”Real Accidents”
Interview with Buzz Yudell and John Ruble, by Wendy Kohn
Campus & Community: 140-144
WENDY KOHN You have compared Moore Ruble Yudell’s design process to jazz improvisation. How does this work?
BUZZ YUDELL Well, if you look at a wonderful jazz group, it tends to be four or five very talented musicians who may have slightly different ways of seeing things but also tend to agree on certain things. It’s not a paradigm of collectivism versus a single artist hero. It’s a group of artists working together. It’s what we agree on that allows the differences to come into play.
WK In other words, you don’t have someone sitting at a piano just randomly playing the keys.
BY I think we have a fairly broad set of shared values about the humanistic principles of architecture. You could talk about a number of underlying beliefs that I think are shared throughout the office—about connecting to place, connecting to people, about architecture that is connected to tradition but also explores contemporary art and culture… yet always coming back to how buildings are places and are inhabited at various scales.
JOHN RUBLE That’s true, although I think that a lot of the things we do on the very specific level of design come from what Charles Moore described as enthusiasms, or things that you personally respond to. We have a lot in common here as well, in terms of places we’ve seen that we like…. The enthusiasms that influence what we do on one project or another come out of experiencing places we all admire.
WK So there’s a context within which the exploration occurs—a sense of harmony—of what has value.
BY At the core, one thing that is very strong is a conviction or optimism that architecture can actually counter some of the contemporary disorientation we see and can stand for values that are fundamental—a sense of shared habitation, or shared separation even, as opposed to architecture that embodies a chaotic, hopeless, contemporary society.
WK There are architects who find that the only appropriate response to the current context is to rebel…or to reflect chaos.
BY One thing that’s really unfortunate is that the ideas that people like Charles Moore and Robert Venturi were expressing 30 years ago, about fundamental traditions of inhabiting places—quite rebellious at the time—were taken by some people to be just about historicism. What they’re really about is basic human needs and aspirations and desires. Just because the Machine Age followed the Agrarian Age and is followed by the Information Age and chaos theory doesn’t mean that we don’t biologically and emotionally and spiritually still have very fundamental needs that architecture can satisfy. I think we’re at our best when we’re expressing not just a superficial image of a place, but really connecting to its deeper spirit and history.
WK And does this relate to style?
BY The debate now is not necessarily between Modernism and something that is historically connected. I think it’s more of a discussion about architecture that is still based on humanism, versus architecture that is based on something else, whether it’s the analogy of the machine or the analogy of abstract linguistic theory. I think you can find lots of “Modern” architecture, like a lot of Tadao Ando’s work, that is very beautifully connected to place, where there’s a sense of inhabitation and procession. It’s unfortunate the media has ended up making this kind of modernism versus Post-Modernism argument. You can cut through and find historicist work that doesn’t make wonderful places and very modern work that does.
JR Our interest in history, in valued places, is both emotional and analytic. I guess for us the creation of a place, whether it’s light coming through the window, or movement across a landscape, is the experience. You don’t need to create an analogy to that. The order should inform the experience, rather than substitute for it.
BY There’s a sort of discipline related to geometry as one aspect, or abstraction related to the land as another aspect. I think something that we do very well is to discover how form roots itself to the experience of the land and the landscape.
WK And where does history enter the work?
BY We’re free to draw on history as a sort of continuum. Here we are in 1996, we’re part of that continuum, and we can equally look for inspiration in the year 20 B.C., or the year 1450,1920, or 1996. There’s not necessarily a predetermined positive or negative about any one of those periods. But I think the vernacular is a big influence in the
sense that there are a lot of principles in vernacular architecture that are essentially what we’re talking about. It’s about how people make places that they understand in relation to places they know, and their culture, and themselves. So when you look at hill towns, for example, or places in Mexico—places made over time by many people—there’s an incredible wonder and richness in terms of architecture.
JR There’s also a kind of pragmatic simplicity about vernacular architecture that I think becomes more and more influential for us.
BY One thing we’re not is ideological.
WK And yet while it seems clear that Moore Ruble Yudell’s work isn’t meant to be distressing or profoundly alienating— the idea is not simply to make work that reinforces everybody’s expectations or preconceptions. Can you both talk about that?
BY Originality comes from a process of exploring, that within the design process there’s a dynamic of conversation and critiquing built-in—it’s almost as if we’re sketching when we’re talking, or talking when we’re sketching. It’s a kind of conversation that builds on itself and creates a broader image of greater depth.
JR And as Buzz said earlier, we’re not trying 10 reach point where we’re all trying to do one thing. We don’t believe there is one way to respond to any problem. But we are doing things in an interactive way. Someone sketches an idea, and that goes to someone else who has his or her take on it, and maybe does something unexpected with it. It becomes an interesting process.
