Lebbeus Woods

Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods

from http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/without-walls-interview-with-lebbeus.html

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan, 1999; view larger].

Lebbeus Woods is one of the first architects I knew by name – not Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe, but Lebbeus Woods – and it was Woods's own technically baroque sketches and models, of buildings that could very well be machines (and vice versa), that gave me an early glimpse of what architecture could really be about.
Woods's work is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence proclaiming that the architectural imagination, freed from constraints of finance and buildability, should be uncompromising, always. One should imagine entirely new structures, spaces without walls, radically reconstructing the outermost possibilities of the built environment.
If need be, we should re-think the very planet we stand on.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Havana, radically reconstructed, 1994; view larger].

Of course, Woods is usually considered the avant-garde of the avant-garde, someone for whom architecture and science fiction – or urban planning and exhilarating, uncontained speculation – are all but one and the same. His work is experimental architecture in its most powerful, and politically provocative, sense.
Genres cross; fiction becomes reflection; archaeology becomes an unpredictable form of projective technology; and even the Earth itself gains an air of the non-terrestrial.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, DMZ, 1988; view larger].

One project by Woods, in particular, captured my imagination – and, to this day, it just floors me. I love this thing. In 1980, Woods proposed a tomb for Albert Einstein – the so-called Einstein Tomb (collected here) – inspired by Boullée's famous Cenotaph for Newton.
But Woods's proposal wasn't some paltry gravestone or intricate mausoleum in hewn granite: it was an asymmetrical space station traveling on the gravitational warp and weft of infinite emptiness, passing through clouds of mutational radiation, riding electromagnetic currents into the void.
The Einstein Tomb struck me as such an ingenious solution to an otherwise unremarkable problem – how to build a tomb for an historically titanic mathematician and physicist – that I've known who Lebbeus Woods is ever since.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, the city and the faults it sits on, from the San Francisco Bay Project, 1995].

So when the opportunity came to talk to Lebbeus about one image that he produced nearly a decade ago, I continued with the questions; the result is this interview, which happily coincides with the launch of Lebbeus's own website – his first – at lebbeuswoods.net. That site contains projects, writings, studio reports, and some external links, and it's worth bookmarking for later exploration.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Havana re-imagined, 1994; view larger].

In the following Q&A, then, Woods talks to BLDGBLOG about the geology of Manhattan; the reconstruction of urban warzones; politics, walls, and cooperative building projects in the future-perfect tense; and the networked forces of his most recent installations.

• • •

BLDGBLOG: First, could you explain the origins of the Lower Manhattan image?

Lebbeus Woods: This was one of those occasions when I got a request from a magazine – which is very rare. In 1999, Abitare was making a special issue on New York City, and they invited a number of architects – like Steven Holl, Rafael Viñoly, and, oh god, I don’t recall. Todd Williams and Billie Tsien. Michael Sorkin. Myself. They invited us to make some sort of comment about New York. So I wrote a piece – probably 1000 words, 800 words – and I made the drawing.

I think the main thought I had, in speculating on the future of New York, was that, in the past, a lot of discussions had been about New York being the biggest, the greatest, the best – but that all had to do with the size of the city. You know, the size of the skyscrapers, the size of the culture, the population. So I commented in the article about Le Corbusier’s infamous remark that your skyscrapers are too small. Of course, New York dwellers thought he meant, oh, they’re not tall enough – but what he was referring to was that they were too small in their ground plan. His idea of the Radiant City and the Ideal City – this was in the early 30s – was based on very large footprints of buildings, separated by great distances, and, in between the buildings in his vision, were forests, parks, and so forth. But in New York everything was cramped together because the buildings occupied such a limited ground area. So Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren’t tall enough – we’ve got to go higher! Of course, he wasn’t interested at all in their height – more in their plan relationship. Remember, he’s the guy who said, the plan is the generator.

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region. [Images: Lebbeus Woods, Nine Reconstructed Boxes; view larger: top/bottom].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, it seems like a lot of the work you’ve been doing for the past few years – in Vienna, especially – has been a kind of architecture without walls. It’s almost pure space. In other words, instead of walls and floors and recognizable structures, you’ve been producing networks and forces and tangles and clusters – an abstract space of energy and directions. Is that an accurate way of looking at your recent work – and, if so, is this a purely aesthetic exploration, or is this architecture without walls meant to symbolize or communicate a larger political message?

Woods: Well, look – if you go back through my projects over the years, probably the least present aspect is the idea of property lines. There are certainly boundaries – spatial boundaries – because, without them, you can’t create space. But the idea of fencing off, or of compartmentalizing – or the capitalist ideal of private property – has been absent from my work over the last few years.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan, 1999, in case you missed it; view larger].

So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself. I think that comes across in the drawing. It’s not geologically correct, I’m sure, but the idea is there.

