office interior design proposal template
[russell thomsen] the nameof our office is idea office. and i'm going to give you just a quick history. i'm partners with eric kahn, andwe both went to school together. we both worked together in a variety of places. where we worked together was in super studioin florence for a few years after school was out,and then we came back. i came to san francisco; eric was in l.a. we both worked for other people for a while,and then we formed our office in the late '80s. we used to be called coa, andwe did that for about 20 years. and then we decided to rethink the office,a kind of 2.0, if you will, of what we were interested in.
so what i'd like to talk to you briefly about,which has to do with our point of view ... i come to you today as an architect. i'm not an urban planner, andi'm not necessarily an urban theorist. we're going to be working on a large project. but i think what alberto said still rings true,what was true for corbusier is probablymore so for architects today. which is a way we've alwaysthought about our art practice, which is that even if you're working onthe smallest piece of architecture, you have to think about it ina powers-of-ten way, about howit resonates in a larger context, more often than not in the city, and if you're thinkingabout very large projects, there's a kind of ...
it’s incumbent upon you to think about how eventhe largest projects are expressed as architecture. so that idea of the blurry line is not a new idea. that's been pretty well establishedfrom back radio city days. but i think now more than ever, you'll seethe scale of projects being proposed,both here and in places like china. sort of amazing enormous and capable in a wayof taking on urban qualities in the single project. implicates architecture in a big way in the city, and then the sort of whole idea of the plannerbeing someone who's dealing with codesand zoning and sort of abstractions being implicated back into architecture,that no longer can those thingsoperate really without intersection. so anyway, to get back to the officehere, that was a little bit of a preface.
one of the things that eric and i werereflecting on after 20 years of workingtogether, 20 years of teaching at sci-arc, was this idea that architectsand architecture have akind of inner and outer life. and so our history is such that by working in europe,we started out really thinking about our inner life. so i would call it 20 years of sort oftalking to ourselves, talking to each other. and i would call that a sort of disciplinary discourse,in other words, what does your work haveto do with architecture as a discipline, and not so much does it have to with allthe circumstances and serendipities of the outsideworld, but where are you within the discipline? and we spent 20 years kind of working on that. so when we began working in europe,we were strident modernists. we were trying to bring a language ofarchitecture back to a place like los angeles,
which really resisted the idea that therewas a singular language of architecture. and we were strident in doing that,we were interested in proclaiming that. and at the same time, we startedto try to think about what our ownrelationship was to the discipline. and like every young firm, we were engagingin any project you can get your hands on, whether they be a lot of houses, ora fast food restaurant, etc., things like that. but in a way, just trying to definewhere we were within this kind of larger milieu. quick word about los angeles. after living here and in europe and then decidingto be in l.a. was a conscious choice on our part, because when you thinkabout los angeles,very different than here.
and i think this is our friend neil damari remarkedto us once, and i believe this to be true, which is we all kind of converged on l.a.,we moved to l.a., we decided to work in l.a.because it represented a kind of patient. the city was a kind of patient thatyou could do endless surgeriesto and the patient would never die. so we were interested in this idea that los angeles,is as you know, if you spent any time there... is both astonishingly beautiful andincredibly horrific all at the same time. and that was really interesting to us, becausethere was no kind of set agenda for the city. first things we did were actually projectsabout the city, so publications that weretrying to capture some idea about the city. i'm going to come back to thatin a minute with you guys. so these were a series of multiple-exposurephotographs that try to captureideas about how the city works
that was commissioned by the forum down there. we participated in showswhich were using, in this case, we were really interested in scenarioplanning -- and i can talk about thatin length another time maybe -- scenario planning to imaginemultiple futures to the city. we were interested in tryingto make very large-scale models, this one being ours, aboutagain, the nature of the city. so here's a practice that one hand is working onthe tiniest of house additions and things like that and on the other hand trying to get intoevery sort of venue, if you will, that couldtalk about something much larger, which, again, is the context we're operating on.
project from super studio, where eric and i worked. so you could kind of get it, wherethey influenced in a big way. so to come back to this dichotomy, after20 years we decided to go public, if you will. in other words we had 20 years of talkingto ourselves in a kind of dual-personality way. and we decided, okay, we have it down now. we know what we're interested in;we know how we want to express ourinterests; let's take this into the world. so the idea of something circumstantial intersectingsomething that seems resolved and structuredin your mind is a really interesting point for us. so we moved from maybe making an architecturenow that was about a signature, which wasstrident in its formal language, things like that. and we're much more interestednow in the kind of one-off things.
and we don't care anymore whether or notthe work can be identified, that saythat's another one of idea's projects. so alberto uses this word several times, "idea." and i think it's such an interesting word, if you think about all the manifestations of it,and that it really is in fact the driver for projects. so the work we're doing, since we becameidea office, is much more all over the place. it's much more messy, and it's muchmore driven by circumstance thani think the work probably was before. have you, anybody, ever read ian mcewan? you know this author, british author? you have, yeah.
so, one of my favorite authors among others. but what i am so interested in in readinghis books is that the characters tendto have a kind of very figured-out world, where everything works, and everything is stable. and then he introduces someradical instability in the storyline. and then the rest of the story is about how thatall gets resolved in really astounding ways. i think we're fascinated by that. so in a way, that's starting to carryinto some of the work we're doing now. a word about architects, like i said,you are, we are, schizo in a way. so we have this kind of internal worldofk you know, doing all these things.
