Paul Finch

Paul Finch has spent more than four decades at the centre of British architectural culture, editing key publications, chairing CABE and co-founding the World Architecture Festival. Tim spoke to him about architectural criticism and about his friend the late Jeremy Melvin.

 

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Podcast transcript

Tim Abrahams: The World Architecture Festival takes place this year from November 18 in Fort Lauderdale of all places, an unusual place for one of the most unusual institutions in contemporary architecture to end up it’s part awards programme, part conference, part grand architectural crit, and it brings architects from around the world together to present and defend their buildings in person.

I’ve always been intrigued by it, the culture, as much as the buildings that it airs, which you don’t see being acknowledged elsewhere. Since it was founded in 2008 – what an auspicious year that was – tt’s travelled from Barcelona to Amsterdam to the US, to Singapore, while becoming an interesting barometer for how architectural culture is changing.

The man who is at the centre of it though is Paul Finch, and Paul is one of the best known figures in British architectural journalism. And when I see him rock up to an event, I know it’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be lively. There will be discussion. Paul edited Building Design and the Architect’s Journal, and was director, editorial director of the Architectural Review.

He also chaired CABE which was the Commission for Architecture in the built environment, an official body in the UK, which for more than a decade played an important role in the debate and discussion of architectural standards and urban design. I wanted to talk to Paul not just about the history of WAF, but about criticism.

Why should architects have to stand up in front of their peers and defend what they’ve designed? We also spoke about the late Jeremy Melvin, architectural historian, critic, and a central figure in WAF for nearly two decades.

Paul Finch on why Sometimes being told that your building isn’t very good is what an architect needs. 

Paul Finch: From sort of 2005 onwards, we started thinking about this, and then it became serious in 2007. We got the go-ahead from the company and launched in 2008, six weeks after Lehman Brothers went bust. It was terrible timing. But at the time, I was editing the Architectural Review, and the intention was to create an event which represented the same values that we were espousing at the AR i.e. Critical but constructive pluralist rather than one style only very much international and worldwide and open to all

Tim Abrahams: How was it launching the event in the teeth of a global recession? 

Paul Finch: When we actually got our permissions, the recession hadn’t started, otherwise we’d never have got off the ground and probably wouldn’t exist today. So w-we were fortunate in that respect. We were actually seeking our first sponsorships when times were reasonably good.

I think people forget how quickly things changed. But in two thousand and six, two thousand and seven things were looking pretty rosy, actually. We got three big-ticket sponsors to get us kicked off. Our decision to hold the inaugural festival in Barcelona was paying off. That proved to be very popular, which wasn’t a surprise to us because we did a lot of research amongst architects using the AR database, basically, and we had a huge database from around the world to ask which city would you like to go to.

So we were confident about Barcelona and I think there was a great feeling of optimism in the air at that time. Globalization hadn’t really become a dirty word, and people were keen to use the festival, for example, to hold their global directors meetings, at the same time .

And it was all looking, pretty good, to tell the truth. And we put a lot of money into the launch in terms of marketing to make sure there was brand awareness. there was a lot of sending out of literature and big brochures, as well as the usual online stuff 

I think that was another thing. We were on the cusp between old-style physical mark-marketing and the trend today, to, make it ninety percent online and only print if you really have to. 

what were your markers? What were your benchmarks for that first festival and how did it fare The awards program in year one was for completed buildings only. And I think because the market was quite good and architects were feeling reasonably prosperous and there was a culture of entering awards, not in every country. Some countries like entering awards, but not if you had to pay to enter.

So there was a distinction then as now. But there was enthusiasm to enter, and I think we got about 750 entries. And that number is not far off what we get today. Today, we also do future projects and interiors as well as completed buildings and landscape. So that was a direct consequence of the financial recession hitting us because we didn’t think that we could confine ourselves to completed buildings.

So in year two, we introduced future projects, and then later on, interiors came in, in a natural order of events. 

And what we thought would, thought would interesting, and I think it was and it still is seeing examples of how architects from different geographies, different climates, different cultural backgrounds, how they address the same sort of architectural challenges and what approaches they have in common and what may be completely different.

I suppose an example of difference would be, let’s say, multifamily housing, which in Western Europe by and large people don’t wanna know about it. Whereas obviously in some Southeast Asian cultures in particular it’s a commonplace to have three generations of people in one home.

