I believe in those who know their neighborhoods and own the streets they walk on, because while you do that you can contradict yourself from one street corner to the other without being cynical, with a lot of honesty. You have to know your territory, you have to work with them, because you can take positions that no one can take. Welcome to Archimetic Sessions, one to one. I'm Amelia, and this week I'm talking with architect Bernard Corrie.
Corrie came to the US from Lebanon to study architecture at Risdian Harvard, then returned to establish his practice in Beirut in mid-1990s. His father was a prominent modernist architect, practicing during Beirut's booming pre-civil war years, and much of Corrie's works somehow engages with Lebanon's post-war event. We spoke about his time at Harvard studying war architecture with Levius Woods, and how his practice is a constant re-evaluation of how architecture can reflect upon and come to terms with the traumas of war. So Bernard, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
I wanted to start out the conversation by asking you to maybe dig back a little bit in your memory bank, and tell me what it was like when you first came to study architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1980s, while back in Lebanon, a civil war was going on. Oh, a lot of drinking. Out of sorrow or out of natural collegiate activity? Out of a lot of natural things.
No, I had a good time at RISD. It was a good program. RISD was going downhill, according to certain people, but I think we had a good time. I went through the whole cursus site.
I went through the freshman year, started five full years there, and then I continued straight to GSD. I didn't take a break. And one of the reasons I did that was because I wasn't really sure where I was home at that point. I didn't want to settle anywhere.
Right. So you came to another country to study without necessarily a specific plan as to that you would return to start a practice where you came from or say in the US that you were just kind of feeling it out. It wasn't very clear. It wasn't very clear at the end either, because for a period of three years after I graduated, I kept the foot in the US.
So I was going back and forth very undecided as to where I was home until I realized there was no home for me. Was that a liberating realization or a terrifying one? Both, I think. They lied to Lee Sauer.
I bet there's a better word for that that English just doesn't have. So what was it like then when you first then did go back to Lebanon? Lots of hopes. I was one of those naive soldiers who thought that I could take part in a great reconstruction project and I don't mean the reconstruction of buildings.
We thought that there was a project in the works, the rebuilding of a nation. That obviously did not happen. And after a while, I started understanding the mechanisms of survival here and was time for plan B. So between the time I arrived and the time I actually started building things had changed at least for me.
So the plan B, what exactly was that? Well, the plan B was to understand that there was no reconstruction project in the conventional sense of the term. The state, the absence of the state being rebuilt, the institutions being completely corrupt, incompetent and bankrupt. There were no museums, no competitions, no public debate around public space.
No comment has to be formulated, no collective effort in terms of even from a different kind of memory. It was very strange. To me, there was no post-war period. I think the world did not end with the title codes in 1890.
And it did not start in 1975. In fact, from a complexion and that. So I'd like you to talk or based on what you just said, I'd like you to relate that to one of your projects, the subterranean club nightclub that you worked on. I think that's kind of a perfect or to me, the evolution of what I do know about that club does speak to what you're referring to is this difficulty of not just literally rebuilding after the war, but in fact, establishing any type of cohesion in society and having a place for people to vent and relax and socialize, but also to discuss these kinds of post-war ideas.
Well, this we were already back, we were already in 1998. I'd like to rewind back to the early 90s when I was still in my academic cocoon. My first project, the Taco Bay route, was something I worked on with Levius Woods back at the GFD. And it was a project called Evolving Scars.
And the exercise, what we tried to do was to try to turn the demolition of the war-torn buildings into an architectural act in an effort to build another kind of memory during the scarring period. That was very politically naive because I thought at the time that it would be possible to work on a collective memory, obviously coming to the route three, four, five years, and a lot of about the projects and understanding how things worked here brought me to the plan B, which was to change strategies, stop waiting for the great noble projects that would never come around and stop from the bottom, the bottom being the entertainment industry. So I did not build post-war memorials or serious projects in the sense that the programs I tackled, well, at least my first buildings were, I described as sort of vulgar commissions in the sense that I catered for the entertainment industry. I designed places of the Bouch, and these were not politically accountable in the sense that they were not at the outset political projects.
When you design a museum and when you design a building for the public sector, you have a certain level of accountability. I mean, on the political level, it turns out when this territory does not exist and you start from the bottom, you work on temporary buildings, which is why I did the first six buildings, I built world temporary structures, meaning they had a very limited lifespan, and you at what date they were going to be demolished even prior to designing them initially. So when you work on temporary buildings and you work for the entertainment industry, it is kind of liberating because you're not accountable politically. So you can start taking positions, you can take postures that you would not take if you're building permanent buildings and if you're building serious commissions.
