Projects CA TX NY

Michael Bell Projects California / Texas / New York

First printed in the United States of America by Michael Bell Architecture 155 West 68th Street, Suite 1626, New York, New York 10128 Copyright Š 2002 Michael Bell

Funding for the works represented here was generously provided by: The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago DiverseWorks ArtSpace, Houston. Texas The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, Houston The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Office of the Dean, Bernard Tschumi The Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York LEF Foundation, St. Helena, California The Rice University School of Architecture Bank United, Houston And private donors

Designed by: Brett Snyder, Trevor Atwell, and Michael Bell during the summer of 2002 in New York City Edited by Trevor Atwell

Michael Bell Projects California / Texas / New York

California / Texas / New York

The architectural design, writing, and exhibitions contained here form an architectural practice that

The earliest works here were completed in San Francisco and exhibited in a 1995 installation titled

spans theory and academic inquiry as well as the practical aspects of contemporary sites, politics

"Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann" curated by Lawrence Rinder at the Berkeley Art

and programs. The underpinning of this structure place architectural design in a renewed context

Museum. This installation of 14 paintings and 7 architectural projects marked the end of a phase

where art and historic ideals of architectural agency are situated within less than visible territories

dominated by heuristic and discrete methods based in drawing—in particular the pictorial techniques

such as fiscal and government policy, or finance and urban infrastructure. These projects are devel-

of perspective. The installation positioned the Hofmann paintings as an immanent horizon; architec-

oped in response to real world economic conditions and politically contested urban territories—

tural and pictorial space were shown to be a result of each other and the autonomy and equilibrium

inchoate sites that are continually in the process of being re-inhabited. On one hand this work has

of each realm as well as the viewing position of each was redefined as contingent and incomplete

been steeped in a project of resistance; it highlights certain social and political crisis without suc-

on their own. This work was seeking to renew the relationship between painting and architecture, but

cinct resolution. On the other it has actively engaged the generative potentials of political and finan-

more importantly it sought to renew and to extend the spatial potentials of perception within art and

cial sectors in a way that neither idealizes their products nor underestimates the degree to which

architecture to the inchoate areas and spaces of the contemporary city. The formal characteristics of

these procedures predominate in shaping the contemporary city. While the work is architectural—

the early works in this exhibit can be viewed within the lineage of modernism, particularly Colin

and its goal has been to broaden what architectural practice can address—its core concern has

Rowe’s and Robert Slutzky’s work of transparency and the mechanics of pictorial space that Rowe

been abetting the agency not of buildings but of an urban subject.

and Slutzky as well as Hofmann had defined. This exhibition was decisive in establishing a practice

California

that has continually tested the formal, spatial and tectonic attributes of modern architecture against contemporary sites and pragmatic building practices. Simultaneous to this exhibition I published a

Since founding an independent architectural practice in 1988, my work has been based succes-

monograph on the work of Stanley Saitowitz, a Berkeley professor and San Francisco based archi-

sively in California, Texas and as of 1999 in New York — the three most populous states in the

tect whose work has explored the contingencies of architecture and site; Saitowitz has been a lead-

United States, each one paradigmatic sites of the late-modern city. In each city and university —

ing example of an architecture that is both autonomous as well as conditional.

Berkeley, Rice and Columbia — the direction of my design work, writing and teaching has been affected by the differing urban contexts. What has remained constant is a focus on the program of

Texas

the house and, since 1996, on the political history of federal low-income housing and the recent

Two collective projects served to broaden the theoretical and practical aspects of this early work;

trends towards privatization and market factors in federal housing policy. This has provided a control

both were instigated in direct response to the urbanism of Houston and a move to Rice University.

factor, allowing the architecture to substantially evolve according to its own trajectory, and to

The first was a book, Slow Space (Monacelli Press, 1998), and the second, an exhibition, 16

respond to new situations. In this way the work reveals as much about the complexity of site and

Houses: Owning a House in the City (forthcoming, Monacelli Press, 2002). Through three essays of

provisional situation as it does about the architecture and its internal histories. Since 1995 this work

my own and seventeen essays and/or projects by colleagues, Slow Space addresses a national

has been manifest in the context of museum exhibitions and art, community redevelopment groups

and international condition of architecture’s role in the contemporary city. Slow Space characterized

and the private house, and most recently in the context of New York’s public housing authority and

Houston as emblematic of a post-war United States city whose formal and architectural attributes

federal housing policy. This work has attempted to bridge aspects of art and theories of space and

have become increasingly fragmented and devalued as its financial, media and production systems

perception with the building procedures of contemporary low-income housing and the political goals

have become unified and virtually self-regulating. Slow Space posited that architecture’s renewed

of urban redevelopment.

urban agency—and its ability to participate in the construction of an urban subject—would find its potency in an enzymatic role or as retroactive cohering agent. The goal was to explore how architecture could engage the market processes of rationalization, production and finance as an ultimately atomized fragment of these techniques—and yet not be uncritical or unaware of their dimensional hegemony or the modes of power they represent.

Themes from Slow Space were realized professionally in the 1998/99 exhibition, 16 Houses:

As a result of this collaborative model the HPD is now considering hiring architects and planners

Owning a House in the City. As coordinator of five organizations — DiverseWorks gallery, The

prior to developers thus placing design as well as ecological issues on a more even playing field

Graham Foundation, The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, the Rice School of Architecture and the

with finance. The HPD relied on 16 Houses as a model that renewed former roles of the university

Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation (who served as client and builder) — I commis-

taking a substantial lead in social and politically sensitive urban redevelopment. 16 Houses and

sioned sixteen architects to design a house that could be built within the parameters of a new feder-

Stateless Housing establish bridges between the university and the community at a level of engage-

al voucher program designed to bring lower income individuals into market rate housing. At the local

ment that does not diminish the complexity of either realm. The work attempts to renew the effec-

level, these houses served the constituency of Houston’s Fifth Ward (a close-knit African American

tiveness of architecture and the university but indeed any local component of urbanism. It has been

neighborhood with a median income of less than $10,000/year). More broadly, the projects showed

an attempt to bring a generation of urban theory into a contemporary and pragmatic realm. The

the depth and diversity of ways in which a group of American architects, many represented in Slow

expansion of the United States economy in the 1990’s has been the inevitable impetus for this

Space, responded to the challenges of moving federal housing subsidies away from collective

engagement—architecture’s critical role has always bridged art and economics and these works

housing and towards the market practices of budget, square footage, tight regulations, and commu-

attempt to redefine the malleability of this conflation. This requires a position that understands the

nity participation. The exhibition and ensuing publicity generated considerable excitement in both the

spectacle of the avant-garde and full-scale professional engagement; in some sense they create

Fifth Ward and at the universities, some of which was directed toward building. Construction for

each other’s stage and sustain differing purposes. 16 Houses and Stateless Housing are the mov-

seven of these houses, including my own "Glass House @ 2," was funded under by the Local

ing in that direction and the response to them has been positive. These works engage each spec-

Initiative Support Corporation of New York, and four are sold and about to enter construction. This

trum of the architectural profession and as collaborative models break down barriers between disci-

project is realizing a multi-faceted goal in which architecture simultaneously serves as a template for

plines. The goal is to bring as many relevant forces to the table as possible: to do that architecture

diverse formal explorations, a pragmatic tool for a grass-roots social organization, and a political

has to position itself at a precarious point and be willing to be changed by the encounter. Ideally,

instrument of analysis with national implications.

each participant emerges with new potential.

New York City 16 Houses was reviewed nationally where it was supported for both its architectural content and as a model for collaboration between institutions whose efforts are multiplied by shared information and specialization. It also served as the model of institutional collaboration that the New York Department of Housing Preservation Development relied on this year in forming a research and exhibition project to explore the redevelopment of a 100-acre city owned site on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.

The HPD chose to fund four university-based teams—one of which I am leading—to explore how market-rate housing could be inserted into a fragmented urban fabric whose margins are formed by three eras of public housing. The 100-acre ocean front parcel on the Rockaway Peninsula was cleared in 1968 as one of the last major urban renewal projects in New York City and never redeveloped. Today it is an ecologically and politically unstable site that will be redeveloped as 1800 units of new market rate housing. In this context we designed a project, titled Stateless Housing, whose title refers to the literal states withdraw from subsidized housing in this area as well as the organic and ecological qualities of the ocean front site.

Michael Bell, New York City, 2002

I. 1988–93 San Francisco, California Space Inside Out The Blue House The Topological Stoa The Double Dihedral House Vittorio Plastici Oculus House J Shaped Glass House House with No Style Mathematics Daycare

Having Heard Mathematics

zz

II. 1993–99 Houston, Texas Eyes in the Heat

III. 1999 New York, New York Statelessness

The Duration House

Stateless Housing

Chrome House Glass House @ 2˚

Books

16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House, 2002 Books

Stanley Saitowitz, Architecture @ Rice 33, 1996 Slow Space, 1998

Exhibitions

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann 16 Houses: Owning A House in the City

Having Heard Mathematics, 2003

1. California Turning Space Inside Out

The Double Dihedral House, the Berlin Stoa, and the Blue House—indeed most of the works designed in California—use an oculus as a device to syncopate vision and the perspectival field in a way that might spill their framed contents and alter their static basins—to turn the room inside out. In these projects vision has a syncopated pulse that threatens the stability of ocular distance. The relationship of perceiving subject and perceived object is here turned inside out; overcoming the relativity of perspective’s constructed subject and its fixed basin. The idea of a third figure ground condition situated between the possible inversions of figure as positive and ground as negative drives the relation of building and site in the works included in this section.

In plan and in elevation the works suggest another possibility: that of a space turned inside out, of a void situated within a void. The works are developed for actual sites— the figure/ground work is addressed to literal as well as phenomenal readings. It is hoped the works could reveal the pathos of site and place in their plastic qualities.

1. Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” ed. Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), p. 29.

In the essay "Modernizing Vision," Jonathan Crary analyzes the camera obscura as a model of modern subjectivity. The camera obscura, says Crary, "defined an observer who was subjected to an inflexible set of positions and divisions." The spectacle of camera obscura required an acquiescent subject; one who knew where to stand and who accepted the interiority of the room—the camera. Crary’s observer "is a nominally free sovereign individual"1 standing in a "quasi-domestic space separated from a public exterior world." These works take the architectural room as camera— and begin a process of transforming both its interiority and its relation to a wider field. This work is explicated in the essay "Having Heard Mathematics, The Topologies of Boxing," published in Slow Space and included in this chapter of the folio.

left to right: Hofmann Genus 3; A model for a new horizon: A Hofman Genus 3: Complex topological surfaces find their strict description through geometry and differential equations. The combination of analytical methods allows the description of minimal surfaces--a specific type of minimal surface is described as embedded--it is boundaryless as well as non self intersecting.

Though it is described in quantitative finite terms an embedded minimal surface is capable of infinite extension without self-intersection. Only three such minimal surfaces where known to be embedded until recently; the plane and the catenoid, and the helicoid whose curvature makes the proposition of extension more difficult. The problems of topology are involved in the every aspect of life's construction; and in this essay I'd like to use topology as the carrier, the infrastructure of a transformed visual field in which both the phenomenological separation of subject and object is eradicated and the idea of the subject constituted in relation to an other is collapsed.

Bulding site, Double Dihedral House, La Cienega, NM.

The Blue House was designed at the outset of private practice while based in San Francisco. The project was to be sited on a property at the junction of the

project

Potomac and St. Mary’s Rivers in historic St. Mary’s County, Maryland. The riverfront property comprised two acres of land in total; access to the house requires

client

visitors to traverse a 500-acre farm before reaching the river’s edge. The design of this small 1200 square foot house is driven by two major concerns each of

program

which were important aspects of theory and design in the late 1980’s. The first aspect was an inquiry into architectural typology; the Blue House was derived

Tidewater, Maryland, St. Mary’s County

from a transformation of historically significant regional plan types and details. The second aspect of the design was an inquiry into emergent ideas of

The Blue House

William and Anita Bell House

site

1988-1990

architectural space in relation to topology. These themes form the basis of the essay Having Heard Mathematics, The Topologies of Boxing presented later

date of design

in this portfolio. The Blue House is organized around a central oculus; a sleeve or tube shaped hallway that connects the two major components the house.

current state of project

This sleeve also allows vision to pass through the house—the house is in effect a continuos of surface that like a mobs strip continually folds in on itself. The

budget

outer surfaces of the house are continuos with the inner surfaces. The goal was to produce a house that was regionally and historically based yet also contemporary in its spatial inquiry. The spatial continuity of the Blue House was intended to question the place of the inhabitant amidst architectural histories.

