inSTUDIO
Neil M. Denari Architects

Flanked by storefronts, Neil Denari's office resides in a discreet, unassuming building off of Washington Boulevard. Photographs of NMDA's various projects line the walls above industrial desks where half-a-dozen architects sit, working on their projects. Numerous awards, books, photo equipment, and models, including the recently completed HL23, lie scattered around the office - evidence of the tremendous creative vision of this small firm. 

In Gyroscopic Horizons, Denari writes “…within the constant flow and movement of technology, politics, and economics, it is necessary to find orientation without the fixity of place.” With this philosophy, Denari absorbs the zeitgeist of contemporary times and articulates it into the 3-Dimensional world of form, creating meticulously fluid, sublime spaces. NMDA's work seems to meld the technological imagery of aeronautic machinery with the poetics of architectural theory, while maintaining the accessibility and impact of pop-culture. It's this thoughtful duality and intelligent integration of the realms of architecture, urbanism, and contemporary life that keeps Neil Denari at the forefront of the architectural field. 

-Emily Kuriyama

You've been an educator for a number of years. Has your involvement in academia informed your work at NMDA or vice versa? 

It does and it doesn't. Of course, it's a big part of the activities of my professional and creative life. I teach pretty much full time and I've been doing it for 25 years now, starting when I was 28. How convenient it is to find enthusiasm and passion in working with students.

More and more, they're interested in working with me on advanced topics that I'm interested in; but, I don't teach as a way to confirm what I already know. I only teach as a way to explore questions that I'm not sure about. I have some instincts. I'm interested certain questions. There are things going on in the office that are related to it; but, definitely what we do here in the office isn't some sort of model or blueprint in terms of the work and subject matter for teaching. 

It's a different world. Students are in a very different situation with you as a teacher than somebody, here, working with me as an architect. It's collaborative here; but, I direct things rather closely. That's how the work turns out to be the way it is. With school, it needs to be very open ended and it needs to be experimental as much as possible. In that sense, school and teaching are no different than an office in the desire to make it an experimental process. There is a different type of, let's say, concept of failure that can happen in school, that can't happen here. You have to meet certain demands with your work, especially with projects that have certain conditions.

To that end, I never use projects, for instance, that I’m working on in the office as a way to identify an expert position on something. I like to be sort of an amateur and an expert all at once. I like to change the relationship between expert and learner, which is the typical kind of vocational way of teaching something: there is a finite idea and then you communicate it by teaching calculus; or, how to take an engine apart and how to put it back together again. Architecture is so much more non-empirical. It's conceptual. It's based on hunches and opinions, as much as it is based on materiality and fact. I think you have to be fairly open to doubt, in a way. In that sense, you have to welcome the kind of amateur-prospector, the miner looking for something, as opposed to the expert. After 25 years, I still feel the same kind of curiosity about all that and no greater sense of being a professional at teaching. It's funny to say that. 

How do you think your view of architecture evolved, from your time as a student to your present practice? 

It has changed a lot because I never really made a big plan. The only sort of sense, and I think it might be the same for most students, is you begin studying architecture and it's what interests you. I was lucky enough to be able to focus on something that, not only was I interested in … but, I would say greater than interested. There was a real obsession with it. It wasn't mild. In that sense, I was condemned early on, as I say, to do this; so, that sort of sets the path.

In terms of benchmarks and dates and times and the kind of goals or something that either your parents or your elders say, "well here are the benchmarks," beyond graduating from [Harvard] GSD, working in an office, and getting a license, I'm not sure there was anything else beyond the abstract and intuitive mission to just keep working; to act and to work. Moving to New York was a kind of a new beginning. Not only of a so-called professional career, it was really an independent life, because I worked on installations, competitions, and exhibitions in a city where there's a lot going on. That gave me an understanding, to a certain extent, that if you just keep working, and if you're really focused on production, at some point, in some ways, there will be moments where you'll be identified for it, whether in competitions or prizes or exhibitions and those sort of things which were happening in New York. Commissions weren't happening.

I had to see it as some way in which I understood a system that was going to unfold in a more professional sense, which had to with age, status, levels, positions, cities, and so forth, politics and all that, which comes to color one's ambitions more than just having ambition itself. In other words, all that phenomena is a huge factor on what happens in your work. 

