Interview with Rem Koolhaas at MUF 2018 "Moscow, Archeology of the Future" (English)

Remco has the olanski chapter hide unisys now actually etiologic of deconstructivism Gloria preserves capri me so at of alive innocence k Biennale zapped wat when he checked her oh right ESL guard Scavo University as now vital architect or ANOVA Bureau om a office for metropolitan architecture has Adina's of that name Italy is as Natalie Institute a media purgatory design a streak of 3dc 2dc attended of masks where the earlier data situational suitable gotta ramp rate stable and hit external concepts less than a tree Tchaikovsky gallery in a grim scam voluma square Lattimer Posner II Ram Coker's [Music] for a change [Music] I'll say a few words in Russia okay WH er before they dummy good evening ladies and gentlemen I have the honour and I hope pleasure to interview mr. Ram coal Hoss I'll talk in English so those of you who don't understand English you have equipment for simultaneous interpretation and then later or during the interview you can send in your questions and later I will pass on these questions to Ram and he will answer those you first came to Moscow in 1965 67 67 so you were 23 yeah and you go to her in 92nd turned on me 22 22 and you were a journalist I was a journalist and was a friend of somebody who invited me to come because he wanted to do an exhibition but person architecture okay now I've read that this visit to Moscow played a very important role in your becoming involved in architecture is that right it's true how so why don't you tell me basically when I came to Russia Henry stood for the first time that architecture was not about making shapes or making buildings even but that it was a profession that kind of could define the content of society and it could intervene in shaping Society so they can vary in a way ambitious interpretation of architecture but when I saw the work of Russian architect in the 20s and 30s I understood that that was their essence the architecture was a wave of script writing but but with buildings what are them words that was half a century ago and Julia have you come back to Moscow over the years yes I know that this is a it's a it's a naive question and also a difficult question but could you sum up in your view how was Moscow changed over that period how would you characterize that change well when I first came to Moscow particularly if you came from a kind of sweet country like the Netherlands really harsh country but I also like the aesthetics of harshness where we try to compose everything in Moscow totally radically different entities existed next to each other something's really beautiful something can really extremely ugly and I always thought that the quality of Moscow was to accept that kind of coexistence almost as if it was nature and I think that that quality is still there except that maybe in the last five years in Moscow is going in the direction of something that is better composed and maybe more coherent you know I arrived in Moscow when I in 1952 when I was 18 years old and over the years it changed very slowly yeah it was it did change but wasn't anything radical and then suddenly yeah something happened now when when a when a city changes that quickly when there's that kind of urban change is that good is that bad is that a promise is that a potential is that something to worry about I've become increasingly bad in terms of those kind of judgment if you ask me what is good and what is bad maybe 20 years ago I would know but now I'm much more in beginners and I see that kind of basically in everything there are good and bad things at the same time so I would say yes it is very good what happened in the last five years because you can see that there is a kind of degree of public consciousness and the public is taken care of and therefore the kind of brutality of the city is kind of reduced but perhaps some of the wildness and some of the strangeness of the city is also being lost is it risky at all do you think huh is it risky is it real your risk a level of risk in it that is not a kind of very worsen characteristic maybe all right as you know I'm not an architect no I think I'm a journalist and you initially were not an architect I know do you have an architectural education yeah when I was here I kind of seemly decided to become an architect and then I started to study in London when I was 25 and then I finished 20 or 30 all right I don't understand architectural lingo there are many things now you came up with the word the building is falling down this is this is what happens when it develops very quickly you I think invented a word called bigness now you're taking a noun are you taking adjectives big and you turn it into a noun saying bigness you can't do that in Russian the language doesn't allow for it I don't know whether you can do it in French but what do you mean when you say bigness just exactly what are you talking about okay maybe I would like to talk about the language okay before because my career has never taken place in my own language in other words I'm native but I don't think about architecture and Dutch I would divide about architecture in Dutch and I think this kind of relationship between language and how I look at the world is really crucial because I adopted maybe a kind of angry sex and persona but I could easily adopt a kind of continental European persona also and I would say that some of my writings is actually more inspired by the French and by the English so I think that language is really the the