I.M. Pei Interview (transcript)

Via www.archrecord.com

JUNE 2004
Modernism's elder statesman looks back over 50 years and forward to finishing new museums on three continents
By Robert Ivy, FAIA

I.M. Pei's agility with the Modern form has garnered him prestigious commissions for museums and cultural institutions throughout his career, from the East Building of the National Gallery of Art (winner of this year's AIA 25 Year Award) to an addition and renovation of the centuries-old Louvre to a new wing for temporary exhibitions at the German Historical Museum in Berlin (pictured at left). Although he's been officially retired for more than a decade, Pei still has projects on his plate and a twice-a-week-at-the-office habit. Shortly after the AIA Accent on Architecture dinner on March 3 in Washington, D.C., editor in chief Robert Ivy visited Pei at his office in Lower Manhattan, where they discussed the evolution of Pei's design thinking, the importance of working abroad, and his current slate of projects.

AR: You say you have retired, but you continue to be involved in projects. What are you working on right now?

IMP: I haven’t taken any new projects in the past three years—I told myself, if I cannot live long enough to finish it, I don’t want it. So I have three projects now. The first one is the Musée d’Arte Moderne in Luxembourg, which is under construction right now. The museum will be located on top of an old, old fortress, Fort Tüngen, which the Austrians built in the 1800s. The client is the State of Luxembourg. I accepted the commission for the project in 1990 or 1991, after I retired, but it began only six months ago—it was stopped altogether five or six years for various reasons. The second project is a museum in my hometown of Suzhou, China. And I am also designing the Museum of Islamic Art in the Middle East, in Qatar.

AR: So do these projects involve design work, or development work and decisions about construction?

IMP: It’s a little bit of each. I just completed the design for the museum in Qatar, which I accepted about two and a half years ago. It’s now under construction, but that’s an exceptional one, because usually it takes longer than that. I’m doing most of the work on the Suzhou Museum on my own.

AR: That’s a very active, demanding schedule.

IMP: I’ve been active all my life. In 1990 I retired from my firm, I.M. Pei & Partners, and for two years I didn’t do much. Then I started to get kind of antsy, so I decided, I’m going to do some more work. And I chose to do work outside the U.S. because I’ve spent 45 years here and I wanted to learn more about what’s happening in the rest of the world. So I travel to the Middle East, I travel to China, I travel to Europe. It’s all very rewarding—the only problem is the travel is getting more and more difficult for me now. Ten years ago I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

And my projects have typically taken a long time to complete. Buildings might take on average about five to seven years to finish, but in my case it’s been longer, because the projects I have accepted within the past 15 years have been mostly government projects, and those involve some politics and funding issues, and approvals and so forth. So they’re slower.

AR: Tell me about the museum you’re designing in your hometown in China.

IMP: When this commission came, it was very special. I was born in Suzhou, a city not very far from Shanghai. It’s a very interesting town—there is a long artist’s tradition there, especially during the Ming and Ching dynasties, which produced many, many scholars and painters and so forth. That’s where my family lived for 600, 700 years. When the mayor first came to me about designing a museum, I said no, it’s too far away. They invited me to go back six or seven years ago, and I always tried to say no. But finally, a couple of years ago I accepted it. The location could not be more exciting. It’s a very special site, surrounded by a wonderful garden. I thought the project would touch on my relationship with my past, my ancestors, my old home. The building is now under construction. It has two more years to go before it’s complete.

AR: How about your other projects? Say, the museum in Luxembourg?

IMP: That project came to me after I had completed the Louvre. I was approached by the prime minister of Luxembourg and asked to design a museum for modern art, near the fortress [Fort Thüngen], which is being turned into a museum as well. It wasn’t as big of a challenge as the Louvre, but I was very interested in it. For instance, I wanted to know why the building would be located on top of a fortress. Luxembourg was and still is today a crossroads, the place where Germany meets the rest of Europe. The country lost part of its territory to Belgium in the 1800s, and during World Wars I and II the German military overran it. The fortress was the natural symbol, the physical symbol of the country. Very few people have visited Luxembourg—when I went there and looked at it, I said, my God, it’s built on a rock. And within the rock they had a castle, and within the city there’s a network of tunnels so the residents could move around and defend themselves. That was of great interest to me. I was curious to know how Luxembourg remained an independent country—that’s why I accepted the commission.

AR: Let’s go back and talk about a few of your past projects. Your work at the Louvre represented one of the first instances of an architect being employed by a major government agency in a way that gave you a prominent role in the country’s self-image. Could you talk about that? Were you consciously aware of how important the Louvre was to them at that time?

IMP: It was a total surprise that they approached me to do the project. You know the French, not to mention the Parisians—they see the Louvre as their monument, so to come to an American for a project like that is something I never expected. I thought perhaps they were just trying to show interest in different architects to try out the idea. But when President Mitterand asked me to see him, I knew that it was serious. Mitterand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, “You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington—you brought the new and the old together.” But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.

