HUO: In your book S, M, L, XL (1995) there is a text on the “Berlin Wall as Architecture”. Can you tell me about this very first project of yours in Berlin in the early ’70s?

RK: I was a student at the end of the ’60s, the end of a period of an innocent way of looking at architecture in general. There was especially an optimism that architecture could participate in the liberation of mankind. I was skeptical about this, and instead of going to Mediterranean villas or Greek fishing villages to “learn” (as most people did at that time), I decided to simply look at the Berlin Wall as architecture, to document and interpret it, to see what the real power of architecture was. It was one of the first times that I actually went out and did field work. I really didn’t know anything about Berlin and the Wall, and was totally amazed at many of the things I discovered. For example, I had hardly imagined how West Berlin was actually imprisoned by the Wall. I had never really thought about that condition, and the paradox that even though it was surrounded by a wall, West Berlin was called “free,” and that the much larger area beyond the Wall was not considered free. My second surprise was that the Wall was not really a single object but a system that consisted partly of things that were destroyed on the site of the Wall, sections of buildings that were still standing and absorbed or incorporated into the Wall, and additional walls some really massive and modern, others more ephemera, all together contributing to an enormous zone. That was one of the most exciting things: it was one wall that always assumed a different condition.

HUO: In permanent transformation.

RK: In permanent transformation. It was also very contextual, because on each side it had a different character; it would adjust itself to different circumstances. It also represented a first naked confrontation with the horrible, powerful side of architecture. I’ve been accused ever since of taking an amoral or uncritical position, although personally I think that looking, interpreting is in itself a very important step toward a critical position.

HUO: How do you feel about the disappearance of the Wall, the fact that it was completely erased?

RK: In the early ’80s, we did a number of competitions for Berlin that anticipated the fall of the Wall, proposals for the “Afterlife of the Wall” that made a new beginning without removing all the traces…

HUO: The IBA building?

RK: Yes, but it’s not the current building. In an early competition it was a much more interesting, more open situation, where walls were used to exclude the impact of the Wall.… It was simply through a proliferation of walls that you could live next to the Wall. We thought that the zone of the Wall could eventually be a park, a kind of preserved condition in the entire city. I’ve been appalled ever since, that the first thing that disappeared after the Wall fell was any trace of it. I think it is insane that such a critical part of memory has been erased, not by developers or commercial enterprises, but simply in the name of pure ideology [it’s] really tragic. The paradox is that it creates now a completely incomprehensible “Chinese situation.”

HUO: Can it be compared to the disappearance of the whole industrial architecture, which Hilla and Bernd Becher documented?

RK: But at least it disappeared by accident. The Wall disappeared deliberately, and in the name of History.

HUO: Could you tell me about your IBA building which was realized ?

RK: Actually, I was so offended by the whole notion of rebuilding the Friedrichstadt blocks that I didn’t work on the IBA building. My partner, Elia Zenghelis, did it. He hadn’t done the competition so he had a more objective relationship with the Checkpoint Charlie site. It was unbelievable for me to move from one kind of architectural proposal to a totally opposite proposal, so I couldn’t do it.

HUO: But you are very involved with the current Berlin projects…

RK: Yes. It has been very exciting.… that was the early ’80s. In the early ’90s, I participated in the Potsdamer Platz competition where I disagreed with the outcome, in fact, not even so much with the outcome, but with the whole content of the discussion, with the virulence of the discussion, with the arguments put forth.

HUO: Do you agree with [Daniel] Libeskind, with his idea that there shouldn’t be a master plan, that there shouldn’t be an overall solution, that it should be much more heterogeneous, heteroclite and fragmented?

RK: There were many beautiful projects, not only the project by Libeskind, but also the project by [William] Alsop. The project by [Hans] Kollhoff was also really interesting. In other words, it’s not that there weren’t any interesting proposals, and the three of them, Alsop, Libeskind and Kollhoff were then in one camp of architects who could work with the destruction that was the essence of Berlin, and who were not out to repair, to (re)create a synthetic metropolis.

After the Potsdamer Platz competition, there was a serious discussion in the Berlin Parliament to deny me the right to enter the city.… Recently it has been very exciting for me to be involved again in Berlin, as the architect of the Dutch Embassy (Netherlands Embassy, Berlin, 2000-ongoing), to rediscover Berlin and at the same time the Dutch, and also a certain spirit of adventure which is perhaps Dutch, in the sense that they chose a very courageous location, not near all the other embassies but in the former middle of Berlin, in the formerly communist part, according to a very logical reasoning that in this way they will be near to the other ministries. They are willing to engage in the East Berlin condition. What is fascinating there is also to discover that there is a whole army of formerly East German bureaucrats who are actually much more rational about the whole reconstruction of the city, who clearly feel offended that the “liberalism” of the East has led to the imposition of an inflexible urbanistic doctrine. So they have been extremely collaborative in terms of doing things differently. I think that simply because of the fact that we work with a formerly East German bureaucracy we have been able to experiment.

