https://aefoundation.co.uk AEFoundation Wed, 14 May 2025 19:29:58 +0000 https://aefoundation.co.uk en https://aefoundation.co.uk/David-Grandorge Mon, 03 Mar 2025 13:37:42 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/David-Grandorge LOG <img width="2495" height="3183" width_o="2495" height_o="3183" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44c988fe2e867c2f9c62230e1d0bb4b36930958e7a9f58c75b3ac0b439298a10/Hadspen_Pavilion_DG_BW.jpg" data-mid="228761030" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/44c988fe2e867c2f9c62230e1d0bb4b36930958e7a9f58c75b3ac0b439298a10/Hadspen_Pavilion_DG_BW.jpg" /> Hadspen Pavilion II 2008 Credit David Grandorge DAVID GRANDORGE ︎︎︎Kieran Hawkins The following are excerpts from a conversion between David Grandorge and Kieran Hawkins in November 2023. KH How would you articulate a relationship with the past in your work – with inheritance and disinheritance? DG There is a personal history, the development of knowledge of architectural history and also the histories of art, photography (especially as an artistic practice), literature, humans, geology, ecology, non-human animals and also many smaller things. The personal history is important. Maybe we’ll discuss some of it later. The writers who have been important to my thinking about architecture and photography include: Robin Evans, Paul Shepheard, David Leatherbarrow, Georges Perec, Primo Levi, Geoff Dyer, Yuval Noah Harari, James Lovelock, Teju Cole, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Stewart Brand and many more. I have no favourite architect, or movement of architecture, but there are buildings important to me because they provoked a strong emotional or intellectual response when I encountered them. They include: - Pantheon: Rome, 126 AD, Unknown - Wren Library: Cambridge, 1695, Christopher Wren - Soane Museum: London, 1824, John Soane - Schindler House: LA, 1922, R.M. Schindler - Villa Muller: Prague, 1930, Adolf Loos - La Tourette: Eveux, 1961, Le Corbusier - Upper Lawn Pavilion: Wiltshire, 1962, Alison &amp; Peter Smithson - Danzinger Studio: LA, 1964, Frank Gehry - Salk Institute: La Jolla, 1965, Louis Kahn - Leca da Palmeira: Porto, 1966, Alvaro Siza Viera - Gehry House: LA, 1978, Frank Gehry - Spiller House: LA, 1980, Frank Gehry - Lisson Gallery: London, 1992, Tony Fretton - Van Hee House: Ghent, 1997, Marie-Jose Van Hee - Santa Maria do Bouro: Amares, 1997, Eduardo Souto de Moura - Svartlamoen Housing: Trondheim, 2005, Brendeland &amp; Kristoffersen - Row Houses: Svalbard, 2007, Brendeland &amp; Kristoffersen - Raven Row: London, 2009, 6a - Tour Bois le Pretre: Paris, 2010, Lacaton &amp; Vassal - Tree House: London, 2013, 6a &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - Teller Studio: London, 2016, 6a - Feilden Fowles Office: London, 2016, Feilden Fowles - Cork House: Eton, 2019, Matthew Barnett Howland - House for Artists: London, 2021, Apparata There are many other buildings that I have been influenced by, but not encountered. I would like one day to visit some of them, to experience their spaces and external form and also to see how they have survived the vicissitudes of time. KH What inheritance do you hope to pass on through your practice? DG The disciplines I practice at this moment are teaching, photography (in many guises), writing (that I am both good at and not good at), making buildings with timber with my own and other hands and looking after the needs of others as often as I can, especially the homeless. I hope only now, in most of the work I do, to encourage others. Is this an inheritance? KH What were your core interests when you started your work as an architect, teacher and photographer? How have these interests evolved and influenced each other over the years? DG I had no core interests. I was interested in and practiced many things when I left college. I have developed a set of reasonably clear intentions in most of my work over time - a thesis by accretion. <img width="3543" height="2585" width_o="3543" height_o="2585" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f064ca5a17643958685ee9ce553b7d306de7ba872c2ab6feaa15a656c40d9646/1964_A-P_Smithson_Upper_Lawn_Pavilion_Photo_2009_DG.jpg" data-mid="228765743" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f064ca5a17643958685ee9ce553b7d306de7ba872c2ab6feaa15a656c40d9646/1964_A-P_Smithson_Upper_Lawn_Pavilion_Photo_2009_DG.jpg" /> Upper Lawn Pavilion, Alison &amp; Peter Smithson Credit David Grandorge KH One of the things that I thought was interesting in your first answer, was that you chose to list writers rather than books, but you chose to list buildings rather than architects. Is there a particular reason for that difference? DG Architecture has many authors. Writers most often work alone. They can be tyrannical. An architect should not be. A writer’s output is democratic. Buildings should also be. Architecture without writing would be a sad state of affairs, wouldn't it? Architecture needs to be theorized, abstracted, critiqued and re-understood. Good writers are able to articulate things about buildings that their designers didn't intend. A mature architect, I think, doesn't worry too much about criticism. What's interesting about writing is that it can be sustained over a longer period. Good writing is autonomous. Architecture wants to be autonomous but will always struggle to be. Thinking about recent history, there are many things that prevent architecture being practiced as well as it could or should be. There has been a loss of agency for architects: in planning terms, in terms of a construction industry that doesn't really play fair, against all sorts of external forces that have affected supply chains: we have experienced a pandemic, there are now wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the UK has exited from the EU. You add up all those things and realize how it has made good architecture much more difficult to realise. The amount of architecture per square foot in the early buildings by an architect is usually very high. If you look at many of the projects listed, they were the earlier work of an architect, and this issue of inheritance and disinheritance is interesting in relationship to this. I do not disinherit their later work though. There is always the issue of how an architect is able to move up in scale and keep the same architectural intensity when there are so many things that can prevent this happening. KH To come back to the analogy with writing, in many ways the architecture becomes more dilute, as an architect goes through their career, as other factors come in. DG That’s sadly true but it's not always the case. There are architects that transcend this condition. Siza would be a good example. KH Yes, but with writers it is more often the inverse. DG I've really enjoyed reading books by the writers listed. I'm interested in the consistency of their voice, whatever subject is being addressed. I'm not so much interested in the architect's voice or their insistence on the importance of their authorship. Maybe architects have to assert their authorship in order to stand up to all the stuff they have to deal with on an everyday basis. They should also strive to be modest. We are facing new challenges, particularly that of mitigating climatic damage. I'm interested in what and how we build in the future. Even though I sometimes feel challenged about teaching in a school of architecture with my ecological concerns, I still get a lot of joy from experiencing buildings, from seeing care, gentle innovations, a sense of generosity and sometimes a clarity of ideas and execution. These things form part of my teaching. I do enjoy a certain austerity in buildings, but also spaces in which the idea of pleasure is evident. Although I have no religion, I am still fascinated by churches, from the smallest chapel to the tallest cathedral. I feel exactly the same way about the inside of a cooling tower. It does the same thing as the Pantheon, that mediation between sky and ground is so powerful. When spaces are top lit, and you have less reference to the outside world, it’s almost primeval. It’s about being in the cave, having darkness and looking out to the world. <img width="1401" height="1702" width_o="1401" height_o="1702" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18377f0165d9bea19487ca307f9dbe57119dacc325bb91dc57a6569a0fa92a4a/Cooling_Tower_1_20_Model_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763100" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/18377f0165d9bea19487ca307f9dbe57119dacc325bb91dc57a6569a0fa92a4a/Cooling_Tower_1_20_Model_DG.jpg" /> Cooling Tower, Timber Translation 2017 Credit George Fenton, Kai Majithia, Tarn Philipp KH I think there can be something about being in a church or a place of worship that is lonely, and quite vulnerable. That intensifies the spatial experience. DG Is it that first encounter or is it something that works on you after having been in there for a time when your eyes adjust and you can pick out details? Some buildings need quite a lot of time to experience and to understand what’s going on. Or even going back to spaces at different times of day when the light has changed. I suppose my epiphany was when I was in the Pantheon and it rained. That was such a beautiful experience. The rain fell in a diffused top light, and the filigree of that rain against the coffers. Wow. Then was the sound as well and the movement of water into the drain at the centre. It’s such a perfect piece of architecture. The experience was collective, but probably a little different for everyone. If we're talking about the inheritance from this, it was at first to be moved by space, light and materials in quite a simple and direct way and then moving on, through reading and practice, to a growth in my interest in first tectonics, then embodied energy and finally an understanding of life cycles. This building has lasted a long time. It communicates to its contemporary inhabitants, I imagine, in a very similar way to it did to those who lived two millennia ago. What is interesting about Barnabas Calder's book (Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency) is the way he looks at architecture in terms of the energy a society uses to make its buildings and infrastructure. He argues that form follows fuel, but he is still moved by the achievements of architecture. Sometimes humans do impressive things. I think that a really important inheritance for anyone starting the profession is to be moved by architecture, otherwise why study it? I don't like to sound naïve. It's not all about emotion. Practice requires a keen intelligence and also an inner strength to manage inevitable disappointments along the way. If designs are good and they are well developed tectonically, spatially, highly calibrated, and then a client doesn't get it or there is not enough money, or the planners don't like it, sometimes it's a war of attrition to keep the building in the state that it was conceived. Sometimes it's a little more gentle, sometimes it's a retreat, there are battles you just can't win. <img width="3064" height="4167" width_o="3064" height_o="4167" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/231e6c5ead9665d523138dabad2986659b9876b6eb8d26e1e23d51af54d9f656/Lacaton_-_Vassal_Tour_Bois_Le_Pretre_Aug_2013_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763169" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/231e6c5ead9665d523138dabad2986659b9876b6eb8d26e1e23d51af54d9f656/Lacaton_-_Vassal_Tour_Bois_Le_Pretre_Aug_2013_DG.jpg" /> Tour Bois Le Ptetre I 2013, Lacaton &amp; Vassal Credit David Grandorge KH Coming back to your list of buildings; I appreciate that you've chosen to list buildings rather than architects, because it brings to mind direct experience as the heart of your thinking about architecture. DG Sometimes it's experiencing but sometimes it something more, a duty to bear witness. This has involved making quite painstaking visual records of buildings, cities and landscapes with strong intentions about how their qualities can be mediated. That's not in all cases. KH Have you also taken photographs of all of them? DG I've experienced all of them. With the Pantheon, my partner and I knew we would be becoming parents of twins in a few months and this was our last chance, or first chance, to go to Rome. I chose not to take a big camera. I did take a few snaps but I wasn't there to document the city. We really wanted to experience the city in an unmediated way. I’ve been privileged to be inside Trinity Library a few times. A postgraduate student from Trinity College helped me to get access out of hours. I often ate my usually sparse evening meal on the banks of the river Cam looking at the library with the west light on it. I did this many times. I've always been intrigued by the story of the building and also this amazing period in Britain where for the last time we had a group of people who were thinking outside of the academy and there were some incredible innovations by Wren, Hooke and Boyle. I think that the library does it for me more than St Paul's because of the clarity of its spatial order and tectonic. KH There’s also less cultural baggage than St Paul’s. DG I agree. But it’s also about what it gives back to Neville’s Court. What it does on both sides is very powerful. As it is largely open on the ground floor, there is a direct visual connection from the courtyard to the landscape to the west. I love the fact that this library full of important books, including some of Wittgenstein’s notes, was lifted above the flood plain. KH Something I like about that building, not knowing it deeply, is the discontinuity between the façade and the structure DG It’s very powerful the way Wren composed the facade. He deliberately extended the middle section of the elevation. The relationship between façade and the interior invites a misreading. It’s quite an austere building for Wren, quite restrained. When I started studying architecture in 1990, I was already immersed in the early work of Frank Gehry. I had studied for an A-level in modern art and architectural history at night school the year before. The history of modern architecture and painting was already an inheritance. As a young student, I was aware of stuff happening in Switzerland and also that there wasn’t much confidence in the profession in the UK at the time. The Prince of Wales had recently made his point. He had cancelled the Mies van der Rohe tower on the Number One Poultry site. Stirling would build there soon afterwards. It was an interesting period. At postgraduate level there was a greater awareness of the early work of Herzog and de Meuron, which I still think is exemplary. We’ve been studying factories in my studio this year. Students have made model fragments of six exemplary 20th century examples. One of them is the Ricola Storage Facility by Herzog and de Meuron. What's interesting is that the architects were given a prefabricated steel frame shed clad with SIPS panels. It was all set out already and the client said, look, these dimensions are determined by the gantry crane to be employed. It enclosed a completely automated storage system for herbal sweets. The stuff that architects were complaining about in London, Herzog and de Meuron chose to embrace. KH They were given freedom only with the design of the façade. DG They had no problem with that. The site was a spent quarry and they had to clad a building that was nineteen meters high. It was like, how do you de-scale this big thing. Then they took the idea of stacking and made this beautifully layered façade with very little waste. It's such a clear tectonic, incredibly elegant. Nothing about the façade has got anything to do with the structure inside. In fact, it's a completely different grain and that doesn't matter. This is a very different way of thinking about architecture and it can be done well, as in say, the Ricola building. Or it can be done.... KH Like a Holiday Inn. DG Absolutely. KH I think there's something about architects having an idea to believe in, that I'm thinking about with religious buildings. Modernism offered that too, at the beginning. DG A good factory is like a church, by the way. KH Yes. Architects believing in what they're doing and doing it with commitment and care, which I think early modernism had. DG But early modernism wasn't nuanced. It was declarative. It was evangelistic in many ways. Architects had good reasons to think like that. They'd just been through World War I and they wanted to remake the world anew because of World War II, because of the advent of bombing by planes and the destruction of whole swathes of cities. This is the context that modern architects operated in, and what they did, and what they believed in, did transform our world. But there was a lack of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. The evangelism of modernism led to a divorce between thoughts about the natural world and architecture. After World War II, circular ideas were prevalent. Look at the reclamation of brickwork in Berlin. It was a process undertaken with an improvised plan and with very little fuel for the workers, who were mainly women forming chains. These things still happen in the world, which I find absolutely fascinating. It's about finding the right size materials and people working collectively for a public good. That's an interesting idea. I think that was talked about a bit by you at the Poetic Pragmatism symposium last year. Like you, I'm interested in making going back to being undertaken by many hands. Some of the impetus for this has come from Steve Webb, but also from Tom Emerson. Those incredibly fresh early projects when he started teaching at ETH. The first project was called 96 Hands. It was undertaken with forty-eight students. To deal with health and safety issues, the students were not allowed to use any power tools. The project addressed circularity before it was called such a thing. Frank Gehry’s on the list, his earlier works. The thing that I was interested in at that time was the loose-fit way in which he explored the possibilities of timber frame construction. He did lots of different things. He played with geometries as well. I liked that. It’s simple trigonometry. It’s quite simple maths to use. There are compound angles, which is just like doing a hipped roof. I really love the way he allowed the balloon frame to explode and that it had something in common with brutalism, the very direct use of construction, much of it left exposed. You don’t have to add lots of layers. It’s about what you take away. <img width="2780" height="3543" width_o="2780" height_o="3543" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/82f8c510e3d51dd63d78186bfee4f776d0492d0298eb274deec09830a526d333/1999_Gehry_House_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763264" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/82f8c510e3d51dd63d78186bfee4f776d0492d0298eb274deec09830a526d333/1999_Gehry_House_DG.jpg" /> Gehry House I 1999, Frank GehryCredit David Grandorge KH A bare rawness. DG Yes, it's raw, which is very powerful. There's also this idea of something being definitively unfinished. Later on, through Tom Emerson and Irene Scalbert, I came to learn about bricolage as an architectural strategy. It's there in Gehry’s work. The poetic pragmatist is a close relative. The bricoleur is able to respond quickly to tricky situations. I've been amazed by speaking with architects during a period of material shortages, how they have found other resources closer to hand. I think that swiftness in the ability of architecture to adapt to rapidly changing situations is a very important issue at this moment in time. The bricoleur is also interested in multiple stimuli. I think that sensibility was there in the early work of Herzog and de Meuron. Another early influence was my studio teacher in my fourth year, Peter Beard. A lot of people have been talking about the introduction of ecology into the architectural education curriculum. This was happening back then in 1994. I was encouraged to design a water collection system, the water collected from the redundant Thyssen factory roofs. The water would be fed to the garden through an irrigation system, a garden that would test the resilience of European plants in technogenic soils that were found in the ground outside of the blast furnaces. Peter introduced me to a set of ideas I hardly understood at the time. It was only about ten years later that I really got to grips with what he had taught and why it was important. Sometimes it takes time for an inheritance to be received. KH Which connects very much to making do with what's there, with a creative, incisive decision-making. DG There was a gantry crane that was used to drop a very heavy ball onto steel to break it down into smaller pieces before it would go back to the blast furnace. The steel frame that held up the gantry crane, you could see it'd been bashed in parts, and some of it was rusting, especially at the top. It was proposed that the steel structure be dismantled, and that certain sections of it would be cut and stress-tested. I now recognise that there was quite a lot of redundancy in the repurposed elements used. As the earth in the existing hole had had such great force dropped upon it, Peter persuaded me that the compacted earth might have the properties of a rammed earth floor or stronger. There would be no need for a foundation. The steel frame structure would be dropped in the hole in prefabricated sections. The overall form was like a skeletal eggcup. The steel frame held a fibreglass water tank that would be walked around on the journey to the platform above that overlooked the garden. There are many conversations now about circularity and the use of material passports. Thirty years ago, this ecological conversation was evident in some of the teaching at Cambridge. I was encouraged to look at Linnaeus, and I really got into the idea of cataloguing. I went to the botanical garden, and met a very old professor of Botany who seemed to be quite taken by me. I was wearing overalls and had a shaved head, not a typical look for a Cambridge student at the time. He spent two hours with me, explaining everything they did there, including one of the most beautiful experiments I've ever seen, a timber A-frame of bamboo suspending fluorescent lights over these quite innocuous looking garden flowers. I asked, “What are you doing?” He said, “We’re testing which British flowers would survive two degrees of climate change.” I loved the directness and simplicity of the experiment. I don’t know if the method was rigorous, but it appeared to be so at the time. When I was in the Arctic in 2007, I documented an antenna field operated by the Max Planck Institute. There was an array of upright scaffold poles from which hung really ordinary looking plastic buckets. Underneath the buckets was some very expensive sensing and recording equipment that was being use to measure electrical activity in the Ionosphere. Sometimes I think architecture could be a little bit more like that, where you can read primary, secondary and tertiary elements. There could be greater simplicity to the components we employ. Maybe High Tech tried to do that at its beginnings but it became too techno-fetishistic. If you look at Team Four, there is an incredible clarity in how they articulated each building element and their connections. That's an inheritance, that ability to read a building because of its legible structure. <img width="3543" height="2893" width_o="3543" height_o="2893" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5ee8e874a481c6e5ed86096b050601e1d4a2bb0f595d4457328adf094cea13e3/2007_Svalbard_Max_Planck.jpg" data-mid="229763265" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5ee8e874a481c6e5ed86096b050601e1d4a2bb0f595d4457328adf094cea13e3/2007_Svalbard_Max_Planck.jpg" /> Svalbard (Max Planck) I 2007Credit David Grandorge KH In all of the examples that we're talking about, there's an enjoyment in being able to read or understand how things are made. DG All of them? Maybe with the exception of the Villa Muller, but that has other qualities. The Schindler Chase house is pure tectonic. I think that’s very interesting, this could be the red thread. It’s maybe also a transfer of those inheritances and interests. The other thing I do is photography, lots of it, maybe too much. I’ve been very lucky with the quality of buildings I’ve been commissioned to document in my photographic life and I feel grateful for that. Also, I record many other things, things I’ve chosen to take an effort to go and see. Mainly, I chance upon situations that I feel are worth documenting. What’s not on the list is a lot of the more anonymous urban environments that I have spent quite a lot of time documenting. I particularly enjoy the experience and the photographic opportunities of the more anonymous hinterlands of cities. Apart from photography, a lot of my work has been teaching. I’ve been teaching architectural design and construction for twenty-eight years, all the while maintaining some interest in architectural history. Sometimes I’m interested in absolutely ahistorical analysis. I am sceptical of the idea of context as it is commonly understood. I’m not that fond of nostalgia, though I’m prone to it sometimes. I think context is incredibly important to talk about, but we should relate to precedents in a more nuanced way. I think learning about what fails and why this happens is interesting as well. Some recent writing has addressed this issue. Douglas Murphy’s book comes to mind. When we analyse precedents in the studio, we try to be thorough. We also use precedent to analyse different forms of construction. We’ve looked more than once at timber translations, translations from stone, concrete and steel. We are interested in how heavy buildings can be made lighter and be less carbon intensive. We’ve explored how different industrial building types could be made from timber. We’ve even looked at how the Pantheon could be made from timber. Some of it is about performance issues, but we’re also concerned with the language of construction. When there is a very direct use of a tectonic system and material expression, they can combine with the modulation of light within the space and bring about a strong emotional response. Take the Cork House. There’s a system evident, but also lessons learnt from history, from pyramids and corbeling. It goes back to quite primitive architecture, yet it’s all CNC cut with minute tolerances, all so it could be friction fitted with no mechanical joints. What’s amazing about the project is its darkness and its acoustic qualities. I’ve brought many architects and students to see it and what they have all talked about, after being told about its low carbon construction and its attitude to life cycle and so on, is the building’s powerful atmosphere, its quality of light, the calibration of space. It is architecture of very high level. This was very important to its designers. Matthew Barnett Howland (one of its authors) and I have collaborated together in teaching and discussed many issues over nearly three decades. We had many conversations during the early stages and construction phase of the Cork House. His tenacity during the development of the project and the build was incredible to witness. There was a lot of risk to this project. Innovation can be scary at times.KHWhat’s come up again and again so far today is a combination of constructional clarity with rich atmospherics. DGMaybe that’s all we’ve got, right? KHMaybe.… <img width="3543" height="2262" width_o="3543" height_o="2262" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5663b5039c3d515269d6f0b9ffdde4403e3edeb96b6824a42f18dc03321f470/2019_MBH_DM_OW_Cork_House_Photo_2021_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763269" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e5663b5039c3d515269d6f0b9ffdde4403e3edeb96b6824a42f18dc03321f470/2019_MBH_DM_OW_Cork_House_Photo_2021_DG.jpg" /> Cork House II 2021, Matthew Barnett Howland Credit David Grandorge KH Let's talk about your photographs. I also want to talk about your writing and I wonder if we can talk about them at the same time, because you say that you're writing now, which you claim you are both good at and not good at. I'd like to hear more about that. I was thinking about the way you write and the way you take photos. For me, there are clear parallels between them, and I can hear your voice in both. It's about everyday language; there's an unpretentiousness and at first glance, or first reading, both can appear quite simple but are actually very highly considered and contain a great deal of understanding and sophistication. There's a tautness, a tightness to them. I wonder if this is something that reflects how you see the world, or it's how you want to communicate? DG It’s how I want to describe the world. It is informed by how I see the world, but it’s more about how I want to describe it. I want the image to be as succinct as possible. KH Do you see your writing in the same way? DG The writing comes from the same wellspring. In conversation, I am embarrassingly verbose. I try to be a more precise version of my verbose self when I write. I wrote a very prescient dissertation as a student, which my tutor hated and the external examiner loved. It was called God Loves You. It addressed the impact of secondary realities on architecture and humanity at large - the thing we’re going through now from algorithms to AI. The time people spend glued to their phone was there in all the conversations about cyberspace at the time. We didn’t know then what the interface would be. I didn’t know it was going to be the so-called smart phone that would enslave most of those who use it. Often, people take photographs because they don’t want to write. They want to make an image of something because they don’t have the words to describe it. That sounds like what a painter does. But painters and photographers can be articulate about what they do and why they do it. But they will always prefer that someone else write about their work. I started taking pictures from about 1991 when I met Edward Woodman, a photographer who worked with the art world. I had direct access to this world through him, including some very important artists of that era. That was an inheritance. KH Artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst? DG Tracey Emin, no. Damien Hirst, yes. Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread, Helen Chadwick and many others. Tracey Emin did once walk in to one of the strange pop quiz nights at the Bricklayers Arms in Shoreditch that I put on with my friend Brian Greathead. Look, a lot of people were around. KH What a great time to be in that part of the city. It’s so different today. DG We just happened to be around at a good time for the city. For a while, rent was cheap. In 1994, I saw an exhibition by Thomas Struth called Strangers and Friends at the ICA. There was a picture there that transfixed me, Bernauerstrasse II. It was taken on February the 6th, 1992. What I was interested in was the way he conferred the same dignity on his human sitters as he did on the city in his street photographs. They were empty, but compelling. I liked the light he shot in and the viewpoint taken that allowed an equality of description between all the elements in the frame. I liked the way he composed with colour. This was a way for me into photography. By this time I already held the Bechers in high regard. I was very interested in this reading of industrial forms, the issues of typology, repetition, of similarities and differences, minimalism, of conceptual art. It was all in the air, these things. Then there was Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. When I started out some architects chose to work with me because I pursued a certain type of photography and we had quite long conversations before I started taking photographs for them. Some of these practitioners I still work with. In 1999, after I had bought my first view camera on a hire purchase arrangement, I started making independent work in a more sustained way. It suddenly made sense to record things. I could get the same amount of information that the Bechers had in their negatives. I had many large format negatives that I did not scan until about fifteen years afterwards. Sometimes I made prints. I just had this stuff. I had this archive of negatives, of history, just sitting there. KH It must be amazing to see now. It must be like time travel. DG It is. It was pretty rough for me at first. I didn’t start with money. I’m amazed when young people start with these amazing cameras. I was hiring equipment for years. It took a while to find my voice. When I found my voice, I used it. With the writing, I wrote for the Cambridge Architecture Research Quarterly. It was a review of a book about the life and work of the Bechers by Susanne Lange. It was the first time I had to do some disciplined writing. Footnoted. Analytical. KH Yes, serious academic stuff. DG Serious stuff. It was a good piece of writing. It took ages. I had young kids then and I used to go to a mate’s flat to write with a small bottle of whiskey and packet of cigarettes on the desk beside me. They were both sadly depleted by the time I had finished writing. My copy of the book is now completely battered. I’ve used it for reference many times. Photographic work is different to writing. If they are both laconic and austere, I hope that there’s also a little bit of wit there sometimes. KH Absolutely. <img width="2268" height="2834" width_o="2268" height_o="2834" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eae5e05c63bdd9a240c5c16c8ee188ec8b5e05b0e722fbe0ce90d930ae4f0483/2016_Auvere_I_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763267" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eae5e05c63bdd9a240c5c16c8ee188ec8b5e05b0e722fbe0ce90d930ae4f0483/2016_Auvere_I_DG.jpg" /> Auvere I 2016Credit David Grandorge DG One thing I was interested in, when making photographs, is that if you just put the camera in the right place, then that is all you have to do. The same thing with writing, I didn’t want the personal “I” to be there. At this moment, there were so many humans using social media, exposing so much of their own lives. I decided when writing these essays for the AJ, that I would never use any first person “me, my, I.” I could say “we”, talk about ourselves collectively as humans. KH That’s an interesting place to start from. DG To write as dispassionately as I’d photographed. I set this up as a rule. I’ve stuck to it. I also told the editor at the AJ, “This has to be a piece of writing that starts with a piece of writing about the picture shown.” There is a simple repeated structure. I describe the content of the picture as precisely as I can. This leads on to an exploration of an idea or theme. I will often read four or five texts to develop the idea – I’m privileged to own an extensive library. Then it’s about how you tell it in the clearest way. I spend a lot of time rewriting sentences, so they stop feeling cluttered. Despite or because of this editing, a clear voice appears. A lot of people have said to me that they can hear that it’s not my conversational voice. KH It’s you. But the voice is distinct. DG I suppose one can feel it’s the same human telling the story every week. There is then a correspondence, actually, between that taut way of writing and what I’ve tried to do over a long period, and I still adhere to, as a valid form of practice as a photographer. … <img width="2362" height="1287" width_o="2362" height_o="1287" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/862cfba2c01733e8c2304b40355100ec853059c1a6142ba0dc07d112552dc754/2017_Dead_Sea_near_Wadi_Mujib_I_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763268" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/862cfba2c01733e8c2304b40355100ec853059c1a6142ba0dc07d112552dc754/2017_Dead_Sea_near_Wadi_Mujib_I_DG.jpg" /> Dead Sea (Near Wadi Mujib) I 2017Credit David Grandorge KH I was interested that you talk about having a thesis by accretion. To finish, I wonder if we could just unpack that a little bit. What is that thesis now? DG I’ve seen a lot of things in the world, so inevitably there’s going to be an accretion of ideas and thoughts. I’ve been to some quite extraordinary parts of the world. I went to these places with enough intentions for my photographic work, mostly about taming the exoticness of any situation and trying to confer dignity on it. Especially when I was in Africa. I was very conscious of the colonial problem, of being a white man taking photographs in urban situations in Africa. KH Not being the white guy who’s come over to see and save the world. DG Yes. I wanted to do something a little different. Subjects were chosen carefully. I only took a photo if I thought it was valid. I was interested in looking at the similarities and differences between African urban neighbourhoods and those in Europe and elsewhere. I did go off-piste, and I found out that I somehow knew how to operate in these situations. I was calm. I felt comfortable talking to the wonderful humans I met. If I cast back to almost 10 years before that, when I left college, I was rudderless. