Translator: Sawako Higuchi Reviewer: Denise RQ
Eight years ago, I was standing in front of the town hall in Fogo Island.
I was there to talk about six artist studios in the Fogo Island Inn
we were about to make.
The room is packed.
I look around and I see familiar faces,
not faces that I know, but faces from my past.
I see these old women with curlers in their hair
that look like my grandmother.
I see fishermen that look like my grandfather.
I see little kids in the room
that look like friends of mine I hadn't seen in years.
I was a teenager when I left Newfoundland,
and here I was standing in front of this room, all by myself.
There was a million thoughts going in my head.
I froze. I couldn’t talk. I was overwhelmed by emotions.
I realized that I really, really missed Newfoundland
and tears welled up.
Questions started bubbling in my head: "Is this project at all possible?"
"Am I the right architect for this job?"
The most important of all, "Will we disappoint these people?"
Finally, one of the guys that I was working with came up,
and put his hand on my shoulder, whispered in my ear, and he said,
"I know how you feel."
Right there and then, I realized that, for better or worse,
the project I was about to work on will define the future of Fogo Island.
It'll define me as an architect. Failure was not an option.
So how did I get in that room in the first place?
My background is a bit non-traditional. I grew up in Gander.
I moved to the mainland when I was 16.
I can honestly say it was the saddest day in my life.
I studied architecture at McGill. I actually wasn't so interested in school.
I wanted to use my education as an excuse to travel.
So I worked in Vienna. I worked in Berlin.
I worked in Russia, and now I live in Bergen, Norway,
and I ended up there while hitchhiking from Paris to China.
I started work on a Monday,
and I actually found a place to live with two architecture students
on a Wednesday night.
That Friday night, they were having a birthday party
and I met my wife.
(Laughter)
So I thought I was going to be there for six months.
Now it has been 18 years.
July 2006,
I was paddling my kayak down the west coast of Norway,
and the telephone rang.
She introduced herself as Zita Cobb.
I didn't have a clue who this woman was.
She said she had an idea for a project on Fogo Island,
and I blurted out, cut her off, and said, "You know what?
I've been waiting for this call for 20 years."
That night I paddled into land.
I sat in the cafe and goggled who she was.
Wow! This is the best client I could ever, ever, ever get.
The second thing,
it was in Newfoundland, the place that I would love.
I just dreamed of doing architecture, but I never ever thought I would do.
You know what? I would have paid to do this project.
I felt like the dog that caught the car.
(Laughter)
My job was actually to put another leg in the Fogo Island economy.
Zita Cobb and the Shorefast Foundation
asked me to make contemporary architecture.
but they based it on 400 years of them living on Fogo Island.
I figured out I had yet to answer the question:
what's the new Newfoundland architecture?
I got my inspiration by looking at outport architecture.
I just love these traditional houses in stages.
They were small. They were fragile.
They sat lightly on the landscape. It is rough, rough beauty.
They were quirky.
They were like nothing else you see anywhere in the world.
Usually though, when I make architecture,
I have to study the people, the culture, and the place.
Usually I am the foreigner architect. This wasn't the case here.
I was in Newfoundland. I was back at home.
All my memories and senses were attached to this place.
So what I was doing,
I was making an architecture based on my gut feeling.
So we started off.
It was a very unusual process.
Nothing about this project was normal.
I can stand here all night
telling you stories about what was different.
But I decided to pick out four.
I'll try to remember that there are four because I keep forgetting that.
The first one,
we tried to work with as many local people as possible.
We are all a bit uncertain about how good these guys were with building.
So we started out very, very slowly.
So instead of building all six studios, we just decided to build one.
So when we started the construction, I flew over from Norway.
I walked out to the construction site.
And on the way out, I caught sight of the long studio.
It was right on the horizon.
I stopped up and I said, "This is beautiful."
I realized, right there and then as well,
that these carpenters I have been working with
are probably the best carpenters I'll ever work with
for the rest of my life.
They would do a fabulous job.
