Hanif Kara

How do you design a roller coaster? What was it like on the North Sea oil rigs in the 1980s? What did you learn in the steel yards? Hanif Kara, recipient of this year’s Soane Medal led the engineering on the Peckham Library by Will Alsop, the Phaeno Science Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects amongst many others, Tim though is interested in where Hanif came from as much as where he got to.

 

Podcast transcript

Tim Abrahams: Superurbanists. How are we? It’s November. It’s awards time! Hurray! In the glittering galaxy of awards, available to architects at this time of year. The Soane Medal is a relatively new arrival. First awarded to Rafael Moneo in 2017, there is something transcendent about it though. And the best judging panels of it have imbued it with the values of the man it’s named after. 

Sir John Soane, who was not only a prime mover in establishing the profession of architecture in the late 18th century, but also in founding its fundamental importance to modern society. Visiting the museum in his erstwhile home on Lincoln’s Inn field in London is a rite of passage. One of architecture’s origin points. I was excited to learn that this year’s award has been given to Hanif Kara. 

The chair of the Soane Medal jury was Amin Taha who has also been a guest on this podcast? Amin said “this year’s winner came through a new jury keen to demonstrate how the Medal reflects the spectrum of skilled contributors, that help form cities as incubators of dynamic thought and culture” 

Although Kara is an engineer, a 21st century man, his life has parallels with Soane’s. He is by his own description, a self-made man, like Soane. Ugandan, born, he arrived in the UK at a young age without much English. He got a job as a welder in a fabrication yard. And at this apparently arbitrary moment an astonishing varied career was born. Kara is a man aware of his time and its opportunities. 

Take a listen 

Tim Abrahams: The most important question for me straight off. What is the most important thing to consider as an engineer of a roller coaster? 

Hanif Kara: Geometry. Because if you go back to how roller coasters arrived, it was by instinct and intuition that people started to imagine what it’s like to go past the g force.

And over time, they perfected this idea, probably from swings, when you go on a swing as a child, just at a certain height, you feel your stomach. And I think the history of roller coasters was based on that excitement and exaggerating it and repeating it over and over.

So the most important thing really is to understand geometry and understand when the geometry is against you and where you’re encouraged by the geometry. 

Tim Abrahams: So how did you end up as an engineer of roller coasters?

Hanif Kara: There was a guy called Dr. John Roberts at Alan Lomax, my company, because I have an odd history of not doing a degree straight away. I went to an apprenticeship for craftsman welding and so on. And John Roberts had taken me in his group and we were doing huge nuclear power stations, coalfire. And he’d seen that I was quite keen on making the engineering more special. At first, he sent me up to Aberdeen to do oil rigs for two years because they were opening an office there. I was young and single so that was complex geometry again, and it’s offshore and when I decided to come back from that two and a half to three years after doing onshore offshore He said you’re not going to be stable in the office You’re not really a normal person and we should have you in that team that’s doing roller coasters and stuff they picked up the contract because not long before that the government bill had just been passed, , to actually regulate roller coasters. Before then they were free for all, you can build anything anywhere, people died. But because Blackpool and the others were fixed spaces, there was a regulation out that said you had to make them safe every year.

So Alan Lomax actually picked this up, the contract, and they couldn’t get volunteers. And I wanted to continue my career, not just as somebody who can do beams and columns. I can do those. And I was out of that already. So he put me on that and I got really fascinated by it. I got really interested in it.

And, apart from anything else it helped me overcome my fear of heights, both oil rigs, seriously, oil rigs and roller coasters, but also, without knowing it now, you look back and learn about materials, about joints, the wonder of timber, which today everybody evangelizes over how they make them in the past, and how could you now jump to steel roller coasters?

And it wasn’t all good if you just changed the material. But what was the good bit of that? What was the bad bit? And that has been formative in how I think.

Tim Abrahams: So even at that stage, you’re looking at different materials learning their different faculties, their different qualities, their different strengths, their different purposes.

Hanif Kara: You had no choice because most roller coasters were made by timber and instinct. When they were designing intuitively, they put five members of timber in, just in case three broke, right? But timber gives and wears and behaves and is live. Nobody taught us that at university, you just learn by going there. What happens when it’s rotted by 50%, at what point do you tell the client it needs to change it? All those kinds of things I learned. 

Tim Abrahams: So when you say there, I assume you mean Blackpool?

