Five Houses, Ten Details [1 ed.] 9781568989631, 9781568988269

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Five Houses, Ten Details

Five Houses,

Edward R. Ford

Ten Details

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

To James

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657. Visit our website at www.papress.com. © 2009 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 12 11 10 09 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Managing Editor: Jennifer Thompson Project Editor: Wendy Fuller Designer: Project Projects Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Bree Apperley, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Dan Simon, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press  — Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ford, Edward R. Five houses, ten details / Edward R. Ford. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-56898-826-9 (alk. paper) 1. Architecture — Details. 2. Architecture, Domestic — Designs and plans. I. Title. II. Title: 5 houses, 10 details. na2840.F68 2009 728 — dc22 2008046075

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Five Houses

6 8 10

Part 1

1 The Detail as Abstraction: Place and Displacement 2 House 1 3 Abstraction and Animation

30 42 58

Part 2

4 5 6 7

The Detail as Material Expression: Material and Form House 2 The Free Union Country School Competition Sculpture, Engineering, and Architecture

64 76 90 102

Part 3

8 The Detail as Structural Representation: Structure and Weight 9 House 3 10 Gravity and Meaning

110 118 138

Part 4

11 The Detail as Joint: Abstraction and Joints 12 House 4 13 The Alpine Mountain Hut Competition 14 The Part and the Whole

144 152 170 182

Part 5

15 The Detail as Dissonant Element: Architecture and Furniture 16 House 5 17 The Matteson Public Library Competition 18 Scale and Dissonance

186

Epilogue: The Detail Notes Selected Bibliography Credits Index

232

200 218 230

242 248 250 251

6

Five Houses, Ten Details

Preface

In January of 1997 I purchased a small urban lot near the center of Charlottesville, Virginia, and, over the next three years, working with the same site, the same program and often the same building footprint, designed more than a dozen houses for myself before starting construction in 2000. This is the history of five of those designs. More accurately it is a history of five long investigations into the architectural detail, each of which ended in the design of one of those houses. The first three houses were not built for a variety of reasons. Some cost too much; others were based on presumptions, technical and otherwise, that proved inaccurate or unproductive. The fourth house was the one I began to build. The fifth house was the one I designed and built within the fourth as it was being constructed, the small scale elements, particularly the built-in furniture. While all influenced the final design, each was not an evolutionary development of the previous one, but rather an independent exploration of an aspect of architecture —  site, material, structure, construction, and program — and how those aspects were manifested in five concepts of the architectural detail. Each of these concepts was the culmination of years spent in practice and research, so each house is explained as part of a larger personal history, and mixed into the text are other projects that continued or began the same explorations. Obviously there is a great deal more than detail that influenced the design of these houses, but it is the premise of this book that the detail is not an accessory to architecture but its essence. Each was pursued with the conviction that the primary mechanism for the exploration and expression of these five subjects was the detail. It was not, however, based on the assumption that the miniscule detail is the final product of an ideology inherent in the larger building, but rather the opposite: that the detail is the mechanism by which certain ideas are communicated, ideas that may be absent or even contradicted by the larger design. The goal of this book is to show how this happens and the role details play not just in the constructive

7

Preface

but in the communicative aspects of architecture. More correctly, its goal is to show how I discovered this. What precisely is an architectural detail? It is a frequently discussed and commonly criticized aspect of contemporary architecture, yet it is rarely defined, if at all. Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret, Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph all declared that details did not exist. Many architects of the contemporary avant-garde agree. Rem Koolhaas has proclaimed his intention to make detail-less architecture; Ben van Berkel has spoken of their exclusion; and Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid, and Greg Lynn have all described the detail as a fetish. They do not dispute the necessity of detailing in a technical sense, but the articulated detail — the visible manifestation of a solution to a technical problem, elements such as the door frame, the window mullion, and the fastener — must be avoided. Details do not exist for these architects, but the act of detailing does. It is the elimination of the visible minutiae of construction in the service of abstraction and simplicity of form.1 To many practitioners, detailing is simply a question of consistency. The ideas of the larger building are carried into its smallscale elements. It is a seamless continuation of the act of design and requires no more understanding or skill than does architecture, simply a bit more technical expertise. The articulated detail has its modernist advocates. Marco Frascari and Kenneth Frampton have turned the idea of detailing as consistency on its head, arguing that the detail can be the part from which the whole is generated, that it is a technical condensation of the greater building from which, in the manner of DNA, the building can be reconstructed. In practice this takes the form of the repetitive motif — sometimes decorative, sometimes technically necessary, sometimes both — as in the work of Carlo Scarpa or Frank Lloyd Wright, who based whole architectures around it.2 A second group of advocates of the articulated detail includes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who explored what can only be called a detailing of structural symbolism, a necessary activity in a building where one wishes to express structure but is required for technical reasons to conceal it. While this study is in large part an exploration of the detail in my own work, it is less a criticism of these commonplace ideas about detail than an exploration through design of a far richer, more productive idea: that the detail is a positive, albeit autonomous, realm of architecture.

8

Five Houses, Ten Details

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Downing College for the award of the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellowship, which enabled me to work on the project; the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, the RIBA Drawings Collection, and the Robert Treat Paine house, Stonehurst for assistance in historical research; David Leatherbarrow for reading the manuscript; Jim Duxbury, who served as an environmental consultant on the Mountain Hut Project; Graham Peterson for help with the drawings; the University of Virginia and all my colleagues there for their assistance; and my family for their patience and support over the life of this long project. The design and construction of the house on Farish Street was greatly assisted by the following: Builder: Geoff and Jim Pitts of Ace Contracting Structural Engineering: Dunbar Milby Williams Pittman & Vaughan Lighting Design: Mark Schuyler Structural Consultant: Kirk Martini Landscape Consultant: Nelson Byrd Woltz

9

Acknowledgments

Dr. Smith Everyone has a teacher who, from the perspective of age, emerges as more important than the others. In my case it is an unlikely candidate, Norris K. Smith, my instructor in ancient and medieval architecture and the author of what is still the best book on Frank Lloyd Wright. There was much to like about him. If not exactly charismatic, he was always engaging, available to talk about anything, and could ride his bike from his home to school without apparently taking his hands out of his pockets. There was a problem, however. He was a lifelong critic of modern architecture in its entirety and an advocate of Greek classicism. Were he alive today, he would probably not remember me. I received a B- in his course, missed a fair number of classes, and, along with my classmates, was frustrated at my own inability to respond to his arguments against the vacuousness of modernity and for the virtues of classicism. He was in many ways a frightening figure, not because he required you to believe what he believed, but simply because he required you to believe something and to explain why you believed it. But if he got the larger questions of style wrong, he got the smaller questions of meaning, which were in many ways more important, right, and I preface each section with a quote from his work that goes to the heart of the issue found there. He spoke in a voice I knew only too well, that of a man who grew up steeped in the culture, if it can be called that, of Presbyterianism, one rather heavy in Calvinism. It is not the best background with which to approach the subject of Renaissance art, his other great interest, but when he began the last chapter of his book on Wright with a discussion of the New Eden and the New Jerusalem, nothing could have seemed to me more natural. One of his favorite final exam questions was, “Where would you rather live, Fallingwater or Monticello, and why?” I like to think of this book as a long overdue and overlong answer to that question.

10

Five Houses, Ten Details

Introduction Five Houses After two years of searching the ever-expanding rings of suburban devel­ opment and subdivided farms of Virginia that surround Charlottesville for a site that, if it did not possess the illusion of wilderness, was at least suggestive of agriculture, I bought a one-quarter-acre lot near the center of town. The lot sat vacant for another two years while I pursued a number of designs. Some proceeded no further than a pencil sketch. Some progressed as far as wall sections. What follows is a description of five of these. I am frequently asked what my neighbors think of the house I built there, implying, with good reason, that there is a considerable distance between my idea of a house and theirs. But the distance is at times no greater than that between myself and my architect peers. Despite my commitment to modernism, there is much about the contemporary avant-garde I find disturbing, hypocritical, wrong-headed, and ill-advised, and while I did not desire the house to be a commentary on anything, if it is inherently a criticism of the neocolonial status quo, it is also a criticism of the current state of modernism, particularly in regard to the detail. Rem Koolhaas said that “details are old architecture,” meaning by implication that they are not new architecture and in the best modern architecture they are absent.1 In 2000 when I began the house, this was the common if not prevalent view in avant-garde modern­ism, but each of the Farish Street houses was designed with the conviction that details were not superfluous but essential, and with the certainty that architectural meaning could not occur without them. There is no reason that the best qualities found in traditional architecture, which certainly include details, cannot be present in modernism without recourse to historicism, kitsch, or gratuitous ornament, and each of the Farish Street houses and each of the five types of detail they exemplified were inspired by precedents, some modern, but often protomodern or even traditional.

11

Introduction

Each house held within it the memory of another five older houses, each embodied a detail type that was out of the mainstream of post-1920s modernism, and each answered a different question: how place relates to configuration, how material determines form, how structure informs meaning, how the architectural part relates to the whole, and how scale works for and against these perceptions. In order to explain how each design led to the answer of a question about detail, I must describe the five houses that raised the questions. House 1 Place: The Absent Detail and the Abstract Detail My first encounter with a famous building took place seven blocks from the house where I grew up. It is the Richard Lloyd Jones House, built in 1929 by Frank Lloyd Wright for his cousin, the editor of the Tulsa Tribune. Although not exactly on the prairie, I assumed that this was prairie architecture, despite the fact that it is an assembly of tall, thin, tightly spaced concrete block piers that could not be more vertical. It is, in quantity of glass, one of Wright’s more transparent designs, but the rows of upright concrete blocks give the opposite impression. This makes the large glass prisms with steel sash that project beyond the ends of the masonry building all the more striking. Spatially bound to the site by the terminal glass prisms and the L-shaped plan, the house seems inseparable from its immediate land­ scape, but space is not the only factor in merging the building and site. The key lesson of the house is about the role of detail in “locating” a building. What is critical in this case is not the presence of detail but its absence. The absent detail is the abstract detail, and abstraction goes to the heart of connecting or not connecting a building to a place. The abstract detail is the opposite of the articulated detail. A detail is considered articulated to the extent to which it expresses and demonstrates the resolution of the problems of weight, material, connection, and assembly. When it expresses the opposite — absence of weight, an indifference to material, a lack of apparent connection, and an apparent disregard for the elements — it is seen as abstract. Another measure of abstraction is the degree to which the building is an ideal form perceived as a whole and not as a series of parts.

12

Five Houses, Ten Details

Therefore, the means to abstraction in architecture and in detailing is elimination. The abstract details in the Richard Lloyd Jones House include sills, copings, gutters, trim, and a great deal more. The technical roles they play are accomplished, but the means for doing so are hidden. Details that are visible, the articulated ones, include the tightly spaced, long, horizontal bands of steel windows, the grid of threads on which the building is woven. They physically separate the interior from the site by their presence, but they connect the house to the site by their minimal quality. In a subtle way they are Wright’s horizontal line of the prairie multiplied many times over. Forty years later and 1,200 miles to the northeast on a site in suburban Virginia, I was asking the same question: what is the relation of form to place? While not literally in the shadow of Monticello, I was close enough, on a small urban lot four hundred feet lower and three miles to the northwest. Outside the historic district, the lot was under no stylistic restrictions beyond those latent in zoning and building codes, but to any architect or layman it was unthinkable in 2000 that the house would not be contextual, even regional. There are a plethora of answers to the question of how a building responds to context, most of them problematic, for the neotradi­tion­alist form would be determined by historical tradition and the immediate context, but the result would be an architecture based solely on glib associations. The more thoughtful architect might explore Monticello’s underlying framework and extract the applicable principles. Form could be based on an abstracted classicism, perhaps on landscape principles reflecting Jeffersonian ideas of an agrarian utopia, but the result would be only the banality of an abstracted classicism or the fiction of an antiquated regional ideology, Southern agrarianism. There were respectable modernist answers to the question of how a building relates to a place. Form could be based on the ecosystem of the site, but the idea of an ecological determinism, even if possible on the urban site, would be only another fiction. Vernacular forms could be appropriated, provided they were sufficiently abstract to be protomodern. Existing types could be stripped of elements reminiscent of a particular style and reduced to their abstract, minimal essence.

13

Introduction

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright, Phoenix, Arizona, 1937

Richard Lloyd Jones House, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1929

14

Five Houses, Ten Details

Technological fragments could be incorporated as a contextual reference. Entire contextual technologies, which in Virginia means brick, could be used provided they were also stripped down to their hopefully timeless constructional essence. While none of these methodologies for connecting to a site were wrong, they were all rather un-self-critical, and their products to me suggested that their authors had fallen in love with the superficial residue of context and not the reality. It is interesting, however, that all of these strategies — save ecological determinism and historical association — require some type of abstraction unless forms were already sufficiently abstract in their original manifestations. Why is all this abstraction necessary? Is it really to get to the essence of the thing? Why is the literal element acceptable to the modernist only as a quotation? In fact the contemporary modernist uses both abstraction and quotation, not to connect a building to its site, but rather to disconnect it, by setting it apart from its context. Each of these strategies required the absence of something, such as historical association or the evidence of envi­ ronmental boundaries, or required the presence of something else, such as the technological fragment or the regional detail, to provide an association with the region, although in practice they are highly abstracted as well. All the exercises in regionalism were in reality exercises in its opposite, in abstraction — a removal from the physical world rather than a connection to it. Is it not the role of the abstract detail to tell us that this is not the typical local building but a trans­ formed version of it? What fascinated me about the Richard Lloyd Jones House was not the way it fit its site but the way it did not; it was so unlike anything around it, it seemed to have little to do with suburban Tulsa. If the house belonged where it was, it was not because of regional forms or regional materials, and certainly not regional details, a deter­ mining ecological framework, or any gesture toward context, natural or man-made. If it belonged there it was because of its abstract qualities that made a real spatial connection possible by eliminating more literal, but superficial, connections of a symbolic nature. If it did not belong there, or at least seemed alien to the place, it was because of the abstract qualities produced by its abstract minimal details. At the

15

Introduction

same time, it was not constructed entirely of abstract nondetails. Its true value was its ambivalence. The first house was about the detail as both an abstraction and a literal manifestation of construction, structure, or performance, and about what both had to do with disconnecting as well as con­­necting to place. House 2 Materials and Form I never saw the real Taliesin West, although I have been there three times. It was begun in 1937. Low, massive walls were built by filling wood forms with stone and adding concrete, giving them a crude but immediate character. Sitting atop these were redwood beams supporting canvas roofs. Taliesin West employs familiar metaphors, the cave and the tent. One form is permanent; one is nomadic, despite being fixed. In a way, it is about Wright being connected to a place in a very basic way yet always remaining restless. The desert climate soon had predictable effects on the light, organic materials. Over time the wood was replaced with steel and the canvas with plastic. It is more habitable but has lost much of its architectural character in the process. The form remains, but built of another material, however similar, it is another building. Le Corbusier tells us that any human of any culture will recognize a sphere, the ultimate, ideal form of whatever baseball, ball of string, or billiard ball we hand them.2 Not so for Wright, at least in theory. Whatever the form, if it is built of wood, it is a wood form; if stone, it is stone. There is no recognizable ideal form from which it was a deviation. Taliesin West raised a basic question: is it possible to construct an architecture in which the form is inseparable from the material? Despite the simplicity of the idea, how this can be accomplished is far from clear, and precedent is not always helpful. The perplexing and unanswered questions of the form/material relationship are perfectly illustrated by the following three statements: Gottfried Semper wrote in 1851: Let the material speak for itself; let it step forth undisguised in the shape and proportions found most suitable by experience and science. Brick

16

Five Houses, Ten Details

University of California, Berkeley Faculty Club, Bernard Maybeck, Berkeley, California, 1902

17

Introduction

should appear as brick, wood as wood, iron as iron, each according to its own statical laws.3

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote in 1858: The materials used must indicate their function by the form we give them: stone must appear as stone, iron as iron, wood as wood, and these substances, while assuming forms suitable to their nature, must be in mutual harmony.4

And Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1932: So I began to study the nature of materials, learning to “see” them. I now began to learn to see brick as brick, learned to see wood as wood, and to see concrete or glass or metal.5

The fact that all three statements are nearly identical is not surprising, given the documented and hypothetical relations between the three authors. What is surprising is that each, using the same words, meant something different. Semper’s approach was sculptural, seeing architectural language as representing archaic technology. Viollet-le-Duc’s view of material was the engineered, as exemplified by the cathedral. And Wright’s was motific based on his concept of nature pattern. Despite these ambiguities, the second house began with a clarity, at least of intention, that it was about the detail as material expression, a means of creating a house that was not just sympathetic to wood or steel and not just associated with wood or steel, but a form that was inherent in them. The second house was conceived from its inception not as abstract but material, not as a geometric shape but a material reality. It was to be a house that could only be conceived of in the mate­rial of which it was built — stone, brick, wood, or steel. House 3 Structure and the Structurally Representative Detail On an evening in 1891, riding the commuter ferry between San Francisco and Berkeley, Charles Keeler met Bernard Maybeck. Keeler in time became

18

Five Houses, Ten Details

Maybeck’s first independent client, but more importantly, fifteen years later he was to write The Simple Home and, in the early 1930s, “Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic Man in the Twentieth Century,” which, according to some, are the closest things we have to a Maybeck manifesto. Keeler wrote of Maybeck: He detests shams, imitations, veneers that are done for effect. When he designs a building, it is not stage scenery, but life, reality, construction that he is seeking to embody. He pointed out that [the design of the Keeler house] was in large measure determined by materials of which the structure was to be built . ...A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood — straight lines. Wooden joinery, exposed rafters . ... Everything that concealed construction should be done away with . ... His next principal [sic] was that whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. He called attention to the fact that, in the old Gothic cathedrals the rafters which upheld the pointed arches, the succession of pillars which gave strength to the walls, the flying buttresses that helped hold them firm were also necessary to the solidity and stability of the building.6

The evidence of Maybeck’s architecture, however, raises the question of whether Maybeck believed any of what Keeler wrote about him, especially after 1909. The University of California, Berkeley Faculty Club (1902) is built in the manner that Keeler described, with its structure largely exposed. The Roos House (1909) appears to use the same structural forms and motifs, but not one of the beams, columns, or struts that one sees is real. All are either cladding of cruder wood structures or hollow casings with no structural role. The type of construction vocabulary and material palate Maybeck used in the Keeler House (1895) are highly limited. As the size and complexity of program of a building increase, adherence to the type of construc­tion Keeler idealized becomes progressively more difficult. Thus it is common in wood architecture of the late nineteenth century to find these two types — exposed construc­tion showing the real structure and clad construction showing only a representation of the structure — together in one building.

19

Introduction

Two books and twenty years of investigation have demonstrated to me the difficulty of exposing structure and the frequent necessity of representing hidden construction, but I have never stopped believing what Keeler said and Maybeck did in 1895, not that structure needs to be exposed, but that it needs to be expressed. It is not a question of honesty; it is a question of weight. Architecture is about weight and the way material reacts to weight. If you look at the Parthenon and the Pantheon, if something is communicated to you, it is through the consciousness of their mass, of the forces they create and the way they are resisted. This is not to deny the importance of light, proportion, texture, sculpture, or even decoration, but it is the way weight engages them that is the mechanism through which they communicate. Without weight there is no size, no up, no down. There are countless buildings that deny weight, but it is the denial that is essentially their message. There are countless buildings that misrepresent, simplify, or deceive us as to what loads weight imposes on them, but they convey a message nevertheless, and there is a need for a device — the detail —  to express the structure when it cannot be exposed. Thus the third house was about the detail as structural expression, not necessarily about exposing the structure, but designing a building that explained it. It was a house where a way of making structure was the key to a way of making form. It communicated through struc­ tural empathy and not glib association, and it showed how the force of weight moved through the structure. If one understood this movement as a smaller manifestation of something much larger, either literal or metaphysical, one was thereby understanding the architecture. House 4 Construction and the Detail as Joint It is a short drive from Chipping Campden to Sapperton, through the calendar-worthy English countryside of Gloucestershire. Neither town seems charged with political or cultural revolutionary history, but at one time they were, a fact that is, to me, a great part of their appeal. Chipping Campden was the home of C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft from 1902 to 1908. Sapperton was the home of Ernest Gimson and Sidney Barnsley, and their workshops from 1902 to 1926. Their architecture

20

Five Houses, Ten Details

was not so much about structure as about construction, the process of assembly, and the joint. The arts and crafts architects were no less conscious than Jefferson of the necessity of a connection to the land and a rural way of living, but their reason was precisely the opposite, it brought them into contact with traditional craftsmen. Barnsley and Ashbee were two years apart in age, lived thirtyfive miles from each other, and were friends, if not close friends. If you look at a history of arts and crafts furniture, you will probably find them there, side by side. On examination, they have far less in common. Barnsley’s furniture was about joints — exposed dovetails, pegs, and tenons — and while there was a fair amount of inlay and veneer, for the most part it was exposed, solid-oak construction, whether a small sideboard or a large building. Ashbee’s furniture is more often veneered and far more refined, often with carved, inlaid, or painted illustrated panels. If any connections are shown, they are limited to the metal bands and oversize hinges that seem to bind the wood structures together. Barnsley’s architecture and furniture is more crude, immediate, and irregular. What is appealing about Barnsley’s furniture is the joinery, and his joints were about autonomy of the part, a consciousness that a building or table was a construction, an assembly of elements in a tense equilibrium. This was not done for the sake of “honesty” but the celebration of the craftsman. The role of the exposed joint was less to remind us of the joint than the joiner, to show that it had been done with pleasure. The imperfection of art was, according to John Ruskin, a reflection of the imperfection of man.7 The joint became in Barnsley’s work ideologically charged, where a method of joinery was an expression of a social organization, albeit an idealized one. The fourth house focused on the joint as detail. The character of the joint was to determine the character of the architecture, the type of joint to determine the type of structure. This may not seem an odd intention, but the majority of contemporary architecture is rather about the opposite, about conceptual disassembly. House 4 was to be a building that was to be fabricated, assembled, constructed, and joined — not peeled, eroded, rotated, deconstructed, transformed, or displaced — a building where revealed joints did not pretend that

21

Introduction

Sideboard, Sidney Barnsley, 1923–24

Detail of a dovetailed corner on a sideboard, Sidney Barnsley, 1923–24

22

Five Houses, Ten Details

Stair in the Robert Treat Paine house, Stonehurst, H. H. Richardson, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1886

23

Introduction

they were ever hidden, that was appropriately crafted where craft was exposed and appropriately crafted where it was not. It would avoid the pseudojoinery of the modernist conventional wisdom, the carefully controlled lower level of craft that is used to create the illusion of the architect’s noninterference. It would not be a trimless, jointless totality, and neither would it be an overarticulated material one. It was to be a house that explained its construction without pretending to reveal it. The intent was not to show all the joints or even a majority, but to design a house that proclaimed itself as an assembly. But the joint was to be about more than construction. It was to be a manifestation of a larger understanding of part to whole, one that went well beyond architecture. House 5 Furniture and the Autonomous Detail H. H. Richardson’s Robert Treat Paine House, Stonehurst (1886), is an oversize shingle-style barn of a building. It is largely empty today, but though the large rooms are caverns with unbroken floor surfaces, the edges bristle with furniture, all built-in. At the center of it all is the great staircase, a room turned inside out with nooks, built-in benches, and cascading steps that extend, with frequent interruptions, around the oversize landing. One might say this furniture looks more captured than built-in. In some ways it is part of the woodwork; in others it seems almost freestanding. The built-in furniture of Stonehurst is filled with sculptural eruptions: fluted oak columns suddenly transform into foliage, square oak newels begin to twist, curved chair arms emerge from wood paneling, and chair legs become small columns. The assembly of buildings that make up Camp Sagamore (1897), one of the great Adirondack camps, was begun eleven years after Stonehurst. Historically the two have much in common; they are both the products of a desire, however symbolic, to escape from the city into the wilderness. Formally they are more dissimilar. One cannot speak of sculptural eruptions at Camp Sagamore. One could describe its log architecture as sculpture, but it is everywhere — log columns and log walls support log beams and brackets with log balconies with log balusters supporting log rails. It is drained by log gutters and filled with log furniture, right down to the log bench in the log bowling alley.

24

Five Houses, Ten Details

Inglenook in Stonehurst, H. H. Richardson, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1886

25

Introduction

Main Lodge at Camp Sagamore, Raquette Lake, New York, 1897

26

Five Houses, Ten Details

It is, to my eye, consistency gone mad. There is no detail, only little versions of the big architecture. Stonehurst is not consistent; as size changes, so do the rules. Furniture is not designed the way the architecture is. The small scale becomes an opportunity for an alternative way of seeing things, a different language of material, form, and craft. More fascinating still is the blurred boundary between the two. There is no point of size when one language begins and the other stops. Thus the fifth house is about the detail as a definition of scale. I did not want a house full of miniature versions of itself, in which any element would work at any scale, size had no meaning, and forces had no magnitude. It would have multiple scales, a house not designed as if it were a table with a table designed as if it were a house. It would be a house that was not afraid of breaking its own rules. The house would contain autonomous objects, even autonomous details, small-scale elements that were almost, but not quite, independent of the building around them, designed in a way that even contradicted that building. Its details would begin at a point that was an end of the language of architecture, a point where built objects were so small they no longer answered to a need for stability, permanence, and order; just below this point was another language, perhaps of furniture, perhaps of sculpture, perhaps of something else. Conclusion These precedents were the beginning of the five houses that follow, based on five ideas: That as the scale of the building changed, so did the methodology. That a way of making joints can inform a way of making spaces. That the way to true architectural empathy is through an understanding of weight, structure, and assembly. That the way to form is through material. That an appropriate response to context is not imitation or decorative nostalgia, not a geometry abstracted from its surroundings, not the adaptation of principles derived from the local vernacular, not even the sensitivity to a larger set of ideas that may have regional associations, but is rather a site-based under­ standing of the totality of history. In short, that the way to a spiritual understanding of building is through a constructional understanding.

