Interfacing

Welcome 

last updated April 12th 2017

this node is currently morphing... 

 As Architects we can inquire into different areas. 

In my first years at the university I was working within the safety net of accepted theory and design, 

which is determined by mainstream opinion, which is ensnared by tradition. 

There are many other areas - all architecture - which can be found. 

Architecture is about breaking down the barriers that contain us, 

testing our intelligence against the realities of the built environment,

and acknowledging each project's unique potential to become meaningful... 

otherwise we are left with a least-common-denominator approach to design.

Transcending the prevalent, isolated perception of "building" 

an Architect is the interface between buildings and people's lives. 

Ancient architecture is transcendental - it suggests to the future that there is more to its existence than will ever be known.

That is real freedom, unlike our modern concept where the almost unlimited materials and technologies

available to the Builder and Architect are seen as the means to creative freedom.

With the ever expanding palate construction possibilities made available to the Architect industrialization and

technology also destroy the human touch that has been a central part of man’s destiny.

The United States became the World’s most wealthy nation in the 20th Century and the by-product

that we are leaving behind - a vast empire consisting of homogenized, commercial manifestations of building.

This asserts that Architecture runs much deeper than the physical attraction of the building - that it is

the expression of the level of interest that architecture generates within the community or culture.

Design can be as simple as the understanding of form and function and it can morph into the mix of forms, materials,

and details that are an expression of the technology in use by the culture indicating a true level of sophistication.
This asserts that architecture is both modern and ancient,
that architecture is important because it outlives almost everything that man produces.
The ideas, theories, and the qualities that is architecture also spans civilizations and time even into our "modern" era.
 

Interfacing Manual

Interfacing

Studying theory rather than just design (read: style, physical appearance) has given me the details of architecture and planning beyond the limits of imagery. Taking the time to absorb so many perspectives will do nothing but help improve upon particularly deficient areas...

Assertions!

I think that fewer and fewer architects write these days, but why? My theory is that there is a sort of triangle gap between the clients, the critics and the architects. Also, now there is such a thing as a star architect.

Both imply that the whole field of architecture today can be simply reduced to shape-icon-and-landmark. This has been a huge liberation for most architects, it seems they no longer have to deal with any other issue than shape, so there is no architecture speech anymore - no architecture writing - no architecture program - no architecture nothing! Today architects make simply shapes; they sculpt, and think everyone will live happily ever-after. It will be interesting for us to break-through that.

Rem Koolhaas

Why are there so few architects today who theorize about their work?

Because most architects can’t do architecture, I would argue. And to theorize about your work means that your work contains ideas. And so the only work that remains in history are work about ideas – Rem Koolhaas, Moneo – the only Architects worth their salt have in fact theorized in some way or another about their work.

What do you think about the state of architecture today?

We’re no different than the state of architecture ever. There were always very few architects - look - you go into a book store in an
airport, is that literature? No. Is it necessary? Yes. You go into a Cinema, is that film? No. Is it necessary? Yes – you go into any town
90% of the buildings are not architecture, are they necessary? Yes. So it’s no different.

Peter Eisenman

Professionalism - Programming vs. Design

(currently morphing)

Working on the Vail Design Hub - Fundamentals

Designers in western resorts largely import their architecture much like all the Audis and Bogner ski wear. Copying "Euro" design has created an impotent design industry that is largely fueled by the real estate market rather than design or innovation. The almost instantaneous counter-reaction to insert “modern” architecture into the traditional Bavarian landscape has been largely ineffective. The biggest urban and architectural problem in mountain communities is that you have city dwellers bringing their urban style problems into the mountain towns.

Massive opportunities in tourism are exploding around the world. Nostalgia and tradition alone are no longer enough to sustain the i-phone toting consumer. Modern destinations, no matter how hot they are in the moment, require a constant flux of innovation. Buildings are always part of the experience. Some destinations have attempted to improved on the “destination” part by employing starchitects in order to generate publication in some glossy travel magazine. At least the tourists are becoming somewhat more informed about what’s worth the trip, or not – and that corresponds to actual design awareness. It comes to the point where it will take more than the current standard of luxury condos, spas, and faux European villages to wow them. Vail was cool until all the other ski resorts copied the Vail model.

Iconic buildings have always remained commonplace in any successful culture, town, or industry. These buildings in our modern consumer context continue the tradition of cathedrals, museums, and resorts in becoming tourist magnets. Engaging design gives both locals and tourists a new reason to center their vacation around a particular ski village or resort. At the same time, at what level is modern architecture compatible with the traditional constructs of this place. This level of modernism - a minimalist box - looks as much like a wastewater treatment plant or utility building.

