10 Questions 10 Architects
10 Questions 10 Architects
10 Questions 10 Architects
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1. What role does program play in your current practice and how has it evolved since it first emerged in your thinking and design? Has the shift of your work from paper (both writing and design) to practice changed the way you conceptualize and/or use program?
KOOLHAAS: Would it be shocking if I claimed that it is no different than it used to be? It TSCHUMI: My current practice explores a number of dif-
is straightforward. My work with program began as a desire to pursue different means of expression that were similar to writing screenplays. At an interesting moment my obsession with script writing almost randomly intersected the world of constructivism, and with that I discovered an exceptionally interesting hybrid, where any aspect of daily life could be imagined and enacted through the architects imagination. I think that there are underlying structures in the process of architectural creation and design that critics never recognize. For instance, the difference between a competition and a commission dictates your room to maneuver and has a decisive impact on the design. As the Seattle Library was presented to a Board of Trustees it had to be understood as a linear, logical process. Porto, on the other hand, was a competition so it could be a totally irrational, insane, and surprising project. Seattle had to be diagrammaticin order to win the commission, we had to generate material that explained it step by step as an educational process. There is a dialectic dimension to this project, which was not my motivation, but became a tool for a certain explanation of the project. Program increasingly has another connotation for me, which is closer to agenda. I have been trying to find ways that we could circumvent or avoid the architects passivity and by this I mean his or her dependence on the initiatives of others. However it is framed and pursued, our agenda/program is an important term for me, to the extent thatcontrary to my longstanding reputation as a capitalist sell-out and cynical bystander in the process of globalizationI was actually very interested in selective participation. The key is being selective while also looking for strategies that would allow us to pursue (programmatically) our own interests. AMO has been an important part of that initiative, affording us a greater means to redefine the initial project brief, through the addition of political or cultural dimensions. We have just completed a competition in Dubai for a vast museum that includes components of the Hermitage, the Tate, and the Serpentine and that forms amalgamations in culture and politics. This kind of programming allows us to finally engage a practice that really interests me. Brief is merely an architectural word, but for me program is a word that exceeds that sheer limitation. I am not suggesting that we are not interested in briefswe are highly literal about briefs. In fact, in a certain way, we are earnest and innocent, maybe too earnest and innocent. In Porto, the Berlin Embassy, IIT, and Seattle we literally pushed the brief in a particular critical direction to produce specific effects. In that sense I wouldnt claim any sophistication or uniqueness in our approach.
ferent issues and concepts. Program is only one of them. Envelopes, movement vectors, and, more recently, a new questioning of contexts are among our lines of research. The shift from paper to practice really happened with the shift from The Manhattan Transcripts of 1978-81 to La Villette in 1982-83, since I had consciously entered the La Villette competition in order to move from invented programs to a real program, from pure mathematics to applied mathematics. What strikes me is that some of the theoretical themes from years past are still present in our work today, but now practice precedes theory as often as theory once preceded practice. It is a very fluid relationship. For example, the recent foreword on Concepts, contexts, contents in Event-Cities 3 was my conscious attempt to post-theorize what I had learned from our practice. In our recent projects, concepts often begin as much with a strategy about content or program as with a strategy about contexts. For example, in our conceptualization of Dubai, a cultural island with an opera house, we purposefully revisited an earlier programmatic concept (the strips of our opera house in Tokyo of 1986) by combining it with our recent research on double envelopes.
