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Hi, I'm Dr. Sally McGraths. I'm an architect. I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet. This is architecture support. Cure Branco, is there a theoretical limit of how tall a building can be on earth without collapsing? After the Burj Khalifa, Saudi Arabia is looking to do a building over a kilometer high. I mean, in theory, tall buildings are built and they're made to move. They sway in the wind. It's rather like a tree. The roots are the pile foundations that go into the ground. You need like a kind of spread of plate effect so that you can actually stop the thing toppling over.
Obviously, there's there's ways to make a frame building like a wedding cake going up to a point at the top as the Burj Khalifa does. It's more about elevators. Elevators restrict the height of a building. In tall buildings, you have to get out of one into another. So, that's the kind of limiting factor. Ultrasaurus, today I learned that there's a London skyscraper that melted cars and set buildings on fire in 2013. That's fondly known as the Walkie Talkie because of the shape of it. It also got named as the Walkie Scorchie because of the um setting fire to things. What happened was the angle of the sun on the glass becomes almost like a magnifying glass. It was increasing
the power of the sun's rays and so yes, it was melting cars and in the end they had to fix like a brise soleil uh which is a series of fins. You can't necessarily predict something like this. Of course, there are guidelines and typically if you're going to step out of the traditional way of buildings, you have to have the stomach for the fact that there may be issues down the line that you need to deal with. They found a solution, but yeah, it's it's it's not ideal. Jesus script, what are the biggest architectural challenges you've ever faced? There's a few. I worked on a project that was on an island in a volcano crater. It was a 15-minute walk from the nearest road down a narrow path. How on
earth was I going to deliver building materials? In the old days, they used to use donkeys, but they don't do that anymore. And I'd also designed this huge pivoting arched window. And the answer was to do helicopter drops. What I hadn't necessarily figured out was the weight restriction of the helicopter. So, the steel pivoting arch and the glass had to be loaded up on the road and then come around the mountain and be dropped into place perfectly into place with a team of guys waiting on site. Actually, I couldn't bear to be there at the time. I did ask them to film it so I could see it afterwards, but it was quite a hair-raising moment. Who I pay says, "Change my view. Brutalist
architecture is ugly." Brutalism, it's associated obviously with raw concrete. It comes from the French béton brut. It's raw. It's unadorned. It's heavy. It's usually hammered concrete. Typically, it's not very well maintained. So, it's small windows and big heavy concrete streaked with stains of leaking pipes. So, it can be pretty depressing. I mean, funnily enough, they're becoming trendy again. I think it's the way that people view these kind of monsters and then insert something soft and emotional into them. It's quite an interesting juxtaposition in a way.
Take for instance the Barbican. It's right in the heart of the city of London, bush-hammered concrete. It does have gardens, but it was a utopian vision of how Londoners would live. There are those that love it. It's quite a complicated piece of urban residential design to navigate. There are two types of lifts. Often, you go to see a theater piece there and if you get in the wrong lift, you're not on the right floor. Some would say that there's sort of arrogance of the architecture that is quite off-putting. Obviously, for the people that live there and it is full of architects. There's a kind of raw spirit about it. Brutalist architecture is
almost like it's not wearing makeup. If you compare the enhanced the Kardashian approach versus Pamela Anderson's no makeup look. I mean, I think there's something quite interesting. It's just much more honest and truthful. Is that ugly? I'm not so sure. So, from the architecture subreddit, does the climate of a city affect how architecture is built? In Denmark, the roof pitches, they're very steep. They're dealing with snow. So, the vernacular of the local architecture takes on a particular form for that reason. The other end of the scale, when I was in India recently for this project, I was struck by the university
that I visited. It's very heavy thermal mass, smaller windows, not really glass in those windows. They've paid attention to passive solar gain and the way that you can use natural ventilation to cool spaces and the orientation of those spaces to create shade and comfort cooling. That said, it's strange also in India to be witnessing high-rise going up with air conditioning, sealed windows, and not the same fundamental intelligent approach to how we should be building. Polite architecture asks, "Can architecture influence human decisions or behavior?" You've asked me whether architecture affects humans' behavior. I mean, when I was a young architect, I was a massive fan of the penguin pool at London Zoo, which is designed by
Berthold Lubetkin. It's this fabulous double helix ramp. The penguins could jump off and play and jump into the pool. And architecturally, it's absolutely exquisite. The interesting thing is the penguins became very sad in that environment and the zookeepers decided that they would create something on a different site, simple timber buildings, a pool where they could interact and they weren't straightjacketed into this sort of geometric form. Fascinating. All the penguins started being more playful, having baby penguins. Um it's really interesting how a kind of beautiful piece of architecture modernism can actually literally have that effect on living creatures.
