writings + texts
Interview: Michael Rotondi and Clark Stevens with Wayne Fujii
GA Houses 34 / March 1992
On the New Jersey House (qwfk) and the RoTo Design Process
​
​
GA: Which project do you consider to be RoTo’s first work?
​
MR: Probably the genesis for the works we are doing now, and a bridge project between Morphosis and RoTo, is the New Jersey House. It brought together a number of things Clark and I had been independently thinking about. I think, in abstraction, what we were both interested in was developing what we called the ordering systems of the building, and in this building, for the first time in all of my years, the ordering system became so overt that it was actually drawn as the kind of geometric code. The geometry was not only based in abstract numerical relationship, but also in the spatial relationships of the land itself. It was drawing the movement of somebody walking the site and imagining where the building would be situated, then moving into the building and having the site begin to unfold. Those were all drawn as points and lines both in plan and in section. I think that building was the first time that Clark and I began to talk about ordering systems as being abstract and natural. And with the current Sinte Gleska Indian University project, the natural is being pushed toward a third area that encompasses the prior two: the mythological, which is basically the relationship between the abstraction of the natural with the stories that emerge out of that. That is what creation myths are about.
GA: The term indigenous comes to my mind as I listen to the description of your design process; for the people, by the people, of the land, the site…
MR: The term that we use is the very basis of society itself, which is reciprocity. It is an honest give and take, and the objective is to keep things in dynamic balance, which means that you are completely open. You look and you listen before you speak. You speak, and you can speak with a very strong will, but then incorporate everything that you have heard and listen when the sound comes back. I think that is the key ingredient in not becoming dominant in any relationship. A relationship between you and the land, the relationship between you and the building, the relationship between you and another person. Reciprocity is key.
​
One time, in one of my travels, I decided not to have an itinerary, just an idea of the things I wanted to experience. What I used as a guide was the journal of Marco Polo. I was not following his map, but his courage of making decisions about what you want to do and having to search for whatever it is. What I began to think about at that time was how you can set some guidelines for the direction you want to go in, but be completely open to whatever it is you are discovering along the way - continually constructing a picture of what it is you’re immediately immersed in, but at the same time thinking about how this fits into the bigger context of what you are searching for. That creative process can be used in traveling; it can be used in making a building. I think our process has been one of trying to be as inclusive as possible, while at the same time continually bringing all of this information to closure by constructing something that we can see as a test of what it is we are attempting to do. So, it is not really being goal-oriented in the conventional sense. It is bringing things to temporary closure, but then as soon as it all closes, the lines diverge again and they go back out, and then we bring them together to converge, then they diverge as soon as they cross, and it keeps on going. It is like having two sign curves crossing each other continuously. Actually, it is like a double helix. Maybe that is the way the information in DNA works. The double helix which we draw as the final condition may be the process of information coming in and out of the zone of interference.
.jpg)
​
​
CS: There is one other thing that I think is worth mentioning about the traditional projects. This may even go back to the Reno House, because that is what we looked at briefly before starting the NJ House. And that is the idea of starting to make space before you taint yourself with geometry, that is, before you get very committed. In this case, the client had a very detailed program of activity of what he imagined there, and of the relationships between individuals and his family. It was very well defined, so it seemed reasonable to start with that information independent of the formal information the site provided. We asked, “Okay, how do we structure these relationships, how do we make something interesting or spatially unique out of these relationships?” So we created little pavilions that were completely independent of the site or of geometric rules. Combining these pavilions with the ordering that was beginning to develop on the site started to suggest a configuration. That exercise of starting with events independent of any prescriptive about site or structure, although it is very much about the site and the client, continues. At the Carlson House, we asked, “What would really be great to have happen here, that cannot happen anywhere else, based on the materials we have?” We did not worry about whether it might be bizarre or out of scale or homely or graphically incorrect, we suspended that concern for a period of time to make sure that potential activities and exciting possibilities got into the project. They were not edited too early because of some other idea about formal structure. We tried to find a formal structure to support those events, rather than developing form for form’s sake then trying to design life into the structure that we created.
