Interview with Allison Arieff, by Amal Dar Aziz, November 2008

One of the founders of the architecture and design magazine Dwell, Arieff became a strong proponent of the prefab movement, rethinking how to build more sustainable communities. Today, she continues to advocate building better homes and stronger communities, both in her NYTimes blog, By Design, and as Editor-at-Large for Sunset.

AZIZ: What's your first memory of when your interest in design and architecture began?

ARIEFF: My mom [who passed away in 2004] always used to say that she read architecture books when she was pregnant, and my parents first met at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Since I was really little, my family always took trips to art museums, mostly to see modern art. My parents like modern stuff: I grew up with Scandinavian modern furniture and things like Heller plates. This wasn’t considered high design; it was pretty affordable and sort of the normal thing for a young family to live with. When I was eight we moved into an amazing modernist house in Marin. So I was surrounded with good design but it’s not like I was thinking specifically about it.

By the time I got to college, I was mostly interested in art history, and thought I’d work for an art gallery. There was a day at UCLA when my professor Thomas Hines piled my sophomore seminar into a van and took us on a tour of Case Study Architecture. I thought, ‘wow, this is really cool.’ And it really stuck with me. I was sort of interested in these things, but not sort of pursuing that career path, until I got job at Chronicle Books where I worked closely with graphic designers and edited culture and design-related books like Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht and Hatch Show Print. Then I found out that Dwell was starting and just applied for a job there though I hadn't worked for a magazine or written about design before. I got the job because the woman who hired me was not one of those people who's like, "well, your experience doesn't really match..." And so, that's how I got there.

AZIZ: You've had very different experiences and careers. How do all of these experiences come together for you? How do you appeal to such different audiences?

ARIEFF: They all come together organically. Though things seemed disparate at one time, I’m amazed at how life experiences, knowledge, and information all blend together. Everything happens for a reason—you see something, read something, hear something—and then if you’re lucky, it reemerges at the right time to guide an article you’re writing or a project you’re researching. The column I write for The New York Times has been a nice departure as I write for the OpEd section, not the Design section. I will get comments back from my editor like, "Who are the Eameses?" Or, you know...things that I would never stop to define when writing for Dwell. I explain a lot more than I would normally, because I can't assume that people have that knowledge.

I wrote earlier this year about living roofs right now, and you know, in design circles everyone knows what a living roof is, but it's going to be new to some people, for New York Times Opinion page readers. Then at Sunset, I focus a lot on the the efforts of everyday people to change things through design—a recent piece, for example, described the efforts of a woman who “greened” Guerrero, one of the busier thoroughfares in San Francisco. She got the speed limit reduced on Cesar Chavez, got the # of lanes reduced, got the community involved in planting and organizing. It’s such an inspiring story. I like bringing new ideas and perspectives in. And to go off on a tangent: In terms of all the different things I'm doing now, in my mind in many ways they're sort of more connected than different. When I was in grad school, studying to get my PhD at NYU, and just getting very frustrated, I went to this panel called the College Arts Association and it was called "If not teaching, what?" and the panelists were people who had gotten their PhDs in art history but weren't teaching art history. And they all had these amazing career paths! One panelist said something like, "Oh, I left school, went to Spain and married a bull fighter, and now I'm an art critic." And I remember feeling so liberated—I was like it's going to be OK. If it's not a linear path, it's going to be OK. I just followed that. In NYTimes I can totally rant about what’s important to me, and, actually advocate quite strongly for change. And then any sort of design consulting work I might do hopefully allows me to actually change some of those things, in a small way. So to me it's sort of all connected.

AZIZ: What challenges does sustainable architectural design face?

ARIEFF: My feeling is that there is a lot of information out there. Everyone has it, everyone knows it, but everybody is still building 6000 square foot, not at all sustainable homes that require people to drive hours to get to work or get a quart of milk. And that's frustrating.

People express a desire for smaller spaces, for more walk-able communities. In fact, lots of people bought into things that were meant to be walk-able communities, but then it was like, "Oops! We didn't get a chance to build the neighborhood cafe." The best intentions don't always translate. So it's not that there isn't any knowledge of or demand for [sustainable living]. It's just easier not to worry about it.

It's a complicated problem, which is something I saw with the Prefab movement. The more I knew about all the players, codes, and financing involved, I couldn't just blame the lack of progress on one thing. However, I would say that now, with the economy being what it is and housing being what it is, this is the perfect time to say, "Wow, what we've been doing is totally screwed up, and we should be doing something else."

AZIZ: Can the economic downturn impact how we interact with our environment in a positive way?

ARIEFF: I wrote a lot about sustainability at Dwell, and I've almost gotten to the point now that I don't want to write about anything that hasn't addressed sustainability in its gut. I don't want to write about sustainability in the sense of discussing green, for example, "eco sheets." Those conversations gives me a rash. I want to be asking, "How could you design a building right now and not think about [sustainability]?"

