Lina Ghotmeh on Ruin and Regeneration in Architecture

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Lina. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

LINA GHOTMEH: Hello. Very nice to see you again.

SB: Yeah, in the flesh.

LG: Yes.

SB: As I was thinking about your “archaeology of the future” concept, which we’ll get deep into in this conversation—I guess we could say it’s the core thesis of your work—I was thinking about this book called The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. It’s by the art historian George Kubler. Which, credit where it’s due, I actually discovered this book because of this podcast and having Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer, on the show. He had mentioned this book.  Anyway, it was published more than sixty years ago, 1962, and in it, Kubler effectively challenges the notion of “style” and considers various artifacts, objects, and images as part of a much larger and longer continuum. He challenges this traditional linear historical sequencing that I think so often we wrongly assume is how time works. He argues that the world exists in a constant process of mutation, innovation, replication.  First, I wanted to ask, are you familiar with this text? Second, it makes me think about how your approach to architecture is very much this idea of mutation, replication, innovation.

LG: Yes, definitely. This is a beautiful view on things. I think the question of time is very much linked to what we do as architects and, more specifically, to my process of thinking. I always think of time as a nonlinear process and the way of designing and thinking about space—in a way, that we are living in a cyclical time, rather than in a linear time, where the process is not about moving from one step to the other, but always coming back to the steps and digging back to what had occurred before. It’s always like a digging process where we look at the past, and we look at findings, to invigorate things that we have forgotten and give them new shape, and bring them into a new memory and a new, original being, as well. There’s maybe this relationship to a continuum. This view on time allows you also to see things in a much more modest way, in a way that you’re not constantly reinventing, or let’s say inventing, things from scratch. There is this notion of reinvention or notion of repurposing, rethinking. Even any original thought has remnants of something that had been there before you and the past becomes as important as the future. There’s a sense of Earthly relationship that is triggered from this view of time as a continuum, as a cyclical relationship to things.

SB: It got me thinking as you were saying that—but also just in turning back to this book I hadn’t looked at in a while—how so much of this connects back to the Earth and just thinking about how things fall back into the Earth. Also, relevant in today’s conversation—I swear these will be the only two random book references that I bring up.

LG: I love that.

SB: I’m currently reading this book called The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. It was published just a couple of years ago, and in it, the author makes this case, which is similar to Stewart Brand’s “whole earth” and “long now” concept. He makes the case for being “long-minded.” He calls for this ethical approach he dubs longtermism and writes, “In the early twenty-first century, the ‘now’ commands all attention, and any sense of past and future is filtered only through the events of the current moment.” I think we all feel that constantly.  I wanted to ask, how do you think about your work in this context, this “longtermism” idea, but in the face of the very present Now?

LG: That makes me think actually of Tim Ingold and this question where material and architecture as such is in a constant state of becoming, that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. You’re projecting constantly in what one is doing, but you’re also decaying. The long-termism view of things—I’m more interested in this notion of transformation and the notion of constant decay. Whatever you build new is constantly in transformation because the material is transforming. There’s a sense of the ruin that is very much present already in the new build that one is projecting. Nothing is certain in this way of thinking.

When you’re projecting in the long term, you’re already projecting into the ruinous quality of what one is doing. I love this thought because it makes you think about the intensity of what one is doing. What’s the intensity of the experience that an architectural space can bring and how the materiality and material of the space or of an architecture can manifest itself in a strong manner today or now as it’s experienced, but also is able to transform through time and is able to look at the future in a way that brings its essential qualities that were drawn in the past as well, at the time of conception?

It’s a bit of an abstract thought, but time is that, actually. Time does not exist without matter. It doesn’t exist without light. I’m deeply in that subject at the moment because I just published—maybe we’ll come to that conversation—the book Windows of Light. It really talks about this relationship between matter and time and light, in a way.

SB: Actually, in preparation for this, I watched your M.I.T. lecture. I think it was from last year? You talked about when starting any project, you’re always looking at Earth. So, again, back to that whole Earth idea and that if we continue our way of making as we currently are, we need two Earths, but we don’t have—

LG: More than two Earths now. [Laughter]

SB: We need three Earths, four Earths. It brings to mind for me this “Spaceship Earth” Buckminster Fuller idea. Could you talk a little bit about that, how you view this Spaceship Earth idea in your own practice?

