Reto Geiser, Editor

HOUSE IS A
HOUSE IS
A HOUSE IS
A HOUSE
IS A HOUSE

Architectures and Collaborations of

JOHNSTON
MARKLEE

Birkhäuser
Basel
Contents
1

Prologue
Marianne Mueller

26

Specific
Indeterminacy
Reto Geiser

49

Sale House
A. Portrait by Livia Corona
I. On Totality—Conversation with Philip Ursprung

89

View House
B. Portrait by Nicolás Valentini
II. On Reflectivity—Conversation with Raymund Ryan

129

Insert
Luisa Lambri
Untitled (Hill House)
145

Hill House
C. Portrait by Veronika Kellndorfer
III. On Gravity—Conversation with Sarah Whiting

185

Insert
Walead Beshty
...

201

Porch House
D. Portrait by James Welling
IV. On Multiplicity—Conversation with BLESS

241

Vault House
E. Portrait by Jack Pierson
V. On Geometry—Conversation with Sylvia Lavin

281

Appendix
Works, 1999–2016
Contributors
Acknowledgments

299

Epilogue
Marianne Mueller
V)

On Geometry
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee in conversation with

Sylvia Lavin
ALONENESS SL One of the most consistent aspects of how you present—
and produce—your work is that it seems nothing is ever
alone. You describe individual works as belonging to a family
of possible objects, you proceed in relation to typologies that
precede you, and you frame your ideas in relation to the ideas
of others. Nothing is alone. Even when the situation depends
on an isolated site or a problem that appears to be sui ge-
neris, you work hard to bring somebody or something else
in to ensure that there is no “aloneness.” Every step of the
process seems to move by way of a collaboration or by phe-
nomena that are doubled if not trebled. Of course, you also
belong to a generation in which the single architect has given
way to more collective producing agents. When I speak of you,
“you” are already doubled in a way that reflects importantly
on the state of contemporary cultural production.
ML I remember the piece you wrote in Arquitectura Viva about
how Frank Gehry is an outsider—someone who is outside and
inside at the same time. We are always part of an architectural
community but we also always feel a little outside. Maybe this
is a position that we are quite comfortable with and one that
also differs in the American community versus in the European
community. European colleagues tend to think that we are
very American and American colleagues perceive us to be very
European. As a consequence, we never really felt we belonged Johnston Marklee, Amiryani Residence,
Marfa, Texas, 2003.
or were attached to a particular group or movement. So, we
began to reach out to other fields early on. The art world
became a way for us not to limit ourselves to a single commu-
nity, but rather to take part in a much less political and more
direct exchange about the work and how it communicates. It
started off innocently with projects in Marfa, working with art
institutions and collectors; it led to collaborations with art-
ists and evolved from there. Artists from the nineteen-sixties
and seventies were so engaged with notions of specificity and
with the concreteness of things in the world. We find that
directness relevant to our thinking.
SL It is interesting that the person who first comes to mind
is Gehry. Certainly Gehry worked hard to become an auteur
against a context that rewarded corporate bureaucracy and
its valorization of economic efficiency. For him, a strong and
individualized voice was necessary to resist forces of anony-
mization. On the other hand, this outsider status produced
a form of camaraderie—his famous group of artist friends
who also considered themselves outsiders—that was useful
to him as an architect. Outside the world of bureaucratic ar-
chitecture he found or, better yet, constructed for himself a
confraternity of outsiders, a band of brethren, who in turn
led him to a new inside. Clement Greenberg and others wrote
this dynamic of the outsider/insider into the history of the