MR: The Reno House had a unique program that could be interpreted in four different ways. It was a house for a young banker who had an outline of everything he wanted to accomplish in his life at different phases, which included the house at this phase. He was just beginning to resurrect his Italian heritage, so he was trying to be as Old World Italian as he could. It was a house on a really difficult site climatically, because of the strong winds throughout the year and wide range of temperatures. The other component was that he was a triathlete, so he was always swimming, biking, and running. Initially, what was difficult in my mind was to put all of this together and make sense of it. What we decided to do was pretend that the client was only one of these things, and to model the experience of the building and the site in four very distinct ways. We actually modeled them in cardboard. We looked at them, analyzed them, and then started to take bits and pieces of them and put them back together. We decided to approach the NJ House in the same way. We would have modeling of experience, the experience of one person to another person, of the person to the site, as well as the person to the building, and the form would come out of the experiences. The modeling exercise was a way of visualizing all the things we might have just talked about and diagrammed on paper. That tends to be a way we still work. We model experience and form separately and concurrently, as a way of looking critically and analyzing. But it is always about being the person who is in the building, experiencing the building or around the building on the site. There is a means for them to figure out the things we were thinking about, so it is not meant to be misunderstood or vague.
New Jersey House / qwfk
Reno House
GA: Describe the site for us, and how you gather information from it.
MR: The first thing, if you did not know anything else about how to start a project like this, is to experience the site and look at what the site has to offer. It has a forest, it has a very large grassy plane, it has a road on the front site with very large trees that define the road like a country road, and then walking on to the site on the edge of the forest or in the plane of grass field, the forest turns direction and heads down into a very large valley with a view that is about 27 miles out to the next hills. You want to place the house to experience all this and not to destroy it. It became clear in the beginning when we both looked at it that the house would not be set on the road where it is normally set, that it would be set up to where the view is. But it was not just about the view, it was about experiencing the forest and the large grassy fields.
​
CS: We also talked about it as completing certain things. The house completes the slope, it completes the forest. One part of the forest has a partially eroded corner. That erosion corresponded to a kind of peninsula, a piece of topography that was flowing down the hill and creating somewhat of a more level area compared to the other condition around it, which was a valley. You move through those conditions as you enter the site along a bridle path which has been there for many, many years. We made a very specific map of the place; every tree, every diameter, every relationship, every spacing, the degree to which the slope changes over time if you move in one direction or another. As we were doing this experiential modeling and walking and talking, we were also doing an analysis of the place, looking and giving meaning to very specific conditions about the site that start to break down at a smaller and smaller scale. To the point where you are asking questions like, Why is the grass a little thinner here than here? Is that based on just not getting enough light, or is there a change in the soil condition underneath? You try and define all the structures that are obvious, and ones that are not but might become meaningful later. The mythological aspect of the work, as Michael mentioned, comes out of realism. It comes out of looking hard at something and just seeing more and more every time you look, and starting to notice relationships that you begin to think might be the way stories get written about the place. Myths come into being simply by knowing what is already there.
MR: What is absolutely essential to understand about this process is that both Clark and I have a profound belief that the most sophisticated instrument of all for recording information is the human body itself. When you are walking a site, it is like walking through one of the gardens in Kyoto. You could look at them photographs, in plans and in drawings, but it is not until you feel the temperature on your skin, smell the air, and feel the qualities of the space and the dimensions of the space that the body begins to record information, your body chemistry kicks in. If you are aware of all the potential information that is present, you can use the body as a means of receiving information, of collating that information, and of putting it into memory so you know what the space exactly feels like. Then everything you draw on the plan, you can visualize three dimensionally in your mind. When we start to draw after having walked the site (it usually starts in sketch form), we are expressing the physical experience by drawing those lines.
New Jersey House - surrounding landscape
CS: There is always a testing of any abstract exercise. In the studio we draw and model and begin to find relationships in drawings and maps of something that you suspect might really lead to an experience. You will go back to the site and say, “I discovered this, but is it really important?” If I set up an architecture to expose this, would someone have an experience of it? If there is not enough coming together that would allow them to feel something, it would be just another piece of information creating a complexity that is not meaningful. The body is always the testing instrument of the abstract systems we develop.
MR: The floor plan isn’t just the plan within the walls, the floor plan is the property line and in many instances even beyond the property line. The Barcelona Pavilion was that. At the Barcelona Pavilion when you are inside you are also outside. Everything is extending. Frank Lloyd Wright did the same thing. The houses that extend from within to without, and that all coalesces in the hearth. In the NJ House it happens to be the most solid piece in the building, made out of stone of the earth. The stone from the site is the fireplace and that is a very direct quote from Frank Lloyd Wright.
CS: We did not initially know that we were going to dig and find a rock shelf and come up with stone that was suitable for using in that way. The discovery process continues to happen as you are starting to mark the site and dig it out. You change directions sometimes based on what you find. You are always looking. There is always a new experience every time you take a step in the process. We try and find ways to let that filter into the structure, and usually it pushes it one direction or another. It links with something else and we find ourselves saying, “I wasn’t sure about this, but definitely now it makes sense to move the project in this direction.”
