I Would Prefer Not To, a podcast hosted by Ana Miljaki, explores the act of architectural refusal
There are many good options for architecture and design podcasts if thats your thing. The relative ease of their production and distribution coupled with the intense interest in conversation means the internet provides a variety of aural adventures, from the widely promotional to the more niche. I Would Prefer Not To takes a different approach than most shows. Hosted by Ana Miljaki, a critic, curator and professor of architecture at MIT, the research begins with a question: Why do architects turn down commissions? The title comes from a refrain of refusal uttered by a law clerk in Herman Melvilles short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. Miljaki is a thoughtful and calming conversational partner, so the episodes unspool naturally as guests talk about a project they turned down and why. The premise is smart because it gets at the dark matter of architecture beyond the success stories of shiny new buildings and happy clients; here, talk turns to the gigs that got away or were rejected, how offices make decisions, and the dance of being a creative person in service role. The podcast connects to her Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT and to her wider scholarship on the organization of architecture offices (as seen in OfficeUS, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia) and the practicalities of creativity (as seen in her great book Under the Influence, now in a second edition.)The show is now hosted by The Architectural League of New York, and so far the guests for its fourth season include Germane Barnes, MOS, Deborah Berke, and Lateral Office. Past seasons are similarly stocked with a mix of big names and more up-and-coming practices. I spoke with Miljaki last year to learn more about the podcast, how it connects to her wider scholastic interests, the intersections of architecture and media, and her guests collective flavor of optimism. Jack Murphy AN: What motivated you to start the podcast? Ana Miljaki (AM): I initially started with a beta version of I Would Prefer Not To (IWPNT) that I recorded before the pandemic on Skype. I was interested in two questions. The first had to do with intellectual property in architecture. I was interested in finding out how come architects dont tend to take each other to court when they see their ideas repeated somewhere. Legal scholars were asking why there were no legal cases around this topic, and I kept saying, Well, the discipline would dissolve or couldnt exist if we actually thought that way about our ideas. But I had no proof. Decisions not to pursue legal action left no trace. I thought the only way to arrive at something that could function as evidence would be by having conversations about cases that never happened and inquiring why they didnt happen. I started the early, beta version of the project by asking that question, as well as the question about commissions not pursued. I spoke with maybe seven or eight architects who are also my friends. The idea was to try to assemble an exhibition that worked with the Skype recordings of these talking heads. At the time, I thought it was interesting to see the technology of the office in the background of these interviews; that was interesting to me, even though it wasnt the main question. The videos were inadvertently creating richer office portraits, than the questions alone.Then the pandemic hit, and we all got on Zoom. I couldnt imagine why anyone would want to see an exhibition that reproduced what became our new normal way of communicating.During the pandemic, architecture students at MIT started a radio station, so I did a series of radio interviews with curators and editors of architecture titled Conversations on Care. I found that audio-only way of relaying our stories compelling for their intimacy and immediateness: When they were on radio, they were streamed in real time.It became evident to me that the question about commissions was the more urgent one to pursue. The question about copyright was interesting, but I only wanted to record the story so we could talk to legal scholars about it later. It was not a mystery to me, whereas this this question of how architects decide not to do something endures.From the beginning, this was an oral history with an infinite horizon: We could interview everyone, and then if we interviewed them again the answers would change. I thought of it as a resource for both those who are thinking about practice, or thinking about starting their own, or rethinking the way their practice operates, as well as for historians. That was my main motivation, and the collaboration with The Architectural League arose out of a search for a kindred institution that has staying power. The League provides stability and long-term stewardship that I on my own could not.AN: Who is the audience for IWPNT?AM: I always think of my students first. I most often hear about it from my young colleagues in architecture. I receive feedback from people who are practicing, or who are actively thinking about how to organize their practices. Or theyre thinking about the topics that get discussed in the context of their practice, and who gets to have agency to think about them.Maybe you dont get this from a single episode, but I think we have spoken with a lot of architects who have real faith in architectures agency. Thats not necessarily what I am asking them about directly. But this sense of a particular kind of perspective slowly accrues across the conversations I have led with my interlocutors. I like this collective flavor of optimism.AN: What kind of feedback have you been receiving from your audience? AM: The most common feedback might be about the personalities that come through these conversations. For me