An Interview with Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Architect

Haegwan Kim  : So, first could you tell about your definition of success? 

Ann Pendleton-Jullian : I think the definition of success has changed drastically, in my life at least, in the past eight years, but I also don’t think it has settled yet. I think that the next five years will bring a monumental tsunami of change that we can’t quite begin to understand yet and so the definition of success is completely open. I was at MIT for fourteen years, and at that point, I thought that I had achieved a certain sense of success. Although how I defined success at that time may or may not be a norm. I’ve often been somewhat on the edge of my profession. For me, my profession – my work – includes practicing architecture, writing about architecture in terms of the theoretical, cultural, philosophical components of it – the poetics as well as the pragmatics of it – and also teaching. 
For me, teaching has never been specifically about teaching how to do things. It’s always focused on how I can take my students from point A to point B. Point A being their place of entry – where they come in which usually brings with it a certain understanding of problem solving and expectations of what an architectural education should be. And then try to get them to point B very quickly, even in the first year, where they can take more control over their own learning. They begin to understand that yes, problem solving is both the motivation and the framework for learning, but that it cannot, in design, be associated with the normative linear processes. That’s really what architectural education is about. I don’t think that I’m overly unique in that understanding, I think it’s just something that I’ve picked up or I’ve been trained into through my twenty some odd years as an architect.
I was at a great educational and research institution: MIT. It had tremendously bright students; they were, and are still, very entrepreneurial, perhaps slightly more entrepreneurial than students in other schools of architecture, and so educationally I was in a really good place in terms of a feeling of success. I worked as the associate head of the department for two years, so I was working on thinking about new pedagogical structures and things like that. This was a certain level of success, in my mind. In terms of writing, I have been involved in the past with writing about pedagogy and theory. One book about a school down in Chile was again slightly on the edge, but it had quite a following because it was a highly innovative type of school that combined all aspects of the discipline around a poetic agenda of identity.
I was also practicing. For me, my writing and my teaching and my practice were complexly interlocked. There was no separation. My practice was for many years with my husband, who was a very well known architect of international standing. He had worked for Le Corbusier, one of the fathers of European Modernism so he had developed as an architect in a very prestigious position. My practice with him was at a very high level and we won several competitions.  
I then started practicing on my own. I also used competitions to further my own researcher as an architect, and I was winning some and placing in others, and publishing. So, success was very much on three fronts at a certain level. I chose to bridge different things and success was measured by how much I was growing. So everything I did was attached to that as a priority: how much was I growing, how much was I giving back in terms of understanding to my students. My own work was a way of doing research on cultural issues, and perhaps a way of giving something back there as well.
I really enjoyed it and was getting a lot out of it and the students seemed to be responding. Then my view of the world and my motivations began to change – the world was changing.

I was working on a project in Bangladesh – the Asian University for Women Project – where I was involved with not just designing, but also setting pedagogical direction. And I was involved with fundraising. We were able to raise $15 million from the Gates Foundation as a first seed grant. I was involved with finding the right architects in Bangladesh to work with. I was involved with all aspects of the project, and concurrently, because of my teaching, we studied the first master plan and first buildings. Because of that project, I was invited to India to participate in a round table on education and innovation, one that was specifically looking at the role of technology and information technology in education in India. I was the only architect there. The participation in this discussion opened my eyes to how fast the world is changing around us and how quickly one needs to begin to adapt and how resilience really needs to become one of the defining concepts for now and for the future. So when I returned to MIT, although I was very happy, I felt that I could contribute more than I had been.
At that time, a search committee for the Directorship at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University was trying to recruit me for that position. I was very happy at MIT, I didn’t know what directorship meant. I didn’t know what my life would be if I took it on. But, at that point I just decided that I needed to, in a sense, as John Seely Brown and John Hagel would say I needed to orchestrate a different serendipitous future. I needed to put myself into a different situation.  
I was doing some work with games design in my studios, but I was doing it in a very experimental way. Until then it had been something I had worked on because I instinctually believed that it was a different way to approach design through a meta-process. On the urging of a non-architectural colleague, I began to write about it and about design as a way of approaching and working on the world. I’ve written three books in the past three years that look at design as a way of constructing more than a way to design things but also as a way of thinking and acting that leads towards innovation at many scales.
At that time, I literally threw myself into a completely unknown world in many respects. I went out on the edge of anything I’d known and started writing about topics I had not written about, I starting working on the administration and design of the school, and through the things I was doing and the people I was now meeting, I began to understand that for any of our futures now, success, to use your word, I think is dependent upon a concept of resilience. And if we talk about education, I think it’s dependent upon . . . if I do nothing else, giving my students the capacity for being elastic to stretch between different things – things that often seem unrelated – thereby developing resilience, as a disposition; helping them create a self-motivated scalable learning while understanding that skills are really REALLY important to a baseline, a foundation. And it is through our studios that these kinds of skills, capacities and disposition can be built – studios that are, by nature project based environments where a group of people work and learn together in a community of practice. And they do so by trying things and failing and trying again over and over, but in the company of their peers so that failure is not a disconcerting or frightening proposition.  
Our studios are communities of practices. This is the foundation of our education. But now we also need to completely open them up to the world. I’ve been working internationally for about 28 years now. It is a given that success in the future will be increasingly based upon the way one can pick up skills very quickly as one needs them, the way one can form deep and rich partnerships with people who have different skills, because you can’t do everything, and that these partnerships must be rich networks that are part of the global communities we are building and negotiating.
It’s all about building international networks. It’s all about international practice. Clearly, national boundaries have become less and less important as finding quality partnerships of talent becomes more and more important, and the capacity to listen and work in multicultural environments, to have a new kind of disposition where growth is essential, resiliency is essential, adapting, and even more critically, evolving is essential. One’s social networks are really important, but that’s only one platform despite that it is being seen as THE platform. Listening is, I think, even more important than broadcasting. None of this is substantive or constructive in terms of relationship – network – building if you’re just blogging and not listening. It’s hard to know how we will develop better listening skills, especially when we all speak different languages – and not just linguistic languages but also disciplinary and cognitive languages. But I do know that we’re going to see a tsunami of change in the future. And these last generations are genetically different than the others before them and so they are developing different skills and motivations despite ‘our’ systems of education.
Change as a rhetoric, especially one that is used to undermine things that do work, or as a way to justify all things new is its own dangerous drug. I think that critical resistance is important – and I emphasize critical not merely as a qualitative adjective but as a way of constructing thorough and rigorous analytical thought. It is important as a way of counteracting the change rhetoric that allows for sloppiness, or anything goes-ness, or do what you want to be different regardless of its impact within the larger social system you inhabit. I think that a critical edge is extremely important and its part of what I would call a toolset for success.
Again we’re going to have to listen very carefully and continually recalibrate the terms under which we, not necessarily define success, but the terms under which we set goals that pull us forward – how we pull ourselves incrementally and productively forward – what’s the next mile marker? what’s the next goal? within a changing and dynamic environment. This is very different than setting life goals, or even stage of life goals. It requires continual recalibration with a high level of sensitivity to what is really going on around you. This means tapping into all of one’s experience so far – both conscious experience and tacit experience – and at one moment in time applying that experience instinctually, with dexterity. You make a judgment and you set something in motion. There may be a bigger global success that you define for yourself as an orienting device, but you must not be afraid to change it, to recalibrate the big goals by the opportunities and challenges you find in-between and by the way in which you orchestrate the serendipitous events to affect change, to open opportunities, all of this so as to produce value in terms of one’s growth and one’s contibution.   

