Raising the Barn Linehouse transforms former opium factory
Julius Shulman: capturing modernism June/July 2017 | retroform.com
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Contents ON THE COVER: Julius Shulman's photograph of Case Study House #20, Altadena, California. THIS PHOTO: Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs photographed by Jake Holt
30 Raising the Barn Linehouse transforms 36 former opium factory Shulman: 44 Julius capturing modernism Ressurection of the 52 Rosenbaum House 15 The Rising Star
22 The Perfect Mix
18 The Design Archive
25 The Comeback Kid
Meet Linehouse & Charles De Lisle Watch Lists: Oki Sato Lego Innovation
Remembering Lucienne Day Zaha Hadid In Memoriam Back to the Beginning
Perrault updates Versailles Diamond in the Sky From Front to Back
Oscar Niemeyer rescues Rio Hotel Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill Storybook Odyssey
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THE
Rising Star
two of the best & brightest LINEHOUSE Linehouse is an architecture practice established in 2013. Alex Mok (Chinese-Swedish) and Briar Hickling (from New Zealand) have experience working in China, Asia and abroad, a rich cultural heritage and an understanding of cultural values from the West, the Pacific and Asia. Shanghai provides a rich historic and cultural context, and operates as a platform for Linehouse to investigate the rituals of inhabitation and how these daily moments can be celebrated through design, transforming the mundane into performative acts.
Each brief is approached individually, creating a poetic concept for each client through research, site context, history and responding to the client’s brief. Through the process of design, each project has a strong narrative and an element of whimsy and voyeurism, creating a unique spatial experience.
CHARLES DE LISLE Charles De Lisle is an upscale design firm based in Hayes Valley, San Francisco working in commercial and residential designs as well as handcrafted custom lighting and furniture. Pulling inspiration from bold pairings of the natural and manufactured world, Charles De Lisle’s design projects marry stellar workmanship with interesting textures and precision. The result is work that is as structurally impressive as it is avant garde. Born in Massachusetts into a design family—he is the son of a colonial reproductions manufacturer and the grandson of a machinist— Charles De Lisle grew up acquainted with the world of interiors. Later, he attended the Hartford Art School. De Lisle then made a post-graduation move to California where a stint welding and manufacturing light fixtures honed his craft.
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textile design
taking cues from the past ALL IN A DAY’S WORK celebrating the life of Lucienne Day The lifetime oeuvre of British textile designer Lucienne Day is celebrated in her centennial year. Lucienne Day, born in Surrey in 1917, was one of the leading lights of modern design in postwar England. Though she could easily have been mistaken for a 1950s homemaker, Lucienne was anything but. A groundbreaking textile designer, she created sunny yet sophisticated prints for the masses, becoming a household name in the process.
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June/July 2017
THE
Design Archive
Above Lucienne Day lounges with her dog in her personal garden. Below are examples of her bright, optimistic prints that were an antidote to the austerity of World War II and were widely embraced as a fresh alternative to traditional floral fabrics. Her breakthrough pattern was Calyx, a plant-inspired design shown at the Festival of Britain in 1951. A huge success, it led to a decades-long partnership with Heal Fabrics. But Day was prolific in other areas as well, including wallpaper, carpets, ceramics, and silk mosaics. Though sometimes referred to as the Eameses of the UK, Lucienne and her husband, furniture designer Robin Day, pursued separate careers and collaborated only a handful of times, notably on aircraft interiors for BOAC in the 1960s. Lucienne, who died in 2010, would have turned 100 on January 5, 2017. The centenary is being marked with a year of exhibitions and events in the UK that will reveal works and photos never seen before, bringing back into the public eye the remarkable accomplishments of this midcentury modern woman.