its great when everyone is at ease and we can address the key aspects of the practice. I start by asking about the commission that my interlocutors might have said no to, or how they would draw that line between the work they pursue and the work they dont. It is about refusal, but more generally it becomes about how they think about practice. AN: Some younger practices start from a clear ideological stance or even a rejection of certain norms. This displaces an older model of Im just going to say yes to everything until I start having to say no. Has anyone said no to joining your podcast?AM: I wanted to talk with Mario Gooden, but we ended up having a live conversation instead of a podcast. I keep working on those who are reluctant to join for an episode.Because we are collaborating with The Architectural League, we are conscious of the way The League thinks about geography. It is based in New York, but if you look at its Young Architects or Emerging Practices awards, it is more generally concerned with North America. Weve been trying to follow its lead as we think about who to engage. Its not a request from them, but its a way for us to narrow the scope.View this post on InstagramA post shared by The Architectural League of NY (@archleague)AN: The impacts of refusal vary by region and depend on culture. For example, what did you learn from the four practices from Mexico that youve interviewed to date?AM: There are a different set of circumstances and frameworks that theyre working in. Many of them struggle with how to and whether to collaborate with the government and what that enables. There are certain structures in this context that work to enable scale and speed, and this produces effects and circumstances that are very different than the constraints encountered in the U.S.AN: One of the things I like about the podcast is that it seeks to uncover how decisions are made. What comes out when you ask who gets to join a group or add their voice when approaching consensus? AM: I am interested in forms and formats of collective wisdom. Theres a spectrum of how practitioners balance different opinions. When I ask about decision-making practices of a firm, I tend to picture them taking place in their office spaces, and always wonder how they impact the firms organizational structure and atmosphere in the studio. Of all the questions I ask, I think this is the one I sense has effects later on. The range of answers to this question is not unexpected. It covers the territory from principals making decisions, through everyone in the firm having some form of say, and major office transformations tend to influence this. I also think the pandemic forced changes in how offices operate. This came up in my interview with Claire Weisz when she spoke about certain pandemic practices that her firm maintained, like online meetings. But yes, the question about formats of decision-making is a bit of a litmus test.AN: You get a revealing sense of how power flows in offices through these answers. AM: Its about power, but its also about technique and the relationship between the two. If anything, with this podcast and in general, I hope my work provides a repository of possible techniques and links to politics and that the discerning and testing of these may help others operate their own studio.AN: Last year we ran an ethics column where Victoria Beach, Peggy Deamer, and Thomas Fisher respond to quandaries. What encouragement might you have about better centering operational concerns in architecture? AM: Ethics is definitely top of mind for me. During these conversations we quickly discard binaries and arrive at questions about the values that drive the decisions architects make about commissions or about ways of organizing their offices. As I mentioned earlier, lately both of these are becoming topics that everyone in a given studio can comment on in some way. I believe in the bargaining power of the collective voice. There are some things we can only arrive at if many of us are demanding solutions or more conversations about ethics.We often talk about the nature of the commission and how one thinks about that is implicated with the question of who is responsible for things in the end. In my mind, this is maybe a question of temperament and politics, but my sense is that the more we understand the way in which the financial and legal dimensions of the office operate, the better we can engage in the discussion of values, ethics, and projects. These are not separate conversations; they are always joined. And yet, they are not linked enough in our conversations about architecture. So not as a practicing architect but as an interviewer of architects, and someone deeply dedicated to architecture, I am interested in discussing the environmental and labor-related circumstances that surround a project and whether or not it makes sense to engage in it. AN: Could you talk about the medium of the oral history as it relates to studying architecture? Its an underrated format for knowledge.AM: I obviously embrace it. I think its important in the context of doing history, and especially so in the histories I have been studying in Eastern Europe, where I feel that the knowledge that surrounded practices working under socialism is getting lost. Its sort of dilapidated, or its even gone. There is almost no other way to access the experience of how architecture was practiced and how architects felt about practicing under socialism. This is something I think about as a historian.In the context of contemporary practice in the U.S., the nature of urgency is a bit different, though related. Certain aspects of a practice, or elements of a particular office, are also available in and as experiences of individuals who work there; this information has value, and I think we all benefit when we share it. I go