I have chosen to include my introductory remarks from our recent Wisznia Memorial Lecture as our “welcome” to the Tulane School of Architecture website. In many ways, Adam Yarinsky, FAIA LEED AP represents many issues and qualities that I believe architecture students, faculty, and practitioners need to embrace in positioning themselves and the profession for a more robust and relevant future. While he and his partners are both accomplished and recognized designers in the normative sense, they have also built a diverse practice across a range of scales, issues, and entrepreneurial opportunities. They were ahead of the professional practice pack in identifying the central and creative opportunities of “research”. Schools, including our own, would be wise to pay attention to these signals as we change aspects of our pedagogical paradigm for architectural education.
Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA
Favrot Professor and Dean
Adam Yarinsky
Design as Research / Research By Design
February 6, 2012
This evening’s lecture is presented in the name and memory of the late Walter Wisznia, a noted architect and real estate developer from Corpus Christi Texas, and the father of Marcel Wisznia. I’d like to say a few words about Mr. Wisznia before introducing this evening’s lecturer.
Mr. Wisznia has funded a lecture in honor of his father for several years now. In addition to this year’s distinguished lecturer, we have been honored with three other wonderful architects as Wisznia lecturers since my arrival - Mark Tsurumaki from New York, and Julie Eizenberg from Los Angeles, and Stanley Saitowitz from San Francisco. As many of you know, he has recently endowed this lecture so it will become a permanent part of the lecture series lineup in years to come.
For Mr. Wisznia, the lecture is one of many ways he supports the School. “I am pleased to give back to an institution which has given so much to me. One of the most important lessons that I learned at the School of Architecture was never to be afraid of seeking answers in life. Rather than providing the answer, the School teaches students the process of thinking through an issue and discerning the answer on their own. This is a critical skill that has served me well and one that I still see in Tulane architecture students today.”
I think Mr. Wisznia’s comments are particularly significant when we fast-forward to this evening’s lecturer and the nature of research and practice. Please join me in thanking Marcel Wisznia for his generosity toward the school.
Let me start with a few observations.
As a profession and discipline, architecture is pressured by numerous forces, and it seems that these pressures are increasing - forcing a number of significant changes to the way architects practice today. Whether one looks at issues of sustainability, integrated project delivery, or simply the economic forces and imperative of speeding up processes of design and construction, the picture today is dramatically different than even ten or fifteen years ago.
The dynamics at work beg several questions:
- What are the key ingredients, skills, and values that we should be emphasizing during
2, 3, or 5 years of professional education in architecture? - What are key elements to the tradition of architectural education that should be retained, transformed, or dismissed as anachronistic and perhaps even counter-productive for those entering the profession today?
- How should we be fundamentally changing our heuristics as educators in light of a dramatically changed landscape?
While some of the fundamental skills involved in a “traditional” architectural education seem to still have relevance, clearly the design of buildings alone does not address the full range of opportunity in contemporary design offices today.
Adam Yarinsky’s work and career provide a very powerful example - a strategy perhaps - about the way an architect can position himself in ways that not only serve his clients extremely well, but also anticipate and inform the direction of his work with clients in proactively creative ways.
In many ways, Yarinsky, his co-founding partner Stephen Cassell, and new partner Kim Yao, anticipated some of the key issues confronting architectural firms today - by almost twenty years. Their firm was one of the first in the country to emphasize RESEARCH from its very founding in 1993 (and naming). Unlike almost all of their contemporaries who were obsessed with theory for theory’s sake, art for art’s sake, gallery practices, or purely formal explorations involving blobs, fabrications, installations, and the like, ARO has been relentlessly pursuing the architect’s role as a major strategic partner with other disciplines in framing issues based on rigorous research. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is their central role as members of the 2007-2009 AIA Latrobe Prize project team, which reconceived the New York-New Jersey harbor in response to rising sea levels. A design for Lower Manhattan by Architecture Research Office was the centerpiece of Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, an exhibit that opened in March 2011 at The Museum of Modern Art.
They have also built a body of work that, in my mind, fits comfortably within the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. In other words, the beautiful buildings and landscapes they have created are important design expressions in their own right, grounded on a reflexive relationship between practice and theory, theory and practice.
“Pragmatism, as a philosophical tradition, is based on the premise that the human capability to theorize is necessary for intelligent practice. Theory and practice are not separate spheres; rather, theories and distinctions are tools or maps for finding our way in the world. As John Dewey put it, there is no question of theory versus practice but rather of intelligent practice versus uninformed practice.” (Wiki)
It is through this lens that I would suggest we look and listen to the lecture that follows.
ARO has completed more than seventy-five projects nationwide for clients such as Goldman Sachs, Princeton University, Brown University, Prada, and even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The firm’s portfolio includes civic, academic, commercial, residential, and conceptual architecture. With fellow principal Kim Yao, Cassell and Yarinsky were the 2011 winners of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture. In 2010, The American Academy of Arts and Letters honored ARO with their Academy Award for Architecture. Selections of the firm’s work appear in ARO: Architecture Research Office, published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Adam holds an undergraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Adam has served as the Sanders Teaching Fellow at the University of Michigan, the Shure Professor at the University of Virginia, and the Eliel Saarinen Professor at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Syracuse, the University of Virginia (where I hired him when I was department chair in his first full-time teaching position before his practice took off in New York), Parsons/The New School and Washington University in St. Louis. He was elected to fellowship of the AIA in 2007. Most recently, ARO has been selected for Tulane’s newest dormitory for approximately 260 students in collaboration with Waggonner & Ball Architects in New Orleans.
Stan Allen and Sarah Whiting have noted ARO’s indebtedness to Robert Venturi. Whiting observes that, especially in their widely published US Armed Forces Recruiting Station on Times Square, “ARO has embraced Venturi’s legacy of engaging context. Like Venturi, ARO deploys contextualism in the name of a kind of populist legibility, but for them, legibility readily harvests materiality, landscape, and multiple sensory readings of a project, in addition to the simple visual legibility of ‘signs’”. … “Theirs is an architecture of effervescent pragmatism.” ( ARO: Architecture Research Office, published by Princeton Architectural Press)
Although Yarinsky may have a title of his own in mind, one title I would consider is:
Design as Research / Research By Design
Please join me in welcoming Adam Yarinsky to the Tulane School of Architecture.
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