structural harmony.

i've always admired architects who could design curvy/ organic forms. and how they could do it with so much flare at minimal effort just astounds me with great amazement. i personally always find it hard to design or just to draw a curve for that matter. every time i attempted to do so, a little voice inside me tells me that i'm biting more than i can chew. those words from my father of how inefficient a curved building is in comparison to a rectilinear one haunts me and perhaps might had in some ways have stifled my creative potential. it would probably take me another 20 years before i start giving curves a chance. but who knows, it might come sooner than i think. although i am not deeply saddened by my lack of curvy ingenuity, however, i do hope that someday i would design or at least have an element of curve in some of my architecture, simply as a means to break the occasional monotony of the straight. i guess being raised by a structural engineer who is deeply rational and logical is very telling in my designs. apart from the fact that my designs tend to end up being very structurally rational and honest, the whole thought process always had the structural sensitivity in mind. i personally feel that the structure of the building has to be greatly monitored and be taken with great care of from the very beginning. a lot of architects i know tend to neglect this very aspect, perhaps its because they are just too busy or just plain negligence. whatever their reasons, i do feel the importance of understanding the structural in relation with the architectural design itself. it's really two sides of the same coin.

i fully agree with Oscar Niemeyer when he says that "it was up to architects to anticipate structural problems, so that by combining their imagination with technical sophistication they could create an architectural spectacle responsive to current trains of thought." but also the fact that our role as architects are to guide the structural engineers due to their "lack of imagination" in order to ensure harmony is achieved in the final product.

recently i have been receiving a lot of hate from my structural engineers, i had literally scrutinized their whole structural design... shifting every beam position, questioning every beam and column sizes and it's mere necessity, basically tidying up and dictating how the building's structural skeleton should look. but in my defense their drawings was a complete disaster, they were just too stubborn to admit it. so every day they try to coerced me accepting every flawed structural design and just cover it up with architectural cosmetics. just so they could avoid having to re-do/ refine their work.

and just the other day on site, the director of the structural engineer firm pulled me a side, he advised me that i should basically stop scrutinizing their design and just let them be. he was upset that i had literally changed the whole structural design rational and no architect should do such a thing. he justified this by telling me that nowadays the structure is calculated and design in a 3-d format, hence a lot of factor were put into consideration and a slight alteration would basically screw the whole thing up. i completely ignored his reasons, so he went on to explain that it's not because his engineers are useless, but it's because me as an architect is now trying to be an engineer. i failed to see and understand what he was trying to imply by that.

in the end, my response to him of my intention was purely to achieve harmony between the two disciplines and i had no intentions of undermining their work but simply to find a reasonable middle ground. before i had intervene, the structural design rational was designed completely tangent from the architectural form. and all i was doing was to try and bridge this incongruity. refining the structure to be more efficient and in-line with the architecture; re-adjusting the architecture to accommodate the structural limitations. he was speechless thereafter, and agreed to push harder to get it right.

so that, my friends, separates good architecture from the rest. negligence in the structure (which is the very essence of space creation), results in bad/ poor architecture.