METUJFA 1989 (9:1) 67-104 INTERVIEW WITH ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON Received: 20.11.1989 BG: Alison and Peter, the fifties mark a milestone, a turning point maybe in world Keywords: Team 10 architecture and you played an important role as a member of Team 10. What sort of impacts did Team 10 have from the fifties onwards? 1. This interview took place at 13 April 1989 as Smithsons visited METU, Ankara. The following abbreviations were made in AS: I don't honestly think I can judge that and I am not sure that anybody can. I the text: am very nervous of thinking too much in the past; partly because the inherited AS : Alison Smithson cast of mind of the Scottish person is very conscious of the past and therefore it's PS: PeterSmithson something I have, in a way, to protect myself against. And we get asked for a lot BG: Baykan Günay of archival material and if it gets more than two and a half days a week that I have Two further pieces of text written by to fish something out of the archives or remember something (because now we Smithsons during their visit (on Ankara are getting a lot of questions on the fifties, questions on the sixties are beginning) Citadel and the Campus dormitory build ings) and a list of their publications have you feel you are running a mortician's parlor: I would much prefer to just react been included. to what is outside, now. BG: The reactions you put forth against CIAM's understanding of the separation of functions, let us say emphasis on more greenery and light, rather than identity and association, are still being advocated by many of the (I should not say schools) but many of the recent urban design ideas. I have a certain feeling (of course, as I insist I am a man outside the events) so looking at it from the outside, that from the fifties on, there was a transformation in the field of architecture and urban design and I would suggest that many of the ideas which are here now, like traditionalism or historicism or vernacularism, I even think that Post-Moder- nism in architecture, all diverge from that point onwards. Maybe in the first instance, some principles were used with regard to space organisation but then it also turned back even in formal architecture into imitations, etc. Maybe you did not imitate form but at least you sort of attacked the space organisation which was prevailing then. So would this be a wrong comment? AS: It is very difficult to comment; we are always dealing with ideas, we try to be forward-looking. In a way I think you are in that position yourself with your work, concerning yourself with what is happening to Ankara and in what direction it might go on; one should probably, while we are here, comment on the role of the Figure I. Smithsons and Sinan the Ar Architecture School on this really rather splendid campus because it has not only chitect. 68 METU JFA 1989 BAYKAN GUNAY Figure 2. Team 10 with guests, 1971: Toulouse le Mirall large meeting. f.w *• ^ a particular connection, but a general connection. That is, in Europe they are training too many architects, and a number of schools are having to close and the universities are often quite willing to lose their architecture faculties because the students are there for a long time on campus and do not get sufficiently involved with the other faculties. I sense that this perhaps is also happening here: we looked at some students' work yesterday, where they were dealing with extending the School of Architecture building and in having the existing conditions ex plained to us, we found out with Charles Polonyi's help, that already the basic ideas of the campus, the basic concept, had been compromised by the architects themselves, never mind by any other faculty. So I would put in a plea for the architects to get more involved on the campus. Now when I say that the architects themselves had compromised what I saw as the basic idea: I see the campus as laid out along a ridge with a pedestrian way running along this ridge, feeding buildings on either side that look outwards and across the service roads which are lower down the slope on either side, and these service roads feed car parks. Now what has happened when I say compromised is that a car park has been brought right up into the slope, on to the crest so that the smell of the cars is here, whereas the original idea of the Campus was to keep the smell of the cars down the slope, and put the pedestrian way on the crest of the ridge so that one walked through sweet-smelling space and then went into the buildings on either side without any fear of traffic movement and certainly without any smell from the cars. Now, for the architects to compromise the concept is really terrible, because by their actions they should teach. The school building is splendid, it has marvellous spaces, it is well kept, but I think you should get that car park out of 1. Sia Bakema, 2.Peter Smithson, 3.Saman- tha Smithson, 4.Mme.Schimmerling, 5-Alison Smithson, ö.Hanne van Eyck, 7.Giancarlo de Carlo, 8.Signor Gardella, 9.Aldo van Eyck, 10-11.Christine and Georges Candillis, 12.Shad Woods, 13.Andr6 Schimmerling (Le Carre' Bleu), 14-15.Brian and Sandra Richards, 16.0s- wald Mathias Ungers, 17,Signora Gardel la, 18.Stefan Wewerka, 19Jaap Bakema, 20.Jerzy Soltan, 21.Alexis Candillis, 22.Soraya Smithson. INTERVIEW WITH SMITHSONS METU JFA 1989 69 Figure 3. Team 10, 1976: Spoleto, family meeting. there