The Brooklyn Rail

I met with the London architect Tony Fretton to discuss how reality could be incorporated into architecture. It’s not as strange a question as it sounds. While architecture is always real and always made from reality, architects tend to try to rewrite rules of aesthetics, organization, and space in abstract ways. Tony Fretton radically broke away from this slow gravity into worlds of theory and away from reality that dominates discourse. He is a progenitor of a generation of architects who use the language of building and of cities to design their work. With projects like Lisson Gallery in London, Tony Fretton has established a new connection between the gallery and the street.

In doing so, Tony Fretton champions an architecture that distorts the status quo rather than building new rules. By carefully considering artists of the seventies and eighties, such as Dan Graham, Robert Morris, or Chris Burden, his work is known to crack open everyday London built environment and reveal to us a powerful definition of architecture.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): I have a big introduction question, which is about doubt and faith in architecture. What sustains your faith in architecture being a cultural actor?

Tony Fretton: Those are two questions.

One is how you manage uncertainty in yourself as a designer. The other is whether thoughtful and original architecture can survive. From what I see, it seems difficult now in the United States to be as original as Frank Gehry was in his early career, and as it was in London in the early nineties when I was designing the two buildings for the Lisson Gallery. At that time in London and New York, there was a burgeoning economy—lots of available property and new and credible artists. It was possible, as I did, to live in the center of the city, and if you were an artist, to find low cost studio space and support yourself by working in a bar. Artists like Dan Graham had space to think and live by selling their work.

Since then, property, art, and architecture have been monetized by thirty years of neoliberalism embraced by the left and right. Even more damaging is the effect on education, which in my experience as a teacher has moved from freethinking and discovery to utilitarianism.

But to counter my pessimism, let me ask your view as a younger architect.

Rail: Well, I think architecture’s contribution to culture is extremely high right now, even though the costs associated and the economic pressures are also high. I think in some ways, it has become a functional demand for many projects to be cultural actors. For instance, architects are much more involved in fashion and scenography than I think they were thirty years ago. It’s becoming the sort of status quo, or a sort of functional requirement—being a cultural actor is like being waterproof.

Fretton: Good to hear, but I have some reservations. Each month, Gagosian sends me a very opulent magazine, in which the first ten pages have adverts for luxury clothing, followed by articles about the relationship of art and fashion. It is well written, by capable commentators, but it makes me wonder, really, what art is about.

I had a discussion with a younger curator for a significant London gallery whose job was to find younger artists. While older artists understood that the entry of art into the world meant that their exhibition would never fully sell, younger artists were completely attuned to the market and took issue with their gallery if their exhibition did not sell out.

Rail: Chris Burden comes up frequently in your writings, especially his early work. Reality becomes the material of his art and for you, the materials of reality can certainly become the material of your architecture, too, right? I think what’s notable about your work is that you made architecture in the same way that some artists drew new forms of art from reality.

Fretton: I think I was probably alone, certainly in the Anglosphere, in doing that and showing that ideas from art could turn into architecture without them being, as Clement Greenberg would say, “arty.” I think it’s about properly transmitting ideas that will work from art, and other sources, into architecture.

Rail: But to your earlier point about the economics of buildings: I’ve been working on a project with the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, and it made me realize a very obvious fact, which was that the reason that architecture was the material of his practice was because buildings were extremely cheap. There were neighborhoods in New York that became these superfluous objects with real estate that could become art. Today, we’re reaching another point where artists are working more with money, more in liquid and fluid states of practice. Even the emphasis on painting again today seems so tied to the economic model of selling work.

Fretton: I think artists should be looking at architects for inspiration! Somewhere in SoHo, somebody must be living in a converted Gordon Matta-Clark sculpture.

Rail: I literally had someone come in yesterday and show me a restaurant that they’re asking me to renovate that used to be a Robert Irwin installation in Venice, LA. He took the facade off this building and painted the entire room white with a skylight. Now it’s just a storefront again. That must be true in London to some degree, no?

Fretton: I don’t think so, that is one pattern that did not transfer from America, even though a lot of the artists that I liked, like Dan Graham, were American. There seemed to have been a broader spirit there for which there wasn’t an audience in the UK.

Rail: Where did you first encounter art like that?

Fretton: Through the Lisson Gallery, where I was asked to plan a new building for Nicholas Logsdail—it was through Lisson’s work. Before that, I was looking at people like Robert Morris, whose works came from events and material.

Rail: You designed the first Lisson Gallery project in London in 1986. Were there shows after your first Lisson Gallery project that connected with what you were making?

Fretton: I had formed the sensibility for the design of Lisson 1 and Lisson 2 and that is documented in a publication called III by Drawing Matter, the institution that holds all of the sketchbooks for Lisson 1. But there was an astonishing Dan Graham show that opened the second Lisson Gallery.

