Maurice's Blog

Maybe I'm an AI and this is just one of the trillions of simulations I think I'm living in. If that's the case, what I'm about to say will have the runners chuckling. The algorithm could be showing me more, but I've seen a lot of posts by people experimenting with AI architecture — only in the past week or so. AI has turned a corner with the Banana in terms of ease of use. The images are beautiful, interesting and challenging. I see the AI doing something that I've seen students doing forever. What I did as a student too. We look at lots of architecture and form our own position.

I'm sure that's part of it for me personally. However, there are ideas, forms, scenarios that were with me before education — even as a child. Stuff I still do. Possibly the runners of the simulation could have pre-programed me to see how I got on. Or I'm not an AI and AI is not us.

Either way I have no inclination to use AI for the generation of ideas. I have far too many of those in my own head. It's the bit I love doing the most — why would I ask someone (or something) else to do it for me.

Where AI is incredibly exciting for me is as a helper. Not as an ideas generator, but a way to visualise my own ideas. Below are some images. The sketch was done a few years ago. I recently modelled it in cad and 3d printed it. The concrete image is by AI. All I gave it was one photo of the printed model from above and this was the first image it gave me. It can now, from a single photo, give you any view accurately as photorealistically as you want — incredible?

Some days stay with you. I remember clearly walking into the competition site in Court Hey Park. I immediately saw a line. A line of disparate context. At one end trees, at the other a very long wall, and in the middle a small single story brick building set at an angle of its own. I later found out it was the rangers hut.

Whilst studying at the RCA I had become obsessed with cutting straight lines through complex, messy, unpredictable reality. My final project had a 4m wide, very long tube of light slicing through and out of a 60's brutalist concrete building in a park. The building had been used for animal experiments. The tube contained books. A penetration of light and enlightenment — into the heart of a beast.

When I got back to the office, it's before mobile phones and Google Earth, I checked the site survey and the long brick wall aligned with the angled corner of the rangers hut, continuing on to terminate on a huge mature horse chestnut tree. What more confirmation does one need? This did bring up a problem. The competition rules included a red line site boundary somewhere in the middle of the site. This was where Stephen Hodder and I aligned — he had no problem with risking disqualification for breaking the rules.

The park was naturally split in two by this imaginary line. I thought of it as a dead zone of slightly overlapping invisible boundaries. By placing an object into the dead zone, the new building would act like the central spine of a book. Acknowledging separation whilst unifying two pages with different things written on them. And — within the length of the line, another dimension, disparate contexts would be connected.

The working drawing package and build were intense and exhausting. Whilst on site, I didn't have a day off for six months. I still shudder for my young naive self standing on a sea of steel reinforcement measuring where to nail blocks of wood to the top of the ply shutter so that the top pivots for floor-sprung doors could be recessed into the structural concrete roof slab. Or telling the eight foot grizzly bear that he had to kanga out 12m of concrete wall because he'd put six bolt holes instead of four in each panel. It was mid winter and I'm sure he was thinking of putting me into the foundation that was dug next to where I was standing and pouring concrete over me.

Architecture lecturers — young and old, and students seem to love the Wildflower Centre. During a recent lecture about it at the Architectural Association I pondered the appropriateness of personal, abstract architectural ideas. Should we take experimentation out and design conventional buildings that we already know will work? Does demolition prove failure? It is true that the building was used for seventeen years. Putting tons of soil onto an asphalt roof with 150mm upstands, designed with conventional drainage, was never going to end well. What is also true is that unusual architecture requires unusual thinking. It's unrealistic to expect the council to think this way, they live in a completely different world. I did try — property developers I know attempted to speak with them. No response came. Office headquarters, very unusual residential — were thought about.

Another approach put forward by the 20th Century Society was to strip the building back to its concrete structure and let it stand as a folly. A sculpture, a memory of an architectural idea. Obviously I love this notion. I always saw the project in two ways. Its geometry generated from the wider context — a resolution of the whole park. And then within the diagrammatic line there is space. The line has thickness. The thickness of concrete. You sculpt out space, cut incisions into its mass. The purest expression of the idea is to have zero interior space, no glass, no internal finishes, no sheath of green oak cladding. A pure form providing some shelter, a way to walk high above the park.

I was very lucky. Not for the following, I'll get back to that. From school at age sixteen, I went to, what was then, Salford Tech. I did an art foundation course at the Adelphi Building. This was many years before the Centenary Building was built a few meters away. There seems to be a pattern of the buildings in Salford I've studied and taught in being knocked down. Even spookier is that they're great pieces of architecture. If you read my previous blog you'll see how brilliant my infant school was. Both the Adelphi Building and Centenary Building are being knocked down this month.

I was so lucky to meet a tutor called Travis Isherwood who blew my uneducated Salford mind with his vast knowledge of art and architecture history and philosophy. I've spoken about him in previous blogs. One of the things he told me about was Le Corbusier's belief that the plan is the generator (Le plan est le générateur). My interpretation at the time was that you feel the plan as you three dimensionally move through a building. And I don't think it's changed much. Although, I did go through a phase of thinking the volume as a whole could be designed without the plan being resolved. But even then, I always came back to the plan eventually.

