Archi.ru:
As far as I understand, your first experience of participating in Russian architectural competitions was the project of the Mariinsky Theater in the early 2000s. Today you are here because of the competition for the IT Technopark "Sberbank" in "Skolkovo" [Bureau E. O. Moss reached the final of the competition, took first place Zaha Hadid Architects - approx. Archi.ru] … How do you feel about the idea of the Skolkovo innovation city and the idea of building a new city in an open field?
Eric Owen Moss:
- There is a wonderful argument that is suitable for any city with its history, buildings, streets, utilities, rivers, trees: the city must continue to develop. If you are working with a territory that has never been built up, then the main argument becomes the opportunity to do something new. Therefore, if you are optimistic, and it seems to me that such projects cannot be done without optimism, just as we were optimists working on the project of the Mariinsky Theater, the project for developing the territory from scratch should be a chance for you to show a new time, a new vision of the bank, a new vision of Russian official structures in a new space.
You touched upon the topic of representing the Russian government through architecture: do you think that architecture can change the country's image? And can architecture influence politics?
- Architecture can defend certain values - democratic values, principles of organizing space. This is expressed in how you move, how and what you look at, how you think, where you have access and where you don’t. If this wall is glass, I can see the next ten rooms, and if it is concrete, then not. If there are bars on the windows, you might think that we are in a prison, and if it is just an open hole, that - on the beach. How people move, see how recognizable the space is for you, what is the relationship between the space inside the building and outside, how the structure interacts with vegetation, with other buildings, whether it is connected with neighboring buildings or stands alone - it all depends on the adopted organizational strategy. And, although architecture can influence a lot, it seems to me that it cannot radically change the political context, to want it means to demand too much of it. But she can use certain symbols, embedding them in specific situations. And this is every time a choice, selection, who chooses - in my opinion, this is important, because not only architects or the jury, but also all other people, even those who have not yet been born, judge buildings and projects. People come to look at buildings and discuss what has been done and what has not, evaluate the benefits of what was or was not built, was designed but was not implemented. And this situation of discussion of the decisions made by the authors of the draft allows us to make a political statement.
If you look at the competition task or the program for the IT Technopark "Sberbank", it talks about openness, transparency, a new stage in the development of technology and other similar things. In this assignment, the conversation about the bank is conducted in terms of cultural institutions embedded in global processes. The project involves the creation of about 10 thousand jobs, and many people will also live and work in the adjacent territory. They should be able to come to the Technopark, and then the question arises, what will they do there? Therefore, we have designed restaurants, exhibition spaces, conference rooms, information areas.
Given your experience with the gradual transformation of the Culver City complex near Los Angeles, how fast should an open field project develop, should it be as slow as in the case of Culver City, or could it be dynamic?
- The project you mentioned covers a very significant area. It began not as a single plan, it was a series of separate orders, unique in their own way, which can even be called experimental - somewhere existing buildings were reconstructed, somewhere new elements were added, somewhere designs were changed. But the most interesting thing is that this area has become very attractive for residents. When we first started, it was the outskirts of the city, an industrial zone, with railroad tracks and manufacturing facilities dating back to before World War II. Later, the production base moved to Mexico or China, and then the question arose about the future of this territory, about what can be done with such sites. And the owners of the land decided that architecture in this case should become part of the public relations of this area in order to make it commercially attractive. And now there are offices of Nike, Kodak, Ogilvy International, Go Daddy. That is, the project began as an experimental one, and as a result, the nature of the territory has completely changed - it has become very prestigious. And now we are making a very unusual skyscraper there, on which we have been working for the last 10 years.
Returning to your question about the speed of development of the project, from my point of view, it directly depends on the intentions of the owner and the economic situation, especially in the context of the global crisis or a gradual recovery from it. The "reformatting" of the former industrial zone, from where all production was taken out, and the change in the density of its development well reflects the specifics of the development of Los Angeles and the local cult of Silicon Valley. Technopark in Skolkovo, perhaps, is similar to this story, because everyone wants to have their own Silicon Valley - in St. Petersburg, London, New York. Whether this makes sense and whether it can be implemented is another question. If we compare the speed of development and the structure of the project in Los Angeles and in Skolkovo, then the Technopark project, unlike the area in Culver City, is a single project, a huge section almost 800 m long. Although it can also be divided into many small projects. This territory is located in the southwestern part of Skolkovo, and due to its large throughput capacity it will strongly influence the development of the entire innovation city.