What are the approaches to that? And I think also on climate it’s not so much how do people deal with heat in different regions. how do architects deal with extreme conditions? And it it, it seems, seems that different challenges crop up, over the decades, that you start to see architects responding to in their own way, in their own cultures.

And then you get transference and you start to see ideas jumping across continents. 

Tim Abrahams: Is there an example of any jumping moments 

Paul Finch: when we started, although the,the green agenda was up and running, I don’t think globally that it was accepted in the same way that it is now.

The big difference is there was a period when everybody had to express their green credentials and say, “This is how we’ve done this, and this is how we’ve done that.” And what is happening is everyone’s doing that, and therefore, the reason to make a big deal out of it is starting to vanish.

there’s less attention paid in presentations to doing stuff that everyone would do anyway. It’s taken as read, and I think that is a good thing.

Tim Abrahams: You mentioned the geographical re-reach and its World Architecture Festival. How have you seen that evolve and develop since the opening event in 2007? 

Paul Finch: the number of entries from different countries has been a guide. For several years… when we started, we didn’t get many entries from China.

And the good ones tend to come from expat firms. May have been employing Chinese architects, but , the management style was very muchThat changed, andfor quite a few years, we got more entries from China than from anywhere else.

And we still got the expat firms because it’s a huge market. But increasingly it was native Chinese, if I can call them that. And their practices and their light design institutes were directly entering. And the quality was going up and up.

Uh, In the last couple of years, the biggest award entrant country has been the USA, and that’s that’s obviously because we went to the USA for the first time in two thousand twenty-five in Miami Beach and this year in Fort Lauderdale. And that has had an effect on the number of entries we were getting.

we always got entries from America, but it’s the biggest economy in the world and it’s got, a hundred thousand architects and innumerable interior designers it was probably underrepresented at WAF. And that’s no longer the case. And then you’ve got your old faithfuls.

We always get quite a few entries from UK, from Australia, from Turkey, India. So the top half doesn’t change that much, but sometimes the running order does. 

Tim Abrahams: You mentioned at the beginning Barcelona as the locale in which you had your first event, and then you’ve mentioned Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach.

Has it been a different place every year? I seem to remember you being in Barcelona for quite a while at first. 

Paul Finch: We spent our first four years in Barcelona almost like an Olympic timetable. And we then moved east. We moved to Singapore for four years, and I think in both cases, actually, it was probably two years too long.

Our most successful events in terms of numbers of award entries and delegates were our two years in Amsterdam 2018 and 2019 it was terrific. We did our gala dinner in Belaga’s Stock Exchange building, and it’s a beautiful city to work in. And then we got hit for six by COVID because actually we were dark, as they say in the theater. We For thirty-six months. The second year we did full Monty. We did conference and awards, the fantastic heroic backroom effort, because we had to do about six hundred presentations and judging events online, in three or four weeks. because we were doing it round the world, we had to… to start in the Land of the Rising Sun, and end up in Chile at the end of the day. And it was the most extraordinary thing, which I hope we never have to repeat. It was pretty heroic, so we did the full program, But we didn’t know when we came back from that, so twenty twenty-two we were in Lisbon which had– we’d been advertising it from, before COVID started.

everyone was sick of hearing us marketing the fact we were gonna be in Lisbon. we only did it in Lisbon one year rather than two because we thought, “Okay, that’s enough.” Luckily there was still appetite for live events even after COVID. The Chinese couldn’t travel, so there was a bit of a hybrid element where we let all the Chinese presenters do it online, but in front of the same jurors as all the people at the live festival.

Tim Abrahams: how does the World Architecture Festival sustain its autonomy, if 

Paul Finch: So this question about how do you deal with awards and how do you deal with crit panels was the key thing to launching WAF actually, because we thought there would be an appetite for something, and we couldn’t see it as a global conference event because it’s too easy to replicate, and anyway, people can do conferences in their own countries and get world speakers to fly in.

Why is everybody go-gonna go, gonna go out for a conference? Whereas when we did our research, the idea of awards which will be open to anybody not curated just have a go if you think you’re good enough was quite popular. One of our key questions was would you consider attending this event if you hadn’t actually entered the awards for some reason or another?

