Introduction

In general architectural discourse, movement in architecture is one of those many notions bandied about without any real specificity or complexity. However, in the work of Michael Maltzan, movement is continually seen as a propelling agent, allowed to influence, almost at will, morphology, spatial and programmatic composition, identity, and ultimately one' understanding of the project. This can be traced back to a fundamental belief that the potential for conceptual complexity lies foremost in the ongoing and cumulative experience born out one's engagement with, and movement through, architecture. This is an idea that places the focus on the viewer not the viewed, prioritizing affect over effect, ultimately allowing for a truly open exploration of possible outcomes. The end result is a trajectory of work that is seeks to explore this fundamental element of architecture - movement - in ways which is truly unique in contemporary practice. Here we explore the topic with Maltzan himself.

Interview

(Brian Cavanaugh) I guess the best place is to start by just asking a simple question, when one talks of movement in architecture what does that mean to you? Has your thinking about movement evolved over time?

(Michael Maltzan) The idea of movement has evolved in my work as it's progressed and I think that the techniques that are being used to either produce movement or represent movement have evolved quite significantly in the work. But I think at the foundation the goal, and in many ways the ambition of being involved in it, is exactly the same. That it's really about how the architecture can both find ways and sponsor ways to create a more active engagement with the building participant. And that can mean a single person who's moving through the building, that can mean it's position in terms of a larger context in the City, as well as thing that produces not only individual experience's, but a set of potential relation ships in the building that become very important.

In the beginning when I first interested in it [movement], it came out of thinking about ways in which at the time contemporary sculpture was trying to actively engage a similar set of issues, and how the sculpture could be a kind of mediating element - in certain artist's cases - between context or the surrounding frame of the sculpture and the viewer. And in that way, the thinking was in the lineage of modernism. That there was a kind of one-to-one relationship between apprehending the sculpture and its context, and that movement was really an animating quality.

I think as I have continued to think about this my sense of it has changed. In terms of the way movement does or does not control the pathway or itinerary of the viewer. So maybe that is one of the biggest distinctions, movement in my mind has gone from a sort of itinerary based idea to a much more open and discursive idea of what that can provoke in the building.

(BC) It would seem movement as a potentially radicalizing agent in the work has become more prevalent - Harvard/Westlake to Kidspace to Canadian Museum for Human Rights for example. More and more the work recognizes, or supports, a broader notion of movement.

(MM) I think that's right. This idea of movement is in some ways a part of modernism and difficult to categorize it in such clean historical terms, in such a clean lineage of ideas, but certainly one can look to some of the earlier forms of movement in terms of planning. You can look at things like the English picturesque garden and the idea of the promenade, and then from there one can make a reasonable jump to many of the things Corbusier was exploring in terms of the way the promenade became a kind of animating, and in a sense, singular itinerary or pathway through a particular building; and that was a kind of armature or datum for the organizing the morphological, and in his case, almost typological characteristics of the building.

I think in the earlier projects I was probably looking to something, in a sense, more similar to that way of thinking about movement. Partially I think, it came out of a very strong concern, observation, that I felt that an active engagement with architecture, in a deep way, was loosing ground to larger formal issues and the singularity of the object. This was something I was very critical of. And again, I was looking for ways to put the viewer back into a participatory role in the experience of the building. I thought that idea of movement was a way in which you could do two things. One, you could use it as a kind of armature for ways of structuring the building or structuring urbanism. But also, you could use it to insist on completeness of the experience or understanding of the building only happening by putting together an unfolding set of experiences over the course of moving through the building so that in a way, and again in a kind of modern way, that the temporal dimension of experiencing the building was written into its architecture.

I have become increasingly critical, and even suspicious, of that in the last 3 to 4 years of the work and I think my concern or criticism of thinking about movement in this way coincides, to a certain extent, to my concerns about the way in which public space - experiential space - is becoming more heavily controlled. It was never my intention in the work that a kind of narrative based, or promenade based sense of movement would act as a controlling agent of one's experience, but I can see now where that would be a valid criticism of that as an idea or strategy. I think the work has moved increasingly to something in which a more open series of potential systems or webs of movement in and across a building or urban space are possible. This as a way to try and reinforce what I still think is important about that idea, in terms of experience of space, but to begin to create an idea or structure of movement that is much more difficult to control. So you can see in a project like Fresno where the ground plane has been completely evacuated. Movement in, across, and through the site is the thing which produces an understanding of a whole set of relationships in the building and to the character of the site, the place, the city. But you can move to, through, and around that experience a completely open way.