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was asked to teach straight away. I found I was a natural teacher. Then, I was starting to take photographs. I was practicing as well. I still could have gone that way. I just couldn’t afford to do it. Also, as I said before, I felt uncomfortable with how architects and builders related to each other. Then I was getting asked to do so many other things. I couldn’t commit to a practice. It just wasn’t going to happen by then. I realised I couldn’t just teach through charisma. I had to have some strategy. The then head of school, Helen Mallinson advised me of this. I am forever grateful to her. I think that my subsequent brief writing allowed certain things to become clearer. Originally, I was interested in how institutions worked, and then it moved onto to an interest in design strategies that you could apply to any project. Then I moved on to pursuing very lucid tectonic strategies to re-enforce this. I am interested in helping my students to be critical practitioners, to be familiar with both conventional and new ways of building, to understand some, but not all, of the building regulations we have to address in practice, to have a strong eye, to be very strategic, to be good at managing information and to be able to manage disappointment. With the photography, it was different. It was clear that the sensibility I pursued emerged from the Düsseldorf School but I also had an equal passion for the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, Michael Schmidt, Guido Guidi and others. I also spent quite a long period around people in the fashion industry and the arts world. I had lots of other influences coming at me. Then you are getting to these positions where you have to articulate when you talk about your work for different audiences. It takes a while to learn how to do that. That, for me, was the thesis by accretion: that I had the tools to answer questions about my discipline and how I practiced it in different situations. That was enough for me. I don’t want to come out with this fixed position, like the hedgehog. “It’s like this, and it’s like this alone.” You always have to be responsive. I had to find a form of practice. This thesis through accretion is just about the accumulation of many extraordinary experiences. I’ve had the joy of being in Scotland and being taken to remote places and documenting special buildings and the landscapes in between. I’ve been to many parts of Britain and photographed buildings in some really poor cities and towns. I’ve seen a poverty of opportunity there that I’ve never seen in London. I’ve spent very immersive times in West Africa, East Africa and North Africa. I’ve made research projects in the Baltic States, including a road trip along the Estonian border with Russia. I’ve seen an incredible amount of energy infrastructure. I’ve contemplated the Dead Sea. I’ve also met climate change scientists in the Arctic after they were measuring the greatest extent of glacier retreat ever recorded. That was seventeen years ago. <img width="2267" height="2835" width_o="2267" height_o="2835" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c9c2083a3809a4f4a00bf69b2055e6a9d05683dbc2d74cc92ac9278f96869a1/2015_Ignalina_I_DG.jpg" data-mid="229763266" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4c9c2083a3809a4f4a00bf69b2055e6a9d05683dbc2d74cc92ac9278f96869a1/2015_Ignalina_I_DG.jpg" /> Ignalina I 2015Credit David Grandorge KH Has the teaching been what’s given you the space to bring all these things together? For me, teaching has offered me something of a second education. DG One learns from students and there is a little more space to think and ask questions about our discipline, hopefully useful ones. For me, teaching, photography, writing, designing, building and being a parent are all joined up. They all inform each other. KH David. It’s been great to talk. DG Kieran. Thank you. As Michael Stipe once sang, “I’ve said too much”. The full conversation is available as a printed pamphlet, generously illustrated with David’s photographs. To enquire about purchasing a copy, please email&nbsp;k.hawkins@aefoundation.co.uk https://aefoundation.co.uk/David-Klemmer Wed, 14 May 2025 19:29:58 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/David-Klemmer LOG&nbsp; <img width="3000" height="4000" width_o="3000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d84a0369ea0368f7b0209aa359d69127be0f737b959cd5d5d3fe3ff6a697d14/PORTRAIT.jpg" data-mid="233207106" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d84a0369ea0368f7b0209aa359d69127be0f737b959cd5d5d3fe3ff6a697d14/PORTRAIT.jpg" /> DAVID KLEMMER ︎︎︎Samuel Penn SP Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Your work is immediately recognisable—precise, consistent, and shaped by a strong internal logic. While it doesn’t rely on overt references, it seems to position itself within a broader architectural discourse—echoing certain typologies, formal languages, and sensibilities. With that in mind, I’d like to begin with the idea of inheritance—not simply in terms of style or influence, but as a form of critical engagement. What architectural attitudes or practices do you feel you’ve inherited from your teachers or early education, and how do they continue to shape your work? DKThe topic of inheritance feels particularly significant to me. Before studying architecture, I had considered Industrial Design and Music—disciplines that seemed to involve a certain rigour and structure. I sensed that architecture might bring those sensibilities together. But during my studies, I didn’t find a particular professor or department that shaped my direction. I developed my interest largely through self-initiated work. The person who had the greatest impact wasn’t a professor but a lecturer—Till Lensing, a German architect. I took his course on Tendenza, the Italian-Swiss movement involving architects like Livio Vacchini, Galfetti, and Botta. That was a turning point. Until then, my education and approach had felt vague and unfocused. Meeting him and studying the rational, structural projects from that period opened a door. I began to sense something I now call resonance—an intuitive connection with the work. SPIs that something you’ve continued to rely on—this sense of resonance? DKYes, even if you don’t fully understand it, you can feel it when it’s there. It was the key to understanding order in architectural work, how to prioritize and structure things. This realization led me to discover architects like Louis Kahn and Valerio Olgiati, whose work had a similar impact on me. From that moment, my approach to architecture—and my projects—shifted. While at university, I began crafting what I call an architectural autobiography, a personal record of pivotal moments of my life that influenced and shaped my work. Some of these moments came before I formally studied architecture. For example, as a child, I often crossed a newly built bridge designed by Meili and Peter, with engineering by Jürg Conzett (Figure 1). At the time, I didn’t know anything about architecture, but I could sense there was something special about that structure, and it left an impression. Later, through Lensing and my exposure to Swiss architects like Herzog and de Meuron, I began to understand architecture not just as a collection of individual buildings, but as a larger field of shared ideas and practices. That’s when I became interested in autobiographies of architects—understanding how their personal experiences shaped their work.` <img width="2000" height="2800" width_o="2000" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0c3008efd1671e70e34f98037ce960f2ef184da84446627a4868791069e799d/Figure-1.jpg" data-mid="233231073" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f0c3008efd1671e70e34f98037ce960f2ef184da84446627a4868791069e799d/Figure-1.jpg" />Figure 1. Footbridge over the River Murau, Steiermark, Austria, by Marcel Meili, Markus Peter, and Astrid Staufer, with Jürg Conzett, 1993–95. © Heinrich Helfenstein. SPI remember when Herzog and de Meuron were more theoretical, especially early on. Did their thinking influence you more than the work itself? DKIt was both. What fascinated me about Herzog &amp; de Meuron, especially in their early works, was how they approached each project with the same care and attention as an art piece. Their collaboration with many artists and the way each project was numbered, titled, and surrounded by an artistic aura felt mysterious. Beyond that, I was drawn to the ephemeral qualities of their architecture—the ability to create something atmospheric, not just tangible. For example, they began experimenting with olfactory objects—fragrances or perfumes designed to evoke memories of places through scent. One project of theirs that resonates particularly with me is PROJECT 028 – One Specific Room (Lego House) (Figure 2). It encapsulates many of the ideas we’re discussing—reality, imagination, innocence, and dreams. It’s playful yet profound, demonstrating how architecture can merge these elements. The project taps into the concept of architecture as both a game and a reflection of desire and reality. There is a beautiful text printed on the plexiglass side, which powerfully speaks to the relationship between the real and the imagined. I’ve always been fascinated by oppositions in architecture. In my own projects, I think about light and dark, hot and cold, open and closed, narrow and wide. These are qualities that, as human beings, we instinctively relate to, regardless of cultural, educational, or generational differences. When architecture engages with these elements, I believe it resonates with something timeless or eternal. SPArchitecture has a long tradition of treating the project as a theoretical construct. How did the idea of developing your own conceptual studies first take shape? DKIn fact, during my studies, I realised that I wanted to explore certain ideas and typologies independently. To do this, I began treating myself as a kind of academic client—setting myself briefs, often prompted by a vacant plot, a spatial concept, or a structural curiosity. Over time, I’ve initiated around 50 of these projects—some remain purely conceptual, others I return to and revise. Instead of documenting theories or accumulating references, I constructed a personal referencing system grounded in recurring questions: how to approach structure and space, how draw the edge of a roof, how to precisely fix a window. Whenever something captures my interest, I start sketching a project around it. Most remain incomplete—some merge, others fade—but occasionally they materialise into finished works. This evolving archive becomes a mental framework I draw on when working on competitions or commissions. It’s a system in constant flux, and it shapes how I start and develop projects. I call them work-pieces. <img width="1585" height="2300" width_o="1585" height_o="2300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c886ce2a2815b62f65b8fcd45a8c0d6e726b7052d775c7ce5f2493916a8edf96/Figure-2.jpg" data-mid="233231080" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c886ce2a2815b62f65b8fcd45a8c0d6e726b7052d775c7ce5f2493916a8edf96/Figure-2.jpg" /> Figure 2. 028 Lego House: One Specific Room, contribution to the exhibition L’architecture est un jeu… magnifique, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. © Herzog &amp; de Meuron. SPIt's a very compelling process, but don't you find it a bit inward-looking? DKI do. This approach is personal. I’m not claiming it’s the right or wrong way—it’s simply what works for me. Of course, there’s the reality of daily life—competitions, the building industry, regulations, and norms. But my personal projects are an introverted space where I can be alone with my thoughts, working through ideas that help me understand myself. For an architect, it’s crucial to be aware of your strengths, limitations, and preferences. This space of self-exploration shapes how I think and how I work. A building may remain unbuilt, or a project may exist only as an idea, but that doesn’t make it any less significant or fascinating. In fact, it’s often the opposite—the process of exploring these ideas always leaves me with a sense of mystery. I don’t consider this practice necessary, but it’s incredibly helpful. Many of the issues and challenges you face in competitions can be anticipated, or at least explored, through this process. It lets me engage with a much broader field of architecture than daily practice would allow. That’s what I enjoy about it. SPIt’s almost like an athlete trying to beat a personal best. DKExactly. As an athlete, you’re not just competing—you spend a significant amount of time training alone, honing your skills, and developing both your physical abilities and mental focus. It’s a fitting metaphor for the approach I take with these projects. This ties back to my encounter with Till Lensing, who started designing imaginary houses to explore spatial and structural concepts. As I created images for these projects, I realized that all the houses shared common themes. It also relates to Kazuo Shinohara’s work, where each project delves into a distinct spatial experience. His work is carefully archived and curated, with enigmatic titles, detailed texts, and precise plans, even for his later unbuilt projects in the fourth style. This is where much of my mindset originates—from a fascination with unrealized, yet meticulously curated works. SPUnbuilt works have always fascinated me too. DKBut more recently, I’ve tried to move away from a rigid architectural system toward something more open and flexible. <img width="1200" height="1594" width_o="1200" height_o="1594" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/79cfc2d6cae2f9899ff8090364446f980eb2a553f99281591431bacc6432f745/Figure-3.jpg" data-mid="233231142" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/79cfc2d6cae2f9899ff8090364446f980eb2a553f99281591431bacc6432f745/Figure-3.jpg" />Figure 3. Main floor plan of the Palestra Polivalente by Livio Vacchini, 1995–97. © Studio Vacchini. SPSo, you’re in a pivotal moment? DKIt seems so, yes. In the past two or three years, I’ve experienced a shift—developing a growing fascination with architecture that isn’t focused on a refined object but instead feels more incomplete or fragmented. This has ties to my past as well. I studied in Graz during a time when the influence of the Graz School of Architecture was still present. The movement, though already fading, left its mark on the professors teaching there. At the time, I wasn’t particularly aware of it, but recently, after revisiting the city and these projects, I’ve rediscovered that period and recognised qualities I had previously overlooked. Examples of such works include those by Günther Domenig, Manfred Partl, Volker Giencke, Klaus Kada, Raimund Abraham and many others. They hold attributes that, for me, feel relevant once more. This interest also opened my mind to architects like Carlo Scarpa, John Lautner, and Sverre Fehn. These architects, once on the periphery of my thinking, have now emerged as a significant source of inspiration. SPIt’s interesting how those earlier periods continue to influence our thinking. DKYes, I’ve been reflecting on that. I feel a strong connection to the 90s—probably because it was when I was becoming more aware of the world. When I think back to the architecture of that time—Kazuyo Sejima, Peter Märkli, Rem Koolhaas—I recognise something that feels familiar. Maybe it’s just that these architects were prominent during that period, but I think it also has to do with a kind of parallel development. I was growing and figuring things out at the same time their work was emerging, and it creates this strange sense of alignment. SPA kind of synchronicity? DKYes, that’s probably why I find myself looking back now. I think there’s a sense—whether real or imagined—that things were more open then. Architecture seemed to allow for more experimentation, less pressure to conform. I sometimes feel nostalgic for that—not to recreate it, but to ask what can be carried forward. Another part of it was the arrival of digital tools. In the early 2000s, when the internet became widely accessible and home computers were more common, it felt like a shift. A transition between analogue and digital ways of working. I experienced that change quite directly. SPDid those tools change the way you thought about working? DKDefinitely. The computer became my tool. It introduced a level of precision that was completely new—suddenly you could control everything with exactness: line weights, spacing, the structure of a drawing. That kind of refinement became part of how I understood clarity in architecture. I think of someone like Livio Vacchini, who was deeply engaged with what computers made possible. He developed drawings that were computational and rational, but still expressive (Figure 3). <img width="3340" height="4100" width_o="3340" height_o="4100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c635b159e5031b6ca3f0118ed1887b3272da0fad63843ee3cd1d1d6e93681600/Figure-4.jpg" data-mid="233231368" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c635b159e5031b6ca3f0118ed1887b3272da0fad63843ee3cd1d1d6e93681600/Figure-4.jpg" /> Figure 4. Digital Negatives, David Klemmer, 2024. SPAnd in this context, representation becomes crucial, especially when you’re not building—the way you represent your work can influence how it’s understood. DKYes, for young architects, or those not building much, representation becomes increasingly crucial. It’s about perception. A simple change in line weight can entirely alter how a floor plan is read. Representation not only clarifies a project but also shapes how it’s mentally interpreted. For unrealised works, representation essentially becomes the project itself. When I was working on my diploma project, this was a critical part of my process—understanding what a plan, a text, a title, or an isometric drawing should convey, and how each discipline illustrates a distinct aspect of a project. A plan offers a different reading than a text, a physical model allows for interaction, a photograph captures atmosphere, and so on. This is particularly relevant in the context of digital renders. I’ve been working on a series called digital negatives (Figure 4), which I approach as a way of leveraging the unique capabilities of the computer. Initially, I rendered them in perspective, but I later switched to isometric views, as this projection is something you can’t capture with photography. The inversion of colour evokes a connection to the aesthetics of analogue films. Both decisions cause the simple generated images to appear at once familiar and unfamiliar, with the readable space and the structure of the projects standing out distinctly. SPWhat about three-dimensional visualisations—spatial models, for instance—what do they offer that other forms of representation don't? DKWith real-time computing, we can experience virtual space from the outset, making it an efficient tool for exploring spatial concepts that physical models can’t match, especially in terms of speed and precision. It’s also a flexible tool for researching and modifying projects—allowing easy adjustments or deletions. I don’t see it as competing with other architectural tools; rather, I view the digital realm as an additional instrument in the development process. The digital world offers a fascinating juxtaposition to the physical world. A few years ago, I began noticing a resemblance between the blackness of outer space and the blank computational space of 3D programs. They're quite similar—both allow things to exist and rotate without the constraints of gravity. In the digital realm, we can achieve things that aren’t possible in the real world, and that’s what makes it so captivating. When discussing oppositions, we must recognise that our awareness of balance stems from knowing the extremes. The extremes help us appreciate the middle ground, and that holds true for the digital world as well. It offers possibilities that are completely opposed to the real world’s limitations, though there’s always an effort to merge the two. It’s a complex relationship. <img width="3500" height="3500" width_o="3500" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3b3f20a6cfccdd1a46274005b05b17de246991f769a445c973d9922c9315259/Figure-5.jpg" data-mid="233231376" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3b3f20a6cfccdd1a46274005b05b17de246991f769a445c973d9922c9315259/Figure-5.jpg" /> Figure 5. Microprocessor 80960JA, Intel, 1990. SPWhat I’m getting at is that the real world is chaotic—full of uncertainty, failure, and compromise—whereas the digital allows total control. That pull toward order is understandable. But even in your digital work, you stay grounded in structure, gravity, and physical logic. So, I wonder if you would be uncomfortable producing projects that were purely fantastical or non-physical? DKWhile we strive for order and stability in the real world, the digital space requires a hint of imperfection and error to feel relatable. My focus on the digital realm aligns with my deep-rooted interest in realism. Even as a child, I was drawn to it—never using colourful bricks when constructing Lego houses, always imagining how toys like cars and planes would function in the real world. My passion for model-making, building railways, ships, and cars with a focus on scale and accuracy, has stayed with me. Even today, I view the world attentively and with interest. It is important to train the eye. However, this grounding in realism also allows me to appreciate objects that challenge traditional notions of visual design. Take, for instance, the microchip—a fascinating object because, although it is usually hidden, its design is surprisingly beautiful and complex (Figure 5). The way its connections are laid out creates a visible, almost architectural pattern. To me, the microchip is the heart of everything, powering all the digital processes I work with. There’s something intriguing about this small object, which reminds me of satellites or space modules—there’s no aesthetic decision or visual design, just the result of a system’s logic. It’s this precision and function that I find compelling, and I look for similar ways to integrate functional elements into my architectural work. <img width="1920" height="1440" width_o="1920" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d091135d32ea7006bf9266a0e9a115e6f8757abb29842221fa9bf34e1abead9/Figure-6.jpg" data-mid="233231462" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d091135d32ea7006bf9266a0e9a115e6f8757abb29842221fa9bf34e1abead9/Figure-6.jpg" /> Figure 6. International Space Station (ISS), 2021. © NASA SPYou often reference space-age technology, like satellites and scientific instruments, on your website and in your projects. Where does that come from? DKSatellites and instruments captivate me, especially when it comes to exploring how they are assembled. For example, the International Space Station (Figure 6) is entirely functional—there are no aesthetic choices. It's equipped with sensors, solar panels, and other components carefully integrated into the main structure. In my projects, I strive to create a similarly efficient system, where elements like staircases, roofs, chimneys, or technical components are integrated but retain their distinct appearance. A good example is the Lido Bruggerhorn project (Figure 7), where certain elements contribute to the sense of assembly, enhancing the expression of the project. I frequently join parts using a hinge—it’s a wonderful component that separates and connects a static and a dynamic element. Visually, it alludes to movement and function. This technical curiosity also connects to my interest in industrial design. I think the comparison between machines and instruments is interesting here. The beauty of an instrument lies in its technical necessity and precision, but also in how it allows for human interaction. The way we touch and engage with it—the sizing of elements, how it reacts to an individual. The performance it generates needs to be precise, but at the same time, it has to be adaptable, allowing me to interact with it. The Polar Planimeter Type 7 (Figure 8), for instance, relies on you to guide it—it becomes an extension of the body. That closeness is something I find very beautiful. In architecture, there are comparable moments—doors, handles, windows, railings—objects we interact with every day. They’re not just there; they ask something of us. In that sense, a house can be understood as an instrument for daily life. A machine, on the other hand, is designed to run on its own—you press a button, and it performs its task without you. <img width="1547" height="2100" width_o="1547" height_o="2100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59fc8d88cef63cb3af7f6f2ac2cfb78357bc350a7c5d86b4ade8a853bd4dffe5/Figure-7.jpg" data-mid="234095394" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/59fc8d88cef63cb3af7f6f2ac2cfb78357bc350a7c5d86b4ade8a853bd4dffe5/Figure-7.jpg" /> Figure 7. Lido Bruggerhorn, plan drawing by David Klemmer, 2022. SPYou’ve described all of that in very tactile terms, but let's shift the perspective slightly—from the detail to something broader—what would you hope that your work contributes to the discipline? DKThat’s a tough question. When you’re serious about your profession, of course, you want to contribute something meaningful. We live in a time driven by the pursuit of comfort. This is also reflected in architecture, whose outcomes strangely seem both diverse and yet uniformly similar. Standardised solutions dominate, shaping the visual appearance—not only in the built environment but also in its representation. Technological advancements reduce errors and the need for workarounds, leading to fewer opportunities for individual expression. While technology opens new possibilities, it also closes them off—particularly for those who can't or don't want to engage with these matters in depth. I would love to do and see more projects that emphasize the individual and personal, even if they're incomplete, fragmented, or flawed—projects and images where the focus is on finding our own idea and its representation. So hopefully I can stimulate that in some way. SPIt’s much easier to create an image that looks finished and convincing, and then say, “That’s it, that’s the building.” It’s no longer about creating ideas. DKThat's true. The pursuit of photorealism has become an obsession. The visualiser works on an image until their effort merges with the result and becomes invisible. This is precarious. On the other hand, photography, through the methods of image editing and retouching, is approaching the classification and aesthetics of rendering. Both disciplines offer manipulated renditions of a reality that exists somewhere in between. There’s something interesting—and slightly absurd—about the insertion of future projects into photographs of existing sites. It creates a perfect contradiction: on the one hand, there’s this drive for accuracy and believability, but on the other, the image ignores how time will alter the scene. This simultaneous presence of both states—between what’s depicted and what will really be there—is what makes it valuable. It’s not just a gap; it’s a tension between control and uncertainty, and I think we’ve stopped paying attention to that. <img width="1200" height="900" width_o="1200" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0187e60796cbb0550e15f02ae235d7181db7431ecb087530c189b16b72dfa16e/Figure-8jpg.jpg" data-mid="234095395" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0187e60796cbb0550e15f02ae235d7181db7431ecb087530c189b16b72dfa16e/Figure-8jpg.jpg" /> Figure 8. Polar Planimeter Type 7, Alfred J. Amsler &amp; Co., 1918. © Mathematical Instruments. SPYes, that tension—the sense that something hasn’t happened yet—feels important. DKExactly. It resists finality. I think we should reconnect with this uncertainty to allow images and architecture to evolve—perhaps incomplete and with errors, but at least with a clear attitude and idea. If we look back 30 or 40 years, almost every architecture office had a recognisable language, visible in their drawings, plans, layouts, visualisations, and ultimately in their architecture. Representation was a natural part of their identity. Some of them were still sketching, others used perspective line drawings, worked with collages, or explored early CGI techniques. The limitations of tools and technology were not a barrier but instead encouraged individuality. The distinct personality and character of these offices was unmistakable. Today, everything is reduced to two or three obvious approaches, influenced by media trends from everywhere. Even though it’s difficult to escape this influence myself—I want to challenge it. ... https://aefoundation.co.uk/Bushra-Mohamed Mon, 05 Aug 2024 18:09:29 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Bushra-Mohamed LOG <img width="2362" height="2813" width_o="2362" height_o="2813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9b14156a761519c1759a6c9f0ad76c7d1264789a49ebfcf7f230693f5512b637/Bushra-Mohamed---Luca-Bosco.jpg" data-mid="218824124" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9b14156a761519c1759a6c9f0ad76c7d1264789a49ebfcf7f230693f5512b637/Bushra-Mohamed---Luca-Bosco.jpg" /> Credit Luca Bosco BUSHRA MOHAMED ︎︎︎Callum Symmons CS How would you articulate a relationship with the past in your work: with the idea of inheritance and also disinheritance? BM It's really a pertinent theme within all of the work we do. A big concern in the architectural profession right now is the acknowledgement of its status as a profession of power and dominance and its destructive capacity to perpetuate injustice in our world. The embodied and operational carbon of buildings that you can't escape, but also its links to colonial governance and legislative systems over land. We have a responsibility to first of all acknowledge that we're complicit in the current system. With that comes a huge responsibility to dismantle or disrupt those harmful inherited structures and systems. I see my practice as an attempt to translate these very serious topics, from what can be very negative histories, into more positive and generative outcomes, even though I still believe as a practice, I'm complicit in the destructive tendencies of the profession, which is at times debilitating. Through the work of the practice, I want to give agency and legitimacy to stories, or ways of looking at things that have historically been excluded. I've tried to practice in a way that carves a space for people like me, or people who look like me - women, people of colour – with a particular interest towards architecture from Africa, from South Asia, from the Middle East. I'm from Kenya, and I have a lived experience of African architecture, specifically Kenyan architecture. I'm not saying that we've never looked at the history of architecture in Africa and Kenya, or the Middle East, or India, but that we haven't looked at it from the perspective of it being a fruitful ground for progress, which is something I hope to change. This is a process of redefining the terms of debate, shifting and dispersing the centre of architectural attention geographically and epistemologically, and making space for my lived reality. I've just reached a place where I’m able to do this in my own work. CSWhat inheritance do you hope to pass on through your practice? BM Specifically, I want my practice to pass on the inheritance of vernacular African architecture. I want to connect contemporary architecture to the vernacular of the African continent, to weave it into the canonical narrative, almost as a provocation to say ‘how might contemporary architecture develop if we value the vernacular or the indigenous, as much as we value the colonial or the modern?’ More broadly, I hope that the work of my practice will prompt other people to choose what they want to inherit and what they want to disinherit. It’s about getting to a place, culturally, where we have the agency to choose what we take, what we can leave behind, what we can choose to foreground or to background. I don’t think it is relevant to erase any parts of history: rather accepting the layered and interconnected nature of our world, and allowing choice in what you feel is valuable or what you find inspiration in, is where the richness lies. Through my mixed identity, growing up both in Kenya andthe UK, I have inherited a plural identity. I hope to continue making space for plurality. If I think about the profession in Kenya or in terms of Kenyan architecture, there's an acknowledgement that architecture, with a capital ‘A’, acted as a colonial profession: the capital city started as a settler colony, architecture was purely a system of dominance and control over land, the masterplan governed where Europeans would live, and just like the creation of the modern borders of Kenya, the legacy of this colonial control still exists. From this perspective, architecture can be understood as a colonial construct. Therefore it makes sense that many would advocate a rejection of the main levers of the architectural profession, such as architectural drawing styles, the elements of conventional practice, of ordering and controlling space and how people move through space, instead seeking to find new tools that don’t stem from that colonial heritage. However, in understanding the skill and knowledge of the vernacular architecture of the region and the tools those communities used there is a very interesting new type of architect that can emerge: one that builds on and uses aspects of both. I've chosen very consciously to engage with those existing practices and methodologies to challenge and further understand how they can be dismantled as tools of power. That is to say, okay, while we might still use these ways of drawing or ways of thinking about architecture which originates - especially in the context of Kenya - as colonial practices, we do so by reclaiming agency over them, using them as tools to deconstruct power. It is important for me to pass on those ways of practising architecture: valuing the inherent intelligence of low-tech and vernacular building techniques, methods that consider a circular economy, including existing knowledge systems, and how space can foster communities. It’s about giving the possibility to incorporate disparate parts of one’s identity, aspects of one’s self that might not immediately be understood as architectural in a conventional sense. This process is related to how we define what architecture is. Can we take influence or inspiration from other aspects of our material or visual culture? Can we incorporate our physical culture, our rituals, into our architecture? That is the power of practising in the way that I do, using the conventional, historically established tools of the architect, but using them to practise in a way that is welcoming, that is about unearthing stories, in a way that looks at wider aspects of our visual culture, in addition to those typically contained within architectural practice. In this sense, I think it's deeply political and important to be conscious of our visual world, our physical world, and how we design and make it. I think it's a very personal, human, concern, especially in terms of representation, to be conscious that the physical and visual world we share has had many different people contribute to it. Through teaching especially, you can lay a foundation for this kind of a change. At the teaching unit I led at Kingston University about the compound house, for instance, we’ve been able to shift focus onto a different way of thinking architecturally, locating the centre of our attention in a different place in the world and then considering it from a perspective that doesn't centre western architectural models and types. CS While there is a radical, political, cultural project embedded within the work of Msoma, there is also a certain adherence to inherited systems or structures. There's a certain desire for continuity, a capacity for reconsidering elements of the past in a new way, rather than trying to wipe the slate clean. Tropical Modernism: Architecture &amp; Power in West Africa Exhibition at the V&amp;A Pavilion of Applied Arts, responding to the “Laboratory of the Future” theme for the 18th International Architecture Biennale in Venice 2023. Co-curated by Bushra Mohamed, Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Dr Christopher Turner. <img width="5000" height="4000" width_o="5000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/739d6c19db551c94d933ecc9003a161fd759e84fca650a9886f39ebb8c2fa76a/Luca-Bosco-TropicalModernism-1.jpg" data-mid="218518908" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/739d6c19db551c94d933ecc9003a161fd759e84fca650a9886f39ebb8c2fa76a/Luca-Bosco-TropicalModernism-1.jpg" /> Credit Luca Bosco <img width="4384" height="2924" width_o="4384" height_o="2924" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/89bc6abdd64f356b09f59b2407f439be2445a79b89ec00966132785adb716a74/V-A-TropicalModernism-2.jpg" data-mid="218518912" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/89bc6abdd64f356b09f59b2407f439be2445a79b89ec00966132785adb716a74/V-A-TropicalModernism-2.jpg" /> Credit Luca Bosco <img width="4757" height="6000" width_o="4757" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5510dd3e64c3459aa882c9f75b693ff3556cee7b020d1d26af7de10fc3b1dcd0/Luca-Bosco-TropicalModernism-4.jpg" data-mid="218519046" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5510dd3e64c3459aa882c9f75b693ff3556cee7b020d1d26af7de10fc3b1dcd0/Luca-Bosco-TropicalModernism-4.jpg" /> Credit Luca Bosco BMIf you think about it through the metaphor of