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Susan Lanier Interview - Page 2
SL- My first year I'd say it was Michael Rotondi. He speaks with such passion about practically anything. He really is interesting, and when he talks he can just take you away to some place.
v5- He's a wonderful story teller.
SL- Oh! A fantastic story teller. I could just sit and listen to him for
hours. Robert Irwin has that capacity too, when he used to do those fire side chats... Michael is truly an inspiration, and I think he gave me the gift of seeing myself as an architect. I'll be forever grateful to him for that.
v5- I guess there is no greater praise for a teacher.
SL- I had a really good group of people that first year, Michael,
Heather Kerse, Albert Pope and Chris Dawson. They were so radically different from each other, and they didn't try to homogenize the instruction. You would jerk from Heather to Jon depending on who you talked to (laughing) and that was truly wonderful, actually.
v5 - Really? Did all the students feel that way? Or did that process make a lot of students resent the instructional process? Because it can be so uncomfortable...
SL- Oh yes, and you know you have to somehow resolve this. So yes, I find it is a love and hate situation because it's so frustrating. There is a fear that you will lose your way. What it teaches you is a process, about understanding and reforming and learning and then building on that yourself. Making it yours somehow. And I found that the process, however irrational it may have seemed and sometimes even painful, was really wonderful.
In retrospect, it ended up being a little bit like boot camp, that total
immersion.
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v5 - Do you find yourself continually going back to environmental art and installation art as a source?
SL-Yes, I think so. I had an opportunity to do this in a courseI taught, it must have been 89 at SCI-Arc, for beginning students in second year, about looking at the parallels of process in thinking among different artists, such as dancers or sculptors, and how to kind of suspend your assumptions about what you are seeing long enough to actually see it clearly.
You begin to see the way ideas are molded and brought forth. How they examine an idea and explore. There is just so much resonance between all kinds of creative disciplines and architecture. I find it tremendously useful to be looking around at other disciplines.
v5 - How do you make that transfer from what you see in art to an
architectural composition?
SL- That's a tough one to answer. At least for me, it seems to plant seeds about process, about a way of looking at something. This is just a small example, but I remember this one exhibit that I took the students to see. It was a Michael Macmillan exhibit, some of his early stuff. The works were primarily wall pieces of small buildings that had all the attributes of human habitation without any kind of physical evidence. They realized a kind of a metaphor of life that could be rendered in material and form or just through the way you look out a window or a door. Those ideas I think in a lot of ways make me look
twice at how I'm seeing. Particularly with residential work.
Environmental work often looks at the blurring between the boundaries of being contained and being within the environment. Making a barrier more diffuse has always been of interest to us. I
see that playing with those boundaries happens within the realm of light/space artist in particular. I was thinking about Robert Irwin's work. We saw a piece that Irwin did in an exhibit in New York. It was a series of screens, and it was extremely architectural. It was about the layering of space within a sort of diffuse frame and how that experience alters.The ideas about transparency and how they were built into the space were great. It's hard because it makes you start looking differently at your own work.
v5 - It seems that so much environmental art or installation art is
almost so "pure" that it is fragile in its abstractness. You know, if
one person is already in an installation space and you enter that space, the illusion becomes distorted or there is this other shadow or something that breaks the controlled system. There is a kind of harsh purity of it - it's hard to bring it back into an architectural realm where you don't always have the kind of "author control base" that a gallery offers.
SL- Right
v5 - It seems that a lot of time it is very difficult to make that sort
of shift or transfer. Some of the large works such as the "Lighting
Field" or "Double Negative" and other sort of large earth pieces... If one house is built in the wrong place or one car is parked in the wrong spot, it is over! It throws the sort of beauty, the perception way off. In a strange way it's interesting how strong something can be at one level and how fragile it can be at another.
SL- Yes, I think you hit on something, and actually the pieces that
intrigue me the most are the pieces that do allow themselves to change with their surround. Part of this surround actually has to do with habitation and the changes of the day and all. Basically the way you respond to them, and what they give to you, can be completely different at different times.
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