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CI : Your Audi project explored relinquishing control in order to sustain a more resilient form of growth. Could you elaborate further on your intentions with the project and on the balance that is achieved when the urge to control is subdued? D: Control works at different levels in architecture. There’s control in the design process which is one thing. For example, there’s a constant cycle of relinquishing control to open up new possibilities and then coming back into control to develop and test these possibilities. Then there is the degree of control that architecture exerts over its users and it’s context or vice versa. Our goal with the Audi project was to test the limits of control between nature and the city by reclaiming the uncontrolled ethos of New York through the reintroduction of wild. Since biodiversity is essential to the survival of any ecology, increasing biodiversity in Manhattan would require relinquishing a certain degree of control in order to find a productive balance between urbanism and ecology within the city. C: Our goal is not to control the city but set up the parameters or infrastructures for nature to be re-integrated into the grid of New York. Our cities are constantly changing but proposing that nature take over the city is an extreme provocation. It’s an urban model that goes against the tradition of Western development to prioritize the co-existence of urbanism and nature. It’s a provocation to see what’s at stake within the discourse of sustainability. We developed a model of urbanism to accept contingency and indeterminacy vis a vis nature. So as much as we need precision and control of certain processes, we also need strategies that are resilient enough to survive and accommodate change. I think we increasingly find ourselves
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in situations where we don’t have a comfortable level of control and we need to learn to adapt as a discipline. D: That comes back to the question about our manifesto or agenda. It’s really impossible to propose grand assumptions about the way the world should be unless you are some kind of fundamentalist, which we are not. Instead, it’s really about figuring out how to operate and synthesize with increasing levels of ambiguity and contradiction. For example “fuzzy logic” is a way of operating or making decisions within extremely ambiguous situations that rely more on degrees of truth rather than an absolute yes or no. A lot of it has to do with working in situations with very limited information but somehow still prioritizing a significant action as opposed to paralysis by analysis. CI : Do you think emerging architects in New York have different issues to deal with than their predecessors? D: The context in NY today for young architects seems less hierarchical and more open than our predecessors. This could be a result of the technological proficiency of the younger generation which shifts the traditional roles of production in the profession. Young practices are also working within a media saturated environment that requires a natural propensity for branding and marketing of ideas. But actually these issues are not specific to New York. C: Exactly, the global climate has changed so much that being a young practice in New York really means you need to be global. The global context is something that has to be taken into account earlier in young practices now. www.leong-leong.com 05 CITYVISION 81