In honor of Charles Gwathmey, who died August 3, 2009, we present his 1995 interview with Cynthia Davidson, published in ANY 11: "Legitimate Transcriptions: The Early Work of Charles Gwathmey."

Cynthia Davidson: At the end of his essay in Five Architects Colin Rowe poses several questions that he makes no attempt to answer – and neither does anyone else. I think they are interesting questions to discuss with you 25 years later both because you are one of “the five,” and because these are still relevant questions. The first question Rowe asked is, “Is it necessary that architecture should be simply a logical derivative from functional and technological facts; and, indeed, can it ever be this?” It sounds to me as if Colin is answering his own question here: Is it necessary; can it be?

Charles Gwathmey: It depends on your definition of architecture and whether you believe that architecture is merely the assemblage of information that is literally translated as “functional and technological facts.” If you pull Rowe’s question apart, he is saying that there is no interpretation, no value judgment, no context, and no intention except to evaluate this on an accommodative, factual basis. I think he answered the question too. Indeed, can it ever be this? If you don’t have interpretation and intention and you don’t think architecture transcends or transforms, then it is a possibility.

CD: You said it also depends on your definition of architecture. What is your personal definition of architecture – one that you respond to?

CG: I believe that architecture should extend your perceptual or psychological frames of reference. I would hope that our work would be memorable – that it would force the viewer to interact with and confront what we’re trying to establish, to experience something that he or she hasn’t experienced before that might lead to a reevaluation of architecture.

CD: You seem to be defining the experience of a built work.

CG: It can also be an unbuilt work. Architects like John Hejduk and Peter Eisenman provoke and cause us to reevaluate our expectations simply with their interpretations and projects. Architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be built. Colin’s question implies built.

CD: Yes it does. His second question is, “Is it necessary that a series of buildings should imply a vision of a new and better world; and, if so (or even if it is not), then how frequently can a significant vision of a new and better world be propounded?”

CG: The history of any art form always involves the extension of its limits and surpassing of the known bounds. The idea of a new vision should be as frequent as any perpetrator for whom it exists.

CD: Is it physically and psychologically possible for you as an architect to develop a new vision for every project?

CG: No, but you have to have a sense that each time you investigate a new problem there is an obligation to experiment within the constraints of that problem, to go beyond what is already proven by experience. If you don’t have the sense of obligation to push your own framework, then what’s the point? There are architects who think that eclecticism or repetition is a way of life. That’s easy; it is also boring. It is much more dynamic to be frustrated by the struggle and not to be sure and not to reach the consummate completion.

CD: In his essay, Colin talks about what could be considered a nostalgia for modernism in the work of the Five Architects. Modernism in Europe clearly had a social agenda. Does architecture still have this charge today, to imply a vision of a new and better world?

CG: No, but I think a building or a group of buildings or a plan includes intentions for a better world. I almost think it’s inherent. You don’t always have to define a new and better world through your work but you can question existing conditions through your work, which may offer suggestions or alternatives that would in fact reconcile real issues with new and better solutions. In the 25 years since Five Architects there is no question that information, technology, computers, and speed have engaged architects in the possibilities of an aesthetic that transcends the reminiscing of the European modern effort. This extended vocabulary is less nostalgic and less eclectic – less historicist. But the aspiration still concerns the new. The intent is still to make a better world. In fact, a better world could simply be an experience you’ve never had before.

I never believed that architecture could save people from social ills. Architecture is an art form that affects one’s psyche, that can comment, provoke, and offer alternatives for experience. For example, I see Rem Koolhaas’s Lille project as an urban intervention. Diagrammatically it’s just another megastructure that makes a violent intervention in the city. The forms are much more compelling in the model, very sculptural. In reality they are not as compelling because as buildings they are of a different scale; they don’t have the immediacy or the sort of tactile resonance that the model has. But it is an important thing for Rem to have done because one can evaluate the work at a real scale and in a real place and learn what the possibilities are in a very critical way. The translation from the ideal or the idea to the reality is a very complicated, very intensive set of judgments, and you get to a point where you almost understand that. If you build a diagram, it is never going to be the consummate work. It is going to be an exaggeration that reveals all the problems. The diagram has to be recast constantly.

