(upbeat music)
- Hello, I'm Barbaralee Diamonstein.
Welcome to American Architecture Now.
Today we'll be talking
to Benjamin Thompson.
For almost 40 years,
Benjamin Thompson's
work has been synonymous
with distinguished design.
As a modernist and a preservationist,
he is responsible for giving new life
and new usefulness to
the built environment.
It's a very real pleasure to
welcome you Benjamin Thompson.
40 years ago, together with
Walter Gropius and others,
you founded The Architect's Collaborative.
What was it like to work with
a figure that was already legendary,
such as Walter Gropius.
- Well, it was great of course.
Perhaps the most interesting thing
about Gropius was the
total intensity of the man.
He was really a kind of a
guy who would talk about
a leaking roof or a business problem
or a political problem
or sometimes about women or about food
or about love.
He was very natural,
he was very serious,
and anything he did,
he took very seriously.
- Was Gropius at all involved in
that remarkable idea of yours
in starting and founding a firm
that many of us knew very well
called Design Research.
- That was 1953 and he was
involved in the sense that he
very much supported the idea.
- What was the idea?
Who's the idea behind Design Research?
- The idea was probably most
a connect with environment
and connected with the idea
of art becoming a part of our lives.
I've never been willing
to discuss art as a,
or to recognize artists
as totally museum imposed.
So I really wanted a place
in which art is part of the house,
the kitchen, the whole environment
of living eventually spreading out
into the cityscape and the landscape.
And we were simply trying
to show that picture
in Design Research.
- Did it turn out to be
commercially valuable?
- Yes, it did, it did.
It was always under capitalized
and so it had its economic struggles,
but it was commercial valuable
and did well at times.
- In your experience,
is it possible and realistic
for products to be both
well made and mass produced?
- I would say that Miriam
echos a good example of that.
And I brought him to this country,
this kind of wonderful, vibrant, rich,
coloring, fashioned, feeling of selling.
The way it started with
a self-streamed process.
We've actually moved
into almost a machine,
very large commercial enterprise
and it made out very well.
- We were talking about well made design.
Let's take the instance for example
of a Breuer chair or a tubular chair.
Does our perception of that change
when we began to see it everywhere,
both in its original and its copy?
Does it become a cliche?
Or is it still a well-designed chair?
- Well of course that's
been a much argued point.
15 years ago when many of
us would have been very,
and were very upset
when they started to copy
our chair, a lot of chairs.
The difficulty was that
the original manufacturers
that made them so expensive
and fundamentally so fashionable,
they were only bought by,
only could be afforded to be bought
by people with a lot of money.
And when you have that happen obviously
somebody's gonna copy it.
It's a dilemma for designers, of course,
because I think designers
should be paid royalties
or someway of making a living.
But yeah, it's nice that
things that get used
get reproduced.
- Most modern architects
claim that their goal is
to bring quality design
to a wider audience,
to a larger public.
And in so doing,
in many ways revolutionize modern life.
Was that your intention?
- Well, of course I'd have to say yes.
But I don't think I ever
thought of it that way.
I was starting with Design Research
where I concerned that
you couldn't get the 1953,
you couldn't really buy a chair
unless you went to Mueller.
And there were several people
that sell modern furniture,
I think Mueller and Herman Miller
and they were so expensive
that those of who were alive at the time
could hardly afford them
or when they came the boxes were broken.
It was very very hard.
But then I had a large
world-wide name go out and I
think I was probably thinking
of me and a few of my friends.
- They thought of lots of your friends
when you did one of the
more significant projects,
certainly of its kind in the world,
lost in Faneuil Hall.
I guess it's every city's
dream of adaptive reuse.
Just what does the term
adaptive reuse mean
and how does it apply
to what you did at Faneuil Hall?
- There were existing merchants there
and they had no heat, they had no light,
only had very little business.
But they had a lot of life themselves.
They'd been in business and their families
for perhaps several hundred years.
Long time.
That idea of making a
training hall into a market,
you know I've often thought
it wasn't a very original idea
because after all that's what it had been.
- How does the project contribute
to the life and well-being
of Boston and its residents?
- We closed four streets.
Which of course had a very substantial
and very important affect
on industrialization.
and my wife and I had
written very extensively,
presented very extensively,
stories about the need for a place to go
in the American city.
And we told stories and
we made little films
and we played songs and you know,
we we're trying to prove something
that fundamentally shouldn't have been
that hard to prove.
- How did it all work out?
- Well it's been a huge success.
- Did you expect it to
unfold the way it has?
Where there isn't a city
that doesn't want its own Faneuil Hall?
- Well, of course not.
Because on opening day,
there were 200 thousand
and you know that was a surprise.
- How are your results at Faneuil Hall
differ from what you might have done
in the late 1950s or the early 60s?
- We opened Design Research in 1953
and as I remember,
it was kind of a wonderful opening party
of people lined up on the street.
What I'd like to say is it's
probably something else.
That in '65, 6, 7, we were
in the middle of Vietnam
and you know the whole
world was sort of gray
and brown and desperate and demoralized.
