michael_kubo_lecture_caption
[APPLAUSE]
OK. All right, I was told to speak into the microphone. So let's see how this goes, given that I'm
short. OK, so this is going to be a totally schizophrenic talk. And the thread that I think sort of
connects all of these things, basically, is the notion of the collective or the collaborative.
I am, as it turns out, looking back on years of work. I am, as it turns out, a collaborative person
by nature. And so a lot of the work that you're going to see tonight is me working in various sorts
of collective and collaborative frameworks with various people-- let's see if this-- on all of the
projects that you're going to see, except for the first one, which is this, which is actually the
subject of my PhD work, my ongoing dissertation at MIT in the HTC program. And even though
this is the only one that is not collaborative, it is actually about the structure of a collective and
collaborative and, eventually, corporate architectural practices after World War II in the US.
The dissertation is called "The Anxiety of Anonymity." And it's basically centered on The
Architects' Collaborative, which is a firm based in Massachusetts. They began in 1945. And
they're commonly known as the Office of Walter Gropius, although they were, in fact, eight
partners, one of whom was Gropius, the other seven of whom are much younger.
And the dissertation, broadly speaking, is about the origins of what we have come to talk about
nowadays as the corporate architectural practice, which is to say, not the production of
architecture for corporations, but the corporate production of architecture itself by very large,
collective and collaborative types of offices and basically the origins of the interest in that, as a
movement, after World War II in the US, the stakes of this interest in the collective, and how it
sort of shades over eventually, on its outer edge by the '70s or '80s, into the production of a
certain discourse around what comes to be called the corporate and branded as the corporate and
sort of criticized as such.
And so it's very much about the stakes of this kind of anonymity and the interest in what was
specifically described as anonymous, collective, team-based work as a better way of producing
architecture, but also as a better way of producing architects as people, as people that would live
a full life in this kind of practice. It's very much about the reception of architects, which is why
it's come to center on The Architects' Collaborative, because there is the issue of Walter Gropius
as a canonical founding father, let's say, of modernism in the conventional narrative.
And it's about the way in which, in the discourse, the persona of the singular architect has tended
to be split from the entity of the large scale or team-based practice in these kinds of diagrams or
images. This is from a book called American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame. And you
can see it's a sort of lineage diagram of influence of basically who worked for whom. It's a totally
arcane, fascinatingly illegible diagram.
But in its inability to actually map out all of these things, you get all these weird fissures, like
Gropius being the progenitor of TAC, which was in no way the history of the office, and
therefore being sort of split from it. And so the persona is split from the figure of the office. The
more famous diagram, which presumably you guys have seen, the Charles Jencks genealogical
tree, a sort of evolutionary tree for modern movements in architecture, in which there's a similar
splitting of Gropius being identified with the pre-World War II, European avant garde, the heroic
avant guard, verses this mysterious entity known as TAC, The Architects' Collaborative, which
is allied with the bureaucratic in the postwar. Right? So there's this kind of total split, which
tends to obscure the second half of Gropius's career in the US.
And so I look at the origins of this kind of practice and really the stakes for its founders. This is a
letter from the younger partners, at the moment of founding the office, to Gropius, where they
explain the notion of collectivity that they're interested in. I won't go into it really in any detail.
But they outline a sort of life project, which includes not only the office, but living together, a
collective farm, nursery, daycare, all sorts of things, which for them are part and parcel of the
various models they're looking at.
This is the structure of the office. And I like that you can see Gropius sort of hanging out there.
But they really were structured in this kind of informal way, as a series of architects that would
crit each other's work, the structure of the environment in which they worked, which maintained
this sort of atelier-like informality, and then, the structure of the spaces in which they lived,
which also mapped onto the structure of the office a certain relationship of the individual and the
community.
Each of them designed their own house at Six Moon Hill, which was a sort of collective
enterprise to plan it. And they were all designed within a kind of common language. But each
one had freedom to design their own house. And there was a certain notion of the relationship
between the individual and the community.
And then, the dissertation looks at the way that this shakes out in a series of projects where their
interest in anonymity, in team-based practice, and in the notion of the collective comes back to
haunt them in the discourse and in the reception of their work, in the construction of certain
narratives of what's called, in some cases, the shattering of the modernist ideal or the kind of loss
of idealism that seemed to exist in pre-World War II, which is to say European, architecture and
then it's presumed debasement within the context of US market practice.
And one of the things that is wielded against these sorts of architects-- and there are many
architects included in this category-- is precisely their anonymity. It's the lack of any kind of
signature to rest on for critics, historians, who are used to writing the history of architects and
continue to be used to writing about architects and their histories, really based on the notion of
the singular author and of the signature architect. The dissertation also-- you'll see this coming
back later-- looks specifically at their international extension.
They are very much the heart of the international circulation of US architects after World War II,
quite heavily in the Middle East, for example, in the Gulf states. This is the University of
Baghdad after 1957. And so it looks at the ways in which they fight a series of battles that replay,
in many ways, exactly these issues of the signature architect and the anonymous architect. This is
Kuwait in the 1970s where they designed a series of extremely interesting and bizarre, but
anonymous, parking garages, which nobody really knows about today.
All right, now, onto the series of collaborations. So the set of interests in the structure of office
practice and how it has been historicized and theorized feeds into this next project, which is
OfficeUS. This is the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year, at the last Architecture
Biennale for which I was associate curator.
And you can think of this really as coming out of that set of interests, but being put in a much
larger bubble, not least of which was a much larger set of collaborators. And so this now begins
the series of entities into which my work has sort of gone. This is the full set of collaborators,
including both the curators and a live office that was constructed on the site of the US Pavilion in
Venice, with eight partners that were tasked with living there over the six months of the
Biennale, using the US Pavilion as their office space, and in some way formulating a response to
the question of what an architecture office could look like in the future.
This is the space they worked in. You can see their office space on one side. And so the
exhibition was split into two parts. On the left, you see the archive, which we called the
Repository. This was what I was primarily responsible for, which was an archive of the last 100
years of projects built outside of the US by US firms.