The house was organized by function to abet this reading of space: living spaces are in the main two-story volume. The 35-foot long horizontal band of the cruciform forms the bedroom. The bathrooms are placed in twin volumes that mime the twin chimneys typical in the region.

The project was designed but not constructed. The model and drawings were purchased for the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

$150,000

Designed

The Blue House

St Mary’s County Maryland is part of the historic tidewater region of the Chesapeake Bay. The Blue House is sited on a two acre parcel of land at the merging of the St. Mary’s and the Potomac Rivers. The house is derived in part from local typologies and details are at times modifications of regional “ornament.”

Juried Awards

Museum Collections

Exhibitions and Instalations

Essays by Michael Bell

1990 Progressive Architecture, July. PA Young Architects Awards, The Blue House p. 86.1990

1995 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Drawings and Models; Permanent Collection: Double Dihedral House; the Blue House.

1996 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Acquisitions, group show includes David Lyman House/Gallery and the Blue House.

1990 Architecture California, AIA Journal, Ca., “Space Replaces Us”, Volume 15, Number 2, Fall. p. 39 – 47.

1989 SF, September. “New Talent.” By Lisa Meyers, The Blue House, p. 92 - 93

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

Interiors, “Thirty Under Thirty,” September, The Blue House, p. 174.

Publications: Books 2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell; New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

1993 The Contract SF Design Center 3x3+9, installation, group show includes:Topological Stoa, the Blue House, David Lyman House and Gallery.

1989 Steelcase Showroom, New York, 30 Under 30, group show includes: The Blue House, the Topological Stoa.

Gallery for Contemporary Realism, San Francisco Disrupting Domesticity, group show includes:The Blue House.

Publications in Journals 1992 2AES Gallery Cafe Talks, 1992. Unpaginated.

1991 Concrete, The University of California at Berkeley, “The Frame Labors Indeed: 3 Footnotes on the Collapse of Plastic Space,” p. 2 - 3.

The Blue House

Site St Mary’s County Maryland is part of the historic tidewater region of the Chesapeake Bay. The Blue House is sited on a two acre parcel of land at the merging of the St. Mary’s and the Potomac Rivers. The house is derived in part from local typologies and details are at times modifications of regional “ornament.”

For example: Chinese Chippendale was a name coined for the ornamental rails common in the area and said to have been fabricated by a “talented” wood worker who had escaped from prison. The Blue House facade is a version of Chinese Chippendale — the diagonal patterns were extrapolated to serve as a pictorial device that in a modern form is related here to Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings.

left to right

Twin Chimneys appear as steeples

in many St Mary’s County houses.

left to right

Chinese Chippendale

A House on the St Mary’s River A Curing Barn View of St Mary’s River from site

The Blue House

The Blue House plan was derived from the plan of a historically significant building known as Bond Castle. Bond Castle was built on property owned by Sir Cecil Calvert in nearby Calvert County in 1649. The house dates to 1670.

left

Level 1

Living Spaces + Curtain

Level 2

Bedroom and Bathroom

The Blue House

The Collapse of Plastic Space Figure / (Field/Site)

Space Inside Out

The idea of a third figure ground condition situated between the possible inversions of figure as

1. It is hear that Mondrian rattles the bones of human configuration for the last time. It is here that the

positive and ground as negative drives the relation of building and site in the works included in this

white rectangle steps out of the background landscape into its own space (Frank Stella on

portfolio. In plan and in elevation the works suggest another possibility: that of a space turned inside

Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.)

out, of a void situated within a void. The works are developed for actual sites—the figure/ground work is addressed to literal as well as phenomenal readings. By disallowing any retreat to linguistic or semiotic critiques of site and region it is hoped the works may reveal the pathos of site and place

2. To turn space inside out like a torus glove and make figure and field ambiguously one.(Robert Slutzky and Joan Ockman; “Color Structure Painting”)

in their plastic qualities. The work is undertaken in deference and appreciation to several painters

3. Vittorio Plastici: two types of solitudes. In a 1919 essay by the painter Giorgio de Chirico presents

and architects whose work is essential to this study. Prior to undertaking these projects I had spent

two types of solitudes: that of plastic qualities and those of sign qualities. He speaks of a text he

a year of research and travel to the archives of Theo Van Doesberg, Adolf Loos and LeCorbusier.

read as a child that depicted a tertiary landscape before the presence of man and finds that the

The paintings of Robert Slutzky shown in 1984 at the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco and

paintings of Ingres contain a similar pathos.

published in the essay “Color Structure, Painting” written with Joan Ockman were also central.

Bodyless space

Plastic Density

1. A white hot void.

1. plasticity: the collusion of atmospheric and volumetric density; depicted and recognized about the

2. A volume removed.

surface of a solid.

3. The space of the subject is collapsed.

2. Plasticity depleted: equalization of atmospheric and volumetric density; about the surface of a

4. The foreground screen that composes Raphael’s “Freeing of Saint Peter” as a precursor to

solid. The surface collapses. A simultaneous implosion and explosion. Silent

Mondrian’s New York City. Mondrian’s colored bars span rather than divide the surface.

3. The density of atmosphere to have a viscous consistency.

5. Giuseppe’s Terragni’s Casa Rustici, Milano: syncopation induced by the absent plane.

4. The lungs as a pocket of the exterior within the cavity of the body.

5. The density of atmosphere about the body and its depiction in pictorial space and practices.

Leonardo’s sfumato, Wassily Kandinsky’s ambiguity.

6. Atmosphere coagulates about the surface of a solid.

Color 1. Blue Walls: the walls are voided. Their surface is that of the atmosphere.

2. Color mediates the density of a mass or volume.

7. The surface a volume. The boundary between two densities.

8. To remove the surface of a volume and place it beside.

Site

9. Solid in a void. Void in a solid.

1. To reveal the pathos of a site and of a place within the plastic apparatus of architecture.

10. Solid in a solid.

2. Bodyless architecture places a subject within a place and outside the local conditions of

11. To remove the interior

architecture.

3. Regional types are impregnated with space.

4. House at St. Mary’s River, Tidewater Region, Maryland. At the juncture of the Potomac and St. Mary’s Rivers.

5. Stoa Site: Berlin: No Man’s Land becomes a torus shaped courtyard between East and West Berlin. The Berlin Wall has space within.

6. Studio Site: Vittorio Plastici: DeChirico’s tertiary landscape before the presence of man.

7. Site of Architect: California: USA.

Architecture is culture: not a mirror or sign of culture

The Blue House

Detail: Chinese Chippendale (transformed).

The kitchen connects to the main volume via an outside porch or “curtain.”

right

above Model View: The bedroom spans the oculus: bathrooms are on either side of span.

Model View: A box garden in the foreground of the house is derived from regional type. A seawall at the water’s edge forms the property limits.

left

If space is infinite then the formulation of solids must take place within it.

How could one work beyond the infinite frame?

If space is infinite, how could it be possible to insert a solid into continuous space? To do so you would have to place it within space from outside of space. From beyond the frame. Yet no frame exists if space is infinite.

Where is the edge of the universe?

If you construct a solid in space then how could it be possible to remove it from space; how could you take something from space; how could you take something and place it outside the frame if no frame exists.

On the other hand if there is an edge to space—if the universe is a cube and its boundaries were marked by a frame, then it might be possible to collapse space by turning it inside out. To place the inside on the outside.

To remove a solid from space.

To remove the body from space would be sublime terror and would cause collapse within our hearts.

Architecture can collapse space

Space Inside Out: Fluctuating readings of shallow and deep space in elevation are activated by a deep central oculus. above

rigth

section drawing through oculus.

The Blue House

The cruciform elevation is figural but engulfed within the syphon of the central oculus. It seemed possible to deplete its figural content by means of its own plastic techniques. The vanishing point leads leads the eye through the oculus. The bedroom straddles the oculus: 6’ deep and approximately 40’ long. The bed is set into the wall on the right side of the photo. above

Perspective View: The plan and elevation of the Blue House are a spatial transformation of the cruciform plan type common in the Tidewater Region. Bedroom is connected to main volume by oculus. above

The Blue House

Perspective Drawing: Curatain and Sleeping Cell

above

Perspective Drawing: Oculus and bedroom stair assembly. The stair rises to place the subject at the center of the oculus.

right

above Perspective View of Site: View to St Mary’s River: The Blue House is sited on a river front property in what is known as “Tidewater Maryland.”

The site fronts the St. Mary’s River and extends several hundred feet back from the river’s edge before it gives way to the tilled soil of a farm. The site covers 2.5 acres. Black snakes are a frequent

The Topological Stoa was designed to be included in a larger urban planning project designed by Michael Bell, Lars Lerup, Antonio Lao, William Green, Michael

Project

Palmore and Timothy Rempel. The Topological Stoa was one of six buildings designed to occupy what was formerly known as No Man’s Land. Produced in

Client

1988, the work was a proposal to reuse and transform a segment of Berlin’s No Man’s Land. The AEDES Gallery in Berlin funded the proposal as part of a

Program

citywide set of exhibitions funded under the Berlin, Cultural City of Europe program. At the time it was fantastic in scope but in light of what happened in

Site

Germany in 1991 it no longer seems so. We saw in the unusual situation along the Berlin wall the opportunity to create meaning primarily through difference, but

Date of Design

maybe more importantly through the radical transformation of existing types placed in a newly created urban context. We saw the inevitability of the city grid, the

Current State of Project

perimeter block and its associated planning logic as a threat to the rejuvenation of the city and instead proposed a continuos park and a new habitable

Budget

boulevard, almost accidentally strewn with new building types. Here was an opportunity to return to the city as a street. Vehicular flow patterns were sabotaged in favor of the pedestrian and the block was atomized into a collection of buildings — an implosion of new plaza inside a giant street. On the urban level the project is a team effort and as such it may not appear quite complete. It was not really supposed to. Each building was carefully and independently designed, but the possibility of chance was given free reign in the urban design. The Topological Stoa, like the Blue House and the Double Dihedral House was in effect a continuos surface that folded in on itself to form an ambiguous interior and exterior space. This work is explicated in the essay Having Heard Mathematics.

Berlin Stoa

Name AEDES Gallery, Berlin Stoa, Theory Project

No Man’s Land, Berlin 1988

$1,500,000

Designed

above

Berlin Figure Ground Map

The Berlin (Topological) Stoa

This project was created in response to an invitation to participate in an exhibition in 1998 concerning the future of Berlin. A team of six architects collaborated to form the complete proposal, but each architect was responsible for the design of a component building. Each building was situated according to a collaborative urban planning goal.

The project became a group testing ground for ideas concerning architecture and the city.

Juried Awards

Exhibitions and Installations

Publications: Books

Citations

1999 The Architectural League of New York, Emerging Voices Award

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell; New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

1991 San Francisco Chronicle, “Number Crunch”, May 16.

Essays by Michael Bell

San Francisco Chronicle, “Young Architects Win Competition,” April 14, p. 39.

1990 Architecture California, AIA Journal, Ca., “Space Replaces Us”, Volume 15, Number 2, Fall. p. 39 – 47.

San Francisco American Institute of Architects News (SF, AIA) April, “3x3+9=5?” Review. P. 6.

1989 Steelcase Showroom, New York,

Publications in Journals

1992 AES Gallery Cafe Talks, 1992. Unpaginated.

30 Under 30, group show includes: The Blue House, the Topological Stoa.

1992 2AES Gallery Cafe Talks, 1992. Unpaginated.

1991 Concrete, The University of California at Berkeley, “The Frame Labors Indeed: 3 Footnotes on the Collapse of Plastic Space,” p. 2 - 3.

LEF Foundation, St. Helena, California.

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

Award for essay published in Architecture California, A.I.A. Journal.

1993 The Contract SF Design Center 3x3+9, installation, group show includes:

1990 3x3+9. Competition for installation sponsored by the San Francisco/Los Angeles Chapters of the American Institute of Architects and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Topological Stoa, the Blue House, David Lyman House and Gallery.

30 Under 30. Interiors Magazine & Steelcase Design Partnership, NY. Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Architectural Design Award for The Berlin Wall Project, with L. Lerup, A. Lao, M. Palmore, T. Rempel.

1993 The San Francisco Contract Design Center 3x3+9, installation, group show includes: Topological Stoa, the Blue House, David Lyman House and Gallery.

1988 Newman’s Land, AEDES Gallery, Berlin: Denkmal—oder—Denkmodell? Berlin.

Group show with Lars Lerup, Michael Palmore, Antonio Lao. Tim Rempel,

1991 Concrete, “The Framze Labors Indeed: 3 Footnotes on the Collapse of Plastic Space,” p. 2 - 3.

Metropolis, May. “3x3+9=5” Review.