I didn’t accept the project right away, excited though I was. Instead, I told Mitterand that I needed four months to explore the project before I could accept it. I wanted that time so I could study the history of France, because what is the Louvre? The first portions were built in the 12th century, and a succession of rulers came, added on, built something, demolished something else. For 800 years the Louvre has been a monument for the French—the building mirrors their history. I thought by asking him for this time it might make him say no, thank you very much, because he was in a hurry—he’d been elected in 1981 and his term would last only seven years, and this was 1983—so there was some pressure for him to accomplish something.

In those four months, I studied. I asked for four visits to the Louvre, one visit each month. And I asked the Louvre to keep things confidential at first, without revealing the fact that I was asked by the president to be involved, so that I could go to France unencumbered and visit the Louvre, assess what’s wrong with it, what’s right about it, what had to be destroyed or must be saved, that sort of thing. Mitterand agreed to all this. You cannot defend your design without knowing what you’re designing for. When I was being questioned by the press about the design later on, all this preparation was very useful.

AR: The scope of the Louvre was so vast. You literally went through layers of history as you exposed and joined its lower levels, as well as designing an immense addition, and all with as little disruption as possible to the institution. No one ever focused on that—everyone just talked about the glass pyramid.

IMP: You’re absolutely right. Everybody points to the pyramid, but the total reorganization of the museum was the real challenge. Mitterand understood that. Few people know, for instance, that the French Ministry of Finance used to occupy the Richelieu Wing [north wing] of the Louvre. Mitterand was very aware of the importance of the Richelieu Wing, because without it, the Louvre is just a long
L-shaped building instead of a U-shaped building. Soon after he became president in 1981, Mitterand commissioned a competition for a new building for the Ministry of Finance in Paris. That gave him justification to move the agency to a new location, and therefore enabled us to claim that space. Without it, I would not have been able to do the project. I probably would not have accepted the commission—I could not have done anything for the museum.

And the biggest challenge of the Louvre was beyond merely architecture. When I first went there in 1983, it was divided into seven departments, and each was totally autonomous. The department directors would not even talk to each other. They were very competitive for space and money. So, architecturally we had to change this situation—make seven departments into one and unify them as a single institution. I’m not so sure Mitterand realized how big a challenge this was; I certainly didn’t. But the result worked out. Today the departments are all unified under one president, and they’re also unified architecturally. The fact that people don’t realize this huge challenge of the Louvre is totally mind-boggling to me.

AR: Let’s discuss form for a minute. We talk a lot about form—it dominates the discussion of architecture in the media these days. You yourself are a master of form—the East Building of the National Gallery, for instance, is a superior example of your skills, as the AIA recognized this year. But everything you’ve talked about so far is about the programmatic, complex, deeper issues that reside within projects. How do your formal skills interplay with this programmatic thinking?

IMP: Ever since 1990, I haven’t been all that interested in form, not at all. To create a work of architecture that looks exciting and different is not the challenge for me anymore. The challenge is for me to learn something about what I’m doing. I’ve been more interested recently in learning about civilization. I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that’s about all. And I’ve traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn’t know very much about it, really. When I got the opportunity to do the new wing [the Schauhaus] for the German Historical Museum, for instance, I didn’t see it as an opportunity for my own ego, to do something so exciting that every architectural publication would want to put it on the cover. I accepted it because I knew it was going to be a very difficult project, and I wasn’t sure I could do something exciting there. Originally the building was to have been located near the Reichstag, a very prominent site. But ultimately they decided to site this tiny little building behind an enormous military museum [the Zeughaus] dating from the early 18th century, which is very Prussian. I visited that museum, and you’d think that any collection of military artifacts would be all guns and cannons and whatnot, but there’s a lot more than you’d expect there—a lot about Prussian history, which of course is the foundation of Germany. [The Zeughaus, a weapons depot before becoming a museum, is now undergoing renovation to house the permanent collection of the German Historical Museum]. This location has much less visibility. I had the idea to do something helical and transparent with the new wing, something that would be symbolic of the unification of East and West Germany. The prime minister personally asked to see some sign of this in the building. When you’re asked that by a client, it’s an opportunity you just don’t waste. So, while it was an exciting challenge, form-making is not the reason I’m still engaged in projects. One of the reasons I took this on was that I wanted to find out as much as I could about Germany’s architectural history. The name that kept popping up was Karl Friedrich Schinkel. I’ve seen his museum, the Altes Museum in Berlin, but I hadn’t visited any of his other work until I began designing the new wing. I think his greatest skill was the diversity of projects he achieved, from the very monumental, like the colonnade at the Altes Museum, to the small, domestic skills he brought to the villas he designed in Berlin and elsewhere.

AR: How did your museum project in the Middle East come about?

IMP: How do I begin? Qatar does not have much history, it’s a new emirate. So I couldn’t draw on the history of the country; its history is really just being a desert. But I thought, the one thing I must learn about for this project is the Islamic faith. So I read about Islam and Islamic architecture, and the more I studied the more I realized where the best Islamic buildings were. At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain—the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. To begin with, the climate of southern Spain is not at all like desert, where most Islamic architecture is built. I kept searching. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times. I saw early Islamic architecture in Damascus, Syria, where they took some early Christian churches and transformed them into mosques, so they were not pure Islamic—just as in southern Spain, it’s no longer pure Islamic architecture either, because it gets mingled with Christianity. Or in Turkey, where the Ottoman influence is felt, too—it’s Islamic but not pure Islamic.