LG: I always start my lectures with this view of Earth just like in the middle of the universe. There are twofold feelings to that. One is this view of Earth as small, and somehow as a realm that we can look at and that we can suddenly feel infinitely small, actually, on this space and on this ground and almost invisible when we view Earth from space. It puts things in context and perspective, and also asks the questions: How do we build? How do we inhabit that place? How do we relate to one another? What are the boundaries or maybe unreal boundaries that we build from one place to the other? How can we connect to one another through what we build in a way? Also, this question says that Earth does not need us to survive. We just need Earth to survive ourselves. There’s a sense also of maybe antithesis to Buckminster Fuller in this view, because it’s not about taming nature; it’s not about containing, even if, of course, the light structures are amazing, this idea of the dome, but yet it does contain Earth. It contains part of Earth and maybe I’m trying to look at how to free the ground and how do we create an opening and a woven relationship through space to Earth and to nature, where spaces are constantly porous, open to nature, allowing it to seep through, to be present and to break boundaries, rather than close boundaries.

SB: Yeah, to be of, not separate from.

LG: Yes, exactly. It’s the sense of continuum, of being part. We are constituted of nature. Somehow we are bacteria, we are what we eat, and all these invisible elements that constitute us—that Beatriz Colomina has also evoked in her book, Are We Human?—changes also the way you perceive space and your relationship to what you build. iIt pushes you to think of spatiality and architecture as more porous and more open to the living rather than enclosing and protecting us from that living—from us, at the end. [Laughs]

SB: This is a good segue, because I was thinking about how your practice—and you’ve spoken to this over time—but your practice could fit into these several, what we would call “A’s”: archaeology, art, and atmosphere. I thought we would start with archaeology. Which again, perfect segue, because your “archaeology of the future” concept really gets at this idea. It’s about an unearthing, a finding, a looking forward, but also doing so while grounded in the present and in the deep past. It’s this time continuum thing that you were talking about earlier. Before pursuing your studies in architecture, when you were a student at the American University in Beirut in the early 2000s, you had this deep interest in these subjects that led you basically to wanting to be an archaeologist before being an architect. Could you share the roots of this engagement with archaeology? How did this archaeology of the future concept form out of that early engagement?

LG: The branches. [Laughs]

SB:  [Laughs] Yeah.

LG: When I’m thinking about archaeology, it’s this field where one is brought to dig into earth, you’re already engaged with that material and you’re engaged into looking and finding artifacts into building stories constantly. Those stories sometimes could be true one hundred percent, or I mean, they get closer to a certain reality. They’re never one hundred percent real actually, because as an archaeologist, you’re constantly building through the traces and trying to build up a story from what has been found and getting closer to what has been there already.

I am really fascinated with that process of unearthing and constantly being close to the ground, trying to find those objects and trying to connect them into a story that makes sense of how the space got there. But also this question of disappearance and dissolution, actually, of objects and of artifacts and artifacts being those traces that talk about us in the future. 

This is very much linked to my upbringing in Beirut, as you know, because in this city that had lived through war, that had lived through many events, there’s always the ground that remains. Everything is demolished and then becomes ground at the end. It’s a city that talks about Ottomans, talks about Romans, Greco-Roman time. It talks about the Phoenician times, and all of this happens and is unveiled through archaeology.

These layers constantly fascinated me and made me think about our anchorage in the ground and anchorage of our identity in that earth. It’s a twofold thinking, one about culture, but another side is about matter, about the ground, about nature, and our relationship to that. As I was driven to build things or to look into the future, we’re thinking how this can relate to a future figure or future existence. Architecture was, for me, that pretext to look into the future, and hence is born this idea of how archaeology can be related to architecture. Maybe architecture is an archaeology of the future that is constantly drawing us into looking at what is present and at an environment in a larger sense of the word, looking at resources, at the ground, at traces that exist in a place and bringing us to research any place before any intervention. Yet it’s also drawing us into the future because there is a sense of newness—of something that will emerge in time as well. Then it became a way of thinking about my practice, of also integrating research as part of the practice and part of bringing a broader world of complexities into spacemaking and placemaking. That’s maybe how those ends are brought together, how archaeology makes sense in my practice.

SB: It’s a form of digging, almost. It’s interesting because, if you’re building pretty much anything from ground up, or even sometimes rescaling something that already exists, it still requires digging into the ground. [Laughs]

LG: Yeah, foundation.

SB: A foundation and building up, right?

LG: Yeah. Also, this idea of rooting and rooting architecture in a place where it talks about its climate and almost imagining that a building is growing out of its place like a plant, in a way. [Laughs]

SB: The human body comes into play here, too, both the idea of the archaeology of the body and the architecture of the body. This isn’t to sound pretentious—I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious—because I think just going back to your roots here, you were also very interested and passionate about biology and genetics and how things, including people, transform in time. How do you see genetics and biology intersecting into this archaeology-architecture conversation?

