www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/6522-the-archrecord-interview-vito-acconci

The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci

June 16, 2007

Architectural Record: Vito, with the benefit of hindsight, your remarkable transformation from a conceptual artist to an architect seems almost an obvious move: Your art was always very concerned with how bodies relate to each other in a defined space, whether within a gallery’s walls or the city at large. Also, your art didn’t want viewers, it wanted active participants, and there’s no more interactive art than architecture. But I’m guessing this radical shift in your creative practice was arrived at neither quickly nor easily. Can you walk us through how you came to realize that architecture was where you should be focusing your efforts?Vito, with the benefit of hindsight, your remarkable transformation from a conceptual artist to an architect seems almost an obvious move: Your art was always very concerned with how bodies relate to each other in a defined space, whether within a gallery’s walls or the city at large. Also, your art didn’t want viewers, it wanted active participants, and there’s no more interactive art than architecture. But I’m guessing this radical shift in your creative practice was arrived at neither quickly nor easily. Can you walk us through how you came to realize that architecture was where you should be focusing your efforts?

Vito Acconci: It started when I was doing installations in the mid-1970s. [One] thing that characterized my [work] is I wanted to do installations people were a part of. I did an installation at the Sonnabend Gallery in Soho in 1976 called “Where We Are Now, Who Are We Anyway.” Basically, a 60-foot table—a wooden plank with stools on either side of it—was propped up on the windowsill of the gallery and then continued out the gallery’s window. So what started as a table became a diving board.

As in all of my installations of the ‘70s, there was sound, [in the case of this artwork] a hanging speaker above the table, with a constant clock ticking, and my voice coming in saying things like, “Now that we’re all here together, what do you think, Bob?” … In other words, what I liked about the project was I found a way to use a gallery as if it was a town square, a plaza, a community meeting place.

At the same time, I started to have this nagging doubt. I thought: I’m kidding myself. A gallery or museum is never going to be a public space. If I really want a public space, I better find a way to get there. So even though the work I did for even a long time after that was still in an art context, I was trying to grope my way into architecture. If I thought the artwork needed a public space, I obviously knew there were disciplines that already deal with public space: There’s architecture, maybe landscape architecture, maybe industrial design.

Can you talk about some of the transitional work you did in the 1980’s that was a sort of architecture/art hybrid?

Work of mine had always been connected with the body, so in the beginning of the 1980’s, I did a number of pieces that, in retrospect, were a kind of play architecture or practice architecture: A person sits in a swing, and the action of sitting in a swing causes walls to come up. I wanted to make a body be the cause of architecture. Can a person’s action make a shelter?

You did a number of these housing-type pieces at the time, but they were still more art than architecture.

Those pieces were a way to demonstrate a kind of house building. But eventually, I thought: but a house has to stay there. I have to find a place where people can go to and stay a while and maybe come back. So by the mid-1980’s, there were a number of house-like pieces, like “Bad Dream House”: Two upside down houses tilted against each other support a third upside down house on top. And there was a piece made from junk cars called “House of Cars.”

Then came your exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1988.'

Both “Bad Dream House” and “House of Cars” were at the MoMA show. The title I gave to the show was “Vito Acconci: Public Spaces.” So there was a large green banner outside the museum with those words, and I felt the way that Jean-Paul Sartre seems to think Jean Genet felt when, as a child, he took a loaf of bread and he was called a thief, and he decided now I’m going to be a thief. When I saw that sign, I thought I can’t turn back. I’m dedicated now to creating public spaces. So it was exactly at that time in 1988 that Acconci Studios started.

What I find fascinating is that since launching Acconci Studios, you’ve never looked back. You really entirely ceased being an artist.

You were very right in what you said in your first question. I never wanted viewers, I always wanted users, participants, inhabitants. I should have realized then if I didn’t want viewers, I really didn’t want art. Because with art, no matter how many nudgings into the traditions are made, the convention is always the viewer is here, the art is there.

So the viewer is always in a position of desire and frustration. Those “Do Not Touch” signs in museums are there for a reason: The art is more expensive than people are. I hope that is an immoral position, and I wanted things to be in people’s hands, people to be inside something. You know architecture by walking through it, by being in the middle of it and not being in front of it. And I wonder if the real way you learn things is to be in the middle of something.

Can you articulate a single aesthetic sensibility that ties all your architecture work together?

