Conversations: David Sadighian and AJ Artemel
Director of Communications AJ Artemel (MArch ’14) compares experiences—at YSoA and beyond—with newly appointed assistant professor David Sadighian (BA ’07, MED ’10).
AJ Artemel You and I share a few things in common. We both served as editors of Perspecta—in your case, “Domain” (vol. 44, 2011); and in my case, “Quote” (vol. 49, 2016)—and we studied at YSoA many years ago. What was the discursive environment like when you were a student in the late 2000s? What was in the air, both at the school and in the profession at large?
David Sadighian The halcyon days of the aughts! Let’s start with my experience as an undergraduate architecture major. Before graduating from college in 2007, I was very much seduced by the allure of critical theory and its intersections with contemporary architectural discourse. I was reading a lot of post-structuralism back then—Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and so on. Those authors had a certain appeal at the time, especially in relation to discourse on “the digital,” image culture, and virtuality. This was before the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession. After graduating I was released into the wilderness of the professional world and landed, purely by accident, at a graphic design and branding agency in New York City. First I had worked as a summer editorial intern at Architectural Record, but as soon as that ended I needed a job to pay the rent. A friend referred me to a design agency—called Pandiscio Co. at the time—wedged between nightclubs and the Alexander McQueen store and all these very glamorous Sex and the City–style haunts in the Meatpacking District. Richard Pandiscio hired me because most of his firm’s projects were starchitect-designed real estate developments and I was a freshly minted architecture grad.
From day one I was thrown into intense client meetings for developments like HL23, by Neil Denari; 100 Eleventh Avenue, by Jean Nouvel; and 56 Leonard, the Herzog de Meuron skyscraper in Tribeca, assigned to me just a few months into the job. I was working with the agency’s graphic designers and creative directors to produce branded identities for buildings. These experiences made me aware of this whole other side of architectural production: layers of capital that circulate through rendering, branding, marketing, and other media operations that are seen as peripheral to a building’s architectural design but nonetheless tethered to its deployment into the public sphere. These phenomena raised a bunch of research questions that could only be explored if I were to retreat back into academia, so I applied to the MED program.
I returned to the A+A building, rechristened Rudolph Hall, in September 2008 on the eve of the financial crisis and the Obama election. A major sea change was already underway. Architectural culture, broadly speaking, was turning away from the kinds of laissez-faire development and exuberant form-making that characterized the profession during the Bush administration. People were starting to cast a critical eye on financial institutions and architecture’s relation to capitalism. Yet the cult of the “starchitect” was still alive and well. Here’s a colorful anecdote: my roommate and dear friend Tala Gharagozlou (BA ’06, MArch ’10) was a student in Frank Gehry’s advanced studio, and for his birthday she hosted a party for the entire studio at our Edgewood apartment. I didn’t know it was happening, though. I arrived home to discover the surreal scene of Frank Gehry and his students eating Pepe’s pizza in my living room. We all sang him happy birthday and then—coincidentally it was also my birthday—everyone did the same for me. Then Frank and I discussed a terrible fish sculpture I had made and bonded over the fact that we’re both Pisces. That experience feels like a relic from a bygone era.
AJ During my time as a student, shortly after you left, the veneer of fame concealed the dynamics of Occupy Wall Street boiling underneath. It was a strange juxtaposition at that time, within a school where there was a critical counterculture behind the ranks of all the Post-Modern formalists.
DS It must have been interesting to be at Yale during Occupy Wall Street. That was another very formative experience for me. After I finished the MED degree in 2010, I moved back to New York and got a job—again by happenstance—at the Museum of Modern Art, as a Collection Specialist, interfacing between the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture and the art market. My job was a bit amorphous. In addition to art-historical research on objects in the Painting and Sculpture Collection I was tasked with identifying which objects from the so-called Study Collection and Assets divisions could be sold to fund the acquisition of other works that would, ostensibly, enrich the museum collection. At the time I was living in a grim tenement apartment in Chinatown just blocks away from Zuccotti Park. So during my workday I was soliciting sales proposals from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and off-hours I was attending Occupy rallies and listening to everything that was going on downtown. A lot of that discourse subsequently played a major role in how I study the history of architecture and the sorts of histories I want to write.