LG: [Laughs] It’s very much linked to the question of the living, actually, and the fact that our bodies contain the world as well. The space is actually contained in our body and the space that surrounds us contains us as well. There’s a sense of infinitely large, infinitely small that is constantly at play, actually, and maybe this is why, now I’m thinking about it, I’m always interested in both the architectural scale but also the scale of the object and the detail that is present in every space. This idea also of organicity and of relating to the environment and to an architecture as another skin, as a continuity to our flesh as well, interests me. Maybe the questions of interiority—and here we enter into gender and space. [Laughs] How can we make architecture through the interior, not necessarily as an interior design, but through interiority as well, through this intimacy of experience that one can live in a realm? 

Genetics is about coding, is about transformation. In genetics, when you’re bringing two different genes together and then you’re bringing two qualities into one, then there is this transformation and transmission that is happening, like a genealogical tree. That idea of branching, of looking at past elements and bringing them together in, like, a cadavres exquis way is something that interests me, and that brings into play an architecture that solicits memories, that talks about what had been there. For example, when we are looking at one of the buildings that I realized with my atelier, the Hermès workshops, people—when they inhabited the place—they were thinking there’s a sense of memory, there’s a sense that this place had been there before, but yet it’s very new as well. This combination between what is there and what is new, things that have been talked about with Gaston Bachelard and the phenomenology of space explain why we experience places in a strong way.

SB: Actually this connects to the second “A,” which is art. We could say art and craft, I suppose. There’s definitely a craft element at play here. I want to start with art because photography, drawing, painting, these are all tools in your practice and have played a key part of how you work from the start. You’ve also collaborated with many artists and artisans and craftspeople over the years—actually, including most recently, the Columbian textile artist Olga de Amaral, for her exhibition last year at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. I was looking at how, in conceiving that exhibition, you painted these beautiful watercolors. It was almost like being inspired both by the building itself, this incredible Jean Nouvel glass structure, and then also by Olga’s textile works, which are these really multidimensional pieces. Could you talk about drawing and painting and how essential they are to the architecture that results—or in the case of this project, the exhibition design?

LG: I think art brings emotions into both the scale of architecture, but also the process of making architecture. I believe that the emotional process is very important throughout the making because it engages you with what one is doing. When you’re painting, there is a sense of relationship with the hand. Here, we talk about the power of the hand, what Juhani Pallasmaa also had—

SB: The Eyes of the Skin, a great book. [Laughs]

LG: The Eyes of the Skin, yeah. It is really like this power of the hand to connect to space and also to be connected to the environment as such. When drawing, there’s always something new, something unexpected that happens that you haven’t planned. There is no longtermism. There’s unexpectedness that happens. There’s a sense, almost, that the universe is present when one draws and when you have this watercolor seeping on the material, on a page.

SB: You can only control so much, right?

LG: Yes. Especially with watercolor. The material is there to transform your intention as well. It’s a meditative process that allows you to fall in love, also, with architecture and with the process of designing. That’s what I love about it. I mean architecture, if it’s able to convey art and to convey emotions, it’s a way of elevating further architecture. It is a functional realm. It’s a place for inhabiting, but also for inhabiting in an extraordinary way that allows your senses to be present and to feel, again, your body in full, in the realm where—

SB: I mean, we’ve all felt it, this sense of awe that washes over you when you walk into the Pantheon in Rome or—

LG: Or Luis Barragán.

SB: I’ve even experienced it in a funky building like the Pompidou in Paris. There’s still that feeling of just: Something extraordinary is taking place here.

LG: Yeah, as if you are in front of an amazing natural scene as well if we can get close to those feelings that we get when we are in wild nature or a beautiful scenery—that brings us closer to our essence as beings and natural beings, I think. 

Before I talk about the exhibition itself, there is a lot of relationship to time because you started with time. The question of threading and of making very much embeds time, embeds us and our universe as well. There’s this cosmic quality, meditative quality in Olga’s work, and yet very architectural quality as well, with this constant threading geometric patterns that arise. I saw almost a landscape that rises from every piece and I wanted to highlight that and to work rather with the pieces as spaces, as pieces that are able to generate in-betweenness and specialties in the way they are positioned and in the way just by bringing slate rock into the gallery, it transforms the way we perceive the work. 