and then we have this kind of externalworld of dealing with all these things. and again, the intersectionof those things is fascinating. so now we're working on quite a variety of things,and i'll show you a kind of quick sample of them. but all these things, you know, super studiotaught us this one i think, and we still carry it on, which is, rather than engaging in any oneof these things, we're really interestedin engaging in all of these things and seeing how they, in a way,become synergistic with one another. so the title of this lecture, and again,it's a longer lecture, and i'm sorry to gothrough this quickly, is “driven by dilemma.†so eric and i wanted to show somework that we've been doing where it's really about a dilemma statement,which is meaning within a project,the circumstances of a project,
how can two competing things which seemto exclude one another be the driver formaking a more creative solution to a project? so again, that's going to be a little all over the place, none of it having anything to do with urban planning. i just want to give you an ideaof where we're coming from. first one is, this is a projectthat we were commissioned by sci-arc. they have an exhibition programwhere they invite faculty and othersto do an installation in their gallery. you may know about this if you've been downthere and seen this, or you've seen it online. so we were invited to one a couple of years ago. and this became the kind of dilemma statement for us.
we'd been teaching in mexico city,and the connection is obvious. but we were really interested in howto occupy this space without simply creatinga kind of static object within the space. this is our school, by the way. if you've never been there,it's the longest school in the world. it's something like a quarter-mile longor something, alberto knows it. right next to some very large infrastructure, and thisis downtown, the major downtown is over here. it's kind of one of many edges, but anyway the galleryis kind of right there in the length of the building. these are just interests we were having,things we were teaching in undergraduate studios at the time about integrity,installation that we made with the students.
also interested in some artists whowere dealing with this idea of levitation. also interested in stravinsky and the“rite of spring†and the kind of, on one hand, again this dualism between something that'sincredibly rational and constructed versussomething that is dionysian and more, how should i say, right side of the brain. and flamenco. if you've ever seen flamenco,it's an amazing thing because the woman's feet move soquickly, they seem to be off the ground. and it's a really fascinating form of dance. so these are just things we're interested in,and these are initial sketches.
also another interest, crop circles,the idea of inscription on the ground. so these are initial models for some ofthe things we're interested in, in the project. the drawing is getting more developed,and then finally the installation itself. so a series of kind of figures that are dancing, levitating in the room, andasking if architecture in fact can do that. now i'll show you a house. this house is in tokyo, wherei've been spending a lot of timethese past 15 years or so. i'm teaching there and going there. and so i had the opportunity to do a house there. and of course the first thing you think of when youthink of a city like tokyo is the idea of density.
and we were fascinated, in a way, withthe idea on one hand in a very incrediblydense and restricted situation, how you might in fact stillrespond to this client's desires. every client probably has four:open space, light and air, and all the things that, in a way,density might preclude. some of the similar concurrent interestswith the students who are working ona series of projects we called "box crushing." so you're interested in how you mightopen up the volume of a box, not by in factmaking openings in it, but by acting upon it. these are very early projects we did inour practice that were still, i think, hadsomething to do with what we're doing now, which was this idea of dealing with the tautnessof screens and the plasticity of another project,the plasticity of the kind of envelope of the thing. so, site in the north, little bit north of tokyo center.
not as dense as you can imagine. but dense nonetheless by american standards. they wanted a house that's essentiallythe same number of rooms as my house,but in half the square footage. so it was a bit of a challenge. it fit into here. this was a curious situation,because there's no zoning, really, in tokyo. and all they require, really, is that there'sa kind of, there's a very simple setback,i think a meter on each side. and then this site's about 10 meters square. and then they have a dynamic model,computer model digital model that you have to use,
which allows only a certain amountof shade on your neighbor’s house fora certain number of hours per day. that's it. after that, you can do whatever you want. so it was an interesting ... because what ends up happening is, youget these very conventional responses,where you build the house out to the lot line, and whatever is left over becomes a kind of garden. and then all the openings in the housesall sort of face each other, and nobodyhas any privacy, so they all pull their curtains. this site was an infill site. it used to be a rice paddy a long time ago.
the street is here, so south is behind us. and then the clients wanted privacy, but theywanted the sun to shine into the house. so it was a problem. and so how to deal with this idea of privacy,at the same time maximizing solar access. so we did a number of kind of initial studiesabout building out the envelope, accordingto the digital model, things like that, trying to capture some outdoor space, and inthe end we went back to it in a very simple way, which was to look at whatkind of volume we could build, and then just start to take outthe requirements for the zoning, and then carefully sort of taking outsome volumes of the house that weren't intheir very strict program to make outdoor space,
and then eventually how to kind ofcut that envelope that i talked aboutto maintain the plasticity of that envelope. so these are just really initial studies of the thing. and then this is a model that'sgetting closer to what we were doing. so the house is really organized really simply asa bar in the back in the north side of the house. and then a terrace slides outin the front like a file drawer. so on this side you have an outdoorgarden which comes down to the ground, and on this side the outdoor terrace extendsa fairly small living-dining-kitchen. and what you end up with, then,os because of the section of this, people from the street can't see up into the house.
but at the same time, all of the bedrooms,which are loaded on the other side,look into the private garden, so they have a lot of privacy. so kind of two conditions ofexperiencing outdoor space. model of the final thing. you get to here, carport on the street, the gardenis behind a kind of large screen wall here. bedrooms loaded ontothis side looking into the ... and then on the ground flooran entrance and an office. and then upstairs, living, dining,opening onto the terrace.the rest of the bedrooms, so it's looking a little like that fromthe back to the front where the street is.