Hanif Kara: Not just Blackpool, it was all national fixed so I was touring the UK with that company every summer for eight weeks. And my life became about doing reports straight after that for each one. So it was all the Butlins, all of the Blackpool stuff. That’s how I ended up at Battersea 

Tim Abrahams: Before we get to Battersea: you were effectively examining the condition of existing roller coasters giving reports on their structural integrity, their likely lifespan, the effects of wear and tear. 

Hanif Kara: The company was growing fast enough at the time to then get the new ones. So they got a number of other big roller coasters that were still, so we were also taking responsibility for the design. There’s a guy, I still remember, Doug Dadswell, who led the team. And then there was me and a couple of others. 

Tim Abrahams: And when were you up in the oil rigs? 

Hanif Kara: I can’t remember the exact year, but the year the Chinook went down, killing 14 people was a month after I left because up until that point I would have been in the mid 1980s early 1980s I Was fortunate enough to have been sponsored by Alan Lomax to go to university because I didn’t go to university with A Levels I went with an apprenticeship and so on but when you go to university leave You all either go to Saudi or you go to high big end infrastructure That’s what engineers did from because that’s where the money was.

The only plan was really, I want to work for this company, but I’m not going to sit there with the other 40 graduates because there’s a big company, just being one of them.I want to be the different one.

Tim Abrahams: “I want to get out in the field.”

Hanif Kara: I want to get in the field. And I spent three years on Heysham Power Station on site, because at that time you had to do at least 18 months to get your professional exam. They forced you, the institutions to do it. And I ended up three years on site.

Tim Abrahams: It was part of your training. So even then you’re quite happy to get out there. 

Hanif Kara: Absolutely. On that occasion I lived in Morecambe for three years, which looking back was another type of thing because you learned about climate and water without knowing it.

We had a house on the beach and you go for jogging and you just understood things by doing these things, I think. It’s all retrospective. We’ve been very rich, I think. By being in the environment. By being, being out there, 

Tim Abrahams: so Aberdeen in the mid 1980s, that’s boom town time.

Hanif Kara: It was boom time. There was a demand and the potency of getting into a BP or a Shell, it was quite tough. First class graduates, it was all the difficult things, having come up the other way around.

I didn’t want to do that because I thought “I’ve got no chance”. There’s all these graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. They’ll just get the job, which is how it was. But Alan Lomax gave me the opportunity because they wanted to open an office and they said, you’d be more useful than most of our graduates because you actually know how to build steel work.

You’ve done all this stuff and that’s what it was about because the offshore industry and oil rigs are top sites. Every piece has to be measured in weight. So when you design it, you then go out there and supervise this construction so that the weight doesn’t increase. Somebody doesn’t suddenly add a bit to it.

So the responsibility is much greater. And I learned that and it was big money. I have to say, it was, that was the reason why I managed to buy my first house up in Warrington after leaving, so there was an economic compass as well. I’m entrepreneurial in that sense coming to the UK and trying to make a success of yourself, always in the back of my mind. But I think it was exciting because it was boomtown. Everybody was either from London or Aberdeen in Aberdeen. All the night clubs were ful . I had never realized what the health club was.

Tim Abrahams: It must have been quite a tough environment too. 

Hanif Kara: Yeah, climatically one, one aspect, being a migrant and, looking like I do, In the world of Aberdeen, even other Scottish people find it hard. It’s a tough community and Aberdonians are Aberdonians. They don’t take fools easily. So I think it took a while to understand and be appreciated and become somebody who can join the community of the town and the city. It was very tough. mentally because of the climate, but tough mentally also because of the isolation. You’re two weeks offshore, one week on, two weeks off, one week on. And you don’t want to waste the money to drive all the way to Cheshire. You’d be out there in isolation, which I think was good. 

Tim Abrahams: Not everyone had that attitude. Everyone would work one week on and then two weeks absolutely caning it in London.

Hanif Kara: Because I don’t drink, it worked to my advantage. Because I couldn’t swim, it worked to my advantage because they said when you take the exam to go offshore, they’d sink you in a little container in a swimming pool and turn it over, right? That’s how they test you. And they said before we went into our training session, he can’t swim, he’s the safest guy because he’s not going to rush out of that container. He knows that there’s no way you should swim when you’re [00:10:00] sinking. There were some advantages not drinking. It wasn’t to do with my religion. I just didn’t like to drink. But in any case, breathalyzing us before we go back. And there would be people turned away because they drank for two weeks and it was still in their blood they would just be turned away because it was a serious business. 

