Fresh Meat Issue 2

INTERVIEWS WITH: K. MICHAEL HAYS BEN VAN BERKEL MICHAEL SPEAKS CARTOON BY: JIMENEZ LAI

FIRST-CUT The Sophomore Issue: Welcome back fans: we have returned for round two, fresh as ever and still dedicated to delivering new fodder for gritty / laid-back / off the cuff / water-cooler conversation. The publication is entering its sophomore year in tandem with President Barack Obama, and is feeling a momentary affinity. He is catching heat from all sides, especially the media, and we would like to state for the record that this tabloid will not be jumping on that bandwagon. We know how tough the first year can be, so this issue will rise above the mire of doom-andgloom crisis mongering, and actually be optimistic about the future.

From the theoretical to the realized, this issue explores the possibilities for making design operative in the world. In our interview with K. Michael Hays, we discuss Buckminster Fuller as a figure who used design to advance his vision of the future. In co-curating a retrospective of Fuller’s work (created for New York’s Whitney Museum and exhibited at the MCA Chicago last spring), Hays used his role as historian to develop Fuller’s story with deliberate emphasis on his contemporary relevance. In addition to pointing out Fuller’s impact on issues such as globalization and sustainability, Hays understands Fuller’s approach to design as having even farther reaching implications in terms of his interest in totalities and unexpected connections.

Ben van Berkel’s UNStudio engages in a new design paradigm that redefines architectural production as a “model practice.” Through analysis of its project archive, the firm has identified seven design models that serve as the basis for each new project that comes into the office. In his discussion with students, van Berkel describes how these model diagrams play themselves out in the development of several projects, including the Mercedes-Benz Museum and the Burnham Pavilion.

In the final piece of the issue, Michael Speaks references UNStudio’s practice as an example of design intelligence, which he understands as “thinking by doing” where knowledge and value is accumulated through the process of experimentation and realization. For Speaks, innovation evolves from the rapid prototyping and model practices made possible by new forms of digital software. Though Speaks’ notion of innovation is often inflected by market forces, more than disciplinary agendas, his interest in process and production offers new insights for the projection of architectural ideas.

We have curated these conversations to tell a story about the role of design in today’s world.

We make them available for you to use as you please: to think on, to talk about, and to design with. Feel free to take them and run, mis-read and butcher. After all, they are only ideas…

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K. Michael Hays Interview by Jon Mac Gillis, Julia Sedlock & Jayne Kelly Edited by Nicholas Krause

<< He was, above all, a designer, and I think what designers need to do is understand that design itself is operating with becoming and emerging. >> K. Michael Hays, architectural historian, theorist, and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is best known as the editor of Architecture Theory Since 1968. His recent visit to UIC coincided with the opening of “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe” at Chicago’s Museum of Contemproary Art, an exhibition which he co-curated. In the following interview with Fresh Meat, much of the conversation focuses on Fuller as Hays explains his own role as a historian and curator. For Hays, this curtorial role involves design, that is, organizing information and material into cohesive structures and narratives. As a historian, Hays finds that this process involves a reading of present concerns into the past, and in this interview, Hays relates Fuller to contemporary art, current issues of sustainability, and even architectural discourses on mood and atmosphere. Indeed, he claims his “only interest in history is learning how to think differently.” However, he admits a scholarly inability to “talk about the future” - to project the narratives he creates as a historian out of the past and present. That task, then, is ours...

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FM: What is your attitude toward history?

KMH: First, I do consider myself a historian and a theorist. The two practices are inextricably linked. For me, architecture is not primarily about making buildings. It is a way of knowing, thinking, and a way of organizing ideas and concepts. It is much more general than buildings. It’s about space and time, place and subject formation, structure and process, and a lot of other things.

Having said this, the only way I can keep track of architecture is by looking at it over time: plotting what it has been, how it has changed, and out of those plots try to figure out where we are now. When you decide to be an architect, you step into a territory that has already been prepared; you enter into a discourse that has already been established. You learn about the discourse through the study of its history. That entails that history is not a series of facts, but narratives.

By narratives I mean, in a fully ideological way, it is telling stories, it is making linkages, it is organizing events that may seem not to have anything to do with each other at first. It is organizing information and events in a coherent way so that we can think them.

FM: With Fuller, what is the narrative you are constructing and what is the relationship between fact and fiction?

KMH: When I say fiction, I do not mean making up the story. I mean making it first perceivable; second, understandable; and third, relevant. Whether you’re a historian who writes or a historian who curates, you have this massive amount of material that has absolutely no shape, and you have to start imposing frameworks on it to give it shape, but then this is where the facts or the material starts to push back. Then you say, “well, that fiction doesn’t work, but this one seems plausible.” And I think it’s this same dialectic between the material and the narrative construction—really looking at the material and letting it push back— that is design. When you try to impose an organization on a program or a site, or use a certain type of material, or spatial organization and then let the program push back, this is also a kind of fictional construction.

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While we were collaborating on the Buckminster Fuller show, my cocurator Dana Miller was working on some art projects where Fuller’s influence seemed detectable; she became interested in Fuller’s relation to contemporary art. She came to me and asked: do you see any young architects today looking at Fuller? At first not so much, I thought, but looking further into it, I was able to discover some new things that were not part of the Fuller myth that seemed to be relevant.

It did start out in an obvious way that he was dealing with ecological issues before we even had the term and was dealing with issues of globalization very explicitly before there was even a word for it.

Globalization in design is actually his idea. He started it but did not use the word. Not only was the show a massive construction of the Fuller story, but it was also one that it seemed you could frame in many different ways. So, we wanted many narratives to be possible, but it is still a historical project. From the present, with certain issues in mind, it is about how we can reach back and construct coherent problems that someone will be able to take and run away with to change and reinterpret.

