Questioning Standards in Architecture

Co-Founder of CO-G and Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD, Elle Gerdeman is a talented architect, thinker, and educator with a long list of accolades including the 2018 Rotch Fellowship. Prior to CO–G, she was an Associate at Höweler+Yoon where she led architecture and public art projects in Dubai, Shanghai, and the US. This included FloatLab, a submersible ring designed to experience a contaminated river, which won a Progressive Architecture Award and the 2020 Empathy Pavilion in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. Elle has worked in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Rotterdam. She has taught studios at MIT exploring design through alternate forms of representation and authorship. Over a morning zoom, we chatted about thoughts on architecture and academia.

Elle Gerdeman

How did you get to where you are?

It’s funny because in a way I am going backwards in my trajectory. When I started out my career, I was striving hard to be professional - work at large firms, get experience on important projects, and learn everything about how to be the ultimate professional. As I’ve become more professional, my desired focus has furthered into the nuances of architecture, to incorporate more research and lend more of an art focused methodology. In a lot of ways, I am now trying to gleam off those past ways of working – learning from those offices but also veering on a just-off-architecture path. 

When did you decide to start your own practice?

I started it almost 2 years ago. I was asked to join the Harvard GSD, which acted as a launching point  in starting a studio. Academia allowed me to think about deeper issues in architecture and support my own endeavors in creating a practice. I was also lucky enough to have a building project almost off the bat. Through that process, I had to learn rapidly all the nuances of having a practice – from the admin side to the very particular construction side. I am learning how to thoughtfully tie the construction-heavy architectural with the theoretical;  things I am interested in learning and researching and how they confront issues whether ethical or tectonic. 

During your path, what were some challenges you have had and how did you overcome them?

Architecture tends to be a generalist field – you have to know everything about everything. On top of that, we are asked to have an expertise in something specific. It is hard to develop that specificity when you are asked to know everything. For me, it is very difficult to try and be strategic about knowing or positioning your role in something when the field is as broad as it is. Trying to strategize that clarity and put forth a certain issue that you want to embody is a challenge and is what I am currently pursuing. In order to do that, it takes quite a bit of time to research and re-look at your own work in that lens and understand how it has evolved, how it can evolve, and how future projects can continue to push that particular narrative forward. It is easy to try and design a project under the lens of, “I’m going to do this to answer the question in the best way possible, the most strategic way possible” – an aesthetic exercise. I am however increasingly interested in developing an architecture that plays a role in an ethical outcome. While it is hard to generally know everything, have a strong position, and be able to push that position through a medium of architecture - it, to me, is increasingly important and worthwhile.

Have you found any advantages or disadvantages of being a woman in architecture and academia?

My female predecessors have done a great job in setting the stage. In terms of academia, more and more effort has been made to organize reviews to ensure a balance of women and minorities on panels. There is still a ways to go, but it has been encouraging to see and partake in the efforts. I am also incredibly encouraged by the recent momentum towards inclusion and look forward to see and participate in its evolution. In practice, I have had the great advantage that my clients are progressive, sympathetic to these issues, and are thoughtful to counter these preconceptions.

If you could change a policy in architecture, what would it be?

I have been thinking about this topic a lot recently especially in light of COVID-19. Everyone has seen this rapid change to remote working. When I think about the design field with the hours that are required of many firms due to project-based work, people often need to work late. If you are able to shut down your computer at 6, go home, and then continue to work on a deadline in comfort, that would be great. I remember the feeling of staying late for a project and then having to go home - it felt like a security issue, as a female. I am imagining a workflow where one could be able to go home on time, finish a deadline, and not have to worry about threats when walking home or taking an Uber. 

What positive or negative qualities do you see in emerging professionals or recent graduates?

That question is a little hard. I am not able to compare young graduates coming out now versus before because I somehow (and perhaps inaccurately) feel like I am a young graduate myself. What I would say is that it is easy to be trained in a way where we are relying on software or products to teach us how to design a building. I have been thinking about the productization of architecture and the cataloguing of architecture. There is a trend to choose everything from a catalogue and implement it into a building. I would ask young professionals to continue to be curious in the way that architecture is built. Think through materials in a synthetic way so we can continue to invent and be thinkers in the way of building and not just specifiers. My advice is perhaps less in career trajectory but more about thinking through design as architects and artists. 

What advice would you give to someone who wants to look at architecture in that light but doesn’t know how to start?

I was on a review where the studio was asked to design their very first building, but not only that, to produce it fully in Revit. Especially being their first time designing a building,  they weren’t yet trained to think conceptually. I would love to get to the basics - how can you conceptualize something as simple as a wall - tackle that before the full building. For those students in that studio, I would say to question the standards. Of course, we have to follow codes, but that doesn’t mean we have to build in the typical way all the time. We can rethink the components that we are asked to use and even subvert them in some way. There is a thesis in how you frame a door. There are ways to get around the copyright of certain materials. Even if you think down to the basics of what something is doing; a roof is really trying to shed water, so how can you shed water in a way that is performing the act of it? How can you engage with  a particular element of architecture, not a product of architecture?

Any final tips for emerging professionals or students as well as other leaders?

I would suggest to people to really think about the making of architecture. There is a lot going on in the industry about thinking past the standard of how something is built. How can we think about how a building is being used? How will the building erode over time? Can we elicit an unexpected outcome? We know that glass facades only lasts for 25 years, but we just design it, send it off, and never look at it again. Are there facets of the way we build that might leave traces into the building and not just be the perfect image we see on our screen? I would hope that we could, as designers, start to get involved in that conversation a little bit further and think more about these holistic ideas of a building, from a particle of sawdust to the whole organization and over time.