1 CONSTRUCTS YALE ARCHITECTURE FALL 2011 Constructs Yale Architecture Fall 2011 Contents “Permanent Change” symposium review by Brennan Buck 2 David Chipperfield in Conversation Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry 4 Grafton Architecture: Shelley McNamara exhibition review by Alicia Imperiale and Yvonne Farrell in Conversation New Users Group at Yale by David 6 Agents of Change: Geoff Shearcroft and Sadighian and Daniel Bozhkov Daisy Froud in Conversation Machu Picchu Artifacts 7 Kevin Roche: Architecture as 18 Book Reviews: Environment exhibition review by No More Play review by Andrew Lyon Nicholas Adams Architecture in Uniform review by 8 “Thinking Big” symposium review by Jennifer Leung Jacob Reidel Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern 10 “Middle Ground/Middle East: Religious review by Enrique Ramirez Sites in Urban Contexts” symposium Pride in Modesty review by Britt Eversole review by Erene Rafik Morcos 20 Spring 2011 Lectures 11 Commentaries by Karla Britton and 22 Spring 2011 Advanced Studios Michael J. Crosbie 23 Yale School of Architecture Books 12 Yale’s MED Symposium and Fab Lab 24 Faculty News 13 Fall 2011 Exhibitions: Yale Urban Ecology and Design Lab Ceci n’est pas une reverie: In Praise of the Obsolete by Olympia Kazi The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman 26 Alumni News Gwathmey Siegel: Inspiration and New York Dozen review by John Hill Transformation See Yourself Sensing by Madeline 16 In The Field: Schwartzman Jugaad Urbanism exhibition review by Tributes to Douglas Garofalo by Stanley Cynthia Barton Tigerman and Ed Mitchell 2 CONSTRUCTS YALE ARCHITECTURE FALL 2011 David Chipperfield David Chipperfield Architects, Neues Museum, façade, Berlin, Germany 1997–2009. David Chipperfield Photograph by Ute Zscharnt. Architects, Neues Museum, staircase hall, Berlin, Germany, 1997–2009. Photograph by Ute Zscharnt. David Chipperfield is the Lord Norman Foster Professor in Architecture at Yale for the fall term. Nina Rappaport interviewed him in his London office in the spring. He will give a lecture on November 3 at Yale. Nina Rappaport You have often said that architects don’t need to study math or science but rather anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. How do you bring other disci- plines to your approach to architecture? David Chipperfield I start by being highly suspicious of design. Architecture has suffered from being self-referential, and schools have suffered from talking to themselves. The shock of being in a big commercial world is that when you leave school you can’t see the connection. I’m slightly old-fashioned in a sense. I was brought up with the idea that architecture is as much about problem solving as it is about making a statement. Architecture today is very much about making a statement, but David Chipperfield it’s more about the architect than it is about Architects, Neues Museum, the architecture. I’m of the school that says, staircase hall, Berlin, Germany 1997–2009. “If you don’t need to do something, don’t Photograph do it.” I think there is a part of design that © Joerg von Bruchhausen is about elaboration—making more out of something—so there is a certain contra- diction that relates to care, thought, and consideration about the task that you have of quality of construction and attitude fifteenth-century church, because repair- volume and the identity need to be modified already identified. There is the danger that toward building? ing, stabilizing, and minimizing damage are slightly depending on where the insertion or architecture becomes a separate thing, just DC It is not that you can’t get good completely understood notions. However, intervention is built. If it’s a big, autonomous a decoration. Therefore, it is the architects construction in the U.K. We developed our establishing criteria for what should be done piece, it can be done in one way, but if it’s a striving to show how clever they are by habits in another culture, so when we come with a more modern building or construction small gap, then maybe it has got to be done achieving what no one else can. Do we all to the U.K. we get impatient. In Germany, isn’t so straightforward. another way. need to fit with them? No, we don’t. I start what would be like falling out of bed requires There were lots of opportunities NR How does your strategy for the with a highly cautious and skeptical idea persuading a British or American contractor for us to rebuild this structure as it was. Like Neues Museum, which is like a mini-city, about the power of architecture, and then to do, and it is a pretty easy way of frighten- many postwar buildings, it was built and relate to your contextual urban work and I’m happily surprised by how highly effective ing a commercial client. rebuilt, which is more the norm than what we approach in general? What did you struggle architecture can be. NR A significant example of your did. First of all, why not make the building with in terms of historical exactitude and the NR What are some of your methods approach both in design and construction is look like it used to? And, second, we had to basic preservation issue of which date to to materialize your ideas? the adaptation and preservation of the Neues be sensitive to the fact that it was a war ruin, restore the building to? DC How you materialize and give Museum, in Berlin, which has received much which centered the discussion on whether DC We set the task for ourselves physical presence to ideas is an intuitive deserved attention both in the architecture or not the design transforms the building the way we did because it coincided with the process. We are building at a time when and preservation communities. It is fascinat- into a memorial of a darker side of twentieth- way we work: taking the ruin as context both the construction industry is resistant to the ing that your design insertions establish a century German history. The question was historically and geologically. It was part of a traditional qualities of construction. Buildings dialogue between new and old. By preserv- the validity of the existing material and spectrum of options that ranged from total go up as quickly as possible. And therefore ing the former museum you also reveal the whether, in terms of the war, we were moving reconstruction to leaving it as a total ruin. So notions of permanence and solidity sound building as an archaeology while creating from memory to history. Fifty years later, we considered the history of the building, obsolete. However, I don’t think as individu- something new that works. What was your it had become more of a secular ruin than what the building was originally, its original als we have necessarily adjusted ourselves approach and philosophy for the twelve- something with a profound meaning. plans, interventions, and concepts, especial- completely. Maybe it’s up to architects to year-long project? NR What was your strategy in ly in terms of museology. say, “We are in a modern world, and every- DC The philosophy was to keep terms of new insertions? How did you decide But there was also the desire to thing is different.” But the truth is that most everything that existed. In archaeology, that’s what to maintain, what to excavate, and respond to it as a geological context distinct of us are working in layered cities, and a well-understood notion—no one would try what to build while also giving identity to the from its personal history, like a Piranesian contemporary architecture is just one more to repair a Greek sculpture by throwing exist- new elements? concoction of rubble. The damage had layer. You are thus quite aware of architec- ing elements away and making new ones, DC We basically decided to maintain created an unintended physical dimension tural history. We have gotten used to tasting claiming they are better than the old ones. So everything. For the new insertions, we had that wasn’t a part of its planned history but the fruit, which has modified our palette and as you would in archaeological excavation, to build the bits that weren’t there. There was part of an accidental one. Therefore, emotions. The architect is in a very strange you keep and elevate the existing pieces, the have been restoration approaches where the responding to the physicality of the project place, trying to use technology and the habits critical treasure. In architecture, that’s not historic fabric is stabilized and repaired, and was just as important, if not more so, than of the construction industry in the Anglo- so easy, but it has been done in the restora- the new parts are in high contrast. We were responding to its historical context. If we had Saxon world. We have surrendered most of tion of fifteenth-century Italian churches. concerned with not making a project with too just taken an academic approach, we might the territory to the construction industry, and Before, no one would think of repairing such much contrast between old and new. At the have ended up with something that didn’t the architect’s independent voice has been a structure by returning it to exactly what it same time, we wanted to make a new build- quite work. It had to have strong physical substantially eroded. Working in Switzerland looked like before. But how can you take that ing out of the old one. Therefore, it had to be elements. We had to be concerned with what or Germany is very different from working approach with a bombed-out nineteenth- an expressive idea.