Profile: Ted Szostkowski AIA
Name: Ted Szostkowski AIA
Job title and company: Principal, Director of Higher Education Studio, SMMA/Symmes Maini & McKee Associates
Degree(s): Bachelor of Arts in English Literature (Knox College), MArch (Harvard Graduate School of Design)
Professional interests: Designing places for creative action, whether at the scale of the workstation, the room, the building, the campus, the urban district or the city
What are you working on now?
1. Business development and strategic planning for the firm’s Higher Education Practice, with an invited competition for a humanities building along the way.
2. My first career was as an elementary-school teacher, and I value the commitment, effort and art necessary for public education. I’m trying to promote the idea of an “Innovation School for the Innovation District” as a concrete manifestation of “reanimating” the commitment for excellence in Boston’s public school system, which should strive to be as successful in its realm as our local colleges and universities are in theirs.
How do you explain to your mom what you do for a living?
She died 50 years ago, but if I could, I would remind her of the day she taught me “how to see” as the first step in learning how to draw. Like any epiphany, one keeps returning to it. I had just brought home my first drawing from kindergarten: “My House.” From what I could tell in looking at the work of my classmates, we all responded with essentially identical pictures using the same archetypes that years later I would find cataloged in [Gaston] Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: the sun in a cloudless sky; a gabled box with a big door knob; an apple tree, ripe with red fruit, to one side; to the other side, the child author rendered in ovals and stick limbs; all three—tree, house, child—about the same size.
After looking at my drawing, my mother started a long and tender conversation with “Tell me what you see,” which then led to a walk down our block. What discoveries! No buildings within sight had peaks; they were all flat-roofed, three-and-a-half-story walk-ups; my yard was a fenced rectangle of dirt with no trees, apple-bearing or otherwise. She then stood by a doorway and asked me to compare the heights of a person, a door, and the building in which we rented one of six units: “Tell me what you see.” Then, inside, in front of a mirror, she asked me to look closely at my image as I moved around: What were the parts of the body, and how were they connected? “Tell me what you see.”
Finally, she took out a piece of paper and in pencil began to draw a human figure, stopping at each part to ask: What is the shape of a face? Is the body smaller or bigger or the same size as a head? and so on. We talked about necks and elbows and knees as she completed the figure. Then, with a surety of line, she sketched a horse, finally rendering the animal in a chiaroscuro technique. I couldn’t believe that such life could come out of a pencil and that my mother was its creator. She then folded the drawing, the last one I ever saw her make, and put it away as if to say our conversation about drawing was not about her talents but about my seeing.
From that day on, I fell in love with drawing and would immerse myself in delineating the world. My English wasn’t yet good enough to explain to my teacher that I was not “going outside the lines” but casting shadows and trying to escape flatness and render volume with my thick crayons. In short order, there was the report home about “Ted not finishing his artwork,” which was schoolspeak for not completing a drawing within the administratively allocated time period for “art.” I think my mother succeeded in explaining to the teacher that I was trying to draw “what I see” and why not let me keep at it until the piece was complete.
I would explain to my mother that sometimes I finish drawings, and some remain incomplete.
What inspired you today?
Conversations with my wife, as they always do
What architectural buzzword[s] would you kill?
“We regret to inform you that your firm was not selected.”
When you’re working, do you discuss or exchange ideas with your colleagues?
Yes, as much as they can stand.
What are you reading?
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, by Murray Gell-Mann. At one point, Gell-Mann coins a term that I think perfectly describes architects—“Odysseans”—playing off and synthesizing Nietzsche’s “Apollonian/Dionysian” distinctions of the analytical/intuitive, left-brain/right-brain styles of thought.
Do you sketch by hand or digitally?
By hand
Has your career taken you anywhere you didn’t expect?
