#29 - Eliot Postma

0:00Eliot Postma:Right, Eliot Postma, welcome to the podcast. Could you give everybody an idea of who you are, who you work for, and the campaign, particularly the Humanised campaign, that you're involved with? Sure. Well, thanks for having me on, Bruce. My name is Eliot Postma. I'm an architect who has been working with Heatherwick Studio here in Kings Cross in London for the last 15, 16 years. um so I'm a partner and group leader here um and so my my role over that time has kind of changed when I joined the studio we were a team of around 25 designers and we're now a studio of about 250 260 um and you might be aware Thomas Heatherwick the the founder of the studio back in 1994 he's not actually a an architect himself and so we're quite a broad mix of different designers in the studio although I did study architecture we've got you know vehicle designers model makers fashion designers product designers lots of different design disciplines that all work on our projects that that span architecture furniture um the Olympic cauldron uh yeah all sorts yeah it's a pretty broad studio isn't it definitely it is it is and I think yeah that's part of the reason that I I've loved working here and continue to love working here is um it's given me access I'm as an architect I have been able to work on a whole range of a very very different design problems um and that's always fun kind of never knowing what's going to come through the door next yeah so on the humanized campaign which is the main reason I wanted to talk to you tell us a bit about what the humanized campaign is or how it started and what its sort of general messages are sure so we've actually just hit our second birthday of the humanize campaign um and so it's a campaign that's been launched off the back of a book that thomas and the studio put out um a couple of years ago called humanize um and it's essentially a reaction to our belief and really in a sense this is the core belief that has driven all of our design work over the last 30 years 32 years but we haven't ever managed to quite articulate it and this uh the book was really um thomas's chance to try and really put that in a concrete way on paper um and so it's a a feeling that over the last 70 maybe a little bit more years or so there's been a tendency in our towns and cities around the world i would always almost say like a quiet kind of creeping catastrophe really with our urban environments where they have tended to become flatter colder more soulless and the word that Thomas uses a lot in the book is just fundamentally more boring um and this is a problem that we think the public know it's one of those problems when you say it to someone they're like yeah yeah absolutely I see that but nobody feels empowered to talk about and there is absolutely no public conversation about the impact that our urban environments have on our health, the planet's health.

3:15And so the book and the campaign and the movement really isn't about, it's not a question of niceness or even particularly about someone's design taste at all. It's much more about actually, we believe that this tendency in our towns and cities around the world is having a really detrimental impact on our health on our well-being and ultimately for for the planet um so if i just touch on those two things on there there is now and i i listened to a couple of your podcast episodes i know you spoke with cleo valentine for example we're at a really exciting time in um in the world of architectural design that neuroscientists are starting to get interested in this question of how does detail complexity and form impact our mental health and they're starting to now be like a groundswell of evidence base of something that we have felt instinctively to be true that that actually when you strip out the detail and complexity in the world around you um it can have a really detrimental impact on how you feel about a place how you feel about yourself and the joy and energy that you put into your life as you move through those spaces.

4:38And so that's one side. And then the other side is about the planet. And we really believe that if people don't connect with their built environment and the buildings around them, we're not going to care about them enough. We're not going to love them enough to want to adapt them and change them over time and we're really seeing that borne out now in you know in the UK the average life expectancy for want of a better phrase for a commercial building is 40 years and that's worse in other parts of the world in Japan for a residential building I think it's 28 years and so we can't be going on this cycle of building these buildings that don't connect with us and then demolishing them after 30 40 years only to build them again is you know it's a it's a catastrophe for for the planet and for the climate and the construction industry's kind of really well shrouded secret is what a big contributor it is to climate change and we have a conversation about fast fashion and we have a conversation about um flying too much but they pale into insignificance in comparison to the scale of the impact of climate change that construction has.

5:59And, yeah, this is something that isn't a UK thing. This is something we're seeing all over the world as as that sort of more generic globalised architecture is is proliferating in sort of all the countries with which we work.

