FRANCOIS ROCHE and graphic novelist WARREN ELLIS, moderated Sey idambocchon volver ete hertiend Warren, | want to ask you about your relationship with an illustrator. FRANCOIS ROCHE We know that it’s a lot of work to write a story, And it's exactly the same with a client, it's. a lot of work. When a client comes to me | have to understand what he wants exactly and | will then filter his desires. We need to extract alot of information: the sexuality of the client, the situation - political, sociological, chemical, ecological or ecosophical. So when you start a book you start by embracing the complexity, and step by step from the complexity something grows. WARREN ELLIS As a writer of graphic novels, what I'm producing is a complete blueprint for the work. A full script describes every panel, one by ane, laid ina dialogue, that's just the working document. Obviously it turns inte comics from the script. Comics are such a weird bastard hybrid form anyway. ralationahio with the Sluwtrator i peculiar and hard to define because they're not just a hired hand, there is a wery particular skill-sat to comics art that you don't really get in any other narrative art form, (GM Asa layman, architecturally speaking, what goes through your mind when you see Francois’ work and hearing him talk about it? Is it exciting? Is it potential material? WE As with any theory, it's fascinating to me. It's absolutely material. People always ask me asa writer where | gat my ideas from and it's quite simply this: | take in as much information as: possible from as many different places as possible and place it in the compest bin in the back of my head and it will evertually rot down and at the bottom there'll be one piece of data that will plug in to the second piece of data and ‘that's the germ of the story. GM Actually, where don't get your ideas from? Is there a place that you want to avoid ... WE As a writer you have to go everywhere for your information. What you do avoid is certain writers and certain forms of writing. When I'm very, very deep in writing fiction, | won't read fiction. And there are some writers whose styles have very strong flavours, they'll affect your style just by reading them. Stephen King uses the metaphor of “you don't put that in the fridge because it'll flavour the milk" With King it's Ellison. If ha reads a lot of Ellison he starts writing like Ellison. [For me it’s] Hunter Thompson and Jack Karoude. 'GM [look at buildings as how they present possible narratives. | interviewed Patrick McGrath, a British novelist who writes gothic stories, so there's a lot of foggy moors, old castles, abandoned houses, attics that no-one goes into ... but then the question is: is there @ setting in which Patrick MeGrath could not write a novel? And that becomes an architectural question. WE Yea, it does, | see that. If you drop Patrick McGrath on a tropical island, he will never write anything again. | feel the same way. [| couldn't write in] somewhere that isn't obviously a social machine and a struggle. I'm fine with villages; tiny British villages with three public buildings: a Post Office, a general store and a pub. My girlfriend lived in one for years. ‘GM Frangois, your buildings are open to time. ‘You've got the building that’s fuelled by a cow - the cow walks out, takes a shit, and fuals the building. You've got the spider wab house with the nets that are going to change over time because there are plants growing through ‘them. And there's the building in Thailand that accumulates the dust of the city. By including time in your buildings are you including narrative and entering the realm of the writer?Loft to-right Frangeis Roche, Geoff Manaugh and Warren Ellis FR We don't consider a building as the end of the story, it's a fragment of the story. So we need to construct the story for before and after the construction of the building. Architects work alot with mathematics, and it’s very difficult In fiction, you have “iF "why" maybe" When you are writing mathematics it's hard to protocolise "maybe" It’s a big problem in architecture schools now. We are inside this maverment of mathamatics, using mathematics as a determinist system, aind jwe must] include something that is un-determinist or unpredictable. In the script = we talk about Scripting, we talk about following the scripts - t's very weak compared to your script. And if we waint to force the complexity of our script we need a lot of knowledge WE It sounds like you're actually interrogating your own materials, which | find very interesting. FR Yeah, it's not only to interrogate but to interrupt the integrity of something. | love te push people to be confused, to be in front of something they are not able to consume easily, WE Thay have to work that little bit harder to understand what's in front of them. FR Yes, exactly, Like in science-fiction, you need to identify a format of something, the format is always differant: * oe . WE That is absolutely science-fictional thinking, it's “the door dilated, it's that thing in frant of you that didn't exist before that you just have to work that bit harder to comprehend, which is why so many paople claim they don't like science-fiction. They feel like they're being tricked by the text FR Exactly. Many people refuse to be absorbed by something they don't know. Zitek talks about Kinder eggs. were made by the Germans after the war to reconnect to the unknown and to force the kids away from the lazy period where everything was free. It's a beautiful articulation of knowledge GM One thing that kept coming up with you, Warren, was moving into mew buildings: | feel like many people have killed themselves here. And that’s got this kind of almost hauntological forcefield ... for some of you who look for narrative and possibilities you can build that sort of history into a building, almoat like a presence. WE | was told a story many years ago about a ‘couple who locked themselves in a room for three weeks and did nothing but take LSD, have Sex, cut themeelves and snvear all their bodily fluids over every surface of the room, This is obviously an extreme example. You could feel it. FR ‘You know the Winchester house? It is very interesting ... constructed over 40 years [by the widow of the man who created the Winchester rifle]. Every time she closed a wall, she closed a window, to put in jail the ghost of the people killed by the rifle. Her husband died and she gained the royalties from the rifle = she became afraid of the money that was coming in, and to Stop the guilt over the deaths of the people killed by the rifle she tried to trap the ghosts in the house ... it came tobe 150 rooms (GM | think Frangois has a unique body of work which would be interesting to someone like you, Warren, because it's about growing architecture - this kind of mew discourse which is taking over schools, becoming much more speculative and imaginative. You can build anything nowadays. WE Asa science fiction writer I've got to sit here and think wouldn't it be great to designa building that exuded pharmaceuticals ... GMA famous example iin the US of bad design was the FEMA trailers after the hurricane Katrina, After people lived in the trailers long enough, formaldehyde