Patience Jones: Hello, and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms, buildings, and how both get built. I'm Patience Jones, your co-host. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host. Thank you for joining us.
Today our guests are Marion Weiss, FAIA, and Michael Manfredi, FAIA, partners in, and co-founders of multidisciplinary architecture and design firm WEISS/MANFREDI. Marion and Michael, thank you for joining us.
Marion Weiss: Thank you for inviting us. We’re thrilled to be back.
Patience Jones: It's very good to have you back. You have recently completed a promotional tour for your latest book, titled Drifting Symmetries: Projects, Provocations, and Other Enduring Models. The book explores how your work endeavors to break down the artificial distinctions between architecture and landscape architecture. You write, "Rather than simply occupying a given site, our work seeks to construct it, erasing clear boundaries between projects and their surroundings, and extending the scale of our focus to larger territorial considerations." Has this always been your approach, or was this something that evolved over time?
Marion Weiss: You know, it's a great question because I think what drew us together was our own sense that architecture wasn't very compelling when we just saw it as an artifact. And so we started to collaborate with each other and enter competitions where the briefs were far broader and far more open-ended. And then these opportunities, you know, from our own backgrounds where we came from very rich landscapes, Michael in Rome, me in the hills of California, the sense that the larger terrain of urban and topographical landscapes had to become protagonists in whatever we would design.
Michael Manfredi: I think, maybe just touch on what Marion said, because now we can look back in hindsight and kind of say, "Where did this journey start?" And it really did start at a very foundational point in our lives very early on. In my case, I've had the privilege of growing up in Rome. And there, I think what stuck with me, particularly as I began to think about architecture and began to have conversations with Marion about what we wanted to do, was simply that the network of streets, piazzas, was far more interesting than individual buildings, beautiful as they were. Rome is full of interesting, very beautiful buildings. But the sort of interconnectedness of things and the way the city is shaped by its topography, the famous Seven Hills, shapes an urban fabric, but also shapes how the open spaces are perceived and how you move through the city. I think, Marion, you've got a similar kind of story in terms of your own early emerging childhood and adolescence?
Marion Weiss: These kind of retroactive manifestos become kind of reductive storylines, but there are some things that are really interesting. When Michael and I met, we had this amazing conversation where it turns out that the very person who inspired him to become an architect growing up in Rome became my most inspired mentor and faculty member as an undergrad at University of Virginia. And so that created -
Michael Manfredi: Total serendipity.
Marion Weiss: Complete serendipity. But the thing that inspired both of us about him is that he really didn't talk about architecture. He talked about cities. He talked about art. He talked about the Renaissance. He talked about contemporary work - kind of anything but architecture. It was this kind of expansive, open-ended curiosity and restlessness that he conveyed that was really inspiring for us because somehow within the discipline, at least in the moment we were in school, there wasn't that much being communicated about the value of landscape and the value of urbanism except as really a kind of a theoretical and historical sort of point of view. My mother was a geographer with a background in geology. My father was an aeronautical engineer. And I was a distance runner in the hills of California. So all of this kind of sensibility of topography and, you know, talking about elegance, how little can you do to get something up into space, or my mom talking about plate tectonics, recasting the entire journey of a continent. These sort of sensibilities rumble through your own education because that's really an organic, ill-defined foundation for things that, when you are learning them again and experiencing them with our work, they come into focus in new ways.
Michael Manfredi: I think the point that Marion made in a way does sound a little reductive, but I think these very early childhood memories of topography playing in the Villa Giulia, in my case, where garden and villa are so reciprocal, do bubble up. I think we started our practice after we met at a very influential office at the time, called Mitchell Giurgola. Romaldo Giurgola was the chair of architecture at Columbia. I had gone to Cornell and studied with Colin Rowe. Marion was at Yale when Jim Sterling was there. And the other coincidence, of course, is that both Sterling and Rowe were very intimately connected, and Rowe was essentially Sterling's teacher. So there's a sort of another slice of serendipitous overlaps that I think seem now inevitable, but at the time were just incredibly fortunate surprises. Those things kind of galvanized and we both, I think, in different ways said, "Well, I'm ready to move on after we work for Romaldo Giurgola and set up my own practice.” And then Marian in different ways said, "Yes, I certainly want to be completely in charge and want my own practice."
