Museums

I like museums, but not so much now they have taken on the guise of department stores. I especially like The Imperial War Museum, have done ever since I was a kid, but these days as I sit there periodically (since it is a welcome and convenient distraction from the university) studying, likely as not, 'Old Fred' the Lancaster bomber, I find myself vexed.
There is a window ledge you can sit on to inspect 'Old Fred' and those who mill around him- rarely for more than a few seconds- a snapshot of the distracted museum visitor, always anxious for the next thing, be they excited crocodiles of school kids or bad tempered old men in wheelchairs. That's the good thing about the IWM, at least it's free, I don't feel that imperative at all. 'Old Fred' has so much to offer I can go on thinking about him for days.
Architects have long taken to the museum 'experience'- including me in the nineties. But why make a Holocaust Museum when a copy of Primo Levi's 'If This Is A Man' is a so much better vehicle for historical empathy? What's with all the gratuitous effects? Or is it that people no longer even know the actual story.
Thankfully the excellent Holocaust exhibit in the IWM has been left intact- at least somebody realised nothing needed to be done- but the overall experience now is as much shop as exhibition space, as much clutter of visuals over things. Maybe, dread to think, so many of those originals have been sold off- the Focke Wolf 190, the Mustang, the Jagdpanther...or maybe just moved on to another branch. Whatever, I guess all the HD screens and so on are viewed as a cheap and instantaneous mode of communication in the spirit of the times.
In reality (sic) it's just another version of shopping, and there is a lot of shopping in the IWM, and going home happily with a 'Don't Panic' mug is certainly in the interests of the powers that be; historically not so much as anti-war as pro-patriotism.
And thinking about 'Old Fred', his original fifty five thousand parts (even with turrets and engines counted singly, and not counting rivets either) his power, his thin-ness, his bigness, his tininess, his blackness and the exploding world around him (a german eighty-eight sits smugly next to him, solid as a rock you might say) and what happened inside him and around him as a kind of living hell for ten hours at a time times thirty (and I know he was actually Fleet Air Arm so I'm extrapolating rather) gives you pause for a great deal of thought.
There is a Stassi museum in Leipzig where I remember they hadn't changed a thing. It was deeply unnerving. There's also one in eastern Berlin which, as the actual headquarters of the Stassi, is almost invisible within the urban grain. They didn't change that either.
I think we should think a bit more about museums and what we really want from them.

Architects and Developers

For the first time we are going to be running a class within our  'Ideas in Architecture' course titled 'Profit'. Profit doesn't become an issue until it is hard to find; certainly the case today, as the traditional role of the architect is not so much under threat as under water.
It's been a long time coming and we've fudged it over and over. Joseph Paxton, as far as I know, was party to the first design and built contract designed to outmanoeuvre the bemused architects of 1851. By the early 1990's, the title 'Architect' was fundamentally challenged, and it took a big fight back, including a whole raft of prescriptions from the RIBA as far as education was concerned, to steady the ship.
Back then I was for deregulation; I thought good architecture would succeed without good 'Architects'; that talented individuals would take to the task who would be valued for their skills, working within co-operative organisations!
But the subsequent financialisation of everything has made Design and Build look a milestone. Today, just to succeed, small time architects have to become developers themselves (or work in giant corporations) that is unless they go to become in house architects within pub chains (apparently these are the best paid opportunities) where god knows what they do other than 'defurbish' properties with  cast offs.
Meanwhile those architect friends of mine who couldn't stand their developers (who suddenly started behaving like architects) gave up the business.
We don't teach any of this. An architecture course is not a real estate course. But we do encourage a lot of fantasy in the name of 'design', almost to the point that it is hardly design at all, but illustrated storytelling. Witness this exchange at the Bartlett:

Prof:       'Put a giraffe in that drawing, giraffes are funny...'
Student:  'But I don't think giraffes are funny!'
Prof:       'Just put a giraffe in the drawing.'

Meanwhile, if you are working as a developer, you'd better put your time into those gross to net ratios. An architect estimating 80% when it actually comes out closer to 75% is, in the end, responsible for people sipping their cappuccino on a postage stamp of 'public space' beneath 30 stories of office space. You can't blame developers for making money, but you can encourage architects to take lessons from Mies van de Rohe, who managed to broker that piazza on Madison Avenue and who certainly understood his gross to net.