Second name A is asking, "Do people really build mini models of buildings like they show in movies for new projects?" Models are really useful things. Certainly, there are models that are made for show, made out of beautiful wood often or acrylic. We use models in a slightly different way. We can use them as like little maquettes. Usually, make them out of cardboard or balsa wood and glue. And that can be everything from a small part of a city where you can actually pop in the actual proposal. That might be the fragment of a building. It's really good to break off from drawings in two dimensions and to actually use your hands to explore something. It's typically very useful
when you have meetings with for example a planning committee where you're trying to convey the narrative of how you arrived at this particular massing. There's a gallery roof building we designed in Mayfair. The whole idea was to create these uninterrupted floor spaces. So, no columns. We used the roof structure. Little like when you fold origami paper, you know that it has an inherent strength. So, we started to explore how we could actually use that. What you're seeing on the outside is not necessarily what you're seeing on the inside. So, we had to figure out how the structure and the insulation and all of
that would work. Playing with the geometry in your hands is just quite a useful thing to do. A Quora user asks, "Why doesn't Zaha Hadid believe in using right angles?" Zaha was a friend of mine. She came many times to inspire my students. Zaha was very much an artist. I think that her sense of space, voluptuous space was so inspiring. Like almost on a cosmic level. That the sense that as humans, there's something very humbling to be not registering the story heights of buildings, but just to be in this kind of wonderfully abstract amorphous form.
I mean, super futuristic in terms of when they're built, they're they're like amazing. But, you know, it was radical what she was doing. But, it took her many years to actually build anything. And it's not easy to build her forms, not at all. Straight lines are much cheaper. Spruxster is asking, "Can someone explain the difference between an architecture designer versus an architect?" An architect is a legal title. It's protected as a professional title. It takes many years to qualify. An architectural designer is typically someone who can produce conceptual ideas, but they don't have any accountability for the um drawings that they might produce for you.
Architects typically produce hundreds of drawings. It depends on the scale of the project. But, those are all very technically resolved details of buildings. So, you'll know that it won't leak and it'll stand up. Free time photography asks, "Design versus final product. If you come up with an idea and then you actually it goes through all these processes and then it's made. Amazing. But it's the process that is how the design actually evolves. So, if you're very rigid and you just go, well, this is my idea and that's how it must be, actually you're missing a trick because often things happen along the
way almost by accident rather than design. We did a project with an arcade and what I hadn't understood was how the light would enter that space and be refracted in two ways. And it was like this magical moment when the beams of sunshine shone in before we'd finished the actual design and we went, okay, actually let's keep it like that, not in the way that we intended to do it. So, yeah, I think it's good to be quite open to an element of chance and change. Iridescent light, why is Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture a big deal? The most iconic masterpiece of American architectural houses has got to be Falling Water. It was pretty radical.
This idea of this kind of extraordinary intervention in nature that actually almost embraces the waterfall with the water coming from beneath the terraces. It's powerful and it's that terrible word iconic. It's a motif almost that people go, that sums up architecture. In fact, it was very much of its time. I think if one was to commission today's Frank Lloyd Wright, he wouldn't have done it in quite such a monumental modernist way. It would have been a lot more sensitive and thoughtful about the location. If you look at the Guggenheim, that was an amazing building. It's effectively a spiraling ramp. So,
instead of passing through a series of galleries, the gallery is on the ramp. So, you're seeing a linear exhibition from top to bottom or bottom to top depending on how you want to view the show. From the architecture subreddit, do I need to be good at drawing to be an architect? If you can't draw, you can't really communicate. When you're talking through ideas with a client, it's just really quite useful to be able to pull out a pencil and then quickly sketch. I mean, these can be very simple doodles. It's not about being good at drawing and doing watercolors. There's a lot of clients who would ask for a CAD rendering so that you can have a kind of fly-through of a project. These have a
slightly weird like a hyperreal quality though, slightly bizarre. So, what we tend to do is we might build a computer model of a building, but we will by hand sort of draw the spaces and there's a sort of level of trust between architect and client, let's say, that I think comes across when you have hand drawings. It's different because if you present a client with, this is exactly what it's going to look like. Whereas, I think something that's kind of loose, it's a little more friendly, it's a little more uncertain. And actually, if you can talk and you can draw, great. That's what you need.
