Adam Gebrian & Guests
On interdisciplinary collaboration
- Tuesday Jan 26 / 19:00, Palác U Stýblů
A discussion with Roman Brychta, Adam Halíř, Ondřej Hofmeister and Petr Lešek (Projektil Architekti), Radim Babák and Ondřej Tobola (Hippos design), Petr Babák (Laboratoř), and Vít Havránek, Tomáš Vaněk and Jiří Skála (PAS).
In London in 2006, I heard a lecture by the Argentine architect Hernan Diaz Alonso, in which he described his experience from attending a lecture by a renowned biologist that he found immensely intriguing. After the lecture, he went up to him and asked him several follow-up questions. He got his answers, plus one more question: And what do you do? Upon answering that he was an architect, there followed a series of questions and lively interest in his work. It was then that he understood an important fact. Not only was he interested in the work, discoveries and ideas of others, but the same applied for them. We have many things to share with one another and perhaps even ways of helping each other, because we often work with the same phenomena, though maybe from a different angle. In other words, there are many possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration, and all of us can probably sense its immense benefits. Does interdisciplinary collaboration take place at a massive scale in our country? Is there any at our schools? Do people from related professions work together on projects, perhaps even people from professions that at first glance have little in common? Most of the time, no. There are a few simple reasons for this. The private sector rarely pays for such collaboration, and in academia there are often problems of an organizational nature (if the Faculty of Architecture and Faculty of Mechanical Engineering are going to collaborate on a project, how to calculate the credit?). All interdisciplinary collaboration is, at least initially, inefficient. It takes a long time before people from different fields get used to each other and their working together brings results. These results are often fascinating and worth the effort, but they require a willingness to invest into this great initial inefficiency. Are we ready for it?
At our talk, we will present one example of such interdisciplinary collaboration through a discussion with its participants – the team of people who worked on the design for the National Technical Library in Prague.
Moderated by: Adam Gebrian
