FORT DA // SAMPLER

FORT DA // SAMPLER
An off-site project by Santiago Borja for the Neutra VDL Research House II with Maddalena Forcella, El Camino de los Altos Cooperative, and g727.

November 17 – December 22, 2010
Neutra VDL Research House II
2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039

Opening Reception
Wednesday, November 17, 2010



Los Angeles – g727 presents FORT DA // SAMPLER, a site-specific installation by Mexico City-based artist Santiago Borja. For this project, Borja sets up an architectural intervention to encourage new readings of the frequently elusive nature of “magical thinking” embedded into Modernism. Reinterpreting the modernist vision of Austrian-born and Los Angeles-based architect Richard Neutra, the artist transforms the influential designer’s family home, known as the VDL Research House II, into a temporary functional textile loom design by Santiago’s team of collaborators, comprised of expert weavers from Chiapas, Mexico. The project grows from the formal similarities in between modern abstract geometry and Mayan patterning that represents the cosmos.

The installation title comes from Borja’s study of Freud’s “Fort / Da” theory, based on a child’s game of throwing a wooden reel attached to a string over a ledge until it disappears and then retrieving it. Freud theorized this game of disappearance and return as a way to view how the child manages his anxiety about the absence of his mother. Borja takes this theory further by interpreting it as a way of creating space, envisioning the act of throwing the reel as a way to visually and physically connect with a distant place.

Vis-à-vis this construct is the process of textile making in Chiapas, Mexico, where a young apprentice establishes her own identity as a textile maker through the creation of her first textile piece, a Sampler. The process of weaving and embroidering the Sampler is the connector between past, present, and future textile processes, creating a continuous dialogue with the cosmic and natural world around them.
About the Artist
Santiago Borja has a Bachelor Degree in Architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico and a Master on Theory and Practice of Contemporary Art and New Media from Université Paris 8.

Recent projects include Divan, Freud Museum, London, May 2010; In the Shadow of the Sun, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dècalage, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, 2009; and Halo, Pavilion Le Corbusier, Foundation Suisse, CIUP, Paris, 2008.

Collaborators and Sponsors
Maddalena Forcella
El Camino de los Altos Cooperative
Fundación/ Colección Jumex
SNCA-FONCA Conaculta
Sarah Lorenzen of Neutra VDL Research House II

Additional Programming
g727 Textile Tour and Roundtable Discussion
Date: To be announced on http://www.g727.org.

Downtown Los Angeles Textile Tour will be followed by a roundtable discussion at g727. For more information please to g727.adrian@gmail.com

g727 seeks to generate dialogues on artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape. The building blocks of a city comprise more than simply buildings, streets, and sidewalks. They equally encompass personal experience, collective memory and narratives. These are the less tangible, but no less integral elements that transform mere infrastructure into place. Through photography, painting, writing and video installations, artists open our eyes to these elements and heighten our awareness of what makes a place a place. g727 welcomes these artists to its space to help us all better understand the complex nature of cities and the urban condition.


Media Contact

Adrian Rivas, Director of g727
g727.adrian@gmail.com or (213) 627 9563

Interview with Bjarke Ingels

This interview was conducted at the Campus Inn Hotel in Ann Arbor, USA, on February 4^th 2010 by Ville Riikonen

Earlier this year, I had the chance to sit down with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who runs BIG in Copenhagen. The company is in my opinion one of the most promising young architectural practices out there, so it was great to get to meet and talk with Ingels in person. I’m posting the interview here for all interested readers!

Ville Riikonen: What made you decide you wanted to become an architect?

Bjarke Ingels: I used to draw a lot, and coming to the age of 13 I had already won some drawing competitions, most of them in cartoon style. At that age I also had my second baptism, and after the event my grandfather gave a speech saying that he was convinced I would become a great architect. But my plan was to become a cartoonist, someone like Frank Miller. Later when it was time to choose a career – and in the absence of a comic-book academy – I enrolled in the architecture school of the Royal Danish Art Academy, thinking at the time that I would only take the first few years of art classes and then focus on my own ambitions. But in the process, I got caught up with architecture.

BIG’s book “Yes Is More” seems to be inspired by comic books. Is there a connection between your early ambitions and the style of the book?

In retrospect the book could seem like the revenge of a failed comic book artist, and although it feels right to finally do one, the truth is that we really wanted to find an intelligent way of telling stories in architecture. We wanted to counteract with the tendency that people usually don’t read the essays but instead go directly to the visual content. At that time our discourse was summed up in my lectures – so the idea was to take these lectures and convert them to a book. We tried all kinds of ways, starting by printing out lecture slides and putting post-its to them saying what I usually would say during each slide. For a long time we called it a “bookture”. The challenge was to somehow control the speed of reading, in a similar fashion to how during a lecture you can flip through many slides quickly or stay in one for a longer time. Finally we realized that what we were looking for was the format of the comic book, where the layout and scaling of content are used to control the flow of reading.

