Your profession is very ungrateful. An architect cannot create alone, he needs a team. The bureau is already a problem, but the smallest one. And then there are customers, builders, officials. Instead of creativity, there are endless compromises, and the final product is also a continuous compromise. Why do this?
It doesn't look like that from within the profession. Architecture is a fun process. The project is born, grows, you help it. Your bureau is your team. The team has a captain, there is everyone else, and the captain cannot live without them, and they are without him. For a person in this team, three qualities are important: love of the profession, ability and ambition. Playing on the same team with capable, ambitious people who love their profession - what could be better? Builders, officials are circumstances, they must be taken into account, calculated, circumvented. Customers? It is important to understand the situation correctly here. I always tell my employees: the customer is not a partner. This is the element. Like any element - wind, water, earthquake - it has energy, and you need to know how to use this energy. You can stand against it like a dam, and it will put pressure on you. Or you can set the sail and sail - sometimes at a strong angle, but swim. Otherwise, you will be crushed, or you will doubt, but even so and so nothing will be born.
But this endless maneuvering - why is it? What's good about him?
Man feels the need to create. To do what was not there before you. Architecture is the best way to do this. This is a lifestyle, hobby, sport.
And if sport - then with whom is the competition? With colleagues? With space?
No, this is not a sport where you beat someone. This is not a “game” sport, this is a “process” sport, when you constantly make some decisions, this is a struggle with yourself, with circumstances, there is a strategy, tactics. Like, say, sailing. And here to win nobody and nothing. In essence, this work is more like a gardener. Something grows according to its own laws, and you help him.
The project grows by itself, not out of you? And from what, in that case?
There is a set of circumstances. Spatial, economic, functional. A certain chromosome should be born from them. A certain grain, a model of the future. Even, more precisely, this way: in these circumstances, a certain chromosome can survive. It then grows and becomes an organism. And your task is for this organism to grow normally.
How do you know which chromosome is correct?
Unfortunately, only by selection method. First, many hieroglyphic signs are drawn, each of them carries some kind of spatial model, and then they die. And the one that did not die is correct. You kind of check them for viability.
That is, the situation never arises that you came to the place, saw, and you had a solution
No, that never happens. At first, when you see a place, the first feeling is confusion. Here only experience saves - just the knowledge that something can be built at any place. It is calming. But the feeling that you have to do this is never the case. In general, this first moment, when it is necessary to create many non-viable chromosomes, is the most difficult.
And how long does it last? How long do they die?
Usually fast. Like a dandelion, at first there are a lot of seeds, but then they quickly fly away. The more experience you have, the faster you spot non-viable solutions. However, sometimes there are situations when at first it seems that here it is - the simplest and most effective scheme, but then, at the next stage, you run into some insoluble contradiction. You understand that you are engaged in some kind of violence against life and nothing will be born of it. Then you go back and watch how other embryos behave. And in the end, a system should be obtained that meets the entire set of circumstances, translates all these circumstances into a spatial organism. I feel a kind of peasant cycle in architecture. First plowing, then sowing, then they begin to grow. At some point, you need to leave the project, to feel that it is already maturing itself. And then the harvest. And so with every project. And this is what I like the most.
If a project is a self-growing chromosome, then how to understand what form it should eventually take?
No way. He must grow on his own, I only protect him. It looks most like a plant. The tree has a morphology, it should have roots, trunk, branches, leaves, but it does not have any complete external form. It has grown, and this is its shape. It seems to me that looking for an external form is violence, it should work itself out.
Asking which form is beautiful, I suppose, is pointless in this situation
"Beauty" is a very obscure category. If someone says that he saw a beautiful house, it does not tell me anything, I cannot imagine this house.
But there are some, say, ideas about the perfect architectural form. Proportions, textures, composition, masses. Styles
Any living creature has proportions and textures. By the tree, by the cat, by the elephant. This is also important for my understanding of architecture. But the tree, perhaps, has no composition, and its mass distribution changes. And in this direction, in my opinion, there is no need to look. I don’t like the architecture that is being worn on at all. Niemeyer is correct in saying that the building should already be fully visible in the concrete. It's the same as with painting and graphics - my favorite is minimalistic graphics, when one line says it all. Like Picasso or Serov. The line should not be overgrown with a stroke. The building should not be overgrown with wool. Styles are either for critics or for epigones. This is a way of classification, not creativity. Hare, he does not know that he is a hare, he just is. A building should be born in the same way. A person trying to build a constructivist building today is as much a stylist as a person who makes classical architecture today. The initial, a priori images of the form can only be very general and primitive - we can say that here, in this place, there can be something big, or long, or red. And to say that there must be some style here is violence. You can't even think like that.
Because this style cannot be achieved?
Because it cannot be protected. He won't survive.
Protect against whom?
In front of the totality of circumstances. This is an unviable embryo.
That is, a building can only grow out of place and function. Never from the history of art, from tradition, from an abstract sense of beauty?
Yes, and this is the criterion for the organic nature of architecture. If architecture is organic, it is beautiful.
But historically, architecture was born from a certain a priori method
For instance?
Well, for example, Le Corbusier. The architecture is made for any place. For Berlin, Marseille, India. There is a modulator, there is a clearing - that's all
This is a miracle. This architecture is perfect for this place, it creates the accent of this whole space. But that's not the point. There is some kind of higher form of organicity, he really created a perfect organism. Like, say, an elephant or a cat. It cannot be said that if a cat moves from one place to another, it will become inorganic? So is his house.
Do you strive for a miracle?
Of course.