There are a couple of other interesting features which I’ll just mention. One is that the only bridge I show is the Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t show the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, for instance. That’s just gone. And I don’t show the Manhattan Bridge or the Williamsburg Bridge, which are the other two bridges on the East River. On the Hudson side, it was interesting, because I looked carefully at the drawings – which I based on an aerial photograph of Manhattan, obviously – and the World Trade Center… something’s going on there. Of course, this was in 1999, and I’m not a prophet and I don’t think that I have any particular telepathic or clairvoyant abilities [laughs], but obviously the World Trade Center has been somehow diminished, and there are things floating in the Hudson next to it. I’m not sure exactly what I had in mind – it was already several years ago – except that some kind of transformation was going to happen there.

BLDGBLOG: That’s actually one of the things I like so much about your work: you re-imagine cities and buildings and whole landscapes as if they have undergone some sort of potentially catastrophic transformation – be it a war or an earthquake, etc. – but you don’t respond to those transformations by designing, say, new prefab refugee shelters or more durable tents. You respond with what I’ll call science fiction: a completely new order of things – a new way of organizing and thinking about space. You posit something radically different than what was there before. It’s exciting.

Woods: Well, I think that, for instance, in Sarajevo, I was trying to speculate on how the war could be turned around, into something that people could build the new Sarajevo on. It wasn’t about cleaning up the mess or fixing up the damage; it was more about a transformation in the society and the politics and the economics through architecture. I mean, it was a scenario – and, I suppose, that was the kind of movie aspect to it. It was a “what if?”

I think there’s not enough of that thinking today in relation to cities that have been faced with sudden and dramatic – even violent – transformations, either because of natural or human causes. But we need to be able to speculate, to create these scenarios, and to be useful in a discussion about the next move. No one expects these ideas to be easily implemented. It’s not like a practical plan that you should run out and do. But, certainly, the new scenario gives you a chance to investigate a direction. Of course, being an architect, I’m very interested in the specifics of that direction – you know, not just a verbal description but: this is what it might look like.

So that was the approach in Sarajevo – as well as in this drawing of Lower Manhattan, as I called it.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods. Future structures of the Korean demilitarized zone (1988) juxtaposed with two views of the architectonic tip of some vast flooded machine-building, from Icebergs (1991); view larger: top/middle/bottom].

BLDGBLOG: Part of that comes from recognizing architecture as its own kind of genre. In other words, architecture has the ability, rivaling literature, to imagine and propose new, alternative routes out of the present moment. So architecture isn’t just buildings, it's a system of entirely re-imagining the world through new plans and scenarios.

Woods: Well, let me just back up and say that architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, by definition. But, as a multi-disciplinary field, our ideas have to be comprehensive; we can’t just say: “I’ve got a new type of column that I think will be great for the future of architecture.”

BLDGBLOG: [laughs]

Woods: Maybe it will be great – but it’s not enough. I think architects – at least those inclined to understand the multi-disciplinarity and the comprehensive nature of their field – have to visualize something that embraces all these political, economic, and social changes. As well as the technological. As well as the spatial.

But we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right?

So if there’s a dearth of that kind of thinking at the moment, it’s because architects have retreated – and I’m sure a coming generation is going to say: hey, this retreat is not good. We’ve got to imagine more broadly. We have to have a more comprehensive vision of what the future is.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, The Wall Game].

BLDGBLOG: In your own work – and I’m thinking here of the Korean DMZ project or the Israeli wall-game – this “more comprehensive vision” of the future also involves rethinking political structures. Engaging in society not just spatially, but politically. Many of the buildings that you’ve proposed are more than just buildings, in other words; they’re actually new forms of political organization.

Woods: Yeah. I mean, obviously, the making of buildings is a huge investment of resources of various kinds. Financial, as well as material, and intellectual, and emotional resources of a whole group of people get involved in a particular building project. And any time you get a group, you’re talking about politics. To me politics means one thing: How do you change your situation? What is the mechanism by which you change your life? That’s politics. That’s the political question. It’s about negotiation, or it’s about revolution, or it’s about terrorism, or it’s about careful step-by-step planning – all of this is political in nature. It’s about how people, when they get together, agree to change their situation.

As I wrote some years back, architecture is a political act, by nature. It has to do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living. And architecture is a prime instrument of making that change – because it has to do with building the environment they live in, and the relationships that exist in that environment.

 [Image: Lebbeus Woods, Siteline Vienna, 1998; view larger].

BLDGBLOG: There’s also the incredibly interesting possibility that a building project, once complete, will actually change the society that built it. It’s the idea that a building – a work of architecture – could directly catalyze a transformation, so that the society that finishes building something is not the same society that set out to build it in the first place. The building changes them.

Woods: I love that. I love the way you put it, and I totally agree with it. I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events. That’s what you’re saying: That by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator; it becomes an initiator.

