A few years ago, we invited some people with whom we had worked to a showing of Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary about his father Louis, entitled My Architect. Aside from exploring Kahn’s interesting domestic life, the documentary is infused with the strength of Kahn’s oeuvre and, by extension, the power of architecture done well.

I came out of the theatre with someone I had done a number of projects with – projects marked by no little debate covering the elements in play – and with whom I felt a robust intellectual exchange had been formed. Yet, as we emerged into the theatre lobby, my companion expressed surprise at having witnessed in the film a discipline with ideas, language, debate and all the other accruements of an active global discourse. He was, I felt, somewhat patronising in his comparison with his more familiar milieu, that of the visual art world.

I was astounded at his surprise and silently wondered what he had made of my descriptions, drawings and ideas shared in regard to the various projects on which we had worked together. Were they no more than florid ramblings from someone from whom he expected no more than a building consent and a decent set of documents for a building of commodity, firmness and delight?

On reflection, though, it did account for those occasions when we had fired each other. They were periods that, at the time, I felt were profound ideological schisms but that may well have been no more than two impassioned souls talking past each other, each oblivious of the extent of the other’s intellectual and linguistic kitbag. Even with subsequent discussion, I did not figure out whether it was Kahn’s work that had provoked his surprise or the words used to describe the work: the hyperbole of that politician in Dhaka who declared that Kahn had “given Bangladesh democracy”, for example.

I thought of this not long ago, when sitting in a too-cold auditorium listening to Daniel Libeskind talk about his work. The auditorium was deep in the heart of a design school campus and he was confident of his audience’s familiarity with, and openness to, the constructs of architectural discourse. In an ironic twist, I began to think that perhaps it was now me who expressed wonder at the lecture’s content and the certainty with which his buildings were said to be imbued with complex meaning. I wondered if age had endowed me with the power of vision to discern a naked emperor. It was on the matter of memory that my hitherto-acceptance of any explanation of a project, no matter how obtuse, met a brick wall.

The projected images were those of Libeskind’s addition to the Jewish Museum, Berlin, and, while one cannot but be moved by the extraordinarily evocative power of that building’s collection of incisions, voids and passages, I wondered whether or not we were being short-changed in the architect declaiming that the building was “about memory”. Perhaps this was a commonly understood and abbreviated reference to the building’s concern with the evocation of memory, rather than, for instance, a more-laboured discussion of the ways in which this is achieved.

I felt a bit of a pedant in the dark of that crowded hall, wanting to understand what were the exact ways in which materials and spaces were brought together in the interests of moving the emotions of those who visit. There are some more apparent strategies: the lofted inaccessible volumes, pinched light sources and hard, acoustically lively spaces echoing the sound of footfall. I wanted more, though. I wanted to know when and why he reached for this device or that material, when he contemplated an extended void or an incised external façade.

This is not an unusual response to listening to ‘starchitects’ talk about their work. The barrage of social media and digital magazines perfectly communicates the appearance of things and my attention quickly shifts to other matters. I invariably wonder how and why the speaker determined the mix of materials and dimensions that conspire to imbue mute tectonics with the power to move the human spirit. Perhaps it is felt to be self-evident and the secrets of selection and conjunction are revealed by a thoughtful examination of the drawn, drafted and rendered evidence at hand, but I doubt it.

I think the high-speed jaunt through an oeuvre is a not an unfamiliar scenario when architects talk to their own work, and especially so where the work is complex, abstracted and sculptural and perhaps it is churlish to want to know the minutiae of decision-making. I do not expect Gehry, for example, to explain his whirling confections and am happy to sit with them, draw them and let their delights, and horrors, do their work.

Last year, a happy band of chums travelled to Brazil and, deep within Lina Bo Bardi’s extraordinary São Paulo Museum of Art and, again, at Brasília’s Juscelino Kubitschek memorial, Lindley Naismith produced a tape measure and the gang fell to measuring the width, rise, going and slope of ramped steps.

I loved this empirical research. It brought to mind ex-patriot Kiwi architect Bruce Cavell, who was known for always having notebook and tape at hand to make impromptu sketch plans and sections of especially successful spaces. I thought, too, of ‘The Duke’, my guide and mentor in the Antarctic, who, as befits his passion for writing polar histories, would make similarly impromptu sketches, annotated, in his case, with who sat where and who said what.

In each case, specific mechanisms of effect, be it a stepped entry or an interesting congregation of polar expeditionaries, were examined to understand better the detail of a successful place or event. Perhaps the public lecture is not the time or place for such minutiae but I know that I am not alone in targeting architecture guests at after-lecture dinners, trying to gain some sense of how things come about.

This often covers the mechanics of their studios, how many people are there, how teaching and client demands are balanced, how one extends creative control over remote offices and so forth. On a couple of occasions, though, I have seized the opportunity to unravel the mysteries of preserving bamboo from that master of its use, Kengo Kuma. Despite on both occasions making good progress in the selection of species, the investigation foundered as he lapsed into Japanese as the secret of preservation was to be shared and I was left none the wiser.

I did not have the opportunity to break bread with Libeskind or debate the ways in which he selects and orders elements to effect emotional response in buildings. Had I done so, I would have loved to understand better the need for his buildings to be quite so insistent in their messaging.

At issue is whether there is the need for buildings to be explicit and singular in all cases, or whether the specific circumstances of the holocaust are so profound and their remembrance so important that they make up a unique typology. I am sure this is the case; amid the digital cacophony of unrest, chaos and anomie in which we live, the enormity of the holocaust requires explicit and insistent messaging. I fear, though, that the potency of Libeskind’s memorial projects is diluted by an oeuvre that makes each project equally insistent and the enthusiasm of that politician in Nathaniel Kahn’s film for the huge authority leveraged off a strong but less polemical architecture is lost.

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine.

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