Setting the Scene
We are Cany Ash and Robert Sakula, partners in Ash Sakula, a London-based architectural studio that we founded together in 1994, though we had worked together for many years previously to that. Collaborations have a life cycle and Ash Sakula’s started so long ago it would be no exaggeration to say we grew up together. Arguments were always part of the process of designing together. A natural suspicion of what the other one held dear was deeply ingrained from our different starting points: crudely stated, Robert is the modernist with rough hippy edges; Cany, the postmodernist obsessed with mysterious, dense cities of the 19th century. Robert, seven years older, knowledgeable, retentive of details and places; Cany, keen on theory, film, and fuzzy logic, morbidly worried about lost fabric in the city and her own memory for details and places.
This is not a love story. It is more of a battleground, where stamina counts and a genuine interest in someone else’s mind fuels the ongoing desire to work together.
In a chapter about a working relationship there can be no generalising since we believe that every couple or group of people will have a wholly different nexus of relationships and motivations. It may be that only personal stories will allow us to examine the impact of gender in architecture, which might be pictured as an overlay or a series of strands woven into the daily tussles of collaboration.
We see gender as a spectrum and will not attempt to untangle or pin down its lines in an artificial exercise of justification. Instead we will leave it to the reader to see the traces of male and female in our dialogue and where that enriches or constrains our thinking.
Rocky Patches
Back to the 30-year lifecycle of Ash Sakula: how short that time seems when we dig out an old drawing and remember the scribbling and the twists in our conversation. But really, 30 years is the standard measure of a generation. We brought up three children. We reinvented our practice a dozen times. We even abandoned our practice for three years and went travelling. This may not be the best way to build and sustain an architectural practice, but we are proud of the shorthand we have developed in design work, the hard-won shared territory and the freedom to work at times on the edge of the system, a freedom neither of us can do without.
Designing is difficult. It’s hard to work in architecture. It’s hard to work in partnership, and it’s especially hard to work with your partner. Except when it isn’t; when an idea, or a brave client, throws you out of a deep rut into a smooth, warm slipstream where work is productive and all-consuming, and conversations are intense and exciting. We’ve been through rocky patches where it seemed perverse to collaborate, and, conversely, long periods where we felt secure, even smug, in the shorthand we’ve developed and the double brain we share.
Lately, we’ve been finding it harder to accept the rocky patches. They’re painful and seem so unnecessary. We feel that we should have cracked it by now, and should know how to work together creatively, consistently, in a harmonious co-production that is contagious and compelling. It’s deeply irritating when the grit of years of argument about styles of communication – the stuff any couple battles with – invades our studio space.
20 years ago we contributed an architectural diary to the catalogue of a RIBA exhibition focusing on gender issues.1 We each wrote ‘a day in the life’ in the form of two parallel diaries about how we balanced running a practice with bringing up three small children. Home was a shared project. In fact, the period with young children in the house gave us constraints and excuses: in retrospect, a delicious slip plane. Some of the disconnects in our dialogue over design were a consequence of syncopated working or working around decisions made by one of us alone. Back then, there were many days when we had to tear it all up and start again because the work was muddled, but we knew that we needed to value our multitasking and ability to swiftly pass the ball.
Now we are more demanding and scrutinising of the partnership. Why are we choosing to work together? How can we be sure that it is not inertia, rather than design imperatives, that keeps us bound together? While we actively enjoy each other’s company, there are significant areas of tension deriving from our divergent starting points in architecture.
These starting points are not easily corralled. From the off, the wrongness of the other’s thought processes are intensely experienced as an unwelcome guest to what otherwise could have been a really exciting and fruitful design session. In normal working relationships, these moments can be adroitly ‘handled’ given some tact and dissimulation. But in place of professional distance we have an honesty that sometimes threatens to overwhelm our working partnership. The disputed territories can concern the biggest questions, or the tiniest fleck, which assumes a huge significance in design where diverse, small components are mysteriously but emphatically connected to the whole. How do you start to unpick such contested ground, not once but on a daily basis?
Therapy
Last year we worked with a poet, Mark McGuiness, who, between reinterpreting Beowulf for the modern reader, pays his way with creative consultancy. We needed a mentor to listen and help us learn. We were not sure how useful it would be. But we were reaching the end of our tether and liked the idea we could ‘hire’ in another brain to help us confront our circular communication ruts. Perhaps it was a way to start?
Mark was easily bored by fruitless discussion but also quick to catch any mote of humour and run with it. He made us draw everything: the shape of a project, the chain of command, the length of a discussion. It became evident that many communication hurdles could be mapped and shared. The time taken to make the sketch was a moment of reflection. The time taken to look at the other’s drawing became a moment for recognition. It was a great disruptive tool and one that, he noticed, calmed us down and made us smile.
Maybe it would be possible to visually explore and track the differences between conversations that develop ideas and those that are unproductive, ending only in dreary ping-pong games. It is a powerful technique. We have definitely made ourselves more alert to bad habits. We feel we have choices. We can choose to conserve the energy wasted in demolition and instead build on each other’s ideas. We can jump in and out of each other’s shoes without losing our design credibility. We can play, change pace or place, find new ways of drawing, and invent new avatars to disrupt the old trigger-happy rows.
