Lecture Response: Practical, for Once
Contributor
“How Was It?”
Response to Patrick Bellew: “Anthills to Labyrinths”
The Gordon H.Smith Lecture in Practical Architecture. Who knew we had a practical architecture lecture at this school?
Opening with a diagram connecting architecture, structural engineering, and environmental engineering, Patrick Bellew set the tone for the love triangle (or love-hate triangle?) between these disciplines.
Humbly stating that he did not have “the hand” for architecture nor “the smarts” for structural engineering, Bellew landed on environmental engineering. The University of Bath educates architects and engineers together—a system perhaps unfathomable to us at YSoA where we live far from the Becton Center for Engineering, coincidentally the other brutalist building on this campus.
Amid a career of seminal climate change discoveries and work with Atelier 10, the main story of Bellew’s lecture emerged: from zero-tech to high-tech, from anthills to labyrinths. The labyrinth is the network of ducts, vents, and pipes so crucial to the building’s function. Hidden behind walls, seeing these systems reminded us how dependent architecture has become on engineering to breathe.
That dependency surfaced in Bellew’s repeated slandering of Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay Sands, or “the building with a surfboard,” whose tall, cantilevered form consumes energy in pursuit of spectacle.
It brought to mind a line from my final structures class: “Engineering can exist without architects, but architecture cannot exist without engineers.” Perhaps that, after all, was the “practical” lesson Gordon Smith hoped would knock some sense into us.