New Jersey House - interior
GA: Michael, being a Californian, how did you cope with four seasons in New Jersey?
MR: Making visits at four seasons. I knew that it gets cold, I knew it gets hot and humid, and I knew when it gets hot and humid there are a lot of bugs. I knew there is a beautiful springtime and a beautiful autumn. I made a point to visit the site in different seasons over a period of a year while we were working on the design of the building. Even though I was imagining what the experience was going to be each time, it was really more powerful. The most obvious shift for me was the construction technique. It is a 100 year house. Everything there, all the materials tuck behind and through other materials in order to keep out the extreme elements. It is heavily insulated, so it is built as an East Coast house.
GA: You named the NJ House qwfk. What do these letters stand for?
MR: There is a book about the Big Bang written by Calvino, and it is all about the process of the universe forming. The owner did not want his name on the house, so when we were trying to think of a name for the house we gave it the name of the protagonist in this story. It is all consonants and no vowels because nothing has been formed in the universe yet. You cannot really pronounce it. But we were able to turn it into an acronym using a number of terms or words that the client gave us. It was fun…he likened himself after Don Quixote, and he kept on saying to make it warm and fun and country. When we started the project, "country" for the client was bordering on tacky a bit, [for instance] he would show us one of his log tables cut in half with a piece of glass. It was "Kountry" with a K. So, it became: “Quixote’s Warm Fun Kountry House.”
GA: What was the client’s role in the design process?
MR: The client had given us their program on paper, but talking with them, we asked them to describe their life in more detail. I think we are learning more about how to incorporate the client the same way we incorporate ideas into the project. The client in some ways becomes the principal in the project, they become part of the collaborative team.
GA: I understand he is in the management consulting business. Did he understand the complexity of your design process from the beginning?
MR: He was open to complexity. The way he saw complexity had to do with business organization. A complex hierarchical system can be an aesthetic system, it can be a human system, or it can be a mechanical system. Like when you diagram moving parts in an engine, there was a time when people were diagramming society as if it was a machine. The people were interchangeable with gears. [Now] new business paradigms have come out of Chaos Theory. It is a simplification of Chaos Theory. That fell into our realm quite easily, because of the interest that we had in complex ordering systems.
​
We talked to the client about the principles of human organization, as a basis for developing diagrams for his house and for a prototype office space for his company. We developed an ordering system for both projects in such ways that we could discuss with him their spatial qualities, but not as an aesthetic system in terms of buildings with a modern or contemporary look. We kept it out of the realm of architectural style so that he could understand it in his own terms. So, whenever he saw some piece of the building that did not set well with him, we would ask him to trace it through to see what all the other relationships were connected to that. He could then begin to see that if he changed one thing, it would start to change all kinds of other things. Sometimes he would find something that did not work practically, and we would trace it through and it would get better. Sometimes he would find a conceptual flaw, which was really surprising. We would work it back into the system and it would get stronger or more coherent. It was a basis for communicating that transcended the specificity of each of our fields, so he did not have to feel he was out of his element.
MR: Part of the problem is (and this has to do with education of an architect as well as with people in general), in my experience, from the time you are born until sort of adolescence, you are born with the complete ability to visualize the world in omni-dimensions, not just in three dimensions. Our education system changes it into three dimension and then into two dimension, so most people, by the time they get into adulthood, they see the world as flat, even though they are living three dimensionally. They cannot see three dimensional relationships.
CS: Flat and linear. There is only one cause and effect.
MR: What is evident in all of our work is [a motivation] to unflatten the world and to make it omnidirectional. In the Carlson-Reges House, that was one of the primary motivations for us, and it could be traced back to the NJ House in which we really studied space as much, if not more, as we studied form. The building is designed as much from the inside out as it is designed from the outside in. Inner space and outer space are being worked on simultaneously. Prior to that, prior to the NJ house, the inner space was a result of the exterior form.
.jpg)
GA: Prior to the NJ House, meaning the past works of Morphosis?
MR: Yes. In my mind, even though we had a very advanced ability to visualize space, I think in your youth you’re more preoccupied with form than you are with space. What was always present in our work, from the early days in the 70s until present, is something on the building that can be used as datum. Something that is very clear, which everything else that is not so clear can be compared to. Sometimes it is a line, sometimes a sequence of pieces, or it could be a grid. For this whole new generation of architects, for a variety of reasons, the preoccupation is with both space and form.
