Radical Modernism and Urban Experiments in PREVI, Lima
The Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) was a social housing project in Lima, Peru, aimed at proposing a state-sponsored solution to the housing shortages that Lima was facing at the time, in an attempt to belay the rapid growth of informal housing around the city. Announced in 1966 by Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde (who happened to be trained as an architect) and cofinanced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), PREVI was headed by British architect Peter Land, and consisted of three distinct pilot schemes. The first was the design and construction of a small neighborhood of 1500 low-cost homes; the second was the development of techniques that would extend the longevity of older houses; the third aimed to research methods of rationalized growth, spontaneity that was up to standards.[1] As a project, PREVI proposed many experimental and quite radical strategies. With the intention to create a low-cost and highly-dense neighborhood, the prompt also called for the design of the houses to be changeable by residents over time, a radical notion that reflected the bottom-up building strategies Land saw in surrounding informal communities. Land was also inspired by the research of fellow British architect John Turner, who wrote that “self-governing network structures and decentralizing technologies are the only ways and means through which satisfactory goods and services can be obtained.”[2]
Of the three intended pilot schemes, the project is almost entirely remembered for the first. Belaúnde and Land organized a competition, where 13 selected international architects and 13 Peruvian architects from an open call would propose housing designs and solutions to be used in this community.[3] While six winning projects were chosen, (three from international and domestic respectively), the high quality of all the proposals, along with worsening economic and political conditions (Belaúnde had been overthrown in a military coup in 1968, and the project continued funded by the UNDP) prompted the jury to suggest building a 500-home neighborhood of all the submissions instead, and from there expand out with the best houses. The result was 467 houses built on 12.3 hectares of land north of the city center, organized into 16-to-20-house clusters for each architect, which was finally completed and inhabited by 1977. Further worsening economic conditions meant that no additional phases commenced, and the project faded into obscurity.
The neighborhood still exists today, however, and most of the families that originally took residence there have stayed. Visiting today, it becomes apparent very quickly that the houses have evolved dramatically over time; as architect Justin McGuirk describes, “The original houses are encrusted with geological layers: extra floors, pitched roofs, balconies, external staircases, faux-marble facades, terracotta roof tiles and bright coats of paint. It’s like a form of archaeology, mentally scraping away these accretions.”[4] Almost 40 years later, the project is being reassessed in terms of how successful many of the individual designs and experiments were in creating a sustainable community, especially in the context of contemporary housing issues. Understanding and observing the various urban experiments that took place in PREVI helps pull a number of conclusions out regarding how effective these radical means of residential planning were in addressing the needs of residents over time, and also carries important implications about how bottom-up or informal urban strategies can intersect with Modern ideologies to create successful spaces to live.
Examining the overall organization of the project, one can read a system of axes masterplanned by Peter Land that begin to shape how each cluster of houses begin to interact and intersect with each other. What appears initially as a very collage-like grouping of designs in free association can be broken down into hierarchies of spines that begin to broadly dictate circulation. Most clearly defined is the central pedestrian road that bisects the site and defines the project’s core. This road connects the central park and the main amenities of the neighborhood together, and it also serves as the primary path for public transport to engage with at the ends. Off of this axis, smaller secondary vertical paths begin to separate housing clusters into smaller groupings. Finally, a tertiary set of paths intersect perpendicular to the secondary, interconnecting these spines. Walking along this network of spinal paths, Marianne Baumgartner describes how “the centripetal arrangement of these paths is conducive to strolling around. They lead through an attractive succession of spaces created by the different designs of the houses, and their specific entrance situations, breadths, vistas and lighting conditions.”[5]
A notable comparison for this type of spine-based system are the designs of Ludwig Hilberseimer, whose urban planning theories similarly interrogated spine-based means of organization and spinal transformations of the city. Both concepts have greatly shaped how contemporary suburbia is planned, especially in the United States – one need only look at cities such as Houston to see the dichotomy of a gridded center and a spine-based suburban sprawl. Such theories are explored in publications such as The New City (1944), as well as in projects such as his proposed transformation of Rockford, IL from a centralized grid into a linear spine-based urbanism.[6] His theory of a “street hierarchy” is somewhat evident in the very distinct scales applied to each pathway in PREVI. The primary roadway is the widest, serving almost as an arterial road of transport in microcosm and intended for communal programs, while the secondary and tertiary roads are smaller, providing passages that cut through PREVI’s fabric and stitch together each individual – “collector” and “local” streets respectively, using Hilberseimer’s qualifiers. To Hilberseimer, the hierarchy of streets would primarily “bring about a differentiation of traffic routes: from the residential lane intended only for pedestrians to the main highways for automobiles only,” and while PREVI was largely pedestrian, one can read a scaled down version of this traffic flow hierarchy – most people walk down the primary road, fewer walk along the secondary spines, fewer still the tertiary.[7] Yet Hilberseimer’s hierarchy of streets was also largely based on functional separation, and were highly rationalized, often imagined as low-density linear clusters. Being at a smaller scale than most of Hilberseimer’s proposals, Land’s use of spines are centered more around social permutation: an even division of spines that pass through the group of residential designs and reach every house.
