89. What is Good Luck?

Whenever I talk with people about becoming a famous architect, and I ask "well what do you think it takes to become famous?" The responses are wide and varied. Here are some common responses I get:

• A a combination of luck, timing and who you know...No matter what, when lady luck comes knocking, you'd better be ready to pounce.
• Well... you need to be talented, hard working and have some luck. 
• You have to be lucky enough to have been born to rich parents. 
• Do your best work and it will happen or it won't. 
• There's an element of randomness to it, but becoming famous doesn't happen at random. 
• I suppose you to have to be fortunate enough to be friends with already famous people to begin with. 
• When reading the history of famous architects a common thread is either that they were [lucky enough to be] born rich (like P. johnson...kurokawa, fumihiko maki, shigeru ban, and I hear rumours about Ando too...), had a good teaching job to live off of, or a combination of both.
• You have to be lucky; meaning being in the right place at the right time and yeah talent helps too 

 ...and the list goes on and on.

 If you haven't already noticed, the one common denominator in all these statements is the magic ingredient of luck. 

So what is luck anyway? 

Below are some common definitions. 

• Luck: an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that causes an event to result one way rather than another. 
• Luck: the force that seems to operate for good or ill in a person's life, as in shaping circumstances, events, or opportunities

From Wikipedia: 

For a lot of people, Luck is a belief that good or bad fortune in life is caused by accident or chance, and attributed by some to reasons of faith or superstition, which happens beyond a person's control. 

Buddhism teaches about karmma; the idea of moral causality; that all things which happen must have a cause, either material or spiritual, and do not occur due to chance or fate. 

Followers of Christianity and Islam believe in the will of a supreme being directing the universe and the affairs of humankind with wise benevolence, theologily refered to as Divine Providence. It varies greatly from one person to another; however, most acknowledge providence as at least a partial, if not complete influence on luck. The concept of "Divine Grace" as it is described by believers closely resembles what is referred to as "luck" by others. One such activity is prayer, a religious practice in which this belief is particularly strong. 

Others associate luck with a strong sense of superstition, that is, a belief that certain taboo or blessed actions will influence how fortune favors them for the future. 

These are all well and good. You can believe what you want. I am not here to question your faith or tell you what to believe. But I can share with you what I believe is a useful perspective on luck.

There is an old Babylonian saying that goes something like this: 

If a man is lucky, bound his hands and feet together and cast him in the Tigris and he will swim out with a fish in his mouth for supper 

To me luck is largely a matter of perception. What I mean is that the situations that we find ourselves in are not essentially fortunate or unfortunate, but rather just situations with various levels of potentials, opportunities and limitations. Each situation comes with its own unique set of circumstances that either limit or open up potentials for what we want or where we want to go. It is up to us to find the fortune and opportunities and act on them. My good man that was lucky enough to be thrown in the Tigris in such a ghastly fashion simply discovered that his situation presented him with a good opportunity to go fishing for dinner. Rather than accepting his predicament as bad luck, he saw the potential in the it and most importantly he took action. 

Obviously this is just a mythic tale, but like most mythic tales it offers a simple lesson. 

Luck in not just seeing the glass half full, it is also taking action; not just seeing the potential but using it. After all, seeing the glass as half full is ultimately meaningless if you don't drink what's in it at some point. Isn't it?

Being an optimist alone isn’t enough; being able to see all the goodness, potential and opportunities around you and then not taking advantage of them has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with day dreaming. It is not really any different from a pessimist with no imagination or who sees only limitations in his situation and subsequently does nothing. The old Babylonian Houdini would not be considered lucky if he figured out how to escape and catch a fish but just never got around to doing it, would he? 

To be truly lucky one not only has to be optimistic enough to recognize the opportunities but also courageous enough to act on them while they last. Not only that, one has to do this constantly. This is the way of the famous architect. 

I can not count the amount of times where I encounter architects who after seeing the newly published project of a famous architect and saying:  

"oh snaps! I had that very same idea" 

Well then I ask you "why didn't you act?"... 

"why didn't you follow through and realize it?" 

The answer is in the question: "what's the difference between you and the famous architect?" 

Is it because he is lucky and you are not? 

-or- 

Is it because he was able to see the opportunity and put in the work to realize it while you did not? 

Is it because he has the ability to see the greenness of the grass on his side of the fence while you can only see the weeds on yours? 

It comes in the form of statement like: "Oh of-course they can, they are lucky because they have a team of apprentices slaving away at their office for free and I have none." 

 -or- 

 oh he has connections and I don't. 

The way I see it, the optimist who sees the opportunities and potentials around him and do nothing about it is worse than a pessimist:

He is a coward. 
 

