Ep 22: Lütjens Padmanabhan

You're listening to Scaffold, a podcast featuring interviews with architects, artists and designers. I'm your host, Matthew Blenderfield. In this episode I speak with the architects, Oliver Lichens, and Thomas Padman-Eban, who formed their practice in Zurich in 2007. Their buildings would be giling, seemingly composed of the thinnest of planes, so that they appear like a series of super graphics or billboards folded together to make a volume. This flatness is countered by their deep and complex interiors, which often incorporate elements that are just a little bit out of the ordinary. In one project, a Tarezzo column casts a shadow of wood light into the floor. Well, in another, the doors to a winter garden take on the proportions of a giant window. I met with Oliver and Thomas at splice studios in Perseverance Works in Shortage, where we talked about, among other things, their fixation with Renaissance architecture and the inspiration they find in it. The illusion of truthful construction and buildings today that are no longer solid, but only ever hollow and layered. And the importance of humor and architecture to bring together not only people, but materials and objects too. And now, here's the interview. I hope you enjoy it. So, when you're teaching and when you're presenting your work, you tend to juxtapose two images of two different types of projects as precedents or references for the work you're doing. And typically, you'll choose a project from the past and from a specific moment in the past, the Renaissance. And you'll pick a project from the 20th century as well, and generally between the 30s and 60s. So, there's specific time periods that seem important to you both. And like you've explained this in the past as a kind of useful friction that a contemporary project can come out of. And I'm just wondering why the Renaissance in particular, and what are you looking for when you look at projects from this era? The Renaissance was a very brief period in which architects were doing a fantastic singular project based on very limited knowledge of the past, say, of antiquity. The projects were usually inserted into the medieval fabric of existing cities. They were often left unfinished. They were fragments. They were working with mostly, especially in the normal house buildings with the construction methods of the time. Yet, they were developing a new language of architecture. So, the fragmentary, the unfinished, the partially powerlessness of the actors of the architects, we feel very close to that. And we recognize our own time there. At the same time, the Renaissance was a self-conscious attempt to reconstruct architecture as a language. And we're not interested in the Renaissance as the beginning of a new classicist tradition. We're not interested in it as an idealist, an idealized historic epoch, like it was seen in the 19th century. But we are interested in the individual achievements of very different characters and architects. And there, we have a preference for those who see the limits of their own work, rather than striving for complete harmony and balance. Say, we prefer Julio Romano to his teacher Raphael. We prefer Michael Angelo to the Sangalos or Alberti to Bremonte. So, there's a, we feel that the connection is also that Renaissance palazzo, for example, is usually a very normal, amazingly construction, with a series of outer layers of render of natural stone that provide the architecture that's visible. So, there's a layering of things in the construction, and we have to face the same problem today as we have increasingly layered construction that have a more complicated, where the idea of architecture truth is more complicated than in a modernist attempt to create a direct connection between construction structures, spatial structure, and expression, which was very strong in our teachers or in the generation that came before us in this architecture. There's this line that you always seem to start with when you give lectures that I'm tempted to read back to you now. It's about a particular dilemma that has to do more with regions between the urban and rural. But I think it could actually apply to a question about a dilemma between the past and the present. So, I'm just going to read it, and then I'd kind of like to talk about it for a bit. So, I think every lecture I've seen of yours online, this is how it begins. Our work starts with the dilemma. We love the city, we love streets, facades, squares, and rich complex interiors. We love refined architecture, we love urban architecture, we love history, continuity, and time and architecture. Paradoxically, when we design buildings, we almost always end up in situations that are never clearly urban or rural, but blurry and fragmented and undefined in between. And I think that, just from looking at the projects you guys have done, there's a lot to relish about being in between in architecture, and not only in terms of being in between urbanity and the role, but in between a frame of mind that's backwards looking and forwards looking. And I think this kind of ties back to the Renaissance question. What would we get to talk about is where this fascination originated from? From the Renaissance. I think it's quite different with the two of us. Thomas can maybe explain better his situations, but I'm somebody who comes from the present, and through architects that I like go back into the past. So for me, it was, I think, my first true love in architecture was the work of Alvaro Siza. And I kind of understood that he's doing a contemporary architecture, but that addresses a much broader field. It's addressed the Portuguese tradition, it addressed classical architecture, and when he travels and builds a house in Holland, it looks like a Dutch building, even though it's an Alvaro Siza building. Plus, it has an extremely interesting formal way of making things that appeal to me a lot. And through Siza I came to Venturi. And from Venturi, it was kind of an opening up to the architecture from 500 years ago, Manorist architecture, Renaissance architecture, Baroque architecture, whatever. And because that's what he writes about essentially in complex in contradiction, and he doesn't look at it as a historian, but he looks at it as a contemporary architect, being interested in formal ideas, formal problems in energy appearing in buildings, and tries to make that valid again in his contemporary architecture. And I think that's an incredible statement and achievement. But what Venturi did, notice this directness that you can look at anything and make it