HUO: One could say that since 1991 a conservative idea of architecture has been prevailing in Berlin. Philipp Oswalt explained this in his article published in ARCH+ in 1994, “Der Mythos von der Berlinischen Architektur.” There is this idea of conservative reformism, which in Kollhoff’s words follows the new, only “if it proves to be more performative, more comfortable and beautiful than the old.” But you told me yesterday that even if many forces in Berlin tried to reconstitute the center, it would, nevertheless become a “Chinese city.” Could you explain to me what you meant exactly by that?

RK: I think that Kollhoff as an architect is still very powerful and very interesting, and that the discourse is to be separated from what he does. I still sense that what he does is seriously felt. Disregarding the discourse, some of the work is strong. What’s exhilarating about being involved in Berlin now is that there is a completely new situation. You can see the results of the “first wave.” In a way, I admire it. At least they were very serious. In spite of that, in spite of the most incredible effort to “control” the new substance, simply through the sheer quantity, it has become a Chinese city. It shows that the Chinese city is seemingly inevitable anywhere that there is a lot of building substance.

HUO: How would you define the Chinese city?

RK: The Chinese city is for me a city that has built up a lot of volume in a very short time, which therefore doesn’t have the slowness that is a condition for a traditional sedimentation of a city, which for us is still the model for authenticity. Beyond a certain speed of construction, that kind of authenticity is inevitably sacrificed, even if you build everything out of stone and authentic materials, and that’s a kind of irony. For instance, if you look at the color of the stone of the new Berlin, it’s the color of all the worst plastics that were produced in East Germany in the ’60s. It’s kind of a weird color of pink, a weird color of light yellow-artificial. There is no escaping the artificial in the new architecture, and certainly not in large amounts of architecture being generated at the same time.

HUO: There is this story that everyone tells in Shanghai, according to which the mayor of Berlin was boasting about the rate of construction in his city and the mayor of Shanghai responded by saying that in Shanghai it went probably 20 or 25 times faster. It appears that there seems to be very little knowledge in Germany about what’s on going on elsewhere in terms of urban development and architecture.

RK: That for me is the debatable thing about the Prussian style , because the Prussian is either a form of naïveté or just a strategic claim. There is a deep ignorance in Germany about conditions outside Germany, an incredible preoccupation with the self, and therefore those kinds of misreadings occur easily. At the same time, there is something irritating about the automatic assumption of modernity, of the “inevitability” of, or the application of, state modernism.

For instance, their conversion of the Reichstag is at least as strange as the emphasis on Prussian building, because these are two forms of innocence or naïveté, and to think that in the Reichstag you can exorcise the spirits with a new sort of dome is a sort of very polite gesture and a very compromised aesthetic. It is an equally weak intellectual stand.

HUO: You think that Norman Forster’s dome on the Reichstag has to do with “innocence”?

RK: Innocent in terms of historical givings. For Foster, high-tech architecture was never dealt with in context. To simply put a new head on a building that had an incredibly ambiguous history is innocent, or perverse, whatever you want to call it. Therefore, it’s a very moving condition. Only now are all these civil servants realizing that they actually have to inhabit Nazi buildings as their new ministries, with the anxieties that emanate from that, that demand exorcism, but do glass and steel still drive out evil spirits?

HUO: I remember this very strange event in 1991: there was the “Metropolis” exhibition at the Martin Gropius-Bau, followed by a party in the former Reichstag, which was abandoned at the time. It felt very scary.

RK: That’s the whole point, Berlin is very scary. And somehow everything that tries to cover it up, either by an Ersatz past or by a kind of Ersatz exorcism (which is what modernity is doing), is equally implausible. I also believe that the monumental production of monuments is not going to work either, because that’s part of an “official exorcism.”

HUO: Christian Boltanski’s monument is very interesting (The Missing House, 1990). On Grosshamburger Strasse, Berlin, in place of an apartment house that was destroyed by aerial bombardment in February 1945, he found that all the former residents were Jews, and constructed a memorial space dedicated to “absence.” The signs indicate the names of the residents and approximate place where they lived in the building, their dates of birth and death, and occupations, which went across class lines. It’s a sort of anti-monument.

