Architect - January 2009 - (Page 32) 32 technology ARCHITECT JANUARY 2009 TEXT BY JOHN GENDALL PHOTO BY JOHN WRIGHT → SPECIALIST Engineering Success ENGINEER HANIF KARA HAS MASTERED THE FINE ART OF WORKING WITH ARCHITECTS. HIS SECRET? RELAX, AND GET COMFORTABLE WITH THE IDEA OF BEAUTY. EVER SINCE THE RENAISSANCE, when engineering and architecture split into separate disciplines, the relationship between the two has been plagued by competition and antagonism. And the digital age has made professional boundaries harder to distinguish. Hanif Kara, a design engineer and principal of London-based Adams Kara Taylor (AKT), has become a leader in his field by successfully navigating this tenuous divide. He regularly works with some of the world’s best-known architects, including Norman Foster, David Chipperfield, Foreign Office Architects, and Zaha Hadid. “Design engineering, from our point of view, is about becoming an expert, not about becoming a second-rate architect,” says Kara, acknowledging the line between the professions. “The trend of engineers becoming architects is a bad one.” It’s the design in design engineering that is fundamental to AKT’s practice. Structural engineers, notes Kara, “do things in a contained, technically competent way: they make buildings stand up. As a design engineer, you have to relax a bit more. And you can’t be afraid to use the word ‘beauty.’ ” Initially interested in purely structural engineering, London-based Hanif Kara has found success over the past dozen years working at the intersection of science and design. But he emphasizes that what he and his firm, Adams Kara Taylor, do is not architecture. WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM → http://www.architectmagazine.com
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