Q&A: Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus

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LAST YEAR, JOSHUA PRINCE-RAMUS broke off ties with the ceaselessly profound architect Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Prince-Ramus, 37, and partner Erez Ella turned OMA's New York office into Ramus Ella Architects, or REX, and took over several American OMA commissions such as the Wyly Theater in Dallas and Museum Plaza in Louisville, Ky., a 61-story cluster of offices and condos joined by a floating arts center halfway up. On Thursday, Prince-Ramus talks to a National Building Museum audience about REX's often startling designs and how they happen.

» EXPRESS: Do you feel yourself becoming more REX and less Rem?
» PRINCE-RAMUS: That happened a long time before our reorganization, which is what instigated [the split]. In 2001, Rem and I opened this office. We owned it equally to continue development of a number of American projects. In 2004, starting with the Dallas theater, we had begun to develop our own identity and autonomy from the Rotterdam office.

» EXPRESS: So the design language is your own.
» PRINCE-RAMUS: I'll take issue with the way you said that. We believe in a truly communal, shared authorship. In fact, a step beyond that — not being so focused on authorship. We were always much more concerned with critique than with who's generating an idea.

» EXPRESS: You've described your approach to architecture as "hyperrational" and "almost dumb."
» PRINCE-RAMUS: If you focus on a project's problems, constraints and the desires of the client and try for really tailored one-off solutions, you'll get something much more interesting than if you set out to do a certain thing. That's not in competition with being formal. Form functions, so as you're trying to maximize the performance, sometimes the form is the most important thing to achieve that. Historically, there has been form versus function. Either form follows function or it's function be damned. We think it's kind of bunk, a false dialectic. There are moments when a project's single most important functional issue is its form.

» EXPRESS: What is the role of emotion?
» PRINCE-RAMUS: It's huge, but it's also the part that we don't talk about. If you don't talk about the emotional side of it but say, "We need to do this for a programmatic or political reason," you build up the argument and generate something unusual and new, and the client will embrace it.

[The Museum Plaza] project solves exactly what the developer confronted in terms of financing. We came up with a concept that allowed him to constantly be changing the balance of the various subcomponents. ... [Clients] are only going to be nervous about form if it comes at the expense of what terrifies them. If it works for them, they're all about form.

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; Thu., 7-8:30 p.m., $12-20; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Bradford McKee
Photo courtesy National Building Museum