Tim Abrahams: Then you go from the harsh environment to the more fun environment of the roller coasters. But then roller coasters brought you into construction of buildings, 

Hanif Kara: Yeah, there is a key moment. Margaret Thatcher was in power. John Broome owned Alton Towers and we used to do the inspection of Alton Towers. So they were very close to our company at the time. John Broome bought Battersea Power Station And our company had done the original, like a hundred years before or something. They had all the drawings and just when that project was announced, Fitzroy Robinson were the architect, with a big plan to redo the whole thing. It’s an amazing plan as a kind of fun town, almost like Cedric Price’s fun palace that almost got built. John Roberts immediately said to me, “you could go down and help our London offices to grow. How do you fancy doing this? And I said to him, yeah, if the deal is good.” And the deal was good because they said, you did three years; for three years you have to decant the power station while we’re designing it because it was full of kit. Nobody knows how much copper we took out of there but our role was first of all to design what was being done by Fitzroy Robinson. Some of it was built by the way, the new owner benefited from us piling quite a lot and then the other role was to stabilize it when we decanted it. And that, there’s still crossbracing until recently that was in there. 600 tons of crossbracing to stay it. It was the biggest facade retention ever because it was the biggest brick building ever. So that was really hardcore.

We were semi resident engineers working on site, but also designing and learning about what was there. So that we could say, let’s reinforce this part. Today they call it adaptive reuse. It’s not. It was simple, trying to figure out in reverse who built what, and was it as per drawing, and where it wasn’t what could we do; how to deal with rivets instead of bolts, all that kind of stuff, you could only really figure out by itself, living on the building. Literally.

Tim Abrahams: Anthropology as much as anything 

Hanif Kara: I have never used that term, but yeah, you have to be. And today it benefits us tremendously. We’ve, we just finished the Flax Mills, which is 200 and something years… 257 years old. 

Tim Abrahams: Is that in Shrewsbury? 

Hanif Kara: It’s in Shrewsbury. It’s the first ever multi story iron frame building. And my colleague ran the project for me, David Watson. But as we talk about it all the time, the only way we could do a project like that was nothing to do with AI or computation but by spending a lot of time on site with every piece of brickwork with Fielden Clegg’s people, who are just as nerdy as we are to do it. You just learned from your, the people above you who have been doing it for years. 

Tim Abrahams: Yeah, but you’re also learning from what you find. You must have had to imagine someone building it and what they were doing and what they were thinking when they were building.

Hanif Kara: Without any shadow of a doubt. So even that process of riveting, I’d never come across that. I’d seen it on ships and stuff. But then to try to work out how they did it physically, and what were the calculations they did to determine. So what can we do if we take a few rivets out? What will happen? That was reverse design. Because it wasn’t just numbers, right? It was also understanding the craft, and the obsolescence of some craft. 

 

Tim Abrahams: The calculations and appreciation for the craft element, there must be a moment of synthesis where… 

Hanif Kara: I think. Structural engineering, or engineering of any sort, has been about solving problems. If you don’t like to solve problems, get out of it. Because you’re looking for problems to solve. Even when there isn’t a problem, you’re looking for one, right? I was fortunate again, because, at 16 I started as a draftsman working in a steel yard, doing templates, on the floor for making steel, drawing them and they put me in the welding shop, just to, so that I could understand what welding was like. So what you would do is say you had a haunch for a portal frame design, you had to draw it on the floor, full scale, so the steel plate would come, and they would mark it, and then it would go back to the shop and get cut. Template shops had their origin in ship making. So I had some knowledge of how difficult it is to make things, and that helped quite a lot. So this synthesis of mind and the physical was quite instinctive, and I’ve learned enough about the micro calculations and the macro never scared me because of the race to build, not enough experience is given to the next generations on site. Many of them don’t even get out to site and that’s a problem. And for architecture, I’m sure my colleagues would agree that that’s how you learn more by getting things built, which is why I’ve always been a proponent of not giving away the final stages of a design and construction because you can’t train people

Tim Abrahams: We’re jumping around in time a little bit, it’s my fault. Unfortunately we were deprived of what would have been one of the extraordinary buildings the world would have ever seen with the demise of the Battersea Power Station Fun Park. So your experience, that’s a transitional moment for you in terms of your move from oil rigs or roller coasters and you move into buildings. Was it a clear step for you? 

