Hashim Sarkis

Recorded on May 23, 2025. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

In 1998, Hashim Sarkis established Hashim Sarkis Studios (HSS) with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Beirut, and has since moved their U.S.-based office to Boston. The firm’s projects have included work on affordable housing, parks, institutional and residential buildings, urban design, and a balloon launching pad. Several of their projects, including for the Housing of the Fishermen of Tyre, Byblos Town Hall, and the Courtowers, have received awards. The studio’s work has been exhibited around the world, from MoMA New York as well as in different biennials from Venice to Hong Kong. Sarkis has been the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT since 2015. He was a director and curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened in 2021 with the overarching theme, “How will we live together?” He is author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on contemporary architecture and art and on modern architectural history and theory, including, most recently, The World as an Architectural Project, the companion book to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hashim was head of the Holcim Foundation Awards jury for Middle East and Africa in 2011, a member of the global awards jury in 2018, and head of the global awards jury in 2021. He also joined the Pritzker Prize jury in 2024.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljacki  00:00
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects, deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. Today, I’m talking to Hashim Sarkis. Hashim established Hashim Sarkis Studios, HSS, in 1998 with offices then in Cambridge and now in Boston and Beirut. The firm’s projects have included affordable housing, houses, parks, institutional buildings, urban design, and one of my early favorites, a balloon launching pad. HSS has received several awards for its projects, including for the housing of the fishermen of Tyre Byblos Town Hall and the court tower houses. And the work has been exhibited around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in different biennials from Venice to Hong Kong. Sarkis has been the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT since 2015. He was a director and curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened in 2021 with the overarching theme, How will we live together? He is author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on contemporary architecture and art and on modern architecture history and theory, including, most recently, The World as an Architectural Project, the companion book to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hashim was head of the Holcim foundation awards jury for Middle East and Africa in 2011, a member of the global awards jury 2018, and head of the global awards jury in 2021 and has joined the Pritzker Prize jury in 2024. As you know, Hashim, I’ve been opening these conversations with a question about the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, or if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening and on what grounds?

Hashim Sarkis  03:11
Ana, thanks for including me in your Critical Broadcasting Lab. I’ve been following it closely and hearing some of the podcasts throughout and reading some of them, and I have to say, you remind me a bit of Anthony Appiah and his Ethicist column in the New York Times, because the way you’re positing the question, both to me and my colleagues, is at one level, a very easy question, and then you unpack it to become a very difficult question. And the Ethicist plays that game too, in a way, when he starts with a very obvious question, he makes it not so obvious. And in your case, it starts with an obvious question, it goes on for an hour. So let’s get started. Let me start with the easy part of it. I do think that some of the ethical issues that confront us on a daily basis are easy to answer. You’re presented to a client, a potential client, who you know launders money. You say, thank you. You get away from it. Client comes to you. She says, I fired the previous architect because he didn’t know what to do and he didn’t do what I want. Will you do what I want? Say, Thank you very much, I leave. Or architects who want a very, very specific stylistic angle on things. You say, I can’t do it. Sorry, it’s not my purview. But then again, these come with the idea that what you’re being given is a commission. This is a project do it, and. But we know that commissions are one type of project that we get, but then there are other kinds of projects that we get, which is the way I built my practice. I built my practice, not so much around commissions, but around self-generated projects or partnerships with non-governmental organizations or working as an agent of particular groups to help figure out what they might need and accordingly a project develops. So in those cases, you’d better not get out because you’ve launched the project and it’ll look very bad if you’re the one who abandons it first. I have enjoyed that kind of work, and I continue to do that kind of work. The housing for the fishermen of Tyre was a friend approaching me saying, we have this problem. What do we do? And over a series of conversations, selections of sites, discussions with the community, we determined what to do, and it was a work in progress for about a year before we decided that it should be a project. It should be this. It should be that. The same with many of the agriculture related projects in rural Lebanon. The same with the museum that I’m right now building in the cedars of Lebanon, a biodiversity house. They rarely start with a clear project. It’s our role as architects to help shape the project. Now, this has been a very fortunate position to be in, but it has also constrained me and the practice in thinking that every project should be like that. And over the years, I’ve learned that, no, commissions do exist, and they have a very different rhythm, pace, scale. But in those cases, I have also learned, with some hardships, that ultimately, probably instead of thinking about it as a commission, one should think about it as a contract, and that as architect, you enter into it, not in a bilateral relationship, but as a custodian of the contract, who, in front of the client, represents other experts, other professions, other players, and that the role of the custodian is to make sure that they all work together towards a particular goal that gives a very different role to the architect than just a bilateral relationship with a client.

Miljacki  07:33
You spoke about the spatial contract when you were doing your biennial. Do you mean this in a similar way?

Sarkis  07:42
I would say in two ways, or in maybe three ways. If we add the social contract to the mix, the literal contract, the one that we sign, and everybody else is part of it, but we are responsible for it in front of the clients. That’s one contract. The spatial contract, in that we are trying to interpret the needs, demands, requirements of the client into spatial parameters, and shaping the space in such a way that it does bring people together into some form of ritual, decorums, habits that the architecture shapes and encourages, and then the social contract that is sometimes shaping the special contract and sometimes shaped by the social contract, by the special contract.