That, of course, is what I’ve always promoted – but it’s the most difficult thing for people to do. Architects say: well, it’s my client, they won’t let me do this. Or: I have to do what my client wants. That’s why I don’t have any clients! [laughter] It’s true.

Because at least I can put the ideas out there and somehow it might seep through, or filter through, to another level.

[Image: Lebbeus Woods. A drawing of tectonic faults and other subsurface tensions, from his San Francisco Bay Project, 1995; view larger].

I think in my more recent work, certainly, there are still boundaries. There are still edges. But they are much more porous, and the property lines… [laughs] are even less, should we say, defined or desired.

So the more recent work – like in Vienna, as you mentioned – is harder for people to grasp. Back in the early 90s I was confronting particular situations, and I was doing it in a kind of scenario way. I made realistic-looking drawings of places – of situations – but now I’ve moved into a purely architectonic mode. I think people probably scratch their heads a little bit and say: well, what is this? But I’m glad you grasp it – and I hope my comments clarify at least my aspirations.

Probably the political implication of that is something about being open – encouraging what I call the lateral movement and not the vertical movement of politics. It’s the definition of a space through a set of approximations or a set of vibrations or a set of energy fluctuations – and that has everything to do with living in the present.

All of those lines are in flux. They’re in movement, as we ourselves develop and change.

[Images: Lebbeus Woods, System Wien, 2005; view larger: top/bottom].

• • •

BLDGBLOG owes a huge thanks to Lebbeus Woods, not only for having this conversation but for proving over and over again that architecture can and should always be a form of radical reconstruction, unafraid to take on buildings, cities, worlds – whole planets.
For more images, meanwhie, including much larger versions of all the ones that appear here, don't miss BLDGBLOG's Lebbeus Woods Flickr set. Also consider stopping by Subtopia for an enthusiastic recap of Lebbeus's appearance at Postopolis! last Spring; and by City of Sound for Dan Hill's synopsis of the same event.

Xiaoji Chen

share a link
http://xiaoji-chen.com/blog/

Xiaoji Chen graduated from Tsinghua University, studys at MIT now.

melting space,zoeYEE CHAN

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.
http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2010/10/19/melting-space/#more-10334



      zoeYEE CHAN: Melting Space is a design-manifesto for the iconicity of EXPERIENCE over the object.
      The project brings a moving, fluid world of glass pools into the urban fabric of Manhattan: in contrast and opposition to the self-similar experience of static, orthogonal, and rationally sub-divided space in the gridded city.
      Floating, raining, moving and steaming above an existing tower block in midtown New York, the glass pools bring waterfalls, clouds, movement and drama to the city, creating an escape from the static monoliths below.

Dan Graham

 Graham’s artistic talents have wide variety. His artistic fields consist of film, video, performance, photography, architectural models, and glass and mirror structure. Graham especially focuses on the relationship between his artwork and the viewer in his pieces.

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich is known for installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space. For this exhibition, Erlich presents one of his most well-known and critically acclaimed pieces, Swimming Pool. Speaking about the project, Erlich says: “When I first visited P.S.1, I remember thinking how perfect the Duplex space would be for the installation of Swimming Pool. This space divided the experience of seeing the work perfectly, and in the correct order. Almost ten years since its creation, Swimming Pool is finally in the exhibition space for which I have always felt is so perfectly suited.”

selective works:

Swimming Pool(1990)

La torre (2007)

Window and Ladder - too late for help (2008)

Smoking Room (2006)

The room (Surveillance 1) (2006)

Video-installation 25 flat screen monitors

TSUMARI HOUSE (2006)

这个超赞

links

http://www.leandroerlich.com.ar/works.php?id=27 

M. C. Escher

He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.

Guy Debord,Psychogeographic

from:  http://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/Mapsitu1.htm An example of mapping of atmospheric unities of a city on the basis of ideas of the international Lettrist and Situationist movement. The map of Paris has been cut up in different areas that are experienced by some people as distinct unties  (neighbourhoods). The mentally felt distance between these  areas are visualized by spreading out the pieces of the cut up  map. By wandering, letting onself float or drift (dériver is the  French word used) each person can discover his or her own  ambient unities of a specific city. The red arrows indicate the  most frequent used crossings between the islands of the urban archipel (seperated by flows of motorized traffic).

Guy Debord, 1955 (?) "Psychogeographic guide of Paris: edited by the Bauhaus Imaginiste Printed in Dermark  by Permild & Rosengreen - Discourse on the passions of love: psychogeographic descents of drifting and localisation of ambient unities"

Newyork, I Love You

Love the way it tells stories.
Culture....lives...common people in the big city....
Seeing Newyork from another angle....

