Behind the Drywall

behind the drywall: intimate stories about architecture

behind the drywall: intimate stories about architecture

as compiled by anna kocherovsky dai 325 spring 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Anna Kocherovsky. All right reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means- -electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise--without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

Published by Copymat DigiBranch 191 Battery Street San Francisco, CA 94111-4902 copymat@copymat3.com Phone: 415-981-1300 • Fax: 415-981-1311 International Standard Book Number: xxx-x-xxxxxxx-x-x Printed in the United States of America

Meaning Behind Design was designed by the miss Anna Kocherovsky for the Graphic Design 1 class in the spring of 2011 to lay out a series of architectural essays in an exemplary way.

1 copy was produced using ‘Helvetica Neue Light,’ and ‘Val,’ typefaces.

This is copy number 1 of 1.

Dedicated to all that had supported me: DAI Colleagues & Professors, friends & family.

contents _1 // what we talk about when we talk about architecture // 006_ _2 // if these walls could talk // 012_ _3 // what am i doing here? tall buildings and high anxiety in las vegas // 018_ _4 // love and architecture // 028_ _5 // people in glass apartments // 036_ _5 // underground mainstream // 040_ _7 // what passes for beauty: a death in texas // 046_ _8 // site, ascendant // 054_ _9 // the productive surface // 062_ _10 // spacial intelligence: new futures for architecture // 072_ _11 // paper architecture, emerging urbanism // 080_ _12 // tahrir square: social media, public space // 088_ _13 // whats cooking in kitchen design? // 096_

1 W hat We Talk A bo ut W hen We Talk A bo ut

Arch itec ture

M I CHA E L bei r ut

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The most popular show on American non-commercial radio is “Car Talk.”

The most popular show on American noncommercial radio is “Car Talk.” For an hour, two auto mechanic brothers from Boston ostensibly do just that: they talk about cars.

People call in and describe automotive problems, and Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer suggestions on how their cars might be fixed. What makes the show so listenable, even to people like me who don’t know or care that much about cars, is the fact that the show isn’t really about cars, it’s about life. A simple question about an alternator

digresses quickly into a discussion of psychology, economics or geography; the Magliozzis function as marriage counselors, career advisors and therapists just as often as car mechanics.

Listening to “Car Talk” got me thinking about the pleasures of truly discursive discourse.

Does it occur often enough in the world of design? And when it does happen, who gets to hear it? Which brings me to the Yale University School of Architecture.

I have been involved with Yale Architecture’s promotions and publications program

sinceRobert A. M. Stern came aboard as Dean in 1998. Stern takes his school’s publications seriously because he knows their power first hand: in the sixties, as a student editor of Yale’s architecture journal Perspecta, he was the first to print Robert Venturi’s seminal manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture.

Perpecta, which is published to this day, has a counterpart called Retrospecta, the school’s annual review of student work.

Retrospecta is edited by students from the School of Architecture and designed by

students from the graphic design program in the School of Art. The designers and editors are different every year; I serve as advisor and “continuity director” for the project. Most of the space of the book is taken up by reproductions of student projects and brief descriptions of the assignments that inspired them.

A critical part of the design school experience is the critique, where student work is reviewed by faculty and outside assessors. Previous issues of Retrospecta have included quotes from the visiting critics, sometimes simply to punctuate the layout typographically. In the

latest issue, however, the editors (Jason Van Nest, Yen-Rong Chen and Mathew Ford) and the designers (Willy Wong and Yoon-Seok Yoo) have brought the transcripts of the review sessions front and center. Much of what passes for architectural writing, particularly in academia, is turgid and stilted. In contrast, “the diverse arguments, critiques, and provocations” faithfully recorded here are compulsively readable.

This drama inherent in the design critique has not escaped notice. In fact, Oren Safdie (an

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architect-turned-playwright and son of the legendary architect Moshe Safdie) used it for the setting of last year’s off-off-Broadway play “Private Jokes, Public Places,” in which a young architecture student defends a thesis project against two increasingly combative professors; the New York Times praised its “verbal acrobatics.” And there are acrobatics of sorts to be had in the pages of Retrospecta, where the cast of characters include Peter Eisenman, Leon Krier, Charles Jencks, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Lise Anne Couture, Greg Lynn and Rafael Vinoly.

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What I find interesting is that when the conversation is lively enough, just as in “Car Talk,” I don’t need to understand much about architecture or even the specifics of the problem at hand; I can just enjoy the give and take.

Some examples:

Jeffrey Kipnis: Where did this public and private thing come from? Did they assign you to think about public and private? Or did you just assume it was a natural way to think about ti? I have seen it all day long. When I think about the Schindler House and I look at the plan, it is labeled in terms of “his” spaces and “her” spaces, not public and private. Zaha Hadid: It is definitely not part of our repertoire.

Kipnis: I didn’t think it was.

Hadid: I think it is a Yalie repertoire.

Charles Jencks: Yes, it was [Louis] Kahn who...

Kipnis: And he’s dead, right? I asked Nathaniel [Kahn] and he was pretty sure. I lot of the things you take for granted stop you from making more objective use of your research and that is where you should pause, as soon as you think something too quickly.

Kenneth Frampton: ...I could tell you to cut six more slots into this thing, and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s a negative critique of the project, but it’s also a critique of the whole god damn situation. You have to have a principle, otherwise you can not communicate anything to anybody. Why should I invest my money in this, as opposed to some other project? You have to have a reason; otherwise the architects don’t even talk to the society. Don’t you see that predicament? These computer renderings produce aesthetic effects very well, seamless, very seductive, but they are not about anything.

They are delusions! They are mirages! I’m sorry, it’s very aggressive to say this, but aren’t we going to start talking? It’s just ridiculous to say, “Ok -- individual interpretations,” “So on and so forth.” One has to talk about something fundamental, otherwise we’re never going to talk about anything anymore.

Demitri Porphyrios: I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

KF: I’m talking about the fact that there is a total degeneration...

DP: Do you want some coffee?

KF: No, I don’t. Sorry, I don’t...

DP: Look, look, look. This is a disgusting situation. It’s not right to get upset...

KF: It’s something to get upset about. We always have polite discussions; we have to sometimes get upset, because otherwise we just don’t talk about the things that matter.

Jorge Hernandez: I think this jury, this studio project, brings up this whole question of “history and modernity” and the confidence, or lack of confidence that this age has in its own capacity. There is uncertainty whether one believes in the capacity of this age to build like it intended to build. These are questions the architects have to ask about their own moment of working...That’s what it is, and yet, the building gesture is not confident in its own epoch, it fiddles around with the past epoch, and doesn’t assert its epoch. It is a manifestation of a lack of confidence in its own epoch. It’s using the syntax of the epoch, but doesn’t want to build at the full capacity of the epoch.

Peter Eisenman: Is that a historicist argument?

Hernandez: Why not, why not?

PE: Is that what your argument is, Jorge, the spirit of the age?

JH: The problem is this, when society loses confidence in its own capacity to build, it gets completely confused.

Robert A.M. Stern: It’s not the spirit of the age argument. Kenneth [Frampton] was saying that the Victorians had a total confidence in their own time, they weren’t trying to reflect the time, in the Gideon historicist way. The just had an assignment, they had a problem, and then went out at it full-bore. They used iron

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13 and glass and they made it in old forms or new forms - whatever they thought was right. They just did it.

And, finally, this comment on an Advanced Studio project: Rafael Vinoly: I think it’s great! [Long pause.] You know, one always feels obliged to say something past this point, so I hesitate to go on.

However, I must say...

Needless to say, Mr. Vinoly goes on. You may hear echoes here, as I did, of dialogue by David Mamet, Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard and even (I’ll go on) Harold Pinter. But unlike the work of playwrights, these are the kind of conversations that are almost always unrecorded and forgotten. There is real value to have them set down for the record. How many other spirited critiques - some even about graphic design, perhaps - have been lost?

Once I told a radio producer I know about my milliondollar idea: “Car Talk,” except for design. A few quickwitted experts could take calls from people seeking advice on typefaces and color choice, directional signs and ballot layout, while the rest of us listened in to the supremely diverting proceedings. With a sigh, she said everyone had this idea: Car Talk for Opera, Car Talk for Grammar, Car Talk for Macrame, Car Talk for...well, you fill in the blank. But that was before I had my pilot episode. I’m sending her a copy of Yale Retrospecta: Car Talk for Architecture!

The phone lines are open.

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2 if the se wal ls

cou ld t alk

ale x and r a lange

15

The living room has long been the basic set of the American sitcom, from I Love Lucy to Everybody Loves Raymond.

Most of them are unmemorable, transitional spaces; every front door seems to open directly onto a generic sofa. Many of them are all but repeated from show to show (quick: what’s the difference between the living rooms on Raymond andKing of Queens?). They’re invariably decorated in a neutral palette, acting as a quiet, passive backdrop to the action.

ABC’s hit sitcom Modern Family, which recently won the Emmy award for outstanding comedy series, is different: the living rooms are active parts of the storyline, reflecting and counterpointing and interrupting their inhabitants — and in doing so, eloquently commenting on today’s domestic condition.

The show, produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, is about three intertwined families living in the Los Angeles suburbs.

We meet them in the pilot, each in a moment of stress, with no mention of how they are

connected. The Dunphys, a husband and wife with three children, are at home, arguing over the length of their teenage daughter’s skirt and how to get their son’s head out of the banister (baby oil). The Pritchetts are at a soccer game, where Jay, played by Ed O’Neill, is mistaken for the father of his wife, Gloria, played by Sofia Vergara. The Pritchett-Tuckers, a gay couple, are on an airplane, headed back from Vietnam with their new baby, Lily. Their differences are underlined by crisis, but I could have understood their respective characters with mute on, just by looking at their living rooms.

The show’s producers realized early on that home design is a language that more and more of us speak. We know how to read interior details to find insight into the characters.

The most conventional of the three houses is inhabited by Phil and Claire Dunphy and their kids, the most traditional of the three families: neatly appointed with all the latest suburban luxuries, it’s become a topic of envious conversation among fans online.

“Their style is very comfortable, upper middleclass, Pottery Barn chic,” said Richard Berg, the show’s production designer. “We wanted

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people to be able to look at that house and have it be instantly familiar. A lot of the pieces are bought in stores at the mall,” including Restoration Hardware and Crate & Barrel.

They have a transitional roll-arm sofa, squashy and parked in front of a fireplace topped by a flat-screen TV. Their staircase (which has developed into a character in itself) is lined with family photos. The color scheme is beige and blues. Claire is the only character who ever seems to cook.

room acts as a foil to their arch personality quirks. The good-looking heterosexual married couple is the weirdest of the “Modern Family” bunch: Julie Bowen, who plays Claire, spoofs her natural niceness by being terribly awkward, covering up a wild past, while Ty Burrell, who plays Phil, is a parody of the modern, desperate-to-stay-relevant dad, speaking in text-ese. Their look and their decor match, but what comes out of their mouths points in the opposite direction.

Such details are important, because the Dunphys’ perfect, and perfectly normal, living

Meanwhile, Claire’s father, Jay Pritchett, is married to Gloria, his second wife and a

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glorious caricature (and in on the joke) of a Colombian hottie. They live in a house that could only be purchased by a man who has already passed once through the halls of domesticity: everything is steely modern, with a glassy kitchen and lots of leather.

But as the first season wore on, Berg and his team slowly began adding more of Gloria, to underline her growing control over her new family: a lamp with a zebra shade, red accent walls, a string of chili pepper lights in the kitchen. Just as a second marriage brings a shift in relationships, it also brings a shift in décor.

None of this is ever explained by the characters — it’s up to the viewers to catch it. The show’s success hints strongly that most of them do.

The most urbane house of the three is the first-floor, Mediterranean-style condominium of the PritchettTuckers: Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and baby Lily (usually hidden within — what else? — a Graco Snugride). If Phil and Claire are Pottery Barn, Mitch and Cam are Jonathan Adler, the epitome of upscale, neomodern gay décor. Their stuff doesn’t come from the mall, but from specialty shops around Los Angeles like 20th, Blueprint, Diva and Modern Living. On their walls are artifacts meant to have been collected on their pre-fatherhood travels: African metalwork, abstract paintings and, above the fireplace, a black-and-white photograph of Mitch and Cam. “The selfexpression is Cam, the reserved color tone is Mitchell,” Berg said.

Also all Cam is the bubblegum-pink baby’s room, where Mitchell is shocked to find that his husband has installed a Sistine Chapelinspired mural of Lily’s two dads above the crib. It is truly horrifying, a lapse in taste out of keeping with all their Celadon and silver. Again,Modern Family uses décor to wordlessly yet clearly make a point: children will make you do crazy things to your once-perfect house, on sitcoms as in real life.

The mural is just the most egregious example of the way Modern Family has made its three homes part of the story. Luke Dunphy (Nolan Gould) gets his head stuck in the banister. Jay

kills stepson Manny’s (Rico Rodriguez) turtle while trying to hang a picture. Phil trips (over and over) on the very step Claire has been nagging him to fix. And there is a hilarious episode, “Not in My Home,” involving a dog butler and lots of pratfalls from Gloria. It is a sitcom, so such incidents are par for the comic course, but the integral role played by the homes and their interiors bring new energy to a stale form.

It may be no coincidence that Modern Family won the outstanding comedy Emmy on the same night that Mad Men won for outstanding drama. Mad Men has driven an unprecedented viewer interest in retro design and fashion, and Modern Family seems to be following the same path in a contemporary mode. If anything, Modern Family engages even more intricately with its sets; it’s not just clever backdrop, as in Mad Men, but an active set that characters interact with, carry on relationships with, and use to communicate with each other — just like all those modern families off screen.

Sitting on their respective sofas, being interviewed by the documentary crew that is the series’ minimal framing device, the three families in Modern Family reveal themselves, as if they were in a therapy session. Though it’s been used before, it’s an effective narrative device. But in Modern Family, the people aren’t necessarily telling us anything we don’t already know from the throw pillows. ❚

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3 what am i do in g he re ? tall buil ding s an d hig h an xi ety in

in l as v egas

mar k lamste r

21

A weakness of much architectural criticism is that it is, by nature and necessity, formalist.

A critic looks at a work in its opening week — if not before — forms an opinion on its aesthetics and takes a guess as to how it will function. There is utility to this practice: we all want to hear about the next new thing, and we want to hear about it right now. But it’s also deceptive; so many of architecture’s qualities reveal themselves over time and through prolonged experience. Visiting a place is vastly different from living in a place. Our perceptions

of something new will gradually change as we learn to live with it, as we see how it operates and as our behavior changes along with it. The departed World Trade Center, if nothing else, serves as an indelible reminder of just how vastly our ideas about buildings evolve over time.

A few weeks ago I spent three days in a new entertainment complex, CityCenter, in Las Vegas. What follows here is not a traditional review, but a diary of my experience in that time. While I won’t pretend that this offers some kind of corrective to the problem

described above, it did at least allow for a certain immersion in the project, and along similar lines to what a typical guest might experience. It should be noted that my stay was financed by CityCenter. This is how a good deal of architectural coverage is paid for in these straitened times. Few publications have the resources to send critics around the globe, and the number is ever diminishing.