So this was an inversion of-- the question that was really posed by Rem Koolhaas at the outset of
the Biennale to all of the national pavilions was-- the title he gave it was "Absorbing Modernity,
1914 to 2014." And the issue, as he posed it, was how modernity, whatever one means by that,
was received in various national contexts and then what kind of reaction was produced. In other
words, he posed it as a question of architects of various nationalities or in certain national
contexts receiving things from outside and then responding to them, which is a very conventional
framework for looking at these things.
Given that we were curating the US Pavilion, we felt that we had an opportunity actually to pose,
kind of uniquely, the inverse of that question and to look at not architects, but offices, the
structure of US office practices over the 100 year time frame, which was laid out by Koolhaas
and by AMO, but to look not at things which were received in the US, but at buildings built by
US architects exclusively outside of the US and other places. And so to look at the kind of
propagation of the work of US offices, but also the structure of practice of US firms and the
kinds of reciprocal relations between one and the other.
So it was structured as, on the one hand, a history of the last 100 years, plus of those projects and
of the offices which produce them. And then, part 2 was this live office on site for which this
archive functioned, in some fashion, as their office library. In other words, it was a repository of
information that was structured for the office to work with and repose a series of problems and
repose a series of projects out of that history as a way of framing certain issues around the work
in a kind of new way.
This is the list of offices. This is a diagram of all of the offices-- there were, I think, 169 offices
founded in the last 150 years-- and a timeline of their chronology from the moment they were
founded until some of them went out of business, et cetera. And then, the red dots are all of the
projects. We had 675 projects and 169 offices in this thing.
And so a major part of the project was to visualize the space of the office. "The office" here is a
metonymic term. It refers to both the physical space in which architects practice, but also the
construction of the office as a certain kind of entity, a kind of legal, often corporate entity. And
so part of the project was really to develop a way of visualizing the interior of office space as it
has changed or not changed over the last 100 years.
This is Frank Lloyd Wright. These are all photos by Ezra Stoller. He was one of the major
participants in visualizing sort of part and parcel of the circulation of these architects and their
image after World War II quite heavily. So this is Frank Lloyd Wright. This is, of course, you
guys-- this is on your home territory. This is SOM, their offices in the Inland Steel Building. This
is a kind of incredible image. And then, The Architects' Collaborative, again-- sort of my home
territory, back in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And also to visualize-- and here is where it sort of lands as a metonymic term-- to visualize the
office also understood this way, as a kind of organizational structure, so not the physical space of
the office, but the structure of their practice in a broader sense, whether it's at Albert Kahn at the
time when Albert Kahn was 600 employees, was the largest office in the US pre-World War II,
SOM-- again, SOM was 1,000 people by the 1950s-- or an office like HOK. And I love that they
tell you what the H, the O, and the K do. Right? So H is management. O is design. K is
production, which is sort of funny.
And then, again their international extension-- and so some of the loops that I trace in the
dissertation continue through this kind of framework. I'll just show you one very briefly. This is
the kind of golf story of the oil boom in the 1970s, when these kinds of articles start to appear in
the US press about the oil-rich Mideast, "The New Frontier for Professional Services." And these
are sort of uneasy articles about wanting to get in on a certain territory of work, but also being
wary of the circumstances under which that work is produced economically, risk-wise, and
otherwise.
This is from Architectural Record. And many, many firms-- TAC was among the first. But SOM
becomes invested very heavily, Caudill Rowlett Scott, CRS; Yamasaki's office; many, many
others. This is a graph of them, of all of the offices and projects that were being produced from
1945 to 1991. And so these are some of the graphics that we developed for the project. And
again, here's The Architects' Collaborative in Baghdad, sort of as part of the circulation and then
to trace the reciprocal loops of that kind of involvement and then how these things are both good
and bad for US firms and good and bad on the ground, in terms of what they produce.
So the parking garages that I showed you in Kuwait, TAC designs them. One of them, called the
Souk Al-Manakh, becomes the center of a vast, $60 plus billion dollar black market stock
exchange, called the Souk Al-Manakh stock exchange, which then collapses in the summer of
1982. So you can see it. It gets built, collapses for basically trading on illegal, fictional
companies, and then devolves back onto The Architects' Collaborative. And these are their
memos, where they become very concerned about the collapsing structure of their practice
because they've kind of bitten off more than they can chew. And they're divesting themselves of
work in the Middle East. And eventually, they go bankrupt.
Anyways, this is how it sort of plays out in the exhibition. And so the Repository was structured
as an archive of folders, each of which was on an office or a project and was a media archive. So
each folder would contain essentially everything we were able to track down that had been
published in mainstream press architectural journals, but also things like the New York Times,
the LA Times, et cetera, the Chicago Tribune, on both the offices in their folders and on each
project. And so the density of a folder would track with the amount of circulation that a certain
project received.
And then, that archive tracked all the way around the four rooms of the Pavilion and then was
available to both visitors and to the office on the premises itself. And then, the last product,
which just came out-- like two days ago, I got a copy of the book-- is an atlas, which is really a
condensed version of this archive in book form. It's a fairly massive tome, which I was kind of
frightened by when it came out of the package, which is sort of recently finished. OK, so that's
sort of collaboration part 1.
Collaboration part 2-- part 2, part 3-- is pinkcomma, which has been mentioned. So pinkcomma's
a gallery that I run in Boston, along with Chris Grimly, who was here a few days ago as part of a
panel discussion at the AIC, and Mark Pasnik. It's in Boston. This is our gallery. And
pinkcomma, we've been running it now since 2007. And pinkcomma really came out of the
structure of discourse in Boston, which is very much centered around Harvard and MIT as kind
of two poles of all discussion, which tends to be fairly academic discussion. And what's not
included in that usually is any discussion of Boston as a space in which people work or in which
one could project ideas about the city and what it could be.
On the other hand, there is a certain kind of professional discourse in Boston through the Boston
Society of Architects, which excludes any kind of more discursive or more academic, let's say,
conversation. And so there's a gap between those two things into which most young professional
architects in Boston fall. And so there's a big kind of brain drain problem, where Boston is not
seen as a good place to work. A lot of people study in Boston, and they leave.
And we started the gallery really as a kind of third entity to fill that gap and to try to solve this
problem by basically making a space for certain kinds of discourse that were not really
happening in Boston otherwise and that were not accommodated by the universities or by this
kind of professional discourse. And nobody else was doing it. And so we decided to do it.