yours by trying to make something that is as good as those examples that you really like. So, for me, it's completely intuitive. And for both of us now, it was a completely intuitive thing to work with Renaissance examples, because we looked at the facade of, say, the Palazzo Borrome of Pier Ligorio, and he said, wow, look, it's a central line, it's a horizontal division, one to one. There's a central motive, and this cross, that's something we can still do today. Of course, we have different means, but we can work with the same content. I guess what I'm interested in is how you look at buildings, because there is such a hunger and desire for the contemporary, obviously, for obvious reasons. And especially amongst young architects, generally when presidents are dug out, they're of the recent past, or of the very near present. It tends to be the case that architects shy away from looking too far back, because there might be a prescribed way of reading historical buildings, or an institutionalized way of understanding historical buildings that just doesn't appeal. But what I'm learning from hearing you now and having listened to some of your previous lectures is that there's all kinds of new potential for revisiting historical precedents. And so, Thomas, I know you studied under Ian Pipper, and you were researching Renaissance Architecture while in school. And so you probably have a kind of formal training in how to read and make sense of these types of buildings, whereas all around the other hand, I know that you were-- It's not entirely true, because it's funny that you're bringing this up. I studied in Germany in Archen, and the reason why I, why young Pipper became-- one of the reasons why young Pipper became my most important teacher, he didn't teach studio, but he taught history, architectural history, was because there was a complete lack of other meaningful teachers. It was a complete void, so it was the time when Germany took up some of the British high-tech and copied it in a kind of not very convincing way. So, young Pipper, he came from the anthropological side of the '70s and applied the anthropological view of city ritual, the idea of the city as a theatrical scene, onto his analysis of Renaissance architecture and urbanism, and the richness of experience, and just the claim of how much of culture and thought can go into architecture. That sort of as an example, while his way of perceiving architecture, I felt looking back, seems to me now much more linked to literature, to narrative, than to direct perception of, say, proportion and gestalt. So, for me, it was like a typical relation to a teacher, where the teacher suggests something, or I read in his work, that he suggests that what if today's architecture could be as rich as an experience as the Renaissance architecture, that was the claim, and a promise that I could never fulfill or find in my student work or in the teaching, but it just stood there. Well, then I decided to spend the year in Rome at the La Sapienza to study. I had the chance to see a lot of the work that we are interested in now, and it somehow filtered into my memory as a raw material. But I would say rather as a raw material, that now becomes that memory becomes almost like a quarry from which I take blocks and rework them, because our way of looking at a Renaissance architecture, also at other architects we are interested in, was usually informed not by problems of design in our work. It was hard work, it was not that we didn't start off with an ideological judgment about it. Of course, we love it, we love the stuff, but it was when we ask ourselves a question of, so how do you relate us to story building, how do you relate the two levels to one another? And of course, Renaissance Palazzo where they were asking that question all the time, how do you do the number two, how do you do the number three in terms of stories? That was one of the fundamental questions. So then you look at this stuff, but it was only through the work that a new reading was possible because the work was, the questions came out of the work. So it's completely opposite to a 19th century education, a bizarre education where you would have all this stuff like an alphabet in front of you, and you were asked to learn the alphabet. But for us, also, we always perplex to give reasons why we love the Renaissance so much, because actually we even have a very selective view of the Renaissance. There are a lot of buildings that we never speak about, because they don't tell us anything, but there are others that we constantly speak about in literally never stops, because they have an incredible depth, and they give answers to the most unexpected questions. And it's as if the same building gives an answer to that question, another question, and a different question. So I think there's a kind of common learning process that only started when we were working together, and that takes sources and interests from before, but now they are overlaid to an extent that when I see my notes from my studies in Rome, I only recall that I've seen the place, but today the same building has a completely different meaning. It's also quite funny in the relation how we work together that we almost always agree on what's good and what's bad. There's very little architects that Thomas adores, and I think they're rubbish. I think there's almost none, and so whenever we show us something, we get kind of equally excited, and that's quite special and a very lucky coincidence. I think it's worth actually to step back for a moment and get a picture of your biographies. I know that there's been a great conversation you had with Andrew Clancy on the register podcast a couple years ago, and you covered some grand there in terms of talking about your roots into architecture. But there are some points that I wanted to pick up on, and I guess maybe I'll ever start with you. I know that you were a graffiti artist for 10 years before going into architecture at the suggestion of your girlfriend's mom. Yes. But I think from the outside, people might scratch their heads at how those two disciplines are great. And I think it has something to do with passion. Yes, I mean for me it was just a passion. It's something I stumbled upon. I got really excited about the idea that your name is visible everywhere in the city. Then I got really excited about formal problems in graffiti, because it's you take normal letters and you distort them and you create energy. And so it's not unlike mannerist architecture or working away. This is this idea of distortion blowing up stuff, working