Edited by Grou Serra
Interview prepared with Agata Siemionow as part of the Illinois Institute of Technology Dean's Lecture Series. Photography Credits: Illinois Institute of Technology
Grou Serra You were in your 20s when you began Snøhetta and won the Bibliotheca Alexandrina competition - a very large and long first project, what were the challenges or advantages of being young and inexperienced?
Craig Dykers Say that it was a challenge. We were so young that we were very naive and very inexperienced. So, we had very little to fear because we didn't know what to be fearful of. You know, we simply looked forward and we're excited to participate in this adventure, and kind of threw caution to the wind. I sometimes say that had they chosen an elderly or more elderly architect, that person would have run away immediately because the project seemed insurmountable. It seemed an impossibility. Well, it was a geopolitical project based in a historical narrative that went back to millennia. Everyone seemed to feel that they had an understanding of what the ancient library should be. And so, they were projecting those theories upon us. So, we had to navigate that. The money issue was a big thing. People felt that this was a great opportunity. So, we had to fight off people that didn't win first prize but were given other prizes, who wanted to acquire the project from us. So, there was a lot of back handedness going on. And we were, you know, up against some pretty stiff odds. But fortunately, we had help from, in this case, the Norwegian government, where we started our office together, and they had a vested interest in the future of the project. As you know, Norway has a history, at least in the contemporary era of nurturing peaceful dialogue and the peace accords had occurred sometime prior to the Alexandria library project. So, this was a great opportunity for building bridges, and of course, all of that was in a very special time. The Lebanese Civil War was coming to a conclusion. You're probably too young to remember that but it was a terribly dreadful event in world politics. People were dying in terrible ways. And that seemed like it was coming to an end. It felt like there might be peace between the Israelis and the Arabs and many of the countries surrounding them in the Middle East. You know, eventually, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed; we all thought the world was gonna be great. And here we are now.
Grou Serra Snøhetta is run very differently than most architecture firms. For a start, it’s unionized. Is this a criticism of the contemporary environment of architectural practice?
Craig Dykers Yes, and this is not to suggest in any absolute way that there is only one form of practice that's viable, there are multiple forms of practice that are viable. So, I tend to divide our practice into what I would call old world modernists and new world modernists. Old World modernists are people that create what is essentially contemporary or modern architecture. Things that are identifiable formalistically as modern. Yet they are created in the style, the process is the same methodology that one would have had two or three hundred years ago with a master apprentices and an army to kind of fulfil they're their vision. So, it's very hierarchical in terms of conceptualization. So, its old world and modernism coming together. And then the new world modernists which I would say, we feel we're a part of are people that sense contemporary design and architecture can only be manifest in a process that is relevant to the shape of politics surrounding us at the time we make it. And today we're finding more activism in society, we're finding more interest by diverse groups of people, more focused on allowing minorities and others to have a say, in their world. Gender differences are being slowly, not completely set aside, but partially set aside more so than they used to be. So, our office is trying to reflect that, so we have a kind of a society of people. You can joke about it at times, it maybe seems like a Catholic monastery or something. You know, we all eat together, and all of that stuff and we play together, but at the same time, it allows for interaction in very volatile ways. And we hope that that suggests that, contrary to the old adage, great architecture, great design can come from consensus. Which is very embarrassing to say because most people will tell you, that's an impossibility and you're just an idiot, but we believe it.
Grou Serra Do you see any relationship between the structure of the firm and the quality of design proposals?
Craig Dykers Well, certainly, at least, we hope that one sees a diversity in solutions and typologies so that there isn't a particular driver. Theoretically, that is forming the core of each project. Those core messages grow out of a better understanding of those individual events. Now, I'd be lying if I said that that was absolute. First of all, while we're relatively flat, we're not perfectly flat, there are hierarchical structures in our office, it would be fake for me to suggest otherwise. Furthermore, I would be lying if I said that our projects each one is distinct from the other totally. But I think I can at least say with some reasonable assurance that there tends to be a great deal of diversity in our responses. And that makes it such that many times people don't know what we're doing or who we are. And that allows us to drop off the radar.
Grou Serra Your projects can be very small - birdhouses and bills, and very big - operas and libraries. What interests you in this range of scales?
