J o h n 

R u b l e 

A r c h i t e c t u r e

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Veery: When reading literature, novels or poetry, what architecture stood out to you from that literature?

John Ruble: That is making me think about the Cairo trilogy, the stories by Naguib Mahfouz about the life of a Cairo family, and particularly the middle one of the three, Palace of Desire which I think is a really fantastic experience of architecture and place. Of course the story is about the family, but it's incredibly rich in terms of the moments of the drama taking place in houses or a on houseboat or on a street or on a square, and I think the intrigues of habitation that seem to come up in the story, that very much have to do with culture and how a culture uses its houses and its streets, are really fascinating and something that kept coming back to me after reading it. 


​Veery, 1996

Veery: What disappoints you today about the present architecture world?
John Ruble: I think there is a disappointment in terms of what's imposed on the architecture world by two facts of contemporary life.
 
One is the speed with which things have to happen, the speed with which cities have to be built and buildings have to be designed and put up, and I think that we lose a great deal of the chance to reflect and understand what we are doing; and I'm thinking of the great cities of Asia right now that are being built willy-nilly, or Berlin, for example, which is being built at breakneck speed.
 
Then the other pressure, the other force, has to do with communication, or publication, perhaps, the journals, and the discourse of architecture that is so instantaneous that it tends to diminish the possibilities that a school of architecture might develop in another part of the world that no one else knows about until some time later when an extraordinary volume of work with a lot of interesting ideas has evolved over a period of time and a treasure trove is to be discovered - none of that can happen now; because as soon as anything's done, it's instantly published and the regional tendencies in architecture, the regional schools, have to define themselves almost in opposition to what else is going on, and that to me is not as sincere and not as interesting as it would be if they developed simply out of ignorance of what is going on.




Veery: Who is your favorite architecture critic?
John Ruble: I don't really have one, but there are a number of people writing about architecture that I find interesting, like Witold Rybczynski, who writes from the outside, from the point of view of the people other than architects, and Christian Norberg-Schulz, who writes very much from the inside, as if the stones could speak.




Veery: What do you look for in an engineer?
John Ruble: Flexibility and I think also imagination and grasping the particulars of the problem that we are trying to solve together, versus simply applying over and over again, let's say, the same kinds of solutions, are what I look for. But again, there is that dimension, that engineers need to be reliable and thorough, and in a sense they are a complement to us being so good on certain other things. So, I'd say flexibility but also reliability and imagination.



​Veery