Rail: Were you in communication with him, or did he naturally understand the spaces, the relationship with the school next door, and the context?

Fretton: I had productive discussions with the UK Lisson artists when designing Lisson 2, but was only in communication with Dan to talk about an unrealised proposal by Nicholas Logsdail for a pavilion in the new building. Later, I understood Dan’s particular talent when writing a review of his 1997 exhibition in the Camden Art Centre. The works there looked almost as if they were made for the spaces in which they were located, but then I saw from the catalogue that the exact same works looked at home in other spaces and cities. He has an exceptional ability to make works that relate to their surroundings, whatever they might be. That was a powerful lesson for me that I translated into making buildings like Red House, which have their own distinct presence while being widely open to interpretation.

Rail: I really appreciate that separation. The role of an architect is to create something, if not stable, then more time-oriented. It serves as a continuous space of reflection and continuity, but that’s where I wonder how you translate a practice like Dan Graham’s into architecture. It answers itself.

Fretton: I was never influenced formally by artists, I just responded inductively to their ideas and attitudes that might work in architecture—and not just from visual arts. I can get courage from Miles Davis and John Coltrane. I think it was the photographer Lee Friedlander who said when he heard Charlie Parker play, he knew everything was possible.

Lisson 1 was an outcome of a period in the early 1980s when I felt that I didn’t like architecture anymore. I had experienced the stultifying effect of postmodernism in the commercial practices where I worked, and I was looking at art or listening to music, or, most affectingly, looking at performance art, which was very freely exploring ideas and emotive content that I couldn’t find within architecture. Setting aside the idea of leaving architecture to study art, I thought there must be a way that I could make architecture do the things that arts accomplish, while it remains usable. I became involved with a group of performance artists for a short while, and found that they were using very similar material to that which architecture was using: location, objects of use, human interactions… and articulating their associations and values in ways that could be introduced into architectural design.

Soon after that I was introduced to the director of Lisson Gallery who asked me to look at a building in a new location, which became Lisson 1. It took a while to find the sensibility and method to design the new building, as the sketches held by Drawing Matter show. I found ways to use the language of construction and buildings to voice their social and political content and make architecture that provided quiet but invigorating settings for art without straying into being art itself.

Rail: But I wonder what you think the medium of architecture is?

Fretton: I think that by working quietly, kindly, and critically with people’s basic perceptions, architecture has great power to do good. People say that I make spaces that they like in ways that are not easily recognised, but are felt.

Before I designed Red House, I had spent a lot of time making architecture from non-architecture—windows that could be from an auto-show, elements that had acquired meaning through other purposes.

Rail: Tell me about Red House, the house in London named for its red stone facade and interiors with dramatically classical proportions, in particular a living room scaled six meters high, thirteen meters long, and nine meters wide. Almost a museum space hidden in a house.

Fretton: Yes, eighteen feet, forty feet, and twenty-seven feet! In designing Red House, I used what I’d been thinking of for even longer than the Lisson process—my appreciation of the Italian Renaissance and classical building—and I used it to make architecture that had relevance to the present time. I see Red House as a building from modernism, the whole of modernism. In Ulysses, James Joyce combined vernacular speech as a vehicle for a revolutionary sensibility. Pablo Picasso repainted Diego Velázquez, Igor Stravinsky used Russian motifs in The Rite of Spring in combination with the tonality of French music. All freely used motifs from the past in combination with those of their present time.

Red House has presence and solidity, but it’s also very open to interpretation by other people. I used incidents such as the curve of the street and the district’s eclectic nature, which comes from being made without an urban design by architects servicing the art community of the times. I took courage from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in welcoming and working with chance.

Rail: This James Joyce example is so profound, because it’s clear that there are everyday qualities to your work, but there’s also an organizational structure that often falls into this neoclassical method. This is in the wake of someone like Louis I. Kahn who is putting forth the room as a priority again and against the kind of openness of modern planning. He says, “a plan is a society of rooms.” But even in one of your descriptions of Red House, you say something like, “the structure is subservient to the space.” This grand room is actually not organized in the neoclassical way, where the structure would be related to the rooms. But I’m curious about neoclassicism and the Italian Renaissance. What felt very relevant to those during that moment?

Fretton: Renaissance architecture, and particularly Andrea Palladio, was experiential for me. When speaking of work that is exceptional, the way to speak of it is experientially—as architecture, not as art or literature.

Rail: The creative imagination needs to be unlocked, not told what to do.