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 avant-garde. Greenberg describes how early-twentieth-cen-
tury artists isolated themselves from contemporary society by
moving to Bohemia, but found new forms of collectivity in this
alleged social isolation.
Your work raises similar dilemmas but in a new cadence.
You often use words like “familiar”—not a term associated
with the historical avant-gardes or even with what some have
described as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s neo-
avant-gardist interest in vernacular contextualism (they saw
the vernacular as a way to produce new specialness rather
than familiarity). On the other hand, through your deliberate
effort to be visually low to the ground, to blend in, you commu-
nicate resistance to what you frame as the dominant tendency
for architecture to seek iconicity. In this move away from the
singular status of the object, you find new ways to insist that
you are not alone.
This sort of operation seems especially pertinent to the
Hill House. Although Hill House is not a collaboration, not a
collective project in traditional terms, the house occupies
not only Pierre Koenig’s design but actually lives in Julius
Schulman’s photograph of this other house: you appropriate
both as posthumous collaborators. The way you talk about
zoning has similar effects. You present zoning as though it
naturally forced you to do this or that but in so invoking the
code at every turn, you transform zoning into a kind of alter
ego that becomes a partner in the process. This critique of
the single and often heroic figure of the architect places you
Johnston Marklee, Hill House, Los Angeles,
2004, massing. deeply within your architectural generation. Of course the irony
is that this kind of critique, or rather the figure of non-heroic
architect, is now engendering its own forms of notoriety.
SJ The Hill House was our first publicized project and, in
our early practice, we became identified with it, including the
rhetoric about the zoning code and the representational con-
nection to Schulman. In the View House, the issue of geometry
implicated construction and methods of making form. We were
exploring how to make a building language of form and mate-
rial that can engage a rural context without being mimetic or
familiar. It strives to engage but remains unfamiliar. In this
sense, the building doesn’t blend in but rather fits in loosely,
while maintaining a formal autonomy. It is the balance of these
contrasting conditions that we find interesting to pursue. In
many ways it is not unlike our collaborations with artists; there
is a loose fit that allows each to maintain autonomy. It allows
us to remain outsiders, between disciplines and locales. In a
way we isolate ourselves further through collaborations; we
find this is productive.
ML One way or another, we change or transform the context
in which we work. For instance, the generation before us had

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a very defined style. That previous generation positioned
themselves as demiurgic, heroic, avant-garde figures. So, at
the outset, we tried to avoid any overriding style. We certainly
benefit from their work and research, but we also see a lot
of them burn. So how do you take this vision and cloak it in
a different way, as a critique of the iconic singular author?
At our lectures, people frequently ask why we aren’t doing
complex surfaces. We answer that we are not against complex
surfaces but that there are a lot of people out there who are
already doing that very well. We believe that there are unex-
plored territories which are more fruitful for us to explore. We
think there is a void in what we are trying to do.
SJ There is also a question of how obvious the geometry of a
project needs to be. The conditions of abstraction in our work
allow us to delay any certain or obvious singular reading of
the surface of the project.
ML We are interested in the projection of something that de-
familiarizes you as a prelude to cognition. Abstraction is not
understood as reduction, but rather as masking. Our process
may be complex and layered but we try to find a synthesis that
is more muted in the end. I think that this muteness grants our
work some of its characteristic autonomy.
SL The contemporary parametric and complex surface project
may not seek muteness, but they are at the least deeply en-
gaged in alternative theories of design agency. Whether you
identify with them or not, you are part of a generation that
believes that the death of the author is a good thing or at
least that this death is a necessary prelude to the birth of
new architectural possibilities.
ML The parametric school would certainly be a strange bed-
fellow for us. Its critique of the author probably helps confirm
the old adage that all architects are formalists, they just have
different ways of lying about it.

BEYOND NEUTRAL BOXES SL One of your most constant companions and guarantors
of “not-aloneness” is a particular bandwidth of art. Even as
one considers an apparently architectural thing, like the box,
in relation to your work, it becomes difficult to separate from
specific histories of art. The box is a commonplace euphemism
for buildings constructed in the modernist idiom. On the other
hand, the Los Angeles art movement commonly referred to
as Light and Space—which resonates with several aspects
of your work—relied heavily on the box. From Larry Bell, who
actually made boxes, to James Turrell or Robert Irwin, who
cut apertures into building boxes, the Light and Space artists
used boxes as the substrate of their production. The box was
to their work what flat canvas and paint were to the Abstract
Expressionists.

