Perspectives on Design
page 02
page 03
page 04 - 17
Michael Maltzan about California Modernism, homelessness, and L.A. as a democratic city
page 18
page 19 - 24
Pedro Gadanho
page 25
page 26 - 37
Rolf Fehlbaum and Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec on their relationship.
page 39
page 40 - 51
Sevil Peach expounds upon human needs, good neighborhoods, and culturally-appropriate office design
page 52
page 53 - 54
page 55
uncube's editors are Elvia Wilk, Florian Heilmeyer, Jessica Bridger, and Rob Wilson. uncube is based in Berlin and is published by BauNetz, Germany's most-read online magazine covering architecture in a thoughtful way since 1996.
www.uncubemagazine/about
What’s better than eavesdropping on a conversation? Reading it on the page.
Recorded conversations capture the ambiguity between finished and unfinished thoughts in a way that polished essays can’t. In uncube No. 06, we’ve collected conversations with designer Sevil Peach, architect Michael Maltzan, and curator Pedro Gadanho. Plus, this issue features a special discussion between the chairman of Vitra, Rolf Fehlbaum, together with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, engaging the three practitioners’ thoughts on design and collaboration. The array of ideas, musings, and opinions recorded here reflects a variety of contemporary perspectives, approaching the topic of design from all angles.
Cover Photo: Tahon & Bouroullec, Clouds for Kvadrat, 2008.
Thinking about the architecture of Los Angeles conjures an image of sunlit Californian Modern style architecture, microcosms of Mad Men-style families, and lightweight steel structures that promise new ways of living. However, with a growing homeless population exceeding that of most mid-sized American cities, Los Angeles remains far from the middle-class mid-century ideal. No one knows this better than architect Michael Maltzan. Practicing in Los Angeles, he builds single-family residences on the desirable Pacific coast hillside and also iconic housing schemes for the homeless. But can his architecture actually bring change and improvement to the issues that surround homelessness? The following is a conversation about post-crisis America, (social) responsibilities in architecture, and the challenges of building in a city like Los Angeles.
–Michael, you grew up in Levittown – America’s most famous postwar suburban development – does Los Angeles, with its suburban character give you a sense of home? Yes, it does. I felt very familiar with Los Angeles and its characteristics from the very first time I ever came here. In fact it is the city I have felt most comfortable with, which has to do with having grown up in a similar type of postwar suburb. I appreciate having grown up in a suburb.
–How has that influenced your work as an architect? I believe that the social and civic qualities of a place like Levittown exist in a much more real way than most people give it credit for. Those early experiences
have allowed me not to dismiss cities that are marked by a sense of sprawl, incredible scale, and multiple centers like Los Angeles is. People often disregard them because they don’t look like traditional cities, or like what people think a city should be.
–
You moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, founding your office here in 1995. You have only a few projects abroad, mainly building in California. Is there a connection between your work and the legacy of Californian Modernism?
Los Angeles is potentially the city worldwide that has had the most continuous project of modernism. Globally the city is seen as a great laboratory for modern architecture, and there is indeed a certain culture of experimentation here. I think that my work has a relationship to this long tradition of experimentation in modernism.
–
For many people, Los Angeles means Hollywood stars and plastic surgery, glamour and superficiality. What do you think? What makes this city?
Democracy is one of the major things connecting Los Angeles to the American context. It is like democracy in a physical form: it has messy and complicated places, it is sprawling and has no clearly defined edges. Yet at the same time it has an enormous energy; it is very vital and evolves continuously. That makes it challenging to work here. There are so many influences, so many different cultures, ideas, and attitudes. As an architect in this city it is very difficult to develop one specialty and expect that to be useful and continue working. You need to be very elastic in your approach.
–
Speaking of elasticity: You are currently working on the 6th Street Viaduct, which will be a spectacular horizontal structure
and a major contribution to the Los Angeles cityscape. What do you hope your design will add to the city?
L.A. is a giant infrastructure – the railroads, power lines, water supplies, and the highways are our equivalents of the major icons such as buildings or monuments in other cities. The 6th Street Viaduct is an opportunity to re-imagine what infrastructure can be. The highways, for example, allow you only one thing: to get from one place to another. But at the same time they cut through the urban fabric, cutting off communities from each other. The 6th Street Viaduct will be a redefinition of what a piece of infrastructure can be in the twenty-first century. At its core, this bridge will cross the river. But at the same, time it will weave together the different communities it crosses. In contrast to all the other infrastructures, it will take on multiple responsibilities.
