Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 45

Extreme Makeover

 

Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church is located in Springdale, Arkansas. Its architect, Marlon Blackwell, told me the story. The congregation had bought a piece of land for their new church that included a three-truck metal garage. Having a very limited budget, the congregation asked him to convert the garage into a church. The unlikely result is an extremely  modest building that successfully confronts a neighboring interstate highway, accommodates the liturgical requirements of the Orthodox rite, and manages to create a strong architectural presence in the process. The exterior has shades of Tadao Ando’s Church of Light and Robert Venturi’s Fire Station Number Four, as well as a vaguely Corbusian canopy. What I liked most was the interior. The bare white walls, bathed by morning light coming through an east-facing transom turn out to be a perfect setting for the richly colored icons and traditional wall paintings of the sanctuary. An Orthodox church needs a dome, and in this one it is made from a recycled satellite dish inserted in the ceiling and adorned with an iconic image. Doing more with less.

 

Rough on Rudolph

Photo: Daniel Case

The New York Times article about the Paul Rudolph county government center in Goshen, N.Y. that is threatened with demolition, has fueled a keen (and since this is 2012, a rather rude) debate. Many conservationists' attitude to old buildings is that they should be treated like art, that is, carefully preserved. The problem is that buildings, unlike paintings, are fixed in place. Art that falls out of favor doesn't have to be destroyed, it can simply be taken out of the front room and put in the back, or in a museum's open storage, or ultimately in a suburban warehouse. It is available to be pulled out, if the need arises, that is if tastes change. One thinks of French pompier art of the late 19th century. It was popular—everything starts by being popular with whoever paid for it—then fell out of favor, then was resurrected (see the Musée d'Orsay). Musical compositions can be played, or not played, or rediscovered and played anew. But a building is a part of one's world, like it or not. It must be lived in and with. One argument is to err on the side of conservation, assuming that at some future time someone will see something that eludes us. Certainly was the case with Frank Furness, and with Rudolph today. But maintenance and change are an essential part of a building's life. A building that is unloved will have a hard time of it; it will not be taken care of, and it will be insensitively altered. Maybe Rudolph's building shouldn't be demolished, but should it be conserved?

The Art Police

 

The controversy over the future Eisenhower Memorial has involved many actors: congressmen and congressional subcommittees, the Eisenhower family, the National Civic Arts Society, the National Capital Planning Commission, and assorted political pundits. A small but influential body central to the process has received less public attention. The U. S. Commission of Fine Arts was the brainchild of Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham, who with Charles F. McKim, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick Law Olmsted was the author of the so-called McMillan Plan, which redesigned the monumental core of Washington, D.C. Burnham saw the need for an official body to oversee the implementation of the artistic aspects of the plan, and in 1910, Congress created the Commission of Fine Arts, with seven commissioners, chosen from qualified design professionals, to be appointed by the President for a period of four years. Although the  Commission reviews the design of all federal buildings in the District, as well as the design of coins and military medals, its chief responsibility is "to advise about the location of statues, fountains, and monuments in the public squares, streets, and parks of the District of Columbia . . . and upon the selection of artists for the execution of the same." In other words, a sort of art police.

[Full disclosure: I am completing my second term as a member of the CFA.]

Great Clients

Following a recent lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York, a D/Crit student asked me an interesting question. I had been speaking about the important role that a client can play in the architectural process, specifically how Robert Sainsbury had influenced a young Norman Foster—not least by commissioning him—in the design of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. But what about public clients, the student asked, could the public also be a great client? It is a good question. The history of architecture contains many examples of influential individual clients—Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier at both Ronchamp and La Tourette, Phyllis Lambert at the Seagram Building, Esa-Pekka Solonen at Disney Hall. But what about institutions? Can a bureaucratic committee interact creatively with an architect in something as intimate and personal as the design of a building? The answer, I guess is "not easily." The willingness to take a leap of faith, resist compromise, say no at the right time as well as yes, rethink a problem at the eleventh hour, and take a risk, requires an individual will. The case of Louis Kahn is instructive. His Richards Medical Building at the University of Pennsylvania is a needlessly complicated design that is compromised by being a functional failure. Yet only a few years later Kahn designed an outstanding laboratory building that has stood the test of time, both architecturally and functionally. Of course in La Jolla, Kahn worked not with a faceless university committee but with a great client—Jonas Salk.

Louis Kahn and Jonas Salk

Real and Unreal

My colleague Enrique Norten sent me a copy of TEN Arquitectos: The Limits of Form, which is hefty catalog of a retrospective exhibition of his firm's work on display (March 3 – June 4) at the Museo Amparo inPuebla, Mexico. Actually, judging from the illustrations in the book, there are no limits to the forms that have been explored by TEN Arquitectos; the catalog is a dizzying array of commercial and institutional projects, rectangular, angled, round, square, torqued, canted, and slightly askew. As architects tend to do, Norten has included unbuilt as well as built work. This follows a well-established tradition, in which unbuilt projects and built work are accorded equal importance. Indeed, the architectural profession regularly awards prizes for buildings before they are actually built (which is sort of like giving an Oscar to a shooting script). Paging through the Norten book can be unnerving, since digital representation has achieved such a high level of refinement that it is often impossible to tell the achieved from the imagined. The Guggenheim Museum in Guadalajara, for example, looks convincingly real, dappled shadows, puffy clouds, reflections on the glass, although the building is unbuilt. Equally convincing is an aerial view of Mercedes House, a condominium complex in New York, until I realize that this is merely a photomontage, a digital model inserted into a real photograph of the Upper West Side. Another victim of the recession I think, but I turn the page . . . and there is a construction photo of the real thing. At least I think it's real. It's hard to tell anymore.