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 This “architecture of boxes” was concerned with defamiliarizing
perception and experience rather than with the construction
or building and raises some interesting questions in rela-
tion to your work. Your apertures, for example, consistently
appear as “familiar” windows. The sense of familiarity derives
less from the specifics of their shape or hardware—it does
not matter if a particular window is square or double-hung—
but rather from the way the apertures frame the view. Your
windows obey the rules of Modernist painting: they face the
viewer no matter where the viewer happens to be. In their
emphatic verticality, they reject all forms of abjection.

Robert Irwin, 1°2°3°4°, Museum of

Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1997.

ML But the box is not neutral. This discussion of views and

apertures in our work cannot be isolated from the expanded
spatial landscape defined by form, structure, and sequence.
We don’t want to control the view or the room in the heroic
sense (as did the Light and Space artists) but we want to
establish a landscape of experience: “atmospheres” in which
the window and the view are only one of many layers. In the
View House, the interior and exterior landscapes are visually
and physically inflected, reflected and mirrored. The box here
is already biased as a result of inclination toward the views
and movement. The box is not something we strive for but a
norm against which we react. The box is implicated by these
explorations of our ambition and the site of the resulting
­architectural experience.
SL The box is not neutral for various reasons, but one that is
important to this discussion is scale. That the box can easily
move from the size of an object to the size of a room to the
size of a house gives it not only dimensional flexibility but also
tremendous elasticity in its allegiance to a specific medium
or disciplinary trajectory. In other words, the box as art and
the box as architecture are concepts that are anatomically
isomorphic but not necessarily identical in terms of their
goals and effects. The boxes of Light and Space relied on the
familiarity of the box to produce perceptual and experiential
disturbances. Without the clarity of the box to work against,
the obscurity of its effects could not be generated.
The question that emerges is if the same can be said of
the architectural box. The history of this box is one rooted in
the reverse operation: the obfuscation of the contours of the
box in favor of experiential clarity. Single rooms, even if very

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 large indeed, as large as Mies’ Convention Hall, for example,
made it difficult to see the edges of the box in order to make
a pure and infinitely visible space inside. Can you make this
Modernist and architectural box perform according to the
perceptually disturbing goals of the Light and Space box? And
is there a point at which the scale or complexity of the box
would outpace the value of the box as idea?
SJ Probably one area of strong difference between our work
and the Light and Space artists is that we are very conscious
of where we can tightly control conditions in the building
design. This allows us to have the confidence to relinquish
our hand in other aspects of the project design or execution.
We are fascinated by the potential of what can happen within
the framework we have shaped. For example, in the gallery
building of the Grand Traiano project, we very deliberately
introduced a differently scaled curvature to the roof profile
Johnston Marklee, Grand Traiano Art Complex,
to unify the smaller-scaled boxes that appear to be loosely Gallery, Grottaferrata, Italy, 2007–09.

aggregated in the plan. When the boxes themselves become

insufficient to address a larger whole, another operation
needs to bring coherence. We know that artists and curators
will have many different needs for the rooms and the court-
yard. The openness in plan allows for flexibility of scale while
the sectional roof profile unifies the building.
SL Billy Al Bengston published an article or, rather, crafted
a photographic essay on artist studios in Los Angeles. As a
work, its structure is deceptively simple: simple because it
seems an utterly prosaic document, describing what were
often live-work spaces through dispassionate images and
minute and quantifiable data, such as if the room contains
traffic noise or not or what kind of light it gets from what kind
of window, et cetera. The work is deceptive because it also
presents itself as a work, in other words, as a work of art that
relies on the isomorphism of art/box and architecture/room in
order to explore how they overlap as sites of labor, as sites of
production and sites of experience.
The article also raises interesting questions about how
boxes are defined through the ways in which they are received.
While each room/box differs, they are all consistently photo-
graphed with the artist himself (they were all men) clearly on
view. On the one hand, this emphatic framing of the artist
creates a sense that rather than be self-evident the authority
of the artist needs reinforcing through this elaborate staging.
On the other hand, it more broadly insists on a connection
between an ever-changing set of architectural contexts that
are brought into coherence by the presence of the viewing
subject. In other words, these boxes do not emerge as art or
architecture until they are completed by the viewer and his
experience. While your work shares certain formal qualities