Miljacki  08:35
It seems to me that on your website, also there is evidence of trying to work through competitions. But I wanted to talk about these, little more specifically about these, maybe not clients, but enablers of the work as you, in a way, describe them, and to ask you, who wants to work with you? How do they find you? And how do you find them?

Sarkis  09:16
Who calls? Friends, repeat clients, NGOs. These are the ones that you build trust with over the years. And they call. Or people who visited the house I’ve designed, the school I’ve designed, and they say, how about that? Who calls? I call. I say, you have a great foundation, that you’re doing these amazing things, I’ve done work with this other foundation. Can we talk? Competitions are, as you noted, a different beast. However, there are many types of competitions, and I’ve learned to enter into some and avoid others. The ones that I really enjoy are the ones that rally all the architecture community around a very important project that you feel obligated to be part of, National Museum for the reconstruction of Beirut, the town hall of the city of Byblos. These are things where you feel it is your duty as an architect to be part of them and to just contribute. Then there are those that you feel elevate the discourse on architecture that open up possibilities of where are we going? What do we do here? An emerging art collection that doesn’t have a space in Lebanon. Let’s see what we can do. You apply, you you get shortlisted, and you enter into the competition. The ones I’ve learned to avoid are those that seem to be and smell like ways in which the client, first of all, doesn’t know what to do, and they’re probing. Not that I don’t think that architecture is a way for helping a client figure out what to do, but you also sometimes realize that what it is is simply a promotion of something else, not the project itself, but something else. Maybe the cause is worth it, but I’ve learned to avoid them because of time. I’d rather spend my time on things that will get built, and the older I get, the more determinant that factor is.

Miljacki  11:29
It seems to me, from looking at your biography in some detail, that your work for Moneo on the Beirut Souks was an important return to Beirut and to the architectural scene in that context, which included writing about various topics in that context. And it seems like even as you describe these various projects, they’re all situated in Lebanon. So what is this sort of, what kind of return is this?

Sarkis  12:02
Ana I never left Beirut. I physically left Beirut in 1985 to pursue my undergraduate studies at RISD. Then subsequently, the war kept going on, and I kept studying Harvard masters, Harvard PhD, Harvard teaching. But I’ve never mentally left Beirut in a kind of a state of mind, in a passion for not just a place, a culture, but a disposition and how you are as a human being in the world. I kept working in Lebanon, or on Lebanon throughout. When I did my undergraduate degree at RISD it was on Berlin, another divided city at the time, I felt like the distance, physically, culturally, allowed me to look at Beirut better if I worked on Berlin, and then I did continue to practice in Lebanon, smaller projects every now and then when I went there, and I did found this nonprofit with a group of friends called Plan B, immediately after the war. The return to Beirut, physically, personally, for a long stretch of time, happened with Moneo, because I was, I took a sabbatical from teaching, and I went there for a period of nine months, and it gave me the continuity to be able to launch also my practice there. So that is definitely very transformative. But it also got me directly involved in a large scale urban project that exposed me to the permitting processes, the legal processes, the political processes, societal questions about such a major landmark in the city that connected me much more strongly with the day to day making of architecture.

Miljacki  13:49
Maybe this will bring us back to or my plan is that we arrive back to Beirut through a few questions. But you know, when we do these interviews, varieties of optimism have organically emerged as one of the most maybe consistent dispositions of the architects that we talked to. You don’t even have to back into it. You have been often, or you insist often on optimism as the place from which all architecture or architectural work happens, and I’m wondering if you can connect it for us to the criteria by which you and your firm engage projects, maybe that phone call and conversely, criteria by which you do not engage projects. And then we can talk about how these criteria might have changed with the transformation of the office or your own other roles, really outside of it.

Sarkis  14:44
You speak of optimism as if we have a choice. We don’t. We are condemned to optimism, not just by nature of our profession, but by nature of us, seeking to express, seeking to present possibilities to the world. And even if they are pessimistic possibilities, the act of making, the act of suggesting something like that, is in itself an optimistic gesture. I am of the romantic, meaning 18th century romantic position that it is action that leads to hope, not the other way around. And for that, what we do is the path to hope. Sometimes it’s a bad outcome, and we say ouch, and maybe it’s not as hopeful as we wanted it to be, but that’s the path we have to take, in terms of attitude, tone, posture, towards the future. And yet, architecture has a very, very ambiguous relationship with the future, because it always presents itself as being of the present, especially as you’re working on a project, aspiring for a future that it wants to represent. But if it represents it too clearly it is already how can I say it’s already dated by the time it’s finished? And it is that constant capacity to present a future near that it projects, but you never catch. That present that positions architecture, both in relationship to time and relationship to optimism, in a very unique way. And it is these qualities that we spend our time calibrating: how far into the future? How hopeful?

