FFrom Will Alsop’s rebellious columns to Zaha Hadid’s gravity-defying curves, there’s always been someone in the background making the architects’ unlikely visions hold. More often than not, in the case of the 21st century’s most unlikely structures, that person has been Hanif Kara.
The Ugandan-born engineer has just been announced as the 2024 recipient of the Soane Medal, an illustrious gong that has so far been awarded to architects and their theorists, but never before to an engineer. As the mathematical brain trusted by so many and as a teacher who inspired generations of designers, Kara’s contribution to architecture is eminently worthy of recognition. It is no exaggeration to say that, without it, many of the most daring constructions of the last two decades would not exist. Or at least its columns wouldn’t be so slender, its spans so dramatic, its curves so elegant.
“I see my role as making architects’ dreams come true,” says Kara. A prodigious facilitator, he also describes his work as similar to that of a therapist, revealing his collaborators’ intentions and making sense of their ambitions. “But instead of putting them on the couch, I lay on the couch with them.” He is as much a co-designer as he is an engineer, less a conventional problem solver than an issue reframer and provocateur. He asks architects why, rather than telling them how.
For the Peckham Library in London, which won the Stirling Prize in 2000, architect Will Alsop was adamantly opposed to having columns of any kind. He wanted a huge, impossible cantilever. Kara convinced him that a row of thin steel posts was essential to making the reading room stand, and their jaunty angles not only added delight but also served the crucial purpose of reinforcing the structure. And so Alsop’s trademark was born – the “dance” column.
Similarly, Kara has provided fiendishly complex computer analysis for many of Zaha Hadid’s most extreme creations, building more projects with her than with any other architect. She came to him to help her build the Phaeno science center in Wolfsburg, Germany. Built in 2005, it is a gigantic concrete spaceship, where columns flow into slabs, which in turn merge into walls, in a continuous, sinuous shell. It was one of the world’s first “single surface” structures, without joints, and the largest use of self-compacting concrete in Europe. Nothing like it had been tried before. “This project almost killed us,” says Kara. “It took two years of computer modeling with German weapons software to make it work.”
Few others were willing to take on such grueling tasks. But with the attitude of an outsider who has nothing to lose, Kara has always liked to tread where others are not. “Migrants are never afraid,” he says. “Because he came with nothing and is willing to invest in others and push them, to a point where he also benefits.”
Kara arrived in Cheshire at the age of 14, after her family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin’s brutal regime. He didn’t speak much English and failed all his O levels. He got a job as a welder in a fabrication yard, where he learned to draw steel templates on the floor. “I got really hooked on this drawing thing,” he says. “I loved the process of communicating how you do something.” He attended night school while working and eventually got a place at Salford University to study civil engineering. After graduating, he spent time doing “hard engineering”, first in Aberdeen, working on oil rigs, before getting on rollercoasters, relishing the challenge of the gravity-defying circuits. His time working with engineer Anthony Hunt at YRM gave him a taste for experimental tissue structures and the emerging field of computational geometry, “which has really become my thing,” he says.
When the recession hit in the 1990s, he considered giving up engineering and opened a few dry cleaners to survive. But his wife encouraged him to start his own practice, AKT, which he founded with two former YRM colleagues, Robin Adams and Albert Williamson-Taylor, in 1996. “We started by reducing steel tonnages on other people’s projects,” he says. , “but we soon realized that we needed to talk to some architects.” Kara caught the architecture bug while working on (aborted) plans to turn Battersea Power Station into an Alton Towers-style theme park. “After the oil rigs and roller coasters,” he laughs, “the buildings looked extremely simple.”
He began teaching at the Architectural Association, then an avant-garde hotbed, and, with his outsider charm, soon befriended the likes of Hadid, Alsop and Jan Kaplický of Future Systems. “I felt empathy,” he says. “Everyone had a lot of difficulty building anything, but I saw value in what they designed. And I enjoyed their company.”
Kara doesn’t drink, but he would happily sit and debate with Alsop while draining a bottle of wine, and he clearly enjoyed the glitzy camaraderie of the emerging “starchitect” scene, earning a reputation for being one of the few engineers with the patience to make your crazy schemes buildable. He has collaborated with several Pritzker Prize winners and worked on four Stirling Prize-winning buildings, including the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge, the Bloomberg headquarters in London, and Kingston University’s Town House. Recent projects include Google’s massive King’s Cross and Mountain View offices in London, California, as well as Thomas Heatherwick’s ill-fated Vessel in New York, and several projects with David Chipperfield.
“Sometimes I felt quite schizophrenic,” he says. “Meetings with Zaha in the morning and then with Chipperfield in the afternoon. He was exactly the opposite: he always knew where the columns would be.” He is currently working with Chipperfield on one of the world’s most ambitious net zero carbon projects, for the London School of Economics, trying to reuse as much of an existing 1950s building as possible. calls “advanced reverse design” – also the subject of his current studio at Harvard University, where he has been a professor of architectural technology since 2012.
In many ways, Kara sees her current focus on reuse and low-energy design as a form of penance for her past sins. How does he feel in retrospect, having facilitated an era of indulgent creation of form, for form’s sake, without giving much thought to the environmental impact of his creations? The Phaeno scientific center, for example, used 75,000 tons of concrete and 4,700 tons of steel, emitting a free amount of carbon dioxide for a single building.
“There would be no way to justify something like that now,” he admits. “If you look back at that period, you start to wonder what the hell we were all doing. We were all caught up in capitalist mode. We just wanted to do bigger, better, different, no matter what. We were worshiping our own profession as engineers – just like architects.”
More recently, his work on Norman Foster’s Bloomberg headquarters, completed in 2017 and hailed as “the most sustainable office building in the world”, used 15,500 tonnes of steel (twice as much as the Eiffel Tower), 600 tonnes of bronze imported from Japan and a quarry loaded with stone from India. “The focus was on sustainability in the operation, rather than the carbon embodied in the materials,” says Kara. “The debate is longevity versus circularity and, in this case, we opted for longevity. It’s close to St. Paul’s Cathedral and they wanted something that would last as long.”
But he is aware that the debate has changed in recent years. He recently co-authored a book on structural wood with Jennifer Bonner and taught in a studio with Amin Taha on structural stone. He has also been working with researchers at Imperial College on a form of “clean concrete”, which captures carbon in its production, reducing the use of cement by up to 40%. But he is not evangelical about a single material, as some architects are. “Any monoculture is not good,” he says. “There is a limit, even for biogenic materials like wood. It’s not the answer to everything, nor is the stone.”
While he’s all for reuse, he doesn’t agree with the idea of a moratorium on new buildings. “We should build better, but not too much,” he says, “and use as little material as possible.” Optimistic by nature, Kara firmly believes that the solutions to avoid climate catastrophe already exist. “If technology got us into this mess,” he says, “it’s going to get us out of it.”
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