The Berlin (Topological) Stoa

above

Perspective drawing: New Man’s Land.

left

Site Two: Checkpoint Charlie

center right

Site Two: The Brandenburger Tor

No Man’s Land

The Berlin (Topological) Stoa

Dimensions and proportions for the Berlin Stoa were transcribe from the Stoa of Attalos; column proportions, height and length were maintained in the design of the Berlin Stoa.

“The long, shed-like building which the Greeks called a “stoa” and the Romans a “porticus” consisted in its simplest form of a roof supported by solid walls at the back and ends and by a row of columns in front. Such a structure, involving a minimum of outlay, provided shelter against rain and sun while permitting the movement of air so welcome in summer...the primary function of the stoa was to provide shelter for large numbers of people. Stoas were commonly found in sanctuaries and market places...from “The Stoa of Attalos II in Athens,” The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The stoa plan depicted here is that of the Stoa at Attalos; it takes its name from the King of Pergamon, Attalos II. It stood from approximately 150 B.C. till 267 A.D..

above, left The Stoa of Attalos II as rebuilt, the Acropolis is in the background (1959) ...from “The Stoa of Attalos II in Athens,” The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. above, right Reference image: Paul Klee, “rhythmic line”: a precursor to the Berlin Stoa plan.

Menger Sponge: The Topological Stoa is a continuous surface—folding into itself as a continous membrane.

right

above Model View from Front: Seeing Through: Stoa Room/Oculus

The Berlin (Topological) Stoa

left above

Plan Drawings: ground level.

left below

Elevation Drawing.

above

Model View from Front: Entry Platform at lower center.

right above

Section Drawings through oculus

right below

Section Drawings through elevator

Model View from back: Detail of model depicts stair-tower and elevator. above

plan drawing, second level

The Berlin (Topological) Stoa

What was once a single city with a center is now two cities divided by a wall.

Where historically city walls are protective, the Berlin Wall severs rather than surrounds.

In this urban design project the wall with its barbed wire cornice is transformed: it is divided down its center then dragged across “No Man’s Land,” like a rake erasing the past. A neutral zone is established; a plan degree zero. By this act two Berlin walls are created and a new city center...a new site for new architecture. Building types are scattered throughout the new belt like courtyard that traces its way through the Berlin. Topological buildings such as the new Stoa and typological buildings transformed by the new space are placed opposite each other. the buildings stand like citizens. They comprehend themselves in their relation to the others. The building and their subject gaze across the distance to each other.

Berlin is a city divided. What was once a single city with a center is now two cities divided by a wall.

Where historically city walls are protective, the Berlin Wall severs rather than surrounds.

In this urban design project the wall with its barbed wire cornice is transformed: it is divided down its center then dragged across “No Man’s Land,” like a rake erasing the past. A neutral zone is established; a plan degree zero. By this act 2 Berlin walls are created and a new city center...a new site for new architecture.

Building types are scattered throughout the new belt like courtyard that traces its way through the Berlin.

Topological buildings such as the new Stoa and typological buildings transformed by the new space are placed opposite each other. the buildings stand like citizens. They comprehend themselves in their relation to the others. The building and their subject gaze across the distance to each other.

(text by Michael Bell, Lars Lerup, Antonio Lao, Bill Green, Tim Rempel and Michael Palmore.

Context Axonometric drawing: Detail of site axonometric depicts Stoa in context of other building proposed for No-Man’s Land. Platforms: A. Lao, Iron Duck Chair: Lerup, Bell, Lao, Green, Love Housing: L. Lerup, Berlin Stoa: M. Bell, Machina Combinatoria: M. Palmore.

right

above

Group Installation AEDES Gallery, West Berlin

The Double Dihedral House consists of a house and art gallery situated opposite each other on four acres desert in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A cruciform volume

project

is framed and unframed in the two structures; the house and gallery are each constituted in reference to their paired other structure. In the house, the roof and

client name

floor are cut away to reveal the interior. A subject’s gaze traverses the desert floor, piercing both building volumes—the gaze’s vectoral speed pauses

program

momentarily to seek each surface before falling further in syncopation through subsequent layers. Eventually, the gaze is focused not on the building or the

site

frame but on the unanchored space beyond. The house was designed for an art collector. The program called for one bedroom but two galleries as well as a

date of design

reading room and small library. The title of the Double Dihedral House refers to the occupant as an standing subject; space in the house is organized to reveal

current state of project

depth as well as flatness but most importantly to allow the viewer’s gaze to penetrate the entire spatial composition to the landscape beyond. The house is

budget

simple in construction techniques and composed of elemental planes and primary colors.

Double Dihedral House Dr. David Lyman

House and Painting Gallery

La Cienega, New Mexico 1991-1993

$450,000

Designed

Double Dihedral House

The frames, both in plan and in elevation, are quite literal in the Double Dihedral House.

Upon arrival, one is positioned in front of four black-framed layers of glass. The trajectory of vision pauses at the first frame, plunges to the next to hesitate briefly before collapsing further to the other frames and to the landscape beyond. Through these black frames the visual trajectory has a speed which stutters at its periphery, collapsing in syncopation, and turning the space of the buildings inside out in its wake. the inside of the building is removed, rendered as an outside to its adjacent space. Space is punctured.

Mass is impacted. Thought is everywhere. A place is revealed.

Project Awards

Project Publications

1992. Cafe Talks. 2AES Gallery. Catalog.

1995. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Permanent Collection.

1998. “Having Heard Mathematics, The Topologies of Boxing,” by Michael Bell, Slow Space, (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996)

Exhibitions

1992. Progressive Architecture. January. PA Design Award. David Lyman House and Gallery.

1991. 3x3+9. Juried selection of 5 architects for SF and LA installation.

1992. Progressive Architecture. January. PA Design Awards.

1992. Los Angeles Times. 3/8. “State Architects Prevail at Coveted Awards” by E. DeWolfe. P. K-6.

1992. SD, (Space Design), Japan. June. “Eminent Works Abroad / The Splendid Race” P. 177,87.

right

view from gallery to house

1996. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Dec 16 to Mar 16, New Acquisitions Exhibition.

1995. Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann, The University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1992 3x3+9. Juried selection of 5 architects for SF/LA installation.

Double Dihedral House

Push responds to pull

(see Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann)

“Push responds to pull”—Hans Hofmann used the phrase so often “that it became nearly synonymous with his style of painting.” The spatial milieu of a Hofmann painting is one of complex geometries cohering active and reactive forces; in Hofmann’s realm a pictorial push into space is answered by a rebounding pull back out. Of course these pushes and pulls were achieved not with the weight of gravity but with the weights of color, shape, and line—all activated by the velocity of vision and played out within the basin of the frame’s and the picture’s finite surface.

Hofmann’s paintings are “plastic,” meaning that their space is active—even viscous and alluvial— they “animate” the initially “neutral” picture surface.

The trajectory of Hans Hofmann’s spatial evolution seems to have moved in a staccato rhythm; innovations led to innovations but he also often returned to his foundations. One of his preoccupations was Matisse’s structure of flat space. In works such as Yellow Table on Yellow Background, Hofmann tilts space forward to such a degree that it threatens to spill out of its frame. The paint is viscous and thick and applied with an aggressive stroke, but if this virtual pictorial spill were to become real it would certainly lose this thickness. Yellow Table on Yellow Background is a subjectless work: no human figure is present, and one wonders where a figure could be placed and how some form of a volumetric body might try to inhabit this space.

But what if push didn’t answer pull? What if space wasn’t plastic or viscous? What if space were more of an energy sink, having a dissipative quality—its basin involved in an expansive entropic above Model View: Making a choice: a divided house. My other life.

creep rather than a shoring up contraction. Hofmann’s thesis demands a rebuttal as Slutzky’s and

Double Dihedral House A house without an interior. An approximate formal model or precedent: The bottle with no inside. This model of a Klein Bottle belongs to topologist Albert Tucker of Princeton University. Nobody will ever actually see an actual Klein Bottle because it exists only in the topologist’s imagination. A true Klein Bottle passes through itself without the existence of a hole, which is a physical impossibility.

Le Corbusier’s “thickened space” demands thinned space. That the antithesis of each argument has an asymptotic relation to the space we occupy in the modern “city” should be a reason to be alarmed: space in the contemporary city of finance must surely be aplastic. What viscous pulls shore us up and react to our pushes?

The antithesis to the stability of Hofmann’s dialectic push-pull relation does in fact emerge in Hofmann’s own work: Ecstasy (1947) so fully labors its flat canvas surface that push seems to implode the picture frame’s geometry while pull threatens to spill its contents onto the gallery floor.

The opposing forces’ ability to counter each other is here lost as each seems to have well exceeded its elastic limits: push and pull threaten a new independence that in turn threatens the works’ stability when each is stretched beyond its capacity to rebound. The Double Dihedral House uses the oculus as a device to syncopate both vision and the perspectival field in a way that might spill their framed contents and alter their static basins. In these projects vision has a syncopated vector that threatens the stability of ocular distance. The relationship of perceiving subject and perceived object is here turned inside out, the hegemony of perspective’s constructed subject and its fixed basin is overcome.

This page, left to right Model View: Side to Side: View to Gallery from within House.

Model View: Side to Side: View to house from within Gallery

Site Plan and Site Photograph Two buildings sited opposite each other on four acres of the La Cienega, New Mexico desert. Two thousand five hundred total square feet of space house two galleries for a private collector. Each building contains a central gallery; the north building contains a bedroom and a kitchen; the south a library and a reading room. Construction is in poured concrete.

Double Dihedral House

Eyes in the Heat: Seeing the City text excerpted from the “Having Heard Mathematics: the Topologies of Boxing,” Slow Space, by Michael Bell In his essay “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Norman Bryson ascertains a subject persecuted at the

Stella’s and Slutzky’s pictorial explications. Stella also attributes to the device similar subject-annihilating

center of both Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Jacques Lacan’s accounts of the gaze.1 Bryson’s critique asserts

tendencies: “It is here that Mondrian rattles the bones of human configuration for the last time; it is here

that both Sartre and Lacan retain a conceptual frame that posits a subject as the origin of space even as

that the white rectangle steps out of the background landscape into its own space,”4 wrote Stella in the

they reveal that this sovereignty is menaced by the presence of other origins. In Sartre’s case this

transcription of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1983 and 1984.

competing origin is another viewing subject, while in Lacan’s scenario the subject is challenged by the

Stella’s depicts two techniques by which Mondrian transformed the reliance of pictorial space upon

opaque presence of other inanimate entities, things that “look back.”

perspective, especially perspective’s regulation of a frontal and positioned subject. Stella claims that the

To illustrate Sartre’s theorizing of the gaze, Bryson relies upon a composition by Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin (1504), in which he claims that Raphael has annihilated the viewing “subject as center” at the very instance when this subject has taken up the composition’s offered station point. The vanishing point of Raphael’s composition is portrayed as inextricably bound to the viewpoint; it leads the viewing eye toward what Bryson calls the “drain” or “black hole of otherness placed at the horizontal horizon.”2 Bryson’s analysis of the painting reveals an implacable decentering: Raphael’s architectural space is one that evades the sovereign occupation of a viewing subject at the crucible of this subject’s attempts to occupy the apex of the pictorial field.

Bryson’s characterization of the mechanics of this subjectless space bears quite literal similarities to both Frank Stella’s critique of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) in his book Working Space and to Robert Slutzky’s self-defined initiatives in the series of fifteen paintings he completed between 1981 and 1984.3 The pictorial device that Bryson refers to as a drain or black hole—the vertical white rectangle that composes the door within Raphael’s architecture—has a correlative counterpart in both

colored bars of Mondrian’s late paintings span rather than divide the surface of the compositions and in doing so allow for the emergence of a truly modern pictorial space, a space of abstraction that does not rely on perspective’s horizon line or a relative station point. Of the paintings Victory Boogie Woogie (1943– 44) and New York City (1941–42), Stella states that Mondrian had given rise to a background source of light whose progressive emanation allows it to be understood as foreground. Within this foregrounded yet formless atmosphere, lies the enunciation of a space secured by Mondrian’s “hot blooded structure” and “live-wire armatures,” a space capable of providing a freely directionless extensivity of shape and duration.

Though Stella does not offer this possibility, it seems that Mondrian’s white rectangle places itself behind and around its frontal subject.

Within the same few years in which Stella delivered his Norton Lectures, Robert Slutzky prepared a series of fifteen paintings also dominated by a centralized and usually white square, what Slutzky calls an oculus.

The paintings were presented at the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco in 1984 and subsequently were

Giuseppe Terragni.