some photos and construction. it was a really interesting experience to workin japan and to build in japan, in particular, because unlike here you don't have an adversarialrelationship with the builder, with the contractor. here if you want to change something,of course, immediately dollar signs come up. there we talked about the pricefor literally a month and half. and then finally, it was decided. and once it was decided, when they were inconstruction, i would get photographs sent to me, and i would say, "oh, i don't want to like this. can we do more like this?"
and they'd say "sure, you can do like this, no problem." no extra cost, that's part of the deal. because everybody wantedto have the same thing; everybody wanted to have a goodpiece of architecture in the end. and my friend in tokyo who is our executive architect,who used to be one of my students, i remember i changed something about four timesand he rang me up and he said, "russell, it's okayto change it one more time, but no more, okay?" so anyway, but what was fascinating isthe guys who put up the steel, they putit up in three days, and i was shocked, because here it would take two months,and also they complained a lot. so they complained about the ...
the owner is a steel fabricator, so his factory made it. and he was telling me, "all my workersthat complain, they say it’s too complicated." and because this thing cantileversand floats off the front, which you can see here;it's this whole thing is levitating. but anyway, so it qs a fairly complexconstruction for what they needed to do. and then the seismic standards are huge over there. but what ended up making me happy whenwe were finished was that he told me later, "oh yeah, all the workers from our factorybring their family by on the weekend, andthey get out of the car, and say i made that." so they were really proud of it, and that made mefeel really good that it was worth the effort.
so inside the garden, this kind ofscreen wall folds down to make a bench. some shots of the interior. and then there was a show in l.a. right afterthe tsunami happened up in sendai thatasked us to submit models and drawings. and they auctioned them off to givethe proceeds to the victims of the thing. so i'm going to go a little more quickly. so this was a competitionfor a single room in london. i don't know; you might have knownthis competition; it was a little while ago. two years ago. it was simply to make a temporary structureon the rooftop of a building on the thamesfor the summer olympics.
people would come and rent it outfor a week at a time or something. and then i think after six monthsor something, they'd take it down. so some photos of the site. here it's on top of the queen elizabeth halllooking over the thames. we were fascinated by ideas about fogand ephemerality, and we wondering ifarchitecture could behave like that. in other words, if architecture could both participatein the ephemeral and changing qualities of thelandscape, and at the same time be a built fact. so looking at sugimoto, howthe idea of the horizon changes. some initial sketches, some initial models. thinking about sort of hard and soft systems.
and just trying to think abouthow the thing might behave. so in the end, this is the project. it has a kind of hard inner shell,and then it has a soft pneumaticset of legs that can change and be inflated, which for us was very england. it was sort of england in the '60s,so we were really like this idea. and it's placed upon this rooftopon a kind of resin-coated surface. so it would collect, and then the surfaceof the material of the piece wouldactually allow fog to condense on it. so photographs or images of someof the behavior of the thing, differentweather, and i'll just get to this. so here's an animation of kind of howthe thing behaves over the course of the day.
collapsed. and the nighttime. and the morning after. another project, a bigger project; it'a museum, which was in this competition about,oh yeah, it's been about 10 years now. but the competition where the extension ofthe queens museum, which the directorof our school, eric moss, won the competition. but we were really interested in howthis museum in queens would function. it was kind of a third-rate museum. if you've seen the movie "men in black,"you'll know this structure.
it's where the thing crashes in there, and when they shoot it down. but anyway, here's the site down here. and the museum, the queens museumis probably known more for ... there's a large-scale model of manhattan thatwas for the 1939 world's fair; it was put in there. it occupies half the building down here. and then the other half of the building is occupiedby an ice rink, and a really sort of odd collection of art, which had not a lot of coherence. so the first thing we did was sort of survey allthe other institutions in the five boroughs ofmanhattan and in and around manhattan
to try to understand where the queens museumwould fit into these kind of scenario, if you will,of museums as a constellation. and knowing that the museum was somewheredown here, which was about preserving an oldbuilding, it was static in its identity, and local. and it wanted to kind of move up into this area,which was much more about having an identity,and then having more of an adaptive ability. so again, this is a box. they only wanted us to work on half the box,because they were keeping the model of new york. and we came up with this ideawith the museum on three levels. and we thought that the museum could be,the ground floor could be a column-free spacethat we called the fast floor. and then the ... let's get to these. so this would be the fast floor.
here's the model of manhattan. but because it was column-free andit could have constantly changing exhibitions, it could adapt quickly to any circumstancewithin the confines of the building. so everything from a damien hurstexhibition to maybe fragments of the titanic. and then the second floor wasthought of as a campus floor. it's where all the curators were, andthe curators were placed within the galleries, and the idea that curationand viewing would be one thing. and then the roof would bean outdoor sculpture garden. and so the way we thought about interactingthese things came into being with a section.
we were really interested in how a seriesof sort of penetrations in the roof and light wellscould begin to interrelate those things. then the thing got more developed. this is just a section through it,at the entrance, and then the idea of the roof. so i'm going to go through this one quickly. this is a house in upstate new york. it was for a client, single person, he had a veryexacting set for requirements for the house. and it was the first time we got a project on a sitewhere we didn't have to figure out how to fit it in. we have 14 acres, so the questionbecame like more, where are we going to put it? and it was a really small house, so i'm tryingto just understand how the thing related tothe sublime quality of the nature surrounding it.