Furthermore, by employing a very distinct spine system with the primary pedestrian road and secondary vertical axes and then undercutting it with tertiary axes, Land creates a new hybrid system that takes on additional properties of an extremely loose grid. With conventional spine-based systems, movement is controlled and specified: destinations have very specific pathways and traffic flows that are isolated from other pathways. Only by moving up the hierarchy of spines can one move down another spine. But by introducing a tertiary system of paths that connect secondary spines, Land encourages greater pedestrian fluidity around, inside, and between each cluster of houses, all the while confining motor transport to the periphery. These tertiary paths reduce the sense of linearity that come with the secondary spines, serve to further divide the houses into groups. As a collection of circulatory axes, the site blurs readings of cluster, cell, and spine together: flexible movement in and around housing assemblages anchored down by the primary spine.
The hybridity of this system is also visible in how Land produces open spaces and public areas. In contemporary spine-based organizing systems, each spine inherently becomes a figure on the ground that generates space around it. With PREVI, the figure of each cluster is still visible, yet Land more deliberately opens up public space at points of intersection between the tertiary and secondary axes, more akin to how public space is created within a grid. These become plazas that service several passages at once, where open spaces are not the basis of road organization, but rather a result of it. This overall system of circulation and part-spine part-grid organization has remained relatively unchanged over the course of PREVI’s 40-year-evolution, and the separation of pedestrians and motor transport remains intact, pointing to the relative success of this hybrid urbanism.
Experiment 2: social units and the plaza unit as a unifier
The scale of PREVI’s roads and organization is fundamentally tied to what is referred to by Garcia-Huidobro, Torriti, and Tugas as social units, independent of both individual households and the clusters of separate designs. The social unit has no standard definition; urbanist Ernest J. Green, understanding the terms neighborhoodand community as synonyms of the social unit, proposes the social unit as a face block: “the unit of persons tied together by mutual recognition as they go about daily activities close to home.”[8] Garcia-Huidobro et al, speaking directly in relation to PREVI, defines it as embodying what can loosely be described as a “self-organizing community.”[9] Their description implies scale of intimacy with the term, suggesting a collective large enough to extend beyond a nuclear family, but one small enough to still “promote collective appropriation and the care and maintenance of the public space.”[10]
In PREVI, the social unit is tied directly to the project’s urban layout. Each plaza or public space located at street intersections broadly creates a “bubble” that encompasses a certain number of units, creating an informal sense of ownership of the plaza to the housing units. The relationship between the size of each plaza and the number of units associated with it is fairly even across the site, each plaza belonging to roughly anywhere between 5-15 houses from various clusters. The result is that the plazas feel more like interstices, acting more as extensions of the interior private spaces than that of a broad and solely public space (i.e. the public parks). Spaced uniformly across the neighborhood as a result of being placed at spine intersections, the plaza gives a common vocabulary to a heterogenous group of clusters. Understanding these plaza “units” as extensions of several houses’ domesticity meant that these spaces were left largely unprogrammed, with the understanding that communal uses of the space could range from recreational to domestic at the whim of the inhabitants surrounding it.
