Who Is Architecture?

Who is Architecture?
Who is Architecture?
Conversations on the borders of building
Brendan McGetrick
/
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Copyright © Brendan McGetrick 2009, 2010
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To Liu Mi, my favorite architect
Contents
Foreword ix
1 Michael Rock 1
2 Lu Zhenggang 19
3 Rory McGowan 29
4 Barry Bergdoll 43
5 Haas & Hahn 57
6 Reinier de Graaf 71
7 John Dekron & Markus Schneider 85
8 Jennifer Sigler 95
9 Mark Wigley 111
10 Tan Xiaochun 123
Foreword
Architecture is a collaborative art. The achievement of a building of even small am-

bition requires the architect to commit himself to an array of specialists—engineers, a
developer, a rendering company, plumbers, a photographer, etc.—each of whom is re-
sponsible for a vital piece of his vision. Long before building begins, she must design a
production process that incorporates these outside abilities, that balances individual em-
powerment and general oversight and allows for meaningful interaction between profes-
sions that might otherwise never meet.
In 2009, the Chinese edition of Domus magazine invited me to participate in its an-
nual interview series. I was told that I could interview anyone I’d like on a topic of my
choice, with the results published in each issue as a removable booklet. The previous se-
ries had featured several of the most celebrated figures in contemporary architecture, a
fact that seemed simultaneously intimidating and liberating. Confronted with the need to
maintain the magazine’s high standards and facing an already depleted pool of potential
subjects, I decided to look outside, to the people and professions along architecture’s pe-
riphery. Rather than interrogating architects directly, I spoke to those closest to them, the
collaborators on whom they depend to reinforce, realize, and expand their ideas. Eventu-
ally the concept of a silhouette emerged: by filling in the areas around it in great detail, the
series could produce an image of architecture in relief, a profession defined entirely but
what takes place at its outer edges.
This book presents the results of that effort. Each interview reveals a different facet of
collaboration, where architects have entrusted outsiders to make or break their designs—
from an engineer ensuring structural integrity and a graphic designer providing naviga-
tional clarity, to a curator, editor, or digital renderer presenting it to the public, an educa-
tor placing it within thousands of years of previous efforts, and a contractor determining
how best to build it. Together they cover many of the architect’s greatest challenges and
reveal what is perhaps his most under-appreciated talent, the ability to achieve coherency
from a mass of seemingly irreconcilable differences.
Who is architecture? is an effort to celebrate architects by ignoring them. Most of the
people interviewed have no architectural background, and the few who are trained have
sought alternatives to professional practice. Rather than extolling the architect’s power—
intellectual, aesthetic, organizational, etc.—it examines her flexibility, her unique ability
to oversee and adjust, extract value and form connections, to, as Mark Wigley explains
toward the end of the book, “combine forms of knowledge that don’t belong together”.
Unfortunately, there are many forms of knowledge that are not covered in this book
but are vital to achieving a full sense of architectural collaboration. I hope that in the fu-
ture this series will be amended and enriched by further discussions with developers, cost
estimators, model makers, plumbers, government officials, etc. Still, it is a pleasure to pres-
ent this series whole for the first time. The selection is incomplete, but the conversations
are thorough and, together, they provide a new set of entry points to a profession that is
understood by few but affects all.
New York, February 2010

Michael Rock is a founding partner
and creative director at 2x4 and Pro-
fessor of Design at the Yale University
School of Art.
1. Michael Rock
BRENDAN McGETRICK: Ever since I started working with architects, I’ve been The following
fascinated by the ways in which they collaborate with people outside of their pro- discussion took
place at Rock’s
fession—engineers, contractors, clients, etc. Each of these has a particular posi- apartment in New
tion in an architecture project and through collaboration reveals insights into the York on
nature of an architect’s work. The Domus interview series is planned with that September 4,
2008
idea in mind; the hope is that by understanding more about the roles of people
working along its edges, we can better understand what architecture is.
It seems to me that as a graphic designer you play several roles: you create
signage and way-finding systems for buildings, but you also create publications
about architecture. To start, let’s talk a little bit about those roles.
MICHAEL ROCK: I once gave a lecture titled “In, On, Around and About,” Rock, Michael.
and this is kind of our relationship to architecture. We do work that happens “In, On, Around,
and About.” The
inside architecture and is somehow applied to it and the landscape around it, Cooper Union.
but we also do work about it. New York, 30
It was never an aspiration of ours to become sign designers, it was an ac- November 2006
cidental development of our practice. What’s interesting is that by working at
an architectural scale as a graphic designer you operate at a completely dif-
ferent scale than you do for the rest of graphic design work. Often times the
work is simply bigger or it incorporates materials in a different way, and that
work—which is integral to architecture because it’s murals or it’s wallpaper
or it’s surface decorations or patterns or signs or way-finding—is all driven
partially by the scale of the work that it’s related to.
But then there’s also the work that is about somehow expressing the ideas
of architecture or explaining how it works. In the beginning we did a lot of
that, because the architects who we were working with didn’t have a lot of
buildings; they were still competing for projects and so we did things like
boards or books or materials that tried to explain an architectural idea. Then
it went over into books and magazines, things that were about architecture
somehow, which still had to engage architectural ideas, but in a graphic way.
2 Michael Rock, Graphic Designer
So there’s a split between the work which is architectural in scale and the work
which is graphic in scale but relates to the architecture itself.
That’s the two major strains that you mention: broadcasting architecture
versus work which augments architecture somehow. I think we see them both
as commentary or critique in a certain way, because I think that the graphic
work in the buildings is always somehow in dialogue with the building itself.
There’s a contrast or friction between the things that we do and the archi-
tecture. In the most basic sense, if you think about way-finding: it simply
annotates the building and tells you how to use it—it tells you to go here or go
there, tells you these are the doors you’re supposed to use—and so it’s really
basic labelling. But in a more complex way I think it starts to reflect the ideol-
ogy of the building and it tells something about the story of the building and
how you should feel about it.
I think that’s especially true where the elements inside a building are
elements of partition and not of structure. You’re basically decorating those
elements to give them meaning, saying this is an important wall or not an im-
portant wall. You’re providing very basic functions for decorating the space,
and in doing that you tend to explain the concept of the building. I like to
think that the work that we do in relation to buildings plays a complex and
integral part in the sense that we speak directly to the user of the building
about the building. Way-finding is always seen as something that is directly
related to the user experience of the building, not to architectural history and
not to a theoretical idea but to navigation and to the way that someone moves
in the space. But if you just extend that further out, it becomes about making
a direct address to the users about the building that they’re using.
That happens some times more than others, and it depends on the ar-
chitect and the building, but I think that it’s the clash of two disciplines
coming together that I find interesting. I still find it an interesting area to
work and think about, and as technology changes it becomes an increasingly
important one, because now you have digital things, LEDs, and dynamic ele-
ments that are projected into static elements. Increasingly every building en-
gages the graphic in more and more complex ways. It used to be very typical
that the architect would finish a building and then the graphic designer would
come in and decide where the signs went, but I think that it’s much more like-
ly now that there is an early integration of the two practices and the graphic
and informational part is considered a component of the architectural part.
You make up your own story about it 3
You mentioned graphic design in a dialogue with architecture. Is that dialogue

the product of a real dialogue that takes place between a graphic designer and
architect where he or she explains the priorities and then you try to make them
more explicit?
I think it happens in lots of different ways. Sometimes it’s a real dialogue, and
in the very early stages there’s a discussion around certain overarching ideals
to do with the space, and then that plays out in graphic ideas. For example,
in IIT, the building by OMA, there was an idea from the competition stage Further mentions
of having this portrait of Mies on the face of building; the idea of having IIT: 38
big portraits was there from the very first concept. They were glued onto the
first model that was made, and so there was already a thought about how the
building would be graphic. It is a one-story building so the walls don’t hold
up the ceiling, the columns hold up the ceiling, and the interior partitions
were always just a series of fluid forms that demised the rooms. They were
always thought about as covered with things to give them meaning or make
them different. There was already a dialogue around that idea—not necessari-
ly what the content would be, but that there would be something there—from
the very earliest parts of the design process.
There are other times where, as the design develops, there are certain
conditions that arise and must be met somehow, but can’t be met with ar-
chitecture for a variety of reasons—often because it’s too expensive. So then
they’ll say, “We have this big blank wall. We should make something more
interesting with this.” That calls out for an intervention by the designer. That
is something that is unforeseen in the design process, but in the development
process certain things come up and you make decisions about them for the
sake of the unity of the design.
Other times it happens on the graphic designer’s side in a purely analyti-
cal way. You don’t really have that much dialogue with the designers of the
building so you make up your own story about it. It’s your own interpreta-
tion of the building to a certain extent, and that often happens in buildings
that are quite far along and we’re brought into a situation where we don’t
have a rapport with the architect so we just make up our own way of work-
ing and thoughts about the buildings. Sometimes they match the architecture
and sometimes they work against it, to a certain extent. We did an interiors
project recently–it was for the New York Academy of Science—where we did a
whole series of wallpapers about our own thoughts about scientific inquiry. It
didn’t have anything to do with the physical architecture per se, it just became
another element of the space.
Do you see your role as sometimes trying to supplement a building in order to

provide qualities that it lacks?
I don’t think that it’s a matter of lack and I don’t think it’s a matter of supple-
ment, because one seems recuperative—as if it’s solving a problem that wasn’t
solved by the architecture—and the other one seems like it’s secondary. I
think in both cases it’s more complimentary than supplementary. It’s another
element—like lighting or sound—that’s part of the architectural experience.
I think that a lot of it has to do with completing the atmosphere of a space. If
you think of the Seagram’s Building, the graphic element is extremely under-
stated and it’s played out in simple ways, in terms of patterning or typography,
but it’s somehow completely appropriate for that building. It gives a sense of
“50s modern business attire” to the whole thing. You can’t imagine it being
Further mentions done in a different way than in this almost transparent way. With CCTV or a
CCTV: 6-7, 22-23, project like that, the spaces are so dramatic, so big, so architecturally complex
29-36, 38, 133
that the design program is actually incredibly neutral, because it doesn’t need
that much. You just need some really basic way-finding. Sometimes you need
things of big scale to match the scale of the structural members, because they
are such a powerful element in the space, but it’s not a space that’s calling out
for a lot of additional material, because the physical form of the building is so
incredibly present all of the time.
I think each space has a logic to it and part of the design experience is un-
derstanding the logic and somehow creating something that fits there. That
doesn’t mean it’s something that is totally compliant in the space, because
sometimes it can fit by being really annoying, but it needs to be complimen-
tary to the whole experience. If part of architecture is creating these experi-
ences, then the graphic and the visual is an incredibly important part of it.
Often times one of the first things you see when you go into a space is the
graphic aspect of it.
The graphic acts almost as a buffer.

Completing the atmosphere of a space 5
Architectural language is something that you experience in an incredibly

visceral way, but it’s not necessarily apparent to people right away what it is
they’re seeing or experiencing. You might walk into a space that’s very big, so
that’s the first experience—it’s big, it’s open—but the intricacies of the archi-
tecture aren’t immediately apparent to most people. So often the graphic is an
entry to it, something they can understand on a more human scale.
Do you have a particular building in mind?
I was thinking about Terminal Three of Beijing Airport. When you first step Further mentions
in, that space is pretty overwhelming. It’s almost like you have to look at 180˚ Terminal Three:
6, 39
to comprehend the whole thing. You’re overwhelmed by this huge empty
space and you don’t necessarily understand how the curve of the ceiling works
or how the ceiling detail works or how all of those things add up to the overall
experience. Often you’re focused on the simple, much more immediate expe-
rience of, “How do I find the check-in counter?” And in a way the graphic part
has to work against the overwhelmingly architectural space just to make you
feel like you can navigate it or understand where you need to get to or how
you fit into the whole thing, because your first impression might be absolute
bewilderment at the scale of it.
Right, because the concept of Terminal Three is to try to combine under one roof
so many of the elements that are spread across multiple terminals in the typical
airport. That’s really a challenge, of course, because people have to understand
the system so that they don’t end up at the wrong end, which is almost a kilome-
ter away.
In a way that airport doesn’t use any of the typical architectural ideas of pro-
gression to get you places, because you see the whole thing at once, and that’s
such an unusual experience. You’re kind of high when you enter, then it slopes
down away from you, so it’s almost like lifting the roof off a building and
seeing it without all the room partitions. That’s a situation where the whole
way-finding program becomes absolutely essential to what your movement
through that building will be, because the architecture doesn’t necessarily lead
you through immediately.
Another aspect of the way-finding in airports but more and more in other sorts of
buildings as well, is the need for iconographic expressions that are independent of
language. You almost need to a develop a visual Esperanto that can communicate
even to people who are nervous and rushed and guide them through the building
in an efficient way.
I think that is almost a different discipline in itself, because airports or subway

systems have problems unto themselves that don’t necessarily relate to an in-
dividual building. In an individual building you usually go through a certain
progression of experiences that is pretty standard: you see the building, you
walk across something to get to it, you walk through the front door, and then
there are certain things after that. In an airport, because there are so many
routes that you could take and so many things that you have to do in a precise
order to get where you have to go, you really have tell people exactly: step one
is this, step two is this, step three is this... In Terminal Three it’s interesting,
because you go through the big framing gates where you check-in, and then
everything keeps narrowing down until you get on that train. It’s a series of
steps and I think it’s even played out on the floor: go here, go here, go here...
You don’t really have any free will in the system. You only have one way to go
through it and you have to keep everyone going that way, whereas in other
places you might want to exaggerate the sense of free will and not make them
feel too controlled in what they do.
Airports are, by necessity I guess, authoritarian and design serves that.
I think we’re in a stage where you can control small experiences graphically,
but on a bigger level, outside of a single building or airport or highway system,
all hell breaks loose and you don’t have much control over it. So you create
these little pockets of logic or pockets of unity and then those all fit together
in a completely illogical way.
The airport is the exact opposite of a city in a way. Your movement has
to be prescribed, the graphic has to be consistent, you have know how to get
from one place to another. You can have the shopping street in the airport, but
it’s always under signs that say “Shopping Street” and tell you when you’re in
it or not in it. There can’t be anything left to chance. Whereas with the CCTV
headquarters I think there are certain things that can be left to chance.
Little pockets of logic 7
What exactly are you doing for CCTV? Further mentions

CCTV: 4, 6, 22-23,
29-36, 38, 133
Ostensibly we’re doing all of the graphic design for the site and inside the
building. How all the signs work, how the way-finding works, when there’s
electronic things and when there’s fixed things... But it started off more basic:
What do you call the different parts of the building? How is it labelled or
numbered? It’s a difficult building because, for instance, do you consider it
two buildings or one building when you label it? Is there a Tower One and
Tower Two? But what happens when they join together again? One of the
towers has a different number of floors between the base and when they join
together again, so there’s a certain point where you have to allow for some
missing floors on one so that you get to the same number of floors when it
joins the other one. There are a lot of basic logical problems to understand in
that building.
That was exacerbated in part by certain decisions that were made on a
totally arbitrary level at the very beginning about how the sections would be
called in the architectural plans. All of the rooms were labelled a certain way
on every single plan, and when we got involved and started thinking about
way-finding we found a certain kind of illogic to that, because you’d enter in
Section E then go to Section C then A, because for another reason the rooms
were labelled that way. So you’re stuck with a somewhat illogical overarching
naming process. Then from that, you have to work out a new system so that
it makes sense again.
There’s also drawing the maps of the site and figuring out what happens
outside, in the kiosks and all that stuff. How you get people to know where to
drop people off... Then it works down to the really basic things like how do
you label the cafes and what does it say outside the elevator to explain how to
get to these different parts of the building. There’s a really complicated verti-
cal movement pattern in that building too, because certain elevators go to
certain floors and not to others. Then it goes to the more environmental part
of it: there’s murals for some of the rooms, there’s parts of the visitor loop
experience that are more informational. There’s a lot of different things to do
in that building design-wise. And a lot of it is very dry. It’s much more inter-
esting to figure out how rooms are numbered, but like I said, in that building
there’s so much going on conceptually and architecturally that it just needs to
be decoded mostly—to just get people simply from place to place.
SINGLE DECK
CCTV Elevator System DOUBLE DECK LOCAL

TRANSFER LOBBY
DOUBLE DECK EXPRESS
That idea of “decoding” a building is really interesting. I think that’s an aspect of

the relationship between architecture and graphic design that isn’t well enough
understood. Something like designing wallpaper is very easy to understand. You
get a graphic designer to do that. But there’s another, deeper level of involvement
where you have to enforce what the building’s intentions are, even when they
weren’t clear from the beginning of the design process.
I think it’s also part of the way that buildings are designed. Usually an archi-
tect designs the outside of the building—the basic concept of it, how it works,
how it’s structured in terms of providing enough space to fit all the program
needs. Then another architect, often unrelated to the first one, comes in and
does the interiors. Even if the same architect does the interiors, often it’s a
different team of people, and it’s only at the end that you really start to think
about how people move through it or what they do when they’re there. I’ve
been in many different projects where there’s no allowance for where you buy
a ticket or something like that way into the process. It’s a museum and no
one’s thought about where you wait in line to buy a ticket, because so much
effort has gone into the overall architectural expression and the language of
the building. And that’s not admonishing architecture, I think you just have
different scales of problems that you have to deal with at different times. But
at some point you have to deal with these really basic issues like decoding the
building and how you use it.
And I suppose it makes sense that you would need an outside perspective for ad-
dressing those issues, someone who can think more like a user.
It’s interesting, because I find it difficult to understand buildings even from

their plans and sections. I really have to work at that notion, because you con-
stantly have to be imagining spaces not as formal volumes but as spaces that
Further mentions you move through. For instance, OMA’s Casa da Musica in Porto, until I went
Casa da Musica: 37 to that building and went through it I never fully understood how it would
work or what the spaces would be like inside. That space is so complex and
your route through that building is so interesting, the way one space opens
into the next one is so interesting, but it’s a really difficult thing to imagine at
the level of drawings.
The sea of architectural publishing 9
Photos too generally.
Yeah, photos are such a low-level expression of architecture I think. The pic-
tures that you see of that space don’t have any sense of the scale of it. There’s
a really beautiful way that one space leads to the next in that building, but it’s
almost impossible to explain through photographs.
Which goes back to the other side of your involvement with architecture.
Right, that’s the side that I feel less accomplished in at the moment. Maybe
because I haven’t been designing so much print work recently, but maybe
also because I’ve found that aspect so frustrating. It always comes down to
this set of similar devices that you have for telling stories, and after a while it
becomes really tedious I think: you have a group of plans and sections that
are put together, then you have some photographs that were taken by a good
photographer, then someone writes an essay about it... Those are the devices
that you have to tell the story.
The issue of Domus d’Autore that we did with OMA was an interesting AMO/Rem
attempt to at least catalogue the possible devices that you could use. It had Koolhaas. “Post-
Occupancy.”
people’s postings of images of themselves in the buildings and what people Domus d’Autore
were saying on blogs. It had how the television stations covered it and how June 2006
the newspapers covered it, and it attempted to make a list of all the different
types of architectural representations. But somehow they still always seem
deficient. So this whole sea of architectural publishing I feel more and more
alienated from. There are more and more books, and nothing seems to get at
it or penetrate it somehow. It seems like film or something interactive might
be a better way to do it. But you deal with it all the time, so you must struggle
with the same things.
Yes, also because a building is so complicated and there are so many things that
you could try to express. If you say, “OK, I’m going to concentrate on the expe-
riential aspect of this building,” then there are things that you can do—you can
interview users, you can ask the maintenance man for a tour, you can ask an
author to write a piece of fiction that takes place in the building. But then there’s
dozens of other things that you’re ignoring.
I feel really frustrated about how to move it beyond that. I’m doing a book
with an architect right now, a totally classical book. It’s a series of 22 essays that
he wrote and some pictures of the buildings that he talks about. I’m working
with a very typical architectural publisher and they really wanted something
“different”. But basically every idea that we brought to them that would have
been different, they said, “Oh, but you can’t do that though, because books
that size don’t sell...” And so we did all these covers and they were finally like,
“What we were thinking was maybe like an architectural detail on the cover...”
And I just said, “Well, basically now you’ve worked this book back to being
81/2” x 11”, it has this kind of typography, it now has an architectural detail
on the cover, so it looks exactly like every other book you’ve ever published.”
It just seems like all of the interest to do something different hits a dead end
every time. For that book, we wanted to make it much more like a novel; if it’s
all writing why not really publish it like a novel and make it look like that? But
of course there was no capacity to think about it that way.
Rem [Koolhaas] is one of the only people who experiments with publi-
cations in a way which is as radical as the way that OMA experiments with
Koolhaas, Rem and architecture. Whether you liked it or not, I think Content was a really inter-
Brendan McGetrick., esting experiment to try to get at his practice in a totally different way. And
ed. Content. Köln :
Taschen, 2004. obviously S,M,L,XL was a way and the issue of Domus d’Autore was a way.
OMA, Rem Kool- Each one attempts to crack through somehow or at least throw in some new
haas, and Bruce ways of rendering the projects. I think that he’s come the closest of anybody to
Mau. S,M,L,XL. New
York: Monticelli making a series of publications which reflect on architectural ideas in graphic
Press, 1995. ways: the actual graphic form of the thing itself and the way that the writing
Further mentions is assembled and the way that the publication is thought of is equivalent to
Rem Koolhaas: 13, the buildings in a way.
79, 87, 100-101,
103-104, 112
S,M,L,XL: 103-104, Rem is someone who puts a lot of thought into the problem of representing archi-
106, 112 tecture, because he suffers from the fact the architecture articulates itself so poorly
to the outside world.
Yesterday I went to this conference at a university for a little while. I have to

say it was so bad. The presentations were so completely impenetrable, mostly
incomprehensible really. I had no idea what these people were saying. In this
case it was a conference of architects, but the language was so internal.
All of the interest to do something different hits a dead end 11
I know just what you mean. These academic discussions really are impenetrable
and, worse, they drain your enthusiasm for architecture and architects. But what
is interesting is that, having done Content and even with MAD Dinner, a book McGetrick, Brendan
and Chen Shuyu.,
I edited last year, it’s become clear to me that if you don’t submit to that inter- ed. MAD Dinner.
nal discussion and you try to do something different, you are almost sure to be Barcelona: Actar,
dismissed by many architects and critics. If it doesn’t look serious and it doesn’t 2008.
look like something they identify with, they immediately assume it’s frivolous.
I think that is a major obstacle to the sorts of experiments you mentioned: the
belief that architecture needs to be very serious makes it so much more difficult to
experiment and, once you have experimented, to find an audience that is willing
to make the leap of faith and try to appreciate it.
I think it’s a combination. In some ways, there is an inferiority complex where

architecture needs to be philosophical to somehow counteract the physicality
of it. It needs to be proved that it’s philosophical or it comes out of deep ideas.
But in doing that it completely alienates all of the people who could actually
understand some of what is going on, and that was part of the problem of this
conference. One of the questions at the end was so completely over the top.
Literally it was, “I’m really concerned about the post-colonial idea of concrete
and its hegemonic position in relation to local stone...” And I feel like I’m a
fairly well-read, intelligent person and I just had absolutely no idea. I just
thought, “How would I ever answer that question if someone asked it to me?”
I generally support theory and the idea of criticism being an important
part of architecture, but somehow it gets to the point where there’s no entry
point to it. That’s why I thought that Content was such a daring book, because
it didn’t feel labored in its attempt to prove something. It put a lot of things
out there in a lot of ways that could be interesting. But what do you feel is the
reaction to Content?
Well, I’ve heard some fairly intense reactions on both the positive and negative
side. On the negative, it seems that the cover alone turned off a huge part of the
potential audience. People didn’t bother to read it or even open it once they saw
the crudeness and graphic aggression of the cover. But actually in China I’ve met
quite a few people who really love it, and young architects have even told me that
it inspired them to study architecture.
I really like that book a lot. I thought it was actually really daring and unusual,
fresh. It took risks where no one else takes risks.
I talked once at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and people were
criticizing Content and I said, “Look, our attitude was that there was no book
like that, so we should make one. If in ten years there are dozens of books like
that and Content seems like an amateurish, primitive attempt, then that would
be great, because that would mean we have that many more interesting, experi-
mental books. But as long as it’s the case that nobody else is trying to do it, then
I think a book like that deserves a small amount of respect for showing what else
is possible.”
Right, what I liked about it was that it didn’t feel derivative. Or that what it felt
derivative of weren’t architecture books. What was interesting was that it took
a tabloid approach to a subject that had become tabloidized by the way it was
covered anyway. I thought that was an interesting critical maneuver in a way.
It was one of the only successful attempts that I’ve seen to apply this idea that
architects often have of bringing in someone who has no idea what’s going on
and getting them to apply that ignorance to come up with fresh ideas. Around
OMA there was this recurring fantasy, “Yeah, we’ll let the lady who makes the
lunches do the image selection and that’ll be super interesting!” And it almost
never works, but it did for Content, because neither of the designers knew a
thing about architecture or particularly cared to. So they simply applied this tab-
loid language, which was their native language, because they had been doing a
magazine like that for years. That’s why in the end it feels authentic, because they
couldn’t have done it any other way.
I just feel really worn down by the architectural publishing world to a certain
extent. It’s not where I go to find inspiration or interest at the moment. But I
think maybe exhibits are a slightly more satisfying way to deal with architec-
ture, because you can deal with lots of different media. You can have models
and you can have movies and you can have text and sound. In that they’re
quasi-architectural themselves, they might be a way to address the difficulty
of books somehow.
Brand DNA 13
Some of the animations that are used to describe a building in design I

think are pretty interesting in the way that they can conceptually assemble a
building and move you through it. I’m talking about those Crystal CG fly- Further mentions
throughs and stuff like that. In terms of telling the story of a building I think Crystal CG: 19-27
they’re pretty compelling. They’re cheesy in the sense that some of the graphic
language is a little bit cheesy at this point, but I don’t think it’s fully developed
as an experience yet. But on a Hollywood level, of course, you can start to
make those things really incredible. I’m sure there’s huge potential for it, but
it’s super expensive to do at the moment, so that limits what can be done.
Over the years 2x4 has been involved in a few projects that have gradually ex-
panded to include a variety of disciplines and media. The collaboration between
OMA, 2x4, and Prada is maybe the most obvious example. I know that you also Further mentions
recently worked on Clo, a wine bar here in New York, where you ended up doing Prada: 14, 75, 85
almost everything from the development of the name and brand identity, the web
and interactive components, packaging, to the architectural and interior design.
I’m curious about how this sort of total integration works. As you mentioned
before, graphic design is a complimentary component to architecture, but so is
plumbing or HV/AC and you rarely see the people responsible for those aspects
entering any others.
I think that branding has become so embedded in the way that everyone thinks
about their business, their organizations, that all design, including architec-
ture, is pushed into becoming an expression of that. If you’re going to build a
corporate headquarters now, you’re absolutely thinking about how this selec-
tion of architects supports the overall brand of the company. So that’s part of
the programmatic demand of architecture now, and because designers have
always been pretty integral in developing what a brand is, it’s only a small shift
from determining what it is to starting to create the expressions of it.
Nike always talks about their “brand DNA”. They say that their brand DNA
is so strong and you need to understand the DNA of Nike in order to under-
stand how to make work for them. Once that’s established, everything has
to be an expression of that DNA. Of course, you can say that the work Rem Further mentions
[Koolhaas] is doing for Prada is clearly an expression of Prada’s brand. Rem’s Rem Koolhaas: 10,
79, 87, 100-101,
an integral part of Prada’s brand, and we’re a part of Prada’s brand also. 103-104, 112
For a fashion company to associate itself with OMA is a branding state-

