From the wayward columns of Will Alsop, to the gravity-defying curves of Zaha Hadid, there has always been someone in the background making architects’ improbable visions stand up. More often than not, in the case of the 21st-century’s most unlikely structures, that person has been Hanif Kara.
The Uganda-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 brains that so many have relied on, and a professor who has inspired generations of designers, Kara’s contribution to architecture is eminently worthy of recognition. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without him, many of the most daring buildings of the last two decades wouldn’t exist. Or at least their columns wouldn’t be as slender, their spans as dramatic, their curves as sleek.
“I see my role as making architects’ dreams come true,” says Kara. A prodigious enabler, he also describes his job as akin to a therapist, teasing out his collaborators’ intentions and making sense of their ambitions. “But, rather than putting them on the couch, I lie on the couch with them.” He is as much of a co-designer as an engineer, less of a conventional problem-solver than a question re-framer 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 dead set against having columns of any kind. He wanted a massive, impossible cantilever instead. Kara convinced him that a row of slender steel poles was essential to making the reading room stand up, their jaunty angles not just adding delight, but also serving the crucial purpose of cross-bracing the structure. And so Alsop’s trademark feature – the “dancing” column – was born.
Similarly, Kara provided the fiendishly complex computational analysis for many of Zaha Hadid’s most extreme creations, building more projects with her than any other architect. She came to him to help her realise the Phaeno science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. Built in 2005, it is a gigantic concrete spaceship of a building, where columns flow into slabs, which in turn melt into walls, in a continuous, sinuous shell. It was one of the world’s first “single surface” structures with no joints, and the largest use of self-compacting concrete in Europe. Nothing like it had been attempted before. “That project almost killed us,” says Kara. “It took two years of computational modelling with German weapons-grade software to make it work.”
Few others were willing to take on such gruelling tasks. But, with the attitude of an outsider with nothing to lose, Kara has always been happy to tread where others are not. “The migrant is never afraid,” he says. “Because he has come with nothing, and he’s willing to invest in others and push them, to a point where he benefits as well.”
Kara arrived in Cheshire aged 14, after his family was expelled from Uganda by the brutal regime of Idi Amin. 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 how to draw steel templates on the floor. “I got really hooked on that drawing stuff,” he says. “I loved the process of communicating how you make something.” He attended night school while working, and ultimately landed a spot at Salford University to study civil engineering. After graduating, he spent time doing “hardcore engineering”, first in Aberdeen, working on oil rigs, before moving into rollercoasters, relishing the challenge of gravity-defying loops. Time spent working with engineer Anthony Hunt at YRM gave him a taste for experimental fabric structures and the emerging field of computational geometry, “which really became my thing”, he says.
When the recession hit in the 1990s, he considered giving up engineering, and had opened a couple of dry-cleaning shops to make ends meet. 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 out by reducing the steel tonnages on other people’s projects,” he says, “but then quickly realised that we had to chat up some architects.” Kara had caught the architecture bug while working on (aborted) plans to turn Battersea Power Station into an Alton Towers-style theme park. “After oil rigs and rollercoasters,” he chuckles, “buildings seemed dead simple.”
He started teaching at the Architectural Association, then a hotbed of the avant-garde, and, with his easy outsider charm, soon befriended the likes of Hadid, Alsop and Jan Kaplický, of Future Systems. “I felt empathy,” he says. “They all had a lot of difficulty building anything, but I could see the value in what they were drawing. And I enjoyed their company.”
Kara doesn’t drink, but he would happily sit and debate with Alsop, as he drained a bottle of wine, and he clearly enjoyed the glitzy camaraderie of the emerging “starchitects” scene, gaining a reputation as one of the few engineers with the patience to make their madcap schemes buildable. He went on to collaborate with numerous Pritzker prize-winners, and has worked on four Stirling prize-winning buildings, including the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge, the Bloomberg HQ in London, and Kingston University’s Town House. Recent projects include the gargantuan Google offices in London’s King’s Cross and Mountain View, California, as well as Thomas Heatherwick’s ill-fated Vessel in New York, and several projects with David Chipperfield.
“I sometimes felt quite schizophrenic,” he says. “Meetings with Zaha in the morning, and then with Chipperfield in the afternoon. He was the exact 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, attempting to reuse as much of an existing 1950s building as possible. It is a meticulous process of undoing, which he calls “advanced reverse design” – also the theme of his current studio at Harvard University, where he has been professor of architectural technology since 2012.
In many ways, Kara sees his current focus on reuse and low-energy design as a form of penance for his past sins. How does he feel in hindsight, having facilitated an era of indulgent form-making, for form’s sake, with little thought for the environmental impact of his creations? The Phaeno science centre, for example, used 75,000 tonnes of concrete and 4,700 tonnes of steel, emitting a gratuitous amount of carbon dioxide for a single building.
“There would be no way of justifying anything like that now,” he admits. “If you look back at that period, you start to wonder what the hell were we all doing. We were all caught up in the capitalist mode. We just wanted to do bigger, better, different, no matter what. We were venerating our own profession as engineers – as were the architects.”
More recently, his work on Norman Foster’s Bloomberg HQ, completed in 2017 and hailed as “the world’s most sustainable office building”, used 15,500 tonnes of steel (twice as much as the Eiffel Tower), 600 tonnes of bronze imported from Japan, and a quarry-load of stone from India. “The focus was sustainability in operation, rather than embodied carbon of the materials,” says Kara. “The debate is longevity v circularity, and in that case we went for longevity. It’s near St Paul’s cathedral, and they wanted something that would last just as long.”
But he is aware that the debate has shifted in the last few years. He recently co-authored a book on structural timber, with Jennifer Bonner, and taught 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 one single material, in the way some architects are. “Any monoculture is not good,” he says. “There’s a limit, even to biogenic materials like timber. It isn’t the answer for everything, and nor is stone.”
While he is all for reuse, he doesn’t subscribe to the idea of a moratorium on new buildings. “We should build better, but not as much,” he says, “and use as little material as possible.” An optimist by nature, Kara firmly believes that the solutions to avert climate catastrophe are out there. “If technology got us in this mess,” he says, “it’s going to get us out.”