Architecture for kids podcast with Jerry Tate Founding Director Tate+Co

What a great conversation with Antonio for the Architecture for Kids podcast. It was very interesting to reflect on our outreach education work with kids over the last 15 years, and I think the podcasts will be an important survey of all the different people involved with this type of work.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the very first edition of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Gerry Tait. Gerry founded Tait& Co in 2007 and maintains a central role at the practice. He is driven by his desire to generate creative, pragmatic and unique solutions for each project that have a positive impact on our built and natural environment. Jerry's influential across all projects ensured design qualities paramount. He was educated at Nottingham University and at the Bartlett where he received the Antoine Predock Design Award, subsequently completing a master's degree at Harvard University where he received the Kevin V. Kieran Prize. Prior to establish Tate& Co. he worked at Grimshaw Architects where he led a number of significant projects including the core facilities at the Eden project in Cornwall. Ger is an active member of the construction industry community and is a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is frequently invited to lecture, notably at Education Estates, the Carpenters Fellowship and EcoBuild, as well as to contribute to architecture publications including the Architects Journal, Building Design, Sustainable and world architecture news. He has taught at Harvard University, run a timber design and make course for the Dartmoor Arts Organization and was a Rainier Visiting Professor for Kansas State University Architecture School in 2021 to 2022. Currently teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture and his spare time is involved with a number of charities and is a trustee at the Grimshaw Hello Antonio, nice to be here, thank you. Jerry, one of the questions that I ask to all my guests is what was your favourite subject at school and what were you good at?

SPEAKER_00: 3:03

When I was at school, the breadth of subjects was really available, like maths and English and then French and history. And the only two outlets which kind of really floated my boat were technical drawing and art, both of which I did up to kind of A level. And actually, I really enjoyed art. I was really good at technical drawing. I think I really enjoyed the precision of that as well. But neither subject kind of fully worked for me. So it's quite interesting that I went into architecture because in lots of ways, that architecture is kind of bridged between, you know, the kind of slightly more fluid approach of art and the precision of technical drawing. did it influence your career? I think it did but again I grew up in, I mean one of the reasons why I guess I'm really into trying to involve children with learning about architecture at an earlier stage is I grew up in a place called Suffolk which is quite a rural county and when I was growing up there there was no motorways and no university it was very sort of on its own and I thought I probably wanted to be in architect you know it kind of looks like the thing which might be representative of the subjects I enjoyed you know and I quite like buildings but there weren't a lot of examples of architects and architecture for me to look at and the only two things I found in Suffolk were the Willis Faye building by Foster was in Ipswich whilst growing up so I remember going to that as a child being like blown away by oh my god buildings don't have to all look the same you know they can be like this and then there was an architecture practice called Mullins and Dowse in Woodbridge who gave me a lot of work experience you know which I kind of really enjoyed but the truth is there wasn't a lot in Suffolk really to inspire you to want to do architecture and it's only really when I left Suffolk that I really found out what architecture was. Do you have

SPEAKER_01: 5:01

already a definition of what is an architect

SPEAKER_00: 5:03

and architect? Architects have a potentially very large role within the building industry you know not just you know not just drawing buildings but also in Enabling development, so at the front end, you know, you see architects now joining councils, kind of getting things to happen or becoming developers or becoming enabling planners. They also have a role with consultation, bringing communities in and help them learning. They have a role with post-occupancy, checking if buildings are working and then subsequently retrofit. You know, the broad scope of what architects probably should be doing actually is much, much larger than just drawing buildings. and I wish I'd sort of known that earlier actually to be honest with you and I think that's a message that most of the workshops I've been involved with are trying to give over to people that you know it's not just a single aspect of the profession that's important there's lots of different ways to do it if that makes sense

SPEAKER_01: 6:01

yes I mean there's a political social economic and absolutely probably that's a lot of something that you kind of can experiment with your teaching at the Bartlett