back to example of the 1972 lawsuit against the AIA for price fixing as a source of eliminating the conversation about practice from public discussion. This podcast is useful because it is a bit more formal friends sharing notes. I like the fact that we are putting things on the record.As is clear, I Would Prefer Not To is curated. As I work on this project with Julian Andrew Escudero Geltman, who just finished his degree at MIT, I hope we assemble a set of voices that together represent the discipline we would prefer to have.AN: How does the editing process work? AM: We started by recording an hour and then airing only 20 or 30 minutes, so the first episodes were a lot shorter. Then we recorded Liz Diller, and it was all so good. We didnt know how to edit it down! From then on, our episodes became a little bit longer.Recently we have made episodes with multiple voices, which is harder to edit but it importantly transmits the way the office works. We allow those voices to coexist.It has been interesting how different architects in this process have decided to offer specific information or make things extremely general as they describe them. Maybe you could figure out what theyre talking about if you wanted to do some research. For me, the story is better when its specific. But I think all of it, including decisions to abstract, are important to share.AN: Could you connect the podcast to your larger body of scholarship? Youve previously researched labor, influence, and copyright, and now you lead the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT.AM: Yes, my own scholarship on Czech architects under socialism focused on various dimensions of practice in that context, and especially on what motivated architects in that context. OfficeUS project for the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture that I co-curated with Eva Franch i Gilabert and Ashley Schafer indeed contended with architectural practice in the U.S. over 100 years. So yes, I have been thinking about what motivates architects and how they organize their energies in order to do it.There are a couple of things that directly relate to the Critical Broadcasting Lab. I Would Prefer Not To is literally broadcasting, and is meant as a series of critical reflections on the topic of architectural practice. At the Lab we operate through different media, always producing interventions in architectural discourse. This takes preparation and shaping, but then we can offer it to a larger audience who can metabolize. The point is not to be didactic, but to articulate questions that we need to get better at thinking about collectively.Im interested in the ways in which ideas travel through the discipline, and I certainly think of conversation as a form of co-production. I believe in the conversation when it comes to producing work, whether its written or architected or spoken. Conversation requires all the parties to be present together. This kind of reciprocal relation is one that I enjoy and believe in as a medium. AN: How do you consume architecture media today? And how could it be produced in a healthier manner?AM: There certainly has been a shift in my consumption of architectural media towards things that are online. The existence of outlets like the Avery Review, and Places Journal is important; these are online journals that have cultivate excellent curatorial and editorial work online. I do get The Architects Newspaper as well as The New York Review of Architecture in print and subscribe to and support Log.I dont think we can go back to the moment I remember from my architecture education when we had two journals that arrived to school, and we all read them. In the 1990s everyone knew what was in Assemblage and Any, and that provided some social/intellectual cohesion. Now there are so many more things that we know, and we need to be discussing, and not every venue should commit to the same set of questions. In the contemporary landscape of architecture culture and broadcasting, it seems important to me to commit to a set of questions or qualities.AN: Often people complain that criticism is dead, but actually it swirls all around us. More people today can engage in the conversation and have a voice. Certainly its harder to pay the rent through writing, but the ability to distribute opinions has expanded. I feel encouraged by the space that the internet has created for discussion about the built environment, and Im cautiously optimistic about how we can intensify and broaden that space.AM: I agree. There are plenty of places where criticism is produced; its just how we encounter it that has changed.View this post on InstagramA post shared by The Architectural League of NY (@archleague)AN: What has like surprised you along the way with this podcast project?AM: The optimism I found. I maybe didnt expect to encounter it, yet when I think about the discipline and how I teach it, its kind of constitutive, right? Now whenever I finish one of my IWPNT conversations, I think Wow, they really are optimistic about what architecture does or can do or could do to contribute to society.Ana Miljaki is a historian, critic, curator, and professor of architecture at MIT, where she directs the SMArchS program. In 2018, Miljaki launched MITs Critical Broadcasting Lab (CBL), engaged in critical, curatorial, and broadcasting work. She recently coedited Log 54: Coauthoring with Ann Lui, and an issue of the Journal of Architectural Education titled Pedagogies for a Broken World, with Igor Marjanovi and Jay Cephas. The work of her Collective Architecture studio was featured in the Great Repair exhibition in Berlin in 2023. CBLs video installation The Pilgrimage was presented in Venice in 2023 and in the Architecture Biennial in Timioara in the fall of 2024.
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