“ “What inspired you to write this piece?” It is the question most creative people dread. If you’re composing music, you must somehow be in a trance, in some sort of mystical, transported condition suspending all rational thought processes. It comes as a severe jolt to many that creative activity is generally done like any other job, with hard work, craft, intelligence and a dose of cunning.”
So wrote the composer Julian Anderson in the Guardian on 26 August 2016, and in advance of a UK premiere of his latest work Incandesimi, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle at the London Proms on 3 September 2016.
This opening paragraph of his dispels a myth about the magic of creativity, and brings to the fore some necessary conditions to allow creativity to flourish. Inspiration and talent and ability are givens.
But Julian Anderson enjoys other necessary conditions to bring this creative activity into the world. He is commissioned to write a new piece, and it is for the wonderful Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle. Such patronage or commission, and this client provide the composer with the first two vital conditions.
And it is to be played for a public audience – initially in the beau-tiful Scharoun concert hall and then at the Royal Albert Hall, and to be broadcast on radio and television. All this is in the context of other world class music. It receives critical acclaim (The Guardian ranked it with 5 stars.51). He is a young composer (33 years old) and the piece is relatively short (15 minutes). Is this the equivalent of an architect’s commission to design a new house? Or an artist’s inclusion in a group show?
I suggest Anderson has the perfect set of conditions for creative
51 ref Guardian Newspaper 26 August 2016
places designers and architects have followed, with advertisers and PR people close behind, and then the accountants and lawyers.
And then rents shoot up and real estate is suddenly valuable, and demands for improved infrastructure ensures that market forces prevail. Follow the artists if you want know where to invest your money. European investment in cultural institutions such as the Tate Gallery (London) or Centre Pompidou (Paris) has succeed over several decades to bring substantial investment into areas such as Liverpool in the UK or the ‘rust belt’ of northern France.
There is global understanding and recognition of the value of the Creative Economy, and in the UK it has moved through several phases, noting the changes in the use and understanding of the terms – Creativity Industries, Cultural Industries, and their Econ-omies. Some would suggest this was a marketing ploy invented in the Thatcher years to link together the arts, design and prosperity.
Quickly picked up as ‘Cool Britannia’ by New Labour it embraced everything from Formula 1 car racing to the YBAs (Young British Artists) - artists, architects and designers were all cool. It became a sort of melee of late twentieth century aesthetic and lifestyle. In the twenty-first century, the banking crisis and ensuing recession, rocked all areas. The Creative Economy also found the need to re-describe its value and values. It is the second largest sector of GDP in the UK after financial services. But in the 2010s the drive down of state funding and measures in the age of austerity shrivels all areas from education, research funding, investing in design for long term gain, progressive measures such as British Schools for the Future (BSF)52, Housing Design etc. One of the last schools procured through BSF, won the coveted international Stirling Prize53. Thus funding is removed from the very areas that are gen-erating future creativity and wellbeing.
These many contradictions proliferate. The commercial art market has never been higher and the average income of artists is as low as it has ever been. At the same time a mindless and pointless project such as the Planted Bridge gains back door public funding.
52 Architects Journal 2 Feb 2011 Michael Gove singled out Richard Rogers in his latest unprovoked outburst against the profession: Having twice already claimed architects working on the BSF programme represented a waste of taxpayers’ money, the education secretary has again targeted the profession in relation to profiteering from schools building. Gove also took a swipe at other ‘award-winning architects’ and vowed to deny them any role in the growing, government-backed Free School movement…. he said: ‘And we won’t be getting Richard Rogers to design your school, we won’t be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no-one in this room is here to make architects richer.’
53 Burntwood School by Alford Hall Monaghan Morris
Figure 3.1 Gitte Juul, East West River, The Workers Museum, Copenhagen 2016: Photo
© David Stjernholm
Figure 3.2 Petra Marguc Girafes au lycée, Paris 10, 2013 Photo © Petra Marguc
Figure 3.3 Michael Wildman and Irene Prieler, Grundstein.