Textiles from left to right: Dandelion Clocks, Magnetic, Riga, & Calyx retroform.com
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interior architecture
finding that balance A LETTER FROM FRANCE: additions to Versailles When Daniel Burnham admonished architects to “make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” maybe he was thinking of Versailles. Louis XIV, the Sun King, had by 1682 done everything with his palace outside Paris that the Chicago planner advised in 1907: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.” Indeed, Louis XIV basically thought like Burnham, extending a core idea to its logical conclusion. From the inventive Baroque interiors to
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June/July 2017
THE
Perfect Mix
From top left, The Perrault Staircase leading to the Princes’ Courtyard. Visitors marvel at the newly updates reception hall. The museum’s new shop exists in a subterranean room below the reception hall. The Pavilion Dufour with a glimpse of the Perrault Staircase. landscape design and city planning, he presided over a project of great scope and seamless scale transitions, a project that was utopian in the sense that it projected and literally mapped the governmental model of the Sun King’s absolute power on the land. On the grounds behind the palace, where the king lived with his court, he built gardens within parks organized around vast reflecting basins that stretched to the horizon; out front, he organized a trident of avenues originating at the cour d’honneur and triangulating into the distance, commanding territory through a geometry of spreading control and radiance. It was through this geometry and radiance that the king controlled the country. As he said, he was the state itself. But he was also Versailles. From the beginning, Versailles was a composite design, a product of orchestrated collaboration over time. The architect Louis Le Vau famously wrapped the late-Renaissance hunting château of Louis XIV’s father in a vast Baroque envelope, the core building at the center of four wings. The landscape architect André Le Nôtre invented a garden at the scale of the landscape. The painter Charles Le Brun devised a complex program of interior design, creating a gesamtkunstwerk from furniture to frescos, culminating in the Hall of Mirrors, the palace’s living room where the court socialized under cascading crystal chandeliers and a fresco that rivaled any in. retroform.com
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interior architecture
Left, Perrault designed a round help desk made of simple black granite, mirroring the variety of stone hues on the opposite wall. Below, the modern ceiling fixtures can be seen through Versailles traditional style columns. Built as a total work of art, architecture, and planning, Versailles was nonetheless never considered untouchably complete. Some cultures, like the Moors in North Africa, demolished palaces with changes in dynasty. At the Louvre, successive kings just extended the palace they inherited, adding wings of their own, building on the work of their predecessors, retaining a sense of the whole. At Versailles, that tradition continued during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, who both added to the inherited architecture. The palace grew without losing a sense of the whole, the additions always in agreement with the existing structure even if the classical language of the Baroque shifted to Rococo and Neoclassicism. But Versailles was built as a palace for royalty, the aristocracy and functionaries of the state, not as a museum for 7.5 million yearly visitors, each a potential terrorist to be checked. In recent years, temporary structures set up to screen and process visitors occupied the Royal Courtyard, between the front wings. The welcome was hardly regal. What was needed was a proper yet unobtrusive welcoming center. Few substantial changes had been made to Versailles since Louis XVI’s additions—and certainly nothing modernist. Versailles needed a Pyramid, as at the Louvre, only without the pyramid. In 2011, Parisian architect Dominique Perrault, Hon. FAIA, won a closed competition to reconfigure administrative offices in the Neoclassical Pavillon Dufour and the attached Old Wing into a reception center. Perrault proceeded both cautiously and aggressively. “Culturally and scientifically, we talk about the ‘patrimonial substance’—the envelope, the façade, the fabric of the historical building,” says Perrault. “I wanted to introduce the present inside, while leaving the patrimonial substance outside intact.” For Perrault, the principal issue of the project was refashioning the entrance and the exit, and then adapting the upper two floors into a restaurant and café complex. The architect spent four years “designing and redesigning,” he said, in what proved an intricately complex, excruciatingly detailed commission where every square centimeter counted. Perrault is a minimalist, and he has often reduced the apparent footprint of a design by going underground, as he did in the early 1990s with the “sacred garden” he planted at the underground entrance level of the National Library in Paris along the Seine, the building that established his reputation.
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Story By: Marc Kristal Photos: Raimund Koch
Raising the Barn Architect Preston Scott Cohen resurrected an early 1800s barn as a vacation home for a literary couple and their family, calling to mind both the agrarian spaciousness of the structure’s former life and the vernacular of its new function as a house. Transcending both, Cohen created a piece of architecture that is at once porous and opaque, familiar yet otherworldly.
The Pine Plains, New York, home of Elise and Arnold Goodman boasts 48 windows, the largest of which measures 8’6’’ by 7’6’’. As architect Preston Scott Cohen explains, the “free facade makes it impossible to identify how
The skunks may be miserable on Skunks MiseryRoad, but from the look of things, the people are doing just fine. Land values have risen so high along this roadkill-dotted lane, which winds through Pine Plains, a hamlet two hours north of New York City, that the dairy farms that once flourished on the forested, hilly landscape have been converted into estates. The cows have mostly decamped, but the farmhouses and barns remain—suggesting that the affluent fauna now grazing among the mâche pits shares its predecessors’ architectural predilections. That is, until one turns at the Simon’s Farm mailbox, bumps a mile along a dirt road, and beholds the home of Arnold P. and Elise Simon Goodman. The design, by architect Preston Scott Cohen, takes the peaked-roof gable house—an object so familiar as to seem invisible—and, with a provocative mix of modernity and tradition, a sprinkling of the surreal,
many levels there are, or even to tell the difference between a door and a window.” From without, the windows reveal dramatic glimpses of the 18th-century barn farm and new steel structure that support the house.
