----
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
My first question is related to science. I have been working a lot on the relations between art, science and architecture, and many of my interviews revolve around these areas. In your book, as well as in your other writings, there is a strong emphasis on your dialogue with science in which you borrow from a lot of other fields. You have also written about technology. Could you tell me how your interest in science started?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well, one of my central phrases is the 'poetics of technology', in which I see poetry - poetic aspects of architecture - in the building technologies, going back right the way through to ancient buildings. It is a parade of technical achievement, moving from one building technology to the next, from (tr)aviation to the arch to the vault, to iron and glass and now to even more sophisticated methods. Each one of them is a major factor in deciding what the aesthetic is. So I think history backs up my view on this. I am very upset these days by artists who assume they are pure artists and have no regard for technology, for building structures or for art as a service. This is very central to my position and is one I have had for a long time. Now, of course, in my latest projects I bring up building technologies that are just about to appear - known about but not yet in the stages of research and development. The most advanced of these is molecular engineering. In my book I try to give a very clear position on this subject.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
In your book we learn of your studies with Gropius at Bauhaus in Boston, and that you are a contemporary of many modernist architects. In the text, Kevin Lippard states that from the very beginning you have been what he calls 'a restless experimental'. I was wondering whether you could tell me a little about the notion of transdisciplinarity in relation to this?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well, I've always had a very broad view of things. My parents were both portrait painters of international renown, and so I started as a painter. Then I started to build things with my hands. The relationship between pure art and construction was thus my background. Bauhaus was very strong in its emphasis on building technologies. 'Minimal effort to produce a maximum result' - this principle really caught me. I believe that the ultimate expression that we are presented with in the finished work of architecture has to be a stunning result, but it has to be derived only through a very serious investigation of the needs and purpose of the building and the structure of the building. To say that in another way, architecture is a service art. If it doesn't serve then it's not architecture. Ipso facto, it is structure. It has to be so, and my position is based on that. I believe in design from the bottom up. I believe in taking seriously the programme, the requirements, the budget and the site conditions, and out of that I have the confidence that I can bring out something beautiful. This is opposed to architects - and I won't mention names to you, but they'll be obvious - who design from the top down. They start with a precious image and from there they somehow expect it to be built. This is shocking to me.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Your position leads to the question of self-organisation. In your biological references, a concept that comes out of this is the notion of feedback loops and complex dynamic systems. Self-organisation has been quoted a lot recently in the discourse of younger architects and artists. You have pioneered these ideas in many ways, so I would be very interested to hear about the notion of self-organisation in your work.
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well the first reminds me of Louis Kahn's statement that at a certain point in the design and development of a building, the building turns back on the architect and determines how it wants to be finished. It becomes a living element, a personified partner in the design process. This is what I respond to when you speak of self-organisation. The other aspect is in nanotechnology, or rather, molecular engineering. Once the artificial code of DNA is designed for it, it goes on its own power, its own decision making.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
In terms of the subject of cybernetics, I was wondering whether this was somehow an inspiration for you?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Yes, I think so. In the case of the Oklahoma Theatre, the organisation is not compositional in the conventional sense, but has an order that is adopted from the electronic organisation of elements. I elaborate on this in the first of my books. The basis is the chassis, and the components and sub-components are attached to them, which of course are serving elements for the major components. Then there is the harnessing and the communications system, which are for circulation. This freed me in my thinking, just by its pure terminology, to organise the building. I think that's unique and hope it's original in the sense of going into an organisation that is adopted from another field of endeavour. Otherwise there is no organisation there, and it looks like chaos. I was very proud to have it look like chaos! You pass between certain forms that relate to each other and in turn to the organisation - one on the left and one on the right relate to the organisation, so it's a tripartite organisation with three different centres of order. That was in my first book from 1996: A Life in the Continuum of Modern Architecture.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
