Influences … Andrew Maynard

Interviewed by Geoff Manaugh for UDR #4

Are there any books that have come to influence either your design practice or your general interest in architecture?

When people mentioned architects, or when they asked me who my favorite architects were, I typically choose to quote a few comic books - I generally find the practice of architecture and architects to be pretty boring so I tend to avoid talking about architecture in any direct fashion.   I really enjoy the mischievousness Rem Koolhass' polemical writing, but generally I find most architectural text takes itself too seriously. I enjoy the Quadernes series of books, and a book called Skateboarding, Space and The City by Ian Borden. I feel like skateboarding has really influenced how I think about urban space. Skateboarding is a product of suburban sprawl - these leftover, messy spaces that we have in the urban pattern. But skateboarding came along and said: Well, if these are just leftover spaces, then we need to take advantage of that. It's a different understanding of urban space: cities aren't meant to be a series of privately owned spaces that you have to negotiate between; they're meant to be a public space that we all share and do creative and interesting things with.

I also really like Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. I love the character Yossarian; Yossarian questioned everything to the point that it was obvious everything was insane. This greatly influences my life and work. Question everything and you may find something new - but, more likely, you'll simply reveal that, at the foundation of the things we believe and see, there are false assumptions, guesses, or distortion.

What about films?

Brazil , by Terry Gilliam. There's also that Directors Label series of DVDs, with videos by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham - that was pretty amazing. The video for Björk's All is Full of Love , by Chris Cunningham, had everything in it, in such a beautiful, restrained way. The space it's filmed in - and the high-tech kind of Japanese technology that it features - is everything that I want architecture to be.

Are there are other spaces like that that influence your design work?

There's this new Volkswagen assembly plant in Germany that I love. It's an incredible architectural space - but it probably has nothing to do with architects. It more like this sort of accidental art: this big, disciplined space that got filled up with seemingly random stuff : machines, mechanisms, robotic arms.

There's actually a diagram I use when I give lectures, of a guy assembling a car, and I say to people: Can you imagine if the building industry had to build cars? A car would take 2 years to be delivered after your original order was placed, they'd always break, they'd cost heaps of money, you'd have to pull off the back and rebuild the thing every couple of years to make repairs.

So it sounds like you like machines.

Well, the problem is - and it's because my practice is young, and I'm young - our built work has hardly any of this stuff in it! It's incredibly hard to convince someone to buy an expensive machine that will make their house rotate! Trying to convince your client to build a smaller house that does more interesting things is almost impossible. So it's frustrating, trying to get these objects into our built work - but, as long as we keep getting this into our conceptual work, and we keep playing with these ideas, then I think it will eventually start to get built.

But, going back to that VW plant, there's this comic book artist called Geof Darrow.

You had mentioned comic books.

Yeah. When I was in high school I was heading more toward art, and I was doing a lot of drawing, and I would look at artists like Geof Darrow - and I realized that the thing that inspired me the most about their work was the architecture . Especially somebody like Darrow, where the spaces he draws are dystopias, and they're made up of these unknown, leftover mechanical bits and pieces. You have no idea what this mesh of services was really for, or what it actually does; but these random, ad hoc , organic growths create such interesting spaces. In fact, a lot of paper architecture really turns me on.

I also really like Tom McFarlane's range of toys that he produces, called McFarlane Toys . Every now and then I'll grab one of them, because they're so beautiful - just incredibly crafted toys at a 1:20 scale. And I think more and more about The Transformers these days, because that's what I really want my buildings to be: I want them to be structures that move, and fold, and change. I believe that The Transformers were the first thing that made me fall in love with design; they most likely are the main cause of my interest in mobile, kinetic and adaptable architecture. If you look at the complexity in a Transformer, there's something incredible about it that just isn't captured in architecture. Architects just assemble mass-produced items like taps, tiles and carpet. We're assembling stuff into buildings and structures. Architecture would be so much more interesting if it was made by industrial designers!

Anyone in particular?

No - it's really, I think, basic commercial products that influence me. You just walk around and look at some of the incredible electrical goods out there, or at the products that Apple produces. Or Norman Foster was once asked what his favorite building was, and he said a Boeing 747. When you go and you look at structures and products like that, and when you compare those to contemporary, "cutting-edge" architecture, you realize that we're 100 years behind industrial design.