Before we begin in earnest, here’s the tale of the tape: CityCenter, as its name implies, is a downtown unto itself: 67 acres, 3 miles in circumference, more than 6,000 hotel rooms

serviced by 12,000 employees. It cost upward of $8 billion to build. The place has generated its share of controversies, about which you can read elsewhere. It is wedged into a plot along the Las Vegas Strip between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo, to which it is connected by a private monorail — all three properties are owned by MGM Mirage. CityCenter was master-planned by Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut, and Kuhn, and has four hotels designed by name-brand architectural practices (Cesar Pelli, Rafael Vinoly, Norman Foster,KPF), a pair of condo towers (by Murphy/Jahn), and a full-blown work of starchitecture (a shopping

mall by Daniel Libeskind). Its conceits are several: It is the first and only “green” complex on the Strip. It is a diversified entertainment complex in which gambling will not be the primary revenue source. It is relentlessly and unapologetically modern.

Okay, Here we go.

DAY 1 3:30p Picked up at McCarron airport by one of CityCenter’s stretch limousines. It is silver and

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powered by natural gas. Can there be such a thing as a “green” fleet of stretch limos?

Welcome to Las Vegas.

4:15p Arrive at CityCenter. First impression: the statistics attesting to its scale hardly do it justice. It makes New York’s TimeWarner Center look like a suburban strip mall. It appears cool and efficient and expensive — the same ambiance as TimeWarner. It takes the danger and seaminess out of Las Vegas and replaces it with name-brand corporate opulence. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

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I’d like to experience a little of the honky-tonk that makes Vegas Vegas, but I’m glad to have an austere room with impeccable fittings — no cheesy faux design here. The Aria hotel (Cesar Pelli) is pristine, and the view from the thirty-fourth floor extends beyond some pretty unimpressive competition. (I’m looking at you, Planet Hollywood.)

4:30p As for honky-tonk: it’s right across the street. Tattoo parlors. Discount marts. Off-brand fast-food joints.

But it’s hard to get to them. CityCenter is an anodized-aluminum Oz sheathed in reflective glass, a place apart from a city as fragmented as Daniel Libeskind’s architecture. There is literally no way to cross the street at grade. Forget being a pedestrian here.

4:45p One has to walk outdoors to travel between the buildings within CityCenter. This was a strategy imposed on the architects to foster a sense of urbanity and to keep the place from feeling hermetic, but it’s less than ideal on this (rare) rainy day, and I suspect it will be especially unpleasant in August, when it’s 125 degrees in the shade.

5:30p A note on Las Vegas nomenclature: It’s gaming, not gambling. Gambling is a foolish activity that can only end in tears. Gaming is harmless entertainment. Please keep them straight.

9p Survived “Viva Elvis® by Cirque de Soleil™,” billed as “a harmonious fusion of dance, acrobatics, and live music.” It is not harmonious. It is an assault on the senses.

Feel slightly guilty that I had my fingers jammed in my ears for the entire show with one of CityCenter’s PR reps sitting next to me.

11p One suspects that occupancy rates are low, but the casino floor is jumping on a school night.

There’s a rumor circulating, almost certainly apocryphal, that a Japanese businessman has

dropped $89 million in the casino. Meanwhile, a fellow journalist and former professional gambler has taken the place for $250. In a most unlikely turn of events, I actually feel sympathy for a casino.

11:30p Hmm. The taps in my sinks (you get two in each room) are coughing like the fish fountain in Tati’s Mon Oncle. All electronics in the room are digital interfaces, a system that’s a bit too sophisticated for its own good. Did I just set my alarm for 7:30? Not sure.

DAY 2 7:30a Alarm works.

8a Alas, breakfast with an old college roommate is off. He’s a recent transplant to Vegas from Buffalo, but out of town on business. I’m interested in his experience of these two places on opposite ends of the American urban spectrum, one a frigid industrial city with its best years behind it, the other a rapidly expanding desert metropolis built on an economy of dreams.

9a Managed to cross the Strip via pedestrian bridge to get the wide view of the complex.

CityCenter is what you might call PostMetaphor Las Vegas. Cosmetically, its buildings are not simulacra of buildings from other places and times — Rome, Paris, New York, Venice, Medieval England. Nor does it seem like “Sin City.” It’s not seedy. It’s more khaki pants than sharkskin suit. Which begs this question, at least for me: What’s the point of CityCenter if it’s just an upscale

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25 development in a mid-size American city, six hours from New York?

9:15a How big is CityCenter? The Harmon, at 25 stories, is the “boutique” hotel on the lot.

And it was planned to be considerably taller.

Differentiating between the hotels — the Aria, the Vdara, the Mandarin Oriental — is difficult. They all look vaguely similar (towers of reflective glass), with vaguely similar amenities.

9:45a Building heights on the Strip are determined by the “cone of approach” air corridor to nearby McCarron Airport. This is the opposite of zoning in most cities, where building heights are stepped back from the ground up. In Vegas, it happens from above. A bit of investigation reveals this to be a fairly contentious legal issue. Does the airport’s appropriation of aerial space constitute an unconstitutional taking of property rights? Let’s leave that to the lawyers, and our friends at Bldgblog.

10a Principal architect Francisco Gonzalez leads a tour of Murphy/Jahn’s Veer Towers. They lean at 5 degrees, hence the name. Actually, it’s not a tour: the buildings are not yet open. A few journalists and the PR team mill around on the access road in front of the buildings, which are easily the best things about CityCenter.

They are at once robust and delicate. There’s no reflective glass. This is unheard of in Vegas, and was a major concession won by Gonzalez. Staggered panels of clear and fritted yellow glass animate the facades and give the complex a welcome shot of color. Horizontal louvers (Gonzalez calls them “fins”) give shade from the desert sun. Most of the condo units

are sold. Whether anyone will actually use them or if they’re simply investment properties is another question.

11a After the tour, Gonzalez and I take a walk around Crystals, Libeskind’s shopping mall, which is adjacent to the Veer Towers and shares some of their support structure. Gonzalez wears a leather coat and has a disarming Spanish accent that belies a bulldog personality. “I was hated here but I got everything I wanted. I don’t think Libeskind pushed hard enough. He got a mall. I think he was happy with that. I came in with my crazy English and I pushed very hard.”

I have a difficult time believing anyone hated him. He is sincere, free of pretense, sharp. A reflection of his work. Libeskind, clearly, was impressed. The two are collaborating on a major development project in East Asia.

11:45a Planet Hollywood Las Vegas: World’s ugliest building? Discuss amongst yourselves.

11:55a With the exception of a branded Assouline shop in Crystals, there is no bookstore on the strip. There was a Borders at the Mandalay Bay, but it closed. Also, the fountains at the Bellagio don’t start until 3 PM. Learned that the hard way.

12:30p Lunch at American Fish, chef Michael Mina’s seafood restaurant at Aria. Fine dining is structured as a major component of CityCenter’s appeal, and there are restaurants helmed by star chefs studded throughout the complex. The food at this one is especially good, and I don’t even like seafood. The décor? Comfortable. Every restaurant here

looks essentially the same, in a contemporary but impersonal way. The servers are uniformly excellent, as if they’ve somehow internalized Danny Meyer’s philosophy of hospitality. Which begs a question. Are the servers outside of New York naturally nice? Does New York so jade its inhabitants that even our servers require a remedial course in professional behavior?

1:30p Tour of Crystals, CityCenter’s signature work of starchitecture. A Libeskind minion tries his best to retroactively justify Libeskind’s idiosyncratic architectural language. “It’s a vortex drawing energy off the strip.” “It’s a lifelike spiral.”

“Rocks.” “Fractals.” Please stop. Does it matter, anyway? From the outside, it’s dramatic and shiny. Inside, it’s a bit disappointing. The folds and cuts so prominent on the exterior suggest intriguing, Piranesian spaces, but upon entering one finds a fairly straightforward mall with some wonky ceilings and skylights.

Shadows are projected on blank walls where you’d think the skylights would throw their own patterns. This seems like a failing. If you need projections to create visual drama, why all the structural gymnastics? Materially rich and visually sumptuous installations by David Rockwell — a teak stairwell, a blobby wooden catwalk — clash uncomfortably with Libeskind’s angular white-walled avant-gardism.

Sculptures by WET, the firm behind the Bellagio fountains, are underwhelming, though still works-in-progress.

2:30p Despite its flaws, it’s hard not to be won over by Crystals. It does have its dramatic moments, especially from the outside. It makes, at least

by Vegas standards, considerable effort to engage its neighbors and the street. I’ve heard it said that its entire purpose is to occupy the

wives of high-stakes gamblers, but this doesn’t seem especially fair. With his silly glasses and funny accent, Libeskind has made something of a cartoon of himself, which is a shame. As Lebbeus Woods recently noted, Libeskind’s experimental “Machines” of the 1980s are beautiful and complex metaphorical works that still have the power to inspire. I wish he’d look back at that work and quit it with the “spirals” and “vortexes” and “fractals.”

3p Is there public space in Las Vegas without piped-in music?

5p The absurdity of CityCenter’s urban gesture of separating its buildings now becomes apparent. The PR team has arranged for SUVs to take journalists from the Aria to the Mandarin Oriental for a cocktail party. The buildings are maybe 150 feet from each other.

5:30p The lobby of the Mandarin Oriental smells like fancy soap, and the Sky Bar has panoramic views. But I start to feel claustrophobic and duck out of the event. For a certain type of person, Vegas is a non-stop party. For me, it induces a kind of persistent low-grade anxiety.

There’s something dystopic about the place generally, and CityCenter is starting to feel like the world of Blade Runner come to life. I head back to my room, shut the black-out curtains and lie in bed. More people commit suicide in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States.

7:30p I like Karim Rashid. He has the courage of his convictions, even if I don’t share them, and he’s unafraid to appear slightly ridiculous

27 in public. That said, Silk Road, his restaurant at the Vdara, is not a success, even on his terms. The blobby sofas in its bar area are uncomfortable and the decorative wave patterns on its walls looks like they were pulled from the lobby of a Marriott.

9:45p Dinner at Silk Road has now entered its third hour, despite a paucity of customers. The mind wanders. Is the word vdara Spanish for “banal architectural experience”? Alas, no. It is the invention of the CityCenter marketing team, and has no meaning. Lesson learned.

With due respect to Robert Venturi, Las Vegas is no longer a good place to look for meaning.

10p While we’re at it, the Silk Road isn’t a focused enough theme for a coherent menu. It’s too weak a thread to unite the cuisines of China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean. And because this is Vegas, the restaurant also has to double as a steak house — the Silk Road by way of Nebraska? — which makes no sense but says something about the clientele. The result: generic restaurant food.

10:45 PM: After dinner, journalists are invited to Eva Longoria Parker’s nightclub, Eve, in Crystals. I pass by on the way to the Bellagio fountains. Eva Longoria Parker is not in attendance. The women pretty much all wear sequined tube dresses hiked to mid-thigh. The men look unkempt. Not really my scene.

11:15p Am I the only person not entranced by the Bellagio fountains? They’re visually impressive and a technological feat, fine, but it’s hard for me to enjoy anything accompanied by the schlocky music of Elton John.

DAY 3 9:00a Along the long corridor leading to the convention hall, the entire Aria staff has lined up to cheer attendees of a large luxury travel conference, a much coveted “get” for the fledgling hotel. The media center is on the path, so I get the treatment. It’s nice to wake up to a standing ovation, but it feels silly and contrived.

9:15a A tour of Aria with a pair of enthusiastic architects from Pelli’s New Haven office.

Working hundred-hour weeks for several years running, they managed to design Aria, all 8 million square feet of it, without opening an office in Las Vegas. Can’t blame them.

9:20a The enormous semicircular glass canopy that fronts the Aria is a bravura work of structural design, one of the highlights of the complex.

9:30a Ditch the tour to head out to the Strip so I can buy a souvenir for my daughter. (A small stuffed animal in the Aria gift shop goes for $68.) Walk down to the vNew York New York complex, which has an air of squalid desperation.

DAY 4 How it will survive with CityCenter and other new developments competing for business is beyond me. A friend quips that the only way they could fill the place is “if they reenact 9/11 every morning.” No comment.

9:45a Worth noting that the fake New York has a dummy Whitney Museum (albeit with a crass theater marquee in place of Breuer’s bridge/ awning assembly). I love the Whitney, but it’s odd that they’ve chosen it instead of the more famous Guggenheim facade. Did the Guggenheim’s aggressive legal team have something to do with this? I’ll bet.

12:45p My stay is over. Another “sustainable” limo ride to the airport. The environmentally attuned strech limo is the operative metaphor for CityCenter.

10:30p Back in New York, on the BQE, the city skyline visible on the horizon through the window of a Town Car. Lights are lights. But somehow these seem anchored, real, solid. The Vegas anomie finally begins to wane.

7:00p Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs.

Why, then, does it feel so much more honest?

Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable?

Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent? Are my insecurities the problem?

Maybe a bit of artifice is what I need to survive; the make-up that makes the model appealing.

Anyway, the punch is good. Time for another round. ❚

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4 lo ve &

Arch itec ture

ale x and r a lange

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When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York times, recently divorced, and on a trip to Detroit to meet the young architect whose General Motors Technical Center had proved to be such a smashing success. She was to write a profile of Saarinen for the New York Times Magazine, eventually published on April 23 as “Now Saarinen the Son” with the byline Aline B. Louchheim. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.

Aline was first swept off her feet by the buildings, 25 of them spread out over 320 acres around a huge rectangular pool.

The long sides of the three-story buildings housing Engineering and Research, Service, Process Development and Styling were greenish glass curtain walls, still something new; the short walls were bright glazed brick, yellow, orange, two reds, two blues, olive, gray and black. A shining aluminum dome covered the circular space in which Styling tested and displayed GM cars; a shining 50-foot stainless steel water tower marked GM’s place in the sky above the flat suburban landscape.

Aline wrote in a birthday letter to her future husband:

The General Motors job was all and more than anyone had written about it: really a twentieth century monument, yes, “itself like a well-engineered industrial product,” yes, a beautiful expression of our technology, yes, imaginative and big and

wonderful in its changing relationships, yes, splendid in the carrying out of the concept down to the careful and pleasing detail, yes, a group of buildings that recognized man’s dignity vis-à-vis the machine, yes, very human —

This account and much more correspondence between and by both Saarinens is available online, digitized by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian as the Aline and Eero Saarinen Papers, 1906-1977. Their letters, particularly Aline’s history of their romance quoted above, provide a sometimes shockingly intimate look at an apparent coup de foudre of two equals, both stars in their respective firmaments, and both with previous entanglements (him, a wife and two children; her, an engagement and two children, plus her journalism career).

On their first day together, the work eventually receded, and the man came forward.

…it was a nice dinner, but we were both feeling strange and awed and breathless, still caught in the impulse that made me postpone my plane reservation. Then sneaking into Cranbrook and the dark room and the black coat at the threshold and making love for the first time — hurriedly but so that we both knew it was only the first time. Then the drive to the airport and Aline’s

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autobiography with significantly small mention of any engagement. Then, waiting in the airport on those hidden chairs, you in the black coat and black hat and I looked at you very intently and thought how much I did want to see you again…

(Whew! When I first read this it was on microfilm at the AAA, and I could not believe my eyes. The image of the black coat at the threshold stayed with me for a long time, a short story in itself.)

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Love and architecture were mixed from the first moments of Aline and Eero’s attraction, and as the New York installation of the travelling exhibition “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” argues, she was one of his principal collaborators during his too-short career (Eero died of a brain tumor in 1961, age 51). The exhibition, opening November 10 at theMuseum of the City of New York, includes Aline’s Times profile of Eero and additional excerpts from their correspondence, as well as her best-selling 1958 book The Proud Possessors. It also highlights her illustrious career after his death, when she turned from print to the new medium of television, and eventually became host of her own morning talk show, “For Women Only.” When she left the show to become NBC’s Paris bureau chief (the first woman to oversee a foreign bureau), Barbara Walters took over.