Tony Orrico

When people ask him what he does for a living, Tony Orrico (1979, Illinois, US) does not immediately call himself a dancer. However, dance, or perhaps rather movement, is the most important medium by which this many-sided artist covers various artistic areas, either solo or in collaboration with others. But he would be equally justified in calling himself a performer, director, actor, choreographer, or painter and draughtsman. And whatever he is doing, it is almost invariably about breaking down the barriers between choreography and visual art. Among the things Tony Orrico learned when he was working for the Trisha Brown Dance Company and for Shen Wei Dance Arts was using movement as an instrument to create two-dimensional work and dance to create an installation. Earlier this year, he was one of the artists who, in the context of the major retrospective exhibition Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, re-enacted early work by this performance artist at the MoMA, New York. During these ‘durational pieces’, the performers had to stay in a certain position for a very long period of time. The physical stamina needed for this can also be found in his growing number of original works.

The organizing principle underlying Tony Orrico’s work is not so much the discipline involved, with all the accompanying traditions, as the improvisation. His work is usually created live on location. He brings about a certain artificial structure, in which he then embarks on a process, with the end product as the ultimate circumstance of this process. The improvisation is not entirely free. In his work, Orrico examines partly physical, partly man-bound circumstances and conditions for different states of being and change. Movement, measurement, gravity, energy, chaos, efficiency, duration, limitation, repetition and isolation are recurring themes in his work. Sometimes the spectator is merely an observer of the artist’s slightly introverted exploit, at other times he becomes involved in the performance. In Sunken Ship (2009), Orrico danced and acted to the sound of the mobile-phone ring tones of his audience. In other performances the audience hands the artist the modest utensils he makes use of, or it becomes so carried away by the process that it eventually encourages him.

Fundamental material for Orrico’s performances are more and more often his body, virginal sheets of paper and chalk or charcoal. In his performance at Dixon Place (New York, 2009) he smeared various parts of his body with colour and, always from the same angle, kept letting himself fall over to the right, against a sheet of white paper attached to the wall. During his performance at the Red Horse Cafe (New York, 2009), he pivoted round on his knees in a virtually perfect circle on a white sheet of paper, with his arms repetitively moving backwards and forwards against his body. The sticks of graphite that skimmed the paper in this way showed the creation of a circle consisting of hundreds of interlaced lines. Not only the penetrating graphic quality of this work, but also the conceptual challenge emanating from it, is the direct result of a body that ‘expounds’ itself in situ with notions of size, form, idea. The execution invariably shows great mathematical precision, but the challenge of this one-man-spirograph always has an ultimately human aspect. Orrico’s control of his limbs and his physical stamina are the most important assets in his ever longer performances. Some of these last for several hours. And in these cases, the spectator gradually begins to share more and more in Orrico’s increasingly heavy breathing and the exceptional effort required from his arms and legs. The works of art that subsequently form the reflection of his performances not only lastingly document the physical and abstract process, but are first and foremost the magnificent result of a powerful and personal signature in a still relatively young oeuvre.

During Flux/S, it will be possible to see Tony Orrico at work daily. Three performances from his project Penwald can be experienced live. Orrico has characterized these works as drafts. They are the execution and documentation of just one single performance at a particular moment in an ongoing process. It is never finished, always changeable, always dependent on the situation in question. New performances are always possible. Because for Orrico, too, performance art in fact only needs four basic elements: time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between artist and audience. Wherever these are available, a new work of art can be born.

Penwald 4: unison symmetry standing

A three-hour performance in which Orrico draws on a white wall with perfectly orchestrated bilateral movements. Slowly but surely a densely woven symmetrical image emerges, which bears a strong resemblance to the two halves of our brain.

Tony Orricos performances are free of admission.

more lincks

tonyorrico.com

CHORA

这个网站的diagram有点意思

http://www.chora.org/?p=1

Coy Howard

Coy Howard Interview

Oct 12, 2010

by Orhan Ayyüce

from  http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=101781_0_23_0_C 

Coy Howard’s Ellen and Jay McCafferty House in San Pedro was built in 1980, just around the pivotal, transforming times in California architecture. This is when experimentation with form and materials inspired the whole generation of architects as fresh ideas were beaming from Los Angeles. Group of young architects led by Frank Gehry were making buildings with plywood and drywall but were doing them outrageously. It quickly caught on by the students as most of the group were teaching architecture in UCLA and newly opened SCI-Arc.
Unofficially, Coy Howard was the house poet of that dynamic, exploratory and highly mobile group of the moment.

Coy’s biggest contribution was that he connected the philosophy of his architecture to artistic “making.”

Although McCafferty House was one of the most evolved ones of the ground up projects of the genre, it remained elusive to the architectural community and it still keeps its distance.

