My interests in architecture were also about the classic tension between minimalism and excess. And so I fell in love with looking at Robert Ryman and Viennese action artists, you know, at the same time. And while I didn't know the theories of them very well, because it was above my station at that time, just understanding them in their pure contrast allowed me even to think about architecture that way. Hello everyone, this is Emilia Taylor-Haukberg, editorial manager for ARKNECTS.
Just last week we premiered the second season of ARKNEC sessions in a tighter, shorter format, and are so excited this week to also be launching a brand new podcast, focusing exclusively on interviews. We're calling it one-to-one, and we'll be talking with architects from all over the professional and geographical map. Our first episode airing Monday, November 9th, features an interview I did with Neil Denari this past September. He stopped by our past seat of studio in his way to lecture at SIRK.
SIRK, by the way, helps organize his interview, so thank you so much, SIRK. Shortly after I spoke with Neil, he was on his way to the Arhus School of Architecture in Denmark to exhibit a film he had made about Los Angeles, part of a solicited contribution to the school's 50th anniversary celebration. His Los Angeles-based firm, NMDA, has worked all over the world on projects at many scales, with Denari himself licensed in both New York and California. From 1997 to 2001, Denari served as dean of SIRK, managing a critical period that brought the school to a new location in downtown Los Angeles's Arts District.
He now teaches at UCLA. I spoke with Neil about balancing practice and teaching, what writing can do for architecture, and his reflections on Los Angeles. We'll post more info about this week's one-to-one in the show notes. Enjoy.
As I always tell my students, you know, I'm a professor because I want to learn more than you do, and that's not my quote, that's been out there for a long time, you know, that we teach because we're obsessive learners, and never feeling like an expert, you know what I mean? Yeah, you can never, and also you can never learn what you get from going to the site after it's been built. You see how people interact with it in ways you couldn't have possibly predicted. Yeah, I think that watching people, seeing what they pay attention to, and literally being a kind of anthropologist or a casual observer at one level, because this is the built world is what I learn from more than, you know, imagining fictitious environments that I'm crossing my fingers, thinking are cool, that people will love.
I definitely don't trust myself that much. I like to take in as much beyond research as possible. And so you travel a fair amount, and to lecture and to visit sites and such, are you able to keep that kind of that eye, that constantly improving, wanting to learn eye throughout the stresses of traveling and through visiting and having some type of a jacket to actually visit a space? Yes, I mean, it varies from, you know, trip to trip sometimes oddly enough.
I mean, when I go lecture, I've got more time than let's say if it's a project related trip to go to Vancouver, for instance, it might be literally sort of up and back, but over time I'll learn more about the city. But it really is one of the great, I would say, perks, as it were, of being somebody who's fortunate enough where people want you to come and speak to them physically in space in an intimate setting, as opposed to just look at things online and to hear what their latest conversation is to not take advantage of that, to do whatever investigations that you know, and into environment. And sometimes I might go to a city and not worry about seeing some monument. And let's say somebody might take me around and I'll say let's just drift.
And I do a lot of street photography and do a lot of documentation of things. Sometimes if it's, you know, like Guadalajara or something, I'll want to go out of town and see a Carmi Pino's tower and then, you know, go into the city and drift the rest of the day and go watch people do things on the street or go visit a ceramicist or something like that. So I'm very fortunate to be able to have, you know, more than my share of exploration paid for by other people. And presumably some type of almost field research to bring back into whatever you're then doing for projects at the firm for onward teaching work.
Are there particular cities that you find to be consistently inspiring for informing your work outside of actually which cities you're building in? Yeah, there are. London would be one. London, I make it there a couple times a year and I don't have any projects there.
My favorite premier league team, soccer team is in London. So I'll go see a match once a year. And in fact, I consider, I mentioned that because I consider soccer to be, you know, as an international sport, it's also a language that connects, I would say, me as an American, I feel more like a global citizen since I'm a soccer fanatic to understand that side of what drives, let's say, groups and people on the street and in a place like London. But I can also, at the same time, I'm constantly astonished at the level of, let's say, graphic design and infrastructure in London and in the city that too, I think, is always going on in a place like Amsterdam, you know, where those kinds of systems of communication are really strong because the cities are connected by mass transportation, in the case of Amsterdam, it's almost like a village.
