Bull in a China Shop

Woke up feeling a bit peeky, a bit blanched, this morning after sharing the podium with my old friend Kevin Rhowbotham yesterday evening. It's not often we let the fox in to the henhouse, the cat amongst the pigeons, in architectural education these days. The over riding considerations are more care in the community. But it was certainly refreshing to hear the old firebrand, 'Yosemite Sam' as I once dubbed him way back when we were teaching at Westminster University back in the late eighties, driving his coach and horses through the polite assumptions of our audience, a challenge to all and sundry, and also rather good to feel the energy levels of the student body tangibly rising to the challenge.
Withered by the years, I had forgotten what it was like, what it had been like, and pretty much everything else in between, all plans were ditched; controlling the beast looked well beyond my means. I took on the countenance of a rather anxious dog owner in a sheep field.
The subject was 'Functionalism' and it was clear this topic touched on something of a raw nerve. Certainly, the tacit acceptance of induction hobs and so called efficient kitchens was out of the question. Instead, we got God, not even a dead God, but the origin of consciousness and that spirit of animation that comes with it, precisely that railing against reductivism. And I have to say it felt good, this railing (as of course it always did and always should in something called a school) not entirely comprehensible perhaps, but a sensation sure enough, a tangible apparition of catastrophe, of total failure, coupled with that imperative to reconstitute the entire edifice as something better.
If only Teresa May were in the room I thought, for one perverse moment, as another salvo rained.
Of course, I suspect the more robust of the student body found it amusing; me failing to drag the subject back to Duiker (1930), straining for jokes in The Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) or offering distractions on Dieter Rams; even offering the equivalent of a physical bone (a Braun electric fan, above); but it was all hopeless. History looked suddenly out of place.
Afterwards we went to the pub. We smiled and laughed and chatted gently as good friends in their mature years do. There is great warmth in that fire, and I am grateful to have shared it once again.