In Conversation with Michael Manfredi

This transcript is an excerpt of a conversation between Christopher Ball (MAUD ’23), Elyjana Roach (MAUD ’22) and Michael Manfredi from February 2022.

Michael A. Manfredi, FAIA is the co-founder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, a multidisciplinary design practice based in New York City. Award-winning projects such as the Olympic Sculpture Park, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, University of Pennsylvania’s Nanotechnology Center, Barnard College’s Diana Center, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center construct reciprocal relationships between city and nature, architecture, and infrastructure. He has been honored with the Thomas Jefferson Medal, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, The Academy Award for Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award, Harvard’s International VR Green Urban Design Award, the New York AIA Gold Medal of Honor, and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the Louvre, and the Guggenheim Museum.

(Michael is finishing a charcoal drawing as we start our interview)

Elyjana Roach (ER):

Do you draw with charcoal often?

Michael Manfredi (MM):

Frequently. Recently, for example, my partner Marion Weiss and I spent four or five days producing a range of drawings for a competition. Yet sometimes a week will go by where it's much harder to find the time to do drawings—so it fluctuates. But I do draw as often as possible, for two reasons. The first is just for the pure tactile pleasure of it. The other is embedded with how we work; it's hard to have a conversation without drawing, and drawing becomes a fast, iterative way of communicating design ideas.

Over the course of a project, we do many models and drawings, both analog and digital, crude, and sophisticated animations. We use a whole host of different tools to design, and we believe in using a very large “toolbox.” I'm always suspicious of architects or designers who rely on one or two programs as their primary tools of design, because you become limited by the tools you rely on too much.

Chris Ball  (CB):

There is a certain poetic sensibility common in your projects. How do you foreground these artistic qualities, especially when it comes to the larger projects within urban design?

MM:

Form is not neutral. It’s a question of execution, technique, and development. Even at the scale of designing a neighborhood, for example, there is an aesthetic underpinning because inevitably we deal with form which can take on many attributes. Of course, we make choices at multiple scales that are functional, social, or economic, but somehow these choices are inevitably inflected by formal/spatial intentions that have aesthetic impact. Formal and spatial agendas enter the picture in even the most complex and varied of projects from a single building to a neighborhood. In its broadest sense, aesthetics can be defined in its most rudimentary way. How do our bodies inhabit space? How do we spatially interact with each other? To return to the neighborhood, it’s how we can design collective spaces, capture the benefits of sunlight, set the scale of a street, give social identity to infrastructure. Each of these agendas do involve aesthetic, qualitative choices.

ER:

This is interesting because we hardly have this conversation about aesthetics in terms of human reaction, at least within urban design.

CB:

And there's also so many kinds of constraints associated with working at the urban scale, that it seems education directs practical considerations over something artistic.

MM:

I think it's a cultural trap, too, because in our society, there is tendency to think of aesthetics as a superficial way of dressing something up—making it acceptable to a specific constituency. And to that extent, it's seen in a pejorative manner, at the “whims of fashion.”

But if we think of aesthetics as something more deeply rooted in what makes us human and what gives us pleasure, then aesthetics can be important to the practice of urban design, of landscape architecture, of architecture—at multiple scales right down to the question of how you would design a small object, a teapot, for example. A teapot must hold water, needs a handle, and must be able to sustain a certain level of temperature. But beyond that, is it white? Is it black? Does it have a voluptuous shape? Is it orthogonal? Those are all choices that we make that are about how our own hand and how the ceremony of pouring tea come together. The ritual and the object gather importance by virtue of their interdependence. Those are decisions that regardless of scale fall into what I believe is the anthropomorphics of aesthetic practices.

ER:

It makes me think of the urban spectacle you’ve talked about before. How do you construct value in an urban environment? How do you think that also relates through a multidisciplinary approach?

MM:

Part of what I love about urban design is that by virtue of its indefinite scale, it can operate at multiple scales and across multiple disciplines and still have value. In our Western culture, there's a tendency to ascribe value purely in economic and functional terms. We're now reaching a point where social and environmental values can also be quantified. Coming out of the pandemic there are now critical metrics and new data sets that have to do with a healthy city and why open space matters.

At our Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, we were tasked with functional needs that revolved around the economics of creating a park: providing a playground, a dog park, a playing field, bathrooms, a field office, and a cafe. Our agenda, however, was to sidestep these economic or programmatic needs and instead focus on shaping the water’s edge through the lens of climate change and rising sea levels. At the time that was a radical idea. The Parks Department was anxious during community meetings to have us talk about functional and programmatic issues, not about how to mitigate potential storms. So instead, we talked about the economics of a soft zone that would absorb and capture water and allow for community use—a both/and strategy that we often advocate for. We also suggested, instead of designing four buildings each with their own function needs, why not consolidate them into one curved building that would define space and also be much more economical to build. We played the economic “game,” to address larger social and environmental needs.

By sidestepping mono-functional, economically driven definitions of design, we argued that the park could inform future possibilities for resilient ecological infrastructures and be a socially dynamic urban open space. After the floods of Hurricane Sandy, the resilience of the park—its value—enabled it to become a demonstration project for New York City. While many surrounding communities sat under four feet of water, the park presented a first line of defense for its surrounding community and survived the storm without impactful damage. The goal of good urban design is to simultaneously satisfy contradictory and conflicting agendas—economics, community engagement, and infrastructural ambitions.

