Veery: Before you got into architecture, what was on your mind as architecture is on your mind today? Buzz Yudell: I had grown up in a family where my father was a practicing doctor but also did some scientific research, and my mother was a dancer; we were exposed to both, almost equally, from an early age. To some extent, as a son, in the Forties and Fifties, the male role model was the scientist, doctor, healer out there in society, so from a very young age I observed that. It was not an explicit pressure - I was very interested in science. Then, fortunately, I got involved in sculpture with an extraordinary teacher at an early age, at fourteen, and from then through college I was very happy dividing my time between sculpture, art history, and architectural history on the one hand, and sciences and general humanities on the other. And I actually had a brief diversion with medicine as a calling: I went to medical school very briefly to test it, to get it out of my system, and was only there for two months; and, it was like cutting off the wrong arm, and I realized I could survive without that, but not without the architecture. So, it was a complex process. In retrospect, I'm grateful to have that very broad humanities background including the sciences. To a great degree, architecture is a synthesis of all of those fields.
Veery: What can an architect learn from a sculptor? Buzz Yudell: In different times, there is different sculpture and very different lessons. For a long time in college, I was interested in artists like Donatello. In periods of great figurative sculpture, understanding the physical occupation of space by the human body as well as the emotional and aesthetic content of the individual or groups of individuals in space was a very important source of inspiration. The figure has for a period waned. Now we're getting back to a little more pluralistic situation. Sculptors who rejected the figure and go into more minimal or environmental work provide art new lessons. A number of contemporary sculptors demonstrate poetic ways of connecting to the landscape. Others celebrate pure materiality, the poetic value of very simple materials. In other periods, symbolism has been very important in the relation between sculpture and the rituals of life. In each of those periods, there are lessons. It's important to look beyond the vogues of a new orthodoxy or new avant-garde to look across time to the lessons that are available and that represent an accretion of human experience over time.
Veery: Of your architecture, what is your favorite? Buzz Yudell: It would be hard to single out one piece of architecture. Perhaps I can indicate some aspects in several projects. On a formal level, we take pleasure in the way in which we've been able to manipulate the interaction of light and space to, at times, have an almost spiritual quality, as in a church like St. Matthew's, in a building like Tegel Library in Berlin, or in a house like the Rodes House. On a level of geometries and proportions, I think a lot of our houses (the Kwee House, the Rodes House, and my own house [that I did with my wife Tina]) often take relatively quiet geometric and proportional systems and then evolve sets or sequences of places in the rooms that develop a great serenity. To some extent, these are in the tradition of people like Palladio, where proportion was such an important issue. In these places, it's a quality of serenity and subtle complexity that's very gratifying. In other buildings, it's maybe more about the making of social places: in our buildings at the University of Oregon, there was a huge amount of thought and effort in creating a hierarchy of social spaces, from courtyards to stairways to places for accidental meetings; or, in Crossroads School, an art building for a secondary school, some very simple geometric devices enhanced social interaction so that spaces within the building became favorite meeting or performance spaces. No one building has done everything that we would aspire to, but many of them have raised certain elements to quite a high level of satisfaction. One other area which is increasingly important to us is the interaction of inside and outside, and the gradation from rooms inside to transitional spaces to rooms outside. That's a theme we've been exploring in places like my house and recently in Schetter House. It involves a sense that the mass of the building can be shaped to create not only a spectrum of interior places but an equally rich spectrum of exterior places.
Veery: What makes an architect's career rise? Buzz Yudell: I would say it's probably a mix of issues for every "successful architect" - I suspect it's been very different for each architect. Chance is obviously always an important factor, the chance of meeting people who inspire you, and invite you into their realm, and give you opportunities as John Ruble and I have had with Charles Moore. I think the passion that I mentioned before is critical in such a challenging field. I don't think one would survive or thrive without a sense that this is the only thing that you can imagine yourself doing. The ability to communicate is very important. I know some extremely talented architects, who, because of their inability to or unwillingness to communicate with clients, have not had the opportunities that they should have had creatively. I've also known people who are such extraordinary communicators that they had opportunities beyond what their other abilities might have suggested. If I had to hone it down, I'd say it's probably chance and opportunity, passion, talent, commitment, and the ability to communicate those ideas, passion, and commitment. And, obviously, follow-through, to be able to take the opportunities that you have and make places that are successful is the only way to have any longevity and any repeated opportunities.
