Cultured Magazine

172 culturedmag.com Andrew Heid: As the new chair of the architecture department at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, you're very much embedded in the professional academic culture of architecture. What differentiates and connects your projects to your practice? Mark Lee: There's certainly a difference between the project we have in our office and the project we have at school. At school you are with a group of colleagues with very different agendas, and the pedagogy is very different from one's own practice. I try to separate that. In terms of our firm, Johnston Marklee, we have always believed in the everyday building as the fabric of the city. I think throughout my and Sharon's [Johnston] education there has always been a focus on iconic buildings—the one percent of buildings that would change the world. In contrast, we have noticed that the quality of everyday architecture in most cities is declining; it's in the hands of the developers. If we believe in architecture as a discipline and a medium, in order for that architecture to regain its power, the quality of 99 percent of everyday architecture has to raise. We strive to adhere to that in our practice. We try to have a certain agenda based on the specificity of the project while staying rooted in history and the physical context of the city. In many ways I think we have a more European attitude about the city, for instance, thinking about the building as one of many components. AH: A set piece as opposed to an object in the city. ML: Correct. There's not a formula that we adhere to. Sometimes you get the subject of the buildings in the context, but sometimes the context is nothing and your future building is the context. Understanding which direction to take for each project is important for us. AH: You mentioned a European sense of building. Was that influence from your teachers at the GSD? ML: Sharon and I met at Herzog & de Meuron's studio at the GSD. They were important mentors and teachers for us. At that time they were very different from anyone else. On the surface, their work seems minimal and restrained, but there is this extreme intensity about their work. AH: Isn't the strength in their work from their teacher Aldo Rossi in Switzerland? This idea of the city and typology and memory... ML: Yes, absolutely. AH: How did that trickle down from their studio into your work? ML: After we studied with them, I spent a few years in Switzerland as a teacher. I learned the strength of Rossi and why he was important at that time, which was when Lucius Burckhardt was an important sociologist and very powerful within the architecture circle. Burckhardt's message was that you can do anything except architecture; architecture was really vilified. When Rossi said there's nothing but architecture, it was very refreshing. It was like a pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. We understand Rossi's attraction, but we also understand his sense of typology works within a more Italian or Lombardian sensibility that was perhaps not in line with the opportunity given to Herzog & de Meuron and the generations of Swiss architects after them when Switzerland was developing these new agglomerations or suburbs, many of which fused [Robert] Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction with Rossi. AH: There is no context in these Swiss suburbs, just like there's no context in Las Vegas. ML: Exactly. Or the context is the gas stations, the signage, an embracing of banality. You can almost imagine Venturi's buildings without the symbolism—that mannered way of dealing with modernism actually worked very well with the Swiss vibe. Although Rossi's influence was more a part of this official culture, I think Venturi also plays an important role. AH: You have addressed context and typology in your work, but how does the aesthetic notion of your work play out? ML: I think one of Ed Ruscha's famous quotes was when he was asked what type of response he would like to solicit from his audience and he said he wanted them to say "Huh?" and "Wow." That really resonated with us, and we understand it as defamiliarization as a prelude to cognition and delight. We desire our work to be less loud. We want our buildings to have a sense of mystery. AH: I'm always drawn to this idea of the project behind the project, or the intractable problems of the discipline that architects confront. How would you describe the Menil Drawing Institute as addressing disciplinary questions, circulation, envelope, transparency, façade or materiality? ML: We wanted to address the boundaries of architecture. In school we were taught to dissolve boundaries, but after we left school, we asked ourselves what architecture does best: it's actually building boundaries. As a result, our work always has a definitive profile. The new Menil Drawing Institute faces a future sculpture park. We wanted the scale to be somewhere between the pre- war houses and the Twombly gallery and wanted a timeless feeling, so a new visitor to the campus won't be sure whether it was built before or after the Twombly. That's part of the essence of the

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