You have often spoken of the liberating momentum of biomorphism. You have referred to other architects who share this momentum - Candela and Kiesler. I was wondering what you were reading at the time? I imagine a lot of these influences come from different fields and not from architecture?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well I read very broadly. I don't read much but I read broadly in science and biology - my references are very often from natural forms, from roots and branches. I'm particularly interested in the concept of growth in molecular engineering. If it's a matter of growth, then you have to follow that out - how does it want to grow? It has to express itself through growth rather than having been assembled or built. This is a test then of how you correctly express a building technology. This leads to tendrils and the layering movement of the underground development of root systems in nature. I'm using that right now as I sit here and draw. These references are, then, very real to me. I believe that as technology advances in architecture, the closer it comes to nature. This is a central statement for me. And of course, the ultimate is molecular engineering, which is an indication of growth itself. It is mechanical, but it is an imitation of a biological happening. And of course, it is a joining of nature and technology as we've never seen it before. It's almost one and the same thing. It's not bio-morphism in the sense that it is imitation of natural form, better it is learning how nature organises, and in the same way we can organise our buildings and our cities. Then with all the transportation, all the distribution of services, all the structures that come and go and change, we'll be closer to nature than ever before and how it does it.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
As well as the reading of scientific texts, do you also have dialogues with scientists?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Buckminster Fuller is a good friend of mine, and he is one of the great geniuses of the Unites States (one of the few). Marshall McLuhan is close too, and I quote him in my first book. Another is René de Beauge, who is a wonderful microbiologist. Guy Merchi is slightly less well known, but has written a wonderful book on nature.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
You also had a dialogue with Buckminster Fuller. He also appreciated bridges between architecture, art, technology and science. How did you meet him and did you ever work together?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
We never worked together, but we talked together. Or rather, he talked all the time and I didn't talk much at all! It was rather amusing but wonderful! I knew him during the Second World War in Washington while we were there together. I've seen him on and off. He has stunning views on transdisciplinarity. When he asked an architect 'how much does your building weigh?' it was a shocking thing that no one had ever though of saying. After that he said that the average building weighs ten times the amount it carries, which was also shocking. That then paved the way for the whole movement of lighter, quicker, less expensive, more serviceable buildings. And of course, these are the pressures that dominate today due to costs. So he has been a very real influence on me.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Has Kiesler been an influence on you?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
I know his work.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
He is another person I am interested in for hi transdisciplinary approach. What are your thoughts about his work?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
We are not close friends. His work is very curvilinear, very free of rectangularities that were popular in early modern. He's a free spirit, wonderfully able to detach himself from established thinking and designing. I've never worked with him, but the closest we came was a comparison between his Endless House and my spray Feng Shau concrete work, which were both around the same time. The Endless House was 1958 and in 1955 I was already designing complex curves. Candela comes into that moment with the lightness of shells. The Endless House was not really an endless house of course, it was a sculpture. It was a finer piece of sculpture than mine, but it was never engineered and never built. However, my spray concrete house was engineered by Salvatore. It was not built but it was much closer to a solution for human life, and had a discipline about it. That's very important: it's not just a sweetheart form - the folds and the edges were each engineered rather than just a sculpture. Interestingly, I am much closer to engineering and actual buildings than Kiesler was.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
You mentioned that Buckminster Fuller's architecture moved towards being a service. This is something you developed in your do-it-yourself houses, where the idea of a house as a kit was like Fuller's idea about the car. I was wondering if you could tell me about the notion of do-it-yourself in your work?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well I'm not alone in that idea. It has been brought up by a number of people and it is an admirable thought. Architecture is not a finished piece from which the artist backs off and says 'ah, it's finished', but it's more than that - it becomes a building process. The original building of it is important and is expressed as part of the aesthetic. And then the very fact that you can have interchangeable parts means that it loses its set composition, it is no longer a composed thing and has a new power of organisation, which can change from season to season or climate to climate. And you come across it and maybe you don't even recognise it when you come across it on another occasion. That's an idea that delights me. And that's a matter of improvisation, which brings the client into the picture as one of the members of the design team.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