RK: Yes.

HUO: And what about the East-West relationships and exchanges? In art, there is very little exchange between Berlin and Warsaw, Berlin and Prague.… The lack of exchange is even more evident in Vienna where Bratislava is half an hour away and there still is this wall in people’s heads.

RK: I think it is related to the whole misreading: the single misreading that has a number of sub-misreadings. The idea of the encounter between East and West is still based on difference. What they don’t realize is that there is no difference. They consider themselves an advanced trading post. This was incomprehensible to me when I first came, that West Berlin was sort of a satellite in the middle of East Germany, and that condition of being in the middle of another condition is something that they still do not completely assume. If you’re working on this, and looking at it in an architectural context, there is one group of works that you should look at, an architectural operation by Oswald Mathias Ungers, which he did when he was a professor at the TU [Technische Universität Berlin] in the ’60s. He took Berlin as a laboratory and said “this is a unique situation of a city which is totally cut off and completely artificial, therefore presenting a new condition, so I’ll turn it into a laboratory.” He systematically investigated the conditions of Berlin in terms of a presence of historical particles, but also the presence of the contemporary, with a very utopian, futuristic dimension. As a professor, he organized a series of design seminars, which every time posed the question of how the historical and contemporary could coexist, and how the new numbers, new programs and the historical could coexist. For instance, he would have a year devoted to highways and plazas, or mass housing and the Brandenburg Gate. He made a very beautiful project for how to reconstruct Leipziger Platz in totally contemporary forms. That is a kind of hidden domain. People like [Jürgen] Sawade and Kollhoff, who are now at the core of the “Prussian” architects, were very involved in that, too. So there is an interesting ambiguity there.

There is kind of latent modernity there, which was evident in Kollhoff’s Potsdamer Platz project. So the language of the architecture was retro, but the concept of the architecture, of the urbanism, was very contemporary.

HUO: To go back to the article in S, M, L, XL, you write that Berlin is all about memory, loss and emptiness. This is of course something Libeskind pointed out a lot, like when he kept the center in his building empty.

RK: The Berlin Wall as architecture was for me the first spectacular revelation in architecture of how absence can be stronger than presence. For me, it is not necessarily connected to loss in a metaphysical sense, but more connected to an issue of efficiency, where I think that the great thing about Berlin is that it showed for me how (and this is my own campaign against architecture) entirely “missing” urban presences or entirely erased architectural entities nevertheless generate what can be called an urban condition. It’s no coincidence for example that the center of Shenzhen is not a built substance but a conglomeration of golf courses and theme parks basically unbuilt or empty conditions. And that was the beauty of Berlin even ten years ago, that it was the most contemporary and the most avant-garde European city because it had these major vast areas of nothingness.

HUO: Landing in Berlin was very beautiful, with all these gaps and holes in the urban tissue.

RK: Not only was it beautiful, but it also had a programmatic potential, and the potential to inhabit a city differently represented a rare and unique power. The irony of course is not only that the architecture being built is not the right architecture, but that it is built at all. It’s a city that could have lived with its emptiness and have been the first European city to systematically cultivate the emptiness. Like Rotterdam where there is a lot of emptiness inside. For Libeskind, emptiness is a loss that can be filled or replaced by architecture. For me, the important thing is not to replace it, but to cultivate it. This is a kind of post-architectural city, and now it’s becoming an architectural city. For me that’s a drama, not some kind of stylistic error.

HUO: So it’s not an issue of the quality of the architecture being built …

RK: … nor aesthetics.

HUO: What has happened in Berlin, is that this city planning has happened without any involvement on the part of the different communities. I recently had a discussion with Itsuko Hasegawa, in Tokyo, who thinks that one should advance in a city in a participatory mode, so that the users of the buildings could almost say “this was my idea.” Many contemporary artists today work with this issue of participation. This is a critique heard quite frequently in Berlin, that the city could have been built with the involvement of the people. What’s your opinion?

RK: That’s a very tricky question, because if you ask around and do real surveys, I think the current reconstruction is very popular, because the current mythology of going back to a traditional notion of plazas and streets could be a very populist platform. The other conditions of inhabiting emptiness or living with scars and accepting the rampant and blatant oppositions of the East and West, and standing the distressed aesthetic are much harder to grasp. The whole difficulty of participation in architecture is completely ambiguous. For instance in the Bordeaux house (Maison à Bordeaux, 1996-1998), on the one hand you could say it’s extreme architecture, but on the other hand it’s extreme participation.

HUO: Because it’s a very strong dialogue.

