Architect and Designer, Aranda/Lasch
WHITEWALL: You and your partner, Christopher Lasch, designed the main tent for Design Miami. Tell me a little bit about how the tent was created.
BENJAMIN ARANDA: Design Miami came to us with this idea of extending their platform, as not just a kind of forum for galleries, events, and discussions about design, but to be an instigator and creator on the scale of architecture. We’d never done anything this large before and we were humbled by the opportunity. We worked with a tent company to figure out a way to make some adjustments to their system, and to pull off two big objectives to make the tents work like a piece of art in a city. And that means it has a kind of public character to it, and it addresses a public corner in the city. So that’s one objective because usually there’s no site specificity with tents, so we wanted a transition between inside and outside. The second big thing was to bring light into the gallery and allow the booths to have a lot of light.
WW: What’s going to happen to the structure?
BA: Tents are 95% reusable and this tent is made from reused materials. It can become this same tent, it can become this same tent but larger or smaller, or it can become an entirely different structure.
WW: Johnson Trading Gallery is showing your design objects. Can you tell me a little bit about them?
BA: All the work we are showing here is from the past eighteen months. It’s concerned with mass organization of very small objects, which become very interesting macro organizations that we think have the capacity for making something useful.
WW: If you are appropriating given systems, what is your relationship to conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt?
BA: We are upfront, we’re designers. Ultimately these systems are used to increase the number of relationships around an object. We’re using and at the same time going really deep inside these logics. It’s not about automating something and letting go. It’s about getting inside of a dynamic and finding a way of really finding your voice within that. In order to do that we don’t want to introduce external things, we always like it to be a property of the thing itself.
WW: Do you find more freedom in design or architecture?
BA: One thing we are trying to accomplish in all our work is not to distinguish between scale. Systemically things are always looking for a kind of idiosyncratic outcome, they are always about compromise. For us it’s never about a kind of universal application. It’s always looking for a kind of specificity and an idiosyncrasy that is itself kind of the project. Any easy way to think of it is like a rock. If you look at a rock, a rock has all of the rules of a universal within it like crystalline structure, but when picked up from the ground, its never same rock twice, but always has the specificity of these external pressures that make it.
WW: How does the idea of collaboration enter into your process?
BA: We collaborate a lot with people, because it’s a way of being mindful of the role of design. We’ve been influenced very deeply by a basket weaver, who taught us a lot about the role of craft, not just in the making of an object but making conversations about that object, and the culture that it comes from. We also work a lot with the artist Matthew Richie, who really taught us something that’s been missing a lot from architecture lately, which is how narratives can bring a kind of meaning to a place. We also collaborate with scientists, nanotechnologists, and physicists about how certain things are around us.