–
»I appreciate having grown up in a suburb.«
»L.A. is like democracy in a physical form: it has messy and complicated places, it is sprawling and has no clearly defined edges. Yet at the same time it has an enormous energy; it is very vital and evolves continuously.«
Will the 6th Street Viaduct become for Los Angeles what the High Line is for New York City?
The High Line is a great example of the reuse of an existing piece of infrastructure. The 6th Street bridge is a completely new bridge, but it is meant as an iconic structure just as the High Line in New York or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The Viaduct will also be an observatory where you get a unique view of the city. In that regard it is similar to the High Line, which allows people to see their city in a very different way.
–
The global financial and economic crisis led to a kind of urban crisis (dispossessed housing, abandoned construction sites and properties). In what way has American architecture changed after the crisis in 2008?
I think we are still waiting to see that. Each of the previous significant economic downturns did in fact change the way that architecture,
urbanism, and landscape architecture continued to develop. There is no doubt that it will have an effect. Most profoundly it will be felt by younger generations who are now starting their careers. It is likely that the real effects will not be visible for a few years. But I hope that these effects will be significant. A downturn is only useful if there are new things that come out of it, new ways of approaching our urban or built environments and our ecological environments. I hope that in this time people will continue to find ways to experiment with ideas that we will begin to see put into practice over the next decade. One of the potential dangers of the 2008 crisis is that the discipline may becomee marginalized. The first thing is for architecture to continue to be visible and engaged in the future of our cities. The challenge is to not shrink from that responsibility even when it is difficult to survive as an architect.
–Has the economic downturn influenced your work?
It is impossible for the downturn not to have an effect in some way. But from the very beginning I was trying to make my practice elastic. We worked with a number of different project types: smaller projects, lower cost projects, prefabricated multifamily housing projects, and urban infill projects. These are all building types that are more prominent right now.
–
With the Star Apartments you are currently building your third residential project for homeless people in Los Angeles. Is this a strategy to avoid the crisis, to build for the growing number of homeless people?
Someone could try to make that argument. However, we have been working on what people call “socially motivated” projects long before they became a prominent topic in the world during the economic changes in 2008. The first project I did was a project called Inner City Art (ICA), a school specifically targeting the enormous population in Downtown LA that had been denied educational
Michael Maltzan, FAIA, is the founder and principal of Michael Maltzan Architecture. Founded in 1995 and based in Los Angeles, Michael Maltzan Architecture is committed to the design and construction of projects that engage their context and community through a concentrated exploration of movement and perception. The practice’s intensely collaborative studio culture is focused on developing partnerships across disciplines to integrate sustainability and architectural form.
privileges. We have been working on similar projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT) since 1995. Our very first residential project with them actually happened in 2006 during the most intense part of the building boom. The past years have shed light on the social and political problems in Los Angeles, but the issues existed long before the 2008 crash. I don’t separate our work between the work we do on Skid Row and from other more socially and economically stable institutions. We are doing a full range of work, in good times and in bad times.
–The creation of change through architecture is part of your philosophy. But aren’t the cooperation with the SRHT and the building of homes for the homeless somehow more palliative measures rather an actual means to fight the causes of homelessness?That is a very charged question. The work of the SRHT, with its growing success, has become more present and visible in the city. The scope of their work has expanded and that includes advocacy for the homeless at a social and political level. But the problems of homelessness are not going be solved by one organization. They are certainly not going to be solved by architecture. That is an issue for all of us, as citizens, to deal with at the highest level of society. There are ways in which both the SRHT and even the architecture that I have been involved in designing can make the existing situation better. We can point to other possible solutions and change the dynamic of homelessness in the city. One of the goals of our buildings is to make the communities living in them more visible, so that they are not relegated to anonymity and pushed off to the side. We want to create a strong iconic presence in the city in a powerful and positive way, to make sure that the city as a whole understands that there is a community of formerly-homeless people living there.
»The problems of homelessness are certainly not going be solved by architecture. That is an issue for all of us, as citizens.«
In the exhibition, you address and question the political voice of architecture. What are your own politics – as a curator, critic, and teacher of architecture?