language - drawings, plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, models, etc. are the architect’s language. Rather than try to teach new ideas in a new language, I am trying to use the architect’s language that I have been taught and that everyone already speaks to convey new ideas. Msoma, the name of my practice, is a Swahili word, meaning ‘reader’. In a sense, it’s something different, which maybe most people would not immediately understand, but then everything behind it is in English, which you do understand. It’s one way to acknowledge the practice’s unconventional, progressive approach, which foregrounds a less dominant language through the conventional language that everybody speaks. CSI think that's clear. There's an aspiration for collectivity, or a positivity in that approach, that is inspiring. It's an additive rather than a subtractive attitude. BMI think that often in discussions of colonial histories - or the histories of parts of the world which have been affected in a negative way - we can dwell on the negative, in a way that tends to be really paralyzing. It almost frightens people to a degree, into a belief that they can't do anything to make a change. I think that that's an unhelpful state to be in, to be so petrified by the weight of history that you can't move forward. I always think it's much more useful to think about what this means for what we can do, rather than getting frozen in that state of negativity. It's that message of agency that I want to pass on through my practice, with a trajectory of hybridity within architecture. Pushing the idea that nothing is homogenous, and fixed: it's actually quite dynamic, interconnected and heterogeneous. That's what I want to foreground with my work, an understanding that the physical world that we live in is layered and hybrid and that there are connections that tie us together globally, nationally, regionally, that we can and should make explicit. Through research, I want to foreground West African and East African architectures, specifically the compound house. To show that it is a valuable cultural and architectural resource for the whole world to tap into, and not think of it as a primitive resource. This ties to my positive perspective, a form of practice that focuses on affecting change. CSHow do these discussions manifest themselves physically or spatially, or is this even possible? There's always the possibility that architecture is simply incapable of containing these conversations. BMI think this question is related to the question of what architecture is, and what is architectural practice. For me, it's really important to, yes, build and make spaces, but also to curate, to research, to write, and to teach. A recent project completed by the practice is the Tropical Modernism exhibition, which was first shown in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale 2023. This project captures the way that we are often working across multiple disciplines, and roles, in a hybrid manner. Fundamentally, this was a project about unpicking and rewriting the story of Tropical Modernism, the prevailing version being about&nbsp; European architects who went to West Africa as part of the 20th Century colonial project and made buildings which applied a Eurocentric model of modern architecture to this new “primitive” place, and how they adapted it, first to the climate and then to the culture. What past research doesn’t tell you, is why they wanted to build in this part of the world: the extraction of people, gold, aluminium, cacoa, energy that follow this seemingly generous act of development.The exhibition asks questions about authorship, and how travelling around the region fostered a cross-cultural exchange. It asks questions about who is given opportunity and how European architects in that period used the colonies to test ideas and make a name for themselves. The exhibition unpicks this narrative, looks at it in more detail, it fills the gaps in the archives, understands and highlights the actors and figures who were part of that movement and had not previously been included in the story. It&nbsp;simultaneously reconsiders the simplistic narrative that Tropical Modernism is only a negative, colonial project. The work was about looking closely at this moment of architectural history and then rewriting its story accurately and inclusively. The reality is that, of course, there were a lot of local people, a lot of Ghanaian architects involved, and of course, the main protagonist of the story being Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who found a way to co-opt the modern movement for his own political ambitions. The narrative of the exhibition was about acknowledging their part in the movement, reinstating their agency of this being an architecture that was co-produced, that is now a fundamental part of both Ghanaian and British history . It’s an investigative process which doesn’t take everything at face value and really understands how uncovering a story and revealing a narrative can actually give agency to people. That's not necessarily a conventionally architectural tool, but it is a tool that we, as architects, often use: the narrative and storytelling of our work, right? And then secondly, through curation, it is about how you can tell a story in a very clear way so that anybody can understand it, and it doesn't take an architect who has studied for seven years to really grapple with the concepts. I've found throughout my career and my education that it's really stifling when, as architects, we over-intellectualise ideas so that the general public don’t understand them. And then finally the Tropical Modernism project was about exhibition design. Which, in some ways, is the simplest of the various roles. How do you lay out the research and the narrative, so that the journey that people go through is straightforward, they take in the content in a way that's comfortable, and then they get to a place where they feel like they've learned something or experienced something? In a way, it’s a process of setting a stage, or even a background. In this case, we remade the facade from Fry &amp; Drew’s first project in Nigeria at the Univeristy of Ibandan and used it to hold the content of the exhibition. I think the Tropical Modernism exhibition presents a very good example of the different roles that we often adopt, that the practice is able to adopt. In a way, it’s a process of world-building. Islands&nbsp; Exhibition for the Design Researchers at the Design Museum, London. Msoma Architects, 2023. <img width="1343" height="1343" width_o="1343" height_o="1343" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/673915ef5b5fddadae311c3c4d88722f2843432379e3d6ce31280fb482dad60f/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-3.png" data-mid="218819902" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/673915ef5b5fddadae311c3c4d88722f2843432379e3d6ce31280fb482dad60f/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-3.png" /> Credit Felix Speller<img width="1489" height="1054" width_o="1489" height_o="1054" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b5d6d421bd48d6212555494608b093c627d95f2b36b25625d028bd4d3fd1873c/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-1.png" data-mid="218824105" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b5d6d421bd48d6212555494608b093c627d95f2b36b25625d028bd4d3fd1873c/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-1.png" /> Credit Felix Speller <img width="1039" height="1429" width_o="1039" height_o="1429" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e0953b73464863e7e9e094efc720f2bdb38d0af409bd4c3252054a8f2c86a6f3/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-2.png" data-mid="218819956" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e0953b73464863e7e9e094efc720f2bdb38d0af409bd4c3252054a8f2c86a6f3/Felix-Speller-IslandsDesignMuseum-2.png" /> Credit Felix Speller CSHow do you begin to combine this model of cultural production with a more everyday architectural practice? I’m conscious that Msoma has worked on a number of projects aside from exhibition design. BMAs we are relatively young, each project we work on is important and helps us develop the values of the practice through its narrative. We try to tie the work to the position of the practice, and to the material and theoretical spaces and cultures we are trying to work within. Whether it's a conversation that's had with the client or not, it's something we definitely talk about between ourselves. For example, we worked on the concept design for a workspace called Patch, in Twickenham. From the client’s perspective, they chose us because we are a diverse practice, and the communities they are trying to engage are diverse, and they wanted to somehow create something that speaks to these diverse communities. But, that is a very generic goal, it's very difficult to build an appealing narrative around the desire to create something to appeal to everybody. The question is about finding a narrative where you can introduce an idea for the project. Here, the idea was to introduce a music production space on the ground floor and then to have spaces for knowledge exchange above. We built a narrative around communities that historically were in Twickenham, that were in South London, who had had very clear connections with music knowledge, production and exchange. Another project, related to the notion of global identities that I discussed before, is a&nbsp;collaboration with Adam Nathaniel-Furmanin for Somerset House, an 18th Century Georgian quadrangle on the River Thames. The goal was to shift the architecture of the spaces towards the global identities of the people who use the spaces every day, and we built a narrative around colour, pattern, and texture, which wove these new narratives and voices into the space. We looked at the locations that were part of the British Empire when the main portion of Somerset House was built, in the 17th Century. At that time the British Empire wasn't as large as it got in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, we pulled out colours that were meaningful, and textures and patterns to those contexts, and brought them into the Georgian space. This was important to us because although, through the British empire, the building would have been connected to all these different places, there was nothing in the physical architecture of the space that told us about these connections. This process becomes more important today if we want to acknowledge these kinds of histories and narratives. I would say this in itself was actually very radical for the client. The attitude towards historical spaces in the UK tends to be very conservative, very much rooted in the preservation of and the continuity of the history of the existing building,&nbsp; rather than introducing or making visible intangible historic connections. CSIt's operating semantically, operating through references and signification, but drawing on a different set of references than people like Charles Moore, Robert Venturi or Denise Scott Brown would have done in the 1980s, with a different set of goals. It’s clear how this project manifests itself through image and surface, it seems interesting to ask about the formal, spatial translation of these conversations?BMThe distinction between the postmodern work of the 70s/80s and what we are doing now is that the post-modernists explained their ideas through intuition and whimsy. What we are doing is more rational, with a wider ambition towards equity and equality. In terms of Msoma’s work on housing - the new-build houses or the apartment building in Kenya - those very much reference the spatial logic of the compound house, an incredibly important reference to the work of the practice. Our adoption of this reference really speaks to the notion of historical continuity: how history can inform our contemporary and future culture. It’s also about simply giving validity to the indigenous vernacular architecture of Kenya that has been ignored or deevalued for a long time . We also try to materially reference the local materials that would have been historically used, for example the use of wattle and daub or thatch. There's a nod to history here, but we also find it really important to evolve this aspect of the vernacular. Instead of the roof being made out of the reed thatch or palm thatch that would historically have been used, it is made using recycled plastic fibres, for example. It's not necessarily a matter of building exactly as you might have done before, but instead thinking about how we can use contemporary materials that might be cheaper or more readily available now, yet still reference the history and vernacular of a place. In exhibition design, what is often important is to spatially convey a tangible connection to other places, as well as an intangible connection to concepts and ideas. We've tended to use light, for example, to convey the intangible. The layout of the plan also can be a way where we communicate the intangible, experienced spatially. I've also found that drawing from other aspects of our material culture, or our visual culture can be useful. There are these funerary statues, for example, that are used by the the Mijikenda in Kenya, a carved totem of the person who passed away. And they're really beautifully detailed and crafted. I think they're incredibly architectural when you begin to look at them formally. Looking at cultural artefacts and objects such as those for reference and trying to translate that into architecture is another approach we often explore. For the most part, though, and especially in the exhibition design, our work tends to be based upon colour, pattern, or texture. Mostly because - and I do think this is a big thing - it's cost-effective, and it's cheap. So that tends to be the way we do it. I also think there’s something interesting to be explored in the use of fabrics, about a domestic quality, or a femininity, maybe, or softness. I think generally, fabric has been a really easy way to transform a space from a very generic to a very celebratory condition. In our exhibition ‘Islands’ at the Design Museum, we wrapped a curtain around the whole space and created this very dramatic curve at the end: using fabric allowed us to achieve this spatiality very quickly. We did a similar thing in our exhibition of the work of Althea McNish, who is a British Trinidadian textile artist who obviously worked a lot with fabric. Using fabric in the presentation of her work allowed us to convey the softness and femininity that she brought to her art. This example in particular is tied to the first question of inheritance. For that reference for the Althea McNish exhibition, the reference of the curved curtains, we looked firstly at that Lily Reich and Mies reference of the curtains in the exhibition: it's a deeply established image of how curtains can be used to adapt a space very simply. I wouldn't disregard that reference simply because it is a Western European reference. But then we also looked at the Caribbean, the West African, the West Indian front room, and Caribbean front rooms and how curtains are used there in a dramatic way to frame the window. I’d go back to my point about giving agency to be able to choose different references. It’s about making sure that the references are not just the established ones of Mies van der Rohe constantly, but you also have agency and legitimacy to pull from your own lived experience, of how fabric is used from your own culture, to complement the established, canonical reference of Lily Reich and Mies. Compound House Ongoing reasearch documenting the African compound house as typology, investigating its historical and contemporary condition. Bushra Mohamed in collaboration with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Mark El-khatib. <img width="1913" height="2013" width_o="1913" height_o="2013" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/713b9c9667068cebe7c27526854ea6ef2b45a6c81ffbca1b798bbcde3d87c66b/2-3-Lobi-Rural-Compound-House.png" data-mid="218818959" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/713b9c9667068cebe7c27526854ea6ef2b45a6c81ffbca1b798bbcde3d87c66b/2-3-Lobi-Rural-Compound-House.png" /> <img width="2241" height="2352" width_o="2241" height_o="2352" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18b1dd0d4c6ab7dea5064dd640bc904ab202dd691d8e00747a25bdefbe905514/2-9-Amamoma-Urban-Compound-House.png" data-mid="218819987" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/18b1dd0d4c6ab7dea5064dd640bc904ab202dd691d8e00747a25bdefbe905514/2-9-Amamoma-Urban-Compound-House.png" /> <img width="2867" height="2604" width_o="2867" height_o="2604" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1e97c225bed9fda86a89dbc8e67eace9d575b909e00320871df2610ae3e35426/2-2-Abriem-Shrine-House.png" data-mid="218824119" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1e97c225bed9fda86a89dbc8e67eace9d575b909e00320871df2610ae3e35426/2-2-Abriem-Shrine-House.png" /> All drawings credit Msoma. CSYou touched upon it there, but could you expand more directly upon your research into the compound house typology? I understand it’s a body of work intrinsic to your practice, that has been conducted over several years. It seems a salient example of the spatiality you are discussing. BMI grew up in a compound house in Kenya, which formed my understanding of the term ‘dwelling’. Furthermore, I was very conscious that African architecture sat very low on the hierarchy of knowledge in the West, and at the time vernacular architecture was also underappreciated as architectural knowledge. I wanted to explore this typology academically, as I felt that it represented a missed opportunity for housing on the continent. Therefore, destigmatising and reconsidering this historic domestic typology has been a primary focus of my research. At the same time, it’s about how to encourage a more environmentally conscious way of building that also references a cultural inheritance, places value upon that history, and doesn't just ignore it and start from colonialism or modernism. The compound house project first started as a teaching unit brief at Kingston, and it has since evolved into a book, an apartment housing project, and a house for three families. Along the way, it also evolved into various texts for different publications: the AA files, Sound Advice. In effect, it’s been a process of world-building, as I mentioned before. I had to write those things and put them forward to get other people to understand why it's important to look at this architecture, in addition to other domestic courtyard typologies from throughout architectural history. The typology of the compound house itself is defined by a collective space in the centre of the dwelling, which acts primarily as a gathering space and a thoroughfare, but becomes the spatial nucleus for the home. You have to go through the central space, the compound space, to get to other spaces. It becomes like a capsule, a sort of polyvalent space in the middle that can have lots of different functions. It operates similarly to a corridor space in other typologies, but here it is typically an outdoor space. Even when it's not external, it's still a more generous space than a typical circulation space might have. It has higher ceilings, it is much more celebratory, it's a spatiality not dissimilar to the corridors of stately homes which might hold artwork that the resident family was collecting. The compound room becomes this space to celebrate elements that are really important to the community of the people living there. I think in general, the research into the compound house typology has helped me detach, as a designer, from conventional UK housing standards and really reframe the value of domestic space. One of the questions thrown up by the research is about translating the spatiality of the compound house for UK domestic standards: for instance, if we take the terrace house, is it possible to have a living room in the centre of the plan? Which might help open up to other spaces in the house. In general, it caters well to contemporary domestic developments, particularly in providing high-density dwellings. It's an opportunity that you can sort of translate the compound typology into. Its emphasis on multigenerational living can be translated to support childcare or elderly care within domestic typologies. There is also an important process of destigmatising some of the connotations with these buildings: historically they have been referred to as mud huts, symbolic of a primitive or barbaric culture. However, as we grapple with the climate crisis we come to understand the value in these architectures that are inherently circular: they are made of natural and biodegradable materials and considerate of the multispecies that we share this planet with. For example, with the Islands exhibition at the Design Museum, which was curatorially exploring how islands as earth formations have come to affect our physical environment, we chose to use earth construction to revalue earth building. I think it’s important to challenge the suggestion that this is somehow a lesser form of construction, and value the compound houses for their visual characteristics, their beauty, but also the embodied architectural and constructional knowledge involved in the crafting of their timber frame, or the conical thatch roof, or the carvings in the earth floor and walls. The question is to then think about how we might translate that cultural and architectural knowledge into contemporary standards and contemporary means, without compromising it. This process of destigmatising is required in Kenya too: because of globalisation, there is still a much higher value on Western aesthetic standards and modern materials such as glass, steel, and concrete. We now know that these materials are very damaging to our planet therefore we need to consider how we use them. This becomes especially significant in Kenya, where there's a huge need for housing, and a huge amount of construction is required. If you construct this new housing using western, conventional typologies, en masse, it is going to have a huge environmental impact. https://aefoundation.co.uk/Soren-Pihlmann Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:07:44 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Soren-Pihlmann LOG <img width="979" height="1305" width_o="979" height_o="1305" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d44554fd1e91c22f7ca4317b9f746e38bdc267a314028b99522c235c7d4d659a/Soren-BW.jpg" data-mid="201530201" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/979/i/d44554fd1e91c22f7ca4317b9f746e38bdc267a314028b99522c235c7d4d659a/Soren-BW.jpg" />credit Lasse Dearman SØREN PIHLMANN ︎︎︎Callum Symmons CS How would you articulate a relationship with the past in your work: with the idea of inheritance and also disinheritance? SPIt’s an interesting question, because I think that we are really faced with this idea of inheritance in all our projects. In general, we really look into existing things, really try to understand what we already have been given in the first place. We want to see how that can be translated into something that is relevant again today. I think the reason why we think and practice in this way is in order to create some kind of continuity. We don’t feel it seems very appealing, especially for architects, to constantly redevelop everything from scratch, over and over again. I think on many levels, what we actually need is continuity. But of course, that continuity can be difficult to create, when, for instance, some of the biggest, most urgent agendas that we have today is to figure out a way to build without leaving such a huge carbon footprint and also without using as many resources as we used to do. It’s always difficult as we tend to fall in love with our built legacy. We can’t replicate it, because in many ways it is wrong and problematic in a contemporary context. So we have to find out what we can learn from it, what can still make sense today? And what does it teach us? And how can we continue to build on top of its legacy, but in a way where it retains its relevance today? I really think that this is a discussion that we have on a daily basis. CSWhat inheritance do you hope to pass on through your practice? SPI think what we spend most time on is trying to build in a way that is technically simple. Which actually is super difficult, because the demands upon our built environment keep on increasing: we want our buildings to perform better and better. The easy way to get there is just by introducing more and more carbon intensive materials, more insulation, vapor barriers, technical ventilation systems, and so on. And in a sense, you often have to do that in order to keep up with these contemporary demands. But we think something interesting happens in architecture when we come up with a solution, that is both simple in the volume of resources we use, using fewer resources, but also simpler aesthetically and constructionally. There are many things that you touch upon when you when you start to have these discussions, but I hope that we can pass on a building culture that requires fewer materials and requires only a small number of elements in order for it to work. CS The idea of a ‘building culture’ seems something quite specific to Danish architectural discourse, maybe more so than in other European contexts. From my perspective, the concept of inheritance almost seems like an intrinsic, essential aspect of a lot of the work produced by your office. There are two projects that stand out in this regard however. The first is a recent gallery fit-out in Copenhagen, and the second being an earlier student housing building on the outskirts of Aarhus. They both clearly allude to an understanding of their respective inheritances in the ways that they were developed. Yet each one approaches it from a very different direction. I wonder if you could speak about the differences between the two projects, and what you learned from each one? It even seems as though you almost approach an idea of inheritance directly, as a conceptual framework for the architecture? Student Village Project Description (credit Pihlmann Architects/Kim Lenschow): “Student Village is a transformation and extension of Søgaarden, a traditional half-timbered farm from the 17th century just outside of central Aarhus. Søgaarden once served as a cattle farm but lost its original function when it was absorbed by the growing city, leaving Søgaarden as an oasis of rural idyll nestled between highways and malls – a small village encircled by an ever-expanding cityscape.The native character of Søgaarden is maintained and around it seven new housing units are built. They stand as contemporary interpretations of the original farm and draw references to it both by virtue of their shape, materiality, and construction. Between the buildings a network of streets, passages, and courtyards create an intimate and social space where new and old appear side by side.” <img width="5000" height="3061" width_o="5000" height_o="3061" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eaff18b6d765dcf66d23a62ee330a84381b2bd6c739ecfe39a53a2a7768305ad/36_student-village_hampus-berndtson_2017.jpg" data-mid="201529852" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eaff18b6d765dcf66d23a62ee330a84381b2bd6c739ecfe39a53a2a7768305ad/36_student-village_hampus-berndtson_2017.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson <img width="4868" height="3894" width_o="4868" height_o="3894" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b1d009dd3e0983c016b5faf65fd58db4f93f2277c0f15cebceae23cc37f68835/37_student-village_hampus-berndtson_2017.jpg" data-mid="201529860" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b1d009dd3e0983c016b5faf65fd58db4f93f2277c0f15cebceae23cc37f68835/37_student-village_hampus-berndtson_2017.jpg" />Credit Hampus Berndtson SP If we start with the student village project. It was an interesting project because it was my brother who was the client. He was the one who found the old farm. I was newly graduated at that time and he asked if I could come up with any idea for it. He was out finding stakeholders and people to invest in the project. We managed to combine this partnership into a coherent project which people wanted to buy in to. The direction of the project was driven primarily by its context. The site was a kind of special area, because it had undergone a very dramatic change from being a small, classic, 17th century village into this suburban area with highways, and therefore more than one of the farms have been taken down. So this søgaarden, as it was called, meaning ‘lake farm’, was the only one left. The initial discussion of the project was very much about which aspect of this context we might want our project to inherit. Do we think that this translation, the site’s development into a suburban area with highways and so on, is the most interesting part? Or is it instead about trying to put forward some of the lost qualities of the village? This was in the end the direction that we took. We looked into local archives, figuring out what the layout of this type of village was before they took all the old farms away. And then we tried to recreate that in a way. But we did that not simply to recreate a village in a romantic, nostalgic way but because we thought that it was actually an interesting layout that would fit perfectly with the new programme that we had to create, student housing. These traditional star-shaped villages in Denmark, they have an outer periphery, pointing towards the surrounding landscape. Of course, in the old days, that gave their residents an opportunity to easily go out in the fields, do the harvesting, and so on and go back to the farms. But then simultaneously, they were arranged in clusters, so all the farm owners were very close to each other, so they had this small village typology in the middle, which created a better social connection, a bond between each farm owner. We really enjoyed translating this type into a new programme where this social bond would be between the students, living very tightly together. But then of course, each of the students also had their own unit facing towards the surrounding landscape, allowing them a good opportunity to withdraw, to get away from this social intensity. So in that sense, the project was really about figuring out the qualities of an existing context, and the reasons it was this way, why was the layout as it was? Then, after making this research, considering if we had found any way of translating it into a new contemporary situation where it also makes sense? So really we’re not trying to create a museum here, for people to understand how farmers used to live in the old days. It’s actually because there was a genuine, relevant quality in the historical architecture that we might implement today. And nonetheless, at the same time, we can create some kind of continuity with the old legacy of the site that would have been abandoned and lost without the new project. So I think, in many ways, this project was really a process of reaching an understanding of the site. In this instance it was mostly between the scale of the village and that of the building. What we then started to discuss here at the office and realized was that the deeper we can get into this thinking, or the smaller the scale it operates at, the more interesting it starts to become. In other words, when we begin to talk about resources as well, not just the layout of the buildings: can we simply renovate a building with what’s already materially there upon the site? And that was the approach to the art gallery project. It was also an old building, from the 30s. It had undergone many transformations over its lifetime, but when we first came there it was the office of a bank. So it had these standard elements from these office typologies: suspended ceilings and gypsum boards, and glass walls, and so on. And here what we tried do was to use this found condition as a constraint for this new layout. Everything already there became our resource bank that we had to find a new use for. We came up with the project’s concept based on the elements that we already found in the site. So in a way, it is kind of like the same approach, I would say, but here it’s just more focused on the smaller, component scale in this art gallery. Art Hub Copenhagen Project Description (credit Pihlmann Architects): “By rethinking and reusing the elements added over time, the space is redefined based on an interpretation of the genuine atmosphere and spatial composition. No layers are added, instead the existing ones are peeled away, leaving the distinctive spirit of the space exposed.Both development and execution have been carried out in collaboration with Archival Studies. The two processes have taken place simultaneously, which is essential for the project as a case study – it is an archaeological process, which dissects the architecture layer by layer, dynamically creating a catalogue of possibilities. Every building consists of a series of components. By exposing and reconsidering them anew we can explore their untapped functional and aesthetic potentials. Consequently, a sensitivity emerges by rethinking the components.The suspended ceiling tiles, known from various generic office spaces, have been dismantled and redefined. The slender aluminum profiles are left as a coarse-mesh filter, while the white tiles are reorganized into flexible, suspended folding walls. They hang as staged elements emphasizing the varying hue and intensity of the light, drawing references to both Kødbyen’s history and the surrounding facades.” <img width="6052" height="8074" width_o="6052" height_o="8074" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e0e7d8a368ed746f6ecb026be1e4fbf59870acd542e2bc0338c678990fb559d/12_art-hub-copenhagen_hampus-berndtson_2021.jpg" data-mid="201530098" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e0e7d8a368ed746f6ecb026be1e4fbf59870acd542e2bc0338c678990fb559d/12_art-hub-copenhagen_hampus-berndtson_2021.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson <img width="4497" height="6000" width_o="4497" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/344d887a9ea547cefd3f332a1e2fffd904514a16d457d97009209b7f2853d5b6/13_art-hub-copenhagen_hampus-berndtson__2021.jpg" data-mid="201530101" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/344d887a9ea547cefd3f332a1e2fffd904514a16d457d97009209b7f2853d5b6/13_art-hub-copenhagen_hampus-berndtson__2021.