and a massive explosion of scale, utterly upends our notions of home. “The house is not about a lot of little things,” declares Cohen, with an enunciative clarity that converts simple words like “moves”— “mewves”—into events. “It’s one big thing at all times.” The seed for Cohen’s architectural sequoia was his clients’ desire for a country retreat. “We wanted three things,” says Arnold, who is partnered with his wife in a Manhattan literary agency. “Privacy; a Catskill Mountains view; and a place to swim. But we could never find a house that suited us, so we decided to build.” The couple purchased a 164acre property, one of the last still-undivided parcels created from a 1706 British land grant. There was a spring-fed spot for a pond, and, after clearing 15 wooded acres west of their building site at the land’s high point, they got the biggest defoliation-related
surprise since Mikhail Gorbachev lost his hair: a view, not only of nearly the entire Catskill range, but an Arcadian tableau of valleys, forests, and fields in front of it. As for the dwelling itself, “we’d rented a barn once that had been converted into a house,” Elise says, “and we discovered how lovely it was to have high ceilings and wood beams.” The idea, Cohen recalls, was to “have a barn disassembled and restored, and reconstructed with a new envelope built around the frame.” The Goodmans were drawn to the traditional Dutch version, with its broad, nave-like central axis with aisles on either side, and massive H-shaped supports. In New York’s Mohawk Valley, the couple found a unique example: a barn dating from the early 1800s that, via the addition of a fifth bay (one more than usual), had a colossal 50-by-60 footprint and soared to a height of 37 feet. “Though the old siding was in typically passable condition,” says Cohen, “the frame was the best they’d seen.” The greatest challenge, however, was not finding the ideal property or the perfect barn. It
was engaging an architect who could provide that unquantifiable something Elise calls “a work of art.” And so, in a manner of speaking, she went to the source: the Museum of Modern Art’s library, where she discovered Cohen’s “breathtaking” Torus House, which had been featured in MoMA’s 1999 exhibition The Un-Private House. “[The Torus] scheme has an airy interior, largely a single open space, connected to the landscape,” Cohen explains. “It was quite similar to the Goodmans’ program.” For Cohen, the project was a chance to experiment with “transforming historical typologies to produce a new language.” Vernacular structures like barns, he observes, “establish conventions that are rooted in social practices we can understand. Contemporary architecture can elaborate on that, so that the new is brought into a dialogue that has collective values embedded in it.” In keeping with the Goodmans’ desire to retain the barn frame in “pristine form,” Cohen left the space largely open, locating the master suite, guest accommodations, offices, and baths
In a narrow residual area between the breezeway and the house’s northern elevation, Cohen created a so-called “skinny space,” with a changing area accessible to the outdoor shower. In keeping with the Goodmans’ desire for just enough subdivision for rooms to sleep and work in, Cohen inserted a two-story volume into one of the barn frame’s side aisles. An additional small mezzanine over the kitchen serves as a play area for the grandchildren.
“ It challenges conventions, draws you into a new experience, but relieves you of the expenditure of having to resolve everything.”
in a two-story volume tucked into a side aisle. Then he focused on the dialogue between past and present, producing several large gestures that, by reinterpreting elements of the barn, revivify the “collective values” common to domestic architecture. The first, says Cohen, involves “the irreducible image of a house—the gable form,” which has, through simplification and inflation, been converted into a nearly hyperreal expression of home. “To make the exterior more monolithic and provide a more astonishing contrast with the timbers behind it—a dialectic of the refined and rustic—the exterior is clad in tightly tailored, four-inch-wide cedar planks that look at moments like cast-in-place concrete,” he observes. “It adds to that peculiar overscaled character.” Inside, the contrast is indeed astonishing. Apart from the timbers’ monumental beauty, Cohen says, “their fascination derives from the return to the pure tectonic experience of architecture. The barn frame confronts one with it in the most profound way—and in a domestic setting, where it normally isn’t offered.” Excluding the partitions that traditionally stabilize a barn facilitated Cohen’s liveliest inspiration: an exposed, load-bearing steel frame that sits between the wooden beams and walls. The support establishes a pas de deux between pre-and post-industrial structure, in which the partners endlessly contrast and harmonize—sometimes separating, at other moments colliding with startling, kinetic beauty. Considering the sculptural starburst of wood and steel in the guest room, Elise wonders, “Why put any art on the wall?” By releasing the building’s skin from its structural support function, the steel frame also enabled Cohen’s anarchic, Dalíesque scramble of 48 windows, which reinforces the drollery of the house’s scale. “It’s a free facade,” he explains. “And we’ve displayed it by having the windows wander off out of sync with the barn’s bays.” In fact, there’s a method to the madness: “They’re determined by views and relationships to furnishings, and have geometric connections with one another,” Cohen says. But in a wry inversion of the pleasures of looking out, he adds, “they also frame views of what’s inside—they capture certain intersections of timber and steel.” Perhaps the architect’s richest gesture is the ten-foot-square breezeway—running the structure’s full width and open at both ends—that forms the
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Rather than concealing the barn frame in the private rooms, Cohen created an interplay between modern and historic elements in the master bathroom. The beams are very visible over the bathtub. June/July 2017
main entrance. This was, the Goodmans joke, the only piece of “architecture” they would permit. Indeed, its mention sends Cohen into an enthusiastic fit that borders on the zany. “That was the thing that mattered most to me!” he yells. “That moment when you’re poised in the interval of the threshold—this extends that interval through the whole house. The breezeway invites you not just to enter, but to explore the experience of entering.” Because the space’s windows fold from floor to wall and wall to ceiling, opening 360-degree views of the interior, one is surrounded by the house’s pleasures before going through the front door. The experience is further enriched by the breezeway’s function as an interior porch, directly on axis with Round Top Mountain, one of the Catskills’ tallest peaks. Best of all, it can be enjoyed year-round: Cohen designed outsize roll-up glass and screen doors, which drop