AJ The New Haven Green had a lot of people living in tents, and they stayed throughout the winter and into the spring of 2012. It felt disorienting to ignore that side of inhabitation at school and the meltdown in the real estate market. Our paths are actually quite similar: after getting my MArch degree I just wanted to move to New York and ended up working for a marketing agency doing retail design for Maserati dealerships and designing 200 McDonald’s locations in two weeks with ten drawings.
DS Wait, that’s super interesting.
AJ Another parallel is that you spent a summer writing for Architectural Record, and I wrote for Architizer for two summers. Having moved from journalism to market-oriented branding to Perspecta, how did you settle on the PhD track? Now that you’ve finished your dissertation are you looking to expand further, into other types of writing and discourse?
DS That’s a great question. What you’re pointing out are different models of public-facing writing. As an undergraduate I was very committed to journalism. I was an arts editor of the daily newspaper and took a seminar with Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times. I was enthralled by the idea of writing for the general public rather than a specialized community bound by shared disciplinary codes.
What ultimately led me to the PhD were the curatorial experiences I had during and after the MED program. Allow me to backtrack for a minute: during my MED years I worked with Dean Sakamoto to curate a retrospective on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA). The exhibition was organized on the occasion of Yale hosting a show of the famous Yale Las Vegas Studio photographs that was curated by Martino Stierli for a museum in Switzerland. We used the photographs to frame a retrospective of VSBA’s work, demonstrating how the lessons that Bob, Denise, and Steven Izenour learned from the Las Vegas studio colored their later design practice. After that I worked with Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen on a Kevin Roche retrospective and wrote a piece for the exhibition catalog. So if I graduated from college planning to be a journalist, I graduated from the MED program planning to be a curator.
I applied for an administrative assistant position in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA because I so admired the curators there. After an unexpected turn of events, I ended up getting the Collection Specialist job, working under Leah Dickerman and Ann Temkin. I was and continue to be in awe of their work and the sort of object-driven art history produced at museums. So I thought that if I wanted to do this and do it well, I needed a PhD—ideally in art history. But then over the course of many, many years of doctoral study (in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard), I came to love the intellectual freedom that comes with writing history, as well as teaching and mentoring students. I think historical writing can be a very creative and constructive act.
AJ It’s interesting that you worked at a museum, because your research for the MED degree focused on the Met, right?
DS The Met was one among several case studies in my MED research, which specifically looked at how the museum typology evolved to accommodate a “mass public” during the postwar period. But it was a central case study on account of Yale’s then recent acquisition of the Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates archive.
AJ But during the PhD you focused generally on the Beaux-Arts, and I guess the connection is the museum as an object of study. Your Beaux-Arts work gets into the institution of the school as a way of programing global space. How does the museum fit?
DS I would say that these examples are all about how publics are constructed and mediated. My doctoral work was a continuation of that inquiry, expanded to encompass global history and the exciting scholarship that was emerging on the nineteenth century, as well as histories of empire, capitalism, and race. But in a way the core question continued to be how architecture has historically shaped identities and conditions of belonging and exclusion for various publics.
My dissertation argued that Beaux-Arts composition was one of the most powerful spatial instruments for building publics at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, composition’s design logics of symmetry, axiality, and so on imagined the organization of a building as the harmonious arrangement of elements held together in a stable equilibrium. Proponents of composition thought that architectural logics of harmony could be scaled up to “society” at large—and, further still, applied at the scale of a nation-state, a colonial empire, or even a world of empires and nations.