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Visiting fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), New York
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2. What is the relationship between program and form? And event? And politics? (Feel free to answer any one or all three of these questions)
We have learned that there is no given relationship between program and form. In the past three years weve engaged in radical experimentation that at times produced an extreme relationship between program and form while at others produced no relationship, which simply shows how unbelievably unstable, unspecific, and also inconsistent it can be. It is impossible to abstract from these projects a single direction for the office, but the relationship of form and program is always a large preoccupation. The fact that the users of these projects have appropriated them all with relish is incredibly significant to me. None of them suffers from the slightest dysfunction or offense to its users. The Dutch Embassy employees are unbelievably happy to use it the way it was intended to work, even though that was not obvious when it was designed. Although form and politics is a tempting subject, Ill address your question about program and politics. Contrary to our official stance as cynical bystanders, we have been trying to find ways to create positions that enable us to address what interests us rather than being an extension of the market economy or developers desires or individuals desires, which intensely begs the question of politics. For instance there is a very strong connection to politics in the CCTV building. No other political system today would collect so many programs together in a single structure and create as many interconnections between different components in a single entity. In the West, the equivalent of the CCTV program would have been dismantled and distributed, while in China, the consolidation is relished. There is a direct correlation between centralization of program and the presence of the state. We are not so much flirting with authoritarian regimes as investigating the world and what systems enable what type of architecture. The relationship between program and form can be one of reciprocity, indifference, or conflict. Let me explain. Reciprocity is when you shape the program so that it coincides with the form, or shape the form so that it reciprocates the configuration you gave to the program. Indifference is when a selected form can accommodate any program, often resulting in a deterministic form and an indeterminate program. And with conflict you let program and form purposefully clashi.e., pole vaulting in the chapel or the running track through the library reading roomso as to generate unexpected events. But you must decide which one to use. Thats where architecture begins. There is no value judgment here. All three are fine, depending on your objectives for a given project. A program is never neutral. The people who draft it are full of preconceptions. The first thing an architect needs to do is to dismantle
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that program and redirect it. As an architect, you need to have an agenda. My agenda is often about generating public spaces or spaces of
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central linear court in the Athletic Center in Cincinnati. Program is not the only issue to address, but it is often what you start with. Events? Events are different from programs. A program relies on repetition and habit; it can be written down and be prescriptive. In contrast, an event occurs unexpectedly. Your design may contribute to conditions for some future, unknown event to occur, but you do not design the event. Programs and politics? Programmatic configurations are always political: a house with a corridor serving private rooms has different political implications than a house as a large loft space without doors.
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The Transcripts are about a set of disjunctions among use, form and social valuesThe non-coincidence between meaning and being, movement and space, man and object is the starting condition of the workUltimately the Transcripts try to offer a different reading of architecture in which space, movement and events are independent, yet stand in a new relation to on e another so that the conventional components of architecture are broken down and rebuilt along different axes.
Completed, 1998 At La Villette (or anywhere else for that matter) there is no longer any relationship possible between architecture and program, architecture and meaning.
Architecture will be defined as the convergence of objects, events and places. Such convergence intensifies, reinforces and accelerates
Leaves London, Moves to New York; teaches at the IAUS Publishes Advertisements for Architecture,
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Modern architecture is based on a deterministic coincidence between form and program, its purpose no longer an abstraction like moral improvement but a literal inventory of all the details of daily life.
Program is not definitive: it is safe to predict that during the life of the park, the program will undergo constant change and adjustment.
By separating exterior and interior architecture and developing the latter in small autonomous installments [Skyscrapers] can devote their exteriors only to formalism and the interiors only to functionalism. In this way, they not only resolve forever the conflict between form and function, but create a city where permanent monoliths celebrate metropolitan instability
Founds OMA
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4. New York, 1976: You were pursuing research and developing theories of program that spawned what became for both of you seminal publications: Delirious New York and The Manhattan Transcripts. What was so urgent about the issue of program at this moment? What made New York such fertile groundboth as a working environment and as a subjectat that particular time?
