Farshid Moussavi, "The Function of Style"

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Summary

Farshid Moussavi's Harvard GSD lecture, "The Function of Style," explores the evolving role of style in architecture. Moussavi discusses how style should be seen as an agency in architecture rather than just a unifying visual feature. Through various examples, she explains how style impacts everyday experiences by influencing how buildings are perceived and interacted with. She advocates for architecture that challenges conventions to create new experiences, seeing buildings as assemblages of elements that offer creative responses. Moussavi's focus is on style as an active agent in daily life, bringing about engagement and participation from its users.

Highlights

Moussavi discusses shifting the narrative of style from mere aesthetics to an active component in architecture. 🏗️
She explains how style guides the perception of and interaction with buildings, influencing everyday life. 🏙️
Buildings are viewed as dynamic assemblages of elements, each with its own agency. 🌆
The lecture challenges the norm, pushing for architecture that invites active participation. 🚀
Moussavi uses examples to show how architecture can create new experiences by breaking conventions. 📚

Key Takeaways

Style is more than a unifying visual feature; it's an agency in architecture. 🏢
Architecture today is about creating experiences that engage and prompt interaction. 🎨
Buildings aren't static—they're assemblages that can influence everyday activities. 🚪
Moussavi advocates for disrupting conventional architectural norms to innovate. 💡
Style's role is to facilitate new daily interactions, not just aesthetics. 🔄

Overview

Farshid Moussavi's lecture dives into the intricate world of architectural style, redefining it as an agency rather than just a visual trait. At Harvard GSD, she argues for a dynamic interpretation of style that shapes the way buildings interact with people daily, influencing their experiences and participation.

Moussavi breaks down the traditional notion that style is merely about aesthetics, highlighting instead its role as a component that orchestrates the interaction between people and buildings. Through various examples, she demonstrates how style can change the perception and functionality of architecture, effectively engaging its users.

The lecture emphasizes the importance of challenging architectural norms to foster innovation. Moussavi encourages architects to look beyond conventional aesthetics, exploring how architectural elements can act as active participants in daily life. Her insights propose a future where style is seen as a catalyst for change and interaction.

Chapters

00:00 - 08:30: Introduction and Farshid Moussavi's Career Overview The chapter begins with a warm welcome to the audience for the first lecture of the semester, highlighting the presence of numerous well-rested attendees.
08:30 - 16:15: Discussing Style in Architecture The chapter begins with a reflection on the speaker's anticipation for Farshid Moussavi's lecture after seeing a poster advertising the event. The speaker notes Farshid's academic background, indicating she completed her Master's in Architecture in 1991. There is a personal anecdote recounting the year 1990 as the time of their first significant interaction, establishing a timeline and context for Farshid's influence and contributions in the field of architecture.
16:15 - 26:00: Changing Architectural Conventions The speaker recalls an event from 25 years ago, highlighting the presence of a strong and talented teaching assistant (TA). This individual stands out for their focus, tenacity, and talent during that time.
26:00 - 32:05: Montpellier Residential Complex The chapter discusses the Montpellier Residential Complex, highlighting the enduring quality and impact of the work over 25 years. It recounts the professional journey of Farshid, who, after completing her studies at GSD, worked at various firms before founding the architectural firm FOA with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. The success story of FOA is likened to a fairytale, illustrating the significant achievements and contributions of the founders in the field of architecture.
32:05 - 41:00: 130 Fenchurch Street: Office Building in London The chapter discusses the significance of 130 Fenchurch Street, an office building in London. It highlights the experience of participating in a significant international competition, winning it, and the rare opportunity to actually realize the project. The chapter emphasizes the importance of this project in the architectural field over the past 15 to 20 years, and how it has been recognized as a key project. Additionally, it mentions that the firm responsible for this project continued to take on many other successful projects.
41:00 - 52:15: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland The chapter discusses the contributions of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland to the field of contemporary architecture. It emphasizes the success and recognition that the museum has received through various prestigious awards such as those from the Venice Biennale, RIBA, and Enric Miralles prizes. Furthermore, it highlights the museum's commitment to education and teaching as key components of its sustained success.
52:15 - 58:00: Victoria Beckham Flagship Store Design The chapter titled 'Victoria Beckham Flagship Store Design' discusses Farshid's journey and her contributions to various projects. It highlights her teaching experience across multiple institutions over the past 10 years, focusing on the effective use of studio format in teaching.
58:00 - 67:00: Final Thoughts on Style and Architecture This chapter discusses the importance of seminars as a fundamental aspect of developing architectural investigations and research projects. It highlights how these investigations are crucial to practicing architecture in the modern context. The narrative implies a reflective question on the impact and opportunity that such academic endeavors provide in contemporary architectural practice, further illustrated by the involvement of a group of students at the GSD (Graduate School of Design).
67:00 - 86:00: Q&A Session - Discussion on Architectural Styles and Principles The chapter focuses on a Q&A session that is centered around the discussion of architectural styles and principles. The discussion kicks off with a reference to previous works by a seminar participant, including 'The Function of Ornament' and 'The Functional Form', published in 2009. More recently, the participant has been concentrating on an extensive volume titled 'The Function of Style', which has just been published. The chapter sets the stage for an in-depth discussion on style, primarily anticipated to be led by Farshid.

Farshid Moussavi, "The Function of Style" Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 Good evening. Good evening, and welcome. It's my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the very first lecture of the semester. And it's great to see so many wonderful, well-rested faces
00:30 - 01:00 before the beginning of the semester. When I saw the poster, which is for Farshid's lecture, and it says Farshid Moussavi, MArch '91, I started calculating the years-- '91-- and I remember that the first proper encounter that Farshid and I had was probably in the year 1990.
01:00 - 01:30 So it's exactly 25 years ago that we were together on those trays upstairs, and she was a great TA. I remember that she was very, very focused, very tough, and very talented.
01:30 - 02:00 And I'm glad to report that nothing has changed in 25 years. I think after Farshid finished her studies here at the GSD, she worked for a number of firms and I think it wasn't too long when she and Alejandro Zaera-Polo set up their firm, FOA. And many of you know that it was one of those fairytale stories
02:00 - 02:30 in a way, of participating in a big, international competition; winning the competition; and actually getting to build it. Because often, those things don't happen in that order. And I think that project also has gone on to be recognized as really one of the key projects of the last 15 or 20 years ago. And that's been a very important thing. The firm, they went on to do many other projects.
02:30 - 03:00 But it's also important to recognize that the success and the recognition and the many awards of FOA-- with the Venice Biennale, with RIBA prizes, Enric Miralles prizes, and so on-- have also been sustained by an incredible commitment to education, to teaching, and I think--
03:00 - 03:30 since Farshid has been continuing to practice on her own-- with many, many projects, including some that are actually on exhibition outside. She came to the GSD, having taught at a variety of different institutions, almost 10 years ago. And I think one of the key factors about her teaching has been how to really use the studio format
03:30 - 04:00 and to use the seminars as a very crucial component of developing investigations, research projects, that are really focusing on the discipline of architecture. And I think that it's been very important to see how those investigations produce the possibility of practicing today. I mean, that as a kind of question. She, with a group of students here at the GSD--
04:00 - 04:30 not from the studio, but from the seminar-- developed the book The Function of Ornament, then the book The Functional Form, which was done in 2009. And for the last few years-- very long years, I think, probably-- she's been focusing on the book called The Function of Style, which is this very large volume that has been out recently. I think part of this discussion of style-- that I assume that Farshid will discuss,
04:30 - 05:00 so I don't want to give a mini-preview-- but part of this discussion of style is interesting and important for us because all of us know that there's certain moments in the history of architecture-- when you think about Renaissance, or Baroque, or the Georgian period in the UK, or things like that-- that there is really an identifiable character to a body of work that's being produced in a particular locality, that
05:00 - 05:30 has an extreme similarity. And those things come from that particular moment-- the ideas, the cultural conditions-- and that produces a kind of consistency. We can refer to that moment or to those moments as being important, in terms of the evolution of certain styles. But I think there's also a certain period-- which we are the inheritors of that, in the 19th century-- where there's also, you can really talk about the idea
05:30 - 06:00 of the crisis of style. Where that notion of the kind of consistency, the singularity, disappears and in a way, you could say anything goes.h That there are multiple options. There is not really the focus on something that's so deeply rooted, that everything happens within that same level of consistency. And this means that we are all, in a way, left to our own devices to construct, somehow, mini-tendencies,
06:00 - 06:30 localized-tendencies, affiliations, unique identities, and so on. So that today, you can say you recognize the work of [inaudible]. Patrik Schumacher can write as much as he wants about parametricism, but actually in the end, the work has that dimension of recognized stability despite the resistance, in a way, to the idea of the appearance, of the look, and so on. So I think this book is very interesting,
06:30 - 07:00 and Farshid will tell us in her own way why there is-- for her-- the possibility of another way of thinking about the production of architecture, and the way that the architectural project really performs its functionality, its use, as more critical parameters for the way in which the architectural project is conceived. That discussion is not without its own criticism, if you like,
07:00 - 07:30 or without its own discussions. And I think it would be really wonderful to see how the formation of some of Farshid's recent projects come together, in a way, with her research and articulations of [inaudible] investigations. I couldn't think of anyone better than Scott Cohen to also engage Farshid with a few questions after her lecture,
07:30 - 08:00 and then to open it to all of us for further conversation. So I'm sure we're all looking forward to Farshid's presentation. Please welcome Professor Farshid Moussavi. Thank you. Thank you very much to all of you for being here. I will talk about how we should define style before talking about the function of style.
