SUMMARY

This Interview discusses Mark Lee’s upbringing and his journey into Architecture academia, even including his eventual decision to step away from academia in 2008, just before securing tenure at UCLA. The decision came from a conviction that the professional landscape had shifted. He explained that the model which once allowed earlier generations to balance both a teaching career and an active practice no longer seemed attainable. In the past, academia could provide cultural capital that translated into architectural work, but Lee felt this was no longer the case. In fact, he believed that an academic position could even become a liability. His stance places him firmly within what has been described as the “practice generation” and aligns with Stan Allen’s argument in the 2000 essay Practice versus Project, which frames practice as an engagement with contingencies and changing conditions. Lee contrasted this with the firmly defined positions that dominated American academic discourse, which he viewed as incompatible with the flexibility required in practice.

His education also shaped this outlook. Between 1993 and 1998, Lee experienced the distinct academic cultures of the Harvard GSD and ETH Zurich, which together created an implicit dialogue between American and European approaches. At Harvard, his first year under Peter Eisenman and his second year with Herzog & de Meuron offered him two sharply opposing stances on the primacy of theory versus practice. At ETH, Kurt Forster and Marc Angélil fostered an environment where visiting American architects presented their work and where the ideas of Greg Lynn and Sanford Kwinter were actively discussed.

Lee’s choice to focus on practice can be seen as the product of both the theoretical debates of the early 2000s and his own formative experience of these two models. Ultimately, he leaned toward a European approach, departing from the model that had long dominated in the United States.