And the answer to that was quite encouraging to us. It wasn’t a hundred percent, but it was an interesting thing that people would find the idea of watching other people presenting was attractive. 

Now, this was the key thing to WAF. It’s still unusual. It’s not unique anymore because people do copycat.

But our point was that everybody shortlisted would have to present live In front of three international jurors in a crit room with delegates. No hiding place. delegates would see the jurors asking the presenters questions about their project. it’s like going back to school. It’s like being in a crit in an architecture school, except they only had 10 minutes to present.

And the jury only had eight or nine minutes to ask their questions because that’s the only way we could make this model work. So 16 presentations in a crit room in a day and that would give us the requisite number of rooms, categories, judges. The critical thing it would be live.

there was some skepticism about this. People said why don’t you just do the interviews behind closed doors? It’s gonna cost us a lot of money with all these crit rooms, and then you’re gonna have to have AV,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No. That was the point. It’s a very strong way of actually assessing how good something is.

I think it’s possible to do a great presentation of a great building it’s difficult to do a really great presentation of a bad building. That’s my observation. Unfortunately, it’s possible to do a bad presentation of a really good building. And that’s why there are some of our audience, fr- the Australians do little,these little dress rehearsals in front of their own folk before they ever come to WAF, once they know who the shortlist is.

I introduced one in Sydney the other night online, and they had practices there who were doing their stuff, and then they were gonna get critiqued. And of course, a presentation is an act of design all of its own, so it has to be thought about. But that really has been critical, and of course, if it’s live, that’s the justification for a live event.

If you wanna save money, it’s easy. Do it all online. Don’t have an event. You won’t have to get any delegates to pay money. They won’t have to spend three or four days of their own time in your company. But actually, people do it at WAF. But why do they do it? Because it’s enjoyable, and they learn stuff watching other people doing things.

And I should say for anybody who’s never been to the event I describe it semi-seriously as basically it’s the architectural equivalent of a dog show. Because for the first two days, we have 17 or 18 crit rooms, which are usually inflatables.

 In room one, you might have houses, and in room two, you’ve got offices, and in room three, you’ve got hospitals. And what The jurors have to decide is the best of breed, best house, best office, best school, et cetera.

On the final day , the audience get to see all those best of breed winners presenting against each other. And you say how can you judge, a house against an office?” Actually you can, because what was the depth and complexity of the challenge?

What was the desirability and the delight of the outcome? it’s not a problem. And if you say different jury, different result,” I would accept that’s probably true. 

Although there haven’t been many occasions where we’ve had to go to a vote. It’s almost always been done by consensus.

Tim Abrahams: There’s a little pressie of the event. it’s interesting that you talk about the design review and the crit. I remember coming into, contact with architectural culture and just being struck by how powerful the crit was as a mechanism for learning, perfecting, stepping forward, reflecting.

We hear a lot about the negatives surrounded with crit. They have been brutal in the history of academia but they still exist. you– You’re obviously a firm believer in them as a means of creating worth or finding where worth and value is.

How has the crit changed? And also, if you could just reflect and just perhaps explain, perhaps start off by explaining what a design review is to you. terms of how it worked for CABE. That’s the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment which you chaired.

Paul Finch: C-CABE replaced the Royal Fine Art Commission. it was a Tony Blair invention. And our joke was that there were three things that New Labour didn’t like about the Royal Fine Art Commission: royal, fine, and art.

But they were quite happy with the word commission, so it became the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Richard Rogers was a big supporter of CABE and recommended it. And Terry Farrell was a great supporter of it, provided that it covered off more than just, as it were, pure pure architecture. for significant projects, we did do desktop reviews, which just looked at drawings and then would write a letter.

That became slightly unfashionable with the powers that be, who said if you haven’t done a site visit, how can you possibly comment on whether the building’s any good or not?” The answer to that is, if it’s a shit building, you don’t need to do a site visit. That’s the short answer. And there are plenty of other design issues where it’s actually about the design of a building.

It’s actually not about the place because the client doesn’t control the place, but they do control a building, and that’s really what matters. 

Tim Abrahams: Was there a certain type of building or a certain cost of building, or is it all public buildings?

They’d come before youby statutory consent, and you would offer your feedback on it, and they had to act on it. Is that fair? 