So we've done over 30 shows-- at this point, it's actually more, probably more than 40-discussions, events, book launches, et cetera. Here a few of them. We've been very interested in
formats, in publishing, various kinds of publishing practices and exploring different sorts of
formats. So this was an exhibition called "Newsstand," which is about the resurgence of the
newspaper and the broad sheet as something that architects started producing as a kind of cheap
way of showing their work. We showed Iker's project "Inside Marina City"-- so you know, a
shout-out to Iker-- which was great at the moment when we were investing ourselves in
photography as another kind of medium.
Recently, we've been doing a series of shows about drawing practices. So we have an ongoing
series of related shows about drawing and increasingly representation, sort of writ large, Keith
Krumwiede's Freedomland. We did a double show of Neeraj Bhatia and Luis Callejas, which
was related to a series of drawings with were in Pamphlet Architecture and then a book called
Petropolis, which Neeraj Bhatia had done. And then, more recently, John Szot's work, which I
think is also here at the AIC, sort of mixed media work called Architecture and the Unspeakable.
And so we're now broadening out into a series of things.
But these are the kinds of things that basically do not appear in Boston. They don't flow through
Harvard and MIT conventionally, nor do they appear in any other space. And pinkcomma is a
kind of subset of an architecture practice, to which it is affiliated, called over,under. And I, since
my involvement with pinkcomma, have also become affiliated then with over,under on a series
of curatorial projects which grew out of pinkcomma, but which have now taken to external sites,
where we've been able to continue the conversation about Boston in the present, but also what
Boston has been historically, which is very much an interest of ours. You'll see it coming back
up later.
So we've been doing a series of shows at the Boston Society of Architects' space, BSA's space,
the first of which was called Inform. And this was really a history of Boston after World War II,
very much in the period that the Heroic Project is also invested in. And it's both a history project
and an advocacy project for us. It's a history of Boston in the era in which architects and urban
designers were given a strong say in what the city could look like and how it could perform, how
it could be used.
It's a moment that we've been interested in looking at basically as a lesson to the current version
of the city to say, this used to happen, it could happen again, we want to be a part of it; and to
make people in the city aware of their own history in ways that they themselves have forgotten.
The core of the show was a series of projects which we called The Legible City. And it was
about the moment when the notion of legibility was a major concern for architects and urban
designers as a way of making the city more accessible.
The idea was that cities had to be made legible. They had to be intelligible in the way that they
functioned and that architects could play a role in basically didactic exhibitions, but also
informational projects that operated across a whole spectrum of media, graphic design,
information systems, wayfinding, infrastructure exhibitions, curatorial work, et cetera, and
architecture, sort of full stop, as part of making the city more accessible to a broader public and
making systems which didn't work well function better.
For example, this a pavilion called "Where's Boston," which had a kind of multimedia, Emeslike multimedia slide, 3,000-slide slide projector sort of inside it from 1975, which was an
exhibition about the city and its neighborhoods, which was one of the most popular things in
Boston for something like 15 years, has now disappeared, and which nobody remembers. Things
that we reconstructed out of the archives of which there's very little evidence, like this.
This is a cybernetic information center that was built as an experiment on a city square in 1969
as an experiment in a kind of cybernetic feedback loop of these devices that people in the city
could use both to receive information and to give information about what did or did not work
well in the city. So this was a kind of multimedia experience. And this was a movie tube through
which they could watch. There was a news ticker. This was a kind of LED map. There was a
telephone that users could use to record feedback. And then these inflatables, these kind of
mirror cylinders with inflatables, that we reconstructed the project basically from photographs,
which is all that exists, and otherwise.
The modernization of the MBTA, which is a graphic and infrastructural modernization, which
was really the origin of what was called the Spider Map. This kind of map, it preceded the
Vignelli system in New York. It was the first development of this kind of graphic modernization
anywhere in the US as a way of making the most arcane system in the city, which is to say it's
public transit system, much more intelligible and usable by a broader spectrum of the public, et
cetera.
And then, a project which was published very, very beautifully in mass context fairly recently,
which was called "Futures," which is a history of an unrealized project in Boston for a world
exposition in 1976 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the US. And it was basically a
project for a Tokyo Bay-type mega-structure, which would have been a whole new community
in Boston, was very much a live project. It was an $800 million project supported by the Boston
Redevelopment Authority, which was the main civic authority. It was very much a real thing.
This is not a speculative proposal. It was very nearly built and then was killed by all sorts of
provincial politics. And so we basically a political and economic history of this that was then
exhibited.
We like to work across different formats, which comes out of our interest in different sorts of
media, so the way in which we exhibit, for example, broadsheets as a thing that architects are
invested in. We also then make a lot of broadsheets. We made one for this show.
And then, just to wrap up this story, we started a design biennial, which was something that did
not exist. We started it in 2008, as something that Boston didn't have. We were looking at things
like Young Architects Program in New York. There's now one in Chicago that's about to launch,
et cetera. As a way of recognizing young, emerging architectural talent in Boston and giving a
framework for exhibiting their work, talking about that work, precipitating a certain
conversation.
We also developed an exhibit for-- this is the last biennial. The next one is coming this summer
at the Boston Society of Architects, which again was organized as an archive of all of the
previous biennial winners as a way of kind of collecting them and presenting them to the city.
And so they were these kind of moving panels, like when you go by posters, that would direct
you a series of cabinets that had deeper information about the various projects and things that
were on display and then a series of installations by the four winners of that year's biennial, one
of which is Rorschach by Project Open, which is also on exhibit here. Brandon Clifford, a kind
of experimental concrete staircase which is an investigation of stone cutting stereotomic
techniques. And then, of course, we published a book because we like publishing.
But the main project that we've been invested in, across pinkcomma and over,under, is the
Heroic Project, which if any of you saw Chris here a couple of days ago, then he already
described it a little bit briefly. But I'm going to go back over some of the same ground. Heroic is
a history of concrete architecture in Boston from the '50s to the '70s. And it's part and parcel of
our attempt to revive what we feel was a period in which architecture and design, which is to say
modern contemporary architecture and design, mattered in the city and in which Boston really
was one of the epicenters of building in North America.
