Elegant Solutions? It’s an architectural phrase favoured by lecturers attempting to distill the essence of great architecture and force feed it to their inattentive and distracted undergraduates – who in turn dismiss it all with a derisive tut.
Ivor Smith was my Head of Architecture and he dragged us up to the Cotswolds one weekend to stand in front of a stone Wall. ‘Look at that,’ he said, as we kicked our shoes in the dust and mumbled about how he had now clearly lost all his marbles. ‘If that wall doesn’t move you’ he said, ‘you should give up architecture now.’
And indeed, some of us did a year or two later.
20 years after that I found myself turning a corner and landing in front of the very same wall! But this time it was different – this was a very fine wall, with stunning proportions and an amazing plinth with a beautifully executed stone coping at the top. Halfway up were two large oval holes. You couldn’t quite see through them as they were too high, but they made you really want to see what was behind them. And it was these holes that made the wall special. It was as if the wall was talking to us and mocking us from its great height. The control it exerted over the landscape was one thing, but the control it subtly exerted over everyone else, because of its sheer mass, its utter beauty and the promise of what lay behind, was so powerful that you couldn’t help but be moved. The scales had fallen from my eyes. Ivor was right and that 19 year old, skirt-chasing, numbskull of a student that I had once been, was completely wrong…
What’s it got to do with elegant solutions? Well that took another 20 years. Sitting down to design the ensuites for the Pebbles it made sense for there to be a three way Yin and Yang symbol – after all we like a bit of balance – but by intersecting them in a certain way it was possible to reduce the layout of the building to just four numbers. Now, that is already quite a neat trick, a big and complex building comleptely solved with just four numbers. The diameter of the main circle, the radius of the showers and the distance between them are the first three, but it’s the fourth number that is important.
It was the radius of the circle that defines the entrance corridor and links all the shapes. It’s the glue that sticks the plan together and it’s the really elegant bit.
It’s elegant because it turns out to be… my birthday!
Now that,’ I said to myself, ‘that is an Elegant Solution’.
As for what that number is?
Ah well you’ll just have to come and measure it for yourself!