In one of its rare public appearances, the house was picked up by the ever so architectural connoisseur Charles Moore in his guide to LA architecture, “The City Observed, Los Angeles,” in which Mr. Moore included the McCafferty house among the handful of carefully chosen contemporary homes. I think the only other houses he talked about were Frank Gehry’s own Santa Monica House and Larry Gagosian’s House in Venice that was designed by Robert Mangurian, regarding the particular times.

McCafferty House - was and is - a major work.

Last summer Coy Howard and I drove to McCafferty House in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles. Jay McCafferty, Coy’s client/friend and one of the legendary Cirrus Gallery artists has joined us in the living room. As we sat down around a small round oak table, I thought this could be an interesting conversation between the writer, architect and his artist client, all interchangeable.

I start by asking, “How did you guys meet?”

Jay volunteered to tell how they have met.

“I was having a show at the Santa Barbara Museum in the same time when they were having a show on Five California Architects. And I met Coy and he said that he designed the show, but what I thought he meant is that he curated the show. And he had some connection with the lady, who really curated the show. I was sitting on a large couch talking to some people and I said something disparaging about art collectors and Coy just turned around and walked away. I asked the lady next to me who he was and she said she had no idea. I talked to Coy later at the party wanting to know who he was. Coy introduced himself and said he was a professor at UCLA. I later needed to find out about some California architects for my house, and still thinking that Coy had curated the show, I tried to find him and had to call UCLA to get Coy’s phone number. I asked Coy if he knew the local scene or knew of any California architects and Coy mentioned himself. We met later that same day and Coy began drawing stuff that I never imagined could be drawn. Coy’s pre-post-modern style impressed me since my architecture training only went up to modernism.

Orhan Ayyuce: Do you agree with that terminology about pre-post modern?

Coy Howard: Oh, I never think about that kind of stuff.

Jay McCafferty: But when he showed me the drawings, and when we started designing the place, it was like, ok…and to this day when he shows me shit, you still can’t tell what it is because you’ve never seen it.



Orhan: So I guess this has a lot to do with the way you work? Jay gave me that little video/CD, and I was watching it when you guys were building the garden. It was very interesting to watch, you know, how you work because most architects just kind of show up with shirt and tie and they don’t do things with their hands.

Coy: I have no idea what you guys are talking about. (chuckles)

Orhan: We’re talking about you working with the craftsmen building these garden walls and the way that you are working with them was very organic. You were communicating a process with real time drawings, or by moving from one location to the other, describing it in words and getting them excited about your directions….

Coy: No, I make no distinction in between those things.

Orhan: To me, it is like psychological and creative hitchhiking to get there… constantly processing and moving with the installation, but still vulnerable to getting it right.

Coy: Well, I think it’s a matter of … well there’s certainly the certain issue of communication with myself. I don’t necessarily know where something comes from. It just comes down to a feeling of what seems right because it’s all to me about some sort of appropriateness psychologically of what I think is right, but also in terms of psychologically what I think needs to be delivered. And that’s a very complex internal thing for me. It’s not a simple thing. It’s not about concepts, it’s about feeling and what might be necessary to communicate those expressions. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s an old material or a new material or whether it’s beautifully crafted; it’s just about whether it’s necessary.



Orhan: Is there any one particular feel that you have more of a tendency to work with as opposed to any others?

Coy: Yes definitely. I think it has more to do with a certain kind of ambiguity, and the ambiguity has to do primarily with creating two things. Number one: creating a sort of enigmatic presence in the work that is basically non-identifiable as a concept. And the second has to do with the enigmatic mystery that gets created by that and essentially opens the work up to possibilities for another person. It’s not something that you can look at and read consistently, it’s a lot of jumps and inconsistencies in the work. In terms of how other people might work, for me, those inconsistencies and those gaps and those transformations are really what demand, first of all, they seduce you because they provoke curiosity. And secondly, they open the work up to interpretation. Any good work to me has a kind of dynamic to it and the enigmatic presence is always there. When it’s concept based, you can always understand the concept and when it’s not concept based, it’s always more lucid.

Orhan: One is more rational, one is more sensorial? I bet you if I asked Jay the same question, he would say something similar since this is like the classic tone of describing any kind of art making.

Coy: The way he describes it, I would say is so beautifully articulated because I’ve worked with him and he’s say “oh no we’re not going to do that” and I’d say “well why” and he’d say “we’ll because it’s too ordinary.”



Jay: Mine’s a little dorky. I’m reading Art21 and now they have a series where they’re letting artists talk about their work….Good god…The only one that comes close is Jeff Koons but you don’t understand what he’s talking about. He’s very articulate. Everyone else, it’s like, how dumb can they say this.
And what I would say to Coy is that he just said that he just doesn’t like things that look like things. Before working with him, I thought I can go to any architect and they’ll be just as good, but that’s not the case. Usually an architect will get one idea and they build everything around that one idea, and they could hand it to anybody and they could do it. When you look at a building, you can say, ok, they did that one. I was in Dallas, I just couldn’t believe the one liners. I couldn’t believe that architects were allowed to take just one idea and build a building with it. It’s not complex.
I’m not trying to be a critic….(laughter.)



