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Experiential Architecture

“Architecture and design touch on the most fundamental aspects of what it is to be human; they embody cultural and social meaning, they place us in a cultural context, provoke emotion, change the way we interact, change the way we see ourselves and the way others see us. The best retail and fashion engages with these fundamental issues in just the same way.” Amanda Levete

As partner of the highly influential practice Future Systems for over 20 years, Amanda Levete has galvanized an international reputation as an architect at the vanguard of practice and research. By combining cutting-edge digital processes that challenge conventional notions of form and space with a commitment to the value of hand-drawings and handcrafted models, Levete’s work pushes the boundaries of design, technology and materiality. As an extension of her design research, Levete also shifts effortlessly across scale using the design of furniture and objects to investigate architectural ideas and test material possibilities, collaborating closely with materials manufacturers to investigate new and innovative fabrication techniques.

In Australia as a keynote speaker for the 2009 L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Levete spoke about the importance of experience and place making in creating memorable retail architecture and also unveiled her new eponymous practice – Amanda Levete Architects. The formation of the new office marks the end of Levete’s 20-year partnership with the late Jan Kaplicky, who passed away in Prague earlier this year at the age of 72. Kaplicky and Levete’s longtime partnership at Future Systems resulted in one of the most innovative practices of its time, completing award winning and internationally recognised buildings such as the Media Centre at Lord’s cricket ground that won the prestigious Stirling Prize in 1999 and Selfridges department store in Birmingham completed in 2003.

Amanda Levete Architects’ current portfolio of projects includes the redevelopment of media giant News Corporation’s headquarters in east London, a hotel and retail development for Central Retail Corporation in Bangkok, Spencer Dock Bridge in Dublin, a subway station in Naples in collaboration with artist Anish Kapoor, offices in Oxford Street, London and a City Academy in Southwark amongst others. Levete spoke with Fleur Watson following the opening of an exhibition of her furniture and key projects at Format Furniture – part of the Cultural Program for the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival and supported by Design Victoria.

Transcript

DV: The international attention given to one of your most seminal projects at Future Systems – Selfridges department store in Birmingham – provided not only a successful architectural project but also proved to be a driver for the rejuvenation of a previously neglected part of Birmingham. Do you feel that architecture – when given the opportunity – can be a powerful driver of social change?

AL: Absolutely – without question. Selfridges was very well positioned to do just that because our site was on the edge of a former industrial district that was in serious need of regeneration. So it signalled change and set the bar for new developments. Moreover, Birmingham is not a city that is noted for its modern architecture and even historically significant architecture is few and far between. So it was a city with a huge population that was in serious need of redefining itself and move beyond its reputation as a manufacturer and producer. Therefore, the opportunity for us as architects was that this project could be more than just a department store; it could reach a much wider audience and had the ability to communicate to the public beyond just being a building. So in a sense, it posed the question: “What’s the nature of a public building?” [From a contemporary culture context], we know that many people visit department stores and shopping malls and, in fact, they’ve become the new meeting place, Therefore, our responsibility was to make sure that this building went way beyond its brief as a shop to be a create a place for social interaction.

DV: Moving forward from Selfridges and looking at other well-known Future Systems retail work such as the projects for Comme de Garçon in New York, Tokyo and Paris, can you describe how your work has developed conceptually from some of those earlier projects through to your most recent work?

AL: The evolution of a language and the direction of an office takes time and each project has its part and contribution to play in that process – one thing leads to another. However, I think that if you compare, let’s say Selfridges and the new retail/hotel project Central Embassy that we’re doing in Bangkok as works of a similar type then I would say that Central Embassy is a much more contextual building. That may be due to the condition of the particular site although it’s not at all similar to anything that’s currently in the city. Our building speaks very much of modernity but it is also imbued with the heritage and the culture of Thailand. So perhaps the work that we’re doing now is becoming more process driven in the sense of a mixture of the hand and the digital and this kind of forward and backward way of working between the two.”

DV: It’s interesting you should speak about social context because I think one of the qualities of many past Future Systems projects was this notion of universality that seemed to be regardless of site context and local culture. Was this generally a conscious aspect to the work?

AL: I don’t think there was a conscious idea of universality at Future Systems but there was an idiom and a language within our work that I’m very keen to now push, open up and invite and encourage other strands of thought to inform where we’re going. Bangkok is a very good example of this process because the building will be the first modern building in Bangkok of any significance and, therefore, has the potential to have the same kind of impact – if not greater – than Selfridges in Birmingham. To achieve what we wanted we really researched the traditional culture and the craftsmanship and expertise that exists in the city and attempted to bring it to bear on a building of this huge scale. For me it has been a very interesting and yet kind of diametrically opposed process – the idea of engaging with craftsmanship and volume producing and to get these two aspects working side by side.

DV: During your recent workshop for Design Victoria you spoke about the strategy of using motif within your work to inform pattern making and materiality – did this play a role within the design for the Cultural Embassy?

AL: Yes, for this building to create some kind of cultural continuity we wanted to exploit the typical social economic condition that is in Bangkok – that is, that labour is cheap and technology is expensive. So instead of cladding the building with the typical sort of system that you could get anywhere in Europe or the US, we had this idea to develop something that came out of the Thai culture but re-interpreted to speak of modernity. So we looked at traditional Thai craftsmanship in villages throughout the country and investigated how we could use that kind of expertise but marry it up with digital technology and, as a result, we’ve developed this three dimensional tile that will be glazed with different colours on each side. The building will be clad with 400, 000 of these coloured tiles – a process that you obviously couldn’t do in Europe or the US because the labour costs would be completely prohibitive yet, in this case, the reverse is the reality. It works really well to be able to express the building aesthetically in this way but also, importantly, the strategy speaks of the way the building’s been conceived and where it comes from.