Casa Rustici, 1933– 35. Milan, Italy.

left

published in a monograph that includes an essay entitled “Color/ Structure/Painting” that Slutzky cowrote

Ockman may here be understood to provide a pictorial impetus, a visual inducement, that forecloses on a

with Joan Ockman. Slutzky and Ockman referred to this centralized square as the “counter eye in the

final and catastrophic transformation of the pictorial field itself and with it the fixing of a discrete subject

canvas,” an oculus that confronts “the artist and spectator alike.” Bryson calls attention to this dynamic

and an object. This transformation takes vision irrecoverably past the plastic limits of its learned Cartesian

with Sartre, whose account of his solitary dominion over a park setting is undermined by the arrival of

basin and in doing so moves the locus of our cognition onto a dispersed and unfolded field. In this sense

another person. Bryson cites this scenario in identifying a menaced and decentered subject within

Slutzky’s work also asks viewers to annihilate their own visual origins and having done so to enter a space

Sartre’s conception of the gaze. Upon realizing he is not alone, Sartre finds himself occupying a tangential

of extensivity, a space of uncharted and unanchored movements. To Bryson this type of expanded field

relationship to an other. His vision converges on this other, where he is not and where he cannot be.

results in an alleviation of the conceptual frame retained by Sartre and Lacan. Drawing from the

Slutzky and Ockman ascribe to these fifteen canvases a bit of both Sartre’s animate other and Lacan’s

philosophies of Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, Bryson notes that it appears as the frame is “withdrawn.”

inanimate things that “look back.” Though they do not ascribe to this “counter eye” the explicit existential

The subject/object dialectic that has been reified within modern practices dissolves in this expansion and

aspects of Sartre’s tangential subject, Slutzky and Ockman by interpolation instigate a transformation of

the subject no longer posits itself against that which it is not.6 In this manner the subject is able to

vision’s role in the positioning of the self as both origin of and object within a provisional field. In fact, it is

reposition itself as a “being that exists through the existence of everything else in the universal field.”7

the enframed field that these paintings slowly but surely reconfigure in an increasingly willful compositional process. As the oculus confronts the artist, the artist responds, and one epistemological crisis is undone by another: Slutzky and Ockman state that this oculus turns “space inside-out,” and “like a torus-glove” it makes “figure and field ambiguously one.” There is no doubt that these plastic mechanics ultimately remain dialectical despite the spatial ambiguity they portend and Slutzky betrays no need to deny the canvas as an originary surface. Like Sartre and Lacan, Slutzky and Ockman still seem to posit their subject, at least momentarily, as the origin of the visual field. Though perhaps his subject/painter is menaced as well, Slutzky’s oculus offers an intuitive vantage and grasp of the inferable, a chance to seize and then occupy the composition’s topologically transformed space.5 In this way the dialectic transparency of Slutzky’s techniques constitutes an unconcealment of the enframing device and of the mechanisms of representation. The oculus offers the opportunity to intuit the unframed duration of events.

In providing the fixity and frontality that is both learned and reflexively anticipated, Slutzky also provides a comprehension of time as form—this work is representational, even perhaps a model, but it also operates enzymatically in use, or more accurately, under duress. Here it ceases to be a model and becomes a lived experience. Slutzky’s paintings offer the opportunity to relinquish form but they also suggest, perhaps fetishistically, that we decline the opportunity. This retaining of distance between viewing subject and perceived world allows for a critical vantage that is ultimately difficult to consider menaced. Slutzky and

Robert Slutzky’s techniques operate within a structure of formalist mechanics; while color and shape modulate depth and Cartesian geometries provide a willful author’s heuristic structure, Slutzky pushes each of these dimensions to their extremes, to their plastic limits. The painter speaks of blues that are not

Double Dihedral House

quite blue (as Josef Albers might have) and squares that are not quite square. Without this pushing of

undermining presence is assured by managed capital’s seeming inability to cohere plastic space. This

limits there would be good reason to believe that these techniques are no longer capable of serving as a

blankness, a result of capital’s desperate need to maximize the vectoral coefficients of production,

critical apparatus. The topology of Slutzky’s desired transfiguration of pictorial figure and ground presents

nonetheless, poses its own dialectic traps of rather primitive geometric origin: efficiency of transportation

the means for a significant critical reappraisal and transformation of Cartesian perspective’s dominion in

relies on geometric parameters in the production and assembly of contemporary building materials to

the description and regulation of a contemporary and increasingly visual subject. The pervasiveness of

such an extent that contemporary building techniques are almost incapable of producing truly plastic form

new and still predominantly visual computer interfaces are reason enough to continue to consider the

or space. Efficiency in the production, sale, and transportation of materials also requires a clandestine, or

ocular an important project, but these are clearly only the most blatant and erotically taunting

at least hidden, method of dealing with gravity as it pertains to building design, material configuration, and

conscriptions of cognitive vision that constitute daily life.

ultimately to human weight and presence. The discrete nature of architectural practice within these post-

Slutzky, like Mondrian, seems to have been rattling “the bones of human configuration for the last time.” He speaks of unanchoring our contemplative eyes for distant journeys and faraway places, loci of our memories rebirthed.” Slutzky’s paintings allow for the intuiting rather than the modeling of such a space. As such, these paintings must be understood to be critical; they offer the preservation of an immanence within the represented that could sustain the migratory and lateral passages and cycles of an expanded and authentic life. Bryson’s essay concludes with the suggestion that the “real discovery” of his critique of the gaze is that “things we took to be private, secluded, and inward,” such as “perception, art, the perception of art in a museum, are created socially. What is at stake is the discovery of a politics of vision.”8

metropolitan processes ironically might be understood to offer at least two alternatives both derived from an engagement of the limits of architecture’s professional involvement in urban machinations of finance.

The first alternative lies in the “rattling of the bones of human configuration for the last time,” in occupying Slutzky’s inside-out space. The nihilistic attributes of blankness recede in the expanded field.12 Having occupied this space a second alternative emerges based in the activity of a “being that exists through the existence of everything else.”13 If this rattling is incomplete, if a vestige of a frame remains, it seems possible to work within, rather than model, the shapes and the processes of the contemporary city itself.

In some sense Slutzky’s oculus provides the sequel to the texts he wrote with Colin Rowe; the habitation of these spaces might be considered not as the mathematics of, but instead, the topology of the post

Within the dissipative and unbounded spaces of such contemporary urban cities as Houston, the idea of

metropolitan city. It is a topology that must be lived rather than represented. The means of procurement of

a withdrawn or expanded frame seems in some sense ironic.9 On the plateau of late capitalism’s vacated

this lived space, however, must in some way remain visible if such a space is to endow its subject with

version of the “city,”10 vision is alternatively vast and instrumental. What Martin Heidegger termed the

critical authority.

“malice of rage”—an increasing tendency towards nihilism that is endemic to a reification of vision within modernism today—has an odd and complex resonance in the dissolute spaces of sprawling American cities such as Houston. Here the blankness of the white rectangle already predominates both in the vertical and horizontal planes, yet it rarely emerges in clear distinction and it hardly defines a landscape of its own, at least not a sublime landscape. In these cities, television’s conscription of vision reigns over

Giuseppe Terragni: Vision and Duration The following section presents an analysis of two buildings designed by Giuseppe Terragni in collaboration

the fabrication of a cognitive and social citizen, yet the horizon—the real horizon—of this flat and immense city is literally a 360° circle, and its enveloping topology ultimately vanquishes any attempt to demarcate either a station point or origin. Malice is unable to find clear footing, and rage, when it does occur, seems unable to articulate its province and is thus unable to sustain prerogatives. The material, labor, and shape of space in these cities, almost exclusively orchestrated within the quadratic equations of capital investment, leave the eye/the subject/the citizen in the devastated scenario of trying to cohere the formed remnants and entropic by-products of a process of clandestine financial machinations. When an expected perspective does occur in the contemporary city it hardly constitutes a hegemonic device but rather a perceived relief. We know what it is and we probably even realize that it is artificially contrived. On one hand, vision is confiscated by the devices of the media, and on the other it is presented with a vacancy of such shapeless expanse that it is overwhelmed. Either scenario seems to lead toward a constituent humiliation. The white rectangle, Mondrian’s sublime device of metropolitan criticism and of negative dwelling,11 here offers an ironic and suffered respite.

“We are still in the city,” states Cacciari in The Dialectics of the Negative and the Metropolis, “as long as we are in the presence of use values alone, or in the presence of the simple production of the commodity, or if the two instances stand next to each other in a nondialectical relation.” We inhabit the metropolis “when production assumes its own social rationale, when it determines the modes of consumption and succeeds in making them function toward the renewal of the cycle.” Houston, and indeed most of America’s so-called metropolises, demands a renewed characterization of these terms, for one could argue that the distended space of these post-metropolitan cities is nondialectical even as it has succeeded in establishing modes of consumption that are essentially self-sustaining. The blankness of space in these cities seems also to engender a self-sustaining virus, a metabolic mechanism whose

below, from left to right

Robert Slutzky, Untitled C, 1983.

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art. Shock-wave pattern from a projectile at near-sonic speed.

Eyes in the Heat with Pietro Lingeri during the early 1930s. These two projects, Casa Rustici (1933–35) and Palazzo

The design of Palazzo Littorio was abetted by a series of photoelastic stress analysis experiments that were

Littorio, Scheme A (1934), are characterized by an overt preoccupation with a classicized and

to predict the distribution of stress and strain forces in the surface of the building’s cantilevered wall. These

monumental frontality. Both projects, however, also offer the potential of a transformed visual field, a field

experiments were perfected within a general refinement of the principles and mechanics of camera and

whose edges at times seem alternately expanded and eradicated. The essay’s primary interest is the

lens techniques, as well as the chemistry of the photographic process itself. Palazzo Littorio’s program, in

Palazzo Littorio, specifically the photoelastic/finite element analysis phase of this project; however, the

essence a speaking platform for Mussolini, was to be sustained by the spectacle of the massive cantilever

issues of perspectivalism that this project involves itself in are related also to both Casa Rustici and Casa

allowed by these experiments. The space of this instrument of political authority was derived from the

Giuliani-Frigerio (1939–40). Underlying this analysis is the assumption that Palazzo Littorio exemplifies a

literally deep and frontalized choreography of a political audience, yet it was also a space of shallow depth

phase of design in which Terragni and Lingeri effectively unanchored form from vision and in doing so

developed within the camera and lens techniques of photoelastic processes. These techniques effectively

clarified the spatial potential of material and matter itself; in other words, they bring to a cognitive level an

flattened the actual perspectival depth of the project within the thermodynamics of photographic chemical

ideal of material duration as a replacement for perspectival relativity. Peter Eisenman’s analysis of Casa

processes. Palazzo Littorio’s perceptual and literal frontality relates it vividly to the string of six apartment

Giuliani-Frigerio will later be brought to bear on the conception of an unframed and nondialectical, yet still

houses that Terragni designed with Lingeri in Milan, also during the early 1930s. The perspectival principles

plastic conception of architectural space, a space that has antecedents in the canonical works of de Stijl

of these works culminate in Casa Rustici, a project that, like Palazzo Littorio, vigorously establishes a planar

architecture and painting.14

modulation of depth as it simultaneously threatens its compositional stability.

The frontal arrangement of space in Casa Rustici operates in a manner similar to both Mondrian’s

object as origin, positing each as a durational entity within an expanded field.

work as described by Frank Stella and Robert Slutzky’s ocular paintings. Terragni and Lingeri overdilate the viewing eye; the architects invite the viewing subject to take up the apex of the offered

Palazzo Littorio: Buckling and Immanence

space as they withdraw its authority. The proportion and rhythm of openings in the facade of Casa

The photoelastic stress analysis diagrams that accompany the design presented by Terragni and Lingeri for the 1934

Rustici set up a syncopation within the parameters of a field established by the overt frame

Palazzo Littorio competition have garnered little attention and even less interpretation despite the fact that they have

surrounding the primary facade of the building. Readings of apparently recessive or progressive

been published widely.15 They appear in the Zanacelli monograph on Terragni, in the book Surface and Symbol by

planar depths are modulated peripherally and centrally in unexpected ways that ultimately undermine

Thomas Schumacher, and I am sure that Peter Eisenman will address them in some format in his forthcoming book

the eye’s ability to cohere the classicized formal characteristics of the composition. Terragni and

on Terragni. The reproduction of these images has consistently seemed dutiful rather than enlightening. This claim,

Lingeri focus the eye not on the form of the building but on the central space between the two

however, sets aside Manfredo Tafuri’s essay, “Giuseppe Terragni: Subject and Mask.” Because Tafuri’s explication

primary masses that house the apartment units. Like Mondrian’s bars that Stella claims span rather

does not examine the intrinsic properties of the photoelastic processes,16 he is forced to reconcile their significance

than divide, the balconies of the Casa Rustici seem to span the voided center of the building. In

in the design of Palazzo Littorio within the linguistic prerogatives of his own research. Tafuri seemed unable to

doing so they give rise to a complex space, a space that cannot be read as positive or negative,

synthesize his linguistic research and his sometimes startling structural/mechanical insights. For example; while Tafuri

recessive or progressive, or even as plastic in any traditional sense of the word. It is a space more

recognizes that the apparent wall composing the primary facade is actually a “boxlike structure” rather than a wall—a

akin to a vacuum than to a simple absence. The horizontal expanse of the facade establishes a

fact that completely changes not only the mechanics of its cantilever but also its ability to “speak,” in Tafuri’s

distinct peripheral datum; against this datum it is possible to read flanking window bays as

lexicon—the author still admits that he is unsure of the reason why the isostatic lines of the photoelastic process are

progressive surfaces against a center that appears to be recessive. Yet the readings can be

represented on the surface of this facade.17 Tafuri’s analysis focuses on the belief that Terragni has reduced these

reversed; the light that Stella understood to emanate from the background of Mondrian’s composition

“forces” to an arabesque, to a dissolution of an “apodictic word.” The following analysis of Palazzo Littorio instead

here forces the eye to relinquish its reliance on any expected background or foreground arrangement

attempts to more completely situate Terragni and Lingeri’s ambitions within the techniques of the photoelastic

of space, thus mandating an abdication of enframement or plastic figuration. The peripheral surface’s

process itself. In doing so it reveals the building’s fabrications of power and political authority, as they are manifested

windows, stacked five floors high, appear oversized as well, an attribute consistent to both Loos and

in the realms of optics, perspectivalism, lens and camera mechanisms, chemistry and photo processes, and

Terragni, as well as to contemporary work by Álvaro Siza and Frank Gehry. While they retain a vestige

ultimately in constituent subjectivity.

of the oculus, the window’s expansiveness undermines the progressive reading of the surface; the eye falls deep into them, unable to grasp the distanced ocular frame. These wall surfaces are also at once progressive and recessive; against the outer edge of the facade’s frame they appear to have receded, yet against the vectoral direction and speed of a frontalized vision they appear progressive.

The oculus/window in these surfaces offers the depth-seeking eye a chance to move deeper into space,while offering nothing to look at. Recalling Lacan, it also seems here that nothing looks back either. Space seems to replace the other.

The proportion of the windows in the facade of Casa Rustici, however, is sufficient to cause a kind of peripheral delay or momentary pause. We are asked to consider the nature of the oculus and the represented before relinquishing either. This delay, if understood within a model of ballistics, instigates a degree of turbulence: ballistics tests have shown that when a bullet passes through a plane of Plexiglas, it causes a turbulence that is roughly coplanar with the surface of the glass but derived from the direction, velocity, and shape of the bullet. As the bullet continues its slowed and damaged trajectory, this turbulence models a topology that in effect resolves and describes the catastrophic collaboration of the vectoral and planar dimensions of the experiment’s two components. If the geometries of vision were equated with those that describe the movement of the bullet and given a conical form, the topology of the turbulence could be understood to seek the orthogonal building form. As the balcony/bridges span the white-hot void of the building’s court, a subjectless court with a glass floor, the eye’s ability to hold on to the form of the building and composition must ultimately be intuited rather than represented. The mechanics of the eye are thwarted in this struggle; the eye falls deep into the central space, its speed and directionality damaged by the interaction with the facade, but it is continuous nonetheless. The result is an awareness of the architectural form, presumably of human life, that extends beyond the relativity of the frontal view and of the station point. Terragni and Lingeri triangulate the anticipated bipartite relationship of subject and object within a durational field—the Casa Rustici denies both subject or

below, left two images

Giuseppe Terragni. Casa Rustici, 1933–35. Milan, Italy. below. right Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri. The Palazzo Littorio, Scheme A, 1934. Rome, Italy.

Top

Perspective View: The ladder leads to a study above.

Bottom

Perspective View: An interior view to the tower stair.

Top

Plan drawing

Bottom

Elevation drawing

Perspective View to bedroom and gallery beyond. The main house is sited in a courtyard.

Double Dihedral House

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Sketch book

Santa Fe, New Mexico,September 1990

In the essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Roger Callois proposes that it is an organism’s ability to distinguish itself from space that allows it to form a coherent concept of self—of personality.1 That distinction between the self and space, however, is not easily defined. The Double Dihedral House consists of a house and art gallery situated opposite each other on four acres desert in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A cruciform volume is framed and unframed in the two structures; the house and gallery are each constituted in reference to their paired other structure. In the house, the roof and floor are cut away to reveal the interior. A subject’s gaze traverses the desert floor, piercing both building volumes—the gaze’s vectoral speed pauses momentarily to seek each surface before falling further in syncopation through subsequent layers. Eventually, the gaze is focused not on the building or the frame but on the unanchored space beyond. Under such circumstances the originative quality of perspectival space fails to provide the footing upon which to survey the Cartesian field. This failure also subsequently undermines the subject as the origin of space. Says Callois: “We are allowed to know, as we should, that nature is everywhere the same . . . then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put.”

1. Roger Callois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in October: The First Decade (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press), 70.

Double Dihedral House

3 Footnotes on the Collapse of Plastic Space In the notes below Rosalind Krauss and Robert Slutzky suggest that the frame of a picture provides a reciprocal supportive reaction to that which it contains. Krauss’ frame supports the dissipating body in the Man Ray photomontage “Monument to de Sade.” Slutzky’s frame provides the container that allows his reading of a dense “gelatinous” Cubist space. For both critics it is fair to say that a reciprocal plastic relationship exists between the frame and its subject; the frame is structurally loaded by that which is within it. In the Krauss and Slutzky critiques a reciprocal plastic relationship exists between the frame and that which it contains. The frame and subject are mutually interpolative; they posit each other in a spontaneously migrating reformation of support/supported.

In the essay, The Photographic Condition of Surrealism, Rosalind Krauss suggests that the frame of a picture provides a reciprocal supportive reaction to that which it contains. In her analysis of Man Ray’s photo montage, Monument to De Sade, Krauss claims that the drawn cruciform frame that shores up a dissipating body in the photograph: “Two further aspects of this image bespeak the structural reciprocity between frame and image, container and contained. The lighting of the...subject is such that the physical density drains off the body as it moves from the center of the image, so that by the time one’s gaze approaches the margins, flesh has become so generalized and flattened as to be assimilated in to the printed page. Given this threat of dissipation of physical substance, the frame is experienced as shoring up the collapsing structure...and guaranteeing its density.”

1. Robert Slutzky, In the essay “Aqueous Humor” Robert Slutzky portrays what he calls “a progressive and typically cubist thickening of space” in the late works of LeCorbusier, specifically in the buildings that employed the brise soleil. “The Cubist medium,” says Slutzky, “is not one of one of ethereal clarities, but of dense, gelatinous ambiguities.” Cubism, and in Slutzky’s paradigm the architecture of LeCorbusier, “savors the water rather than the air.” It is the air that Slutzky and LeCorbusier allow us to think of as viscous and turbulent --thick. The Cubist thickening of space that Robert Slutzky depicts in these works of LeCorbusier is activated at the periphery of LeCorbusier’s late buildings; here LeCorbusier instigates a turbulence that delaminates the otherwise unmitigated flow of space into and around a building mass and volume. At Chandigarh the brise soleil's of the Secretariat, the Palace of Justice and the Assembly all activate a dramatic alluvial play of space that is perhaps the last great public manifestation of architecture within a vigorous and willful plastic sensibility. LeCorbusier’s buildings are both the basin -- “the container like still life” -- and the sieve; they operate as enzymatic perturbations in what would otherwise could be a placid field. In a sense they both constitute the field and instigate a re-formation of its plastic qualities; a dialectic process but one seemingly without origin.

2.Krauss, Rosalind, “The Photographic Condition of Surrealism.” “the structural reciprocity between frame and image, container and contained...The lighting of the buttocks and thighs of the subject is such that the physical density drains off the body as it moves from the center of the image, so that by the time one’s gaze approaches the margins, flesh has become so generalized and flattened as to be assimilated in to the printed page.”

3. Derrida, Jacques, “The Truth in Painting,” p 50. “The frame labors indeed. . . it creaks and cracks, breaks down and dislocates even as it cooperates in the producing of the product, overflows it, and is deduc(t)ed from it.”

Robert Slutzky's reading of LeCorbusier's thickened space has a correlative antinomy in the analysis that Rosalind Krauss provides of Man Ray's Monument to DeSade in the October essay “The Photographic Condition of Surrealism.” Krauss suggests that the cruciform frame Many Ray has inscribed upon the surface of a photographic print provides a supportive reaction to the figure it contains. In her analysis Krauss claims that the cruciform frame drawn on top of the print shores up an otherwise dissipating body: “the structural reciprocity between frame and image, container and contained...The lighting of the buttocks and thighs of the subject is such that the physical density drains off the body as it moves from the center of the image, so that by the time one’s gaze approaches the margins, flesh has become so generalized and flattened as to be assimilated in to the printed page.” But this assimilation is thwarted or held at bay: “ Given this threat of dissipation of physical substance, the frame is experienced as shoring up the collapsing structure...and guaranteeing its density.”

In the Krauss and Slutzky critiques a reciprocal and dialectic relationship exists between the frame and that which it contains and this dialectic relationship originates and defines the plastic qualities of the works. The frame and subject are not independent however in some way their relationship is organic in that they are mutually interpolative; they posit each other in a spontaneously migrating reformation of support and supported. Krauss’ Man Ray loads the frame; his subject on the verge of complete dissolution is shored up before final disappearance. Certainly LeCorbusier’s boxer, filtered through the above scenarios must be an aqueous being -- a swimmer in a porous and viscous metropolitan match ring. The question that arises then is of unloading the frame -- relieving the pressure so to speak or curtailing the interpolitive dialectic relation of frame and subject. In Krauss’ scenario would the anatomy completely dissipate if the frame were expanded or removed -- and in Slutzky’s case would the “dense” space of cubism be possible without the transformative and dialectic mechanics that assured the virtuosity of thier architect. Even without answering the above questions directly; they are perhaps in some way rhetorical anyway, there still remains the prospect of a very interesting search into qualities of an architectural and ultimately urban space that seem to have much to do with our time and the “plasticity” of our spaces. What plastic possibilities emerge even within only the slightest precursory exploration: an un-framed space, an un-framed subject-thin rather than thick space--an a-plastic- milieu?

Double Dihedral House

section through study/tube: access is gained by ladder/stair. above

right

axonometric of house and gallery

Double Dihedral House

above

collage elevation studies

Double Dihedral House Notes for Having Heard Mathematics 1. Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 87–108.

2. Bryson, 89.

3. Robert Slutzky with Joan Ockman, “Color/Structure/Painting,” in Robert Slutzky: 15 Paintings, 1980–1984 (San Francisco: Modernism Gallery, 1984), unpaginated. Also contains essays by John Hejduk, Dore Ashton, and Alberto Sartoris.

4. Frank Stella, Working Space: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 82.FF 5. Robert Slutzky suggests that his paintings have topological qualities. They actually seem to intuit rather than model a particular type of topological form known as a minimal and embedded surface.

A minimal and embedded topological surface is boundaryless and non-self-intersecting. Described in finite terms, a minimal surface is capable of infinite extension without self-intersection. Until recently only three such figures were known: the plane, the catenoid, and the helicoid. Others approximate the conditions described, such as the Menger Sponge and the Hypersphere. Their lack of boundary, framing datum, and segmentation disallows readings of space that seek distinctions or edges. Paraphrased from Ivars Peterson, The Mathematical Tourist: Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1988), 56–59.

6. For the sake of clarity I have attributed the concept of an “expanded” or “withdrawn” frame to Norman Bryson. Bryson is actually interpreting earlier work by Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani.

Bryson situates the idea of an “expanded field” within his comparison of Sartre’s, Lacan’s, and Nishitani’s theorizing of the gaze. Bryson, 96–98.

7. Bryson, 100.

8. Bryson, 108.

9. A characterization of space as thin or dissolute is related to a concept of thickened space as presented in another essay by Robert Slutzky, “Aqueous Humor.” Slutzky portrayed what he called “a progressive and typically cubist thickening of space” in the late works of Le Corbusier, specifically in the buildings that employed the brise soleil. This thickening of space was generated largely by innovations in the vertical surface of Le Corbusier’s buildings. “The cubist medium,” says Slutzky, “is not one of ethereal clarities, but of dense, gelatinous ambiguities.” Cubism, and in Slutzky’s paradigm the architecture of Le Corbusier, “savors the water rather than the air.” The cubist thickening of space that Slutzky depicts in these works of Le Corbusier is activated at the periphery of Le Corbusier’s late buildings; here Le Corbusier instigates a turbulence that delaminates the otherwise unmitigated flow of space into and around a building mass and volume. At Chandigarh, the brise soleils of the Secretariat, the Palace of Justice, and the Assembly all activate a dramatic alluvial play of space that is perhaps the last great public manifestation of architecture within a

vigorous and willful plastic sensibility. Le Corbusier’s buildings are both the basin—“the container-like still life”—and the sieve; they operate as enzymatic perturbations in what would otherwise be a placid field. In a sense they both constitute the field and instigate a reformation of its plastic qualities, a dialectic process but one seemingly without origin.