Today theres a total banality of travel and intellectual traffic that didnt exist in the seventies. As a very technical European, I am deeply influenced by almost any of the isms that have comprised Europes history. Therefore I was ambitious enough not so much to want my own ism but to look at the world in terms of isms. On the one hand, I felt a real disenchantment with the slackening of modernity that was an outcome of flower-power or the emergence of postmodernism. And yet I was simultaneously keenly aware of how manifestos themselves had introduced so many failures that the whole typology could not be rescued. So I approached New York indirectly, with a manifesto that consisted of a volume or quantity of pre-existing evidence. I took a journalistic but also a personal approach, which I had to shield behind America. Bernard Tschumis project seems much more clearly a manifesto, or at least it more openly uses the traditional methodology and appearance of a manifesto. I came to New York from London because of an interest in the art scene, which seemed to be in extraordinarily creative flux at the time. Many artist friends, including Robert Longo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Sarah Charlesworth, had come to New York about the same time. For me, architecture was a blank page: everything seemed to need to be invented. I became obsessed with New York City itself, a city in which everything seemed possible. I also watched a lot of black-and-white B-movies at the time. I was struck by how space and buildings could also be protagonists in the action. Performance art seemed a natural extension of conceptual art. These two forms of art practice echoed my definition of architecture: as concept and experience, or the definition of space and the movement of bodies within it.
5. Tell us about your time at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and how it influenced your development as an intellectual and as a designer? Who were your allies there?
It was a time when the Institute was probably much less rigorous and much less rigid in its alliances. There was not a single person in that period in New York that I was not at some point, or to some extent, sympathetic to or involved with, or who did not in some ways influence what I was doing. The big unknown in this story is the influence of Matthias Ungers. I spent a year [1972] at Cornell prior to going to New York, which was significant. There were two phenomena that made it important. First, studying with Ungers exposed me to his way of thinking, particularly his conceptual abilities to think about cities. Michel Foucault also happened to be teaching there that year, as well as Herbert Damisch, another French intellectual with whom I became close friends. He introduced me to Foucault, so even before arriving in New York I spent a year in America immersed in French Intellectual culture, which reinforced my already considerable involvement with Roland Barthes work. Weirdly enough I think I was more intellectual than any of them, but I was working on a project that seemed less intellectual than any of their ideas. They were all outside architecture, and so that was a kind of double, an interesting stereo that was more literary than architectural. Maybe Delirious New York is about architecture, but it is more a literary creationmore writing than thinking. The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, with its conjoined publications, was one of the only architectural settings at the time that grasped architecture as part of a rigorous intellectual discourse. But many of the interests of the Institute were quite distant from my own. Again, I felt closer to the New York art scene of the time. I was at the Institute for just one year, 1976. Perhaps being there sharpened my desire to challenge the formalized discourse on the primacy of form. I began The Manhattan Transcripts immediately after leaving the Institute. Allies? Ironically enough, the key people at the Institute really became my friends only after I left.
Second Prize We abandoned traditional rules of composition and harmony, replacing them with a mode of organization based not on form follows function, form follows form or even form follows fiction but rather on breaking apart the traditional components of the theater and opera houseNo more artful articulations among the auditorium, the stage, the foyer, the grand staircase; a new pleasure lies in the parallel juxtaposition of indeterminate cultural meanings
Transprogramming: Combined two programs, regardless of their incompatibilities, together with their respective spatial configurations. Reference: planetarium + roller-coaster.
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Its unstable configuration allowed us...after our project for Parc de la Villette, to reexperiment with the relationship between specificity and indeterminacy, this time in a building.
Honorable Mention The ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggressively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architectures last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectivity.
Completed, 1994 In this fin-de-sicle, programs have become abstract in the sense that they are no longer connected to a place or a city; they float and gravitate opportunistically to that sitewhich offers the highest number and quality of connection which seems nearest
Completed, 1991 He wanted a glass house. She wanted a swimming pool on the roof. Theoretically, it would be possible to see the Eiffel Tower while swimming.
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8. Some critics have written about the return of the megastructure, not only in your practice but also in other architects designs. Do you agree, and to what would you attribute the recuperation of this type? How is this new megastructure different from its sixties predecessors?