What many museums were doing in the nineteenth century—namely presenting grand narratives of “civilization” and “universal history”—was similar to the agendas of architects trained at the Beaux-Arts and their clients. Of course one must never take historical actors at their word. So one of the major ambitions for my dissertation was to provincialize the claims of architects, colonial administrators, and internationalists who saw monumental Beaux-Arts buildings as foot soldiers on a “civilizing mission” to achieve a harmonious world order. My research argued that the circulation of this design method was never frictionless; it collided with highly localized ways of building and inhabiting space that, along with their constituent communities, resisted composition’s best-laid plans.
AJ What is really at the root of your interest in this subject?
DS There may be an autobiographical dimension to my interest in publics and counterpublics, and the dynamics of belonging and exclusion. I navigated similar boundaries as someone raised in a biracial, mixed faith (Christian-Muslim) household in Texas—especially in the aftermath of 9/11. My community felt, in many ways, like a monoculture centered around the building typologies of the church and the football stadium, each exerting tremendous power over our everyday lives. For example, the AP Biology teacher at my public high school refused to teach evolution and other subjects that offended his evangelical religious beliefs. But there was also a vibrant Tejano culture owing to our status as a border state, which was palpable in the social fabric of central Texas. As I later learned, several of my classmates were undocumented and still have precarious immigration status despite living in the same community since kindergarten. So if I were to self-psychoanalyze, I think my Texas upbringing greatly influenced how I perceive the built environment and its ways of governing social and cultural difference.
AJ That aligns with my experience growing up in Northern Virginia, also a very diverse and complex context. Speaking of the Beaux-Arts, there’s this interesting monument in my hometown, Alexandria, Virginia—the George Washington National Masonic Memorial—built in the 1920s. It’s a headquarters for the Freemasons designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett, one of the New York architects who worked with Hugh Ferris on the renderings of zoning regulations and setbacks. It’s odd because he transplants the nascent skyscraper language, mashing it up with the Beaux-Arts. I like when the Beaux-Arts gets weird, using all its tools but not really arriving at a composition that makes sense. So Corbett tried to echo the lighthouse of ancient Alexandria, Egypt, atop a Greek temple base. Another example of this type of weird Beaux-Arts is the state capitol of Nebraska, by Bertram Goodhue. You’re talking about the central Beaux-Arts school, in Paris, where architects are programed to deliver this set of tools around the world, but it is interesting when the mission can’t be completed or the composition is sort of off, when this universal system doesn’t really work.
DS Absolutely. One of the major goals behind the dissertation—which I’m now transforming into a book—is to challenge a conventional center-periphery model of dissemination and deflate a lot of the triumphalist narratives surrounding the École des Beaux-Arts’s cult of genius. In this respect I’m joining many other scholars who are dismantling the cliché of Paris as cultural capital of the nineteenth century. In my case it comes with broadening the geography of Beaux-Arts composition while divesting the Prix de Rome as the sole arbiter of what constitutes “good” composition. My research focuses on the peripheries of composition, both within the school and at the outer limits of its global impact. For example, I found a bunch of strange overlooked drawings for lesser design competitions in the school archives. And I’ve spent considerable time in Brazil, Argentina, and Panama, among many other places, looking at deviations and innovations in how composition was adapted to serve local agendas.
AJ Now that you’re back at Yale for the third time, what are you looking forward to in terms of teaching?
DS I’m excited to be back in a space of production, so to speak. That’s one obvious difference between where I was previously (in an art history department) and where I am now, literally around the corner from 3D printers, plotters, and laser cutters. Beyond teaching a new generation of historians and theorists, I’m also teaching design students who are translating historical concepts into modes of making. That’s a rather amazing opportunity for a historian. I’m teaching brand-new courses that are tailor-made for the school. In the fall, I taught a seminar called “Capital Building,” examining the long relationship between architecture and capitalism from sugar plantations in the early modern Atlantic to the “supertalls” of Billionaire’s Row. In the spring, I’m teaching a PhD seminar on methods of archival research and an MArch seminar on how architects “use and abuse” history to advance present-day agendas. But there’s a lot more on the docket—exhibitions, symposia, and so on—to be revealed. Needless to say, I have my own agendas!
