Dear Grandchild,
This was the week of my annual tradition of having a birthday dinner with many of my architect friends at the HankangPocha Korean restaurant in Soho. Friday was the tenth year of these dinners, although there was one year that I cancelled because of illness. In the first year the location was in the basement on Hanway street, but since then we have had a corner table on the first floor. We have a great deal of Korean bar food, drinks, and I always hand out presents to everyone.
Some of the architects who come every year might be well-known by the time you read this letter. There are Ludovico Lombardi, and Hannes Schafelner, and Daniel Fiser, who have all been coming for a very long time. LisamarieAmbia and Marian Ripoll have missed the last few dinners for different reasons, and Jakub Klaska and Evgeniya Yatsyuk are new to the table, having come just since last year. Rob Stuart-Smith and Marco Vanucci are already fairly well known even now. Sara Akbari, Fernanda Mugnaini, and Stella Dourtme work with us at Zaha Hadid’s office, and Silvia and Cate are the two non-architects in the group.
This year was special not only because it was a tenth anniversary, but also because it was the occasion when I told the group that I was planning to leave Zaha Hadid’s office and start my own studio in London. I wrote individual letters to each of the guests, and gave them out partway through dinner. Everyone was enormously supportive and very optimistic for me. It was a wonderful night.
Reflecting on the gathering, I intuit the importance of creating traditions. We go to that place year after year, and although some people come and others go, there is a feeling that this is something that we always do in November. It frustrates me that we are subject to the fate of the restaurant itself, and that we would lose our locale if it would go out of business. That was one of the reasons I proposed to your grandmother in front of an eight-hundred year old redwood tree rather than in an expensive restaurant that might be gone in a year, or a decade.
Perhaps this possibility of marking the world, and anchoring us—encouraging tradition—is one critical role of architecture. I write quite often about the need for architecture to been in tune with cycles of nature and of time, shedding their skins and taking on new ones. But perhaps it is equally important to build for the ages, and make homes for our traditions.
I hope that by the time you read this letter that some of the people I mentioned above have achieved great recognition by doing great things.
All of my love, Your grandfather. 16 November, 2014.