All of the largest, most recognized architects of their time were working in Boston in this period.
I.M. Pei, Kallmann McKinnell, Marcel Breuer-- Le Corbusier's only building in North America-Paul Rudolph were all built in Boston. And Boston, for a city its size, for the footprint of the city,
has an enormous, extraordinary amount of this work, much of which still remains, but a lot of
which is under threat of demolition or serious alteration. And I don't have to tell you guys about
the stakes of that, post-Prentice, et cetera.
And so Heroic looks at Boston as a case study and, in some ways, as an attempt to come up with
a model for how to look at that era of work as something which is continuous with a lot of fights
that are happening in a lot of other places, one of which is Chicago. It was an era when there was
a master plan for the city, a comprehensive master plan within which decisions about the scope
of work, who needed what and where, and how architects and developers could participate in
constructing that, existed, was a real thing.
This has not happened-- so this is the 1965-75 master plan. There has not been a master plan in
Boston since 1975. This is the last one we ever had. So development decisions are sort of
piecemeal now. So this kind of regional scope is something we are very much invested in. And
it's very much a revision, a revisiting of urban renewal history, which tends to be looked on, as
you might expect, unfavorably in Boston and in very many other places in the US, certainly
cities on the east coast.
And so this is downtown Boston in the Back Bay, which is basically all of the kind of metro
Boston area. And this is the scale of demolition in the 1960s that we're talking about. So relative
to the footprint of the city, an enormous, enormous reformatting of the city through projects that
were seen to be both symbolic and economically productive of what was referred to as "the new
Boston," the heart of which was Government Center. So that demolition sort of right here in the
middle this is what became the site of Government Center as the show piece, but also the
economic generator of the revival of downtown as a city that was losing population, had lost its
tax base which required, in very many ways, this kind of project, but which generated a ton of
bad blood.
And then, it's a history of the reception of this kind of work, the ways in which these projects
were seen as symbolic of the new Boston, and the various actors that operated in this context,
one of whom, the key actor, was Ed Logue, who was the head of the Boston Redevelopment
Authority, as a-- he tends to get thought of as the Robert Moses of Boston. But he's actually a
much more nuanced and complex character than that, but was the head of really what was the
strong city agency at the time. He was not liked by many.
So this is-- I know Chris showed this, but I just can't resist. Right? This is from the same-- this is
an article in Life magazine about him. And this is people on the city council complaining, "The
resemblances between Logue and Hitler are striking." You know, there he is. I leave you to-- I
won't go into the history. But which produced a series of really canonical, emblematic works of
the time, which for us are unloved masterpieces, which have been subject to what we call active
neglect, which is a process in which the clients and the stewards of buildings from that era often
basically leave them to decay and then blame the decayed state of the building on the architects,
as if they were design flaws of the original building.
And so these buildings are in a precarious position. They're exactly in their middle age where
they're not old enough yet that they've just settled into being recognized as part of the history of
the city, part of the continuity of that history, nor are they current enough that people care for
them and think of them in a contemporary way. And so they're in this kind of middle age, which
is exactly when they're most at risk of demolition or alteration. And we've seen that in certain
cases.
And yet, a lot of them are outstanding. This is Paul Rudolph, also at Government Service Center.
And so the project for us is-- it's a kind of revisionist history, partly in the sense that we don't use
the term "brutalism." You know, we could go through the history of brutalism as a term, its
origins, its use by people like Banham, the sort of standard history of the stakes for the
independent group and others in deploying the term as something that they saw as a positive
term, through this kind of quote-- "Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society and
drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work."
But we don't do that. We've decided that the word brutal realism carries simply too much
baggage and that it skews the discussion in the present and that it's kind of not worth going back
through the history in order to have a discussion about the value of these buildings, what we see
as their value in the present. So we call them heroic.
We call this the Heroic Era, which we think sort of skews it in a more positive way to undo the
way in which brutalism just sounds. It's like one of the worst branding decisions of all time, is to
call this stuff brutalism, because it just kills the discussion right off the bat. People hate these
buildings and think because they are called brutalist, among other reasons, it kind of lends itself
to thinking of these buildings as brutalizing, inhumane, oppressive, all of the kind of terms which
get put on them and overlooking their merits.
We don't mean "heroic" as an exclusively positive term. Heroic is meant-- we like it because it
has both positives and negatives. It suggests both ambition, but also hubris, kind of in the classic
sense, in the Greek tragedy notion of the hero. The hero is one who often fails, who is guilty of
hubris.
So it suggests both success and failure. But it also for us picks up on another lineage, part of
which relates to the independent group. So for example, Alison and Peter Smithson themselves
write a book called The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, where they are looking back to
the avant garde period of the 1920s and '30s and talking about the relationship between the
heroic struggle of the first period of modern architecture and its relation to their own time. And
in a similar way, we are very sympathetic to that as a generation that's looking back with a
similar sort of historical distance to the work produced after World War II in the US.
Also the use a of the term "heroic" by Venturi and Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown as a way of really attacking this kind of work and contributing to the decline of its
reputation. For example, this is a very famous sort of takedown in Learning from Las Vegas
called "From La Tourette to Neiman Marcus," which is basically their accusation that brutalist
buildings are ducks-- in the duck versus decorated shed distinction. But also that there's a kind of
loss, debasement of prototypes that happens from La Tourette, from Le Corbusier's La Tourette
through a series of buildings, Yale art and architecture, through including Boston City Hall, that
basically ends up with a kind of debasement of these formal ideas in a Neiman Marcus in a
parking lot.
Right? So that's the kind of monumental, deeply spiritual meaning of the canonical prototypes
that then it ends up as a kind of debased building in a parking lot. So we were interested in their
use of "heroic" as a negative term also, that this is not the time and ours is not the environment
for heroic communication through pure architecture, et cetera.
So the project for us has been conducted through a series of different media that's been going on
now for five years. And we're about to conclude the first phase of it, to map the locations of all
of the buildings from this area that were done in concrete or partially in concrete, to draw them
in a consistent way to understand how they're structured-- the facade systems, et cetera. What
kind of construction forces are at play?