People don't make a plan and act on it like a script; it's much more unpredictable than that. So, I think for me, and for most people who continue to really devote themselves, everything really changes and evolves and you can hardly predict what will happen. I think the main thing that became clear, when I started teaching at Columbia in New York, getting back to the teaching, was that I could have a kind of independent life and be able to create a world where you could talk, think, and act on the ideas and energy that one has. I think that's what's been more in control.

Apart from that, there's the realm of how the professional work unfolds and exactly what happens in that sense. You know you can't choose your client. That's what they always say, right? So, I couldn't have necessarily predicted the way things happened; but for sure, I chose a path or the path chose me; and, that's the path I was on to do independent work and to drive ideas as much as possible and try to understand the cultural and political system as much as possible to try to create ways in which I could produce built work. 

Expanding on the idea of cultural and political systems, why did you choose to base your firm in Los Angeles?

Actually, I failed to mention that the one thing I wanted to always do was come to Los Angeles to live and work. I've thought that from when I was quite young, being in landlocked Texas. So much popular culture exported from L.A. in the 60's and still today, constructing fictions and ideas about the epicenter nature of L.A. is much, much more connected to the idea of, let's say, media and culture. Los Angeles became an idea, an abstract idea, long before I came here, in a way that it would be the kind of territory for open thinking. Besides the lifestyle things, which I appreciate quite a bit, [I am] able to think and work here in a relatively free way. The media isn't focused on things like architecture here as much as it's focused on, let's say, politics, and entertainment, or Pacific Rim culture. I also found that L.A. was more on a center line between Europe and Asia; and it literally is, because the plane flights to Paris and Tokyo are almost the same time. I like to think about it almost in terms of global or pan-cultural positioning in a geographic sense–to be in the middle of everything. That's my way in which I cultivate a position about L.A.; so, it made perfect sense to premeditate that. That I could control; and that I did. When I came out, I started teaching at SCI-Arc. 

You talked about L.A. being between Europe and Asia, and even though you're based in the U.S. NMDA seems conceptually linked to Toyo Ito and other Japanese architects. Which firms/architects do you see NMDA connected to and why? 

I think these days there is some crossover. You mention Ito in here, and when asked about who are the architects that I really like or that I really follow, Ito is always one of them; but, I wouldn't say that my work falls in line with what he or other Japanese architects do. There is a sort of stylistic or qualitative aspect to what we do here that I think is much different, more insistently formal, than most Japanese architects who really drive their work through concept. I wouldn't say through narrative, but I would say through basic concept. 

Right now, I think there's also a kind of contemporary wabi-sabi in Japanese work [acceptance of transience, imperfection, and impermanence]. I wouldn't call it minimalism, because there's too much going on; but, it's not going on necessarily in the material aspects of the work. I think there's a sense of ridding the work of anything that's not necessary. What isn't necessary begins to identify maybe the differences between what I think and what they might think. Perceptual issues, vis-a-vis form, for me, and including some of the really nicely articulated questions here, makes the medium of architecture a little bit more vague in the way in which it participates in a contemporary culture.

If there's a similarity with young Japanese architects, Sou Fujimoto and others, they like to see their work as indistinguishable from furniture almost, because of the small scale of the spaces. The body comes in contact with the architecture. I feel that kind of sensibility as well, except the geometries are probably more focused on let's say how radiality is an optical effect that produces continuities and discontinuities, as opposed to reinforcing the grid of the city that the Japanese work does. Ito has a wider spectrum of responses to work with than most Japanese architects. He can range from almost free form work to incredibly clinical and rigid modernism at the same time. He can employ glass and aluminum as much as he can employ concrete. He also, in terms of what I get out of his work, uses formalisms in very, very simple and graphic ways. Like he'll make a free form building with a grid across the field of it; or, he'll make a gridded form building with a free form field. He uses these kinds of classic forms of dialectic, or opposition, between the loose and the fixed. There's a lot of that also going on in what we do, except that it's a much different and probably much tighter type of way. 

If anything, I think I've just spent so much time in Japan. Part of the sensibility that I share is that when things get too big, I'm really interested in the spectacle of it all; but, I also get a little bit nervous because I saw and lived in a world of incredible density and compaction. I know what six or five or four tatami mats means, what it looks like, and how you live in it. I think there's a continued curiosity between comparing Tokyo and L.A., even in their hyper-opposite kind of conditions. That was actually part of the panel discussion I was on with Chris Hawthorne in Little Tokyo at Design Week a couple weeks ago. 