and down the slope where it should be, immediately off the service road, and ask other faculties to do the same, if anybody else has also broken that basic concept. Do you have a comment on this because I think with it being early summer, coming from England we are very conscious of the marvellous smell on the campus, the scent of the blossoms coming out. PS: I was upset by the fact that in the pedagogy, the teaching of this program, the faculty had not fed them with the fundamental organizational ideas of the university. When you asked what the impact of Team 10 has been, you could say that there has been a kind of seepage of the Patrick Geddes ideas into the general consciousness, in some way using Team 10 and CIAM. That is, it is quite normal now in a European school for the student of his own volition, on his own initiative, to try to understand the nature of the fabric which he has been asked to work. That is a very Geddesian idea, i.e., don't touch it till you think you understand it. Then you don't have to continue with the existing fabric, but if you understand it you have the right to intervene; like a doctor looks at the symptom, then he tries to figure out why you have the symptoms, then once he thinks he understands, that 'right to touch' is won, is earned by the understanding. Think ing, forward, the nice thing to happen would be like the Paris Haussmann commission to bring clean water from the hills, to provide central drainage and cleaning systems for the drainage; that was part of the process of putting in the boulevards, air, trees, etc.; on the surface, it was just putting in a street, a traffic way, but it carried out all these other things. The mood of Europe is again undoubtedly towards a more green Europe. Taking the view that the culture l.Coderchson, 2.Giancarlo de Carlo, 3.Aldo van Eyck, 4.Peter Smithson, 5.Brian Richards, ö.Pancho Guedes, 7-Alison Smithson, 8.Coderchson, 9Jose Coderch, lOJaap Bakema. 70 METU JFA 1989 BAYKAN GUNAY grows from the bottom, that every decision that is taken about a building should now have built into it the notion of how will it effect the immediate environment and then the countryside, and in a way the global environment. Because if it is true that the ozone is effected, it is not because of one industry: it is our collective acts, each individual act; that every time you buy a refrigerator the old is on the waste-heap. So that the consideration of building an urbanism is suddenly, I think, in a way Patrick Geddes - continued. Talking about British heroes, the lady that went to Skutari to help with the... AS: Florence Deadly Nightshirt. PS: Florence Nightingale: she invented medical statistics because they discovered when they put the soldiers in the hospital, the ones nearest to the lavatory died first: but that was just an observation. Then she started to build statistics, they Figure 4. London Roads Study, 1959, say that medical statistics started with Florence Nightingale. Well that is a classic whole net. bit of Green thinking, isn't it? That is, it is not the will of God, you are actually getting infected through the air. Well, why I brought that up is, she had to start, as Patrick Geddes had to start, from the bottom, i.e., there was no previous person who thought that way. In fact Nightingale was resisted by the medical profession, they thought the collection of statistical information was useless, like it took two generations about child birth, about washing the hands of the doctor delivering babies. They would not believe that the infection was due to them. You have got to perceive each act as having an action on the whole. AS: And by each act you should teach and it is the acts of the members of the staff (in parking their car where the air should be absolutely sweet) you could say is the first act of messing up the teaching system. PS: If the faculty had fed that piece of information in, you would have found in the students' projects some consideration of those factors. If the car fumes are meant to stay down the slope because the carbon monoxide is heavier than normal air, it is logical for the car park to be below the ridge line, but also, if the prevailing wind is this way, you would want to put the building to block the air flow from taking the carbon monoxide on to the top. That is Green thinking, but there is no discussion of this: you would expect these thoughts to be coming from the young people. PS: Because they are the potentially Green Generation, but it is very hard for them, unless they are pointed toward it, given the examples, to understand what we are talking about. AS: Part of our 1950's influence was a kind of osmosis. One of the things we used very early on, in illustrating AD essays was a mosaic of black and white photographs, i.e., a long, scanning strip of separate, but overlapping, photographs. Now this has become absolutely standard. You go to a students* board in Europe and you get these long scanning strips or mosaics of photographs, either made by one person or by the year, to inform themselves about a site. And of course it even entered into art about ten years ago, with Hockney's mosaics of Polaroid pictures, and when he started this a number of people in England said to us 'Hey, Hockney must have gotten hold of an old AD\ i.e., they recognized where it had come from, so that it is by very secret routes these things influence, take hold and it