This interview with Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi addressed their project The Formless Finder.
Download“At Cooper, the sculpture department is sort of probably not making as much sculpture you would imagine. It’s a kind of land of misfits for people doing this that and the other and tends to absorb the most architects looking to get involved in the art school.”
“There was this influence of art and, say architecture on the art world, but didn’t necessarily know what to do with it yet, except for look at it as maybe forms of you know failure or through critique and representation.”
“You have […] the world of architecture that’s, for better or for worse, really entangled with all these, sort of, political and social realities, and I think that’s definitely a set of constraints, but I think we’re kind of at the point where we’d rather engage those.”
“I would still argue that it’s entangled in a positive way because it is a sort of more, in a way, public and ubiquitous thing, like it’s not such a rarified subculture.”
“We had interests in looking at architecture in a slightly different way. Through research, and through working, and through, sort of, browsing through our interests and previous work we had done, we started to make this into a more cohesive argument.”
“Another thing […] is the really intense connection of the history theory faculty I think to our project. And I think […] we really benefitted from a really generous and very serious engagement from them. […] There was a real sense that the thesis should be a kind of intellectual project as well.”
“We started to see movements in design and technology and material investigation that you would say, […] ‘That space that you’re talking about as exclusionary from architecture is like very like ripe and generative for a lot of, say, the nonarchitectural things out in the world that are starting to influence architecture.”
“Through transitioning from a theoretical academic project into the world of trying to make things and have an ongoing viable practice, we’ve started to classify these moments within their use-values.”
“He’s basically talking about how squirrely space is, […] how every geometer and, by extension, basically every architect has tried to […] put it on a grid and define it and like work with it and quantify it, and how, […] just walk around like in a building or a city for a day and you realize that space is just like one of the most puzzling weird things.”
“…I think there’s a real danger because non-composition then can become […] a very formulaic thing.”
“It wasn’t really about tracing the evolution of the concept cause I guess that’s one nice thing about the formless, the fact that it’s not really an idea or a philosophical construct, so it was more about sort of trying to see it as this kind of very fundamental ongoing thing…”
“It’s a bit of a jolt to go directly from Princeton, which tends towards the theoretical and not the practical, into a thing that’s very practical. As much as the PS1 project is about exploring the new […] it’s like a real strict project with a budget and a timeline.”
“A lot of architecture, especially young practice today, you kind of scale-up from the installation or furniture scale into buildings, and I think what we’ve actually ended up doing most effectively is scaling down from sort of infrastructure landscape ecology engineering scale to architecture.”
“That gets back to the complexity of a life cycle of a piece of architecture in relationship to a piece of art. […] It might have aesthetic affiliations with things people have seen, but we are really interested in the full life cycle of the building and the materials and I think that makes it drastically different.”
“One thing we’ve actually been able to, in a strange way, take advantage of is the abstraction of drawing that I think is easy to forget. And I think, especially with things like Revit and certain technologies, I think there’s been an emphasis almost on the drawing as more and more faithful.”
“It’s this process of working through experimentation to produce your own precedent. So you do this once or twice or three times at different scales, and then you know your own work becomes the precedent for what you can do next.”
Producer
Hans Tursack
Issue Editor
Hans Tursack
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Announcer
Trudy Watt
Interviewees
Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi
Interviewer
Hans Tursack