:

DE sign:
(Deconstructing in-order to find new meanings)

A blogging space about my personal interests; was made during training in Stockholm #Young Leaders Visitors Program #Ylvp08 it developed into a social bookmarking blog.

I studied #Architecture; interested in #Design #Art #Education #Urban Design #Digital-media #social-media #Inhabited-Environments #Contemporary-Cultures #experimentation #networking #sustainability & more =)


Please Enjoy, feedback recommended.

p.s. sharing is usually out of interest not Blind praise.
This is neither sacred nor political.

Tuesday, May 1

Jacques Herzog . Interview

An Interview with Jacques Herzog

For a recent book project, Architecture Dialogues Positions, Concepts, Visions, edited by Marc Angélil and Jørg Himmelreich, interviewers Hubertus Adam and J. Christoph Burkle met with Jacques Herzog, who discussed the recent work and intellectual and aesthetic formation of Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel firm he cofounded with Pierre de Meuron. 
 
J. Christoph Bürkle: How are you? How’s your firm doing?

Jacques Herzog: Business is good, thanks. The firm’s doing really well. We’re still growing — slowly — but we’ve got a better handle on it now. We could take on even more projects, but we want to remain very selective. Switzerland is still a country that has good conditions for architects compared to most other countries we’re involved with — both in quality and quantity. Here, architects are even closer to the client and realization. Content-wise, of course, it’s not getting any easier to keep such a large international company on track and support it as intellectually as we have always done. But we’re pressing ahead with it; it’s a top priority for our work. The world is changing dramatically and architecture, and especially cities, need to move with these changes. What can we do to help as architects? Architecture as a way of thinking — as the title of our first exhibition in 1989 suggested — is more relevant than ever.

JCB: Of the Swiss firms, yours has had the biggest international impact. In retrospect, however, it must be hard work to always want to be avant-garde. You were often the first to focus on new themes. How do you manage that over such a long period?

JH: Architecture can only define and keep reinventing itself from within. In that sense, we’re pupils of Aldo Rossi and continue to pursue this approach — perhaps even in a far more archaic sense. We always proceeded from architecture and didn’t just tackle it out of an onerous sense of duty, as other well-known and innovative architects of our generation did and also proclaimed accordingly. However, we always forayed into related fields, especially the social sciences, psychology and, of course, the fine arts, and used them as sources.

An important incentive we set ourselves, as it were, was the foundation of the ETH Studio Basel together with Marcel Meili and Roger Diener. Initiated without a strategic vision really, the place proved to be a lucky break for us in tackling the problems of the urbanization of our planet, which the four of us wouldn’t have been able to do in the same way in our firms. It always challenges us greatly. The work at the studio is very strenuous but worthwhile because we reach places that, in the true sense of the word, we’d never have imagined. Examining other cities and problems all over the world gives us other ideas.



JCB: How do you always manage to make your projects an expression of a theme? In the end, your buildings always seem so logical, as if there was no alternative. Does a theme turn into the project or result from it? This object-like uniqueness, whether it be the Prada Store in Tokyo [2003] or the Dominus Winery near San Francisco [1998]: How do you manage to convince the customer on the one hand and always give the projects something iconic on the other?

JH: We weren’t as good at it in the past. Back then, we always worked towards a project that was, as you say, how it was and nothing else; we never worked with alternatives. That was still the case with the Tate Gallery [London, 1995]; but there we got bogged down with this approach, which I think of as very Swiss today, because it has something hermetic and defensive. That’s how we’d learned to work at university: to think in terms of certainties, not variations. Back then, we always worked in one direction with a lot of intuition. We often hit the bull’s eye, too; otherwise the Tate wouldn’t have chosen us in the first place. But later on we also learned to work in such a way as to start by putting forward a lot of potential ideas and examining them in parallel to bring us closer to the best possible solution in an open dialog with the customer. That’s our method. We have to convince ourselves first before we can convince a customer, but then it’s often much easier. Good projects are often interesting because they’re so complex that you can question them from various sides. They raise new questions, which in turn opens up abundance, not a dead end.

Hubertus Adam: Characteristic of your work are recurring themes that appear in new variations, are explored in a new manner or fade into the background. A theme is rarely dealt with in one project. And, to my mind, the individual projects are not to be seen as ultimate statements, after which there’s nothing more to say.

JH: Our projects really are very different and, in a way, unique solutions. However, it’d be wrong to say that architecture can be reinvented with every project, as it were. You can browse through any work of architecture in history and look for different perspectives, and you’ll always find some "pattern" or other. Some historians call that typology. But it isn’t always typologies but rather other, less categorical basic features that you can’t and shouldn’t avoid. There are many architects who aren’t really aware of their own patterns, just like most people don’t know their patterns in private. We find that a really exciting theme because architecture and psychology suddenly become very close.



JCB: Part of this is surely that you never want to arrive at your own explicit design or product language from the outset, like other architects. Many work towards this, like Frank Gehry. In your case, however, it’s a different kettle of fish altogether. We never know what a project will look like but we always know it’s going to be significant. You worked on this very early on.