If there’s anything I want a work of ours to be, I want it to be secular. I don’t want it to have any religiousness in it at all. I don’t want it to have belief. I’d like to have commitment as we work, but always commitment knowing that something is going to change. We’re not going to be committed to the same thing all the time. We want an outside to come in, so that the commitment is revised.

And what we hate about any kind of architecture is if it makes people feel small.

What have you discovered to be some of the pleasures in architectural work that aren’t there in art?

The beautiful thing about architecture, it does have the anticipation of renovation always built into it, which I find so refreshing from art because art is supposed to be unchangeable. The only things that are unchangeable are tombstones. We would like to provide the seeds of something, but we’re not going to provide the whole thing. Hopefully someone will take clues from us and bring it or something else further.

How do you think your reputation as an artist affects, for good or bad, your reputation as an architect? Does it make it easier to acquire clients? “I want a building by Vito Acconci.” And how do you think other architects perceive you?

We’ve very rarely done projects for private clients though it is starting more. There’s an eye doctor in Winter Park, Fla. who wants us to re-do his house, and I know the main reason is he’s an art collector so that probably drew him.

With regard to other architects it’s a different matter. A lot of architects, especially architects of my generation, refuse to take us seriously as architects. I wonder if sometimes they think once an artist always an artist. Or why doesn’t he stick to his own field. I don’t find that so much in younger architect firms like Asymptote or Foreign Office Architects. But people in my generation, it’s very different, even people that I know well. Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi: They will never accept that I’m an architect.

What are some of the goals you have set for the studio over the next few years? What excites you about the future?

We want an architecture that’s a biological system; we want a regeneration principle. I don’t want it to be just metaphor. I don’t know if architecture can ever be as living a thing as all that. Yes, there’s a lot of work now that looks fluid, looks as if it moves. We would love to be able to make something that really does grow, and I’m sure a lot of other architects would say that.

But right now I have mixed feelings. I sometimes wonder if architecture is getting caught up in aesthetics. I’ve seen the word elegance used a lot lately, and it was always a word I had such a horror of.

Why?

For two reasons. It seems to me it’s totally about form. But elegance is also a word of the upper class. Now we might want to get at a version of elegance, but I hope it doesn’t have the upper-class and all-form connotation.

I wonder also if the whole star architecture [phenomenon] is a sign that architecture as we know it is not really going to exist any longer. I don’t think this will happen soon, but I think there will be an architecture developed that starts to develop itself and grow itself. Maybe an architect is there almost like a planter: You plant a seed and then this thing is going to go off in its own direction. I hope architecture becomes just as alive as a tree, just as alive as a biological thing.

If not elegance, then what are four of five adjectives you’d like people to associate with your work?

I want our [work] to be changeable, portable, multi-functional. I want our [work] to have a complexity, but not a visual complexity.

I know it’s always difficult but can you pick one or two or three works that you feel have most accomplished your vision?

Of built projects, probably Mur Island in Graz, Austria and the United Bamboo Store [in Tokyo]. For some unbuilt projects, we did a proposal for a performing arts center in Seoul in Korea. We did a library proposal in Guadalajara where the brief talked about how there should be an expansion principle because the library would need more books. We tried to take this literally, and our proposed library goes up and goes out; there’s a highway nearby so the library crossed the highway, so it could spread out into the city. I liked the way we started with the very simple idea that books are dangerous.

When hiring architects, what are the traits you look for? The sensibilities you want? The personalities you’re looking for?

One kind of trait we look for a lot is someone who is totally interested in architecture, but at the same time, is just as interested in music, in movies, in theater, in physics, in biology. Multi-disciplinarity is really important.

You did the Kenny Schachter ConTEMPorary art gallery in New York. As an artistic luminary yourself, and with the gallery scene growing by leaps and bounds, is becoming a well-known gallery architect something that would interest you?

I wouldn’t mind us doing another gallery, but I wouldn’t want to be known as a gallery architect necessarily. I would love to do a museum. For Kenny, we did a gallery, and we’ve done two art fair booths. One of the reasons we did it is because I have so many second thoughts and reconsiderations about art; I wanted us to see what kind of a gallery would we do. What is an art gallery like when it’s done by somebody who really feels like he has rejected art?

In the gallery work, not only with Schacter, but with Storefront for Architecture in Soho, which you did in collaboration with Steven Holl, and which some critics feel is your best work, it’s very much about bringing the outside into the gallery, which ties into a lot of your overall thematic concerns.