6:14Eliot Postma:yeah i think it's so first of all i think the fact that the campaign even exists at all is brilliant like the the fact that you guys have launched this uh with sort of thomas's public profile and and sort of his name behind it and all this kind of thing is fantastic and it's sort of having this sort of general message with the backing of your studio and with the publicity you can put forward to it is great. Some of the subtleties of it I'm curious about. So, for example, the choice of the word boring is an interesting one to me because I think that's the wrong word. Because I would suggest there are plenty of very good for your mental health, interesting, beautiful places that could also be described as quite boring.

7:01Eliot Postma:Some of the, I don't know, you could even say parts of Bath are like that. that it's not a particularly interesting form of architecture it's pretty monotonous or you could i don't know a typical vernacular environment of any sort that people like say um and i'm interested how how you sort of think in terms of what the messaging you're trying to put across and who you're aiming it towards are you aiming this towards architects and practitioners to change the way they're designing? Are you aiming it towards politicians to change the legislation around building, building regulations, planning law, that kind of thing?

7:43Eliot Postma:Are you aiming it towards developers saying, these are the kind of things you should be thinking about when you're building? Where are you thinking the messaging is being aimed? Because I think that affects the kinds of arguments that you need to be making in the campaign and how effective they are. It depends on who you're aiming them to. Yeah. So I'm glad you asked that because I probably should have brought it up at the start. So the first page of the book is the book is dedicated to the passerby. And so the campaign. I should say I have the book here. Yeah. OK, there you go. Worth a read, anybody.

8:20The campaign and the book are very specifically targeting the public. We want to be having a public conversation about this. we're not trying to specifically target and change the mind of the way that architects are designing although we hope they become part of the conversation we believe that for there to be a big societal change this message has got to start bubbling up from the public and there needs to be a public conversation you know we we sometimes equate this to um what's happened about food you know school meals that that jamie oliver managed to very successfully start a really broad public conversation about the nutritional value of our school lunches that were being given to our to our kids over the last 15 20 years and we often i often feel that you know politicians in some ways follow like they will listen to and respond to what the zeitgeist is and what the public sentiment is and likewise developers and the products that they're putting out there if there isn't a the public demanding something different they will kind of continue with the path of least resistance which is what they're which is continuing to do what they do now so yeah we're very very clear about wanting to talk to the public and hopefully get the public talking more about this as a as a real societal issue um and i also just to touch on the word boring is something that that we and i know thomas agonized over of like what is the right word for this um and we wanted it to be something that what really clearly wasn't about i wanted to stay away from like beauty or the idea of it being about taste and it just being much more about the fundamentals of visual complexity and the lack the lack of it and so although areas of bath might have repetition um i don't know which particular bits you're talking about but if they are you know pre-1900 or early turn of the century i'm sure they'll have visual complexity within them and there might be repetition of that visual complexity but it's still there and for us i guess that makes them gives them something to catch your eye a reason for your eye to linger and look for a a little bit longer at something which i guess was where we were trying to find that balance of what is boring and not boring

10:50Eliot Postma:um i think from the other from the other side of perhaps a better way of sort of making that point from my end is there are plenty of things that are definitely not boring that are horrifically ugly that 99 of the public despise i most brutalism let's be honest yeah um and probably most sort of commercial modernist tower blocks glass plate plate glass tower blocks that kind of thing those are well maybe the tower blocks are boring but the the brutalist buildings are definitely not boring but a lot of people would say that is absolutely horrific why the hell did you build that that's awful so i mean the sort of i'm sort of taking the yeah the argument to its logical conclusion that you could end up arguing effectively in favor of a sort of Las Vegas style um built environment where you've got all like dozens and dozens of really interesting buildings some of which are beautiful some of which are horrifically ugly and there's sort of this smorgasbord of interesting messiness yeah that so that that's partly why I think the word boring is not the right word that you that you're you've got to take into account the fact that some of the buildings that are really interesting are horrifically ugly.

12:11Eliot Postma:And me and you as architects might think, oh, that's interesting. Oh, what a great building. I love the way they've done all that kind of stuff. But a member of the public comes along and says, what on earth is that? That's awful. Yeah. I mean, so to take brutalism, there are also members of the public that love it because it's not boring. And so, you know, there are people that are very fond of London's sort of brutalist architecture whether it's the barbican probably a lot of them are architects and designers but not all of them and i would say that's because it's not boring but at least it it does uh trigger an emotion in somebody for a lot of people that's i don't like it but also for some people it's actually no that's really interesting it's it's different it's something um but just your point about the sort of the las vegas style we're also the the campaign isn't trying to advocate that every building needs to shout and be formally crazy.

