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Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (APRIL-DECEMBER 2024) - Part 1
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Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (APRIL-DECEMBER 2024) - Part 1
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Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (APRIL-DECEMBER 2024) - Part 1
BELOW IS AN EDITED and rearranged TRANSCRIPT OF A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONs BETWEEN ARYA SAFAVI AND DIETER V. MEYER CONDUCTED IN LONDON BETWEEN APRIL AND DECEMBER 2024 ABOUT HIS WORK, APPROACH, AND OUTLOOK.THE CONVERSATIONs COVER MANY STRANDS OF INTEREST AND INFLUENCES IN AN EFFORT TO CLARIFY ARYA'S STANCE ON BEAUTY AS AN ACTIVE UNFOLDING OF RELATOINSHIPS, ELEGANCE NOT AS AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY BUT AN OPERATIONAL STATE, AND ARCHITECtURE AS PRESENCE AMONGST MANY OTHER TOPICS.
BEAUTY AND ELEGANCE
Dieter v. Meyer: You’ve stated before that “beauty is an experience, elegance is an emotion.” Given everything we’ve already touched on—form, temporality, INDETERMINACY, material agency, and what I expect we’ll return to later in more depth, I want to press you on what exactly that means. Are you rejecting traditional aesthetic frameworks? If beauty is an experience rather than an intrinsic quality, are you saying it is entirely subjective?
Arya Safavi: I’m not rejecting aesthetics, but repositioning them. Beauty, in my view, is not a fixed attribute. It’s not located in a proportion, a geometry, or a formal system. It’s something that emerges through perception, through time, through interaction. A space can be beautiful, but not because it fulfills a rulebook of symmetry or historical reference. It becomes beautiful because of how it is lived in, how it unfolds around a person, how its material properties register and transform over time. Beauty is not something to be applied, it is something that arises, and often it arises through engagement.
DVM: That’s not far from Kant’s idea of beauty being the result of a free play of our faculties, though he wasn’t concerned with time in the way you are. You’re putting a lot of emphasis on transformation, on duration. Are you suggesting that beauty is contingent on time? That it can change, or even disappear?
AS: Yes. Beauty isn’t static. It’s not immune to context. A building or an object might strike you on first encounter, but that’s only part of the story. Its deeper beauty unfolds over time, through the way it weathers, how it receives light, how people touch it, misread it, return to it. That’s why materiality matters so much in my work. Materials carry time. Stone accumulates memory. Metal patinates. Wood softens. These aren’t secondary effects—they’re central to how beauty is produced as an experience, not as a visual assertion.
DVM: And how does that differ from elegance? You’ve described elegance as an emotion, not a formal condition. What makes it distinct from beauty in your framework?
AS: Elegance has to do with the way something reveals itself. It’s not a matter of simplicity or ornament, and it’s definitely not just about refinement in the classical sense. Elegance is a form of clarity, but not the kind that resolves. It’s the clarity of intention, of restraint, of how something holds itself together while remaining open. You can have a work that is raw, even unfinished, and still deeply elegant because of the way it resonates. It’s about the precision of affect, how the thing moves you, not just how it appears.
DVM: But that seems to bring us dangerously close to subjectivity. If both beauty and elegance are experiential and emotional rather than formal, what keeps the work from becoming arbitrary?
AS: The fact that something is experienced does not make it unstructured. Perception is not random. Emotion is not chaos. We are shaped by patterns, of movement, proportion, rhythm, memory. My work is not aimed at personal whim, it is structured to produce certain conditions that can be felt, that can be entered into. The way light falls, the way materials intersect, the way a space slows your body, all of this can be orchestrated. It’s about creating the possibility for beauty and elegance to be encountered, not delivering them as guarantees.
DVM: Then would you say that elegance becomes a kind of legibility? That it allows beauty to register with greater clarity?
AS: Perhaps, though I wouldn’t reduce it to legibility. Legibility suggests one reading. I’m more interested in resonance, how something continues to vibrate beyond its immediate function or use. Elegance, to me, is the thing that lets a space or an object linger in the body, even after you’ve left it. It’s not necessarily understood, but it’s sensed. It holds something in suspension.
DVM: That leads us to a broader question. If beauty is an experience and elegance is an emotion, where does meaning enter the equation? Are these purely sensory phenomena, or do they carry intellectual and cultural significance as well?
AS: They are inseparable from meaning. Meaning is not only constructed through language or ideology, it’s also felt. The way a surface ages, the way a structure holds silence, the way a form resists closure, all of these are acts of communication. I don’t treat beauty as decoration or elegance as a stylistic effect. They are conditions through which architecture can think, can carry memory, can shape attention. They produce meaning not by explaining themselves, but by being experienced in layered, evolving ways.
DVM: But doesn’t that way of framing things position your work within an intellectual niche? If the experience relies on trained sensitivity or conceptual fluency, doesn’t it risk becoming inaccessible, or even elitist?
AS: I think that’s a common misunderstanding. Innovation in any field requires an expansion of sensibility. The avant-garde has always played that role, pushing perception, not pandering to it. I don’t believe the measure of good design is immediate accessibility. Some things are unfamiliar at first, and they need to be approached with care. My work isn’t designed to exclude, but it does assume that engagement is active. The eye can be trained. Sensibilities can evolve. We need new vocabularies, new conceptual tools, to describe and internalize new experiences. Architecture has to contribute to that evolution.
INDETERMINACY
DVM: Your work claims to challenge conventional understandings of furniture, objects, and architecture by situating them within an evolving discourse. But discourse alone doesn't validate a body of work. Why should a wider audience care? What is at stake beyond theoretical positioning?
AS: The work is not made to be consumed passively, It asks something of the viewer, the occupant, the user. That demand is deliberate. It TRIES TO challenge the rigidity of familiar typologies, creating opportunities for different ways of seeing and inhabiting space. In a climate where architectural value is increasingly determined by efficiency, standardisation, and immediate clarity, I am advocating for an architecture of cognitive and spatial richness. This isn’t an intellectual exercise for its own sake, it’s a resistance to a kind of flattening. The stakes are perceptual. They are political.
DVM: That presumes a willingness on the part of the public to rethink how space is read and used. But most people, whether engaging with furniture or architecture, seek clarity and utility. If ambiguity isn't something inherently valued by most, isn’t your work at risk of becoming a closed loop, of speaking only to those already fluent in the discourse?
AS: I understand the concern, but I would argue that what I call perceptual openness, is not about confusion. It’s about conditioning. The built environment has long scripted how we sit, move, dwell, and respond. It rarely invites alternative behaviours or interpretations. My work seeks to interrupt that scripting. It reintroduces agency, asking the user to become an active participant in space. That may not appeal to everyone at first encounter, but the invitation is there. In that sense, I AM INTERESTED IN DESIGN AS a tool for recalibrating attention. It offers a different kind of clarity, one rooted in awareness rather than automation.
DVM: But the word ambiguity itself implies a certain looseness, a lack of precision. If your work is as intentional as you say, wouldn’t a different term serve your position more clearly?
AS: I agree the term is inadequate, or at least misleading. I prefer to speak of indeterminacy, not as confusion, but as structured openness. It describes an architectural condition where multiple readings are not only possible but encouraged. It is not an abandonment of clarity, but a redefinition of it. The work doesn’t obscure meaning, it layers it. It constructs situations that unfold rather than announce, that require interpretation rather than prescribe it. The openness is deliberate and composed.
DVM: But even indeterminacy risks sliding into abstraction. If everything can mean anything, how does your work resist arbitrariness? What grounds it as design rather than speculation?
AS: The difference lies in the precision of the provocation. The work is not open because it lacks direction, it is open because it is structured to activate interpretation. I use specific spatial tactics: shifts in scale, sudden contrasts, misalignments, perceptual delays. These are not aesthetic flourishes, they are calibrated mechanisms. They anchor the indeterminacy, they make it legible without fixing it. The user completes the work, but the scaffolding is there.
DVM: That scaffolding seems to apply to function as well. But if function is always shifting, always in negotiation, where do you draw the line? At what point does a design cease to function and become purely rhetorical?
AS: Function is often treated as fixed, but in reality it is contextual. A chair is not just a chair—it is a cultural construct, a behavioural script. I’m not interested in eliminating function, I’m interested in reframing how it’s understood. My work retains use, but TRIEDS TO challenge the default expectations surrounding it. A piece of furniture might still be sat on, but it may also ask to be leaned against, moved, misused, or simply observed. The function expands. It becomes participatory.
DVM: That sounds persuasive, but also theoretical. Can you point to specific instances where your designs have shifted someone’s awareness? Where the perceptual framework has tangibly changed?
AS: In many of the furniture pieces, surface modulation plays a central role. The experience of the object changes with position, with light, with distance. They’re not inert—they behave. That subtle shift activates attention. The user becomes aware of posture, shadow, edge. Or in architectural prototypes, I work with loosened programmatic boundaries. Spaces are defined enough to hold intention, but loose enough to accommodate drift. That drift is not failure, it is potential. These aren’t spectacles, but recalibrations. They reward slowness, they invite reflection.
DVM: Still, that embrace of perceptual flux could be seen as a threat to architectural responsibility. If space is always in negotiation, who ensures it remains legible, socially coherent, and navigable? Is your work addressing these responsibilities, or shifting them elsewhere?
AS: Responsibility does not require rigidity. Legibility does not require singularity. My responsibility is to create conditions where engagement becomes necessary. That might mean offering friction instead of ease. It might mean asking more of the occupant. But that, too, is a form of care. We have become too comfortable with environments that demand nothing of us. Social responsibility lies not only in providing access, but in cultivating depth. In offering moments that resist erasure.
DVM: You've spoken about your position as one of synthesis, but without aligning clearly to any specific theoretical lineage. Are you working within phenomenology, postmodern ambiguity, speculative realism? How does your practice position itself intellectually?
AS: I draw from many of these frameworks without fully subscribing to any. Phenomenology is important to my understanding of spatial perception, but I move beyond its human-centred constraints by engaging speculative materialism, which suggests that materials and objects possess agency beyond our reading of them. Postmodern ambiguity interests me, but I don’t use it to dismantle systems, I use it to extend them. I’m not ironic, and I’m not nostalgic. My position is methodological. I construct an evolving system of thought and practice shaped by material precision, perceptual experimentation, and conceptual openness. That’s the ground from which the work emerges.
TEMPORALITY
DVM: Your work frequently emphasizes temporality, pause, and the fluidity of time within spatial experience. But time is, at its core, an abstraction. How do you translate that into design? What does it mean to make time a tangible architectural or material concern?
AS: For me, temporality is not simply a theme, it is a condition I build into the work. I am interested in resisting the static assumptions that often govern spatial design. Architecture is typically conceived as fixed, complete, singular in its function. My work proposes an alternative, where space and object are allowed to evolve, materially, perceptually, and programmatically. Time enters not just as an idea but as something made legible through the very structure of the work. It appears in how materials weather, how forms accommodate transformation, how experiences shift across encounters.
DVM: But in a sense, isn’t all architecture already temporal? Buildings decay, furniture wears, programs shift, and spaces adapt. What sets your approach apart from the natural temporality inherent to all built things?
AS: intent. Most architecture undergoes time without participating in it. It endures, it resists, it succumbs. What I’m after is a kind of active temporality, a structure that doesn’t simply age but anticipates and incorporates change. I design with the expectation that the work will be reinterpreted, reoccupied, even reconfigured. It is not about resisting entropy, nor about celebrating decay. It is about folding time into the conceptual and material life of the work itself.
DVM: If something is always open to change, does it ever arrive at meaning? If spatial identity is always in flux, when and how does coherence emerge?
AS: Temporality does not eliminate coherence. It reframes it. The work holds a structure, a logic, but that structure is elastic. I use the term structured indeterminacy to describe this. The object or space retains a formal presence, but its role, its reading, its use can shift. I do not operate at the extremes, neither as a monument to permanence nor as an ephemeral gesture. The interest is in constructing conditions that sustain reinterpretation while holding together as spatial propositions.
DVM: That phrase, structured indeterminacy, still feels abstract. How does a person, in concrete terms, experience time in your work? Is this something perceivable, or is it only theoretical?
AS: It is perceptible, but often in subtle ways. Spatially, I compose sequences, moments of pause, thresholds, shifts in rhythm, that register not just as movement but as intervals. These intervals are designed, not incidental. They slow perception, stretch duration, create a kind of temporal architecture. Materially, the work often reveals its own transformation, through wear, through accumulation, through contrast between surfaces that change and those that hold. Time is sensed through difference, not declared.
DVM: But isn’t there a contradiction between designing for pause and promoting continuous evolution? If you insert a moment of stillness, isn’t that a form of control rather than a genuine openness to temporal change?
AS: Stillness is not the opposite of change. A pause is not a freeze, it is a moment of awareness. I do not prescribe a fixed experience, but I create conditions where a user can become aware of time as a dimension. That awareness might come through rhythm in movement, through shifts in light across surfaces, through the tactile memory embedded in materials. These are not static impositions, they are invitations to perceive differently.
DVM: But time, in the end, isn’t something architects control. We respond to it, but we don’t shape it. How do you reconcile the claim that architecture can engage time as more than an external force?
AS: Time is not external to architecture. It is structured into how we move, how we dwell, how we perceive. A corridor does not just connect two points, it expands or contracts time depending on its scale and rhythm. A surface that wears with touch carries the memory of use. A modular form that allows reassembly changes its identity across time without losing coherence. These are not passive effects, they are designed conditions. I am not suggesting we can manipulate time in the abstract, but we can structure its appearance, make its presence tangible. That is where architecture becomes temporal.
MATERIALITY
DVM: Your work places an emphasis on materiality, often engaging with wood and stone. Yet these materials come with cultural and historical weight. Wood carries associations of warmth, craft, and domesticity, while stone evokes permanence and monumentality. How do you reconcile the claim of pushing formal and conceptual boundaries while operating within such established material frameworks?
AS: My interest in materiality does not stem from nostalgia or tradition. Wood and stone are not symbols for me, they are systems, open, responsive, and deeply contingent. I am drawn to them not for what they represent, but for how they behave, how they record time, and how they participate in spatial formation. These materials are often treated as neutral, but they are anything but. They contain within them histories of pressure, of erosion, of becoming. My aim is to activate those conditions, not merely reference them.
DVM: But that risks romanticizing material expression. Plenty of designers explore tactility, aging, and the poetics of wear. What distinguishes your material strategy from that lineage? How do you go beyond the familiar narratives of patina and texture?
AS: The distinction lies in how I use disruption. I deliberately resist the conventional readings of these materials. I juxtapose surfaces that are over-articulated with those that are left incomplete. I allow rawness to sit alongside precision. I use engineered geometries that push the grain of the wood or stress the brittleness of the stone. Rather than confirming assumptions—warmth, solidity, comfort, I search for the moments when the material contradicts itself. Those contradictions are where new forms of perception can emerge.
DVM: That still sounds primarily formal. Contrasts, interruptions, surface effects. If materiality is so central to your thinking, shouldn't its conceptual underpinning reach beyond composition? What is the critical ambition here?
AS: The ambition is not to aestheticize contradiction but to foreground material as a structuring agent in how space is experienced, not just how it is built. My work probes how materials register time, pressure, resistance. Wood expands, splinters, heals. Stone compresses, fractures, settles. These are not passive properties, they are dynamic responses. I design in a way that allows these responses to become legible. The project is to shift material from being a background condition to being an active participant in spatial experience.
