DESCRIBING HOW WE THINK is a fair way to engage in a conversation with a selection committee however seemingly big picture our thoughts may be. In this case, we were establishing the parameters for how to configure this city’s main library so that it would look the part even among all the faceless big buildings that surround it. (Interview presentation for the Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA, Mar 2017)
“After a comprehensive evaluation of the responses we received and based on our needs, the evaluation committee has decided not to forward your firm to the next level for consideration, we hope you will consider responding to future requests and thank you for your interest.” The evaluation committee for the engagement to which this letter refers, a campus master plan for a local college, included a director of facilities, maintenance and operations, a vice president for business and administrative services, a college services supervisor, an administrative assistant, student services assistant, instructional laboratory technician, instructor, counselor, another instructor, an associated student vice president, and a director of general services. The letter was signed by the college’s “purchasing specialist” to whom we are a “vendor” like the copy machine maintenance technician or the office supplies provider.
WE THINK ALL THE TIME about how to make architecture that both reflects and appeals to diverse communities in California, and in this case the diverse architecture of the neighborhood in which this city’s new main library would situate. (Interview presentation for the Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA Mar 2017)
THE IMAGE WE PRESENTED by the time we presented it had been placed within the context of the thinking behind it as an illustration not of a solution but of a thought process and a methodology. (Interview presentation for the Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA Mar 2017)
While perhaps not experienced or literate in matters of planning and design, these are not unintelligent people. And yet, just as we would not feel qualified in our ability to evaluate the suitability of a candidate for the position of college vice-president of business and administrative services, we would not expect such a person to feel adequate to the job of selecting an architect, especially for such a complex and nuanced undertaking as a campus plan. Still, these are indeed those who do select architects for projects like this, projects that guide how taxpayer dollars are spent on some of the largest capital investments on their campus in their lifetime.
LESS IS MORE was the somewhat inaccurately phrased aspiration applied to this community center whose goal was maximum modesty. The imagery we deployed demonstrated architectural approaches that would achieve a deferential building. (Interview presentation for the Ladera Linda Community Park, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA Sep 2018)
OUR CONVERSATION with this city began with an assessment of the changing roles of parks in the American city and how this park through redevelopment would embrace all those roles in fulfillment of this city’s many ambitious goals for it. (Interview presentation for La Cienega Park and Recreation Complex Master Plan, Beverly Hills, CA, Oct 2018)
Unlike universities, colleges and school districts who engage in capital investments on a fairly continuous basis, municipalities do so only sporadically. How often is it that a city builds a city hall, library or community center? On those occasions when a city does, there is even less expertise in house that would inform how to hire an architect. There are two kinds of evidence that guide selection committees, both of them circumstantial: One is a record of the architect having completed several of the same kind of building at the same size and cost; the other, the architect’s reputation. The limitations of the first are an inclination toward firms who on paper can show the experience without questioning whether the personnel with the experience could profitably apply it or are even still there. The firm that completed a city hall thirty years ago is not the same firm today and it is not unusual to compete with firms named after dead people. The limitations of the latter are a reliance on third party validation, a vague sense that well-known means good; hence, the manic and time-consuming drive by architects to build a reputation (fame being ideal) however flimsy the foundation upon which it is built, often even before having experienced anything at all.
PRIOR TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT in California there was a tradition of development at the coast that promoted well-being through amusement, health and education, a tradition that since 1970 had atrophied and which we claimed could be revived. (Interview presentation for Oceanside Beachfront Improvement Phase 2, Oceanside, CA, Nov 2020)
IF FOR NO OTHER REASON speculation on what is possible is a way to transform what may be for some a pro-forma experience—an interview-- into a creative experience, one that suggests what could lie ahead. (Interview presentation for Oceanside Beachfront Improvement Phase 2, Oceanside, CA, Nov 2020)
THEY WILL ALWAYS ASK “How will you perform the work and how will you engage with our community?” and never really want to know the answer, for as much as they ask and we earnestly respond, describing a process is never all that interesting. (Interview presentation for Oceanside Beachfront Improvement Phase 2, Oceanside, CA, Nov 2020)
OUR ONE OPPORTUNITY to explicitly state what one qualification they should look for in a candidate arrives when we talk about our stewardship of the process, the role that drawings and models play and our ability to make them. (Interview presentation for Thousand Oaks Library Master Plan, Jun 2020)
Perhaps most confusing is a misunderstanding of what experience is. We are not a city manager who knows how to run a city hall, or librarian who knows how to operate a library or a parks and recreation director who can manage a community center, just as none of those people would know how to design a city hall, library or community center. But they want you to speak their language in the belief that unless you know their job you cannot do yours. There is a grain of truth in this but only a grain. Our experiences are tangentially related to building operations and entirely related to building configurations. We configure buildings by drawing them. We are generalists, our real qualification being how well we draw. To evaluate such a qualification, selectors would want to understand and speak our language, the language of planning and design, a visual language, one principally expressed in drawings and models.
