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STAN ALLEN
In your book, Landform Building [Lars Müller Publishers, 2011], you identified this type as a growing trend in recent architectural projects. What are the societal factors that have contributed to this trend? Allen: Landform building is interesting to me because it’s a symptom of the larger cultural phenomenon—a preoccupation with the question of the relationship between man and nature, which is also consistent with the current discourse on environmental sustainability. With the book, I hoped to do two things simultaneously: one was simply document a trend, but the other was to be somewhat critical toward that trend. Specifically, I’m critical of what I call the “softly-rounded mound” strategy. This is the vulnerable cliché of landform building, and it arises out of a false integration of nature and architecture. I’m against the idea that you can just make buildings literally continuous with the landscape, or imitate the forms of landscape. There are very few examples of that being done successfully. It’s too much of a camouflage strategy, where you’re simply covering over the boundary between nature and culture. Again, it’s something we want to document and pay attention to, but to also look at with a certain degree of skepticism. The value of the book was to present a series of compelling projects that go beyond the cliché of the landform.
Allen: Yes.
You often describe the organization of your work with verbs, such as the index you developed for Landform Building. Most of your work contains an embedded component of time. So how does something like a building, which is usually unchanging, become an entity that acts?