with scales. But it's also, it gave me an incredible reading of the city, because if you place a tax on where exactly if this corner is prominent or not, how this surface relates to something else, to the shop that's next door or to the, I don't know, it's the visibility from a certain angle. It's like that, that's all the kind of stuff you think about when you do graffiti or when you just walk to the city and look at that. And it's also a kind of quite typological thing graffiti. It's developed into certain types, how you do it. And so there's limits and restraints. And there's also restraints in terms of your body size or where you can climb, but things like that. And yeah, but for me it was something that I just really, really loved and I just knew if ever I want to be happy in a job, I need to do something that is similar to that. And I didn't quite know what that would be. I was also interested in film or music. But then I started studying architecture and immediately I understood that this is it. And I immediately understood that it goes much, much deeper and it's much, much bigger in graffiti. And so, yeah, within kind of a year I shifted. I just completely got hooked on architecture. And then Thomas, for you, you started by studying industrial design? That's Julia. I was always drawing from the earliest childhood and I never stopped drawing. I spent my adolescent years in the basement of my parents' house drawing, instead of meeting people, which I really enjoyed. And I started painting. I realized I was always pushed back to the line. And from there, I went to the industry design because my father is an engineer and so he had to design a friend. So it kind of made sense. But in a year into my studies at Castle, I realized that friends who studied architecture were dealing with questions that for me felt much more profound. They were reaching deeper into history. They were reaching deeper into human experience of the city. The city and history, these two themes, they were so important for me from the beginning. And in Germany and industrial design is very much rooted in the industry history of the country, start with Peter Berenz and I.G. And so it has a very, I would say, clearer limits in industry production than in other countries say Italy. So from there, and then I stopped and I started architecture and was very clear that that was much better for me. And then you both met working for dinner and dinner. But Oliver, you'd worked for Miele Peter as well as OMA and Rotterdam. And then Thomas, you, in addition to studying, was it in, you said, Akhen University, you were in Cornell for a year? I was in Cornell for two years to be masters. And then you worked at SOM for a year. That's right, yeah. And this was all before dinner and dinner? What did that happen? Yeah, for me it was before dinner and dinner. I, after I finished my studies in Aachen, I went to Cornell from there to SOM. And then I returned to Europe and I went directly to Switzerland because I had worked at SOM that was before the dot, during the dot-com boom on a large number of high-rise buildings in a very short time. While my friends who had were already in Switzerland told me about the incredible, meticulous detail work they were doing on really very fine projects. So I was sure that I would rather be long in that world than into the commercial world of SOM. And I guess I would make to a certain extent all of her kind of brought you into the commercial world of architecture. Is that nothing? Is that not the case? I didn't go for that reason. No, I know, but it was just like what you were exposed to in these like formative years leading up to the establishment of your own practice. For me it was the reason why I went to Oma I was different. I worked after my last semester in the ETH, my assistant, she was actually working for dinner at dinner. She was the HR person for dinner and she said, "Don't you want to work for us for an internship before diploma?" And she put me to Berlin to the dinner office in Berlin and that was an amazing time for me. It was the first time that I worked in an architectural practice where I actually saw all the struggles that I had while studying. For instance, the problem of doubt and uncertainty being kind of brought into the center of the discussions about the design and being part of the project in the end. And I thought that was just so amazing and then there was Berlin as a city that was a bit different than Berlin of today. And I thought I just want to go back to Berlin to work for that office again. It was also a young woman leading the office there is Angard who was just amazing and it was the ambition to show the old guys in Basel that the Berlin office was much cooler and funkier. And so that was really, really a pleasure to work there. It didn't happen because they didn't have enough work so I went to the office in Basel. And then got later worked for Miley Payton after four years in Switzerland and I just needed to get away. And so therefore there was a decision and Thomas and I started doing competitions while I was at Miley Payton and he's in his last year at dinner and we kind of had this discussion. Let's form an office and I said yes but I just really need to go one year out and either a year out to go somewhere else. And I loved English architecture at the time. We were looking at a lot of English architecture and I thought Tony, Fred and Sachsen Bay is a cruiser engine but then I thought yeah but it's kind of rather similar to what I would have experienced at dinner. So then I thought okay let's try Cool House because it was always fascinated by Cool House. So I went there and it was also kind of you know playing Champions League once in the big stadiums at night and having the chat set life and flying like very very tights to Qatar and have kind of crazy meetings and fly back and things like that. It was good for a year but then I had it and it was good that I had an escape plan. The funny thing is that I think for us, all my Cool House is a very important point of reference in our discussion and we for us it's one of the greatest architects living. Well we have both a fascination for America and for American architecture. Say also of the type of SOM but obviously not of the SOM that I have experienced. But it was a projection of the classical great phase of SOM, Gordon Bunch of example. So that almost anonymous greatness of American architecture we feel hugely attracted to. And so it was going to SOM, it was an experience of being in this enormous office with so many people that worked like a machine and