So that's how it all started. I started building nightclubs, but I did it very seriously, I like to think with a certain level of pleasure, of course, but it wasn't as frivolous as people may think. Well, what kind of then ideals were you trying to imbue in those spaces with having this attention towards both understanding that if the people who are going to be using this are... Interesting thing about the entertainment industry in particularly these projects, my association to my collaboration with also the people who made this project possible, because I was not alone on this.
I think you have to have a smart client, someone who's willing to ask the courage to question things in a critical manner. So I don't think there was an idealist projecting from my projects. There was absolutely no certainty in any of those projects, no certainty formulated. In fact, there's a lot of worry in these projects, associated with a lot of pleasure, of course, but I don't see these projects as idealistic projects.
There are projects that try to reformulate the context, a very specific context, and not the consensual definition of the context, but one that is very engaged in the very specificity of the situation itself that I'm tackling. And there you can go very far, because you're liberated also from this complex we have with context as architects. We always want to be contextual, but the term context sometimes becomes also very consensual and dangerously consensual in the sense that it ends up formulating dangerously dangerous simplifications of history and dangerous simplifications of context. Only context is when you're liberated from that and you can engage with a very specific situation and not try to engage with the context in a broader territory.
So it sounds like your time when you spoke before, the kind of naive project initiated with Ljubius Woods at the GSD, would you say that those kinds of academic environments are somewhat implicit in creating that simplified consensus? Oh, definitely yes. I think people who spend too much time at school end up being completely disconnected from those marvellously, some realities that I have learned to enjoy. So what was it about at the GSD at that time?
Was there other work going on paying attention to the similar themes that you were interested in or was the work that you did with Ljubius kind of? No, no, no, no, Ljubius was a fantastic man and I have great memories of the time. I spent with him and enjoyed every second with him. He was a very exceptional character, but besides that, no, I think there was a lot of stupidity happening at GSD.
It was a country club. Well, I think that criticism can certainly be leveraged at many of the similar Ivy League schools at really any point. Well, it means schools in general know Harvard, it's a mysterious institution, but I do keep a foot in schools every now and then. But architecture somehow, the academy has become extremely apolitical and I think the architectural world has become completely disconnected from what I think is political.
I don't think architecture produces any meaning on that level, unfortunately. So what would that be? What would be the prime political platform for architects to be engaged with? Or not necessarily platform, but concept?
Not architecture, no. Did you just say out? It's the practice and try to explore other territories. I was called a gadgetist at school because I was very proud of describing my work, not as architecture, but as instruments.
And I would always start by my projects were very narrative at the beginning and I resisted the act of join, which was a problem with Levi's, but I think he would have the sensitivity to respect that. In fact, I spent three and a half months with Levi's woods and did not produce a join until probably two weeks before the end. And that was fantastic. We had endless conversations and two weeks before the semester, and they told me, don't design a project.
Just don't even come to the final pinup because the conversations we had had were so constructive and were so interesting. He was working on Zagreb at the time. I did not know and published a small publication. So the issue of foreign architecture was very dear to him.
And so we shared a lot of those worries and then when he was gone, I developed this project solo on two weeks, involving scholars as a project that's still presented to this state, sometimes in lectures, some 25 or whatever years later. I think I produced it in 91 to 25 years ago. So from these reflections on the state of the academic context for architecture, I noticed that you were slated to teach a course at the GSD this spring, but I believe it was canceled, is that correct? Yes, correct.
So have you had other teaching experience at the GSD at this time? No, I have never thought that the GSD I have lectured there a few times, but I was giving a studio there that I think would have been very interesting. But I think maybe a bit too political for the audience or the students. Well, I'd like you to speak about that as I've yet unrealized studio, because I think that as what I've understood about it in this engagement with the little climate series in particularly in the Arab world, we last week just had Amal and Dros on the podcast, and there was no specific intent in scheduling these two close to one another.
But you also recently contributed to her book, The Arab City. I did not know that. I think we did dial up together. I don't think it was for a book.
I might be wrong. Well, the book is a series of compilation of research and things from past. So you are credit in it, but I might not have been a thing that is particularly... Amal is a very dear friend and very old friend before she was even an architect.
So we have a relationship that dates way before she went to college. She's a great person and I appreciate her before even considering her as an architect. Well, we spoke to her when I spoke to her for the last week's episode. She had been explaining the context of this book that she recently put out as really the not the culmination, but at least a benchmark in a lot of research and a lot of discussion around the Arab world and quote unquote the Arab city as a kind of unfairly pigeonholed concept or stereotype.
And in her conversation, it sounded like there had been a lot of discussion at Columbia's G-SAP around these issues and that they had been evolving really since in the last time that she was there. So at least the last five or 10 years or so. But I'm wondering if whether or not you see these kinds of conversations, just generally taking up Arab cities as a very fraught concept in the academic sense, but is that something that you feel that architecture schools are giving the appropriate attention to? I think Columbia is trying very hard and I think that's good.
