Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 29

THE CLEAN-UP CREW

Milstein Hall, an addition to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell designed by Rem Koolhaas, received an AIA Honor Award in 2013. The jury commented that “The dramatic insertion of the new program in relationship to the existing buildings and site creates exciting new conditions while posing a series of creative opportunities for future uses and artistic additions by the college.” I was in the building earlier this week to give a lecture, and I must admit that I was puzzled by the award. The boxy wing makes an awkward appendage to the old building. The Crown Hall-like studio seemed adequate if a little impersonal, although it raises the question—as Mies’s building does—of why a studio requires a column-free space, with the attendant structural complexity and cost. At $1,100 psf, Milstein is an expensive building, though the money does not appear to have been spent on details and materials, which are spartan. It was spent on a dramatic (the jury was right there) 48-foot cantilever that projects the building over the street—but to what end? Inside, there is a crit area in a cavelike space that, like most caves, has spectacular echoes. As for the auditorium, it was not a pleasant room in which to lecture. The seats are steeply raked, which is normally effective, but separated from the podium by a large flat area of seats, which acts as a sort of no-man’s land, since no student will sits there. Apparently the flat floor conceals a conference room (for the university board) that emerges from beneath at the push of a button. It’s hard to imagine that this was really the most convenient solution. Any more than designing an auditorium that is surrounded by glass walls. But then so much about this idiosyncratic building defies logic. “Typically, after Koolhaas finishes his design, a sort of clean-up crew comes in and sorts out the problems,” I was told. Maybe they should have gotten the award.

THE EVER-PRESENT PAST

McEvoy Ranch, Marc Appleton, architect.

I am speaking at an architectural conference in Charleston. The participants are architects who design custom houses, and many of the presentations highlght the difference between traditional and modern design, since so many custom houses fall into the first category. At one point, a member of the audience (somewhat impatiently) points out that if this were a meeting of fashion designers, or industrial designers, the distinction would not arise; the implication is that we would be discussing only “the latest thing.” Of course, I thought to myself, that’s because fashion and consumer products are so fleeting. There is no tradition of the laptop; when a new model come along, the old model is out of date, soon obsolete, finally discarded. The cars of our youth are long gone. What our grandparents were wearing a century ago is of no concern except to historians, it is what people are wearing today that interests us.  But houses have a useful life that is measured in centuries. Old houses are a part of the present. This means that domestic traditions change slowly. The symbolic hearth goes back to the Middle Ages; Americans have built porches of one kind or another ever since Mount Vernon; the front door has been a potent symbol for a long time. Old houses are cherished, so little wonder that for many people, building one’s house means participating in—and adding to—a long tradition.

DIGGING DEEP

Peter Pennoyer and Sam Roche have recently unveiled a counterproposal for expanding the New York Public library that preserves the stacks intact and extends the library underneath the Terrace in Bryant Park. Many will be caught up short by the architectural style of the addition which is as unlike the Foster + Partners proposal as oil and water. Critics of the Foster design likened its slick but characterless atmosphere to that of a chain bookstore. Well, the Pennoyer/Roch design certainly doesn’t look like a store, unless it is the late-lamented Scribners Bookstore on Fifth Avenue. More important is that the scheme shows a alternative strategy to enlarging Carrère & Hastings’ masterpiece. Building beneath the Terrace, and adding a floor to the existing stacks beneath the park itself, creates a total area for the entire library of 873,000 SF, compared to only 593,000 SF in the Foster scheme. This exceeds the current total area of the Schwarzman Building, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the Science, Industry and Business Library, and the Bryant Park Stacks (808,000 SF). The cancellation of the Foster proposal opens the door to more such innovative thinking.

ALL THAT JAZZ

B35 Lounge Chair
Marcel Breuer, des., Thonet, manf., 1928-29

I’ve been researching Marcel Breuer in connection with a new book. The 18-year-old Breuer started as an art student in Vienna, then transferred to the new Bauhaus in Weimar. He chose the woodworking program, and proved to be so talented in furniture design that after he graduated Walter Gropius invited him back to be the master of the woodworking shop. In one short period, 1925-30, Breuer designed some of the seminal modernist chairs of the twentieth century: the Wassily, the Cesca, the B35 lounge chair. During the 1930s, he started working as an architect, collaborating with F.R.S. Yorke in UK and Gropius in the US, and finally working on his own. What is striking is that Breuer moved so effortlessly from designing chairs to designing buildings. This is explained in two ways. Breuer had completely absorbed Gropius’s teaching that design was a universal discipline, that is, if you could design a teacup you could design a city. So having no formal training in building design or construction whatsoever (the Bauhaus did not teach architecture until long after Breuer was there), did not discourage him from undertaking building commissions. The second reason is that modernist architects were inventing as they went along; they did not rely on history, traditional construction, or conventional building practice. Hence, the lack of training was not a liability. Just as a tubular steel lounge chair had no precedent, so too a glass and concrete building was breaking new ground. It was all new.

