Episode Transcript
These are the kind of questions I wish people would ask me. But usually I get asked the standard stupid architect questions, so this is refreshing. That's what we're going for. This is just gonna be the best questions you've ever been asked in your entire life, guaranteed. Good. Hey everyone, it's Antonia back with another episode of QuestionAble Strategy, and the voice you just heard was Mark Harris. Now this is a very special episode for me. They're all special, but this one's got just like an extra little place in my heart because Mark is not only an incredible architect and a fascinating person, but he also happens to be my uncle. So in this chat we talk extensively about how you embed personality and what's important to a community into a building. Now, a lot of us, I think, will just walk down the street and not think twice about the buildings around us, but the truth is there are so many important questions that you have to ask to get to the bottom of what somebody actually wants, what's actually important to them. We also talk about architecture being this unique blend of art and functionality. Specifically touching on the fact that he was actually a featured artist at the Venice Biennale. How cool is that? So I can't wait for you to hear this episode. This is how an architect asks questions with Mark Harris. Mark, welcome to QuestionAble Strategy. Thank you so much for having me. It's quite an honor. I've been a fan of your podcast since you started. Thank you. And for anybody who doesn't know, Mark is my uncle. So that compliment is worth a lot to me. Mark, as you know, as a super fan of the QuestionAble Strategy Podcast, the first question is always, who inspired you to be curious? I am not sure there's an individual person. I, I do know a couple events that have always played a key role early in my life. So my mom worked several additional jobs just to afford some Encyclopedia Britannicas, I mean, kind of as corny as that sounds. So she managed to find a really good, hardly ever cracked open used version and very proudly put 'em in our library bookcase. And I remember just picking up A and reading through it. I must have gone through that Encyclopedia Britannica four or five, six times. It constantly gave me a broad purview of consideration of just hearing and seeing, reading about that many things and being a mental traveler, like reading often does for you. To visit far out places that I would only hope to visit someday and to interview and talk to different people whom I could then go to the library and find an autobiography of them and really be able to visit with them even if they were long dead. So that nurturing of being curious about the world around me seemed to have made an indelible mark on my life. There was the double-edged sword of that from my parents. I had an amazing childhood and amazing parents and family, but it was in Texas and it was fairly conventional and our community was that way too. And I was habitually the child, I think from reading those encyclopedias and then going to the library and researching those topics more, I was just habitually in trouble for asking questions. Sunday school in church, my parents were told, "we love having Mark in class, but perhaps you could, keep him from asking quite so many questions. It's really disturbing the class and the teaching." And I kind of had the same problem in school. So that kind of, civil disobedience, for lack of a better word, has always been part of my mojo and how I operate. But it seems like that curiosity and the fact that people, your teachers in particular were pushing back on that almost inspired you to keep going and to keep asking more questions. Did you ever see any of your peers get discouraged from asking questions because of that attitude? Not really. Maybe it's the culture I grew up in, the kind of presiding ideology was, keep your head down, follow the rules and maybe nobody will notice. And I always had a problem with that. I don't know if it's because I'm naturally a contrarian in some ways. it did spur in me a little bit of a backlash to ask a lot of questions, to seek a lot of knowledge. And what I learned from some of my reading is to try your best to educate yourself to your capacity, which is of course a lifelong endeavor. And yeah, there's a little bit of a punk rock rebel aspect in me for that. Punk rock rebel who reads the Encyclopedia Britannica said, said no one ever, except for people in Texas. How would you say that what you learned from the encyclopedia influenced your interests in architecture? You know, I'm not sure about that. My mom said that somewhere around the age of six I said I was going to be in architecture. I always drew, and my dad was an amazing tinker, so almost out of necessity he was always fixing something. And I, I think I naturally fell in line because I followed him everywhere and he crawled under the car, I crawled under the car. He started taking apart the dishwasher to fix it, I started organizing all the parts and keeping them straight for him, so that's always been an influence on me. It's our environment that really starts to shape us and the people who are around. I can add that very young in life, I was probably in first grade, we went to Mesa Verde National Monument in the Four Corners, where the Anasazis made Cliff Palace. And I remember that just striking me as something remarkably interesting, how they made their dwelling, how they made their city literally in the rock and of the rock. And they just lived in great harmony with that. That just seemed to have a great, beauty between the idea of habitation and the natural environment. And being a child of the west, that kind of landscape and that kind of beauty has always been the ultimate beauty for me. So I think that's where a lot of that comes from. I was curious because you grew up in Texas, you went to grad school in Arizona, and then you moved to Colorado. How have the different places that you've lived influenced your style as an architect? So I look at space time when I look at places. My former employer and my mentor is the late great Antoine Predock, and he talks about the notion of an "earth cut." So when a highway, they cut the highways through the landscape. You can see the strata. in the bottom you see Precambrian sandstone and you start to see fossils and then