Miljacki  16:35
You know, this notion about optimism is really, I don’t know if I think of it as a choice, maybe to some extent, but it certainly emerges from the professional or architectural disciplinary kind of disposition, maybe towards the future. As you say, in my own experience, there is a certain ilk of maybe optimism, desperate optimism, that comes out of enduring difficulty. And I’m wondering if there may be a specifically Beirut-y version of optimism that you’re also generalizing for us, but that is specific.

Sarkis  17:11
I hope the whole world is like Beirut when it comes to that. I do know that somehow it, or sometimes it comes with a level of denial of the realities you live in. But we are very good at that, very good at navigating through denial in order to survive, in order to thrive, in order to move forward. But I do sincerely believe that the profession itself is built on that. If optimism means that you try to make the optimal out of everything, then that’s how life should be led. And if optimism means about projection of hope, again, by the act of building is the best way we can project hope. My challenge today, and I’m sure it is yours in the studio in school and the culture we live in is that there is a dissociation of architecture from the act of building, or an increasing questioning of the act of building as being a necessary outcome of our profession.

Miljacki  18:15
Sure, but I want to, I would like to put this in relation to Tafuri. You mentioned him to me last week as having an important formative function for you as an architect and as an educator. And I think we can, just for a moment longer, think about optimism and in conversation with Tafuri, maybe.

Sarkis  18:40
Studying in the 80s, the 90s, you had to read Tafuri in every class you studied. And there was a sense that his framing of the critical role of the architect was the model that we had to follow. But that framing ultimately was a very pessimistic one, or at least one,that relegated the architect to the position of a citizen within a political system that needed to change before architecture could play a significant role in society. It was the model where the forms of architecture had to reflect existing forms of society, rather than propose alternative forms to society. His position of architecture in the Boudoir convinced me that there must be something else. That all of our, all that architecture can do is sit and wait until the revolution happens. Well, I can’t write a dissertation about that. I can’t think of my practice as just waiting for a revolution to happen. And we’ve you and I have lived through many revolutions that happened and did not happen the way we wanted them to happen. So what do we do? That’s what drew me to the notion of action and the notion of agency, and to the work and mentorship of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian philosopher at Harvard with whom I worked during my PhD years. And his position is a very simple one. It is that the central questions of politics are no longer in the space of politics. They have migrated to the professions to the arts, and it is incumbent upon us as professionals to uncover the political content of what we do and use our professional agency to mobilize architecture towards a political project, and that ultimately, the revolution will happen by the mobilization and coordination among us all. Obviously, we share certain collective visions across different social and professional groups. What is universalism in architecture? What is universalism in medicine? Can we work together on that, but it is very important for us to realize the power we hold in the professional knowledge we possess.

Miljacki  21:12
Great. Most of your architectural work is in Lebanon, but also in Canada, China, Turkey, UAE, Armenia and Kenya. How do you think of practicing remotely, and how do you execute it? That’s one question. And then, as you know, we included your work in Lebanon in the Office US project for the US pavilion in Venice in 2014 proposing that every office operating from the US context was a US office. Do you have thoughts on that also? So both of these sort of things: a kind of remote operation, and what makes, what the location from which you operate provides or produces.

Sarkis  21:57
I have come to believe that every office is an international office in this day and age, but maybe again here I’m generalizing a condition I live in, and I’m surrounded by people at MIT and Harvard and in Boston who are all citizens of the world in their profession. I stumbled into that because I was here while mentally in Beirut and really connected to Lebanon, and had to figure things out. So I would wake up early to connect to Beirut every day and start the day in Lebanon and then move to Boston. And eventually that became a model that not only I used, but many others did. So I was an international architect by necessity, first and then by by, you know, the model that now everybody follows. So I wouldn’t say that there’s anything in what I did that was different than what many others did. It just happened by virtue of me being an architecture, an architect in exile, if I can start there, but then the condition of exile is the condition of the cosmopolitan citizen. So I’m in good company. I think, even though, for difficult reasons,

Miljacki  23:12
I’m hoping that we can discuss a little bit more the mechanics of your collaborations with clients. And you started talking about this a little bit in the fisherman’s housing from 2008, the vibrant, colorful housing complex. Who were you in conversation with for that on the ground, but also maybe in architecture, more broadly?

