トム・エマーソン/インタビュー/要約

「実践」に関する言及が面白かったので、スイス建築博物館によるトム・エマーソンによるインタビューを一部文字起こしし要約します。

冒頭の５分では自身の活動の紹介と、イギリス・スイスに共通する思想・実践への重視について語っています。

ロンドンで6aアーキテクツを率い、ETHで教授をしている。

"I'm an architect and co-founder with Stephanie Ｍcdonald of 6a architects in London and I'm a professor at the Department of Architecture in ETH Zurich."

ロンドンでの活動。

"In London, our practice does mainly cultural educational buildings often in London but not always also in continental Europe and it's really about the kind of reuse of the city. It's particularly focused around kind of construction, the garden or landscape as a kind of new paradigm for  architecture"

ETHのスタジオの説明（スタジオのサイト http://www.emerson.arch.ethz.ch/）

"At ETH our studio is sort of concerned with similar issues to do with the environment making and the territory but perhaps at a more speculative and kind of larger scale as well as a smaller scale. And our newest research project at the moment alongside the atlases which are big surveys is a garden a real garden which is being made over several years with different generations of students. So it's all about the kind of the layering of different interventions and the looking after of previous ones so kind of the gardener the kind of paradigm for the world the city and how things work."

正確さ
"So this idea of practice precision making being not just a kind of the consequence of the way that they do things is at the very heart of the way that they do things here. And in that sense, that that's where maybe there and there has been for a long time quite a strong natural affiliation between British culture and Swiss culture. I mean it goes back to the 19th century and all the rest of it but it's certainly strong now. "

イギリスで実践が理論よりも重んじられることの背景

"Not so much precision I think that British culture is fundamentally approximate to do with typography is to do with a kind of this sort of the way that the island culture works. But certainly, a culture in which practice is probably valued higher than the theory it's a fundamental fundamentally pragmatic culture it's kind of empirical pragmatism has been sort of at the heart of a kind of British philosophy since the 18th century. "

考えよりも実践が先行するというアイデアはスイスとも呼応する。
"And this idea of doing first and then thinking later is really I would say something that corresponds certainly in Switzerland. The institution's the rules the precision is at a kind of is much more explicitly felt in all areas of kind of likes and culture that maybe because it's more recent because the country is very extreme topographically, and you could say the difference you know a little bit of approximation can be the difference between life and death in the mountain, whereas you know the rolling hills of England if you're three meters out it doesn't really matter. I mean specifically in Switzerland I mean out and its manifested in you could say highly regulated liberalism. so there is a side of Swiss culture which is extremely liberal whether it comes from things like squatting culture demonstrations. But all of that happened within a kind of very highly regulated environment so you know there may be the demonstration there may be alternative subcultures and stuff like that but by tomorrow morning everything will be cleaned up. "

"So there is a sort of an acceptance of quite a wide variety of behavior in public space most of it is extremely orderly occasionally rather less orderly but whatever happens there is a sort of super layer which I think comes from the administration comes from a kind of maintenance culture which is extremely highly developed. I think in this case I'm probably talking more about Zurich which I know better than Basel. To be honest, I certainly would not claim I know Basel well enough to try to give it a definition and maybe slightly contradict my own description of London but to take George Barracks quote where he says “don't try and find their meeting definition for the city you'll only get it wrong it's too complex”. So in that sense in that sense o I'll proceed cautiously and but the thing that you said I certainly do feel that Basel its scale is explicit when you first arrive there certainly is the fact that it's actually a relatively small city. And we sort of know instinctively its size in vain' without reaching to its boundaries through the scale and density of the canals and space even the walk from the railway station to the river and across the river somehow gives you a very good measure of the place.