William Braham interview
June 2, 2008Members of the TARP staff sat down last December with William Braham, the current chair of the Penn architecture department:
Brian Osborn: When you gave your talk at Pratt, you used the two words “ecology” and “emergence” in the same statement. Looking at the trajectory of the University of Pennsylvania itself, knowing how strong the tradition of ecological design is here, and looking at how, more recently, Penn may now be considered a leader in digital design and emergent research, I wonder in what spirit do you use those two words together–is it in reference to Penn’s history?
William Braham: I realized that the books I’ve been reading for years as an environmentalist and architect are often the same books that the early digital generation, were reading. Now, that reading list is almost universal among contemporary architects - Manuel DeLanda teaches at every architecture school on the East Coast it seems, but those books are the same as those that environmentalists, or ecologically-minded designers have been looking at for a while. However, very different conclusions are often drawn. What I think is important is the potential convergence of those conclusions, and also the way in which there’s something both approaches can learn from each other.
I would say that what has been really successful and interesting here at Penn over the last couple of decades is the intensification of what I would call artistic practices, meaning “research” that is not so functionally constrained, even though it is ultimately brought to bear on functional design, on real-world, practical kinds of issues. The techniques we use in studio are often opening things up in an entirely different way than you would expect if you were just setting out to solve problems.
That approach, however, is unusual to find in a studio or a practice that sets itself to solve ecological problems. I don’t see any reason why the two can’t coexist - the proposition would be that if artistic practices are useful in making architecture practices better, then they should be useful in making ecological practices better. I see them as potentially very similar.
As so often happens with new ideas, emergence was being used as the equivalent of “good.”. It describes a particular condition which was escaping scientific interest for a long period of time and wasn’t being discussed explicitly in many design fields. But as we make it explicit – asking in what ways are things already self-organizing, auto-catalytic, “emergent”–what do we learn from that? Its a hugely interesting subject, but as any self-respecting designer will argue, that doesn’t remove either the importance of authorship or of ethical decisions, or even possibly top-down interventions.
Severn Clay: In your discussion of the organic office layout, you describe these organic layouts within a very clean “SOM” glass box - were they just two different groups of designers?
WB: Absolutely. Particularly in those early days, they were really two different kinds of forces. In the talk I showed that whole family of diagrams about the different rates of change in parts of buildings. This is something that people have been observing for a couple of decades. This is just rational/pragmatic – it is even in the tax code – it is difficult and expensive to change the outsides of buildings, so we make them more general, and don’t redesign them very often, and we make the interior fittings more flexible and allow them to change more rapidly. It is an extremely rational consequence of people assessing the needs and costs of change within that particular climate. The ecologist Howard T. Odum, whose brother Eugene Odum wrote many of the basic textbooks on ecology, was interested in the self-organization of energy flows from the very beginning, back in the fifties and sixties, finding ways to map and diagram and understand energy within ecosystems. He’s the one I was drawing directly on when I was talking about the hierarchies or cascades that emerge from the transformations of energies. Odum has written some much more accessible, shorter books, including one just republished called “Power, Environment and Society”, in which he argues that every self-respecting self-organizing system is ultimately trying to maximize the flow of useful power through it. He means power quite explicitly, in terms of work that can be accomplished, which can be realized in many different forms, including institutional power. So this theory of energy flows can be used to describe all the formations we see in the world—everything maximizes its flows of power. Given enough latitude an open, self-organizing system forms into hierarchies of increasingly valuable high-powered forms of power. Odum applies the same analysis to an ecosystem as to an institutional hierarchy, meaning it takes a large body of photo-synthesizing plants to support a very small population of carnivores, and equally, for example, it takes a large body of workers to support the corner office. So one sees these hierarchies emerging everywhere, and also breaking down and forming new hierarchies at the same time. It was hugely interesting to see how rigorously Odum pursued that in one self-organizing system after another. And its why I’m now less sanguine about the notion that emergence is itself somehow in any way a virtue. More specifically, it is the milieu of our work.