that was fascinating. Yet there was a big gap between architecture speaking between what was being designed then, what I was working on and what I imagined what SOM should be like or could be or has been. So for me it was so important to be at SOM because it completely eliminated all the fear and respect for big projects. And also it made everything relative. I know that there can be more architecture in a bathroom extension than in a city with two million. Because it's about the intensity of the work, the ideas that go into it. And while dinner and dinner is really architecture about the city and we both share this passion and to understand your work in a kind of part of a cultural idea and being part of public space and that you can make a contribution to what's around. And that is also what is around is in the center of your project. And cool house we feel is a lot of people disagree but for us it was a modern idea of making an architecture that's part of the city where the idea of urban life is in the center of its project. Well we feel that in some of Roger Deer's project the problematic nature of the fragmented city of today is being addressed. But even more so in cool house project the contradictions of the modern age between capitalism and social ideas, the city, the question of scale and money. And they all involved so this openness of and this fragmentary nature of our situation we really are really interested in that in cool house work because we feel that architecture is not about just making peace with the situation or solving things, pacifying conflicts but also to articulate them. And to some extent to agitate or not? To be. Sure, maybe yeah it's about energy you know I think good architecture always exudes an incredible energy and sometimes it's a bit more about being calm and sometimes it's much more invigorating. I think when I said agitate I was thinking of like what good fiction tends to do which is to reflect a contemporary condition back to its audience but in a way that you always felt but could never articulate. And there's a kind of uncannyness there or a surprise that is at its heart a little bit disturbing and a little bit uncomfortable but totally curious and intriguing and it makes you want to look even closer. And I think for me the aspect of your architecture that makes me want to do that the most are your facades. And I wonder if we could talk a bit about facades for a second and why they've gained so much importance in the way that you design and talk about your buildings. We saw in our work that the facade, if we in a situation where urbanism, the job of doing urbanism is given to the singular building in a way that something that is in London here that is already almost completely the case while in Switzerland that is increasingly the case. So if the building has to do the job to give beauty, public space to create an idea of the city then it's the facades job to do that and to create a sense of urbanity and not just on a functional level. We don't talk about ground floor uses but on a level of expression and language. And we feel that the aspect of architecture as a formal language has been overlooked in Swiss German architecture for a long time because the question of language has been an attempt to tie the aspect of language together with plan and typology into a stable entity. And we embrace the fact that unity has become increasingly lost and that the building becomes more of an artifact that is composed of pieces and aspects and literally planes and then put it together. It's also interesting is the relation of the facade, I mean it's a kind of conflict situation, the facade now, it's a very thin layer and it deals with a large scale on the outside, with public space, with certain formal ideas or aspects but it also deals on the inside with views, with also formal aspects. And those usually don't really relate, especially not if you have an apartment building at this just a normal bedroom behind a certain type of window but on the outside this window has to provide for something else. And it was so great yesterday to see the Red House by Tony Fretten because we've been looking at this building for a long long time since it's been published. And then you know it has a symmetrical three bay facade with the central bay sticking out with the very tall central window. And then from the plan and section you would understand that on its inside it has this huge studio space, so long space. I don't know how he calls it but it's this very very, huh? Yeah, this is a special name for it. It's a very, very big space that is on two-story high, then you're inside. The bay window is asymmetrically to that space and the central window is also asymmetrical. So it's totally informal and rather relaxed way how this huge and formally very important space relates to this bay window and the centrality of the facade. And that was like a real unexpected revelation and it was really nice because it kind of took also away the weight of that space that it doesn't have a central axis and things but it's in its a huge space with some carefully positioned windows but it doesn't work in an actual relationship or for the outside of the building the actual relationship is important. And yeah, that's in our building on Helen Strasse for instance, we also have a central bay window but even that the rooms that are in this in this window they also have the corner of the bay within within the space and that gives a beautiful second or even third scale within that one room. It's not only that you can look in the street space but also this kind of the facade and the room they have almost like a communication together. And if one in the case of Fredens Redhaus, if you wouldn't have had that independent idea of that facade, he wouldn't have almost a counterpart for the inside to work with. So you need a kind of semi-autonomy of the facade as a starting point to develop these tensions. So that's so interesting so it's that's going completely against the notion of a facade being the result of a projection of needs from inside to the outside. But it's about discovering that a facade has former rules of its own that once you're entering that conversation on the facade, you're not free anymore as a designer but you're entering a set of dependencies where the facade says, OK, I have my own will. And this is how you design literally as well. It sounds like where the facade on a model, usually at 1 to 50, is studied and iterated almost independent of the plan in some cases. Yes. And that you will detach and read here different versions of