new practices q&a

excerpts from a conversation.

this conversation took place in response to a series of questions asked for new practices new york | 2008.

[…]

the given questionnaire asks for three words to describe your firm design philosophy. let’s use this as a way to jump right into a discussion of your practice.

difference. internal difference, that is, between authors or ideas.

this is a good term. i am thinking specifically of systems theory, where all systems are based upon difference: internally, within each system, but also externally, from its context. in order for communication to occur, there has to be a difference of direction, time, or meaning.

is that your word as well?

no, but i think it’s a good description of our process. i am choosing “contingencies.” it is similar to difference, in that nothing is fixed and things are mutually dependent.

i’m going to add “process” and “community.” process specifically because we approach each project as a unique condition, without a predetermined notion. and community because our projects try to promote community on different scales and are, at the same time, informed by it.

all of your words describe a specific methodology or process. did this way of working come about over time, or was it there from the beginning of your collaboration?

it came about over time. it is in part a response to the firms where we used to work. when we began to operate on our own, we started to ask how to chart our own course, how to do things in a way which would feel more true to us, both in terms of clients, as well as process and design and values. so that’s how i think we began to agree, because we began to have that conversation.

one of the words that i was expecting to find in your answers is “collaboration”. as a multidisciplinary practice, it’s very much what you do and quite literally what we’re doing for this exhibition. did you avoid it intentionally?

yes. i think there are two reasons. lately we have been doing a lot of writing about our practice that has forced us to get more specific about what defines us. “collaboration” seems too vague. the second reason is that the cfa made us aware that other firms use “collaboration” as a way to define themselves in an innovative way, and we don’t think that’s how we are innovative. collaboration is part of what we do, but we’re trying to focus more on our actual process.

how do some of the strategies that you describe translate into innovation? is innovation important to you?

we never really discussed innovation until it came up in these questions. we don’t set out with the goal that we want to make something new.

we focus more on local conditions of innovation – smaller-scale opportunities where we try to push things further.

innovation is often linked with technology and that’s certainly not our interest. we focus instead on repositioning the institutional boundary between what is part of our discipline and what is not. by questioning how one looks at an exhibition space, lobby or architecture office, for instance, we hope to put things together in a way that would allow an institution to change. for us, innovation means to question or challenge what you take for granted.

we often approach things naively :we think about why is this, why does this institution work this way, or why is the lobby just the place that people walk through?

we start with given expectations – what the client expects, what the architecture community expects, what anybody expects to happen when they hire an architect and if we question base values, we often end up somewhat to the side of what someone might expect…

is innovation also linked to form?

probably one of the more charged negotiations within the office is between the values that we identify collectively and our individual formal intuitions and backgrounds. even though we ultimately want to get to, for instance, how someone walks through a door, we’ll still have a heated discussion about what the door looks like. but still it’s the act of moving from public to private space where the potential lies.

what are models of practice or precedents that are important to the way that you design and work?

i am probably the one person in the office for whom the plan is very important. i definitely draw from my le corbusier experience, and then perhaps kahn.

i think for all three of us, modernism is our historical reference. but we each have different aspects of modernism that we’re interested in or influenced by.

i would argue it’s the functionality of it. it’s not the idea of going for a style, it’s the idea of making it work and as a consequence it looks a certain way.

our generation is in a weird position historically, in that when we were in school we weren’t being taught modernism, at least i wasn’t. (i don’t feel we need to add in studio here, i think it makes sense.)

i was torn between modernism and the reaction against modernism.

i wasn’t taught modernism in undergrad. deconstructivism certainly and the architects that were teaching and practicing it certainly had a much more modern reference than i did, but they didn’t pass it on to me. modernism is a reference only because we’ve had to reeducate ourselves about what it means in relation to contemporary architecture and to the architecture of the past one hundred years. what we might do now to respond to that is not taken into account.

what are some examples that you draw on in your daily conversations?

sergison bates or lacaton & vassal. aldo van eyck, hertzberger, team x has come up quite a bit.

the eames come up for their process and breadth of research. (this last sentence is not so clear anymore – it looks like it’s a positive example; maybe delete it altogether?)