And modern architecture in itself has a problem inherent of any great idea…

The Law of Raspberry Jam: The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets. ‑Alvin Toffler

City Boy Manual

While Architects and Planners attempt to bring sanity and order to the chaotic city the true magnificence of a place like New York or Chicago is in their energy and their magnetism... millions of people attracted to miles of streets and cars, the noise of bars and cafes spilling onto the street, hundreds of people crowded together on sidewalks and in subway stations, the air filled with smog and food, the kaleidoscope of movement, the lines of people outside theaters and museums. The urban landscape is a stage for the creative and the expressive, a huge broadcast of activity. The city has always been the core from which the character and culture is built. That is where the University of Detroit made the impact on my thinking. It was an inner-city school with inner-city problems. I like to bring an inner-city perspective to the drawing table.

City Boy Manual... 2003

Theory... That red-headed stepchild of architecture. The reaction to theory is about the same as the one you get with even so much as the mention of religion or politics. Much of what architecture has accomplished during the immense building programs following WWII followed the trends of industry in creating an image that can be easily marketed to the masses with the sole purpose of maximizing profitability with no regard for the long term effects on the natural or built environments. Planning and architecture are now firmly placed in external hands... of corporations, developers, real estate markets, and puppet planning departments and design review boards. To counter this bleak forecast, what real and meaningful design is out there is really good... a lot of progress in all aspects of design, from interfacing planning and building design to meeting financial goals and construction performance. Forget about green building initiatives. Lets face it… how is driving a car, even if it’s in a Prius, supposed to be good for the planet? Making buildings is still a wasteful, dirty process. Glass, steel, plastics, sealants, concrete, wood… are all contributing to the widespread destruction of the face of the Earth. What is possibly today’s biggest buzz word – green building – will become the next great shift in building construction. If we can accomplish a truly non-destructive building industry while putting a stop to the most absurd forms of planning – suburban sprawl – architecture will become something marvelous enough to even compare with the monumental works of the ancient world.

Design Depression - year 4...

I'm surprised at the number of Architects who are done with the profession and are looking for another career. I think that architecture is just fate. I cannot separate myself from that, even by living next to mountains with endless skiing. In the current climate of environmental confusion that the modern consumer lifestyle has created I think that people are not pleased with the outcome, and so they are again looking for those things that have existed all throughout human history... like the creation of beauty, necessity of community, intensity of urban life, and the sustainability of life in general. Architecture will always be at the forefront of change that brings people into the next wave of human advancement. In spite of living in a resort climate that perpetuates marketecture that serves little real purpose beyond that of an industry set on digging its greedy claws into every available piece of buildable earth while extolling great expense on the environment… I have resurrected the thirst for advancement that existed back at the School of Architecture and in Detroit. I have invested myself in what I believe will be exciting and productive years for architecture and planning, and so I am putting together this work in order to find a meaningful opening in an architecture office that is clearly motivated and expressive of the changing culture. I look forward to participating in the long term results of a team effort and to achieve an appropriate balance of individual expression and collective communication.

This work is currently morphing…

Explain The Style...

Well, architecture is a really an interesting word. Architecture is paramount to human history because buildings outlive almost everything else that man produces. Architecture has existed for thousands of years alongside the classic arts of the Greek civilization. You can go anywhere in the ancient world and find some form of beauty and thought in building. Architecture is a part of our basic human design. In our modern times there is a variation between the word architecture and the concept of architecture. I think that too many people will understand the true concept pretty late in life - that a lot of people, unfortunately, will never really understand what architecture is capable of. I don't know how else to explain the vast amount of soulless buildings that have been smeared across the American landscape in the past 70 years.

Urbanism and architecture are defined only by its community or culture. It is not defined by a technique or a style, or even an innovative concept. It is defined by the communities and cultures that are currently putting out more meaningful designs than others or can support bigger stars than others. The United States has become almost entirely isomorphic to the point that it can only be defined in its widespread commercial and consumer dependence. This makes the comparison between European and American architecture and planning almost as absurd as comparing Audis with Nissans. The United States is flourishing at a hugely difficult stage in human advancement, one where corporations have as much money and power as small nations. 

Our modern history is a history about oil, not a history about planning or architecture.

Architecture and urbanism have become industries that play by the same rules as the industrial complex... marketing, money, speculation, and all that stuff. Meaningful planning and architecture is a very difficult process that requires personal determination. For this reason I went through a stage where I was very disappointed. I was concerned that too many people misunderstood architecture beyond all the commercialization, marketing, and hype. Americans were no longer capable of interpreting abstract, different ideas properly. I had to get to this point where I realized that I can not be the almighty controller of how people spend their money or view the world. That would cost me my sanity. I can't defend architecture in that way. All I can do is push forward with my best effort - with new work, with my own words, with my own city - to represent it in the most professional and the most profound way. 

One lecture can change even the strongest convictions...