I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I’d visited mosques there before, but I didn’t see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture. The museum I’m designing is more influenced by the Mosque of Ibn Tulun than any other building. This mosque is very austere and beautiful, its geometry is most refined. You think of Gothic architecture, it’s so elaborate. This is the opposite—so simple.

AR: It’s inspiring to see that you’re so engaged with these issues. You’re still a student!

IMP: Yes, I am. You always should be. That’s what makes life interesting.

AR: We’ve talked a lot about museums, but there are other building types that you’ve been involved with. The Bank of China building, for instance, in Hong Kong—a tall building. The issues you faced with that project are a very different set of concerns from those of museums, aren’t they?

IMP: That’s very true. Actually, many of the projects I’m most proud of are tall buildings, especially the housing projects. In New York I have two: one in Kips Bay and one at New York University. At that time, those projects were most challenging, architecturally—how do you enable redevelopment, foster urban renewal with a tall building? For Kips Bay, I had a wonderful client, William Zeckendorf, who was willing to gamble with me on using concrete and not brick for a high-rise apartment building. That was very innovative at the time.

AR: How old were you when you got the Kips Bay project?

IMP: I came to New York and worked with Zeckendorf in 1948. I was 30 years old. Kips Bay came to me two years later, in 1950. Later I got my first museum project, the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse. That was about 1960, 1961. I was very busy back then. You don’t really get a chance to do anything until your mid-40s. I told my sons that: Don’t expect to accomplish too much in the early part of your life. I was fortunate—after the war, I left China, in 1944; there was nothing going on for me at the time. I went back to Harvard to teach and to get my master’s degree. I thought teaching would give me the most flexibility in case I had to return to China to be with my family. I didn’t really practice architecture until I got to New York; I didn’t have many qualifications or much experience at all. Becoming a designer is a long process of learning. You make mistakes when you’re young. It’s important to have the opportunity to make mistakes.

AR: What are your days like when you’re not at work?

IMP: At home, I have a wife, fortunately, and my children are all grown, and I have many grandchildren. I spend weekends with my grandchildren; I adore them. On a daily basis, my home life is very simple. I spend about 2 hours every morning reading the newspaper. As my two assistants will tell you, I don’t come to work in the mornings, for two reasons. First, I want to be informed—that means I go through The New York Times every day, and then I watch some news on television. The second is, mornings are the best time to communicate with my clients abroad. So I communicate with Luxembourg, with Berlin, with Paris—I continue to do work on the Louvre, it didn’t end in 1993. So I’m on the phone a lot to my international clients in the mornings, after I get through the news.

Two afternoons a week I come to my office. If I’m not here, I go to my sons’ office. I still have two of my projects working through them—the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar and the Suzhou Museum.

AR: Did you do any conceptualizing for the redevelopment or the memorial in Lower Manhattan?

IMP: No. That project probably will take 10 years, and I didn’t want to think about a project that I couldn’t finish. That’s a kind of temptation. It was the same reason I declined to submit an entry for the U.N. addition in New York, the one that [Fumihiko] Maki is now working on. I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish it. One has to realize one’s limitations. Why kid yourself? 

Calatrava at NYC ballet documentary audio clip

Santiago Calatrava has designed five set designs for five world premiere ballets appearing this spring at Lincoln Center. This is the first time an architect has designed ballet sets since Philip Johnson in 81. Found this cool little audio clip about the collaboration (At the bottom of this post)...The other voices in the audio post are choreographer Peter Martins, and NYC principal ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied.

A few examplesCourtesy Paul Kolnik

Courtesy Daily Fix

Click to Play.

Calatrava/Ballet

John Hejduk: Interview with Peter Eisenman

Great interview with John Hejduk via www.arch.ttu.edu

ARMADILLOS

John Hejduk

The following was transcribed and edited from a taped interview conducted by Peter Eisenman in the fall of 1977.

I say these things in great trepidation; they are like a confession. I guess I am becoming more Catholic. I was born a Catholic and moved away from it. But I was always intrigued by the ritual. Not only was I intrigued by the ritual of Catholicism, but in fact my first understanding of fear came through my catechism lessons and Catholic school. It was on a Wednesday afternoon. We had catechism and I was both fearful and at the same time elated because I would meet those nuns in their black habits with their black hoods and white trim; they became symbols for the introspective and retrospective nature of my work.

I have been investigating particular antecedents. My work might come out of fear of a Judaeo-Christian condition, out of being born in New York. Also encapsulation back into time seems to be appropriate at this moment. One night last summer I watched a Red Sox-Yankee game. I had not looked at a baseball game since I was about sixteen or seventeen, since I entered academia. Before I was accepted to Cooper Union, I always used to watch baseball games. When I entered the so- called academic field I stopped looking at baseball games. But last summer I looked at my first baseball game in some thirty years - it was a marvelous experience. I just sat there and reconstituted those certain thrills, certain smells, although I wasn't there on the field. So I have been putting baseball games, nuns, and Catholicism all together.

