Getting Louder: Mimi Zeiger on Precarity, Politics, and Sustenance
By Julia Gamolina
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. Her work is situated at the intersection architecture and media cultures. She was co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and currently curating Soft Schindler at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, which openened on October 12, 2019. She also teaches at SCI-Arc and the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design.
She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor, and is an opinion columnist for Dezeen. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been shown at the Art Institute Chicago, Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. She co-curated Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen.
In her interview, Mimi talks about her practice - as writer, editor, and curator - and the precarity at the root of it, advising young architects to not let architecture be their only sustenance.
JG: What first sparked your interest in architecture?
MZ: My interest in architecture developed pretty early - I went to Egypt with my family when I was thirteen as a Bat Mitzvah trip. Rather than have a big party, I wanted to travel and we went to Israel and Egypt, and as the story goes, I was really taken with the temples and the large scale architecture.
I also grew up in Berkeley, in a neighborhood that was full of Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck homes. While we didn’t live in one, I had friends that did. When I was in high school, some friends and I broke into the Temple of the Wings, a Greek temple designed by Maybeck and finished by A. Randolp Monro for a dancer who idolized Isadora Duncan. We got caught [laughs] - so my interest in architecture perhaps really started from an urban exploration point of view.
Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) by Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Transit Screening Lounge at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
What did you learn about yourself and about architecture in school?
I studied architecture at Cornell in the 80’s and early 90’s. I was really gung ho on being an architect. The experience was - as anyone who’s been to architecture school knows - all-encompassing and challenging. I did well in school, was excited by history classes, by studio, by the competitive nature that it produced, but I also was a bit exhausted and broken by that same kind of competitive nature, the lack of collaboration, and the role of the architect to be the sole creative genius.
I graduated from Cornell right into a recession. It was the mid-nineties recession and I ended up working a variety of jobs that were not particularly fulfilling. I designed Pottery Barns and Williams Sonomas and then large, corporate, mall-type projects for another firm before deciding to go back for grad school.
Why did you decide to go back?
I had wanted to teach. I went to SCI-Arc - somehow in my mind I had also thought that at SCI-Arc, I’d learn how to weld [laughs]. They had a major welding cage at the time, and a big shop.
What I learned about myself at SCI Arc is that I’m not a shop person and that I’m not going to be a master welder. But I did learn that I liked to work collectively, in collaboration with people. I liked to write. My interest in architecture was broader than making the building. It was about that connective tissue between architecture and pop culture, music, culture at large, and literature. My thesis became a zine, loud paper, which I published for many years after graduating. I was working out how I want to fit into this field, and how do I want to redefine the terms by which I operate.
“Form does matter. Politics matter. I am fighting in my work to ask, “How do we make these things come together?””
Tell me more about loud paper.
Loud paper was this tiny zine that gave me a huge amount of confidence. I was writing, editing, connecting with people - which gave me access for interviews with designers, architects, novelists, filmmakers. It changed my perspective of how, as an architect, I moved through the world. In the early days of loud paper, I thought of myself as an architect who writes and edits, and then later really wrestled with not being an architect; becoming a sort of architectural writer, and then ultimately defining myself as a critic and curator. Each of those steps towards my identity were not easy to make - I wrangled with the fact that I wasn’t going to practice architecture in the most traditional way.
I can’t tell you how much I can relate. How did you further writing in your career?
I started to pick up freelance projects, writing pretty consistently for Dwell, that led to writing for several other magazines. In 2006, I moved to New York to take on the role of senior editor at Architecture magazine, which is now, sadly, defunct. I moved to New York all excited, like “Oh my god, this is my big moment!” All of this editing that I’d been doing was finally paying off, and I was going to be a voice for one of the most prestigious magazines in the field.
Within four months of moving to New York, Hanley-Wood had bought Architecture and was in the process of launching Architect. The staff was laid off, and there I was in New York, no job, new in the city, and trying to figure out how I’m going to make it work. I went back to freelancing, and being in New York at that time, surrounded by so many great writers like Alexandra Lange, Andrew Bloom, Mark Lamster, Karrie Jacobs - Karrie had been my editor at Dwell before she left there and went back to being independent. I suddenly was in the mix and realized, “I need to hustle. The only way I’m going to be able to make this work is to hustle and scrap for every article to keep myself afloat here.” New York was a truly important place for me to learn how to work harder. It taught me how to be on, how to work, how to write fast, how to continue to make things happen.
LA Forum Reader From the Archives of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, Actar Publishers, 2018, editors: Rob Berry, Victor Jones, Michael Sweeney, Mimi Zeiger, with Chava Danielson, Joe Day, Thurman Grant, and Duane McLemore, design by Jessica Jessica Fleischmann of Still Room, with Jenny Kim.
MADE UP, Design’s Fictions, Actar Publishers/ Art Center Graduate Press, 2017, editors: Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger, design by Benjamin Critton.
Did you actually work for firms before you started getting into writing full time?
When I graduated from SCI-arc, I worked very briefly for a firm in San Francisco. I’m actually drawing a blank on their name. It was not a good fit and I left because I wanted to have more time to work on Loud Paper.
My dad is an electrical engineer, and one of the things people don’t know - I very rarely tell the story - is that I worked for my dad for a time, in his office, as a CAD jockey. Probably for about six years it was my side gig.
I’m really glad you said that - achieving financial stability is a huge aspect in the lives of most professionals, and it’s great to hear you had to do what you had to do while recalibrating your career. At some point in this recalibration, you also began to curate, correct?
Curatorial is something that’s been on my plate ever since Cornell. I worked on a show at Cornell, a small show, and then I worked on a show about female alums at SCI Arc. Those are two early shows. Doing editorial is not so different from curatorial.