ment and then the work that they do for them pushes their brand in certain
directions, expresses it in certain ways. Because of that I think the distinction
of what’s architecture and what’s graphic design becomes a little bit blurry,
because all of them become equal expressions of this central branding. I think
that’s actually a major change in the way that the world works. Of course,
it’s probably happened in natural ways before, but when a museum becomes
totally obsessed with what its brand is and what it means to have Renzo Piano
design their museum for them, it changes the nature of what they’re expect-
ing from their architects and what they’re expecting from their designers. It’s
also implying that, for example, if Nike has really clearly defined DNA and the
architects are working from that and I’m working from that, then naturally
our work should somehow go together, because we’re all referring to the same
object of representation. So I think that the change in our practice comes
from the change in that understanding of brand. The more we work with or-
ganizations where our interaction with them is considered part of their essen-
tial branding, the more the things we work on changes, because we become
expressers of their brand in all these different ways.
Further mentions With Prada it’s different, because Prada has a big brand that we’re a small
Prada: 14, 75, 85 part of. Also part of Prada’s brand is the unexpected, so if you do something
weird it fits, because they’re dealing with unexpected things. But with Nike,
for instance, they have very strong expectations about exactly how they rep-
resent themselves and what is or isn’t an appropriate Nike expression. So, as
in this wine bar project, if you’re in charge of developing the brand of a com-
pany—its name and its feeling and the qualities that it’s supposed to exude—
then you can move into other things for them as well: what the experience is
like or what the space is like or what the interactive parts are like. Controlling
the branding part of it allows you to have a much larger scope of what hap-
pens next, either by commissioning people or doing it yourself. So, as we’ve
taken on these roles where we’ve become much more integral to the establish-
ment of the idea, that allows us to have more scope in terms of the work we
do. Does that make sense?
Yes definitely. It reminds of a text I read on your website this morning. Something
you designed for the skin care company Malin + Goetz was described as “a pack-
age that could function both as a logo and an architectural element.”
From the teaspoon to the city 15
There was this early modern notion of total design and the expression was
always “from the teaspoon to the city”. The architect should be able to touch
any one of those things and pull it into a design. And of course people like
[Adolf] Loos or [Frank Lloyd] Wright were absorbed in the idea that they
would design all the furniture and the light fixtures and it would all make
up one huge, purely integrated art experience. I think brand, in a way, has
become the newest form of total design. But rather than saying that the idea
exists in the architect, it says that that idea exists in this kind of brand manual,
which expresses who they are. Then everybody adopts that as their working
method. It’s a transformation of the total design mentality, and it’s ceded con-
trol from the architect to the client. The client is now in control of the total
design idea and everybody becomes their servant.
Mark Wigley writes about this idea that total design was always implosive Further mentions
and explosive, in the sense that it dealt both with the internal workings of Mark Wigley:
115-126
something but also how it broadcast. That I think is the ultimate notion of it,
where brand DNA somehow controls how the business is run as a practice,
how people relate to one another, all of the products they make, but also all of
their publications and how they express themselves to the world. It deals with
the broadcasting of the subject and also with the design of it. In that way it
unites promotion and product design.
There’s something I haven’t quite been able to get at though, which is the
sense that there is an insidious aspect to all this, which is annoying and con-
trolling and inescapable. The whole branding notion bugs me ultimately, but
I can’t see a way around it either, because it’s one of those notions that in-
corporates any rejection of it. You know, “We’re the company that’s against
branding!” And then that’s your brand.
“Our gimmick is there is no gimmick.”
It’s one of those things that is so totalizing there’s no outside to it. It’s kind of
what [Antonio] Negri would say, you have this sense that you want to rebel
against something, but the thing is so big that there’s no way to be outside and
rebel against it, every gesture is absorbed by it. Branding is one of those forms.
It absorbs all its critique. I think that controlling branding gives you a lot of
power and a lot of agency, but you never control it totally so you then become
a vehicle of it or factor in it somehow. It doesn’t reside in you.
Also when the business-side is given priority, scientifically-justified aesthetic

preferences start to influence designs. You start hearing things like “green doesn’t
sell” or “books of that size don’t sell” and it seems to me the number of options
before the designer contracts.
It does and it doesn’t. There’s a notion of branding that’s also expansive in

the sense that, once you’ve established your brand then presumably you can
move into anything and take it over. One of the tests for whether a company
has a strong brand or not is to say, “If it started a chain of restaurants what
would they be like? Can you imagine them?” And you can imagine what an
Apple restaurant would be like right away. But if Microsoft opened up a chain
of restaurants it’s very difficult to imagine what they’d be like. So if the brand
is strong enough it allows expansion and redefinition, because it changes the
subject rather than the form. It injects its form into it, in the way that Apple
went into the phone market and now the iPhone has become a standard that
everything else has to react against.
I was actually talking to a guy who used to be the president of Leica, and
I was thinking Leica should go into the phone business, because often times
your phone is your camera anyway and people expect Leicas to have a certain
quality to them. And you can imagine what a Leica phone might be like: super
utilitarian, really hardcore, always works perfectly with a great camera in it. It
would be in a way the anti-iPhone, because it wouldn’t be about flash at all, it
would be about something which is much more utilitarian.
And I think there are a lot of people who would rather have a camera that’s also
a phone than a phone with a camera added to it.
Exactly, where the quality of the camera is the thing that is paramount, but
you could also call your friend on it. So I think that is what is interesting: the
design part is about designing the idea and seeing if it is generative enough to
allow you to build all these things on top of it. And I think it works to a cer-
tain extent, because whatever you think about Nike they have a really strong
image, which you can imagine is generative enough to where they can keep
doing new things. They can go into the business of sports beverages or what-
ever. They can infuse it with those ideas that they have and they could give it
a certain meaning or direction.
Nothing can be authentic 17
Of course, the annoying thing is when it goes to a personal level and you
think, “Should I live here? Does this neighorhood fit my brand?” The annoy-
ing part is that it means you always have to step outside of the thing and
look at it in this strange, objective way. Nothing can be authentic; everything
becomes a manufactured expression of this manufactured thing. I think may-
be that is the heart of what’s annoying about the idea of branding: it always
seems inauthentic, it always seems manufactured.
The personalization of branding is scary in a lot of ways. On a macro level, I think

you also see that more and more in the way entire nations represent themselves.
Right. China’s now looking at itself as a brand. Every country is.
And China’s an interesting case, because their brand—Made In China—has

great recognition but a terrible reputation.
Yes, but Made In Japan used to be just like that and it changed 180 degrees to
where Made In Japan is now seen as a symbol of quality and innovation.
Part of it must be simply development and improvement.
But it’s also a choice of which products to emphasize. The fact that Japan went
into cars and electronics is different than if you go into milk products and pet
food. I guess it’s about the professionalization of image control ultimately.
For major companies, it’s become refined as a technique and the devices
for how it’s produced have become very clearly defined. You always had ar-
chitects and graphic designers and all these people who dealt with different
things, but now you have someone who is on top of them, unifying them all,
and trying to get them in line so that all their work is complimentary in a
way that conveys their message. Before, the architects did their thing and the
graphic designers did their thing and since they worked together that was
great. But, to come back to the question, the expansion of the scope of work
is because increasingly clients are looking for all of these things to be unified
rather than separate, so if that can be unified through you then that’s great. If
it can unified by you telling them, “We should hire this architect also,” that’s
great too. But they’re looking for that unity of message.
Lu Zhenggang is the founder and
president of Crystal CG Ltd.
2. Lu Zhenggang
BRENDAN McGETRICK: Crystal CG’s story is very interesting, because almost The following
discussion took
every well-known new building in China was first displayed to the world through place at Liu’s office
your company’s renderings. Yours is really the language through which nearly ev- in Beijing on
eryone in China reads modern architecture, and now we are seeing the company December 25, 2008.
Also included in the
develop along with China beyond buildings toward a more virtual society. I am conversation are
curious about your personal experience leading Crystal through these stages of editor Qin Lei and
architect Liu Mi.
development.
LU ZHENGGANG: Crystal was set up in 1995 and at that time I had just
graduated as a student majoring in architecture. From 1993 to 1995, Auto-
CAD first emerged in China, and I became part of the first batch of people to
get in touch with computer mapping. At that time, elder architects in design
institutes were unable to do digital mapping, so we youngsters took charge
of blueprint digitization jobs beyond sketching and design. At the beginning,
we just did it for ourselves, from CAD mapping to three-dimensional effects.
Later, other architecture institutions heard that we were able do this kind of
job and asked us to do it for them, so gradually our focus changed from de-
sign to digital mapping.
In regards to collaboration between Crystal and modern China’s develop-
ing process, I think two huge events need to be mentioned. The first one is the
global tender of The National Center for the Performing Arts in 1998. I still
remember that over 40 institutions from home and abroad competed for the
bid, which required close communications and interactions between domes-
tic and foreign architects. As the organizing committee openly collected the
plans and opinions of the public, and all bidding schemes were to be exhibited
in the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, we were under
great pressure. All competitors spent a lot of time on visual performance, and
we tried to use cartoons to represent architecture for the first time. From then
on, we got the chance to be in touch with so many foreign architects, and they
found that China had a good ability to display architecture.
20 Lu Zhenggang, Digital Renderer
The second event is Beijing Olympic Games. Crystal started to participate

in Beijing’s bid for the Olympics in 1999. At that time, an important part of
bidding was selecting the site of the Olympic Games. Besides Beichen, the area
that was eventually selected, there were two other alternatives—Yizhuang and
Fatou in the southeastern part of Beijing. From then on, the Beijing Munici-
pal Commission of Urban Planning (BMCUP) became Crystal’s client, with
the agreement that we would help BMCUP to exhibit the planning results of
these different sites. Following that, Crystal became a sponsor of the Beijing
2008 Olympic Games Bidding Committee (BOBICO). At that time, BOBICO
wanted to persuade inspection teams from the International Olympic Com-
mittee (IOC), so it asked us to draw the features of 2008 Beijing in the year
2000 through digitized images. Apart from that, [the film-maker and eventual
director of 2008 Olympic opening ceremony] Zhang Yimou montaged some
pictures of mine for the trailer.
In 2006, we officially became a sponsor of the Beijing Olympic Games,
and that’s the first time in history that a digital imaging company has been
responsible for the Olympic Games. For the opening ceremony, as the general
contractor of images, Crystal’s responsibilities included creating the digital
Further mentions rehearsal, the image of the bowl-shaped top of the Bird’s Nest, the images of
Bird’s Nest: 22, 29, all the huge scroll paintings, etc. Beforehand, many international companies,
40, 129-137
including some from Hollywood, were invited to bid to be the general con-
tractor of images, but in the end, we won.
And how has that victory affected the company in the years since?
The change that the Beijing Olympic Games has brought to us is an upgrade
from digitized imaging to working on the city’s planning, promotion, and
publicity. So you are right that we have developed along with China. Now we
not only focus on architecture, cities, products, films, sports, culture, public-
ity, and education, but on cartoons, including “Fuwa Journey to the Olym-
pics” and “Olympic ABC” with [China’s state broadcaster] CCTV. We always
act as a communicator, and try to help different people to acquire knowledge
via images. But in architecture, we have expanded from doing renderings and
cartoons at the beginning to working in more extensive fields, such as archi-
tectural education and historic building preservation, from future planning
to historic recovery, and from assisting communication between architect and
We always act as a communicator 21
developer to that between architect and ordinary people. For instance, Crystal
took charge of the visual recovery of cities from the Ming Dynasty in Bei-
jing, Xi’an, Nanjing, and many other cities. Besides, we restored some historic
spots like Chang’an City from the Tang Dynasty. And in our self-sponsored
documentary series, we rehabilitated ancient Buddhist buildings in India.
As you changed from architectural design to architectural rendering, how did

your understanding of architecture change?
That’s a good question. When I was working as an architect, I knew that I was
fond of architecture, but I couldn’t become a first-class architect, because of
my personal qualifications. But when I went to rendering, I realized that I
could be exposed to more things, because as an architect, I could only do one
project in a year. As a renderer, I could also communicate with different peo-
ple from different areas, for example, not only architects, but government of-
ficers, developers, and even ordinary people, and understand different points
of view from different groups. That’s useful.
That’s very interesting, especially because you talk about Crystal as a communi-
cator. How did you adjust your job to communicate with these different groups?
That’s simple. We have different departments to handle those things.
I mean, when you’re obligated to show a rendering to an architect, developer,

and official, how can you cater to the tastes of these different groups at one time?
It’s actually hard to satisfy everybody’s taste. Like an architect, he may use dif-
ferent strategies for different groups, like developers and the government. The
most difficult thing is to draw renderings for developers, because they need to
make popular things for common people.
So how does each division in your company handle these different requirements?
We have a department just to communicate with architects and a department

just to communicate with developers. But they share their resources, like the
same dish with two different ways to cook.
Another thing that I find interesting about your story is the idea that Crystal is
now moving in two directions: recreating the past and imagining the future. I
am curious about the different ways that you approach these two things. I can
imagine that the future has to seem very exciting, while the past should perhaps
feel different.
Technically, there is no difference. But it’s strange that you insert the map of a
scene from the future into a book on fictitious historic spots. Actually, many
of the renderings that we have made look almost the same as real pictures. I
still remember when I saw a picture of the Bird’s Nest in Beijing Youth Daily,
I was astonished and shouted, “Somebody stole our picture!” But the truth
is that the picture was truly taken from the Bird’s Nest. That means that our
imitation is accurate.
Well, I am thinking that your style is very modern which I think is perfectly suited
Further mentions to rendering things like the new CCTV or the Bird’s Nest. But when you repre-
CCTV: 4, 6-7, 23, sent something which is two thousand years old, I wonder if you think using the
29-36, 38, 133
Bird’s Nest: 20, 29,
same sort of visual language becomes more difficult.
40, 129-137
Actually, we require more details and energy to restore the old ones, because it
has to be more authentic, and for that we need to consult a lot of people, like
historians and experts researching historical documents and antiques. We do
a great deal of research with Tsinghua University and Beijing Library. Besides,
we work with film-makers, you know, and films need higher requirements in
details and images than ordinary renderings.
I know that you are probably trying to question whether the same tech-
nique is suitable for ancient buildings, because our images are too flowery
and have a lot of embellishments. Actually, we have two different groups, in-
cluding a group with staff that understands archaeology, working on ancient
buildings. On the other hand, some of the images that we illustrated are a
little artificial, but that’s up to the architects.
Actually what interests me is understanding the range of visual languages that

Crystal is developing. For instance, I see the initial work of Crystal as beautiful
renderings like those of CCTV, but recently I’ve seen some simple pictures that
teach peasants how to build houses. These are very different styles.
The company is like a matrix 23
There are 2200 people in this company. Crystal is not a big workshop or mili-
tary group, and it is composed of dozens of teams with huge cultural dispar-
ity. Our core value is variety.
Do you adjust based on the audience or clients?
The clients will adjust by themselves. Like the same client, he probably wants
something like CCTV today, but tomorrow he may ask for something totally
different.
Our teams compete with each other. Sometimes, one team may say the
product of another team is awful. Every year, Crystal holds contests for em-
ployees. We compare different styles of work and hold a contest in different
cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and invite professionals to act
as judges. The company is like a matrix, and it depends on different people. So
we never worry that someday we may exhaust ourselves. Now we’ve started to
hire some foreigners, and we will enlarge the proportion of foreign employees.
QIN LEI: What’s the background of your staff? What kinds of fields did they
major in?
We have four kinds of staff: the first kind is majoring in architecture and de-
sign, such as architectural design or interior design; the second is in arts or
fashion design; the third is in computer technology; and the last but not least
is doing business operations. Everyone can dig out his own niche here, i.e. a
person studying architecture in college can start to make film, as he realizes
that his favorite is film.
BRENDAN McGETRICK: In the beginning, Crystal helped other companies to

fulfill their thoughts, but recently you’ve started to create original productions.
Does you plan to expand this part of the business in the future?
Yes, we will increase original productions, mainly on what we are skilled in.
With the development of visualization, many new fields appear which lie in
blurred strips among existing fields, such as digital education and digitalized
communities. So we may explore the fields in which we are skilled or those
that others haven’t yet well handled.
In the past ten years, we have learned a great deal from our clients, includ-
ing architects, engineers, officials, developers, directors, and so on, and this is
very important for our accumulation. We hope to become an expert special-
izing not only in architecture but also in new media and new visual technol-
www.ncity.com ogy. We recently publicized N City, a new website that visualizes all regions
of a city.
How was N City developed? Did you rely on the catalog of renderings you had
already designed or develop all of this exclusively for the website?
Some parts are from jobs we have done in the past. But it is like the Shanghai
World Expo—we signed a contract with the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo
Coordination to set up an online world expo so that all exhibiting halls can
be seen on the Internet. And for another example, we are developing the beta
version of a website for Zhongguancun Zone.
LIU MI: Is that allowed in China?
Google Earth may have legal problems, but we will not, because we developed
this kind of production as authorized by trustees, including some from com-
mercial and cultural fields.
BRENDAN McGETRICK: I think it may be safer than Google Earth, because

Google Earth uses real photos, and that makes people feel nervous that their pri-
vate lives could be exposed.
Yeah, besides taking photos from satellites, Google Earth has Street View.
Some people may be photographed by chance. But our productions just map
a three-dimensional city without real human beings.
LIU MI: Did you come up with all those ideas by yourself?
No, we have many ideas on the table each year, and some good ideas are in-
spired by our clients. But lots of them may not go forward. So we have a
favorable corporate culture in which everybody can put forward their own
thoughts and try.
A three-dimensional city without real human beings 25
BRENDAN McGETRICK: When you talked about the history of Crystal, you
mentioned that two events were critical to the company’s development, the
National Center for the Performing Arts competition and the Beijing Olympic
Games. Can you imagine what the third milestone in Crystal’s development
might be?
It’s hard to say, but possibly the London Olympic Games. We will disclose the
details of the agreement to sponsor the London Olympic Games in the mid-
dle of February. It’s a big challenge for Crystal, as we will undertake all image-
related jobs for the Olympic Games in London, a city of design and creation.
QIN LEI: Do you have serious contenders?
Not yet.
So are you most likely to succeed?
But there is a problem that under the current financial crisis, the sponsorship
fee is over 10 million RMB. If no financial crisis, we would undertake the task
without any hesitation.
Does that mean that Crystal is the most powerful company in this field in the
world?
At least we have successfully undertaken the Beijing Olympic Games. We have

made a screen 145 meters long and 27 meters wide, and a circular screen with
a length of 495 meters.
The London Olympic Games is a challenge to Crystal. If the situation goes
well, we probably enter the upper echelon of the international creative indus-
try. If not, we may be in troubled water. So I am still worried about that.
I think our technology is OK, and the biggest difficulty is culture and cre-
ativity. London is the world’s creative capital. As a Chinese company, we feel
under great pressure. So we must adjust ourselves and buy a local company in
London, or it will be hard to satisfy the requirements.
LIU MI: So Crystal plans to step into the international arena?

Yes, so our future job will focus on blending lots of internationalized digital
studios. We need to elevate our brand and capacity, and tolerate people from
different countries and cultural backgrounds.
BRENDAN McGETRICK: I have one more question about those renderings

you showed us earlier. You mentioned that Crystal’s imaging has reached a state
where it is difficult to distinguish between a photo and a CG image. Do you think
this will cause problems, especially when recreating historical images, such as
Daming Palace? Couldn’t unfamiliar people believe this was the real thing?
That was actually a sample to show what the technology can do, because the
building in the picture is gone. The building has been restored but everybody
knows that it does not exist. But these two images even make us confused,
whether is it a rendering or picture. Actually, according to Chinese law, we
must label whether it is rendering or real photo in promotional materials.
Besides, that’s a worldwide issue, not just existing in Crystal. Take cur-
rent photography as an example: competitors integrate digital technology in
their photos and it’s hard to make a distinction. Even worse, many photos are
“South China tiger faked, such as the “South China tiger hoax” that happened last year. Images
photos are fake: themselves are just tools and a tool isn’t right or wrong in itself. I want to say,
provincial authori-
ties.” China Daily people wish to see the future via more direct visual methods, and commu-
11 Nov. 2007. nication based on vision is irreversible. If you see a DVD, you will never go
back to VCDs. People become more and more critical, and they like to obtain
information in a quicker manner, rather than reading.
That brings up another issue: Does Crystal do any work with text or is it a purely
visual company?
We just visualize some texts to make people understand. For example, we will
teach illiterate peasants by means of images to build houses, as they can’t
read or understand the drawings. We are not addicted to drawing pictures.
And we’re not a super manufacturing company with large-scale production.
A mature company like Crystal will be misunderstood by others, and they
may doubt that when a company is getting stronger, he may try to influence
others with his style. But actually, we have done many things in many fields
that others will never know about, such as charity.
Variety and democracy, at the expense of speed and benefits 27
LIU MI: I’ve always been curious about how Crystal can enjoy such high prestige
in this field, because many companies draw renderings, and it’s easy to be sur-
passed by others.
Well, we have taught many people, and at least half of the practitioners in this
field are from Crystal. We depend on variety and innovation, and we encour-
age variety and democracy, at the expense of speed and benefits.
At present, we set up a Spacelab for architecture design. We have full-time
architects, as well as some part-time architects. We own a wide customer re-
source network, and we have successfully won many tenders—so we are com-
petent at tendering. [Laughs] I think architectural design can be supported in
capital and resources by other fields and, on the other hand, it will push and
elevate other fields, but finally, the different fields will be separated. All in all,
what we should do is set up a platform and finish more tasks.
Rory McGowan is a director at Ove
Arup & Partners and helps lead the
firm’s Beijing Office.
3. Rory McGowan
BRENDAN McGETRICK: The purpose of this interview series is to try to reach The following
a better understanding of what architecture is by collecting the perspectives of discussion took
place on
people who contribute to it in one way or another. Engineers are essential to any January 8, 2009 at
architecture project, of course, so to begin I wonder if you could provide a sense of McGowan’s office,
how you as an engineer look at buildings. Is there a particular lens through which overlooking the
CCTV construc-
you would view architecture that others wouldn’t? tion site in Beijing.
Rory McGOWAN: There are obvious differentiations I would make looking

at a building, and one of the first and foremost is: can you read the structure?
There’s a greater level of interest when you can see the structure expressed or
when it is clearly an engineered building, as opposed to the “build ‘em high,
sell ‘em fast” type of architecture, or buildings that are completely wrapped
up in something so that there could be anything behind. In this case you have
no reading of them whatsoever. I was always drawn to older buildings where
the timber structures were the building, where architecture and structure are
virtually inseparable.
It’s difficult, because I’m used to looking out the window here at CCTV Further mentions
and I do wonder how other engineers coming along look at it. Do they actu- CCTV: 4, 6-7, 22-
23, 30-36, 38, 133
ally understand the pattern? Do they get it or not? That was always something
that we found exciting about the pattern on the CCTV headquarters: it wasn’t
immediately obvious, even to a technical person, what was going on there. So,
yes I look for a story in the buildings when I look at them.
Since you mention CCTV, let’s talk about it a little bit. I think it is already clear
that, like the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV headquarters will have to endure an enor- Further mentions
mous number of descriptions from all sorts of perspectives and degrees of exper- Bird’s Nest: 20, 22,
39, 129-137
tise. The architects have their ways to describe the building and its values, the
city of Beijing has its ways, CCTV has its own ways, etc. Could you provide the
engineering description of this building?
30 Rory McGowan, Engineer
Well, first I would definitely look at it in the broader aspect: where does it
come from? There’s been a reluctance within the design team to define its
origins, but for me there’s a number of strands [of OMA’s past work] that
Further mentions explain it—starting with [OMA’s design for the headquarters of ] Universal,
Universal: 75 where the four parts of the company were pulled together and skewered by
common program. Another strand is the Togok and Hyperbuilding projects
from the mid ‘90s [that explored] very high-density population in a single
entity, the need for alternative methods of circulation and speed of connec-
tivity, and then using that diagram to actually create a structural system that,
rather than being single, stand alone elements, were actually interdependent
elements, reinforcing the architecture. So when I saw CCTV as a blue foam
form for the first time, while it was not something we had drawn explicitly
before, it was very clear in its origin.
Looking at the structure, one of the key components that we’ve always
been trying to exploit is the fact that the two towers are not free-standing,
but propped off each other—albeit in a radical way, but they do prop off each
other. It’s very clear to us, and I hope that it’s clear in the reading, that CCTV
is one structure. It’s not two towers and a bridge and a link building at the
bottom. It’s one structure and it’s a continuous tube element. For lay people
to understand that in a simple way, I’ve said it’s like when you bend a piece
of copper tubing to make a three dimensional form. I always describe it as a
tube structure, but the tube isn’t solid; it actually needs to be open to serve its
function, and so instead of the solid surface of a piece of piping, it’s actually a
triangulated surface, which gives you the stiffness but also gives you the open-
ings to achieve the building functions. That’s the simplest explanation.
Another aspect that affects the look of the building is the structure, which is made
explicit and performs almost as an exoskeleton. As I understand it, the pattern
of braces is designed in a way that the structure becomes denser in areas that are
more stressed...
Yes, because if you slice through the building at any point, it’s a fairly uniform
section. It’s about 60 [meters] by 60 or 60 by 50, whether you slice it vertically
at the overhang or horizontally at the towers or vertically at the base. So it’s
an idea of a constant section with a constant structure. Yet, due to its geom-
etry, due to variations in wind loading with height, due to the application of
An unpredictable flow of forces 31
seismic forces, you get an unpredictable flow of forces around the surface, and
you do need the power of computers to truly understand the flow of forces in
this structure. And this flow of forces around the surface is expressed by the
density of the bracing that you see there.
So, yes, the parts of the building that are working hardest have the highest
density, much like you would patch the elbow [of a jacket] or a tailor would
cut the cloth to suit the areas that are harder wearing than others. Then there
are areas that are working less hard—as you can see to the left hand side of
Tower One—where the pattern opens up, because the actual tube is not work-
ing so hard. But the structure is not just the diagonals. It’s the columns and
beams that make up every floor, and it’s the columns and beams interconnect-
ed by the diagonals that give you that triangulation off the surface. But it is the
diagonals that is the key element and the one that is expressed in the facade.
Let’s return for a second to the moment you mentioned earlier when you first saw
the blue foam model of CCTV. One of the things that I think is crucial to un-
derstand in terms of the role of engineering in architecture is the process through
which a scheme that is made in a purely conceptual phase of architectural design
becomes something that can actually be built. Could you explain a bit about how
that process usually works?
The process for each project that we’ve worked on has been slightly different.
For CCTV, it was a very, very conceptual piece of art, a sculptural form, at
the beginning. One that worked with the programmatic requirements of the
clients, etc. but which was certainly very sculptural. But it was clear that it was
a deadly serious proposition and from experience I knew that it was deadly
serious and an incredible challenge and opportunity.
We saw it for the first time around April 2002 and the submission went in
in July I think. It took us a while to understand what it was we would need
to do, and during that process we did question the geometry as part of it. We
worked with the given concept, but we also examined other geometries. What
we realized was even when we played with the geometry the question was still
the same, so actually there wasn’t much point in questioning the geometry—
whether you tilt it this way or that way or do something slightly different with
it. It was either make a completely different design or accept the form, take
that as a given, and then move forward. And on CCTV that’s what happened:
we decided no matter what we might want to modify, it doesn’t change the