main driver perhaps of my whole and I think really I my father had a very close friend who was a famous Dutch Documenta lyst movie his name was yours even's and he told me your distilled me when I was a little boy said Dutch is not a language it's a sickness of the throat I really hated expression I knew in Indonesia and he always used to say that he could not close his machete and would always ask my mother to close his mouth shelter that's my kind of alright getting back to bigness whatever bigness so at some point I thought that the world was on its way to fragmentation and fragmentation was becoming also in terms of deconstruction a kind of very fashionable philosophical position way I was feeling or had an instinct that English fragmentation is not a critically noise perspective and I was kind of thinking how architecture could contribute to reintegration and to researching the whole authority of the complete thing my experience in New York in certain cases gave me a kind of sense that certain things are so complex and required the collaboration of so many people and so many different professions and and combination of kind of science and art that the sheer effort of that kind of integration is an antidote or an order model against fragmentation so it's really big mass was for me kind of a deal where through sheer complexity and sheer ambition we could begin to collaborate again and I was just talking about it with an interviewer but we see now it's interesting because what we see is bigness again but not in the terms of more and more complexity but a very very large very simple simplistic entity such as data centers storage spaces distribution centers that are all getting bigger and bigger many of them too big to to actually be built in cities that we typically build them outside cities and so we have a different kind of bigness but without the complexity and therefore without idealism so what can we do about that and can we do anything you think you used to be a profession maybe into the 70s of the century well if you would ask can we do anything about it and any average architect would say yes we can do this we can do that we can do this we can do that but I think that since then something has been taken away from us and what has been taken away from us I think it's the way in which whether it is in China in Russia in Europe in America we have invested the market economy with the final voice about things and therefore this whole connection to knowing recipes of knowing what to do has been eliminated I would say from the repertoire of an architect that's a pretty sad thing to say isn't it it's maybe not that sad it's not only sad there again because it's I think the history of architecture is also the history of a series of incredibly responsible ambitions these huge buildings that you speak about they look all the same everywhere to me there's a kind of a sameness about I can't say oh this is this is American and this is whatever it they all look the same to me and when we speak about this I think about a movie that you probably know very well called a Clockwork Orange and the question I wanted to ask you was to what extent do you think the surroundings that we live in affect us as we are born and grow up do you think that and this is not just a an academic question but do you think that if a person is born in a friendly attractive original urban setting and grows up in now that person will be different from the one who grows up in these identical buildings what do you think maybe of them doing one person to us because I was born in a bombed city that was completely ruined and and spent the first seven years of my life there I would say I've mixed feelings about it yes I think that you would benefit from harmony and beauty but I think it could also give you a kind of false sense of existential security and that therefore in every life that needs to be maybe a kind of cocktail of anxiety and and disbelief and insecurity and and creativity I think that those areas are actually quite close together and I think that certain to be too certain of your environment and to have an environment that is kind of really only affirming kind of secure situation he's probably not in the end big blessing and I think that this is actually an important issue because a couple of years ago I organized the canal in Venice and I certainly can realize that you know typical generation of may 68 so I typically endorsed the values of the French Revolution liberty freedom [Music] fraternity etc and that without really a drastic shift we were in a kind of new situation where comfort security and sustainability became the kind of main drivers of society and there again I've kind of mixed feelings whether that is actually so so so crucial one of the expressions that I dreaded most of the interviews that you've given and also some of the things you've written and one thing that comes up pretty often is city of the future city of the future what is that what is a city of the future do I mean do we know what it's like if Moscow going to be a city of the future I think that first of all I don't know what the city of the future is and also allowed myself to be kind of really incompetent about the future and I try to be a specialist about to present and and I think that's already quite complex that's great in that sense have the kind of religion allistic drug to understand the present and I think during this typical journalist doesn't speculate about the future but of course I have some instinct well you've