RELAX

Michael Singer tells us the highest technique is relaxation. Probably the opposite of this is to try hard. The kind of tying hard where you get nowhere, where you end up in a worse place than if you’d done nothing. Nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever worked out well for me when I’ve tried to force it to happen. Literally everything of any value I have has happened once I let go.

It’s not just me, I’ve seen it many times with other people too, mostly with architects. I’m sure it’s common in any profession. I remember sitting in disbelief hearing David Chipperfield say ‘the chimney is the problem, it must go’. It was a competition for the Tate Modern in the decommissioned Bankside power station by Giles Gilbert Scott. He’d been shortlisted down to the last five and, at the time, it would have been the first major project of his career. The pressure on him was immense. He did everything he could to win - EVERYTHING. The rumours post competition were that the client body had already favoured Herzog & de Meuron. So it might not have mattered what he had done, but for certain, chopping off the chimney wasn’t right.

I get it, I got it at the time. He wanted it so badly. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was much younger and purer in many ways. I could see so clearly that if he just relaxed and designed something incredible he would have won it. Now I’m older and have experienced that clench in the mind many times, I realise how impossible it was for him to just let go.