Architect Wang Shuo was born in 1981 in Beijing. He grew up in the family of neuroscientists and was particularly good in math, wining the national math Olympics in high school. But instead of going into computer science, as did many of his classmates, he decided to study architecture. The decision was entirely intuitive. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2004. The Master’s degree was acquired from Rice University in Houston in 2006. His thesis was called Wild Beijing, in which he focused on the emergence of spontaneous urbanism in Beijing. After completing his training, Wang worked for one year at Peter Gluck’s firm GLUCK+ in New York. The office is known for specializing in hands-on design-built projects and acting as general contractor, which gives the architects a lot of control over quality of construction. Following Wang’s time in America, he relocated to Europe for two years, working at OMA in Rotterdam where he interacted with Rem Koolhaas, working particularly on projectsб in which various layers of social, cultural, and everyday life were overlapped to create active, truly contemporary spaces. 

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Gilles Saucier, one of the leading Canadian architects and a design partner at Montreal-based Saucier+Perrotte Architectes that was founded in 1988 invited me to his studio to discuss how he starts his designs and where he finds his inspirations. Simply by looking and even visiting his buildings one may think that the architect is all about performance and efficiency. His edgy, well-crafted edifices may recall Formula One racing cars. But when I stepped into Saucier’s office – dark, mysterious laboratory where he personally experiments with tree roots, branches, wood, glass, rocks, resin, beeswax, and other organic materials – the real intentions of his work started to reveal.

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John Ronan (b. 1963, Grand Rapids, Michigan) is known for his sensual atmospheric buildings that tend to unfold layer by layer their spatial complexity, as one moves through them. His focus is on the use of materiality in ways that reinvent architecture. Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1991) and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan (1985). He has been teaching architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1992. John Ronan Architects was established in Chicago in 1999, the year Ronan won the Townhouse Revisited Competition sponsored by the Graham Foundation. In 2006, the firm was featured in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Young Chicago exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007, the architect was selected to build the prestigious Poetry Foundation in Chicago, out of a pool of 50 international contenders. His monograph Explorations: The Architecture of John Ronan was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. In 2016, the firm was named one of seven international finalists for the Obama Presidential Library. The following interview is a condensed version of our conversation at the architect’s studio in Chicago.

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At 92 years of age, for his entire career Yona Friedman has occupied an unusual spot within the architecture world; his signature concept, the Ville Spatiale which he first proposed in 1956, combines the top-down megastructural thinking visible in later projects such as Archigram's Plug-In City with a total freedom for occupants to design and build their own homes within the structure. In this installment of his “City of Ideas” column, Vladimir Belogolovsky interviews Friedman at his home in Paris to talk about the Ville Spatiale and his theories of mobile and improvised architecture.

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I am fortunate to have seen numerous beautiful buildings and spaces, so when I recently went to Olot near Girona, Spain, to explore the works of 2017 Pritzker Prize Laureates, RCR Arquitectes, I thought I was all prepared. But even though I was familiar with their works through publications, what I encountered firsthand, moved me in the most surprising and delightful ways. The sheer ingenuity and brilliance of these structures, so integral to their places and consequential of their given programs, empower architecture and yield sensations that are truly special and unforgettable.

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Eliezer Armon was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1955. He tried a number of career choices, including studying engineering, mathematics, and serving three and a half years in the Israeli Defense Forces, before, at the age of 25, deciding on pursuing architecture. Along the way, he also dedicated himself to becoming a Kabala scholar and a martial artist, and after 50 years of practice he is a 6th Dan master in Dennis survival Jiu-Jitsu method. Both fascinations have contributed profoundly to his work as an architect. Also, after years of duty in reserve at the Israeli Defense Forces, he was discharged with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Armon graduated from the Architecture School at the Technion in Haifa in 1985. After working at a large office in Tel Aviv he was hired as the chief engineer of Immanuel, a small settlement in Samaria. A few years later he became the chief engineer of Be'er Sheva, the capital of the Negev and the largest city in the south of Israel, becoming, at the age of 35, the youngest city engineer in all of Israel. He was responsible for planning housing and infrastructure in the region, leading the design and construction of 10,000 dwelling units in Be’er Sheva, resulting in a rapid growth of the city.

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Odile Decq was born in 1955 in Laval, France and studied at École Régionale d'Architecture in Rennes, Brittany. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure D'architecture in Paris-La Villette in 1978 and received her diploma from the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1979. Decq set up her practice in Paris the same year and soon met Benoît Cornette who was studying medicine at the time but switched to architecture. By 1985 he received his architecture degree and the couple renamed their firm into ODBC. In 1996, ODBC won the Golden Lion in Venice for their drawings, selected out of a pool of invited emerging voices that included Zaha Hadid, Enric Miralles, and Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio. That was the beginning of the computer drawings, expressing movement, ambiguities, layering, and overall new dynamics that characterize Decq’s liberated forms and spaces.

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Boris Bernaskoni (born 1977, Moscow, Russia) is the leading Russian architect of his generation. He is interested in what technology can do today, so his architecture would be able to utilize it tomorrow. His work is not about façade aesthetics, which the architect says is the thing of the past. Instead, he is proposing radically new methodologies and prototypes. In the future, Bernaskoni believes, buildings will be immortal because they will continuously evolve and attune themselves to the most current technologies and demands. The ability to transform with the times will be architecture’s most precious commodity.

