked like it was straight out of a sci-fi movie!
EVGENIYQW /
SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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