DVM: But doesn't that rely on the idea that materials have agency? That sounds almost anthropomorphic. These materials don’t make decisions. Isn’t that simply you imposing a narrative onto inert matter?
AS: I am not suggesting that materials think or intend. I am suggesting that they behave. They respond to heat, to touch, to gravity, to time. That responsiveness is not metaphor, it is measurable, and it is affective. A wooden joint that swells in humidity and shifts its creak across seasons tells you something. A stone wall that absorbs sun all day and radiates warmth at dusk alters your bodily experience. These aren't passive attributes, they are forces that structure how a space is inhabited. My work doesn’t invent that behavior, it frames it, intensifies it, sometimes accelerates it.
DVM: You call it intensification, but could it not also be seen as stylization? If you are accelerating decay, exaggerating weathering, embedding fracture, aren't you turning these processes into aesthetic events? Where is the line between engagement and fetishization?
AS: It’s a fair question. But I would argue that the difference lies in whether the work simply displays material qualities or reorganizes their terms of interaction. My interventions are not ornamental. They are calibrated disruptions. I embed designed weaknesses, planned tensions, engineered failure points. Not to illustrate decay but to structure a dialogue between form and transformation. I am not interested in showing how wood looks when it warps. I am interested in what a warped structure makes possible, how it shifts use, perception, posture. This is not about looking at material, it is about designing with its temporal behavior as a primary tool.
FORM
DVM: You’ve argued that architecture should operate as a condition rather than a static object. But I want to press more directly on the question of form. If architecture is no longer defined by permanence, how do you understand form? Is it simply a byproduct of other processes, or does it carry intrinsic value of its own?
AS: I do not view form as an autonomous artifact. It is an index, a trace of intersecting forces, material, spatial, temporal, perceptual. In my work, form is never the destination, it is the residue of a negotiation. It emerges through processes that include gravity, fabrication, occupation, weathering, and the shifts in use that occur over time. Form is not an image, it is a set of negotiated, choreographed or imposed conditions with consequences.
DVM: That sounds like a rejection of formalism, yet your work is often highly resolved in its geometry. If form is only the residue of process, why is there such visible precision?
AS: Precision does not preclude openness. The rigor you see is not about asserting dominance or finality. It is a way to choreograph uncertainty. I work toward forms that are legible yet layered, specific yet reinterpretable. Their resolution is a framework for transformation, not its negation. What you call geometry, I think of as a scaffolding for experience, one that changes depending on light, time, movement, occupation. So yes, the form is resolved, but what it resolves is not its meaning, it resolves a field of possibilities.
DVM: But where is the line between operative clarity and expressive excess? If form is always contingent, doesn’t it risk becoming an aesthetic project rather than a functional one?
AS: That distinction assumes the two are oppositional. I don’t accept that. Expression and operation are not mutually exclusive. A form can be deeply expressive and remain performative. In fact, some of the most operative forms are those that exceed their function, that carry affective charge or provoke new modes of use. My work sees function not as a fixed instruction but as something temporal, unfolding through occupation. The form enables that unfolding. It doesn’t just contain action, it activates it.
DVM: You speak of unfolding and contingency, but how does that affect the act of making? Are these shifts predetermined within the design, or do you relinquish control and allow the form to respond to external forces over time?
AS: It is not a matter of control versus surrender. The work is precisely structured to accommodate variation. I do not leave transformation to chance. I embed it. That means designing tolerances, articulating joints, anticipating shifts. Structured variability is not an oxymoron, it’s a methodology. The point is to design for evolution without collapsing into randomness. Change becomes part of the architecture, not something that happens to it after the fact.
DVM: Then is there ever an ideal form in your thinking? Or is every configuration equally valid as long as it evolves?
AS: Not all forms are equal. I am not proposing relativism. Some forms are more capable than others, more attuned to the kind of spatial and temporal resonances I seek. The ideal form is not the most perfect shape, but the one that holds pressure without collapsing, that enables multiple readings without becoming noise. I look for forms that register time, hold perception, absorb forces. Their value is not in aesthetic balance but in what they permit.
DVM: So in this view, form is not an object but an instrument. But how do you reconcile that with the cultural history of architecture? Built form has always carried symbolic weight, typologies, figures, canonical geometries. Where does your work stand in relation to that lineage?
AS: I am not ignoring that history. I am revisiting it with different questions. Typologies interest me not as stable categories but as loose codes. I work with them as unstable material, not fixed form. The references are there, columns, plinths, thresholds, but they are recast, often misaligned or fractured. I am less concerned with preserving their symbolic function than I am with revealing their malleability. The point is not to erase typological lineage but to destabilize it, to see where it might bend or fail, and what that failure could generate.
DVM: Doesn’t that push form into the realm of pure intellectual play? If meaning is always shifting, if nothing is ever fully resolved, how can architecture make claims that endure?
AS: Resolution, for me, is not about closing a question. It is about framing it well enough that it can be reopened, again and again, by different people in different times. A form can be precise and yet remain unsettled. That is not a flaw, it is a strength. It keeps architecture active. My work is not committed to endless flux for its own sake. It is committed to designing frameworks that remain responsive over time, that ask something of the people who occupy them.
DVM: If form is contingent, if meaning is unstable, and if function is temporal, then what ultimately anchors your architecture? What holds it in place?
AS: What anchors the work is its capacity to sustain engagement. I am not designing metaphors, nor am I rejecting clarity outright. What I want is for space to do more than serve, it should provoke, accommodate, resonate. The grounding is not in a formal conclusion but in experiential density. A project holds when it holds attention, when it continues to offer something across time, when its material, form, and occupation remain in tension. That is what gives the work its weight.
ZAHA and other influences
DVM: Let’s address the elephant in the room. You spent more than a decade at Zaha Hadid Architects, contributing both to the preservation and the evolution of the firm’s formal language. And while your independent work is intellectually articulated in distinctly personal terms, it still bears clear spatial and aesthetic affinities with ZHA’s signature vocabulary, fluid geometries, continuous surfaces, parametric articulation, and a high degree of formal resolution. What distinguishes your practice from being a continuation of that legacy?
AS: I wouldn’t deny the influence, how could I? It was, and continues to be, an immensely formative environment. Not just in technique, but in how one learns to think spatially, to design systemically. But my work is not a derivative of ZHA’s project. It departs in its engagement with temporality, with instability, with the evolving status of form across time and perception. At a glance, the language may seem familiar, but the underlying conceptual structure is different.
DVM: That distinction isn’t always apparent in the work itself. If you’re operating within a different theoretical framework, why does the visual language still feel so aligned with ZHA’s?
AS: Because we share a set of formal questions, about continuity, about spatial integration, about the dissolution of the object. But while ZHA was and is invested in fluid urbanism, formal resoluion, tectonism and continuous geometries as a new paradigm, my focus has shifted toward the conditions under which those forms break down or mutate. My work explores how form registers change, through occupation, weathering, perception, how it resists finality. It isn’t about smoothness, but about friction structured into the system, about how legibility shifts depending on where and when you encounter it.
DVM: But doesn’t that just amount to a different story applied to a similar aesthetic? If the difference lies in intention rather than in formal departure, aren’t you reinforcing the notion that your work is an intellectual rebranding of an established visual code?
AS: Intention isn’t abstract, it’s embedded in the work’s structure, in its execution. I’m not interested in continuity for its own sake. My work accepts friction. It incorporates resistance, material, structural, temporal, into the logic of design. It allows for error, for tectonic interruption, for complexity born of constraint rather than of freedom. This is where material agency becomes central. I often work with stone, timber, steel, not just as surfaces, but as systems of behavior. These materials bring their own limits, their own narratives of time, decay, and resistance. They resist the ease of parametric fluidity.
DVM: But even within ZHA, there are projects that foreground material resistance, tectonics, and the dialogue between precision and contingency. How is your approach not simply a narrower, more focused articulation of that same formal lineage?
AS: There’s an important distinction. Zaha’s project was a formal revolution, a complete rejection of typological and rectilinear traditions, replaced by a language of spatial coherence and fluid continuity. My project is concerned less with continuity and more with instability. Not visual instability, but temporal, perceptual, and material instability. I’m not trying to complete a system, I’m trying to design the conditions under which a system can erode, adapt, or transform. My forms aren’t stable answers. They’re frameworks for change.
DVM: But audiences will still read ZaHA into your work. Does it matter what your intentions are, if the visual and spatial cues remain?
AS: Of course it matters. But reception takes time to mature. When you build within a lineage, initial readings will always default to precedent. But architecture is not an instantaneous medium. It’s slow. It lives through use, and through reinterpretation. Over time, the distinctions become clearer, not in the photograph, but in the experience, in the body, in the changing spatial and material behaviours of the work. What may appear as inheritance becomes, through repetition and variation, something else entirely.
DVM: We’ve spent a lot of time on your conceptual framing, temporality, material agency, perceptual instability. But I want to ground that in lineage. No architect works in a vacuum. If we were to trace the intellectual DNA of your practice, whose ideas or works would we find shaping it?
AS: It’s less about citing a single lineage than about assembling multiple modes of thought. My work exists at the intersection of material logics, spatial cognition, and structured systems. I’m not interested in a perceptual free-for-all. I’m interested in how systems can generate nuanced experiences through structure.
DVM: Let’s start with architecture. Besides ZHA, who’s shaped your way of thinking?
AS: Carlo Scarpa is foundational. Not just for his detail or his craftsmanship, but for his structural logic, how every cut, shift, or insertion becomes a spatial proposition. His work is not about refinement for its own sake, but about how material, joint, and sequence produce meaning. There’s a deep architectural intelligence embedded in his layering, his interruption, his systems of assembly. I also return to Toyo Ito, particularly his early work, for how he constructed discontinuity through system. There’s an elegance in the way his architecture accommodates contradiction without collapsing into chaos.
DVM: So Scarpa and Ito introduce interruption, system, layering. Does that mark a rupture with ZHA’s continuous geometries?
AS: Not a rupture, but a tension. My work engages formal continuity, but only insofar as it can hold contradiction. What interests me is where that continuity meets resistance, material resistance, structural misalignment, temporal shift. Where Scarpa’s systems articulate difference through layer, and Ito’s through system, I explore those same principles through hybrid material strategies. That’s where my computational methodology enters, not as a generator of fluid form, but as a tool for assembling constraints.
DVM: So you use computation structurally rather than compositionally?
AS: Precisely. Parametric tools are not ONLY aesthetic engines. They are instrumental, useful in constructing layered assemblies, responsive geometries, adaptive joints. They allow for control, but also for uncertainty. I work with computation not to polish form, but to let materials articulate their own limits within the system. That’s why I see fabrication and making as inseparable from the spatial outcome. The logic of the piece isn’t finalized in software, it’s discovered through material interaction, through testing, adjustment, failure.
DVM: That sounds more like engineering than architecture. Is your work veering toward performative practice?
AS: Not in the measurable sense. I’m not quantifying energy loads or environmental metrics. I’m working with performance in the way a dancer or musician might, a form that emerges through repetition, resistance, and refinement. My understanding of performance is closer to Greg Lynn’s early work, where form and system are co-emergent, not overlaid. Architecture is not a representation, it’s an enacted system, and every part of that system has to participate.
DVM: That ties to Kipnis and Lavin, whom you’ve cited before. How do they influence your work?
AS: Kipnis has been enormously influential, especially in the way he frames spatial systems as affective and atmospheric. But I read him as more than a theorist of perception. His work on tectonics, on the assembly of systemic complexity—is foundational. His reading of Reiser + Umemoto, for instance, changed how I understood the overlap between structural intelligence and perceptual ambiguity.
Lavin, in contrast, is less about systems and more about how architecture accumulates meaning through history, through cultural projection, through modes of authorship. Her writing forces a confrontation with how architecture is read, not just how it’s made. That’s crucial in a discipline so often obsessed with novelty.
ARCHItEctURE
DVM: Across our conversations, you’ve consistently returned to themes of temporality, material agency, ambiguity, and what you’ve called structured indeterminacy. But before we go any further, I want to step back and ask something foundational. How do you define architecture? Is it a process, a system, an experience, a constructed artifact? What is it, to you, outside disciplinary convention?
AS: I don’t define architecture as a fixed object or a resolved image. For me, architecture is an evolving spatial condition, something that mediates between material, time, and perception. It’s not about permanence, but about the capacity of space to remain open, to adjust, to respond. I’m not interested in creating static monuments. I’m interested in constructing frameworks that can be inhabited differently across time, that hold within them the potential for reinterpretation.
DVM: But doesn’t that drift into abstraction? Buildings are built. They have shape, structure, specificity. If architecture becomes a condition rather than a form, don’t you risk overlooking the discipline’s concrete realities, decisions, constraints, material execution?
AS: Not at all. To speak of flux is not to deny form,it’s to understand form as a condition that can absorb time. My work does not reject specificity; it rejects finality. A project can be precise in its articulation and still designed for change. Specificity, in that sense, is not the opposite of openness, it’s the means by which indeterminacy is structured. What I oppose is the notion that architecture’s value lies in its ability to remain untouched, unchanged. My concern is with form that anticipates its own transformation.
DVM: Architecture has always existed in dialogue with change. Buildings age. Programs shift. Histories are rewritten. From ancient ruins to modernist reconfigurability, adaptation is nothing new. So what makes your approach different?
AS: The difference is in authorship. I’m not interested in architecture that simply survives the passage of time or is retroactively adjusted. I want time to be designed into the work from the beginning. That means anticipating how materials respond to light, to weather, to use. It means thinking about spatial sequencing not just in terms of movement, but in terms of memory and return. The design does not wait for change,it invites it. Time becomes an operative element, not an external pressure.
DVM: But if time is central to your work, how does the user perceive it? If temporality is embedded, what makes it legible? And how do you prevent ambiguity from becoming incoherence?
AS: Ambiguity is not confusion. It’s an invitation. It allows space to carry more than one reading without collapsing into vagueness. The clarity is in the structure, the sequence, the material logic, the spatial rhythm. What’s indeterminate is not the form itself, but the meanings it can carry, the ways it can be occupied or interpreted. I’m not interested in dissolving function, I’m interested in decoupling form from singular function.
DVM: But isn’t that dangerous ground? If form is always open-ended, doesn’t it risk becoming an intellectual exercise? How do you ensure that your architecture still functions, that it still works?
AS: This isn’t about openness as indiscipline. It’s about control applied differently. The architecture is not open in every direction, it’s open within a defined system. That’s what I mean by structured indeterminacy. The conditions are deliberate. The sequences are intentional. What’s variable is how the work is perceived or used over time. It’s not a blank slate, it’s a designed framework that resists being reduced to a single role or reading.
DVM: Within the broader field, where do you locate your work? Your interests align with phenomenology, material systems, post-structural ambiguity. Are you continuing an existing trajectory, or proposing a break?
AS: I see it as an evolution. There’s no clean break from discourse. My work engages with phenomenology, with material ontology, with the legacy of indeterminacy—but it redirects those trajectories toward something more systematic. The shift is subtle but significant. I’m not just acknowledging time as a context, I’m embedding it as an active force. That’s the difference. Architecture, for me, isn’t just shaped by time, it shapes how time is felt.
DVM: Why should that matter to people beyond the disciplinary bubble? Outside of academic conversations or critical discourse, what’s at stake? Why does your approach have relevance?