JH: As young architects, you don’t do it as consciously, but we tended to have an aversion towards corporate design. At the beginning of your career, everyone wants to do things differently to the established players: in our day, architects like Richard Meier or Mario Botta, who were clearly recognizable from their style; a style that was omnipresent and acknowledged all over the place. Of course, a recognizable style makes it easier to establish yourself on a market — as we know from other products. But the way the market works also means that eventually you’ve seen enough of it. For sure, some architects suffered because they were predefined by their style and had to carry it with them, like hunchbacks. Every architect and, indeed, everybody has a hunchback, a pattern.

Because we know that and can observe it day in, day out — also with us — we try to work against these patterns to find a fresh balance or open up new horizons. That might be what you mean by "reinvent" or "avant-garde." For us, it’s a way of working, but above all a way of life. The awareness of and reaction to this pattern and obsessions that worry us all might be unusual for architects. Nonetheless, they exercise an overt design force throughout our urbanized world and find direct, physical expression. That’s what our text on the "Specific City" [1] is about, and we’ll be analyzing these issues further together with Marcel Meili and Roger Diener’s chair in a comprehensive study at the ETH  in Basel.

HA: The astonishing thing is that you manage to reinvent yourselves with a big firm. It’d be much easier in a small one, that’s for sure. Then there are the architects we mentioned who became big because you always know what you’re getting with them. And those who don’t have such big design ambitions but have become big through a professionalization in the processing. But rarely does someone manage to combine size and design heterogeneity. But is there a size where you can’t manage it anymore? Does growth set limits? With a staff of 360, do you have to make too many compromises?

JH: The quality of the firm has always depended on the creativity invested in developing the company structure. And in this respect we must be one of the best in the world, at least in our generation. Here too, not just in the architectural design, it was a stroke of luck that Pierre and I governed the destiny of the firm together without one of us being responsible for everything. For sure, Pierre has more merits in this respect, and yet we actively bounce ideas off each other on these topics — even more so in the last few years, where the questions of the size of our firm today, tomorrow and in the future seem so urgent, and we’ve developed the idea of a generation model where the main partners increasingly take more responsibility and can also buy shares in the company.

When I say we’re right up there with the best in establishing a successful corporate structure, it’s because we’ve always put the design of the architecture and the design of the working conditions on a par. Right from an early stage, we wanted to support younger architects and make them partners. Today, Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach have top responsibilities as senior partners along with Pierre and me. One day, others might join us and Pierre and I won’t be able to inspire and supervise all the projects closely to the same extent we do today. Then we’ll see how good the envisaged generation model can work. Are there conflicts and jealousies about money and concepts of quality or can it all be combined in a relaxed atmosphere? We don’t know, but we’re confident; otherwise, we wouldn’t be working towards it.



JCB: Although there’s a discursive design process, in your case in particular you get the impression that you come out on top quite strongly.

JH: Come out on top ... over our partners, the clients or the public? Makes no difference, really. The important thing, as you say, is the discursive process that forces everyone involved into a debate. It’s pointless to cut corners in the discursive process by getting all authoritarian. It might be more laborious, as is the case with the democratic processes in Switzerland that [means that projects] still have to go through a voting process to be accepted by everyone in the end. We’re certainly not that patient at the firm; everything’s always urgent and the discussions and permanent changes force us all to be present all the time to follow this discourse. But in public, the discourse is simplified to make it understandable for everyone. The architect is also needed for communication here, if major building projects have to be conveyed. Public projects that have been confirmed through votes, however, quite literally stand on better footing.

HA: The situation in this country is undoubtedly in jeopardy. What will it be like in ten years? Will Switzerland fall into line with the European environment or remain defiant?

JH: The question is whether Switzerland is politically and economically an island and completely independent, as some people see it and want to achieve, or we can no longer dodge the European development, norms, laws, pay pressure and so on and have to adapt accordingly. At the moment, we’re still living in both "realities." The internationally and globally active companies have long had to adapt to the corresponding standards of a globalized architecture world. The so-called star architects might benefit from the advantages of their reputation here, which enjoys a particular status as an international brand. But for the majority of the projects and new inquiries, [the processes of] public procurement, competitions and management already take place according to European norms.

In Switzerland, however, there is still a special case: There’s more state that advertises correct competitions, organizes fair judging panels for them and spreads the commissions over a wide area so that young people also get a chance time and again. That’s important for the culture of architecture and one reason why Switzerland spawns so many good architects. But it’s also important for young architects to learn how to flaunt their qualities on the European and global stage and not just settle for the Swiss scene because it’s so convenient here and you can easily start your own little firm. That might well sound like a lecture, but sometimes the architecture scene in Switzerland makes me cringe since, even though it produces good people, all in all it comes across as incredibly hermetic and cocky.

JCB: You’ve often mentioned various role-models, like Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi, but you also stress that as young architects you wanted to do things differently from your predecessors. Traces of modernists like Mies van der Rohe or — in art — minimalism, in other words the precision of these directions, might also be mentioned as reference points. Weren’t there other benchmarks?