also called Moscow the only mega city of Europe first of all what's a mega city and what makes it the only mega city in Europe with cities like London in Paris and well I think the unique thing about Moscow is it can a single spot in an unbelievably vast territory and and although it has relationships with this past territory they don't quite get it's not quite explicit though it's relatively isolated as a city and there's very few big cities next to it but of course if you look at the kind of whole conversion between Holland Belgium Germany that is all urban and that is all a kind of urban pattern but it has less identity and it is less can historically defined and therefore it's a kind of more open-ended condition I think that Moscow is the only mega city in in Europe because it's the only isolated city of that scale I feel understand okay so New York is not a mega city okay yeah New York is not Isis it's an urban condition you keep the crush job the man who denounced Stalin yeah was also the man who changed urban act architecture in this country now maybe that wasn't his goal but he did on November 30 of 1954 at the all-union Conference of builders architects and workers of the building industry so-called socialist architecture was put to bed Khrushchev criticized the architect the Stalinist architecture with what he called unneeded curlicues and what have you and began putting up these five-story box-like buildings for housing obviously and now the plan is to knock a lot of them down and [Music] first of all how do you feel about that basically of course I'm incredibly interested in the relationship between politics and architecture and particularly couch off I think is a really a key figure in that whole kind of situation because I'm deeply admiring of what he did the amount of housing that he created in a very short time the simplicity of the housing and actually the quality of the housing and open spaces next to them is is for me kind of really important paradigm particularly because it was an articulation of a combination of intelligence beauty simplicity and equality and and I think that combination of activities is well used it's very difficult to to discover today but I also see that a lot of the kind of substance is that you can no longer maintain it and that something needs to move to happen about it I've been for that reason because I think it's such an important issue been involved in the idea of preservation which is not typical for our kind of architects but simply to see whether through preservation you could achieve other aims or maintain qualities that you cannot recreate today as part of the stroke effort that we launched I worked with one of the students to declare one of the coach of apartments where the poet pre Gogh had taken worked a UNESCO World UNESCO heritage site so it was the most normal architecture with the least architectural quality the most banal view and we wanted to get a kind of recognition for those failures do you think the idea of simply knocking them down and then putting in a denser kind of architecture do you think that's a positive I think that to some extent it is inevitable I think it could also be done in inward way I'm not saying it cannot be done and also not saying it's not an intelligent effort but I do hope that the city doesn't erase any evidence of that past arrest for instance I think that the city of Berlin may take a massive mistake after the unification to erase everything that was part of the kind of communist aesthetic yes and yeah and and I think that has been really a historical mistake so Moscow should make a say mister I'd like to quote you you said the following you can say so many things about the Soviet system that were bad but in terms of public architecture it was generous generous meaning for instance one of the strongest experiences as a condiment being a still swim in the pool that was kind of created in the basement of the monument to the 30 international it had kind of beautiful dressing rooms you were diving under calles plate and you would enter a world of water that had kind of really totally magical and unique world so there were moments were of that kind of generosity particularly when the public at large had to be kind of recognized I think Moscow Metro is another form of that University the I get admire do admire you know traveling around Europe I have been struck by the similarities between the fascist architecture of Mussolini the Nazi architecture of Hitler's Germany especially of sculptures public sculptures in public places and the Communists architecture of the Stalinist period I don't know why they have these similarities but it seems to me that they do what do you think I'm mistaken it's obviously a very tricky subject because I don't want to go and record it to convert more that kind of architecture but at the same time I think it's also important to recognize that each of those systems perhaps the knot is the least created important architecture if you look really really carefully I think that Nazi architecture is on the whole more banal I would say less but that in both Mussolini's architecture and Stalin's architecture that was at least incredible imagination knew there was it was indeed very interesting how do you feel about preservation because we're talking about buildings being knocked down how do you feel that preservation yes maybe ten years ago I'm teaching in her fridge and I preservation was something that I never thought about and and preservation you know any architect the preservation