MULTIVALENT COMPLEXITY
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Thom Mayne, last fall you were appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on his Committee on the Arts and Humanities. What is your task there, what do you think will be expected from you?
It’s still too early to tell, but I can anticipate… The Committee is operating at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and economic issues. My task will of course align with an engagement in architecture and the arts – particularly promoting the integration of the arts and architecture into the public realm. I admire this administration; this administration understands and values the power of culture as an essential product of the country.
Are you optimistic that the work of the Committee will pass the status of a decorative think tank and will have a practical influence on the social and cultural situation and structure within the U.S.? What would be the aims you would primarily like to realize?
Absolutely, I am optimistic that the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH) will make a very real and lasting impact. My primary aim is to work with the PCAH to leverage the creative capital of artists to catalyze long-term cultural and economic development of the city. Complementing the Committee and the NEA’s parallel initiatives, my 2010-2011 Suprastudio at UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design will explore the intersection between public policy and urban design. The architecture studio will select one city as a prototype for developing a comprehensive cultural plan for cities across the U.S. The goal of the studio is to generate real world impact on the economic, cultural and social life of the city through the work of the PCAH.
Several of your buildings have been recognized for their achievements in sustainability and you are considered a pioneer in this field in the U.S. How important is this aspect in the practical work as an architect? How dominant is it in the process of generating structure, form, spaces?
Architecture is a confluence of cultural, political, and ethical decisions that occur in an estuary of broad societal currents; thus, ever-changing, it encompasses the aesthetic, the tectonic, and the functional, the urban and the global – and now the sustainable. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), buildings worldwide account for up to 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to energy used for building operations. In the United States, buildings consume nearly half of all energy (48 percent). Architects face a grave responsibility, as well as an enormous opportunity, to impact how society collectively constructs and inhabits buildings. With parametric modeling (like in the Phare Tower) performance and form are now designed simultaneously as they are in any living organism; perhaps we should think of our work as grown rather than designed. We seek design choices that optimize the use of natural resources, human comfort, energy conservation, and sustainability; and parametric modeling allows us to do so, as we search also for the architectural expression we seek. Digital technology conveys the power to interconnect building systems with the resources they consume, the broader environments they impact, and the feelings and sensations they produce – in one breath. The San Francisco Federal Building is an example of this: The skin is not supposed to be an artistic piece of sculpture. It’s a modulator. It’s a second skin that helps allow us to improve energy efficiency and forgo air-conditioning in favor of natural ventilation. It clearly has formal characteristics, and it’s about the ground and the vertical, and it’s about a metabolic kind of approach to energy.
Connected to the topic of sustainability: Do you feel that the criteria for architectural projects – from clients’ perspective – have changed due to the economical crisis?
What we’ve been seeing is in fact a heightened interest in sustainability from clients, because high performance systems reduce operational costs. And concurrently, with the lower cost of construction, it’s easier to justify the capital costs of including environmental features, which will increase a building’s performance.
Architecture always combines, among other things, science and art. Your buildings however seem to follow and express this trait of character in an especially intense way. How relevant is the actual work with scientists, the factual interaction between the two fields for you, for your office?
Scientists have relatively recently grown excited about non-deterministic ideas, and in particular about what they call chaos: any system which can reach unpredictable results from predictable beginnings – the now oft-cited butterfly’s wingbeat that leads eventually to a hurricane or the fecund locust leads to a plague. The true revelation of chaos studies is not that order appears out of real chaos, but that some systems that appear chaotic – such as the city – are in fact complex systems. The study of emergence has much to offer urban design strategies now more than ever, as we look for an expanded set of procedures capable of addressing current multi-faceted planning problems. As architects, we can synthesize systems from science to further our own investigation. While ant colonies and cell collectives can act as aids in studying how complex behavior affects collective form, in the end we are not scientists, we are making architecture; there needs to be a translation.
While an often simple, at least rather formal iconography of architecture has become quite popular, your buildings are iconic without being simplistic – which sometimes even includes a sense of aggressive expression. How important is the notion of complexity, also on the level of appearance, readibility?
From the beginning, we have been interested in an architecture of multivalent complexity. There was a turning point in our trajectory, when the scale of our projects increased, that allowed more space for component forces, which in turn enabled them to engage in an even more complex dialogue. The larger-scale projects more ably accommodate both contingency and complexity. They explore more new ideas of coherency structured around disbursement, accretion, and fragmentation – a unity of disunity. Look at Cincinnati, the University of Cincinnati Campus Recreation Center – the complexity is comprehensible because of the connectivity. Everything connects to everything else through landscape, transparency, views, light, and material to make this building a fragment of the city. Or take Shanghai, the Giant Group Campus… Like other projects of its scale, by connecting multiple building types with infrastructural systems and natural ecologies, we were able to achieve a cohesive entity – a meshwork of non-linear interdependencies with trans-dimensional connections. We look to capture oppositional inconsistencies, contradictions, and fragments so that the work will engage and provoke.
Taking the term “sustainability” not only in a strictly ecological sense, it most of all means the development of a lasting and humane environment. Do we need a new vision of the city? And, thinking of buildings like e.g. 41 Cooper Square which clearly deals with questions of public space, city vs. interior, social interaction: How influential could architecture (still) be in that context?
Looking at Cooper specifically, it embraces the energy and dynamism of its context… And it generates a force of synergy within the school and out to the city. Our design process subjects architecture to the demands, complexities and energies of the city – crosscurrents of urban context – in order to both activate the individual building and create a broader impact. And well before Cooper, since the early smaller-scale residential projects that began our discourse with the city, we have sought strategies to integrate architecture into the life of the city. Throughout history, civilizations have left their mark through built artifacts. Today architecture advances culture not only through inventive form but also through inventive systems. If buildings continue to embody our highest ideals as a society and a civilization, then yes… architecture must become a discussion not just about individual buildings but about new models for construction and for life – models that accrete to entire cities, define our culture, and shape the future.
You were educated in the 1960s and the jury of the Pritzker Prize, which you were awarded in 2005, saw some influences or traces of those – political – times in your attitude. Would you agree with that point of view? Or to put it this way: Do you see yourself as a clearly political person, also in the sense of a kind of rebellish thinking?
As architects, we do have to engage these issues. We are involved in a political act that uses resources, so we need to take a position. Without our relevance to the political class and to the economic class, we’re going to be decorators. I think it starts with “What are you fighting for?”, “What are the values?”, etc. It’s inevitable that architecture is a political activity. It’s inescapable.
Thom Mayne, born in Waterbury, Connecticut, USA, studied Architecture at the University of Southern California and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 1972 he founded Morphosis to which, as design director and thought leader, he provides overall vision, project leadership and direction. With Morphosis, Mayne has been the recipient of the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize and numerous international awards. Morphosis has been the subject of various exhibitions throughout the world, including a large solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. In 1972, Mayne helped to found the Southern California Institute of Architecture and since then has held teaching positions at various schools. Currently, he holds a tenured faculty position at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.
www.morphosis.com