We started by doing an exhibition at pinkcomma at our old gallery space. And we did it is a
series of sheets, which were hung up, you could see on hooks on the wall, so that viewers could
lift these sheets and take them away. These were informational sheets about these buildings.
And the idea was that a viewer could come into the gallery, pick up a sheet, read about a building
that they wouldn't have thought twice about, take it with them out of the gallery, and then leave it
on the subway or something. And that there would start to be these kind of fliers circulating
around the city, so that somebody might see a picture of Boston City Hall, and then read a quote
from a book from 1965 praising it, that would make them think in some way differently about
the building. And this happened. This really did happen.
I've written or contributed to a series of articles, which you can see from the titles-- "In Praise of
Ugly Buildings," "The Beauty of Concrete," "Tough Love," et cetera-- I've tried to revise this
history. We have a website which also has this informational content about each one of these
specific buildings. We have a Twitter account. That's more advocacy.
And then the part that we're about to conclude is a book is really a monographic publication on
these buildings called Heroic, which was a series of chapters devoted to these different buildings,
including various projects that are really not known, like a series of experimental concrete
houses by Mary Otis Stevens, built in the suburbs of Boston in '60s. Marcel Breuer designed a
high school in Boston that nobody knows about.
And then a series of interviews. And so these interviews appear in the Chatter exhibition.
Interviews with the protagonists of these buildings about their thoughts, both about what
happened then, their remember of what happened, but also the reception of these buildings and
what they think has changed since then-- Araldo Cossutta, Peter Chermayeff, Michael McKinnell
of Colin McKinnell, and then Mary Otis Stevens herself.
OK. So that's prelude, basically. I'll try to go quick through the three. There are three more
projects coming. So basically that gets us through these different sorts of collaborations and this
interesting collectivity too. From the Collective to the Collective-LOK, which is a collaboration
of three different entities. So basically, all of that is encapsulated here, which is sort of me.
The other two parts of which are Jon Lott of PARA-Project, which is his office, and William
O'Brien, Jr., of WOJR , which is his office. The important thing is that Collective-LOK is not
exactly an office. It's a collective, and we talk about it in that way.
And so each of us brings our own office practice. These continue to exist. We each do work
independently, which is ongoing. But we also came together out of an interest in basically, what
would happen if the three of us worked together on certain kinds of projects that couldn't happen
within the space of any one of these practices?
And so our interest was-- these were just to show you Jon Lott's work with PARA. He's very
interested in the familiar and the unfamiliar, the notion of taking the familiar, the every day, the
quotidian and estranging it in some ways. And so this a project he calls the Ice House, which was
to take basically the confined lot of a suburban house and estrange one's notion of what a house
can be, basically, and how it can function.
This is William O'Brien, Jr.'s work. This from a show that we did at pinkcomma last year of his
work. His interest recently has been very much in form, in the potentials of form. And
specifically in what he calls "anachronous formalisms," which are formalisms which come from
earlier, often Renaissance and Baroque ways of producing formal agendas and the way that those
could be redeployed in the present, specifically in relation to digital technology, the ways that
those can be merged. And here you see eggs.
And so we came together out of my work and their work out of a notion that there were certain
kinds of projects that basically would benefit from the three of us with our different backgrounds
working together rather than separately. In other words, that there would be some potential in
that. That I, with a background in curatorial work and editing and publications, et cetera, and as
an historian on the other fronts, that you could do something different.
And we specifically came together for this project, which was the headquarters of Van Alen
Institute in York, which was an invited competition which we entered. There were 150
submissions, I think. We then made it to the short list. And then we won the competition and
have recently completed.
And so we came together really around the potentials of this project as something that we
thought would uniquely benefit from the three of us working together. In other words, it was
very much project driven that we started doing this. And it was because of the unique status Van
Alen as a cultural institution in New York, of which there are not so many on this type.
And so the task was to design a new ground-floor headquarters for Van Alen in a building. This
is their building. They've owned their building for a very long time. They're very old. They're
from the end of the 19th century. They were originally Beaux-Arts Society.
But they've never occupied their ground floor. It hasn't been possible within their lease. They
were on the sixth floor. Then they moved to the fourth floor. And they've been by degrees slowly
moving downward.
And so the project was really to create a new institutional home for their office space, office and
exhibition space, but also to produce a new public projection of Van Alen Institute. And their
mission as an institution is to rethink questions of public space in the city. And so we were very
much taken by this notion as something that the three of us could think through and work on.
And so one strong interest that came through for us, and that we've continued in all three
projects, and are now looking for projects on that basis, is this notion of publicness and
rethinking questions of public space and the notion of publicity in a non-conventional way. The
other strong interest that really bound us together and which was kind of a surprise was our
interest in precedents and specifically-- well, you'll see certain kinds of precedents. In the
conversations, we had these emerge naturally, that we were very much looking at and thinking
about a similar set of references, many of which were where from the art world.
For example, in this case, we were interested in the notion of scaffolding. This is a Tatzu Nishi
project in New York at Columbus Circle, in which this scaffolding was constructed to basically
build a room around the statue of Columbus that you could then climb up to. You could walk up
a staircase and basically inhabit this suddenly domestic room, in which the statue of Columbus-so you're many stories up now-- would appear basically as a domesticated version of itself, but as
a thing which suddenly you have access to. And so this is, again, the notion of estranging the
familiar or giving you a new relationship to it.
And we were very much interested in the notion of the institution as a kind of scaffold, whether
the Van Alen could be a space in which one could provide a space for objects to appear in
unfamiliar ways, or to re-publicize, let's say, certain things that wouldn't have been publicized
otherwise. This kind of operation-- this is the Walter de Maria room in New York, through the
Dia Foundation, inverted as a way of basically creating an exceptional space that you almost
accidentally find your way into in the city.
This is its beautiful space, but it's just off the street. If you didn't know it was there, you'd never
go. And then the notion of basically flipping it so that floor becomes ceiling, et cetera.
We were looking at a series of cultural institutions. Basically, the landscape of cultural
institutions in New York and how Van Alen would situate itself among these and its new home,
and also differentiate itself from them. In other words, what architecturally was it that gave
character to these different spaces? Was it through the wall, in the case of Storefront? Was it
through the ceiling, in other sorts of cases? Or were there spaces that lacked character?