seems to be the enemy who or the the other side of architecture but when I really started studying carefully it became a very fascinating domain and one of the reasons is that for instance the first law of reservation was made by the French after the French Revolution and it's very logical because if you have a revolution you have to decide what to keep and the second preservation law was maybe the Victorian Industrial Revolution for the same reason and basically the first preservation lost the interval between the present and what they wanted to preserve was maybe thousand years the second law it became two hundred years then it became hundred years and now already is this interval between the present and what the preserve is getting shorter and shorter there are even kind of things that we built ourselves at the preserve the moment we finish them and therefore I think that preservation is not a thing where you have to look behind you and say let's keep that I think you in the future you have to decide even before you build something but it has the quality and the console Aditi and the depth to be maintained over time while other buildings are more provisional so I think that will be an important kind of separation that's my hint about the city of the future but how do you go about deciding before you know I understand your point that you should start by thinking before you build something you should start by thinking about whether or not it's going to be something that should be there but a lot of stuff is already there however maybe I'm a bit extreme or a bit polemical but but I think that there are certain cases were really within 20 years you have to decide in or out and and and I think that the domain is for me kind of really exerting intellectual domain knows and and for instance the transformation of the garages you can example alright but if you know what's the what's the but what's the argument what's the principle it's ugly let's get rid of it or typically that's the argument let's not care and it's officially it's serving a higher purpose or not so I think there's a whole value system that is driven and that kind of suggests that only important things and only exceptional things and only historical things should be kept and and that I think has a very negative effect because for me it is important to preserve things so that anyone who lives in 100 years understand how we lived you once said and I found this very interesting you said open season has been declared on post-war social architecture it's a very interesting concept if you were to talk well you as we spoke about East East Berlin for instance but in general post-war architecture is what years 60 70 60 70s 80s yeah and and now the idea is to try to get rid of all of that I think it's it's may be part of a collective shame I think in those spirits there was a kind of political layer and a political domain that was visibly taken care and thinking about how the population should live and that was also dedicated to not let inequality become the dominant factor in urban life and I think that for that reason now that we're in a kind of situation not only here but basically everywhere in the kind of world that cities are to some extent kind of monuments to inequality then obviously this whole other way of thinking about what a city can do for population is almost like an embarrassment well look at Paris plus there is also of course many of those buildings are extremely stark made out of concrete and if you don't convert us maybe soon some kind of refinement in detail actually absolutely brutal and I think we've become more intolerant for that eternity and we want to in a way be consoled by a building's the reason I brought up Paris is you know barrels man who knocked down God knows how many buildings in Paris which before that I don't think was ever really considered to be a incredibly beautiful city but it's after that that Paris acquires this this world or of the most beautiful city so here's this man who knocks down half the city and then rebuilds it what are you suggesting well what I'm asking is that maybe could they do the same thing pardon me could one do the same thing or is it is it you know it seems that it's not all bad although you know as far as preservation is concerned one might say that he committed a crime I think one of the crucial words may be to introduce is modernity and and maybe even more important modernization but what does modernization mean modernization means there is and an ideology that suggests that things can be improved and it suggests that kind of basically you can live longer you streets can be kind of planned there is sewers that kind of take your waste you get running water blah blah so I think that the Houseman is one of the economic stations of let's say an initial or almost a package of improvements combined with the kind of sense of aesthetics and in a way very tangible intervention that for almost everybody would have beneficial conditions and I think that is the equivalent is very hard to imagine today because somehow you know if I would be kind of forced to say what would be your program I would wouldn't have a very coherent package I could imagine some kind of improvements but I cannot kind of present myself you know as you can author or a thinker of a Collini radical radically different life in a radically better life there's so much I want to ask you there are two cities that you've written a lot about one is Lagos and the other is Palermo okay now when you speak about