Sam Lubbell Daniel Libeskind Steven Holl Elizabeth Diller

LIVE_2016-11-14_Never_Built_New_York

SAM LUBBELL | DANIEL LIBESKIND | STEVEN HOLL | ELIZABETH DILLER

NEVER BUILT NEW YORK

November 14, 2016

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Bartos Forum

SAM LUBBELL: Thank you very much. Thanks all for being here. This is very exciting and thanks to Paul for putting this together. This program – he’s telling us the next three days here and there's like, I don’t know, like presidents and popes and just amazing. So we’re honored, really honored to be here. And also want to thank Metropolis Books for making this possible, this book possible. We’ve started with Never Built Los Angeles. Some of you may know about that. And now we’ve, as my urban failure, quote on quote, testament to, we have become experts in failure in New York. But the amazing thing about failure is that it tells us sometimes – I hope this isn’t too poignant these days – but it tells, sometimes tells us more about ourselves, about our city, than success. And it’s an amazing, amazing way to look at a city. It’s an amazing way to look at the history of a city. We’re all very, very used to looking at the history of a city, especially nerds like me that look at urban history, looking at the history of a city through things that got built. But we’re not used to looking at a city through things that DIDN’T get built. And it actually tells us an incredible, incredible amount. So to join me, we have an incredible panel. I don’t know how they all said yes, but I’m very, very thrilled and honored. We have Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl and Liz Diller. All three of them have won pretty much every – I don’t really need to announce or tell you their projects, but let’s just say they’ve won pretty much every award in architecture you can win, I think, I think they have. And I travel a lot and I’ve been a lot around the world this year and I’ve been inspired by their buildings in Berlin, in Oliver, California, in New York, in China. So their presence is felt and their inspiration. And just from talking with them you’ll see why. And let’s bring them out onto the stage please

(applause)

I think I’m supposed to sit here.

SAM: So, here we are. Everybody – these pictures are important, so basically the format is that, it’s a conversation, it’s definitely not a panel and I’m looking forward to that. But the idea is – I don’t know if anybody has been to PechaKucha. You guys have. It’s sort of architects and designers like to do this, they throw up images. I think it’s like twenty images twenty seconds at a time and they talk about all their work. We’re doing sort of the opposite. You guys don’t know what I’m going to start bringing up. You just saw these now. And we’re going to talk about these images and the idea is these images that we’re going to look at, these projects, are a lot more than images, they’re ideas. And architecture is about not bricks, not windows and stones, it’s about ideas.

STEVEN HOLL: And also bricks.

SAM: And also bricks too. Irving knows that part. And you are three of the people I respect the most for your ideas, and for your bricks and your architecture too. And Daniel, who wrote the beautifully moving forward for the book, I think sums this up really well. He said, “The drawings in this book are for me not a compendium of nostalgia or regret or opportunities missed. They are on the contrary drawing the open mind to rethink the built and unbuilt.” And that’s sort of what we’re here to do today. We’re rethinking the built and the unbuilt through the unbuilt, because as I said, people have done it a lot through the built. Sort of done. So, and so, and unfortunately my co-author Greg Golden who’s another amazing thinker I think, he couldn’t be here, he’s in Los Angeles with his family, but he wishes he could have been here but I certainly – he’s been part of this discussion too. And so we’re going to start this sort of reverse PechaKucha. I’m going to pick out an image and I think the first one we wanted to start with was –let’s see. This is fun. Number 3. Let’s see if we can – so there’s a lot of reasons people like unbuilt projects. And I was talking to our, my friend Luke who works art Artwork D.A.P. and Metropolis Books and he was agreeing that one of them, the biggest reason(s) people like unbuilt work is because it’s freaking insane a lot of the time. And this is a good example. This is a project by Buckminster Fuller, a plan for a dome, a geodesic dome, with glass over it, over most of Manhattan, not all of it. And this is a really good example of something we were talking about earlier in the room back there, which is this idea of speculation that architects like to do. And these are three architects who are quite good at this. So architecture as I said is about ideas. And a lot of the ideas are never even intended to be built. And let me show you another example of that. Another really good example is number 17. This is a long time before that. And this is by an architect named Charles Lamb in the twenties, and it’s called Walkways in the Sky. And he’s really – Manhattan is growing, congestion is getting out of control, and he was just dreaming up ideas, dreaming up ways to rethink this congestion and in the process designing one of the most beautiful drawings. This is at the Avery Archives at Columbia, absolutely gorgeous drawing. So these ideas, these sort of – the first question is why? Why do you do – we’re going to talk about projects that were intended to be built, but speculation. Now Steven, you said – and we mentioned this in the introduction – you can make as much of an impact in New York with your speculation with stuff that wasn’t built as you can with stuff that was. Buy why? What does this do to your process to do things that you don’t even intend to build.

STEVEN HOLL: I think in a certain sense, the passion of architecture drives you to think that you could possibly do it. I just have to transition because Leonard Cohen’s song – “at first we take Manhattan then we take Berlin” – was played over and over and over in my little studio when we were doing the Berlin Aga Dank Bibliotek library competition. I mean, we were staying up all night because we were just kind of doing this competition. We decided to jump over the existing building. It was an outrageous scheme. You know, crazy. Guy Nordensen did this balloon-shaped bridge. We won the competition, right? But, and Danny and I were in the building department at the same time because he had just won the Berlin library, and we were both – they were like trying to kill us. Both projects. He survived, we died. But, but we were invited to the Helsinki competition later on. In other words, it’s an unbuilt project, slightly outrageous, very idealistic, but it had some power after that. And I think that’s the greatness of this book. It’s documenting things that live in the mind. And architecture is una causa mentale: it’s a work of the mind, and I think that’s the important part of your publication.

