Building with Writing: From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism

Today Stan we're going to talk about from an object field and I think as the first time we're talking about your own writing this is the piece that's traveled the most of everything you've written. Yeah I mean it's interesting as you were talking I was just doing the math in my head and the first time that I used the term field conditions was 1994 and I first used that in the context of a studio brief at Columbia University for actually the very first of Columbia's paperless studios where Bernard Schumi had recently become dean I think it was Schumi's second year and Bernard had the model of the architectural association in his mind where he he assembled a group of young faculty who could talk to one another but also would be fairly competitive with one another and that generated a really productive atmosphere at least for the younger faculty like myself but did you know everybody before you were teaching there well the people that I ended up being in dialogue with I had known all from before people like Jeff Kipness people like Sanford Quinter Catherine Ingram how would you have how would you have met on the scene you know through assemblage and then I believe both Greg Lynn and Jesse Reiser were were hired not necessarily on my recommendation but I would invite them for reviews Bernard became aware of what they were doing and and so Jesse and and Greg were brought in so that was sort of the nexus of that conversation but you know I actually work for Bernard one summer and you know remember he would build very loose models out of foam core photographed them blow those photographs up very sort of fuzzy and a grainy black and white photographs and then he would he would paint over them using an airbrush and you know I mean there's a further irony there considering what happened later that you know in the later part of the 1990s Columbia becomes associated with a kind of computer driven formalism based on curvilinearity and so on and complex form and Bernard in many ways conceptually stood for something exactly the opposite right you know he always resisted formalism and and insisted on things being concept driven and for grounding program and event but so that was the atmosphere she talked about the piece itself but I'm curious about just the reactions was it like instantaneously a hit or you know was there debate around it no well first of all again it was something that I wrote as a way of just figuring ideas out and in dialogue with Greg Lynn because Greg had probably the most coherent theoretical argument around using the computer in the design studio based on these ideas of defamation and mapping of forces and his attitude in my view first of all it was object based you started with a sort of more or less stable form and then you you subjected that form to a series of deformations leading to increasing levels of complexity but never really challenging the essential condition of form as an object of the building as an object so I you know I questioned that I also questioned the way that it looked to me like a geometric deformations that Peter isem was associated with which is of course no accident because Greg was fairly fresh from Isomens office at that time those those I think were two points in the kind of dialogue that we're going on up there at the time I think certain certainly Sanford quinter who talked about field theory and physics as a kind of model for you know a kind of invisible field of forces and I think there was another sort of larger argument which is that among the generation the architects who were included in the deconstructivism show to my view deconstructivism was still operating according to essentially cubist compositional principles right a kind of composition of parts fragmented and distorted that are existing together within some kind of compositional whole so in other words it's even though the the formal language is no longer classical or high modernist the basic assumption that architectural composition has to do with moving figures and elements around in different kinds of compositional arrangements was still still present who is still I still linguistic model well linguistic in the in the kinds of meanings that were associated with it that that was another critique that was very often put forward as a counter example was Gordon Matt Clarke you know Gordon Matt Clarke cut buildings up into fragments but he did so in some cases at risk to his own life and he really did create conditions of instability the compositions of architects like who Pimmelblow may look unstable but they've been engineered and you know you got to make sure the building doesn't fall down same with Isaman right I mean there's as I mentioned briefly worked for Bernard Schumi as a result of that I was on site at MoMA when the Deacon show was being installed and Zahadid wanted to show one of her models as if it were crashing through the wall so in order to do that in order to create this apparently violent image of a model crashing right through the gallery wall it's very carefully placed in and it's held up by the scaffolding and that it's very carefully plastered back in to create the image of vials and instability right there's absolutely nothing unstable about it at all right so so I think our generation was was