you get to the upper ones, you start to get McDonald wrappers and beer cans and things like that. And it's not just the blip in time that's human for human history. You start to see the deep space time of history and geology of a site. And I tend to look at that. So when I go visit a place like New York City, I experience New York City and I just love the energy of it. But I'm also looking very deeply into its space time, to the sandstone and limestone that's down below, the way this place may have looked a million years ago, 10 million years ago. And from that, you can really start pulling the history out of it. And you always have the cultural aspects, but I think you always have to look at architecture in a, very broad, perspective. And that means that the cultural aspects, the human aspects were really a blip in time. And when you start looking at those cultural aspects is where you start to start seeing that, Cicero talked about, our cities and our buildings simply reflect the culture that creates them." And I find that to be one of the most interesting aspects of visiting different places and experiencing different cultures. But I do get down to the same point often is with that broad purview of consideration, people are people, and that's where the questioning comes in, is if I ask the same questions of the same people, I don't care if I'm in Timbuktu or Watsahachee, Texas, I'll get the same answer. So you have to ask the deep culturally, sometimes personally significant questions, and that's where I find the culture and the human aspects come out. I think that's incredibly important and I hadn't really thought about how you might think of the much longer history that predates the current civilizations that are present in a space, but you really need to respect all of the land whenever you're building something on it. Can you think of a time when you were traveling to a different country that led you to question your understanding of architectural principles altogether? I get a lot of inspiration, from times and places and cultures that I think are similar to our culture right now. For example, at some sense we're living in a new Renaissance. So the last time this many norms and conventions and orthodoxies were overturned was the Italian Renaissance. It's really amazing how that works. If you simply go through the Uffizi in Florence, you see really 2D Byzantine flat drawings, and then all of a sudden there's a 10 to 20 year period where everything turns technically 3D. So to be an artist, you had to master the mathematics of perspective. So you start to question who your friends are and what allied arts and sciences you're borrowing from, and then how that starts to impact how your field or your, profession starts to change. A lot of people think it's its own subject matter, but I don't believe architecture is its own exegesis, it's not its own explanation. It's a result. And you have to study the human condition. And it's a merger of the technology we have at our time and the cultural mores of our time and sometimes the problems of our time. So that's why I think architecture is so exciting and why you have to be a student of the greater human experiment is it's always evolving and it's always changing, but you have to have that contextual set of lenses to wear. I am really fascinated by, the point that you were making about constraints in imagination. So different artists were really breaking the mold when it comes to what people expected from the art that they were gonna see in a museum or in someone's house at that time. That just goes to show that people are really constrained by their own imaginations and oftentimes have this notion of what they want based on what they can think up in their own head. But as an architect and as an artist and as a social scientist, what questions help you get at the heart of what a client really cares about, what really matters to them so that you can design something entirely fresh, but that also serves them? That, that's such an astute question. I wish more architects asked that one as well. It goes back to the old adage of "I know what I like," and the first question you ask somebody is, do you know what you like or do you like what you know?" Not to be confrontational, but you can ask questions, but I think asking the right questions, the deep questions, sometimes the difficult questions is really important. And I think when I ask people that question, it normally sets them aback. And I have to be very careful how I do that. The other job of an architect is to lead them through the process safely. So specifically with public projects, that becomes paramount. But to unravel that and to get into an intellectual emotional space is really difficult. What I usually do with almost any client is I just say, here's access to our cloud. There's a folder in there for images. Just start downloading images. And they'll download a ton of images and you can really start to go over those images. It's a long, sometimes two hour long process of, tell me about this one, tell me about this one. And they'll slowly start to reveal where they're coming from and where they want. And then I'll upload a series of pictures after reading that, and they'll be very different pictures. And what I find I have, it's happened my entire career, it's not exactly what they wanted. It's not exactly what I wanted, but it ends up being a greatest hits, so it's a merger. And it's that world of the thin blue line of the in-between, where really great design, really great solutions can actually emerge and it's seeking those great solutions, that's really what you're after. It's not trying to be fresh or cute or even, you know, novel is something you specifically avoid. You're just solving problems. So I've had people look at my portfolio and I get it. They say, the so and so the Billboard project or the Border Crossing project is so creative. I wish I could just throw reason to the wind and be creative like that." And I take it properly. I, I, I thank them for the compliment that it is, but inside of me, it usually just burns me up because I'm not throwing logic and reason to the wind. I'm being as rational as I can possibly be. We are solving very intense problems. The difference is we have uncovered questions, feelings, thoughts, problems, and sometimes they're painful. I've had people