One of the problems of the Technopark is that one architectural team wants to complete the entire project, the entire Technopark, and this is difficult, this is actually the same as building an entire city for a private developer. At the same time, the project is important because it will affect the social and cultural life of the entire Skolkovo. To solve these problems, it is possible to make the Technopark attractive for people, take into account the ecological situation, the environment, and think over its interaction with other buildings on the territory. In this case, the development of such a complex is, rather, a question of influences, rather than the ability to rigidly regulate something.
- On the one hand, the structures in Culver City and your other buildings are quite minimalistic in terms of decision and choice of materials (concrete, metal, glass). And they can be perceived as abstract compositions, as elements of the landscape. On the other hand, the names of some buildings have a clear animalistic motif, such as
office building "Pterodactyl". What is behind your ideas, what images are they associated with?
- At the initial stage, it seems to me, there are always several different ideas. Architecture as a reflection of the process of cognition is a search, research, experiment. But this is not creativity according to the principle "I can design an architectural object this or that way" with the reproduction of this approach in different cities. This position would mean that you have a clear idea when it cannot be. For the architectural process, my idea is the feeling that I have now, and it is changing, this is the same as the desire to be active and alive. And architecture is a derivative of this feeling. Therefore, each building is initially “different”, but it also reflects some of the general ideas and experiences. And the idea of the experiment turns out to be the leading one for the creation of architecture, regardless of what this experiment relates to - to form, to space, to materials. The latter happens less often, although there is one material that seems to me absolutely fantastic - this is glass, it is like air.
Therefore, I consider architecture as one of the layers of culture. If you acknowledge that a culture is changing, this does not mean that it is getting better, it is becoming different. This forces us to ask questions about how we use things, for what purposes, how space and materials affect people inside the building. But construction involves other issues - cost, structures, techniques, ecology, and all of them must be posed and decided for each specific structure.
The purpose of the study is to help you do what you did not know how to do before this study. When you write, you know in advance what you will be writing, but if you were James Joyce or Edward Cummings, you would ask yourself, "What does it mean to write?" He writes a sentence: capital letter, noun, verb, period. This is a proposal, but not for Joyce. Therefore, in architecture, we are also interested in research, this is the hidden subtext of what each project is about. And every project changes over time, and the ability to observe this process over time in Culver City is very unusual.
What is the fundamental difference in approach when you work “locally” in California, where you live, and in Moscow, within the framework of a global approach?
- The simple answer to this question is that all architecture is global. For a building like Pterodactyl, it doesn't matter where it is - in Beijing or Istanbul. Rather, this issue is related to the dissemination of ideas, but if they are related to architecture, they are international, because it develops in a global space. It should be borne in mind that for very small cities such a rule does not work, while in New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Paris, London or Beijing, in cities that allow large flows of people through themselves, the architectural discussion will have a global character. Therefore, working on architectural projects in different places does not make you dependent on where you live.
But there is another side to this issue that I think some will find important. For example, I argue that the Sberbank Technopark's IT project is connected exclusively with the Russian, Moscow context, with the development context of the Skolkovo campus. Therefore, the international character of architecture is expressed in the fact that the modern world, its conditions determine how the project should look. The modern ideas that architecture should look the same regardless of location are almost 100 years old, and they are connected to a greater extent not with Russia, but with the Bauhaus and the futurists. But it seems to me that they should be revised, because, for example, the project that we did for Skolkovo cannot be repeated elsewhere due to the peculiarities of the program, climate, site, and also because this project can simultaneously relate to the Russian, Moscow and global architectural discussion. Therefore, the context and conditions for the development of the project turn out to be local, and those ideas that are included by the client in the task - openness, transparency, the complexity of digital technologies - are also discussed in Los Angeles and in Silicon Valley. Although these concepts, which are related to social and political ideas, are interpreted very differently in different cultures and in different countries, and when you hear them as a Russian, you understand them differently than if you were Chinese, French, American … But we still hope that such openness will eventually become common to all.
Working on such a project as the IT Technopark of Sberbank, do you think that digital technologies can change the architecture or somehow affect it?
