& Conversation held in two parts at the office of WORKac, New York City, 29 September 2011 and 24 May 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all work courtesy of the architects. How has your practice evolved, not only out of your education, but also out of the places where you ve worked? In your case, maybe this is OMA specifically. Our thinking on this issue has evolved and changed. We may not agree. I don t think we disagree. [Laughter] I think our project is frustrating because it s not necessarily only an architectural project. It is an architecture and project. I m not sure if one can define that as a project. The work is certainly at the intersection of architecture and. Is it the and that continues to evolve over time? The and so far has been urbanism, ecological urbanism, infrastructure (how to architecturalize infrastructure), nature (the relationship between architecture and nature); program is where we started. And politics, to a certain degree. Yeah, if we can still aspire to be political. I think we would embrace that, though it s been difficult. We aren t big on the autonomy of architecture. It s very much a project of engagement: trying to find new ways to operate with relative autonomy. Form is one of the many ingredients we might consider in a project. Strategy is often more important. We are very strategic about the moves that we make. I m not sure if this constitutes a project. I think we have an urban project in terms of rethinking the urban, the rural and the natural, through mixing them up and rethinking the relationship between those entities. Architecture seems to somehow fit into that larger project. You said that your project and the idea of the and is evolving. Have you thought about how or why that happens? Is it on a case by case basis for a particular project or a particular studio? For instance, in your first studio at Princeton, the project was in Panama. You seemed to get into ecourbanism almost by accident. The two things seemed to come together at the right moment. That s a bit of the evolution. I don t think we would ever present it as an accident now, even though, who knows what the truth is? I think that there is a project of not having a project right now. For people like Bjarke [Ingels] it s all about the story: this leads to that, which leads L Assemblée Radieuse, Libreville, Gabon, 2013. Rendering. to that, and so on until the final solution has evolved out of a certain number of circumstances or strategies that came together at a specific moment that defined that particular project. That s the narrative, but of course when you look at the work there s a definite project of stepping, stacking there are a lot of formal projects. I think that WORKac is moving away from that kind of narrative, because a lot of things come up in our work time and time again. Often there s just not enough within the situation to drive the project in terms of our own interests or in terms of what we might think is interesting. So a lot of the time we re bringing our own agenda. Even if it s not a project, it is an agenda. We clearly have an agenda. I think that s the critical part of our project. We brought a completely new agenda to the PS1 competition that brought it into a new zone. We tend to do that. That s a project where it s very hard to have the Bjarke narrative. You need to have shade, you need light, you need sun; therefore we did... a farm? Not really. You can t make a Bjarke story out of that. When we started the office in 2003 I had already been out of school for eleven years and we had no idea what we were going to do. After ten years of working at OMA four years for Amale OMA was the mindset. We were steeped in that way of thinking. So our five year plan with WORKac was to say yes 68 PROJECT Issue 2 69
to everything. We decided we weren t going to teach or just do theoretical work. We were going to take whatever came our way and use that to try to find out what we were interested in and what the project was. In 2003 we decided that say yes to everything as a method could be a kind of rebound after OMA. PS1 really came completely out of our personal interest in the visionary, and in the relationship between the urban, the rural, the natural and our extra architectural love affair with Michael Pollan. Also, our thinking on 49 Cities [(New York: Storefront Books, 2009)] led to PS1, in a weird way. That certainly set us on a trajectory. Right. PS1 was our first big project that had an agenda in such a clear way. So that was the end of the say yes to everything idea, where we really kind of took charge and just collected the things that we were interested in and put them in a project that had no other real requirements. That led to the next five years, which were really up and down because of the recession. But throughout that time we really tried to hone the project. I would say that all of that subsequent five years of work culminates in Gabon [the Assemblée Radieuse in Libreville, Gabon], which is like the next hinge. PS1 also led to a number of very real projects. It led to all of the Edible Schoolyards and it led to a lot of theoretical projects like Infoodstructure, which is a video that we did; it led to Plug Out and a series of competitions and installations that continued that investigation. There was also an urban scale dimension, which led to the New Holland Island Cultural Center Master Plan in St. Petersburg where there s a complete integration between landscape, architecture and preservation. But there was also a series of competitions that looked at architecture, landscape and food. Our competition entry for a building on the National Mall was to do an alternative to the landform building; how do you integrate