Orhan: So, how many ideas are in this house? (laughter.)

Coy: I don’t really know because I don’t look at things as ideas, I look at them as moments where something needs to be done. So it’s a much more direct kind of process. It’s not just about an idea. I might be over articulated later as an idea. But it wasn’t an idea at the moment of creation when I was doing it. It was just a thought process of oh it needs more symmetry, it needs more texture, it needs more work in order to create the kind of feeling or tone or sort of psychological moment that I wanted to have.

Jay: Coy may not even know that he’s done and subsequently the remodels have gone way more complicate, but it’s this step-down idea, in a way it’s almost like a gun shooting. If you look at the outdoors…… It was parallel. The idea was brought into the garden. If you look at the pattern on that way, there’s no pattern. There are rules…..like a solid piece….

Orhan: To me it’s very poetic structure, for example, a poet writing the words at the length of his breath. I think of it as a poetic checkpoint for the structural essence of its continuity…. That’s how I read the lines going from one space to the other. Then it continues into Max Palevsky House.



Coy (interjects): There’s a poetic technique called ‘enjambment’ and enjambment is where you have a line where the thought that it contains stops and then that thought is picked up in the next line, so in the reading of the poem, you basically have to pull around to the next line. I’m very concerned with the idea of variability and how elements can beckon to other elements and how some incomplete gesture or some particular gestures encourages the eye to move on to something else. To me, when Jay talks about ideas and when you talk about these gestural movements, it’s really about visual movements. You try to provide within the work, enough visual movements so the eye never stops moving. But at the same time, it’s cognitive moves because you’re having to reorganize how you think about the space and yourself within the space relative to that visual movement, and also what things are. You know, is it just a staircase or is it something else as well as a staircase? There’s two kinds of movements that I try to build into the work.



Orhan: Which brings me to an interesting point. In architecture specifically, these things are very difficult distances to navigate. For example, from what you said, the feeling of the space has certain requirements of what the space is going to be. For example, let’s say a function works as the expression in simpler terms. So, how to you approach those things? Because you take it to that maximum. Where ever it can go, you’d take it there and you don’t stop. You don’t say, well this is done. It’s almost open-ended.

Coy: Well, function has all sorts of different dimensions to it. It’s not, “well, oh can you perform this different activity that this space was created for but does that space in some ways celebrate that activity?” And does that space also have some kind of variability so that it can have a life in other ways so that space can be reinterpreted. Every space in this building could basically be used in some other way. The configurations are very generous and they allow lots of different things. I tend to try to think about things as having multiple capabilities - what I refer to in my studio as “manifoldness.”

Orhan: Manifoldness?

Coy: Yes, there’s a multiplicity, a manifold quality to things as opposed to a singularity to things, so pretty much everything I do challenges the idea of singularity. I like the dynamic multiplicity in terms of interpretation, in terms of use. Like that staircase is a staircase, but also the way it’s done is also as a seating arrangement for the house. It also becomes part of the kitchen so you can set things on it in the kitchen. It functions in many different ways depending on whatever you need.



Jay: If you look at the cabinets, they’re not functional in the sense that you could use them but they are functional in the sense that you could put things in them that you didn’t use often. And then they become a piece of sculpture on top of that. (gives example of the …museum where an aspect in the elevator looked like an ashtray and people just assumed that it was an ashtray so the elevators eventually filled up with cigarette butts)

Orhan: There’s something very interesting about the process in this house and I’m sure that’s like other projects that you’ve worked on. There’s a peculiar continuity about this house that’s been here for 30 years now and you’re still able to come back here and add things to it. To me, that’s the fluid definition of architecture. It has nothing to do with the shapes or the forms, but with how the space is lived through and how it continues on. Am I close to something here?

Coy: Yes, it’s called potentiality. Potentiality is for the thing to continually engender transformational qualities in terms of how it’s used and how it can manifest itself in different guises. Part of the way in which that happens here are things can have certain enigmatic presence but they can also have an idea of some sort of abstract incompleteness. Abstract incompleteness invites completion. You never want to complete it because then it wouldn’t invite that anymore. So it’s always open-ended to that and that goes back to what I said earlier in that because it’s abstract, it’s partially referential in that it conjures up and seduces people to make the associations. Conjures up analogical thinking processes.
And that’s a very important part of it for me that basically carries a lot of memories and activates certain desires – the desire for completion. And the memories suggest all sorts of other presences and all sorts of other histories.

Orhan: I think that point of view is really interesting because you never have to struggle for new art. Your art is always new…

Coy: (chuckles) Yes, in certain ways that’s true because it defies closure. I don’t think you should strive to make anything new, I think you should strive to make something strange. Because new is only new for how long?

