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Interview with Anthony Lumsden page 2
V5: What can students learn from reviewing the body of architectural projects that you have completed?
AL: Many of our buildings are really quite minor.
V5: Minor in scale, or in accomplishments?
AL: Minor in accomplishments. Partly they're minor because they're done with respect to control, maybe correctly controlling the situation. The absolute distinction between some of the aesthetic aspects of a building, and the organizational aspects of a building. That's very different from the way many architects approach it. The other thing is what I said about mutation (see Quantitative Systems).
I think a lot of our architecture has to do with something that's unexpected, or something where aesthetic rules are interpreted differently. I have a thing about trebiated buildings. Trebiated buildings are basically related to bearing walls. Most of the aesthetic systems that have been used up until ten years ago, and even today, are trebiated systems where the gravitational mass is just transferred to the ground and goes back to what the structure needs to do. In actual fact, structure used to consist of things like a four foot long span between columns, with the columns themselves being quite dense or bearing walls. Today, however, the columns are like that (moves his hands very far apart). So the infill is not definite. You've got material that will do tension systems - shapes which before you'd have to put on top of the building, (moves his hands to describe a round void) could not occur farther down on the building because you couldn't transfer the load. Shapes like domes, etc. that had to occur at the top of a building, now can occur here or here or here or here (shows that a void could be in the middle or bottom of a building).
It's possible to make a building that's not trebiated at all, where the surfaces are not vertical or rectilinear. I'll say something very ambitious. The system of our projects for the hotel in Beverly Hills and the system of Bel Labs is a system related to what Frank (Gehry) is doing in Bilbao. But our projects were 20 years ago. The combination of curved surfaces - Frank is learning that now, what a curved surface will do. He used to do shapes that just clashed together and distorted, ordinary things. But now he's doing things that relate to a clearly-defined separation of visual quality and geometric form. It is in part a derivation of a Corbusian system. One of the things that students could see looking at our work is that we were playing that game quite a while ago.
V5: What particular project have you learned the most from?
AL: I don't think there's one particular project. The projects that were most important were a series from about 1972-1974. Best, Nagano, and hotel we did for Beverly Hills. Fundamentally, they are extruded buildings. The shape varies any way you like, but it can actually work on a modular system in plan, so that although this (sectional) variation is quite extraordinary, because it's repeated (in the plan configuration) you can make it quite cheap because it's added to itself incrementally. You can also work with it and manufacture it very easily.
V5: What kinds of opportunities or constraints do you think an architect has working in a corporate firm, like DMJM?
AL: He has ridiculous constraints. Some corporate firms are design firms, like Pei's office, and some are management firms. In management firms you have to be very careful, as I've discussed already. As long as you respond to traffic signals and parking signs, you can drive where you want to. A person has to have that discipline to respond to the traffic signals and the other regulations that minor people in the firm have. One of the problems of a firm like that is if you have your name on the firm, then you have control over personnel. If you don't, a person who answers to another person can sabotage practically anything. When I was with DMJM, the thing that protected me was awareness of things that helped him with public recognition outside the office. Inside the office, there are a thousand people who could have eaten you alive every day, out of jealousy or whatever.
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