SPEAKER_00: 6:10

I mean I have done a lot of teaching over of the years I do really enjoy it and one of the things that I particularly enjoy about teaching actually is you are setting up a platform to allow people to explore their own ideas you know it's not a vehicle for your ideas and that's absolutely crystal clear in teaching in practice that is actually true as well interestingly so if you're running an architecture practice your job isn't to do the big pen designs and someone else takes it on from you because that produces bad buildings So, you know, actually your job as a practitioner is also to set up a platform to create great architecture. But as a student, that is crystal clear as the deal. And I really enjoy that, you know, that idea of assisting someone kind of working through a process. The trouble, I think, with university level stuff, which sort of the thing I really enjoyed at Dartmoor was getting this kind of group idea of everyone working together and getting this kind of collaborative co-creation idea together. So at Dartmoor, we'd have one project, 12 students, and that was kind of super interesting. And I've done that a bit at the Bar, that actually is part of the MNG course. And I think that's a good discipline for them as well, this idea of a co-creative base on which they're doing. It's something most people aren't very used to, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 7:29

I can talk about Dayton Co. So how did that come about?

SPEAKER_00: 7:33

Yeah, I sort of pretty quickly knew that I wanted to set up an architecture practice, not not really because it's like you want to be the Charlie Big Bananas or anything but it's just interesting for exactly the reasons I've just described actually I think it's really interesting to set up a platform which has a certain attitude and then see what the outcome is in terms of the built outcome honestly that's a really interesting experiment so that's really what Tate& Co is about we have quite clear ideas about the impact of what we do on the environment so things like whole life carbon and stuff like that and we've had that from the very start but also we've got an opinion that connecting people to nature improves health and well-being and their living outcomes and all that kind of thing so and not just nature and they're kind of like putting trees on buildings but natural daylight and natural ventilation views to the outside lots of different aspects of it so we've got a kind of philosophy if you like behind the platform which we design from and that's sort of like what does that mean in terms of a building I think that's really interesting we just finished a big building for York St John University and who was showing QPM around the other day and you know he said gosh it's it looks a bit quirky you know it looks a bit different I'm like well it's interesting isn't it I think that's what you get when we come from kind of like it's a passive house rated building made of natural materials so it looks quite chunky you know it's got views to the outside so there is glazing but there's even daylight you know there's lots of sort of parts of the philosophy which have a huge impact on how the building kind of comes about so that's the interesting experiment You set up a platform, see how it goes. So I always knew I wanted to do that. I work for Grimshaw Architects. I think they're brilliant, I have to say. If I hadn't set up my own practice, I'd still be there, for sure. They are fantastic, and also I'm a trustee now at the Grimshaw Foundation as well, so I'm still involved at arm's length with bits and bobs. There was a building called The Core, which is the education facilities building for the Eden Project, and I was working with Jolima Brewis on it so you know we designed it ran the project all the way through you know I was a project architect and completed it and at the end of that I thought well I've learnt unless I move up the ranks now in Grimshaw I can't learn what I need to learn here so at that point I stopped and said I think I need to go and do something else and I actually went and did a masters at Harvard after that to give myself an intellectual reset if you like so I didn't really want to there's a risk Because you're standing in someone else's intellectual framework when you're in someone else's company. If you just stop and start your own company, you'll never establish your own framework, really. You'll always be spinning off of theirs. So I went to Harvard to do a two-year master's to get a kind of intellectual reset, if you like. Came back and luckily had one project, which was a new build house for a friend. And it kind of went from there.

SPEAKER_01: 10:37

and your engagement with children and young people, how did that come about?

SPEAKER_00: 10:42

Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. So we are involved with children and young people in quite a few different ways, I guess. So it's interesting to talk about how all of those came about. But, you know, we design schools, basically. And when you design schools, you know, a big part of your stakeholder community is children. who need to be engaged with. So there's that aspect of working with young people. I'm really keen for young people to know more about architecture and the built environment. And why? Well, because I think it's completely ignored at school level, to be completely honest. I don't think there is any teaching about that at school level. So it's one of those things where if you're thinking about getting into it, it's very hard to know where to start, really, So unless you've got a relative who's doing it, it's a bit of a black box. And also what all the roles are, so not just architecture, but there's some really important roles, sustainability, MEP, structural engineer, planner, all these roles that are kind of like not taught at school, no one knows what they are, and yet they have this kind of huge influence on our life. So we, from the start, really, were working with Open City on their schools programme, So we knew Victoria Thornton and she knew we were very passionate about this. So we've been, I guess we started really doing children's workshops with Open City, going into schools and running schemes of work inside art classes, basically. Art seemed to be the best fit. And

SPEAKER_01: 12:25

how would that work? What kind of, what would you do?

