The designs he did himself were mostly utilitarian, somewhat trad looking buildings right? I recall you shared photos of the campus of a school or something.
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yeah though the fact that it looks trad is a red herring; ask yourself instead why contemporary architects have to use wacky materials and dangerous-looking cantilevers etc
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yeah so hopefully now you can see the fundamental impedance mismatch: alexander was never trying to make a "statement" with his work like his contemporaries do, he was primarily trying to build something that worked for his clients—he didn't give a shit about getting in magazines
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for every other architect their current project is an advertisement for their next project
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Which is also fine by me. If innovators weren’t willing to try new things on clients’ dimes we’d never get anything new. Faster horses etc. Frontiers always have both fraud and novel shit people didn’t know they wanted until somebody decided to give it to them,
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alexander's contract stipulated he could unilaterally reorganize the construction budget; indeed a big chunk of the cost of the mary rose museum proposal was an innovative design for piles so the structure could be built on clay for under £10M
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Okay that’s the sort of thing I’d lead with if I were trying to convince people convinced he was trad that he wasn’t…it’s the buried lede
If you turn this thread into an essay, I’d open with that. Took a conversation buried 15 replies deep to get there.
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I mean for people hostile to trad stuff (and I admittedly am fairly hostile) the main thing they’re *friendly* to is novelty and innovation and evidence that someone is willing to break from tradition.
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iirc a lot of his projects involve some kind of in situ invention; regular use of sophisticated materials and techniques (FEM, shotcrete/gunite); his meta-innovation was stipulating that he didn't have to a) invent up front on spec or b) beg permission
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the fact that he likes to use compression structures with pitched roofs is mainly cause they work, and he's not interested in precarious cantilevers or fancy parametric undulating glass/titanium/whatever because that serves little purpose other than to advertise the architect
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