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 with the milieu presented in Bengston’s essay, notably the
simple box at a more or less one room scale that seeks to
produce dense experience, I wonder if the viewer solicited by
the architectural situations you engender has a similar expe-
rience and function.
ML It is interesting that you come back to Light and Space.
Some years ago we helped Robert Irwin on a project in Marfa.
As we worked with him, we began to understand how par-
ticular he was in dealing with the notion of one room. I never
really thought about that in terms of the box, but we certainly
learned a lot from him in terms of how a small object could
organize a larger field not by spreading out but rather by
being very tight and specific. This is particularly interesting
when thinking about the Gran Traiano project in Grottaferatta,
Italy. Here we are working in a complex semiurban landscape
defined by layers of various historic buildings. The new dis-
crete buildings “fit in” by approximating the scale of the
surrounding buildings, which vary greatly in size. The distilled
building logic is distinct from the context, but also actively
transforms the surrounding urban space. Maybe it could be
described as operating on two levels simultaneously to create
Robert Irwin with Johnston Marklee, project
a situation that is both clear and uncertain. Architects don’t for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas,
1999–2000.
have the same luxury as artists; we can’t demand the same
kind of attention from people who just come to look at the
work. Architects always work in the context of other forces,
such as participants, program, or time. While we profited a lot
from the Light and Space artists, we also see the context of
art as very different from the context of architecture.
SL But there is a circular and sometimes disingenuous way
in which architecture uses both its obligations to programs
and budgets and clients, as well as its association with art,
to remain accountable to neither. This is especially apparent
in architecture’s relation to Minimalism: architecture has,
through a strange kind of magical thinking, managed to turn
Minimalism into something that can automatically confirm
that the architect has been responsible to his constraints.
Minimalism’s spatial simplicity is presented as infinitely pli-
able to program, its limited palette of details is presented as
inherently rooted in an economy of means, and its associa-
tion with good taste means that it is offensive to no client.
Minimalism is architecture’s Trojan Horse. It is often used as
an alibi to allow architects to free themselves of architectural
constraints and yet still claim that they are functioning by
architectural rules.
The reverse also happens when artists use architecture
as a Trojan Horse, as a means to appear as if they are working
in social milieu rather than in an autonomous aesthetic realm.
Even though artists tend to criticize architects for indulging