Marion Weiss: So we both had separate practices for about a couple of years there. And then competed in competitions together.
Michael Manfredi: So it just goes to show you, whenever you think you have a plan, life intervenes. We did start doing a series of pro bono projects just because at the time, architecture was very deeply discussed. There were ideas of philosophy, Foucault, Derrida. It was a very intense and highly intellectualized way of seeing architecture, which we, I think, admired, but also felt that there was a kind of larger world that was left out of the discourse. So we were really interested in a series of pro bono social projects, mini competitions that, in some ways, were mostly ideas. We jumped in and said, "Well, you know, despite the fact that Marian wants to be working on her own and Michael wants to be working on his own, let's just have fun with a few of these competitions and see what we can do together." One was called Vacant Lots, which was sponsored by the Architectural League of New York, to come up with new prototypes for housing and thinking about how families are reconstructing and redefining themselves and what kind of architecture might suit that. So you can take up the second half of the story.
Marion Weiss: Right. I was going to say, the other part was new schools for New York, where huge H-shaped, urban planned, super block schools were failing. And so there was, yet again, sponsored by the Architectural League, an inquiry about what could be better. What we suggested, that if these were through block buildings that were really barriers, with the middle of the H kind of buckling up any kind of connectivity, if we could remove the middle of the H, we could create a community center on one side, a school on the other, both smaller and more intimately scaled to be successful, and frame an urban community gathering space in the middle. And that was, in a sense, one of the things that became a thread that we found ourselves always looking for: the space that was shared, either urbanistically or within the landscape, as a protagonist that was unwritten in any script or brief, but for us, the imperative for giving value to the architecture that engaged it. And these were both published and gave us a sense that it wasn't so terrible collaborating. [laughs]
Michael's mother had been in the military and she asked us to enter the competition for the Women's Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, and we thought, "Sure, of course."
Michael Manfredi: Well, she didn't ask. She told us. [laughs]
Marion Weiss: [laughs] Yeah, she was a little bit more directed about that. It became very meaningful for us, both in the site - the more we learned, the more it was clear that little recognition had been given to the women who'd served in the military, over two million of them - and it was located in a site where a historic retaining wall just hid anything that could occur behind it. So that was the idea that of breaking through that-
Michael Manfredi: In Arlington Cemetery.
Marion Weiss: In Arlington Cemetery, breaking through that historic hemicycle to create a gateway and a place to illuminate their narratives and their stories, became this moment where truly looking at carving an earthwork, but illuminating with light and glass a story that was hidden, and a place now that could honor these women, for us was the launch of our practice. Because General Vaught, after the competition, said, "Do you have a firm?" We quickly asked our great friend, David Curry, graphic designer, to make business cards for the press conference the next day, and flipped a coin to see whose name would come first, and then acted as if it had been that way all along.
Michael Manfredi: I think from a point of view of how that project resonated, my mother had traveled the world and then met my father in Italy. I think also Marian's parents were also very active in the world. So this was an incredibly interesting topic because what was little recognized at the time was that women had played a very pivotal role in the Revolutionary War as spies and part of an intelligence network. In the Civil War, it came out of the need for nursing. There's a kind of interesting storyline that, for us, went back to this kind of connection of, why is architecture meaningful? And how can we create something that is both meaningful and beautiful? Because those two worlds aren't necessarily antithetical, as is often the case. I think on a very strong intellectual level, and personal level, it was a project that we felt very close to. There were two stages. It wasn't quite as simple. We were part of five finalists. Five or four? I can't remember.
Marion Weiss: I think it was three.
Michael Manfredi: Yeah. And then we really realized we had to start work together, and we brought in a few people to help us, mostly students, because we were both teaching.
Marion Weiss: Well, we were both teaching, so we were recruiting our favorite students over the summer and working in an un-air-conditioned-
Michael Manfredi: [laughs] ... apartment.