Conrad Newel 
NOTES ON BECOMING A FAMOUS ARCHITECT 
Liberating Minds Since August 2007

88. What is the Venice Biennale of Architecture?

 ...As well as addressing the academic side of architecture, the Biennale is an occasion where big-name architects and designers can showcase new projects, arranged in different pavilions, each with different themes. The Biennale is currently held in the Biennale Gardens.

-crowdsourced / WIKIPEDIA

...the Biennale offers an incredibly diverse and dense display of ideas and responses that aim to provoke us to reconsider the role of the architect and the ways in which we create public life for citizens of the contemporary environment.

-Linda Taalman / DWELL

The Venice Architecture Biennale is the world’s most important celebration of contemporary architecture.
The Biennale is a unique insight into what is happening in the architecture profession around the world at this moment in time.

-Jonathan Davies and Anna Meyer / DESIGN WEEK

If one did not know that the media constantly exaggerates, one could almost conclude ... that the Venice Biennale of Architecture really is the world’s most important architecture exhibition.
... let us not deny the truth. This event is an expensive danse macabre. In a city of plunder (an exhibition of plunder) hordes of tourists (architects) roll along broken infrastructure in order to satisfy their petit bourgeois desire for education (in the case of the architects: vanity, envy, schadenfreude, suspicions). Even the glamour that the visitors are supposed to feel is staid and faked by the media for whom a star architect is like a film star.
In truth it is all hollow, arduous, exhausting, bleak and boring. It is no longer about lively discussion and criticism of topics in contemporary architecture, but rather about empty, conservative and perhaps populist shells that are charged with feigned meaning.

-Wolf D. Prix / COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

If we are to accept a certain validity in Prix's remarks, it is important not to attribute special privilege to the Venice Biennale — it is only indicative of a more widespread political naivety in contemporary architecture, and the ineffectiveness of its various governing institutions. The failure, if you will, is endemic. However, unlike Prix, I don't think the starchitects are at the heart of the problem. I would prefer to lay the blame elsewhere.

-Jack Self / DOMUS

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Wolf D. Prix came under fire for this attack (especially when it was realized he didn’t even set foot at this year’s Biennale). And yet, had he written this critique for any other Biennale, he wouldn’t have been so far off. The Biennale is, after all, an expensive affair of prosecco-filled parties and, often, inaccessibly esoteric exhibits
Prix hedged his bets that this Biennale, with its fluffy-sounding name, “Common Ground,” would be just like its precedents. Unluckily for Prix, it wasn’t. In fact, it was probably the most politically-engaged Biennale yet.
...that is exactly what this year’s Venice Biennale was – and should be. Not just a display of architectural ingenuity but a “fresh look, from the [common] ground up, at what architecture really is.” Even if was at times reductive or idealistic, the Biennale grappled with our political reality, reflected our cautious optimism, and put forth the question of our decade: what purpose do we serve?

Vanessa Quirk / ARCH DAILY

Biennales by their nature are sprawling, skin-deep omnibus festivals, contrived above all for tourism and congenitally awkward as a medium for architecture...
It (This year's Bieannale) pays almost no attention to the developing world, to designers from Africa or China, and precious little to female architects, aside from Zaha Hadid, who, like Peter Zumthor, Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and a surprising number of the old boldface names, hogs much of the spotlight.

-Micheal Kimmelman / THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Bieannale is a typical gossip place. "who slept with whom?,Who drank too much? Who is on their way down because they drank too much?"..."His last project wasn't very good, he must have been drunk all the time. Maybe he is going blind?" Its a lot of personal gossip.

-Kjetil Thorsen / SNØHETTA 

But the exhibition itself, despite that determinedly optimistic and wide-ranging approach, feels limited, exclusive, stiff, starched and a bit cloistered. And for a show that is so keen to question the value of architectural celebrity — Chipperfield writes in the catalog that he wanted it to "emphasize shared ideas over individual authorship" and reject "solitary and fashionable gestures" — this biennale includes an awful lot of stars, many of them longtime friends and colleagues of Chipperfield's.
Though Chipperfield makes a big show of casting a wide net with this biennale, mostly what he's caught with it are the kind of big fish immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the architectural scene of 20 or 25 years ago. The architects featured most prominently include Norman Foster (given two separate rooms to work with), Renzo Piano, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Rafael Moneo, Alvaro Siza, Peter Zumthor, Bernard Tschumi and Jean Nouvel.

Christopher Hawthorne / THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

87. You Don't Have to be Good Part 5: The Taxonomy of Architectural Fame

For a long time the diagram above represented how I understood the mechanics of famous architecture.

