Bonus Replay: Improving the Work of a Legend | Part 1
Transcript
Atif Z. Qadir 00:03
Welcome to American Building. I'm your host Atif Qadir. Join me as we explore the skylines and strip malls, the crosswalks and rail crossings, the balconies, the buildings and the boroughs shaping the next generation of real estate. Let's build common ground.
Atif Z. Qadir 00:22
Four years ago, we sat down with architect and urbanist Vishaan Chakrabarti to explore his vision for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame expansion in Cleveland, then still on the drawing boards. Today, that project is under construction, reshaping Cleveland's lakefront with a bold new cultural landmark. As cranes rise and the tower takes form, our conversation with Vishaan feels more timely than ever.
Atif Z. Qadir 00:54
It's a front row seat to how great design can catalyze civic life and spur economic vitality. In this re-release of parts one and two, we revisit visions insights on adaptive reuse, public private partnerships and the power of storytelling through architecture. You'll hear about the challenges he faced, from site constraints to community engagement and the innovative solutions that laid the groundwork for today's groundbreaking construction, whether you're a developer, policymaker or a design enthusiast, this two part conversation offers a rare glimpse into the making of a landmark in motion and where the future of urban creativity may go next. Enjoy.
Atif Z. Qadir 01:43
Thank you so much for being here with us, Vishaan.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 01:49
Thanks for having me.
Atif Z. Qadir 01:51
Absolutely so let's get started. Your path to architecture started with art history and engineering at Cornell. How did you go about choosing your majors, and what did you take away from that coursework?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 02:03
Well, I always loved architecture in cities. My parents came here with very little money in the 1960s but my father was a scientist and loved to travel. So whenever he had a kind of lecture gig somewhere, he would like splice and dice the honorarium, and we'd go on a shoestring budget, off to Europe or the Soviet Union or all sorts of really interesting places. And I always loved cities, and I loved going to museums. I loved looking at the art. I loved anything having to do with like urban culture.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 02:32
By the time college rolled around, there was time to go to college. I of course, you know as I don't know if you have any similar stuff in your background. But as a good Indian boy, I had the choice of either being an engineer doctor or, you know, maybe a lawyer, like your lawyer is totally at the third position, yeah, absolutely. Like, it was way down there. In fact, Doctor was about engineer, of course. And so I became an engineering student at Cornell.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 02:58
And I was a horrendous engineering student. I mean, I really I was like, it was like being the wrong line at the bank, but I stuck it through. But every single elective I had, I would take either a fine art class or an art history class. And I realized in my fourth year that if I stayed an additional year, I could get both my engineering degree and Art History degree, because I had taken enough along the way that I built up the credits, and my parents kind of freaked out, but then sent me the student loan forms, and I stayed an extra year and just immersed myself in art history, which was great, and did a lot of studio art. You know, it's funny, I found journals that said that I was interested in architecture back in sophomore year in college, but I think my parents would have none of it.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 03:45
And so the funny thing is, now people look at that background, art history, engineering, oh, what a great green brand. There was no strategy whatsoever. There was less than no strategy. And then I said city planning at MIT, and then ultimately architecture at Berkeley. So it's a very roundabout way to getting architecture. My wife knew she wanted to be an architect when she was five and did a B arc and like, like. So, you know, there's a lot of different paths in this profession, I guess is the lesson.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:12
I think what you're describing is so wildly similar to my own because I stayed five years so I did two undergraduate degrees in architecture. And the one that I stayed later on for was the Urban Planning degree, which was the extra one after the technically appropriate one for being busy. My parents a little bit more generous with that.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 04:31
So they were okay with you getting your degree.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:34
Yeah, yeah. So I stayed on for a fifth year as well, and eventually did a master's degree. I did an MBA, and when you look at it in retrospect, like, oh, that's the perfect collection of stuff to be a developer, then you're in retrospect, that's not what 18 year old Atif was thinking about.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 04:52
Exactly, exactly, exactly. I know it all works out in the end somehow. You know, I always encourage students to not. Uh, focus on too linear a path. Sometimes those little highways and byways you travel down, you know that are kind of, uh, detours, turn out to be incredibly important artistry, art history has served me very, very well in my career, because what is it? It's this way of talking about visual things through the written word and language. And as architects, we have to do a great deal of that. We're presenting to lay people, to communities, to you know, and we have to explain visual ideas through words and art history is actually great training for that,