Sarkis  23:43
In that particular project, the first conversations were primarily with the head of the NGO that was helping fund this project, and then with the fishermen themselves. But the conversation with the fishermen themselves was at two levels. One is programmatic, and that had been done through another NGO social organization that was anthropologists, sociologists, helping first understand their way of life and how we can transfer it from the Old City to this new residential area. And then the second one was constant presentations to them as a community, and it helped me understand very well questions of equity as they translate from social equity to spatial equity, and how certain words we use in one domain when you translate them to the other domain acquire a very different outcome. Let me give you one simple example. When I designed the project, I realized that we had very little area indoors for everyone, but given the weather and the fact that they mainly would work outside, I wanted to maximize the outdoor space for every unit, and we had four floors. So if you give the ground floor outdoor space, it’s a terrace. If you give the second floor outdoor space, it’s a balcony. And if you give the third floor outdoor space, it might be the terrace. Also, if you’re at the corner, you have exposure to two sides, whereas the other, so as a way of giving everybody equal access to outdoor space, by virtue of the spatial distribution, it had to be different. So when I proudly showed it to the fishermen, say, look, everybody has outdoor space. And they said, Wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. We we are socialists, we are egalitarian, you’re giving us units that are very different, one from each other. How do you justify that? How are we going to make choices? And I felt defeated. I felt completely defeated, like, how can I explain to them that I’ve been trying very hard to give them equal units, and so it took me a while to say that, well, the difference is, in order to adjust for inequalities that are spatial, so that you all get the right, same amount of goods, that we hit it off and then we moved forward. So it’s that kind of dialog that, for me, was very, very enriching, and I’ve learned a lot from that. I can give you another example about… in the first one, maybe it’s about space and questions of dimension. In the second example, which is with a private client for designing their houses, it’s more about image. As you know, when we enter into any project, the clients are extremely eager to get an image. They’re impatiently waiting for the image, and so much so that many competitions are about the image. In this case, the architects asked me for an image, and I said, How about if we start with a series of questions in order for us to set up the program and build a better knowledge of what we do? So I sent a questionnaire, and they diligently filled it. These are amazing clients, by the way. And then they said, Okay, what about the design? I said, Well, how about we test different models of the distributions of the houses over the terrain and all and we slowly started working together on developing a common language of the different options we have, giving them names, the community, the village, the street, the house that is linear, the house that is vertical, the house that is this. And then once we narrowed it down to one typology of houses, they said, Okay, now we get the image. I said to them, Why do we need the image? Why not just build the house itself on the site as a framework so that you can visit it? Go to see the view, to see this, to see that. It was an amazing exercise of patiently working to find alternative ways to engage the client, then through the shorthand representation. And it was also helpful for me, because I revised a lot of things by avoiding to work first with the image that you become enslaved to and to test, you know, the assumption that if you go to the third floor, you can see the sea from that angle, if you walk around this way, you avoid the view towards that. So the scaffold itself, with all of what it brought with it, was actually a very liberating one for our practice. So that way, we are now more and more building one to one mock ups. We are building a lot of scaffolds to test ideas before we even draw the images. Now this avoiding of the image, or maybe working around the steps of an architecture project, dates back to the work I started doing with NGOs. You make the drawings that are needed to build, and then once you finish the drawings to build, you make the drawings to represent the project, because you can’t afford that. So that has helped shape the practice and the dialog with the client in a different way than the usual model.

Miljacki  29:15
Can we talk about color, the importance of color in the fisherman’s housing project? But also in general, in your work?

Sarkis  29:24
You and I were educated with the idea that architecture is monochromatic. It’s white, or if it has any color, it’s the genuine color of the material itself. We’re also educated with the idea that every aspect of the building as you design it could be determined or guided by the central principle that your concept proposes. But we sometimes arrive at moments where the next decision that you’re going to make about the facade or about the window size has nothing to do with the concept of the plan or the program or anything. That it has to come from somewhere else. And it is this possibility that architecture could be informed by a variety of books, not just one book, or not one source of inspiration that we’ve always been in denial of. You can’t go there. You have to always come back to the central idea. And color is one of them that ultimately, if you keep going back to the concept, the structure, the form, the light, it will give you all the answers. But I found myself again and again, and I’m confessing openly here, reaching a point where I needed someone to help me decide on the color, because there’s nothing in the concept I started with that told me that this shall be green or this shall be yellow. What does one do? That confrontation became desperate with the housing for the fishermen because I was covering the building with plaster in anticipation of a spray that I was going to apply on it, which is a regular one to make the surfaces more continuous, and it was going to be white, and the contractor came to me and said, We’re running out of budget. We’re running out of time. I’m leaving this project. We need to finish it for the fishermen to move in. And you only have one choice, which is to paint the building. So okay, we paint it white. He said, Well, I have news for you. The surface, the underlay is so warped. We were thinking about it as being just a rough finish, because we want to put the spray on top that. If you paint it white, it’s only going to exaggerate the mistakes, it can’t be white. I said, what color? He said, any color, all colors cost the same. And went back to the office. It was really at that moment, it was 2005 I remember very well a serious moment of reflection on everything you’ve learned. Goethe. Let’s go to Goethe. He wrote the theory on color, and then you start uncovering that actually almost like Greek statues in Greek architecture, the depth of modernism… not the depth, but the foundations of modern architecture were not just white. We forgot the rest of the colors because at some point we decided to edit them out. But there’s a lot of white. So in adherence to the modernist principles, at least at the beginning, I felt okay, I can resurrect the color dimension. Polychromy, Josef Albers all of that, and helped me to recover color. And it helped a lot that the vernacular in Lebanon had color. And ever, ever since that moment, I’m free, and I’ve become obsessed with a few colors, some of them are behind me, blue, that recur in all the projects. They’re more in relationship to the presence of the sky in the architecture that I try to pull in to every building, but out of habit and maybe now a little bit of signature, like, a bit of blue is important for me to feel like I left a mark on the project that is, is me.

