RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 03.01 A Conversation between Michael maltzan and Stan Allen
Stan Allen: Your career has developed consistently in close contact with artists and the art world. Can you talk about what you have learned from those experiences, and how it affects your work and your way of thinking about architecture? I mention this in particular because the studio you will be teaching with Guy Nordenson will be looking at the intersections of art and architecture in Marfa, Texas. MICHAEL MALTZAN: My connection with artists and art culture came simply because most of my friends and colleagues were artists, having gone to architecture school at RISD. Because of that, much of my thinking about architecture’s relationship or presence in culture was as much through the lens of art, art history, art theory, and criticism, as it was through architectural history, theory, and criticism. It still is. At RISD, there wasn’t a substantial distinction between disciplines, but rather a real emphasis placed on ideas, and how you saw the world first. Only afterward, how you worked in that world, and how you made something about that world required you to ultimately become conversant and capable with the histories and contemporary practices and techniques of your discipline. I think because of those experiences I feel comfortable being in both of those worlds, art and architecture, simultaneously. I understand the subtle distinctions in the vocabularies, the ambitions, the instincts, what separates us, but also what connects us. Looking at art practice is also an important way for me personally to step outside of architecture when thinking about projects. While I feel deeply committed to architecture and its history, the field has become formally too self-propelling. If you look at much of the work now, it has gotten too good, too competent. It makes you wonder what the next great problem for architecture will be, or at least what the problem is at all. I’m looking for that problem in other places, and art has always been a good place to start.
Sa: As I think you know, I am particularly interested in the recently completed house for the painters Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell. It seemed to me a very radical to response to the existing Neutra house — and the long history of California modernism — to turn the new house inwards. So much of the rhetoric of modern architecture is based on dissolving the barrier between inside and outside, but you wrap this house in a nearly blank wall and orient the view to the interior courtyards. (I think of the famous Adolf Loos quip that “a civilized man does not look out of the window.”) There is something of this in the recently completed Carver Apartments as well, but my sense is that in that case it’s a response to the site and the need to create a protected enclave. Are these simply two instances where the site and program caused you to reconsider interiority as a working principle, or is this something that has a resonance with other projects in the office? MM: In both projects the intensity you mentioned was a response to the conditions of the site, but also grows out of one of the principle lines of interest in the overall work of the office. At the Carver Apartments, the proximity to the highway creates phenomenal visibility to and from the project between usually separated communities, but that social exposure and the pragmatics of noise necessitated a more interior life. Pittman/Dowell is located on the threshold of the mountains, and the exposure created by the classically modernist transparency of the Neutra house became very hard to sustain for Lari and Roy against the harsh context of the mountains. But I also became aware of a different type of exposure, and that had to do with Lari and Roy’s life. Both are very visible people. As professors, lecturers, and exhibiting artists, they are almost always present in the public realm, and I think that no matter who you are, or what you do, that intense exposure and visibility has become our common reality and condition of our lives. At both Carver, and especially at Pittman/ Dowell, I was fascinated by this newer dynamic
03.01 p.01
Top and left: New Carver Apartments, Los Angeles; above: Pittman/Dowell Residence, Los Angeles.
at a cultural and social level, where the reality of our collective contemporary life, and our presence everywhere simultaneously seems like a new, and a real spatial problem for architecture. In the face of that reality, maybe a rethinking and renegotiation of our internal world is the more radical idea. The transparency and dissolving of the inside and outside is a modernist ideal, but not necessarily a contemporary idea. Sa: You could say that broadly speaking there are two distinct trajectories for architects of our generation. In one scenario, perhaps more typical in the US, architects develop highly experimental work in their early careers, and then when they win a competition or get larger scale commissions, they are faced with the challenge of translating that work into built form, often with a loss of complexity or sophistication. Others — and although I would associate it with Europe, it seem a closer fit for you — have tended to start from simpler forms, and as the complexity of the commissions increases (and perhaps the confidence in the office’s ability) higher levels of complexity are introduced. Does this seem accurate? And in your case, it also works against expectations to some degree, given your early experience in the office of Frank Gehry. Can you talk a bit about how you see the overall trajectory of the work? MM: I was conscious of those two different trajectories when I began, and I’ve gone the way I have partially because I believed that architecture is at its most full, complex, and influential form within culture when it is built, when it is undeniable. It changes the equation between the architect, the idea, and the audience. I was, and still am committed to that route of investigation and participation in architecture. As for the evolution from simpler to more complex form, you are right that in the beginning the types of commissions and the capabilities of the office lent themselves to a more reduced vocabulary, but your second point about working against expectations was more on my mind when I started. I was trying to find what was mine, and the only way I knew how to do it was to try and “clear the palette” and build a vocabulary or a direction to the work from a more distilled starting point. It was more about making a break from what was around me than a conscious idea about form. I was naïve though to think that I could do that with some anonymity, quietly, until I figured it out. It doesn’t happen that way anymore, and the work got known, and you get known of course for the work you have done, and not for what it is leading to. Interestingly for me, when I look at the trajectory of the work, I see a greater similarity in the spatial complexity of the work from start to now, while I would agree that the form complexity has evolved a great deal as you mentioned.