INTERVIEW: http://parasite.usc.edu/?paged=6 Roland Wahlroos-Ritter interviews Neil Leach, Professor at USC.

Neil Leach has also taught at Columbia GSAPP, SCI-Arc, Cornell and the Architectural Association. He has published 18 books on theory and design, including Rethinking Architecture, The Anaesthetics of Architecture, Camouflage, Designing for a Digital World and Digital Tectonics. He was also the curator of the exhibition, (Im)material Processes: New Digital Techniques for Architecture, at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2008. This interview was first published by Alice Kimm in the spring issue of IDNWS. RWR: It is now 12 years since Rethinking Architecture was published. How have your ideas about architectural theory changed since then? NL: I can recall that when I was teaching at Columbia in 1999, soon after the publication of Rethinking Architecture, one of my colleagues, Stephen Perrella, commented that Rethinking Architecture was a very useful collection of essays, but that it was 10 years out of date. Its all about materiality and technology now, he said. In a way he was right. And it is already 10 years since that comment was made, so maybe the ideas are now 20 years out of date. Certainly my own thinking has shifted, and the opinions that I see reflected in my students these days reveal only too clearly that debates today are indeed centered on materiality and technology if not as an end in themselves, then at least as a way of engaging with issues that are more relevant today, such as environmentalism and structural concerns. Looking back on the 80s and 90s, the preoccupation with issues such as meaning, by both the more conservative disciples of phenomenology but also the more avant-garde proponents of deconstruction and other structuralist or poststructuralist outlooks, seemed to fall fairly and squarely into broader postmodern concerns. The fundamental paradigm seemed to be based on literary philosophies, and the way that this translated into architecture seemed to present a highly scenographic outlook, where if materiality was discussed at all, it was seen from a distinctly poetic outlook. And for sure the intellectual debates were all centered on a rather narrow definition of history and theory, and the engineer and other scientists were all but ignored. The general interest today has shifted away from these more literary based philosophies towards a more pragmatic but no less theorisable discourse of materials and technology, fueled no doubt by the digital revolution. And with it comes a critique at least in some circles of the superficial scenography of postmodernism. There is now a new set of concerns that have become increasingly dominant concerns such as environmental sustainability or structural performance which broadly come under the heading of performativity. To my mind these are based not just on aesthetic or stylistic shifts, but are motivated by deeper, ethical issues. If we use fewer resources, for example, in constructing our buildings from a structural viewpoint, or in maintaining them from an environmental viewpoint, then surely architecture can step into an ethical framework, and address a series of concerns that were overlooked in the era of postmodernism. I am now preparing a second edition of Rethinking Architecture, and am considering what new content to include. The biggest shift, then, that happened since the original publication of Rethinking Architecture is that a new paradigm has come to the fore, one that we might call New Materialism. Indeed of all the thinkers from the first edition, the only one who has really survived is Gilles Deleuze at least the Gilles Deleuze that is championed by Manuel de Landa and a few others whose work opens up toward a more sympathetic engagement with concerns about process and performance. It is a shift that opens up beyond the otherwise limited horizons of literary based philosophies, to embrace material thinking and even scientific thinking, as concerns that should be foregrounded in our contemporary age. So, for example, the whole realm of science that was if not dismissed then somehow relegated in importance in intellectual terms in an age that looked to History and Theory as the true domains of intellectual enquiry, has now been reappropriated by thinkers such as Manuel DeLanda, to become once more a site of genuine intellectual enquiry. Also, engineers, for so long overlooked as playing merely a supporting, secondary role to architecture in the construction process, have been revalorized and respected for the contribution that they can make from stage one in the design process. It is no coincidence, then, that many of our most progressive architects are engaging with talented engineers, such as Cecil Balmond engineers that Manuel DeLanda has described as material philosophers. So too, architectural students of today seem to be more fascinated by new scientific theories, such as emergence, as championed by Steven Johnson and others, and books such as A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, and pay less attention to figures, such as Heidegger, whose denigration of science and technology seems so out of place in our highly technologized cultural horizon of today. So this is the shift that I have seen happen over the last twelve years a general shift away from literary based philosophies to a more constructive theoretical engagement with technology and materiality.