I just wrote a story for Sunset about John Perry and the Compact. John was sitting down for dinner with some friends in 2005, talking about recycling, and what bullshit it is because 5% of stuff actually gets recycled, and that the real problem is consumption. He and his friends made this pact called the Compact. They promised not to buy anything new for 90 days, except for toothpaste, underwear, and other essentials. They're now on their third year.

I think the Compact shows how all of us could adjust our thinking about how much we're accumulating. It's very hard for companies to talk about it. No one actually wants to address the real issue, which is you have to consume less. There's no way around that part of it, but I never hear people talking about it in design circles. You can make it smaller, you can make it cheaper, but how do you not make it? Hopefully this economy is making people re-think the sheer volume of stuff we build. Something could be incredibly sustainable if it could actually last, which things currently are designed not to.

You don't want to alarm people, and I know it's daunting. I have a three year old, and when she was a baby, I would spend money on whatever people told me I should to be a good parent. People bring everything back to the safety and health of your family—the planet is just too abstract. There has been a lot of change to this discourse of making sustainability more about what you can do at home. It's about taking care of the people around you and your community.

AZIZ: What's your concept of an "ideal" community?

ARIEFF: I’m living in it in many ways. But I think an ideal community is one that is walkable, has a mix of generations, incomes, and architectural styles, has centralized nodes for people to congregate—parks, town centers, and the like. If it’s something that’s new, it should be as green as possible—have mixed use, multi-family as well as single family. There’s a great project in Austin, Texas, called SOL Austin. It’s sort of a mini development with maybe 20 houses. There’s a community park, and all the houses are all 1800 square feet or less, within walking distance of, of course, the park, and some other things like that. They're designed using sustainable materials, in fact, it’s billed as a net zero energy development. There's been serious efforts to lower utility bills, use less materials during building, make sure that a good number of the homes are affordable. There was good thinking put into this development from the beginning, there was a system, as opposed to like, here's my 10 acres, and I can fit 4-5 houses per acre—what’s my ROI? There's not a lot of holistic thinking about these things. Communities like SOL can exist; there hasn't been this full-scale investment into them.

You see things like WalkScore.com, that calculates walk-ability of cities and neighborhoods. You can enter your street, and the site will tell you how walkable the area where you live is. Glen Park is a 95. We have 1 car for our family. We use it maybe 4 times a week—during the weekends, we rarely use it. We can walk to the BART station, we have a bus that goes around the corner, and walk to the market whenever we want. And that's in the City. New York is one of the most sustainable cities, because there's nothing you can't get to. Apartments are small. There's a lack of space. They cost less to heat, because they're smaller, most buildings don't have garages, people don't have cars, and so they use public transit. Packing a sustainable lifestyle into cities is actually easier.

Plenty of people opt for the suburbs and that’s fine. But of late suburbs have just been horribly designed, particularly the way the connect to the rest of the world. The fact that people have grown to accept long commutes—up to 5 hours or more! "Oh, well, it's ok if I have to drive for this long because I live in this huge house..." You sacrifice half of your life getting to work! What I think would be a great architecture studio project would be to see if you could design mini communities that could be self-sustaining. I think that needs to be the goal of any community going forward. Do you have enough to serve the people who are there, that doesn't necessitate some ridiculous transport, that doesn’t promote to even more irresponsible sprawl.

AZIZ: What's your favorite building?

ARIEFF: There's this funny little dentist office on Mission and I think the 19th or 20th—this 60s modernist thing-- I’ve always wanted to solve the mystery of this building! Who did this building? Who owned this building? You may or may not notice it...It's just simple, and there's just something kind of hipster about it and it's in the midst of all this craziness that's the Mission but I really like that building. That's a crazy answer. It’s hard to pick a favorite—there are so many. I love everything from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to Rocio Romero’s super sleek LV Home.

I really love all the walkable parts of the city. I mean, I live in Glen Park, which doesn't even feel like the city. It's got a downtown that feels very much like a European shopping street. There’s a BART stop and easy freeway access. I know everyone in my neighborhood, I know, the neighbors on my street, I know the business owners, you know, it feels like how you would really want any community...and why couldn't any suburban or masterplanned community have that little sort of central core, with little streets and a playground. It just doesn't seem that hard. But that is the trick for newer communities—how do you make something brand new feel like it was able to evolve over time?

AZIZ: What are your thoughts about current attempts to revitalize San Francisco, like, for example, on The Embarcadero? Is this a space where architects and designers can experiment?

ARIEFF: I hate King Street. And the sustainable buildings on Kings Street are...well, not so sustainable. And I don't think anyone is going to buy building X more than building B because it’s being marketed as green luxury...it's not really anything that different. I think that all the development that's going on there is a real missed opportunity. While I do like the park just behind it, the retail is awful. Cold Stone Creamery? Panera Bread? Seriously—why couldn’t there be incentives to get local businesses in there and create something that feels more authentic, more San Francisco? I am being harsh; there's probably worse examples. At least there's a train, and you can walk, and there's transit, so it's good on that level, but I'm not particularly into it.

