Conversation with Tom Weaver, Editor.

Tom kindly agreed to complete some lists for me:

List One:

Most Admired Architectural Historians (in no order)

Banham, Summerson, Evans, Vidler, Rowe, even Sorkin (cheekiest critic).

List Two:

Top Journals

1. AA Files, and then in brackets, ‘by a million miles’.

2. Arch+, nice mix of the contemporary and historical and never following the herd.

3. Criticat, low-tech, polemical French journal, produced by the great Françoise Fromonot. The buildings are shot guerrilla-style, photographers jumping over fences, blurry shots … they show architecture the way you actually see a building.

List Three:

The criteria for work accepted in AA Files:

1. Absolutely no projects. The writing is always a comment on something else – the ‘exact opposite of a project’.

2. Lots of good stories.

3. Avoid usual suspects.

4. Essays not papers, and try and get rid of footnotes (except for Georges Teyssot’s texts – where the best stuff is the footnotes).

5. Encourage younger writers, who write specifically for the journal, rather than older, established writers who send in lectures they have presented a million times before.

List Four:

Top Teachers (in no particular order):

Adrian Forty

Georges Teyssot

Peter Eisenman

List Five:

Favourite Architectural Encounters:

1. A conversation with Swiss art and architectural historians Karin Gimmi and Martino Stierli, discussing Max Bill and Max Frisch while swimming across Lake Zurich.

2. Leon Krier in Poundbury for AA Files – architecture’s pantomime villain; scary but engaging.

3. Berthold Lubetkin – at the Bartlett School in June 1990, just a few months before he died.

And a statement:

There is no architecture in the US only buildings – ‘Jesus, I’m sounding like Pevsner here’ – this is why US architecture schools are built around architectural theory, because that is all that architecture is in the US. In Europe and the UK it is the opposite. Everything is architecture; this is why all schools here are dominated by practice, and architectural history becomes this little bit of inconsequential salad dressing on the side.

Architecture as a Thermodynamic System

The drawing above is a diagram of a heat exchanger, with the functions of the Archive overlaid.

Architecture can be described as a thermodynamic system, a system which channels or transfers energy flows, and a system that is time-based, a ‘continuous process’.

Architecture can be viewed as an event that occurs in the space of energy transfers. Energy is required to extract and prepare raw material for use in construction. Energy is required to construct the building, and energy is required by building users to control the building conditions, and to maintain the building from disrepair and disintegration.

Luis Fernandez-Galiano in Fire and Memory (2000) seeks to place architecture in the ‘field of processes and time’. After making the distinction between matter and energy at the scale of habitable architecture, he describes architecture as ‘a material organization that regulates and brings order to energy flows; and, simultaneously and inseparably, as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forms’ (p 6).

In the Archive, forms are constructed and maintained through the thermodynamic system – the forms are a function of the energy flow and heat transfer through the system. It is an open system, exposed to seasonal changes in climate – the heat from the sun, wind direction, conditions that affect the conformation of the archive.

The Archive occurs in the ‘space’ of phase change, part of this thermodynamic system. Phase change is a function of time, and temperature. Phase change creates form and dissolves form. Phase change is temporal, an event, a spectacle.