Profile of a young architect

I speak with Stephanie Tham, whose work stood out at the recent RCA graduate show. We discuss – among other things – conservation, the role of the creator in a consumerist society, and the surprising crossovers between architecture and competitive cheerleading.

I went to the Royal College of Art's architecture school postgraduate show last month. It was great! I was super impressed by the energy and creativity on display.

But given that I had hoped to learn something about the perspective of these architects-in-training it was unfortunate that none of them were around to talk to when I was there. Afterwards, though, it occurred I could simply get in touch with one of them and see if they would have a chat with me. So I sent an email to Stephanie Tham, whose project, as I wrote, I thought was particularly compelling.

Tham replied and generously agreed to meet. Bravely, perhaps, too. At one point in our meeting she refers to my mean mockery of the awkward prose in some of the other students' blurbs (in fairness, I was more positive about their actual designs!): “I saw what you wrote about my classmates and I was like, Shit! … Oh my god, what am I getting myself into? Then I read it, and I was like, Oh! He liked it.”

We do the interview at a pub near Victoria station. It goes really well. Tham speaks with energy, in an engagingly direct, informal way. She is also driven, though. The novice interviewer's fear that the subject will clam up or be confounded by certain questions never comes to pass: she has a thoughtful, mature take on all of the topics that we cover. She speaks quickly. It feels a lot of the time that she is a step ahead of me. The opening of the interview is a case in point. I suggest we start by talking about her project itself and I begin tapping at my smartphone to get to the pictures I took at the show; she already has her phone out. “Ah, you mean these?”. Of course, her pictures are much better and we work from those instead.

The project

I mention that what originally caught my eye were the render drawings. These are unusual. 

from https://www.instagram.com/stephbysteph_____/

If you look at a lot of architects' renders (i.e images of what the finished thing will look like) you notice that they are almost invariably done from a perspective located some physical distance from the building itself – so you are looking at, if not the whole thing, an entire elevation or facade. It is as if the architect is announcing 'behold: this is my work!' 

Tham's images are quite different. They are like a set of candid camera pictures: architecture caught in the act. The perspective is that of someone inside the design. Each image is from a window, walkway or balcony, or half-way up a staircase. There are tantalising glimpses of other parts of the development from odd angles. It's very engaging because, as the viewer, you are immediately immersed. You can imagine yourself there.

Was she conscious of breaking the mould in terms of how her designs are presented? She was, but this wasn't necessarily something she set out to achieve from the start. “Do you want me to start from the beginning of how I got to the end?”, she asks. Yes.

She explains that the site is a real one, on Leinster Gardens, Bayswater. She was looking at building on “impossible sites”, and her tutor gave her a tip-off about the existence of this one. It is a fascinating story in itself. It is a exposed gap over what is now the District/Circle line between Bayswater station and Paddington, created when the cut-and-cover line was built in the 1860's to allow steam venting from the original steam railway. Since the gap was in the middle of the terrace, a false facade was built across the No's 23 and 24, complete with fully formed neoclassical doors and pedimented windows. She had a hard time finding the location: “you don't even see the false facade there, because it just looks so real”, she says with wonder.

She was conscious of how typical developers think and of how soulless the results typically are. Her whole approach was a reaction against this. “They want to build on land that you can build tens of units on that are so tall… one bedroom, two bedrooms, everyone is living the same way. I didn't want to do that … I wanted to cater for people who are individual and different in terms of how they use the space or how they want to live.

“When I started designing the individual units, I tried to stack them up to create these kind of spaces to fit in the site, which was really small. … And basically what I planned to do was take everything out and build my own foundation at the bottom, stack everything up, and then in the end have a structure that pushes everything back again.”

Each of the apartments is a unique shape: a tube, a wedge, a triangular prism, a half-arch and so on. Tham shows off their particular qualities in a series of series of framed drawings of the individual units, each with its own whimsical inscription, “For the Acrobat who trapezes 24/7”, “For the Architect who is tired of walls in his home so he decided to live in a cylinder”, etc. 