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson CS I also understand a progression between those two projects, a progression of thinking, from a typological level to a material level, let’s say. And the latter seems more distinctly representative of your office’s approach. I mean, it’s not a trick that we see being replicated very often: literally materially rearranging a context, in order to create a new architecture. SP That makes total sense. And I also agree that it is a progression. To begin with, in terms of our analysis, with the student village project that was as far as we could go. After that we really developed this idea of finding potentials in the qualities that already exist. The more we discussed this thinking in the office the more we moved towards conversations about our resources, and the source of this resource. The more we discussed this, the more it pointed us toward this idea of just using the things where they already are. Simultaneously, we found ourselves trying to begin technical discussions very early, because you know, that’s what makes the difference with this kind of proposal: normally you don’t do it, because it’s often super technical and demanding to take materials from a site and just reuse it on the site. The projects that we are doing currently are going even further in this direction, and also trying to understand not just how to reuse things, but also even if we have to use something that is new, how do we create those things? Also at a small scale, material level: what kind of materials do we build with? Inevitably, there is lot of discussion around natural materials, of course that’s a big thing. Oftentimes however, there are also interesting hybrid components or hybrid materials which might employ some residual waste from another process, but a very industrial process, and then suddenly, you can use that in another material, and it becomes relevant again. We find this kind of transformative thinking and processes very interesting. CS You’ve talked about perceiving a degree of standardization within the architecture being built in Copenhagen, and attempting to disrupt this habitual practice with your own work. At the same time, it seems that the way that you’re attempting to do that is rooted in a deep understanding of the very same systems themselves. It’s almost a strategy you could describe as ‘against from within’? SP I definitely think that there’s a willingness to understand how these things come about, and then trying to see how you’re able to affect change by shifting something a little bit, even on a very small scale. But in order to do that, you really have to understand how things have been put together: how things practically work. CS There’s currently a lot of discussion around the notion that ‘everything needs to change’. Nonetheless, some kind of critical continuity seems equally essential, learning what we can from our current situation in order to actually achieve this change. Are there any specific architects or architecture that you are looking to when you’re employing this kind of thinking? SP The funny thing is if you go 200 years back, or even 300, we were building in this way I think, because there was a lack of resources. You were forced to rely on what was already in the place where you wanted to build something. So this thinking is not a fancy new idea. It’s something that we’ve already done, the only thing that has changed is, of course, time and our abilities. Because suddenly, we have machines, robots and a lot of other technologies and knowledge to help us that we didn’t have 300 years ago. I think the initial ideas that creates a building, such as the half timbered farm that the student village took as its starting point, is exactly the same idea, of a simple construction, which we are discussing at the start of our conversation. It’s a super simple way of building: it is created in a way which allows change after some years if you want, if there are some new functions you need then the whole building structure will be able to adapt to that. And constructionally you’re using just the amount of resources that are needed for the architecture to work. Also, the appearance of the architecture is purely due to pragmatic reasons. Yet at the same time, it has a super beautiful, ornamental structure that is clearly visible. But it’s not there just to please the discipline, but it’s actually there because there’s a reason for it. I think it is a very holistic approach to architecture, where the place that you inhabit, the resources that you harvest, and the building that you build are all in a kind of intimate balance with each other. And I think that this is the approach and attitude which we are trying to introduce again, but in much more complex world. Nowadays we are confronted by so many ruins and problematic structures from the 60s, filled with concrete and so on. At the office we wonder if we might reintroduce this very holistic perspective into this contemporary situation: looking simultaneously to context, to resources and to architecture and creating work where all of these things are in touch with each other. CS It seems appropriate to also talk more widely about architecture in Denmark. There was a recent exhibition at the Utzon Centre in Aalborg: Super Dansk that, for me, exhibited a kind of self awareness and almost a theoretical cohesion amongst a new generation, let’s say, of Danish architects. How closely do you feel aligned to this framing of ‘Super Dansk’? What do you feel distinguishes this generation from that which came previously? SP Yeah, okay. So I think on many levels at the office, we are part of this new generation of younger emerging architects in Denmark. And I think if we look at generation that was just before us, like the one that I mentioned before, with Bjarke, and then Dan Stubbergaard, and all these figures, our position is on many levels in opposition to everything that they did. But nonetheless, it’s not in opposition to the history of Danish architecture, because if you go back further a generation or two, to the classical modernists and you know, all the most famous Danish architects. These figures were very much dedicated to working with materials and attempting to find simple solutions to complex problems. And they also worked on a detailed level that was super impressive. But then it seemed as though this culture disappeared into an eagerness to always build something that was more exciting than the one that you just did. And this worked at the time: if you look at those offices now, which came forward in the early 2000s, they are now the biggest offices that we have in Denmark. Of course, Bjarke was the front runner, but there was also so many other offices that brought the same idea, the same approach. I would even say actually, on all levels, that the emerging architects of today are working in sharp contrast to all the ideas that this previous generation implemented. <img width="1990" height="1492" width_o="1990" height_o="1492" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c9c751c81870114003798905476480ee6705ed362e6c7cf75ee34c4d53730af6/01_hampus-berndtson_14a.jpg" data-mid="202255156" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c9c751c81870114003798905476480ee6705ed362e6c7cf75ee34c4d53730af6/01_hampus-berndtson_14a.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson House 14a Project Description (credit Pihlmann Architects): “ The transformation creates a non-hierarchical collage, combining plain and grand materials with constructional traces from changing times. It presents a building that explores its own past and acknowledges to be just one stage in a continuous process, which is still ongoing. The house was originally built in 1951, standing as a classic example of Danish post-war housing: an unpretentious cubic box, two floors atop a basement, evenly distributed windows, red brickwork, and a pitched roof. This archetypical typology remains, but alterations and their traces gradually appear. On the outside, new wider openings towards the garden are obvious while flat arches over the infilled windows are preserved as subtle reminiscences of past conditions. The transformation regards the building as a mine. It was planned mostly on-site rather than digitally. Existing elements are interpreted anew, and what is removed is merged with what is added, e.g., pieces of crushed brick from the façade being used for the terrazzo stair treads and flooring. Every intervention occurs with varying apparency; from the crushed bricks and the maintained fragments of flooring to the reworked exterior masonry and the insertion of three interposed vertical brick cores. “ <img width="850" height="1063" width_o="850" height_o="1063" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d828f38af4dc3ffe3fb4549ef6e18e98489c5ec9bc51bb69b7ec934d26524c61/03_hampus-berndtson_14a.jpg" data-mid="202255009" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/850/i/d828f38af4dc3ffe3fb4549ef6e18e98489c5ec9bc51bb69b7ec934d26524c61/03_hampus-berndtson_14a.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson CS I mean, I guess it’s not by accident that it’s Super Dansk in opposition to Super Dutch. For me, it’s interesting to wonder how this new generation came about. And I guess, whether the pedagogical situation in Copenhagen, maybe contributed to that shift? Or did you feel like that desire to reject what came before was from somewhere else? SP I think some of it came from inside the academy. I remember when I went into school, there were all of these different departments, yet all of them were focusing on this post-modern approach, where the focus was about understanding the landscape or spatial proportions and so on. And also about ‘flows’ in buildings. A lot of which came to Denmark also as a consequence of this Dutch movement. But then suddenly there was a department at the School of Copenhagen that started to be more interested in investigating building culture and historic methods of construction. It was initially seen as very dry, many people knew it as being the boring department. CS This would be KTR (cultural heritage, transformation and restoration)? SP I think at that point, it was called Department 5. And then some of the people from department five founded KTR: cultural heritage, transformation and restoration. The programme set itself apart initially through their strict requirements upon the way you should hand in your design proposal. They wanted exclusively a 1:5 detail, 1:50 plans elevations and sections. And a 1:500 landscape drawing. So in contrast to these super creative proposals from the rest of the school, made in many different visual programs, at this department everybody was simply working with the drawing, nothing else. Sometimes photos of existing places. But Department 5 didn’t really work with layout, or renders and so on. So this approach had very stylistic and very simple demands as to the format of the student’s work. At a certain point, people started to realize that there was something to the rigour of this approach. That there was something interesting about this consistency, and the detailed research, even though at first impression it had seemed rather boring. And that, in fact, it offers a lot more than just measuring up old buildings, and doing small iterations to what’s already there. There was just a dramatic shift, it went very fast from being this boring, old school department to being the department where everybody wanted to go. Suddenly, they had to say no to students. I think that was the shift that we were part of when I was at the school. I went to the department as a masters student. I felt like we were part of that change that suddenly realised, okay, there is something to this department‘s attitude that is really interesting. It’s also a very impressive group of people working there, you probably know some of them. Victor Boye, from the office Kolman Boye. And of course Nicolai Bo Andersen plays a big role at the department as well, and there is the professor Christopher Harlang, who’s also very visionary when it comes to this approach. CS I think it’s nice to speak about that, because maybe those names aren’t so widely known outside of the context of Copenhagen and Denmark. It’s also interesting to hear about that specific unit having such a wide effect. Returning to the work of your practice, the inevitable question addresses the progression that we discussed earlier. For instance I know there’s currently a much larger scale project in the office, Thoravej 29. Are you able to continue the thinking of the smaller scale projects in a larger building? SP I think Thoravej is going to be a very important project for us. It already is. I think, in terms of a progression between the projects, that it has taken the ideas from the art gallery and simply tried to implement them at a bigger scale. Not just simply because it’s a bigger scale, but also because it’s a good opportunity to face all the kinds of difficulties that you don’t face when you’re working with a small interior project. So we have to work with that and learn from it. There is a bigger contractor, meaning that everything is more demanding when it comes to legislation, and cost efficiency and so forth. We have been faced with those kind of difficulties in this project, which inevitably drives the architecture in a direction where we constantly have to reevaluate our own initial ideas. Maybe something that you think is a good idea to begin with is eventually super difficult and time consuming to actually implement in a later stage, and doesn’t really make sense. We spend endless hours on these kind of questions. Not just to create the project itself, but also just to document the process of the project, which we are going through right now. Because hopefully we can learn a lot from it. The practice has also recently been appointed as the curator of the Danish contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025. And that also presents a very good opportunity for us to take an even closer look at our approach to architecture and begin to imagine which direction it might develop without the constraints that we currently have to work with. This is a process where we are trying to figure out where do we actually want this approach to go? It’s really the perfect scenario to properly unfold some of our ideas, where we are actually also the ones who can set up the right constraints to be to evaluate our ideas effectively. I think that this is the direction of the office right now: firstly we are trying to implement our ideas in a larger scale project and simultaneously, we’re also working more theoretically, in a dream scenario where we will look into where we could possibly progress towards in the near future. Thoravej 29 <img width="2560" height="1920" width_o="2560" height_o="1920" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b614147693a02f3e91154ce8350c50691ec67e70561bb07b0a9d1fc67fc3fbf8/35_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" data-mid="201531043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b614147693a02f3e91154ce8350c50691ec67e70561bb07b0a9d1fc67fc3fbf8/35_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson <img width="2560" height="1919" width_o="2560" height_o="1919" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6bd02ac050341464b6dfd7afa2ddc91f98d2db4850ce196529aa97a3c38a74a6/33_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" data-mid="201531048" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6bd02ac050341464b6dfd7afa2ddc91f98d2db4850ce196529aa97a3c38a74a6/33_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson <img width="6000" height="4500" width_o="6000" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7a25587f311c0eb21d4a422ede22f75165f9741fcdb8cdfcbbef755160e3a0a/31_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" data-mid="201531160" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f7a25587f311c0eb21d4a422ede22f75165f9741fcdb8cdfcbbef755160e3a0a/31_thoravej-29_construction_hampus-berndtson_2022-2025.jpg" /> Credit Hampus Berndtson CS Could you speak more specifically about one of these ideas, or a specific practical problem that you have encountered during this process? SP So for instance, we had this idea again, to simply find new purposes for all the material that is inside the existing structure. And sometimes that creates an opportunity where you also are faced with facing some spatial problems, for example it’s a very low ceiling building, so you want to open up the space. But as a result of opening up this space, removing some of the old decks and the slabs between the levels, we had to find new uses for this material. We decided that we would repurpose these slabs into a centralised ramp that could connect between the levels of the building. So the same slabs which used to compress and constrict the space will now connect between the floors, reformed into one continuous big staircase. This was a simple idea. When you do the modeling in Rhino and so on, it’s quite simple to make it work. Of course, as soon as you attempt to introduce this idea into reality, issues of certification arise: engineers have to make their calculations in order to ensure it as an actual building component. This process dragged out the time that we were spending on the project, as our engineers didn’t really know how to make the correct calculations. All of these problems arose as a consequence of that simple idea. In the end, we actually ended up searching for the original company that delivered the slabs back in the 1960s. Thankfully, they still exist today and they had the original calculations for the structure. We scanned the slabs today, comparing this situation with the initial calculations from the 60s, and introducing another engineering firm to do a recalculation of their calculation, and only then did we managed to get the material through the certification process. This situation really captures how you can - and often have to - kind of hack the whole system of how you normally work as an architect and as an engineer to introduce some of these quite radical ideas. Right now, we also know of some interesting research projects undergoing at the Aarhus School of Architecture - they actually just got funded by Realdania, this big fund in Denmark - to develop a method of scanning existing concrete modules in order to receive the same type of certification with old structural elements. We’re having a discussion with them, because maybe we could use some of their research within our projects. We’re working on the boundary between something that is purely research based, and something that is actually employable on a construction site. I think this is an interesting place to be in, because you can really push the trajectory of how we might develop our built environment in the near future. So we like to stay in this peculiar situation where we are both trying to be visionaries, looking forward, engaging in discussions with researchers and so on, considering how things could be in the near future, but at the same time doing our best to implement some parts of these visions into reality, with the constraints that we are faced with today. ︎︎︎ https://aefoundation.co.uk/Accountability Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:37:58 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Accountability LOG <img width="1023" height="767" width_o="1023" height_o="767" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/818ce978a379c5c261537517c5b1d40e8f0e6df268904442ed45027bce2c0bf4/HOCHPARTERRE.jpg" data-mid="73692127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/818ce978a379c5c261537517c5b1d40e8f0e6df268904442ed45027bce2c0bf4/HOCHPARTERRE.jpg" /> <img width="1023" height="767" width_o="1023" height_o="767" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54cf5532a76fae5a1d72e52f1cad133d3c4dc5fdcb59a1523997e60dba5f7d48/IMG-20191109-WA0000-2.jpg" data-mid="73692183" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54cf5532a76fae5a1d72e52f1cad133d3c4dc5fdcb59a1523997e60dba5f7d48/IMG-20191109-WA0000-2.jpg" /> <img width="1023" height="767" width_o="1023" height_o="767" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2cc34103f9c7c16251b1486c6a2c60e2ca32ae774a4d57a42f98932f46763e98/IMG_20191108_203218.jpg" data-mid="73692211" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2cc34103f9c7c16251b1486c6a2c60e2ca32ae774a4d57a42f98932f46763e98/IMG_20191108_203218.jpg" /> <img width="1023" height="767" width_o="1023" height_o="767" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1dc741ae776670fd8766e8cc2554e37e8782b1e24388577fae3788b3bc898b78/IMG_20191108_203427.jpg" data-mid="74550840" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1dc741ae776670fd8766e8cc2554e37e8782b1e24388577fae3788b3bc898b78/IMG_20191108_203427.jpg" /> ANGELA DEUBER PASCAL FLAMMER OLIVER LÜTJENS THOMAS PADMANABHAN ︎︎︎Samuel Penn ACCOUNTABILITY SP Thomas, what aspect of your work do you take most seriously? TPWhen we work on projects sometimes it’s not obvious where the attention goes. So when we start on a project we are first very serious about the inner workings of the project, all the serious work of legislation, programme and structure and so on. But this is only scaffolding, a kind of stepping stone for the real thing, to get to a final form where the things that we are exploring finally take shape, and where the difficulties and the contradictions that we encounter in the process take shape and are expressed. So it’s very funny that the end result is really very often something we discover in the end. The outer skin of a building, its expression is the very last thing we work on and the very first thing that you see. And sometimes it comes from a moment or a need that is almost ephemeral and almost spontaneous, but that builds on a body of serious work. So there’s a kind of functional seriousness of a core project with a result that can sometimes seem more complex and more contradictory. But in the end, our perception of the work is just the opposite; the end result, the outer shell, we take seriously. Because the next day, after the project is finished or built, you forget the programme, you forget the constraints, you forget the jury, you forget all these things. And also the programme or the jury won’t be important in ten years time, but the end result will be. So there’s a strange reversal of seriousness and playfulness in our work, from the process to the result. SPSo, what would you consider to be the core? OLForm. TPYes, form, expression and language. SPAnd does this have a social dimension? TPYes, we celebrate the contradictions that we encounter. We try to integrate them. If there are sixty people in this room, all with different views of life, then we try to make an architecture that acknowledges these differences, an architecture that welcomes rather than excludes them. I’m saying this because I want to throw a stone in one of your windows—laughs. PFWho has the biggest windows? I mean, when we talk about being ‘serious’ it would be interesting to know what we consider ‘not serious’. And I think you kind of made a first proposal, which was playfulness? TPYes. PFI try to answer this holistically, or as holistically as I can. Playfulness doesn’t stipulate if it is serious or not serious; playful can be serious. I wouldn’t necessarily consider playfulness as being un-holistic or ‘un-as-good-as-I-can’. So in a way the idea of serious or playful is not really a parameter. SPI don’t think the discussion is about the distinction between ‘playful’ or ‘serious’. The question I’m asking is more about the social dimension of your work, if you give credence to the idea of the common, or the common good? Architects in the relatively recent past considered the social dimension an important aspect of their work. What I’m asking is if you consider this in your work? PFYes, I think every part of my work does it principally. But the big difference is that in the past the topics that were a common problem, which people were working on, were more clearly defined. That’s the biggest difference. Yes, I would say that everything I do in that sense is serious. I try to understand things as broadly and as holistically as possible. And the idea, just to say, do I continue a formal repertoire of the past, versus ‘am I a modernist’ that doesn’t care about form; I don’t see that my work makes a differentiation between modernism, post-modernism, or formal versus pragmatic, or programme, or something. So I find this idea of separating our profession into ‘formal’ versus ‘programme’ very old. I think we should forget it altogether. For me it doesn’t exist actually. TPPascal, you just said that we don’t have the big problems that link us as a profession at the moment, and I kind of disagree when you see the four of us at this table. My perception is that our work is very different, each of us, but the questions we work on are very similar. I would for example say, and please contradict me if I’m wrong, the vulgarity of consumer culture and how we deal with it is a question we all have in common, of mass society, placeless-ness, loss of the individual. I think we all deal with this. And I would say that there’s a completely different answer that Angela is giving, or you are giving, or we are giving to that question. But the question that’s in the room, that everybody deals with is, ‘what’s your local individual reality?’ versus the homogenisation of culture, of lives, the fact that everybody can be replaced, the sense that you’re just a ‘bit’ in a trillion, that everything gets thrown away in a short time. And I think Ollie and I have an answer that’s more saying, ‘ok, we should go along with all that, the flat screen, the plastic toilet’, that all that should always be there in the project, and you said the word holistic, and holistic means, of course, ‘integrated’? PFYes. TPBut integrating many things into a project where the ‘one-ness’ of the project is still a scope. And for us the ‘one-ness’ of the project is constantly questioned, as is the one-ness of the world for that matter. I think we differ in the answer rather than the question, at the moment. ADI have a broken window. For me there are four aspects. First: I do not play. For example, during teaching we have a blackboard with words written on it that we don’t use. One word is 'play'. Architecture is too serious to play. But you have to have some kind of excitement to move ahead, to be fascinated. It has to be sincere; but also relaxed at the same time. To answer your question: all parts have to be serious. There is no difference between something more or less serious. Number two. To take everything seriously, you should go further than just taking something seriously. And in addition, there should be no contradiction. There are no contradictions in my work. That's a big difference to what was said earlier. Once I have a contradiction, there is a mistake, the thought is not clear. Number three. We should re-question everything. That is what we do. We question the programme, we question the world, we question the writings, the history of architecture. In the end we have to question everything. And that's more than just to take something seriously. Number four. What is also very important for me is to put the world in parentheses. To put brackets around what we do every day allows us to think something from scratch, from the beginning. For me everything is serious, but it has to go further. SPI want to draw out the social dimension a bit more. Pascal? PFI think in my case it’s what I would call empathy; empathy toward people and society, and the things that I have to work with. I think it’s a love and admiration for the thing that I’m in relation to, or have to look at. And in empathy is also the idea that I give my best or most holistic answer to it. But I would never think, for example, that it could be full of contradiction. Because I think the world is full of contradiction, but also charming and loving. I found it interesting that you, Angela, kind of don’t want to have contradiction. ADThey don’t exist. PFI like contradictions. ADI think, if you see a contradiction then you didn’t think about it in a clear way. OLBut does it mean that you establish a hierarchy in a project that everything derives from, or that comes from a specific logic? Because if you and I have a discussion, every now and again we might have a difference of opinion where we contradict each other. But for the people listening to the discussion it might be quite interesting to hear these contradictions, much more interesting than if we always agreed. And architectural elements, they can claim this kind of autonomy in a project, so you might have a column in a certain configuration and a wall in another, and which can contradict each other, but that create energy and tension. Michelangelo’s work is full of examples like that. ADThere is a big difference between the term ‘contradiction’ and ‘opposite’. The opposite is a very nice theme, spatially. OLYes. ADSo, for me this is semantics. Of course the idea of opposites is a nice theme. PFSo what would be a contradiction that you might like? ADA contradiction doesn’t exist for me. I don’t want to think it. PFNo, just to understand. I’m not really sure what you mean? When you say you don’t want any contradictions. Just so I can begin to understand your position; what would be a bad contradiction where you would have to think more to correct it? ADYou are doing the contradictions. You should answer. SPThomas, you first raised it. What do you mean by contradiction? TPI remember, Angela, when you were our guest in Munich, and we had students that were working on the contradiction between being able to design an urban façade and being able to organise an apartment behind the facade. There were a hell of a lot of contradictions, because there was neither a clear typology they could follow in terms of a contemporary apartment, because we have no idea what that should be, and there was no clear idea what the expression of a clear urban building should be today. While they were looking at these two things they persistently didn’t match up. I think this was a contradiction that you enjoyed discussing with the students, while being a bit troubled by it. That was the point where we probably departed? ADI am not two architects; one doing the façade, one doing the interior. TPYes, or even one architect working consciously against themselves in one project, as a conscious operation. We just encounter so many inconsistencies, the desires, wishes and goals in society that we want to bring into the work, that if they are absorbed into the work that it becomes richer and stronger. We never think about origin. It’s really interesting that you brought up origin, Angela. You brought up origin as a thought where architecture is looking for its own foundations. We rather take ‘stuff’ and work with it, with material that’s somehow already available.&nbsp; SPOliver, do you want to add something? OLI’m just worried that Thomas is taking us on to very slippery ground here—laughs. TPYou want to play it safe Ollie—laughs. OLThomas said that we take ‘stuff’ and I was worried that you could interpret from that that we look at images and make collages out of buildings, making shortcuts, taking finished elements and making something new, like Miroslav Šik’s Analogue Architecture does for instance. And even though we sometimes quote, and then we definitely take a piece from someone else, we more often pay homage. We think that architecture is like a language and that every element that you see is a puzzle, like words in a sentence to create something bigger that in the end has meaning. Therefore the ‘stuff’ that we take is rather very very small fragments wouldn’t you say Thomas? It’s a hard and a long process. TPYes. What I meant with ‘stuff’ is like when we start with a typology of a building, the plan at the beginning, then we usually start in a very conventional way, we start in the most normal way possible. We are not original. We almost try to work in an impersonal way in the beginning. That’s what I mean by ‘stuff’. It’s the opposite of an idea where you start with basic elements. When we develop a floor plan we start with a very simple scheme that’s almost non-artistic. And it’s also not fundamental but rather conventional, it’s taken. Not taken from something specific but taken from a general expression of housing or of an office building or of a school. We take that and then we transform it in the process. SPWhy do you start from convention? OLBecause we don’t think we need to start with a very good idea. We believe that you discover things when you begin from a very banal foundation, and that then as the project continues, ideas are found in the process, and we don’t stop finding those ideas. That’s the great thing about architecture, it takes a long time. And if you work five years on a building you’d maybe better have space for a few more ideas, and maybe also in the last year while you’re working on the construction details; ideas that completely change the perception of the building.SPBut your buildings are full of original ideas as well. I know this. OLBut we also steal—laughs. TPBut our starting point is usually quite stupid. SPWhat do you mean by stupid? TPThat it’s a non-architectural rationale that’s at the base of a project,&nbsp;because it’s more practical. It’s super pragmatic on the most stupid, lowest level possible. We are trying to think of the most stupid project that we can possibly manage. By stupid, I mean the most basic, the most conventional, the most generic. We believe that a generic structure is like a beautiful sponge that can absorb many different ingredients, and then it can become richer and richer. But the starting point doesn’t have to be complicated. PFIt’s a kind of programmatic fulfilment of needs or something? TPYes, but in the most generic sense. PFSiza called that ‘the ugly model’ or something. I heard this story, I don’t know if it’s true. He would say that he would ask his staff to produce the most simple and clear answer, how to structure a school or whatever, to produce a project that is kind of the most normal and well working without any crazy things in it. And that he would also ask this in a physical model, which he would refer to as like being ‘sculptures in the past’; that in a studio those studying under a master would make a model which the master would then rework. He says that he sees it in a similar way. So the basis is the thing that works, and that he then reconfigures it from that basis. I understand what you’re saying as something like this. OLBut can I ask Pascal, because we rarely have the chance to talk. You come from a school of thought where the initial idea is the key to everything. I want to ask how this is in your daily life, do you work like this, because when I look at your work I’m not sure. I mean it could be but it also doesn’t need to be. PFI used to work like that. I don’t work like this anymore. Let’s say, the best state to be in is one where I feel curiosity. I think that’s the best state we can have in life, for food, for other people, for architecture, that’s when I feel the most awake, or that’s my best feeling. The worst is when I feel nothing, when I walk through cities and feel nothing. So basically what I would like to do, and what all us here want to do, is make stuff that produces curiosity. When I look back at my time at architecture school I was quite traumatised by my teachers because I disliked almost all of them, and the reason was that they wanted to tell me what I should do and like. They tried to teach me how I should feel or what should excite me, and I realised that there are three people in my life that I was really fascinated with, and I think the key with them was that they were not imposing on me what I should feel or think, and I think that this in a certain way is also our role. We are like a movie director. We have to think how to make a building, to manipulate it so that the future user feels attracted. We should not imply too much, not tell them already what they should like, we should actually seduce the person without the future user feeling that they have been actively seduced. That’s also the reason why I don’t do projects with the main idea anymore, because that’s exactly the problem of it. It’s very dogmatic, you say, ‘look this is interesting’. Now I think the important work of the architect is to find this very complicated balanced construction between doing something while the visitor doesn’t feel something is happening, but being aware what the future user will feel. In a negative way we would call this a manipulation. In a positive way I would call it a seduction. TPThis is a compliment. Don’t your buildings invite the visitor, the user, the people that experience, to also critically analyse, raise their perception or artistic sensibility, to question and also to be introspective, all things that are not just emotional, not manipulated but very conscious? I think I see your work more on an experiential level as having intellectual content that takes the visitor and user very seriously. PFOf course. TPI was a bit critical of this idea of manipulation because I think your buildings are more open. PFWith that word ‘manipulation’, I just want to say that I’m aware that when I do something it will be perceived in a certain way. And this I have to steer. But of course I would like that somebody goes into a space and feels attracted, and in the best way they wouldn’t know why. They think, ‘this is a crazy structure’, and then, ‘actually this is not a structure’, ‘is it that form’, and at the same time ‘something else is opening here’. SPBut why all these acrobatics? PFIn order to produce and unanswered curiosity. I think it’s very important that you should not get to an answer, that you should not get to the final ‘why’. OLYes. PFThe best building is one that’s circling, like a story where you bite your tail. TPLike any work of art, when a work is open it can attract so many wishes, feelings and projections with the changing times. SPDo you build for an ideal reader of your buildings? And do you equate that audience with society? OLNo. I can’t influence what people really think about our buildings. I can present a building if visitors come, then they always like it much better than before—laughs. TPLaughs—but Ollie we wouldn’t invest so much love and detail into the building if we didn’t think somebody would appreciate it. OLIt will of course be appreciated by somebody, but by very few. The things that you and I care about Thomas very few will appreciate or care about. PFI don’t think that you feel very different to the way I do. I really think that we are extremely similar, all of us. I’m not saying we’re exactly the same, but I think to a large extent we’re very similar. TPYou said that you have times when you walk through a city and you don’t feel anything. PFBecause of the bad buildings—laughs. TPLaughs—architecture is so funny. You can’t ignore it, and you can be perceptive about it, and you can be really open about it. It depends on you. So it can be between people but also within the same person. I can’t just walk through the world without seeing anything. SPMy next question is about the teaching of history to architects. Angela, do you think it’s important to teach students about history in a way that is not just about inspiring them in their design process? ADOf course. In the end I am taking about masterpieces. Thinking about history is your counterpart. It’s like a person you talk to. This is one point. And then to be inspired is a lot. To be inspired is already the highest you can reach. So, I don’t agree with your word ‘just to be inspired’. For me it’s the main thing holding everything together, the inspiration. OLI would absolutely agree with that. It was also you that said that you have to be critical about architectural history, yes of course, but it’s also much more important for everybody to love architecture and to understand what you love, to fully engage with something. It’s the same as what Pascal says about not understanding or being curious about things, because it’s always fresh, the same but new, but different, not getting behind it because there’s depth, so there’s a full engagement from your side with it. And then you can also be critical about it because some architects that you love, they also made some crap work, and then you understand why this other piece is so much better. Then you can also discover that some people that have written about it have said wrong things that they didn’t understand. So history has this much more scientific side, and yet as mankind it’s our common history of culture. You don’t need to know about anything, you just have to engage with it.