FM: The show seems to be re-exposing rather than reinventing Fuller in terms of sustainability. Now, in terms of design and economy, everyone is talking about sustainability and ecological design. Is this what makes him relevant now as opposed to five years earlier?

KMH: You’re right. The timing was everything. We sensed that Fuller’s understanding of ecology, but also his interest in globalization, his interest in distribution of resources and information and how we can communicate in a global way, all seem of the moment, and we knew if we could catch that wave it would be a popular show. Its popularity and its accessibility would depend on that.

Having said that, I don’t think the perception of the show as about sustainable design gets at the whole story. Fuller -- and this is where I think we do more than just re-exposing, or rewriting, or re-scripting -- doesn’t really fit well with the dogmatic moralizing version of 14

sustainability. He sees nature as something much more dynamic and not able to move toward a more perfect stable state, but constantly evolving. This parallels some current ideas of sustainability. My real interest in him is his insistence on thinking in totalities. Thinking how unlike things, whether they are different types of practices or media, or just different substances or force fields actually interact and cross one another in unexpected and unknowable ways - unknowable ways because we didn’t have any way of mapping them. He tried to find ways of mapping them in physical patterns and physical models.

Mapping those underlying force fields, whether they be forces of ecology, nature, resources or forces of communication or economics, you could see how they interacted. At the same time, I am of the generation where my intellectual formation was that you were not supposed to think of totalities, you were supposed to think of partial ideas, fragments, heterogeneity. Fuller insisted that things might be unlike one another but that doesn’t mean that they are unrelated. And that’s not very popular; it’s difficult for a popular audience. It won’t show up in the popular press, but that is my interest.

FM: In terms of the difference between your interest and interest of the popular press, if you are trying to understand Fuller in terms of architecture as opposed to presenting a story for a more general public how do you reconcile those differences?

KMH: I think when you do a show for a large museum for the widest possible audience, you have to let the material speak for itself and speak differently to different people. Our show is organized chronologically, but that is because Fuller’s ideas developed chronologically and cumulatively. What we tried to show is how ideas built on earlier ideas and how they then could take different paths.

Architects can look at the juxtaposition of the objects and read one thing off of that, but a performance artist or a scientist could conceive a different story. You have to do it that way for a large show, but if you are doing it for a smaller audience you could do it differently. That is just a practical issue and a responsibility to your audience.

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FM: How does that change when the show has multiple artists together as opposed to a single artist? For example, the chronological method works for Fuller, but it is almost him working against himself because he covers different disciplines.

But if you have Duchamp and Le Corbusier, for example, how do you see that as an end result?

KMH: As a curator, the possible benefits of a group show are much greater than a monographic show, but it is also much more difficult. If you put Duchamp’s urinal next to a picture of the entrance to the Villa Savoye and the sink, obviously the urinal is going to make you think about that sink in ways that you would have never thought before, and that sink is going to make you think about the urinal in a different way. That is an interesting juxtaposition that you would never get with a single artist Duchamp show or a Le Corbusier show. At the same time you have to ask yourself: “Is that a legitimate juxtaposition?”

And there is no right answer to that question, so you find works that you are compelled by. Our first idea was to take the Fuller show and juxtapose Fuller’s works at every moment with contemporary art and architecture. It would have been a fabulous show, but it would have been ten years in the making instead of five and would have been out of control.

FM: Any examples off the top of your head of contemporary work?

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KMH: The first person that I would put Fuller next to is his contemporary, Frederick Kiesler, the guy who did the Endless House.

I don’t know what it would say and I can’t tell you -- I haven’t really thought it through -- but I’d love to see a geodesic dome or some of Fuller’s drawings next to Kiesler.

I’d love to see some of Kiesler’s rooms, reconstructed rooms, populated with Fuller’s drawings.

Now, I think that contemporary artists are easier: someone like Andrea Zittel who picks up on the ecological version and someone like Tobias Putrih who takes a geodesic dome and then distorts it, looking at a kind of parametric way - parametric in the sense of the geodesic system where you move one piece of it and that effect ripples through.

Those are easy and direct, but I think, in general, there’s a lot that Fuller was doing geometrically that just begs to be digitized, because you can take it so much further.

FM: So, I guess, seeing it along those lines could you also include him in this parametric or geometric construct of architecture as well, in terms of people doing the Maya thing and using geometry to create new spaces. It seems like, for Fuller, the geometry was a necessity that was found in nature and it seems like the people doing scripting and parametrics in software are also trying to express nature but he was doing it in an analytic method. Could he almost be responsible for that movement as well?

KMH: Absolutely. Fuller insisted that everything in the universe, whether at the molecular level or the middle scale human level or the scale of galaxies, obeys laws. Everything can be mapped using similar geometrical characteristics that came down to basically a tetrahedron. Think of nanotechnology and the discovery of the carbon 60 molecule, the fullerene. They do operate at the molecular level in the same way that forces in the galaxy seem to operate as far as that goes. So, it’s for certain that Fuller will be taken up by two groups as the new guru. The sustainability people: they’re looking for a new certainty, they’re looking for new truths and morals and imperatives.

The opposite side of the very same coin is a certain kind of parametric research in architecture that is also looking for truths in the sense of certainties of technique.

But I don’t think that is what Fuller was after. He wasn’t after those kinds of certainties and those kinds of truths. He thought that everything in the universe obeyed similar laws, but he also said “God is a verb, not a noun.” The universe, these laws of the universe are 17

not stable, they’re not certain, they’re not truths; they’re constant becomings. I think he may have even used the word becoming.

He was, above all, a designer, and I think what designers need to do is understand that design itself is operating with becoming and emerging.