like theatrical flats and keep out the cold in winter and bugs during the summer. The outcome is an architecture that unites Cohen’s theoretical rigor, instinct for the sensuous, and sheer creative exuberance. It’s also remarkably in sync with its occupants, who seem like typologically correct Upper West Siders of a certain age until, of course, you come to recognize their unexpected iconoclasm, appetite for risk, and good humor. “The house is a great source of pleasure,” Elise affirms. “Can you imagine having this in your life?” Cohen, pointing to the design’s use of space, replies, “Why not? The persistence of those gigantic things creates great effects at many scales. It challenges conventions, draws you into a new experience, but relieves you of the expenditure of having to resolve everything,” he says. “That’s part of what makes it a modern house. And I like that.” retroform.com
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transforms former pium factory for WeWork
Words: eleanor gibson
Line house
“ Linehouse celebrated the grandeur of the building, encapsulating the feeling of a grand hotel, transporting guests and members on an unexpected journey of whimsy, voyeurism and festivity.”
photos by: Jonathan Leijon-Hufvud
When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation–most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate. In the last fifteen years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the
construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits. Fabrications, an ambitious, three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents twelve installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the twelve projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide,
lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely. But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display? Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed the site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be
A green staircase weaves through the circulation space, joining the triple height space, the bathroom walls are lined with custom-printed tiles, while the ceiling is painted a dusty pink, & detail of the pastel colored patterned terrazzo in the atrium area. relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other
“ a play with the in-between zone of the old and new.”
materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends. Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum. The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials. Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel. The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner
Colors alternate as one travels up the stairs, creating a gradient of tones from wood to blue; a tropical retro-themed pantry with a fan-shaped neon lighting that adorns the bar; the atrium is encased by the heritage facade. Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture. Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action,
Passing through the central atrium space to the back bar located within the heritage building, one is transported to a tropical retro oriental parlor. A gold gradient wallpaper wraps the perimeter by Hodgetts and Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop. Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests. At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t
wall, with hand painted Shanghai ladies, clothed in zebra attire and adorned in gangster bling, their era blurred between the 1920’s and the present day. The pantry is framed by blue and pink neon fans.
tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined. It is the four installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street. Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors
in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play. The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in museum galleries. With The Body in Repose, Kuth Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tattooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery
“ Linehouse played with the narrative of old and new in the design, and in doing so embraced a lot of existing elements of the building.”
where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority–you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space–other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane. To the extent that Fabrications can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad
range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, Fabrications promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal–and stretch–itself.
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J U
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Julius Shulman is widely regarded as the most important architectural photographer in history. Over a seventy year career Shulman not only documented the work of many of the great architects of the 20th century, but he elevated the genre of commercial aarchitectural photography to a fine art form.
By: Craig Krull
Above: Town and Desert Hotel, (Palm Springs, CA), 1947 Right: Stostenberg House, (Malibu, CA), 1962
E
veryone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention
“a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy. In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends. This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost
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Above: Shulman House, (Los Angeles, CA), 1950 Below: Jackman Industrial Buildings (El Cajon, California), 1959
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Grossman House, (Los Angeles, CA), 1962 for Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company
Above: Mirman House, (Arcadia, CA), 1959
of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?” The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement as defined by Mor-
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ris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as ready-made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined. On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials. Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect de-
signed some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but the architects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age. Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to non-load-bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night. More in keeping with Mies’s courtyard houses, the M House by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separated from its residential street by a wall of perforated metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a two-story central courtyard that is
sunk, along with the dining, work, and living areas, below ground level. This courtyard and two other light courts are open to the sky, so that in passing through them, one is exposed to the weather as in a traditional Japanese house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and down, run between the light courts in a configuration that limits privacy within the house — although the streetscape is effectively screened out. Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen. Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind
which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxed-off and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the top-floor architecture galleries.) Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy. But even some of the houses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books as well as a reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a three-story wall of bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream.
Miller House, (Palm Springs, CA), 1937
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