And you know, there's a physicality to it. And some of these things are antidotes to Los Angeles and the distancing effect and so forth. So I do feel like I'm looking for other things, you know, that don't mirror, you know, what we have. And there's always something interesting to look at it, London, over the last 10 or 15 years in terms of architecture, whether it's, you know, the towers that are going on or Zaha's projects or even architects who aren't well known, who are doing more vernacular work like housing and things like that.
I really love seeing, you know, what's going on with all that and then the museums in the show. So that's one world in other cities like Ljubiana in Slovenia, you know, not really that far out of the way. I've been there a number of times and feel a lot of connection to what's going on there in terms of politics and architecture and a completely different landscape. You can walk across the city in, you know, 45 minutes.
So there's a whole array I could go on and on about it. But you've chosen to stay in LA and you get to constantly kind of pick and conserve and reflect on what you're experiencing and other cities to kind of bring back here. What is it about LA that's and trans do you enough to say? Well, you know, I came here to fulfill a kind of a childhood mission growing up in Texas, landlocked in the 1960s.
And so the exotic, you know, of what got sent out even before digital media, TV and music and so forth. And via New York, New York became and still is a benchmark of a certain type. I don't say that it's the benchmark for cities because the one thing that we need to acknowledge and recognize and I think shout out to the world is that, you know, we have 16 and a half, 17 million people in a 60 mile radius. I don't care what the morphology is, right, this is a world city.
It may have its difficulties or, you know, less than true utopic, you know, kind of form in a way. So I think I'm here because not only do I get to use these other cities as benchmarks, but I think I'm here because I really think it's the unsolved, you know, urban mystery in a way. And if I said something like, I don't want to live in a city that presents itself to you as a finished historical project, but to, you know, be an American not to provincialize anything but being an American architect in Los Angeles is sort of the ultimate challenge, the ultimate position. You find yourself wondering about solutions defending the human economies of intelligence and knowledge, which I think are unparalleled.
And I do think people are a big part of LA, which is, which is different than just constantly analyzing its physical form. The highest level of diversity in the world, the human knowledge and intelligence and, you know, the upper stratas of knowledge production are incredible. And as a professor, I get to interact with, you know, a lot of that. So there's so much going on here that I can't imagine not being an architect here.
Yeah, I can imagine that for potential students and people who are interested in studying architecture to go to a place like Los Angeles without this kind of thing, this hanging over your head constantly of a standard, you know, you can never meet in ways. There's something happening in LA that allows people to feel that they have that liberty to go and try whatever they need to try. And I'm sure you saw the kind of the vanguard of that working with in SIRC. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your time at SIRC and leading the school and what the atmosphere was like at that time, kind of in the late 90s, I believe, towards working towards a new kind of architecture for the school.
It was definitely a pivotal moment. Of course, it was questions not only among the board of directors, but to a certain extent of the more senior figures, you know, who had helped found the school of attention between institutional identity of, you know, the garage project, right? The DYI project, the nonconformist project. And then it was what 25 years in at that point when I took over.
And of course, the first thing that I had to do that became almost the only thing that I was working on was to move the school, you know, find permanent home and so forth. And what was interesting was that the idea of owning a building seemed to be at odds with, you know, what was going on. And I just said, well, own a building, it'll just be a garage. Don't worry.
We'll still be a garage for a train. A garage for a train is what it turned out to be a very long one. And maybe being a, let's say, a different generation, you know, by 10, 15 years, then, you know, people who had who had led this role before in the case of Ray, like 30 years, maybe I just had a different idea about what it did mean to CLA in the way in which I was just talking about it, which is larger than itself. And so finding a way to give it permanent, but at the same time, conceptually destabilize it and actually make it more vulnerable to outside forces and global forces and just expand it and make it more vulnerable rather than understand that the audience for the school is already a pre-selected set of people who want to talk in a like-minded fashion.