13:05Or like I said, whether it's a crescent in Bath or the Victorians were brilliant at it, like mass producing terrace after terrace after terrace of houses that were the background of people's lives. They're not shouting. They're not stand out. But they all have visual complexity, a richness and a detail to them that they're you know, is a reason why they're still standing and that people still today, even architects and designers still today, prioritise trying to live in a Victorian or Georgian house over a modern new build. Not all of them, of course, but largely. And I think that a lot of that comes down to that care and craft and detail that was put into those buildings.

13:55but it's not about them being some crazy amazing shape like it's not every building doesn't have to be the Guggenheim and then suddenly it is like Las Vegas it's just like oh my god you need the counterpoint and we often say that if everybody was building you know unbelievable crazy organic you know nature inspired architecture we would probably be the first ones then to try and create a gorgeously crafted cube that still had some detail and richness to it but was a counterpoint to everything else. So, yeah, again, it's not about trying to prescribe a way to design. It's trying to advocate for complexity and detail.

14:39Eliot Postma:Yeah, I think that visual complexity and complexity generally is really the key to this. But I'm interested, because it's a campaign that you've launched, I'm interested in any campaign has to have an idea of what the mechanisms are at the end. What's the mechanism by which change will come about? Because I would love to have sort of people rioting on the streets saying, we demand beautiful architecture or we demand not boring architecture in your words, which would be wonderful. And I'm sure lots of people would, if asked, agree with a lot of what it is that you're saying and a lot of the same things that I agree with your campaign.

15:19Eliot Postma:But I'm interested in sort of how that, how does that translate into actual change? and so say you get loads of people say your campaign is amazingly successful and the Humanized campaign gets loads of support and the BBC sound series that Thomas is doing at the moment is loads of traction and loads of downloads and people say yeah yeah we want more interesting buildings then what? what happens next? because there has to be a mechanism and the mechanism at the moment is through procurement, it's through developers, it's through the architects who design for those developers it's through the regulations that control what those architects can design for those developers as you know i'm sure those things aren't necessarily going to change because of a strong public set of public opinions unless those public opinions directly lead to politicians changing those things which is a very high bar very high bar so how do you imagine that sort of going forward what's what's your sort of perfect scenario with the with the humanized campaign in terms of success?

16:24That would be the perfect scenario that people, well, first of all, the campaign continues building on the momentum that it has. So we've got, so as I said, we've just turned two as a campaign. We've got things happening like you might have seen bland castles happening in Morecambe, which was kind of like a little event where we created a series, some artists created a series of sandcastles, but made them look like the blandest of modernist architecture to try and get some people talking about that the problem and then we've got coming up at the in a month's time Thomas is the director of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture in Korea and so we've got you know a brilliant opportunity there where the the theme of the entire biennale is humanize.

17:17And so there's a real opportunity to start a big international conversation there around this topic. So we think we are starting to gain traction. The campaign is starting to gain traction. And there's just sort of a general feeling that over the last two years, aside from the campaign, that it is becoming a little bit more of a topic of conversation. And so we just want that to build. And there's a belief that if that does build and uh that you know we're engaging with politicians in seoul we're engaging with um uh politicians and and regulators but also developers about suggestions that you know we've got a lot of developers that come to us and say this is great like how do we like how do we turn this into something tangible how does this become part of our our methodology of how we deliver buildings in the future.