We were also looking at our favorite ceilings as a way of thinking through basically what could
provide continuity to the space. And we settled on the ceiling as-- very traditionally, in galleries
spaces-- as the instrument of continuity and the production of character that unifies a whole
series of disparate programs.
We were also interested in the notion of screening. The project is called "Screen Play." We
visited, actually, this project, which was a reconstruction of a Robert Irwin piece from the '70s
that had been displayed at the Whitney and was reconstructed, in which this coffered ceiling of
the Whitney was screened by this light veil or scrim that bisected the space in two. And which
for us provided a strong suggestion of the ways in which all of the program in the space could be
accommodated, but also packed away, screened, via a series of different elements that would
allow the space to be usable for different purposes.
And so the new space was designed for their offices. But it also had to function as a gallery
space, as an event space. And it had to be reconfigurable across all of these things and in much
smaller area than they had been accustomed to before. And so screening became our strategy,
both for accommodating the program but also for getting at this question of publicity or
publicness. We were interested in notions of publicness which were not the conventional idea of,
let's say, making a purely glass storefront, or the kind of easy alliance of transparency with the
notion of publicity, that the most transparent is the most public.
It's something that for us has since been co-opted by all sorts of commercial retail storefronts, et
cetera. And which we wanted to question, and especially to question at the Van Alen as a place
that is devoted to that kind of institutional questioning. And so we were looking-- for example,
we really liked-- happened upon this phenomenon in Berlin quite heavily, but also in other
places, of people opting out of Google view, Google Street View.
So in Berlin, it happened more than any place I know of. So these are shots of streets in Berlin,
of where one can basically decide that they don't want their building to be visible. And then this
kind of moving pixelated screen is put over their building as you zoom around it in Google Street
View as a way in which the image of one's space in relation to the public is now contested
through these kinds of media, through Google Street View. And we were very much taken by
that.
A notion which for us also related to a series of precedents. And this is where really our common
interests, the precedents that we kept coming back to, were very often late modernist and late
minimalist art world precedents. We basically found that that was a kind of language that we
were very much interested in, strangely-- like a lot of work by Dan Graham. You've already seen
Robert Irwin, James Turrell, these kinds of works and projects.
Like the Dan Graham, the project for a suburban house, in which the front half of the house is
evacuated. And the house is bisected by a mirror, which then reflects both the interior contents of
the house back onto the street and the street into the space of the house.
So these all come together in the project through what we called "Screen Play," a series of
screening elements-- screens understood conceptually, but also physically-- that served to
organize the space. And so act one was to take the confines of the space-- this is the back wall,
the front wall-- and basically increase the institutional area of it by producing a bracket that
actually extends beyond the sidewalk into the parking space, where we create a street seat that's a
kind of occupiable park-like kind of box that basically extends the wall of the institution
outwards, so that people on the sidewalk become implicitly part of the space of the institution.
And then on the other side, also extending the face of it into a screening wall that produces a
terrace on the back.
And then what we called the bow tie, a sort of curved accordion wall that basically packs in this
dense poche all of the program that you need to construct this sort of flexibility in a kind of
dense array of stuff. Which then has a series of screens that can come out, which are curtains,
basically, that can either connect this space through from front to back and create the sense of
singular space, or separate different areas for different uses. So that, for example, there could be
a book event here and office space in the back, a projection screen on this surface, which is a
literal screen. So there's a multimedia system installed in the roof that allows for a continuous
multi-protection.
And then the final element is this light coffered ceiling, which you'll see, which allows us to
pack, basically, all of the program that you need up in the ceiling. And which is usually, as in the
case here-- there's always this play in these ceilings of hiding or revealing these kinds of services
that have to pack the ceiling. And so we wanted basically a deep system that could allow things
to puncture and be visible below the ceiling when they need to be, like projectors or dedicated
lighting, but also other things like ductwork to be packed above the ceiling. And so it required a
three-dimensional coffered system to accommodate that.
It was designed to accommodate all of these different scenarios of use. This is from the
competition. We mapped out basically a year's worth of a hypothetical series of scenarios for
them. Dinner guests buzzing in anticipation of David van der Leer's toast-- David van der Leer's
the director of Van Alen-- at this long table as one kind of extreme use. But also office space
with croissants waiting in the conference room.
And the different elements of the space could be deployed or not deployed in order to allow an
event to happen here while the office space is happening here. Or it could become continuous
gallery space or a series of small media galleries. This is the galleries scenario with this
continuous projection and mediating screens. A cocktail party, normal, different kinds of work
scenarios. But it can also be a lecture space that accommodated as required amount of seating,
which they have, et cetera.
And then at the center of this bow tie is a conference room that can be extended outwards to
create a bigger space-- for example, for the Board of Trustees meeting, these kinds of things.
And so different sort of scenarios are enabled by this. This is at the pinch point of the bow tie. I
should probably speed up now.
That it can accommodate, for example, a normal workday scenario, where there are spaces in the
back where the desks and the desktops are, smaller meetings, lectures scenario, et cetera. And
then finally, this is the bracket that extends the institutional space out onto the street. And so that
bracket takes the form of this cubic box with this garage door and seating on the inside of it.
This was intended to be a prototype. But you see that it's on wheels. So the idea was that this
could become basically the billboard for Van Alen, that you could hinge it to a truck and drive it
around and have pop-up events all around the city. But that in the city, it performs something
like the opt-out Google Street View, that you can mediate the relationship between the interior
and exterior. And both extend it and also obscure it in some way to create a sense of mystery that
invites people to peek behind and then enter the institutional space. So you see the relationship to
the precedents.
This is the space. It just opened in January. And you see basically this kind of light. So the
coffers are made out of perforated metal panels that house everything above it and basically
obscure them when seen in perspective. But don't obscure them if you look straight up into these
elements. So the idea was to basically have both the screen and the coffer as a singular,
integrated system.
This is the plan. It was very much a planimetric project. It was a poche project, thoroughly, of
tuning this thing, calibrating its length to all the different sorts of uses that needed happen at
every point. And also calibrating it lengthwise on a certain module. And then the thing that
unifies all of it in this calibration is the ceiling, the ceiling grid.
