From Objects to Buildings

FROM OBJECTS TO BUILDINGS A Design Studio with Ivan Smith Visiting Professor Tod Williams, FAIA

Recently, Architrave had a chance to ask visiting professor Tod Williams, FAIA and his partner Billie Tsien about their own work, philosophies and the recent graduate studio taught by Williams and UF’s Nancy Clark in the Spring of 2011.

Interview by: Daniel Luis Martinez

The spring 2011 studio that you conducted at UF’s Graduate School of Architecture was titled, “Libraries for Mind and Matter.” Students started with a 1:1 construction of a display armature for objects selected from your personal collection and ended with the design of a special collections library to house the objects of their choice. Can you talk about the main ideas behind the studio and its relationship to your own architectural work and thought?

TW: It was a way for each of you to personalize the project and connect to what I feel is the importance of a strong and intimate sense of scale and material. And I wanted for you to make a personal connection through an understanding of the objects to an understanding of our own lives.

The idea of an object is almost like a book. As I look at an object, I can pick it up again and again and read it in different ways, dissect it, analyze it, objectify or simply enjoy it as a memory device.

Objects as books, find themselves mediated to one another. Often, a book is never a book alone, but a book on a shelf or amongst a series of memories.

Finally, practically or philosophically I wanted to start with something real.

Cover image and above: David Bly, Acetylene Torch Photos [right] and opposite center: Andrea Smith, Printing Plate

BT: I have been reading an interesting novel in which people send out a shimmer of light when they are broken or hurt. In the story, a boy begins to see an object as something with feelings because his object also sends out a beam of light or a little glimmer. I think that by starting out with an object, while it may not be sending out a glimmer, it does hold a history, especially if it’s been touched or used by people. Objects hold a kind of mystery passed down from the people who have touched them before. For instance, an old mirror may make someone think about people who had once looked in it or held it. It’s quite romantic but I think, for both of us, objects do hold the touch of people who are no longer here and the potential to be held by those who will one day no longer be here.

You have both been involved in architectural pedagogy for several years. Have objects always played a special role in the

teaching of architecture for you? Tod, I know specifically at the Cooper Union objects were rather prevalent in some early design studios. How does the making of things engage with the complexity of making buildings?

TW: I went to Princeton when the school was breaking from a Beaux Arts tradition and when one of its graduates, Robert Venturi, had just released Complexity and Contradiction. It was a time when the school’s direction was being split between a post modern and a theoretically based pedagogy. Then shortly after graduating I began teaching at Cooper where I remained for nearly 20 years. Cooper effectively became my graduate degree, offering me a chance to realize the relationship between drawing, the hand, architecture and the making of things. The workshop at Cooper Union is located on the fourth floor, just one above architecture and one below art. Linking the two, it was used as much by the architecture students as by those studying art. We began to use the shop as a tool, and in the second year where I most often taught, a staple of the year was a problem of making full scale a utilitarian or (occasionally) non-utilitarian object.

Not as complex as making a building, our students gained confidence in their hands, the value of making and the excitement of creating an object.

BT: Well, in my own education, both as a student and teacher, I don’t think I had something quite so formal as what was taught at Princeton, or at Cooper Union which in its own unique way also offers a formal architectural education. My undergraduate was in art with a more scattered approach and that still informs how I look at the world. For me objects are the things around me that serve as inspiration for ideas and work. It’s undirected - like seeing a bunch of balloons flying around and grabbing the strings and pulling a few of them in. I know I am not being very clear but, maybe...when you buy a car and suddenly you notice that car is everywhere.

You have a heightened sensitivity to this object that you never really noticed before. When you’re working on a project and thinking in a specific

direction, you look around and begin to extract a certain meaning from the things around you. You look up and see these balloons and you pull some of the strings.

Implicit in much of your work [I am thinking of projects like the American Folk Art Museum, the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, and the Barnes Collection in Pennsylvania] is a vital relationship between architecture and art.

What are your views on this relationship and how it affects your role as architects, educators and, more broadly as residents in a dense urban place like Manhattan?

TW: I think that the issue of the relationship between architecture and art is now so deeply integrated that it is nearly inextricable.

When I first began to practice, I had the most meager of budgets and challenging normative assignment. As many starting up, it was to completely renovate an apartment with virtually no budget. I was excited: an entire apartment but with it came the responsibility to first and foremost solve the problem with the means at hand. This remains the case today. Under such conditions how can one elevate architecture past the most utilitarian state? The answer is that we must humbly solve and then transcend the assignments we are given. It must be in this order: solve and transcend, not transcend and solve. The latter is an act of arrogance and hubris.

