Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That seemed to be… Franz
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Staples: Bruce Stark came to our office when we were still on Capitol Hill, he happened to be in the neighborhood. They had called for portfolios. Thelen: He happened to be in the neighborhood of Washington, DC, Capitol Hill from Johannesburg. Staples: He was in Hungary. Thelen: Oh, he was in Hungary, right on the way, Capitol Hill. Charles: We thought he was interviewing other people in the United States. It turns out it was not, the three firms he was looking at was us here, one in Japan and one in England. I think they had already decided that the Japanese one, the whole culture shock would not work, even though they liked what some of the final designs were that they had seen. So he was kind of coming with a proposal to work with us, but we did not find it out until about four in the afternoon. Terrific location. We said earlier, you have got a project in Vietnam all the rest of this I will ignore . Thelen: Conversely, if it is Detroit. Charles: Detroit is good, but it has to be a good project. Thelen: What’s not good? Staples: Palm Springs, the Annendale project. That had several things about it. Charles: I cannot really say there is an awful location, but terrific location we will try. If it is a great interesting project in a potentially uninteresting location, we would go for the interesting project. Staples: This Annendale thing is an interesting case in point, we interviewed or were interviewed. The concept was to turn the residence that they had in Palm Springs into a conference center. They had lots of art, which they had donated to lots of museums. Charles: The Met primarily. Staples: They were going to put reproductions in the house of the art that they had given away. There were three or four levels of administrative hoops that we had to jump through. Charles: This was where you did not have any control of your final solutions. Staples: We finally ended up saying no thank you. The project ended up being sixty million dollars. Charles: I do not know what all they finally did, we have just seen it written up. At that point, they were only open to thirty-five people a week or something. Staples: It was ludicrous. Charles: It was a tax boon doggle. Staples: It was just ludicrous, there was too much money there and too little payoff. What they were trying to do is get tax break on this property that the Annenbergs had that was designed by Quincey Jones, an architect. Charles: I think, Mrs. Annenberg really wanted this to happen and they were trying to honor her legacy. Staples: It just got - it is too bad. They could have put that money to better use other places. Charles: So that is my little list. Thelen: Do you think at some point you folks got a reputation, certain strengths? Charles: Difficult. Thelen: You had a reputation for difficult, what kind of difficult? Charles: Asking too many questions, asking… Thelen: Wanting to control the project too much. Staples: We wanted to be accurate and accuracy, some people means time and money, they will not go away until you answer the question. Charles: I was called difficult, also early on we were considered expensive. I do not think we are considered expensive now. I think particularly initially when there were not many people working in the museum world and somebody on a salary would say they are getting paid x-y-z which is a high number and has no idea about the overhead of an office and the staff members and all the costs of running an office. Staples: In this town there are a lot of federally employed designers and they often do things on the side. Charles: Freelance. Staples: So they are undercutting you, so to speak, because they do not have the overhead you have, the office to maintain. They do it in their garage or whatever. Then we become considered expensive because the people in the museums do not buy anything to speak of. And you tell them how much it is going to cost, they say, “oh my gosh, three thousand dollars for a case, I can get one for seven hundred dollars.” Charles: I think also for the amount of time for really trying to care for the content and the design. We may well put more time in at a higher level. If we are going to build principal hours versus staff hours they inherently cost more money at a higher rate. As they say, I think maybe back in the seventies or early eighties we would have been at the higher end of pay scales, then say other firms like Ralph Applebom are way beyond us I am sure and certainly what Ralph personally would charge. I do not think that we are considered necessarily expensive, although if we cannot and will not bid a job on a financial basis because we will not get it. If they are going to get low bid then it means they do not really care about the quality and that is fine, go for low bid, but do not ask us to bid. Thelen: Can you control that before you start? Charles: You can read the RFP… Thelen: And what are the signals? Charles: If it says low bid is going to get it. Staples: I mean, when you get an RFP and it talks about all these interactive devices they want in their thing and they have got a hundred thousand dollars, you know right away, you cannot do all this for that. If you cannot do the building for that, then what are you going to do for the design, you are going to ask for twenty five thousand dollars. Charles: That is another way if the whole budget seems out of proportion to the scale of the project