‘Open bookshelf ’.
photo © Frank Gassner
The risk is that the creativity of artists, architects and designers becomes a desirable acquisition and bankable commodity, rather than a life enhancing process in need of investment for the future and perpetual renewal. Creativity is valued at its out-turn and not at its input and inception. Too often the client will pay for the pro-duction process but not the brilliance of the idea.
In July 2015 two major and closely inter-related reports were published concerning the value to the national economy of the arts and culture, and the need for public investment in the arts to ben-efit the Creative Industries.
The first of these published by Arts Council England ‘Contribu-tion of the arts and culture sector to the na‘Contribu-tional economy’54 was written by Cebr (Centre for Economics and Business Research) and the second is published by Creative Industries Federation’s (CIF) ‘ Arts and Growth; How public investment in the arts contributes to growth in the creative industries’. 55
Creative Industries Federation CEO John Kamfner, launching the publication 2015 said: “There is nothing ‘nice to have’ about the arts and the creative industries, there is nothing tangential, nothing ‘soft’. They are central to our economy, our public life and our nation’s health.”
The reports include some striking statistics. For example:
• Arts and culture is worth £77bn in gross value added to the British economy – an increase of 35.8% between 2010 and 2013.
• Arts and culture industries generated £15.1 billion in turnover in 2012-13, an increase
of 26% since 2010.
• For every pound invested in arts and culture, an additional £1.06 is generated in the economy.
• More than one in 12 UK jobs are in the creative economy, with employment increasing 5% between 2013 and 2014, compared with a 2.1% jobs increase in the wider economy.
• Britain invests a smaller percentage, 0.3%, of its total GDP on arts and culture than other countries. Germany invests 0.4%, the EU as a whole 0.5%, Denmark 0.7% and France 0.8%.
• Grant in aid to England’s Arts Council has fallen nearly 30% in the last five years and few
54 See more at: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/arts-council-news/we-pub-lish-new-report-highlighting-contribution-ar/#sthash.y696lZyj.dpuf 55 See more at http://www.creativeindustriesfederation.com
Figure 3.4 CJ Lim. Studio 8 Architects. Food Parliament. © CJLim
Figure 3.5 Karin Helms.
Normandy landscape exhibited ADAPTr 2016 photo
© Katharine Heron
expect the situation to get any better.
The previously published research of the Work Foundation56 also offers good insights over two decades or more, and links with government research and the effect of the recession. It also points to the future importance of Digital Economies to be embedded in the Creative Economies and becoming an integrated part of all aspects of creative industries. 57
These and other commissioned researches demonstrate the value of the creative industries, but there is little reference to the core creativity, inception of ideas, the imagination and invention, and the need for its recognition and nourishment. This short essay explores some of the conditions that enable productive creativity in design and architecture where the client, their commission and the critical context all play a part. As educators, architects, designers, and critics we continue to explore ways nurture creativity and ena-ble the realization to benefit for the creative practitioner and for a wider public and to contribute to benefit society as a whole.
But the reality is that creative practitioners need more that the attributes of talent and ideas – they need finance and time, direc-tion and space, enhanced skills, and recognidirec-tion by peers and a wider public. In short, they need the right context. We shall look at Client (ideas and risk), Critique and ‘the Crit’ (or peer review), and Commission and Exposition (or outreach and dissemination).
These conditions are explored in more depth and while not intended to be exhaustive, may provide insight to the conditions that enable creativity for an architect, or designer.
ADAPT-r58
The ADAPTr project has been one way of nurturing and devel-oping creative practitioners by providing fellowships that support research into their own practice, exposing hidden depths, discover-ing Tacit Knowledge and describdiscover-ing it to others. And through this dissemination of research findings, feed more into the collective knowledge.
ADAPT-r focuses on Creative Practitioners in Small and
56 http://www.theworkfoundation.com. The Work Foundation was set up in 2002 building on the legacy of The Industrial Society set up in 1918 to improve the quality of working life through advocacy, research and practical interventions.
57 ‘Staying ahead and the UK Creative Industries’ published 2007, followed by the ‘Creative Block’ published in 2010.