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 their narcissistic impulses rather than restricting themselves
to a service profession, when artists look to architecture,
they generally don’t do so in a way that engages typical archi-
tectural constraints conceived in professional terms. These
various double standards are systemic, in my view, although
they become particularly evident when Minimalism crosses
back and forth between mediums, from art to architecture.
One might see this in historical terms as well. The Ozenfant
Studio by Le Corbusier is a twentieth-century ground zero for
Le Corbusier, Ozenfant Studio, Paris, 1922. how mediums come together in the box. The studio is as much
a cubic form in a still life—in other words, an art box—as it is
a space of the free plan, in other words, an architectural box.
The toggle between the two is the window, which functions
both as a kind of sky painting and as a link to the outside
world. However, that link to the outside reveals nothing that
might make the world constitute a challenge to the interior.
The view offered produces no friction of any kind. The dif-
ferential relationship to Minimalism explored by art and by
architecture hinges on the view out that window: in other
words, it hinges on the way different practices construct the
real and their relationship to it.
ML Sometimes we talk among ourselves about how we have
been labeled as Minimalists. There are good Minimalisms
and bad ones. We do not favor John Pawson’s restrictive
Minimalism. Aldo Rossi or Alvaro Siza, on the other hand, are
more generous. In the Ozenfant Studio, the phantom cube is
there in the two windows, in the skylight and in the ledge that
suggests this extension of the cube. Because the phantom
cube is there as a framework, everything else is possible: the
stair, the sawtooth skylight, everything.
SJ The cube as a phantom volume has been a driving element
in some of the more recent projects. We have described the
sensibility of projects like Gran Traiano through an idea of
approximation, of using smaller integers and building them
up to approximate something altogether different in scale. At
the scale of the total form it can be read as a much larger and
more complex figure. We paid a lot of attention to individual
relationships between the aperture and the singular box. At
this larger scale the implied volume morphs into spaces of
void and solid within the building mass and in the surrounding
urban space. So the role of the phantom volume is transformed
by the jump in scale, but is still productive.
SL As you well know, the jump in scale that often happens
mid-career has historically been a challenge to architects.
Our discussion today coincides with this moment in your
career; you too are jumping scales. I am interested in how
this general problem posed by changes in the scale of prac-
tice intersect with the way you have thus far framed your

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 conceptualization of architectural questions. If your ideas
have been structurally dependent on the box as art and box
as architecture parallel—an idea that imposes certain limits
on size before the analogy breaks down—how will you make
this line of speculation expandable?
ML That a change in scale inevitably demands a change in
operation is a historical conundrum every architect has had
to wrestle with—from Bramante to Mario Botta—with varying
degrees of success. We are very much aware of the limitations
of scale in the box as a model. As a result, we resort to other
architectural elements to bring coherence to larger projects,
projects that reach the scale at which the box or the collec-
tion of boxes reaches it limitations. The roof as a large figure
Johnston Marklee, Palos Verdes Art Center,
is such an element and something we have tried since the Palos Verdes, California, 2001.

beginning, from the Palos Verdes Art Center to the Calumet

Environmental Center competitions. The roof of the UCLA
Graduate Arts Studios and the Menil Drawing Institute have to
be understood as extensions and refinements of those earlier
endeavors. We have not changed much after fifteen years.
Our convictions remain the same. Perhaps what differs today
is that our knowledge of their application has grown in scope
and precision.

SURFACE VS. MASS SL Even though James Turrell produced drawings in the
context of his installation at the Mendota Hotel, they were
made after the fact rather than as a projection of what was
to come, or as a set of instructions. In this regard, therefore,
and despite the fact that they represent architecture, they
are an artist’s drawings rather than architectural drawings.
On the other hand, they less depict the atmospheric effects
of Turrell’s manipulations of how light entered the building,
which is generally how the “artistic” intentions of the project
are understood, than record the movement of light across
architectural surfaces. From this point of view, in that they
are not only analytic and descriptive but operate through the
intersections of lines and surfaces, they speak to conven-
tions of architectural representation.
The digital environment in which architectural draw-
ings are produced today not only has radically altered these
conventions but also challenges the way architecture under-
stands its conditions of possibility. For example, someone like
Robin Evans could once argue that architecture emerged from
the gap between drawing and building but today, as the same
digital tools now increasingly control both the construction
of the architectural image as well as its built counterpart,
this gap is closing. If there is no gap, then from where does
architecture spring? One implication that stems from this
line of questioning and is pertinent to your current work is

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 that contemporary building technologies allow for construc-
tion that is not organized around profiles and contours. It is,
in other words, now possible to draw surfaces in a way that
does not rely on lines. Form is actually already constructed
as a surface. But your work increasingly has neither profile
(which is to say it does not proceed by line) nor is determined
by surfaces. Instead, it seems to emerge out of a notion of
mass, which is an interesting thing to extract from the digital
context of architectural design today.
ML Early on we were interested in Alberto Giacometti’s
drawings—not the single line works but rather the heads
composed of multiple lines from which an oscillation of mass
and figure and line hold the work together visually. This work
challenged us to consider how we might think about mass and
form without relying on edges and profiles.