AS: Because space is lived. Architecture is not an autonomous art, it shapes how we move, how we gather, how we feel. And if we accept that human experience is temporal, perceptual, and material, then our spaces should reflect that. They should not be fixed symbols but responsive conditions. My work is an argument for an architecture that participates, one that acknowledges its own incompleteness, that makes space for memory, for weathering, for inhabitation. This isn’t about theory in the abstract. It’s about constructing spaces that adapt to the complexities of life as it unfolds.
BELOW IS AN EDITED and rearranged TRANSCRIPT OF A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONs BETWEEN ARYA SAFAVI AND DIETER V. MEYER CONDUCTED IN LONDON BETWEEN APRIL AND DECEMBER 2024 ABOUT HIS WORK, APPROACH, AND OUTLOOK.THE CONVERSATIONs COVER MANY STRANDS OF INTEREST AND INFLUENCES IN AN EFFORT TO CLARIFY ARYA'S STANCE ON BEAUTY AS AN ACTIVE UNFOLDING OF RELATOINSHIPS, ELEGANCE NOT AS AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY BUT AN OPERATIONAL STATE, AND ARCHITECtURE AS PRESENCE AMONGST MANY OTHER TOPICS.
BEAUTY AND ELEGANCE
Dieter v. Meyer: You’ve stated before that “beauty is an experience, elegance is an emotion.” Given everything we’ve already touched on—form, temporality, INDETERMINACY, material agency, and what I expect we’ll return to later in more depth, I want to press you on what exactly that means. Are you rejecting traditional aesthetic frameworks? If beauty is an experience rather than an intrinsic quality, are you saying it is entirely subjective?
Arya Safavi: I’m not rejecting aesthetics, but repositioning them. Beauty, in my view, is not a fixed attribute. It’s not located in a proportion, a geometry, or a formal system. It’s something that emerges through perception, through time, through interaction. A space can be beautiful, but not because it fulfills a rulebook of symmetry or historical reference. It becomes beautiful because of how it is lived in, how it unfolds around a person, how its material properties register and transform over time. Beauty is not something to be applied, it is something that arises, and often it arises through engagement.
DVM: That’s not far from Kant’s idea of beauty being the result of a free play of our faculties, though he wasn’t concerned with time in the way you are. You’re putting a lot of emphasis on transformation, on duration. Are you suggesting that beauty is contingent on time? That it can change, or even disappear?
AS: Yes. Beauty isn’t static. It’s not immune to context. A building or an object might strike you on first encounter, but that’s only part of the story. Its deeper beauty unfolds over time, through the way it weathers, how it receives light, how people touch it, misread it, return to it. That’s why materiality matters so much in my work. Materials carry time. Stone accumulates memory. Metal patinates. Wood softens. These aren’t secondary effects—they’re central to how beauty is produced as an experience, not as a visual assertion.
DVM: And how does that differ from elegance? You’ve described elegance as an emotion, not a formal condition. What makes it distinct from beauty in your framework?
AS: Elegance has to do with the way something reveals itself. It’s not a matter of simplicity or ornament, and it’s definitely not just about refinement in the classical sense. Elegance is a form of clarity, but not the kind that resolves. It’s the clarity of intention, of restraint, of how something holds itself together while remaining open. You can have a work that is raw, even unfinished, and still deeply elegant because of the way it resonates. It’s about the precision of affect, how the thing moves you, not just how it appears.
DVM: But that seems to bring us dangerously close to subjectivity. If both beauty and elegance are experiential and emotional rather than formal, what keeps the work from becoming arbitrary?
AS: The fact that something is experienced does not make it unstructured. Perception is not random. Emotion is not chaos. We are shaped by patterns, of movement, proportion, rhythm, memory. My work is not aimed at personal whim, it is structured to produce certain conditions that can be felt, that can be entered into. The way light falls, the way materials intersect, the way a space slows your body, all of this can be orchestrated. It’s about creating the possibility for beauty and elegance to be encountered, not delivering them as guarantees.
DVM: Then would you say that elegance becomes a kind of legibility? That it allows beauty to register with greater clarity?
AS: Perhaps, though I wouldn’t reduce it to legibility. Legibility suggests one reading. I’m more interested in resonance, how something continues to vibrate beyond its immediate function or use. Elegance, to me, is the thing that lets a space or an object linger in the body, even after you’ve left it. It’s not necessarily understood, but it’s sensed. It holds something in suspension.
DVM: That leads us to a broader question. If beauty is an experience and elegance is an emotion, where does meaning enter the equation? Are these purely sensory phenomena, or do they carry intellectual and cultural significance as well?
AS: They are inseparable from meaning. Meaning is not only constructed through language or ideology, it’s also felt. The way a surface ages, the way a structure holds silence, the way a form resists closure, all of these are acts of communication. I don’t treat beauty as decoration or elegance as a stylistic effect. They are conditions through which architecture can think, can carry memory, can shape attention. They produce meaning not by explaining themselves, but by being experienced in layered, evolving ways.
DVM: But doesn’t that way of framing things position your work within an intellectual niche? If the experience relies on trained sensitivity or conceptual fluency, doesn’t it risk becoming inaccessible, or even elitist?
AS: I think that’s a common misunderstanding. Innovation in any field requires an expansion of sensibility. The avant-garde has always played that role, pushing perception, not pandering to it. I don’t believe the measure of good design is immediate accessibility. Some things are unfamiliar at first, and they need to be approached with care. My work isn’t designed to exclude, but it does assume that engagement is active. The eye can be trained. Sensibilities can evolve. We need new vocabularies, new conceptual tools, to describe and internalize new experiences. Architecture has to contribute to that evolution.
INDETERMINACY
DVM: Your work claims to challenge conventional understandings of furniture, objects, and architecture by situating them within an evolving discourse. But discourse alone doesn't validate a body of work. Why should a wider audience care? What is at stake beyond theoretical positioning?
AS: The work is not made to be consumed passively, It asks something of the viewer, the occupant, the user. That demand is deliberate. It TRIES TO challenge the rigidity of familiar typologies, creating opportunities for different ways of seeing and inhabiting space. In a climate where architectural value is increasingly determined by efficiency, standardisation, and immediate clarity, I am advocating for an architecture of cognitive and spatial richness. This isn’t an intellectual exercise for its own sake, it’s a resistance to a kind of flattening. The stakes are perceptual. They are political.
DVM: That presumes a willingness on the part of the public to rethink how space is read and used. But most people, whether engaging with furniture or architecture, seek clarity and utility. If ambiguity isn't something inherently valued by most, isn’t your work at risk of becoming a closed loop, of speaking only to those already fluent in the discourse?
AS: I understand the concern, but I would argue that what I call perceptual openness, is not about confusion. It’s about conditioning. The built environment has long scripted how we sit, move, dwell, and respond. It rarely invites alternative behaviours or interpretations. My work seeks to interrupt that scripting. It reintroduces agency, asking the user to become an active participant in space. That may not appeal to everyone at first encounter, but the invitation is there. In that sense, I AM INTERESTED IN DESIGN AS a tool for recalibrating attention. It offers a different kind of clarity, one rooted in awareness rather than automation.
DVM: But the word ambiguity itself implies a certain looseness, a lack of precision. If your work is as intentional as you say, wouldn’t a different term serve your position more clearly?
AS: I agree the term is inadequate, or at least misleading. I prefer to speak of indeterminacy, not as confusion, but as structured openness. It describes an architectural condition where multiple readings are not only possible but encouraged. It is not an abandonment of clarity, but a redefinition of it. The work doesn’t obscure meaning, it layers it. It constructs situations that unfold rather than announce, that require interpretation rather than prescribe it. The openness is deliberate and composed.
DVM: But even indeterminacy risks sliding into abstraction. If everything can mean anything, how does your work resist arbitrariness? What grounds it as design rather than speculation?
AS: The difference lies in the precision of the provocation. The work is not open because it lacks direction, it is open because it is structured to activate interpretation. I use specific spatial tactics: shifts in scale, sudden contrasts, misalignments, perceptual delays. These are not aesthetic flourishes, they are calibrated mechanisms. They anchor the indeterminacy, they make it legible without fixing it. The user completes the work, but the scaffolding is there.
DVM: That scaffolding seems to apply to function as well. But if function is always shifting, always in negotiation, where do you draw the line? At what point does a design cease to function and become purely rhetorical?
AS: Function is often treated as fixed, but in reality it is contextual. A chair is not just a chair—it is a cultural construct, a behavioural script. I’m not interested in eliminating function, I’m interested in reframing how it’s understood. My work retains use, but TRIEDS TO challenge the default expectations surrounding it. A piece of furniture might still be sat on, but it may also ask to be leaned against, moved, misused, or simply observed. The function expands. It becomes participatory.
DVM: That sounds persuasive, but also theoretical. Can you point to specific instances where your designs have shifted someone’s awareness? Where the perceptual framework has tangibly changed?
AS: In many of the furniture pieces, surface modulation plays a central role. The experience of the object changes with position, with light, with distance. They’re not inert—they behave. That subtle shift activates attention. The user becomes aware of posture, shadow, edge. Or in architectural prototypes, I work with loosened programmatic boundaries. Spaces are defined enough to hold intention, but loose enough to accommodate drift. That drift is not failure, it is potential. These aren’t spectacles, but recalibrations. They reward slowness, they invite reflection.
DVM: Still, that embrace of perceptual flux could be seen as a threat to architectural responsibility. If space is always in negotiation, who ensures it remains legible, socially coherent, and navigable? Is your work addressing these responsibilities, or shifting them elsewhere?
AS: Responsibility does not require rigidity. Legibility does not require singularity. My responsibility is to create conditions where engagement becomes necessary. That might mean offering friction instead of ease. It might mean asking more of the occupant. But that, too, is a form of care. We have become too comfortable with environments that demand nothing of us. Social responsibility lies not only in providing access, but in cultivating depth. In offering moments that resist erasure.
DVM: You've spoken about your position as one of synthesis, but without aligning clearly to any specific theoretical lineage. Are you working within phenomenology, postmodern ambiguity, speculative realism? How does your practice position itself intellectually?
AS: I draw from many of these frameworks without fully subscribing to any. Phenomenology is important to my understanding of spatial perception, but I move beyond its human-centred constraints by engaging speculative materialism, which suggests that materials and objects possess agency beyond our reading of them. Postmodern ambiguity interests me, but I don’t use it to dismantle systems, I use it to extend them. I’m not ironic, and I’m not nostalgic. My position is methodological. I construct an evolving system of thought and practice shaped by material precision, perceptual experimentation, and conceptual openness. That’s the ground from which the work emerges.
TEMPORALITY
DVM: Your work frequently emphasizes temporality, pause, and the fluidity of time within spatial experience. But time is, at its core, an abstraction. How do you translate that into design? What does it mean to make time a tangible architectural or material concern?
AS: For me, temporality is not simply a theme, it is a condition I build into the work. I am interested in resisting the static assumptions that often govern spatial design. Architecture is typically conceived as fixed, complete, singular in its function. My work proposes an alternative, where space and object are allowed to evolve, materially, perceptually, and programmatically. Time enters not just as an idea but as something made legible through the very structure of the work. It appears in how materials weather, how forms accommodate transformation, how experiences shift across encounters.
DVM: But in a sense, isn’t all architecture already temporal? Buildings decay, furniture wears, programs shift, and spaces adapt. What sets your approach apart from the natural temporality inherent to all built things?
AS: intent. Most architecture undergoes time without participating in it. It endures, it resists, it succumbs. What I’m after is a kind of active temporality, a structure that doesn’t simply age but anticipates and incorporates change. I design with the expectation that the work will be reinterpreted, reoccupied, even reconfigured. It is not about resisting entropy, nor about celebrating decay. It is about folding time into the conceptual and material life of the work itself.
DVM: If something is always open to change, does it ever arrive at meaning? If spatial identity is always in flux, when and how does coherence emerge?
AS: Temporality does not eliminate coherence. It reframes it. The work holds a structure, a logic, but that structure is elastic. I use the term structured indeterminacy to describe this. The object or space retains a formal presence, but its role, its reading, its use can shift. I do not operate at the extremes, neither as a monument to permanence nor as an ephemeral gesture. The interest is in constructing conditions that sustain reinterpretation while holding together as spatial propositions.
DVM: That phrase, structured indeterminacy, still feels abstract. How does a person, in concrete terms, experience time in your work? Is this something perceivable, or is it only theoretical?
AS: It is perceptible, but often in subtle ways. Spatially, I compose sequences, moments of pause, thresholds, shifts in rhythm, that register not just as movement but as intervals. These intervals are designed, not incidental. They slow perception, stretch duration, create a kind of temporal architecture. Materially, the work often reveals its own transformation, through wear, through accumulation, through contrast between surfaces that change and those that hold. Time is sensed through difference, not declared.
DVM: But isn’t there a contradiction between designing for pause and promoting continuous evolution? If you insert a moment of stillness, isn’t that a form of control rather than a genuine openness to temporal change?
AS: Stillness is not the opposite of change. A pause is not a freeze, it is a moment of awareness. I do not prescribe a fixed experience, but I create conditions where a user can become aware of time as a dimension. That awareness might come through rhythm in movement, through shifts in light across surfaces, through the tactile memory embedded in materials. These are not static impositions, they are invitations to perceive differently.
DVM: But time, in the end, isn’t something architects control. We respond to it, but we don’t shape it. How do you reconcile the claim that architecture can engage time as more than an external force?
AS: Time is not external to architecture. It is structured into how we move, how we dwell, how we perceive. A corridor does not just connect two points, it expands or contracts time depending on its scale and rhythm. A surface that wears with touch carries the memory of use. A modular form that allows reassembly changes its identity across time without losing coherence. These are not passive effects, they are designed conditions. I am not suggesting we can manipulate time in the abstract, but we can structure its appearance, make its presence tangible. That is where architecture becomes temporal.
MATERIALITY
DVM: Your work places an emphasis on materiality, often engaging with wood and stone. Yet these materials come with cultural and historical weight. Wood carries associations of warmth, craft, and domesticity, while stone evokes permanence and monumentality. How do you reconcile the claim of pushing formal and conceptual boundaries while operating within such established material frameworks?
AS: My interest in materiality does not stem from nostalgia or tradition. Wood and stone are not symbols for me, they are systems, open, responsive, and deeply contingent. I am drawn to them not for what they represent, but for how they behave, how they record time, and how they participate in spatial formation. These materials are often treated as neutral, but they are anything but. They contain within them histories of pressure, of erosion, of becoming. My aim is to activate those conditions, not merely reference them.
DVM: But that risks romanticizing material expression. Plenty of designers explore tactility, aging, and the poetics of wear. What distinguishes your material strategy from that lineage? How do you go beyond the familiar narratives of patina and texture?
AS: The distinction lies in how I use disruption. I deliberately resist the conventional readings of these materials. I juxtapose surfaces that are over-articulated with those that are left incomplete. I allow rawness to sit alongside precision. I use engineered geometries that push the grain of the wood or stress the brittleness of the stone. Rather than confirming assumptions—warmth, solidity, comfort, I search for the moments when the material contradicts itself. Those contradictions are where new forms of perception can emerge.
DVM: That still sounds primarily formal. Contrasts, interruptions, surface effects. If materiality is so central to your thinking, shouldn't its conceptual underpinning reach beyond composition? What is the critical ambition here?