Atif Z. Qadir 05:39
I think, in particular. So this year, I've been working from home, so it's easy to travel. And I've been doing road trips every month to different parts of the country, from Chicago to North Carolina to Maine. And particularly, I've spent a lot of time in West Virginia and North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania, which were the heart of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and I think particularly looking through these preserved cities from like Gettysburg, I was in a couple of weeks ago to Alexandria, to Arlington, to Fredericksburg, you see this really beautiful set of preserved architecture. And you realize that understanding the progression of American architecture is really important to recognizing what it is that an architect does is in the context of other things, particularly when you work in cities like New York City.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 06:29
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Starting with Jefferson,
Atif Z. Qadir 06:30
Yeah, absolutely. So your interest in a wide sweep of things continued on beyond college and education to work as well. So you have had the opportunity to work in the public sector and the private sector, you work for a development company and a design firm for others and for yourself. So this is very awesome, and I think, very inspiring. And could you talk about the work path that you took, and what organization or order there may or may not have been in that part of your life as well?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 06:59
Well, there's a couple of things here. One was, you have to be somewhat opportunistic. And I, I've had a tendency to be fairly open about different career trajectories with the notion of, you know, architecture is one of the few old persons games left in the world. I mean, we live in a society where people want to be, well, when I was growing up, people wanted to be like wealthy Wall Streeters when they were 28 now people want to be wealthy tech entrepreneurs when they're 28 and you know, as an architect, you're not a wealthy anything when you're 28 you're, you're, you're an apprentice, basically.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 07:37
And you know, so it's an old person's game. It's something because it just there's so much to know that it just takes decades to really gain all that experience and understand the full breadth and width of what you need to understand, especially if you're practicing in an urban context, in a community context, things that are just really, really complicated. So I feel like I spent the first, you know, 50 years of my life, kind of walking the planet, doing lots of different things and gaining lots of different perspectives and learning lots of different languages.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 08:18
And I don't mean you know English in Bengali. I mean, you know, the logic of development, the logic of urban planning and urbanism, and, of course, the logic of design, man, how all these things intersect. And the thing is, is, it's nice to hear you say that it's inspirational, but I think it's, you know, there's two things about it for architects, it's deeply violative of the way they tend to think about the world, which is that architecture is a kind of monastic practice. You know when you start at a sort of young age, and you know the intensity of understanding how a piece of wood gets detailed against a piece of glass, the act of drawing and building and all of that is something that you know doesn't leave room to go stray and do all these other things.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 09:10
And so for the architectural community, it still takes a while to really accept this kind of more nomadic career trajectory. The other thing is, I find, and it's interesting, I know we're going to talk about pay later. You know, if you're not a white male in the architecture profession, being a nomad is somewhat thrust upon you, because the linear monastic path is sort of reserved for a certain demographic. And so you find that you often have to come at the profession from its flanks.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 09:48
You know, I was told point blank when I was a fairly senior person at SOM about how much my advancement was restricted by my race. And so. So you know you have to learn how to navigate the dominance that exists in the profession, and I know a lot of women go through this, and have to figure it out and hunt and peck as well. And so it has been a good journey, and I'm really glad I ended up doing all of those things, but some of it is out of exploration, and some of it was out of necessity.
Atif Z. Qadir 10:24
I think that it's very similar from my experience, but I think was quite a bit less time in design and quickly into development, or construction. And development is at least ext the way that you advance, as if you are Gary Barnett's son or a son in law, the most normal way to do it. All of his daughters are married at that point. So I think my hope was pretty much so. I think when you realize that there are skills that you have, and not until you're able to identify those as doors and not something that only matter when someone else identifies them for you, that that switch ended up happening for me, and I think for others, where I realized that you know what, I could do it. I could go out and do it on my own. And I think that sometimes necessity is the greatest inspiration to start here on something different.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 11:13
Absolutely.