It does, but Storefront was an interesting project in that people who know Steven’s work more see it very much as a piece of Steven’s. People who know my work more think of it as a work of ours. It’s something that really was a collaboration. In some ways neither one of us would have thought of certain things if we didn’t have in the back of our mind that we were working with the other person. In fact for a while that was a problem. It started to be almost like I was trying to do a project that looked a little like Steven’s, Steven was trying to do a project that looked a little like us. But eventually we got somewhere.

Let’s jump to portability which is certainly a key concern of the practice: allowing people to carry architecture with them or creating portable parks, housing that can be moved from site to site.

When we start to work on a project, we certainly consider site. That doesn’t necessarily mean we want something to totally fit into a site. We want a project to have a conversation with the site and sometimes that can be an argument. We want a project to exist almost as if wow, it could have been there from all time. But other times we want a project to exist almost as if it’s a spaceship has landed on the site.

Portability allows you to not have to think of site. You can go through many sites, you hook on to one for the time being. … There probably is going to be a world of nomads, people are going to carry their own space with them. There’s no place that’s necessarily home because you can make any place home. So portability is the idea of space on the run, life on the loose. Portability is important to us because it means you can always change the space around you. You can always change your environment. Again environment is great, but it’s also a trap.

I’m dying to ask you about Building Full of Holes, your proposal for the Ground Zero site in Manhattan.

Building Full of Holes started from thinking that if a building nowadays is going to be exploded anyway, maybe a building has to come pre-exploded. That was the basic starting point. But what interested us was now that there are holes through the building, there are tunnels through the building. Now that there are tunnels through the building, the rest of the city can come inside. Parks can come inside, street vendors can come inside. So rather than observing the convention of this private building built with a public plaza outside, our attempt, as it is with all our work, is to mix public and private.

Let’s imagine that a student at Pratt or Cooper Union with a lot of talent in both art and architecture comes to you and says, “Vito I’m torn. Which career path is ultimately going to give me more creative satisfaction?”

Remember, I have a loaded view because I pretty much did make this decision for better or worse, and I do think it was for better. I would ask, what do you think you’re more concerned with: other people and a possible future? Or yourself? And if the answer is yourself, then maybe art is the better choice. If you want an anticipation of a future and if you want the necessity of having to think about the public, then it’s architecture. Public is this composite of many privates, and you’re never going to know who they all are, you can’t anticipate them, but wow, it’s incredibly thrilling to try to guess at frames of mind.

What are some of the goals you have set for the studio over the next few years? What excites you about the future?

But right now I have mixed feelings. I sometimes wonder if architecture is getting caught up in aesthetics. I’ve seen the word “elegance” used a lot lately, and it was always a word I had such a horror of.

Why?

If not elegance, then what are four of five adjectives you’d like people to associate with your work?

I want our [work] to be changeable, portable, multi-functional. I want our [work] to have a complexity, but not a visual complexity.

Obsession might be a strong word for it, but almost all of your projects, even in their thumbnail descriptions, will emphasize the seating they offer. Is seating so important because it can create that sense of community that was such a big part of your Conceptual work?

We try to provide different kinds of seating. We want seating where people might group together, we want seating where it might be two or three people, and we would also like the seat where maybe one person can be alone. Because it seems like if you’re dealing with the public, you have to account for the occasional potential suicide, the potential serial murderer. This person should have a place for himself/herself, too.

When hiring architects, what are the traits you look for? The sensibilities you want? The personalities you’re looking for?

When we’re designing something, yes we’re channeling ourselves into doing architecture, but it’s got to be an architecture that’s affected by the other things in the world. Blade Runner is probably just as big an influence on architects as a lot of architecture. But you know Blade Runner came at such an interesting, Post-Modern time, and came out of that, but it was a very different version of Post-Modernism than a lot of architects were doing at the time. It was Post-Modernism because it was desperate, because you were building on the ruins of the old—which Rome has done for a long time.

Do you think you were influenced by Blade Runner?

Yup, yup, yup, very much. For me, it was, wow, for me it was, this is the alternative to 2001. In 2001, the future is all white, it’s built as if there was nothing there. Blade Runner kinds of shrugs its shoulders and says, well, you can’t get rid of everything, so let’s build on it. Blade Runner, I don’t know if it introduced me to [the concept], but I started to think of architecture as a parasite. There were all these empty facades in New York, and we built stuff on them.

It had a happy resolution.