was very very critical of that Deacon show like it unified a previous generation but did it also unify let's say a generation of reaction against it do you think like you don't have a show like a Deacon show with you and your peers no like you don't have one show that brought you together but you could say you were formed in reaction against that show I mean in my case and and I think for you know these sort of younger colleagues at Columbia that that was certainly the case so that was the kind of conversations when you were good together you'd be all like I can't believe this Deacon well there's less conversation I mean for example the issue of architectural design called folding and architecture that a Greg Leon edited and I mean when I give that argument about fragmentation you know that's essentially the argument that Jeff Kippness spelled out in that issue you know about the persistence of collage and montage methodologies in architecture the translation of Delus' book The Fold came out right around this period and then Greg picks up on that and edits this issue of architectural design showing you know all of the people in that group were represented in that book how did characters like Sanford and Jeff Kippness how did they come to be in architecture because there's nobody like them anymore again you've got to give you've got to give Peter Isman credit Peter used to sort of collect these people in as he as he later did with Mark Wiggly and you know arranged for Mark Wiggly to to curate the Deacon show with Philip Johnson so you can hear in Wiggly's intro it sounds very Peter it's strange to me because it's like I don't usually put them together I mean I I feel like Mark has probably done a lot of work to try to distance himself well okay two things right one is that you know I've heard Mark repeatedly say that he never taught Derry Daw in his seminars I took a seminar with Mark Wiggly at Princeton and we read Derry Daw so this was the first semester that he taught in the US again brought over by Peter Isman then the other thing which has been completely written out of the history is that Mark Wiggly worked in Isman's office on the Frankfurt competition the Frankfurt Bio Center competition which then was later included in the Deacon show so Mark had to erase any trace of his involvement in that project you know Mark was trained as an architect he was brought into Peter Isman's office to be somebody to bounce ideas off of but he was working as a designer on that project wow I didn't know that there's probably a lot of people kind of curating their own histories I always heard from from Kipness is that he was really involved in the show and then Johnson sort of anointed Mark and pushed him out. Jeff was very close with with Philip Johnson although Jeff would later identify more with with people like Greg and Jesse and a kind of younger generation and also Sanford and Mark don't see I die either what do you think that's all about is that personal stuff or is it is it more um intellectual well I think it's intellectual I mean you know again it used to think I mean Sanford and Catherine Ingram are I mean the two people who you know have PhDs in comparative literature who are actually academically qualified to talk about some of this stuff Foucault Daryda to lose Sanford studied in Paris with Foucault I think he felt he had had a sort of privileged access to this material. It's something that also had a big impact on me and some of the thinking around Columbia at this time to kind of bring it back a little bit to the field conditions piece, was the first double issue of zone edited by say, "Oh wow." That was on the city. And so if I had another criticism of Greg's theorizing of the computer, not only was it object-based, it couldn't deal with the city as a sort of larger field of forces, whether social forces, economic forces, architectural ideas. The piece really is a lot about the city. It is, absolutely. Yeah. I think it goes back further. I mean, I think it goes back to Cooper Union and the Institute, my early interest in Rossi. And Rossi talks a lot about infrastructure in the architecture of the city. So there was another aspect of the field conditions piece. On the one hand, the sort of more experimental side of the practice was moving towards deconstructivism and the language of fragments and more and more complexity. The counterweight to that was still the sort of lingering shadow of the contextualism of the '80s. And this was the debate that was literally being played out at Columbia with Bob Stern and Richard Plundz and to some degree, Kenneth Frampton on the one hand and Bernard and this sort of cohort of young faculty on the other. Do you think that that helped? I'm just thinking about architecture nowadays too. Like a strong orthodoxy, let's say, that there's a counterpoint to the theory experimental group that is going on. You know what I mean? You know, it certainly provoked dialogue, public dialogue. I mean, there were very public debates and discussions and even arguments and shouting matches at reviews. And no, I didn't create it. It created a certain sense of urgency. Put it that way. That these ideas mattered. And I felt to some degree that Rossi had been sort of co-opted by new urbanism and contextualism and that there was a more radical idea that could be teased out. And I think what