How did you like to study architecture?

I passed my first years of architecture studies as a series of really fast and intense “love affairs” with various architects. It was really all of them, from different eras and styles of architecture. I would discover a new architect, dive into their world just to realize that most discourses were based on a series of unquestioned fundamentals. And once you question them, the whole house of cards falls down. This process continued – when I started there actually were a lot of Finns in there, like Heikkinen and Komonen who were the hard stuff at that time. I also had a moment with Alvar Aalto, who I discovered though Alvaro Siza. Aalto actually marked the end of my architectural promiscuity: I was studying in Spain at the time, where I went from Aalto into this study of tectonic culture, Utzon and Miralles – I had Miralles as a teacher and while I had imagined a much more straightforward sensibility towards tectonics, all he was talking about was French philosophy, reading poetry and so on. And after two months of studio with him, nobody in the class had a clue about what was going on. At the time I once again fled into the library and started reading, this time the books of Rem Koolhaas, starting with conversations with students from Rice. For the first time I wasn’t faced with an architecture that is dealt as an autonomous form of art but rather that it is in direct dialog with all other aspects of society, economy, social and cultural issues, globalization and so on. It was about making architecture an instrument of the real world. I think that architects constantly refurbish the surface of the planet to better accommodate it to the way we live; we transform the immaterial structures of the world like culture, economics and politics into physical frameworks.

Let’s talk about your practice, BIG. Many of your projects originate from winning competitions – how do you see the architecture competition as a feature of our profession?

There is this Danish sailor who writes books and has some of his lady friends visit him, while living his lovely sailor life. He said once in an interview that “the man has the children that the women he meets want to give him”. It’s a bit like that in architecture: we get to build the buildings the people we meet want us to build. And often they are not the ones you think you’d get to build. It’s very unpredictable as there are so many deciding factors. You know, we just lost four competitions in a row during the last two months – and then even if you win a competition it’s not given that you get to actually build the building, like in the recent case of the national bank of Iceland. But anyways, the competition is an important way to get work. The dream is to find a courageous, collaborative and demanding client and then together develop the idea.

What about international practice in BIG?

We have been competing more and more internationally and have gotten good clients all over the world, like this highly visionary developer from Taipei who used to be a film producer. He was very impressed with the little films we make at the office, and said that we should make a few buildings first and then do a movie. But we haven’t really had that much of a focused strategy – we’ve been loving back the people who have loved us. Until 2-3 years ago we were mostly doing work in Copenhagen, and for a small group of clients – mainly this one client who we have worked with in the VM, the Mountain and the 8 house. In these projects we were injecting new qualities to the urban fabric of Denmark. The same applies to international contexts, it’s like you are given new material to work and play with. For instance, the three projects I just mentioned were reinterpretations of the Copenhagen perimeter block, the typology of the wall. The work we have done in Athens deals with the Greek architecture and Athens morphology, the Kazak national library deals with the notion of creating a landmark in the process of moving the national capital.

How you see yourself as a leader in BIG?

We have a curated collaboration at BIG. The work is idea-driven, and because of this the main part of the work is to find the key issues, define the problems, formulate the big questions – once you have defined a clear agenda or mission it’s then quite easy to carry out the architecture. A major part of what we do is to make things tangible so that everyone can contribute to the process. Over the 10 years of BIG’s existence we’ve gradually grown the structure of the office, we just recently we appointed a CEO, a businesswoman with a MBA background. We have a director of business development who is taking care of prequalifications and international relations, and then a group of partners that are more like project managers, they have teams around them to work with the projects. I’m more like a creative director, I have relationships with the teams, and it is my responsibility to guide the process of the teams. I think I’m doing exactly what I need to do but also what I want to do: finding ways to collaborate. It’s an art to get people to do what you want and to do yourself what others want, to build a symbiotic relationship with your colleagues. I don’t believe that an office should be a bunch of executive morons who wait for a creative genius to come in and give the right answer, but to have a lot of creative people who overflow the design meetings with ideas, leading to a process of selection.

Let’s talk about humor in architecture. What agency do you think humor and playfulness have with the creative process of architecture?