Why share this fragile and quite personal strategy? One reason for writing this here is to ward off bad spirits by actively shining a torch into our skeleton-filled cupboard. We’ve seen too many examples of partnerships ossifying and retreating into an airless other world that becomes self-regarding and unable to step out and communicate more widely. Architecture is hard; the stress is constant; the challenge is always changing; the failures are obvious, and success hangs by the merest thread. We want to find the tools we need to properly collaborate – both with each other and with a widening pool of friends and colleagues.
Drawing
We were able to respond to our mentor’s methods because, as architects, we have always used drawings to articulate and solve complex design problems. At its best, a drawing is brilliant for this because it is an atemporal statement of a situation: that is to say, it summarises and presents the case as it is, in the present, all in one go. This is different from a text statement that, however short, presents an idea sequentially, thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis. So a drawing presents a situation without ascribing causality as to how it got to be the way it is.
Drawing is also something that we can, as architects, do semi-spontaneously, so it is an easy way to describe and share a thought – often a lot easier than trying to articulate a thought verbally. And architects don’t just draw what is; they design what could be, and our drawings are dissatisfied and always asking the next question. A series of scribbles can accelerate time, provide the seeds of a solution or synthesis, and open up fresh territory.
Territories
Though we had tended to imagine that we shared the same territory, we started to realise that we were most at home in very different design landscapes. Robert started with a rough map, Cany had an untidy compost heap. Robert liked to dart, Cany to follow forking branches. Both of us came up with the goods but not always for reasons that the other could understand. Lately, pursuing what we’ve learned in our sessions with mentor Mark, we’ve been trying to articulate the different modes we each have for discussing design issues, using spatial metaphors relating to our different approaches. So we’ve invented the terms ‘woods’ and ‘treasure’ for two different kinds of conversation.
Robert tends to prefer treasure conversations. These are intended to be focused discussions aiming for a particular target. The buried treasure is the goal and you are trying to locate and uncover it. It’s a bit like Michelangelo’s metaphor of the statue residing latently in the marble even before the sculptor has started carving. You strip away the superfluous to discover the essence. If you can go straight for the treasure, there is nothing to be gained by dawdling. You do not seek, you find.
Cany dislikes treasure conversations. She mostly prefers woods conversations. Woods are vast, fertile, and complex, brimming with possibilities and ideas. You may get lost in the woods but you don’t mind being lost. You explore slowly. You use your peripheral vision to spot the edges of things rather than their centres. You enjoy the shifting parallaxes of the tree trunks and the necessarily partial views between them. You do not need to find paths and clearings. Through exploration and the simple experience of being there, you develop a sense of the wholeness of a situation that will guide you to where you want to go.
Robert distrusts woods conversations; they make him impatient. He can’t understand why it’s interesting to paddle in old information, revisiting a compost heap of previous conversations and extraneous social theory. However, inviting the other into your territory can work. Robert doesn’t feel implicated in the tendency to double back and rehearse an argument, or concerned about the time taken to rake through extraneous detail. Cany can enjoy the mad chase in a treasure conversation and not worry about whether the premise is right or the focus too narrow. It really helps to know what kind of conversation is coming up, and to forestall each other’s more predictable responses by saying, ‘This conversation is going to be a treasure conversation.’ Or, ‘Do you mind if we have a woods conversation?’ We have some ground rules and a space for what we are setting out to achieve. Robert won’t fret about being lost in the forest and won’t be wondering when we are going to ‘get to the point’. Cany won’t mourn too sharply all the missed opportunities and interesting diversions when we are going straight for the treasure.
Joint Production
In the future there will be new interfaces that make solitary activity at a computer screen more collaborative. Designing will move smoothly in and out of detail, slicing into a shared model. There will be ways to replicate and probably integrate the fuzziness of a sketch that, through its uncertain line, opens up new possibilities. However, we are presently living in a period of discontinuity: architectural representation is jumpy and split between different digital models and rendering systems.
Drawing by hand is the way we – like many architects – attempt to ground early design work and paper over the cracks in the system. The ergonomics of the interface is critical. Drawing takes place under your eye on a horizontal surface. You lean in and dominate the page. The screen, by contrast, is at a remove: delicate, vertical, placed at a correct and ideally unvarying distance. It tends to work best as a solitary workhorse followed by presentation, rather than a co-production tool.
Hand drawing is a layered activity and one that suits collaboration. It’s like the game of laying hands on hands in a pile: there is always one to retrieve and place on top. The journey is still there in the palimpsest of tracing paper and hands, but we move on together through taking turns and revising or embellishing the other’s marks in a complex game of leapfrog. As the design takes shape we work on both sides of the paper to anchor thoughts, with colour on the reverse, while keeping the pencil alive to revision on the front.
We take breaks in collaboration. When we want to introduce new ideas we often have five- to ten-minute sessions on separate pads and then return with the goods. One fresh scribble might change the direction of the design, especially if it comes with a shared memory of a real place. A volley of sketches where each builds on the other’s thoughts is exhilarating but is not an everyday occurrence. The more we practise, the better it gets. We have said in a self-mocking way that we are each half an architect because we share responsibility for all our design right down the middle. And yet self-reliance and independent production is arguably no match for the confidence and speed gained when two minds are harnessed together. We know we do better work together than each of us alone. Our working method has not got anywhere near perfection but it works, just, for us.