Christian Kerez with Nile Greenberg

I sat with Christian Kerez in a Milanese apartment, in which he houses his home and architecture office. In the sequence of spaces one tiny room has six doors and a single door divides 3 zones of the flat. The art in his practice is to simply describe the medium. In doing so Christian Kerez offers a zero-degree architecture, where space is revealed and not designed. The ability to act directly on the medium of architecture is not available to all architects, in fact he sees it as a prolonged struggle for freedom. Simultaneously his process is anti-authorship, but this results in highly specific spaces. In our 90 minutes together, the architect from Switzerland describes his current position, film, writing and the role of an architect today.

Nile Greenberg (Rail):  How is the current climate in terms of architecture: politics, construction, changes to the industry, and the art world, affecting your approach to architecture? 

Christian Kerez:  Conditions have changed dramatically. When I started in the profession, if you came up with something new in a competition, you could be sure your contribution would be recognized  and discussed. You would not be sure to win, not at all, but at least there was an attitude or  understanding that you would also make a contribution to open public debate on architecture.  

Today, in most cases, you serve a system that is pre-conditioned and one that doesn’t allow  much discussion on architecture. The Special Mention that was always an important prize doesn’t exist anymore in Swiss architecture. It gave you the possibility to go against the rules but still win. The first round in a Swiss competition is nowadays mostly a form of  censorship: everything that is different is eliminated immediately. The rules and regulations have increased to the extent that it is hard to differentiate amongst the results. So, I gave up doing competitions in Switzerland, of course there are exceptions once in a while, like a competition for the Textilmuseum we won recently. But in general, I gave up doing competitions in Europe. 

I still like doing competitions in China. There is still a lot of freedom in China, and the results are announced immediately. Then there is an open debate about it. The open debate is a testing  field: Will it be accepted by the public or not? This public debate was absolutely crucial when I got started in Switzerland, but it has evaporated since then. I think a public competition needs  a public discussion. Without that, there’s no sense in doing competitions anymore.  

Rail:  It’s quite sad to hear you start our conversation by saying “I’m over, I’m done, retiring from  competitions,” but then what do you think of the architect’s role, right now? 

Kerez:  The freedom that you have as an architect is not a given. Architecture is always under extreme pressure: the pressure of money, of power, of everything you can imagine. If you consider it as  an art form, it’s the worst possible form of expression with the smallest amount of freedom. But I like this challenge—that freedom is never guaranteed, but it is something you have to fight for. Sometimes I think the struggle is more important than how much you really achieve by  looking for this freedom. What attracted me to architecture was the subversion: it’s meant to be something like a civil service, but there is the component that you could look at as a free expression of the individual called “the architect.” There is no history of clients, no history of the politicians that made architecture possible. There are very few engineers that are famous for their contribution to the field of architecture. There are even fewer construction companies that became visible for the work they did for architects. It’s a simplification: that the recognition of  architecture is reduced to the name of a single architect. It needs a whole group of people that are fighting the same struggle. They are also looking for the challenge in the exact same way that I’m looking for the challenge of a new project. But this is not possible without many others. 

Rail:  It’s one of the hardest professions to operate as an art. That is the core challenge in many  ways. I think your work is the “building art”—Baukunst. Your work offers a clear definition of  the medium of architecture: the cohesiveness of the structure, the circulation, the mechanical systems. The composition and character of the building intersect often, and become a singular identity. Very simple, reduced to the core elements. Architecture can be an art, not by using  elements from art, not using paint or color in the same way, only using the materials of the envelope and the skin and everything that goes into a building, and excluding the things that  go out of it. I’m curious how you think of Baukunst in your work? 

Kerez:  An architect could be compared to an artist, but an architect is concerned about architecture as a painter is concerned with painting, a sculptor is concerned with sculpture, and a movie director is concerned with movies. Whatever you do, the medium’s expression is the field; an expression that belongs to the field you’re working in more than it belongs to yourself. I am suspicious of an understanding of art, which relates to performance and where you can use videos, sketches, sculpture, no matter what, and all relate to each other, but only thanks to the outrageous personality of the artist. More than any performative aspect of the medium, I'm interested in the medium itself. A lot of my memories are directly related to spaces. I can’t remember faces very well, but I can remember spaces—where certain moments happened or appeared. If I could choose what medium I would work with, it would probably be literature. But in the end, you can’t have the choice of which one you appreciate or respect the most. And in my case the easiest was architecture.  

Rail:  Your background is also in photography. I’m curious how your early career as a photographer influences your design process, which relies heavily on photography, as opposed to renderings. 