18:11And so we've been working on a set of humanized principles that developers can have in their mind when they're talking with architects, but also for themselves when they're looking at developments. And so the hope is it with enough public momentum and enough of a conversation around this as a genuine issue and a, like something that genuinely is important for the health and well-being of our cities around the world that policymakers developers will start to feel that and so yes absolutely start to hopefully change policy and developers start to expect more something different we've we've spoken a lot about it has worked on the with the climate crisis like the developers now absolutely understand we call it the green premium that absolutely it impacts their ability to um lease buildings if the company that's going to be in it can't be talking about the credentials of that building from as part of their um uh sustainability goals as an organization and so developers absolutely are seeing that rents can be directly impacted depending on how well a building performs and so there's a hope that we something like the human premium could be applied like the green premium that people start to understand that actually there's a long-term economic value to places that are loved that people want to spend time that there's absolutely an economic upside to building some of these principles into places and um and so it starts to sort of roll out from there but we don't have a yeah that and in a way it's not for the studio to do it the campaign is now it's out there it's kind of taking on a bit of a life of its own and so we don't have some like master plan of how this all exactly has to work out and at the moment it's still the stage of just continuing to push that conversation and talk to as many developers and policy makers as we can and to as many members of the public as we can through mediums like this.

20:19Eliot Postma:Yeah. Have you engaged with architectural education at all with the campaign or have they sort of maintained their little silo? No, we have absolutely. So we've got actually two of our humanized partners, our education institutions, so Loughborough University and the architecture course there are one of the humanized partners. We also have a partner in South America. um there's a uh a university called ean um and they're starting a new design school but they're actually calling the design school humanize and so they want to bake some of the humanized principles into their um uh their curriculum and the way that they uh they're going to teach design and not not just architecture but just design more um holistically um and again that you know that's something that is they're just sort of taking that forward and likewise at Loughborough University I think they're now into their second year of baking some of those humanized learnings and principles into their their curriculum and then as we release so we're working with a so what you had Cleo on so Cleo is one of the scientists that's doing some really amazing groundbreaking work trying to build this scientific evidence base to back up this idea for our need for visual complexity and a direct link to health outcomes.

21:44And there's a number of different scientists working on it. And so we're actually, as part of the Sol Biennale, we're going to launch the first kind of global review of all of the scientific evidence that's out there that supports this theory. And so I think there's a really good base now of the start of evidence, some of which the Humanised Campaign has sponsored and lots that it hasn't, that we're going to launch in Seoul that people can then start to understand a little bit better.

22:17Eliot Postma:Yeah, I think that is absolutely key. Having a proper scientific literature base that actually shows the relevant evidence and the mechanisms involved as well, especially around neuropsychology and neurology not just sort of pure psychology and reported uh statistics or reported results that makes a massive difference i think um the challenge of course is getting the architectural establishment being an arts-based thing to take scientific literature a to be able to understand it when they read it and b to take it seriously and incorporate it into their work um i mean i've skirted around this uh word beauty for a while you you and the campaign seem very keen to avoid the word beauty why is that so your you your episode i can't remember what it was called was it called the architecture of beauty you did an episode the way you basically spoke about this a little bit um yeah maybe i've talked about it many times and you had a a very good quote in there which i wish i could remember off the top of my head where you spoke about what like that what happens to an architect that's sort of cast aside from the architectural industry if they were to dare utter the word beauty or ornament or decoration um and so there's a huge hang-up in the industry post-modernism you know ornament is a crime all those like those are made like really powerful modernist manifesto points form follows function those those things that you know in a lot of ways like the campaign we believe by the way that form follows function and that's a really important part of designing and the design process but the campaign is all about the fact that emotion is a function arguably the most critical function of architecture and that was sort of missed when we when you think about form follows function a lot of it is thinking about kind of the science and the engineering side of it but there's also the people and the human side of that and if you're not responding to someone's emotion then functionally your building is not performing and so for us we sort of nod yep form follows function but emotion is a function too and we have to have to focus on that um so yeah we have knowing that sort of history and the of of the sensitivity around beauty and the architecture stuff and we did deliberately stay away from it but also because we don't want to be trying to prescribe an aesthetic we don't want to be being the arbiter of what beauty is because it's so subjective and we would love to be able to lean more into the scientific evidence base and that's why we did lead to lean on this word boring and the idea of visual complexity because it's something that's measurable and you can you can measure the visual complexity in one facade versus another um and then we believe that there's absolutely a relationship between that and emotion um you know like the i don't know the last time that you went and touched a building but i can imagine if you did it would have been one that was of a probably a natural material probably had an interesting form that you wanted to touch definitely I would have thought had some detail to it that meant you bothered to walk up to the facade of it I don't think I've ever seen anybody walking past you know either a flat metal panel facade or glass facade and being like oh let me just run my hand against that and see how it feels um so yeah uh we were trying to stay away from the subjective and try and move the conversation into that more scientific evidence base and really didn't want to be saying like this is how you should design buildings from a taste point of view it was like please just include more more complexity uh and visual richness and detail in in whatever you're doing particularly at the ground where people walk past it um yeah well excuse me i agree with all of that except for the part that beauty is subjective okay i think the the the visual complexity the intricacy the scaling laws the sort of fractal geometry all those sorts of things that is the definition of beauty and can be measured scientifically and as the evidence comes out and more and more neuropsychological evidence comes through we'll be getting more and more data as to exactly what that definition is and exactly which bits sort of form what people like and appreciate.

