Website = portfolio. Blog = process. Facebook = people? Okay… accelerate personal relations into Wedding Bels. The next WHAT_project 23xbel_ is a shift from Belgium to Belgrade.

TBC: Client as player, architect as spectator. We accept that good architecture requires good clients. So what are the performance criteria for clients? Ambition? Decisive decision making or dawdling (possession or execution)? Framework agreements? Portfolio vs workability? Handshakers vs goalscorers? Big budgets? PQQ vs IQ? Introduce Agnieszka Londynska (CV, optimised performance)

This Sunday we were happy that as a sign-of-our-times, player performance was reported by The Observer in ‘Maths of the Day’: how geeks took over football aka how date captured football: link here. In our informational age (say the past 20 years or so), there has been a dramatic shift from intuitive appraisal towards data driven analysis to assess human resource value. Sport is one endeavour where performance is closely monitored. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a 2003 book by Michael Lewis about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its manager Billy Beane. The book’s focus is the team’s adoption of an analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation. You could say it’s about how to win from a losing position. This idea is central to WHAT_architecture’s research into ‘architect as player’ performance. In Human Resource terms, the value of an employee reference is being increasingly being devalued given the historical approach which uses very subjective tools: “good team player, practises well, very creative, a good head “. We think that a more studious metric approach could hold value and so we turned to the Opta Indices / Match Attax guides as to player performance in football as a form guide to 2moro’s architect. TBC: fake cvs / architectural awards culture / starchitecture / FB Likes / KPI: the pass as an email / levels of communication / Is the Goal a Building? / As our ‘output’ is only 5% buildings, what is the other output? / WHAT_Architecture is building Human Resources. The PRS Research will be presented as a book of two halves: reading left to right ‘What is the Game of Architecture?’ vs reading right to left ‘Play the Game of Architecture!” Think vs Do!? ! vs ?  

The world’s first 100% weatherboard house – yes, that includes a weatherboard roof – is currently being clad in Auckland… whilst the architect sits seemingly chillaxed here in London. In a world of tech-heavy, brain dead CAD systems, this is BIM-lite: a Skype-SketchUp 8-bit architecture without resolution. And if we seem chillaxed, LOL, it is purely because every detail +/- 1% has been drawn into existence whether in 2d, 3d, 1d or 4d. At Stage K for Konstruction this means: Draw more, Talk less. Tolerance is everything.

The Late Night Chameleon Club (LN-CC) in Dalston is a shop without a street window, has no shop assistants, is open only by appointment and has no street presence in that it is reached down an alleyway. A shop unlike any other. Very Dalston.

What does an architect’s office look like?

The London Festival of Architecture returns this June 2014 as a “month-long, city-wide celebration of architectural experimentation, thinking, learning and practice. In 2014 the festival will take ‘Capital’ as its central theme, and explore its various manifestations; from London’s place as the UK’s seat of government and finance, its flows of social and intellectual capital, the politics of regeneration and its impact on the city and its position as a world capital of architecture, through its practices and its built environment. RIBA London will again be coordinating focus days and Open Studios in Shoreditch and Fitzrovia. This is a fantastic opportunity to get your practices involved with a public audience. It’s a chance for you to open up your studio, showcase your projects and demonstrate ‘behind the scenes’ of how architects work, as well as a good marketing & PR opportunity.” Read: don’t look like a sweatshop, look like a boutique. We are resolutely NOT cynical at all about a public engagement with private design-production space, merely optimistically offering a reality antidote which could make your dreams come true! Okay, so we might clean up, add some magic…

Using this invitation WHAT_architecture reflects on what an Architect’s office actually looks like, rather than should look like. That’s PRODUCTION vs PR. [John Pawson, the ultimate minimalist had a sleek 1990’s office manifest as 80% client space (boardroom table) vs 20% employee space (window less shelf of computers)]. To augment our RMiT Practice-based Research we also ask: how does the internal/input configuration of an architectural office influence its output production? How does y/our workspace affect what you/we design? Our new office’s internalised configuration is the polar opposite of our previous TransWorld House ‘goldfish bowl’ exteriorised configuration.  Given the recent 5y shift in office rental costs since the David Cameron-Boris Johnson exaltation of Silicon Roundabout, our SME was nearly forced out of East-Central London aka Shoreditch. Our new office is therefore pragmatically modelled on the USS Enterprise from Star Trek with it’s minimal windows to space out there and its increasing proliferation of computer screens. Less retail windows, more MS Windows. How many passerby clients, apart from Shek, did we get from being prominent in the street scape? (See also Doors of Perception 1: Herzog and De Meuron where the entry into a Starchitect’s office seems to be more about the reality of working – a front door looking resembling that to you grandparent’s flat – than say the swagger of say Foster+Partners grand staircase entry vista to a glass-tabled mini-skirted supermodel receptionist greeting your expectant large walleted client steps towards engagement). (See also Anthony Hoete vs Jacques Herzog 2007 RIBA Gold Medal interview…)