Of course, such an improvised art could not last. By the late 1950s, as modernism became an academically entrenched discipline—instead of an avocation—it began to show signs of flagging. You can’t really teach improvisation, any more than you can teach jazz. Neither modern jazz nor modern architecture survived.

THE IKE MEMORIAL, CONT’D.

A New York Times story described a recent report of the House Natural Resources Committee criticizing the commission that is in charge of building the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C.  But the Times didn’t mention, as the Washington Post did, that the Congressional committee has not actually voted on the report, which was released by the Republican majority. Moreover, according to Martin Pederson, editor of Metropolis, the report is the work of a single staffer. The Times headline was Memorial Plan Called a ‘Five-Star Folly’. “If you read the Times account, you would have been led to the incorrect conclusion that the House Committee had called the Gehry design a ‘five-star folly,”” writes Pederson. “No, a subcommittee staffer with a clear ideological agenda crafted that epithet.”  The Times article has two interesting bits of information. According to the article “The report also criticizes the design selection process, asserting that the panel chose Mr. Gehry’s approach over the objections of the design jury, which had characterized his proposal as ‘mediocre.’” If true, this would be extremely unusual, and throws a poor light on the commission; it sounds like a canard to me. The Times also quoted a statement released by Frank Gehry that includes the revelation that “I personally have done all my design work pro bono.” Given all the opprobrium that has been heaped on Mr. Gehry, it is a touching admission.

NOT THE SAME

A month ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the current building boom in Bogotá. It described a planned luxury residential building designed by Richard Meier. Why import an architect from thousands of miles away, who has never built anything in that city? “One aspect of new construction is important to local buyers: no red brick. Exposed brick is so prevalent in Bogotá that many apartment buildings look the same.” Well, Mr. Meier’s building, which is white steel and glass, will certainly not “look the same.” Indeed, to my eye, it will likely stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. No doubt, other “not-the-same” buildings will follow, and soon this brick city (look at those wonderful buildings on the right side of the image above), will look like everywhere else.

A LIFE IN THREE ACTS

 

Photograph by Robert Damora, 1964.

An account of Paul Rudolph’s life would make a good opera—a tragedy. Act One. The provincial rube, son of an itinerant Methodist minister in the South, studies architecture in Alabama. He designs his first house at 22, and joins an office in Sarasota, of all places. Goes to Harvard, and studies at Gropius’s knee. The war interrupts. He returns to Sarasota, becomes a partner in the firm, and begins to design remarkable houses—as if Frank Lloyd Wright had attended the Bauhaus. He completes his Harvard degree and returns to Florida and continues to build. The houses are airy, light, delicate, romantic. Act Two. Rudolph acquires a national reputation. He designs an unbuilt embassy in Jordan, a campus building at Wellesley, and an office building in downtown Boston. All striking. He is appointed head of the architecture department at Yale, and builds the Art and Architecture Building—massive, concrete, brooding. Not Form Follows Function, but Form Follows Imagination. He leaves Yale to set up an office in New York. Act Three. It is the Age of Theories—postmodernism, populism, regionalism—but Rudolph is no theoretician; he is an artist. His romantic monumentalism appears outdated and he is left behind. The Yale building, increasingly unpopular with students, burns—perhaps arson— and in some undefinable way the architect is blamed. His commissions dry up. Rudolph continues to build in Singapore and Hong Kong, but he cannot recapture the old magic. He is forgotten. The curtain descends.

Until such an opera comes along, we have Timothy M. Rohan’s forthcoming The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (Yale University Press). The book shows Rudolph to have been an intensively private man, an introspective romantic, and while Rohan covers the work (although the photographs appear awfully flat to me), his subject never quite comes alive. Rudolph’s buildings, on the other hand sing out, forte fortissimo.

THE VIEW FROM DOWN HERE

VIA 4 (1980) included an interview with Michael Graves and essays by Tom Wolfe, James Ackermen, Robert A. M. Stern, and James Wines.