cry in programming It's almost like therapy. I've had people say that going through the programming phase and or an early design phase is like a therapy session. But it is because if I'm gonna make something, I have to ask myself what do I believe? if you really wanna solve problems, you gotta ask really hard questions and reveal those problems. Can you tell me about one of the sessions that you've led that's really felt like a therapy session? Yeah. I've had this happen several times, so I've, I've spent, a good, part of the last 35 years designing educational facilities. So when I go into a community, and when I start a project, I just, I read everything I can get my hands on. And when I read generational poverty. Psychologically, there is a condition with that in a society and even with individuals is you eventually have to wiggle your way into a comfortable spot with the community and you have to ask them if they feel like second class citizens. If it's rural or you know, generational poverty is there. Very few of them want to admit, but they do feel that way. And right off the bat I'm trying to give them a school with a long list of things that need to happen that's the same as it was in a very wealthy school district. And if it's a state funded project, there's money there for that. But the backlash I get is, um, well, we don't really have to have that, or we don't need that, or, we can go without, and I have to have the conversation with them of stop. Let's talk about why you feel like you deserve less than someone else." And that's a very pointed question, and I have to be ready to navigate that. I can't get past programming and talking about design and what they need and how they wanna use it, and specifically making it socially or culturally meaningful for them until we can broach that issue. And I often get tears in those discussions. Sometimes anger for a while, but we actually have to walk through that. It is like therapy in a weird way to ask those hard questions and get them out. But then we continue with a series of other hard questions. The easy questions, I can talk about that and the sticky notes and what people put up. Those are just not the questions you need to ask. that's a really good example of it where, where tears come about and, people are always very grateful to have those questions asked. 'Cause then they feel like they've truly been heard. And the first fact that they don't feel like they're ever heard is a big stumbling block. So that's where architecture truly is a social science. And you truly do need to understand people if you're going to design for people. It sounds like you're thinking about one specific project, one specific school that felt like they were second class citizens. Once that project was done, once the school had been built, was there some element of the school itself and something that you had baked into the design purposely for them that really touched them? we did do a school is a quarter million square foot school. It is like going into an art gallery. You learn how to read paintings, what's the symbolism why they do this? What's the composition? You learn how to read people and you learn how to read sites, and you learn how to read existing buildings. People treat their buildings in a certain way. So when I go to an existing school like I did for this one, you can read the graffiti and you can figure out what's going on. You can read how much graffiti is there and of what kind. And we would normally do surveys. We did very early web-based surveys where the students had their own site private, the teachers had their own, the community had their own, and the school district admin had their own. And what you read will literally curl your hair. Like what? We had a lot of racism in this school. And so there was a second class citizenry there. On top of the aspect that most of our educational facilities, if you think about it, they segregate functions and therefore our environment shows us to segregate. So there's the bandsies over here. There's the math geeks over here. There's the athletes over here. So you break into these different groups and the, the school building, if you look at it, actually tells you to do that. It's all zoned. So what we did was we broke up all the zoning, we blurred those boundaries. We told them we're not gonna do computer rooms, so we're gonna do media rooms. And we realized the best way to get the students to merge was they shared music in common. So this was early iMacs. They had this brilliant software called iTunes, and they had this brilliant software, called Garage Band. So at lunch you were allowed to bring your food into the computer labs where they did all their math. And they realized that the students would come in and they could have classes on composing music. So. Classrooms were flooded at lunch and you would find that the star quarterback for the football team would love a certain country and western artist. And that math geek over there, I mean these two would never talk to each other. They realized that they shared the same love of that artist. So this was a great way for people to simply have an opportunity to meet each other, to realize what you find all over the world is we have infinitely more that we share in common than we ever have that will divide us. And if architecture alone can do that, I can put that in a building, I can diagram that, I can program that. And when you realize that a building, a built environment can affect how people operate, that's of interest. They also had very low student participation. So this was early on. I made the classroom walls glass. And you had to buy the special markers that write on glass. So the teacher had to be trained to ask questions, somebody would answer, they would say, show me, or diagram it for me. So the students would get up and start drawing. So it would bring the most reclusive person out and at the same time allow people who didn't have a problem talking in the classroom to get up and write. Well, at the end of the day, the walls are filled with the education that's going on. Parents walk through that building after it was closed and they go, "oh my God, I can see the education here. I can see the curiosity." So this changed the textbooks they had, the way they taught, the teachers they hired, it changed everything. So this was one of the