27

Introduction

Balcony rail, Main Lodge, Camp Sagamore, Raquette Lake, New York, 1897

Part 1

On Abstraction It is important to remember that [ninth-century Anglo-Celtic illuminated manuscripts] were not made to be read for pleasure or instruction; in a country where illiteracy was nearly universal, the act of reading came to be associated, even in the minds of the monks themselves, with the mysteries that were celebrated in the church rather than with any of the secular activities to which we relate reading and writing today. This is not to say that the monks shunned or despised the world. We know little about them; but obviously it would be a mistake for anyone to conclude from the “abstract” nature of modern art that ours is an especially “unworldly” age. The issues are not as simple as that. All we can say is that the Celtic artist did not find the wellsprings of his art to arise out of the experience of, or experiences within, the visible world around him. — Norris Smith, Medieval Art

Chapter 1 The Detail as Abstraction: Place and Displacement

It was during the summer of 1965, after my freshman year of college, when, while hard at work on the great American novel, I first encoun­ tered a book some feel is the great American novel, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a likable, single, not very hardworking New Orleans stockbroker. Binx has no grand vision of his life or his world. Rather than in old New Orleans, he lives by choice in one of its more banal suburbs, in part because its picturesque romantic qualities are precisely what he wants to avoid. Binx seems a mass of contradictions. His life is defined by his family and the geography of his hometown, but he wants to escape from both. Binx has no interest in finding “meaning.” His only real passion is a desire to undertake what he calls a search. Yet he has little desire to travel. It is not really a search at all but “what anyone would under­take if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” 1 He doesn’t want to physically leave New Orleans but the opposite, to escape its banality by looking at the items from his pockets lying on his dresser every morning and be able to see them as they are. The Moviegoer is about disconnecting from an image of a place and connecting to the reality of a place, and it is about our ambivalence about placement in the world. Percy might have been speaking for Binx when he said that he lived in Covington, Louisiana, another New Orleans suburb, because “it falls between places” and that it was “a nonplace in a certain relation to a place (New Orleans), a relation that allows one to avoid the horrors of total placement or total nonplacement or total misplacement.” 2 But The Moviegoer is also about our detachment from

31

The Detail as Abstraction

the world, and this ultimately led back to the question of abstrac­tion. Abstraction for Percy meant this kind of detachment. In a later book, Percy wrote, “Art, like science, entails a certain abstrac­tion from its subject matter, albeit a different order of abstraction. And the greater the artist, the greater the distance of abstraction . ...Writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust are able to write about the marketplace and society only in the degree that they distance themselves from it — whether by exile, alcohol or withdrawal to a cork-lined room.” 3 The Moviegoer was advertised as a Southern novel, and Percy was often pressed into the role of a Southern writer, a label he disliked. Rather than a regional novelist, he was a writer who realized that a sense of belonging is accompanied out of necessity by a sense of alienation. But if The Moviegoer is not a regional novel and not written by a regional novelist, it nevertheless has a great deal to say, by implication, about regionalism. Binx wants to escape from what the architect, on the surface, wants to embrace — a sense of belonging to a place and, by implication, a region. The book is not about the absence of connection to place, rather, it is about an ambiva­lence about that connection. As strong as the need to locate oneself by geographic association may be, equally strong is the need to do the opposite, to disconnect from place. Literary regional ambivalence is hardly unique to Percy. W. H. Auden’s biographer notes that after declaring in 1936 that it was a fiction that “one could change one’s life by going to some distant place” — that is, of the unimportance of place to literature — Auden then left England for lengthy stays in New York, Italy, and Austria, before finally returning to Oxford, and his poetic style changed in response to each place.4 Whose work is more squarely placed in England than that of T. S. Eliot, an American expatriate? Robert Frost wrote much of North of Boston, his first great book of New England poetry, in England.5 It is no accident that for all of these authors, their sensitivity to place was heightened when they became exiles. The sense of belonging seems strangely linked to a need for mobility; a sensitivity to place is often accompanied with a larger state of alienation. If the modern writer sees himself adrift even when stationary, the modern architect is more likely to think of himself as regionally

32

Five Houses, Ten Details

anchored, regardless of his degree of mobility. The tenets of archi­tectural regionalism — the veneration of the anonymous vernacular, the necessity to “build the site,” the pursuit of an ecological sensitivity if not an ecological determinism — are such sacrosanct axioms of the conventional wisdom as to go unchallenged, but the lesson of Percy, Frost, Auden, and others is a different one, that regionalism is inherently ambivalent. I had no particular regional attachments, but my dual education had presented me with two irreconcilable attitudes toward place. As an aspiring writer in the 1960s, I took alienation for granted, including alienation from place, but as an aspiring modern architect I was taught to see virtue in the most gratuitous regional gesture. If nothing else, the ambivalence of the modern writer toward regionalism shows how naive and self-denying are the modern architect’s certainties on the subject. A larger question remains: if the modern writer’s ambivalence about place could have an architectural manifestation, what would it be? Like any architect of the last forty years, I could hardly have left the issues of context and regionalism unexplored, but in retrospect, what I thought to be exercises in regionalism were explorations of its opposite — abstraction. Abstraction by Elimination Ten years later I was working in an architecture office in Philadelphia, the great American novel unfinished. My first job as a project architect was to put together the working drawings for a small special exhi­bi­tion gallery for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was not the designer, but the intentions, if unspoken, were unanimously agreed upon by architects and client. We were doing a white, seam­-­ less, detail-less, jointless anonymous box, lest the architectural minutiae detract from the art. The only compromises in this minimalist enterprise were a metal eggcrate ceiling to hide the lights and a flat six-inch-high oak base. This was modernist abstract detailing at its most relentless. Thermostats, light switches and outlets, diffusers and registers, access panels and exit signs all had to be kept out of sight or made invisible. It was an extreme but not atypical example of what modernist detailing was about then and is largely about now — 

33

The Detail as Abstraction

a type of abstraction different than literary detachment, abstraction by elimination. During these same years I spent my nonwork hours doing theoretical house designs for specific sites and generic clients. Each was associated with a particular place, and while they were in part meant to be exercises in regionalism, they unconsciously became exercises in abstraction by elimination as well. The basic intention was to link house to site using spatial continuity — by making the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside — by creating spaces with multiple foci. A single room would feel both inside and out, open and closed, introverted and extroverted. In the houses of Maine and Maryland, the mechanism for this simultaneity was overlapping spaces. Both houses were formed by stone-walled courtyards, interrupted at one corner by square steel-framed glass prisms that were supported at the midpoints of their edges rather than at the corners. The prisms straddled the courtyard walls so that the spaces defined by glass and stone overlapped but maintained their individual character. The models for these houses were some of modernism’s most ambiguous constructions, those that have multiple foci or an ambivalent focus and therefore a simultaneous connection and disconnection to their sites, such as Eliot Noyes’s own house (1954) in New Canaan, Connecticut, a forested courtyard in the woods; or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Hubbe House (unbuilt, 1935), not quite a courtyard, not quite a glass house, not quite enclosed, not really private. Yet while in my own work this was an exploration of simultaneity of experience, it was also an investigation of how an ambivalent attitude toward a site, however seductive that site was, might take on a physical configuration, and the mechanism was two types of abstraction, one of connection and one of disconnection. The abstraction of connection began with the buildings’ boundaries that show little evidence of their ill-defined environmental envelopes. For spatial connection and ambiguities to occur, it was essential that there be a seamless connection between inside and out; the material surfaces flowed through the environmental boundary of the house with imperceptible changes, and this required seamless details. The glass was frameless; there was no indication where the

34

Five Houses, Ten Details

rainwater went or if there was any heating system other than a fireplace. The primary role of detail in this case was to abstract the building envelope into nonexistence, to maintain, largely by the absence of detail, the illusion of spatial continuity. At the same time, structural and material information about the buildings was exaggerated — the walls were brick or stone or wood and they had a certain weight that must be supported. This was another type of abstract detailing — solving certain problems in a way that made it appear that there was no problem (no water, no gravity, no program to be accommodated) while exaggerating and articulating others such as materials or structure. But there was nothing unusual or innovative about this. I thought I was following straightforward impulses; in fact, I was following the detailing practices of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, articulating what they articulated and suppressing what they suppressed. The reasons for this second type of abstraction were less obvious. It was about abstraction by denial, and its goal was displacement, not connection to a site but disconnection. What was conspicuously missing from this series of houses was any element other than a material that could be called regional, and the open question was whether houses such as this would lose or gain by the subversion of abstraction — the inclusion of literal elements within their abstract forms. Abstraction by Quotation I arrived at the University of Kansas in late August 1979 to begin my first teaching job, including my first lecture course in detailing — building construction to be more precise. I adopted the fairly obvious strategy of focusing on how to detail the kind of buildings the students admired and wanted to design. In Kansas in 1979 this meant the minimal forms of late modernism or abstracted vernacular. Thus my first course, insofar as it was about detailing, was about how to detail so that no one would know it had been done: how to eliminate a coping, how to hide a door or window frame, and how to build a drywall partition without a base. I was teaching the art of the invisible detail, eliminating all evidence of assembly, structure, shelter, the effects of the environment, and the qualities of the materials.

35

The Detail as Abstraction

Plan of a house in Maine, 1977, unbuilt

Perspective of a house in Maryland, 1977, unbuilt

36

Five Houses, Ten Details

Noyes House, Eliot Noyes, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1954

37

The Detail as Abstraction

Being a teacher, I was faced with the necessity of explaining why all this was necessary, and with it came the realization that I had no idea. These details were certainly not more functional, hardly more honest, than their traditional counterparts, and the contention that technology had eliminated the need for visible details — frames, trim, copings — was simply a lie. The technologies being used were old — wood frame, plaster, brick — and required no fewer articulated details in their raw form than older architecture. It was an exercise in minimizing and eliminating the traditional elements of detail, at times at the cost of adequate performance. Although it is a highly unattractive idea to the constructionally minded, the obvious reason for this approach was that this was simply the modern style. This kind of detail was what made a building look modern, and these details had no more or less functional or conceptual legitimacy than a baseboard or a crown mold, probably less. A more palatable and accurate explanation was that they were the manifestation of a necessary level of abstraction for the buildings to be perceived in a certain way. Certain types of information, particularly those supplied by symbolic or familiar elements, were suppressed in order to make possible the understanding of the building as a geometric and spatial construction. However, this abstraction could take various forms. My theoretical house explorations continued, but the question of regionalism resurfaced, specifically in regard to Kansas. Regional Kansas architecture, insofar as there is one, is more subtle than Virginia’s. There was a somewhat eccentric, if not unique, local sandstone vernacular architecture, but a type common in the older parts of Lawrence was the two-story, white, wood clapboard box. I was quite comfortable glibly incorporating what appeared to be regional elements after only a few weeks in town. If a writer could do it, why not an architect? I began by transforming the clapboard house type, using for the most part the same abstract details as in my earlier efforts — no frames, no trim, no visible windows if possible, but at other points I would use all three. My methodologies were conventional techniques of the day: the expropriation of vernacular forms and materials, cubist fragmen­ tation, surrealist juxtaposition. More specifically, I explored the

38

Five Houses, Ten Details

contrast of technologies, particularly the juxtaposition of sophisticated and handicraft ways of building and of literal and abstract elements, which raised an additional question: could a modernist regional architecture contain literally regional elements? Thus the theoretical house designed for Lawrence incorporated local, literal elements, such as bay windows, panel doors, and even bar joists, but they were set off by the abstract context in which they occurred, the unbroken planes of clapboards, shingles, or glass. A typical vernacular plan type of four rooms with a stair at the center was transformed by the insertion of a steel frame of columns and bar joists that was hung front and rear with planes of clapboards and shingles containing recognizable “quotations,” primarily double-hung or bay windows. Continuous skylights behind these walls created layers of transitional space, further separating them from the body of the house. It was a battle not to veer too far into literalism by introducing gables or fanlights. There were elements, particularly the windows, that were recognizable as objects, but they were also functional necessities, and they could morph into abstract patterns. The house was detailed without copings, water tables, or any of the normal paraphernalia of trim that typically accompany the type. They were abstract details, and their purpose was to isolate the literal details of the other elements. But in the end, the value of the regional elements was not that they were regional. Arguably they were not regional at all. The double-hung bay window and clapboard wall would be just as much at home in Boston or Chicago. The premanufactured windows would have come from Iowa or Minnesota, and the clapboards from Georgia or Oregon. This was not, in Kenneth Frampton’s terms, a problem of negotiating a compromise between mass culture and local condition.6 There would not have been any real mass-produced building components in the house, in any case. The “vernacular” windows and clapboards were no more or less mass-produced than the “high-tech” bar joist. The value of these elements was partly that they were recognizable but also that they had a degree of reality, of animation because of their technical explicitness that the abstract elements did not have.

39

The Detail as Abstraction

Plan and elevation of the house in Lawrence, 1980, unbuilt

40

Five Houses, Ten Details

Some of the things it has taken me longest to learn are, in retrospect, the most obvious. One of these is that there is little modern “regional” architecture, from Alvar Aalto to Álvaro Siza, in which abstraction is not as important, if not more important, than whatever regional references the work contained. Regional elements are used, but they must be either quoted or simplified into forms suggestive of themselves. The ultimate lessons of these regionalist exercises deal with an obvious question that my contemporaries and I have ignored. Why was all this abstraction and transformation necessary? To show that after all, we are still modernists? To disconnect the more literal images from their sources? One answer is the need for quotation. A work of art typically has some device to inform us it wishes to be perceived in a different way than what is around it. Pictures have frames. Sculptures have pedestals. Stages have prosceniums but buildings have no such devices for quotation. They need abstraction in order to be understood in the same way, and abstraction means details that solve the problem but go unnoticed. Of course, there are a great deal of paintings without frames and sculptures without pedestals. We understand this message without them. It is a question of degree. Three years later, I was teaching construction as an adjunct at Princeton. Out the rear bathroom window of my downtown house, one could see the back of an older house for which Michael Graves had designed a small addition, the Claghorn House (1974). Each morning while shaving I had the perfect vantage point to experience its split and displaced pediment. Built of painted wood and stucco, it had little consciousness of material, little structural rigor, and it could only be sympathetically understood as an oversize three-dimensional cubist painting. This, of course, is precisely what it was. Its whole appeal was that it was an architecture of pure abstraction and pure represen­ tation. This was quotation but of a different order: it was quotation of a purely ornamental element. Graves’s early work was always best when all copings, trim, and moldings were minimized or eliminated. The abstraction of these elements was essential to empower them symbolically. It was Graves’s contention that if an element such as a keystone were deprived of its functional significance, it would

41

The Detail as Abstraction

enhance its semiotic power.7 Any suggestion of material, assembly, structure, or shelter risked destroying that appeal. The architecture might have symbolic representations of all these things, but it was critical that they be detached from the reality. I thought that Graves had it precisely wrong. The value of cer­tain literal elements, such as trim, window muntins, and water tables, was that they were functional, so they had a degree of reality rather than representation. They were an escape from an abstraction, and in another way, they were articulated details, reminders that problems such as keeping water out had been solved, that the building had been assembled, and that it was subject to structural forces. They formed an animation of the weightless, geometric abstraction of the building as a whole. The process of quotation by abstraction was a way of detaching the building from its site and at the same time connecting to it. Rather than establishing a connection, the role of the detail was to establish far more systematically its opposite. It was an exploration of the polarities of abstraction and literalism, using literal details to locate elements of the building in the real world, and abstract details to is locate them from it, to transform them into a manifestation of some abstract or literal super-reality. This exploration of the boundary between the literal and the abstract was, in its own way, just as related to place as the symbolic associations or spatial configurations of the house might have been.

Chapter 2 House 1

The lot is located in the Virginia Piedmont, a region bordered by the fall line to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west. It sits at the intersection of two small streams, one running east–west, one running north–south, that eventually drain into the Rivanna River and ultimately the James River. It was an urban leftover, an unused parcel, an eccentric combination of fragments of subdivided properties, traversed by storm and sanitary sewers. While not a natural site, it was urban in location more than in character. Never built on but much modified, the site was not without natural features, though it had few native trees and little topsoil. The courthouse square is two blocks to the south. The University of Virginia is two miles to the west, and Monticello is three miles to the southeast, but the immediate architectural context is neither classical nor colonial. Two blocks to the west is a street of Queen Anne houses from the turn of the twentieth century. Closer is an arts and crafts bunga­low, but the smaller houses immediately adjacent to the site, while brick faced with white trim, have no recognizable orders or pediments. The plot is an L shape much wider than it is deep. The restrictions of zoning setbacks and utility easements reduced the buildable area to a tiny fraction of the site at its eastern extremity. Less than 1,500 square feet, it would be entirely filled, whatever the design. The largest exterior open space would be to the west; a smaller open space would lay behind the house to the north. Views, such as they are, face west.

43

House 1

Elevation, House 1 

4'

View from southeast, House 1

44

Five Houses, Ten Details

The land slopes away from the street, and each leg of the L is bisected by one of the streams. The site thereby has two preexisting axes following the views defined by the streams, one parallel to the street, one perpendicular. If the first house was to be an exploration in connecting architecture to place, this is an unlikely location to begin, there being little, natural or man-made, to connect to or disconnect from. As in my earlier work, my intent was to use abstraction to eliminate the envelope by making the inside and the outside identical. But it was also an exercise in ambivalent connection, and this required the abstraction of detail by eliminating the articulation of forces and conditions. One’s connection to or alienation from a place is not just a question of spatial consciousness  —  knowing where one is in relation to an interior or exterior landscape — but of perceptual consciousness of the building in which one is situated, how it is perceived as a reality or as an abstraction. In the process of abstracting the building envelope, I did not want to destroy the inward-looking character of the private living, dining, and sleeping spaces of the traditional house, or even subvert them. In fact, I wanted to make them more isolated in some places. I did want to blur, overlap, merge, interlock, and undermine their edges. I began with a series of walls laid across the site running east–west, parallel to the street and the major stream, using elemental planes of specific materials rather than volumes or closed forms. The spaces they enclosed had few defined environmental boundaries or allusions to gravity, and a roof little different from a wall. The space of the site and the space of the house were inseparable. The large unbroken planes of the east–west walls were punctured by small openings; openings in the north–south direction were simply the voids between walls. These were organized along axes that connected to the peripheral spaces. There were no visible doors, operable windows, or door or window frames. These elements were there, of course, but they were to be invisible. Hiding the envelope meant hiding the entry, and hopefully it meant moving back and forth across the nonexistent boundary of that envelope. This involved a strategy of exit and reentry. The second-floor

45

House 1

a b c d e

c d b

e

A

Site plan, House 1 

20'  N ↑

House Parking Streams Gabion retaining wall Sewer easement and zoning setback

46

Five Houses, Ten Details

living room was organized around two symmetrically opposite stairs. The spaces these stairs led to, a bedroom for my son and two small libraries, have a sense of detachment from the rest of the house since, in a different world or on a more rural site, they might have been separate buildings. However, I also wanted the simple effect of entering and then leaving the house, of connection with the exterior and disconnection from it, as one moved through the building. This involved “displaced” thresholds: the house is full of thresholds, but they are in the wrong places. I was not erasing boundaries so much as moving them. This also required the abstraction of detail. The planer elements would be constructed of specific materials, straddling the boundary between material reality and abstract unreality, and parallel to the spatial manipulations of the plan was a process of abstraction by elimination of the technical necessities of construction. Whatever their material, the interior and exterior walls were reduced to a minimal, planer geometric equivalency, recognizing that the thickest plywood is smaller than the thinnest concrete. The bed became a floor; the bookcase, a wall; the cabinet, a partition. There was not always a distinction between exterior and interior walls. Some were thicker, such as storage walls and, more significantly, walls of books. Nevertheless each plane was unmistakably of a certain material, whether clapboards, plywood, or drywall. The clapboards and other materials would be expressed so that they would be neither too abstract nor too literal. One would see the horizontal joints of clapboards and brick, and even the lintels, but the copings, corner boards, and other edges would be minimized, hidden, or set within steel frames. I did not want to just erase the articulated detail but to deny what it represented — gravity, wind, water, sun. This required more than the elimination of details; it meant abstracting the building beyond its physical reality. There could be no evidence that the building responded to the immediate environment. There could be no evidence of water, and therefore no visible copings, sills, flashing, gutters, downspouts, or drips. If the house had window mullions, they would betray the presence of an external boundary between inside and out. If it had a structural frame, the house would

47

House 1

a b c d e f g h

f

G

E

c H G

A

Second floor plan and section, House 1 

B

5'  N ↑

D

Kitchen Dining room Bedroom Lower living room Main entry Living room Master bedroom Library

48

Five Houses, Ten Details

Circulation axonometrics, House 1

The circulation system of the second and third levels was one of circumnavigation and reentry. There were two north–south axes; each ended in a fireplace located in a layer of space between the exterior and main living room.

Opposite each fireplace was a door to a stair, each of these led to a different study on the third floor. The south stair, glazed on the garden side and opaque toward the living room, led to a transparent study that seemed to be outside the building. The other stair, its twin, with walls on both sides, led to a, second, skylit study and the third-floor bedroom.

One exited the main space, circum­ navigated it, and reentered, always returning to the axis of the hearth. This formed two circulation systems, each a mirror image of the other.

49

House 1

Section perspective at living room, House 1

50

Five Houses, Ten Details

lose its weightless quality. If it had a recognizable roof, it would have lost its planer qualities or, worse, gained a recognizable image of a house. The house could have built-in furniture, but it would have to be just as abstract as the architecture. There could no difference between interior finishes and exterior ones, no difference between interior and exterior anything. There also could be no evidence of weight, thus no beams, columns, lintels, or struts. Although there is up and down in the building, there could be no clues that there is gravity. Having arrived at a form lacking structure and an environ­mental boundary, there remained a simple question. How to build all this? House 1 had no frame; in fact, it had no structure. Planes floated in glorious indifference to gravity, touching each other as little as possible. A few errant beams served less to support them than to pry them apart. Then there was the problem of seeming structural impossibilities, including thirty-foot-long cabinets and sixteen-foot-high bookcases floating in space. I was supremely confident, however. Structurally it was a challenge, but with some architectural modifications, it could be accomplished. Access to the resources I would need to realize the design might not be easy, but I knew it could be done, for in fifteen years of practice and an equal number of years of teaching detailing, I had acquired great skill, how to hide technology. The wall became a beam; the table, a column; the bench, a pier; and a few steel pipes tucked away would fill in some of the small but conspicuous structural gaps. This process had left me in a paradoxical position as to the building’s details. On the one hand, it seemed critical to eliminate them. For all these spatial moves to work, there could not be any noticeable architectural details or perhaps only a few articulated ones. On the other hand, it seemed unthinkable not to have details. There was no doubt they could be removed. Trim could be made flush, bases recessed, and window frames minimized. Hinges could become pivots, and doors could be frameless glass. But I was uneasy about where the project was going. I had written two five-hundred-page books on detailing and then designed a house that did not seem to have any. I had the sense that I had wandered far off course, into the realm of nondetail or antidetail. This was to be a house about the art of building, but a large amount of technical and constructional information about the building

51

House 1

Structural axonometrics, House 1

The major elements were a series of planes of clapboards, concrete, and plywood running east–west across the site.

Within this abstraction were placed more literal elements — fireplaces, chimneys, steel beams, and a regular grid of glue-laminated beams. However, much of the key structure was concealed, such as the trusses within the bedroom closets.

Two pairs of tubular beams spanned the living room to support the library balcony. These beams were supported, in turn, by two exterior wide flange beams, the structural chimneys, and the columns partially hidden within the walls.

52

Five Houses, Ten Details

Detail of window frame and coping, House 1 The window frame was minimized, eliminated, and blurred into the surface of the clapboard wall. The glass stop was hidden in a notch. Only the copper gravel

stop broke the minimal profile. The roof was sloped to drain water that accumu­lates at the base of the window. This was an abstract detail, solving the problem but hiding the evidence. The height of the copper coping was minimized, and it was pulled back from the face of the wall

to reduce its apparent size from below so that the plane of the clapboard wall appeared unbroken by trim. The detail denied by concealment the forces of water as it affected the building. These details, like many abstract details, hid all evidence of the environmental boundary of the building.

53

House 1

Detail of steel beam and chimney, House 1 The steel-channel-reinforced metal tubes of the fireplace chimneys, part of a symbolic air distribution system, contrasted with the real mechanical air distribution located

in the horizontal steel tube beams. These supported the library balconies and were supported, in part, by exterior steel beams and the chimney supports. These were articulated rather than abstract details, both solving the technical problem of the detail and showing how it

is done by the selective presentation of information.

54

Five Houses, Ten Details

View from west, House 1

55

House 1

was suppressed and hidden. In addition to a rather cavalier attitude toward gravity and enclosure, the design had no doors, no operable windows, not much of a building envelope, and a massive amount of invisible fenestration. But if the intent was an ambivalent connection, there was a need for an opposite type of detail, one that was articulated, one that was about placement and connection. I had treated details as reminders of unwanted realities — that the building had weight, that it was an assembly of parts, that it needed to keep heat in and water out, and that it needed to accommodate myriad programmatic requirements. It seemed that within the framework of no detail and invisible detail there should also be their opposite — a certain number of articulated details. I returned to the virtues of the idea of quotation and the use of literal elements. The ambivalence of the building’s spatial connection to the site had a parallel in the character, the details, of the architectural object. Although conventional elements — doors and windows, columns and beams, trim and frames — remained hidden. More powerful than total abstraction would be the inclusion of selective details. These would be not invisible but explanatory. I wanted to vary the levels of representation between one that was weightless, immaterial, and geometric and one that was a real, material object, in which one was conscious of the weights, the forces, the heat, and the water flowing on the surface and through the building. This required the introduction of isolated moments of explicit structure and construc­tion — beams, tubes, ducts, chimney column struts —  into a building that was largely devoid of structural expression and somewhat structurally deceptive. No doubt had I shown the design of House 1 to my modernist colleagues, many would have been critical not of the degree of abstraction, but rather that it was insufficiently abstract; they would have objected to the few literal elements that remained. The relative absence of any articulation of gravity, environmental necessities, or constructional processes would trouble no one. I am equally certain they would have been unable to explain why. The modern detail has been the abstract detail for so long that we have lost all sense of its purpose. The first house, if nothing else, served to ask the question.

56

Five Houses, Ten Details

In sum, the first of the Farish Street houses was an exploration of abstraction as disconnection from site. All the abstract details of the house acted to deny the forces — weight, stress, heat, and water —  that flow through and around it. But it was also an exploration of connection to place by selective architectural details. The lesson of my prolonged exploration in abstraction was a simple one — detailing requires the selective presentation of information sometimes in the service of abstraction, other times in the service of literalism. Just as abstraction of detail was necessary to dislocate the house from site and region, selective articulation and technical intrusion were necessary to locate it. There were literal elements in House 1, but whatever regional associations they had they were accidental; they were chosen because of the ability of a steel beam, a clapboard, or a pipe rail to be a material object or an abstraction, not a symbol. It was the purpose of the abstract detail not to be a detail at all, to detach the building from physical reality; it was the purpose of the articulated detail to place the building in the reality of gravity, weather, weight, and program.

57

House 1

View from street, House 1

Chapter 3 Abstraction and Animation

Insofar as it can be said that there is a contemporary philosophy of detailing, it is clear that the most prevalent position is that contempo­ rary modernism has no details. Either it does not require them, or they are by definition undesirable even if required. Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid have expressed their desire for a detail-less architecture, and others, including Ben van Berkel and Jan Kaplický, have at times voiced similar intentions. In effect, all are quoting both Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret in saying that in execution, there are no details.1 Given the obvious fact that details in the technical sense are mandatory, and given the plethora of them required in contemporary building, what we are hearing is an argument for the abstract detail, the one that solves the problem but does not show us how, leaving the minimal lines of the building untouched. Abstraction has become the modernist default position, particularly in regards to detail. To the International Style architects, abstraction was functionally justified; to those seeking the zeitgeist, it was justified by the absence of historical references; to the purist, it was a manifestation of platonic beauty. It is none of these. It is not functional. It has become its own historical reference, that is, modern. In the current philosophical climate, a platonic justification is not likely to be met with favor. Abstraction’s primary justifications have long ago departed, but the prejudice in its favor is unabated. While the abstract detail is necessary for architectural meaning, it is not sufficient. The idea of total abstraction from place is no less naive than the regionalist idea of total immersion. Someone encoun­ tering a work of architecture, however mundane or aesthetically

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Abstraction and Animation

ambitious, will at any given moment perceive it as a material object or an image. The occupant’s attention must at some point engage the immediate environment, with an awareness of the physical forces at work in the structure. Every detail that is articulated, that shows us how gravity, wind, water, and material are accommodated, aids in the occupant’s awareness of how the building belongs to a region, a city, or a plot of land. Yet at some point, he must also perceive a building as an abstraction, a geometric shape, a recollection of a recognizable historical object. The idea that the appreciation of art and architecture is a dualistic, contradictory experience is, of course, quite an old one. Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, written in 1908, described what he called the two counter poles of Western aesthetics: abstraction and empathy. According to him, empathy was a projection of oneself into an object and an object into oneself: Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself, to empathize myself into it. What I empathize into it is quite generally life.2

Empathy manifested itself in the organic and naturalistic: The need for empathy can be looked upon as a presupposition of artistic volition only when this artistic volition inclines toward the truths of organic life, that is toward naturalism in the higher sense.3

Abstraction, by contrast, manifested itself in the inorganic and geometric: Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity.4

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Five Houses, Ten Details

The counter pole to the need for empathy appears to us in the urge to abstraction. The aesthetic of empathy connected us to the world, whereas abstraction did the opposite, he claimed: Whereas the precondition for empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomenon of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world.5

For Worringer the tendency toward abstraction in the ornament of what he called “primitive peoples” was a reflection of their desire to mentally escape from a hostile environment, “a refuge from appearances.” 6 There is a great deal of art, particularly modern art, to refute Worringer’s thesis, just as there is a great deal of art that confirms it. But even if his two counter poles do not describe the fundamental extremes of Western aesthetics, they describe precisely the condition of placement and displacement, of much of the best of modern architecture. In twentieth-century modern architecture, the abstract manifests itself in geometric forms and a tendency toward the denial of scale and weight, all elements that disconnect a building from its site. The empathetic manifests itself in the acknowledgment of construction, the affirmation of weight, water, and the forces of nature that connect the building to the site. It may take the form of organic shapes and natural materials but often does not. Both these modes are, as Worringer argued, necessary to understand a work of art. We may perceive a building, or any construction, in several ways: as animated or inert, as an object made of a certain material or as an abstract geometric shape, as a dynamic arrangement of forces or as weightless form, as a totality or as an assembly. In each case, these correspond to the polar opposites that Herbert Read calls vitalism and abstraction, and our relation to the object or our affinity with it will alter as we perceive it as more or less part of the natural world.7 In architectural terms, this became an exercise of a third type, not of abstraction, but of the subversion of abstraction by animation.

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Abstraction and Animation

If there is such a thing as a regionalist detail, it will not be the cultural reference, historical quotation, or literal imitation of a pseudohistory; it will be the equivalent of what Worringer called the empathetic detail — the one that connects us to the world. And if there is an architectural equivalent of the regional ambivalence of literature, it will be the intrusion of the empathetic detail into the realm of the abstract one. It seems impossible that we simultaneously think of a building as an assembly and a totality, as a mechanism for bearing weight and as a dematerialized object, as an imperfect manifestation of an immaterial ideal and an expression of a materialistic essence, but that is precisely how we experience architecture. I think that it is undesirable if not impossible to eliminate the expression of any of these phenomena, but it is insufficient to simply recognize that they are in conflict with one another. The resolution of these two perceptions, the abstract and the empathetic, is the process of architecture, and the mechanism is the detail.

Part 2

On Materials I should like to propose, as a means toward gaining a better understanding of Wright’s work, not a new definition but a new descriptive characterization of Romanticism. The word is associated in our minds with another that is loosely thought of as being its opposite — namely, Classicism. What I shall try to demonstrate is that these two attitudes or perspectives derive from the two main sources of Western thought, the Hebrew and the Greek respectively . ... For the most part my analysis is based upon Thorleif Boman’s extraordinary book, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek . ... [Boman wrote:] “Our way of thinking is different from that of the Hebrews and Semites; we first of all conceive of the altar, i.e. its form, and then the material out of which it is made while presupposing an altar formed and used in this way could as well have been made, e.g., of copper. For us therefore, the form and the matter of anything are separate, and the form is the principle consideration; for the Semites the material is the thing. If an altar is wooden, then it could not possibly be copper, for that would result in a totally new and different altar, namely a copper one.” —Norris Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright

Chapter 4 The Detail as Material Expression: Material and Form The best book is not the one someone tells you about, not the one you read about in a review, not the one that was on the New York Times bestseller list, and certainly not the one you are required to read for a course. It is the one you just find, and in 1967, browsing in the Washington University bookstore, I found Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. I was on academic probation, struggling to decide between a major in English or architecture, and Mayakovsky seemed an architectural poet. If he did not exactly write about architecture, he did write about materials, particularly the very light or the very heavy. Sometimes he is the latter: The self does not care whether one is cast of bronze or the heart has an iron lining.1

Sometimes he is the former, describing himself as, “not a man, but a cloud in trousers.” 2 Often he is a machine, but a humanized machine, not a mechanized human: to us

love



tells us, humming,

that the stalled motor of the heart has started to work

again.3

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The Detail as Material Expression

To Mayakovsky, words are materials, the materials of the artist or of the factory: the steel of words corrodes, the brass of the bass tarnishes.4

If there was a moment when literature and the visual arts coincided in modernism, it was Russian constructivism, and the equiv­ alence of word and material was fundamental to that movement, particularly the collaboration of Vladimir Tatlin and Velimir Khlebnikov. Tatlin (artist, designer, glider maker) and Khlebnikov (nomad, poet, science-fiction writer, ornithologist) shared a common interest in the origins of language and the nature of material, which they saw as parallel phenomena, Faktura, in their terminology. Both felt that to get at the essence of things, one had to remove the associated vessels, whether words or forms, leaving pure sound or pure material. One result was some of the most enigmatic examples of constructivist art, Tatlin’s counter-reliefs — assemblages of glass, wood, sheet metal, and wire. Although inspired by cubist papiers collés, in theory Tatlin’s reliefs had abandoned the representational quality of cubism. They were close to architecture in large part because some had what appeared to be a structural frame of wire. Did they represent something other than themselves? To the literal-minded, some of them could be understood as ships, a memory of his time in the navy. He made a number of drawings of ropes and sails, and all of his works are composed of lines and surfaces, or in three dimensions, of wires and planes. A key to understanding all of this is a stage set, a kind of occupiable counter-relief, for Khlebnikov’s play Zangezi, which consisted as much of abstract sounds as of words. Khlebnikov explained its organization thus: A story is made of words, the way a building is made of construction units. Equivalent words, like minute building blocks, serve as the construction units of a story. A superstory, or supersaga, is made up out of independent sections, each with its own special god, its special faith, and its special rule . ...The building block of the supersaga, its unit of construction is the first order narrative. The supersaga resembles a statue made from

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Five Houses, Ten Details

blocks of different kinds of stone of varying colors — white for the body, blue for the cloak and garments, black for the eyes. It is carved from varicolored blocks of Word, each with its own different structure . ...Narrative is architecture composed of words.5

Tatlin, who acted in the play, said of his design: Parallel to the word structure I decided to introduce a material construction . ...Khlebnikov takes a sound as an element. Within it is the impulse to give birth to words . ...All of these words give the idea of an outer shell, one body in the shell of another . ...To reveal the natures of these sounds I have taken surfaces which are diverse in their material and treatment.6

Despite his eccentricities, Khlebnikov was a great influence on twentieth-century linguistics, particularly Roman Jakobson, one of the founders of semiology. Both shared a common belief that underneath words as symbols were more fundamental meanings based on sound. Jakobson wrote: Those of us who were concerned with language learned to apply the principle of relativity in linguistic operations; we were consistently drawn in the direction of the spectacular development of modern physics and by the pictorial theory and practice of cubism, where everything “is based on relationship” and interaction between parts and wholes, between color and shape, between the representation and the represented. “I do not believe in things,” [Georges] Braque declared, “I believe only in their relationship.” 7

Constructivism exemplified one of several modernist theories of the relationship of form to materials, one that might be called the elemental mode, and the architectural manifestation of this mode seemed rather simple. The elemental building would be an assembly in which each material would be separated into autonomous planes or fragmented volumes that emphasized the individual material’s qualities. Each material would have its own form, but an abstract one.

67

The Detail as Material Expression

Winkler-Goetsch House, Frank Lloyd Wright, Okemos, Michigan, 1939

Set for Zangezi, Vladimir Tatlin, 1923

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Five Houses, Ten Details

They would then be collaged in an arrangement in which they were dependent but maintained a large degree of autonomy. They would be configured in accordance with their structural properties. Each part should unquestionably be built of a certain material. The result of my musings on elementalism was a project —  a second house in Lawrence, Kansas. Based on material and material only, it was to use the strategies but not the forms of Tatlin and the other elementalists. It contained planes of wood, brick, concrete, and metal, all in the form of elongated rectangles, their long axes at right angles to each other. While forming volumes, they would retain their separate formal identities and were thus as detached from one another as possible, linked when necessary by glass or structure. Although the house used pipe columns, bar joists, and wide flanges, it had no structural frame. The planes of material — used in accordance with their structural properties — that enclosed the house were both architectural and structural, although dependent on the isolated structural members for support. The masonry sat on the ground, was unbroken by openings, and had no lintels. The wood and steel planes were cantilevered; nevertheless, this use of material was largely “elemental.” There was something satisfying to me about this house— the tension between material and abstraction, between highly specific details and very general nondetails—but there was also the sense that whatever the house was, it was not really that much about material. It was a bit too easy and, at times, appealing to switch materials and forms. It was literally superficial in that I was exploring the surface qualities of materials and not their inner character, more an exhibition of material than an exploration. Nevertheless, I held on to the conviction that a material-based architecture was possible, and the next step was to find the elemental in more rigorous from. There were in Frank Lloyd Wright’s brick-andwood Usonian houses an elemental exploration of material not unlike Tatlin’s. The Winkler-Goetsch House (1939), one of the most abstract, exemplified an approach that was based on the unique qualities of each material, qualities that enhanced our material consciousness. Each part of the house was of a single material, and each part had an autonomy from the others, forming a series of elongated planes floating in space,

69

The Detail as Material Expression

barely touching one another. It exploited certain structural properties of the material, but the primary impulse was the autonomy of elements. Wright’s approach, however, proved equally problematic. Material as Pattern: Wright It was about a year after my encounter with Mayakovsky that I met a man in many ways his opposite, Norris Kelly Smith, my instructor in ancient and medieval architecture. Like many art historians, he enjoyed contrasting examples, and two of his favorites were Monticello (1784) and Fallingwater (1937). To Smith, they expressed the polar opposites of Western thought: Jefferson’s concept of form was the classical, based on ideal, abstract shapes that were applied to materials, and Wright’s, the romantic, was based on forms that were derived from the materials themselves. Using an idea developed by Thorleif Boman, Smith stated that whereas the classic form originated in the Greek view of the world, the romantic came from that of the Old Testament.8 Boman saw the classical and the Hebraic as two opposing worldviews on material and form: When we observe and study a thing, we involuntarily make for ourselves an image of it somewhat analogous to a photograph. When we mean to think about the thing and describe it, we try to develop by means of words the same image in our hearers. The Greeks did the same thing. The Israelites, on the other hand, had no interest in “photographic” appearance of things or persons. In the entire Old Testament we do not find a single description of an objective “photographic” appearance . ... Noah’s ark is discussed in detail . ...It is striking in this description that it is not the appearance of the ark that is described but its construction.9

To Smith, Monticello and Fallingwater were the direct descendents of these two traditions. Based on idealized abstractions, Monticello origi­ nated in a classic, Greek view of the world. Based on material, Fallingwater originated in a biblical, Hebraic concept of the world. Smith, who clearly preferred Monticello, thus encapsulated for me one of architecture’s most basic questions: could there be a contemporary architecture like Wright’s, one based not on preconceived form, but derived from the inner life of its material?

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Five Houses, Ten Details

Wright’s work was the obvious point of departure for this endeavor, but most who have read Wright’s series of articles, “The Meaning of Materials,” will share my disappointment with their content.10 In most cases, he discusses the subject in a superficial way, and when he does speak of materials, he emphasizes the importance of geometric motifs, what he called “nature pattern”: 11 Nature furnished the materials for architectural motifs out of which the architectural forms as we know them to-day have been developed.12

And elsewhere: Not until the abstraction finds proper use as method and motif for true building, and its pattern becomes the constitution of construction as well as its colorful imaginative features, not until then will we have the nobility of a truly genuine architecture.13

“Nature pattern” was created by the abstraction of specific plant forms into decorative geometric patterns. These were interesting in themselves but hardly in the nature of the material, seeming in many cases to go against it. Nevertheless, this was a second means of material expression — the motif. It is one of the oldest and most common in twentieth-century architecture, favored by architects from Eliel Saarinen to Fay Jones, but also one of the most problematic, since it is not about material at all but about geometric pattern imposed on material. There was in Wright’s work fragments of a third approach —  the engineered — based on the structural capacities and limitations of material. Buried under the glacier of verbiage in his writings were some true material insights, such as, “The stick is the natural post. It is also the natural beam.” 14 The Usonian houses expressed certain structural strengths and limitations of the material: that masonry cannot span a flat opening without reinforcement or that wood can cantilever. The roofs, then, are planes of wood projecting from a masonry core, and stone was used as found in nature, with few openings and fewer lintels, and brick, being masonry, was used like stone. Although these houses require a great deal of concealed steel, this seemed an approach that,

71

The Detail as Material Expression

being structural, would go deeper into the nature of material than the elemental or the motific. Material as Structure I met George Nakashima once briefly, in about 1972, in his furniture showroom outside of New Hope, Pennsylvania. His life story is that of an exile, often not by his own choice. Born in Seattle to Japanese parents, he was caught up in 1941 in the internment of Japanese Americans and sent to a camp in Idaho. There he met a Japanese carpenter and began his work in furniture. In 1943, he was given permission to leave the camp to live on a farm in New Hope, and there he remained. While he is remembered primarily for his furniture, he designed a number of buildings, primarily the dozen or so that sit on his compound in New Hope. His work in furniture and architecture is about material, and mostly about wood, solid wood. He wrote, “We work with solid wood, not veneer, the better to search for its soul.” 15 He used the same material — wood — for architecture and furniture, but that did not lead to a commonality of attitude. The majority of architects from Robert Adam to Marcel Breuer approach the two in different ways, but nowhere is the difference greater than in the work of Nakashima. The furniture might be best described as monumental organic. The typical Nakashima table is a single solid slab of wood. The largest, the Peace Altar, is ten feet square and three inches thick. The most powerful are those that are the fusion of a literal organic form with a highly crafted one such as the Conoid Bench. But Nakashima’s attitude toward material, which is arguably his entire focus, is strangely dualistic. If his furniture is about weight, his architecture is about lightness, about an absolutely minimal weight. Nakashima’s first buildings at New Hope are very similar to traditional Japanese wood buildings, but, after 1956, he began to experiment with thin-shell vaults. These were primarily wood, constructed with a great deal of handicraft and at times disturbing in their thinness. The first series of vaults, mostly conoids, used three layers of plywood and two-by-four nailers turned sideways. A concrete conoid with a twoand-a-half-inch shell was built in 1959, followed by a plywood-vaulted pool house and a hyperbolic paraboloid for his museum.

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Five Houses, Ten Details

Conoid Studio, George Nakashima, New Hope, Pennsylvania, 1960

Walnut Conoid Bench, George Nakashima, 1974

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The Detail as Material Expression

This was the engineered attitude toward material: to configure the wood or concrete to exploit its structural properties, to enclose the largest space with the smallest span using the minimum quantity of material. From one point of view, this is the reverse of Western tradition. Buildings are supposed to be heavy and suggest permanence. Furniture is supposed to be light and suggest mobility. From another point of view, it sits comfortably within the Gothic tradition. To Viollet-le-Duc, high French Gothic could be explained as the result of material efficiency. The engineered approach is, of course, respectable modernist territory. Most architecture students of my generation began their education with basic design courses with assignments such as “inves­ti­ gations in the nature of material,” the volumes made with folded paper or the flexible structures of wood, all seeking a configuration to make a weak material stronger, all derived from the Bauhaus or Bauhaus-inspired courses. As one Bauhaus student recalled: Economy both of materials and means was stressed, since what [Josef] Albers described as “thrift” was not only the antithesis of “waste,” but also made for “an element of weightlessness.” 16

The impact of this third attitude on my own work was the Brick, Wood, and Steel House (1990). It had no particular site, a generic program, and a minimum of other restraints, and it explored material by using as little material as possible. There would be three rooms, three buildings, and each would be of a single primary material. The three independent volumes of the house contained living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms; the materials were steel, brick, and wood. The form would be not only appropriate to that material but also unique to it. Each form would maximize the material’s inherent structural character, perhaps its strength, perhaps its weaknesses. Each space would grow out of the character of each structure, and each structure would grow out of the character of each material. The brick dining room was covered by a vault of hollow tile supported by steel pipe Vs. The steel living room was the reverse, a hanging steel tent, but also supported by V columns. The bedroom structure was a wood frame. This was an “engineered” use of material.

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Five Houses, Ten Details

It was a building that, however deterministic, was fraught with internal contradictions. Each single material needed another in order to articulate its nature. Brick needed steel, steel needed glass, wood needed both steel and glass. In the end, I determined that this was not the problem but rather the solution. The best way to achieve a materialbased architecture was to reinforce, to inform, a weaker material with a stronger one, to inform brick and wood with steel. The engineered approach when applied to a single efficient material such as steel was often problematic, illustrated perfectly by Richard Rogers’s PA Technology Center (1982). It has the style that material economy was meant to generate, but, like many other high-tech buildings of the period, it is structurally excessive, with spans that seem far in excess of its program requirements. It had the sense of an elegant tool, but one vastly overlarge and overexpensive for the job at hand. Doubtless our admiration for the suspension bridge is based in part on its efficiency: its use of the minimum quantity of steel to span the maximum distance. Applied at the smaller scale, the results evoke an entirely different reaction, at best a miniature technical charm, as in the case of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1946). In any case, economy of material does not automatically yield economy of labor, economy of capital, or at the small scale, even appropriate architectural form. I cannot say that I began the design of the second Farish Street house with an absolute conclusion as to which of these modes I would follow, but it was with the suspicion that I should avoid the motific and pursue the engineered while avoiding its excesses and with the hope that another strategy might emerge.

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The Detail as Material Expression

Elevation of the house in Lawrence, Kansas, 1980, unbuilt

Perspective of Brick, Wood, and Steel House, 1990, unbuilt

Chapter 5 House 2

The second house on the Farish Street site was an exploration of material. I proceeded with the conviction that through material would come structure, and through structure would come space. Each material would have a form unique to that material. It would not use motifs; it might have elemental qualities, but it would draw primarily on the engineered mode, mitigated by the fear of structural excess, and be based on the idea that the best strategy for avoiding this was to inform a weak material with a strong one. For reasons that went well beyond the idea of informing one material with another, I had long determined that the house would be a hybrid of materials. A persistent modernist fiction has been the mono­material building. Modern architecture abounds in wood houses supported by steel for structural reasons, and steel houses made of wood for economic ones, but all appear to be a single material in the interest of aesthetic purity. Whatever the constructional dream of the modern American house, the constructional reality is the wood-steel hybrid. Despite appearances, only a small number of contemporary brick houses are true, that is, solid, as opposed to veneered masonry. Many of the well-known all-wood houses, traditional or modern, are nothing of the sort. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “wood” houses contain a fair amount of steel, carefully kept out of sight, but he was not alone —  H. H. Richardson and Charles and Henry Greene designed buildings that, while meticulous in their expression of wood, contain not a little steel at some critical locations. The modernist steel house is no less impure. The Eames House (1949), the “steel” Case Study Houses of

77

House 2

Elevation, House 2 

5'

View from southeast, House 2

78

a b c D E F

Five Houses, Ten Details

Kitchen and dining room Library Entry hall Living room Storage loft Bedrooms

e

c b

f

b

e a

Second floor plan and section, House 2 

c

d

6'  N ↑

79

House 2

Structural axonometrics, House 2

Living room It is the nature of the platform frame to be a box with small openings. As larger openings were made in the box, it became a true frame as individual members became larger and fewer and, in certain cases, changed from wood to steel. It is the nature of the steel frame to punch holes in that box. This was an engineered approach to material that used the limitations of wood in combination with the strengths of steel. The steel frame is a beam that tapered as loads changed. Because of the long span of the balcony, it employed the same tubular beams that doubled as chimneys in House 1.

Bedrooms The bedrooms were contained within a plywood vault supported by glue-laminated ribs. It is in the nature of processed wood to be curved because it gives the structure additional strength. The ribs were C-shaped rigid frames with one leg resting on a floor-height truss and the other on the bearing wall to the east and are tapered accordingly. It was an engineered approach to material but it has a sculptural quality that is suggestive of other materials.

Kitchen and library The long tapering space of the kitchen and library was built of brick walls and steel floors. The brick walls were bottom-heavy, buttressed, and without lintels. The second floor was supported by a minimally designed steel truss. This, again, was the engineered approach to material, utilizing the limitations of brick and the possibilities of steel.

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Five Houses, Ten Details

Base of Nanni di Banco’s Four Saints, Orsanmichele, Florence, Italy, 1410–14

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House 2

Raphael Soriano and Craig Ellwood, and most of the other well-known all-steel houses of American modernism are so in image only, using steel only for exposed structure; the remainder of the framing, typically joists and studs, are hidden from view and invariably built of rough carpentry to reduce cost and facilitate construction. House 2 was very much an American house in that it evokes the reality of these two great but impure traditions — the steel house and the wood house. There remained the tadpole-shaped building envelope defined by the site restrictions described in House 1. At the center of the tadpole head I placed a two-story block of living and library space with a loft above for the bedrooms, and in the long tadpole tail was a long thin brick block with a kitchen below and office above. There were three major spaces of three different materials, forming three distinct structures. The living area would be a frame, a double-layered cubic volume with an outer layer of wood clapboards and an inner cube of casework. The inner cube forms a living area within and a doughnut of smaller spaces. The loft bedrooms would be contained in a wood vault. The bedrooms are the most private spaces and thus the ones with the greatest sense of enclosure. The kitchen and office wing follows the setback lines and has brick bearing walls lined with cabinets on both sides on both floors. Although the approach to material was engineered in each case, the results have something of the opposite effect. The steel allows the brick to take on a light, floating character foreign to our perception of it. The steel of the wood cube, like the brick tail, takes on an animated character, giving it simultaneously an expressionistic character, including a steel frame suggestive of a giant fossilized mammal. Despite the rationality of the wood vault, it takes on a sculptural character. This introduces a fourth mode of material expression — the sculptural. Take the panel at the base of Nanni di Banco’s Four Saints in Orsanmichele (1404) in Florence. What does it portray — a man carving a statue of a putto or a man attacking a baby with a hammer? How do we know it is the former? In all the other figures, the marble represents flesh, clothing, or wood, but in the case of the statue, marble represents marble. Typically sculpture employs a difference in material between subject and representation. The appeal of the capitals of the Southwell Chapter House (1295) is that they use a brittle and massive

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Five Houses, Ten Details

material — stone — to suggest a light and flexible one — foliage. This gets at something basic about the representational nature of sculpture: at times it requires a contradiction, or at least an inconsistency, between form and material. About eight miles from the Nakashima studio is another house, Fonthill (1912), built by Henry Mercer for himself. Its historical importance is that it is an early American work in concrete, but much of its appeal is the oblivious inappropriateness of concrete to the way it is used, from its concrete roof to its concrete chimneys to its concrete birdhouses to its concrete double-hung window mullions. It was a sculpture of a French château, executed in concrete. This process of innovation is transformational — the new material replaces the old, and the old forms remain. Just as in the case of sculpture, the original form is thus represented in the new work. This is the essence of the sculptural mode translation — informing one material with a concept derived from another. On the surface, it might appear that the engineered approach to material and the sculptural approach — translation — are mutually exclusive, yet they have a strange interdependence. The results of the engineered approach often evoke a sculptural reaction. The sculptural interpretation of material can never be entirely eliminated. In fact, it is often most pronounced when another mode, the engineered, is most rigorously applied. What is appealing about the vault of Amiens Cathedral (1266) is that it is light and thin, unlike stone as we think of it. This process of design through material translation is an ancient methodology that has the endorsement of Vitruvius, who described the stone Doric order growing out of a primitive wood one.1 While translation may easily produce the deplorable — the fiberglass Corinthian capital or the Styrofoam molding — it may just as easily produce the admirable and structurally rational. Usually this occurs if the material of origin and the material into which the form is translated have similar structural properties — the rope suspension bridge that becomes the steel suspension bridge, the concrete vault that becomes a wood one. This has no better illustration than the work of Wright. Fallingwater (1937), a concrete-and-stone building, is a translation of the wood-and-stucco Laura Gale House (1909). In modern

83

House 2

Fonthill, Henry Mercer, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1912

84

Five Houses, Ten Details

Detail of brick and steel wall, House 2 Since brick cannot take tensile stresses, it required lateral bracing and support at openings, and therefore lintels and, at times, buttresses. A steel frame with a rib sitting on each buttress

supported the floor and wall above. Another set of beam ducts tied the ribs together, using the steel to assist the structurally limited masonry. This steel was as light and minimal as possible, so the ribs were tapered. The static nature of the brick was “informed” by the steel, expressing not

the quality of brick but the quality the steel imparted to the brick.

85

House 2

Detail of glue-laminated beam detail, House 2 Because both the beam and the plywood were laminated, they were more easily curved than other materials. The glue-laminated rigid frame structure required pinned-connection hinges at its

ends and thus literally demon­strated structural movement. The wood vault was more about the possibilities of fabrication than structure, but the curves gave it additional structural strength in the process.

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Five Houses, Ten Details

Section perspective at living room, House 2

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American houses of the late twentieth century, we see translation in technological reverse. The concrete-and-masonry Villa Savoye (1929) becomes Breuer’s masonry-and-wood house for himself in New Canaan. The steel-and-concrete Farnsworth House (1951) becomes Ellwood’s all-wood Kubly House (1965). None of these are foreign to the structural nature of those materials, given the similarity of the actual material to material of origin, for example, both steel and wood can take tensile stresses although steel can take many more. It was an unsettling quality of House 2 that one could think of other forms that would be equally appropriate to any of the materials. It was not difficult, and in some cases rather easy, to interchange the forms and materials: to make the wood form out of steel, certainly, but why not the steel form of wood? The approach in all three cases was engineered, but the results in each were somewhat different, not so much the utilization of the material but the suggestion of an inner force. The key to understanding the sculptural approach was not scientific and mathematical, but intuitive and aesthetic. Conclusion Writing in 1832, Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy argued that stone could only find its own expression by imitating another material: But one might ask, what does stone, whether in the quarry or in the field, find to emulate, imitate or feign? Should stone imitate the caves or the mountains and rocks from which it is quarried?...By copying itself, stone copies nothing, offers no form to art  . ...Stone, having only itself to imitate, or better still, having no representation of combinations to emulate, no projections, no solids and voids, and no correlations or proportions within the massing and its parts, finds nothing else to build but surfaces, and nothing else to express but massiveness.2

Most architects find the idea of the equivalency of architecture and sculpture unpalatable, but it is difficult to deny Quatremère de Quincy’s major premise, that material expression often requires an

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animation of one material with the qualities of another, one that may structurally appropriate but visually contradict what we consider its nature. The ideal described by Boman and Smith — the form that without the material could not be a form — is elusive at best. Certain forms are appropriate to certain materials, but rarely are they unique to that material. Forms that are appropriate to a material in a structurally unique way are not always appropriate in a architectural way, and most of the moments in architectural history when designers claimed to grow form out of the nature of material invariably involved transformation —  making an old form out of a new material. The most profound examples of material innovation and expression in history involve not just translation but an animation of the inanimate; something has intruded into the material — a form, a force, the properties of another material, even, in the mind of some, a deity. This is not to say that the qualities are not coming from the materials themselves, simply that they require an animation to release them. The lesson of the second house was that the engineered mode required the sculptural. One devoid of the other will inevitably be superficial. The engineered on its own leads inevitably to excess. It manifested a kind of inner life, but it is a sensibility acquired from outside the material, and sculpture in this case meant more than just an image applied to a material; it meant the inhabitation of one material by the qualities of another. It was a lesson applied immediately after to a very different wood building — a school on the outskirts of Charlottesville.

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House 2

View from west, House 2

Chapter 6 The Free Union Country School Competition

I made my third visit to Mesa Verde National Park in the summer of 1952 at age six, a result of my father’s love, if not obsession, with the West. The American West is not the obvious place to begin one’s architectural education, but there I saw a great deal of architecture —  the pueblos and Anasazi ruins; the huge, shingled log piles of the Old Faithful Inn (1904) and the Glacier Park Lodge (1913). The best of these rustic masterpieces is long gone, the Longs Peak Inn (1906) in Estes Park, Colorado, which burned in 1949. It is not as well-known as the log palaces at Yellowstone or Glacier national parks, but it was this style at its most outrageous, most extreme, and most literal. Nor was it the work of an unschooled rustic, but that of one of the best-known naturalists of the day, Enos Mills. The columns used by Mills were fire-scarred, gnarled, twisted tree trunks that extended a full story height above the roofline. These surreal elements are not the subtle intrusions of natural elements, as in Aalto’s work, but huge, almost freestanding sculptures that dominate the simplicity of the rest of the building. Mills wrote: We avoided conspicuous craftsmanship. Joints were neither concealed nor emphasized. We mortised, inset and spiked, pinned, bolted, and clamped. There were no frills nor freaks, no striving for effect, and the simple lines produced substantial and pleasing results. We did not follow a carefully thought-out plan, but constantly readjusted and experimented. The finished structure was a good combination of the rustic and the artistic.1

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Most historians would see Mills as the kind of designer Colin Rowe and Claude Lévi-Strauss would call a bricoleur, someone who “makes do with whatever is at hand,” as opposed to an engineer, who sees architecture as part of a comprehensive science.2 But Mills was hardly an innocent primitive. He was well aware of the tradition in which he worked, that of the Adirondack camps. His work was rather something closer to what Thorleif Boman described, an architecture that was truly inseparable from its materials. Literalism That log building could be expropriated into modernist architecture is hardly a heretical thought. It is respectable modernist territory. Wagner, Maybeck, Gropius, Aalto, and Le Corbusier all designed some type of log cabin, and in 2003, the issue surfaced when the Free Union Country School, a small private elementary school, held a competi­tion for a large, combined auditorium and art space with adjacent classrooms. Free Union, Virginia, is a small town northwest of Charlottesville, a rural location in the process of being subur­banized, but for now the site remains picturesque, with views of farmland to the west. It is housed in a loose, rambling assemblage of one-story log and board and batten buildings. The school sees its connection to nature in the academic and literal sense as a part of its mission. Since the multipurpose nature of the space pushed the solution toward a long-span loft, I was conveniently provided with an oppor­ tunity to explore the reinvention of log construction in the age of blobs and folds. Had an explanation been required for this exploration, the obvious answer would have been context, and in the world in which I live, context can be sufficient reason for the most irrational of decisions. Arguing that logs were structurally appropriate, environmentally desirable, or a sustainable material could have been a suspect notion, but context was beyond questioning. Had the character of the existing buildings been neocolonial, an analogous exploration would have required, in some quarters at least, a lot more explaining, but to the mainstream modernist, at least since 1930, the vernacular has always been an acceptable point of departure.

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At the same time, it was difficult to argue that logs were a regionalist idiom. That was not even wood, if you were a strict Jeffersonian. He wrote in 1781: “A country whose buildings are of wood can never increase its improvements to any considerable degree . ...” 3 With or without his approval, the log cabins of the school were neither regional nor vernacular. The oldest dated from the 1950s, and their rustic, primitive imagery is the result of romantic fiction, not practical necessity. In terms of authenticity, there was no real difference between these buildings and their neocolonial counterparts at nearby schools. There was, in fact, a long list of reasons not to use logs. The first was technical. In their primitive form, logs do not deal well with extremes of temperature between inside and out. A six-inch wood stud wall uses less wood and has a higher R-value than a log wall of the same thickness, that is, heat moves though it more slowly, reducing heat loss. The modern log wall can achieve thermal parity with the stud wall, provided it is thicker, largely because of the advantages of thermal mass. Log walls do not use the material in a particularly efficient way. Being round, logs do not make very good beams, which are more efficient if they are deeper than wide, and they are difficult to join.4 These last two factors explain the problems some of the more conspicuous monuments of log architecture, such as the Old Faithful Inn, have experienced. This was symptomatic of the second objection — that logs represented an archaic, overly romantic technology that should be disposed of, but this generalization is not completely supported by the facts. Log construction has in some ways become the system Ellwood and Eames dreamed of; logs are, far more than steel, a modern industrialized housing system. Where Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé failed, the log cabin has triumphed. The modernist dream of a massproduced, off-the-shelf, ready-to-order industrialized building system has been realized in the mass-produced log cabin. It is one of the fastest-growing systems of industrialized building. About 25,000 log house packages are sold annually by 650 manufacturers in North America. This makes up about 7 percent of the custom house building market and 2 percent of the total single-family house market, and the number being built annually has roughly doubled since the late

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A cabin at Longs Peak Inn, Enos Mills, Estes Park, Colorado, 1906

Main Lodge at Longs Peak Inn, Enos Mills, Estes Park, Colorado, 1906

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Oregon Pavilion, Foulkes and Hogue, Panama Pacific International Exhibition, San Francisco, California, 1915

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1980s. Henry Thoreau’s Cabin has yet to go into mass production, but the standardized plans, including instructions for assembly, may be purchased for thirty dollars at the Shop at Walden Pond.5 A third objection is that a log building of this size is invariably a steel and wood hybrid. A typical case is Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms (1908) in Morris Plains, New Jersey. There is an odd similarity between the campus of the Free Union Country School and Craftsman Farms. It was to be a self-sufficient craft-based community, producing its own food, building all that was needed for the good life, and living close to nature. The reality was that Stickley, who was a magazine editor, proselytizer, and factory owner — a kind of nineteenth-century Martha Stewart — spent much of his time on the train commuting to his office in New York City and his magazine publisher in Syracuse in the same state. In some ways, the buildings are equally inconsistent. The main building, a log cabin lodge, contained a significant quantity of steel when constructed and contains even more today after resto­ ration, all hidden; Stickley’s spatial ambitions having transcended the structural capacity of logs. However admirable Stickley and what he aspired toward, the inner contradictions of his house parallel the inner contradictions of his own life. The main building was advertised as a school but occupied as a residence, since the school was never realized, and designed in wood but built with a great deal of steel. In the end, he was just another commuter from New Jersey, conveniently located near the railway station. The same contradictory attitude between a romantic vision and a commuter’s reality might be found in the goals of the Free Union Country School and the architecture that housed it. The log cabins represented a fictional past, exemplifying in theory the qualities we value but describing qualities largely missing from the life of the suburban commuter. In all likelihood, it would be realized using the same methodology as at Craftsman Farms — a great deal of internal steel reinforcing. In the end, I used logs not because they were contextual, regional, literal, romantically evocative, or an industrial product. I thought the intention of the school, to be close to the natural world in its placement and its curriculum, and in the building that housed it, was a good one. .

