who needs paper?
In the June 2009 edition of Icon magazine, the Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati responds to a question regarding his working method. Olgiati claims he begins every project by talking. The people in his firm discuss a project and its specific needs and environment for hours, sometimes days, until the focus has revealed itself. During this time, nobody draws or sketches anything. He likens his process to exactly the opposite of art, with its highly engaged system of the process. Artists simply paint or draw and hopefully something comes out of the studio. Olgiati doesn’t bother with all that, and waits until the essence is argued, wrestled, or cajoled into existence. Then someone goes away and draws the ideas onto paper…presumably in a cloistered room, far far away.
Someone in art should give this a go. In their heads, artists tend to stay jailed inside their own points of view, even though they may have unearthed a mass of data on a subject. But as most of us know, living in the wide wide world of different lifestyles and opinions ensures that, at one point, our points of view change as we live our lives. Wouldn’t this be a productive method for art as well, where supposedly people with talent (artists) engage with supposedly people who have less talent (us) to create, at first, a discussion, before the artist feels well and truly prepared for a first attempt. I’m not such a process-driven person that my life could always function like this, I wouldn’t get anything done otherwise, but somebody should try this. Give and take happens in the real world anyway, and artists are in no position to fortify themselves in a tower for critical acclaim.
The architect Adolph Loos thought along the same lines, stating, “Good architecture can be written. One can write the Parthenon.” And if one had honest colleagues, one could plan a city.