Hi Archinect!

I’m at the very beautiful Cambridge Public Library (by William Rawn Associates) for a conversation between Marikka Trotter (co-editor with Esther Choi of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else) and K. Michael Hays, who was co-author together with Trotter of “Reenchanting Architecture” in that book.

[Note: these are not the exact images shown, but there was a continuous slideshow of these projects during the talk.]

7:15: MT opens by passing the ball to KMH, asking him to talk about the launch of assemblage, since that was an inspiration for her series with Esther Choi.

KMH: Things really have changed since the 1970s and 1980s. During that time, the great teachers were all practicing architects who had little work during the recession, and then become increasingly involved in academia and teaching. Their roots were in practice and were very informed by structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss).

Race civil rights in America preceded conversations about gender, sexuality, class, and so on: their theoretical tool was French post-structuralism. So the big switch from Oppositions to assemblage was a switch from a conversation about the ‘folding and unfolding of form’ (Eisenman), to ‘folding form out into its various contexts.’

MT: What were the consequences of folding form out into its larger field—into conversations of sexuality, gender, race, class, and so on?

KMH: Although you could do shelter for the homeless or for low-income people, we didn’t see that as architecture; architecture had more to do with how you could start to frame wider issues in architectural terms. Today, it’s hard for us to swallow the notion that a work of art or architecture has its own politics, independent of the politics of its creator—the artist or the patron.

MT: To the extent that there are things particular to architecture as a discipline, that architecture can do that other things can’t do, Habermas suggests, then architecture can have agency. Are you talking about a disciplinary project of this kind?

KMH: Part of this is a deep respect for the history of the discipline—not just as a resource for ideas, but as a way of rethinking the present.

MT: Would you say that assemblage founded modern architectural theory?

KMH: Theory has always been its own world. But the much-discussed split between architectural theory and practice, in the 1990s, that can be largely blamed on assemblage and its group. Assemblage was never interested in creating a theory that could be instrumentalized. Although we did publish projects—we were the first to publish Herzog and de Meuron in North America, for example.

MT: When you chose the title assemblage, there was a thinking behind that, and a possibility of operativity, isn’t there?

KMH: And then there’s that thing we never talked about: post-Modernism. What we thought was happening was that the structuralism and semiotics of theories before us had a direct lineage with the building boom of the 1980s and with post-modernism. We wanted to stand against that, which mean that theory was the avant-garde for us and that practice had lost its way.

MT: So once money started coming back in for people to practice, the work of these practitioners had taken on a different meaning.

KMH: Even people we respected a great deal—Aldo Rossi and so on—when they practiced, we thought the work was very conventional.

Assemblage for us also related to the collage-like nature of combining many different kinds of writing and argumentation within a journal.

MT: When Peter Sloterdijk visited the GSD, he said that the worst thing about the generation of young people today is that they feel they have nothing to do. That the generation before them “did everything” and left our current generation no room to manoeuver. It really struck a nerve with the students in the room that day.

So in our generation, we feel that the world is incredibly unjust, and that there isn’t room to establish the kind of discourse that we want to have. So we have to go about making that.

KMH: And how did you do that?

MT: Ha! Well we didn’t know what we were doing, which was a benefit.

KMH: What struck me about the first issue is how many interviews there were in the first issue [of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else] that were raw and unedited—we’re used to interviews being highly produced and edited for publication. One of the things you caught there was a sense that there was a sense of emergence, of something happening that we don’t yet have all worked out.

MT: It’s funny, because as editors you mostly send a publication out into the world and there’s a deafening silence; and you have no idea how it’s been received. Eventually you start to get a few pieces of feedback, and you hope that they are representative of how people felt about it.

KMH: Part of what we started with in this interview was that schools had completely given themselves over to building performance, mood, affect, and atmosphere, and that form was no longer a concern. The other thing was a kind of presentism—that there is no sense of a past that is consequent or in any way binding on current practice. There is simply practice at this moment, and no sense of a future. So there’s no sense of our present as a past-for-some-future, which is a problem.

