C 01 75
are a kind of professional ‘laymen’, we do so
many things for different fields of our society
without being real experts in them: muse-
ums, laboratories, offices, religious spaces,
city planning, furniture…
I like that generalist side of our profes-
sion, it is a great privilege and freedom, but
in fact we are quite limited when it comes to
really understanding the processes and life
components in all our projects…
ET: As you said before, in wine and in
architecture time is also important. Yester-
day we were drinking a wine from 1964 and
it was amazing, but it was a bit too old. It
is interesting to compare a wine from dif-
ferent years, or simply different wines from
the same year. It is something mental, you
need to put together different wines in order
to compare them and talk about them. It is
a way to start a conversation. I believe in
architecture as a kind of conversation about
the site, the temperature, the weather…
JH: In wine tastings wines are compared
often vertically, e.g. the same wine in differ-
ent years or simply different wines from dif-
ferent places. For a winemaker such tastings
are probably a comparable exercise to archi-
tects’s visiting and photographing buildings
in order to compare them for the sake of
better understanding.
The wine world guru Robert Parker invent-
ed a rating system which gives points up to
100 for the great wines. Parker’s rating sys-
tem became hugely successful with a strong
economic impact on the wine market. This
has been leading to a ‘Parkerization’ of many
wines, a more uniform style which would ide-
ally please Mr. Parker’s taste whereas other
wines, also great, but more subtle ones would
get lower scores. I was often wondering when
such a rating system would be introduced
into the field of architecture…
ET: It is a simplification. If you give
points to a wine, or give prizes or awards to
a building, you are simplifying the approach
of people to them. It is, in my opinion, more
interesting to make the effort to understand
how the building that you really enjoy is, and
how the wine that you really enjoy is.
«If you give points
to a wine, or give
prizes or awards
to a building, you
are simplifying
the approach of
people to them»