RK: Yes, and therefore participation is not necessary for people to be able to say “this is my idea, this is your idea,” but on the contrary, a situation where it becomes impossible to say whose idea it really is, either the architect or the user.

HUO: So it’s a kind of Ping-Pong?

RK: Not necessarily, but rather to imagine a process in which the intelligence of others is mobilized. But it’s not to establish a dogma according to assumed preferences, which I think is what’s happening.

HUO: Can you tell me how you came to the idea of building the house in Bordeaux for the Lemoine family with a mobile elevator-platform?

RK: It was a house for somebody who in the middle of his life became handicapped, and who interestingly enough is very courageous and assumes that condition without any inhibitions. Therefore, it became interesting to think of a house not dealing with that issue, but almost inspired by that issue. So there are basically two attitudes toward the handicapped: the idea of helping them but reasoning within the possibilities that are still left, and building on the strength, which exceeds by far the idea of compensation, or helping them in such a way that the entire building makes a step forward in general. So it’s a building that is entirely based on his possibilities and not based on his impossibilities, and that has also allowed the entire family to live in that kind of logic.

Part 2: On Seoul, and on the Library and the Museum.

HUO: When was your first visit to Seoul?

RK: My first visit to Seoul was maybe six years ago. We were working for Samsung, and it was a very interesting experience because, in the first phase of the work, we were working with a Chaebol (a conglomerate of many companies) at its most megalomania really insanely megalomaniac. I think at that point they were doing six hundred architectural projects, and this meant that there was an incredible traffic of international architects there who did not know of each other-that they were there, that they were working for the same client, what they were doing. So it was a typically unpleasant sort of architectural competition. And we were always surrounded by these kinds of phalanxes of some sort of executive assistants, etc. And the funniest thing is that we were doing a sort of museum, with Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel, and ourselves, which was a combination that had not been engineered by ourselves but engineered by someone near the chairman, so the chairman and his wife took a particular interest in it, and at some point I needed to explain the project to the chairman, and I was waiting in the ??? Hotel, which is an incredible hotel-the level of smoothness in it is really unbelievable, it’s as if you’re in a dream in terms or preemptive service and preemptive comfort. But anyway, I was waiting, and then suddenly at four o’clock in the morning there was banging on my door, and it was the same Samsung executives, who said, “You have to see the chairman now.” And I said, “Why at this time?” It was the first meeting. And they said, “You have to see him now because he will be arrested at nine o’clock in the morning!” So I went, and I saw the chairman between six and eight. It was very quiet. He disclosed the whole thing; but that was also, of course, the first signal that things were going to change there. It was in a way the beginning of the crisis, when all of the endemic corruption was kind of dealt with, which showed the fragility of the whole economic structure and then it’s unraveling.

So we made this project-it was actually a very interesting project. We had to connect the different architectures of Jean Nouvel and Mario Botta, who had started it. Our project is mostly underground. It is two volumes, on a very beautiful hill, one of those parks full of villas. And because we did not want to add another building, we made a straight slice horizontally, part of which goes into the mountain and part of which emerges from the mountain, so that many of the facilities are underground. It was an interesting project. It’s also a museum and a cultural institution. The only mark we’ve left so far in Seoul is a kind of enormous underground pit dug in granite. It is in a way the most beautiful building. And what I tried to convince them to do, and maybe I can still convince them, is to leave the pit, to do something with that incredibly bare … it’s just the biggest negative space you’ve ever seen.

HUO: Can you tell me what it is that you particularly like about Seoul?

RK: What I think is really beautiful about Seoul is that it is a city that occurred on a site where there cannot really be a city. There isn’t really room for a city there. So it’s as if the metropolis has been established in the middle of the mountains, a city that has to coexist with mountains and beautiful forests, a kind of “Manhattan in the Alps.” … The middle class lives in the flat parts, those who can afford everything and those who can afford nothing live on the hills. And throughout the city are scattered the remnants of this Metabolist project. And I simply like the speed with which it extends. I think Korean people are the most direct in Asia; they are very raw and direct, not prisoners of politeness, and very humorous.

HUO: What about the screens? Do you like those big screens?

RK: I think the screens are beautiful from a distance. From the hills, you see these flickering screens.