question, and then we addressed the question. And it was only with three
weeks to go before the deadline that we came up with a structural system that
we all believed worked.
We knew from the outset that we had to turn it into a tube, that a con-
ventional “core + column” skyscraper would never be adequate to deal with
this geometry and the brief. There were a number of meetings in Rotterdam
[where OMA is based] and in London [where Ove Arup is based] during
the summer of 2002 and there were some very earnest proposals about how
to build the tower, including one like the Bank of China building in Hong
Kong, you know with the big diamonds. Another one looked at a mixture of
concrete and steel and how you might take this form and try to balance its
weight to achieve the cantilever and the overhang. So we played around with
it, but there was no solution that we were happy with and it was during phone
conversations between London and Rotterdam that the idea was brought up,
Why don’t we do what we did for [OMA’s design of] the Whitney Museum,
which was just take the shape and analyze it without any consideration of a
structure, just give the surface a property and then look at that and how it’s
behaving under ordinary gravity load and moderate horizontal loads. From
that we got this pattern of stresses which showed immediately that there’s a
huge diversity in terms of how hard the tube is working and also that the pat-
tern it was throwing out, this sort of camouflage pattern, wasn’t necessarily a
pattern that spoke of any logic to an untrained eye. It seemed contrived, and
so we said, “What do we do with this? It’s clearly not a solid like the Whitney;
it can’t be. So rather than make it a solid surface let’s redo this and turn it into
triangles.” We basically triangulated the whole surface so it became a whole
series of diamonds which have floor beams behind, and that basic diamond is
still represented there in the west facade of Tower One. You can see it—each
triangle is over two stories or each diamond is over four stories.
That was the mesh that was put over the entire structure and analyzed.
Then we said, “Ok, instead of making the members bigger or smaller to re-
flect the force, let’s just make the pattern bigger or smaller and try to keep the
members the same size.” And, unusually, most of that discussion happened by
telephone and by digital camera shots, doing analysis, making models, mark-
ing up images with pencil, scanning it, sending it down the line to Rotterdam
and getting their reaction. There wasn’t that moment of face-to-face where we
De
50 percent sheer terror and 50 percent sheer exhilaration 33
came up with it. It was literally: we got an image onscreen, we sent it over to
Rotterdam, they saw it, and we said, “That’s it, we’ve got it.”
That was unusual, normally these sorts of moments occur in a particular
meeting, but it didn’t happen for CCTV. It just happened over two or three
days, three weeks before the deadline and after that it was basically trying to
understand more and more about the structure and whether we really be-
lieved we could build it economically and make it work. So in the few weeks
up to the competition submission basically Arup had to decide whether it
was something we were really going to put our name to or not, whether it was
something we really believed we would ultimately deliver with only having a
matter of weeks knowledge of one of the most unique structures in the world.
So when Arup enters into a competition, how confident do you have to be in the
proposal’s feasibility?
You can never have the luxury of total confidence. When [OMA partners] Ole
[Scheeren] and Ellen Van Loon and I met after the CCTV contract had been
negotiated, they asked me how I felt, and I said it’s basically 50 percent sheer
terror and 50 percent sheer exhilaration. At the end of the day, we said it could
be done, but it was a small number of people and it was a difficult moment,
and behind the scenes we had a team working on it long before the contract
was even signed. All the way from August 2002 to the contract signing in De-
cember we had a team secreted away in London working on it to reinforce and
make sure it was really something we could do.
So, yes, in a competition you have to make a call based on experience and
in making that call we called on individuals in the firm who would have ex-
perience with buildings of this sort of sophistication and if we get enough
people agreeing that we can make it work then we feel confident enough at
a competition level. Then you are going through a process of building up
your levels of confidence to a point where ultimately you have to give the
government here confidence and the Ministry of Construction confidence.
It’s not just the client and the architect, you actually have to build up levels of
confidence to the point where other people are accepting what you’re saying
as reality.
How does that process work?

Through hard work and having the right people. It takes time and it’s an it-
erative process, but for CCTV, as I said, the first stage was the competition
and the second stage was the back room analysis that was going on during
the contract negotiation. The next phase was the formal scheme design and
the key hurdle there in terms of public liability was the approval of the struc-
ture by the Ministry of Construction at the end of design development. That
finally happened in February 2004, and so when you think about it: we first
looked at [the design] in April 2002 and we got an approval with comments
in January 2004 and we carried on answering some of those comments. It was
a very detailed process, very intense, working with the Ministry of Construc-
tion, with a group of twelve or thirteen experts appointed by the Ministry.
Buildings like CCTV, and more and more we’re finding that modern build-
ings for whatever reason, fall outside the normal codes which govern 95 per-
cent of buildings and you have to engineer from first principles. So we basi-
cally had to take the code, understand the spirit of the code, put it to one side,
and then write a code to design CCTV, get the code approved by the Ministry
of Construction, then design the building to that code, show them the results,
demonstrate that we know how the building is performing, that we know mil-
lisecond by millisecond how the building will perform in an earthquake and
that we can predict how it’s going to behave—not just understand what forces
are in what members but predict how it’s going to behave in a severe event.
We build up our knowledge of the structure and we use that knowledge to
go back and tweak the code. There’s an iteration there between tweaking this
bespoke code, doing the work, and going back—and ourselves and the Minis-
try of Construction are part of that process. At the end of it, you’ve agreed on
the code, you’ve agreed on all the work you need to do, you present the final
results, and you get approval if you’ve done your groundwork. But in getting
to that point we held 50 to 60 meetings with individuals, groups, and gather-
ings of the entire Ministry of Construction expert panel. It was an incredible
effort and involved all of Arup basically.
But now if someone wanted to build several new versions of CCTV you’ve done
all the legwork for them.
Yes, if one of these [points at CCTV headquarters] was to be built over there,
yeah. The basis is there. Of course, if you built it in Tokyo it’s very different.
Something that challenges the skyscraper 35
There are lots of local issues, but the fact is that it’s basically groundbreak-
ing work for the Ministry of Construction. They were accepting practice that
Arup believed was appropriate to use on the building from, say, California,
from Japan, from Europe, putting it together into a specific code for that
building. That work represents a huge body of research into unusual struc-
tures, and that methodology could be applied and form the basis for similar
projects by the Ministry of Construction here but also for countries around
the world. It stands as a huge advance in designing alternatives to towers:
there are other ways and it is possible economically to do something that chal-
lenges the skyscraper.
CCTV is a very globalized building in that way, because it’s based on experiences
from different parts of the world and, now that it’s established, could be the basis
for projects around the world.
Right, as well as be accepted here. A lot of the work we’ve done on CCTV was
never done in China before. We had to bring the Ministry of Construction up
to speed with cutting edge international practice. And we learned more and
more about their attitude towards building design and what they’re comfort-
able with and not comfortable with. We really enjoy those processes as long
as they’re not political, and that process is one that is particularly present
in seismic countries. Places like California and Japan have this “engineering
from first principles” approach to buildings that fall outside of the normal
prescriptive codes.
What exactly is engineering from first principles?
If you’re doing [a standard building like], say, Fortune Plaza across from here,
in the structural engineering law here in China there will be a code that gov-
erns buildings of that height, made of concrete with those beams, and basi-
cally the code tells you what you can do and can’t do. Then you basically tick
the boxes and do it exactly as the code says, and if you’ve done it to what the
code says then you’ve carried out the design to the national standard and as a
company you don’t take any liability for any failings of that code. It’s prescrip-
tive; it’s a catch-all guideline. So, for example, there might be limits on the
percentage of shear walls you can transfer at the ground level of a building:
the code might say that you can only transfer 50 percent of the shear walls,
so the designer will limit the shear walls to 50 percent, tick the box, and on
he goes.
In engineering from first principles, you would understand why they don’t
want you to take out more than 50 percent of the walls—that’s basically to
avoid a soft story at the bottom of the building—then take that understanding
and generate a structure that achieves the same performance but in another
way that the code didn’t envisage. That’s the difference between prescriptive
and engineering from first principles. You’re basically building the structures
element by element and deciding all the design criteria for it, analyzing it,
agreeing that it’s all appropriate with the authorities, and getting approval.
Engineering from first principles is, for engineers, very exciting. Rather
than just working to a code, we are actually engaging with the people who
write the codes here in China and agreeing on the code for this building. So
it’s a fantastic process for engineers, and OMA was almost jealous of the inti-
macy that existed between engineers [and the Ministry of Construction] on
this project. You could see at some points the frustration that it was such an
intimate process and one that they didn’t feel part of. But also they couldn’t
influence it, and the process was fundamental to achieving the architecture.
Is it fair to say that, because China at that time didn’t have codes that were at
the cutting edge of what was happening architecturally, you were provided more
flexibility in terms of developing a new code?
No, the code here in terms of structure is already up there with most of the
codes in the world, and there isn’t a code anywhere in the world that would
allow you to do [CCTV]. So it would be the same process anywhere else. But
you can imagine in some countries it would turn into a political process; in
others it would turn into a mess where you would never get any agreement.
What’s been achieved here, and it’s similar to what we find in California and
Japan, is a workable, pragmatic, non-political process, and that’s great.
Due to the fact that China, Japan, and the western US are seismic areas?
In China, the codes are law and if you don’t fulfil the codes you’re actually
breaking the law. If you go to other countries, the codes are guidance, they
Get real and understand what the limitations are 37
have a different level of status in law. But it’s law in China, in Japan, and in
places like California, and that’s because of the concern about seismic events
wiping out an entire city. It’s such a major issue with such huge socio-political
ramifications that the degree of damage to an economy has to be considered:
what’s the appropriate level of security for a building in a seismic event?
This idea of the differing status of codes around the world reminds me of some-
thing I wanted to ask you at the beginning. You’ve done work on four continents,
is that right?
Well, North America, all over Europe, Africa, India, China—not Australia and
not South America.
Increasingly even small architecture offices operate globally, and I’m curious
about the effect that working in different cultural and legal conditions has on the
process of designing and building.
There are huge differences. If you start with Germany, say, where there’s a
DIN [German Institute for Standardization] standard for how to fold a draw-
ing—and I’ve always thought, I don’t want to work in that environment. Then
you go to developing countries where, in reality, there aren’t codes so you’re
actually applying codes from another part of the world and you’re making
a judgement about cost benefit and consequence in a rural situation. You’re
working outside of any codified environment in terms of personal responsi-
bility as an engineer. I’ve built buildings in Tanzania and bridges in Cameroon
and in each situation decided what I felt was the appropriate code of practice
to that particular situation—to the materials, to skills and workmanship, etc.
In those situations you have to be highly responsive to the realities on the
ground and in developing designs you need to just get real and understand
what the limitations are.
It gets blurred when you go into Europe. I’ve had very different experienc-
es working in somewhere like Portugal on the Porto Casa da Musica [Con- Further mentions
cert Hall]. You have countries where clients question the design authorship Casa da Musica: 8
continuously and expect the role of the design team to be that of technicians
rather than designers. And while Casa da Musica was eight years in the pro-
cess of being designed and built, the design was never questioned, despite the
difficulties of the process. The difficulties only had to do with people and
money and politics, but design was never questioned. In other countries, the
design is continuously being manipulated and changed to suit the last person
to come in, so you get very strong cultural influences on the process. In the
US, and China as well, there’s a tendency for architects to do as the client
instructs, and I think the client gets, in a way, what they deserve—but don’t
deserve at the same time.
Then you’ve got the legal framework in which you work. For example, for
Further mentions IIT in Chicago, one supplier wouldn’t supply basketball netting as a wall ma-
IIT: 3 terial, because they were afraid of being sued—they were afraid that students
would climb up it, that they would become entangled and injure themselves,
and then sue them because they had allowed basketball netting to be used in
an inappropriate way. Then Latin countries are much easier going and less le-
galistic. Then you get design by committee in the UK. Two places I’ve avoided
working in as much as possible are Germany and Britain. I’ve found that in
the process of design in Britain so much energy was absorbed in control rath-
er than experimenting and making things happen. So my personal experience
is that there are still huge differences and that makes it interesting to go from
one country to another and practice.
Because of that, I suppose it’s inevitable that each project will have the finger-
prints of the area where it’s built, no matter who has designed it. So although
CCTV was initially designed in Rotterdam and London, it is inevitably a Chi-
nese building.
From OMA’s point of view, the journey on the interiors and fit out would
certainly indicate that. But—I’m probably going to contradict what I said
earlier—in terms of the structure of CCTV, it was only ever going in one
direction. It was going down an appropriate international process, in terms
of establishing the code, designing it, engineering it, analyzing it, building it
and monitoring it, etc. It wasn’t a “Chinese” project. Apart from lots of guys
digging holes in their bare feet and cutting off the top two meters of piles
with hammers and chisels... Once that part was done and the building started,
there was only one way to build it and that was to the highest international
standards. There will be interesting stories about the process of working and
how it’s difficult to get people to work at different times of the year because
Lots of guys digging holes in their bare feet 39
they’ve got to go cut corn at home, but in terms of the way it was built, there
was only one way.
How has Arup been involved in that building process?
The process here in China is different from a lot of other countries. Basically
the site supervision is, by law, undertaken by a third party, independent of the
consultant and the contractor. They are legally responsible for the implemen-
tation of the technical specification. Very few clients here want to duplicate
that role on site, so very few of our projects actually have resident engineers or
architects. Some firms may elect to stay involved, but in most cases the client
won’t pay for it and doesn’t want it or appreciate it.
But there must be some process of communication with this third party, espe-
cially for a project like CCTV which doesn’t really have a precedent.
In terms of continuation of the process to the point where the contractor

receives it, of course we were heavily involved with ECADI, our local engi-
neering and architecture partners. Ourselves and ECADI worked closely to-
gether on the specification in the construction document phase, in the tender
process evaluation, and handing over to the contractor. What I was describing
earlier is actually on site.
It was an interesting lesson here, and I saw the same in Japan when we
were working on Kansai Airport where we were foreign consultants coming
in, but at some point the Japanese said, “We want to do it ourselves. We want
to be able to say we’ve done it ourselves. We understand what you’ve done: we
understand the specification, the design, the drawings, and if we’ve got any
queries we’ll get back to you, but we want to do it ourselves.” And I certainly
felt that there was a certain amount of that here, where the contractor basi-
cally wanted to achieve it. They saw achieving a building like this as putting
them among the top ranking contractors in the world.
If you go to Abu Dhabi or to Chicago and say “We delivered this,” of course
people are going to sit up. Especially if you can demonstrate that you invest-
ed the time and the money and the people to actually deliver a project like
that. So, China State, the contractor, certainly grabbed the project and gave it
everything.
Having been in China for a few years now, what have you learned?
Arup has been in Hong Kong for over thirty years, so we were here in China,
and we did our first project down in Shanghai about 15 or 16 years ago—the
Hilton Hotel in Shanghai. Since then it’s gradually grown up, but the first big
step was to open offices in Shenzhen and Shanghai in the late ‘90s and then
Beijing opened up in 2001. So it’s been ramping up very slowly and CCTV
Further mentions was the first of the big four: on its heels came [terminal three of Beijing] air-
Airport: 5-6 port then the [national] stadium and the watercube.
Stadium: 20, 22,
29, 129-137 What I notice now is the speed at which expectations are changing here in
terms of what is a good design. The speed at which the understanding of what
good design means, especially among repeat clients is on the upward part of
the curve. They are learning fast what is and is not acceptable. What passed as
a design process three or four years ago is just not acceptable anymore. The
codes have changed, energy has shot up the agenda, green building issues have
shot up the agenda, water usage... But also the quality. The earlier buildings
that were built were basically: knock ‘em up, sell ‘em, and get out. And the
quality tells, you can see that after five years those buildings look like they’ve
been there twenty years and they’re not going to last very long. So working
and living in a design environment that’s changing and redefining the rules
almost monthly has been really interesting.
Because there isn’t the level of experience and training, particularly in
multi-disciplinary complex buildings, you come crashing back down to earth
and particularly here the importance of architecture as a human process is
magnified greatly. I could go on. What have I learned here? To be patient. To
be thick skinned. I was told you need the skin of a rhino to work here and
even at that it still gets to me sometimes.
I ask that because I’ve noticed that the people who come to China and manage
to be productive and have a positive experience do end up learning a lot, because
some of the basic working processes are very different. If you come from a culture
where there’s a rule for how to fold, operating effectively in China requires a cer-
tain kind of mental rebooting, which I think is beneficial for people to go through.
Right, it’s fantastic. Anybody I meet who’s got any sort of get up and go I tell
them, get over here and just get stuck in. They might not be doing the most
I was told you need the skin of a rhino 41
cutting edge work, but it is cutting edge for this environment. And if you’re
serious about wanting to do something relevant then China accounts for half
of the world’s built environment, so come here and make an impact on the
built environment here. Achieve some buildings that you can point to and
people can use as stepping stones to get to the next level. I think that’s a great
motivation for people to come and cut their teeth.
Barry Bergdoll is the Chief Curator of
Architecture and Design at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art (MoMA) and a
Professor of Architectural History at
Columbia University.
4. Barry Bergdoll
Brendan McGETRICK: In this interview series, we’re talking to people from The following
discussion took
various professions who interact with and react to architecture in some way. I’m place on
very curious to talk to you as a curator because of the immense importance of the February 4, 2009
gallery as an arena for architecture, particularly modern architecture. One aspect over the phone
between New York
of your role as curator that I want to discuss is the challenge of translating archi- and Beijing.
tecture for exhibition. When I interviewed Michael Rock earlier in this series, he
talked about the frustration he felt when trying to express architecture, particu-
larly the experience of being inside a building, in a two-dimensional format like
a book or panel. I’m curious about how you relate to that dilemma.
Barry Bergdoll: My last show, Home Delivery, was, I suppose, a multi- Bergdoll, Barry and
Peter Christensen,
media approach to the age old problem that the only way you can display cur. Home Delivery:
architecture is through full scale buildings. We did construct buildings in the Fabricating the Mod-
exhibition, and then for the rest of it we were working with representations. ern Dwelling. New
York: Museum of
The more you can multiply the representations, the more ways that you can Modern Art, 2008
reveal aspects of the architecture that are more to do with the nature of mak-
ing architecture than about the architecture itself.
In that exhibition, I set out to make a show that is about the process of ar-
chitectural thinking and designing for one particular set of challenges, based
on this recurrent theme of designing for industrial fabrication, whether it be
old fashioned industrial fabrication, heavy industry, or whether it be digital
industry. That was the theme of the show, but the challenge was also how to
make a show in which you reveal to the public the actual process of thinking
and making architecture. In that sense, I don’t think of some of the techniques
that we explored in that exhibition as specific to its subject. I think that they’re
applicable to making exhibitions about process rather than the end product.
The reason that I was interested in doing that is because, to a certain extent,
you really can’t exhibit architecture. You can only exhibit something about
architecture.
44 Barry Bergdoll, Curator
Right, and in your case the challenge is further complicated by the fact that you
are an architecture curator operating in a modern art museum. Your audience is
not necessarily knowledgeable about architecture, or even particularly interested
in it, but still you have to find ways to create seductive points of entry for them.
Was the focus on process a way to do that?
It is true that the status of the objects that we are exhibiting in the architec-
ture gallery are different from the status of the objects in any other gallery in
a museum. Most of them have a dual status: in the best cases they are works
of art in and of themselves—they’re beautiful architecture drawings, they’re
beautiful renderings, they’re beautiful models... They might have complex
histories, because they might be the products of collaboration. They are not as
Picasso, Pablo. frequently masterworks; it’s not, you know, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which
Les Demoiselles we can assume was more or less painted by Picasso.
d’Avignon. 1907.
Museum of Mod- To come back to your question, the pieces have to be so visually compel-
ern Art, New York ling in and of themselves that they’re going to to engage the minds and the
imaginations of non-professional visitors and lead the person to want to start
thinking about process. [One has to] assume that the visitors might treat it
in the same way that they might view Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and be so
stunned by it as a visual experience that they stand in front of it for a while
and part of their contemplation might be on the nature of the cubist con-
struction of space. So [for architecture exhibitions] you need something that
is equally intriguing and that, in a certain way, can carry other objects that
might be more technical.
You need to set up the questions—not verbally, but through objects, and
in that sense it is still like an exhibition, it’s got to be carried by the things that
are on display. You can’t have a panel that asks a question that is extremely
provocative and instructs the audience that this is the question to bring to
the objects in the exhibition. You have to find some way that the actual design
and content lead the visitor that way, through visual experience, visual experi-
ence that can be arrived at through many different ways. In that way, there is
a fascinating parallelism to making architecture, because you can make a plan
that says how people are going to move through the building, but you can’t
actually dictate to them how to move; you can only give them cues, and you’ve
got to be cognizant of the fact that there will be many other experiences of a
The possibility for relationships 45
building, just as there will be multiple experiences of an exhibition. So it has

to work in the way that you intend it to work, and it also has to work in many
of the unintended ways in which it will be experienced.
Do you think there are ways to script and anticipate these unintended experi-
ences or do you simply draw up your best case scenario and then study the unin-
tended uses retroactively?
I think there is a way to think about multiple experiences in a single space. I

did that in Home Delivery, just to talk about my most recent effort. That show
was designed so that it could be seen in multiple ways. That was the funda-
mental architectural problem: if you want something to be seen in a certain
sequence, you need both an entrance and an exit, and once the entrance and
the exit are in the same place, then you’re really out of luck. So, I designed
an exhibition that could be viewed as a timeline, as an enormous U, but that
allowed viewers to ricochet off both sides of the U and find interesting and
provocative juxtapositions. There were also more localized juxtapositions that
were made against the grain of the chronology, and that was done on purpose.
But that other people may have discovered things that I hadn’t even intended
to be there has to have happened, because I must have given a hundred tours
of that exhibition and almost every time I went in, there was some juxtaposi-
tion that I hadn’t seen before, hadn’t planned on, and that set me to thinking
anew about the topic. But that I think is because in a thematic exhibition I
like to work in such a way that the theme is a little bit of a hypothesis, rather
than a didactic [declaration]—“You will learn this”—so that it raises ques-
tions and opens up possibilities, particularly the possibility for relationships
that are non-linear.
Let’s talk more specifically about some of your shows. The first exhibition that you
did after coming to the museum was 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, which Bergdoll, Barry and
Alexandra Quantrill,
presented selections from MoMA’s collection of architectural works. I can imag- cur. 75 Years of
ine a few factors influencing your decisions, for one the enormous body of work Architecture at
which you have to analyze and somehow represent, but also MoMA’s reputation MoMA. New York:
Museum of Modern
and historical influence as a patron of architecture and leader in architectural Art, 2007-08
discussions in New York. What was the process of putting together that show?
In that case, it was an historical show, but with two different histories that
were overlaid on one another. One was the history of modernism, with the
idea that in the architecture gallery we would have a small scale example of
what is present upstairs in the painting gallery, where there is a history of
modernism that unfolds in painting and sculpture. It’s a very canonic one,
although that canon is not one that it tries to respond to; it’s one that it has
historically created. That was my second historical line on top of the first:
what is the relationship of the history of the department itself to that of mod-
ernism? So there was a dual reading in the exhibition—the actual history of
architecture and then the history of the department itself through its exhibi-
tion and collecting practices. It was a perfectly fine exhibition if you didn’t
want to go to that second line, you didn’t need to go to that level of reading,
but I like to create things that have multiple layers and are satisfying on what-
ever layer or layers you want to engage with.
But to get back to your specific question... How do you go about choosing?
It’s a kind of give-and-take process. That was a show that I did in order to fa-
miliarize myself with the collection, because my only previous experience had
Bergdoll, Barry been with a Mies show, so I knew the huge holdings of Mies, but I didn’t know
and Terence Riley, the rest of the collection, which is quite different, since the Mies is an archive
cur. Mies in Berlin.
New York: Mu- and the rest of the collection is very highly selected examples.
seum of Modern I started to look at these examples, and began to think about what they
Art, 2001 would allow me to do—what stories they would allow me to tell, what they
would allow me to think about with the public to open up the tradition of the
avant-garde as something that is not only historically interesting, but also has
questions that are of contemporary relevance and fascination.
I began to develop four themes by looking at what some of the clusters and
strong points there were. Once I’d formulated four questions or categories—I
chose four for the dumbest reason in world, simply because there were four
walls in the room, and so I thought that would lend itself to a clear structuring
of four themes—I went back and started to look at drawings or models that
might be interesting to think about in relationship to that theme. And that’s
when it really becomes fun, because that is when, suddenly, a drawing that
might mean one thing monographically—let’s say, in a Mies show—means
something quite different when you put it in a different kind of configura-
tion. Suddenly the collection becomes a little bit like an intellectual pack of
cards, and you open up completely different questions and completely different
Trying to explode that myth 47
territories depending on which four things you put into one group. And that
is what’s so fun about the collection: you realize that the next time that you
bring that drawing out, it will be in a completely different context, so you’re
going to think about it differently and you’re going to invite people to come
back to see it in a different way. That, at least when you’re working with archi-
tectural drawings, is not that dissimilar to the way that my painting colleagues
upstairs are working with paintings—as individual works that stand on their
own but that take on additional meanings depending on the “hang,” the con-
figuration of the gallery.
In terms of the second history you mentioned—the relationship between the ar-
chitectural department of MoMA to the history of modernism itself—what con-
clusions did you come to through your exploration and shuffling of the collection?
The conclusion was a little bit open-ended. What I was trying to do was to
break down the received truth that there was a very straight and narrow line
that MoMA had held to for at least the first forty or fifty years of [the ar-
chitecture department’s] existence—from the foundation show, the so-called
“International Style” show, up until the 1980s when post-modernism was Barr Jr., Alfred H.,
beating its drums so strongly that even MoMA couldn’t ignore them. When Philip Johnson
and Henry Russell
I actually looked back at the history of the department—which is something Hitchcock. Modern
I’m working on as an ongoing project—and saw what was in the collection, I Architecture: An
found all sorts of evidence that MoMA had had a much more broad-ranging International
Exhibition. New
and exploratory approach to modernism than is implied by the reputation York: Museum of
that had been set in motion in 1932 and repeated over and over again as a Modern Art, 1932
mantra—probably more frequently outside the museum than inside. So I was
in a certain way trying to explode that myth, and the conclusion I reached in
the process is really pretty straightforward: as always, history is much more
complex than the operative myths.
Which I think also relates the exhibition on Mies van der Rohe that you did prior
to coming to MoMA. The popular narrative that has come to define his work has
also been greatly simplified over time.
Yes. The Mies show, Mies in Berlin, that I did together with [former curator of
architecture and design at MoMA] Terry Riley was a similar sort of operation:
we said, “Well, what if we don’t simply confine ourselves to the projects that
Mies said over and over again were his most important? What if we put in ev-
erything that he did, what kinds of new conclusions can we draw about Mies’s
overall activity?” In fact, much of what he rejected opened new windows into
what he had retained. So the result of doing that exhibition for me is that
even some of the canonic works like the Tugendhat House or the Barcelona
Pavilion I now experience very very differently compared to when I was do-
ing it filtered through the very selected group that Mies and Philip Johnson
had put forth over and over again as the master works. Mies actually became
a much more complex figure historically, and he became one with relevance
to contemporary questions in ways that we had hardly expected when we
started out.
Earlier you mentioned that part of presenting architecture to a lay audience relies
on material that is so strong visually that people feel almost obligated to try to
understand the thought process behind it. One of the difficulties for me in looking
at architectural representations from the computer age is that I don’t have the
sense of personal involvement that I do when I look at hand drawn material. An
AutoCAD drawing or CG rendering seems much flatter and more disposable to
me than works from earlier times when a drawing had a personal signature. I
wonder if you’ve encountered that problem when selecting material...
Well, as you were speaking, I’ve been hesitating whether I wanted to fully
agree with you or try to disagree with you.
Disagree please.
[Laughs] Right. On the one hand, the means of representation has changed.
So, it’s not pencil or chalk or mylar, etc. etc. And I do have a feeling often
when I see AutoCAD projections that they seem, as images, interchangeable,
whereas if you dropped ten drawings from the twentieth century on the table
I could probably assign them a probable author on the basis of the actual
means of representation, the style, as you say, the signature, the handwriting
as it were. I could submit them to the same kind of analysis that a drawing
curator would for master drawings. With CAD it seems that you want to look
through the means that are used—because it’s within the pallet of the com-
A continuous set of moves, rather than a set of discreet steps 49
puter program—and see what the spatial implications and design moves are.
You almost want to look through the means of representation to the design
itself to try to guess, who must be doing that?
But I wonder if maybe we don’t have enough historical distance to see the
handwriting with that more mechanical projection tool. On one level, I think
it’s a paradigm shift; on another level I think it’s another means of representa-
tion. I don’t think my photographic colleagues would like it if I said, “How
can you have individual style in photography, it’s all done with film and a
camera?” We know that there are incredibly different photographic styles, so
it might be that curators haven’t really caught up with the digital revolution to
begin to see different types of style in that machine environment.
What other complications do you encounter as a result of this paradigm shift?

