More is More
Francis Aguillard
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
HdM’s Website Overhaul
Francis Aguillard
February 2024
Along with a bizarre mix of product spec sheets, ArchDaily posts, Gmail, house sets, and maybe the project page of one or two design firms, a recent mainstay in my tabs has been Herzog & de Meuron’s (HdM) new website, unveiled in early 2023. If their previous website was esoteric, poetic, and frenetic, this one is direct, soothing, and amenable.
HdM’s former website deserves as much attention as the new one; even as recently as 2019, it had all the energy and UX flair (and not devoid of the usual impracticality) of a trendy academic firm. A clean white background and simple Swiss typeface filled with project windows at the command of a mouse click—each one layered atop another in chaotic fashion. Many architects and designers remember the site fondly. It created a visual display that re-presented how we experienced the internet—always halfway between focus and pandemonium, vaguely aware of the wake of information behind us, creating mental collages as idiosyncratic as each one of us. Or perhaps we loved that HdM, a large, established, and well-oiled firm, could keep all the youthful energy of a start-up in their website.
Former Herzog & de Meuron website. Screenshot by author.
Now decidedly more professional, HdM has approached their revamped website as a public and professional good that seems to prioritize ease of navigation and a certain degree of simplicity over eccentricity and experimentation. Perhaps the transition from esoteric and lofty to more straightforward and practical mirrors a general trend within architectural communication and design, favoring plain, no-nonsense language and messaging.
This shift in language proves most effective in the website section that addresses sustainability—I’d implore you to spend some time with it. Given HdM’s long-standing commitment to building rehabilitation, responsible urbanism, and local material usage, the statement reads as one of the few serious ones posted today, defining sustainability as more than just material usage or operational and embodied carbon.
Similar to its previous incarnation, the site has nearly every project HdM has ever done (619 at last count) cataloged chronologically. #001 dates back to 1978, a simple attic conversion in Riehen, Switzerland; #036, 1986, cladding for a house in Fischingen, Germany; #119, 1994, the Central Signal Box in Basel; #226 the Bird’s Nest; #305 TriBeCa’s 56 Leonard Street—and so on and so forth.
#001, Attic Conversion (1978). Elevation. Herzog & de Meuron.
Once one navigates the genealogical tour de force and selects a specific project, an unprecedented amount of material is available for viewing: finished photographs, construction photos, overall plans, models, detail sections, low-res 35mm design process photos, etc. The abundance of images is one of the site’s biggest departures from the previous iteration. In 2019, we were lucky to get four images of a project. Now, HdM has opened the floodgates, welcoming us into their world and process.
If the old website had all the eroticism of that Hinge match whose Instagram only displays elusive pictures with the occasional toned body part eliding the frame, the new website has embraced its identity as a silver fox who has a lot to teach you, if only you would be a good boy and sit down and listen.
#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Studying a 1:2 model of the shell of the building. Herzog & de Meuron.
#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Design process & prototyping. Herzog & de Meuron.
HdM’s “more is more” approach situates their brand temporally while collectively framing the act of architecture. We see employees throughout the firm’s history actively participating in the design process, the public enjoying the spaces, and the workers who built them. The celebration of the construction worker in project after project and image after image is perhaps one of the most refreshing aspects of HdM’s new website. Whether consciously or not, architects often distance themselves from the workers who construct their buildings, but HdM brings the laborer back into frame.
#319, Naturbad Riehen (2014). Construction photo. Herzog & de Meuron.
In an increasingly atomized and siloed world, architects have the chance to engage people across many media, from public meetings for civic projects, to educational lectures, and, yes, even websites. Most people who don’t work in the design or building industry get only glimpses of what is involved in making a building—some people might enjoy peeking through the scaffolds and fences that obscure buildings under construction, or even looking at renders pasted on those very same scaffolds, showing what’s to come. But it might take architects speaking more clearly—and critics keeping them on their toes—for a more transparent and less exclusive understanding of our discipline’s tools and what can be done. HdM’s new website prompts us to reconsider what it means for architects to commit to making buildings—the tangible and the intangible aspects—as public as possible.
Francis Aguillard is an architectural and urban designer currently working for Henning Larsen in New York. Previously, he worked for Waggonner & Ball in New Orleans, his hometown, on water management and resiliency projects and BMW Mini Living in Munich. He is a Fulbright-LSE scholar; his research focused on urban canal living in London.
The Media Ecosystem of Architecture
Eva Hagberg
What’s the Matter with Canon?_September 2023
A Conversation with Eva Hagberg
September 2023
How do buildings become architecture? Narrative-making and the role of the press are inextricably intertwined with the production of architectural culture, and, by extension, what is consumed, discussed, remembered, and eventually taught. Editor Mai Okimoto speaks with Eva Hagberg about writing, publicity, and the politics of self-promotion.
Mai Okimoto (MO): Tell us about your book, When Eero Met His Match!
Eva Hagberg (EH): It's a hybrid biography and personal narrative. It had its origins in my dissertation for Visual and Narrative Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The book aims to interrogate—and ultimately undo—academics' reliance on the press as a neutral archive. Historians have this idea that if somebody is in a magazine, it's because they deserve to be there by merit. My book demonstrates that this is often not true. It reveals that architectural media is produced in an ecosystem that contains an important element at its core: the publicist.
I use long-time New York Times art critic and the first architectural publicist, Aline Louchheim Saarinen, as a case study, arguing that she professionalized the role of architectural publicist while also being the wife to her client, Eero Saarinen. I shed light on her role in Saarinen’s work and its public narrative, as well as how the relationship shaped her own work. Then I place that story and framework against the backdrop of my own work as a publicist; while I’m not married to any of my clients, I learned a great deal from Aline. The book takes two strands: 1) the interrogation of my own work and how I learned my methods, and 2) Aline’s trajectory and ways of working, and how she came to influence the production of architectural culture. The book is juicy. It's been called a “beach read,” which is great to hear considering it’s an academic text.
