The Building And The Bully: A Tale Of Two Mysteries

Back when I was still in the early days of studying for my architecture degree, my year head was a real jerk. Full of his own self-importance and ready to bully students at the slightest provocation, he was best avoided at all costs. As part of one project for which I was unfortunate enough to have him as a tutor, my group had to do a study of an architecturally unique house that he assigned to us.

The one thing my group and I struggled to understand was how the structure of the building worked since there were very few walls. After reluctantly asking for help, we were told:

Tutor: “This is incredibly simple. How can you not understand it? I’m not here to do the work for you.”

And with that, he walked off. We put our heads together and really tried to figure it out but simply couldn’t. We tried asking for help again a few days later but got the same sort of response. After that, we went to our structural engineering lecturer to ask for her help, and while she got us much closer to an understanding, she wasn’t completely sure how it worked either, though she gave us her best guess.

Following that, we approached the tutor for a final time, telling him that even our structural engineering lecturer had struggled to understand and explain it, telling him what she had told us.

Tutor: “It’s so simple! Fine, I’ll show you how it works… It’s, uh… The floor cantilevers out by… Umm…”

After several minutes of stunted explanation and sketching diagrams, he was forced to, very reluctantly, admit that he had set something that he didn’t understand properly how it worked either. This didn’t stop him from telling us to just work it out ourselves, though. Luckily, our structural engineering lecturer was able to help us, and in the end, we got the project finished and presented our study, to which the tutor responded:

Tutor: “Of course that’s how the structure works. I told you!”