 |
|
Return
to design |  |
|||
|
In a department of architecture divided between theory and construction, Keith Mitnick must have made an ideal student. Not content to focus on one or the other of academic architecture’s two extremes, he feels most comfortable in a sort of middle ground he has carved out for himself, trying to reconcile the two. “In academia,” he says, “things tend to be too polarized between reflection on what things mean and the production of the things themselves. I get bored or frustrated when it becomes one or the other.” Mitnick began his intellectual life squarely on the theoretical side of things, though not in architecture. He studied art and philosophy as an undergraduate and, at first, set out to become a painter, setting up a studio in SoHo, in New York City. But he quickly became disillusioned. “I couldn’t see the social relevance of painting,” he says. “It’s such an elitist discourse. I even went so far as to apply and get accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago for painting, and then I bailed at the last minute. It was strange, because I was letting go of something without having something to replace it.” In the early 1990s, Mitnick dabbled in several fields: carpentry, construction, even glassblowing. None of these satisfied all of his intellectual interests. Mitnick characterizes his career path during this time as a pendulum, swinging back and forth from one extreme to another, but swinging in a narrower and narrower arc each time. Architecture finally occurred to him as a possibility when he was doing exhibition installations for various art galleries. “My job was to arrange the work in space, as a way of embodying the meaning of the work,” Mitnick says. “If you asked the curator, she’d say no, he was just the schmuck who hung the stuff up, but it was the first time there was a question about the meaning of what I was doing. It was the first time I was engaged in the process of design.” So Mitnick applied to the University of California, Berkeley for his M.Arch. “In school, the lights really came on,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I was swinging back and forth anymore, doing one thing while worrying about another. No one was saying ‘you need to find this intersection between theory and practice,’ but I felt like it was available to me. You’re taking history courses, you’re taking theory courses, you’re taking courses in construction, heating, ventilation, cooling systems. And then you’re talking about what these things mean, and what your intentions are, and what happens when your intentions are aligned or misaligned with the product. And again, this relationship between the intellectual formulation and the production asserted itself.” Mitnick and his frequent collaborator Mireille Roddier were both working day jobs in the Berkeley area when Mitnick applied for—and won—a teaching fellowship at the University of Michigan. (Roddier, coincidentally, won the same fellowship the following year). The fellowship, which gives the winner a faculty position somewhere between adjunct lecturer and full-time professor, has allowed Mitnick to pursue his academic ideas while simultaneously designing real buildings. “It’s rare to be able to have a middle-ground opportunity like this,” Mitnick says, and it’s clear that it’s the ideal sort of middle ground he has always been seeking. by Kevin Lerner
|
|||
 |
|