Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 46

Up at the cottage

Jay Teitel, a writer and editor at Cottage Life magazine in Toronto, recently emailed me a question: he was writing an article titled "The Cottage of the Future," and he wondered if I had any thoughts about what summer cottages would look like in the year 2050. The custom of having a country retreat goes back to at least the ancient Romans—Pliny's villa—but the summer cottage is not simply a house in the country, nor it it a beach house or a ski chalet. The quintessential cottage is a cabin in the forest, perhaps in the mountains, preferably by a lake. A primitive hut. This tradition, which probably dates from the nineteenth century, is most common in Scandinavia, Canada, and parts of the United States, places with wild forest, mountains, and lakes–and cold winters. It is about getting back to nature, canoeing, fishing, chopping wood, cooking outdoors, kerosene lanterns, morning swims. In other words, "roughing it." A summer cottage, at least in my imagination, has no electricity or running water, it smells of wood smoke and cedar planks, it has a porch. What will summer cottages look like in 2050? Forty-four years ago, I built a cottage for my parents inVermont, overlooking Lake Champlain. The current owners have barely moved the furniture, and they still eat at the table and benches I cobbled together out of scrap wood. In another 40 years I expect it all to be still there, pretty much unchanged.

Cottage in Vermont., c.1968

The Sixties

My friend Hugh Hartwell, an accomplished pianist, sent me a link recently to a video of Count Basie's big band. The hour-long film of a live concert was shot in 1962 (in Sweden), pretty much the same band I heard in Birdland in 1959 when I was sixteen, although Joe Williams is absent here. What is most striking about the film, apart from the wonderful music, is the serious demeanors of the musicians. Basie clearly ran a tight ship and no one is fooling around—except maybe Sonny Payne, a bit. These are pros doing a job, which just happens to be playing great jazz. The sixties are associated with student unrest, the Vietnam War, and really ugly cars, but it was also a time when a big band like Basie's could make music that, fifty years later, still sounds thrilling.

Creative Destruction

Park Circle, a neighborhood in North Charleston, SC, was originally laid out according to British garden city principles in the early 1900s. Since then, the adjacent naval shipyard has closed, and the grand vision has not quite come to fruition. But Park Circle is only ten miles from downtown Charleston, and it caught local developer Vince Graham's eye. He had completed the successful planned community of I'On in nearby Mt.Pleasant, and this seemed like another opportunity to apply the principles of density, walkability and  mixed-use. The development, which he called Mixson, after one of the original city's founders, began with a neighborhood of three-story houses tightly grouped around courtyards. The result, conceived by local designers George Holt and Andrew Gould, was like a chunk carved out of the 13th Arondissement and teleported to North Charleston. Real estate is a highly risky business, however—developers are at the mercy of politicians, bankers, and local homeowners. Here, the portents were all favorable, until the national economy intervened, and the housing slump put a stop to Mixson. The little piece of Paris remains unfinished, a cluster of houses surrounded by open space. No doubt, it will one day be complete, but in the meantime, like the original garden city of which it is a part, it remains an old American urban story—the dream that wasn't.

Mixson, SC

Housing Redux

Every small rebound in the number of new houses built is followed by a flurry of articles about how the housing industry is poised to make a comeback. But if my developer friend Joe Duckworth is right, the U.S. housing market is not experiencing a correction but a major restructuring. With college graduates heavily in debt—and high school graduates without well-paying jobs—the first-time buyer market is stalled, and existing homeowners, who might have "moved up," are stalled, too. The future, according to Joe, is likely to include many more renters than in the last several decades, and so-called starter homes are likely to become permanent homes, as they were in the 1950s when a Levittown house was likely to last a family's lifetime. Twenty-two years ago, Avi Friedman and I designed the Grow Home, a 14-foot wide row house only 896 square feet in area. Over the next decade they were built in large numbers in the Montreal suburbs with a price tag of  around C$60,000 ($95,000 in present day U.S. dollars). We intended the Grow Home as a lower rung for young families beginning their climb up the housing ladder. Today, that ladder appears considerably less tall, and what was  designed as an "affordable home" looks like it may be the new normal.

Grow Homes, Montreal, 1992.

 

Corridors

Jon Gertner writes an interesting article in the February 25 New York Times on the history of Bell Labs. It is illustrated by a 1966 photograph of researchers standing outside their offices in a lab building in Murray Hill, N.J. An endless, featureless, rather wide corridor with a strip of fluorescent lighting straight down the center of an acoustic tile ceiling. A model of dreary, unimaginative, bureaucratic design, right? Wrong. As Gertner writes, the building was specially designed by Mervin Kelly (who later became Bell Labs' chairman of the board) in 1941, the long corridor, which everyone in the organization had to walk along, was intended to create chance encounters. These were apparently effective in fostering creativity, as Kelly intended, and in those early years Bell Labs scientists were responsible for seminal inventions such as the transistor, the silicon solar cell, and the laser. There is an important lesson here for architects, who have often sought to find elaborate formal expression in the design of scientific work-place–one thinks of Kahn's Richards Medical Building at Penn, and Gehry's Stata Center at MIT–not always to great effect. Yet sometimes the most effective solution is the simplest. One of the best accounts of how architecture fails–and succeeds—remains Stewart Brand's  How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (1995).

Eliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

 

Kitchen Confidential

Last fall we renovated our kitchen. It was a piecemeal project that started with long-needed repairs to a cracked wall and improvements to lighting, and finished with a total gutting of the space. The work was done by Jay Haon and his assistant Sarah Finestone. The design was a three-way collaboration between Jay, my wife Shirley, and myself. My only advantage in the process was not my years of professional training and experience but the simple fact that I was the only one who knew how to draw. The result brings together Jay's craftsmanship, my architect's eye, and Shirley's desire that the kitchen should be a workplace rather than a showpiece. We've always liked open storage, and Jay found a nice looking shelving system. The old ceramic-pretending-to-be-slate floor was replaced by oak, the granite counters were recycled from the old kitchen as were the cupboard doors, several of which were turned into deep file-drawers. By moving the main fixtures in what had been a dysfunctional arrangement I was able to recreate the "work triangle" that I remember from my schooldays, and add a butcher block work surface. We debated the need for a support for a long time, then realized it looks fine as it is. The furniture is by two of my mid-century favorites, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen.

 

Dress Code

I finally had a chance to see the modifications that Diller Scofidio + Renfro have made to Lincoln Center. These changes were much ballyhooed by the New York press, but they strike me as self-conscious one-liners, calculated to draw attention to themselves. Like a Hollywood star who dresses for the Oscars in a tuxedo and colorful sneakers. The, perhaps unintended, and surprising consequence at Lincoln Center is that the 1960s buildings actually look like coherent works of architecture by comparison with what come across as art installations.

Photo by Robert Mintzes

 

Northern Magus

Last week Michelangelo Sabatino gave an interesting talk at Penn on Arthur Erickson. Not a name to conjure with today, Erickson (1924-2009) was the first Canadian architect to establish a global practice—and reputation—with projects in the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria,  Malaysia, Japan, and China. I worked on Habitat at Montreal's Expo 67, and the big names in the exposition were Moshe Safdie, Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller. Erickson designed a pavilion at that fair, but it garnered less attention. The chief attribute of his architecture was, well, beauty. Beauty was not something that architects talked a lot about in 1965—still don't. In addition, Erickson's work didn't fit into any of the current stylistic categories; he often used concrete but wasn't a Brutalist like Rudolph, he explored innovative structures but wasn't a technologist like Otto, and he built megastructures like Simon Fraser University that weren't—quite. Like Eero Saarinen he tailored his designs to the context, the client, and the program. His best work was over by the early 1980s. Over-extended, the quality of his international practice suffered, there were fewer winning competitions, costs rose, and in 1992 he was obliged to close his office and declare bankruptcy. He continued to build, though never achieving his earlier eminence. And yet. On a recent visit to Vancouver, I was taken around the Olympic Village in Southeast False Creek, a lackluster group of generic condominiums. A pair of buildings caught my eye, something about the simple yet compelling undulating glass facades, like shining fish scales. It was Erickson's last project.

181 1st Avenue West, Vancouver

 

 

 

The Last Classicist

The dome of the U.S. Capitol and the portico of the White House may be more iconic, but almost every evening the Federal Reserve Building is featured on the evening news, making it one of the most familiar architectural images on television. It was designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), an unsung giant among American architects. Born in Lyon, an ancien élève of the École des Beaux-Arts, he made his career in the U.S., but he stands apart from his contemporaries. Unlike John Russell Pope, for example, he was not a far-ranging eclectic, nor did he romanticize the past. Cret was interested in developing what he called a "new classicism," and he did so in a series of great public buildings—he designed few private houses—such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, several World War I memorials, memorable bridges, and the University of Texas at Austin. He stripped away ornament almost to the same extent as the European modernists, but was unwilling to abandon the classical lessons of the past as far as planning and composition went. The result, as the Fed amply demonstrates, is not quite timeless architecture, but almost. His new classicism stands up particularly well when compared to the cheerless 1950s International Style Washington office buildings that succeeded it.

Photo: Dan Smith

Corbu in Chelsea

524 West 19th Street in New York's Chelsea District is a small residential building designed by Shigeru Ban, with Dean Maltz. The 11-story block contains only 8 units which the developer calls "houses," since they are two-story duplexes that extend through the building, front-to-back, recalling the units in Le Corbusier's unité d'habitation in Marseilles. The Chelsea houses have two-story living rooms, too, and shallow loggias. There the resemblance ends, since these are expensive ($3.6 – $11.25 million) condominiums with Corian kitchen islands and Miele cook tops. Press a button and the entire motorized 20-foot glass wall, which resembles a garage door, pivots up and opens the living space to the exterior. The façade consists of perforated metal shutters that can be raised or lowered to control privacy (though not sun, since this part of the building faces north). It is all very elegantly designed in a clear and unfussy way (unlike Jean Nouvel's crazy quilt of 1,647 different windows across the street). But it raises a question. Is it really a good idea to open up your home to the dust and noise of Manhattan. Maybe, but I can imagine once the novelty wears off, the glass garage doors and metal shutters will mostly stay in place. As my friend Ian Ritchie says, "Architecture is the solution, but what is the problem?"