I believe one should look back, not just forward, at the work one has done. I saved everything, every drawing, every piece of work for thirty years. It was valuable to me, not in a historical sense. It was very important to keep all of my drawings. I am like a squirrel. I took them all over the world in a big tin box.

There is another aspect of saving material. I bought a house in Riverdale, a tiny little house, seventeen by twenty-two, and I'm meticulous. I go outside, and there's a big apartment house right next door. Every morning I go out there and sweep up. I like doing it. And the guy across in the apartment house is filthy. I mean junk, rats. So I went across and asked him if it was possible to keep his place clean. It's nice to have it clean, I said. And he said, "Why don't you do it?" So I said all right, I'll do it. And I did it. Now that house is absolutely impeccable, and he comes every Tuesday and brings big garbage bags as a gift to me.

In 1947, I was accepted to Cooper Union. Previous to that time, I really did not know that there was a Manhattan. I came down to this strange place. I was accepted as a control student, one of a group, because I only had a sixty-six average in the High School of Music and Art. The high school was in Manhattan, but just across from the Bronx at 135th Street and College Avenue. Thus began an illicit affair with Cooper Union which would profoundly affect how I would do things in the future. At Cooper Union, which was only a three year course at the time, you would get a certificate and then were supposed to move on. Most people went up to Yale. Yale was just beginning to be a good school.

I went to Cooper Union from 1947 to 1950. Looking back I can see the influences on me. I know where I come from, and I want to pay homage to those influences. The first influences were three magnificent teachers at Cooper Union. One was a drawing teacher by the name of Robert Gwathmey, who is the father of Charlie Gwathmey. He was a great drawing teacher, extracting the abstracted essence of form through the figure. He was number one. Number two was a guy named George Kratina who was a sculpture teacher. Kratina, I believe, did some sculptures for the Parkchester housing. He was a Catholic, and he was a Catholic sculptor. Basically a very religious man, religious in the sense of his Catholicism and another passionate teacher who never saw anything bad in your work, he always pulled out whatever was good in it. A little too much that way. I could never manage sculpture. I drew very well, but I was a very bad sculpture student. I didn't know how to transform an idea into three dimensions. I would cut away at that block and it never worked. It always looked static and uptight. That's how it was. That was my experience of three dimensions. It just didn't work.

The third teacher was a really magnificent experience. She was a lady by the name of Henrietta Schutz, who taught two dimensional design. Apparently she is still alive, in her sixties or seventies, now living in Mallorca. She taught me, I think, the very essence of my architecture. I look back at her, and I see what she taught, and I can recall now in pieces what I did at that time, and relate them to my very recent work. She would give you a jar of white paint, a jar of black paint, a piece of white paper, and ask you to make a shape on it, in black and white. She would say, "The upper left corner, you have to do something there. Put the white paper on there and fix that shape up." Sometimes she would stand in back of you and hold your brush and show you how to do it. She would tell you, "take off that thing on the top," and then you would do it, and obviously she had you. Because you had taken away something from the top left corner, and she would say, "Oh, now you'll have to take the black paint and add something down on the lower right corner." And we spent one term with that, making that shape. And what we learned was about black and white and about the craft of the brush, because we worked with the brush and learned how that toll could be manipulated. Fundamentally what we were learning was not only addition and subtraction; we were learning about relationships.

Also in the class of Henrietta Schutz I made drawings of animals: a sick lion and a sitting lion who had just killed a deer; a town and country mouse; a grasshopper and the ants turning white as they went under the dark tree; the tortoise and the hare. This represented a particular kind of Cooper training, which carried over into architecture.

At Cooper we learned how to make curves. I'm talking about positive and negative space. We learned how to use the brush for curves and their relations. The colors of my early drawings are basically the Bye House colors. Right in that three color range. It pops up some thirty years later.

I had two good friends at Cooper, a sculptor by the name of Emil Antonucci who was also a calligrapher and a
graphic designer, and Gloria Surma, who was a graphic designer. She was the daughter of a Ukranian. He used to bring in honey. We teamed up on every project while at Cooper, practically every architecture project. The first project done at Cooper was a little church. Emil did the drawings for the sculpture, very elemental. The second was a little footbridge. At that time I was deep into the Yoshida book on Japanese architecture. The little footbridge has Japanese detailing. Then we had to do a ski lodge. Then we had to do another chapel. Funny about the programmatic conditions at that particular time after the war - the ski lodge, a couple of churches, the bridges. The chapel was an important project for me because it was again the idea of looking back, of recall. Then I did a cemetery for the war dead in Hawaii with Emil. We put the cemetery in the crater. I have to laugh about the recent manifestation of the earth boys. That project was earth mounds that surround the chapel. Then thirty years later you get the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought which sort of captures the same idea. We did a competition together for a pub and a saloon. It is interesting, apropos again of the time sequence, of the so-called capturing of the spirit of the place. You had to know the difference between a pub and a saloon. Emil and a guy named Don Mallow, a New Jersey architect now who has done very Wrightian houses for many many years, and I entered that competition. All of these projects are still pretty fresh, in terms of the planning, the shapes, and the drawings. They have the kind of sensibility, of someone working with his hand and eye. Many of the images that were initially there I am using today. I'm not talking about squares and things like that. I can already see the wall houses coming. What I'm getting at is that for me work has always been additive. I take one project, use what I received from it and go on to the next - reject what I don't want and then add, you know - so each is a progressive condition of going from one thing to the next. In the process you discard heritage because you have become so sophisticated, but somehow or another your essential early thrust begins to creep back again.