I had to reconsider how those influential persons affected me over the years. They put me in a place that commercialism or popular culture could not. I'm not looking to steal anything because I believe that it is all done for the benefit of cities and the people who live in them. I owe them my work because they helped me break down the barriers that contained me, creating a larger perspective of things. I can tap into my soul and draw the way I draw - make models - write and theorize - because they gave this experience of what if felt like to understand the thing that makes us tick on the most raw and efficient level, on the most passionate and overwhelming amount of power. When you feel that, you don't want to feel anything less. When I place a line on a piece of paper or draw a blade across a magazine page I try to make myself feel that same level of purpose. I think when I was burning the midnight oil that's the exact ambition that we had. We also lived and worked and imagined in a depressed environment - Detroit -  and if we wanted to ever overcome this environment - well we had to do something equivalent to the landing on the moon or something. We had to dream our way out of that place, and we did that through our pursuit of designing the future.

I would have to say that if it were just up to me and my experiences as a guy struggling to make it through each day in Detroit, well I would have put 100% into dj'ing. Maybe I would be on a plane to Tokyo right now. Instead I found myself needing architecture because that's something that comes from somewhere deep, like fate or something. I did learn some important lessons though from being around the techno scene in Detroit. It hit me especially hard when I showed my project to some of the dj's at the club and they told me that I needed to really stick with the architecture, because our city needed Architects more than it needed dj's. I was also told to keep doing what I wanted because that is what got these guys to where they were today. Detroit music in general is an unexploitable force in the music industry. When 4 guys from Detroit were trying to get a record deal for their own kind of electronic music they were told that the music had to have black lyrics in order to sell records. Nobody wanted to give them a record deal. They didn't want to cave in to the record industry and so they started  producing their own tracks, started their own record labels, got their tracks mastered on vinyl, and used their gigs as dj's to promote their sound. They took what they were doing in Detroit to England, Europe, and the world... and the rest is pretty much history. Electronic music is the biggest music out there today, yet if you look at those guys they are still keeping it real. I wanted to do the same thing in my work... to break down the barriers of popular culture that are strip-mining the small scale cultures that allow us some opportunity to experience the human touch that has been used over the centuries to construct our own destiny.

That does not mean that I want to work by myself and do my own thing. Without a doubt I would rather work with a team of great people than sit in a isolated cubicle where people e-mail me instructions and hardly anything is said about my work. And who wants to work for an architect with an ego problem? It's embarrassing to show a client work that ignores their input because your boss thinks that the client, consultants, contractors, and pretty much everyone else out there are idiots. That only works if you are a designer with huge recognition and the client wants your design.  The best decision that I made in Detroit was to spend my 3 terms of internship at ENGA rather than at one of the cool design firms. It was some of the upper level students who told me not to waste my time in an office as a design monkey. You can't learn much about the profession in that kind of design-only environment. So I looked for a job at a larger office and really found an interesting A/E office where the Architects and Engineers worked side by side on projects that were mostly for the Pharmaceutical, Health Care, and Automobile industries. I learned about the necessity of working in a team environment, and not just one that existed only on paper. Every aspect was well managed by great people. After those experiences and the general attitude of people from Detroit I will never be be o.k. working for managers who have no guts - the kind who blame every contractor, consultant, and draftsperson working on the project, and even the owner for the problems of the project. Experiences like that make me only more anxious to find the right group of people to spend my career with so better to dispense with the honesty now. I have found that working with people who get along well will lead to a better product.

We never had to wonder how we would put those ethics and philosophy courses to some practical use. We were warned from the very beginning that our profession amplified a lot of big egos. We do need to posses the intelligence to offer something substantially architectural to our clients and we must also make the client happy - even surprised or uncomfortably speechless - than to try and push a really cool idea into the drawings that they will hate every day of their life. Unlike music or the other arts buildings often give people no choice but to live with them. Why is it that our buildings are constantly in a state of renovation to bring them into some current standard set by an industry that survives by an ever changing market that is always creating a new trend or style for consumers to spend their money on. Architecture is more than powerful enough to break free from the chains of the real estate market which exists only to make a profit by peddling cheaply conceived goods sheathed in smoke and mirrors to an increasingly more intelligent public. One of the qualities inherent to architecture is permanence and the ability to hold value throughout many generations.  

American Architecture...

Something that was discarded sometime after WWII in favor of some marketed consumer version of building. Modern architecture is Las Vegas or Los Angeles - sprawling, nondescript, soulless areas that were once farmland and desert and are now huge consumer zones that suck rivers dry and pollute the air and water with their endless roads and parking lots, Wal-Marts, and over-sized suburban homes surrounded by large, treeless yards – all smeared across the American landscape from ocean to ocean.

Mind Design...