Atif Z. Qadir 11:14
So speaking of when you take that idea to a larger context, I think when you talk about the way that America has been built and has not built. There's intention and reason for certain things, and oftentimes they're a circumstance for a lot more. So your first book, a country of cities, that's a manifesto for urban America, came out in 2013 for Metropolis books, and was the basis of a class that you taught at Columbia, one that I actually was in, and tell us what you want readers to take away from this first book that you spent so much time and effort putting together, and it's so beautifully produced.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 11:47
Thanks. You know, it's so funny. I reflect on that book a lot, because, as you say, it's, I mean, it's eight years old at this point. And you know, the way that book came about is I was writing for urban omnibus at the Archie and I had written a 10 part series called The country of cities. And Rosalie denevaro, who's the executive director of the league, said, You know, this is this really has the makings of a book. And you know, you should talk to Metropolis. And we put that book together. Pentagram did the graphic design.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 11:51
And you know what I didn't realize Atif when I wrote that book, is that I was stumbling into the culture war of our era, that if you think about guns, abortion, I mean homosexuality, a little less the culture war today, that it was when I was growing up, although certainly with transgender people. But cities, urbanism, and especially the car, has become way more than a policy matter and way more than a design matter. It is, you know, there's that famous Charlton Heston line about guns. You know, out of my cold, dead hands, will you pry this gun from me? And it's sort of like out of my cold, dead hands. Will you pry this a Chevy Suburban from me?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 12:05
And my son and I just drove cross country, and I was really struck by how much fossil fuel and large cars animate this country. And I say this because, like we we drove, we pulled an Airstream across country. And so I with utility vehicles that do things like pulling trailers across the country. I have a problem with utility vehicles being driven from suburban locations into the hearts of downtown, or even worse, in downtown, people rock their chubby little kids in utility vehicles when there are many other modes of transit available to them. And so the book, I don't know. I mean, many people were writing Ed Glazer's book came out around that time. Obviously, there was all the creative class stuff that came out before that were from Richard Florida.
Atif Z. Qadir 13:59
His book was The triumph of the City, right at Glaeser, the one you referring
Vishaan Chakrabarti 14:04
The triumph of the City, yes, yes. And each of you looked at it through a very different lens. I mean, Ed's an economist, right? Mine was more of an urban policy book. The book I'm writing now for Princeton University Press, which is your to where you're sitting, is called the architecture of urbanity. And in many ways, it is a retort to the first book, because the first book, where I think it fell short, it made this kind of really hard to argue with presentation about why things like transit oriented density makes sense, given climate change, given the economic data we have given even the racial struggles we have and the ability for cities to adopt more progressive policies and so forth.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 14:49
The question that it didn't answer, I felt, was a design question, which is the fact that most transit oriented density is absolutely mind. Numbingly soul crushingly bad, and is not any place that anyone wants to be. And that's not true of every single place, but it's true of most of them, and that design and density are heavily linked in terms of the fact that, you know, the dense places we're building around the world are largely banal, and I've been giving TED talks about this, and now I think it's a really big climate issue, because if people reject density, then we're lost as a planet. And yet, there are real issues.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 15:31
There's issues with the development community. There's issues with a lot of the architecture community is not interested in working at that scale and with those kinds of players, and I can understand why it's a rough and tough design proposition with very little latitude, but so what I'm trying to work through is, you know, a lot of people do believe that we should build more and bigger and better cities, but what are the experience of those cities. You know, how are they more equitable? How are they more ecological? How are they more joyous? Those are still big questions that are out there, and so I feel like I owe the reader a kind of it's not a sequel, but a kind of response to the questions raised by the first book.