RWR: It is also now 5 years since Digital Tectonics was published. Was Digital Tectonics a radical departure from the paradigms that where driving the concept of Rethinking Architecture? NL: Digital Tectonics marked a radical moment in the development that I have been describing. Digital Tectonics was an attempt to rethink in broad terms the relationship between architecture and engineering in the twenty-first century, a century increasingly influenced by a new strain of digital research. It coincided too with the emergence of a new generation of buildings that had harnessed the potential of digital techniques to understand the paradoxical importance of the immaterial world of the digital to understand the material world of actual construction. Two years earlier I had published Designing for a Digital World, which was an attempt to record a crucial moment in the development of digital techniques in architecture, but which was limited by the fact that there had been few actual buildings constructed using these new techniques. All this changed with projects such as the British Museum roof by Foster and Partners, for which Chris Williams served as a consultant for Buro Happold. Here we had a project whose form had been generated by an algorithm, and modified digitally through dynamic relaxation technique. By the time of the publication of Digital Tectonics we had a new generation of buildings whose designs relied on these new techniques. In other words the opposition that used to exist between the world of the digital and the world of the tectonic had begun to collapse, so that instead of the digital versus the tectonic, we now had a tectonics of the digital, or a digital tectonics. The choice of title was therefore very deliberate. It was also an attempt to rescue the term tectonics from being used in a somewhat moralistic way by those who subscribe to a certain conservative strain of thinking, and re-appropriate for a digital age. RWR: So can we now, 5 years later, expect another radical leap? NL: I see the primary purpose of my work as a theorist as being not to predict anything, but merely to recognize and articulate what is already at hand to sense and register the new ideas in the air. There is, I would maintain, a certain new design intelligence operating within the discipline of architecture, a design intelligence that might not express itself in explicit theoretical terms, but which nonetheless has a clear agenda, and is informed by a well developed way of thinking. All I do as a theorist is to codify that intelligence and make it recognizable as a new paradigm of thinking. And that new design intelligence is taking the logic of Digital Tectonics scripting, programming, parametric modeling and other advanced digital techniques and applying it on a larger scale. We need only look at the proliferation of digital research units developing within architectural practices from the Specialist Modeling Group at Foster and Partners to the Advanced Geometry Unit at Arup, or CoDE at Zaha Hadid Architects or Gehry Technologies within Gehry and Partners to realize that something new is afoot. And often these research units can be found in mainstream commercial offices, such as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill or Kohn Pedersen Fox, and even relatively conservative offices, such as Allies and Morrison. But it is not as though these units are research units that were set up as somewhat esoteric indulgences on the back of the profits enjoyed by these practices until relatively recently. No, these units have been set up as necessary support structures in order to design and build the complex structures of today. But there is another concern that was articulated in Digital Tectonics that has also come to the fore, and that is the concern for performance. Digital Tectonics addressed structural performance. We can see how this has spread, for example, through the recent generation of buildings in Beijing, from the Birds Nest to the Water Cube to the CCTV Headquarters, where it is apparent that not only is there a growing concern for structural engineering, but also that this has begun to eclipse the postmodern paradigm of the decorated shed that dominated architecture for some time through the use of curtain walling. Often these ornamental faade techniques would obscure the underlying structural logic of a building. Now it is not so much a question of ignoring ornament for the sake of structure, but of structure becoming ornament, and ornament becoming structure. It would appear that the era of the decorated shed is coming to an end. And clearly sustainability has also come to the fore, as another domain in which the question of performance is vital. The issue therefore becomes how digital techniques can support this interest in performance. Interestingly, in an analogue world there were few mechanisms for testing a form out, apart from, say, a wind tunnel analysis for aerodynamic behavior or a heliodome for observing the path of the sun. Most often the only way to test out a design was to build it. However, digital modeling has changed all that. Not only are there sophisticated packages becoming more and more available for modeling and testing performance. But the potential exists for introducing performative parameters into the design process itself. For example, if we think of scripting the use of computer code to generate design we can see how performative concerns can be written into the very process of design itself, so that the results are already optimized. What this realm offers is not so much an extension to postmodern scenographic form-making, but a critique of that realm. And this, I think, is the real potential of scripting the potential is to focus more on process than representation, more on performance than appearance. We might speak, then, not of forms as such, but formations formations informed by performative considerations, buildings as landscapes of information. So the leap has already happened. It has become clear that what existed as a marginal practice at the time of Digital Tectonics has begun to spread like a virus and has become relatively mainstream. RWR: You refer to these new trends as developments in architectural practice. But can we also see evidence of these trends in academia? NL: Strangely, it would seem that at present academia is lagging behind architectural practice. This might be a temporary situation, of course, but it is remarkable that the schools producing the students that are most marketable in our contemporary market such as it exists are the progressive schools, such as the Architectural Association, SCI-Arc and so on. These are the