Hanif Kara: It was very clear because the London office of Alan Lomax, when that project folded, was suddenly looking for work that were buildings. And I was part of that office at the time. Because the Northern office, which were the headquarters were still doing nuclear power. They had lots of work. So I made that shift to buildings, refurbishment and small scale buildings. And very quickly realized London was a golden opportunity. And left to join YRM actually, not even Anthony Hunt. And during that phase of my notice period after getting the job, YRM bought Anthony Hunt. So I went through the merger of the two companies. which was initially fun, but very quickly, not my thing. I just did not fit into that. I wasn’t particularly interested in a pin detail by Nick Grimshaw because I’d done rivets in all my life. I learned in that transition period, that if you want to do good buildings, the first thing is you’ve got to empower the architect, give him agency, then understand what he’s trying to do and where he might be going wrong, help him rather than take over.

People assume you’re inspired by individuals, You follow the path of Cecil Balmond or someone. It isn’t like that. I was a very good structural engineer, and I could turn my hand easily to buildings because I’d done everything else.

I didn’t really get scared. What I got scared of is how to understand architecture. And how complex it was for an architect in order to produce what they did. They were beaten by people, but suddenly I could take them very seriously and got really good.

Tim Abrahams: Let’s talk about the historical moment. It’s a fascinating time because there’s a couple of things that are happening. There’s a, there’s an architecture, at the moment you’re working at as British architecture is being known for its engineering literacism.

Hanif Kara: Spot on.

Tim Abrahams: Secondly, there’s another thing happening, beginning to develop in the background, which is the computer. Your skills, how were they received? How are you encouraged to use them?

Hanif Kara: No, it’s an excellent question because things like BIM, which has been invented in the last 20 years, existed in the offshore industry 50 years ago. We just didn’t call it BIM. So computation and computers were essential for hardcore engineering. Whenever hardcore engineering developed, it first developed in the built world, in infrastructure projects, where you have to deal with a lot of data, numerical analysis, and so on. When architects were trying to use computers theirs was a different use, because they didn’t really need to understand how heavy the steel was, or what it was made of.

They needed to understand how to use it as a tool to do aesthetic options but also tested thinking in design. In around 1992 – 1993 Waterloo finished – a premier project, the station, Anthony Hunt and Nick Grimshaw; a number of Foster Anthony Hunt projects happened. Schlumberger was my favourite with Hopkins. Because I was really into fabric structures and stuff at the time because it’s tension and compression.

I personally strongly feel that if it was anywhere else, it was unlikely to have ever happened. London has this incredible capacity to bring people together. It’s open. It’s plural. There are lots of people interested in lots of things for design, for computation, the conversations. You were given the freedom if you had the guts to take it up. And that’s where my story really begins because I started. Before I did anything else, I started teaching at the AA.

 And at the AA, you saw it. You saw the boom of the use of computation, how architects are going to really master this and how are they going to push it through. It was fantastic. The occasions were just, the interaction of designers of all, and there was a tradition in London of engineers and architects working together. We underestimate that. Even today, after all the successes I’ve had, it’s phenomenal and how different it is in the rest of the world. First thing was that having never worked for Arup, which I’ve never held against anyone, I have no doubt that it was all going on in there, [00:20:00] right? Cecil Balmond and his geometry group were thinking about it, but it was closed shop for people like me.

And that was their mistake, because people like me then found another outlet to find it. And I think the AA became a home Fridays and Saturdays when you could spare the time to teach for that culture to develop. And Alessandro and Farshid were teaching. I was a technical supporter for a year or so.

So that’s Alessandro. 

Zaera-Polo. So Foreign Office Architects had just started. 

Tim Abrahams: Farshid Moussavi, who’s also been on the podcast. 

Hanif Kara: Correct. Amazing, right? So they were just there it was like, I’m an interloper, listening to all these people, and why are you making it all difficult? I can do all this. And Jan Kaplicky once said to me, he said, whenever I talk to anyone, you’re sketching away at stuff. Why don’t you tell everyone what you do? Because people don’t know that this is how it works, so I began to open up about this conversation, and I think the people that were around, and Greg Lynn several times came to the DRL and others who promoted this idea of single surface projects, continuity in geometry, How do you make micro to macro connection in geometry?

What are the numerical connections and all? How do you fabricate something like that? Those conversations were happening already. And Yokohama was the, let’s say, the most intelligent version of how that manifests itself into the world. At the time, in my view, it was a little bit like a Pompidou moment of that generation.