27:02Eliot Postma:And that is, in effect, the definition of what beauty is. And yes, within that, there will always be an element of subjectivity and taste in terms of given two things of the same high level of visual complexity, say, but of different styles, one person might prefer one to another. But that fundamental property that those two things share of a certain amount, say of visual complexity is a measurable and scientific thing and it is that that is the definition of beauty effectively.

27:34I don't necessarily disagree with that but I just could imagine that you could still take those essentially like it's the the laws of the rules of nature in a lot of ways like a lot of those mathematical ratios that we've come the eye has come to find beautiful or draws our attention anyway absolutely our patterns and repetitions that are found in nature i just wonder if you could still take all of those you could still take all of those rules but you could apply them in a way that still manifested in something that you found profoundly ugly and i think you might be able to and that's when it becomes really

28:14Eliot Postma:difficult then um well i just to jump in on that i've always thought that about the um you know the sort of hyper organicist almost alien like architecture the kind of thing you get in a sort of sci-fi film of yeah sort of weirdly grotesque kind of uh forms and things which are visually complex have a lot of scaling laws in them arguably they don't have any order or set form of order that's appreciable but those obviously a lot of people i don't know you but i find quite ugly interesting certainly but ugly um and that probably would fit that kind of that kind of definition yeah so it's i guess it was this we wanted to try and stay away from this debate within the campaign because it's it's really hard to pin down and at the moment there is a growing evidence-based that will start to help us define what is important about visual complexity repetition patterns geometry but it's so early that to be able to sort of call out like this is beautiful and this isn't i think we're still a long way from that if we ever get there um yeah because there still are levels of subjectivity to it so i don't i don't fully agree that it's not subjective um but i do agree that there are within it there are rule sets that can help you find beauty i don't know that they necessarily automatically equal it well i think a good um a good comparison i use is sort of in terms of human beauty like there are objectively measurable standards of human beauty that exist everyone knows that that's true um and it can be measured scientifically in terms of ratios and all this kind of thing and proportion and that kind of stuff of the human body but obviously there is a range that some people find attractive and other people find attractive.

30:11Eliot Postma:And that's quite a wide range. But that doesn't mean that the average is not still true. So I think the same thing will probably apply to buildings. That whilst there's a significant range in what people find beautiful, there is a clear and demonstrable average of what people like. And I'd argue that exists already in terms of the kinds of buildings that people like. It's just we haven't got the scientific evidence to show what the properties are exactly to demonstrate that yet. So, yes, but also no, because so there was a brilliant photographer did a brilliant exercise. So there's absolutely there's like the ratios, proportions of the human face, like distance between the eyes and distance between the top of the lip and the nose and those things that have been quantified as whatever.