Lagos you say this Lagos contradicts almost every defining feature of the modern city yet it's a city that works okay what is a city that works what do you mean by that a city that works or give me an example of a city that doesn't work basically Lagos was supposed to be the most dysfunctional kind of city in the world a dangerous city in the world and I went to see it you know at the end of kind of really ruthless dictatorship when basically the whole public sector had disappeared and so it was a free-for-all and it was complete and utter chaos and you know to the extent that it had once been a capacity with an infrastructure and a confusion of what occurred modern city should look like all of that was completely gone yet 16 million people used it as a tool to not improve their life because that was in but to survive and to kind of somehow you know out of this completely broken machine extricate and and create kind of pockets of maybe sanity or pockets of energy or pockets of intelligence or pockets of imagination to to survival for instance and and I think what what I really discovered is that you know in cities like Moscow maybe in one day we have to take 200 decisions but at the most you know where to go where to better to take attacks a bit in the city like Legos you had to probably take 20,000 decisions that each could have a kind of really vertical effect on your life so it's it simply enabled me to really stretch the understanding very much off and not to be judgmental and say it's bad doesn't work it's think it's good but to see you know to what extent under those conditions the city still offers you call Palermo an incubator of the global problematic excuse me I'm not gonna answer that an incubator for the the global problem at an ideal blueprints blueprints for the Mediterranean and Europe as a whole because they should say we have an office with eight partners this is a statement by one of our partners who actually is from Palermo yes and who is but of course completely endorse it and can also believe in it polymer is not comparable to labels but it is to some extent almost unique collection of very problematic European conditions and also persistent European hypothesis that that come together there [Music] it's very lucky to a very creative politician as a man who is basically able to reach many of those features in a positive rather than a negative way all right we're gonna move away from the city for another and go to the country you have an upcoming exhibition in the Guggenheim which is called countryside future of the world right yeah okay so how was the countryside too true of the world because the view I've always had is that gradually the countryside has in a way become much smaller because once upon a time the majority of the population lived in rural areas and the population of cities was much smaller and then there's been this movement what with industrialization and all the rest of it and now it's about 50/50 but in developed countries much many more in cities than in the countryside so how can the countryside be the future of the world well I became aware of a kind of serious paradox that universally ever since this color statistic of 50/50 we have overwhelmingly looked at cities and kind of celebrated cities and argued about unique effect of and abilities of cities to to lift the economy to lift copulation this morning must have been one big autocracy of the kuru city and what is then if you listen to it can really very noticeable is that the city is the country that is completely absent from the discussion and so I simply made a very simple observation yes maybe 50 percent lives in cities but the other 50 percent still lives not in cities and lives in the countryside and so I became fascinated by simply the simple question what is happening in the countryside and once I started looking what is happening in the countryside and actually these are the sites where we are looking what is happening in the countryside I realized that cities are relatively stable because if you look no not in this case of course fortunately this is brand new but if you look out of the window you know everything is been there for 200 years and if you look carefully and this is what I wanted to understand you know this is what sure hundred years ago yes and you it's a kind of beautiful cone here and then it's true and this is Switzerland 200 years later and you see that this vertical change but what has changed it's globalization that has kind of put its tentacles everywhere and I simply found it interesting to forget about the city for a while not as an archetype with and to focus on the changes in the countryside and what we discovered you could say is that in order to maintain the spectacle of the city in order to kind of maintain the kind of feeling of the city in order to maintain in certain cases the energy of the city the countryside is becoming kind of more more structured organized and Cartesian and that sounds kind of difficult to understand but if you look at agriculture in America or agriculture in the Netherlands it is now based on digital data that it can receives from satellites that are transferred to a laptop that the information of a laptop is transferred to an automated tractor blah blah blah so for many many reasons the countryside is transformed in completely unrecognizable condition and I simply want to do that that's why you call it the frontline of transformation yeah well then tell me this do you think that presents new opportunities for for architects for