Mark Foster Gage is the founder of Mark Foster Gage Architects, a professor at the Yale School of Architecture, and has published several books including Designing Social Equality: Architecture Aesthetics and the Perception of Democracy and Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture and Philosophy. His academic interests are focused upon the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and design. His designs have been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA), the Royal Gallery of Art in London, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in publications including The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York Magazine.
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What drew you to architecture, and how did you enter the field?
I went to high school in Omaha, Nebraska. I played football, and I had a coach named Mr. Hall who also taught a class called “The Humanities.” I took his class because I wanted to gain favor with him so that I could get the starting quarterback position—the worst of all possible reasons—but the class ended up changing my life. It’s pretty unusual in the Midwest to have a class about the arts, especially if it’s taught by a football coach who knows nothing about the arts. He played us music and showed us art and some slides of architecture.
He showed the class a picture of an Art Deco building in Omaha, which I had never seen. It was later made into the Museum of Western Heritage, and it was this gorgeous white marble building. I was like: “Wait a minute, people can do that kind of thing?” It never connected that someone could spend their life doing something that looked that cool. So, I eventually attended the University of Notre Dame and declared my major as architecture. It just clicked. I took enough classes in the arts, which I was also interested in, so I got a double major in art history and the rest was history. It was very weird. I never felt like I had to make a decision. It just happened super organically from when I was 17.
Could you please describe your work with the Biden/Harris Presidential Campaign—what did you create, and what was the process behind it?
In “Creativity, Innovation, and ‘The New,” the class I teach at Yale, we’re talking about the dial between what’s familiar and what’s new. Campaign logo signs are turned all the way to familiar because they have to appeal to the most number of people––300+ million Americans, from New Yorkers to farmers in Oklahoma to surfers in Hawaii.
So, campaigns are not a place where you see a lot of innovation. They go through lots of iterations and colors and land on something that is almost always boring, but campaigns spend a ton of money on them, and they are highly developed.
I got put in touch with the head of Public Relations for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign about designing for the campaign. I made a couple of sketches, they loved them, and we developed them further. Because it was all during Zoom, no one needed yard signs because no one was going outside, so they mostly served as Zoom backdrops for fancy fundraisers. I think they put it on some swag, t-shirts, and donor gifts. The logo we designed in our office’s, let’s say, “signature style,” has a lot of detail, numerous different figures and forms, and even when you’re in a virtual world, it was intended to produce a feeling like: “Oh, I feel like I’m seeing something special—above and beyond the official campaign logo.”
2020 Biden Harris campaign logo designed by Mark Foster Gage Architects
Why do you consider aesthetics as equivalent to politics?
You’re referring to my book Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture and Philosophy. Aesthetics isn’t just a judgment of whether we think something is beautiful or not; it’s a philosophical discipline that helps us understand how we interface with the world as humans.
Aesthetics are about sight and sound and touch and smell, and because it’s the philosophy of that interaction between humans and the world, it governs how we understand reality. If you can influence how someone understands reality or actually builds their reality, which is what architects do, those are inherently political acts.
Aesthetics was not a topic you could discuss in architecture schools for about a century because Architectural Modernism cast aesthetics as a very elite thing. It was seen to be only about beauty. But philosophy kept moving with it, and it has developed today into a field that is much larger than only art or beauty. It’s how we relate to the world.
My goal in the book Aesthetics Equals Politics, which was also a symposium at Yale called “Aesthetic Activism” in 2016, was to invite people from philosophy, arts, curation, architecture––all sorts of disciplines to talk about how this renewed idea about aesthetics could influence all of our fields. The book is meant to be interdisciplinary—we’re all thinking about aesthetics in a different way in our fields, but we never talk about it across disciplines. Let’s come to Yale and talk about it. That was the idea that became the symposium, which then became a book.
How can architecture promote democracy? How can it harm it?
Question of the year—everyone in architecture is thinking about this. Donald Trump wants to make all new courthouse buildings be built in the classical style because he believes that democracy equals classical architecture. He’s not entirely wrong—the founders of the United States, in particular in Philadelphia and later in Washington DC, adopted the classical language in architecture because democracy originated in Ancient Greece, and they wanted to make allusions to this first democracy. And so, the architecture of antiquity became the reference for the architecture of the U.S. Government for a century. They wanted to skip all references to more northern European architecture, especially the Gothic, because Europe was the oppressor, with all of their kings and queens.
In Greece, they didn’t have any wood because it’s in a climate that doesn’t have a lot of big trees, so it was all stone. When it came to America, it became mostly wood and so things became thinner and lighter. It was a distinctly American architectural style that developed, loosely called Federalism, and it produced centuries of beautiful buildings. Harvard is entirely built in a kind of Americana style, which is why Yale went Gothic in style, because they wanted to differentiate themselves architecturally.
When I go and do jury duty near Wall Street, I’m entering this temple of democracy and go up these giant stairs. There’s these beautiful columns, and it just feels important, in the same way, that when you walk through the main door of Sterling Library—you feel like, “Wow, I can tell this is important. It’s big and formal and has a lot of detail. It’s special and houses special things.” You can tell just by looking at it that it’s special—which is something that architecture has lost the ability to do well today in my opinion.
Now, there’s a general consensus that most of the buildings that are built these days, certainly government buildings, tend to be pretty ugly. They don’t really imbue you with a sense of civic pride or provide a sense of civic engagement. I think that impacts how people feel about the government. We’re not spending enough money or time on our civic buildings. However, I totally disagree with Trump that the answer is to officially legislate a style. Legislating an official national architecture that is also classical in nature is exactly what Hitler did in the Third Reich, which makes it extra sinister to me. Hitler was making reference to the longevity and power of the Roman Empire, rather than Greek democracy, which Trump is obviously trying to tap into. Either way, through ignorance or intention, it’s terrifying.
