inSTUDIO
Frederick Fisher

The office of Frederick Fisher—of Frederick Fisher and Partners—is peaceful, tranquil, calming. Interior rooms open onto one of several courtyards. Offices and conference rooms are of unusual, angled shapes and flanked by large windows. A path of hallways connecting the smaller rooms opens onto a long, double-height work area. Models of past projects are displayed prominently on walls, shelves, desks—on many surfaces and at many levels of vision—touches that speak to Fisher’s love of modeling. Although the office is not Fisher’s design (it was once the self-designed office of mid-century modernist A. Quincy Jones), it fits with Fisher’s philosophy of building-as-frame: his aim in creating buildings is not to design a structure that is the center of attention, but one that assists in maximizing the space’s intended use.This philosophy works harmoniously the types of projects he specializes in: Fisher works primarily in residential and institutional architecture, designing artist studios, academic buildings at colleges like Princeton and Caltech and museum and gallery spaces for MoMA’s P.S. 1 and the Eli Broad Foundation.

-Kana Hammon

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Frederick Fisher and my father was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio, which is what brought me into this field. At first, he got me interested in architecture as a child. That, in combination with taking classes at the ClevelandInstitute of Art and getting interested in art, eventually came together after studying both art and architecture and art history in college and getting into the professional program in UCLA. After graduating from UCLA, I was fortunate enough to work for Frank Gehry. This was in the early 80’s, when he was just beginning to develop the work that we know him for today. The way Frank drew on the work of visual artists and really surrounded himself with artists at the time was very inspirational to me because it brought together those two strains of interest of mine, which was art and architecture. I started my own practice shortly after that. My first jobs were working with artists, doing studios and art galleries and that has always been a focus of my practice and an area of greatest interest to me. Slowly but surely, the institutional projects—the Eli Broad foundation, P.S. 1 came to us—but we’ve always maintained a residential practice. We like doing houses. It’s a very different kind of practice than working with institutions. Needless to say, it’s very personal, with the pluses and minuses. One can sometimes pursue work that is more speculative and ideological working with an individual client than one can with an institution. At the same time, institutional work offers a scale and complexity.

What encouraged you to leave Gehry’s office?

After a couple of years there, I felt that I had to make a decision about whether to stay with him for a long period of time and really become immersed in his work and his thinking, or try to see what I could do on my own. So it was a matter of really deciding to try to find my own voice.

How would you characterize your work right now?

Itry not to categorize my work too much because I think I have evolved over time. There are some strains in my work, some of which related to my background in art. My work is informal. It’s collage-like, it’s not predicated on preconceived formal relationships. It is more situational. I consider myself a modernist, and yet, I’m not uninterested in history and references to the past. My background in art history has always served me in terms of being interested in the context of buildings and the social, artistic history of the environment in which one practices. Robert Venturi’s book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was extremely influential to me. That made me think that I could, as Venturi did, bring everything that I was interested in together—art, history and architecture—in the practice of architecture, whereas before, I thought it was kind of an either or : either art or architecture.

Some of your watercolors were at Edward Cella Gallery, near A+D. How does your art influence your architecture work? What is the process from handwork to building?

The title of the exhibit was Thinking by Hand. To me, that was a natural title because that’s the way that I start to think about work. It’s not necessarily ideological and formal, but it’s about the exploration of issues through drawing. I don’t always paint, but it’s one way that I think about things and look at things. Partly, it’s a conscious strategy to slow down. It takes time to do a drawing or water color. It’s also about letting go of control. In architecture, it’s very much about control of many issues. It’s refreshing to deal with something very direct, where you have to let this lack of control participate in the media and the execution of something. I’ve always been interested in actually making things with my hands—the drawing, the model making. Today we have the all of the computer software and rendering and visualization capabilities, but we still go back and forth between drawing and physical modeling.

Many designers are very reluctant to connect design to art, especially architecture and art, in particular. What is your take on the relationship between architecture and art?

I think every architect and designer has to choose for themselves what inspires them. Some people are hermetic and try to generate everything from within. There are those people that look out at the world and are always trying to draw from it. I would be more on that side of things. I always am looking for opportunities to bring art into a project, particularly with artist collaborations.  I think that the most successful collaborations are when the result is something that nobody expected, that it’s not a signature piece of the architect or the artist, and it’s something that came out of the chemistry between them.

When you do studios or museums, do you look at it with your art background, as something that facilitates the exhibition of art, or do you see it more as creating a piece?

I think it’s really the former. I look at making art spaces for art and making spaces for artists to work in as framing, where the subject matter is not the architecture. The architecture creates a framework to look at art, to experience art, to make art. I don’t think the architecture has to be seen as the subject matter. I came to think of architecture in general as a framing device for views, for the way people live. Thinking of architecture not as an object, but as a frame, is something that I think I learned early on from artists, and its affected the way that I think about architecture, whether or not it has anything to do with art.

How do you allow your own voice to be heard, so to say, while still creating buildings that serve as a frame rather than the main focal point?

I still think there is plenty of room for personal expression and identity… I think there is an aesthetic of framing and of silence as opposed to an aesthetic of drama and making architecture the subject matter. The artists that I came into maturity with in Los Angeles—the space and light artists—they were, in a way, making very profound statements out of nothing. I think that there can be as much of a notion of identity and expression in that process of creating framing and experience that there is about making a sculpture or a subject-oriented architecture.

Is teaching part of your humanistic identity as an architect?

I do think that one needs to think about the practice as a whole rather than just the jobs that I’m going to get myself. It’s a very competitive field, and everybody is struggling for work, probably more so than in the past. People tend to really go into their own corner and put all their energy into keeping their practices going. At the same time, I think it’s important to step outside of that. The profession as a whole needs a sort of collaboration and mutual support and supporting the next generation. I think that a lot of the people that are supporting the A+D Museum are doing it because you do have to give back and support the profession and support the community, not just going in your own corner and getting everything that you can.