I believe I was the one who opened that door, you know, for the school to the idea that part of our job, if not our inherent entrance is to expand the audience. But not to automatically assume that that means a populist position or a conciliatory position or anything like that. I've always been somebody who, while I've made, you know, I've been in the world of academics my whole career, being a practicing architect and really pushing into the world and wanting to be vulnerable. That way, I've always seen that.
I've never believed in autonomy, you know, in terms of architecture. And I don't think that the founders of SIRC did that. It was alternative, not autonomous. And the fear would be that it would become autonomous.
And I wanted to make sure that didn't happen. So that was both, I think, the feeling and also what my mission was. And I think it's been taken up by the school. And I think it's not a problem that you need to SIRC really, anymore in any way, or really never was, but in how architectural institutions are trying to adapt to new educational models.
And we see it just with SIRC education in general, becoming at least in the US, this kind of downing of quality and upping a price. And so an overall problem with how to still make architectural education completely inspiring and necessary while also adopting an attitude like SIRC that we need to have this alternative focus. So we need to provide something else. And you're also a tenured faculty at UCLA.
Obviously a very different educational institution to be a part of, built into the UC system and such. I was wondering how your role there influences particularly your work at your firm and how, particularly in regards to young architects. So you're teaching explicitly as a professor, but you're also teaching as a person at the firm, as a leader of the firm. How do you see these new architects coming in?
What are their main concerns? I think that UCLA, which is not SIRC, and I believe has a different outlook and a different in a way, constituency in the students who choose to go between the two schools, have a different idea about it. I think that what UCLA has done, especially if you look back to Sylvia Lavin's time as chair, which was from the mid-90s to the mid-aughts, and then that established, I think, a very, very strong, robust design culture that wasn't quite like that incarnation in the history of the school, which was, the school was born in the mid-60s, like a lot of other schools. And it was about alternative practice, even back then, a lot of social stuff, a lot of spatial psychology and so forth.
By the time Satoshi Aabe gets here and he's coming from Japan, pretty prolific as an architect building, and then starting the super studio on the Ideas campus for a specific post-professional set of students to really try to engage in a way that, on the one hand SIRC being an outsider school, it wanted to adopt that idea since it's not a program that's even now supported program by the state funding. But if you take that, and then you take the students who are coming through the MR1 program, I think what they're looking for, on the one hand, are questions about, well, what's architecture going forward and how can I practice it? I think that generally, based on what's taught, the medium of architecture is still the primary realm of experimentation and focus. The Ideas campus expands all that.
Tom is doing Haiti research and so forth. But sort of on campus, I think that the issue of I might become a scenario planner, I might become a graphic designer, or I might become a cinematographer was a little bit more the case when the economy was more in doubt and how these things work. They shift and change based on viability of making a living. I think that the medium of architecture is still the primary focus.
How somebody might practice, though, I think is more open-ended around that, whether they go to Europe and spend 15 years and work for somebody like Herzog, or I think a lot of students, which is, I don't know if it's surprising or not, say they want to teach while they're in school and I think UCLA, while we use the medium of architecture, I think pretty centrally. I think there's also the idea that we are teaching people how to teach for the future in a way. I'm seeing the gamut in terms of what students are looking for. I think also what's interesting is we don't have a landscape department, which I believe is growing in terms of applicants for design in places like Harvard and Toronto.
We've become more sensitive to teach ideas of urbanism and landscape, if not officially, than folding all of that into the curriculum. I've been teaching tower projects the last couple of years and I talk about them purely almost in terms of urban ideas and not strictly about iconography or signature or pure identity making, but about issues of density and whether it's a city like LA should have more of them. So when teaching, especially with something as often victimized by that icon culture as a tower, for teaching students and giving them that basis of form to work around, what are the other main concerns that you have them think about? One of the things that we're constantly discussing with practitioners and students is not just the social-minded aspect of design, but just how to come into something from a holistic perspective and keep that you mentioned in an IVTA earlier, keep that IVTA around a project as fresh as possible so that when you're moving from different project to different project, you don't become hardened by what you think you know is already the case.
How do you keep that freshness when you're teaching students, especially about towers? Right. I think that it's really important as a teacher and this is after doing it for 30 years, I think providing a context for let's say why you would engage the students in something, you know, in particular. So I don't say choose me to a tower and just be an expert on that and then you walk away and you don't even know what the context of it is.