Miljacki  33:44
On your website, you list some things you like in the office. And I’m wondering if this list is something you produced with the office and includes liking courtyards, olive trees, blue. And I’m wondering, are these also the books you’re referring to. Are these the many? What is the status of this list?

Sarkis  34:09
Fetishes? Maybe?

Miljacki  34:13
An atmosphere?

Sarkis  34:15
The courtyard is a fundamental feature in every project. In every project, even if you don’t see the enclosed space with emptiness in the middle, we try to find interpretations of an intense edge and an open space in other ways than the courtyard. But it does come from my belief that architecture should not be about the program, but should be about the space and the possibilities that the inhabitants can enact in that space out of a support system: the edge, closets, intense edges that are filled with possibilities, but it’s up to the clients to lay them out in the open space. For me, every every room is like that.

Miljacki  35:08
Do people in your office agree with you?

Sarkis  35:13
I think so. I think so. I think we are in a post programmatic generation. I mean, I especially so, not to interrupt you, but especially that the notion of sustainability, which is extremely present in the education of the new generation, does overlap strongly with that.

Miljacki  35:34
I read you describing something like this in the conversation with Angelo Bucci, where you were describing the kind of emptiness that you found in San Paulo architecture as a kind of space of potentiality. Maybe you’ve written on ways you think we must see and operate as architects today about world making, about world architecture, and in this interview with Angelo Bucci for NESS, you also described early work, maybe your thesis, that aimed to produce a panoramic view where there was no overview provided, a kind of visual coherence. And I don’t know that these are sort of disparate things, but they seem to me to connect as a kind of constellation of architectural values about maybe coherence. And I’m wondering if I’m even slightly right, how these values influence you thinking about projects that you might take on or would want to take on. So I’m connecting a kind of notion of world architecture with this capacity to produce an overview, or desire to produce an overview, or I’m suggesting coherence of some kind through architectural terms. And then how would these, if this is true, if these are indeed values that are of interest to you, how do they impact you thinking about projects?

Sarkis  37:03
I’ll take it, answer it in many ways, If you don’t mind. I don’t know if you had a chance to see the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Met last month. 

Miljacki  37:13
No.

Sarkis  37:14
As you know, he’s famous for those suspended views over hills, over seas and lakes and laying out the world in front of the individual. But that very famous painting, standing on top of the hill, looking through the mountains and fog, it’s the most, how to say, prominent position from which to see the world. And you see nothing. You see fog. You see mountains. But that clearing, that moment, that that mountain peak provides, is crucial. I have come to learn over the years that that platform itself is not a singular platform. It’s not about the individual, even though he exaggerates it, but people of his generation, like Von Humboldt, like Schinkel, made it a very social platform. That view that brings everybody together in order to apprehend is a social view. We educate each other about it, we converse about it. It’s a possibility of society that looks together at the world. Architecture can provide that. Architecture should provide that in every building. At another level, I do feel that there is a dimension of architecture that we do not pay enough attention to in our thinking is its interiority, that when you step inside, what happens, what you step inside, architecture has to offer you a different world, a better world, a possible world. And that world, for it to be laid out as a world, needs a sense of comprehensiveness, completion, but also that sense of collectivity. At another level, I do feel more increasingly the case today, if I can share with you another obsession is, where is it on this earth as we’re walking around that we arrive at the point as I’m walking down the street and I apprehend the curvature of the earth? Because I believe that if we feel like we are living on a circular, spherical planet, then we are much more attentive to each other’s needs and culture and all. I shared that obsession with a philosopher friend of mine, and he said, But Immanuel Kant talked about it. I said, Well, what do you mean, Immanuel Kant talked about it? He had no notion of the need for climate change or the challenges of climate change! And the need for us to connect that with climate change. He said, No, no. Kant was talking about kindness. Apparently. Kant said that the reason we are kind to each other as human beings is because the Earth is round, because we come back. If the Earth were flat, and our encounters with each other are going to be just in the passing, and once, we would not be kind to each other.

Miljacki  40:24
I have to ask you this next question, Hashim, because you will laugh. Maybe that you know, maybe you’ve already begun answering. But so, as someone who taught your constructing vision class at the GSD for a few years, world architecture, when it emerged in your article in new geographies, made sense to me as a form of vision or a way of seeing, and in the context of all of the other forms of seeing and constructing that you explored in the class, which were always both historical and architectural constructs, constructs and always of instrumental relevance for architects. Can we talk about forms of planetary vision and why you think they’re important?