BY As an aside, I think it’s interesting that all architects collaborate… it’s just that a lot of them don’t think they do.
JR Within collaboration, the overall direction comes from an evolving sense of appropriateness. Each project develops a kind of a story or a set of themes, and that begins to tell you what to do next.
JR One of the things that we feel good about, in terms of our built work, is that people value it. Part of the optimism, or the positive, affirmative part, is that we find people have values invested in the architecture that will last. People who have been involved in the design process value the building—it means a lot to them. One indicator of this is that they take care of the buildings. So we’re working, I think, very much towards finding those kinds of fundamental values that people can bring to architecture and which will live long past the design and construction process.
WK For the past 15 years or so, you have used a technique of client workshops, in which you design a variety of exercises to help institutional clients communicate their aspirations for a building. You’ve both talked about these work sessions as one way of discovering certain kinds of values and connections. How does this collaboration with the client contribute to the architecture?
JR That’s a good point to make…about the workshops: they extend collaboration as a process—which means individuals can take part, but it also becomes a way of exploring place. The workshops are about helping us discover what values are invested in places by people who are there or who belong there—whether it’s a campus, or a town, or a house. Then it’s not just our reactions as visitors or as architects that go into the design. I ink the collaboration in the workshop sense is a way of getting a lot more depth to what is valued in a place, and therefore becomes a design instrument.
BY This relates to another theme about collaboration, which is that underlying the ability to collaborate is a sense that one can learn. One doesn’t know everything about a place, whether it’s Oregon, or Berlin, or Taiwan. Or even amongst ourselves, critiquing or bouncing ideas off each other, we enjoy hearing each other’s partially formulated ideas…creativity isn’t a finite entity, and doesn’t have to be a one-man show.
WK Do you think this interchange—which is clearly so much a part of the design process—gets expressed in the buildings?
JR There is a kind of community spirit, almost like something that allows you to participate, as opposed to a building that just exists on its own, reflecting on its own perfect order, which doesn’t need anything else.
BY One thing that seems to happen quite often is that we find an interstitial space or places of connection in a plan, and see them as sort of living, rich places, sometimes with uses we hadn’t thought of. Oftentimes, this is how we shape spaces between buildings, or the spaces beside buildings. It’s a way of taking what would have been circulation space and collecting it in such a way that it becomes a place of community.
JR This is reminding me of something I remember encountering when I was in the Peace Corps in Tunisia…which is that we thought a lot about why the Tunisians, whenever they would greet each other or sit down to do some business, would spend so much time just chatting and having tea and doing all these other things. Someone explained that the fact of two people sitting down together to talk to each other and have a meeting was more important than any particular subject they might have to talk about. And so you don’t just jump into the business at hand. You exchange respect and celebrate the fact that here is one person and another person sitting down to meet each other and to spend time together. This is one of the most important things that buildings can do. They can remind us that we’re gathering together, and that’s actually as important as anything we might do afterwards.
BY Community itself is the ultimate function.
WK In certain projects you have been asked to create the entire place yourself, in some of the master plans for entire campuses, for example. What have become the generating ideas for these projects?
JR I think of a campus as a place where in a very abstract or general way, order and hierarchy are important. There should be a center. There should be a place where the whole thing started, on which everything else builds.
WK You root the community in a particular place.
JR Yes, and in the process we’re not inclined to ride roughshod over lots of little traces that are on the site. When we first came to places like Karow, Germany, or Dong-Hwa, Taiwan, there were some very specific things in the site, and there was also a kind of blankness because we were planning on what were basically big, wide-open fields. We had to look extra hard and had to be very quiet and listen to qualities that weren’t necessarily shouting at us the way they might, say, on the University of Maryland campus. I think it’s a process of refining latent forms and making them stronger. And I guess the fewer things there are, the more a certain feature of the site becomes an important theme, because it’s available. At Dong-Hwa it was just the fact that there was a river near the site. This confrontation of the formal with a kind of craggy landscape suited us very well because we’ve always liked the idea of order and accident somehow interweaving and affecting each other.
BY One of the main themes of our work is basically a dialectic: there’s a tension between different kinds of order on the one hand, and the events of chance and circumstance on the other. The fundamental and the circumstantial, if you will. And we think that’s not just an arbitrary dichotomy, because each of those is a potent and meaningful aspect of life. Fundamentals are kind of timeless and beautiful things that people connect to, and the circumstantial things are not just arbitrary but relate to a particular place in time and space. In that sense the opportunity for making a synthesis out of this dialectic comes from two very different parts of the universe—order and accident— that we believe are both part of the whole. Both essential, and both a part of everyday life.