AS: The ambition is not to aestheticize contradiction but to foreground material as a structuring agent in how space is experienced, not just how it is built. My work probes how materials register time, pressure, resistance. Wood expands, splinters, heals. Stone compresses, fractures, settles. These are not passive properties, they are dynamic responses. I design in a way that allows these responses to become legible. The project is to shift material from being a background condition to being an active participant in spatial experience.
DVM: But doesn't that rely on the idea that materials have agency? That sounds almost anthropomorphic. These materials don’t make decisions. Isn’t that simply you imposing a narrative onto inert matter?
AS: I am not suggesting that materials think or intend. I am suggesting that they behave. They respond to heat, to touch, to gravity, to time. That responsiveness is not metaphor, it is measurable, and it is affective. A wooden joint that swells in humidity and shifts its creak across seasons tells you something. A stone wall that absorbs sun all day and radiates warmth at dusk alters your bodily experience. These aren't passive attributes, they are forces that structure how a space is inhabited. My work doesn’t invent that behavior, it frames it, intensifies it, sometimes accelerates it.
DVM: You call it intensification, but could it not also be seen as stylization? If you are accelerating decay, exaggerating weathering, embedding fracture, aren't you turning these processes into aesthetic events? Where is the line between engagement and fetishization?
AS: It’s a fair question. But I would argue that the difference lies in whether the work simply displays material qualities or reorganizes their terms of interaction. My interventions are not ornamental. They are calibrated disruptions. I embed designed weaknesses, planned tensions, engineered failure points. Not to illustrate decay but to structure a dialogue between form and transformation. I am not interested in showing how wood looks when it warps. I am interested in what a warped structure makes possible, how it shifts use, perception, posture. This is not about looking at material, it is about designing with its temporal behavior as a primary tool.
FORM
DVM: You’ve argued that architecture should operate as a condition rather than a static object. But I want to press more directly on the question of form. If architecture is no longer defined by permanence, how do you understand form? Is it simply a byproduct of other processes, or does it carry intrinsic value of its own?
AS: I do not view form as an autonomous artifact. It is an index, a trace of intersecting forces, material, spatial, temporal, perceptual. In my work, form is never the destination, it is the residue of a negotiation. It emerges through processes that include gravity, fabrication, occupation, weathering, and the shifts in use that occur over time. Form is not an image, it is a set of negotiated, choreographed or imposed conditions with consequences.
DVM: That sounds like a rejection of formalism, yet your work is often highly resolved in its geometry. If form is only the residue of process, why is there such visible precision?
AS: Precision does not preclude openness. The rigor you see is not about asserting dominance or finality. It is a way to choreograph uncertainty. I work toward forms that are legible yet layered, specific yet reinterpretable. Their resolution is a framework for transformation, not its negation. What you call geometry, I think of as a scaffolding for experience, one that changes depending on light, time, movement, occupation. So yes, the form is resolved, but what it resolves is not its meaning, it resolves a field of possibilities.
DVM: But where is the line between operative clarity and expressive excess? If form is always contingent, doesn’t it risk becoming an aesthetic project rather than a functional one?
AS: That distinction assumes the two are oppositional. I don’t accept that. Expression and operation are not mutually exclusive. A form can be deeply expressive and remain performative. In fact, some of the most operative forms are those that exceed their function, that carry affective charge or provoke new modes of use. My work sees function not as a fixed instruction but as something temporal, unfolding through occupation. The form enables that unfolding. It doesn’t just contain action, it activates it.
DVM: You speak of unfolding and contingency, but how does that affect the act of making? Are these shifts predetermined within the design, or do you relinquish control and allow the form to respond to external forces over time?
AS: It is not a matter of control versus surrender. The work is precisely structured to accommodate variation. I do not leave transformation to chance. I embed it. That means designing tolerances, articulating joints, anticipating shifts. Structured variability is not an oxymoron, it’s a methodology. The point is to design for evolution without collapsing into randomness. Change becomes part of the architecture, not something that happens to it after the fact.
DVM: Then is there ever an ideal form in your thinking? Or is every configuration equally valid as long as it evolves?
AS: Not all forms are equal. I am not proposing relativism. Some forms are more capable than others, more attuned to the kind of spatial and temporal resonances I seek. The ideal form is not the most perfect shape, but the one that holds pressure without collapsing, that enables multiple readings without becoming noise. I look for forms that register time, hold perception, absorb forces. Their value is not in aesthetic balance but in what they permit.
DVM: So in this view, form is not an object but an instrument. But how do you reconcile that with the cultural history of architecture? Built form has always carried symbolic weight, typologies, figures, canonical geometries. Where does your work stand in relation to that lineage?
AS: I am not ignoring that history. I am revisiting it with different questions. Typologies interest me not as stable categories but as loose codes. I work with them as unstable material, not fixed form. The references are there, columns, plinths, thresholds, but they are recast, often misaligned or fractured. I am less concerned with preserving their symbolic function than I am with revealing their malleability. The point is not to erase typological lineage but to destabilize it, to see where it might bend or fail, and what that failure could generate.
DVM: Doesn’t that push form into the realm of pure intellectual play? If meaning is always shifting, if nothing is ever fully resolved, how can architecture make claims that endure?
AS: Resolution, for me, is not about closing a question. It is about framing it well enough that it can be reopened, again and again, by different people in different times. A form can be precise and yet remain unsettled. That is not a flaw, it is a strength. It keeps architecture active. My work is not committed to endless flux for its own sake. It is committed to designing frameworks that remain responsive over time, that ask something of the people who occupy them.
DVM: If form is contingent, if meaning is unstable, and if function is temporal, then what ultimately anchors your architecture? What holds it in place?
AS: What anchors the work is its capacity to sustain engagement. I am not designing metaphors, nor am I rejecting clarity outright. What I want is for space to do more than serve, it should provoke, accommodate, resonate. The grounding is not in a formal conclusion but in experiential density. A project holds when it holds attention, when it continues to offer something across time, when its material, form, and occupation remain in tension. That is what gives the work its weight.
ZAHA and other influences
DVM: Let’s address the elephant in the room. You spent more than a decade at Zaha Hadid Architects, contributing both to the preservation and the evolution of the firm’s formal language. And while your independent work is intellectually articulated in distinctly personal terms, it still bears clear spatial and aesthetic affinities with ZHA’s signature vocabulary, fluid geometries, continuous surfaces, parametric articulation, and a high degree of formal resolution. What distinguishes your practice from being a continuation of that legacy?
AS: I wouldn’t deny the influence, how could I? It was, and continues to be, an immensely formative environment. Not just in technique, but in how one learns to think spatially, to design systemically. But my work is not a derivative of ZHA’s project. It departs in its engagement with temporality, with instability, with the evolving status of form across time and perception. At a glance, the language may seem familiar, but the underlying conceptual structure is different.
DVM: That distinction isn’t always apparent in the work itself. If you’re operating within a different theoretical framework, why does the visual language still feel so aligned with ZHA’s?
AS: Because we share a set of formal questions, about continuity, about spatial integration, about the dissolution of the object. But while ZHA was and is invested in fluid urbanism, formal resoluion, tectonism and continuous geometries as a new paradigm, my focus has shifted toward the conditions under which those forms break down or mutate. My work explores how form registers change, through occupation, weathering, perception, how it resists finality. It isn’t about smoothness, but about friction structured into the system, about how legibility shifts depending on where and when you encounter it.
DVM: But doesn’t that just amount to a different story applied to a similar aesthetic? If the difference lies in intention rather than in formal departure, aren’t you reinforcing the notion that your work is an intellectual rebranding of an established visual code?
AS: Intention isn’t abstract, it’s embedded in the work’s structure, in its execution. I’m not interested in continuity for its own sake. My work accepts friction. It incorporates resistance, material, structural, temporal, into the logic of design. It allows for error, for tectonic interruption, for complexity born of constraint rather than of freedom. This is where material agency becomes central. I often work with stone, timber, steel, not just as surfaces, but as systems of behavior. These materials bring their own limits, their own narratives of time, decay, and resistance. They resist the ease of parametric fluidity.
DVM: But even within ZHA, there are projects that foreground material resistance, tectonics, and the dialogue between precision and contingency. How is your approach not simply a narrower, more focused articulation of that same formal lineage?
AS: There’s an important distinction. Zaha’s project was a formal revolution, a complete rejection of typological and rectilinear traditions, replaced by a language of spatial coherence and fluid continuity. My project is concerned less with continuity and more with instability. Not visual instability, but temporal, perceptual, and material instability. I’m not trying to complete a system, I’m trying to design the conditions under which a system can erode, adapt, or transform. My forms aren’t stable answers. They’re frameworks for change.
DVM: But audiences will still read ZaHA into your work. Does it matter what your intentions are, if the visual and spatial cues remain?
AS: Of course it matters. But reception takes time to mature. When you build within a lineage, initial readings will always default to precedent. But architecture is not an instantaneous medium. It’s slow. It lives through use, and through reinterpretation. Over time, the distinctions become clearer, not in the photograph, but in the experience, in the body, in the changing spatial and material behaviours of the work. What may appear as inheritance becomes, through repetition and variation, something else entirely.
DVM: We’ve spent a lot of time on your conceptual framing, temporality, material agency, perceptual instability. But I want to ground that in lineage. No architect works in a vacuum. If we were to trace the intellectual DNA of your practice, whose ideas or works would we find shaping it?
AS: It’s less about citing a single lineage than about assembling multiple modes of thought. My work exists at the intersection of material logics, spatial cognition, and structured systems. I’m not interested in a perceptual free-for-all. I’m interested in how systems can generate nuanced experiences through structure.
DVM: Let’s start with architecture. Besides ZHA, who’s shaped your way of thinking?
AS: Carlo Scarpa is foundational. Not just for his detail or his craftsmanship, but for his structural logic, how every cut, shift, or insertion becomes a spatial proposition. His work is not about refinement for its own sake, but about how material, joint, and sequence produce meaning. There’s a deep architectural intelligence embedded in his layering, his interruption, his systems of assembly. I also return to Toyo Ito, particularly his early work, for how he constructed discontinuity through system. There’s an elegance in the way his architecture accommodates contradiction without collapsing into chaos.
DVM: So Scarpa and Ito introduce interruption, system, layering. Does that mark a rupture with ZHA’s continuous geometries?
AS: Not a rupture, but a tension. My work engages formal continuity, but only insofar as it can hold contradiction. What interests me is where that continuity meets resistance, material resistance, structural misalignment, temporal shift. Where Scarpa’s systems articulate difference through layer, and Ito’s through system, I explore those same principles through hybrid material strategies. That’s where my computational methodology enters, not as a generator of fluid form, but as a tool for assembling constraints.
DVM: So you use computation structurally rather than compositionally?
AS: Precisely. Parametric tools are not ONLY aesthetic engines. They are instrumental, useful in constructing layered assemblies, responsive geometries, adaptive joints. They allow for control, but also for uncertainty. I work with computation not to polish form, but to let materials articulate their own limits within the system. That’s why I see fabrication and making as inseparable from the spatial outcome. The logic of the piece isn’t finalized in software, it’s discovered through material interaction, through testing, adjustment, failure.
DVM: That sounds more like engineering than architecture. Is your work veering toward performative practice?
AS: Not in the measurable sense. I’m not quantifying energy loads or environmental metrics. I’m working with performance in the way a dancer or musician might, a form that emerges through repetition, resistance, and refinement. My understanding of performance is closer to Greg Lynn’s early work, where form and system are co-emergent, not overlaid. Architecture is not a representation, it’s an enacted system, and every part of that system has to participate.
DVM: That ties to Kipnis and Lavin, whom you’ve cited before. How do they influence your work?
AS: Kipnis has been enormously influential, especially in the way he frames spatial systems as affective and atmospheric. But I read him as more than a theorist of perception. His work on tectonics, on the assembly of systemic complexity—is foundational. His reading of Reiser + Umemoto, for instance, changed how I understood the overlap between structural intelligence and perceptual ambiguity.
Lavin, in contrast, is less about systems and more about how architecture accumulates meaning through history, through cultural projection, through modes of authorship. Her writing forces a confrontation with how architecture is read, not just how it’s made. That’s crucial in a discipline so often obsessed with novelty.
ARCHItEctURE
DVM: Across our conversations, you’ve consistently returned to themes of temporality, material agency, ambiguity, and what you’ve called structured indeterminacy. But before we go any further, I want to step back and ask something foundational. How do you define architecture? Is it a process, a system, an experience, a constructed artifact? What is it, to you, outside disciplinary convention?
AS: I don’t define architecture as a fixed object or a resolved image. For me, architecture is an evolving spatial condition, something that mediates between material, time, and perception. It’s not about permanence, but about the capacity of space to remain open, to adjust, to respond. I’m not interested in creating static monuments. I’m interested in constructing frameworks that can be inhabited differently across time, that hold within them the potential for reinterpretation.
DVM: But doesn’t that drift into abstraction? Buildings are built. They have shape, structure, specificity. If architecture becomes a condition rather than a form, don’t you risk overlooking the discipline’s concrete realities, decisions, constraints, material execution?
AS: Not at all. To speak of flux is not to deny form,it’s to understand form as a condition that can absorb time. My work does not reject specificity; it rejects finality. A project can be precise in its articulation and still designed for change. Specificity, in that sense, is not the opposite of openness, it’s the means by which indeterminacy is structured. What I oppose is the notion that architecture’s value lies in its ability to remain untouched, unchanged. My concern is with form that anticipates its own transformation.
DVM: Architecture has always existed in dialogue with change. Buildings age. Programs shift. Histories are rewritten. From ancient ruins to modernist reconfigurability, adaptation is nothing new. So what makes your approach different?
AS: The difference is in authorship. I’m not interested in architecture that simply survives the passage of time or is retroactively adjusted. I want time to be designed into the work from the beginning. That means anticipating how materials respond to light, to weather, to use. It means thinking about spatial sequencing not just in terms of movement, but in terms of memory and return. The design does not wait for change,it invites it. Time becomes an operative element, not an external pressure.
DVM: But if time is central to your work, how does the user perceive it? If temporality is embedded, what makes it legible? And how do you prevent ambiguity from becoming incoherence?
AS: Ambiguity is not confusion. It’s an invitation. It allows space to carry more than one reading without collapsing into vagueness. The clarity is in the structure, the sequence, the material logic, the spatial rhythm. What’s indeterminate is not the form itself, but the meanings it can carry, the ways it can be occupied or interpreted. I’m not interested in dissolving function, I’m interested in decoupling form from singular function.
DVM: But isn’t that dangerous ground? If form is always open-ended, doesn’t it risk becoming an intellectual exercise? How do you ensure that your architecture still functions, that it still works?
AS: This isn’t about openness as indiscipline. It’s about control applied differently. The architecture is not open in every direction, it’s open within a defined system. That’s what I mean by structured indeterminacy. The conditions are deliberate. The sequences are intentional. What’s variable is how the work is perceived or used over time. It’s not a blank slate, it’s a designed framework that resists being reduced to a single role or reading.
DVM: Within the broader field, where do you locate your work? Your interests align with phenomenology, material systems, post-structural ambiguity. Are you continuing an existing trajectory, or proposing a break?
AS: I see it as an evolution. There’s no clean break from discourse. My work engages with phenomenology, with material ontology, with the legacy of indeterminacy—but it redirects those trajectories toward something more systematic. The shift is subtle but significant. I’m not just acknowledging time as a context, I’m embedding it as an active force. That’s the difference. Architecture, for me, isn’t just shaped by time, it shapes how time is felt.
