print this article | 
e-mail this article
comment The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci
BR: What are some of the goals you have set for the studio over the next few years? What excites you about the future?
VA: We want an architecture that’s a biological system; we want a regeneration principle. I don’t want it to be just metaphor. I don’t know if architecture can ever be as living a thing as all that. Yes, there’s a lot of work now that looks fluid, looks as if it moves. We would love to be able to make something that really does grow, and I’m sure a lot of other architects would say that.
This slideshow includes images from two emblematic works from Acconci Studio, one built (Courtyard in the Wind), one unbuilt (Circles in the Square). Both are in Munich.”
Listen as Acconci discusses his relationship with Gordon Matta-Clark—and reveals what influence Matta-Clark’s work had on his own (0:56).
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
BR: Why?
VA: For two reasons. It seems to me it’s totally about form. But elegance is also a word of the upper class. Now we might want to get at a version of elegance, but I hope it doesn’t have the upper-class and all-form connotation.
I wonder also if the whole star architecture [phenomenon] is a sign that architecture as we know it is not really going to exist any longer. I don’t think this will happen soon, but I think there will be an architecture developed that starts to develop itself and grow itself. Maybe an architect is there almost like a planter: You plant a seed and then this thing is going to go off in its own direction. I hope architecture becomes just as alive as a tree, just as alive as a biological thing.
BR: If not elegance, then what are four of five adjectives you’d like people to associate with your work?
VA: I want our [work] to be changeable, portable, multi-functional. I want our [work] to have a complexity, but not a visual complexity.
BR: Obsession might be a strong word for it, but almost all of your projects, even in their thumbnail descriptions, will emphasize the seating they offer. Is seating so important because it can create that sense of community that was such a big part of your Conceptual work?
VA: We try to provide different kinds of seating. We want seating where people might group together, we want seating where it might be two or three people, and we would also like the seat where maybe one person can be alone. Because it seems like if you’re dealing with the public, you have to account for the occasional potential suicide, the potential serial murderer. This person should have a place for himself/herself, too.
BR: When hiring architects, what are the traits you look for? The sensibilities you want? The personalities you’re looking for?
VA: One kind of trait we look for a lot is someone who is totally interested in architecture, but at the same time, is just as interested in music, in movies, in theater, in physics, in biology. Multi-disciplinarity is really important.
When we’re designing something, yes we’re channeling ourselves into doing architecture, but it’s got to be an architecture that’s affected by the other things in the world. Blade Runner is probably just as big an influence on architects as a lot of architecture. But you know Blade Runner came at such an interesting, Post-Modern time, and came out of that, but it was a very different version of Post-Modernism than a lot of architects were doing at the time. It was Post-Modernism because it was desperate, because you were building on the ruins of the old—which Rome has done for a long time.
BR: Do you think you were influenced by Blade Runner?
VA: Yup, yup, yup, very much. For me, it was, wow, for me it was, this is the alternative to 2001. In 2001, the future is all white, it’s built as if there was nothing there. Blade Runner kinds of shrugs its shoulders and says, well, you can’t get rid of everything, so let’s build on it. Blade Runner, I don’t know if it introduced me to [the concept], but I started to think of architecture as a parasite. There were all these empty facades in New York, and we built stuff on them.
Reader Comments:
