The lecture I attended that Michael Maltzan gave this past winter at PRATT Institute in Brooklyn, mainly to a student audience across design disciplines, charged the full-capacity room with supersized images of his explosively dynamic works—houses, apartment blocks, museums, art centres, theatres, schools and bridges. While exhibiting his photogenic realisations, predominantly in Los Angeles, the architect discussed the issues of density, urbanity, community, culture and politics. A dozen or so selected buildings—vividly white, sleek and dynamic assemblies of sharply cut fragmented forms—appeared specific to each place yet projected an unambiguous sense of continuity from one project to the next. In our conversation following his lecture, the architect articulated his guiding design strategy, “One of the main spatial problems of our generation is that of simultaneity. We now occupy multiple spaces both physically and virtually, mainly owing to the ubiquity of the digital. That impacts how we think about and experience contemporary architectural space. Much of my work is about composing elements that form and provoke relationships dynamically across space. I am interested in producing a dynamic space that is not particularly formally ‘resolved’ but has more of an ‘equilibrium’ to it.” 

Maltzan was born, grew up and educated on the East Coast. He studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) while working at the office of Machado Silvetti in Boston; at the time, Rodolfo Machado was the head of the architecture department. After graduating in 1985 from RISD, the American architect went straight to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), earning his master’s degree in 1988. He then relocated to Los Angeles, US, where he felt more opportunities lay ahead for a young architect. He was hired by Frank Gehry to work on the competition for the Disney Concert Hall. He did not plan to stay for more than a few months, but after the office won that commission, he stayed there for seven years as a senior designer before opening his practice in 1995.

In our interview, Maltzan talked about wanting to become an architect since the age of 12, getting mesmerised by LA “adventurist” architecture that lured him to the West Coast, lessons he learned from Gehry and Richard Serra and ways a house can relate to a city around it.

I am most interested in the way that architecture has the potential to be at the centre of connecting dispersed things. – Michael Maltzan

Vladimir Belogolovsky: I read that visiting a friend's house first triggered your interest in architecture. How so?

Michael Maltzan: [Laughs.] I must have been 12 then. At the time, we lived in a rural town outside Syracuse, in Upstate New York. My best friend’s father was a successful product designer. The house he designed was completely different from anything else in the neighbourhood -- open-plan, split-level and all in all, very contemporary. In their home was a small office with a drafting board and equipment, where he worked on weekends. My friend and I would pretend to be architects by drawing plans with clipped-out people and furniture from magazines. In a way, we were making environments in two dimensions that represented our ideas about life inside buildings. That’s when I first thought one could imagine and affect a space and an experience. That stuck in my mind. It was the beginning of thinking about how I could be an architect. I’m not sure I really understood what that meant; it was almost a visceral feeling. The idea that I could make my own world and that architecture was the means to create that physical manifestation of the world I saw. It was a very powerful feeling. 

VB: You studied architecture at RISD, where Rodolfo Machado was the head of the Department of Architecture. What did you take from him?

MM: He was my professor at RISD. The classes I took with him were influential, but more than that, it was his presence that was influential and his intellectual ambition was also manifested in the kinds of people he invited to teach and lecture at the school. He developed an extraordinarily spirited and critical culture at the school. I also worked at Machado Silvetti on and off. Before graduating, I took a year off to earn the money needed to continue my studies; I also worked at their office that year. I never had enough money and always had to work in the summers, even [had] to take some semesters off to keep myself afloat. I graduated from RISD in 1985 and, in the same year, went on to Harvard’s GSD. I took additional time off periodically to make enough money to continue before finally graduating in 1988. 

VB: You moved to LA right after GSD. Michael Rotondi told me, “You get to invent your life in LA. It is a city of constant change and little memory.” Do you agree and what do you like most about the city?

MM: I think it was true more vividly at that time. The city continues to evolve and still has many cultural possibilities because of how open it is. But it has become more challenging. It is denser now. It has become more difficult to do anything. At least it seemed more possible in the past. I came to the city because I felt that the East Coast was a very difficult place for young architects to do much. Hierarchies were so ingrained that to do anything of substance would seemingly take forever. Los Angeles seemed much more open. There were architects like Rotondi, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss and, of course, Frank Gehry. They were doing work that seemed more radical and adventurous than, frankly, anywhere else in the world at that time. That was very attractive. Before moving to LA, I took a studio at the GSD with the Los Angeles architect Robert Mangurian. Robert brought us here to see the city and I immediately felt an incredible connection to this place, even though many of my classmates were bewildered by it. It made a lot of sense to me and I felt I understood it. I came to believe I felt that way because I grew up in a postwar suburb on the East Coast and much of Los Angeles is a similar postwar suburb. It felt very familiar.

VB: You ended up working at Gehry’s office. How inevitable was that choice?