There's something primary about the plan. I think it has something to do with it being invisible. We generally move through spaces looking horizontally. We mostly see elevations dynamically flattening and tapering with perspective. We never really get a direct visual of the plan view. And yet it is always there — unconsciously structuring the building. Diagrammatically thinking, we move through buildings, in a two dimensional sense, locked to the plan. Even when we rise up ramps or stairs the Z coordinate is mostly miniscule compared to the X and Y.

I very rarely show my plans, because people don't understand them in the same way they understand three dimensional images. When I drew with ink, before computers, I would draw plans from below looking up into the space with perspective. And sections the same way, but looking horizontally. My attempt to bridge the gap between the invisible plan and our common understanding of the insides of buildings. Coincidentally my very first job after leaving the Royal College of Art was in James Stirling's office. All his beautiful hand drawings — axonometrics from below with the floor removed, plastered the Georgian walls of 8 Fitzroy Square in London. None were in perspective though!

Here are some plans below of my projects. I've chosen ones that show how the essence of the building is generated from the plan.

I like gross simplifications. Some of the psychologists I've listened to say reality is too complex for us to process as a whole. We therefore break it down into packets. Each packet could contain billions of sub packets — we manage our processing budget by not seeing those. Some religions say something similar. That once you think you've understood the complexity of anything, a deeper complexity will reveal itself. That you will never know the mind of God.

I like to try to understand why some things are the way they are. And sometimes I avoid this responsibility by telling myself that it's too complicated and others know way more than me. And then I remember that it feels so good and reassuring when I define where I am in relation to the things I want to understand. And that even the person with the highest IQ in the world only partly knows what's going on.

I've always had a natural affinity with Modernism. Even as a child I felt more comfortable in my Alvar Aaltoesque infant school of the 70's than my one hundred year old back to back terrace house with its outside toilet. Yes — who would have thought there would be a single story, angled, curved, white rendered walled building with classrooms that had glass doors to their own outside garden spaces in Salford? A Modernist's dream. Aged five, I always worried about the old house falling down. The end house on pretty much every street had collapsed — patterned wallpaper and stair scars becoming external elevations. I actually saw the bookies at the end of our street fall in on itself, exciting stuff. I hated Coronation Street and loved the Six Million Dollar Man.

Here comes the simplification of infinity alluded to earlier. Modernism in wider society pursued universal truths or laws of nature through science and technology, not allowing tradition to limit investigation. Einstein shook the foundations of stability showing that even the edifice of fixed time and space is an illusion. Picasso broke out of the historic confines of the two dimensional picture plane, inside painting itself, with Cubism. Architecture hunted for a fundamental expression, freed from the bounds of externally applied language.

Post Modernist writing is very difficult to understand. Until you realise that it is trying to speak without making a statement of truth or putting forward a fixed position. It's a paradox — how is it possible to say 'there is no truth' — if saying 'there is no truth' by your own philosophy, can't be true? They have to do verbal gymnastics in order to say without saying — I used to mistake it for Zen, but that's something else altogether!

In architecture Le Corbusier developed the Modulor. A system of proportion based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. He was trying to uncover universally beautiful rules of form. Modernism and technology allowed him to jettison the language of ornament, hierarchy historically added to buildings. And work with abstract geometry in a much more experimental and creative way. Mies Van Der Rohe stripped architecture down to its most fundamental form — the plane. The wall, the floor and the roof. He also had columns and glass — but I think he would have eliminated those if the technology would have allowed it.

Postmodernism in architecture, as with Postmodern philosophy, mocks the serious, earnest search for truth of the Modernists. Robert Venturi brilliantly transformed Mies' 'Less is more' into 'Less is a bore'. He later regretted saying it — but I think all is fair in love and war. Po Mo brought back all of the languages of architecture — it even turned Modernism into a style — just another set of symbols to be added to all the others and used to say.........something.

Intellectually I am superficially attracted to this way of thinking. Imagine being completely free of any fundamentally correct way of doing anything. Free to say anything and it be of equal value to anything else said — because I say so. The reason I rejected it is because all the master works I've experienced tap into something fundamental, they share a truth. A truth that, although connected, exists apart from syntax or language.

Hence why I'm still a Modernist. Even though I use elements of historic architectural languages, albeit as abstracted artifacts. I still believe there are fundamental truths to be uncovered through creativity and the only way to uncover them is to free yourself from convention or traditional ways of operating.

"I love music too much to live from it." This is a quote from Carlos Paredes, a recognized genius of the Portuguese Guitar who kept his normal day job. This resonates deeply with me. And reminds me of Paulo Mendes da Rocha who didn't have an architecture practice, but created sublime architecture and won all the big prizes like the Pritzker. He would collaborate with ex students who had set up offices. His art was architecture — not running a business.

There was an article in The Guardian a couple of days ago about AI 'Wiping out architects'. I speak to AI every day. It's like having an assistant. Currently it makes a lot of mistakes and flat out lies, but it takes me down roads I might not have gone down — Roads I don't have the time or the inclination to research, analyse and write about, as it does in seconds.

Carlos chose to make feeding himself and his family a separate endeavour to making art. For some artists creating can only ever be a pure process, so delicately balanced on the edge of a knife. A world to be entered voluntarily with full commitment from a place of love. Necessity and time have no place in this world.