Sarkis  41:10
Thank you for exposing the lineage. They are very connected. Actually, when we talk about the panoramas the world, when we talk about the possibility of comprehending the world through a cognitive map, it’s the world. And when we now talk about the World Vision, or the idea that we create worlds, it’s very much connected to that lineage, but projecting a different dimension. I do want to add in all of this, even if it might sound like I’m avoiding the question. The Universalist project, we are in front of a world today which its pluralism, its diversity, its divergences and differences are highly, highly projected, so much so that, and contested so much so that the project of the left has been usurped by those projects. There was a moment where the project of the left had a very strong Universalist underpinning. We have forgotten about that. I think the World Vision is a desperate call for us to recover the underlying Universalist tenets of the left project.

Miljacki  42:29
I’m going to bring you back to your work from that. So when I think of the more monolithic works that you’ve produced, Byblos town hall Assabil library, proposal for a mosque in Doha, maybe the court towers. They all strike me as participating in that kind of world vision, a kind of planetary seeing. Do you think that’s a viable reading of those projects, or at least of their hope?

Sarkis  43:04
This is very observant and generous on your part as well, because at one level, these are all very simple objects that you can find everywhere, and therefore they have a certain level of familiarity that is not place based, but can be, so you can associate with everywhere. And at another level, they are distorted just enough to be of the place. And then when they you go inside them, they take you somewhere else. They take you to the sky most of the time, because that’s the more prevalent view And the sky’s presence, for me, is another way in which architecture, if we emphasize the sky, in architecture, in which architecture can connect across the world. So yes.

Miljacki  43:59
What kind of research is practice, and how does it fit with your scholarly, curatorial and decanal work?

Sarkis  44:08
My practice, in a way, informed my research work on my PhD, where I was trying to look for best practices of Architects who deeply engaged in the democracy of different forms, as practitioners, but also as theorists, as people who shaped a particular relationship between one form of democracy and one form of space. But I can also confess, this is more like a confession hour, isn’t it? I can also confess that I’ve become a much better teacher, educator through my practice, because I think it helped me select the kinds of questions that seem to me more relevant, more poignant and to bring to the table. I also think of my practice, my teaching, as a space where I ask questions that I don’t know the answers for yet. I read somewhere that if you want to learn something new, teach a course about it, you retain 95% of the material, whereas if you’re the student, you only retain 5%. I hope they retain a little bit more than that. But so I usually have a question in the office that comes up, a recurring problem that I don’t know much about, and I say, let me teach a course about it. And it’s that kind of exchange that has emerged between my research and my practice, the new geographies dimension, which led to the world architecture, the lab, then the magazine, and then the world project, all came out of what you asked me for earlier, which is, how do you relate to different geographies in your practice, but also the strong presence of the land in a lot of the projects I was working on.

Miljacki  46:04
But so when I asked what kind of research is practice, I’m also wondering, are there feedback loops within practice itself that you would say are about advancing topics and ideas internally, and are they different from teaching and scholarship?

Sarkis  46:23
Yes, they are, and it has a lot to do with the breadth. I think the breadth of a project is much shorter than the breadth of thinking about the book or a research project in school, which makes the loop in practice, very short, but carrying from one to the other to the other certain threads, and these threads are the ones that become the research undertaking. However, there is the very deep, practical research that you do in every project you’re working on. Now, we’re working on a museum for biodiversity in the cities of Lebanon. And every item we touch, we say, Well, that can’t just be a door. It has to be a door that tells the story of biodiversity. So we’re looking into the industry of manufacturing doors to say, Okay, how is it that we can recover from that an aspect related to biodiversity? So there’s that immediate answer that you need to produce that is in itself a very, very serious research answer. So I will never design a door the same way, and I’ll never talk about the door the same way. I don’t know. I don’t like talking about doors because I don’t know how to make doors. But that’s another discussion.

Miljacki  47:39
This one might feel like it’s coming from the left field. But have you ever regretted not taking a commission or vice versa?

Sarkis  47:46
Oh yeah, you regret losing some competitions, definitely. There was a house that I said no to because I felt like the client had too much baggage. The daughter was an architect. There was, there were too many players already. As I said, I don’t want to deal with that headache, but looking retrospectively at it, I think I would have managed my way through. And it was a beautiful site, a beautiful problem. That’s one of many, many, many.

Miljacki  48:20
Are there some things you took on that you wish you hadn’t?

Sarkis  48:24
Oh yes.

Miljacki  48:26
Tell us!

Sarkis  48:27
And some that I had to disown halfway through, or somewhere the client changed halfway and you feel like you no longer have your bearings. So you withdraw, increasing the, especially when you work with larger scale projects, which are quite speculative, you always walk in thinking that this one will be built, and then you realize that what you’re being brought in for is to just help develop a coherence out of, let’s say, three parcels to make them into one big project so that the value of the property increases and then they can sell it again. These are the ones I regret deeply. And every time I enter into one of these, I’m promising you and the office in front of me, I will not do that again. I regret it because it’s a waste of time.

Miljacki  49:22
I would like to ask you about the Venice Biennale in some way, but maybe we can start with the fact that we just recently returned from Venice this year, and I’m wondering how you think of that platform having operated at the highest level of it. I’m interested in how you thought of it as you began it. Has your position on it changed? Have you seen things that you think we need this platform for?