As a teacher and critic, I’ve always tried to call upon the need for responsibility. My curatorial politics are about expanding and promoting innovative and creative design culture – outside-of-the-box architectural and urban thinking – in order to tackle our immense problems and fight the dominance of increasingly mediocre mainstream culture...
Is there a critical stance to be found within this show?
It is not easy to produce criticism when one curates at an institution like MoMA. However, there are always critical choices to be made, even if it’s left to the viewer to interpret whether the absence of certain works or authors is a form of criticism. At its best, architecture is a cultural form that can make political statements; I’ve also tried to convey some criticism of architecture’s culture itself, when it is subsumed by economics and contributes to a landscape of pure consumption, or when it adopts simplistic ideas like “physical transparency equals social transparency.”
Are we surrounded by an inflated abuse of the term “political?”
Maybe. However, even at the risk of many superficial uses of the word, I still prefer that option to what’s been common in the field of architecture for so many years: the absolute primacy of autonomous practice that feels no responsibility towards the world and therefore considers itself “apolitical.” That tendency has been around ever since critics like Manfredo Tafuri lost faith in the ability of architecture to carry a revolutionary purpose, and that disillusionment then extended to a whole generation of starchitects who lost sight of the political implications of their work to achieve a certain material success.
You selected 100 works from the MoMA collection – what’s missing from their archive that you’d like to acquire?
In the little time I had – nine months – I did make an effort to acquire a number of works that I considered important so as to represent political aspects not otherwise represented in MoMA’s collection. They appear mostly in a section called “Occupying Social Borders.” These acquisitions included recent works by raumlabor Berlin, Didier Faustino, and Andrés Jaque, and one earlier work by Álvaro Siza.
9 + 1 ways of being political: 50 years of political stances in architecture and urban design
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Architecture and Design Galleries
12 September, 2012 - 25 March, 2013
www.moma.org
Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator, and writer currently based in New York City, where he is the Curator for Contemporary Architecture at the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
From Siza, you included his SAAL housing projects, which alleviated slum conditions in Portugal in the mid-1970s – and seem to have a relevance again after 40 years, not only in Portugal. What political stances in architecture and urban design do you foresee will have a comeback?
The participatory processes of design, typical of work by other architects in the 1970s, namely in the Netherlands, have already returned to architecture. Fiction and the exploration of dystopia as a form of expressing political dissent is also around, and in fact motivated a certain archeology of the theme in one of the exhibition's sections. Humanitarian and social concerns are also part of the current agenda. It will be interesting to see if institutional critique becomes more a norm in the architectural field, because with less commissions, architects increasingly produce unsolicited work.
»I found myself starting architecture with a deep social, Jewish, liberal conscience, and the belief that architecture is for the people. It was a do-gooder base; I was born and raised that way … When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn’t have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies. And my intuitions led me back to making mud pies – forms.«
→Frank O. Gehry talking to Ross Miller and Angela Ledgerwood about – well – himself, in Interview Magazine.
Since Vitra’s Rolf Fehlbaum first commissioned the French designers (and brothers) Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to re-imagine the office space in 2002, they have worked on numerous projects together, developing a unique working method based on continual discussion and the freedom to question everything. Norman Kietzmann engaged the trio in a wide-ranging discussion about their process of collaboration.
–Mr. Fehlbaum, you’ve been working together with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for many years now. That’s almost like a marriage…
Rolf Fehlbaum: I don’t know if I would call it a marriage. We’re not monogamous (laughs). We work with other designers and Ronan and Erwan also work with other manufacturers. I would say it’s a close and respectful relationship that is borne out of mutual understanding.
–To what extent has the relationship changed since the early years?
Ronan Bouroullec: When we began working with Vitra, we were of course very naïve. That was also a great strength, because at that time, Vitra began to concentrate not only on the office but also on the home. As we developed the “Joyn” system in 2003, this naïveté was certainly helpful in bringing a different atmosphere to the office and for working a little outside the box. But naturally we aren’t quite so naïve today as we were twelve years ago.
