William Braham interview

Members 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.

SC: Is it possible to make a link between the people doing the interiors and the systems theory world, or are they just ideas that were in the air at the time?

WB: These were definitely ideas that were in the air. If you look in Progressive Architecture in the late sixties, they were very clear that systems theory or cybernetics was the coming thing. There’s a whole special issue to explain what it is, because how in the world would architects know? They explain all the nascent research, which looks like very early 3D digital modeling, similar to [Christopher Alexander's] Pattern Language, that might enter into architectural design. Of course once you go to the next scale up – traffic organization, organizations of businesses and resources, then it becomes much more comprehensible, and there are professionals who specialize in it. Everybody was aware of it at a certain level, but were puzzling about how it might actually come to bear on practice. They barely mentioned the office landscaping, and it is still true that the fitting out of office interiors often doesn’t register as architecture.

Some of my previous work was on color, and one of the things I learned is that there are some things (like color) which are simply excluded from the architectural discourse. You can talk really intelligently and deeply about color with architects and they’ll nod patiently, but view it as a different category from architecture.

Nathan King: Severn and I took a studio at Pratt with David Ruy and Karel Klein this last semester, and his provocation for the studio was to somehow use color. We started by looking at flowers – it was incredibly difficult – I don’t think anybody knew how to deal with it. It all just sort of flattened out by the end – it became an appliqué on a building, or some sort of sign or signifier that nobody was really sure of the meaning.

WB: The other way that could go is that the theoretical rules on the perception of color could provide a ruleset that then becomes a geometry, so you can say – “color leads me to this geometry, now I can forget about color”. It’s hard to get color right, and hard to clearly provide it a place in the architectural discourse as it has been constituted. I’ve written several other things on color in addition to ”Modern Color/Modern Architecture”, and I think color get’s rolled up in the masculine-feminine divide that is imposed on architecture in the late nineteenth century.

This is also about the time you start to find women in design practices. If you go into a large practice, the architects are still mostly men and the interior designers are mostly women, with notable exceptions. Some of this runs to the characterizations of architecture – durable, eternal, authentic, powerful – and that it has to do with form and with the aspects of the form buildings that are not themselves changeable and will endure. Venetian blinds are a little bit architectural, but a curtain is not architecture. It becomes very interesting for architects when they start talking about adaptive buildings, because almost all the aspects of buildings that already accommodate change aren’t seen as architectural. The furniture – that’s not architecture – but other changeable stuff, like all the ways windows and window treatments in many buildings adapt, moment by moment, day by day, season by season, that doesn’t count as architecture unless we make it out of aluminum and attach robotic controls to it. I’m being a bit cynical about that, but color points at that particular problem problem of disciplinary definition.

A lot of this follows from the great male renunciation of color. The uniform most men wear, even though it has shifted to an informal mode – dark suit or clothing, white shirt – was more or less was invented in the early nineteenth century. Think about eighteenth-century men in spectacular colors with lace and make-up and so on. Through the revolutionary period of a couple of decades they moved group by group to the dark suit. That process gets worked out through the century. Depending on who’s history you read, it finally gets consolidated with the trial of Oscar Wilde, who like was both flamboyant and gay, though he was married and had kids. At that moment colorfulness gets powerfully bound up not just with women but with femininity in men; and the really hard-nosed definition of masculinity emerges. A certain amount of this, by the way, comes from Mark Wigley’s remarkable book “White Walls, Designer Dresses,” though I suspect he’ll never write about color again either because he discovered that it slips out of the architectural discourse.

BO: The relationship between color and femininity – there’s also a parallel with ecology and nature. Up until Ian McHarg, the initial pushes in that direction were people like Rachel Carson.

WB: It’s paradoxical for landscape architecture as a discipline that most of the famous or the highly visible landscape architects are men, who were often trained originally as architects. If you look at the population in our Landscape department, it is largely women who enter the field. Go back to the seventeenth century and Claude Perrault would say the good architect is the one who is the most sensitive to the subtle differences in fashion and taste and judgment – that’s part of what gets excluded from the discourse as it is made more rational and more functional. It doesn’t seem accidental that a lot of the neo-avant-garde are trying to make sense of things which fall in the excluded category of ornament and decoration. Ali Rahim, for example, had a whole symposium this past Fallon “Aura.” Qualities, aesthetic phenomena, the whole business of subtle, refined, aesthetic experiences being captured within buildings continues to challenge the strong emphasis on form and the functional properties of form. So I think its fascinating that the younger generation of the serious, thoughtful designers are taking up questions of ornament, affect,and the sublime, and now color.

SC: I think we all found it very hard in David’s studio – you don’t realize you’re working within a group received aesthetic until you try to get out of it. The softly lit model on a white background – you realize you’re sort of unequipped with the aesthetic tools to deal with color.