FM: I wonder if that answers the next question that I had, which is about the phrase that you often use in a lot of your writings, “irreducibly architectural.” I was wondering about that term in relationship to the Fuller exhibition, because he is such an interdisciplinary figure and he doesn’t see things in terms of a specific field. How can you reconcile his work and his approach in terms of a disciplinary idea?

KMH: Back in the 70s, we were always told to never look at him as an architect. The reason for this is that he was not dealing with proper architectural problems. It goes back to the very first question where I insisted that I do believe that architecture is fundamentally a way of knowing. I do think it’s irreducible in the sense that to know something through architecture can never be translated perfectly into other ways of knowing whether it is engineering or literature or philosophy or painting or whatever. Architecture is its own way of knowing and has its own ontological system.

Fuller understood architecture as a way of organizing being itself. Can architecture have its own ontology and autonomy and at the same time resonate and participate and interact with other semi-autonomous fields? Of course, we know it can. That may be the most exciting thing that we’ve learned recently, that architecture is expansive and renewable.

FM: What you’re talking about reminds me a lot of Mark Linder’s piece on transdisciplinarity, and I’m wondering if that’s a concept that resonates with you and what you are talking about?

KMH: I don’t know, is Linder saying that? I think he’s saying something like that, but my problem with Mark’s version of it is that Mark wants architecture to still be dominant, or first, or whatever. I like very much 18

what he says about the relationship between art and architecture during the time period that he covers, but I think I’m thinking of something a lot less direct and something that happens on more of a structural level. I like what Mark says as far as it goes, but I think what we’re moving toward is something much less visible and much less direct that what even Linder talks about.

FM: Maybe the way that Kwinter talks about it?

KMH: One of the things that Kwinter shares with Fuller is the search for the way fundamental forces, whether they are energy flows, resources, or migratory patterns, do at some point take on shapes, and those shapes can be mapped, and if they can be mapped then we can know them. I think that’s what it feels like to me with Fuller.

Other contemporary theorists are trying to figure out notions of atmosphere and mood. Though Fuller never directly talked about anything like this, I think that mood and atmosphere is also a way of getting information. I don’t think it’s any softer than form; I think it’s just a different way of getting information and I think it’s just part of what I’m talking about with this resonant exchange that is not always visible, that is more atmospheric.

FM: Well, it’s interesting because it manifests itself in this very technological aesthetic, with the domes and the space frames. I’m wondering what you’re talking about in terms of taking it into the digital? When you talk about mood and atmosphere, I’m thinking about Paul Preissner and his work...

KMH: I was thinking more about Olafur Eliasson, whose show will overlap with Fuller in Chicago. I’m interested in Preissner’s spotting as communication, but I’m not sure you can go from Fuller to that. More like Venturi, maybe. Fuller didn’t anticipate everything.

FM: So much of Fuller in the show is these iconic images of, for example, the dome over Manhattan or the map. Do you see -- instead of going the geometry way -- any kind of work today that follows this kind image of the future, dreams of the future, more of an aesthetically driven kind of trajectory from Fuller?

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KMH: The big monolithic masses moving through space or floating on the ocean or floating in the air, those were extremely influential in the 60s on people like Superstudio and Archigram.

Stanley Tigerman did a tetrahedral city actually in the mid-60s; those things were kind of in the air. Those images were also completely understood and responded to by minimalist artists; Robert Smithson, too.

I don’t know of any contemporary examples.

There are big things, of course, but we’re not in the mood right now to make large scale utopias and we’re not in the mood to think about collective habitation the way we thought about it in the 60’s. We’ll have to think of alternatives cities but they’re likely to be more porous than Tetra City.

FM: This is a little bit of a tangent, but what you said just made me think about it in terms of the work you did in researching Fuller. I’m just curious if he had a sense of self-consciousness about being such a visionary, in terms of his aesthetic? How did he respond to his own ideas?

KMH: He was the megalomaniac. He wanted to be the guru, he was extremely charismatic, and he wanted to be the center of attention. But he was a very smart megalomaniac. He was completely self-conscious about wanting to be perceived as the savior of humanity. Had he not done some of these things, had he not made some of these objects, we probably could have just dismissed him as a total lunatic, but he actually was able to make these objects.

He also completely took other people’s ideas. Part of his work was extremely original, but he could also use others’ ideas without hesitation.

FM: It’s not like he’s the only one to do that. It’s hard to look at a geodesic dome without thinking of him.

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KMH: It’s impossible. It’s hard in his case to separate the work from the man.

FM: The last question is about your academic experience of teaching at the GSD and how you understand your work in history and theory as impacting design students?

KMH: I feel like I want to straighten something out, and it’s sort of related to this. Maybe unlike other theorists and critics, I’m reluctant to try to set an agenda for the present. What I like to do is to be involved in the present. I love teaching in a professional school where I’m surrounded by people working on present problems because it helps me conceptualize things now, and I love to take those frames and run them back through history or project over and bring them back through history that way. I think my only interest in history is learning how to think differently. To be doing history is producing difference and the only reason for knowing the difference is so we can think better now.

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I’m a historian so that I can think better now, but, at the same time, I’m reluctant to set agendas for now using my writing or curating. This is just something I have to work through. Someone like Sanford Kwinter says you’re crazy, you should be talking about the present and the future. I certainly can’t talk about the future -- I can’t even talk about the present!

I think that’s just different. With the Fuller show, I know that everybody expects that show - especially because of all the reasons we’ve said, because of all the contemporary issues -- to set a specific agenda. What would Fuller have done about sustainability? What would Fuller have done about parametrics? I know that’s going to happen and it’s inevitable and 21

it’s fine but I’m very reluctant to answer those kinds of questions. It seems to me that what you do as a scholar is create this fiction and then, I hand it off to you guys and you decide what to do with it, right? All we were trying to do was to make sense out of a huge amount of not-meaningful material when we first got there, but not to make one kind of sense out of it, not to make one story.