Cheetus08, why do we not build ornate buildings anymore? If you look up as you walk through the streets of a city, there were extraordinary freezes, skilled, amazing brickwork on Victorian buildings. These trades are disappearing and the reason is that it's expensive to do that. The other thing, of course, is this all happened on the back of modernism in I think it was 1910, Adolf Loos wrote an essay which was the foundations of the Bauhaus studio, which was ornament is a crime. That's because the modernists were saying that once you add ornament to everyday objects, they go out of style and then you throw them away and we should actually think about the form follows the function. With the
advent of the machine age, buildings were no longer typically made by stonemasons with beautiful carved gargoyles or whatever. They're often machine-made offsite and then they come and they get fixed into place. So, there's not necessarily the same regard for ornament, which is a shame. AlternativeBig6493 is asking, how do architects know that their designs are feasible, engineerable, and structurally sound? It's not entirely down to the architect. Obviously, buildings are made with a series of experts who you rely upon in order to actually put together all the ideas in a way that is truly buildable. It's quite loose at the beginning. It might
be shapes and forms. I don't like to go straight to the computer because that is very restricting. We don't just do drawings, we'll also make exploratory maquettes. It's very much an exploratory process. So, as the design develops, we will test it. So, an Englishman in Paris says, Pompidou or Pompidon't? Pompidou, of course. It's that 1970s optimism and spirit about it. It's also very interesting that the architects chose to really reinvent the gallery space, turning it inside out as we know. There's a legibility about the services of the buildings which are normally hidden. So, each color is for a different thing. The water's in green, the electricity's in yellow or however it works, but it's all on the outside.
So, the guts are on the outside. I think what was also very interesting was that the space adjacent to the Pompidou Center, it's a very free and easy and lovely place for people to gather. So, sometimes it's not the architecture itself as an iconic form, but it's the space in between that iconic form and the rest of the square. Amcure asks, how difficult is it to build a bare concrete home? Concrete is a liquid thing that sets. It needs to then be finished. You have to create formwork so you pour the concrete in, but you also need insulation and it the concrete needs to dry out. It's very, very specialist stuff. So, although concrete itself isn't expensive, it's basically something that is like a
moment and then you strike the formwork and you take it away, but you have very little opportunity to make mistakes and as a result, it's it's quite expensive to do. So, absolutely is possible, but it isn't easy. ThenFeeling7989 is asking, how true is architect's dream is an engineer's worst nightmare? It's very much a collaboration. The spirit and the vision has to be a shared thing. And for a structural engineer to work well with an architect, there's this kind of balance of pragmatism on the one hand and fanaticism on the other. And when that's in good dialogue, that's when great things come out. I mean, I've been lucky enough to work with some of the world's greatest structural engineers and they
make a huge difference to the outcome of the building. SanAndreas asks, why does the Louvre pyramid get a pass? And I think what's extraordinary about that place is there's definitely a tension between the sleek glass versus the old stone buildings that surround it. A lot of Parisians despise it. Parisians can be quite conservative about these things and yet very interestingly, it's more than a pyramid-shaped roof light. The juxtaposition of the old with the new, it's a place where people feel excited and I think it's it's quite special. It's a difficult thing to pull off, but I think he did.
A Corey user asks, why don't most architects live in self-designed homes? It might be a cost thing. It's very expensive to build your own home. Architects' homes are typically a laboratory for their ideas. My own realization is that I can't live in a home designed by somebody else. So, my last house had an oculus in the roof open to let the snow fall in apparently into the bedrooms. It had brick doors that swing open. So, I mean, there's a lots of opportunity when you're doing your own house to actually introduce magic and excitement and mysticism. At the same time, if there's problems, you got to live with them.
This is everything for today. I hope you learned something. I hope you enjoyed it. This has been architecture support.