08:00 - 08:30 But first, let me say that by function, I mean agency, not utility. So the function of ornament can also be read as the agency of ornament. And the function of form can also be read as the agency of form. Style relates to the way we arrange buildings. But when discussing the function of style, we are asking, what is the agency of style as objects in every day life? The agency of human subjects in every day experience has been discussed in the field of phenomenology,
08:30 - 09:00 in terms of how humans gain access to the being of objects. This being is assumed as either already existing, such as matter, or being governed by natural laws, or as having a metaphysical reality, such as God and so forth. Although more recent investigations in every day experience-- for example, by speculative realism-- question the privileging of the human being over other entities and propose the flattening of human subjects and objects, they still investigate objects as given, whether natural
09:00 - 09:30 or artificial. In architecture, the object-subject relationship is unavoidable, as buildings are part of every day experience. But buildings don't exist as ready-made objects. They are arranged with our architectural process. And because style relates to the way we arrange buildings, it is central to the discussion of agency of buildings in every day experience. Traditionally, style has been the word employed to describe a narrative around which architects unite buildings. However, three pivotal changes in the way buildings
09:30 - 10:00 are designed and used since the 1990s force us to define style differently. Firstly, unity seems not to apply to contemporary architecture, which is characterized by immense diversity. If this diversity is not the product of mere eclecticism or the market, style must account for the coherence that underlies it. Buildings today face many challenges that are separate, distinct, and irreconcilable. They have led to different co-efficients for buildings-- such as space planning, security,
10:00 - 10:30 rights of light, fire engineering, sustainability, facade engineering, or health and safety-- that are often beyond the expertise of the architect, requiring specialist consultants. The design process has therefore changed from a solo activity to more of a team sport, in which the different co-efficients are the product of separate and concurrent lines of development that unfold at different speeds during the design process, and introduce much unpredictability to it. Different building elements, no matter how small or large,
10:30 - 11:00 are consequently vital forces for the project, some crossing paths with one another and others not. Therefore, style needs to account not for how buildings can be unified, but how they can be coherent and yet be composed of different elements that are implicated with each other, to simultaneously address different concerns. Secondly, with the advent of the internet, the way architectural ideas are made is different, since ideas are now shared and circulated worldwide with astonishing speed.
11:00 - 11:30 And architects are so steeped in each other's ideas and theoretical anxieties, that certainty of what belongs to one person and what to another disintegrates. And thirdly, again because of the internet, the way that buildings are used has changed since many every day activities and events that used to happen in buildings-- such as shopping, reading a book, or watching a match-- are now easily accessed online. But since these online activities are all reduced to the uniform context of a screen, independent
11:30 - 12:00 of time and space, their experience has become very similar, whether reading different books or buying an item of clothing or watching a sports match. To complement the uniformity and the ubiquity of engaging with every day activities online, buildings must exploit their unique spatial-temporal natures to generate the possibility for diverse types of encounters between people and activities which buildings house. For example, libraries in the wake of e-books
12:00 - 12:30 have changed from inward-looking book repositories-- solely for quietly taking out and consuming books-- to open and differentiated spaces that encourage people to construct different reading and learning habits. While schools, responding to the fact that information can be accessed and searched online, have shifted from generic to the focused classrooms that favor the transmission and reception of standard knowledge to unique, differentiated configurations that promote different kinds of experience-based learning.
12:30 - 13:00 While department stores, responding to the rise of e-tailing, have shifted from hermetic environments whose sole objective is the provision of goods, to acting as places in which the physical experience of shopping is site-specific, so that buying an item in one store is unlike buying it in any other. While offices, rather than declining in the face of email and conference calling, have shifted from the one size fits all arrangement of [inaudible] to create efficiency
13:00 - 13:30 to include different types of interstitial spaces, that promote knowledge construction through chance encounters and serendipitous knowledge exchange. Therefore, the agency of buildings-- or their ability to act-- resides in how their actual presence informs people's experience of their every day activities, and thereby makes a creative contribution to every day life. To think of style in relation to people's every day life encounters, rather than their understanding
13:30 - 14:00 of the narrative underlying it, is to deviate it from the traditional uses of style to unite buildings to represent the personality of its architectural author, its geographical location, or the time it belongs to. For various reasons, these uses of styles are now redundant. For a start, should style strive for unity? No. Unity across a group of buildings implies that the actual presence of a building plays no unique part in people's every day life encounter, but rather provides them with the same experience
14:00 - 14:30 as all other buildings. Should style represent authorship? No. Today, architectural ideas exist as an open source. The over-zealous protection of an architect's ideas as a signature or autonomous domain inhibits the migration and circulation of ideas, and the consequent development of new ones, rethinking what is now labeled as copying or imitation. And sharing from a common pool-- as is often done in the field of music or has been explored by the function box-- will allow us
14:30 - 15:00 to detach style from being fixed to an author and treated like an open source, or a reason which has no beginning or end. It is always growing from the middle, evolving in different directions by different architects. Should style represent nationality? No, because in today's world of extensive free trade; increased mobility of capital; the rise of transnational corporations; and the increased mobility of technologies, materials, and designers; strict boundaries between nations have been eroded.
15:00 - 15:30 Like the style of the modern bicycle that has evolved in the hands of different nations ever seen since its inception, we need to approach the style of buildings through the idea of singularity. That any style can be adopted by any nation and changed to generate new, unpredictable styles. Should style represent a period of time? No, because time is not divided into periods in which everything is fixed or frozen. Today, as I mentioned earlier, buildings are subject to different external and often conflictual
15:30 - 16:00 causes, which means that they evolve through separate, equal, and concurrent lines of development that unfold at different speeds during the design process, which may take anywhere between one to six years. Enhanced levels of security may require imminent changes to the entry sequence of the building early in the design process, whereas new environmental regulations may necessitate changes to the envelope design midway through the process. And the election of a new mayor every four years
16:00 - 16:30 could imply change in the space program, a budgetary change, or even the building location. Now the organicist model, in which each element or part obediently serves the whole in a vacuum, is clearly out. Like the M-16 rifle, the challenge for an architect today is to conceive of buildings not as unified wholes, but as a confederation of elements which we can call an assemblage or manifold.
