PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- SPRING 2012 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 03.03 right: Ravensbourne College, London, 2010; underlay: proposal for the Spanish high-speed rail station, AVE, in Ourense, Galicia, 2011.
A Conversation between Stan Allen and Alejandro ZaERA-POLO In July of this year, Alejandro Zaera-Polo will start his term as the School of Architecture’s fifth Dean. An accomplished practicing architect and prolific writer, Zaera-Polo continues the School’s tradition of promoting ambitious design work in a challenging intellectual context. Stan Allen and Zaera-Polo conducted their interview by email in early May 2012. STAN ALLEN: I’d like to talk less about the specifics of pedagogy and more about some of the larger issues facing the discipline today. You might argue that all major innovations in education spring from the need to confront new problems with new techniques. There is no doubt that the tools of design are themselves changing; we could talk about drawing versus simulation for example, but also the importance of data, the need for collaboration and the role of research in design — what might be described as new intellectual technologies. I am interested in the way in which these changes are reflected in your own practice, and your thoughts on the future. ALEJANDRO ZAERA-POLO: I have always believed that technology is the supreme form of intelligence. I am Bergsonian in that sense, believing that intelligence is the “faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely vary its makings”. And architecture as a discipline is very much about being able to capture the capacities of the Homo Faber throughout history. For my generation, traditional architectural tools were replaced by a new technology. The threshold of difficulty to access computer technology was reduced to the point that everybody could start using computers effectively as design tools. This opened incredible opportunities to rethink the discipline, and made new experiences and new architectural effects available. The datascapes, the parametric, the processual, the diagrammatic, etc. were all theorizations of the impact of these technologies in our practice. Technology for me has never been a production tool, but a realm for thinking and research about architecture in its own right. Technology has continued to evolve at an enormous speed. I flew for the first time at 22, started using internet when I was 33 and I had my first mobile phone at 35. My daughter was on a plane before being able to walk, used the internet at 5 and had a cell phone at 7. This will have enormous effects on the way people will live in the future, and these are the areas within which the true opportunities to advance the discipline of architecture can be found. SA: Axel Kilian makes a convincing case for carefully distinguishing between the digital (which for him implies media and communication technologies) and computation (the architecture of the computer itself and the software that drives it). Writing code is mandatory today for advanced work in computational design and we see a new generation of architects and students with access to these new technologies of design. Interest in
robotics and sensing signals new protocols for computational design. Is this a revolution or an evolution? How do these new techniques relate to the discipline’s established paradigms? AZP: I believe the difference between revolution and evolution is a matter of speed. And this is sometimes dictated by perception. The shift from traditional drawing to CAD and the introduction of the world-wide web felt much more sudden and revolutionary than the rise of social media and algorithmic design, robotics and sensing. “We have never been revolutionaries,” as Bruno Latour would say, but in this new brave world of computation there will be a progressive integration between media, communication and production. Sensing devices are providing constant and simultaneous information about remote environments; content is managed by search algorithms; relations are driven by social media; and production is handed over to robots. All of this impacts the assemblage of social, political and technical protocols that intersect in the practice of architecture. But I do not think that this will entirely terminate the arcane material substrate of architecture. It will simply expand it in new dimensions. When I started learning AutoCAD in 1989 at the GSD I was told by some important faculty that the program was for “CAD monkeys,” as if technology was devoid of any theoretical, cultural or political content. In fact, with the exponential development of the artificial, I believe this will become the stage of the most intense cultural and political battles and the most important area for speculation in architecture in the near future. Perhaps we need to develop a philosophy of new materials: a new theory of the genesis of material form may be necessary to understand how to use productively a computer-simulated evolution to breed new architectural designs. Questions such as the importance of scale in the world of simulation and modelling, or the implications of modelling the physical world through polygons, NURBS, metaballs or particles, the exploration of newer technologies related to artificial life — such as cellular automata and object-oriented programming — or the potentials for designing new materials from the bottom-up as advanced in nanotechnology are important theoretical inquiries for the discipline of architecture. I believe those will become crucial fields of speculation and theorization in architecture. Princeton has the best tradition of speculative science and I think that this is one of the most important potentials for the School of Architecture. We need to use Princeton’s scientific infrastructure in order to gain an advantage in these crucial fields. SA: As much as the techniques of design are changing, the structure of practice is also changing. The most innovative practices today are agile and more entrepreneurial, less dependent on conventional patronage structures. Architects are more mobile than ever, working all over the world. The discipline is asked to confront new issues, such as climate change (where our capacities may be limited) or global urbanism (where architecture may have more traction). This requires a new skill set and a new knowledge base. What are your views with regard to these new practice modes? Is there
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a danger of architecture’s impact being diluted as it is asked to perform in these unfamiliar territories? In the past you have talked about “the engineering of material life;” how do you see the relationship between the virtual and the real in these new territories? AZP: Yes, this is something that we need to rethink, too. We can’t keep thinking that we are a species fed by museum commissions. One of the issues that I try to teach in the studio is the necessity for students to understand for whom they work, who will be their clientele or their audience. I do not think that a contemporary school of architecture can keep educating students for these ideal commissions which are supposed to fall onto you if you are talented. This is not a matter of being pragmatic. It is actually a theoretical problem: paper architecture has irremediably lost its former capacity to transform. As a contemporary architect you need to think of — in parallel — your acquisition strategies and your fields of engagement. And the globalization of the practice means that its modalities have multiplied exponentially. Your architectural problems and opportunities become dramatically different if you decide to act for an NGO in Nigeria or to work for a condo developer in Kuala Lumpur. We are no longer in the age when the architect is the origin of everything a la The Fountainhead, but rather a surfer who joins waves and harnesses energies, to quote another well-known metaphor of the practice. In this sense I think that a practice or a school needs to be able to identify the domains where it will experiment in order to be transformative. We cannot cover all domains of practice and therefore we remain in the neutered state of pure architecture. Ecology and sustainability are an obvious wave, a low-lying fruit. If we are to advance in this field, the returns on our investment will be immediate. You can spend billions of dollars in research trying to build more efficient jets or energy plants, but that will produce a negligible effect compared with the impact that developing an architecture that will make environmental technologies aesthetically desirable and cheap to implement could have. Sometimes we underestimate our transformative powers; Post Modernism was an invention of architects — some of them Princetonians — and to this day it has a huge audience. If we could make thick PVC windows and solid facades look good we could do a great service to the planet and to the profession. A school needs to identify some interesting potential audiences and target them deliberately. SA: Can I push you on that? Only to ask if saving the planet can ever be the major part of our ambition… Our impact as architects will always be marginal; maybe it is more interesting what effect these new challenges might have on architecture? AZP: I think what truly dilutes architecture’s impact is not the operation in unfamiliar territories but the inability to engage with them by pursuing some sort of disciplinary specificity. I am obviously not in the autonomy camp, but I have to admit that my passions are schizophrenic. On one side I have been always truly excited by the challenge of venturing into these forbidden territories and the brutal editing of the disciplinary (CONT. ON P.07)