Craig Dykers Well, there are a number of reasons for that. I'll try to be concise. First of all, I would say that intimacy is a luxury in our world. Especially as new forms of communication technology grow. People are like on their mobile phones talking about their stomach surgery next to you in the bus. And, you know, there are all kinds of things that are happening that kind of somehow make it much harder for us to be intimate with one another. Design has grown, in many cases, so abstract, that it's difficult even to determine what scale it is. So, I think one driver is just this desire to find intimacy in things. So, the small-scale projects allow us to be directly intimate, and we hope that we can translate that to the larger-scale projects. I always say and some of my colleagues agree that it's one of the gifts of being a great architect is to make big things seem small. You know, that's hard to do. And another thing I would say is that when we take on small projects, it means that the youngest people in the office who may be very little experienced and not have the capacity to run a gigantic you know, megaproject, they get the chance to run a project or it's sort of theirs and they take it running. It gives them some confidence and allows us to kind of expand what we do. I think that maybe answers it. We've done a number of other projects that I quite like. A little doll's house, which was maybe one of our favorite projects. We actually built it in the studio. And there were many reasons why we made the doll's house. First of all, it was for a good cause it was an auction item for a hospital for children with cancer on the border of Mexico. But besides that, we realize that there's just not enough of our world that deals with children. You know, we tend to be very adult thinking. And architecture is kind of an adult thing. And we think about adults when we do it. We rarely think about kids. And kids, their view of design is so limited because the things that they have to play with are so sort of generic. So, take a doll's house, for example, generally little girls, not always, but mostly little girls play with doll's houses, some little boys too. And they're given a kind of shed roof thing with sort of, you know, normal rooms and couches and it becomes an interior design exercise. And it's great because the kids that haven't, fortunately, enough imagination that it doesn't hold them from thinking. But this doll's house that we made. The whole thing was convertible. You could open it. It was hinged. It transformed. There were trees coming out of the living room. It made no sense. But it was this exciting thing. And so, a child would get this doll's house and they would see that design isn't just about decorating things. It's about transformation. And that's something that we should, I believe, think more about so we're trying to do more work with young people and things related to young adults and young persons. We made a playground in Austria for the Swarovski Foundation, which is a five-story playhouse. It's like a skyscraper for fun. And the kids jump around, and we made a little rocking garden. In other words, it was a planted garden on a rocking chair that you could kind of hang out in kids loved it, things like that.
Grou Serra You always explain your buildings in a very simple way - and seem fairly critical of the notion of concept and focus more on performance. What role do you give representation in architecture?
Craig Dykers Well, first of all, I would say that I need to also preface all of this, that we're a pretty broad group. So, I may say something and my partner another may say exactly the opposite. So, you know, I don't think you could take what I have to say as being a manifesto. But in any case, we do have, I would say minor arguments about that. When I speak about concepts, I'm not trying to suggest that they're not important. Of course, they are, you must have a concept. It has to - something can't exist really without some form of a core value. So that's not my point. When I am critical of the notion of concept, I am critical of the way in which it is used as a kind of camouflage for how we must make things perform. So, I often say that a concept is not an answer. It's a question. You must first ask the question before you can have an answer. And we usually just jump right over the question part. And in fact, in many fields of intellectual thought, a concept is indeed a question. It's not an answer. So that's more my criticism, not that their value, but how we adapt that value to meet our own desires, which are often, I would say, selfish. And we're kind of selfish. Architects especially can be very selfish. So, the following end of that question had to do with performance. This is something else that, you know, again, you could talk to my partners, and they would give you a very different answer. So, I'll give you my personal attitude. I believe in some way that architecture is, in fact, a service industry. By that, I don't mean that we're out there just giving people what they want any values of our own. Of course, we must have ego, we must create challenges. We must involve ourselves with the messiness of the world, I get that. But at the same time, we are making very, very important things that people have to live with. And if they can't live with it and grow better for it, then why the hell are we doing it? I don't want to be out there making things that hammer people to death. I want them to be challenged and I don't want them to always be super happy. It's not like we're making lazy boy recliners for eternity. But I do think that we need to understand that comfort and performance and intelligence are all related.