DVM: Why should that matter to people beyond the disciplinary bubble? Outside of academic conversations or critical discourse, what’s at stake? Why does your approach have relevance?
AS: Because space is lived. Architecture is not an autonomous art, it shapes how we move, how we gather, how we feel. And if we accept that human experience is temporal, perceptual, and material, then our spaces should reflect that. They should not be fixed symbols but responsive conditions. My work is an argument for an architecture that participates, one that acknowledges its own incompleteness, that makes space for memory, for weathering, for inhabitation. This isn’t about theory in the abstract. It’s about constructing spaces that adapt to the complexities of life as it unfolds.
BELOW IS AN EDITED and rearranged TRANSCRIPT OF A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONs BETWEEN ARYA SAFAVI AND DIETER V. MEYER CONDUCTED IN LONDON BETWEEN APRIL 2024 AND DECEMBER 2024 ABOUT HIS WORK, APPROACH, AND OUTLOOK TOWARDS MOVING AWAY FROM SUBJECTIVIST RELATIVISM OR DETERMINSITIC FORMALISM TO aesthetic indeterminacy OF MORE open-ended interactions. THE CONVERSATIONs COVERS MANY STRANDS OF INTEREST AND INFLUENCES IN AN EFFORT TO CLARIFY ARYA'S STANCE ON BEAUTY AS AN ACIVE UNFOLDING OF RELATOINSHIPS, ELEGANCE NOT AS AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY BUT AN OPERATIONAL STATE, AND ARCHITECtURE AS PRESENCE AMONGST MANY OTHER TOPICS.
BEAUTY AND ELEGANCE
dieter v. meyer: You’ve stated that “beauty is an experience, elegance is an emotion.” Given everything we’ve discussed about form, temporality, ambiguity, and material agency before and will try to cover in more depth later, I want to push you to clarify exactly what you mean by that. Are you rejecting traditional aesthetic frameworks? If beauty is an experience rather than an intrinsic quality, does that mean it is entirely subjective?
Arya Safavi: I am not rejecting aesthetics - I am repositioning them. Beauty, in my view, is not a static attribute but something felt through engagement, perception, and time. A space, an object, a material can be beautiful, but not because of an inherent formal or proportional correctness. Beauty is an event - it emerges through interaction, through the unfolding of spatial and sensory conditions.
DVM: That sounds similar to Kant’s idea that beauty arises from the free play of our faculties, but you also emphasize temporality and material transformation. Are you suggesting that beauty is contingent on time? If so, does that mean something can cease to be beautiful?
as: Exactly. Beauty is not fixed - it is conditioned by time, perception, and circumstance. A work of architecture may have an initial presence, but its true beauty unfolds through the way it interacts with light, weathering, human touch, and reinterpretation. This is why materiality is crucial to my work - stone, wood, metal, they all carry temporal depth, and their transformation is part of what makes beauty experiential rather than simply visual.
DVM: And what about elegance? You say it is an emotion rather than a formal quality. How does that differ from beauty as an experience?
as: Elegance is different from beauty because it is about the way a thing reveals itself - it is about clarity, restraint, and the way an experience resonates emotionally. You can have something that is raw, unfinished, evolving, and still deeply elegant because of the way it allows itself to be felt. Elegance is not about minimalism or refinement in the conventional sense; it is about the precision of how something affects us.
DVM: But isn’t that dangerously close to pure subjectivity? If beauty and elegance are not formal qualities but experiential and emotional conditions, what prevents your work from becoming arbitrary?
as: The key is that experience and emotion are structured - they are not random. The way we perceive space, the way we emotionally register elegance, is shaped by materiality, proportion, rhythm, and sequence. I do not design for subjective whims - I design to create the conditions where beauty can be experienced and elegance can be felt.
DVM: So would you say elegance is a form of legibility? A kind of coherence that allows beauty to register more deeply?
as: Yes, but legibility does not mean singularity. Elegance, as I see it, is the capacity of something to resonate beyond its immediate function. It is what allows a space, an object, or a form to linger in our perception, to hold depth beyond its first encounter.
DVM: This brings us to a larger question - if beauty is an experience and elegance is an emotion, where does meaning come in? Are these purely sensory conditions, or do they carry intellectual and cultural weight?
as: Beauty and elegance are not separate from meaning - they mediate it. The way we experience form, material, and space is not just an intellectual act but a felt reality. A space that allows time to register, a form that invites re-interpretation, a material that reveals its history—these are all acts of meaning-making. I am not interested in beauty as decoration or elegance as style. I am interested in how these conditions create deeper architectural intelligence - where space is not just understood but profoundly sensed.
dvm: But doesn’t that position your work within an intellectual niche, rather than as something with wider social or cultural impact? If engagement requires a trained sensitivity, does it not limit its own relevance?
as: That is a valid concern, but I do not believe that architectural or design innovation should be limited by mass accessibility. The avant-garde has always functioned as a critical agent, shaping the evolution of broader discourse. My work does not exclude - it invites. If architecture and design do not challenge inherited norms, they risk stagnation. The question should not be whether my work is immediately accessible, but rather what new possibilities it proposes. GOING BACK TO YOUR CONDITIONAL , MY ANSWER POSITION IS THAT THE EYE DOES NEED TO BE TRAINED, NEW SENSITVITIES NEED TO EMERGE AND SENSIBILITIES NEED TO BE DEVELOPED TO UNDERSTAND AND INTERNALIZE NEW SETS OF TERMINOLOGY AND VOLCABULARY TO ENABLE DESCRIPTIONS AND READINGS OF NEW EXPERIENCES.
INDETERMINACY
dvm: Your work CLAIMS TO challenge conventional UNDERSTANDING of furniture, objects, and architecture by positioning them as part of an evolving discourse. Yet, discourse alone does not validate a body of work. Why should a wider audience care? What is at stake beyond theoretical engagement?
as: My work resists passive consumption and encourages active engagement with space. It matters because it challenges the rigidity of conventional typologies, opening new ways to perceive and inhabit the built environment. In a world where architecture is increasingly reduced to economic and functional imperatives, my approach advocates for a richer spatial and cognitive experience.
dvm: That argument presumes that people are interested in rethinking spatial engagement. But the majority of users - whether of furniture, objects, or architecture - seek clarity and functionality. If the broader audience does not inherently value ambiguity, isn’t your work just an insular academic exercise?
as: what you call ambiguity is not an obstruction but a method of expanding perception. While it may not cater to passive engagement, it provides an alternative framework for those willing to explore. The built environment has long dictated modes of interaction without question - I aim to disrupt this passive conditioning. My work matters because it reintroduces agency, forcing individuals to reconsider their spatial awareness.
dvm: You rely heavily on the term “ambiguity,” yet this word suggests a lack of clarity or coherence. If your goal is to create a richer spatial awareness, shouldn’t you propose a term that captures its intentionality more precisely? Ambiguity implies randomness, but your work is clearly deliberate.
as: I acknowledge that ‘ambiguity’ can be misinterpreted. A more accurate term might be ‘indeterminacy’ - not as a state of confusion, but as an openness to multiple readings and possibilities. My work does not seek to obscure meaning but to provide layered spatial narratives that adapt based on user perception and context. Rather than dictating a fixed experience, it allows for a range of interactions that evolve over time.
dvm: Even ‘indeterminacy’ remains vague - if anything can be anything, then how does your work resist falling into arbitrariness? What are the defining principles that anchor it in intentionality rather than mere abstraction?
as: My work is governed by a set of spatial and material strategies that define its engagement. These include the use of shifting material contrasts, spatial discontinuities, and varying scales of perception. While interpretation remains fluid, the design itself is structured around deliberate spatial provocations. This ensures that the experience is not arbitrary but rather participatory, requiring the user to complete the spatial narrative through their own perception and movement.
DVM: Your approach to function remains nebulous. If function is mutable and open-ended, at what point does a design become ineffective? If the boundaries of use are blurred indefinitely, how can your work claim to have purpose beyond theoretical speculation?
as: Function is not a singular condition - it is relational and evolves based on context. The assumption that clarity equates to effectiveness is a modernist legacy that constrains spatial experience. My work does not reject function; it proposes a more dynamic understanding of it. A chair remains a chair, but how one perceives and interacts with it can be expanded beyond default expectations.
dvm: But isn’t this just a rhetorical stance? You speak of expanded perception, but can you demonstrate tangible ways in which your designs materially change spatial consciousness? Can you provide examples of where your work has had measurable impact?
as: One example is the interplay between materiality and movement in my furniture pieces. By designing objects that shift in perception based on light, positioning, and interaction, I introduce an awareness of space as an active participant rather than a static container. Another example is my architectural investigations, which resist fixed programmatic constraints to allow evolving occupation over time. While these may not yield immediate quantifiable metrics, their value lies in fostering a deeper understanding of spatial relationships.
dvm: Your emphasis on perceptual indeterminacy risks undermining architectural responsibility. If space is always in flux, where does accountability lie in ensuring that environments are legible, navigable, and socially responsible? Is your work avoiding these questions in favor of conceptual experimentation?
as: Not at all. Legibility is often conflated with predictability. Social responsibility in architecture is not merely about providing clear wayfinding - it is about fostering meaningful engagement with space. My work does not create disorder; rather, it proposes alternative forms of order that require participation. In a world increasingly defined by passive consumption, architecture must reintroduce friction as a means of cultivating awareness.
dvm: You align your work with critical architectural discourse but have yet to position it clearly within contemporary theoretical frameworks. Are you operating within the lineage of postmodern ambiguity, phenomenology, or a more radical materialist perspective? Without a clear position, how can your work contribute meaningfully to intellectual discourse?
as: My approach intersects with several of these frameworks but does not align wholly with any single one. Phenomenology informs my emphasis on spatial perception, but I diverge by incorporating a more speculative materialist approach that treats objects as active agents rather than passive vessels of experience. My work also engages with postmodern ambiguity, but rather than ironic deconstruction, I use it as a means of expanding engagement rather than critiquing existing structures. My position is one of synthesis, where multiple frameworks inform an evolving methodology rather than a fixed doctrine.
TEMPORALITY
DVM: Your work frequently emphasizes temporality, pause, and the fluidity of time within spatial experience. However, time is an abstract concept - how do you translate it into tangible design principles? What is at stake in making time an architectural or design concern?
as: Temporality in my work is about resisting static spatial conditions. Conventional design often assumes permanence or singular function, whereas my approach allows space and objects to evolve over time, responding to shifting conditions and human occupation. Time is not merely an abstract concept in my work - it manifests in material weathering, adaptability, and spatial flexibility.
DVM: But isn’t all architecture inherently temporal? Buildings decay, furniture wears down, spaces are reprogrammed over decades. What distinguishes your approach from the natural passage of time that affects all design?
as: The difference is intentionality. Most architecture passively endures time, while my work actively integrates time as an operative component. I design spaces and objects that anticipate transformation, that invite reinterpretation rather than merely resisting entropy. The work is not about enduring time but actively engaging with it.
DVM: Yet engagement with time often results in either planned obsolescence or perpetual incompletion. If design is always in flux, at what point does it become meaningful? If space is never settled, when does it provide coherence and clarity?
as: Temporality does not mean perpetual instability. My work establishes a framework within which change occurs - it is structured indeterminacy. Objects and spaces hold their form, but their meaning and function can shift based on time, use, and perception. Rather than creating a static monument or an ephemeral installation, I operate in the space between these conditions.
DVM: This ‘structured indeterminacy’ still lacks specificity. How does a user experience time within your work in a way that is distinct from any other space that evolves with use? If temporality is central, how do you ensure it is perceptible rather than merely theoretical?
as: Perception of time in my work is often tied to material and spatial sequencing. For example, Spatially, I design for episodic engagement, where moments of pause, transition, and recurrence shape experience. These are not just functional delays but designed intervals that structure how one moves and perceives.
DVM: Isn’t there a contradiction in designing for pause while also advocating for continuous evolution? If a moment of stillness is curated, isn’t it simply another form of spatial control rather than an authentic encounter with temporality?
as: A pause is not the absence of movement - it is an awareness of time passing. My work does not impose stillness; it creates conditions where users become conscious of time’s effect on space. This might be through rhythm in circulation, thresholds that slow perception, or material shifts that mark duration. The goal is not to dictate experience but to heighten an awareness of time’s role in shaping it.
DVM: Your argument suggests that time can be ‘designed’ - but isn’t time always external to architecture? We perceive it through change, but it is not something an architect controls. How can a work of design claim to shape time rather than simply respond to it?
as: Time is not external to architecture - it is embedded within it. Just as light and shadow alter perception throughout the day, spatial sequencing dictates how time is experienced. My work does not control time itself but structures its legibility. A corridor that elongates movement, a surface that wears with touch, a modular object that reconfigures - these are not passive reactions but active manipulations of temporal perception.
MATERIALITY
DVM: Your work places significant emphasis on materiality, often engaging with wood and stone. Yet these materials come with historical and cultural baggage - wood is associated with craft, warmth, and tradition; stone with permanence and monumentality. How do you claim to push boundaries while working within such conventional material frameworks?
AS: Materiality in my work is not about adherence to tradition but about revealing latent qualities within familiar materials. Wood and stone are not static; they hold histories of transformation, erosion, and assembly. My approach does not treat them as passive materials but as active agents within the evolution of form and space.
DVM: But doesn’t that position risk romanticizing materiality rather than critically engaging with it? How does your use of wood and stone differ from the countless designers who already explore tactility and aging?
AS: The difference lies in intentional disruption. I employ processes that resist the expected narratives of these materials - juxtaposing polished with raw, engineered with organic, structural with fragile. Rather than reinforcing wood as ‘warm’ or stone as ‘eternal,’ I explore moments where their properties contradict expectations, forcing a reconsideration of their assumed roles.
DVM: That sounds like a formal exercise rather than a fundamental rethinking. If materiality is central to your work, shouldn’t its conceptual underpinning go beyond contrast and textural play? What is the broader critical ambition of your material strategy?
AS: My work interrogates the agency of materials - how they dictate interaction, how they encode time, and how they resist or yield to forces. Wood and stone are not just aesthetic or structural choices; they are mediums through which the dynamics of decay, compression, and adaptation become legible. The ambition is to foreground material as an evolving participant in spatial experience rather than a passive backdrop.
DVM: Yet your approach still assumes that materials have inherent agency. Isn’t that an anthropomorphic reading? Wood and stone do not ‘act’ - they undergo external forces. Are you not imposing a narrative onto them rather than uncovering one?
AS: Agency does not imply autonomy. It means acknowledging that materials shape experience as much as they are shaped by it. A stone surface polished over time by touch, a wooden joint that creaks under shifting humidity - these are not just technical phenomena but experiential conditions. My work amplifies these effects rather than suppressing them.
DVM: You speak of amplification, but isn’t that just aestheticization? If the material qualities of wood and stone are already present, what do you contribute beyond framing them for appreciation? How does this approach resist being purely phenomenological?
AS: It is not about aestheticization but about intervention. My approach integrates processes that accelerate, distort, or redirect material behavior - embedding controlled fractures, inducing calculated warping, designing for erosion rather than against it. This is not about passive observation but about structuring material temporality as an active design parameter.