Alongside Eero and Aline’s romantic correspondence, complete with pet names, illustrated envelopes, and cut-out construction paper hearts, is Eero’s rather darker correspondence with his shrink, whose name appears to be Dr. Bartemayer (Eero’s handwriting is somewhat obscure, though he was famously ambidextrous). In that correspondence he writes and writes and writes about his relationship with his first wife, Lily Swann Saarinen, and his pre-Aline romances with several other women, including Florence Knoll, who had been semi-adopted by the Saarinen family when she attended the Kingswood School, andAstrid Sampe, a Swedish textile designer. He seems to have threatened divorce over a span of years, one foot psychologically and physically (many of the letters are written on one airplane or another) out the door.

In an undated letter to Aline, Eero’s woman troubles bleed out of therapy and into their careerist romance. Analyzing the situation of their (future) marriage, he ranks many of the design couples he knows on a chart, the scale based on their percentage of happiness.

This was the kind of numerical analysis he performed on airports and corporations, and he saw no reason not to let it carry into his private life. The chart can be seen at AAA (Page 25), as well as at MCNY. Up at the top, between 100 and 90 percent happy are his parents, architect Eliel Saarinen and textile

designer Loja Saarinen, and “Charlie” and Ray Eames (Ray was also a second wife). Between 70 and 80 percent, the Girards; 30 and 40 percent the Knolls, the Louchheims and Eero and Lily Saarinen “before degeneration.”

Locked apparently in a loveless marriage were the George Nelsons, down at 15 percent. He might have added Henry and Doris Dreyfuss; she ran his office, where she was known as “Miss Marks” in order to separate public from private roles.

In hindsight, the problem with Eero Saarinen’s first marriage seems very obvious. When he met Lily Swann at Cranbrook in 1937, she was glamorous, a sculptor, a former competitive skier, daughter of a prominent New York family. They married in 1939, and she had a son, Eric, in 1941 and a daughter, Susan, in 1945. Lily contributed sculpture to a number of his early projects, including the winning entry for the Gateway Arch in 1947, just as his mother Loja had contributed to his father’s commissions. Eero wanted a partner, in work and life, as Charles Eames had in Ray. As his commissions grew and travel increased, Lily was left at home in Bloomfield Hills with their two young children. As he recounts it, Lily was depressed, possibly unstable, but he was also clearly disappointed that she could not keep up with him.

Aline, on the other hand, was a working woman. She had a nanny and an ex-husband.

And she made every effort to see Eero in the months before and after the article was published, meeting at the Langdon Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, traveling to New Hope, PA with him to check on the progress of Harry Bertoia’s screen for the GM cafeteria, hooking up in Boston in a hotel room filled with models of MIT’s Kresge Chapel, watching him

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35 present furniture ideas to Hans Knoll. Even on the day they met, there was dinner with the Girards, Alexander and Susan, neighbors and kindred design spirits in suburban Detroit.

Eric and “Susie” Saarinen, even Loja, make appearances in Aline’s history of love; Lily is strangely absent from the Vaughn Road house where the family then lived (Loja in a modest modern cottage of Eero’s design out back).

After their marriage, Aline had to recuse herself from covering the world of architecture in which her husband played such a leading role (today she would have had to recuse herself after that first Cranbrook encounter). Instead, she became “Head of Information Service” at Eero Saarinen & Associates, pitching his projects to the magazine editors for which she previously worked, charming his clients personally and professionally. She threw herself into his work while simultaneously managing to further her own. Part of her artful packaging of Saarinen’s career included a feature on the new Saarinen family, Eero, Aline and son Eames (born 1955) li vi ng i n that Vaughn Road hous e i n mi ni m al s tyl e.

Her aid continued after Saarinen’s death, when she helped to secure his place in the American architectural pantheon. She and Saarinen’s longtime partners Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo traveled around the country, making sure the firm’s nine commissions under construction or in design (including the TWA Terminal, Dulles Airport, two residential colleges for Yale, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the CBS Building) were all completed as Saarinen buildings. In 1962, she published a book of his writings, including gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Eero Saarinen on His Work. She also outlined a book on the

CBS Building after its completion in 1965, as she always considered it Saarinen’s most mediacentric project.

I always feel a little sad for Lily Saarinen (and Catherine Woermann Eames, and the other architects’ first wives who are not present in Wikipedia). I would like to think the relationship of Eero and Lily might have gone differently today. She might have been in architecture school alongside him, rather than in the sculpture program. She might have entered the Gateway Arch competition on her own.

She would probably have waited longer to get married, and longer to have children. She could have turned into Aline, rather than be replaced by her. Eero’s older sister Pipsan worked alongside her husband, architect J. Robert F. Swanson, a onetime partner of Eliel and Eero Saarinen, designing furniture, textiles, fashion and interiors.

And, at least according to my anecdata, architecture schools today sometimes seem like dating services. Many in my husband’s class at Yale architecture school are married to each other and living within five blocks of us in Brooklyn; others are married to architects they met on their first job at a big firm. In 2007 Robin Pogrebin chronicled this trend (also without hard numbers) in the New York Times, pointing out a raft of up-and-coming practices led by married couples including SHoP, nArchitects, WORKac. Already there is Diller Scofidio (+ Renfro, not quite sure where he fits in), Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Sauerbruch Hutton from Germany. It is quite likely that, after Zaha Hadid, the next woman to win the Pritzker Prize will be in partnership. Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA would be the obvious candidate; she practices with Ryue Nishizawa.

gap, and one that increases at the higher levels of the profession (principals and partners).

When Architectural Record surveyed female practitioners in 2006, many with their own firms said solo practice brought them freedom (and a few said they backed into when seeking greater flexibility while I’ve been asked why so many architects marry each When architecture works raising children). I would like to other, and my theory is that it should make us all swoon, think that women graduating from architecture school in good partnerships, in work just like our partner. the 1990s or 2000s don’t or life, are based on the see partnership with a man as a limit on their same foundation. One partner has qualities freedom, and maybe partnering with a or talents the other lacks. In many of the husband makes work-life balance, and not architecture partnerships I’ve observed, getting mommy-tracked, possible. (I could one person is the front (wo)man, the other not find data on architecture couples. If any the quiet design force, one the critic and readers know of better sources, please note the other the workhorse. There has to be a that in the comments and I will update these level of trust between architecture partners numbers. If no one has done this survey, it commensurate with marriage; why not seems like a worthy topic.) searvch for that in a single individual? The grueling schedule of architecture school Like Eero and Aline, architects married to and first jobs puts those talents on public architects are seeking a partnership of display. Rarely do you see so much of a complementary equals, someone who understands person, under such duress, as in architecture ttheir language and their sacrifices, and who school. If you still love them after 10 cups of can prioritize the same aesthetic quest. Aline’s coffee and three nights with no sleep, you birthday letter to Eero puts his architecture first should put a ring on it.

— that’s why she is in Detroit, and that’s what initially wows her. When he turns out to be as I don’t think practicing in partnership rather imaginative and big and wonderful and human than alone is a bad thing, or a comedown, as that architecture, she gets more than a little for women, who are still severely underweak in the knees. When architecture works it represented in the profession. The National should make us all swoon, just like our partner.

Architectural Accrediting Board’s 2008 report ❚ says 41 percent of architecture graduates were women, while according to the 2009 AIA Firm Survey report, the share of architecture staff at AIA member-owned firms that is women is 27 percent, and the share of firm principals that are women is 17%. The AIA is a voluntary professional organization, so these are not the total numbers of women practicing architecture, but that’s still a big

Luckily the Pritzker jury has rewritten the rules in the last decade. When Robert Venturi won in 1991, Denise Scott-Brown, his longtime partner and wife, was left out, but Herzog & de Meuron won jointly in 2001.

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5 pe o ple in gla ss

apa rtm ents

stephen helle r

39

People in glass apartments shouldn’t throw stones or other projectiles.

Nor should they engage in private acts directly in front of their floor to ceiling windows. Yet lately there has been a rash of exhibitionism throughout New York City owing to an increase in floor to ceiling windowed buildings. Influenced in part by Richard Meier’s glass box towers in lower Manhattan (and his newest one at One Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn), these transparent living spaces, once the quintessence of twenty first century Modernism, have become eyesores,

particularly at night when they take on the appearance of showrooms in Amsterdam’s red light district.

How often have you walked down streets where you’ve seen much more of another person’s life and lifestyle than necessary? Yet like a moth drawn to light you couldn’t resist?

You’d think there should be a law. Indeed there are peeping Tom statutes on the books.

A Tom is a person who, according to uslegal. com, “stealthily peeks into windows, other openings with the purpose of getting a sexual thrill from seeing women or girls undressed or couples making love. It is a slang term for a voyeur. Being a peeping Tom is treated as a crime based on sexual deviancy, according to state laws, which vary by state. The victim of

a peeping Tom can bring a lawsuit for invasion of privacy.”

Granted simply walking down the street and inadvertently peering into a window does not constitute “secret or surreptitious” trespassing on another’s privacy, but it does beg the question: Why would anyone want their intimate life exposed to any peeping Tom, Dick or Harry? In other words, what were the architects thinking? And why are so many developers buying into this aesthetic?

In the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand’s overwrought The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper as the “visionary” architect Howard Roark, a residential skyscraper looms over Central Park with its terraced glass facade shimmering in the sun. The structure

represented the victorious struggle of iconic Modernism over tired classicism. It further symbolized Rand’s ideal of the supreme individualist combating mass conformity. Any high school and college student aspiring to iconoclasm envies Roark’s tenacious insistence on artistic integrity — the integrity of the devout modernist for whom rightness of form trumps the needs of many. Curiously his fictional buildings, perversely rooted in Bauhaus aesthetics, reveal a preference for glass curtain walls, which in real life on Park Avenue in the sixties added luster to the old boulevard. But now that such buildings are sprinkled all over

the city and throughout the boroughs the result is not radical but bourgeois conformity.

I will leave the critique of structural virtues of floor to ceiling fashion to architects. I accept that living space, even in these troubled economic times, is expensive and the glass wall enables architects to give the illusion of more height and breadth in otherwise small apartments. I also accept that at the architectural scale-model-stage, these exteriors are quite impressive, especially when the glass punctuates the monotony of an average brick and mortar streetscape. But inhabited

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buildings are never as pristine as the model, not everyone has the same window coverings (if at all.) Often furniture, which would ordinarily be placed in front of walls are backed up to the windows. Moreover, I’ve passed buildings where residents have even thrown up bed sheets to block out the sun and unwanted gazes. But most of the apartments in my neighborhood do not even attempt to coverup. Speaking as an involuntary peeping Tom the windows are invitations for leering and are as provocative as the sensational photographs and headlines on the New York Post.

I asked a neighbor who lives on the fifth floor

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in one glass front building why he allows his family to be so exposed. “Well, we paid for the windows,” he replied, “and we like the light, the view of the street, and didn’t really think that people would even want to look in.” But they do, so how do you feel about a stranger’s gaze? “Well, we are careful not to run around naked, but that’s a small price to pay for the airiness.” Still, don’t you feel like you’re in a fish bowl? And doesn’t that make you feel self-conscious? “Well, for now its fine, maybe in a few years we’ll be sick of it and decide to sell.” Then one final question, is there any pressure from the building or your neighbors to maintain your windows in a specific way to insure the integrity of the design? “Well, it was suggested that we not hang heavy drapes, or shades that were not white. But that makes sense given the environment we chose to live in. No one has told us what sofa or lamps to buy, it’s not like company housing. What’s the big deal, anyway?”

This is as far from company housing as possible, but the floor to ceiling window policy invites unwanted company. A more traditional window treatment means there are more options to be open or closed, revealed or concealed. Floor to ceiling windows also produces visual clutter that ultimately conflicts with the architectural transparency. So, what’s the big deal? These buildings, especially at night, add to the chaos of the street. Too much visual information is not good design. Floor to ceiling is certainly in, but I’m tired of looking in — I’ll close my eyes, but you close the blinds. ❚

6 und er gr o un d

mai nst ream

steven helle r

43

Commercial culture depends on the theft of intellectual property for its livelihood.

Rebellion of any kind breeds followers, and many followers become a demographic.

Mass marketers steal ideas from visionaries, alter them slightly if at all, then reissue them to the public as new products. In the process what was once insurgent becomes commodity, and what was once the shock of the new becomes the shlock of the novel. Invariably, early expressions of sub- or alternative cultures are the most fertile sampling grounds, as their publications or zines are the first to be pilfered.

Invariably, pioneers of radical form become wellsprings for appropriation.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-gardes have ceded original ideas to the mass marketplace. In Europe, the Weiner Werkstatte, Deutsche Werkbund, Bauhaus, and scores of other reformist schools and movements that sought to better the marketplace with convention-altering artsand-crafts fell victim to their own successes.

Their collective goal was to raise the level of both manufacture and design while changing timeworn habits and antiquated expectations,

yet their ideas became “established.� The avant-garde is usurped when its eccentricity is deemed acceptable.

In the 1920s, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a progressive American advertising executive, argued that quotidian products and advertising campaigns must borrow characteristics from avant-garde European Modern art. Despite its anti-establishment symbolism, Cubistic, Futuristic and Expressionistic veneers, he argued, would capture consumers’ attention better than a hundred slogans. In the postWorld War I era, when renewal was touted,

new-and-improved-ness was the commercial mantra. But why waste time, Calkins reasoned, inventing something entirely new when the most experimental artists and designers of the age were already testing the tolerance of new ideas on their own dime. He commanded commercial artists to appropriate and smooth out the edges of Modern art, add an ornament here and there to make it palatable for the consumer class — and voila! — instant allure.

Calkins further proposed the doctrine of “styling the goods” (otherwise known as “forced obsolescence”) to keep the traffic in new products moving. He alleged that frequent cosmetic changes to everything from a soap package to a radio-receiver cabinet would encourage consumers to discard the old and purchase the new — and simultaneously to replenish the economy. Waste was not an issue. Of course, this required true visionaries, skillful acolytes and capable mimics. Commercial artists were, thus, early participants in the knock-off trade.

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Yet when an intrepid commercial artist attempted to push the boundaries of design, they had to be cognizant of what industrial designer Raymond Loewy called MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). Fervent avantgardists created truly unprecedented form, but when it is commercialized a kind of trickledown occurs. Invariably what began as an elitist subculture follows a predictable trajectory from popular rejection to mass acceptance.

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Take the Sixties psychedelic movement for example: It was born in a small community that shared proclivities for sex, drugs and anarchic behavior — all threatening to the mainstream. Kindred visual artists, musicians and designers developed means of expression that helped define the culture’s distinct characteristics. Psychedelic art was a distinct vocabulary, influenced by earlier graphic idioms, that overturned the rigid rules of clarity and legibility put forth by the once avant-garde Moderns. Through its very raunchiness it manifested the ideals of youth culture. For a brief time it was decidedly a shock to the system. But as it gained popularity (like when it appeared on the cover of Hearst’s EYE magazine or the sets of NBC’s “Laugh-In”), it turned into a code easily co-opted by marketers.

Synthetic psychedelic was manufactured when the visions of the originators were co-opted by entrepreneurs, and what began as a pact of mutual self-interest turned into cultural imperialism.

Underground bands led the way in this commercial whirlpool. They were given record contracts by labels owned by major corporations who wanted significant market share. In turn, the record labels advertised and packaged these bands using the very codes that signaled “alternative” to the growing youth market. Psychedelic design was one such code. At first the look was fairly consistent with the original vision and motivation of the avant-garde pioneers.

Many album covers of the period are today “classic” examples of true psychedelic design.