GA: What is the datum for the NJ House?
MR: I think the light monitors, the towers. Because there are a lot of things happening in the building, and there is this even increment moving all the way through the entire length of the house. In this case, it is transforming, which is another way of using datum, but you know what it is in its pure state by looking at the top. As it moves into the building and the activity changes on inside, the piece changes. It becomes part of the space. It does not stay intact, as if it is not responding to anything.
CS: Repetition out of phase was also important. In one of the wings, there is a more direct repetition that is meant to be read very clearly. When the corner is turned in the forest and you are starting to deal with the flow of the slope, there is a repetition there, although it is not really meant to be the predominant element. One way that was done was to add other repetitions so there is a 20 foot bay that breaks down in a certain way. It breaks down on the basis of 5s, it breaks down on the basis of 4s. Sometimes they are coincident and sometimes they are out of phase with other things. That was just a geometrical device to talk about flow, how something is moving out of sequence even when they are both rooted in the same piece and in the same mathematical system. By introducing a different phase, you start to introduce an idea of movement in one direction. By not doing that on both wings of the house and other places, it is clarified. That had to do with reading of the site, that it was more appropriate in one place than in another.
MR: This was also a way we began to explore issues of scale as they took form. The issue of scale in an ordering system would be if everything is evenly spaced, like every column is 20 feet apart, then the increment is 1 space, 1 space, 1 space, 1 space. If the space changes 3 times, if it goes 1, 2, 3 and then it repeats itself, 1, 2, 3, you have an increment of 1, 2, and 3. But then if you have an increment that goes 1 all the way to 3 and then it begins over again, you have another increment. The increment is changing scale because of the number of parts that are in each of those increments. They could go 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 and then all of a sudden go 3, 5, 7, 3, 5, 7, so now the increment goes from 1 to 3 to then 5 to 7. You can continually scale out on a building. What you then can do with that is to change the size of the pieces that are connected to that scale system. So when you are standing next to a piece, it might be the size you expect it to be but then all of a sudden the next thing you are standing next to something that looks like a Sequoia tree.
CS: The same applies to repetition, too. You think of it in a linear way and think of it as an idea in plan, but it really isn’t. You might go 1, 2, 3, look up, and the third thing could be a volume. It may not be a sequence move. The third element of increment might be a change in direction either vertically or horizontally. In order to show that, there is a lot of transparency throughout the house to let you see how the structure moves.
MR: Your next question might be, “Well, where does a person enter into all this? Can a person actually see this stuff and actually feel this stuff?” Perhaps no, perhaps yes. The objective from the very beginning is to assume that whoever is going to be living in the space is going to be able to know it in a very visceral way, but they are also going to want to know it in the same way we know a building when we’re designing it. They can spend more time there and begin to discover things. They say, “That column is bigger than that column,” and all of a sudden they start to realize that there is some reason that they are not the same size. When they begin to look from the floor to the top, they see that the column is pointing to something. Or maybe that column which in plan isn’t situated in a symmetrical way, but in section it happens to be the geographical center of the volume that is made by the roof that is a different shape up above. It is like an archaeological discovery.
CS: Also, it affects the way they inhabit it, and the way in which they inhabit the space also affects those relationships. It changes the geometry of those relationships, because ultimately none of this is meaningful unless there is a receptor. The goal is to have it completed in many possible ways, then let the occupant inhabit it and decide how those things are structured.
MR: The same way we say, physiologically, you need the four food groups to be healthy. The four food groups for healthy design is the sensuous, the emotive or the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The spiritual can only happen when the first three are present. The access into the spiritual is through the physical. We have learned in Western civilization that the access to the spiritual is through the spiritual. So we sit quietly in church every Sunday, listening to someone else speak or dance around on the stage and we do not sweat. What we have learned from the Native Americans (for whom we are currently designing Sinte Gleska University in South Dakota), which fits well with the way I have grown up both personally and professionally, and the way I know Clark has, is that the complete experience is sweating, thinking, and praying all at the same time. That is when it all happens. Where you can see it really happen is when the Indians are doing their ceremonies. They’re sweating, they’re thinking, and they’re praying, and they leave the planet. I did not know that until I watched a sun dance last summer, and I watched all of the dancers go to the sky, as they say. You see it with the third eye, you can just see them going out of body. It is the most peculiar thing. I had never seen anything like that. They are dancing for four days, and on the fourth day, they move beyond mind, basically. Then I began to think about the fact that what we talk about in our world is the spectacle. We talk about looking at things. In architecture, you sit here and you look at that. You design buildings to be looked at and critically looked at and analyzed and talked about rather than experienced. It does not make sense to me at all anymore that we talk about what we do as something merely to be experienced vicariously or to be looked at. It is something that has to be lived, and it has to be lived when you’re making the thing in order for it to be lived when you’re experiencing the thing. Architecture has to become a blue collar profession. That is the only way it can operate. We have moved into design-build mode in our mind, like we did in the early days of Morphosis, we’re doing that again now. We’re staying involved with very small buildings with very small budgets, designing them and building them ourselves. It is indelibly marked our psyche once again, so even when we are working on big stuff we’re involved in it in a complete way, where we’re thinking about it, we’re sweating about it, and we’re praying that everything turns out at the same time.