Sarkis  49:54
When the question came up during the pandemic as to whether the Biennale should go virtual or just be turned into one event that brings everybody together in the ether, I convinced the directorship to do a survey of the participants, past curators and everybody, and the answer came back a resounding no, because there are very few places for architects to meet on this planet all together around architecture. It’s one thing to exhibit and display architecture online, and it’s another for creating a platform for communication, discussion that lasts this long and which, where everybody comes together. And if there’s any testament to that is the amount of people that showed up at your exhibition last week or two weeks ago, and how much hope, connectedness, optimism. Let’s come back to that word you feel when you see 1000 people convening around architecture. There’s nothing like that. And that was, for me, a very assuring gesture, because it was connected to the theme, indirectly. It was an accident of circumstance that the pandemic happened around the theme of, how will we live together? But the question that I asked was directly extracted from practice, meaning it is, if you tell me, what is the central question that you ask on a recurring basis with every project, it is that. how do you bring people together under the architecture. And how will we live together? Question is one that predates the finale by 2000 years, right? It means it was Aristotle who asked at first when he wanted to put together his ideal city. And every contract that we write is about that, how, what is the code that we create, the decorum that we create, the parameters, the legal parameters, the policies that we create in order to come together? But we have often relied on the social contract to shape the spatial contract. And little do we talk about the fact that every architectural project is a spatial contract that proposes ways we can live together, and that can inspire, and has inspired a lot of the social contract business, meaning architects sometimes precede the social dynamics that happen inside them, and they help shape them. And that’s what I was hoping to find in asking this question to architects, because I feel we engage in that, in asking that question, in everything we do. And maybe that could help inspire society at large, especially at a time when neither the politicians nor the philosophers nor the religious people and nor, I would say, the psychoanalysts, are helping us with that question, and yet it’s the only question that is in front of us. 

Miljacki  53:05
It goes back to action and optimism about action. I counted about nine to eleven people on your HSS website. Do you have any procedures in place by which you both expose your office to the realities of running the office, and do you invite your team to think collectively about the commissions or projects that you will and will not work on?

Sarkis  53:33
You are looking at an iteration of the office which is quite recent. We just moved to the space in the South End about a year and a half ago. But I would say it’s not the post pandemic office. It’s the post Biennale office. The office, I’m going to say, suffered, but took a hit from the Biennale. As you know, I have this other job, which is MIT. 

Miljacki  53:57
We’ll get to that too.

Sarkis  53:59
And usually it leaves me some space for my practice. So when the Biennale happened, little did I know when I said, Yes, that it will take over that space, which is obvious, because I had to continue doing what I’m doing at MIT. And even though it was exhilarating, even though it engaged the office in many ways, including design, we designed quite a few things for the Biennale, but it created a pause or a gap in the practice. So, and because of the pandemic, it was a kind of double blow. So the return here has allowed us a way to stop and think about first, the rhythm of life. How do I combine the two together? How do we engage MIT grads, who are now close to me intellectually, instead of Harvard grads? How do we build in the team in Beirut, which has been the continuity team, though here, things have changed constantly, and how do we now begin to think more about that very first question you asked me, that we are an international practice, and we need a setup for that. And so we now have very serious discussions constantly about managing the projects, but managing the office collectively, between Beirut and here. We do have an office manager, we have amazing architects on the team, amazing designers on the team, because we’re expanding from urban design all the way down to furniture design and all. So the breadth in the office is really exciting, and we’re testing it as we go, project by project, and coming back to articulate, okay, based on this experience, what is the best setup? Based on this experience, what is a better setup? The international dimension has helped in one other way, which I think other practices in the US, you studied them better than anybody else, feel which is dealing with economic cycles, because, except for the depression and the recession, even the recession, the economic cycles fortunately, do not go in sync, and therefore we’re able to benefit from connections here or there to help keep the flow of projects in the office.

Miljacki  56:24
Can we talk about the conditions in which you do your best work, or would prefer to do your architectural work?

Sarkis  56:31
In angst after long periods of procrastination! Isn’t that how we work?

Miljacki  56:38
Yeah, well, maybe this is, this is meant to be more like, what are the circumstances that would be great for you to align, sort of, is it the NGO and the site and then two offices, right?

Sarkis  56:54
And the two offices helps a lot, because…

Miljacki  56:58
Or the kind of question like, What is the question? Maybe this leads us to the next one, so you can immediately start thinking about it. Are all commissions equally exciting? Or are there ideal commissions, or ideal circumstances for a commission?

