Transcription of Scott Simons for the show Architecture + Art #174
Dr. Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 174, Architecture and Art, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 11, 2015. The creative process is necessarily an evolution. Artists and the community in which they create are continuously changing. Today we speak with architect Scott Simons and with Mark Bessire, director of the Portland Museum of Art, about designing updated spaces and programs that can absorb and celebrate change. You won’t want to miss these intriguing conversations. Thank you for joining us.
I always enjoy spending time with people who work in very different fields from my own, and these include artists and architects and other people in the design world. Scott Simons is principal at Scott Simons Architects. He has over 30 years of professional experience in architecture and design. He is a founding member of The Portland Society for Architecture where he is a board member and past president. Scott has served as a design critic at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Northeaster University, among many others. Thank you so much for coming in and being part of our show today.
Scott: You’re welcome.
Dr. Belisle: Scott, you were one of Maine Magazine’s 50 people. In fact, you were on the cover of Maine Magazine last summer. Obviously Maine Magazine considers what you’re doing, and I know Maine Home+Design feels similarly to be very important and considered as architecture to be very important. You found it important enough to go into it as a field. What drew you to it?
Scott: I really came up through a studio world. My mother was a painter and she taught me how to draw at a very early age. I spent a lot of time in studios, so for an early age was very comfortable in studios and thinking three-dimensionally, and I just assumed that everybody could do that. They could see the back of something by looking at the front of it. Of course, that’s not the case. That was unique skill that my mother helped train me. My father, on the other hand, was a lawyer and a judge and he was very analytical.
It was an interesting combination, my mother being very intuitive, and my father being very intelligent, analytical person. Architecture is a wonderful combination of those two skills that I developed just by growing up in my family. I didn’t discover architecture until I was a senior in college, and when I did it just felt really comfortable. It felt like an obvious thing for me to be doing because I could really sculpt space, but also it involved engineering. It involved mathematics. It involved light and materials. It was a great combination of things that I was interested in.
Dr. Belisle: What did you enjoy doing when you were younger? What did you enjoy doing when you were in high school and in college before you found architecture?
Scott: Just making things, mostly. I drew really well from an early age. I could pretty much represent anything with a pencil, but I spent a lot of time just making things out of whatever materials were available, whether they were wood or ceramics or leather or whatever, just making things, paper, cardboard, so I took a lot of sculpture classes. I was also very interested in music early on in life and played in orchestras and bands. Music is a very interesting counterpoint to architecture because there is a metric to architecture and there’s a lot of things that you find in music, repetition, rhythm, counterpoint, all of those are concepts that work with arch- … I mean, the architecture is all about the same things.
Dr. Belisle: What instruments did you play?
Scott: When I was younger I played percussion instruments, everything; timpanies, xylophones, snare drums, bass drums, everything, all those things in the back row of the orchestra. There’s like 50 instruments back there so I learned to play all of those.
Dr. Belisle: As you’re designing things, is there a sound to them? Is there a sense that you have that there’s something going on in the background in a metric, rhythmic way?
Scott: Definitely. Ultimately the building has to stand up and so it has to have a structure to it. It has to have a rationale to it that can be built, so you find the spacing searching through the design of the building and how it needs to work and how it needs to fit in its context. You find a rhythm to that and there’s sort of a logic to the structure of a building and so just finding the rhythm that works with any particular building is an important early decision.
Dr. Belisle: You’ve been involved with buildings like the Portland Public Library, which was pretty newly redesigned within the last few years, I believe; also the ferry terminal, the [Wayne Fleet 00:07:17] Art Center. You’ve been working on a master plan for the Portland Museum of Art, and these are all public buildings that have a diversity of uses. How do you take those uses and the way people are going to exist within a building? How do you take that into consideration in design?
Scott: It’s really the starting point for the design. We don’t really start a project with an idea of what it might look like in the end. It really grows out of a deep investigation of the culture of the place, so the more we learn about it … We spend a lot of time up front studying what’s happening in a building, what’s happening in that type of a building where there are shifts happening. For example, libraries are going through a paradigm shift. They used to be just a place for holding knowledge. You used to go in there and it was a very introverted experience, but now a library is really an extroverted experience because you have the Library of Congress on your cellphone, so you don’t really need to go to the library for a book. People read books on tablets. You can read a book on your phone if you want.
Libraries are growing in their popularity in communities across the country. Portland is no exception to the rule, and so the idea was to find out what’s going on. Why are they more popular? What are the activities that people are wanting to be at the library for? Yes, they want to go to libraries to take out a book, but they also go there for a sense of community. It’s like a gathering place. That’s why the café is on the front. That’s why we brought the whole library right out to the sidewalk. It used to be a void. You used to have to walk like 120 feet to get to the door through a dark and really scary place. It was not a welcoming experience.
Now it is. It’s right on the sidewalk. You can see everything going on in the square. There’s a lot of interaction between the sidewalk and people inside, inside/outside, and that was the paradigm shift in that case and it took as a while to learn that. We’ve designed 21 libraries so we’ve sort of seen this trend over the last 20 years. We’ve seen it evolve. Portland is a much larger library and it’s right downtown so it was a great opportunity to really express that idea of information in the public realm versus on the inside of the library. We brought it right out into the public realm.
Dr. Belisle: How does the library differ from, say, the ferry terminal building?
Scott: The ferry terminal, if you remember what it used to look like, it used to have the mechanical room on the end facing the water. All we did and it was really a very simple idea where we took the waiting room and we put it on the end so you could see the boats coming in. Again, interviewing lots and lots of people, talking to lots of people that use the ferry on a day-to-day basis, there’s a romance about the boat ride, but there was no romance in the ferry terminal. What we tried to do is expand the experience so that you can see the boat coming. You can see the water. You can see the activity in the harbor while you’re waiting for your boat.
