AR+D Publishing

I was just thinking about that question of expertise last night when I was reading an article about Alison Killing, who was trained as an architect, and who won a Pulitzer. She’s been doing work in China, revealing prison camps using spatial information. I think she’s the first architect who has ever won a Pulitzer, and she actually calls herself an architect rather than a journalist, because she thinks about her work as being able to visualize and spatialize things. In terms of my work, I think it’s a question of visualization, and I guess my role is as a translator between much larger, much more urgent issues and something that’s part of everyday experience, like the building that’s on your block, or a park you visit every day. As a result, these issues get woven into an experience of an architectural project—which has been the case for Hamilton Gears in particular. And I think that’s an architectural disciplinary expertise, finding ways to translate or synthesize really big issues into something that’s an object or spatial experience that embeds itself in three-dimensional space, where you are confronted with it. I think that’s one of the issues with these larger urgent questions, that it’s not about a wrist slap, like you can’t use plastic bags anymore. Rather, what are alternatives? How do we engage with this? Is it possible to think about this in a charismatic way or in a way that actually brings people in and encourages them to engage with an issue differently, or tries to find alternative routes? I also think storytelling is a part of that—translation and storytelling, and building out the larger context for how we might understand particular issues. The hydrants project is a really tiny project, but it communicates a new narrative about being able to drink water from the city. It’s like an unfolding story, and I like thinking about how the experience can be familiar but inevitable, somehow.

Your projects range from built physical things in the real world—buildings and infrastructural installations, for instance—to projective or speculative projects with huge ambitions. Can you tell us a little about how you envision the relationship between these different types of work as it relates to the identity of your practice?

It has to do with this idea of practice, and also what a young architect can do within certain situations. When you get out of school, what kind of work are you doing, versus once you’re ten or fifteen years out of school, what are you capable of doing, what do you have under your belt? Some of the speculative work came out of a moment when I didn’t think building was the right answer right then—I just wanted to explore and think about how to experiment. I had some time to do research, and I think that came out inevitably from that moment. I’m doing much more built work now, which is great. But I don’t think too much about the identity of the practice. There are certain moments in one’s practice or in one’s trajectory where certain things feel appropriate. And I guess I like to think that there’s a speculative dimension to built work. I also feel like you have to have larger conceptual or speculative ideas at the beginning of your career, before you get into nitty-gritty details of a door schedule. I think it’s important to lay out what is foundational or influential, as well as the values or ethics of your practice. Architecture is so detailed that you have to really think about what are the big ideas, what’s important to you, so you don’t lose sight of those things. So, the speculative work and some of the installation-scale work help me to identify those things.