The television burbled away in the background: the evening news. I was trying to head off a rook/bishop trap my former flatmate had set. Such was his confidence in the inescapable array he had established on the board that his attention shifted as I squirmed. He shared his thoughts on the many failures of the building into which he had just recently moved. I seized on the conversation, saved from my predicament on the board between us by this shift, the game forgotten as the newsreader announced that the very building my opponent had been discussing had just received an Institute of Architects award.

With the confidence of ignorance, I proclaimed the absurdity of awarding a building with so many obvious failures, whereupon my opponent challenged me to do something about it. In that moment, I transitioned, as one would now say, from a life of manufacturing and surfing to one of architecture. Within days, I was in the architecture school’s dean’s office, being told that “had I applied last year, it’s possible I might have got in”.

With that lukewarm encouragement, I sold up my life down south and moved north to a new one. One of the delights of the school was Claude Megson’s photographic slide shows in which his beautiful, saturated images revealed the world of architecture. One of his most potent lectures focused on the Ahlambra, that sublime assemblage of hilltop gardens and palaces that I determined to visit.

I experienced an epiphany in the Alhambra’s Generalife garden when, at last, I was there. It was not a full-blown ‘road to Damascus’ epiphany but one of those unsettling insights that sit and cast a shadow on the psyche. Amid the gentle reverie induced by those exquisite combinations of brick, water and planting, it became clear that rarely do we moderns match the ancients in the creation of the sublime. A more troubling thought followed; perhaps the quality of architecture might be correlated to the architect’s sense of well-being and, furthermore, that only extremely rarely has a decent bit of architecture been made since architects stopped living in fear of being buried in the foundations of the remedial work if their project didn’t ‘cut the mustard’.

If this seems a bit extreme, you might consider the mythical story of the Taj Mahal architect’s fate in which it is said that, after completion of his work, his thumbs were cut off to prevent duplication of the ‘Taj’s’ sublime beauty. Though an apocryphal story, it did suggest a sort of reverse Darwinism in which the creators of great architecture are mutilated and hence lost to the profession, lowering the average skill level of the drawing office, until it is populated only by dimwits with operable opposed thumbs. 

We contemporary practitioners are not generally in the pay of clients having sword-wielding hirelings and are pretty safe from physical retribution for a stuffup. However, as it is said, “when Washington sneezes we get a cold” and the change to a more robust administration in that town may well herald a more aggressive approach to evaluating our work. I understand the new president has identified a few samplers for our US peers to aspire to in order to cleanse the republic of decadent ‘modern’ architecture and make it look more, well, Roman. At the very least, we might well polish our acanthus leaf and pediment detailing if we are to escape the wrath of clients keen to make Aotearoa great again, though any such initiative will be at renewed risk of losing one’s thumbs, or perhaps mouse fingers.

We should enjoy our profession’s commitment to judging the fruits of our labours without fear or favour, while it lasts. To its enormous credit, the Institute of Architects awards programme eschews the efficiencies of assessing award entries by image alone. Rather than locking up the jury with piles of carefully curated photos and screeds of adjective-heavy text, architectural foraging parties are dispatched across the motu to experience the projects.

An early internet chum in Los Angeles once typed through the dial-up connection that, while our messages were fun, he really needed to smell me to know me better. I was a bit alarmed at how this might pan out were we to meet and delayed travel to the city for as long as possible. When at last we did meet, it was apparent that ‘smelling’ was a sort of shorthand for a comprehensive review of me: my strange accent, clothing, odd gait, and unfamiliar views on the US, indigenous people and everything, really.

And so the institute jury is charged with smelling the entries, listening to clients and the sounds of their buildings, the reverberation of footfall and the silent corners, the fall of light, the slope of the land, the juxtaposition of colour, texture and material, the patterns of its use and occupation and, yes, even the smell of the building.

Buildings are an exchange in which the architect is but a bit player. The jury members bring their knowledge, experience and biases to examine the assemblage presented, seeing each entry as both an object in space and the manifestation of its programme of use and aspiration. They are challenged to assess the extent to which the project brings together all the elements in play — the labour, materials and intellectual endeavour — to make a unique building.

One of the challenges of assessing lies in the comparison of dissimilar projects: the rural and the urban, the domestic and the civic, the big, the small and so on. There’s no doubt that setting a 50-square-metre backcountry off-grid scintilla against four or five hundred metres of well-honed clifftop behemoth or an inner-city hotel is an interesting challenge.

A relatively recent initiative to ‘level the playing field’ and make judging a little easier has been the creation of new award categories, such that one might have one’s entry judged against similar types of project. This is a useful convenience and offers a way of promoting one or another concerns that the institute might have.

The important and immediate concern for sustainability, for example, has bedevilled the institute for years as it has sought to offer guidance, if not leadership, to its members in their endeavours to balance care of a client’s best interests with those of the planet. The promotion of an award category acknowledging the success of a project in achieving construction with a diminished impact on the environment is a useful lever for coercing greater consideration of the issue. Laudable though this aim is, it opens the door to projects that may well be highly successful in reducing their impacts on ecology and ecosystem yet lamentable in other matters, perhaps: for example, contextual concerns, decolonisation or, even, the ‘correct and magnificent play of solids in light’. Some will argue that the imperative to engage in the possibility of global extinction is so acute that we can afford to cast off more ephemeral concerns. Yet surely great, even good, architecture is the ability to reconcile complex and often contradictory aspirations and expectations in order to create the sublime. If juries are really to get the full scent of the projects visited, they must be freed of the topical demands of the day, no matter how important the issue.