JH: Rossi and Venturi had the biggest impact on us as students. Back then, they stood for something new that countered modernism somewhat; something ambivalent and routine; something that wasn’t as abstract and model-like as modernism demanded. Very soon, however, while we were still at university, the fine arts had a much greater appeal. I personally studied art and artists more strongly than architecture. Why? The great appeal that my friends back then in the Basel scene, Helmut Federle, Martin Disler and Rémy Zaugg, held for us. Their personal dedication and their far more radical exposure — compared with the safety of the architects — challenged us. We noticed that there weren’t any recipes, traditions or ideologies anymore that could be used for your own work. Everything had had its day and that has remained the case until now.
What has changed compared to then, however, is that architecture scenes have developed in Switzerland and other places that support each other and that there is a kind of unspoken consensus as to what good architecture is that is not explicitly formulated, but lived all the more intensely in practice. If you look at Swiss publications or the weekend supplements, you can see how similar the projects of various Swiss authors have become; how identical the volumes, windows, large formats and materials are. There’s hardly anything that’s really bad and even more rarely anything that at least challenges this uniformity. Swiss architecture has become a lot more Swiss, homogenous, hermetic and folkloristic again today — like at the time of the Landi perhaps? — than its protagonists would like to recognize and believe. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the architects; it doesn’t bother us all that much. What bothers us far more is the mishmash that goes hand in hand with it and which the Swiss building zones are being filled with. The Swiss architecture of today is a kind of "pseudomodernism" that thinks it recognizes a moral legitimization with the abandonment of playfulness, individuality, experimentalism and radicalism, without following the really interesting side of modernism, namely the critical vision of a new society. But we believe it’s high time we strove for precisely this more intensely again.



HA: You say you grew up in a time of departure from the modern. There was a clear concept against it and there were the stimuli we mentioned earlier. The last few years, however, have been marked by a sense of laissez-faire — a tendency throughout society that also leaves an imprint on architecture. Where conflicts were fully discussed in the past, there’s a heterogeneous coexistence that seems to bother no one.

JH: In this uniformity, I see a tendency among architects to respect and maintain the status quo, and a consensus about what architecture is and can do for our society. That’s the expression of a decorative understanding of architecture, even if it expresses itself in a subtle, modernist language.

It contrasts with the political understanding we’re aspiring to and which we gave a nudge toward with the Studio Basel publication Switzerland: An Urban Portrait [2006]. At the moment, we think that considerations of where, how densely, how much and how distributed over the country we can and should build are more important questions than those concerning the individual object. Yet there have always been different kinds of models for living and exploring architecture. You just have to think of modernism in Switzerland, where there were radical, strongly politicized figures from Basel like Hans Bernoulli, Hannes Meyer or Hans Schmidt on the one hand who combined extreme minimalism with a social utopia and created objects of immaculate beauty, and on the other hand the bourgeois architects from the Zurich or central Swiss scene like Haefeli Moser Steiger or Armin Meili, who tended towards an attractive, decorative architecture.

JCB: So at the end of the day it’s all about attitude. What’s the situation with the young architects? What’s your take on the younger tendencies?

JH: The question is to what extent you use architecture simply to produce or understand something, like society for instance — and how far your own work changes as a result. This question is uppermost in our minds at the moment, but we haven’t found a decent answer to it. Yet it brings us back to the patterns we were talking about earlier. You can’t just change a nation and the way it lives. In Switzerland, there’s now this semi-urbanism; architecture that’s neither good nor bad, neither urban nor rural, and yet well-connected to the public transport network; where there’s always something green, but never lush or a lot; where there’s always a bit of water in the form of a river, stream or a lake. As long as most people can live like that and it doesn’t suddenly become too dense and packed in the districts, and in the trams and suburban trains, it’s impossible to change it. And the author architects, whether they are young or old, add a few buildings to the mix here and there that are mostly somewhat better than the large mass of the more anonymous architects. But how much better does it really get? Can this added value be justified in the long run without the authors becoming authors of a complete overhaul of the urban and ecological conditions in our country?

JCB: Your generation has theorized a lot, conducted dialogs and struck new paths. Does that still exist among today’s generation or does laissez-faire take precedence?

JH: I’m sure you journalists and architecture critics could answer that question a lot better; you’ve got a greater insight into the scene. But there are bound to be a few prominent figures in every generation.

HA: Undoubtedly. But it’s been some time since a book was published that was as significant as Rem Koohlhaas’s S, M, L, XL. Things are also stagnating theoretically at the moment. And in this country some architects can build a lot quickly at a young age because the economic situation enables them to. At the same time, however, this is leading to an ebb in creativity because often the [prevailing] patterns are just copied.

JH: The last seminal publications are a lot older still: L’ Archittetura della città by Rossi and Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, which were both analyses of specific urban conditions: the Italian city, which Rossi invoked with a poetic and nostalgic impetus; and Venturi’s Las Vegas, which introduced pop art into architecture. I regard all key later architecture books like Koolhaas’ publications more as brilliant journalistic articles. They’re not sustainable textbooks or instructions as Rossi, Venturi or, even earlier and more explicitly, Le Corbusier or Adolf Loos, intended. The theoretical works of my generation consist more of individual essays or pamphlets; comprehensive works like the Urban Portrait of Switzerland, mentioned earlier, are rarely published. But the most effective and sustainable communicative architecture tool is still architecture itself; every single work. This means that the necessary political, urban and ecological dimension of architecture we talked about earlier needs to be expressed in the work itself. There’s nothing outside; no justification, no book, no explanation. Nothing has changed in architecture in this respect as long as it has existed.