Another problem is that there’s a purely affirmational attitude—a sense that uncertainty can have a use, or a sense that you can do things that you can’t justify. This is a kind of “negative thinking” (in Adorno’s sense) in the sense that there are possibilities at any given moment that are not yet representable—that you can’t yet affirm—and that we have to represent the unrepresentable in a sense. That’s the Kantian sublime—representing the unrepresentable.

MT: The way I could grasp this was that we can—even if we can’t consider how to get there—we can still imagine the hole that a certain thing would make in space.

KMH: The point of the night, if there is one, is that discourse can have a kind of power, predictability, and consequence that is difficult to imagine belonging to something like discourse.

We were thinking about this question: Can there be a contemporary avant-garde?

MT: If we hadn’t looked at specific contemporary architecture projects, we would never have gotten to the contemporary, because you’re not interested in the contemporary.

KMH: Whoa, you gotta be careful there, girl. Well, there was nothing about contemporary practice challenging in the way that I found Mies and Hilberseimer helpful in order to think about architecture. But Marikka kept bringing contemporary work to the table—much of it pavilions and small pieces—which started to make sense within a global project.

MT: There’s a relation to Borges’ idea of an encyclopaedia: that you could make an encyclopaedia of fictitious things, and eventually they’d start to make their way into the world as people took in the ideas. There’s something about architecture that always makes other possibilities possible—it’s not necessarily about knowing where those possibilities are going to go. And this architecture doesn’t have to be something that is built, as long as it goes into cultural circulation.

KMH: Marikka introduced the notion of enchantment as a “singing into being,” of inviting possibilities. 

Questions.

It’s pretty quiet, so I ask how they see a distinction between architecture and other practices and fields, given that there are many practices and fields (such as technology) that also open up future possibilities.

KMH: In our world of big urgencies—global hunger, poverty, a real threat of ecological disaster—there are certain things that we can’t address architecturally. Architecture doesn’t seem like the right, to me—

MT: Well, here I have an advantage, because I’m finishing another book called Architecture is All Over, which asks what architecture can do in the face of these dire situations. On the one hand, it looks like there is nothing architecture can do, but on the other it seems like there isn’t anything it can’t do—that the skill set of an architect can’t deal with.

Me again: But is that circular then, if we say that something is architecture if it’s done by an architect, with the skills of an architect? Doesn’t that just displace the definition rather than aswer it?

MT: I’m OK with that. I don’t think there’s anything particular or unique about architecture among other design disciplines; I think they’re all equally potent. 

KMH: Hannes Meyer said that architects are specialists in generalization, that architects contextualize problems in a larger and larger way. Whereas biologists and economists work in a fairly small context, their interests come together under a rubric that we can call architecture or design more generally.

Another student comment about the problem with representational tools today, that it is too precise and doesn’t leave enough possibilities hanging in the balance. General consensus that there isn’t enough “smudginess” today.  KMH talks about Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building, and how this project which aimed to resist representation ended becoming an icon; the ridiculousness of trying to make a design of a chocolate bar that would look like the Blur Building.

I still believe in art. Why do we listen to music? Music gives me—and I’m being too personal here, but it gives me something that my mother called faith.

Bill Saunders: There’s a difference between mystery and vagueness. The cop out is that you can get a little more precise than blur; you can look at the graduation exhibition of GSD student projects and get a sense of some kind of direction being established that isn’t literalistic but that is about emerging forms. But what are they?  Is there something emerging other than vagueness? This (Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo) is pretty vague.

KMH: The Blur Building was primarily critical, and I think there’s a place for that. When we look at, for example, “informal” settlements in Mumbai, Rahul Mehrotra would never call that informal because he can see the form, the order in what we see as chaotic.

MT: I think we’re still in a process of trying to figure out what we’re seeing. (Reference to Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion—it looks vague but it is articulated; each rod is a seed capsule and comes to a point). 

KMH: This for me is the healthy thing about the relation between theory and practice now, as opposed to the assemblage or Oppositions years. There’s a productive division of labor. I struggled to write the piece for Nader Tehrani’s project at Georgia Tech.

Question from student: What kind of studio would you teach?

MT: In the studio I taught recently, I assigned one reading from Deleuze, and we looked at one site for the whole semester--it was not a site that was particularly useful for anything and the project was to find what kind of latencies it held.

