a conversation with Lisa Iwamoto

patricia andré | April 17th, 2012

 

a conversation with Lisa Iwamoto…

KD: we are with a publication with Georgia Tech School of Architecture called gray_matter(s) and, umm, we just have some short questions that get to know you. We want to get to know you as a person. We understand that you’re an architect, or else you wouldn’t be here, right? So we’re just going to go through them.

LI: okay

KD: some of them might seem a little silly but… they’re fun.

LI: ::laughs::

KD: where are you from originally?

LI: Berkeley, California

KD: what was your master’s thesis project? And do you still like it and think it’s relevant?

LI: I don’t think it’s still relevant, but I still like it. It was on orthographic representation; that was the metatopic. The program itself was a design for a Chinese medical center; but umm, what I wanted to do, and this is all hand-drawn, FYI. This is when we were all hand-drawing, so. What I did is I looked at methods of representation in western medical practice, which is very similar to architecture representation. The cut. It is about the section and the plan, the axon, the, you know, the perspective kind of view of the elbow or something, versus the way non- western medical practices represented the body, which is through systems. Like lines of chi. As a network; your body was a network. So I wanted to look at how to rethink architectural representation in the same ways.

KD: sounds very intense, actually.

LI: it was a lot of drawing.

KD: was that a personal choice to pursue that? Or what is a part of a research platform?

LI: no, but it’s funny because, you know when you’re a student, I could never describe it like that. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Now I know, now I know…

PA: that always happens

KD: you’ve had time to think about it.

LI: But I mean got it together by the very end.

KD: what is your favorite thing about teaching? Why do you teach?

LI: I think it keeps ideas fresh and interesting. I like the conversation. I love sitting on reviews.

KD: does it keep your ideas in practice contemporary?

LI: uhuh, yes.

KD: is that the real reason?

LI: I think they inform each other.  I think the practice informs the teaching, and that informs the practice. I don’t think I need to teach to have ideas, you know, but I like having conversations with colleagues and with students. I don’t like when students don’t work very hard.

KD: it keeps you always thinking fresh and open, right?

LI: yes.

KD: what about your firm excites you the most?

LI: Right now, I think we’re in a transitional moment. And that’s exciting. Stressful, but it’s exciting, too. It’s like, how do we get the next level, basically. Bigger scale works. And in fact, the other part that is stressful is: how to we actually make it a viable business model. Probably less interesting, in a way. Well less interesting to me, which is why we never think about it. We probably should start thinking about it. And I think really, having to think about that, I’ve tried to think about why should architecture be more important to people than it is. And that is a really big question that we all face. Architecture comes last, in terms of what someone is going to spend money on, in a way. When really it should come first or second. We don’t go to cities because they look crappy; we don’t go to Florence because it’s some generic place. It matters. So, I’ve been thinking more about that. And I’ve been thinking more about, not just what that is to our practice, but just. Architects think about it a lot, usually, because it’s tied to the economy and their firm. But because my partner and I do other platforms with the teaching, we’re thinking about it more now and how that can be translated, maybe.

[ 2012 spring lecture series, digital fabrication, future practice, Lisa Iwamoto ]

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