Atif Z. Qadir 16:20
I think in particular, what the acceleration of this gap between the wealthy and the not and this vast polarization of our country makes it feel like, I can say, after having lived and been to, by this point, over 100 different cities in this triangle that I've been traveling in, is this idea that the city is the inevitable way that we're going to live and be structured may not necessarily be the case. And I think particularly this dispersion of population out means there's many variations of what city actually means, right?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 16:52
And that's exactly what I was going to say, too. I think that the word city is problematic because it instantly triggers New York, LA, London, you know, liberal, very dense, yeah, and the thing is, is that a lot of villages have some of the same characteristics that big cities do. They're mixed use, they're walkable, they're communal, and we haven't put enough time money thought into how do we do a better job designing our small towns?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 17:25
And I'm all for that, and I include city in that big, kind of Catholic sense of the word, of like, what urban life could be, even at a much smaller scale. And I agree with you that that is something that is very off putting in a time of gross economic inequity and the fact that our big cities have become so unaffordable, and in fact, with COVID, we have data that people are moving from our bigger cities, not into suburbia necessarily, but into small cities, because people still wanted urban life.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 17:57
They just wanted an urban life they can afford, and one that feels more comfortable for them, and that's something that we should encourage. And you know, one of the big problems has been that you take a country like India, you know, one of the places India has really struggled is that most of the population growth, and most of the population growth that's coming in the coming decades is in the Global South, most of the population growth has happened into four or five major metropolitan areas, and they really haven't done what China's done, which is really try to encourage the growth of small cities and small villages and understand those kind of rural economies and so forth.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 18:37
And so I agree with you that that is also part of the problem. And in fact, this title the architecture of urbanity, I go through this sort of painstaking thing in the introduction to define urbanity as apart from big cities, because there are plenty of cities that are not very urbane.Actually, there's a lot of examples around the world, and if I start stating them, I'm going to start getting hate mail from each of them. Mail from each of these. I did it for you. Yeah, so you can get eight mail. But there are plenty of big cities that are urbane, and there are small villages that are urbane. So I'm trying to figure out a terminology that is an academic jargon, but at the same time, is something that feels a little different than all of this focus on large metropolitan areas that I think is just overwrought and kind of getting uninteresting.
Atif Z. Qadir 19:28
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Atif Z. Qadir 20:23
I think particularly, what I've used as my metric is when I go to the smallest of cities and the largest of towns on these trips, is how many New Jersey and New York license plates I see in that area. And that's the measure of this out migration to all these other unusual places. And I think New York's loss of this estimation of 345, percent as a permanent loss of population is absolutely New Haven's gain. It's Montclair is gain. It's Princeton's gain, Philadelphia's gain. I think there's something positive to come from all of that.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 20:53
You know, it's interesting because we got the last census back, and New York's at 8.8 million people. So now that obviously grabs a time period well before COVID, and we get population loss in the city, but I both agree with you that that is a very good thing for the surrounding region at the same time. What's interesting is, I think New York's ongoing resilience in the face of huge disasters like COVID and not 11 is extraordinarily important Sandy and is extraordinarily important to all those regional centers, right? Because it's an ecosystem.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 21:25
I'm much more worried, because I just lived there for 18 months, about the Bay Area ecosystem and the long term health of San Francisco. I'm extremely worried about the long term health of San Francisco, and it has to do with a kind of civic infrastructure that exists in New York City that I find lacking in San Francisco, the tech companies in particular, I don't think, have a lot of geographic loyalty. Now, I'm making a big generalization, but I think a number of them would pick up and leave for Texas or Florida or wherever the taxes happen to be lower and disband their office space and so forth. Not all of them, but a lot of them, whereas I think the New York business community is, you know, bending over backwards to figure out how to keep the New York economy thriving, what it means to have a, at least in part, hybrid, remote workforce, and how that's good for The city and so forth, very different kind of tone and conversation going on here than there.