The next relationship would come for me in 1954 when I met Bob Slutzky. He was in the studio painting at Texas. He was doing these incredible painting. I already had a prejudice in favor of that kind of painting, because I had a landscape architecture teacher at Cooper Union. His name was Bryan Lynch, an incredible old Irishman who did the Eldorado down in Puerto Rico, which I hear is one of the great pieces of landscape architecture. Lynch's one act for me was to hand me a book called Plasticism and Pure Plasticism by Piet Mondrian in 1948. He handed it to me and said, take a look, read it. For years I could never get past the thirty-ninth page. I didn't know why he handed it to me. He took me to a studio on 96th Street at that time, to a sculptor by the name of Jose di Rivera. I saw Rivera's sculptures, a wall full of his metal work.

It was in Texas that I met Colin and Bob. Bob had just come from Yale where his teachers were Jose di Rivera and Albers. I then looked at Slutzky's paintings and began to see a second phase of what I call a "relational person." Shutz was the first relational person and certainly Bob was the second.

I also learned during the 1947-50 period by doing tract housing for my uncle, who was an architect. I am always amused by those people who talk to me about built form, details, all those specifications, you know, builder-architect, because I did my time. I guess I did a hundred tract houses. What we did, we started on Friday night. My uncle would be on one end of the dining room table and I would be on the other end of the same table. My grandfather was going to come in and start playing pinochle at a certain hour. We would knock out a set of working drawings by Sunday night and hand it to the contractor to build by the following Sunday. So there was a parallel, practical experience that I was getting while I was getting my education.

In 1950 I got accepted at the University of Cincinnati School of Architecture. It was a school of applied architecture, where they had a work-study program. This meant that you could work six weeks and go to school for six weeks, and that's what I did. I commuted from Cincinnati to New York, because in Cincinnati they would give you a job for thirty-five dollars a week where you carried plaster on your back. I was making at that time a hundred and thirty-five dollars a week, which was a lot of money, doing access roads for the New Jersey Turnpike, which at that time hadn't been built. So I became very good at making curves.

I spent two years out in Cincinnati. In Cincinnati my projects were a zoo, a country fair, and a biological center. In Cincinnati I had my first taste of Academia. The dean was going to fail me if I didn't play ball and do my work the way he wanted, that is in whatever imagery was in at that particular time. When I did my thesis, he was not going to give me my degree; you see, there was a prize of two hundred bucks for the best thesis. And I needed the money badly. I really needed it, and I broke my back to produce that thesis because I wanted to get that two hundred bucks. And they gave it to somebody else. The dean said, "But we're going to keep your thesis because we want to show it around the country as representing the University of Cincinnati." I ran out of there, went into the hall, and took al the drawings down. I said "Keep your degree, you ain't having these drawings if you didn't give me the two hundred
bucks."

I thought it was very amusing that Mike Graves went out there. (He also went to Harvard after I did, always after.) I applied to Harvard and I got accepted. I did meet Gropius. I remember coming in there trying to get a scholarship from him and he gave me half a scholarship. That was my first introduction to a Germanic mind. There I got my first introduction to the Modern Movement. At Harvard my teachers were I.M. Pei, O'Neill Ford, and Kay Fisker, all of whom were good; they knew when to leave me alone. At Harvard, I ran into one of the leaders of the Modern Movement. Alfred Roth. And Alfred Roth said to me, "Hey man, if you don't play ball and do it the way I want you to do it, you ain't going to get your degree from Harvard!" Just like that. That was my second encounter with that kind of Germanic mind.

Then I was fortunate enough to get a Fulbright to Italy. I spent the year 1953 to 1954 in Rome. While I was in Italy, I did a few little decorative drawings, no architectural drawings. When I came back from Italy, I did a project for a cathedral in the summer just before going to Texas.

During the time I was at Cincinnati I went to work for Fellheimer and Wagner. They built the Cincinnati railroad station which later I was to go to every year, one of the magnificent transportation pieces in the world. I met a guy in the office by the name of Bernhard Hoesli who had just come from working in Le Corbusier's office. That was in 1950. Before that I was a rabid Wright fan. I visited all his work while I was a student at Cooper Union. The Usonian houses were being built at that time up in Pleasantville.

I had a hatred for Le Corbusier. In fact I took over a class at Cooper Union teaching one night a week. In it I jumped up and down about the horror of the Marseilles block and the Mickey-Mouseness of its architect. I was ready for conversion. You get converted very rapidly when you hate somebody that much. Hoesli had just come from two years in Corb's office. He had done drawings for that beautiful house down in La Plata, the Currutchet House. He had come to America to visit Frank Lloyd Wright. He had a passion for Wright. Hoesli and I came to be friends. He then went down to Texas. When I came to Texas he had already been there a year. It was Hoesli who called me up in September of 1954 and asked me if I would come and teach at the University of Texas. He called and in one week we were down there. Harwell Hamilton Harris, a magnificent wood detailer from the Greene and Greene tradition, was the dean. He was terribly disorganized. He wanted to bring in so-called young blood down there. I had no teaching experience. So 1954 began a second phase of my architecture.