&nbsp; ADThis is interesting because when we were in the library of Luca Ortelli in Lausanne, you had this Plečnik book in your hand. Around the same time I reduced my library to a hundred books so that when took a book from the shelf I would feel only joy. My goal is just to have books with masterpieces where I don’t have weak parts. I am now thinking of world architecture, for example from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greek City Planning. It’s the question of clarifying and to value. SPThere’s a great difference between learning from history and studying historic buildings. Just learning about the rules of a building is formalistic; it’s not history is it? TPNo, but history is the only way we can expand our imagination beyond the present moment. It’s another dimension of space. We have three-dimensional space and then we have time, and because we can’t see the future we can expand our imagination into the past, and the only thing we have from the past are artefacts; memories, texts, images, buildings, objects. So these are the sources. They’re not the ‘mere’ sources; they are ‘the’ sources. SPThey’re not the ‘mere’ sources, but they are a chosen and then curated collection. And they’re brought together for a specific reason, which makes it instrumental. There is agency in their choosing. It’s very rarely talked about. If you’re just choosing examples from the past willy-nilly then I’m afraid you’re a shit architect. But you’re not a shit architect, so you must be compiling these examples or artefacts in the here-and-now for a reason. TPIt’s like falling in love. You’re attracted to something, and only after you get to know it you find our, later, the reason why you were attracted to it. It’s not an analytical process; it’s one of affection. OLI want to go back to what Angela said because I thought that was great and tough at the same time. You said that you want to exclude everything that’s weak, right? ADYes. OLAnd in principle I understand, but for instance, I looked at a Robert Venturi book yesterday and I’ve loved his work for a long time, and he made a garage for somebody outside of Philadelphia. It’s really quite a bad project, it’s very early, and it’s very touching because you can see all this ambition and you can see that he kind of fails, and it doesn’t matter to anyone, it’s just a garage for two cars. But there’s an arch, you know, and it’s very thin. I love that project because of what’s coming after, because you can see he’s trying. Don’t you have that feeling with the architects that you love, that you also like the weak parts, or where you feel this unrealised ambition? ADI don’t want to waste my time to find out these weak parts. I like to take a book out of my shelf and open it and not be disappointed. I’d like to take out a Gothic book and open it and see for example Palazzo Ducale in Venice just to discover great things. Because my time is, like all of us, we have a certain amount of time, so I try to make it as successful or positive as possible. And then there is another point. By reducing there are also many books which are not written yet and which are missing. So, I’d like to spend more energy in finding them and including them in my library. And not always taking the same and talking about the same. We are so limited in our way of thinking. It’s just one perspective how we were taught history. OLBut don’t you think the history of mankind is also about ambition and about failure? I mean that makes us human, that we fail in the things we do. And in this failure there is also something very moving, that’s a humanistic idea, that mankind is not perfect. ADI also appreciate that mankind is not perfect. You take Mies van der Rohe, House Tugendhat, and it is full of mistakes. It’s conscious. SPBut the ambition is not mistakes. TPIt’s interesting. We had a chance to visit Stockholm a few weeks ago, and we had the chance to visit some of the works of Lewerentz and Asplund, and then we saw some of the minor masters, Celsing, who we admire a lot but who doesn’t have the importance and the fame of these other two masters. And I felt extremely the openness and the incompleteness of his work; lot’s of loose ends. That really inspired us, to visit those, while the other works were almost encapsulated in their perfection. OLI know what you mean, but Asplund and Lewerentz were also amazing. TPYes they were amazing. But for me it’s like a can that’s closed, it’s almost impossible to open. SPSince we determined that looking at historic artefact is a suitable venture, for the benefit of students in the audience or recent graduates who have gone through the system here, where they were probably taught by professors who had their particular set of reference points, their chosen artefacts. And of course the students can try to make a whole out of all these parts. But are you trying to pass something on through these choices. When I said earlier about being ‘just’ inspired by buildings for instrumental purposes I meant rather that if that’s the case, then do these choices contain something deeper that you want to pass on as a lesson in architecture? TPYou know, I think you keep going back to the same point, which is completely useless. You’re going back to the point where you want to talk about principles. Ollie and I, we never talk about principles, because we don’t think there’s a principle core, we don’t think there’s an abstract world of ideas that floats above the forms. SPI don’t think so either as it happens. OLBut Thomas, when we argue we do. TPYes, but we are completely sceptical of the idea of the origin, of German idealism, where the world of ideas floats as a kind of cloud above the worthless form of reality. SPBut then why do talk about ‘type’ if you don’t believe in it? TPI use the word type because it doesn’t work, because I know it’s a fragment. SPBut it’s a formal principle that exists in the abstract. TPYes, but which doesn’t work. It’s dysfunctional. We encounter the dysfunctional type every day. We are completely sceptical of any basic principle that is a kind of fundamentalism. SPI’m not talking about fundamentals, but rather the understanding that what you do has motivation and therefore can have meaning attached to it, especially if you’re teaching.&nbsp; TPYes, but a painter finds his truth in the painting, in the act of painting. Not in the act of thinking about the fundamentals of painting. An architect finds the truth of his work within the means of an architect. SPIt’s not about the artist thinking about the fundamentals of painting as he’s painting but rather about having the skills and sense of intention and then to communicate it, if not during then after the process. TPIn our teaching it’s quite simple. We are for the public role and responsibility in architecture and we think that the language of architecture and its public role is completely underdeveloped. OLBut that’s kind of a principle that you’re talking about, because in the end you sit on desk crits with your students and you discuss the work, and every week there’s another step and you discover the next step, and every week you discover the next step with them together. You know the feedback from the stu-dents is always, yes yes, their ideology is all fine, but we enjoyed the process, there was a lot of energy and we got really far with the project. Architecture is also about making things, and that’s what you pass on when you’re teaching, it’s how to explore, how to be curious as Pascal said, how to have empathy, how to like things. SPBut if you don’t know what you’re passing on, how can you teach? Are you ‘just’ great inspirers? PFI’m not saying we shouldn’t have history; I’m just not very good at it, so I don’t teach it. What I try to do is foster curiosity and empathy, and the student decides what to bring in as a topic, where they have a feeling for something. And I try to discuss with the student and eventually help to develop and analyse, to eventually produce form with it, or connect it. So I try in the best way possible to have zero dogma, no dogma. And every book is as good as the next one, or no book, or whatever. I think it doesn’t matter. Then you find out during the discourse what is interesting. One could say it’s like psychoanalysis but somehow in architecture. But there is no dogma and no better or less good, everything is principally accepted, and everything is worth thinking through if an individual says it’s valuable.&nbsp; TPPhilosophically I agree with you, only in our teaching we do the opposite. We are more on Angela’s side in our teaching because we basically open our collection of one hundred books, which doesn’t exist literally speaking, and we take out the best things that we think, we take out the best stuff because we want the students only to get the best. And we’re not waiting for them to bring a mediocre house from the Internet, because it’s a waste of time —laughs. OLI’m also with Angela here—laughs. PFBut then is teaching not a waste of time? Because then you already basically know what you’re going to talk to them about, since you decided already that this is a good building. Why do you need to talk if you know already? TPNo, the good building is so rich that it can lead to anything. In the student’s work it can lead to anything because it’s so complex and rich and it can absorb so many projections from the student’s side that anything can happen. Because I’m also against second rate inspiration. I never experienced the teaching of Miroslav Šik, but the idea of being inspired by the ordinary I find really terrible. Why would you want to set your ambitions lower than they can be? I find that really depressing. SPDo you know why he proposes this? I mean he’s not here, but do you have an idea? He’s influenced almost two generations of students here in Zürich, and now teachers too of course. You see these buildings springing up everywhere. I’m sorry if some of you in the audience have designed them. Maybe they’re really good. TPMy understanding is that he was in the tradition of Aldo Rossi and that the intellectual idea of the historic type got replaced by a less intellectual version based on the ordinary. PFYes, the ordinary does not make you afraid. What you know makes you feel good. TPFor me it’s terrible. PFYes for you, but let’s say when a thing does not disturb your understanding of something it can give you a sense of happiness. I mean psychologically this is proven. Where you don’t have disruption you feel good. If you see something that you understand, you feel good. I principally understand this idea that you try to make people happy by giving them no disruption. SPHe might even argue that this is the ‘social dimension’ in his work, even if we disagree.&nbsp; PF Yes of course. TPI think it’s populist rather than social. PF But it’s really interesting to think of what he says by doing this and a bit less interesting to experience the buildings. SPI’d like to turn to the audience for the final questions. You’ve all been standing very patiently. AUDIENCEI’d like to talk about the role of emotion in your work, because it was a common theme among all of you in this discussion, and something I feel very closely to in my personality and in my architecture. To feel a space is much more than to just see a space. I would like to hear your opinion. PFI think it’s key. The emotional is the trigger to then go and analyse it. I think it’s almost the only thing we have to do as architects. As a starting point it’s the key to make us curious. You feel triggered to do and to develop by being emotionally connected. OLWe had this point already when you talked about manipulating or seducing people, and I’m really much less confident that I can trigger emotion within you. I know what makes Thomas hot—laughs. PFLaughs—what makes him hot? OLYou know we’ve been working together for over twelve years, and I know what he likes and I know what I like. But I’m also surprised by the stuff that I don’t know, the triggers in me. I think the work we do, we can only do as good as we can, and then hopefully somebody will feel the same, or more interestingly will feel something else, and that there will be a discussion about that at some point if you’re lucky. But I also trust that our sense of proportion is good so you would also feel that. But maybe you would feel that it’s not comfortable. I don’t know, I don’t have a solution, and you know, a lot of the things I find ugly I find interesting ten years later and then have a deep affection for them. So I don’t know. Of course there are standards like dark to bright and things like that, but in the end emotion is extremely complex and very specific and also has a lot of cultural baggage. TPI personally would like to replace the word ‘emotion’ with a sense of value, with density, and with human dignity. If I see a building that has been done with incredible care, intelligence and sensibility, any of you will feel that, a building that is this dense as an artefact, even if it’s from another time, or if you don’t know the author, or if you disagree with the philosophy of the author. It doesn’t matter. PFI disagree. TPReally? PFYes. Didn’t it happen to you that you made a work that you put all the best you could into, and you were suffering, and it was just a piece of shit, you know, just bad? So this idea to put all your energy, all your ability, is not enough, because I think it’s only enough if it triggers this magic thing that makes you want to continue. The word in German would be ‘streben’, ‘das streben arbeit’ (aspirational work). It’s of no relevance I find TPI thought it’s just that we’re working against the background of a lot of architects that are not trying hard enough, and that that is already a value in itself. OLBut you are talking about two different things. If the thing is achieved, then as Thomas says there’s that feeling of energy. But yes of course we also experience that you work and work on a competition and you think it’s great and then you loose it, or you even win it, and later you say, ‘shit, it’s not so great after all’. Or you just can’t do it. You just fail during the attempt, a productive failure, but kind of a sad failure, and you put it in the drawer. ADI would just have a very simple answer to your question, for me being inspired is the moment of feeling happy emotion. And this is what drives the work. SPAnother question. AUDIENCEYes. The idea of not being dogmatic is already dogmatic, is already a principle. Looking at the work of all of you one could say that you all believe in autonomous architecture. What makes architecture autonomous is the first question? We heard about meaningful architecture, we heard about balance, that you want to get inspired. But what is there beside language, beside autonomy. What makes a building architecture is the second question? TPWhen we finish a building we don’t know if it’s good or not, because time will tell, and the perception of it will change anyway within a few years, and then after ten years again and then again. Then buildings will either turn out to be architecture or they will just fall back into being buildings, you know, just a house or a garage or a shop. That’s kind of a beautiful thing isn’t it? We always have a safety net. We can also still have a functional house when the greatness fails. AUDIENCEI just wonder if there are other tools other than the tools of autonomy, the tools of language and history that we can access to make architecture? PFYes, the use, society, the guys that will go in. The way that they feel, the way they interact, the way they perceive eventually the piece, the piece in relation to history or in relation to the contemporary. TPAnd the way we build today. The building industry provides materials that you can afford. ADBut he asked what makes a building architecture, not what makes a building. TPNo, but it’s a factor. When you take an idea, then the present state of the user, the present state of the building technology will transform that idea. It will feel and look different than you expected because it will materialise through the technology of today. And that’s the wonderful thing also about the relationship to history, that you can take things from history and when you use them today they are immediately detached from history, and they automatically get a certain sense of autonomy and originality because you’re using the technology of today not of hundreds of years ago. We experienced that at some point and we got more and more relaxed about just taking things, because in the end we know they will feel and look different. PFI think everything is architecture as long as it doesn’t rain on your head—laughs. SPFinal question. AUDIENCEThere’s a beautiful movie by Lars von Trier, The Five Obstructions, where this other director, I forgot his name, made a movie about the perfect human being, and I think this movie somehow applies to this conversation because you all work with the same, like you take other conventions than you do or you do, but you all take these little conventions really seriously and transform them a little bit to make ‘curious’. And I think this movie, where this other director gets these restrictions, makes for a way more interesting movie than he made in the first part, because he had to make this perfect human being movie, and then he had to have these restrictions and he had to make it again. Twelve frames instead of twenty-four. My question is, where in the work of each other do you get the curiosity? What qualities do you see in the work of the others? I just want to make it a little less polite. OLWhat I love about Angela’s work is the toughness. ADHe wanted to make it uncomfortable. Laughs—what do you hate about my work?&nbsp; OLI actually haven’t visited any of your buildings, but I’d love to do that. SPThis isn’t a dating agency—laughs. OLLaughs—what I love about Angela’s work is the toughness, the sharpness, and I have a feeling there’s a sense of fragility there, which is maybe just a projection that I bring, but I’d be curious to see and to find out. And it’s this contradiction actually between something being sharp and tough but also fragile that interests me. ADBut without the contradiction—laughs. OLBut that is a contradiction. I don’t have a problem with both at the same time—laughs. PFThis is kind of funny, we just have to bash on each other? AUDIENCENo, it’s more what makes you curious about the other’s work. PFWell. I like your use of green for example. OLThanks—laughs. We named the green in the office. It’s called Klohstein. TPI’m curious about this very precise slow expansion of vocabulary. And I’m always imagining what the motivation behind each step is. We have so much stuff in our projects you can’t even follow. But in your projects Pascal, you can more closely follow a language. You talk about film. I try to imagine what the film director was doing behind these projects when he introduced a new element that wasn’t there before, because I feel an incredible discipline and reluctance to be too free and too fast with your elements. And that’s probably for both of you. So I’m following it like a very slow growing plant in this garden and I’m interested where the plant will grow next. PFWell I think because I didn’t publish at all in the last few years, I think you might be thinking about projects that I did quite a long time ago. What I do today, for me is very clean; I imagine how it is to walk around the space and how to always produce this feeling of being triggered by something but not getting to an end, not getting the full satisfaction in a certain way. SPYou’re a tease.&nbsp; PFYes I try to tease. SPThese conversations never reach a totally adequate conclusion. I’m getting used to it. Thank you all for coming and special thanks to our guests.︎︎︎ https://aefoundation.co.uk/Accounts Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:04:34 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Accounts LOG ACCOUNTS ︎︎︎Available at Pelinu Books Editor: Samuel PennAssoc editor: Cameron McEwanDesign: Alin CincăPublisher: Pelinu Projects SRL 16.5 x 23 x 2.1 cm248 pages, Texts and Colour ImagesPaperback500 copies, first edition 2019 Printed at Fabrik, BucharestISBN 978-973-0-29787-4 ACCOUNTS is the record of an extended conversation that took place among the members and invited guests of the AE Foundation in the first five years of its activity. It includes lectures, discussions and interviews with prominent figures, emerging architects and educators. Beginning with Doubt and ending with Beauty, the conversations between explored the many and varied schools of thought that occupy the discipline. <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a3ea5a20e4e14f570a6b69f4f5c52e99cb74a21648cda3928296df622df47f46/01_Accounts-Cover.jpg" data-mid="74549631" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a3ea5a20e4e14f570a6b69f4f5c52e99cb74a21648cda3928296df622df47f46/01_Accounts-Cover.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4144a6b7769dc04dbf4d49ac334e7bafab0082ad0553f00e6353fef5847f92b3/02_Accounts-Page-006-007.jpg" data-mid="74549638" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4144a6b7769dc04dbf4d49ac334e7bafab0082ad0553f00e6353fef5847f92b3/02_Accounts-Page-006-007.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a3b263f02155004face2eba9fead73933902704dc11ee5a5b93e6349723044b4/03_Accounts-Page-084-085.jpg" data-mid="74549640" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a3b263f02155004face2eba9fead73933902704dc11ee5a5b93e6349723044b4/03_Accounts-Page-084-085.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01dc59322aef3d5f2c3e63b9548873b4271526f7d714535f975f2ed2087d8c0d/07_Accounts-Pictures-2.jpg" data-mid="74549688" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/01dc59322aef3d5f2c3e63b9548873b4271526f7d714535f975f2ed2087d8c0d/07_Accounts-Pictures-2.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d644dd3d6e43e5570758cbba6df4b4ecc0263f801011daa62e84e26d0b24de4/08_Accounts-Pictures-3.jpg" data-mid="74549692" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6d644dd3d6e43e5570758cbba6df4b4ecc0263f801011daa62e84e26d0b24de4/08_Accounts-Pictures-3.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="849" width_o="1200" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bafffb89312c6af16570555405fc542db1ca2f014cd2c3e47c78de5eb209dba0/09_Accounts-Back.jpg" data-mid="74549695" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bafffb89312c6af16570555405fc542db1ca2f014cd2c3e47c78de5eb209dba0/09_Accounts-Back.jpg" /> Reviews <img width="1608" height="2048" width_o="1608" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d0fcc5df4fe66bce9f0198e62f22a8f1801abdc404dfb367ea9152e423ba58c/Modulor-Magazine-Review-March-2020.jpg" data-mid="74162446" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1d0fcc5df4fe66bce9f0198e62f22a8f1801abdc404dfb367ea9152e423ba58c/Modulor-Magazine-Review-March-2020.jpg" /> <img width="2776" height="3508" width_o="2776" height_o="3508" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d963748d33f451cea4f2eec459e679c9288df4280648a3fd1dfccfac5e82163f/Buch-Accounts-aus-wbw_1-2_2020-2.jpg" data-mid="74162235" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d963748d33f451cea4f2eec459e679c9288df4280648a3fd1dfccfac5e82163f/Buch-Accounts-aus-wbw_1-2_2020-2.jpg" /> https://aefoundation.co.uk/Raphael-Zuber Sat, 06 Jun 2020 13:06:10 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Raphael-Zuber LOG <img width="2298" height="2770" width_o="2298" height_o="2770" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c698a3d297649d98f8c04c135bbfe92e3601889e86abb773e24b83e525529fdd/7_Raphael-Zuber_Portrait.jpg" data-mid="74135961" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c698a3d297649d98f8c04c135bbfe92e3601889e86abb773e24b83e525529fdd/7_Raphael-Zuber_Portrait.jpg" /> RAPHAEL ZUBER ︎︎︎Samuel Penn SP Your new book includes the four projects you exhibited at the Venice Biennale 'Reporting from the Front' in 2016 titled 'Spaces'. Why did you choose these particular projects? RZ At that time it was the ones I liked the most; from the time we made the decision to do the exhibition in Venice and not looking back too far. They were a bit recent and I think it was a good selection. SP Did the four have anything in common that you thought made them a good grouping? RZ They have, but I don't think that was the reason. Maybe because they were the most clear. SP But they all have common features. For instance I noticed that the entrance sequence is very important in each. If you want to talk about space, then there's one thing you do that is in each one of them, you have compression and release at the point of entering. I know it's nothing clever but we should begin with the basics. RZ The Frank Lloyd Wright stuff. SP Yes, compression and release. You enter from a low space and then emerge into a larger space. At the university campus building in Mendrisio you enter the cross shaped space that is an outside courtyard from a low underpass. So you're not inside the building yet but you've entered the building at that point. In fact I never really noticed where the entrance to the building is? RZ There is no entrance—laughs. SP Laughs—and in the funeral chapel in Steinhausen you have the canopy. RZ In the weekend house on Harris there's also this corridor. SP And in the apartment building in Ems you also do it, but you do it from the corridor inside the house. That door from the corridor leads into the space that you call an outside space, but that is actually inside and the living space, that's the entrance into the space. RZ This, and also a bit the staircase. It's a very different space when you come in. SP Yes, but you don't think of that as the entrance. It doesn't have the same significance because there you're not entering the principal space. That space with the stair is part of the outside space. So actually you enter from inside the house. RZ Yes that's true. SP Then the other basic thing is that your spaces are generally rectangular, long and tall. In each of these spaces you enter from a compressed state into a long rectangular space, and then you also tend to enter into the space laterally from the side, not length ways, so the space spreads out to either side of you. Is this conscious or not? RZ Not very conscious. SP You do in the funeral chapel, even though there it's in the corner. Mendrisio has the same. You come into the space and then it spreads out, and in Harris and Ems too. RZ It's about the movement and the complexity of the space. But then it's also always about how the space relates to the outside and everything else. SP What do you mean by everything else? RZ I mean the immediate outside, the neighbouring plot, the city, the world, everything. SP Why is it important for you that it connects to the outside world, to the rest of the world? RZ I started to think about this when I saw Nishizawa's work. I saw how opposite his way was to the way of Valerio Olgiati. Valerio's work is always very enclosed and very detached from the universe. In his buildings I feel this ideal of Palladio's Rotonda, where you make up a world. And Nishizawa's work is rather about being an animal somewhere, in the universe, being part of everything. This I find an extreme opposite, and it changes the whole. I mean of course it's a mental thing; it's in your head, more than how you immediately feel being there. But still it changes your feelings, being there; your behaviour, your thoughts, everything, your whole attitude changes. SP In its relation to things outside, to the world? RZ Yes. SP What is it in Nishizawa's work that made you think: "this is important"? RZ I don't know, I just realised that Valerio and Nishizawa are extreme opposites. That it's two completely different ways of living, with all that living means, and I appreciate both, and I could not tell which one more. SP If Olgiati is creating a universe of his own, is there something in this that's not quite enough? RZ It's not that it's not enough, but I would rather like to be part of everything that is around, and not closed in this mental construct I made up myself. SP What is it about living in a mental construct makes you feel like this? RZ This is what I don't know. On the one hand I find it great of course. But now thinking back on Nishizawa, his buildings have this lightness. In German I would call it Natürlichkeit. It's almost as if it's just there without having to think about it, even though it's very complicated, and also constructed. I felt closer, and this I don't know how to express either; I felt closer to animalism, closer to nature or reality, just more normal, Natürlich again. Not Natürlich in the sense of nature, but in the sense of 'casual', but without losing intellectual power. SP But there's a another kind of thinking in his projects. When you talk to Nishizawa it's clear that he's not just interested in architectural ideas. He's not constrained by wanting to say something specific about architecture. RZ I think so, yes. More also just letting himself go, experiencing. SP Do you see the same, for instance if you look at the work of Lewerentz. Which do you think he is, more open like Nishizawa, or conceptual? RZ This I find difficult to say because he changed so much in his lifetime. SP Let's say the churches toward the end of his life. RZ Klippan is very different from the others. The others I don't find so strong. He's maybe somewhere between Nishizawa and Valerio. It's also very precise, a constructed world, but it still has a bit of looseness, openness and this sense that it's not this absolute. SP This is something we talked about years ago; that we should try to discover a looser and more natural architecture. Is the thing that you're attracted to in Nishizawa's work is that it seems more inclusive, that it's easier to understand, and people can react to it in a simple way without having to have another level of understanding? RZ Yes. SP That most people who go into one of Nishizawa's buildings will have an immediate reaction? RZ Yes, an instinctive reaction. SP And in Olgiati's we have think a lot, to try to find something out. RZ And to confront yourself with it, to react to it. SP And to not stop until you do. RZ To say it simply, in Nishizawa's buildings I feel part of everything and in Valerio's I feel detached. SP And would you like your architecture to be more part of everything? RZ I don't know, but probably yes. SP Are the four projects more attuned to Olgiati's way of thinking; that to understand them you somehow have to unveil something? Or is there also a more immediate, let's say 'open' part to them? RZ I find these four projects more open. More connected and less closed, probably because the spaces are less defined and bigger. For instance, the funeral chapel although closed physically is mentally very open. And Mendrisio is visually very open; the space doesn't have a visual boundary. SP But I think that when people look at your work they are still expecting to figure something out, to try and understand it conceptually. And the question is whether these projects are conceptual, if you want them to be understood like this, or if you want them to be appreciated more naturally? For instance, the funeral chapel could be read as a story. If you understand all the parts then you understand the story? RZ I guess to understand something you still need a conceptual device. But I guess a person that isn't thinking will just enter these spaces and experience something, and one that begins to think will have a bigger experience. It's always like this. SP Why is this device important? The Pope Leighey house by Frank Lloyd Wright is very straightforward, maybe less intriguing, but spatially very comfortable. It feels like a house, like someone's home. It doesn't need any conceptual devices. RZ It's just good. You feel good when you enter. SP Then you look at the kitchen, and its tall space, or when you enter the living space and it's suddenly taller than the entrance, is that a trick? Do you think he's trying to reveal something? I guess what I'm trying to get at, is why it's important to have something to understand? RZ With Frank Lloyd Wright there is nothing to understand. SP But they are still stimulating buildings. RZ What is stimulating? SP The question is rather what it adds for the user of the building, this intrigue, when something has to be understood mentally, and can't just be appreciated as a space. The intrigue is an added dimension, it's not necessary, but you do it. RZ In Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings, for me, there's nothing to think. I enter, I feel good from the beginning and everywhere I go I feel good. Sometimes I think: "why do I feel good here, is it a good situation." Then maybe you notice that the ceiling is lower, or whatever. SP Is this not enough? RZ Yes exactly, now the question is whether this is enough? For instance in Klippan, all these things also happen, but are over very quickly. I could imagine that if you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house after quite a short period you won't think about these things anymore. You just feel good being there, and it changes your lifestyle, maybe your way of living. In Klippan this is all there, but there's also this question of the column that is not in the middle, that changes the whole space. This is a very constructed thing, and this is something you can always think about. SP So using writing as an analogy, we could say there's the normal narrative of a story and then there's a subtext; a deeper meaning. But that subtext is generally also constructed. Or maybe the author isn't so clear about what they want to say, but there is always a conscious or unconscious subtext that explains or points to something deeper. So rather than intrigue or a conceptual device, we could call this dimension the subtext. In this analogy is your subtext something conscious or unconscious? RZ No I think it's conscious somehow. Now thinking back, it's this question about how to relate. The question, do I want to be part of nature, or not? Do I want to feel part of my constructed story, or existing as a small piece in the universe alone? Do I want to feel part of nature or not, is it something constructed that stands as a separate thing in the universe, or something loose that's just part of the universe. Like for example the Zen Buddhist gardens that try to mix nature and artifice into one thing with the ultimate goal of connecting or melding them together into one thing. And as an opposite the Islamic garden for example that build up their paradise that has nothing to do with nature. SP Those are good examples. Both these ways of thinking about a garden relate to a way of thinking about the world: the otherworldly paradise and the perfecting of nature as artifice using nature itself. RZ It's about the unity of everything, human, not human, animals, plants. SP The Japanese garden is less related to Buddhism than the Islamic gardens are to Islam, but both are generated by an organised belief that is bigger than one individual. Is this something you think about in your work? RZ For me personally, no. When I'm working on something I don't think about this. But when I let it go then it's part of the world, part of something bigger. SP Great works are reliant on great thoughts. Are you proposing a great thought, something bigger? RZ This is what I would like to do, yes. SP So the things you are trying to communicate are about human nature and understanding? RZ Yes, they are about bigger things. SP But do you know what this bigger thing is? Have you thought about this? RZ No I don't know. I mean I'm constantly trying, but I don't know it. SP I'm not saying there's an answer. I'm sure the individuals who made these gardens also didn't know. RZ No, but I do know that these four works and the ones before were much more part of the closed system way of thinking, a quite small closed system. And for example the house I'm making at the Black Sea is very different. I can still explain it, very precisely actually, geometrically, systematically, spatially, but it's much more loose, much more open. But this is exactly what it is, what is this big idea? I see one in the work of Nishizawa and one in the work of Valerio that are opposite, and mine I see somewhere between, but I don't know where and also not what it is. It's because of this that I can't really talk about it. SP We should try to keep it simple. RZ We should be as simple as possible, before getting complicated—laughs. SP Most architects that are notable had an objective. For instance, Palladio tried to create Greek temple facades and Sullivan struggled with the office tower. As things changed in society the architects that were most noteworthy tried to respond to the challenges in some way, Mies too, by asking if it was possible in the industrial age to make great architecture, or to make an architecture that could relate to the spirit of his time. RZ If a classical architecture was still possible. SP The question then is, is there something in society that you're responding to? RZ That's the big question. What would you say Valerio and Nishizawa are doing, if you explain it in these terms? SP Really, I've no idea. RZExactly. SP What do you want the reader to understand from seeing the stills from the animations? RZ I thought that these were projects that you could understand differently by seeing the stills, but it's probably not true. You could also understand them similarly by just having drawings. The renderings help a bit but just with drawings you can also understand. SP I think you need to see the space with these projects. RZ Chapel not, Ems not, Mendrisio maybe, Harris you probably need to see. SP So why did you want to talk about space in this exhibition in Venice? Was it that space would allow you to talk about your work in a more open way? RZ Not just to talk, but to work and think more freely. SP Space is quite difficult to quantify. You can talk about proportions, volumes, how you move from one kind of volume to another, but it's never just about the space, and in your work too, we rarely discuss space itself but the elements in a space. RZ This is the same, the elements and the space. SP So the elements are the 'space-making' devices that make you act or see things in a certain way? RZ Yes. SP In your new house at the Black Sea you have a ceiling element that comes down into the living space. How would you describe what that does? RZ It makes it more cosy—laughs. SP Laughs—So if we can say that the idea is still important, is the idea in each building thought of uniquely or are there ideas that migrate? Are there overarching ideas that can be extracted from the works? RZ Maybe it's about how to create a place, a specific place and how this place relates to all other places, or to everything else. I would like to know better what I'm doing and I would like to build more.