instance of course but but since we were so uniquely kind of obsessed with the city I think we we need to kind of really make a serious effort to to connect to it to those developments do you see a guy I think that kind of for instance there are in the countryside kind of unity forms or firms that don't work with daylight anymore that work with artificial colors a lot right so everything if you hear it this is the image if you look here this is a very strong architectural impression with which none of us in this room has anything to do and and nevertheless it's kind of fresher than anything we do so for that reason I think it's crucial that we find a way to connect to it if there a link between climate change and this is a barrier this is what where I grew it how this where you grew up yeah not very attractive no you know the fact that for instance permafrost is receding in Siberia which may add rural land and so on is there a link there that that's tied to what you say about the new frontier in a way permafrost is gone really crucial kind of part of what we're looking at and converses a crucial country and and yes it is true that the melting of permafrost is something that hasn't even been kind of thought or included in the calipers Accords so it's just like airplanes or shipping kind of big unknown that that we somehow haven't addressed yet and and yet if it continues as intensely as it is already operating there will be unbelievable kind of quantities of methane mercury blah blah blah and so I don't want to give a couple elliptic girl story because the I think that's boring and irresponsible but the transformation but also the apparatus of scientists that is beginning to look at it kind of family and also slowness of the understanding of that phenomenon but also the history that the Russians have already since the 17th century to look at it and look at its transformation is really opening for me a completely unknown territory and very crucial theory I was very intrigued when I found out that you're involved in working on the new triptych off gallery now I happen to think that it's one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen and if I could I would blow it up okay all right but I can't yes right now but I'd like to ask you what attracts you what what what what are you doing there what is it about this building that you find interesting well I mentioned in the beginning that for me the exciting thing about version interpretation of architecture was to see it as you can form or script writing by other means and and if you look at the architecture like that and basically every square meter is kind of potential invitation to change something or to white let's say the square meter of architecture is like a white page of a novel and this building happens to be an enormous building and so therefore it is without making the effort or the expensive expense of creating a new building out of nowhere it simply has unbelievable potential for accommodating more activity which combinations of activity and also I think a degree of experimentation with how you can interact with the art how you can combine art how you can experiment with art but you know if you would start from scratch you could never achieve at the same scale so that is you know a practical reason to save it and then if you actually know the history of the architects their ambitions to building that out of all people is built is inspired by the ducal palace in Venice you would never guess it but but there it is so I think that you know apart from simply being perhaps ugly or not deeply appealing it has a history that in itself compensates for that lack of beauty maybe when you say that something is not worth saving if it doesn't have a function doesn't everything have a function I mean even the ugliest statue has an aesthetic function no I'm not sure what you're well into when we were talking about preservation yeah you preserve or rather there are things that are not worth preserving yeah many things even for instance it depends what you want to do if you want to do a museum then you have to introduce dimensions that are welcoming it's very soothing today to create dimensions that are welcoming it's very expensive so if you start from scratch with a museum you would have to hear kind of compress it and can make it smaller and and and but if you find something that already was welcoming and that has the kind of conditions to to be used in a different way I think for me it is an exciting transformation to to work with that she is to you function more important than beauty no but it's I don't want to either complain or gonna involve you in too much kind of architecture converge argon or but there is a fundamental [Music] consideration or interpretation of architecture today of which for which the word star architect which is a word that I can really hate an IV level has been used and which kind of suggests that architects are invited to display the full force of the imagination to create an exceptional work which I find you know as an as a method deeply repulsive and so for me preservation is also an interesting field to create a kind of camouflage you've been to Hong Kong yeah okay you remember those huge buildings thousands of apartments probably very small I've never been inside but they remind me of some kind of kingdom of the ants you know millions of people bucks up inside now can we say that they have a function I suppose we can but it's a terrible function isn't it frankly I don't think so you don't know it's