SPEAKER_00: 12:28

So interestingly, the other aspect of this is my wife is an art teacher, so I've got quite a good idea of what art teachers have to do. But it would essentially be we would come in and do I think it was like two or three in-school workshops and one kind of visit to a building or one outside workshop and they would be running a scheme of work which is about a term long scheme of work if you like so there's other lessons that are built around it we would have essentially a programme which was a plug-in to a scheme of work that a teacher could run and Open City ran this really well I think it was kind of the start of this idea of we've got to get people in schools understanding what architecture is and actually at that point we were kind of really ambitious, there was talk of it maybe becoming a GCSE subject or something like that which didn't really happen and the world hasn't really gone that way actually I think the world is kind of current education policies if anything shrinking the number of GCSEs available and having more of a kind of core of maths and English At State& Co are you doing some mentoring? We work on a mentoring programme as well so we're part of that, that's really good we do the livery schools link which is a sort of outreach program working with the architects livery looking at East End schools so the city of London which is where they're based has quite an interesting social mix you could say just on the outside so we interface a lot with that we still work a bit with the ROBA and you know on their education program and we do a lot kind of informal children's workshops and I'm also course heavily involved with the Grimshaw Foundation and we are running our own children's workshops with Urban Learners so I think actually now the majority of my time kind of doing the outreach stuff to children is expended on the Grimshaw Foundation.

SPEAKER_01: 14:22

children and young people that you work with how do they get to you or you know and sort of what sort of are they Londoners are they from outside so what's the demographics and you know

SPEAKER_00: 14:35

yeah I think that's a really interesting question and I'm going to give you quite a complicated answer I'm really sorry because actually you've kind of nailed something quite important I remember we used to do a lot of RBA education program work and the difficult the ROBA is they're always kids of architects of course right because you have to apply to do this course and so the architects are the ones who know about the ROBA and the reason I like things like the delivery schools link is at that there's an event that we do a sort of festival fair where we're one of many professions and a whole host of schools come through over a two to three day period you know and it's like a stall where we run an event and a workshop there we run these sort of hour long kids workshops where they can join in And that way you're kind of harvesting a much wider cross-section of the population, but not geographically. They're still all very close to London. And one of the things at the Grimshaw Foundation we've been talking about is exactly that question about how do people get to us? How do they join the programme? And inevitably, you know, the risk is you end up being quite London-centric. And I think that, again, if people are doing work work experience with us might put them on the spot a little bit but you know the work experience people I think this year we've got four or five people coming in to do work experience with us but they're all children of friends actually you know and I feel a little bit guilty about that I mean I like having obviously because of what we do I think it's really important people come in and do work experience with us and you know we get them doing lots of things in the office and I think it's really good for them and really interesting

SPEAKER_01: 16:16

How do they contribute to the office in this work experience?

SPEAKER_00: 16:20

I mean like the honest The truth is, they rarely make anything or do anything that's of commercial value. So that's not the point of the exercise. I think that the point of the exercise is to allow people to meaningfully understand what the profession is, for them to make an informed decision about whether it's right for them or not. And I think if every architecture practice did that, there'd be a much better understanding of the profession by people who enter it, if you like, and there'd be much less surprise. You're like, oh my God, this is what architecture is. But, so, then the final thing about something like the Grimshaw Foundation is one of the key things that we are now looking at is diversity in terms of, you know, if you like, our mission is to improve, the Grimshaw Foundation is to improve access to architecture and the creative industries, you know, but now, you know, there's, that is a real focus on diversity and that is diversity both from looking to get people from the global majority, ethnic minority to come in but also geographically you know like if you're in Lincolnshire and you want to become an architect I'm not being horrible about Lincolnshire but there's less architects in Lincolnshire than there are in Hackney basically it's much easier to learn about architecture if you're living in Hackney than it is in Lincolnshire and how can we address that and the reason that's important is you want your profession to be representative of a very wide cross section of society because otherwise it's solving a problem for a very narrow bunch of people. It's like that tech problem, isn't it? If all tech's invented by white males in their late 30s, then most of the problems that are getting solved are those problems of white males in their 30s, right? And if all architecture's getting designed by people like me, I'm 48 and I'm a white bloke, right? If I was the only type of architect out there, well, everything would be kind of steering around white blokes at age 48. In the end, the long-term solution to that is for the profession to be representative of the population it serves. But you talked about something really interesting, geographically, how you expanded this programme. There are methods of outreach now that weren't available 20, 30 years ago. And of course, that's down to the internet and social media, right? So at the Grimsfield Foundation, there is a lot of effort put into creating online resources and online schemes of work and things like films and videos that people can kind of, you know, short films that tell you a lot quickly that people can watch I think that's really important and there's a big social media outreach push and I think that inevitably is the way you can reach people in more remote locations and the difficulty with the physical stuff is like running a physical workshop can only happen in one location and inevitably the locations of those are probably going to be in the centres of architecture so the ones you just mentioned like Manchester or London or Birmingham. But at least if people are signposted to where things are happening, then they understand more about what's going on before they just kind of rock up.