From 1954 to 1964 was the next phase. I was in Texas, Cornell, and Yale. At the time I went down to Texas, I went into the library, and there was a guy smoking his pipe, you know puffing away at books, and the librarian introduced me. I remember that. He had first come from California and had been down there a year, and that was Colin Rowe. That was the first time I met him, sitting there, and he hasn't changed in thirty years. He was brought there by Harris. He was doing something with John Entenza in California. He was working in Bakersfield. Then there was a whole bunch of young guys coming from Yale whom Harwell Harris had hired. There were two of them, a guy named Lee Hershey and a guy named Bob Slutzky. They were brought in to do drawing and to do color, a la Albers, because Harris knew about Yale. He had taught up there, and wanted freehand drawing and color brought down to this isolated place. Somehow he picked up the phone and they happened to be there in the summer. They said, okay, we'll be right down. And they arrived at the same time. And so began my second phase of architecture.

Raimund Abraham Interview with ACFNY

I rode by the Austrian Cultural Forum today and thought about Raimund Abraham...so I'm going to post an interview with him and then search for one with John Hejduk. Here is an interview with Abraham back in November 2001.

courtesy ACFNY

Q: You recently said that irony is one hallmark of the Austrian personality. Can you elaborate on this from your perspective as an architect?

RA: It's practically genetic in Austrians. It's in their literature. Austrian literature of the 20th century especially is a document to irony. The great poets and writers always question the German language, not in terms of content but the language itself. So irony is a mechanism to question, to become a critical device. In its final formulation, irony has to disappear in one's work like any metaphor. Take for example the project Adolf Loos presented in the competition for the Chicago Tribune tower in 1922. His response to the problem, the inherent conflict between modern technology and the tradition of aesthetics, was to make the whole shaft of the skyscraper one gigantic Doric column. There was such a deliberate arrogance to his proposal! On the other hand, the column was executed to have so powerful a presence that the irony was not entirely predominant. The irony could be there and that is the potency of the work. Irony needs to be present but never clearly so. It's like tightrope walking for the artist.

Q: Do you walk that tightrope in your own work?

RA: Any artist walks the tightrope. When I am working, I try to eliminate speculation entirely. When I have completed the work, then I speculate about my own intentions like anybody else does. But the whole truth is only in the work itself.

As an architect I simply try to solve the problem at hand. My father was a winemaker. He just tried to make a very good wine. I look at bakers or shoemakers and I don't see that much difference between them and myself. I never liked the notion of "fine art." An artist is primarily a worker. Take Jackson Pollock: He was a worker. The action of his work became a new language of painting.

Q: How did this approach -- working without speculation -- play itself out with your design for the Austrian Cultural Forum building?

RA: When I started to develop my first ideas in the competition for the project, it quickly became evident to me that the smallness of the building would cause an incredible, almost inconceivable increase of cost. The Austrian Cultural Forum is a tower 25 feet wide and 24 stories tall on a site less than even 100 feet deep. These are remarkably restrictive conditions that demanded ultimate formal reduction. It would have been totally irresponsible to just engage in an architectural gesture of grandeur without trying to provide the utmost use of the building. That immediately became my problem to solve. Architecture is the only discipline within the arts that has to confront itself with the issue of use. And there is not one formal decision in the Austrian Cultural Forum building that has not been contested with use. The use in this case is a very dense, complex program on a site where the space is compressed laterally by surrounding buildings -- a compressed void. I had not only to confront use in terms of the zoning envelope, the general functions of a building, but also in dealing with gravity, with materials, with the physical world. As the architect you must translate your idea into a drawing, then into the physical world.

Q: What inspired your design beyond these specific limitations of the site?

RA: You never know about how ideas can come into being. Maybe from looking at the sidewalk or from what one has eaten for lunch. So I can't say what the inspiration was. But I can tell you what my intention was with the building: to resolve the extreme condition of smallness of the site, its void, its lateral compression.

Q: Among the 226 architects who competed for this commission, you were the only one whose scheme placed the emergency fire stairs at the rear of the site. This was a remarkable move that nevertheless seems so obvious in retrospect.

RA: This particular solution of a stair, which would satisfy the functional requirements as well as the directives of the building code emerged as a result of a rigorous and sometimes agonizing process to arrive at a solution within the severely restrictive spatial conditions. And at the same time this solution enabled me to transform an element of sheer utility into a decisive architectonic component. If there has been any inspiration or reflection upon a particular New York condition it was my fascination with the simplicity and surprising complexity of the scissor stair, which I believe was invented in New York City in the 19th century in courthouse designs in order to provide independent access and egress for prisoners, their captors, and their judges. Whether or not it will continue to function in that capacity I will leave to the future users. Architecturally it has become the Vertebra of the Austrian Cultural Forum tower, striving for infinity as does the endless column of Brancusi. Architecture ought to transform the profane into the sacred, that is its ultimate challenge.

Q: In attempting to resolve this essential conflict, in making ideas material and the profane sacred, is there a moment when construction -- actualization -- compromises your ideas?