This is always the architect’s struggle; that is, to have patience in the creative search, retain faith and not to force art on architecture. We struggle with this today. Even with the best of intentions, there are times and places where we have been impatient and arrogant. In both the Barnes and at Rubenstein artistic interventions do exist. At the

Watercolor [left]: Alana Taylor, Peruvian Canopas Top: Mary Carver, Mammoth Tooth Fossil Bottom: Victoria Janok, Cache-Sexe

same time, most of what we have done is to resolve the problem and then hope for the grace by which our architecture transcends the quotidian. Architecture is not additive. It is integrated; it is embedded. Only through a slow aggregation of pieces and an integrated understanding of the whole can our work be both practical and artistic in nature. Then and only then can it truly be realized as “Architecture”; only then can it transcend.

BT: I think that art is not ever really tethered. And for us both this is its interest, and yet I think especially for me, the reason why I could never really be an artist. I appreciate the sort of tether when I’m working because I need to feel that it relates to more than simply me. But I also appreciate the lack of tether in the arts and that’s what we do in our free time.

TW: That’s why we can pick up and appreciate an object so much. We don’t really have a favorite. They come in so many different guises. They are tethered to one another and to life. It’s almost as if the pleasure in the

matter came from the letters in the alphabet rather than the words in the book. One could look into each and every letter and almost write a whole book; where they came from and where they might be going. At the same time, the book ties them together into a completely different construct.

The next question is maybe the most political. The Folk Art Museum, which in many ways was a building that catapulted you guys to a certain status in the architectural community, has been in the news lately. One of my fondest memories was going through that building with you Tod and seeing your almost paternal connection to it. Do you think it will survive? Also, can you talk about the life of buildings and the contingencies that architecture always butts up against over time?

TW: That’s interesting. I think that when you finish a building it’s as if you’ve sent your children off to college. You can’t help but be concerned for their well being; at the same time they’re really on their own. A long time ago Billie and I determined to only make buildings that would last a lot longer than our

lives. We began to weed out commercial work from the institutional and to remove things that seemed superficial in favor of things that were lasting. So it is particularly painful to see that the American Folk Art Museum is now owned by MoMA. Yet, even as the building was under construction I had a premonition that it might eventually be absorbed by MoMA. Folk art and Modern art are so very closely related. Even in the late 90’s MOMA was attempting to control the entire block; today it’s the same. What they will do with the building? I don’t know. Certainly, if they wish, they can readily use it, tying it into their collage of buildings. We all hope this will happen.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not concerned. We’re terribly concerned. When we finish a building we have to set it out into the world on its own and wish it well.

We hope it’s been given all the tools to survive and sometimes the survival of a child has very much to do with the way you raised the child. When they don’t survive it’s not always something you did. You mourn and yet even in mourning it’s almost impossible not to feel a sense of guilt. Ultimately, their elevation into a stratosphere of importance or their loss has to do with things outside of your control. I believe the same is true of all buildings. All we can do is to create a building with good bones; bones and organs and a life that is created with commitment and the best of intention.

Would you insist that if the building were to remain and not be razed, that it be used for the housing and display of works of art?

TW: Not at all. I think it should be torn down if it can’t be used in a positive way, but that not need be for art.

It’s difficult to imagine that it be used as offices or as a home, but not outside the realm of possibility. Under the present circumstance it could very easily be used.

The top floor aligns with the second floor of MoMA. You can easily penetrate our building and make it part of an ensemble of different buildings on that block. I know it can be integrated and used for art. Yet there are

other uses that might also be imagined.

Over time, what has changed and what has remained the same in your architectural thinking or in thinking about things through architecture?

TW: My thinking has changed in that I don’t believe buildings are objects. They are part of a greater whole.

I think that nature is more important than architecture; that human beings are more important than architecture.

That is not to say that architecture is not important. It is more important now than ever before.

BT: I was in North Carolina giving a lecture recently and I started off by showing an image of the hand of god reaching for the hand of Adam on the Sistine Chapel and I said basically, “When I was a young architect this is what I thought architecture was about.”

I didn’t exactly see myself as the hand of god but it was a kind of unidirectional thing: you have the idea, reach out, and deliver it. Afterwards, I showed another image of someone’s hand interlocked with a child’s. Certainly now I realize that it is something much more flowing and not unidirectional at all. The point is a point of connection, something more completely reciprocal.

And it is a service. I know that sounds boring, like volunteering to take people around in a hospital or something. But I think the idea of essentially serving is one that powerfully elevates the meaning of architecture and what we do. In a way, it is the idea of connections, some larger and some smaller, that give meaning to your life.

TW: Going back to the objects in your class last year: When they were first made, they were no more than objects of use. The authors did not think of themselves as artists. But the objects themselves connect us back to a continuum of humanity, culture and a way of living a meaningful life. It is no longer about the making of a singular object. Actually, you were the ones, in many ways, that brought the objects to life and that was truly thrilling!

BT: I hope that an architect will look at the rest of the world besides architecture. In many ways I feel like this

Opposite Page: Alessandra Sarue, Chinese Musical Instrument Library [Section] Top: Jeremy Franklin, Relief Plate Library [Exterior Perspective] Bottom: Daniel Luis Martinez, The Typing Pool [Roof Garden Perspective]