The generation of Archigram, Peter Cook and so on all adored your work in the early '60s. It was a great inspiration to them. One of the things that you anticipated (and which particularly influenced English architects) was the kinetic dimension, the idea of putting architecture on the move. Cedric Price talked about having a school on a railway, and this made me think of your Leapfrog City, which was a very early example of architecture on the move. Could you tell me about the Leapfrog City and the notion of cities on the move?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Firstly, I have a great respect for Cedric Price. I like him very much. Archigram is not too distant from him, and I was greatly taken by them as well. I went to London in 1960 and they were hardly known at all at that time. I rushed to the office and said that I was one of their admirers and they were sort of surprised. I was a little better established at that time, so I took them all out for a drink and paid the taxi fare home and they were delighted. Ever since that time we have been very close together. I will go to the Bartlett and lecture soon, where Peter Cook still is. Michael Webb is a dear friend and he lives nearby to me here. The brilliant ideas that were developed by Price and Archigram dealt with movement. I believe it was first suggested by Peter Smithson, but was illustrated beautifully by Archigram. I have taken ideas from them and they from me, so we are a mutual admiration society. In my first book I illustrated a house that engages and disengages its parts. Each part is on a railway track, moving together or away from each other to rearrange themselves in different patterns of life. That was a direct attempt to use movement in that way.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And you also envisaged a whole city on the move - the Leapfrog City?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
I think it could be built. It is possible. I like the idea of impermanence, rather than something designed and built for eternity, which is the classic approach. The new architect's building is changed or is torn down. Impermanence is there and is alive as long as the construction method can be adapted to different needs. There is perhaps a longer lifespan for buildings that adapt to change rather than resist it. Of course, New York is full of buildings that are to be torn down. They are still firm but they don't serve any more, and they are difficult, heavy and expensive. I think it's a move against that idea of the permanent. The house I live in here is steel framed, thirty square foot, has 64 attachment points on the frame - 32 outside and 32 inside, from which rooms can be hung, platforms can be moved out and bits can be shuffled. I haven't made many changes yet, but they are still very much possible.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So one could say that the user can change the building?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Yes, I could add more rooms outside or more rooms inside. Where I'm sitting now, I'm on a platform that is held from the roof by two cables. This could be removed and rebuilt somewhere else. This is a delight. It is a kind of game. One year, the wife has her choice and the next year the husband has his or whatever! The changes required in the house serve a growing family, say a couple with no children, then children, then grandchildren. Then the children go to college and so on. The demands of the average house in terms of size and rearrangement are very taxing. It's nice to design for that rather than to oppose it.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
There seems to have been a shift to projects for the future, for the 21st and 22nd Centuries. I wondered when this transition happened? Another question is whether you would consider your works to be Utopic in any way?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
In my first book I talk about my transition from being a practising architect - which I had grown weary of - to a commencement of something new. I call it a commencement rather than retirement. In my nature, that is what I wanted to do with all of my time, to be free of the organisation of an office and to be free (like I am now) to make sketches. The two advanced molecular engineering projects in that book are a house that grows and multi-storey apartments. Since then I have been working with two young architects to create computer-generated images, and completing two other designs. One is of a bridge that grows and the other one is a complicated building that is morphable. It would be 'come and go' spaces in a museum, for example. Now I'm working on a drawing for my fifth molecular engineering project, which is an entire community of 100,000 people with a civic centre. There are different clusters devoted to culture and another one to education, one to administration, one to business, and a chapel at the top. It's very complicated and it has a lot of organisation. It has geometry, which of course, nature does have, so it's not detaching itself in any way from how nature might do it. These clusters of stalks start with roots for nourishment into chemical vats. They enclose themselves and grow in stages. It will maybe grow and change, discarding parts of itself to enlarge another. This is my continued search for other ways of expressing molecular engineering in more complicated building forms.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Could one talk of a genetic space, a genetic house or city? Is it a new space?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
I suppose so. Genetic means 'the birth of, or the origins of things in nature'. This has its origins and its process of growing in nature, and would be determined by the artificial DNA. I think of it as a plant, I think of it as an organism. I go to the dictionary and I find out that an organism is a co-ordinated effort of many organs. Each organ has its own functional purpose, and that is true of any living being, ourselves included - our digestive system, heart and lungs all have their separate roles and yet each is dependent on the other. So again, there is reference to other terminology and I feel very strongly that the terminology we use determines what our thinking is. To change your thinking, you have to change your terminology.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Are there many other people you know that are working in a similar direction?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
