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AP:
I want to start by talking about how I work. In the site at Tempe the
foreground to me is the enigmatic quality of the desert. You’ve
seen the limitless space and you understand that there’s a coarse-grained
image that’s legible to you. This is ostensibly a singular environment.
Yet that building is a kind of accumulation of secret places. It’s
a procession that one can invent alone but you have these unexpected destinations
that have to do with respite from the sun, but also celebration of the
blazing sun.
I thought the idea of exposing students to that kind of adventure was
perfectly appropriate. I like the way the music students practise in and
around the building – in the courtyards, so you have unexpected
sounds issuing from the centre. You can have projections on the ‘drive-in
movie’ screen of the flyloft, at night. The colour of the building
changes in a chameleon-like way, from morning to evening. It was just
the right mixture of pigments in the stucco. It’s a building you
can look at and say there are no windows. There are apertures. There are
light control devices but there are no ‘window’ windows. Light
is admitted and revealed in a very selective way.
I like secret desert places that I have discovered hiking and traveling
in the Southwest, and I guess the building is an unconscious release of
a lot of those images, all in one spot. They are images, but they are
more often feelings about the desert. You described the moon rising and
sunset hitting the archival mountain in Laramie. Those are luck of the
draw events that we find sometimes. The Fine Arts Center terraces that
go to the sky are for lovers. I’ve seen students up on the pinnacles,
and there are blurred distinctions between indoor and outdoor spaces on
that building. The exterior organisation of the courtyards and placitas
are all usable for theatrical events where the notion of separation of
audience and performer is confused. The building is a mechanism for inductive
air flow in the way that the cooler substrata of the sunken, oasis-like
forecourt to the museum entry is associated with water and air movement.
This was set up as an inductive air movement site, where the bleachers
have open risers above and the stratified hot air would go out of the
risers, and the cooler strata would be where the body would be experiencing
it on entry.
GHB:
We have discussed the experiential dimension of your work, but I know
that in addition to the inspirational quality of any site, the programme
is also an important generator of your architecture. Could you say something
about this: does the programme have an equal weight in your conceptual
design process?
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AP:
The programme is the beginning before the programme is the client. The
client makes the building happen, and the programme is not only the empirical
model for the functional performance of a building, but it also contains
inspiration, hopefully, that different clients bring, in different ways,
to the beginnings. The programme, in terms of weighting, is systemic to
the process. When I begin, say, working on a clay model, or even with
a collage piece in anticipation of the model, the programme figures very
solidly in imagery and the 3-dimensional investigation.
In the case of my clay models, my team literally cuts out functional programme
bits in cardboard, to scale, in terms of footprints and vertical volumetric
dimension. They’re abstract squares or rectangles and I test them
against the clay forms as I’m assembling and shaping the clay. So
I don’t do an architectural concept sketch and see if the programme
has anything to do with it. It’s embedded in the work from the very
beginning and the discussions with clients with respect to the programmatic
life of the building are very exciting and lead off into some interesting
directions in terms of the programmatic intensities in the work. So the
programme figures continually, but it’s a process where it’s
very hard to dissect the different ingredients of energy that go into
the first moves or gestures towards making the piece that becomes a reality.
The disclaimer with respect to the programme would be that we know historically
that buildings through the ages change the programme and this ephemeral
notion of programme has to do with political overlays, cultural norms
or evolutionary changes in what was functional content. The Pantheon changes
from a Pagan temple to a Christian church overnight, so these kinds of
tremendous reversals are also part of the possibility. That means that
any building must have a life of its own, in a way independent of programme,
but of course accommodating the original programme. So when a building
becomes solely programme-driven and is merely a functional diagram, without
other admixtures, it becomes a rather empty determined condition. Like
a body without a soul.
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