This simple act of allowing residents from various units to use the plazas how they want creates associations with a complex mélange of urban theories, all largely emerging as a critique of the Athens Charter and the initial doctrines of CIAM. The writings of Team X, and specifically Alison and Peter Smithson’s urban research into notions of “association” and “identity” of inhabitants, certainly had a profound impact upon the overall design (indeed, van Eyck, Candilis, and Woods, associated with Team X, all contributed designs to PREVI). But where the Smithsons sought to “construct a hierarchy of human associations which should replace the fundamental hierarchy of the Charte d’Athènes,” the treatment of public plazas in PREVI removed functional distinctions entirely, a radical step away from the debates and counterdebates over functionalism that sprung up in the aftermath of CIAM. As historian Ute Poerschke writes, “The real problem [with CIAM], which resulted from both the prewar and postwar phase, was less the separation of functions than the lack of a definition of a whole, into which the functions could be woven together.”[11] In a way, PREVI addresses the lack of a whole through refraining from addressing it – a hands-off approach that allows residents to establish their own functions, lifestyles, and uses of space.
This notion of not concretely defining the use of each plaza and instead allowing the residents to have agency over their public spaces ties more closely to Henri Lefebvre and his theories on social spaces and public agency. Lefebvre’s mantra of the public having a “right to the city” reflected his understanding of the urban not as a product of processes of industrial production and capital accumulation, but “more or less the oeuvre of its citizens.”[12] In his assessment of Lefebvre’s writings, scholar Chris Butler interprets this reading of urbanity as analogous to “a work of art constantly being remade. . . . In addition, the urban operates as a space of encounter – simultaneously encouraging differences to flourish, but also generating possibilities for collective action.”[13] From contemporary accounts of the public plazas in PREVI today, it seems evident that each has continued to act as a platform for collective inhabitation; as Marianne Baumgartner describes, the neighborhood features
a wide variety of open, intimate public spaces. Although freely accessible, they are not frequented by a wider public, since rather than providing infrastructures, the PREVI housing scheme mainly serves local residents. The spaces are all of pedestrian scale. As a result of this intimacy, the voids are of a collective rather than a public nature, and are well kept by the inhabitants themselves.[14]
Baumgartner argues for the design of public spaces being at the core of how the project operates today, writing that “collective space, immaterial and flowing, is the most determinant and lasting element of the PREVI.” While certain permanent features such as concrete benches and garden elements have been added over time on the bequest of residents, the concept of each plaza unit having open and free use seems to have maintained.
Experiment 3: building expansion relating to form and site
A core tenet of PREVI is the notion hat the houses transform over time; the architects were tasked with integrating adaptability into their designs from the beginning. The reasoning behind this can be similarly tied to questions of residential agency that were floating around as a reaction to the top-down theories of CIAM, but this ethos also held a regional dimension to it, emerging as a means of reflecting informal housing patterns sprouting around Lima. As Aldo van Eyck explained, “It would be a grave error if pre-designed and partially pre-constructed urban environments such as this pilot project proposes should counteract the growth and development of the barriada [Peruvian slum] idea and practice.”[15] Certainly, observing the neighborhood today, expansion has happened, and at an extreme scale. The very fact that the houses were expanded in the first place rather than kept static (or abandoned completely) can ultimately be considered a success of the project, even while enlargement often did not happen in the way predicted by the architect.
This sort of expansion can be analyzed in numerous ways, especially given how specific each enlargement is to the design of the house itself. Many have evaluated the relative success of each architect’s design – James Stirling’s housing design, for instance, is considered to have been the most successful in anticipating how residents would enlarge their house. Architects Julián Salas and Patricia Lucas instead understand design adaptability as being inherently tied to the building technologies employed, writing that the project “successfully promoted technical innovation by favoring rationalized construction and small-scale precasting techniques.”[16] Observing it at a larger scale, and in the context of an urban plan, expansion can quantified through three modes: one where the form of the building inherently provoked expansion to occur within itself, filling out the existing formal block, one where new additions expanded outwards to fill the lot of the house, and one where the addition appears formally distinct or visibly added on to the original building.