We’ve been talking about the intellectual implications, but I’m sure there are
more practical challenges created by the transfer to digital representation.
It’s a challenge on every level, down to the storage and preservation level. The
original word for a curator was a “keeper.” We tend to think of a curator now
as someone who arranges things in space, who makes arguments with objects,
but the original notion of curating had to do with safe keeping. So, that’s a
huge issue, and a lot of people are thinking about it, but there are no conclu-
sions yet. But I think that there is an intermediary issue as well, because, in a
sense, the whole process of designing is different in a computer environment
than in a sketch environment. It’s a continuous set of moves, rather than a set
of discreet steps. If you are in the position of the curator—a person who is
outside wanting to record and represent this project in your curatorial narra-
tive—the material almost becomes like a film, and you have consider where to
freeze frame the material you’re collecting and exhibiting.
Another feature of the digital shift that I imagine must be influential is the extent
to which information and imagery can be spread. Because people consume infor-
mation differently and travel more frequently over shorter periods than they did
when MoMA’s architecture department first started in the 1930s, I wonder if the
potential value of an exhibition has changed. Particularly I wonder if the idea of
a revelatory must-see exhibition has changed since one often no longer needs to
be physically present to observe the material.
Oh absolutely. At the moment I’m teaching a history of the department for an

Further mentions art history seminar at Columbia [University], and we just looked at the early
Columbia: 55, shows again, and I told my students that it’s very important for me to drama-
115-126
tize for you a sense of the novelty of simply acquiring black and white pho-
tographs of these far flung buildings, and being able to put them together in
one room. In 1932, besides the fact that it was in the heart of the Depression,
if you look at the magazines that most of the architects got, just seeing these
images was not something that they would encounter easily. This is eighty
years ago when this department was founded and it was essentially going to be
an information resource for architects and for the general public. As you said,
now you can do that yourself on the Internet in about ten minutes. Images
proliferate and everything is immediately accessible as representation.
I think it has less to do with the ability to travel than with the density
and the immediacy with which an enormous amount of visual information is
available at very high quality through the Net. That’s yet another context that
pushes me in my urge that, whether it be process or something else, the cura-
tor has a different responsibility towards architecture in the 21st century, and
particularly a curator in my position, which, as you said at the very beginning,
is a distinctive position because I am not a curator for architects; I’m a curator
in one of the world’s most visited art museums. I have a general audience, and
when I go to meetings of various architecture curators, it’s actually a small
minority of us who work in highly visible public venues. Most people are
working in something that’s related to a school or to a center for architecture
that derives most of its audience from either design students or design profes-
sionals, so an already very well informed audience.
People in New York don’t wander into the Center for Architecture by
chance, but people wander into the architecture galleries at the Museum of
Modern Art who were not intending to look at architecture. They’re here to
look at something else, and you grab their attention and suddenly they’re
looking at architecture. That puts our department in a small group, and the
responsibility there is not to show them objects that they could also see on the
Net, but it is to engage them in some way that, hopefully, will lead them to
look at the next building that they confront a bit differently than they did on
their way in. They’ll have a heightened awareness and heightened experience
of architecture, on any level, from aesthetic appreciation to a more critical
engagement with architectural decisions that are being made around them.
The ongoing life of the exhibition 51
What role do exhibition catalogues play in that effort?
Because we deal so much in representation, there’s less of a misfit between the

catalogue and the show. If you go to see a Picasso show, the catalogue has pho-
tographs of Picasso paintings, but if we’re dealing with digital files, whether
we’re blowing them up to put them on a wall or whether we’re having them in
a catalogue, there’s a more fluid passage between book and exhibition. (Not
that I would ever want to conceive an exhibition that would be accused of be-
ing a book on a wall, which so many are.) But I do agree with the cliché: the
book is important as a permanent record of the exhibition and for its further
diffusion. Three quarters of a million people visited Home Delivery, but its
incalculable how many people will consult the book. So it’s part of the ongo- Bergdoll, Barry
ing life of the exhibition. I think one of the most amazing things about the and Peter Chris-
tensen. Home
1932 “International Style” show, which is one of the most famous shows in the Delivery: Fabricat-
history of modern architecture, is that if you actually look at the statistics, the ing the Modern
number of people who visited that show during the six weeks that it was open Dwelling. Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2008.
was pretty miniscule. But the publications that came out of that show have
been in continuous print for most of the 78 years since then and are among
the most influential publications that there are, and something of their influ-
ence has to do with the fact that they are connected with a famous exhibition,
so there’s a sort of symbiotic relationship between the two.
Let’s shift to some of your other shows. First, the Lost Vanguard exhibition of Bergdoll, Barry
Soviet avant-garde architecture. To me, what’s really interesting about that show and Jean-Louis
Cohen, cur. Lost
is how clearly it presents architecture as the reflection of the spirit of a time, and Vanguard: Soviet
I think it does this both by assembling so many ideologically compatible proj- Modernist Architec-
ects, but also by presenting them in a consistent way. Most of the buildings are ture, 1922–32. New
York: Museum of
represented by contemporary photographs, and I’m curious how that curatorial Modern Art, 2007
decision was made.
If I can just roll back a little bit—and stop me if I get off track and don’t return
to your specific question—I’d like to give a little background. In my mind,
the Lost Vanguard exhibition was a stand alone exhibition, but it was also the
fifth wall of 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, because one of the themes of
75 Years of Architecture was, What are the key aspects of modernism that the
Museum of Modern Art’s foundation show (the “International Style” show)
wasn’t able to accommodate? And one was the complete lack of attention to
Soviet architecture, which was one of the most vibrant fields of experimen-
tation in that architectural avant-garde in the 1920s. One of the reasons I
wanted to do that show almost immediately was to say that, if we’re going to
reopen the history of modernism, this is a very big field that needs to be inte-
grated. But of course it wasn’t done through architectural drawings or any of
the objects that comprised the 75 Years of Architecture exhibition; it was done
primarily through Richard Pare’s extraordinary photographs that were taken
over the last fifteen years. So there was another dimension, because every pho-
tograph was simultaneously a record of a building that came from these Uto-
pian experiments and this atmosphere that you mention in the 1920s when,
despite the enormous material needs of the early Soviet Union—really I think
the poverty and confusion and the disorder are almost unimaginable—none-
theless there was a Utopian spirit of building the new, complete social reor-
ganization, and so on and so forth. But then, on the other side, these were
photographs of the buildings in decay, and they spoke in a rather melancholic
poetry about a dream that had either gone sour or been neglected—and the
neglect on the part of Western scholars could be equated with the neglect
within today’s Russia to deal with this heroic past.
There were a complex set of things going on in that exhibition. On one
hand, it was a documentation of a lost chapter of Soviet modernism. On an-
other, it was a kind of poetic exercise about the irretrievability of the avant-
garde. Then, in the way a lot of people read it, it was an unexpected statement
of the Museum of Modern Art on the need for historic preservation for mod-
ern buildings.
Now let’s talk about Home Delivery, the exhibition on pre-fabricated architec-
ture that you mentioned earlier. I wonder if it’s possible to identify in a way simi-
lar to what was done for the Lost Vanguard show an impression of the spirit of
the pre-fab golden age, which spanned the mid 20th century I guess. Is it possible
to define a set of attitudes that propelled Western pre-fabrication design, as you
were for Soviet modernist design?
Well, I think there was a spirit. One of my own critiques of the show was that
I perhaps presented too much of the optimism that surrounded the launch of
each of these pre-fabricated prototypes, and so the history of pre-fabrication,
Space for mediocrity 53
which many people say is a history of failures, wasn’t presented with its dark
sides. It was very much a history of the optimism, this idea of “hope springs
eternal” that seems to accompany the history of pre-fabrication. Partly, the
idea of showing the whole thing was, as we’re in this moment once again, to
look back and see previous episodes and by accumulating that history sug-
gest that we shouldn’t so naively inflate a new bubble of enthusiasm for pre-
fabrication or accept this idea of digital fabrication as the panacea of a future
architecture without taking into account the rather checkered history of pre-
fabrication. But, it was a very upbeat show. It was not a show that underscored
the fact that so many of these things didn’t take off. It was more presented as
saying that they have lessons but they also have untapped potential.
It’s interesting that you see a parallelism with Lost Vanguard, because I
guess there were some elements of nostalgia and the impossibility of retrieval
that were in both, but I hadn’t seen that myself until you pointed it out.
To me, it’s completely understandable that there would be an emphasis on the in-
novative or inspirational aspects of any movement. But do you think there needs
to be a certain sort of space for mediocrity in an exhibition?
Well, that was big a question for me, because if you wanted to talk statisti-
cally I would imagine that hands down the Soviet panel system was the most
successful and now the most reviled pre-fabrication experiment—although
I don’t even think you can call it an experiment, because it became an abso-
lute industry that rebuilt large parts of eastern and central Europe, the Soviet
Union all the way to Asia, and was even exported to Cuba. We treated that in
very little detail. It had to be there, it was fascinating, but I didn’t want to do
a whole critique of it as it got put into play—and much of that was mediocre.
It’s a question of not only how do you deal with architecture in an art
museum if you want to deal with the larger context, but also how do you deal
with social context, social history? How do you address the historical context
in an exhibition in an art museum where the norm is masterpiece after mas-
terpiece after masterpiece on the wall? You wouldn’t expect to find a painter
exhibited in the painting and sculpture galleries that the museum did not
think was an extremely accomplished painter whose work merited a place in
the history of art as it is collected and narrated by the Museum of Modern
Art. On the other hand, there were many things included in the Home Delivery
show that were there for the history of technology or the history of inven-
tion, but were quite unresolved architectural forms. I think it’s interesting that
you ask this question, because I was really surprised that there was very little
discussion on the fact that [post World War II pre-fabricated housing model]
the Lustron House is completely uninspiring architecture. What is it doing
in the Museum of Modern Art? I thought it was a rather provocative gesture
to put a Lustron House in MoMA, and there was a real mixing of high and
low throughout the exhibition, but there was very little commentary on that,
surprisingly, in the reception of the show.
Do you think that that’s because of the strength of MoMA’s aura? The reputation
of the institution dignifies all the objects it presents and people sort of assume,
this is something that should be taken very seriously since MoMA is exhibiting it?
That might be part of the explanation. Partly, I think we were very successful
in creating an extraordinary spectacle through the role of film, creating a very
dense space, an overall sensory overload in the show. This is what made it so
popular, even with children and families. I was thrilled that they were spend-
ing an hour and a half and really engaging with the topic. I think all of that
overrode thinking about the heterogeneous nature of the material that was
in there. Even the design of the show, since it was so much about process and
movement, took the question of “Is the judgement here one of architectural
quality?” off the table. But, if you think about it, that is a provocative aspect
of the show. It was probably the first MoMA show in decades that showed
things without putting a stamp of approval and saying, “You can come here
and be told that these are historically and contemporaneously the most ac-
complished buildings.” It wasn’t a list of things you should admire.
Last, I want to ask about your parallel roles beside curator. I know that you’re
also a writer and, as you mentioned earlier, an educator. What different means
of expression and observation does each provide you and how does it influence
your relationship with architecture?
I think there’s an incredible synergy to all three. There are certain things that
are specific to each one. As an educator, for instance, you’ve got responsibility
for individual people. The students at the university are individual people, so
It wasn’t a list of things you should admire 55
it’s very different from curating for the public of a museum, many of whom
you’ll never meet or even see, or writing where you have no idea who is read-
ing you. So there is this distinction between working for a collective unknown
and training students. Education is not just about handing over information;
it’s actually about mentoring and coaching individual people, and that I see
as, in large part, a very different activity—although I’m a professor at Colum- Further mentions
bia, which is a research university, and part of my job is to do my own research Columbia: 50,
115-126
and diffuse it, so the publications are in a certain sense a part of that world.
There are very different sorts of questions that I would take up in a schol-
arly article compared to an exhibition, and I feel very blessed in that I have
an entire spectrum of outlets: I can take on rather arcane historical topics in
publications in my scholarly life and then I can take the exact same themes
and try to work on them in a way that they take on a public dimension in
the Museum of Modern Art. And this makes me incredibly lucky, because
through the Museum of Modern Art I have an enormous audience for what
I think is important and responsible to attract attention and interest toward.
As you said before, there is this sort of aura that MoMA has acquired for itself
over its history and that really raises the stakes and the attention level. As a
curator it is an incredible gift, but also a responsibility.
Haas & Hahn (Jeroen Koolhaas &
Dre Urhahn) are artists based in The
Netherlands and Brazil.
5. Haas & Hahn
Brendan McGETRICK: What’s interesting to me about your project is that The following
one part of it is dedicated to creating works of art on the walls of favelas, using the discussion took
place on
buildings as canvases, but another part is creating art about favelas—paintings, May 1, 2009 at
films, and music videos that are inspired by favela life. Let’s start by talking about Koolhaas’s studio
the favela as an urban or architectural creation and how that impacts your work. in Rotterdam
Dre Urhahn: One thing that I really like about the favela is that it’s a com-
munity or urban structure that the people build themselves. And I think that’s
amazing. In Europe you never see that sort of unplanned activity happening
on public space.
Jeroen Koolhaas: Most favelas are made out of concrete and brick and
it’s as if somebody has made a standard design and then everybody agreed to
build according to that standard. I think that that homogeneity is really nice.
Even though its creation is random and like an organic growth process, at the
same time it is like a single whole, one huge building.
DU: In a way, it’s an approach to building which is more connected to how

animals might approach it—everyone builds their own space and contributes
to the larger structure in a way that ants do. And it functions so well as a result.
JK: There isn’t the level of anarchy that you might expect, or that people ex-
pect before they go there. It’s quite well organized, and the social structures
provide for everything you would need. You don’t really have to ever leave the
favela if you live there. It’s a self-sustaining village, almost, within a huge city.
Why do you think that everyone builds in the same style?
JK: I lot of the people who live in the favelas came from the countryside and
this is the style of houses that they have in the countryside. So it is basically
58 Haas & Hahn, Artists
a country style of construction transported to the city and made very dense.
That density is one of the things that makes the favela as a building form so
interesting, because it must be one of the most compact ways of living.
DU: The funny thing is that when you’re in a favela, you get reminded of me-
dieval villages in Italy and places like that.
JK: Yeah, that’s right. We were in southern Italy and we saw these villages on
hills and they looked so much like favelas in the way they were built.
DU: One thing about that process that you notice is that people build out of
necessity and then gradually they add luxury along the way. There are some
people who build according to a plan, but that’s not the standard way. Most
people start with one small thing and then add something, add something,
add something. It’s necessity-driven mostly.
You develop and embellish it as time goes by. It’s a natural extension of the your
life, basically.
DU: Right, it’s something that grows together with you.
JK: Another important influence on the look and function of the favela is roof
life. The people live on their roofs very often, so the public space is mostly on
people’s roofs.
Then I guess that partially explains why the houses are so geometric, and why
everyone has a flat roof—so you can sit and stand on top of it.
DU: That, but also because people expect to add later. It’s the easiest way to
add an extra floor.
JK: Right, everything is made so that you can change it.
DU: The roof is always the basis for your next house. You finish your roof, but
always leave the steel reinforcing bars sticking out so that you can easily add
another floor next time.
An environment where everything works out naturally 59
JK: If you look at how they build the concrete structures, they make wood
casings completely from scrap wood or with the least amount of wood they
possibly can, because it costs so much money. And when you see how they
put that together, it’s amazing, because the shape of the concrete is then de-
termined by these random bits of wood.
How has that condition affected the work you do there?
DU: In terms of using it as a canvas, I think we noticed quickly that in a slum

you have opportunities that you wouldn’t have in a “regular” city. But often
the opportunities don’t get used.
JK: Yeah, you have planning freedom.
DU: Right, if you wanted to go crazy, you can actually.
How do you think the fact that both of you come from Holland, which is such a
meticulously planned place, affects your view of favelas and the possibilities there?
JK: I think we really enjoy being in an environment where everything works

out naturally. It works simply because you don’t want to cause problems with
other people. Here [in The Netherlands] you have building regulations and
you’re not allowed to make an addition to the back of your house, even if it’s
in your own garden, and it’s really difficult to get permits for things. Coming
from that, it’s so nice to go to an environment where everything happens out
of common sense—you don’t make a huge wall in front of your neighbor’s
window, because you’d just get in trouble with your neighbors.
DU: Or you do.
JK: [Laughs] Or you do.
DU: Someone built a house in the middle of our painting! We were shocked,
because they actually blocked part of the painting by building a house there.
But eventually we got used to it. But it was really strange—they just built over
this existing structure, and they even included part of the metal fence that was
there. And to us, it was like, “You can’t do that! This is public space!” Because
here in Holland, public space is Holy.
JK: You can’t touch it.
DU: But there you say, “Fuck public space. It’s room to build.” So that was re-
ally interesting for us to see.
JK: I remember on one of the first days when we started painting, there was
a guy who had no water, so he thought he’d dig a well, and he just dug it
right through the concrete where we were painting. He started breaking up
the concrete looking for water. But he didn’t find any, and then he had some
cement in his house, so he just made some concrete quickly and just covered it
up. That’s another thing that I really like—the building materials there are so
easily prepared. Within an hour people can do a little cement job somewhere.
Everybody is always mixing cement. Where we’re not really used to ever mix-
ing cement, they do it all the time.
DU: I’ve learned a lot from being around that sort of mentality. For instance,
I had a flat tire a week ago, and everyone around me was like, “Oh, you’ve got
to bring it to the shop to fix it.” And I was like, “Huh? You can fix it yourself.
It’s easy.” And I would have brought it to the shop two years ago, but now I’ve
really learned to fix my own things, because you can. If you can build your
own house, you can fix your bicycle.
JK: The barrier in front of you before you start doing something is just much
smaller there. Here, we’re like, “Holy shit, adding a floor—that’s a really big
thing to do! I’m gonna have to buy bricks and cement...” And in the favela,
they’re like, “Ah ok, let’s get some brick and cement and build this floor.”
DU: I don’t think there’s a lot of that sort of attitude left in our society.
JK: In way everything in the favela feels man-made. For example, the stairs are
totally irregular. When they build stairs, all the steps will be different heights
and sizes, and everything will be a little bit crooked. And it doesn’t bother
anybody. Actually, I like it better than having every step the same size.
Fictional privacy 61
DU: Because you know it’s going to be irregular. You don’t expect it to be
otherwise.
JK: And I think maybe what we as Dutch people like is that irregularity—on
every layer of life. Everything is irregular and unpredictable.
In order to complete your last painting you ended up living in a favela for almost
a year. What was it like living in this extremely dense, irregular environment that
you’re talking about?
DU: One thing that I found really interesting living in a favela was the fic-
tional privacy that you have there. It’s a privacy that doesn’t actually exist, but
it’s a form of social privacy that everyone respects. In the house where I was
living, the bathroom had no door, just a sheet separating it from the rest of
the house. But if you were in there, no one would talk to you anymore—even
though they could hear and smell everything you were doing. They consider
that private. Also, for example, in the morning people will see you in your
house, but they won’t say hello until you leave your space. They still see you,
and nothing really changes, but as soon as you’re in “public space” they’ll say,
“Hey, good morning!” But they wouldn’t say it through the window or some-
thing, because that’s your privacy.
Do you see this “fictional privacy” in the ways that people build or decorate their
houses as well, or is it purely social?
AU: In a way you see it in the buildings too. One thing that I always found
interesting about favelas is that the level of luxury in the inside and outside of
a building can be totally different. You can see houses that look like shit from
the outside, but inside they are immaculate—beautiful tile floors, air condi-
tioning, everything perfect. You would think that you’d want to make it simi-
larly beautiful on the outside, but it’s almost as if people don’t connect the
luxuriousness of the inside with the look of the outside. In the West, I think
we’re used to the idea that the outside of your house should somehow reflect
the condition or function of the inside. But when you look at a slum, you can
think that it’s a terrible condition, but when you go inside, you see that some
people are living more comfortably than people in the city.
Let’s talk a little bit about Rio as a city and the relationship between Rio and its
favelas. What I thought was really interesting while I was there was how in a way
unnatural the favelas looked, because so much thought has been put into how
Rio is laid out, how the buildings interact with the environment, how the infra-
structure accents the nature, etc. The favelas aren’t part of that officially planned
city, but nevertheless they’re very prominent and actually occupy some of the best
locations in the city.
JK: It’s funny that you say it’s unnatural, because I think the favela is the build-
ing style that looks the most appropriate for the area, if you compare it to all
the apartment buildings and all the modern architecture. The favelas almost
go along with the mountains. It’s natural, almost as if birds have built it or
something.
DU: It’s true what you say about the best locations, because in other societies,
the rich people want to live on mountains and hills, but in Rio they just left it
open, and the people who made the favelas were like, “Well, if you don’t want
to take these beautiful spaces, we will.”
But at the same time, you get the sense that the favelas are an embarrassment to
the city—socially and visually. They seem totally disconnected from the city that
tourists think about.
DU: Definitely, and our project is partly about that. It’s really strange that
such extremely different worlds exist in the same city.
JK: There’s a name for that as well, you have O Morro and Asfalto—the hill and
the asphalt. And it’s true that they are completely separate worlds. You know
exactly when you’re going from one to the other and it’s a scary thing almost,
because you know that you’re entering a completely different social structure
where there’s different laws and different ways of going about things.
DU: But once you get used it, it becomes really nice to enter the favela. Like,
whenever we entered Vila Cruzeiro [the favela where we painted], we felt re-
lieved, like, “Aaaaah... We’re home.”
The whole slum is like your home 63
JK: Yeah, in a way the whole slum is like your home. For us in Europe and
in the city center of Rio, the border between inside the house and outside
the house is a very hard line: you’re either inside your house or you’re in the
city. But in the favela, you’re almost still inside your house when you’re in the
street.
DU: The slum is the home and your house is like the bedroom in your home.
You come home by entering your favela. It really feels like that. When I was
living in Vila Cruzeiro, I would see the house as my bedroom and the restau-
rant on the corner as the kitchen and the staircase that connected them as the
front yard almost.
And as people who would navigate between Rio’s two worlds, how do you see
your paintings function in that relationship?
DU: From the beginning, we hoped that the painting could in some way im-
prove the relationship or improve the image of the favela at least. The idea
was really simple: if you want to build a bridge between these two parts of
the city that live side by side but have this enormous gap between them, the
easiest way to do it is through some sort of art intervention where you make
something that interests people on the outside and on the other hand gives
people inside a sense of pride.
JK: To convey that pride is important I think. People in the favela are very
proud of where they live. They’ve built their houses themselves. The outside
world looks on it as a shame that these neighorhoods exist and [thinks that]
the people who live there should be ashamed of themselves.
We thought about that discrepancy a lot, and tried to find a way for this
sense of pride to be painted on the walls of the favela so that the outside world
could see how good they feel about themselves and could understand that
there are families there and they can take care of themselves. We thought that
if we could somehow help them put up a better appearance to the outside
world—by only putting a thin film of paint on the surface of the thing—it
could be a really simple way to help bridge this gap. I think that’s the project’s
main idea.
Are there other artists whose work inspired the Favela Painting project?
JK: Well, we always talk about Christo [the Bulgarian artist who has done
several building-sized art projects, including wrapping the Reichstag building
in Berlin]. But it’s not really that he inspired us; it’s more that we’re interested
in working at his scale. We’re interested in how he approaches scale and how
he approaches artworks as projects. I feel the painting is more part of the art-
work than that it is the artwork. And that is basically because of the struggle
of making it and the influence that the people in the favela had on us and the
influence we’ve had on them. We set up some sort of portal of communica-
tion by working there for so long. We don’t know what that means or what
that has done in the larger scheme, but it has definitely had a very positive
effect on us and for the people who live on the street.
DU: Really, it was the slum itself that inspired us. The favela presented this
option to us.
Firmeza Total. Dir. JK: Because when we started, we were making a documentary film in the fave-
Jeroen Koolhaas la. And this idea of painting came to us as a completely abstract concept. Then
& Dre Urhahn.
Youtube.com.
when we told people about it, they took it seriously, and said, “You should do
Accessed on 01 it.” And we were like, “Oh, OK. We’ll try.”
December 2009.
<http://www.
youtube.com/
I think that is something that distinguishes the Favela Painting project in a way.
In the past few years, there have been several films made about favela life, it’s
become a hot topic at the big architecture schools, and DJs from around the world
have started collecting and playing music made in the favela, but the painting
project seems more aimed at interacting with and contributing to these neighbor-
hoods, rather than just documenting them or publicizing them.
DU: A lot of times people come [to neighborhoods like Vila Cruzeiro] and
they take. And the first time when we made the documentary in a way we sort
of took stuff—we took images and we took them back home. But making
this painting is exactly the opposite, and unintentionally you create the best
medium to actually communicate with the people, because when we walk in
the neighborhood there’s no question whatsoever about why we’re there. It’s
become a fact of life. We’re painting this thing and its unquestionable and
Shootouts and violent times 65
our presence has become unquestionable, as well as the presence of our video
cameras and us talking to people. Its all through this painting that this is pos-
sible.
JK: But while we were doing it people did question us. People did think that it
was weird that we were spending all this time painting a staircase. But I think
that after they saw that we were really determined to finish it and determined
to do it in detail and to become friends with everybody, people stopped ques-
tioning and thinking it was weird. But even til the very end I had guys come
up and say, “What?! You guys are still painting? What the fuck are you guys
thinking?!”
DU: The only moments when it became uncomfortable was during shootouts
and violent times. There were times when I thought it was becoming almost
insulting that we’re walking the streets when people are actually hiding in
their houses.
JK: I thought about that too: if this neighborhood is thought about as the
worst place in Rio it might be insulting to the people who live there if it seems
that we come there at our leisure.
That’s something we haven’t talked about yet, but that seems crucial to under-
standing the nature of the project and favela life. The neighborhood where you’ve
been working, Vila Cruzeiro, is notorious for the violence that goes on there be-
tween the local drug gang and the police. I know that at times during the painting
of Rio Cruzeiro, the violence became extreme. I suppose that is part of the larger
experience that you mentioned. Could you talk about that part of the work a bit?
DU: In a way that was minor. The fact that there were days of constant gunfire
had the same effect as when there were days of rain: it’s just days when you
cannot work. In a way it became natural, like we’d say, “OK we have thirty
days, so probably ten you cannot work and that leaves twenty where you can.”
Something like that.
JK: But those sorts of things do have an effect. A long period of rain is really dis-
couraging. A long period of not knowing if you can feel safe in the neighorhood
or if the bus ride over will be safe... having to take your headphones off on
the way in because you want to make sure that you’re not hearing gunshots.
Stuff like that does work on you. You feel a little bit ridiculous sometimes that
you’re risking all that just to make a painting.
DU: It’s also scary. One day when we were working on the painting, we heard
a bullet fly by. Really heard the sound of it flying by and that means it’s pretty
fucking close, you know?
JK: Yeah, if you hear a bullet you know it’s close.
But you just come to accept it as a fact of life, just as the people in the favela do.
JK: Yeah. There were definitely times when there was shooting going on some-
where, and we continued painting, just saying to each other, “Oh, the shooting
is on the other side of the hill. Let’s continue until it comes over here.” You
really get that type of mind state.
As Dre was saying, when you have disruptions built into the project, then you
have to try to maxmize the time that you can spend outside painting.
DU: Yes, but the fact that [the painting] is so extremely detailed means that
you cannot go faster. You can’t just put more people on it. You can’t work
more hours, because it’s so detailed and difficult. We thought we would paint
the stairs in two months... but it really became our lives.
JK: We never thought that it would take almost a year, but the fact that the
painting grew out of proportion and made us spend so much more time in
the favela is also what got us more involved in the neighborhood, and that is
what opened our eyes to what exactly it is that we’re doing. Spending so much
time painting with the kids and with the families there and, in the end, getting
this neighborhood some positive attention changed for us the idea of why
we’re here and why we’re actually doing these types of things.
For your last painting you collaborated with Giovanni Da Conceição Silva, Vitor
Luis Da Silva, and Robson Teles Carneiro, who live in the area. How did that work?
At a certain point we became scared 67
DU: I think it was as much a learning process for us as it was for them. Besides
the fact that we were teaching them something about painting, giving them
something to do, and showing them a different side to life maybe, they were
also showing us things. They were our entrance into the community and our
friends. Now the painting is finished, but we still talk with them and [when
we’re in Rio] we hang with them almost everyday.
JK: There’s an interesting trajectory to the project: we started it as a social