In your interior design work, your use of fillets seems to define space in an architectural way, creating voids and acting as walls within a pre-defined structure as seen in the Endeavor Offices. This creation of a fluid, almost ephemeral, space seems neither architectural, which is often fixed and static, nor interior design, which often consists of outfitting a space rather than defining it. Is this the product of being trained as an architect, but designing interiors? Or is this the product of something entirely different...? 

I think your question and your view of "it's not this, it's not that, it is this" is quite good and that's sort of what we want; but, if I were to classify it, it's all architecture, all the time. Sure there are worlds on the interior that are, by definition, completely different than the way in which a building envelope works in an exterior environment; but, at the same time there is very little difference apart from the technical condition. There is very little difference in how we approach designing spaces, as opposed to designing a tectonic object in a landscape. It's all architecture. In fact, the first little project we got to do was a installation in Gallery MA in Tokyo in the mid-90s. I developed a sheet geometry in the project and it was sitting inside a rectangular space; but, it could've just as easily been placed outside as a freestanding pavilion. From that project on, it was more or less actually an obsession to just do architecture, and not necessarily think about the binary or the differences between the inside and the outside.  

Since we've been doing interiors for the past ten years now, we sort of understood the realm of interior design and that it can be articulated as such; but, because we don't do it as a primary form of business, even though people more and more want interiors done by more established architects, it's the same project. While materials, lighting, and things like that may change, the ambition is the same and I think that's a good definition of why it is and why it isn't architecture or interior design in some specific way. 

I think the key word is to say it's architecture. It just behaves in a scale that is built a little bit differently once you're beyond the threshold of inside and outside. Endeavor is probably the most fully formed version of that because it's the biggest interior that we've done to date and we literally controlled the whole environment, as opposed to, as you said, interior design controlling different scenarios or art directing or trying to coordinate materials, per say. [Endeavor] was basically one material. It's dry wall, all based on shape and geometry, activating the space. I feel like we could lift that out of the building and turn it into a freestanding building at the same time. It's definitely a different approach. 

I guess it was a year ago I was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame which was a huge nice honor, and possibly the most unexpected one so far, because I've always made no discrimination between design of any type. In fact, that's why they were kind of curious about me: that they're just spaces. Spaces being the key term. Decoration and atmosphere and all of those things, they usually are terms that are described in interior design, and, of course, describe architecture as well. It's not just the proprietary measure of interior design. 

In a world increasingly dominated by 2D imagery, where do you feel architecture and urban design as physical, geometric fields are headed?

I'm not sure where it's headed vis-a-vis that question. [Maybe] it's headed toward, as perhaps some would like it to be headed, 180 degrees away from all that, to remind everyone that architecture is not virtual. Looking at it in the common sense of space, it's not virtual. It's about the body. It's not sculptural solely because it has other sorts of demands and purposes. It has a functional matrix involved. It's supposed to be permanent. And, yesterday's news is yesterday's news. And, yesterday's image is yesterday's image. And there'll be another one tomorrow and another one after that. Architecture is historically meant to be permanent; and a building has to stand up and continue to house and perform. Whether or not architecture is going to retrench and become more conservative because of that, and have less and less of an interface with the rest of the world, I would just say that I'm personally interested in architecture in the realm of materiality, but not in a resistive form, but rather in a more collaborative mode.

For me, relative to architecture, my question is, why would we want architecture to become recalcitrant or resistive to the complexity of all that? I'd rather [architecture] try to engage or continue to try to be a part of the world. Not where ephemerality of the structure is part of it, because you're commissioned to make a project, and I want my buildings to be crafted well. I'm not interested in them as stage sets. In that sense, I'm super dedicated and super traditional. I don't want to make the work in terms of its emotion or morality, to be a kind of resistive object. It needs to be an engaging one. The more you think that the work has a connection to that, either because of the space, the geometry, the aesthetics, or the interface, the more successful the work is, the more contemporary the work is. I don't say futuristic. I just say contemporary and engaging, relative to the world of the everyday form of spectacle of technology.

I spent the weekend on the iPad, making music, working on some instrumental compositions and jams, because in the 80s I did that. I had tape machines and primitive stuff. Now, it's basically clean and digital. And there's a real dramatic change and effect of technology. To a certain extent, compelling architecture has always had a quality about it that it felt like it could contend with media--media literally today, or in the 20th century, the media or mediums of technology in oncoming sort of digital technology. Shifting things from physicality and objects to experiences and information, that's been, for me, a really cool and challenging thing to think about. Our work is not about trying to run the opposite direction from this world. It's about trying to get into the mix. While there aren't narratives being played out, it's still fairly abstract at that level. We want to try to get to a point where the work feels like it's contemporary and that architecture is engaged with that. That it's not using its heaviness and its historical life to resist.