16:30 - 17:00 With a particular kind of arrangement and grouping that introduces an effectivity to them, without reducing the independence of the elements, so that they can be changed during the design process. Having discarded the representational narratives that historically defined style, what remains in people's experience of buildings is the real presence or business. Which the diversed individual elements-- with their colors, textures, shapes, and forms-- together produce severe limitations indeed, but for the architect
17:00 - 17:30 they hold the secret to a new way of working, which involves assembling the larger and larger number of elements and things which buildings are divided into, in new ways without the constraints of representation. Each assemblage gives a specific propensity to the building elements, which manifests itself as a cluster of effects. A gate introduced in the perimeter wall of a building may transmit closure and traversability. The asymmetric location of a window in a bedroom
17:30 - 18:00 may transmit invisibility and openness. Full-height glassing of hotel rooms may transmit transparency and exposure. Handrails located around museum exhibits may transmit visibility and untouchability. Or skylights in a train station may transmit transparency as well as protection. In order to investigate buildings in relation to questions of agency, we must then ask not what its style stands for, but in what way is it active in every day life?
18:00 - 18:30 Here, for instance, is the Smithsonian East Wing by I.M. Pei, where unlike on the inside of the museum-- where people are discouraged from touching its precious artifacts-- the exterior of the museum is designed with blade-like corners, whose effect of sharpness is so inviting to touch that visitors have worn their edges away. Similarly, at the Guggenheim Museum, the lowness of the handrail invite people to recline on it. With the result that people who might otherwise pass quickly
18:30 - 19:00 through its ramping galleries-- as if they were walking along the aisles of a supermarket-- stop and lean on the handrail while they look at the art. While in the case of FOA's Leicester Cineplex, the reflectivity glare and the formation transmitted by its mirrored stainless steel rainscreen cladding means that rather than ignoring the Cineplex-- as is often the case with such inward-looking buildings-- at a couple of points around the building, passers-by stop and salute the building. Systematically. No matter what sex or age, there is no reason
19:00 - 19:30 that people should respect this building. This was certainly not part of our brief as architects, nor was it a cultural response that we hoped to evoke. Rather, like the handrails which stop people falling into the Guggenheim atrium, or the walls which shield the Smithsonian galleries from the elements, the envelope of the Cineplex is a consequence of the practical demands for dark interiors, as well as the desire to generate effects that would disrupt
19:30 - 20:00 the conventional encounter with this kind of building in the city. What is going on here can be reduced to either the agency of the object or the passers-bys' subjectivities. It is produced by them together, it is caused through their encounter. The traditional representational approach to style is based on an anthropocentric conception of agency that assumes that there's a direct road from the act of looking at a building, and the fact of understanding it, as well as a concordance between the sensibility of one
20:00 - 20:30 person and another. Which we know doesn't exist. Recognizing that the aesthetic experience or encounter between people and buildings is a co-production brings us closer to a non-anthropocentric conception of agency. That is, when people-- when different people, with their own unique, subject positions-- come into contact with a building, they encounter some or all of its effects, which result from how its different elements have been styled or arranged. For example, a residential building
20:30 - 21:00 may transmit effects of flexibility, transparency, and differentiation inside, and scalelessness and privacy outside. Some people may only experience the building as a passers-by, and others who live in it may encounter all of its effects. Through these encounters, people construct their unique, experience-based knowledge of the world. So we can define style in the following way. Style is the agency given to the elements of a building through their specific arrangement.
21:00 - 21:30 It manifests itself as a cluster of effects that spreads directly from the building and influences the kind of assemblage that people will form with it as they take part in their every day activities, like residing, working, or watching movies. Consider the interior of a cinema. When a certain way of arranging one of its elements, such as its seats, is repeated over and over again, a convention emerges. The seating arrangement in cinemas then becomes a type-- or typical-- leading
21:30 - 22:00 to a typifying of perception in those going to watch movies. The activity of watching movies in this way this seating arrangement dictates acquires a naturalness, so that people begin to watch movies in this way unthinkingly. Whereas if the convention of seating arrangement is changed, made different, and a cinema no longer conforms to people's expectations, it becomes conspicuous. And even if it is just for a brief moment, they have to think about it and work out how to use it.
22:00 - 22:30 In other words, the introduction of a stylistic shift away from the typical cinema creates an awareness or a surprise about the cinema which people who would otherwise not have noticed. When discussing subjective experience, Heidegger and Levinas refer to surprise as a rupture in the experience of objects that helps humans decipher the transcendent beyond. However, we know that the source of change or surprise, in this instance, is the result of the efficacy or the creative agency of the architect.
22:30 - 23:00 Here is the Oklahoma passenger port terminal, a project where we-- as the architects-- changed a number of conventions that influenced how people typically engaged with a ferry terminal. Instead of the conventional or dominant way of arranging the terminal around a linear circulation route to simply move passengers as directly as possible to the gates-- which reduces this experience to a thoroughfare-- we designed it around a looped circulation system, through bifurcating terminal floors which seamlessly connect people to levels above and below,
23:00 - 23:30 to freedom from the habit of passively passing through it, so that they might choose to use it as a place to sit down and paint. Therefore, by disrupting the conventions associated with a building for traveling, we generated the presence or style for a ferry terminal that frees individuals both from their previous preconceptions-- traveling preconceptions-- as well as so that they can creatively respond to it. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere argues
23:30 - 24:00 that the significance of aesthetics lies in the fact that what can be apprehended by the census determines the possibilities for the participation of individuals in daily life. For Ranciere, politics is a disruption or descensus in conventionally-perceived or prescribed spaces. To make that which did not possess grounds to be seen, seen, so that active encounters replaced passive participation. We could then say that by making the conventions of how
24:00 - 24:30 every day activities are arranged unfamiliar, architects disrupt or resist the way bodies of individuals are supposed to fit those every day activities. And in doing so, ground style in the micropolitics of every day life. The efficacy of the architect is not about telling people the right way to use a terminal, or watch movies, or to live in houses, or to work in offices. It doesn't have definitive outcomes. It resides in creating a disruption or descensus in how
24:30 - 25:00 buildings are conventionally perceived and used, to generate the kind of differences in buildings that call for a response or active participation from the people who use them, contradicting the idea that only human subjects have agency. To adopt this potential of buildings, it is necessary to address style not as a representation, but a performance. So what is the effect of this approach on the process of design? This is a residential complex that we are designing for the city of Montpellier in the south of France,
25:00 - 25:30 where we have based this style on the arrangement of its elements and how they would influence the experience of residing in it. The core, through its layout and location, is the agent determining the privacy or intrusion of people that they experience on their way to their apartments. The floor plates, owing to their size, are the agent determining the size and number of units on any one floor and the number of orientations afforded by each-- and therefore, whether residents
25:30 - 26:00 experience natural ventilation or stuffiness. The location of the service rises core and structure is the agent determining the level of flexibility or inflexibility the residents experience over time as the need to reconfigure their interior layout arises. And the relationship between the floor plates, the envelope, and the handrail is the agent determining the privacy or exposure residents experience in their balconies.
26:00 - 26:30 So you can see that the building can neither be governed by a single, unifying idea-- as in an organic whole-- nor can it be reduced to independent elements. The elements must be arranged as an assemblage so that each one-- by virtue of its location and grouping with other elements-- develops an emergent property whose effectivity is the possibility it provides for people to reside in the building in a new way. The structure and core and services form one group of elements, the floor plate and envelope
26:30 - 27:00 form another group of element, and the floor plates and handrail form another group of elements. And here is how the group performs. The core and service rises are centrally located, and coupled with the structural walls along the perimeter envelope. This generates an interior that transmits flexibility as it is liberated of any fixed elements. The external envelope is inset to generate balconies. And the remainder of the floor plate-- owing to its small size-- is divided only to four corners--
27:00 - 27:30 eventual units-- that benefit from cross ventilation. Since these outdoor spaces would abut each other, it would be usual for dividing screens to be introduced. Or since dividing screens limit views laterally, their shape might be changed from straight to curved, as in the Marina Towers or Aqua Tower, which rectifies the problem of blocked views. But since the outdoor spaces overlook each other laterally-- whether they are wrapped around a circular plan or aligned linearally-- they compromise privacy sideways, as well as
27:30 - 28:00 from above since the balconies are stacked on top of one another. Discordance also exists between the interior layout and the balcony, either because the balconies are identical in size despite the differently-sized apartments, or because the balcony's curved whereas the interior is rectilinear. Given the increasing invasion of privacy we experience in our contemporary life, we chose to focus our agency on shifting
28:00 - 28:30 this convention of outdoor spaces which provide people a lack of privacy. Firstly, the typical floor plate is pinched to divide the balcony of the four units, obviating the need for a dividing screen. Then, the floor plate and the perimeter envelope are made curvilinear, so that balconies would flow more easily around the corner. The floor plate is then rotated relative to the envelope, until it is no longer possible to overlook the neighboring balcony, as seen in this image, in the lateral views.
