Interview with Architect Michael Maltzan, pt. 2
In the decade since founding Michael Maltzan Architecture in Los Angeles, Michael Maltzan has developed a practice that engages the increasingly complex reality of urbanization and information-driven culture. Through projects such as the Mark Taper Forum/Inner-City Arts, Harvard-Westlake School’s Feldman-Horn Center for the Arts, MoMA QNS, Kidspace Children’s Museum, and UCLA Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, Maltzan charts a new trajectory for modernism and the public realm.
Having worked with Michael on the MoMA QNS project, we decided to get in touch and see what he’s been up to.
Base: Your work is quite different conceptually and aesthetically from a 1922 bungalow [your house]. How would you approach such an addition? Would it be similar to your solution for the Sonoma County Museum, where you successfully fused old and new?
Michael Maltzan: We’ve really struggled with that question. In the end, it will look a lot like the old house on the outside and be very different spatially inside.
Base: Do you ever see building a new house for yourself, provided that time and money were not necessarily primary considerations?
MM: Since starting the addition, building a new house is all I want to do! But I think it’s difficult also; the expectation is that an architect’s own house is a perfect representation of everything they believe in. That’s a heavy burden to think about taking on.
Base: What household object would you like to redesign?
MM: The doorknob. We actually have been working on some ideas for one. When I started thinking about how to design one, I quickly realized that all of the functional issues had been worked out a long time ago, so then the real question comes up, “Now what?”
B: “Green” design is becoming more and more prevalent. Is this something that you are integrating into your work?
MM: We are very serious about it in the office. I am trying to integrate it so thoroughly that it’s an expectation in the way we do all work, and as essential and connected to the architecture as aesthetics, structure, light, space.
B: Does the “green” aspect influence the design?
MM: Until fairly recently, it’s been primarily through applied technologies, a more “bolt-on” mentality. But increasingly, I think, the real innovation will be more in thinking about the full decision-making process of building, from conceptualizing a building through the construction and the impact and consequence that all of those decisions added together has on sustainability.
B: How do you find out about and evaluate new technologies?
MM: We are always looking at what is being developed, but we also depend a great deal on our collaborators on projects who have special technical knowledge or areas of concentration. They often bring ideas to the process, but it is more often in the collaboration of a few seemingly unrelated ideas that are put together in a new way that creates an innovative result.
B: Architects are a unique breed… highly mathematical yet highly creative. Do you think this is entirely “nature”? Or can you remember particular people or events that prove it’s also “nurture”?
MM: I had a D average in high school math so I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer this question, but as I get older, I increasingly believe that some people are just naturals.
B: What’s a “good idea”?
M. M.: The good idea is the one that when you say it out loud is still a good idea.
B: What determines whether a structure is warm or cold? Materials? Light? Decoration?
MM: You know, I always hate that equation—it’s “warm” or “cold”—although I hear it a lot. I never think about the work in that way. Maybe I should, but I think it reduces the what we should and can expect out of architecture. Architects put so much into the work to make it generous, to make it about something, and then you get back: it’s “warm” or it’s “cold.” My reaction is always, “Come on, there’s been so much put into this design; you’ve got to do better than that!”
B: What measures are needed to improve the quality of buildings being built in New York City?
MM: Developers that believe in architecture, and government that understands architecture as a civic responsibility.
B: Critics have talked about your talent in designing buildings in relation to/in function of the landscape. If after the building is occupied the landscape is changed, either by excavation or implementation of other structures, do you see this as natural evolution? Or a destruction of your initial plan?
MM: All you can control is the time up to the moment the building is done; from that moment on, change is inevitable. You hope that what you made was true enough that what gets made around it after is in some conversation with your building. That’s when the city really becomes something extraordinary, when all of these different voices are in a discussion.
B: Do you see an increasing cross-pollination between architecture and other disciplines? Such as branding, landscape design, art, sound, etc?
MM: Absolutely, but I think architecture represents our time, and I think you can see this trend of interdisciplinary thinking taking hold across a wide range of disciplines especially outside of the design fields.
Read part 1 of this interview.
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