(BC) To follow-up on Fresno, and I would also bring up the Sonoma County Museum in this regard, this relationship between movement, both internal and external, and a building's form does become quite complex, and in fact, the relationship between the two often creates a third "in-between" condition, or threshold, which then becomes that less-controlled space you mentioned.

(MM) I have been interested in threshold conditions, or in a sense, liminal conditions in the work for a long time; and increasingly I have thought of that threshold not just as a something you move across, but rather as a line that gets expanded and becomes a space to occupy. This idea has found its way into a number of projects. Its in those kinds of spatial conditions where you are really moving from one type of public space to another, and that other space - the liminal space - does have a series of characteristics and qualities, where the control of the entities on both sides is challenged. Because of this I think it's a very interesting space to try and expand, to create, this level of openness or lack of control. That's really where that [less controlled] space can reside. But I think this idea is having a real effect on other parts of the architecture in a way that it didn't previously. So for instance, we are looking more and more at the way in which the facades of the buildings are being made and how those façades can begin to work, through movement, optically really, so that things like perspective are no longer just spatial, but they are trapped in this kind of zone of the façade as a way of animating your position - your experience with the building at a series of finer grains or textures in the building. And in a way, I have begun to think about the relationship in our work between a kind of modernist idea of elevation as being more tradition - something that is a projection of the internal spatial and pragmatic functional characteristics, toward something probably closer to a more classical sense of façade. Not in the decorative, metaphorical, or allegorical sense, but really in the way the walls, the container, stand on their own. Not necessarily projecting what is happening on such a one-to-one relationship with the interior but really being much more about the way in which the depth of space works optically between the viewer as you move around the building. And, so you see that in recent work like Leona Drive.

(BC) Yes, with Leona you can see that there are certain views or positions where the building really locks itself into position and then as one moves around the site the building composition becomes destabilized.

(MM) That really had to do with two things. One, it had to do absolutely with that character or quality of osculating between the tangible and known and then at times becoming much more complex and destabilized. It's also for me in that particular project very much about thinking about the history of the house in the way the villa - from Palladio to Corb - is often a kind of typology, not necessarily urban, that you have to travel to. So the entire procession, the movement to it, the sequence to it, influences how the building is initially accepted. And then how you understand the building in its surroundings once you are there has been very much on my mind.

(BC) Let me just go back to something you mentioned a couple of times. That is, responding to specific issues of movement for any of the given projects can be a method to lock them into a larger context - Fresno, Leona Drive, and maybe the project where this can be most clearly see MoMAQNS, that project is so much about the 7 train, Manhattan, and the institution moving out to Queens. By hanging almost the entire concept on this allowed you to take this isolated site and connect it to a much more expansive context.

That in combination with this idea of the threshold you spoke of as a space not to just move across but move through, again thinking out QNS, you can see movement as a mechanism to actually respond to site.

(MM) I think that's right. I think in many ways this [MoMA QNS] is where it first came from - how this has become such a characteristic exploration in my work. When I first began to think about this I was still in undergraduate school. I was very concerned that many of the design/planning strategies at the time were being produced by working solely on the 2-Deminsional plan and there was a level of abstraction there from the actual characteristics of the place. You could make the argument the technique was what was important the actual context or site was really secondary and abstracted from that technique so you could work in New York, Atlanta, or Paris. In a sense, it was objective. I was interested in a subjective approach to working in the city. One way to do that was to begin to think about strategies that were being produced from eye level. That started me into an investigation of perspective and very quickly moved to a way of thinking about perspective in a kind of filmic idea of moving through space, rather than from the kind of one-point perspective.