HUO: You mentioned that when you visited Seoul for the first time after the economic crisis, it was all of a sudden a completely different city. The city completely changed in a few days.…

RK: Yes, in a way, the future seems to be telescoping, and this exacerbates the inability I’ve always had to conceptualize the future as future. The future is telescoping to the point that not only can you no longer predict ten years away or five years away but the acceleration of everything seems to make even next month completely inscrutable and unpredictable. And one of the strongest signs of this kind of acceleration is in the Asian crisis, and how the Asian crisis has had an immediate impact on urban conditions-, which sometimes had only existed for three years, but in those three years there were brand new sparkling products of the Asian economic miracle. Soaring cities, exploding cities, then all of a sudden … Then, while everyone here was writing about the collapse, there was already a kind of resurgence, and now the apparent gain in strength. And this whole cycle was in a way a total mystery to people in the West, because nobody here grasped the speed of it, nor can anybody explain why it happened. My theory is that China saved the capitalist world by not going bankrupt and by not devaluing the currency, and that the Communist system in the end, in a very paradoxical way, came to the rescue of the capitalist system. That is something that you never read about. And my most perfect demonstration of it is that Seoul, a city known for its eternal traffic, in the middle of the crisis all of a sudden became this kind of eerie, silent city with no traffic: a city without pollution. And maybe that was when I could finally see that Seoul was a kind of Switzerland, really beautiful.

HUO: In previous interviews and texts, you have always said that you despised futuristic city predictions; you said that you preferred to talk more about present conditions.

RK: I think anyone in their right mind should simply give it up. All you can hope for today is some kind of intelligence about day-to-day decisions. Another example, which is not as extreme as Asia, is that we’ve been involved in Seattle for maybe a year, and that within that year there have been major upheavals that happened in the city that made it defenseless. From a kind of perfect city without any trouble, it became a troubled, anxious city: there was also the first major anti-capitalist demonstrations since the New Deal, which traumatized the entire administration, and the fact that Microsoft, even nine months ago, was a completely vigorous, powerful, monopolistic entity that is now condemned and about to be divided, and Bill Gates, once a complete myth, is now no longer CEO, but chairman, etc. All those things are an incredible demonstration of how there is absolutely no certainty that you can count on. And the interesting thing is that the clients are trying to outwit this situation by accelerating more and more the whole pace of architecture. The buildings we once had to build in two years we now have to build in one year. In that sense, it was a good instinct to document in our Harvard research, in general, how fast architecture can be produced. But I could never have imagined at that time, when I discovered that some buildings in Shenzhen were produced in two afternoons on a home computer, that two or three years later we would be in the same position. But we are. And even so, we realize that we are not quick enough, or that architecture can never be quick enough.

HUO: Does this affect the life span of buildings?

RK: This is really interesting, actually. There is this planning project for La Defense Paris we did, where we considered everything more than 25 years old theoretically obsolete, ready to be taken down, so that you could build a new city on the site of the old. At the time, it was considered totally visionary and an outrage. I recently had to give a presentation for the station in Rotterdam, where there will be a super fast TGV train, and I again launched the suggestion that after 25 years you could simply declare buildings redundant, because they are so mediocre, and this time there was a sort of barely suppressed nervous laughter. This limited life span of buildings is still an absolute area of blindness and real taboo in Europe.

HUO: And in America?

RK: In America, you can only say in retrospect that this is in many cases true, but you can never make it the basis of architectural production in the beginning. And this is really unfortunate, because I think it could liberate an enormous amount of energy if you could be more independent vis-à-vis the lifetime of a building, and by implication the context. Nevertheless, we are of course contradicting ourselves when we do a public building, and we do not design it as if it will disappear in 25 years. But the pressure would be less if it were an automatic given that a building will exist 25 years at the most.

HUO: What is the part between slowness and speed?

RK: It remains a very strong tension. In that sense, it is a very fascinating thing to see this medium-architecture-that is now so popular but has a sort of inherent resistance to completely following the current tendency, which is toward acceleration. It may be that that is a real conundrum for architecture, that it can accelerate but that it also has some kind of intimate resistance, maybe more than television, film, or music, and maybe that is why it is so interesting today. But it also means that we have now discovered that architecture can never reach certain speeds, and that discovery pushes us into another domain, where the same kind of thinking now has to be applied in a much more conceptual, theoretical, and disembodied way.

HUO: You mentioned OMA’s library project for Seattle (Seattle Public Library). I think there is a certain relationship between the notion of the museum and the notion of the library, both often very defensive institutions, and moralistic, too. To energize these institutions evokes examples from the ’60s: for instance Cedric Price’s Fun Palace (1960-1974), or the way Willem Sandberg ran the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This is part of your personal history as well?