I think that there is definitely a relationship between humor and intelligence. And I believe that there is a connection between humor and innovation. For instance, what makes you laugh in a joke is the punchline, which is often somehow surprising but at the same time it also makes a lot of sense. It was not what you were expecting hear but it does make sense, and the contradiction makes you laugh. Often a brilliant idea is a bit funny at the same time to begin with, but when you think about it more carefully you realize that it makes perfect sense. For us, cracking jokes is an essential part of any brainstorming session.

How do you see CAD as a tool in your practice?

Every new tool will create possibilities that you can use in a smart or less smart way. Tools create possibilities that deserve to get explored. In the last couple of years we have been a lot into grasshopper, which is a very intuitive vehicle for parametric design. I see it not as to get the computer to spew out very complicated stuff, but to find exactly the parameters that respond to the effects you are looking for. In the Danish expo pavilion we eliminated the need for air conditioning through having the whole façade be perforated and thus naturally ventilated. Since the façade is also essentially a structural steel beam, it has places where there is so much tension in the steel that we could not perforate it at all, while elsewhere we could make either smaller or larger holes. We also didn’t want any direct light to come in through the openings. Using grasshopper, these parameters would then turn into the image of the façade. Such tools are great in turning complex issues into something very rational. It brings me back to the definition of complexity – a lot of parametric design is used to create complicated stuff, but the complexity that interests us is defined in computer science as the capacity to transmit the maximum amount information with minimum amount of data. So if you have a 10000-character and a 100-character piece of code producing the same results, it’s the short one that is the more complex one. So it’s a higher form of simplicity that we are looking for, the minimum effort to create maximum effect.

How would you compare the US and the European architectural education?

So I studied at the Art Academy at Copenhagen and at the Polytechnical University of Catalonia – I much prefer the Barcelona school. It was a technical university, which didn’t make it less creative but much more structured and demanding. I was disappointed with the Art Academy because we essentially just had a key to the facilities, a copy card and a library card. There was hardly any education, there was no real input nor demand. This is why I felt stimulated by Barcelona, and then when I came back to Copenhagen I was able to truly enjoy the complete freedom now that I knew what I wanted. I have afterwards taught at the Art Academy, Rice, Columbia and Harvard. I’m going back to Harvard to teach a joint studio with the graduate school of design and the business school. What I have sensed in these American schools is a much higher working morale and much higher commitment, and also a much more multi-ethnic faculty, which also sets the bar higher.

How do you see the students as members of the BIG community?

Out of the 80 people we have around 20 are students. The students play a significant role, especially in the early stages of design – I’d say the students often make the most fun work, which is really about testing new ideas and proposals. They are the main designing hand in the model making, it’s the younger generation who usually knows how to make digital models, use grasshopper and so on, and quite often the rapid prototyping comes from the younger team members. The excess of design proposals for the discussion of the team is significant, and the students are by definition the core of this process. Therefore we couldn’t do what we do without the students.

This interview is also posted in Ville's  online journal 

http://matkamuistio.wordpress.com/

Beyond Objects

by Chao-Wei Su

I was introduced to Professor Craig L. Wilkins during a short, but satisfying trip to Detroit during my first graduate semester at TCAUP, University of Michigan. Craig’s insightful talk on the issues surrounding his role and beliefs helped gauge a general understanding of predicaments we face as young professionals. I am grateful for Craig taking a little moment of his time to talk in detail about architecture.

--Chao-Wei Su

Chao-Wei: Tell us a little about yourself; who you are and where you came from.

Craig: I did my undergrad in the University of Detroit. I then went to Washington D.C., worked for about five years and went back to get my graduate degree at Columbia University. I left there, worked for a couple of years, started teaching and found out that I had some skill at teaching. I decided that if I wanted to teach, I might as well do it the right way, so then I went back and earned my Doctorate Degree from University of Minnesota. I’m originally from Chicago. I left to go to college when I was sixteen, sometimes going back to visit family. However, my mailing address has not been in Chicago since 1978. In between then and now I have visited 116 cities in the world, 14 I’ve lived in.

Chao-Wei: What spiked your interest in architecture and urban planning?

Craig: That’s interesting because they both pursuits didn’t flourish at the same time. I came to it in a back-ended way. I went to a public high school in Chicago, but it was a magnet school. Back then, these schools were called ‘college prep’. There were only two in Chicago, one of them located on the South and the other on the North side. Even now, Chicago is still one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. The one on the South was primarily for students of color, the one on the North side was not. However, the curriculum was the same and for the first two years you had to take drafting. It was just required, not sure how that would get you into college, but it was simply required. The third year was an optional year. It was called architectural drawing. I was very good at drawing, specifically free-hand drawing. I also won an award in school. When I decided to attend college, I chose a college that had an architectural and baseball program. I ended up attending Arizona State University.