SPEAKER_01: 19:33

How easy it is to establish the relationship with the schools to create these projects?

SPEAKER_00: 19:39

You know, again, the best fit for any of these things is inevitably the art department. So really it's contacting the art department in each school to understand if they have capacity or they want to be involved with something like this and actually one of the problems with teaching really is when we started doing this I guess about 15 years ago now teachers basically had more capacity to do things like external partnerships it was sort of less data heavy as a profession there was less administration and it didn't have to fit such a kind of narrow bandwidth now it's quite I'd say very heavily structured actually as a profession teaching and I'm not sure if you get into you know whether that's right or wrong I don't really know I don't know enough about pedagogy to be able to kind of deal with that but I do know that that leaves less space for external partnerships so not every school that you approach is keen to have things like children's workshops with external partners not because they don't want to do it but because they just don't have the capacity to be able to do it. As someone who obviously mainly likes to do art and technical drawing at schools I am I think that there could be a better understanding in education policy about the power of the creative industries in the UK you know I mean even if you're kind of a hard-nosed capitalist you know churning out people who can draw really well and come up with good ideas and you know just think things through and make them happen I think it's something like two billion people work for the creative industries and it's the second biggest industry if you bracket them all together you know going from fashion to architecture and they all started off as people who were good at art. What is the impact

SPEAKER_01: 21:26

of this work to them in your experience?

SPEAKER_00: 21:30

I think the impact, yeah, it's interesting with kids because the honest truth is it's hard to read the impact because kids don't have the kind of, the wherewithal is not the right word, they haven't got the life experience yet to understand, you know, quite what things mean when it's happening to them. So you can see when a kid's really engaged and that's really nice so you often find that about you know half the kids are just kind of like really concentrated on it and really engaged and that's lovely to see it's like they're really getting into it and they're really going for it and sometimes when it's more of a kind of self-selecting group running a workshop where people apply to come it can be up to 100% so that kind of that's your best measure of are they into this because they're just really engaged with it they're really concentrated you can see they're doing it but they you know you can't expect kids to turn around to you and go thank you for that life-changing event that really made me think about our I mean, they're just not, you know, they're not set up to think all that through yet because that's just not how they are. There's often

SPEAKER_01: 22:28

one or two that wants to become an architect after one of those workshops.

SPEAKER_00: 22:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, no, and that is satisfying. I want everyone who becomes an architect to know what architecture is before they make that jump because if you don't love it, it's hopeless. As a profession, you've got to really like it. Architecture is a really, really inspiring thing to do. You know, it is fantastic. And the training in itself, it's amazing. The training is amazing, but it is a hard job, right? It is a hard job being an architect. It's hard because there's a lot to deal with, both in terms of managing lots of things, there's a very wide aspect to it, the hours are quite long, you've got a lot of responsibility, like legally, actually, interestingly, which is all right, and that's all good, and that's fine if you are really into it and really want want to do it, then you'll just find all of that, you'll just do it. So people who come in, they've got to understand that equation, I guess.

SPEAKER_01: 23:28

You said earlier that you've been doing outreach work for the last 15 years. How has this landscape changed within the time that you've been working?