very cheap housing and there are many people with it that they are not reaching Hong Kong and those apartments enable them to live an encore all right so no no I'm fine but look let me give you a quote from than yourself I have an instinct that what the 21st century has to offer is this post human architecture this is a new sublime a landscape totally dictated by function data and engineering the scale alters the human becomes almost irrelevant we are in a moment of transition now in a half-human half-machine architecture so I think that just to reassure you and the audience I think there will always be a kind of place for human beings and also credible for architecture to accommodate and make human beings happy living is a kind of very obvious example but what I'm saying is that let's say the last avant-garde or the last kind of moment of a breakthrough in architecture was kind of perhaps in the nineteen in the beginning of the 20th century I think we are facing a kind of similar moment where in addition to do all the architecture that we make for you on beings we are also beginning to make architecture for the new conditions that we are creating the whole morning was all dedicated to digital controlled smart Second City's self-driving car cars in all those environments and all those conditions there is at least an equal importance to accommodate machines and to think about how an environment where machines are perhaps more important than the canoeing beings that supervise them all of that is new in the classical sense of the world so we don't they haven't exported we don't know what it means but it is new and I welcome Yunus in my profession well I'm going to ask you what is probably going to be the last question of this conversation before I do that are you okay with people asking you questions I've got them here you know again very modern okay I don't even see the person but but anyway the question I wanted to ask is this although you said you prefer not to talk about the future because it's who knows what the future is instinctively are you optimistic about how things are going to develop or are we gradually destroying destroying ourselves things to kind of really early and efficient got a redesign I'm optimistic so it's a kind of self engineering that I can perform to when I was 20 and from that moment I was officially optimistic good nice to hear all right well now a few questions from the audience alright here's the first question do you believe that it's possible to implement modern coal living conception in Russian cities especially after releasing from communal apartment system you know what the communal of this is in a way why so kind of sympathetic to Russia and to Russians because I think you've experienced so much more than out of other countries and that this kind of such a luxury that you can even ask this question can you because we would be too clueless to to even make the connection and so I think that yes it's definitely kind of possible but you are probably also warned and cynical enough to to be skeptical about it well being skeptical is not a bad thing no no opportunity it's it's also a deeply version feature being skeptical yeah Russians are skeptical extremely skeptical okay but but not cynical and it's your sentence okay how do migrants change cities in what way and do they generate cities yes of course and I think that that is the the key I don't know whether it is the key issue but I think the the period from the post-world War two situation is maybe essentially the economic globalization you know became intensified and were the movement first of workers then of refugees and then of economic became under dominant organ feature I think in almost all cases you can I would say that the cities have benefited our countries have benefited from that kind of emigration in terms of becoming more diverse but also more more intelligent and more experienced and less purist and less self-satisfied and you know I've been an immigrant in New York and immigrant in London you know I've seen for instance the city like London change from a kind of horrifyingly bigoted environment in the early seventies to the effects of immigration into can really sophisticated and exciting condition thirty years later and now perhaps going back to this kind of earlier model so if you look for instance at London alone I would completely be positive about that condition it's an interesting question I'm gonna rephrase it but it's an interesting one in the past many things were built with the concept that they wouldn't be there forever yeah the question that's being asked is is that possible today or do you know when you're building something that it's going to be maybe for 50 years but you're certainly not thinking about eternity that is totally true and that is actually what I was kind of suggesting if kind of reservation that you have to almost decide on spot I think that I think that today almost not a single architect would think that any of his buildings would be built for eternity and that is a kind of obviously very drastic change because when I started to convert actually there were actually architecture would declare on the stage that we were lucky because our work was intended to last millennia but I not out of cynicism but I think it's kind of currently can we leave em realistic assumption got a couple of personal questions for you huh the one is very simple I didn't know this but supposedly you swim every day is that right yes have you managed to do that in Moscow no in Moscow