ORIGINALITY AND CRICKET

 

Zimbabwe beat West Indies in the cricket World Cup qualifiers which was a huge achievement as some of you will realise.

The ESPNcricinfo report headlined with a picture of Harare Sports Club and the verandah that I helped to design in 2002. Still looking good as a minimal intervention that adds important seating capacity and blends into the Cape Dutch aesthetic of the original building.

Kudos to Mike Clinton, my boss at the time, for directing the design with a light touch in his inimitable manner. As you can see it was all Autocad in those days, although I was already dabbling with Sketchup and Archicad.

The grand scheme for a circular stadium, to be built in segments as money permitted was designed in 3d Autocad but never won the hearts and minds of the committee.

Nice memories though, to go along with those of taking my now-grown-up sons to matches. Chatting to Chaminda Vaas on the boundary😳😎. I really miss those days in Zimbabwe sometimes. But in the end life there became untenable. Tragically so.

 

 

 

I was meditating on the etymology of "Originality" and decided to talk to chatGPT via the new Bing. My prompts are captured in the image.

The responses were plausible but to my mind a bit long winded and evasive. It's almost as if it was just trying to guess what I wanted to hear then padding it out with snippets of text from an ordinary Web search.

The most useful insight came right at the beginning. The usage of "original" branches off in two directions that ended up poles apart.

1. An original is the source object which can been copied many times. It may or may not be inventive.
2. An original is a surprising departure from all previous work often expressive of a cult of personality.

Not what the robot said, but my own thoughts, prompted by our short "conversation"

We used to build within established traditions, which acted as deep wells, points of origin for a huge variety of reinterpretations. (the same can be said of painting, music, etc)

The modernist myth suggests that we can design, un-moored from any preconception of style. The aesthetic will somehow emerge during the design process, which aims to be rigorous and functional. The line between originality and novelty becomes paper thin.

Origin as roots v originality as un-tethered flights of fancy.

 

New rule: a different kind of post. Allegorical stories, spliced in with BIM pencil images. Because "the way we build" reveals who we are, cast in stone for our grandchildren's grandchildren to puzzle over.

For the next few days, it will be the Bank of England aka Project Soane. After that, who knows? Let me know what you think.