Improv
“Improv” seemed like the right title to relay a career arc in which offhand decisions became jumping-off points for opportunities. As improv requires, we have embraced the “yes, and” (as opposed to the “no, but”) philosophy in our practice. The following – adapted from the A. S. Hook Address we delivered at the University of Melbourne on 29 October 2019 – outlines where that philosophy has taken us. We start with our roots, describe what drives our practice and, finally, share some projects.
Roots (Hank)
I wanted to be an architect since I was three years old. My father was a builder – a hardworking and sometimes stubborn Dutchman. He tendered for houses designed by architects who gave him sets of blueprints for the purpose. I would pull out my Derwent pencils and colour them in, carefully representing brick, stone, glass and wood as appropriate and trying to keep within the lines. Dad returned the coloured drawings with his tender. At around thirteen, I started drafting plans for spec and custom houses that Dad was building and, over the summers, pitched in with the construction. These were typically suburban brick veneers inspired by model homes. A few years later, the family bought a property on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and Dad let me, at sixteen, design my first house. It was a ten-by-ten-metre A-frame with a full-height glass wall looking out to the tea-trees. Then I had to help build it, which gave me quite an appreciation for the challenges an architect can create.
At age sixteen, Koning designed – and then helped to build – his first house, an A-frame with a full-height glass wall on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Image: Hank Koning
Julie and I met in 1972 on the first day of architecture school at the University of Melbourne. She knew nothing about building – her father made ladies’ underwear. Over her summers, she had often worked in her dad’s factory, from the packing room to the design studio. She fell into architecture, enrolling on the advice that it offered a good all-round education. Julie, who was comfortable in the world of ideas and opinions, was impressed by my ability to make and do anything, and I by her willingness to question and argue.
Architecture, back then, was a five-year program with a required additional practice year, usually taken after the third year. We remained in Melbourne. I worked for Hank Romyn, who designed great modern houses and was one of the architects whose blueprints I had embellished years earlier. Julie interned at the Public Works Department (PWD), engaged in additions to schools in poor inner-city neighbourhoods. These schools had just received an infusion of cash from the new Labor government but the PWD architects preferred clean-slate suburban schools and handed the more complicated projects to the grateful interns. Gender equity in the workplace had a long way to go at that time (our architecture school entering class was 10 percent women) and a female architect working at the PWD was a novelty. An enlightened boss made it possible for Julie to go onsite – a first for women architects in the department.
We like collaborating – it allows us to dig deeper than working alone – and did so in our fourth-year design studio and on our thesis. Our thesis team included the late Steve Ashton of ARM and the investigation involved demonstrating that historic buildings could viably be included in redevelopment. Our case study was the Rialto block in Collins Street; the Rialto and many of its neighbours had been abandoned and were slated for demolition. This work motivated us, on leaving school, to join a group of architects (including Evan Walker, Norman Day, and John and Phyllis Murphy) to kickstart the Collins Street Defence Movement – a citizens’ advocacy group aimed at preserving the heritage buildings.
After graduating, I joined Max May’s practice, designing and detailing inventive houses. A lot of talent moved through that office. Four of Max’s employees have gone on to be awarded Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medals and a host of others have influenced the design community in various ways. Drawn to the practice’s social consciousness and innovative approach to institutional projects, Julie went to Daryl Jackson Evan Walker (now Jackson Architecture) before joining me at Max’s office.
Our share house was well located within the Carlton architectural scene and hosted many after-work exhortations on what architecture should and shouldn’t be. Grant Marani inaugurated the Halftime Club around our kitchen table and Ian McDougall, taking Grant’s lead on the need for serious examination of current architectural ideas, started Transitions magazine. Julie and I left town.
We headed to the US, where we had been accepted into the two-year master’s program at UCLA. (And yes, we were definitely planning to come back.) We landed at an interesting time and delved into topics neither of us expected. Bill Mitchell (an alumnus of the University of Melbourne) was chair of the department. He enlisted us to help illustrate the book that he and Charles Moore were writing, The Poetics of Gardens.1 We also participated in competitions as well as real projects and got our heads around Los Angeles.
Bill was also at the forefront of design computation and attracted like-minded faculty, with whom we worked on our research thesis. The project involved the formulation of a design algorithm – a shape grammar that generated existing and new Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style houses. But this was 1980; anything to do with the computer was considered an affront to creativity. Complimenting us on what they thought was a drawing of an existing Wright house, faculty members were incensed when they realized it was a new exemplar and, worse still, generated by an algorithm. The research was published in a design methodology journal and has often been cited in the computation world. Design algorithms opened our minds to new ways of thinking and influenced our approach to composition. When the first Personal Computer was released by IBM in 1981, of course we bought one. This was also the year we started a practice.