Rolf Fehlbaum: The naïveté is an important aspect, because it’s not possible to keep it forever. Of course you can try to resist, but one day it’s simply gone. I think the biggest danger in design is falling into a routine. A “routined” designer – a person with lots of experience – knows a lot about what they do. They understand the machines, the customers, and the markets. But, like in the art world, the word “routine” does not have a positive connotation in design, because the freshness is often lost. Of course the market pays very well for routine work. By only making variations of something that’s already known and well understood, the risk is manageable. You can be sure that it works. But it’s precisely this attitude that must be avoided. Fortunately, to this day Ronan and Erwan have not settled into a routine.
–So the idea is to take on new challenges?Ronan Bouroullec: The problem for specialists is that the process of developing ideas takes place within very clearly defined parameters. That’s why we don’t want to become specialists. But naturally that’s also a question of character. The designers who work at Apple have become tremendous specialists over the past ten years and have pursued their task in a downright scientific manner. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, the result is interesting.
Erwan Bouroullec: At Apple, they have the good fortune of working with constantly changing technologies. It engenders an extreme evolution,
even though the design language has barely changed over the last ten years. The work of Alberto Meda has a similarly extreme consistency. He has focused on one thing for decades and has increasingly perfected it. I have enormous respect for that, even though we take a different direction.
–Compared to other designers who work with Vitra, do the Bouroullecs enjoy a certain free rein?
Rolf Fehlbaum: It’s true that this freedom is unique even for us. With the other designers, who we also like very much, the process is often clearer and more focused. With Ronan and Erwan it’s something completely different. Their designs cannot be easily assigned to fit neatly into a single category such as the office environment or the home. And they themselves are curious and always want to do
things differently. So we give them a little head start and see what happens. The interesting thing is that Ronan and Erwan have two very different personalities and yet, as brothers, they stick together very closely. It’s almost like with Charles and Ray Eames, who were also a couple. This kind of close relationship is especially rewarding when both are not of the same opinion. When we talk about a design, it’s not just them arguing one side and me the other. With three opinions, ever-changing coalitions emerge, which makes the discussion very exciting.
–A dispute between brothers is different than one between two business partners. After all, you can’t simply send the other one home…
Ronan Bouroullec: We definitely have more tolerance in conflicts. And we can say exactly what we’re thinking. A good project is always a hard struggle. Erwan is often more optimistic. I’m always a little more critical. We complement each other pretty well this way.
Rolf Fehlbaum: This solidarity is important because the design process
is often a chain of frustrations: “Why won’t that work? Why not the other option?” Things usually progress in small steps, and failures are part of the process. We were talking about a really nice project this morning. I was very happy when I saw the model. But then when we spoke to our production managers about it, we determined there’s a technical problem that we can’t solve for now. Yet you can’t give up and you need to consider what else can be developed out of it.
–How do you start a project? Is a briefing on the agenda from the very beginning?Ronan Bouroullec: The process is very organic. It’s an ongoing discussion where it’s hard to say what we have suggested and what came from Rolf. The collaboration is like a train that keeps moving, without making any stops in between. We are always in contact – sometimes it’s more intense and sometimes a little less intense. For the projects themselves, there’s no briefing and neither the price nor other parameters are set. That’s truly unique compared to other manufacturers. Vitra has an enormous romance with research. We try lots of things yet we frequently start again from the beginning.
Rolf Fehlbaum: The question is always whether or not there are still other options that might be more interesting. Of course, this attitude always gives you the feeling of being much too slow. On the other hand, we’re not machinery involved solely with production. I think that even as a company, this mechanical way of operating has to be avoided.
–To avoid hasty reactions?Rolf Fehlbaum: Yes, there are simply far too many products on the market. Why should you make one thing
and not something else? Even if a product sells well, isn’t it good if you aren’t satisfied with the product by default? It’s important that we are really satisfied with a project first, before we implement it. Otherwise it doesn’t work. This also includes the freedom to tell each other when something isn’t good.
Erwan Bouroullec: Rolf is satisfied with never being satisfied because he has this “Vitra project” in mind. He knows that everything can always be pushed much further. But he also knows that the search can go on almost forever. It’s difficult to explain in detail how a project develops. But this attitude acts like an incredible motor, instead of halting progress. I think that our way of working thereby changes altogether.
