James Wines: If you kill the environment for art, it’s
not worth it.
Nothing is that important.
And there’s so many other ways to do art.
I tell you what, after you’ve lived so long, it’s hard to be rebellious.
I’m always saying something and doing something that somebody objects to.
I was an artist that sort of gradually moved into architecture, so we kind of crossed the
traditional barriers.
I was doing sculpture, abstract sculpture, I guess, in the Constructivist tradition,
and content and context are one and the same.
And I think that’s the reason I left sculpture, is I felt always I was isolating this and
I was in my studio making this thing that sat in one place.
And we were all discussing escape from the gallery, getting out of that precious environment.
We always used to say it was great to put art where you least expect to find it.
People subconsciously come there to buy merchandise, they never think about the building they never...they
just have only one purpose.
They park their car, they go in, they buy what they need and go home.
And it just occurred to me: Here’s an archetype, really, of an entire industry that no one
has ever even thought about in terms of any aesthetic experience.
I do believe that architecture, as a public imposition really, has a responsibility to
communicate, to engage in this dialogue with the public.
I have made it a point that, really, you’re serving humanity.
So people themselves should be part of the raw material.
So why don’t we do a building as a critique of itself?
So I said, “Well, what if we just keep all the trees?
We’ll just build a building around the trees.”
But then I realized that what it did was completely changed landscape architecture, which always
to me is too fussy.
It’s always fiddling around with little plants and bushes, and it’s all orchestrated.
Here was a natural environment, just leave it like it is.
Just build the building around nature.
And right in the middle we left all these incredible oak trees; shaded the building,
cut down the air conditioning enormously because the building was totally shaded by the trees.
So people would bring their lunches, they’d sit there and have picnics.
And we call it kind of like nature’s revenge, too.
I mean, you build the building around the forest, not destroy the forest with the building.
So it was a reversal of that.
Karen Shipt: We’re hoping that some animals will decide
to re-inhabit this area, because the entire site was wooded like this section over here.
John Watkins: I was over here late one afternoon and the
squirrels, they’ve already started to…
Karen Shipt: Oh, they have?
John Watkins: Yeah.
Karen Shipt: Well, I thought about that when we were thinking
about the plant material.
It’s going to be great.
John Watkins: And so, nature’s coming back.
Andrew Lewis: If someone takes the time to write me a letter
telling me that he doesn’t like our building, then that someone has done something very
unusual in the course of his day.
I mean, he’s thought about architecture.
He’s thought about form and function and what our expectations are about commercial
buildings.
And I take that as our contribution to the community.
James Wines: Yeah, it was controversial, but it was fun
because people engaged in conversations.
Customer 1: Talking about the way the building leans.
Customer 2: Are they asking if we like it?
Customer 1: Yeah.
Customer 2: I don’t like it.
Customer 1: I don’t either.
Employee: One evening a man from out of state came in,
in his car, and pulled up in the front driveway and hopped out and ran up and beat on the door.
And in all sincerity, he felt that the front was coming off this building.
And he said he didn’t know if there was anything we could do about it, but he thought
he ought to notify somebody with authority.
I told him that it was actually an award-winning design, that the building was constructed
this way intentionally.
James Wines: They were saying, “Well, you’re ruining...
I know, you’re about destroying buildings, you’re ruining it.”
I said, “No they’re not ruins at all, they’re about process.”
You know, let me try to explain simply.
Isn’t it more interesting to see the building being built or being taken away?
I’ve always thought that was the more interesting interval in the building process than seeing
the slick, finished thing.
So they’re about process, the process of doing it and everything.
I really use hand drawing as sort of an extension of my brain.
And I think the reason I like it is the speed and flexibility, and you can sort of think
as you go.
Buildings were being plotted or being approved as green or whatever, and you look at them
and they’re even uglier than normal.
It’s almost that they went out of their way, that there’s some kind of correlation
with the badness of design and accommodating the environment.
So my opinion was that bad buildings are not going to be preserved or they’re not going
to be sustainable simply because nobody wanted them around.
And I thought that we should see if there is an aesthetic that would, at the same time,
accommodate the environmental movement and look good when finished.
In some way you would know that this building has made all the preferable choices.
So the Ghost Parking Lot was another form of critique, you know?
Well, in fact, automobiles consume petroleum.
Well, asphalt is a petroleum product.
So why not reverse that, and have the petroleum consume the cars?
You’d have a whole different idea.
Man: Some of them like it, some of them don’t.
The older people don’t.
They think it’s very morbid.
But the younger generation, they think it’s great.
James Wines: And I used to say, “Well, to say that my
buildings are about demolition and ruin is just as stupid as saying Giacometti’s sculptures
are about starving people.”
It’s the same thing.
You know, it’s just like they look at it and that’s what it looks like.
So not going one inch further, just a refusal to go one millimeter further into trying to
understand what you’re saying.
Just a wall of resistance.
Yeah, that’s the most…the greenest building we’ve done for sure.
This became sort of a model for how much can you do with regional materials, collage, found
objects, recycled materials, thermal glass, earth covered roof?
It has everything.
It has the whole catalog in one small building.
We built the entire building out of the materials that were within 20 kilometers of the building.
If you can do that, then you’re obviously extremely green.
If you’re an artist, you’re not always looking to find the easiest message.
You’ll expect to find a more complex message, more provocative message, more interesting
message, or more integrative message.
The idea of a dialogue, I think, is the most important.
In a sense you’re setting a stage, you’re like a theatrical designer, you’re setting
a situation where people are going to interact.
So that orchestration, or helping to orchestrate people’s interaction, is just like incorporating
trees and grass and bushes and flowers or whatever, optimistic examples of what you
can do with the environment that isn’t finger-wagging and gloom and doom, that there are things
you can really do to make it pleasant to be there, make it interesting.
And at the same time help the ecological structure.
The highest compliment, I always said, a little old elderly woman would come up to me and
say, “Well, you know, I never thought about a building before, before I saw that.”
It’s just everything.
“I never thought about a building before.”
And that’s exactly the point.