DV: The ideas and overall aesthetic that underpinned the work of Future Systems seemed to be built on a lineage that was connected to visionaries such as Cedric Price and Archigram that had a strong investment in conceptual or ‘paper architecture’. Now that digital technologies allow innovative ideas to be realised more easily, what do you feel are the opportunities inherent in straddling the utopian analogue world of ideas to the realisable digital realm?

AL: Well, for me personally, our unbuilt work has as much significance as the built work and that extends to looking back at other visionary architects like Price and Archigram who built virtually nothing but whose work is still resonant today. If I look at the legacy of our own unbuilt work, it has a significance that’s just as powerful as the built work and sometimes even more so because it’s more extreme. It’s very important for me to have that kind of vision, passion and conceptual overview but also to merge it with something that is rooted in real pragmatism and uses the very limits of technology as they exist. Now whether that process lies in pushing the limits of design, digital software or fabrication I feel it’s always important to bring that back to the hand – the hand drawing or the handmade model – because when you try and separate the two you become distant from the people that you are actually designing for and you become distant from the process. I think that it’s very easy to be seduced by the digital world and trapped by computer-generated images and it’s easy to lose sight of the core idea. When that happens I think it’s evident within the building – it becomes an empty vessel and there’s no real authenticity or integrity. So, for me, the way of holding onto that authenticity is to merge the digital and the hand and to switch and test how one impacts the other.

DV: Architects are often criticised as creating ‘mini’ buildings when they design furniture but your pieces for Established & Sons amongst others displays a natural dexterity between scales. How does one scale inform the other?

AL: I see designing furniture as a kind of laboratory if you like – a test bed for experimenting and exploiting complex three-dimensional form and geometries that you might not be able to realise in a building simply because of the cost or the scale. It also stretches our visual language, explores materiality and pushes fabrication possibilities to their limits to inform the larger-scale buildings. So, in a sense, the reverse is happening in our work where the furniture and the explorations that have come out of the design process are informing a much larger scale in the form of buildings rather than the other way around. Working with furniture there’s an ability to refine form in a way that you aren’t able to finesse in a building so being able to work on the detail of a corner or a curve or refine the way that a curve becomes a straight line can then be drawn from when designing buildings.

DV: As you embark on your new practice Amanda Levete Architects and looking back at your working relationship with Jan Kaplicky and the team at Future Systems, what do you think you’ll take from that experience into your new venture?

AL: Future Systems was a huge part of my life. It was a 20-year partnership with Jan Kaplicky and he had a monumental impact on my life that will undoubtedly stay with me in the future. I take forward the legacy of what we created together and a fluency of thinking underwritten with an absolute need to understand the way that a conceived idea can be realised. I’m not interested in exploring form and then trying to figure out how it’s going to be made – that holds no meaning for me. Whenever Jan and I did a competition we always knew how the building was going to be built and we even knew the only people who could build it. So it’s important for me to make sure that myself, my fellow directors and the team around me keep at the top end of technical advances, materials and construction techniques so that we’re always designing to the limits to what is achievable at the time while, concurrently, continuing to hold a great belief in imagining beyond the present to where you think you may be able to push forward – I think that’s a Future System mentality I will take with me.

DV: It’s been a long time since your last visit to Australia 17 years ago – What are you thoughts on the development of Melbourne’s architectural culture?

AL: I love Melbourne and I enjoy it more than any other Australian city I’ve visited. It’s been 17 years since my last visit and within that time Federation Square, Docklands and other high rise buildings have been built and almost, without exception, I think they are missed opportunities. This is a country where you could do anything, unconstrained by history and space and yet, for the large part, the buildings are disappointing and I think you deserve better.

If I try to identify what I think has become typical of Melbourne’s modern architecture it is that the work appears to be zany for its own sake – it’s a little bit extraneous, over worked and there doesn’t seem to be any real ideas underpinning it. I’m thinking particularly of Federation Square, Docklands and the Melbourne Recital Hall, which are all buildings that have the potential to communicate a powerful presence beyond their size – I feel they have just missed the mark. I think the buildings speak of a lack of confidence. Not that I believe that every building should be an iconic landmark but I think it’s about a project feeling rooted in its place – daring without be overly flamboyant. I think many of the buildings in Melbourne display an idea of the medium being confused with the message so that the message becomes too superficial with bits of sculpture clipped onto the edges of buildings.

Saying that, I do remember from my last visit that the best expression of Australian modernity can be often found at a domestic scale and that housing in the suburbs, country and beach seems to provide the base for pushing experimentation. However, the only [large-scale] building that I’ve seen in Melbourne so far that’s impressed me – and admittedly I haven’t seen everything – is Wood Marsh’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. I think it’s beautiful – it’s powerful, dramatic but also a little bit understated and completely contained. You can see that each move has been considered, every line, every element has thought behind it.

DV: Thank you very much Amanda - it’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

Related Links

Amanda Levete Architects — www.amandalevetearchitects.com
Future Systems — www.future-systems.com

Publications

Deyan Sudic, Future Systems, Phaidon Press, 2007.

30 April 2009

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