it became actually a driver for the project. so instead of the house being interesting,confrontational, and object-oriented, it really tried to simply be something thatpromoted a sort of understandingof what was going on outside of it. i'm really interested in the idea of the insideof the house versus the outside, contrastingnature with things that were human-made. so a series of shots of light polesand billboards and trees, and then understanding, again, the kind of sublimequality of nature surrounding you and changing. and all the stuff the guy wanted to putin the house, which was a lot of stuff. so the house is really just a simple bar,and it has two very simple sides, one side with a loaded utility edge,if you will, in the house, and the other sidebeing much more open to the view,
and the sort of virgilian ideaof participating in thelarger sort of rhythm of nature. these are also the idea the metal on the sideof the house would reflect a change in the season. and then this is a series of sectionsthrough the house in the forest. basically the dilemma in this is thatright now at auschwitz, the remnantsof the camp are disappearing. they are ruining, and the place is beingflooded, and it's quite literally going away. and there has been, it's one of the few places,and ironically the most sort of notoriousand infamous symbol of the holocaust. it's one of the few placesthat has not been dealt with. and right now, there's a discussion aboutonly two ways to think about what to do with the camp. one is to restore it.
i saw an article in the papernot too long ago of, therewas an israeli architect -- no, a german architect and an israeliart historian got together and theyproposed to rebuild it, which is insane. i mean, i don't know where they ... it's just, i can't believe anybody's proposing that. so they proposed to rebuild it. so anything from restorationto reconstruction, whichis kind of unacceptable. and the other polemic in the discussionis to simply let it disappear, that its time is over and it should return to nature. and eric and i were really dissatisfied with bothalternatives, if you will, to that, so we were interestedin coming up with a third way to deal with the camp.
so some background stuff, again,i wish i could go into this more, but .. we presented this a number of times,but we presented it recently at a forum,at the american jewish university in l.a. and in the audience were quite a number of --i'm surprised how many -- survivors from auschwitz. and it was really difficult andinteresting at the same time, because it's obviously something wherepeople have, especially a survivor, has a greatdirect emotional contact with this as a subject. but the idea of, everyone agrees thatthey want to remember this place, but the discussion is about how toremember this place into the future, especially after the last survivor has passed. so that's where it gets to be sticky,
because for us, if you turn it into a museum,then the narrative of it is established, and museumstend to be places where go, we visit them. we get the narrative as given by a curator. and then we go away and say we've seenthat, and now we can forget about it. and how much you forget about itobviously depends on the person. but nevertheless, that idea thatyou consume something meansthat the question has been erased. you can give it an answer. so we were really interested in prolongingthe indeterminacy of this place. in other words, not provideeasy answers for it. so that's why restoration's not working for us.
this is a plan of birkenau. so, if you know auschwitz, there area number of camps around it. the two main camps are auschwitz 1which was the prisoner work camp, which has the kind of famous sign above the gate,"arbeit macht frei" -- work makes you free. and then this is the entrance to birkenau,which is essentially, as you can see,the much larger ... let me show you. this is birkenau; auschwitz 1 is down here, very small. i mean, you can get an idea of the size. the sole reason for this campis to exterminate jewish people. so that's why it was built.
so we're really interested in preserving one asthe museum, as it is now and leaving it that way. but we were interested in what to do withbirkenau, which is again, you can see, here's an aerial shot from one of the guard towersof birkenau, it's really falling into disrepair. these are all the chimneysthat are left from the barracks. this is the ruins of a crematorium. the ash pond where all the ashes were scattered. so the project comes froma biblical idea called the tel olam. it comes from deuteronom, which isin the torah and in old testament. and essentially what it is is, it's a termthat describes a place where such a horrific evilhappened that you can no longer occupy this place.
so there's a whole description in the torahthat talks about the commandment of godabout what to do with this place, which is essentially to seal it up,and no one can go there again. so we were really interested in this idea asa way to proceed with what to do birkenau. so our project is really about afterthe last survivor passes, to surround theperimeter of the camp as a figure, which you can now, because of technology these days,still see it as kind of a google earth icon of the place. but no longer would you be allowedto go inside of this tel olam. and instead, visiting the camp wouldinvolve moving around the perimeter. and then it also deals with ideas about over timethe idea of entropy and how the thing would fall apart. and a kind of timeline about moving up to the war,what it was, and then after the war.
and then moving to where we are now,and understanding it's disappearing. and in then 2045 building tel olam, and thenover time that thing eventually disappearing. so that in the end, when it finally decays,the next group of people would have todecide what will be done here. so it perpetuates the idea that itwill always be there as a figure. but the idea of not occupying it means --it's like, there's a great quote by gerhard richterthat says something like, art should confront you witha question, not an answer, and that each person hasto respond to it in their own way. so moving around the perimeter of the campwould be one where you would never be ableto know what is in there anymore. and you would always be asking the question,"what happened here? why did this happen here,"as opposed to being given sort of an easy answer.
yeah, i'm almost finished. so a lot of our work right now has been tryingto model or think about how the wall would decay. we just got a lot of robots at sci-arc,so we were trying to use them to think abouthow the behavior of something would deal entropically. and then making sort of animations again;they're crude but the idea of how this thingwould literally fall apart over time. you get the idea. and then thinking about different conditionslike corner conditions and thicker and thinner. and then there's a last thing here,and then this is the last project i'll show you. again, i'm sorry it's so quick;it really needs more time. there's a ceremony that occurs everyyear called the march of the living.