The focus is on cosy, individuated spaces. Although offbeat in terms of mainstream residential architecture, Tham's approach is in line with a current fascination, outside of the profession, with huts, sheds, re-purposing of utility vehicles, glamping – with small, personalised, semi-architectural, spaces in general (think George Clarke's Amazing Spaces, or, uhm, more notoriously, David Cameron's luxury writing shed). She comments: “I had a little study on how big a space is needed if you stretch out your arms or you do whatever exercise.” To swing a cat? “Yeah! And from that I designed the bare minimum space that they needed – so it's comfortable for one person, but it's not too big. That's why I designed really, really small.” She studied how to stack up her units to create the most interesting, pleasant space. “I have had multiple arrangements of it.... how to build a courtyard in the middle, how to have three blocks instead, or whatever.”

Given the nature of the design, the overall shape isn't really the emphasis. As she says the configuration in the drawings/models represents one of many possible arrangements. It resists resolving into a single, brand-worthy, nickname-able outline (as with the Walkie Talkie, the Shard, etc etc). It is an aesthetic that aims to be picturesque as opposed to iconic, and in my book that's a very good thing.

Hence the unusual from-within perspective of the renders. “If you look at this series of images, it's captured in a way so you see what you need to see, and that's it. It's exterior, interior. This is in-to-out, and this is out-to-in. So it is basically looking two ways, instead of having everything shown in one picture, which I don't like. That's what this series was doing. It's all looking here and there, here and there.”

Something I hadn't noticed before was that the renders were all arranged in pairs. That is, every image from inside one of the apartments is matched with one looking back at the same spot from the courtyard. This represents such a simple yet effective manoeuvre that it is a wonder it isn't standard practice. It seems the obvious thing to do. Tham points out: “It isn't obvious until you say it! And I didn't even know that I was doing it until my tutor was arranging it side by side, and I was like: wait a second, something is going on here that I didn't know about!”

Another arresting aspect is the set of incidental, non-architectural elements that are included: mops propped up against walls, copious amounts of washing hung from railings. There are lots of cats too, wandering into frame as if photobombing the architect's vision. This sort of whimsically offered, yet realistic, element engages the viewer and humanises the whole thing. It's another instance where you think: why don't all architects do it like this?

I tell Tham that I like the cats. She points out that there is also a golden snitch in every image. A what? She explains the Harry Potter reference (it's one of the balls in Quidditch apparently) and shows me the tiny Where's Wally-style element tucked away in the pictures. 

I confess I never was a Potter fan: slightly too old when it first came out, maybe. “No one is too old for it!” she laughs. 

“It's fine!” she continues. “I wanted to be mischievous about my project. I already had the cats... and I wanted to see if people pay attention to my drawings. So I've added a snitch into every one of them! So far everyone has seen it, so it is good. But I've been questioned: why did you put it there? I was like: well, you saw it, right? It's a matter of whether you actually see my drawings properly or not.”

That explanation is, I think, is super interesting. It might be key to appreciating why Tham's approach stands apart. As she says, she wants to see if people are paying attention to her work. In other words, she doesn't take it for granted that others will engage with what she does, yet cares deeply that they in fact do. On the evidence of what numbers of other architects produce, and how they talk about their work, this is, strangely enough, an uncommon attitude. One gets the impression often that they aim to communicate not with any actual, individuated human mind but with a sort of disembodied intellectual aether – with, as it were, the Ages, or with the gods perhaps. Whether or not a particular shape or curve is intelligible (let alone pleasing) to anyone else is seemingly a matter of indifference; what appears to matter instead are grandiose abstractions such as Purity, Honesty, Dialectics, mysterious Essential Qualities, etc.

Tham, by contrast, evidently does think it matters whether others can make sense of what she does. And she intuitively understands the fact – a counter-intuitive fact, perhaps – that a good way of encouraging such engagement is to play games, to tantalise, to be deceptive even.

