Henri Fanthome Office for Architecture

 Kate Wagner in one of her recent podcasts @kategwagner was talking about design and tech  and im quoting snippets here - “Architecture has been de-skilled in a lot of ways, they don’t teach drawing anymore” further she goes on to say, “ buildings are now the built version of a spread sheet” explaining that all the elements are plug and play, and if you wanted do a curve it would takes a huge amount of labour”  

Years ago, when I had just started out as an independent architect, I was asked to design a garden canopy from the gate to the entrance of door of a very reputed dentists clinic in Sunder Nagar. 

This was Dr Anil Kumar’s Clinic, visited by among others, the President of India, and of course Ashish Ganju, Architect and my Guru, who had recommended me for the job saying I was the “perfect man for the mission”.

The Dentist wanted this elaborate set up that would be motorised, like the Wimbledon Centre court, and could retract or extend on the press of a button. On the face of it Money was not a question, and im inclined believe it never was. 

The Dentist also had a beautiful garden that received beautiful sunlight in winter, and being a huge lover of his carefully nurtured garden, he was loathed to think of columns of any obstruction to both the view of the garden as you walked to the entry or to sunlight when then canopy was retracted. He did not want shadows- from a frame, columns , anything - “It should just disappear” 

Now that was a tall ask.

Somewhere in this whole conversation I did begin to feel we were going a bit overboard - a shading canopy 6 feet wide and about 30 feet long should really not need anything more than one reasonably fit human to stretch or retract at the beginning and end of each winter.

So why were even discussing motorisation? 

Towards the end of the discussion I tabled the thought, and got a “If you can make it work, sure - but you have to demonstrate it to me yourself”. 

So we did!

We built a canopy- every metal part fabricated by hand by Brijlal and Sons, including lathed pulleys with Royal Enfield Axle bearings for butter smooth rolling, Stadium Canopy Grade Tensile Fabric from Mehler Technologies, strung up on a 3mm Stainless Steel cable anchored on an new Gateway Arch at one end and the House at the other. All fabricated off site and installed in 2 days flat. And it all worked - and worked for years.

Back then, and much more so now, one wonders, is the need for luxury so much that human interaction with the spaces we inhabit must be removed altogether. All need for human action removed after being labelled as inconvenient. So we can exist like cozy couch potatoes,  priming ourselves for strokes and heart attacks - everything in out buildings from taps to lights to curtains is overrated by voice command as we

Is Automation making us lazy human beings? Why cant you walk up to a curtain and draw it to. And reveal a breath-taking view?

Which brings me back to Kate’s observation. And its a real thing, I some times see glimpses of it when I work on larger projects. 

Is software actually making us lazy designers? Why are curves going out os style? Why is the hand drawn, carefully assembled vision of place and space slowly giving way to the 6 hour sketch up or Revit plug and play model that is increasingly becoming the idea of architecture?  

Not quite apparent, but to me they appear as flip sides of the same coin - 

The Architecture of Lazy-ness, and the Laziness of Architecture.

Ps.- We still haven’t motorised a single thing in any of the work we do!

# posted by Henri Fanthome : 8:27 am