Alberto Giacometti, Annette, 1954, oil on

canvas (22 × 29 cm), private collection.

SL But where does the mass come from? What is its point of
departure? For example, Gehry would argue, at least prelimi-
narily, that mass is an expression of the volumes required by
program. We could contrast this approach with that of John
Chamberlain. Both use similar surface treatments, which are
always both abject and integral. Both generate simple kinds
of shapes or configurations that seem both informal and to
in constant search of animation. But if Gehry’s mass begins
in program, Chamberlain starts with a different conceptual
origin. In Chamberlain’s sculpture, mass is the result of the
manipulation of a material.
SJ The inside and the outside are the same. Similarly, with
Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, you do not sense that the
surface is applied onto a mass but rather feel that it derives
from the weight of the mass, slumping.

Claes Oldenburg, Giant BLT, 1963, vinyl,

kapok fibers, painted wood, and wood,
32 × 39 × 29 in. (81.3 × 99.1 × 73.7 cm).

266
 SL Yes. But Chamberlain begins with a piece of material as
opposed to an image. Furthermore, although the final resting
forms of Chamberlain’s materials are quite complex, their
material homogeneity gives the work a monolithic quality or
heaviness, even. Oldenburg’s works, on the contrary, are com-
prised of multiple elements and operations from the image,
the material, the entropic sag, et cetera.
SJ The Hill House is a project that explores these issues in
the most direct way. The problem of gravity one faces when
building on a hill, as well as all the issues of structure that
were a direct consequence, challenged the project. Distilling
the design to a limited number of issues is important to our
process. The Hill House combines the oppositional qualities of
gravity, reminiscent of Richard Serra’s work, with aspects of
light and buoyancy.
SL Mass does not present itself to the viewer in the same way
that the picture plane does. Some of your earlier work toyed
with the tension between these two modes of addressing the
viewer, with the space between mass and the plane. Some of
your more recent work, by contrast, seems to focus more on
pictorial questions.
Johnston Marklee, Scope House, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1999.

SJ I think it is interesting to consider mass and porosity

and how these conditions affect apertures, structure, and
materiality. In the Vault House, qualities of porosity are linked
with use and privacy, proximity, view, light, and structure. The
overall building mass is more porous on the beach side to the
west than on the street side to the east, which is more public.
SL Rosalind Krauss described Rem Koolhaas’s project for the
Très Grande Bibliothèque as a piece of Swiss cheese, as a solid
and massive block internally riddled and rendered porous by
pockets of suspended program. While hers is an evocative de-
scription of an important project that initiated a new type of
spatial organization, it is not, in fact, an argument rooted in
a theory of material or mass. Instead, it recalls Michelangelo,
who proceeded by imagining that every block of marble had a
figure already in it, a figure that only needed the assistance
of a carver to be released. In other words, the stone is a
Achille Castiglioni, project for Casa del
Fascio, 1940, model made of cheese. frictionless and ideal piece of matter rather than a resistant
and obdurate mass. We could compare this to a project made
by the industrial designer Achille Castiglioni for his thesis in
architecture school: it was for a Casa del Fascio, for which
he made a model out of slabs of cheese. The photographs
of this model show the slices slumped in the middle, a little
sweaty, as if the model had sat out in the room a bit too long.
In other words, the model performs its architecture through
a transformative interaction with its environment. The mass

