schneiderism

I have really enjoyed the Manifesto issue of ICON, and posted earlier the manifesto of Bruce Mau. It is interesting to read the results of a person’s efforts to catch something smart and concise for the benefit of us all. Admittedly, some of the manifestos are pretty weak. But some were pretty great. Joshua Prince-Ramus’ was pretty great.

Prince-Ramus is an architect and designer, and a partner in the recently formed architecture studio REX. He came out of OMA, the studio of the famous “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, where he led various projects like that for the Seattle public library. My first exposure to the thinking of Prince-Ramus was via his presentation at TED in 2006 (absolutely worth watching). In that presentation he dropped more than a few bombs on the world of architecture. Nothing we didn’t know or acknowledge already, but powerful to hear spoken out loud. He described a “hyper-rational” approach to architecture, explaining how logic can act as the catalyst for extraordinary buildings and yield opportunities otherwise hidden by the bias of the designer. This hyper-rational approach is something paid lip service to by most design fields, but Prince-Ramus lays bare the the essential mechanics, and results, of this approach to solving design problems.

His manifesto in ICON is a summary of that TED presentation, and essentially forms the mission statement for his studio. Following are a few of my favorite excerpts:

“We design collaborations rather than dictate solutions. The media sells simple, catchy ideas; it reduces teams to individuals and their collaborative work to genius sketches. The proliferation of this false notion of “starchitecture” diminishes the real teamwork that drives celebrated architecture.”

Design is riddled with myths, and designers are perhaps the best at perpetuating those myths. The reality is that successful design solutions come directly from a thorough understanding of context, constraint and audience. Meaningful design is also most often the result of effective collaboration and the blending of perspectives. These perspectives, and the efforts of the team to develop a 360 degree understanding of the situation, are the foundation on which opportunities are built. Anything less is at best a stylistic bias.

“We embrace responsibility in order to implement vision. The implementation of good ideas demands as much, if not more, creativity than their conceptualisation. Increasingly reluctant to assume liability, architects have retreated from the accountability (and productivity) of Master Builders to the safety (and impotence) of stylists.”

We see this all of the time. Sometimes we are like gold miners. We strike a rich vein of ideas, or a successful approach, and then mine the hell out of it. We become identified by those results, it becomes our genre. Ultimately, this leads to commodification and the disregarding of the importance of context, constraint and audience. It is a one size fits all approach to design.

“We side with neither form nor function. REX believes that the struggle between form and function is superficial and unproductive. We proffer the term “performance” instead: a hybrid that doesn’t discriminate between use, organization and form. We free ourselves from the tired debate over whether architecture is an art or a tool. Art performs; tools perform.”

If you watch the TED presentation that Prince-Ramus gave last year, it is abundantly clear that REX is practicing what it preaches. The approach that resulted in the team’s solution for the Seattle public library is exposed for exactly what it was… total understanding of the context, constraints and diverse audiences for that project. It is also clear that from its inception, that project was about performance and the inextricable integration of form and function, of the aesthetic with the need for the solution to work.

“We love the banal. REX dares to be dumb (like a fox).”