2024-10-08
7 分钟Every week on Monocle Radio we welcome one of the jury chairs of the Holcim Foundation Awards, the world’s premier competition for sustainable design, to hear their views on creating uplifting places, fostering a healthy planet and building thriving communities. In episode one, we sit down with the US architect and founder of Studio Gang, Jeanne Gang. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Welcome to the first in a special series of tall stories brought to you by the Hulsam Foundation Awards, the world's premier competition for sustainable design, highlighting projects that contribute to the transformation of the building sector.
I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
In each episode, we welcome one of the jury chairs to explore their views on creating uplifting places, fostering a healthy planet, developing viable economics, and building thriving communities.
We ask them how their careers began, the pillars of their practice, and what their hopes are for the future of the industry.
This week, we speak with the American architect and the founder of Studio Gang, Genie Gang.
Architecture just seems to blend the things that I love to do, which is art and mathematics, geometry.
But more lately, it's even, you know, thinking of new paths in architecture.
I come back to nature for inspiration in terms of how it can regenerate.
Architecture can be so many different things.
For me, it's about practicing this art of making in the spirit of working with the environment and with the habits of people, the behaviors.
I always knew that I wanted to have my own studio and to build it out the way that we could do all these different things and not be put into a narrower, let's say, box.
So in the studios that I worked for, you know, in my internships and my apprenticeships, early on, I was really just taking note of how these different studios operated, but I had a different idea of how I wanted to do it, and so there was never a question.
I always wanted to start up my own office and really follow organically, like the things that I just like to do, like the things that I like to occupy my time with, which is design, writing, making beautiful things, responding to neighborhoods and people and what they need, and trying to be useful, I guess, to the communities that I work in.
But it being led by me was really important because I just didn't see those activities happening.
In some of the other firms.
There's different scales of sustainability and response to environment from the most personal things that you do, and the more community level and the architect group level, the community of buildings that you're working in, the cities, and then the.
There's even, you know, things that are on the scale more of the planet.
So just knowing what you're trying to impact when you're working on it, what scale it is, is really important.
I'd say also, though, that in architecture, what's changed is when I first started the practice, there was a lot of work on the operational uses of the buildings, and there was less about embodied carbon and materials.
And so now the Big challenge is embodied carbon.