leached 4s ee ee eee eee eeby the plywood was causing respiratory illnesses, asthma and probably cancer ir the future. Im quite curious to see what the architects and the science fiction writer can learn from each other. FR | asked Bruce Sterling two years age to write about the building we're finishing, and he wrote about the building but he took the position of 30 years after it was completed and it helped usa lot to finish the building. He put the critic in the future, which is very interesting, and because of that he helped me to negotiate the present better. (GM What kinds of things was he imagining? FR We were doing the building in tha forest entirely with spider nets and wood, a lot of ‘textile and fabric to start to push away the: forest and use the forest as wall. It was 500sq m, so not too big, but there is akind of porosity where you don't know whether you're inside a building, inside a forest or inside a labyrinth. Like the Blair Witch house or something. Because of the text we took care to blur the boundaries of the a * house we were in construction, we blurred the boundaries. So it's interesting how the text ag a report from the future is at the same time modifying what you are doing in the real time. Honestly that is fantastic. ‘GM Would you ever design a building knowing ‘that it might inspire somebody like Bruce Sterling to write a story like that? FR No... | hate when in architecture books there is only comment on the building, All the time | ask somebody to make a layer, to invent another story and te pull layers and to push reality to go in some, not to unfold the reality but to push the reality a bit further or beyond the construction, WE People have an idea in their heads of what science fiction is and they don't imagine it as engaged with the world. The function of science fiction is in fact te be directly engaged with the world, to affect it and to allow yourself to be affected by it, to learn from it and to take on whatever it says about the social condition. GM If you could influence a building the way that Bruce influenced Frangois’ building, which direction would you be interested in? WE In many science fiction stories there is the house that follows you, the house that reacts to you, that’s beera classic setting for many years. it could be a house that will fuse with nature, or houses would exude pharmaceuticals or homeopathic remedies in water vapour, perhaps: the roof is a fog farm and that’s where your water is coming from, which in certain parts of ‘the world is going to be more useful than solar panels in the future. Where | am now in Essex it was classified as semi-arid by the Unitad Nations ten years ago. This is the same part of Essex of course that's going to get washed away when water levels rise. The architectural possibilities of that are interesting to me, many of the buildings in my area have been built on flood plains. | would be interested ina house that's going to rise with the waves. GM Some people would call that dystopian ... WE | wouldn't define that as dystopian, it's ambracing change. There's something unnerving about it but all these things have another side, it's not binary, thera are many useful things ... Obviously that’s the slippery slope because that’s how things are sold tous, the ID card will be auseful thing but we all know what it's really for, but | choose not to discount the possibility that some things might work out. FR | try to negotiate with my romanticism - | know it's. a bad word now, romanticigm = the project we are doing about all this kind ofyou are a romantic you try to be affected by a situation. You are like writers, you need to be outside but at the same time inside. When we start a project, we switch off the possibility of receiving alot of influence, even contradictory, to feel the situation. And when you arrive in your location, you have a panoptic view, you embrace everything but ina way you need, te focus on what could be the input and output to reveal the condition of a situation and to extract from this condition something as a project. WE When I say “I would like my house to have * wave mation generators to produce power for me and if some of that power could be hived off to desalinate saa water, lim not necessarily being a pessimist or a cynic I'm just covering my options and embracing the environment. Just because | canry a Swiss army knife instead of a. * penknife dowsn't mean, you know, | think I'ma dystopian or pessimist, it's just | might actually need a screwdriver. GM | was once describing the future impact of swine flu on the city on BLDGBLOG and somebody on another blog accused me of romanticising disaster and beautifying negativity. But let's do the opposite and describe anon-swine flu future where everybody lives happily and gets married and has a house ete, now you are accused of being, what, bourgeois? No matter what it is you are describing your enthusiasm for, you are either romanticising the apocalypse or you want everyone to live in the suburbs and be safe forever, 'WE We are primarily talking about our perspective from Western culture and Western problems and there are still places where those are good problems to have. DRC Ri sien have. | | think there’s perspective to be had in just the layers of discussion. There are apocalypses happening that we can't conceive of, still, GM One thing that's exciting about both of your work is the idea that architecture lends itself very well te storytelling and storytelling lends itself easy peel te being t translated | into buildings. building that will inspire people ina certain way or could you write ina certain way to have architectural effects Later? FR It's very beautiful when you share a movie, when you tell someone "| saw a movie about an incredible story” and you transfer the curiosity to go aoe the movie. When you talk about a oe 8 ee ee ee ee * wane . building you say "| saw a glass cube beautifully dora” it interests nobody, just the architecture field. If you say "I see a glass cube which is melting when it is raining” or “a cow appears to warm the building and it smells of cow" you say “oh, I want to go there’, it's touching something psychologically in me. The problem with now is the building cannot be told, it’s just dry ican, and dry icon is a catastrophe, nobody will want to tell a story of a dry icon. There is a specific high-chemistry relationship which forces you to understand something different like a movie, to understand, to open your mind on something, not to be only a slave of coquetry and elegance. Last are Norman Foster ... they are ridiculous, they are just the dick, the emission of the dick of the mayor, and that is problematic. So you could say, OK, the dick of the mayor is one hundred metres high ... the story could ba interesting because of the spermatic jets on the top, no, but you understand it's ridiculous now. No, | want to be provocative as well. WE Just got that in at the end, yeah. t This conversation took place after Thrilling Wonder Stories, a symposium at the Architectural Association curated by Liam Young af Tomorrow's Thoughts Today and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG www.tomorrowsthoughtsteday.com bldgblog. blogspot.com