CD: Your notion of translating from the diagram to reality leads to Rowe’s third question: “Is the architect simply a victim of circumstances? And should he be? Or may he be allowed to cultivate his own free will? And are not culture and civilization the products of the imposition of will?” Perhaps we can begin by asking if the architect is simply a victim of circumstance.

CG: We are all victims of circumstance. The difference is in what that means to different people. The connotation of “victim” is that you suffer because of circumstance. But if you identify yourself as part of a circumstance, you can evaluate it and make it better rather than become a victim. A visionary proposes alternatives or changes to the circumstance. Just being in the world you are in a cultural and social condition. As an artist you use your art form to comment about that condition – you comment about the circumstances you want to change.

CD: Is it possible that Colin’s “victim of circumstance” is about the architect as servant? Or is the architect free to exercise his or her own will?

CG: You have to work within constraints, even as an architect with a client who allows you to realize your vision. The real problem with being an architect as opposed to being a painter, writer, or sculptor is that the architect first needs a client who will take a risk and a leap of faith by committing him/herself before the fact. Architects are not free agents; in a sense they are hired guns servicing a problem or a project. We don’t have the same freedoms as artists have in their studios, working with their own hands at their own speed, not necessarily having to deal with a client, an agency, or an institution. An architect is in eternal conflict between the roles of artist/visionary and servant to the problem.

CD: What are important determinants for you in making a form?

CG: I don’t think about making a form.

CD: I want to avoid the word design.

CG: I understand. I think that this is a truth: There is a level of intuition and select artfulness that goes into the kind of manipulation that evolves into a series of forms. It’s not one form (which is why I resisted for a second) that allows something to be, but the amalgamation and collective interaction of segments of a culled form that ultimately make the composition. When the subtractive idea is most successful, the forms never read as whole but as parts of implied and suggested wholes. They represent but they are fragments, fragments at a moment in time or a moment in space that could re-engage in another time. The expanded, the added-to, is inherent.

CD: So how does one approach and read one of your buildings? How does one see the fragments as making up a whole?

CG: The fragments make up the whole when you read the object of the whole work. I don’t think you look at my parents’ house and see a cube with a triangle stuck on the roof and a semicircle stuck on the corner. The semicircle is stuck on the corner asymmetrically and the triangle on the roof has been eroded in plan, section, and elevation. It extends a volumetric diagonal perceptually, through the cube. They’re not perceived simply as solids joined together. They are perceived as volumes intersecting solids and voids, spatially and formally interlocked. When you see a building, any building, after you get the first image of the whole, you get primary, secondary, and the fragmentary readings. You start breaking it down, and you then select parts that are primarily informing and you reassemble it.

CD: You often speak about being an architect in the second or third person. Is this your personal burden as well?

CG: I was raised in a house of artists. My father’s battle was always about what he himself could do and how he executed it. He didn’t rely upon or have to deal with the reality of somebody else making his vision come to reality. Architects have clients who really don’t care, who are totally disinterested in what they feel, what they need. The idea of a project has absolutely no relevance. Thirty years of trying to move the process of architecture into a more intellectual process of discovery with clients who are disinterested is very frustrating.

CD: How do you deal with the frustration?

CG: We still do houses. The great reason to do houses is to work with people who are initially uninformed, unaware of the idea of a process. We involve them in that discovery, in the confrontation and provocation, questioning, and, in the most positive sense, decision making. I have always believed that the house is an ideal project for an architect because you confront yourself and you engage in a dialogue and in a collaboration in the truest sense. Once I have that in a house, and I know this is my frustration, I have the expectation that it happens with every project. When it doesn’t I become disillusioned. I’m still naive enough to think that I can change this, that I can alter the structure of the process.

CD: Are you answering these questions today in a way that is substantially different from how you would have responded 25 years ago?

CG: I am answering them with the benefit of having had broader experiences. When Five Architects was first published our buildings were primarily houses. We were all young and idealistic and believed in the modernist ethic as though it were dogma. It was an uncontaminated state of mind and a great moment that I would love to recapture. But how do you edit yourself back? How do you take all the information that you accumulate over 25 years and filter it in such a way as to return to that state of dogmatism, that blind belief in the ideal of something that allows you to be free and not pressured by the forces of reality?