What advice would you give students who are developing and reaching their aesthetic maturity in this time? 

For the last ten or twelve years, maybe longer, especially with the digital revolution, approaches, methods, and philosophies have expanded. They're an inexorable force of architecture as its own medium and how it's made and how it's produced. What one could do with one's creative life is less determined now than ever before. Let's say for instance the people who come to NMDA, the fantastic young people who come work here, probably are the ones who feel connected to this last point I was making--that there's no giving up on the material world. Objects haven't completely receded into pure experience, even though the rhetoric of today suggests that. Or, that architecture can only be a spectacular resistive thing to the world of Facebook, Twitter and ephemerality and illusion. 

Case by case, person by person, how is a new generation coming into the world? I guess, optimistically. I feel like we passed through a bit of a phase where architecture was put on the scrap heap of things you could disregard because it would never be as interesting as making a film, or never as interesting as running a blog, or never as powerful as dealing with the quicksilver nature of information and engaging in ephemerality and fashion. That's actually exciting because you can play out so many more scenarios with such less cost and with such greater speed. When you think about building, it really hasn't gotten that much faster. It's gotten nominally more accurate with CNC and tools and interfaces and so forth. It's still a super costly, slow kind of medium. Yet, if you work in that world, it doesn't mean that you're operating in a conservative fashion. I think that if you can find the right scenarios to play it out, it has an incredibly visceral and powerful effect. 

I guess my advice is that one has to play out one's interest and energy across whatever field or discipline to be able to feel like you can effect a change or change perceptions with the work that you do. In my world, in UCLA and in the office, architecture is still a central medium. I think it's gotten more and more exciting, just generally, and across the last 5 or 6 years with global production, that people feel like it is a persuasive medium now. It's not like everyone is sitting around thinking about how they can study architecture, then turn it into something other than that. At the dawn of the computer era, you could get paid much, much more to go be an animator because it was still a new scene, rather than doing cad in an office. I think that's all been equalized now and things have changed.

You reference a lot of films in your book and in other places. What do you look for in films?

What I'm looking for in a film is not based on escapist fantasy. It's a funny thing. I am totally entertained by films that don't necessarily provoke my imagination in an obvious way. I will go on record and say that I’m not really fond of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and anything with flying dragons and so forth; (laughing) I’m the oddball in my family that way. I need cars and guns and real people and cities and urban environments, which is more connected to a "gritty realism" that began as early as Italian neo-realism after the WWII. Or I want so much abstraction that the film is just like total ambience, which in a world of heavy narrative, is often hard to find, which is why I still have areas of film and research that are connected to things like conspiracy stories and global networks and things like that… to really feel like an extension of a way of thinking about space and design. In that sense, film as I enjoy it most is also deeply and most strongly a reference to how I think and how I work. That's a perfect example of how work and play are super indistinguishable for me. I don't seek out film as a passive medium. The last thing I would want to come off as is a snob, even though I could understand the sense that somebody might say that. I'm really just interested in how it affects me and my work. The same with books. The same with design; the same with art. There's very little that I pursue that's not somehow actively about how to engage the questions of the work that I think about and the work that I do. I'm entertained by all these other media, except I'm entertained in a way that I'm really just trying to create a web of relations between all of these things all of the time. I think you'd probably find that most architects you know wouldn't say something too much dissimilar. It would just be a different set of likes and dislikes. So much of it is the way in which it's going to play out in the work that one does. 

So you're curating your own set of visual representations of environments?

I go through groupings when I watch movies. I go through groupings, not recently, but by city for instance. I would watch as many films on Berlin as I could, or as many films on New York as I could that are set in those cities. You couldcan go on Wikipedia and they have lists of movies in every decade that are set in a particular city. In that sense, it's a way to talk about urbanism and how filmmakers have represented urbanism. The last one I saw about a week ago was Enter the Void set in Tokyo. I thought filmically and graphically, the first half of it was really amazing. The way in which the camera worked, and obviously the color, and the fuzzy surreality of a place like Shinjuku or Shibuya was fairly strongly depicted. In that sense, I was looking for, in that movie, how it reflected my own extensive memories of that city.