Grou Serra You mentioned that 'In schools, very often, people are just an abstraction. That we build it, we put people in there and we see what happens. How do you propose to change that?
Craig Dykers Well, very good question. Thank you. Some, some of the ways are very intuitive. And I would say that when I talk about people, I'm very careful to suggest that this is not about human behaviorism, the science of behaviorism because I don't believe in that. I don't believe that one can create absolute models for human behavior because as soon as you make them, people will break them. That's the nature of being human. So, there is no absolutism, we can find value from behaviorism. We can hone our skills, and we can see things we might not have seen otherwise, but we cannot rely on behaviorist methodologies to create positive results always. Instead, we need to find intuitive ways to understand people. And by looking, we can learn a lot. So, I spend a lot of time just looking at people and just watching how they, what they do and the funny things they do. There was an example I gave many years ago that I discovered when riding the subway in New York often. If you're standing on the platform waiting for the train, and you look down, which most people do when they're waiting, you'll find that the dirtiest areas and the most bubble gum is where the train doors often open. Because that's where people spit their bubblegum out. Right, like, so it's a kind of trail of human behavior that you're looking for. And there are so many other things where that comes into play. Furthermore, if I could add just another sort of an aside, my brother who's very dear to me, my only brother was a structural engineer of great talent and in the middle of his life, in the middle of his career, he had an aneurysm in his brain. And as a result of the aneurysm, he lost his short-term memory. So, he has all of the intellectual skills that he had from before and he was brilliant. He had a degree in Russian literature and structural engineering. I mean, it's like, amazing guy. But now he can't remember anything from one moment to the next. So, he lives every moment as though that's all that existed. And I watch him all the time, trying and you know, he's perfectly you know, he's not like bumping into things and he manages. He exists, he actually has now his own apartment, and how he lives without a memory is just astonishing. So, you see how he moves, and I watch him all the time and see how he manages his world. And I've learned a lot about behavior through that because he's an ultimate test case. Every five minutes he has to do it over again. [Laughs]Incredible person he is.
Grou Serra Does this strategy relate to your conception of architecture as social monuments?
Craig Dykers Yes, absolutely. We need to find ways to socialize our world. We need to make- especially in this age where conflict seems so rampant in an age where everything is about saying no. We're in a no society. Even the best ideas people will say no to. We need to find, (a) a way to get people to say yes. And the only way they can say yes to a good idea is that they feel that they own their world. They're not as alienated as they think they are. So, socialization of space as a very high priority in our office. How do you do that? Well, you know, it's not like you can just make everything furry. You know that kind of helps, but not really. But you know, you have to think on multiple levels. So, getting people to be active is one thing just kind of existing in space moving your body gives you an unconscious sense of ownership. Whenever you turn your body one way or the other, your body is registering that you're doing something, even if your brain isn't. And so, getting people's physical geometry to move in space. That's what the opera did. So, you know, when you go on the opera and you know, you already in advance are seeing that something's not right about what's ahead, right, there are these weird platforms that I'm in, everybody wants to go, so I guess I'm gonna have to go. And then as soon as they get on those strange platforms, their angle of incidence due to gravity changes. And so your body registers that, that coupled with the idea that you're walking on the roof of a building, gives you a sense of ownership, even if false, that it's kind of yours because anytime you can put your crappy shoes onto a building, you feel it's yours, right? So, all of those things together are making socialization of space have value. And the formal content of the buildings are trying to allow that to happen without dictating it. Because for so long, and modernism tried to engineer these events, you know, that we could just engineer the hell out of social space, and everybody would be happy, and they'll go sit in little amphitheaters. And there'd be little musical performances and all of that stuff, which, of course, doesn't work because there's nothing more dreary than an empty amphitheater. And that's what gets registered, not the musical performance. So, you know, it's a lot of little things like that.
Grou Serra You say that people can be very irrational - for example with the Wall Street bull sculpture, how do you embrace this in your design?