is for other people to make the connec tions; I think it is not for us to look back at history. When you walk into a place freshly, you are able to notice things that the local Figure 5. London Roads Study, 1959, work people don't notice. You are also in a position (because you are in and out and up in detail of Soho as most congested area you could sayyou don't have to carry the can) to say things that the local people served (Dean and Richards). INTERVIEW WITH SMITHSONS METU JFA 1989 71 may feel but don't necessarily want to speak out, you know we are for keeping our head down in our own country. It is easy just to swan in, but you hope that by saying aloud these observations they will be creative, because you recognize the fact that people can say things in their country and nobody takes any notice; that it is not even a matter of inclination to keep your head down. You are invited as a foreign visitor to say something and therefore often you can, by perhaps saying something, release some energy or unstop a bottle-neck. BG: As far as I understand from your talks in the last few days, I think that you don't want to enter large theoretical frameworks but you would rather prefer to look at things from the very essence of the events, from where things originate. That was very much visible in Peter's lecture where he mentioned the story about the children, that it is out of the basic needs of human beings that problems arise and architects should in the first instance tend to solve these problems. Well, in this respect, may I raise another question (because this disvalidates my questions and I am simply trying to pick up new questions) what sort of differences then shall we find for instance, between Haussmann's, operations in Paris and your London-Road study in this respect? Again, a bit historical, sorry! PS: My own feeling is that in terms of urbanism we have had no effect whatsoever because four fifths of what we saw in Raci's studio was what we were rejecting forty years ago, i.e., urbanism people making compositions of buildings in advance; in advance of real needs, real clients, real construction. We thought that it might be possible to invent a kind of graphics, together with documentation, of some sort you cannot imagine, that would guide the development of an area without prefixing forms because Raci and you keep on saying (and it is correct) you cannot just give an architect a pre-fixed shape in a plan and say 'fit it into that' because we know what happens; in modern times you just get a banal building, an object. It is exceptionally difficult, you think you can make a diagram .. just to take a simple example about real things: look at this in a Geddes way as if it is a village. There is a big street here which does not seem to carry many people, maybe you could make another connection; there is enough capacity; you examine also the kind of human action. Again a simple example from the Bath Campus... (Figure 6) KEY PLAN •• AMENITY BUELMNC •H SECOND ARTS BUILDING i?S BUILDING 6 EAST Figure 6. University of Bath Campus Mat, wi^L-0 1989. 72 METU JFA 1989 BAYKAN GUNAY AS: Because it is also on a ridge and you are overlooking the terrain, m<\ PS: that the social spaces that work well, the university discovered, are where students look out of the building and where people somehow naturally gather and sit talking. That space on the drawings intended for social space people don't use, it could be used as a computer area... you organically remodel. Taking that into town-planning, your project, there is a powerful drop in the contour because there is an old wall, therefore that if there is no longer housing, maybe this is a place for a belvedere, a look-out place. You identify the possibility but you don't specify how. Then the obvious thing, like when there is an underground station that is clearly going to generate the town's pedestrian flow and therefore will -r-r need more pavements... How do you put that over to the municipality? We have never been able to effectively find a way. We haven't done any commissioned Figure 7. Mehringplatz, Berlin, 1962, air urbanism since the Berlin Mehringplatz and Lutzowstrasse Competitions view of model. (Figures 7,8). AS: You mentioned the London Road Study; it was on well-accepted theoretical principles of one decision at a time, right/left or yes/no, and I don't think it has been followed at all in the London ring roads or anything. It is as if in this really practical urban theory one has had no influence at all, or rather one is influencing the people who are still trying to fight the system. Influence may come through, but at the moment we can't see it. And, to go back to what you said earlier about thinking of the users, Team 10 always swung (as CIAM did) from the whole pattern to the detail and back again. I think that it was good to use a program on campus, and it might be a good policy to push this, to make quite a high proportion of the projects on campus, serving the needs of the University, then invite the other faculties to have a look, to show that you are trying to put something in, that you are in a way trying to extend the thinking of the original builders of the Campus. Always a response, with the original intentions in mind and the changing patterns of use. You might even find some of the faculties then coming to you, and say *Look, our accommodation isn't quite fitting our current