The whole exhibition is divided into three main spaces. The ground floor, which is a big open space that is related to the garden where we have her largest works, and it’s a space that is related to the garden. The idea was to bring the garden in and to bring in new elements, which are those big boulders made out of slate stone. The presence of those boulders completely transforms our perception, actually, to the works. It brings us into a surreal landscape that is made out of those dark black stones that anchor all the pieces onto the ground, as well. From there, you move into another room where you are experiencing the sky and you’re experiencing a falling colorful rain. Those are her works, named “Brumas.” They’re just all colorful threads and they’re suspended there in a box that is semi-reflective, and you’re really suspended in a colorful cloud in that space. 

Then, after, you’re invited to go into the underground and basement of the Fondation Cartier. For me, the underground is a womb. It’s a place of protection. I grew up in Beirut with the war and going to the basement was a way to protect oneself. It’s a place that emphasizes this womblike quality where everything is curved and where these pieces become dreams that you encounter and you’re just walking between and [you] discover her fascination with gold where she started really making part of her work, like these golden leaves and golden patterns. The more and more you move, gold is more present, and then you end up with the “Estelas” in the last room. They’re really the most rigid of her works, and they’re just standing again in a circular space. That brings you back to Earth. It is a journey through time, through light, through material, and through also an intersection between art, architecture, and craft.

SB: I’m sure every listener is now going to want to see images of this.

LG: Well, it’s going to Miami. [Laughs]

SB: Oh, good. 

LG: But not the same scenography.

SB: We’ll put images on our timesensitive.fm website. Everyone listening, I’m sure after that beautiful description by Lina, you all want to see these images. They’ll be on our website. [Laughs]

Let’s talk craft really quick because so much of your work, it’s a material study, in a way, and it’s thinking about materials almost as memorials of where they came from. I think also about this idea of craft embedded in fabrication and construction. I’m thinking here of your textured-concrete skeleton of the Stone Garden in Beirut or the Hermès project you mentioned earlier, which has this incredible artisan brickwork, these five hundred thousand bricks that were made locally. Maybe just talk a little bit about this artisanal quality to what you do, which I think, sadly, is all too rare in architecture these days, but can really be done thoughtfully and in a way that we would call sustainable, actually.

LG: Mmhmm. Craft, for me, is a way to bring back humanity in architecture and in our built environment, and also to think about construction and architecture as a way of perpetuating the knowledge that is embedded in our hands, our ancestors’ work, and to allow it to be present in any building, and to take the building also as a pretext to continue that construction or that process of writing our book, in a way. 

When looking at Beirut, for example, this idea of emerging a building and of course through our technologies today, but yet bringing a skin that talks about the hand—the hands of many migrants that are present today in Lebanon or Beirut, valuing their presence and their work—was also about engaging them in this process of making and of conception and allowing the workers and the artisans to be proud of what is built. It really reconnects the makers to what is made. I believe this is very important because we have to be engaged in our environment, in what we make. There’s a sense of care, a sense of respect that arises, and a sense of, maybe, sustainability, environmental awareness that is arising with that. It’s about technology, sustainability, and the environment at large, brought together at once, when we are engaged with craft. It’s not a backward-thinking mode. It’s very important for me that architecture be a way of bridging between technology and our capacities as humans, and valuing what we humans are able to do and how we can push further that capacity in the future. Building a workshop with five hundred fifty thousand bricks was also about optimizing the number of bricks with the structure because it’s about building structurally with bricks and using our calculation tools, technology to have the smallest or the thinnest arch possible. It’s also pushing our knowledge today and allowing that to push our way of constructing and, at the same time, bringing masons that have forgotten how to build with brick and allowing that knowledge to be present again. That emanates a sense of beauty, at the end, that is related to an act of sustainability, of durability, ecology, but also of the act of making with time. Threading, almost a building, almost like Olga de Amaral’s thread.

SB: Well, it reminds me, too, of your watercolors and just this thinking about the joy of creation. A.I. can only do so much for us, right? At the end of the day, there are still things that A.I. cannot do, and those are those deeply innate human caregiving qualities. I would argue that, at the level of architecture, if we’re talking about caregiving, that’s where craft comes in. The care that you take in your process and translate that to the builder or the mason or the brickmaker, the bricklayer.