the facade. Well, maybe the plan is being worked out as its own problem. Yes. We have a very intuitive way of working on the plan and of the facade. And we have a very linear way. We don't do options. We just go one way. And so when we are in constant discussion and so if there is a good idea in the facade, it usually has a formal strengths somehow and comes in conflict with what is the design of the plan at that moment. And out of that, there is something developing. So it's an operation that is ongoing. And sometimes I mean to design the plan, especially in Swiss housing, where the surfaces and the relation of rooms and the size of things are very, very clearly defined, takes a very, very long time. So usually when we start with the facade to really design it apart from having ideas, the plan is already quite developed. But that doesn't make it less independent in a way. And our experience was increasingly that when you have a contradiction between, say, the plan and the facade that there will be a way to solve it. We are extremely optimistic about it. And there will be a way to be stubborn both about the facade and about the plan. Because we are not architects who tell the client, oh, we needed to move that room because of the facade, because that would not help us. Because we live in a world where nobody cares about the facades and the plan is everything. But it was interesting that sometimes you need to have very, very minute, very little operations to reconcile them, to bring them together. And it's not, you don't have to think them together from the beginning. So we kind of relax about it for a long time. And we are extremely optimistic that things will come back, come together in the end. And our urge to impose control of the totality is becoming less and less with our work. [Music] There wasn't only no urban context that would kind of tell us how we should design the facade. There was also no more constructive context. We would say that Swiss architecture 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, for instance, monolithic concrete construction, colored concrete, things like that. It was just, to us, it was not available because our projects that we started with were under quite an impressive cost. So for the first building we had to build, it was clear we had to do outer insulation and stucco. And that was something that very little contemporary architects tried. They were predominantly one, even with plastic windows, which was quite interesting. But a lot of the others tried to be very abstract about that, and they were a bit of shame, then it was kind of seen as not correct to do it and not being constructed enough or real material. And it comes also, of course, from problems that could happen, and you need to maybe in 20 years those installations are gone. It was seen as a decline, as a decline of architectural quality, because when we were building physics decided that we would not have 12 centimeters of insulation, but 25 or 28, and the massive construction with a massive outer layer and inner layer would be impossible from a certain point on. So how do you deal with that cheapening of the building, with that loss of where the value of also the architectural significance of the building at the time was based on monolithic weight and closed form? And a lack of open joints, a kind of illusion of truthful construction. And when we discovered through that work with the outer insulation that when we liberate ourselves from that dogma, we can open up towards all kinds of more complex ideas of the relationship between construction and truth, layer construction, open forms where you can actually, where you're self-conscious about the hollowness of the layering facade. That was a liberation, and I think that has opened up a kind of an ongoing interest in all forms of layering and skins. It's interesting that, I guess, just to kind of break down this dichotomy between the solution of authenticity, that's it apparently achieved through creating buildings that look solid, but in fact can't be anymore because of technical environmental and economic constraints versus creating buildings that are apparently almost paper thin or have outer skins that are as hollow as egg shells. I think architects begrudgingly move in that direction, very rarely do they embrace it, and very rarely do they see the potential and opportunity to exploit the cheapness of contemporary materials and the thinness and malleability of them as well. I feel like generally architects would feel like they failed if they had to resort to that, and yet you seem to be embracing it wholeheartedly and finding all kinds of new potentials in there. And I think the main potential that's most exciting to me is this idea, not of tectonics as we know it, but of what you've turned a visual tectonics, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about what that means to you. I want to go one step back, because building with cheap materials or with construction, with joints and things like that doesn't mean that you embrace say a kind of trashy way to do architecture. I had this discussion with a friend who's the same age as us, but I would say a generation ahead, I know another head before. And she thought that our building ahead and she thought it was actually the trashy way of making a facade, but I mean that facade cost us so much time to design and construct. And it's not relying on a system that somebody sells you and you just can't glue it on the building. It's pisspoke. It's pisspoke, and it's like when you go to Savile Row, you get the finest stuff and every joint is very carefully judged and fought for. Whereas she built the building that they glued very thick ceramic tiles on it. And in my opinion, that's like really trashy because you see the silicon joints and you see all kinds of shit and it looks really, really bad. But for the old generation, this is still valid out of shell because it's ceramic tiles that are glued on the facade. So, therefore, yes, it's also not the kind of, you know, cheapness of cool house sometimes, working with spruce board, or I don't know what, you know, and kind of transforming it into something else. I think, yeah, it's tailor-made stuff, but with different materials, it's something else. And it costs us a lot of work and energy. So, but I know I've got too questions. The visual tectonics. We look looking at, looking at, for example, the Renaissance. And when one asks oneself what tectonics means, they're different answers. One of the answers that was, that's bit one that where the tectonics is seen through a kind of