FORM
DVM: We’ve scrutinized your stance on materiality, temporality, and ambiguity, and you’ve argued that architecture should be a condition rather than a static object. But let’s push deeper into the question of form. If architecture is not defined by permanence, how do you understand form? Is it merely a byproduct of processes, or does it hold intrinsic value?
AS: Form is not an autonomous entity; it is an index of conditions - material, temporal, spatial, and perceptual. In my work, form is not an end in itself but a consequence of the interactions that shape it. It does not exist in isolation but emerges from a structured negotiation between forces - gravity, weathering, occupation, assembly, and reconfiguration.
DVM: That sounds like an argument against formalism, yet your designs exhibit a high degree of formal resolution. If form is only a byproduct, why is there such an emphasis on precise geometric articulation in your work?
AS: The precision in my work does not contradict my stance - it reinforces it. A designed form must be rigorous, but rigor does not imply fixity. I approach form as a structured indeterminacy, where its legibility shifts depending on time, scale, and use. The idea is not to reject formal resolution but to construct forms that remain open to re-reading, where perception is not singular but layered.
DVM: But at what point does form become its own aesthetic project rather than an operative one? If form is always contingent, does it risk being purely expressive rather than functional?
AS: That is a false dichotomy. Functionality and expression are not opposites; they are intertwined. A form can be highly expressive and still maintain operational depth. My work does not treat function as a static programmatic dictate but as a temporal performance - one that evolves rather than remains fixed. Form is the scaffold for these performances, allowing for shifts in occupation, use, and meaning over time.
DVM: You argue for layered interpretation and evolving function, but how does that translate into the act of making? Do you predetermine these transformations, or do you allow form to be subject to external forces without control?
AS: I do not design for randomness. Instead, I create frameworks that allow for structured variability. This means embedding flexibility not through arbitrary openness but through precise configurations that anticipate multiple possible states. The work is not about surrendering control but about designing the conditions for change.
DVM: Let’s take this further - if form is always contingent, is there ever an ideal form? Or is every configuration equally valid?
AS: There is no singular ideal form, but there are forms that are more or less capable of producing the conditions I aim to create. The success of a form is measured not by its static appearance but by its ability to facilitate shifting experiences over time. The criteria are not aesthetic harmony or proportional correctness but the capacity of the form to hold time, perception, and material transformation within it.
DVM: You’re positioning form as an instrument rather than an object. But doesn’t that dismiss the cultural and symbolic weight of form itself? Architecture has always operated within a history of typologies, figures, and recognizable spatial gestures - where does your work stand in relation to that lineage?
AS: I am not dismissing typology - I am interrogating its stability. Forms carry meaning, but meaning is not immutable. My work does not erase history; it destabilizes familiarity so that new readings can emerge. It engages with archetypes not as fixed entities but as unstable references, reconfiguring them to introduce ambiguity into what might otherwise be a rigid formal language.
DVM: That approach risks making form purely about intellectual play. If meaning is always shifting, is there ever a moment when a form is resolved?
AS: Resolution does not mean finality. A form can be precise in its articulation while remaining unresolved in its interpretation. The goal is not indeterminacy for its own sake but an architecture that resists singular readings while maintaining a structured framework for engagement.
DVM: And finally - if form is contingent, if meaning is unstable, if function is temporal, then what ultimately grounds your architecture?
AS: The grounding is in its experiential depth. My work is not about randomness or uncertainty for its own sake; it is about constructing spatial conditions that demand engagement over time. The architecture is not unstable - it is responsive. The goal is to create forms that do not dictate meaning but invite participation, where the user, the material, and the forces of time complete the work.
ZAHA and other influences
DVM: Let’s address the elephant in the room. You spent over a decade at Zaha Hadid Architects, contributing to BOTH PRESERVING AND TO evolution of the firm’s formal language. Your independent work, though intellectually framed in your own terms, still carries strong aesthetic and spatial similarities to ZHA’s signature approach - fluid geometries, parametric articulation, continuous surfaces, and a high degree of formal resolution. What distinguishes your work from being an extension of that lineage?
AS: I won’t deny that my time at ZHA has influenced my approach - how could it not? It was aND STILL IS profoundly formative experience, not just in technique but in conceptual thinking. However, my work is not a derivative extension of ZHA’s project; it diverges in how it engages temporality, material transformation, and perceptual instability. The formal language may appear similar at first glance, but the underlying logic is different.
DVM: But that distinction isn’t always clear in the work itself. If you claim to be developing a different conceptual framework, why does the aesthetic resolution still feel so closely aligned with ZHA’s legacy?
AS: Formal similarities arise because I engage with certain shared spatial concerns - continuous forms, fluid transitions, and the dissolution of rigid boundaries. But where ZHA’s project was largely about fluid urbanism and parametric continuity, my focus is on how form registers time, material weathering, and shifting occupation. My work is less about seamlessness and more about structured ambiguity, where legibility shifts as conditions evolve.
DVM: That still sounds like an attempt to differentiate through discourse rather than through substantive formal departure. If the distinctions lie more in intention than in appearance, do you risk reinforcing the idea that your work is merely an intellectual repackaging of an existing aesthetic?
AS: Intent does matter, but it is not separate from execution. The key difference is that I am not pursuing pure continuity or surface-driven complexity for its own sake. My work allows for disruptions, slippages, and material constraints to shape the form rather than treating form as an autonomous aesthetic pursuit. This is why material agency plays such a crucial role—stone, wood, and other tactile elements bring resistance, grain, and decay into the equation, which are often at odds with parametric fluidity.
DVM: But even within ZHA, we’ve seen projects engage material agency, tectonic expression, and the interplay of precision and contingency. What makes your approach unique rather than simply a more focused variation of the same formal DNA?
AS: yes, the current strand of research within zha does extend to what you are referring to, the difference is that I do not see form as an absolute. ZaHA’s project was fundamentally about a new formal paradigm - an alternative to rectilinearity, a complete rejection of historical typologies in favor of new spatial continuities. My work, in contrast, is about the instability of form itself - not in terms of visual complexity, but in terms of how it exists across time and perception. The question is not how to generate seamless, fluid geometries but how to construct architectures that can accommodate transformation, erosion, adaptation, and multiple readings over time.
DVM: But if the audience still sees ZHA in your work, does it matter what your intentions are? Doesn’t the reception of the work ultimately define its identity?
AS: Reception matters, but it is not fixed. It takes time for a body of work to establish its own legibility. When you challenge an existing formal language, early readings will always default to the closest reference point. But the true measure of distinction comes not in immediate recognition but in long-term engagement - how the work is used, how it ages, how it continues to unfold over time. If my work is viewed only through the lens of ZHA today, so be it - but that reading will shift as its own trajectories become clearer.
DVM: We’ve spoken at length about your conceptual framework - temporality, material agency, ambiguity, and perceptual instability - but I want to push you to be more explicit about your influences. No designer operates in a vacuum. If we were to trace the intellectual DNA of your work, which thinkers, architects, artists, or filmmakers have shaped your methodology?
AS: My work is never about a single lineage or mode of thought - it is about the intersection of multiple trajectories. Architecture, for me, is an assemblage of material systems, perceptual experiences, and structured methodologies, rather than an open-ended perceptual experiment. If I had to name influences, I’d highlight those who work at the intersection of systemic thinking, material specificity, and spatial ambiguity.
DVM: That’s still evasive. Let’s start with architecture. ZHA is the obvious reference, given your time there. Beyond that, who do you see as meaningful to your trajectory?
AS: If I were to distill key architectural influences, I would start with Carlo Scarpa for his layered approach to material articulation. His work is deeply systematic - every joint, every cut, every shift in material is an intentional structural and spatial decision. It’s not just about craftsmanship; it’s about material logic. That’s something I consider fundamental in my own work.
DVM: So is this where you depart from ZHA? Because Zaha’s work is still very much about continuous fluidity, whereas Scarpa and Ito introduce interruptions, layered conditions, and systemic order.
AS: It’s not a departure, but an evolution. ZHA’s work is about formal cohesion and fluid articulation, but I am interested in where that articulation meets structured constraints - whether through material resistance, systematic assemblages, or hybrid methodologies. The moment where a form encounters interruption, tectonic layering, or material divergence is where it gains deeper architectural complexity.
DVM: You talk about layered systems and structured methodologies. Are you engaging with contemporary computational design?
AS: Computational methodologies are essential - not as aesthetic generators but as structural and material systems that enable deeper architectural reasoning. If I use parametricism, it’s not for smoothness or formal continuity, but for its ability to generate systematic assemblies - layered material conditions, adaptive structural frameworks, and responsive spatial systems.
For instance, I don’t see material as secondary to form - I see it as an active agent in the design process. A system is only as good as its material resolution. This is where I depart from purely perceptual architecture. The process of making—assembling, iterating, testing - is as integral as the spatial effects it produces.
DVM: That sounds closer to an engineering approach rather than a purely aesthetic or perceptual one. Would you say your work is moving toward performative architecture?
AS: Not in the sense of quantifiable performance, but in the sense that architecture is fundamentally an interplay of material, structure, and spatial cognition. The way I think about performance is closer to Greg Lynn, in the sense that material articulation and formal logic should not be separated. A form is not applied to a system - it emerges from the constraints, material conditions, and processes of making.
DVM: You mention spatial cognition. This suggests a connection to Jeffrey Kipnis and Sylvia Lavin. Are they conscious influences?
AS: Kipnis, certainly - his writing on affect, atmospheric conditions, and spatial emergence is deeply instructive. But I don’t just read Kipnis as a theorist of perception - I read him as someone engaging in the tectonic and systemic production of architecture. His reading of Reiser + Umemoto, for example, is crucial in understanding how material conditions, structural orders, and perceptual ambiguity intersect.
Lavin, on the other hand, challenges architecture’s cultural and historical interpretations. Her work is useful in questioning how architecture constructs meaning over time, particularly through material transformation, shifts in authorship, and modes of assembly.
dvm: in our conversations over the years you have brought up serra, irwin, pollock and dylan as key figures in your life. Richard Serra’s engagement with materiality and space seems to have certain parallels with your own interests. His steel plates don’t function as objects but as conditions that shape movement, perception, and gravity. Do you see his work as an influence, and if so, how does it manifest in your own thinking?
As: Serra’s work is critical, even if he rejeced his work as architectural. not simply as sculpture but as a redefinition of how material, weight, and spatial pressure affect the body. His interest in verbs - "to roll, to fold, to lift" - positions material as something that acts rather than something acted upon. That resonates deeply with me. In my work, form is not an imposed geometry but an emergent condition shaped by material constraints and spatial negotiation. Architecture, like Serra’s steel, should not be passively observed but physically confronted, moved through, resisted.
dvm: That emphasis on perception and spatial experience makes me think of Robert Irwin. His work isn’t about objecthood but about modulating how we see, about perception as material. Do you connect with that?
As: Absolutely. Irwin’s work is about attunement - about slowing perception to the point where space, light, and movement become primary. That’s directly connected to my interest in temporality. I often speak about architecture as pause - not as static permanence but as a condition that demands attention, that unfolds over time. His use of scrim and layering reinforces that architecture is not about mass alone but about thresholds, veiling, and the subtle conditions of visibility.
dvm: That ties into something I’ve wanted to ask - Jackson Pollock rejection composition in favor of fields of movement, rhythm, and accumulation. You talk about form emerging through process rather than being imposed. Do you see a connection there?
As: Yes, but not in the sense of gestural spontaneity. Pollock’s paintings are records of process; they exist as an accumulation of forces rather than as fixed compositions. That’s close to how I think about architecture - not as a designed object but as an interplay of material behaviors, structural forces, and spatial negotiations. My use of hybrid material systems and assemblage comes from this belief that architecture should be an evolving field of interactions rather than a resolved formal gesture.
dvm: You’ve referenced artists, sculptors, and perceptual thinkers. But what about music? Someone like Bob Dylan - his ability to resist categorization, to continuously redefine himself - does that have any bearing on how you see your own practice?
dvm: You mentioned Dylan’s constant reinvention as something that resonates with you. But beyond that - beyond the idea of personal transformation and resisting categorization - what is the deeper connection? Dylan is a songwriter, a storyteller. His work is built on language, allegory, and time-based experience. Architecture is not narrative in the same way. How does his approach extend beyond biography into something relevant to your discipline?
As: The connection isn’t in the literal mechanics of songwriting versus architecture, but in the way Dylan constructs meaning - how his work is layered, elliptical, and resists closure. His songs function as open systems; they don’t tell a singular story but invite multiple readings, shifting depending on context, time, or the listener’s state of mind. That’s precisely how I think about space. Architecture should not be a fixed statement but a field of potential interpretations. Spatial ambiguity isn’t about a lack of clarity but about creating conditions where meaning isn’t predetermined but continually produced through occupation, movement, and perception.
dvm: But Dylan’s work is also deeply rooted in tradition—folk, blues, country - while simultaneously dismantling and reconstructing those histories. He is both inside and outside of his discipline. Do you see architecture in that way?
As: That’s a compelling parallel. Dylan doesn’t erase his references - he transforms them, distorts them, reconfigures them into something new. His music acknowledges lineage but refuses to be nostalgic. In architecture, I think about history in a similar way: not as a canon to be upheld, but as a material to be worked upon, a set of structures and logics that can be fractured, recombined, or set into motion in unexpected ways. My approach to form, for instance, isn’t about pure invention but about reconstituting architectural elements - structure, materiality, surface—as systems that behave in ways that are neither entirely new nor entirely historical. They exist in a state of reassembly, much like Dylan’s compositions.
dvm: Another aspect of Dylan’s work is the way he resists finality - not just in his career but in the songs themselves. He alters lyrics, rearranges structures, delivers entirely different versions of the same piece over time. There’s no "definitive" form of a Dylan song. Is that something you relate to?
As: Absolutely. That idea of iteration, of non-finality, is central to my thinking about architecture. A space, a structure, a material system should not be a finished artifact but a framework that continues to evolve. I’m interested in architectures that allow for adaptation, that absorb change rather than resist it. Just as Dylan’s compositions mutate across time, my own work explores how materials weather, how structures shift under different forces, how the spatial experience is never fixed but dependent on time, light, and the presence of the body.
dvm: So, in a way, you’re drawn to Dylan not just because of his fluid identity but because of the deeper structure of his work - its openness, its refusal to be singular, its engagement with history without being trapped by it.
As: Exactly. It’s the way his work resists closure. Whether in music or architecture, the most compelling works are those that remain alive, that resist being flattened into a single reading or a single moment. Dylan achieves that through language, structure, and performance. In architecture, I aim for that through material behavior, spatial complexity, and the ability of a work to shift in meaning and experience over time. It’s not about ambiguity in the sense of vagueness but about creating an architecture that continues to unfold - just as a song, when played in a different moment, with a different inflection, takes on an entirely new life.
dvm: So, in a way, all of these figures—Serra, Irwin, Pollock, Dylan - point back to a shared ethos in your work: process over finality, perception over object, material as active rather than passive, and form as something emergent rather than imposed.
Asi: Yes. What connects them is their refusal to see their medium as a closed system. Each in their own way dismantles the idea of fixed composition - whether it’s Serra using weight and gravity rather than pure sculptural form, Irwin working with perception rather than material, Pollock allowing gesture to replace traditional composition, or Dylan reinventing his own language with every iteration. For me, architecture has to be more than an image. It has to be inhabited, engaged with, negotiated. And that means designing not static forms, but systems, conditions, and materials that evolve over time, both perceptually and physically.