Kerez:  My work as a photographer was always about architecture. I used photography to look at architecture, or to try to reveal architecture. As an architect, you do everything but “building”: you make drawings, you make models, you make pictures, you make renderings, you write a text, and you give a speech. It’s always a different medium than building a space as such. As an architect, you’re constantly dealing with translations. I’m fascinated by this indirect approach to the medium. If I were a painter, I would be horrified by the closeness to the medium. Taking pictures was a way for me to be the closest to my dreams in architecture; much closer than starting in a small office and working on a small interior design or private house; taking one step after the other. I was fascinated by the big scale that can change the perception of the landscape. I started to take pictures of power plants in the mountains, of an engineering building. It was at a time when Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron made their first small projects. At the time, I have to admit that I could never imagine that they would become so big and would master this large scale. I wanted to start right away with the large scale, and photography was my tool to get there. 

Rail:  I wonder about your relationship to other architects, like Kazuo Shinohara, or maybe John Lautner,  who also made small projects. How were those different from Jacques and Pierre? 

Kerez:  At the moment, I’m spending most of my time on writing. Half of the day I’m writing and the other half I’m at the office. The writing makes it possible to be close to an architecture that matters independent of any requirements. Architecture that is not just fulfilling certain functional needs: political, social, or economical expectations. For me these are all similar to each other in the sense that they don’t matter in architecture, what matters is architecture itself. But, I’m not writing about my own buildings, I’m writing about buildings by other architects. One of them is John Lautner, another one is Shinohara, both of whom you mentioned. These texts are related to photography in the sense that I try to be as close and as faithful as I can to their work, not to use them for any theory, not to use them for an illustration of my own understanding of architecture. It’s an exercise in the pure description of architecture, nothing more, but also nothing less. What I see in the work of both architects is that it is an  individual work, but not as an expression of personality.  There are other architects who interest me a lot, like Francesco Borromini or Antoni Gaudí. Next week I will visit the work of Vilanova Artigas. The work from Jaques and Pierre was crucial and very influential when I started my own office. What is different about them from the architects I described is the  enormous quantity and scale of projects that they work on, that is hard for me to capture.

Rail:  I’m hoping all this writing would be your great novel! [Laughter.] That sounds like a really beautiful project though. What distinguishes a building today from being generic or arbitrary? What makes something really particular? 

Kerez:  I look at the project as a once in a lifetime opportunity, as the first and last time in my life that I can be working on this project, like the first time we ever designed a house. This goes  together with the research for a project and the desire to forget all projects done before: I start again. The more experience you have, the harder it is to recreate this condition of innocence.  

I try to work in as unprofessional a way as I can, always starting from scratch.  Ultimately that is not possible, of course. For example, in our last project, I started to make clay  models by hand. The reason was not that I like clay, but because nowadays everybody has apps on the iPhone to scan three dimensional objects. I could explain certain things more easily by doing them by hand and then doing a scan. Ten minutes later I have a digital model with which we could work. Many of the tools we use, like VR glasses, are used more  frequently by the entertainment industry than in architectural studios. 

Rail:  Starting from innocence is a very useful way of describing your work, in that it’s self-evident; it develops out of, or within, its own logic. Which gets to this idea of rules, of utilizing a project, or a project being a type of game; the usefulness of a game; a childlike medium. 

Kerez:  It’s always like that:  you want to open a new door and you’re excited by the thought “that something is new.”  Immediately afterwards comes the feeling that it already exists. My interest is not to invent something, but to reveal something that already existed. The 3D scan on the iPhone is commonplace; every kid can use it. Frank Gehry would have had it so much easier today than when he started. Of course there were others that were there before it was commonplace. Now that it is commonplace though, how should that change the design agenda in architecture? It’s not personal anymore, it belongs to everybody. But it’s a commonplace tool that still can reveal a logic of its own; its own evidence.

It’s not like I’m the author and I see things that nobody’s seen before. I just take enough time and have the patience to reveal what existed already, a long time before I even started thinking  about this thing that interests me. I am looking for a work that has a quality of anonymity, that is evident that something was there already; with or without me. It’s hard to imagine something  more self-evident than the Chapel in Oberrealta or House with One Wall. But the same desire for the self-evident drives something as wild and complex as Incidental Space, or the Bahrain Pavilion in Dubai. This desire for the self-evident brings us back to where this interview started. This interest in the medium of architecture, the essential experience of space. The project doesn’t come from me, it comes from the basic possibilities of creating a space, and I’m just revealing them. The essential elements in architecture are buried under a mountain of conventions and requirements that are far away from any architectural or spatial experience. 