lowest performing schools in Colorado. And within four years, and not through just me, obviously the principal was on board with this and the teachers, it became a nationally known nationally ranked high school Wow. in some small town in Western Colorado. And it doesn't look like any other school you'll ever find because it's specifically for that agricultural valley that it's in. So it's one of those things, awards, accolades. Love it. It's fantastic. I mean, there's nothing like having your colleagues telling you to floor it, but getting a letter from a plumber who walked through one of your buildings and said, "I've never paid attention to architecture ever, and I've walked through your building, and it was like Wizard of Oz. It was all black and white, and all of a sudden everything's in color." So when someone sends you a letter like that, that the building changed who they are and you bring a community together through the design of your building, sign me up. That's what you live for. That's what gets you up in the morning and it makes you go. I think that's so inspiring. Just imagining how all of those kids' lives changed too. They probably didn't think too much about school. You said that the place was graffitied. It didn't seem like people respected the space, but it's amazing what can change once people respect a space, or respect a public good, something that they share. I'm kind of curious though, just to drill down on how all of those goals came to your attention, because it seems like, sure, it's one thing for a principal to say, "we have a lot of cliques in the school. How can we reduce the segmentation of our student body?" But it's also another thing to realize, "oh, the traditional walls make it so that nobody can see what kids are learning. So let's make them glass and let's have it be very obvious what the students are learning so that the parents know what's going on within the school. How many sessions, how many meetings does it take to actually illuminate all of those different desires that the school administration has? That's a, that's an interesting question. Fortunately and unfortunately they do teach architectural students in school these days, to be more inclusive, in including the client and including the community and the buildings that they're paying for. I think that's a good thing. It's so easy to run away with that. You have community sessions, you know, one a week you invite people to get people to come, you have to give away a tv. I mean, it's just, it. There's a way of doing this, and then you've seen it before. There's separate tables of people sitting down and there's, there's little pieces of paper they're moving around that represent the program. And then they've got all these sticky notes all over the wall where they write down their hopes and dreams and, and things that they wanna see in the building. And, you know, the dirty little secret with that is if I ask them the same questions instead of the same project, I get the same school every time. And those sticky notes, I can just peel 'em off the wall and put 'em up in the next one if I'm around the world. Everyone says the same things. They have the same response to the same questions. And people feel like they're being heard. I get it, but you need to ask the right questions. So I have found, I'm notorious, interesting as our buildings are and unique as they are, I'm notorious for being on budget or under budget. And I'm notorious for getting through design faster than anybody else. It's 'cause you just asked the right question right off the bat. Uh, you know, an interesting one is someone will walk in and they'll say, "I like things symmetrical. I really like a symmetrical plan." You know, my response, "you know, me too. I do too. But is it, is it symmetry you want or is it order?" And knowing the difference between that is interesting. And I think teaching these kids a process of quote unquote listening to people, they end up going through the process and they don't really listen. They're just validating their fee and validating their time. Because when a client comes to you with, let's say you have, I need a house, four bedroom, four bath, kitchen, family room three car garage, you know, well, what makes the difference? To really, really dig into what would be so unique about them is to ask them how they wish to live. And sometimes that's an interesting question and that's why I think when you do a house for a husband and wife, you have to be kind of careful because through that process, instead of moving into a house and making it yours, you started from scratch. So you have to ask yourself, "well, how do I wanna live?" And sometimes you can find that they actually might want different things in life. I fired two clients in my life and both of them were houses because I'm not a marriage counselor. But through that honest and sober process, it can get to the point where you need to say, you know, there's clearly some issues here. So rather they're wasting your time on my fee and continuing, maybe you guys should sit back and talk about this and figure out how you wanna live your lives. So, fortunately none of 'em were divorce cases, but, those are the hard questions that you have to ask. There's no bullshit in this. You, you gotta ask 'em. Absolutely, and it seems like all of these sets of hard questions come from listening, as you were saying before, and this is something that I've always been a champion of. I think that greater than 50% of any great questioning is great listening, and seems like you are able to tailor your follow-on questions to what you yourself have heard and then are able to interpret. nobody can get mad at you for that. Am I wrong? Have you ever been in a situation where your questioning has really pissed someone off? Because it seems to me like if somebody you're working with takes the time to really hear you, to digest what you've just said and then reflect it back to you or give you designs that you think would be attractive to them or fit their needs. It doesn't seem like that would be grounds for frustration. It, it can be. There's a kind of closet psychology, you know, the notion of digging sometimes in places where it hurts. So yeah, you learn to, to back off when you need to. But I have had people, thinking I've got a lot of gall to ask that kind of personal