The practice (Julie)
The playground
People had warned us that Los Angeles was ugly, that it was the poster child of suburban sprawl and the tyranny of the car. People were right. If we could have returned to Australia without losing face, we would have. But then there were the things we didn’t expect. We didn’t expect artists and architects like Hockney, Ruscha, Charles Moore and Frank Gehry, who were riffing on this context. Nor did we expect the architectural legacy of Gill, Schindler, Neutra and the Case Study Houses architects, whose work responded to the benign climate and opened up the idea of informality. We read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. We eventually stopped thinking in clichés of “good” and “bad” and started really looking at the city: we discovered that a freeway had poetry (read Joan Didion), that the sprawl was actually made up of fantastic hidden neighbourhoods and ethnic enclaves, and that the best food might be found in strip malls. (These malls are certainly not pretty but change complexion when you realize that they are engines of economic opportunity for new generations of immigrants coming from Asia and south of the border.) We embraced LA’s messy imperfection, its cultural mash-up, its energy and opportunity. Compared to polite and beautiful Melbourne, it looked like a place where architecture could really make a difference and where we could test ideas with no one watching too closely.
Getting started
Armed with our IBM PC, our dot matrix printer and an evolving point of view – and propelled by a promised first project that, of course, did not materialize and a work permit that did not allow us to work for others – we began our practice. We brought knowledge from Australia – where ideas about environmental sustainability and social housing were way ahead of the game – that made us also look way ahead of the game. (How Australia has lost that lead, I don’t know.)
We were willing to talk to anyone and do most anything. To get a foot in the door, we volunteered, which led to work in affordable housing as well as repairing and reviving vernacular places, which were both marginalized by the architectural community. We jumped at the chance to adaptively reuse fifties and sixties architecture that was then out of vogue. And then there were the neighbourhood buildings – community centres, municipal gyms and schools – that were not that appealing to the design community of the day but interesting to us. When we could get them, we did houses (our own included) and house remodels, and thanks to Hank, we also started to design and build live-work housing – an emerging typology at the time.
And our work got noticed. By 1999, we needed more workspace and took the decision to build rather than rent. Hank built a 500-square-metre studio to showcase sustainable strategies, including daylight harvesting, exterior moving sunscreens and onsite water management – an uncommon demonstration of environmental principles back then. Its design began, in typical Hank fashion, with the creative working of code to build fast and cheap, while somehow avoiding the appearance of expedience. Hank led the “making” effort and I became the “voice” of the firm, teaching and lecturing around the country and beyond. We held on to our ever-extending five-year plan to return to Australia. This conceit also allowed us to hold on to a creative position that was important to us – that of the outsider. But, clearly, we were putting down roots.
Trust, ease and fit
In 2007, we published a book, Architecture Isn’t Just for Special Occasions, to convey our interest in the social potential of architecture and to give visibility and status to ordinary people who lived in or used our buildings. The book featured many of our second wave of neighbourhood and community projects, which were getting larger and more ambitious. They benefited from the interaction of a bigger team of thinkers to support our preferred collaborative and exploratory working style. Today, we have a great team of around twenty-five people, including two partners – Nathan Bishop and Brian Lane – to push our shared agenda.
Architecture Isn’t Just for Special Occasions included a diagram about observation with musings on how life lived intersects with architectural intent. This informal analysis was based on our anecdotal experience living in LA with a young family. It translated into a set of attributes – trust, ease and fit – that we realized we relied on to create a sense of welcome and inclusivity. This empathetic bent drove the practice and evolved, in retrospect, from our personal history. Both our families came from non-design immigrant backgrounds – we understood what it meant to be different – and both our households valued social equity. My father added another dimension. Born in Europe and raised in pre-World War II Australia, he was both immigrant and larrikin. He quit school in eighth grade and, to make a long story short, passed on his distrust of authority to me.
Koning and Eizenberg’s diagram describing the intersection of life lived and architectural intent was based on their experience of living in Los Angeles with a young family.
We have become more specific, over the years, about what is needed to engender trust, ease and fit. It goes without saying that the starting point is engaging with people and, unlike many, we enjoy the public design process. When seen as an exchange of information and ideas rather than as a power struggle, community interaction invariably strengthens outcomes.
We are always working to better identify the actual physical strategies that shape architecture. Here is where we are at in our thinking:
Trust is engendered by empowering and valuing the user. Transparency is a well understood strategy that offers a visitor time to anticipate how to engage with place; this is implicitly empowering. A spatial sequence that offers choice also cedes power to the user and discovery further consolidates a sense of control. We have always thought that architecture needs to be generously given and cared for in order to make building users feel valued; this is where craft and temporality come in.
Ease or informality is the bridging strategy. It is an experiential sensibility that crosses socio-economic class (think loose-fit blue jeans). Informality (which doesn’t come easy) is established by the plan flow and reinforced by daylight (now proven to improve a sense of wellbeing) and a degree of imperfection that conveys licence to participate without fear of breaking the rules.
Fit involves offering an active play between what is added and what is already built and the spaces between. Setting up open-ended narrative and what we have come to call “sticky space” principles, intended to achieve resonant connections between building occupants and the community at large, is part of this. And yes, sustainability is a given; it is more than a local response, it is a global one.