One can broadly understand these housing expansions as reacting to the paths and axes defining the neighborhood; over time, expansion took the form of houses pushing inward on the roads and plazas associated with them. This is another indicator of the plaza existing as an extension of the domestic interior; the plaza’s form is very much a reflection of the houses around it and how they evolve over time. This reflection of house expansion onto urban form is tangible visibly: the neighborhood has also undergone a perceived increase in density because of how it has expanded and enlarged. As Salas and Lucas note:
The increase in building density, mixed usage and the pursuit of formal variety to break the serial monotony and individualise the housing are the most visible changes undergone by the PREVI designs. Use and time, through successive enlargements, have changed the design not only of each individual house, but of the urban group as a whole.[17]
It is important to note that the neighborhood has not extended beyond its initial site plan, nor added any additional houses to the existing system. While a sign of the initial plan’s effectiveness in addressing the spatial needs of the residents, it is also an indication of how PREVI remains rooted as a project of composition, rather than one of aggregation. Comparable high-density neighborhoods in Lima, typically informal housing designed bottom-up, grew based on a logic of aggregation, with no masterplan or systematic path of expansion to follow. The result was that in Lima, “sites on occupiable land were urbanized by means of invasions, land-trafficking or legally constructed housing development.”[18] As a project based on a detailed masterplan, PREVI stands in contrast as an extremely composed neighborhood, intended for internal expansion but not for any outward expansion. While this means that several positive aspects of PREVI have been preserved – the separation of pedestrians and vehicles, for instance – this has also created perceivable differences between PREVI and the neighborhoods surrounding it, and is a large factor as to why surrounding neighborhoods did not adopt PREVI as a model. According to Rodriguez, without support of the government to continue with PREVI as a template and actively masterplan various sites, the land around PREVI rapidly filled with housing based on different planning legislations, meaning that “PREVI came late to Lima, even if its contributions had been massively widespread.”[19]
Experiment 4: programs in flux
It is interesting to compare the evolution of PREVI to what happened in other Modern social housing projects, such as Le Corbusier’s social housing in Pessac in 1924. With much of the same ambitions of producing low-cost repeatable housing, Pessac saw similar transformations undertaken by the working class residents who lived there over time. As observed by architect Philippe Boudon, “Pessac not only allowed the occupants sufficient latitude to satisfy their needs, but also helped them to realize what those needs were.”[20] Both projects arguably produced a similar sort of liberation from rigidly designed plans that empowered residents to take control of their residential spaces. In that sense, PREVI can be viewed as still fitting within the broadest underlying ethos of Modern social housing projects, which understood people as the priority in design. Indeed, while at the time such modifications at Pessac were seen by many as the project being “destroyed,” Le Corbusier’s own reaction to seeing his designs changed – famously saying that “life is right and the architect is wrong” – points to an understanding of Modern architecture needing to accommodate processes and changes over time, even if it stood in the way of ideology.[21] PREVI, fundamentally designed as a project in flux, not only embraced such changes, but also bore witness to changes that went beyond merely restructuring form.
To that end, while the residents were expected to expand their houses based on changes in living conditions, many did so while simultaneously transforming the program of their building. The initial masterplan of PREVI only accounted for a few educational blocks and a community center, with every other building treated uniformly as residential. This certainly implies that despite not being explicitly planned out by Land or any of the architects, programmatic transformations were expected. Several blocks changed from being residential to becoming commercial (the most common new program), service-oriented, or educational buildings. These changes in program can broadly be read as popping up against busier circulatory paths – specifically the primary and several secondary spines – as well as by the boundary of the neighborhood. The type of program became specified to various aspects of the neighborhood design; for instance, convenience stores and restaurants popped up at properties facing the perimeter roads, while internally shops were smaller and more localized. The large public park became an anchor around which many nurseries and schools were introduced.