And I think so what I do, you know, when I begin a year or a course as I talk about economies and politics, before I even talk about typologies and you know, craft and technique and all of those things to try to expand their skill set. I want to do that too, but the most important thing I can think about is how can I create an awareness of the value of let's say building typologies or market difference between a tower as a symbol and you know, a tower as a compressor of space and you know, in a purely organizational manner and then find not how they stay unhinged but how they you know come together. And I think about this in my office because these are the things that you know we're engaged with anytime. We do a project.
It's it's fortunate because we're always asked to make a difference, you know, somehow we're not an office where people say I want to take the safe route and you know, just produce something that will go into the background. So I transfer the demand and the interest in I think a whole range of issues. So that's how I would say I make it fresh and I also I think give them more long lasting, you know, tools that don't they'll learn software but I'm not really software driven as a professor and we'll learn about issues of energy and sustainability, you know, within that building type. But everything changes, you know, technically so fast that I'm trying to leave them with ways to research and think, you know, about the work.
And I also oscillate between doing really strict building design studios and then doing really large kind of urban speculation projects where we're dealing with fictions and scenarios and less about form and that range also reflects my own interest in our work in our office. Something that is what we notice and it's hard to say whether this is actually like a provable theory but when the recession was hitting architects really hard and people who had just graduated were looking for work, they were finding new ways to capitalize on their education. So either going into as you said, like kind of alternative design practices and using their tools for just other purposes or still calling the architects themselves architects but kind of charting out new weird territories that are now becoming more and more understood and actually accepted. But now the economy is picking back up, has picked back up and those architects who had previously charted out on their own to try some alternative practice have the opportunity now to kind of come back into the fold in a way.
Do you see that in your office of having an influence from both students who might have had a different understanding of what architecture could be because of these alternative practices that came out of the recession and also just practitioners who are now hiring who lived through it and have might have had their ideas about architecture changed in the midst of it? I think there's a range I couldn't generalize completely but if you think about if you were in school or recently graduated and the recession hits and you can't find work, whether that then produces a new spirit for being an entrepreneur or going and doing something else, whether it's forced on your desperation or thinking that design education in the most optimistic sense would allow you to go live a creative life. I did think that there was the idea that working on projects that were interesting that had some social mission and that engaged design in some way was really all that mattered. The medium of building wasn't the be all and end all and that might have changed and since the economy's gotten better and that if you go study architecture and you know that architecture doesn't really go away it more of some changes but buildings keep getting built and you know when you see cranes and cities and those cranes are generally associated with developer projects and you know that money is flowing back in and that's what cities are built on.
There's only x number of museums and palaces and all of that stuff and to build a city you have to directly engage in the economy. I'm not so sure that for a certain sector having the ambition to have your own office and to go through the trials and tribulations of building I do think that that a lot of young graduates think that's a pretty daunting thing. In other words I think architecture as in and of itself has been reembraced at so many levels but I don't think anybody now graduating feels condemned so to speak. I mean that in a funny double entendre like that's the only thing you can do is go still be an architect maybe they would say I'd like to be involved in architecture but if I'm only doing this part of it so I'm not so sure that there are that many young graduates who are going out to start their own offices again or want to start their own office because that's very difficult or if they go work for an office whether they will spin off or emerge you know to their own practice.
I think there will always be a few where really doing buildings is you know that's the best thing you can do and you'll take the those trials and tribulations and the miracles that have to go along with it to be a part of it so I think it's still pretty scattered right now in terms of how future graduates or recent graduates will practice. I think you're right though I think there is a reembrace of architecture since it's possible again. Right possibility as long as there's some money backing it up that you know inspire a lot in your just day to day life of balancing both working in the firm and teaching. How do those two spheres influence one another?