Jay: How many things look old today? This is the only house that’s held up. So many things in the 70’s that were “modern,” look terrible. They didn’t hold up, but this one still looks good.



Orhan: So what other specific things about this house became references for you?

Coy: Oh, everything. At the time I did this house, I was working on five other houses. None of them got built except for this one. With different houses, I was exploring different ways of the qualities I wanted to capture, so they were all very different in terms of that. It was very different in terms of this house because of the incredible restrictions in terms of the site. The site was only 25 feet wide, very narrow, and only 140ft long. It was very, very restrictive and the coastal commission and the building FAR was very restrictive, so it was all about, oh well how do I potentially deal with that? But also how do I deal with Jay’s aesthetic of burning and creative destruction and creating pattern. So those were all things to think about. And I just showed you drawings of all this new work. Everything in those drawings is in this house. There’s nothing new there in terms of an underlying formal gesture that is not already in this house. The ultimate intention about how to make something has not changed for me. The quality hasn’t changed for me at all. The materials have changed, the budgets have changed, the actual level of sophistication with my ability to detail something has changed, and the basic understanding of materials has changed. But the basic aesthetic and underlying aesthetic idea I used in this house, I still use in all my work today, because they are basically what I call principles. It’s not a style, it’s a principle.

Orhan: Can you explain more specifically what those principles are?

Coy: Yeah, sure. It always deals with multiplicity of opposites, so there’s basically a sense of symmetrical asymmetry or asymmetrical symmetry so things are always blended together. The underlying principle behind that is that most of the things we experience or encounter doesn’t exist in singularity, they exist in multiplicity and they exist as opposites. Our consciousness is based on that notion in terms of our intuitive understanding and grasp of the world. So a fundamental part of our existence is based upon this fusion of opposites and how these opposites feed each other to produce transformational dynamics. That’s almost always the principle. How do I find a way to embody as many oppositions as a coherent dynamic of transformation not as a juxtaposition. Some architects intend to be provocative by using opposites as juxtapositions. I don’t really like provocative gestures. I respond more to the deeper way where oppositions are fused together, as opposed to the more juxtapositional way most people use.

Orhan: It’s more organic in that case then? I don’t want to use that word in a sense of the current argument in some architectural circles but as more of a philosophical development of the idea.

Coy: Yeah, the word “organic” sort of connotates the more contemporary free forms and I personally don’t like that word. But I certainly do like the word “dynamic” and I like the word “natural” and the word “hybrid”. All of those words work better for me.

Jay: I guess people reject the word “organic” out right because they don’t understand it.

Orhan: Yes, the word organic mostly refers to commerce nowadays. Organic food, organic tee shirt, but Coy knows how I meant it, and you do too. It’s always been a gauge for me to look as people’s work and see their motivations. If you look at the space they created, you can tell the amount of life they have and that space gives them an identity. I know a lot of architects that will work on something for eight hours and say, we’ll I’m going to charge this much…. It is that much their space…

Coy: Yeah, we do that (sarcastically)

Orhan: Yeah right. (laughs)

Jay: I bought this lot for 20 grand because my parents threatened me that if I continued the way I was going I was going to end up a bum on Beacon Street. A lot anywhere else in this city would have been three times as expensive. Literally I was a lifeguard and a part-time teacher. I wasn’t even married at the time. And we just put this thing together for under a hundred grand, I think, when we first started. And his fee should have been that much. (At this point Coy and Jay begin to joke about trading artwork to each other laughing)

Coy: 30 years later I still haven’t gotten my fee!

Orhan: In the beginning, did you give him artwork?

Jay: In the beginning that was part of it. Not that he liked my work as much at the time, but I was a client. I think Coy likes my work now. At least I assume he does.

Coy: Um hmm. (agrees)



Jay: And, I obviously respect his. There way a guy that framed his house. He was a really good framer, an Oki kind of a guy, but a great framer. Because anybody that looks at this house, they say, that they didn’t know that they were going to have to go up one wall that was 60 feet. There’s two kinds of guys in this world. There’s people that do stuff for money, and then there’s Charles Manson. It was because he said that this was crazy. Nobody would design like this. This is a crazy person. Someone that would just design to make money and go to the river on the weekend just to get drunk. This is just crazy.

Orhan: Coy, is there anything in particular that you would state about this house?

Coy: It would probably have more to do with Jay. I mean, the house is just a vehicle for our friendship and a great sense of shared values and a shared sense of what stuff can mean in life, what stuff means. Not in the sense of use-function, but what they mean as a certain spiritual…. So, in that sense I was extremely fortunate to have met Jay and I feel extremely lucky that I’ve had him as a friend for 30 years. And the house has been an excuse for that sort of friendship.