they are looking for, it means they are looking for kind of a quick and dirty solution. Thelen:So you can tell that when you first… Staples: Sometimes. Charles: You try and sniff around, you try and talk to people on the phone, try and see if people will tell you their budget. A lot of people try to play it so close to the vest, I think, in fact, that is not smart. Most of these people starting a project know what a budget is. It would be better, but they do not do it, some do and in fact if a client was saying,” I have got three hundred thousand to build it, I have one hundred thousand to apply to design or four hundred thousand to build it, a hundred thousand to apply to design. This is the brief, this is what we are looking for, tell me what you are going to do for that.” They would really make the judgment on what they are going to get for their money, rather than how much is it costing them. Thelen: That would seem like a good, would not it? Charles: I think it would be a very logical way, but you do not get that very often. Sometimes you can kind of get an overall sense of what the budget might be. There is a sense somehow, again I think because of this whole secretive bid process that started happening. The client ought to be secretive and try to get the people bidding to present everything, but it is hard to put together a really good package for the bid. This is like a mini-marriage, a short term mini-marriage, both sides need to get to know each other. Some people running these bid processes think that only they need to know you, you do not need to know them. Thelen: Have there been any, have you experienced any place, any bid process where you could collaborate? Charles: I think Marica Gallagher on Views of the Vanishing Frontier when she picked two or three firms and was willing to give five thousand to try out ideas and we could call her up and ask questions. She got a very good sense of what it would be like to work with any of us, plus the museum can say they own the ideas, that they have bought those. Nobody could come back and say, “you stole my idea because I used it in a presentation.” Marcia was great that way. Staples: We did many projects with her. One of the nice things our past is that we have had a few clients over and over and over again. Thelen: That must be very gratifying. Charles: It is, it is great. Staples: It is. You develop friendship as well as cooperation. Charles: Coke we did a lot of stuff. Staples: Chicago history. Charles: Chicago history we did a lot. Now Monticello, hopefully Montpellier. No these are nice projects. But these closed bids are difficult. We going through one now for American Revolution Center. Staples: In Philadelphia. Charles: We made it to the final four, but we do not know. Staples: July is not here yet. Thelen: But soon. Charles: Yes, supposedly we will find out, but they’ve been very close to the vest and you respond to an email marked design. Thelen: Do you know whose paying for it? Charles: No, not really. There are some funders, but they do not have all their money. We do not know who the other three are. One email let the other names came through, only once. You can look at that and see who they were first talking to. And I know through the grapevine some people who are not in anymore, but I have not been able to figure out who is in. the five architects do know who they are because they had to go to a site meeting. I think it is unfair that the architects know and we do not. Thelen: Woah, that’s amazing. Charles: That would be an interesting case study, just of the process and so on. Staples: That was one that we had to do a reasonable amount of work to make the presentation that we did make. Charles: Well all of these presentations take a hell of a lot of work. They put a challenge to each of us, which was very interesting. Thelen: Which was? Charles: They own George Washington’s tent, or one of his tents. You had two hours and they wanted you to present one hour about yourself and how you would work with them, how you would stay on budget and all of that. The other hour was how would you present George Washington’s tent. So we did a lot of work on that. It is huge, just the scale and the building. What do you do for conservation? Staples: It is not so huge, it is like an elephant, just bigger than a breadbox. Conservation-wise it is not structurally sound, light-wise you cannot expose it to light much. You cannot go in it because of issues. Charles: I think we made a mistake, we did not make one of these booklets. We were very late getting it all together. We did a verbal presentation with a PowerPoint, but the screen was little and so on. I wish we had been able to leave a booklet in hindsight. We sort of went home at four AM and got in the car at seven so. It was worse the second round. The first round you just had to do the beauty pageant. Then we made it to eight. I thought, we are never going to get it. You know we are selling our house, all this stuff is going on, this was all this spring. I do not think I started what I had to turn in until Wednesday, and it was due at noon on Friday. I missed FedEx on Thursday night, I worked until like four or five in the morning. I went home and got on an eight o’clock train to Philadelphia and hand delivered it. I almost gave up saying, “we are not going to make it so why flagellate yourself?” But then we made the cut. Thelen: In this kind of a case, other people have bid, other people have sent them ideas. You have not seen those ideas, but