ArchiTeam interviews the architect RALPH JOHNSON

What is the importance of architectural tourism?
Whenever I travel, I always take time out to visit cities and see buildings. Not because you copy the building, but because it's interesting to see how other architects solve similar problems on the way you are working. It's also interesting to see how buildings how buildings react in different cultures and different contacts.

Our firm is a global firm. We work all over the world. We have offices in many cities in the States. We have offices in London; we do work in India and China. It's important to observe not only buildings, but buildings in their settings and their cultures and other work in different place.

 

What is the importance of traveling, especially for architects and humans in general?
It's just experiencing the world beyond where you spend your day the day life. I've seen the world in much bigger, people think in different ways, they have different life styles. Some of these lifestyles maybe you can learn lessons to infect your lifestyle. It's important not to be isolated, but to be open to new ideas, new cultures, realize that there is something beyond your personal culture that you just never knew.

What do you think is the added value that architecture creates within a city?
The main purpose of architecture is to bring people together, to create environments for interactions and exchange of ideas, to help educate people. It's the public nature of architecture that is the most important, for cities to create new spaces within a city, new existing conditions, new buildings that will always add to their environments and react to them and become positive elements that produce catalysts and change and become part of the city. Cities are continuously evolving. And architecture is part of the process.

What is the importance of Architectural events (like WAF) worldwide? What are the profits for a city holding such kind of major events?
The wonderful thing about WAF is the presentation; the series of presentation, not the final presentation but the main presentations that accrue over the two or three day period. You can see how architects think, how they present their ideas in person.

It's quite different from reading a magazine; it's much more personal expression than you will find in a magazine, it's much more different from reading it in a book and it's presented in a different way.  There is much more revealing about a building when you see someone present it than when you see it in a magazine.

You currently work as a member of the board of Directors at the architectural office "Perkins + Will". 
You design in many countries with great history. Designing a modern building within this context is a complex procedure. Is critical regionalism an approach to your architecture?
Yes. That's always been the key contour to my work. Not literal reproduction of regionalism but a transformation of regionalism in a minor way. Constantly challenging yourself to observe the characters in whatever environments you are working in and then to allow that to transform the architecture or inform the architecture. Not in an obvious way, but in an integrated way.

How would you characterize modern architecture nowadays?
It's a very realistic period. There are periods of recent history when there are certain styles, other popular. Right now some of them return to modernism, there are so many different ways of interpreting modernism. What is happening is positive. There are different opinions.

Chicago is a city with short history, but great architecture. Since Daniel Burnham's master plan many radical changes have taken place in the city. Do you think that Chicago can be referred as a paradigm metropolis city and why?
Yes. The most important lesson to be learned from Chicago is its waterfront. How the city engages the edge of Lake Michigan and how of this left the entire short line of Lake Michigan as a public ground. There are no private buildings that are listed in the major portion of the downtown area that come up to the wateriness. In cities like New York or Boston, the water has privatized. You can't use the water as a public, open space.

Because of Burnham's legacy, we have permanent open space. That happened one hundred years ago when there was more a tabular raiser in terms of what you could do. We are fortuned that happened at that point. It's the kind of thing that you can't do now in many cities. That's the lesson for new cities maybe. The public space is the most important element and organism for the city.

In recent years attention turns to green urban regeneration. Do you think that it is imperative for the city or it's just a new fashion with economic outcomes and covertly interests?
It's more than just a fact at this point. It's a worldwide phenomenon and it will not go away. I re member twenty or thirty years ago when we had the gas crisis and suddenly in '70s and '80s there was a big push for energy and then the gas crisis went out again and everybody forgot about it. This is more embedded in society in peoples' thinking.

Sustainability is not a special thing but something that is embedded in our practice and part of our everyday thinking. It's a point where we just assume that we design a building that is a sustainable; it's not something special anymore. It's embedded in our practice; it is part of the way we think. Therefore, it won't go away, because it will be just like many other elements of design that are just the basis of design.

At the end, can you please provide your personal proposal for 10 buildings (constructed and visitable) which you think as the most important worldwide that someone must visit anyway?
I just was in Chandigarh in India so that was a building that pops into my mind; Le Corbusier's  projects.

Other projects by Le Corbu, the housing Marseille block.

Examples of Aalto's work; Finlandia Hall and many of his houses.
Paimio Sanatorium in Finland; that's a wonderful hospital; we do a lot of hospitals, so to me that's one of the best hospitals.

There is one building of Perkins and Will, not mine, it's Crow Island School.  It's probably one of the most wonderful schools in the world, it's in Winnetka.

It is hard to say ten buildings because there are so many wonderful modern buildings that I admire..

ArchiTeam
Production: Maria Anagnostou, Kyriaki Gkavogianni, Matina Koloniari
Editing: Alex Vandoros, Maria Anagnostou
Video: George Vlachodimos

Notes
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