- This is, in fact, the question of what spatial form the Internet has, and this is a very interesting topic. Several years ago, we took part - although we did not win, but became the second - in the competition for the building of the National Library in Mexico City. The problem was that no one could tell what a library was, how form and function were related. We had a consultant from Stanford University, which is located in Silicon Valley. Stanford has two libraries and the main building is called the Green Library. This is a building in the spirit of the neo-Romanesque master Henry Richardson, because the architecture of the Stanford campus is very conservative. But at the same time, it is one of the most well equipped and technologically advanced libraries I have ever visited. The books there are scanned by robots, but the furniture in the reading rooms is old and heavy. Therefore, technology in this case does not determine the modernity of architecture, you can make a very “digital”, technically advanced institution and place it in a building like in the 19th century.
Technology is an idea that we know can sometimes be used for evil purposes, destructively - for example, by young people or by the government. The intrigue is that technology is a completely natural thing. This is the same as saying, "Books are great." But some books are great, others are not, and there are also books that fail. But if we are talking about technology in an optimistic way, we should talk about a space that is very free, very accessible, it should not limit your possibilities, information is appreciated and transmitted freely, and not so that you tell me what to do, or I - to you. This is an ideal based on an optimistic attitude towards digital technologies and an optimistic attitude towards space, towards the search for new forms. And this attitude contributes to the creation of a new work environment.
Coming back to the Pterodactyl Building, one day my friend Stephen Hall and I went there one Friday night at about nine o'clock. The offices there are located above the garage, and when we went up, we found ourselves in a space full of people - and that is Friday night. Everyone was busy that day with a volunteer project for the mayor of Los Angeles to promote sustainable water management. The women brought children with them, some brought pets, so you could see a pillow on the table and a sleeping dog on it. On the site in front of the building there were yoga classes, barbecuing, and a bar was set up indoors, and not in a restaurant on the same street, but right in the office - a bar with beer. But already around the corner from "Pterodactyl" the area is not very welcoming. While inside it, people certainly didn’t feel at home, but it was a much more flexible work environment, with flexible working hours and vacations. And, if I understand correctly, the task for Sberbank was also focused on creating such a flexible environment. I don’t know if there are many such places in Moscow, but in Los Angeles there are more and more such places in the Silicon Beach area [an area in Greater Los Angeles, where about 500 tech startups are based - Google, Yahoo !, YouTube, etc. - approx. Archi.ru]. This is also optimism and energy - doing yoga, drawing on glass, playing ping-pong in an office where there are no desks, no partitions. And, if people work in such a very experimental space, they get a very optimistic present that offers a scenario for the future. Of course, the outlook for the future changes every day, but it seems to me that this is also part of the Sberbank idea, which shows what architecture can do for the development of the workspace in the Internet age.
Talking about "Pterodactyl", you compare the interior of the building and the space around it, how different are they for you? Should the urban space be something fundamentally different from the space inside the building, does it require special design methods?
- If you answer your question with the Sberbank competition in mind, due to the fact that the design area is very large, this project is more focused on creating an urban development strategy, and these goals are important for the Sberbank project in the same way as and issues of architectural concept. But at the same time, the space or spaces in the interior of this building and outside it work to solve completely different problems. The central part of the project is the glass boulevard, which continues the pedestrian zone that runs through the entire campus. And here there is an important point for an architectural discussion, because, on the one hand, we are making an open public space, and on the other, this is Russia, and you can freeze on the open boulevard. It is as if we built a roof over the Ringstrasse in Vienna - this is a space where there are cafes, restaurants, meeting places, exhibitions. This is an 800 m long urban space, and the single building that we have designed can be viewed as a whole, made up of many parts that can be used in different ways. A person who works in one part of this complex may never go to another, or may be there every day. And the boulevard allows you to regulate these movements, although this space can be interpreted in different ways, changing its meaning over time and offering unexpected ways of using it. Therefore, flexibility in its modern architectural understanding is an important part of the concept. However, it doesn't make sense to create a neutral space where you can do whatever you want. In other words, neutrality does not have to be synonymous with permanence. Our project, which should start day after day in Barcelona, is the transformation of the La Thermica power plant into a hotel. Likewise, the Louvre in Paris was once a residential complex, but has now become a museum. Everything changes, and the desire for neutrality is only the result of the ambiguity of concepts. Therefore, the Technopark project for Sberbank consists of many separate parts that can be used in different ways. This is a different definition of flexibility, but it is also flexibility nonetheless.