Craig Dykers Yeah, that could be rational. I don't know. I mean, maybe it's rational and taking your picture on the front is the irrational part. Well, there are many ways to see the bull's balls exercise. One of them is irrationality. But another is, again, this notion of intimacy. And by the way, sex is one of those things that we don't somehow talk about. It's embarrassing to talk about. Is there a role for sex in our eroticism in the world of architecture, and I think these balls these testicles, excuse me, somehow make this like weird, like door open for people to be suddenly erotic in public? You know, it's astonishing that somebody I'm sure when I watch the people that do that, some of them are the most delicate people that you know, they would never in a million years, like in a polite company, you know, talk about anything like that, but they go to this bull and they do it and they take their picture. So, you know, I think that, how do you make for rational space? You deal with intimacy and you deal with those things that don't fall into polite conversation like eroticism? Can a building allow? Like one of the ways, we're looking at a project we just finished in Toronto is trying to see how many people kiss in the building? You know, that's the return on investment is the number of kissing people and the first time I went, it's the Ryerson project. The first time I went there after it had opened, there was like a lesbian couple kissing in the front of it. There were you know, multiple couples inside finding places and it's throughout the day. You know, I thought that's a weird way to look at a building, but why not? And, you know, it's irrational. I mean, to a certain extent. Is that the only way you can deal with the rationality? No, you can deal with it in so many other ways. You can allow things to be unpredictable, things don't seem like. So, one of the things I'll say tonight at our talk is that another way to divide the world of architects is that there are those that want to straighten everything up. So, they're incredibly modular, and everything has to align. And if you make a ceiling and something's not in line, they like, freak out, and it has to be in line. And then there are those that just want to shake everything up. So, if anything's in a straight line, they have to break it, or they have to make it so you can't even see the line. And that's two kinds of modes of thinking. And those are logical modes of thinking. What I would say is, why does it really matter? You know, can we, you know, is it necessary to become a demigod? I don't know. It's just like, there's something about having to tribalize everything that kind of freaks me out. We just don't have to tribalize everything. And that can allow for accidents. So, we're landscape architects, architects, interior designers, graphic designers all sitting in this kind of big room and everybody's working on everything and nobody gets upset if it's a landscape architect drawing an interior of a toilet.
Grou Serra You mentioned that you “try to take reality by surprise”. Can you expand on that statement?
Craig Dykers That's not my quote. It's actually the artist Francis Bacon. Who said that, so I stole it? We stole it from him, but I always give him credit. There's two quotes that- the only quote I've ever personally had that made it in some kind of list of quotes was not my own either which I try to always give credit, which was, 'I've never seen anyone walk into a building drop to their knees and say what a fucking great concept.' And that was actually Quite Howard who said that originally. Do you know him? He's a really funny guy. Anyway. The notion of, of taking reality by surprise, which Francis Bacon was interested in, was the fact that and by the way, another person who alluded to the same thing was Abraham Lincoln, who often said, 'I never say anything that's not familiar. Everything I say is something that you know, already.' You know, and I thought, that's just amazing coming from someone like that, Abraham Lincoln. And the same goes with Bacon. He said, I'm just dealing with what you already know. But I'm showing it to you in a way that you didn't expect or expressing it in a way that puts the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that we would not be considered ordinary. So, you know, there's a kind of value to not re-evaluating but reconsidering or something. I don't know, that's a very fine line. Whether that comment even makes any sense at all but. You know, my wife, Elaine, who would have wish could have been here she's also architect running projects with us. She says people are always happier when they want what they get than when they get what they want. And it's true. I'm kind of that way too. Like when I when somebody gives me something it wasn't what I wanted, but I really liked what I got. That's a better condition.
Wiel Arets Can I ask you something about these bills. I would like you to say more about it, because when you look at it, you don't see the images on it, in a way, it doesn't look like money. Can you explain that?