28:30 - 29:00 In order to reduce the overlooking of the balconies vertically, the position of the balconies are shifted from one floor to another. This generates floor plates that are not identical to each other, and transmit effects of privacy, diversity, multidirectionality. It also doubles the vertical distance between the balconies so that the overlooking that conventionally occurs when balconies are simply stacked is minimized, as the balcony below is always two floors down.
29:00 - 29:30 To minimize views down even further, the handrail is mobilized as an agent relative to the balconies that are visible two floors down-- a condition that is found along the red lines of these plans. So plans of some handrails of some balconies must generate a gradient of privacy along their lengths. In a residential building, the handrail must typically perform two contradictory roles, to allow maximum views out of each balcony, and minimal views in from the exterior.
29:30 - 30:00 And in our case, the third one of enabling minimum views down to the balconies below. The profile chosen for the handrail support and its distribution can play a significant role in performing these roles. As indicated by these four types of handrail supports-- and the different percentages of using an out-of-date [inaudible]-- views in and views out do not vary so much whether the handrail support comprises one line of support, be it rectangular profiles, or two lines of support with
30:00 - 30:30 circular profiles. But when the two lines of support are offset, views in are reduced while maintaining their transparency out. And if the spacing of the support is densified in certain areas, the handrail can minimize overlooking down. This assemblage of floor plates, envelope, and handrail generates two types of private balconies, a single-height balcony with an exterior curtain for additional privacy, and a double-height balcony,
30:30 - 31:00 which is found in different orientations along the height of the building due to the rotation of the floor. So therefore, providing many options of outdoor space based on size, shape, type of view, and sun exposure. Therefore, approaching the building as an assemblage, we can see, can provide a style of a different kind of agencies. The agency to shift people's experience of their interiors from interior-exterior discordance and possibly stuffiness, to interior-exterior concordance
31:00 - 31:30 which encourages indoor-outdoor living and cross-ventilation. And the agency to shift the experience of balconies from exposure and homogeneity, to extreme privacy and diversity. Now the building isn't finished yet, so it is impossible to know what impact these effects we have on the people who will live in the apartments. But it is inevitable that the encounter between people and a new kind of balcony in the apartment-- an open, extremely private space-- will prompt creative responses from residents,
31:30 - 32:00 since there is no precedent for this kind of outdoor space. The style of office buildings can also call for active participation from the people who use them. This is 130 Fenchurch Street, a 19-story mid-rise office tower we are working on, located within the Eastern Cluster of tall buildings in the city of London-- an area which fosters airborne synergy or knowledge spillover between financial trading firms, formally and informally. This means that the public ground between buildings
32:00 - 32:30 is in intense use as traders move between headquarters. So the project raised two questions for us. How should the building articulate its presence as an object of encounter for passers-by, for whom the practical functions of the interior is not of concern? And given that work is increasingly defined by digital technology, how can the physical space of work make a contribution to it? To address these two questions, we had to identify the elements that relate to each of these, and the co-efficients that they together would produce.
32:30 - 33:00 The massing and the curtain wall of an office building are the agents determining its exterior presence by day. For example, the massing could imply that the rays of sunlight are directed towards people's cars parked nearby, as in the case of the so-called "Walkie Talkie" at 120 Fenchurch Street to the left. The massing could benefit the rights of light of neighboring streets and buildings, as in the case of the so-called "Cheese Grater" at 122 Leadenhall Street to the right.
33:00 - 33:30 By night, the exterior presence of an office building is defined by its structure and the ceiling that becomes visible. Here, our office building's near by our site, which during the day are designed to be distinct from one another. But at night, it's hard to tell one from the other, as they all use the same ceiling system. The interior presence of workspaces is defined through the relationship between core structure, curtain wall, and shading devices as well as services.
33:30 - 34:00 The relationship between the core and the structure relates to the flexibility of its occupancy pattern. The combination of the central core and exoskeletal structure of 30 centimeters [inaudible] at the top provides less flexibility than the combination of external core and exoskeletal structure at 122 Leadenhall. And the relationship between the structure and the curtain wall relates to the transparency of the workplace and the flexibility of space planning. Just like a residential project, the building
34:00 - 34:30 can neither be governed by a single idea-- as in an organic whole-- nor can be reduced to independent or discrete elements. It must be conceived as an assemblage in which elements-- by virtue of their location and grouping-- can develop different emergent properties. The other advantage of this approach is that certain elements can continue to develop over a long period of time-- longer period of time-- as needed. For example, the core of our building is still being re-appraised and developed.
34:30 - 35:00 We began by addressing the presence of the building in the city, since this is first needed in order to obtain planning approval from the City of London Corporation. Most mid-rise buildings in the area have a stepped massing to disguise their scale from the street level. But there is no need to disguise the mass of the building on Fenchurch Street, since Fenchurch Street is continuously bending and narrow. So the building mass will always only be seen partially along approaching streets anyway.
35:00 - 35:30 Since stepping would have almost no effect on passers-by, our massing strategy is based on pure extrusion, and therefore the element that will have agency in shaping their encounter of the building will be its curtain wall. Conventionally, curtain walls are assembled independent of the load-bearing structure. In order to appear transparent-- yet they are never transparent, except perhaps at night, because the curtain wall includes horizontal and vertical caps or mullions, silicone joints, and expansion joints, as well as differentiating devices which
35:30 - 36:00 appear darker than glass. Consequently, a grid appears that transmits effects of efficiency, which perhaps belongs more to the [inaudible] days than today. During the day, the glass curtain wall is reflective, which is meant to integrate the presence of the building into its context by mirroring it, but instead generates a sense of anonymity and disappearance in the building. We wanted to shift the presence of 130 Fenchurch Street in the city away from these conventions of transmitting efficiency, anonymity,
36:00 - 36:30 and disappearance, which are not desirable any longer. Therefore, firstly, rather than assembling its curtain wall with flat pieces of glass, it is an assembled with concave ones, which are varied in scale to accommodate the irregularities of the site footprint, and generate variety in people's experience as they move around the building. Secondly, the glass- curved glass panels-- are assembled with a structurally glazed reveal, replacing the conventional appearance of frames
36:30 - 37:00 with a shadow reveal. Instead of simply mirroring its context, the fluted curtain wall will compress reflections of the context into each one of these segments, and new images will emerge. Thirdly, in order to simplify the color and tonal range of reflections into a subtle gradation of tones, the glass will be frit to appear black, similar to black glass used by painters in the 18th and the 19th century, to turn from geometric to physiological optics.
