Tectonics and History. A Conversation with Amin Taha, by Cristina Díaz Moreno & Efrén García Grinda

November 03, 2022 • Cristina Díaz Moreno • Efrén García Grinda • Entrevista • Groupwork

Tectonics and History:
A Conversation with Amin Taha

by Cristina Díaz Moreno y Efrén García Grinda

Text published in El Croquis 217 [II] Groupwork 2012 2022

Cristina Díaz Moreno & Efrén García Grinda: Often the beginnings of the careers define the aspirations, ambitions and motivations of later work, especially in a place as peculiar and competitive as London, where one most often starts out working for others. In your case, are you able to identify the origins of your story as an architect?

Amin Taha: We graduate from architecture school, go from one practice to another, and each office has its own 'style'&mdashthat is to say, "we do not do it like this here". This style is more or less all about the expression of the form, and very occasionally structure has a relationship to that. What tends to happen is that the practice will recreate a series of forms, a language based on the vocabulary they have developed and have worked very hard to achieve. Sometimes those practices have close relationships with engineers, and together they discuss how an initial series of ideas might have to be manipulated in order to be successfully integrated while still expressing the same original approach. At times you might have an engineer, often a structural engineer, who by education doesn’t care about the design, no matter what it looks like, even if the project starts to cost several times the amount of material, energy and effort&mdashand, yes, money. This is where the ethical questions come in. You start asking, is it costing that much more material?

Is it costing the client that much more money? Is it burning that much more energy as a result? If the answers to those three questions are yes, then as an architect you ought to be thinking, why are you allowing this 'vision' to carry on. Very quickly you begin to realize that there is a complete separation between the architecture, engineering and the other disciplines involved in the project. As architects we are being asked to develop and promote visions that are literally supported by others, and yet it would have only taken a few conversations with those disciplines and material suppliers and fabricators (that is, the makers) to integrate ideas and create something that would have been unique to a context or situation. Not only in relation physical and historical contexts, but the context defined by the people, their brains that come together to address the project. To me, that is fascinating, and I enjoy it. And when it does not happen, it is frustrating, and that frustration is evident elsewhere and ultimately legible in the built outcome.

CDM&EGG: You’re essentially privileging the integration of material and technical aspects as a distinctive feature of your architectural identity?

AT: Wherever you go, there is an agenda that mostly uses architecture as a visually acceptable skin to a financially profitable vessel. This approach is not completely illegitimate&mdashhistorically, the same thing was done with architectural pattern catalogues and books. But the world has moved on. Critically, the Venn diagrams that once balanced both the role of the builder and architect and that of, say, monotheistic dogma and individualism have collapsed, subsuming the former differences. We do still find that some might tell you they are a Marxist or 'public space' architect, say, but there is very little evidence in program, let alone anything tectonic, that might aid their agenda. All the offices I worked for had their own, mostly visual, agendas with no real tectonic generator, returning to the development of their 'in-house style' that was sometimes expressed as a drawing style alone. For some, the sole innovation is the idiosyncratic way they draw. But then comes the issue of that translation. When you are drawing a line, and you imagine this fantastic curve, what do you imagine as the material that line represents? What’s driving those relationships between one line and the next? Their beauty is very seductive, but they will never become what you imagine because as you slowly go through the design process of engineering, trying to make the drawing a reality, the lines vanish, becoming what is physically possible: much larger depths of steel or concrete, thermally insulated with rainwater flashings; visibly not the original vision but a necessary compromise. How do you avoid that disappointment? One way is to thoroughly understand the materials at hand, so when putting lines to paper you can predict the knowns and leave space for the unknowns. Involving material suppliers and specialist fabricators early in the process with the design team allows for this. It is where the interesting and, arguably, ethical as well as aesthetic aspects need to occur. At the end of this process you have worked together to create something hopefully unique to the overall context, and none of it could have been entirely predicted or achieved alone.

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Tectonics and History:A Conversation with Amin Taha

by Cristina Díaz Moreno y Efrén García Grinda

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Tectonics and History:
A Conversation with Amin Taha