Repurpose the Architect
“Instead of architects attempting to repurpose a surrounding, they need to allow the surrounding to repurpose them.” –Wes Janz
I recently sat down with Wes Janz, an architectural educator and an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Ball State University. He is currently working on a book titled One Small Project, which is inspired by living conditions in the working class neighborhoods of Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Colombo, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New Orleans, St. Petersburg, and Singapore. We discussed a number of things ranging from his visits to various countries to the roles of architects in society. What follows is an interview with Dr. Janz…
Q: You've talked about residents in developing countries using unused materials to build houses. How sustainable and effective are those houses?
A: To me these are very sustainable practices. People are using what they find locally, in their neighborhood or the part of the city that they live in, reusing what they find and slowly trying to upgrade those houses at the same time. They may start with a house made out of some wood frames and some plastic and canvas and slowly over time collect some bricks or some timber pallet or some pieces of concrete and in time they can make a nice finished house for themselves.
Q: How do you relate that to this world in terms if incorporating the practices of changing our habitats more often in an already ever-changing world?
A: It is very difficult to take informal building practices and put them into the formal economy because they are two different economical frameworks, but the fact of the matter is that these buildings which we occupy are ever-changing--although maybe slowly for instance. The university has a whole construction crew making modifications to the existing building so there is interesting potential there. In the work that I do here, probably the best that I have been able to address this was in a students’ master thesis. Someone up in Flint, Michigan was proposing to work from the sensibilities of the squatters. In a city where they’ve lost a lot of jobs and population with thousands of abandoned houses the student was saying can we take a squatter’s sensibility and relate that back into the built environment? Can we hint at the beginnings of construction and empower squatters to start to construct their own housing by remodeling an existing abandoned house or building something new from scrap materials? How do we see this not from the position of the bank or the developer or the institutional power figures but from within the lives of the people who need the housing?
Q: I saw some projects of wood structures popping up around the library, what’s that about?
A: Some of the students want to build things and they have interesting questions about what their work as architects would be in the future and what the built environment can or can’t add to the lives of others. So, we say you should build something and test this idea that you have by actually making something, put in place and see how people respond to it.
Q: In that sense, what is the fundamental difference between architecture and art?
A: Architecture has a different set of responsibilities than art. Architects are told that they have to care about the health, safety and welfare about the population so it is primary for us doing the building to provide space for people to occupy; if there is a fire to get them out of the building safely, to make sure the building doesn’t collapse when there are a lot of people in it or the wind blows really strongly. I think there is a different level of realities architects have to deal with than maybe what an artist has to deal with. Not to diminish what artists do in any way.
Q: Do a lot of architects though, try to incorporate a lot of art in their work by making people stop and think about their projects?
A: Too often, I think even here in this building, we see a building as a kind of a solution to a set of problems and I say always "to me a building is just another set of questions about how we occupy space." It is an architect, a client, and a team of collaborators saying we have some questions about the way society operates and we are going to use this building as a way to address some questions, and in that way it is not a solution, it is another group of questions.
I think the better architects are artists also and we tend to say architecture sits between art and science. The thing I try to add is that as architects, we typically forget people in the sense that are actually doing something for real human beings. We tend to categorize people as being users, the occupant or the live loads that the building has to hold up. I try to argue that we should start the work that we are doing by knowing another human being and eventually we’ll get to concerns about aesthetics and science but architecture should be a human profession in many ways that it's not because we are so wrapped up in the equations, in the law and the aesthetics and the last thing we think about is another human being in a real way.
Q: Does the usage of a project affect the architect in any way?
A: It can be the case that architects don’t look back. When you talk to architects many times, if you ask them what their favorite project is they’ll say the next one because they are always looking forward. There might be a lot to learn by staying connected to a project, to a building or the lives of some of the people that are using the building. I don’t know that many of the architects are that interested in that because they are busy looking forward.
Q: Is it possible for a piece of architecture to revolutionize a culture and change the way of thinking?
A: I think architects would like to think that that is the case, that what we do is so important that we have the potential to change peoples’ lives with the buildings we design, but I tend to think that that’s not so easy or so obvious to me. The world is so intra-connected right now it is hard for me to see one thing--especially a building--making that much of a difference in a culture, maybe in a family or for a person but I think it would be difficult here at Ball State. And I think architecture can be important, but in terms of changing a culture… I would hope.
My argument would be that these things that come from the top down where the people in power say we are going to create a building to change the society or the people that maybe what they are really trying to do is change the viewpoints of the people in their economic structures. I think if you want to argue for bottom up work that we need to start with one human being and work up from there.
Personally, I’m trying to be open to being changed myself by my interactions with people. I don’t have to change them or their world; can they educate me and can they make my world better? I think people should be interested in changing the world by being changed themselves, by being open and responsive to what they find in the world by not always assuming that they know what is best for other people. That is very fundamental to me.
For more information on Wes Janz and his projects visit:
Website: http://www.onesmallproject.com/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/onesmallproject/
Blog: http://onesmallproject.blogspot.com/
Delicious: http://delicious.com/onesmallproject
Overview of a museum show: http://onesmallprojectwiki.pbworks.com/Installation%3A-Terre-Haute