question. But, you know, if you don't want a personal building, go to a builder. Have your construction company design roof overhead. That's easy. If that's all that a building is, why do you need architects? I mean, you just need some, space planning. Everyone always confuses design with problem solving. So problem solving is inside design, of course. But design is when you move it to another level. I was actually gonna ask you about your work for the Venice Biennale because I am wondering, as a viewer and an appreciator of art, when you create an artistic piece with multiple levels of meaning and symbolism, how much can you realistically expect the average viewer to understand and appreciate? That's a brilliant question. So if you're going to be personal and you're going to put your fingerprints into something, which you do no matter what. I mean, we should just admit that, the architect's always gonna put imprints on it. The builder's gonna have some imprints on it. So if you're gonna have some fingerprints all over it, how far should it go? And especially relative to contemporary art these days, is it gonna shock people? Is it going to be artistic theory mumbo jumbo? Or even worse, is it gonna be sustainability performative metrics on display? So what? What do you expect? If you look at architecture as almost like a choreographed dance, when you think about it, when you walk in the front door of your house and you go through your house and you go all the way to the kitchen, you have choreographed your way through a series of spaces, and that may or may not tell you anything but you being in the kitchen, you actually have a latent memory of how you got there and how you felt through whether you paid attention or not. So Buckminster Fuller said, "stop trying to change people. Change the environment and the people will follow." So as an architect, I take that very seriously. To really take care of that human aspect and element is really interesting. And when you talk about my work, relative to the Venice Biennale, those were all projects of a certain kind that were specifically commenting on our milieu, our, time and place. This time of great questioning. So they weren't providing any great answers, but its success at the Biennale was because it generated so many questions. I got calls from the curators and the docents saying that all the students kept coming to our two rooms and they were generating just a wide range of questions instead of people just looking at pretty stuff. It provoked people. And those projects are all designed so that they don't really defamiliarize the spaces and incidents that they are, but they do defamiliarize enough for us to question the environments that we're in and what we might normally call normative. I'm sure you're aware of Diller Scofidio Renfro's Highline in New York City. The best stuff is extremely subtle and the Highline is a really great one. So the sociologists took over the Highline four or five years after it was up, and they asked New Yorkers what they thought of it. And the common response a lot of New Yorkers got was, I never noticed how little space New York City actually gave human beings." And they would go, "this is clean," and they would point down the street and they would say, "that's dirty. That's for infrastructure." And they go, "this is our space." and they would say, "you know, I realize that New Yorkers really, really do like to stop in the city and have a conversation with each other, which you really can't do on a New York sidewalk." So New Yorkers began to learn something new about themselves. It's not that they need to change, and it's not a critique, it's just they broadened the definition of what it meant to be human in New York City. And by that measure, that small, insignificant reuse project, reusing the old elevated train lines, was interesting. And when they asked the developers about it, A lot of the developers, since it's elevated, so it's on the second or third level of some buildings. Those real estate developers all of a sudden go, "oh, the first floor is not the most expensive floor because it's on the ground floor. I have access now, even just visually, to the second, third floor." So they started charging more rent for the second and third floor. Rather than just the mindset that the first floor is public- private, and everything above it is private, public- private started going into a cross-sectional aspect of buildings. It's the first, second and third, maybe fourth floor. So it's interesting how that one move has effects. To answer your question directly, I think it's more powerful when it's indirect, where you change the environment and the people follow. You just have to be responsible to make sure they're following, not in a despotic spiral downward, but in an enlightened, spiraled upward. And that's, that's the responsibility that architects have that I think very few really heed these days. With your buildings that you've built or designed, what can you do to encourage people to think of the significance as they walk past? Almost like that plumber that you were talking about earlier, how he said, "wow, this really changed the way that I thought about schools." Well, it's, I think it's interesting. You can be very authoritarian about it. "This is what I do, this is how I do it. I'm gonna drag you in." It's almost like a lot of movies. at this moment they're gonna cry at this moment, they're gonna laugh, right? It's very scripted. So I can do that. I design restaurants, I, I know how to design a restaurant to be outta business in six months, just depending on how I did the kitchen. Put the dishwasher, the wait staff in the middle, in the way of the sous chef, you're gonna lose your sous chef over and over again. So it's very functional, it's very calculated. A lot of clients will even go, I, you know, what's your big idea? What's your big central idea? And if you really look at specifically social media today, I mean, you gotta, you got a few brief seconds to catch somebody. So you have to kind of do an "oh wow" situation where you just catch them and it's like, click bait, right? I gotta have a moment to photograph. And the one shot where people want to take the selfie and then past that, there's really not much left of that building. But if you can invite them in and suggest an experience, or just in the fact