Ali Tayar's Modern Marvels
By Prashant Pradhan

Turkish born architect Ali Tayar's designs have been featured in New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Denver Art Museum. He is an architect and furniture designer, and founder of Parallel Design Partnership. His most recent work includes the interior and facade of restaurant Pop in New York.

EGO: You grew up in Istanbul , studied architecture in Germany , masters in M.I.T. and practice in New York . How have these influenced your approach to architecture?

AT: Obviously growing up in Istanbul did influence my work. The capital of two empires, the Byzantine and later the Ottoman, it boasts some 1500 years of extravagant architecture. My father was a professor of structural engineering and would take me around and show me all the ancient buildings and how they functioned structurally. Basically, the way that these buildings look is defined by the way they function structurally. Structural reasoning is now a very important part of my work – both with furniture and architecture. You don’t look at my work and say “that is Orientalist work” but the underlying principles definitely come from that.

Germany was also a great learning experience. Architecture schools in Germany are decentralized in that the design approach changes within the school or from one institute to another. I fell into the hands of modernist architects so my education was a purest form of modernist education at the height of postmodernism. I had a completely insulated, isolated experience where they taught me to slander postmodernism, so by the time I came out, I didn’t have to make the change by myself. I had almost skipped an entire school of thought, which was good.

EGO: Given your background, how is it to live and work in New York?

AT: It’s very difficult as an architect here because people don’t build houses, so you spend a lot of time designing bathrooms. On the other hand, everything you do here takes on another meaning. You’re in a very small world that makes a huge difference, and if you start getting established, it’s much easier than somewhere else. I don’t think I could have done the same thing in Istanbul , though perhaps Istanbul was like New York a few hundred years ago. But even if you did the same thing there, then what? When does anybody get to see all that? Then I think that New York must be like Rome in the first century.

	Ali Tayar's Website

Everything that happens somehow happens here, and if you do it here somehow everybody hears about it or sees it. Even when it was bad and I was suffering, I still enjoyed living here. I could always have gone home but it never even occurred to me. Lots of people are doing interesting things, but it’s like a meat grinder here in that so many people come and very few people end up staying. People burn out or people leave because you can almost live anywhere else better than you can live here. You could be living much better in Connecticut , so there has to be something else that you can have here no matter what.

EGO: Was there a particular incident that inspired you to be an architect?

AT: There was one day actually. My father always wanted me to study architecture but I wanted to study medicine, I wanted to do genetic engineering. My mother took me to Copenhagen so I could talk to a couple of her colleagues at a ladies program at the Congress. I went with them to a show of Frei Otto’s work in an outdoor museum and I was so fascinated. My father always put down architects as silly formless creatures but I suddenly saw that I could learn this kind of architecture. I went back to the hotel and decided not to study medicine. My mother said, “it’s good, you always forget to put on the cap of the toothpaste!”

EGO: How old were you then?

AT: Seventeen.

EGO: What would you say have been the basis of you Design Principles?

AT: Actually it all goes back to my education in Germany , which was very much about prefabrication and the idea of architecture that is factory-made. At MIT my work was a little more about the influence of the structural behavior of the developed form. So what I do is essentially a combination of these two things. Sometimes these things contradict – in order to express structural behavior you want to have organic shapes, but mechanical reproduction may require that the cross sections remain the same. So how do you find instances where you can satisfy both? Everything I do is in some way looking at how things are made and how things behave structurally and how can you make these two ideas one.

EGO: What role do ‘aesthetics’ play in your design approach?
AT: Obviously everybody who does things like I do insists that there is no aesthetic, and that the aesthetic develops at the end. But that’s not true. At the end of the day I make things look a certain way. But I try to find as many reasons as possible that define the aesthetic, so the irrational part of the project is minimized and doesn’t take over the whole project. Yes I shape, but I try to shape at the end.

EGO: The reason why I ask you this is because once you had told me that your design philosophy had something to do with the way a guitar was made.

AT: Again, that was sort of stressing the rational. I think of a guitar in that it, or any musical instrument for that matter, is a high performance machine. It has to produce a sound perfectly, and yet we don’t look at a violin or piano and say ‘this is an industrial object’. I try to make architecture or design in such a way that people like to touch it because I feel that an industrial aesthetic doesn’t have to necessarily result in cold objects. I mix materials in the same way a guitar does because certain materials do certain things well- not for effect, but based on what would be the best performing material for the task.

EGO: Most of your architecture or at least the ones close by here, Pop Burger – they have a marriage of something that is really earthy and base and something that is high-tech.

AT: I missed postmodernism but I don’t think that a postmodernist criticism of modernism should be dismissed because a lot of it is relevant. I do not want to simply go back to building glass boxes because they were built/imagined at one point and then criticized for not fulfilling certain things. So just going back in time and reviving modernism seems stupid. My houses basically start off where case study houses left off. There was another 20 to 25 years of thinking about houses – that people don’t like living in these houses or that a bank shouldn’t look like a church – that definitely has relevance for my work. You can reduce details but you can’t eliminate them. I try to pay a great deal of attention to the point where materials change. They don’t simply change from one to another, something happens. With restaurants, I think of them as theatrical experiences. They’re like little performances that recreate themselves every time. I never thought I would design restaurants- I try to transport ideas from the architecture that interests me. These ceiling panels (at Pop Burger) use computer-generated images to create small runs of manufactured systems. Its interesting for me to try out stuff like this and its easier to do in a restaurant than in a house. I don’t want to be experimenting with people’s lives. I try to listen to what people want but I don’t necessarily do what people want. I try to choose my clients so that what I do fits more or less what they want. That is important to me. But once I get them, I don’t want to use them as guinea pigs – people who pay for something that I want.

EGO: What would be your dream project?

AT: I used to design airplane hangars, I’d love to do another one. A big structure like that would be great.

EGO: What contemporary art or architecture do you like?

AT: I would always tell my students to look at contemporary art and not the most fashionable architecture. Because when you look at art you can draw your own conclusions. When I was studying architecture Michael Graves was a god who filled every auditorium in his lectures. Who would go to listen to him now? I tell my students to go look at German photographers like Schult and Andreas Giursky. I like Foster and Renzo Piano, Rogers and the rest don’t really interest me. I find them absolutely uninteresting. I find Robert Wilson’s earlier work interesting. I love watching 007. I could watch all the 007s, and never stop.

EGO: I remember you saying that the villain of a movie always has the best taste.

AT: Modern taste implies good taste. North by Northwest has the villain living in the most amazing house. Actually it has the most amazing eye candy. Because it celebrated New York when it was at its peak.

EGO: Tell me a bit about your personal tastes – likes and dislikes?

AT: I only buy shoes that are always in production. I hate the idea of liking a shoe and buying it and then next season it not being there. So I can only wear Clark’s, and higher-end would be Church’s. I hate specials on the menu, because if you like it, you cannot go back to eat it.