But within a short time, as profits began to roll in, youth culture trend-spotters expanded the range, thereby dulling the edge of the psychedelic style. Psychedelic was no longer an alternative code; it was the confirmation of conformist behavior, a uniform of alienation.

The establishment still disapproved of the aesthetics, but it was difficult to be terrified of something that was becoming so integrated into the mass marketplace. Drugs were still bad, but psychedelic was just decorative. The avant-garde was commodified and the result was a mediocre, self-conscious rip-off. A hollow style that denoted an era remained.

During the ensuing decades the emergence of other confrontational art and design movements, including Punk and Grunge, sought to unhinge dominant methods and

mannerisms, but were ultimately absorbed into the mass culture. It has become axiomatic that fringe art, if it presumes to have any influence, will gravitate to, or be pushed towards the center. All it takes is the followers of followers to cut a clear path to the mainstream. Indeed the mainstream embraces almost anything edgy; although once the label is applied it is no longer on the edge.

Very little emerging from the underground fails to turn up in the mainstream. Pornography, once the bane of puritan society, is used by the advertising industry for edgy allure. Despite the occasional salvos by morality-in-media groups, all manner of publicly taboo sexuality appears in magazines and on billboards.

Popular tolerances have increased to a level where shock in any realm is hard to come by.

Conversely, even before the mainstream began leeching off alternative cultures, the underground satirically appropriated from the mainstream. Today it’s called “culture jamming,” but in the twenties Modern avant-gardes usurped the fundamental forms of commercial advertising by making art itself into advertising.

What were Dada, Futurist and Constructivist master works if not advertisements for their new ideas? In promoting themselves they further expanded the visual languages of advertising, which, not coincidently, was later adopted by mainstream advertising.

Advertising has been a favored target of social critics. In the 1930s, Ballyhoo, a popular newsstand humor magazine, and the prototype for MAD magazine, which in turn was the father of sixties’ Undergrounds and the granddaddy of contemporary zines, savagely ripped the façade off the hucksters on Madison Avenue. Ballyhoo took original

“ quotidian ads for automobiles, detergent, processed foods, you name it, wittily altered the brand-names (a la Adbusters) and caricatured the product pitches to reveal the inherent absurdities in the product claims. Likewise, in the fifties and early sixties, MAD magazine skewered major brands by attacking the insidious slogans endemic to advertising. They came up with such classics as “Look Ma, No Cavities, and No Teeth Either,” a sendup of Crest Toothpaste’s false promise of cavity free teeth, and “Happy But Wiser,” a slam at Budweiser beer through a parody ad that showed a besotted, forlorn alcoholic whose wife had just dumped him. MAD was the influence behind Wacky Packs (created by Art Spiegelman), which came inside Topps Bubblegum packages, that used puns on mainstream product brand-names to attack society, politics and culture (i.e. Reaganettes, a take-off on the candy Raisinnettes that looked like the former American president).

Paradoxically, Ballyhoo, MAD, and Wacky Packs were all mass-market products, but because of their respective exposure each

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had an influence on the kids who grew up to produce the icons of alternative culture.

Underground denizens attack the mainstream for one of two reasons: to alter or to join, although sometimes both. Few designers choose to be outsiders forever. Outsiders are, after all, invariably marginalized until the mainstream celebrates them as unsung geniuses. Outsiders may choose to join the mainstream on their own terms, but join they must to be able to make an impact larger than their circumscribed circles. This is perhaps one reason why so many self-described rebels enter advertising, and now viral advertising.

“Its where the best resources are,” one young creative director for a “progressive” New York firm told me. “It’s also where I believe that I can make the most impact on the future of the medium and maybe even culture.” In fact, on the wall of his office hangs a sheet of yellowing old Wacky Pack stickers. “This is advertising at its best,” he explains. “Because it is ironic, self-flagellating and irreverent. The best advertising should be done with wit and humor, with a wink and nod. Self-parody is the thing.” Indeed the process has come full circle. Today, designers for mainstream advertising companies, weaned on alternative approaches, have folded the underground into the mainstream and called it cool. ❚

7 wha t p ass es f or b eau ty: a de ath

in t exa s

jim williams on

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For most people, this is a story about Texas, for some, a story about architecture.

And to a few who know about both Texas and architecture (I am thinking here of the late “Texas Ranger” John Hejduk), it is a sort of myth: an intersection of human beings with place, grounded as much in our imagination as in reality. It is also a coming of age story: the story of my first job and my first project.

As most stories do, this story has an ending, and the ending is so strange that I will break with convention and reveal it now: They buried her in a martini shaker and a Dixie-cup.

Not so long ago, young and ambitious graduates of Texas architecture schools had few choices other than joining one of the corporate firms of Houston or getting out of the state — far out of the state. There were not many firms with large architectural or artistic ambitions, and even fewer with both. But there were a few such firms and one of them, thefirm of Frank Welch, was in Midland, which is, as you might expect, in the middle of nowhere.

Midway between El Paso and Fort Worth, Midland, in the 1970s, was peculiar even by Texas standards. The land that it rests upon had once been an ancient seabed and had long

ago been lifted up to become the Texas High Plains. It is a land full of tumbleweeds, high winds and dust storms. If you are unlucky enough to be outside during a storm, you will feel the dust sweep its way in-between your teeth, even as it covers the street curbs in gritty, brown drifts. This part of west Texas is also a land that once was full of oil; lots of oil, now mostly gone.

Midland was a small city of 60,000 then, but it ranked as the fourth wealthiest city in the United States. It had more millionaires per capita than any other city; it had more private planes per

capita (used for business and shopping junkets to Dallas), more Rolls Royces per capita, etc, etc. It also had a lot of roughnecks and real cowboys. How George W. Bush got away with calling it the heartland is a mystery.

Like others in the 1950s, Frank Welch had found his way to Midland as part of a phalanx of Texans and Northeasterners (like George H.W. Bush and his young family) who traveled to the flatness and the heat of West Texas to find success. Frank had been a merchant marine in the Second World War; afterward he photographed Paris on a Fulbright (in an

impressive imitation of Cartier-Bresson). He was handsome and talented, and he was married to a kind and gracious banker’s daughter.

Welch was a well-admired architect in Texas, and his work, like that of his mentor and the granddaddy of Texas architecture, O’Neil Ford, was a version of critical regionalism well before Kenneth Frampton wrote his famous essay.

A good architect and a bon vivant: one could do a lot worse in Texas. Frank was exactly the kind of person I wanted to work for.

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I had been in the office two weeks when Frank told me that his best friend had called to say that the wife of one of his several brothers had passed away, and that his brother wanted us to design a gravesite on the family ranch in the foothills of the Davis Mountains. Frank wanted me to design the gravesite. I was reticent, but secretly elated. I knew others in this small office envied the assignment. It promised to be serious and fun and strange.

Frank’s friend was part of the Soren family, a large oil family, with many brothers heading offices in several cities in four or five states. The

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brother who had lost his wife was in San Antonio. The family ranch was near Kent, which is near Marfa, which was not then the minimalist nirvana that it’s since become; back then it was known for the UFO-like phenomena called the “Marfa lights,” and for the faux mansion built for the set of the movieGiant, which stood deteriorating among the mesquite and prickly pear.

I set to designing and laboriously rendering what I hoped would be a minor de Stijl masterwork: a set of finely proportioned, low, gray granite slabs, a counterpoint to the rough red granite of the hilly site. Some of the slabs would be benches, some would be inscribed with a dedication or the family name, and some would be there just for effect. The design resembled an abridged fragment of Mies van der Rohe’s famous brick house with its attenuated lines and right angles. In my view, the schemes were elegant and artistic; I was happy with the results.

But apparently the Soren family was not. So I revised and eliminated some of the slabs. They sent back an amateur’s sketch of a star that filled the space of a sheet of oil company stationery. The star was dimensioned so that it fit into a twelve-foot-diameter circle. It was a |big lone star.

A few years earlier, Frank had struggled with the design of his own son’s grave, and he understood the exaggerations of grief. I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he talked the Sorens out of the star. But the minor de Stijl masterwork was never to appear again; instead we settled on a nondescript, rose-granite square within a square, two foot on a side.

And then a new requirement arose: a cross on a nearby hill — like Calvary, of course. Even though I am a Christian, it was painful and disheartening even to make a drawing of the cross for the stonecutters; it seemed as unfortunate an idea as the star.

In the course of the project, we took several trips to the ranch. Mr. Soren would fly to Midland to meet us, and then we would fly to the ranch together. We would land on the ranch’s airstrip and then drive up a single-lane asphalt road.

The main house was big, and it saddled a hill

and was crammed with western art. Cowboys worked outside, as if mirroring the art inside.

On some visits, we would arrive early enough to eat the cabritothat the Tejana cooks would prepare for lunch. The ranch had a gritty romanticism; it seemed to be its own world.

Presiding over this world was Charlie O’Donnell, the ranch foreman, who would also be our contractor. Charlie was in his sixties, tall and slim. He really did look like John Wayne. He also looked like my father, which meant that we would probably never hit it off. But he was an admirable man; he would go out to the campsites along the migrant trails that crossed the ranch and leave food for the illegal workers.

He did this because it was the right thing to do, and because he knew their lot was terribly harder than his — it was a different Texas back then. On one visit, he looked more exhausted than any man I’d seen; he had been up for days fighting brush fires, and he was dirty with soot.

Parts of the ranch were too rough to cross even with a jeep, so Charlie and his crew had lead horses saddled with stacks of wet burlap bags up the hills to beat out the fires out by hand.

Charlie was in love with two women. He was in love with Mrs. O’Donnell and Mrs. Soren. His love of Mrs. Soren wasn’t romantic; it was a bo nd forged through generosity and respect.

Some of the nearby ranches were merely weekend retreats, but Mrs. Soren had instructed Charlie that he was not a caretaker but a real foreman. He was to make the ranch profitable, and he did. Charlie dug Mrs. Soren’s grave himself, blasting a hole in the rock with the dynamite.

Charlie was in love with two women. He was in love with Mrs. O’Donnell and Mrs. Soren. His love of Mrs. Soren wasn’t romantic; it was a bond forged through generosity and respect. Some

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of the nearby ranches were merely weekend retreats, but Mrs. Soren had instructed Charlie that he was not a caretaker but a real foreman.

He was to make the ranch profitable, and he did. Charlie dug Mrs. Soren’s grave himself, blasting a hole in the rock with the dynamite.

He had just finished a telephone conversation with Mr. Soren and learned that the family was planning a memorial service on the ranch in two weeks. Mr. Soren wanted us to drive down and place Mrs. Soren’s remains in the gravesite and seal it before the service. Standing by my desk, he said, “Jim, Mr. Soren has told me that he is putting Mrs. Soren’s cremated remains into a martini shaker. It was an anniversary gift from Mrs. Soren to Mr. Soren.” Frank looked weary and dismayed.

I could say nothing but “Oh.” It made a grim kind of sense.

The day before the memorial service, Frank and I arrived at the gravesite early in the morning.

Charlie was already there with one or two ranch hands. It was almost midday for them, and they had come on horses. A slightly befuddled stonecutter from San Angelo was there, too.

We gathered around the grave that Charlie had blasted out of the rock and encased in concrete. The granite slab and bronze plaque lay next to the hole on a portable lift. The atmosphere was sad. Not much was said after the handshakes and hellos.

Then Frank turned to Charlie and told him that Mr. Soren had wondered if Charlie would like to place Mrs. Soren’s remains in the grave.

Charlie’s eyes welled up, and he nodded. Frank reached into a cardboard box and brought out the martini shaker, which was wrapped in brown packing material, and began to unwrap it.

And as Frank unwrapped the shaker, we stood dumbstruck, and stared, blindsided by a small, unexpected epiphany.

The shaker was startlingly and exquisitely beautiful. It was simple and unadorned and subtly shaped in a way you could you only call feminine.

It was 24-carat gold. It was gleaming, like the treasures from an Egyptian tomb that had just been touring the country.

Charlie took the shaker in his rancher’s hands, and he placed it gently in the grave and choked up even more as he did so. Frank looked happy and relieved; I felt a thickness in my chest; somehow, something had made a kind of wondrous sense.

We had entered some unpredictable and paradoxical place where beauty trumped all. And where architecture doesn’t have much of a stake.

The slab was glued to the concrete, and the grave was sealed, and we started to say our goodbyes. And then Frank reached back into the box and brought out something else that was wrapped in brown packing, and turned again to Charlie. “Charlie, they were not able to put all of Mrs. Soren into the martini shaker,” Frank said. “Mr. Soren was hoping that you would take what is left someplace on the ranch and spread them out.”

He unwrapped the packing and pulled out something that looked too much like a Dixie-cup not to actually be one. Charlie nodded. He took the cup from Frank.

Frank and I, the stonecutter and the ranch hands left Charlie at the gravesite. I am not sure what happened next; I know that Charlie got on his horse and rode out to some part of the ranch to scatter the rest of Mrs. Soren’s ashes. But I also imagine that he returned a few hours later for the lunch that he had every day with Mrs. O’Donnell, carrying with him an empty Dixie-cup. ❚

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8 site,

asc end ant

david heymann

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The role of site in various forms of Western cultural production has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years.

Though a broad impulse to defer content and, to some degree, authorship to the natural landscape is surprisingly uncommon to the long history of Western art, the current cycle has been around for a while, at least since the late 1960s [2]. You see it in the usual suspects: the work of Smithson, Heizer, DeMaria, Turrell, et al. Various arguments have been made for why this work began and succeeded when it did (curiously, you hear many architects speak

as if it were still actively happening). Most center on the idea that these artists were seeking to counter the consequences of an increasingly world-wide (that is, location free) media-driven consumption-based society — of which the museum and gallery, the format of which these pieces resist, are merely mouthpieces — in favor of an unmediated and difficult experience of authenticity arising from the distillation of essential location. Other arguments can be made, including the economic evolution of organizations and patrons capable of financing artists independently of the marketplace, but most have this underlying theme in common:

the site is a source of experience that is perceived to be meaningful because it remains authentic and intransmutable. I put this in italics because I think this belief is probably more widely and powerfully held today.

But one point needs to be made about this work. As much as these constructions seem concerned with natural landscape, nature is actually a subtopic. These pieces are first and foremost about site. This is a complicated distinction, but an important one. Many of these artists chose to work in natural landscapes, but many also had the opportunity — and

sometimes actively pursued the possibility — to work in urban conditions. The examples shown here — works by Irwin, Turrell, Kawamata and Matta-Clark — do not in any way seem incongruous set against the celebrated work that these artists designed for non-urban sites.

That is because there was no pejorative consequence to the content of the sculptures arising from working in urban situations. Instead, each location was treated as an equally ripe source of meaningfulness. The larger concern — regardless whether the work was in the high desert of New Mexico or the Lower East Side of Manhattan — was to identify or expose or

respect or strengthen the explicit value of each location — each site — as it structured sin gular experience, rather than as it served within a biological frame.

So it will be true of such sculptures in natural landscapes that they concern the natural — but this is because natural (variously defined) is perceived to be an indwelling condition of their sites. Much of this work was, and still is, called Environmental Art, but hereenvironmental refers to clarifying experience within the larger frame of a landscape, and not to the environment as a biological system. This artwork is more

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aptly called site specific, and, though the \number of grand gestures has tapered off — critical artwork has moved on — it has not gone away as a popular format. If anything, it has only become more pervasive. Certainly the underlying problem, the dislocation of modern life, has not gone away! One strange (albeit indirect) proof of this is the pervasiveness of legal requirements for artwork in publicly financed buildings, most of which are calls for site-specific works. There is an interesting inversion at work in these pieces. The site is the new construction, for which the artwork serves as a form of place authentication!