project, to have an effect on the community and a small number of youths.
Then we veered towards the idea that we’re actually doing an art project with
a social side. But once we started working on it, we realized that we were hav-
ing more of an effect on these kids than we initially thought, so we had more
potential to change their lives. And so we started focusing more on talking to
them and seeing what effect it had, what roles they’d like to have and what
dreams they have for the future. I think at a certain point we became scared
that we might fail in something that we could have done, and that’s—as peo-
ple who are ten years older—to help these kids as much as we can in learning
how to be more successful in achieving their goals. We talked about that a lot.
I think the reciprocal nature of the relationship that Dre mentioned is interesting.
In an environment like a favela, which is a very close and sometimes dangerous
community, as outsiders you need help in integrating yourself and learning the
code of behavior. That can only come from locals so in a way it evens a relation-
ship out. Even if you are the more experienced painters, you could never have the
traditional master-apprenctice relationship.
DU: Right. It’s an interesting situation when you’re an employer, but you have
to ask your employees how to walk the streets. In most other situations, the
employer is the person who knows everything better, but in this case every-
thing that doesn’t have to do with paint they know better. And for that they’re Haas & Hahn. The
really invaluable to the project. And for our safety. boy with the kite.
2007. Vila Cruzeiro,
Rio de Janeiro
It’s interesting that none of the difficulties or dangers inherent in the neighorhood
are present in the work you’ve done there. So far you’ve done two murals—one of Haas & Hahn. Rio
Cruzeiro. 2008. Vila
a boy flying a kite and another of fish swimming in a river. Did you ever con- Cruzeiro, Rio de
sider using images that were drawn more directly from the environment? Janeiro
JK: The boy flying the kite is basically drawn from the neighborhood, because
you see kids flying kites everywhere in the favela. At some point, we discussed
that we could paint something that directly links to the reputation of violence
or the story of Tim Lopes [a journalist who was murdered while investigating
the drug trade in Vila Cruzeiro], something to do with the dying youth—
there’s a million things like that that we could do. But in the end we decided
to do something that didn’t have anything to do with those problems, because
we wanted whatever we brought to the neighborhood to be removed from all
those negative aspects and bring some kind of beauty to the area.
Right, because I think in Europe or America there’s a feeling that when you work
in an environment of poverty or violence you are obligated to directly engage
those problems, but of course none of those topics are new or inspiring to the
people who are dealing with it everyday.
JK: If you’re living there, you don’t want to be looking at a huge painting of
a dead kid.
DU: In a way, I think it is a political statement to make something unpolitical.

There is a social and political statement in saying, “In this slum where there
are so many difficulties and so much bad press, let’s make something that is
totally detached from that, something that’s just beautiful.”
JK: In reacting to a situation which is already so political by using similar

media—political imagery or quotes from the press—you’re playing the same
game that all the journalists play. Instead, we brought something visual that
brings across a positive sentiment. And I think that’s a message in itself.
DU: To make art with those types of political messages seems to impose the
fact that you know everything. But we don’t know jack shit. After we made
this painting, now we know something. How could we have made a painting
with a message? We didn’t know anything in the beginning.
The favela has also been the inspiration for a lot of the painting and installa-
tion work you’ve done here in Europe lately. There you also leave out the social
or political aspects of favelas and focus instead on the the geometric form of these
Really organized and really random 69
interlocking cubes that you talked about earlier. How does that sort of construc-
tion inspire you from a purely visual standpoint?
JK: I think that it’s almost digital, but at the same time organic. I like the
combination of something that is really organized and really random at the
same time.
DU: You see a lot of that combination in nature, but it’s usually round, like
coral for example. The favelas are similar, but it’s square and that’s what makes
it so sexy I think visually.
JK: It’s a bit like how crystals grow—there’s an element of organization and
an element of randomness.
I suppose that makes the fact that everything in the favela is hand-made and
imperfect that much richer. Because, for instance, Habitat ‘67 by the architect
Moshe Safdie is in some ways similar to a favela—it’s cubic and dense and sort of
arranged in a seemingly random way. But it is modern and “perfect”; it doesn’t
have the imperfections and fuzziness of nature and, to me at least, it doesn’t feel
organic at all.
JK: I don’t think that the people living in the favelas embrace imperfection, but
I really embrace it. I’m not sure if they all feel happy about the imperfections.
So I know that this is an ongoing project that’s already taken many forms. What
is planned for the future?
DU: Well, it will continue and get bigger.
JK: We’re now working on a plan for a new painting, which is way bigger than
the last one.
So, in a sense you’re developing your project in a way similar to how a favela
develops—you go gradually and scale up as the possibilities present themselves.
DU: The favela taught us that we can do this. We really learned that in there.
Reinier de Graaf is partner of the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture
(OMA) and head of its non-architec-
tural wing AMO.
6. Reinier de Graaf
Brendan McGETRICK: The purpose of this interview series is to try to reach The following
a better understanding of what architecture is by collecting the perspectives of the discussion took
place on
people who contribute to it in one way or another. AMO is interesting because it June 2, 2009 at the
sprang from the idea that much of the information and representation that goes OMA-AMO offices
in Rotterdam
into architecture has value whether or not a building results from it. In a way,
AMO’s work seems to argue that if an architect were liberated from the obliga-
tion to build, he or she could work to solve problems in new ways and interact
with other disciplines in new ways. So to begin, could you explain a little about
the development of AMO and how you become involved?
Reinier de Graaf: I became involved accidentally, actually. At the time we

were working on a commission for Schiphol [Airport]. There was no idea of
AMO then, but there were two other projects happening at the same time.
One was Prada, which first began as a commission to design a couple of shops Further mentions
but which expanded to much more in the end, and the other was Universal, Prada: 13-14, 85
Universal: 30
which was essentially a project for a building which perished, but through
which such an amount of insight was created about the corporate world that
AMO emerged as a way to retain that insight. So AMO was born from these
three experiences, which occurred more or less at the same time, and that was
eleven or twelve years ago.
Could you talk about the Schiphol project in a bit more detail, since that is how
you become involved and it might offer a more practical idea of what AMO is
and how it operates...
Schiphol was important to the creation of AMO, because it was a project that
sequentially wrong-footed you every step of the way. Initially we got a project
for the airport, and we were very impressed that we got a project for the air-
port so we started to diligently study flight paths, runways, and all kinds of
technical stuff that we didn’t know anything about. But that’s of course not
72 Reinier de Graaf, Reform Architect
why they asked us. They wanted us to make an urbanistic proposal for the air-
port, because evidently the airport made most of its money not out of flying
but out of other related activities, like shopping, real estate development, etc.
So, in a way, they came to us because the airport wasn’t an airport anymore.
So we worked on an airport to make it less of an airport.
That project carried on, and then the airport entertained the idea that they
wanted to move their whole operation from land to the sea. Then of course
the same thing happens—once you’re asked to be involved in that then you
start to design an airport in the sea, but actually our main focus wasn’t even
supposed to be on the airport in the sea but on what the hell they would do
with all the land they left behind. So again and again we got wrong-footed in
terms of where our focus should be.
But the fact that we were strange people to be involved with that particular
issue—because of course there are airport specialists—was a symptom of the
fact that the airport already recognized that their issue was much wider than
just moving to an island in the North Sea. The interesting thing with that
project was that we worked with [the consulting firm] McKinsey, we worked
with the banks, we worked with airport consultants, we worked with the air-
line companies, etc. But all of them were specialists, and actually the only
party who could profoundly articulate the whole concept of the move was the
party that was, essentially, most ignorant of the specialisms. And there, for the
first time, the situation emerged that we, not intentionally, drifted into a role
of overview and eventually articulated the position toward politicians, who
were equally ignorant as we were. So that started as a fairly traditional com-
mission to make urban proposals for lands owned by the airport but became
in the end an effort to tell the whole story of an enormous, expensive opera-
tion and to articulate why that would make sense. That was the first time that
we really discovered the power of ignorance and how we were totally power-
less on one hand and extremely powerful on the other. And that is the space
in which we operate all the time.
From that point, how did AMO begin to transition into projects that were purely
non-architectural, rather than these early offshoots of architecture commissions?
I think that began to happen first with Prada, but those were separate projects
for a client with whom we did architecture. But I think the first real project
The power of ignorance 73
where we did something which essentially had nothing to do with what you
would consider our professional domain was our project on Europe. That was
essentially a marketing/identity study for the cause of the European Union.
That started initially with a question for us to look at Brussels as the capital
of Europe and to think about the symbolic needs of a capital which wouldn’t
be the capital of a country but of a relatively new transnational political sys-
tem—a capital which could never be a capital like London, Paris, or Berlin.
From there we expanded the question into a question about the representa-
tion of such a system on every level possible—so not just urbanistically, much
wider. We did that relatively early on, so it became a project that was accepted
on those terms, and we could happily shed some of the notions ingrained in
the questions that we were initially asked.
Did you have the sense at the time that this was the first time anyone had con-
sidered these wider issues?
Yes, in that particular way. Because of course the EU has branding specialists,
it has advertisement agencies, etc. They also did some of the things that we
did, but they are limited to their ground. This was really the first time that
we could respect no professional boundary and assume no limitations to our
own competence. I think that was the first time anybody had ever done a
thing like that.
So I suppose that gets to one of the core issues: what do you think is beneficial
about an architect thinking about issues like branding? What does it offer that the
specialists in those fields don’t?
I think the interesting thing is that architects are especially lay people when
it comes to branding. So that means that they look with a very general eye
to branding and even question the necessity of branding in itself, even while
they’re doing it. The other thing is that since they operate outside their pro-
fessional domain, the type of questions they get asked are different from the
type of questions advertising agencies get asked, because those agencies have
a fixed professional domain, which probably means that their mandate from
the client is limited to cracking a particular problem. In our case, our mandate
is often the result of us elbowing or stretching the question, and that, almost
by necessity, means a much wider range of issues. And that is simply because
at the outset of every project you’re absolutely clueless about what to do. Ab-
solutely clueless, and every project starts and ends with a kind of desperate
improvization.
But returning to the question you asked before—I think the real difference
between AMO and an advertising agency is that we presume no knowledge.
It’s not only that we have no knowledge, but we presume no knowledge, and
therefore every project becomes a kind of self-educational experience. I guess
in the case of a commercial advertisement agency, there are a set of prede-
termined professional skills with which they go at something. Since we don’t
have that, it’s a process of finding out as you go along. Of course, it’s much
trickier to give somebody like that a commission, because the result could be
anything.
I think that self-educational aspect of the work is really interesting. I remember

you once told me that the initial work done for the European Union was for the
most part just the visual representations of AMO’s own gradual understanding
of how the EU operates and what it provides.
The EU is a very distinct thing and, in a way, the world can be divided into
people who know a lot about it and people who know nothing at all about
it, and there’s not a whole lot in between. We went from knowing nothing to
become people who by now actually know quite a lot about it, but we made
that journey, and in the end it’s the ambition of the European Union to make
everybody make that journey. Simply to be understood is in a way its biggest
project, because its biggest letdown is that, for all its accomplishment and
quality, it is an unknown entity. In that sense, since we went from one extreme
to another, we visualized that learning experience so that other people could
use it.
Yes, and for me the value of those visualizations is that they unlock forms of in-
sight that would otherwise exist only in the form of reports or ugly PowerPoint
presentations. In that sense, it’s also worth talking about how AMO interacts not
only with branding people but also academics and researchers, many of whom
have no background in creating seductive visual matieral that can communicate
to the unfamiliar.
As an architect, most of the time you have to make an implausible argument 75
I think architects communicate by drawings in the first place, and that’s differ-
ent from communicating by text, although Rem [Koolhaas] is a writer and I Further mentions
guess equally developed in either form. But more importantly, as an architect, Rem Koolhaas: 10,
13, 87, 100-101,
most of the time you have to make an implausible argument, because all the 103-104, 112
standard prejudices, all the standard rhetoric you encounter when you want
to do a modern building causes you to almost invariably make a guess against
the odds. You always have to prove an existing prejudice wrong, at least when
you do the type of architecture OMA does. Certain people in their rhetoric
mobilize prejudice in order to propel a certain cause, other people have to
dispel prejudice in order to use the prejudice against itself. That is the kind
of ability that, when you’re dealing with the EU, comes in very very handy,
because in a way the EU has to argue permanently against the initial reflex to
trust your own national identity, to trust your own government before you
trust a foreign government, etc. There is a certain level of counterintuitive
arguing that coincides quite nicely.
I’ve noticed over the years that many of OMA’s most ambitious buildings posi-
tion themselves within a reality that OMA defines. By changing the shading and
bringing certain factors into focus and obscuring others, OMA often presents its
buildings as the only appropriate response to this reality, a reality the client may
not be aware of. So I suppose it makes sense that AMO would operate in a similar
way.
That could be, but the arguing is different to some extent in the sense that
OMA is much more established. When you do a design for a building, people
tend to take many more things at face value, whereas I think AMO has never
been properly established, even after twelve years. So every time it must first
establish its own necessity, because an architect’s firm is an architect’s firm but
AMO is something less defined. In every project it must argue the project but
at the same time its own existence. Which ups the pressure and in a way makes
it more pure rhetoric in its form, because it has to defend its existence so
heavily still. To some extent OMA is relatively untouchable in the architecture
world, so unless we cooperate with really shady regimes, people are generally
favorable about its outlook, because the buildings are very tangible evidence
often of good intentions and even the shortcomings of earlier buildings have
gone, so in a way they stand there as evidence. With AMO you come across a
lot of professional envy, particularly in academia, among people who feel

you’ve invaded their territory. When you’re an architect, you’re an architect
and you’re safe within the confines, but now you are joining them in their
own circles to talk about what you yourself are doing. That often leads to a lot
of, I wouldn’t call it envy, but discomfort. There are a lot of people who just
wait for something ridiculous to pop up so that they can say...
I told you so.
Yeah.
Before we continue down this path, could you provide some background about
AMO’s Europe work? How it started and where it went...
It started with work that I guess you could call pretty superficial. We did a
tour around Brussels and photographed everything and really looked at the
way Europe looked inside Brussels. One of the big things that we noticed was
that there was an enormous discrepancy between the relevance Europe had
acquired in terms of numbers, in terms of achievements, in terms of the size
of its economy, etc. and the complete limpness of all its visual manifestations.
Every single one of its visual manifestations was infinitely more mediocre
than manifestations you got on a national level. We described that as Eu-
rope’s “iconographic deficit,” because [iconography] was simply a realm that
they had probably never paid any attention to. We then invented a few what I
would call “image bytes”—not sound bytes but image bytes—to immediately
address that, to invent a number of ways in which the idea of Europe could
be portrayed in a much more energetic and articulate way. That was the first
part.
Koolhaas, Rem and Later on, we were invited by the Dutch government to make an exhibition
Reinier de Graaf, about Europe. In that exhibition we spent a lot of energy trying to visualize
cur. The Image of
Europe. Brussels, European history and trying to offset the history of Europe against the history
2006 of the European Union. We did this on two long panoramas with the history
of Europe in front and the history of the EU in back of it. What we tried to
demonstrate is that the European project is impressive, because, in merely 50
years, more integration and more unity had been achieved than in 3000 years
of bloodshed.
The deep shock of architecture 77
In that exhibition we also tried to visualize a number of other things, like

we created a European passport, which was sold for one euro and which had
a condensed version of Europe’s history in it, but also an explanation of how
the EU’s political institutions worked. We also had a book of the Acquis Com-
munautaire, which is the sum total of all of Europe’s legislation. That only
existed as virtual documents, so we made a print out of it and it resulted in a
book of 6 1/2 meters long. All of that was in a big circus tent, which was con-
structed in the middle of the European Quarter of Brussels. The design for the
tent itself was based on the “European barcode” which was a proposal we had
made earlier on for an alternative to the European flag.
Do you think that the frequent confrontations with confusion and ignorance that
architects experience made it possible to take on something as ambitious and
seemingly impossible as creating a coherent, full narrative of 3000 years of Eu-
ropean history?
Yes, but the point wasn’t to have an accurate history of 3000 years. Once you
know what you want to achieve with a certain thing, the whole duty to be 100
percent accurate diminishes, because even if there are mistakes in the 3000
years of Europe or the 50 years of the EU, it doesn’t take from the fact that in
the 50 years evidently more was achieved than in the 3000 years. The exhibi-
tion has 90,000 words of text, but the whole thing was made to ram home that
one point, which it does very effectively. But even a history that is infinitely
more scientific isn’t complete, and that wasn’t the point. The point was that
there were two histories offset.
But I do think at the same time that we are very aware of our ignorance,
because we never hesitate to invoke the help of others who we count as ex-
perts in those fields. So it’s not a thing done in isolation thinking we’re more
clever than the rest of the world. For all AMO projects, we have a certain
amount of time to do something and generally mobilize the help we need
fairly uninhibitedly.
Which is emblematic of the way architects work, basically.
Yeah, essentially it’s the exact same way you work on a building. The deep
shock of architecture is that once you meet architects you realize that they
know way less of building than you would assume. Essentially they’re more a
co-ordinator of a set of specialists who together make a building. The archi-
tect is a figure who has the oversight and knows the points he wants to make
with a building, rather than who is a technical expert. So in that sense, it’s
similar.
Once you’ve come to terms with that role as an overseer or co-ordinator, I guess
it’s not much of a leap to begin coordinating larger and more diverse sets of spe-
cialists, including those who have no experience with or interest in building at all.
Right, and the whole point is that in a world that is defined by fact checking
and specializations, the capacity to have oversight or the capacity to tell a
story is increasingly rare. You find that in society, in politics, but you even find
that in primary and secondary schools—the figure who tells the story and
provides a general view of the world is almost non-existent now.
I know what you mean, and one thing that I’ve noticed in China is that that
sort of extreme specialization and tunnel vision hasn’t infected work there to the
same extent. I think that’s partly because there are so many professions that are
relatively new to China that one almost feels empowered to invent his or her own
profession and play multiple roles. For the moment at least, the lines between
architecture and advertising or fashion or art seem much more fluid.
In a way I think they haven’t got the time to entertain those borders, because
what you say about China is also true about the Arab world, which I know
much better than I do China. Once you meet the people who call the shots,
you notice that they think amazingly conceptually. They think on a concep-
tual level and you can relate to them on a conceptual level in a way that is
increasingly rare here.
Why do you think that is?
It’s partly that they’re filthy rich. They’re from royal families and have had the
best education money can buy. I think it’s partly an Arab thing and partly a phe-
nomenon of a society in which religion and society aren’t so separated. There
is a certain amount of poetic, conceptual thinking embedded in the culture.
Three-dimensional thinking 79
But I also think it comes from the fact that, in order to take a leap, to bring
your country from the middle ages into the twentieth century in a single leap,
you simply can’t entertain the small steps that go with the segmented profes-
sional world. It has to come as a big bang. You have to think about where you
want to be, even if you don’t know precisely how you’re going to get there.
I remember when I first started seeing things about AMO, I would always come
across the phrase “architectural thinking”. I would read texts that said things like,
“AMO applies architectural thinking to non-architectural problems.” I’ve always
been confused by that phrase. How would you define it?
I think architectural thinking is essentially three-dimensional thinking. If

you pause for a moment, of course an architect thinks three dimensionally,
because space is three-dimensional, but there’s also another element to it. It’s
three-dimensional thinking as opposed to one-dimensional thinking. The
essence of a specialism is that it thinks one dimensionally, in terms of mea-
surable entities. Our society is built up out of measurable entities—economic
performance, demographic performance, etc. etc. Three-dimensional think-
ing implies that you deal with more things at the same time, but also that you
deal with qualities that aren’t essentially measurable, and therefor qualities
that are very difficult to defend in a society that tends to evaluate everything
by measurable performances. Therefor, it is a kind of conceptual thinking,
because it is thinking that requires a leap of faith, just like architecture. Just as
the transformation of Dubai or the transformation of China requires a leap of
faith. There I think a number of these things come together.
How so?
Since the state owns everything—in Dubai for instance you have a condition
of pseudo entrepreneurship but ultimately all developers relate back to the
royal family—then you do have a situation where macro-economic effects
are weighed into micro-economic decisions. So you can have a building with
43 percent efficiency and it’s still being built, because it’s the tallest build-
ing in the world and it will attract tourists and other things. Here, you will
never have that. 43 percent efficiency in a building is simply unthinkable here,
because you don’t break even, and you don’t give a toss whether the hotel next
door is filled, because you don’t own it. But in Dubai there is a different sce-
nario, which in theory gives a mandate to architects and gives a mandate to
a certain Utopian dimension in architecture that has become unimaginable
here. The reality is that, of course, because of that phenomenon, 99 percent of
the architecture is incredibly wasteful. It’s a condition that can create Utopia
or can create disaster, and more often it creates disaster. But even the tiniest
percentage of chance that there is a condition in which you can do something
that you cannot do anywhere else is hugely persuasive for us—the idea that
you will be the one percent that uses those conditions to the benefit rather
than to the detriment.
Which is another sort of “leap of faith” I suppose.
Yes.
I think the idea of state control vs. private sector free-for-all is important to un-
derstand. I know that AMO was originally created because OMA was finding it
almost impossible bring its private architectural designs to completion, simply
because organizations, particularly in the ‘90s, were mutating and merging so
quickly. AMO’s work, since it didn’t require a building, could address some of the
concerns that these mutating corporations had without demanding of them the
stability or long-term vision that they obviously couldn’t provide.
Most of the institutions or the corporations that wanted a building, partly

wanted a building because they struggled with their own identity and in a way
hoped that by having a new headquarters they would find their new identity.
Of course, that meant that they weren’t looking for a new building, they were
looking for themselves in a weird way. It is almost like a couple that has a kid
because they think it will mend their relationship, which of course it never
does. Likewise a building never mends the problems of a company, and it
doesn’t take very long after getting into intimate contact with clients before
you discover the real thought behind why they came to you with the initial
question in the first place.
What do you think have been AMO’s most successful efforts in that regard? As a
sort of organizational marriage counsellor...
You never lack information, you lack a way to guide yourself through it 81
I think Prada is undoubtedly successful, because it’s still going on. It’s a cli- Further mentions
ent that has come back time after time after time. But it depends on how you Prada: 13-14, 75
define success. For me, the European project is immensely successful, because
of the potential you discover and the progress you make, but actually precious
little has been adopted in any official realm. Europe is as unpopular as ever
and less people will turn out to Thursday’s vote [for the European Parlia-
mentary elections] than ever before. So in that sense, the whole project was
not successful, but at the same time the point that the project discovered was
incredibly valuable. Maybe it will just take more time.
I think that’s the challenge and the point where architecture, for all its difficulties
and vulnerabilities, works better, because once a building is built it stands there
and embodies what you believe in or have argued for. The trouble with AMO
work, or any communications work really, is that if the proposals don’t get ad-
opted then it simply disappears, particularly in the overflow of information that
we’re currently wading around in.
Absolutely.
Perhaps that’s even an area that AMO should consider in the future—how to
generate coherency amid information overload. That’s a question that I think
could use some three-dimensional thinking, and also one that architects as natu-
ral editors or conductors could assist in, because at this point you’re never want-
ing of information, you simply need...
Navigation. I totally agree. But to some extent I do think that certain AMO
projects got quite far, in terms of dissemination. They were all over the place,
and I guess we didn’t have a building, but we did have George Bush lecturing
behind our barcode, which is something. But I do think you’re right. To some
extent, you never lack information, what you lack is a way to guide yourself
through it, to form your own narrative.
I think that’s another dimension of “architectural thinking”, because architecture