+ 25

To the uninitiated, Ricardo Bofill might come across as something of a chameleon. Comparing the post-modernism of his projects in Paris of the 1980s, his recent glass-and-steel towers, and the stark stoicism of his own home and studio which he renovated in the 1980s, one would be forgiven for thinking that there is no consistent thread present throughout his work. However, as Bofill reveals in this interview from Vladimir Belogolovsky's 2016 “City of Ideas” series, his designs are actually rooted in concepts of regionalism and process which, while recently popular with the architectural community at large, have underpinned his architectural mind since his twenties.

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Architect Giorgi Khmaladze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1982. After graduating from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art in 2002, he was accepted to AA in London but at that time he could not afford studying there. He remained in Georgia, working on his own projects, as well as taking part in various international architecture competitions. In 2010, Khmaladze became the first Georgian who was accepted to Harvard’s GSD on full scholarship, which was provided partially by the university and partially by the Georgian government. He graduated with Master’s in Architecture in 2012 and returned to his practice in Tbilisi. In 2014, his groundbreaking Gas Station/McDonald’s in Batumi won 2014 ArchDaily Building of the Year Award in Commercial Architecture. The architect’s other projects include Georgia National Pavilion at 2010 Shanghai Expo and Coffee Production Plant in Tbilisi. We met at the architect’s small office located at an attractive prismatic glass volume with a pronounced concrete exoskeleton to his own design. We discussed the architect’s intentions, inspirations, and that every one of his projects starts from scratch.

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New York-based architect Eran Chen (b. 1970) was born and grew up in Be'er Sheva, Israel where his Polish-born grandparents, Holocaust survivors, settled right after World War Two. Early on the original long Polish surname was abbreviated to short Chen, which is pronounced “Khen.” In Hebrew, it stands for charm. After four years in the army, following high school, Chen studied architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the top architecture school in the country. Upon graduation in 1999, he ventured to New York to gain professional experience. He was hired by Perkins Eastman, a global New York-based giant of over 1,000 architects. In just a few years Chen was made the youngest principal in the company to oversee the design of his own diverse projects, including several competition-winning entries. By then he got married, became a father, a licensed architect, and settled in the city that he now calls home. In 2007, Chen decided to strike on his own. He focused on working with developers on residential projects, mainly in New York, as well as other major cities in the US and around the world. Many of Chen’s projects are situated in dense urban places. They are about reinventing the familiar living typology of buildings as extruded boxes. We met at the architect’s busy Manhattan office of over 100 young, ambitious architects helping Chen to make our cities more livable. We discussed his concept of vertical urban village and the truly democratic idea that every apartment, no matter where it is positioned in the building, can be turned into a penthouse.  

As the founder of SITE (Sculpture in the Environment), an architecture firm most widely-known for its seminal series of buildings for the BEST discount-store chain in the 1970s, James Wines (b. 1932, Oak Park, Illinois), originally an artist, introduced his unique approach of practicing architecture as a form of cultural criticism. It struck a chord by delighting the public and infuriating many architects and critics for corrupting architecture with his witty ideas. His buildings were among the first to engage nature head-on, both for pure delight and to raise environmental issues.

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Nikoloz Lekveishvili (b. 1986), originally from Tbilisi, Georgia, has left his country in 2004 for his bachelor studies to Istanbul Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and to get Master of Architecture at Politecnico Di Milano. He then practiced architecture in Italy, Germany, Turkey, and India until 2017, when he was attracted back to his home country by emerging economic opportunities and bustling creative scene in this former Soviet republic in the Caucasus. Nikoloz has started his practice, TIMM Architecture the same year together with his younger sister, Natia Lekveishvili (b. 1989) who has graduated from Georgian Technical University in 2012 and worked in local architectural and design-build firms.

The partners’ studio is located in the heart of old Tbilisi in the same building where their parents, architecture professors and practitioners, lead their own research-based office known for documenting historical monuments in the region. We met with Nikoloz and Natia at their studio which also serves as an architectural salon where young architects and students are welcome. In the following conversation, the architects spoke about a journey of emotions, transitioning from light to darkness, being interested in Kintsugi, traces of time, treating buildings like human beings, and of the importance of being selfish in order to create architecture that’s unique and personal.

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I live in a bubble. I hop from conversation to conversation with architects who live in their own bubbles. I bounce from one bubble to the next. These bubbles are formed by the gross misalignments and discrepancies between what these architects say and what they do. I like venturing into their fascinating minds; they form the mythology of architecture that I love to inhabit. In the following interview Beijing-based architect, educator, and critic Zhang Li helped me to diagnose these discrepancies. He said, “No matter how moral, how ethical, how correct you are if you can’t do beautiful things you are doomed… Architecture is great because it is beautiful.” 

Zhang Li graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing and taught at prestigious European and American universities. He has been a Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Architecture Department in the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, China’s most prestigious university. His 50-person practice Atelier TeamMinus was founded in 2001. Since 2012, the architect has been serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the leading Chinese monthly magazine World Architecture. The following is an excerpt from our recent conversation at his Beijing studio.