architecture and landscape without ending up with a buried building? The conference center for Libreville is an integration of architecture and landscape in what is still a very wild setting around the building. It s a celebration of systems and ecosystems and how that becomes part of a new kind of representation. I appreciate the way that you talk about the series of five year plans. You don t suggest that there are a series of projects (with a lowercase p) and that those projects led to an interest. There was just work, and it almost didn t matter what that work was. It only mattered that you were engaged and thinking and working together. Yes.We were so interested in program in the first few years, and that really came out of the clients and issues of the sites. It was one hundred percent engagement. But in a way, that s also just the way we work: the project with a small p, which provides options or opportunities to find something that resonates for us after trying out a number of different paths. It s much more of a horizontal weaving of PF1, MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, Long Island City, NY, 2008. 70 PROJECT Issue 2 71
interests. If you only explain it with the clarity of a big p Project, then you re missing out on some of the discoveries that you might make in the process. How do you see your representational techniques and your material interests intersecting with the polemical quality of your work? Do you think it heightens the polemic? Camouflages the polemic? Does it make the polemic more palatable? That s an interesting question. Even when our projects are kind of serious or satirical they look very fresh and pink and optimistic. I think there is a little bit of a naivete to the representation. It s very fresh. I m not sure if that s strategic, but that s how it is. Yeah. It s interesting. The representation is a bit divorced from the work. Obviously, we re always trying to get the point across in a fairly straightforward manner, but the way that it looks always comes out more colorful than we might have originally expected. We like clarity. That s not very trendy. [Laughter] But there s something about the beautiful era of modernism that we re nostalgic for. And working in emerging countries or developing countries, we re able to plug into that interest. There isn t much anxiety about articulating or projecting the future and maintaining a high level of optimism. Of course, we re Generation X, and our faith in progress is not absolute. But there s at least a desire. Plug Out, New York, NY, 2009. Aerial rendering. But you re saying that clarity is more of a desire in emerging countries, where the context is not as clear? There is definitely a desire for clarity, and I think that architecture can play a pivotal role in that, for better or worse. I was once told that there are two ways to conceptualize the diagram: one is that the diagram explains the project. The other is that the diagram must be explained; the diagram becomes the generator of all of the interest within the project. Does your project in Gabon operate under this second understanding of a diagram? It s true the diagram is not the project. Sometimes it s very hard to explain to students that the diagram of the project is important, that it helps to clarify the project and is able Locavore Fantasia, New York, NY, 2009. Aerial rendering. to give structure to a large part of the project. But a project that is just a diagram will always fall flat. One of my favorite quotes, which I always share with students, comes from Jasper Johns. He wrote, Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that. It s really those second and third operations that maintain the interest and complexity of a project. Gabon, for example, appears to be totally clear; it s a tilted cylinder with three gardens equally spaced and all the program divided evenly within it. It s very easy to explain to somebody, but once you get into it you realize that it s not a cylinder, it s a cone, so every floor is slightly shifted. And it s not just a cone, it s a sliced cone, which begins to generate some very complex geometry. So already the very clear outside shell is made more complex. And then the gardens themselves are the most complex geometrical shapes we ve ever attempted. We like the way that one can immediately understand the organization but one can t immediately understand the building. That s very important: a project has to have some interest or excitement that you won t understand until you get inside the building. We use both types of diagrams. In our process we definitely use the diagram as a generator to conceptualize and clarify relationships for ourselves. Here we use the diagrams operationally. Then there are presentation diagrams with arrows, but those aren t the tools or the sequence that we use to develop the project. They re just an explanation of the project. If you re able to generate a good diagram at the beginning it s a good project. But it s probably not a great project if you re just left with that diagram at the end. But it is interesting to make that distinction with students, especially these days... 72 PROJECT Issue 2 73