I would add to that, as much as it's a critique of new urbanism and contextualism, it was also, I think, in some ways, anticipating what sort of later became landscape urbanism. If you're going to think about urbanism in North America or for that matter in Asia, you're dealing with a different kind of city than the compact European city that you find in the United States. It's only on the East Coast. So thinking about, like Los Angeles, as a kind of horizontally extended porous field, the gridded cities of the Midwest, Toronto, Chicago, there's a whole section in the essay about the Jeffersonian grid. This extended horizontal grid laid out continuously over the end of the United States. So I think there's also an intuition that, late 20th, early 21st century, there are different models of urbanism out there. So I think as much as I could point to the experience of the quarterbaimus, that was around the first time that I visited Japan. And the first time I was in Tokyo, my hosts took me on a helicopter tour of the city and to see this extended carpet of a city. And then you would see the sort of thickening up of the city around the transportation arteries in the railroad stations. And then later, you know, visiting like Shinjuku station and you see all the kind of interweaving of different levels and different programs, an infrastructure system, different transport systems, you know, an incredible mix of programs with cafes and restaurants and museums and office buildings that this, you know, this is an urban phenomenon that simply can't be well understood, you know, either through theories of new urbanism or for that matter, I would say, by Rossi's architecture of the city. So as an urbanistic proposition, it was also response to what I was seeing as a kind of new condition of the city. - At some level, you're using urbanism also to pull apart and rethink the object. But I actually don't think you're getting rid of the object at all. I think you're still an object oriented architect, actually. Maybe landscape is the closest through ecological and like you said, landscape urbanism. But I was curious about Cool House because in a way, urbanism becomes just a way to rethink the architectural object in that model. I don't know if it is for you. I don't know if you were thinking about that. - Well, I don't know exactly what the chronology is, but you know, the famous Kohlhaus statement that architects can no longer control the built, they can only control the void. That certainly entered into my thinking with the field conditions piece and the infrastructural urbanism piece. Yeah, and it was, I think this was also, you sort of forget. It was a kind of, it was a pretty vital period for Kohlhaus. OMA was beginning to build this transition from an architect who'd won competitions and published books and was known for his theoretical propositions was very consciously making an effort to get this work built. - You said this is 96, the text. - Well, yeah, but Cool House work is earlier than that. I was also beginning to teach with some regularity at the Barelaka Institute. So, you know, I was around in, first in Amsterdam and then in Rotterdam and, you know, not in any real way in dialogue with Kohlhaus, but, you know, his presence was kind of inescapable in the Netherlands and then later through contact with the younger generation, people like Woody Moss and MBRDV. So, there were two questions that I skipped over if we could go back to, right? The one is I just, you know, in this context, I did want to note that as much as there is in the piece, there are two fairly glaring absences. One is there's absolutely no mention whatsoever of landscape, simply a blind spot. And the second is, there's no mention of the Allison-Smithson piece on the map building, which leads to my sort of second point at Columbia around this time. None of us were building anything. The economy in New York wasn't very good. Jesse and Nanico were building some very, very small residential things, additions. They built a garden, great wouldn't build anything until the Korean church, but parallel to all of this, I was doing galleries and loft renovations. So, in my mind, at least there was a sort of connection there that an interior and an urban project, one is too small to be an object, the other is too big to be an object. So, none of the work that I was doing in practice until I designed the first house that I did could be called object building. So, I think that's sort of important at the time, but, you know, you got into sort of tricky territory where, you know, I've written this piece, have some of these competition projects, and you try and implement the field conditions idea. And frankly, I kind of ran up against an impasse, and that impasse was the map building. - What is it, why, what does that mean? - What is the fact that the map building's exclusively plan based? It doesn't deal with a vertical surface at all. Also, the map building is dependent upon extent. You can't do an auditorium as a map building, for example. So, when I did the Cart of Bay Opera House, you know, it's, it is nothing to do with the field conditions idea, right? I mean, the other difference is this. Greg and Sanford were drawing their references from biology, from physics, and from computer software. I was drawing my references from, you know, post-minimalist