RA: All this depends upon the ability of an architect to translate his own idea into built form. For example, if I talk conceptually about sheets of glass which are suspended and are more falling than rising, then I have to find materials and methods of construction that satisfy this condition when I build. If I don't succeed in that first, then I don't succeed at all, even if I have the most striking designs. I succeeded at the Forum building with the glass Mask because it achieves that quality of suspension. It expresses the condition of the site, the gravitational forces that are represented by what I call the three towers of the building -- the Vertebra of the stair tower on the north, the structural Core tower at the center, and the Mask glass tower, which is the curtainwall on 52nd Street.

Q: Must an architect actually build his ideas in order to achieve something "sacred"?

RA: I believe architecture doesn't have to be built. There are equally important projects I have drawn that have never been built. When you build, you enter the public realm and that is a different kind of architecture. I don't need to build in order to verify my ideas. But building is the most difficult type of architecture, I must say, because the whole process of translation is exceedingly complex. It engages you completely. You have to become a street-fighter, a lawyer, and a detective to succeed. It encompasses the risk to entrust your work to others for its final implementation.

Q: Is a perfect translation possible in the evolution from drawing to building?

RA: Perfect? No. Perfection is like truth. You can strive for it but you never reach it. Building in New York is extremely difficult. The architect has no true authority here and that is frustrating. The authority lies with the contractors, the builders. I'm just a war reporter on the scene every day. If it is true, what some critics claim, that this is the first real architecture to be realized in New York in 40 years, it would mean that for 40 years builders in New York have not been challenged to the highest degree of precision. You must have that precision to have real architecture.

Q: Returning to your comment that artists and architects are workers, why do you think we need to make distinctions that elevate artists above the status of worker?

RA: These are simply devices to make art and architecture easier to consume. The whole construction of history is simply a structure for people to consume the past. And history -- or about 99% of it -- is all wrong because there is no continuity in history. Every invention is a break in time. That's true of architecture as well of all other disciplines. There are influences obviously, influences that carry over. But the influences are devices of comparison and that comparison never provides a true critical argument. You cannot, for example, compare Frank Lloyd Wright with Le Corbusier. Each work can only redeem itself, illuminate itself. You can only take projects by one artist and have them confront each other, then see which one is stronger in terms of a detectable vision within the body of work of that individual artist.

Q: Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, has described yours as 'a career without compromise.' How do you respond to that description?

RA: In terms of my own work, unwillingness to compromise is not a virtue. I simply cannot compromise because my nature does not let me. So I am lucky. But I observe that architecture in recent years has generally been promoted through stardom and spectacle rather than respect for structure, precision, and a real commitment to social issues. It was not always like this. Think about the pioneers of modern architecture of the 1920s and 30s. Architecture was then very much engaged in social issues. The most important projects of that time were either for workers -- factories, housing, churches -- or projects that identified cities, civic work. And now ironically it seems that just when art has more or less disappeared as a critical device in our society we have more museums than ever before and more new museum architecture. That's particularly interesting when you reflect upon the pioneer artists of the post-War era in America. They were so socially committed that they couldn't really separate their art and their own existence from being part of the larger society and engaging in critical arguments about the state of affairs of our society. In my opinion this has almost completely disappeared.

Q: Do you think the building for the Austrian Cultural Forum has a social or societal role to fill?

RA: In terms of what goes on at the building, I believe the Forum as an institution exists outside of the commercial world, a commercial world that is rather orthodox in New York nowadays. The Forum is autonomous from the power structure of the art world and if the director and the staff and involved outsiders can succeed in attaining a high level of quality in the programs, if they introduce work that is not part of the existing power structure, then the Forum could be a very, very unique place for this city and actually very influential. I believe they intend to be also an outlet for American and international artists working in collaboration with Austrians, a place for new ideas, new forms. If this is really going to be the policy and the practice of the institution, I will be extremely happy because then architecture has succeeded in inspiring and challenging its use.

Q: In the wake of the events of September 11th and the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, there is a great deal of discussion and even debate about how architecture can and should satisfy the need for beauty while honestly acknowledging the dangers of modern life. But for years you have declared that beauty and danger are inextricably linked in architecture. Do you think such ideas take on new significance in these times?

RA: If I did not include the anticipation of terror in my architecture, it would not be worth anything. Ultimately you become conscious of your own existence and accept the truth we are born with: the knowledge that we are going to die. If such anticipation is not part of your spectrum of thought and feeling as an architect, your work is meaningless, without authenticity.

Adolf Loos wrote, "When you walk through the woods and come upon a hole two feet wide, six feet long, and six feet deep, you know that is architecture." This is what I am talking about. Death has to work, it must express itself and its meaning somehow just as do hope or desire. Maybe it's a problem of a technocized, urban society that death becomes very much removed from our lives. I grew up in a small town in Austria where there were funerals all the time. It was part of life.

Q: This was during the Second World War?

RA: Yes. And there were bombs, of course. I had horrifying experiences that shaped my aesthetics. I saw buildings disappear that were supposed to be permanent. I saw the entire sky covered with airplanes. But do you have any idea of what a beautiful sight that is -- an iron sky? It was magnificent. So in terms of the power of a moment of destruction, walking through the completely destroyed center square of our town as a 12-year-old was as monumental for me as what happened on September 11th here.