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 of cheese comes alive through its contact with environmental
contaminants.
I am curious about how you understand your mass, so to
speak, and if you understand your mandate as architects to
comprise engaging with, and even encouraging, the environ-
mental exchanges between different forms of contaminants
or if you understand your job as protecting the observer
from these kinds of potentially toxic or at least deforming
exigencies.
ML This contamination goes back to what you mentioned
earlier regarding the erosion of the a priori singular object,
whether it is theater or occupancy or material. But you also
mentioned a historicism that is very apparent. Instead of
starting with heuristic model, we always start projects with
something very archetypically architectural. During the
process, the heuristic model comes in (like a sponge) and
begins to inform the project. We do not feel that we have to
follow established rules, but we use historical examples as
precedents—a cruciform plan, for instance, is not limited to
the function of a church. Our historicism is often convoluted
by the heuristic process and the project’s limitations. Do you
feel this historical interest and perspective on our work is a
certain burden?
SL It is a constraining factor. But, on the other hand, con-
straints are your strength; they are what you need. Familiarity
is a complicated thing. Familiarity can easily become unfamiliar.
ML Do you mean how a sign in the postmodern sense can take
on multiple readings? I would agree that the constraint of any
project provides a specific and somewhat unfamiliar context
to a concept that might be otherwise familiar.
SL Today, rather than make assertive manifestos or act out
critical rejections, we sift, we sort, we scan. These are fun-
damentally new ways of organizing the world that are rooted
in much more provisional epistemologies. Over the past fifty
years we have been developing tools in order to prepare us
to work in this new context. Learning to understand the sign
as engendering multiple meanings is one such tool. Typology
and the diagram are also systems for organizing information
into loose and flexible systems. The model offered by these
various lineages is more toolkit than historical precedent.
ML For us, type is a toolkit and not a membership card to
a certain lineage. When we think about projects, we do not
necessarily have to look at courtyard types as an evolution of
a certain historical lineage. We look for what we can gain from
the type itself. Our education at Harvard’s Graduate School
of Design left us very self-conscious about this association
with historical type. But I think we are also critical of the
typical GSD models, whether formulated in the seventies or

268
the eighties. The school usually boasts a profile of architects
that cover all the grounds and are everywhere but nowhere. I
am even thinking of the postmodern phase before now: a little
bit parametric, a little bit typological, a little bit historical. I
think when we talk about our own practice we are very con-
scious not to default to that agenda.
Mark Lee, B-A-S-E-L Housing, Studio Herzog &
de Meuron, Harvard GSD, 1994.

SL Having a little bit of everything in order to satisfy the

market is not the same as having a collection, although the
distinction between the two is pliable. I think of you as col-
lectors. You collect things, chairs, books, clothing and you
collect knowledge and especially erudition, erudition in the
form of obscure anecdotes from the history of architecture.
While the postmodern impulse toward the historical combined
with its impulse toward the superficial yielded a tendency
towards connoisseurship, I find it more productive to think
about this in terms of contemporary approaches to data and
information. Cataloging is a primary feature of today’s cogni-
Office of Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles, 2014.
tive mapping but instead of producing map it just produces
more catalog entries.
A good example of the implications we can extract from
this kind of operation today can be found in Ed Ruscha’s serial
photographs. Even though his works are serial, things theo-
retically without end, he always constructs hypothetical limits
and systems of restraint to contain the series: every building
on the sunset strip or thirty-four parking lots, no more or
no less. Today, we would struggle with whether and how to
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, 1966, 54 pages, accordion fold, invent those limits. Today we would make a catalog rather than
black and white photographic illustrations
(18 × 14.2 cm). an art book, a wiki rather than a map. Furthermore, the term
that has been used to describe the individual photographs
in a Ruscha series is “indifferent.” In his work, it might be
necessary that there are specifically thirty-four parking lots,
but it doesn’t much matter which particular parking lots are
included or even who took the photographs themselves. Your
work has important connections with these issues except you
catalog rather than produce series, and your entries seem
less to betray indifference than to demonstrate decorum.
ML There is an analogy to pornography. You either resist
pornography and attempt to abstain or you say okay to
pornography and you orgasm. I think the decorum we are de-
scribing is like that. Another way to think about decorum, and
this is what we favor, would be to imagine it as a practice that
balances competing desires for ambition and propriety. These
factors are not resolved to be static as in good behavior. You
seem to be asking, is our work subversive enough? But maybe
decorum is washing out our desire to do subversive work and
tempering our desire for abjection.