Writing about this elsewhere I've illustrated the point with a Bill Hicks put-down in which he tells his audience that they are responding to his gags “like a dog that's been shown a card trick”. The cruelty, yet almost philosophical brilliance, of the line hinges on the way it draws attention to a whole domain of stupidity, of slack-jawed disengagement, beyond that of being a fool. To be duped one must have some apprehension of what is going on. A dog looking at a man shuffling and dealing cards doesn't have any relevant apprehension. It hasn't formed a mistaken view about where the ten of diamonds now is, rather, it hasn't formed any view at all. The dog is not a dupe – it's too dumb for that. 

Hence it is actually something of a complement to the audience if they are led up the garden path. Such manipulation presupposes an understanding to begin with; it requires that the author/performer/architect makes some effort to be meaningful or intelligible. There is a lot of architecture out there that seems, conversely, to be purpose-built for the proverbial card-watching dog. Dull repetition or tedium-inducing arbitrariness implies total indifference to the mind of the viewer. In such cases, one is treated like a dog. I decide not to bring up the analogy, though, with my interviewee: as we will see, she is a big dog-lover...

I do bring up one other aspect of the work that I liked: a series of drawings showing the construction process, namely parts of the building being lowered by cranes into place, as in a game of Tetris. (Even better, I've since discovered the video of this, below.)

Tham explains, self-deprecatingly, that this came about “because my project was too fun”.

“I wanted it to be pink and not white or what everyone else in school was doing. ... My tutor asked me 'why is it pink?' and I just answered 'because it is fun!'. Because sometimes I just don't have answers to those questions. And he was like yeah, there you go. Just do it like that and stop worrying so much, you know?

“Because [I was worried] it was too fun, and too cute and too playful, my tutors were like, why don't you try and see how it works on site and try and find a construction methodology to make it more realistic? So I tried it, and it was a pain, but it worked. I had to research sizes in terms of how to transport them on a truck. The street is only lanes wide. … [The maximum size that could be transported] was about 2.5metres by 2.5metres and one unit was in the maximum about 9 metres, so I had to chop the biggest part in eights and I had to calculate the weight and how they would fit on the crane and everything else. It was a pain, but it was fun because I didn't know that it would be like that. I almost thought I would plonk it there and that would be it. But that's not going to work.”

Would these things be something that, in practice, engineers or contractors would deal with, I ask? Tham explains that “because it is a design school they expect you to know everything. So you have to learn everything by yourself. … In real life engineers hate architects because we give them this kind of design and expect them to deal with it – you can see that right? It's hard!”

Some students were exhibiting far more outlandish projects: floating islands, artificial suns. Was she tempted to do something like that? “Those are fun to think of and in school it's fine. But in the end it's a pretty project, and all in all it's a pretty thing to see... but I don't know... I've always had to bring my projects back down to the ground. This was going to be too playful until I had that axonometric drawing of the construction.”

The making of an architect

Tham had quite an international upbringing. In fact, she is, to adapt a phrase used by Malcolm Gladwell (to describe himself, as the Canadian son of English and Jamaican parents) something of Commonwealth child. She was born in Canada, grew up in Malaysia, went to university in Australia and then moved over to the London for her Masters.

From https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/stephanie-tham/

Surprisingly for someone with such obvious aesthetic gifts, she hasn't always wanted to be an architect. Her earliest ambition? To be a vet. She makes no secret of her love for animals. In her profile on the RCA website she describes herself as someone who 'prides herself on joyful architecture design and does backflips with her pet dog more frequently than not', and whose dream is 'to design a university for homeless dogs in Malaysia and guide them to become assistance dogs for those in need (or not).' 

But despite studying sciences all the way through school she tells me she eventually realised she was scared of blood and couldn't cope with “pets that are dying”. She doesn't like seeing animals suffer, I suggest? No, she agrees, “I like happy animals!”

However, her father tried to dissuade her from architecture as his cousin was an architect and seemed to have work very hard for it. So she gave business school a try. After three months, she knew she had had enough (“I was like, I can't do this, I can't do this!”) and transferred to architecture. She hasn't looked back.