Something like that would be the answer to your question generally, and I know that’s not satisfying. I think the students that get most from my teaching are the ones that are willing to re-script what I say. Not just take what I say, but to say: “Okay, I know you didn’t meant this, but I’m going to make it mean this.” That, to me, is very healthy. I think ideas are made to be used and abused and distorted and not treated in a precious way.

Never ask, “Is this right?”, it’s more like, “I am going to make it this way.”

I know you can’t do that totally, but…

Image Credits: 1. © Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

ANDREA ZITTEL, A-Z Wagon Station, 2003 Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan Closed: 61 x 82 x 57 inches, (154.9 x 208.3 x 144.8 cm) Open: 91 x 82 x 57 inches, (231.1 x 208.3 x 144.8 cm) 2. Olafur Eliasson The weather project, 2003 Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, and scaffolding 26,7 m x 22,3 m x 155,4 m Installation in Turbine Hall, tate Modern, London Photo: Jens Ziehe Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York © 2003 Olafur Eliasson 3. Courtesy, The estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

4. Montreal’s Bioshère. Courtesy of Matthew Burpee 22

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STUDIO BERLIN 2009 UIC @ UDK

The architecture departments of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin collaborated, for a second time, on a five-week summer research, design and fabrication studio. The product is an ephemeral, interactive public architecture installation on an unused 3400m2 lot in the Tiergarten-Mitte area of Berlin. The design resulted from a three-step process in which 20 UIC and UdK students’ initial individual projects led to a series of four 5-person team designs. These group proposals were then incorporated into one final design. The previous exercises were used to gradually inform the overall form, function and systems of the installation; while attention was also paid to existing site conditions and nearby infrastructures. The heart of the design is an open-webbed, wooden truss structural system that is both complimentary to and integrative of the underlying triangular and hexagonal geometries of the previous team projects. These are no ordinary trusses however: their otherwise simple geometry drastically morphs to create a complex mesh that allows for interesting, multi-faceted inner and outer surfaces. The inner surface changes from a meandering path that playfully interacts with several of the existing “grass mound” artist installations on the site, to an engulfing enclosure that serves as the focal point of the project. Most of the structural mesh is strategically “skinned” with either ½” thick OSB or durable and recycled tarpaulin material, while others serve as niches for implanted lighting and sound devices. These lighting and sound components allow users of the space to directly affect both of these conditions via natural movement through the installation and/or intentional operations. The result is an interactive, multi-sensory experience that is visually and audibly optimized, enhancing the experiential quality and allowing the user to become a “performer” in the space.

Go to www.studioberlin.org

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Ben van Berkel A conversation with students.

Edited by Jon Mac Gillis

<< As an office we are particularly interested in the theory of practice and how we create arguments for why we do things. I have always believed that you have to rethink the concept of the architect. >> The following article is a transcribed conversation between graduate students at UIC (SoA), Robert Somol, Director UIC (RES), Ben van Berkel, Partner, UNStudio (BvB), and Christian Veddeler, Senior Architect UNStudio (CV). The conversation took place on April 14 2009.

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RES: These are students from the down and dirty in house publication Fresh Meat. You might be the next helping.

BvB: I have to warn you, I do not have much meat.

[Laughter] So, where are all of you in school?

RES: They are all graduate students in some variety. So, Ben is yours.

SoA: We are interested in your relationship with Chicago, and the design of the Burnham pavilion. What did you want to accomplish with the design?

BvB: Chicago has had a great influence on me since I was younger and visited the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan in the city. Then when I was in Japan, I went to the Aisaku Residence by Wright and then that is when I decided to study architecture. I did not realize how influential Chicago architecture was until I traveled the world.

So, immediately UNStudio was fascinated to do the project. I saw the potential for a new public center, especially with the Anish Kapoor sculpture [the “bean”] being right next to the pavilion site.

We thought to do something similar with reflection. We asked the question, how could this pavilion be a contemplative place? We are in a time when I do not think this is a bad thing to do.

Picking up on Burnham’s grid, we wanted to play with the diagonality of the site to start to open up the grids. The diagonal quality is recognized both in plan and section of the city. When in the pavilion you can see through the ceiling as petals tear into it allowing for views of the top of the skyline 1

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as opposed to only having a horizontal reading of the city. These petals start to transform the pavilion from a harsh box organization to a softer infrastructural one. This transformative quality is the essence of the pavilion.

SoA: How is the pavilion a reinterpretation of the Burnham plan?

BvB: I’m looking more to trigger the mind differently, rather than typically looking at the formal aspects of Burnham’s work.

Chicago has a degree of openness to it, as opposed to New York, which is an intense mountainous city. Chicago is far more open and diagonal, so we wanted to bring in not just the plan, but also the section of the diagonal into the pavilion.

SoA: What is the life of the pavilion after the Burnham celebration? If recycled, did this aspect have an effect on the design?

BvB: It’s funny because we found a guy who calls himself a deconstructivist contractor, and we were shocked because he said that with all of his current projects he knows how to recycle all of the construction materials. We intend to recycle both the steel and the wood. Another option we are looking into is if artists would want to use the pavilion’s materials. The Burnham committee is also interested in the possibility of selling the pavilion, so it would have to be able to be disassembled and then reassembled on another site. This creates many problems in a way because we have done many other pavilions, and it is as expensive to remove the skin, take the steel work down, and reassemble it. The cost would be the same to make a whole new pavilion. These are the difficulties of a temporary structure.

SoA: If the major organizing factor for the pavilion is the grid, would you be ok with changing the context of the pavilion?

BvB: That is true it would be difficult to change the context, but on one hand you could look at the pavilion as art.