Rail:  I’ve heard you describe the House With One Wall—one of your early projects that’s very important for a lot of architects, especially my generation. You designed the concept of the  house, and then you really didn’t want to be burdened with all the details to finish the design of the actual house. Once the idea was there, which elements to keep and which elements you did not need anymore, you have the maximum distance between your authorship and the result. You’re pushing yourself as far away from the final project as possible, which is a way of  keeping yourself at the beginning. It reduces the translation. Some design requires each stage to have instrumental decisions being made: what color are the walls? How is the ceiling constructed? Every detail is being worked through. You’re offering a chance to be extremely far away and yet very close. 

Kerez:  My personal interest is how things come together and relate to each other. There were many  different decisions, but they were decided through the overall perspective of looking at them together and seeing how they influence each other. Let’s say this one wall is guiding the stair,  and then you have all the tubes from the sanitary systems, and the structural system. It  becomes the scenography: the outside view. By looking at all these different aspects at the  same time and saying, “Well, the wall should stay… the rest, I don’t care,” the house designs itself. In the end it is still the work of the architect to bring all these things together. They are just separate aspects of the same concept, of the idea of a house. That integrity is the opposite of something that is driven by special effects. But I love special effects, it’s just a different domain of a different field of architecture.  

Rail:  Are there books or movies that relate to your way of thinking about architecture?

Kerez:  I get kind of suspicious if a movie is too conceptional or too much driven by aesthetic desires or ideas on how to create a picture. I read a lot of books by directors. 

I watch a lot of movies every day. I am a movie addict. I am sure watching movies has an  impact on my designs. Some of my favorite movies are The Passion of Joan d’Arc by Carl  Theodor Dreyer and The Gospel According to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini. They both took existing texts: a transcript of a 14th century interrogation, and a text from the bible. Both movies show what we already know in a breathtaking and stunning way, but which we never could have imagined. In my understanding, this is the purest form of expression in the art of cinematography. I am fascinated by this purity. The storytelling in film is much closer to writing a book than creating a building is related to writing a book. Maybe that’s also a reason why there aren’t that many exciting books in the field of architecture. I think they’re different capacities, designing and writing. You mentioned Shinohara. He was an excellent writer. You mentioned John Lautner too, I think he was an excellent non-writer.

Rail:  Shinohara had very close relationships with poets and writers. He would make a house for a poet, and it would be poetic. I think your work offers a different perspective: the individual that you’re designing for is often the building itself. You’re anthropomorphizing or personifying a building. It’s like taking this strategy of Shinohara, but applying it to the bones of the building rather than its occupant. I find that very funny!  

Kerez:  Shinohara was one of the architects that used writing, not to justify his work, but to prepare it.  There’s a lot of rhetoric in architecture that has a defensive quality: “I did this because of…” I feel we don’t have to explain what we are doing, which is already a position of weakness. I am rather interested in the speculation: “What could I do next?” “What’s coming next?” “What’s next in architecture?” This is an aspect in the personality of Shinohara that impressed me a lot when I met Shinohara as a student. He was somebody who was critical of his time, of himself and of all others, and he used his buildings to raise essential questions in architecture.  

Rail:  He had a very contentious relationship with Arata Isozaki. I was in Tokyo doing an exhibition of the first Isozaki buildings in ’55: a very simple white house called Whitehouse. Isozaki and Shinohara intensely debated the definition of architecture. They couldn’t have had a more different approach. Isozaki thought a house wasn’t architecture: it didn’t have enough scale to qualify, to be in the art of architecture. Obviously, Shinohara felt very strongly that the houses are, and require, very good architecture. 

Kerez:  When I approached Shinohara for the first time he wrote back in a nice way, and said, "You know, unfortunately, all my houses are private, and you can hardly visit any of them, and I’m surprised that you are interested." [Laughter.] That was more than twenty years ago. 

Rail:  But you managed to see some? 

Kerez:  Yes. And he was extremely friendly and nice, but also provocative. He saw in some  publications that I was building a school—the school in Leutschenbach. So he told me, you  shouldn’t build the school because there are too many codes and everything is defined: you  don’t have any freedom. You should build a house for a family; this is like a stroke on a pure  canvas.  

Rail:  I was lucky to visit the school yesterday, actually. I had never been: it was amazing. It’s  something I’ve studied before. But it’s funny because I went there, and I thought, “So much freedom!” It felt like you had so much authority in that project. 