It's possible, though, that her less direct route has affected her mindset. “I think the way I see architecture is very different from some people … I don't like seeing things that are straight-to-the-point - that's my way of doing design, that's how I'm going to present to the world - and you expect everyone to understand your work. In terms of presenting it, architects are always in front of a computer. They don't talk to one another, asking what needs changed. So you are designing and you forget how to put it into words. It's hard to change to from what is in your head into plain words. It is quite difficult for some. For me it was quite difficult as well … I just had to figure it out.”

The transition from sciences to architecture was tough, but Tham was motivated "because it was fun”. I comment at this point that I wish I had gone down a more 'fun' career path. Tham says “No no, please, trust me, don't!” Why?

“A lot of my friends who are studying medicine or business, they come to exhibitions and they are like 'oh my god, this is so much fun!'. But they don't know how many hours you put in before your finals. You sleep for like 2 hours a night, for like a month. And you can't complain because that's what you have to do. And you think that your project is not done until you have to print it. So until the last day. Even if it is not done you have to say that it is done. There is no such thing as 'OK, today I'm going to finish this', because it's never going to be finished. ... The deadline is all that matters. Even if you try to finish a month in advance, you won't finish it a month in advance.”

OK. Nonetheless, I comment, it is early days in your career and you are producing some pretty convincing work. And that is true of her classmates too: everyone at the show seemed to have serious talent.

She agrees with this last remark. “Yeah. It's a tough school... When I first went in, I was so scared, because I was the youngest in school. Everyone's been working for 5, 10 years. I was freaking out but in the end I just tried to be as good as I could. I tried to bring in a young person's perspective. ... They were about 28-30. Some of them were married, some of them had kids. And when I went I had just finished my degree. I was like 'I don't know what you are talking about!' …

“It was very coherent in terms of how they presented as well, very professional. I just took my month's break travelling, playing with my dogs or whatever, and then I took a masters. It was a big plunge into this school. It was good. I mean like, if [I had a chance to] to do it differently I wouldn't go to any other school because I've heard about they do it in other schools, and it's more. ... This was self-taught.”

She did at least get some work experience during her BA, which she did at RMIT in Melbourne. In the long breaks between semesters – Australian universities apparently send you home for 3 months both in the summer and in the winter – she returned to Malaysia and interned at her friend's mothers' interior design firm. This mainly involved helping this “auntie” (in Malaysia older woman are all addressed as “auntie” she explains) learn to use design software, such as Rhinoceros, so as to be less reliant on draughtsmen. She enjoyed this, even though she wasn't doing the designing. She was also taken on site visits, learning something about the client-designer relationship in the process. There was one client who insisted that her boss install a 3.5 metre curtain rail “... which was ridiculous, but she had to do it because the client wanted it.”

Tham evidently doesn't regard interior design as somehow lesser than architecture. “I've always liked interior design: in terms of material, how you design and divide a space. I like playing with spaces.” I make a connection here back to what I saw at the RCA show. I say I was surprised at the scope of what the MA Interior Design students were doing: often remodeling whole buildings or even streets. It was on a larger scale than I was expecting. Tham agrees. “It's all architecture! Sometimes when I look at their projects I feel they do more architecture than we do, right?”

Along with her dogs, something else she keeps up with when she returns home is competitive cheerleading. It is an interest mentioned in her RCA profile and she brings it up now unprompted. She has been part of a competitive team since high school and has coached school kids when back in Malaysia during the uni breaks. It is another delightfully incongruous fact about her. Architects have a reputation as being lone wolfs, as bloody-minded creatives (and indeed, I think, in the nicest possible way, Tham is in this sense quite bloody-minded about her work). I would think of cheerleading, by contrast, as the ultimate team enterprise.

But she sees a surprising link between the two: “I think what architecture and cheerleading have in common is how you stack things up and change the configuration on the mat in terms of performing. So that's why it was so interesting to me. If I am coaching the kids, I have to plan out where everyone goes and how you dance and how you make the pyramid and stuff. It's kind of like architecture, it's kind of the same.” She shows me a video of her team performing at a competition. I hadn't appreciated that at the level she does it, it is, in effect, a choreographed gymnastic sport, with jumps, stunts and, above all, all sorts of human pyramid-building. I can kind of see what she means.

