CONTEXT 177 : SEPTEMBER 2023 49 Vox pop Gregor Harvie Who has been your greatest inspiration? Frei Otto, the German architect and structural engineer, for having a vision for a different type of structure and then having the determination to make it a reality, starting with simple analysis of soap bubbles and taking it right through to the delivery of structures such as the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich and the German Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967. What has been your best idea? Creating Designing Buildings, the collaborative knowledge-sharing platform for the construction industry. People had talked about the poor dissemination of knowledge in the industry for as long as I could remember, and as the technology was available to do something about it, it seemed crazy that nobody had. Now Designing Buildings has become more popular than I could have imagined, with seven million users a year. It has benefited hugely from our collaboration with the IHBC and the creation of Conservation Wiki, taking conservation knowledge beyond the realm of specialists and out to the rest of the industry. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? I’m an architect and I also trained as an artist. I spend as much of my time as I can painting and I’m currently preparing a body of semi-abstract paintings about quantum physics. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? It depends who I’m talking to. When I’m talking to someone from the construction industry, I say I’m an architect and to everyone else I say I’m an artist. I think in the past having more than one role was unusual, but careers are now a lot more fluid and the move to working from home has made it fairly easy to combine two very different roles. What is your biggest frustration? The lack of visionaries in the construction industry. There is a huge amount of groupthink, with everyone doing the same things at the same time to the exclusion of everything else, sometimes even common sense. This is one of the reasons the industry keeps getting caught out with high profile disasters. There needs to be much more longterm thinking and a greater appetite for research and innovation. What would you like to be doing in five years’ time? I would like to be delivering more innovative, strategic solutions to the industry and finding like-minded, creative leaders to collaborate with. Someone recently said to me ‘we need to start doing things on purpose’. That is a great line. What is your favourite building? Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It is an amazing example of a unique vision delivered against the odds. Not only is it an extraordinary sculptural shape, it is also an extremely clever structural design Photo: Chris Wallace Photography
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