“Road trip!” exclaimed Richard Quittenton, an architectural designer, with enthusiasm. We were standing near the Rialto Bridge among a group of recent graduates from the University of Venice, laurels in their hair, when I told him that, after visiting the Biennale in that city, I was going north to look at examples of what I consider imaginative forms of reuse and renovation for a book I am writing. Quittenton had traveled with me before between Taliesin West and Taliesin when he was a student there and I the School of Architecture at Taliesin’s president. “Why don’t I come along for a few days? I need to get up to Amsterdam anyhow,” he suggested. It seemed like a good idea to me. I had always enjoyed our conversations and his company.
When we got to the airport a few days later to pick up the rental car, however, they had given away the automatic transmission vehicle I had reserved. As someone who learned how to drive in the U.S., I was at a loss. “Well, why don’t I just come along for the whole trip?” Quittenton proposed. Being Canadian, he had no problem with stick shifts. We made a deal: He would drive and get to see some good architecture, and I would pay for the hotel rooms and meals.
So, we set off from Venice, past Verona, where we visited Carlo Scarpa’s renovations to the Castelvecchio, which I consider to be one of the main precedents for the work my book will be surveying, but which I had never visited. We crossed the Alps into France, stopping by a little chapel called Ronchamp (where Quittenton, brought up as a devout Catholic and with a brother who teaches theology, stood in awe and lit a candle for his deceased father). We continued into Belgium, then on to the Netherlands and back down through the industrial heritage sites of Germany to end up, after a final night in Vicenza drinking a spritz under the shadow of Palladio’s basilica, back in Venice.
Quittenton traveled as light as I was encumbered by too many clothes and books: He had a single, small backpack, a well-thumbed copy of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra peeking out of its side pocket. He had just resigned his position as a designer at the Berlin firm Sauerbruch Hutton, where he wound up after a stint at Herzog & de Meuron, and was on his way to Bangkok, where he takes up a teaching position in the fall.
Much of our conversation centered on his career, both in practical and philosophical terms. It seems that for many of my more talented and ambitious students, the old notion that you either work your way up through one or two firms, or branch off quickly to design the proverbial house for your family or a store for a friend, is as dated as most 20th-century career paths. Quittenton, who has also worked for MVRDV in Rotterdam, Urbanus in Shenzhen, and Morphosis in Los Angeles, has flitted around the world and was now starting something like his own firm. What that meant, however, was unclear.
A few months prior, a friend of his who is a video game designer had pinged him. This designer had been approached by the organization overseeing NEOM, the 100-mile long, 50-story tall city now under construction in northwestern Saudi Arabia, to design two villas as part of the development’s extension on the rocky coast. Not having architecture training, he had called in Quittenton. Their designs, two towering constructions that to me seemed like a mixture between the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mark Foster Gage and, indeed, a video game, were well received, and now NEOM wanted them to propose themselves as a team to take on larger designs. Quittenton spent every free minute and most of the nights on our trip putting together a team and a proposal, submitting his documents on the final day of our adventure.
At the same time, he was following up on a conversation he had started with a woman he met on an airplane. A motorcycle touring enthusiast, she wanted to turn a castle in Germany she owned into a stop-over point for her and similar groups’ trips. As a start, Quittenton and some of his friends at Sauerbruch Hutton (who were also former classmates at Taliesin) had designed a few tiny homes, which the client loved and was now shepherding through the local building approval process. More odd jobs beckoned on the horizon: Quittenton had recently consulted with another friend on the redesign of Air Canada’s airport lounges, for instance. None of these commissions were what you might consider traditional.
Nor is Quittenton’s nascent firm. It will be more of a loose agglomeration of friends, some from the various firms at which he has worked, some from the Berlin club and gallery scene, some from Taliesin, and some from his native Toronto. There will be no actual office, just a series of agreements on how to divide up work, payment, and credit. Might it be a ‘real’ firm someday? Perhaps, but maybe not. With everybody on different continents, and the potential jobs of such a heterogeneous sort, there might not be a need for or even a possibility of a fixed team. I was not surprised: More and more I see people working together across countries and continents, coming together for a competition or commissions. I have done it myself, entering competitions with a friend in San Francisco, a collaborator in Taiwan, and former students spread throughout the world.
So, what would be the legal format for such a firm? Quittenton shrugged. It would consist of specific agreements. He had learned how to write contracts at Taliesin. And, what about the firm’s name? I thought I had the perfect one: “Q,” the first letter of his last name. It had overtones of international intrigue (Q is a figure in the James Bond movies), and also indicated an open question in several languages: the Spanish word “que” or the French word “quoi.” Finally, it sounded both scientific and enigmatic. “Nice, but no,” was Quittenton’s response. “It is much too personal. I have seen firms where it all depends on one or two named partners. I want to this to be more open and less about one or two people.” His preferred name? “Adventureland,” which for him indicates the character of his life right now.
And how would Adventureland, or whatever this venture became, distinguish itself? “We don’t have a style, we don’t have one way of approach,” Quittenton admitted. His sensibility, as well as that of his friends, is shaped by Taliesin, but also by the firms for which they have worked and, what is just as important, by their love of video games, science fiction, literature, and music. It is, in other words, the architecture of young people trying to articulate the culture that surrounds them into form, space, and image. “It will work itself out as we go along,” Quittenton said confidently.
As we drove up north and encountered the work that makes me enthusiastic these days—existing buildings reimagined, reinvigorated, and opened up—he admitted to being fascinated by what he saw. Might that influence his work, I asked hopefully? Quittenton politely declined to answer.
Finally, there is the question of ethics, especially as he was jumpstarting his independent career by working on a project (NEOM) commissioned by a despot (Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and the project’s instigator, Mohammed bin Salman) and of a rather problematic, to say the least, environmental nature. As someone trained in philosophy at the University of Toronto before he turned to architecture in graduate school, Quittenton was acutely aware of these questions. His answers, though, frustrated me: “I think that being an architect for a ‘good’ client is still implicitly bad for the people traditionally held under the boots of the powerful, And also implicitly bad for the earth. Working for an ‘evil’ client is arriving at a similar end result although in a much more explicit way. I question what makes one okay and the other one not okay.”
I felt only slight uneasy telling him that he needed to be more rigorous in his ethics as well as his architecture. He has been taking criticism from me for years, and we have been arguing for just as long. I pointed out all the problems I saw in working on NEOM, but realized it was also an opportunity that was liberating for Quittenton, who grew up in a lower middle-class family with very few means and has struggled to survive on very little money for most of his life .
As the kilometers of highway rolled underneath our little Renault Clio and the architecture projects opened up in front of us and then receded before we reached another moment of architectural reinvention, we also spoke of ethics in a larger sense, about sexism, racism, and power dynamics in the discipline, and about what defines beauty or importance in buildings. The days went by quickly.
Quittenton is certainly one of the most talented and thoughtful people I have ever had the honor of advising, mentoring, and critiquing. Whether his chosen, somewhat random path through the field will lead to him running a traditional firm or working in collectives, and whether he will actually design buildings that are constructed (“the one thing I know is I do want to build,” he kept repeating) remains to be seen. Watching how his Adventureland unfolds will, whatever the outcome, be a pleasure to behold.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
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