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Logs could be the raw material of architecture, not just a representation of it, and they were a material near, if not in, its natural state. My intent was to learn from log architecture the way Louis Kahn had learned from the remains of Roman brick architecture, to remove the layers of literalism, historical association, and predetermined imagery to reach what was the essential nature of the material. As I had in House 2, I determined that the steel and wood hybrid was not the problem but the solution. It seemed possible to think of Stickley’s house and the Case Study Houses in a different way — a wood structure inhabited by a steel one and a steel structure inhabited by a wood one, and if one animated the outer structure with qualities of the inner structure, the result might render the best qualities of both. This, as in House 2, involved a process of material translation. The oversize log prototypes of American architectural history present two different types of transformation, one that was representative and one that was engineered, and both involved an animation of the material. They were the opposite of abstraction, making us more rather than less aware of the actual as opposed to the perceptual nature of the material. In the representative type of transformation, forms associated with another material, such as stone, were built of wood. This type has time-honored precedents, such as the log Parthenon that was the Oregon Pavilion at the Panama Pacific International Exhibition of 1915. In the engineered type of transformation, the one used in House 2, structures associated with one material, often steel, are executed in wood or logs, such as the log wood trusses of the Old Faithful Inn. The strategy was to build a form not associated with logs out of logs, by means of both translation and abstraction, the former on the inside to form the animated structure, the latter on the exterior to distance the material from the nostalgic atmosphere of its context. Simultaneously, I had to deal with the technical problems of building with logs — their structural weaknesses, their environmental shortcomings, their joining difficulties, and their inefficiency of material. The strategy, again, was to inform wood with steel. I began with the structural problem and with an old, popular, yet strange device — the flitch beam — a plate of steel sandwiched between two

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Construction sequence, Free Union Country School competition entry, Free Union, Virginia, 2003

Rigid frames of wood and steel flitch beams

Flitch beams supporting floor

Interior walls of squared logs

Exterior walls of wood platform framing

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Detail of rigid frame joints, Free Union Country School competition entry, Free Union, Virginia, 2003 Pivoting steel connectors anchor the rigid frame’s tapered legs to the ground. This suggests movement and implies mobility; the structure

is animated, not static. Although the joints at the base and midspan are structurally necessary, their movement expresses the force within the structure.

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boards. It is an idea more beloved by builders than engineers but has a long history. It is used as early as William Burges’s Tower House (1876) and as late as Peter Salter’s Inami Woodcarving Museum (1994) in Japan. I began with a three-hinged rigid frame, a steel form built out of wood using the flitch beam. By making the upper corners of the frame rigid, lateral stability was achieved, preventing these corners from rotating and collapsing when loads were applied from the side, while the joints at grade were allowed to rotate (a pinned connection). Because the greatest stress was on the upper, rigid joints, the frame was larger at the top than at the bottom. The frame members were a wood and steel hybrid: two half-round logs of uniform diameter sandwiched around a steel plate, the shape of which changed as the load it carried increased or decreased. It was a sculptural transformation, a steel form built of wood, but it was about animating wood with the character of steel through the forms of steel. Unlike traditional log construction, the rigid frame sits lightly on the ground and is disassociated from the earth. Its joints moved and looked like they moved, adding an inner life to the structure, demonstrating its internal forces. The building consisted of three layers — the rigid frames, a series of interior log walls, and a platformframed envelope. The design began not with an idea about education or the site but with an idea about a material. I was not indifferent to the former, but I was confident that a response to material would lead to a response to a place and to a program, and that the degree to which the material was abstracted or animated would lead to a relationship between building and place. I did not divest log architecture of its romantic veneer any more than Kahn divested brick architecture of its romantic veneer, but I did separate it from its familiar forms and ornaments with their associations, in the hope of getting below the surface to find, as Kahn might say, the point of beginning.

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Section perspective showing room set up for performance, Free Union Country School competition entry, Free Union, Virginia, 2003

Exterior, Free Union Country School competition entry, Free Union, Virginia, 2003

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Section showing rigid frame, Free Union Country School competition entry, Free Union, Virginia, 2003

Chapter 7 Sculpture, Engineering, and Architecture

We are reminded on an almost daily basis that we live at the boundary of a new world, if we have not already crossed the boundary. The way materials are fabricated and joined will never be the same; design and fabrication are to become simultaneous, the assembly of large-scale components is just around the corner, and a plethora of new materials is about to be unleashed on the market. I am skeptical of these predictions, but not so much of their technological accuracy as of their long-term importance. This innovation exhibits two parallel phenomena. Old materials are being changed by material technology, in theory at least, and new materials such as translucent concrete or carbon fiber are being developed. The effects of the new processes and materials have been almost entirely decorative, and most of the digitally based work in old materials seems more a new process of rendering than a new method of building. Digital fabrication has simplified many existing processes but has not fundamentally altered them. Architectural theory has been quick to discover a larger order in this process, largely before it has really emerged, and has been a bit too hasty to connect the ideology and theory of Gilles Deleuze and others to this technical development, largely because it neatly coincides with the current and ever-changing vision of the zeitgeist. It can be argued that many of these new material-based pheno­ mena are not really new. The motif has seen something of a resurgence in contemporary modernism as in Herzog and de Meuron’s Ricola Storage Building (1992) with panels imprinted with a photograph of

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a plant motif. Wiel Arets’s Utrecht University Library (2004) repeats an image of willow trees on glass, precast panels, and cast-in-place concrete. A number of projects, in practice and academia, draw on simple geometric motifs from culture or biology that are then applied at a multiplicity of scales to solve a multiplicity of problems in a multiplicity of materials, such as RoTo Architects’s master plan competition for a Center for Art and Culture (2003) in Hefei, China. Whether this is a strategy that will produce an architecture of substance is questionable, but none to my knowledge has claimed, as Wright did, that it has any basis in the nature of materials. Wright published the first segment of In the Cause of Architecture in 1908, the same year Wilhelm Worringer wrote Abstraction and Empathy. Wright’s view is diametrically opposed to of Worringer’s. Geometry is not the mechanism for escaping the natural world; it is the structure that underlies it, and abstraction is not a way of distancing us from nature but a way of engaging it. Abstraction was the result of a necessary “conventionalization” of natural form: “[Nature] has a practical school beneath her more obvious forms in which a sense of proportion may be cultivated,” Wright wrote.1 This was, in fact, the relation of form to material: architectural motifs furnished by nature. However appealing the transcendental nature of Wright’s argument, this gets at the heart of the problem of his architecture, or at least its details. The impulse that led to his geometric ornament, conventionalization, in which the qualities of material are more likely to be denied than expressed, is not the same impulse toward abstraction that gave rise to the Usonian houses. It was their disconnection of the material from the natural world through geometry that was their virtue, not the opposite. The engineered approach so critical to the cable-suspended, airplane‑like constructions of high tech has fallen out of favor not because its economies of material did not translate into an economy of capital (which they did not) but because the imagery that it produced has become unpopular — the futuristic nightmares of technology’s broken promise for a better future. This is more glib association that can only lead to a superficial understanding of architecture of any kind, but here remains the problem of the inevitable excesses of this approach when used with efficient modern materials such as steel.

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The sculptural approach is commonplace although rarely under that name. Unless the process of material development over the next ten years is radically different than over the last 500 years, the incorporation of new materials will be mostly a process of translation — a form drawn from one material executed in another. Even when the structural nature and limitations of a material guided the determination of its form, it rarely occurs in a way that makes no reference to precedent. The appeal of many of these translations is that they are representative, that one material suggested another. We respond to architecture in two ways, the sculptural and the architectural, or put another way, the animated and the abstract, and thus there are two corresponding modes of interpreting architecture. The good form will evoke both responses. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, in part, originated the idea of a material-based architecture, agreed: Architecture is not an art of imitation, but rather an autonomous art; yet at the highest level it cannot do without imitation. It carries over the qualities and appearance of one material into another: every order of columns, for example, imitates building in wood.2

The argument I am making, however, is that if there is to be a meaningful (perhaps not deterministic) relation of form to material, it must come out of an engineered attitude but informed by a sculptural one. In the end, the difference between these modes may be one of degrees. We may have an engineered, mathematically accurate under­ standing of the internal forces at work in a material. We may understand its internal forces in a structurally representative way — a wood building that appears to behave structurally as a steel one. We may understand the internal force in an intuitive way, but we are still responding to perceived internal stresses. It seems to be a fundamental urge at some point in looking at a three-dimensional work of art or architecture to understand it as inhabited and thus animated. Most of those who describe the nature of material speak of it as a kind of spiritual habitation, an inner life. They do not sound all that different from Michelangelo writing about sculpture, and ultimately not all that different from what Quatremère de Quincy said of stone,

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“By copying itself, stone copies nothing.” 3 What I had described in House 2 as an animation of steel to wood was, in fact, an animation of the latter by the former, and another demonstration, if any was necessary, that the evocation of the inner life of material required an external application of another force. At the same time, this expression was not something imposed from without. At its best, it was instead from within. Mircea Eliade wrote in Patterns in Comparative Religion, “undressed stone indicated the divine presence far more effectively to the primitive religious mind than did any statue of Praxiteles to the sculptor’s own contemporaries.” 4 In his history of the Ise Shrine, Kenzo Tange described this phenomenon: Later a stage was reached in which stones and rocks, instead of having themselves spiritual qualities, were looked upon simply as abodes for supernatural beings: abstract, undifferentiated mononoke [spirits] was replaced by more definite, individual animistic deities sheltering in rocks and stones. Such rock abodes of deities are called iwakura. This primitive thought process of the ancient Japanese was a reflection of a general trend in the spiritual history of the human race.5

This is hardly a non-Western idea. One of the gnostic gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, describes the same thought: Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things . ... Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Pick up a stone, and you will find me there.” 6

This was the second type of detail, the detail as a manifestation of material. This type of detail was abstraction’s opposite — a connection to reality, not a removal. It might be the representation of an inner life; it might be sculptural expression; it might be the reality of an inner life. While the first house was about abstract detail and articulated

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details, this type was the articulated detail made sculptural — not just demonstrating a solution to a problem but articulating a sense of its internal forces. Much of what we learned or read about architecture was about how it operates as a stimuli; how one reads it; how it is a sign; how it is ambiguous, symbolic, metaphorical; how it is a language. The impulses that Wright or Kahn spoke of were different. What does the object project from within? What is the inner character that it emits? While we cannot completely ignore the building as a text, we only understand it with a simultaneous consciousness of the building as animation.

Part 3

On Structure It is of the greatest importance to observe that [Frank Lloyd Wright’s] Johnson building is the finest example of the hypostyle hall in twentieth century architecture. Despite the fact that the word “hypostyle” means under columns, most modern persons, following [Arthur] Schopenhauer and the functionalists, tend to think of the column in relation to what is above it, or to the load it carries. The ancients, on the other hand, knew that the principal element in those halls is the floor. It was upon the floor plane that members of the community came together periodically in order to reaffirm their common agreement — or their common understanding, as we sometimes put it . ...It was upon the communal floor, then, that the interchangeable columns stood, working together to maintain a sheltering and enduring structure that was the chief symbol of the body politic . ... For this is a space in which persons are encouraged to think of themselves as members, united upon a common floor in a common undertaking, even as were the citizens of Rome in the Basilica Ulpia or the members of the early church in Old St. Peter’s. — Norris Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright

Chapter 8 The Detail as Structural Representation: Structure and Weight I never met Louis Kahn, but in 1972, when I lived in Philadelphia, I used to see him occasionally on the Walnut Street bus, and when he sat down next to me one day, I was too petrified to speak. I have often wondered, given another chance, what I would ask him. This is probably because, despite his lengthy and repetitive explanations of his work, he never spoke of its central paradoxical quality. As much as it is about weight, mass, solidity, permanence, and stability, it is equally about precarious equilibriums and material efficiency, about making the most building with the least material. As much as it is about great weight, it is simultaneously about lightness. The essential quality of Kahn’s work is that the choice of a particular structural system means the choice of a system of spatial order, not out of technical necessity, but out of a conviction that this is the nature of the discipline of architecture. More specifically, the lesson of Kahn is that architecture is about weight. Kahn’s contemporaries, those who gave us Lincoln Center (1962–69), thought the way to a monumental modern architecture was through a lightweight classicism. Modernism, in art or architecture, was about lightness. Kahn’s approach to monumentality, by contrast, was heavy­ weight modernism. Architecture might be about weight’s absence, its presence, its resolution, or its lack of resolution; or it might be about how it is balanced, distributed, or conducted. If architecture was “about” something else — a view of the world, a manifestation of a society or an intellectual order — weight was the way in which it was manifested.

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Yet an equally essential quality of his work is the paradoxical means by which this is accomplished. The forms are not really heavy, at least in the formal sense. The most striking quality of his work is that it consists of structures associated with light materials executed in heavy ones. What is the appeal of the Yale University Art Gallery ceiling (1953) except that it is a light steel space frame executed in heavy concrete? What is the appeal of the Richards Medical Research Building (1965) except that the precast concrete begins to take on the quality of a light woodlike structure? The reason for the appeal of these paradoxical structures is that we respond to architecture in two ways, one based on a perception of lightness, and one based on a perception of mass. That architectural meaning is based on the perception of great mass, weight, and its resolution is not a new idea. Schopenhauer said, “[Architecture’s] sole and constant theme is support and load” and wrote: Properly speaking the conflict between gravity and rigidity is the sole aesthetic material of architecture; its problem is to make this conflict appear with perfect distinctness in a multitude of different ways. It solves it by depriving these indestructible forces of the shortest way to their satisfaction, and conducting them to it by a circuitous route, so that the conflict is lengthened and the inexhaustible efforts of both forces become visible in many different ways . ... In the same way the form of each part must not be determined arbitrarily, but by its end, and its relation to the whole.1

Architecture may convey ideas merely by pictorial symbolism and association, but those understandings will remain superficial and glib if there is not a deeper structure. That reading can only come through our understanding of a building as the resolution of a series of internal forces in an assembly that communicates these ideas in a more profound and more enduring way. A corollary to this is an old prejudice that lighter materials could not produce great buildings. Schopenhauer argued that “no architectural work as fine art can really be made of timber,” and writers as varied as John Ruskin and Charles Rennie Mackintosh argued that modern materials such as iron and glass could never produce a real architecture

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because they had insufficient mass.2 Without great mass, there could be no great weight, and weight was what architecture was about. While I have little doubt that Schopenhauer was right that archi­ tecture was about weight, I also have little doubt that he was wrong about lightness and wood. While the absence of weight makes certain things impossible, it makes others possible. There is clearly one type of structural understanding based on the perception of great weight and its resolution, one that is literally monumental, representing forces that are far greater than those in our own bodies. But there is a second type of structural appreciation, one that is lightweight and anthropomorphic. Rhys Carpenter wrote of Greek figure sculptures: Whether or not we project ourselves sympathetically into the statue I do not know . ...Still, there is some very clear connection between our apprehension of the solid as solid in the case of a human statue and the fact that the only other method of direct apprehension of spatial solidity is our awareness of it for our own body. It may not be strictly our own strength or power of movement or agility or gravitational equilibrium which we feel to be heightened while we contemplate the sculptural indication of these qualities; but our power of spatially apprehending the statue as we spatially apprehend our own bodily selves makes us immensely susceptible and sympathetic to an emotional and almost muscular-physical understanding of such qualities when they are sculpturally presented. We know them, not from the outside . ..but from the inside, in terms of what they are for their possessor.3

However limited the “empathy” explanation for our relation to a work of art, it certainly describes one way, perhaps the most important way, we respond to a work of sculpture or architecture of a certain size. There is the sense of awe that comes with great mass held in a complex equilibrium of thrusts and counterthrusts — the enormous weight of the Baths of Caracalla (216). Take away the great weight, you take away the meaning. Our reaction to the human body, or something that suggests it, is of a different order. It does not provoke awe, authority, or anxiety but has the possibility to provoke empathy.

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If one accepts that architecture is about weight and structure, one must also accept that there are two types of structural expression, one like ourselves, and one far heavier. If an architecture of mass and weight conveys a message of stability, an architecture of lightness might communicate something more precarious. Its connections would have a temporary, even tenuous nature. It could distribute and resolve its weight and forces in a different way, and since its weight and forces were less, it could do so in ways that were less direct and less symmetrical, and in doing so suggest something beyond what a monolithic, massive assembly could convey. This is precisely why mass can communicate permanence and stability, and lightness communicates transience and change. If an architecture of mass could speak of structural forces greater than ourselves, an architecture of lightness could speak to structural forces within ourselves. An architecture that communicates stability might as easily speak of oppression, and thus an architecture that communicates transience might speak of oppression’s absence. But understanding how we read weight and structure is only part of the problem, for there remains the equally large question of how that weight is to be expressed. Cladding My entry into the profession in 1972 coincided with a number of important architectural events, most dramatically, perhaps, the first energy crisis of the decade, which began with the oil embargo in October, the beginning of a long-term and severe increase in the cost of energy. Its immediate architectural effects were formally dramatic if somewhat short-lived — the incorporation of solar panels, earth berms, Trombe walls, and a variety of other gadgets to create passive energy sources. Its long-term effects were more subtle but more permanent —  a dramatic increase in the importance of the wall as a thermal barrier, resulting in not only a lot more insulation but also the decline or even disappearance of single glazing, uninsulated spandrels, exposed columns and beams, and thermal bridges. Whole architectural vocabularies —  the exposed steel frames of the Case Study Houses, the exposed concrete frames and mullionless glazing of the brutalist era — declined or disappeared, and the structural frame retreated behind the building

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envelope. The wall, at least in large-scale buildings, had long ago lost most of its structural importance, and once the wall became primarily an environmental membrane, everything changed. The solid wall devoid of insulation was replaced by the multilayered multifunctional wall. It is no accident that the advent of postmodernism and the decline, if not disappearance, of any interest in structural expression followed soon after, for it is difficult to express a structure you cannot expose. I spent the subsequent years in a medium-size architecture office learning the grim realities of the American construction industry, rapidly discovering that while there were countless formal imitations of Kahn’s work, there were far fewer constructional ones, and concerns of energy conservation and heat loss were only part of the problem. For the most part, structure was steel, not concrete; brick was veneered, not solid. Unlike the monolithic assemblies of Kahn’s work, modern buildings were built of components that were specialized, independent, and complex, not multifunctional, integrated, and simple. This was partly because the specialized energy-efficient wall required specialized components but also the product of the organization of the American construction industry — specialized labor and specialized subcontractors, all of whom worked best independently of one another. It was something of a shock to discover that Kahn’s thoughts on construction — which, when I was a student, seemed clear, straightforward, and commonsense —  ran counter to the conventional wisdom, and could often only be accom­ plished with great difficulty. It was a realization that raised more questions than it answered. I discovered that the total exposure of modern structure was a fiction. The partially exposed structure was far more common, and the clad structure, symbolically expressing its construction, was equally common. Nevertheless, this did not dim my conviction that a structural under­ standing, in however primitive a form, was the most profound way in which we respond to a building, and that to judge a building by simple association would always be superficial. The question then was how to display the structure without revealing it or, if partially revealed, how to determine what would be hidden. One of the secret histories of modernism is the degree to which it employed representative construction, elements that were not structural

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in themselves but which both clad the structure and represented it. Its use by Mies van der Rohe in the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) and elsewhere is well known, but it was also used by countless others — Scarpa, Johnson, and even Kahn. While it is not quite accurate to call these buildings failures, it is a construction type fairly rare in contempo­rary modernism. These systems, once developed, usually moved quickly away from the representative to the ornamental. Mies’s buildings at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive are steel frames clad with steel mullions. Its neighbor, the 900–910 Esplanade Apartments (1955), are concrete frames clad with aluminum mullions with profiles in imitation of steel. James Ingo Freed used a similar system to that of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993), but the classical columns of the Ronald Reagan Building (1996) followed soon after. Le Corbusier’s answer was that we should not represent the structure; we should rather feel it. In the short passage of Toward an Architecture that deals with exposed construction, Le Corbusier used two metaphors to argue that exposed structure is unnecessary. The airplane (in this case, a canvas, wood, and wire one) does not expose its structure, and neither does the human body: A commonplace among architects (the young ones): It is necessary to emphasize construction . ... Sorry! Emphasizing construction is fine for students at the Arts et métiers who want to show what they’re worth. The good Lord indeed emphasized wrists and ankles, but then there’s all the rest . ... Architecture has another sense and other ends than emphasizing construction.4

There is something oddly satisfying about the skin-and-frame constructions of the early aircraft illustrated in Toward an Architecture, part visceral, part intellectual. We cannot see the structure, but to the informed, it is implied, and there is satisfaction in knowing it is just under the surface. This seems to fit the argument often made about the human body. We cannot see the skeleton, but we can understand from appearance that it is there. You can feel the knees and shoulders

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of the Erechtheum caryatids (407 bce) under the fabric of the marble dresses. You can see the bones of the Dying Gaul (220 bce) under its marble skin. You can appreciate these objects without knowing the structures are there, but you can appreciate them more if you do. Yet the idea of feeling the structure can be problematic in other ways. The difference between the exposed and the expressed and between the frame and the skin requires a clear distinction as to what is structure and what is not. These are distinctions that are not always clear in airplanes or buildings. The years since 1923, when Toward an Architecture was written, have seen the aircraft frame and skin evolve into a more integral, total structure, rather like a frame and shell. The early types had fabric-skinned skeletons; then came the metal skin and frame hybrids of the middle years, still in use today in the Boeing 737; and the all-skin, no skeleton shells such as the Lockheed F-117. It is a typology of mammals and crustaceans. The frame or mammal type of the early planes is a mechanism; the parts are as discernable as the whole. One is conscious of an assembly, of the role each part played — wire in tension, stick in compression, the canvas lifting it all. The all-shell or crustacean type is different. The traditional architectural divisions of structure and nonstructure are not very useful here. What part of these planes is not structural? There are many wood examples of this shell type in aircraft design, such as the plywood-and-balsa de Havilland Mosquito, but strangely few real architectural equivalents. Some of Le Corbusier’s buildings are similar to these shell structures, particularly the structurally integral concrete frame and skin of Notre Dame du Haut (1954, Ronchamp, France). He sometimes described its roof as a crab shell, a vault, or an airplane wing. Under­ standing the vault required an empathy, not a reading, a sense of weight and how it is accommodated, even if one cannot see literally how it is done. This analysis revealed two lessons. The first is that if a structure is concealed, it can be expressed by representation, as in the work of Mies, but it can also be expressed by suggestion. The second is that there is an architecture beyond the skeleton and skin, curtain wall and frame, a distinction so critical to modernism — and that is the

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shell. While offering the possibility of structural expression through direct exposure of the shell, this idea also raises the possibility of weakening the concept of structural expression altogether through its ambiguity.

Chapter 9 House 3

The third house was about structure, beginning with the structural frame. Its structure was to be exposed where possible, representative where necessary, but it was to be felt rather than symbolized. It would evoke different types of response and understanding from the viewer — some monumental, some anthropomorphic. Understanding the structure, its internal forces, and their resolution would mean understanding the building in its largest sense. The first question was material. I wrote in Chapter 6 on the paradoxical nature of the American house — the wood house made with steel, the steel house made with wood. On a basic level, the objective was to manifest and lay bare this simple reality. If the house was not about regionalism and certainly not about regional materials, it was to a degree about the paradoxical construction of the American house. In order for the house to be understood as a structure, there would need to be a true frame, a real skeleton, of large-scale timber, not small-scale studs. Thus I never for a moment, considered a conven­ tional wood frame. Avoiding the platform frame was a way to avoid the typical modernist fictions that characterize the current avant-garde: the fiction of a wall building disguised as a frame building; or the fiction of a wood-and-drywall assembly masquerading as a Corbusian concrete flat-slab building. All are characterized by an image of over­designed columns and a smooth ceiling and a reality of drywall ceilings and elaborately disguised beams.

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Elevation, House 3 

3'

View from southeast, House 3

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House 3 was about two frames of two different materials. A steel frame and a wood frame would occupy the same space, interlocking with and mutually supporting one another. There was no practical necessity to use two materials. There are a few long spans for which steel is the obvious choice, but it could have been all wood as easily as it could have been all steel. The two materials were necessary for the two frame types and for the two types of structural expression. There would be two types of wood structure — a wood frame and a wood vault — since wood could form the curved roof of the large living room without recourse to a drywall-faced concealed structure. However, it was not just about the expression of weight, but the expression of weight directly by exposure and indirectly by suggestion. It was about a house with two frames — one that was static and one that was animated. It was about a heavy structural system and a light one, and we respond to those structures in two different ways. One frame was made by taking a lightweight wood frame and making it heavier, the other by taking a lightweight steel frame and making it lighter still. Of these two semiautonomous frames, one would be a regular, equalspan grid of wood. The second structure would be a set of steel frames responding to individual programmatic conditions, creating specific spaces for specific uses. The house was also about a frame system and a planer system — the vault — with one affirming its monumentality, and the other transcending its anthropomorphism. One system would be completely exposed; the other would be largely concealed. One structure you would see; the other you would feel. The wood frame was to be stable, permanent, symmetrical, equal in bay size, equal in the dimensions of its parts, and equal in the weight those parts would carry. Its members would be all be the same depth and width. It would be post and beam, square in plan, square in section, based on the maximum span of the material, and, for the most part, only generally related to the functions that it would serve. But the frame was to be more than post and beam; it was to be the organizing geometry of the house. The columns and beams of the wood frame form two twentyseven-foot squares in section and elevation, and one twenty-seven-foot square and one-half of a twenty-seven-foot square in plan. These squares are each divided by structural bays into nine nine-foot squares.

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a b c D E F g H

e

f

d

h

g

f c A

Second floor plan and section, House 3 

b

5'  N ↑

Kitchen Dining room Lower living room Main entry Living room Master bedroom Library Bedroom

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Structural axonometrics, House 3

The primary structural system was a frame of glue-laminated wood columns and beams, with an infill of structural insulated panels and exterior diagonal steel bracing. Ground-floor columns were steel, to facilitate connection to the steel-framed glazing.

There were two exterior column types: one straight, one angled. The straight column also supported the chimneys. The structure was asymmetrical because the roof was asymmetrical, but this also gave it an anthro­pomorphic character. The vaulted roof was supported by pairs of triangulated steel struts that rested on the ends of two large beams supporting the library. As in House 1 and 2, the steel tubes were ducts and the chimneys were structural, but the beams ducts proved ineffective, since they delivered the air to the wrong places.

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The second frame, the light, specific one, was steel, nonrectilinear, and sized to fit the job at hand. It had parts fitted to their specific function. The steel structure would support the library and roof, carry the heaviest load, and sustain the longest span, and therefore it would be built of the largest members. The steel was triangulated, and thus the connections were pinned rather than rigid. The wood post and lintel system grew up out of the ground, was permanent, stable, and it was composed of elements of constant dimension and connected with rigid, continuous joints. The lightweight, minimal steel structure would sit lightly on the ground and be built of members of variable size designed to meet specific loads and joined in ways so that the parts remain recognizable as parts. The top layer of structure, the wood shell roof, was more of a crustacean. It was symmetrical on its east–west axis. It was asymmet­ rical on its north–south axis. The structure would touch the roof lightly, like a waiter’s fingers holding a tray. The second, middle layer would be the library, suspended above the main living area. This asymmetry of form produced an asymmetry of structural support, perhaps more out of a desire for an anthropomorphic composition than structural necessity. The design of the support began with the image of a tripod. The Greek or Etruscan tripod is a highly architectural piece of furniture, in spite of lacking most of the qualities one associates with classical architecture; it is top-heavy and diagonally braced, and it sits lightly on the ground. The Greek orders are bottom-heavy, stable, permanent, and structurally overdesigned. All their load problems are resolved by mass, not clever mechanics. Gottfried Semper argued that this was why the tripod was not architecture in itself; it was too light, too mobile, and too impermanent, and so insufficiently monumental.1 However, these were precisely the qualities I thought made the tripod so architecturally appropriate. Lightness and mobility were the qualities I wanted to achieve, its similarity to the human body, not in shape but in structural force and configuration. The tripod’s modern equivalents tend to be more asymmetrical — the artist’s easel, the surveyor’s transit, the radio telescope base, and, in inverted form, the airplane landing gear. The most convincing

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explanation for their appeal is their similarity to the human body, and the best modern examples are not from engineering but from art — the sculptures of David Smith. The three most fascinating types are those that are tables, those that are people, and those that are combinations of the two. Rosalind Krauss suggests that the tables are altars.2 What or who the people are is subject to some debate. According to their names, many are totems of some type. According to Smith, they are all women. According to Krauss, they are all Smith, despite the occasional breast. What is of architectural significance is what makes the figure and table recognizable. The table supports are upright and vertical, and take their load straight to the ground. The “people,” often like real people, stand in a pose with one upright support (leg) and one indirect. Some, such as Tanktotem IX (1960), have three, one direct and two indirect. They are obviously a modern equivalent of the classic contrapposto pose with one leg flexed and one leg straight, taking the load of the body, as in figure. Rhys Carpenter also wrote that the introduction of contrapposto literally animated ancient Greek sculpture, making it less frontal and more threedimensional.3 This, as many have realized, has clear implications for architecture. Contrapposto animates the structural frame with a disproportionate distribution of weight and if applied to a building could disengage it from the ground, suggesting movement. As with Smith’s table, the frame could be coupled with an upright system of equally distributed weight. Smith’s work suggests that an unequal distribution of weight and a tentative connection to the ground —  given an object of anthropomorphic size and shape — will suggest the body. To me, this is the structural lesson of these sculptures, the coupling of two structural schemata — the table and the person. The steel structure of House 3 began with something like an asymmetrical tripod, a kind of oversize furniture, internally stable and self-sufficient, touching the ground lightly, and a structure that suggested, in contrast to the wood, not just impermanence but even mobility. I wanted a kind of architectural contrapposto, like David Smith’s sculptures, suggesting the body in asymmetrical equilibrium and giving the impression of weight, of visual joints with the character of knees or elbows, and a sense of elasticity in

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Bronze tripod, Etruscan, ca. 525–500 BCE

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Tanktotem IX, David Smith, 1960; Art © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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its parts with the same tentative, light, and mobile connection to the ground that any mammal has. Equally important were the structural expressions to be avoided. I did not want any of the conventional fictions of modernism: the exposed “honest” structure; the house in which nothing is hidden and everything is shown; the building in which because one sees the structure, one sees nothing else. Nor did I want the fiction of exposed construction — layers peeled back, exposed joists and studs — the false revelation that is the subtractive building. All of these were constructional impossibilities except in fictional form, and all were undesirable, no more accurate a presentation of the facts than their neocolonial counterparts. The wood frame would be glued and laminated columns and beams; the infill panels would be structural insulated panels (sips), a thick layer of insulating foam between two thin layers of oriented strand board (osb). This frame and infill assembly was to be completely clad on the exterior and partially on the interior. The wood beams were completely exposed; the wood columns were completely concealed. One would understand the wood framing from the exterior without seeing it, and one would see the effects of the steel frame directly explained but only in fragments, as it straddled the boundaries of the house. If the verticals and horizontals of the structural cage were completely exposed, the spaces would become a series of cells. For there to be any continuity of space, there must be a continuity of surface. The typical modernist space, from Le Corbusier to Koolhaas, exposes the columns and hides the beams; spatial continuity, when it occurs, is created by ceilings. House 3 would be the inverse, with continuity created by walls. The columns were concealed for the same reason that Le Corbusier and Aalto concealed the beams. From the exterior, the steel structure would be completely exposed, while the wood structure would be completely concealed. The wood frame, however, was implied by the fenestration that would sometimes expose beam ends and sometimes brackets, and thus locate a column. This is not to say that the windows would have nothing to do with light or view, only that I had an additional consideration in locating them.