31:04Yeah. Metrics that can help us define what a human, beautiful human face is. um but interestingly it also needs deviation from that to be considered beautiful so a photographer did a brilliant exercise where they found uh people with very beautifully proportioned faces and then they mirrored them they mirrored the face so that it was perfect there was absolutely no deviation in eye height width of nose mouth and everybody looks like an alien like it looks so weird and in no way is it beautiful anymore because it's lost something that is that like level of imperfection that that clearly our eye needs to see to understand that it's true and natural and real and so yeah it's interesting somehow the maths falls apart and yeah it needs that like slight nuance um yeah no i definitely agree i'm not sure how that relates to buildings

32:05Eliot Postma:by the way but yeah no i do i know what you mean there is a level of imperfection and um i mean the analogy could maybe be with textures and materiality that that sort of imperfection of materials and roughness yeah is um and the variation within materials is something that people really like like i really love the um the project you did in uh china where was it she in shian with the was it dragon skin is what you called it so dragon skin was actually what we called the um the rooftop of the google project in dragon scale but shian was the ceramic tile so yeah that's what i mean ceramic tables yeah like that kind of variation of imperfection of something really interesting that i think that's potentially where people sort of appreciate that maybe um and in sort of mixture of sort of ornament and things like that as well and the sort of variation in ornament that you get in maybe in historical buildings where it's not symmetrical even if the whole building is symmetrical yeah yeah yeah um on your own practices work how are you applying the principles of the humanized campaign in terms of the practices work moving forward and in current projects um so yeah that's a very good question surprisingly hard to articulate but i'll give it a go so like I guess the first point is that idea of emotion as a function that I, we spoke about a moment ago.

33:35That's like a thread that carries across all of our work, like the, whether it's architecture, whether it's furniture, whether it's vehicle design that we try to design from the point of view of the user and put ourself in the position of, okay, you're interacting with these buildings, which are the bits that you're going to care about most? and how do we create something ultimately there's going to be loved for the next hundred the next two hundred the next thousand years hopefully and what are the little details that we need to put in it what are those touch points where you will run your hand across it what is the imperfection in the material that means that it gives the eye something back so that ceramic glaze has got almost like an infinite quality to it like you can keep looking at it and continue to find something new and another detail and another layer within it um and so how do we bring that level of of interest into our designs um and so we talk about that so let's take the olympia project for example which we're finishing at the beginning of next year so it's a project in kensington in in london um that we've been working on since back in 2017 so i don't know if you know the exhibition halls in London, Kensington Olympia.

34:55They're these kind of amazing Victorian exhibition halls that date back to like 1886. The first hall called Grand Hall was built and over time additions were built around it. And there's this 14 acre site right by Kensington's train station on Hammersmith Road. And it's this 14 acre site and the original Victorian buildings became kind of fossilized with all of these new additions around them and MEP on top of them and it became this one enormous lump within West London that if you didn't have a lanyard like a ticket to get into the double glazing show that might be on it really was just like this big fortress this 14 acre block that just gave you nothing and even had of these gorgeous Victorian facades, like modern, like port-a-cabin, like entrance conditions that completely covered them up.

35:57And so when we came to the site working with a developer called UCapital, the question was like, how do we open this back up to the public so that they can re-engage with it in a way that harks back to the history of the site? I mean, this was an amazing place that had, you know, Jimi Hendrix played there. they had amazing like boxing fights there's it was like the horse show the motor show like it was this incredible place of like innovation and showcase and gathering of people and so wanting to bring a little bit of that back so that connection with the buildings back um and so for us it was just about we've got to somehow allow the public through this 14 acre block but you still need like an exhibition business that works which needs an enormous almost lateral floor plate at the ground.

36:47And so we sort of created this route that took you up, a public street that takes you up onto the shoulders of the Victorian buildings, and like through the heart of the site and back down again, so that you can, the public can engage at a closer level with these buildings, even if they don't have a ticket to go in. And then as we're designing, we think about three scales. We call it city, street, and door. if you've read Humanites, it's in the book. And so with all of our projects, we think of the architectural projects, we think about those three scales. So when you think about the massing of Olympia, like how does it have some presence for the city?

37:30And we have quite a tall commercial building in the centre of the site. And rather than it being a singular block, it sort of steps up both for rights of light down to the street below, but also just in elevation to create a form that's that gives has like some slight nod to the original victorian barrel vaulted arches it's not like a flat top thing it has like a a slight sense of a curve on that skyline city view scale so there is just some form there in addition to the kind of the additional arch that we put in that's sort of a contemporary interpretation of the original two victorian arches um and then at the at the street scale it was very much about like we've got these gorgeous Victorian buildings that have just been like covered up with all of this just get it out of the way just like get it out the way restore the Victorian buildings and we're very lucky working with an existing asset like that that the street distance it's got that visual complexity and richness and we just wanted to make sure that any new bits that we put in had a nod to that in them and the thing for us in that project was the Grand Hall has got this beautiful pleated glazing on the front elevation of the barrel vault.

