Q&A with Bryan Cantley

CoA+A Director of Communications Meg Whalen speaks with Bryan Cantley about Dirty Geometries + Mechanical Imperfections:

Bernard Tschumi was recently on our campus, and one piece of advice he gives students is “Start with a question.” You are also interested in questions – maybe more than answers.

It kind of starts with the impetus of the idea being a non-concrete, undefinable entity, as opposed to a building, which is, in my opinion, as resolved as one can get. Ideas are by their very nature open to interpretation, open to misinterpretation.

When I was trained, the working drawing, the specifications, the construction documents, were the final answers, a set of conclusions. I wasn’t really interested in working with the finite, so what I started doing years ago was to look at the architectural drawings not as a set of conclusions or finite calculations, but to use drawings to be somewhat vague. Typically a drawing is about a specific entity – a floorplan is about organization, for example. I wanted to look at drawings that were not singular in the ideas that they were concocting, and I feel that if you’ve got a document that is not singular, that has multiple ideas running through it, it in itself automatically becomes a condition of question, because there is not a single outcome.

How is this idea manifest in your recent work?

I’ve really been playing around with the idea of misinterpretation. If you look at some of the drawings I’ve made, there are very specific architectural references that are purposely distorted, and it’s meant to prompt a bigger discourse about building, about the process of architecture, the act of architecture. If architecture is about ideas, then the drawing has to be open-ended, to ask questions of architecture itself, but also of the observer.

There are three layers of participants: the person who constructs the drawings, the person who reads the drawings, and the set of occupants. I wanted to blur the relationship between the observer and the occupant or inhabitant. It always intrigued me – were the drawings being done for the observer – the people who were reading them and building them and discussing them – or for the inhabitant of the space? What happens when the drawing is neither specifically for the occupant nor for the observer? And I’ve tried recently to take it to a different level, where I am describing an occupant as someone who might inhabit the drawing. So the drawing becomes, ironically, a finite document, in that it is not intended to build from, but it also becomes an infinite document in the terms that it’s not intended to give a person one and only one way of reading.

Why do you think that the open-ended, the infinite, the “imperfect” are more fascinating to you than the prescribed or finite or however “perfection” might be described?

If I think back to my time at UNC Charlotte, the studios that I remember being the most impactful were the ones that allowed us to experiment – and by experiment, I don’t mean there are no rules or no context, no budget – experiment with a mindset of parameters. Any opportunities in my life that are most meaningful to me are the ones that have allowed me to play around with them and manipulate them. I look at architecture as a set of investigations, and for me it’s always more interesting to investigate and experiment and search than to be given the answer. It’s the old saying, “life is a journey, not a destination.”

I get asked the question, how do you know when the drawings are complete if there’s not a projected outcome or a conclusion you are trying to reach? I have said in the past that some are never done. I will go back and reinvestigate a drawing based on new understandings or new findings, or I will do a second drawing based on the first drawing because my knowledge has shifted.

The drawings are kind of like a set of conversations you might have with another person. It’s that kind of back and forth. Conversations start one way, and they may end up completely different, they may contradict themselves. We don’t have a script. So, in that sense, I think one of the reasons I’m interested in that is because an open-ended, investigative system kind of reflects the way we live our lives.

Why is it important to your work to create work both digitally and by hand?

I look at architecture as a physical act. The physicality of the act should be reflected in the physicality of the investigation. All my drawings are done by hand; most of them are done free-hand, without any tools. Two of the three models that are in this show were 3d printed, but I augmented them with hand-modeling. When working digitally, interface equals interference – a kind of remove. So the tactile quality is about stripping away a level of interference. I do quite a bit of digital work, but typically the digital work will begat some sort of analog scenario. Either I work digitally and then produce an analog scenario or I work analog and then bring that in and scan it and manipulate it digitally. There is usually some factor of hybrid.

Is there a built architectural project in the world that is in productive dialogue with the ideas that exist in your work?

The Morphosis Caltrans (District 7) Headquarters in Los Angeles. Specifically the façade – they’ve taken the 100 and made the graphic one-zero-zero as a deconstructed part of the architecture. And at certain places when you view it, it’s really hard to tell if you’re looking at graphic content or at built form. So for me, that particular piece of that building represents this hybrid of graphical exploration/deconstructed building exploration- a place where there’s both or neither happening at the same time. It’s one of the most poetic architectural spaces in downtown Los Angeles.

What else do people need to know about your work?

The general philosophy of my studio, “Mechudzu,” informs the formal and conceptual nature of my work. It was actually born from my time in the South. It comes from the words “mechanical” and “kudzu.” Growing up in rural North Carolina, I watched kudzu deconstruct abandoned tobacco warehouses and power lines. Kudzu is basically uncontrolled organic growth. Overtime the kudzu becomes the structure. And I grew up around farm and road equipment and saw these huge machines that people would climb into and inhabit as forms of architecture. So I’ve always looked at the research and expression and experimentation of mechanical architecture, but also the uncontrolled, organic nature of the kudzu vine.