And the need for a place in the city
was some kind of uplift
was even greater than
ten or 15 years before.
- During the period you refer to,
that very turbulent
period in the mid 1960s,
you were the then Dean
of Harvard Graduate
School of Architecture.
What were your goals at that time,
both for the school and for the community?
- I was very critical,
I still am, of the jury system.
It puts the student into
a state of defenses
where he is unable to free his
mind or ability just
to think freely in his prime.
So I think that's that
we did some things with,
we brought into the school other teachers
we felt that we very oftenly,
the traditional architectural teacher was
too stiff,
too one or two dimensional.
Did we succeed?
Well, a lot of people feel that way now,
but they're not teaching.
Because they got driven out of the schools
by the old professional teachers mostly
who resented us practitioners
and so we were very unpopular
in the schools because we worked outside.
- You once said that
most schools and designs
seemed to be back in the 15th century,
what do see of the future
of architectural education
in this century.
- You can't teach a profession
any longer, I don't think,
without teaching people how to build.
- From what I understand when your staff
begins to work on a new project,
either hotel or a marketplace,
you normally encourage them
to think first like a guest,
then a consumer, a human-being,
anything rather than an architect.
- If I'm going to design a,
let's say a house on a beautiful field,
I'd want to go and stay on that field
for a year or two
and get to understand the wind,
the rain, the animals,
the whole nature of the place.
The time, the seasons, and
that before I touched anything.
And then I was gonna understand the people
that were gonna live there.
And then after that maybe
we talk about design.
And I found that most designers
wanted to rush right into problems,
just give me the pencil
and I'll tell you what you want.
- You made several references
while we were talking
to your wife, Jane Thompson.
She is also distinguished
in the field of architecture
as an editor, a curator,
a writer, and a lecturer,
and vice president of Benjamin
Thompson and Associates.
Most recently, she has become known
in restaurant business.
How did she and you first become
involved in that endeavor?
- In bringing up Faneuil Hall,
we began to say, you know,
not only do we want to have restaurants,
but then what kind of restaurants.
And so well, let's think about
the best seafood restaurant
we've ever been to.
And so, we would describe one in Paris,
I'd say, or in Marce or Oscars.
Or what about a French restaurant?
Until you find one and you describe that
or let's say a cafe.
And pretty soon we found we
were running all of them.
Because we couldn't find anyone to do it.
And so we dived into
this whole enterprise.
- I was sure that your wife
has had considerable influence
on the development of your own work.
Who would you say is the most
important thing you've learned
from this very special collaboration?
- I'd dare say that I
would certainly call Jane
one of the better architects I've run into
in the field of architects,
of course she's had a
tremendous amount of background
and in the field of just general values.
We call it social values or other,
all those things have been of great help.
- Let's go back to the discussion
of Baltimore and Harbor Place,
a large complex that
opened in the early 1980s.
In fact, sometimes I think of Harbor Place
of a sort of combination Design
Research and Faneuil Hall.
- Well, when General Ross came up
to talk about doing Harbor Place,
he said, can you do...
A kind of Design Research in Baltimore?
What he liked was this kind
of effervescent glittering,
glowing,
glistening thing.
I would call Harbor Place a destination.
In other words, I'd say
it's not tied intergyral
with the city in the same
way that Faneuil Hall
or eventually the New
York Seaport would be.
Harbor Place is a place you go to,
it's not exactly the place in the mountain
or up in the hill or an island,
but it's kind of an island
in that sense, it's all self-contained.
- What was your key idea there?
- Well, the key idea was not
the center of Faneuil Hall,
it was food.
- Why such a heavy emphasis on food,
was that based on your
previous experience?
- The Faneuil Hall,
the emphasis was probably the heap
of the key idea of the
whole place was food.
Aside from the 15 or 20 restaurants,
a tremendous amount of shops
selling food-related products,
from tea and spice and pots and pans
and china glass and so on and so on.
So we had the plain that
we have some critical mass.
And the critical mass really was food,
so we said we put this
whole food thing together,
we have roughly 100
thousand square feet of food
and that's a small department store.
- What do you have in
mind for us in New York
that is different from
Boston or Baltimore?
- Well, it's gonna be a
lot more comprehensive
in New York because,
although it's not larger
in terms of square footage,
in fact it's a little smaller than Boston,
the variety is really kind of stupendous
because not only is there
a market, or a new market,
with restaurants and all that,
but many of the old
buildings will have shops
of different kinds and
streets closed for walking.
We'll have a place for the ships,
the peer which extends
out into the east river
about 450 feet.
And then various kinds
of shopping experiences.
I think that it's much more
diversified than Boston
and much richer than Baltimore.
And while that is richer
in kind of a mix of different activities
because New York is so,
so much that way.
- Why don't you take a moment
and run through your plans
for the renovation of
the South Street Seaport.
- The building is a market building,
they call Fulton Fish Market.
On the street floor,
which opens onto front
street, onto Fulton street,
big garage doors, vendors
selling vegetables,
meat, fish, and right
on the street itself.
- How do you manage to
keep both quality control
and some standards of order and tidiness
just playing garbage disposal and traffic?