Marion Weiss: Building models and doing drawings, because that was pre-computer and...
Michael Manfredi: Yeah. So we, you know, magically and happily prevailed. And then, I think, Marian's recollection of this whole business card business was like, oh my God, now we have a firm. Eh, of course we do.
Marion Weiss: [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: But that, I think, launched us as a practice. And what followed, and this will go back to, I think, in some ways, the book, which is an interesting way in which this conversation started. The second competition was actually for open space. It was called Olympia Field: Creating a New American Green.
Marion Weiss: Olympia Fields, just south of Chicago.
Michael Manfredi: It was a former farm that had been greatly suburban - or the surrounding areas had been suburbanized. They really wanted to make a town green in a way that exemplified a kind of Midwest condition of suburbanization. We saw it as a great opportunity to think about water management, ecological issues, social issues, but also a nod to the kind of agricultural tradition that creates very beautiful settings out of a set of performative qualities.
Marion Weiss: What was super interesting is that there had been some flooding in the Chicago area, but in particular, this neighborhood had flooding because, for some strange reason, this particular 20-acre site had inherited five suburban districts' water runoff. So it exceeded what it should have been responsible for and created a very curious condition. For us, what it offered was a great opportunity to create these tiered terraces that could work as playing fields, but it could also create this robust water retention area when it needed to. The net result was that there was also an old barn and old farmhouse on the site that they said was up to every competitor's discretion to either tear down and do something new, or restore. We chose to restore both, and add to them. But what we also discovered in this whole making of topography is that it almost made it this acropolian hill because of the amount that we excavated across the 20 acres. Just the whole idea of constructing a site, which you noted in our book, is really important. That was one of the first opportunities where we realized that constructing this site would give it a topography it never had, do a new performative element, but it also elevated the legacy of its identity as a place where farming had taken place, and the barn and the farmhouse were the symbols.
Michael Manfredi: We both quickly had to learn because it was a project that was heavily related to shaping the land: how to deal with topography, how to create contours. I think to this day, that was one of those things that architecture schools don't teach, but we are very, very good at grading.
Marion Weiss: We're super sensitive to every dimension vertically.
Michael Manfredi: Yeah. [laughs] I mean, when you actually have to draw each contour and make sure they connect, it's an invaluable way to learn the power of landscapes.
Marion Weiss: The other thing that was really interesting is that it's not just landform building, which we care deeply about, but it's what happens when we're also introducing both architecture and botanic life together. And in this case, the budget for the project, 20 acres, three buildings, you know, playing fields, a water retention area, windmill, the budget was $1.3 million for the entire project.
So, clearly it was insufficient to do the kind of investment in trees, because we wanted these terraces to be a clearing in a forest that had been there before and cleared for farming. We were so fortunate that there was a wonderful gentleman, Paul Handing, who had retired, and his focus had been landscape. He worked with the park district, ourselves, and the nurseries to get grants for small nurseries to gift trees. We acquired for free nearly 700 trees to be able to create that new surrounding forest.
Michael Manfredi: And the community helped plant.
Marion Weiss: The community helped plant. It's a really fantastic recognition that it was going to be a bootstrapping to achieve what really would be extraordinary. He's since passed, but he was the most inspiring individual because we were getting all ready to photograph in April and May, maybe June, and we said, "Paul, when do you think we should photograph everything?" And he's kind of scratching his head and he said, "You know, you could get a couple of photos in about five years, but I'd really wait 10 years to get your best photos." [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: That was humiliating advice for someone who’s starting out.
Marion Weiss: It was so humbling.
Michael Manfredi: But I think that's maybe an elliptical way of getting back to your original question about the book, because I think now with a little bit of history behind us, we wanted to do a couple things. We wanted to, of course, document the work around a series of themes, rather than just one project after another. But we also, as I think as Marion said, we didn't want to hide our tracks. We wanted to maybe illustrate projects that have been influential. Not in a literal way, and I think it's important to emphasize that, but in a thematic way. Projects that have influenced us over the last 10, 15 years, and document them very precisely as we've done here in the office and make them available to anyone who's interested. Then the third kind of leg of the stool of the book was to invite respected colleagues to offer thoughts and there we kind of kept it a little open-ended because we didn't carefully prescribe what they should be addressing. We said, "You could address themes of this book or write something about what might have been influential." So that gives you a kind of sense of the various strata of the book.
