Joshua Comaroff | S5E4

To start our conversation, could you describe your multifaceted creative practice in your own words?

Okay.

Yeah, I think what you had there was the bio.

But I think what it really boils down to in a sense is that I, or how I consider myself is I'm a multidisciplinary designer and academic.

And mainly I'm just interested in how these curious species humans construct the world and how understanding more about that process of construction allows us to make and imagine and experience the world differently.

And I pursue that really just across different areas where we see that manifest.

So sometimes that could be through academic analysis of existing spaces or spatial practices that people create and follow together, but also through.

actual projects that attempt to intervene into the world and make spaces that people inhabit.

And the beauty of doing that from environmental design is that you make spaces and then you get to see how people actually inhabit them.

So there's always this kind of wonderful misfit between design intention and actual lived life, which is always fun to witness.

Okay.

And how did this come about, this multidisciplinary creative practice you've just described for us? Was it from your education in school? Was it from your childhood? How did it all begin?

I think I was very interested in particular in environments from a really young age.

I think the root of this really started with architecture and really started with the experience of architecture.

I didn't know for a long time that it was something I wanted to do.

I think like many people in Chicago where I grew up, I was just an architecture fan.

I mean, Chicago is a city where architecture is very important to the life of the city.

People talk about architecture, I think, a great deal.

have conversations about new buildings and so on.

And it's very key to the city's identity.

So I came to that city at the age of nine from Manchester in the UK, where I was born, which was a very gray kind of post-industrial city that was still kind of in the 1970s, even in the early 80s.

So coming to Chicago, which was this sort of wonderful, improbable, ethereal, dreamlike kind of city in contrast to what I knew, I think really heightened my sensitivity to that environment.

But also, I felt a lot like I was kind of living in a dream.

And I like to just go and kind of look at these buildings of a kind that I'd never seen before, of a scale I'd never seen before.

I think particularly from a very young age, the presence of Mies van der Rohe and his buildings and their role in the identity of the city and your kind of experience of them was really, really powerful.

To start our conversation, could you describe your multifaceted creative practice in your own words?

Okay.

Yeah, I think what you had there was the bio.

But I think what it really boils down to in a sense is that I, or how I consider myself is I'm a multidisciplinary designer and academic.

And mainly I'm just interested in how these curious species humans construct the world and how understanding more about that process of construction allows us to make and imagine and experience the world differently.

And I pursue that really just across different areas where we see that manifest.

So sometimes that could be through academic analysis of existing spaces or spatial practices that people create and follow together, but also through.

actual projects that attempt to intervene into the world and make spaces that people inhabit.

And the beauty of doing that from environmental design is that you make spaces and then you get to see how people actually inhabit them.

So there's always this kind of wonderful misfit between design intention and actual lived life, which is always fun to witness.

Okay.

And how did this come about, this multidisciplinary creative practice you've just described for us? Was it from your education in school? Was it from your childhood? How did it all begin?

I think I was very interested in particular in environments from a really young age.

I think the root of this really started with architecture and really started with the experience of architecture.

I didn't know for a long time that it was something I wanted to do.

I think like many people in Chicago where I grew up, I was just an architecture fan.

I mean, Chicago is a city where architecture is very important to the life of the city.

People talk about architecture, I think, a great deal.

have conversations about new buildings and so on.

And it's very key to the city's identity.

So I came to that city at the age of nine from Manchester in the UK, where I was born, which was a very gray kind of post-industrial city that was still kind of in the 1970s, even in the early 80s.

So coming to Chicago, which was this sort of wonderful, improbable, ethereal, dreamlike kind of city in contrast to what I knew, I think really heightened my sensitivity to that environment.

But also, I felt a lot like I was kind of living in a dream.

And I like to just go and kind of look at these buildings of a kind that I'd never seen before, of a scale I'd never seen before.

I think particularly from a very young age, the presence of Mies van der Rohe and his buildings and their role in the identity of the city and your kind of experience of them was really, really powerful.