Q: What do you think we will build down there on the Trade Center site?

RA: Right now it's just too raw, of course. There are still several thousand people buried on that site. And the question of a monument, a memorial seems absurd. Think about the fact that no Holocaust memorial ever succeeds in the end because no monument can ever be more monumental than a concentration camp. For the most part these museums and memorials to the Holocaust are, for me, trivializations. It's always the case that the place of the actual horror itself is by far the more powerful manifestation of memory than anything you try to artificially impose. No building can match the terrifying empty spaces of these original sites.

Q: Can an architect ever really succeed with such projects? Can you build memory?

RA: No, you cannot. But you can build to evoke memory, to manifest absence. For example I think the Austrian Cultural Forum building will provoke different kinds of memories through association. You look at the building now in a particular way after what has happened on September 11th. Because of its iconic presence it evokes totemic qualities. Just recently I looked at the building and recognized a figure, a totem. This was not at all intentional. If I had planned to make a totem, a piece of memory, the building would not have the same strength. The inspiration for the design came completely out of seemingly trivial circumstances of the site, zoning, codes. And then other things triggered, unconsciously. I think the only time one is really conscious is when one works. When I work, I concentrate completely, totally on the problem at hand. When I draw a line, that is the most honest moment in my life. Everything else in my life may be confused, but that line is true.

Q: Drawing has been essential to your career, probably the dominant route of access into your thought process for other people.

RA: When I draw, the drawing is not a step toward the built, but an autonomous reality that I try to anticipate. It's a whole process of anticipation, anticipating that a line becomes an edge, that a plane becomes a wall; the texture of the graphite becomes the texture of the built. That is the dialectics of drawing. Now, when you translate the drawings, one also has to distinguish between the drawings you make in this autonomous process where the drawing is the ultimate reality. I draw first for myself, not for somebody who is building, which means there has to be an absolute clarity in my mind, and the ability to retain the idea that I've established in the drawing, and furthermore, the anticipation that this idea will be buildable. Of course, it's a highly complex process. I'm talking about the first stage, which is a dialectical confrontation of whether what I draw will be built. From the moment I know that something is going to be built, my drawings have become something else. And at that point I draw less, and build models immediately. One really has to distinguish between those different phases.

Q: Is recollection important? You grew up in the mountains of Austria. Do memories of those places of childhood have any presence in your architecture now?

RA: Yes. I even published a book called "Elementare Architektur" (1963) to celebrate these memories. It has just be reissued, in fact.

Q: What sort of house did you grow up in?

RA: In a house with a large garden and a view of the Dolomites. I spent a lot of time with my relatives in South Tyrol, which is Italy now. They had a huge farm and an inn and animals. I always identified more with this place, the birthplace of my father where we still grow wines.

Q: And now you are building a house in Mexico.

RA: Never in my life did I dream I would design a house for myself! But just in the last three years I have had the desire for a place where I could cook. And in this village in Mexico they have wonderful fish, so that is what triggered the idea for building a house there. Cooking is a device to define your home. Without cooking, without a hearth, you have no home. A friend of mine owns spectacular land there. We walked around and there was one very special place to which I immediately felt a special attraction. We walked further and a bit later encountered a sign that said, "You are entering sacred ground." There is a hill surrounded by ancient fragments of what must have been huge walls. The village does not even allow archaeologists to dig there and it is completely pure. I think it is the only manifestation of real architecture on the entire Pacific coast of Mexico! And it is the most southern point of the North American land mass. When I saw this site I knew I wanted it. It was meant to be. That was three years ago. We are beginning construction of the house in early November.

Q: Did you take the same level of pleasure in building the Forum tower that you are clearly taking in constructing the Mexico house?

RA: Well, the adventure of building in New York City is still going on. You are confronted every day with the enormous challenges of getting it right. I have to force myself to enjoy the privilege of building the Forum tower because as I have said, I do not look beyond the process or think about how it feels while I am working. So I suppose I don't really take pleasure in the building yet. I will take great pleasure when the building is in use, when programs and artists and audiences take it over, and when I'm celebrating the fact that I was finally able to give something back to New York City, which has been my home for three decades and is the city I love.

Q: Is the whole notion of presenting Austrian culture in America relevant to you? Do you relate to the idea of being an Austrian architect, an Austrian artist?

RA: Do I feel Austrian? Well, I was born there. Maybe childhood is the most important memory one has. Undeniably it influenced my personality. Am I Austrian today? I carry its culture, its sensibility. I am still an Austrian citizen. But I have no clue how Austrian my work is. I have become a New Yorker and maybe the memories of ones origins are reignited in a new place. And this place feels closer to me than the place of my origins. Except the work, everything is fluid, everything moves, everything changes, my work is my life and ultimately my real and only home.

I found this great photo of Abraham and Lebbeus Woods on Lebbeus' site. There are some touching stories told by students and friends of Raimund in Lebbeus' entry the day after Raimund died...one of which is from Anthony Vidler here....http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/raimund-abraham-1933-2010/

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