the eyes of the mechanical age is one of a gravitational tectonic where things are stacked. And elements are physically attached to one another to defy gravity and to move up towards the sky. But if you look at a lot of, most of the architecture of, say, of Europe is mazenry architecture. And you have large walls with windows, and you have architectural elements that give a structure and gestalt and a form to the facade. And essentially Roman architecture. And very seldom do you really need a kind of full alphabet of the conventional classical language that has to be done on the facade. And for example, somebody like Paladio who did villas, also with budgets that were quite limited, did enormous beautiful render walls with a minimum of architectural elements in natural stone that sometimes float. And sometimes, but it's, they imply a tectonic where the forms, they come together in the eye of the beholder and they create centers, they create centralities, they create edges, they provide an understanding of how this facade wants to be read from the top to the bottom, from the centers, from the periphery, from the periphery to the center, from the lower part to the upper part. And so on, off from the left to the right. And so this reading, this capacity to read architecture with the eye is a necessary ability to read the architecture, the European architecture in general. So the visual tectonic is not a, it's not a new thing, it's not something we claim for ourselves. But we think that it's as the tectonic that is weight based is actually a very limited view of tectonics. Because we also think that the Greek temples are not about weight, where the weight, the weight conflict, the tension becomes the strongest, the idea of weight is always suppressed in classical architecture with flowers and organic forms and so on. And even the work of Hans Kohlhoff, you know, it's not necessarily about weight because this stone clad facade, it's more about how pieces overlap with each other and kind of make a visual solidity, but you can still feel that it's not a massive stone construction. It was early projects in Berlin where he makes very tectonic facades, he calls them tectonic facades their skins. And the question of weight is really interesting and being here in London to speak about this subject because when you look at a lot of the architecture in London that has been inspired by Saint Paladio, if you look at the Chessik house, and I've seen it three years ago, I saw it for the first time. It's a paper thin model. It has a specific weight, that's a third of the Paladian villa, yet it's architecture, it works, and it's adapted to the gentleness of the English situation, of the landscape, of the climate, of the green, of the country that is protected and that for long. That for a long time had, was able to live without city walls. We have a series of projects that float, and we discovered that first I think in a project for a town hall, we had a central space and it was really dividing two masses, a bit like a hamburger, two masses and been a floating condition. And we realized we can do that with lines and things like that. So for our last building we just finished the house in Waldmeister-Veguze, it's also the central line. And even that, I would say, is still tectonic architecture in the sense that it's this book by Hans Sadelmaier, where he speaks about the loss of the centre. It's a bit problematic because he has a real problem with modernity, but he speaks about Boulin, and he's annoyed by the spherical rooms and forms by Boulin, because he says this does not recognize earth as a basis for architecture anymore. He's Sadelmaier says everything that recognizes earth or the surface of ground as the basis is still a tectonic architecture. And so therefore if you have something that floats or hovers over a horizontal surface in our view that's still tectonic. And then also we think that when we look at contemporary or modern art, art is always also a kind of teacher for architecture to think about former relationships. And so the explorations and the knowledge of contemporary and modern art is informs also our capacity to see relationships and architecture. And so that is also, so architecture is somehow not isolated from the other arts, but we think that that's part of the same experience. And often art in our eyes is a bit more advanced and it's teaching us things. And we as architects are really slow and we have to drag along with us many other things like bathrooms and so on and toilets that we have to make work inside our buildings. So maybe it takes us a few more decades to bring artistic experience into architecture. To what extent do you see yourselves as working in an art practice or as artists? I'm thinking of the way for example in one of your projects you've cut, or first of all you've built a hollow column because of how it contributes to the room it's in and how it delineates the space, not because it's holding anything up. And it's quite a beautiful terrarzo column. That one is out of stone. It's it's just cloud in stone. And then the stone, the hollow stone column is casting a fake wood shadow across the floor. No, that's a different one. I'm thinking of it. Okay. The one that's casting the shadow is, it's terrarzo. It's load bearing. It's load bearing. We do because only load bearing columns can cast a shadow. Well, in any case though, let's separate the two. You have a real column made out of pretzel casting a fake shadow made out of wood in the ground. And then in other projects, you have hollow columns, which are serving a different purpose that has to do with defining the space in the interior. But also, I mean, they become sculptural elements in their own right to a certain degree. And if you like decisions like that might often be made by someone who thinks like an artist or who thinks like a trickster or who thinks like someone who wants to make a problem out of the way we think about living in a building. No, we don't see ourselves in this kind of league of being an artist or something. I think it's, you know, architecture history is full of columns that don't support anything. But let's serve a visual or a spatial purpose. And I don't know, in English, in German, you would say an "stütze" for something that is load bearing and it would be defined by an engineer, its size, no? Maybe a post in English? I think a square rectangular volume that's holding up a ceiling. But then, if it's a rectangular volume, if you call it a pillar, a filer in German, it's an architectural element and the proportion of the pillar is