MM: When I moved to LA, that was not my initial plan. I was looking for a job with a much larger firm. I had experience working as a designer on smaller projects in small offices and I wanted to learn about designing large and medium-sized projects that were more at the scale of the city. I was interested in the debates going on around cities at the time, with people like Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi, Leon Krier and Peter Eisenman, among others. Frank was becoming increasingly well-known, although he did not have large projects. The biggest, I think, was the Air and Space Museum in LA. It didn’t fit with my plan. In any case, when I sent out my resume, I was inclined to work for a larger commercial office and included Frank’s office, just in case. But they responded right away. During my second interview with them, I realised that they were at a pivotal point in the trajectory of the practice. The work was beginning to change and the new work was at the scale of the kinds of projects I was hoping to be a part of. I felt very fortunate when I was hired. They were just about to start working on the competition for the Disney Concert Hall. I was hired for that competition. I thought I would stay there for three to four months just for the competition and the odds were that we wouldn’t win, they would fire me and I would start my job search all over again. But we won and I ended up staying there for seven years. I was a senior designer.

VB: What did you learn from him?

MM: I think that the most important thing that Frank made was the office itself. He curated a culture where there was a sense that anything was possible. I think you need to make a culture of your studio that allows you to do the work that meets your ambitions and if you don’t make that place first, then the work will be challenging in terms of how you can manifest those ambitions. Going beyond Gehry, the lesson I took was not from any one project or one architect but from many projects and architects. It is about looking at what already exists around you and then trying to see it in a different way. John Baldessari, the LA artist, said something to the effect that what an artist does is to jumpstart your mind to see something in a fresh way as if you are seeing something for the first time. How do you breathe new life into stereotypes? You can see through the line of LA houses designed in the early 20th century as a constant attempt to take such a stereotypical form of the single-family house and bring a new life into it. 

VB: Among many artists who influenced your work, one stands out. I am referring to Richard Serra. Could you explain?

MM: He became important to me at the time when the “Modernism versus Post-Modernism” debate was going on. The main criticism of modernism was that it had become extremely self-referential and the post-modernists were trying to break that insular conversation and looking for models of an architecture that could have a more meaningful role in the city and to the individual. But if you look at their work, which was made from a kind of classical overlay on the contemporary city, it is clear that the result was just as abstracted from the city as the work the modernists were being criticised for. Neither of those polarised positions seemed to resonate with me.

I was more interested in how the viewer connects experientially and perceptually to form and space on the ground. I saw in Serra’s work that the form became a kind of barometer for the viewer of the context around it. This is what fascinated me in his sculpture, Tilted Arc in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan, which became controversial and was eventually destroyed in the late 1980s. To understand the piece, you couldn’t just stand in front of it. It was necessary to walk around it and through that promenade, the sculpture became a kind of interweaving element between the participant and the context around it. It engaged people and the city in a kind of dialogue. I was intrigued by it and was interested in the question of whether architecture could be designed using similar strategies. Stepping back from a geometric formalism to something that was more about choreography, a kind of perceptual unfolding or cinematic experience, I received my first architectural degree at RISD, which is an art school where my colleagues were thinking about the world through many different disciplines of art. That was also the context through which I understood architecture. Eventually, I became interested in people like Bruce Nauman and how he assembled forms in unlikely and provocative ways. It was those unusual relationships that I found startling and exciting. It pushed me to see forms and compositions that seemed recognisable at first glance but, on closer examination, had such an unusual set of relationships that they provoked new questions for me.

I do think that a house represents a kind of condensation of all the mechanisms that make up our lives, in a similar way to the city. It is only the scale that changes. Every time I work on a house, I find I am thinking about the city simultaneously. – Michael Maltzan

VB: When you describe your work, you use words and phrases such as elastic, community, pleasure, transparency, simultaneity, bundled forms and anticipatory scale. What kind of architecture do you try to achieve?

MM: I am most interested in the way that architecture has the potential to be at the centre of connecting dispersed things. I think architecture has a very powerful capability of doing that. It can happen in many different forms, styles and ambitions. But at its best, architecture becomes a medium between a community and an individual, between an institution and a larger culture around it. I am not interested in answering this question with a singular solution. I am interested in finding potential connections but leaving space for questioning and possibilities to arise and allowing answers to be constantly evolving.

VB: You have said, “Housing is a microcosm of the city itself.” How so?

MM: Of course, this is not a radical new idea. Architects from Alberti through Yona Friedman have written about the idea of the city as a large house and the house as a small city. I do think that a house represents a kind of condensation of all the mechanisms that make up our lives, in a similar way to the city. It is only the scale that changes. Every time I work on a house, I find I am thinking about the city simultaneously. Working on a house can be a response to what the contemporary city is or an expression of what an idealised city could be in the future.