is particularly concerned with proportions and relations, and that is precisely
what we don’t have at the moment, any sense of how things relate to each other
or what the relative scale of something is.
The essence of architectural design is that you are trained to take decisions be-
fore you know everything. You take decisions in order to get to know things,
but you do take decisions before you have all the facts down. I guess archi-
tecture is a very good way of mobilizing intuition in the face of an overload
of facts. When there is too much to know, and you are not able to know ev-
erything anyway, you have to rely on intuition, which is a kind of internal
navigational device.
Yes, but intuition is difficult to cite in defense of a proposal, particularly in a

condition like you described earlier, where there is an emphasis on measurability.
In the end, architecture relies on somebody being seduced. AMO work also
relies on that and that is why I would be incredibly hesitant to call it research
or call it analysis or any of those terms. In the end, it is something that you like
and somebody else does too, and that’s true with buildings as well. The real-
ization of any beautiful building ultimately relies on a group of persons—and
often only one person—who is charmed enough by the thing to put his ass on
the line to get it done.
If you look at European tenders now: they have a very elaborate point sys-
tem where they give you points and percentages in different categories and
then they add it all up and select an architect. And in that case it becomes
increasingly difficult, when you’re design-oriented, to acquire a job. It makes
good, innovative architecture almost impossible, because that has always re-
lied on someone in power thinking, “This is good. Let’s go for this. I believe
in this.”
Do you think that AMO has had an effect on OMA?
For me it’s really difficult to say, because I was part of the creation, but I was
never standing with both legs in either camp. AMO is so much grounded in
the way a certain group of people in the office think, and OMA had a different
way of thinking already before the creation of AMO. So I think that AMO has
in many ways just served to highlight it more or mobilize it more. I find that
an incredibly difficult question to answer, because I’m not sure.
Mobilizing intuition in the face of an overload of facts 83
I wonder if that is also why AMO hasn’t really been replicated by other offices—
it’s such an idiosyncratic organization that is often directed by the personal inter-
ests of Rem [Koolhaas] and a few other people.
Also on Rem’s particular career path, where he wasn’t always an architect and
he wasn’t willing to shed everything else once he had become an architect.
There’s not that many people who have had that type of career path, so it’s
also related to something more personal, which is fine I think.
John Dekron and Markus Schneider
are the chief technology officer and
chief executive officer of thismedia.
7. John Dekron & Markus Schneider
Brendan McGetrick: The purpose of this interview series is to try to ex- The following
plore the collaborative aspect of architecture. I noticed that in your office descrip- discussion took
place on
tion you say that thismedia acts as a bridge between designers, artists, architects, July 4, 2009 over
hardware companies, etc. To start let’s talk a bit about that aspect of your work. Skype between Ber-
lin, Hamburg, and
Rotterdam
Markus Schneider: I think we sit in a very important area where design
constantly meets technology. This happens everyday within architectural proj-
ects without our help, but in these sort of situations the problem may occur
of how to make sure that a design concept or an artistic approach can be syn-
chronized with a technological concept or solution. The problems that many
projects are facing are derived from differences in language and approaches.
An architect, who also plays his role as a designer, may have an idea related
to media, but when he’s talking to a company that is technologically-driven
or engineering-driven, how do they make sure that they are talking about the
same thing? Besides the different forms of knowledge that are delivered by
those disciplines, there is also a simple communication problem. This is where
our role as a missing link becomes more and more important. In many cases,
the involved parties—architects, designers, and technology companies—are
basically helpless in terms of finding an appropriate solution.
John Dekron: This style of handling media is a new approach to a thing

that is commonly considered to be understood very well. There are people
who want to add new media layers to their works, and the first thing they
think is, “Can we do it ourselves?” With other media, for example film or tele-
vision or photography, it is well known that you need some kind of specialist
to work in a special area. When the film industry started, it was not clear that
it’s a good idea to have a cameraman or a set designer. Everyone was doing ev-
erything, everyone was helping out and working on it. Over time, it developed
to the point where now everything is specialized, so if you want to shoot a film
you know whom you have to hire. In this new area of media, it’s not so clear.
86 John Dekron & Markus Schneider, Media Designers & Consultants
Typically the architects have some idea, and they say, “Well, we just need
some lamps to put up on our building,” or “We need to bring the screens in-
side,” or “We have to make a special floor.” Then they say, “We need software
for this, so let’s find a software company.” But one software company is not
like another one, and one needs experience and understanding of the archi-
tect’s needs in order to find a solution that can fulfil their real needs—even
when the architects or artists themselves don’t know what the real needs are.
Since the devices with which we’re working are mostly physical devices, con-
nected to the building, architects tend to see them as part of their own area,
but normally they would never work on the layout of a book, for example,
because they think a graphic designer has to do it; it’s not a part of their area.
In our experience, after going in the wrong direction many times, I feel that
it’s not so easy to simply investigate these new technologies and do it yourself.
Could you explain your experiences a little more specifically? Perhaps choose a
single project and briefly outline the communication and the wrong directions
and adjustments that you mentioned.
JD: OK, I would choose the BIX project [for the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria],
www.realities- because I think it’s a very good example of collaboration. realities:united [a
united.de Berlin-based architecture office] were asked to do the media planning for the
newly built Kunsthaus in Graz, and on their initiative they added a media skin
layer on the outside. The first idea was to simply have special switches for the
lamps that you can switch on and off to show an icon for each exhibition tak-
ing place in the Kunsthaus. While they were researching this, they found out
that there is a company in Switzerland making fluorescent lamps in grayscale
that can switch at 18 frames per second. Then they said, “Now we can play
films on the building.” They needed someone to design the software for that,
and they asked me, because I had a little bit of experience with software, if I
could help them to find the right person.
Together we looked around for people to do that job, and we eventually
found out that the people working on software were very gifted, but not very
inspired to bring anything more to the project. They were very dry people
who just wanted to know what had to be done and had no idea about how
their work fit into the entire concept of the Kunsthaus. So there was not such
a clear idea of what the software would have to do. After that, we decided that
You just cannot explain these things by talking about pixel aspect ratio 87
I would have a try at making the software. I had never worked on a project
on that scale, but I said, “Well, I can try.” So we started collaborating togeth-
er and we ended up developing a simulation software for the building. We
did this because we felt that no one would understand how to use media on
that building unless we have a 3-D simulation that people can use to preview
their material. This proved to be a crucial step, because later it was often the
case that people provided DVDs with material to be played on the facade
and when we put it into the simulator they realized that it makes no sense. It
sounds simple, but you just cannot explain these things by talking about pixel
aspect ratio and pixel size, etc.
MS: Maybe I can add that, looking back, the BIX project was a kind of best
case scenario where a lot of solutions that were found there we continue to
use in our daily work. Another important aspect of this project for me is that,
if you are going to work with architecture in that way, you need to deliver very
reliable systems. The system that was installed at the Kunsthaus in 2003 is still
running and, as far as I know, it’s still running on the same computer. I think
that’s an important part of determining the overall success of the project.
But if we go forward a bit to more recent projects, I notice that the tasks
that we are being faced with are getting more and more complex, although
the structure and approach itself is not changing that much. But each task is
getting more and more complex, because the media projects themselves are
reaching a much more dynamic and sophisticated level.
One thing about the BIX project that I find interesting is that it is not as visually
sophisticated as what is available in terms of facade-based media screens now.
I’m curious what effect using a display that is essentially low resolution has on
the kinds of work that it inspires—from artists or film-makers.
MS: I think the size of resolution has nothing to do with the level of sophis-
tication. If something is low res or high res, there is no inherent value in that.
I think it’s more important to think about what you want to achieve. What
is your idea? Ideas do not come out of resolution questions. It might be es-
sential that a certain idea or a certain aesthetic image that you want to achieve
requires a certain resolution—a higher or lower resolution. It brings me back
to another point that I think comes close to this, and that is that technology
itself does not initially lead to an idea, but technology must be used to realize
an idea. What we try to do is first have a look at the situation—the building
or the initial concept or the problem that the architect is facing—and then to
develop concepts from that idea. Then resolution aspects or technology or
budget aspects become important, but I think that resolution itself doesn’t say
very much about the quality or complexity of a project.
I totally agree with that, but what I think is interesting is that, because of the
nature of technology and the speed of its evolution there is a tendency to want
“bigger, better, faster” and in the process of that you lose a certain form of repre-
sentation that being limited in terms of resolution forces you to explore. What is
interesting to me is that forms of low res imagery that you no longer see in other
media, you can still find on building facades.
JD: I think that your question is very important, because in the media tech-
nology that everyone now knows—like television or cinema—the goal is
totally clear: you want to see cool movies in perfect quality, and for that it’s
clear that bigger is better, brighter is better, louder is better. But media facades
for architecture are not like screens. If you want to add a screen to show adver-
tisements or something like that, then you should try for as high resolution as
possible so that it is readable, but if you want to have visual elements as part
of your building, then it’s not clear from the first moment that the resolution
should be as high as possible. Although you can have pictures on a building’s
facade, it’s not necessarily a screen. It’s not supposed to be a screen.
Let’s talk a little bit about the AAmp project that you recently completed in Sin-
gapore. That one combines a high resolution commercial screen and a much
lower resolution lighting and color element, so that would seem to cover a lot of
what we’ve been talking about.
MS: As you said, the principle of the AAmp is to have two resolution areas,
where you have a high resolution screen, which is commercial, and you have a
low res area that is part of a facade design that was developed by realities:united.
JD: The project has different modes in which it can operate. The first and
most common one is what we called the “direct mode”. In direct mode, the
More like a machine’s work 89
commercial, high res screen displays advertisements in a loop—that is not

our technology. That is just some technology that is spread all over Asia and
the most important aspect of that is that it is totally safe and you make sure
that if a company has paid for the advertisement time, their commercial is
played. In this mode, the low res facade works through an analysis of the ad-
vertisement and creates displays that fit with the mood, with the color, with
the speed and patterns of the high res screen. It tries to correspond to the
content of the high res screen. This means that nobody has to take care of
the content of the low res facade, because it is following and amplifying the
content of the high res screen. That also explains the meaning of the name:
AAmp means “Architectural Amplifier”.
The second mode is used when companies that show high res advertise-
ments allow their advertisements to be repeated for free but with an overlay
of feedback from the low res facade. It’s actually a technical trick where you
can have patterns that are shown on the facade overlaid on the high res screen,
then the building becomes more like a single shade.
Then there is a third mode when there is no advertisement showing—that
is supposed to be used especially late at night, let’s say from one o’clock to two
o’clock. In this mode, the system records some snippets of the advertisement
material and transforms it into content. It replays material, cuts it together; it
has face recognition and can morph faces into each other, making nice pat-
terns. It’s more like a machine’s work.
MS: I’d like to add one thing: as John mentioned, the design of the low res
LED area is derived by analyzing the commercial, high res screen. That means
that there is a commercial nature to one part of the skin of the building, but
the low res aspect kind of transforms this commercial aspect and brings the
two elements together.
What’s really interesting is that the source material itself—the color and
the dynamics of the advertisements themselves—control the modular effects
that are imbedded in the application, so you have a new design derived from
whatever the source material is. This is important, because the problem of
many projects is that, once you have a system installed, what kind of content
should be displayed? This is the early test of many projects. So, with AAmp, as
long as there is content on the high res screen, the rest of the facade will react
to what is going on there.
This project is also a good example of our work as collaborators. We are

not the inventors of the project itself: the concept of having the high res and
low res areas was developed by realities:united, who were kind of supplemen-
tary to the building’s architects. Our role was to develop a kind of software
that basically realizes the whole concept as realities:united thought of it. This
is a very specific project for us, where we just realized one essential part of the
much larger project.
One thing that I think is interesting and potentially valuable about this project is
that it takes these high res commercial screens that are more and more common
in cities, especially in China, and it on one hand enhances them by creating a
complimentary chromatic environment for them, but on the other hand it also
somehow disarms them, so that you feel slightly less offended by this stupid screen
showing car commercials over and over again.
MS: Exactly. I was surprised myself at how the low res screen almost dissolves
the commercial until the ads aren’t not so annoying anymore. The commer-
cial aspect becomes part of the identity of the building but it doesn’t feel like it
is only attached to it. And of course this is also the challenge in programming,
how to find an application that actually generates this kind of effect.
Let’s talk a little bit about the work you’ve done in China. I know that you devel-
oped displays for the Audi showroom in Beijing...
MS: Right. Yes, in the Audi showroom at the Oriental Plaza shopping mall in
Beijing. This is a good example, because it is a pretty small project, but it was
a pretty tough one to realize. I think John can talk a bit about that.
JD: For the Audi project, we were asked by a lighting company based in
Switzerland who made the LED wall for that showroom. We’d collaborated
on some other projects before. Technically it was kind of similar to AAmp,
because it combined low res and high res elements—a low res LED wall with
high res commercial screens built in. So we came up with a system that could
not only address these two elements but could also address the six high res
plasma screens independently. This meant that you could have really broad-
band advertisements—driving a car from one end to the other over every
The outside or inside 91
screen. Then we made sure that the system could be operated very simply,
which was actually fairly complex technically, but has worked fine in the end.
All you really need to do is put in a DVD and switch it on and the rest works
independently.
MS: As John said, the interfacing is another big challenge. What we want to
achieve in delivering a system for that kind of project is for people who are
not trained to be able to operate them. So you don’t need a technician or an
engineer to be able to operate in different scenarios, the people who work
there can basically handle the system. For example, if you need to replace a
part of the LED wall, you can independently switch the wall off and replace
the part, but the system will still run and once the replacement is done, you
just switch it back on. In terms of maintenance, it’s very helpful to have a
system like that.
Are there fundamental differences between doing this sort of media work in an
interior versus an exterior?
JD: The only difference that I can see from outside or inside is that architects
tend to ask for more screens and content on the inside and light or color ef-
fects on the outside. Personally, from our side, there’s not a big difference.
MS: Well, we are not particularly interested in facade projects. We are inter-
ested in media projects, particularly related to architecture. Facades are part
of the representative skin of a building, so when people look at the building
they can enjoy whatever might be going on in this particular facade. It helps
to transform the building between the day and the night. But what happens
with all the space inside of the building? I think that there are essential dif-
ferences between the outside and the inside. Often in projects where we are
asked to contribute, the focus lies on the facade or the skin of the building,
but that doesn’t mean that this is our initial interest. Our interest is usually to
figure out in which areas media could be supportive, whether it is the outside
or inside.
What I think is interesting about applying media to architecture—particularly

to architectural interiors—is that you emphasize a range of immaterial building
elements, such as light, movement, or sound, which are as essential to a build-

ing as material elements, like glass, steel, and concrete, but which function very
differently.
MS: For an issue like that I think there are many questions, but few answers.
One big question is: what is media? How is media related to architecture?
Usually people can imagine media as something that is attached, but the idea
of media as an integral part of architecture requires a different way of work-
ing, it requires the involvement of somebody like us at a much earlier stage,
basically when the space is first being designed. A sensibility for media would
be great in that very early stage, but usually that is not what happens.
JD: The first step that someone must take is to understand that media is not
only film or video; it can be light or physical elements that transport a picture
or sound. For most people a media element means a screen, but I would say
that each channel defines a different outcome and a different possibility. You-
tube is different from VHS tapes or a DVD. Music clips on Youtube are totally
different from videos shown on television. That is because nowadays video
clips are mostly made for the Net so they don’t go into the same amount of
detail, and that’s totally transformed the content. If you ask somebody, almost
everyone will say [a Youtube clip] is a video, but for me it’s very different. This
is just an example. Media is channels and each channel does something differ-
ent and in the end the intention is to bring them together to make something
that looks good.
Finally, let’s return to China, for a moment. I’ve heard that you’re working with
some local architects, Ma Yansong’s office MAD, for example.
MS: At the moment, we’re trying to develop collaborations with architects

in China who we think share a mutual range of interests with us—a shared
interest in how to embed media into architecture, for example. We’ve started
at first by simply talking with people and explaining to them a bit about what
we are doing.
JD: With MAD we’ve done the SINOLIGHTS project [a lighting design for
MAD’s Sinosteel Tower]. That was a challenge because there were so many
Each channel defines a different outcome 93
lights on it. In the Iluma Media Light Facade in Singapore there were almost
7000 fluorescent lamps, but with Sinosteel I think it’s over 80,000. So it was
a neck breaker for architectural 3D programs, and this meant that it was not
possible to generate previews of how it would look. So, together with 3D de-
signers, we had to find a way to preview material, so we rendered the lamps,
first as a texture, and with a few interior tricks we were able to give a sense of
what it would look like inside of the building.
MS: For that project, we developed a complete concept for a building design
that had already been finalized. The facade structure had already been set, and
one of the challenges was to find a way to integrate a lighting system into an
existing architectural concept. This you can only achieve when you have all
the tools and experiences together and you have a technology partner—in this
case Suzhou-based OptoTech Company Ltd.—who can guarantee that what
you have in mind is, in the end, doable—also in terms of maintenance and
service. So, next to the communication in partnership with architectural of-
fices, another important part of our development in China is also to develop
and strengthen partnerships with the technology providers. This is another
major effort that we’re working on, because very often technology compa-
nies have developed tools and software that are not derived from a design or
artistic point of view, but from an engineering point of view. Of course they
work, but they are not flexible, they are not easy to operate and definitely they
are not well suited to realize design concepts. So they themselves ask us if we
can help their product to appear in a different way. This is something that we
were not focusing on originally, but which is very interesting for us to see and
to follow.
Jennifer Sigler is an editor originally
from the United States, now based in
The Netherlands.
8. Jennifer Sigler
BRENDAN McGETRICK: The aim of this series is to try to understand the ex- The following
discussion took
periences of people who work with architects and find out what they give and place on
receive in the collaboration. I want to begin with the basics. How did you start August 2, 2009 at
editing? McGetrick’s apart-
ment in Rotterdam
JENNIFER SIGLER: Actually I started making books as a kid… writing,

drawing, cutting and pasting words and images and letters from magazines to
construct stories. I was less interested in writing the stories than in assembling
them—in arranging these sequences and stapling them together. The act of
turning pages has always been important. There’s drama in that—suspense,
engagment. It’s physical.
And from there?
In college I got a student job working in the library of the GSD [Harvard
Graduate School of Design]. I loved that job. Every day I looked forward to
going there. My cart of books was always waiting when I came in. I got to put
them all back on the shelves...
Wow, I had the same job when I was in college.
It’s funny, sometimes I think, “Oh I’m not an academic; I’m not part of that.”
But all that time in the GSD surrounded by those books made a big impres-
sion. I remember kneeling down between the shelves, being so close to them,
and of course you’re secretly reading them while you’re filing them and they
are getting into you.
I thought at a certain point that I wanted to study architecture—to be one
of those people from the GSD library—but I wasn’t sure whether it was going
to be architectural history or architecture itself. So after I graduated, with a
degree in English and Art History, I got an internship at Progressive Architecture
96 Jennifer Sigler, Editor
magazine. It doesn’t exist anymore, but at the time that was the American
architecture magazine and the PA Awards were very prestigious. I was going
to work there for a few months and then decide which program to apply to.
My job at PA was writing descriptions for what was called the “Information
Sources Issue” and it was so boring. It was a special issue about architectural
products; architects could use it to order new catalogues for their office li-
braries. So it was a catalogue of catalogues. I wrote descriptions of catalogues
about bricks and roofing materials and lighting fixtures and toilets and park
benches… you name it.
The descriptions were one or two sentence blurbs: “A wide assortment of
window frames are featured in this 32-page catalogue.” And I had to do that
for about 300 different catalogues, and you can imagine that after a couple
months I was freaking out and I had all these catalogues piled up on my desk.
I couldn’t figure out what this job had to do with the 30-page paper on Le
Corbusier I had submitted with my application, and I just wanted the thing to
end as fast as it possibly could.
Then one of my colleagues told me about a short-term position she’d
heard about from [the publisher] Rizzoli: the assignment was to “go to Rotter-
Further mentions dam and collect the material for a monograph about Rem Koolhaas/OMA.”
Rem Koolhaas: It was supposed to take six months to a year. Rem was hardly known at that
10, 13, 79, 87, 101,
103-104, 112 point. He had recently been part of the Deconstructivist Architecture show at
MoMA: 43-56 MoMA and had built the [Netherlands] Dance Theater. And of course there
Johnson, Philip and was Delirious New York. So Rizzoli wanted to do a monograph on him. It was
Mark Wigley, cur. to be part of a series; they had already done Aldo Rossi, Charles Moore, Mi-
Deconstructivist
Architecture. New chael Graves, and now they wanted to do one on Rem Koolhaas too. [Laughs]
York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1988
Four peas in a pod.
Koolhaas, Rem.
Delirious New York:
A Retroactive Mani- [Laughs] Exactly. As I remember it, each book in the series had a pastel cover
festo for Manhattan. with a small-ish square image in the center. There was a certain kind of typog-
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, raphy and a certain kind of paper. And the next one in the series was going
1978; Monacelli to be Koolhaas and I was supposed to go over, pull the material together (of
Press, 1995.
course this was before digital photography and FTP servers) and bring it back.
But of course, it didn’t happen that way.
Did that book ever get made?

Try to catch it in mid-air 97
No. At first Rem wasn’t even interested in doing a book. He was in the midst
of building the Kunsthal, Villa dall ‘Ava, travelling to Fukuoka, Lille. And the
big competitions started up—Bibliotheque de France, Karlsruhe, Zeebrugge.
That was such an exciting time in the office; I had never seen that kind of
energy—frantic invention—and I was absorbing everything. Documenting.
Recording. Interviewing people. Collecting images, articles, quotes. It didn’t
take long to realize that the content of the book was still being born and I
didn’t seem to have any choice but to try to catch it in mid-air.
That book that Rizzoli had in mind just wasn’t the one that we were going
to do. As little as I knew at 22, I knew that that wasn’t it. As time went by, our
commitment to doing something different—something “of ” OMA, rather
than “about” OMA—meant that we couldn’t be part of the Rizzoli series. At
the same time, Gianfranco Monacelli broke off from Rizzoli to start his own
press. He was committed to making the book happen, and it simply couldn’t
have happened within the construct of Rizzoli. At first he wanted to name his
press “Black Diamond”—like the markings on the expert ski slopes—because
he only wanted to do the toughest, most ambitious books.
That is still a major problem in publishing now: it’s often hard to find a publisher
who is willing to take a chance on something that doesn’t fit into their existing
catalogue.
They are afraid it won’t sell. But what sells? Now people are asking whether
the book will cease to exist. But I’ve been thinking about this and it seems that
just at the moment that publishing is in danger, architects themselves don’t
know what to do. So publishing becomes a viable form of practice, because ar-
chitects aren’t building. This is the time for architects to publish or to express
themselves on other platforms.
Have you ever thought about making books with people in other fields?
Absolutely. My interest in bookmaking, or editing, isn’t necessarily tied to ar-

chitecture. For me what is interesting is the intersection of media. It could be
much more exciting to work with a choreographer or a theater director or a
musician for instance, than it would be to work with a lot of architectural of-
fices out there. Or to connect those fields to architecture and design.
One of my interests is in transferring the event onto the page, or into the
thickness of the volume, so that the book itself becomes a new sort of “event.”
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’m working on a 12-week event
Brugmans, George program for the [Rotterdam Architecture] Biennale. It’s very tempting to vi-
dir. Open City: De-
signing Coexistence.
sualize the event program as a table of contents and to think about the rela-
Rotterdam: Nether- tionship between what’s happening in real time and real space and what could
lands Architecture happen on the page and how they can have a relationship potentially. That has
Institute, et al.,
2009-2010 always really interested me. When I started working at the Berlage [Institute]
I had the same observation: there was this missed opportunity, there was so
much stuff happening there. Someone had to grab it...
You mean lectures and seminars?
Yeah. All the live action was there to be explored in different formats. Not
that everything that happens is meant to be published, but I have this interest,
and maybe it’s more journalistic, in editing real life. It may be more related to
documentary-making.
I’m also obsessed with the spoken word in print—the intimacy and direct-
ness of speech, or conversation, when you read it. It’s like you’re in the room
with the person. Before I got into architecture I was very involved in theater.
I also used to have summer jobs, in high school, working at a television news
station. News production was too fast and superficial for me, but still, from
those experiences I became more interested in dialogue, in the interview pro-
cess, or in taking a lecture and generating text from that. The candidness of
the spoken word in telling a story has always appealed to me, and the process
of teasing the story out of an author is part of that. I don’t see myself as an
author but more as an accomplice.
A henchman. [Laughs]
[Laughs] Yeah. It’s like, “We’re gonna get it out of you!” Do you see it that way?
Yes, I totally agree about the power of the spoken word. And about transferring an
event onto the page and how, ultimately, the process through which you transfer
architecture into a book could be applied to contemporary art or music, etc. I
think in the end it comes down to really understanding the author, what he or
Editing real life 99
she is trying to do, what obstacles they face and finding a way to translate that in
a clear and compelling way.
I know that in doing a project like S,M,L,XL, where you’re involved in all Further mentions
facets and spend years bringing a book into existence, the scope of what the edi- S,M,L,XL: 10, 104,
106, 112
tor does stretches far beyond what is commonly perceived as an editor’s job. You
OMA, Rem Kool-
almost need to invent a new term to describe that sort of work. haas, and Bruce
Mau. S,M,L,XL. New
York: Monticelli
“Mother,” maybe? But seriously, it’s always a process and a dialogue. It’s not Press, 1995.
about saying that one person did something.
I suppose it’s about acknowledging that one person can’t possibly do everything.
Yes, but it’s simply also about the chemistry and the back-and-forth that goes
on in these projects. Things that can only happen through collaboration. Not
just between the editor and the authors, but also with the designer, who, in
the most exciting cases takes on a co-editorial role, or even a position of co-
authorship.
It’s funny, I don’t know if Bruce Mau would have ever been involved if
I hadn’t fought for him to be the designer. And without him, of course, it
wouldn’t have been S,M,L,XL. I can remember sitting down with Rem after Further mentions
we had explored all kinds of possibilities and saying, “Bruce Mau has to do Rem Koolhaas: 10,
13, 79, 87, 100-
this book.” I can remember picking up Zone 1/2 again and again, flipping 101, 103, 112
through it, and thinking, “He’s the only one who can take this idea to the next Feher, Michel and
place.” For me, being an editor is all about that pushing and driving things in Sanford Kwinter,
ed. Zone 1/2: The
certain directions, whether it’s the content or the process or the people you [Contemporary] City.
choose to work with. But it’s also about knowing when to hang back and let New York: Zone
certain things take their course. Books, 1987.
And understanding the freedoms that you enjoy by being something other than
an author.
You talk about what an editor does—or doesn’t do. Most people think that
someone hands over the text and you fix the commas. But what people don’t
realize is that often the editor is the one that initiates that text, or the entire
context for that text. In a project like S,M,L,XL, where we actually had to rein-
terpret the experience of architecture onto pages, each one of those different
approaches to writing about architecture started with a conversation. How do

we approach this? What is the story that we need to tell here? How do we tell
it? Who do we need to talk to or where do we need to go to get it? Just like in
architecture, the things that seem most obvious, most effortless, are often the
biggest struggles.
Can you choose a particular example from the book to give a better sense of how
that worked?
The Kunsthal was a really interesting one, because I can remember being com-
pletely stuck. Rem was stuck. I remember at one point saying, “Well, whenever
you show the building to a visitor, you lead them through this very specific
circuit. Maybe the routing, the circulation, is the story here. Why don’t we just
do a really boring tour? Why don’t you just give really matter-of-fact instruc-
tions for how to ‘do’ the Kunsthal, as if you’re telling a friend how to drive to
your house?” So I took the tape recorder and I made [Rem] say it. Turn left,
turn right, etc. And he said it and then we made the sequence of images. Then
we added something else—and this was one of the things that kept me up for
so many nights: sound. I thought there had to be sound, there had to be voices
in there. I was obsessed with the idea of planting ghosts in the building, so
that you could walk through a silent space and overhear this intimate conver-
sation that would also somehow echo the experience of the design, of seeing
things you had already seen from new positions. So we experimented with all
these different scripts. At first we tried some [Jean-Luc] Godard scripts, but
Beckett, Samuel. in the end it was [Samuel] Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It took a long time
Waiting for Godot: to find the dialogue that worked on all the levels that we wanted it to. It may
A Tragicomedy in
Two Acts (English not show to most readers, but for me it’s one of the moments that the book
edition). New York: pushes the limits of the medium because it starts to work with time and space
Grove Press, 1954 and characters and voices all at once. It started with this idea of having sound
on pages.
Right, which is such a nice idea.
Can you have sound in a book?
How do you cultivate a sense of ambience in a book?