︎︎︎ https://aefoundation.co.uk/Oliver-Lutjens-and-Thomas-Padmanabhan Sat, 06 Jun 2020 17:50:30 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Oliver-Lutjens-and-Thomas-Padmanabhan LOG <img width="1107" height="1106" width_o="1107" height_o="1106" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c82852aedcf7db2e1daf0580d21b45ba4144a61226039d8a357f907467033c4f/A5_Portrait_3_flat_bw-2.jpg" data-mid="73712664" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c82852aedcf7db2e1daf0580d21b45ba4144a61226039d8a357f907467033c4f/A5_Portrait_3_flat_bw-2.jpg" /> OLIVER LÜTJENS &nbsp; THOMAS PADMANABHAN︎︎︎Samuel Penn SP&nbsp; When we organized this interview we decided that it would be good to talk about some of your influences; the Renaissance and Robert Venturi. One example that you find particularly interesting is the Laurentian Library by Michelangelo. I wonder if you could explain why you think it’s an important reference in your work? &nbsp; TP For us the Laurentian Library is one of these examples where there is a lot of architecture in a very small space and in a relatively small project. The Laurentian Library itself is built within an existing monastery complex and it only consists of two spaces, the staircase space and the library hall, and we’re mostly interested in the staircase, and in the idea that architecture can have an incredible intensity and depth in limited dimensions, within a limited scope, and yet contain everything that architecture is about. We think the importance of architecture and the scale of the building are not connected. You can have entire cities without any real architecture and you can have a single interior space that contains all the architecture of an age. OL I want to be a bit more precise. It’s not the staircase that we’re interested in, it’s the vestibule; it’s basically the walls. Of course the staircase is amazing too, but when we speak about the Laurentian Library, or look at the library, we mostly look at the walls, and there are many things about those walls that we could talk about, and I’m not sure if we should do it now or maybe you have another question? SP &nbsp; No, I’m happy for you to talk about it TP What we’re interested in is not to read it as a classicist system of architectural elements that form a consistent whole. Instead we are interested in seeing it as a conglomerate of independent architectural elements that come together, that are almost forced to come together. In other words, there are columns and there are pieces of walls that also project as volumes, and then there are all kinds of other architectural elements that are not connected in a conventional manner, but stand side by side, and by their proximity they create an entity and a wholeness, and that’s what we are interested in. We are interested in things that are independent, where each thing has its own value, and when they come together they form a whole without losing their value as individual pieces. OL I think in Michelangelo’s work this is always put to an extreme, I mean, Heinrich Wölfflin defined the Renaissance. Like Thomas said, it’s about individual pieces coming together, and he compares it to the Baroque which is kind of about one thing, where the individual thing doesn’t stand out anymore, but gets merged in order to form a whole. And with Michelangelo I think this individual piece, the intensity is at its highest, and in the Laurentian Library it’s not just the pieces but also the space between the pieces in that wall. It’s just amazing that when you look how close the columns stand together, or how close they are to those wall pieces, that there is another little pilaster between the column and the wall piece, and the space that they define, I think this is also incredibly beautiful, and so full of tension. TP &nbsp; To make the argument in a very general way, Roman architecture took a lot of the vocabulary of Greek architecture, the columns and the systems of columns, but it became an architecture that was mostly about mass and walls. So they somehow had to find ways to reconcile the question of the column versus the question of the wall, the treatment of the wall. That conflict between the wall and that kind of system of columns and horizontals, and that conflict continued in the Renaissance. In the 19th century people were looking back at the Renaissance through the eye of classicism, they felt the Renaissance was the beginning of a consistent grammar of architecture, where walls and columns are put in a correct relationship. We don’t believe in that. We think there is a conflict that is going on that cannot be resolved, there is no resolution between the basic idea of the column and the basic idea of the wall. But the collision of both and the contradiction and that tension between both is fantastic and can be exploited. So we are trying to erase the classicist reading by looking more directly at Renaissance architecture. OL &nbsp; I think this is interesting because the Renaissance, in a short period of time, was incredibly inventive, all these facades or walls, they don’t really have a canon, everything is done in a different way, there’s individual solutions, and that’s very beautiful and they are very rich, and there’s so much you can learn from, no? TP&nbsp; &nbsp; It’s a bit like when you look at the early development of the human species. There was the Neanderthal man, you know, and all these different ancestors of ours, and we know a lot of them were unsuccessful, or didn’t have followers and somehow died out. Just like this the Renaissance developed so many, many ideas, and some of them became successful in the Baroque period or in classicism later, and others not. We are not interested in that architectural lineage, but we are interested in the creativity of each of these individual architects. So for example, in an odd way the architecture of Alberti is like a Neanderthal man, I mean he did fantastic buildings, but he did not develop models that were copied over and over again, like say, Vignola. We like to look at the creativity of the Renaissance architects, just as we look at the creativity of architects today. SP But is this not also a response to the culture we see around us today. Do you think there’s a link? TP I think there’s a strong link, and the link is precisely that we are in an age where we don’t believe in total design, we don’t believe in the modernist promise of having full control over design and the happiness of people through architecture. We think we are powerless and we can create bits and pieces in the city, in a kind of fragmented city, in an incoherent city, but we think that these bits and pieces can be really powerful. OL And another thing that we think makes the Renaissance contemporary in a way, or very urgent today, is that these guys built with very little means. The construction of these buildings is quite straightforward and simple. It’s usually a lot of plaster or other materials that are rather cheap. It’s not based on fantastic travertine or marble. It’s actually done in kind of a cheap way. It’s more about language than about craftsmanship, and we see a direct link to our times with the insulated building and walls that have to become thicker and thicker, but actually need to be thin to get the most area out of the building. You can’t rely on the pure thick concrete wall anymore, especially not in buildings that are in the city. TP Another parallel to the Renaissance situation is that we are not interested in the ideal visions of the Renaissance. We are interested in how the Renaissance was able to insert new architecture, new ideas, into the kind of compromised grown fabric of the medieval city. Most of the Renaissance projects are really insertions into existing medieval situations, and also the perceived chaos or organic character of these situations. And in some way we recognize our city in that relationship. We know that our cities today have no coherent idea of how they should develop, they are fragmented, they have many voices, and they represent in a way perfectly also our understanding of society that has many voices. SP Is this also why you’re interested in Venturi, because he understood pluralism? Is there something specific about him and his work that you find important today? OL There are many reasons why we like Venturi. I mean first of all, he’s a really good architect and his buildings have an incredible quality. But what is conceptually interesting about him is that he was looking at architecture just as what it was. When he wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture he wasn’t really interested in the context of these buildings and in the history of these buildings, he was interested in the forms, he was interested in the language, and he describes bits of that language in the buildings and tries to conceptualise them. And this way of looking at architecture, we think is really fruitful, because you really need to look at the work and see what the formal possibilities are. And then you can translate that into the sensibility of your own time, and this is exactly what Venturi did. Another thing that’s really interesting is when he was building in these American suburbs, he wasn’t really looking, I mean, he was looking at the city around and tried to make buildings that were inclusive of their context and where the building is sited, but actually he was addressing a cultural framework that was much broader, that was really about historic precedent. That’s also a way of understanding an urban culture. TP What Ollie is describing is another way to understand context. It’s an idea of architecture in a cultural context that includes everything that the architects wanted to include, basically the common memory, in this case, western European architectural culture. Another thing about Venturi is of course that we think there is an incredibly positive tension between his book and his own work. His book is a huge promise, and in his first works he is continuously trying to fulfill that promise, and we find in many cases that he is very successful in fulfilling that promise. But the promises he makes in his book are multifaceted, so you could kind of build your whole career by looking at this book and thinking about what it promises. SP What promise did you take from it? TP It’s the promise that when you read through that book and you see the examples, and you look through your own work, that you don’t want to be disappointed. OL The promise is that architecture can be incredibly beautiful and complex and rich, and can be many things at the same time, and it can address many things at the same time, and that it doesn’t rely on where the building is, and it doesn’t rely on how the building is built, it relies on other things. This is what this book promises and this is what is really amazing because it actually allows you to do real architecture, wherever you live. SP I don’t want to reduce the discussion to essentials, because that never leads anywhere, but in the Laurentian and now when you talk about Venturi, you talk about a language of architecture. As I say, without reducing it, what do you mean in terms of a language of architecture? OL Laughs! SP Laughs—sorry to put you on the spot. Without going into essentials. OL I think the language is about what you say and about how you say it, and we think the question of what you say is first where you’re based in history and time, which problems are given to you by your time, and we have for example the problem of the city which we talked about before. And then there’s how you say something depends on the common cultural experience. And that common cultural experience for us includes Michelangelo, but it also includes the art experience of the 20th and 21st century. For us, the experience through art and also through modern architecture cannot be excluded from our thinking; it’s part of it. So we like to look at architecture in a way so there’s no contradiction between these things, so that it’s one continuous way of looking at our profession. TP But I think you’re avoiding the question about the language, don’t you? I think we believe that ultimately architecture is about form. Architecture is a visual language in which form is constructed through different architectural elements in proportional relation to each other, like words in a sentence. When we talk about facades, or other things, we often talk about expression, which I’m not sure if it means the same thing in German as it means in English. In German the correct term is Ausdruck, expression sound to me a little bit too much like expressionism, and I’m not sure that’s correct. OL You could say that the Laurentian Library is quite muscular in a way, whereas Venturi’s mother’s house is quite flat, or let’s say there’s a lot of surface, and it’s about very fine things in that surface and therefore the building feels very light. So, those are things that I think connect to language, but I wouldn’t say we are super interested in a proper classical language. &nbsp; TP Let’s take an example from theatre. If you have a play by Shakespeare that was written many hundreds of years ago, and you have a very good actor, he will read the words of the play or recite them in a way that will seem fresh and of our day. For us it’s the same in architecture. When we do something we look at it and we discuss and we try to find out whether it’s fresh and of our day, but that’s not an ideological judgment, it’s a judgment of the eye. And the more we are able to re-appropriate elements and turn them into something fresh just like Robert Venturi did in his Mother’s House, the happier we are, because we feel enriched by the things we are able somehow to recover from history. SP I think you’re probably right. When we work on a building we’re never fully in control of making a language, or making a form, or a space. We tend to fight with a project. It tells us what it wants to be, and then sometimes we don’t like it, and sometimes it doesn’t tell us anything, but we certainly feel that when we’re working at that formal/spatial level, that there are right ways of doing things and wrong ways, and we try to strike the balance, or find imbalance. What I’m getting at, in terms of a language, is that it might not be purely cultural, not purely about something that you can refer to somewhere in the discipline. I think there are probably certain things that are continually wrestled with by architects trying to create certain spaces. OL Definitely yes; I mean even Mies when he would speak of the Seagram Building, how it’s all about steel and glass, and that this is the construction of the time and it’s kind of as if the building would be the result of the way he chooses to build a building with steel. But then he glues many steel mullions on the facade, and these are means of language. Those are about trying to unify the facade and to make the volume one thing, and give it a certain delicacy and so on, and he was judging with 1:1 samples the proportions of those steel volumes for months until he could decide which were the proper ones. That’s the work of the architect on the language of architecture, and it has little to do with how the building is really constructed. TP Going back to Robert Venturi. I think for us, and certainly for him, the art and pop art and the different art surrounding pop art were very important for him to find his version of an architectural language. And I’m pretty sure that some of this art helped him to transform some of the elements and linguistic ideas of architecture into his architecture and into an architecture that felt right for that moment and time. OL And all that is well before he started to work with ‘signs’ and that sort of thing, which was then too much pop art and not enough architecture anymore. It’s not that he built bad buildings after Learning from Las Vegas but everything tends to be more didactic and conceptual, and the way he explains it are the same Las Vegas arguments over and over, even with buildings that he built before and didn’t have anything to do with his later ideas. It’s a bit of a pity but I guess it was just the success of Learning from Las Vegas that made him play his role and sell his architecture that way. But most of the houses that he built after are still great. SP I’d like to move on to teaching. You often give the students two images to start with a Renaissance building and sometimes a Venturi or another more modern building. OL Yes, we work with pairs and there’s always a building from the Renaissance and one from the 20th century that form a pair together. SP Why do you do this? OL Working with references in teaching is very fruitful because it avoids for you to fall into contemporary banal things. It forces the students, but also us, to be experimental about things, and by doing a pair there is a space opening up between the two references. That’s something we discovered in our own work. I think the first pair was between Thomas and myself when we tried to communicate a vision for a building, and we put together a pair, and all of a sudden it had an incredible energy. The building just had a rectangular shape and we could see this and that at the same time. So a pair of references produces a certain energy and it produces a certain space, and within that space there’s probably an infinite amount of variables in how you interpret that pair. That makes it really great in teaching because, you know, some of the pair we use to explain our buildings, and some of them we use as inspiration, but then we give the same ones to the students and completely different projects arise from that. But it’s also kind of a guideline. If the students go too far off, and they kind of lose track, then you can always say, hey, look at what Michelangelo did, look at this idea, that constellation, this proportion, couldn’t you do that and that with your building as well, and then they learn from the reference but also they learn from their own project. SP Do you think by focusing on making the object look a certain way, by focusing on facade, you avoid dealing with the fundamental problems or questions of architecture? TP I think it’s not the case, because we find that in our generation, or architects of the present time often have problems with the expression of a building, and we think this method of teaching is somehow giving the expression and the facade of the building its own autonomy. It gives the students trust that the expression of the building has its own value and stands, in a way, on its own feet, that the expression of a building is a dialogue together with the plan and the interior structure of the building, it’s not a result, there’s no linear process, but you need an idea, a vision, a kind of Vorstellung an imaginary thing about the expression of the building to be able to design it. And that of course goes against the widespread idea of modern architecture, that the exterior of the building is the result of interior functions or needs, and with that idea of course we disagree. SP For Roger Diener the facade was an important question too, at least in his early projects. Were you aware, when you were working for him, of the influence it would have on your own work?&nbsp; &nbsp; OL I guess we were already interested in facades before. I was very interested in urban buildings and I loved Álvaro Siza and I loved Robert Venturi and it’s kind of by chance that I got into Roger’s office. I think what we learned most from him was that architecture is kind of an intellectual adventure, that it’s a leap into the unknown, and that there is a lot of doubt on the way, there’s a lot of struggle on the way, there are chaotic moments, but what was great in Diener’s office was that there was a lot of talk or discussions about the projects. It’s not like Roger is someone who sketches something and then gives it to someone who draws it and then there’s an iteration of a further development, there are open and long discussions about projects. And I guess when Thomas and myself started out the discussion was from the beginning in the centre of our design process and it still is. TP I remember the first competition we did together for a small building in Zürich, and the building on the corner in an urban context had quite an abstract rationalist façade, but we, from the first day tried to enrich it with a lot of secondary meanings, different in scales, Sockel (pedestal) and different lines, multiple readings and so on. Do you remember that Ollie? Yes, and so behind this kind of mute rationalist frame there was another interest in complexity, and also in a multifaceted idea of architecture that in our work developed further and further, and brought us to a place where Roger Diener would not go, because his work is dedicated to the architectural and cultural context of the 20th century. That’s his starting point and that’s also the limits he imposed on himself. SP It’s interesting that you mention doubt; that you doubt during the process. How do you know when something is right? OL Well, we try to produce work that is accurate, all the time actually. TP Ollie, it’s the process, I think it’s the process and we go step by step, and we have doubts about the steps, but we are quite confident that the process will get us somewhere we haven’t been before. OL No but what I wanted to say about being accurate is that we produce either a model or a drawing that has a certain accuracy so that we can then discuss it, and that’s the point from which you take the next step, you erase or move something and all of a sudden things solve themselves. SP This is the dialogue was talking about earlier. Not the dialogue between the two of you, but the dialogue you have with the thing you’re trying to create. TP Exactly yes, and we are in a way lucky because the jobs we get have a lot of constraints. They leave very little space for fundamental doubts. So when we start, like any other architect, we have to investigate the building laws, the volume and the constraints. Once we know that we usually have a very ugly starting point for our projects. SP Yes very ugly! I’m not talking about yours in particular, but form is very ugly. &nbsp; &nbsp; TP Yes, but we don’t have to blame ourselves for that ugliness. That’s a relief. SP I hadn’t thought of it like that. Do you usually find that you start from something ugly? &nbsp; OL We don’t consciously think about ugliness of course. We just start. We realised, in the ten years that we are working together, that a banal starting point is usually quite okay, and that the ideas, the beauty, the cultural context and all that kind come along the way. We very rarely start out with a brilliant idea, and then the building is just that brilliant idea. We realise that you can start and you can accumulate things. You can accumulate ideas, many ideas, every element can have its own idea, and that therefore the building just gets richer and richer and more refined, and yes of course sometimes there are ugly bits in it. We try not to be too elegant I guess. SP Architectural form, at its most basic is quite an ugly thing, is quite big and cumbersome, and that you have to do quite a lot of work to refine it. In the end it’s difficult to make something wholly beautiful, that some of that basic form will always remain, and maybe should remain. When you look at the Laurentian, you see something beautiful but also quite brutal and elemental. The proportions of the space are not easy to handle. OL And I think it’s a bit an illusion. I guess we admire the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers for that reason, because he really tried to make the perfect project, and he realised that he failed somehow, but he went to the end to complete failure and then he tried something else. But yes of course, if you try to do the perfect project it gets very hermetic and it connects to nothing. TP Fortunately most of the Swiss programmes are very compromised and very difficult and you have to squeeze a building on to the site. So that’s a big advantage because we can be very idealistic without falling into Unger’s trap to somehow idealise the project until it’s dead. SP Ungers also suffered a lot because of this. OL Yes he even lived in his perfect building, House without Characteristics, when he was in his seventies. He moved in to this white thing with his wife, and sat on his own furniture, and it probably had a lot of acoustic problems. TP And it probably hurt him to sit in his chairs. SP Yes, probably a lot. Is there any more we can say about the Laurentian Library? I’d like to think about it some more. I mean it’s very much an interior space. OL Yes, and it doesn’t really feel like an interior space, does it? It’s an architecture that seems to have been created for an exterior. SP As an exterior it wouldn’t be as interesting. OL Yes, and we realised, and it wasn’t very conscious, that in the last two buildings we didn’t really build interiors as well. They were more like architectural pieces put together. There wasn’t a notion of an enclosed space with its own wall cladding; they were more like urban plans in a way. TP We were even trying to, in terms of colour and materiality and the scale of the elements, we tried to bring the scale from the outside into the inside of the building, so that there’s no break of scale between the kind of brutal scale on the outside and the delicate one on the inside, but that it’s more like one thing. It has something to do with two things. First we had no idea of an interior culture that we think is relevant today, and the clients and users have no consistent interior culture. The way people live today is a bit nomadic, with not so much furniture, single pieces and things that they can easily transport from one place to the next. So the architecture is not just there to provide a neutral background for a complex interior arrangement, but it’s more that the architecture provides a specific interior landscape for someone to dwell for a certain and limited time. SP In contrast to another period in time, let’s say when Loos was designing houses? TP Or even when modernist housing was done and claiming that it was neutral. It’s like an architecture that you want to make specific, but specific as an architecture, and not user specific, our interiors are specific to the building, so they can be a very clear and obvious dialogue partner to the person that moves in. OL But we still think there are many possibilities of how you can live in those buildings, and many possibilities about what style of furniture the inhabitants bring, that doesn’t really matter, we don’t design something that can only be lived in with Eames furniture. I think we try to be generous, not make neutral space, but specific space. SP Of course specific, and I think you’ve said this before, that interiors should be figurative. So your work has something to do with being resistant to the neutrality in our culture. OL I think we also try to provide a certain richness of space so that there are small and big scales, compression and relief, so that the apartments themselves have a certain richness and more than one sense of space. So we have a few projects lately that use columns or pillars. Sometimes there is a single pillar that acts as focal or gravitation point in the space. For instance in the house in Binningen the pillar connects or ties three spaces together.&nbsp; It also helps to layer the space. It defines one big space and at the same time three different spaces. It is productive as an element that is totally different from the white walls.&nbsp; &nbsp; SP Your work seems very coherent and formed at the moment, almost like a style. One could say that from Binningen onward it’s possible to trace a consistent line of thought. Are there things that you’re exploring that are taking you in different directions, or do you work on different ideas project by project? TP For us it’s project by project. However, for us there’s an interesting tension that we are feeling more strongly in the last projects between the heroic modernists versus, I wouldn’t say classical but another kind of architectural sensitivity. In the cultural context of Swiss-German architecture at the moment, we find some Neo-Conservative undertones, and we find ourselves, at least mentally, in a position where we stress our modernist side a bit more. SP In terms of being more socialist? TP No, I think one of the ideas of Modernism was self-consciousness, honesty in a way, honesty to yourself, and the acceptance of being out there in the modern world, without glossing that reality over. And we are really interested in the condition of the modern time when you are exposed to what life is really about. That’s a reaction to some tendencies that surround us where architecture is kind of trying to soothe you, you know, protect you from the evils of the modern world. That’s not good. In modern architecture from the first part of the 20th century there were two currents I think. There was the current where architects tried to express equality and emancipation, the new world, and there was another phase of modern architecture where the brutality of mass society and authority and the meaninglessness of the single individual also became expressed. Russian Constructivism was always walking the line between liberating the people and reflecting a scale of society where the individual was at risk. And the question of mass society, even in our individualised society today, is one of the main questions, and so to pretend that we can work locally, and that we are not somehow subject to these forces is just not true. For example in the Herdernstrasse building, we thought of that building as being a bit Russian, in a kind of constructivist way, and it was a way of thinking about the darkness, the dark side of the building. We think it’s a successful building, not because it’s a happy building, but because it has a dark side to it. It’s basically the reality of the slaughterhouse next to it and the stadium that is not only bright, not only happy. OL This is not pessimistic. It’s rather the contrary, it’s an optimistic position, that a building can express these things but also give value to a situation like that. SP Yes, but in theatre or in poetry you would never even think to justify yourself in these terms, in terms of optimism or pessimism. A poem can express something pessimistic and be a great work. OL Yes that’s true, but I think architecture should always be optimistic. I’m not saying it should deny dark sides, definitely not, but it should be optimistic about life in the city. It should be giving and not taking. TP I guess the pessimistic or cynical is the commercial architecture we see all around us, where no thought is given to the kinds of things we’re talking about here. OL In some of the architecture that surrounds us at the moment in Switzerland there’s a kind of propagandistic undertone to some of the architecture, where community is evoked where there’s no community, where the visuals of the architecture are trying to evoke a bourgeois life that is long gone, and a city life that is long gone, and that same architecture is sometimes also operating with the idea of the authentic, and we think that often that idea of the authentic is propagandistic, almost in a socialist propaganda way. SP Is this something you want to explore further? OL It really depends I would say. We just did a school competition, which illustrates perfectly what Thomas is describing, and it’s very visible. At Herdernstrasse it might be a little less visible, but it’s also because it’s quite a small building. This other building is quite big and it also has a certain relentlessness, but at the same time also a fineness. It really breathes in this kind of cold modern condition. TP We think it will be wonderful for children. OL So in our work, even though we like Venturi and also some of the postmodern architecture, there’s no irony and nothing of that cynicism, nothing where we pretend that something is what it is not. I guess we are quite visible and vulnerable and idealistic. We don’t try to keep a distance; we try to engage. SP So, how do you try to engage? OL Laughs—that’s a typical Samuel question! It’s like Boris Becker standing at the net and immediately smashing back. He’s done that so many times to me. I thought I made a really good point, then there’s a pause and, zack, a volley back! TP Laughs—it’s when you encounter a problem in a design, then you should try to turn it into something that has a value, so we don’t try to supress the problem. And I think that’s one of the differences to the majority of the architects before us in Switzerland, where many things were supressed so you could reach a kind of purity of design, and we don’t like to supress them, but to think that as many things as possible should have a voice within the project. OL It also comes from the fact that we usually build in very crappy conditions, in contexts where there is no architectural imperative, how what you do should look like, there’s no tradition you could lean on, because we always build in situations where there’s a wild mix of different scales. So, there’s a lot that our buildings have to provide in order to give a certain sense to the place. SP But I think there are other architects working in similar contexts that don’t react in the way you do. OL Yes, most in fact. SP My hunch is that you would do this anyway, even if you were in Porto or in Edinburgh, in a stone city. TP If we had a client in Edinburgh we would have sleepless nights. OL Yes, how could you not build a stone building in that context? You couldn’t use these fibre-cement panels that we work with here. That would be totally ridiculous I guess. I can’t say what we would do. We think it would be totally arrogant to build a shabby cheap building next to one of these stone buildings Edinburgh. SP So how would you deal with a situation like that, if you had a classical context? OL Getting slightly sweaty hands! It would be interesting to find out, but yes, we don’t know. TP It would be very interesting to know if we have learned enough outside the city, to be able to continue along the same lines in the centre of a city. I mean Robert Venturi did it when he designed the extension for the National Gallery in London, the Sainsbury Wing, and we really like the project, but there are also some things that are not as successful as in other previous projects. For example, I would say, the way he builds the entrance situation with a folded, kind of staggering classical wall that has been cut out, with a foyer that sits behind, as a design I find it really successful and wonderful, but when you look how it’s built from a certain scale on, he forgets that he wanted to do a fragmented building. It becomes quite stable and maybe too stable. And I don’t mind the beautiful exhibition spaces, the enfilades, to be stable and to be done in that way, but the hinge point at the new entrance where you go up to the new wing is where he didn’t get enough out of the idea of the fragment, of the collage. OL Are you talking spatially or urbanistically? Because he was very unhappy with the entrance situation. Apparently he had a terrible time with the client. There is a whole text from Venturi, where he says if you visit the Sainsbury Wing, you should know this, and then there are about twelve points where he wanted things to be different. And I think the entrance hall is one of the big things he hates about the building. SP We should come full circle and finish with the Laurentian Library. TP Yes, in front of us we have the beautiful book by Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi on Michelangelo which has dozens of photographs of details from the Library. The photographs are by Portoghesi himself and when you zoom in to the building you discover that Michelangelo never stopped designing. His volutes, his mouldings and his details have a degree of sophistication that you can’t discover anywhere else, and that’s just incredible. It’s on the same level as his sculptures. There’s this prejudice against Michelangelo that he was only a sculptor, and people say he was not a great painter, not a great architect because the sculpture always completely took over and I completely disagree. In fact he was a fantastic architect and in this small building he went further than anybody else in his whole generation. And we respect Giulio Romano very much, but when you are sixty centimetres from a Giulio Romano building in most cases nothing happens. OL And with Michelangelo you can zoom in to the 1:1 detail and then to the 2:1 and to the 5:1 and it’s still amazing. ︎︎︎ https://aefoundation.co.uk/Beauty Mon, 08 Jun 2020 09:02:14 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Beauty LOG <img width="4391" height="2927" width_o="4391" height_o="2927" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e1c5036b2f61fac2f4521853b8553ea8b8b03ff1580279246a1995853598965b/DSCF1524bw.jpg" data-mid="74542129" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e1c5036b2f61fac2f4521853b8553ea8b8b03ff1580279246a1995853598965b/DSCF1524bw.