and people converge on auschwitz and theymarch through the camp to proclaim the people whosurvived, and the event that life is stronger than death. so it's a really important aspect ofthe camp, and so we're interested now in ... the slide on the left is showing howthe march of the living proceeded as it is at present, and the idea of the slide on the right would be,that's probably hard for you to see, but that would be something thatmoves around the perimeter. these are sort of the trails people would leave. so a view from above... again all approximations. so that's a work in progress, so we gotshortlisted for a foundation grant to deal with it.
so it's interesting. i have to tell this one anecdote, eric and i too this ... there's a friend of ours in sci-arcnamed jeff kipnis who's atheorist and critic at the school. and he saw the project at our office;he was really interested in it. so about a month later he in december called us upand said, "i showed the project to peter eisenman," because they're good friends, andhe said, "peter wants you to show it to him." so i said okay, so we went to new york in januaryand showed it to peter, and it was a reallyinteresting conversation, as you can imagine. and i realized again that we're all students. i felt like i was talking to my professor.
but it was really interestingconversation, about two hours long. and he was both extremely interestedbecause of the project that he did in berlin,the monument to the murdered jews, but also told us that we didn't go far enough,so he said in a word, in a sentence, he said,"achitecture can't end in nothing." so he told us we needed to think aboutmore of an idea in permanence in it. and it was a really interestingargument about what that meant. but nevertheless, it may be a segueinto saying that i enjoy teaching, bcause i learn more than you do,i just don't tell you that. and it's always really interesting, especiallyin situations that we're about to go into, which is that, as an architect to think aboutsomething larger, but to think about it in avery palpable, three-dimensional way
is an interesting circumstance. to do it in four days is alsoan interesting circumstance, and that the thing is driven manicallytowards understandings of this problem that probably wouldn't be arrived at had youworked on it for years and years, as the way,usually, these kinds of projects are worked upon. so i want to quickly move into ... how are we doing for time? yeah, okay. i'm going to talk just for about 15 more minutes on this. so when alberto asked me if i would liketo come up here and do this, of coursethe immediate answer was "yes."
i know the terrain' i know some about the school. i'm really interested in it as a teacher, andfeel a kindship between our school andyour school, especially as i visit your campus. but also, i started to think about what this ideaof urbanism is, and i'm not going to give you ... i'm not qualified to, nor do i have enough time,even if i were qualified, to give you anexhaustive history of urbanism. i probably could insert the word"random" in there, but to see it that way is ... i started to try to think about what'sthe definition of urban planning. and that’s the best one i could come up with. so, can you read that back there? anyway, the anticipation of needsbefore they become desperate.
now, that's a kind of almost pragmatic answerto what a city is going through whenthey think about planning something. it isn't necessarily about master plans, whichtend to imagine fixed images or scenarios ofwhat the city will be at a certain point in time. when i was kid, i used to remember to seethose covers of the l.a. times magazine that said "the future l.a," and it always had the kind of image on the cover,it was a watercolor more often than not,and it had spaceships flying around. and everybody thought,"wow, this is really interesting," but as we get older we thinkthis is really not interesting. and so on one hand, urban planning is tryingto anticipate qualities in the city that are desirable,and needs in the city, if you think about it that way, before they become desperate and you haveto sort of deal with them on the fly or retroactively.
and then there was this daunting fact, which architectsonly design less than 1 percent of cities in the world. cities are really large organisms -- i don't thinkthey're machines; i think they're organisms. and they're a series of ecologies, and they'rea series of interactions which produce somethingbeyond needs, and beyond planning. and if you can understand that,then i think you'll understand that we have,as architects, control over some things, and we don't have control over a lot of things. and in a way, what you have to do is thinkabout how architecture can participatewithin that in a productive way and understand and accept the sortof incompleteness of that act, and also understand that whatyou are creating is potential. i always liked what louis kahn said,which was architecture is a kind of offering.
and people take it up or they don't. but i don't know if it's so much about prescribingwith precision about what happens versustrying to, in a way, design scenarios, if you will, where built facts participate inpromoting something to happen. so this is my super brief history of urban planning. and it's more like art of cities really,and it's more a series of observations. one of the first things i was thinkingabout was, why do cities originate? and it's probably because of these two primary drivers. there's probably not a notion about civicness,or collectivity beyond those two immediateneeds, to come back to those ideas of needs. so there was a ... there used to be a greatseries of little books called the "semiotext(e).â€
and there is a french theorist namedsylvã¨re lotringer, with virilio he wrote avery short one, and it's called "cities in defense." and the whole book argued that every citywas planned around defense, and war. and all the other stuff didn't matter;that's what it was planned around. i always thought that was fascinating,but again, primarily two big drivers here. and then my hometown, i like to think about itas my second hometown, of florence. and what's interesting in a city like florence,and common in many european cities, i think, is that if you think about architects participatedin these large, important buildings, they wereusually institutions for the catholic church, or they were houses for really rich people. but after that, all the rest of the cityreally was designed not by architects,and it was designed by typology.