More and more I think the office is informing the teaching and that's probably natural at some level because 10 or 15 years ago let's say right after I you know step down at SIRC and didn't really have any work and you know just kind of starting a little bit from scratch because prior to that was research projects and didn't really have a building office you know together so how I thought about teaching in my work let's say when I was in my 30s or early 40s was I wanted the studio stuff to be really different and now I don't give studio projects in which I'm already know the answer and you know I'm the expert and they're the learner not at all but for instance I might not be doing tower studios if we weren't you know engaged in that issue personally but I take it outside of our own office and it's a completely generic problem or possibility you know for architecture and I'm also interested in them working on projects for which defy whatever they might think of themselves in the future like oh I'll only be a small architect and I'll never do a tower because that's just not who I am or what I'm going to be and I'm will tell them even if I thought or didn't think that when I was you know graduating from school the best thing I said was I won't limit myself you know in terms of what could happen you know as a practitioner so I think I think they're they're joining up more and more but not I don't teach them like in-house techniques and proprietary things you know I don't want to generate student power or anything like that so I think more and more just feeling a bit like as the work becomes you know bigger in scale takes on more obvious conditions you know to work in that's why I think I talk as much about social and political you know conditions as much as I do about well how does your plan work and I wasn't teaching in that mode I think 15 years ago and to return a little bit to your own education after you got your VR kit University of Houston going to the GSD to study you were also involved quite heavily in philosophy of art is that correct yes I don't really even know where to start asking you about that but I just want to know you're the expert I wish I'm still looking at them I don't have that master's degree but what was your motivation if you can even recall that like why did that feel important to you at the time to involve that kind of education alongside architecture I grew up in a family that was you know they were my parents were art lovers and I was fortunate and I probably went to every major museum east of the Mississippi River by the time I was 10 years old we weren't wealthy we just you know took a trip and and my dad just made sure that we were gonna they were just obsessed with it so I was exposed to it and I correlated art you know in the classic sense of you know the the artist has the unfettered life of being able to just intuitively give expression you know to something and oddly enough while they were more focused on appreciating representational work maybe just as a defiant you know kid I was looking at Barnett Newman and Lee Bontakou and you know just people like that in the 1960s and was drawn to it so it just stayed with me as time went by and when I got into college just being the type of person that I was and I got my first subscription to art form it's not a boast it's just sort of like okay well I hadn't even been to New York and just looking at the first 50 pages of you know gallery ads of what was going on it just you know just intuitively it felt like okay well I can learn something about representation that isn't you know strictly taught to me I know how to do an ink axonometric well what else is there and I could sort of track it you know through a lot of things just in terms of relational ideas and my interests in architecture were also about the classic tension between minimalism and excess and so I fell in love with looking at Robert Ryman and Viennese action artists you know at the same time and while I didn't know the theories of them very well because it was above my my station at that time just understanding them in their pure contrast allowed me even to think about architecture that way that's incredibly helpful though just to say that you could you had this almost like primitive response to it without knowing any of the theory because that's also most of the self-conscious attack on those types of arts is that they require some type of booklet to accompany them so that you can understand them because the only way you can appreciate them is understanding them which is of course a little bit also a justification applied to a lot of architectural critiques that oh this is something that you just have to understand better so I'm guessing that throughout that kind of exposure and interest as it led you through your education that was also a gave you kind of like a framework to also kind of think about architectural ideas through is that more or less no absolutely I mean the time period of undergrad would like when the New York 5 were going on I mean if you if you if you dared tried to read Chomsky you forget it and you know you would just take sort of face value ideas you know on that if I remember picking up Michael Fried or Rosalind Krausen just not being able to because I didn't have a teacher you know our content you know total auto-dact at that level but it's time you know when behind then finished grad school and I did have a very my most influential teacher was an Austrian ex-patriot painter he is named Paul Rotterdam and he taught in the VES program and I taught I took art theory and drawing with him I mean they were survey classes in a little bit more intimate setting and drawing and I finally had enough I think maturity to be able to get a lot of the issues about what I had intuitively you know sort of thought about whether it was rhyming and process and substance and not about the subject matter and what the differences between those were but I think that your thought about you know audience and especially in architecture and do you need to decode things or is it