you think we should move on to the next question: the culture of the office? we’re shifting a little bit that way. office, studio or lab?

i think workshop. workshop as a place where you make things and where you go to learn things. sometimes it’s more of a workshop than other times.

our office takes on any one of these roles depending on what we work on. i propose provisional and open as the culture of the office.

how does your design culture relate to your design philosophy and mode of practice?

having the common room spaces facilitated working on a number of things simultaneously now we’re at that large table. sometimes it’s not the most efficient way, let’s say, but it’s certainly a way that we all participate in some level on everything.

how do you feel about the creativity question? it’s another one of those tricky terms? how do you create an atmosphere that is conducive to creativity in your practice and work?

what is creativity? is it good organization? is it communication? is it bringing people together to find the right solution? is it coming up with an autonomous idea which then comes from the top down and works out really well?

how do you create creativity?

we met with two clients today who are both writers and both work in their apartment. we proposed two desks next to each other and they both said oh, no, i have to be in one space which is enclosed and the other person needs to be in a space which is open. so their processes of writing are completely different. it made us think about the fact that our table is pretty equal, and we all find a way to be “creative” there.

i feed off just watching and hearing other things around the table and get ideas from that. the open table allows discussion to happen very quickly. in that sense, our office space does allow for creativity.

you could also say our office structure actually neutralizes creativity due to the lack of individual authorship.

how do you come to one design solution? i’m sure you each have different ideas, different sketches…

often the client is the mediator.

we go to client meetings with as many schemes as we think are viable, with separate authors that are pushing for them.

we start with an office meeting where we flesh out the ideas, and then everybody dives into the ideas that are most interesting to them, and then it ends up on the wall. we either keep the schemes we each pinned up or we reassign them, and then those get developed. but when we go to the meeting with the client, we show all schemes, and the client often decides.

once we’re past the schematics phase in a project, it becomes less about specific authors putting their ideas forward and more about getting it done.

type of project or typology your firm would like to design but hasn’t already.

we would like to continue expanding the definitions of typology, in general, which has to do with the shifting of boundaries. if we could take a library, for instance, and redefine the institution of the library itself by proposing a new relationship to the community that uses it, then we would redefine the typology. so any typology, especially institutional typologies, would be interesting to us to the extent which we could be allowed to move them just a little bit.

i think a lot of young architects find themselves in the position of having to subvert an intended program as a way to express something that’s of more value to them. and quite frankly i’m getting tired of it. either it doesn’t happen or it happens in such a sort of obvious way that it loses its interest.

we don’t want to be subversive. i mean that’s sort of the school from which we come. i think, the dean of my school michael rotondi said that’s what he was trying to teach us to be at sci-arc. subversive. why do we have to be subversive?

the flip side of being subversive, is to be the “pied piper”, to convince them so thoroughly, that your agenda becomes their agenda.

this is something we’ve touched upon as being a limit in our practice that we are not activists or that we are not interested in being activists. i think there’s a little bit of a schism there. we won’t be activists, but we still expect that our clients have an agenda that is forward thinking and compatible with our views.

but we still do propose solutions that aren’t necessarily what the client directly asks for and that are, not subversive, but somewhat oppositional.

that’s a common position for critical contemporary architects.

i guess when we enter a competition, if we won a competition because we proposed what we thought was true, then that’s the right way to achieve our goal. look at a collaboration like ifau + jesko fezer, it seems like their commissions come because someone is interested and understands what they are trying to achieve. which is one of the most admirable things; it seems that they have a dialogue with the owners of those cultural institutions that allows them to pursue their urban and architectural values while responding directly to the client’s brief.

how is your design or practice influenced by the city?

the physical and intellectual territories are more fiercely contested in the city and that the shifting boundaries or redrawing the lines results in more direct feedback and dialogue.

resistance is a very positive aspect of process in that it requires you to work within preestablished limits. working in the city reinforces the way we like to work: negotiating, adjusting, adapting to the exisiting conditions; physical, social and economic.