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Work that proceeds from site as the source for its parameters has been understood to beresponsible to landscape, even if it is not responsible to landscape from a biologically environmental point of view.

Turrell’s work at the Roden Crater is a good example of what I mean. The planned sequence of chambers, sight lines and other constructs aligns with various cyclical occurrences in the positioning of the earth in regard to the sun, moon and stars. Turrell is clearly intent on making deep natural orders legible, but the methods used to construct these connections — including earth-moving at a vast scale — are unavoidably the by-product of an unsustainable culture. A useful analogy is bird-watching (an activity that has exploded in popularity over the last twenty years). To be honest, most birders do little for the environment — a bird-watcher flying to Central America for a week of scouring the countryside in order to add a hundred species to a life list has a ridiculously high carbon footprint — beyond providing local economic incentive to not clear natural landscape. Yet no birder would imagine that he or she is against the environment. After all, calling attention to the environment and doing something about it stem from the same wellspring of emotional reasoning.

But these really are fundamentally different thingsethically and tactically, and the transition from notifying to correcting is not clear: will it be a revolution, or an evolution?

In either case, it helps to understand what is happening right at the changing point, at the cusp. The same trajectory that we see in Western sculpture — of site evolving from settingto source — can be traced in Western architecture over the corresponding time frame.

history of buildings to prove that any era is site sensitive; so one might point to the Casa Malaparte or Fallingwater to prove that the Modern was committed to site as source, as Hatshepsut’s tomb might be used to prove the same for its era. But extraordinary sites have always tended to elicit extraordinary site responses, overriding other considerations. A better place to look is at ordinary sites: how does the natural play a role here? A good faith comparison might be Ralph Rapson’s Greenbelt House, designed in 1945 (as part of the Case Study sequence) for a developer’s lot in Los Angeles, and Tod Williams’s Tarlo House, built in 1979 on a subdivided potato field near Wainscott, Long Island. Both

of these constructions are conceived for sites that are defined economically, rather than experientially; that is, for ordinary plots of otherwise unexceptional land.

The Greenbelt House famously revels in the potential of the outdoors, and so it is a useful means to point out the Modern distinction between outside and site. If the outside was understood as an extension of the inside, and vice-versa (and this is a familiar Modern trope), it is clear that the outside is seen as a continuation of a world measured by function and convenience. In Rapson’s drawings we see the happy family planting and playing: the outside is a setting for essentially utilitarian activities, the fact of which becomes the method by which meaningfulness is partly measured. There is no issue with the arbitrariness of the property lines and the establishment of site, since these arise also from a landscape of convenience and purpose [4]. The house is self-sufficient: it has no problem with the anonymity of its location, which merely provides the setting for its normative activities.

Though similar in syntax, the Tarlo House is construed of formal gestures that are almost without exception site responses, rather than functional tactics. Of the house’s four distinct pieces, the first is a screen wall that shields the house — it’s literally a fright mask - from the adjacent road to its north. This mask connects to the house volume by a suspended deck shading an outdoor space. The volume of the house proper, though laid out to sensibly manage interior need, is rotated from the property line orthogonal partly to take advantage of views of the distant ocean, but primarily to maximize cross ventilation in summer. The southernmost element of the house is the second shading element, a brise-

61 soleil that shields the southern windows from summer sun exposure (while letting in winter sun).

If none of these factors are solely specific — or better endemic — to the plot of land available to the architect, they are nonetheless true of the site in a larger geo-physical sense. Like Land Art, the house can be understood, with regard to this plot of land’s absolute ordinariness — that is, to this plot of land’s notsite-ness — as a cry for help against the strategies of land ordering that generate such sites, and the arbitrariness of its lot lines with regard to the concrete experience of things that are now considered meaningful: the passage of the sun and the movement of the wind. Here, site — experientially rather than economically defined — is clearly intended to be the source, not just the setting.

One can nicely measure the further evolution of site’s role in architectural design by comparing the Tarlo House to a later work of this firm, now Tod Williams and Billie Tsien: the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. At the Tarlo House, quantitative site factors are the basis for pragmatically justifiable formal moves. At NSI such moves are enriched by gestures that touch on qualitative and immeasurable assumptions about site inhabitation, associating specific activities with landform and location. The massing seems to complete an existing bowl-shaped valley (actually it forms this valley). Thus created, the valley floor — a landscape location long associated with public space and public activity — serves as a setting for common interaction; it is further defined by a fountain as its well or spring. One enters the public realm through the semi-circular opening this spring has “eroded” into the edge of the massing. Central to the open valley floor is a

concert hall partly submerged in a mound — a landform long associated with burial and the storage of cultural artifacts. The walls of the valley — a landform associated with individual and small group dwelling — are where the scientists work in their cave-like labs: here the architects have detailed the curtain wall so that it changes from window to rail, refusing to allow window to disrupt the reading of valley wall. The top of the landform — a space in landscape associated with the dwelling places of gods and the enlightened — is left as an open platform intended to serve the scientists as a place to walk and think. Only the director of NSI is allowed to dwell in this traditionally (at least until Jefferson built Monticello) forbidden zone, and that is whose office sits astride the ridge.

Like the beauty of that Blur Building cloud (discussed in an earlier essay in this series), none of this will likely strike you as odd. But that is only a measure of the present. With the exception of the ever contrarian Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers, and perhaps Aalto, no Modernist would have dared venture so deeply into mystical notions of site to justify anything, this sort of backwardgazing anti-progress being viewed with the utmost suspicion. (If we look at a yet more recent project from the same architects — the Natatorium at Cranbrook Academy — we see another stage in this evolution. Here technical and mystical definitions of site go hand in hand with the mechanical operation of biologic need. The extraordinary skylights of this pool are operable, used not only to continuously balance the head load of the building, radically reducing its energy usage, but also to allow you to be outside while you are indoors.

But this is a building on the brink of a noncontradictory site and environmental paradigm,

so it is ahead of the topic at hand).

I think one can safely assume that the sources for the differences in the Greenbelt and Tarlo houses existed outside of architecture.

Antagonism to the sense of dislocation — that much noted consequence of late Modern society — was the driver here, as it was with changes in sculpture. Yet the evolution of these pressures can be seen within architecture. You sense it already in the criticisms of High Modern architecture leveled by Team X, in the work of Hertzberger and Van Eyck, or Candillis, et al; or in the work of their inheritors, like James Stirling, in whose charming study for housing one can at once perceive a compositional or production rule at work, the necessarily abstract quality of which is associated with the Modern, and, at the same time, in its complex result, a nostalgia for the patterns and scales of local landscape. This is a great example of a long-standing Modern yearning for a guilt-free picturesque! [5] If there is not, in Western architecture of the 1960s and early ‘70s, an upheaval on the same scale as Land Art — with the odd exception of the radical but oddly inconsequential Capitol Building in Australia — there is nonetheless a complex codification of the inherent primary value of site in the PostModern assault and its consequences. Both Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City suggest that buildings have certain inherent long-standing rules of behavior in landscape, and that they should be allowed to play by these rules. The seeming self-evidence of this argument is of course a sham. That buildings have behaved a certain way does not mean they must continue to behave that way, unless their function is to make — and to

a degree to uphold — landscape. The PostModern arguments of Rossi and Venturi made sense because they fell on ears open to the possibility that landscape cohesion is primary to building form!

Despite the fact that the Post-Modern assault can thus be sympathetically seen as an attempt to protect landscape, the inherently conservative consequences that its initial practitioners suggested to architectural design were met with unease within a large part of architectural culture, particularly with regard to the daunting crisis of jettisoning abstraction — the tough birthright of the Modern — for the thin forms of representation offered by Rossi and Venturi (and today offered by New Urbanism). [6] Though there was not a popular counter-manifesto sharing the same desire but resolving it by means still sympathetic to the strengths of Modern method, one can still see these issues being worked out across a broad spectrum of constructions, from, for example, Alvaro Siza’s Boa Nova Teahouse, to Rafael Moneo’s Museum of Roman Antiquities in Merida, to Maya Lin’s masterpiece, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, to Peter Zumthor’s Zogt Benedikt Church, to Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada Aoyama.

Present in these examples is an extraordinary range of strategies — from the typological, to the mapped and authorless site gesture, to the distilling object — but also a distinct commonality. As is evident in the success of their presence — and in this the architecture of the past twenty years is unparalleled — one can see the importance of site in the building’s definition of landscape. I love the story that, to design the Fred and Ginger building in Prague, Frank Gehry apparently commissioned a highly

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detailed, room-sized model of the kilometerby-kilometer portion of the city surrounding the site, in which — popping his head up like a gopher — he could study the design from every conceivable approach. Gehry’s work is a good example of the complexity of the calculus at work. These are difficult forms — talk to the curators at the Bilbao Guggenheim! — the ultimate measure of which is resonant site presence rather than any other parameter.

Here is one last example of the insidiousness of site — of the ascendance of site — as a primary form-driving factor in current architectural design: the Seattle Public Library by OMA. Rem Koolhaas, OMA’s founder, has made a strong argument for the advantage of anywhereness — that is, of precisely the condition that most current design strategies have evolved to combat. At first glance, the SPL seems to hew to basic tenets of anywhere-ness: an illegibility of order, a lack of scale, a crassness of generic material presence. But, in fact, the volume of the SPL may be derived by mapping a series

of limits that are endemic to its site: the zoning volume, views to the site from important vantage points, and views to Elliott Bay and the distant Mt. Rainer. Two separate things at are work in this contradiction, one economic, one cultural. On the one hand, there is the architect’s economic need to convince a location-sensitive public that is paying, and — anywhere-ness be damned! — there is no better way to lie a building into being than to suggest that it is fit exactly to its site. On the other hand, there is something more interesting arising from the cultural apotheosis of site: the idea that the architectural object is authored by the site and not by the architect. How many times in the recent past have you heard an architect present a building that way? The site made the building. But — come on! — this is nonsense. In the immortal words [7] of Rush: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” ❚ v

9 the pr o duc tive

sur face

mas on white

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From the legacy of high modernism, an emphasis on form, technique, function and technology has dominated the representation of surface in architecture and landscape architecture.

This emphasis has perpetuated a binary interpretation of the role of the architectural surface — either form and technique driven or function and technology determined. Form privileges the expressive, a response to the question of what the surface could be; while function privileges the operational, a response to the question of what the surface should be. Certainly these hard-lined distinctions have not always been so clear, though they have organized camps of thought in 20th-century

design histories and practices. Yet external to this pairing is an overlooked history of what could be called the “productive surface.” The productive surface is a constructed terrain with the ability to — simply put — yield something.

In other words, it has a tangible, positive byproduct — for example, energy, or biotic or abiotic components. The productive surface depends upon an intimate understanding of context, climate and natural processes. It may operate at the scale of a building or region, or at scales between — because of its networked and scalable logic. My goal here is to reveal a 20th-century history of the productive surface,

establish its key progenitors, and interpret and assess its recent resurgence.

What is the productive?

Earlier considerations of the productive within architecture and landscape were firmly embedded within the functionalist camp. This is understandable, given that the primary instigators have been agriculturists, technologists, botanists, material scientists and engineers. But contemporary design ambitions, and an increased interest in critical sustainability, ecology, and biological

analogies, have posited new possibilities. Taken literally, the productive surface refers to the capacity for a designed surface to generate a usable component — agriculture, renewable energy systems, water harvesting systems, et al. Much as Reyner Banham exposed a previously suppressed lineage of environmental engineering in modern architecture, the field requires, once again, a sociological and methodological account of the impact of environmental technology on design. Such an account is especially timely, given a contemporary design context increasingly littered with ecological metaphors, with

sustainability as design justification, and with divergent understandings of the role of infrastructure.

To begin this account of the productive surface, some questions: What does architecture and landscape already produce — intentionally or otherwise? And how is that component managed by design? Possible byproducts of any new construction include heat, light and waste; also shifts in air patterns, hydrology, species patterns and land value. The envelope, or outermost skin, is the principal plane of contact between a regulated interior and a

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fluctuating exterior. The main objective of this surface, in the case of architecture, has typically been preventive — to keep cool or warm air in or out. In landscape, the main objective has typically been to perform at the level of nature. But today the productive surface embraces a wider range of possibilities.

Increasingly, design seeks to convert its very liability — an exposed surface — not only into a low-impact element but also into an economic and climatological asset. To return to a central question: How has the role of the horizontal surface — given its land uses, properties and resources — evolved toward the productive?

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Zoning Production

To understand the rise of the productive we need to acknowledge the blurred, yet empowering, distinction between ecological and experiential ambitions. My argument here is that the productive is an extension and evolution of sustainability — without any dubious empirical or technological determinism. In addition, to isolate a history of the productive surface, we need to understand the impact of zoning and land-use regulation upon larger urban assemblies. The rapid corporatization of land during the 1970s and ‘80s, and the subsequent deindustrialization of cities, are well-documented phenomena, and have provoked inventive propositions for new forms of urbanism. But what are the origins of the industrial city?

One of the urgent goals of early 20th-century urban planning was to manage the increasing complexity and unhygienic conditions of the expanding city, and its relationship to both rapid industrialization and the resulting strains on agriculture. Leading up to the turn of the century, planners and designers including Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes and Tony Garnier expounded new models of urbanism that sought to confront this difficult transition and coordinate these challenges.

Geddes offered a biologist’s view of urbanism, construing cities as forms of life. Howard, trained as a stenographer, positioned the garden city as an ideal alternative to the current town form. Extending these provocations into a situated and detailed design proposition, Garnier developed the Cité Industrielle over a period of about 15 years, finally publishing his treatise in 1918. While each of these visionaries explored the form and format of the nascent industrial city, it is Garnier’s proposition that most accurately reflects the early modern ambition to incorporate the productive amid the residential.

Influenced by the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier, the Cité Industrielle emerged within the context of early forays into regionalism.

Cité Industrielle, planned for a plateau in southeast France, incorporated residential, cultural, governmental, manufacturing and agricultural facilities into a gridded and zoned city; Garnier embraced the pre-condition of the site as both opportunity and obstruction.

Unlike Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept,

Garnier’s vision anticipated growth and evolution through an expandable linear framework. Various programs were located in dense homogenous clusters, which were strategically proximate to each other. Divided into either residential or public zones, the plan used circulation, green belts and park areas to modulate separations as required. To address the industrial component, the plan specifically called for a metallurgic factory, a silk manufacturing factory, mining, a cattle farm, abattoirs, a vineyard, and a hydroelectric station and dam. Garnier’s city was conceived and strategically programmed to absorb the productive capacities of industry for its own benefit — for the production of energy, food and a strong economy.

Garnier’s preoccupation with hygiene determined many aspects of the city’s configuration: its east-west alignment, the height of building masses, its intricate drainage systems and the separation of functions. The overall zoning strategy was intended to better facilitate future expansion, though it also espoused a separation of functions, which became increasingly common throughout the 20th-century. It might even be argued that this prompted the proliferation of segregated, enclaved urban environments — that it catalyzed the growing dominance of suburban, periurban, and exurban typologies. Frank Lloyd Wright would later extend and critique Garnier and others with the spatial order promoted in his suburban-utopian Broadacre City.

Howard, Geddes and Garnier struggled to realize their visions in their own time — which is not unusual for planners — and the subsequent course of modern planning would do little to rectify the neglect of most of the essential components of their plans. But

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today, the growing interest in urban agriculture, renewable energy technologies, and positiveenergy developments invites a re-reading of early modern planning with regard to the productive urban surface.

Resource Terrains

More than four decades after Garnier and the early regionalists, another important provocateur propelled and expanded our understanding of the interrelationships among engineering, design and the productive surface.

