The Rubble Club

Another story which caught my eye this week was the news that architects who suffer the ignominy of seeing one of their buildings demolished in their own lifetime can now seek solace in a new online support group: The Rubble Club.

To qualify for Rubble Club membership, architects must be alive and not party to the destruction of the building in question. The building must have been intended as a permanent structure and its destruction must have been deliberate.

This struck a small and sad chord with me. As a lowly trainee architect who was working in practice at the same time as studying, one of the few things I ever designed at work which actually got built was the toilets at Fleet Services McDonalds on the M3 (yes, I know, you can add having to do work for McDonalds to the list of reasons Why I Never Became an Architect).

Picture the scene: it's June 2003, Mr K & I are in the first flush of romance, and we're merrily heading down the M3 en route to Glastonbury. The sign for Fleet Services hoves into sight, and excitedly I squeal "ooh, stop, stop! I can show you something I designed which got built!" (note at this stage I didn't tell him exactly what this, erm, splendid thing actually was).

So we pulled into the services, and I led Mr K to the services building, giddy at the prospect of sharing an admittedly small and not very glamorous achievement with my beloved: they may only have been toilets, and they may well have been located in the world's most reviled fast-food outlet, but I'd designed them and they were mine.

We came to an abrupt halt in the entrance hall. Confused, I scanned the garish fascias of the various kiosks and shops. I couldn't see McDonalds. What I could see was a new-fangled "healthy eating" salad joint in the space where McDonalds had been.

I was gutted. All trace of my toilets had been obliterated, thanks to McDonalds dramatically scaling back their UK operations in the face of the 'Fast Food Nation' backlash and a hostile media. "What is it I'm supposed to be looking at?" asked Mr K? "Nothing," I said sadly. "I'll tell you about it when we get in the car".

So we returned, much subdued, to the car, and I said a silent goodbye to my impermanent monument to human ablutions.

What makes this even worse is that, since reinventing themselves slightly, bloody McDonalds have now re-opened their outlet in Fleet Services! Pah.

So in my own tiny way, I really feel for the members of the Rubble Club. I wonder if they'd let me join?

This is not a surprise to me

Architecture is the most socially exclusive profession in the UK, ahead of law, medicine and accountancy, according to research by the Cabinet Office.

And, as Building Design notes sadly, "it costs more to qualify than in any other sector (and the salary is rubbish)".

RIBA president Sunand Prasad identified student debt as a serious problem, and added that more needed to be done to improve access for older students.

As someone who started their Part I at the grand old age of 28, studying part-time on day release one day a week, I completely endorse Prasad's comments: my practice were pretty supportive, but I was still working a 40+ hour week (compressed into four days), on four-fifths of my rather meagre salary, drowning in course-work and model-making in the evenings and at weekends.

I had absolutely no life or leisure time apart from one evening a week of band practice, and sadly I just couldn't sustain the colossal effort required to complete my degree. Which is one of the reasons Why I Never Became an Architect. I still feel sad about this sometimes.

One of the readers' comments on the BD story caught my eye though. 'muhammad badr' argues for a change in the law, making the need to employ an architect a statutory requirement for RIBA stages A to D, but he notes:

"This only makes sense if a well designed built environment is important to society/government. For this to be the case, the built environment has to be held as more of a resource for all. At the moment it is (and has been) a cash cow."

His comments are spot on: architecture and the built environment are about so much more than proft margins on flats and offices. A truly visionary government would recognise this and embrace the industry's potential. But as I've said before, this Labour Government doesn't care about Construction.

Blog Panic (or, Why I Never Became A Coder)

As with any recently acquired interest, this blog is often in my thoughts at the moment. I had a spare five minutes between meetings while I was in our office at King's House earlier today, and so I thought I'd log in to Blogger just to check on things (like you do).

Having spent a good few hours last weekend tweaking the layout and fiddling around with it until I was actually really quite pleased with how things were looking, you can imagine my dismay when I was confronted with a screen resembling the monstrosity below (only much worse):


Quelle horreur! What had happened to my beautiful blog in the time since I'd left the house and arrived at the council offices?

Then I realised: all the council PCs use Internet Explorer as the default web browser. Now, I've been using Firefox for all my interweb activities for years, and because I am not remotely l33t (aka Good At The Internet) it had never occurred to me to test my new blog layout in IE.

But clearly, this was a problem. Much as I find it hard to believe that anyone uses Internet Explorer any more when there are so many better browsers to be downloaded, I suspect that IE is still the browser of choice for the vast majority of web users.

So I started panicking that, erm, literally dozens of readers were not only being denied the opportunity to enjoy my blog in all its technicolour floral glory, they were also unable to even read the actual posts. Which entirely defeats the blog's fundamental purpose. And then I had to go into a Planning Committee meeting.

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I resumed panicking on the bus on the way home. All my poor readers having to squint at an inky screen with undecipherable posts! And even worse - how on earth was I going to rectify the layout situation? The current one had taken me ages to get to its present state (via some haphazard cutting and pasting, and a whole load of trial and error and F5-ing and guesswork) and I had absolutely no idea where to look in the lines and lines of coding in order to identify the problem. Or what to do even if I did locate the glitch.

Stuck in the rush hour rain and traffic on North Street, I did a bit of desperate Googling on my crackberry for '[layout name] blogger "internet explorer" fix', and bingo - the search returned the following phrase: Internet Explorer 6 and below cannot display PNG transparencies correctly.

"Aha!" I thought. "God only knows what 'PNG' means, but that rings a bell from all those wretched lines of XML (or whatever it is) burnt into my eyeballs after the weekend's tweaking."

So feeling a bit perkier, and before I finally resigned myself to having to go back to 'Thisaway (Green)' or some other unexciting standard template, I decided to give it one last go in IE when I got indoors.

Et voilà! It all works just fine in Internet Explorer 7 (the council PCs are evidently limping on with an older version than the one I've got at home). But I've posted a caveat over there > > > > > > at the top of the page, just in case anyone operating an inferior browser chances on my blog and is put off by its apparent illegibility.

And I still think you should all be using Firefox.

PS The IE6 situation clearly isn't down to my crappy coding (*phew!*), but there are still x-amount of bad things about the code for my blog layout (eg why no blog title on the 'Older Posts' page or on individual post pages?), so if there are any kind-hearted techies out there who'd like to assist me in my quest for layout functionality, please get in touch!