Paul Finch: We adopted the design review method of the old Royal Fine Art Commission, which is to say somebody comes in, they present for, twenty minutes or so.

And then you would have that twenty minutes or so of discussion and questions and comments. And then the panel would reach some conclusions after the applicants or the developers had left the room. And we did was we made the Royal Fine Art Commission process friendlier. It…

What they used to do is a bit like an aesthetic magistrates court. So people would present. Questions would be asked to which you weren’t expected to give particularly long or comprehensive answers, or comments would be made, maybe without questions. And then you wait in trepidation for your letter saying, whether you were great or rubbish, and you didn’t have any possibility of responding to what was in that letter.

That, the letter was the letter, end of story, unless you came back in again for a further review. And people found this quite frightening, actually. Lord St John of Fawsley, who’s a rather patrician person, ran it as though he was the Lord High Executioner. And you had these very, very, high really high-class architects and landscapers and engineers.

They were a formidable crew and what we decided to do was to loosen this up, make it more user-friendly. And in particular the design review chair would do a summary at the end and the applicants would be encouraged to respond to questions and comments rather than it hanging in the air They would be encouraged to say what they thought, whether they thought her comment was reasonable or to answer a question that had been put to them.

So far more interactive. And then the chair’s summary of this is roughly what you’re gonna get in the letter wasn’t gonna come as a surprise to them. even if they didn’t like what was coming, it may have been unpleasant, but it wasn’t a shock or a surprise because everybody had their say in the room, so the session would last an hour roughly.

They’d have all had a chance to have their say. So at that point, there wouldn’t be any ambiguity about questions unanswered or why didn’t they ask that? It’s all out on the table. So that to me is a smart way of doing things. 

Not quite a crit, which is, typically crits in schools of architecture might be a bit longer on presentation and a bit more rambling and a bit looser because depending on what stage the project was at or what stage the student was at, then you would expect more or less levels of detail.

my experience of doing occasional crits in schools of architecture is they’ve been really quite user-friendly and those tales of yesteryear of people shouting and screaming and people ending up in tears or walking out of the room,. Yes, it certainly happened, but I don’t think it does happen these days, partly because there’s been almost a fashionable reaction to the typical crit. the woke brigade describes it as patriarchal because there’s somebody in charge of it.

Although, women are perfectly capable of running a crit, And there’s this thing that somehow, makes women feel uncomfortable. my answer to that, it can make anyone feel uncomfortable, if their work isn’t very good, or they’ve been lazy and they haven’t done enough.

You need criticism and a proper crit session, to my mind, so you can’t have too many people involved. And it would also involve communication between the critics themselves So part of the thing is What question does this project raise? And you would get a conversation about precedent.

And the conversation between the critics themselves becomes useful to the students- … because they’re hearing a conversation about intellectual matters. Usually not technical matters because that can be done elsewhere. So that’s the first reason I think it’s good. But the second reason, in my view, schools that do not do proper crits are letting their students down.

I would say it is professionally incompetent and dishonest not to have tough crits. the reason is that architects who practice in what academics sneer at the phrase the real world. Will be confronted throughout their career by stroppy clients, sometimes unpleasant vociferous, and sometimes aggressive to the point of physical aggression.

Action groups and community groups, it is known for planning committees to have police called because the opposition to what the architects are doing and the developers is so extreme. And of course, that matter of dealing with difficult and recalcitrant planning officers, design officers, heritage officers, building control, environmental inspectors, Chris Packham.

All designed to unsettle you. And I tell you one thing, 

if all you’ve ever had in, architectural training is lovey-dovey questions saying how great you are, it’s an utter waste of time WAF presentations are a mixture or version of this stuff. . And actually, doing it in public, is just a little version of what happens in the real world where you’re in front of planning committees and community groups and all the rest of it. Architecture’s a public activity, and you’ve got people in the room who are also members of the public.

I think it’s a winning formula. And there are one or two organizations that having been very sniffy about what we were doing now just do exactly the same thing.

Tim Abrahams: You’ve described very well the crit and why they’re so essential, and yet we live in a social media world where, what we say online to each other can be extreme. And to actually be in the presence of someone and discuss something is a very different thing, isn’t it?