What is the story we want to tell and how do we tell it? 101
Right. But with every single project in that book, it started with a question—
what is the story we want to tell and how do we tell it?
Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting a recorder and asking someone to tell it.
I just bought a book [The Rhetoric of Modernism] about Le Corbusier as a Benton, Tim.
lecturer. It’s really interesting, because it analyzes the way he spoke and how The Rhetoric of
Modernism: Le Cor-
he was able to draw these huge crowds and convince his audience of his argu- busier as a Lecturer.
ments. Print and spoken word are different media and I think it’s interest- Basel: Birkhäuser,
ing to think about what can happen when they come together. How do they 2008.
intersect?
How do they enrich each other?
And what happens to the value and the power of a lecture when we interpret
it in print? How does it communicate differently than a written text would?
Another thing that’s useful about lectures in terms of establishing a narrative is

that they force architects to compress. They force the speaker to figure out exactly
what matters about the subject and, hopefully at least, cut out the superfluous or
self-indulgent parts. I find that it’s very hard to replicate the urgency involved in
that without a real life performance and real life audience looming.
Right; it’s a form of discipline.
And storytelling.
Exactly. The format insists on a narrative. It’s the beginning of a book for-
mat—simply a sequence of images and captions and a process of page turn-
ing. But it’s strange, I haven’t been working on many books lately. Right now
Christiaanse, Kees,
though, I’m working on this book for the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale,
Tim Rieniets and
Open City: Designing Coexistence, but that’s a very different kind of role, Jennifer Sigler
because I’m one of several editors, with Tim Rieniets and Kees Christiaanse, (ed.). Open City:
who are the curators. Of course I’m very heavily involved, but it’s not the same Designing Coexis-
tence. Amsterdam:
kind of nurturing that I’ve done before. And Hunch was different—it wasn’t Sun Publisher,
a book... 2009.
Let’s talk about Hunch, the magazine you made for the Berlage Institute. I know
that you worked on that for several years, but I don’t know much about what
went into it.
I started it up and did the first seven issues. In the beginning it was meant, like
Further mentions S,M,L,XL, to have very clear approaches to different types of texts, and dif-
S,M,L,XL: 10, 103- ferent aspects of the Berlage-world, which would return in each issue. There
104, 112
was a diary format, there was a lecture format, there was always an interview,
a theoretical article, a project, a photographic or artistic intervention... The
issues weren’t themed; each was meant to slice through a moment in time.
Now everyone wants a theme—it’s more marketable and maybe seems
more serious. But sometimes it’s exciting to work the other way around—to
distill your theme from your evidence. Time has its own way of organizing.
How did Hunch start?
Berlage called me one day and said they wanted someone to work one day
a week to make their newsletter. It was a really little job. I had very young
kids and was doing a few freelance projects at the time, so I said, “OK, sure.
Why not.”
So I started this one-day-a-week job, but as soon as I got there I felt really
passionate about it. The Berlage was a very inspiring place to be. It was still
in Amsterdam at the time and Wiel Arets was the dean. Stefano Boeri was
teaching with Francesco Jodice; Stan Allen was teaching; Sanford Kwinter and
Edward Soja were lecturing... and Sejima, Branzi, Zaha; Steven Holl was do-
ing a masterclass; Bart Lootsma was there and Roemer van Toorn and Vedran
Mimica were there, of course. There were all these interesting people coming
through and I was very happy to be back in this international scene, like at
OMA. And maybe I also felt within myself that I had never...
Been to grad school.
[Laughs] Been to grad school! I’d never been back to school, so I was now get-
ting a sort of architecture education and having a good time. I felt a little bit
rebellious and sometimes more like one of the students than one of the staff.
Of course the goal was not to make a student publication—it was supposed
A personal laboratory 103
to have international relevance—but I wanted to make something that was in

the spirit of them—not in the spirit of a newsletter.
[Laughs] You say that like it’s the ugliest word in the language.
[Laughs] I just saw the potential to do much more. At the time they were do-
ing two kinds of publications—a newsletter and a review of all the student
work which was as least a year behind schedule. So I suggested that we bag the
two and do a magazine that would combine the best of both worlds and bring
in all of the interesting lectures and events that were coming through.
The name “Hunch” and the format came to me right away, and the quality
of the typography on the cover too. I had that image in my mind immediately
and developed it in the first issue with the graphic designer Simon Davies. No
one in Holland knew what hunch meant so I had to explain this strange word
to everyone and convince people. But once I did, it was fine. That’s what was
great about the Berlage—they gave you space. They called it a laboratory and
it was a laboratory.
I put a call out to students asking who wanted to take part—in making the
diary, for instance. So in every issue there was a different student writing a di-
ary for Hunch and I always developed close relationships with these students.
Some of them found their own voices in writing these diaries and really used
it as a personal laboratory. They were all very brave, and very willing to expose
the place where their private and professional selves overlapped.
Tell me more about the thinking behind the format?
It was more or less the width of a novel and the height of a magazine. But the
content didn’t have to extend over the entire height of the page. Each article
could occupy a different portion of this vertical “territory” and leave the rest
available for marginalia, or for some other intrusion. So we could blow up
quotes, or do whatever we wanted in this play-zone we created throughout.
The problem was that we didn’t have design continuity. We did most of the
issues in-house, and after I left even the in-house designer changed, and there
were various “guest-editors.” So this idea was not maintained. Now Salomon
Frausto is the editor and has relaunched it with NAi Publishers. It’s very dif-
ferent, but I’m glad he’s taking care of it, and that it will continue.
It’s interesting that you said you started with a graphic designer but then pro-
ceeded without one for the rest of the issues. Often, in the kind of editing that
you’ve been describing, you have to develop a very close relationship with graphic
designers and absorb their way of thinking, almost to the extent that you could do
it yourself. That’s a struggle of course, but it can also be a lot of fun.
It’s the most fun when you can really invest in that and have a graphic design-
er who wants to have that dialogue, who really wants to interpret the content
and not just make it look good. That’s the most interesting part of the project
I think, but in some situations it’s a relief when you have enough confidence
and trust in a graphic designer to back off and say, “Let’s see what you do with
it.” That’s what’s great about working with Mevis and van Deursen now on the
Open City book. I can let go a little bit. It’s something I’ve had trouble with in
the past, I can be a bit too possessive.
Me too, but at a certain point you just feel that you’re the only one who actually
knows what’s going on. You’re the only person who’s read everything, understands
how the pieces relate to each other, how the sequence should work, etc. and I think
it’s somewhat natural to say, “Well, I’ve got to make sure that this thing goes
right.” To be an editor is to be a bit of a control freak I think. In that way, I think
it’s interesting that you say you’re now one of several editors working on a book.
Yes, but sometimes it’s interesting to discover that different editors play differ-
ent roles and have different backgrounds and talents and orientations. There’s
a lot you can learn from working with different editors. Let’s say you’re work-
ing on a project where you have to bring in a lot of authors: there are always
authors who you simply wouldn’t have known or had access to otherwise. I
really like to work in collaboration, to have a sparring partner and bounce off
of people. If I don’t, it all just spirals inward.
That’s another aspect of working with architects though—because everything

they do is so collaborative, you learn through working with them how valuable
the process of collaboration can be and how to nurture it.
The question is, what can this editorial collaboration mean for architects and
for the history of architecture? What is the relevance of publishing to archi-
What am I doing here? 105
tectural practice? That’s part of what Beatriz Colomina and her PhD students
at Princeton investigated with the Clip, Stamp, Fold exhibition for instance. Colomina, Beatriz,
et al., cur. Clip,
And Michael Kubo has been working on a project called “Publishing Prac- Stamp, Fold: The
tices”—specifically about the relationship between the history of books by Radical Architecture
architects and the history of architecture. It starts with Le Corbusier’s Vers un of Little Maga-
zines. New York:
Architecture and ends with S,M,L,XL. So I have to ask myself what role I have Storefront for Art &
had or could continue to have in “publishing practices” as an editor. Or what Architecture, 2006-
2007.
role we could have... or do we even want a role?
Le Corbusier, Vers
un architecture.
[Laughs] Right. Paris: G. Cres, 1923.
That’s what I ask myself sometimes: what am I doing here? But I guess it’s
just something that gets in your blood. That’s why I told you about shelving
those books in the GSD library. Or the Le Corbusier book I mentioned before.
When I saw it in the store I got this enormous buzz, and thought, “Why am I
getting a buzz from this architecture book?” Because I’m not supposed to get
that. [Laughs]
[Laughs] But you’re just in denial.
I am not. Listen, people don’t realize this. I couldn’t even tell you... I can’t
name all the buildings by Jean Nouvel or Herzog and de Meuron; I don’t stop
in lobbies and study details; I don’t buy El Croquis; I don’t walk around the
city looking up in the sky. I am not into architecture. But I’m into...
But that’s the big question: what is it?
I don’t know. It’s about the communication. It’s about the ways that the ideas
are expressed, somehow.
Is it because architecture is so difficult to express in that way? Like the old say-
ing goes, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It’s so hard
to communicate across platforms and maybe that challenge is what keeps it
exciting.
I really don’t know. What is it for you?

My experience is very similar to yours. My architectural education is limited, first

because I never studied it in school but also because even now I don’t feel com-
pelled to read up on architecture in the way I do other subjects. There is a social
dimension to it, a societal dimension that I think can be fascinating. But actually
I feel motivated to make architecture books and write about architecture now
mostly because I have so much sympathy for architects themselves. I’ve seen how
much effort and sacrifice goes in and how poorly understood all that is among the
general public. So I agree that it’s about an interest in communication ultimately.
But I keep coming back to the same question: what kind of book could the
next really important book be? And will the next very important book in
architecture be made by the one who has the most important thing to say,
though maybe in a very familiar book format, or by the one who finds a new
potential for the medium to communicate architecture?
Or both… I think that one of the most obvious inadequacies of architecture books
is their failure to convey a real sense of space as it’s experienced by a visitor.
Maybe that’s a problem that the next great architecture book has to solve. It’s a
challenge from an editorial point of view but just as much from a graphic design
Further mentions point of view. Michael Rock talked about this. He’s made many architecture pub-
Michael Rock: lications over the years and says he’s still completely frustrated by the problem of
1-17
translating physical experience into print.
It’s similar to my talking about the spoken word, and of bringing in sound—
it’s really about immediacy. It’s about making the book more of a live, tangible
experience, because ultimately architecture is only accessed as a first hand
experience by a limited few. For most of the world, it’s accessed through a
secondary medium, usually photography and some sort of descriptive text.
I wonder if the enormous emphasis on photography in architecture books and

magazines influences that. I don’t have any data to back it up, but my feeling
is that we visit great buildings less because we are so inundated with high-defi-
nition, highly commercialized imagery of them. In that sense, I think architects
do themselves a disservice by presenting anal-retentive, humanity-free visions
of their buildings. When I write for magazines, for instance, I often find that the
photos offer no help at all in terms of providing an interesting perspective on the
Photography and some sort of descriptive text 107
building, because they are so focused on simply making it look pretty. That’s the
benefit of editing something yourself, of course, you can develop a relationship
between text and image much more actively.
It also has to do with who you ask to photograph and how and why. That’s
also part of the editorial process—who you commission to take those pho-
tographs and what the nature of their assignment is. For instance, once in
Hunch we published a private museum called the Hedge House that Wiel
Arets had done in Maastricht. It was for these contemporary art collectors
who lived in a 17th-century castle surrounded by gardens and who also raised
orchids and this special breed of chickens called Barnevelders. We knew we
wanted to publish this building, but not as architecture, and not as the sub-
ject. The architecture had to “work.” I asked a French artist and photographer,
Philippe Terrier-Hermann, to do it, and he actually visualized a scenario that
he wanted to project in that space. He said something like, “In this museum I
want to bring women in costumes that I’ve designed and they will be giving
a tour to twelve businessmen. Can you find me the twelve businessmen? That
will be one story. The other story will be about six little boys having a birthday
party.” So we actually staged these two events and then he made these two se-
ries of images and it created another layer of interpretation. It was no longer
just about the building. We wanted to take it further: we wanted to present
the building; we wanted to present the art in the building; and we wanted
the documentation to contribute to that art in a way, and for the magazine
itself to feed back into that. The text we commissioned wasn’t just analyzing
the architecture of the Hedge House, it also reflected on this photographer’s
work—how he interpreted the environment, domesticity, the “collector as
artist.” So for an editor it’s a question of to what extent you see your document
as just a document, a record, or to what extent you see it as a contribution to
the process.
Part of a feedback loop.
No matter what the medium that you’re producing is, it remains part of a
feedback loop. It gives something back, rather than just records.
I guess that’s the ultimate challenge: to respond to art with art.

But it’s one thing to be an editor who is working with an architect—“We are
collaborating to make your statement”—versus being on the other side where
the architect is your subject. Those are two different relationships, and I’ve
found that the degree and the nature of collaboration that architects are will-
Further mentions ing to engage in differs a lot. What was amazing during S,M,L,XL, and some-
S,M,L,XL: 10, 103- thing that I think few people realize, is how vulnerable Rem made himself.
104, 106
Rem Koolhaas: 10, And how collaborative it was. Not many architects, or writers in general, are
13, 79, 87, 100- so willing to expose their vulnerabilities. They’ll hand over a text and they are
101, 103-104 extremely rigid about it. They’re very uncomfortable with changes and with
sharing the editorial process. They don’t know how to deal with the edito-
rial process. But when I go back and look at that process with Rem, how it
could literally start with a scribble on a napkin that I would type up and send
back… and when I sent it back, I could send it with...
Comments.
With comments. Then it would come back to me and that same scribble on a
napkin could go back and forth a hundred times. Maybe two hundred times,
when you think of the number of corrections that each text went through.
Through the fax machine, of course. There was no e-mail then. Long ribbons
of that thermal fax paper would be spilling onto the floor on Sunday morn-
ings from London! Ironically, it was maybe only by having such a humble
position, by being...
A stenographer.
Yeah, that you can have such an intimate role in the process. Because then
you’re really following the thought process, so sometimes when you type
something up, you say, “Maybe you could...” In the beginning Rem was not
always prepared to take my comments, but as the process went on, it built and
built into more of a trust. Eventually he started scribbling “J?” when he wasn’t
sure of something and that was the way it worked with all the texts—back and
forth, back and forth. That doesn’t often happen. I wouldn’t even have time
for that process again.
Rem wouldn’t either. [Laughs]

It’s not about glamour, it’s about invisibility 109
No, it was very specific.
I agree that there is a basic level of confidence you need to work like that. You need
confidence on the author’s side and openness to critique and suggestion, and you
need confidence as an editor to treat the least glamorous aspects of the job with
the same level of seriousness that you do the most glamorous ones. Is there any
glamour in editing? [Laughs]
It’s not about glamour, it’s about invisibility! Of course you’re at the center
of everything, but the better you do your job, the less your effort shows, and
the more the project works. Editors are there to make others look glamorous.
Mark Wigley is Dean of Columbia
University's Graduate School of Ar-
chitecture.
9. Mark Wigley
BRENDAN McGETRICK: In this interview series we’re trying to get a sense of The following
who architects are by talking to the people closest to them. The hope that by fill- discussion took
place on
ing in the area around the subject in great detail we can create something like a August 25, 2009 at
silhouette of a profession. I’ve been anxious to speak with you, because education Wigley’s office in
New York
is such an important part of understanding where architects come from.
MARK WIGLEY: It’s a very interesting concept, and it immediately begs the
question: what is an architect? For me, it’s quite simple: an architect is some-
one who doesn’t know what a building is. That is to say, someone for whom a
building is a set of questions, rather than a set of answers. Almost everybody
knows what a building is, but the architect is someone for whom the building
is filled with mystery.
What’s interesting then about the school is that you’re training a group
of people and what holds them in common is that they don’t know what a
building is. So, actually, in a school you can’t simply deliver a set of informa-
tion about what architecture is and a set of professional procedures for ac-
complishing that. I like your concept of the silhouette: in a way, what you can
do is deliver the silhouette of the big questions, the big doubts. Interestingly,
architects are not allowed to share that doubt in public. In fact, architects are
called on to do quite the opposite, to produce images of certainty and security,
stability, and so on. So that is an odd assignment—you take the one group in
society who sees objects as full of mystery and you ask them to invest those
objects with the symbolism of certainty.
What that means is that there is a big difference between the public and the
private in architecture. If you look inside an architect’s head, it’s pretty messy
and yet the work they do is very clear. If you look inside an architect’s studio,
it’s a mess, but when they present to the client it’s very clear. When you look in-
side an architectural school it’s pretty messy, but then you look at the publica-
tions and the website, and everything seems very clear. Publicly, architects are
certain, sure, confident, precise; privately they really don’t know what they’re
112 Mark Wigley, Educator
doing, how they’re doing, why, and so on. This is not to say that they’re igno-
rant. On the contrary, architects have been talking amongst themselves about
what a building is for 3000 years in the west, 10,000 years in the non-west and
so on.
It seems to me that a graduate degree in architecture has two sides: on one, you
have to prepare the students to be professional architects and go out into the
world and perform as such; on the other hand, there also seems to be a strong
commitment, at places like Columbia at least, to encourage students to think
about things that have less to do with the nuts and bolts of the architectural pro-
fession and more to do with the role of architecture and urbanism in society. I’m
curious about how you approach the relationship between these two educational
ambitions.
For education, it means we have to cultivate both sides of that: we have to

allow the students to assume this sense of professional certainty in the world
while not sacrificing the doubt. What’s interesting, of course, is that this is all
about questions, and I guess the philosophy here [at Columbia] is that the
more you reinforce the questions, the more you get to the clarity. It means
that you don’t look at architecture so directly. If what architects share is not
knowing what a building is, strangely enough, all of the other disciplines
around buildings become our natural allies, because they don’t have the same
problem. In a certain way, we learn about what a building is from our profes-
sional colleagues. In the process, we become incredibly good at one thing and
one thing alone—combining forms of knowledge that don’t belong together.
I think that architects are not very popular, even in the countries in which
architects are famous. I think architects are only hired because people genu-
inely do not know what to do—from as simple a thing as how to renovate
your house after your children have gone to college to how to put a library
into a big city. If you knew what to do, you wouldn’t hire an architect, you’d
hire an engineer, you’d hire somebody important and you’d pay them. You
hire an architect because the kinds of factors involved cannot be put in the
same orbit—emotional, technical, aesthetic, legal... The architect becomes
somebody who has a special skill, which is to think and combine forms of
knowledge that don’t belong together and to shape some kind of organization
that allows the complexity to keep going. They don’t resolve the problem; they
Comfort with the unknown 113
allow a kind of ecology to continue. And that’s an amazing talent, but it’s a
talent that requires you to be comfortable with doubt.
Being comfortable with doubt is probably a talent in itself.
I think the greatest professional asset of the architect is the ability to be com-
fortable with incompatibilities, complexities, and uncertainties and, in that
space, to give some sense of organization. So, in a way, the greatest contribu-
tion a school like this one could pay to the profession is to maximize this
comfort with the unknown and with mystery. Unlike other schools, we really
go directly to the questions and try to stay with the questions. The end result
is simultaneously maximizing the students’ professional ability by allowing
them to think in spaces that other people cannot think, while maximizing
the experimental displacement of the profession. So here it’s not a matter of,
“We’d better give you professional skills and have you challenge the discipline
and think of its future.” We think there are ways of challenging the profession
that generate a new set of professional skills.
Students come from all over the world knowing that the future of architec-
ture here is unclear and therefore their personal future is unclear. But because
of that courage or naïveté or romance and the danger of being in a world that
is uncertain, they develop great strength, which means that they immediately
find positions in the professional world. Ironically, by abandoning profes-
sional hope they become professional leaders. That’s the paradox of the place.
That’s for the students, how does that sort of philosophy apply to the instructors
and how they approach their role?
It means that the teachers here are more like students and the students have to
be, not exactly like teachers, but more like research leaders. Since neither the
teachers nor the students know what the future is, nor even what the specif-
ics of the problem that they’re working on are, they have to collaborate. The
school works through parallel processing: you allow curious students to work
with curious teachers, not knowing which of them is going to develop results
that contaminate other teachers and students. In a viral sort of way, the whole
thing begins to function almost as a brain—it starts thinking about certain
questions. But I would say that parallel processing is definitely our method.
What do you mean by parallel processing?
That means not just a program in architecture, but architecture, preservation,

planning, real estate, urban design... all possible aspects of the built environ-
ment. Inside each program, parallel tracks; cross-over laboratories that link
all the programs in promiscuous ways; big initiatives that link the school with
other fields and other universities, and so on. Layer upon layer... This creates
a kind of networked intelligence where literally the school operates as a kind
of brain.
What is that brain thinking about?
So many things. It’s kind of like a human brain—many things at the same
time.
What’s its main interest?
I think there is, again, a naïve or romantic view that small changes to the built
environment lead to the possibility of a better society. There is a ridiculous
optimism: these people who don’t know where they are going are unbeliev-
ably optimistic, and the brain is trying to think, “Well, what could we do so
that optimism can lead to a better society?”
To say it another way: I think architects’ gift is to produce a hesitation in
the rhythms of everyday life so that you see your world differently and, for a
moment, even imagine living differently. Architects produce a hesitation in
life that presents an invitation to think, an invitation that’s generally passed
on. [Laughs] So the work of architects sits in the streets like the work of a
very good writer might sit in a subway news stand. It’s there, you could take
advantage of it, it’s inviting you to see things differently, but you might not. To
craft this sort of invitation requires multi-dimensional thinking. Maybe that’s
not a very interesting thing to say, but that’s the guts of it.
I think it’s very interesting, but, to return to something you said earlier… The
point you made about the teacher and the student being equally curious and ex-
ploring things together I also find interesting, because there was once a time when
there was a very clear asymmetry in the relationship between the teacher and
Most architects don’t talk to each other 115
the student. Now, partly because of technology and partly because of the global
orientation of schools like Columbia, the traditional teacher-pupil dynamic is
changing. It’s interesting to think about how you can take advantage of that,
rather viewing it as something that warps the process of education.
I think that the extent to which any of us is operating within—and being de-
fined by, in a positive sense—a multitude of networks creates new modes of
thinking. Architecture is a way of thinking. It’s not a set of objects; it’s an atti-
tude toward objects. It’s even the claim that objects have an attitude. The stu-
dents here come from 65 countries, so they bring new forms, new questions,
new techniques. The teachers are also highly global, but I think something else
comes in... Every room that we’re in is filled with so many electronic interfaces
that are more or less unconscious but are bringing information in or out of
the room. So, if architecture is a way of thinking, it’s super-charged right now.
This school, for example, was founded on Avery Library, which is the
reference library of the field. It’s a quiet, well-controlled space in which all
that is important in theory ends up. Upstairs is pure madness. Students are
multitasking at a level never seen before. They’re carnivorous; no increase in
density of any kind seems to effect them, they just swallow it. But, neverthe-
less, what they’re trying to do is send a message down to the library, they’re
trying to send a crazy project out into the world that will eventually get into
the library. So what they look for in a teacher is not even a guide—because
that implies that the guide has already climbed the mountain or been across
the forest—but sort of a fellow traveler with unique forms of wisdom. Despite
the fact that they’re in this hyper-networked digital environment, even post-
digital environment, they’re also working on instinct. They need a figure who
has travelled many times, but not on the same path, because part of what they
want to do is talk about the nature of the path.
The really great teachers feel the same way. This school was founded by a
guy called William Ware, and he was the first person to put architecture into
the university. He argued that, despite the 3000 years of classical architecture
history, the field is still an unexplored territory, and therefore students and
teachers have to explore it together, make maps, and those maps will become
text books. And so he set the school up as a research organism.
He had another really interesting insight: he said that most architects don’t
talk to each other. They may have their offices in the same building, but they
don’t talk. One way that they could communicate is for apprentices to leave
the studio, come to school, swap information, and then go back. He presented
the school, strangely, as a way for architects to talk to each other through the
exchange of information. He set up a research culture based not on teach-
ers telling students what the truth of the field is, but on networking exist-
ing architectural intelligence, and he made the existing intelligence in studios
around the world feed into the school. Avery Library was born out of that,
and so you could say that Avery Library is an artifact generated by networking
19th century architectural offices. That’s not such a different model from today.
No, that seems like an extremely contemporary idea.
Right, so the guy basically had the idea that, by allowing information to con-
centrate and be recorded and compared in a university, a discipline would
take shape. I think that the same model is still relevant. This school used to
outsource its thinking to other schools, which would then, after another five
years, outsource it to the profession. That makes no sense at a moment in
which all of the major experiments are happening in China, for example. If
more than 50 percent of the world’s buildings are being built in China and
China is one of the world’s great urban laboratories—socially, politically,
aesthetically, you name it—then that is where your focus should be.
Really, at this school, we’re not interested in other schools. We are try-
ing to learn about the experiments in China. But it’s the same thing: whereas
when this school was founded in the 19th century, it networked together the
extraordinary intelligence of architecture offices around the United States,
now, in a way, the mission is to try to create intellectual networks and friend-
ships through whole regions that are evolving and experimenting.
In other words, the intelligence of our field is now in China. It’s in Latin
America. It’s in Africa. It’s in the Middle East. It’s not in New York. Not be-
cause we’re not intelligent in New York, it’s because the real intelligence of
architecture is now being thought by a global network not of architects or
even of cities, but of quite large continental areas. This is why we have Studio
X in Beijing, for example: not because we have some special gift to bring, quite
the opposite. We have a kind of stupidity.
Architecture is being thought of in completely new ways and this could,
for example, generate a whole new kind of library, just as Avery was generated
The mission is reduce the level of stupidity 117
by 19th century knowledge. It certainly will develop whole new forms of