LG: I think A.I. is a revolution. We’ll use it, and it’s really amazing if used in a good way. It will transform our lives; it will better our lives. At the same time, I think it’s very important to remember what makes us humans and how we can invest in that further, how we can push our humanity further and maybe allow A.I. to be a tool that allows us to invest better in what makes us human. Our relationship to matter is very much one that is specific to us that A.I. could not replace—and will not replace. How do we relate to one another as human beings, as well as as matter—one another as bodies—but also how to relate to our environment and to caring about this living ecosystem that surrounds us? There are many creative ways to build that continuum, and I think we should invest in that knowledge and build further that ecosystem. Hopefully, A.I. can help us do that.

SB: Now, just to return to the third and final “A,” atmosphere, which the architect Peter Zumthor has written so beautifully about in a book called Atmospheres. He writes about the emotional response or release that can come from certain material presence or when a coalescence of things combine in space to just create, more or less, awe. What’s your personal definition of atmosphere, and how do you go about realizing it in your projects?

LG: Talking about the book of Peter Zumthor, I really loved the passage when he talks about himself as a child. There’s a moment where he opens, I think it was the door of the kitchen or the space in his own home, where he felt the atmosphere of that space. I believe that atmospheres are about bringing you back to become a child again. There’s a sense of you becoming again, just a kid or child, enjoying—really, deeply enjoying—what surrounds you and engaging you to play. Play means also touching materials, being joyful in where you are and feeling that intimacy of space that is present, whether in a public space or in your private place. That atmosphere is really emerging from that moment, from that sentiment, but it’s also possible because of the material quality of a place, and also the time embedded in that place, the time of care, the time of making that environment—and the relationship between light and matter, as well. This is where we go back to the importance of light as a matter itself.

SB: Well, tell me about your youth. You were born and raised in Beirut and remained there through your studies. Your mother was trained as an architect, your father was a contractor. Paint a picture of this upbringing. Your parents, your family’s home, your life in the city, and I guess more broadly the life of the city.

LG: It’s a Mediterranean city, so the light is very much present there. It’s this dark light, it’s a light of contrasts, also, that brings on materiality and beauty in everything, even in a left-out corner. This is a site that is very much present in me, that desire of light and of colors that is brought from this light hitting a surface, but also the deep blue in the sea that is present and nature that brings beauty even in the most chaotic of cities. 

I lived between Beirut and the mountains, because my father is from a small village up in the mountains. This idea also of being both in a built space and a dense urban environment and suddenly being on a mountain and surrounded by green…. It’s a site that is deeply embedded in what I do. But also the sites of constructors doing vernacular architecture through stone, for example. Chiseling stone, building by hand is very much something that I grew up looking at and seeing the built spaces happening in front of me. It did affect the way I perceive architecture today, naturally. 

Going back to light, I think in a context like Lebanon or in Beirut, you have the four seasons. You also see light in different gradations and different colors and how it affects the atmosphere of a city and of an environment. 

There’s always a desire to build and to think of architecture as a way of bringing people together because I lived through…. I was born in the 1980s, so I lived through the years of the war as a child. For me, architecture and looking at the city was a way to bring things together: How can I mend or heal what I’m seeing? How can I use architecture as a way of bridging and of connecting rather than degrading and demolishing?

SB: It’s not lost to me that your parents have…. It was like having this hybrid architect-builder mindset in the house around you.

LG: My mother studied architecture when I was a child. She never practiced as an architect but, growing up, I saw her doing her models. Actually, when I was a child, I didn’t want to be an architect. I wanted to be a doctor. [Laughs] Genetic medicine. Or an archaeologist. But somehow I spent all my childhood drawing and drawing, and I had so many drawings all the time. Somehow I was meant to be an architect, but I didn’t know it. Being surrounded with professionals, whether my father or my mother, definitely influenced my insight on space and architecture.

SB: Was there a building or buildings in Beirut or in Lebanon that stood out to you as you were maybe beginning to form this interest in architecture and in the built environment?

LG: What stood out first was not necessarily constructions or buildings, but more natural elements that you can see in the city. For example, the Pigeon Rock in the Mediterranean Sea, this rock that is just standing in the middle of the sea, was something that constantly opened my imaginary. It felt like a built structure in the middle of the sea. Of course, afterwards, Beirut is full of those structures that are completely left out. The Burj el Mur, like this tower that is sitting in the middle of the city that is almost like an observation tower and completely uninhabited because it was built and then the war broke and it never got inhabited—like this concrete shell, or the cinema that is this egg that is suspended in the village. You have these Brutalist architectures that are present in the city—or the Wardi building by Khalil Khouri, that has an amazing sculptural presence. They are present there. They’re like ghosts, actually. They’re just concrete structures and just sitting there. They have a massive presence and they always talk to me, in a way.