But to me it was, like, ordinary because I watched them do this in the studio all the time and suddenly somebody had taken them seriously. At that time we were building Belgos, they were. It was their first London project. Tiny little cafe. So it began to really mushroom from all of those times so there were all these other parties who were beginning to see the other side of it, which was how do we make this into business? And that included me. Because if you can make and build these things, you can then also get a bigger public and bigger group of people interested.

And people will fund the construction of it. So my argument would be that the moment between 1993, 1994 through to 2000 was the most productive in terms of that collaboration between architect and engineer through computation. It had always been there, Frank Newby was always there, Peter Rice, my hero, was always there, they were all, these were polymaths rather than engineers. But in the computation conversation, I would say it was that decade. 

If you can do flow of forces you can do almost anything. You just have to wonder why you’re doing that. As an observer, I was captivated and turned that into a practice. So immediately working with all the people that you know, I worked with Zaha Hadid’s office specifically.

Before the Phaeno Science Center, I’d worked on Strasbourg, which were very simple car park but again, complicated. Will Alsop was emerging at the time I became very close friends with him and he would always ask “what’s Zaha up to?” and Zaha would go “What’s will up to?” So I was part of this kind of conversation in London so Peckham library would be the one that is all about geometry, but people never understand it.

So these crazy columns are not random. They were deliberately put on a circlegrid on a floor, where Will was allowed to move his column within a circle. And that circle, when it groups into a set of columns, becomes a lateral stability. Very geometric, very computational idea. You couldn’t have done it without computers.

The question being asked by Will wasn’t based on parametricism or geometry, the spaces he was trying to create were not so different from what Zaha was thinking, except the scales were different.

And they were both from a different starting position. I’ve always said it was really feeling the empathy and the pain of the architect that made me feel that way. I didn’t want to ever cross over between them. I would never tell what the other was saying about them, but I would always be able to say, that building we work with him on. And that would make Zaha think you did Peckham library, Phaeno Science Centre.  Phaeno Science Centre though is the Concord moment. 

Tim Abrahams: Yeah. The  Phaeno Science Centre it’s the project which has given birth to continuity of surface, for want of a better word. That’s something that they’re known for; part of what they do. Yeah. And that seems to come at that moment. And what were they asking you for? 

Hanif Kara: The first thing was that they had come to maturity where they’d built the fire station in Germany and nobody liked it. People were complaining that you can’t walk in it. They’d just done Strasbourg and they were in this competition for Phaeno Science Center and we had all come together by this moment to wonder whether we’ve been barking up the wrong tree at the AA and all that. But when the competition came out and I would state my, because I’m on the foundation and I’ve seen the archives, it started with Zaha.

She had sketched an idea with Christos Passas. To continue the single surface project, because if you think about her early days, even the drawings that she did, there was an imagination about mathematics she understood it way more than me. So she’d already had this imagination that nobody could then make into real.

So when she started to draw things, like the Phaeno Science Center, and had the capacity through Christos Passos to manifest it as a set of drawings, this is how it could be. Then that allowed me, entry point, to say, I think we can do this structurally. Are you mad? Yeah, we can. We just have to make it out of concrete because you’re drawing it like a liquid and so on.

I think they were asking, help us win this competition. They were asking, now that we’ve won it, what the hell should we do? Can you, can we really build it? We didn’t know. We just won the competition. Phaeno made the world also realize this is possible. I call it the Concorde moment, we pushed software, we pushed materiality, we pushed communication. Sections and plans were no longer enough to build something like that. You had to do every little detail, redraw it, they detailed every single shatter on that job themselves.

to prove that it could be done to the contract. So it pushed the concrete industry, craft again, digital fabrication, because all the shutters needed that. It pushed so many boundaries would we ever do that again? I’m not so sure, but we did it, and therefore it’s made it easier to do the Turner Contemporary or win the Stirling Prize with Grafton at Kingston, which is a basic concrete frame, but done extremely well

Tim Abrahams: to talk about the Grafton example, was that because it pushed concrete contractors to be able to take on board , an incredibly sophisticated specification through the computation. 

Hanif Kara: Contractors in the concrete industry no longer said no when they saw Phaeno. the conversations 20 years later on Kingston about making it out of a car park was quite easy. It was like, okay, they know what they’re talking about. We want to do that because we’ve never done anything that’s won an award type of thing, so I think it pushed the discourse as much in construction as well as design to a level, at least maybe I’m giving it far too much credit, but I do talk to students. I do talk to people. It also gave the opposite, which is, I keep continuing to get asked “would you ever do something like that again?” Of course not, because I also repositioned myself six years ago like everyone else around climate. Before that it used to be, can we make this? There was an era of Cool Britannia, through this dominance in structural and architecture, that combination in the world showed what we can do. 