The second point is that we used models to build these projects.
In my office, we always build models.
I've been doing this since I've been a little kid in Gander.
So we would show up in these construction meetings,
and then we pass the model around.
I'd be sitting there with about 100 drawings on my arm.
Nobody looked at them.
So what I realized is that these guys-- this is how they learned how to build.
Many of the men, the guys in the crew, they were boat builders.
Boat builders didn't have drawings.
They had these half scale models that they passed down through generations.
It was completely unknown for me in the architecture world,
but it was very comfortable for them.
The third point, this is a bit different.
We had to use technology to deal with distance.
I was on the other side of the Atlantic, in Norway.
So the carpenters would send us pictures about once or twice a week.
Because there was a five hour time difference,
we can make comments to them,
send them off before they have to work in the morning.
So it turned an 8 hour work day into a 13 hours work day.
So I was actually spending more time on the construction sites in Newfoundland
than I did on my sites in Norway.
Every Wednesday we'd have meetings.
They would last from an hour to eight hours long.
I still joke.
Four years ago, I quit drinking alcohol because of these meetings
because they were just driving me up the wall.
To this day, I will not drink. It was so stressful.
We would meet all the consultants and meet with constructors.
There were people on those calls. There were people from New York.
There were guys from Toronto.
There were guys, or women as well, from Norway, London, St. Johns, Gander.
We are all getting to know each other in this virtual world.
It was a bit like internet dating, for example.
So the fourth element, this is one I've always been doing,
but it was particularly interesting on Fogo Island.
We decided to put nature first, and architecture second.
So, Fogo Island, you see these pictures now.
This is a beautiful place, extremely pristine.
You cannot destroy the landscape there.
And if you destroy the landscape on Fogo Island,
it'll take hundreds of years to get it back.
I can remember, one day, first when we started construction,
Zita is there with a construction hat.
I am standing right beside her listening.
She is telling the builders,
"If you guys kill one blueberry bush, I will kill you."
(Laughter)
If you look at these pictures today,
it looks like the buildings have always been there.
The landscape is pure and pristine.
The buildings can blow away in 500 years, but the landscape will still be beautiful.
So these four elements that I was working with,
these were making my life easier.
We were sorting things out.
But in an unusual process, like the title is, that continued.
What I didn't know
was some of the biggest challenges were right in front of me.
One of the scariest things about this building project
was that it was extremely complex.
Another thing, I was in my 30s. I was a young architect.
Any client in their right mind shouldn't have hired me.
I was just too young to do this. But the inn, it was so complex.
I wouldn't really call it just an inn. It had a restaurant.
It had a bar. It had a library.
It had an art gallery, and then it had a cinema as well,
and it had a sauna upstairs.
I couldn't sleep for two years doing this.
It just... it was really a lot to have on my shoulders.
One day I am walking to work, and I am a bit stressed out,
and I am trying to calm myself down.
I said, "You know what? This is not really a big complex building.
It is just a big house."
So instead of having 3 bedrooms, there are 29.
Instead of having a small kitchen, it has a big kitchen.
So what I was doing, it was like a blessing in disguise.
I was convincing myself that this was much easier.
So what happens today
is that the inn actually has a lot of domestic qualities about it.
This feels very warm inside. It feels more like a home than a hotel.
Right in the middle of the process,
I thought things were going completely wrong.
It was getting extremely serious. It was week after week of meetings.
Every time we would go to a meeting, there would be a new consultant there.
It'd be just more and more serious.
We just talked about technicalities and economics.
We were no longer talking about
the culture of Fogo Island and the heritage of Fogo Island.
I was really worried
that this would just be any other normal building.
This bothered me.
So for about a month, I was going around in my head and I said,
"How can we make this building
feel like Fogo Island from the inside and out?"
Did you know, 50 years ago,
everything on Fogo Island was actually built on Fogo Island
is from Fogo Island?
Somebody in the group asked.
They asked a question,
"Could we make everything inside the inn on Fogo Island?"