so there were typologies that endured withthe people who built them to producehousing for housing, for example, housing stock. so housing stock wasn't thoughtabout as an architectural act. very different from the waywe think about things today. so the idea of the italian city is that you get a kind ofbackground and then you get a sort of foreground. and then you get all these exceptions,which are the piazzas and piazette thatreally become the sort of public space. again, a whole different conceptionabout what architecture is andhow it participates in the city. and then we have other cities whichare simply not about architecture at all, but just an index of need. and we obviously know there area great many cities in the world that actin this fashion, behave in this fashion.
so i started looking at some of the majorfigures who thought about cities. some are architects, some are not and trying to think about what their thoughts meant,not so much historically what they did. so hippodamus is a greekcity planner, among other things. really considered the kind of father, if you will,of urban planning because he proposesthe idea that a city is organized on a grid. and i'm less interested in the beauty ofthe grid or the spaces of the buildings, but more about this idea that he thought of the city planas a reflection of a rational social order aas opposed to a sort of morespontaneous, excretive one. and then you know you look at someone like nollil,who drew this plan of rome, completely his jobwas one of recording, a cartographer if you will.
but drawing this amazing plan of rome,which simply in black and white describesthe city as either public or private. and if you think about a city like rome, whenprobably before he drew this, but still when hewas alive and drawing this and measuring this, that the city, both the interior of major publicbuildings like the pantheon, the streets and thepiazzas, as all public space and then private space, a very sort of binary conception of the city. it's sort of either or, you're in one or the other. there's no gray zone in here. and i find that fascinatingas a way to think about it. if you think about someone like camillo sitte, theidea that the city is conceived of parts, over wholes. less interested in singular buildings,more interested in the odd voids that are created bycollections of buildings in the city.
his book was to plan citiesaccording to artistic principles. so a whole kind of survey or collection, if you will; of the principles he thought were important in making strong and effective public space. he liked oddities as opposed to regularities. and then you get somebody like ebenezer howardproposing these garden cities; you'veprobably seen a lot of this before. but the idea of self-sufficient, sustainable sparse,spread out, series of satellites, nothing new here. but again, interesting to me, not because thisis a sort of utopian idea, but interesting to me because it conceives of the city as having nosingular center, as having a series of nodes
or it's like a network, and then thinking aboutthe sort of version that grew out of this,which is essentially suburbia. and that ebenezer howard wouldprobably be rolling in his grave. but nevertheless, the idea that this was somehowsomehow sustainable, green, and healthy. and you think about suburbia, and i'm notsure you can think about that in the same way. and then, fascinated by thisperson's sant’elia, the futurist; which, you know, the futurists, sant’elia andothers, marinetti, all sort of reveling in the ideaof industry, and actually advocating war. the future is thought, as you probably know this,that the idea of war is sort of leveling what wasthere before in order for everything to begin again, very radical thinking in italy. ironically sant’elia was killed in the war.
but again, kind of visions for things that werenot yet, and "vision" being a key word here. you look at ciam, started by corbussier and seretin,a lot of others, in reaction to people like sittethinking that city is not a picturesque postcard, the city is a kind of series of systems,the city reacting to the horrors of slums and the sort of incredible cross-programmingthat produced really horrific living conditions, and really in the name of hygiene and the separationof things, proposing that in fact we should live inhigh-rise buildings and be surrounded by parks. pretty radical idea when you think about it,especially when proposed in paris. again, a little anecdote -- when i was teachingin switzerland, we had a chance to gosee a lot of corbusier’s buildings -- as alberto, i know you being a fanof corbusier, you'd appreciate. and one of the things that we were able to do wasin paris, saw a lot of buildings, but then we were ableto go and have a nice tea with charlotte perriand,
who was corbusier's, she designed allof corbusier’s furniture, if you know. and she was still alive at the time. and she lived in this fabulouspenthouse apartment in saint germain. anyways, having tea with her and talking to her,you know, she was kind of talking to us about thethings she did and the furniture and telling stories. and i thought, this is not very interesting right now. so i asked her, what do you thinkabout ciam, should we do that again? and she kind of perked up like thisand said, "yes, you should do that again." but she said, "don't invite any of the old people." and i said, okay.
but then we started about this project,which this project is demonized constantly, saying who the hell wouldthink of doing this to paris? you're going to destroy this beautiful city. and she started talking about is as a reality ofthe circumstance, saying, well this part of pariswas actually called with a lot of slums at that time. and you have to understand that therewas a much larger social idea in the air. and i only say that because i want to pry your mindopen not towards creating ville radieuse projects,but rather to think about things circumstantially, because you knowm i was listening toa lecture recently with rem and eisenman. and eisenman was saying, "we know this is corrupt; we know this isbankrupt; this kind of thing doesn't work anymore,"
the kind of large slab block housing, you know,pruitt-igoe, the whole argument. and rem says, "well, it doesn't work here." but he said it's amazing how inventiveand creative people are living it in asia. and his, koolhaas's argument was,it depends where you are. he said that city is different than this city,and this idea of things being universal, which ironically was what thiswas about, is not necessarily true. so i think that it's easy to kind of sayno to things, but i want you to sort ofthink about when you might say yes. frank llyod wright, then, fascinatedwith this idea of frank lloyd wright. if you read about him, the sort of rugged individualist,truly democratic, looking for an american architecture.