Slutzky’s reading of Le Corbusier’s thickened space has a correlative antinomy in Rosalind Krauss’s analysis of Man Ray’s Monument to De Sade in the October essay “The Photographic Condition of Surrealism.” Krauss suggests that the cruciform frame Man Ray has inscribed upon the surface of a photographic print provides a supportive reaction to the figure it contains. Krauss claims that the cruciform frame drawn on top of the Man Ray photograph shores up an otherwise dissipating body: “The structural reciprocity between frame and image, container and contained . . . The lighting of the buttocks and thighs of the subject is such that the physical density drains off the body as it moves from the center of the image, so that by the time one’s gaze approaches the margins, flesh has become so generalized and flattened as to be assimilated into the printed page.” But this assimilation is thwarted or held at bay: “Given this threat of dissipation of physical substance, the frame is experienced as shoring up the collapsing structure . . . and guaranteeing its density.”

In the Krauss and Slutzky critiques, the relationship between the frame and that which it contains defines the plastic qualities of the works. The frame and subject are not independent, and in some way their relationship is organic because they are mutually interpolative; they posit each other in a spontaneously migrating reformation of supporter and supported. Man Ray loads the frame; on the verge of complete dissolution his subject is shored up before final disappearance yet this subject also assures the eventual stability of the frame as well. Le Corbusier’s boxer, filtered through Slutzky’s scenario, must be an aqueous being—a swimmer in a porous and viscous metropolitan match ring. The question that arises in this context is of unloading the frame—relieving the pressure or curtailing the interpolative dialectic relationship between frame and subject? In Krauss’s scenario, would the anatomy completely dissipate if the frame were expanded or removed? And in Slutzky’s case, would the “dense” space of cubism be possible without the transformative and dialectic mechanics that assured the virtuosity of their architect? There remains the prospect of a very interesting search into the qualities of an architectural, and ultimately urban, space of our time.

10. Massimo Cacciari, “The Dialectics of the Negative and the Metropolis,” in Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 711.

The reference to negative dwelling is derived from the term Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Kakania “was the most progressive State of all; it was the State that was by now acquiescing to its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least had not irrevocably happened, as by the foam of the oceans from which mankind arose.”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, (London: Picador, 1979), 34.

12. Bryson, 97. The term “blankness” is a reference to Nishitani; the actual term is sunyata. Bryson translates its intended meaning as “radical impermanence.”

13. Bryson, 97.

14. Peter Eisenman, “From Object to Relationship II, Casa Giuliani-Frigerio: Giuseppe Terragni Casa Del Fascio,” Perspecta 13/14, 36–65. On Eisenman’s relation to Terragni also see Sanford Kwinter, “Challenge Match for the Information Age: Maxwell’s Demons and Eisenman’s Conventions,” Architecture and Urbanism (September 1993): 146–149.

These three projects were designed in succession for a single client. The project title, Vittorio Plastici, is taken from an essay by Giorgio DeChirico. DeChirico

project

was a painter whose work in the 1920’s frequently portrayed empty urban spaces and vacant plazas. DeChirico’s urban scenes were usually occupied by a

client name

sole visitor shown only as a shadow. These studies for a minimal or one room house were done for a client who initially wished to add to an existing house. As

program

the project progressed it became clear that the new building would serve as a private space fully separate from the existing house. DeChirico’s essay provided

site

the context to discuss a space segregate but also adjacent to a busy site. The three proposals shown here explored ways to achieve these goals. The first

date of design

project was done using shape and color as the primary element. The next version—the Torus House or CourtHouse—provided a succession of that lead

current state of project

through the house and its programs. The final proposal—the J-Shaped GlassHouse—used steel and glass as a both surface and structure. The house was

budget

one room and the interior spaces were cleared of functions as well as structure.

Vittorio Plastici Barbara Kelly

Minimal House: Guest House

Columbia, Maryland 1992

$125,000

Designed

Vittorio Plastici I

These studies for a minimal house/studio were designed as an addition to an existing house in a suburb of Washington DC. Each of the studios was designed to be situated at the rear of the existing house’s property. The study was undertaken prior to the design of the client’s requested project as an attempt to clarify and isolate a series of spatial relationships that might be used in the final project. The final design is presented in this folio as the Glass House; that project’s origins were established with this series of three minimal dwellings. This project is a preliminary study for the Torus—Court House and the J-Shaped Glass House projects in this portfolio.

Exhibitions and Installlations

Publications

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

1991. 3x3+9. Juried selection of 5 architects for SF/LA installation. Jury : Adele Santos, Eric Moss and William Stout. Sponsored by the SF Architecture Foundation, SF Museum of Modern Art Department of Architecture and Design.

above

Model view: three color field studies for minimal dwelling.

Vittorio Plastici I

Color Fields

An essay published by Giorgio DeChirico in 1919 presented a distinction between what the painter called two types of solitude: the first was a solitude of plastic form; the second was a solitude of signs. DeChirico’s essay also described what he called a “tertiary landscape;” a landscape that might have existed before the presence of man. These three studios were developed with DeChirico’s “tertiary landscape” in mind. They were attempts to establish a series of plastic/ mechanical techniques that could be understood to “deplete” the body’s plastic presence in a way that could provide some durational autonomy to the landscape, to its architecture and to its inhabitant.

Model views: Three proposals for minimal dwellings: Bathroom and sleeping chamber is suspended at mid level.

above left to right

this page: above left

at mid level.

Bathroom and sleeping chamber is suspended

Vittorio Plastici I

Color Fields

These projects use color and form in diagonal relationships that work against a stable figure/ground or object/field condition. The ideal was to manage to be both demonstratively formal yet avoid the formalization of spatial experience.

zzVittorio Plastici I

Color Fields

Vittorio Plastici II

Oculus/Torus House

Three chambers form an axial promenade. Each space is dedicated to a particular program. A courtyard surrounds the dwelling and forms an ambigous negative space. A deep bath is formed at the center court forming a torus shaped space at the main body of the house.

Publications 2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

note:

The title Torus House is also the title of a

house by the architect Preston Scott Cohen.

Vittorio Plastici II

Oculus/Torus House

Vittorio Plastici III

J Shaped Glass House

The elbow of J-Shaped configuration of the plan sets up a dual vista or gaze across the interior and exterior space. The idea is modest in this application but is considered in light of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The subject is metaphorically displaced by the twin towers—the bath and kitchen—and placed outside of space to witness their exchange. In a limited volume I was trying to create an expansiveness that would be liberating for the clients. The project evolved towards a minimalism that could perhaps speak of much more than what was at hand.

Exhibitions

Publications

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

Vittorio Plastici III

J Shaped Glass House

The glass house is a free standing studio/guest house. It was designed for a family of four who had outgrown their existing house in the suburbs of Washington DC. Initial proposals specified an addition to the rear of the house. The idea of a separate building evolved as it became clear that the primary objective of the new proram was to provide a “time out� zone a refuge for a family that owns and operates three businesses and has two young children.The courtyard house, also in this folio, was an earlier proposal - the glass house was the final design proposal. At this point the client is interested in building an entirely new house and the project will start fresh.

Vittorio Plastici III

J Shaped Glass House

The Surface as Structure

Construction

The glass house frame is integral to the surface of the building. Two columns fall inside the space almost as extracts or holes in the continuity of the interior volume. The bath room and kitchen cores similarly are volumes removed from space - they sit in recessed motes. I have been interested in the possible ambiguous reading that a skin surface may belong to the edge of mass or the edge of space. If the skin belongs to space than the building is a void - a hole in space and the other edge of space comes into question.

4 inch square steel sections are attached flush to the top outer edge of the foundation slab and to the lower outer edge of the roof slab. The columns are set on a fourteen foot bay. The windows are framed in a steel flange and prject past the surface of the columns. The foundation slab is paved with roman brick; at the bath and kitchen a reveal is cut in the concrete floor. The towers were designed to be fabricated in brick.

Structure

The frame of the building is atteched to the outer edge of the floor plate. The complete building structure and closure occurs at the outer most edge of the building. From inside - the subject reaches for the envelope of closure as if it were the outside surface of space rather than the inside surface of volume.

Vittorio Plastici III

J_Shaped Glass House

Site

The Glass House is sited at the rear of the existing property. A lawn separates the two houses.

This project was created in response to an open competition sponsored annually by Japan Architect magazine. Each year an invited juror writes and judges the

project

competition dedicated to themes of housing and domesticity. In 1992 Rem Koolhaas was invited to be the author and jury of the competition. This work pro-

client

House With No Style

posed that the house be turned inside out—and that occupation takes place in the city. The work won a Fourth Place/Honorable Mention and was 1 of 16 proj-

program

ects awarded from 732 international submissions.

site

Japan Architect House

No Site

date of design

1992-1992

current state of project budget

Un-Built

200,000 Dollars

House With No Style

Text excerpted from the call for entries:

Is it utopian to imagine a “designer-free” zone? It would be an enormous relief; no more show, no more intention, no more intimidation, no more significance...

The house with no Style should fit anonymously in the designer- free zone, anonymously. Its designer should impose massive constraints; avoid all recent cliches, avoid all nostalgia, avoid the 50’s, avoid the 60’s, avoid palm trees, avoid (almost all) angles that are not 90 degrees, avoid color, avoid... Programs too, have to be purges of the frivolous and the decorative...In spite of elimination of style, it is not the intention that the houses talk only about architecture, only about space, only about kinari...about eternal values. They have to be clearly contemporary; to be included in the most characterless contemporary conditions. Entries will be judged with the utmost severity...Originality will be rewarded. –Rem Koolhaas

Juried Awards

Exhibitions and Installaions

Publications: Books

Publications: Published Design in Journals

1993 Honorable Mention Award, Japan Architect, Shinkenchiku-Sha Residential Design Competition for: “House with No Style.” 1 of 16 projects awarded from 732 submissions. Rem Kookhaas, Sole Juror

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

1993 Shinkenchiku, (Tokyo), House with no Style.

Volume 2. p. 122.

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

1993 Netherlands Architecture Institute, “House With No Style.”

Also shown at: Yokohama Design Center, on interactive CD Rom.

Japan Architect, House with no Style.

Volume 9. February, p. 38 - 39.

Space Replaces Us by Michael Bell Did you ever dream that you awoke to find yourself the only person left on the planet? In my dream everyone is still here but they have all gone inside. Of course I did not realize this at first but after I did I tried to find out if and when they were coming back out. Soon I give up guessing and got used to the idea that people were something like a mirror a without them I couldn’t see a point in shaving or even getting dressed. Since everyone else was inside to stay I started feeling at home everywhere. My house lost its centric pull and I started sleeping wherever I wanted. I once put my bed out on the street and slept without covers. Another time I put my bed on a very steeply curved freeway exit ramp near where I had once almost rear ended another car because I came upon it too quickly. My house seemed like it had been turned inside out and I felt like I was everywhere all at once. Usually though I just slept at home in the bedroom with the windows secured and the drapes pulled and the door locked.

I guess it was just for old time’s sake but it made the room seem like any point anywhere. At night I would go to sleep trying to hold that thought while simultaneously thinking of the all the others in their rooms and the continuous spaces between us.

Picture this: The interior of your voided stomach cavity across which are strung what appears to be cables. Feels this: The pain where the tensioned linear cables tug at the surface lining of the stomach. Your view is from within the voided cavity and outside the coordinates of sensory pain. Imagine this: The topologically complex surface of your voided stomach and absence of nerve endings within the space it contains. Worry about this: Though pain can only be felt along the coordinates of the body the space hurts more and you don’t know why?

During the topological revolution of 1993 my house was turned inside out. My neighbor’s houses resisted, but thick green shrubs sprouted and belted them all inside till the physicists could figure out what had happened. I called my neighbor on the phone and he told me we were about to enter the realm of true modernity but until then we would have to be content to speak on the phone.

No one was coming out past his or her shrubs. My house didn’t have shrubs so I went out to see what it was like.

Conjecture? Yes...But the facts accumulate: Mies and Stephen Hawking examine the artifact and recall Bataille’s "The Impossible." The third member of their party, a social worker, realize that economic topology has made this a true story for the homeless on American streets.

