Michael Bell describes his work as developing out of a struggle against the constraints of linear time and our place within it. His work is about architecture’s ability to cohere and overcome linear readings of time. He discusses a project from 1989 that proposed a Topological Stoa” between East and West Berlin. He talks about the city of Houston. The center is relatively small and chaotic during the day and almost completely vacated at night. The downtown never quite grew to its potential, being belted in by the mid-city region, and paralyzed after the oil industry collapse in the 1980s. Bell describes how a period of investigating how things work instead of how they look led to a series of collages that are about duration. He talks about an upcoming exhibit at UC Berkeley where he plans to juxtapose his own work with paintings by Hans Hoffman. He hopes for a transformed visuality that would unify time and place in the contemporary city. He concludes by discussing a project for a 1992 Japan Architect competition, for which Rem Koolhaas wrote the brief asking for “a house with no style.”
