Composing a Playful Architecture Through Images / Andrew Kovacs

The Archiologist

Kovacs, is an academic professor and an architect, he is a faculty at UCLA and the creator and curator of Archive of Affinities, a website devoted to the collection and display of architectural b-sides. Kovacs’ work on architecture and urbanism has been published widely including Pidgin, Project, Perspecta, Manifest, Metropolis, Clog, Domus, and Fulcrum. His recent design work includes a proposal for a haute dog park in downtown Los Angeles and the renovation of an airstream trailer into a mobile retail store that travels the Pacific Coast Highway.

Archive of Affinities is the longest project he has ever worked on and all of the research and work he does emerges from it. It is a project with no deadline, no client, and no budget. Therefore it is a project that has no outside impositions and is free to be a project of pure passion. Archive of Affinities is both deeply personal and extremely public. Archive of Affinities is a constantly updated collection of architectural images that exploits the dual meaning of affinity and the likeness associated with the word as both personal predilection and the relationship between things.

In this episode, Andrew and I talk about his life-long project called Archive of Affinities, he tells all of us how and why he started the longest projects of his career yet. He describes the relationship he has found along useless images as he calls it, to the architectural field, and how this archive can be of great help for designers to understand architecture better. We talk about his process, how he finds an image and then proceeds to scan it and publish it. We also talk about what he has learned through the archive and how he brought that knowledge with him to do amazing projects for his studio, Studio Kovacs. He then talks about why architecture should be playful and communicative, instead of boring and dull and finally, how we must have fun doing what we love and pursue it.