SPEAKER_00: 23:39

Yeah, interestingly, actually, this is a strange answer. I don't think it's changed as much as I would have liked, I have to be honest. I think actually the methods of outreach outreach have really improved and I think the people doing it have massively refined what they're doing. The stuff that people are achieving with outreach and with workshops I think is amazing. But the kind of scope of what it's achieved in terms of integrating itself into schools I think has been less than we all hoped for at the start 15 years ago. So that's a kind of mean thing to say and it's not the fault of anyone doing these workshops either. But just I think the appetite of schools to kind of fold these outside players in has reduced over the years. I think the appetite amongst architects to go into schools for no money and run workshops is huge. That is a massive, and frankly, untapped resource, actually. Understanding of the value of creativity in schools, which isn't there at the moment. And I think it can be balanced by the academic stuff. I'm certainly not dismissing that you shouldn't be doing the academic work, but I think that the balance has tipped too far in terms of that kind of straight, straight, straight academic stuff, when I suspect that certainly the UK kind of strength if you like on the world stage has nothing to do necessarily with straight academia I mean of course it does and you can say life sciences and all that but when you think about things that we do which have this kind of huge soft power impact like the music industry the film industry you know architecture London is an architecture centre right there's a few in the world I mean it just is it's an international architecture there's London there's New York maybe Tokyo you know Hong Kong Hong Kong probably Berlin is a growing one Melbourne Melbourne possibly Copenhagen right but that's it you know London is like front and centre one of the biggest architecture centres so it's this sort of industry that we've got which has come from an international base actually but the core of a lot of it is from people who work at a school in the UK who are good at art right that's what a lot of architects are we forgot Chicago oh Chicago

SPEAKER_01: 25:58

is there any other challenges that that you want to talk

SPEAKER_00: 26:01

about? I mean, the other challenge is, you know, architects are time poor, and I think this is a problem actually across the teaching profession, interestingly, but there's kind of the invention of schemes of work, if you like. So I think we've now got, not to sound like we're lazy, but we've got like six different kind of playbooks for how to run workshops, you know, that we kind of know this is a kind of thing where we make a model, this is a thing we do a collage, you know, we've got these kind of things, so we kind of know how they go, we've got resources in the offices and like plastic boxes and things but it's taken us a while to get to the point we've got that stuff all lined up and we're not getting paid to do it do you know what I mean so there's no real there's zero time from a commercial point of view to prepare it all and I think that something that's quite interesting is to kind of prepare those resources for people to be able to kind of like download them you know a list of what you should be taking to a workshop you need these pens this type of safety scissors these you know bits of sticky tape just that kind of like basic level of a scheme of work prep, if you like, would be really handy for architects, because all architects are time poor. I have one

SPEAKER_01: 27:06

last question, which is, is there a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you? And what is that

SPEAKER_00: 27:12

question? There is a question that I sort of, we sort of question this, which is, what is the, you run an architecture practice, which is a business, what is the business outcome from all this outreach work, right? And I think the reason you should have asked that is because there's like a system It's a suspicion of why are you doing this then, sort of thing. Honestly, it makes no commercial sense at all. I have a very kind FD, Caroline, who essentially sets aside money for us to go and do stuff like this, because we think we should do it. So it makes no business sense. It does make sense for the profession, I have to say. It makes sense for the long-term health of the profession. So in a funny kind of way, I think that we are doing it, and I think it'd be great if all architects did it, and it's like an investment for the profession in 20, 30 years' time. In the end, really, that's the benefit of it. So I might be too old and doddery to even see the benefit, if that makes sense. But if everyone did it, if everyone did outreach into schools, it'd be an incredible profession in 20, 30 years' time. But I think from a direct here and now business point of view, If you're running an architecture practice, it's quite hard to justify, actually. So there's a sort of conflict there, which is interesting. Great. Thank you, Antonio, and thank you for having me. Great. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 28:39

To find out more about it, visit our websites. and follow us on Instagram, Arch for Kids CIC, Twitter, Ant Kaplaun, LinkedIn, Ant Kaplaun, C-A-P-E-L-A-O. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Build Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.

UNKNOWN: 29:35

Thank you.