professionalism, whole new forms of publications, and so on. The thing is
that none of us know the consequences of that. But if you’re not thinking
about the future in and with China then you’re not thinking about the future.
That’s not just because China is so large and its ambitions so great, it’s that
its intelligence is so high. There’s really the evolution of a whole new form
of intelligence. That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, but if you’re interested in
thinking, you have to listen and learn and participate in the great experiments
in China. And I feel the same way about these other places.
This again relates to your silhouette: one cannot quite say what’s happen-
ing to architecture in this moment, but you can be absolutely certain that we
are participating in one of the big mental accelerations in our field. And these
are accelerations that can do just fine without schools of architecture. We are
not essential to this evolution, and I think just to be a witness is a pretty good
position too. Maybe that’s the position that interests me most—to be like the
friend at the party, not necessarily invited but somebody that’s happy to be
there and to learn and to think. It’s a very long answer to your question, but
when the experiments of China and the experiments of Latin America, the
Middle East, the old Russia, Africa, and so on, become collaborative between
regions—and this could be at the micro level, individual things, or the big lev-
el—I’m very optimistic about the ignorance reduction that could take place.
As Cedric Price once said, the mission is reduce the level of stupidity.
I agree, but I also think that it’s somewhat tricky, because often the people who
are operating in these places, in the Middle East or in China, are not think-
ing about what is going on there in the same way. Even if you are claiming the
position of a silent observer, just by the fact that you are observing and you are
implicitly declaring the importance of observation, you become a participant. So
you can never really say that you are “just listening” because simply the fact that
you are there...
Changes the conversation. I really like the way you put it. In each of these
locations, there is something like a controlled society. China can be seen that
way, Russia can be seen that way, but also Latin America and America can be
seen that way. You can see in each of these situations that it’s actually highly
controlled, highly regulated. There’s a lot of planning going on, there’s a lot
of expertise. And there are a lot of effects that look like they are unintended
—like, say, unemployment in the United States—which are in fact planned.
So deciding which elements of a situation were part of the plan or represent a
problem with the plan or were simply unplanned is really hard to know. But
in all of those situations in which there is the attempt at control, a kind of
acupuncture approach can produce enormous transformation.
What do you mean by acupuncture?
Incredibly small things, including listening, can produce effects and I feel that,
at one level, students can more easily find the point. Maybe I have an inflated
confidence in youth, but I see again and again the ability of students to go into
very complex new situations and locate points of great sensitivity and make a
relatively small gesture that’s transformative. I think that’s a really interesting
counter-model to the sheer unimaginable scale of global interactions. And
everybody always says, of course, “the global is the local” and on and on, but it
really can come down to something small. Could whole experiments in China
change on the basis of a single conversation? Of course. In fact, it’s much more
likely to than anything else. Sometimes that conversation is between one fa-
mous person and another, but not always.
You say that Columbia isn’t interested in other universities. Is that also true outside
of America? Is that the case when you go to China, for instance, because schools
there have a very different approach to education from the one you’re describing.
We’re sort of friends with every university, and we recognize kindred spirits
in each place. In every university there are interesting people and interesting
programs, interesting events, and so on. But the whole culture is not orga-
nized around those interesting things. Maybe the Architectural Association in
London is the only school that one can think of in which the whole school is
organized as a laboratory. We are close friends with them, and, for example,
when we’re in China we are filled with admiration for the architecture schools
there and for the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and we would like work with
all of those. But deep down they also have their own special intelligence and
special projects that they are working on. We would like to collaborate, but
ultimately we’re working in a different space.
An acupuncture approach 119
Every time that we are in a different location, we immediately become stu-

dents of the other university. So if I’m in Beijing I’m learning from Tsinghua
[University] and Beida [Beijing University]. I’m learning. They simply talk to
us and educate us, and we’re interested in listening. They like to listen to us
too, but that’s not the main event. We share interests, but in trying to think
through the way that intelligence is sliding across the global landscape, we
find more natural partners in industry, in business, in government, in NGOs,
in technological systems themselves. Those are our natural allies. That’s what
I mean when I say we’re not interested. If somebody’s making concrete, we’re
really interested in all of the issues that they are facing, and we are on the same
page with somebody who has to think about concrete in a global sense—
where it’s going, why, etc. We could not be more excited than to listen to that.
If somebody is running a fantastic school of architecture we have lots in
common, but it’s not the same, maybe because education is not a global in-
dustry. There are more than a million architecture students in the world. So
it’s a city. Everybody knows what’s going on in every part of that city, but the
city’s behavior is conservative in the sense that most of the city is trying to
make sure that nothing is happening too much. Whereas if you go to indus-
try—and maybe it’s just the harshness and speed of the business world—you
have to think about what global intelligence means. Mayors of cities are also
very interesting from that point of view: they have to do their local city stuff
but they have to integrate it into a bigger picture. If you’re running a school of
architecture you don’t have to think about that.
To give you a simple example: I think the future of the university is going
to be very much about data visualization. The real architectural university of
the future will be trying to answer the question, how do you visualize data? I
think that’s an architectural question.
It’s also an architectural expertise.
Right. Now try to find a university that thinks that that’s its future. You can’t.
So if you’re fascinated by universities, which I am, and you really want to talk
about the future of the university, you’re much more likely to go to parts of
the art world, parts of the information world, parts of the economic world,
parts of the NGO world, parts of the military world. You’ll go to a different
place. We are more of that view. We’re probably incompetent, we’re amateur,
we’re small, agile. We’re good company, because we’re irrelevant. Nobody ever
thinks that a school of architecture can effect anything, and we’re therefore
welcomed to many, many tables and feel honored to be there.
How do those sorts of interactions then feedback into the development of new
approaches to architecture or education?
We’re exploring a series of different strategies now. For example, we’ve just
www.arch.colum- started the Columbia Building Intelligence Project, C-Bip. Basically that’s
bia.edu/c-bip based on the idea of targeting the greatest stupidities in the building industry
and developing an entirely different pedagogical model for addressing them.
Instead of twelve students in a studio, 36 students will gather together in a
room with three teachers and three professionals from outside of architecture
to explore for three months an issue that a whole series of experts have iden-
tified as a key area for exploration. Basically, the idea is to take the stupidity
of the building industry—and one can’t find a slower, lower industry—and
really take it on as an area of thought and effort. The students involved in that
will do it in their second year, and they will become part of a major university
research project into new possible forms of intelligence in building. That’s a
new pedagogical curriculum.
The laboratories in which students can escape the confines of their own
program is another one: we added an extra year so that students could stay
and work on extended research projects. Basically, through these sorts of ef-
forts the school gets turned inside out: normally, the heart of an architecture
school is the studios. They are very fragile, and to pull those right out of the
heavily fortified school and place them around the world in places of great
vulnerability demonstrates a new pedagogical model. Each of these is a theo-
retical act that creates a new possible way of teaching. But it’s only the teachers
and the students who will mobilize those techniques.
How many of these sorts of experiments are going on currently?
I would say we’re doing five or six experiments in new modes of education in
architecture. I can offer you no assurances as to which of them will pay off.
The history of the school is that some of them will become default settings.
And when they are default settings, they will be of zero interest to us.
Massive incompetence is a normative lifestyle 121
I think that a new form of architectural education is being tested here. It

could be a huge mistake, and the core architectural techniques, the studio
system, I think is very very powerful, so let’s see if we’re screwing it up or not.
It is powerful, but in a way out of sync.
I think it’s a totally inadequate model: architectural education as it has devel-

oped over the last hundred years is not even incompetent, it’s entirely blind to
the very reasons that we were attracted to architecture in the first place. It is,
in its own terms, massively incompetent and, as recent leadership of a number
of countries around the world demonstrates, massive incompetence is a kind
of normative lifestyle. But, maybe, there are ways of thinking of education for
the next hundred years that are as romantic and urgent as the very reasons we
became interested in architecture in the first place. I guess that’s my mission—
to create an educational environment that matches the extraordinary love of
the built environment that drew us to the field in the first place.
I really like that idea, especially because architecture has such an intensely love-
draining, passion-destroying component. There is so much drudgery that it really
requires an heroic effort to maintain that initial enthusiasm that motivates a
student.
It’s almost masochism. Love is a difficult thing to match, but it’s the currency.
To love something is to not know what it is, but to not want to be away from
it—to want to be with something for reasons that you don’t know. So to say
that architects love buildings or love the built environment or love the orga-
nization of culture precisely means they don’t know what it is. A school of
architecture has to nurture that love, which means not answer the quesion
“What is a building?”; “What is a city?”, but instead to really refine the ques-
tion and nurture this love. That love becomes intelligence, because if what
you love is what you don’t know, you develop around that an unbelievably
delicate intelligence that is capable of mobility, agility, and complexity. I’m
very chauvinistic about that: I put the architect’s brain right up there. So we’ve
got to keep up the architect’s brain, and in a collaborative network society that
means that a whole school has to have the characteristics of a brain, since the
brain is the paradigm of networked intelligence.
Tan Xiaochun is Chief Party Secre-
tary of Beijing Urban Construction
Group.
10. Tan Xiaochun
BRENDAN McGETRICK: In this interview series, we’re talking to people who The following
discussion took
work with architects to try to understand their experience and get a better sense place on
of how architectural collaboration works. You’ve served as head contractor for October 2, 2009 at
several highly complex construction projects here in China, so I’m very curious to Tan’s office in the
basement of the
hear about your experience. National Stadium in
Beijing
TAN XIAOCHUN: As you know, I’m the chief of construction for the Na-
tional Stadium—or Bird’s Nest—so I’ll start by talking about the construc- Further mentions
tion phase of that project. Bird’s Nest: 20, 22,
29, 40, 130-137
We began in 2003, when it was still a village here. On the 24th of December
2003, after the removal of all previously existing structures, the Bird’s Nest
and the National Aquatics Center—or “Water Cube”—had their ground-
breaking, marking the starting point of construction for the Olympics. Jia
Qinlin, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the
CPC Central Committee, attended the ground-breaking ceremony. China
chose the Bird’s Nest as the main stadium because of its impressive appear-
ance and, as the name suggests, it agrees with our traditional philosophy that
man should return to nature.
My first challenge in constructing the Bird’s Nest was its heavy duty steel
structure, which is unlike the light steel structure of National Grand Theater.
We wanted to localize the fabrication of the tens of thousands of tons of steel
required, but were we capable? Do you see the 110 millimeter-thick plate steel
used for the main columns out there? It’s Q460 high-tensile steel. Very few
countries can make it, and China did not have the technique at that time. So
first [we had to learn how to produce] the material, then how to bend and
twist it like a Tianjin fried dough twist.
Second, in the process of production and butt connection of the steel
structures, we had to face the problem of final gap closing and unloading.
The whole structure was divided into six parts, with gaps in between, and we
could only get them fully welded and make the separated pieces become one
124 Tan Xiaochun, Contractor
when it came to the final gap-closing. After that, we had to unload the Bird’s
Nest from its previous support system of 78 pillars, let it stand on its own and
deform evenly. These techniques posed problems that would be difficult to
solve anywhere in the world.
Based on those challenges, how did you organize the construction process?
The Bird’s Nest took five years to build, and the construction phase could
be divided into the following stages. The first stage was to make a concrete,
bowl-like grandstand of 91,000 seats. We started from pilings, and then built
a bearing platform, on which we eventually built the stands. It took us eight
months altogether, and was finished on November 10th 2005, before the Bei-
jing winter.
At the same time, we had stage two: manufacturing steel structures. We
chose to do it in the Yangzi River Delta region, the biggest steel structure pro-
duction base in China, where there are many large factories serving the ship
building industry and the iron and steel industry. After the 44,000 tons of
steel structures were made there, they would then have to travel over 1300 ki-
lometers, crossing five provinces and three municipalities, to get to the Bird’s
Nest to be assembled and installed. Don’t you think it was a miracle? The
distance was similar to crossing several European countries.
The difficulty of manufacturing was in the so-called bend-torsion com-
ponents. We developed a new machine called “Dieless Multipoint-forming
Bend-torsion Component Builder”. With this, the steel plates would come out
as we designed. This was something remarkable, since the plate bending rolls
previously could only make circular shapes, but this one could accommodate
bend and torsion.
After manufacturing, we had to pre-assemble the structures in the facto-
ries to see if they are OK. Our engineers would check the quality, fabrication
precision, etc. and confirm everything on the site of the pre-assembly. Then
we would take the structures apart for transportation, and install them here.
Otherwise, if there was a mistake, we would not be able to correct anything
in Beijing.
Stage three: butt connection and installation. It was technically difficult to
butt connect components in mid-air. In some places we had fourteen com-
ponents converging on the same point, and the deviation could not be more
We in China 125
than three millimeters in any direction. There were three factors that might
result in error: temperature, production process, and measuring devices. Even
so, we still succeeded in controlling the errors, which showed that we in China
have a high level of production precision.
It sounds like a combination of huge scale and tiny detail...
The Bird’s Nest used more than 910 welders; the weld was about 300 kilome-
ters in total, almost equal to traveling roundtrip between Beijing and Tianjin.
The welding material weighed more than 2000 tons, which was unique in the
world. The welders came across the nation from ship building or other indus-
tries, and had to pass an exam to work here. The welding records were saved
in our computers, including the time, the name of the welder and the inspec-
tor, so that every weld was taken responsibility for, and the overall quality was
ensured.
I kept asking Herzog & de Meuron why they didn’t use this approach in
their own country, and their answer was that labor was too expensive in west-
ern countries—in China, a welder’s monthly salary is only about 4000 RMB
[less than 600 US dollars] and, what’s more, how could they find so many
welders there? I asked the same question to some British architects, and they
said their Parliament wouldn’t allow such a big budget if something like the
Bird’s Nest were proposed for their 2012 Olympic Games. In all, China was
the only one to make the Bird’s Nest: on one hand, our national power and
production standard had improved a lot with [our economy’s] reform and
opening-up; on the other, due to our cheap labor, this project could work eco-
nomically. Imagine, there were more than 7000 workers on site when building
the grandstand, more than 3000 when doing the steel structures; and we sum-
moned many excellent domestic enterprises to collaborate on this project.
That covers phases one through three...
Stage four was the final gap-closing, in which temperature was the key factor.
Before that, the Bird’s Nest was “breathing” all the time: heated in the day, it
began expanding; cooled at night, it contracted. We used all of Beijing’s me-
teorological data to figure out the ideal temperature for the final gap-closing:
19 ±4° Celcius. In July 2006, all the welds had been completed except for the
six closure lines, and we began to wait for that temperature. You can’t imagine
how anxious we were, since every day counts on a construction site and it had
been more than a month, but the temperature still didn’t come. Finally on
August 23rd 2006, the weather forecast said it would drop to 22 at night. We
waited. At about 11 or 12, it was 23 degrees, and then at one in the morning,
it finally reached 22! We summoned about 200 welders who worked continu-
ously for more than ten hours and completed two closure lines. On the 29th
and 30th, the temperature reached the necessary point again. We did the final
gap-closing in these three days, and the Bird’s Nest became one unity.
Then it came to stage five: unloading. The Bird’s Nest had to learn to stand
with her own 24 columns and the stress from her own heavy duty steel truss,
after the removal of the previous support system of 78 pillars. Whether the
resulting deformation would exceed the acceptable value was key to evaluat-
ing the design of the Bird’s Nest. Our engineers gave a theoretical value of 286
millimeters, but such deformation had no reference in the world. After drill-
ing on September 12th, we worked day and night for five days, going through
seven major steps which were comprised of thirty-five minor steps, and had
the Bird’s Nest unloaded. The unloading process was broadcast live by four
major Chinese TV networks: CCTV, Phoenix, BTV, and Dragon TV. The final
deformation value, detected by two companies, was between 217 millime-
ters and 276 millimeters, lower than the theoretical one. With the success of
unloading, there would not be any more subversive problems to the Bird’s
Nest’s steel structure; in other words, the final success was almost a sure thing.
People cheered and tears ran down my face: what a reward for years of hard
work! This great breakthrough proved that we China are surely first-class in
every aspect in steel structure production.
After the unloading on September 17th, I asked Herzog & de Meuron, the
stadium’s architects, how they felt about it. They checked it all over and said it
was “impeccable”; with planned organization, we Chinese realized a miracle
of steel structure, a dream that couldn’t come true in their own country.
That National Day, our General Secretary, Hu Jintao, toured the stadium,
listened to my one-hour report, and highly valued my work. The President of
the International Olympic Committee, Dr. Jacques Rogge, and UN Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon also agreed that the Bird’s Nest was a great achieve-
ment in architecture and structure. The construction that I led had won world
recognition.
You see my white hairs? That’s the duty of five years. 127
That’s a truly heroic story. Could you explain some more about the innovations
required to construct the Bird’s Nest?
Fifty-one innovations were developed for the Bird’s Nest. For instance, testing
the standards of construction quality: the Bird’s Nest was a unique structure,
and there weren’t any relating national standards then, so we set new stan-
dards during construction. The production of the steel structure needed in-
novation, too. Though China had the world’s biggest steel and iron industry,
we weren’t capable of producing 110 millimeter-thick steel plates, which had
to be imported from Luxemburg and Japan. But we aspiring Chinese wanted
to make it on our own. Wuyang Steel experimented for three months: furnace
by furnace, they smelt, ground, and rolled. As soon as the steel came out, it
got transported to Harbin, to test its physical properties and welding perfor-
mance under -15° conditions. By the seventh furnace, they succeeded in pro-
ducing Q460E, which was used for the columns, and we no longer needed to
import. Experience was also accumulated here for the devastating Z-shaped,
highly-stressed structure of the CCTV headquarters. Further mentions
The Bird’s Nest’s entire structure has a span of 333 meters, a height of 69.4 CCTV: 4, 6-7, 22-
23, 29-36, 38, 133
meters at the highest point, with 258,000 m2 of floor area. The biggest rod
section is 1.2 m x 1.2 m, although they seem quite thin in photos. After com-
pleting the steel structure, we went on to machinery installations, decorations
and membrane structures. The construction of the Bird’s Nest was open, just
like China: the membrane went to Covertex, from Germany; intelligence con-
trol went to Honeywell, from the USA; cranes were from Mammoet, from
the Netherlands, for we had a lot to hoist—up to 360 tons. We also invited
Bouygues, from France, as our technical supervisor. Under my command, our
Chinese staff learned from all the collaborators to make things better. You see
my white hairs here? That’s the duty of five years.
For a small scale worker like myself, it’s really difficult to imagine how you can
organize such as massive enterprise—so many workers and so much training...
I’ve had quite some experience in organizing big projects. I was vice com-
mander of construction for Beijing subway Line 1, one of the main leaders in
the construction of the China Millenium Monument, and commander of the
temporary hospital in Xiaotangshan during SARS.
In terms of this particular project, I am thankful for help from all over Chi-
na: when we said we needed help for building the Bird’s Nest, all the domestic
companies were so supportive, for it was a one-hundred-year-old dream for
us Chinese! We had eight major domestic factories to produce just the steel
structures: Anshan, Baoshan, Wuyang, Beijing… During transportation, all
provinces along the route opened their highways at night especially for our
trucks.
Which I think supports the idea that you mentioned earlier that it required the
special qualities of China at the moment to realize a project like this. It couldn’t
happen elsewhere. I’m still very curious about how you provide oversight in a
project like this. I realize that you have a background in doing complex projects
like the construction of a subway line or projects with extreme time pressures like
the construction of a SARS hospital, but an effort like the Bird’s Nest, where there
are so many vulnerabilities and no real precedent seems that much more difficult.
How do you maintain control and confidence in a situation like that?
I depended on “technique solution package programs”. We collected pro-

grams from eight countries including Australia, Singapore, and Japan. In all,
there were three kinds of methods: piece-by-piece connection, which we used
to butt connect pieces in the air; sliding, where you fabricate the structures
aside first and then slide them to the right place to put them together; and
integral jacking, where you lift the whole structure after integral fabrication.
According to my experience and China’s reality, I chose piece-by-piece con-
nection for its precision in fabrication. Steel structure wasn’t my major in
college; I studied railway construction, such as tunnels and bridges. It was so
lucky that we had a terrific team, including more than 100 Chinese engineers
and some state-sponsored research teams that provided expert support in
every particular aspect. To summarize, the key of organizing the construction
was program demonstration: only with a detailed program could we make it.
Everyone held different responsibilities when carrying out the program:
one of my assistants took care of steel structures, the other the butt connec-
tion, and another the supervision in factories… We had good division of
labor, so it was easy to monitor. With model simulation, our tens of thou-
sands of components were sequenced according to the timeline of fabrication,
hoisting and butt connection, and the types of workers in every step. We
An important reference for the world of the future 129
worked according to this schedule, so everyone knew when to do what. At the

construction headquarters office, we made a big model which was colored
with red, green, blue, and black, and marked with numbers to represent the
sequence of construction. We also had a huge construction schedule there on
the wall so everyone knew their responsibility and timelines.
I also think it’s interesting that you mention this project raised the level of pro-
duction and construction quality in China. Techniques from around the world
were learned in order to make the stadium and in the process China became
world class. Now that this has been achieved, has your company been approached
to do construction outside of China?
Now there are a lot of tourists here every day, up to 80,000 people a day, but
there have been very few academic exchanges. The Bird’s Nest does have high
touristic value, but, for its structural challenges, it should have high academic
value as well.
Time magazine and Business Week acknowledged it among the greatest
contemporary architecture, and the British Museum has included it in their
exhibitions. 45 of our 51 technical innovations were first in the world: beside
the bend torsion of high tensile steel and membrane structures, we also pio-
neered a concrete jacking technique, which was, when building the grand-
stand, to jack the concrete to 60 or 70 meters high and let it form naturally.
Steel structures are preferred in construction now, especially in big public
projects and high-rises. So the Bird’s Nest will be an important reference for
heavy duty steel structure construction in the world of the future, including
the construction of the new CCTV headquarters. If you are asking whether
I’m able to lead another construction of a big sports facility abroad, I would
say, “No problem!”
I want to ask a general question: architects often say that contractors affect the
design, because they influence many things like material choice, construction
techniques, etc. I’m curious: how do you view the relationship between contract-
ing and architectural design?
In terms of material and technique, architects always think of the best effects,
but in the real market, such things sometimes don’t even exist, so we must ask
them to modify the design. For example, the red walls of the Bird’s Nest were
designed to use glossy paint, which would reflect too much light and be really
offending to the eye. Then we suggested flat paint, and built a sample room
to let the architects see the real effect. We also proposed to put more lights,
since there weren’t enough in the original design. Our experience and the ar-
chitects’ concepts should collaborate, so we have to communicate in order to
make things better for the client.
Sometimes architects are just experimenting with new materials and tech-
niques and, in this case, we have to build a sample room before further con-
struction to see if some technical data should be modified. Data from the
books sometimes doesn’t work on site, then we have to negotiate with archi-
tects and tell them what are the best possible solutions in China.
We once corrected a mistake in the Bird’s Nest’s design. As you know, the
Bird’s Nest is an open building and wind can blow in. In the original design,
the walls of the first and second floor were interior walls, and the strength of
the keels and surface board would not be able to resist the wind. So I pointed
that out. But, on the other hand, architects help us a lot with introducing the
most advanced materials and techniques. So we make up for each other.
One last question: now that the stadium is completed and the Olympics are over,
why are you still working here in this office at the bottom of the Bird’s Nest?
Well, first, our company is one of the stakeholders here, with an investment of
more than 400 million RMB. Second, the Bird’s Nest should have some func-
tions after the Olympics, like tourism, conferences, shopping, performances,
and dining, so some small modifications are needed for future use. I’m the
man who knows how the stadium was made, so naturally it would be my job
again. The modifications need to be discussed with architects. For example,
the black stone used in the original design does not suit the Chinese prefer-
ence for bright colors, so we changed it in some rooms. And we felt the lights
weren’t enough, so we added more.
Are Herzog & de Meuron involved in that?
Their Chinese colleagues [China Architectural Design & Research Group]

would be enough, for the modifications won’t affect the exterior appearance.
The lights weren’t enough, so we added more 131
Think about it: at least 20,000 people come here every day... Where can they
eat? How do they amuse their kids? We must provide services for them. You
can see now that we are preparing facilities for a Formula One race here. I
think the Bird’s Nest is one of the best examples of post-Olympic economic
returns. It’s absolutely a new tourist spot, standing at the Fourth Ring [Road],
with all the Chinese population, let alone the world population, as potential
visitors. We’ve received more than 300 million RMB solely from the ticket
sales of over 10 million visitors. Its benefits are emerging.
Brendan McGetrick is an indepenent
writer, editor, and designer.

Who Is Architecture?

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Who is Architecture?

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Printed and bound in the People’s Republic of China

Architecture is a collaborative art. The achievement of a building of even small am-

New York, February 2010

You mentioned graphic design in a dialogue with architecture. Is that dialogue

Do you see your role as sometimes trying to supplement a building in order to

The graphic acts almost as a buffer.

Architectural language is something that you experience in an incredibly

Do you have a particular building in mind?

I think that is almost a different discipline in itself, because airports or subway

Airports are, by necessity I guess, authoritarian and design serves that.

What exactly are you doing for CCTV? Further mentions

CCTV Elevator System DOUBLE DECK LOCAL

That idea of “decoding” a building is really interesting. I think that’s an aspect of

It’s interesting, because I find it difficult to understand buildings even from

Photos too generally.

Yesterday I went to this conference at a university for a little while. I have to

I think it’s a combination. In some ways, there is an inferiority complex where

Some of the animations that are used to describe a building in design I

For a fashion company to associate itself with OMA is a branding state-

“Our gimmick is there is no gimmick.”

Also when the business-side is given priority, scientifically-justified aesthetic

It does and it doesn’t. There’s a notion of branding that’s also expansive in

The personalization of branding is scary in a lot of ways. On a macro level, I think

Right. China’s now looking at itself as a brand. Every country is.

And China’s an interesting case, because their brand—Made In China—has

Part of it must be simply development and improvement.

The second event is Beijing Olympic Games. Crystal started to participate

As you changed from architectural design to architectural rendering, how did

That’s simple. We have different departments to handle those things.

I mean, when you’re obligated to show a rendering to an architect, developer,

We have a department just to communicate with architects and a department

Actually what interests me is understanding the range of visual languages that

Do you adjust based on the audience or clients?

BRENDAN McGETRICK: In the beginning, Crystal helped other companies to

LIU MI: Is that allowed in China?

BRENDAN McGETRICK: I think it may be safer than Google Earth, because

QIN LEI: Do you have serious contenders?

So are you most likely to succeed?

At least we have successfully undertaken the Beijing Olympic Games. We have

LIU MI: So Crystal plans to step into the international arena?

BRENDAN McGETRICK: I have one more question about those renderings

Rory McGOWAN: There are obvious differentiations I would make looking

we decided no matter what we might want to modify, it doesn’t change the

How does that process work?

What exactly is engineering from first principles?

How has Arup been involved in that building process?

In terms of continuation of the process to the point where the contractor

building, just as there will be multiple experiences of an exhibition. So it has

I think there is a way to think about multiple experiences in a single space. I

What other complications do you encounter as a result of this paradigm shift?

Oh absolutely. At the moment I’m teaching a history of the department for an

What role do exhibition catalogues play in that effort?

Because we deal so much in representation, there’s less of a misfit between the

DU: In a way, it’s an approach to building which is more connected to how

Why do you think that everyone builds in the same style?

DU: Right, it’s something that grows together with you.

JK: Right, everything is made so that you can change it.

How has that condition affected the work you do there?

DU: In terms of using it as a canvas, I think we noticed quickly that in a slum

JK: Yeah, you have planning freedom.