Realizing your buildings, unusual in form and structure, how do you cooperate with engineers and designers? In the USSR, there was a long tradition of standard construction, when the same buildings and structures were reproduced many times, in different places, which became the reason for the significant conservatism of the building complex. How do you see the embodiment of your ideas here in Russia?
- Working with engineers is definitely an important part of the project. But we work here in Moscow with engineers - the Moscow branch of ARUP - just as we work with engineers around the world. I think you should be careful when calling buildings "unusual". Sometimes the building is different from others, but in fact it is quite ordinary, and sometimes the building seems to be the same as everyone else, but behind this there may be a non-standard solution. When we develop a project, we work very closely with engineers, because construction is a very responsible process. This process should be as efficient as possible in terms of time use, and the project should be economical. And the way we do this is called constructability in America.
For example, working on one of the projects in Los Angeles, we order steel from Germany, steel contractors from Los Angeles and Oklahoma, and infrastructure engineers from Europe: such a team is responsible for the project's feasibility and builds its virtual model without missing a beat. And we see the whole process, we understand which parts need to be ordered in 3 months, and which - in half a year. Of course, this is not an absolute protection "from the fool", but close to this, such a model allows you to manage the interaction of the general contractor, designers, steelmaker and architects so that all parameters at each stage are clear - sequence of actions, estimate, schedule. This is one of the benefits of working with 3D digital models. At the same time, all specialists work with the same model in the CATIA program, which was originally created for the aerospace industry. Therefore, it seems to me that practical questions do not contradict ideological and conceptual solutions until someone starts asking "What is this?" instead of asking "How can we do this?" You must understand that you know what you want and what you don’t know. Then you can look and decide that it will not work out that way, but in a different way - you can try. And in my office, discussions about how to do something better happen all the time.
Another question - what is a building, what does it tell us about? And also what decisions are behind the construction of this building, for example, behind the decision to build certain things in the same way. And in two hundred years, someone will understand your priorities, your values, your city in a special way. Will there be diversity, interesting differences, and not just a monotonous, uniform, homogeneous environment? Diversity is really long-lasting, and then you will realize that the potential is only to offer something [new] as an element of a city or building, or to offer it as an idea that is optimistic or energetic or a progressive point of view. Does it matter? I think so, given the experience of the Culver City project that we talked about, it turned out to be amazingly successful financially, because there was an opportunity for unusual buildings to appear. Large companies do not see modern experimental architecture as a hallmark of their business model, but they do see it as part of their business model.
Do you think that the whole city should be built up with experimental architecture, or should it appear only in certain places - buildings or public spaces? Should there be anonymous or vernacular architecture in a city?
- I don't think it's my job to solve this. It seems to me that it would be a huge mistake or even arrogance to tell all cities to build only modern architecture. The challenge in urban planning is to create opportunities for different approaches. If a city has a history or a way of presenting itself that has been around for many years, I don't think there is a reason to act like Shanghai and demolish all buildings that are not modern skyscrapers. We sat in a cafe in Shanghai and saw how a very long, unusual building from the late 19th century was demolished. I said that it should not be demolished, but they told me that it should be demolished. I think there is enough space for both modern and historical architecture. What to keep and what not is an interesting question and cause for discussion, as well as the question of why we are not trying to keep everything. Los Angeles is very much a city that doesn't try to save anything. At the same time, we return to the Palazzo Venezia over and over again. Are the needs of the city changing or not? Are the meanings of urban life changing or not? What is happening, it seems to me, is always an attempt to place new accents in the means of communication, means of transport … The boulevard that we proposed at Skolkovo will hardly make sense anywhere else. Therefore, the city should always have the opportunity to change and rethink something. And this is not a question of ideology or a master plan (which seems to me a bit outdated construction), but the flexibility of a master plan, when ideas can appear and disappear, but the city remains open to new opportunities and seeks a path to sustainable development, taking into account its own personality and history. … Both Skolkovo and Sberbank Technopark are examples of this approach, they will not satisfy everyone, but they should not be liked by everyone: there can always be different points of view. That is why an experimental project is significant and useful, it opens up new territories and involves people in its development, which is always important for a city.