Atif Z. Qadir 22:26
So New York, so Eric Adams is officially the mayor elect. Given your sweep of professional experience, what advice would you have for this next mayor of New York?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 22:36
The same advice I give to any mayor, jobs, justice and joy. So mayors used to run almost exclusively on this thing about jobs, jobs, jobs, right? And you earn. It was like it was a mantra, and that's because people care about the economy, and people still do care about the economy and everything have to care about the economy. But we now live in a world where people workers have a lot more room to understand where they want to live because of remote work. And so the pandemic accelerated certain trends, and one of them is this notion that all cities are in competition for what's known as human capital, for people, right for great people who come and do things, young people, old people, old people, people who start companies, people who employ people, people who just think about the city differently, or activists and so forth. You want all of those people coming to your city. How do you attract them?
Atif Z. Qadir 23:30
Financial incentives.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 23:34
Actually, it is not just jobs, and that's is the issue with the old sort of corporate welfare model of financial incentives, it is jobs, justice and joy. So yes, you still need to attract companies, but you need to explain how you are an economically and environmentally just city, right? How is it that parks in your poor part of the city are treated versus the richer parts of your city? How is the school system, the healthcare system, the transit system, the garbage pickup system, all of those things working towards both equity and ecology.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 24:10
And I think people will go to places that they feel are measurably more just, and then joy, which is something that I don't think we talk enough about and this is where design comes in. The design of our public spaces, the design of our buildings, the mix of preservation of our historic building stock with new and exciting architecture, the ability of the city streets to be a stage for serendipity. These are the things that bring people joy, right? The notion that you're walking around your city, you experience things that are a surprise to you.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 24:47
You run into a friend and a sidewalk or a subway station, these things are phenomenally important and are part of the design of our city, and everything from zoning to building codes to. A especially how we design and think about our streets, which are the most important piece of infrastructure we have right now. Both cities are 30% roadbed. How we design that roadbed, you know why it's given over to all these private vehicles in our cities, as opposed to express bus lanes, more bike lanes, more pedestrian space. Cities for people, these are all things that, to me, could fall under the umbrella of jobs, justice and joy.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 25:27
And so I have a lot of hope for the Adams administration, not just the Adams administration, but the fact that we have a new mayor and a new governor at the same time, in a period where we we've historically had very calcified relations between the state and the state. And it's extremely important, given this infrastructure bill that just passed in Congress, we need to build the gateway tunnels. We need, you know, Sandy, you mentioned Sandy that, you know, really damaged the existing trans huts of tunnels for our trains.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 25:58
We need to rebuild Penn Station and move Madison's work garden, we need to really rethink our entire street network and how we provide better transit. These things are all partnerships between the city and the state, and so I really hope that designers really engage these conversations. And just going back to your earlier question about having a really expansive background, I was just my wife, and I were just in Madrid with Norman Foster and his wife, where they formed the foster Foundation. And when I think about Norman, I think about the whole architect, someone who can design how a piece of glass intersects a piece of metal, but also is thinking about the city in the world and really broad strokes. Who has advised the Mayor of London and mayors all over the world? That's, I think, a role that architects need to do more of.
Atif Z. Qadir 26:54
Yeah, I think being able to go beyond that previous generational idea that an architect or designers responsibility ends with design set and not with the welfare of the people building the building, or the welfare of the people living in the building. And I think that there are many, many more people that are speaking like you than perhaps an older generation of architects did.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 27:15
Yeah. Well, you know, we had this unfortunate interregnum after the 80s, when you know, Thatcher and Reagan so won, like, part of how they won in the architecture industry is this idea of specialization, and so if you were a building architect, you weren't an urbanist, or vice versa, you know, in the 80s and the 90s. And I often get this question like, does pow my firm, are you guys architects or urban planners? And I say, yeah, like, does it matter? This happened? When did this horrible, horrible happen? This notion that you're not a great designer if you're thinking about these broad urban things, and you're not a great urbanist if you're thinking about design, we're going to talk about the Rock Hall later.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 28:02
That building is a building, but it has enormous, enormous urban and regional impacts across Cleveland, across Northeast Ohio, and for the entire country, in terms of this incredibly unique genre of rock and roll. And so to imagine that that's only a piece of architecture is just, it's shooting ourselves. It's just, it's extraordinary. But that is the milieu under which, like, I grew up, that's, that was the generation of like the object building on the hill, where you really only have to worry about the photographs of that object building day one, and then after that, how it related to its environment, or what it meant for the people who built it, live in it, who work in it, who visit it.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 28:54
It's just extraordinary to me, and I think you're right. I think our generation is now changing things. I had breakfast with Jeanne gang the other day, and I know, I know she thinks this way, Tatiana, Bilbao, Ajay. I just think a lot of people have rejected that paradigm and are thinking much more broadly about their work.