embedded in the work and how does the work communicate and if you love it how do you know it won't alienate and you know just what's transmitted I've learned a lot you know through this kind of parallel discourse and by the time you know you're 10 of art for him finally getting you know what's connected and what's unhinged and what's autonomous and what doesn't lead toward a clearer representation of the work it's exciting now because it seems there's so many more forums and spaces for people to talk about architecture and hear about architecture and see architecture in a way that I kind of can't imagine being saturated in pre-energetic just like it's harder to come by you'd have to know where to look and now it's just everywhere for better and for worse it's too early to really make any claim like that anyway but you do have this kind of new very loud population of people that feel very comfortable sharing their very opinionated ideas about architecture and such a new architecture and oftentimes they're maybe interested in theory and might have be familiar with it but there isn't necessarily that same level of shared discourse that you can find at university or you can find within a certain practice in a city or so so I'm wondering obviously you've done a lot of academic writing and you also publish but what is your ongoing firms relationship with theory and how do you kind of like struggle through that and find the benefits in both the midday the things that I'm interested in actually are it's it's almost a self-reflexive to the terms that we were just talking about which is architecture as a as a media or as a medium and in what state is it in you know in the digital world and in essence some of the theories that go into the work like how the how architecture should be not a resistant medium but a collaborative medium with with issues of ephemerality and illusion or the graphic which those are the things that I spend most of my time quote unquote theorizing I first set up the problem which is we had better make architecture you know work and be collaborative rather than resistive in the world it needs to work and be in its own realm and its own medium but the idea of I don't practice it as a as a guardian of the real and so therefore thinking about how to communicate that I want to say in very very direct ways where the very subject matter is of concern to a lay person as it is to a practitioner which is what is the medium of space what's the level of how do we get entertainment distraction infotainment education and all that and where does architecture I'm truly obsessed with that as a question and actually trying to turn let's say the language of our work and the sort of art form of the work to become purposeful within that field as opposed to just trying to produce difference or signature or personality or autonomy it may have aspects of that because I recognize the singularity of our work but it's coming out of the very issues of how do we communicate and I think that architecture is about communicating it may not communicate the way a blog or a text communicates or a story but it is a medium that goes well beyond becoming a shelter or background for you know our lives on screen in a way definitely in LA that's for sure for sure so what are some projects you're working on right now oh goodness our biggest project is a port terminal project in Kilong, Taiwan we won a competition three years ago and that's been on the verge of going into construction for a while these huge projects are complicated and they don't sail through and that's something that I think has been a project because of its scale and its location has encapsulated a lot of these you know issues and questions about communication and I think we won the project because we if we didn't do it perfectly we did it well enough in the issue of what would we say as architects in a particular site to a city to a region as LA architects and what would we say even if we were speaking a foreign language right how could we communicate how could we make sure that when we bowed to somebody in Asia and they stick out their hand and it's a kind of culture class of understanding what customs and rituals are not just critical regionalism or anything like that because we don't practice that way but making things mean something to treacherous set of terms because architects can be phobic about that the idea that you would be imposing some type of meaning on the site or through the project is something that you would impose it but also even if you were to try to excavate it you know somebody might say well there's nothing truly there to excavate you're not really doing forensics you know as archivists can't be that and I admit to you know a gap between intention and resolution I think that the medium is too big and broad and coarse and it's not a like a finely fit glove around you know theory I think we all understand that but I'm sure when you know I was doing sort of theoretical projects in my 30s I was more thinking about you know the world of industry and sameness and then you know that sort of turned into a project about dealing with the univocal nature of let's say digital technology in the 90s right every company said the same thing you know buy our tools and you'll be able to go where you want and feeling like somewhere between you know the empathy of the loss of the local and voice and all of that but never being an architect who said well I'll go to the site and I'll just build with whatever materials are you know local or available and in a world today where you know it is a global enterprise we've learned a lot on that we're doing two tower projects in Vancouver a city that you know is long known or 30 years now into kind of high-rise identity in a city that still has suburban tendencies and we have very good clients who want to bring small apartments to a broader segment of the public because you know these projects help drive the economy on the one-handed race prices but the things we've been working on are I would say a kind of contemporary capsule