JR That’s why the original site as a place is so important to us: given a choice between real accidents and pretend accidents, we’d rather work with the real accidents.□
Interview with Buzz Yudell and John Ruble, by Wendy Kohn
Campus & Community: 140-144
WENDY KOHN You have compared Moore Ruble Yudell’s design process to jazz improvisation. How does this work?
BUZZ YUDELL Well, if you look at a wonderful jazz group, it tends to be four or five very talented musicians who may have slightly different ways of seeing things but also tend to agree on certain things. It’s not a paradigm of collectivism versus a single artist hero. It’s a group of artists working together. It’s what we agree on that allows the differences to come into play.
WK In other words, you don’t have someone sitting at a piano just randomly playing the keys.
BY I think we have a fairly broad set of shared values about the humanistic principles of architecture. You could talk about a number of underlying beliefs that I think are shared throughout the office—about connecting to place, connecting to people, about architecture that is connected to tradition but also explores contemporary art and culture… yet always coming back to how buildings are places and are inhabited at various scales.
JOHN RUBLE That’s true, although I think that a lot of the things we do on the very specific level of design come from what Charles Moore described as enthusiasms, or things that you personally respond to. We have a lot in common here as well, in terms of places we’ve seen that we like…. The enthusiasms that influence what we do on one project or another come out of experiencing places we all admire.
WK So there’s a context within which the exploration occurs—a sense of harmony—of what has value.
BY At the core, one thing that is very strong is a conviction or optimism that architecture can actually counter some of the contemporary disorientation we see and can stand for values that are fundamental—a sense of shared habitation, or shared separation even, as opposed to architecture that embodies a chaotic, hopeless, contemporary society.
WK There are architects who find that the only appropriate response to the current context is to rebel…or to reflect chaos.
BY One thing that’s really unfortunate is that the ideas that people like Charles Moore and Robert Venturi were expressing 30 years ago, about fundamental traditions of inhabiting places—quite rebellious at the time—were taken by some people to be just about historicism. What they’re really about is basic human needs and aspirations and desires. Just because the Machine Age followed the Agrarian Age and is followed by the Information Age and chaos theory doesn’t mean that we don’t biologically and emotionally and spiritually still have very fundamental needs that architecture can satisfy. I think we’re at our best when we’re expressing not just a superficial image of a place, but really connecting to its deeper spirit and history.
WK And does this relate to style?
BY The debate now is not necessarily between Modernism and something that is historically connected. I think it’s more of a discussion about architecture that is still based on humanism, versus architecture that is based on something else, whether it’s the analogy of the machine or the analogy of abstract linguistic theory. I think you can find lots of “Modern” architecture, like a lot of Tadao Ando’s work, that is very beautifully connected to place, where there’s a sense of inhabitation and procession. It’s unfortunate the media has ended up making this kind of modernism versus Post-Modernism argument. You can cut through and find historicist work that doesn’t make wonderful places and very modern work that does.
JR Our interest in history, in valued places, is both emotional and analytic. I guess for us the creation of a place, whether it’s light coming through the window, or movement across a landscape, is the experience. You don’t need to create an analogy to that. The order should inform the experience, rather than substitute for it.
BY There’s a sort of discipline related to geometry as one aspect, or abstraction related to the land as another aspect. I think something that we do very well is to discover how form roots itself to the experience of the land and the landscape.
WK And where does history enter the work?
BY We’re free to draw on history as a sort of continuum. Here we are in 1996, we’re part of that continuum, and we can equally look for inspiration in the year 20 B.C., or the year 1450,1920, or 1996. There’s not necessarily a predetermined positive or negative about any one of those periods. But I think the vernacular is a big influence in the
sense that there are a lot of principles in vernacular architecture that are essentially what we’re talking about. It’s about how people make places that they understand in relation to places they know, and their culture, and themselves. So when you look at hill towns, for example, or places in Mexico—places made over time by many people—there’s an incredible wonder and richness in terms of architecture.
JR There’s also a kind of pragmatic simplicity about vernacular architecture that I think becomes more and more influential for us.
BY One thing we’re not is ideological.
WK And yet while it seems clear that Moore Ruble Yudell’s work isn’t meant to be distressing or profoundly alienating— the idea is not simply to make work that reinforces everybody’s expectations or preconceptions. Can you both talk about that?
BY Originality comes from a process of exploring, that within the design process there’s a dynamic of conversation and critiquing built-in—it’s almost as if we’re sketching when we’re talking, or talking when we’re sketching. It’s a kind of conversation that builds on itself and creates a broader image of greater depth.
JR And as Buzz said earlier, we’re not trying 10 reach point where we’re all trying to do one thing. We don’t believe there is one way to respond to any problem. But we are doing things in an interactive way. Someone sketches an idea, and that goes to someone else who has his or her take on it, and maybe does something unexpected with it. It becomes an interesting process.