Atif Z. Qadir 29:13
I think it's particularly an American notion to imagine our perspective is the worldview. And two guests earlier this season on American building, Galia solomonoff and Camila krasu, both of them did their undergraduates in South American and their graduate degrees in architecture here in New York, and both have the exact same thing to say. They said they never realized this notion that design was split, as you described, until they came to New York. That's just not the way it's taught or thought of in Latin America.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 29:43
Yeah. And I think you know, one of the main ways in which we're seeing that shift now manifest back into that more international understanding of what design is is with the Pritzker committee and who we see now winning the Pritzker when you look at. Lakatana vasal, Aravena Doshi, what you're seeing over and over is them saying we are going to premiate design that has that broad sensibility. I mean, she's browsing projects as much as his architecture, same with Aravena, same with lakatan. So it just that, to me, is something that, but it's a huge fight in the American system, right? Because the American system rewards specialization.
Atif Z. Qadir 30:32
Whether it's design or healthcare professions, everywhere is specialization
Vishaan Chakrabarti 30:37
Everywhere, absolutely. I mean, you know, if you talk to a doctor, it's extraordinary, like if you look at a psychiatrist versus a therapist. So psychiatrist is an MD. Psychiatrists barely do therapy anymore. They just prescribe drugs because it's incredibly renumerative for them to see patients at a 1520 minute clip and just write prescriptions instead of actually understanding their patient. And so this world of specialization we live in, it's really, really unhealthy, and it's also, by the way, the worst paradigm to solve things like climate change, which requires interdisciplinarity and a very broad view, an interconnected view of things.
Atif Z. Qadir 31:21
I 100% agree, and I think this might be good to have. Might be your time to pivot to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So Cleveland, very handsome city on a lake, not necessarily the most dense in comparison to say, New York City, but the building itself is on Lake Erie and a few blocks from the heart of downtown. What would you say in your first visits to the site were your observations that you were struck by?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 31:42
Well, first you have to zoom out a little bit. We've been working in Detroit for some time for Ford Motor Company, which owns Michigan Central Station. We've been doing a big map plan for them around Detroit, right around the time we won the Rock Hall competition. We won this competition to design a bridge in Indianapolis, and so we were also doing a master plan for the City of Niagara Falls for the state of New York. And the reason I mentioned all of these in one breath is because suddenly we're doing all this work in the Rust Belt. And this also goes back to your thing about not just focusing on the big cities, working day to day, visiting all of these places, and they're all different from one another. They're very, very different from one another.