It’s really expanded the experience so instead of it just being when you got on the boat and you get out on the water; it now starts long before you get there. You can read the mural in there about the history of the Casco Bay Ferry Line, so it gives you some sense of history about the ferries. You can see the boats coming and going in every direction. It’s filled with sunlight in the summer. The wall opens up. You can feel the breeze. You can smell the ocean. That’s all it was. It was just that simple, just get people out where they can see the water and start that experience of being on the water 20 minutes earlier and 20 minutes later on the other end, expand the experience.
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Dr. Belisle: I’m remembering myself back as a younger person visiting the library before it actually was renovated I don’t know how many years ago, but it was very precious. It was a place where you go to see the precious paintings and it felt, it wasn’t a place that resonated with me as a child. I went, I guess, a few years ago with my daughter and they had really a wonderful person who was showing what art could mean to the kids, so really there is this reaching out to the children as opposed to the experience I had when I went, which is there’s something kind of static sitting on the wall. It almost feels as if libraries, art museums, are trying to create more of a living space and more of a connection, especially with the younger generation.
Scott: See, it’s the same as, I think, everything that I’m experiencing in my life as the accessibility is just our ability to access information and access elements of culture as well is almost infinite now. I looked up some of your shows to see how they went, you know, just like that. It took me two seconds just to find them. The Portland Museum of Art collection will be digitized soon and you’ll be able to see the show or while you’re looking at the show to get information as you walk around from your own cellphone. I think that that makes it more accessible.
You don’t have to have studied art in college to be able to understand the museum experience, to be able to walk through and see the Homers and see the [Wyatts 00:15:11] and things you can basically learn on your own, which makes it much easier, much less intimidating for people, and so it’s not just a certain section of our community that’s able to access the information all. It makes it a broader-spectrum experience for the community.
Dr. Belisle: It’s been interesting for me to watch my generation and my children’s generation, even my parent’s generation to become so much more tuned in to the visual, and even actually into the auditory, because now we have Instagram. We have Facebook. We have people who are understanding that you can look at something and even though it may not be “art,” it becomes art once you take a photo of it and you upload it. Then you have the audio. You mentioned the radio show. You can listen to podcasts any time you want.
You can decide that you want to hear more about something, and I do think that that multisensory availability is really changing the way that not only we are accessing information, but the way that we’re able to communicate with other people. It’s interesting to see because I think we’ve gone from … Things have really changed. What have you seen in your line of work in architecture? How are things been influenced by all of the new media?
Scott: When I am just reading my journals every month, they all come online so I get them daily almost online. I could be looking at a project in Papua New Guinea or I could be looking at one in Indonesia or South Africa or Chile. It used to be that all I could see was the Americans architects, the most famous people and make it into the publications, but now I can see the fantastic work that’s happening all around the world and you realize it really is a global community. I always make the analogy with music. It used to be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They were the ones that made it to the top. There was this huge pyramid and they were on top of the pyramid and everybody was one layer down from there.
Now, even in music as it is in architecture and with painting as well or so many different creative endeavors, if you do a good painting, the world can see it. It’s not that hard to get it out so people can see it, whereas before you had to work your way up through the hierarchy. If you design a good building the world will find out about it. If you write a beautiful song people will hear about it. You’ve had that experience, I’m sure, where somebody sends you a song. You can’t believe it. It’s just the most beautiful song or video or something. It’s changed the way I think we experience culture. You don’t have to go to it. It sort of comes to you.
Dr. Belisle: It’s been interesting for me to see. Recently there was a little bit of controversy in the Portland Press Herald about the way that we put art out into the world and the way that art is sold and the way that art is sold and the way that some art galleries want to stay with the old art-gallery model and some art galleries are proceeding forward in a different way of putting art out there. Do you see any friction in the architectural world about the desire to stay with what was and the approach that what used to be that sort of pinnacle where you work your way up and you have to do so many years of something before you have the right to design a beautiful building or get credit for it. Is there any sort of friction between the old guard and the new guard in the architectural world?
Scott: Yes, there definitely is. They always say architecture is an older man’s profession, and I actually think I got a lot more work once I started having grey hairs because there’s a lot of money involved. Buildings are expensive to build and they’re complex, so I think there’s just more comfort with someone that’s had a lot of experience, especially with public buildings where there’s a lot at stake, public money, larger-scale projects, and things like that. When I was younger I was very frustrated by that. I felt like I had the juice. I had the ideas. I had plenty of motivation and skill, but now that I’m older I can understand why.
If you’re going to trust a 30-year-old architect with 20 million dollars to make sure the building is perfect and everything, that’s a risk. It might be a safe risk with certain architects. Frank Lloyd Wright was extremely successful at a very early age, but most of us, it takes a long time to learn how to put buildings together well and to make sure that they perform and that they’re inspiring. It’s a very complex business so it’s not uncommon that really good architects are older.
Dr. Belisle: Scott, after listening to our conversation I’m sure people will want to learn more about the works that you’re doing, so how can they do that? Do you have a website?
Scott: We do. We have a website, simonsarchitects.com, and a fun way to follow what’s going on is on our Facebook because we post a couple of times a week. We post information and that can range from construction photos from a project that’s under construction to new publications to new awards that we’ve received for work to individual things that are happening with different people in the studio, so that’s a fun way to follow it, too.
Dr. Belisle: Very good. I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today. I encourage people to find out more about your work with Scott Simons Architects. We have been speaking with Scott Simons. He was the principal at Scott Simons Architects and also designer of many buildings around this area and I’m sure beyond this area. Thanks so much for coming in and it’s been a really interesting conversation.
Scott: You’re welcome. It has been very interesting. Thank you.