JCB: In other countries, urban development discourse always proceeds from the mostly lacking or poor infrastructure. In this country, as far as urban development is concerned, we talk about construction zones or their concentration. With the Studio Basel, you raised awareness again of the topic of the urbanization of Switzerland, and meanwhile an increased urban concentration is in the pipeline at the planning offices in the region and cities. Is that a topic you’re still interested in?

JH: Yes, of course. Marcel Meili and I just had a lengthy discussion with the Tages-Anzeiger on these issues, a sort of review ever since Switzerland: An Urban Portrait came out. You can concentrate [urban development], but only in a country that also has an urban consciousness and where, somewhat more crowded together, you still see a certain quality and can live it, too. Really, the country is moving toward a kind of "City of Switzerland," since the agglomerations are beginning to touch, such as the metropolitan areas of Basel and Zürich with the Aargau interchange.
What’s the vision now that the future developments are supposed to gear themselves toward? Today’s zone plans only yield unsatisfactory answers that don’t project the everyday reality. Concentrations within the existing centers confirm the identity and distinction of one city from the others. So what would the alternatives be? Concentration along commuter flows, concentrating what used to be rural or village areas? What do Swiss citizens want? Who’s going to explain to them what’s possible and makes sense? There are overly divergent forces between what’s desirable, reasonable, feasible and necessary, and no one knows how all of these forces can be made fruitful. We already considered whether a regular TV format, in the same vein as Arena on Swiss television, might trigger public discussion and awareness of such issues.



JCB: It probably isn’t possible to resist the urban sprawl in Switzerland; it might be more pragmatic, as you say, to find the [desirable] qualities in this mixture of city and country. There isn’t any real urbanity in this country anyway.

JH: Really, it’s just being filled up somehow. Then sometimes there’s a competition in a community that isn’t quite rural anymore because it already has a population of 25,000; then you build a square, like in Oerlikon, that looks a bit urban and gradually it become a town district. That was already the case with the medieval suburbs and it hasn’t changed much to this day. Apart from those dating back to the Gründerzeit [in the mid 19th century], there are hardly any city quarters that are designed from scratch. The transformation of industrial wasteland is mostly more of an addition and adaptation than a tabula rasa, too. That’s not a bad thing; it’s also a reaction to the partly reckless encroachments of the modern into the old town and village. But it’s also an expression of a lack of vision as to how a city or country of cities like Switzerland can work in the future.

JCB: There’s an ambivalence in regions adjacent to cities, obviously a reluctance to commit themselves to the city. Among the young architects, you don’t find any urban structures in the designs for the outlying suburbs that’ll be slam-bang in the middle of the city in a few years. Why is it so hard to realize urban patterns in Switzerland?

JH: Because people don’t like them — and perhaps the architects don’t either. Architects in Switzerland, and indeed elsewhere, aren’t designing a vision that’s supposed to change anything radically. Architecture seems powerless to me today — more so than ever.

HA: You mentioned the necessity for a radical perspective that didn’t just develop for you based on the insights of the Studio Basel, but is also necessary with regard to the contemporary world situation. You already mentioned a few points — but there must be more of what you might call a new agenda.

JH: The topics of sustainability, resources and energy are on everyone’s lips these days. We’re also dealing with questions of the CO2-free city and asking ourselves what architecture can do to help. Instead of rebuilding cities radically, it’s more likely that we’ll see inventions like solar cells that you can adjust according to the position of the sun to collect more power.

But maybe in parallel there’ll be more radical developments, where parts of our city realize new perspectives from the 21st century. If you ask me, that’s only possible through infrastructure. Radical changes only come about through things we have to learn the hard way. We’re seeing that now with the discussion on nuclear power plants: We already knew it wasn’t possible to supply the world using nuclear power — even before the disaster in Japan — because its permanent disposal isn’t guaranteed for thousands of years. But a change in thinking only comes about if the knife’s at your throat and your throat’s already been half slit — then you get a panicky reaction. That’s the way of the world and human nature: more reactive than active.

And that’s why cities look the way they do: because the pressure isn’t great enough to change anything. But it’s up to us architects to try and make a difference, because we might recognize a bit earlier what others might not yet see — the ingredients for possible change. Still, we don’t have any recipes that can be realized directly, either. The Studio Basel book about metropolitan regions and the green spaces in-between was adopted by the Swiss federal planning department; yet it [doesn't contain] about precise, firm wording, which is famously difficult in Switzerland. On the other hand — and here comes the "but" already — that’s also part of Switzerland’s success.

JCB: The topic matters to you, you can see that. But more precisely: Conflicts like the current one between zero-energy and Minergie [the Swiss rating agency for green buildings] — do they concern your firm or do you think it’s up to the technicians to resolve it? Anyhow, you’re well-known for conducting a lot of research.

