Architectural sculpture, sculptural architecture: an interview with Sam Jacob

Abstract

Sam Jacob is an architect, writer and editor. He is currently principal of Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design and is also Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture and Director of Night School at the Architectural Association. Sam Jacob Studio exhibited at the Venice Architectural Biennale 2016 as part of the Victoria and Albert Museum's World of Fragile Parts. The Studio is also working on a strategy for VA how is the term sculptural used or abused by architects. This has created a series of projects that have exploded traditional definitions of what formal architecture is composed of, to such an extent that the young, new generation find it challenging - there's no point in competing! This architecture presents itself as having its own kind of form-language. The relationships between a architecture and sculpture seem to constitute a delayed reaction to form-making.AL/KF: Do you think there's a deliberate, conscious anachronism in that delayed response?SJ: I don't know if it's deliberate. In some senses there are certain references which are, or which were, definitely already anachronistic. You could think of the relationship to Constructivism and its influence on a certain set of architects. Sometimes it's just age. Gehry is really old - he's still doing what he was doing when he and Rauschenberg were kids!AL/KF: Do you think that means that in Gehry's newer projects he's in a nostalgic mode? You could say something like that about Robert M. Stern and what he's doing, capitalizing on the nostalgia that Yale itself contains in its modern Gothic in his own designs for two more twenty-first-century, contemporary Gothic colleges, which contain an enormous amount of sculpture by Patrick Pinnell.SJ: Absolutely. Definitely. Sometimes it's nostalgic, and sometimes deliberate; sometimes it's just a coincidence.AL/KF: A little while ago you said something about Tracy Emin's Bed as being a bit architectural. Can you say a bit more about that?SJ: Yes, it's a kind of found architecture, claiming space, frozen time, taken out of its original context, as a record of the ephemeral architecture of the domestic.AL/KF: This morning I was thinking about domesticity, and about Alain de Botton's project for philosophical architecture and the Living Architecture series of houses. …