Tim Abrahams: There’s a moment you said six years ago, which you identify, is there a conversation even before that we can do this, but why are we doing this? To what degree is that exclusively a sustainability question and what to what degree is that social? 

Hanif Kara: It’s an excellent question Tim because you’re reminding me how it happened. So I think it was interweaving as well as computation.

I also met Simon Allford who was known for frugality in his work. If that’s how I describe it. 

Tim Abrahams: This is a Simon Allford building, isn’t it?

Hanif Kara: It is. The white collar factory We did it together. But before that, Casper in Birmingham is a very famous little building which was their first major housing project run by the Rowntree Foundation.

So it was a charity that was saying, How can we make cheap social housing in the middle of Birmingham. And it was a social question. It was almost in parallel with inventing the Phaeno Science Centre.

So the question was different, it was about Birmingham social housing. The architect was different. His starting position was designed through a frugal approach, and that, if you look at the lineage, I think with AHMM, we’ve done 20 buildings, about the same as Zaha. There was a parallel in the weaving with that type of architect. Parry Allies and Morrison, all of those people who, to us, we respected, tremendous respect for all of these people, and we didn’t delineate between them and Zaha and Foster and the others we worked with. I think it’s an interwoven question about social that was always there, but when you get branded as the star engineer, the dilemma you face is that all the things that are in the public domain, not only the sexy, amazing projects, people don’t see all the great work that doesn’t make it to the press. But there is a lot of that in this practice, and thanks again to London, that early targeting of Cadogan Estate as a client, who I got to know very well, and doing all of King’s Road, almost every building, including the Duke of York, for 20 odd years.

[00:30:00] We’ve done Chelsea, AKT did Chelsea. It was a parallel activity because that was about how is London grown on London? And it is the Estates. The Estates have had a 500 year plan, not a 5, 50 or 30 year. So getting in with Cadogan Estate was very important to me in the early days, in the practice. to rebuild their estate. 

Tim Abrahams: So what exactly are you doing for them? It’s, are you saying, are you advising them on how to build? Where to build? What to build, what to demolish, what to keep what value do you give him 

 

Hanif Kara: This was a very big question Stuart put to us. Why has Lord Cadogan never had the corner of Sloane Square? It’s because the Circle Line was half a meter below, with brick arches. And we did it. We retained the facade. We did all the clever things that have then gone on to become normal practice. How do you build railway lines? How do you build next to a brick arch tunnel? So what we were giving is not necessarily structural and technical advice. It was more than that. 

Tim Abrahams: You’re providing analysis on a structural engineering basis.

Hanif Kara: It’s also a conversation about city making. You have to recognize that London was built on London. And you have to recognize that if we go to King’s Cross, it’s not going to be Chelsea. And when we do the Olympics, it’s not going to be King’s Cross. So what I’m trying to get at is it’s transcalar. You can’t get fixated on doing a building if you’re going to design a practice. My goal later in life has become about designing a practice with a pride in structural engineering, not the pride that my institution would agree with because there’s a conduct: professional rules and biases.

My vision has been to design a practice that has the wider conversation, but never stops thinking about what its role is, do the structure in the best possible way. And I think this width and breadth. that London provides is unique

Tim Abrahams: Perhaps you could touch on the course that you’re currently teaching? 

Hanif Kara:  I’m currently teaching a course called Advanced Reverse Design and Embodied Carbon. I’ve done studios recently, the last one was “Stone as a material” with Amin Taha. The one before that was CLT with Jennifer Bonner, where it went from the AA was very important because when I got to enjoy that and did well, we became busy. The practice would rather I didn’t teach, rather have me here, but I got a job at KTH in Stockholm. I was a professor in practice for five years, full professor without a Ph. D and I learned how to create a curriculum for those who don’t understand the interaction between design, city making, structure, civil, drainage, all of those things, how to help them make a curriculum that has a technical bias. And it was from there that I was plucked to Harvard and three years after being there, they made me a full professor in practice. I’ve just celebrated my year 10 as a full professor this year.

