Courtesy Jamison Ford
“I didn’t have a culturally rich childhood or travel the globe,” Heather Woofter says. “I grew up in an American suburb.” Daughter of an engineer, she excelled in math and science, so she made it through chemical engineering (“I’ve been taught not to quit anything”). And then she turned to what, for reasons still a mystery to her, she’d always yearned to do.
An internationally acclaimed architect, she was recently named director of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design programs at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
You’ve worked in Greece, South Korea, New England, the Midwest. How does geography influence design?
I wouldn’t say I’m formally a regionalist, but I do believe an architecture should be born of its place. An approach that’s incredibly sensitive to the history of the place also tends to work environmentally.
What works here in St. Louis?
Well, [William] Bernoudy is a classic example. There was a time in St. Louis when Modernist architecture thrived; we were one of the leading cities for design. Where I hesitate is, those houses are part of a suburban landscape that’s an older notion of how to build a neighborhood. It’s symbolic of that [racially segregated] era, which is problematic. So by endorsing the Bernoudy… I’m sensitive to this other history that is in a way more important. But I can’t point to a building that rights that wrong, because I don’t think we have it yet.
What are the practical obstacles here?
The climate is hot and humid. We’ve had a lot of brick, but if you ask me what material would be appropriate to our day and time, I don’t know that brick would be the predominant material. However, we live in a city of brick, so we often use it as a contextual device.
What are the social challenges you’d love to tackle?
I think there are still some real divisions that need addressing. I’d also be very sensitive thinking about the landscape and larger urban systems. Economics would play in. And we can’t do housing without talking about domesticity and what defines families today and having a greater tolerance to that definition.
Wash. U.’s landscape architecture program is fairly new.
There wasn’t one in the Midwest, yet we have two-thirds of the watershed! We’re looking at how the landscape can be an integral part of the city, increasing the value of the city through the landscape, and how to make not manicured lawns but more ecologically sustainable systems of landscapes woven through the city.
Your students think globally, too…
We rewrote the curriculum to think about developing affordable housing around the world. We think housing is one of the global crises that will be important for our students in the future. Each team writes their own brief, addressing a relevant problem or situation in Barcelona or Japan or Berlin or New Orleans, and the students work on housing initiatives in that context… Sometimes it’s important to explain to a student with a passionate social agenda that just because something costs less, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.
You and your husband designed an extraordinary house once.
We did Amonte House for a developer in town, right before the economy tanked. They divided a plot of land among the architectural faculty, and my partner and I were the youngest. [Woofter is married to Sung Ho Kim, and they co-founded Axi:Ome LLC]. We were given a sliver of land. You can see where this is going! It had a pretty good dropoff; it was site challenged, let’s put it that way. And the program called for a $1 to $3 million house. The brief suggested a McMansion type of proposal, where the house is very frontal. But because we had a very thin site, and we wanted to be subtler, we decided to do something very different. We presented the house on its narrow end. We had quite a large swimming pool, cantilevered, and the cars came in under its hull into a tucked-in garage.
Courtesy of Axi:Ome LLC
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What’s fun about designing a house?
It’s personal. I enjoy understanding how people live in a space, and I also appreciate all the really subtle things that can happen with light and with space. You’re creating both intimate spaces, at the heart of the family, and social spaces that are about bringing groups of people together. In the history of architecture, people have often talked about how the house is related to the city and the city is related to the house.
What’s your favorite piece of furniture?
We don’t have a lot; we live in a small house. I have schoolhouse desks my grandmother found at auctions. And her china cabinet—it was a tradition of ours to have tea together. It stands out, because we don’t buy furniture like that, but I tend to be nostalgic. If I had to run out of a burning building and could carry only one piece of furniture, that’s it!
What objects delight your eye?
Maybe it’s because when I was an undergrad, Virginia Tech had a very strong Bauhaus approach, but I really enjoy textiles. Blankets, rugs—the color, the material, the weave, where they were made. They’re almost art pieces in and of themselves, and they introduce us to different cultures.
How do you feel about the maker movement?
I think it’s fantastic. I come from a pre-digital generation—at Harvard, we were one of the first classes that was on email. We drew everything by hand. And between undergrad and grad, everything flipped, and then it was all experiments on computer. What’s fascinating is coming full circle: It’s almost as if there’s a hybridization between the things we can make by hand and how we construct things digitally on the computer. Our students are learning more and more about programming language; before, everything was software based. And for architects, as the interfaces become more and more sophisticated, we might actually get back to the tactility of the hand.
How are tech and craft intersecting for your students?
We’ve been talking about having technology workshops across the Sam Fox school, on animation and different methods of fabrication. One of the things we’re interested in is descriptive geometry. Some schools just go right to the computer’s 3-D modeling, but we parallel that with making drawings and models by hand, seeing how materials come together. We believe there’s a lesson to be learned by learning how to draw perspective, seeing where the vanishing point is, moving between two and three dimensions and seeing the relationship between them. On the computer, you are drawing 3-D only. It gives you all kinds of new possibilities, but it also changes your sensibility.
What are some of those new possibilities?
Because of the different ways of thinking mathematically about a surface, you can have a building that varies its geometries across the façade, and that can be directly tied to environmental conditions. We can have a much finer-grained understanding of an element than we could have when we were thinking literally about each line that was being made, each door that was being drawn. A computer changes the way you conceptualize.
Can you give us some examples where the two approaches intersect?
With the students’ airport project [A 100-foot-long sculpture, Spectroplexus, which hangs in Terminal 2 at Lambert International Airport], we needed to conceptualize the project digitally and then build it by hand because (she laughs) we didn’t have the budget. For the Solar Decathlon, [a residential design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy], they are using concrete panels that have high tensile strength, yet an incredible amount of detail. When you look at the patterning on those panels you realize that is something that couldn’t be done solely by hand and yet is not coming out of a solely digital process either.
Courtesy of James Byard/Washington University
06.15.2017--Spectroplexus installed at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. James Byard/WUSTL Photos
What’s at the heart of your design philosophy?
I think we have come to a place where buildings can no longer stand on their own. We are part of a larger system, a larger landscape. We have responsibilities to others.
Who’s inspired you?
Eric Mendelsohn talked about architecture as a social act. He talked about the relationship between the interior and the natural, which has always been a hallmark of Modern architecture, but he had a label for it: “the sensitive architect.”