It's a shame that all the building that went on [during the past two booms] was so ill-conceived. They tore down existing stuff to build this other stuff. There were lots of interesting buildings that people didn't want to pay to retrofit, and so a lot of them got torn down. I think the city would feel far better if there had been better incentives to keep it, reuse it, because now it's just a lot of...no one's going to be like, "oh, that building on 5th and Brannan on the freeway off-ramp..." that's just awful. That's why I'm amazed that the Academy of Sciences, and the deYoung, and the Federal Building all have happened, because the city's just traditionally not behind new architecture. For a city that's so progressive, San Francisco has waged some bloody battles against more progressive architecture. The DeYoung Museum [by Herzog + deMeuron] almost didn’t happen because of one crazy guy who began commenting relentless on SF Gate about how it looked like a gas station in Vegas. That actually stopped the building process for awhile!

AZIZ: How we can design the world to be more sustainable?

ARIEFF: A lot of it is a behavior problem. When I was at IDEO we did a lot of design work targeting behaviors, and that works to a point, but then you realize that it doesn't totally work. You can make 5000 super cool water bottles for people to carry around, but then they'll end up forgetting their water bottles and buy bottled water instead. It's the same thing with reusable shopping bags. It's because you have a default, and that default exists with everything. This is the big problem. So the question becomes, how can you instill new behaviors?

It's so much about attitude. In this country, there's the issue of sacrifice. It used to be that when we were at war everyone shared the collective burden--we knew there was a crisis and that we had to scale back. Now, it’s just so much harder to sell the public on that concept. So we actually have to search for ways to make doing the right thing more palatable—when really it should be, ideally, the way people behave normally. There's just a very weird disconnect, and that to me is one of the biggest design problems. It is really hard to design for behavior.

AZIZ: How do you make the sense of an impeding crisis more immediate?

ARIEFF: I do think that the current economic situation has finally forced people to act. It’s out of fear or necessity or perhaps just the realization that the time has come to change our ways.

A positive thing I have seen is a nostalgic return to backyard farms, root cellars, babysitting exchanges, community garage sales—things that are really bringing people together, closer to their homes and their neighbors. It's all so old-fashioned that it feels innovative. At Sunset, we’ve even coined a term for it: extreme sharing. I do think people are realizing that it’s OK; in fact, that it’s absolutely necessary for us to rely on one another, to help our neighbors, to contribute what we can to the common good.

AZIZ: Tell me about your Airstream trailer

ARIEFF: The Airstream has long been a design icon in part because of all it packs in such a small space. Ours is a ’62 Flying Cloud, just 22 feet long, but there's a kitchen, a small bathroom, a couch, a bed, storage...everything is just so perfectly thought out. It's just a great piece of design. That’s not so true for the stuff the company is putting out now. It’s baffling to me that now people buy trailers and literally want all the comforts of home in them including flat screen TVs, double beds, and microwaves. Why not just stay home then?

My husband Bryan Burkhart and his brother had bought and rebuilt the Airstream themselves years ago. Later, Bryan was in design school and had an assignment to do a book design project. Airstream became the focus of it. When Bryan showed the project to me, I was an editor at Chronicle, and I said, ‘oh, I can sell this idea to Chronicle.’ So we did it together as a book, and then got married along the way...(laughs).

The Airstream has been a funny constant in a lot of what I've done as it’s also quite tied to prefab because it's a factory-produced thing that has long been a source of fascination to designers and architects. It’s a smart system that really makes you think about how creative can you get with these particular constraints. I think people love the Airstream because it represents this fantasy of exploration, of being a nomad. You can just take off, head down the road, and do whatever you're going to do. People have all these fantasies about a house out in the middle of nowhere but at this point in my life I’m kinda dying to crane ours into our backyard and make it into my home office.

AZIZ: What does your office space at home look like?

ARIEFF: It's a mess...(laughs). We have our living room, and then our very open office attached and my desk is in one corner, and my husband's is in the other, and our daughter's stuff is all in the middle—and her stuff is taking up more space each and every day. At any anytime, we'll all be doing our little thing—I’ll be working at the computer, she’ll be playing with her Tinkertoys nearby. There's floor to ceiling bookshelves which don't even begin to take care of all the books we have, because I'm a complete, compulsive, collector of books. What I do like about my workspace is that it's a lot of things that are really personal to me, visually, and so I like to take a break and sort of look around at it all. Lots of drawings my daughter did, pictures of my family, things that my mom gave to me...that kind of stuff. I have an ridiculously messy desk. It's controlled chaos, and it's always been that way. I'm actually always really suspicious of the people who always have their desks really tidy. When someone’s desk is just so neat, that I'm not sure if they're actually doing any work.

AZIZ: What are you working on these days?

ARIEFF: I love the mix of stuff I'm doing. I love my two outlets for writing—Sunset and The New York Times. I would love to write another book someday. I've been talking to a bit of people about it. I feel like my biggest goal is advocating for all the things we've been talking about, and I’m really really hoping with all my heart that this work will help to make someone change their minds and maybe even their actions. But my most important project is definitely my 3-year old daughter.