DANIEL LIBESKIND: That’s certainly true, there are masters of architecture, and you know them, like John Haddock, Aldo Rossi, others I could name in history, who believed that the drawing is far more important than the building.

STEVEN: Right.

DANIEL: That the idea in the drawing is far more real than this – in the introduction you had the “failed world agnostic” – or what is it – “nostic idea of the world.” So the drawing is probably in some way more powerful than a building, the way a book or an idea is more powerful than an army. And I think this is the attraction to utopia. Because if you don’t have any utopia probably life would not be worth living. You know, if there wasn’t something …

SAM: Especially nowadays.

DANIEL: …impossible, you know, then nobody would live, we would die.

ELIZABETH DILLER: But is it really about imagining impossible things? It’s a way of thinking. I think architectures have thoughts and that’s a way of sharing them with the public. I mean I think that that may have something to do –I don’t know maybe in what way – but we always kind of discuss whether architecture, whether architecture should be autonomous, whether it’s just a way of thinking and one has to share it with the public, whether it needs to built or it needs to be shared in a book form. And I think that might be the distinction, whether it’s built or not is maybe not the most important, but whether it’s intended to be shared it.

SAM: Well I think, you know, I made the point in the introduction, that Bach’s work was considered old-fashioned by the time he died. It was not played, not performed at all. He was considered old-fashioned composer, nobody wanted to listen to this church music. It was only 150 years later when Mendelssohn decided to create a performance in Leipzig that Bach came back into fashion, after complete oblivion. I think the same thing is true for buildings. Look at the Palladio revival. Who would even have remembered Palladio hundreds of years after his work. Or the Renaissance which you know discovered in the ruins of Roman inspiration for a completely new, radical architecture. So I think it’s more than autonomy. It’s just the nature of the human mind, and the Corbusier. You talk about architects. I was always impressed that he said, “I’m not an architect,” in his papers, you know. Identity papers. When, his profession. He says “homme de lettre”.

SAM: Analyze.

STEVEN: A man of literature. And he said you don’t need to do much – you don’t need to know much about architecture. “You need to do a little bit of travelling,” and I’m quoting, “and read a couple of books.”

SAM: So then the question becomes, and Paul referred to this sort of ideal of perfection before it reaches reality, so why wade INTO reality? Why bother building at all?

DANIEL: I can say, for me, because perfection itself is as form of imperfection. I mean a perfect performance of something leaves you, it leaves you kind of empty.

SAM: Right.

DANIEL: ANY perfection leaves you empty. Whether it’s, I don’t know, don’t you think so?

STEVEN: No. For me it’s the balance between the two. In Vienna, in fact I’m just on my way to Vienna in a couple days. Dietmar Steiner is retiring at the head of the Architecture Center. He asked me in 2002 to sum up what we were doing. And I said, “Idea and phenomena.” Now, for me the idea that drives the design, that’s the most important thing. That’s what we’re talking about. But the phenomena is when the public can experience it. To me, these things are in equal balance, so, because I believe that architecture is a kind of phenomenology that you experience the light, the space. It actually can change the way you live. So for example, this little Chapel of St. Ignatius that we did in Seattle which has seven bottles of light in a stone box. Okay, you can, there’s an ideation there that’s driving the design. But a small child can go in there and feel the light and feel the phenomena and then get excited about it. So for me, I agree with Daniel that the ideas the most important thing. I said “una causa mentale.” But I really love it when we can realize something and you have the other side which then gives it back to society forever. A building can last 100 years. You know, it takes 8 years for us to do a building from sketch to realization. That’s the average.

DANIEL: That’s a short time.

STEVEN: Yeah. It’s like a, it’s a long period, you know…

SAM: Which in this age of instantaneous gratification, this concept that it could take 8 years ..

STEVEN: …oh…

SAM: ..to do anything, I just am in awe of that.

DANIEL: But I think…

STEVEN: But that’s particular to architecture. If you really, if you ask anyone, I mean, yours is LONGER than 8 years, right?

DANIEL: It’s true. My first project took me 13 years.

STEVEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: My project in New York will take, til it’s finished, maybe 50, maybe 20 years. It’s – and it’s not really finished then because , you know, architecture is not finishable. Most people think when a building is finished and given over to the client it’s finished. But to me it just begins its life then, and it has its own..

STEVEN: …right..

DANIEL: … phenomenology.

STEVEN: ..right..

DANIEL: .. right after. So the drawing is a strange thing because it’s hard to believe that architecture is born out of something so weak and so vulnerable. Like just a piece of paper. I don’t know, today maybe on a screen. But something that doesn’t seem to have any power at all. It’s powerless against government,

STEVEN: .. right..

DANIEL: Against money, against political forces. And yet a drawing somehow you need a drawing to build even a very small building. You can’t go with just 2’ x 4’s and a spade and start building something. Some people think you can do that but I don’t.

ELIZABETH DILLER: There’s another, there’s another set of issues which is that you have an idea. Goes from a sketch book into some form that can be communicated and generally drawings, digital, models, whatever. And those continue to get defined more and more and more. So less things are vague, more thinks get defined until a point where you can share it with people that can actually build something. And the moment that a project is built, it’s basically frozen in the time, from the conception to that point, it’s frozen forever. In a way. I mean, the public of course experiences buildings and they have different interpretations, and in that way architecture changes. But it is, you know, that length of time, I mean, it seems like 8 years, 13 years, it seems like a lifetime, from a concept to the moment that the doors open and then you actually – it’s frozen, right? So that becomes particularly difficult when you do things like a museum of contemporary art, which is by definition always contemporary. People that come in are always contemporary. So how do you really think about putting something on the surface of the earth that’s going to be there for – and it has to work. How do you think in a way for the future?