Yeah, though I think it has a big flaw. The big flaw was that it’s hopefully a good space for spring and summer, but it’s a terrible space for fall and winter [the façade is a series of 12 panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street]. And one of the worst things is that we thought for a budget as low as we had, we couldn’t deal with the [exposure to cold air]. But you always have to deal with that. At least part of the reason architecture exists is that nature is dangerous, and that to me is such a tragic flaw of that project. We could have had something with some kind of transparent fabric that would have at least closed it up. We could have kept the openness, but we didn’t think far enough.

Whatever we can do with our architecture, I hope we can make a space that allows people to be in the middle of this fluidity. But we still want it to have all the functions it has to have. And we might want to give new meanings to some of those functions, but not such a new meaning that we say that function isn’t important. At Storefront, they were freezing in the [winter] in there, and I thought that was really irresponsible on our parts. And I mean not just Acconci Studio, but Steven, too.

Which is a good segue to my next question. As an artist you essentially had a free slate to do whatever you wanted, whereas with architecture there are real-world concerns and clients. Does that constraint aid in the creativity in any way, that there are these restrictions placed upon and you have to operate within them?

It does. When I was doing installations in a gallery context, I would never really have an idea for a piece until a gallery said, “Here, you can use this space.” So I started to realize, I don’t know if I want to be told, “Do anything you want.” But if somebody gives me a space, now I have to consider this space, and the way I try to consider it is, can I find some quirk that it has that some other space doesn’t? So I realized I needed to react to something.

When we do work now, if we’re doing a skate park for example, sometimes our first conceptual proposal doesn’t have railings. But we know we’re going to find a way to do railings because we have to. I mention railings specifically because a railing looks like a kind of prison. But you start to think, how can I do a railing that doesn’t announce itself as a railing? And so in some ways it makes you be more inventive than you ever dreamed you could.

And in art, sometimes you don’t need to have that kind of reinvention—because you don’t have this problem that so many people have already dealt with, and the challenge is now, can you find your own way of dealing with it. Maybe a short hand way of putting it is, yes, in art you can do anything you want, but not too many people care except an art world. And the great thing about design is that people do care. They do get angry.

For a while it seemed like that New York cared so incredibly about architecture right after 2001. For a while it was amazing. I’ve never seen the city like that, where architecture was so much a part of the [discussion]. People [were really aware that] this is the world they’re living in, this is their everyday space. This is about history, the future. But then it all fell apart. That and the new Museum of Modern Art at the same time. The most wasted opportunities.

Speaking of Ground Zero and wasted opportunities, I’m dying to ask you about Building Full of Holes, your own proposal for the site, and about your take on what we’re actually left with now at Ground Zero.

In terms of what we’re left with, it’s gotten much worse than it ever was when the Libeskind proposal was first chosen. But the Libeskind proposal was the choice of solemnity and religiousness and fake history, 1776 and all that. There were some not bad proposals. The United Architects’ proposal was really potentially exciting because it was almost this winding building, and as soon as buildings wind, they’re not monuments anymore. The Libeskind proposal was monuments as building. But it has gotten even worse.

Going through your projects I found a handful of qualities that seemed to be in most if not all of them. And one of them is this notion of bulges: people either being physically able to bulge out the space or the bulge is already there. What drives this interest in this form?

We want a space to go out of its habit. If it’s inside and private, we want it to stretch to the outside. If it’s outside and kept away from the inside, we want a way to get partially inside. We like it when a space bulges out and you’re still within the walls of a building, but you might be in a more park-like, outside space. So it’s a way of being in two places at once. And a person starts to decide, where do I want to be? Do they want to be more outside? We want people to be decision makers. And I do love surfaces if you can push them, if you can bulge them, if you can do activities with them

The juxtaposition of transparencies and mirrors is another characteristic that has appeared in a few of your projects: In a great way in the Atlanta Airport Transfer Corridors, where people are sometimes seeing themselves in a mirror and sometimes seeing other people.

This project came from the fact we knew we had to have this wall. Transfer corridors separate people: Are you getting off the plane and going into the city or are you transferring to a domestic or international flight? So there was no question we had to have the wall, but we thought maybe the wall could be a little bit more fluid. If the wall waved, a person sitting in one corridor is right next to a person in the other corridor. So you can’t have physical contact, but you still at least have an approach at contact. If you mix mirror and transparent, you see the person in the other corridor but that person now might have you feet or your arms.