It organizes the module of the curtains that come across. But also then you're at the unifying
visual effect of the space. So again, there's this front part, the sidewalk, the bracket that closes it
off from the street, and then this front part, which can be used for temporary events. There you
see looking back out from the interior back out through the front door.
The middle zone at this pinch point where you have the conference room-- and this is it closed
off. So this is the notion of the screening, is that you can pack up. You can basically close
everything off so that it just becomes one singular, unified thing that none of the contingencies of
these different spaces are visible and that would have a completely unified character-- for
example, in a gallery scenario through this curtain-like accordion wall. Or the spaces can be
opened as pockets within it. So this is looking out towards the back at this rear terrace.
So the opening in January. And then we had these kind of happy accidents, where this was our
rendering of the long table scenario. And there was a preview dinner where they actually made
the long table. This is not a thing we asked for. We just walked in and they had it. It felt like our
rendering had come to life a little bit.
Anyway, the second project we did came directly out of the first one as a related opportunity,
"Mirror, Mirror." We were finalists for the PS1 Summer Warm Up pavilion, along with four
other firms. And for us, it was the perfect opportunity to keep going in our investigation of
basically the institutional space, now not of Van Alen, but of MoMA PS1, and specifically PS1,
and basically the question of the public. What was the role of the public in relation to the space
of the institution and its own self-definition?
So we started really with this quote, which I will leave you guys to read. "Many artists today do
not make self-contained masterpieces, do not want to, and do not try to. Nor are they, for the
most part, interested in neutral spaces. Rather, their work includes the space its in, embraces it,
uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame, but material."
So we started by framing this text for the PS1 jury. This is not us. This is a quote from the first
exhibition that was ever done at PS1 in 1976, called Rooms, which was really a re-appropriation
of the space. And so we built up the project by basically replaying to PS1 an institutional history
of itself in this way.
This was them circa pre-1976. These were a series of blocks that were filled in-- street blocks.
The building was this. It was an old school building that was re-appropriated, hence the name
PS1. And then through a series of steps, basically appropriated as space for art. This is a Carl
Andre work that occupied, basically once those lots were cleared out. This was the school
building, the Thomas Struth photo of it from when he was in residence at the end of the '70s at
PS1.
And then basically narrated to them a history of their own architectural self-definition of this
space-- this was from 1997-- as an isolated precinct that was separate from the city. And so it
was a history of their own isolation from the public, which we found to be very problematic, And
basically, we wanted to put in question through the project. And specifically, through the
creation of what we took as basically a minimalist figure, the figure of this triangle as a kind of
minimalist gesture inserted into the city, but which was not really visible to the city.
And so we started with this conceptual notion of doubling, of taking the triangle-- basically
taking it for what it was as a pure figure and then conceptually doubling it back onto the space of
the city through a series of operations. Both to complicate the publicity, or lack of publicity, of
the institution itself and as a critique basically, but also to open up new potentials between the
one and the other.
So the first step of this was to lift the triangle, was to take the space of the triangle, which was a
pure figure in plan, to lift it up and make it legible as a figure from people outside the space of
the institution, through this roof, this undulated, slung, catenary roof, which would basically
manifest the form of this as a minimalist insertion into this space. And so the project-- put
another way-- was entirely about narcissism. It was about our accusations of the narcissism of
PS1 as an institution, the narcissism of the PS1 Warm Up program and its selection of architects.
And we didn't want to come out and say this. The idea was that it was embedded in the fabric of
the project. And it was there to be read if one wanted to read it. But basically, as an accusation of
their narcissism within their own space. And then a attempt both to exacerbate that and to put
themselves outside the space of it. To both give them a hyper version of this narcissistic interior
space and then to be able to put one outside of it.
So this is the roof. The roof is a series of mirrored tiles. The proposal was to construct this
mirror, to build a mound that would allow people to get up, basically, beyond the wall, peak out
beyond it into the city. And then mirror the inner surface, the inner lining of this space so that
people could both take selfies of themselves endlessly reflected back, but also basically get
outside of it and look into the space.
And so this is the conceptual doubling of the institution. It was the notion that we would use this
as a mirror plane to visually project the space of the courtyard through this catenary roof, that is
then reciprocated by the form of this stone mound, which contains a secret grotto on the inside
that's tuned to one of the few windows that exists in this wall, so that people could look out.
There was an idea that this would be halfway between what we saw as-- half of the projects that
have been done historically for PS1 are very roof-based. The other half are very object-based,
objects that sit-in the courtyard. And we wanted this to be both roof and object-- at certain points
to appear roof-like and encompassing, at other moments to basically take on the volumetrics of
an object in the way that it comes down almost to your head height but not to it. And that all of
the temporary program which they need for cooling and shade and fun and things are all taken up
basically in this colonnade that rises up to support the space of the roof.
There you see all of the program accommodated. And the notion was that the mirror would go
from most dense at its outer edges-- here, it's completely dense-- to less and less density. And
then at the center of it that it would actually suddenly produce its inverse. It would create
basically a space in which to look up. And then that this roof would then actually screen you off
from all the buildings surrounding. And you would get basically a pure view of the sky as a
contemplative moment, as a suddenly contemplative moment, right at the center of this with this
roof just above your head.
So that the enormity of this roof could then suddenly basically become a thing for one person. It
could become a singular moment within the collectivity of this whole thing, but that it could also
produce the collective. You're basically required to show PS1 this image when you do the
competition of a party that's extremely fun.
But it was calculated for us. We wanted it to be able to look like a disco ball in the narcissistic
sense, with the flashes of people taking selfies and with their phone bouncing off the surface of
this thing. And then corresponding to that is a total evacuation the ground plane.
And so basically what we took as the given elements of this thing were the triangle as a form, the
gravel that already existed in the courtyard, and the concrete of the walls. And we essentially just
decided to build a project out of that as if it already were latent in those elements. Anyway, this
is the of evacuated plan, the different elements of this-- the mound and the grotto that comes up,
which is just larger versions of the gravel, gravel turning into rocks. The colonnade that brings it
that produces the triangle.