years typically I'll do it but not today today this is a more detailed one being so smart and successful having so much connection around the world and impact have you thought to change sphere and go to politics business development for other seers why did you stay in other yes I think that's a very good question and I would say that the business is necessarily been very tempting but politics have been kind of very tempting for for me and and a group of Ghana friends even Netherlands passionate European and and for that reason alone [Music] I'm genuinely torn because on the one hand we see how Europe through its preoccupation with itself and with its constant with the complexity of its architecture is simply unable to convince pond adequately to kind of changing international conditions and and personally deeply kind of said that the collaboration ship between Europe and Russia is as complex as it is today and very surprised that there is not a kind of awareness that Europe needs to be associated with Russia and China kind of in the near future in order to form a can really zone of intelligence and creativity and so I would love to be a politician working on that message at the same time I think the the very nature of politics in Europe his so-called so counter effective that I think I've been maybe more efficient as to create propaganda for the notion than to try to implement this is something you've said intelligence beauty simplicity and quality of Khrushchev's residential buildings and the person rights and what do you think about their repetitiveness the such massive repetition bring quality to the urban environments yeah what can I say I basically have a very high tolerance for repetitiveness and also a tolerance for excitement so and sometimes I think that you are combined today in one button not very often I was asked to ask you what building in Moscow or anywhere in the world or rather which two buildings do you consider the ugliest and the most beautiful I'm super bad at kind of saying the ugly is the best the worst I definitely will not I don't know what the worse building in the world is I think there are many to many candidates to to explore in a lifetime maybe one of the my favorite to almost all my favorite buildings are Roman buildings because I think that you can Roman architecture has a kind of unique ability to be both repetitive and unique and generic and specific and welcoming and to be monumental and useful so that is kind of a range of natural kind of affinity do you believe that REM koolhaas the answer's no could you replace by artificial intelligence one day are you afraid of that I'm not afraid of it because I'm pretty confident that it's unlikely not because I'm so smart but but because I think everybody is so smart really yes [Laughter] [Applause] fascinating I was told that I was told that today it is possible to produce with computers models of towns like say 30 or 40 models present them to a public and also with other high-tech new inventions register the emotional impact of these models on the audience and then on the basis of that select what you're going to build does that not kind of exclude the architect I mean you know why didn't you an architect when you can do that it's not only it's not only an issue in architecture I think it's an issue in general we have better and better con means to understand what kind of individual responses are and I think only could obligation is do we want to make people only happy or only to kind of indulge in their own kind of preferences or do we think that life is maybe more challenging and I'm definitely on the con side of the challenging and and so I am confident that canna for the time being we can cover basically in the case of architecture avoid that that kind of one-to-one relationship between an emotional response and architecture okay well I guess this is pretty much it except I'm going to ask you one thing that I will now do and this is the last question ladies and gentlemen it's a it's it's a quote from you you say in the last 30 years architecture has been deeply influenced by the conversion of things Thatcher and Reagan moving from a welfare state to a market economy Architects used to be connected to good intentions notionally at least with the market economy we slowly found ourselves supporting at best individual ambitions and at worst pure profit motives in that sense every crisis perhaps presents an opportunity what opportunity because what you're saying they're basically partly the work of an architect exist of course on many levels and basically part of that statement is a kind of a rhetorical statement and obviously the situation is not as dire as that because I could also say exactly because that situation it has kind of forced each of us to become more personally and responsible for what we do and to not make an automatic assumption that we are serving the public good but to oblige ourselves to to be on the good side of our collective efforts so forget the rhetorics and and and see our profession you know it's constantly kind of changing and navigating through all these different conditions thank you very much okay great pleasure I enjoyed it [Applause] [Music]

Channel: ArchDaily

Views: 9,767

Rating: 4.9672132 out of 5

Keywords: architecture, archdaily, ArchDaily videos, ArchDaily Interviews, AD Videos, AD Interviews, Moscow Archeology of the Future, Moscow Urban Forum, MUF 2018, MUF, Russia

Id: tsycvWfu4F8

Length: 70min 15sec (4215 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018