The Fall 2015 RSA/RDA lecture series begins today, Monday, September 14 with renowned designer, author, and Harvard professor Farshid Moussavi. Below, Cite editor Raj Mankad interviews Andrew Colopy, who curated the series as a faculty member of the Rice School of Architecture, which is also where this publication is based.
Raj Mankad: It's easier for me to understand the way "cute" is used to describe a poem, a painting, or video than for a work of architecture.
Andrew Colopy: For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that for something to be understood as cute you need to be able to perceive it as small and simple. It’s easy to see how this condition emerges from the relationship between a parent and child, but anything we can perceive as small and simple can be cute. That’s clear from your example of a poem --- a small, deceptively simple (if it’s good) text. How that might relate to architecture has to do with our shifting perceptions of scale and complexity. Consider for a moment what sets your standard for bigness. You might have once said a building, but today it’s hard not to see the entire planet as a constructed object. As a result, buildings seem less significant, and easily slip into cuteness. The "seriously cute" acknowledges that this reduced position isn’t powerless, it just produces a different form of power, a soft power, one inherently concealed. Beauty may still be loved, delight may be pleasurable, but it’s the cute that’s interesting today.
Speechbuster / 99 Chairs (2013). Photo: bureau-spectacular.net.
RM: What does "seriously cute" mean for architecture?
AC: Architecture, along with the humanities and the social sciences, has taken what some describe as a "turn toward affect" in recent years as we've tried to better understand the role emotions and intuition play alongside cognition and reason.
In architecture, this turn is perhaps most easily affiliated with the digital project of complex surface geometries. In part, what I've termed the "seriously cute" suggests a countervailing tendency (or potential) for architecture to exhibit the perception of a reduced complexity and scale in response to the broader effects of technology and new media. The potential is perhaps both a novel way to engage architecture at a global scale (under which the agency of any one building is diminished) but also the ability to promote attention and interest in the built environment.
Public Media Commons. Photo: Julia Christensen - OhJuliaAnn.com.
RM: The last speaker for the RDA, Tarik Oualalou, who won the Spotlight Prize with his partner Linna Choi, said that the gravity of architecture is a counterbalance to the Twitter life. Is it one or the other?
AC: It’s a question of whether technology helps us to value real, lived experience. I’d say that’s part of what architecture should do, provide gravity and counterbalance to those aspects of life mediated by technology. But I don’t think it should be seen as a form of resistance. My office just completed an interactive media plaza that blends real public space with interactive digital content --- it helps bring people together in a physical place through media, then extends that experience to social media back online. Architecture must directly engage the technology that shapes our lives, otherwise we risk not seeing it when the power’s out.
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Photo: ©Dean Kaufmann.
RM: The first speaker in the Seriously Cute series, Farshid Moussavi, is respected both for her research and her practice of architecture. What should lecture-goers expect to hear?
AC: I suspect we’ll hear about the research from her recently released book, The Function of Style, which looks at how we might make sense of the current diversity in architectural work within a global context. She’ll also discuss the role of affect in that context as it’s particularly relevant to speculations like the seriously cute. But we’ll also see a number of exciting recent and upcoming projects her office is working on, including several large retail and office complexes in London and Paris. We might also see the recently completed Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, a striking building that I recently visited and encourage everyone to see.
Purchase tickets for the Seriously Cute series.