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This articulation of the structural frame requires an absolute clarity as to what is that frame and what is nonstructural wall. It was a clarity that was short-lived as the design began to evolve, as it morphed from frame to shell, from mammal to crustacean. Despite the long horizontal openings in the infill wall for the strip windows, these panels proved sufficient to brace the building, making the steel cables provided for that bracing unnecessary. Not only the visible expression of diagonal bracing was lost, but also the clarity of separation between structural frame and nonstructural wall. For economic reasons, the sips became stud walls, and the concealed glue-laminated columns were changed to studs. As a result, there was only the haziest boundary between studs that were nonstructural, those that were primarily for diagonal bracing and supporting the wall surfaces; and those that were structural, the ones that would take vertical loads. The construction of the house evolved into a more complex and ambiguous configuration in which it was not easy to say where the structural frame ended and the wall began. In the end, having disposed of a long list of fictions I did not want, I was left with another, the fiction of the frame and skin, not really a lie, but not really the whole truth. The Roof Vault In contrast to the skeletal mammal that was the rest of the building, the vault was a crustaceous shell. While inspired by the metal-and-wood vaults of Jean Prouvé, particularly the Youth Center (1972) in the Paris suburb Val d’Oise, the model was the roof of Notre Dame du Haut, but translated into plywood. This is perhaps why its development followed a course that led toward clarity. It began to have fewer parts, which, being structurally ambiguous, performed more tasks, and since it had been conceived of as a structural unity, it gained legitimacy of expression by becoming one. There were two large constructional problems: sequencing and available technology. I wanted the vault to be a smooth convex curve of plywood that would be of a piece with the structure and not applied, an integral arrangement of outer skin and inner ribs. The problem was how to make the plywood surface a structure and not a hung ceiling. Obviously the plywood skin could structurally

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House 3

Marble statue of the Diadoumenos, Roman copy of Greek original, first to second century CE

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Preliminary wood column and beam joint detail, House 3 The columns of the wall are concealed. Only the crossbeams perpendicular to them are exposed. Thus, the cross-bracing reveals the force that is otherwise concealed in a structure. The largely

concealed metal plate fastener allows the members to maintain their visual autonomy.

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Final wood column and beam joint detail, House 3 As the design developed, the columns changed from independent structural members to a denser structural area of the two-by-fourinch wall, confusing the clarity of structure and supported elements.

Not being in the axis of the structure, the diagonal bracing proved of little value and was eliminated.

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Section perspective, House 3

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House 3

contribute to the stiffness of the roof, but it would have to be applied simultaneously with the erection of the beams, since if the skin was truly structural, the roof would be unstable without it. To be integral, frame and skin must be built simultaneously, a far more sophisticated procedure of fabrication and erection. This would have been a highly difficult procedure, in part because of the complex assembly required, in part because the skin, being a finish material, would need to be protected throughout the long construction process. Construction would be infinitely simpler if the ceiling beams were self-supporting without the aid of the skin. The first option was a steel truss faced with a nonstructural wood ceiling but detailed with exposed fasteners, making the non­structural nature of the ceiling clear. This approach, cladding a real structure with a representative one, has respectable modernist precedents, particularly in the work of Otto Wagner. However, it does not really get at the problem of making the structure felt when it cannot be seen. A better alternative would be wood ribs sandwiched between plywood panels but done in a way that the plywood would be structural, not applied after the fact, as it would have been with the steel. But again, the plywood would have to be in place from the beginning. A third solution was sips forming a structurally continuous vaulted surface, although it required some rather large internal wood beams and, to achieve fire protection, probably a wood cladding as well. Although it would look the same as the first two solutions, it would be different, and I pursued this sips option since all the parts were structural; it was not a frame with a nonstructural skin, but an integrated assembly. The entire process of structural development confirmed the obvious: the frame and skin concept is ultimately an artificial construct, albeit one recognized in every American building code, which divides buildings into frames, beams, bearing walls, and curtain walls and specifies requirements for each. The structural endpoint, at least in a building of this scale with these materials, is not a frame and skin, frame with infill, shell with ribs, crustacean or mammal, it was rather all of these, and ultimately the design has a clarity of structural expression that is far simpler than the reality.

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Detail of roof shell, first design, House 3 This was a plywood-clad steel truss structure. The ceiling was unrelated to the structure above, describing none of the force in the frame it concealed, but it was detailed with exposed fasteners

to make its cladding purpose clear. This was a skin and bones, skeleton and wall, structural arrangement.

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House 3

Detail of roof shell, second design, House 3 The second solution was a structuralinsulated-panel vault clad with plywood. The structure and finish were one, although concealed beams were required in the sandwich of the panel. Rather than resembling

a skeleton and skin, the vault was like a crustacean. The frame, though, mimicked the human body, resembling fingers holding a tray.

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Conclusion By the end of its development, the structural narrative of House 3 had diverged considerably from structural reality. The house was about weight, but it was about a narrative of weight and not the expression of actual forces of weight. The structural frame and nonstructural wall had become ambiguous hybrids; the skeleton and skin had become a shell. Having avoided the fictions of the monolithic building and the fiction of the single material building, the design had succumbed to other fictions: the fiction of skeleton and skin, of structural and nonstructural, of frame and finish in one. The structure had been conceived of in two contradictory ways; in the end, they were far more similar. The mammal had become something of a crustacean. But this is not the reason it was not built and, ultimately, only a small part of the problem. In order for there to be an anthropomorphic reading of one frame and a monumental reading of another, in order to understand the roof as a shell and its support as a frame, and in order to understand structure as a manifestation of something larger than itself, dissonance was necessary between the image of the structure and the far more complicated and ambiguous real structure. It was the role of the detail to maintain the structural narrative in the context of a much more complex reality.

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View from street, House 3

Chapter 10 Gravity and Meaning

Antoine Picon wrote in 2003: Architectural form used to appear as the ultimate result of a process of research. Its beauty was the beauty of the end, of the point of equilibrium . ...The beauty of architecture could be somewhat analogous to the pleasure derived from the spectacle of a dance or a flow. But it was the underlying structure of the dance or the flow, the choreography or the mechanics, that was made visible through the architectural medium. A computer-generated architectural form can no longer pretend to achieve this status. Even if it appears as the most satisfying configuration for its designer, it remains the result of an arbitrary stop in an endless process of geometric transformation, the type of process that Greg Lynn calls “animation.” Architectural form becomes similar to a cross section in a continuous geometrical flow. Whereas the traditional status of architectural form suggested a comparison with the human body, its new status renders it closer to the snapshot or the videogram.1

This is a common argument used against not only structural rationalism but against many other conventions of twentieth-century modern architecture: the digital age has altered the nature of architecture. Lynn sees the process differently. The conventions of architecture based on weight are not so much outdated as inaccurate:

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Gravity and Meaning

Architecture survived as the last refuge for the flat earth society with respect to the general understanding of gravity as a straightforward, unchanging vertical force. While structure to force and gravity relationships are numerous and interrelated, architects continue to cling to the ideal of buildings standing as vertical structures. This truth leaves buildings open to being brought down by wind and other lateral loads that have the potential to be much greater than the forces gravity exerts. These forces have the potential to generate uplift in lighter buildings. While architects and engineers do not ignore these facts, they are still bound by the base assumption that buildings are vertical structures.2

Lynn’s argument is valid, but a building that expresses the results of structural force in all directions is likely to express none. But in any case both Picon and Lynn see the zeitgeist of the digital age as demanding the creation of a new architecture. The problem with both approaches is the absence of any mechanism, other than styling, to create the expression of this zeitgeist. In the end, the architectural results of this thinking are typically the products of a facile, expressionistic mani­ pulation of the building envelope, based on the vague notion that a continuous surface and a lack of articulation are the expression of this zeitgeist. It is a type of design in which one configuration may have no more validity than any other. The basic premise of structural rationalism, as laid down by Viollet-le-Duc and followed by architects from Henri Labrouste to Kahn, is that understanding a building’s inner forces is the mechanism by which architectural meanings are revealed. Without this mechanism, we are left only with styling, which claims the validation of the zeitgeist but is determined largely by fashion. Much of the criticism of the recent products of structural expression — the buildings of the high-tech architects — is based on the assumption that they symbolize a failed utopia with an overdeveloped faith in science. However, recent work that has suppressed or covered the structural frame does not alter this type of perception as much as its authors would like, for, by eliminating the expression of structure, we cannot eliminate a consciousness of weight, leading back to the structural interpretation of architecture.

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The nineteenth-century poet Coventry Patmore gave an elegant description of weight as architecture. J. Mordaunt Crook summarized his view: Weight of material is “the great fact of building,” and “the primary source of architecture symbolism.” The Egyptian style was an expression of unrelieved weight; the Greek of weight in equipoise. It was left to gothic to complete syllogism, to demonstrate in three dimensions the conquest of spirit over matter; that is, “weight annihilated; spire and tower, buttress, clerestory and pinnacle . ..[indicating] the spirituality of purpose to which [these elements] are applied.” “Weight, support and ascension,” Patmore concludes, “are ideas which in all times and all languages, have been accepted as the most direct and forcible material images of the three great phases of sensuality, intellectuality and spirituality.3

Though the third type of detail was about the detail as an expression of weight, it could also be about the absence of weight. While structural meaning is the key to architectural meaning, it cannot be achieved solely through the direct expression of structure. Direct expression will often be impossible; it can never be complete. It will always be selective and at some point will be symbolic. A building might express weight literally; it might represent it symbolically. It might represent weight as a great force that we find reassuring or overwhelming, or it might express weight as something of a smaller scale with which we can empathize. The detail as abstraction (the solution of a problem without its expression), the detail as material expression (demonstrating the presence of an inner animation), and the detail as weight (expressing the sculptural force taking on a structural character) are similar, to a degree. They are all dependent on the presence of a body of non­detail or abstract detail. They do not entail continuation of the ideas of the larger building into the smaller scale but rather the opposite, eruptions of inconsistency.

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Part 4

On Joints In Classical and medieval buildings the shape of a given part is indicative of its function: columns, capitals, bases, lintels, gables, and buttresses are all formed according to their roles in the working structure, even as are the hand, tooth, femur, and knee-cap of a man. In Fallingwater such differentiations scarcely exist — yet not because one shape is made to serve many purposes, but rather because the number of discernable functions has been reduced to the barest minimum, or even because the very notion of functional differentiation has been declared irrelevant. One is not made conscious of the relation of load to support, nor can one readily isolate and identify such namable parts as roofs, windows, walls, doors and chimneys. The service of the part to the whole is, as an organizational principle, dispensed with. — Norris Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright

Chapter 11 The Detail as Joint: Abstraction and Joints

I arrived at Washington University in St. Louis in September 1965, and, since my architectural education had not really begun, I did not fully realize the importance of what was to happen ten miles away a month later: the completion of the Gateway Arch, Eero Saarinen’s design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Two 630-foothigh incomplete, curved, and leaning legs had to be pried apart by a giant jack in order to insert the keystone, an event that had to occur at precisely the right moment before the metal shell, expanding in the afternoon heat, closed the gap. In retrospect, it is strange that a construction so difficult to build was seamless upon completion, the joints almost invisible, but at the time, this seemed natural. This was the kind of work associated with Saarinen or, for that matter, with Star Trek: devoid of parts, connectors, and joints. In 1965 this was, to many, what modern construction was about. Yet only one year earlier, the first phase of Saarinen’s John Deere World Headquarters had been completed — a building that was nothing but joints, the structural members sliding past one another in a way that recalled both Japan and Gerrit Rietveld. Within these two buildings, both the work of a single architect, resided some basic questions: what was a joint, what was a good joint, and what was a modern joint — unified and seamless, or articulated and independent? Although I spent the first ten years of my professional career struggling with this problem, working as a project architect, it was an experience that did not answer these questions and raised several more. I was learning what is still the conventional wisdom and at

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times the grim reality of the practice of joinery in modern American construction. Much of our time was spent hiding joints — eliminating drywall trim, detailing frameless doors, minimizing baseboards, and searching for ceiling systems that, while made of panels, would appear jointless. One recurring problem was tolerance, a kind of legislated inaccuracy of the American building industry that allows components to deviate from required dimensions by certain “small” amounts. The result was holes everywhere. The component that is too small can be accommodated, but this is not so for the component that is too large. The result was an assembly that required, among other things, an enormous quantity of caulking. Another recurring problem was the control joint, essentially a designed crack. Manufacturers’ associations informed us that they must be provided in stucco, masonry, tile, and drywall. That they were completely absent from any modern or traditional building from before 1950 proved an inadequate argument against their use. This was one of many kinds of joint that had to be accommodated and there was a constant battle to avoid the condition of “panelization” caused by them. When working with repetitive parts in wood or metal or concrete, we struggled to keep the joints under control, not necessarily to hide them, but to keep them from taking over the image so that the buildings visually came apart. If the number of visible parts becomes so large we cannot perceive them, then we cannot perceive the totality. In hindsight, we were facing two evolutionary developments. One was the rise of specialized components installed by specialized subcontractors who needed to work as independently of one another as possible, hence all the holes and all the caulk. The control joint problem was symptomatic of the second, equally significant development. Our walls were not the solidly built, massive, thermally minimal walls of antiquity or early modernism. We were designing elastic membranes stretched across steel skeletons whose critical loads were often as much thermal as structural. We also spent a great deal of time keeping joints from disap­ pearing; they were sometimes made larger. A flush, butted joint between two panels of stone or precast concrete may appear invisible if not visually reinforced in some way. I remember one particularly

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Base of Gateway Arch, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, Eero Saarinen, St. Louis, Missouri, 1965

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unsuccessful experiment with dark-gray calking. The conventional solution was to recess and enlarge the joint to create a large, deep shadow. Cold joints and formwork joints in cast-in-place concrete were almost impossible to hide. They could be sandblasted off, but, following Kahn’s example, we enlarged the recesses or projected them outward to make the joint more visible. Stranger still, we created false joints where we wanted, but did not need, them. Window mullions were placed where pattern and composition, not structural stress, dictated. Eight-by-sixteen-inch concrete masonry blocks were given an additional vertical decorative joint to create a grid pattern. This was so common a practice that manufacturers provided blocks with extra shallow grooves as standard items. It never occurred to me how paradoxical this activity was. Most of what are called great details were joints, yet I spent most of my time trying to eliminate them or, if not that, trying to put them where they did not want to go, never questioning the propriety of doing so. This is the perplexing mass of contradictions that is the contemporary practice of detailing, in use for so long by so many that we have lost all sense of its inconsistency. The articulated joint is the most advocated (and least practiced) detail in modernism; the truth is that the modern architect spends far more time hiding joints than revealing them. We spend endless quantities of time concealing, suppressing, and minimizing large quantities of information, and on the odd occasion overdesigning the seemingly insignificant joint to demonstrate the straightforwardness of our construction. Why all this schizophrenia? A great deal of this effort is economically driven. The exposed joint is often by necessity the well-crafted one. The concealed joint has fewer obligations to precision and more to performance. But the larger problem is that buildings are not really about assembling parts. We conceive of buildings as totalities. We can perceive a totality of parts, but we cannot perceive all the parts — one hinge, one brick, even one slab at a time — while at the same time perceiving the whole. Thus modern buildings, and most traditional ones, contain a reality of joinery and a narrative of joinery — the actual number of joints versus the number of joints that are articulated — and there is clearly

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an aesthetic necessity for this narrative. Was this need a question of perception or ideology? In my years in practice, I was convinced it was the former. My years in academia have convinced me it is the latter. If there is such a thing as a history of joinery, 1972 was an important year. That fall I drove up to the Princeton University Art Museum from Philadelphia to see the exhibition the Arts and Crafts Movement in America. This was a landmark show in the history of American taste, but I think its architectural significance at the time was that it was emblematic of a trend. It was my first real encounter with the furniture of Stickley, the Roycrofters, and Charles and Henry Greene, all of which was characterized by a profusion of conspicuous and highly articulated joinery. It did not seem at that time or now either traditional or antimodern, but rather an alternative modernism to the seamless, jointless work of Saarinen. One year before the Princeton exhibition, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had won the Pompidou Center competition. The nature of the final design evolved over time, but its central characteristic was, as its engineer Peter Rice said, “making the joint the essence of the solution,” an intention that was not so different from Stickley’s.1 Rice wanted to move away from the continuous welded steel structures of the day and return to the constructionally articulated parts of nineteenth-century iron structures. Was this part of a trend? My car in 1972 was a Volkswagen Beetle, and the bolts connecting wheel to hub were hidden under a metal hubcap. Today more than half the cars I see on the street, the Chevrolet Camero, Ford Mustang, Honda Accord, Chevrolet Corvette, and the new Volkswagen Beetle, have these same bolts exposed. Is this the result of technological possibility, functional necessity, or stylistic evolution? I am fairly certain it is primarily the latter. There may be a zeitgeist of joinery in the late twentieth century. And in architecture, if not in automobile design, there may equally be a zeitgeist of seamlessness in the early twenty-first, but to me, the suppression of the joint was one of modernism’s many wrong turns. The arts and crafts show presented an alternative to contempo­rary modernism, one of joinery, an object or building that presented itself as an assembly, that shows how it was put together — the handlike clamp fasteners of the timbers at the Gamble House (1908) that not only show

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Joints at the corner of John Deere World Headquarters, Eero Saarinen, Moline, Illinois, 1964

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us how the parts are joined but remind us that the building is parts brought together to form space or the exposed dovetails of a chest by Sidney Barnsley, the exposed tenons or pegs of the furniture of Gustav Stickley or Charles Rohlfs that remind us that the pieces are assembled and not monolithic objects. These joints are the most powerful when they are the most singular, when they are accompanied by a large number of hidden joints.

Chapter 12 House 4

The fourth house is the house that I built or, more correctly, the house that I began to build. Many of its smaller elements were undesigned or in need of redesign at the start of construction. Other elements, some not so small, were redesigned out of necessity in the process of building. Being about construction it was thus about joints. It was about parts and wholes. The type of joint was to determine the geometry of the structure; the character of the joint to determine the character of the architecture. There was a plethora of modernist traps I was determined to avoid. It was to be a building that was assembled, constructed, and joined  —  not peeled, eroded, or deconstructed — where revealed joints did not pretend that they were ever hidden. It would be appropriately crafted where craft was exposed and where it was not. I did not want a false evocation of a hitherto concealed joinery, the carefully controlled lower level of craft that is the illusion of the architect’s noninterference. I did not want to do a blob or a warped box covered with an unrecognizable jointless material with no qualities other than color. I did not want a trimless, jointless totality, the abstract composition, but neither did I want an overarticulated material one. I did not want to design a distorted frame of nailed-up studs and joists covered with an encrustation of high tech any more than I wanted to do a brick-faced, balloon-framed colonial knockoff. But the house is nevertheless a narrative and not a literal expression of joinery. Just as the house is full of structural contra­ dictions, so, too, is it filled with contradictory attitudes about joinery.

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Elevation, House 4 

View from street, House 4

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Living room looking north, House 4

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Living room looking south, House 4

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Section perspective at living room, House 4

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The house is about construction, but it is about the joints of only a few of its parts, and for every joint that is expressed there are a hundred, perhaps a thousand, that are hidden. The eighteen exposed anchor bolts of the steel structure are visible; the approximately ten thousand nails that fix the drywall to the wood studs are not. The narrative mediates between two expressions, one of the building as an assembly of real parts, the other as a unified immaterial whole, and the process of detailing required a fluctuation between these two polarities, trying to have both but maintaining an appropriate tension between the two. The intent was that the structural type could not be determined without determining the joint type. It contains two different structural materials, each demanding its own structural form. This of course, requires two, even three types of joint. In fact, the house has far more than two different languages of joinery, varying in concept with the size, material, and level of craft of the particular subsystem, and most importantly varying in the way that members appear to be continuous or discontinuous. The Steel Frame House 4 is far more explicit in its treatment of joints and far less sculptural in its treatment of material than its predecessors. The steel frame became symmetrical and triangulated with joints that were pinned. The asymmetrical structure of the steel frame of House 3 proved not so much structurally difficult as structurally illogical. The forces of site and program are likely to be asymmetrical, but the forces of structure are more likely to be symmetrical. The asymmetry of structure produced an asymmetry of loading that worked against the size and configuration of the form. House 4 has a symmetrical roof and section and thus has symmetrical structural supports. The largest steel elements support the library and roof, as they carry the heaviest load and sustain the longest span. The library is a building within the building, but one that is larger rather than smaller than the structure it replaces. The two Vs support the major beams under the bookcases; the two Ws support the butterfly roof that brings light into the interior. Unlike the strictly rectilinear post and

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beam structure, it is completely triangulated, at least in one plane, and thus the connections are pinned rather than rigid. The wood post-and-lintel system grows up out of the ground; it is permanent, stable, and composed of elements of constant dimension. By contrast, the steel frame is lightweight, minimal, sits lightly on the ground and is built of members of variable size designed to meet specific loads. Each part of the steel is to be seen as just that, a part. Each joint is explicit; each part is individually defined. The joints of the steel structure are rarely the same. A great deal of what can only be called styling was performed on these connecting elements. Square members are curved, edges are rounded, transitions are eased — largely with the intention of implying movement, and in fact, many of the joints are moving, but the moving joints are not always where the movement occurs. Most of us, including architects, are not fond of structures that move and deflect when we occupy them. The great strength of steel is its elasticity. The purpose of the styling is to provide the appearance, if not the reality, of movement; the steel frame was to be animated, to communicate its inner life. The wood vault of House 3 was discarded in favor of open steel trusses, used in part because they proved less expensive, but also because they are more structurally explanatory, and, of course, they expose many more joints. The final roof design, a V, creates the clerestory lighting and pushes the focus of the space toward the perimeter. The roof assembly is all structure, with no internal finish materials; the structure is the architecture. The wood has a clear finish but the steel structures are painted with color used in small areas of intense colors. The largest structure, the library and roof support, is green; the intermediate columns and beams are orange; the furniture railing elements are yellow. The color spectrum, unlike Piet Mondrian’s palate of primary colors, is not of opposites but of colors relatively close together in the spectrum —  yellow, orange, green — to produce the illusion of vibration created by colors that are relatively similar rather than strongly contrasting. It is a scheme that owes much to the color schemes of Ellsworth Kelly, but also to John Deere.

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Kitchen, House 4

Bedroom, House 4

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Detail of wood-to-wood joint at clerestory, House 4 Unlike the steel joints, those of the wood frame are far more visually continuous and static so that one is more aware of the whole rather than the parts, because one is less aware of the joint.

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The Wood Frame Moving joints are more common outside of architecture than in, particularly in pre-1930 aircraft design. The structure of the old woodand-fabric planes is largely exposed and explicitly articulated, as is the way the parts are joined. We see not only the plane but the parts of the plane. We see only a small fraction of the joints, but we see them transform an old material, wood, into something entirely new. Some of the joints seem to barely join at all. Many seem to imply that the whole structure is moving, and in many cases, it was. In a plane such as the Antoinette VII (1909), there is a tight interdependence of the way you make a structure and the way you make a joint. The appeal of the older aircraft joints is that they allow the parts to maintain their visual identity. Unlike a conventional wood structure, the members become smaller near the joint rather than larger. This is because they are pinned joints; they do not transfer moments, and lateral bracing is achieved in other ways, such as by triangulation of the main members or X-bracing. The other quality is that they move and look like they move. They are incidences of an isolated animation. Without wishing to literally adopt this configuration, I wanted at least part of the house to have these same qualities — an autonomy of parts and an animation of the joints. As in House 3, the volume is defined by the geometry of the wood frame, two twenty-seven-foot squares divided into nine nine-foot squares in plan and elevation. If each steel joint was to be unique, the woodto-wood joints of the post-and-lintel system are, in theory, standardized because of the regularity of the frame. I eliminated the X-bracing, but my initial thought was to use the concealed plate and slot system used in House 3. It is a popular and expensive system in contemporary heavy timber, and modernist prejudice in favor of this system is fairly universal. Perhaps this is because it hides the joints more, perhaps because it emphasizes the timbers rather than the joints, but the result is a system in which one is far more aware of the structure as an assemblage and less aware of a unified structural cage. In the end, for reasons of simple economy, the connectors are made with a “bucket and bolt” system, a method that wraps the outside bottoms of the timbers. The result is less articulated than the large steel joints but, at the same time, highly descriptive of connection.

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Details There remained one more type of joint, the smallest and most problematic — trim. If the details of the steel become more sculptural at the small scale, the details of the interior finishes become progressively more abstract, and again I was mediating between an identifiable image and an abstract pattern, and between material and immaterial readings of the building. The modernist house has no ornament and little trim, but it is not because the twentieth-century American house is built in a fundamentally different way than its nineteenth-century predecessor. There are thousands of “traditional” joints in a technical sense in any contemporary house in wood, masonry, and drywall, but they are not made in a traditional way. In any modern house, including my own, only a small fraction of the joints are articulated, as opposed to hidden. This is largely for pragmatic reasons, but what technology has changed is not a way of doing things but a way of looking at things. While the number of joints in the modern house has exponentially increased, the number of articulated joints has, on the whole, declined. The only simple explanation is the insistence on abstraction of form in modernism in all its manifestations. Technical and material information is suppressed in the interest of minimalism and immaterial perfection. The modern narrative of joinery is a highly abstract one, whatever the reality. Trim is not, as was maintained by some modernists, a decorative element that can, for the most part, be dispensed with. Much of tradi­ tional trim was ornamental but it was also a way of making, and of hiding, a joint. The typical joints of the American house follow a simple strategy. Liberal tolerances in the size and accuracy in placement of material result in large gaps, gaps that also accommodate differential expansion — the gap between wood floor and drywall partition, between window and door frames and wall — hence the baseboard, window and door trim, and other moldings of traditional architecture. The standard modernist substitute has been the reveal. The projection is replaced by the notch. Although Kahn said that “the joint is the beginning of ornament,” for the most part, he was referring to reveals, as in the “joints” of the Kimbell Art Museum.1 The reveal is,

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however, a highly problematic detail. In countless other buildings, the reveal is used for every junction and rarely to good effect, as in Yoshio Taniguchi’s addition to the Museum of Modern Art (2004). It is technically useful in allowing the junction of accurately and inaccurately crafted materials. The problem remains that the degree of inaccuracy of the exposed edges may be visually or technically unacceptable. Modernism, in anticipation of the machine-perfect construction of the future, elimi­ nated the trim of traditional architecture that concealed this problem, but it has still not quite got around to actually changing the technology, so the absence of trim becomes a technical and, at times, visual liability. I did not forgo the use of the reveal, but I used it sparingly. On first examination, one might say that I had designed House 4 to have no trim, but there is a great deal of it. It is eliminated from the interior doors. All the drywall edges are made with invisible beads; there is a wall base, but it is recessed and aluminum, not projecting and wood — a reveal. This evoked a prolonged, eloquent tirade by the drywall subcontractor, punctuated with expletives and obscenities, stating that I had completely misunderstood the concept, history, function, and procedure for building a base. He was partially right, but I had not misunderstood it; I had ignored it. There is nothing terribly functional about a recessed base in which the drywall must be painstakingly finished, as opposed to a traditional base where the edge is simply covered with wood. The projecting wood base joins the two surfaces; the reveal separates them, allowing the wall and floor to be more visually autono­ mous. At the closet doors, the frame is eliminated by using pivots instead of hinges and magnetic latches instead of bolts. This strategy might be called concentrated joinery. Articulated fasteners are used in places, such as the hinges and pivots that were overdesigned and oversize, while hiding the remainder of the joints and eliminating the trim. Conclusion There is a critical difference between the two types of joint in the house. The hidden fastener generally visually unites what it joins. The articulated joint may or may not do this, and it may do it to varying degrees. The parts might be perceived as parts, and we might perceive the parts and the whole simultaneously. But some erosion of the abstract visual totality

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was necessary, and it was a given that some perception of parts, some visual autonomy of elements, some consciousness of assembly, was necessary for any type of empathy with the house to be possible. My former teacher, Smith, wrote of the polar opposites of our perception of the natural world: nature could be a watch (an assembly) or a tree (an organism). A building could be a tree and consist of parts but have no real joints. A building could be a machine with parts that connected in reality but that in appearance did not join. The role of an expressed joint is to bridge the gap between our perception of a building as an assemblage and our perception of a building as a unified image, and therefore the role of a detail is to bridge between a constructive and an abstract understanding of the building. But we react to a tree and a watch in different ways. We perceive each differently or, put another way, each keeps us a specific distance from itself. A good building will have the qualities of both a watch and a tree. The lesson of House 4 was the necessity of selective animation and the importance of the detail or joint as a mechanism for demon­ strating a narrative of construction and a narrative of weight. But the house provided other lessons as well. The most effective joints were those that seemed to run counter to the formal intentions of the building, and the fewer of this type of joint, the greater their impact. In retrospect, I have asked myself a number of questions about the house, its joints, and the particular disposition of the various types of joint in the different parts of the house as they evolved through the pragmatic aspects of its development. The most continuous joint was in the most private areas. The most independent one was in the most public. The type of monumental and anthropomorphic structural readings I had sought to establish in House 3 were also roughly aligned with these two areas and were dependent on two types of joint to occur — one continuous and static, one fragmented and animated. This raised a question as to whether the narrative of joinery in the building is more than just a narrative of construction. Was it a mechanism for a larger understanding of a program of the culture that produced it? Two years after the house was completed I explored this question in the Alpine Mountain Hut competition.