When my daughter Courtney was killed it took me a long time to admit that I was depressed and that I wasn’t working in a creative mode but was in a holding pattern. Based upon that experience, I could maintain a certain level, but I wasn’t pushing. I couldn’t push. When I got past it, I could look back at the work that I was involved in at that time and see a clear distinction between then and now. Today my frame of mind is more like when Colin first asked these questions than it was 10 years ago. I feel freer today, and in a way I feel more frustrated. Having gone through all this, why isn’t it just as simple as it was when I built my parents’ house? The goal should always be to have a clear process.

CD: Do you mean a clear idea?

CG: No, a clear process: a site, a program, and a supportive client, meaning an engaged client who trusts you. The best work for me is work that comes from the pursuit of an idea. I don’t have to agree with it but I can be so moved by the commitment to the idea that I can learn from it.

CD: What investigations did you push aside that you are now returning to?

CG: When you find yourself having to add to a strategy to solve a problem instead of subtracting from it, you are accommodating as opposed to editing. The collage and the assemblage of the work are not about adding on but about reductive selectivity. It is not an assemblage of addition; it is an assemblage of subtraction, a carving away.

CD: Do you mean to say that your work has gone through a period of addition and now you’re back to subtraction?

CG: Yes. There were buildings that tried to expand the vocabulary in ways that were not as clear, or not as formally resolved as in my parents’ house. But in the de Menil house in East Hampton, built 20 years later, there is a whole different complexity that reinforces the ideas in my parents’ house, like spatial layering. There is a different density, a more complex hierarchy of primary and secondary readings. For me, that house became a sort of second life after my parents’ house. It was very provocative because, though not simply thematically reiterative, it made me realize that you could keep the same integrity and the same formal morality and still do investigative work. The last group of houses is representative of this as well. The Katzenberg house, the Becker house in Switzerland, and the Dell house, or Villa Austin, are resummaries of formal strategies but also reductive and extraordinarily articulate in their hierarchies and in their resolution.

CD: What do you think the zeitgeist was 25 years ago?

CG: There was a strong ethic in the roots of European modernism, an aesthetic that helped define or interpret a period of time through architecture, painting, etc., and allowed one to question the vernacular or the historicist base of our culture. We were young 25 years ago, not only as individuals but as a country. The aesthetic of our culture is rooted in classic European references. But 25 years ago we were the second wave of modernists who wanted to understand what went before us and to use the information, to elaborate on it, and not be afraid to reference Europe again in questioning the ethic of American historicism. Even today, it is much harder to build a modern building. Think of all the architects who design houses versus those who design modern houses. The percentage narrows to an infinitesimal number. A lot of time is spent getting past people’s preconceptions of comfort, visual and otherwise. What is the image of traditional architecture in America that makes people comfortable or secure? How do you disengage them from that? How do you get someone to understand that by not knowing something, exploring it, and discovering it you can find greater security than you could ever get by constantly regurgitating and dealing with your habit?

For example, there was a time when everybody talked about ornamentation. That to me was a low point. In the end ornament was really about dressing, and if you could dress, you could also undress. I was interested in the undressing, so to be accused of doing unadorned and reductive building was very positive for me.

CD: What do you believe constitutes comfort?

CG: Comfort is a state of mind. It is also unfortunately ascribed to a state of body. You don’t aspire to make comfort. It is not so interesting, actually.

Now if discomfort causes reevaluation, then you endeavor to make discomfort. Frank Lloyd Wright’s work was about that. Any avant-garde work is about discomfort. It’s not purposefully inconvenient; it’s about creating a new awareness or extending one’s understanding of what art might provide or allow. Implication and speculation are much more interesting than blanket statements. Likewise, being inconvenienced causes you automatically to be more aware. You rethink your patterns; you rethink a lot.

I believe that a state of intolerance allows you to be more purely analytical, perceptive, and inventive, uncontaminated by the “state of the art of comfort.” By intolerance I mean an intolerance for the correct. I am more interested in going beyond the known or correct. Beyond comfort. Comfort is the already known. If the known is known, why keep repeating it?

CD: Rowe’s next question is a good segue from this point: “How permissible is it to make use of precedent; and therefore, how legitimate is the argument that the repetition of a form is a destruction of authenticity?”