Operating at a significantly larger scale than his predecessors, and with a predisposition to comprehensive thinking, R. Buckminster Fuller was one of the most complex figures in 20th-century architecture. His transdisciplinary focus — which led some to dismiss him as a dilettante — spurred him to pursue a holistic understanding of energy, resources and urbanization. John McHale, a stalwart supporter, described Fuller as a “phenomenon [who] lies outside the customary canons of architectural judgment.” Two projects in his vast oeuvre stand out as particularly relevant here (notably, both have been somewhat obscured in most accounts of his work). The first is the “Profile of the Industrial Revolution”; the second is the research initiative World Design Science Decade 1965-75, which led to the study and proposition “World Game.”

In his Profile of the Industrial Revolution (started 1946, updated 1964), Fuller charted the discovery of 92 chemical elements, beginning in 1250 when Albertus Magnus isolated arsenic and culminating in 1961 when scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Lab synthesized lawrencium.

Fuller leverages the chart as evidence that humankind is in“command of the complete inventory of

building components with which the universe is structured.” The elements occur organically and inorganically and are extracted through mining and other earth-altering techniques: in short, they are sourced from soil, water or air — farmed from the earth’s surface or atmosphere for conversion and transformation. In Fuller’s scheme, biological resources are extracted for pragmatic purposes (with food or energy as the results), while elemental resources are cultivated as a result of intellectual curiosity (with scientific knowledge or materials as the result).

Fuller’s preoccupation with this kind of total inventory re-emerged in his 1961 speech to the International Union of Architects, at their VIIth Congress in London; there he argued that architecture schools must “invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total world’s resources, which now only serve 40%, serve 100% through competent design.” From this beginning Fuller then produced a series of documents, all under the banner of World Design Science Decade, 1965-1975. Fuller worked closely with John McHale, a sociologist and artist, to develop these ambitious documents, starting in 1963 with “Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends, and Needs.” McHale became increasingly involved in the WDSD project, and was sole author of the sixth in the series, the 1967 “The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials,” later expanded into a book.

In the article and book, McHale argued that both industry and agricultural needed to be reconceived and redesigned as “ecologically operating systems rather than piecemeal aggregates of unrelated processes.”

McHale wrote that “[o]ur concern here is to more fully appraise the role of man-made

systems which are also natural systems in the overall integral functioning of the system.”

The WDSD culminated in 1965 in World Game, which was also developed in anticipation of the International and Universal Exposition — known popularly as Expo ‘67 — that would open soon in Montreal. The scale and ambition of Fuller’s thinking is evident in his title — which to citizens of the ‘60s would evoke not only the latest world’s fair but also the World Wars, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, etc. If Banham’s The Architecture of the WellTempered Environment (1969) charted an overlooked environmental interior, then Fuller and McHale’s WDSD Documents and World Game charted an overlooked environmental exterior. Each argued for a more efficient use of resources, land and materials — and did so years before the science of climate change emerged as a vital inquiry.

Specifically, the World Game located current and potential energy sources, resources, food trade, mobility patterns and education, all at the global scale. As Fuller explained: “[A] great world logistics game [could] be played by introducing into the computers all the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical resources of the earth.” And in this way — though it would certainly be no easy undertaking — what Fuller called all “human trends, known needs and fundamental characteristics” could be calculated and mapped. According to Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, editors ofYour Private Sky, Fuller intended World Game to operate as a piece of software that could compute, “answers to the mounting social and ecological crisis, which he had been predicting since around 1950.”

It is significant that Fuller’s argument for thinking comprehensively about planetary resources coincided with the famous images of Earth taken from space in the era’s path-breaking space exploration program — enabling a view of the whole planet never before seen.

Fuller’s computational inventory and the astronauts’ visual documentation: each encouraged thinking at ever larger scales. They also helped to launch the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s counterculture, as chronicled in The Whole Earth Catalog, by Stewart Brand (an admirer of Fuller).

The incorporation of resources, and the industries dependent on them, into design thinking is significant in the shift from mitigative sustainability to the productive surface. The inventories underlying the World Game, for example, were meant to offer not a single solution, but rather a resources framework for possible solutions. Fuller wrote that to “accomplish the game’s objective, the resources, pathways and dwelling points around the surface of our eightthousand-mile-diameter, spherical Spaceship Earth must be employed by the players in such a way that the world’s individual humans would each be able to exercise complete actional discretion.” Much as aerial photography profoundly informed perceptions of the 20thcentury landscape and thus influenced its uses, so today satellite imagery and Geographic Information Systems are changing 21st-century perceptions of land use and interpretation. These processes are bringing about new techniques for managing constructed surfaces, which geographer John May argues are not a type of infrastructure but instead “statistical-electrical control spaces.”

In fact, several contemporary practices and thinkers have emerged as proponents of these issues and methods.

71 Generative Plots

In the last decade we find increasing focus on the productive surface. Massive energy generation, water harvesting, and agribusiness projects are transforming buildings and landscapes — turning Fuller’s inventory into sites of intervention, development and generation.

These new surfaces farm and harvest the environment, generating byproducts that are then integrated or distributed.

There is, for instance, the groundbreaking 2003 renovation of Ford Motors’ 1,100-acreRiver Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, by William McDonough + Partners, which converted the liability of the massive roof into a water harvesting system. The living roof, the largest of its kind in North America, now cleans about 10 billion gallons of water annually in what the designers call an “industrial strength” landscape. A similar intervention was completed in 2009 on the roof of the Atlantic City Convention Center in New Jersey. 13,486 photovoltaic panels produce an average of 26 percent of the convention center’s energy.

Savings from the project are estimated at $4.4 million over the next 20 years. And in addition to water and solar, there is wind farming. [17] For example, the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, installed during the 1990s and 2000s in southern California, comprises an array of 3,218 turbine units delivering 615 MW. Combined with the Altamont Pass and Tehachapi Pass wind farms, they account for 11 percent of the wind energy generated worldwide. Approval and development of these farms was initiated as early as 1981, in response to the 1970s energy crisis, meaning that some of the turbines are now significantly out of date. A renewal project that broke ground in 2008 at Tehachapi seeks to expand the field

further, with ambitions to supply power to three million homes by 2013.

Then there are propositions and implementations of agriculture and the productive surface.Eurofresh Farms in Wilcox, Arizona — a place with no shortage of sunshine — houses some 318 acres of hydroponically grown tomatoes. In the United Kingdom, Thanet Earth, majority-owned by Fresca Group Ltd., has recently completed phase one of a massive greenhouse project in Kent. There tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are grown in glass houses in which everything, according to its website, is “computer controlled — from the blinds in the ceilings to the [operable] windows, the liquid feed make-up, the heating, lighting and carbon dioxide levels.” The project designers selected the site for its light levels, proximity to the national grid, high local unemployment and good transport links. Most notably, though more modest in scale, the White House installed a vegetable gardenon the South Lawn in 2009, which is the first on that site since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during World War II. In many ways, this is more telling than any industry or science development. Intended somewhat didactically — though it does provide produce for White House chef Sam Kass — the garden plots yield vegetables, fruits, herbs and honey. [18] And to control harmful bugs, the Presidential team deploys not pesticides but ladybugs and praying mantises.

Producing Design

Productive surfaces articulate a new public realm, and with that a new public — a public characterized not by whether it is urban, suburban, or rural, but by whether it participates in the cultivation of its necessities, of its energy and food. The shift in emphasis from the “function” of Modernism to the “production” of contemporary practice can be charted through relationship of architecture to the larger environment. The productive surfaceyields, making it not only responsive to its environment but indeed operational because of it. This is not a sustainability mantra so much as it is a biological one — the goal is an architecture of synthetic surfaces servicing variously scaled constructed environments, including the roof, the site, and the wider climatological and ecological territory.

The productive surface acknowledges and capitalizes on its innate potential for a seasonal or cyclical yield. It is dynamic and responsive, yet occupiable and tangible. As the history of the productive surface emerges, its key provocateurs are likely to be corporations, venture capitalists, farmers and technologists.

How might the productive surface generate new economies, programs, typologies and public realms? For the architect and landscape architect, the opportunity is ripe. ❚

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10 spa cial int elli gen ce : new fut ur e s fo r

Arch itec ture

william l . f ox

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How do designers understand space?

This large question is the central focus of Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture [John Wiley & Sons], a wide-ranging and ambitious recent book by Leon van Schaik, who holds the apt title of Innovation Professor of Architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Schaik introduces his topic with a deceptively simple question with complex implications: What if architects, instead of endlessly recombining elements from a stock vocabulary of building forms derived from a

preoccupation with shelter, actually designed from “our ideas about space, our histories in space, our communal mental space all built upon that combination of inherited capabilities that have evolved into us over millennia, and the unfolding of those capabilities in specific environments?”

Schaik anchors his discussion of spatial intelligence by acknowledging the influential work of Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard, who two decades ago enlarged the understanding of mental capability with his theory of multiple intelligences.

Gardner identified different types of human intelligence, including logical-mathematical, verbal-linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musicalrhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and visual-spatial — this last a special talent for visualizing and mentally manipulating spaces that is integral to our navigational abilities. In essence, Schaik proposes that we reposition the foundation of architecture — to move away from a reliance on our logical-mathematical mind and to hew more closely to our spatial intelligence.

“What if our forbears had professionalized architecture around spatial intelligence rather

than the technologies of shelter?” he asks.

“Might society find it easier to recognize what is unique about what our kind of thinking can offer?”

Spatial Intelligence unwinds from these initial questions by arguing that the professionalization of architecture in England in the 1840s was rooted partly in the envy of architects for engineers; the designers of bridges and dams and other utilitarian structures drew upon a highly rationalized typology of forms to meet any conceivable challenge — which impressed the public

as the epitome of enlightenment enterprise.

So when architecture sought to standardize its own vocabulary, and professionalize its activities, the emerging field “sought out as its body of knowledge the notion of being Master Builders.” [p. 11] But this was neither a necessary nor inevitable emphasis, and, as Schaik agues, it effectively closed out other possibilities, including a more intuitive — dare we say creative? — approach to buildings and environments. One of Schaik’s concerns will be to argue for this enlarged approach — for a field informed not only by formal and constructional vocabularies but also by neurology,

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information systems theory and an acknowledgement that buildings have the ability to make people happy.

Besides establishing his themes, the introduction also acclimates us readers to Schaik’s writing and teaching styles, both of which start with a crowd of images and propositions from which the themes will emerge and proliferate and find shape. The way to proceed, then, is to relax and realize that the book itself is a trope for the kind of practice Schaik envisions, one that draws upon and productively blends a host of information and

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ideas, from the history of ship building to that almost mystical French tradition of walking aimlessly known as dérive.

The first chapter provides a primer on the nature of spatial intelligence, from its distribution throughout the body to the relationship of sleeping and dreaming to the mapping of space; and here Schaik points to a gap. “Much has been discovered that makes the existence of spatial intelligence an ever stronger presence in the ways that we work in the world,” he writes. “But we ... would have to acknowledge that we face a central mystery: while we know more and more about how we are put together, and of the material that constitutes us, and how it organizes itself and faces the challenges of being in the world, a working hypothesis on how the bundle of matter that we are achieves consciousness eludes us.” [p. 22] The second chapter discusses how spatial intelligence serves to “build our mental space,” [p. 36], and how the rise of analytical taxonomy in the enlightenment era broadly disrupted what had been a pre-modern unity of “time, place and mental space” — and a unity of individual mental space with creativity. The regional European architectures of the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods developed in cultures that were intimate with their natural and cultural environs; the principal purpose of architecture “was to represent, within the belief systems of specific societies, their fullest understandings of the workings of the universe.” [p. 45] But this gave way to in modern times to a global encyclopedia of forms disconnected from local intelligence about specific environments.

Plainly this disruption was both spatial and temporal — witness Greek columns supporting the porticos of the plantations of the antebellum South. As an instance of how to counteract this deep and long-established practice of dislocated appropriation, he cites his own experience in Khutsong Township, in South Africa, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, where he and another architect worked on a project to build homes. (Schaik himself was born in the Natal province in the South Africa.) Working with an anthropologist, an urban planner and several local social workers, the architect devised a process that began “by helping each family to make a model of the shanty they had built for themselves when they arrived as squatters,” and resulted in 1,000

self-designed homes, each “tailored to the mental space of the family” that designed it.

Schaik broadens his thesis in the next chapter, tackling this pre-modern/modern historical disruption as it is manifested in cities. Schaik is not a puritan, and he acknowledges that the juxtaposition of forms and styles across space and time can produce delightful buildings. Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London, of 1851, and W.R. Lethaby’s Melsetter House in Orkney, of 1898, are provided as exemplars, the former a pastiche of quotations from earlier civilizations unified under the naked engineering of a monumental greenhouse, the latter a traditional farmhouse morphing into Arts and Crafts.

But in the case of the design of a city, Schaik contends that distilling the best forms from a global encyclopedia is a formula for disaster.

In a complicated argument, Schaik traces the processes by which earlier civilizations created cities, arguing that essentially each generation was “laying down a stratum” that recorded its culture, and arguing further that the disunifying impulses of modernity effectively ended this complex process, bringing about the “separation of architecture from the matrix of the city.” [p. 59, 60] Schaik describes how an increasing “self-consciousness” and professionalization “slowly ended the tradition of the usually anonymous master builders who both designed and constructed” cities and their buildings, and “replaced it with the architects as designers and arbiters of taste.”

In Schaik’s view, the more successful efforts of civic design are founded upon attempts by urban designers and city planners to understand what he terms the “epidemiology” of a city — which is to say, to document and analyze how

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79 patterns of habitation spread outward and upward in response to local environments, and then to develop appropriate responses.

Ildefonso Cerda’s chamfered grid in Barcelona is given as an example. Schaik explains: “Cerda’s proposition for the extension of Barcelona arose from a spatial analysis of the longevity of the citizens of the ancient city. This epidemiological approach revealed that the higher up in the buildings of the old city people dwelt, the longer they lived. The pioneering spatial distribution of statistics then cross-referenced to adjacency to sunlight and fresh air, and distance from sewage and refuse.” Cerda’s solution, Schaik points out, was “to extend the city across its coastal hinterland on a grid that enshrined, in its very shape, spatial relationships between sunlight and air and propositions about transport that were the logical consequence of seeking to enshrine equality of access to the goods of city living for all of its inhabitants, not only for those rich enough to live in the top storeys.

The chamfered corners of the grid allowed for the threading of cables and tramcar turning circles through any part of the grid...” [p. 63] Another instance of this epidemiological approach is the organic mix of legal and illegal development in the neighborhoods of Taipei, which has been documented by Schaik’s colleague Sand Helsel. Here what could almost be described as an Asian version of a souk enables small businesses to incubate in an ad hoc economic environment impossible to achieve within the strictures of a highly rationalized modern grid. As Schaik writes: “The city has a fine grain of development... and families vie with each other through architectural invention and through

novel encroachments on the public realm....