JH: That’s a very good question. Of course, we don’t develop any new solar collectors or types of insulation. There are strict laws and regulations in Switzerland that we have to respect. In concrete terms, we tried to develop autonomous houses that are self-sufficient. Mostly, these attempts fall flat because they are merely recipes that are accepted by the building owners — or not. They are approaches to possible ideal conditions. We’re more interested in questions of sustainability in the context of urban development or a whole country. Next semester, we want to concentrate on these questions at Studio Basel and devise an overview of the state of affairs, as hardly anyone knows where we really stand at the moment. That goes for both the individual object as well as the regions and cities. We’re particularly interested in the issue of water, food production and waste.

HA: I’d like to come back to the need for radicalization. The sensitivity to social change has also taken mostly a backseat in the architecture profession internationally. Maybe that’s the problem.

JH: That’s right. We grew up and studied in the late Sixties, during the social revolution. The transition from modernism to postmodernism, the criticism of society, was fundamental. That left its mark on us and we left ours on the period. Nowadays, we live in a time in which nothing’s forced upon us that shapes the younger generation, which isn’t politicized to the same extent. And being politicized also means questioning everything. After all, architecture is just an instrument to shape our society and give the people in our time the chance to express themselves in one form or another and live in a particular way, both privately and publicly. That also means that public space corresponds to it: It can be open or hermetic.

Here’s an example: Because it's accessible to everyone, the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern is a contribution to the notion of public space. That’s the most exciting thing of all at the Tate. We learned that lesson during the project and have been able to use it in other locations, including in Switzerland. Architecture is a vessel for the people in a society. That’s fundamental for our understanding of architecture and the city. You can also understand the state of a society historically from how much the architecture productively sought this publicness or not. We always used to say: Architecture is an object of perception for the world, and also society.

JCB: So we’re experiencing a Jacques Herzog who’s just as radical as he was at the beginning of his career. But there’s also a Jacques Herzog who’s looking to devote himself to other themes after all this time, like sculptural architecture, the reference to nature, and is not as interested in everyday problems anymore. Do I sense a certain wisdom with age here?

JH: No, you’ve got me all wrong. A curious person will always be curious — whether that’s an advantage or not. Those of us from the generation of ’68 are rooted in a tradition of reason. But now we live in a time where ideologies are increasingly on the rise — in other words, in an anti-enlightenment era. Is that the future of the world? Will the world enter a new phase of isolation, nationalization, ideologization? As a paradoxical counterplay to the onset of globalization? That would require new architecture or author architecture to degenerate into a kind of "parallel architecture," which it already is to a certain extent today.




JCB: You could ask whether this process has caught on in some places, for instance, in the more repressive parts of the Arab world.

JH: We shouldn’t assume our form of democracy is the only possible democratic form. A revolution like the one that started in North Africa in 2010, and that might lead to an enlightenment in your own society, is far more interesting. In Christianity, the Reformation destroyed an incredible number of values. I was raised a Protestant and only realized its enormity later as an art and architecture enthusiast. In Basel alone, entire churches, monasteries and cathedrals were knocked down. This was evidently necessary to achieve something new, to reach a truly new starting point for a society that had had its day and couldn’t rebuild itself from the established power structures.

That brings us back to the radical perspective. Perhaps everything has to break down. In the spirit of the age we’re living in today, maybe we won’t manage to overcome this shallow, sluggish, random but successful indifference in Switzerland. Remember: The change of Protestantism opened the door for industrialization; the Huguenots came to Switzerland, bringing silk dyeing and ultimately the pharmaceutical industry to Basel and basing the clock industry in Geneva and Jura. A large part of industrialization, in Germany and England, too, wouldn’t have been possible without Protestantism; you see that in Catholic countries where no such development took place. 500 years on, that’s still a social reality and continues to have an impact as a conflict between the countries in the north and south, which causes friction in the EU. Even though Switzerland is doing well, we must constantly seek new horizons.

JCB: That would be a nice note to finish on.

JH: I’ve often talked to you both and always found it interesting to tackle issues relevant to architecture. Mostly, this works best with reference to a specific object. However, if you don’t ask yourself these overriding questions, the object ultimately becomes boring.

JCB: Just before we finish, however, I’d like to ask an object-related question that is of particular interest to me, coming from Hamburg: What’s the situation with the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie? Why are there now conflicts after the brilliant launch in this city, which doesn’t exactly have an affinity with architecture?

JH: Complex political and contractual constellations have led to [the delays in construction]. We always have to make an effort with various lawyers to ensure that everything is correctly represented and we’re not accused of things we’re not responsible for. I wouldn’t wish that on any architect. Unfortunately it’s a reality in such big public projects nowadays — not just in Hamburg, although it’s particularly pronounced there. We have to battle on, but we’re confident we’re on the right track. The especially important thing for us now is that it ends up as magnificent as we always imagined it. It’ll be a wonderful building; the rooms are fantastic and at the end of the day that’s the only thing that counts. The building will stay up for a long time to come and should give all the citizens of Hamburg and its visitors a lot of pleasure.







http://places.designobserver.com/feature/an-interview-with-jacques-herzog/32118/

Forward Reading

Future Of Reading


a topic explored by Findings.com to think the future of reading along with evolution of technology & our complex easy way of life. 


I'm Going to copy some highlights from the interviews conducted by the website with People like Steven Johnson & Kevin Kelly.