In New York, I was part of a group called the Leagues & Legions. We had formed mostly online, and this was in the height of everyone blogging, everyone on Twitter. We created this group interested in architecture and publishing. Through that, we did some public programs and publications. I also curated and exhibition at Columbia GSAAP’s Studio X called A Few Zines and was about changing publishing practices in design, at a time when print seemed on the verge of death.
“The challenge of managing one’s own precarity is at the root of my practice.”
Back to your writing, were there any topics that you focused on or messages that you wanted to push forward?
Loud paper had a very specific voice. It gave people who didn’t necessarily have access to a place to write, platforms for talking about things that matter to them, and that had a lot to do with this relationship between architecture and pop culture. The voice in the magazine was often kind of snarky, and connecting to things that were going on in larger culture.
As a young freelancer, I was just gigging and trying to pick up whatever work I could. It was later in my career, when I was in New York and freelancing more, that I was starting to have enough work that I could, if not pick and choose, at least start to pitch the things that I wanted to write about.
Around that time, a couple threads emerged in my work which are still consistent. One is an interest in urbanism, and the interrelationships of urbanism to politics to culture, architecture, and design. And two is tracking emerging practices. I was well-positioned in New York with my age and my network to watch who was up-and-coming in the field. I did a lot of work looking at emerging practices, at young folks earlier in their careers, starting to make their first leaps.
That’s becoming my focus with Madame Architect - to focus on those who need a platform that doesn’t necessarily have one, and to find those firms just getting started, led by women, and hopefully being able to accelerate their growth in some way.
Where do you feel like you are in your career today?
I had curated a number of shows from LA prior to working on Dimensions of Citizenship, but curating the US Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale with my collaborators –Ann Lui, Niall Atkinson, and Iker Gil – carries a kind of gravitas and public visibility that I don’t think I had previously.
Some of the work that I had been doing leading into Venice looked at the relationship of politics to architecture, and how architecture can make an impact, and what is the responsibility of architecture and design to even try. How do they take on formal characteristics so that there isn’t this dichotomy between socially-minded design and Architecture with the capital ‘A’ that’s only interested in form. Form does matter. Politics matter. I am fighting in my work to ask, “How do we make these things come together?”
Dimensions of Citizenship was a testing ground to make that happen. How do we reach out to these hugely talented practices with a question that has meaning, and make work that doesn’t side step questions of form, but is expressive in its execution, meaningful, and rich in what it’s proposing. Venice was a way to test so many ideas about belonging and exclusion, and how architecture is intertwined with definitions of citizenship. I felt like it was action I needed to pursue as an individual living under the Trump Administration.
Handbills made from tweets. Platform Project 2012, SVA Design Criticism and Research Summer Intensive, led by Mimi Zeiger, design by Neil Donnelly. Photo: Neil Donnelly.
Skyscraper Debate on 57th Street. Platform Project 2016, SVA Design Criticism and Research Summer Intensive, led by Mimi Zeiger, design by Neil Donnelly. Photo: Neil Donnelly.
What have been the biggest challenges for you thus far?
Everybody has hiccups and moments of guffaw in their career, but the balance between being independent and being enmeshed in institution or publication has been one of my biggest challenges. I’ve gone back and forth over the years, between working for architecture magazines, or Woodbury University School of Architecture, where I was the director of communications for a couple years, which brought me to the West Coast. I worked for the West Coast Editor for Architect Newspaper. I was taking on roles that had titles and institutions behind them, and at moments in time, it’s been useful for me, but my best writing often comes when I’m working independently.
My relationship to the collaborative entities that I’m working with - whether that’s a magazine or an institution or a school, takes navigation. I have to balance between something that seems stable, and something more precarious. The challenge of managing one’s own precarity is at the root of my practice. Like, “Where’s the income going to come through this month? What projects am I going to take on that pay, and recognize my value?” There are projects I’m going to take on that are underpaid but important to me, to take on a platform or idea that wouldn’t get expressed otherwise.
Keeping all these things balanced will probably continue to be the biggest challenge as my career moves forward, because people don’t always know what to make of you when you’re independent [laughs]. It’s much easier for folks to understand you when you’re connected to an institution.
“Architecture is a cultural tool. If we don’t recognize it as something that has meaning for people outside of the discipline then we have isolated ourselves from having any kind of influence.”
What is the impact you’d like to impart on the field?
I was talking to a friend recently and she was saying, “Why are you still in architecture? You’re a critic, you are often critiquing the very premises of the profession.” I remember saying to her, I wouldn’t still be in it if it didn’t matter. Yes, I am super interested in – and this is at the core of my mission – the expanded field and the way that architecture touches so many different kinds of practice. Architecture is a cultural tool. If we don’t recognize it as something that has meaning for people outside of the discipline then we have isolated ourselves from having any kind of influence.
The tagline for loud paper, way back in the day was “dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse”. It’s tongue-in-cheek, right? We’re going to make something louder, but it was also about making more discourse, fostering more voices. Many parts of my career have been about helping to give a leg up: teaching writing to burgeoning design critics, making magazines that have multiple contributors, curating exhibitions. How do I give more voices to the profession? If we are collectively louder around issues of gender, equity, agency, etc, we can institute change within the profession.
I love that. Finally, what advice do you have for those just entering the field, starting their career?
Be curious. The greatest architects out there have huge interests. Koolhaas is a polymath, interested in everything, Gehry is interested in art and music. It is about getting yourself to a punk show, an art exhibit, a Marvel movie. This week I’m obsessed with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and the sci-fi novels by Annalee Newitz, they build worlds not so dissimilar from architecture.
You can always narrow down your “position,” but allowing non-architectural things to enter into your work and lead you into paths will be sustaining as your career unfolds. Architecture doesn’t have to be your sole sustenance.