37:00 - 37:30 The black frit will not only reduce the tonality of reflections and the reflective qualities of the glass, it will also absorb the dark shadow reveal between the glass panels, turning the repeated images into a continuity. The tighter the fluting, the finer will be the grain of the image. The variation of the curtain wall, as well as the simplicity of its extruded shape, will be at odds with the stepped neighbors or sculptural nearby high-rises, and will engage passers-by to explore all of its edges
37:30 - 38:00 as they move past the building. While its serrated rooftop will reinforce the building's presence and distinction against the sky, here their focus will be lifted upwards. Unlike a conventional flat curtain wall that almost disappears against the sky, the cluster of effects of presence and multiplicity, verticality, and fluting, serration, fluidity, are very different to effects of rigidity, stepping, stacking, flatness, absence, and uniformity that
38:00 - 38:30 are experienced in the buildings immediately next door. This effective break will surprise people and invite them to make sense of the building. On the interior, the curtain wall of a mid-rise office building-- as seen in these images-- remains present, but its agency resides in the type of alliance it forms with the building's structure, to define greater or lesser flexibility for the workspace. The structural frame of a mid-rise building is conventionally designed at 9-meter spacing. At this span, the columns are very large,
38:30 - 39:00 which is a challenge for office partitioning. Instead, we have designed the structural columns at 3-meter spacing, so that they would appear as part of the curtain wall. At this span, the columns are substantially smaller and fit within the depth of the curvature of the curtain wall. This frees up area taken otherwise by structure and optimizes the interior for partitions, if required. In addition, the 3-meter spacing of columns will perform like interior brise soleil along the west facade by stopping the afternoon sun from coming in at low-level,
39:00 - 39:30 and therefore avoiding glaring the workspaces. On the south facade, at midday, the sun will be shining straight through to the space. In this case, it will be the frit acting to filter the light, mitigating glare. The alliance between the structure and the curtain wall, however, has emergent aesthetic implications, too. Inside, the conventional 9-meter spacing of columns places the emphasis on structure, whereas the even distribution of columns at 3-meter spacing
39:30 - 40:00 places the emphasis on the space. And outside, along the frontal views, instead of large columns at 9-meter centers and the floor slabs, the presence of the smaller vertical structure at 3-meter spacing dissolves behind the recessed mullions. Along the oblique views, however, the depth of the columns inside will partially interrupt the views in. The center of each glass panel, marked in red, are where there will be clear views of the interior. With this in mind, the black frit
40:00 - 40:30 is graduated, from densest at both edges that sit in front of the structure, to total transparency in the center of each glass module. Here, we see half of one of the glass modules. For the interior views out, the black color of the frit has the advantage that, physiologically, the human eye is trained to focus on lighter colors. And therefore, the eye will see straight through when it is viewing to the outside. On the exterior, the dense frit along the edges of each glass panel will absorb the shadow-- structural reveal,
40:30 - 41:00 as well as the presence of the columns on oblique views. And it will also generate dark vertical shadows in each glass flute, transmitting verticality. In contrast, the dark vertical shadow. The presence of the floor spandrels recede and the tower will transmit scalelessness. By day, the space between the passers-by and the curtain wall will therefore be constantly active. The eye will become aware of a seemingly-tireless movement within its apparent simplicity.
41:00 - 41:30 And from this, a sensory paradox will begin to emerge. The passers-by eye will be drawn to search across the surface of the curtain wall for the source of its dramatic, vertiginous effect, only to discover that there is nowhere for it to rest on. And it is in this act of assembling elements in a coherent way-- so that they would co-function to generate emergent effects without any attempt at communicating their practical functions-- that this style of the curtain wall will be free of any representational, as well
41:30 - 42:00 as practical, functions of the offices, to instead engage the actual process of perception. At night, as I mentioned earlier, the exterior presence of the building is defined by its structure and the ceilings that become visible. The fluted glass panel will appear transparent, and the peripheral columns will carry less visual weight, by virtue of their slenderness and dark color. It is, therefore, the interplay between the ceiling and the floor spandrels which will have agency in people's perception,
42:00 - 42:30 focusing on the effectivity produced by the relationship between the ceiling and the curtain wall at night. Instead of using typical ceiling tiles, we are at present developing a linear baffle system, which will easily address the co-efficients of lighting and accessibility to services integrated in the ceiling, whilst also providing texture to the ceiling. Instead of an even distribution of baffles, we are at present exploring an uneven spacing between them, as a way to create an illusion of pleating
42:30 - 43:00 in the ceiling at the scale of the column grid. The ceiling would then transmit rhythm and movement, rather than flatness. From the exterior, looking up at the ceiling at night, the conjunction of the horizontals of the floor slabs and the diagonals of the ceiling will produce an entirely new form. This could not be predetermined. We had to find it during the process. As I mentioned, the project is ongoing, but I think it already shows that what might seem a limited beginning-- a curved glazing
43:00 - 43:30 profile-- can become a fertile ground for many other effects. Because it is very neutral and you can work into it, and work into it, and work into it, to generate an assemblage that works simultaneously on two levels. The physical identity of each element, and how it conjoins with other elements to perform certain practical functions-- and at the same time, the perceptual experience of that relationship according to each element
43:30 - 44:00 of the building-- is simultaneously one thing and several things. It is neither subservient to a single fundamental idea, nor is it seen by itself. It is always affected by other elements. And the agency or freedom of the architect consists in moving about within this narrow frame to find opportunities for shifting conventions, no matter how large or small. Next, let's briefly discuss the Museum of Contemporary Art, as it is a project that belongs to our discussion tonight.
44:00 - 44:30 Whereas the primary concern for terminal buildings is getting people from A to B as quickly as possible, the primary concern for contemporary art museums is the flexibility of the galleries to display changing exhibitions. The white cube gallery, because of its total whiteness and separation from the rest of the museum-- as well as the exterior-- is typically considered the most flexible for changing exhibitions. However, by being self-contained and freed from time and daily life, it transmits a neutrality, a temporality, and a contextuality.
44:30 - 45:00 And as the museum exterior is disconnected from the experience of the galleries, it can prompt critics to argue for the style of the museum through external narrative-- such as sales or spinnakers-- rather than the agency it might otherwise carry, vis-a-vis going to see art. Meanwhile, the rest of the museum-- given that the galleries are sealed away-- is devoid of any art. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland
45:00 - 45:30 is designed to subvert this convention of the museum as a decorative shed, that represents external narratives outside and provides a neutral white cube inside. However, this is not done by designing the museum as an organic whole, but as an assemblage of elements that-- in groups-- act as different agents in people's experience of the art museum. The envelope and the main stair are the main, primary agents, but these in themselves are elements made up of smaller elements, or smaller agencies, as Darwin would say.
45:30 - 46:00 The small elements of the envelope include its shape, its entrances, its rainscreen cladding, its fireproof paint and structure, and its windows. Its shape generated through a compact hexagonal entry floor, rising to a rectangular roof, allowed us to locate the building in the corner of the site, leaving space for a plaza in front, into which museum events would spill out during good weather. This shape-- which is the second-best fit for the corner after a circle-- also
46:00 - 46:30 provides five different entrances on five sides of the building, which embed all of the interior and not just the main gallery with hyper-flexibility, to be reconfigured in different ways over time and accessed separately. At times, it can be used for events, and at other times, for multiple, simultaneous exhibitions. Such as this space on the entry floor with an entrance of its own, that is assembled with movable shelving so during the day it hosts the museum store, and at night, it converts to a performance art space.
46:30 - 47:00 The envelope's shape is also designed to act together with these construction layers, to generate unexpected experiences. Its exterior, vented rainscreen layer is assembled with black mirrored stainless steel strips pressed in the middle and arranged diagonally across the building's faces, to provide a specific phenomenal quality to be simultaneously reflective and absorptive. Therefore, rather than being timeless and separated from every day life, it catches the light and reflections
47:00 - 47:30 of the physical context of the museum-- as well as changing human relations-- and generates different, unexpected effects. Close up, the cladding strips transmit delay, compression, and transience. Further away, the rainscreen in combination with the envelope's shape transmit other effects, depending on the point of view which it is viewed from. From certain points, solidity and blackness, and from others, hollowness or otherwise tenting. We could say ambiguity.