defined by architectural needs and not by structural needs. And we speak almost entirely, except when we design the parking garage, we speak about pillars and it's only in the parking garage where we actually have "stützen". So therefore, it's just, yeah, so it's not, we are earnest and sincere about it. And not, we just, we say this with the hollowness we underline is because it's always very nice to make some of our colleagues nervous about that, you know, that we enjoy that very much. Maybe it's fine me to fixate too much on hollow columns because of course, as you say, many hollow columns in architecture and architectural history. There are other things too that make me, that peak my curiosity and make me wonder how you define the role you're playing as an architect versus that of someone like an artist. So for example, in one project, the way you enter the building is by whispering into the ear of a metal cat. - You have to ring first. And I think it's in the same project in the communal circulation area. There are these giant fasteners pulling up the glass plates that form the ball straight. Similarly, the windows out onto a winter cord and look like doors. They're the scale of a door. And then in the way you photograph your projects, I didn't realize this, but you handmade fake cardboard furniture to populate the interiors of your buildings. In some instances, in others, you'd fill a large room with just a guitar standing upright or something. There's this kind of interest in, I think, upending certain expectations about what we think about when we look at architecture. And I tell myself this is what a trickster would do and to a certain extent, all artists or tricksters. And so that's maybe where the question came from. In those two cases, the problem was very practical. If you have a photographer, photograph your building, and it's about housing or apartments, then do you have to get the photographs of the empty apartment? Or do you get a sense of inhabitation? Because the empty space is very difficult to read as such for the eye in photographs. So in the first case of the cardboard furniture, we were working, in both cases, we were working with a specific photographer, Avatamaya. And we found that it was not good to bring in real furniture from the furniture store because it was actually all his idea. It was his idea. He wanted furnished apartments and he said it's tacky to rent stuff. He said, "Can't you build models now?" Because he liked our models. And Thomas, you actually build all our models most of the time. And correct me. But I thought it was entirely about this idea, also the way they would be made somehow. And I went to his studio and I built them every evening. I went there for a couple of weeks. And he had books, because we thought about abstract furniture, but he had books and he was very precise as do by laws. I started out building a generic table. What I thought was a generic table. And he looked at it and he said, "Oh, that's a bit borish." And then I said, "Okay, please tell me what to do." So then he pulled out this large collection of books on traditional classical furniture. So from which he selected the ones I should build. So there was an English chair from the early 1800s. There was a lot of Peter Meyer from Austria and Germany. There was the Egyptian Lose stool. There was a table from owned by Thomas Jefferson. The mostly classical stuff. And so this populated the space. And so it was a bit like a zombie. It was these cardboard furniture. They have a presence. Yet they are not really there. And because they are. Much friendlier than a zombie. Because the color was amazing. How the color of those furniture is brownish. How that relates to the colors of the interior. It's really fantastic. And then when we did the other building, in the Hadenstrasse building, we had the same problem. And first we wanted to have real people inside the apartments. And we did. We cast a series of people. And they came. And Walter took photographs. But it was completely unsuccessful. Because they were so specific. These people and they were sucking the energy out of the space. So instead of having people to do certain things, we thought we had props. Like theatre props that would indicate or talk about inhabitation and use. So there would be the guitar, there would be the umbrella, the steam cooker, what else. Some other elements. That would somehow. Or the walking stick that would somehow speak about the absence of a person who may have been just there. It just strikes me that the degree of care with which you approach the construction of the image of your projects is quite uncommon. And maybe it's not the work of an artist per se. But it certainly isn't what you'd expect an architect to do when they document their work. We spoke with Stephen Vaits about this yesterday. And it's a problem that we have with the last building we did, which is this house on Walt Meisterweg, where we have this narrative that it could be like a beach house in this green and leafy area of the city. But when Helen Binay came to photograph it, it was end of November, very grey weather in Zurich. It was in the fall on the first day, and which actually resulted in a beautiful series of images. But if you want to tell the developer that this house has the lightness and the joy of a beach house, he will not see it. He will see a cold, austere, very formal architecture. And so, yeah, sometimes, you know, maybe we have to refotograph it for that documentation or selling reasons of a building. That set that Helen made is still amazing to us, because to us, when we finish the project, we kind of leave it aside. And all the energy you put in, all the struggle, it kind of goes. And also all the ideas you kind of did them, and they're gone for a while. Maybe some come back in a different phase, but it's kind of interesting how when you haven't built them, you kind of constantly reuse similar ideas and test them out. And when you've worked through them, and you constructed them, and you've seen them, they kind of, they're on their own, and they're not so important anymore. New ideas appear. But still, for us, it's the photographs that we get from those buildings is a way to revisit those buildings. And most of the time, I like the images much better than the actual buildings. I'm always a bit worried when I go back, because the Helen shots next to the football field, then I always go to the games, when they're in the right place, and I always pop by the building. But I'm always a bit anxious, you know, how does it look, is there a problem, how do people