Chao-Wei: For the better weather? (laughs)

Craig: No, I was there for the baseball team. Architecture was something I was going to do in-between playing baseball. But it turned out I wasn’t as good at baseball as I thought I was and stopped playing on the field. Two years later, I directly went on to pursue architecture in one way, shape, and form ever since.

Urban planning came later after I finished my graduate degree at Columbia University. I lived in New York for a while and was asked to teach an urban planning course at Pratt Institute. It was a last minute thing. Shortly after, I was co-teaching with someone else right after finishing the urban development program at Columbia. Since then, I’ve been more interested in integrating urban spaces along with buildings, while prior to that, I was interested only in buildings. There was no grand scheme; both interests slowly melded into each other. Now, I can’t think and see the environment in any other way.

Chao-Wei: They’re married to each other.

Craig: They’re fused together. I can’t separate the two of them. (laughs)

Chao-Wei: What’s the connection between you and present Detroit?

Craig: The connection? In what sense, I’m not sure.

Chao-Wei: What I mean is: how did you find that particular place—how did you get there and become involved with Detroit?

Craig: After my first year here (University of Michigan) as a Visiting Professor. The former Dean Douglas Kelbaugh told me that the school was planning to open a design center in Detroit. Because I’ve worked for design centers before, he wondered if I could offer any insights in the conceptualization of the new design center. Eventually, we came to realize that it was a good fit for me and Taubman College. He then asked me to take on the position of Director of the Design Center. I replied, “Absolutely.” When I graduated from the University of Detroit in 1985…

Chao-Wei: One year after I was born…

Craig: (laughs) I feel so young now, thank you very much. I never expected to be back in the area (Detroit)—so many places to go, so many things to do. It just never crossed my mind to be back here again. It was a surprise for me to be back in Detroit. You never know where life will take you. (long pause)

Chao-Wei: In the present context of discourse, we’ve seen architects from different aspects of the industry obsess over how cities can be revitalized and reformed, almost as if architecture has an ailment and it can be cured. What is your particular opinion of this?

Craig: Well, I don’t think architecture has an ailment. I think the architecture profession is ‘ill’ and is in the process of self-diagnosing itself when it should really be asking for help. And in my sense, there are many things (we can do as) professional architects, professional in the truest sense of the word—I would recommend people look up that term for what it means. It doesn’t mean you are paid for what you do. A profession is a special type of practice. The more we understand that, the more we understand that the practice of architecture is not a right, but a privilege, the better off we are as practitioners. That aside, I think the profession could use (sigh)…there is a lot of things we could do with our talent that we allow ourselves to do. Either that is because of a certain amount of willful ignorance on our part, a refusal to situate ourselves in the world, or our desires to be an artist above all else whiles the rest of (society) is beneath the attainment of the perfect object. I don’t want to hazard a guess which one it is. It probably is a combination of all three and some others. But the result is, we don’t allow ourselves to do as much as we can possibly do with our skills, and that is unfortunate. One of the problems with that is we perpetuate the impression that architects are elitist and only work for a particular kind of client and who are only interested in a particular kind of thing, when in truth we have the ability to work with anyone, anywhere at any time. It’s unfortunate that we don’t do so.

Chao-Wei: That was a little different from what I was expecting.

Craig: From me? Okay. (chuckles)

Chao-Wei: Well, in comparison with anyone else in the profession. It’s not something that I’ve been hearing in today’s age when technology has become the dominant means in parts of the profession. (pause)

Chao-Wei: You’ve probably heard the phrase constantly in the profession that architecture is a service and an applied art. Based on your experiences, how would you define architecture?

Craig: How would I define architecture?

Chao-Wei: It’s a broad question.

Craig: There are as many definitions for architecture as there are many people who practice. It’s the same (subjectivity) for hip-hop, for jazz, and for artists. I don’t know if my definition works for anybody other than me. Having said that, I will tell you that the practice of architecture is a privilege—something that emanates from culture and society we live in. And it should be responsible towards preserving that privilege or group. I also believe that architecture is both a noun and a verb. I don’t believe that if you don’t produce an object, you haven’t produced architecture. I think that’s a real problem for most folks. Because we are an object-oriented culture, we feel the need to produce an object every time we intervene in the world. Sometimes the best thing to do is to produce nothing at all. We have a hard time defining architecture as a process and not an object, one that is respectful of people and place. I’ll just leave it at that.

Chao-Wei: Some architects value service, while others value the rationale behind form, function, and even the question of cultural identity. What do you value most in the field of architecture?

