Robert Somol

Robert Somol, That was Now, This is Then, 26 de octubre de 2018. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.

That was Now, This is Then Robert Somol

El año académico 2017-2018 marca el 50 aniversario de la primera clase profesional graduada de la UIC School of Architecture y de la primera fase de la construcción del edificio basado en teoría de campos de Walter Netsch en el campus, los definitivamente inacabados Architecture and Arts Laboratories. Quizás la contribución más significativa de la Escuela durante este medio siglo ha sido la proliferación de ideologías y movimientos antitéticos que han sido lanzados y luego abandonados, a menudo con un éxito institucional brutal en otros lugares: infraestructura, posmodernidad, neotradicionalismo, deconstructivismo, neoclasicismo, organicismo digital, landscape urbanism. Aprovechando esta historia de abandono, la Escuela avanza en un proyecto explícito de estar fuera de tiempo, apostando a que la promiscua mezcla de un pasado olvidado con un futuro desconocido ofrece una de las pocas formas que quedan para organizar una alternativa al cierre político y cultural generalizado del presente, que podría verse como la crisis de la mediana edad del posmodernismo. Al igual que Benjamin Button, la arquitectura nace tan antigua como siempre, y se vuelve más joven a medida que el futuro resuelve qué hacer con ella. Este tipo de anacronismo no es el caso de la tecnología, de la construcción, ni de aquellas prácticas de obsolescencia forzada cuya fecha de vencimiento se denomina innovación. A los 50 años, la School of Architecture de la University of Illinois at Chicago puede estar a mitad de camino, pero la pregunta sigue siendo: ¿qué mitad? Un poco como ese niño de Hibbing, Minnesota, que una vez cantó: era mayor entonces, ahora soy más joven que eso. Elegimos enfrentar la urgencia con la indolencia, y arreglárnosla sin la crisis. Architecture about other Architecture

For us, the school architecture is a cultural endeavour. This means it is like other kinds of cultural practice, like film, art, literature, or music, and you must be an obsessive fan of it if you want to do it well. Scorsese and Tarantino are exemplar directors for us because they make movies about other movies. We make architecture about other architecture. I think that is what you do when you are in a cultural field. That is its first place of address. History in your Favour

In design, you think about context in terms of how you can turn it into something else. You try to use history in your favour. There is an interesting history to our school. Alvin Boyarsky, who would later become the probably still most famous chair at the AA, was the associate dean and a professor of architecture at UIC from 1965 to 1970. While he was in Chicago, at his inaugural lecture on the city energy system, Rem Koolhaas was in the audience. And many years later he would say how instrumental that lecture was in his thinking about Delirious New York. He really found sympathy with Alvin’s project. I like to think that Delirious New York is a book written because of Chicago, including its postcards’ strategy of development.

Exporting Ideology

Greg Lynn was at the school in 1991, before he went to teach at Columbia, and before we became colleagues again at UCLA. This is the moment when his Stranded Sears Tower project came out: the digital project before the digital. Greg’s project was an intellectual architectural project before it was a technical project. In other words, he was making blobs

the old-fashioned way. The Stranded Sears Tower was his first supple, pliable, big, hairy, version of the Sears Tower along the river. After Greg, Charles Waldheim was here in 1996, with the landscape urbanism agenda, and then went to Toronto and to Harvard. The point of this story of departures is that UIC is a school that exports ideology. It tries things out and ships them off to other places. It does not take advantage of it. It is part of a paranoid theory about the way in which architectural education and pedagogy informs practice in 16-to-20-year cycles.

Plastic Politics

What we were trying to do was combine the previous two models of Columbia and the AA, taking the plasticity of one and the politics of the other. We called our program Plastic Politics, rubric under which we launched the next year, with all sorts of ironies. You must have a goal, and part of it was the fact that, when I arrived, there was a lot of earnest work running in parallel to formal apolitical sophisticated design, but never the two would meet. The question is how to rethink the connection between politics and form in another way.