I hope I'm not alone. I may be among the first to move into these things, out of curiosity, in order to prepare for the time when this new building technology is available, which is probably two hundred years away. Still, it's exciting for me and for others to anticipate this. My drawings are not science fiction, though, and you can see from the research and the discourse that this is very serious stuff.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
There is a strong sense that it will be a new reality, a space of the future. You say that much of yesterday's fiction is now reality and much of today's fiction may be the reality of the future. I was wondering if you relate your work to ideas of Utopia?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
I don't believe in Utopias. I don't think nature is utopian, I don't think the universe or Creation or even God is that. It's a false state, only manufactured by the human mind - it's something that might be. I guess that puts me off, and I don't really refer to it. But molecular engineering and nano-technology is a breakthrough that is seriously being investigated now in California at the Foresight Institute. On the strength of that there is promise that we can develop things in architecture, which I find very difficult to wait for: I want to rush into it. I think that architecture is in trouble now, particularly among those who are playing with forms, because we are waiting for a new building technology. If we could go into nano-architecture now, we'd really be producing something new. I think that's going to be a revolution in manufacturing, and an evolution in the history of man-made things that we are waiting desperately to conquer.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
As well as new spaces, you also talk of labyrinthine spaces - spaces as educational or recreational tools for an exploratory journey.
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
That is one of the great primordial experiential symbols. The others are the bridge, the forest, the tower and the cave. And I see it in that way, as a symbol. I have the modernist view that however a thing is built, it has to express the way in which it was built, if it is to be honest. In this case, if the building process were growth, the building or product resulting from molecular engineering, it would have to express growth itself, even if it had to exaggerate slightly. Molecular engineering would produce anything you want, as long as you tell it what to do - an automobile, a marine engine, but I think when we come to architecture and art, we're interested in expressing what the molecules want to do themselves. The process of growth is so exquisite and important that my buildings then take on the forms and spaces that could have only have been built by growth itself. The test is when you come to one of these buildings and you say right away 'it had to be grown, it couldn't have been cast or put together', it has to have been expressed by its process. So back to the forms. The forms I give you are somewhat like vegetables or flowers - not self-consciously - but they somehow end up being closer to the nature of natural things. So you find the house and the other elements have stems and haunches. Nothing meets at right angles, but rather everything fuses from one to the other, into a continuous entity, as in nature, where you can't separate the tissue of bone from ligament, from ligament to muscle and from muscle to nerve. That's what we're moving into - buildings with different substances that fuse into each other with seamless continuity.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
This seamless continuity also becomes manifest in your projects for cultural spaces, such as theatres and museums. Working in a museum, I am naturally very curious about your ideas of the museum of the future and also the theatre of the future I would be curious to know your thoughts of the museum of the future.
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
The computer-generated images should be ready soon. There are any number of growth centres, and each growth centre is a source of chemicals and bulk material in which is cast the code which then sprouts a cluster of stalks, each of which turn out petals. This is a hexagonal organisation. Each one grows its petals to meet the petals of the adjoining cluster. When this process is complete, you have a floor platform of an acre or a quarter of an acre or whatever you want. Also they have the ability to morph, to change their forms. I know an engineer, a physicist on the West Coast who has designed an air-car that has no wings, but can grow them in a very short space of time. He can alter the shape of those wings to the most effective form for the different speeds that the air-car will travel at. And then when it returns, its wings are no longer there. If he can do that, then I can put out petals that move towards each other, and have any combination of floor. This then would accommodate the changing requirements of the exhibits that a museum displays. Each of these things has elevators in them, bringing up exhibits from the basement, and then returning them. Moving a collection or exhibits is the most serious demand of any museum.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
My last question is the only question that I ask in all of my interviews, and concerns your unrealised projects. Which of your yet unrealised projects would you most like to see realised?
JOHN M. JOHANSON:
Well of course I'd like to see a molecular engineered project, but that's not at all possible as it is still 200 years away. Leapfrog City would be the project from the past that I would like to try. It was on stalks of course, with this same idea of a central tower with things growing from it. I'd hoped that it would start in Manhattan, New York, and then go into the East River or the Hudson River and continue into New Jersey or Brooklyn. That would be my answer.
|