Hybrid Projects: Weiss/Manfredi's Marion Weiss on Culture, Landscape, and Architecture for the Public
By Julia Gamolina
Marion Weiss is the co-founder of WEISS/MANFREDI and the Graham Chair Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Her New York City-based multidisciplinary practice is known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape. Notable projects include the Seattle Art Museum: Olympic Sculpture Park, recognized by TIME Magazine as one of the “top ten architectural marvels.” Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, the National Building Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
She is a National Academy Inductee and recipient of Architecture Records 2017 Design Leader Award. Her firm has also been recognized with the New York Center for Architecture President’s Award, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, and the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press has published monographs on WEISS/MANFREDI’s work, Site Specific, Surface/Subsurface and PUBLIC NATURES: Evolutionary Infrastructures. Their forthcoming book, DRIFTING SYMMETRIES and Other Enduring Models, will be published in 2023. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Marion talks about her foundational passion for topography, opportunities in crisis, and projects for the public, advising those just starting their careers to travel as much as they can.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
MW: I grew up in Los Altos, a town south of San Francisco, California. As a young girl, I was interested in music, theater, art, and design. I was first exposed to architecture through a close family friend and Danish architect, Stanley York, who designed homes in the steep hillsides surrounding San Francisco. His office was filled with models of these houses — many, in retrospect, emulated Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House — and it looked like his job was enormous fun. He also shared a collection of black and white photos of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat with me, which inspired my obsessive creation of modular reconfigurable dollhouses.
My parents were also both sources of inspiration. My father was an aeronautical engineer working at Lockheed during our country’s ascent in the space race. He later worked for NASA on the space shuttle and completed his career teaching at MIT and Stanford. My mother was working on a master’s degree in systems analysis and land use planning when I was in high school, and she later taught at San Jose State University. Both had an incredible commitment to the work they were doing, curious about contemporary political issues, and were always generous mentors to their students.
Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale University. Photography by Jeff Goldberg.
Women's Memorial and Education Center. Photography by Jeff Goldberg.
How did you get to UVA?
I was the only female distance runner on our high school cross country team, and our training on the steep foothills of San Francisco’s Bay Area initiated a passion for topography. Our team competed at Foothill Junior College, a campus designed by architect Ernest Kump and landscape architect Peter Walker. At sixteen, I was inspired by the campus design that wove a collection of wood pavilions into the site’s steep topography. Not knowing who to ask about US architecture schools, I reached out to Ernest Kump, actually cold-calling him, for advice.
I was grateful that he agreed to meet me, and he strongly recommended the University of Virginia. He had once taught there and described it as the only school in the country that equally valued architecture and landscape. At the time, I had no intention of leaving California, even considering a cross country running scholarship at a West Coast university, but Ernest Kump asked what was more important, my days as a cross country runner or my life as an architect. Of course, I chose to go to UVA.
I also ran cross country, and relate so much to this. What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
UVA had an uncanny capacity to be both intimate and intimidating. The program’s emphasis on history and the conceptual foundations of projects that connected architecture and landscape were truly seminal. I initially felt lost in the lock-step ink line abstraction taught in the introductory studios led by Ralph Lerner, who became Dean of Architecture at Princeton, but later, the Italian architect Carlo Pelliccia, who drew exquisite charcoal figure drawings, suggested that intuition could lead my process. Ultimately, both were important mentors, and by my final year, I discovered the nearly magical intersection of abstraction inflected by intuition.
I then went to Yale for my master’s with an ambition to study with James Stirling. The studio juries, with Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Bob Stern, were simultaneously terrifying and inspiring. Acceptance into Stirling’s studio was based on a portfolio submission and his insistence on brutal diagrammatic clarity and a playful recasting of platonic form continue to inflect my teaching and creative process. There were, however, few women faculty, and Andrea Leers, the first female critic I ever had, insisted I invest more deeply in one direction rather than diffuse the potential of a project through endless possible scenarios with inadequate focus. I feel fortunate to enjoy her mentorship and friendship today, and her capacity to shape a critical practice and academic career has been a powerful model for my teaching and practice.