“The best metaphor for getting older,” Twittered Paul Goldberger recently, “all the hills are steeper, but the views are better.” That sounds about right, although from where I stand—and increasingly sit—the views are not always what they were. I was brought up on Sixties jazz, for example, and I can’t help but agree with with the late Frank Zappa’s pithy assessment, “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.” I remember when there was just one telephone company, you didn’t actually own your home phone, and it never, ever broke down. And I remember when cities were real places rather than tourist attractions. Oh, well. I thought about the good old days last week when I received a fat little journal called Thresholds, published by the MIT Department of Architecture. Student-edited architecture magazines are an old tradition—I co-founded one–Asterisk, or * as we insisted on calling it– when I was a student. We ran on a shoestring, typing stencils on a Selectric and running the pages off on a Gestetner machine; we silk-screened the covers ourselves. Thresholds is much plushier, 192 heavy stock pages, although the illustrations are in purple, for some reason, so they have the blurry quality of an early duplicating machine. The text is pretty blurry, too. “The individual human subject is the encultured bodily subject.” I’m not sure who wrote that since the magazine contains nothing as mundane as Author Bios. Like most architecture school magazines today, it is determined to write about anything except buildings, and to do so in as opaque prose as possible. I sighed, and set Thresholds aside. I have been reading an article in another student-edited journal, but from an earlier time. In researching a book, I came across the 1977 issue of VIA, which was published by architecture students of the University of Pennsylvania. The contributors included British historian John Summerson, the great observer of the vernacular landscape J. B. Jackson, Denise Scott Brown (the revised edition of Learning From Las Vegas had just appeared), and Henry Hope Reed, the granddaddy of the classical revival that was just around the corner. Also present were such relatively unseasoned architects as Tom Beeby, and Allan Greenberg, whose essay on eighteenth-century furniture I was consulting. The theme of the issue was Ornament, and the editor was Stephen Kieran, who would go on to found KieranTimberlake. The issues addressed were timely, the writing lucid, the presentation clear. I wonder if, in four decades, Thresholds will stand the test of time as successfully?

CITIES AND MEMORY

Núria Ferragutcasas, who is the US correspondent for the Catalan newspaper ARA, interviewed me about the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site at Ground Zero. Her last question—“What is your opinion about the new site as whole? Do you like the Memorial? Is it appropriate?”—prompted me to reflect further on the subject, so here is an expanded version of my answer.

Monument to the Great Fire of London

Cities have regularly suffered catastrophic events—plagues, floods, sieges, and fires—and have commemorated them in different ways. The Monument to the Great Fire of London, for example, designed by Christopher Wren, was erected only a decade after the fire. Designed by Christopher Wren, it’s a tall Doric column, topped by a gilded urn of fire. The column is 202 feet high (it is located 202 feet from where the fire started), but it does not occupy a large space and it takes its place in the city, allowing urban life to go on around it unimpeded. A good memorial doesn’t hector, it reminds—gently.

Trafalgar Square occupies a much larger space than the Great Fire monument. It commemorates a naval victory and the man responsible, yet it does so without hindering other uses, for the square also functions as an urban meeting place. It is the site of public celebrations, sports and musical events, political demonstrations, and public meetings. A giant tree is put up for Christmas; people play street hockey on Canada Day. None of this bothers Lord Nelson high up on his column, I am sure.

Trafalgar Square is about 6 acres; the memorial and open space at Ground Zero cover about 8 acres. But the memorial components at Ground Zero are so large and so assertive—all that cascading water!—that they overwhelm and suffocate their surroundings, which are permeated with an air of sombre piety. “The place doesn’t do much to celebrate the city’s values of energy, diversity, tolerance openness and debate,” wrote Michael Kimmelman recently in the New York Times. What was advertised as a park coexists uncomfortably with the memorial. Already we see posted “rules of behavior,” enforced by a police presence. That is not the way a city should work.

PUT IT BACK

EPA/Robert Perry

The tragic fire at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece, raises anew the question: How to rebuild? In a thoughtful blog, George Cairns of Melbourne’s RMIT, who has studied the building in detail, points out that many undocumented changes were made during the building’s construction, so it will be impossible to recreate what was there. In addition, the inevitable demands of modern fire security will likely alter the original design. Rather than try to rebuild Mackintosh’s design, Cairns argues for “great architects to be invited to design a worthy intervention that will breathe new life into the school.”

I’m not so sure. When the fifteenth-century canal facade of the Doge’s Palace was destroyed by fire in 1577, Palladio proposed rebuilding it in a Classical style, but he was over-ridden, and the original Venetian Gothic was restored. When John Soane’s Dulwych Picture Gallery was hit by a V-1 rocket during WWII, it was rebuilt exactly as it had been. In fact, the building had been altered several times since Soane’s death.

Buildings are not works of art, time changes them, alterations regularly take place, life has its way. What’s wrong with repairing damage? Even if it is not exactly as it was, it could be almost as it was, and a hundred years from now, the difference will not matter. Surely that is better than a “worthy intervention”?