AI can beat the greatest human chess masters easily. People still love to play chess. It might not go this way, but my hope is that AI can wipe the business side of architecture away for people like me. It will probably also create incredibly beautiful architecture. But that won't stop me, like it doesn't stop people from loving to play chess.

One of my clients researches widely, thoroughly and tenaciously. He thinks deeply. My job is to somehow hang a building onto a hook that not only moves, but constantly changes shape. I'm convinced he would be doing this anyway, some people are just creative, but he does have a good reason. And it's a reason that effects all of us without knowing.

My client has been on a journey involuntarily experimenting with various living conditions to see how it effects his health. It began by accident. An undiscovered leak in his bathroom had grown a hidden spewer of airborne toxins — mould spores. Upon moving out he immediately noticed a difference to his health. The Americans were called in. Two amazing experts who know, scientifically, how buildings make us ill. Bill and John. Could they have been called anything else?

I'm designing my client's own home. We've already been out to tender. What do you do when you find that what you've specified will make your client ill?

The Americans want men in spacesuits to clean everything. To create an airtight, sterile environment. None of the new materials can have anything in them that could become food. Getting these materials in the UK is proving to be very difficult. It's looking like my client's family in America will buy the materials there and ship them over. The Americans sympathise with poor me for having to live in such a backwards country suffering its lack of healthy materials. I feel a twinge of shame and say god bless America.

My client then moves into a new build house in Manchester city centre. He has it tested for mould. All clear. After a week his health plummets. The Americans aren't surprised. A lot of the materials we regularly specify are full of toxins. Over time they off gas into the spaces we live and sleep in.

What's kind of interesting is that this process has forced a more rigorously beautiful design. We can't use ply (formaldehyde) or glue in the floor. This has lead to a beautiful solid oak floor screwed down to the joists. Glued floating engineered boards are out. We're going to work with an enlightened carpenter for furniture and kitchens etc. who only uses natural methods and materials. The bathrooms will be made from a material that's inherently antibacterial — the tiles and the sanitary ware. There's a clarity and solidity that comes from cutting out all the unseen nasty padding materials.

And my client will be able to live in a sanctuary where his immune system is not constantly on the back foot. Although I don't appear to suffer from exposure to these toxins, who knows how it might be affecting me? When the project is finished it will be interesting to see if it feels any different. I'm predicting it will.

Tony Trehy recently introduced me to the Artist Marsha McDonald. Marsha will be creating fictional work for a fictional art show, in a fictional art gallery in Tony's fictional world. Marsha once lived in Japan. She said something interesting to me — 'but part of me is in Japan'.

I was very drawn to Japan as an early teenager. The mystical elevation of discipline and technique in all fields. Even the making of a comb transcends into a spiritual practice. Zen made a lot of sense to me. Mainly because I began studying a Japanese form of karate at the age of 13. I still practice it now. The removal of intellectual conscious thought, surrendering to the flow of the ever changing circumstances of combat. I loved the idea that it was even possible to methodically train towards this lack of structure.

It was no surprise to me when I started studying architecture that the same esoteric forces were also alive in contemporary Japanese design. So I sort of know what Marsha meant. But in a different way.

When I visited Japan in 2001 I felt like an alien. I spent a month riding the bullet train looking at contemporary and traditional architecture. I had some sublime experiences. My god — the Ryoan-ji stone garden blew my mind into a million pieces. And Ando's Church of the Light — what is there to say? I also had a profound moment with Monet's waterlilies at Ando's Oyamazaki Museum in Kyoto. A project you can't possibly understand from photos (drawings maybe — if you know drawing).

I didn't penetrate Japanese culture at all. But I do resonate with their Art — Art in its broadest sense encompassing all of existence. Across culture and race. As can be seen in Rothko's apparitions.

I first met Tony Trehy in 2007. I designed a competition winning art gallery as part of a masterplan for Radcliffe town centre in North Manchester in collaboration with Sir David Adjaye and Urbed. Tony was going to be the director of the gallery. Within minutes of our meeting we were talking about the space between objects, proportional systems and grids. All in relation to Ulrich Rückriem's stone sculptures which were going to be placed in and around the new gallery. We spoke each other's language.

Tony is a poet and writer. He was also the director of Bury Art Museum until he retired and moved to Porto in Portugal at the start of the pandemic. He curated his final show in 2018 with myself and artist Sarah Hardacre.

After the show we worked on a book together where Tony wrote poems inspired by my pencil drawings. The brilliant John Rooney designed the book itself.

Tony is about to write another novel. It's called The Museum Quarter. To my utter delight he asked if I would prepare a conceptual sketch for one of the museums in the book. The Art Museum. There's something special about this request. I don't fully know why yet, but I do sense a kind of inevitability.

I designed my first gallery in 1997 on my kitchen table with detail paper and a pencil. Little did I know then that it would be the only one I would build for the next twenty five years and counting. Over those years I've lost count of the many art galleries I've designed for competitions all over the world — they all live in my imagination only. And the one I built — Cube in Manchester — has also gone. It was turned into a bar in 2015!