We have been building out furniture in Newfoundland for about 400 years.
So why couldn't we?
Why couldn't we build it all ourselves instead of just buying from catalogs?
So we got the idea of inviting,
I think there were 30 or 40 young professional designers
from all around the world that come to Fogo Island.
They came for a month. We called it a workshop.
We called the workshop 'outport esthetics'.
The design brief for the workshop was actually a poem.
The designers spent the month on the Island.
They were walking around.
They were meeting the local craftswomen and craftspeople.
They were meeting the builders and boat builders.
When they returned back home to their home countries,
they were asked to build one piece of furniture.
So what they did is they didn't send us back drawings,
they sent us back prototypes and models much like we were doing ourselves.
There were 150 craftspeople involved building these products.
The products included were chairs, there were tables,
there were lamps, there were even keys.
There were only 2,500 people on Fogo Island.
It's just amazing.
There was a Scottish designer
that worked together with a group of women.
They made all the quilts for all the inn.
The quilts were so popular that the guests wanted to buy them.
So these same women now have a little business.
So we were actually putting another leg on the Fogo Island economy.
So the inn feels extremely special when you walk inside this inn.
I can remember my first visit. I was with my kids and my wife.
and I came over, and it was just furnished.
I asked to borrow the key to room 22.
It looks out over to Joe Batt's Arm to the east.
It looks out over to the Atlantic Ocean.
So I get the key and I walk up, put the key in the door, open up.
I just get hit with this weirdest feeling I hadn't felt in ages.
You know what?
It was the same feeling I had
when I used to visit my grandmother around the bay.
It was this feeling of familiarity.
It was a feeling of warmth, and it was definitely Newfoundland.
So I went over and sat on the edge of the bed
and looked out over the ocean, and I just smiled, and it felt right.
and it was actually the first time in eight years I could relax.
(Laughter)
It was a great great feeling.
The Fogo Island Inn is actually a hand made piece of architecture.
There are stories of people who made it
as the stories of the people came before them.
The stories of great great carpentry.
It has, when you walk inside, you can smell Newfoundland foods.
You can hear Newfoundland dialects.
You can touch furniture that was made on Fogo Island.
It is a building made with love, just like our ancestors made before us.
Just like perhaps the quilts our mothers and grandmothers made.
So all of these elements were actually making this
an authentic piece of new Newfoundland architecture.
When I visit the inn today, I just see life unfold.
It feels so great.
It's no longer about a building any more. It's all about life.
So, to summarize, what did I learn?
I definitely became a better architect.
I learned to be a servant to the people of the place of Fogo Island.
For some reason, I learned to slow down. I learned to dig deep.
We also learned on Fogo Island to plan.
We plan from 100 to 500 years on Fogo Island; a very long time.
It took a long time to build this building.
It was eight years it took to build this building.
Me, Zita and the guy, Nick, in the crowd here,
we often joke around that the first five years
we were arguing about what we would do
but it only took three years to build the frigging thing.
(Laughter)
But the first five years were extremely valuable,
because that was the time we took to reflect.
Another thing I learned to do,
I learned in a hard way, I can admit it.
I learned to work with a lot of different people.
All kinds of different people.
But what we did when we designed and built this inn,
we created an atmosphere
where anyone can say whatever they wanted without being looked down upon.
Everybody was a potential guest in the inn,
so everybody's opinion was extremely valuable.
So the inn opens.
Everybody on Fogo Island is invited to come for free.
One old guy shows up one night with his daughter.
He is from Deep Bay, on the other side of the island.
It is probably the furthest away you can get from the Fogo Island Inn.
He is the town skeptic.
(Laughter)
Listen to this.
He walks in.
He is in the lobby, looks around, and he goes, "I love this spot."
A friend of mine heard him say this.
He goes, "I am so glad they made it old."
Hum, think about that.
Working on this project probably is the best thing I ever did in my life.
Making this new Newfoundland architecture, it was an extremely unusual process.
One I am most proud of as we managed to build it old.
Thank you.
(Applause)