pattern of use. Would you like to do a study?' then it could be put to the administration, to perhaps in the summer holidays do some conversion work, and I think that this input of the architecture faculty into universities is some thing that really should begin to happen more. What happens at Bath? PS: It is very difficult to keep^on bringing them back to the principles on which the Campus was originally designed, because they will say 'That is not the way it's done now', because they are not innocent people, and know what the world trends are, they pick up ideas and get excited by them, like anybody else does. AS: It is consumerism and shopping. PS: They are consuming them, and of course the urbanist is running a very long program, isn't he? He is like a horticulturalist. He knows that the ideas won't come to fruition for a generation and a generation on. Therefore in a way the Figure 8. Lutzowstrasse, Berlin, 1980, axonometric showing north, rear, elevation of apartments along Lutzowstrasse. INTERVIEW WITH SMITHSONS METU JFA 1989 73 campus structure will only come through if it is sustained over a long period, so that the idea becomes clearer as it goes along. And I find at Bath that I can't produce any real influence on this process because fashions in university build ings arc as in other places. And these people are very responsible and devoted to the university, these are good people. AS: But all the more reason why the architects' department should all the time show a concern for the way the university is developing, and as it were, have a 'doorstep project' that the students realize, that it brings a kind of reality, 'it could happen here', *would we really like it if. That kind of consciousness is necessary to be grown in the students. I also think that unless the architects take this kind of active role on their campuses they won't learn how to deal with people, how to fight this consumerism. By pure chance we were asked to have another look at one of our Team 10 documents, because somebody was wanting to do an academic exercise on it, and we had to bring it with us because we knew we had no other time. The piece that I was reading last night happened to be a Team 10 discussion on consumerism, how difficult it was to deal with administrators and fight off this sort of supermarket-culture that we are all involved in where they say 'yes, but we've just seen something smashing somewhere and never mind the old idea, let's do this because presumably where we saw it had an old idea that they've just pushed aside'. Cities were nice in the old days. There were always old men who could remember the intention of why they put the fountain there, or why they paved that street, and why they didn't do something else, or who planted that tree in grandmother's day or something. Now this is all lost, largely because of the great number we are, but also because of these really horrific pressures of the 'McDonalds and Coca-Cola culture'. BG: Yes, but probably that is something we can't help, but you brought out certain issues where the architect can be helpful. In that respect you point out something: the architect is not simply a designer, the architect is more than that. He should go into the preparation of the design process, the design, the after maths of design and even the consequences of design should also be in a way dealt with by the architect. How could this effect architectural education? What sort of new measures should be then located into architectural education? PS: That's a good question because it enables me to continue in a practical way... When we opened the new building for the School of Architecture in Bath, the head of the School said 'We will have a two-day meeting', actually very like a Team 10 meeting, and he said 'We will call it Genesis', i.e., how the design process began, and it was fantastically good. A footnote on this is that we invited the president of the University and the man I'm talking about, the registrar, and the contractor, and the administrators in his department to this lecture, so they would hear the genesis of the building they had just finished, and what influenced it, and we had the person who worked on the concept of the university as a young man, someone who is now the boss of a firm was then an assistant. AS: In his first job. PS: You know, the man that did Hook, did the University of Bath general plan; his assistant from the time: so he went through the arguments on which the university plan had been based. We followed naturally on that, what happens twenty years later, how do you reinterpret. They invited other people (because we are a mixed school) an engineer came who worked on Piano's art gallery in America. He started in the same way, he said 'This woman', AS: Schlumberger. METU JFA 1989 BAYKAN GÜNAY PS: They are a French drilling company. AS: Strasbourg-Alsace. PS: She wanted to make this art gallery in Houston where there are no planning regulations and no zoning, therefore she said every building built in this town which is successful, like a new restaurant or a little shopping thing, immediately skyscrapers come around and kill it because real-estate men see it as a point of attraction. PS: She said 'Before I commission an architect I've got to buy, nine city blocks. I am going to put the art gallery in the middle, nobody will be displaced but I will have the freehold, they will have leases...' She