RK: The moment I discovered art as an independent person, as a teenager basically, coincided with the Sandberg regime. The exhibition designs completely changed the museum each time. “Dylaby-a Dynamic Labyrinth,” (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1962) would now be a prophetic title again. All those shows were the kind of shows that enabled me to be more modern than my parents … so in a way I was kind of indoctrinated by it. And I think all of that had a big influence on my museum projects. But of course, at the same time, the museum, even in the ’60s, was a very demanding place, in the sense that it insisted on participation and was presenting issues fairly aggressively. The big difference between now and the ’60s is not only that this kind of aggression or those demands are missing in the presentations, but I think the sheer numbers are drastically changing the entire equation, limiting the things you can say and do in a museum. One of the things no curator liked about our designs for the Tate or for MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, New York] was the notion of creating a fast-track tourist trajectory, a kind of shortcut that would also enable the return of slowness, or intensity. In the absence of a two-speed system, the museum experience is accelerated for everybody, you can see it with the new Tate installations, not based on accumulations but on “juxtaposition”-the grids of Gilbert & George next to Mondrian, a quick “Aha!” and on to the next “rhyme,” all a form of fast-track, against complexity.
I think this is equally true for the library. Apart from all the kinds of ideologies that you could have-or launch or repeat or renew-the sheer fact of the numbers needs to be incorporated within the concept or course of each of these projects. You are often referring to the beautiful era of MoMA, “the Laboratory years,”-and it was a beautiful era, but I don’t think that you can have a laboratory visited by two million people a year. And that is why, in both our libraries and our museums, are trying to organize the coexistence of urban noise experiences and experiences that enable focus and slowness. That is, for me, the most exciting way of thinking today, the incredible surrender to frivolity and how it could also be compatible with a seduction of focus and stillness. The issue of mass visitors and the core experience of stillness and being together with the work are what is at issue in [the Seattle] project.

HUO: Richard Hamilton recently made a text piece in the form of a badge with the text “Give me hard copy.” It’s actually a fragment that he extracted from the Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982). Accordingly, the idea is that the museum gives the hard copy but the library does, too. So I was wondering how you see the role of the museum and the library in terms of network conditions. How do you see the relation between the actual and the virtual? How do you avoid having hierarchies between different actual libraries and virtual libraries?

RK: I think this is very interesting, because in Seattle, there is a library system made up of 24 libraries, and this is the main library. So this is in itself already a sort of hierarchical position, which assumes that the main body of the government is in the main library. And so there is all the history and routine of centralism. But of course, it is entirely networked and about to be more networked. And what I find fascinating is that there is a lot of work going on these days by people like Judith Donath at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], who are looking at the Internet but also at different kinds of databases as potential sources to fabricate new communities. And the irony is that, on the basis of network conditions, which are always assumed to be increasingly democratic, you can of course create new hierarchies. And what is currently the latent and almost threshold question is: “Does a network imply homogeneity?” or “Does a network imply democracy?” or “Does a network imply privacy?” The discourse on networks has always been a disturbance to universal distribution, but I don’t see any ultimate reason why that should be the case, why its opposite potential should not be investigated. The moment at which the library will be able to connect, for instance, all the data that the readers generate-who reads which books-then that would be an incredible way of modernizing their function.

HUO: At which point the library becomes an agent, to guide people on what to read.…

RK: Yes, but there is the question of privacy. And the same for the museum. And that is why I said yesterday that it’s not only the end of the future but also the end of privacy. There’s a whole thing, like a reservoir; you feel that the wall is cracking and that you’ll simply go. And about the issue of flattening and hierarchy or value, the Internet does not only have to flatten value, it can also be used to create value, because you can disseminate eighty percent, and make the next ten percent really difficult, and the next five percent even more difficult, and then have a core two percent, which represents the equivalent of rare books: the rare information.

HUO: What exactly do you set against flattening?

RK: Instead of flattening, you can create value. And the defensiveness is not only in the wardens, it is also in the repulsive domain of public art, which so rarely is anything but the nostalgic reinforcement of, or compensation for, an abandoned domain, and therefore rarely able to convince anyone but itself. And if you ask about aging cities, the context of the city is no longer a physical context. And still, when we talk and think about context, we routinely think about mass.

HUO: Reading will be one function among other functions?

RK: Yes, even if it’s not really an interference. We hope, since reading is only one of the advances in the library, that what we are doing is creating space where advances can take place. We’ve always done that. We’ve always noticed that, when the chips are down, there is nobody to run those kinds of programs, nobody to conceptualize that kind of activity, even though the buildings themselves would support it incredibly well. That is why we are very vehement that it’s very important that somebody take care of that kind of thinking. But the tragedy is that there is still such an incredible war between words and images in libraries, even if in the outside world it’s completely gone.