Increasingly I have been interested in how you create a series of deep connections with these sites, their characteristics. But do so in a way that doesn't mimic those characteristics; and at times be critical of them, radicalize them, and change them in some way that they become, if not contentious, apparent. And, in a project like MoMA I think movement was doing that to a large extent. That building could not be seen in isolation. Its impact, influence, its constituency was much broader that that particular corner of the city and that recognition was built into the DNA of the architecture. The recognition there was this much larger context that the building was part of. And, in this particular case this idea of movement was, quite literally, a way of making that connection.

I think in other cases it forces you to contend with the characteristics of the surrounding site and to acknowledge the characteristics of the surrounding site and their influence on the architecture or particular building we are working on. And, to read that in a more complex way. So, I think again, that relates to this idea of movement.

In many ways it's one of the problems for me in representing any of our projects in photographs because the photograph is in many ways antithetical to the entire idea or ambitions of those types of relationships.

(BC) As you were talking I was thinking, in retrospect, I actually don't know how one would have responded successfully to the [design] problem presented by MoMA QNS without taking on board movement. Again, I think the relative isolation, the characteristics of the site, and the problem of creating a temporary institution demanded a response anchored to movement.

(MM) Well, I think that project is one were an idea of movement operates in a variety of different ways.

First, you literally have the majority of the patrons coming on the 7 train. So that experience is so iconic, moving across those roofs, moving through Queens, through Long Island to the site, in a sense, is so intense its impossible to imagine denying that. Two, I think the fact that it was a temporary project was a given condition. The idea of making something look like it was temporary was completely disinteresting to me. But the idea of you being temporary, really a temporal condition, was much more interesting. Because of one, it's relationship to modernism, and two, the way that idea challenges one of the most foundational ideas of museums in general - permanence. So it had the ability to work at a broad and large scale in terms of the experience of the space and the architecture itself. But also, it really operated at a critical level in questioning the museum institution itself; exploring what an institution like that means. And, we were fortunate because it was this temporary project and so there was a lot more latitude that we were given, but I think much of what happened there really comes out of attempting to explore those two issues through this one kind of general idea.

The roof sign was about the train, that the experience of those letters recombining was a puzzle you could only put together by moving transversely across the broader roofscape. But it was also very much about the institution and the supposed dynamic quality of a modern institution. That the very logo, the brand of that institution, those four letters which are so iconographic, through that experience was destabilized at times and made unreadable. Allowing that to happen to the very identity of the institution was the set-up for the experience of the building.

(BC) Before we stop, let's talk briefly about the Kidspace Children's Museum. You can't really have this discussion without talking about it and its educational mandate - and your recognition that movement could provide multiple armatures for learning.

(MM) I think that project, Kidspace, is important in that, I think you could say, and to a certain extent MoMA, are really projects that both bind and separate the early work from where the work is going now, in terms of their relationship to exactly this relationship to movement. Kidspace had very specific site characteristics, qualities of form which had to do with existing buildings - I'm not really going to go into that so much - that do play out in this issue though. But the most important thing there was this conceptual framework they were interested in that comes directly from Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard, who has written extensively about what he describes as a theory of multiple intelligences, the idea that everybody, children in particular, have many different styles of learning. But really different techniques of apprehension. That the problem in most educational systems is that there is a homogeneity, a least common denominator aspect to the way kids are educated, which comes from the desire to quantify and test, to create a datum that you can measure all students against; which Kidspace is constitutionally opposed to. So what we were looking at in that building was both how you could provide for sequential experiences, a kind of narrative loop, and put together all of the individual experiences, but more importantly, for those coming back to the museum on a regular basis, that there were a series of short circuits, short cuts, and multiple possibilities for moving directly to the areas of content and areas with different types of learning engagement, like tactile learners, visual learners, audio learners. They would allow you to go directly to those areas which, in a way, best exemplify the way in which you learn and interact with information. The complexity there is you are trying to structure an architecture, you are trying to structure an experience through extremely open, non-hierarchical, ordering system, which is antithetical to what most architecture tries to produce where you are trying to coalesce things around a much more identifiable and singular - hierarchical - ordering system. So there you really have the possibility of extending to all these different areas which have a significant impact on form.