PREREQUISITE QUALIFICATIONS for work with community colleges in California include all sorts experience with the many regulatory regimes (DSA, CCCC0) that govern these state funded institutions, however little such prerequisites constitute real qualifications. (Interview presentation for Santa Monica College Arts Complex, Santa Monica, CA, Oct 2019)
SHARED GOVERNANCE in the community college setting in California has its roots in the anti-authoritarian social justice movements of the 1960s. That everyone on campus has a voice in the planning of their campus is a good thing if everyone also remembers who it is that we serve. (Interview presentation for Santa Monica College Arts Complex, Santa Monica, CA Oct 2019)
DAILY PRESSURES distract the typical administrator, faculty member or trustee from the ability to step back, take a breath and consider the long-term health and well-being of the college and its campus. We always use the interview to provide them that opportunity. (Interview presentation for Ventura College Facilities Master Plan, December 2020)
WHEN ASKED how we would provide for the long-term health and well-being of a campus, we appeal always to American know-how—we know how to make campuses in America, we have merely forgotten how. (Interview presentation for Ventura College Facilities Master Plan, Dec 2020)
Ours is not a culture in which we easily think visually or long term. Often our selectors are mostly thinking about personnel matters, operating budgets and the state of their office supplies. Our recourse (and our obligation) is to meet our selectors where they are, appeal to their intelligence, and from the first encounter (a submittal, an interview) employ the right language, get them use to the language, those tools with which we advance ideas in support of the goals of any design effort in which we hope to play a part. The more we can sooner than later in earnest and without cynicism introduce to a receptive audience ideas through drawings, illustrations of what’s possible, how we would think through a design with them, the better chances there are for opening a mind, prompting curiosity, cultivating the desire and the confidence to try something new: This sounds right to me-- I don’t understand it, I’m not even sure I am, uh, well, qualified, to understand it-- but something is telling me there is something to it.
THAT THIS LIBRARY, Powell Library, was one of only two buildings first built on this fledgling campus over 100 years ago, must have meant someone thought it was important in the life of the university-- a thought expressed in the architecture of the building. (Interview for the UCLA Library Master Plan, Jul 2018)
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE LIBRARY on a university campus is consistent throughout the American tradition—our point being in this interview how important it is to now reconsider the role of what is now an immense library system within the university. (Interview for the UCLA Library Master Plan, Jul 2018)
It rarely works. Our success rate may be 1 in 10 or less, and still it is the only way we know to advance not only our prospects but that of the profession. When we have the confidence that there is no planning or design endeavor for which we are not qualified, that our real goal is to qualify our selectors, to cultivate in them the understanding—or at the very least appreciation—for what their real needs are, then we will know that in so doing, whatever the outcome, we will have done our job.
THIS MID- CENTURY LIBRARY, the Young Research Library, ignored its civic role in favor of its warehousing one. As a result one’s experience of this, the largest library on UCLA’s campus, is one of being warehoused and neither educated nor elevated. (Interview for the UCLA Library Master Plan, Jul 2018)
DESTROYING the early 20th century Green Library at Stanford would be unthinkable while destroying the mid-century Undergraduate Library (UGLY) was not. The building, the place, matters—or so went our argument in this interview. (Interview for the UCLA Library Master Plan, Jul 2018)
CRITIQUE ALONE seeds doubt and discouragement, whereas demonstration seeds hope and a way forward. (Interview for the UCLA Library Master Plan, Jul 2018)