‘I make architects’ dreams come true’: Hanif Kara, the magician who makes impossible buildings stay up

He has had a hand in some of the 21st-century’s most daring structures – including Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno science centre. We meet the Uganda-born engineer, who has just won architecture’s prestigious Soane medal

From the wayward columns of Will Alsop, to the gravity-defying curves of Zaha Hadid, there has always been someone in the background making architects’ improbable visions stand up. More often than not, in the case of the 21st-century’s most unlikely structures, that person has been Hanif Kara.

The Uganda-born engineer has just been announced as the 2024 recipient of the Soane medal, an illustrious gong that has so far been awarded to architects and their theorists, but never before to an engineer. As the mathematical brains that so many have relied on, and a professor who has inspired generations of designers, Kara’s contribution to architecture is eminently worthy of recognition. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without him, many of the most daring buildings of the last two decades wouldn’t exist. Or at least their columns wouldn’t be as slender, their spans as dramatic, their curves as sleek.

“I see my role as making architects’ dreams come true,” says Kara. A prodigious enabler, he also describes his job as akin to a therapist, teasing out his collaborators’ intentions and making sense of their ambitions. “But, rather than putting them on the couch, I lie on the couch with them.” He is as much of a co-designer as an engineer, less of a conventional problem-solver than a question re-framer and provocateur. He asks architects why, rather than telling them how.

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