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5fe821c9e6cc85f6896580b39b475e5841910a5b6c01806dc5689a1d43f924f4/DSCF1523-crop.jpg" data-mid="74542127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/5fe821c9e6cc85f6896580b39b475e5841910a5b6c01806dc5689a1d43f924f4/DSCF1523-crop.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64ce6b01f41af1778ebed054adaedb70aaca2fc3c6fc19164a7ea2d41e316547/DSCF1524.jpg" data-mid="74542163" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/64ce6b01f41af1778ebed054adaedb70aaca2fc3c6fc19164a7ea2d41e316547/DSCF1524.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/98805e66198076328ab2b5ada041b74822bf44c146a46d117558be635414350c/DSCF1530.jpg" data-mid="74542164" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/98805e66198076328ab2b5ada041b74822bf44c146a46d117558be635414350c/DSCF1530.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/61638bc0728ff02baca10daf927b90b5368297b9d0d1172996ec0cb025d86081/DSCF1588.jpg" data-mid="74542386" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/61638bc0728ff02baca10daf927b90b5368297b9d0d1172996ec0cb025d86081/DSCF1588.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4adb0dccdd9ffb70174512680999f47630255539f97579b2651106561f4501f8/DSCF1595.jpg" data-mid="74542376" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/4adb0dccdd9ffb70174512680999f47630255539f97579b2651106561f4501f8/DSCF1595.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b620dd4ff4ded044f5ffeb96f959ea44333435e288c7c8957cad8619e97d03d/DSCF1580.jpg" data-mid="74542200" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/7b620dd4ff4ded044f5ffeb96f959ea44333435e288c7c8957cad8619e97d03d/DSCF1580.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3dc1fdaaadcd0e91115f23bcc03a77fb65345285c78b874fc3dd4b587fa678ca/DSCF1579.jpg" data-mid="74542172" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/3dc1fdaaadcd0e91115f23bcc03a77fb65345285c78b874fc3dd4b587fa678ca/DSCF1579.jpg" /> ANGELA DEUBERADRIEN VERSCHUEREANDREA ZANDERIGO︎︎︎Rowan Mackinnon-Pryde BEAUTY RM-P I’d like to begin by asking each of you in turn why beauty is important to you? AZWhen we work it’s the most important aspect or goal in our practice. When you produce architecture you have to answer so many questions and desires, but in the end the fundamental question is still if it is beautiful. We have the feeling that if a building is beautiful, then the building will of course be sustainable, democratic, will last longer and so on. So in a way, as difficult as it is to define this quality we still feel that it is the main goal of our way of producing architecture. AV I would say that beauty is not only a goal, but it’s also a process, because I think beauty is closely linked with knowledge, with perception, and also understanding. I can appreciate something because I can perceive it, but I could also appreciate it because I understand it. This way of thinking is closely linked with how we work on projects. It’s clearly something we all aim to achieve in a very sincere way, but I see beauty as something more active. If I think about things that I find beautiful it’s not only because I have these deep feelings, but it’s also something that can transform our perception, our understanding of us and the world. So this is how I would see this idea of beauty. ADThis discussion, or talking about beauty, is one of the most difficult discussions. This is why we don’t talk about it very often. In my whole education no one talked about it, except Peter Zumthor once as a guest lecturer. For me personally in the office beauty is the main force driving me to survive in architecture. If I see a beautiful building like Hagia Sophia it gives me so much energy to go on, because we all know it’s a tough metier to work as an architect. There are two points: one, it’s the most important thing, and I’m also happy to hear it’s the goal Andrea is aiming for, and two, at the same time it’s the most difficult. I mean, it’s not possible to define. Beauty is the name for something that doesn’t exist, the name that I give to the things that give me pleasure. So, it’s something we cannot talk about but we have to talk about. It’s not something we can demand from students but they have to try and go for it. It’s totally paradoxical, and this is maybe one of the most beautiful things about it, that it’s such a powerful thing to drive us. In this word there are of course also many expectations, that a building has rules, that it’s well made. RM-P Why do you think it’s shied away from? AZHistorically it’s quite clear that the Enlightenment and later Modernism made it impossible to talk about beauty, it was immoral to talk about it. And in a way even what came after functionalism still avoided the topic, putting the social or the programme, or a certain scientific objectivity before beauty in architecture. So historically, up to a certain moment, the experts of the discipline were talking about beauty, and had the tools to talk about it, but nowadays we have to learn again. If a culture is not used to talking about it for a couple of centuries then you don’t really know where to begin, despite the fact that philosophy and other disciplines still discussed it, it never re-entered architecture again with a certain weight. In Edinburgh, and this is what we wrote for this call for papers in San Rocco, we mentioned that with Kant and Hannah Arendt you really got an attempt to define the power of beauty and to understand the core of this difficulty which Angela mentioned. Because when Kant says that beauty is subjective, it is at the same time always aiming to the universal, and in a way that’s why beauty is so human. You might argue that it’s the most human thing, at the same time you realise the difficulty of trying to grasp it, because what does it mean in the end? It means when you seesomething and you think it’s beautiful, or when you try to produce something beautiful, you really sincerely have to try to forget yourself, and to channel a certain wider idea of what human beings might appreciate, what human beings might think beauty is. And practically, when a student is doing a project, what can you tell him? ADI think it’s not so difficult. It’s interesting, when you tell a student, do the most beautiful space you can imagine, eighty percent of us in the discipline know for themselves because it’s subjective and because it’s the deepest longing they have. Then the difficulty is not to fall into a cliché, which can be avoided for instance by using a material and working within the rules of the material. I think everyone knows what it is, but there’s no consensus, people have different ideas about what it is, so different things appear, but in the end they are beautiful in their way because the logic used is deep and rich and correct. RM-P But should the personal not take a back seat because we create things for society? ADI think the ‘personal’ shouldn’t be a personal problem, or a personal feeling that we want to express. It should be a thought which is general, a thought you express with space and a thought that can be interpreted by someone else, so it should be something objective in the end. But I think you have to begin from the personal feeling, make it in to a general thought, and then you can reach society where it’s not personal anymore. AVFor me it’s quite obvious that we work for others. So when we make something that we think is beautiful we hope that it would be shared. This also comes back to what I was trying to say about understanding and that beauty is linked to understanding and also non-understanding. So yes the idea of collective beauty is important to us. RM-P Then we should talk about judgement. In Edinburgh Andrea talked about how we have moved from the census communis to the census privatus, and that a lot of work is generated in the isolation of the individual project, which doesn’t have to relate to the whole, or anything else. So I suppose the question is how you evaluate or judge something that is beautiful in your own work and in the work of others? How are these judgements made, because yesterday Adrien you talked about architecture lying between ideas and making, the rational and the subjective? Somewhere between the two we should be able to define how we judge what is beautiful? AVI guess that’s the project. RM-P But do we not need a language to be able to discuss it. Or is the language the work itself? AZI guess it’s a very complex set of questions that you’re posing. In a way I think it’s dependent on who your client is, and what the market is. On one level I think that beauty simply happens. I understand what you mean when you talk about understanding beauty, but at the same time we have to agree on the fact that when it’s in front of you, you simply get it, even before you begin to try to understand it. That’s the immediacy and quality of it. AVI’m not focused on the understanding, but that it’s somewhere in-between. If you don’t understand at all, then you’re not moved. If you don’t have personal feelings toward it, it would be the same. If you understand or analyse it too much then it’s also gone. I would say it’s really in-between. Otherwise you would have no interest. You become interested in something that you feel is beautiful somehow. AZOn that level it’s unavoidable that this kind of beauty, let’s say the beauty that is produced for the public sphere, is even related to pop, not pop culture in the sense of the overexposure of your private life, but that the aim of beauty is to be popular, and maybe not immediately, maybe in a hundred years, because sometimes it takes longer to realise that a work of beauty is widespread and popular. But I think the elephant in the room is the relationship between beauty and the classic. I’m not talking about canons, but that it’s unavoidable that true beauty is immediately related to the idea of classic. Let’s say, to make things a bit easier, I was talking the other day about two architects who where working in Milan in the ‘60s and ‘70s and who shared the same milieu, two guys from the Left, working for small municipalities around Milan. One is Aldo Rossi, who everybody knows, and one is a guy who nobody knows, Guido Canella, who was also a very talented architect, and who worked for the same clients. Rossi tried to grasp a certain idea of beauty through the classic, and Canella in a fantastic way used a post Corbusien brutalist language, almost sci-fi. And now you go and see these buildings by Canella and they’ve aged badly, very badly, and the critics at the time were highly appraising of these buildings, and when you look at them you think, oh fuck, they are really from that era. They didn’t survive, you know. And that’s why, and it sounds a bit of a fascist thing to say, but beauty is unavoidably related to the classic whatever it is. ADI don’t like the idea of classic because then we already have to know what the idea of classic is and it’s a bit abstract. Can you not say that the basis that something can be beautiful over time in architecture, which is the art of permanence, that it has to be done well—finito. This is the one main task we have to fulfil as an architect, just to build in a way that a building can get old in a good way, that it’s done very well, and then we already have one problem in our time, that we are building much too fast, that our industrial products are not good enough to build a beautiful building, then we have a real big problem to make beautiful architecture. I mean for me, I’m living in a very rural region where craft still has a high value, which is good, and we can build beautiful houses because we have craftsmen, but we also have to look for them and fight for them. For me this is one of the main questions. Is it still a key of beauty that a building should be able to get old well?&nbsp; &nbsp; AZI agree, but not completely. For example you mentioned Hagia Sophia. Hagia Sophia was crappily built; it failed and fell so many times. I think there are so many buildings that are in the end crappy buildings that nonetheless certainly aim for beauty. Then when you talk about contemporary conditions of production I totally agree, the fact that we are now producing buildings that have a clear expiration date is a shame and completely unsustainable. But I think it’s only partly related to the discourse on beauty in the end. I think there are plenty buildings which are crappy in which you still see a certain beauty shining through. Hagia Sophia is one of them. I mean they had to remake it so many times for us to appreciate it now! ︎︎︎ https://aefoundation.co.uk/Values Mon, 08 Jun 2020 09:59:47 +0000 AEFoundation https://aefoundation.co.uk/Values LOG <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/733f96964d7381670383bf4f5ea612ecb7901a85512aee60c57712638f690038/values2.jpg" data-mid="74544001" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/733f96964d7381670383bf4f5ea612ecb7901a85512aee60c57712638f690038/values2.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed26c9a70a4ca6e204bfde5f7f4dd16b4e3a1ceb621cf9617e36c3186cc05875/values1.jpg" data-mid="74544002" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/ed26c9a70a4ca6e204bfde5f7f4dd16b4e3a1ceb621cf9617e36c3186cc05875/values1.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" 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width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/addf5715f12223f75856a3d73b9f034ed65330f28c0e35fb1139f987359e97fa/P1140370.JPG" data-mid="74543998" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/addf5715f12223f75856a3d73b9f034ed65330f28c0e35fb1139f987359e97fa/P1140370.JPG" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1360f55be8bbe53151496e9e52293d22d8e09f3b0c579fc12b580327eeb6c41a/P1140388.JPG" data-mid="74543997" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/1360f55be8bbe53151496e9e52293d22d8e09f3b0c579fc12b580327eeb6c41a/P1140388.JPG" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d6cbd7f4efb46cd78c210cc1cb1cf0f185fb20b5b0421cb14fdbede390fa890/P1140462.JPG" data-mid="74543992" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/9d6cbd7f4efb46cd78c210cc1cb1cf0f185fb20b5b0421cb14fdbede390fa890/P1140462.JPG" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9b4786f0c2fa0549e1ddfc3e7d5930bfe58e9850cf309af2fe7ecc6bc29acbb/P1140469.JPG" data-mid="74543991" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/a9b4786f0c2fa0549e1ddfc3e7d5930bfe58e9850cf309af2fe7ecc6bc29acbb/P1140469.JPG" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6bfd27158b173f456b0dcb96ea96975209db974bcb4bb783545816956294deea/P1140484.JPG" data-mid="74543990" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/6bfd27158b173f456b0dcb96ea96975209db974bcb4bb783545816956294deea/P1140484.JPG" /> <img width="800" height="549" width_o="800" height_o="549" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5f1dd1cbec0b9b2f8d0d76faac5068b58b9787efb6e3fad69e74769e3b9c8dd/P1140495.JPG" data-mid="74543989" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/c5f1dd1cbec0b9b2f8d0d76faac5068b58b9787efb6e3fad69e74769e3b9c8dd/P1140495.JPG" /> ANGELA DEUBERADRIEN VERSCHUERE ︎︎︎Samuel Penn ANDREA ZANDERIGO ︎︎︎Rowan Mackinnon-Pryde VALUES SP This session is split into two parts. First Angela and Adrien will outline a proposition on Values for discussion, and after, Andrea will give a short talk on Beauty. Adrien, over to you.&nbsp; AVThank you. The idea is not to give a talk about the buildings we’ve designed; we could maybe do that some other time. But it’s more to address the issue of values, and maybe not directly, but more indirectly, and I hope that the talk we have together will broach this issue. So I’d like to address three things that I think are relevant for practice as an architect. They are not dogmas. They are just positions so we can discuss them later. The first would be that architecture is mainly about ‘building narratives’. Architecture is essentially an act of thinking. It’s not about doing things ourselves, but rather doing, so others can make things happen. A large part of our activity is then ultimately about anticipating the real working in some kind of a fictional context. Our tools, words and drawings, help us to build our thinking through speculative fictions. In this sense, we could understand architecture as part of a larger artistic realm, like any other form of art. Making buildings, through the medium of space, is also for an architect about the construction of abstract signs, the construction of meaningful elements. Sometimes these signs act as traces in our personal memory. They could even be shared by a community and become then part of our collective memory. Place and memory share a lot together. Not only because they both act as complementary devices or structures, but also because our practice is ultimately engaging memories of existing situations that interfere with the way we think new ones. Architecture derives from iterative approximations, from metaphorical interpretations. Beauty lies in the possibility of multiple understandings. My second point is ‘the constitution of choices’. Although it is very clear that buildings are only possible because of certain contemporary conditions, architecture has fundamentally to be understood as a timeless act.&nbsp; Our contemporary interpretation of existing buildings, whatever their own story, makes them, implicitly or explicitly, part of today’s way of thinking. Beyond the construction of a building culture, history gives us a fantastic repertoire. Without any kind of nostalgia, these precedents act as an incredible potential to reformulate narratives, by means of new compositions. Architecture is a performative form; it does not make sense for itself. Architecture consists essentially to build new relationships between people and things that exist, as they exist. Building new paradigms by means of new proportions. Architecture enables us to make critical choices, sometimes political, always rational but nevertheless subjective. If the architect is responsible for new organization of living, the nature of his choices constitutes the content of his proposal; it contributes ultimately to provide new values that go beyond the specificity of uses or contexts. Beauty lies in the dynamic migration of choices. The third point is ‘the inefficient logic of means’. Architecture is a personal transformation of concrete observations. It is perfectly useless to know something that I could not modify. A project is always the construction of knowledge that would not only help to understand better our world, but mostly figure out the relevance of our choices. This process implies necessarily a personal point of view that goes beyond the self-will of the individual. The pragmatic use of observations tends obviously to an economy of means. Proportion, dimension and scale plead ultimately for the quality of this economy. Beauty lies in the inefficient logic of means. AD Beautiful music, like architecture, can connect people who have no common language, culture, neither past nor future. The search for beauty is what has brought me into architecture. In architecture the word beauty is almost not available. But I am driven by the search for beauty. Every time I experience a wonderful building. I think for example of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It inspires me to continue my engagement in architecture. “Beauty is the name for something that doesn‘t exist, a name I give things for the pleasure they give me.” as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa says, because beauty is the name for something that doesn‘t exist I want to explain five architectural terms which are desirable qualities for me. The first term is ‘physical presence’. It’s like a starting point, a basis. With physical presence I mean the strength of the corpus, the bodies that surround us; physical means corporeal. Presence means, what is there, or the strength of the presence. I’m talking about the boundaries that make up a space. These limits have to have a corporeal strength. The basis for the physical lies in the material. Architecture is, if it is built, materialised. Each material has a unique regularity, a right and a wrong. My intention is that we should understand which opportunities are inherent in the material, and then to build with this knowledge in the physical present. Physical means that the surface is the material behind. The surface is a result of the material as it is built, as it was thought, and should not be scenographic. Architecture is simultaneously an act of an idea, the concept, and the construction. Not the poetic construction, in the sense of a symbolic construction, or a detail-story. It is more about building with the material, the means to develop and to think about details and the structure from the material with simple rational, mathematically, logical conclusions. If the surface is thought about as the material that is behind, the surface will let us understand the construction retroactively. We live in a time in which it is almost impossible to understand how something is made. We should be able to understand this intuitively in principle, even as novices. The construction should be as simple and unsophisticated and intuitively understandable, comprehensible and logical as possible. The boundaries, the surfaces, the colour, the material should be a logical result of the material used. The way in which something is joined should suit to the material; it should be logical and pragmatic. Presence creates identity. Identity is important. Identity means to find ones way, in everyday life, in ones environment and in the world. We remember architecture that appears strong, striking and distinctive. Strong architecture can provide a place, an object, an interior space with its own identity. Architecture can be a strong opposite and still influence us. The second point is ‘the interdependent whole’. By interdependent whole, I mean that the whole is complete and that each element is interdependent on each other. To be dependent on each other is a condition. To be a whole means to be unhurt, unharmed and complete. A whole is understood as the combination of all components. This means in the physical sense, integrity, actual determination and perfection. If I talk about a whole that is interdependent, I mean that nothing can be taken away or added to the sum of all parts. I want my buildings to be whole. Architecture should be physical present and a whole that is interdependent. This leads us to structure. If we imagine an arch, every stone gives the load to the next stone. The supporting structure and the spatial structure is identical. The supporting structure is a fundamental component of the architecture. Without thinking about the supporting structure it is not possible to think about a building. The nice thing is that there are very precise logical criteria of statics, which make a form. It is an exact science. Most decisions in architecture are not an algorithm, are not clear and executable action-rules that lead to the results. So I think we should be grateful, that there is a right and wrong in architecture. We should use these for the architecture and not work against them. The fragment or the implied space: a whole implies the fragment. Only if one has something that is a whole is it possible to have a fragment of it. The fragment lets us retroactive know something about the overriding whole. Within this whole I’m always looking for the break of the whole. I call it the break of the rule. The whole should be perfect and imperfect, because perfection is inhuman. The claim that there is a greater whole which is interdependent in itself leads to the question of the perfection. Again Fernando Pessoa: “We adore perfection because it is out of our reach; if we would reach it, we reject it from us.” Perfection has something oppressive. That’s why the fragment, the first and the second structure, the break is important. The break of the whole is something beautiful. In my architecture I’m first looking for perfection and then I look forward, by finding natural given problems, to making the perfection imperfect and human. The break of the rule contains the question of how we can, in an equalised society, make architecture without being arbitrary? Because it is important to reflect on architecture with rules, especially today where everything seems to be possible. We should think about what this rule is, and the imperfection, the break, and what thought is behind it. The third point is ‘the optimal, minimal and poetic space’. With optimal, minimal and poetic space I mean to think of architecture as space from the beginning, optimal for people, for the program, minimal means to build adequately, pragmatic, economically and not more than we really need. Poetic is a dream; the definition, sizing, disposition, joining and formal design of spaces is the main task of architecture. Architecture without space is unthinkable. In a space a piece of life is directed. A space can be the backdrop for a work of art in which a piece of life is staged. One can imagine here a society or a person who are staged in a room in a given time frame as in a play. At the beginning of the space is a longing, a desire. In the beginning is imagination; it’s a feeling, a dream, a desire, a wish. Out of this, the building develops. In a purely conceptual design, the project is developed by itself. A concept is a rule without poetry. I favour an unnecessary beautiful space before a functional one. To make a beautiful unnecessary space, is more than what we can understand and more than what we need. Every space can be its own universe. We can think of beautiful spaces regardless of what happens in the next space, but starting from what would be nice, at a certain time in the year, at a specific hour, in a very specific place. The basic question is the how we want to spend our lives. Architecture is the backdrop. The essential factors are the cardinals, the light, and the orientation in space, the view and the atmosphere that should be in a room. Each room can be thought of as a world of its own as a separate universe. The fourth point is that ‘to create and to construct need to be inseparable’. I am totally against the separation of the idea and execution. Architecture today is defined less by beauty than it is by ugliness. We should begin architecture with a longing, a desire, a thought. We have gotten lost in the complexity of architecture. Architecture is the backdrop for a piece of life for a society. When we build in the narrower sense, at the same time we build our life in the wider sense. We should take physical boundaries seriously again. Most things we build make our environment, not better but worse. Construction is an underestimated and intrinsic part of architecture, but since we no longer build with our hands, construction has become indirect, remote and alien. My work is an attempt to escape this alienation. The baseless separation of the idea and the execution degrades Architecture. To create and to construct need to be inseparable. As architects, we have a great responsibility in society, which we should take more seriously. My fifth and final point is ‘the myth of the idea’. I conclude with an overall reflection on architecture. We can ask ourselves whether architecture is a pure building that is beautifully designed? Architecture needs more than just material specific thinking. A building may physically hold together, but if there is no spiritual support, it cannot exist in the course of time. A building must be physical and mental. But with this spiritual support I do not mean the idea, which means in common parlance, that something is never completely realized, or simply a lucky thought, or simply a difficult term. I am against the myth of the idea. A myth is something we heard so often, but don’t know if its true. The term ‘idea’ is misleading. I notice my students make meaningful and very beautiful projects, if they are searching for a specific target. Then they have a dream, an image, a feeling, a thought, they follow something they are personally interested in and fascinated by. The mistake is to think at this point it would be done. After this point, the challenge is to realize the immature new, to work out a solution. We first need to know everything about a possible project and then think about ideals and then think it through freely. We produce good, mediocre and bad, we have to sharpen and deepen our judgment to discard, to select, and combine all thoughts together to one thought that makes sense. It is obvious that the ‘anything goes’ ticket is anything goes for ugliness in the world. Architecture must make sense and something makes sense, when we realize coherence. We are fulfilled, when we see a multitude of correlations. AV As I said before we voluntarily presented our ideas as something a bit dry, but also to be provocative about certain things. The first thing I’d like to look at is ‘choosing’, since as architects we mainly make choices, like other people also, but what would be the reasons for these choices, and ultimately choices interfere with the idea of values, since I believe that the choices we make have something to do with content of values you made in the introduction. So I would maybe address you, Angela, to explain a bit about these choices, because you were talking about the interdependent whole, the value of holding things together. Could you tell us a bit more about this? AD For me it’s quite important to build something that’s an end, which is a whole, but at the same time it’s important for me to break it. So, why do I want this? When I look around in Switzerland there are so many things that are built which don’t make our environment much better. They’re very arbitrary and random. Maybe that’s why I have this wish to make something strong, which is a whole. At the same time I know that we’re living in the 21st century, and I don’t want to make something overpowering. It’s a balance, how we can make, in our time, architecture, a city, a building, which is strong but at the same time, human. I guess what the whole is, is clear, or? AV I guess we also somehow address the same issues that if a building is about responding to certain realities, like a site, economy, or use, that is of course maybe a starting point, or maybe not even a starting point, but like elements, that we work with as architects, these are things we do, but it’s not enough. And this also relates to the choices we make, where we start, of course by bringing attention to economy and the means. Is this close to what you call values? SP Are there any shared values between architects today? You both talk about the performative aspect of architecture. Whether it’s a value or not is another matter. But you both talk about architecture as a backdrop, or something that allows the staging of life. AD Maybe I can start. When I talk about the backdrop for life, for me it’s especially about how you design a building. You can think conceptually, with rules, for instance, a rule would be, I’m in Edinburgh, and at each traffic light I will turn right. That’s a rule. It leads me to something without poiesis (to make). It’s a way you can develop a space in plan, or as a concept, or as a grid. You can also develop it out of a perspective way of thinking, the way Greek city planning was conceived. That’s what I mean by a backdrop or a stage. Because I can’t think of all the moments of a building at the same time, so I have to focus on main points. It’s kind of a picturesque thing, even though I don’t like the picturesque. There should be more to architecture than just a concept, more than just rules, it’s important to have them to enable you to work clearly. I think to imagine architecture from a personal point of view, and asking the question: how do I want to spend my life? We have to know this as architects. Of course architecture is for a wider society and it has to include the art of boredom. I call it the art of boredom. It should be calm and open to interpretation. Architecture is not like art where you can choose what to put in a museum. Everybody has to deal with it; it concerns everyone. We grow up in houses, in buildings. It’s a public art. &nbsp; AV The thing you said about interpretation is very important. I think we both agree that we should try to define a strong moment, moments of intensity, but I wonder if these moments of intensity are really related to the way we live, a way of living. If you look to the past you will also see that it’s about interpretation. You know, architects one hundred years ago built a certain way, with certain values, but we are still able to live in their buildings, and more importantly we can interpret their architectural choices. I don’t really see the architect as the only one who controls the choices about how we live. We are only there to start the story and then there’s a long story after we did our part. I think the choices we make are very relative, that’s just what I wanted to say. History also shows us, I mean, we were talking this morning about Aldo Rossi, and he quite clearly showed that a building can transform itself, a building can have different meaning in time, so this is more the way I was trying to address this, as a performative form. It’s a moving (temporal) way to understand and to live in a building. It’s not something that’s superimposed from the bottom. It’s static somehow. PENNY LEWIS I’m interested in this idea of strong architecture and weak architecture. Andrea Branzi says we live in a period of weak urbanism, and you Adrien are characterising the architecture of today as weak architecture, and then occasionally there’s strong work, and you Angela are saying that to make real architecture is to make strong work. Neil Gillespie and I were talking about this because we were having a discussion about Peter Cook criticising architects in London who produce a lot of brick buildings. He sort of dubbed them the ‘biscuit boys’, kind of saying that their obsession with building, detail, where a window sits, a kind of obsession that we associate with Switzerland, if you control nothing else, Neil says, then through brick you can at least control the building process. If we have weak architecture in Britain, which I think we do, certainly weaker than in Switzerland, or at least it feels weaker, then is building the actual act of realising the idea as an integrated process. Is building the best mechanism to guarantee strong architecture. Is a preoccupation with building the only way you can make strong architecture in the current condition, because it feels like that’s the world we live in. The best work is being produced by people who are very preoccupied with the integration of structure and the delivery of the product, if that’s the case, then the idea, I know you have a problem with the idea Angela, but the idea used to be something we got excited about, then we have to put all that on the back burner because building is the only terrain that’s left. I’m interested in what Neil thinks about that, but I think everybody is probably thinking that at the moment in Britain, is that the only means to control is to create strong buildings. AV We should talk a little bit more about what we mean by strong buildings. Personally I don’t see it as something especially radical, massive or robust. We were talking a bit about resistance, and for me a strong building is a building that can resist, responding to certain issues, the site, the economy, the social context, but resisting is also about time, and it’s not only about what we call pérennité (sustainability) it’s not about being robust so that it survives through time, but for me it’s also a question about memory. Is the building capable of addressing issues that people can recognise in the building throughout time? This could perhaps be a first definition of what we call a strong building. It’s about the resistance. It has nothing to do with the kind of radical architecture that we can see today. That’s the way I would consider it. SP You talk about memory, not inasmuch as you interpret memory to create a building but more that it creates memory? AV This is a nice issue I’d like to maybe address because