Fretton: I have problems with theory as it has developed over the last decades. Not the underpinning of practice with thought, which was the traditional role of theory, but the overwhelming of practice and experience by concepts. I think that it has commodified both writing about architecture and architecture itself in line with neoliberalism.

Rail: I appreciate that; being an author is partially feeling like you don’t know anything. Part of theory is trying to know more about an analytical process or the history of knowledge, but that’s not really what the imagination is about. I think a lot of architects my age look at your practice and see that same form of freedom. Even the ability to say, “I like Palladio, that was great, and maybe something I can try to incorporate.” That kind of simple trust in oneself, the faith in your own imagination. I think staying true to that is really a good lesson. If you’re sensitive.

Fretton: Architecture is architecture and not art. Adolf Loos said that the difference between art and architecture is that artists can please themselves (which I think is not true anymore) and architects have to please other people. I think architecture is more difficult because to do good work, architects have to both please other people and please themselves.

I made this star-shaped courtyard in the house for Anish Kapoor. In his view, the house should be a free standing aesthetic object. I explained that art objects are shown in controlled conditions, viewed for a limited amount of time and not physically used, while a piece of architecture has to have the capacity to sometimes be a freestanding aesthetic object and, at other times, just a background to life.

Rail: In these examples, you’re saying that architecture, when it’s sublimated as a structure or as an organizational, acoustic, visual system—not as an aesthetic one—can structure associations and relationships. It seems that you’re driving towards the use of a generic type of architecture, let’s call it fabric, or readymade architecture. By using the everyday, architecture has an ability to defamiliarize settings or reframe the context through which it is experienced. What can you bring to people by restructuring their vision or experience of something?

Fretton: If you just provided a framework—like Cedric Price, arguing that anyone can form their own point of view—it is only half the work of a piece of architecture. The other half is to provide the signals that make the place habitable and pleasing, signals that come from the associative qualities of convention, materiality, color, light, ambience, and relations to the surroundings.

Looking at Palladio, you wonder why Villa Rotunda has four porticos. They provide a striking architectural statement, but also frame the different and pleasurable qualities of the surrounding countryside in the four directions.

Rail: Detlef Mertins wrote on Mies van der Rohe quite a bit, and he describes the history of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The city of Berlin wanted a Mies building, because they didn’t have one and he was getting older, and they said, “Here’s a bunch of sites, select one and make whatever you want to.”

He selected the site in a very unformed area, an incomplete territory in the city, and Detlef makes this kind of leap to say: “Mies’s building served as a viewing apparatus that brought the site into focus as a place of violence and tragedy.… Instead of attempting to restore the city’s past, it offered a finite place within the formless zone of destruction.” Mies tried to show how architecture could give form to its context, especially when it is formless.

Fretton: It is the role of writers to propose things like that.

Rail: It’s definitely just writing, ha! But the experience, it’s similar to how you describe Villa Rotunda, maybe in that it helps organize a place by giving a certain perspective, but that selection of the formless zone, I thought, was notable.

Part of what you’re known for are the people who have adopted some of your methods and become big architects on their own. Some worth mentioning are Jonathan Sergison, Stephen Bates, Adam Caruso, Peter St John, Jonathan Woolf—many have talked about these informal reading groups that you were part of as well, an almost father-figure to the scene. But what about your predecessors John Winter and James Gowan—

Fretton: James Gowan was my great and significant teacher and a very, very interesting architect.

Rail: Do you see your work as a kind of continuity of that project? How did you feel at the time about those practices?

Fretton: As a practitioner, you have to escape influence, and as a teacher, to avoid influence except in terms of transmitting technique. I introduce my course at London Metropolitan University by saying that architecture is a craft, and we will show you how to do it by making you aware of the possibilities that exist in the design you produce. In this way, we will show you how to find your own voice as an architect. In this way, there is hope for a new generation of architects that understands and has the confidence to deal with the issues of their times.

Rail: It really reflects your practice at large. The opportunistic nature of being an architect is taking what’s there and making something in it. With a student, too, you meet them where they are.

Fretton: Most teachers don’t do that. At ETH Zurich, a school I respect highly, a high percentage of teachers impress their knowledge on students. You go to their class, and learn their architecture. It is a legitimate way to pass on architectural knowledge.

Rail: There is this set of quite established architects I mentioned who do follow the kind of technique you created. These practices in London have become important globally, and a lot of students are looking at your work and theirs as really exciting. They are known casually as London Architecture.

Fretton: Well, I’m happy they got something from it. Some are great friends. Their interests are very different from mine. I never wanted my method to stay as their method, just that it unlocked something in themselves, and that’s what seems to have happened. My view is that architectural society works best when it consists of different minds and personalities that respect each other.