58 A full description of ADAPTr is http://adapt-r.eu
Figure 3.6 Tom Holbrook:
5th Studio’s speculative approach to working in the context of East Anglia © Tom Holbrook
Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Small businesses are normally pri-vately owned companies, partnerships, or sole proprietorships.
What businesses are defined as “small” in terms of government support and tax policy varies depending on the country and indus-try. In the UK the definition of medium is under 50 employees and less than £25m turnover or assets under £12.5m. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills estimated that at the start of 2014, 99.3% of UK private sector businesses were SMEs, with their
£1.6 trillion annual turnover accounting for 47% of private sector turnover.
While in the arts these will usually be individual solo practi-tioners with some examples of collaborative practice, in architec-ture the great majority are SMEs. About 45% of registered archi-tects (28,894 in England and Wales in 2015) are sole principals, or employ five qualified staff or less (source: RIBA). The 2011 census in England and Wales showed that there were 54,000 people call-ing themselves artists, and research by the Paycall-ing Artists Cam-paign in 2014 showed that the average income from their creative practice is £10,000 pa.
Returning to the early work of the Work Foundation lead by Will Hutton, he presented a ‘bull’s-eye’ diagram in which he showed at the centre the most creative being the most anarchic creative people artists/designers and in the outer rim he located the successful creative industries in terms of wealth generation, with new corporate creativity. It follows that the small enterprise is at the centre and the largest at the edge, and the centre must survive in order to feed the edge and the edge is dependent on the centre for its quality.
This ‘centre’ is vulnerable and is like to be very fragile and precarious. It needs to be nurtured for its own sake and how it feeds into the greater economy. It is made of clusters of individuals taking personal risks in pursuit of ‘the project’ and new ideas and inventions. It is recognisably anarchic and wilful, and therefore a risk. Risk takers are key to the development of a creative economy, and the wise investors are those who know how a little well placed seed-funding can start something new. At the same time it is full of questioning and doubt, insecurity and at times missing peer review or a supportive community of practice. Missing too is the critical evaluation to hone the project.
In ADAPT-r our interests are in the Creative Practitioner, the individual, and therefore the very centre, and we recognize the rip-ples that spread out from it. We are looking at the practices of our Fellows and analysing some of their practices in terms of project
Figure 3.7 Alice Casey and Cian Deegan TAKA.
Window 2013.
Photo © Alice Clancy
or client or patron. No practice exists in a vacuum, and architects in particular depend on the client to develop the project, and to whatever its conclusion. Where does this necessary ingredient come from?
At the conclusion of the ADAPT-r project we have gathered some fascinating and comparable case studies from the Fellows – these are recorded in the ADAPT-r deliverables and shown in the concluding exhibition. From ADAPT-r we can look at the client types from the projects undertaken by ADAPT-r Fellows and in the following groupings:
The self initiated project - The architectural critic and writer Edwin Heathcote described the idea of the self-initiated project in the Financial Times 24 July 2015 59 on the occasion of the nom-ination of architectural collective Assemble for the Turner Prize (which they subsequently won).
“What has been publicly recognized by the Tate Gallery in this nomination, is familiar to many arts practitioners and some architects over decades since the 60s, but thought to be
‘alternative’ – now it is being recognised as mainstream albeit avant-garde and radical.”
Amongst the fellows in ADAPT-r we can see this within the work of some practitioners such as Tom Holbrook who develops a project idea and proposal, but it is also core practice of Gitte Juul, Petra Marguc, Michael Wildman and Irene Prieler of Grundstein.
For Eric Guibert there is another version of this genre in which he has developed a practice as an architect undertaking small scale developments. He is the developer/client and architect. Karin Helms has initiated a project of recovery of historic landscape in Normandy. Many of these projects develop as main-stream funded projects while others remain self-funded or with small grants.
The speculative project - This takes its model from academia, and CJ Lim has taken the speculative project beyond the usual
59 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=edwin+Heathcote+FT+24+July+2015&bex-t=msl&atb=v33-3__&ia=web Heathcote said that this “ marked a moment of real significance. Young, widely admired and increasingly influential, Assem-ble do things differently. They don’t wait for commissions to come to them, they initiate their own projects and work with communities and institutions to create designs of real social value. Then, most of the time, they build the projects themselves, learning as they go. This is very far from the traditional image of the architect as the immaculate intellectual working in a minimalist studio. But at a time when the authority and influence of architects are being eroded and austerity has devastated local-authority and government building programmes, are such collectives the future of progressive architecture?”
