Finding glory in the everyday process of architecture

I wrote in this column a couple of years ago about how we need to better communicate the process of architecture in order for people to realise its value. Having spent the last couple of years with always at least one project on site, and what always feels like too many deadlines and urgent queries, it’s been easy to think this was me at my more idealistic.

It often feels like there is little worth communicating about my average week: another DTM; another site walk; site observations filled with statements like ‘first fix in progress’; a few more calls in a day than it feels should be possible; and far, far too many conversations about fire that start ‘well, before the Building Safety Act…’.

There is little in this everyday that can be easily communicated in an interesting or engaging way. Too many stories require so much explanation that the joke is no longer funny. Too many conversations are too technical for the complexity of the coordination or problem solving to be understood by the uninitiated.

I don’t think I was wrong. The process is important and interesting, but talking about it is hard.

I have tested making my daily work life, at the very least, vaguely amusing to non-architect friends with limited success. My (non architect) boyfriend has survived any number of soap box rants and shaggy dog stories about architect drama or the state of the contemporary profession with very polite interest.

I have been beginning to feel that perhaps communicating the process is just a bit too hard. Maybe there’s a reason that so much of the time architects just talk to other architects. Or maybe the process just isn’t that interesting.

But as Paul Goldberger writes in Why Architecture Matters, “the familiar has a pernicious power; it can render glory banal.”

Maybe I’ve been trying too hard to make people understand the process of construction, maybe we just need to communicate its beauty

It may be a little grandiose to call a small retrofit making its way through the construction phase, or a feasibility for a reuse of part of a building, or double checking drawings before you send them out into the wide world ‘glory’, but in my more meditative moments I remember that there is something glorious in what we do, and it was a colleague who reminded me of it this week. My practice (Allies and Morrison, who I hope will forgive my writing about them this once) have recently commissioned architectural photographers to capture two projects while they are still under construction, catching a fleeting moment in time where the building hovers somewhere between concept, drawing and reality.

It’s a case in point in finding the glory instead of the banal. Most of my site photos are zoomed-in details to remind me of conversations, or to demonstrate problems, or show previous problems that have been rectified. I lose most of the joy in the mundanity of trying to do my job competently.

These images, though not of my projects, captured the glory, the moments we all see but too often don’t notice, where the contractor’s temporary light hits orange site barriers just right in a dark hallway, or where cranes move on the skyline like a giant steel ballet. The handful of photos captured the beauty I’ve been missing in the indifference that is bred by the familiar.

One of the people involved in commissioning them admits they are an indulgence. They’re not the sort of photos you can put on a website or in a bid document (though I would dispute this). They don’t show the finished building, which is what we have all got used to selling. They don’t show the architectural product or people using the building.

However, what they do show is the process, the craft, and a glimpse at the effort involved. They glorify the everyday graft of building, the struggle in which something is created.

Maybe I’ve been trying too hard to make people understand the process of construction, maybe we just need to communicate its beauty. For a moment when I was looking at the photos all the fraught conversations with the contractor, all the worries about the programme, the budget, and the very definite constraints of space and physics, faded and, for that moment, I remembered the glory of my everyday.

Then my phone rang again.