Interview with Alejandro Zaera Polo

From an interview conducted on November 11, 2007, by Nathan King and Severn Clay-Youman.

TARP: We’d like to start by asking about your thoughts on the relationship between academic architecture and professional practice. Specifically regarding how the academic setting feeds FOA’s professional practice.

AZP: The act of teaching is very much about rationalizing and verbally articulating the operations you follow when you perform as an architect. This skill becomes quite handy once you have to explain or put a project into any kind of context because you have been trained to explain what your processes are and the reasons why you are doing things, and you are better able to be accountable for your decisions. However, there exists a gap, a very important gap, for an academic architect in relating their work to certain methods of production, or certain demands existing in the market. Even so, that capacity to explain becomes very useful to mobilize the potentials within all these more professional, let’s say, more “real” knowledge that our practice is now engaged with.

TARP: Does this professional/academic relationship work in the other direction, i.e., is the academic environment ever an opportunity to test the ideas you develop in your professional practice?

AZP: Yes and no, because I think that the hypotheses that you address when you are approaching academic exercises are different from the problems that you face when you are doing a real project. You can test some ideas but the tests that you conduct in reality originate in a different field of operations. So professional practice is not about demonstrating a certain point, it’s about being able to bring together a number of market forces and present technologies encountered outside of academia and threading a certain rationale through them that will hopefully become a device for producing something new. I think the main transfer between the academic and professional practice is not so much in being able to test the same hypothesis in one field or another, but to address the academic demand to explain and articulate given problems.

I think academically oriented practices have an advantage. Architects who do not have the same academic training, who have built their entire career in the practice domain, often what you see is that they react very quickly to satisfy certain demands that come from the outside and are structuring the material in a way that doesn’t try to produce any further effect.

TARP: It sounds almost like the project begins as a sort of tension between client and theory.

AZP: Yes, but the client is just one part of the equation. We often talk about clients because they are more immediately associated with this other (non-academic) side of the process. Often it is the market as a whole, because clients can act as agents of the market, and have to be sensitive to certain demands. Obviously the clients decide for themselves what they are going to do; neither the architect nor the client are simply looking for a project that will put a certain number of square feet on the market. Both are also pursuing something that will produce some political effect. So in that sense, I’m not sure if there is intentionally some sort of dichotomy between a theoretical approach and some realistic situation. Theory is much more interested in the way you articulate the inputs, be they political, commercial, or technical into a problem and find consistencies across these inputs. Being theoretical means having the distance to turn immediate concrete problems into more abstract generic problems or questions. Otherwise you are simply driven by giving answers to immediate questions. I don’t want to describe our practice as having one theoretical side and one practical side.

TARP: That’s too simple?

AZP: When we teach, we propose a certain problem: that of an artist’s house in the mountains, or on the coastline; a project that had no real-world constraints, so students do not have to expect or explore these very powerful forces. At the same time, people may say the opposite about our professional work; that we tend to prefer projects that are subject to very specific technical, commercial, or political constraints. So I suppose theory is never something that develops completely parallel to reality.

TARP: We see a lot of studio projects that use FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal as a precedent. Doesn’t this produce a paradox, as Yokohama evolved out of all of these real-world constraints, which don’t really exist in the academic setting?

AZP: Yokohama is probably one of our earliest projects and probably at that time we did not have enough knowledge about reality, that is the realities of practice, and we were, to some degree, relying on theoretical research. This research was motivated by a certain formulation that led to us the following problem: that of exploring envelopes and the movement of people as a condition to generate public architecture. There was also an associated problem concerning the continuity between the landscape and the design of the built structure. Yokohama was a rare channel in which we could test the larger theoretical interests we had at the time, and continue to have.

The difference between Yokohama and what we are experiencing now by becoming more deeply engaged in practice and real projects, is our need to identify in the same way certain non-research based tendencies that may become the origin of some sort new architectural embodiment. In our development in Umraniye, Turkey, for example, the retail becomes a new form of public space that is built upon private land, as opposed to the traditional forms of public-ness which were built with public funds on public land. This condition is becoming increasingly important and should be the subject of deeper theorization.