artistic practices. - And music, I'm really curious about music. I understand the relief to art, right? - In a way, maybe more. You're in that world because of poly, but also just your friends, and you're doing galleries at the time and things like this. And I'd say the piece has within it a kind of mini art history, a picture almost in there, but the music part to me is a mystery. Like, where does that come from? - Right, yeah, it was around the period of the time when we became friendly with David Lang and Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. So, you know, I was listening to a lot of contemporary music. And, you know, I would, I would explain that I was really interested in Zanakis because of his experience with Luc Arisie and his use of graphic notations. And they could talk me through what that means in terms of music. You know, there was this great quotation that I found from John Cage sort of after the fact, but it's sort of consistent with all of these references. He says, "We know of two ways to unfocus attention. Symmetry is one of them. The other is the all over, where each small part is a sample of what you find elsewhere." So, I really liked the way that that dovetailed with my own sensibilities in terms of art, in terms of music. I mean, that was the sort of field of influences. that came together here and then from somebody like Sanford Quinter, the references like flocking theory. Yeah. That we're part of this sort of larger emergence around this time of interest in complex behaviors and fragile geometry. Even emergence as a term. Exactly, which is before I jump into that. I should mention another really important reference. What's my experience of visiting the Mosque in Córdoba during the time I was in Spain? Literally the visceral experience of being in this extended field of columns that is non-directional, non-hierarchical, that had a major impact on me. For me, that and the Venice hospital were the two dominant architectural models behind this. You know what I really like now as we're talking an object to field is actually incredibly personal. There is meneo in it. There is all your experiences that are all coming together into this text. It's not written in a clinical academic manner. It's something that you're really trying to figure out obviously and it's you're bringing your own personal experiences into it. It's interesting because I don't, I always think of theory as somehow being more formulaic of like this versus that or finding that new philosopher to just debunk the old philosopher etc. But of your projects do you think exemplifies the text? Yeah. I often say that most of the things that I've written come after the fact trying to make sense of design propositions. But this is the one instance when that was not so much the case. It was a kind of speculative proposition around urbanism and on trying to sort of understand what could be some alternative possibilities for computation in architecture. I was not terribly successful trying to turn it into projects. So there are three projects that are probably trying to work through these ideas and points in mind. The coma project I always think was very much in post-Mineo. Like it has to be. Interesting. Yeah. Well, if you look at the plan though, it is, it's a kind of a matte building. It's lifted up. What are those rhomboid? I mean, I'm only doing this for memory here, so I don't have any of these for me. But it was like two maybe large rhomboid shapes that are floating. No. But it's a single plate with a courtyard in the middle and then a range. And that's lifted up. And then a range on that plate are a series of floating gallery boxes, each one of which is expressed with a skylight. As I said, it's a form of a matte building. I don't think it's a brilliant project, by the way. But it's a process of learning. Which projects do you think are brilliant, by the way? I don't know how that works. I don't know if you can make that judgment any way. No, I probably can't make that. I mean, look, we're getting into tricky territory here. I mean, that's projects in points and lines. I think are probably all in some ways fundamentally a bit flawed. I think they represent an architect who's a young architect who's trying to work out certain ideas and hasn't really arrived at a very specific identity. I don't know. I think you're being tough on yourself. For me, the thing I liked about "Exite Got That" as a student early on is there is almost a no-take, like an early digital world of notation that's stripped down. It is tied to things like SANA, I think, things that you write about later. It is tied to you. Well, by the way, I have a sketch for the Koma project. I probably should have kept that at one point I had a big sort of elliptical form with floating gallery boxes. So I effectively drew the plan of the SANA's Museum of the 20th century in like about 1997. That's a sort of pointless thing to say. But no, I think you're correct. It's probably one of the reasons why when I discovered first-segment then SANA, I was very taken with their work. No, look, I think the book is strong conceptually. I think the relationship between the writing and the projects is strong. I think you're correct in identifying a turn towards notation and diagrams as the unifying factor in the book, but taken individually, I don't think all the