Culture & conservation

I ask whether she thinks that living in different places – Malaysia, Australia and the UK – has influenced her outlook in any way?

“I have friends who have studied in Malaysia and who have never been overseas for a bachelor or a masters. ... From what I have seen from my friends who have studied overseas, I think sometimes when we examine we are more open and we are more into testing different things instead of copying things every day. So you will design differently and try to bring that design into your home country to see if it works.” The irony is that despite living in a global society, despite living in an age in which there is unparalleled access to ideas and possibilities “we're all living in the same house, the same planning, the same this and that. We're all expected to have this amount of whatever there is in your house and you don't get to choose what you have.”

Here another hint of an underlying mission enters in. “I won't say [this is true of] everyone... but my mindset of studying overseas and going back is to wish that I could bring something that I studied from overseas, or design something I've picked up from somewhere, and put it in Malaysia instead of everyone designing the same things and doing it the same way. Because it's boring. And we don't want to live like robots!” 

You get the sense that she isn't too impressed with the standard of design, or of planning, in her home country, and would like to do something about this if she could. She says “walking is fun ... you don't walk in Malaysia ... everyone has a car. One house can easily have 3, 4 cars when you only have 2 people. It's like that”.

Moreover, there is, apparently, no conservation culture at all. “The thing I like about the UK is that the value of a building: you want to maintain it ... they conserve it here. But in Malaysia whatever old buildings we had have all been taken away because they want to make way for new apartment buildings. And it's terrible!”

She refers to a the demolition of a “really nice, old prison” to make way for a metro station. “There are also a lot of nice things that your parents took photos of which you can't see any more. … And every year – if you study overseas and come back every year – there's something different in Malaysia. Or you get lost! You definitely get lost, because so much has gone.”

One might think a young architect would be more interesting in tearing everything down to create a blank canvass for their own creative output. Once again, Tham thinks a little differently.“I like to preserve things as well as making new things. I don't want to see old things disappear. It is like when you travel, you want to see what made the country what it is, right? Obviously you want to see the new designs if the new designs are amazing, but you want to see what was there, how the country came about, what the art history and the culture is.” The operative motive here is very much curiosity rather than nostalgia. She's not stuck in the past – the accusation often thrown unthinkingly at people who are fond on old buildings – but, rather, likes to swing by to see the interesting stuff that is going down back there.

A design for life?

In the last part of the discussion I want to talk about the challenges that student architects face as they enter the final stages of their training. She is starting to apply for jobs. In the UK, the next stage, the so-called Part 3, of the accreditation process requires you to work and study at the same time. It is potentially a tense juncture, but she is pretty sanguine about the process.

I comment that a lot of people say that entering any kind of creative profession is one of the toughest, most risky career paths you can go down because you have to put in a huge amount of work and often there is a lot of competition. “And it's very subjective, in terms of who likes it”, Tham adds. Yeah, I say. You're at the mercy of the market, at the mercy of changing taste. This can change overnight and you can be left doing something that nobody wants any more. Does she think you have to be quite a brave person, then, to go into it?

“I think you do. Either you want to design something everyone else is designing, or you want to bring something new to the table and see if they accept it. If they don't, find someone else who does. You can't expect everyone to have the same buildings. … In the end, I think it is how people accept what you propose instead of them asking you to give them something, right?"

So the role of an architect is to provide an offering, which people can either take or leave?

“I will often do a project and if my tutors don't like it, I will try to convince them why they should like it. 'If you don't like it, I will convince you!'”

That is quite a brave approach...

“You have to try. You have to keep pushing them. We are always stuck with what we want, you know: [Tham affects a sort of tough-Asian-businessman drawl] 'I want a house. I want a house that's like a barn. But if you give me something and you convince me that I don't want a barn then I'll definitely take it. But if you don't convince me: I want a house like a barn.' That's it!”

There's a bit of an interesting implied critique of rational choice / market democracy philosophy here, which we don't get into. I do comment that Jonathan Meades makes a similar argument. He says it is silly doing public consultations, or asking people what they want, because we can only articulate what we've already seen, so you will never get anything new. Tham agrees: “Yeah. Everyone has a mindset of what they think they want, because they don't know what is out there, or what can be new.”