react? And with the images, I never have that problem, because that's kind of a very safe and also a distant way to see them. It's not our way to see them, but somebody else's, and that opens up qualities that we did not expect. And it's a bit similar when somebody writes about your work. He brings in aspects and ideas you would have never thought of, or he sees things you never thought of. And that's very rewarding in a way that something one does, triggers things in other people, and that come back to you. I think, hopefully, we'll just continue to go into some advantages. I really want to, there's a few more quick questions. One reference that comes up again and again, when you talk about your projects, and it's Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, where for listeners who aren't familiar with the project, it's a room with a very grand and considered and apparently constructed interior. But when we look at a plan detail of it, we see that these columns are pushed into a wall that's almost paper thin, and that there's so much work being done to achieve a certain effect in the interior, that in fact has more to do with a slight of hand or a certain kind of magic. And that's different from construction. And so you have this kind of dichotomy of architecture versus construction. And there's a kind of strangeness, I think, in that comparison. Why is architecture distinct from construction to you? Today's construction methods don't contain an architectural culture. So the construction methods of today need an opposite and a will, an idea of what could be done with them. So when we design, and we try to find the expression of a facade, often we consciously refuse to decide on the materiality for quite a long time while designing it. So that the discussion centers on proportion and structure and relief, it forms rather than on materiality. So then, of course, when the materiality comes into play, then the materiality gives us a kind of resistance because we have to construct it. And we really, really enjoy that resistance between the formal will and the materiality, which doesn't mean that we are working against the material when we construct it. But we can be very clear in our internal discussion when we go with the logic of the material and when we break the logic of that material. I think this is a way to wrap up now. Part of the richness of that visual experience has to do with the inherent humor, I think, in a lot of the work that you do. And there's a lot of talk about historical reference in relation to the postmodernist tradition and the specific type of humor embedded in that, which is one of irony. And this kind of plays out across mediums from literature to architecture. And I know that you've asserted over and over again that yours is not an ironic architecture. But it's a certain type of humor that you use a cultural association to try and unpack. And you talk about speech and language in German and the way that seriousness is conveyed with a serious tone. Whereas in the kind of English tradition, seriousness can come through the lightest and most humorous tone. And in fact, sometimes the more serious something is, the more the funnier it comes across, could you talk a little bit more about, I guess, first the idea of humor in your work. And then the specific cultural association you've made and how you align yourself at once with a kind of Swiss tradition and then something that maybe is more other. I think there's two aspects to the humor question. The reason why we don't like irony or why we think it's problematic in postmodern architecture. irony is claiming to be serious and the seriousness conceals a joke. I think that was Schopenhauer now. Whereas humor is using a joke to say something very serious. And our work is very, very serious but we also enjoy doing it. And we talk a lot about it and also the studio and we have pleasure in doing things. It's architecture, such a generous profession. We give and give and we can create things that are unexpected and that are delightful. And so this joy we experience, it kind of comes into the work and humor is a part of that. And humor is fundamentally inclusive. humor takes your opposite into your own realm, includes him or her. While irony is creating a border, it's excluding we have a person. We've stumbled across an interesting writing by Arnold Hauser on mannerism in which he linked the mannerist angst of the 15th century to the emergence of humor. Where humor in his view is a sign of being emphatic about the helplessness of the human situation and the kind of the lost individual in a tragic situation. While sarcasm or irony exists before that, before mannerism as a way of just putting somebody down, creating a distance. So that probably irony can be seen as part of a humanist idea. The thing about this is the tone. I think it's very important because if you create something like symmetry or have classical aspects in a building, but you're in a really everyday agglomeration situation where left and right the buildings don't look so great or not glamorous and don't have certain ambition. It's toning it down, making it thin, making it light, making it humorous, is a way of totally including all these crappy buildings next and right. They're not a problem. When you meet people, you try to be open at first and not always show your back and think you're something better. And even if some people may be stronger and lead forward somewhere, it's better to take everyone with you instead of having everyone against you. And a question of including things goes into the materiality, physicality of things. I mean the TV screens and all the aspects of consumerism, they should be comfortable in our houses. We don't want to exclude, create an exclusive environment in which everything that's not precious and beautiful, it looks terrible. We have to include the normality and if normal, if plastic toys on the ground look great in a place, that's a good sign. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. You've been listening to Scaffold. I'm Matthew Blunderfield and I produce the show. The theme music is composed and performed by Andrew Rayworth of the band Stanley Park, with additional music this week by Tyler the Creator. Subscribe to Scaffold on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at Scaffold_Podcast. Thank you to all of our legends and Thomas Pettman and Ben. And special thanks this week to Split Studios and the Architecture Foundation. Thanks as always to Skandalman and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you again in two weeks.