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RES: Also in your work you talk about the intensity of the diagram that migrates from project to project. So it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really matter where or what, because in a sense the diagram has a half-life beyond the specific circumstances.

BvB: Yes, the pavilion is also a prototype. We have done so many pavilions over the past two years; I think we did about six or seven, maybe even more some built and some not, but they all become prototypical for a diagram or model for design. With this pavilion design ten other projects might come out of it. Pavilions are instruments for other ideas.

SoA: Is the â&#x20AC;&#x153;urban conditionâ&#x20AC;? a generic term for you? Or is it site specific?

BvB: No the way we see pavilions, or the theoretical aspect to the pavilions, is as ways of how to switch on and off external influences in specific places. Sometimes it is necessary to take external influences in and sometimes not.

CV: It could be interesting to collide it with a different context.

What would happen if you were to bring it to an area without such a strict rectangular grid that you have in Millennium Park, but with a more ambivalent site? With this viewing device what would the views become?

BvB: Or the pavilion could be more about interior relations. Things you find in architecture that are not studied enough. It is not only about external influences.

CV: The good thing about designing a pavilion is that you are not literally bound to pragmatic program. It is somewhere between a built diagram, architecture, and sculpture. It could be tested in different contexts and provoke different outcomes. In terms of views, size, and orientation and also the location on the south promenade in Millennium Park is very site specific. If we would have planned this for another event we would not have started with a rectangular shape following the parallel Chicago grid.

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SoA: I am curious how a larger office is affected by the economic downturn, and if you see this as an opportunity to reinvent itself or to take on a different role?

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BvB: The economic downturn has affected us but not in a large way. We could not have protected ourselves from this situation, but we are lucky that we have projects in multiple countries at different scales. Some projects have been stopped or put on hold, but we have not had to get rid of people.

For the Venice Biennale pavilion, in 2008, we unconsciously predicted that how we operate as architects and how we respond to the market would have to change. Before economies started to weaken, we as architects were all asked to build in the most amazing places, one after another. As an office we are particularly interested in the theory of the practice and how we create arguments for why we do things. I have always believed that you have to rethink the concept of the architect. I see an enormous opportunity for you all to think differently about the profession in an innovative or radical manner. The danger is architects who only produce; there is not enough time to think about the profession when you do this. When you are in school you have time to think and talk about the profession and where it can go in the future. I wish I had more academic time.

SoA: You use these mathematical principles in your work, like the Klein bottle or the MĂśbius strip. These principles are always developed in relation to themselves, how do you apply these principles?

BvB: They often come in very early in the process, but they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t operate as a starting point for the process of design. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m interested in mathematical models simply because I have no interest in geometry. There are so many wonderful architects who use geometry in such a particular manner --Brunelleschi, Sansovino or

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even Borromini-- in order to invent spatial organizational qualities in architecture. Mathematics gives you innovative organization and infrastructure to the project, so that they can operate as a diagrammatic instrument for the organization of the project.

For example, the Möbius House uses implied variables- both work and at home. She says “I’d like my workspace with a view onto this side.” He says, “I would like a more interior view, and to be close to the entrance of the site.” So there were all these conversations about a sleeping room here and another one there, and the kids’ rooms here—so this was how we started to deal with the four problems of the locations on the site. We could not fix the combination of sleeping, living, and working. So we devised one loop to incorporate living, working, and sleeping. We saw the loop as a time machine. This was one approach—the other was to think of how you could live in the landscape and how you could see things from the landscape, and how the art in the house would be approached, etc. Then we instrumentalized the idea, because our interest is not to diagram and then build the diagram literally, it’s been to instrumentalize these ideas into an organization of a house, museum, or whatever. So that diagram comes later, if you would cross your arms like this, you would already notice that an eight-like organization of the Möbius strip is prescriptively quite stiff. It gets us away from the model of the grid system, because that is what we know of as a highly efficient organizational principle. I believe that our minds need to think of new ways of organization that could be as efficient and work as well. And could incorporate all things from construction to infrastructure, to combining programmatic qualities, external aspects of landscaping—all could be included into one model.

I believe we can expand the model of aesthetics and functionality far beyond what it is today. With the computer we are able do so much more. If we put aesthetics and functionality on a line, we can bend the line to form a circle, so you cannot point to anywhere where aesthetics and functionality are separate. It ought to be argued why do we do this mathematical model…

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SoA: In your work, architecture at the scale of a building appears as a closed system, whereas, at the scale of the pavilion it appears to be open. Does the client or the audience have an influence on the system used?

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BvB: I would argue that at all scales we are using open systems.

In the Möbius house, and how I talk about instrumentation, the exterior glass façade turns into an internal glass façade and divides a living room from a kitchen. There is a sophisticated play between semi-public and semi-private at both scales. It is not all public; it’s how you communicate to the public that is most essential.

BvB: The reason why we pulled the [Mercedes-Benz] museum close to the highway is similar to the pavilion, we wanted a dialogue between external infrastructure and the internal environment at Mercedes. The building almost touches the highway, and when you walk down you see the cars speeding along, they appear to drive into the museum.

On many levels we incorporate contextual ideas, but not always in the literal form of what we think context to be. I believe strongly— that you should not look at traditional work of context. You should be an artist as well as an architect sometimes. I only love artists/ architects. That is why I have a problem with someone like Mies more than Le Corbusier, because for me Corbusier is far more of an artist/architect.

They will not like that if I say that too loud tonight.

RES: That’s okay, because your pavilion is associated with UIC, not IIT. Zaha’s problem is to love Mies.

[Laughter]

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RES: The more that I hear you talk about it, the more the pavilion seems less contextual, which I probably care even less about than you do, but the pavilion acts as a diagram of your work the way that domino is a diagram of Corb’s work.