Designing a fictional gallery for Tony's book has a radically different feeling to a competition. You would think it would be the same or at least similar, but they aren't. The energy of a competition is something like this — me pushing my ideas into the world hoping that people who know nothing about me will choose me over others. Not the purest of processes to put yourself through.

Acknowledgement from someone you look up to with awe and respect is like taking a creative tonic. And I think this building has way more chance of being built in the real world than any of the competitions I've entered. Here's a link to Tony's blog about his book.

This is just a start and I'm still designing on the kitchen table with a pencil and A3 paper, it's a different house. Further development of the spaces will come over time and I will update on here. This is some text I wrote about the fictional gallery —

There is an incision into the surface of the earth — buildings want to have a flat base. To minimise excavation the incision gently slopes up at 2.8 degrees or 1 in 20 — a gentle ramp. At the top of the hill the incision is 10m deep. Opening the surface creates a new space. Life wants to occupy the void. A series of objects are inspired by the fresh geometry — plates, planes and cubic objects. Diverse space is layered into the cut. Inside and outside, object and space blur. Stakes are driven into the wound to keep it from healing shut.

Gallery space, external sculpture gardens, internal sculpture galleries, cafes, auditorium, toilets, offices, storage occupy the line. Entry is made on the snaking road that cuts through the middle of the cut.

This blog post first appeared as a guest blog for Urban Splash.

Beehive Mill is one of the first mills of the Industrial Revolution. Building commenced in 1824 and it is now Grade II star listed. It marks that time when people left their cottages and began working communally away from home. Liberation? Not in those conditions, but the home became home at least.

I still find it mysterious that a building made almost two hundred years ago as a machine for the production of cotton can function so beautifully in a completely different age after another technological revolution with an unforeseen function. It looks obvious to us now, but imagine the building filled with enormous looms being powered by a steam engine. It is equally ironic that most of the tenants fill their spaces with homely objects and their dogs. A sense of domestic space is now conjured by the building when its original purpose was a counter to the cottage. Home, work and freedom reconfigured.

Why do we love these buildings so much — what did those architects and craftspeople actually do and why do we enjoy it on such an instinctive level? How do we unlock that sense of well-being by bringing whatever it was they did forward into our time — to enable people to truly experience all that these buildings give us from a past where different things were valued? I've found it's not enough to just leave buildings as they are. They become pathological relics if left to their own devices. A layer from our time must be added in order to secure the future. Getting the balance of how we intervene is never obvious.

I have observed that people enjoy this building for its authenticity. It expresses its structural components openly with minimal amounts of decoration. It seems to be a deep, instinctive force within us that resonates with materials that speak about their purpose. Brick holds up timber beams that hold up floors. Everything is there for a reason.

My approach is to strip the building down to its primary components — almost like archaeology. Many years of layers were removed to reveal the original wooden flooring. Plasterboard and paint were stripped from walls allowing old bricks to see the light again. And then equally visceral new structures are added. In the reception space the original cobbles were uncovered and a new steel layer intervenes. This new layer folds and bends, forming itself into seating and tables. A strip of light always delineates the gap between the new palimpsest and the old structure.

New functional elements are the places where a different game can start to be played. A cast in-situ concrete wall cuts across the grid at forty five degrees defining separate entrances and happens to be thick enough to house postboxes. A celebration of the everyday in a monumental form. It also happens by chance to be pointing due South — springing from an existing stair geometry.

Toilets are different on each level. A slightly skewed personality to balance the rational repetition of the existing structure. Remember this building was the precursor to the Modern Movement in architecture. A functional machine with a grid of repeating columns. Its functional rationalism attracting like a magnet Sankey's nightclub — one centre of the counterculture — certainly in opposition to 'work'. Nothing on the night was as it seemed — moving artificial light bounced around disparate red and black surfaces.

Every new door is different. The idea here is to reminisce about old doors then slice through the fabric of reality to form new openings to other worlds. Everyday objects are tilted slightly towards the uncanny. One tenant tweeted "We don't say we're going to the loo anymore. We say we're going to Narnia."

A young person's centre in Ancoats Conservation Area.

This project won Manchester Society of Architects Building of the Year, Manchester Chamber of Commerce Building of The Year and Best Innovative Design at the Northern Design Awards. It was published in The Architects Journal. My favourite critique was written by Karen Regn for Manchester Confidential.

My preoccupation with lines that cut across un-unified context can again be seen clearly in this project. This is the text I wrote about the building for the Manchester Society of Architects Awards submission:

At the rite of passage into the adult world teenagers are possessed, particularly viscerally, by the relative world. The body is a vehicle for sensory physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience......From this perspective imagine the profound, mysterious transformation happening at that time. The environment is seen through the vale of visceral fascination which flips from the sublime to the morbid — ecstasy to paralysing pain — excitement to boredom. As extremes of emotion are experienced, so the transition point in the middle is filled with confusion and uncertainty. Feeling........awkward / nothing fits in with demands / wants to change the world / can't bare fixedness / the body is changing at a rate never before seen / new sensory organs come on-line.