Theres a very seductive and potentially very nave form of looking at the past fifteen years, whereby you begin by saying that architecture meets megalomania, and megalomania is debased. But fortunately the force of the market flushed it away with the unfortunate commitment to postmodernism. Then in the 90s the market seemed to parallel and even sponsor or support radical redefinitions of form. In the late 90s, together with the destruction of the World Trade Center, form was discredited, and perhaps also the possibility for architects participation and complicity with the market economy. Now were all looking for something which gives us not so much powerbecause I dont think many people are nostalgic for power, and its still a very dirty wordbut perhaps a larger scope of what architecture could do, or could say. The recent Factory 798 project in Beijing started with our wish to save the liveliest cultural center in China from being razed to make way for ten million square feet of residential towers. After talking to the artists and gallerists there, we proposed to keep the art program below and put the housing program above, hovering over the existing art neighborhood. The vertical support points were located anywhere we could place them between the existing buildings on the ground, so that the resulting random grid became a lattice. The project generated an enormous amount of media coverage since people saw it as a way to keep the old while moving forward with the new. Maybe in part due to the response to our project, the government decided not to go ahead with demolition. So maybe we saved the neighborhood but ultimately lost a project. I do not think the project could have been done elsewhere but China. Freemarket economy and megastructure are two terms that rarely go together. Who will pay for megastructures? Todays capital is transient, while megastructures are not. So maybe you can call the newest megastructures a resurgence of criticality. (What an ugly word!) Megastructures often act as manifestos. Our Factory 798 project was a buildable manifesto.
7. What was the relationship between this early research and writing and the radical reconceptualization of program evidenced in your design for the Parc de la Villette?
There is a very direct relationship. I explained La Villette as a kind of horizontal skyscraper. The relationship to Delirious New York was so unbelievably literal that, as our practice evolved, it has inevitably become more indirect. At first those ideas worked as an example or prototype, but then it became simply an influence or area of attention. I still notice occasionally that the early research returns in an almost literal way, certainly in CCTV . So its a source that we feel free to ignore, but theres always a pull. Except when theres a kind of anti-pull. Or when it has no relevance whatsoever. For instance when I work on a house, its totally in abeyance. But I also consider it as a historical given, and so in texts like Generic City and Junkspace it remains a reference, but a reference we constantly suppress or refine. My work on The Manhattan Transcripts began with a tripartite definition of architecture as space, action, and movement. The resulting mode of notation was used throughout the Transcripts and led directly to the La Villette principle of superimposing points (of activities), lines (of movement), and spaces (of appropriation). The precedent for my point grid was interesting in its relationship to programs. In the mid-1970s, I used to give my students at the AA excerpts from Kafka, Poe, Borges, and Joyce as programs. In order to organize the complexity of Joyces text with a number of students, I gave them a point grid that announced the one at La Villette. It proved a great way to explode the parks programmatic complexity and reorganize it around the points of intensity of the folies. Simultaneously, I was writing more theoretical textsArchitecture and Limits and Violence of Architecturewhich addressed the issue of program directly.
the cause-andeffect relationship sanctified by modernism, by which form follows function (or vice versa) needs to be abandoned in favor of promiscuous collisions of programs and spaces, in which the terms intermingle, combine, and implicate on another in the production of a new architectural reality.
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Finalist [The Gardens] Programmatic flexibility and social space provides places for activities and art forms that are not easily contained within conventional exhibition galleries. Our concept extends this quality throughout the Museum in the form of multiple courts.
Disprogramming: Combining two or more programs, whereby a required spatial configuration of program A contaminates program B and Bs possible configuration. The new program B may be extracted from the inherent contradictions contained in program A, and Bs required spatial configuration may be applied to A.
Completed, 1998
JR Rail Station
Kyoto, Japan
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10. Recently, various critics have argued that you are responsible for inspiring an entire body of work regarding program, both pedagogical projects and also trends in architectural production outside of academia. What is your reaction to this type of blame: acknowledgment, or attribution?