Paul Finch: I couldn’t agree more, and I think for jurors we don’t pay our jurors. They come because we invite them and we cover expenses. But they’re really donating their time, and one of the reasons the jurors like doing it is because it’s very stimulating.

You sit in a room and sixteen presentations on health projects or projects or whatever it is, and it’s very unusual that the jurors themselves aren’t enthused. Just occasionally you get a bum steer and actually it’s not a great day. But by and large, the jurors are hugely enthusiastic, and it is because of that human interaction and the possibility of course, when the day is over of all the informal conversations that then take place because people can ask the jurors, what…

you made that comment, is that what you really thought?” kind of thing. But the word crit is a bit of a problem because it can be taken as opportunity to criticize in a negative sense. But a proper crit isn’t like that at all. It’s critical.

a critique. It’s an assessment of what’s good and what may not be so good. And I should say that our jurors, are experienced people and they’re people who often the first group of people we invite are people who’ve won a category the previous year.

So we get this kind of rolling up to a point, a kind of rolling not academy exactly, but there are groups of people we can call on who we know are good. 

The only advice we give them is the Cabe document on what makes a good project.

And anybody who says that you can’t assess, it’s all in the eye of the beholder,” and you can’t assess whether something’s good enough I’ve got news for you. Yes, you can. I would hesitate to say that You can’t define beauty. CABE has one of the questions that it encourages, reviewers who ask, ” Is it beautiful?”

And it’s not an unreasonable question to ask. And the nearest we’ve ever got to a definition, because the more you push it, the more it becomes impossible, as Roger Scruton out, but he admitted you couldn’t define it. You certainly couldn’t define it in a way that would fit neatly into Britain’s town and country planning lawWhat we said, it’s something that lifts the spirits. And I think there are buildings that lift the spirits, and sometimes it could lift the spirits even if you’re not sure if you like it. It’s a bit like Jonathan Meades’ comment when he was doing his series on brutalism on television.

And he said, “Small may be beautiful, but big is sublime.” I think those conversations about that and about scale are the sort of thing that you get at good crits. And I think there’s something about having the people in the room and being able to ask a question.

There’s a bit of a college reunion vibe at WAF, all part of this face-to-face thing. some of the schools of architecture the Bartlett or the Architectural Association or the National University of Singapore when they’re in town, they put the word out, anyone from the school who’s an alumnus will be having drinks down the road 

So you get these chance encounters, And there have been occasions where architects who never knew each other ended up working together on joint projects. 

Tim Abrahams: Sadlythe reason why I reached out to you was because I was extending my sympathy for the passing of Jeremy Melvin, who died, a couple of months ago now. What was his involvement in WAF and what kind of person was he?

Paul Finch: Jeremy is one of those people that several people have said to me, that you remember when you first met him. I met him at a pub on Tottenham Court Road because he’d been recommended by a Bartlett professor as somebody who we should think about using on Building Design Magazine, which I was editing at the time.

Jeremy started freelancing for us, doing spoof articles on did Ruskin ever see a motor car tomore serious pieces. I remember he transformed one of those advertising supplements we were doing on cladding with a long brilliant essay on Gottfried Semper and color theory Jeremy wasn’t involved in creating WEF. he worked on Building Design and then he moved briefly to the Architecture Foundation where he put on nine exhibitions in six months

he taught at the Bartlett for many years. He was the guiding light of the Royal Academy’s architecture program and when I approached Jeremy to see if he’d like to get involved with WEF towards the end of 2007 because I had it in mind that our conference theme at the festival should be accompanied by a little exhibition which would explain why we picked that theme and he joined to do that but then got involved in the the festival,

so he became a kind of integral part of the WAF team from 2008 onwards. eventually we stopped doing the little exhibits because we found the sponsors were quite happy with the conference theme. But Jeremy was involved and worked with me on everything from, special prize shortlisting contributing to our monthly newsletter, distributed to about a quarter of a million architects around the world.

And he was a, remarkable writer. I should say not least because he had what I think the psychologists call an eidetic memory.

It’s almost as though once he’d read something, it was imprinted in his memory. You had to be careful because a conversation could easily turn into a lecture. but he was A very skillful chair at the festival itself, particularly the evening keynote sessions. So he was completely integral. and it’s a very sorry story because Jeremy got double pneumonia the first year we were in Singapore on our last outing there. And the doctors and insurers said he was okay to travel, and in retrospect, he really shouldn’t have done because he clearly was not well by the end of that festival. His lungs had been damaged by the double pneumonia, basically.