and it couldn't have manifested itselfmore clearly than in broadacre city. the idea that each person would ownan acre of land, and it would coverthe earth with american democracy; meaning it's a grid, everybody is equal, everybodycan do what they want on their one-acre plot. not so unlike the idea of voting, whichvoting says we're all individuals, we're alldifferent, because it's a democracy. but when we vote, we're all the same person, right? it only counts once. so kind of an interesting dichotomy there. you know, and again -- whoops. here's the vision.
and then the reality is when we live like this. not so different than goingoutside somewhere in arizona. it looks like that, near taliesin west. and you know, understanding that all of this kind ofas an idea didn't ever work, because we don'thave those, you know, we have something else. and so, you know, thinking about thingsin reality also as a series of forcesthat architecture only participates in. i included team x and the smithsons, becausei just think this quote is so germane to what you'redoing, it's been stated over and over again. but you know, when you think about it,that they said that in the '50s,which was probably an echo of corbu. but we have to start thinking about uurbanismarchitecturally, and architecture urbanisticly. and that those two things are sort of interactive,i think is a really important observation.
again, some of this team x stuff hadthe idea -- this is candilis and woods, berlin free university, sort of matte building covering the earth and dealing with the section. i wanted to include this because, you know, after the war in japan, tokyo beingfirebombed, it was just flattened. you could be looking at a photo of hiroshima. but that kind of futurist dream came true,or i should say nightmare, came true, and the city was destroyed. and so the metabolists in japan areanother interesting group of people. originally they weregoing to call themselvesthe burnt ash school.
but the idea that the city,it represented an opportunityto rethink an entire city. if you know anything about tokyo, it's --anybody ever been to tokyo? ever tried to find a buildingwhere you have the address? well, it doesn't matter. so when you try to find a building, they'relisted chronologically when they were built,so their numbers are actually chronological. but anyway, it's a medieval city, and it wasan incredibly medieval city that built up over time. the war kind of flattens the city. the metabolists think, we're goingto rebuild this, in a kind of thinking about all the new possibilities of conceivingthe city as a more organic growthon a megastructure infrastructure.
and so you get some really absolutelyastounding proposals for how to thinkabout tokyo being built in the bay, and the idea of megastructures vis-ã -vismaki and isozaki, but here's the point: tokyo didn't do any of this. tokyo built up so rapidly because of he reconstruction after the warand the expansion of the economy that all those economic forces eclipsedany architectural or urban planning idea. and so when you go to tokyo today, it's evenmore medieval than it was before the war. it's an amazing kind oflabyrinthine sort of configuration. and venturi and denise scott brown. i only include them because their idea that planningwas no longer a sort of two-dimensional enterprise,but rather a three-dimensional understanding of things
i think was a really important contribution to howarchitecture and urbanism can start to converge. and then rem with "delirious new york." and i think a point to be made here is thatarchitecture, what you're going to bedoing with part of the embarcadero, you're not going to be planning a city, andyou're not going to be reconceiving san francisco,in the way of any of the examples i just gave you. but you will be building a large enough pieceof the city that you can begin to think aboutit generating or, how should i say, promoting qualities that movebeyond what's asked for. so what i think is so interesting about"delirious new york" -- i mean there are lot ofinteresting things about it is frequently cited. but rem talking about the city as a kind of enginethat actually moves it beyond the, to go back tothe original quote, the anticipation of needs. so his argument is that the cityproduces something greaterthan the sum of the parts.
and i think you're going to be dealingwith large enough part that you can beginto think about that idea of delirium. and it's a slippery fish; you can't grasp it, youcan't plan it, but you can create the potential for it. and so for rem, you know, a lot of thiscomes out of the ideas of manhattan,and being intensely congested. and instead of the idea of demonizing congestion,he says it should be promoted and the cityproduces it already, simply out of circumstance. and that if architects can begin to understand howincredibly dense and congested conditions couldproduce something greater that the sum of the parts, can produce its own heterogeneity insteadof architects willing it, that he think that's apositive force that comes out of urbanism. and the kind of famous ideathat simply in one building, how can you sort of think about the elevatortaking you through a variety ofsort of radically different conditions. and he's so interested in the way that thoseconditions rub up against one another.
and he asked,what does architecturehave to do with that? so the idea that you're on the kind of 51st floorin the athletic club, boxing and eating oysters. he sees that as a sort of odditythat only the city can produce. and then that leads to some of his obviously largerurban projects that deal with the idea of bigness. so these are just some simpleobservations i was thinking about. i was actually typing theseon the plane on the way up here. so the idea that cities are elastic or inelastic -- what does that mean? it really means the change in permanence,engagement with the complexity of culture,is an index of informal, i'll call them smooth cities,
to use that kind of dichotomy of smooth and striated. and then on the other hand, stability, predictability,drive a desire to fix the identity of the city,asking as a form of resistance to change, that it can become exclusive and quickly exhausted. one's l.a., one's san francisco, okay. and i’m being mean. no, i’m not really. but what i mean by that is, there's a desire,and you'll see it many cities,and i think you'll see it here, which is, there's a desire to kind of fix the identity of things,because there is a value in that; it's a valueabout stability, it's a value about image, and that feeds directly into an idea about economy.
and i'm not arguing that cities should beamorphous and have no identity or character. but i'm really interested in the idea of thingsthat are soft and perhaps changing,and things that are hard and fixed. because that's an act of architecture, is that it's fixed. and how those two things interact. so the idea that there are some thingsyou can control, and there aresome things you can't control. and that your imagination might not be about seekingout and describing all the things you can't control, but again, thinking about how you mightmake things in places where multiplicityand a kind of elasticity can occur. so let's talk about the site for just a minute. so i think alberto's outlined it.