WB: Well, the precise parallel of the male renunciation of color was the polychromy dispute about whether ancient buildings were colorful, and that goes on for about fifty years. I don’t mean to oversimplify the story, there have been constant attempts to resist or overturn whiteness or formalism. Certainly some of the elements that got lumped together as post-modernism were an attempt to bring color back into the discourse. Le Corbusier, for example, was an incredible colorist. The first time I went to the Werkbundsiedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, it had just been resotred.I had no idea that his buildings were colorful at all. Of course the color palette is from Purist paintings, so a certain turquoise, a rusty color were used, a very beautiful color palette altogether, but Le Corbusier also looked carefully at how it worked architecturally. Frank Lloyd Wright was also very attentive to color- really that whole first generation of Modernists. Mies collaborated with Lilly Reich, and although he would pick colorful stones, she would provide the other elements of color the fabrics, the carpets, and so on, If all you have is the skeleton, you’ve missed half the building.

SC: Well, like the uproar about whether the Guggenheim should be repainted the originally specified pale yellow or the final off-white that people have grown used to.

WB: The person who’s done the most work on that is the head of the Historic Preservation department here at Penn, [Frank Matero].He has examined the layers of paint from the building and has also researched the history of color in Wright’s buildings, pulling out the original paint chips that Wright would have been referring to in those days. In the correspondence he used a very precise color specification system, toning down the color as he realized that it couldn’t be realized in an an exterior paint. At almost the same moment with Fallingwater –same concrete, a lot of the same details–he intended the concrete at Fallingwater to be gold-leafed. Finally the client said “I’m a Jewish merchant in a Midwestern city in the Depression, I can’t build a gold building in the woods!” But I’ve always imagined that Wright wanted the Guggenheim to be gold – he loved gold, used it in a lot of his interiors. He may have gotten it from Japanese paintings, and their particular material quality – he simply hated white, which is why its such a shame that the Guggenheim ended up so white.

NK: My father-in-law is actually an interior designer who graduated from Pratt in the 1960’s, and his portfolio, his early work is all of these landscape offices that I had no idea how to critique. Until your talk, I don’t think I would have even thought of them as landscapes, but I realize that he was part of the systems movement. Why was there a distinction between office and interior design? Now it seems like interior designers are sort of bristling at that.

WB: Well, for that generation it’s coming from this business consulting, systems-theory body of knowledge. You would have to look at the bigger history of interior design as a separate discipline. Elsie De Wolfe – the famous actress of the late nineteenth-century in New York, more or less declares herself to be the first interior designer, and she is the one who brought neo-classical purity and clarity back to interiors, after the darkness and decadence of the Victorian period. She takes a house and transforms it with these lighter colored, pastel walls I wrote another article comparing Emily Post, the author of ” Etiquette”, with the catalogue of the International Style exhibition. Emily Post’s father, the well known architect Bruce Price, designed the amazing hotel in Quebec City, the Château Frontenac, so she grew up in a design household. Later, when she was divorced, she wrote the Etiquette to make a living, but she’d already been doing interiors as business before her divorce, and wrote another book called the Personality of a House, the most sensible book you’ll pick up on domestic design, published at the same moment that the International Style show was mounted at MOMA. My article was a reading between two books that exhibit an astonishing agreement about taste. It is somewhere in first decades of the twentieth century that the profession of interior design really begins to come into being.

NK: The profession doesn’t seem to have a problem with color, the way that we do.

WB: Oh no, in fact they’re the ones who actually learn about it. I taught a course here called “Light and Color”, an elective, where we would investigate them together and actually read color theory. It was how I ended up writing ”Modern Color/Modern Architecture” – I began wondering why architects are so bad at color , and why we don’t teach it in architecture schools?

SC: Its interesting you would mention “Light and Color”, because it does seem like something that architects working in the field seem to want to assign to other professions – I worked in an architectural lighting firm for a couple years before coming to Pratt, and architects would always come to us and say “we want to do something colorful, what can you do?”

WB: Yes, it has to do with all these other interesting distinctions that come up in architecture, but I do also think that architecture through the modern period, from the mid-nineteenth century until now, has spun off one specialty after another. Architects are just plain too busy to do everything! There’s too much to do in practice, and you look at how hard we work in schools to teach and learn the family of things we already provide, and you realize that there isn’t room to jam in much more! So it makes sense to allow for specialization from. Look at the movie industry. They don’t have a crisis of identity about the specializations in quite the same way that we do, although maybe directors do – they think that they should be controlling everything. On the one hand I think we should hold on the broad image of the master architect, but on the other, architects succeed by collaborating with and organizing specialists, by being a kind of specialist themselves.

I do think much of the appeal of systems theory (or emergence) for architecture is to provide a way of better understanding our limited scope of activity, of leveraging design work to its best effect. When architects complain that they are only consulted after the real decisions have been made by clients or other specialists, it may help to realize just how much every player in the built environment is always, already constrained by the self-organizing flows of money, power, energy, and other resources. I am not a strict ecological determinist, meaning I believe that we constantly change our futures through design, but we must operate within the systems at the moment we find ourselves.