Could a building reflect and help reconcile this transformation we all go through? A place they could feel 'at home' in — when the 'home' which they have loved throughout their life suddenly becomes alien — when the one place of security and protection becomes a restriction and the people you love who live there appear all too well defined. A building which offers security and familiarity, domestic in scale, but with unusual freedom — stable and yet free. A building which expresses duality — two opposing forces / geometries. The geometry of the site context containing a rebellious form which cuts through the site in a gesture of defiance. The site context provides a solid, familiarity.....a comforting brick environment with the almost domestic proportions of the Victorian shop and the Coates School building.

The new building follows the existing urban geometry and forms a similarly proportioned three story end elevation to Jersey Street. Although the Pickford Street elevation is 'longer' in scale and more akin to its neighbouring MM2 development, it is still 'polite' and sensibly adheres to its contextual geometry.

Inherent within the placing of the main accommodation at the back of the site, is the lack of a presence on Great Ancoats Street. The solution is to slice a link through the gap between the end of the Coates School and the gable of the MM2 apartment block, terminating at Great Ancoats Street as the point of entrance. The form of this link manifests itself as a 'leaning' wall wedged between the existing brick containment which continues on to slice through the orthogonal main building. In cutting the main building a triangular, double height, vertical space is formed, the stair cascades up the side of the wall completing the journey of circulation, always in relation to this 'rogue' angular gesture. From a conceptual perspective this rogue element will fuel a synergistic relationship with the centre and its not so old, not so square, visitors.

The main accommodation building is orthogonal, rational and simple in its expression, this is to provide an overall stability and will enhance the juxtaposed angular sliced leaning wall. The windows are all orthogonal too, but are spaced in a random way. Again, this is to balance all the right angles, too many aligned grids can feel oppressive.

The people who 'are' 42nd Street have become particularly adept at dealing with the desire to self harm, to cut in order to express or release powerful overwhelming forces. Inherent within this desire is the notion of balancing, curing with like for like, violence cancelled by violence.

Leonard Cohen wrote the lyrics: 'There is a crack in everything — that's how the light gets in'. To release this building from its completeness as a 'box' a 17M long glass slot slices through its core — that's how the light gets in.

Such vulnerability as this must be protected at all costs, it's what keeps us straying too far from ourselves. Four steel Sentinels stand guard, they demand / inspire your attention and clarity of heart, before you pass into this modern manifestation of sacred space.

Once inside be prepared for the unexpected: tapering stairs, angled rooms, leaning walls, a corridor to nowhere — and wardrobes which are passages to the psychologically protected land of one to one therapy.

I recently had a Planning Application rejected. I've had refusals before, but this one was different.

The Application was for an extension to a typical 1930s semidetached house on Bancroft Avenue in Cheadle Hulme. I knew before the application went in that the Planners were going to recommend rejection on the basis of architectural style alone. I had already submitted a Pre-Application and from the feedback had ironed out any easy-to-reject rule breaking. This was going to be about aesthetics.

I asked some friends to write me letters of support. Stephen Hodder, ex president of the RIBA and inaugural winner of the Stirling Prize. David Rudlin who is Chair of the Academy of Urbanism and winner of the 2014 Wolfson Economic Prize — he has also written books about planning and urbanism. Craig Stott — who runs a unit in Architecture at the University of Leeds.

Because of these letters the Planners were forced to go to committee so the Application could be decided by our elected Councillors.

In an unavoidable twist of fate I ended up in A&E on the night of the meeting. This was unfortunate in light of what transpired. The Conservative chair Brian Bagnall set up an argument around what he called a measurable reason for refusal. The opposing Liberals felt the Planning officer Callum Coyne was being far too subjective in his eagerness to refuse. They argued that rejecting an application based purely on personal architectural taste is unfair. Brian Bagnall sidestepped this by inventing a false measurable fact.

The drawings were sat in front of all who attended showing how the new extension was specifically designed so that the eaves of the new aligned with the eaves of the existing house. Despite this Brian managed to convince everyone there that the extension was higher. The Planning officer who knew the truth wholeheartedly confirmed this lie. The debate was over and the vote was to reject.

I did write to the thirteen people in the meeting pointing out the error, but I only received one reply from Councillor Suzanne Wyatt of the Liberal Democrats. She was supportive of the scheme and voted for Planning Approval.

I was expecting a refusal. The position of the Planners was made very clear at the pre-application stage — 'If you don't replicate the building technology used ninety years ago to construct the original house we will refuse'. What I didn't expect was the debate within the councillors meeting for such a small project — it was very clearly about style, about personal opinions. At one point I thought it might even get an approval. Brian put an end to this as described above.

Matt and Sam, my clients, also expected a refusal and we always intended to go to Appeal. But the way it was refused, based on a lie, was infuriating and unfair. And for this to go unacknowledged by the people in the meeting is outrageous.

And why are these people who are the guardians of our built environment not listening to people as knowledgeable and experienced as David Rudlin, Stephen Hodder, Craig Stott and myself? No mention of their support for a tiny house extension came up in the meeting. The young Planner who I would guess is in his late twenties who has never built a building in his life was talked about extensively and his opinions given huge weight. These men are in their fifties and sixties and have a lifetime of building Architecture.

It is now the 19 July 2022, the hottest day on record.