tower not about plug in and plug out but just simply all the apartments will be completely built out they're only 350 square feet they're for first-time buyers you know out of college or what have you and they range between 25 and 30 stories and mixed use projects we're doing a project in the west side for Wildwood to private school for middle and high school students in west LA and so we're involved in their brilliant very very progressive liberal way of thinking collaborative thinking about education they teach their students to I think go do good things in the world and not really become the wolf of Wall Street and that's the kind of client that we you know like so those are some of the things we're doing working any type of academic project for an architect I imagine being like we were talking earlier about Tommy's work on the Caltech campus but certainly also early education or high school education doing those types of institutional projects seems like one of the also craziest storm of different pedagogical theories working around of like how you should structure the space how you structure the navigation and flow and everything so that that just strikes me as like we could have a whole other conversation about like the thought process behind putting that together we could I also just wanted to because our listeners unfortunately don't have a tie directly into the arkneckneck's office at all times but earlier we were talking about a presentation you're going to do at or who's university and then mark with a film you made about Los Angeles can you talk a little bit about that film? We were we were just we the architects invited for the 50th anniversary of our whose submit a film and and my first thought because they said oh it should maybe be about your work in the building and so a building and I thought to do that we have to go you know construct that film and and it just struck me that I should really talk about Los Angeles and make this a sort of love letter about Los Angeles to Los Angeles in this film and then give it back as a sort of happy 50th to or who's because a number of architects have gone back and forth through the school and given lectures and and been invited you know to do things and they asked me actually to give the the 50th anniversary lecture unfortunately I'm going to be in in Albania next week and that's when you want to clone yourself for sure yes or upload your brain to a computer yeah let's work on that they are so the so the little film is is about the idea of Los Angeles is why we love it it's because it's eccentric and and not perfect and it's it's beauty is is defective its dreams are given new life every day and broken the next and there's a persistence to it of attractiveness and so a sense I'm describing the city as a as a really incredibly levelable place but for not the classical reasons you know no postcards involved even though we can conjure postcard images of LA there's 17 million dystopias inside our heads you know of what the city is and I just think that that's what I wanted to give to the EU about you know LA right now so I hope we can share it with you at some point it's definitely something else and soon to be watchers if you can get this video we'd love to see and also just as a comparison point any Danish city but any but particularly something like oh who's that you have you know a metropolitan region of over 10 million people in a content and then compared to a country like Denmark of five and a half million people not entire nation and the whole nation and the whole nature of a urban space built on social democratic systems that help things along in the way that they don't exactly hear and I've spoken to a bunch of people who are very who agree with this idea of LA and again have it be and also have it's their reason for being here as well and I always wonder like if that premise with that premise is it even possible to solve LA what do we want to if we could or if we do will it turn into someplace that is altogether terrible however altogether functioning in a certain way so that's not a specific interview question that's just a rhetorical question but I love that there's this engagement with Los Angeles and how I'm sure it influences your work all the time to have this constant questioning and engage with the city and trying to understand whether or not there is this common language I mean we talked about soccer earlier yeah which I'm sure also gives you a certain framework for understanding Los Angeles do you imagine that within all of this wackiness there is still something of a local architecture to Los Angeles that people either think is a local architecture and they might ask for when you're talking with people in Vancouver or other areas or just kind of a perceived idea of a local architecture I would say I would say no I don't think that the world sees a local architecture anymore especially in the internet age where even the architects that are the most well known here you know build more outside of LA and you know more than half of our work is planned for you know projects outside of Los Angeles so you could say it's a case of the global but but I also don't want to you know say that that people who work in practice here and who mostly build here are somehow not contributing you know in that way probably there's a little bit of an idea about perception vis-a-vis media which is which is you know unavoidable because unless you're on the ground here you might not you know know let's say quote unquote what the gestalt reality is is it more this is it more that is it is it a project to perpetuating historical modernism and let's say LA becoming to a certain extent I think maybe what was presented you know in Pacific time two years ago was a bit like Chicago might talk about themselves as you know the progenitors of the high rise and and of a certain type of modernism we did the same thing and what I was worried about was that the rest of the world would think we went into protect mode and we went into a classic design mode and everything was put on an