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 SL But the more important question is not how do you re-
spond to pornography but how do you define it? Choosing
whether to be subversive or not is already to accept given
notions of the proper. The legal definition of pornography,
rooted in the notion of “I can’t define what it is but I know it
when I see it,” sanctions that worst kind of tyranny by con-
sensus. Architecture is a compelling field because it is ideally
situated to test the limits or to redirect this kind of thinking.
What I mean by this might become clear if we compare
Diderot’s letter to the blind to the Indian proverb of the blind
men and the elephant. In the Indian proverb, seven blind men
touch the same elephant but they all “see” a different el-
ephant. This is a story about the essential and distinguishing
nature of experience. Diderot, on the other hand, argues that
if seven blind men touch this elephant they would all “see”
exactly the same thing because he understood vision to be
completely overdetermined. If your work is the elephant, what
would the blind men see? Or rather, what kind of experience
and form of perception do you intend to solicit from your
viewer? Neither the Indian proverb nor Diderot’s letter can
be reduced to a simple form of subversion or acceptance but,
on the other hand, neither particularly suits our current cul-
tural situation. We cannot accept the former’s essentialism
and have grown resistant to the latter’s logocentrism. I hope
that contemporary architecture will sharpen its interest in
questions of experience and perception so that they more
explicitly help us resolve this dilemma. As your work unfolds it
will be interesting to observe the matchup between material
sag and conceptual gravitas.
ML This seems to be on many peoples’ minds. We always think
the question of what is next is partly contrived and that it
has actually been on the table from the beginning. We do not
see our work developing in a linear way as we consider what
we have built, in part because we see the future in terms
of our community as a landscape of possibilities. We appre-
ciate these questions because they remind us why we are so
fascinated by the work of contemporary artists Peter Fischli
and David Weiss. In their Visible World series we admire the
intensity, time, and respect they give to everyday places and
circumstances. The matter-of-fact nature of the images bal-
ances the ordinary with the extraordinary and reveals a level
of latent intensity that has great potential for invention in
contemporary architecture.
I think our work aspires to this ordinary extraordinary,
which is one way that we stand out as architects and as
artists, who are all more often interested in being extraordi-
nary. But we also remain open to the possibility that we will
not always do things exactly the way we do them now. As a

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practice, we have remained deliberately agile in terms of our
approach to scale, to clients, to form; we are not nostalgic or
especially loyal to the earlier phases of our practice because
we are not especially interested in reliving that work or in
being devoted to some pure, original objective. The room and
the window are still on our minds, but it is a new room, a dif-
ferent room, and the window has shifted.
SJ To conclude, I am curious how you, as a scholar, see our
current work in relation to that of our colleagues.
SL One feature of the contemporary landscape, of its culture
of churning and sorting, is that nothing really stands out or
has priority. We no longer insist on a clear division between
background or foreground buildings and instead seem to pro-
duce a tremendous amount of middle ground chatter. As a
scholar of the contemporary, as you put it, my proclivity would
be to observe the landscape as a whole and to resist the
temptation to focus on discrimination. One immediate thing
this form of observation makes evident is that architects
themselves are not insisting on standing out as they once
did. This reticence takes many forms, from buildings that are
decorous rather than subversive to discourse that is often
more like shop talk than a manifesto. Architects are increas-
ingly silent regarding the stakes of what they do.
ML But do we have to speak? Or can our not saying be a way
of saying?
SL By asking me, you are “saying,” even if only by way of
trying to get me to say it for you. Perhaps this is another
technique for producing architecture that is not alone.

This text is based on a conversation held in Los Angeles on November 19, 2011.

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