The other thing, which can be difficult to maintain, is a pleasure in the process. In the end, as architects, we really have nothing. Either you go after a project and you don t get it, or you get it but you never know what s going to happen. Or you get it, it happens and then it s gone. You have nothing to hold on to. So the process is really all we have. That makes sense relative to what you said about your office s growth spurt. Are there other growing pains related to that? Changes in the way you work because there are so many new people? L Assemblée Radieuse, Libreville, Gabon, 2013. Interior garden rendering. Yeah. There are a lot of arrows out there today. Do you see yourselves now starting to consciously write more or to teach more, or starting to devote some of your energy to articulations of your work in other terms? We ve been teaching a little bit everywhere. At Princeton we organized a lecture series, Shades of Green, and we interviewed the lecturers. It s coming out as part of Actar s next Verb. Writing certainly forces you to articulate positions all the time. Dan has been writing articles about other architects projects. It s definitely something we look to do more of. It s part of a normal evolution. If you re not only interested in the professional practice aspect of architecture, you ve got to find an edge: some new way of operating. Writing and teaching are good places to do that. Teaching also allows you to be part of a community of peers and critics, so it s always an adventure. It s interesting in the context of the office having a project. That project has to be shared by the office. It s not enough for just Amale and me to have a project; it s the office that s producing the work together. At some point you have to delegate. It s interesting that that s an issue now because we re at a certain size. During the say yes to everything days, someone could come into the office and it didn t matter who you were or what your background was, it was all just absorbed in each particular project. Now it s important to refer to both the work that we did before and the work that we re doing now. Yeah. Now it s much more about our way of doing things, architecturally. Right. So it s only an issue because the office now has more of a a certain boldness. The relationship to the figure is more clear. All of these things are much more defined now than they once were. So if you We re trying to do a blog for Gabon.. And we can still do it We can still do it! Its all set up, we just haven t written anything yet. But all of this is really important because it s about establishing a culture for the office, especially as the office grows and new people come. We can t sit down with everyone and impart the culture of the office to each of them. So it s very important that it seep in from the outside, so that when people start here they can be exposed to everything we ve done. Urban Aqualoop, Shenzhen Biennale, Shenzhen, China, 2009. Rendering. 74 PROJECT Issue 2 75
come to us with a background in surface, or nuts and bolts, it will be difficult. So it s a very interesting moment. If you come to us and you are interested in the typical architectural issues, it s going to be hard for you: craft, materials tectonics; we can t really do that. But other than that, there haven t been issues with getting bigger, because we ve always acted bigger than we were. That was one of our rules from the very beginning. Even if we had three people in the office we were thinking on a large scale. And we have a history of working with very large teams. So now it actually feels more exciting. This is where we wanted to get. A lot of our old ways of dealing with big teams have come back to us. It s kind of second nature. Each of your five year plans seems to have culminated in a project of a different scale: PS1 at one scale, Gabon at another. Is that a trajectory that you re hoping to continue? We re interested in scaling up the ideas, in scaling up complexity and scaling up the number of issues that we can engage. That doesn t necessarily correlate with the actual scale of the project. I also think it can t be linear. On the one hand we have Gabon, and on the other we have the Edible Schoolyard projects. We re doing an installation with a fish farm in the San Diego Children s Museum. Operating at these different scales will have to continue because there s an information flow that happens where your brain is constantly shifting. But also Gabon might happen, but then we might shrink back to apartment renovations for a while. Who knows? It s very difficult to predict. Even though our ambition is to say, well, we ve already done that, and now we want to do this, we definitely are comfortable with the larger scale. But I think that there has been too much bigness in the last decade. Right. Herzog and de Meuron were doing much bigger projects, with the Bird s Nest, whenever that was, ten years ago. But a lot of their newer work is just different. It might be more interesting: more preservation stuff, really working with existing buildings. It s an interesting model. It s hard to say for us. Gabon is a commission that is just amazing. We may never be in this exact situation ever again, because we re doing it this fast, with this many people, and with this much intensity. Villa Pup, 2008. Collage. But I also think that bigness has exhausted itself given our agenda and our interest in environmental questions. We re fascinated with what s been happening in Japan in terms of smallness and the extra small: compression. When I teach I m always saying, compress, compress! The sense of scale has somehow gotten lost, because the body doesn t really exist anymore, with computers, et cetera. So there s also something about not doing small for small s sake, but a certain density at the level of architecture. In regard to your Villa Pup project you ve said that the scale of a project doesn t necessarily determine the scale of the project s ideas. So that s one conceptual pursuit that you have in relation to scale. On the other hand, you have also mentioned a more physical or spatial idea of scale. Right. Those are not just compression exercises for reasons of budget; it is always an issue. Gabon, for instance, went from 110 meters in diameter to 97 after we won the competition. So you re well versed in how to make that compression happen. Villa Pup, 2008. Collage. 76 PROJECT Issue 2 77