Craig: I’m not sure how to answer that. It’s not just one thing. What keeps me engaged is not so much the pursuit of the beautiful object. I love beautiful things and hope that everything that I produce can be described in such a manner. But that’s not why I produce. I don’t produce solely because I want something beautiful. I believe that architecture has the ability to change lives. I don’t know how many professions when every day you have the opportunity to do that. And I mean you can meet someone on the street and be influential in people’s lives, and obviously you can change the lives of your family and things of that nature. I’m not talking about that. Those are things you do regardless of what profession you are in. I’m not giving favoritism for this career choice. Not everyone can be an architect, not everyone can be a lawyer, and not everyone can be a doctor. Some people do other things for a variety of reasons. But I don’t know a bus driver changes people’s lives (in a deeper sense), unless they get someone late for an interview. It has the ability to make the world a better place, and there are not a whole lot of professions that can say that. It would be difficult for me to be involved in something where that is not an option. What sustains me is knowing that the work that I do has the possibility to live beyond me, to be useful to someone other than me, and the possibility of elevating or at the very least, enhancing the lives of others. It makes it a worthwhile endeavor for me and it may not work for others or (support the reason) why they are in the profession. That is fine. There are as many reasons to be in architecture as anything else. But for me, those are the things that I important, and those are the things I try to teach. I don’t require students to buy into that perspective, but I do require them to respect it.

Chao-Wei: Respect is something that needs to be earned.

Craig: That’s true. (chuckle)

Chao-Wei: Do you believe that our status as architects has risen or declined in the last decade?

Craig: I believe it has declined. I believe that it has been declining since the ‘60s. Well, let me be more specific. I need to make a distinction. I believe the profession of architecture in general—status, has remained (short pause)…I want to be clear about this. Architects have always been held in high status. And I’m not really sure if that has changed all that much from the public’s perception. But I think it has changed not for the better…the relevance of the architect has diminished greatly. People (the general public) don’t see architects as relevant to their daily lives. What’s even more damaging is that the allied professions, e.g. contractors and interior designers. They have to a certain degree of…

Chao-Wei: More ‘ammo’?

Craig: (laughs) Well yeah, why not. They’ve become more emboldened. There are a select few of star architects who command a high amount of respect, attention, authority, and status across the board. But I think in general if you pulled architects out of the mix—honest, hard-working, design-oriented architects, you’d recognize that they have been marginalized. Not just in the public realm, but also in the process of creating the building itself. Construction managers, contractors, are sometimes much more ‘sophisticated’ about what they want, what they do, and much more information is available to them than to rely on the architect’s (diminished) expertise. We need to recognize the game has changed and begin to gather in expertise in areas that we, perhaps haven’t before.

Chao-Wei: What type of message would you give to encourage or motivate young professionals?

Craig: I think that if I need to encourage or motivate students in architecture then they shouldn’t be in architecture. I think one should be self-motivated and that motivation shouldn’t be coming from any other place other than oneself. A student should be here (architecture school) because he or she wants to be here and more importantly, the student should believe that this is the place for change. In this case, I would talk some students down…

Chao-Wei: Ouch (laughs).

Craig: …and not try to build them up. Here’s the thing, there are no architecture solutions per se because there are no architecture problems per se. Architecture is mostly tied to something else. There’s only so much you can do to with architecture. You can do a lot, but you can’t do everything. My advice would be to recognize the fact that there is only so much you can do with the practice. Definitely push the boundaries, but a building can only do so much. If one is comfortable with that, you might have a productive career in architecture. If you’re somewhat uncomfortable with that, I think you’ll have a long and great career. If you refuse that inevitability, I think you would be frustrated for the rest of your life.

Chao-Wei: Last question…

Craig: Oh, you lie.

Chao-Wei: (laugh) On a high note, who’s your favorite music artist? That’s more of a pun.

Craig: I can’t think of a favorite at the moment. But I will say this though. I find certain artists I can listen to no matter what mood I’m in and where I’m at, and I’m ok with that. Now there are some I would like to hear from others if I’m in either in a dance mood or mellow mood, but these I can listen to and be very happy. One is Gorges Arigon (spelling?), a Brazilian singer. Another is Thievery Corporation, they are absolutely stunning. Another is Miles Davis. I can listen to him on any day of the week and I’ll be a very happy man. I’m going to name a group that you have no conception of…

Chao-Wei: Before my years…

Craig: Definitely before your years. They were a marginalized group, but they were hot, Con Funk Shun—out of the Bay Area, out of San Francisco and Oakland. They are an underrated group from the late ‘70s and ‘80s. If you ask me tomorrow I might give you some others. My musical taste is very broad and eclectic.

Chao-Wei: Thank you Craig for your time. It’s been a great experience hearing from you. (shakes hands)

Image above by the University of Michigan A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.