Question from audience: In practice, where you have a definite site and program, why is there still a vagueness in form?

KMH: There are different kinds of architectural practices. These are the more speculative projects that we were looking at tonight; with the exception of the UK Pavilion, they didn't even have a program. So this isn't a way to build a public library, but as a kind of research it will eventually impact how we build a library.

KMH: The ICA is very generic, it's nothing like the Blur building. It's not like it looks like Blur, but it's learning from Blur.

Thanks for reading!

Lian

Hi Archinect! This one is for the lols. The GSD's Scott Cohen and Nader Tehrani, Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, are having a friendly lunchtime debate--as illustrated by the hot air rising from each house in the poster. 12:10: Scott opens things, describing his close and collegial...

Hi Archinect! I'm at MIT today for Margaret Livingstone's lecture on visual perception. She'll be talking about how works of visual art can inform us about how we see. (Her excellent book with many visual games and informative optical illusions is called Vision and Art: the biology of seeing.)...

Hello, Sorry to abuse my blog in this way, but this is just to reach out to incoming GSD (and MIT) students, as well as GSD Career Discovery summer students, who are looking for apartments. We have a Facebook group with almost 300 members called 'Harvard GSD Housing' where you can post ads...

Hi Archinect! I wasn't able to live blog last night's lecture by Marc Simmons from Front, but it's just as well, as he talks so articulately that it's better to watch the video yourself, at the GSD's YouTube channel. It was a great presentation of Front's façade consultation and...

Hi Archinect! I'm at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square for the Harvard Graduate Council's 'One Harvard: Lectures that Last.' Top professors from each of Harvard's twelve schools have been rounded up to to give a talk:     Roland Baron | Harvard School of Dental Medicine...

Hi Archinect! By now, you've probably seen Google's April 1 release of its 8-bit map for NES. But have you seen this real-time animated map of wind in the United States? And this Metro Distortion Map that shows the travel time to stations in Washington DC? And Mapnificent, which shows what places...

Google Maps 8-bit for NES

Hi Archinect! George Baird is giving a lunchtime lecture today, hosted by the student groups CanadaGSD and LandGSD. Baird is the former Dean (2004-2009) of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and is a partner in the Toronto-based architecture and urban design firm...

[Photo by Julie Chen for ArchitectureBoston] Hi Archinect! ArchitectureBoston, a quarterly publication of the Boston Society of Architects, is undergoing a change in leadership. The founding editor, Elizabeth Padjen, is stepping down after fourteen years of service and Renée Loth, a Boston...

Hi Archinect! 6:25: I have springtime allergies here and would rather be at home...but here I am...live blogging Rosalind Williams' keynote lecture for this weekend's Landscape Infrastructure conference. The conference, organized by GSD Landscape professor Pierre Bélanger, is subtitled...

Hi Archinect! Just to mention that my former roommate, recent GSD M.Arch.II grad (and thesis prize winner) Etien Santiago, has launched a new print and online journal called 'Apeira.' The first issue includes: The Whole of Apeira / Etien Santiago Fêlure in Humans and Machines / Lea Anglais...

Although I'm actually pretty keen on the potentials of pervasive computing, the current hype about GPS-based social networking apps makes me uneasy. The idea is that your mobile device will be able to tell you when somebody in your vicinity has or shares certain interests (or other...

Hi Archinect! Koolhaas in the haas. Omagawd! [Photo from Chauhaus--our cafeteria--courtesy of Paul Cattaneo.] Koolhaas just introduced the study-abroad Rotterdam studio he's teaching in the fall, and now...he's giving a talk called "Current Preoccupations," with Q+A led by Sanford Kwinter and K...

Hi Archinect, I'm sitting on the floor in a very stuffy, very tiny room for the last session of this weekend's conference, "Ethics of the Urban: the City and the Spaces of the Political." Gerald Frug and Richard Sennett are speaking, moderated by Neil Brenner. 4:45: Gerald Frug: "Richard Sennett...