MO: Were there any themes that emerged or discoveries made as the project developed into the hybrid form of biographical research and personal account?
EH: One of the main arguments I make is about the iterative relationship between design and narrative. A design propels a narrative forward, which then propels a design forward, and so on. My book has the same iterative relationship to itself: An autobiographical, memoir-like chapter informs the ideas I explore in the next chapter. That scholarly chapter then sets the stage for the next chapter. With many academic books, you can read a chapter on its own, or read the chapters in any order of your choosing. This book is an argument against that, because each chapter sets you up for the one that you're going to read next. The iterative relationship of the chapters forms an interplay of arguments; historicizing arguments and looking at them in context. I was interested in this process of layering different arguments on top of each other.
As for what I learned while I was writing it, I think I always learn from what I'm writing. I never really know what I'm going to say until I write it down. Writing for me is a very intense, generative process.
The front cover of When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect. Photo by AWW.
MO: You mentioned earlier that your book has been called a “beach read.” As you make evident by the writing process which you’ve just outlined, every part of it is intentional and deliberate. I think readers often have this misled assumption that if something is easy to watch or easy to read, it must have been easy to make.
EH: There is this very pernicious idea that personal writing is somehow this freeflow of words and ideas that just comes out of your brain, whereas academic writing is careful, rigorous, and thoughtful. The chapters that are personal were as carefully and meticulously constructed as the chapters that are academic.
It was important for me to delve into the ways in which women hide behind this semblance of spontaneity or being oversharers, which is actually a meticulous and controlled performance. Aline was very personal in her letters to people, and often pretended that she didn't know where things were, and was chaotic in her presentation. I would say that I'm writing very much in the tradition that she started, which is disarming her reader, disarming her interlocutor into thinking that they're getting a very personal take. Ultimately, Aline manipulates her interlocutors into believing what she wants them to believe and into doing what she wants them to do.
I am also always interested in exploring how to undo this knee-jerk reaction against memoirs—particularly against memoirs written by women, where the praise is often focused on the bravery of the author sharing her story. When someone like Karl Ove Knausgård writes My Struggle, technically a novel but very much based on his life, he is lauded for the qualities of his prose. It’s important to note that my book is constructed as a coherent whole through the careful deployment of different tools. One of those tools is biography, another tool is analyses and theory, and another tool is writing about myself.
My great struggle is that people read my writing and say, it's so easy to read that it must have been so easy to write—but that’s why it took ten years.
MO: How does a narrative around the built work come together and eventually become the work’s identity? Could you talk about how you approach the relationship between narrative-making and history, or narrative-making and knowledge?
EH: There are really good theorists on narrative. From a literary standpoint, I'm very influenced by Hayden White and the discursive turn. It’s a moment in the practice of history where new ideas about the role of narrative and the role of coherent storytelling really came to the forefront. Narrative is often constructed by somebody whose job is to do that—and I show this in the book.
I'm interested in the idea (which many architects seem to believe) that buildings tell stories inherently—that if you just look at a building, you'll know what it's about or you'll figure it out—or that their narratives appear out of ether and get adopted on their own. But stories are co-created, and there are originating moments. I use Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962, Trans World Airlines Flight Center, New York) as an example of this kind of co-creation. There’s a moment in the Time magazine profile of Saarinen where he tells an anecdote about having been inspired by a breakfast grapefruit, which is a very legible analogy that I argue was constructed by Aline. Later, a writer described it as a soaring bird, and Aline picked up on the soaring bird imagery and made it prevalent in the press. In my research for the book, I traced the construction and adoption of that narrative. Analogy and metaphor are important elements in constructing narratives about buildings.
When Santiago Calatrava unveiled his proposal for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub (2016, New York), he referred to it as a bird in flight, while others compared it to a stegosaurus. In any case, it was immediately anthropomorphized, and the analogies became central to the way people talked about it. With the aid of its newly adopted narrative, the project became more legible and understandable to the general public, making it one of the landmarks in the redevelopment of post-9/11 Lower Manhattan.
Answering how buildings come to have, or exhibit meaning, is very complicated. I think it’s a question that somebody could devote a career to. My book is an attempt to say: Here is one way to approach that question; here is one mechanism and I'm going to trace that mechanism with exacting specificity with the hope that it shows at least one method.
MO: I’m curious about your thoughts on the limited presence of the press in architecture academia and education.
EH: Architects are not taught to take the press seriously. This is funny because, eventually, they want to get published—and they have a profound misunderstanding of how getting published works. As a publicist, I've encountered architects with completely unrealistic ideas about what's going to happen to their project. I think it's unfortunate that the importance of media literacy and architectural press, and how to navigate them, are not taught in architecture schools. There is a great deal of education about how to speak to the press that is necessary.
I think the downside of architectural education is that architecture is reified as a difficult field. When I was in school, I was often reminded by peers and faculty that architecture is the hardest major. “Three quarters of you are going to drop out,” I was once told. There was this sense that if you are sticking to architecture despite all of its challenges, you must be hardcore or smart. I don’t disagree that architecture school is hard, but it's not any harder than learning to write really well. I've spent twenty years getting incrementally better at writing, and that has certainly taken a tremendous amount of effort and thought. Architects don't take the press seriously because they're taught not to take anything auxiliary to architecture very seriously. I think it's a great tragedy.
Aline and Eero Saarinen at a party, ca. 1954. Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1906-1977. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.