Kerez:  It’s from a time that is gone. This time does not exist anymore. But I would not call it freedom, because Shinohara was right. Everything is defined, if you build a schoolhouse, every single thing is defined. But the difference, at that time, was that it was possible to negotiate, to argue, and to discuss. In the schoolhouse, nearly everything is an exception. And every exception was officially approved by the city government. At that time people working in the city government were in charge. It was their decision to say yes, for fire security: “Yes, this works,”  or “No, it doesn’t.” Today, they are terrorized by the idea that they might make mistakes, and  then they would lose their job. They are not in charge anymore. The decisions nowadays are rather made out of fear, no longer out of personal responsibility, competence, and common sense. 

Rail:  You did have a few projects with schools earlier in your career. You’ve also been teaching for twenty years. I’m curious about when you’re designing a school, how do you conceive of the  education taking place inside? Does that relate to your teaching practice? 

Kerez:  This open public space always interests me in school buildings. It is a public place where people come together out of common interests. When I worked on the competition for an enormous schoolhouse in Basel. I created a street of nearly 200 meters in length with integrated stairs that are overlaid like an ornament onto this space. This vertical and horizontal  street through the building had an informal appearance and several layers of space with different heights, and it was rejected. The final scheme that won created a huge block. There was also a large public void, but it looked like a railway station, just a void, totally anonymous. For me, the interest was in how people come together: planned or not planned. I guess these ideals of school that interest me are not possible in Switzerland anymore. 

Rail:  You just mentioned that you don’t care about the outside of the building, maybe that’s too much to say, but the focus of your architectural project is the space inside of a building. It’s important that a distinction is made between architects who have a different appreciation for the interior or exterior condition. I was curious how you approach interiority. 

Kerez:  If you, as an architect, focus on the volume, then you are making a kind of  large scale sculpture. If you focus on the design of the façade, you’re more of a graphic designer. The essence of architecture is space and nothing else. I always start with imagining the interior of a building. In the end, I’m also interested in how a building looks from the outside, but I always  try to find an expression of the inside on the outside. The outside is also the limitation of the interior space. I desire a space that never ends, in a building that has no facades. But there is this natural conflict between this ideal of an interior space and the limits given by the elevations which are defined by the borderline of each plot. I also don’t care how a building looks from the outside as long as it relates to the interior.

Rail:  It reminds me of a “degree zero” of architecture, where space is the only actor. Similar in concept to Malevich or Rothko, but where the only material in the building is the space. I think the counterpoint to that is structure. It does seem like structure and space have this intense relationship in your work.  One of the only relationships? 

Kerez:  You could look at the Pavilion in Dubai, as an exercise in structural design, but it all comes  from the imagination of an interior space: All the structural elements were extremely thin steel tubes of 11 centimeters, for a space of 1000 square meters, 23 meters high.  The starting point was the idea of a space that is not empty–on the contrary–a space that has density and is also not closed or divided. This space felt open and light, but at the same time incredibly differentiated. The space in Dubai had 126 columns that were all different in terms of  orientation and length and in terms of their relationships with other structural members. Through that, we created a space that was open and light, and at other times it was a thicket of  structural elements and a jungle that you could hardly go through. It constantly changes your perception of it. That was the experience that we were looking for. 

Rail:  Changing the density of space is an interesting proposition, like being underwater. 

Kerez:  Or like a landscape: in the forest, the trees can stand extremely close to each other, but you  can also find a clearing in the same landscape. 

Rail:  Another recent project is the parking garage in Bahrain. It’s such a North American type. But you’ve done something utopian for a garage, which is to create floating planes that touch one another and create intersecting hills, something nature can’t do. Each one is ethereal, which I imagine is a special experience to drive up to. 

Kerez:  There are so many parking garages, but nearly none which you could perceive or enjoy as architecture. We looked for a space that would be created through the movement of the car—which expands to the very border of the building, to the utmost extremity of the building. The ramp is one of the most important elements in the heroic period of modernism. You can find a ramp in every car park, but it’s always a separate additional element. But in our parking garage, all floors become part of the ramp, which becomes one entire continuous surface. By doing so, the ramp also creates spaces which are different from one another. Now that they’re finished it’s beautiful to see how they change the city. You refer to a landscape: In the sense the four parking landscapes rather have the dimension of landscape than of a house. Now that we see them in this very dense medieval urban texture of Muharraq, these buildings create several open squares on top of each other which are continuously connected one with another. It’s primarily an urban gesture that breaks up the extremely introverted urban pattern of Muharraq.