38:44It's a pretty amazing piece of Victorian engineering, very, very delicate. And so that sort of pleated glass motif is sort of a nod that we brought to all of the new buildings in different ways. So the big commercial building has got pleated glass facade rather than just flat glass. The new glass canopy we put over again is sort of like pleated, almost like a shuttlecock. And even the new theatre building has got, uses almost like curtains being pulled back. It is metal panelling, but it's kind of pleated in a way as if you're sort of pulling the curtains aside and revealing what's inside. And then just finally, the door distance.

39:25in all of our projects we look for opportunities thinking through like how which part of a building is someone going to touch and why and what's it going to give back to them um and so there are you know several moments here where again we've got we're lucky that the grounds scene has got that victorian detail but nonetheless there are moments where where we want to make sure that when you're walking up to the new modern entrance something like the door handle like how does that feel special what material is it has it got like an interesting detail to it there's a nod again to the historic architecture in a way or something that we we've we've sort of found the power of a lot is lift buttons too but that's one of the few bits of a building that people literally do go and touch and so out in the public realm there's a public lift that gets you up to that elevated platform and that button there's like a special moment that's um that's cast metal and something that you want to touch and enjoy and so trying to give that moment of joy and make someone smile hopefully when they when they come up close to the building um so yeah those different scales city street door are really really important in in all of our projects and how we sort of think through that process and that's a big sort of part of the almost like assessment criteria internally as we're designing like are we getting those three scales right and we actually start the other way around in terms of when we assess it it's like most important is the door are we getting that right does it have the detail for the street you can then be a bit more forgiving at the street distance and you can be even more forgiving at the city distance um and that's how we sort of try and make sure we're living up to the principles of humanize in our um in our buildings um and then finally it's it's around also just around public conversation with we're trying to start this public conversation how are we meaningfully engaging the public in our design processes so again I mean Olympia was you know in the UK the engagement with the public during the planning process is sort of an important part that's prescribed that you have to do and so how we were making that engaging and how was it something that was happening with frequency throughout the duration of construction um still going on now there are residence evenings where people come around and talk about what they're liking what they're seeing things that um uh have been challenging for them and the client's been really good about continuing that conversation going from the earliest design all the way through to today um and yeah so what

42:11Eliot Postma:what uh in what ways has the practice's work actually sort of changed in its sort of design philosophy if at all because of the sort of principles of the campaign or have they sort of always been embedded in the work that's been done by the practice anyway and nothing's changed or have there actually been changes where you think okay we did this in the past maybe that wasn't the best way we're going to do it differently in the future no of course we we've learned a huge huge amount over the last 30 years so our but the essence of our the design philosophy of how we approach our our projects as i said at the start in a way the book was was trying to articulate why we design the way we do and so in a way we haven't upended our process at all like We feel that our historic projects that were delivered way before humanized still live up to those humanized principles.

43:06And so it's been it's been part of our design dialogue and the way that we talk about our design. We are just now more articulate and we're able to design. You know, we're a growing studio. As people join, we're much more able to clearly explain to them. These are our design values. This is how we approach design problems. this is the way that we see see the world and sort of the bigger problems that we how we want to address those um so we're we're better at explaining it and being able to more quickly uh onboard people into the way that we we want to approach design problems are you finding it

43:45Eliot Postma:good and easy with with clients to sort of bring them around or are they are there particular points where you're trying to push a certain principle and the client's saying no that's i just i either don't agree or i agree but i can't afford it and it doesn't fit on my bottom line kind of thing um look every project every project has its economic pressures every project goes through value engineering and you have to make tough decisions as to what stays and what doesn't So there's always those pressures. I would say I've found it very helpful in that we've really put our head above the parapet.