Projects
Sticky spaces
Neighbourhood building is our focus and the DNA of neighbourhood is housing. In our metropolitan region of some nineteen million people, multi-unit development is more often than not formulaic and generic. Its design continues to be boxed in by myriad regulations and community-driven constraints aimed at camouflaging density and scale. Three very different examples of multi-unit housing projects in Santa Monica in which we applied sticky space principles to propel a more active engagement between home and street are 500 Broadway, The Arroyo and 810 Ashland.
500 Broadway, a mixed-use project in Santa Monica due for completion in 2021, applies “sticky space” principles to connect its residential community to the street.
Each project uses massing that unifies rather than stratifies and focuses on the space between to strengthen connections. The Arroyo provides sixty-four units for low-income families and is located in a densifying urban neighbourhood. Upmarket 500 Broadway is a much larger mixed-use project (250 units) that applies sticky space principles to connect its residential community to the street and nearby transit terminus. Both are LEED platinum projects,2 employing passive shading (among other strategies) to improve energy performance and to add craft and ornament. 810 Ashland is a ten-unit development that offers California indoor–outdoor living at an urban density. It would be an example of missing middle housing save that the cost of land in Los Angeles is so high that the threshold of affordability is difficult to achieve through market-rate development.
The power of the library
The Museum Lab opened earlier this year on the North Side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in what was the first Carnegie public library in the US (c. 1890).3 The library featured closed structural book stacks and quiet reading rooms – books were precious and access revered. Libraries have changed.
Expedient sixties alterations were stripped back in the remodelling of an historic library to create the Museum Lab (2019), where the building’s structural underpinnings are revealed and celebrated.
Image: Eric Staudenmaier
When we took on the project, the Carnegie library had been abandoned for years. We set about repurposing it for teen programs. The Museum Lab offers tools, rather than books, to explore making, art and technology in a setting that highlights the building’s structural and poetic underpinnings – a fitting backdrop that was revealed as we stripped back expedient alterations from the sixties to reach a stable surface.
The Pico Branch Library (2014) is a municipal facility added to a city park that we had designed with the predominantly minority community some ten years earlier. It offers books (and DVDs and digital access) in multiple languages and a not- so-quiet reading room. The public design process made clear that families were eager for an educational resource that was informal, welcoming to all and at the centre of things.
At the UCLA’s Geffen Academy (a university-affiliated secondary school), the idea of a traditional library morphs more dramatically. The school’s “open library,” as it was dubbed, starts at the front door and threads through the building’s three floors to offer a variety of individual and group study spaces, an unsecured (and limited) book collection and a robust wi-fi connection. This immersive resource, study and circulation spine anchors the school’s independent and collaborative learning agenda and is designed to support the way in which today’s students merge study and socialization.
Community settings
The 28th Street Apartments building was designed to foster a strong sense of community for its vulnerable residents (formerly homeless and mentally ill) while also restoring dignity to a distressed landmark in South Los Angeles. The historic building (1926) was originally a YMCA serving the African American community in the era of segregation and designed by acclaimed architect and African American, Paul R. Williams. The original building was restored and a new addition was wrapped in screens that are punched and tagged to create a volute pattern that featured in the YMCA’s historic ornament. Mechanical equipment was hung in a lightwell to release the historic building’s rooftop for use as a social space that links old and new. The laundry is also located at this level to further encourage informal social interaction.
A completely different community will benefit from the New Student Precinct at the University of Melbourne. We are part of a team including six other architecture and landscape firms brought together by Lyons Architecture to match student diversity with design diversity. The project involves renovation and new infill buildings as well as a unifying reconciliation landscape designed to reveal the land and culture of the city’s Indigenous peoples. Our office designed the new Student Pavilion at the northern end of the precinct. Not surprisingly, our brief focuses on the social neighbourhood, including food and the Rowden White Library – a recreational library (“not for studying”) that we loved when we were students.
The architectural expression varies between all of our projects and the Student Pavilion is no exception. This project addresses student interest in natural materials and demonstrable sustainability. In all cases, including this, the principles of trust, ease and fit are applied to create a sense of welcome and inclusivity. It is a fitting project to round out the A. S. Hook address – it has brought us full circle, back to Melbourne, and allowed us to work again where our careers began.
1. William J. Mitchell, William Turnbull Jr and Charles W. Moore, The Poetics of Gardens (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988).
2. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a green building certification program developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Buildings are credited with points and platinum is the highest achievable status.
3. Between 1883 and 1929, 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built (mostly in the US, the UK and Ireland and Canada but also in Australia and elsewhere) with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The endowment was based on the idea that knowledge should be available to all.
Source
Discussion
Published online: 31 Jan 2020
Words:
Hank Koning,
Julie Eizenberg
Images:
Eric Staudenmaier,
Hank Koning,
Matthew Momberger
Issue
Architecture Australia, January 2020