One thing I hope characterizes our architecture is that we want a questioning of certainties. It’s not that we want people to necessarily be in danger, but we do want them to be on uncertain or shaky ground. Because when you’re on shaky ground, you have to make more decisions for yourself. You can’t assume a convention to fall back on. A lot of our projects come from the fact that we question the idea of home. Because home can be very comforting but home is also a little bit like dying. Home is great if you can leave it. We’re much more interested in thinking of space not as a place but as circulation routes. We would like space to be this possibility of movements; this possibility of not just going out of the space, but can you constantly move within the space, through the space.

Is the questioning of certainties, of making people a little bit uncomfortable, is that the closest relationship between your conceptual art and your architecture?

It probably is. But also it’s because architecture supposedly has firmness and stability and you want to question that. It’s not that we want to make a space that falls apart. But we want people to realize, well, let’s not feel as sure of ourselves as all that. Because when you feel so sure of yourself, maybe you feel so comfortable that you don’t need other possibilities. We try always to make an attempt to bring in those other possibilities.

Tunnels and ramps: a lot of your projects have a lot of them.

That interests us in ramps is yes, it’s a floor, but it’s a floor that takes you to another level in either direction. Either you’re going up or you’re going down. Yes, you have this stable place to walk on, but you’re going to something, you’re going from something. We’re not as interested in places as passages.
I wonder also if tunnels interest us because of a kind of nostalgia for a science fiction space-and-time tunnel. If you’re in a tunnel, maybe you can see through to the outside but usually you can’t. So I wonder if as you go through a tunnel you’re transformed from being in one kind of space to being in another.

Portability allows you to not have to think of site. You can go through many sites, you hook on to one for the time being. Lately I’ve thought it’s probably deeper than that. For us portability comes from some kind of conviction that George W. Bush—and a kind of ultra-conservative tendency not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries, a lot of renewed barriers against immigrants—is all a sign that some old world is really dying. That this kind of conservatism, this idea of a country for people who belong there or were born there, is on its last legs, so it gets so desperate.

So what I hope this conservatism is a sign of is that at some point, I don’t how soon it will happen, but national boundaries, countries, aren’t really going to exist anymore. There probably is going to be a world of nomads, people are going to carry their own space with them. There’s no place that’s necessarily home because you can make any place home. So portability is the idea of space on the run, life on the loose. Portability is important to us because it means you can always change the space around you. You can always change your environment. Again environment is great, but it’s also a trap.

Who are some of the architects you most admire?

Greg Lynn is important to me. Foreign Office Architects. Francois Roche. UN Studio. Asymptote. I still retain an interest in Rem Koolhaas probably more than anybody else in my generation. Maybe not so much for the architecture, or not only for the architecture, but because he is almost a kind of Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. I don’t know if he would approve of that. But there’s this urge with him to get at the tenor of the time that I’m interested in.

What about your own works. I know it’s always difficult but can you pick one or two or three works that you feel have most accomplished your vision?

Of built projects, probably Graz [Mur Island] and the United Bamboo Store [in Tokyo]. For some unbuilt projects, we did a proposal for a performing arts center in Seoul, Korea. We did a library proposal in Guadalajara where the brief talked about how there should be an expansion principle because the library would need more books. We tried to take this literally, and our proposed library goes up and goes out; there’s a highway nearby so the library crossed the highway, so it could spread out into the city. I liked the way we started with the very simple idea that books are dangerous.

Speaking of built and unbuilt, does unbuilt have in some way more appeal than built because you can be more free, creative, imaginative?

When we do a proposal, we have this incurable optimism, and we want to assume that we’re going to propose something that will be built. At the same time, being built is far from the most important thing for us. When we design a project, we’re trying to design a theory of the space: What can the space do? What can be done in this space? At the same time, we love a theory of a space, but sometimes theories seem a little cheap. It’s easy to have a theory. But can this theory really be proven until it’s built?

When I think of the architecture that has formed me or turned me toward being an architect, I would probably mention Giovanni Piranesi, Pierre Boulet, Archigram. No built projects there. But a lot of theses.

What kind of meaning, if any, do your buildings have?

The meaning of a building comes from the people using it. You can set up the incentive for a meaning. Even when I thought of myself in an art context, I always felt like I could talk about my intentions better than anybody else since I was the person who had those intentions. But I don’t think I could ever talk about the meaning of a piece. Meaning changes. I have no more privileged ownership of the meaning of the piece than any other viewer or participant does.