–Also with respect to other clients?Erwan Bouroullec: Yes, we’ve learned that a project must be attacked systematically. If it turns out that an idea is not strong enough, you have to give it up rather than getting all wound up in it. Of course there were times when I started cursing and no longer believed in a solution. But I’ve stopped doing that. Now we try out something and dissect it. Afterwards we try something else and then toss it to the wind again. So the projects need an enormous amount of time. Some clients become very unsettled if we still haven’t sent them anything after six months or a year. But in the meantime, we may have made more than 30 different designs and models that we have rejected. I think we’ve acquired an unusual sense of time in working with Vitra – and an extreme sense of patience.
Ronan (born 1971) and Erwan Bouroullec (born 1976) have been working together for about ten years now. Their collaboration is a permanent dialogue nourished by their distinct personalities and a shared notion of diligence with the intention to reach more balance and refinement.
In 1997, they presented their Disintegrated Kitchen at the Salon du Meuble in Paris and were spotted by Giulio Cappellini, who gave them their first industrial design projects, notably the Lit Clos (“Closed Bed”) and the Spring Chair. In 2000, Issey Miyake asked them to design a space for his new collection of A-Poc clothes in Paris. Then the decisive meeting with chairman of Vitra, Rolf Fehlbaum, occurred which resulted in their conception of a new kind of office system, Joyn, in 2002. This was the beginning of a special partnership which has borne fruit in numerous projects, including Algues, the Alcove Sofa, the Worknest, the Slow Chair, the Vegetal, or the L’Oiseau.
A new comprehensive monographic book was published in 2012: Works, by Phaidon Press.
Rolf Fehlbaum, the eldest son of Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, was born in 1941 in Basel. After receiving his Matura diploma, he studied social sciences at the Universities of Freiburg and later in Munich, Bern and Basel. He completed his academic studies in 1967 and worked for a short time with the Vitra Company, the shop-fitting business founded by his parents. In 1970 he moved to Munich to work as an editor and producer for the Bavaria Film Company and from 1973 to 1977 he was responsible for education and training at the Bavarian Chamber of Architects. In 1977 he took over the management of Vitra.
–Who is the author of a design: the designer, the manufacturer, or both? Ronan Bouroullec: It’s most certainly a collective intelligence. Because it’s not only the designers who have ideas. There are so many people who are involved in a design project, from the prototypes to the fabric covers to the product in the store. The interaction required with other people is downright monstrous. Of course the designer holds a central position, but to achieve perfection at a certain level takes a collective intelligence. Otherwise a good idea remains nothing more than a good idea.
Hadid: »… I love the idea of doing something in St. Petersburg, it is a wonderful city. As for Moscow – I find it one of the most amazing places in the world.«
Naomi: »I say the same thing. People ask me: how can you live there? But it’s almost like living in New York: amazing restaurants, amazing art, exhibitions, ballet. …«
H: »Beautiful, and so very spacious. I remember staying with friends who seemed to live by my hotel, Metropol. I decided to take a walk this once, and it took me 40 minutes. Every street is triple in size of a normal street, and buildings are 8 times bigger!«
N: »They need a few more parking lots and garages.«
H: »And public transport. Though their subway trains are beautiful, don’t you think?«
N: »The trains! Did you see Alexander McQueen’s show in the subway?«
→So this is what happens when Naomi Campbell and Zaha Hadid meet to discuss design issues? We found this on the website of the German edition of Interview Magazine.
Sevil Peach wants to make the world a better place – starting with workplace design. With wholehearted dedication and a fine sense of humor, the Turkish-born interior designer has dedicated herself to the creation of more human and productive office environments for nearly twenty years. She founded her London-based studio Sevil Peach Architecture+Design in 1994, and in 1997 designed a new office for Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra at their campus in Weil am Rhein. The result was an enduring relationship that has included showrooms, trade show stands, exhibitions, and workplace concepts as testament to their fruitful collaboration. Her office has also realized numerous projects for international clients such as Sony, Mexx, Eczacibasi Holdings, Microsoft, the Tate Galleries, and the Novartis Campus in Basel.
–You have done a lot of workplace design in recent years. Have you observed any important changes in how workplaces should look, as far as what companies demand from you?For quite a while now, clients have been asking for better workplaces for their staff, which is great. Their main interest is in creating environments that enable interaction and collaboration. In business terms they obviously see the positive sides of people interacting, communicating, and sharing knowledge, and they also understand the value of creating more welcoming and human environments for their staff. In this competitive world companies want to attract and keep talent.