Craig Dykers Yeah, so part of the reason it doesn't look like money is that that's the concept design. So, a lot of things go now onto that bill, which are about security. And you know, so once you start making things like little holograms on it, it starts to feel more like money and look more like money, which it will. But I agree with you totally, it doesn't look like money and it wasn't intended to, I can tell you the story behind the images. There were two things that we were interested in. First of all, the theme was given. So, the government gave the theme. Everyone designed to the same theme. In this case, the theme was water. Norway, as a nation has been historically and culturally linked to water not only in its salt, water shoreline but also its freshwater lakes, which are numerous throughout the country. So, this was the theme. We were interested in a couple of things. One of them had to do with pixelation, and contemporary technology and how we could describe that, but pixelation in and of itself is kind of boring. So, we thought about it in another way. In terms of mosaics. Mosaics, which are culturally powerful artefacts that represent our history as artisans. And we thought maybe we could bring this notion of mosaics into pixelization. And theme that together with water. And the water idea is based on the value of the money. So, you have basically five values. The lower the value- in all the values, you're looking at a landscape, a water landscape, so you're either looking across the ocean or a lake at something, it could be a building or something. And the lower the value of money, the lower the wind speed, which we can talk about today because it's very windy. So, the lower the wind speed across a body of water, the easier it is to see what you're looking at, you know there're forces of wind and maritime travel, you know, Mark 8 and Mark 5, and all of that. So, the thousand kroner note is the highest wind speed and the 50 kroner note is the lowest wind speed. And that's why when you get to 1000 kroners, it's impossible to see what you're looking at. It just looks like a gale. So that's a gale-force wind. So, you're sort of slowly losing the horizon. And there's a word in Norwegian called hildring which means when the horizon disappears in the land and the sky merge into one. And this often happens in atmospheric conditions where there's water present. And finally, the pixelation in the mosaic meant, as you've probably seen that you could theoretically, and we're not allowed to ask people to do this because it's defacing government property. But you could take all the money and glue them together, and you get one continuous landscape where the wind is changing across it. And that was basically it. I'm not sure how they had the courage to choose that idea, but they did.
Wiel Arets I listen to your stories, you explain everything in a very, I would say in a very elegant way. Talking about spitting, talking about sex, talking about fish, is it part of your conceptual thinking?
Craig Dykers Yes, I would have to say so. Is it deliberate? Well, everything is deliberate at some level, you choose who you want to be. And you find a way to express yourself. And for me, again, this is just my personal viewpoint. That's the choice I have made. I want to find a place where I feel I can make extremely what I hope is very challenging works of design and architecture, but inside of a forum that allows people to connect to it. So that I'm not trying to avoid fights. And people who know me really well will know that I also engage in you know, healthy banter. But I do think that fighting should be a last resort. We should, you know, instead, no matter how complicated our thinking is, and no matter how aggressive we wish to be, we should do so in a civil gesture. And my language is part of that tool. And architects aren't taught how to speak. We're taught how to make and show. So, everything is very visual. I mean, I gave a project. I don't teach very much, but one time I taught, and I had the students pin up all their work in one room. The jury was not allowed in that room. And then they in another room, each one presented their work only with words and then I gave the jury little yellow stickies with the names of all the people and asked them to go in and try and pick which project belonged to the right student and 70% were wrong. Because you know, the words they were using had no value to create a mental image for people to help understand what they were really doing. They were using all the zeitgeist words, the buzzwords, everything that we were kind of told has an academic or intellectual value, and I'm not saying it doesn't it, those things do have value, but they have to have value in their place. I have in fact won competitions that were not clearly stated that they were designed competitions. But actually were. Where everyone else comes in with models and we spoke our way through it and won through words only.
Wiel Arets How would people describe your work?
Craig Dykers I don't know. Not a lot of people do describe our work. So, I'm not sure how to answer that. I do know that a few people have said things like, Ada Louise Huxtable. I really liked her description of our work where she said it was an architecture of engagement. And recently there was a, not so recently now, a couple years ago, the New Yorker article that talked about the psychology of space. That these are terms that don't have to do with formal things. I mean, it does in a way you could see engagement maybe, but not really. And you can see psychology maybe, but not really. And space, you can't see unless something tells you what it is. And so, you know, I thought those were nice. And then people have told me recently and I was happy to hear that, you know, there was a sense of intimacy in the work no matter how big it gets. So, for me, I'm very proud of that, trying to think of some negative stuff. You know, I'm sure there are negative things. Maybe, you know, some people say that, or some people feel that some of the formal moves can get characterized too quickly into objects that like, you know, it looks like a steamship or It looks like a fighter pilot or It looks like a coke bottle or something like that. You could say that's a negative quality. I personally like that. I like the fact that people invent weird names for our buildings. You know, I think that's okay. It's good. least they got something to say. I'm sure there are negative things. I don't know. Maybe you have a critical.