I cant deny that Im perversely interested in these attributions. I have such a vast attention span that I cant deny that I follow them. But I think that at this point it is not attribution. The extent of media coverage has reached complete insanity. It is sad that the discipline is so dependant on one group of people to provide its subject. Im still totally dedicated to the discipline, in terms of working in it, but since 1995 Ive effectively left the discipline. I have almost no friends left in architecture. My intimate friends used to be architects, but now theyre all outside the discipline because I need nourishment and within the field there is an almost infernal circle of regurgitation. And that of course makes everyone who is regurgitated bitter. So that even if you produce something good, there is a cynical view of it from the beginning. So while Im increasingly disenchanted with the practice of being interviewed, I hope this questionnaire produces something new or at least something less than totally predictable. Look, I do not think that architecture must begin with form. It begins with a concept or an idea. Some of these concepts or ideas may be programmatic. Architecture is the materialization of a concept, and I feel no qualms about calling the program a material, much as concrete walls or glass enclosures are materials. You can also use programs the way Malevich or Mondrian transformed painting, or Joyce and Schnberg transformed writing and music. Most interesting, however, is to design new conditions for living, whether urban or otherwise.
9. How does the above drawing represent program? Is this a diagrammatic device, an operative tool, a formal construct, a descriptive idea, or a combination of these or none of these?
Not that I have a particularly high regard for diagrams, but this one is simply an illustration to enable others to understand our process. Its not at all a diagram, but a drawing that came after the fact. Hidden in it is a more simple reading of which elements of a particular kind of building can be stable, and which have to remain volatile. This is simply an end product, a retroactive illustration of what, in a more private sense, is a way of thinking. The real diagram is the one that addresses stability and instability. In other projects there were diagrams, barcodes of stability and instability, or defined and undefined spaces. All of the above. Most projects start with a program. First, you have to understand the programs intricacies, but also what you want to do with it. So you explore possible configurations and relations. I do not mean bubble diagrams here, but spatial connections or sequential routes. The quickest way is to diagram it, i.e. to conceptualize what you want to do with that program. There are many potential programmatic concepts. Sometimes thats it: your programmatic concept becomes your architectural form. At Lerner Hall, we had to put in 6,000 mailboxes, an auditorium, music rooms, and so on. I wanted a central meeting space (which was not in the official program) so that all the parts of the program would be visible and accessiblea vertical social space of sorts. But a program always has to be inserted into a given site, which often has multiple constraints, whether physical or otherwise; in other words, it has a context. That in turn affects the selection or the expression of the programmatic concept. At Lerner, there were many specific site constraints, including historicist ones, but I could take advantage of one of them, namely, the fact that the campus is half a level higher than Broadway. I could link these two levels by a ramp and continue the ramp to the top of the building, assembling the pieces of the program with its 6,000 mailboxes along the ramp. Program? You need to figure it out, literally. Thats what this diagram is.
There is no architectural space without something that happens in it, no space without content. Most architects begin with a program, that is, a list of users requirements describing the intended purpose of the building. At various moments in history, it has been claimed that program of function can be the generator of form, that form follows function, or perhaps that form follows content. In order to avoid engaging in a discourse of form per se or of form versus content, the word form is replaced here with the word concept. Can one therefore substitute form follows function with an alternative formulation, namely, concept follows content? Because an entirely new building will contain the entire Museum program it will have the advantages of Bigness: programmatic hybridization, proximities/frictions/overlaps/superpositions, the entire apparatus of montage invented at the beginning of the century to organize the relationships between independent parts Acknowledging the inevitable confrontation of old and new, the proposal is intended as an alternative to the wholesale demolition of the existing arts facilityThe project, thus, is about a strategy of inbetweens.
Miami, Florida Winner, Completed, 2003 Here, what a building does becomes as important as what it looks like. The building must act as a generator, activating spaces as well as defining them.
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In Bigness, the faade becomes disconnected from the programmatic elements inside. Program changes, but faade remains stable...The artificiality and complexity of Bigness release function from its defensive armor to allow a kind of liquefaction; programmatic elements react with each other to create new events Bigness returns to a model of programmatic alchemy.
Programme (glossary entry): The slow realization that the excitement of a scheme is not in its outrageous components, but is the most modest programme. Peter Salter
Completed 1997
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