I recently had a coffee with Julia Fawcett OBE, the CEO of The Lowry Theatre in Salford. To my surprise she had read my blog and wondered why I hadn't written anything since 2018. I didn't really have a good answer. When I logged in I found a draft from 2017. Here it is —

A lot of the spiritual traditions say that there is only one thing. That the things we see as separate objects are actually all an expression of one continuous thing. An easy way to visualise this is to think about a computer. Do your files or movies have actual space in them? Are they discrete objects? No — they only exist as code that is arranged in a way that simulates our perception of real space.

If all is one and separation is just an illusion — it must follow that opposites are the same — thing. The space in a video is code. The wall in a video is code. In the real world we think of solid objects in a very different way to space. Enlightened beings tell us they are the same thing. The universe is just one big event.

The thing I have been preoccupied with in Architecture — from the beginning — is the choice to be rational or irrational. My degree thesis was entitled Irrational Rationalism. Do you build from an internal emotional, intuitive place or do you allow the external forces of an evolved system to dictate your work? The rational choice is to build upon what has gone before, to refine details that have stood the test of time in terms of function and aesthetics. It seems irrational to risk building new, untested ideas based on a feeling they might be of more value.

Architecture literally shows us these two opposing forces frozen into its existence. We sense the conservative evolution of structures enabling the building to stand. And we are inspired by the progressive responsive ideas that fit the building into this particular context by resolving an enormous set of unique problems specific to this time, client and culture. All the great works of architecture I've seen feel like worlds or even universes unto themselves. No separate parts. No separation.

I was recently asked to take part in an invited competition, I do quite a lot of them. The site was incredible — it was for a house on Lake Windermere. I didn't win it, but I did realise something which you'd think was obvious: Sites like that don't come around very often. My philosophy has always been that context is always interesting — no matter what. That the smallest, most restricted project can produce anything you want — if you are creative enough. Conditions are seen abstractly and beauty is found everywhere — if you are just open enough to see it. With this site seeing the beauty didn't require any creativity from me. And anyone would be able to see it. Just sitting on the jetty looking out over the lake, hearing the water lapping was a beautiful experience.

And designing the house was a pleasure. It opened a new vein of pure space in me which has sent me down a mine I had unconsciously closed.

The realisation — it's important to work on a site, every now and then, which is truly beautiful — a site where everyone would be in agreement about its beauty. Universal beauty.

The gritty sites I normally deal with do have a beauty, but only through my eyes. My Architecture reflects this — I don't expect anyone else to see it.

As a follow on from a post in December of 2014 — 'We are all children really'. Here is a small selection of some of the things my boys make. Louis is now nearly seven and Albert is nearly four. They have an innocent compulsion to form these creations which seem to explode inside their minds and must come out before and above anything else. They don't dwell on process — they know exactly what needs to appear and move at full steam to make it become. They don't care if what materialises isn't perfect. They know exactly what the essence of the object should be. If this essence doesn't come through they will work tirelessly until it does. And this is what shocks me the most — the essence they must manifest is so intimately personal. It is beyond taste, correctness even reason or logic. It just is there and it must find expression.

My job is to protect and honour. For as long as I can. In them and in myself. The world simultaneously and paradoxically both loves and hates this essence which we all possess. It at once worships the creative genius whilst maliciously brutalising the individual who questions the collective common denominator. There is an invisible wall. On one side we would rather support a bland correctness which suppresses our own, and more importantly our competition's, individuality. For this we pay the ultimate price — to stop you from expressing who you truly are — I must sacrifice my own essence.

On the other side of the wall are people who see through this self-harming delusion and fearlessly express who they really are in the purest way. Once over this wall the suppressed elevate you above themselves applying all the labels we know about.

What I see in my children is life before the fearful delusion of mediation has been learned. When I'm involved in building something with them I sometimes hear myself saying '"that's impossible, said Mr Impossible". I don't want to limit your ideas, but with the tools and technology we are using — it just can't be done'. And yet there hasn't been a time when we haven't achieved whatever it is they have dreamt up.

In Urban Design there is a very useful plan called the Figure Ground Drawing. It's usually black and white and is at the scale of roads and buildings — the city. The buildings are black (figure) and the background or space between is white (ground). This type of drawing shows density to open space ratios as a graphic abstraction. I like this drawing because it represents the physicality of an urban situation from an external perspective. Much like walking around the spaces of a city — the buildings become objects — their interiors separated into another world.

The Euclidean notion of the line has length but zero thickness. This fits well with the Figure Ground Drawing as it could be said the boundary between the black and white is a line without any thickness. It also fits well with our experience of the city as a collection of objects with space between. And it could be stretched further to say an object (a building) has interior space and exterior space — the boundary between the two being a zero thickness Euclidean line.

One of the motivations of Modernist Architecture was to breakdown the idea of internal and external space. Ultimately to express Architecture as the subject rather than the object. Consciousness as the subject. No separation — all as one. Below is a Modernist Figure Ground Drawing.

Space takes a step forward and the figure (object) is transformed into a line. Ironically Euclid's line is manifested by giving it real thickness — the wall. In Classical Architecture the wall doesn't exist — there is only the zero thickness boundary between object and space. And this is the paradox I felt on my first visit to Mies' Barcelona Pavilion. The very act of eliminating the boundary between the inside and out concretised the impenetrable nature of form. Transparency is rendered opaque by removing the illusion of the internal.