Figure 3.8 Deborah Saunt DSDHA Covert House, South Elevation 2016 photo: © Christopher Rudquist
Figure 3.9 Eric Guibert House in France photo: © Eric Guibert
Figure 3.10 Johannes Torpe. Agnes Cupcakes.
Photo © Johannes Torp Studios
Figure 3.11 Steve Larkin Architects, House at Bog West. photo © Alice Clancy
boundaries in with Studio 8 Architects. With his PhD thesis
‘From Smart City to the Food Parliament: an investigation into urban consequences of food transparency’.60 Competition entries are another form of the self-initiated project albeit to a brief, and often un-built project. Willem Tomiste has made a career from this approach. Karin Helms has started a major public landscape consultation project in Normandy linking the changing practices in agriculture with a change in the terrain and noting unintended consequences, and Tom Holbrook’s practice makes a strong case for the speculative design process being a ‘site’ for on-going projects of every sort. Many practices enter competitions but surprisingly few have surfaced in this arena.
The family project - Many young practices start with the indul-gence and patronage of family members, and often this work is breath-taking in its originality enabling early ideas to be developed that are often key to later practice. Both TAKA and Eric Guibert cite early family commission while Deborah Saunt who cites exam-ples at the start and at the end in her PhD.
The individual client or one-off client - E.g. Clancy Moore, Steve Larkin and Johannes Torpe. Interestingly this category is often thought to be the most fruitful for development of new creative talent, and yet few examples come out of ADAPT-r. There may be a competitive selection process here such as the Dairy House for Niall Hobhouse, by Clancy Moore; or the house at Bogwest by Steve Larkin. The Bakery for Agnes Cupcakes by Johannes Torpe Studios is also self initiated in the sense that the designer is also part of the client. These projects usually funded by the client them-selves, and are literally single stakeholder projects.
The similarly small scale enterprise, organization, a company – e.g.
the Cricket Club or a small advertising or law firm, and interior projects. Here there is likely to be a competitive selection process. It is likely to be funded by the organization concerned who accounta-ble to membership or funding body, and it is possibly grant funded also. e.g. TAKA, Siv Stangeland, Sam Kebbell.
The corporate client – While the scale may vary greatly these clients are accountable to others, and may have public funding.
Traditionally these are the most risk averse and the least likely to procure innovative work. The examples of clients who procure cre-ative practitioners, are to be applauded and often have an equally creative process to support it e.g. Deborah Saunt, Siv Stangeland, Johannes Torpe.
The public body /state or quasi public funded body: working to rules
60 Food City by CJ Lim, published by Routledge in 2014.
Figure 3.12 Siv Helene Stangeland, Helen and Ard Co-living pro-ject Vindmøl-lebakken 2016,
© Helen and Hard
of public procurement e.g. OJEU 61rules. These apply to organiza-tions who receive funding from public bodies or Quangos such as EU funding, Lottery etc. Deborah Saunt work for Olympic Park, Tom Holbrook (Lea Valley), Siv Stangeland Library landscape architects Thierry Kandjee and Sebastien Penformis, Siobhán Ní Éanaigh schools
Returning again to the publicity around Assemble, who may have become the symbol for creative practice in art and architecture by being shortlisted for a prestigious arts prize. The writer Rowan Moore says in the Observer62
“If one version of architecture is about the perfection of a finite and permanent object, Assemble see it as a series of events and collaborations, of which building is one. They are in a tradition of architects who prize making and responsiveness over the design of monuments, which also includes Cedric Price and Walter Segal, and perhaps William Morris. “ At the end of this process, there is no doubt that there is an abundance of creative practice, and many creative practitioners.
Their creativity spreads into a realm outside the traditional
Their creativity spreads into a realm outside the traditional