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Structural axonometrics, House 4

Primary wood frame Before its transformation, the wood frame was a glue-laminated timber cage of nine-foot cubes.

Primary steel frame The steel frame displaced parts of the wood cage to create the living room roof and library.

Composite showing secondary steel frames The steel furniture frames grew to take on a structural and spatial character in the inglenooks and dining room.

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Detail of steel-to-steel joints, House 4 Many of the major structural mem­ bers are round tubes, with joints made by welding a plate into a slot in the tube end. This preserves visual discontinuity at the joint, achieves structural continuity, and eases

adjustment of dimensions in the field. Many of the joints in their raw form are members cut from structural tees. The squared ends of these tees were cut into three-quarter or one-half circular arcs. Their implied movement is deceptive. The pinned cable ends look like they move, and do; the larger members do not. The beams sit atop

one another so that the individual parts maintain their visual autonomy and identity. In both cases, the joints take on a character of isolated animation, in contrast to the static joints of the wood frame.

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Living room composite showing pinned joints, House 4

Detail of door hinge and base, House 4

Chapter 13 The Alpine Mountain Hut Competition

Despite the fact that I went backpacking with my father, despite the fact that I went camping on my honeymoon, and despite the fact that the best times I have spent with my son were in a tent, I find camping a somewhat absurd activity. At best it is a kind of high-tech rustication, using one set of sophisticated tools to escape from another, and if one’s intent is to escape one’s fellow man, camping is an activity in which you are far more likely to encounter him. If camping is truly about solitude, that is another matter, of course. John Muir spent a summer in the Yosemite Valley with only the occasional companion and often little more shelter than a blanket. He could probably have told Thoreau, who lived two miles from Concord, Massachusetts, something about the subject. Smith traced this impulse back as far as Giovanni Bellini. Smith wrote of his portrayal of St. Francis (St. Francis in the Desert, 1480): Bellini . ..celebrates the utterly unique and intensely personal religious experience — a moment of agonizing poignancy which comes to the Saint when he is alone in the midst of nature. A Wordsworth or a Thoreau could have added nothing whatever to Bellini’s presentation of that experience . ...Bellini states explicitly, as other painters of the subject had not done, that St. Francis received his transfiguring vision outside and away from the city.1

It is appropriate that this book, in which connection and discon­ nection from the world play such an important role, would include this competition for an overnight shelter for a backpacker in a remote location

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in the Sierra Nevada. It is appropriate for our time, however, that this individual is not alone. He is, in fact, crowded into a small building with seventy-nine others seeking the same experience. Such was the vision of the University of California, Berkeley’s 2003 competition for an Alpine Mountain Hut, an overnight shelter to house eighty backpackers in the Sierra Nevada. This program called for a prototype for huts to be built by the US Forest Service in a variety of remote off-grid locations that would be designed accordingly, with self-sufficient energy systems. The program description was an oxymoron — a hut for eighty people — and if camping is an absurd activity, this was a program to maximize its absurd aspects. You can argue that solitude is hardly what a backpacker’s “hut” is about, that it will be filled with couples, boy scouts, and school groups, but to me, the essence of the wilderness experience is solitude. You might be able to replace Bellini’s image of St. Francis with that of Thoreau or Muir, but you cannot place seventy-nine other St. Francises on the rock with him, and this was the program: to shoehorn eighty backpackers into an oversize cabin. However critical the environmental and sustainable aspects of the program were, the larger question was how to maintain something resembling an indivi­ dual experience in a high-density environment. To me, this had a clear construc­tional charge as well: how to relate the part to the whole. Smith argued that the organization of the parts of the great buildings of history paralleled that of the societies they represented. The individual parts of the Parthenon and their structural inter­dependence were a manifestation of the organization of Athenian democracy. Buildings that had no such parts, such as the Roman vaulted architecture of the empire, were a reflection of the submission of the part and the individual to the whole and to the society. This hut, if it indeed was to be a hut, should have this quality; the relation of the part to the whole should reflect the relation of the individual to the institution — or noninstitution in this case — and the key to this would be the joint. At an elevation of 8,500 feet, the site is subject to heavy snows, landslides, and severe temperatures. Although it is accessible by truck and adjacent to existing utilities, the prototypical nature of the program suggested that these be used only as backup to demonstrate the adaptability

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St. Francis in the Desert, Giovanni Bellini, 1480

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of the solution to primitive conditions, and that the construction system should take into account the remote location of future huts. The models in the minds of the competition organizers were high-density compact shelters recently built in the Alps. They are claustrophobic affairs with ten-by-twenty-foot rooms holding as many as twelve persons, with no direct light or view of the exterior. Oversize tents would be a kind way to describe them. If a large petrified tent would not work, why not a small lodge? Perhaps a miniature version of something like the Old Faithful Inn? I did a few high-tech, high-density designs inspired by this, but they seemed to contradict the program even more. They were hardly about solitude. Ultimately I returned to the program and its inner contradictions, beginning with another obvious model, the numerous lean-tos commonly used by backpackers, particularly on the Appalachian Trail. They are typically set on low, covered platforms just off the ground, and the active space is not the shelter but the space in front of it. This became the basis for the design of an individual room for four persons. There would be four beds per room, and each room would be set on a platform just off the ground. Each room would have individual access to the exterior through the large outer overhead doors and a view relatively uncluttered by buildings, and each individual would have the opportunity for solitude, albeit a limited one. Some aspects diverged from the lean-to model. The structure needed to be lighter and stronger for assembly in the backcountry, and the joints needed to minimize on-site labor, but lightness and conspicuous joinery were aesthetic intentions as well. Both building and joint were about autonomy, about parts that would join but not merge. As I had done in the past, the solution was to design a wood structure as if it were steel, and in some places, it would be steel. What really distinguish wood and steel are their characteristic joints. While the two have certain things in common (the ability to take tensile stresses, for example), the small local stresses created by a bolted connection are far more easily resisted by steel than by wood, and there is a distinct advantage to a wood structure with steel joints. The construction system was small, lightweight, and easily assembled, requiring a minimum of large construction equipment. Just

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as the program was about autonomy, so were the joints. Each part would have an individual identity. Made with fabricated steel-pinned connectors, the joints were configured so that each part (and each part of each part) would maintain visual autonomy. The method for achieving lateral stability is often the one that gives a structure its character, and the methodology for this stability lies, in most cases, in the joint, for example whether the connections are pinned or rigid. Here I used a cross-braced rectilinear cage, which meant the joint would require only a single pin. This was done to achieve lightness, for ease of construction, but also to delineate a building in which the parts were of equal importance, if not more importance, than the whole, allowing the individual parts to retain their visual autonomy. There was a need for larger spaces, primarily for dining, and with them came an opportunity to develop a second constructional system that would be a prototype for locations accessible by heavy equipment and thus more conventional construction procedures. This would be the opposite of the small system but designed to minimize disturbance to the site by maximizing off-site assembly to accommodate the framing of larger spaces with longer spans. The dining area was built of the heavy construction system made of log-and-steel rigid frames leaned against a log wall that was then buttressed with cross walls of logs. No components were wider than twelve feet, the width of a typical truck bed to allow transport to the site. Some of the joints of this second system were pinned, but the system as a whole was more visually and structurally continuous. Thus corresponding to the two program types, one of groups and one of individuals, there were two construction systems containing two joint types, one of components that were small and light and joined in ways that were visually autonomous, the other of components that were large and heavy and joined in ways that were more visually unified. The population was divided in half, creating two nearly identical buildings to decentralize the large mass of campers. The two buildings flanked either side of the footprint of the old lodge and were slipped in plan, in part to allow uninterrupted views, but also to avoid the creation of a courtyard that would have suggested a kind of pseudocommunity. Each of these buildings was formed by a long log wall on either side

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Section perspective at living unit, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003

Section perspective at dining room, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003

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Living unit construction sequence, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003

The lightweight construction system was easily assembled and required a minimum of large construction equipment. Each unit was a nine-foot cube. No structural element weighed more than forty-five pounds or was longer than nine feet, for easy transport and assembly.

The small furniture system was also lightweight. The beds were commercially available tubular steel basket stretchers supported by tubular frames of similar construction and by plywood closets that double as room dividers.

In many places, the diagonal cables were replaced by sheer walls. Floors, roofs, and interior walls were tongue-and-groove decking. Exterior nonbearing walls were tongueand-groove boards with insulation between them.

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Detail of Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003 Each member of the lightweight system was an identical nine-foot member made from flitch beams and columns of two half-round logs with a three-sixteenths-inch steel plate

between. Each joint was made with a single pin, simplifying field assembly, articulating movement, and creating an autonomy of parts.

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View from trailhead, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003

View of north unit from south unit, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003

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of which were placed the two types of program elements and two construction systems used to house them. On the north side, the row of housing units was aligned parallel to the contours of the hillside site. These were built with the light construction system with its autonomous, visually disconnected parts. On the south side, the communal dining and kitchen areas were rotated for a more direct southern orientation to maximize solar exposure. This was built with the heavy construction system and with its more continuous joints. Conclusion If there are two ways to conceive of a building — as a watch or as a tree — this building was clearly a watch, a configuration of perceptible parts that were visually autonomous and minimally joined. While there were countless technical reasons for making a building this way, in the best architecture, the role of the detail as joint is not just to lay out a constructional narrative of a building; the relation of the parts to the whole becomes a narrative of the relation of an individual to a society, a world, or some other larger order. In House 4 the narrative of joinery is based on the idea of understanding construction as a necessary opposition to the understanding of a building as an abstract totality, but in the Alpine Mountain Hut, it was something greater: an understanding of a building as manifestation of a larger society or even spiritual order, through an understanding of parts and wholes, of connection, of animation and movement. A simple explanation of this aspect of the Alpine Mountain Hut would be that since there was no institution, only individuals, there was no whole, only parts; but this is a bit too easy. The lightness of the components, their identifiable character, and the perception of the parts as an assembly in equilibrium were factors expressive of the program, but they are elements that any architect might pursue in the most urban communal buildings imaginable. The independence of the part within the whole and the articulation of the joint within the totality were characteristics that were clearly universally perceived, if not universally applied, within any given building, much like the relation of any individual to a society.

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Dining Kitchen Terrace Bedrooms Bath Wood pellet stove Cistern Fire pit Gravel courtyard Office

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Site plan, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003  15'  N ↑

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Floor plan at north unit, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003  6'  N ↑

Section at dining room, Alpine Mountain Hut competition entry, Inyo National Forest, California, 2003 The roof was a double shell of plywood with a cavity between. Through an inlet at the base, warm air rises to the glass-faced attic, then is pumped to the crawl space below the living units for storage and later distribution to the dining and sleeping areas. On summer days, warm air accumulates in the attic and is directly exhausted to the exterior.

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Chapter 14 The Part and the Whole

In a 2002 article on the future of the aerospace industry, Ahmed Noor and Samuel Venneri, the chief technologist for NASA, wrote: The realization of the autonomic vehicle concept requires a paradigm shift in some technologies . ...Discrete joined structural components from assembled elements require labor-intensive processing and assembly, resulting in high cost and weight. They will give way to unitized, or jointless, adaptive multifunctional structures made in free-form fabrication processes.1

There is a large and growing number of architects who see a parallel development in the building industry and for the same reason — digital fabrication will lead to a world in which joints will be seamless, invisible, and possibly nonexistent. Of similar mind are a large number of modernists who see the joint as detail, one that like all details must be hidden. But the important question is not whether a jointless architecture is technologically possible but rather if it is aesthetically desirable. More bluntly, can an architecture without joints communicate? The simplest objection to the perfect joint is that made by Ruskin, that “neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect.” 2 There is the more complex issue that the joint is the most conspicuous evidence that a building is con­structed, and if architecture is the art of building, how can we have an architecture that tells us nothing about how it was built? But the

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most significant objection is the number of buildings throughout architectural history that were dependent on a concept of parts and wholes, and an attendant understanding of the constituent parts of the building and their relationship (a narrative of joinery), in order to establish whatever meaning they held. To H. P. L’Orange, one cannot understand the difference between Roman republican architecture and Roman imperial architecture without understanding that the former was an architecture of parts in equilibrium and the latter an architecture of monolithic wholes.3 To Erwin Panofsky, the relationship of the parts of a Gothic cathedral —  ribs, vaults, shafts — was a perfect representation of the parts of a scholastic argument and their relationship.4 To Paul Frankl, the intro­ duction of rib vaulting into the cathedral translated it into a narrative of parts and wholes that were a reflection of a society in which “men no longer regarded themselves as totalities, but realized that they were parts of a higher, or even an infinite whole.” 5 Heinrich Wölfflin contrasted Renaissance architecture, in which “beautiful elements combine in a unity in which they continue to breathe independently,” and that of the baroque, which features a “conception of absolute unity in which the part, as an independent value, is swallowed up in the whole.” 6 And Smith saw the “hypostyle” hall of Wright’s S.C. Johnson Company Administration Building (1939) in a similar way.7 The implied consequence is simple: take away the articulation of parts and you take away the meaning, and the presence or absence of the digital world is of little significance.

Part 5

On Furniture As Wright perceived, the occasions of dining and “living” give rise to quite different modes of family grouping. At no time do the members of a family exhibit a greater oneness of purpose than in sitting down together for a meal. In his early houses Wright consistently treats the occasion almost as if it were liturgical in nature . ... In the living room, however, the family is not grouped with reference to a single and definable purpose. Occasionally it may be so, but ordinarily the relation of its members to one another is variable and unpredictable . ... In Fallingwater the “living room” quality . ..now permeates every detail of the design, while the “dining room” formality is wholly absent. The house celebrates a mode of familial relatedness that is based upon a lively process of interaction rather than upon an architectonic pattern of orderly submission.  — Norris Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright

Chapter 15 The Detail as Dissonant Element: Architecture and Furniture

I made my first serious attempt at furniture in the mid-1970s, a small coffee table that got no farther than a white pine mock-up built with hand tools on a makeshift workbench in my Philadelphia apartment. It was a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright meets Sidney Barnsley affair, fitted with long cantilevers and bristling with dovetails, and for both these reasons, it was unstable and insecure. I designed a number of pieces of similar character that did not proceed even this far, but the one piece I could not come to terms with was the chair. The reasons were clear. I designed the table as if it were a building, emphasizing structural and constructional properties of the material. It is a strategy that will work well for a table but less so for a chair. The greater the amount of contact with the human body a piece of furniture has, the more problematic and the less useful an architectural sensibility becomes. So what did I discover in all this? There is a point where architecture must stop being architecture and become something else, particularly if it is a structurally expressive architecture. Of course chairs and sofas can be designed like architecture, as the chairs of Wright and countless built-in banquettes demonstrate. It is an interesting question as to whether this furniture is uncomfortable or simply looks uncomfortable. Even the most abstract of modernists is likely to concede that some degree of anthropomorphism in a chair is visually if not functionally desirable. This issue is about more than just what constitutes furniture or architecture, it is about how detailing is different from other types of architectural design. As the scale of the design problem shrinks, the rules change, in part because the criteria

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changes as certain factors recede or others emerge. But beyond that, a change in size brings with it a change in perception and requires a shift in the mode of expression. The degree of difference between architecture and furniture in the work of individual architects does not necessarily correspond with architectural styles or historical eras. The architecture and furniture of Wright and Mies have far less in common, for example, than does that of Mies and Robert Adam. To Wright, the design of furniture and the design of architecture were the same activity and produced the same forms. To Mies and Adam they were separate activities with separate rules. So what is it that distinguishes the two? The language of furniture is characterized not just by an affirmation of scale and an anthro­pomorphic character, but by lightness and impermanence, and as a result, subdued structural expression and a real or implied mobility. By contrast, the language of architecture is characterized by mass and the suggestion of permanence, the appearance of stability, and an affirmation of structure. The boundaries between these languages are not always clear, however. This issue took on another dimension in 1987, when, while in Vienna researching the work of Otto Wagner, I spent a lunch break making my first visit to Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Austrian National Library (1726). It is more of a book-lined cathedral than a library. Overscale and oversize, it is redeemed by the small-scale wooden furniture sitting within the vast stone monolith — a second layer of architecture brings the building down to the size of the user to the point that one could imagine reading a book there. This is not, however, all of the “furniture.” The library is a building with two orders: one giant Corinthian, and, in place of what would normally be a smaller order supporting the balcony, a series of wood columns that grow larger as they ascend. The smaller columns were, to my uneducated eye, giant table legs. It is architecture in the language of furniture. This is not an isolated phenomenon. In the work of many architects — Richard Norman Shaw, Stanford White, M. H. Baillie Scott —  despite stylistic differences, there are certain devices and elements that sit on and blur the boundary between architecture and furniture.

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Austrian National Library, J. E. Fischer von Erlach, Vienna, Austria, 1726

Tensile bookcase, Franco Albini, 1939–49, reproduction

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These buildings are more than instances of an image we identify as furniture at an enlarged scale; they adopt certain qualities of furniture, such as implied mobility or anthropomorphic or zoomorphic sculptural intrusions that often characterize table legs and chair arms. While the Austrian National Library offers an example of furni­ture turned into architecture to the benefit of the building, examples of the opposite, architecture turned into furniture, are not always so successful. What is it about Franco Albini’s Tensile bookcase (1940) that makes it so appealing on one level and so ridiculous on another? The concept could not be simpler: the principle of the suspension bridge is applied to a bookcase. Why does it seem so wrong? There are a number of simple criticisms that can be made. The structural configuration seems to be working against the need for mobility at the base. There is the obvious contradiction that when filled with books, the complex assembly is hidden from view, but there is something more. A form that seems so appropriate, so structurally correct at the scale of a bridge seems wrong for a bookcase. We have no problem with this concept at the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge, but at a certain scale the concept becomes problematic — perhaps smaller than Norman Foster’s Renault Distribution Center (1982), perhaps larger than Roger’s PA Technology Center (1982). My Vienna experience was the beginning of a long exploration into the relation of architecture to furniture. Although not all boundarycrossing examples are fruitful, this exploration led to a belief in the virtues of an ambiguous border. I wanted to achieve the strange appeal of the small built-in furniture of Richardson, Le Corbusier, and Wright. On one level, these phenomena were simply indications of the building responding to a specific need, but there was obviously something more, related to the often-used, ill-defined word “scale.” Tables It is not easy for a modernist to love the work of Richard Norman Shaw. His country houses are the three-dimensional manifestation of the worst aspects of the English class system. Their imagery is rather senti­ mental, and they are filled with constructional deceits of all sorts. His work’s great virtue is the furniture that is not furniture at all but part

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of the architecture. A common type is the engaged sideboard cabinet: a tall two-tiered cabinet with doors that appears to be free­standing but is, on closer examination, engaged in the wall. Sometimes this is done in a way in which the wall and the wall paneling, base, and crown mold project into the room to form a seamless unity, but more commonly the projecting cabinet has tapered legs, animal feet, or some other support that is associated with a mobile piece of furniture, making the cabinet fixed at the top but apparently mobile and anthro­pomorphic at the base. Despite its somewhat surrealistic nature, this type has a long history. It was most prevalent during the Queen Anne revival, a period rich with a variety of furniture-architecture hybrids. Shaw’s contemporaries —  Richardson and White — used this device with some frequency, but it was used just as often by Le Corbusier and Wright. Wright’s houses are full of engaged furniture, but it is the tables, the dining tables of the Usonian houses in particular, that have the richest series of variations. These tables are off the module, eccentric assertions in abstract compositions, and, although they have no curves or anthropomorphic forms, they are anthropomorphic in character. They were sometimes freestanding, sometimes built-in, and sometimes a combination of the two, as in the Rosenbaum House (1939). The seating was a mix of movable chairs and built-in banquettes. Their great virtue was that they are figural elements within abstract compositions. They speak of lightness and mobility yet are part of the architecture. They do not ignore structural expression; they express the diminution of structural forces that occurs as scale is diminished. There are a number of similar table arrangements in Le Corbusier’s work, usually connected to a window or windowlike opening — the table in the opening of the garden wall of the house for his mother or the engaged tables at the Villa Savoye. Many are supported by two legs on one end and attached to the building at the other, and a common feature is structural incompleteness; a table that appears to be an autonomous object but cannot in reality exist without the architecture. The occupant responds to these building and furniture combi­ nations in a different way than they do to the larger building. The small scale elements are engaging in a way that is personal, direct and anthropomorphic, while allowing whatever other qualities the building

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Built-in sideboard at Flete House, Richard Norman Shaw, Devon, England, 1883

Dining table in the Rosenbaum House, Frank Lloyd Wright, Florence, Alabama, 1939

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Table on the terrace in the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, Poissy, France, 1929

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exhibits at the large scale — abstraction, monumentality, minimalism —  to occur simultaneously. They suggest two different strategies of design. The first is the introduction of regularly scaled furniture into abstract architectural compositions. The second is the enlargement and transfor­ mation of furniture to become architecture. What both suggest however, is the idea of generating architecture out of furniture. The House with Three Tables The House with Three Tables (1991, unbuilt) was primarily an exploration into how a language of architecture might be generated out of a language of furniture, but the wood vault and the tripod were also essential elements in this transformation. The house appeared in a publication designed to address a multiplicity of issues about the single-family house.1 The issue I chose to engage was the smallest, at least in scale —  the juxtaposition of the language of furniture and the language of architecture, or put another way, how to inform one with the other. Each room of the house was designed around a piece of furniture. The primary volume of the house would be formed by two parallel clapboard walls. One living space was inside the wood volume, another in a courtyard. Both living spaces were structurally independent of the enclosing wood walls, and both were roofed with plywood vaults, formed of square segments of spheres, one curving down slightly to enclose the space, one curving up slightly to open it. The larger steel frames supporting these vaults were deliberately meant to recall furniture, particularly the tripod support of the inner living room. These elements were furniture made large. The other furniture-architecture combinations in the house extended furniture without enlarging it. The bulk of the built-in furniture was not oversize or overscale, but it was furniture that would grow into architecture. Each room of the house was designed not around a function so much as around a piece of furniture that defined that space both functionally and structurally. Four rooms had beds, two had fireplaces, and three had nearly identical tables. The rooms with tables were the dining room, kitchen, and study. The furnishings defined these spaces both func­ tionally and structurally, because parts of the furniture frame were used to support parts of the building.

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This project only scratched the surface of furniture as archi­ tecture, as the tables of the house were, for the most part, little pieces of architecture. There is a great deal of built-in furniture in older buildings that do not represent miniversions of architecture; instead, they take on shapes that are anthropomorphic or evocative of parts of animals, mythical and otherwise, following a different set of rules than we encounter in a building. Inglenooks Another common Shaw furniture-architecture combination is the inglenook, the fireplace room. A staple of nineteenth-century architec­ ture, it was an essential element in any Queen Anne or shingle-style house. It is difficult to explain the appeal of these elements, but they seem to allow the occupants to engage with the room in a way the rest of the building’s architecture cannot accommodate. However, there is something more specific. Inglenooks, or something like them, were present in 1960s modernism in the work of Louis Kahn, Aldo van Eyck, and Herman Hertzberger. The latter wrote, “The habitable space between things represents a shift in attention from the official level to the informal, to where ordinary day-to-day lives are led, and that means in the margins of the established meanings of explicit function.” 2 For many years I felt that, like them, I was looking beyond all the lattices, scrollwork, animal parts, and ornament of the older inglenooks to see the core of the idea that could then be geometrically simplified. This is essentially what Kahn had done, making the inglenook part of the abstract language of the building. Yet this is not what is really important about them. The virtue of the inglenooks of Shaw, Baillie Scott, or Richardson is precisely the way the lattices, scrollwork, and animal parts are not in the language of the building. They employ an alternative language, which sometimes includes the language of furniture, sometimes the intrusion of a sculptural impulse. The inglenooks of Baillie Scott and E. W. Godwin follow a similar pattern. The adjacent wood paneling morphs to form the back or sides of the bench and a seat. All or part of an anthropomorphic chair arm or leg is added for partial support so that, like the tables discussed above,

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f

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First-floor plan and section

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Second-floor plan and elevation

Plans and section, House with Three Tables 

10'  N ↑

a b c D E F g H

Living room 1 Living room 2 Kitchen Dining room Study Court Bedrooms Balcony

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Section at living areas, House with Three Tables

Section perspective at living area 1, House with Three Tables

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one end is fixed and the other, by implication, mobile. Richardson’s and White’s built-ins are also furniturelike but filled with sculptural eruptions, a kind of oversize organic ornament; where the permanent seems to become mobile, an abstract building takes an anthropomorphic character; the heavy, light and delicate. The same material takes on a different mode of expression, distorting itself to accommodate the body but also to suggest it, or even to suggest another material. These built-ins are closer to sculpture than to architecture, in that their task and their appeal is to suggest properties that the material itself does not possess. While conceptually similar to the engaged tables of Shaw, Wright, and Le Corbusier, the built-ins also have the quality of a kind of sculptural eruption. The bench in the inglenook of Godwin’s Frank Miles House (1878) appears freestanding but is a half built-in piece of architecture in the language of Godwin’s furniture. The benches of Baillie Scott’s Blackwell (1900) and Mackintosh’s Hill House (1903) do the same, but the furniture seems to aspire to become structure. In these instances, these anthropomorphic eruptions suggest something else, a transformation into structure. Likewise, the furniturelike spindles and posts of Richardson’s bench at Stonehurst grow beyond the ingle­nook to become structure. The inglenooks of Mackintosh and Baillie Scott contain vertical elements that could be read as columns or simply as large nonfunctional ornament. All these suggest the possibility of furniture taking on a structural reality, as opposed to merely a structural appearance. This kind of anthropomorphic sculpture is not to be found in modernist inglenooks, but it is an attitude that pervades the work of Aalto, Asplund, and many Scandinavians, the way handrails, doorknobs, or column facings change into more “organic” forms when we come in contact with them. Aalto argued that they were functional.3 What they really are is a change in expression. As the scale of the building changes, one is brought closer to the building, but more in spirit than in fact. The real appeal of all these elements is not the romantic associations of the bench and fireplace, not the change of scale, and not the point of functional specificity in a large generalized space.

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It is their inconsistency with the buildings that contain them. At the small scale, the rules change. The permanent seemed temporary, the massive and fixed seemed light and movable. The elements invited tactile engagement; they became far more anthropomorphic. Yet these small elements, like the spaces they occupy, need the larger elements to exist. Thus the effect of this on the Farish Street house went beyond the design of furniture; it became an attitude toward detail. Houses 1, 2, and 3 had contained built-in furniture, but that furniture was little more than miniature architecture. In the fifth house, the last one, built within the fourth, it is dissonant, inconsistent, and contradictory, and it is not just a set of small-scale furniturelike elements but an alternative attitude toward detailing.

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Inglenook at 44 Tite Street, E. W. Godwin, London, England, 1879

Inglenook at Blackwell, M. H. Baillie Scott, Windermere, England, 1900

Chapter 16 House 5

The fifth house was the house that was built within the fourth house. Quite literally, as construction was well underway while key elements were still being designed. This house within the house was the built-in furniture, but a more accurate description is that House 5 was a parallel set of details that exist within House 4, a set that has a large degree of autonomy from the building that contains it. The fifth house is constructed of architecture in the language of furniture and furniture in the language of architecture, and both are independent episodes within the larger building, producing dissonant details, ones that contra­ dict the expression of the building as a whole. The significant details of House 5 are in the realm where the languages of furniture and architecture overlap. The smallest piece of structure is much smaller than the largest piece of furniture, and the language of furniture is, at times, used to make architecture, as, at times, the language of archi­tecture is used to make furniture. If consistency across a spectrum of scales and materials is problematic, is an inconsistency of these elements then virtuous? Not precisely, but I did not want a house full of miniature versions of itself, in which any element would work at any scale. Within the larger space of the house, there are autonomous objects in autonomous spaces, even autonomous details, all suggesting an alternative perception of architecture, and all almost, but not quite, independent of the building around them. Some are designed in a way that perhaps even contradict that building. Thus began a series of experiments in juxtaposition of different levels of craft, different methods of joinery, and different attitudes toward the same material.