HUO: I was wondering if you could tell me more about these different platforms. It’s a very Deluezian idea, a mille plateaux idea, because they’re really high-connectivity platforms.

RK: Because the departments are very specific, we need to address their specificity in a precise way. But of course, we also hope that more will happen than is defined in the program, so between platforms are the public spaces that, less contained, have room to evolve. In civil architecture, like in physics, the pressure between two dense plates in itself can create an enormous tension, and programming those plates can also trigger events in-between. We try to make the floor and the ceiling interactive, so that you could see clouds of color but also clouds of information. An aesthetic spectacle, so you could basically summon the people to come together at a certain point, or scatter them in different directions. So in that sense we are becoming more ambitious about recording those problems in the architecture also.

HUO: Does this mean that the different sections will not become ghettos, but that there will be interdisciplinary exchange?

RK: The whole thing was about breaking up this kind of division into departments, where one floor is this, another floor is that. We are reorganizing all that.

HUO: But you still have four main sections?

RK: Not really “main.” It has become a continuous spiral of subjects, and there is a journey through it. It s not really a subdivision, in my view, it’s more what the French call a mise en relation, which doesn’t exist in English, or perhaps you could translate it as “continuous exposure.”

HUO: This interview started with the city, then we came to Seattle-the library, specifically: you talked about connectivity, hyper-connectivity within the building. In my last interview with Peter Smithson, I asked him about how he sees the present condition of the city. Here is what he answered: “I think that the critical thing to work through now is the space between. Most of the world out there is a nightmare. I worked in Montreal last winter, and the drive from the international airport to the city was one factory after another, one group of dwellings … It is unbelievable. And it has happened so fast: in twenty years, a generation has almost wiped out the notion of architecture.… But there is no sense of the collective, the space between: all buildings are built as if they existed only in themselves.” Do you share this view? Isn’t it true also for Holland?

RK: We see that there is an incredible dysfunctionality in terms of connections. We are really interested in working and thinking on the meta-structural or infrastructural level on concepts to improve conditions. Fernando Romero took two and a half hours last night to get from Rotterdam to Amsterdam by public transportation, by train. He did all the socially right things: he walked to the station, took the train and the tram. So there is this kind of insanity in which, if you take public means of transportation in the way that you’re intended to behave, it takes three times as long as going by car.
That’s why everyone takes their car, and that’s why the car doesn’t work either. It’s a vicious circle. And we are incredibly interested in it and [we’re] also good at conceptualizing interventions and solutions, but the difficulty is that that is the level of politics, and that is the level that is the hardest to ever enter. And even if you enter, you’re going to be typecast very quickly as either a visionary, who has interesting but irrelevant visions, or a nuisance … or a megalomaniac. I think there is something touching about Smithson and Team 10; they were obsessed with conceptualizing new types and families of connections. And my feeling about their residue, their effect, is both more cynical and more optimistic, because I think, to a large extent, things connect in spite of the efforts of the architect. There is an incredible infrastructure or architecture of connection, particularly in this century: all the ramps, all the highway crossings, all the pedestrian connections, etc.; and my instinctive belief is that they all hinder exactly the kind of communication that they are supposed to generate. In Lagos, connections proliferate in spite of the infrastructure, or of the dead-end, the fiasco of infrastructure. That is typically one of the aspects of the profession that is fighting a rearguard action, because it denies all the connections that are in place already in supposedly lost or residual space. And the fact that those autonomous parts can exist now because there are remnants of invisible connections, I think is for me the interesting point, that somehow those invisible connections need an architecture, and that that kind of architecture probably benefits from a relationship with real architecture. And so that is why we are interested in that kind of virtual reality, because it enables you to conceptualize something without being literate about computer use or computer animation.

HUO: Can you tell me about your interdisciplinary project at Harvard University, the Harvard Design School Project on the city?

RK: Harvard is a school of architecture, a school of landscape, and a school of planning, where smart and more or less autonomous and independent people are both teachers and students. And the interesting thing is that these groups have the say-so to appoint new people, so on the whole, they’re always appointed in conformity with what these fields represent. Architecture has lost certain abilities; landscape has taken them over. What could be very interesting would be to unite these residues, and what we have called it is this fourth thing. It is more a thing than a space, and to declare that this is the perfect domain to participate in a redefinition of … if within a school like Harvard you made a consultation of all the marginal people, you would obviously have some kind of government in exile, a kind of exiled Harvard, but also-and that would be more and more obvious-you would find that all those people have some intelligence that can no longer completely fit into a given mold. So it’s not really interdisciplinarity per se, but more about the power of marginalizing.