Brian Jones: Your work is inextricably connected to the natural environment, as you've noted in the top of the conversation. How has climate change played a role in your designs?
Marion Weiss: You know, that's such an important question because climate change is real, it's upon us, and it's shaping very much the way we look at how to build and where to build and what to build. Arguably, the kind of flooding that was sort of influencing our thinking about Olympia Fields so many years ago has come into focus now in just about every project. When we think about, say, Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park, there was a case where we were creating now a new park at the perimeter of the water, you know, of the East River and Newtown Creek, that needed to deal with up to six feet of tidal change, but then also flooding. So that if you could think about building a park that could become, in a sense, a soft sponge or buttress to the upland community, then people would feel comfortable building a community around that. This preceded the creation of all the housing that followed, the fourth largest affordable housing in New York since the '70s. So the real query was, how can you leverage all this to both? And so in many ways it was utilizing topography to help create a fortified edge to protect a new wetland, leverage the high and lows, so that you could have intimate connections to the water as opposed to separation, but also recognize that shade is becoming increasingly important.
What had been scripted really as just a concession building and a maintenance building also gathered up to extend to become this incredible shade canopy that could reach out and become the new docking location for the ferry. It's the simultaneity of all these things that we think make it richer. That it’s not the question, “Okay, and now what's the climate change part of the sustainability plan?” but really what are the threads that are going to make it richer and also enduring?
Patience Jones: An important theme throughout the body of your work is the idea of collaboration, especially in thinking about how the end users will ultimately experience your work. In a world that seems increasingly fractured, you seek to find new ways to make collaboration possible and even desirable. Why?
Michael Manfredi: If the collaboration first starts, I think at a very primal level, sometimes collaboration is easy, sometimes it's not. We are more than happy to argue passionately about our respective positions. But I think what we do find is once a project or an idea emerges, it's like a child, and then we feel like we collectively need to do everything we can to make sure that child succeeds. We've tried to structure our studio around the idea that once there's a project, there are many different voices that could enter at different levels of experience or different levels of passion to make sure that the project succeeds. So that I think operates internally in terms of how Marion and I work, but also in terms of how the office works. It's very much centered around teams that stay on projects all the way through. But I think you're asking also a larger issue of collaboration and I think, I know, Marion will second this, I think the collaborations that are often the most successful for us are where there are very clear areas of expertise. When you get too many people with overlapping areas of expertise or passion, then you end up just not producing anything effective. It's like a series of jazz musicians playing. Each one has their own instrument, but together they create something. But if you have four drummers trying to create a tune, it will be no more than four drummers. I don't know, Marion, do you have some thoughts on that?
Marion Weiss: Collaboration is one of these things that everybody could say, "Isn't it wonderful?" And yet it also creates frictions, but sometimes those frictions create something greater. Michael and I walk to the office from Brooklyn every day across the Brooklyn Bridge, and we hope that we can have our debate phase pretty clearly resolved before we come in the office. Although, I think the debates keep on going sometimes. But in effect it is the debate where we get to both give each other courage when we're losing it, but also poke a few holes when something's just overstated. So it kind of begins there with us, but I think that, to Michael's point, we so benefit when somebody has different expertise because it adds a new lens of opportunity. A good example would be the nanotechnology building at Penn. We were working with the engineer and we had a big cantilever, and that seemed like the big difficult thing in the room, but it wasn't. In fact, the hardest thing in the room was to eliminate all the columns in the gallery so that what was a narrow space and felt like circulation could become broader with the elimination of columns to become a place of collaboration. That involved a brilliant engineer, Severud, figuring out how to suspend intention at the building and build up with gravity down on the other half so that the space could be suspended in between and there would be no columns. That was a case where we were trying to achieve something but knew the columns were in the way, but we didn't know they couldn't be there. And we had a brilliant structural engineer who said, "You know, it wouldn't be so hard if we took them away."
