Ms Camilla Block
About the speaker
Our speaker today is Ms Camilla Block.
Camilla is one of three directors of Durbach Block Jaggers Architects. Prior to her current position, she joined Neil Durbach in practice in 1992. Camilla has been a design principal in all of the major projects of Durbach Block Jaggers, including the UTS Thomas Street Science Building and, Canberra and Sydney Amenities Buildings Homebush Bay.
In 1998, the office of Durbach Block Architects was established. Camilla worked as the project Architect on the Droga Apartment (completed 1998) which received the National Royal Australia Institute of Architects (RAIA) Robin Boyd Award for Housing and the RAIA Wilkinson Award for Housing (NSW).
She has also taught as a design tutor at UTS as well as the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney. Camilla is often invited as juror on various awards panels, including the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) National Awards, the International Juror New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) National Architecture Award and the Auckland Architectural Association Cavalier Bremworth Design Awards and has exhibited and published both nationally and internationally.
Apart from being an awards juror, she is often invited to speak at the Australian Institute of Architects National Conferences as well as other recent events including the Affirmative Architecture Symposium and the Sydney Opera House 40 year celebrations. She has graduated with a bachelor of architecture with honours from the University of Sydney.
It gives me great pleasure to invite Ms Camilla Block to deliver the occasional address.
Speech
Good evening.
I would like to thank the university for inviting me here tonight and acknowledge the Presiding Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Faculty Dean, staff, distinguished guests, graduates, their families and friends.
I have been asked to say a few words to you (I think they said maximum 1000) before you go out and enjoy the real business of celebrating this milestone with your family and friends.
You have probably never heard of Roy Chapman Andrews but he is the real life inspiration for ‘Indiana Jones’ of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ fame.
Chapman Andrews recommended the following five items for a life of adventure and study:
Learn a language
Learn a musical instrument
Read a lot books every year
Climb a mountain over 1000m
Bench press your own body weight
I recommend this list to if you are a planning a big adventure as your next step. Believe it or not, I have 3 of these covered. By the end of this address you will probably be able to guess at least one.
But if and when you settle into the more sedentary and contained life working in your chosen field, I would like to give you my own slightly more attainable set of five maxims.
This list is compiled from my thoughts and biases as a graduate of architecture. They are borne from architecture but I hope not exclusive to it.
I must say at this point, that I rarely experience a yawning generation abyss with people younger than me. We seem to share so much: art, music, love of nature, concern for the future. However, there is one area that is a glaring point of difference and that is technology.
I was born and spent my childhood in South Africa. I know people like to say to the younger generation: ‘we had no computers, no mobile phones, no google maps, no email, no faxes even’ . But we had No TV. I am going to say that twice. We had no TV.
South Africa is a wild and unregulated place today and was more so when I was little. My mother, who is prone to making her own rules anyway, believed that building sites were public territory. In her view, theses sites did not belong to anyone until the moving trucks had pulled away from the curb.
One of the things we used to do to entertain ourselves in these technology-free, olden days was to take walks around our neighborhood and investigate half completed buildings. These were not great works of architecture. Mostly houses and gardens under construction. But I remember trying to puzzle it out. What was it going to be? Completing, wondering, adjusting, finishing this beginning. It felt natural to me.
So my first message is 'see for yourself'. A kind of thinking-seeing. We need to trust in the eloquence of the physical world. What we see and feel, not what we say.
I love Adam Caruso’s book called ‘The feeling of things’ which I bought it based only on the title. In it he says: ‘We are interested in the infinite richness and ambiguity of concrete reality’.
My second item might sound contradictory but you need to see through the eyes of others. David Malouf talks about being a writer and slipping into other skins, saying 'A person who is in two minds about everything, and when he’s given it a bit of thought finds that he’s in six minds about it’
You have learnt the opening phrases of complex disciplines. Now see what others have done. Don’t worship your own uniqueness. Be humble, suspend disbelief and learn other ways. See the great works. These are the talismans that hold you steady in what can be a roller coaster ride.
Now I am going to go out on a limb. Analogue is not dead. I know this is not what IT graduates want to hear but it is too easy to get lost in a computer- it is both compelling and closed.
In our office we all draw, write and add up on computers. We all draw and model in three dimnesions on the computer. We all document our buildings for construction on the computer.
But these are not the vehicles that short cut the design process or facilitate invention.
So my third thought is particular to graduating architects:
You must learn to draw on the spot, in three dimensions and by hand. This is not ‘sketching’. These are not necessarily artistic or realistic drawings. They should be incisive, instructive and clear. This is not an old fashioned, bring back the good old days, folksy kind of instruction.
Every meeting with a client, builder, consultant group, or other architects is a duel of sorts, sometimes friendly. If you can't draw you are unarmed. This is how you contribute in real time to the messy, iterative, in-the-now process that is called design. I have been struck many times by how incapacitated young graduates are in these situations. They race off to the computer to model their thoughts but the conversation has moved on by the time they reappear. Or they muddle through with words which are too loose and too suggestive- they can mean anything or nothing.
And as an aside, drawing is the only thing builders think they can't do better than you.
Perhaps there is an equivalent for IT graduates. Don't forget that people are not digital. That even though our interactions are increasingly mediated by digital technologies and that these technologies are shaped by you, it is the ones that work intuitively, that resemble modes that we recognize without explanation that have revolutionized our communication. You only have to watch a pre verbal child using an IPAD to understand the brilliance of Apple.
Here comes my fourth idea, which is as much for me as for you. Don’t be afraid to look like you don't know. You are not meant to know everything. Ever. Ask the question that you fear makes you look dumb. Others will be grateful too.
Everyone is bluffing a bit.
(Oh and a corollary to that is it is better to admit when you are wrong)
And lastly, you have learned the beginnings of a language. In the same way you don't stop reading or hearing stories in the language you learned as a child, don’t stop seeing, reading and understanding. Develop your ability in the language of architecture or Information Technology. Helen Garner said that ‘Curiosity is a muscle’ and like all muscles, it needs exercising.
Your graduation is not a frozen moment. It is a beginning, not a finished work. See your degree as a loose pegging of territory. The first broad brushstrokes of a landscape painting. Set it as broadly as you like, then fill out the detail.
As TS Eliot said:
‘If you aren’t in over your head , how do you know how tall you are?’
Congratulations to you all.
