The Horizontal Fault is going on a brief hiatus for the rest of April.
I am starting construction on a new residential project. In addition to designing the three-story house, I will also be building it, and for the next two weeks, I will be finishing up the construction drawings. The last time I was physically involved in construction was in 1994 when I completed my first project, a warehouse to residential conversion in Melbourne, Australia. I started it a year out of undergraduate school.
On that first built project, I did manual labor and assisted with minor tasks and site maintenance, e.g., digging holes, ‘managing’ the wheelbarrow, sweeping up dust, taking out the trash, and helped with light finish work. It was memorable and instructive to be the builder’s assistant and the architect at the same time.
The most enjoyable aspect of that project involved chalking out the plan at one to one and then adjusting the drawings at full scale. The least enjoyable part of the project involved being called a thoughtless idiot by the carpenter daily. As you can see above, lower right, he may have wanted to “accidentally” take my head off. I think the perpendicular, leaning walls meeting at two unequally radiused corners were a bit much for him. With that sort of quality verbal abuse—is there such thing as a thoughtful idiot?— I quickly learned the hard way that what I drew, out of fancy, had a real impact on what I asked tradespeople to do with their time, their hands, and expertise. Because I was in Melbourne, they let me know it, vehemently. Australia, you see, was and perhaps still is a country with a healthy respect for workers’ rights. So on building sites, until you can prove otherwise, architects are still “glorified, bloody pencil pushers.”
Important questions arose. Had I valued or understood the meaning of wasted labor and materials when I initially assembled the construction drawings? Did I understand what was implied at full scale in my little cardboard study models? Had it occurred to me that an architect’s responsibility is not only to the “state of the art” (if there is such a thing) or to the client but, importantly, to everyone else involved in a project’s delivery, especially the individuals who have to have put their backs into the work, literally?
For the next 27 years, while working in architectural offices in LA and New York or working for myself, I’ve mostly had to adopt a “pencil-pushing,” hands-off, observation-only approach to construction. This is the route that most architects have to take either out of legitimate concerns about legal liability, conflicts of interest, or frankly not having the time to manage materials, labor schedules, and construction equipment on top of clients, codes and staff.
Sometimes, and perhaps this only applies to smaller buildings, this detached working style can have a deadening effect on architecture. It can often prevent a more collaborative approach to making buildings, diminishing the “state of the art,” as it were.
So, hopefully, this summer, while I am building my first free-standing residential project in LA, I can put what I first learned in Melbourne twenty-seven summers ago to some good use.
Coming Up
While I am away, I’m going to be preparing a few new posts as well.
In the coming months, I’m planning on writing —as a designer of art galleries— about the sometimes puzzling relationship architects have to art, artists, and the art world, while exploring my midlife transition to making and exhibiting paintings, like the ones below.
In another post, I’ll be touching on chromophobia, a fear of color, something I think quite a few architects suffer silently, speaking from experience. Painting, certainly, has been a means of working through my dread of color.
Something else I’ve been contemplating is the relationship between cultural identity and architecture, how the two inform each other. I will be writing about this in light of my own lived experiences and a series of recent exhibitions and books on the topic.
Finally, I’ll be revising some old interviews and preparing some new ones.
Warehouses
I like this photograph of Pattern Language; a two-person pop-up exhibition installed two summers ago with another architect-artist, Tyler McMartin, in a mid-city, sawdust-filled warehouse. It reminds me now that I started my architectural journey by converting a similar warehouse into a residence.
After I reestablished my studio in LA, I designed twelve galleries, many in former warehouses, between 2003 and 2013, including Night Gallery east of Downtown LA, seen below. Clearly, I have a thing with warehouses.
There is a great show up at Night Gallery through May 1st by Khari Johnson-Ricks. If you can’t schedule an appointment to see the show, the gallery has an immersive digital capture of the exhibition in the gallery here; scroll down the webpage to launch it.
In 2013 artist Yunhee Min beautifully and economically transformed the exterior of Night Gallery by spray painting the windows. If you read my recent post on retail and commercial buildings in LA, you may know that one of the things I love about ordinary buildings designed for specific uses, like storing goods, is that they can be quickly and cheaply adapted and transformed for all sorts of new uses, from living to making and showing art.
In a city like Los Angeles that struggles to accommodate and house so many people affordably, perhaps at a larger scale, the adaptive reuse and recycling of underutilized multi-story commercial buildings can help fill that gap. I’ll touch on that possibility in a future post about housing and urban design for LA, post-COVID-19.
Thank you
Finally, before closing, It’s been an enriching few months on Substack for me. Thank you for your continued readership and words of support; please keep sharing my posts if you have enjoyed them.
I will catch up with you all in May. In the meantime, here are a few more installation photographs from Pattern Language. You can see the show here, and you can read an interview with Tyler and me about it on VoyageLA.