We are forever indebted to collaborators like that who understand that there's an aspiration that's being impacted by some technical obligations and their strengths all of the sudden make it very different. Similarly, Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. Failing Seawall, Army Corps of Engineers said it's going to be about $70 million to hold that up. You can't build on a waterfront site until this wall is prepared. Amazing civil engineers, Magnusson Klemencic, who came up with the whole revetment system under water that simultaneously created a salmon habitat, got $5 million in federal funding. We were able to stabilize that seawall, do something good for about one-twentieth of the cost that was anticipated to stabilize it. So again, brilliant engineer that we're collaborating with to do something larger.
Michael Manfredi: That's actually an interesting project because it's so outside of the norm of a typical project. Marion mentioned salmon habitat. We actually had two -
Marion Weiss: Two. [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: - very celebrated marine biologists who had different opinions about how salmon-
Marion Weiss: They had their debate phases. [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: - salmon habitat could be encouraged. [laughs]
Marion Weiss: Early juvenile salmon habitat is a whole different thing.
Michael Manfredi: We actually enjoyed that kind of friction, being on the receiving end of it rather than in the middle of it. But also, that project has a very, very complex set of earthworks that had to be carefully engineered and developed in a kind of phased way. Working with a brilliant civil engineer there, a brilliant civil and structural engineering firm was breathtaking because in some ways they not only got what we were trying to do, but by offering really interesting opportunities, the project was made much better by their intervention. That was a case of different disciplines, understanding a kind of common design, and bringing a level of expertise that made that design far better than it had been if it had just been generated by us.
Marion Weiss: Here's a super interesting thing. I mean, all of a sudden you've got a desire to span a highway that's a federal trucking route, you know? What do you do? And you want to make a park in the middle for sculpture. And so sometimes because it can't be permitted as a normal project, also new terms like “aerial street vacations” are pursued to be able to bridge over. Then the Burlington Northern train is very complicated to get permits, but as we were dealing with their constraints of having to fully enclose a bridge, it became an opportunity for us to create a framework for artist Teresita Fernandez to create her Seattle Cloud Cover. These constraints become opportunities. They were always interested, energized, and challenged by constraints that seem improbably competitive with what a design vision can be because something else emerges.
Brian Jones: On the theme of constraints become opportunities, it seems kind of important in how you might encourage collaboration within your firm. How do you go about that and build that up from the youngest part of your firm to the leadership?
Marion Weiss: It's a super interesting question. One of the things that we're discovering, particularly with the range of expertise within our office, people who are older than us, and then people who are younger than us, many of them former students, is that the skill sets are incredibly varied right now. We know that there's up and down mentoring going on, because the senior folks have an insight that's broader and deeper, but some of the folks just coming out of school have a fantastic tool set that has expanded our own tool set of models and drawings, because we're 3D representing things in animations and learning literally, spatially the consequences of things that may seem simple, but all of a sudden generate maybe a whole host of questions we might not have seen had we not been able to do real time, say, animations while we're studying things. It's a natural collaboration. Now we all need each other more than ever. I think that makes it actually far easier than it might have been, say, 15 years ago.
Michael Manfredi: The other thing we try to do, which is, you know, very, very hard, because you never quite know is, we always have, by intention, a fairly robust invitation out to young interns who are in their third year or their fourth year, from various schools. We love the idea that a certain naive energy, is something that sometimes pushes us. Someone will ask a crazy question.
Marion Weiss: Or they'll ask why.
Michael Manfredi: “Why are we doing this?”