47:30 - 48:00 I've been told it was designed to look like a crystal, but its agency lies not in representing any external narratives, but in appearing relational or more dialogic, rather than detached from its context. Inside, the structural steel decking is another small element of the envelope whose agency has been activated. It's painted in blue fire-resistant paint. Instead of a narrative, the tension between the effect blue on the inside and black on the outside
48:00 - 48:30 produces a sense of-- or the way of-- entering the museum. Which is not like moving between two disconnected states, because both the black rainscreen and blue structural metal decking follow the same shape. The building retains a sense of surface tension between the inside and the outside, which visitor's experience upon entering. The blue fire-resistant paint performs other functions, too. It wraps around all of the museum spaces,
48:30 - 49:00 reinforcing continuity between art and non-art spaces. When it wraps around the main gallery, it subverts the neutrality of the white cube gallery where art floats and has no weight. The contrast between the dark blue ceiling of the main gallery and the light floors and walls generates an inversion of the gallery interior's exterior, in which the ceiling transmits a sky-like effect of boundlessness and the space below transmits an effect of weight, due
49:00 - 49:30 to its contrasting brightness. Finally, MoCA's windows form another small element, or agent, of its envelope assemblage. They are arranged as long strips-- respective of the location of the floors inside-- and diagonally-orientated following the orientation of the exterior rainscreen cladding. In combination with the envelope's shape, they transmit an effect of movement and scalelessness. On the inside, the windows are mobilized to create a different effect, to disrupt
49:30 - 50:00 the assumed incremental ability of the white cube interior and exterior, typically celebrated by carefully-framed windows. The window reveals at MoCa are clad in mirrored stainless steel, to displace the depth of the gallery walls with the lateral views of the exterior. The inside and the outside create a new act that shifts constantly, bringing a sense of time constantly changing into the galleries, or an effect of temporality. The stair is another agent in changing
50:00 - 50:30 the conventional museum experience. It is designed to both provide access and subvert the typical separation between art and non-art spaces. What appears as a single staircase is, in fact, a double-decker stair. An open stair stacked on top of one of the egress stairs to save space, but also to provide not one route to climb the museum floors, but 10 opened and closed ones which are intertwined with art. The enclosed egress route is designed as a sound gallery, subverting the idea that an egress stair is only used
50:30 - 51:00 in the case of emergencies. It is painted in yellow to dematerialize the sense of space and focus attention on sound, while the upper route is designed with wide landings to act both as a social space, as well as a performance space. This stair is extended above the top floor gallery, to enable visitors to look inside when it is closed for setting up exhibitions, thus expanding their perception of the museum beyond the space of display to include the production of exhibitions.
51:00 - 51:30 I think we can conclude that the specific arrangement of MoCA's elements-- its stair and envelope, entrances, rainscreen cladding, and interior fireproofing define its style, trajectory, or [inaudible] as a museum. A contemporary art museum that transmits flexibility, temporality, transience, boundlessness, scalelessness, relationality, and dialogism. Just to finish with a smaller project, the Victoria Beckham flagship store in London,
51:30 - 52:00 where we were asked to design the store on three floors of an existing building. Like most brands, Victoria Beckham has an online shopping platform, so this project raised the following question for us. How can the style or arrangements of its shopfront, ceilings, floors, stairs, and display systems generate a site-specific shopping experience? The shopfront is usually arranged as a display space separate from the interior, which, as in a market, focuses on transmitting choice
52:00 - 52:30 with display systems that transmit permanence and predictability over time. To shift customer's experience of shopping away from these conventions, we focus on the various elements of this store as well as people's perception as material to work with, and how they might generate a variety of experiential moments that invite different types of encounters in time and space, like different propositions. They shopfront is designed as a window, partially in glass
52:30 - 53:00 and partially in a concrete sash window, with no merchandise on display. So it would function with the space inside, and activate the sense of the store from the exterior less like a market and more like a gallery. When customers approach the concrete window, they are presented with the surprise that what happened-- what appeared as a sash window, that usually slice vertically up and down-- is a sliding door which effortlessly slides to the left. The accessory wall for handbags, immediately
53:00 - 53:30 behind the shopfront, is designed to change the perception of this space over time. Its long shelves are retractable to allow the store to vary the amount of shelves and handbag on display, or to completely remove them to allow the space to be used for other events. The ceiling is clad in mirrored stainless steel, so it would draw customers to view the top of handbags that are reflected in it, which is often the most interesting. And to create a virtual double of the space,
53:30 - 54:00 people are engaged in a process of working out where exactly is actual ceiling line, or how tall is the space in actuality? Two staircases connect the entry level to floors above and below. Their opening is made or arranged smaller than the stair, generating a partial ceiling for them that shows everything up and down-- or upside down-- and provides an uneven headroom. This alters people's perception of the staircase as merely practical. The stair is a room of its own, in which
54:00 - 54:30 accessories and clothing and different artworks are displayed over time. Meanwhile, in order to engage customers in a sense of upward expansion, the ceiling of the floor above-- seen here to the right-- is designed as a lightweight, concrete, coffered ceiling. This use of coffered ceiling, incidentally, has a long history in the modern art gallery, concealing the mechanical and electrical systems. But here, it is used to support a movable system of chains for hanging clothing, too, subverting usual clothing
54:30 - 55:00 displays. Clothing can be moved to different locations-- like movable walls in a gallery-- or entirely removed to convert the store into an event space. The alliance between the hanging system and the ceiling has other implications in the shopping experience. Typically, customers need to put down their handbags to pull the hanger off a rail, and use both hands to view a piece of clothing front and back, or to hold it in one hand and pull the price tag out with the other.
55:00 - 55:30 It soon becomes quite an awkward exercise. The chain system allows customers to pull out the chain and rotate the clothing 360 degrees with one hand, while they continue to carry their handbag with the other. It injects playfulness into the shopping experience, challenging the convention of a shop as simply a market focused on choice. To further make the perception and experience of shopping site-specific, the counters for folded clothing
55:30 - 56:00 and small accessories are designed in mirrored stainless steel to turn them from floating objects to objects that are immersed in their environment. Consequently, the experience of shopping for knitwear or small accessories is inseparable from the space that surrounds them. And to further liberate customers from the predictability of the seating they find in the store over time, the seating is designed as a system of triangular benches that can be combined in different ways, and be moved around the store so they would encounter
56:00 - 56:30 the seating in different ways over different visits to the store. So, when you come into a store, something that you may have taken for a given-- the usual displays and a focus on choice of merchandise-- starts to lose its ground. You have to find what the shop is, and how you behave in it. This example of how we mobilize the different elements in a shop to create shifts in the traditional encounters people form with shopping, is an example of how style can be given agency. So what is the consequence of this approach
56:30 - 57:00 to style as agency? when it is adopted by all architects? To answer this question, the style book brings together projects from the 1990s to the present, and some from earlier in the 20th century. They are drawn in a similar manner, and grouped according to the activities they host. To identify their similarities and highlight the differences, because it is in these differences that moments of descensus are located,
57:00 - 57:30 and where architects have chosen to exercise their agency. The larger consequence of this approach to style-- as I hope these slides show-- is not incoherent diversity, but a diversity underlying which is a network of projects that are related to one another, but discontinuous with each other at the same time. Each project appropriates conventions set by another project and shifts it to make something new appear in the encounter between people and their everyday activities, and in doing so,
57:30 - 58:00 uses styles as an agent of change. These processes of appropriation, which is inevitable, then becomes a disciplinary tool for architects to engage the micropolitics of the every day. We can leave these slides now running while I answer any questions you have. Thank you,
58:00 - 58:30 Well, [inaudible] asked that I kick off the conversation and then open this to everyone. I was struck by the way in which you articulate the field today as a collection of conventions and systems of a certain consistency versus what it seems
58:30 - 59:00 your commitment is, which is to introduce disruptions, to actually produce exceptions and unique occurrences, or unique types of synthesis of those systems, so as to call attention to them, as you said, to ask for active participation by breaking the conventions. It reminded me a little bit of-- it seems to have some parallels to the interests that
59:00 - 59:30 were developed-- the kind of interest developed in the Koolhaas Elements exhibition in Venice. Though there is a difference. I mean his exhibition seems, to me, was a function as a show stopper, as it were, breaking the tradition of the Biennale which was usually to exhibit new and extraordinary works today. And instead, he wanted only to introduce the elements
59:30 - 60:00 that we have inherited, things that are given the intractable aspects of architecture, things that were not to do with any innovation or any synthesis-- in fact, taking architecture apart and making it everything except for the synthesis. Of course, they are not projects. They were just a collection of examples of things. And you, of course, are bringing them together and to work, so it's a very different problem. But I'm curious to hear how you reconcile-- I mean I think,
60:00 - 60:30 somehow, you are interested in that kind of way of looking at things that is somehow manifest in that exhibition. Well, I think-- Let me hear about that. --started being interested in the kind of thing I've been doing since a long time. I think it was very refreshing to see Rem have face in architecture again. And obviously, I am-- I respect him enormously.
