I just returned from a lecture at UCLA by Toshiko Mori, architect and head of the Harvard Design School. The lecture covered a lot of ground, but let me break it down into three parts. The first part outlined some of her house projects in New England and Florida. It was commendable to see someone highlight the lack of innovation in housing New England prototypes – whether this is a problem with overly zealous protectionist NIMBYism or simply because people in the northeast have traditional tastes, I don’t know (probably a bit of both). I’m not sure her designs advanced a particularly genus loci for the northeast, but they were nice examples of crisp modernism (in the L.A. tradition!), which is never a bad thing.

Personally, I think that Brian Mackay-Lyons’ work in Atlantic Canada is far more interesting in this regard. Lyons’ work carries on Modern traditions (is it possible for there to be traditions in Modernism?), yet his construction methods and finely-tuned understanding of climate and landscape seem to achieve what Mori was talking about, only with a more deeply-rooted connection to place. It seems to me that Mori’s work is more materially-driven – in all her houses, she was concerned more with experimenting with different glass treatments than with developing a formal response to the northeast geography, climate, or culture. Good architecture need not be those things, but in the context of how Mori framed her explorations, the resultant buildings, which beautiful, speak more to her comfort zone of material exploration.

The second piece of the lecture is where it started to get interesting – here, she talked about her students’ work with fabrics, which is all the rage these days in architecture schools. These material explorations – and I’m thinking also of the work that Jeannie Yoon does at MIT – can be seen as either opening up new and interesting avenues or, conversely, an entirely esoteric naval-gazing exercise. For those unfamiliar with such materially-driven design, they are essentially trying to use different methods (weaving, knitting, etc) to achieve new uses of materials and new resultant forms that are lighter and more malleable. There are many useful applications – think Kevlar or fiberglass. Such exercises need not be purely self-referential to architecture practice, but too often they way architects talks about it (i.e. as art), it comes across that way. Let me return to this is a moment…

The third piece of the lecture talked about a project that she is doing for the Chinese government – it was a strange international competition where names were drawn out of a hat (so to speak) and Mori randomly ended up with a project to design a newsstand. Mori talked about how her design was controversial since the tradition in China is for newspaper to be pasted on a wall and passersby read it (since they can’t afford to buy their own). State propaganda is also broadcast via speakers at such newsstands. Mori’s project essentially replicated this paste-up tradition — expand this to non-state news from around the world – clearly the Chinese government, as of now, is not yet ready for 1.3 billion free speech advocates! The design was highly orchestrated procession through a ramp (architects always assume that people will behave predictably; more often they do not). In the course of the presentation, she attempted to broader the scope of architecture by calling for architects to do small projects that speak to larger social or political issues (like her little newsstand and free speech in China). I agree that architects should engage more often in this kind of discourse – and such a narrative need not be made through the mega-statements (think of Rem Koolhaas’s library in Seattle, for example).

Yet, following her discussion of the fabric/material explorations, it reminded me of something that I’ve long thought: that architects – despite all the creativity in the world and being so well positioned to innovate for the benefit of all – tend to focus on the nitty-gritty without seeing the bigger picture. If, for example, Mori (and others engaged in testing the limits of materiality) framed their work not as a new and decidedly groovy ‘plaything’ of architects, but rather talk about how the application of this new techniques can contribute to genuine socially progressive goals, then the a wider audience could see what all the fuss is about. For example, it is not too much of a stretch to make a case for using new materials (or old materials in new ways) on the grounds of its potential environmental impact.

At present, structural systems (at least in the eyes of most engineers) are an exercise in the ‘bigger is better’ world view; that is, to transmit larger forces, one needs a bigger beam, column, etc. The material explorations that Mori and others are promoting seek instead to using lightweight and small pieces and distribute forces across surfaces instead of through structural members. The benefits are many — buildings can quite literally touch the earth lightly, smaller pieces can be used, and such structural surfaces can also be permeable, allowing light and air to pass through them. This, in turn, creates opportunities for natural ventilation, which reduces the heating and cooling demand (and thus reduces energy consumption). These are just a few arguments, but the point here is that architects need to stop talking only to themselves about the coolness of their craft, but rather engage in, as Mori suggested, broader social and political endeavors. While Mori’s newsstand did so in only the most superficial way, her material explorations has the potential to have genuine societal benefits. The world needs more architects, but architects who turn their naval-gazing playthings into the social progress for everyone else.