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MM: Yes, pretty much. Most of the quantifiable, documented work to actually get it built happens on the computer. But the real visual issues happen on the model, even to the point of picking color in the projects. Our presentations often happen that way, with photographs of the models which we often collage into specific sites or contexts. But
again, it really comes back to that tactility.
This goes back to issues in my work that have been germinating or bubbling for a number of years, really since my undergraduate thesis.
That was in 1985, when Post Modernism had a real hold on what architecture was. I was at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and I was very interested in the city and how buildings could work in their context. At the time the people who had a hold on urban theory were Colin Rowe and Fred Kotter, books like Collage City, and Rob Krier.
What disturbed me about that was that most people were taking a kind of God's eye view of the city, looking at things at a two-dimensional
level, in plan, and then manipulating the fabric of the city from that level. They looked at precedents like Noli maps [Renaissance-era maps of Rome] for reinforcement that they were on the right track. The problem was that it seemed completely distant from the way that cities are normally built, which is through a much slower aggregation of pieces.
Los Angeles, however, is made of a very dynamic, democratic series of parts that were put together based on a whole range of factors. There was not an architect moving the pieces. So I started to look at ways that one might be able to proceed with working in the city that were not necessarily normal to architecture. I ended up spending a lot of
time reading Richard Serra's writings and looking at his work. What was interesting to me was that most people looked at his work at that time as
a purely sculptural object, a kind of very elegant, beautiful moment that was also very aggressive at times. What was much more interesting
to me was that his work did not have so much to do with itself, but everything to do with its context. It had everything to do with the way a piece like Shift ran along on a straight line and you saw the
topography of the ground moving up and down, working as a barometer to allow the viewer to understand what was happening. You had to move
around the piece and participate in it to get the sense of it.
Tilted Arc, the piece in front of the Federal Building in New York that was taken down, was another great example. If you actually spent time with that piece, you realized that you were seeing Modernism in the Federal Building, the nineteenth century in the cast iron buildings, and the early part of that century in some of the brownstones that surround the work. All of those had a relationship back to this individual piece of sculpture. It was like a looking glass, and a very democratic telescope to what all these surrounding pieces were. I was starting to wonder if architecture could do the same thing and could play that role.
So I did my thesis project, which was for a university campus in the middle of Boston. It was a very complex site. The Massachusetts turnpike came under it, a number of roads ran diagonally through it, and it was at a split between the grid of the south end from downtown Boston. The entire project started to develop a kind of language, a sculptural and functional relationship to its individual parts, which you could only discover by moving around the campus. That is how you accumulate a series of experiences that added up to something that made sense. The buildings both framed views and created views that gave you important visual connections to very specific instances in the surrounding contexts. I realized that you could only represent that in a truthful and honest way by doing it three-dimensionally. The school was prejudiced towards drawings, so I drew many perspectives, but I did not present any plans. The plans were in the perspectives because you could see them lightly constructed. It infuriated people because there was not an easy way into the project. So when I first started working with actual tactile, three-dimensional models, it did not seem like a radical break but rather a natural next step in the process of making
buildings.
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Harvard/West lake School
General Contractor: Weinstein Construction
Project Manager: Project Development Group
Structural Engineer: King Benioff Steinmann King
Electrical Engineer: V&M Electrical Engineering, Inc.
Lighting Consultant: LAM Partners, Inc.
Landscape Architect: Nancy Goslee Power & Associates
Acoustical Engineer: Martin Newsom
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Inner-City Arts
Architects:
Project Design Architect: Michael Maltzan Architecture
Project Architect:Marm al & Radziner Architecture -Leonardo Marmol Project Assistants-; Megan Dayton, Chris Shanley, Jared Levy.
Structural Engineers: Decoma Industries Mehrzad Givechi Levine-Seegal Associates-Mark Seegal,
Mechanical/Ele ctrical Engineers: Gary Dunn, Anil Shinde
Landscape Architect: Nancy Goslee Power and Associates
Contractors:
Decoma Industries (main building and courtyard);
Pacific Southwest Development (ceramics building)
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V5: When Zaha Hadid was teaching at the Architectural Association, she was doing the Peak competition in Hong Kong and everything was done in perspective. It was all about drawing "moments" and the guiding artifacts were all perspective. But the systems of the creation were not perspective at all, it was an interesting sort of flipping and spinning.
MM: Although she has not built very much, her images and perspectives are incredibly seductive and brilliant. That leads people to imagine that those projects would only remain at that kind of level in the drawings, that when something was built it would be like pulling back the curtain. I feel the Vitra firehouse in Weil Am Rhein really dispelled the idea that it was just paper architecture, though. That it is in fact a very gorgeous building, and as intense as the drawings in many ways.
V5: Three fourth-year students of mine saw it last summer and said, "Oh my god, it looks so great!" But I haven't seen it yet.
MM: It's that way with all buildings, you imagine what they are like, and when you see them you realize it's completely different. That is one of the other reasons I was so interested in perspective, and then in modeling. It's what made me realize that perspectives and drawings were not correct to what I was trying to achieve. They were almost there, but not really right. I remember seeing a film called "Beyond Utopia" in my last year of undergraduate school. It had four architects: Meier, Graves, Eisenman and Gehry. I knew very little about Gehry's work at the time, just what I had seen in photographs. In his segment they showed an interview with him, showing the buildings that he was talking about, moving around and filming the buildings. They were at Loyola University,
which looks like a very flat, elementary building compared to what he is doing now. They were moving the camera on a dolly, perhaps ten feet
around the large, orange classroom building. In that moment I realized that I didn't know a thing about that building, everything that I had believed about it was completely incorrect. The sense of proportion, of depth, of the way the materials worked, the details and the context was completely wrong. It really shook my faith in everything I had been learning, even in architectural history classes. You realize that all of those images were such privileged, political views of what the thing was.
V5: Picture making.
MM: Exactly. It made me at the time a little disheartened, but in the end it was very valuable because it made me realize that you could not
trust those images. You could only form your opinions about buildings by actually going and seeing them and understanding them at that level.
Like the cliché of everybody going into the building and saying, "God, it's so much smaller than I imagined it" (laughs). In some ways, how great that is.
V5: Have you been able to travel and really get out there?
MM: Lately, not so much (laughs).
V5: I mean, as part of your education were you able to get away from the history books?
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