altar and that you know LA wasn't prone to risk anymore and I mean I don't think that that truly happened but on the other hand it was a substantial enough effort to awaken design where even the future the idea of the future you know was exposed as finished you know over or it never came a time that had never come and I don't think there's any any specific school of thought that seems to be perceivable prior to the internet it might have been seen as a school just about pure formalism and a nerve and risk and and because we weren't building social housing and or even low-cost housing it was you know the exotica of design and that that legacy is still operative at some level but I don't think that it defines you know the identity so I would say generally I don't think I think it's vague yeah and I think we just kind of how we want to keep it right like we don't want to get any more specific yeah this has been great I really appreciate you coming into our studio today and talking with us and by us I mean the royal we that we use the podcast audience and one of the things we like to ask people when we're having interviews is if there's anything that they're reading or listening to or perhaps watching that they'd like to share with listeners doesn't have to be architectural at all just like whatever you're immersed in right now right now I'm reading a book called cruel optimism you know this book I said by a professor at the University of Chicago named Warren Berlant and its premise basically is a challenging book it's a confrontational book it's not imperious and deeply political but the idea that optimism you know in in terms of a better life or in terms of the democratic project or whatever it might be you know certainly it's it's it's inflecting you know the American way of life that there is a cruelty involved in persisting with the very thing that you want can produce you know frustrations for you and even just with that as a kind of preamble and she sets that out at the beginning and then goes through a lot of specifics part of the reason why I picked it up is because I thought cruel optimism isn't that what architects how architects operate don't we if you if you capitulate to you know the the pessimist you'll quit right and being optimistic patient and managing restlessness with all of that and and I was curious and I was transposing the ideas of let's say optimism for architecture's future like it will be sustainable built in humane environments and all the things that we want to move forward that it will be aesthetically interesting and you know we need to want technology transfer and we want it to be more like a cell phone and less like this and you know on and on and it's been pretty fascinating another book is called reality hunger by David shield and it's like 600 little aphorism aphorisms from a few lines to a paragraph and quite a lot of it's about the the issues of appropriation and plagiarism in writing and Jonathan leitham's book on the ecstasy of influence which he wrote a few years ago trying to get around the issue of difficulty in writing and heavy postmodern ways of writing and getting into feeling freer to make new things happen of course the critics on the other hand are still plenty and kind of talking about a positive ideas or music being the same thing regurgitation but you have to read it a little closer to understand that it's a project and it's not just being about lazy nor is it about standing on the shoulders of you know people who came before you with something more challenging than that and the reason why I've been reading these books is because I'm just finishing a big monograph that I've written of which you know it's trying to make clear or make provocative all the ideas in many respects that we're talking about and I look to them to see how quotation or versioning etc works in a powerful and honest way and not a well I'm just an architect and I don't know how to write so I need to just you know do that I think there are talented writers out there who you know are thinking about that just the same in architecture as well so and I would say that I'm I'm not of I'm more I'm reading more now than than ever and I'm not and I haven't historically been a voracious reader probably more of a surfer and now I'm a little bit more of a deep sea diver in some things yeah yeah even though so you don't um are you more interested are you able to read these in physical form are you reading them just out of curiosity in the e-book or no I buy the books and you know they're good for plane flights and an hour here you know they're generally I'll read a chunk and then sit down and write or read a chunk and then write and then work on these soundtrack things that I'm doing and I like to mix you know media and stuff I mean when I'm on a plane even I'm doing some soundtrack stuff on my iPad and I'll read for two hours and then and then get into my software and you know play the keyboard while I'm over the Atlantic you know on my iPad or something that's that's the age we live in we play every media at any altitude fantastic pretty much yeah we're all um I guess a long time ago you would have kept being an ADD quiet now everybody's like where's a t-shirt and go right I'm you know that as many digits as we have on our hands yeah yeah well thank you so much it was so great to talk with you thank you Amelia it's nice to be here thanks a lot Neil okay thanks for listening to our very first episode of our connections one to one with Neil Denari and a special thanks to Sire for helping coordinate the interview Donnie LoVoynov edits the podcast and Matt Scaling's composed the music myself and Paul Petunia are the producers of one to one you can learn more about this week's interview in our show notes and listen to new episodes coming out every Monday to keep up with podcasting news from our connect follow us on Twitter through at bark sessions or hashtag our connect sessions and let us know what you think by rating us on iTunes you can also email us through connect at arcanects.com thanks again for listening