accepted a piece of the town as the urban landscape setting; it's another of these 'how to save portions of the town you like'. The art gallery and the car lot over the road; the pace of the area has changed of course but not changed much. There will be more people in the street and there will be more car movement, but it's probably an increase of say five percent, whereas if it happened the other way the increase would be times fifty. AS: The trees are all there, the density is still the same round about. PS: The end of that story about the pedagogy: we had (you could say that) half the students in the upper school. So the kind of Team 10 meeting was the administration, the engineers, service engineers; not people simply talking about things. They were the people who had done the work, they made the building, therefore it was direct information which for the young architect is fantastic. AS: It was successful on several counts. One is the idea of the family getting together, the enlarged family having a few guests. The Team 10 idea had penetrated as a teaching method, as a communication method. And the next was the business of people feeling they could tell all the details of the actual produc tion, all the little faults and things that went on, because they trusted everybody who was listening. One of the most successful things apart from 'what a nice event it was' and 'how everybody enjoyed it'; this communicating directly was so successful I am sure that the Bath School is going to repeat it because everybody there could see that it was a marvellous family way of extending that collective sense to outside the school, outside the three professions (architects, structural engineers, service engineers) who were trying to learn to work together better, which is the teaching method in Bath. It was a real reaching out, and this I think is a marvellous teaching method because everybody is learning, and the com munications are kept going. BG: So it is not simply participation of people, but participation of the architect himself in all the events. AS: The architect must take the action, he must in a way make the connections and go out (what we said earlier) an architect in a way has to take the position of the old man; he has to understand the fabric of what he is dealing with and take up the position of 'remembrancer', and also the 'seer' into the future. He has to have the foresight to know which direction he should move in, in order to keep the original idea and not get it spoilt, and to fend off all the poor things that happen to it. And another reason, apart from running a mortician's parlor of one's own past dead life, we created this role for ourselves of 'remembrancer*, of the context, of the place, of the fabric that you are trying to deal with. We must be forward looking as well, because otherwise you put on this old man's hat all the time. INTERVIEW WITH SMITHSONS METU JFA 1989 75 BG: The horse's AS: Blinkers, yes, that's right. BG: Well, in fact I think architecture students, at one time, 1968 to 1970's, tended to deal with societal problems, but then it also created its own dilemmas where architects then had forgotten to deal with architecture. So in fact, this is a new man who will be conscious of politics, engineering sciences plus architecture. So he must be more than the man we are thinking of now. Is that so? PS: Difficult to imagine such a thing. BG: Or shall we put the architect into the political field as well? PS: I don't think I can do it because fundamentally it is a craft. Unless you do it yourself there isn't any product, can't do it as a politician. AS: The way is through good work ... so that the politicians are listening to architects, engineers, service-engineers, thinking and acting as 'remembrancers', and acting as people who are looking forward. If politicians can observe this, they begin to understand what it is you have to offer, and they don't just say 'O.K., we bought the plan, now you go away. We the politicians are the administrators, can deal with it'. They realize that you can actually contribute all the time and should work together all the time, to keep these cities alive, and to keep the qualities of the various places in the city that people really are connected to, and that you must not destroy their sense of connection, by just wiping whole bits of cities. PS: One thing came up in the discussion where I got cross with Chris Abel is 'Team 10 had no kind of political follow-through'. I have always thought that Team 10 was the effect (to repeat what was said then) was that someone like Bakema had tremendous social energy, could actually follow it, follow a project through and if necessary would go to the Queen if it was blocked. Holland is a small country; someone was saying about Denmark, it worked because it was a small country, that is, a famous architect can follow a project through, he can help with its initiation not by being in the council of administrators but by telephoning his friend who is the Queen's doctor or the prime-minister's; you know, the old Ottoman system, and you paid the price. Bakema was a good working architect when he was young, do you see, in the end the buildings suffered because the office did them, because you can't put your energy everywhere. This is why we are saying that Raci is on the point of collapse because his energy is too far extended, he can't keep it going all