HK: You said that in the 21st century, we’ve got to be flexible against changes since the world changes drastically every day. So, the questions is: how we can be flexible?  

APJ: I want to change your word ‘flexible’. I use the world resilient, and the reason I use the word resilient is because resilience is coupled to elasticity. Elasticity is the capacity for something to stretch. But resilience means that after that thing has stretched, it returns, not to the same exact position it was in, or shape it held, but it returns to a similar but different position or shape. There are certain constants that one goes through life with. It’s one’s personality; it’s one’s talents; one’s social and intellectual possibilities. Of course, my personality and my talents are different than yours, and this gets at the foundation of answering of your question. My personality and my talents are different than another’s. Granted, they’ve been formed into the way they manifest themselves, through time and experience, but still, they’re different and I have to recognize that. So the notion of resilience is that everything I have to do as I stretch – and today that stretch may be very far, and probably even in multiple directions simultaneously – there is still a return to something self-similar to what I was. Although possibly unrecognizable on the exterior, it’s still a similar thing, but it’s a thing evolved. This idea of resilience is fundamentally important.  
So, how to do that, in this world today, has everything to do with the way we revise the way we do education. There is some amazing work being done in this area and lots of attention being given to assessing what is wrong and what doesn’t work and what we need to focus on. And there are some very good experimental educational projects that have been put in motion. But we certainly don’t have any answer yet – or any truly new models. I do believe that the studio environment, as we engage in it within architecture, is not the same as normal problem solving, and therefore it begins to provide something different – it adds something unique to the conversation. It’s really about looking at complex problems, stretching the boundaries, developing the skills you need, whether drawing skills or modeling skills or computer skills or thinking skills or multi-media skills. There are skills associated with my discipline, medicine has its own skills, law has its own skills. Today all of those skills are much more varied as digital media has matured enough to participate in a whole new way of thinking and making – using information that is both analytical and projective in a different way. This is really critical to recognize.  
Creative research around these new platforms is a different thing. Creative research for me is allied with complex problem solving. As an educator, I need – as any other discipline would also do – I need to create environments in which a group of students can come together and have a problem which is complex enough to drive questions that move the discipline forward. I also need to create mechanisms to get at that problem, not necessarily ways to solve it. By mechanisms I mean things that facilitate work, from frameworks of questions to methods of approach, to means for collating complex information visually across diverse disciplinary vernaculars.

HK: That’s really interesting. The final question, what would be your advice to achieve success, not just as a professional, but in general?  

APJ: I think the one capacity and skill that we’ve lost, that would be really important for achieving success in general, in anything, is to learn how to listen better. And by listening, I mean both listening with your ears but also a deeper sense of listening, often through doing and testing and metaphorically listening to the response whether it be a response of pushback or resonance, or even a dull thud (worse!). It is about understanding that one needs to put oneself in situations that are foreign to them, and unusual, situations where you might not be comfortable. But then, instead of approaching them aggressively, one needs to approach them with humility fueled by ambition to learn, as opposed to aggression to make something predetermined happen.  
Aggression is about being in control and success then is about making a mark; ambition around learning is about wanting to create a connection so as to learn something you could not independently. Creating a connection means that when I come away from that experience, I’ve got a whole new group of individuals that I can work with, professionally or personally. I understand them because I’ve listened to them, and I understand where they’re coming from. In the global world we’re building today, if we are not listening, and if we are not supporting each others’ risks, we’re not going anywhere: as individuals, as communities, as countries, as businesses.