TARP: Looking at the projects you showed during your lecture here at Pratt, and we’re thinking specifically about the retail development in Turkey, it seems like FOA is very willing to engage politics. One often hears of the choice of politics in architecture as being either to build or not to build, but it seems like FOA is looking for a third approach, perhaps changing things by building?

AZP: First of all, I think that when you are working as an architect and building in the city or building the urban network, unless you are building a small house for an artist in the country side, you are inevitably involved in politics whether you like it or not. In Istanbul, we were able to make the project work because we had a client who was willing to try a new form of retail. We may have had a different client and we would have had to do exactly what we were told, but then there was a certain openness in that commission that enabled us to explore the potential of generating a retail complex that was less of a suburban shopping mall and more of a piece of urban fabric or landscape.

When I spoke of about the envelope in the lecture, I did not talk about other firm’s projects. But look at what is happening now in China, where the country is building for the Olympics, and here you see in the specific case of envelopes that there is a very clear tendency towards a certain form of representation inscribed in these envelopes. Look at the stadium, look at the swimming pool, with these buildings what you see are envelopes of enormous scale with surface pattern that is on the one hand homogeneous, and at the same time random, or differentiated (it’s not really random). The intention is to produce a surface that differentiates or collages different elements or becomes totally transparent. You might compare these new envelopes with the political representations of public buildings during Modernism. Take, for example, the political representation of a public building of Le Corbusier, where the effect was more towards transparency: the building appears as a transparent machine that explains how people work inside. Nor are these buildings in Beijing the political representations of the envelopes of the post-modern or even the Deconstructivist period of individual differences. What you see happening now in China is this wrapping of materials that communicates sufficiently the building on a normal scale, while the kind of representation is no longer that of, let’s say, a collectivist state, in which everyone is the same. Rather there is a kind of maniac, large-scale collective project where people are represented by a surface that is differentiated. I think this is like an image of frozen swarms, where people are still part of a collective, while being represented on the buildings on a maniac scale. It’s the representation of some very large collective empire, or rather a successful embodiment of the message that the collective is no longer made out of evenness or equality but, on the contrary, out of differentiation. At this moment all the political implications of envelopes are very interesting to me, and are certain to become re-conceptualized or re-theorized in our projects.

I talk about the housing in Carabanchel as also having as having a very large, blank envelope, but also one that differentiates that kind of swarm effect as opposed to the collage effect of post-modern housing. This kind of envelope builds new forms of information, and new forms of monumentality, builds perhaps new forms of integration with the collective. So the reason I am so interested in the envelope as a political location is because it deals with and cuts across many different issues. Some are issues of representation, and some are very technical issues, and some deal with the development of the surface and what the building communicates and exchanges with the outside.

TARP: How do you think students can bring this political material into their studio?

AZP: Students should be experimenting with all of these political materials. What you need to do is to simply get out and try to determine for yourself what the important issues are. However, in order to engage the truly political problems of architecture, you need to identify where there are real opportunities for architecture to affect politics. So whether you are voting for Republicans or Democrats doesn’t really interest me very much because I don’t believe that architecture can be discussed effectively in those terms. But you can discuss architecture as a certain tendency to represent collective ideas, such as examining the effects of architecture in terms of reducing carbon emissions including the energy performance of a building and so on. Or you can question how to articulate the interests of the private/practical with public/performance which is basically what we’ve been trying to do with our retail projects. Inevitably you are going to encounter something that is going to force you to make political decisions. I’m not saying everything you examine should be political, but I think these problems you can bring into the discipline and practice of architecture that lie beyond the internal, disciplinary discourse, which becomes sterile when it doesn’t look beyond itself.

Our thanks to Alejandro Zaera Polo for his time and insight.