I’ve learned how to articulate all the crises for a positive hope and positive direction rather than the “it’s the end of the world” approach. I’ve learned all that through, not through practice or through clients, that’s through putting myself in harm’s way in teaching because you also meet important intelligent people who are full time academics.

You meet mayors, you meet all sorts of people when you’re teaching that have a different question. So it has never been able to bring it to practice always, right? Because I think there was a time ten years ago when I could have stopped, I could have just stopped and just gone ahead into teaching or just be a consultant. But I’ve been fortunate enough that it’s given me the fuel to continue. And I still find that, Sometimes things I say are relevant to all the generations. It’s a lovely moment. It happens very rarely these days. 

Tim Abrahams: You’ve enabled architects to do a lot of incredible things. You’ve had dialogues with them throughout your career. career, Particularly the latter stages. What would you say to architects is the great potential for architecture at the current moment? 

Hanif Kara: They should first recognize the life support system of the planet is in trouble. And then, and which they do. and that they have now a new agency because the built environment contributes so much to that problem.

It is the one of the most important professions that can get this out. Can get us out just like technology will start to help and resuscitate that life support system. And I remind you the climate crisis specifically forget for a second equity and social justice, which I never separate. Other people separate these things. There is no separation in my mind because if you go all the way back to the predictions of the global South taking over the world and what they would do when the population grows, it’s all rubbish, right? What you do realize is that. We will all be affected by this crisis, which was largely created by us.

The developed world architects can play a big role in helping show how you could do it better, even if we don’t get to build in China and India, and we show them what to do better. So my, my, my ask of younger architects is if you’re serious about having a great quality of life, rather than just making money, architecture is a good profession because it’s one that lasts forever.

It’s enjoyable. It makes and affects humans. And it’s not time to give up. That’s the last thing to do right now is the time to actually arm yourself again and say, let’s get this sorted. And I think architects can. The climate, environmental, economic, ecologic climate, the barriers of some of the social injustice, all that stuff is rather important, but when it comes to design, it is what design can do, rather than talk about design. I think it can help, and I would like to bring forward that argument to all the institutions. How do we change it? 

Tim Abrahams: You’re very good at understanding the history of your own times, and you. And how things evolve and how things change.  You mentioned that there was a kind of the covid moment and a couple of years after, when it was manifesto led and no building. 

Hanif Kara:Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams:  Whereas now there are buildings, and I think the phrase you use is you can’t not build. 

Hanif Kara: Yes. 

Tim Abrahams: So there is a, there is still quite a valuable constituency who would suggest that not building is exactly what we must do. What do you say to that? How, what’s your argument against not building? 

Hanif Kara: In simple terms, there’s about 2 billion people without homes. You don’t just look at London and Birmingham, look around, there’s about 2 billion people in the world.

So that’s my starting point when it comes to why we can’t stop building. And if you tell them to not pour concrete, do you think they’re going to stop? It’s better to make concrete clean and give it to them in a way that they can afford it, rather than to tell them to stop. They have to have a home, so that’s one argument.

The other argument is that the global shift and the political shift I strongly believe is still in favor of those who have and those who have not. But it’s shifting fast enough. And if you look at the bigger countries, the BRICS or the India or China, they’re not only catching up, they’re leapfrogging in certain areas.

So they will soon start building sustainably because they have no choice. So to tell people not to build across the world is ludicrous in my mind. I don’t disagree that where we have enough buildings to live in, which Europe happens to fall into that category, we have to be careful what we build next, and how we build better, and where possible, not do a new building.

Where possible, but I don’t think that you should just be binary about this. I think that manifesto driven approaches are okay to start with, But they probably end up harming the very people you’re trying to manifest for, in the end. I’m cautious about that binary conversation that goes on.

And I don’t think it’s helpful when headlines don’t help. And at the moment I talk about peaks around 2019, where was it, 2020, when David Chipperfield was at Domus. And he asked Jacques Herzog, here are all the problems of the world, what should we do? And Jacques’s answer was nothing. I was infuriated. So at that time, it wasn’t long after the APCC report and all the other stuff.

So I do think the next generation always thinks they can do better and think better than we can or the previous generation. I was like that. But I also think there’s a bigger responsibility to have the conversation that we’re not having often because it’s hijacked by one or the other. And 

Tim Abrahams: What do you think the, just by way of conclusion, what do you think the watchwords will be for engineering as we go into this new period?