projects hold up. What was the first project you published? I'm just curious, how did your work get published as not writing, but. Well, a design work. It's another thing Bernard did, by the way, on an A.A. model is he gave young faculty exhibitions and published little catalogs. So, you know, one of the first real publication I did was that mini-series catalog for Honey Roshite had the first one. I think I had the second one. That was an exhibition that published photographs of the built work of the galleries as well as drawings, and then I did a kind of installation around the sort of question of drawing and projection. I wrote a short introductory text. So, you know, that in a way sort of established this pattern of projects, drawings, writing. When was that? Well, '89, '90, something like that. Very early. So, by this time you're from Object to Field, you're pretty set in academia. So, yeah, the first version of the Field Conditions piece, I believe, and if I'm not mistaken, the first version was actually published in one of the yearbooks of the Berlaga Institute in '96. How did you. You were trying to differentiate yourself through the urban, let's say, lens from Greg and Jesse, and also architecturally, you seem also like an oddball in that group, only in the sense that digital didn't mean curvature, etc. Like, or the computer. Like, you're. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, in part, that's, you know, simply a question of sensibility, but I think it does connect back to this, you know, this early intuition that I had, and also to my sort of longstanding connections with the art world. There was a certain moment in which curvilinearity and complex form not only was associated with the computer, it was also the sign of radicality in work, right? And, you know, I've never been a minimalist, but I think because of my relationship to the art world, I think I saw that there were other models of what it could mean to be radical, right? And, you know, radical in the way it's conceptually driven, could be radical in its minimalism, or, you know, radical in its forms of serial repetition. So, again, as a kind of conceptual model, which ties back to diagrammatic thinking, that idea that you set out of, set a very, very simple rules that through repetition and interaction will produce a certain degree of complexity. That to me is very different than setting out as, say, Greg and Van Berkel and Jesse did to make complex form. Do you think the field condition still resonates with you nowadays, or is it of a moment? I know you've gone back to it. Yeah. In the arc of my career, that, you know, that, look, that was a really important time and very productive for me, you know, let up to by getting tenure. I think it's sort of established my presence in the fields. You know, I was traveling a lot those days, of lecturing a lot those days, of writing a lot those days. But, you know, I mean, you say situated objects is coming home to some extent, and it is in many ways a pretty radical departure from my experience in Spain and my experience with Monéo. I think you're also looking at what's going on in the world around you, in architecture as well. Absolutely. And you're trying to figure it out. I mean, I think I operate like this as well, like I think that's normal as a person. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I'm there in New York. I mean, I'm at MoMA when the decon shows being installed. You know, you can't help but react to what's around you. But if you ask me what the next step is, I mean, for me, the next step and in an interesting way, the field conditions piece leads directly to it, it was the collaboration with James Corner around ideas of landscape urbanism. So Jim had been in dialogue with Charles Waldheim for a number of years and I pretty sure Waldheim credits Jim or maybe Jim credits Charles with being the first one to coin the term landscape urbanism. Either way, it came out of that dialogue between Charles Waldheim and James Corner. And I was not part of that original dialogue, although. You know, the field conditions piece was out there and, you know, certainly was mining the same territory, particularly both Jim and Charles derived their ideas from a study of the American landscape in American cities. Jim's case in the book "Taking Measures of the American Landscape" where he did those photographs and collages and Charles's early work looking at Detroit as a kind of model for given the emptying out of Detroit somehow made visible the landscape basis of American urbanism. So it was quite natural. Jim and I first collaborated on the competition for Park Downsview in Toronto. That would have been in 1999-2000 and we were selected for this large urban park and we were the unknowns. You know, OMA, who won the competition. Shoot me was in that competition and FOA was in that competition, some local firms and, you know, these two guys that nobody had ever heard of, you know, who are essentially both academics at that point, right? We suffer at some extent the indignity of being ranked first in the technical assessment of the entries. By the way, that makes complete sense. Yeah, well, you may not be in the mix, you know, but don't you think? Don't you think, though, that, I mean, if anything, that is one of the shifts in landscape. To me, landscape has gone through. It's not