And then this catenary roof, which is stiffened by a metal plate here, where it's tautest and has
the most structural requirements. And then the pattern of this roof as it evacuates towards this
center. And then the mirror that completes it.
The tiles themselves, these mirror tiles, were designed to be funded through a Kickstarter
campaign, which was for us going to really exacerbate the kind of vanity aspect of it-- vanity
mirror, ha ha. The idea was that the Kickstarter campaign-- that basically people would self-fund
their own personalized title. So you would find a tile that would then be etched with your
inscription, your tweet-length, 140 character inscription, that would be inscribed on the tile,
which would then reside up there. So when you would go visit the space, you would have your
title as part of the collectivity of these. I think we had something like 16,000 tiles in this pattern.
And then after, when everything is demounted, that your tile would sent to you as your own
personal vanity mirror. So that you could-- right? And this was where we were hoping titling it
"Mirror, Mirror," and you know, "mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the prettiest of them all?" that
this would be the point where if it wasn't obvious to them already, it would become obvious. But
then also the ways that one would be able to stand outside and see some reflection of the interior,
just as people in the interior would be able to see reflection on the exterior of PS1.
OK. And then I'll wrap up very quickly. The very last project was a competition for the
Guggenheim. Basically, we've had to answer the question a lot that I think everybody who's
entered the Guggenheim competition has to answer, which is basically, why do a competition for
the Guggenheim, especially this competition? And we did it for two reasons.
The first was that we were looking for a third project that would let us continue to basically
continue the same investigation of a certain scale of cultural institution and a certain notion of
publicity and keep questioning along that line. And then also that we would be able to continue
exploring the ways in which we work together, which is still a under-investigation question, by
putting things at the next biggest scale, a scale that we hadn't worked at.
This is how we work together. This is a table that Liam designed in his office with a chalkboard
surface on it, where we would just drawn on chalk. The Pabst is basically an homage to Jimenez,
if Jimenez had showed tonight.
And so again, the institutional question for us was, what is required of a contemporary
institution, like the Guggenheim? Not the Guggenheim specifically-- although to some extent-but really, the contemporary global museum. What sort of spaces appear in them typically?
And we had the idea that a space which is, in some fashion, required, or has come to be seen as
emblematic of this kind of institution, is basically a single, large, often vertical space that has a
regular geometric figure, a kind of figurable space within the mass of the institution, in which
large-scale artworks are possible. So the Tate is the most successful one, versus other kinds of
institutions that have much more diffuse kinds of space. The rotunda of the Guggenheim is the
other example.
And so we started thinking about basically how to excavate this kind of figure within the
enormous mass of stuff that an institution like the Guggenheim now requires. Looking at things
like the [INAUDIBLE], which we took as a model of a museum with the city inscribed inside it.
Or it could be said in reverse-- a model of the city with a museum inscribed inside it. But the
kind of carving of this institutional figure that is legible and has a certain definable form.
This led us to look at certain archaeological precedents. This is Catalhoyuk, which is the first
city, basically, in Turkey, in Anatolia. And this is the excavation. And so the notion of basically
creating a museum that would be in some fashion on display horizontally, from which figural
spaces would then be excavated that would then be visible to a public, and for which you
specifically wouldn't have to pay.
And then we were also getting from it already certain notions of enclosure of that space through
a roof. And so this took us straight back to our toolkit of modernist and late modernist and
minimalist precedents, chief among the Mies in the Neue Nationalgalerie. Which for us was a
curious motto of this idea of a plinth, a plinth in which actually the galleries are buried, but
which is not ever made visible. You have to go in.
And so basically the creation of a plinth, and then an open public platform enclosed by a roof,
overhanging roof that is sort of offered as a public space for the city. But which then actually has
to bury the mass of stuff underneath it in a way that is obscured and not seen as part of the space
of the project conventionally.
So we were looking at these kinds of excavations-- Heizer or this is James Turrell at Rice open
recently-- of excavations both above you and below you, of these kinds of spaces within a sort of
plenum of public space. And then ways of enclosing that space above you through, again,
notions of the scaffold in this type.
So the notion was to create a plinth, with a public platform on top of it and these kind of
archaeological cuts, as part of the continuity of this diagram of public spaces in the city, open
public spaces. One of which included the church, the cathedral, which was already on top of a
plinth that housed a large mass of public program.
This is it. So continuous with this kind of space that you would go up to this public platform,
which was free. This was before ticketing, which we called the hull. That you would circulate up,
and then circulate across a series of these cuts, these excavated spaces, before then turning 180,
going down a stair, and then the ticketing would all happen on the lower level. So that all of the
mass of gallery stuff would be buried beneath it.
And this is a reflected ceiling plan of the roof. This is the section where you see, circulate up into
this public level. It's bisected, intersected, by this other space. So this is the character of that kind
of space, with this frame above you and cuts that make it visible. And then the gallery excavated
below you, so that you could, without paying, basically have access to a whole series of works
that would be on display, some large, some small.
And then the central element of it is a cube, which we called the square, which really is this Tatelike or Guggenheim-like space for large-scale artworks, which unifies all the different levels as
the figurable space at the heart of the institution. That's it. And then I won't get into it.
So this is basically all the stuff in the plinth. These are the lower two levels of galleries, which
were actually quite heavily, quite intensely programmed by us. And fairly rigorously worked out,
let's say, which was a whole exercise in itself, and which are reconfigurable as you go down.
So you circulate down from the upper level, down this staircase. Ticketing happens here. And
then you began circulating around this into the various spaces of the galleries, which have their
cuts in them. And then down another staircase onto the ground floor of this thing, which is
accessible to trucks and all sorts of other stuff. And then these are the reconfigurable spaces for
various kinds of performances, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the galleries.
And then at night, it would have this luminous presence of this structural cloud, which would
basically allow you to carve out the volume of this and would defuse the structural forces of this
over the space of the platform. But which would also give you ghosted, the glowing, luminous
presence of these artworks, now at the scale of the city.
And so I leave it to you whether there were other-- you've already seen the egg-shaped table. But
I leave it to you whether there were other kinds of previous precedents feeding into our work as
we were doing this. All right. That's all I got. Thank you.
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