Theory is pretty much a part of the everyday routine. That comes from the Jesuit education. When you are surrounded by ethics and philosophy it is natural to look into the theory of Architects. You could hardly escape that knowledge in the SOA and at the same time we were warned that most of the profession is practicing image based design so that we didn't have any high expectations with employment or in searching for a job. But that is also a good thing because the 10 percent of people who create real architecture are the people whose attention I am trying to get... otherwise I am just working for an Architect because the money is good and there is really no contribution to the spirit of building. That is what really separates the United States from Europe. When I returned to Detroit I couldn’t help but see how ugly and boring most of our building was. Our buildings are a product of the age of industrialization and consumerism and so our buildings come from the same mold as the products we buy at Wal Mart or Pier One. What we consider good planning and architecture is probably imported from Europe in the same manner as Audis and Armani.

If you turn the pages of your monthly Architectural Record you see images of buildings but what you don't see is that all of the Architects featured in that magazine have formed some kind of theory of architecture. One might succumb to the idea that the thing that separates the architects who are published and those who aren't is theory. Most architecture is image based because that is how people work, they see something and they like it, or not. Architects are no different. We are taught in school that design is based in imagery - in flashy computer generated graphics and rendering techniques for presentation - in style based design. As a student the first lessens that we are taught is how to perceive form and function. We are taught the history of architecture from a perspective of styles. This all becomes like a ball and chain… our projects from day one are wrapped up in the common perception of good design, and so design becomes based in imagery. 

The difference in a Jesuit university is in the core values of ethics, morals, and philosophy. I wondered why architecture did not go as deep as those subjects. It was after my second year that I began to dig deeper into the books at the library, mostly out of the boredom of exhaustive form making. It wasn’t productive spending night after night in the studio drawing different buildings and programs and picking the one that was the most fun to work with for the final presentation. All of my early projects were based from the standard of form and function. My instincts however told me that architecture was not about designing a fantasy - it was more about being a part of the conception of life.

I began to ignore the flash and imagery and focus on the writings of architects, and it was there that I could see something more to their work, something beyond merely designing buildings. There were ideas and theories behind the design and I could see that was the level where the buildings became intelligent. I found that these different themes or ideas were being expressed by a number of Architects and I began to look for those patterns that were present in different projects or work because I was searching for the universal stuff that architecture was made of. The deeper I looked into the ideas of the architects that I liked the more I saw the common assertions of architecture and the ability to interface between people and the culture and the site and buildings. When I was working on the Starr Park Pavilion project I worked on a deeper level of perception - one where people went under this structure not because it was raining out and it kept them dry, but because it has an experience, a kind of magnetism that drew them into another dimension of the build environment.

My school was in an urban environment and the SOA was intent on bringing urban design back into the realm of the Architect as it was in the past. The gap between the two professions had become so separated that one side could hardly see the other. This was at the time I was on an exchange to Warsaw and after seeing how much more advanced the European city was to the typical cities in the States I saw urgency in my study of architecture. The most significant thing that I realized was the effect of the separation of planning and architecture in the late 19^th Century on our cities, of the very bland outcome of suburbanization, and the sale of the culture to big industry. After riding the tram day after day I was shocked that General Motors was able to erase the public transportation systems with hardly a sound from the people.

So my work became more intense from those 5 months freewheeling in and around Europe. I wanted to recreate the purposeful, meaningful buildings that I experienced there. I started to dig into the history of Detroit because the auto industry was rooted there and of the suburbanization and consumerism of the culture after WWII. I began looking into the history of planning before its demise during the 20^th century. I looked at planning and urbanity as an inseparable component of architecture.

Assertions!

I think that fewer and fewer architects write these days, but why? My theory is that there is a sort of triangle gap between the clients, the critics and the architects. Also, now there is such a thing as a star architect.

Both imply that the whole field of architecture today can be simply reduced to shape-icon-and-landmark. This has been a huge liberation for most architects, it seems they no longer have to deal with any other issue than shape, so there is no architecture speech anymore - no architecture writing - no architecture program - no architecture nothing! Today architects make simply shapes; they sculpt, and think everyone will live happily ever-after. It will be interesting for us to break-through that.

Rem Koolhaas

Why are there so few architects today who theorize about their work?

Because most architects can’t do architecture, I would argue. And to theorize about your work means that your work contains ideas. And so the only work that remains in history are work about ideas – Rem Koolhaas, Moneo – the only Architects worth their salt have in fact theorized in some way or another about their work.

What do you think about the state of architecture today?

We’re no different than the state of architecture ever. There were always very few architects - look - you go into a book store in an
airport, is that literature? No. Is it necessary? Yes. You go into a Cinema, is that film? No. Is it necessary? Yes – you go into any town
90% of the buildings are not architecture, are they necessary? Yes. So it’s no different.

Peter Eisenman

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.  These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions:  hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.

Werner Heisenberg - i.e. quantum mechanics founder

The Law of Raspberry Jam: The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

Alvin Toffler