an oversight that you didn't think about landscape when you were doing from project, you know, field conditions. Landscape at that time was a romantic, it was a very different, I mean, least from my perspective. No, absolutely. Fashion. It was garden. Sure. Sure. Sure. And if anything, that shift has become landscape as a large-scale bureaucratic management problem of ecology. Sure. And that's why the taking measure of the American landscape, those aerial photos, which are beautiful, sort of, it removes any of the romance, the kind of human centric reading. Oh, absolutely. And that was precisely Jim's critique of the state of landscape architecture as he found it in the 90s that it had become very pictorial. Yeah. It had become narrative-based. And he was interested also in the working landscape. You know, Jim used to say when we were working together, you know, you have to think like a farmer, right? How will a certain soils condition or landscape configuration behave in the rain? Do you think he really, I mean, the thing about taking measure for me was always like, it's just beautiful. Yeah. Like honestly, those photos are beautiful. Like, I know that they're sort of technocratic landscapes at some level, but I don't care. They're just wonderful. Sure. Like, sure. Like, was there a culture clash at all between the two of you? Let's say you caring about aesthetics in one way and him and another. Oh, Jim is, Jim is, and you see this in his work. I mean, he, you know, the argument is against the sort of pictorial character of landscape architecture at that time towards a more infrastructurally-based, time-based, ecologically-driven architecture. But no, Jim, you know, I mean, he's like anyone else in the studio, you know, make that drawing beautiful. You know, no, no, no, no. There's no culture clash at all. Every argument against the pictorial, let's say, has always been an argument for just a different pictorial in my experience. No, there are also two things. I mean, one is, Jim also kind of, you know, invented a kind of collage and graphic language to analyze that landscape based on a, in part, on a completely, you know, a figure who's completely fallen off the radar. Raul Bonshot and Chauten. Oh, yeah, sure. Remember, Korra projects. Is that what it's called Korra projects? Exactly. Yeah, he did a bunch of memory. Yeah, good memory. Yeah. But there's two interesting things about Downsview. First of all, Debtlef Mertens. Debtlef advocated for you, didn't he? Debtlef seems like is the part of the reason why I'm working. He was, you know, he was the professional advisor and, and, you know, he was the one who called me up on the phone and said, you're, you're, you're in. So we submitted our qualifications, you know, it's a request for you. That's a proposal. So, but the program for Downsview is very, very intelligently written and the push towards a landscape that develops and changes over time, that pays attention to ecology, that works with principles of emergence. That comes directly from, from Debtlef's brief. And so the irony is that every submission used in some way or another the word emergent or emergent in their brief or on the boards, even Bernard Schumi is talking about emergence in his entry. With the one exception, which is the entry done by Bruce Mao and OMA, that didn't make any mention of emergence, but actually demonstrated a kind of emergent strategy for the competition. And Jim later sort of button hold Kurt Foster, who had been ahead of the jury, because he wanted to know why, yeah, Jim, this is Jim is like this, you know, if his project is inselected, he'll, he'll go to the jury and say, but why didn't we get, why didn't we win, you know? Yeah, yeah, they said it took them like 10 minutes to decide that the OMA entry was the best one. You know, partly because it was so graphically convincing. It's so graphic. I mean, it's basically, when did Somal write that? Well, and it is, and by the way, it is a kind of feels, right? Oh, yeah, it feels like it was, I like their proposal a lot. I remember at the time. No, it was the only one that didn't talk about emergence, you know, it's the old thing of show, don't tell. What happened to that in the end? It never got in the middle of nothing. I mean, you know, I mean, Jim, it drove Jim, baddie. There's a photograph of first, first of all, it was mostly done by Bruce Mao by the OMA office, which is, you know, why it's graphically so beautiful. So there's a photograph of Bruce Mao on the cover of the Toronto newspaper announcing him, announcing, oh, I mean, it's the winner of the project. He's holding a tree, and it says, landscape architect Bruce Mao, who will lead the team for, you know, Downsview Park. And, you know, this just drove Jim baddie that anyone can call themselves a landscape architect. So, you know, the next step for me coming out of the field conditions piece was to really engage more seriously questions of ecology, where the ideas of field conditions that I, I think, really lost traction in the architectural context. It was around this time that Hush and Sarcus asked me to contribute to one of those case books at Harvard. I think of the Matt one on the Matt building. So I wrote about the Venice, well, that book was structured around the Venice hospital. You know, there's that OMA project in Japan that I think is probably the