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Elevation, House 5 

View from street, House 5

4'

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Exterior dining table, House 5

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North inglenook, House 5

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Detail of dining table, House 5 The dining table is supported by steel vertebrae — curved steel plate ribs supported by a backbone of two steel channels. The exterior steel rod, which intersects the table at midspan, simply penetrates the glass. If the seating areas are furniture

made into architecture, the dining table is architecture made into furniture. Its structural character and oversize steel members impart an architectural, monumental quality to what is only a piece of furniture. These details are inconsistent ones, introducing a character foreign to the building as a whole.

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Dining table, House 5

View of dining table from entry, House 5

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Dining table and inglenook composite, House 5

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Detail of north inglenook, House 5 The yellow tubes and angles of the facade are extensions of the tubular seating elements of the inglenooks, which both engage and penetrate the wall, becoming the support for the windows above and turning the

wall below into a thin membrane. These small-scale structural elements are linear, winding through the building, replacing elements of the wood structure as they go, growing in size when necessary. Like furniture, these elements are made of standard components: one-and-a-quarter-inch round pipes and two-and-a-half-inch

angles. Their cross section is the same, regardless of load or function: post, beam, rail, or bracket.

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View of entry, House 5

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Cut-away perspective, House 5

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The Fireplace Every version of the house on Farish Street had at least two fire­places. I wanted to make them the real source of heat, although they might rarely be used. Although the modern fireplace has lost most of its functional purpose, the fireplace areas in House 5 are nevertheless the source of primary heating for the main living areas. The voids created by the walls surrounding them are used for air distribution, and the supply ductwork is exposed in these areas so that the real source of heat is juxtaposed with the symbolic. I also wanted to use them, as in the furniture in the House with Three Tables, as generators of architecture. The inglenooks and similar small transitional spaces of Kahn, Van Eyck, and Hertzberger are architecture made small; in the work of Shaw, William Ralph Emerson, and White, they are furniture made large instead. They follow their own rules and exhibit their own architectural languages. All the previous designs contained a series of rooms straddling the boundaries of the building envelope — inglenooks, bay windows, and other small structures, sometimes pushing the wall off the grid to accommodate program, sometimes eroding the building kin to increase transparency, sometimes penetrating the wall to connect to the exterior. These were occupied not with people but furniture. Each of the major spaces of House 5 contains a piece of furniture that is its essential element — a fireplace, a sofa, a dining table, or a desk, set on the perimeter of the space. The peripheral spaces are, in some cases, structurally independent as well. They are buildings within buildings, obeying their own rules of composition, creating their own individual spaces, and having their own relationship to the exterior. The structure of each built-in furniture piece is enlarged and expanded, replacing columns and beams, supporting walls and windows, transforming the wood building skin when touched, until the frame of the furniture becomes the structure of the space that houses it. This forms a hierarchy of structural expression, from the largest steel frame to the intermediate to the smallest, the furniture. The largest and most dominant of these smaller structures is, not surprisingly, the inglenook — the seating around the two fireplaces — a kind of tubular

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House 5

a North inglenook b South inglenook

A

b

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b

Second floor plan and section, House 5 

5'  N ↑

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metal version of the inglenooks of Shaw, Baillie Scott, and White. Like these prototypes, House 5’s inglenooks both merge with and grow out of the architecture around them. The furniture elements occupy the house much like the occupants — lounging about, leaning against walls or columns, or sitting around the edge of the room. As the joints of the building become smaller, as in the case of the joints of the pipes that form the seating and tables, they become less structurally explicit, more continuous, and in some ways more sculptural, implying continuity where there is none, expressing softness, using steel but with the offending signs of joinery, the welds, ground off. This is hardly an unusual practice, but it is a phenomenon rarely explained. Obviously there are functional reasons for the nature of a joint to change as the scale changes, e.g., loads are smaller, but is there a visual reason? We cannot make big joints like small ones, but we can make small joints like big ones. Is our comprehension of a building dependent on our perception of this difference? The Table The largest of these elements is the dining table that is literally both inside and out, extending through a frameless glass wall to form an exterior dining area. There are no walls, no window frames, only vertical and horizontal planes of clear glass. The only opaque element is the small steel clip that connects the two glass planes at the midpoint of the vertical joint. While part of the furniture, the table contains within it one of the largest structural members. I struggled with how to disassociate it from the structure while physically connecting it, finally settling on a series of asymmetric curved ribs that sit lightly on the beam on which the glass itself lightly sits. Where it does touch the structure, that structure is transformed. During a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kentuck Knob (1956) in 2005, after the house was complete and occupied, I encountered a sculpture by Anthony Caro, Bailey (1971). Built of welded steel, it is the same yellow color as the small-scale steel of the house. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not; I had admired Caro’s work so much for so long, I might have been copying it subconsciously. What is striking about the piece, however, is how oversize it is, in a structural sense.

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It is not a structure, of course, but it uses the I-sections and angles of a typical steel structure; elements that can span up to twenty feet instead span two. Naturally, this is a large part of its appeal. It occurred to me that this is what I had done with the table. Rather than making the heavy elements light, I made them even heavier. Conclusion At one point during the latter phases of the house design, I was working simultaneously on the miscellaneous metal and lighting layout, specif­ ically on the design of a steel support for the open stair to the third floor and the selection of an adjustable reading light for the sitting area below. I had been considering a tension-cable truss for the former, and when the lighting designer suggested for the latter a floor-mounted Tolomeo fixture — also a kind of mast-and-tension-cable design —it occurred to me that these two solutions, in combination with the cable-and-angle design of steel roof trusses, were an opportunity for a harmonic formal and conceptual unity :  the same structural principle working simultaneously at three different scales on three different levels to solve three different problems. It also occurred to me that this was precisely what I did not want to do. However admirable the unity of vision that ties together the small- and large-scale elements of the architecture of Wright, the Greene brothers, and Rietveld, more admirable still is the corresponding disparity between the large scale and the small scale in the work of Le Corbusier, Aalto, and Peter Zumthor. As the scale changes, so does the problem and so do the rules. It was more than a question of how the design of a detail is like or unlike the design of a building. It was part of a larger question: how does scale matter? For reasons I never systematically analyzed, many of the details in the fifth house are about consistency, about making one thing like another, about lining up this with that, perhaps out of a sense that regularity and consistency are inherently good, perhaps out of a vestigial allegiance to modernist ideas of standardization, or maybe out of a misguided sense that there would be an economic benefit from the resulting simplicity. The windows are copper clad to minimize the difference in color with the siding; the flashing is copper to match the

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Railing details, House 5 The small-scale steel elements supporting seating and casework exhibit little evidence of load or connection. Made of seemingly continuous steel pipe, they move in and out of the house like so much spaghetti, playing various

roles—supporting a wall, becoming a rail, forming a chair — sometimes for structure, sometimes for safety. They are joined in two ways. One is straightforward, a joint of exposed welds, that visually appears not to be joined. The pipe joints, by contrast, formed by welding and grinding, do not just appear to be joined, they are

joined. The seating elements are an intrusion of the language of furniture into architecture. They have the character of furniture — sculptural joints, minimal equal-sized structural members suggesting minimal loads — and bring an anthropomorphic character into what is really part of the architecture.

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House 5

South inglenook, House 5

Axonometric of north inglenook, House 5

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copper-clad window. Many of the windows are the manufacturer’s standard sizes, but there are many standard sizes. The result is a subtle module of the same repeated width. All are set at a height to align precisely with the edges of the six-inch horizontal rows of clapboards. I still frequently ask myself when viewing the house if this was necessary or misguided. But if a majority of the details in the house are about consist­ ency, the significant details are about dissonance, about when to make something different. Hence details like the windows at the entry or dining room, which are not copper clad, not modular, and, unlike the typical windows, they project rather than recede. However eccentric the details of my own house may appear, this self-contradictory process is, for a majority of architects, not the exception but the rule. Yet while there are countless buildings that suffer from meaningless inconsistencies of detail, no architect truly wants consistency of detail, and neither is he capable of attaining it, sensing perhaps that the inevitable dissonance between certain details and the building as a whole is beneficial. But the phenomenon that produces these details is not so easily explained. It is not simply a question of otherness, but of two ways of experiencing and engaging a building, both of which are necessary. As Kahn said, the question of design is when to make things different and when to make them the same.1 Ultimately these details are not about sociology but art, not the accommodation of need but its expression, and the way to do this is not through architecture but through whatever the activity was that Shaw, Richardson, and Aalto did. This usually involved making the parts of the building, in a variety of ways, more anthropomorphic and less abstract, and thus one becomes more directly engaged with the building through the process that Worringer calls empathy. I also found the process could work in reverse. As the parts of the building become less anthropomorphic and more abstract, one becomes less engaged or perhaps engaged on another level: one becomes more an observer and less a participant. Detailing becomes a way of estab­lishing a certain distance between a building and ourselves. It is a mediation between two expressions of the building, the material and objective, one abstract and one representative. The process of detailing is an exercise less in

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House 5

mitigating than in contrasting these two polarities, in part out of a desire to have both but also to have an appropriate tension between the two. This issue is about a great deal more than the difference between architecture and furniture; it has significant consequences for the way that any work of architecture is understood. Ultimately furniture and architecture are designed in different ways, because we respond to them in different ways. The interpenetration of the language of architecture into furniture results in an increase in apparent mass and stability, an amplification of representational qualities, a heightening of structural readings, the expression of a real or implied stability, and a lessening or elimination of anthropomorphic character. The interpen­ etration of the language of furniture into architecture results in an apparent decrease in mass, a deceptive indication of scale, a lessening or denial of structural readings, the expression of a real or implied mobility, and a heightening of anthropomorphic character. Thus I am perfectly willing to use elements and perform operations at the small scale that I find unthinkable at the large — the intrusion of a sculptural impulse, the denial of an expression of structure, or the use of a joint that appears neither connected nor supported. The problem does not change; it is the way the solution to the problem is interpreted. Ultimately the lesson of the fifth house is the lesson of all the other houses, that there are two basic ways, often occurring at two different scales, by which we react to any landscape or any building. There is no particular reason that any one of these modes of under­ standing should exclude the other, but the widespread exclusion of what Worringer described as the empathetic way of understanding can account for many of the problems of contemporary architecture, modern and other­wise, the glib, value-free aesthetics of neotraditionalism, the equally glib but constantly changing fashions of the modernist avant-garde, the wide­spread belief in the importance of the zeitgeist but the absence of any consensus as to what that might be.2

Chapter 17 The Matteson Public Library Competition

In the summer of 1969, I was backpacking through Europe when, in a Paris bookstore, I bought an issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui devoted to the recent work of Louis Kahn.1 Its contents were a shock. The new buildings seemed closed, static, and quite out of sync with what modern space and composition was supposed to be like. Particularly surprising was the plan of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library. The space with which one would assume Kahn would begin — a central reading room —  was nowhere to be found. There was a large central space, but it contained not a stick of furniture. The real reading spaces were smaller carrels at the building periphery, so those using them seemed on the verge of disconnection from the library proper. In retrospect, I think Kahn had articulated what an absurdly contradictory institution a library is —  a building that brings people physically closer but psychologically apart. While the great libraries of the world often have great rooms, few are great meeting places. The large spaces of these libraries, from Labrouste to Asplund, seem to indicate instead an occupant’s quite real disconnection from his fellow occupants. The vast cavernous spaces are there seemingly to monumentalize a different type of encounter, that of an individual with a book. Kahn also said, “Every book is really a very, very personal kind of a contact, a relationship.” 2 But to him that meant two types of architecture. The brick and concrete of the large room at Exeter and the oak-and-teak architecture of the smaller study carrels are a division not just of space and furnishings but of structure. More accurately, it is about architecture and a kind of architectural furniture. It was partly a question of scale, but it was more a question

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of how architecture accommodated the experience that is the reader’s encounter with the book. The library is a building type in which the architect must design the furniture along with the structure and the architecture. Without the books, the bookstacks, and their digital equivalent, there is no building, and even if the disciplines of architecture and furniture design are separate endeavors, this is a building type in which they cannot be disconnected. The most familiar traditional library type is the book warehouse — a barnlike building filled with tightly spaced bookstacks attached to a reading room. The books are in one room; the people are in another. The best libraries are of another type altogether. Rather than being rooms filled with books, they are rooms defined by books, by walls of bookstacks, as in the libraries of Richardson, Asplund, or Aalto. The built-in furniture of the great libraries includes a great deal more than bookshelves. The furnishings of the older college libraries at Cambridge or Oxford universities are little buildings in themselves, with shelves, storage, a reading space, and a place to sit. Sir Christopher Wren’s library at Trinity College (1695) is only the best known. The desks of the Laurentian Library (1525) are a kind of secular pew with the reader almost kneeling at the altar of the book, and the modern libraries of Kahn and Aalto are also cluttered with built-ins. These elements are transformed not just to functionally accommodate the reader, but to express functional accommodation. They are literally the mechanism that connects the reader to the book. The key space is small and indivi­ dual, not large and collective. I am not sure how many of these thoughts about the paradoxical nature of the library preceded the Matteson Public Library competition (1990), but it was a program in which the paradox could hardly be avoided. The site was altogether too familiar: a large, flat, treeless subur­ ban lot located in a low-density neighborhood in the exurbs of Chicago. A design based on a contextual response would find little to respond to. Perhaps this became an excuse to let the solution be guided by the program and not the site, and by two related preconceptions about what made the great libraries great. The first was the wall-of-books idea, based on the concept that the books themselves should be the container. The second was the building-as-furniture idea, based on the concept

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View from parking, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

View from street, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

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Section perspective, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

Axonometric, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

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of an interface and an interaction between the furniture, the structure, and the building. The design began where Aalto had begun, by making walls and bookcases one so that the building and each space in the building was defined by walls of books. The basic elements of the plan were parallel rows of two back‑to‑back bookcases that were two stories tall in an a/b/a/b pattern to form the reading rooms, which were effectively the same regardless of function (whether for children or adults, books or computers) or location (whether at the perimeter or in the depths of the building). These double rows were separated internally by two thirty‑five‑foot‑wide spaces and externally by a fifty-five-foot-wide courtyard to form the reading rooms. The long rows of bookcases would be interrupted at intervals by openings that divide the long reading rooms into a grid of ten-foot squares. Each of these squares was to hold something like a carrel, but of an eccentric type. Having established this rigid understructure of bookstacks and spaces, I wanted to introduce a foreign element, the carrels, the space for the individual encounter of the reader with a book, a text and an idea. They were not there just to differentiate one place from another, although that was an objective, but to introduce a different scale. The intention was to create not just a difference of size but a difference in the rules of ordering, of joining, of shaping materials, of accommodating structure, and of accommodating function, one that would respond to the size of the individual both literally and perceptually in a way the larger building would not. I began not with a room but with two simple, common elements — the table and chair. There is something specific about a table and chair; there is also something universal. Almost all the spaces in the building required a table of some sort — reading rooms, offices, conference rooms, and even the lobby. From one point of view, they were all just tables. What is the real difference between the table on the dais of the meeting room, the head librarian’s desk, and a simple workstation within the library? Is it differences of design, function, or importance? If the latter, why not make them all the same, free of boundaries of status or preconceived imagery? Why not make each table and chair just that, a table and chair — and make them part of the architecture?

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Each of the small spaces in the grid overlaying the rows of generic reading spaces contains a table and chair. They marched across the plan, sometimes inside and sometimes out, ignoring or displacing walls, sometimes becoming small buildings themselves. They formed enclosed study areas in the interior rooms, extensions of the building that were almost freestanding at the courtyard, a small meeting area in the conference room, and a small reading place in the lobby. Each of these elements was generated from fragments of furniture, all designed by architects — Scarpa, Breuer, Mies, and Rietveld — and all are thus recognizable, at least to the initiated. The steel (and, in one case, wood) members that make up this furniture would be extended in three dimensions to form supporting and sometimes enclosing structures. It was equally important that the structure and the furniture be not just connected but interdependent. The tables and chairs needed the structural frame for support, but the major structure needed the legs, arms, tubes, and angles of the furniture as well. Chair legs merged with columns, table supports merged with beams, and angles and tubes were connected to H columns and wide flange beams to form a single structural unit. I wanted to create an analogous structure to the highly carved, modeled, and anthropomorphic built-in furniture of architects such as Richardson and White but using tubular and angled steel. The intent was for the language of furniture to invade architecture and the language of architecture to invade furniture in a construction that has some of the qualities of both. These isolated spaces for individuals and small groups exemplified the inner contradictions of the library that Kahn had explored. They were the essence of the building and not an accessory, the private space within the public domain, like a grid of secular chapels, structurally dependent but visually semiautonomous. They would be spatially independent but structurally dependent parts within the building as a whole, and there was a parallel between this structural organization and the strange social organization that is a library — a collection of individuals in their own sheltered enclaves. Why all this built-in furniture beyond a simple desire to establish scale? Obviously it was not a fear of some potential shortage of tables and chairs in the library. Clearly a large part of it was a desire to make

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Axonometrics, carrel types 1 and 2, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

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the building respond to its users at a smaller scale in a functional way. Hertzberger had incorporated a great deal of built-in furniture within his buildings to achieve what he called polyvalence (flexibility without physical alteration), but his built-ins are more small architecture than furniture, simple geometric shapes that are smaller versions of the simple geometric shapes of the buildings.3 They are not so much miniature architecture as scaleless abstractions that could be any size. My built-in furniture pieces were delineations of a different attitude toward form —  different shapes, following different structural laws, joined in different ways from their large-scale architectural counterparts although formed of the same materials. I was unconsciously dealing with the problem of abstraction and literalism. Abstraction was both modernism’s great virtue and its great problem. At its best, it created tense, simultaneous perceptions of form and material. At its worst, it descended into pattern making —  the endless repetitive curtain-wall mullions, precast slabs, or metal panels of modernism’s most despised buildings. Most of the great modernists found ways to introduce compositional centers and ends to these repetitive patterns. The pinwheel patterns of Le Corbusier’s Secretariat Building (1953) at Chandigarh, India, is an outstanding example, but the most common device is the figural element. In appearance and in theory (at least outwardly), modernism had discarded figural elements, whether in the form of architectural elements (the order, the arch, windows, be they Serlian, Gothic, or double hung) or sculptural elements (the ornamental base and capital) or the truly figural element, the representation of the human body. The great virtue of many types of traditional architecture was the tension between two modes of representation, the sculptural and the material. This was generally assumed to have no place in modernist practice. In the modernist buildings I wanted to emulate, that was not the case. They contain structural and sculptural elements that are figural, in forms not always subtle. Modern architecture was full of human figures. On rare occasions, they were literal, as in the caryatids of Berthold Lubetkin at the High Point Apartments (1935). More commonly they appeared under the cloak of functionalism as furniture, for example Asplund’s bench at the Woodland Crematorium

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vestibule (1940), Le Corbusier’s built-in tile chaise in the Villa Savoye, and, in the service of smaller body parts, Aalto’s door handles and Asplund’s handrail. The use of literal, well-known furniture precedents — the Cesca and Tugendhat chairs (1928, 1930) or Scarpa’s Doge Table (1968) — began as an expedient, for I had no time to design my own, but they are also some of the most anthropomorphic modern furniture. The arm of the Cesca Chair, the back of the Tugendhat Chair, and the body of the Le Corbusier chaise look like arms, backs, and bodies. It was an operation parallel to those done by Shaw, Richardson, Mackintosh, and White —  to blend and overlap a way of making furniture and a way of making architecture. In their case, the result takes the form of built-ins —  griffin-shaped chair legs, anthropomorphic chair arms, and undulating benches, all literally growing out of and connected to the architecture. I did the same; I simply did so with modern furniture. I was, at least in theory, appealing to two types of architectural response — the material and the sculptural — and two roughly corres­ponding languages: that of architecture and that of furniture. Again at least in theory, these two characterized two different perceptions we bring to buildings. One is the need to understand, however primitively and intuitively, a building as a logical structure, a mass of shapes and materials engineered in a way that answer to gravity. The other is the need to understand a building, or at least part of a building, as a representation of something else — in this case ourselves — which is a different, more intuitive kind of structural understanding. I was thinking about not just the difference between architecture and furniture, but two types of structural expression —  one larger, literal, and bigger than ourselves, the other smaller, sculptural, and more like our own bodies. This description is only a partial explanation for phenomena that were considerably more complex. While our response to the furniture elements might be based on anthropomorphic association, most would argue that our response to gravity is no less anthropo­ morphic, simply of a different order. Nor did this theory really explain the architecture-furniture qualities of buildings such as the Austrian National Library, where anthropomorphic associations are

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Elevations, carrel type 1, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

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Elevations, carrel type 2, Matteson Public Library competition entry, Matteson, Illinois, 1990

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subtle, if present at all. That library is not just mixing the language of architecture and furniture but also of transformation, in this case by greatly enlarging the furniture to the scale of the architecture. The difference between the architectural and the sculptural and between architecture and furniture is not the presence or absence of weight but the methodology of expressing its accommodation and quantity. Conclusion The digital world was in its infancy at the time of the competition in 1990, but it has not done anything since then to make this idea obsolete. Computers and networks may mean a great deal to the nature of the equipment and its accommodation, but more critically, it has exacerbated the contradictory qualities of the library as institution — placement and displacement, connection and disconnection. The answer to the question of what is furniture and what is architecture has implications beyond our need to separate the design of objects into neat categories. While in theory the built-in furniture of the Matteson Public Library design was functionally responsive, this was a great simplification of the concept being explored, which went well beyond function into the ways in which we fundamentally respond to buildings. Architecture and furniture are not just about two different ways of designing an object; they are about two different ways of responding to an object.

Chapter 18 Scale and Dissonance

Antoine Picon wrote in a 2003 article: We live in a world in which scale has become highly problematic because of the shift of our visual and perceptive categories. On the one hand, with satellites or computer generated global models, we see at a much broader scale than our immediate ancestors did. On the other hand, we are able to look at microstructures as if they were right under our eyes. We have difficulty dealing with our environment at a traditional distance. Science and the often computer generated images that illustrate it play a role in this crisis of scale. Scientific notions and representations shape our vision of the world. Among them, information plays a key role. Contrary to the traditional notion of structure, information ignores the distinction between the large, the medium, and the small, between the macro and the micro . ... The blurring of the very big and the very small, and the crisis of scale that is its main consequence, tends also to reflect the fundamental evolution of our society.1

If scale, like structural rationalism and the expression of joinery, is a casualty of the contemporary condition, it is less likely to be the result of the rise of the digital era than the product of an older, simpler phenomenon. We have come to read buildings rather than feel them. Once a building became a set of signs to be deciphered, a set of symbols to be identified, a collection of motifs to evoke pleasant associations,

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then it ceased to be something that resolved weight, that possessed equilibrium, that was assembled and subject to external or internal force. Only the surface mattered. Nothing behind it, real or imagined, could be of any importance beyond the purely functional. Thus much of contemporary architecture, whether furniture, details, or building is about consistency. The handles, lights, handrails, stairs, and structure of Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003) in Cincinnati are all miniaturized versions of the geometry of the building. It may result in a rather uncomfortable handrail, but that is the price we pay to a fictitious digital zeitgeist that cannot accept heresy. This is an architecture in which there is no difference in scale, only in size, and without this difference, a major component of our architectural perception is absent. The essential link between scale and perception is that we feel different things at different scales. Because these perceptions involve weight, force, and a certain tactile engagement, the size of these perceived forces is critical. Is it at the scale of our own bodies or at a much larger scale? The Matteson Public Library and House 5 were explorations of the detail as a manifestation of scale, and it is a type of detail that includes all the others. Scale is relevant to the difference between monumental and anthropomorphic structures, the difference between architecture and furniture, the difference between abstracted and articulated detail, and the difference between a formal and a sculptural understanding of material. All of these, particularly the last, are essentially the difference between designing a building and designing a detail. But while both modes of understanding are desirable, they are not equal partners in our understanding of architecture, and the lesson of the fifth house was the importance of informing one of these attitudes, in a dissonant way, with the other.

Epilogue The Detail

If transcendentalism, as many believe, is the primary intellectual foundation of what is arguably the most American of American architectures — the work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright —  it must be acknowledged that it had two very different architectural manifestations represented by Sullivan and Wright themselves. Wright’s work at every stage of his career was based on motifs —  geometric patterns — that informed every aspect of the design from the site plan to the detail, unifying part and whole. The motifs were usually drawn from nature and might be quite literal, as in the sumac or hollyhock patterns of the Dana and Barnsdall houses (1904, 1922), or more abstract, as in the squares of Unity Temple (1909) or the hexagons of the Hanna House (1936), but they are always there. It is a practice that can be traced to a number of influences, but certainly to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the idea that the order of nature is also the repetitive motif. Here is Emerson on nature: Nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form — spine on spine, to the end of the world . ...And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Every thing, at the end of

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one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last.1

By contrast, Sullivan understood nature as opposing forces, which he described as masculine and feminine. The Emerson quote above is from his essay on Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who is, strangely, the primary source of Sullivan’s concept of opposition. Narcisco Menocal explains: [Swedenborg] believed that universal rationality, or wisdom, comes into harmony with the masculine principle of the cosmos, and emotion, or love, with the feminine . ...[H]e posited that correspondences of wisdom-love, reason-emotion, and masculine-feminine existed between the two spheres . ... Sullivan adapted Swedenborg’s theories to establish a funda­ mental principle of design. This consisted in making organic efflorescence issue from a system of straight or curved lines or any other geometric combination of them. As a result, the vegetal motifs, representing the “feminine-emotional,” dominate visually, but the underlying linear system, standing for the “masculine-rational,” sustains the design.2

Sullivan spoke of buildings as beginning with mass and composition, and then being clad in a “garment of poetic imagery.” He wrote: An ornamented structure should be characterized by this quality, namely, that the same emotional impulse shall flow throughout harmoniously into its varied forms of expression — of which, while the mass composition is the more profound, the decorative ornamentation is the more intense.3

Wright’s work often has an absolute geometric consistency, as in the ornament of the Francis Apartments (1895), a pattern that appears years later in the Llewellyn Wright House (1953). Sullivan’s is invariably dualistic in expression — sculptural and abstract, fluid and geometric,

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or as he called them, organic and inorganic, but they are always found together. Even in his “inorganic” ornament there are organic intrusions; and below the surface of his “organic” ornaments there is an underlying geometric grid. Both approaches are problematic, again as exemplified by Wright and Sullivan. In Wright’s work, the motifs cross all boundaries of differences in material, scale, structure, construction, and function to attain a universal but highly stylized and often superficial unity. Likewise, as Wright maintained, Sullivan’s methodology often resulted in form being imposed on material rather than emanating from it. Some might not accept Sullivan’s distinction of masculine and feminine, or that either Wright or Sullivan’s approach is truly organic. Some may question whether this kind of spiritualism is an appropriate methodology for thinking about architecture. Regardless, Sullivan and Wright personify two very real alternatives in thinking about the relation of the architectural detail to the work of architecture: the idea that detail is an integral part of a larger whole, even to the point of replication; and the idea that the detail is an independent, even contradictory, narrative within the larger building, one that may be in opposition to it. Both approaches can be found in the great buildings of history, modernist or otherwise. It is a distinction Worringer found in Greek architecture between the “mechanical unity” of the Doric order and the “organic” infusions of the Ionic order.4 It is a distinction Ruskin found in the Piazza San Marco (1177) between the mechanical ornament of Jacopo Sansovino’s Renaissance National Library of St. Mark’s (1553) and the individually carved capitals of the Doge’s Palace (1424), portraying the life of the city and its beliefs — a portrait only loosely related to the building on which it occurs. Although the idea of an independent narrative of detailing might seem to be at odds with modernism’s vision of itself since 1900, there is no shortage of independent narratives. The door handles of H. P. Berlage’s bare-bones, minimalist stock exchange, the Beurs van Berlage (1903), in Amsterdam are elaborate replicas of biological forms from Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of marine organisms in his Kunstformen der Natur.5 Though the details of the International Style might be the integral detail at its most pure, the isolated, organic, surreal moments in the work

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Gate detail of the Francis Apartments, Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago, Illinois, 1895

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Facade detail of the Home Building Association, Louis Sullivan, Newark, Ohio, 1914

Facade detail of the Guaranty Building, Louis Sullivan, Buffalo, New York, 1896

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of Aalto and Asplund — the handrails, door handles, and benches — are the autonomous detail at its most significant. Although the integral detail, in the guise of the nondetail, appears to be in ascendancy in contemporary modernism in the work of Hadid and Lynn, and though the motif has seen an resurgence in the work of Herzog and de Meuron and others, the inevitable cycles of architectural history seem to indicate that we will soon see the rise of a new school of autonomous detail. This suggests a stylistic pendulum from which there may be no escape, but there are clear advantages to recognizing that although we can hardly design a building without a large number of consistent, abstract, even motific details, we would do well to recognize the necessity of autonomous ones. Each of the Farish Street houses and the projects that followed them explored a type of detail that was autonomous: The articulated detail that expresses a reality within a context of abstraction. The materially expressive detail that speaks of an inner force in an architecture of surface. The structurally expressive detail that speaks of weight in a structure that is indifferent to it. The joint that speaks of isolated animation in a structure that is static. The subversive detail that contains a sculptural impulse within a building that is architectural.

