JC : There is an argument in preservation that many buildings are already sustainable. Instead of the idea that we need to make sustainable buildings, perhaps we need to recognize how they have become this way through time. JOP : Many old buildings are indeed already sustainable, but I think the question is also whether they are already architecture. Architects are searching for sustainable architecture, which is something more than sustainable building. When does a building become architecture? Some people think that all the architecture is in the architect’s plans, and according to that view the building is either architecture at the outset or it isn’t. But in fact a building can become architecture many years after it was built. What it takes is someone recognizing in that building the answer to one of our contemporary architectural questions. That is for instance what happened when Le Corbusier saw architecture in the old whitewashed houses of the Mediterranean, or when Gordon Matta-Clark recognized architecture in the suburban tract houses of New Jersey. By the same token, buildings that are considered architecture at one point may cease to be so at another. This happened to many Art Deco buildings, for instance, which were only recently rediscovered as architecture. It is possible that the buildings that are now considered sustainable architecture might not be considered architecture at all in the near future. To get beneath all the hubris, I think we need to ask ourselves what are the lasting fundamental architectural questions that are being challenged by sustainability. One of them, I believe, is our understanding of the temporality of buildings. JC : That is an idea I identify with Kevin Lynch and [his 1972 book] What Time is This Place? JOP : What I find interesting about that work is that in order to deal with the question of temporality Lynch had to move away from the traditional academic book and develop a very interesting hybrid that is more of a visual work of art in which the photo essay really takes center stage. Sometimes words are not enough to spur our intellectual ability to recognize the relevant architectural questions raised by certain buildings. I think Lynch recognized that when he pursued this more aesthetic line of research. The openness to art as a form of research is a very particular MIT tradition, and I think I absorbed some of it when I was there. In addition to Lynch, MIT produced people like [electrical engineer Harold Eugene] Edgerton, who explored the nature of movement through photography, and had exhibitions at MOMA, but never considered himself an artist. I understand Edgerton’s ambivalence towards being called an artist, because the name artist used to mean that your work was unscientific. The situation is a little different now. Scientists recognize the importance of aesthetics and intuition more, and artistic practices are also more scientifically rigorous in terms of their research methodologies.
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LH : I am really interested in your ideas about smoke as something that fulfills this function of revealing an author-less and unintentional architectural aesthetic that is difficult to represent. Could you talk more about this issue of intentionality and what that means for preservation and architecture? What are the risks we take in incorporating a chance thing like smoke as a building material, something that is never connected to the authorship of the architect. JOP : Smoke is a fascinating material precisely because it resists categorization as an architectural material. Yet, it has really changed the way we conceive of architecture. Principally, it has changed our conception of architecture’s temporality by shortening it dramatically. Smoke was responsible for acid rain, and by the middle of the 19th century architects began to realize that the monuments that had been around for millennia were starting to literally dissolve away and would not last very much longer. Smoke played an unacknowledged role in shaping the modernist understanding of buildings as being able to have a very short lifespan, as short as a single generation, and therefore being reducible to a contemporary zeitgeist. Clearly, there were other factors involved in this temporal shortening, such as financial notions of depreciation, and the consumerist cult of newness, but historians have yet to fully grasp the role of smoke in the emergence of modernism. I don’t think it is a coincidence that modern architecture emerged in the most polluted places in the world: Germany’s Ruhr Valley, England’s industrial towns, and the USA’s Rust Belt. It seems to me that insofar as modernity is unthinkable without the production of industrial quantities of pollution, modernism is bound up in the problem of smoke. Steel and glass construction may have made possible modernist ideas of architectural space, but smoke was at least partly responsible for opening up new notions of architectural time. Steel, glass and smoke were all industrially produced, with the difference being that smoke was unintentionally produced and its effects on architecture were also unintentional. By delaminating and isolating the layer of historic smoke deposited on buildings, a layer that both damages them and makes them modern, I’m attempting to recover and draw attention to some of the unintentional qualities that make up our contemporary understanding of architecture. This has, as you point out, implications for the long held assumption that architecture is the intentional product of human authors, and suggests a larger role for unintentional and even non-human agents in the production of architecture. n PHOTO CREDITS FIG. 1 Jorge Otero-Pailos, “The Ethics of Dust: Alumix, Bolzano, 2008,” detail of pollution. Collection of the Museion: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy. FIG. 2 Jorge Otero-Pailos, “The Ethics of Dust: Alumix, Bolzano, 2008,” detail of pollution. Collection of the Museion: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy