Gang: Exactly. You’d have to cut holes or courtyards into shopping malls just to get access to daylight.
Rail: In a problem-oriented theory of design, you end up optimizing wrong unless you ask the right questions.
Gang: Well, the optimization conversation is usually centered around constructability and cost. In converting buildings to different uses, that’s usually outside the status quo. We hear a lot of “no,” and we have to knock down each one of those no’s, with solutions, one at a time, until we get to the answer we believe in. And then there are some things that will always be subject to change. Ideally, you can satisfy the demands for cost and constructability in some other ways and focus on the adaptability of the structure. That’s a lot of the work, probably a majority of the work on any of our projects.
Rail: One of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I believe you are state-of-the-art. Your office is international. Your contribution and collaborations with the industry of architecture, with the primary set of builders—universities, museums, development, people who really are the best builders in the world. I believe you may have some of the heaviest experience and success in this area. It’s rare. I listen to you when we talk about the problem with housing, or why it is hard to build. You’re saying the majority of buildings are fighting budget and construction constraints. And as many people are reporting on restructuring policy, your position is important, especially in housing where people really are feeling it the most.
Gang: I don’t feel like I’m an expert at housing per se, but we have done a lot of it and worked with the many professionals involved in these projects. In some ways it’s like any other building in that it has its constraints. Being a maker myself, my interest starts with thinking about how to build it. I’m very curious about the different ways of constructing housing.
There are also ideas that come from the collaborations. A building isn’t the product of just one person. You have to trust the people that you’re working with: the engineers, the builders, the specialty consultants. This becomes more and more rare as the whole profession is being chopped up into different bits.
Rail: What do you think the role of an architect is right now? I feel like you’re a prototype for an ideal practice that many people think they want to be.
Gang: There are so many different ways to practice architecture and they’re not mutually exclusive. The way that I do it is for the love and joy of making buildings, but also having them hopefully impact the world around them.
I don’t think that our practice is the only type that can do that. But I do think it succeeds at what we want it to do, which is trying to make the world a better place. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true. That’s what motivates us. It’s like leading a campaign, similar to what I was saying earlier about getting people to care about something from the bottom up.
I’ve been working on policy change in Chicago for twenty years around bird-safe architecture. Chicago is on a very important migratory route, so how can we implement building regulations that make it safer for birds?
These conversations haven’t been received well by many developers or politicians. So, now we’re tackling the issue from the other direction and generating visibility from the public. This summer, we’re curating an exhibition at the Chicago Architecture Center, which engages around five hundred thousand visitors a year, to raise awareness and show the solutions to the problem of bird-window collisions. We’ll show architecture that’s designed to be bird-safe, as well. We’re inspired to do this, because we see it’s the only way to make real change.
Rail: Architects are literally becoming politicians and moving into policy, both in big, widespread ways like HouseEurope!, an EU policy change, but also in advocacy ways like you’re describing.
Gang: Which we saw worked so well with the Chicago River. People have now embraced it in so many ways.
Rail: I like your description. I’m going to try to rephrase what I think I understood of what you said: an architect is like being a campaigner, and you have to get the hundred people involved in constructing something. The role of the architect suddenly becomes someone who’s very much an advocate of certain issues within this big collaborative organization. A big change in the architect’s job as being a campaigner for an idea within their own project.
Gang: Yes, and it’s the communication outside the professional circle as well. We’re in favor of engaging with a wider audience because we like it and we feel it supports a stronger project, not just because it’s the nice thing to do. A project is enriched by having the people who will use it take part in the planning and design process. It’s been called co-creation, which doesn’t mean that everyone is making the design. That’s your role as the architect—making the connections between deep ideas and research, talking to different people who have desires for certain outcomes, and having all these inputs come together into something that is formal, drawn, spatial, compelling.
What I think we at Studio Gang do well is respond to these contextual prompts. Who are the stakeholders? Who are the users? Who are the future stewards? We want to create something that can be relevant for them. This also makes the architect more indispensable.
They might want to know why we are using a certain form. What does it mean? How is it impacting the neighborhood? The essential thing about the architect’s role for me is this rallying, maybe a little bit of cheerleading too, along with the campaigning.
Rail: It makes sense. I like that you’re focusing on form, because I don’t think other people see that, other than an architect. Form gives form.
Gang: It sets it all up. It’s just the basis of it.
Rail: What is your relationship with art?
Gang: Art inspires me. My relationship with art makes me think of my relationships with artists, who I respect so much and who are dear friends. I feel I am someone who works on issues of form, similar to the way sculptors do, rather than say, painters—even though painting is probably my favorite medium to seek out in a museum. Painting is amazing.
As an architect I’m driven by form, creating, making, drawing, sculpting, assembling. It’s just very satisfying to make things by hand as part of the design process. There’s art in that to be sure. I think making studio art is where I thought I would end up when I began my studies, but then I found my true love, architecture.
Rail: To be a part of the zeitgeist, you have to establish a survey, a vision of the world that’s unique to the author. A big difference between an artist and an architect is the difference in authorship—there’s so many people involved in architecture. I feel there’s really a changing dynamic in architecture with authorship. I actually believe that suddenly, because of communication, Building information modeling (BIM), and team structures, authorship has actually become easier, not harder, for architects. If you had a pure vision, that’s all you wanted to do, there’d probably be a way you could see that through, in a way that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in the seventies would have a harder time as it needed to delegate through so many people.
Gang: But would you want to do that? If you would, then the project wouldn’t be owned by everyone. When you’re putting something into the public realm, I think the success of it is creating a feeling of ownership for others, as well. It might look like what you want it to look like, but it needs to fulfill peoples’ needs and desires for it to be successful. That’s my view. I wouldn’t want to go into my studio and draw something that came into my imagination and then plop it down in somebody’s city.
Rail: I understand, but an artist is asked to do that with a sculpture.
Gang: There are different kinds of artists, just like there’s different kinds of architects. Certainly, there are artists that are more engaged externally with the city and the people around them, and ones that are more internally motivated.
Rail: I’m being provocative a little bit; we’re in a moment where the potential of super authorship is possible, and people are calling for the opposite.
Gang: What do you mean when you say authorship? Do you mean authorship that is assigned to one individual?
Rail: You can make a giant Carlo Scarpa building if you wanted, at scale with mass customization and all these weird techniques.
Gang: I guess authorship and originality are an interesting pairing to start talking about, because many artists’ practices are about creating art by mixing existing things. So that doesn’t really suggest singular authorship.
Rail: My own research on crisis comes from this view that young people are sitting here being like, “Why do we do this? This is all bad. We can’t fix it. Architecture can’t fix it.” I call it the apocalypse mindset, which is this stagnation and plateau because of the state we’re in.
I get the sense that you have a different point of view on this, and architecture needs to very urgently reconcile this issue. Because I think there is a real sense from people that architecture is a kind of net negative in some ways.
Studio Gang is this example where you don’t just make architecture. All of your work expands into the field around it, into policy, into ecology, into community. What do you think about this apocalypse mindset?
Gang: I’m glad you’re asking that now. It’s funny to think about apocalyptic views when we, as architects, have to think about how we are going to live. How are we going to survive?
Plants can live no matter what—in spite of droughts, natural disasters. They’re just so persistent, and that’s why I’m so inspired by them. They’re always finding a way to keep going.
I think architects can’t just fold at this point in time. There’s got to be a little crack, even the smallest opening, that you can find a way to sprout out from. That’s the challenge for us, to get into this mindset, because it’s not an easy path that’s laid out for us. For a long time, architecture had very clear boundaries as a discipline, but right now, so many changes are underway. We need to look under every stone and find the solutions that can help people get through this, help ourselves get through this.
Rail: We have to transition.
Gang: Absolutely. Always. The only challenge is when you love doing something a certain way, but those ways are going to change. You just have to find a way to incorporate the things that you love to do into your practice. For us, one of those things is physical modeling, even though so many offices have gotten rid of their model shops.
Rail: I’m green with envy looking into your model archives and model shop.
Gang: We’re not giving it up. We have four offices. Each one has some regional independence, but together we’re a network with one vision, a shared ethos and way of working, and approach to how we think about practice in life. And that’s the way we’re surviving this time right now.
It’s based on going with what you really care about, what you want to do. I promise I’m not trying to make a lecture for young architects right now. I’m just thinking that, since you brought up this aspect of our success, or our ability to work in this environment, it really has to do with doing what you want to do and feel is right, and not replicating other practices that are successful. You’ve got to find your own way to be that plant growing out of the crack and toward the light!