Lviv, Ukraine. A letter from a former client, the Ukrainian Catholic University, explained they were seeking to develop a university that would educate the next generation of ethically grounded leaders for their newly democratic country and asked if this would be of interest. The issue of language and the power of the word emerged in all its fullness: At the initial interview, where the electricity failed just as the introductory slide was being projected, and my former partner Michael McKinnell FAIA and I were asked to discuss architecture without the comfort of images; where one was aware of the need for precision and the weight of every word proferred in the mode of dual translations; and in the presence of numerous photographic memorials to the victims of the Gulag, so many of them poets whose uncompromised words were taken as an extreme threat to the previous authoritarian regime. It was a profoundly cleansing experience compared with the vast cataract of our daily commercial and political speech.
Where is the field of architecture headed?
What’s well documented now are the extremes of the consolidation of firms featuring broad service offerings; global economic presence; and sheer size on the one hand, and the small, tactically re-combining design firms on the other, with specialists staking out specific niches in between. Toward sustainability, of course, with a major choice between a “lite green” reformist and technocratic posture that, while addressing the issues of resource depletion and pollution, still maintains the possibility of a “utopia of abundance” vs. a more fundamental reimagining of global sufficiency, limits, environmental adaptation and social interdependency.
Can design save the world?
Saving the world requires political action. One of my teachers proposed the distinction between the personal realm, where one could choose to be as politically and socially engaged as desired, and the professional realm, where the architect’s social responsibility is to “design a good facade” (hard enough to do and who else can do it?). I’m sure there’s a powerful fantasy that a techno-urban Steve Jobs is out there; it’s quite possible that Living PlanIT’s radical approach to creating an “eco-city”—“iCity”?—with economics based on partnerships rather than land, and a “cradle-to-grave” reimagining of the building-design/building-construction/building-maintenance industries, can provide such design salvation.
On the issue of the interface between design and politics, I’m reminded of an architectural presentation of housing designs that was bookended by early- and late-career projects: the former was an affordable-housing project featuring a highly developed section providing views of neighbors’ entrances, common pathways, common spaces, etc., fostering a local and democratic community; the latter, a Middle Eastern villa, sited on created land in the shape of a palm tree, designed so there would be no views whatsoever of the neighboring villas. Which client is in greater need of a “democratic” architecture, if that’s what is necessary to “save the world”?
What do you hope to contribute from your work?
Yvor Winters stated in his Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises that the first responsibility of a critic is to feed his family. I’ll wager the same holds true for most architects. I’ll get back to you on the other things after the recession is over.
Who or what deserves credit for your success?
First, serendipity. Second, a wonderful education with inspiring teachers, an experience extended by periodic and rejuvenating jury participation at our area’s schools of architecture. Third, at every stage of my career, the example and personal generosity and encouragement of my architectural colleagues, and their constant emphasis on improving the quality of design.
Your least favorite college class?
Languages. This was the period of the transition from a text-based pedagogy to an aural one. I had previously flourished in the visually based textual environment and absolutely floundered in the language lab setting. I more or less still know the Cyrillic alphabet.
If you could give the you-of-10-years-ago advice, what would it be?
Spend more time with your children.
Your favorite Boston-area structure?
The Swan Boats. Following eight years in elementary education featuring numerous readings of Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, I came to Boston in the bicentennial summer of 1976 to attend Harvard GSD’s Career Discovery Program in Architecture and made the Public Garden, the site of the story, my first tourist stop. This included a ride on the Swan Boats so I would be able to describe the experience firsthand to my last group of students, as I afterward applied to and entered the GSD in 1977. In time, I would return to ride with one daughter, then two, with both eventually participating as ballerinas in the annual “Return of the Swans” event. Of more personal signification than [Robert] Venturi’s “Duck” and more carbon-neutral than the Duck Boats. What other mode of transportation owes its inspiration to Lohengrin?
Who would you like the BSA to interview next?
Brian Healy AIA, Sheila Kennedy AIA, Jonathan Levi FAIA and Tim Love AIA—unique voices in our design community, and all wonderful teachers as well.
If you were on a late-night TV show, what would your 30-second plug be?
“Please send your pledges and architectural commissions in to the address shown at the bottom of your screen.”
If you could sum up your outlook on life in a bumper sticker, what would it say?
“Whiskey for My Men, Beer for My Horses.”
tags: People + Projects, people, profile