Part 3: On the design for the exhibition “Cities on the Move,” Hayward Gallery, London (1999).

HUO: When first approached by the Hayward Gallery to make a design for the installation of the exhibition “Cities on the Move,” your proposal was to recycle other architects’ recent exhibition designs for the gallery rather than producing a single, unified scheme.

RK: I’ve always tried to be “economical” with our imagination. Schwitters’ Merzbau (1925-1936) was an accumulation of (urban) debris that was reassembled a number of times. Here, Ole Scheeren and I have tried first to accumulate previous Hayward designs, then to reassemble them, almost as a form of urbanism. I thought it would be nice if the show revealed a number of things about the Hayward, especially since the existence of this very building is currently under question.

HUO: You moved to London the year the Hayward opened, in 1968.

RK: Yes, lured by people like Peter Cook and Cedric Price and the thought of the architectural scene in London as some kind of huge club.

HUO: Do you remember the opening of the Hayward?

RK: Yes, of course. I mean it was THE event, and now I’ve lived here through all its declines and falls and resurrections. I think it’s an incredibly vital and generous space, mainly because it has never conformed to anyone’s expectation or model of what an exhibition space should be. Although everyone always complains about it, I think the Hayward has had some of the best and most extreme exhibitions that I’ve ever seen.

HUO: In the Louisiana Museum, where the exhibition was presented immediately before coming to the Hayward, we organized the show into a number of different typologies of cities, following the many, many interconnected spaces of the building’s architecture. (”Cities on the Move,” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark, 1999) You decided not to do that at the Hayward.

RK: I was worried about dispersal. The Hayward doesn’t have sufficient different areas to divide the exhibition into many city typologies, and I wanted certain main points to be evident. I thought we should see whether we could compress the show into four or five cities, with a sense of introduction and some kind of compression chamber that tells you you’re about to enter a continent in total upheaval and turmoil.

So, in the light of the recycling of previous Hayward exhibitions’ architecture, what we have done is keep the basic structure from the previous “Patrick Caulfield” exhibition (1999), and add many of the objects that Zaha Hadid designed for “Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art & Fashion” (1999). We use the same circuit as for the “Caulfield,” but we modify it, so that when you enter, there is a big arrow telling you which way to go, but there is also a smaller passage, which goes to the red light district. We’ll do newness, like airport construction, but we’ll also do decay, sex and drugs like in a real city.

HUO: You think that at present the exhibition is not sexual enough?

RK: Yes, very unsexual. I mean, given the fact that there is an enormous volume of sex tourism and that sex is one of the most important forms of transaction between people in cities, this show as it has been so far is almost oblivious to it. The problem is doing it without exoticism, and it’s always difficult because of this reticence in Asia to talk about it. This I think is actually a really critical thing …

HUO: And the architects?

RK: It is a difficult issue for architects, how to deal with such an explosive phenomenon that seems to flourish beyond individual architects. How to connect to it? We’ll put all the architecture together, into a sterile room of architecture …

HUO: A torture chamber of architecture?

RK: It’s where my projects will go too…

HUO: So there is no value judgment?

RK: No, no value judgment, and I think this will let the works contaminate each other in an interesting way.

HUO: Will there be other changes to the “Caulfield” architecture on the ground floor?

RK: We’ll make a kind of intimate streetscape with Zaha Hadid’s plinths, turning them into video buildings and vitrines for icons so that one room becomes some kind of monumental alley. We’ll tunnel through the corridor surrounding the ramp and put in some videos and plaster the walls with Armin Linke’s installation photographs. Overhead will be Chen Zhen’s bicycle/car dragon.

HUO: Let’s move to the top floor.

RK: It will be a “commercial area”-projectors in the staircase, and we’ll use another of Zaha [Hadid]’s big vitrines to create a cinema. Then we’ll have an area with things for sale, which will make us see the nearby cinema as commercial too. And then the space will end in political protest where eggs are thrown.

HUO: You mentioned the idea of urban wallpaper.

RK: The walls of the whole ground floor should be covered with wallpaper; wallpaper of urban images, of urban realities. There will be no words, with the exception of occasionally the front page of a newspaper. The wallpaper is a background, a grey presence everywhere, kind of overwhelming. That’s the whole point of cities, a nightmare in a way. An overkill. Urban overkill inside the Hayward.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Volume I, Edited by Thomas Boutoux, Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery / Charta, Milan 2003, p. 507-528.

Copyright Archphoto 2004/Thomas Boutoux, Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery / Charta