60:30 - 61:00 I think that the Biennale is always a challenging exercise. I welcome what it was taking on. I personally think that its shortcomings is that it-- if I can say it strongly-- failed to make the argument architecturally because I think, from my experiences and actually the elements today--
61:00 - 61:30 the architectural elements, the actual individual elements, are very much a collaborative investigation between the architect and many, many other experts that inform them. Architecture is the way you put them together. So I don't think the corridor scene as towards that space in the middle is what makes that significant, but where you locate that corridor.
61:30 - 62:00 A corridor in an office building means entirely different to a corridor in a residential building and a corridor in a museum, which you rarely find. And where you're located, what size it is, I think that's when these elements become architecture. Window frames or windows, it's not really the inventory of windows you have. I mean we are inundated with that choice. And it will only grow. It's where you put the window. It's how many windows you have.
62:00 - 62:30 It's what size they are. It's what view they enable through-- this is when the window becomes a piece of architecture. And while I thought the Biennale didn't even begin to deal with was the assembly of the elements, which I think is architecture. But there was one-- there's one aspect of it, I think, I hear in what you're saying some sympathy with, which I think I hear in what you talk about, which is it seemed to me that it was a critique of the endless proliferation
62:30 - 63:00 of innovative disruptions. In a way, he is trying to turn it into-- architecture into a field of particles in which you can't understand it in any way relative-- the inflections that authors give to it. That is the voice of the individual architect. Instead, it's just this field of the elements as he put it. And-- But it's not true. --what I wonder is due you concern-- I mean I would think you would-- the proliferation of difference
63:00 - 63:30 is the problem that you may have been criticizing. You, for example, have said you like to see these things going against the normative office building or going against many of the things that seem otherwise to just be banal and undifferentiated, all at night, the offices with the same ceilings, and so forth. You would like to break it. Are you concerned though that with breakage after breakage, it collapses into a new normativity in which nothing can be seen as different.
63:30 - 64:00 How do you handle this question of building the field of-- building the field of the conventional against which you break-- I mean first of all-- --and breakage? --just to clarify, these conventions are not done by some dirty person. They're done by us architects. We create conventions all the time. Gund Hall, a building I absolutely love, is a convention. It's already a convention, so we can take it and change it. So when I say convention, I don't mean bad buildings. None of the projects in this [inaudible] would be there if I thought they were bad buildings.
64:00 - 64:30 So they are buildings we can learn from, and we can learn certain things. We can learn conventions of putting elements together in a particular way. But what we also need to be committed to is to contribute to peoples experience of life and not turn conventions into monotony. We create conventions every time we make a building. It's a new convention, if you are an experiment architecture, et cetera. And therefore, what we also need to do
64:30 - 65:00 is to find a way in which we both carry knowledge forward, but also find a way to innovate. And I think there has been a lot of criticism of the '90s to present, not looking at difference, but saying everything looks similar. That's normally how people talk about the work of the '90s to now. It's talked about, oh, it's all similar. It's all similar. And I think the problem is that those people who say that are not looking at the right scale
65:00 - 65:30 and are not looking at the work in the right way because I think there are significant differences. You just have to look at them. It's a finer range-- You'd have to find them. And so rather than thinking that-- since the '90s, the architectural profession was inundated with commissions. There was a boom in the building industry, and so architects lost their stolen, and they didn't have a big manifesto to sell. I think we need to look closely and see that something really
65:30 - 66:00 important was happening there. And architecture, I believe, completely changed. The way we work is no longer the way it used to be before the 1990s. And so the way we work is different. We need to react to this, and in order to be, let's say, carry agency, we need to work with the system, but to be able to also change it. I mean I-- of course, I've shown projects of the office
66:00 - 66:30 as a way to illustrate how things work. But I think, ultimately, what reads in these-- I hope-- is the fact that there is something happening across these projects, which is not just interest of mine. I'm interested in it because it's not just my interest. I think you can-- this is a particular reading. I'm sure there are other readings of this period. But I think this reading exists. We can see it. Well, let me-- now, let's open the discussion because I think there have been so many provocative subjects
66:30 - 67:00 already brought to the floor. And I know many of these are on many of the students and faculty minds because they're in the discussion. They're in the culture of the school. The book is part of the culture of the school given how many were engaged in it, and the other books before it. I mean it really colors the studio culture, and so I think so many people here will have a number of thoughts about what's happening in the work that you're doing.
67:00 - 67:30 Who would like to ask a question? Oh, good. OK. Hi, Farshid. I'm Stephen. Earlier, you said the buildings face challenges, and the architects are faced with problems beyond their own expertise at this point, both with environmental, financial, legalistic. I was wondering if you could comment on what you feel like the expertise of the architect
67:30 - 68:00 is now in today's practice. Assembling them together. I sincerely believe that that's the unique role of the architect, to assemble them together, which I'm calling style. I think that's what we do. I think that's what we've always done. It's just that perhaps the number of fields that related to an architectural project were less and we had less collaborators.
68:00 - 68:30 But ultimately, we've remained as the experts who creates some kind of transversal link between all these different parameters that are thrown at a project. And I don't think that's a skill that the other people in the team have. But wouldn't that require us to learn about all the other extrinsic forces and disciplines in order
68:30 - 69:00 to-- Yes, as an architect, you need to know a little bit about all of it. You do. You do. You need to know a little bit. If you want to ask the right questions and push these different areas in a project, you need to know enough about them. So we are a little bit of a generalist. We don't know the gasket of a window as much as a window manufacturer.
69:00 - 69:30 Antoine? [inaudible] Yes, please. I'm not sure it's a question. It's more a perplexity about the overall ambition because you started from the traditional problem of style, which is, how do you articulate an individual building or an architect individual expression
69:30 - 70:00 with a more collective set of production or way to do things, et cetera? So that was the initial thing. And that's the traditional notion of style. But then when you moved to your own work, it was more about being stylish. But let it me clear. It's because my English is clumsy. It's not about making objects which have a style of their own in which it's no longer the problem of the relation of an individual building or an individual practice
70:00 - 70:30 with a collective, a broader set of the buildings or practices. It's about being stylistically interesting. You know, just-- and then when we go back there, we go back to the suggestion that there are connections between individual instances, so we're back to the traditional notion of style. So I'm wondering, by the end, what do you mean by style? Is it style as the relation between an instance
70:30 - 71:00 and a broader set of buildings, authors, or whatever? Or is it style as doing something that is-- when I use stylish, I mean which has an interesting appearance, is stylistically interesting, but by itself. Yeah, I never-- And the way you-- [interposing voices] --presented your building. Just to finish. Just about the new and the not new, what you said about the architect today is exactly what Vitruvius said.
71:00 - 71:30 That's OK. That's OK. Just as a side note. We go through cycles. That's OK. I don't think I meant to say that-- I think there is a shared approach in this architectural style. But that's not a formal shared approach. And it's about a way to work-- an approach to the way of putting together buildings and in what context you see-- you direct it to.
71:30 - 72:00 So when I talk about the projects, I explain them against shifting conventions. So this is not about trying to look like other architects. But however, there is this conversation that, whether we like it or not, ideas are shared. We are inundated with the sharing of ideas, so similarities appear. Sometimes, they are conscious. We know, for example, that the work
72:00 - 72:30 of OMA and [inaudible], there has been a longstanding dialogue formally. There has been a longstanding dialogue. It's intentional, which I think is interesting because it's about very, very careful shifts. That has been happening for a very, very long time. Sometimes, it's conscious, and sometimes, it's not conscious. But the idea is that you, in fact-- there is-- I don't mean to say that projects are supposed to look similar intentionally.