Once again, left unplanned by the architects involved, these transformations speak to how much agency residents had over the buildings in PREVI. The intentions of the residents are easily read in where and how new programs were introduced. The transformations by the periphery speak to how the neighborhood has attempted to integrate itself into the fabric of Lima as a whole, despite (as mentioned earlier) how distinct PREVI was as a self-contained neighborhood. The rise of schools and nurseries clearly reflected the need to accommodate growing families and larger numbers of children. A lack of imposed zoning or predetermined commercial spaces meant that the introduction of additional programs was closely attuned to socio-economic changes in the neighborhood. Furthermore, seeing how widespread many of these changes were across the site demonstrates how families continued to invest back into the neighborhood, strengthening their ties to the community. This serves as a model for understanding how citizen-led economies can begin to adapt the city as needed to benefit their own growth, and where they tend to act. As Garcia-Huidobro et al. write, “Understanding the location patterns of new uses . . . makes it possible to design a neighborhood well prepared for change, without generic or overdetermined zoning, that promotes entrepreneurship (in the form of new family businesses) to strengthen the local economy.”[22]
Conclusion:
In discussing the state of social housing today and how PREVI may fit into the discourse of residential design as a case study, architect Tomeu Ramis wrote the following:
In this way, now more than ever, citizens are taking on a central role in the process of configuration of the contemporary city. We are, then, faced with an approach that brings together everything that sociologists and anthropologists have been positing as essential for understanding and constructing the city with the resulting shift from top-down planning or formal urbanism, managed by order and governmental control, to the bottom-up planning or informal urbanism exercised by citizen participation.[23]
PREVI represented a multi-pronged attempt at creating low-rise, high-density housing with an emphasis on social (particularly Peruvian) living, as well as continuous evolution and growth. Many of the experiments found in PREVI have yet to be fully documented and further refined in other projects. It is inarguable that several specific urban strategies employed in the project have been successful; the plaza-passage system of organizing public spaces and the hybrid spine-based system of movement, for instance, have both been maintained and remain integral to the neighborhood today. The freedom afforded to the residents in terms of adapting their homes has not only created an incredibly heterogenous and textured neighborhood attuned to the needs of the people, but has given a sense of ownership of the land and their houses to the residents, leading to further investment into the community. Garcia-Huidobro et al. describe this as “value added for both the house and the neighborhood.”[24] Salas and Lucas describe how despite the numerous successes of PREVI as a neighborhood, “its findings have apparently failed to take root in residential construction in Lima.”[25] However with this recent retrospective analysis of the experiment, many projects have emerged bearing similar ideas or logics – notably Alejandro Aravena’s 2008 Elemental project in Quinta da Monroy, Chile, and the Colombian collective Urban Think Tank, both interrogating citizen participation, adaption, and a redefined informal architecture.[26]
In many ways the project has historically been positioned in opposition to how social housing had previously been viewed in a Modern sense. As argued by Justin McGuirk, “PREVI marked the shift from a dogmatic modernist approach to housing the poor to one that capitalizes on the evolutionary, organic nature of informal settlements.”[27] Yet simultaneously, in the various urban experiments that have been observed, PREVI can also be viewed as a continuation and evolution of the Modern project, and perhaps as one of the last instances of Modern social housing. When asked whether his urban principles in designing PREVI were a rebut to Modern ideas espoused at the time, Land responded that “[PREVI] is a more comprehensive take on functionalism but does not contradict the theoretical framework of CIAM. It abandons some elements such as the machine aesthetic and high-rise imagery for common sense reasons.”[28]
By establishing what worked and embracing the architecture’s role as a foundation to be continuously built upon, the project arguably moved closer in achieving in microcosm what Modern urbanism strived to produce: dense living with socially stratified communities. PREVI drew on the principles espoused by previous Modern architects in attempting to design with a social aspect in mind, but combined it with emerging notions of functional liberation and social agency, as well as a specific Peruvian context, to create a project incredibly attuned to the contemporary issues of its residents. The notion of designing with change and evolution in mind rather than understanding housing in purely static terms, and the ways in which this manifests in the masterplan, each individual house, and in the technologies used, all differentiate PREVI from other housing efforts as a fundamentally unique entry in the Modern catalogue, with urban experiments that are still relevant today.
[1] A fourth scheme was introduced later after an earthquake in 1970 that aimed to examine earthquake-resistant design strategies. For more on PREVI and its implications in Lima’s more earthquake-prone and unsteady terrain, see Luis Rodriguez, “The Impact of PREVI on Lima,” Digital Architectural Papers 9: PREVI Revisited (July 2012), https://www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.php?ID=92.
[2] John Turner, “Housing priorities, settlement patterns and urban development in modernizing countries,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34, no. 6 (1968): 356.