It that very clearly
built into the design?
- Their management or
maintenance has been very very
fastidious, the security is...
Internal police.
I mean you're not being taken care of
by the Boston and
Baltimore New York police.
They're on the project,
but the actual security is
controlled by the developer.
We have a fair amount of identity
in these projects,
but the number of people making decisions
are just literally hundreds.
(mumbling)
There's some lonely little guy over there,
there's a maintenance department,
there's an operational department,
there's a leasing department,
there's an advertising department,
there's a...
Construction department.
- How do you update features,
for example the old seaport,
to accommodate today's visitors
and still satisfy the
needs of preservationist,
zoning laws, concerned citizens,
the original habitats of the neighborhood?
What are you planning to do there
at South Street in terms of those issues?
- First, I think going through
a group of street details
will be (mumbling)
And then we went through
them with the city,
then we went through
them with the developer--
- Which is the most rigorous test?
- It's possible the developer.
Because with the developer there is money
and that gets to be a real discipline.
If you deal with the
materials and the problems
without any sense of reality of the cost,
you can literally say yes to anything
and that's when you know
that you can't be
responsible for (mumbling).
So, what success we had at Faneuil Hall,
I think was with the materials,
the brick and the stone,
and then some benches and some trees.
- How many of those elements
will we be getting in New York?
- Well you're probably
getting all of then.
Let me just try Disneyland for a minute,
Disneyland is artificial.
And I'm sure that we all know that.
Not only does the scale
of the buildings change
from the first to the second floor,
but also every front is a scab front.
And there's nothing sold there,
there's no dirt because
everything is cleaned up.
And if a horse goes by
and performs his duties right,
a little man rushes out and cleans it
because they're afraid
they're gonna upset the children I guess.
But, although we do make a great effort
to keep these places very clean,
we trying to make them a part of the city.
In Boston you can sit on the windows,
you can sit on the edge of the stage,
you can sit on all sorts of odd places.
It isn't completely thought out,
it isn't an automatic design,
but if you set every scene,
then it begins to feel artificial
and that's my thought on
the Disneyland situation.
- You said that we were probably going
to get all the elements
at the Faneuil Hall,
and in that restoration vine,
you included trees.
I was not familiar with the idea
that their were often trees at seaports.
- Well I'm not a historical authenticists.
(both laughing)
- But you know what you like?
- I like trees.
Trees are wonderful for people
to sit under and they provide
all sorts of places for birds,
and, fresh air, and all
sorts of great things.
So...
I'm not a tree freak,
but I like trees.
New variety.
- The practice of your firm is so diverse
that it ranges from individual structures
to complex renovations and rehabilitations
of old buildings to be large-scale hotels
and commercial area developments,
such as some that we've been talking about
and even includes
comprehensive building plans.
What ties all these
interesting projects together?
Is there a common thread?
- There is a consistency in design ideas.
And you don't start every one at scratch.
And the buildings,
we work with vocabular materials
and a way of putting them together
and beginning to start every building
is where you're going to invent the wheel.
I mean some people try to,
but at least I don't.
- I wonder if you have
any long-range plans
or a secret project or future dream
that you especially care to do
that you have not done yet.
- Well, I haven't been
worrying about it too much.
I'd love to do a major park
or have to do something like Central Park.
I'm not anxious to do a new city
because I think that it's been proven
that it's too hard to do.
But some very good
people have taken a shot
at a couple of these
and you see them from Sweden to England
to Scotland
and they really are not very satisfactory.
I'm much more happy working
in the existing cityscape.
And tall buildings, for
some reason nobody's come
around and said,
Ben, will you design a tall building?
Maybe that's poetic justice.
I'm gonna stay on the prairie
and not go up.
- What are you building in Ottawa?
- I'm building a concert up there,
it's part of the
architecture of the capital.
So, you know, you don't want
to upfront all those buildings.
We're going to build in
nature of that architecture.
- Did you ever expect your
life to unfold the way it has?
- Well, I just had my team of people
and you have to, as we know,
be awake and seize your opportunities.
If you don't do that,
everything passes you by
and some other guy walks
in and he grabs it.
And then you're standing there
and saying, oh, I didn't
know that was going on.
- If you had to do it over again,
what would you do otherwise?
- I'd like to be Darwin.
I don't know.
I'm sure I would've been left with Darwin.
- Darwin, why Darwin?
- I feel that he's got a wonderful book
that's written about the tip of the
(mumbling)
- [Barbaralee] Only in New York.
- The trip he took seemed so wonderful
and he went around South America
and he went to all the
islands and looked at all
these wonderful animals
and birds and turtles and stuff.
And what really impressed me was
Darwin and observation.
He brought back all this,
you know, this broad collection
of shells and fossils and skeletons
and skins and stuff.
Then he sat down and he looked at it
for a couple a years.
And that falls into my philosophy
of saying for god sakes,
get to understand, feel the problem
before you start designing.
And just the way the did it
seemed like such a nice way to do it.
- For the evolution and the revolution
that you've been such
an important part of,
our special thanks to
you Benjamin Thompson.
(clapping)
(upbeat music)