Sarkis  57:12
I can’t afford not to make them all exciting. I mean, I take very few and they have to be great. It would be too corny to say that the office is a lab, but it is, because I have so little time to be here. And if I’m not, if I’m just going to turn it into an office that churns projects, because we have to for the business part of it, which is a necessity, then I would be lying. I would like that to happen more, but there’s no time for that. So because there’s no time for that, I try to get the most exciting projects in front of us at the table, or even invent the most exciting projects on the table. Recently, I was asked by the city of Dubai, because I serve on a jury of great Arab minds, which is connected to the city of Dubai. And they asked me, What do you think the city needs? And I looked around, I said, you have everything, except they are in the wrong places. Why don’t we bring architecture to the community? And I proposed something like that. And they said, Yes, so we’re working on that. So it’s these kinds of opportunities that I am now trying to multiply so that we are able to, at one level, bring to the office, meaningful projects, but also extend what we started with, which is the notion of agency, from being an agency with small NGOs working in rural areas, which, which is my weakness, and I continue to do that, but to see whether it can scale up, it can have a bigger impact and possibility of being not generalized, but applied in different contexts.

Miljacki  59:00
Thank you. I do have to ask you a few decanal questions. Deborah Berke gave me this word. I would have probably said it differently, but you’ve traversed different academic contexts as a student and as a teacher, and have been in your Dean role at MIT now for a decade. So I know you’ve been thinking about some of these for a while, but what do you think we must cultivate at architecture schools today?

Sarkis  59:27
Architecture and architecture education, I believe, are under increasing scrutiny. It’s not to dramatize where we are, but they are, and the scrutiny is coming from two major sources. One is the democracy and one is, for lack of a better word, performativity, meaning accountability to certain technical performative parameters that increasingly, especially with the climate challenge, are becoming more and more visible. One would expect that architecture would cave in, because neither are we able to speak as clearly and teach as clearly about our societal engagement, nor are we able to turn everything that we do in terms of design to something that is justifiable and explainable through the performativity dimension. But luckily, we are at a very beautiful, transformative moment which allows us to actually take these challenges on in a beautiful way. And I believe that the first one is the expansion of the design table, because the technologies that we have in terms of how we make projects right now allow us to bring in budget, to bring in climatic concerns, to bring in structural concerns, very early on. And in doing that, initially, we started about thinking about these as being contingencies. Meaning, let’s face it, the Beaux-Arts education has developed over the years to think of the design problem as a design around a few parameters, maybe site, maybe form, sometimes program. It goes up and down and to a certain extent, certain performance questions, but structure and all the others come later on. They are the consultants. They are contingencies, externalities. Those pressures have allowed us to think of them more as internalities, or try to think of them as internalities, and to enlarge the design table to include them from the get go. I think this is where academia should be going. And if I can say with a pride that I hope you share with me, MIT is leading the way there, that we are really expanding the table and putting everybody around the table, and that this, the synthetic role that design plays usually is only stronger. That, you know, there was always an apprehension that if these things invade us, that we become weaker as designers, or our role is relegated to secondary, tertiary. Contrary, only the designer is able to handle such synthesis to be the custodian of that contract no matter how complex it is. And I feel like MIT’s position right now as a school of architecture is stronger because it is able to engage that complexity head on.

Miljacki  1:02:36
Do you think there are any constraints in contemporary architecture, architectural education, in the US that you think are hindering us in adapting to meet the moment?

Sarkis  1:02:46
Yes, the Beaux-Arts model. And that’s why I’m pushing and pushing and pushing, with your help and the help of the faculty in the School to articulate the different model, the MIT model. I’m sure we’ll give it a name other than MIT, but until then, let’s call it the MIT model.

Miljacki  1:03:04
Can you describe the task of building a school on our behalf at MIT? What is your hope for architecture’s role in the project for the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning?

Sarkis  1:03:17
The primary hope is that the ground floor is part of the building. As you know, MIT prides itself for making the ground floor of the main group available for everybody, but it ends up being for nobody. You walk in and you think it’s open, but it’s actually a labyrinth, and you get lost. Till today, 10 years into it, I sometimes get lost in the MIT labyrinth. The fact that you open the door, walk in, and the ground tells you what’s going to happen, what’s happening on top and greets you openly is very important. So I think recovering the ground is very important for our new school building. The second thing I feel is that we are growing physically. We’re not growing demographically, and that growth is primarily in the space of Public Engagement and in the space of research. And we have, as a school, committed, over the past many years to increasing our capacity in research and to think of research itself as form of pedagogy, again, the MIT model, and I think the building allows that to happen. Let’s speak specifically about the Met warehouse and Liz Diller and the amazing contributions that you and your colleagues have made to the building, it speaks volumes that a school that has the label of technology on it and that is constantly thinking about the future of architecture we’ll move into a 19th century building and reuse it adaptively to its future needs. That I think is in itself, just by virtue of it happening, is a great thing and the way it’s happened, with the help of Liz and her team, Liz Diller and her team, and with the help of the faculty, turns every aspect of the building to a lesson in architecture that’s beautiful. I didn’t plan that. It happened.

Miljacki  1:05:26
Thank you. Hashim, is there anything else you would like to put on the record?

Sarkis  1:05:31
After this hour of confessions, I think the question should be, should there be anything that I take off record? No, this has been, this has been an amazing discussion. Thank you so so much.

Miljacki  1:05:44
Hashim, thank you very much for talking to me today and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produced by myself and Julian Geltman.