Everything architecture does is inherently political. If I’m doing a building in New York City and I put the front door on a particular street, it means that people who walk this street have access to the building. If I put the front door on another street, it means a total other constituency of people have direct access. The boundary of the doorway is the most political thing in the world. A doorway is intended to separate out the people who are allowed in and the people who are not. That’s Politics 101: who’s allowed to have a voice, who’s not allowed to have a voice; who’s allowed to make decisions, who’s not allowed to make decisions; who has access and who doesn’t have access.
Also, the way we organize our communities can be political—architects can put down a bunch of glass towers on a barren sidewalk, really only accessible by car, or we can build buildings around a common plaza with markets and restaurants and encourage social interaction through mixed-use. So, architects have a lot of power to influence these things, but they aren’t being considered enough now because architecture is thought of as disposable and not worth sinking more than the lowest amount of money into—at least in the majority of cases. Get it done as fast as you can. There’s no real attention paid to the type of community it produces, the identity it produces, who has access to it physically, and what it does visually and culturally in a neighborhood. My position on ‘aesthetics equals politics’ orbits these particular ideas.
What architectural project are you most proud of?
We did a project for the Helsinki Guggenheim, which is this wild collection of sculptures that makes this wacky building. It got so much attention and was a statement that we can think about architecture differently. It doesn’t all have to be modern, basic, and minimalist. I did it to do something completely maximal and crazy. It was to remind people, “What else can we do other than glass boxes?” It resonated with a lot of people.
Helsinki Guggenheim proposal designed by Mark Foster Gage Architects
Is political meaning in art always intentional?
That’s a debatable thing in art. I always say art and architecture don’t come with instruction manuals. Unless you’re overt with political meaning in art, I don’t think art is the right communication tool for political ideas.
Art was used as a political device, for example, by the Catholic Church when it was building cathedrals. They showed Jesus and the apostles at the top and then the common people down below. You could tell from the picture what the hierarchy was. Back then, they didn’t have phones, they couldn’t read, they couldn’t produce books. Architecture or art, therefore, used to be the best medium to convey political ideas.
Now, I think they’re among the worst. Everyone has a smartphone, which is a much better communication device than architecture or art. Having said that, there are ways to do art and architecture that are politically forceful. I’m just not sure that should be their main goal. Richard Serra, the famous sculptor who went to Yale, is known for these giant torqued metal shapes that are sometimes tens or hundreds of feet long. One of the first ones he did was actually in front of a New York City courthouse.
In the early 1980s, he put this giant sculpture called “Tilted Arc” in the middle of Foley Federal Plaza so people couldn’t as easily walk between government buildings. To get to where you wanted to go you had to walk around this big art-obstacle. It made you think about your ability to access these civic buildings. It didn’t do it through a message; it did it through actually obstructing the way you move your body. But, I’m not sure we want all of our architecture and public art to be only about challenging us—we also need beautiful and humane places to live and work. Both can be political.
How have recent technological developments affected the field of architecture?
Very poorly. When the computer emerged in the 1990s as an architectural design tool, there was a lot of excitement because it could help us make forms that we had never been able to make before. Architecture prior to that was mostly lines and basic geometries that any kid could draw. With the computer, we could all of a sudden make these supple, complexly curved blobs and vectors. There was probably the most excitement seen in architecture in centuries, maybe similar to when, in the early Renaissance, they discovered perspective, and it completely changed architecture’s nature.
What actually happened was that we spent a lot of time figuring out how to make these things robotically and really imagined a changed world enabled through computational design, but the technology that actually ended up influencing architecture the most was the spreadsheet. You could track the number of bricks, the number of pipes, and the number of linear feet of wood and how many window frames you need. It became easier to reduce the cost of buildings when you had the cost of every single item in front of you. So, I would say that the technological dreams of architecture that existed a few decades ago have been eclipsed by market efficiencies. As with so many things, profit wins.
When you’re thinking about how to make buildings cost less money, you’re not thinking about the cultural impact of a building. The computer ended up being the enemy instead of the liberator. It has honestly been super painful for me to have to watch over the last few decades.
How do you think that Yale’s architecture represents and characterizes politics?
There are a couple of different answers to that. One is the student body. The architecture school has always been very politically engaged. All the way back in the late ‘60s there was speculation about whether students may or may not have burnt the architecture building to the ground during the racial and political tensions of 1968 and 1969.
Yale has different design studios where students sign up to learn with particular professors, and they can be very different. There’s a lot more studios today than there were 20 years ago centered around political topics.
However, I worry that there’s a little bit too much emphasis at Yale on solving the world’s problems through architecture when I think that a lot of them are not architectural problems. They’re political problems or economic problems primarily. It feels good to pretend to solve them with architecture, but it’s probably not the right tool. I think we’re not teaching the cultural aspect of architecture enough, how it produces community and identity—even beauty—through a more aesthetically driven agenda.
Architecture has a very bad habit of doing this kind of thing—if there’s a refugee crisis in Syria, all architects are going to design refugee housing for a year, and none of it will get built. None of it will be used by anyone, but it’ll make everyone feel like they’re engaged and doing virtuous work. It’s a good thing to do to think about the world in that way, but I also worry that it may be done at the expense of teaching what architecture has historically been. It’s a fine line. How do you be virtuous and also be realistic about what architecture is and what it can accomplish?