We started to explore new ways of working in 1994, making use of the
advantages of new technology. At the time, the concepts we came up with were considered crazy and nobody was interested in them. I’m glad to say that 15 years on, the workplace environment has finally become a topic of discussion. This does not necessarily mean that everything coming out is good. There are a lot of interpretations of what people deem to be a good office. At Orgatec, for instance, you get the feeling that the concept of creating new ways of working has become a sales tool to sell more products.
–There is a lot of furniture at the Orgatec fair. Sofas with high backs, booths, niches, and retreats in the office space – all to create privacy. Some of these ideas have been promoted and done before, by Vitra, for example, but now privacy seems to be the big trend found everywhere.
»It’s really worrying if the toilet is the only place you can go to be private in your workplace.«
to what really happens at the particular workplace – the dynamics, the psychology of people, their ups and downs within a day. It’s really worrying if the toilet is the only place you can go to be private in your workplace.
–
During a panel discusson during an event at Vitra you mentioned a “human scale” for the number of workers in a given office. It seemed that everybody on the panel could agree on certain numbers, like eight, twelve, or fifteen people in a certain office space – that did not seem to be very controversial. Are there rules for preserving a human scale?
I can only speak from our own experience, since there is no formula. Our office has a footprint that we find really comfortable. The maximum number of people I can seat in the office is twelve people. Within
More and more, companies realize the advantages of an open plan, but are concerned about changing from a cellular or cubicle-based plan due to the perceived downsides of compromised privacy, disturbance, noise levels, lack of personalization, etc. – these can indeed be problems. So, while designing, you need to balance the importance of communication and collaboration with the employees’ needs to retreat and be private. While others offer solutions for privacy and noise by creating products like furniture, we do this by manipulating the architecture and spatial planning, including creating breathing space between large work groups, and finding acoustic solutions.
To us, the workplace issue is not just about choosing a cellular or open plan. The issue for us is to create environments that are human, sensitive, supportive, and inspiring. We don’t use a formula; we are attentive
that frame, we can almost be a family. More people than that and things start to feel uncomfortable. Furthermore, we break up the big spaces in our building through architectural interventions to form controlled views, so that people sitting in the open space can still feel a closeness within their group – like they belong to a “neighborhood.”
–
Has there ever been a point where you thought you wanted to design a piece of furniture?
Very often, but we don’t – we always use the excuse of having too much work to do. When we are working on projects, we quite often need something that doesn’t exist in the market. There are a lot of holes to fill and there is a lot of room for designing, but whether we will ever design furniture, I do not know.
–
Microsoft’s Dutch Headquarters, Amsterdam, 2005. Communal workspaces in an office complex for 1000 staff, with no dedicated desks nor offices for senior employees, in order to encourage social interaction and collaboration.
»I think a lot of the furniture lacks sensuality. I think technical solutions should be there, but not be seen.«
That is interesting to hear, because here at the fair there is such an overflow of furniture. What could be here that is missing?
When we actually specify a desk during planning, I find it difficult to find more than one option to show to the client. I think a lot of the furniture lacks sensuality, emotion: it’s too technical. I think technical solutions should be there, but not be seen. In the environments we would like to create, where we are at ease for many hours, they are usually comfortable ones – I suppose the analogy of “home” is a good one. As much as you feel secure and comfortable at home, I feel the workplace should offer this too. I would not want the kind of furniture I see around Orgatec in my home, so I do not like to see it in offices either. Therein lies my problem: how do you design a piece of furniture that gives you emotion, but at the same time fulfills
clients’ needs for cable management, adjustable seating heights, and so on?
–I don’t know if this is a cliché, but yesterday I talked to another woman who said that fairs like Orgatec are such a men’s world…I agree. The hotel where I’m staying is full of men. The buyers are men, the designers are men....
–And isn’t that how the furniture looks?I don’t think men would like me to say it, but I’m sorry – it does lack female sensibilities and emotion. And I’m saying this because I’m a woman. I see things in a different way. That is not to say that a female designer would necessarily do it better. I don’t know. Even in Milan it’s only recently that female designers have started to become successful.