we work on the lower east side, which is a very specific neighborhood, with a lot of housing, and a very strong sense of community. it is also a very resistive neighborhood and changes slowly.

i think we’re very fortunate to have our office located here. that’s certainly core to some of the things we’ve done, some of the values that we continue to practice.

our neighborhood is full of provocative examples of late modern architecture and urban planning. it’s interesting to compare the practices of those architects who operated locally, like herman jessor, to our practice. we’re working within buildings they designed and the communities they put in place fifty years ago. a lot of issues have played out in this context during that time; negative and positive reactions to the planning. as a built environment, the coop village, the modernist housing blocks that replaced the original tenements, are emblematic of the failure of modernism. we are involved in that; and at this point we are saying it works. it works for us; it works for many people around us. we’re able to re-evaluate and use it as a point of reference; to re-evaluate some of the things that one takes for granted when considering what it means to build architecture. that’s one way the neighborhood works.

common room + irina verona, praxis: a journal of writing + building, july 18, 2008

community: “in a long political tradition, “society” is conceived on the basis of contractual relations, structures of law, personality, and controlled interaction. in contrast, community is the site of hidden traditional, but also biological bonds. and the concept of community makes sense only in this opposition and tension.

[…]

i would tend to consider any form of spatial and architectural ordering that disrupts the total and compulsory encounter as community-founding. and especially through processes of uncoupling that, depending on the case, make me prudish or lascivious, focused or absent-minded. the ideal form of encounter is an encounter that is unforced, that allows for a free game of social positioning. hence one of the most important architectural inventions: the door and its multifaceted dramaturgy. an entire universe of social relationships can be generated from the types and uses of doors.”

http://www.common-room.net/cr/pdf/aa.pdf

collaboration: “collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour.

the term is widely used to describe new forms of labour relations within the realm of immaterial production of varying areas, but though significantly present there is very little research and theortical reflection on it. what is at stake is the very notion of establishing a new understanding of the term ‘together’ within a dynamic of ‘working together’.

the problem is, that most often collaboration is used as a synonym for cooperation, although etymologically, historically and politically it seems to make more sense to elaborate the actual differences that shift between the various coexisting layers of meaning.

in contrast to cooperation, collaboration is driven by complex realities rather than romantic notions of a common ground or commonality. it is an ambivalent process constituted by a set of paradoxical relationships between co-producers who affect each others.”

http://kit.kein.org/node/1

innovation: “being new is, in fact, often understood as a combination of being different and being recently-produced. we call a car a new car if this car is different from other cars, and at the same time the latest, most recent model produced by the car industry. but as sören kierkegaard pointed out – especially in his philosophische brocken – to be new is by no means the same as being different. kierkegaard even rigorously opposes the notion of the new against the notion of difference, his main point being that a certain difference is recognised as such only because we already have the capability to recognise and identify this difference as difference. so no difference can ever be new – because if it were really new it could notbe recognised as difference.”

http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html

creativity: “i would (…) like to discuss ‘creativity’ as a discursive term that occupies a central role in contemporary capitalist society, with a genealogy in processes of secularisation and the emergence of a modern subjectivity. in relation to the term ‘industry’, it can be observed in our use of language that the social and cultural might be transformed partially by industrialisation processes and technologies, if we are not willing to critically intervene. this is apparent in current debates on cognitive abilities or capabilities, or issues surrounding social competency, creativity and intelligence, which are increasingly represented as separate abstract units and understood as being learnt or already possessed by post-fordist workers. broader questions of what is achieved through these abilities, or why and for whom they are directed, seem to be of no relevance. abilities are treated as a value and a source in themselves, a source that could be generated and improved by training methods, or exploited by capital. but that can only happen when they are discussed as nonrelational and segregated from each other, when they are highlighted and represented from scientific and popular viewpoints as entities. for instance, with the requirement of ‘life long learning’ as a process isolated as a value in itself, as a concept not concerned with what to learn or why, but with the ongoing process of learning itself, whatever it is, as something valued positively as beneficial.”

http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/32.pdf

new  practices  new  york  |  2008

common  circular  1  –  new  practices  new  york  2008