Marion Weiss: Until there's no more reason why. [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: Pretty soon, you know, you can't stammer for too long before you can't answer that question. And then as Marion said, we do have some folks who have been with us for, you know, 20 years, who I think know how we want to build, have helped shape the ethos of the office, and bring, as Marion said, a level of perspective and distance that comes only with time. So that sense of trying to keep a balance between a young, mostly young, energetic office, but we do want to make sure that there are some folks here who really know how to build. Because, as you know, many of our projects are-
Marion Weiss: They're cross-disciplinary projects
Michael Manfredi: They're cross-disciplinary. They're very complex. They are in the public eye. They're public projects, so you can't treat them lightly. You can't just say, "This was an experiment, and we hope it might work out." Going back to the Nelson-Atkins, for example, what's super exciting to us is the responsibility is to honor the existing building, to honor the Kiley landscape, but to do it in a fresh, inventive way. We can't just be naive and suggest we can kind of bring in something new. On the other hand, we don't want to be hamstrung by that level of responsibility. Being able to balance that requires an office or a team or a studio that has a certain crazy, young energy with a certain level of groundedness.
Marion Weiss: I think that the gravitas that it takes to do significant work and keep it fresh and poetic are two things that, in some ways, maturely in time, allow what I would call an ease between those two seemingly oppositional positions.
Michael Manfredi: That's a good way of putting it.
Marion Weiss: And, you know, a very senior person in our office understands the timing by which certain decisions need to be made so the consultant team of engineers and all the other specialists effectively making things technically strong are able to work off of a shared base. At first, you look at a schedule and say, "Wow, I've got all the time in the world." And you go, "Uh, well, you don't." It's a very slender window by which you have to tee it up to allow sufficient room so that when you hear the kind of conflicts that inevitably come in between your mechanical systems, your electrical systems, your plumbing systems, your structural systems, your civil engineering, and then some regulatory things that you never realized were going to trigger, say, making everything come up to code and become costly, it really takes the long distance horizon view that an experienced view can offer that is really counterpoint to the fresh one of the “why not.” And both are super valuable.
Michael Manfredi: I'd just add a footnote to that question, because it's a good one. Both Marion and I teach, so we do have the privilege, actually, of interacting with young students, some of whom have architecture degrees or might have worked. Some of them decide that, for reasons that are interesting to them, they'd like to work for us. We feel very privileged to have that kind of capacity and benefit from that level of energy. And that, I think, is something that, for us, is incredibly rewarding about teaching, in addition to, of course, learning new things and being kept on your toes by students who might not believe the dogma that has been taught to them.
Brian Jones: About your project McCann Residence in Tuxedo Park, New York, you write of the opportunity to blur the distinction between what was given and what was made. Why is the blurring of that distinction important?
Marion Weiss: It's a great question because in some cases, what is given is so powerful that if we don't in fact embrace that, what we make will be less significant. And in the case of Tuxedo Park, it was a split between two rock outcroppings on a 45-degree slope that overlooked a lake. Only because of the good luck that a house had been built there before they started not permitting anything to build on those slopes, were we able to effectively take that which was there, the early foundation, tear everything down, but use that as a way to avoid the restrictions that would have said “no building,” and then leverage the incredible power of the topography and the rocks to get an overview out to the lake. It became really interesting to look at the foundational world of Tuxedo Park developed around a series of lakes with big stone retaining walls, and then gather our stone from the same quarry that had shaped the landscape of Tuxedo Park to actually create our series of check dams to finally reach the uppermost part where the fairly delicate glass pavilion could give you the sense that there's no more than a few hundred feet occupying the site.
Michael Manfredi: This brings to mind a conversation we had with David Leatherbarrow, who is a very influential architectural historian. He said about our work and about some of the other architects who we admire, like Alvar Aalto and Siza, that good work is about building the site. It sounds kind of simple, but when you construct the site, there is an immediate interchange between what you're adding and what's already there. In that sense, maybe blur isn't the right word, but there's a conversation between what's there. As opposed to the kind of very beautiful object on a neutral ground plane. And Tuxedo Park, as Marion said, that neutral ground plane was moving-
Marion Weiss: All over the place.
Michael Manfredi: - in three dimensions. To build on that narrative of what constructing a site means, it also enables us - in a site like Tuxedo, you could say all the views are fabulous. But they're all so fabulous that they neutralize each other. And so, when you construct a site, sometimes you do it in such a way that you can bring into focus things which are unseen until they're set up between a certain framework.
