Oana Fayyad and Marina Kindelan Calvo shared the stage to make one argument, that clarity is a discipline, and a strong enough idea makes its own form inevitable, with the architect and the façade engineer defending it from both sides.
The talk was staged as a conversation between design intent and what the glass will actually do: Fayyad speaking for the architect at Killa Design, Kindelan Calvo for the façade engineer at AESG. Their thesis, the discipline of clarity, holds that the right idea, pursued honestly, makes its own form inevitable.
They structured it in three movements: how they challenge the norm, how a strong idea defends itself through engineering, and how the resolved design finally becomes inevitable. The lens across the work was wabi-sabi, beauty found in the imperfect, the impermanent and the incomplete, carried down to something as small as a coastal cottage finished in sea-worn indigo lime-wash.
The engineering half of the work is where the idea had to defend itself, and the proof was a number. On one façade, of 784 panels, 96% were resolved to single curvature, leaving only 32, just over four percent, genuinely double-curved. That is what made the façade economically deliverable: the discipline of clarity turning an ambitious form into something that could actually be built and paid for.
It is the same instinct that runs through Killa’s best-known work in the city, a strong idea resolved until its form feels not styled but inevitable.