And I think Amal is doing a lot on that front. I think in that man, not long ago, I think it was... The studio ex? Yeah, from studio ex.
So Amal is very engaged, but I'm not very aware of what's happening in schools very much. In my coming in and out, I do quit sometimes and I teach every once in a while in the couple of years. I just did a thing at all this one week, a intense workshop. We don't want to be in Turkey, not only in Italy before the end of the year, but I usually don't do that often.
So to branch out from the academic world, you've also engaged with these ideas in the last Venice Biennale. The Kingdom of Bahrain's Pavilion would be under Riemkelhas' fundamentals. And your spin or perhaps not your personally, but the pavilion spin on Bethine was fundamentalists and other urban models. And I'm wondering if you can give a brief explanation of what the pavilion entailed and what the ideas around Arab cities you were trying to discuss.
What I tried to do is to establish a clear and obvious relationship between the notion of the nation state and modernity and modernism, if anything in the Arab world. And it was interesting, the span between 1914 and 2014. 1914 is the beginning of World War I, at the end of which these states are literally plotted on the map by the colonial powers who bring with them the notion of the nation and have building the state institutions and major infrastructure projects. And we were very much associated to the colonies that brought, in fact, the notion of the state and structure the state, if anything, our constitutions and our laws are very much inspired or influenced by the colonies who helped put them together.
And we've had, I would call them, the glorious 30 or 40 years, depending on which city, which country you look at, during which many of those cities, like Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, not only in architecture, but in other creative fields, had their take on modernity, whether it's cinema, music, or other creative fields. Beirut, at some point, inspired it being a very modern city, whether it's failed, it's a modern project or not. To me, it's not just a question that stops and stops with architecture, but you will see that with the beginning of the failure of the state and the state institutions, for level, it became very obvious by the early mid-70s, for other countries, it was a bit before, a bit after the rise of this participant and dictatorships. And then you see the notion of the state completely collapsing and going bankrupt and with it, the modern project going down the drain.
And you can read that on the facades of the buildings in those cities. So there was a very obvious value between modernism and the notion of nation-state. And most of the early modern projects in our part of the world, even the first and second generation of moderns, which my father was, I would consider part of the first or second generation of local modern architects, their commissions, at least in their beginnings, were mostly public buildings. It's interesting to compare my path with that of my dad, for instance, I was never commissioned a public building, I probably never will, I never worked for the public sector.
So this says a lot about, it all boils down to politics at the end of the day, but the architecture will completely immune to that. It's very interesting, we got a lot of coverage for our pavilion, but certainly not for the right reason, there was never a constructive or serious critical debate around the political aspect of our scheme. Instead, I thought, in fact, I was in fact very deceived by the Biennale in general. It seemed to me it was a sort of a parade of archives, not to say even to a certain level, almost an autopsy on a dead carver, which was modernism, sort of a pornographic Macavo, autopsy of the modern carver, where we were just observing what parts and what it had produced purely from very limited territory of architecture and completely apolitical.
So I think I was a bit off the map and of the radar. I was doing something that I had nothing to do with what I've seen in other pavilions or the Biennale in general, but any other thing that screwed us. Well, it sounds like the Biennale was just not, while it is praised and so much as the, as an apex in architectural discourse, that it is certainly not a place to actually constructively discuss these things that you think are significant. And I would like to then hear whether you think that the current discussion around the upcoming Biennale under Alejandro Arvanos, the directorship, that has a much more explicitly socio-political approach than certainly Rimmkelhaus' of curation, and how that is being almost, while at the same time, praise it is being also almost universally to write it in a way that people are, or at least in the mainstream press, it seems that there's a certain mainstream architecture press that you say, there's a certain criticism towards the architecture who believes that these things can be done by architects, and that at the same time, somewhat contradictively, there's also the belief that they have to want to do this, that to be a good architect, you have to be engaged in these things.
There seems to be almost a little bit of a cognitive dissonance around those kinds of so-called social issues. Depending on what we mean by good architecture, but by what I feel, my superficial reading of what we see in the polished pages of architectural magazines and books to be a good architect today is to be wise and cynical. It seems to be the state of the times, the wise and the cynical, and the least very smooth that seems to be the trend. That's why I don't, I'm not really following up on what is happening in the field at this point.
I don't read on the actual magazines, I don't read on the actual books, I don't know who's doing what, frankly. That sounds very refreshing, especially in the context of, well, of course, I encourage you to read everything on ArchiNecta. What I worry about doesn't seem to be worrying what my colleagues are tackling, my colleagues are doing in the most stable parts of the world. I'm not concerned by what concerns them, and they're not concerned by what concerns me.
It seems to be like that, but that's okay. Do you think it's then fair to kind of continue parading around the idea of the architecture profession when there seems to be such a drastic fracturing in that community of what the actual role of the architect should be and what the profession should look like? I believe more and more in the local. When I got out of school, I had this stupid fantasy of becoming an international architect.
