by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Scott Cohen is the newly appointed chair of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the current Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and three Progressive Architecture Awards. Cohen also is the author of Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture. Among projects under way at Cohen’s Boston firm, Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., are the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, the Taiyuan Museum of Art, and the Nanjing University Student Center, both in China. He will assume his position as chair on July 1.

Education
I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, BArch from there, and then a master of architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Firm’s design philosophy
The firm is dedicated to exploring the intersection of history, technology, and the problem of constraints, and by constraints I mean all of those aspects of architecture that exert a certain kind of pressure on the form that we wish to propose for a project. This comes together most in an overall idea about a hyper-synthesis of these things, an extreme condition in which everything is unified in a very intensive way. We’re looking for new modes of synthesis and we use geometry, tectonics, and the problem of typology as the basis for this effort to create a higher level of synthesis. I think our main aim is to raise the synthetic dimension of architecture to a higher level.

Will you continue practice, or focus exclusively on the GSD?
I’ll be doing both. The practice is a very collaborative effort. I am working with two outstanding project architects on various projects now and they really are running the show on the production of these projects. One is Amit Nemlich, an Israeli architect who is the lead project architect for the Tel Aviv Museum, and the other is Gilles Quintal, a Canadian and American architect who is doing the various projects we’re working on in the States. Amit also works on our projects in China. We also have a number of young people in the office.

I am directly involved in the design part of the projects and will continue to be, and hope to be taking on new work as time goes on. In fact, I think the relationship between practice and the school is absolutely essential. They stimulate each other. This exchange between practice and academic work goes to the heart of what I’m doing, thinking through problems of architecture. I think these problems of synthesis and of history and typology are articulated in the academic context in one way and in the office another way, and that they are clearly reciprocal. It’s the reciprocity between the two that is so essential to my life.

Currently reading
There were a couple of novels that I was reading. I was reading this book called On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. I read an interview of Moshen Mostafavi, the new dean of this school who was interviewed by the Boston Globe, and it was really quite remarkable because he mentioned that he was reading it, too, and I just thought: “We really are coming together here.” We are on a parallel path to rethink the school in many ways, and it’s really exciting to work with him.

There is another book that I just finished that I loved, Leviathan, by Paul Auster. The book is incredible. It struck me as having a lot to do with architecture in a very indirect way. This peculiar story is about a man who gets into a lot of trouble in a very odd way but goes through a lot of living vicariously through other people’s fantasies and ways of being in the world. He’s writing about all of this as well. It’s about writing, but what was interesting was that he had to track other people’s lives in a very intricate way. These other lives were all tangled up in such unexpected ways. It was the process of looking at the way people lived that seemed to me to get to the heart of how architects live. They are always imagining how other people are living, as well as living in those very same spaces along with those people. It’s real and it’s also imaginary. That’s what architecture is all about in a way. It’s very interesting in that sense. The book seemed to really describe that experience, but not be about architecture itself.

What will you bring to the GSD as chair?
In particular, I would say that this idea of thinking about architecture as a synthetic project, from my point of view, is interesting because it requires us to think in different ways about how architecture is integrating so many things. Architecture is obliged to integrate itself with the city, integrate different modes of living, and to deal with the integration of technology and ways of living that are inherited through conventions and practices that are age old. Architecture is a very complex collaborative and social practice, and so this idea of thinking about it as primarily a question of synthesis is an interesting challenge. For example, if we were to look through the lens of certain special areas of knowledge, we have to reframe things. If we were to say the digital medium is an essential question that we’re confronting, it permeates all of these domains. It permeates questions of optimizing the environmental conditions of architecture, whether they are lighting or the control of heat gain and loss. The question of the digital has so much to do with the expressive form of architecture and the communication of architecture to a larger public. The digital medium moves into all of these domains. How do we bring these domains together for the digital medium? That’s what I mean by synthesis.

We can look at the question of sustainability in the same way. It also goes to the heart of so many of these aspects of architecture: how people live, how people think about transportation vis-à-vis that building’s position in the city. The way the city is thought of relative to the placement of buildings in it has so much to do with sustainability, but of course how we live in the interior, how light and air are part of that experience, how the use of materials or the shape of the building optimizes or does not optimize the deployment of resources as far as materials are concerned. All of these things go to the questions of architecture at all levels.

These two lenses, if we think synthetically, can move into all of these domains and reorganize the way we think about architecture and ask students to think in a whole new way about the relationship of these fundamental conditions in architecture, whether they be the form, the tectonics, the environment, or the ways of living. All these things can come under these umbrellas. Those two questions are really essential for me right now. They’re two major concerns of this time in architecture, and I really hope to bring a new focus on these questions.

Other priorities?
I think the overriding or top concern, which is more specific to the academy, is that I want to elevate the discussion. I want to turn back to the question of architecture as a social practice. What I mean by social practice first and foremost, if we’re going to deal with it in the academy, is that architects become social. They think socially about what it is they’re doing and that goes to the question of how they talk to each other and how they develop a culture of ideas and participate in that discussion. I want to return to the idea that debate in the Aristotelian tradition is the catalyst for developing new thinking in architecture. I’d like to bring that into the school.

I think we need to stimulate each other by being immersed in discussion at a very high level. That’s going to be a top priority, to bring people into a higher level of discussion, and that will galvanize everyone around these two areas that I described to you, the digital and the environmental questions that are on everyone’s mind. I think it’s important to have different views. I thrive on having different views on the table. I cannot bear to be in an academic environment where everyone is in agreement. It is unbearably boring. We have to have debate. It’s very important that we set those terms, put things into play according to people taking positions and having convictions about these positions. I think the students are in a period where they’re suffering from lack of commitment to particular ideas. We have to think critically, and we have to think from different viewpoints and debate those views if we’re going to develop our thoughts to a higher level. That’s what sharpens our minds, so this first of all has got to become an intensely socialized environment according to the kind of discussion taking place. That’s what the GSD is all about.

What challenges and opportunities do you see for architectural education in the next 5–10 years?
I think that the question of how we’re going to handle the sustainability question is really a tough one for the next 10 years, no question about it. The problem is to overcome thinking about it strictly in terms of the technical component. I think it goes to the heart of how we live in architecture and how architecture behaves as a discipline in the larger matrix of the city where policy will shape these questions about sustainability at the systematic level. Architects should be contributing to this discussion about changing policies that affect the allocation of resources or the decline in resources; how we deal with materials and technologies that are effecting the limitation of resources. Architects should have a role to play in the discussion about the policies that govern how we go about building, but it also is essential that architects bring back into this question how it is that these become aesthetic: how this becomes part of the project of architecture that is always both aesthetic and technical.

I think one of the challenges to overcome is facing the question of the environmental only from the point of view of technology. We have to question it on other levels. It is fundamentally aesthetic as well. Architects must find a way to bring this question of the environmental back into the fold of architecture and back into this dialectic between the aesthetic and the technical. I think right now the problem with the sustainability questions is that they are falling outside of that dialectic between the aesthetic and the technical. We’ve got to bring them back into the heart of that. It’s tough to do it, but if we don’t, students and architects will not be thinking about the environmental questions as they’re forming their designs. It becomes an accessory to that formation if we don’t integrate it … It has to become part of the unconscious knowledge of architects. I hope that at the end of the next 10 years, that’s where we are.