Marion Weiss: What was wonderful about working with the McCanns themselves is they're basically expert garden designers, landscape architects themselves, passionately making sure that the trees and the groundcover look as if they had always been there without a fuss or trimming or clipping. Just a kind of wandering ground plant of strawberry, Andromeda, moss, and then a series of tulip trees, so that all of a sudden it felt as if that site had always been settled in as opposed to just inhabited by a new build.
Patience Jones: Almost buried, I'll say nestled, in the section about your designs for Hunters Point South Waterfront Park is a small black and white photo that shows you both looking out across the East River to the Empire State Building. I spent several minutes just sort of staring at that photo, because there was so much emotion in that photo and so much possibility. You could sort of feel it in the photograph. Do you recall what you were thinking when that photo was taken?
Marion Weiss: Actually, we do. [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: Wow, it's really cool.
Patience Jones: Oh, fantastic. [laughs]
Marion Weiss: First of all, we were getting prepared for the interview, and we had to, you know, it was a contaminated site, big chain link fence. So we had to break in. So part of it is actually hoping that nobody would - we wouldn't be, police wouldn't be noticing that we had pulled back the cyclone fence and crawled under and through and made our way out there. There was something so magical about thinking we're the only ones here. We're the only ones seeing this. It was a really special thing that gave us a sense that if we could draw focus to those views, they're like no other views that you could ever have from the island.
Michael Manfredi: I think as Marion said, part of it was the kind of breaking into an area that had been cordoned off. But seeing Manhattan in a way that no one could ever have seen it made us both terrified and exhilarated.
Marion Weiss: It was also that the topography of the site was shocking. What the hell is topography doing right on the East River?
Michael Manfredi: Yeah.
Marion Weiss: You know? For all of it then to come up to a rise and have the prospect of the city beyond, and literally to have dirt and, and weeds and a little bit of trash at your feet, to know that it had never been touched yet for anything other than sort of early cleanup from contamination.
Brian Jones: The book includes a survey of architecture around the world that has influenced your practice. When so many things can be seen online, how important to architects is travel?
Marion Weiss: Essential. When we talk to our students about what they should not shortchange in their steps after they graduate, traveling's so important, because I know both Michael and I were lucky enough to have separate traveling fellowships when we were in graduate school. For me, I had had these massive crushes on projects.
And to get the grant, I identified all these places where I had crushes, but they were objects. They were not situated in their city, their time, their place, nor did I have any idea of simply good photography. So to go and see these things meant that it was the things that weren't on the list that were shockingly extraordinary.
Michael Manfredi: Yes.
Marion Weiss: And yes, of course, one would go see the amazing things, but it was the things that were adjacent and you find some of those adjacent things in, in our book, that had been thoroughly analyzed because you find that you were gobsmacked by something you never even thought had any particular resonance with your own curiosity and that changes the way you think and see and make things.
Michael Manfredi: It's actually even more important now because I think students, all of us, not just students, are living primarily in a highly digitized visual world. Everything's flat. It's on a screen. To see an architectural project that you might have seen in the context of a lecture, you suddenly understand its context in a way that you never could. But you also, I think, and this is for us why architecture matters, it reminds us that we're living in a real world, with temperature extremes, with real people moving through a space. For example, we looked at the Spanish steps, which I remember as a child, Marion remembers. But to actually go there, document it, and understand how it's situated was for us transformative. And similarly, if a student were to go and actually visit one of the Indian stepwells, they would immediately understand its context in a way that they couldn't through a photograph or, or through even an animation.
Marion Weiss: That was why we chose to actually document these. I mean, in a sense doing that, we created all these, whether we could get the information or we had to assess it from photography and figure out the dimensions. We wanted literally and figuratively to build these things that had an impact on us because it was like a diagnostic thing, like what's going on here? Why is this powerful? What's compelling about it? For instance, the Agrasen ki Baoli stepwell, which you can't see when you're walking around, it's just not there. And then all of a sudden you descend and it becomes spatially this powerful space. It's also acoustically powerful because it's where birds are flying over. So all of a sudden it's a concert of birds and conversations of people who are going out with each other and flirting and, you know, it's a whole social scene even though it had been a stepwell. And it's cooler. Ten degrees cooler.