most convincing contemporary, well, contemporary in the 90s, built example of the Matt building. But, you know, for me, the answer is the move to landscape urbanism, to engage questions of ecology, of landscapes that, you know, as I had described in the field conditions piece, you know, a field of forces that interacts and changes over time, that I could now have, you know, when when Jim corner pointed me to certain literature in in ecology, talking about succession, for example, I could begin to theorize those principles in a way that made sense for me, both in the context specifically of landscape, but also in the context of the contemporary city. Did you, you shared an office together? You and Jim, is that how work? I don't remember. So you would go into work together and argue in the talks. So the mechanics of it, pen at that time had a had something called pen practice that there was a floor of a building that or three or four rooms that were available to faculty to do architecture faculties to do projects. So Jim, got us like that up there with some computers and drawing tables and we could build models there and a team of students to help us. Jim literally mortgaged his house to complete that competition. Wow. And we're sitting there late at night loading the models and the boards into a van to drive them to Toronto and he says to me, I hope the van doesn't crash. I mortgage my house to get this work done. So, you know, because, you know, we were paid, we were paid $50,000 when the entry was turned in and judged. They sent him a check for $50,000 and he was able to pay off the the loan that he that he had taken. And I think we had about $5,000 left over. Why do we do this? I mean, we all do this. It is crazy. And no, I mean, that was a kind of one-off thing. We did that project as Stan Allen and James Corner. And Jim had already been practicing as field operations. And so we briefly worked together. We had letterhead printed up in business cards as field office for a while. But no, actually, that's a funny story. We were going to be field office because Jim had it was already identified with field operations. And we went to register the domain name for the website. And one of our students had already taken that name. They were already field office. Oh wow. So we ended up-- we had a website. We had letterhead. And Jim rented an office in Philadelphia. If I was going to be involved, I would commute down to Philadelphia. So make a long story short. So then we did the fresh kills together. We did fresh kills out of that office in Philadelphia. What are your landscape projects? What are they? They're special-- Well, we built a little garden on Fifth Avenue. That was immediately after Downsview. Jean-Louis Cohen invited us to a competition for a tiny little garden that faces Fifth Avenue in the '70s for the French cultural consulate. And I remember Jim saying, so the OMA Bruce Mao model for Downsview was lit from underneath. So we made a model that was lit from underneath. It was convinced that was going to win us the competition. So we did win the competition. And then I executed it pretty much out of my New York office. So my New York office was the New York office of field operations. And Jim's Philadelphia office was the Philadelphia office. So our business cards, field operations, New York and Philadelphia, that basically meant-- Did you have to learn a whole new set of detailing? No, Jim did most of that. And a tiny little project, really. I think the budget was $150,000. So certainly not a major project. So we won that. And then we did fresh kills together, and we won that. But by that time, Jim was really taking the lead in these projects. And ironically, for a kind of practice, landscape urbanism that is associated with interdisciplinary collaboration, Jim would insist, I do the landscape, you do the building. So my contributions to the Fresh Kills project are mostly the structures that were on the original competition project. So we win fresh kills. And then Jim, actually at that point, decides to move up to New York and rent an office on 8th Avenue, near Port Authority. And we are involved together in the ground zero competition. Fresh Kills was announced. And we were chosen, I think, we had our site visit. All of the invited architects, all of the invited teams, we had our site visit in August of 2001. And so then there are delays because of September 11, and then of course the remains are brought to fresh kills. And that then becomes incorporated as a requirement in the project to create some sort of memorial for the remains. During the period when Jim was then setting up an office and a practice in New York City, I got the dean ship in Princeton. And-- And that's when it ended? That's when you started. Yeah, essentially, I mean, there were other reasons for it. I mean, part of it is Jim's insistence that I do the buildings, he does the landscape. I mean, a short version of the story is that Jim is moving to New York at exactly the point where I'm moving down to Princeton and need to put a lot of effort and energy into a new job. And the other thing, which maybe opens up to later discussions and in particular to land form building, there's a kind of logistical problem with a small office trying to do a very big project like fresh kills, particularly with a city client. You work like crazy, you