Beirut has a lot of modern architecture. You could see a lot of reminiscence of Modernism, and that’s very inspiring, as well. I would say also what always inspired me are natural elements or natural forms that existed, whether in the city or beyond.

SB: I think—true to your archaeology interests—it is really a city upon cities, right?

LG: Yes, yes. It has constantly built upon itself, so you’re constantly unveiling. When a new building has to be emerged in Beirut, you always find some archaeology underneath. Of course, unfortunately, there’s no protection plan, so they disappear. At some point, I was taking photos of those moments of disappearance and trying to hack them. It’s fascinating to see those.

SB: In 2001, you left Lebanon for this internship with Jean Nouvel in Paris. You later also worked for Norman Foster, in London. I wanted to ask, reflecting on it now, how you think about your time working at the studios of these two architects and how they shaped you early on.

LG: Well, that was twenty-one years ago, but I think at that time, it was a very short experience, in reality. It was just between 2003 and 2005. Then I won the Estonian National Museum, in 2006. It was a two years’ time of experience, and it was mainly getting to know two different ways of working: the atelier of Jean Nouvel, which was more like a bit more artisanal, but also that of Foster, with a great organization. I was lucky to meet them both and really see the processes of work.

It got me to discover two cities, Paris and London, and get attached to both of them and somehow realize myself in terms of my own identity, realize that I relate, basically, to both cultures, whether French or Anglo-Saxon culture, in addition to my Lebanese-Arabic roots. Maybe, architecturally speaking, I don’t know whether—and I’m not sure I have any influence from one another—I think I was rather bringing my own architecture through my upbringing in Beirut and through what I had built up throughout my studies at the American University of Beirut.

SB: Well, you mentioned the Estonia National Museum—which, I think, for the listeners who aren’t familiar with this story, I just want you to share it here. It’s this remarkable tale of three young moonlighting architects, who put this proposal together in an open competition and, maybe miraculously—and also not, because it was such a great proposal, but—the project won. There’s not many cases of this. You could point to the Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, them being young architects, or a young Maya Lin winning the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This is extremely rare that moonlighting architects would win an open competition. It’s gone on to change the course of your life. So, I guess, yeah, share this story in brief and what occurred.

LG: Well, that was in 2005, when I was working at Foster + Partners, and during the break, I found this competition for the Estonian National Museum. I was 25 by then. I looked at this amazing competition for a national museum in Estonia. Estonia at that time just joined the European Union, in 2003, [Editor’s note: Estonia joined the European Union in 2004] and in 1991 it had broken from the Soviet times. For them, it was a way to talk about identity and to build their own museum where they can display their ethnography collection. It was a beautiful brief, also, that questions notions of ethnography and relationship to collection and what is a museum, what is a national museum today? I was very intrigued. I thought, This is amazing.

Also, it’s a context that has lived through war. The site itself has one of the largest Soviet ex-military airfields. It talks about that painful history as well. Along the same time, I met two colleagues, working one of them at Jean Nouvel and another one, another office in London, one Italian, Dan Dorell, and Tsuyoshi Tane, a Japanese architect. Then I invited them: “Well, let’s do this competition together, and let’s see what happens.” We’d barely met. [Laughs]

SB: Three young architects, not even a formalized firm, applying. [Laughs]

LG: Yes, not even super, let’s say, close. I just wanted to do this and do it in a group. That was really fun. We started doing this project, and then we submitted our proposal. Early in January 2006, I got this call that we won this project, and I was in front of Centre Pompidou, as you were mentioning that building. It was crazy, 26 years old, we win this project. Of course, nobody believed us that we will build this project. When I won, together with my colleagues, everybody was telling us, “Oh, don’t leave your jobs. You will never build this project.” I was like, “No, we will build it,” like risk-taking. I’m afraid of nothing. 

[Laughter]

We just set up our practice, arrived in Estonia. They were very surprised to see us. They thought we were an Estonian team who won this project because it was very contextual as a project and then we fought together with the director of the museum to make this happen. So, it took ten years to build this project. It was a really amazing journey. It’s a forty thousand square meters project, a ninety million euros project. It was a great way to start a practice. You have a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of what it is to be an architect. Generally, architects finish their profession with such a large project. I started mine with this.

[Laughter]

SB: Well, we talked about this in a previous conversation we had, where I found it fascinating that this building literally takes off from the ground, and so, too, did your practice.  [Laughter]

LG: It was very controversial when we won because the whole idea was to come up with a building that connects to that airfield and transform that airfield into a ground for manifestation, for the museum itself, and also to retransform the history.