obviously this is a kind of an operative word here. you know, too often when you get a brieflike this, if you're a responsible person, andi certainly try to be a responsible person, you try to read the brief as carefully as possibleand you think about the idea of satisfying itin the most robust way that you can. and there will always be someone onyour team -- it's probably usually me -- who says, "wait a minute, they didn't ask for that," or "that's toomuch parking," or "that building can't be that big,you know, you can't do that." i am not arguing for irresponsibility,but at the same time, when you thinkabout what a visionary scheme is, you know, i think, god bless him,he just passed away and you havea great show at your museum about him. but lebbeus woods commenting on this, saying: "is it or was it ever likely that either steven holl's orle corbusier's visionary projects would be realized?
no. did they matter to the architects? did that matter to the architects? not likely. so why did they make them? why are you guys making this? to unequivocally articulate a set of architecturalprincipals and design ideas and to test them." so remember at the beginning of the lecturei was talking about that kind of internal conversationyou have with architecture as a discipline? a big part of this has to with understanding theseideas about cities, and to thinking about whatthis project can contain and what it can't contain.
and then within it can contain, understanding whereyou might even challenge some of the things as given. so you know, i again, maybe last anecdote,there was a competition in l.a. about five years agoto design housing around dodger stadium. they were going to help payfor keeping up dodger stadium. if you know it in l.a., it's up on top of a hill. it's pretty much all by itself, surroundedby a very large park, elysian park. and there was a competition to designhousing around it, and they invitedmaybe five firms to do this -- good firms, all coupled up with landscape architects. so you know, some of the firms proposedvery nice housing surrounding the stadium. you could look into like wrigley field.
very sustainable, a lot of green, howto get the park in there, the whole thing. very responsible schemes. and they pretty much responded to the brief as given. and then thom mayne, who's a sort ofbad boy in l.a., i heard him on the radio. he had proposed this project where heunraveled the whole thing and the stadiumup there, the housing and the park moved down through acrossthe freeway into downtown l.a. it was an enormous project. and the cynic in me would say, "oh,tom, he's looking for a big project to do." but then i heard him on the radio.
and he said the difference between doing competitionsin america and doing competitions in europe,is in america we respond to the brief, and in europe they use the brief as anopportunity to uncover what the real issue is, and that the architect has a kind of imaginationabout how to think about not only what's given butwhat could be, in a very responsible way, if you will. i mean, he had a whole series ofarguments about why this would happen, and he started to think about it in muchbigger pieces about the city, and one partof the city responding to another. and he didn't think about it withinthe confines of what he was doing. now, that's not an advocacy thatwe all go out there on the site today and say,"you know, i can't wait to tear down coit tower. and i'm going to build something toalcatraz," you know, we're not doing that. but it is a way of saying that to try to think not aboutthe most audacious thing you can do, but to thinkabout the most intelligent thing you can do.
and there's a huge difference there. and i would encourage you to thinkfirst and foremost about what this site is. when i lived here. this freeway was here. and i used to love to drive on that freeway, because it was the only time that i could actuallydrive through the buildings and downtown, especially where it meets the one going over the bay bridge. i don't remember the numbers. it used to come off of there, and then i worked for ... mark mack used to have an officeright over by the freeway.
and i remember this thing, people woulddrive by and you could wave to them. and it was really amazing, that youcould actually drive through the city. part of me lamented that they took this thing down. and then part of me also understands it, because if you go down there now, you understandit as a way of reconnecting to the water. and you understand it as a kind of lively placewhere all kinds of things can happen, everything from selling stuff to havingpolitical protests to pillow fights. i have not seen this, but it looks it's fun. but anyway, so i encourage you to kindof think about this as a larger thing.
and when you think about this, perhaps you canstart to think about it in very specific terms, the way alberto is outlining, there's going to bea kind of major event here, it's the america's cup. there are ideas about buildings here. there are ideas about parks,all sort of matter-of-fact things. we could design any of them well. but we could also try to think about this asa larger condition that represents an opportunity. and i think you touched upon it, which is, thisis an edge, and what's the nature of an edge? i was reading in the planning report, of allplaces, which usually i don't find very interesting. there was a history of the city, talking reallyand about how much land had been addedto san francisco to build out into the water,
much the way they do inbattery park in manhattan, thatkeeps getting extended by fill, right? and that idea that a good part of this is already artificial. and so to think simply about the ideaof parks, of recreation, of green spaceand things of being a kind of built fact, and to think about this idea of this edge was createdfor completely other reasons, yet we kind of marvelat the idea of the massive amount of surface area. who doesn't like to go out here and look at the city? but to think about what constitutes this as a largeredge, and that an edge doesn't have to be a division. i think the ancient greeks said an edge is not wheresomething stops, it's where something else begins. and i always liked that idea. so thinking kind of about that as a larger thing,and thinking about that as a sort of larger constructthat could have a great deal of variety in it.
but to think about the relationship of thesetwo things, not in a romantic way, likei like to look at sailboats -- i do, but ... but more in a way that talks about maybehow you would deal with the idea ofextension, the idea of incursion, the idea of maximizing the surface area of that thing. i mean, these are all things that we will discuss. but in the end, that's what's in frontof you; that's what's on the table. so i'm looking forward to areally robust four days. thank you.