In a way, it’s a kind of condensed version of Mercedes and other projects, but you could misread it as Chicago in the sense that its got the rationalism of the sandwich, and the irrationalism of the folded floral plates that come down and separate the sandwich. It’s Mies and [Bertrand] Goldberg put into a combination machine. You get rationalism and irrationalism together in the same sandwich.

BvB: Yes, I like the play between the infrastructural, the mathematical and the grid, and the transformative aspect between these three. There is a categorization going on in architecture between the minimalist approach and reductive approach. I believe in the proliferation of architecture, the unfolding aspect of architecture, and the potential of architecture, but this can only be accomplished if you can liberate architecture from its fixed system.

Thank you.

Image Credits: 1. Burnham Pavilion, UNStudio, 2009. Courtesy of the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago Lecture Series.

2. Diagram, UNStudio. Courtesy of the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago Lecture Series.

3. Mercedes-Benz Museum, UNStudio, 2006. Courtesy of the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago Lecture Series.

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Panama design-build

UIC+Global Architecture Brigades Last spring several UIC students joined Global Architecture Brigades (GAB) to help develop a community-based design-build project in Barrigon, Panama. GAB works with student volunteers and professionals in a web of university clubs throughout the United States to provide communities in developing countries with sustainable solutions that respect local culture and benefit the environment, in order to improve quality of life. GAB helped connect UIC’s club to Alejandro Rodriguez and his family, who had recently gained full ownership of their farm in Barrigon. As a subsistence farmer, who grows just enough for family consumption and smallscale village exchange, Alejandro expressed interest in developing his farm as a site of agricultural tourism in order to generate additional income. The UIC club worked with the Rodriguez family and local volunteers to design and build the first of two visitor cabins that Alejandro was erected on his property as part of this new venture. The cabin was built using vernacular construction techniques and local renewable resources. Passive and sustainable methods were used to provide cooling, ventilation, cooking, cleaning, and waste disposal. Community participation greatly reduced construction costs, and became a source of personal pride and investment in the project’s success.

UIC’s next GB project will take place in Kusapin, Panama, at a primary school which is the largest center for learning on the Valiente Peninsula. As one of the only schools in the area, students travel many hours to study, while some live so far that they are required to reside in school dormitories. The existing facilities are inadequate to sufficiently accommodate the dining needs of these commuter and live-in students. UIC students will work with the school’s director and the local community to develop a new cafeteria that will accommodate current and future student populations. The new project will provide a space that embraces local materials, responds to a unique climate, and allows for easy expansion.

The design portion of the project will commence this spring. New student volunteers are welcome!

For more information on UIC’s Global Architecture Brigades chapter, contact: Samia Malek at smalik9@uic.edu or Vera Douma at vdouma2@uic.edu Or visit: www.globalbrigades.org/page/architecture-brigades www.gabchicago.blogspot.com

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Michael Speaks on…

Interview by Alysen Hiller, Dorit Hershtig, Jon Mac Gillis & Julia Sedlock Edited by Maya Nash & Julia Sedlock

<< Design is a more promiscuous way of engaging and making and remaking the world. >> Michael Speaks, Dean at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is a theorist and educator who advocates for the application of design intelligence in design curriculum and practice. When Fresh MEAT sat down for a conversation with Speaks, he explained how design thinking can redefine problems to produce new opportunities through an iterative process of production and analysis. In this context, the end game of the design process is the generation of knowledge rather than physical representation of a final idea. In the following excerpts, Speaks explains how the current economy, and the limits it has placed on the field of architecture, has provided an opportunity to rethink its modes of production through design intelligence and innovation.

Though he is less interested in the question of architectural disciplinarity, Speaks suggests that this notion of design as process over product is a way for architecture to reinvent itself as a source of innovation for possible new futures. In discussion with Bob Somol, what becomes clear is the fine distinction that exists between design as a tool for innovation and design as a service or market. What Speaks proposes is an opportunistic embrace of specific tools and methods in order to advance the discipline’s projective aims.

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ARCHITECTURE & THE ECONOMY <<The current economy raises a lot of questions: will you be able to practice architecture and what will that practice look like? It will surely be a different thing.>> There’s a backlash, a knee jerk moralism that makes me nervous. I am uncomfortable with the attempt to link the problems generated by toxic loans and the bad economy in general to high-end architecture. We don’t have to get rid of high design to be able to do other things. Not every design can be a Shigeru Ban relief shelter. Don’t get me wrong: that is needed, but there is more to design than that. I am just uncomfortable with the upsurge in moralism in architecture that we see everywhere today.

The critique of obsessive form making to the exclusion of everything else is a legitimate one. It is a critique I’ve been making for a long time—not just for economic, cultural and political reasons, but because the single minded focus on the exquisite, designed object, is not a useful way to understand the importance of design in the world today. There’s a discussion about design thinking that’s been happening in other areas of design for the last four or five years—the focus is on the way designers think by prototyping and testing, by speculating and creating design knowledge. That knowledge then transforms and changes, and it becomes a new kind of product. I would say that today we are in greater need of new design deliverables and products that add value than we are in need of new designs, new designed objects.

DESIGN THINKING & INNOVATION <<I’m saying, we don’t need less design, we need ten times more design, but it needs to be focused and directed.>> One answer to this question is that the design deliverable is not only the design object; it is also, literally, the processes and the knowledge that’s generated along the way towards producing the object. And that form of design knowledge 37

is itself becoming as important, if not more important, than the object itself.

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So by design thinking I mean this iterative, speculative way in which design knowledge is generated through prototyping and testing.