DVM: You mention time, which brings us to cinema. Your descriptions of architecture suggest an affinity with filmmakers who deal with temporality and spatial indeterminacy - Tarkovsky, for instance.
AS: Tarkovsky is a key reference. His idea of sculpting in time aligns with how I think about material weathering, spatial memory, and the layered conditions of architectural experience. But I wouldn’t say my work is about slowness or atmosphere in isolation. If Tarkovsky is about duration and material presence, then Antonioni is about framing, juxtaposition, and discontinuity.
Antonioni constructs space not as a smooth continuum, but as a series of interrupted sequences, shifting perspectives, and unresolved spatial tensions. This is closer to how I think about architecture - not as a singular form, but as an assemblage of structured components, material junctions, and spatial thresholds.
DVM: Let’s pivot to materiality. You work extensively with wood and stone, yet your formal language still suggests fluidity. How do you reconcile the two?
AS: Materiality is not an aesthetic decision - it is a structural and systemic logic. Wood and stone are not just textures or surfaces; they have inherent structural and temporal properties. Wood moves, stone settles. These materials demand architectural strategies of layering, assembly, and adaptation.
This is where Richard Serra is relevant - not for fluidity, but for his engagement with material weight, balance, and tectonic logic. His work is about how material behaves under forces - gravity, pressure, resistance. I think about my own material assemblies in the same way—not as neutral surfaces, but as active systems that define the architecture itself.
DVM: But that’s a very different approach from ZHA, where materiality often serves the continuity of form rather than resisting it. Do you see your work as an evolution of Zaha’s?
AS: Zaha’s work pioneered a new spatial paradigm—she transformed how we conceive of continuity, fluidity, and spatial coherence. But I am interested in what happens when that paradigm meets resistance. Where fluid form meets systematic assembly, where parametric logic collides with material constraints. That’s where new possibilities emerge.
If ZHA’s work is about the seamless integration of geometry and space, my work explores where seamlessness meets discontinuity, where assembly generates emergent complexity.
DVM: Final question. i opened these series of conversation with your stance; “Beauty is an experience, elegance is an emotion.” Given everything we’ve discussed about your influences - how does that statement hold up?
AS: looking back at all the figures and works we discussed, i can read their work within the same framework, that Beauty is not a fixed condition; it is an emergent experience. It doesn’t reside in proportion or harmony alone, but in how a system of material, form, and space interacts dynamically with the observer over time.
Elegance is an emotional response to coherence within complexity. It is not minimalism or simplicity - it is the sensation of clarity within an intricate system.
My work is not about achieving a singular aesthetic goal. It is about constructing architectural conditions that evolve through time, material intelligence, and systemic assembly - where beauty is not prescribed but discovered through engagement, experience, and transformation.
ARCHItEctURE
DVM: Throughout our discussions, you’ve articulated a position that emphasizes temporality, material agency, ambiguity, and structured indeterminacy. However, before we go further, I want to push you on something fundamental - your definition of architecture. What is architecture to you? Is it a process, a system, an experience, a constructed artifact? How do you define it beyond disciplinary conventions?
AS: Architecture, to me, is not a static object but an evolving spatial condition. It is a framework that mediates between material, time, and human perception. My interest lies not in producing immutable structures but in designing conditions where space remains in flux - where it is continuously negotiated by time, use, and interpretation.
DVM: But doesn’t that reduce architecture to an abstraction? Buildings are built, they take form, they exist. If architecture is only defined by flux and negotiation, doesn’t that undermine the reality of architectural practice, which requires specificity, decision, and form?
AS: Not at all. Flux does not mean the absence of form; it means form is embedded with the potential for transformation. Architecture should not be a frozen moment but a framework that can accommodate shifting conditions. This doesn’t negate specificity - it challenges the idea that architecture’s value is in its finality rather than in its capacity to evolve.
DVM: You speak of evolution and transformation, but architecture, as a discipline, has always negotiated permanence and change. From the ruins of antiquity to modernist flexibility, architecture has always been in conversation with time. What makes your approach distinct from the long history of adaptive architecture?
AS: The difference is in the agency of design. Rather than designing buildings that merely endure time or are reprogrammed through external forces, I embed temporal legibility into the design itself. This could be through materials that shift over time, spatial sequences that guide perception differently at different moments, or configurations that are structured for reinterpretation. My work does not just respond to time - it anticipates and engages with it as an integral component of architecture.
DVM: Let’s talk about legibility. If your architecture is designed to be indeterminate or ambiguous in meaning, how do you ensure it is still communicative? At what point does ambiguity become a lack of clarity?
AS: Ambiguity is not the absence of meaning; it is the presence of multiple readings. My work doesn’t reject clarity - it resists singularity. The goal is to construct spaces that allow for layered interpretations, where users bring their own understanding to the experience rather than being dictated by a singular narrative.
DVM: But doesn’t that risk architecture becoming an intellectual exercise rather than a functional discipline? If space is left entirely open to interpretation, how do you ensure it still serves its intended purpose?
AS: I don’t argue for total openness - I argue for structured indeterminacy. The framework is clear, but within it, meaning is not fixed. This is different from arbitrariness; it is about designing the conditions for multiple possibilities rather than enforcing a singular experience.
DVM: Where do you position yourself within architectural discourse? Your ideas engage with phenomenology, material agency, and theories of spatial experience, but where do you diverge from existing paradigms? Are you continuing a lineage or proposing a rupture?
AS: I see my work as an evolution rather than a rupture. It engages with critical discourses - phenomenology, postmodern indeterminacy, material ontology - but reframes them through a lens of structured transformation. While others have explored architecture’s relationship to time, my focus is on embedding time as an operative force rather than a contextual backdrop. It is about designing for temporal consciousness rather than simply acknowledging that change happens.
DVM: And finally - why should a wider audience care? Beyond intellectual discourse, beyond disciplinary debates, why does your architectural approach matter?
AS: Because architecture is not just about objects; it is about how we experience and inhabit space. If we acknowledge that time, material, and perception are fundamental to human experience, then architecture must engage with them actively rather than passively. My work is about shifting the way we understand built space - not as something fixed, but as something continuously unfolding, something that invites participation, interpretation, and change. This is not just an academic pursuit; it is a proposition for a more responsive, dynamic architecture that acknowledges the complexities of lived experience.
2.
Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (january-february 2025) - Part 2
2.
Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (january-february 2025) - Part 2
2.
Conversations with Dieter v. meyer - london, united kingdom (january-february 2025) - Part 2
UNFINISHED SENTENCES
On Beauty, Elegance, Form, Legacy, and the Architecture of Modulation
Dieter V. Meyer: Rather than summarizing where we left off, I’d like to pick up with something more immediate. Let’s begin with Zaha. You’ve made a point of distancing yourself from that lineage, but clearly there’s a connection. What, precisely, do you carry forward? And at what point do you begin to diverge?
Arya Safavi: Zaha gave me a language, one which i tried to learn but I at some poiinted I lost the interest in completing her sentence. What I’ve retained isn’t a catalogue of forms, but a sensibility, a way of treating form as a mode of thinking rather than decoration. Her early axonometrics didn’t depict buildings, they constructed architectural episodes. Those drawings weren’t representational, they were strategic. They used projection as a weapon.
But if she taught me how to speak, I’ve become more interested in mispronunciation. Where her lines sought fluency, mine seek friction. I borrow the syntax, but shift the grammar.
Her project was oriented toward the future, toward a continuous acceleration. I’ve grown more invested in interruption. I’m less concerned with reaching the future than with thickening the present. I want form to stutter, to delay, to resist propulsion.
DVM: So you don’t view parametricism as a natural evolution of her work?
AS: Parametricism, as a formal ideology, systematizes what was once speculative. It transforms variation into command. Zaha’s early work untethered form from typology, and space from function. Patrik’s framework reterritorialized that rupture into legibility. The fold became syntax, it became grammar, not disruption.
My work returns to the fold not as a continuity, but as an open wound. I’m not pursuing seamlessness. I’m drawn to forms that hold contradiction without collapsing. Conditional coherence, structures that hum with internal friction. I don’t design for resolution, I design for resonance.
DVM: That description maps onto your Loop Bench. You’ve called it a temporal diagram. Why has time become such a central structure in your work?
AS: Because time is the one condition that form cannot exclude. The Loop Bench is composed of two asymmetrical loops, past and future, joined not by a hinge but by a delay. The thickened center doesn’t reconcile the loops, it holds them apart. That spatial tension is what gives the piece its temporal intensity.
We tend to design for permanence, but permanence is a fiction. I prefer suspension, a condition just before collapse or transformation. A form that leans forward, but doesn’t fall. Design, for me, is less about resolution than about learning how to hesitate.
DVM: There’s a choreography in all your projects, Slide, Comma, the V-Y-X series. Are these objects or performances?
AS: They are instruments, spatial instruments that anticipate behavior rather than dictate it.Slide isn’t a solution to seating. It’s a grammar for adjacency. Each configuration is a sentence written in space. The user becomes its co-author.Comma, by contrast, isn’t about movement, it’s about the pause. A comma doesn’t conclude a thought, it slows it. The table does the same. It holds the room open, long enough for thinking to gather.The V-Y-X pieces are different still. They’re not forks in the road because they demand a decision, they propose divergence. They spatialize indeterminacy. Arrangement becomes a form of speculation.
DVM: But does this openness ever become too diffuse? Does your work risk ambiguity for its own sake?
AS: Indeterminacy is not a lack of meaning, it’s the presence of multiple meanings held in tension. I aim for what I’d call confident incompleteness. Each piece offers enough clarity to carry intention, but not so much that it forecloses interpretation.
This isn’t vagueness, it’s precision directed toward multiplicity. Form that’s over-explained becomes inert. I want it to breathe.
DVM: You’ve described elegance not as restraint, but as the calibration of contradiction. But doesn’t that veer dangerously close to preciousness?
AS: Elegance is often misunderstood. It’s not reduction, it’s alignment. A form becomes elegant when opposing logics coexist without resolution.The Comma table is an example. It isn’t seamless, it’s precise in how it holds internal contradiction. The body finds comfort, but the form remains alert. Elegance, when it functions well, doesn’t lull, it intensifies attention.
DVM: If you had to distill your work into a sentence, what is your project?
AS: To treat form as negotiation, not conclusion. To stage hesitation as a method. To allow space to think itself through.
DVM: Let’s move to material. Your objects are often materially dense, bronze, hardwood, resin. Yet the forms suggest instability. Why that tension between mass and suggestion?
AS: Because mass doesn’t neutralize instability, it amplifies it.
Bronze, for instance, isn’t just a material, it’s a cultural index. It’s slow, heavy, resistant. It imposes a certain temporality on the process. To work in bronze is to accept difficulty as part of the language.With hardwood, the resistance is structural. You don’t impose a line onto grain, you negotiate with it. That negotiation becomes visible in the form. The tension is folded into the final result.
I’m not interested in surfaces that conceal labor, I’m interested in forms that carry their own making.
DVM: So the form isn’t applied to the material, it emerges from contesting it?
AS: Precisely. I’m not chasing smoothness. Smoothness erases struggle. I want forms that register their own difficulty, that appear as if they barely held together. Not inevitable, but contingent.
DVM: And what about perception? Loop, for example, fractures visually as you move around it. Is that destabilization deliberate?
AS: It is. But not as a trick.
I don’t design optical effects, I design perceptual latency. The goal is to delay immediate recognition, to interrupt automatic legibility. I want you to misread the object, then return to it, then see differently.A form that gives itself away at first glance has already stopped thinking. I want the work to unfold across time.
DVM: That sounds like an ethic. Is your work moral?
AS: It’s methodological, but there is an ethics in it. To resist legibility is to trust the intelligence of the user. To refuse instant recognition is to value patience.Architecture today is too often calibrated for consumption. I want my work to hold something back. That’s a different kind of generosity.
DVM: What does that look like in teaching?
AS: I teach perception before composition. We begin with fragments, a line, a surface, a junction. We observe, we read, then we distort.The goal is not self-expression, it’s structural experimentation. We treat form as syntax. The studio becomes a place to construct legible and illegible relations. Not projects, but propositions.Success is when a student begins to draw questions, not conclusions.
DVM: Much of this has revolved around objects. But what happens when you scale up? When the work takes on program, site, infrastructure?
AS: I don’t draw a line between object and building. I see it as a shift in density. The logics remain, hesitation, calibration, misalignment. What changes is consequence.Architecture must sustain behavior, but it can still destabilize typology. It can still displace program. A building doesn’t need to confirm its role, it can test it.
DVM: Would you call your work anti-typological?
AS: No. I work with typology the way a poet works with grammar, to bend, to fracture, to find new resonance.A corridor that thickens into a room. A stair that detours. A facade that folds just beyond its logic. These are not flourishes, they are spatial tactics that refuse resolution.
DVM: But architecture is inhabited. Over time, ambiguity wears thin. How do you account for that?
AS: Precisely by designing for the return. The work must shift as the user does. That’s the only way to remain alive.I don’t design for the first glance. I design for the second, the fifth, the twentieth. A space should not exhaust itself in a single encounter.
DVM: So you reject the architectural event?
AS: I distrust spectacle. I prefer the interval. The space between actions, where memory, fatigue, sound accumulate. That’s where architecture lives.
DVM: You speak of authorship differently. What does that mean in pedagogy?
AS: I teach calibration. How to listen. How to draw silence. We don’t start with concepts, we begin with tension. The studio becomes a laboratory for incompleteness.Students aren’t asked to master style, they’re asked to construct systems that remain slightly ajar.
DVM: Is this work political?
AS: Absolutely. To refuse resolution is political. To demand attention is political. Every choice, what to show, what to withhold, what to delay, is charged.The building that inserts a pause into a street. The wall that resists symmetry. The room that misaligns with expectation. These are spatial arguments. They recalibrate perception. They interrupt habit. That’s a form of resistance.
DVM: So you’re still invested in architecture, not just what comes after it?
AS: Completely. But I see it as a discipline under pressure. It needs to deform in order to think.I believe architecture can carry ambiguity as structure, that it can host contradiction without collapse. I want to hold that possibility open.
DVM: What comes next?
AS: Not arrival, threshold. I want to move toward forms that resist mastery. Buildings that hesitate. Infrastructures that blur. Installations that whisper rather than declare.The work should remain slightly misaligned with its time. That’s how it stays alert.
DVM: And finally, if you had to name it, your architecture, your position, what would you call it?
AS: A discipline of unfinished sentences. A practice of calibration. A spatial ethics of refusal.
UNFINISHED SENTENCES
On Beauty, Elegance, Form, Legacy, and the Architecture of Modulation
Dieter V. Meyer: Rather than summarizing where we left off, I’d like to pick up with something more immediate. Let’s begin with Zaha. You’ve made a point of distancing yourself from that lineage, but clearly there’s a connection. What, precisely, do you carry forward? And at what point do you begin to diverge?
Arya Safavi: Zaha gave me a language, one which i tried to learn but I at some poiinted I lost the interest in completing her sentence. What I’ve retained isn’t a catalogue of forms, but a sensibility, a way of treating form as a mode of thinking rather than decoration. Her early axonometrics didn’t depict buildings, they constructed architectural episodes. Those drawings weren’t representational, they were strategic. They used projection as a weapon.
But if she taught me how to speak, I’ve become more interested in mispronunciation. Where her lines sought fluency, mine seek friction. I borrow the syntax, but shift the grammar.