Orhan: The houses are interesting buildings. They are different, let’s say, than a commercial building because you have that first-hand relationship with the person that’s going to live in the house.

Coy: And that everyone I’ve ever worked for, I’ve done repeated work for. There’s never been a client that I’ve only had briefly, I continue to do work for everyone.

Orhan: Do you ever wonder why you don’t have your own office now with 50 people working on buildings all across the country.

Coy: Of course, Jay and I talk about that. Jay says it’s because I’m just an asshole. (laughs.) Yes, I think it’s been my responsibility. I wouldn’t blame that on any rationale outside of myself. I think it has to do again with the way that I find personal satisfaction in the work. I mean I have had 6 or 8 or 10 people working for me and I have just found that I enjoy doing so much of the work myself. I enjoy the intimacy of doing the work. I enjoy the intimacy of watching my mind work, the intimacy of going into my shop and figuring out how to do something. (Coy then described some of the woodwork in the house as how he had to experiment with it himself before he sent it off to a fabricator and how the fabricator was the same guy that built the stealth bomber).



Orhan: Those are the people that are the most difficult to find.

Coy: Oh yeah, some of the pieces for that are so big that they couldn’t fit in his shop.

Jay: Oh I didn’t know you went there?

Coy: Oh yeah, it was so big that he had to take his front window of his shop out so to mill the wood he had to hang it out that window and pull it back in again.

Orhan: Did Jack Brogan do any of this here? He had a shop here in San Pedro. He did some of Gehry's early cardboard chair prototypes...

Coy: He did that handle there.

Orhan: On the rail?

Coy: Yeah, the one that goes to the roof. That’s basically all Jack did. Jack was the artist’s craftsman. To give you an example of Jack, he would go to the phonebook and look for somebody with a Christian reference. He thought if they were Christian then they’d have to be good. Then he’d have them do the work and then he’d bring it back to his shop to clean it up because he knew what clean lines were about. (Laughing)



Orhan: I know him pretty well.. Your work is highly well done. How do you maintain that kind of focus on the work?

……Long pause……

Coy: I think it’s a matter of what you care about, you know?

Orhan: I didn’t use the word obsessive with you because you are not an obsessive person.

Jay: No, I think he’s different from most architects because he gets things so plastic. He gets parts of the whole to where if you needed to throw in a drainage pipe and it hadn’t been part of the original idea… I’ve almost watched his head explode…he agonized over how to do that. I think if you got a guy like Frank Gehry and said you needed a mail box there, he’s just ask where you needed it and stick it there. I think of Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright picks one thing and then repeats it all over. Coy’s plasticity is at least three things, not two, not one. But he gets them going. They’re all plastic and they all relate to each other. So if you juggle one out of place and say, oh I need a door handle here. You could wait 30 years for it. Coy’s stubborn, and I probably know that better than anybody. And I love that because that’s integrity. He isn’t traditionally successful but that door opened him up to sensibilities that he’s developed. If he ran a big office full of 100 people, he wouldn’t have been able to do all these great things in such great detail.

Coy: Ok, going back to the question about 20 people or 30 people or whatever, I could say that I’d like to have more buildings in the world. I’d like to have that level of professionalism…I’d like that. The thing essentially is to explore my creative impulses in lots of different ways. One of the things that few people know is that I’ve got graphics in the Museum of Modern Art, I have furniture in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, and other museums.



Orhan: And ceramics here in LACMA?

Coy: Oh no, those ceramics aren’t mine, I did the room. And I write, so I’ve got these short stories I’ve written in a book that coming out and some haiku poems.

Orhan: When is the book of short stories coming out?

Coy: Whenever I get around to designing it. I’ve got all the stories written, now I have to get around to designing the book.

Orhan: How short are they?

Coy: Oh they’re short, they’re like a page.

Orhan: Oh, could I publish one? That’s very interesting to me that you did that.

Coy: Sure, you could publish one. I think that art and architecture is an epiphenomenon. And what I mean by that is that it’s really what the name we give to the aesthetic experience you have in built form. It’s not a thing. It’s the assemblage or the experience. And that varies for different people. If that’s right, then the way you trigger that experience in people should be able to happen in many different ways. So the stories are based upon activating a bunch of different sense modalities and situations that create the possibility of having that kind of experience.
If, in fact, you look at a building and it creates certain association in your mind, it gives it a certain richness and certain depth of emotional experience. There’s also probably a set of words that can do the same thing, and trigger that association and trigger that same thing. These things are crafted very carefully in terms of what words are chosen and what the line widths are. They are more like prose points really. They are as nuanced as I can make them and created by the same sensibility. It’s just that the expressive modality is different, and that goes back to the issue. I’ve had a very creative life, but it hasn’t manifested itself in one singular professional mode.

Orhan: That’s the way you are?

Coy: Exactly.