44:22It's very out there. And so now almost every single client we work with has some sense that we're engaged in this campaign. um so and it's also then a very useful tool to be able to explain to them before we start doing any work together this is how we're going to come at the problem and it's helpful in that if they've got a very very fundamentally different point of view one they might not be coming to us two we can talk it out before we start anything as like this is the way we would like to see it go so actually in that sense it's been really helpful for us um yeah in people understanding the way that we think before we've started a project and certainly it's there have been developers that have come to us that have read the book and been like yeah i would love to figure out how we we can move towards this sort of radically more more joyful soulful world that we might be talking about and yeah come to us like let's talk about how we might make that happen together um but it's each probably each project is tough and it's tough to to deliver on this because it it often does come with a small cost premium um there is a there's an economic reason why buildings have become stripped back and that you're absolutely trying to minimize surface area and reduce ornament and visual complexity because it does come with more material and more surface that you have to construct.

46:02And so, yeah, there's absolutely an economic factor here, but one that, yeah, we try and work within those parameters. Yeah.

46:11Eliot Postma:I think personally, I think, or I'm increasingly thinking that the only ways to solve this is a combination of a bit of legislative change, either within the building regulations or the planning laws around visual complexity and i think some kind of metric that measures visual complexity that can be treated like a u value effectively um but also showing developers ways or developers who already believe in the the philosophy showing them practical ways to actually do interesting visually complex interesting things at not very much or no additional cost yeah um and as a sort as a developer myself i'm now sort of going across coming across those challenges where you're trying to balance cost with the bottom line with the desire to do something really interesting um so yeah i don't know what you think about that about whether it's what the balance is going to have to be um so yeah we would so we're right now starting to uh work on a few projects that are really like really super constrained um and trying to work out how we can uh manifest those principles in some of the most economically constrained typologies whether that is you know something even like affordable housing like can can you still make a step change towards more visual complexity something that that people connect with and feel is more cared for and loved without massively moving the needle of the cost and it's absolutely a huge challenge like huge huge challenge but one that we we're starting projects now that are trying to look at that but also there are you know there are lots of other architects out there doing it and there are really good examples of affordable housing around the UK and around the world that are like orders of magnitude better than the norm and with a bit more care design ingenuity haven't ended up costing more you know built by housing associations and others and so it can be done it can be done and we just need a bigger and bigger evidence base of more and more projects that are doing it to point to developers towards and say here look they did it there it's been done here and and figure out like what the are the things we can learn from each of those projects is there sort of a toolkit is there a pattern book is there a something that can that can help make that uh applicable at like a larger and larger scale yeah no i think you guys i think as a sort of multidisciplinary studio are very well placed to potentially even put products to the market that are licensed i guess that are effectively things you could pick off the shelf as a developer either as a residential commercial whatever and say okay here's a really cool product or a molding or a piece of ceramics or a brick assembly or whatever it is here's something i can pick off the shelf and apply it to my building and know it's going to work and know it's been tested and know it's all fire rated all this kind of stuff yeah and say okay this has worked here's a one-to-one mock-up of it i'm going to apply it cost this much per square meter um and know that that's going to sort of immediately enhance the building without me having to start from scratch effectively every single time yeah i i mean it's such a i mean it's a huge it's a huge topic and i mean you look back to the georgian and victorian pattern books house builders then what you know they were literally picking uh they were picking from a kit they were like yeah i want that type of window with that kind of reveal i want that cornicing and this that and just put it all together and in a way it was it was more like a jigsaw puzzle and it all being churned out and tried and tested and and there is no modern equivalent to that but there could be there absolutely could be one that i mean i guess the modern equivalent now is you know you have the the window manufacturer that's got their profiles and yeah they do have like set products that you know and understand but i guess you need to go a little bit bigger than just the component scale to something that could deliver on a contemporary pattern book, but with the philosophy of visual complexity in it.

50:55And it would be so powerful, it would be so, so powerful for developers to be able to look at that and yes, have a good understanding of the cost of it and have some certainty as to what they were going to build. Yeah, it's not here yet. And who knows? yeah i think there's we're sort of missing a whole set of technical patterns that fit around