72:30 - 73:00 The intentional act is to actually make them look different because the general tendency is for them to be similar. Other questions? Ariana? As you know, this year, the Architecture Symposium focuses on the topic of organization. And because I'm so focused on it,
73:00 - 73:30 it was impossible for me not to look at the material that you presented through that lens. And one of the core ideas behind it is that the question of how architects put things together. And I think you talked directly to that question. But one of the issues that I'm wondering is that, in how we put things together, for some people, this idea of organization could be related to function, how you distribute programs in the building. For other people, it could be the material itself, the relationship between the ceiling
73:30 - 74:00 and the windows and the walls. But I think it also is related, for example, to how you organize the material in your book, right? And if historically, this idea of organization has enabled perhaps for the discoveries of new paradigms in architecture as they emerge, I wonder what are your thoughts in the moment where all of these elements or all of these comparative processes make the buildings become equal. Because I think you're arguing not for the erasure of difference, but that somehow
74:00 - 74:30 this newly identified relationships become visible, and they produce something beyond the time when the buildings were made or the style that the architect was trying to produce. So I am-- the question would be, what are your thoughts in terms of how this idea of how you organize materials, how you put things together, go beyond the issues of style and what
74:30 - 75:00 if they can actually produce new architectural paradigms or if, in effect, they're actually going to erase them? Well, I think that this is-- there doesn't have to be one. There could be many at different scales. But this is not something that I think will be-- I would not advocate for a shared, new, single paradigm. And that's why I'm not interested in defining it. This process is about an open-ended resource
75:00 - 75:30 for architects to take it into zillions of different directions. And I think our job is that creativity. It's to be experimental and to be creative and to forever change what people have already experienced. This is the contribution we make. So is the ultimate paradigm the one that is never going to end? Is never going to end? What do you mean by that? That if throughout history we can identify different historical periods of different paradigms, this new paradigm that
75:30 - 76:00 advocates for this [interposing voices] I truly believe that we will never go back to a single paradigm. I think architecture has reached a point where you can't try to write one, a manifesto, to say it's about this and that. But I think it's out of control for the better.
76:00 - 76:30 One of the words you kept saying today is agency. And I would like to pair it with another word that we don't like discussing too much, which is political agency. And I wonder if, historically, we think of style-- at least at certain periods-- as corresponding to a certain type of politics or a certain type of governance, and if today you're talking about a situation where at least a symbolic, or the literally visual aspect of style, is disappearing or already gone, what kind of politics
76:30 - 77:00 do you think this sort of plurality of styles or visual styles is corresponding to, whether it's masking, let's say, [inaudible] liberalism or it's actually reflecting as very dominant, capitalist culture? Well, I tried to situate the projects in daily life activities as a way to argue that actually
77:00 - 77:30 the politics these play are the scale of the everyday. And that architecture with a big P-- well, maybe if you had a very interested president or leader who was going to make it a grand project, at some point, it becomes political with a big P. But generally, architectural practice works at the scale of micropolitics, and that's the power it has which
77:30 - 78:00 is regardless of who is running the country or who is your client. It's the politics that the architect plays. And I am really interested in it. That's the politics-- that's the kind of politics that we architects play through the way we arrange things and through the way we generate platforms that condition how people have interfaces with different moments of their everyday. Imagine you're an architect, and you're
78:00 - 78:30 making one minute a house, and you are deciding on their corridors. And these same people then walk into a school, and you decide on how they relate to their fellow students. And then they go to a cinema, and you affect the way they watch a movie. I mean the amount that we have agency, as architects, is enormous. We don't need to go to external conversations and try to plant on architecture other kinds of accountabilities
78:30 - 79:00 because I think it's ingrained. And this is not new. This is architecture ever since Vitruvius. And we shouldn't forget about that. And I think because we've been since-- mainly since the '90s, the world events have thrown so many different pressures on life, including architects, et cetera. We've had to find these-- well, we also have to focus on sustainability and focus on certain this
79:00 - 79:30 and certain that. And It's fine. We need to develop areas of expertise. But I think architecture is not just those. Those other things continue as well along the line. It just becomes richer, more complex, more challenging, and more, also influential. But I think that architecture's power and politics is at the scale of its own instruments. [inaudible] Warner?
79:30 - 80:00 Hi, Farshid. Thanks for the talk. So in one hand, you are somehow encouraging us to shift the conventions. And I think you have shown a pretty good job on that, on shifting many things. But I've seen, across the lecture, an underlying conventional that you have not even attempt to modify. And I want to ask you all about that. That is this question of flexibility. I'm here by the way. Ah, yes. I'm trying to locate you.
80:00 - 80:30 OK. OK. So is this notion of flexibility, all the praise you have shown that is almost like a-- excuse me the word-- reduction to all the intensity, to the facade, to this idea of a skin architecture and liberating the floor plan as [inaudible] very clear with the office example. The residential, I assume, there is more be beyond that. But you focus, again, on the balconies, the same example with the little [inaudible] or the original [inaudible]
80:30 - 81:00 in London. So I'm just curious, over precisely the last 30 years, if there has been one thing that is remaining in terms of a structural condition is this idea of the flexibilization of markets and flexible [inaudible] of accumulation. That are pushing architects to liberate the grounds. Say no because this is going to change, and we need flexibility. And if the company fails and you need to do another business, the better if it's clean and something new could happen.
81:00 - 81:30 So I want to ask you, why you have not shifted the flexibility convention that we have had over the last 25, 30 years? What's your problem with flexibility? Well, I don't have any specific problem. I'm just afraid that it's pushing us or reducing all our agency towards the facade. I actually-- No. No. No. I mean, first of all, I think that you need to recognize that what I'm trying to highlight
81:30 - 82:00 are the particular components of each project that are making shifts. I have given a lecture on MOCA before where I spent the entire lecture talking about a project. Today, I wanted to speak to you about some aspects of it that fitted in the conversation. So about the housing project, you could talk about the landscaping, the relationship to the ground. There are many-- how the roof is used. But that's not the point of the conversation today.
82:00 - 82:30 However, going back to flexibility, I am surprised that you think everybody wants flexibility because flexibility is something you don't normally find in a residential building. Normally, in a residential building, you buy an apartment, and you can change very little of the inside. So actually, as an architect, if you can locate this structure in a place so that the internal partitions are non-structural, you've done a very good job.
82:30 - 83:00 We were not asked to provide flexibility. This is something that we are trying to give to people so that when they have a child or they retire, they don't have to move out and buy another apartment. They don't have to do that. It would be a choice if they want to move. So I don't know why you say flexibility is a problem. I also think that you are giving me the impression that you think flexibility has a single architecture. There are many, many different ways of creating flexibility. This is not some kind of a neutral thing
83:00 - 83:30 that comes to a project. Yeah? I mean if I-- OK. Can I go ahead? Carry on. One more. I mean [inaudible] had this article a few years ago about skin architecture. And basically, it was detecting this trend that because of that condition of things don't last 20 years. They last five or two or less. I know the labor market is so flexible
83:30 - 84:00 that people move from one city to another so fast. This is starting to render an architecture that is as flexible as possible in terms of their function, in terms of the program, and reducing all the intensity to the core and the scheme. I don't have a particular problem. And I think most of the ways you are talking flexibility is pretty nice. I mean is not a critique. I just-- No. No. No. No. But honestly-- It's just simply that-- I think you have the wrong impression.
84:00 - 84:30 Maybe it is true that there is a lot of, for example, speculative offices, et cetera. But actually, because of pressures of the mobility of the work force, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, there are a lot of companies that are having to create signature spaces in order to attract employees. Look at Google. Look at that. They are trying.
84:30 - 85:00 I mean I think it's not done well at all. But they're trying attract talented, young graduates by giving them cool interior. So I think this idea that we are in a sea of generic, neutral, anonymous thing is not my experience. And I don't-- the Victoria Beckham Shop, you call that neutral? You said flexible. I'm talking about flexibility. I know. And our client didn't ask for flexibility by the way. You also said flexibility as if there
85:00 - 85:30 are people whipping the architect asking them for flexibility. It's not true. We introduced flexibility because we thought that it's a way to bring surprise and change to people over time. Farshid, I just want to thank you. I think this would be a good time to close. Not because your at your pitch, but well, maybe because this we'll mean we will continue. No doubt, we will be able to talk with you
85:30 - 86:00 while you're here this semester. And I just want to thank you for opening this semester with such a vibrant talk that really pushed a series of issues for us. And I know it's going to be provocative as we go on into the semester. So with that, everyone thank Farshid.