Model The torus formation produces a courtyard. The front glazed area faces the suburban street. The court is open to the rear via a covered passage. Half of the building is open horizontally; the other half open vertically.

After five years in business and having overseen the care of at least one thousand children the owners of suburban Maryland day care center had the chance

project

to move their business. The available site was a very small piece of building property at the rear of a new 40 acres commercial project. The property available

client name

is at the far back of a new commercial project and on the edge of a few acres of water shed held back from development by zoning and the Environmental

program

Protection Agency. Feeling that day care centers had not been given significant architectural attention the owners asked me to work with them on several

site

issues. The foremost concern was helping children construct a space for themselves in the city/megalopolis. How the children saw them-selves within the city

date of design

and how the building could affect this were primary concerns for the clients. The building is at the edge of a water shed — the overall site was at the edge of

budget

Columbia Maryland, a planned community which is in turn on the edge of Washington D.C.. How to make a child’s space, how to help a child cohere space and their place in it, on the edge of an edge city, in a car and capital shaped environment and at an unknown distance from your parents. The problem was one of time in a city that doesn’t shape time in any traditional way. Our strategy was to design a building that could somehow make time—could have a sense of immanent time. Since the city didn’t allow any sense of visual time it seemed that we could make a building whose structure “made time”—a building based on ideas of torsion, gravity and buckling that could instigate some new structure of time that might allow the children to see the megalopolis in a different way.

A very abstract idea for a day care center—maybe—but certainly children have a fantastically abstract ways of seeing and thinking. The day care center is a building that could allow children to make time more plastic.

Daycare and Kindergarten barbara kelly

School

Clarksville, Maryland, USA 1992 - 1993

500,000

Mathematics Daycare

The shell of the Physics Pre-School and Kindergarten operates as a structural beam; it is designed to resist buckling in its thin plate pre-stressed concrete construction through its box-beam configuration. The walls, floor, and ceiling act together in a tuned configuration that induces a virtual reading of energies along their surfaces. Holes are cut for windows in neutral surfaces with glass inset and recessed parallel to the building’s surface.

Juried Awards

Exhibitions and Installations

Publications: Books

1999 The Architectural League of New York, Emerging Voices Award

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell, Monacelli Press, 2003.

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

Model photograph depicts disassembled model. The first floor houses a daycare center; the second floor is a kindergarten. The two “U-shaped” spaces compose the completed school building.

Stairs and bathrooms occupy the solid brown and black towers.

The foreground court has gym equipment and playing fields. The kindergarten roof has a circular solarium — the building counter’s subject centering radial formations with Cartesian parallelograms.

Model detail the kindergarten roof has a circular solarium — the building counter’s subject centering radial formations with Cartesian parallelograms.

A small kitchen and cafeteria area occupies a wing of the building. The second level floor extends to form a roof over serving counter. Two circular skylights are centered over counter below. A “square peg in a round hole” allows for an exhaust vent from the kitchen. model

The building faces a playing field. Entry to the building from the field requires crossing a small bridge. The thin second floor “post tensioned” floor plate is revealed in the elevation. The first floor glazing system engages the underside of this plate and the sill of the ground floor slab.

model view

Mathematics Daycare

The site is adjacent to a watershed and at the far end of a 42-acre commercial development devoted predominantly to automobile dealerships.

Site Drawing

The shell of the Physics Pre-School and Kindergarten operates as a structural beam; it is designed to resist buckling in its thin plate pre-stressed concrete construction through its box-beam configuration. The walls, floor, and ceiling act together in a tuned configuration that induces a virtual reading of energies along their surfaces. Holes are cut for windows in neutral surfaces with glass inset and recessed parallel to the building’s surface. The co-planar flow of tensions along the surface of the structure even involves the building’s paint in construction. The brittle shell induces a reading of spatial membranes like those found within agitated water; the pointal coordinates of a complex surface waft with the ebb of waves. In this case the building charges the air with a buckling musicality. The oculus roof garden causes a concentric wave ripple that must buckle to ccommodate itself to the cubic building volume. The volumetric building shell infolds (collapses) to form the extruded shelf in the cafeteria. Upstairs is a kindergarten - downstairs a day school and playground.

from left to right

three towers depict problems of center of mass and gravity. The stability of each relates height to base surface — the tendency to topple is exacerbated by their height.

Model detail

Kitchen/cafeteria roof: “square peg in a round hole”

Model detail

model detail Windows and frames are set inside the building’s steel surface. The glass surface reads as co-planar with the building surface: the window modulated depth as well as surface relations.

The second level elevation windows are “cut outs� from the steel shell of the building. They lighten the weight of the shell and remove material at the structural center of inertia. Color changes create a rhythm that moves in a belt-like formation around the kindergarten classroom. A lower level room is built into the hillside.

elevation detail

service handrails

The stair towers are surrounded by clearstory glass openings.

San Francisco in the studio

Second Street Studio.

model view at window of

Mathematics Daycare

above

Plan Level One: Daycare

Plan Level Two: Kindergarten and Solarium

right

Windows from the second floor kindergarten classroom offer a reciprocal view across the narrow court.The second level windows telescope the view both into and out of the building. The building is both a cubic solid and a hollow membrane.

model

Solarilum occupies circular court.

left

an elevation study collage

rigth

isometric drawing of building

2. Texas Eyes in the Heat

The Swimmer Navigating the inchoate fabric and the after affects of economic promiscuity. In the contemporary metropolis it seems we oscillate on the cusp of two spaces: while fully connected, plugged in, subjugated, over-coded, and prearranged by the mechanisms of urbanism, we are also adrift — loose and flailing — in the malformed, unshaped spaces that the templates of commodification fail to cohere. In these spaces — adjacent to the freeway, beside the house, behind the retail strip— the trajectory of economic vectors that maintain and invent the shape of the city find nothing to carry or transmit them, let alone give them plastic presence. These spaces slip off of us as water slinks in sheets off a swimmer emerging from a pool — wafting, cohering, flexing to and unfolding from the body. Though the codes of the contemporary city are mediated by the intellect, it is hard to believe that we don’t swim in and out of the vaporous, a-plastic spaces they construct; that we don’t register their haptic presence as they slip on and off.

Eyes in the Heat: Seeing the City

Photoelastic Stress Analysis Photoelasticity was “the method of experimental stress analysis” during the 1930s.18 As a form of finite

text excerpted from the “Having Heard Mathematics: the Topologies of Boxing,” Slow Space, by Michael Bell

element analysis the photoelastic process revealed an observable relationship between optical patterns generated within a transparent material and the distribution of stresses that migrate through the material under loading.19 The behavior of the material under stress is witnessed in the patterns generated as a polarized light passes through the assembled model. The polarization produces a light whose waves vibrate within a single plane; as a control device, the polarization allows for the discretization of an

The Duration House as it was presented in Slow Space framed the local, small-scale, volumetric and tectonic ambitions of

otherwise infinite number of wave axes. In certain materials, the refraction of this polarized light coincides

architecture against the fluid and global processes of urban finance, trade and labor. The Duration House characterized Houston as

with the material’s primary stress points. Changes in the “velocity of the transmission of light” as it passes

an emblematic of post-war United States city with formal and architectural attributes that have become increasingly fragmented and

through these materials reveal the pattern of stress distribution as it occurs in the model.20 Since the

visually inchoate, as its financial, media and production systems have become unified and virtually self-perpetuating. The Duration

model stands in for an actual material, the value of these results must be extrapolated in order to be of

House posited that architecture’s renewed urban agency, and its ability to participate in the construction of an urban subject, would

use. Given the scale of the cantilever that Terragni and Lingeri proposed in Scheme A of what would

find potency in an enzymatic role or as retroactive cohering agent. The goal was and still is to view architecture as being sustained

eventually total three design submissions, it is not surprising that they chose to perform some stress tests

rather than undermined by urban processes of rationalization, production, and finance—yet also to open the role of resistance.

in the form of finite element analysis. But why would Terragni and Lingeri choose to implement the stress patterns culled from the photoelastic studies as a primary element in the final design proposal? In the case of Palazzo Littorio, the isostatic lines that depicted the evaluation of stresses in the photoelastic

Palazzo Littorio: Buckling and Immanence

model were to be traced into the building’s facade by steel support cables.

The photoelastic stress analysis diagrams that accompany the design presented by Terragni and Lingeri

The facade of the proposed speaking platform from which Mussolini was to address an audience

for the 1934 Palazzo Littorio competition have garnered little attention and even less interpretation despite

revealed the tracings of the stresses generated at the two massive trusses that were to support the

the fact that they have been published widely. They appear in the Zanacelli monograph on Terragni, in

cantilevered wall.21 What is referred to here as a wall appears to be actually a curved diaphragm structure

the book Surface and Symbol by Thomas Schumacher, and I am sure that Peter Eisenman will address

that operates as a thin-walled beam: in the perspective drawing that depicts the structure from above and

them in some format in his forthcoming book on Terragni. The reproduction of these images has

in plan, two wall surfaces seem to compose a structure that synthetically acts as a hollow beam. As

consistently seemed dutiful rather than enlightening. This claim, however, sets aside Manfredo Tafuri’s

such, the suspension of this conflation between curved structural plate and box beam would have

essay, “Giuseppe Terragni: Subject and Mask.” Because Tafuri’s explication does not examine the intrinsic

behaved very differently under loading than a single plate or wall surface would have. It is not clear if the

properties of the photoelastic processes,16 he is forced to reconcile their significance in the design of

photoelastic analysis was performed using a diaphragm model that accurately depicted the complexity of

Palazzo Littorio within the linguistic prerogatives of his own research. Tafuri seemed unable to synthesize

the proposed cantilever, nor is it clear if the modeled surface employed in analysis conformed to the

his linguistic research and his sometimes startling structural/mechanical insights. For example; while Tafuri

curvature of the actual building design. In either case, neglecting these attributes would have rendered the

recognizes that the apparent wall composing the primary facade is actually a “boxlike structure” rather

test results inaccurate and the resulting construction almost invariably catastrophic.

15

than a wall—a fact that completely changes not only the mechanics of its cantilever but also its ability to “speak,” in Tafuri’s lexicon—the author still admits that he is unsure of the reason why the isostatic lines of the photoelastic process are represented on the surface of this facade.17 Tafuri’s analysis focuses on the belief that Terragni has reduced these “forces” to an arabesque, to a dissolution of an “apodictic word.”

The following analysis of Palazzo Littorio instead attempts to more completely situate Terragni and Lingeri’s ambitions within the techniques of the photoelastic process itself. In doing so it reveals the building’s fabrications of power and political authority, as they are manifested in the realms of optics, perspectivalism, lens and camera mechanisms, chemistry and photo processes, and ultimately in constituent subjectivity.

Stress concentration factor determined by photoelasticity.

right

If a slight adjustment were made in the calibration of surface curvature to wall thickness, wall height, vertical support, or material chemical stability, it is clear that the project could suffer a dramatic structural collapse.

