RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2010 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 02.01 A Conversation between HANI RASHID and Stan Allen
Stan Allen: Asymptote presents an extreme case of a trajectory that has come to characterize architects of our generation: a period of intensive experimentation, teaching, working in galleries and alternative venues, slowly moving toward a more comprehensive, buildingoriented practice. You and your partner Lise Anne Couture are now running a large office with projects all over the world, working for a range of clients and dealing with complex technical and logistical challenges. The conventional lines of what constitutes experimentation and what constitutes ‘professional’ practice are blurred, and it makes those on both sides of that divide nervous. The trick is to keep the spirit of experimentation alive, even as you are working in unfamiliar territory, and not to fall back on conventional solutions. How have you been able to navigate this transition, and what do you see as the effect on your way of working and your way of thinking? hani rashid: A dominant force in our discipline through the latter part of the 20th century was the notion that experimentation in architecture, although distinct from conventional notions of professional endeavor, was nevertheless a legitimate form of architectural practice. For us, as for many of our generation, drawings, writing, modeling, installations and environments were, in and of themselves, architectural ‘projects’ even though much of that production was not necessarily explicitly applicable to the typical practice of designing buildings. Lise Anne Couture and I founded our practice in that spirit. Asymptote was
conceived as an experimental practice focused on theory, multi-media installations, experimental drawings and photography; these were all speculations on architectural form, space and cities. We always understood our theoretical works as opportunities for research that would enable us to achieve a richer definition of what ‘practice’ could become. In all of the research we have done and continue to pursue, we have passionately kept an open mind and critical eye on the way in which aspects of the experimentation could be relevant in a more conventional realm of building practice. The trajectory of the work in our studio, though it has always been in response to pertinent issues of the time, has not been linear and predictable, and has eschewed definition based on simplistic notions of style. We have created many internal references and histories that we continue to draw upon such that the work we produce—whether in building form or as an experimental installation—is always part of a larger story. We don’t see an ongoing body of research and experimentation as being at odds with the undertaking of architectural commissions; rather, one propels the other. Today we work with a sense of liberation from dogma, style, fashion and other forms of expectation, and instead approach each new project as part of this legacy of experimentation set against political and cultural forces, program requirements, site constraints and the other ‘realities’ of professional practice and the business of building architecture. Sa: More than ever, speed, movement, connectivity and virtuality characterize our day-today reality; these have important themes for Asymptote from the beginning. This would seem to make the recently finished Yas Hotel, in Abu Dhabi a seminal project for your practice—not only a program that literally encompasses all of
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those issues, but the way in which it works in today’s global economy, where capital and culture move freely around the world. Here it seems to me that the constructed reality of the project flows into the ‘atmospheric’ seamlessly, creating something new and difficult to describe. Can you talk a bit about the experience of the project now that it is finished and its double life as something at once real and virtual? HR: The Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi was certainly an interesting and well-timed commission for us for a number of reasons. In the experimental arena we had looked at many relevant themes, such flows and spatial deformation that could be enacted through the building of physical installations: the interactive touch surface architecture we built at the CCAC in San Francisco in the late 90s, or the mutated Auto-bodies installed with Creative Time in 2000, the Mscape experimental series developed in 2002 as well as at Documenta XI in Kassel in 2004. More recently our installation work at Venice Biennale in 2008 can also be considered an extension of much of this earlier research with the additional overlay of an interest in robotics, computer controlled surfaces and augmentation of form. One aspect consistent in many of these works was how each project looked into the ways in which speed, atmosphere, flux, and plastic seamlessness (meant figuratively and formally) could physically and conceptually make manifest what one might understand as the predominate forces at play within contemporary life and cities. In essence for 20 years we have studied and delved into the spatiality and contexts which we feel are prevalent, and which define a frame within which architectural work needs to be developed today. Our tectonic language is the result of an approach to architecture that is fueled by such interests and perhaps one could say fetishes. Asymptote’s built projects all embody these preoccupations and readings of contemporary culture and space. In the Yas Hotel in particular, the pursuit to create and realize a complex, differentiated yet fluid (continued on p.8)
(left) Asymptote: Yas Hotel, Abu Dhabi, 2010 (photo courtesy Asymptote); (right) Fall 2010 final review; (above) Barbara Hillier, model, Fall 2009 505 design studio (photos: Daniel Claro, 2010).