When I see what the international architects and what their certainties have produced on my territory, I'm beginning to think maybe I should stay and practice in my own neighborhood. I believe in those who know their neighborhoods and all the streets they walk on, because while you do that, you can contradict yourself from one street corner to the other without being cynical. With a lot of honesty, you have to know your territory, you have to work on within, because you can take positions that no one can take while coming with universal certainties from outside, while coming with the supposed curiosity of the territory. We've also seen what this has produced.
It doesn't take a 500 pages book to research a territory to publish it and say, okay, now I know I've been curious enough to practice there. It doesn't work because, again, I feel there are theoretical posters and theory only can only produce consensual definitions at the end of the day. I believe in the local. I believe in the very, very specific, extremely, specifically, obsessively specific approach and reevaluation of what context means at every single situation.
I'd also like you then to speak about your work with DW5. As I understand it, this is a architectural design production company. So you work with a variety of other local architects to help them put together whatever they need to create a project. Is that kind of a fair way of describing it?
And it was the official idea looking at it like hospitals do. A lot of doctors can operate in one single hospital, but it turns out most of them have run away. Maybe it's because I painted the floor red, maybe it's because I ride my bike in the office. Maybe it's because...
By bike, do you mean motorcycle? Yes. I ride it to my desk, literally. So you have, you can just have a many motorcycle size elevator that you can use?
No, it's a big, it's a big crater. I can drive the car too. Excellent. So if you needed to, you could do a drive in architecture studio.
Yes, correct. So one of the projects that you have on your website that I think is pretty fascinating and I certainly haven't seen any other architect to kind of adopt anything similar to this or your drive-by films where you are, as you just described, literally driving your motorcycle from the studio, from your office to the construction sites or projects that you have around in Lebanon. And I've watched a few of these videos and I've been only on them. I myself have personally ridden as a passenger on a motorcycle and it is a terrifying experience.
And at the same time, watching these videos really does convey that. It really gives you this excitement and vicarious experience of actually being on the motorcycle by watching it because the camera is actually mounted on your helmet. So let's first start just like, where did the idea for this come from? I wanted to put my projects in their juice.
Of the city? Well, yeah, in French, we said all the other, I don't know if we translate the same in English, but yes, it was very important to understand these projects by linking them literally to a graphically different, by my studio, to wherever they are. And in some of those videos, I fly up in the crane with my helmets. I walk in the buildings with my helmets, but the approach is very important because you have to understand this building and this is as much as I can do in a 10, 15 seconds, 10, 15 minutes on edited film.
I'm not a filmmaker. I don't pretend to be. So it was a very humbly, very spontaneous way of approaching the building in its physical context in the violence of the city through the motorcycle and that sort of speeds and sometimes counter traffic. I don't know if you've seen in some of the, I watched them sometimes and I don't know if I would do that again.
But so what exactly is the value then of you watching them again and having them as an archival process? If you, after a project is completed and you're looking back at these, what kind of value does it have in that regard? Well, I think we've planned buildings, I've designed them, I've talked about them in certain ways when they were on the drawing board, when they were on the construction and looking back 10 years later, they come from times are completed from meaning. So I think it's important to do register at some point in time very specifically at a specific date on a specific route, what it was like because it certainly won't be the same.
If I could do this every day, I'd do it. I think it's a lovely example of what the actual designers experience in a way is with regards to like visiting these projects and gradually seeing them progress while also giving a very visceral piece of media for someone who might never see the place to actually get to experience it in some perforated. We've in fact, there was an installation that was produced with these 12 videos, I think there were 12 of them a couple of months later in Mexico where I sculpted a replica of my helmets in wood sections in which I've based it in the middle of a room with a circular formation of 12 screens and the 12 videos were running looping constantly and you can wear that helmet that had another sound that was produced by a friend of mine who's a local musician that was supposedly produced with sounds that he had captured out of these videos, he's a musician. So anyway, you had the sounds produced by the 12 videos which was a pecophony of the wind and the cameras don't capture sound well and you had the 12 tours, the 12 rides running simultaneously and you were trapped in the middle of that was an interesting thing to work on.
So these were in fact done also for that, the videos were also produced with that installation in mind. Well Bernard, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, it was great to talk with you. Thanks for listening to ARKNEC Sessions 1-1 with Bernard Corrie, Daniel LoVoynoff at its our podcast and Matt Sculings composed our music. Myself and Paul Bresunya are the producers of 1-1.
New episodes come out every Monday. You can subscribe to us on iTunes and Google Play music and if you like the podcast consider leaving us a review. We are at ARK Sessions on Twitter and you can email us at connect.arcknect.com. Thanks again for listening to 1-1.