–One last issue that interests me is the process of planning a project with a client. How does that actually work? Do you speak with the people working there?If I’m allowed to, yes, then it’s a good starting point. The management gives us a particular brief, but it’s also interesting to hear what the employees want. I ask them if they have a magic wish for how their workplace should be. I don’t say I can give it to them, or that the request is doable – or even that it’s the right thing to do. But it’s amazing how often I find that people haven’t even thought about it – they often find it difficult to respond to the question. Sometimes I ask them something like: ‘if we could have a swimming pool in the workplace, would you like that?’ You find that people accept their environments so readily. They never ask themselves what it is to work, what work really is, they just come from university and start. So for me, it’s really very important to talk to workers before and after our projects. You see people change, behave in different ways. We are always in contact with our clients in the following years.
Recently I received a letter from someone at Microsoft in the USA, who wrote to me that when he visits Microsoft Headquarters in Amsterdam it feels like coming home. It has exceeded his expectations. Two years after the project’s completion someone writes to me about the emotion of being there!
–You are planning workplaces in different countries. Are there big cultural differences? There are clear cultural differences, and I can imagine that this could present problems, but personally we haven’t come across many. We have to be culturally sensitive, but sometimes
Sevil Peach spent several years as Associate, Project Director and Design Director at YRM Architects, before leaving in 1994 to set up her design and architectural studio with Gary Turnbull - the idea being to run a studio which was design-driven not management-driven.
we can question a culture too. The work culture in some countries is really top-down, which I like to challenge through design.
–But do you want to change people with the environment you are planning?I can’t – that makes me sound like a prophet! No, not at all. It’s not about changing people; it’s about being a catalyst. It’s about making people question things and think, and raising awareness of their workplace.
We once did a project in Istanbul, where there is a strong social hierarchy. As a designer, you are in the position to understand and respect that but it doesn’t mean you can’t create a nice environment. You start exploring what can be done within the limitations of the particular brief. When I understand the issues at hand, I ask, within these restrictions, what can we do to create a better environment for these people? It could be for the CEO, the personal assistant, or the guy who makes the tea.
–The guy who makes tea is a very important person in Istanbul...Absolutely. You know, in that particular project in Istanbul we gave him a fantastic kitchen – that’s a good example. Our immediate idea for the project was to create a coffee point where people could gather, but actually, in this culture they are used to someone bringing the tea to them. Furthermore, Istanbul has a high rate of unemployment, so the tea boys need to keep their jobs. So we designed a kitchen instead.
→Focusing mostly on the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but also delving into some more general topics, Mohsen Mostafavi discusses the relationship between architecture and design with Justin McGuirk on Domus Web.
Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective
Massimo Scolari, with introduction by James S. Ackerman
Translated by Jenny Condie Palandri
Hardcover, 416 pages, 6 x 9 in.
MIT Press, 2012
ISBN: 9780262017749
This book offers a fascinating perspective on perspective – or rather on those forms of visual representation that have been somewhat eclipsed over recent centuries by single-point perspective’s ability to create illusionistic 3D space. In particular it looks at parallel projection: axonometrics and isometrics, which – whatever their weaknesses illusionistically – have the great advantage over single-point perspective that they preserve the actual measurements of a represented object, avoiding distortions. Erwin Panofsky: eat-your-heart-out! The book traces the use of this form of representation in classical Greek vases, Pompeian frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, and early modern avant-garde art. Interestingly it highlights how parallel projection is still the most common form of representation used in China, underlining a key strand running through the book: that different forms of visual representation developed, not as manifestations of artistic skill, but as reflections of wider ideological and conceptual views of the world prevalent in differing cultures. (rw)
Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities
Alexandra Lange
Paperback, 160 pages, 19 x 20 cm.
Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
For once, New York-based architecture critic Alexandra Lange has turned her eye on her own profession. In the six chapters of her latest book she showcases six essays by renowned critics: Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles W. Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Each essay is then carefully analyzed by Lange. The book is based on her design writing courses at New York University. Certainly, Writing About Architecture is not only for students or beginners: the brilliant essays and their accompanying critical analysis offer some eye-opening inspiration for looking at and thinking about our surroundings (and architecture) much more closely. (fh)
In the next issue of uncube we’re going places: off-places. Off the map, off the beaten track, off into the blue… join us, because you never know where we’ll end up ...
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