Michael Manfredi: That's the beauty that you can't sense.
Marion Weiss: Not gonna make it into a photo.
Michael Manfredi: As the climate in Delhi is increasing the importance and the sociability of spaces that are cool becomes more essential. And again, as Marion said, you'll never get that from a photo. So we wanted to, I think, maybe it was an act of love, an act of sharing our passion. Each of those projects we documented very carefully here in the office. Sometimes with the help of students, but mostly, I think, through the kind of love and care that many of our staff also had for this kind of research. It goes back to your question of these are perhaps one step closer to actually going and visiting them, but there's no substitute for visiting a project.
Marion Weiss: The Sydney Opera House - again, major crush, right? Super crush, one of the reasons I thought, “I want to be an architect.” And everybody, of course, notices the sails and the silhouettes and all that. And going there, I thought, "Whoa, the whole perimeter of Sydney is all about these crazy peninsulas." And this is really just a thickened peninsula that's been given a social section that you've never believed that ultimately rises to become a theater set, a series of theaters, and then finally becomes a silhouette that shapes the horizon. It did it all, but I had missed all the stuff that hit the ground plane and why. That's why our analysis actually features that. We're just suggestive about the silhouette, everybody knows that, but we wanted to reveal the thing that was so extraordinary, which was inhabiting it and finding that it's woven completely into the structure of the city.
Patience Jones: You talked about this a little bit earlier, but in addition to your thriving practice, you also both teach. Why do you choose to continue teaching?
Michael Manfredi: We ask ourselves that question, um, often. [laughs]
Marion Weiss: [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: If you take it seriously, it's a commitment. We have tried I think and we're at a point where we don't want to compromise our practice and the incredible energy it takes to create a project. But teaching also has a kind of an ability to pull you out of the kind of constraints of creating work and, in a way, opening up a larger chapter. That kind of chapter, whether it's through conversations with students or with colleagues, becomes increasingly important.
Marion Weiss: Michael and I began teaching and supported our practice, that was for several years we never paid ourself, we just paid our staff, you know, through supporting ourself through teaching, but I know I was compelled to teach because I felt like I got out of school feeling pretty confident about design because that's where I put every ounce of my effort. I had skidded through and barely kept my eyes open for all the other coursework, which was so amazing. I missed most of it. It was that sense that teaching would become an opportunity to frame up the very topics that I had missed and use it as an excuse to learn with the students these things and stay an ounce ahead of them in the process. When I began teaching, I was only a few years older than them. In some ways what it does though is it creates simultaneously a level of distance, as Michael says, a view once again about a horizon that is vast and broad and important to consider. It creates a great deal of discomfort. And that discomfort is probably the very thing that I think keeps us edgy with each other and edgy about the work needing to actually push forward in places it's never been, because we ask that very much of our students and we're impatient with them. And then we come back to the studio and realize we have to carry that same impatience with ourselves.
Brian Jones: What advice would you give to an emerging architect?
Michael Manfredi: Wow. [laughs]
Marion Weiss: [laughs]
Michael Manfredi: Ask us in 10 years.
Marion Weiss: Actually I would say that there's no task that you're ever asked to do that doesn't have a richness of insight you can gain if you put your heart and soul into it. There's nothing too insignificant to not become something that tells you about design in a better way. I'd say work like crazy, wherever you are. The second thing is travel and be curious. Let your peripheral vision be way greater than the very tasks you've been asked to do and be curious about everything that's going on around you to better understand how the very things you're doing situate themselves into something far larger.
Michael Manfredi: Marion said it perfectly. I couldn't add to that.
Patience Jones: That is good advice for everyone. Whatever your role is, that is good advice. Marion and Michael, thank you so much for joining us. This has been As Built. See you next time.
Marion Weiss: Thank you, Patience. Thank you, Brian.
Michael Manfredi: Thank you. A pleasure.
Marion Weiss: Wonderful to be able to continue the conversation.
Episode Resources
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