>>



Reading. It’s a simple act. You’re doing it right now. You probably read something off of billboards, screens, and packages hundreds of times throughout the course of a single day. Can something so fundamental really be changing?
Here at Findings, we believe it is. We engage in conversations with our users every day about what they need to fill in the gap between their reading experience and what they imagine it could be. Reading in a digital age gives us both more tools and more distractions to contend with.
We wanted to start asking authors, publishers, and thinkers we knew: How do you read now? And how is it going to change? In that vein we want to welcome you to “How We Will Read,” a series of conversations about social reading, digital media, and annotation with literary minds like Clay ShirkyMaud NewtonLaura Miller, and Richard Nash. We’re excited to get inside the reading process of some of our favorite writers — and to share their thoughts with you.

@STEVENJOHNSON
We’re very happy to kick off “How We Will Read” with authorSteven Johnson, who’s been an adviser to Findings since day one. His most recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, explores what kinds of environments foster intellectual breakthroughs. Looking through Steven’s Findings page or Twitter account is a romp through genres and inspirations — you’ll find tech news, political analysis, and cultural critique, from Dickens to the Federalist Papers. Broad-base innovation is at the core of Steven’s thinking. So we asked him: Where does reading need to innovate?
How do you do most of your reading these days?
Wherever possible, I read books using the Kindle app on the iPad. But I do a lot of reading of articles, essays, blog posts, and Wikipedia in the browser. (Usually Firefox on the Mac, though sometimes Safari on the iPad.) I know it is supposed to be on the decline, but I do more loosely-directed surfing than ever: I head off in one general direction, and start following the links, which usually end up taking me somewhere completely unplanned. (I wrote a little case study of how this works here.) But it’s not the classical web surfing, where you just click on one link after another; it’s more staggered that that, and it often involves social media. So someone will link to an interesting article on Twitter, and I’ll go read it, and it’ll mention some musician I’ve never heard of, so I’ll Google his name, and read the Wikipedia entry, which will send me to a Pitchfork article, which will send me off to a new Google query about some sub-genre of music I’ve never heard of, which will lead me to a book I download for Kindle. Repeat, ad nauseum.
If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?
Skimming. It’s a funny thing with print vs. ebooks; the digital age is supposed to be all about attention deficit disorder and hypertextual distractions, but ebooks lock you into reading them in a linear fashion more than print books do. It’s much easier to pick up a print book and flip through the pages, get a sense of the argument or structure, than it is with an ebook (or magazine.) It’s a very interesting interface challenge: I think it’s probably solvable, and I know many smart folks are working on it, but we don’t have a true solution yet.
Can you recall the moment you fell in love with reading?
I have been a reader for as long as I can remember. I would just lock into books and sit there on the couch with them for hours. When I was in second grade, I remember being obsessed with the Great Brain series, which we just tracked down on Amazon and read with our older boys this fall. They loved them as well, which was 1) pretty surprising, since they’re all about life in a small town in Utah in the 1890s, and 2) incredibly gratifying to see as a parent.
Has reading become more social for you?
My article/essay/blog post reading has become intensely social. I think easily more than half of the articles I read in the average day come from passed links on Twitter. Those social recommendations are a tremendous source of serendipity, much more interesting and unpredictable than they are given credit for. It’s not just an echo chamber of predictable fare from a close circle of friends, partially because I follow a lot of people from different fields who are not personal friends: musicians and political writers and food writers and movie critics, etc. And also because they’re often retweeting interesting links from people I’ve never even heard of. This is not a new idea: it’s the strength of weak ties argument essentially. But I’m surprised that people still underestimate the power of those weak ties in terms of making surprising and rich new connections.
Do you often annotate what you’re reading? Why? How has this changed over time, with the advent of new technology?
I used to read print books with a pen — assuming it was work-related, and not a beach read — and would highlight passages and scribble short comments in the margins. And then I would go through these elaborate steps to convert the text into digital form so I could store and search it later, with comments. Now Findings has taken almost all the labor out of the capturing process, but interestingly I have stopped making comments in the margins, even though technically you can do with the Kindle and with Findings. I just select and store the text, and assume I’ll figure out why I selected it later on. I’m not exactly sure why that happened with the shift to screen reading. I may need to restore my annotation habit.
How do you see reading evolving in the years to come?
Probably the biggest change is going to come from the changed definition of what we’re reading. More and more, texts will evolve the way Wikipedia entries evolve; the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox—something you’d expect from a novel, but not from a magazine article, say. And that open-endedness will likely mean that the reader is capable of participating, adding links, commenting, suggesting new avenues for exploration, fact-checking. So we’ll have to read in an even more focused way, I suspect, knowing that we can have a say in where the text eventually goes. So there you go: ebooks and digital text are keeping us from skimming *and* forcing us to engage with the text more directly. Who would have thought it?
Find Steven on TwitterFindings, and at his personal blog.

