Billie Tsien

Architecture of the real

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, New York, USA

This article first appeared in Indesign Issue #35 - November 2008

Billie Tsien:

“Architecture is an act of physical and tactile experience. Pictures don’t count and renderings most often lie in this age of global images,” says New York based Billie Tsien, speaking in Sydney at the RAIA CV08 conference. In her talk titled Resistance, Tsien urged the audience to “resist the force of images in favour of experience”.

Even if she’s correct, and I think she is, the spirit of the work Tsien produces with her husband and partner Tod Williams transcends the two-dimensional representations that are projected for the benefit of the audience. While there can be no substitute for viewing the architecture in person, Tsien’s generous outpouring about their life and work, and lyrical descriptions of the clients and processes that are essential to achieving their extraordinary outcomes, are illuminating.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects was founded in 1986, nine years after Tsien commenced working for Williams at his own practice in New York City. The couple have a 23-year old son, and still live in the compact but beautifully appointed apartment above Carnegie Hall on 57th Street, where they raised him. “We are surrounded with a collection of objects that we’ve picked up over the years, that combine beauty and use,” she says. “We live in tight circumstances but it feels quite exalted, even with the laundry hanging out to dry, because of the light and views. We sleep upstairs under a skylight.”

The pair work on Central Park South, two streets away, in a one-room studio where “everyone is responsible for everything”, Tsien says. Many of their built works are in their immediate neighbourhood. “We wrote a book called Life/Work where Tod said that ‘everything in the work is mine and Billie’s’,” she recounts. “Throughout the office there is a sense of responsibility for everything and we all try to make it beautiful.”

Williams and Tsien work collaboratively on every project, although they have complementary but overlapping interests, Tsien says. “Over time, we have developed like two separate trees, but below ground, our roots are completely joined,” she explains. “We might have an argument above ground, but we can do that because below ground, we agree.

“Tod is a three-dimensional space-maker where I’m very aware of how one perceives and feels as one moves through a space sequentially – that’s the gender divide that some people talk about,” she says. “That approach allows us to knit different aspects rather than be on top of each other. Sometimes we change places, but more often than not that’s how it works out, although we are always stitching on each other’s side. I’m very into materials, and Tod is very concerned with how materials come together.”

Most of the firm’s built work falls into two categories, which is a result of the architects’ deliberate attempts to focus on project types that most suit them. “We have chosen over the years to confine our work to residential and institutional projects,” Tsien adds. “Just yesterday, Tod said that sometimes you need to be able to not build, and that it’s important to say no. One of the most important things as an architect is to know when to say no. We say no to certain types of work.”

In recent years, the practice has expanded its geographic reach, completing the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California (1995); a swimming pool at the Eliel Saarinen-designed Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1999); and the CV Starr East Asian Library at the University of California at Berkeley (2008). TWBTA is currently working on a ticketing venue at the Lincoln Centre in New York; a new museum for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; and the Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Chicago. By far the firm’s most ambitious project, larger in size than all of its built work to date, is the Banyan Park office campus for Tata Consulting Services in Mumbai, India.

The 9.3 hectare site will eventually house 12 buildings to accommodate 2,000 people, arranged around open-air courtyards and walkways. “We are concerned about buildings that have no relation to the place where they are built, the climate or connections to the amazing material culture that exists in countries like India and China,” Tsien said. “Our scheme is for three-storey buildings that configure themselves around the existing banyan trees like fingers extending into the site.”

Drawing on the firm’s rich exploration of materials and the hand-made – for the American Folk Art Museum in New York the architects experimented with a white bronze alloy called Tombasil, formerly used only for aircraft propellers and fire-hose nozzles, which was cast in an art foundry using sand moulds taken from concrete and steel – working in India is enabling Williams and Tsien to reinvigorate traditional construction methods and support hand-crafted trades, such jali stone carving and weaving for custom tapestries.

“The best way for us to understand what was possible in India was to ask for mock-ups to be made of the building,” Tsien said. “India is in the midst of huge changes, but craft made by hand is still less expensive than that made by machines, so we are trying to use that to infuse our building with a sense of place.”

That approach sums up the philosophy that underpins all of the couple’s work. “If you look at what is being built now in Abu Dhabi or China, it is very removed from those cultures,” Tsien says. “We are not foreign mercenaries, and we believe the work can be most rich when you really believe in what you’re doing.

“Unlike Australia, New York is so staid because it’s older and real estate is so expensive, so architects undergo a much longer training time. You start out doing interiors such as bathrooms and kitchens,” she adds. “Through that, we realised that the personal connection with the client was so important.

“On an institutional level, working with a client who takes ownership of the project is really important,” Tsien continues. “[The TSC client] Mr Tata had seen our work and came to us because he felt that we would honour the site, that we were interested in material culture and that we wouldn’t be making a signature building. Obviously every architect has their own signature in a certain way – one develops it unwittingly like wrinkles that develop whether you like them or not – but we are always looking for integrity in a project that responds to the place.

“Great architecture will take us on a quiet and slower journey inside the building and ourselves,” Tsien concludes, “to that immeasurable place that is not the image of the building, but the experience of the building.”