the time (he won't physically collapse because he is very strong) but you lose control because the control is personal. When it goes beyond the person you got to be a different kind of person who sets up systems and will see them through. AS: You see already he is having to use students to make the sort of drawings that the committees expect to see. When I was in Samarkand, the urban design department has an old Russian house (partly in order to hold the property) wooden boarded, wooden ceiled; they have all their plans of Samarkand, of the past thirty years, up on the walls; revised, anything from every five years to every two years. First you could see political kind of revisions and then the last seven years you felt that they were beginning to revise these plans on a sort of eighteen month basis, with a fresh lot of assistants with fresh gimmicks out of the magazines and it had become absolutely crazy, this worrying about presenting drawings, communicating to the people, communicating to the politicians, com municating in order to get the money allocated; and communicating participa tion, where to put the road, where to put the market and so on. It was absolutely METU JFA 1989 BAYKAN GUNAY desperate and you could see in a way that Raci has got into this position, that almost it would be better to say 'O.K. we will take full responsibility for this demonstration bit and unfortunately the rest we just got to chance that somebody else will come along and take responsibility and hold another bit'. And you do it as a demonstration area of what it is you are trying to talk about and then you seed another area. It is in a way like gardening, you've got to put the real seeds in, nurture them and get the real plants before anybody can see, and then hopefully hold it long enough in order to get the fruit, and this is why you've got to get this instilled in the young people. And that is why I say the odd exercise, on campus, to show this was the original 'plant' as it were, and this is how we must keep it growing, and keep trimming it and protect it from all the things that might happen to it. And again, to make offerings to the campus, to show how architects think and how they can make contributions. If, in the first instant it is too delicate, politically, to offer your services to one faculty, to show how by altering its accommodation to make it serve better the occupants, you might take something like the guest accommodation that we are in; take a block and analyze it to see if it is actually serving the pattern of both residents and guests to its best ability and actually finding out from the users, both the short-term guests and the long-term residents, how they need to occupy the building, and what sort of space you need to be a useful member of the university community because that is really the essence of it. If you put a single resident in one room who is going to stay here a couple of years, they can't really be working at their peak because they are constrained all the time, you know. That is, an academic resident (whether it is one person or two people) they need a study space, they need a kitchen space that they can go to at any hour of the day or night because they might want to work long hours sometimes. You might have separate apartment units byconversion; usinggaps (filling indents) in the buildings that are not really serving any particular purpose, absorbinga couple of balconies that are not really being used and, by looking next door at the very successful early housing which has now got beautiful planting grown up around it, putting a lean-to roof over an extended ground floor so making two extra big units. An apartment unit, whether it is one-room, two-room; one person, two person; each unit has to be perfectly self- contained because the socializing takes place other ways now than the way architects originally thought it would take place. BG: So, this also brings in one other question, or one other issue: once you make a design, it also should be open to further changes and there should always be someone, because ways of living change, ways of using space change. So buildings should also be, well maybe buildings cannot be so elastic but there should be something there, something elastic to cope with the new functions, the new way of life. AS: You are taking up one of these Team 10 themes, of the building being able to respond, being able to grow and change, but exactly how it is done, in a way the architects not only have to learn how to do this and they have to show to other people how it can be done without somehow destroying the initial building or extending rather than destroying the initial idea, serving people better and if you can learn to deal with, as it were, the relatively new guest house, perhaps you can also learn something of how to deal with the old better. PS: I would have thought, other than examining the fabric, kind of understanding it, that it is difficult to build into a building the potential for change in a society when you don't know what its change is going to be. I think it is more the other way round like the urbanism where the person is making the alteration, to feel himself obliged to understand the underlying nature of the building before he makes the change even though that change is very violent. For example this business of the impact of information technology; it could not possibly have been