“We are designing and constructing settings and places that nobody, prior to that moment, had imagined would exist. This is something very fundamental and unique about our discipline; through our panoramic lens and practice as designers, we are able to create tremendous value.”
Noting that there were few female faculty, and the studio juries that you mentioned were all male, what did you make of this at the time? What do you make of it now? You mentioned you were the only female distance runner, so I am guessing the gender balance in architecture school was maybe not necessarily new...
The evolution of architecture schools and for that matter, athletic teams, has thankfully changed for the better, and in architecture, the diversity of faculty and students now is roughly equal women and men. I didn’t reflect on the absence of women faculty at the time, although at Yale, Andrea Leers was an instrumental critic and wonderful role model for me as both a practicing architect and teacher.
All of this said, many of my greatest lessons, especially those about myself, were discovered through travel. During graduate school, I was fortunate to win an SOM Foundation fellowship and traveled for seven months in Europe. My proposal focused on documenting a series of architectural crushes, projects in Spain, Italy, Scotland, France, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. The trip exposed me not only to my “pilgrimage” sites, but also to the discovery of unplanned wonders. The Alhambra in Granada, along with the lush oasis of the Generalife Gardens, overwhelmed my expectations. The sound of water and the crush of gravel beneath my feet turned a half-day “checklist” visit into a one-week stay.
How did you then get your start in professional practice?
I always envisioned having my own practice. That was the dream. After Yale, I moved to New York City where the economy was fragile and full-time work was elusive. During that first year, I was lucky to be hired for competition charettes with several interesting architects including Michael Sorkin, whose passion for unsolicited urban master plans was contagious, and Raquel Ramati, who introduced me to Ada Karmi Melamede — an equally inspiring architect. I had long admired Aldo Giurgola’s pencil drawings for the Canberra Parliament building, an ensemble of landform building and architecture that defined an entirely unprecedented civic architecture. I was hired by his firm and dreamed of immediately working on public projects of similar importance.
I learned in the first week that I would be spending the next eight months detailing nearly two dozen staircases for the new IBM executive education center. Little did I know then that those eight months and multiple staircases would ignite my passion for the cinematic potential of topography in architecture. I also met my partner, Michael Manfredi, at Mitchell/Giurgola. We discovered our shared connection with Carlo Pelliccia, my UVA professor whom Michael knew as a child growing up in Rome, Italy. We were equally inspired by Pelliccia’s charcoal drawings and bonded over our shared conviction that architecture should inform work for underserved communities. Through the Architectural League, we collaborated on two speculative projects in Harlem: one for affordable housing and the other for a school and community center.
Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park. Photography by David Lloyd.
Kent State. Photograhy by Albert Vecerka.
Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech. Photography by Iwan Baan.
How and when did you both start Weiss/Manfredi?
After leaving the firm, we chose independent professional paths, occasionally collaborating on pro-bono design competitions. I taught and worked on a few small projects, and the idea of forming a practice together was a remote idea.
In 1989 though, we entered the design competition for the Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, and out of 137 entries, were shortlisted. It was during the final jury presentation that we were asked if we had a firm, to which we improvised a response and said, “Yes.” We won the project and, a few days later, formed our practice, Weiss/Manfredi. This led to hybrid projects, equally focused on culture and landscape. Early projects such as the Olympia Fields Park and Community Center, the Museum of the Earth, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center led to more infrastructurally ambitious projects like the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle and Hunters Point Waterfront Park in New York City.
Where are you in your career today? What is on your mind most at the moment, and what are you most excited about right now?
I’m excited by our current projects. Just before the pandemic, we won the competition to rejuvenate the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles. It is an incredible honor to reimagine a geologic wonder bound to LA’s history, a public park with asphaltic seeps, a fifty-year-old museum adjacent to LACMA, and the world’s largest active urban paleontological research. It is also interesting to learn about Los Angeles’s Pleistocene past, an era of intense climate change, and understand its relevance to our era of globally pressing climate challenges.
We’re also working on the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, a project we have been working on for a number of years and is currently under construction. There, we were profoundly impressed by India’s deep history of connecting architecture and landscape, and our project builds on the evolution of these sensibilities in dialogue with Edward Durrell Stone’s tropical modern embassy, the first building on that site designed nearly half a century ago.
