Archinect Sessions One-to-One – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Tired of all those repetitive Pritzker-prediction lists? Always those same, predictable bigly names, and when was the last time they actually got it right? It's time to cut through all the crap and go straight to the source to get the info — the ones who operate at a higher level than any listicle or explainer-piece could. So we asked a psychic.

After a quest to find a future-seer who would let me record the reading, I (Amelia) ventured deep into the depths of Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood and sat for 15 minutes with a psychic named Mary. She gave me the following tarot reading, responding to two questions: What are going to be the major concerns for architecture in 2017, and who’s going to win the Pritzker? Find out the answers in this season finale of One-to-One.

After this, One-to-One will be going on indefinite hiatus for 2017. In the meantime, we'd love to hear your feedback on the show — things you liked, disliked, ways to improve, and people you'd like us to interview. Send any One-to-One thoughts to us via connect@archinect.com or through Twitter, @archsessions. Here's to 2017, and thanks for listening!

Shortly after Grafton Architects won RIBA's inaugural International Prize for their UTEC campus in Lima, Peru, I spoke with the firm's director, Yvonne Farrell, to get the backstory to the project and discuss how the award might affect the firm in the long run. As an academic building, UTEC joins a rich collection of other institutional projects by the Dublin-based Grafton.

Steven Holl is globally renowned for monumental works that specifically invoke light, color and porosity in both programmatic and aesthetic ways. Holl can also be thought of as an artist’s architect—his firm has done work for many arts institutions, he methodically sketches his projects in watercolors, and his style is heavily influenced by art practice and theory. He’s also very interested in the phenomenology of architecture—how it’s sensed by humans, and its impact on our existence.

We spoke in a totally unremarkable conference room at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the day before Holl was scheduled to give a keynote presentation for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture’s conference.

Tomas Koolhaas is a filmmaker in Los Angeles, whose most recent project, a documentary about his father Rem, recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. REM follows its titular architect around the world, visiting his projects and investigating their human impact. Aware of his special perspective on the film's subject, Tomas didn't want REM to be a teary biopic or heady architectural salvo, but something more impressionistic and accessible, appealing to emotions over intellectualism. We speak about managing family relationships in creative work, his influences as a filmmaker, and film's role in architectural media at large.

Martino Stierli took over as MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design in 2015, when the museum was already undergoing major changes. Diller Scofidio + Renfro's redesign was underway, and the architecture and design galleries faced something of an uncertain future in the expanded museum layout. On the podcast, Stierli dispels the rumors that the galleries would be closed permanently, and discusses MoMA's strategies for exhibiting architecture, as well as his plans to diversify the museum's collection.

For nearly 30 years, Michael Arbib taught computer science, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, and mathematics at the University of Southern California, and is known for his prolific work on brains and computers: essentially, what the mechanisms of one can teach us about how the other works. Gathering together all aspects of his work, he’s sharpened his focus on the connection between architecture and neuroscience, and developed the concept of neuromorphic architecture.

He is now associated with the NewSchool for Architecture and Design and UC San Diego, and has played a major role in the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, based in La Jolla, California. We spoke about the Academy’s upcoming conference, and what architecture practice can realistically take from neuroscientific research.

Kunlé Adeyemi founded NLÉ in Amsterdam and Lagos in 2010, after over eight years at OMA. Raised in Kaduna, Nigeria, with an architect father who was constantly redesigning his childhood home, Adeyemi studied architecture in Lagos before getting an MArch II at Princeton, studying with Peter Eisenman. His work at OMA included pivotal roles in projects such as Lagos’ master plan and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Throughout his work, he focuses on issues of rapid urbanization and climate change in the Global South.

I spoke with Kunlé this past August, for his keynote presentation at the AIA Tennessee Convention in Chattanooga. We cover his work in wide breadth: how he focuses on cities’ relationships to water and infrastructure, quickly iterating projects like the Makoko Floating School prototypes in Lagos and at the Venice Biennale, and why he left OMA to start his own firm in the first place. Due to a technical glitch in the live recording, the episode starts about ten minutes into our conversation.

Los-Angeles based architect Michael Maltzan may be best known for his multiple residential projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust, and the longer-than-the-Empire-State-Building-is-tall residential mixed user, One Santa Fe. But Maltzan’s office is also designing Los Angeles’ new Sixth Street Viaduct, a since-demolished infrastructural icon of the city that bridged the Los Angeles River between downtown and Boyle Heights.

Michael shares his relationship with the growing identity of downtown Los Angeles, and his perspective on the style of urbanism arising on LA’s westside in the “Silicon Beach” neighborhood of Playa Vista. We also discuss the effect of China’s ban on “weird” architecture for LA-architects practicing there.

This episode originally aired on March 14, 2016.

Design/Build with Jersey Devil: A Handbook for Education and Practice is a wonderful mixture of history, interviews, experiments and how-to’s, all focused around the design/build pedagogy and practice of its 1970s pioneers, Jersey Devil. Author Charlie Hailey, who is also an architecture professor at the University of Florida, spoke with me about Jersey Devil's beginnings at Princeton University, and the implications of design/build pedagogy for today’s academic climate.

Special thanks to Princeton Architectural Press for helping coordinate this interview.

This episode's title is a reference to architect and writer Michael Sorkin's description of the firm: Jersey Devil “put the funk back in functionalism".

In the spring of 2015, we ran a Working Out of the Box feature with Abraham Burickson, the practicing architect who founded Odyssey Works—a theater company that produces performances for an audience of one, often lasting days. Participants are extensively researched and the performances are rigorously planned, so that the whole thing unfolds before them spontaneously, as they move about the world.

To Burickson, theater and architecture are one and the same—their objective is to immerse the audience, and make them feel something. And in preparation for this month’s theme of Games, it's impossible not to see Odyssey Works' performances in the same genre of experience: game-like interventions that change the way we experience the built environment.

The following interview is our conversation from February of 2015, edited for time and clarity.