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This is the fifth post of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. See our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.
Kevin Kelly is a scholar of the future. There seems to be no better way to encapsulate his myriad intellectual endeavors, which have sought to explain the new economytechnology as an extension of the self, and the mechanisms of complex organization. Even the creators of The Matrixrecognized his brilliance — they made his book Out of Control required reading on set. It’s impossible to speak to him without it realizing that you are talking to someone who has a wide and incredible knowledge of the world. A humble and extraordinary man, Kevin has so many ideas for the future, he doesn’t quite know where to put them all.

Currently, Kevin maintains an active presence on his website, KK.org, where he blogs on several different personal projects he is pursuing, including the sequencing of his own genome and incisive analysis of gadgetry. A founding editor at WIRED and prolific writer of nonfiction books, Kevin’s explorations have never been far from text. So that is precisely what we wanted to ask him about. And who better to ask about the future of books than a scholar of the future?
You’re posting your book New Rules, New Economy in blog posts over the course of a couple of years. I noticed that the posts areformatted in a way that makes them seem annotated. Can you tell me about that?
I long ago got in the habit of marking up books as I went along — talking to it, marginalia, dog-earing, all that kind of stuff. I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.
This project is a recycling of that book. When the book was out of print, I decided to re-issue it as blog posts page-by-page. I had some heuristics, and my assistant Camille went through the book. It’s her work. There was some emphasis elements that we decided on, and on her own judgment, she followed through emphasizing in more than one manner.
I have had an idea of actually republishing the book in paper in the kind of annotated way. That was inspired by Tom Peters, the business guru, who does these books where he has a kind of kinetic typography. I always liked that, so I thought I’d try to imitate it here.
Why post your book as blog posts at all?
I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain. I believe that is naturally where it wants to reside. I think that works enjoy a temporary moment where they are monopolized and you can charge for them, but they’ll revert back to the free. So putting it out free was basically my habit. I believe — I’m not sure — but I believe I was the first person ever to put an in-copyright, in-print book on the web for free. I happened to have owned the digital rights. Because when it was contracted in 1989 or 1990, nobody knew anything about digital rights.
I don’t think my publishers even know. I just decided to do this. I have no idea whether I own the digital rights or not. I’m no longer even concerned about how many books I sell. I’m really concerned about how many books people read. I’m almost willing, right now, to pay people to read my books.
Wow! Really?
Yes. So I’m actually working on ideas right now where if you read my book you get paid. Or you pay $10, and if you read it, I’ll give you $9 back. Because people aren’t reading books — particularly books, particularly long-form books. They’re still buying a few, but they’re not reading very many of them. There’s just so many other things to do or read or whatnot that getting someone to read a book is just really hard.
That’s where my real focus is. My real focus is actually making it as easy as possible for someone to read the work. Make it easy as possible for them to hear about it, make it as easy as possible for them to get it, make it easy as possible for them to get into it, to read it. Right now any kind of impediment in any of those fields and you’re gone. Making it free was just one step in that direction.
Okay, two questions: Why books over other kinds of text? And how do you make money off of that model?
I don’t think people are going to make money off of books for very much longer. Just like music. How do you make money doing music? The real reason you do music is because you love it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll make some money from it. There are people making money writing, and there are paid journalists, and other things that pay in other ways, so I’m not really concerned about the economic model — I should be, because I’m playing both sides. I make my living doing it.
Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow. I don’t know the exact revenue model, but I know money will come. The real key is getting people to pay attention. I’ve always had the belief that if you are getting people’s attention and keeping people’s attention, focus on when to monetize then. I’m not really focused on the monetizing aspect, because I don’t think we know yet.
So what have you learned? How do you keep people’s attention?
Well, this goes back to the question about the book. There is less attention for books, for the long form. However, there is some attention to it. And what a book is, in my kind of formulation, is a coherent, sustained long argument or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. I don’t buy the idea that we have a total shorter attention span. I just think we have an expanding variety of attention spans. We are able to service some forms of attention that we had not been able to service before, and so we’re filling those out.
But there is still an appetite for long form, though it’s not huge. It may be a niche appetite. That’s why, again, I’m not looking at the money. It may not be enough of an appetite to sustain a huge business or industry, but nonetheless, there is an appetite for it. The real key is to build, serve, and cultivate that appetite. And protect it from being trampled by all the other options that are out there.
In my weaker moments, I think that if I really truly believed in trying to reach as many people as I could, I would simply do YouTube videos. Because that’s what people are paying attention to. My TED talks have a far greater audience than any of my books ever will. I mean, how long did I prepare for a TED talk? I don’t know, 18 minutes? You just kind of do it. If I were to spend as much time on those as on preparing my book, I would spend a couple years working on a series of TED talks, 18 minutes each, that totaled up into a really fantastic experience.
Besides the fact that I’m not quite ready to do this big experiment, I also feel that the tool set is not quite ready as well. We don’t actually know how to do that yet, because you’re trying to do two things at the same time — which is not only make a fantastic book but also invent the entire platform for doing it. That’s a high risk thing. You’re almost certain to fail in getting the format right. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it. But certainly that’s what’s preventing me from doing it right now.
It sounds like you’re more interested in getting your ideas out than you are about the mode for doing so.
Yes, because I’m not a born writer. I’m a natural editor. And also, I started off as a photographer. I think very visually. I don’t have much allegiance to the literary aspect of books. I’m more utilitarian in that sense. In conveying ideas, my allegiance is not to the flow of words, per se. I don’t expect books to go away — and I don’t want them to go away — but what technology brings us, and this the theme to What Technology Wants, is increasing options. We’re inventing new ways to read. Those are not going to replace listening to words or reading words, they’re going to supplement and expand. They’re going to be additional options. Those who really need to read only words on their own will always have that option. Paper books aren’t going away. They may become very very expensive, or all at once become really, really cheap, but I think anybody who wants to read something in a book will always have that option, if they’re willing to pay for it.
If you take a look at any prolific author’s reading space you’ve got books in all kinds of formats: hardcover, softcover, audio, Kindle version, trailer — and that’s just going to increase. In fifty years you’ll have fifty different ways to approach the material. I’m not saying you can have shovelware and just move things from one medium to another — there are limits to that. A website does not want to be a book. Even my New Rules, New Economy — we did something to try to change it to make it more appropriate for the blog and it would be better, maybe, if we did more.

