RK: Yes, “born Frenchist” and when I was in the school for three months he took me and said to me: “you know for people who are expo-French as you are there are better schools. He literally tried to get me into a different school. From that comment on (long silence)… and then for instance, the Exodus project is a polemic against Archigram. With Archigram I didn’t get along well. And only in retrospect I can really admire their work. With Cederic Price I got along really well; with James (Charles) I began a good friendship; with Peter Smithson it was an ambivalent relationship, and Stirling I got to know because we had a mutual a friend.
RK: From this period, I would add that I was never a communist.
RK: I think that it is more an affirmation as you described.
RV: Isn’t that obvious?
RV: I agree, but many people see it as an attempt to confront pragmatism with dreams. And you even mentioned Superstudio when you wrote about this, and you know their drawings are dreams.
RV: OK. Let’s go back to the Netherlands. I read one of your interviews with the PROVO group that’s particularly interesting. It’s about the Avant-Garde groups from the left, and then Paris ‘68, etc. You were really against all this, weren’t you?
RK: During the period in the AA I was also working on a book on Leonidov, the Russian Constructivist, with a Dutch architect, Gerrit Oorthuys, who had been the trigger for me to reorient my interest from writing to film simply because he was interested in Film. So he invited me to give a Lecture and I became interested in architecture (Seminar on Film and Architecture at the University of Delft, 1967). So that’s how I met the architectural elite of Delft. At that point that was a kind of trading places: I was suddenly interested in architecture and he was in film. So with him I went to Russia a number of times and also met people, and due to figuring out who Leonidov was, I learned really everything about his concepts and to write also about architecture and the difference between the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. So I had a sense of all the transformation and of the political background at the same time.
RK: I was not really against it but I was very skeptical about it. I was skeptical because my orientation was allowing modernity to happen, it’s about smoothness, abstraction and not Antonioni (the Italian film director from the 60’s) and kind of soul alienation, etc. This seemed rough and, in a way, old fashioned, kind of overemotional and just inarticulate. So, my position after I’ve been in it was never quite rigid. I thought it wasn’t a very important thing. I always looked from a distance but, at the same time, I was interested in these movements. HP’s position was to be skeptical about anything so there was a consistent skepticism that was cultivated by all meanings. That’s why we were always dressed in suits and wearing ties. (In the middle of the Hippie era.) RV: I read about the HP atmosphere.
RK: Well, but that was at a time, the 60s, where everyone who had a heart was a communist. And, since Italian modernity didn’t exist in Holland there was no way to say that you could be modern in anyway without being a communist. But as soon as I got to AA, I visited Russia a lot between ‘69 and ‘72.
RK: I introduced Superstudio in the AA as a kind of “empty project”. RV: So, what is the influence of surrealism in your work?
RV: So ,you went through some changes in the AA in the 70 ? s
RV: I was re-reading some things you wrote around 1972 about architecture and about Exodus, your thesis project, and thinking about the big door that was opened by your ideas back then. Is Exodus a statement against Utopia or is it rather a reaffirmation of it in a sophisticated way?
RK: In a visual sense kind of zero because I don’t even like most of their work, but in my writing it is enormous. I think that Andre Breton wrote unbelievable text and that Dali wrote too unbelievable text. So it’s kind of those two that are really influential. RV: Back on the time track. At the AA you decided to move to the US. What motivated you to go to the US? RK: Basically a combination of things: I wanted to do something related to New York, and I think that while working I began to understand that I could do something polemic with New York that could clarify that moment. And I think it had to do with the kind of sense that sometimes realization was more important than theorizing. That was one thing; the other one was an admiration for Mathias Ungers who I just discovered when I was studying Berlin in the AA, and who produced years of publications based on Berlin as a kind of laboratory made for abstract seminars like “buildings in islands”, “buildings in parks”, and so on. Building as a kind of repertoire that was never about direct relationships but more about desired relationships. (in)forma 10
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