Atif Z. Qadir 32:26
You can't just do one of these and lump them all.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 32:29
But there's a certain through line. And the through line, of course, is de industrialization coupled with racial segregation. What these cities and what, especially black communities, have been through in these cities, is just, it's appalling. It's, you know, when African American communities talk about how they are the most patriotic of all Americans, because they've stuck through some of the shit that they've had to I'm not talking about slavery and Jim Crow. We can talk about that all night long.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 32:58
But I mean the stuff that happened in the 60s and the 70s with not just urban renewal and redlining, but you know what happened in so many of these towns, including New York, actually, is that as as cities de industrialized and lost white population and black and brown communities kind of were the fabric of the city and held it together, and then the whole economy changes, policing changes, often for the worse, and then suddenly you have gentrification, and those same communities that held these places together are now being forced out.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 33:36
And so this is this is not talking about history from 150 years ago. This is about what's happened in our lifetimes. And so working to understand how acts of architecture and urban planning are acupuncture in those environments, working with those communities in Detroit in you know, just south of the station is Mexican town, and like working with that community, or, you know, with the Rock Hall, to me, what's so fascinating is the rock halls worked really hard on this is that, you know, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, in large measure because of extraordinary group of people fought to get it in Cleveland, but also because there was a disc jockey named Alan Freed who coined the term rock and roll.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 34:24
And you know, Cleveland is a place where a lot of the history of race in America literally plays out in terms of music. And so the fact that rock and roll is the uniquely American genre. Of course, you know, you have the British invasion and you have now rock being an international music form. But like jazz and the blues, it really has its seeds here. And of course, it has its seeds completely with the African American population roles in.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 35:00
You know, what would rock and roll be without Chuck Berry and Little Richard and so? And then, of course, Aretha Franklin, like you just can't get there without those folks. And so the Rock Hall as a building has this extraordinary responsibility. It is at once international because of, I mean, I was just at the induction ceremonies, and you're like, LL Cool J,
Atif Z. Qadir 35:25
Tina Turner was this year too, right?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 35:27
Tina Turner and the Foo Fighters. And, you know, there's this whole history that kind of famous surprise guests. Taylor Swift introduces Carole King, Dave Chappelle, Jay Z that Paul McCartney, the Foo Fighters, just the list goes on and on, and it's just extraordinary. So it's got this huge international presence that what you realize is there 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of art museums and concert halls around the world. There's only one Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 36:01
And so it's centered in Cleveland for a lot of good reasons. And then, of course, they did this thing of hiring Pei, and Pei was arguably the most established architect of the late 1980s and of course, there was all sorts of questions about, you know, how does this Asian American man really Asian man, right? Understand rock and roll. And of course, as soon as they announced the competition, I started getting those same messages on LinkedIn, like, dude, what do you understand about rock and roll? It's like, you know. So you know, all of that stuff is omnipresent.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 36:38
The other thing is, as a language, Pei was really manifesting late stage. I.M. Pei, post modernism, via Louis Kahn, in this building of a series of Platonic solids meant to look like a record player from the here, that results in this building that's incredibly iconic, but not very functional. So they did this big invited competition in January of 2020, right before the pandemic, we were invited with a list of, I think, 2425 players, a number of Pritzker winners, who's who.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 37:16
And I sat around with my senior people in our office in New York, and I said, Well, guys, we're never going to win this. We have to make a good showing. And the funny thing we were at the same time invited to compete for a similarly amongst a similarly August crowd of architecture luminaries, for a building at Princeton and this bridge in Indianapolis, and we ended up winning all three, which was wild, because I didn't think would win any of them, but the Rock Hall in particular, you know, went from 25 to 14 to nine to four to one. And we had a couple of ideas from the start that I think held us in good stead.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 37:55
One, we were really going to get to know this place. So we flew to Cleveland soon after we got invited. We really wanted to see the site. Wanted to understand what is this place. The next thing was, we felt very strongly that the building should be an addition that attaches itself to the Pei building. And like rock itself is both irreverent and reverent the, you know, in the sense that it had to not just kowtow to the pay building and not just respect its elders, but also understand that you are adding to an I.M. Pei building. And you know, one of the things that really helped us is we said, what would Pei do? You know, Pei did these extraordinary additions to the National Gallery and to the Louvre.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 38:44
So we looked at what he did, and he kind of did the same thing. He did something that was absolutely of our era, but responded to the formal language. In the case of the louver, it's an incredibly kind of Beaux Arts proposition that pyramid, and felt we should engage the Pei pyramid. And what was interesting is every one of our competitor schemes decided to try to design an object next to the Pei building. So like object in the field, object in the field.
Atif Z. Qadir 39:15
It's like adding another face to Mount Rushmore, basically.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 39:19
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and we felt strongly that we should not do that.
Atif Z. Qadir 39:31
I'm Atif Qadir, and thanks for joining me on American Building. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite listing app and leave a rating and review. America's housing crisis is one of our greatest challenges. But what are the real solutions? Hear from the developers and other industry experts driving meaningful change. Get our exclusive guide housing in America eight ways we could. Solve our way out of a crisis at americanbuildingpodcast.com.