An Interview With the Architect of Restraint
Over thirty years she has turned down more commissions than she has accepted. A conversation about refusal as a design method.
The office is smaller than expected — eleven people, one floor, a table long enough for everyone to sit at once, which she says is not a coincidence but a constraint she has enforced for two decades. Growth was possible on several occasions. It was declined each time for the same reason: past a certain size, she would have stopped doing the work and started managing the people doing it.
On saying no
She is precise about what refusal is for. It is not, she insists, a moral posture, and she is impatient with the suggestion that turning down a commission makes anyone admirable. It is a design tool. A practice that accepts everything has no position, and a practice with no position produces buildings that could have been made by anyone.
Every project I took defined the practice less than the three I turned down that year. Clients understand that immediately. It is only architects who find it mysterious.
The criteria have narrowed over time. Early on she declined work on the basis of the brief; now she mostly declines on the basis of the client's decision-making structure. A committee that cannot say what it wants will not become able to during construction, and a building designed by a committee that cannot decide is, she says, always identifiable from the street.
On the long project
Her longest commission ran fourteen years from first sketch to occupation, through two funding collapses and a change of site. She describes it without any of the war-story relish that usually accompanies such accounts, and says the most important thing she learned was to keep the drawings deliberately unfinished for as long as the funding was uncertain — not out of caution but because a fully resolved design becomes psychologically expensive to abandon.
On what buildings owe their users
This is where she becomes most animated. The obligation of a building, in her account, is not to express anything. It is to be legible — to tell a person entering it, without signage, where they are and where they might go next. She regards most contemporary public buildings as failures on precisely this measure, and attributes the failure to a design culture that rewards photographs over occupation.
You can photograph a building in an afternoon. You cannot photograph the fourth year of using it, which is the only period that matters.
Asked what she would do differently, she answers immediately and specifically: she would have started refusing earlier. The first eight years of the practice contain three buildings she considers compromised, all accepted for the same reason — the office needed the fee — and all, she says, still standing.
It is the only point in two hours where she sounds uncertain. Then she moves on to the model on the table, which is for a project she has not yet decided to take.
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