that they're gonna go in and deliver a package or go visit somebody. If you can spur the notion of an experience, most people will notice it. It's like that plumber, he never notices something caught his eye. And it's not because it's flashy or, photo worthy. It's usually the subtlety of a function. I've got synesthesia, so I hear spaces. And I think I've been able to use that as part of that experiential way of having people see spaces, experience light, intimacy, openness at the same time. And I don't expect people to experience anything. Some people just go on, run in and do what they need to do and run out. But it's an invitation. It's that generosity. If you offer it and you know how to offer it, most people will take it up. And that's a lot of the reason why some buildings, their function disappears very rapidly. And with the technology today, the old adage of form follows function, I always say, "I hope not" because nothing fades faster today than function. If a building is an indelible space, if it makes people think and feel a certain way, whether it's direct, or whether it's indirect and subconscious, people feel it. That's why people won't take down some buildings, even though their function is long since gone. Take the Pantheon. What is it? Why is it indelible? you're back to, again, an aspect of value. Do I want that building to be valuable and used for 20 years, 30 years, or a hundred years, or 500 years? You mentioned briefly that you have synesthesia. Do you ever find that the way you sense the world makes it difficult for people to understand your ideas? It makes it really hard to explain. Yeah, I bet. It makes it very difficult to explain. I mean, I, I, I can't really even explain any of this to my parents or even my wife. It's just, my senses cross, numbers have colors, numbers have textures, people have, colors and sounds associated with them. My relationship with you is part of that. It's part of your nickname. I remember figuring out early in elementary school, I. I Mentioned my report cards earlier that they would write, "Mark has the most interesting way of seeing the world." So somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, what was this interesting way of seeing the world as a young child became a discipline problem. Mark doesn't follow the rules." Mark got the right answer, but he used some other mathematical equation to get there. And that's not what we're doing." But you know, that mathematical equation also had sounds and colors and patterns and I, I put patterns together. That's how I do this. This is how you understand human beings. It's associative, it's not transactional, it's relational. And yeah, I do use that to my advantage, but it's stuff that I can never explain to other people. But for whatever reason, the majority of it, specifically some of the work we did at the Venice Biennale, it seems to be attractive or provocative to other people, but it's part of how I see the world in just such a very different way. I think a common thread that I've seen throughout this entire conversation and when it comes to architecture in general, is this balance of art versus function. What do you do when you find yourself caught between your personal desire to make art and the requirement to make something functional? Another really great question. Again, that, book Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, it really talks about balances. And I think balances are really important. I'm not trying to create art and I'm not trying to just solve function. There is a function, but the most important thing is making something indelible. Usually that people can't even name. So when a client comes to you and says, I love my building, it works just the way we wanted. You know, you asked if the trash can goes on the left and it's perfect." Right? You know, and on and on. They just gush about it. I listen to it, I take the compliments. It's really wonderful. But when that company leaves that building, or when their business strategy changes, they're gonna walk around that building and they're gonna go, "this doesn't work at all. What were these people thinking?" And they're gonna gut that thing and they're gonna start all over again. So everything that was perfect and so precisely put, is gonna be the dumbest thing anyone's ever thought of in a very short amount of time these days. It used to take a generation and then it took a decade. Now it takes a year or less. So I don't try to achieve art. I just naturally am gonna have an artful resolution. And let's face it, art and architecture have a remarkably difficult relationship with the notion of beauty. It's highly complex. What is ugly and not beautiful to one generation is the Mona Lisa to the next. And I love to treat buildings like a person. They do have a personality. You talk about, what it was like to experience that building. And most people, I find the most satisfying responses are, you know, I really don't know what it is about it. I just like being in every single one of those rooms and when I'm in a different mood, I like to go over here. And when I'm in a different mood, that building accommodates me." And it's just like the way you describe your best friend. I'm always comfortable and I change and they're always there for me. And that's why we keep some of those buildings is because they're loved ones and they're cultural loved ones that last generations. And that's the way you make indelible cities and indelible cultures. And if you want to be able to pull that out of the foundations that we lay in our buildings, that's usually how it works when it's relational and not transactional. I think that's so beautiful to think of buildings as your friend or as somebody that you know. I mean, having lived in a foreign city for three years, there are definitely buildings that I come across or that I walk past that really strike me. And then whenever I see them, I almost think of them as old friends. And every time I see them it's almost like we're catching up. But I would also be remiss not to ask you a little bit about your teaching work. 