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Interview with Anthony Lumsden page 4
V5: How do you see the role of the architect changing in the next 25 years?
AL: Well, architects like Rogers and Foster seem to have satisfied a need
in clients that I guess I hadn't seen. There is a recognition that good buildings are important to the city. Apart from that I would have been very concerned about architecture in the next 20 years. In Los Angeles it's pretty dead. It's ridiculous with all the problems we have here, and the lack of visual interest in the communities, that there's nothing going on. To me that means that the architects are not satisfying a need. Somewhere like Bilbao they saw that they had a need: maybe they just see it as a special building, but architects can make that happen in a city. The profession is in trouble if the AIA just keeps on recognizing things that deal with what post-modern was, or things that are not accessible to the public.
V5:What do you think those needs are, that architecture can address?
AL:Things that make good solutions have to do with what makes interesting
volumes, either internal or external, or interesting silhouettes, and places that people can go. Buildings that respond to light in a particular way. All the things that produce wonderful cities are incremental additions, so that the individuality of shapes is absolutely reduced. You get these shapes as erosions, these incremental shapes that make all of these variations in size and shape.
V5:I was going to ask next, are there regional conditions in Los Angeles
that effect your work, but now you're doing so much work in Korea - let's ask then, did you spend much time in Korea before you started to do buildings there? And when you visit there, what kinds of things are you paying attention to that influence your work?
AL: No, I didn't spend a lot of time in Korea. We had a joint venture with
a local architectural firm, and we were lucky enough to win a few competitions. Some of the competitions may be the result of inside favors, but ours was the superior solution, without any doubt.
Their competitions are good - they were for things like an airport, a skating rink, and an energy center. So we won those and then were lucky enough to have an interface with a guy on the Dae Wang project, and we were able to show him how they can save three million dollars on the parking system - they had just made an incorrect calculation. Sometimes in Korea when you build certain parts of the building above grade, for example, a parking structure above grade, it takes away from the leasable space you can develop. So they'd analyzed that on that site and it was incorrect, but the previous guy didn't know it. So just on excavation, instead of going down twelve floors or so, they went down six floors and we saved them a hell of a lot of money. So they gave us a shot at the building on that basis. We had a few situations there like that, it wasn't knowing people there so much as the fact that we had the joint ventures, a few competitions, and they gave us the jobs.
V5: You're adding value through your expertise.
AL: Yes, one of the contracting firms on one job saw that and then gave us an opportunity on something else.
V5: Well, what percentage of your work is over in Korea now?
AL: About 90%.
V5: When you go there, are you trying to get some special feeling for the place, or the cities, and whatever conditions are there? What kind of conditions there influence what you're doing?
AL: It's not an easy society to work in. Their society went through, as I think most Americans are still going through, a preference for things that organize the world. One of Frank's problems is that he is doing buildings that dis-organize the world. But most societies, if you go to Paris or Washington, are now in this battle.
V5: Classical Korean architecture is extraordinary, when you look at the roof forms, the plan order...
AL: I don't think it's extraordinary compared to Europe. In 1905 in Korea they were building buildings like they were building in 1650 in Europe. Architecture in Korea was derived out of Chinese culture; they don't like to say that, but it was. If you look at Europe, and go to any secondary European town, you'll see Renaissance or Gothic buildings that can't be compared to anything in Asia. In Europe there was a transmission of extraordinary new ideas, whether it was in architecture or music or literature or justice or law - it's just a completely different society. It's not that the people are inferior in any way, it's just that the culture has a particular attitude about power and tradition and change. And change means undermining authority.
V5: What advice would you give someone entering the field of architecture today?
(Laughs) Well, I have a son who's in architecture. I think the profession isn't sufficiently honored at all. The client has too much power. It's OK to serve the client, but it's another thing to have the client make arbitrary decisions about things that he doesn't understand. You're absolutely at the mercy of people who are uninformed. It's like Picasso painting for someone who's sitting in front of him and wants to tell him where to put the brush strokes. They talk about television selecting programs that have been pre-tested, and make money by following all these formulas. But those people are bright people, and widely exposed people, in television. But you get someone who's exposed to something for the first time like many clients do, and how is he supposed to understand something that an architect has been disciplining himself for 15 or 20 years to do? An architect is really practicing a very particular faith by that time. Most architects are practicing a very particular religion. It is not an easy thing at all.
Most architects are in for a lot of disappointment. You know, even for Frank - it hasn't changed. (Louis) Sullivan was 20 years without a commission, I believe: (Charles Rennie) Mackintosh went 15 or 20 years without a commission. (Frank Lloyd) Wright didn't get many commissions, he did a lot of houses. It's a difficult profession to get work in. I guess what I'm saying is that if architects can at least show when they get a job that they can do something to help the client and help the city, that makes a difference. Even in Frank's case. There's no way Frank would have gotten a Disney Hall if he didn't have the connections, or people who'd been previously exposed to his work, basically pulling for him.
He does it because people in power are willing to trust him to do the job. Not because they really understand. I mean, I can look at half the paintings in the Museum of Modern Art right now to know that the curators are screwing up somewhere, because half of them are not good!
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