Premises for Practice

(excerpt from a public lecture at the Institute for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, June 19, 2004)

We are invested in the constructionist possibility of architecture, in the ability of architects to construct new worlds and to encourage new forms of inhabitation in these worlds.

The term constructionist is inspired by Nelson Goodman, an American philosopher who argued that works of art are self-contained worlds and that, if produced through a cumulative intensive logic, they offer a level of rigor and complexity on a par with whatever real worlds there are out there. He also argued that the realism we project onto the world is a matter of habit and that works of art help us develop habits of seeing.

The constructionist position in architecture is based on the following main ideas that guide our work:

The idea that each building could be a world or part of a world, that it would start from an instant transition to an internal moment, usually a courtyard, and that it would unwind outwards to meet the edges of the world and transform it. That this transformation could also transgress the conventional boundaries between building and context so that a new spatial relationship could emerge, something like a new geography that re-describes the terrain in which architecture operates.

The idea that the functional dimension of architecture should remain important in this process but that it should be addressed as inhabitation rather than as program. In that sense, program is redefined as habits of living that should be interrogated and revised rather than a sequence of sequestered spaces that get reshuffled and recombined but that are ultimately maintained intact.

The idea that architecture should act as a framework on which the operations of design are applied with intensity, along the edges of the space, and that it reverberates with possibilities, maintaining a void on the interior and an object-like character on the exterior.

The idea that we should inhabit these new contexts with new eyes, that the new habits of living encourage new habits of seeing which in turn help in achieving another level of significance to architecture. This significance is one that maintains a level of openness to the experiences of its inhabitants, it is acquired rather than imposed.

The idea that these new ways of seeing provide, in every project, a logic of measurement and proportion that helps in making decisions about how high, how wide, and how deep the buildings could be. Proportional systems, structural constraints, and empirical issues, will always produce the numbers for us, but our eyes should provide the final calibration.

These ideas respond to several predicaments in contemporary architecture:

• Contemporary architecture’s inattentiveness to measurement and scale
• Its uncritical embrace of modernist formal repertoires
• Its blind reading of program
• Its infatuation with material and detail
• Its inattentiveness to context

We live these contemporary predicaments in our practice everyday. We share with most architects the desire to be contemporary, whether in Cambridge or in rural Lebanon. We share the pleasures of communicating through current trends. We also share the ambition to be ahead of, or detached from, the contemporary just enough to appear as if we are heralding architecture towards us, but we would hope, like most architects, that we express the best qualities of our epoch and resist its worst and that in this process, we define a unique position, somewhere between Boston and Beirut.