Hi Archinect! The sultry r&b is playing, and Saskia Sassen is in front of the gold curtain this Friday night for the keynote lecture of the conference, "Ethics of the Urban: the City and the Spaces of the Political." This is the third in a series of conferences organized by Dean Mostafavi...

Hi Archinect, I'm at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government tonight for a talk with Samuel Klein, Trustee at Wikipedia. It's a small crowd, but we'll see how it goes. 6:43: How ironic, we're starting with some technical difficulties. 6:44: SK is asking who has started a Wikipedia entry that...

Hi Archinect! I'm a bit under the weather today, but this is one not to miss. Richard Sennett, the GSD's Senior Loeb Fellow for 2012 (and faculty member at New York University and the London School of Economics) is talking about the "Architecture of Cooperation": “The theme of the lecture...

Hi Archinect! Tonight's event is called “Design Technologies as Agents of Change,” with Thomas Bock (TU Munich), Paul Seletsky (ArcSphere New York), Rivka Oxman (Technion Haifa), and Ingeborg Rocker (GSD). Moderated by Martin Bechthold (GSD). Three Germans tonight! 6:32: It's still a...

Hi Archinect, We're back in full Piper, eagerly awaiting Philip Glass. I'm not sure what will happen. Our website says that "Mr. Glass will speak on the theme of collaboration and the creative process and, through brief performances, share selections from his oeuvre." [Photo by Fernando Aceves...

Hi Archinect! I'm at the Media Lab for a talk with Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Facebook. His presentation is called "Design, Hack, Ship: How we build products at Facebook," and it was billed as offering "a glimpse into what happened behind the scenes of the initial News Feed...

Hi Archinect! Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects and founding director at the AA Design Research Lab, is in Piper tonight for a lecture on "Parametric Order: 21st century architectural order." [You can see the video online at the GSD's YouTube Channel.] 6:36pm: PSC takes the...

Hi Archinect! [Left to right: Charles Waldheim, Diana Balmori, Joel Sanders, Mohsen Mostafavi, Ben Prosky (facing away), and Chris Reed in Piper Auditorium before the lecture.] Balmori and Sanders are in Piper tonight, talking about their book Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. I...

Hi Archinect! We're in "full Piper" with a full house for the GSD's first public event of 2012, called "Museum as Genealogy"--and it's all Scott. [Added note as of Jan 29]: For many of us as GSD architecture students, this kind of event is anticipated as a moment when some of the most important...

Oh hello there, Archinect! Finals were a blur and vacation was the best, and here we are back in the trays yet again. Oh, I have so many things to tell you. But first, my project from last semester! A twelve lane highway runs under the entire site. I was building on air-rights over this highway...

Hi Archinect! We have one week left before our final review and the plan is to finish my model today. Actually, the plan was to finish it yesterday, but this morning I realized that this was unrealistic. If I can finish the model today, then I'll have six days for drawings, which is still tight...

Hi Archinect! This is just a quick update as we head into our last few weeks before studio finals. Things are going well and I'm just buckling down to focus on representation techniques and the specifics of my design, so that things don't become a complete shit-show in December. I'm gonna hold...

Hi Archinect! It's Open House day at the GSD, so we're in "full Piper" (using the entire auditorium) for a lecture by Wang Shu from Amateur Architecture Studio. The video is now viewable at the GSD website and the GSD's YouTube channel. 4:05 pm: A long and laudatory introduction from Scott. He's...

Hi Archinect! We had our midterm last Wednesday and I am finally rousing myself out of my post-review sloth and pleasure-chasing (and yes, it was glorious) in order to post some images. I've already posted photos of our site. And you may have seen the video of my critics' public lecture at the...

Hi Archinect! Stan Allen, Dean of Princeton University School of Architecture and Principal of SAA/Stan Allen Architect, is going at it tonight with Preston Scott Cohen, Chair of Architecture at Harvard GSD and Principal at Preston Scott Cohen Inc. The video is also posted at the GSD's YouTube...

Hi Archinect! William S. Saunders, Timothy Hyde, George P. Dodds, David Gissen, Simon Sadler, and Meredith TenHoor are in the house tonight in front of the golden curtain. The topic is theory and writing. [Update: you can now view the full video at the GSD's YouTube channel.] 6:40: William...