schools that teach these skills such as parametric modeling as a matter of course. Lars Hesselgren once said to me that Kohn Pedersen Fox simply could not find enough graduates trained in parametric software such as Generative Components to employ in their offices. Of course, that comment was made when economic conditions were better, but the point is that many mainstream schools are simply not teaching these skills. In a way they are doing their students a disservice, because now especially as competition for jobs has become so intense students need to have an edge if they are to find a job. Not only that, but once they have a job, these skills will help them keep it. I heard recently that it is often those with these specialist skills who are being retained in offices when there are staff cuts. But the introduction of scripting, programming and parametric techniques to the studio is only part of the story. What we are also witnessing in many of the leading schools is an increasing interest in digital fabrication. This became very clear in the recent Architecture Biennial Beijing 2008. In the last few years a number of schools including the Bartlett, IaaC and the Architectural Association have set up dedicated digital workshops with advanced fabrication machines, such as 3-D printers, laser cutters, CNC milling machines and water jets. At ETH Zurich they now have a robot that can be programmed to lay bricks and other building materials in a precise manner which has opened up another arena in which computation can inform fabrication. RWR: So what would be your message for USC? NL: I think that USC is in a very good situation to exploit these new developments. USC has a strong tradition in professional competence. All USC needs to do is to supplement this by integrating these new digital techniques into the design studio. And there is clearly a demand for this within the student body. We witnessed the astonishing popularity of the processing workshop offered by Roland Snooks. But these workshops should not be seen as add-on extras to architectural education. They should be seen as an essential part of the curriculum. I heard from one of the PhD students at USC that every week they are introduced to a new software program. This is very impressive. But this culture should spread throughout the school. Every student should be trained in how to use Catia, Generative Components, Eco Tech and so on. And training in scripting, processing and so on should be available for those who are interested in it. But what I would also really like to see in USC is a greater degree of engagement with some of its existing strengths. For example, USC is the home of Contour Crafting, a new digital technique for 3-D printing buildings in concrete developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis of the Viterbi School of Engineering. Broadly speaking this is a technique of using layered fabrication technology using a moving gantry to print the concrete through a computer numerically controlled method. The concrete is pumped through a nozzle to form layers. The concrete is literally squeezed out a little like toothpaste. The rough edges between the layers are then smoothed out using a spatula/trowel following behind the pump nozzle. Contour Crafting has considerable potential advantages over traditional concrete construction. The problem with the latter is that effectively there has to be two separate construction processes: the construction of formwork, and the casting of the concrete within that formwork. The formwork is often very costly and is frequently thrown away after use. Contour Crafting eliminates the need for formwork, as it uses rapid hardening cement that sets and supports the next layer. Recent tests conducted by the US military concluded that by obviating the need for formwork used in traditional concrete construction, Contour Crafting reduces construction times by 90% and costs by 75%. The technique is therefore able to provide concrete construction quickly and cheaply, and has great potential for low-cost housing and emergency accommodation in disaster areas. The potential of using the technique in extra-terrestrial environments is also being explored, and some prototypes have been developed for NASA. Also, given the waste of traditional concrete construction it offers an environmentally conscious alternative technique to concrete construction. Contour Crafting is also able to construct free forms with great accuracy and efficiency, including double curvature surfaces. It therefore also has a great appeal to avant-garde architectural designers. Indeed the French architect, Francois Roche (R&Sie(n)), has used Contour Crafting, and exhibited some work based on this technique at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2008. Ali Rahim and Greg Lynn are two other progressive contemporary architects interested in the technique. Potentially, then, Contour Crafting is set to revolutionize the construction industry. I understand that Harvard GSD is currently considering buying a Contour Crafting machine. USC already has a prototype in the School of Engineering. It seems to me that the School of Architecture at USC is potentially ahead of the game here, and needs to exploit this advantage. RWR: Finally, what is the subject of your next book? NL: I have just completed an issue of Architectural Design on Digital Cities. It is coming out in July 2009, and explores how these new digital techniques are helping us to understand and design cities in a new way. It seems that we have now reach a threshold condition where they are now being used at an unprecedented scale by practices such as Zaha Hadid Architects to design major urban interventions. Here at USC we are also exploring these themes in the design studio on Swarm Urbanism and in the theory class on Deleuze and New Scientific Thinking.