The architectural detail and the fear of commitment

Mark Burry holds a unique position in architecture, straddling the worlds of practice and academia as Senior Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona and as Professor at RMIT in Melbourne, where he is Founding Director of the RMIT Design Research Institute. In his Counterpoint to this issue of AD, he puts the spotlight back on construction, asking whether the detail could be in danger of falling victim to an inadvertent and 'massive separation of design from making'. As he states: 'to detail effectively is to understand not only what the building "is", but how it will be made'.