Helsel and her students made figureground plans of the legal structures of the Yong Kung community, and of the legal and illegal structures combined, revealing in the comparison a ‘swollen rice’ effect as the actual boundaries of the spaces were constricted by the expanded profiles of each small building. This is not simply a plan effect.... We often marvel at the phenomenon, but do we appreciate that we are looking at the popular manifestation of spatial culture?” [p. 67] Spatial Intelligence is illustrated extensively with photographs Schaik has taken worldwide, and the fourth and fifth chapters rely heavily upon both the breadth of his travels and the depth of his image library. Chapter four takes us on an extended tour of what Schaik sees as specific redemptive moments found throughout the history of architecture; or, as Schaik puts it, “Despite the manifest lack of awareness of [the] interdependence between architecture and the mental space that gives rise to it, the world is peppered with places and spaces that have the power to move us.” [p. 83] One example is the neo-classical Grand Central Station, in New York City, which, as Schaik says “haunts the mental space of New Yorkers,” and appears as an “emotive force” in, for instance, novels by Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Smart. [p. 93] Chapter Five, titled “Pioneers of Mental Space,” explores the works of such contemporary architects as Peter Zumthor, Sean Godsell, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Kathryn Findlay, and Zaha Hadid; Schaik argues that these practitioners use spatial intelligence to move beyond the mere flexing of their status as master builders or star architects and in the process create designs

that address society’s need to integrate memory with place and our senses.

Schaik describes the Swiss Peter Zumthor as “the architect who possibly above all others today ... operates within a single unified mental space.” [p. 142] Zumthor, who started out as a carpenter, has an almost uncanny sensitivity to local materials. “It is as if they did not exist, they would have had to be spontaneously invented,” writes Schaik [p. 143] Thus his elliptically-shaped Sogn Benedetg Chapel, in Sumvitg (1989), responds to the avalancheswept ridge that is its site, an homage to nature and a softly rounded refuge for meditation.

“Nothing here is mimicry; the design reads the site with mathematical accuracy,” says Schaik, “defining the ellipse as if it were a natural topological derivative of the spine.” [p.

145-146] Or, for another example, Schaik describes Hadid’s Maggie’s Centre, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland (1986), as making a compelling case for the use of the “fold” as more than a fashionable design trope. Hadid’s design, he writes, “wraps the tarmac of the existing hospital car park into a folded ribbon on the edge of the cavity of a wooded former quarry, and sets this knot against the flank of the hospital’s slab of rooms...” But the point is not merely virtuoso form. “You keep rolling along the edge of a steep declivity into that abandoned quarry until the programme of Maggie’s Center — a kitchen for making coffee and snacks, a large table adjacent for round-table discussions, a service area for the kitchen, a library, a quiet zone for spiritual contemplation, a sunny outlook — is accommodated.” [p. 158] In a sense, it’s as if Hadid had given the patients a design with which to exercise their minds while recuperating. Although Schaik does not

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say so explicitly, it could be extrapolated here that the deployment of creativity in the service of diverse needs is required to sustain a family, a city and a state.

It could also be argued that Schaik’s comprehensive and eclectic teaching method — which I’ve tried to suggest here — makes him an exemplary design educator. That’s a large claim, as the field is notable for hosting a crowd of talented and persuasive teachers.

But the final chapters — which outline how practitioners should be schooled in designing real and virtual environments, and the ethical concerns that fall out from such a discipline — are proof that Schaik is willing to take on the entrenched wisdom of what has become a deeply analytical profession that fails time and again to remember a simple condition of life: happiness. At one point, referencing the philosopher of science W. Zimmerli, Schaik notes that “members of a profession around the world have — due to their

acculturation of a common body of knowledge — more in common with each other than with members of their own families who are in different professions.” He continues: “This is a trap for us, whatever profession we inhabit, but it is particularly devastating for architects whose business is — I argue — our spatial intelligence.” Schaik has an unshakeable belief that architecture can promote well-being and joy, and at one point he even affirms: “There are real spaces — and we all know this — that support us, buoy us up in our endeavors, but we forget to demand them!” [p. 177] For Schaik, as exemplified in his latest book, teaching students to design homes, workplaces and cities that awaken spatial intelligence as an ethical concern — versus schooling them in a formal and empty discourse of abstract forms — arises from an obligation to address what is human. If that’s a heresy, it’s a valuable one. ❚

11 pap er a rchi tect ur e ,eme r gi ng

urb ani sm

TIM LOVE

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The current economic downturn has impacted the building industry and architecture profession more severely than many other market sectors.

As Scott Van Voorhis commented in the November 9, 2009 issue of Banker and Tradesman: “Amid handwringing over a national unemployment rate that is nearing 10 percent, architects are living through their own equivalent of the Great Depression. Estimates of unemployment in the field range from 16 percent to as much as 40 percent.” This upheaval has generated some thoughtful

soul-searching by academics and architecture critics about appropriate priorities for moving forward.

As early as November 2008, when many firms were first jolted by a sudden downturn, John McMorrough, an assistant professor and director of the graduate program in architecture at Ohio State, gave an informal lecture at Northeastern University that sought analogies between the current economic situation and the deep recession in the mid1970s. McMorrough asked whether the shortage of commissions would spur a return

to the theoretical speculation — the paper architecture — of the 1970s, albeit digitally produced and broadcast, given the discipline-altering advances in representational technology during the ensuing forty years.

[2] In a recent issue of Architectural Record, James Murdock asked the question more directly: “Will we see a new generation of “paper architects” — the archetypal figure from the last recession?”

These are important questions: with the building boom over, and as both professional offices and academic programs seek to reframe their

roles to adapt to our fast-changing culture, we have an opportunity to recalibrate the relationship between practice and education — and more, to realign progressive practice with academic inquiry. With fewer projects on the boards, firms with relevant agendas, media connections and the resources to negotiate the new economic order will increasingly create paper architecture, design projects that remain unbuilt — not as an end in itself but rather as a bully pulpit and tool for self-definition. So what should this paper architecture look like and what agendas should it raise?

To answer these questions, it’s useful to recall a crucial distinction between the kinds of paper architecture created earlier. In his article James Murdock includes as precedent the work compiled in Five Architects, as well as the proposals of Archigram, Superstudio, Bernard Tschumi, and Lebbeus Woods.

But Murdock does not differentiate between the theoretical work that was centered on discipline-specific concerns such as language and design methodology, and exemplified by unbuilt projects by Peter Eisenman and Aldo Rossi and championed by the journal Oppositions, and the speculative

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work which was a form of social critique, and exemplified by the utopian visions of Archigram, Superstudio, andLebbeus Woods. For John McMorrough, the speculative opportunities for paper architecture predate the downturn and reside mostly within design research and thinking enabled by the computer. He identified certain projects — Toyo Ito’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park (2002), Asymptote’s Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi (2009), and the proposal by MOS for Ordos 100 (2008) — as speculative architecture that was made real (or almost real) by the economic boom in places like Dubai and China, and by wealthy patrons of progressive architecture, whether in Abu Dhabi or Mongolia.

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But despite the allure and influence of these projects, and many others made possible by digital modeling, the paper architecture that seems to be gaining traction during this downturn is focused less on architecture as a self-referential discipline and more on the imperatives of the deepening environmental crisis. Like the paper architecture of the 1970s that focused on alternative futures rather than disciplinary mechanics, recent proposals range from realistic to utopian — and yet so far they remain largely within the realm of provocation rather than practice. One of the most serious is Architecture Research Office’s vision of Manhattan after the predicted sea level rise caused by global warming, which is supported by analytical maps that demonstrate the vulnerability of New York to rising seas and future storm surges.

ARO’s engagement with infrastructural issues and interdisciplinary approach are both laudable; yet one wishes the project renderings were more focused on the character of the new infrastructures that will need to be built rather than on the ethereal buildings that populate the future edges of Manhattan.

[4] And despite its depth and thoroughness, ultimately the scheme seems unsure whether its intent is, on the one hand, to design a city that can co-exist and even benefit from a more direct connection with the water, or on the other, to provoke a call-to-arms by powerful real estate forces in New York (but to do what?). ARO’s renderings of a future Manhattan suggest that their project is more an illustration of the potential consequences of climate change than a disciplinary response to impending crisis.

The premiated proposals for the WPA 2.0, a competition organized by cityLab at UCLA, are another example of realistic-utopian visions centered more on the environmental mission of the program brief than on the architectural consequences. Like ARO’s proposal, the projects are architectural illustrations of non-architectural technologies, no matter how fascinating, virtuous or timely the ideas. In spirit and focus the proposals are remarkably similar to the kind of projects being designed in advanced studios at Harvard and Yale, with their amalgamation of statistics-heavy environmental research and whimsical form-making [see my earlier essay].

But is the realm of “what if?” technology and provocative illustration, like King’s turn-of-thecentury visions of New York, the only or most

productive role for progressive architecture within the current economic and social context?

Is there a course of action that might be relevant to the exigencies of practice and to the aspirations to expand disciplinary knowledge and skill?

One especially promising approach will be to re-embed architecture, as a discipline, within important emerging ideas about the future of urbanism and the existing realities of the contemporary city. For the discipline of architecture, as articulated in the schools, has long had an ambivalent relationship to these realities. Most architecture curricula are untethered to relevant urban issues, and most do not integrate studio pedagogy within the broader intellectual framework of the city and do not include an urban design studio in the course sequence.

A telling consequence of this ambivalence is the typical treatment in studio projects of the relationship of buildings to site. For at least two decades the most prevalent framework for conceiving a building in design school studios has been a certain kind of contextualism, in which the specificities of site conspire to make each architectural opportunity a unique project, a one-off. A range of methodologies has evolved to privilege this one-of-a-kind-ness. Perhaps the most common of these is the result of mapping (in plan) the idiosyncratic aspects of a site in order to divine the “site forces” that might shape the project. Usually this technique results in a correspondingly idiosyncratic formal language, since every twitch and fidget of the surrounding geometries and grids are used as justification to generate complex threedimensional forms. It’s curious: while the city itself and urbanistic ideas do not drive the logic of such architectural projects, the site

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87 geometry becomes a kind of alibi for highly elaborated formal speculation. In such a process the function of the building becomes almost irrelevant, or in some cases, is symbolically linked to the compositional connections made to the larger context through the mapping analysis. Not surprisingly, community centers and branch libraries were once popular vehicles for this approach; more recently, programs that both comment on the site and try to fix it, like recycling centers with landscape bioremediation strategies, have been in vogue.

To begin to re-engage architecture with urban design, certain ideas are proving especially promising. In recent years landscape urbanism has emerged as the most persuasive model of urbanism in North American architecture schools.

James Corner at Penn and Charles Waldheim at Harvard have each been arguing, through writings and projects, for an urban design that is motivated by and that facilitates interrelated environmental processes and infrastructural systems. Significantly, the rise of landscape urbanism discourse is being fueled by both a growing body of theoretical texts and by still mostly unbuilt — paper — proposals that identify a territory for invention between the specific project and the larger ecological and urban forces acting upon the site.

Various factors account for the success of landscape urbanism. Chief among these is its strong engagement with ecological and environmental issues; this makes it a compelling alternative to New Urbanism, which since the early ‘90s and until recently has been the only comprehensive practice-model for integrating architecture into the city. (While New Urbanism offers an impressively overarching framework, its proponents are openly hostile

to contemporary modes of architectural expression, making the entire approach offlimits to serious discourse. The success and subsequent codification of New Urbanism, as much as the ascendance of sophisticated digital design methodologies, might explain why urban issues were dropped from most architecture curricula in the past couple of decades.) Another factor is the virtuosity of the representational graphics that illustrate both the landscape urbanist design proposals and the supporting technical data. The finalists’ proposals in the WPA 2.0 competition underscore how fully the design methodology of leading landscape urbanist offices such as Field Operations and Stoss are informing the preoccupations and illustrative techniques of progressive architects.

Yet despite the many strengths of landscape urbanism as new model for relevant practice, there is something missing: the fundamental role of the building as a city-making component.

In a number of landscape urbanist proposals, buildings are often understood largely as contributors to the sets of statistics that account for such phenomena asstormwater flow, energy usage, heat island effect, etc. In Martin Felsen and Sara Dunn’s provocative Growing Water — a proposal for eco-boulevards in Chicago — existing buildings are rendered as luminescent-white ghost-like apparitions in order to frame and highlight a dynamic new open space network. This is not an oversight. In fact,in landscape urbanism, this kind of fadingout of the buildings is not a simplistic rejection of the traditional city for a pastoral urbanism of community gardens and bike paths; rather it is a critique of the viability of architecture in the discourse of contemporary urbanism.

The landscape urbanist critique is all too justified. Yet ultimately this recessive role for architecture will be unproductive, at the very least for practical reasons: because the individual building and the assemblage of several buildings, as measurable units of real estate development, constitute the basic elements of contemporary city-making. For most clients, it is the functional need for built space that generates a project. For the various self-interested parties that populate the real estate and construction industries, it is the use-category of a building, e.g., office, hospital, housing, education, that then shapes the design of the project. And even before design begins in earnest, the business plan is developed and enriched through assumptions about initial capital costs, potential revenue and performance measured in predicted lifecycle costs — all of which are calculated with the goal of minimizing financial risk. The upshot, in the modern market economy, is that lending institutions and financial underwriters tend to favor proven building configurations and that these configurations — the so-called comparables, or “comps” — have come to persist as almost inevitable types. The center-core plan of the commercial high-rise and the doubleloaded corridor of countless residential towers are only the most ubiquitous results of the feedback loop of the risk-averse real estate industry.

Rather than ignore these influences, urban design should engage the logic of marketdriven buildings — not as an end in itself but instead as a way to imagine alternative and more innovative solutions for the design of buildings and cities. What if practitioners sought to align the goals of progressive building design with the promising new frameworks of landscape urbanism? To reestablish the role

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of the building, as a discrete but necessary urban artifact, into the systemic approach of the landscape urbanists? This would be a fertile field for design speculation — for the unbuilt projects being generated in this latest turn of the economic cycle. So instead of being rendered as passive poché, the buildings in landscape urbanist projects could be use to generate positive programmatic and spatial friction that could inform the site infrastructure and help shape the open space network. If the first forays into this cross-disciplinary approach are rigorous and successful, the result might be a rebalancing of urban discourse, the creation of a more comprehensive vision.

But can design academia and professional speculation engage real-world economic determinants without abandoning the discipline to overly professional concerns? For the schools, one tactic might be to privilege prototypical and paradigmatic problems in studios and reengage the idea of type, which was mostly abandoned in the 1990s in favor of theoretical discourses that could accommodate the formal possibilities opened up by the computer. And for the today’s paper architects, an answer might be to explore not expressive and unique solutions but instead new prototypes for common building types.

Most market-driven building types are, of course, remarkably resistant to wholesale transformation. So I propose two tactics for

attack. The first — the stealth approach — is to seek to change building types on the basis of their own internal market logic. Here the growing demand, both regulatory and cultural, for more sustainable design — for renewable energy, water conservation, et al. — will provide an impetus for invention. A second and more radical direction is to seek to develop wholly new paradigms for the basic programs that constitute the city. This will require searching analyses of the social, economic and cultural composition of our cities, and also more speculative thinking about sustainable models of city-making.

There are inherent risks in a pedagogical program built upon an empirical and pragmatic foundation. For this framework to flourish, design speculation will need to focus on the cultural and social implications of re-imagined building types and potential urbanisms rather than on their economic and functional performance. Projects dependent on the authority of scientific data can never have the productive thickness of design inquiries that are driven by deeper cultural analyses and speculation. As we architects struggle not just to survive the recession but also to expand our disciplinary range — as we create our own paper architecture — we would do well to concentrate on creating a complementary urban vision that would match that of the landscape urbanists in realism and intensity.❚

12 tah rir squ ar e : so c ial med ia

publ ic sp ace

MO HA ME D E L S HA HE D

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A few months ago I moved from Brooklyn back to Cairo for what I anticipated would be a quiet year of research on my dissertation.

My topic is mid-20th-century architecture and urban planning in Egypt; my focus is the 1952 coup d’état that swept away the monarchy of King Farouk, and the period of pan-Arab socialism that followed under the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser — a period during which the new republic deployed a modernist, international style design for state building projects.