[3] The finalized international teams consisted of James Stirling (UK); Esquerra, Samper, Sáenz, Urdaneta (Colombia); Knud Svensson (Denmark); Atelier 5 (Switzerland); Toivo Korhonen (Finland); Charles Correa (India); Herbert Ohl (Germany); Kikutake, Maki, Kurokawa (Japan); Iñiguez de Onzoño, Vásquez de Castro (Spain); Hansen, Hatloy (Poland); Aldo van Eyck (the Netherlands); Candilis, Josic, Woods (France); and Christopher Alexander (US). The Peruvian entrants consisted of Miguel Alvariño; Ernesto Paredes; Miró-Quesada, Williams, Núñez; Gunter, Seminario; Morales, Montagne; Juan Reiser; Eduardo Orrego; Vier, Zanelli; Vella, Bentín, Quiñones, Takahashi; Mazzarri, Llanos; Cooper, García-Bryce, Graña, Nicolini; Chaparro, Ramírez, Smirnoff, Wiskowsky; and Crousse, Páez, Pérez-León.
[4] Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London: Verso, 2014), 74–5.
[5] Marianne Baumgartner, “Walkways, Oases and Playgrounds - Collective Spaces in the PREVI,” Digital Architectural Papers 9: PREVI Revisited (July 2012), https://www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.php?ID=90.
[6] See Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New City: Principles of Planning (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944). For more on spine-based urban systems, see Albert Pope, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), and Neyran Turan and Stephen Ramos, eds., New Geographies 1: After Zero (2009).
[7] Hilberseimer,The New City, 107.
[8] Ernest J. Green, “The Social Functions of Utopian Architecture,” Utopian Studies 4, no. 1 (1993): 4–5.
[9] Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti, and Nicolás Tugas, “The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: The Making of a Neighborhood,” Architectural Design 81, no. 3 (July 2011): 28.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ute Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism(New York: Routledge, 2016), 162.
[12] Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville [The Right to the City] (Paris: Anthropos, 1968), 117. Emphasis in original.
[13] Chris Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2012), 143–44.
[14]Marianne Baumgartner, “Walkways, Oases and Playgrounds.”
[15] Aldo van Eyck, “Who are we building for, and why?” in Carl Koch, Alfredo Perez, Halldor Gunnlögsson, “PREVI/Lima: Low Cost Housing Project,” Architectural Design (April 1970): 189.
[16] Julián Salas, and Patricia Lucas, “The Validity of PREVI, Lima, Peru, Forty Years On,” Open House International 37, no. 1 (March 2012): 14.
[17] Ibid., 9.
[18] Rodriguez, “The Impact of PREVI on Lima.”
[19] Ibid.
[20] Philippe Boudon, Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier's Pessac Revisited (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 162.
[21] See Ada Louise Huxtable, “Le Corbusier’s Housing Project – Flexible Enough to Endure,” New York Times, March 15, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/15/arts/architecture-view-le-corbusier-s-housing-project-flexible-enough-endure-ada.html.
[22] Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti, and Nicolás Tugas, “Time Builds!,” Lotus 143 (2010): 87–101.
[23] Tomeu Ramis, “Learning from PREVI,” Digital Architectural Papers 9: PREVI Revisited (July 2012), https://www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.php?ID=94.
[24] García-Huidobro et al., “The Experimental Housing Project,” 31.
[25] Salas and Lucas, “The Validity of PREVI,” 15.
[26] Tomeu Ramis, “Learning from PREVI.” See also Josep Lluís Mateo, “PREVI Experience,” Digital Architectural Papers 9: PREVI Revisited (July 2012), https://www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.php?ID=96.
[27] McGuirk,Radical Cities, 79.
[28] Tomeu Ramis, “Experimental Nature: Interview with Peter Land,”Digital Architectural Papers 9: PREVI Revisited (July 2012), https://www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.php?ID=89. For more retrospective interviews on PREVI, see “Genetic Strategy: Interview with Fumihiko Maki,” “Local Background: Interview with Frederick Cooper,” and “Big Hopes: Interview with Alfredo Pini, Atelier 5,” in Digital Architectural Papers 9.