BY As an aside, I think it’s interesting that all architects collaborate… it’s just that a lot of them don’t think they do.
JR Within collaboration, the overall direction comes from an evolving sense of appropriateness. Each project develops a kind of a story or a set of themes, and that begins to tell you what to do next.
JR One of the things that we feel good about, in terms of our built work, is that people value it. Part of the optimism, or the positive, affirmative part, is that we find people have values invested in the architecture that will last. People who have been involved in the design process value the building—it means a lot to them. One indicator of this is that they take care of the buildings. So we’re working, I think, very much towards finding those kinds of fundamental values that people can bring to architecture and which will live long past the design and construction process.
WK For the past 15 years or so, you have used a technique of client workshops, in which you design a variety of exercises to help institutional clients communicate their aspirations for a building. You’ve both talked about these work sessions as one way of discovering certain kinds of values and connections. How does this collaboration with the client contribute to the architecture?
JR That’s a good point to make…about the workshops: they extend collaboration as a process—which means individuals can take part, but it also becomes a way of exploring place. The workshops are about helping us discover what values are invested in places by people who are there or who belong there—whether it’s a campus, or a town, or a house. Then it’s not just our reactions as visitors or as architects that go into the design. I ink the collaboration in the workshop sense is a way of getting a lot more depth to what is valued in a place, and therefore becomes a design instrument.
BY This relates to another theme about collaboration, which is that underlying the ability to collaborate is a sense that one can learn. One doesn’t know everything about a place, whether it’s Oregon, or Berlin, or Taiwan. Or even amongst ourselves, critiquing or bouncing ideas off each other, we enjoy hearing each other’s partially formulated ideas…creativity isn’t a finite entity, and doesn’t have to be a one-man show.
WK Do you think this interchange—which is clearly so much a part of the design process—gets expressed in the buildings?
JR There is a kind of community spirit, almost like something that allows you to participate, as opposed to a building that just exists on its own, reflecting on its own perfect order, which doesn’t need anything else.
BY One thing that seems to happen quite often is that we find an interstitial space or places of connection in a plan, and see them as sort of living, rich places, sometimes with uses we hadn’t thought of. Oftentimes, this is how we shape spaces between buildings, or the spaces beside buildings. It’s a way of taking what would have been circulation space and collecting it in such a way that it becomes a place of community.
JR This is reminding me of something I remember encountering when I was in the Peace Corps in Tunisia…which is that we thought a lot about why the Tunisians, whenever they would greet each other or sit down to do some business, would spend so much time just chatting and having tea and doing all these other things. Someone explained that the fact of two people sitting down together to talk to each other and have a meeting was more important than any particular subject they might have to talk about. And so you don’t just jump into the business at hand. You exchange respect and celebrate the fact that here is one person and another person sitting down to meet each other and to spend time together. This is one of the most important things that buildings can do. They can remind us that we’re gathering together, and that’s actually as important as anything we might do afterwards.
BY Community itself is the ultimate function.
WK In certain projects you have been asked to create the entire place yourself, in some of the master plans for entire campuses, for example. What have become the generating ideas for these projects?
JR I think of a campus as a place where in a very abstract or general way, order and hierarchy are important. There should be a center. There should be a place where the whole thing started, on which everything else builds.
WK You root the community in a particular place.
JR Yes, and in the process we’re not inclined to ride roughshod over lots of little traces that are on the site. When we first came to places like Karow, Germany, or Dong-Hwa, Taiwan, there were some very specific things in the site, and there was also a kind of blankness because we were planning on what were basically big, wide-open fields. We had to look extra hard and had to be very quiet and listen to qualities that weren’t necessarily shouting at us the way they might, say, on the University of Maryland campus. I think it’s a process of refining latent forms and making them stronger. And I guess the fewer things there are, the more a certain feature of the site becomes an important theme, because it’s available. At Dong-Hwa it was just the fact that there was a river near the site. This confrontation of the formal with a kind of craggy landscape suited us very well because we’ve always liked the idea of order and accident somehow interweaving and affecting each other.
BY One of the main themes of our work is basically a dialectic: there’s a tension between different kinds of order on the one hand, and the events of chance and circumstance on the other. The fundamental and the circumstantial, if you will. And we think that’s not just an arbitrary dichotomy, because each of those is a potent and meaningful aspect of life. Fundamentals are kind of timeless and beautiful things that people connect to, and the circumstantial things are not just arbitrary but relate to a particular place in time and space. In that sense the opportunity for making a synthesis out of this dialectic comes from two very different parts of the universe—order and accident— that we believe are both part of the whole. Both essential, and both a part of everyday life.
JR That’s why the original site as a place is so important to us: given a choice between real accidents and pretend accidents, we’d rather work with the real accidents.□