I’ve been living in Garden City, a leafy neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Nile, just a short walk from Tahrir Square. Almost

daily I walked to Tahrir to catch a bus for the hour-long ride to the new suburban campus of the American University. My routine was not unusual. Tahrir Square is part of daily life for many people: it’s a major downtown square surrounded by important government headquarters and major cultural institutions, and it’s a busy crossroads jammed with honking cars and buses. For tourists Tahrir is the locale of the famed Egyptian Museum; for some Cairenes it is the destination for official state business, for many others it is one of the over-congested places of downtown Cairo to be avoided. For me — even before the

latest revolution — Tahrir Square had come to symbolize the failure of the urban planning policies carried out during the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak.

The Mubarak government extended a series of policies initiated under Anwar Sadat.

The regime supported laws and actions that sharply limited Egyptians’ access to public space — to places where citizens could congregate, meet, talk, interact. It promoted the development of gated communities with private parks, golf courses and luxury shopping malls, and in doing so facilitated the exodus

of Cairo’s middle and upper classes into the desert at the city’s periphery. At the same time the government ignored the city’s center; its ongoing mismanagement of housing development has resulted in the extensive zone of informal housing, mostly unfinished brick shanties, that rings Cairo.

And Mubarek worked to effectively dismantle and depopulate Cairo’s much-admired public squares and parks, including not just Tahrir Square but also Ramses Square and Azbakiyya Gardens. For decades, in fact, public policy and urban planning, like most governmental matters, were filtered through

the harsh lens of state security. Urban open spaces — anywhere citizens might congregate and stage political demonstrations — were systematically subdivided or fenced off or given over to vehicular traffic and flyovers, and thus made challenging and even scary for pedestrians. Collectively such policies have led not only to the decline of public space but also to the inexorable deterioration of cities and the erosion of civic pride.

The January 25th Revolution has had a dramatic, immediate effect on how Egyptians occupy Cairo and interact with one another.

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Commentators in the West have been quick to credit online social networking with empowering the protests. But the revolution that started in January 2011 in Cairo has provided powerful evidence that the virtual is not enough: in the course of several historic days in Tahrir Square it became decisively clear that the occupation of physical urban space was, and continues to be, crucial to the success and continuity of the revolution. No doubt the initial rush of online exhortations, including the Jan. 25 call to protest police brutality, was vitally important; but as we now know, the country was unplugged for six days,

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from Jan. 28 through Feb. 5, during which period the protests actually grew larger and the protestors became even more determined not merely to express popular dissent but ultimately to overthrow the regime.

Indeed, in the past few weeks Tahrir has became a truly public square. Before it was merely a big and busy traffic circle — and again, its limitations were the result of political design, of policies that not only discouraged but also prohibited public assembly. Under emergency law — established from the moment Mubarak took office in 1981 and yet to be lifted — a gathering of even a few adults in a public square would constitute cause for arrest. Like all autocracies, the Mubarak government understood the power of a true public square, of a place where citizens meet, mingle, promenade, gather, protest, perform and share ideas; it understood that a true midan — Arabic for public square — is a physical manifestation of democracy. A truly public Midan al-Tahrir would have been feared as a threat to regime security, and so over the years the state deployed the physical design of urban space as one of its chief means of discouraging democracy.

In Tahrir this meant erecting fences and subdividing open areas into manageable plots of grass and sidewalks. To cite one prominent example: the large portion of the square that fronts the Egyptian museum was, until the 1960s, a grassy plaza with crisscrossing paths and a grand fountain. Here families and students would gather throughout the day; it was also a notorious meeting point for lovers on a date in the heart of the city.

But in the 1970s, the government fenced off the area — and more, it never offered any clear explanation of what was to be the fate of this favorite meeting spot. Cairenes speculated that perhaps it was closed to allow for construction of the Cairo Metro or other infrastructure projects. Sometime in the past decade a sign appeared, announcing that a multi-level underground parking garage was being built. During the protests in Tahrir Square, activists took down the fence and used it to build barricades to protect themselves from the attacks of pro-Mubarak thugs — and the removal of the fence revealed that none of the promised construction had ever taken place.

The area had been taken away from the public sphere precisely to avoid the possibility of large crowds congregating in Tahrir. Such was Mubarak’s urban planning legacy.

When protests erupted on January 25, peaceful demonstrators from all over the city started marching toward Tahrir Square. The square was a magnet partly because of its central location and symbolic name — Tahrir means “liberation” — and partly because of its history as the scene of dissent. Earlier demonstrations, however, such as those against the Iraq War, were much smaller, and quickly quashed by police. This time demonstrators were determined to occupy and hold the square — to symbolically reclaim it. Violence between the security forces of the Interior Ministry and protesters broke out on the evening of Jan. 25, and the square began to empty; but the use of excessive force then made Tahrir an even more potent symbol, and spurred the larger protests that started on Jan. 28; by this point an estimated 30,000 people had gathered. State security, too, recognized the growing symbolism of the place and took still more vigorous measures to fortify the area, using water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition against crowds of people equipped mostly with cameras and cell phones. And so on Jan. 28 the battle shifted yet again; now the goal was not only to defeat state security forces and to topple the regime but also to claim the square as the main stage of events and to transform it into the epicenter of the revolution.

During the next few days, as the state police retreated and protesters gained control, Mubarak sent paid thugs to attack citizens with sticks, knives and Molotov cocktails, and in a desperate and surreal move, he also

95 sent plainclothes officers on horseback and camelback. There were violent moments, we know; but once these ended what remained was a new Tahrir Square, quickly dubbed the “free people’s republic of Tahrir.” Entry points were manned by volunteers who checked for weapons and identification — denying entry to anyone employed by the Interior Ministry.

Outside the checkpoints, long cues formed and people waited patiently for hours. Once inside, past the checkpoints, new arrivals walked through long rows of men and women who welcomed them with cheers. By this point the military were standing by, at the entrances, helping to secure the area. The square now belonged to the people who had defeated the regime’s efforts to disperse and defuse the young revolution; by this point the crowds had grown to an estimated 400,000. And for the next two weeks, what happened in Tahrir was more than a demonstration; it was the creation of a dynamic and resourceful community of citizens brought together by the shared goal of bringing true democracy to Egypt.

The mood in Tahrir ranged from cautious and depressed to celebratory and jubilant, depending mostly on the developments of the day (and to some extent on the weather).

There were some who dug in and set up tents, making Tahrir their new address. There were many more, like myself, who were daily visitors — spending hours in the square chatting with strangers, strolling around and taking in the creative signs, listening to music and making notes on the inventive protest chants, and then returning home at the end of the day.

And always there was an amazing crosssection of Egyptian society — a mix of class, gender, age, sexual orientation, dress code, ethnicity and religion — strangers who under

normal circumstances would never have met.

The revolutionary spirit seemed to break down the longstanding barriers, and to imbue a new sense of solidarity and acceptance.

During these days Tahrir became a hub for social activity and artistic creativity. People sold food and drinks, set up recycling bins and portable toilets, organized the logistics of daily life. Protest signs were humorous and creative.

One said, “Step down, my wife is about to have a baby and he doesn’t want to see you.”

Another said, “Thanks for bringing us together.

Now leave.” And yet another, held aloft by a stoic young man: “Step down already, my arms hurt.” Throughout the square bloggers were streaming comments and images onto the Internet. Doctors and nurses were providing free healthcare in impromptu clinics.

Filmmakers were interviewing protesters and creating an instant archive, a visual and oral record of history as it was unfolding. Musicians, professional and amateur, wrote songs and tested them on eager audiences. There were poets, puppeteers and comedians. Art teachers provided supplies and then displayed the artworks that resulted on a public wall.

There was even an artist who painted a large canvas that invited protestors to participate in its making. Tahrir Square had been transformed not only into a social and public space but also into the biggest spontaneous event of community-organizing and nationbuilding the country had ever seen. With the protection of the army, as the security threat abated, Tahrir took on the atmosphere of a carnival.

But the occupation of Tahrir Square, day and night, by mass numbers of peaceful

protestors, had an over-arching purpose: to bring international attention to the demands of the people, to force the government to step down, and to pressure the military — constitutionally obligated to protect the people not the regime — to take action and topple Mubarak. And ultimately it was this peaceful occupation of an important urban space in the nation’s major city that brought down a repressive and tenacious government.

In the days following Mubarak’s resignation, thousands took to the streets with cleaning supplies, brooms and trash bags; they were responding to spontaneous nationwide calls by activists and concerned citizens. Cleaning efforts had begun in Tahrir just days after the start of the revolution, but with Mubarak truly gone, Egyptians wanted to clean — to cleanse — the entire country, to rid it of trash, of the old regime. Cairenes scoured their city, and many give Tahrir special attention. Streets were swept, anti-regime graffiti removed, statues were washed. Artists and students painted patriotic slogans on blank walls: “Welcome to the new Egypt,” “From Egypt with love,” and “25 January Revolution.” Construction companies dispatched volunteers to move mounds of trash to landfills. A true sense of civic pride, suppressed for decades, has blossomed.

A week after Mubarak stepped down, the military helped activists organize an official celebration in Tahrir Square; an estimated 1.5 million citizens turned out. Such a gesture would have been unthinkable before the events of January 25. Egyptians know that the real revolution has just begun, and they are building on their newfound, hard-won knowledge — that

their fight for democracy is inseparably linked to their ability to assemble in urban space. The military understands this too, which is why it is tolerating public calls for mass demonstrations to take place every Tuesday and Friday across the country. These demonstrations are meant to maintain pressure on the military to release political prisoners, oversee the amendment of the constitution, and lift emergency law, among other demands. And even as Tahrir Square has captured the attention of international media and became a symbol of popular revolution, people around the country have taken to the streets, occupying squares and avenues as they continue to protest and demand the resignation of local governors, as Egypt transitions to democracy. ❚

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13 wha ts c ook ing in kit ch en

des ign?

ale x and r a lange

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Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture and a New York-based architect, is famous for his broad palette of traditional styles that includes neoclassical, gothic and art deco. So it was no surprise to see his condominium tower at 15 Central Park West draw heavily on the classic prewar New York apartment, complete with crown molding and parquet floors. Mr. Stern’s luxury condos don’t hew to prewar standards in every respect, of course; they have all the modern amenities (and then some) that you’d expect for eight figures. Still, it’s striking how far the floor plans

veer from tradition in a place that has come to define the modern American home: the kitchen.

Prewar kitchens, no matter how grand the apartment, were for servants and wives. They were small spaces, the only light coming via the air shaft, closed off by double-swing doors.

Many of 15 Central Park West’s apartments, in contrast, have open, airy kitchens big enough for tables, islands, sofas and widescreen TVs. And Mr. Stern’s designs aren’t alone — whether in new apartment towers or suburban homes, today’s kitchens are as much about entertaining and relaxing as slicing and boiling.

The contemporary kitchen is a huge leap forwards in making the home more casual and meals more sociable. But it papers over a century of attempts by designers, engineers and home economists to make life easier for the cook. The narrow galley kitchen, the horror of today’s host-cum-chef, is in fact a paragon of efficiency, saving steps by putting ingredients and gadgets within easy reach. And although some architects and their clients look askance at their cramped spaces and out-of-the-way location, they were actually a vast improvement on the kitchens of the Victorian era, which were large, unplanned and inefficient.

Not that efficiency in kitchen design hasn’t trickled down to the present. Many of the elements that define today’s kitchen — integrated counters, cabinets and appliances, modular and wall-mounted — started with a new type of cabinet invented and popularized during the 1910s by the Hoosier Manufacturing Company. The cabinet looked like a china hutch on steroids. Built-in sifters held flour and sugar, with a built-in spice rack on the door of the cabinet above. An enameled counter slid out to create work space and pots, pans and bowls were stored in cupboards below.

A food mill could be permanently attached to

the side, and basic recipe charts developed

by Christine Frederick, a pioneering home economist, were affixed to the cabinet doors.

The housewife or servant could stand in one place and make a complete meal, stepping back only to bring filled pans to the stove or dirty bowls to the sink — a many-armed Shiva, measuring, mixing, grinding and pouring.

By 1920, the company had sold over 2 million Hoosier cabinets, which promised that “every staple food, every utensil, every movable adjunct to the preparation of meals — and the cleaning up after them — finds its logical place. Each

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is easy to get at — without walking, reaching or stooping.” When industrial psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth made her famous motion studies of housework during the 1920s, she focused on the tasks embedded in the Hoosier kitchen. Saving steps meant saving time, saving steps meant saving energy and having one’s tools close to hand was as important at home as it was in the factory (which Gilbreth also helped to reform, along with engineer husband Frank Gilbreth).

But it was a German architect, Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky, who codified and popularized

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the fitted, modular galley kitchen. Schutte-Lihotsky’s “Frankfurt Kitchen,” which she created under the direction of Ernst May, the architect in charge of Frankfurt’s Municipal Building Department, was the first mass-produced kitchen to combine rational planning and modernist design. It is conceived as two parallel bars, one with a stove and a counter, the other with a sink, a counter and storage. SchutteLihotsky included an ingenious system of storage bins, similar to those on the Hoosier cabinet, which came with their own pour spouts. A sliding door allowed a housewife to close herself in, or keep an eye on the kids; later she could close the door on the smells and dirty pots. (In September, as part of the exhibition “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen,” the Museum of Modern Art will be exhibiting a complete Frankfurt Kitchen, recently acquired and now the earliest work by a female architect in its collection.)

So how did we go from efficiency to entertainment? In Mad Men, Betty Draper has wall

In other words, what felt like a battle in the 1920s was, by the mid-1960s, a victory.

ovens and a stove-top island, both desirable today; the differences are the brown plaid wallpaper and cabinets made from dowdy knotted pine. In other words, what felt like a battle in the 1920s was, by the mid-1960s, a victory. The emphasis on time-saving consumer technology, born in the Frankfurt Kitchen and fueled by the postwar domestic revolution in the United States, brought us the microwave, the fridge-freezer combo, the automatic coffee maker and a thousand other gadgets; with those in place, we could relax. The barrier between the workplace of the kitchen and the social space of the living room broke down; we could invite the rest of the family in.

Packaged foods meant children could help themselves. By the 1970s men were doing more cooking. The kitchen island became less a work station than a coffee counter to which anyone could pull up a stool. The kitchen cabinets got tricked out with moldings and white paint to match the furniture. The

pass-through, one of few modernist domestic innovations to be adopted at a large scale, got bigger and bigger until the whole wall between kitchen and living room disappeared. With dishwashers, insulated stoves and powerful vents, there was no need for anyone to take the heat or look at a pile of dirty pots.

The opening of the kitchen is not just for the suburbs, either; even small-scale New York apartment renovations typically remove the traditional wall. No one wants to be in the back of the house.

In an instance of history coming full circle, the styling of today’s mega-kitchens recall those from the end of the 19th century.

Typically centered on a big work table, these werve furnished piecemeal, with separate stoves, Ssinks and hutches standing around the walls, unlinked and unmatched. Consider the coveted spaces in the films of director Nancy Meyers.

In It’s Complicated, for example, Meyers manages to resolve the feminist issues surrounding the kitchen by making Jane, her protagonist (played by Meryl Streep), a successful baker. Her cooking is her work and thus it can take up as much time and space as she wants.

And what Jane wants is straight out of 1900.

The island is a marble-top table, the stove is free-standing, a linen curtain hides the undercounter shelving and in the corner, she’s simulated the Hoosier cabinet, with jars of flour and sugar and mixing bowls ready to hand.

In Meyers’s popular fantasy world, unfitting the kitchen, letting it all hang out and saying goodbye to efficiency is the ultimate luxury. ❚

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