CG: Repetition of form is a destruction of authenticity, therefore the notion of replication diminishes the original. Right? That’s what we’ve been saying. But I don’t think it’s as isolated as that. The idea of precedent and repetition changes when it is seen in a reinterpreted set of circumstances. Context in the pure sense can change what is meant by repetition or replication. I would ask, When does something become a precedent and when does something become repetitive?

CD: You have talked about site and program as composites created in making a building and designing circulation. What influences you in solving these problems?

CG: I’ll give you an example of what I feel is my ability to quickly analyze sudden opportunities. We are doing a new house in Pacific Palisades, California, on a site that overlooks the gorge, has long horizontal views to the ocean, and is 90 degrees to Santa Monica and then downtown Los Angeles. This little piece of land tucked into the edge of the gorge has two layers, thus two vertical platforms. I knew the program right away. This was the perfect opportunity to make a building that comes from the land and a building that comes from out of the land and to have the two combined in the exterior and interior circulation systems. The one that comes from out of the land is a pure geometric pavilion, and the one that comes from the land is a series of vertical and horizontal layers that have been extruded. Together the two make a kind of collage and site-responsive building that is totally unique. Strategically, the building has not changed much from the first sketch I made on that land. I knew intuitively that the program would fit, that the disposition of the program would be correct in terms of the adjacency, in terms of the layering, and that all of this together was totally form-giving or form-provoking. I had no preconception about it.

I am happy, finally, that I can go to an unexpected and unique site and not put my parents’ house on it. Traditional architects have always taken a predetermined, symmetrically cross-axial front/back strategy and applied it to a site and then adjusted the site to make it fit. This strategy – that site dictates the organization – could never be formally cross-axial or symmetrical, but is inherently asymmetrical both in section and in plan, with specific orientation and different densities of pieces. One piece is on one part of the site, the other is somewhere else, and this raises the problem of connecting the two without having it look like a link, like a bipartite Bauhaus building.

CD: Has the site always been this important to you? Was the site such a factor when you did your parents’ house?

CG: The site of my parents’ house was the top of the mountain, the plateau on which I could make the consummate object. This California site makes the consummate object possible, but it also becomes a counterpoint of ground and building. The two have a different way of integrating and a dynamic that is different from that of any other houses we have done so far. It could never have happened without the formal precedent of the Bechtler (Zumikon) and Katzenberg houses; all those other houses were only partially informing, self-determined exclamation points of a reconciliation of a series of investigative strategies that have been edited over the years, eliminated, and then reconsolidated. When I reconsider something, I have to do it in a pragmatic and soul-searching way that allows me to get free. I’m always trying to free myself in the sense that I don’t want to repeat.

CD: In fact, the phrase “permissible to make use of precedent” seems to question all of architecture. One could argue that all of architecture is in some sense based on some sort of precedent.

CG: I agree. This question of the repetition of form also uses only one example of repetition. There is repetition of principle, repetition of an ordering idea, repetition of an ideal. Repetition of form is the easy demonstration of what Rowe is talking about. For Rowe, form is meaning, not what makes it, how it got to be, and its relationships. If you understand precedent as the manifestation of form, then you’re denying the implications of precedent, the overlays, and the interrelationships. If form is the ultimate definition or ultimate reading, I think that’s too simple. For example, if you had a pediment and columns and you placed them in a condition of subversion, they would not be about precedent or repetition, they would be about a context which questions their legitimacy or their right to be. I really think this question is about style. In other words, is a transparent cylinder the same as a translucent cylinder or the same as a solid cylinder?

CD: Yes and no.

CG: Exactly. Rowe’s question doesn’t allow for transformation. I think transformation is a huge issue both in terms of precedent and of repetition. It allows for authenticity to be partial – a partial authenticity that allows for an ideal that considers precedent and new possibilities.

CD: What is partial authenticity?

CG: If repetition diminishes authenticity, I would say that transformation, which has to do with both repetition and authenticity, can be partial or fragmentary. The question of authenticity then is relevant because it does not have to be holistic. Transformation allows a much denser set of strategies that can argue that repetition does not necessarily destroy authenticity, and that it is permissible to use precedent because precedent is the establishment of a kind of ideal ordering in a particular situation that then must be reinterpreted for a new situation. In this case, precedent informs rather than dictates form.

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