Business schools are interested in this because they believe that designers have found a very clever way to innovate. In fact, I would argue that it is only through this kind of iterative process that you innovate. Innovation is essentially transforming a problem that you bring to me by reforming that problem, adding something to the problem, and then providing a solution that exceeds the problem you initially posed for me to solve.

What emerges is a new problem (that I have helped you shape with my knowledge) that leads to a new solution that was not anticipated in your original problem. You can accomplish this, I would argue, only through this iterative process. Many educators in engineering, business and management, even in the military, now see this process as an important engine of innovation. It is interesting that even though architects work like this all the time, most architecture school curricula do not reflect the importance of design thinking. The â&#x20AC;&#x153;what ifâ&#x20AC;? that architects use to imagine a project (it would look like this if these were the constraints) is a form of innovative speculation. In that way, architects, and designers more generally, hold the key to innovation. Design is one of the engines of innovation, and in fact, without it, business and all these other means of economic output are not as powerful.

I think we can innovate our way out of a lot of the problems we now face and we have to make the argument that design will be a very important factor in that equation. Rather than diminishing the importance of design—as the new moralism would have us do—we need instead to make stronger economic arguments for design; we need to show how design adds economic value. And it is not a hard argument to make if you can focus on the process of design innovation and not only on the design object. If the discussion is only about whether the object should be orthogonal or blobby, then we are all lost.

For example, at the University of Kentucky we’re partnering with a research group called the Center for Applied Energy Research. They’re looking at ways to mitigate coal use by repurposing or byproducts like fly ash. Already we know that fly ash is mixed with Portland cement to make a more durable, cheaper form of concrete. Our relationship with CAER—who are mostly conducting scientific research of the products themselves—is interesting in that they have no design outlet for these materials; they have no way to think through possible uses, no means of speculating on what could be done with fly ash. Design is very good at that. So we’re partnering with them to generate a series of products including tables, countertops—all kinds of things—that might become useful, commercial products. Only design can engage in that form of speculation.

MODEL PRACTICES <<Rather than inventing the wheel each time, they use one of these models as a kind of yogurt starter culture, and then that model becomes the way they approach a project.>> There are architecture offices that are basing their practice on this iterative practice. UNStudio, in an essay in their monograph, Design Models, claim that they sift through all the information that they’ve used to generate the many, many projects they have developed over the last decade or more 39

and that in sifting, which is a kind of pattern recognition, they have discovered seven (or maybe eight) “design models” that they use to generate their work. It is significant that these models do not come from the outside; they are not philosophical concepts that come from outside architecture or even their own practice. Rather, these models are patterns -- I would say congealed forms of design knowledge or intelligence -- that are produced from the raw materials of the office itself. These models, these congealed formations of design knowledge -- and not any style or formal language -- form the DNA of the office. These models are not objects but are rather knowledge products that UNStudio uses and reuses within their practice. This, in my view, is a very forward-looking approach to innovation and to looking at other ways that designers might practice. More importantly, it allows UNStudio to take back some of the territory from those -- developers and others -- who have claimed ever more of what architects once controlled. That is a very powerful thing and it is what, in my view, separates them from so many other contemporary architecture and design practices.

DESIGN THINKING in SCHOOLS <<It was a fast way to output funky weird shape, and then put some red car paint on it to make it look cool (see page 47).>> Here’s an example of how design thinking might begin to shape architecture. When I first went to SCI-Arc, in 1998, to become head of the graduate program, Neil Denari was the director. He wanted to make the school smaller and move the culture of the institute towards digital design. There was initially a great deal of resistance. SCI-Arc, you may know, was known for physical model making and material research—a lot of hands on stuff. That is not what the digital paradigm, at least at the time, was about. So there was a lot of head butting and debate between two cultures: one that was focused on modeling and using traditional materials and the other was focused also on modeling, but in the computer.

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What started to change—and transform head butting into productive tensions—was the introduction of CNC machines; what was designed on the screen could then be milled or printed as a physical model. Initially, those means of output— CNC, laser cutters—were just another form of model making.

We saw lots of cool shapes dipped in red automotive paint.

Nothing had really changed except that the models were no longer hand made and had become shiny objects. But over time the way the models were used began to change; after the first year or so, the models began to be used as prototypes, not as finished product. So that instead of considering the model as something at the end of the line of design production, it became a way of thinking through the design process.

Models used in this way reveal a kind of design thinking; thinking by doing, thinking by using the model to prototype, test and refine design decisions. Design becomes a creative speculation rather than a way to complete in the form of an object a great idea you have.

PETER EISENMAN <<So, what is architecture? I don’t know. I’m sure it’s something.>> There has been a discussion and a debate and whole set of essays and problems generated by asking a question about architecture that probably Peter Eisenman has asked more than anybody else. It’s a question that I personally have no interest in whatsoever, and that question is “What is Architecture?” For me there is not a more uninteresting question in the world. That question—what is architecture—is an academic, philosophical, question; it’s a Heideggerean problem. There are other people interested in other things, Koolhaas for example, is interested in what does architecture do, and architecture is an instrument of urban transformation.

But saying that is itself already becoming a bit of a cliché and somewhat tiresome.

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For Eisenman, great architects are those who call into question the very essence of an existing typology—the villa, for example—and in so doing attempt to offer a new essence of that typology. According to Peter there are only three architects who do that: Palladio, Terragni, and Peter.

(Laughter) Convenient. Like the question, what is architecture, what is the villa, is a philosophical, Heidegerrean question. That’s the disciplinary discussion. I think it’s a great thing to know about, but it shouldn’t limit the action that architecture can take in the world.

SOMOL & SPEAKS discuss…

MS: We’re talking about the disciplinarity discussion and debate, design vs. architecture, among others.

