Understanding Architecture from the Inside
Omnivoracious: The wider culture tends to tell stories about architecture that are organized around the Great Creators: the Gehrys, the Wrights, the Pianos (the Howard Roarks). Your stories, by contrast, are much more impersonal—if there are any heroes they are as much the people who explore their environment—the Michael Cooks. Where do people fit into your designs?
Geoff Manaugh: Well, I don’t have that many designs as such—being a writer—but I think the everyday users of buildings are almost always more interesting than the actual creators of those spaces. For instance, what do janitors or security guards or novelists or even housewives—let alone prison guards or elevator-repair personnel—think about the buildings around them? What do suburban teenagers think about contemporary home design, when their own bedrooms are right next door to their parents—or what do teenagers think about urban planning, when they have to drive an hour each way to get to school? These sorts of apparently trivial experiences of the built environment are often far more important to hear about than simply learning—yet again—how a certain architect fits him- or herself into a self-chosen design lineage.
So perhaps we should stop talking to Frank Gehry and start interviewing valet parkers in Los Angeles—or crime novelists, or SWAT team captains. They all have an opinion about the built environment, and about the way that cities function, but no one tends to ask them what those opinion might be.
— Tom of Omnivoracious / Amazon.com interviews Geoff Manaugh of the BLDGBLOG about The BLDGBLOG Book. 2009.