'Cause you also teach architecture. And I wonder in attempts to be overly creative or different, what's a common mistake that you see less experienced architects make? I've been very fortunate to be a theoretical practitioner. I think it's important to teach and practice at the same time. So when I get these students specifically in the last probably 15 years, they're just as bright as they could be. And I can critique architecture and architects all day long. There's much that is wrong with this profession. But I can also say that most of my colleagues and most of the students that get in, they get into for all the right reasons. They're great people, they're smart. They really have the best intentions. There's so many places to go astray. And when I get students, one of the first things we do is we really have a lot of discussions about the erasure of self. We have discussions of the erasure of architecture and replacing the ego that can be in architecture with something a little more broad and a little more idealistic. And most students, like most architects, treat architecture as its own exegesis. It's, it's its own explanation. It's its own hermetically sealed field of interest that requires its own field of study. And while there is a truth to that, of course, it's a result. And the best thing you can ever do is borrow from all the allied disciplines. I'll remind them what Le Nôtre said. Le Nôtre was the landscape architect for Versailles. He would bring in other talented people, and he would invite them to do projects on that. And people would ask the great Le Nôtre, why would you let somebody else come in and mess up your grand vision?" And he goes, "really, really great ideas are big enough and powerful enough to have other people leave their fingerprints all over it." And that's part of the quote unquote, collaborative aspect of architecture and why it's so important for you to surround yourselves with other people who think differently than you, that have other skill sets and talents. Your creativity is gonna come from you opening the door and letting everything walk in. You just let all ideas walk in, and then your fingerprints are you borrowing, interpreting, and abstracting those ideas and your client is the most important one. So the more intelligent and creative you can spur your client to be, the more intelligent and creative your building's gonna be. My clients make me look great, I'm not all that bright and I'm not all that creative, quite frankly. I just know how to listen to what they say, and more importantly, to really pull out stuff that they never thought they had inside, which is exciting. I think that's one piece of great advice after another. It really makes total sense to me how collaborative of a process this is, and that's a really important lesson for people to learn. So I guess it's time for my final question, which is, what is one question that you like to work into a conversation, whether it's at work or in a social setting that really helps you get to know someone? I know that you always ask that one, and I, think it's really interesting the answers that you've gotten One thing that I do like to kind of probe with a lot of people is, when's the last time you had your hair blown back by something that you saw or read? I've always found that to be an interesting question because you, it's really funny. People will mention a book or something a friend said. It's always something that's interactional or relational. What really blows people hair back I, I just don't think we have a lot of those moments anymore the more we've relied on our screens to provide that for us. It's a very thoughtful question and I really appreciate when people give me a very thoughtful answer to that. Yeah, I can imagine that what impacts people in a hair blowing back kind of way, typically has a strong emotional component to it. Just thinking about that question, I think it's a fantastic question because it'll tell you a lot about the media that people consume, what types of books they read, what types of places they like to go to, what type of food they like to eat, that sort of thing. I personally was roped into watching a film with my mom a couple of days ago. We watched Flo w which is the Oscar- winning animated film. And I was, I, I like an animated movie, but I wasn't really in the mood until she started it. And then once she started it, I couldn't stop watching it. I thought that the animation style was really cool. The questions that we were asking throughout the entire film about what the hell is going on were really interesting. And then the emotional pull that this story has, the, the emotional connection that you feel to these animals made me cry. And I'm not a big movie crier. So yeah, that really blew my hair back the way that this film that I didn't particularly wanna watch really moved me emotionally, and I've since recommended it to tons of people. Anybody that I see on the street, I will recommend this film to them because it was that good. So I think that's my answer to that question. I think it's interesting in animation because the style of how they do it has a lot of the storytelling and you can go all the way back to Sleeping Beauty with Disney the way it was Renaissance, high Gothic as a style. And then a lot of the animations they have, uh, is kinda like a really great cinematographer who knows how to evoke an emotion relative to an angle. I, I just find the animation to be really amazing, because of how they can tell the story simply by how they drew it and when they gave a certain shot and for how long they focused on something or how quickly they flashed. And it's like editing, cinematography, storytelling all at the same time. That stuff just blows me away. It's just so interesting. So how to turn that into architecture, I don't know. But that's, that's actually something that I'm interested in. Yes. What really struck me specifically with the way that this particular film was shot, is sometimes you are seeing the world through the eyes of the cat, who's the main character, and then sometimes you're seeing it from above, or you're watching the cat actually move as if you're there yourself. So the way that they transfer between the two. Was really interesting to me and was very different. So see, it starts a conversation and now you, I understand how much you enjoy cinematography and its relationship to animation, and you understand that I like animals and I cry when they're in distress. So we've gotten to know each other so much better. That's just such a brilliant way to do it. So the, the art of conversation, it's not