[Philosophical aside. Some might sense there is an inconsistency, or at least a tension, between this attitude and Tham's commitment to pleasing and engaging those who experience her designs. But I don't think there actually is. There are two different ideas at play here: (1) that aesthetics is fundamentally a cognitive phenomenon – it happens in the brain of the person experiencing the work, rather then in historical dialectics or in the mind of God or whatever – and so everything that a designer does should aim at engaging the imagined viewer; and (2) that it is nonetheless hard for people to predict, let alone articulate, what will please them ahead of actually experiencing the finished thing. Belief in proposition (1) is logically entirely consistent with (2). It certainly doesn't commit one to the inverse of (2), namely a belief that artists/architects ought to stick with what is popular (let's call this the 'democratic approach to art') and try to anticipate people's preferences (as opposed to their thought processes). Conversely, someone might advocate a democratic approach to art on grounds of respect for public views, or whatever, and not believe in proposition (1); such a person might even avoid having any positive views about the content of aesthetics at all. Indeed, in my experience, people who articulate art-democratic views do tend to combine them with radical, super-relativistic, conversation-ending blandishments such as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, actually meaning by this that beauty, far from being a cognitive concept, has no objective, tractable content at all. Tham's combination of beliefs is more interesting that this (not least because it actually has some content), and is, in my view, a better one too.]

Of course, Tham is realistic about how far she will be able to push her creative ideas, at least at first. "From my classmates, because they've been working, right? … Every time I ask them 'Working is fun, right? Like, how hard can it be?', they are like 'you don't get to design what you want a lot'. Because it's all what the client wants. So I think all this is fun in school, or [if] you have your own practice, or you publish and you try and get your ideas out the world ... but I'm not sure it works in the real world. You get shut down a lot.”

Reflections

I certainly hope Stephanie Tham doesn't get shut down a lot, because I think her work is cool and she has got a lot of good ideas.

As I played the tape of the interview back to start writing it up, I wondered if I could think of examples of other architects who, like her, have/had a similar fascination with playing games with the viewer... Yes: good old Clough Williams-Ellis, of course! Williams-Ellis, the creator of Portmeirion, and one of my heroes, understood the point discussed earlier, namely that trickery is a great way of engaging the viewer. Portmeirion is full of distorted perspectives, trompe l'oeil and all sorts of hidden features to reward exploration and careful attention.

The two are also linked by a passionate love for genuinely lovely old buildings (Portmeirion eventually became, in its creator's words, a 'home for fallen buildings', or rather reused bits of them), a love that is refreshingly heartfelt and unmediated by that often all-too-worthy and slightly bogus, English Heritage-y, concern for conservation as an abstract goal in itself.

There are personality similarities too. Both Williams-Ellis and Tham are playful characters who relish seeming incongruities. The former enjoyed the fact that he was both a minor aristocrat and a Labour-supporter, that he was building an Italianate-style village in North Wales and that his creation became a place of pilgrimage for fans of The Prisoner, the innovative, futuristic psychological TV drama that was shot there. The latter enjoys being a CAD-wielding architect and cheerleader, invoking big cranes to build something cosy and comfortable, and hanging out with dogs (but not treating people like them).

Above all, though, the two share an intense thirst for variety in their surroundings. Tham speaks with genuine urgency and passion about the sameyness of contemporary development and her desire to do something different. Williams-Ellis was the same. He wrote in his autobiography that '.. a building that seems to me no worse than dull can none the less make me very definitely uncomfortable and unhappy. I feel frustrated and cheated – it should have been thus and thus, it has missed this chance and that, and why, oh why, could it not have been given the other thing instead of this tired stupidity!' I reckon Tham would relate to this remark.

It does feel a little odd to be declaring a 20-something female graduate from Malaysia to be, in effect, a sort of intellectual heir to someone who was an eccentric member of the Anglo-Welsh gentry who came of age as an architect in the Edwardian era. But why not? It's the sort of incongruity that both, I think, would appreciate.