My design for the National Wildflower Centre took the impenetrable Miesian wall as figure and found space within its depth. The internal is sculpted out of the very fabric of the illusory line. A return to the Classical. An object with an interior. The zero depth line re-emerges as the boundary around the (Miesian) wall.

It seems there is no way out. The interior is just an illusion.

I constantly wrestle with opposing forces. Through experience I know the bloodier the battle the closer I am to a truth. I know this because any form of fighting can only come from believing in a particular position. And I know even more deeply that particular positions don't exist.

In light of the above it may sound contradictory to say that I know I'm onto something when I have a good battle raging — surely scrapping must be the diametric opposite of what's really happening. But to think of it as a battle is also a fixed position, and we know fixed positions can only take us into battle.

And even knowing all this I still have no choice but to fight. But I do it in the knowledge that the fighting will eventually end and what seemed to be opposing forces will have melted into a flow of continuity, and it was only my fixedness that saw opposition where none existed. The battle is an alert, an indicator something is crumbling within, it relentlessly rages on becoming more devious, more brutal, safe in the knowledge of its own ultimate conclusion — dissipation into light. This is war's purpose in life — to never give up until the bloody end. Beautiful logic.

An example — the perennial issue I enjoy struggling with is the practical tension between archetypes and the desire to be irrational, or even worse, original. Intellectually it's fairly easy to resolve but I do have a trait for rule breaking. I used to think it was cool but now it's just become hindrance to progression, a habit.

Aldo Rossi has an answer — typology in architecture is something that is permanent and exists prior to form. He says dwelling types haven't changed from Antiquity to today. The form has, but the typology persists. Typology is the model and the model shouldn't be copied as there would be no Architecture.

I love all this and it provides a way forward. A way to be creative and at the same time not deny there are archetypal forces which exist and shape what we do, probably more so if we oppose them.

And even saying all the above I'm still at war with it. This is why the Borg say ''Resistance is futile''.

I recently had a discussion with an old friend about Architecture which shifted the balance of my understanding of Mies. More specifically it was about how we appreciate a work of architecture — as an abstract, physical, spatial, object or as an expression of a set of values and beliefs about the world. The discussion went something like this.

As Vitruvius said, Architecture is a political act. The reason Mies is Mies is because his Architecture is fuelled by human issues which go way beyond the surface of his physical constructions. When Mies returned to Germany and built a transparent art gallery in the heartland of what was the centre of Fascism — Berlin — the last things on his mind were 'I' columns and beautiful proportions. Well, not the last, but they were there only as a means to clearly express a political position.

Imagine having to leave your homeland to live in America, for all the reasons we know about. And imagine the immense significance and emotion Mies must have felt when returning after the war to create Architecture which expressed values, not only in opposition to Fascist ideology, but about a modern, transparent world.

It's easy for us now to forget the context and focus on the work of Art. And you have to remember that in Mies' time all the top Architects of the day were masters of proportion and detail. They were grounded / trained in the Beaux Arts tradition. It's only today, when those skills are very rare, that we fetishise Mies — for all the wrong reasons.

That being said, the genius of Mies was to uncover a physical expression for those values which not only goes beyond the proportional skills of his contemporaries, but also brought forth a new form of Architecture.

The lesson here is a reminder not to worship the graven image. Idolatry — it's hard not to become entranced by the object, thinking that's it. And it's even easier to misinterpret Mies' famous sentence — 'God is in the details'.

My five year old son Louis has a new love — modelling. We sit and cut tiny bits of cardboard out, he uses scissors and I a knife. Wheels are made from dowel and sawn up plastic cancer research pens — they're the perfect size. Initially I glued most of the little pieces together, but now he does it himself. Below is one he just made while I wasn't looking, I sawed the pieces of dowel for the wheels and funnels.

Painting is Louis' job. He knows exactly, with absolute unshakable certainty, what colour each engine should be. I bow to his insight. I have my own ideas too, but these are his engines not mine. I struggle with that.

Albert, my two year old is fascinated by them. When I give them him to play with he looks at me in disbelief — 'how is it possible I can play with something which has an intricacy so absent in my other toys?' — this is an expression rather than words. Somehow these small creations have a different value, he sees them as precious. And my reasoning was if he broke them I'd just glue it back together. Interestingly none of them have required any repairs. They disappear too, but then always reappear — they seem to be indestructible and unloseable.

And what a gift for me. Louis dragged me out of bed at 6.30am to build the American style Jupiter engine. There wasn't even time for a coffee — the excitement so great. Such clear, focused, pure enthusiasm and love for a bit of cardboard and glue is literally changing my life.

The first time I saw the Glasgow School of Art was at the age of sixteen in a history of art lecture at Salford Tech given by Peter Pester. He was our Art Historian and, like Travis, was far too accomplished to be teaching at such a place. He was brilliant at conveying the magnificence of a work of art. He was incredibly posh and dapper and he made me feel like a total scally scruff bag. But not in a condescending way, his aim was to empower. He just didn't dumb anything down which reinforced how erudite he was and, in comparison, how much I needed to learn.

