Here’s the story: we won a project to do a school for neurodiverse children, a place offering specialised education for people who fall outside the formal education system. We learned that it would share the site with a psychiatric institution. We thought, what's the link between these two things? There isn’t any, it’s just insulting. So we said to the client, this is not the right site — and they shut me up. This is the site, they said, and if you don't want it, you can resign.

There was a dump there too, a massive junkyard with trucks and bits of cars and piles of rubbish. The whole site was enormous, you know; it was just a big property, and then, over years, it was filled up with buildings. So this school would have been just one of many things put there. It was an absolutely dreadful situation. So I decided, fuck you. I'm not building on this site.

But the people who chose the site were so far away that I was never getting through to the ones who decided. So I start looking; I'm looking, and I find a large gas line that goes right across the site. To remove something like this is very expensive and it just turns out that I'm incapable of coming up with an architectural layout that does not involve building over it! I make one plan and they say no, way too expensive. We want another plan. So I design another plan, for free. It also builds over the line and I give very good reasons why it has to. Then I tell them, I'll give it another try, do another lap. And I design it over the fucking thing again.

I wait for the escalation, I add soil issues and so on. The cost is escalating. Every time they speak to the cost engineer, the cost goes up. They don't know I'm feeding the cost engineer wicked information. I’m telling him: they don't realise how much this thing is going to cost, please be straight with them! And when he tells them and I see everybody's eyes go big, I act surprised too. Like I don't know shit.

In a way, fucking this thing up took years; wasting their time, delaying the delivery of the school by three years. The school was upset at the delay. They could not understand why the project was so late. At the time, they were furious. Finally the clients say, we cannot afford the cost of moving this gas line. And I agree: I get real soppy. Wouldn’t it be tragic to take 5 percent of the budget and spend it on moving some pipe — a cost for which we get no additional education facilities? So they say, we’ve got to look for another site. And I say, yes. I think that is better.

Then they found probably one of the dumbest sites where we ever built anything. It's the only building I've ever done in the suburbs, but I was delighted because it was such a normal site. It was just super normal — a desirable everyday world — and for that school it was really suitable; that’s what we achieved. That school became an exemplary school for neurodiverse children.

That’s strategy. You can't make a good building on a bad site, it just never works. Years later, I spoke to the school principal about it, and he said, we never understood why they changed their mind but we were so happy that it happened.

Bio

The Magician has been playing the long game of architecture for over 30 years.

Lev Bratishenko is a writer and recovering curator. His most recent publication is 21 Games you can play with a Cosmic House, and his curatorial inventions include the Come and Forget series proposing benevolent acts of mass amnesia, and How to, a workshop that brings strangers together to produce interventions in architectural culture: How to: not make an architecture magazine (2018); How to: disturb the public (2019); How to: reward and punish (2020); How to: not become a ‘developer’ (2022); How to: do no harm (2022); How to: mind the moon (2023). He was the inaugural Curator Public at the Canadian Centre of Architecture.