Of Dubai and Emo

Its one more year to graduate and when friends and relatives ask me how's "the job market",
"have you seen what they've done in Dubai?"
"oh you can design condos and skyscrapers!"
"its amazing what they've done in Beijing"

usually i just nod and go
"hmmmm nice?"
"ah yes crazy right?"
and then proceed with an uninterested look i usually reserve for golf or sellavision, i don't have much to say after that, i oftens appears as an unenthusiastic nonchalant reply.

The following tries to explain why:

You've seen the stuff Zaha Hadid, Foster, Nouvel , OMA are going to or have done in Dubai
You've already seen Beijing's monsters of new buildings.

Here's something they'll never tell you in their snazzy design briefs.

'We need slaves to build monuments'

And this, my archi peeps, doesn't just happen in Dubai or China but also in Singapore. While we sit on our comfy little white desk, decked in black, royskopp playing in background as you flip thru *wallpaper and SA, remember who's standing under the 10 tonne precast panel you just detailed

The only thing that protects him is a 5 dollar yellow hard hat, two hooks and an almost non existent construction workers union.

People still die in construction sites

Remember that for every extra floor you add to the skyscraper, your putting the life of that construction worker at risk, the guy whom you'll probably never know the name of unless something happened to him.

All we know is that if UHU fails to connect that cardboard beam to the column, we just use stronger glue.

The people you indirectly hired to build that community centre with a cool pub on the roof with the surreal looking garden in mid floor (with gym), is probably hesitant to return home because he can't afford to and has to find a new job and a new place to live in. Yes we still have illegal construction workers (see point 5) and squatters in Singapore.

Learning with building site managers and watching the construction workers take pride in their work in Melbourne, revealed to me something i never even bothered about back in architecture school. Safety regulations exist, sequencing, weightage, erection process, crane operation should never be "see engineers detail". Construction workers have a minimum wage, are covered by insurance and most importantly are given credit for their hard work.

Learn construction sequence in live scale...not just construction detailing.
Remember the craftsman not just the craftsmanship.
You don't really own the building and don't even think that you deserve 10% of the total cost
While you sit there doodling on trace, someone out there is an ocean's distance away from home working longer hours than you
He's in steel toe cap boots and a hardhat under the hot sun
attaching that line you just drew to the other line you just traced over
with a blow torch he just figured out how to operate two months ago
most probably dangling 10 floors above ground level.

Its not something that can be solved overnight. Understand that the situation is way more complex than i have put it in, but at least give some thought to reality of it all.

Yes reality, the one thing all architects pretend they have a full understanding of but fail to fully grasp . As long as we believe that design is EVERYTHING we'll never get out the bottom of the well that modernism + postmodernism + blob architecture + high tech movement have dug. It's so deep we never bothered trying to get out.

And if you think the food scare in China was bad, wait till you read about their construction industry.......just wait (think white rabbit in epic proportions)

Architects can't solve everything, BUT boy did we created helluva lotta problems.

so yes I'm not exactly proud of belonging to the generation that saw the rise of the Burj, Bird's Nest, the Sail or the next Platinum, Greenstar, Leed award winning fail building (they still are not and never will reach net-zero status). Architecture in the near future is going to be like bad 90s music, trashy, decked out in flashy patterns and very baggy pants. All i want to be is that self conflicted outsider who won't get caught up with nonsensical superficial super mega (insert next level of superlative) structure and be able to look back and perhaps say "...well at least you didn't try to kill/enslave/underpay anyone"

UHU by the way has the strength of a full strength continuous fillet weld at 1:100 scale. I heard there are students using superglue at least ten times stronger than that.