As soon as I saw the slides of the intricate lines of stone and wrought iron with small pulses of colour I thought 'now that's it, that's what I want to do'. I can still remember it. I remember the feeling. The stretched verticality emphasised by black lines and spots of glowing paint or coloured glass looked (to me) much like my work at the time — I was fascinated by computer chips and circuit boards and glowing lines, think of Tron.

When I eventually studied there I fell more in love with Mackintosh's other side — the functional side of the school, which in some ways is more impressive: its aim being about conceptual completeness as opposed to the decorative quality of the more extrovert areas. For example, in the basement where not many people went, long cream shelves would kick up, fly over the top of a door, then drop back down and curl into a box. What a way to terminate shelves, most people would just stop. Doorways are usually set into a timber box, a spatial experience, never just a door. And my God — his furniture.

If I ever had a problem with my own work I'd walk around looking to Mackintosh for answers. He never let me down, there was always a spatial sequence, a threshold, a detail or a piece of structure which miraculously dealt with whatever problem it was I was struggling with. And that's why it's a masterpiece — because it transcends style, time and function — forever contemporary and relevant. Every part somehow relates directly to its whole — I'd be stuck with a door problem and the answer would be found on the ceiling. It didn't matter where you looked — magic, mysterious.

This week — the fire, the library and chicken run lost. It's probably hard to fathom for people who haven't been to the Glasgow School of Art, and it's surprised me too, but it feels like such a loss. I know it's only a building, but a huge part of my history is wrapped up in those spaces which taught me so much. Only last week James Reed and I were discussing going up for the degree shows to see our old friend and look at its new neighbour by Steven Holl.

I feel for the students who were setting up their degree shows, again it's difficult to explain the uniqueness of what it means. The degree show openings have an electrified atmosphere.

I imagine the damaged areas will be meticulously recreated, which will be right for people who didn't see the original. It's the only possible response, I'd do the same. But for those of us who spent a lot of time there, it's gone forever. Strangely I wrote a post about this a couple of weeks ago — 'Everybody Knows'. If ever there was a building that generated that mysterious quality — it's the Mac. I doubt even Charles himself could recreate it.

I watched a Peter Eisenman lecture a couple of days ago and he said something which got me thinking. He always does. One of my favourite points from a few years ago was how sculpture and architecture swapped their position somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century. Traditional sculpture had no particular location — set on a plinth, a kind of universal level separated from the ground — ground as earth. Modernism in Architecture transformed the ground into a universal plane, a never-ending grid — a surface which slid under architecture, taking with it the very notion of place — and the edifice of inside and outside. In reverse symmetry Modernism in sculpture saw the plinth evaporate as works became site specific, contextual, even environmental — think of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Sculpture left the Plan.

Anyway back to the present... Eisenman was talking about the importance of the plan and aggregation — how he layers various geometries to form an unorganised whole which critically says something about existence...

About thirty years ago I had a great teacher (there have only been two so far) called Travis Isherwood. God only knows why such an intellect was teaching at Salford Tech. I was only sixteen on a foundation course in art and design. He taught me many things including life drawing and he could actually draw, I mean really draw, or see as he would put it. For his education he'd spent four years life drawing, every day at the Royal Academy. He was about sixty, so traditionally trained. He taught me about Michelangelo and Leonardo and Ingres and Picasso, he knew everything there was to know about Art and History.

He treated me like I was an idiot and would laugh mercilessly at my misunderstanding of everything he would blow my mind with. He wore a black eye patch and would cackle like an old pirate. But I didn't care one bit, all I wanted was access to the secrets of the universe I'd craved all my life. You see he didn't just know about Art, his main interest was Architecture. He'd sit for hours demonstrating how Le Corbusier's Modular proportional system could be used to determine the most functional height for a chair and how it encompassed the Golden Mean, function and aesthetics fused. He told me about the Greeks and the Parthenon and its connection with Le Corbusier. I heard for the first time 'Less is more'. 'My God' I thought, of course 'Less is more'... In the back to backs of Salford Architectural Philosophy isn't really discussed!

The 'Plan is the generator' Travis said, quoting Le Corbusier, this is the sentence I was reminded of from thirty years ago.

This is kind of what Peter Eisenman was saying — although he sees it in a different way which involves lots of French philosophy which is very difficult to define. My simplistic interpretation is that it's something to do with the convention of the plan as an internal logic belonging to the Discipline of Architecture with a capital 'A'. As if the plan is a formal, critical tool which can be used to unlock the meaning of Architecture as a Metaphysical Project — is it really there? and, if so, what is it?

My interpretation at the age of sixteen was given away by my response: 'So do you mean you can feel the plan when walking through a building?' I asked. Eisenman would hate this response. He is at war with Phenomenology. And I think for all the right reasons. Although I love the fetishisation of materiality, as I love Zumthor's work, I still want Architecture to be about the discipline. A culture with History/Time and syntax. It's just too fascinating — to only think about the sensory experience of a building seems far too easy.

And if you look at Jacques Derrida whose Deconstruction philosophy is a part of Eisenman's investigations, his aim was to reveal Truth by deconstructing the very context of a system — the binary oppositions set up to form an idea. Or what some Modern Spiritual thinkers call 'This and that' or 'The relative world of opposites'.

So yes I'm back to the mystery which 'Everybody knows' and can only be not talked about by talking about something. The something is the plan.