SB: Yeah, literally rising out of this dark past, World War II.

LG: Exactly. There was a lot of polemics, whether this airfield had to be completely erased or why should we connect to it. It was all about the role of architecture to become urban, to regenerate its site, and to talk about the past, rather than enclose itself as an independent building of its site.

SB: When I think about this building and when I think about your work at large, it really makes me think about poetry. There’s this poetic to it and maybe this is too on the nose, but early on, you also designed this proposal, never realized, for the Rimbaud Museum in France.

LG: Ahh, yes, you remember.

SB: This was a space meant to showcase the life and work of the nineteenth-century French poet. Did that engagement on some level get you thinking about this intersection of poetry and architecture and maybe perhaps lead you—at least in some philosophical sense—down these avenues of poetry and architecture?

LG: That’s a beautiful question because I always feel like architecture is about poetry. There’s a textual quality to architecture, poetry in the way that it is about relating words sometimes in an abstract way, allowing you to reinterpret and to live things as you hear them in a way or as you experience them. I think that is also linked to Arabic as a language. The more I move on, I realize also that Arabic as a language is very rich and very metaphorical. It has multiple facets of meanings, and there’s a sense of poetics that is very much embedded in that language. For example, the word love has maybe more than twenty-five ways of saying the word love, and that multiplicity is very much present in my culture and in the way I perceive space, I make space, as well, and that maybe brings also that poetics. 

I think the experience of designing that unrealized project for Arthur Rimbaud is really also interesting. Because Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were in love together and the whole story was about this poet that is constantly in torture. He’s always flying away and running away from Charleville-Mézières, which was his original city and where the museum had to be built. There’s a notion of escape that is constantly present both in his poetry and in the museum itself, and had to be translated in space. The whole space is this Escher-ian space, these multiple levels that open up with staircases interlinking one another, but also the floor of it opens to the water because it’s really set on the river, so it’s open. There’s no ground. There’s always an escape route into that place. It also echoed the poem “Le Bateau ivre”—“The Drunken Boat.” [Laughter] It intersects in that project more in a literal and direct way, poetry and architecture and history.

Well, here, let’s talk about your new research book, Windows of Light, which gets into poetry for sure, also how light impacts things biological, astronomical, architectural. This book doesn’t come out of nowhere, I should say. This notion of light and engagement with light is so much a part of your practice. It’s a key focus of your work. In fact, you’ve even done light-specific projects. I’m thinking of your 2015 “Light in Water” installation or the lighting installations you were tapped to create at The Okura Tokyo hotel, which are extraordinary. Tell me about your time engaged in light and in lighting, and in thinking about it, crafting it, installing it, using it as an architectural and atmospheric device.

Just a few words about the book. It’s really this research book. It talks about the process of my practice. It’s always a research-driven process, so the whole book is really research on light, a series of field notes that plunge us into an archaeology of light, where we start looking at the origin of light or how light was captivated throughout time, looking at how we as human surveyed light, and then at moments where light does not exist in some places like in Beirut and maybe more like poetical approach to things, light through material and through making.

This notion of light and this research really made me realize how much space and how much matter is very much linked through light. We perceive our spaces through light constantly and through light and darkness and darkness is as important as light. The whole book opens with this image of the CMB imagery of our universe, which is this cosmic microwave background, and this photo that represents the afterglow of the big bang. It’s an amazing photo. It really talks about the moment of the creation of the universe with the big bang, where the whole universe was almost the same temperature. It also makes you realize that these particles, these fossils of the origin of the whole universe, are still surrounding us all the time. It’s mind-boggling, actually, and it plunges you in the phenomenology of space and emphasizes further the importance of this relationship between material and light to generate a sense of time constantly. 

When I’m designing, I’m always looking at natural light, artificial light, and darkness intertwined together, whether it’s through a building in Beirut like Stone Garden, where there is this measuring of the opening and the window and its relationship to the outside. It’s not a glass building. It talks about the Mediterranean climate where it is, and here the window becomes a device that frames the outside and transforms the outside into photography almost towards the apartment, as if you’re looking at the city as framed photos within your personal space. Or whether it is in the project of Hermès, where the light is flooding inside the ateliers with the northern diffused light because they’re working the leather. It’s about the precise light inside the space. Or through moments of scenography or exhibition design where artificial light or natural light play a moment of creating heightened atmospheric moments in that sense where you’re plunged in a special perception of an object in front of you. More specifically, in The Okura Heritage Wing, it was this light presence of the lighting fixture, in that case with this Okura “wisteria” that is suspended.