When we did the writing project, it was simply to get some writing done on architecture by practitioners, because we saw that there wasn’t enough. The project has always been about the health of architecture. It’s very interesting to hear you say that from where you are. I didn’t imagine that I had any significant reputation there.

Jonathan Woolf, who was, I think, probably the best amongst that generation, died of melanoma, which was awful. I taught him how to use FaceTime, and we had great conversations while he was dying, like “What did you do today?” “I got up and I went back to bed.” He was very special.

Rail: I’m really, really interested in Woolf. I’m glad to hear you say that about him.

Fretton: He had the talent that I’m describing, which is in the form, it’s in the building itself, and the intelligence is there, which is what it was like in early Álvaro Siza.

Rail: I wanted to touch on the role of the media. I’m also interested in how you have bridged the gap through photography and drawings and books and writing. I’m interested also in how you publish your own work, and also how you write about other people’s work, which not everyone does. I appreciate that you have this open quality; I read this review you did of Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern building. Do you view that as your primary discourse for how you communicate your work?

Fretton: If you have any aspirations as an architect, you have to be in a public forum, which means you have to be in certain magazines, you have to teach at elite academies like ETH. That’s part of the business of being an architect and getting recognition. When you emerge, you hope there’s a discerning publishing regime. It gives you status amongst your other architects. It can, with something like OMA, give you status with clients.

Rail: But how do you think you’re contributing to the discourse through writing?

Fretton: It is writing for other architects and interested creatives.

Rail: I think where I get a little caught up in architecture is that so much great art depends on an ability to take risks, right? So how do you think an architecture project, or an architect, can fail?

Fretton: Give me an example.

Rail: Maybe Andy Warhol—he starts by manufacturing painting, the repetitive screenprint against the norm of the aura of painting by hand.

Fretton: Architecture is not a place for that kind of risk, you know. If you want to do that, you shouldn’t do architecture.

Rail: That’s what I’m getting at. Obviously, architecture depends on new ideas, and those push architecture into new territory. It’s useful to me to think about how risk and creative risks take place in architecture, which has these high levels of functional demand.

Fretton: The risk is not made evident. But that’s honorable. I mean, all very good architects have expanded the vocabulary of architecture. Siza, who has a very original mind, said that architects don’t invent anything. But the way he communicates profound ideas in simple forms is astounding. Lina Bo Bardi, too, communicated passionate social ambitions in very direct forms.

Rail: I wanted to zoom in to the moment we’re in and focus on the current situation. A lot of young students are contending with new pressures on architecture, this focus on carbon, on energy use, on whether we even need new buildings. There is also this intense focus on legislation and the viability of the status quo, the construction and building industry. It’s just very intense right now to make things. How do you feel about this whole climate of architecture?

Fretton: There are very serious issues to contend with in education and practice. The construction industry is resistant to the changes that are essential to address climate change, and I think serious competency might be lacking at governmental levels. It is right that schools of architecture propose low carbon construction, and above all, find architecture and social justice within it.

Adaptive reuse is increasingly becoming part of the syllabus in schools of architecture. The best architects in the UK, like Henley Halebrown, are creating great new architecture, with proper social and intellectual content from existing buildings, but this type of project can easily become lazy, crude conservation.

Rail: What is your relationship with your peers: Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry? There’s people who you seem to have a respect for, but really a different point of view—maybe an oppositional point of view—from.

Fretton: Rem is my generation and is very fascinating in his writing and buildings, but it has a kind of anti-humanism that I find difficult. But he is a very astute critic and he’s not confined to his own tastes.

Gehry is older. I remember seeing his work in Los Angeles in the 1980s, not liking it, and then liking it very much a few months after I came back. He is supremely skilled as an architect, personality, and businessman, and his work has lessons.

Rail: I find that Gehry’s work, Rem’s work, and your work all share a conviction in reality.

That’s why I think there’s an importance in your practices, dealing with the material of reality, producing objects which operate in the flow of reality good or bad. Reality becomes part of your projects. That’s why I see your work as partially relevant to the future, for dealing with heightened reality, or a more devastating reality.

Fretton: That’s really a very difficult question, that’s something that we all face. There are very, very few answers for that.

Rail: This circles back to my first question. It comes back to this question of doubt and faith. What sustains your faith in architecture? What gives you the faith to say, “No, we need to keep innovating architecture”?

Fretton: The faith that you need is the faith of a hospital doctor on very low pay who has to deal with insults by the public and disdain from politicians. You have to feel that nobility inside yourself to make work with a public interest.

Rail: As an architect, I feel that there’s something deeper about the faith in architecture as being meaningful and relevant to people beyond their understanding. It’s a superstructure of the way things are, and to design that structural part of society has radical implications.

Fretton: We do. Quietly, architects create change. Nobody else is doing that.