BLDGBLOG vs. FSG’s Work in Progress

In an interesting – and I would say successful – experiment, BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviewed me for his site, and then I turned around and interviewed him for Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Work In Progress site. For those of you who are wondering, Geoff is the better interrogator. Exhibit A:

BLDGBLOG: It’s easy to see how all this can sound quite technocratic and dystopian–which makes it all the more interesting that you open the book with an unexpected pair of quotations. One is from Le Corbusier, the other from novelist J.G. Ballard. To anyone familiar with Ballard’s work, in particular, I might say, this seems like a strangely subversive gesture against the book’s own premise; it’s like opening a golf course community and saying you were inspired by Super-Cannes. Why did you choose these quotations, and what effect were you hoping they would have?

Lindsay: I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve been curious what people would make of it. What I love about Ballard is the kind of dark irony of his work, which is something I find in Koolhaas’s writing as well. They know the future is slick and disposable, and they revel in modernity’s contradictions. They know how dark globalization’s undercurrents are, but go on despite–or even because of–them. The book reviewers who said the aerotropolis had “forgotten” a soul completely missed the point–these cities never had souls to begin with. That’s why I find them fascinating!

The Ballard and Le Corbusier quotes should be read as a flashing red light, signaling to the reader: Caution: Unreliable Narrator Ahead. You’ve been warned. Especially that Le Corbusier quote: anyone who knows anything about urbanism who encounters that quote should immediately have their guard up–which was my intention all along.

Here’s my rambling attempt at a question — and Geoff’s excellent answer:

Greg Lindsay: I think this is our moment to segue into my interviewing you now, so my question for you is: how prepared are architects to be generalists, or to really think about the issues, or to work with people in other fields. I’ve spoken to Jamie von Klemperer, the design principal at the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, who’s basically the mastermind behind New Songdo City in South Korea. And now, because of the work that he’s continuing to do with Gale International, he’s trying to work with people from Cisco to figure out how to build a smart city into the physical city, or how to work with the aspatial or nonspatial in a place that’s all about space. Von Klemperer would be the first person to tell you that he’s not really much of a technophile. Are architects prepared to grapple with other cultures, in the sense of technology culture and engineering culture? Are they bewildered? What’s your perception of how they are dealing with nontraditional urbanism?

Geoff Manaugh: There are a bunch of answers to that. One of the reasons I like architecture as much as I do, and enjoy writing about architecture so much, is that I think there’s a multidisciplinary open-mindedness toward these sorts of approaches and ideas. But, having said that, I also think that architects still have a tendency to try to use these multidisciplinary experiences simply to stylize their projects—to offer nothing more than aesthetics.

They end up missing real opportunities coming from the material sciences, information technology, or even new engineering and construction methods. Rather than genuinely jumping into these sorts of things, there’s a tendency to use them as a signature move that will make their buildings look individualistic enough to be seen as theirs. That’s a tendency that I’d like to see go away in architecture. I would rather see people genuinely dive into these technologies and new cultural encounters. I’m thinking of everything from 3-D printing to robotized construction methods, even to the great specter of prefab that has been hanging over architecture for about forty years yet never seems to work. To see more effort in that direction would be interesting.

The cultural question is something else entirely. For instance, last summer I was based in Montréal at the Canadian Center for Architecture, and there’s a man there named Vikram Bhatt, a professor at McGill University. It was interesting to talk to him about the work he’s done—I guess you might call it “humanitarian urbanism”—where he was trying to design whole neighborhoods. It’s nothing compared to the stuff you’re talking about in Aerotropolis, but it’s very large from an architectural standpoint. And it was interesting because Bhatt didn’t just take a design method that he’d been taught in a North American university and then export it to India and China to see if it worked; he actually developed an entire spatial system, trying to figure out exactly how much space someone might need if they were going to be weaving clothing at home, for instance, or if they were going to be making shoes or even assembling circuit boards. In other words, he was taking the informal economy that architects otherwise might want to sweep under the rug, and he was trying to extract from it culturally specific spatial needs. From there, he tried to frame a new architectural project based on these cultural requirements. What’s interesting about this is that these projects reformatted space from a different standpoint; Bhatt looked at what people might need in a village in a totally different way. Instead of just saying “everybody needs a piazza” or “everybody needs benches in a park,” he realized that everybody needs a place to hang out laundry or a front porch where they can simultaneously assemble gadgets and also sell them to the people who come through, or public squares that could easily and immediately be reconfigurable as traffic throughways and marketplaces. It’s nothing particularly avant-garde or groundbreaking, but it reveals that there’s a whole other world of spatial rules out there, hidden in everyday human behavior, if only you’re willing to look for it. Architects need to be open to performing that sort of investigation.

The funny thing with architecture is that it’s going through a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. It sees precisely all of the things that you’re talking about—businessmen launching their own cities; FedEx inaugurating its own metropolis in the middle of the United States—and it looks at what architects can do. For the most part, it’s people in their thirties and forties who are more or less doing work for free because they can’t find any clients—they might design a single-family house for their parents, or they’ll do a bathroom renovation, or they have to get a job at a major corporation like Kohn Pedersen Fox, SOM, or, for that matter, OMA—and they no longer know what architecture is capable of.

Trying to figure out what it is that architects should do now is a real question. There’s a kind of diaspora of architects who have taken the skills that they learned in architecture and, because they couldn’t find work in that field, have begun to use those skills in other industries and other businesses. It would be fascinating some day to map that diaspora and to see where everyone has ended up, because you see architects going into things like graphic design, or set design for films and theater, even special effects for everything from video games to motion pictures. It would be interesting to see not only where they’re going but who they’re being replaced by. That’s one ongoing evolution or transformation within architecture that I think will be particularly interesting to watch over the next five or ten years.