But there was no question of him not coming to the WAF last year which he did. And he was in the middle of writing a book about a brilliant South African architect called Jo Noero.

Sort of anti-apartheid architect of considerable merit, who’d been a speaker at our festival and a super juror. And Jeremy was cooperating with Jo on her book and had gone out to South Africa for two or three weeks and was meeting Jo pretty much every day, And, He was sitting on the top of the sort of apart-hotel, I think, where he was staying.

It had a lovely roof terrace. And he was sitting on a bench probably watching the sunset and just passed away., The only silver lining one can find that it was peaceful and natural. A huge shock to us because although, as I’ve said, he wasn’t in the best of health, we certainly hadn’t anticipated anything like that happening.

And we’re gonna run at the Bartlett in October, date to be confirmed, but no doubt the word will get out of anybody who’d like to come along and pay their respects. So that’ll be a celebration of a life rather than an event for mourning.

Buthe’ll be hugely missed. I hope the event will be as good as ever. But it won’t be the same because of his extraordinary knowledge of history and culture, and A properly critical way of relating things to each other in a very broad cultural context. After 40 years I’ll miss him immensely. But, We carry on. 

Tim Abrahams: Fort Lauderdale you’ll be in. When I found that out, I was like, “Ooh, didn’t see that one coming.”

What takes you to Fort Lauderdale? 

Paul Finch: we had a two-year contract with our key sponsor, Grohe, as previously mentioned, we’re on two-year timeframes these days. So we were definitely gonna be in the States for two years.

first, Miami Beach, we wanted to go there because of the connection to Latin and South America. Easy place to get to, and we did see numbers of award entries going up from Latin and South America. So second year, why we’re in Fort Lauderdale I’ll tell you the truth, partly ’cause we couldn’t get the dates in Miami Beach at the center.

They just weren’t available. However, we were keen to stay in Miami. Fort Lauderdale was an easy second choice it has a wonderful convention center and a big hotel next door and lots of other hotels nearby

it’s described as the Venice of North America. It’s not like Venice because it doesn’t have little narrowed, dark, dingy canals. What it does have is 162, kilometers of inland waterways. So you’ve got ocean on one side and an awful lot of water on the other.

Very riverine environment. water taxis not as many as Venice, of course, because you can get around by car. 

But it’s a very watery environment, and that’s why we’ve made our conference theme this year water. It’s too good an opportunity to miss. We knew our sponsors, Grohe, would like it because, water is what they do.

And one of our categories is food and water, which can split. Could be food or water or both. And we’ve had some wonderful entries over the years which would deal with this condition that many countries find themselves in of simultaneously suffering from dearth and excess. You get droughts in Bangladesh then you get floods.

there are parts of South America, in these forests where they have a water shortage. It sounds unlikely, but it’s true. And the entries for that are always interesting. we also actually do a water research prize that Grohe put 10,000 pounds a year into to help fund that’s ranged from how you collect water from building facades, for instance, to how you can use scientific method to generate water in deserts from moisture collection.

It’s all that kind of very interesting research. there’s no shortage of water, in Fort Lauderdale, but the subject of water is endlessly fascinating and it’s gonna be a good place to be examining it again. 

Tim Abrahams: Looking forward to hearing all about it. Thank you Paul Finch.

Paul Finch: Thank you. 

Tim Abrahams: Excellent stuff. What I find interesting about Paul’s description of the World Architecture Festival is that beneath the awards you love, awards, you architects, don’t you, and the international spectacle, there’s a fairly basic idea. Architecture gets better through debate. The crit can be uncomfortable.

Design review can be difficult, but architecture is a public activity and architects ultimately have to explain and defend their decisions to all manner of people.

Why not themselves? 

There’s also something increasingly unusual about WAFs insistence that this happens face to face. I think there’s something very touching about Paul’s memories of Jeremy Melvin. A reminder that architectural culture depends upon people who can bring history, criticism, and knowledge into those conversations.

Best of luck to those heading to the World Architecture Festival in Fort Lauderdale, appropriately enough with water at its theme. And my thanks to Paul Finch for joining me 

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