SB: Right, two thousand four hundred pieces of purple crystal.

LG: Yes, they talk about the wisteria, which is this flower that is very much the symbol of this hotel, as well. Another lighting fixture that I did was also in Palais de Tokyo. The whole space was orchestrated by light.

SB: This restaurant.

LG: Yeah, the restaurant with two hundred fifty or three hundred pendant lights. They create the intimacy of the whole space, thanks to those lights actually.

SB: Maybe to finish the conversation, we should morph this into the subject of lightness. We’ll go from light to lightness and back to where we began, with this whole-earth, long-view thinking conversation. Particularly, I’m interested here in your research into zero-carbon or low-carbon spaces, which, given our climate emergency that we’re in, I think it’s really the only way forward, much as people would like to think otherwise. [Laughs] 

Could you speak to some of your projects in this area in particular, whether that’s your zero-carbon hotel concept, or the Hermès workshop in Normandy we talked about, or even the Serpentine Pavilion from 2023? These are all designed to minimize waste and have this sense of renewal and longevity embedded into their very nature and structure.

LG: In these thoughts, I’ve always believed that for architecture to exist, it has to be worthwhile. It has to have a positive impact on its environment—in all senses, in all fields, both as a space that one enjoys being in, but also as a structure itself. Its built materiality should have a positive impact rather than a heavy carbon footprint. Otherwise, it’s not worthwhile existing. 

In this thought, one has to think in a holistic way. So how do you build low-carbon, energy-positive construction? As such, the workshops for Hermès is the first low-carbon, energy-positive building in France. That pushes you to have a holistic thinking to both think of the material with which we are building—the brick is coming from the earth of the site, and is made just really few kilometers away from the site—and what bio-sourced material we can use. That’s beautiful because it allows any construction to be really connected to nature and have a sense of beauty, as well. 

When we talk about bio-sourced materials, we’re talking about materials that could become earth again, with time. They are everlasting, but they can also be biodegradable at some point. It’s also a way of thinking, in a smart manner, how to design, how to be more bio-mimetic, but also how to compact the building, how to respond to the wind direction and ventilate, take advantage of the sun direction, really elements that we used to always think about, but maybe our cities do not allow us anymore to do it as such.

It’s a beautiful and complex system of relationships that should be established to have this positive impact. The result is an architecture that is more perennial, that really wants to be there and where you want to be in it, actually, and that respects the human. This mode of thinking is also one that refuses waste. The question of waste—where everything is a resource, where every hand has a role in our society—that’s an important shift to make. It’s a very urgent one, where we could act as one. Whenever you do something in one place, it has an impact in another place—we saw that in Covid times, we’re seeing it today with other events that are happening. 

It’s very urgent that we think about our earth as an ecosystem and us as interrelated—that any action you do, it bounces back to you again. This thinking is also something that I wanted to bring in the Serpentine Pavilion, by making a place of togetherness, a place where people are invited to be around one table in a circular manner. The structure of the pavilion is built with wood, so it’s a lightweight structure. It’s meant to be a temporary pavilion that is where you build it and then unbuild it and put it somewhere else.

This thinking is always present in my work. Now in Osaka also, we are finishing the pavilion for Bahrain for the Osaka Expo. The whole building is like a boat structure, built by those wooden elements that are present in Japan and more specifically close to Osaka. They are not engineered wood, so they can be used again. It’s just about building and then dismantling and using the whole construction again. It’s about no waste.

SB: I think that serves in an interesting way as a metaphor for the more “permanent” projects that architects do. I love this idea that architects could—and I think should; it will become necessary to design with this—to go back to your archeological mindset, do exactly that. Meaning that, one day, what an architect builds will eventually, at long last, fall back into the earth. So why not design buildings as a form of ecology, as this idea of eternal return?

LG: Yeah, definitely. I love that. I love what you’re saying, and I think, Spencer, it’s really about also how do you build in an ecosystemic way? It’s not necessarily only about architecture or the architect. It’s about building partnerships, because that’s where an ecosystem is important. It’s about a client and a partner that really wants to do that, that fights with you and goes all the way. It’s not only us as architects that are responsible for our built environment. We build very little today in our cities and built world. We need those partners. We need people who have a value system and who want to make a difference.

SB: Thank you so much, Lina. This is really great to be able to sit down with you at long last.

LG: Thank you so much. That was really fun and nice to talk to you, as well.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on February 12, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, Kylie McConville, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Kimberly Lloyd.