Hanif Kara: I have invented one, or my practice has for the last five years, and we’re about, hopefully I won’t regret this, about to do a book on it. We’re calling it advanced reverse design. And that doesn’t mean reverse engineering. That’s one part of it. What that means is walking back in the footsteps of our past and looking at how you would do it today.

You learn lessons. It doesn’t mean you save those lessons for the future. You’ve got to be in the present. What can we learn quickly? We’ve added 10 floors onto a 20 floor tower just by that principle. Look at the codes. Look at what’s going on. For me, the [00:40:00] buzzword is, that captures quite a lot of things, from retrofit to regenerative, is advanced reverse design.

How can we use today’s lens and technology to get us out of it by looking back quickly, fast forward, and then starting to put it in the present. 

Tim Abrahams: Just to break that down a little bit, so you’re talking about existing structures, how do you understand quickly their logic and how do you augment that and carry that forward?

Hanif Kara: That’s just one part of it. That process of advanced reverse design helps you design new buildings better. So if you look at the Herzog de Meuron Tower right now, it is a new building in Canary Wharf, the circular one. That came out of this kind of process of them being geniuses in how you design a room that’s different on a rotunda.

Every city has a rotunda. How do you do one that’s more interesting, likely to live longer, fetch a lot more money for the client, all those things. Our work, our part in that was really through the tools we’ve developed, bioclimatic tools but also tools of doing that kind of iteration so that you delay the moment of decision to a point at which it becomes the present.

So you invent the project, four years in you test it just before you build it. You don’t just say we invented it four years ago, let’s build it, it’s already out of date. So I think it also applies to new buildings, but the reverse design shift is that it then applies to a bigger scale. So if you look at city scale, I’m very fortunate to be working in parts of AlUla, which are in Saudi Arabia, which are existing 4000 year history in stone and mud and you learn how they built stuff by just watching them. And you can see what is the 21st century version of what they did with mud bricks. It’s not what they did, but what is the 21st century version? And that, I think, is the buzzword for me, advanced reverse design. And architects should really think about that.

It does apply to existing buildings. 

Tim Abrahams: Just, I’ve realised that there’s one more question that I haven’t asked. It’s the reason why I have this wonderful opportunity to speak to you. And it’s the medal, the Sir John Soane medal. How did that…, that must be a wonderful thing to be given. And how did you feel when you received it? 

Hanif Kara: It’s emotional. Emotional. When you look at his history, there’s a parallel, in terms of somebody who was frustrated and yet had the opportunities and did something interesting, right? Coming from a very odd background, a bit like me, but the more interesting thing is peer recognition is far more valuable than people give it credit to, and awards can be a framework of pay and get, but the appreciation I have for the people that selected me, but also the history of the song, its connection to the Marshall building, but also if you had any interest in architecture,, design, construction, how you train people. If you had any of that interest, which I’ve had all my life, he’s been a character in your life. He’s been sitting there on your shoulder, right? So to get that was a particularly mind blowing moment for me.

And many of my friends were architects it was like, Whoa, okay, now you’re… because I, obviously I got an OBE for services to architecture and engineering and design but the Soane is broad. It’s really broad. It’s about having a big impact on other people. 

Tim Abrahams: You’ve had a big impact today. Thank you so much, Hanif. That was amazing. 

What a life he has lived if Soane defined architecture for his age in a mad atypical way. I think Hanif though, he’s an engineer, defines the early 21st profession. Not in a literal sense in that he’s a typical designer because he’s not actually a designer, he’s the engineer, but because his skills suit the transfer of one age to another, like Soane born very literally from the declining industrial period of the 20th century, he learned how steel was cut and put together before he learned how to calculate its application to Britain’s, perhaps last great industrial venture, North Sea oil, these industrial processes, these computational systems he took with him, it’s a world of architecture. The columns of the Peckham library and the flowing forms of the Phaeno science center by Zaha Hadid. All delivered using the techniques of an industrial age, but then also the material economy of AHMM buildings that incorporate existing structural prefabricated components, buildings such as the. White Collar Factory on Old Street in London, which contains his offices and where there’s interview took place. The thing about Hanif Kara though, is that he transcends his field. His story is one of entrepreneurship of ideas. He embodies London. He expresses something about the UK as we see ourselves. And the noughties embraced the extravagant form and the deployment of huge resources. Just as he does currently with his commitment to sustainability. It makes me wonder what the skills the engineer of the future will need. Congratulations to Hanif Kara for the Soane Medal. Thank you Superurbanists Thank you for your time. Please like, subscribe and share. 

 

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