Architecture is Illuminated
Vladimir Belogolovsky
New York has been witnessing the rise of a new star–51 year old architect Thomas Phifer. In the near future a whole sea of electrical stars will shoot up into the sky to light Avenues and Streets of New York City in a new and imaginative way. Phifer’s proposed street lamp design has won the prestigious international City Lights competition that attracted over 200 architectural offices from 35 countries. Phifer’s luminaries are immediately appealing for their refined forms and elegant designs. They are also practical, featuring much brighter, more compact and longer lasting LED lamps.
Before the South Caroliina-born Phifer established his New York City practice in 1996, he worked at Gwathmey Siegel Architects for seven years and was the leading designer at the office of Richard Meier for a decade, where he was responsible for the delivery of 27 projects. Among many projects realized by Phifer’s office are private residences, galleries, museums and administration buildings, for which Phifer has won numerous awards. In 2004 he was given the Medal of Honor, the highest award given to an individual or firm, from the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
It would be unnatural to expect Phifer’s projects to contrast greatly with the white modernist architecture of Richard Meier. Thorough knowledge of his mentor’s aesthetics, has led Phifer to define his own vision in architecture. His projects are distinguished by poetic details and refined taste. They possess a rare ability to decelerate time by hypnotizing everything, everyone around them. His architectural compositions are rarely symmetrical, but are always perfectly balanced.
I visited the architect’s futuristic-looking office in SoHo soon after he won the City Lights competition.
Vladimir Belogolovsky: Your works are open, transparent, filled with light, and rational–how does this impact the individual’s experience within the structure?
Thomas Phifer: I think the important thing is to begin to connect man with nature again, to make buildings that are diaphanous, more open, porous and accessible. To make buildings that, really begin to breathe again. I think that for so long 20th century buildings were closed and hermetically sealed. There was no sense of light, no sense of a thunderstorm and a cloud moving overhead. We want to make buildings that respond to the environment, help its inhabitants to communicate with the environment and that will ultimately tie a building to its place, rather than just land on its side. We want our buildings to harmonize with each site and with the people. A building and a landscape should be inseparable. This is a humanistic approach that we try to pursue.
VB: Your projects celebrate art, craft, light, landscape, passage of the sun, ecological technology, space, what else?
TP: I think they celebrate the passage of time. They celebrate the movement of the sun the way the traditional Japanese temples do. The change of season is very important. Also I think it is important to understand how buildings are made, how buildings are held up, how they are naturally ventilated. We try to express all of these ideas in the character of our architecture. We want our buildings to be a living and breathing organisms, not stationary objects.
VB: If the goal is to create a living, breathing building, where do you begin?
TP: Three things are important. First, is to understand the people who are going to use the building. What is their soul about? What is their day to day life about? Second, is to understand the site. How is the building related to its place, not only to the ground around it, but to the sun, the wind, the climate. Where is it located? Is it located in the landscape or in the city? And third, is to understand the ecology. Dealing with the rainwater, solar shading, energy saving. We start the design process as collaboration. We sit down at a table before a single line gets drawn. We have all possible consultants from the very beginning: structural, mechanical, lighting, environmental and so on. We start all together. It is not about a building that has an image and steel columns are here and mechanical ducts are there. We want to have one building where everything is integrated and thought out.
VB: Contemporary architecture is characterized by free biomorphic forms developed through the use of the latest computer technology. You on the other hand are consistently working in the direction of the modernist tradition. What is it about modernism that makes you refer to it as a major source of inspiration?
TP: I certainly believe in modernism because I think it is a pure and minimalist expression of our time. In the past when everything was hand-made and buildings were made of solid stone, it was a real craft to cut block by block and build and so on. That was the technology of that day. Today we define our technology through lightness. We try to take that idea of lightness and things that are very ethereal, things that can be made very thin, because of the new technology. For example steel can be very thin now, because it can be calculated precisely. I think that we are at a moment, as always in history, where architecture is an expression of the time that we live in. I think it is important to embrace it. That is what modernism is traditionally been. Modernist architecture always expressed its time.
VB: Who influenced your architecture the most?
TP: I think it is hard to do anything without Mies van der Rohe. Also Louis Kahn is very important to me. The more you practice, the more you understand his buildings and the older you get, the more you appreciate his architecture. It is absolutely timeless, honest, monumental and yet heroic and humanistic. It is very powerful and it really bridges all historical references. This is probably why no one really tried to copy him the way architects copy Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius or Richard Meier. You don’t see buildings that look like Louis Kahn buildings because they are so original. He never really adopted a style. There is no style there. I never heard people refer to his buildings as Louis Kahn style. Also there are a number of architects practicing today that are influential. For me it is Peter Zumthor and Renzo Piano who are making buildings about our time and about our craft. It is a wonderful and exciting time to live in.
VB: What about Richard Meier?
TP: Richard Meier was extraordinary to me, particularly in the early houses that he did. There is such an extraordinary clarity there that certainly relates to Kahn buildings in a sense that there are serving and served spaces, expression of public and private spaces. A lot of the work that we do here at the office doesn’t look like that, but a lot of those principles are very important. What I like about our time is that there are so many sources that are readily available. You can look at what other architects are working on and you can borrow ideas. We live in a time of sharing information and ever-changing technology.
VB: You hardly use colors, why?
TP: We think that glass takes on an extraordinary reflection of what is going on around it. In some moments it is completely clear, then slightly reflective and in other moments it is completely reflective. We are expending into the use of subtle shades of grey and silver, but we haven’t done a red or a pink building or anything like that. We are exploring glass surfaces that change color because of the light. What buildings have is the environment around them. So we want them to reflect the changes in the environment and to take its color. For example, the Rachofsky House in Texas, which is a very large house with a private art gallery, has a double skin–two layers of glass. The first layer of glass reflects the nature. It begins to blur the distinction between the landscape and the interior. The second layer of glass has a special mirror behind it so the color of the landscape when the sun shines on the leaf, suddenly gets reflected in the glass, but in a very subtle way. Then there is a courtyard with plants, which again blurs the landscape and the interior.
VB: You have designed beautiful houses for your clients. Do you have your own house?
TP: I have a beautiful Greek revival weekend house about two hours drive north from New York City, near the Hudson River. It was built very thoughtfully in 1839. But I live with my family in a fairly small apartment in New York. Some day, maybe in five or six years I want to build my own house, completely new.
VB:What is your dream project?
TP: My dream project is the next project. I love to start things. I love the beginnings, the idea to begin something new. And it doesn’t matter if it is a new table or a building. There is always a question: How do you start?