Her project was oriented toward the future, toward a continuous acceleration. I’ve grown more invested in interruption. I’m less concerned with reaching the future than with thickening the present. I want form to stutter, to delay, to resist propulsion.
DVM: So you don’t view parametricism as a natural evolution of her work?
AS: Parametricism, as a formal ideology, systematizes what was once speculative. It transforms variation into command. Zaha’s early work untethered form from typology, and space from function. Patrik’s framework reterritorialized that rupture into legibility. The fold became syntax, it became grammar, not disruption.
My work returns to the fold not as a continuity, but as an open wound. I’m not pursuing seamlessness. I’m drawn to forms that hold contradiction without collapsing. Conditional coherence, structures that hum with internal friction. I don’t design for resolution, I design for resonance.
DVM: That description maps onto your Loop Bench. You’ve called it a temporal diagram. Why has time become such a central structure in your work?
AS: Because time is the one condition that form cannot exclude. The Loop Bench is composed of two asymmetrical loops, past and future, joined not by a hinge but by a delay. The thickened center doesn’t reconcile the loops, it holds them apart. That spatial tension is what gives the piece its temporal intensity.
We tend to design for permanence, but permanence is a fiction. I prefer suspension, a condition just before collapse or transformation. A form that leans forward, but doesn’t fall. Design, for me, is less about resolution than about learning how to hesitate.
DVM: There’s a choreography in all your projects, Slide, Comma, the V-Y-X series. Are these objects or performances?
AS: They are instruments, spatial instruments that anticipate behavior rather than dictate it.Slide isn’t a solution to seating. It’s a grammar for adjacency. Each configuration is a sentence written in space. The user becomes its co-author.Comma, by contrast, isn’t about movement, it’s about the pause. A comma doesn’t conclude a thought, it slows it. The table does the same. It holds the room open, long enough for thinking to gather.The V-Y-X pieces are different still. They’re not forks in the road because they demand a decision, they propose divergence. They spatialize indeterminacy. Arrangement becomes a form of speculation.
DVM: But does this openness ever become too diffuse? Does your work risk ambiguity for its own sake?
AS: Indeterminacy is not a lack of meaning, it’s the presence of multiple meanings held in tension. I aim for what I’d call confident incompleteness. Each piece offers enough clarity to carry intention, but not so much that it forecloses interpretation.
This isn’t vagueness, it’s precision directed toward multiplicity. Form that’s over-explained becomes inert. I want it to breathe.
DVM: You’ve described elegance not as restraint, but as the calibration of contradiction. But doesn’t that veer dangerously close to preciousness?
AS: Elegance is often misunderstood. It’s not reduction, it’s alignment. A form becomes elegant when opposing logics coexist without resolution.The Comma table is an example. It isn’t seamless, it’s precise in how it holds internal contradiction. The body finds comfort, but the form remains alert. Elegance, when it functions well, doesn’t lull, it intensifies attention.
DVM: If you had to distill your work into a sentence, what is your project?
AS: To treat form as negotiation, not conclusion. To stage hesitation as a method. To allow space to think itself through.
DVM: Let’s move to material. Your objects are often materially dense, bronze, hardwood, resin. Yet the forms suggest instability. Why that tension between mass and suggestion?
AS: Because mass doesn’t neutralize instability, it amplifies it.
Bronze, for instance, isn’t just a material, it’s a cultural index. It’s slow, heavy, resistant. It imposes a certain temporality on the process. To work in bronze is to accept difficulty as part of the language.With hardwood, the resistance is structural. You don’t impose a line onto grain, you negotiate with it. That negotiation becomes visible in the form. The tension is folded into the final result.
I’m not interested in surfaces that conceal labor, I’m interested in forms that carry their own making.
DVM: So the form isn’t applied to the material, it emerges from contesting it?
AS: Precisely. I’m not chasing smoothness. Smoothness erases struggle. I want forms that register their own difficulty, that appear as if they barely held together. Not inevitable, but contingent.
DVM: And what about perception? Loop, for example, fractures visually as you move around it. Is that destabilization deliberate?
AS: It is. But not as a trick.
I don’t design optical effects, I design perceptual latency. The goal is to delay immediate recognition, to interrupt automatic legibility. I want you to misread the object, then return to it, then see differently.A form that gives itself away at first glance has already stopped thinking. I want the work to unfold across time.
DVM: That sounds like an ethic. Is your work moral?
AS: It’s methodological, but there is an ethics in it. To resist legibility is to trust the intelligence of the user. To refuse instant recognition is to value patience.Architecture today is too often calibrated for consumption. I want my work to hold something back. That’s a different kind of generosity.
DVM: What does that look like in teaching?
AS: I teach perception before composition. We begin with fragments, a line, a surface, a junction. We observe, we read, then we distort.The goal is not self-expression, it’s structural experimentation. We treat form as syntax. The studio becomes a place to construct legible and illegible relations. Not projects, but propositions.Success is when a student begins to draw questions, not conclusions.
DVM: Much of this has revolved around objects. But what happens when you scale up? When the work takes on program, site, infrastructure?
AS: I don’t draw a line between object and building. I see it as a shift in density. The logics remain, hesitation, calibration, misalignment. What changes is consequence.Architecture must sustain behavior, but it can still destabilize typology. It can still displace program. A building doesn’t need to confirm its role, it can test it.
DVM: Would you call your work anti-typological?
AS: No. I work with typology the way a poet works with grammar, to bend, to fracture, to find new resonance.A corridor that thickens into a room. A stair that detours. A facade that folds just beyond its logic. These are not flourishes, they are spatial tactics that refuse resolution.
DVM: But architecture is inhabited. Over time, ambiguity wears thin. How do you account for that?
AS: Precisely by designing for the return. The work must shift as the user does. That’s the only way to remain alive.I don’t design for the first glance. I design for the second, the fifth, the twentieth. A space should not exhaust itself in a single encounter.
DVM: So you reject the architectural event?
AS: I distrust spectacle. I prefer the interval. The space between actions, where memory, fatigue, sound accumulate. That’s where architecture lives.
DVM: You speak of authorship differently. What does that mean in pedagogy?
AS: I teach calibration. How to listen. How to draw silence. We don’t start with concepts, we begin with tension. The studio becomes a laboratory for incompleteness.Students aren’t asked to master style, they’re asked to construct systems that remain slightly ajar.
DVM: Is this work political?
AS: Absolutely. To refuse resolution is political. To demand attention is political. Every choice, what to show, what to withhold, what to delay, is charged.The building that inserts a pause into a street. The wall that resists symmetry. The room that misaligns with expectation. These are spatial arguments. They recalibrate perception. They interrupt habit. That’s a form of resistance.
DVM: So you’re still invested in architecture, not just what comes after it?
AS: Completely. But I see it as a discipline under pressure. It needs to deform in order to think.I believe architecture can carry ambiguity as structure, that it can host contradiction without collapse. I want to hold that possibility open.
DVM: What comes next?
AS: Not arrival, threshold. I want to move toward forms that resist mastery. Buildings that hesitate. Infrastructures that blur. Installations that whisper rather than declare.The work should remain slightly misaligned with its time. That’s how it stays alert.
DVM: And finally, if you had to name it, your architecture, your position, what would you call it?
AS: A discipline of unfinished sentences. A practice of calibration. A spatial ethics of refusal.
UNFINISHED SENTENCES
On Beauty, Elegance, Form, Legacy, and the Architecture of Modulation
Dieter V. Meyer: Rather than summarizing where we left off, I’d like to pick up with something more immediate. Let’s begin with Zaha. You’ve made a point of distancing yourself from that lineage, but clearly there’s a connection. What, precisely, do you carry forward? And at what point do you begin to diverge?
Arya Safavi: Zaha gave me a language, one which i tried to learn but I at some poiinted I lost the interest in completing her sentence. What I’ve retained isn’t a catalogue of forms, but a sensibility, a way of treating form as a mode of thinking rather than decoration. Her early axonometrics didn’t depict buildings, they constructed architectural episodes. Those drawings weren’t representational, they were strategic. They used projection as a weapon.
But if she taught me how to speak, I’ve become more interested in mispronunciation. Where her lines sought fluency, mine seek friction. I borrow the syntax, but shift the grammar.
Her project was oriented toward the future, toward a continuous acceleration. I’ve grown more invested in interruption. I’m less concerned with reaching the future than with thickening the present. I want form to stutter, to delay, to resist propulsion.
DVM: So you don’t view parametricism as a natural evolution of her work?
AS: Parametricism, as a formal ideology, systematizes what was once speculative. It transforms variation into command. Zaha’s early work untethered form from typology, and space from function. Patrik’s framework reterritorialized that rupture into legibility. The fold became syntax, it became grammar, not disruption.
My work returns to the fold not as a continuity, but as an open wound. I’m not pursuing seamlessness. I’m drawn to forms that hold contradiction without collapsing. Conditional coherence, structures that hum with internal friction. I don’t design for resolution, I design for resonance.
DVM: That description maps onto your Loop Bench. You’ve called it a temporal diagram. Why has time become such a central structure in your work?
AS: Because time is the one condition that form cannot exclude. The Loop Bench is composed of two asymmetrical loops, past and future, joined not by a hinge but by a delay. The thickened center doesn’t reconcile the loops, it holds them apart. That spatial tension is what gives the piece its temporal intensity.
We tend to design for permanence, but permanence is a fiction. I prefer suspension, a condition just before collapse or transformation. A form that leans forward, but doesn’t fall. Design, for me, is less about resolution than about learning how to hesitate.
DVM: There’s a choreography in all your projects, Slide, Comma, the V-Y-X series. Are these objects or performances?
AS: They are instruments, spatial instruments that anticipate behavior rather than dictate it.Slide isn’t a solution to seating. It’s a grammar for adjacency. Each configuration is a sentence written in space. The user becomes its co-author.Comma, by contrast, isn’t about movement, it’s about the pause. A comma doesn’t conclude a thought, it slows it. The table does the same. It holds the room open, long enough for thinking to gather.The V-Y-X pieces are different still. They’re not forks in the road because they demand a decision, they propose divergence. They spatialize indeterminacy. Arrangement becomes a form of speculation.
DVM: But does this openness ever become too diffuse? Does your work risk ambiguity for its own sake?
AS: Indeterminacy is not a lack of meaning, it’s the presence of multiple meanings held in tension. I aim for what I’d call confident incompleteness. Each piece offers enough clarity to carry intention, but not so much that it forecloses interpretation.
This isn’t vagueness, it’s precision directed toward multiplicity. Form that’s over-explained becomes inert. I want it to breathe.
DVM: You’ve described elegance not as restraint, but as the calibration of contradiction. But doesn’t that veer dangerously close to preciousness?
AS: Elegance is often misunderstood. It’s not reduction, it’s alignment. A form becomes elegant when opposing logics coexist without resolution.The Comma table is an example. It isn’t seamless, it’s precise in how it holds internal contradiction. The body finds comfort, but the form remains alert. Elegance, when it functions well, doesn’t lull, it intensifies attention.
DVM: If you had to distill your work into a sentence, what is your project?
AS: To treat form as negotiation, not conclusion. To stage hesitation as a method. To allow space to think itself through.
DVM: Let’s move to material. Your objects are often materially dense, bronze, hardwood, resin. Yet the forms suggest instability. Why that tension between mass and suggestion?
AS: Because mass doesn’t neutralize instability, it amplifies it.
Bronze, for instance, isn’t just a material, it’s a cultural index. It’s slow, heavy, resistant. It imposes a certain temporality on the process. To work in bronze is to accept difficulty as part of the language.With hardwood, the resistance is structural. You don’t impose a line onto grain, you negotiate with it. That negotiation becomes visible in the form. The tension is folded into the final result.
I’m not interested in surfaces that conceal labor, I’m interested in forms that carry their own making.
DVM: So the form isn’t applied to the material, it emerges from contesting it?
AS: Precisely. I’m not chasing smoothness. Smoothness erases struggle. I want forms that register their own difficulty, that appear as if they barely held together. Not inevitable, but contingent.
DVM: And what about perception? Loop, for example, fractures visually as you move around it. Is that destabilization deliberate?
AS: It is. But not as a trick.
I don’t design optical effects, I design perceptual latency. The goal is to delay immediate recognition, to interrupt automatic legibility. I want you to misread the object, then return to it, then see differently.A form that gives itself away at first glance has already stopped thinking. I want the work to unfold across time.
DVM: That sounds like an ethic. Is your work moral?
AS: It’s methodological, but there is an ethics in it. To resist legibility is to trust the intelligence of the user. To refuse instant recognition is to value patience.Architecture today is too often calibrated for consumption. I want my work to hold something back. That’s a different kind of generosity.
DVM: What does that look like in teaching?
AS: I teach perception before composition. We begin with fragments, a line, a surface, a junction. We observe, we read, then we distort.The goal is not self-expression, it’s structural experimentation. We treat form as syntax. The studio becomes a place to construct legible and illegible relations. Not projects, but propositions.Success is when a student begins to draw questions, not conclusions.
DVM: Much of this has revolved around objects. But what happens when you scale up? When the work takes on program, site, infrastructure?
AS: I don’t draw a line between object and building. I see it as a shift in density. The logics remain, hesitation, calibration, misalignment. What changes is consequence.Architecture must sustain behavior, but it can still destabilize typology. It can still displace program. A building doesn’t need to confirm its role, it can test it.
DVM: Would you call your work anti-typological?
AS: No. I work with typology the way a poet works with grammar, to bend, to fracture, to find new resonance.A corridor that thickens into a room. A stair that detours. A facade that folds just beyond its logic. These are not flourishes, they are spatial tactics that refuse resolution.
DVM: But architecture is inhabited. Over time, ambiguity wears thin. How do you account for that?
AS: Precisely by designing for the return. The work must shift as the user does. That’s the only way to remain alive.I don’t design for the first glance. I design for the second, the fifth, the twentieth. A space should not exhaust itself in a single encounter.
DVM: So you reject the architectural event?
AS: I distrust spectacle. I prefer the interval. The space between actions, where memory, fatigue, sound accumulate. That’s where architecture lives.
DVM: You speak of authorship differently. What does that mean in pedagogy?
AS: I teach calibration. How to listen. How to draw silence. We don’t start with concepts, we begin with tension. The studio becomes a laboratory for incompleteness.Students aren’t asked to master style, they’re asked to construct systems that remain slightly ajar.
DVM: Is this work political?
AS: Absolutely. To refuse resolution is political. To demand attention is political. Every choice, what to show, what to withhold, what to delay, is charged.The building that inserts a pause into a street. The wall that resists symmetry. The room that misaligns with expectation. These are spatial arguments. They recalibrate perception. They interrupt habit. That’s a form of resistance.
DVM: So you’re still invested in architecture, not just what comes after it?
AS: Completely. But I see it as a discipline under pressure. It needs to deform in order to think.I believe architecture can carry ambiguity as structure, that it can host contradiction without collapse. I want to hold that possibility open.
DVM: What comes next?
AS: Not arrival, threshold. I want to move toward forms that resist mastery. Buildings that hesitate. Infrastructures that blur. Installations that whisper rather than declare.The work should remain slightly misaligned with its time. That’s how it stays alert.
DVM: And finally, if you had to name it, your architecture, your position, what would you call it?
AS: A discipline of unfinished sentences. A practice of calibration. A spatial ethics of refusal.