Veery: To what extent does the press play (specialty or general) in the previous question? Buzz Yudell: It depends to a large extent to one's aspirations. If one wants to try to be center stage and have a kind of meteoric rise, for example, I'm sure that would be impossible without being one of the favored in the press. On the other hand, I know some extraordinary architects who have not sought to be in the limelight, but by a combination of being talented, decent people have risen steadily to a level of distinction: somebody like Fay Jones, for example, or Joseph Esherick; they're two exceptional architects, they're both Gold Medal winners, who have not sought an international limelight and yet have, by virtue of their talent and skills and perseverance and commitment, accomplished great work. The press can play a big role in the case of people who become favorites or become celebrated as the new avant-garde, as the new excitement; there seems to be a voracious need in the press for the next thing, so, in a way, there may be two tracks: there are people who get on a fast lane and are able to tolerate or even enjoy the pressures that can have, and then there are people who attend to their work in a very passionate and serious way and slowly build a body of work, credibility, and respect. That may define the spectrum.
Veery: Do you find you have personalized your creative process around your habits, schedule? Or do you veto your schedule, habits and just go full tilt, damn the calendar? Buzz Yudell: I'm constantly trying to juggle all of the day to day requirements of being a rounded person in a complicated society, trying to fulfill all the things that one is committed to, from creating a very positive total environment for our office to personal relationships and involvements in the community. In the midst of all that, the thing I try to protect is time for creative activity. I find over time that the more structure I'm able to create, the freer I am to have more creative time. It's constant envelopment and commitment: you're never away from architecture, you're always thinking of it. Often, some of the best ideas happen when you're doing something else, when you're swimming, walking, reading, or travelling.
Veery: Would you like to clarify any positions or misconceptions through external sources, people, applied to your work, in a brief way? Buzz Yudell: The only one, which again is something that I partly touched on, is the tendency to oversimplify work and see architects as falling into slots. For example, in the last number of years, it's been fashionable to refer to a certain body of work as postmodern and/or historicist and then to see that negative version of that as raiding history or pastiche. I take that to be a real confusion of issues and a lack of willingness to remember the issues that people like Charles Moore and Venturi initially brought to the dialogue. Those have much more to do with fundamental humanistic concerns about connecting to place, about learning from the past, learning from different cultures and regions, listening to people, generally engaging the world in a very profound way. They also involve the feeling that one should have and can have the freedom of expression to see oneself as part of a continuity of thousands of years and to therefore learn from that entire history as well as have the freedom to explore and invent based on that knowledge. If I see one oversimplification to the point of distortion in the kind of dialogue amongst architects and the press at this point, it's the Style Wars mentality: there was modernism, there was a kind of early modernism, there was an overreaction to the problems people saw in that that then lead to postmodernism, which lead to extremes of historicism, and then that was sort of swept away by new modernism and deconstructivism, et cetera. That gross simplification is unfortunate because it just obviates a great deal of very important discussion and thought. When I look at buildings and cities, I hope to and try to understand the underlying passion and intent of the architect and then try to understand the buildings within their context and culture. There are many very successful pieces of architecture within a broad spectrum, and I would hope that there could generally be more pluralism, more of an understanding of multiple approaches.
Veery: You referred to your father as a healer, a doctor, and your mother as a dancer. Does this remind you of how you've balanced this architectural view you have of the architect having to take in the needs of people (the healer side) with the aesthetic (the dancer)? Buzz Yudell: Definitely. It's interesting, isn't it? It seems like a very basic issue, but I haven't actually thought consciously about that for a long time. You've definitely hit on an important synthesis. I do remember that as a child my father had very significant social concerns, that he was very much a doctor as healer, somebody who sat by the bedside of people, talked to them, and listened, and not as a technician or businessman, but the opposite. I remember as a young child admiring that and feeling some strong sense of its importance, and I do see architecture as needing to be engaged in society, listening to and in a sense healing places to the extent possible. The excitement I got from my mother involved the physicality of the creative exploration, of literally moving through space and time, experiencing space and time with your body. These are powerful aesthetic implications in this way of experiencing. Now that you've said it, it's a powerful way to think about those influences.