RES: In terms of the issue of design and the discipline, there’s the PRAXIS exchange where you, and others, review Hal Foster’s Design and Crime. Hal Foster argues that in the good old days there was architecture and art, and today we’re awash in design, which has erased the specificities. Design here really means the market in a certain sense, so it comes off as a kind of Marxist critique. You were taking some forays into that debate, along with Sanford Kwinter who is also clearly somebody who argues for design, though maybe he argues for design in a different way than you, but you both proselytize for a certain model of design.

MS: Well, yeah, the question came up about disciplinarity and I said that I take that question to issue from a kind of problematic that Eisenman identifies in the question, “What is Architecture.” The question and the answer allows those who pose and answer it to decide who is and who is not an architect. Personally, I don’t care. For me design is concerned with a much broader set of problems and concerns; design is not interested in establishing or reestablishing what the territory of architecture is. Design is a more promiscuous way of engaging and making and remaking the world.

RES: In these times I find it a useful ally. At a moment of increasing demands to become a service industry the issue is how you have a project that isn’t exhausted by social, utilitarian, functional, 42

environmental, business , or professional demands. In that case, a nice thing to have in your back pocket is your obligation to something that those other markets or other constituencies are not bothering with. So the issue is then to define what it is that you do that is different than what is exhausted by professional offices, social policy, communities, engineers, whatever. And for me the answer is that we project alternative futures, so in that sense, that’s where we share our project.

MS: But this is how we started the discussion, with the irony that, curriculum-wise, architecture schools seem to be the least interested in what I would call design thinking. But everybody else seems to be.

We live in a very odd time when the tools, techniques, technologies and even the way that people are engaged in design today are completely out of touch with the intellectual paradigm that underpins schools. So, we read Slavoj Zizek and debate Second Modernity, but we’re doing something completely different. We don’t have an intellectual paradigm that accords with the very things we know we’re doing. Weirdly, other people are figuring it out, but not us.

RES: It’s certainly part of a turn that took place in the field in the late nineties with the use of the term pragmatism, though it wasn’t a great version of the term. For example, the MoMA conference organized by Joan Ockman. Whether you want to call the Dutch work “radical pragmatism” or the idea of thinking-by-doing, it is really what versioning and scenario planning are about. Instead of having an idea (in the Hegelian sense) and then materializing the idea, you throw the material experiments out into the world and you see what comes back. So the idea that you think through the experiments is a way to theorize a material practice.

MS: That’s right, that’s pretty much what I’m talking about. But, I would take issue with Joan Ockman. I would draw the distinction by saying there’s a real difference between Joan Ockman and those people who were reviving American pragmatism, and the forms of knowledge that are generated through speculative thinking like scenarios. For one, American pragmatism believes that there is a way of establishing truth. On the other hand, scenarios only believe in plausible truth, 43

which is not verifiable; plausible truth is neither true nor false.

RES: Right, so, then going back to the discipline and why I think it’s useful: regionally we have this question of sustainability, and so what does it mean when the lemmings have all lined up on the edge of the cliff and are willing to go off? But the other question is about the BIM model, and how we differentiate Revit from versioning. Revit to me is the death of disciplinarity because optimization is not the answer. Optimization is in reference to an existing reality and that’s really not the job of architecture, and that’s where I would agree with Peter [Eisenman] that there’s a difference between building and architecture. The fact that it’s called Building Information Modeling suggests exactly what that reduction is about: there’s no architecture. It’s not the “Green Architecture Council”; it’s not “Architecture Information Modeling”: It’s a reduction of the architectural discipline and its cultural possibilities to just building.

MS: Okay, okay, let me take a whack at this…

RES: Certain parametric software is interesting, just not that specific AutoDesk version because it’s really about real-time value engineering…

MS: It is, but that can be useful. It can be an incredibly useful tool in working with a client, it can be an incredibly useful tool in speculating about design decisions that might or might not be useful. It doesn’t have to be the driver of the project itself. It’s a tool that can give you another means of having a conversation where you can add value to the design equation. The way that a lot of BIM is being used now is like that first generation of rapid prototyping programs in design schools where they’re using it to do the same old stupid thing, but it’s a tool that can be used as a kind of testing, a speculative tool.

RES: Yeah, I think the question is simply: what is the direction of the arrow? Is this a way that the market and the offices 44

are colonizing schools, or is it a way that the speculation and experimentation at schools can get realized in the world.

MS: The later will not happen if we don’t understand the problem.

If we don’t know that those guys are going to suck us up and take us over, and we don’t know the territory in which they operate, then they will. And it is more likely that they will if we continue to read Log, Grey Room and old copies of Assemblage as if we can return to the moment when the kinds of issues published in those very excellent journals were still relevant. They are not. We should all read these and other journals; but what was at stake 15 years ago is no longer at stake. Those journals and their editors are now historical fact and not active contributors to any kind of meaningful discussion.

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Image Credits 1. Burglars Tools Found in the Bank.

2.“Automatic Business” by Nicholas Gurewitch. Provided by the Perry Bible Fellowship (http://pbfcomics.com/).

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COLE MONAGHAN KEVIN MEYER LAUREN TURNER KATIE RATHBONE

MAYA NASH

MEGHAN FUNK IVAN OSTAPENKO

CANDACE MOUNTAIN

BRADY SCHNEIDER NICHOLAS KRAUSE JAYNE KELLEY JARED MACKEN

JULIA SEDLOCK

JON MACGILLIS

BUTCHERS.

Fresh Meat could not have been possible without the help of faculty and students. We would like to thank all of you for you support and hope that you enjoyed the issue as we did.

Special thanks > K. Michael Hays Ben van Berkel Michael Speaks Jimenez Lai Lauren van Damme Bob Somol Vera Douma Lyndsay Pepple and Dorit Hershtig & Jason Colturi (European Correspondents) 46

this model is

( red )

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