That all famous architecture was the result of good work that was well promoted. 

While this is more or less a nice truism, it is far from the norm when you look at the full scope of famous works.

The fact is, that like most neatly packaged truisms, it is an oversimplification of a vastly deeper and more complex reality.

A more accurate-to-reality diagram would begin to look something more like this



Because lets face it, not all architecture that is famous is also good: Some are and some are not.

There are a lot of famous architecture out there that are just plain deficient in a lot of respects, but because they are interesting to a few influential people and are well promoted, they receive a lot of attention in the press, and stand a better chance of getting singled out for awards and accolades.

So what do I mean when I say “good architecture” you ask?

As I mentioned in part I of this series, I had a teacher in college that once told me that in order to make really outstanding works, you have got to innovate; push the envelope and do something interesting or you have to go the way of Mies and raise the detailing and craftsmanship to a level of high quality.

However, I always thought that to be really good it should be a combination of the two. Like this:



However, what I have noticed after travelling and seeing more and more architecture both famous and non-famous is that there are a lot of works out there that are famous that is either interesting alone and are poorly crafted (like The New Museum or The Mountain Dwelling ) or conversely, there are others that are very well made alone but does little in the way of innovation (eg. the works of Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld).


So maybe my old professor was right after all, maybe it just needs to be one or the other...well kind of.

I say kind of because the other thing that I have noticed as well, is that I have never ever in all my life, come across any famous architecture that was not well promoted.

This is something the old guy never told us about. 

Promotion?
Branding?

Do you think Mies, Corbu or Wright promoted their work?

Yes! Absolutely Yes! and fuck yeah!

The general exception (if you want to call it an exception) is where it was designed by an extraordinarily famous architect. In this case he or she does not really have to make that much of an effort to promote it because the press are usually all over it like a pack of hungry wolves. And if the press is writing about it, ta-da!... it is being promoted!

When you start taking individual works of architecture and begin to look at them through this paradigm, immediately it becomes much more interesting.

Take the mountain dwelling and the new museum for example.
In my view this is where they fit (space #2).

They both have interesting concepts and ideas, but they are constructed and detailed at a  commercial grade quality. So as you can see, I had to create an extra classification to properly define them. 

Both projects are also extremely well promoted, so it should come as no surprise that they are very famous. The lack of quality has no effect and does not tarnish the popularity or the reputation of the work.
And therein lies the essential flaw in this diagram - quality. Quality is no prerequisite for famous architecture.  It is optional and in most cases irrelevant.

As mentioned in part 3 of this series, unless the project specifically discusses quality in craftsmanship, detailing, or construction, this is a non-issue: It is the ideas of the work that takes precedence.

Mies, Pierre Chareau and say Louis Kahn’s work would generally fall in the overlap of quality detailing and interesting ideas.

Now before I could have finished that sentence I felt a massive scream in the universe. It was the voices of all the architects who believe Mies is boring. I hear you. I think his work is boring too in a lot of ways, but I also believe the idea of his work in itself and what he was aiming to accomplish is very interesting.

More importantly though, what I consider interesting really doesn’t matter in this diagram.
What matters is what the architectural community as a whole finds interesting and (as I will argue in a future series of notes) what matters supremely is what key influential members within this community believes is interesting. Form follows taste and so does celebrated works of architecture.

So if we take away this stuff about quality and say exactly what is meant by interesting then we get this:



You will also notice the addition of the “Celebrated Works” category. It confirms that it is the famous architecture which key influential members of the architectural community finds interesting that are the ones that wins awards and are celebrated. After all, who do you think sits on a jury and decide who will get the awards?

If you remember this line from note number 76 - (Predicting the Pritzker part 2- Take a lesson from Brad & Angelina), then then you will understand exactly where the Pritzker fits into this picture.

The Pritzker only celebrates the celebrated and gives more attention to the already famous. It does not advance architecture or humanity in anyway beyond creating mindless chatter in the hallways and online chat-rooms throughout the architecturally-interested world about whether the latest pick was worthy enough to be crowned America’s top star-architect.

The Pritzker picks it awardees almost exclusively from the architects who have already got a few buildings in this narrow sliver of celebrated works.

The other category that we have up there is Anointed Works. This is a rather strange area, it consists of works that key figures in the architecture community finds interesting and even though it is well promoted, for some reason or another it just does not have enough appeal to make it famous or celebrated.

This I will talk about next week in more detail with some real world examples.

Stay tuned.

Conrad Newel 
NOTES ON BECOMING A FAMOUS ARCHITECT 
Liberating Minds Since August 2007