ER:

How important do you think the pilot project is to those processes?

MM:

Very important. I think there's another aspect to this, which is, the power of an idea. Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace in Boston a notable example of an idea, a metaphor, which captured the public's imagination. It shows that if you're an architect or a landscape architect or an urban designer, design and form do matter, especially over time. If it's a strong enough idea like the Emerald Necklace was, then it can take on all the temporal adjustments that come with large public projects and still succeed.

The Olympic Sculpture Park, for example, was an extremely complex project. It had multiple agendas–it was a public private partnership. The museum was interested in exhibiting art, the mayor was interested in tourism, and the community in open space. We were really surprised by the communicative power of our simple z shaped diagram- once we could show the diagram, developed as a rendering or as a model, people could support it because it was a very imageable idea able to address multiple constituencies and develop over time. That convinced us that the power of an idea—the diagram—drives a successful urban design project. If you don't have that clarity at the most fundamental level, then projects, especially in the public realm, are likely to be compromised.

CB:

The character or the context can influence the site, both at the beginning of the project, like in Seattle, but also in later moments, like in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In your process, what is the driver there?

MM:

One has to do with the initial gesture, or the strength of an idea that exists at the macro scale. And then, how do you take that idea and try test it out at multiple scales and through material choices that make a project pleasurable?

In the case of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, we had the idea that the building was a gateway, a threshold between the city and the garden. We were fortunate because land was very tight, and we didn't want to do an overt freestanding ‘object’ building in the middle of the garden. As we developed the project, we thought of the building as Janus-like. The idea of the building as transitional—from very architectural and urban to more garden-like. At the city edge, it would be overtly architectural, and part of the roof would be clad in copper, like its historic McKim, Mead and White neighbor down the street. The roof then transitions from copper to a planted surface to become landscape. This transition was further enhanced by pushing the building into the existing hillside, allowing it to partially dematerialize into the garden.

Another example is the pavilion at the Olympic Sculpture Park. We decided to clad the pavilion in pleated stainless steel to amplify what's beautiful about Seattle, the changing weather patterns. When it rains, the pleated surfaces reflect the headlights of the cars in a dynamic way. When its softly misting, the stainless steel is the color of weathered pewter. At night or on a dreary December afternoon, its silvery surface mirrors the city lights. Through material choices, we could focus on what it means to design in a changing climate like Seattle's and amplify Seattle’s unique characteristics.

ER:

What lessons have you learned from projects such as Hunter’s Point masterplan or other large scale architecture projects? Has there been consistent lessons learned that carry on to others? Or have they been more subtle in their shift?

MM:

We’re designers and inevitably want to design everything, but one of the lessons we’ve learned is that it takes reining in your ego to include unscripted spaces to be appropriated by the community they serve. Public space is often populated in entirely unanticipated ways and if a design for a space is crafted with a certain level of care, not over articulated, people can enjoy it in ways that were never imagined. During COVID we discovered at Hunter’s Point Waterfront Park that underserved communities had quite literally, a place to breathe—a safety valve that allowed families in large groups to find a common place of retreat and rejuvenation.

ER:

How do you think that freedom of space translates from Hunter’s Point to some of the other more programmatic projects that you work on?

MM:

For us there is an ethical position you must take that acknowledges the larger public. For example: the Nanotechnology Lab building for the University of Pennsylvania. Lab buildings are notoriously anti-urban. They're introverted boxes, anti-public, because they have issues of security and interior environmental controls. And for technical reasons, the Nanotechnology Lab building had to be set back from the street to avoid the vibration that came from a nearby train. We were concerned about this set-back because it would make the project even more anti-urban. Instead, we reshaped that set-back as figural space open to the street, a communal public green framed by the collection of lab spaces.

CB:

How does teaching circle back to your practice?

MM:

For me teaching and practice are reciprocal. The Urban Design Studio, as both a place of research and a place of invention, is the optimal collaborative environment that invites students to discover newly synthetic connections between landscape and architecture, infrastructure, and planning, as well as social and environmental realities. Each studio, and indeed each project in our office, has the capacity to become a catalyst that expands the potential for both local interventions and broader territorial transformations. Both my teaching and practice reinforce each other, recasting the questions of the reciprocity of infrastructure and the public realm.

ER:

What do you see are the biggest challenges facing urban design, as a discipline and through professional practice, in North America today?

MM:

Urban design is at a critical crossroads. Environmental issues, social issues, and issues of health have never converged in the same way that they are converging now. And precisely because urban design is hard to define, it can and must cross over and engage multiple disciplines with impunity. The beauty of urban design is that it can sidestep the administrative and systemic obligations of large-scale planning and the extremely specific and sometime limiting requirements that can constrain architecture. Given everything that we've been through in the last few years, and the unforeseen horizon of the next decade, urban design, by virtue of its scalar and disciplinary elasticity, is poised to accrue great value through its ability to address contemporary challenges. In that sense, I am very optimistic. I'm optimistic about design in general and urban design in particular because we can synthetically engage challenges that in the past have been addressed along purely disciplinary lines. The global design culture coming out of the industrial revolution was an advocacy of singular solutions—top-down solutions—often driven by economists or technocrats. We cannot assume that singular solutions will address the complexity of problems that cities and societies face today. Urban design, by virtue of its suppleness and lack of prescriptive definitional edges, offers powerful opportunities to construct value and meaning.