Graphic Protocol

In 2006, I wrote Green Dots 101, as a response to Peter Eisenman, who asked me how to teach green dots. For him, it was clearly not a teachable, legible, or critical project. It did not have a procedural method that he could understand. It was an explicitly graphic, expedient project, not in his vocabulary of teachability. When I wrote the essay on Downsview Park, I was a defender of the OMA and Bruce Mau scheme: the graphic protocol as opposed to the geometric one. In the US academic context, which I know is a narrow context, but dominant in the early 2000s, it was all about the project of digital biomorphic intricacy. Whether you look at Greg’s work, or Jesse Reiser’s, or Preston Scott Cohen’s, that was the dominant form of advanced practice. Graphic Expediency

This roundup of figures and principles became the unconscious manifesto of the school as we developed it. The main idea was that there were four ways to go after modernism: you could articulate, you could notate, you could decorate, and you could figure. In some sense, Frampton, Eisenmann, Venturi, and Hejduk stand for those four possibilities. It seemed that the digital generation, the intricate people, were combining Frampton’s tectonics with Eisenman’s index. This is what I call the digital intricacy project, the micro articulation of non-standard elements and the call to mass customization. I was trying to experiment in the opposite trajectory: what if you combine decoration and figuration with the result of graphic expediency as opposed to digital intricacy?

Custom Massification

Mass customization is part of a political economy of differentiation where everyone has his own product. It is the way in which society gets atomized as a commercial and political phenomenon. On the other hand, the idea of custom massification, is that our job as architects is to figure out ways of producing new collectives and audiences. We talked about this when doing Flat Out: how can you, once again, engage in the idea of making collectives or fashioning audiences?

Banking on the Future

We are a school interested in the discipline. You would think that every school is interested in the discipline, but it turns out this is not the case. Most schools are interested in themes, and they market themselves thematically. We do not think there is a problem with practice and academia being disjointed. This was our own story of 1992. In Chicago, Adrian Smith, alumnus of the school and part of SOM, was doing this vaguely hightech postmodern historicism du jour kind of work. Meanwhile in our school, Greg Lynn is doing his potato slicing blobs. Obviously this is where the practice gets up and says: you

guys are not doing anything relevant for us. Then you cut to 2010, twenty years later, and what Adrian Smith is doing has all to do with what the school was doing. The point of a school is not to be in sync with practice at its moment, but rather to project itself forward 10 or 20 years, because the offices will follow what happened. You are banking on the future. If we had produced students in 1992 making the 1992 Adrian Smith work, they would all be out of work. Offices do not want that sort of obsolete model.

Untimeliness

We are interested in the inversion of the now and the then to operate in an untimely way, out of sync with the circumstances. We cannot be doing work that models the present. We must work in a way that is not interested in mirroring what is happening now, whether in practice or in society. We must develop techniques of untimeliness. This is even more crucial today than in 1992, because there is a flattening and suffocation of a blinkered view to deal with today’s issues. The assumption is that those issues will always be the same. At the school we try to model a way to deal with the archaic forgotten past as well as with organizations and future situations, combining them in a way that gets us out of the fixation on the here and the now.

Perverse Precision

it is our job to pursue seriousness through frivolous means. When I came to the school there was sloppy earnestness, work that was trying to do good but did not work. In contrast to that, we were trying to install a perverse precision. Unlike a lot of places that started doing serious things and ultimately ended up frivolous, we think we can get to serious ends through frivolous means. Rem Koolhaas is a fellow traveller in this. In Whatever Happened to Urbanism, he calls for the Nietzschean frivolity that dared to be utterly uncritical. We must become irresponsible and lighten up. Counter Inductive Realities

Knowledge is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever-increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives. Nothing is ever settled. The task of the scientist is to make the weaker case the strongest. That is a way to work in architecture too. You need to figure out how to overcome the clichés and platitudes of convention. It is the only way to test out some other way of imagining a collective living. We need a set of alternative assumptions toward an entirely alternative world. The issue is how to instrumentalize counter intuition.

Extractos de la conferencia de Robert Somol, con introducción de Ciro Najle, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 26 de octubre de 2018.