But I do think what we’re engaged in is unbundling the book. There’s many ways to unbundle the book; for example, you can read things by page. But there’s also unbundling in the sense that what a classic paper book did was it performed many functions. And we’re teasing apart those functions and assigning some of those functions to different media, and maybe even reassembling, or rebundling those into different bundles of functions. A book was a very powerful device because it did so many different things. We’re taking some of those apart. And we’re adding new things that books can now do that they didn’t do before. Long-term, I see that we’re inventing new ways of reading, not eliminating old ways.

If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?

Hmm. Just one.

You can have as many as you want.

Well, I’ll take all of them. (laughs)

I do miss the general three-dimensional navigation aspect, of really being able to tell where I am, and then to get there really fast. There is something, that is probably the result of a number of different factors, that makes a paper book so much easier to browse. There’s something about the bandwidth of seeing it and the general scale of it in your hand. So far no e-book that we have is able to do that.
I’m not convinced that e-books will end up as single planks, as this kind of a flat tablet. There’s no reason in my mind that you can’t make an e-book that’s a sheaf of flexible electronic pages that resemble a book that you turn. The difference is that it may be touch sensitive, so you can do your swishing and capturing and stuff, and then you tap it on the spine and it changes the book. I think we’re just at the beginning of the form factor. I don’t see any reason why we can’t bring most of the qualities the paper book, eventually, to the e-book. You may have your favorite leather-bound container, that you read for years and years, to read all size-A books on it. I don’t see why that’s not possible.
Can you recall the moment you first fell in love with reading?
My first job ever as a kid was I was a page for our local library. I grew up in suburban American New Jersey. I tell my own kids — it’s really hard to imagine how parochial that life was at that time. I’d never seen Chinese people, I’d never eaten Chinese food. You couldn’t hardly buy anything fresh in the grocery market. We never went anywhere. We never took vacations ever. It was a very different world.
In the library, while I was putting books away, there was this book called Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons, and it was about eating wild foods. That idea electrified me. I remember hiding the book out of place so no one else would find it so I could keep reading it! It was my bookMy discovery! That was the beginning of the end for me, in the sense that I discovered the Whole Earth Catalogs and decided not to go to college. The Whole Earth Catalogs was this sort of alternative universe where you could invent your life, and here were the catalog of possibilities, and it was things just so far beyond anything that I had experienced in a white suburban East-Coast town. I was in junior high school, or something. That was the thing that opened up the portal saying, there is a big world out there you don’t know anything about. That was the book that did that.

Last question — user-submitted, from our friend Sahadeva Hammari, who is a fan of yours: Why do you think people are afraid of the future?

That’s a really good question. I think it’s because we have become unable to articulate a plausible future that we actually desire. Most of the visions of the future are very dystopian, very fundamentally broken in some way. There’s no place that any of us wants to go to, in any of these futures. But I believe, actually, that we are headed towards a future that is very desirable. Why can’t we see it right now? That’s a question that I don’t really have a very good answer to. I suspect it’s because in many ways it’ll look an awful lot like what we have now, in the sense that it’s not going to be spectacularly whiz-bang — and the kinds of things that will be special are things we have trouble imagining right now. I mean, I know for a fact that if we were able to get on a time machine and go back thirty years to describe to people what we have right now, it would seem completely implausible. And this is what I call the plausibility paradox in futurism. Any future that is going to be correct is going to seem to us implausible. And anything that is plausible is probably not going to be correct. So we have this dilemma that the future — while maybe desirable — is going to appear to us right now as implausible. And that’s the catch. If someone from the future were to come back now and describe it, we’d say, “that’s impossible.”
So what do we do, keep our minds open?
I don’t know. I go around saying we have to believe in the impossible. That’s what I’ve learned from this time on the Internet — believe the impossible. Wikipedia is impossible. Everything we know about human nature says that Wikipedia cannot happen, but there it is. That should help us learn to believe in the impossible. It’s economically impossible to have Google EarthGoogle Street Maps, stock quotes for free, weather all around the world — it’s economically impossible to have all these things. But we have them all for free. We have to learn to expect the impossible.
Find Kevin at his website and on Findings.
(All interviews conducted by Sonia Saraiya.)