“I like to think that the net of questions we must ask as designers is not finite, but infinitely expandable, and much of our work as educators and architects is less about refining form but determining what important questions have yet to be asked before design, and form giving, begins.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
I am currently inspired by a collection of designers, in some cases unknown and unrecognized, that have created public projects of enduring significance. The simultaneity of social and environmental challenges has led me to explore more deeply a collection of hybrid works of infrastructure, architecture, and landscape, shaped by and impacting their respective cities and landscapes.
For over a decade, my Penn research studios have been investigating the generative potential of these lesser-known projects such as Agrasen Ki Boli, a stepwell in New Delhi, the Khaju Bridge in Isfahan, and Joze Plecnik’s River Walk in Ljubljana. Each example generously offers gifts to the public while simultaneously connecting to territories well beyond the boundaries of their site. These studies build on the personal and academic research that Michael and I have been pursuing, first shared at the Venice Biennale in 2018, and now coming into focus with our forthcoming book.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?
Some of the biggest challenges have proved to be sustaining a powerful vision through the enormously long timeframe required to realize public projects. An endless number of challenges can emerge over the course of a project, and inspiring new collaborators in the process, including client teams and government agencies that change leadership, requires listening with care to evolving agendas while sustaining the essence of a project and its value for the public realm. My greatest wistfulness resides around projects that we have worked intensely on for years, with incredibly meaningful aspirations, and yet have been paused indefinitely when funding is out of reach.
In terms of how to manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback – I’m always interested in the opportunities embedded in each crisis. In the case of the Women’s Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, our initial competition design was rejected, and we had to return to our research on the history of women patriots, which lead to our design of arc glass tablets hovering at the edge of the cemetery, with their words inscribed in each glass panel. For the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, the Army Corps of Engineers deemed the waterfront parcel as unbuildable due to a failing sea wall. With the persistence of our client and team of engineers, we instead pursued a federal grant to reinforce the shoreline wall with a series of underwater terraces that created habitat benches for juvenile salmon. That solution was less expensive than the Army Corps’ approach and ecologically more sensitive. It has established the approach currently being implemented for downtown Seattle’s entire waterfront.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center. Photography by Albert Vecerka.
Olympic Sculpture Park. Photography by Iwan Baan.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I’m profoundly committed to working on projects that are foremost for the public. I’m grateful to the incredibly talented members of our office and my students who share our preoccupation with connecting larger cultural questions with the loose ends of landscape, infrastructure, and ecology. I feel fortunate to be the Graham Chair Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, where my ability to accelerate research within the context of advanced studios has been an essential complement to the work our office is doing. As a designer, I hope to continually engage the questions that bring enduring value to people and places that may have eluded focus by others.
Teaching has shed a light on the necessity for continuous learning. For me, teaching and my practice are stimulants to one another and entirely reciprocal. The conceptual ambitions that arise within the academic framework often inspire improbable approaches to our work. I like to think that the net of questions we must ask as designers is not finite, but infinitely expandable, and much of our work as educators and architects is less about refining form but determining what important questions have yet to be asked before design, and form giving, begins.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
My advice would be the same for all emerging architects. Travel. Travel might be as modest as exploring unknown parts of a city you live in, or to countries with identities dramatically different than your own. Images dominate our experience today, yet it is profoundly different to discover the gifts of a place in person. Physically being on a site enables us to ask ourselves, “How do I feel?” How does time register on these landscapes or buildings? What does this landmark silhouette against the skyline do in relation to other competing landmarks? What is the smell, sound, and tactile experience of a place? These are things that can only forge enduring impressions if you see them yourself. Do not be picky. Immerse yourself in historically rich things, in contemporary things, and in all that blank space in between which has more texture and life than we ever give credit for. The beauty of travel continues when you come back to your own work.
And one final thing — design fields, from architecture to landscape architecture to art, do something that few other fields or disciplines do. We can synthesize contradictory agendas and challenges seemingly unrelated to each other to create something that is measurable only through the act of design. We are designing and constructing settings and places that nobody, prior to that moment, had imagined would exist. This is something very fundamental and unique about our discipline; through our panoramic lens and practice as designers, we are able to create tremendous value.