the idea of memory is both about how you make the building, and maybe we can come back later to the idea of repertoire, of reference and of experience, but at the same time it’s also as a result something where everybody can project their things on to, and I still believe that if you go through cities, if you go to Milan or to Venice, it’s not only because people told you to go there, but it’s also somehow a way to meet memory, not only because we like old stones, but also because we identify ourselves to the particular values of our surroundings. AV Can we go to the idea of structure Angela? Because this is probably also an issue we share. So, the physical structure of a building, can you maybe develop the idea a bit, how you work with the topic, how you consider it? AD Structure is something that can create identity, it can be corporeal, something physically present. But at the same time it allows the programme for example, it allows us to be very open, to be very flexible. I have this example, the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua; it’s a Palazzo in the city. It’s an enduring timeless element that is not defined by the programme. The programme changed over time and after the site, the site lasts even longer, the structure remains. It’s not something we should over-value. I don’t like architecture which is just an engineer building, because it’s there that the interpretation is missing. It shouldn’t be the pure result of what the engineer says. I don’t want to build bridges, I want to make a building where the structure has an important part, and when I talk about this it’s not only the supporting structure but also the spatial structure or how the circulation structures something to give a certain clearness or calmness. When I was studying for example, Louis Kahn was the only one we could find in the library who wrote about monumentality, and I don’t mean we have to build monumental buildings, but with the structure there is a good opportunity to make both; to create identity but also to build something in the 21st century which is quite open and allows a lot of reactions. I don’t even want to control, to tell the user where he should put a wall. &nbsp; AV The structural issue is also interesting in the way that it is very precise, I mean this is the way we like to work with structure, because it’s very precise and somehow very objective, but at the same time it’s abstract enough to think about other things. For instance, in our practice, this is often a question we raise with clients, because it’s precise enough so we can talk about materials, and we know that when we talk about the structure it’s often defined as the physical structure, it still leaves a lot of space to talk about other things without necessarily talking about the whole project. One of the obvious things is hierarchy, because the structure defines what is first, what is second, if there is a hierarchy in what you want to propose. I guess it’s also a tool; a very clear, objective device to make the articulation between the dream you talked about Angela, and reality. It’s a bit trivial maybe, but in Belgium, or in Switzerland also, you know that when you do a building, in terms of budget, it’s more or less one third, one third, one third. One third goes to the structure, one third goes to the technical facilities, and one third goes to the architecture, and that already gives you a reading, an understanding about the reality of the architect. I mean, we can talk about energy afterward if you wish, but for a client basically, two third of the budget is not a discussion anymore. You want to have a building that stands. You want to have a building with ventilation systems, heating and whatever. So the only discussion we can have is about the other one third of the building, and this is why I think we should engage again the structure and also the technical parts of the building, because otherwise our spectrum is getting narrower and narrower, and of course the reaction of the client is to question the materials of the floor, not even the lighting system, but the curtains, the type of glass, the amount of glass, and I think this is the reality of the profession. If we accept it as it is then I think we are trapped. This is somehow my dream, to be able to think about the lighting system, or the ventilation, or all the things that is not part of our discussion anymore. I mean I’ve never heard of a client who asked the structural engineer to look at his calculations, same for the ventilation—never. &nbsp; &nbsp; PL But Angela was saying that construction has become alien. I mean alien to the public. AD We are living in a world where we have to deal with a lot of layers. Layers of insulation that protect against wind, water, warmth and so on. It’s a big, complex, expensive way to create a space. If we could just build one layer of wall that could do everything it would be such a huge progress for everyone, for the client it saves money, for the architect, on the construction site, everybody would be happy again. So how can we get there? With the students that I am teaching we develop projects that are built out of one material, only one, and for us it’s real, but when people from the outside come it seems like unfinished buildings, but I think we have to continue with this, and I’m not saying that everyone should go there, but intuitively we should be able to trust our environment. AV In our projects we already managed to change the ratio to fifty percent structure and fifty percent architecture, and then there is the technical, but with the technical there is a drawn line because they are these big lobby groups that control things. But clearly it’s a dream. SP I’d like to ask you about the idea of repertoire Adrien. Your understanding of repertoire probably differs from the conventional idea of reference. I know that Angela is very clearly against the idea of references in her work, but you are much more open in how you interpret it. What do you think they allow you to do in the development of your architecture? AV Your question is obviously about the making of the building, but it’s also about the building culture. For me, I could not think about architecture without considering the building culture around me. I mean, for me architecture is not a pure invention. I know that some people maintain that it is but we all have our own way of living in space, I’m not talking about values, if there is good space or not good space, but we all have our own personal knowledge of those spaces, and beside this we have a whole history of architecture. I don’t believe in modernity for instance. I think that modernity is kind of a continuity of other things. SP And yet you’re comfortable adopting themes of modernity in your own architecture. AV I’m not saying we should not build without regard to the time we are living in. But we are still free to look back into history and to consider it. That’s what I mean by repertoire. Then the way you use it is personal. AD How do you make your choice? AV That goes back to the ‘strong’ building I guess. A strong building for me is also a building that is open, and open for my own interpretation, to do something else out of it. It’s not only because I love the building, but it’s also because I feel there is a possibility of continuity somehow, and I guess it’s not personal. SP But we are in danger of seeing the history of architecture as the history of form. What I mean is that architecture is produced in a specific context, time, space, resource and so on, and if we take as architects the purely formal aspects as our basis for continuity then we miss the complete tapestry, and it could in reproduction, even in interpretation be emptied of meaning, the original meaning it had when it was created. AV Or you reinforce other meanings. SP But then you must be aware of the specific meaning you’re aiming to reinforce? For instance Mies van der Rohe is a thread in your work. Either you think that some meaning from that period needs to be reinforced in the present, or as I was suggesting with Venturi today, Palladio tomorrow, the charge could be made that it’s just playing around. AV But it’s not finished. He had his own sources. I don’t see it so much as a historical thing. History is what I try to address in my work. As architects, to know things for themselves is not very interesting, I mean we are transformers, we transform society. It’s our idiom. History for me is the same. You were talking about your students Angela, our students they often see history as something static, and for me history is not static. This is why I said that I didn’t believe in modernity as a static moment. And of course I realise that there are certain ways of building, certain societies, context and so on, but I still think it’s a moving element. AD But I think you should try to reach a kind of perfection, not necessarily in the plan and section for example, but in how you do it, how you think it. Frank Lloyd Wright was ninety years old and thought that he’d never made a great building, or Alberto Giacometti, he was always searching. – AZ It’s very difficult to talk about beauty, and luckily, because we also run a magazine called San Rocco we recently wrote a call for papers on beauty, called ‘Pure Beauty’ for the next issue. So, I’m a bit prepared. I’m not a theoretician. I’m an architect, and we always say that architecture is formal accumulation, formal knowledge. I will first read you some sentences from Hannah Arendt and her view on public beauty. Please forgive my English pronunciation and even more my German. It’s from Arendt’s essays on Kant’s political philosophy, a text from 1982. For us it’s fundamental to understand what we mean when we talk about beauty, and beauty in architecture specifically. She says: “We have judgments of, or pleasure in, the beautiful: ‘this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension [Auffassung; not perception] of an object by the imagination by means of a procedure of the judgment which it must also exercise on behalf of the commonest experience’. This judgment is based on that common and sound intellect [gemeiner und gesunder Verstand] which we have to presuppose in everyone. How does this common sense distinguish itself from the other senses, which we also have in common but which nevertheless do not guarantee agreement of sensations? The term common sense meant a sense like our other senses, the same for everyone in his very privacy. By using the Latin term, Kant indicates that here he means something different: ‘an extra sense, like an extra mental capability [German: Menschenverstand] that fits us into a community. The common understanding of men, tis the very least to be expected from anyone claiming the name of man. It is the capability by which men are distinguished from animals and from gods.’ It is the very humanity of man that is manifest in this sense. The only general symptom of insanity is the loss of the sensus communis and the logical stubbornness in insisting on one’s own sense (sensus privatus), which (in an insane person) is substituted for it. Under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e., of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity. This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather that the actual judgment of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.” So let’s say, it’s true that to appreciate beauty and the judgement of beauty is subjective. It’s even true that each time we make this subjective judgement of beauty, we should also always suppose the judgments of every other man, this sensus communis as Kant calls it. Public beauty then. I will start with Giotto, in the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua. The very specific moment, in which the power of the prince, the power of religion, is slowly decreasing, it’s being substituted by the power of the citizens, the power of the city bourgeoisie. In a way what is interesting in the architecture of Giotto is that he’s reusing what he knew at the time, elements from religious architecture, elements from the palace, but reassembling them, as in a sense, tools or devices, to enact public life, in order to make public life possible. Why am I telling you about Giotto’s attempts to invent the new public architecture for the rising city society? It’s a bit of a cliché but we now live in a moment when all this is in danger. For instance, take Milan station; the most public space in the city, through the introduction of automated turnstiles has become much less public. It’s not just about politics, or economics, which is pushing the substitution of the private sphere to the public sphere. It’s even due to the creatives that made this transformation possible; they pushed for it, say for example pop culture. During the 20th century after Modernism, pop culture was, in a way, only concerned with the private sphere, beauty in the private sphere. To the extent that even art started to monumentalise the private sphere. For example, Jeff Koons makes a classical sculpture depicting him and his Hungarian porn star wife, Cicciolina. So this private sphere, this sensus privatus is completely monumentalised and completely occupies what was once the public sphere. What does this mean in terms of producing architecture, and producing beauty for the public? The figure of the architect became completely inscribed by these new rules. A famous example is of course The Fountainhead in which Gary Cooper interprets this pseudo-right figure, in which the creation of architecture is coming straight out of his head, in this completely personalised idea of producing architecture and beauty. Opposing this, we might argue in Manhattan, in a society that was extremely focused on the individual, American society at the turn of the century; even there it was possible to produce beauty, to produce the city, to produce architecture in a sort of collective act. The very famous firm from that period, which were responsible for shaping Manhattan, as we know it, McKim, Mead &amp; White, producing architecture together, with a firm of one hundred and twenty employees, in a time when this was unthinkable, and even using architecture as a shared public knowledge, because they were importing drawings of buildings from the Renaissance, Roman buildings from Europe, and giving them to their employees in order to build and design the Manhattan of the future. Other occasions when this collective spirit emerged inside capitalist society, to some other extremes, hundreds of draftsmen designing aeroplanes in an Albert Kahn factory during the second world war, or the most corporate office ever, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill producing architecture as a real collective. Obviously these set of tools are not immediately translated into projects because a lot of other things interfere with the production of architecture. At the same time you see this idea of architecture as shared knowledge, the idea that architecture can try to produce public beauty is something that we really believe and try to achieve in our recent project in Milan. It’s called Casa della Memoria, ‘House of Memory’, and it’s a bizarre building because it hosts five associations that are related to cruel fact of 20th century Milanese history, the partisans, the victims of the terrorism of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the victims of fascist and Nazi deportations. It’s an office, a public space where you can do lectures or little exhibitions, a gigantic archive of the history of liberation, from a war that we started, okay, but let’s say that that’s another story. It’s the story of liberation from the German occupation from the second half of the Second World War. It’s part of a much bigger project, a huge real estate development that has taken place in Milan over the last few years, by a developer called Hines, with buildings by César Pelli, KPF, Arquitectonica, Stefano Boeri. Before we were involved there was already a ‘House of Memory’ project that had been designed by Stefano Boeri. You may think it’s beautiful or ugly, but for me what was interesting is that in this project by Boeri, the interpretation of memory was all about transparency. It was really the modernistic interpretation of memory as a sensibility. He decided to run to become the Mayor of Milan, he lost, but anyway he decided to stop all Italian projects, so they did a competition in 2011, and all our competitors went for the very same interpretation of memory, openness and transparency. Our first thought was that this memory was extremely fragile and that it needed protection. So, we thought of the building as a safe. At the same time we understood that there was the need to convey this memory on the surface of the building, so the first thing that came into our mind were polyptych’s from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, where there is an effort to present collectivity, a set of stories, all together, on a given surface. The Polyptych of the Madonna of Misericordia, by Piero della Francesca is a good example.&nbsp; <img width="595" height="567" width_o="595" height_o="567" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a683cf8919578353669256a4734fe99dfd13ac88dcfdb4b6e23d08ee06efb127/1.jpg" data-mid="74399727" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/595/i/a683cf8919578353669256a4734fe99dfd13ac88dcfdb4b6e23d08ee06efb127/1.jpg" /> fig. 1 The Madonna of Misericordia Tuscany 1462 Obviously the aesthetic is very different now, but luckily, Gerhard Richter is always there to help, not only in terms of aesthetic, but also in terms of how to tackle this set of memories related to such difficult events. There’s an impressive series of paintings by Richter. Portraits of the members of the Baader Meinhof terrorist group from Germany at the end of the ‘70s. What interested was that they are composed of small portraits, big collective scenes, and his signature blurring, for us was almost like saying that these memories were impossible to forget and impossible to remember, as if by blurring it made these memories more distant and at the same time terribly present. The other problem, when you talk about the idea of trying to represent a collective memory, while in the Renaissance there was someone deciding what to depict, the prince or the pope, nowadays things are different, we’re in a democracy, so you need a sort of participation game in order to find the right representation. There wasn’t money to do it properly, but nevertheless, we did this participation game. And then there was the issue of how you combine a building with this idea of a collective portrait, and we found this amazing example: the National Library by O’Gorman in Mexico City, where this modernist building, an archive block, is surmounted by this the cosmogony of Mexican origins. <img width="700" height="863" width_o="700" height_o="863" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/110ca196c742389c77cd850fcf18ba5aaaf70820c28c896c7fa5efde862e495b/2.jpg" data-mid="74399782" border="0" data-scale="61" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/700/i/110ca196c742389c77cd850fcf18ba5aaaf70820c28c896c7fa5efde862e495b/2.jpg" /> fig. 2 Biblioteca Central UNAM Mexico City 1952 And then came the idea of framing, like the polyptych, and we found this building by Giovanni Muzio in the early 1930s, trying to adapt to the new language, to Rationalism, and at the same time not really being able to convey this idea of lightness, and fighting with it, and producing this fantastic hybrid building, a convent in the centre of Milan. <img width="800" height="800" width_o="800" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ae709b39bffc1f99643f8302b83cacf72a89e823cb139efd4f9b5d8b95b9875/3.jpg" data-mid="74399784" border="0" data-scale="58" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/6ae709b39bffc1f99643f8302b83cacf72a89e823cb139efd4f9b5d8b95b9875/3.jpg" /> fig. 3 Angelicum Milan 1942 Gradually our façade started to appear, as a framed polyptych, comprising portraits and collective scenes made out of terracotta, a traditional Milanese material. We made a proposal for the competition and won. We suggested a safe, a very simple form, and indeed the plot didn’t allow much more, so it’s a simple rectangle. Then we started asking ourselves how the plan could be organised. The answer came from different trajectories, because we had been looking at buildings like the ‘corn house’. This tradition of keeping the corn during the winter in the very centre of the city because it’s protected, and the idea that this building despite being a storage space has to be monumental, because the content is extremely precious. We found that extremely interesting. They are tools that enable public life, but are at the same time very minimal in their physicality. Another influence came from the traditions of the Venetian schools, which were important buildings, public buildings in the city, but second league monumental buildings. In the various neighbourhoods they were trying to establish some welfare, even trying to make local centres of power, and out of this came an architectural typology that is quite stable, a big room at ground floor with columns, and a monumental stair to reach the upper floors. This is the plan of our building which is very close to the plans of the Venetian school. A ground floor that is totally public, two columns and monumental stairs, and two wings for the services. <img width="800" height="501" width_o="800" height_o="501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f8a321ce16938b5667e6ef8df7eb2dc2dac0e204c26319b57199e7af715205c/4.jpg" data-mid="74399813" border="0" data-scale="72" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/9f8a321ce16938b5667e6ef8df7eb2dc2dac0e204c26319b57199e7af715205c/4.jpg" /> fig. 4 House of Memory plan Milan 2015 We knew from the beginning that the budget was very low. We also knew the façade would cost quite a lot, so we have to be essential inside. We referred back to the essentiality of the Brazilian architecture of Villanova Artigas, and we imagined the inside as a dignified garage, very harsh, with idea of having part of the archive exposed, with a monumental stair which get’s you very close to the archive, which is closed because of the fragility of the content. I think we won the competition because the head of the jury was César Pelli. Apparently he entered the room and said something, which I think says a lot about the idea of public beauty, he said something like: “I really don’t like it. It’s really not my style. At the same time, if you want a house of memory, this is it.” After we were announced as the winners we started this participation process with the associations, which was a real effort, in order to define the set of images for the façade. And in studying how to build these images we developed this matrix of numbers, with each number being one pixel. There are six numbers for six colours of brick; four red and two greys. The portraits and scenes are made with a quarter of a brick, while the pattern below is made of half a brick. Then we started testing with a couple of mock-ups and we were happy with the result of this blurring, because when you’re close these images are simply disappearing, a pattern of colours, and you need a certain distance in order to perceive them. The only way to construct the images was to print the all the façades on paper and then to glue one square meter of this matrix on the insulation layer. The bricklayers had six piles of bricks behind them and simply built by numbers. It went surprisingly smoothly. We were lucky with the contractor, with the way the engaged with the building, and they built in a very precise way, doing things that are not so common to do in Italy, maybe more common in Switzerland. They were so happy about the stairs that they really resisted the idea of painting it in yellow, and we really had to fight with them because they were saying: “Oh it’s so good like that, come on you can’t destroy it by painting it!” And we told them: “look, it’s a garage, if we don’t paint the stairs it’ll be even more of a garage, we really need to inject a bit of life there.” So they painted it, and in the end they were happy with the result, so I think it’s okay. I think it’s a very bizarre building, especially in that location, surrounded by these big new towers with a completely different idea of architecture in terms of what you could consider as being nice or beautiful. <img width="680" height="1020" width_o="680" height_o="1020" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3da602d30fd02241c78eb1bd1748a150bf58605487dbe528a2ffbb65ff40caa6/5.jpg" data-mid="74399804" border="0" data-scale="64" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/680/i/3da602d30fd02241c78eb1bd1748a150bf58605487dbe528a2ffbb65ff40caa6/5.jpg" /> fig. 5 House of Memory Milan 2015&nbsp; Photograph by Stefano Graziani Let’s say, everything around is extremely fashionable, I’ll be nasty for a moment—in a very populist way. The ‘House of Memory’ is a very strange building, I think it’s quite difficult to know whether it’s an old or a new building, it seems as if it’s been there forever. It relates to the scale of the existing city to the north, to the late 19th early 20th century city made of blocks. At the same time it deals with the new part, from the south it appears almost like a pavilion in the park. Beyond our expectations, it soon became totally part of the city, really as if it had been there forever. I think the appreciation of it was unexpected. It became hugely popular quite quickly. Hugely, I mean, we’re not talking about the Bilbao effect, but with respect to the size and ambition of the building. It’s still a garage. I have to say that a year later, since they moved everything in, and I have to agree with Angela when she says that architecture is a backdrop for life. After one year it’s totally filled with all the gadgets from the associations. So there are flags, there are portraits; there are ugly sofa’s everywhere, the building has supported, quite decently I think, this invasion, probably because it is almost like an empty shell. Being an architect, as I said earlier, the only way to talk about architecture is to talk about projects. That’s why I decided to present this. It’s even the way we write San Rocco, each time we develop a call for papers, which is in the end an editorial, but at the same time the whole magazine is built up around cases. RM-P One of the reasons we wanted to talk about this subject today is because there’s a general pervading culture of not wanting to talk about it, that to have an aesthetic outlook is maybe a bit out-dated and conservative, or even luxurious in some way. Roger Scruton says we don’t talk about it anymore is because we’ve lost faith in ideals. Koolhaas says it’s boring and you’ll only get boring answers. Another aspect, going back to your Arendt reading on Kant, where it’s seen as undemocratic to make a judgement because it presupposes that there’s a right and a wrong, and that it might be a criticism of another individual who should be free to have their own ideas. AZ I think, maybe I’m oversimplifying here, but in a way the Enlightenment and Modernism basically killed it, killed the possibility of talking about beauty. In the best case Modernism substituted the discourse on beauty with a social agenda; Hannes Mayer for example. In the worst case they substituted it with efficiency, everything you could measure, efficiency is measureable, it’s the scientific paradigm in a way, while beauty is part of a different paradigm, it’s a totally human science whatever that means, and as such is not measurable. Even Kant or Hannah Arendt are not of great help in this respect. They show you something, but they don’t necessarily provide and answer. What they say is extremely ambiguous. I think it’s just the way human culture developed after the Enlightenment, but I think there’s a crucial moment; Vignola going to Paris to work for the king. There are these diaries in which, a very old Vignola, is talking with the king and with the new architects from the Enlightenment, and Vignola is simply, and continuously in a stubborn way saying, no, we have to do it like this, because to do it like this is beautiful. And the Enlightenment boys are saying, no, because we can’t feed the horses there and so on. It’s very nice to read and I think it’s really the moment in which you have this clash of very different ways of understanding architecture, or at least of understanding what the priority is in architecture. I’m not saying that efficiency isn’t important. I’m saying that the ‘programme’ is hosted by a building. It’s not the main reason why a building is shaped the way it is. As we all know, buildings all came from very different programs throughout history, so in a way, if you understand form as the main quality of a building, the main characteristic, then beauty automatically becomes the priority, because form is the only thing that will never change. The installations will change in twenty years, but form is there forever. RM-P I find the idea that Modernism killed beauty difficult. I’m interested in something Angela said about the whole, that you couldn’t add or take away but to the detriment of the whole, and the Modernists talked about this idea in their preoccupation with reduction and finding the essence, dismissing decoration as superfluous. Is there a relationship between this form of abstraction and the decorative references used in your work, especially in the House of Memory? AZ It’s a very difficult question. I think if you understand architecture as a fundamental part of the city, quoting Rossi’s Architecture of the City, I think that decoration was always a very powerful tool in order to signify and understand the hierarchical side of the city. Because, even in a very literal way, the house of the rich is a little bit more decorated than the house of the poor. The more decorated church is the church in which the believers put more money, and so forth, and I think it’s not irrelevant to how you as a citizen are then able to read the city, and to grasp immediately the values of a city. And now these values are in a way built up in an ensemble, with all these architectures that are there. On the other hand I agree that it’s not necessarily through decoration that you represent values and priorities, because it can be size, it can be mass, a peculiar structural choice. There are many tools, then it’s simply what you prefer, what you like, and what you like to use. I’m not for or against decoration per-se. I’m certainly not interpreting Modernism in a very literal or pedantic way. It’s not banned to talk about beauty; it’s not banned to use decoration. Decoration is probably one of the only areas in which the architect can still have a bit of pleasure. All the rest is such a big effort, to match the client desires, to be inside the budget, to fit the regulations, all the rest, drawing a plan, drawing a section, combining the complexity of the building into a difficult whole which is reasonable. It’s such an effort that finally you get a sort of relief in the easiness of decoration. But that’s very much from the side of the architect. RM-P If we’re talking about the decorative potential, is beauty then in the quality of the object, whether it’s the interpretation of the object by an individual, whether it’s in the moment, the event, or even if it’s in the idea. Umberto Eco says that an idea can’t be beautiful because it has no physicality, and that only mathematical ideas can be beautiful due to their relationship to the physical. Is that an important distinction? I find it difficult, as an architect, to remove aesthetics from the made object, because I think that’s the only thing we can control. AZ I think that beauty is an event. I think it’s an event that’s happening between the object and the observer, so you certainly need the object, and of course also the observer. It’s only happening in relation. Going back to Kant, it can only happen in the object, the observer and the mind of the observer in relation to all the other possible observers. If this is not the case then we kind of retreat back into the picturesque idea of beauty as a simple fulfilment of your senses. To me it’s a more appealing, or at least a more productive idea of beauty as the public shared quality of a given object. RM-P Are there any questions from the audience? AUDIENCE I have something to say. It’s a little bit about what you just touched on. You were getting to something about a shared collective values. If I remember my Kant, there’s something in there about universalising directions that beauty goes in, like there’s infinite ways to be ugly but there’s only one way to be beautiful. That’s obviously very crude. As you were saying, you’re interest is in the judgement of the viewer and not so much in the object itself. There’s something in that, when I judge this object to be beautiful, or when you do, somehow when you make that judgement there’s something universal about it and we all come together in that judgement. What I’m wondering though, is if you accept that we live in a multicultural society and there’s millions of kinds of beauty, then are there any other values in architecture that we might talk about that are universal. From Kant the thing about beauty is that it’s universal, and I’m wondering if it isn’t beauty anymore, not that it doesn’t exist, but if it’s become more of an individual thing, then is there anything that replaces it as a kind of universalised value? AZ I wouldn’t know what else in the end. To talk about universals now is becoming increasingly more complex. But at the same time it’s the only thing we should really talk about, universals on many different levels, the now fashionable discourse on sustainability is a universal discourse which is maybe a possible answer, but I would say a cheap answer, and still in the realm of efficiency, in the realm of something you can supposedly measure once you define the priorities, because it’s very difficult to define them. Beyond that I think it’s still only beauty that you can try to agree upon. PL Sustainability is a moral imperative but it’s not a universal objective in that sense. In fact it can be incredibly divisive. But beauty, and truth, which is the foundation of knowledge, and then from knowledge genuine democracy, to me these are the components of Humanism and a mechanism through which we could establish universals. We used to think that that was important, why do you think we took that off the table? AZ I’m not sure about truth. At least when you talk about human culture it’s about misunderstandings. Transformation in culture is always through appropriation, misunderstanding, or being dishonest toward your ancestors, using their words, their forms, their production and heavily manipulating it. At least in respect to culture, truth is very difficult. PL I would argue that you use Hannah Arendt as a framework, and her actual preoccupation is how you arrive at real knowledge and understanding of the world as a human being in relation to the rest of society. So when she talks about the public, she’s not just saying we want to hang out together in a public space, or even that we want to make a public building. What she’s saying is that we can’t make architecture, as an expression of our collective will now because we have abandoned the project of developing our knowledge and understanding of the world and our individual place in relation to society. So for her, truth, knowledge, democracy, are all intimately connected and she thinks that to develop knowledge makes room for public life and democracy, so in a way it’s not fair to use Arendt as a starting point and then abandon the project of what she’s arguing, because I think she would never have given up on the possibility of getting closer to truth, not to arrive at a truth and for it to be fixed, but for it to be an open process that’s related to democracy. AZ I totally agree with you. But at the same time Arendt was a much more serious person than any architect I know—laughs. She was really busy with the fate of humanity. Architecture cannot compete with that. But at the same time I still consider every act of architecture, even the most private one, let’s say a guy in a remote part of the country asking an architect to do something in his house, that is already a public act, for two reasons. One, it’s happening on the globe, which is still shared, and the other reason is much more interesting, if you call an architect for your little kitchen, you’ve got a public ambition toward that kitchen. As an architect you might want that kitchen to be published, and as such, even the most private act of architecture is by definition, a public act, and immediately enters the discussion about what is nice, maybe not what is beautiful, but certainly what is nice or cool. In that sense, I think it’s one of these professions that are still necessarily linked to the realm of the public, the collective, the shared, which is somehow an act of resistance. I think it’s an act of resistance on many levels actually. We all know that architecture is such a slow profession. It takes five, ten, fifteen years to do something. But luckily this slowness is even embedded in the object, and the object is there to stay longer than us. I think that’s an incredible act of resistance toward the atomisation and individualisation of our society. ︎︎︎