hire a bunch of people, and you produce a submission, it goes to the people of the city. And they take three months to review it before they give you approval to go on to the next phase. And Jim is then facing the situation where he's hired all these people, and he's paying them and there's no money coming in. There's nothing for them to do. So he started taking on a lot of straight landscape work. And in a certain moment, and for me, I didn't want to kind of redefine as a landscape architect. I wanted to hold on to my identity as an architect. I do want to go back to from object field. I have a couple of things. One is, I would challenge you on the idea that it's art practices, not art history only in the sense that you, I'm looking at the text right now, it's definitely Rosalind Krauss. Like you said, Judd was already a canonized thing, specific objects. But I wanted to talk about Sanford Quinter. You start with Sanford Quinter. And Sanford, what was Sanford's role? Like why start with Sanford of all people at the beginning of the text? Well, that was very much the, you know, I mean, the 1990s, you know, this is the time when assemblage is the kind of most prominent journal, at least sort of among the American schools. Assembly represents the opening up of architectural discourse to critical theory and philosophy and literature theory. So theories of literature. So I think it was, you know, that was just very much the atmosphere at the time. And of course, very specifically, people like Kipness, Catherine Ingram, Sanford Quinter, were brought into the fields. And the field was very receptive to that kind of cross-disciplinary conversation. You know, I mean, it was same as, you know, true in the art world, right? I mean, people were looking at philosophy, literary criticism in the art world as well at that time. So was Quinter, was he a very central, like you, like, again, starting with a quote by Quinter Ingram, but she ever seems like he must have had a kind of galvanizing role in the field or something. Sure. Well, so he said he was instrumental in this turn from Derry Doff, from theories of language to an interest in the history of technology and science to, you know, practices that were more materially based. I was certainly aware, without having any kind of deep mathematical understanding, you know, that field theory was first developed in, as a proposition in physics. And Sanford was a one person who had written about that already. So, you know, that was the reason to start with a quotation from Sanford. But I think the larger thrust of your question is that it was very much in the spirit of a kind of opening up of the discussion to philosophy, history of science, history of technology, and the science and technology side of things was seen by a lot of people, Greg, I think, among them, as a useful counterweight to theories coming from literary criticism that were very much language-based. I mean, if you want to track back a little bit further, and I was less part of this discussion, but two conferences held in 1990, and then two subsequent publications. So, one of them was a conference organized by Bob McNulty, John Whiteman, and Jeff Kipness. John Whiteman, after Harvard, became head of the Chicago Institute, right, the SOM Institute. And he had a lot of money, and he organized a conference on architectural theory in 1990. And, you know, Mark, Betrie's, Jeff-- I don't know if Quinter was involved, by the way. We're all Catherine Ingram, Jennifer Blumer. We're all part of that conference. That, you know, if you want a single document that sort of gives you a snapshot of the discussion around theory at the time, I think it's that document. I definitely think theory-- and I think it still thinks like this, unfortunately-- maybe this is because of the counterpoint at Columbia with people like Bob Stern, et cetera, you were saying in Frampton, is that it seems like they always see themselves against practice, whatever that means. Well, that-- So, again, I think in-- The opening up is because somehow-- Exactly. Insular. Look, I. I think in many ways, all out of these figures are operating according to the distinction that Peter Iseman has always made between a commercial or a professional practice and a critical practice. So yes, to that degree that it's aligned with critical practice, it is lined up against conventional professional practice. That's absolutely correct. And I think quite intentional on their part. The second conference, and it's more local, was a conference organized by Greg Lynn, Ed Mitchell, and Sarah Whiting, also in 1990 at Princeton University on the fetish. And so there you're exposed. Were they students? Were they students? Grad students? Yes, yes. This was for the Princeton Journal of Architects. A conference was to be turned into an issue of the journal, included people like Emily Aptor. So the fetish as either the Marxist notion of the fetishism of commodity or the Freudian notion of the fetish. So critical theory or psychoanalytic theory, both can be theorized through the fetish. So Tony was part of that. Emily Aptor. And again, these are happening parallel to the early days of assemblage. And so to me, those two conferences and two publications are a kind of snapshot of the nature of the conversation around theory and architecture at that particular moment, 1990, 1992.