Wiel Arets One of the first sentences you said when you won this competition for the Alexandria Library, you said we were naive. We didn't have any fear. Is that still the case?
Craig Dykers Yeah, I would say that that's still the case. And we keep that going by doing different things. So, you could even say that our establishing of a studio in New York and America after 20 years of success in Europe, and without, you know, our Norway operations are still very thriving. But that's a test on any company, and it remains so. So, you know, there's a lot of anxiety mainly because of time zones. You know, how do you talk to people with the time zone problem, you can catch people at different times of day but it's awkward, you know, I have to plan the time, and I'm going to talk to somebody so that you know, that is thrown in a kind of degree of control nature. And we set up an office in San Francisco and when one in Innsbruck. So, sort of simultaneously, these two almost similar sized studios and all of them are kind of self-sustaining, with really bright young designers, you know, and sometimes you see things that we don't expect. So, I think all of that makes us deal in a high level of risk. Plus, we don't save a lot of money. So, you're always on the edge of bankruptcy. I won't say that's true. That's not true. We're not on the edge of bankruptcy. So, scratch that off the record. [Laughs] But no, you know, we're always having to deal with investment and trying to make sure we operate, which also makes you a little scared.
Wiel Arets What do you think about the building we are in? [Crown Hall]
Craig DykersOh, this building? Oh my gosh, well, you know, this is... And I use this word in a positive way, an iconic building. I don't mean it's iconic because you look at it and it's nice and a postcard, not that kind of iconic. It's a building that has generated kind of, I don't even want to say factory and you call it the largest classroom in the world. It's something you can't really, you know, say, oh, it's that, you know, it's like none of those things. So, you know, the types of ways of teaching have evolved so much here. And that's kind of a good thing, right? Like, it's never happy with the way it was. It's always looking for something else. And I don't think, you know, more traditional building would allow that. It has very actually what I was saying earlier, a lot of irrational things, things you should not do, if you follow the rules, this thing would not exist, right, like you walk in, and there's, like these offices, and then there are students and, you know, there's not like a receptionist and you know, and there's the door for the faculty, and you know, and then there's the studios, you know, this space is just a kind of, almost, well, I don't really know how to say, but over the years, I've always admired it. Along with a number of other of his works, which I think are interesting. And I've, you know, I've followed Mies in a weird way for many, many years. So yeah, it's a great building. Fortunate to be here.
Wiel AretsSo is it old world modernism or new world modernism?
Craig DykersThis is old-world modernism. See, what I said is that I'm not saying that you can't get great works of architecture from our old world modernism. I'm not discrediting it. I am curious to know if Mies were alive today, what he would be doing and how. I suspect he would have adapted. He adapted his whole life. I mean, he started off as a window dresser, I think, right? In Aachen. Like that was his first job was doing window dressing in a department store in downtown Aachen. And actually, I've always loved that because I still think he's kind of window dressing like setting up these windows and putting stuff in it, you know what I mean? Laughs] Which is great because people love to window shop. Right. And I think he adapted a lot from that early time knowing that he has to deal with the public because that's what a window dresser does. You're dealing with strangers coming by and catching them and then. I guess I don't know enough about the operation of his studio, I just imagined that he was a kind of a Maestro. And people learned how to be like him in his studio. I mean, I used to work on some Craig Ellwood buildings, you know, Craig Elwood. Great, you know, disciple. And I was in charge of all of the restoration work of a Craig Elwood building in El Segundo when I was younger, just out of school, you know, and you could just see the hand of Mies in these works. And I mean, made great buildings, but I sense that Mies was like that. Whereas I think if you took somebody from our office, and they went off and did their own thing, I'm not sure if you'd see the hand of Snohetta. Maybe you would.
Wiel AretsWhat is the hand of Snohetta?
Craig Dykers Yeah, I don't know. [Laughs] I'm just it would. I don't know. Yeah, you can't really say, it's true. Yeah. So maybe that's a misstatement.