they have. Have you ever run into the case where they say, we liked what you were doing on A, B and C but look what this other competitor said on E? Can you adapt to that or when I hire you, do I hire only your work or do I hire the chance that you might engage what a competitor has actually done? Or you might not know it, but the client will say, I wonder what would happen if you turned the tent upside down as one of your competitors might have suggested? Charles: I do not know that I can think of a… Thelen: If it were me and I am hiring… Staples: It is not very moral, I do not think to pick two pieces out of thing and put them together. Thelen: But if you have a plumbing problem and you ask two plumbers to come or carpenters or something. I would handle it by doing this way or I would handle it by doing that way, I do not know maybe I am just an immoral person, but I would say to one what the other had suggested and say, why is your idea better? Charles: I think it happens, there is no question… Thelen: You just do not know it? Charles: We might not know it. I do not remember ever being shown somebody else’s proposal. Thelen: Well you never know where they might have come up with it. I do not want to makes this… Charles: It is pretty rare that, I think we were saying earlier maybe, doing the drawings for the tent, that was a rare experience of having to do a design thing for a competition that was a real design problem without being paid. The Yale one was our choice to do the whole pogo panel without being paid. It is not often in our experience that you are asked to do some kind of design upfront or if you are that should be another thing on the list, sounds like a project to avoid like the plague, except we are now going to do it for Singapore because it would be fun to go back to Singapore, or Vietnam maybe. Staples: It is cheaper to take a vacation to go there. Charles: That is what Bob has always said. Thelen: So do you get a reputation, you were talking about being difficult and being expensive. What about other designers, Applebom, and say, “well I have this sort of impression of what his outfit does, what they do well, what they do not so well, what they do similar to what we would do?” You in a world of other people… Staples: Do we plagiarize are you saying? Thelen: No, just the opposite. What is it like to be in a world where there are people who are doing similar work, in fact you are maybe competing with from time to time, but you think have a certain kind of strength or think you have a certain kind of strength or weakness. Staples: I do not know how to say anything about that. Thelen: How do you think you are viewed, let us try it this way. Do you think if we got some other designers in here, oh there is those guys they tend to be good at this or not so good at that? Staples: I would be afraid to be critiqued by others, I guess. Charles: I think…I think we are respected for very very careful design. There is a book around here. Staples: We have a friend, Harold Scramstein, who started at Smithsonian, went to Chicago we did several project for him. Thelen: I do, he is the reason that the book Presence of the Past got written because he was on the NEH council. Staples: You know how he is a very very thoughtful and wonderful friend. We have had many years of family-ish friendship with him. He is, once he left Chicago and he still dabbling in the museum world we have never had any contact with him. Charles: That is not true. He left Chicago and went to Henry Ford and we did Popular Mechanics at Henry Ford. Staples: Okay, I beg your pardon. Charles: And he did recommend us for the Jewish Museum in Philadelphia initially. So he has recommended us for things. But not for some projects we would have liked him to recommend us for. Thelen: So what so you make of that? Staples: I do not know how to answer that question. I mean, maybe he feels that he served his time and does not need more pain, but he’s now out of the business I believe, officially. We have never discussed it with him. Charles: Our friendship is too dear, so we do not want to discuss it with him. Thelen: I can see that. Do you have any friends, well do you see him in the field of design? Staples: He was an administrator. Charles: He was a client who became a very dear friend. Thelen: I mean do you have some friends within the field itself. Staples: Yes, Phillip… Charles: Well, Ben. Well, Phillip Brady who worked for us. Staples:For nine years. Charles: Has a small office in Washington. Ben Lawless who we have talked about. Ben jokes that he is our founder because he found us. He works a lot with a guy named Jerry Osterhold. Once Ben left the museum he started doing freelance work and he did a job out at Boystown in Omaha and Jerry was young designer in Kansa City who worked on that project with Ben, so Ben does a lot of work with Jerry. I would consider Jerry a friend, very much so and Ben. Staples: Well certainly Jerry is a competition to us. Charles: A competitor. Staples: I do not think Ben is, he’s been a consultant to us several times. Charles: On SAB for example. Staples: And on Coke. Some great times with Coke on that stuff. Charles: I think Jerry is probably the only one that we would day is a good friend who we also compete against. I am always amazed Jerry finds out about jobs I never even know are out that. It is much more out looking for things. We are much more reactive of people looking for us. Thelen: That is an interesting distinction. Charles: I think that is because