dead, obviously, but, we don't have a lot of time. We don't have a lot of time of repose anymore, and I, I, and you know, even this, this interview here is a moment of repose, for us both, which is, is, uh, uh, I, I don't know. I don't know if it's prayer like or if it's meditative, but, a moment for two people to share experiences and thoughts and ideas is just something we don't have a whole lot these days. And I, I've listened to every one of your podcasts and I just really wanted to comment on you and, commend you for helping to shape the art of the conversation again, these days. Wow. Thank you. That's so nice. That's really touching to hear. I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for having an interest in what I do. And thank you so much for giving me one more chance to have a conversation with one of my favorite human beings. well, thank you for coming on the podcast. It's, it's an honor to have you on QuestionAble Strategy, especially as a super fan. And I don't know, I'll FaceTime you later. Okay, thank you Antonia. You keep up the good work and floor it girl. Okay, so the question that Mark left us with at the end of our conversation was, when's the last time you had your hair blown back by something you saw or read? I think this is a really interesting question. What I find interesting about it as well is the phrasing. So personally, I don't know if this phrasing is something that I would use in my every day, but I was excited to give it a go. Truthfully. I struggled to find a scenario where I could really weave it in seamlessly, but a day came where I happened to be starting a new job. So I had a bunch of new colleagues to get to know, and after my first day, everybody in the office went out for a team dinner, which was really fun. So it was a pretty casual setting, but still with professional colleagues, and halfway through the dinner, we were having a really good time. Everyone's really casual. They're mostly my age, so we're all peers. And felt like if I wasn't gonna ask the question then and there, I wasn't gonna ask the question at all. So kind of clunkily, admittedly, I said during a little lull in the conversation, Hey, I have a question for you guys. When's the last time you had your hair blown back by something you saw or read?" And everyone kind of laughed. I think that they thought it was a little bit of a bizarre direction for me to have taken the conversation. But immediately, one of my colleagues said, "oh, besides everything I see every day on the news?" And I didn't even think that that was a way that this question could be interpreted, because I always thought of having your hair blown back as being a good thing. You're being wowed, you're being shocked, you're being impressed. But I I feel like there's an element of tone with this question that could either suggest that it's a good thing or that it's a bad thing, and it was very clear to me that she interpreted the question as being a bad thing. so that was a pretty cool finding, just when It comes to testing out new questions. Tone is very important. So after she said that, I kind of guided the conversation. I clarified, "no, I was kind of thinking in a positive way." And one of my other colleagues jumped in and she said, you know what? This is gonna sound really silly. But my family has gotten really into watching Bluey." Which for anyone who doesn't know is a children's TV show, like a young, young children's TV show. We all kind of laughed and we were like, "why do you, do you have younger siblings?" And she was like, "no, I'm an only child." And she's, she's in her late twenties. And I said. Okay, well, you know, we're not here to judge. Why are you and your family sitting together and watching Bluey?" And she said, "well, when my family wants to just take some time to disconnect from the chaos, that is our world, they'll sit and watch Bluey together. It's just something that they can all agree on that takes them out of whatever's going on. And it's a really wholesome show and a really wholesome way to spend some time." She articulated really well the power of children's TV shows and the value that kids' TV has, even for adults. I thought that that was a really nice answer. And I guess the point of asking these questions is, you know, what's a question that you asked to really get to know someone? And that told me a lot about her and a lot about her family. Not to mention the political views of my colleague who responded first. So even though it was a bit of a shaky start in asking the question and finding the right time and place to ask it, it did end up achieving what it was meant to. I do feel like a better setting for it would've been at a party potentially with people that I knew a bit better. Coming in and asking this question on my first day at work was a bit of a bold move. But hey, I think that I, at its core, this question is really trying to get at what's surprised you recently? What has shocked you? What has impressed you? Those are feelings that are really powerful and really valuable and really entertaining for all of us. It's really interesting to talk about and share what shocks and awes you and the people around you. So I encourage everyone to go out and try this question out or try some variation of What has surprised you recently?" "what is something that you thought you wouldn't like that you really loved?" or what's something amazing that you've witnessed recently? Those are all variations on this question, at least the way that I interpreted it. And so I'm curious to hear how it goes for all of you. So go out into the world and try it out and let me know how it goes. This has been an episode of QuestionAble Strategy. I'm your host, Antonia Hellman, and if you like what you just heard, go back. We've got some great episodes already up with practical tips that you can apply to asking questions in your everyday life. And in fact, here's a question that you can go and ask your friends: Have you listened to QuestionAble Strategy?" And if their answer is no, just send them the link. And while you're at it, follow subscribe, leave a review. It all helps. Let me know what you're interested in hearing about and who you're interested in hearing from. Where there's a will, there's a way, and we can get them on the podcast. Till then I'm Antonia Hellman, and I will see you next time.