Mercedes House, NYC

Gimme Shelter

A recent report (read it here) on the shelter situation in Haiti by Ian Davis of Lund University points out a troubling aspect of post-disaster reconstruction. Following the earthquake of 2010, more than 100,000 temporary shelters have been erected. These lightweight timber structures, called T-Shelters, are intended to be a transitional solution between tents, which are the usual emergency post-disaster shelter, and permanent houses. The problem, as Davis points out, is that the average cost of a T-Shelter ($13.80/square foot) is not much less than the average cost of a permanent house ($16.60/square foot). He suggests that the $500 million spent on T-shelters could have been better spent building permanent homes, especially as experience shows that "temporary" shelters tend to last a long time, becoming what he calls a "dismal legacy." This is a problem as T-Shelters often occupy sites that are suited to permanent construction. Since the conventional building technology inHaiti is not timber (there are few trees) but reinforced concrete frames with cement block infill, the materials of the T-shelters are not easily transformed into permanent housing. Moreover, the imported technology is poorly suited to create the sort of skill-training that might generate future employment.  Good intentions, not so good results.

Maggie Stephenson/ONU-HABITAT

The Death of Criticism

In 1997, my friend Martin Pawley wrote a column for The Architect's Journal titled "The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism." The leading architectural critic of his generation, Martin died in 2008, but I wonder what he would have to say about the latest demise of his craft? The New York Times has a "chief architecture critic" who hardly ever writes about architecture. Paul Goldberger, our leading critic, has not appeared in the New Yorker since May 2011, and that was a piece about New York taxis. I always check to see what Sarah Williams Goldhagen, the interesting critic of The New Republic, has to say, and she hasn't posted anything since November 2011. The Huffington Post has a crowded architecture page, although it is hard to find a clear critical voice among all the snippets of information. Slate decided it could do without an architecture critic—me—last December. I don't know whether it's the recession and dearth of new buildings, or whether after the boom years, when architecture became faddish, the fad has simply faded. Popularity has its costs.

Books and Books

When I was at Loyola High School in Montreal, my favorite room was the library. It wasn't just the sight and smell of all those old books, but the opportunity to make discoveries wandering through the stacks. There was a whole shelf of G. A. Henty, and another of Edgar Rice Burroughs, that I worked my way through during an entire semester. This reading was definitely not a class assignment, and I don't think anyone recommended the authors to me. I was probably attracted by the books themselves, solid Edwardian creations with colorfully illustrated cloth covers—no cheap paper jackets in those days. Years later, when I started writing, I reenacted those schoolboy adventures when I prowled university library stacks, researching books on subjects such as leisure, domestic comfort, and small tools. Card catalogues were useful, of course, but a more pleasurable research technique was to find the title I was looking for in the stacks, and then simply browse to the right and left of it, seeing what I could find. This doesn't make much sense in a digital age, and I rarely prowl the stacks anymore. That is a shame, for while the Internet is a very good tool for finding information, it is much less effective at discovering information.

Stern 1; Nouvel et al. 0

Great article by Vivian Toy in last week's on the economic value of celebrity architects in New York. It turns out that many of the striking—and strikingly expensive to build—condominiums completed in the last 5 years have failed to deliver on the economic front. Units in buildings such as Jean Nouvel's 100 11th Avenue, Enrique Norten's One York, and Richard Meier's173 Perry Street inBrooklyn, have either been slow to sell, or have sold at greatly discounted prices.  During the housing boom, developers convinced themselves that having a name architect attached to their projects was worth the extra cost and added real value. Now, Toy argues, that assumption seems in question. Homes are not like designer jeans. An industry executive is quoted as saying that well-heeled buyers "aren't looking to be sold a lifestyle, they're looking to have their lifestyle understood and respected." Perhaps that is why a notable exception cited in the article is 15 Central Park West, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, which has continued to set sales records. Not so much a question of tradition vs. modernity, but of understanding a market and delivering value. It reminds me of something an old schoolmate told me after he had been in practice some years: "I've learnt that not every building I design has to please me."

100 11th Avenue

Tiny Palladian House

Last summer I visited Charleston and saw an interesting house designed by George Holt and Andrew Gould. It's basically a tiny version of Palladio's Villas Saraceno, or at least its central portion, with the characteristic triple arch. No room for a loggia here, just a single room, barely 12 feet deep, but with a wonderfully tall ceiling that maintains the original villa's regal scale. A small house with a big attitude. The ingenious plan has a two bedrooms (each with a bathroom) above, but with two separate staircases, which allows one of the rooms to be rented out. The thick walls look solid because they are solid: load-bearing cement block filled with concrete and reinforced. Nice wood details. The owner, Reid Burgess, has a website with great photos of the construction in progress.

Andrew Gould, Reid Burgess, and WR.