we started with people coming to us and we have never gotten used to the fact that we have to work hard to get jobs. Staples: We ran an ad once in the Museum News or something like that. Charles: Yes, the AAM. We ran it in 1977, only ad we have ever run. Staples: And we listed all the projects that we had done around Washington. Charles: And what these projects have in common. And we had a cute little Uncle Sam toy that we owned, no other rights for anybody else. Federal city, Smithsonian, We the People – Smithsonian, America on Stage – Kennedy Center, a little asterisk and at the bottom it says “designed by Staples and Charles.” We spent seven hundred dollars that we did not have, full page. We got three responses. Somebody wanted a job. Somebody wanted a catalog for all the cases that we manufactured and the third which I think I found and it will go to AU was a letter from the legal counsel of the Smithsonian telling us we should not have used their name. Thelen: Oh my God. So much for advertising. Staples: We have not tried it ever since. Charles: And when people call us to do an ad, I tell them that story. Thelen: One other thing I wanted to ask about at this point. Maybe this is just a few minutes. Charles: We are fine, but you have to be downtown at seven you said. Thelen: When do I need to… Charles: Soon. Alright, it is almost six. Thelen: I do not know how long it takes. Charles: If we get you to Braddock Road by six-fifteen, six-twenty, you are going to have to change. Thelen: That is okay. Charles: You are going to Dupont, right? Thelen: No, I am going to the Portrait Gallery, Galleryplace. Charles: Oh that is easy, yellow line. Thelen: It has to do with when the field became one that had critical, formal criticism, obviously because of the Journal of American History was one of the first history journals to do that. I wonder how you experienced these people who were scholars. And I presume it was being reviewed in other… Charles: There was never much good review. If I would find the early, oh we had a great review. Oh, God. Thelen: That is right, well newspapers that is a good example. Charles: The only time our name I think has been in like the Washington Post for exhibition reasons, or maybe even any place, I do not know. Anyways, 1978 maybe, little exhibit, not much bigger than this room, Aspects of Art and Science. We had all these individual people, objects. It was based on a concept by Serril Stanley Smith I think I found the book the other day, out of MIT, about how discoveries of materials could then transform how objects got made. Staples: Some of the first uses of a material would be as an, well not as an art object… Charles: But some of it became art objects. Processes… Thelen: Using something for a different purpose. Charles: Or how you would be able to hammer a tool. Like a beautiful sword, the whole issue of understanding once people making Damascus swords or Japanese swords understand that the more they fold it and yield it, they can make it sharper and sharper and stronger. It is was those kind of examples of ah-ha moments in discoveries of materials. A great idea of how to install this. This was overdesigning. Staples: Again it was Ben Lawless who said, he asked us to do this show and he wanted a sparkling jewelbox. And it was several glass cases that existed in the Dimner Library foyer at American History. And these pieces were all different sizes and all different materials. There was nothing really, you might say, to hold them together other than this concept of materials. Charles: And they were arriving at the last minute, so you do not even know if the measurements you are getting are going to be right. Staples: The idea, we had little things and we had some pretty good sized things. You had some very early things coy Plates. I came with this idea of two aluminum tubes all of varying heights and varying diameters that these pieces would then be mounted on to be displayed. You would come into this gallery and there would be these objects sort of floating because the cases had a low base and we wanted them up at eye level. Charles: We could move it around once all the stuff was there. Maybe this one is better on this pole or this pole. It had a lot of merit. Staples: It had logic behind it. Charles: So anyway the place opens, Paul whatever his name, the art critic for the Washington Post comes. Thelen: So is that who they assigned, the art critics? Charles: In this case. He think, almost the last line in the review is, the exhibition was designed by a local firm, Staples and Charles, they have a lot to learn. Thelen: Woah. Wow. I cannot begin to imagine the thoughts. Charles: You are excited because you are name is in the newspaper, but then you are not so excited. Thelen: In a case like that, can you call. You have to take it. Charles: Turn the other cheek. Thelen: Turn the other cheek, right. I mean, did it have any effect. Do reviews have any effect? Charles: I think now somebody like Rothstein of the New York Times is really writing very insightful coverage. I do not know that it has effect to the extent of, oh I read about that show in Rothstein because he never says who designed. Occasionally he does, he actually mentioned Jerry. He has reviewed a number of our shows and always been very positive, but we have never been listed as having done them. But I think enough to put it in our booklet, a quote of positive comment from Rothstein to mean it is very high praise. 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