Yes. Every time I visit a modernist jewel, I m always shocked at how small it is. You think, people must have been smaller. We were just in Paul Rudolph s apartment, which is maybe too much compression. There are, like, twenty levels in his two-story apartment. It s just amazing. It s like the school [Paul Rudolph Hall at Yale]; his house is like a mini version of that. And the stairs are, like, eleven inches wide. Form ran its course. Bigness ran its course. It s just not good enough anymore. Just because it s big, that doesn t make it exciting Are there more instances of things that you would consider having been exhausted in architecture today? Does that apply to a larger set of things that you see going on in the discipline? Yeah, there s something that s been a debate in the profession for thirty years... What s the debate? It s the split between the autonomous project......and the engagement project. Right. The autonomous project has appeared in many different ways, as have projects of engagement. I think a lot of us are trying to get beyond that dichotomy. There are some interesting writings about how the autonomy project was never actually autonomous. It used to be that the autonomous project was the serious project. That was the academic project. Certain schools, like Yale and Princeton and Columbia, still operate according to that initial dichotomy. You could still put these schools in these alliances and alignments. The dichotomy still operates only because of the people who are still teaching. We re in a generation that comes after the people who uphold that dichotomy, and I think we re going to break through to a new paradigm. Our generation is certainly trying to find new ways to operate in the world and in practice, not just in the lab. If you re like [Mark] Wigley, and you describe architecture as a field rather than a discipline, suddenly the notion of autonomy disintegrates. That doesn t mean you re not in that field. There s a lot to mine in the autonomous project, but it just isn t exciting anymore. In the same way, there was this pure faith in progress, there was a pure faith in a certain form of resistance, but by now we ve seen its limitations. Nature-City, Foreclosed, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2012. Rendering. You re always working within a power structure, one way or another. So a third possibility would be more interesting. That s interesting: the notion that the field can accept or embrace diffuseness. But that doesn t mean you can t have an agenda. You can, even if that agenda is not always as rigid. Similarly, I think form for form s sake, for pure pleasure, has also run its course. How could you outdo Zaha [Hadid]? Why would you? So we re also post-form. It s just not enough anymore; it s had its exuberant moment. It seems that if autonomy was once considered the serious project, today it s been used as an opportunity to introduce humor into architecture. You ve spoken before about humor in your work. In your project of engagement, it seems like it would be more difficult to use humor when you deal with serious issues. How do you use humor? Is it a means of driving your concepts? Is it used in representation? Or is it just rhetorical? If someone is starting a speech, no matter how serious it s meant to be, he or she will often still start with a joke. In a sense, that s how we look at it. It s a way to deal with very difficult issues. You can deflect some of the initial discomfort through humor. In a sense, we find that humor can actually make a project more serious sometimes. It seems that the intent is to get people to say, Oh, I hadn t thought of that before. 78 PROJECT Issue 2 79
Without being didactic though. Without saying, You are going to take this route because I want you to see this thing. It s more like what you said: I hadn t thought of that before. That, for me, is an ideal reaction to a project. It s a lightness and it s also the humor of surrealism. Surrealism is taken pretty seriously by a lot of people, but it s almost always funny at the same time. It s funny to see something in a context you don t expect. That s the essence of every joke as well. This runs through all of our work, and in a sense that s a project: a sharp contrast between one thing and something else that you didn t expect. For us, that leads to a whole bunch of things, including the realization that things could be different. You can live differently in the city, or you can experience a different view. You can engage with the outside world in a different way. It s hard to explain, but somehow this utopian notion that in the future or even right now something could be different from the way it was yesterday, or the way it was five minutes before. That contrast can be very funny because you re not expecting a farm in the city, for instance. Humor. It s an architecture and. Yeah. Humor. I find that you have to keep it up. But it gets harder. Funny. But funny? I never liked funny. I like funny. Oh, I know. Dan likes funny. If it bends, it s funny. If it breaks, it s not funny. It s the possibility to imagine something different. The other thing is that we re interested in the future, and the possibilities of the future. As in a real future? Yes, a real future. We can imagine a real future. So there is an optimism. There are the critical and funny aspects of the work, but then there s also optimism about life. We don t want to give up on the idea of utopia. There s a certain lightness to it. Nature-City, Foreclosed, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2012. Model. 80 PROJECT Issue 2 81