Recent economic meltdown notwithstanding, the past decade has many positive developments in the city’s architecture sceneone of which is the small, four-person architectural firm Johnsen and Schmaling. Its principals, Brian Johnsen of Chicago and Sebastian Schmaling of Berlin, met as grad students at UWM and have been working closely ever since. In 2003 they founded an architectural firm whose work has garnered praise from the American Institute of Architects and has been featured in numerous leading architecture journals in the U.S., Europe and beyond.
Last week they showed me around their small East-Side office, a former Schlitz tavern gutted and redesigned to accommodate a generously day-lit ground floor gallery space that serves as both a client meeting area and an exhibit area for the firm’s sumptuous presentation models. Upstairs is where the real work takes place, and where the large and ever-growing collection of study models residea testament to the firm’s irrepressible creative passion and a hands-on, tactile approach to design that sets them apart in a profession increasingly reliant on computer generated media.
How did you end up starting your own practice?
Sebastian: We both met at grad school and realized we had similar ideas. It’s very hard when you run an architecture firm. You have to balance what you want to achieve artistically with the money that comes in and make an executive decision about where you allocate those funds. And I think we always felt we wanted to put the time and money into the investigationbuilding models and studying things very carefullyand that is something that obviously that takes away from the profits. You can only do that if you are in charge, making that decisiondoing that extra work even if you don’t get paid.
Brian: Yes. If you look at these models we make, they’re all done in our own time, above and beyond the research of architecture.
S: That was the trigger to set up on our own practice, because we really need to investigate these things we are interested in. We can’t just let somebody else decide what gets done and lose the focus on the architectural issues important to us.
Was it difficult striking out on you own?
B: With anyone starting their own business it’s always this leap of faith and there are many risks one has to take.
S: We were very fortunate because Whitney Gould, who used to write for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel knew us from projects we had worked on previously and she wrote an article a week or two after we opened our doors, and we got two or three projects out of this within a month of the article coming out…
B: It’s the kind of publicity you couldn’t buy or pay for. She had appreciated so much of the work we had done previously and she thought it was really cool we were setting up our own practice. Its not everyday a smaller firm tries to establish itself in Milwaukee. It’s so over-weighted by these larger corporate firms.
Describe some of the pros and cons facing emerging architects in a city like this.
S: I think the pro is also a con. In a city like New York or Chicago and other more cosmopolitan cities there’s a lot of energy that feeds itselfa lot of mutual exchange. That doesn’t really happen here all that much. It’s not really the kind of architecture community that exchanges ideas and kind of feeds off the ideas of other parties. It’s more solitary. There are three or four good firms that work parallel to one another without much intellectual interaction and that’s a challenge but it’s also an opportunity because this place isn’t crowded. You can raise your voice and you’ll be heard more easily than in a place where there are hundreds of other talented local firms.
B: A lot of people looking for that accessibility to architecture find it in a small firm. A client looking to do a small, boutique type project is much more hesitant to approach these larger firms: thinking they probably only do big office buildings etc…
How do you think architecture scene has changed within the last decade or so?
S: I think the architecture client has changed since Calatrava. Just the idea that something so different can be built here shows people buildings can take up different forms. Whether you like it or not, it’s a building that really shook up the scene.
B: It was a milestone, a mini architecture renaissance here. The tail end of the Norquist era, where this new urbanism was reigning champ and regurgitating these neo-traditional structures.
S: And I think after that people were willing to take chances and find alternatives to the boiler-plate commercial architecture predominant here before.
How about in terms of production itself? Has the quality of buildings being made here greatly improved?
B: Mildly. It’s a hard thing to evaluate. It’s progressed but also there are so many people who try to build contemporary or modern architecture but don’t necessarily have the talent or tools to do it and it turns into a worse building than if they had actually looked at the building next door and taken a cue of how to make a new building…
S: Just because something’s not traditional doesn’t mean its good. What’s dangerous about that is just like Modernism was discredited after everybody tried copying Mies van de Rohe and the proportions weren’t right, the materials weren’t right, everyone just thought this is bland and bad copies of someone who actually got it. And that’s the same thing happening here, and throughout the world. Developers and architects know clients are more receptive to modern design but they can’t really make good pieces out of it and that creates bad buildings and discredits contemporary thought. It’s probably only a matter of time before people go back to the past…
B: Postmodernism. Or Neo-Postmodernism!
S: For Brian and me, the buildings we look at or that we take visitors are not buildings that were built here in the last 10 years.
What do you think of the idea playing the role of architect and developer?
S: The idea sounds good. Its great for architects to have more control and its very frustrating to see developers making millions of dollars and you get your meager architect’s fee and you have compromise to meet the needs of the client. But its funny when the architect actually wears the two hats at the same time. You create the same conflicts within your own firm. Of course, if you look at the profit suddenly you start compromising the architecture. What we actually find productive is that dualism between client, interested in good architecture but mostly in keeping costs under control, and the architect. There’s a constant back and forth in terms of pulling and pushing in both directions. You can probably come up with something better and more reasonable as a result…Architects have to be conscious of budgets but that’s something that should come from the client ...
B: I’m sure if you’d ask firms like that how this worked for them they’d have a more positive viewpoint. And we have seen architects who are successful at this and really make great architecture…
S: People have to make their choice. This is one business model for making money.
B: they have a different perspective on the futures as far as their age and what they want; we’re young and wanted to explore materials and all the great things of architecture rather than being pigeonholed.
How do you approach projects? What’s the first move you make?
S: It always starts with a very intense analysis of the site. Context is very important to uswhich is something almost everybody saysbut we’re looking for a deeper understanding of the surroundings. We build a lot of analytical models in which we explore landscape or urban context to see what we can extract from it. We spend a lot of time at the site watching, listening and trying to extract what is there beyond the pure visual things…Something that runs through our projects is that we are poetic rationalists. We look for the poetic reading of context but everything you see is very rational and disciplined. We use materials frugally and detail very carefully and there’s a certain austerity that carries through.
B: We’re not Gehry or Liebskind. We don’t create an explosion of architecture. It’s more of a subtle taking in of context that we try to weave together.
What do you predict will happen to small firms like yourself and recent graduates in the current economic climate?
B: It’s all so new, its really a week by week evaluation. We’ve had projects put on hold but also had other projects start up.
Does being smaller somehow better equip you to weather the turbulent times?
B: Well it’s a question of client base. If you don’t have the client base you’re going to have to get absorbed into a larger firm or find something outside the profession altogether, which is what I think is going to be the case right now because I think the larger firms are all down-sizing…One of the pros of a time like this in a way is that clients who’d normally approach larger firms but know these larger firms have larger expenses and fees associated with them are more willing to explore smaller firms.
S: A lot of the projects built in last 10 years or so were speculative and based on money people thought they had in the stock market and there were a lot of foundations sponsoring competitions. I think this is all going to change very dramatically. Everybody’s going to have to find something to stay busy.
To find out more about Johnsen and Schmaling go to www.johnsenschmaling.com.