GA: There was a change, a reduction of a sort, in the program of the NJ House in the middle of the process. It wasn’t a budget cut…but how did you cope with that?
MR: Yeah, the family got smaller. We got immensely depressed for about 10 minutes, and then we called the client and said, “You have to live somewhere,” and he agreed he had to live somewhere. We immediately began to reprogram part of the building.
CS: He was attached to the design at that point, so his first response was to keep the object intact…to say, “okay, keep the form, change the meaning, change the structure.” There had to be a balance between changing form and maintaining the order.
MR: It was the first time that I think our system, our whole way of working, was tested. The development of a project is an inclusive system, so it is additive. You are accumulating things along the way, and then you are making the overall system work with the inclusion of new ideas and new parts. This project was the first test of whether or not you can start to subtract the same way you have added. I think the system allowed for subtraction, but our minds had a very difficult time, because the house was at that particular moment in time the perfect solution for this project.
CS: When you are making these intuitive judgments about what has value in your analysis and in the program and making that into a form that is tested all the time, you have to develop an attachment. We do not give up on the interest in form, and really, at some level, the love of a form created through a process that you think was done in an appropriate way. You are not completely detached, it is not totally abstract. You are losing some of your intuition, some of your spirit that went into that at some level, and you have got to try and find a way to get it in there in other ways.
MR: But the system worked in reverse as well. We were able to subtract from the house and then make it different, keep the parts the same and make other parts different.
GA: I think the living room of the NJ House is one of the most complex spaces. Did you actually visualize it and build a model?
MR: For me, when I was trying to visualize it, it always came out as a positive form. It was like the knuckle in your finger. The way we had been working on the house up to that point, I could not visualize it. What we talked about was to keep it a void. Let the rest of the house complete that space. It is an L and right at the intersection, you can put a positive or you can eliminate the positive piece and let both other pieces pass through each other. Once both pieces register their unique aspects in that place, we began to work on it the same way we did with the rest of the building, to see where we could place what the extent of the floor, where the walls went, where the ceiling went, not only in plan but also in section, and it was a process of editing, basically. It went in both directions. It was almost like giving birth. It was like the two wings were the parents giving birth to this piece, but it could be read in reverse as well, that this central piece gave birth to the two wings. We tried to make it ambiguous as to what direction things went.
CS: It is actually really difficult to draw a space that is not a positive, that is not a shape, yet is the main space of the house. That led to some direct formal and sectional moves to try and make something that has no container. It is just empty space. You just happen to be occupying a seam where things are happening around you, but the space you are occupying does not push in an obvious way. It does not have a form in an obvious way, and it leaks. So in a way, we decided we were not going to complete the corner of the forest. The building turns, but it also passes through in two different directions, and you occupy the zone between, based on the fact that hierarchically this is the space where the collective community activity of the house can happen. Not because of its shape. The site, and its views and systems, passes through.
​
​​
​
New Jersey House - interior
GA: So the saying that the most difficult part of architecture is turning the corner is true.
MR: When you see the finger of God and man on the Sistine Chapel, the spark is in between. You try to construct the spark, you cannot. You have got to construct the fingers, but then again you cannot construct the fingers without knowing what the spark is. What we talked about with the client was the possibility of the house at once being strange in the sense that you have never seen anything like that before, but very familiar in the experience of it. It feels like something you have felt before. The one thing that we operate on is the assumption that you can find a contemporary form for traditional experiences. The client, after living in the house for a while, said that it actually happened. The thing is strange or unfamiliar in terms of not having a precedent in his mind, but the house feels very familiar to him. I think part of that has to do with the fact that he took part in the process, and that the process came from human activity.
​
​​
​