All occur, as these types of detail must, within a larger context of more abstract details that are invisible or consistent. They are all isolated moments of dissonance that are necessary for architectural understanding to occur. If architecture is to relate to a site, it can only be through abstract connection, by the denial of the expression of certain elements in order to articulate others. If we are to understand architecture as the organization of a society, an era, or a system of

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thought, it can only be through an understanding of the relation of the parts to the whole and of the nature of their connection, through the perception of how the internal forces of a building are resolved, and through an understanding of how its weight is maintained in equilibrium, however stable or precarious. If architecture is to respond to the individual in a way that is functional or aesthetic, it must be at the scale of that person, and if there is an architecture at the scale of a person it must exist within an architecture that exists at a larger one. So there is an inevitable opposition to the way architecture is expressed and the way it is understood — that of the design of the building and that of the design of the detail — and if the two are dissonant, so much the better. And this is what architectural detailing is; it is the necessary but selective presentation of this information, often in a context that speaks of its opposite. These methodologies are not based on any stylistic or historical sensibilities, but there are almost no neotraditionalist and very few contemporary modernist architects that recognize this necessity. Both choose to work instead solely through the process of association — this symbolizes that because we have learned that it does. Association is the most accessible, least significant, and most transitory of the ways to connect a building to an idea. Easily made, association is just as easily unmade. The details of classicism can be made to represent democracy or slavery with equal conviction, if association is the only tool making that connection. We have long thought, if we thought at all, that the best-detailed buildings are those in which every element of the construction is revealed or expressed, in which each part is subordinate to the whole. We assume that the best detail is the logical extension of the idea of the whole into the part, the element that unifies the totality, the cell from which the organism is generated. Certainly most building details have these qualities (even the articulated details), but they are not the significant ones. The meaningful detail is the exception — the detail that forms articulation within the abstraction, demonstrates an inner force within the abstract form, describes joinery within the totality, expresses weight in an immaterial abstraction, or tells us the size of the scaleless building. The strength of these details is not only the absence

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View of the Beurs van Berlage, H. P. Berlage, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1903

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Door handle of the Beurs van Berlage, H. P. Berlage, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1903

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of a relationship to the premise of the building that contains them but also their open contradiction of that premise. They present an alternative reading, describing a different set of conditions and even a different set of rules. They are not only conceptually disconnected from the buildings in which they occur, but often subvert them. It may be that we have entered the age of the detail-less building, and the visual manifestation of the technical solution is no longer practically required, but this has never been the real issue. The question is rather, what is the role of these articulated elements, these details, in understanding a building as a manifestation of something more than the satisfaction of practical necessity and can that understanding occur without them?

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Notes Preface 1 Lucien Hervé, The Architecture of Truth (New York: Phaedon, 2001), 7; Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 496; Philip Johnson, “Architectural Details,” Architectural Record 135 (April 1964): 137; Christian Schittich, “Detail(s): 16 Statements” Detail 40, no. 8 (2000): 1437; Alejandro Zaera Polo, “Finding Freedoms: Conversations with Rem Koolhaas,” El Croquis 53 (1993): 10; Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe, 1970), 31; Robin Middleton, ed., Architectural Associations: The Idea of the City (Cambridge, MA: Architectural Association and MIT Press, 1996), 81; Greg Lynn, ed., Folding in Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: WileyAcademy, 2004), 9. 2 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1984), 28–31; Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 299.

Introduction 1 Ed Melet, The Architectural Detail (Rotterdam: NAi, 2002), 15. 2 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 1.

3 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture (1851; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 48. 4 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on Architecture, vol. 1 (1877; repr., New York: Dover, 1987), 469. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932), 148. 6 Charles Keeler, The Simple Home, http://www. oregoncoast.net/simplehome.html; Charles Keeler, “Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic Man in the Twentieth Century,” http://www.oregoncoast. net/maybeckgothicman.html. 7 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2005), 172.

Chapter 1 Epigraph Norris Smith, Medieval Art (Dubuque: Brown, 1967), 41–42. 1 Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Knopf, 1960), 13. 2 Patrick Samway, ed., Walker Percy: Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 3. 3 Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 143.

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4 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), xviii.

7 Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (New York: Praeger, 1964), 77.

5 William Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford, 1984), 91–107.

Chapter 4

6 Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf, eds., Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture (New York: Academy, 1997), 98. 7 Barbaralee Diamonstein, American Architecture Now (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 61.

Epigraph Norris Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 36, 38–39. 1 Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (New York: World, 1960), 65. 2 Ibid., 61.

Chapter 3 1 Polo, “Finding Freedoms,” 10; Middleton, Architectural Associations, 81; Future Systems, Unique Building: Lord’s Media Centre (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Academy, 2001), 85; Hervé, The Architecture of Truth, 7; Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, 496. 2 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 5. 3 Ibid., 14.

3 Ibid., 213. 4 Ibid., 185. 5 Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works: Prose, Plays and Supersagas, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 331. 6 Larissa Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 248.

4 Ibid., 4.

7 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4.

5 Ibid., 15.

8 Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 36.

6 Ibid., 16.

9 Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: Norton, 1960), 74.

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10 Frank Lloyd Wright, In the Cause of Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 171–213. 11 Wright, An Autobiography, 308. 12 Wright, Cause of Architecture, 53. 13 Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941), 127. 14 Ibid., 118. 15 George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981), 121. 16 Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed (New York: Dutton, 1985), 155.

Chapter 5 1 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (New York; Dover, 1960), 107. 2 Samir Younés, ed., The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy (London: Andreas Papadakis, 1999), 78.

Chapter 6 1 Enos Mills, “A Home of Forest Fire Logs,” Sunset (May 1921): 4. 2 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 102; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–36. 3 Thomas Jefferson, “Colleges, buildings, and roads,” in Notes on the State of Virginia, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ JefVirg.html, 280. 4 D. Burch, W. Remmert, D. Krintz, and C. Barnes, “A Field Study of the Effect of Wall Mass on the Heating and Cooling Loads of Residential Buildings,”(Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards, 1982), http://www.fire.nist.gov/ bfrlpubs/build82/PDF/b82001.pdf. 5 Log Home Living Institute, “2004 Log Home Production & Construction Report,” www.thelogandtimberhomeauthority.com. Unpublished report available on request.

Chapter 7 1 Wright, Cause of Architecture, 53. 2 John Gage, ed., Goethe on Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 197. 3 Younés, Historical Dictionary of Architecture, 78.

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4 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1958), 235. 5 Kenzo Tange, et al., Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 22–23. 6 Marvin Meyer, ed., Four Gnostic Gospels (New York: Knopf, 1986), 33.

Chapter 8 Epigraph Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 145–46. 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2 (Indian Hills, CO: Falcon Wing, 1958), 411. 2 Ibid., 215; Pamela Robinson, ed., Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Architectural Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 186–87; John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961), 45. 3 Rhys Carpenter, The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 69–70. 4 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty, 2007), 162. Italics in original.

Chapter 9 1 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 641. 2 Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 104. 3 Carpenter, The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art, 152–79.

Chapter 10 1 Antoine Picon, “Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, ed. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 302. 2 Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 14. 3 J. Mordaunt Crook, The Architect’s Secret: Victorian Critics and the Image of Gravity (London: John Murray, 2003), 149.

Chapter 11 Epigraph Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 132–33. 1 Peter Rice, An Engineer Imagines (London: Artemis, 1994), 26.

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Chapter 12

Chapter 15

1 Richard Wurman, ed., What Will Be Has Always Been (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 177.

Epigraph Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 74, 135.

Chapter 13

1 Jude LeBlanc, 18 Houses (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

1 Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 162.

2 Herman Hertzberger, Lessons for Students in Architecture (Rotterdam: 010, 1991), 188.

Chapter 14

3 Alvar Aalto, Synopsis: Painting, Architecture, Sculpture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1970), 17.

1 Samuel L. Venneri and Ahmed K. Noor, “Plenty of Room in the Air,” Mechanical Engineering, November 2002, 42–48. 2 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, 172. 3 Hans P. L’Orange, Art Form and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 13, 15.

Chapter 16 1 Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been, 78. 2 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 5.

Chapter 17

4 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: World, 1957), 47ff.

1 “Louis Kahn,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 142 (February–March 1969): 141–43.

5 Paul Frankl, Principles of Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 104, 113–14; Paul Frankl, Gothic Architecture (New Haven: Yale, 2000), 49.

2 Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been, 108.

6 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (1932; repr., New York: Dover, 1950), 159, 185. 7 Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, 145–46.

3 Hertzberger, Lessons for Students in Architecture, 146.

Chapter 18 1 Picon, “Architecture, Science, Technology,” 307.

247

Notes

Epilogue 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 668. 2 Narcisco Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 25. 3 Tim and Charlotte Benton with Dennis Sharp, Architecture and Design: 1890–1939 (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1975), 3. 4 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 79. 5 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 281–374; Pieter Singelenberg, H. P. Berlage: Idea and Style (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1972), 135.

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Selected Bibliography Individual Architects Arets, Wiel Arets, Wiel. Living Library. Utrecht: Prestel, 2005. Ashbee, C. R. Ashbee, C. R., Papers. Kings College Library, Cambridge University. Crawford, Alan. C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Baillie Scott, M. H. Kornwolf, James D. M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts and Crafts Movement: Pioneers of Modern Design. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972. Barnsley, Sidney Gimson and Barnsley Drawings Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum. Greensted, Mary. Gimson and the Barnsleys: Wonderful Furniture of a Commonplace Kind. London: Evans Bros., 1980. Berlage, H. P. Singelenberg, Pieter. H. P. Berlage: Idea and Style. Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1972. Le Corbusier Brooks, H. Allen, ed. The Le Corbusier Archive. New York: Garland, 1982. Le Corbusier. Le Livre de Ronchamp. Paris: Les Cahiers Forces Vives, 1961. Ellwood, Craig Jackson, Neil. California Modern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Freed, James Ingo Dannatt, Adrian. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: James Ingo Freed. London and New York: Phaidon, 2002. Hertzberger, Herman Hertzberger, Herman. Lessons for Students in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1991. ———. Space and the Architect: Lessons in Architecture 2. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2000. Herzog and de Meuron Wang, Wilfried. Herzog & de Meuron. Boston: Birkhauser, 1998. Kahn, Louis Brownlee, David, and David De Long. Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. Louis I. Kahn Drawings, Architectural Drawing Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Maybeck, Bernard Bernard Maybeck Drawings Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Freudenheim, Leslie. Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts & Crafts Home. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2005. Keeler, Charles. “Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic Man in the Twentieth Century.” http://www. oregoncoast.net/maybeckgothicman.html. ———. The Simple Home. http://www.oregoncoast. net/simplehome.html. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Drexler, Arthur, ed. The Mies van der Rohe Archive. New York: Garland, 1986. Nakashima, George Nakashima, George. The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981. Nakashima, Mira. Nature Form & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima. New York: Abrams, 2003.

249

Selected Bibliography

Prouvé, Jean Sulzer, Peter. Jean Prouvé: Oeuvre complète. 3 vols. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1995. Richardson, H. H. H. H. Richardson Drawings, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1989. ———. Taliesin West. Tokyo: ADA Edita, 2002. Wright, Frank Lloyd. In the Cause of Architecture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Writers

Saarinen, Eero “80-Ton Keystone Completes St. Louis’s Gateway Arch.” New York Times, November 7, 1965.

Auden, W. H. Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Salter, Peter Salter, Peter. 4 + 1 Peter Salter: Building Projects. London: Black Dog, 2000.

Frost, Robert Pritchard, William. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. New York: Oxford, 1984.

Shaw, Richard Norman Richard Norman Shaw Drawings, Drawings Collection, Royal Institute of British Architects. Saint, Andrew. Richard Norman Shaw. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Smith, David Giménez, Carmen, ed. David Smith: A Centennial. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Krauss, Rosalind. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson, Peter. “A Parallel of the Orders.” Architectural Design 36 (November 1966): 558. Stickley, Gustav Hewitt, Mark A. Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms: The Quest for an Arts and Crafts Utopia. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Tatlin, Vladimir Zhadova, Larissa, ed. Tatlin. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Wright, Frank Lloyd Futagawa, Yukio, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: 1924– 1936. Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1985. ———. Frank Lloyd Wright: Selected Houses. 8 vols.

General Architecture Barnes, Christine. Great Lodges of the National Parks. Bend, OR: W. W. West, 2002. Carpenter, Rhys. The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1959. Frampton, Kenneth. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Gray, Camilla. The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863– 1922. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Judson Clark, Robert. The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876–1916; an exhibition organized by the Art Museum, Princeton University and the Art Institute of Chicago. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. McCoy, Esther. Case Study Houses, 1945–1962. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977. Melet, Ed. The Architectural Detail. Rotterdam: NAi, 2002.

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Credits

155 Scott Smith 159 Scott Smith

All images are the author’s unless otherwise noted.

169, top Original photograph by Scott Smith

13 Ezra Stoler © ESTO

172 Copyright the Frick Collection, New York

36 Ezra Stoller © ESTO

188, top Reproduced from Fisher Von Erlach: Der Ältere

67, top Reproduced from Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 1927

188, bottom Reproduction, Jonathan Meister, the Knowlton School of Architecture Digital Library, The Ohio State University

67, bottom Reproduction © The Art Institute of Chicago 72, top Ezra Stoler © ESTO 72, bottom Mira Nakashima/George Erml 93 Estes Park Museum 94 San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library 125 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1960 (60.11.11) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 129 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frederick F. Thompson, 1903 (03.12.8a) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 154 Scott Smith

199, top Country Life Picture Library © IPC Media 199, bottom Blackwell, The Arts and Crafts House. The White Drawing Room. © The Lakeland Arts Trust 2008 203 Original photograph by Scott Smith 205, bottom Scott Smith 206 Original photograph by Scott Smith 208 Scott Smith 215, top Original photograph by Scott Smith

251

Index

Index

Aalto, Alvar, details and, 197, 213, 216, 222, 237 furniture of, 219, 222 abstraction literalism and, 38, 41, 56, 91, 96, 225 quotation and, 34 subversion of, 34, 60 age, digital, 138–39 aircraft design, 116, 161 Albers, Josef, 73 Albini, Franco, Tensile bookcase, 188, 189 Alpine Mountain Hut Competition, 8, 66, 170–81 construction processes, 173–74, 176–77, 179 hut, nature of, 171 joints in, 171, 174, 176–77, 179 passive systems in, 181 Anglo-Celtic illuminated manuscripts, 29 Antoinette VII, 161 Appalachian Trail lean-tos, 173 architecture, jointless, 23, 32, 145, 148, 152, 182 architecture, language of, 26, 187, 193, 200, 217, 223, 226 Arets, Wiel, Utrecht University Library, 103, 248 Arts and Crafts Movement in America, exhibition, 148 Ashbee, C. R., 19–20, 248 Asplund, Erik Gunnar, 225 details and, 197, 226, 237 furniture of, 218, 225 Woodland Crematorium, bench in, 225 association, 19, 31, 103, 111, 114, 238 Auden, W. H., 242, 249 regionalism and, 31–32 automobile design, stylistic evolution, 148 Baillie Scott, M. H., 248 furniture of, 187, 194, 197, 212 Blackwell, 197–98, 199 Banco, Nanni di, Four Saints, 80, 81 Barnsley, Ernest, 19 Barnsley, Sidney, 20, 248 furniture of, 20, 21, 151, 186

Baths of Caracalla, 112 Bauhaus, 73, 244 Bellini, Giovanni, 170–73 St. Francis in the Desert, 172 Berkel, Ben van details and, 7, 58 Berlage, H. P., 247–48 Beurs van Berlage, 232, 239–40 Boman, Thorleif, 63, 69, 243 material and, 69, 88, 91 Breuer, Marcel, 87 furniture of, 71, 223 Cesca Chair, 226 Brick, Wood, and Steel House, 73–74, 75 brutalist era, 113 building as text, 107 Burges, William, Tower House, 99 Camp Sagamore, 23, 25, 27 camping, 170–71 Caro, Anthony, Bailey, 212 Carpenter, Rhys, 112, 124, 245, 249 Case Study Houses, 76, 96, 113, 249 Charlottesville, Virginia, 6, 10, 88, 91 cladding, 18, 113, 133–34 contrapposto, 124 Cook, Peter, 242 details and, 7 Crook, J. Mordaunt, 140, 245 Deleuze, Gilles, 102 detail abstract, 11–12, 14–15, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40–41, 44, 46, 52, 55–56, 58, 68, 106, 140, 231, 237 antidetail, 50 articulated, 7, 11, 28, 32, 37, 41, 46, 50, 53, 55, 59, 107, 144, 231, autonomous, 7, 23, 26, 201, 237 consistency of, 7, 26, 200, 213, 216, 231 definition, 7, 238, 240 definition of scale, 26 expression of weight, as, 140 fetish, 7, 11, 12 locating, role in, 11 joint as, 19, 20, 23, 130–31, 144–51, 182 in classical buildings, 143, 162 motific, 7, 17, 19, 70, 71, 76, 102, 230, 232–34, 237 nondetail, 50, 140, 237

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regional, 14 structural representation as, 110–17 Doric order, 234 wood and, 82 Dying Gaul, 116 Eames, Charles and Ray, 92 Eames House, 76 ecological determinism, 12, 14, 32 Eliade, Mircea, 106, 244 Eliot, T. S., 31 Ellwood, Craig, 81, 92, 248 Kubly House, 87 Emerson, R. W., 232–33, 246 Emerson, William Ralph, 210 empathy, 19, 26, 59–60, 103, 112, 116, 166, 216. See also Worringer, Wilhelm enclosure, ambiguity of, 34, 44, 55, 81 fabrication, digital, 102, 182 fireplace, 210 inglenook, 194 Erechtheum, 116 fictions, modernist, 12, 76, 114, 118, 127–28, 136 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard, Austrian National Library, 187–89, 226 form, ideal, 11, 15 Foster, Norman, Renault Distribution Center, 189 Foulkes and Hogue, Oregon pavilion, Panama Pacific International Exhibition, 94, 96 Frampton, Kenneth, 38, 242 details and, 7 Frankl, Paul, 183, 246 Frascari, Marco, 7, 242, 249 Free Union Country School, 90–101 construction sequence, 97 rigid frame and, 98, 99, 101 See also log construction Freed, James Ingo, 11, 248 Reagan Building, 115 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 115 Frost, Robert, 31–32, 243, 249 furniture anthropomorphism in, 187, 189–90, 194, 197–98, 217, 223, 226 architecture and, 23–26, 71, 158, 166, 185–89,

200, 217, 204, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217–29, 222–23, 225–26, 229, 231 built-in, 6, 23, 50, 186, 189–91, 194, 197–98, 200, 210, 219, 223, 225 language of, 187, 193–94, 200, 214, 217, 223, 226, 229 Queen Anne architecture and, 190, 194 scale and, 187, 189–90, 193, 198, 217, 223, 225, 229 Fuller, Buckminster, Dymaxion House, 74 Gimson, Ernest, 19, 248 Godwin, E. W., 194, 199 Frank Miles House, 197 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 104, 244 Glacier Park Lodge, 90 Gospel of Thomas, 106 Graves, Michael, Claghorn House, 40 gravity and architecture, 34, 44, 46, 55–56, 59, 111, 139, 226 Greene, Charles and Henry, 76, 213 Gamble House, 148 Gropius, Walter, 91 Hadid, Zaha, 237 details and, 7, 58 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, 231 Haeckel, Ernst, 234 Hertzberger, Herman 194, 246, 248 furniture of, 210, 225 polyvalence, 225 Herzog and de Meuron, Ricola Storage Building, 102 high tech, 38, 74, 103, 139, 152, 170 House 1, 6, 11–13, 42–57, 79, 81, 106, 122 abstraction in, 44, 46, 50, 51, 55–56 articulated details in, 53, 54, 57 circulation, 44, 46, 48 displaced thresholds, 46 Farish Street site, 10, 42, 44 steel beam and chimney detail, 53 structure, 46, 51, 50 window frame and coping detail, 52 House 2, 6, 15–17, 76–89, 96, 106 brick and steel wall detail, 84 glue-laminated beam detail, 85 material expression in, 79, 81–82, 87–88 material hybrid, 76 structure, 79 House 3, 6, 17–19, 118–37, 157–58, 161, 166

253

Index

roof shell details, wood vault, 132, 133, 134–35 structure, two frame types, 120, 122, 123 wood column and beams details, 130–31 wall and frame ambiguity, 128, 136 House 4, 6, 19–23, 152–69, 179, 200 joints in, 152, 157–58, 161–62, 165–66, 168 steel frame, 157–58, 161 steel to steel joints, 168 wood frame in, 161, 167 wood to wood joint, 160 House 5, 6, 23–27, 200–217, 219, 231 dining table details, 204 furniture in, 200, 204, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217 inglenook details, 207 railing details, 214 house in Lawrence, 37, 38, 39 house in Lawrence II, 68, 75 house in Maine, 33, 35 house in Maryland, 33, 35 House with Three Tables, 193–96, 210 hypostyle hall, 183, 109 inglenooks, 24, 165, 167, 194, 197, 199, 203, 206–207, 210, 211, 212, 215 Ise Shrine, 106, 244 Jakobson, Roman, 66, 243 Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 69, 244 Monticello, 9, 12, 42, 69 wood, on, 92 John Deere, tractors, 158 Johnson, Philip, details and, 7, 115, 242 joints. See also detail as joint articulated, 147–48, 161–62, 165 control joints, 145 hiding of, 145, 147, 162, 165 watch and tree model, 166, 179 Jones, Fay, 70 Kahn, Louis, 96, 99, 147, 216, 223, 246, 248 furniture of, 194, 210, 218 joints of, 115 Kimbell Art Museum, 162 Phillips Exeter Academy Library, 218 Richards Medical Research Building, 111 structure of, 107, 110, 139 Yale University Art Gallery, 111 Kansas regional architecture, 37 Kaplický, Jan, 58

Keeler, Charles, 17–19, 242, 248 Keeler House, 18 Kelly, Ellsworth, 158 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 65–66, 243 Faktura, 65 Zangezi, 65, 67 Koolhaas, Rem, 127, 242 details and, 7, 10, 58 Krauss, Rosalind, 124, 245, 249 Labrouste, Henri, 139, 218 Le Corbusier, 225, 242, 245, 298 Chandigarh, Secretariat Building, 225 details of, 7, 15, 58, 213 furniture of, 189–90, 192, 197, 226 log cabin, 91–92 Ronchamp, Notre Dame du Haut, 116, 248 Savoye, Villa, 87, 190, 192, 226 structure 115–16, 127 Toward an Architecture, 115–16, 245 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91, 244 libraries nature of, 218–19, 222 Oxford and Cambridge, 219 Lincoln Center, 110 literal elements, 34, 38, 41, 51, 55–56 literalism, 38, 41, 56, 91, 96, 225 log construction problems of, 92, 96 industrialized building, 92, 95 L’Orange, H. P., 183, 246 Lubetkin, Berthold, High Point Apartments, 225 Lynn, Greg, 138, 139, 237, 242, 245 details and, 7 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 111, 226, 245 Hill House, 197 materials and form. See also detail as motif elemental, 66, 68, 71, 76 engineered, 74, 76, 79, 81–82, 87–88, 96, 103–104 inner life of, 69, 88, 99, 104, 106, 158 new material technology, 102 romanticism, 32 sculptural, 17, 79, 81–82, 87–88, 99, 104, 107, 157, 225, 231 translation, 82, 87–88, 96, 103–104 Matteson Public Library competition, 218–29, 231

254

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furniture in, 219, 222–23, 225–26, 229 scale, 222–23, 225, 229 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 64–65, 69, 243 The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, 64 Maybeck, Bernard, 91, 242, 248, construction, and, 17–19 Keeler House, 18 Keeler, Charles and, 17–19 Roos House, 18 University of California, Berkeley Faculty Club, 16, 18 Mercer, Henry, Fonthill, 82, 83 Menocal, Narcisco, 232, 246 Michelangelo, 104 Laurentian Library, 219 Mondrian, Piet, 158 motif. See also detail as motif Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 116, 243 details of, 7 Esplanade Apartments, 115 Farnsworth House, 87 furniture of, 187, 223 Hubbe House, 33 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 115 Tugendhat Chair, 226 Mills, Enos, 90, 244 Longs Peak Inn, 90–91, 93 Muir, John, 170 Nakashima, George, 71, 82, 244, 248 architecture of, 71 Peace Altar, 71 Conoid Studio, 71, 72 Conoid Bench, 71, 72 nature pattern, 17, 70 neocolonial architecture, 10, 91–92, 127 Noyes, Eliot, Noyes House, 33–35, 36 oil embargo, 113 Old Faithful Inn, 90, 92, 96, 173 Panofsky, Erwin, 183, 246 Patmore, Coventry, 140 Percy, Walker, 242, 332 abstraction and, 30–31 The Moviegoer, 30–31 Perret, Auguste, details and, 7, 58 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 32 Piano, Renzo, 148 Pompidou Center, 148

Picon, Antoine, 138–39, 230, 245–46 place and alienation, 31–32, 44 ambivalence and, 30, 32, 35, 55, 61 Prouvé, Jean, 92, 128, 249 Val d’Oise, Youth Center, 128 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostôme, 87, 104, 244 Read, Herbert, 60, 243 regionalism architecture, and, 14, 32–33, 37, 118 literary regional ambivalence and, 31–32 reveal, 162, 165 Rice, Peter, 148, 231, 245 Richardson, H. H., 76, 249 furniture of, 189–90, 194, 197, 216, 219, 223, 226 Stonehurst (Robert Treat Paine House), 22, 23–24, 24, 197 Rietveld, Gerrit, 144, 213, 223 rigid frame, 79, 85, 97–99, 101 Rogers, Richard PA Technology Center, 74, 189 Pompidou Center, 148 Rohlfs, Charles, 151 RoTo Architects, master plan for Center for Art and Culture, Hefei, China, 103 Rowe, Colin, 91, 244 Roycroft community, 148 Rudolph, Paul, details and, 7 Ruskin, John, 20, 111, 182, 234, 242, 245–47 Piazza San Marco, 234 perfection, 20, 182 Russian constructivism, 65 Saarinen, Eero, 144, 249 Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 144, 148 Gateway Arch, 146 John Deere World Headquarters, 144, 149 Saarinen, Eliel, 70 Salter, Peter, 249 Inami Woodcarving Museum, 99 Sansovino, Jacopo, 234 Scarpa, Carlo, 115, 223, 226 Doge Table, 226 motifs of, 7 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 109, 111–12, 245 sculpture, Greek 112, 124, 129 Semper, Gottfried, 123, 242, 245

255

Index

material and, 15, 17 Shaw, Richard Norman, 199, 216, 249 furniture of, 187, 190, 191, 194, 197, 210, 212, 226 SIPs (structural insulated panels), 127–28, 133 Siza, Álvaro, 40 Smith, David, 245, 249 Tanktotem IX, 124, 126 Smith, Norris K., 9, 69, 242–43, 245 abstraction and, 29 furniture and, 185 hypostyle hall and, 183 joints and, 143, 166, 171 material and, 63, 69, 88 solitude and, 170 structure and, 109 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 249 Soriano, Raphael, 81 Southwell Chapter House, 81 Stickley, Gustav Craftsman Farms, 95–96 furniture of, 148, 151 structure cladding of. See cladding crustacean, 116, 123, 128, 133, 135, 136 exposure of, 113–17, 127, 158 representative structure, 17, 104, 114–15, 118, 133 skeleton and skin, 116, 135, 136 structural rationalism, 138–39, 230 structural representation. See detail as structural representation Sullivan, Louis, 232–34, 236, 246 concept of opposition, 233 Guaranty Building, 236 Home Building Association, 236 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 233 Tange, Kenzo, 106, 244 Taniguchi, Yoshio, 165 Museum of Modern Art addition, 165 Tatlin, Vladimir, 65, 68, 243, 248–49 Faktura, 65 Khlebnikov, Velimir and 66–67 materials and, 67–68 Zangezi, 65–67 Thoreau, Henry, 95, 170–71 cabin, 95 transcendentalism, 103, 232

trim, 12, 37–38, 40–41, 50, 52, 55, 145, 162, 165 tripod, 123–24, 125 structure and, 193 Van Eyck, Aldo, 194, 210 Venneri, Samuel, 182, 246 vernacular architecture, 12, 26, 32, 34, 37, 38, 91–92 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 139, 242 material and, 17, 73 Vitruvius, 82, 244 Wagner, Otto, 91, 187 structural exposure and, 133 weight and architecture, 11, 19, 26, 55–56, 61–60, 110–13, 116, 120, 124, 136 White, Stanford, 187 furniture of, 187, 190, 197, 210, 212, 223, 226 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 183, 246 Wordsworth, William, 170 Worringer, Wilhelm, 103, 216–17, 242, 243, 246–47, 234, 247 Abstraction and Empathy, 59, 60–61, 103 Wren, Christopher, Trinity College Library, 219 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 7, 11, 34, 63, 67, 107, 186–87, 189–91, 197, 213, 232–35, 242, 246, 249 Barnsdall House, 232 Dana House, 232 Fallingwater (Kaufman House), 9, 69, 82, 143 Francis Apartments 233, 235 In the Cause of Architecture, 103 S.C. Johnson Company Administration Building, 109, 183, Kentuck Knob (Hagen House), 212 Laura Gale House, 82 materials, 15, 17, 69, 103 “Meaning of Materials” articles, 70 motifs, 70, 103, 232, 234 Richard Lloyd Jones House, 11–12, 13, 14 Rosenbaum House 190, 191 Taliesin West, 13, 15, 249 Unity Temple, 232 Usonian houses, 68–70, 103, 190 Winkler-Goetsch House, 67, 68 zeitgeist. See digital age Zumthor, Peter, 213

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