Terragni and Lingeri appear to have set the project on the verge of material and formal failure: in other words, it seems that they have found a combination of formal and material properties that reveal a threat to the stability of the status quo while allowing for its ultimate and highly dramatic sustenance. In this light the complexity of Terragni’s political beliefs might find some clarity. Perhaps more significant, this project reveals the status of the dialectical imperatives that define its plastic and mechanical prerogatives, and so provides a critique of its own means and those of its patronage. This is something that contemporary conscriptions of the visual do not seem to provide. The polarization of the light source in the testing process delimits the plane about which the light waves vibrate, and relies upon the discretization of axial dimensions that were otherwise potentially infinite. Understood within the cultural and political regime for which this project was designed, this delimiting of mechanical and physical cycles allows for the dialectical confinement of what above

Photoelastic studies of Palazzo Littorio.

would have been infinite within nature. In essence, this delimiting is the architecture of Palazzo Littorio: an artificial contrivance and model of nature’s duration, a frontalized and at least partially classicized

The trusses that were to support a significant portion of this surface’s weight, seen in the perspective

architectural design whose structural mechanics instigate a pseudo migratory set of forces that mimic the

illustration from above, would not have been visible to a viewer at ground level. Their support of the

duration of organic life. Within the discrete basin of modern engineering techniques, this dialectical device

eighty-meter-long porphyry wall occurred at two points that straddled the removed section of construction

becomes a mechanical and translational model of what Guy Debord refers to as the “social appropriation of

cut out to accommodate the balcony. The cut-out section effectively creates two almost independent

time.” It is an edifice that both conceals and reveals “the power that built itself up on the basis of the penury

surfaces that reconnect under the balcony; each in effect is supported at one point, but their joining also

of the society of cyclical time.” Palazzo Littorio is “the power . . . of the class which organized social labor”

causes them to act as continuous structure. This places a great strain on the surfaces that surround the

and confiscated “the limited surplus value to be extracted” from it.23 The Palazzo Littorio is a model of

cut-out. Given the slight curvature of the suspended wall surface, the pointal support of the trusses would

temporal surplus as disequilibrium. The surfaces upon which this power is inscribed instigate and resolve

have instigated rotational moments in not one but two axes, and each of these moments would threaten

their own structural instabilities; while the relation of forces in the two cantilevers is binary, the origin of the

the ability of the structure to achieve or maintain equilibrium. The first rotational moment would have been

instability appears to be migratory and floating. The resultant equilibrium is one that feigns surplus in a

parallel to the surface of the composition, and it would induce a membranic stress across the surface of

perpetual motion. Within the quantitative techniques of finite element analysis and the discretization of

the wall; the second rotational moment would have been instigated by the slight curvature of the wall

structural mechanics and optic properties of light, Terragni and Lingeri have assembled a model of

surface and its axis would have been perpendicular to this surface. Both rotations would have critically

structural immanence—a model that succeeds the dialectics of its own contrivance. Surely equilibrium is

altered the degree to which the photoelastic analysis, if performed on a flat surface, could predict the

the necessary final state, but in choosing to represent the residual and latent forces—the surplus

behavior of these surfaces and their beam configuration under loading. If the construction was indeed that

energies—at work in the creation of this spectacle, Terragni and Lingeri have created a critique of

of thin-walled beam, how and when it would fail would be very different from that of a singular plane. The

metropolitan dialectics and in doing so of metropolitan subjectivity. This wall, an expansive painting of sorts,

design of the building, however, appears to anticipate the complexity of forces at play and it seems

delivers to Mussolini the pictorial gaze of an audience whose subjectivity it both conscripts and ironically

intuitively to both induce and counteract them. The diaphragm construction of the building’s facade

also may sever.24 In transforming the perspectival depth of a viewing subject into the thermodynamic

appears to be intended to provide the depth needed to counter these oblique loading conditions. While

modeling of light as material strain within photography, Terragni and Lingeri effectively have flattened the

the shallow curvature of the plan exacerbated the capabilities of the cantilevered composition to maintain

menacing distance that segregates subject and object. In other words, it is possible to read this pictorial

equilibrium, it also appears to provide the structural depth and ballast required to resist buckling and

field as both expanded and tragically foreclosed.

22

structural failure. The potential that the wall surface would buckle under its own loading would have been more complex at the central balcony, where a section of wall is removed. Terragni and Lingeri seemed willing to both allow for structural depth and curvature, and the concurrent deep pictorial depth and frontality that abetted the project’s political requirements, while effectively trying to maintain a primarily surface or shallow distribution of stresses along the surface. The result is a construction that has qualities of both depth and surface, yet it is a composition that refuses the hierarchical dimension of either axial vector. This lack of hierarchy has confounded succinct readings of Terragni’s political resolve.

Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri. The Palazzo Littorio, Scheme A, 1934. Rome, Italy.

right

far right Giuseppe Terragni. Casa Giuliani Frigerio, 1939–40. Como, Italy

In his essay “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” Martin Jay describes the distinction between “artificial” and

Fringe pattern in disk containing a central hole. Load applied at the top and bottom center. Patterns emerge as a result of polarization of light-wave vibrations; the waves vibrate at different magnitudes depending on the stress in the material they pass through or refract from.

left

“synthetic perspective”: artificial perspective places a flat and planar mirror to nature and therefore produces a flattened representation of it; synthetic perspective employs a concave mirror and, even though the concave surface still produces an ultimately homogeneous representation of nature, provides a multiplicity of potential vantage points.25 The concave surface adds attributes of the infinite to the finite in its dissolution of the single station point. Synthetic perspective allowed work to be “successfully viewed from more than the imagined apex of the beholder’s visual pyramid.”26 The facade of Palazzo Littorio, literally a concave surface that was to embrace a delivered and frontal audience,27 in this light espouses the homogeneity of Cartesian perspective, yet could also be said to model the autonomy of the individual within a spectacle of synthetic perspective. While such a suggestion is plausible given Terragni’s affiliations with the Fascist party, any attempt in design to eventually transpose Terragni’s mechanics to

The chemistry and optical mechanics of the photoelastic processes were perfected during the 1930s as

contemporary sites within contemporary regimes is haunted by an unresolved doubt. Jay clarifies this

Terragni and Lingeri completed the design of their project.28 The implementation of this experimental

doubt in a reference to the camera obscura and the “gleeful conclusion” by Friedrich Nietzsche that “if

technique in the design of Palazzo Littorio appears to be an isolated incident employed only once in

everyone had his or her own camera obscura with a distinctly different peephole . . . then no

Terragni’s career. Terragni did, however, design and build other projects in which this technique would

transcendental world view would be possible.” The monocularity of both the process by which Terragni

have been useful, if not necessary.29 The manner in which and for whom the Palazzo Littorio project was

and Lingeri attempted to deliver an audience to Mussolini and by which they employed the processes of

produced is in this sense a unique instance in the history of architecture and optical experimentation.30

photoelastic analysis relied upon the discretization of vision within an evolved photographic process, a

The scion of Palazzo Littorio’s patronage is undeniable; the photographic and lens techniques employed in

single peephole in effect, that mimicked the quantitative and monocular geometries of Cartesian

the building’s design at the very least aggressively attempted a resituating of an optic subject within a

perspective. The photoelastic process could even be said to have transformed attributes of visuality into

delivered mass audience. The paradigms of Cartesian perspectivalism, the monocularity of camera and

the chemical process of photography itself: the photographic surface is the hegemonic confiscation and

lens mechanics, the discovery and manipulation of light waves, and the thermodynamics of the

dissolution of human vision—vision and figuration here become thermodynamic in a chemically

photographic process are employed in the design of Palazzo Littorio in a way that marks this project as

“expanded” field. Is the curvature of Palazzo Littorio’s facade a form of synthetic perspective, and if so,

one of the most advanced and complex attempts in the history of architecture to inculcate space and

was Terragni interested in providing an individual and a transcendent worldview? If this is a correct reading

political authority.

of Terragni’s intentions, does this “synthetic” subjectivity provide both the transcendent omniscience of its party’s patronage in a monolithic form as it also provides the individuality of the single person? Given the ultimate homogeneity of synthetic perspective’s structure and its ultimate failure to provide a truly unlimited number of vantage points or to relinquish enframing itself, is Palazzo Littorio an intimation of the impossibility of both transcendence and the monolithic?

In the case of Palazzo Littorio, it is clear that Mussolini becomes the metaphoric force that prevents both the collapse of the party and, figuratively, the collapse of the architectural apparatus itself. Thomas Schumacher speculates that Terragni’s lacing of porphyry, an Egyptian stone available from only a single quarry, with steel was an appropriate image for the omnipotence of Fascist ambitions. It is hard to argue with this thematically, but Terragni’s recurring willingness to retain an extravagant degree of both the figural and symbolic, and his willingness to almost allow the represented within the severity of his abstracting techniques require that we speculate further about the significance of this work in a context beyond those of either state ambitions or an architect’s symbolization of those ambitions.

The mechanical and translational techniques that Terragni employed in his incantation of Mussolini’s authority were also employed by Terragni in different programs toward completely other ends. The seeming portability of these techniques gives validity to a strictly formal analysis, even given the circumstances of this architect’s patrons. While it could be argued that all of Terragni’s works were completed within the margins of Fascism, it is difficult not to see these spatial interests as perhaps more endemic to Terragni himself. It is difficult to evaluate fully the pictorial mechanics of Terragni and Lingeri’s collaborative works; these projects offer an architecture of dialectic pictorial means that expresses both the omniscience of authority, but also the negation of its discrete means. On a contemporary site, however, the techniques by which these projects orchestrate space offer in the catastrophe of their ocular engagement an ironic and unexpected experience. The widening of the visual field and overdilating of the eye afford access to a mode of time as duration. As such these techniques have value in the comprehension of the dissolute spaces of the late American metropolis.

below

Diagram depicts the photoelastic process.

The Centripetal and the Centrifugal: Dutch Matter Peter Eisenman’s research and analysis of Terragni’s Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, published in the essay “From

Eisenman’s analysis has been criticized for isolating the formal aspects of Terragni’s architecture both from

Object to Relationship II,” more than twenty five-years ago, offer a model of Terragni’s plastic mechanics

the political milieu in which the works were generated and from the theological complexity of Terragni’s

that has yet to be fully assimilated into a larger critique of Terragni’s enduring relevance. Casa Giuliani-

own Catholicism. Eisenman has resisted this criticism, and in some ways this is unfortunate because the

Frigerio was completed in 1940, and in many ways the attributes that Eisenman reveals in this building

revelations of his analysis can be understood as a mechanism of broader critique of subjectivity as it is

indicate a conception of space that Terragni could not have imagined within the visual dialectics of either

drawn within the machinic authority of metropolitan processes. The dialectic relationship of centrifugal and

Palazzo Littorio’s structure or Casa Rustici’s perspectivalism. Only by passing through these stages and

centripetal forces that Eisenman’s analysis disables are, in scenarios of contemporary urbanism, manifest

by unanchoring the visual from the formal could Terragni conceive of space in the manner that Eisenman

almost exclusively by the demands of speculative capital. To paraphrase Guy Debord, the “dictatorship of

presents. According to Eisenman, Casa Giuliani-Frigerio is involved in the simultaneous development of

the automobile, the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance, has left its mark on the

two types of space: the first considers space as subtractive, or cut away from a solid; the second

landscape in the dominance of freeways that bypass the old urban centers and promote even greater

considers space as additive “and understood to operate in the layering of planes.” The key to Eisenman’s

dispersal.” The centrifugal satellite developments of Debord’s scenario are themselves “subject to the

explication is that these two techniques not only operate simultaneously, but that this simultaneity reveals

irresistible centrifugal trend, and when, as partial reconstructions of the city, they in turn become

an ambiguity in how the project exists “plastically.” Eisenman’s analysis portrays a “conceptual ambiguity”

overtaxed secondary centers, they are likewise cast aside.” Within the machinations of a self-sustaining

developed “from the use of two opposing conceptions of space”—the centripetal subtracting of space

consumptive economy, the dissolution of the city is inevitable.33 Eisenman’s model of an ambiguous

from an existing volume or mass, and the centrifugal layering of planes in a cumulative and additive

hierarchy of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies could be understood in this light to offer the possibility

process. The analysis seeks to reveal the potential of “abstract relationships” as conceivably independent

of an objective yet nonplastic architectural engagement in this dissolution: it seems that Eisenman found

of actual ones, and proposes that the search for an architectural syntax is likely to be found in the

in the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio a kind of nonplastic space, a mode of willful yet nonsubjective composition, a

ambiguity between these conceptual and actual relationships. Eisenman’s analysis ultimately tends toward

manner of building that refuses to participate in the deployment of authority. Eisenman and Tafuri situate

a resolution of the questions of transformation and hermeneutics that preoccupy his own practice of

the bulk of their theses within the mechanisms of language; it could be argued that in doing so they

architecture, but they might also be understood to reveal Terragni’s architecture as a kind of Bergsonian

suppress the potential plastic attributes of the work they analyze but also suppress its usefulness for

duration, a type of third form that encapsulates the expansion and contraction of two types of space.31

fabricating a conception of plasticity in contemporary architectural and urban space.

This offers a nonrepresented and nondialectic conception of matter, a conception of space that I would argue is the conception of “autonomy” that Eisenman’s House X sought.32 In his analysis of Terragni’s Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, Eisenman moves the subject’s cognition from the relative and the represented to the intuited and the conceptual, and in doing so places both the subject and the object within a third duration that allows the autonomy of each participant. While Casa Giuliani-Frigerio makes use of techniques endemic to pictorial space, such as frontality and depth, it does so in a multivalent manner that offers no real hierarchical viewpoint. It is perhaps the closest Terragni ever came to eradicating the vestige of perspectivalism from his work. Even if we set Terragni aside, Eisenman’s interpretation of space

Eisenman’s analysis of Terragni must be understood as related to attributes of de Stijl conceptions of the real. Theo Van Doesberg wrote that “intrinsic reality” was “dynamic movement” and that this movement was established in “abstract art by the exact determination of the structure of form and space.”34 The trajectory of Terragni’s experimentation as it moved from Casa Rustici and Palazzo Littorio to Casa GiulianiFrigerio involved a search for the real as well, though this search tended to posit the real as something that must be intuited. Terragni never fully relinquished the enframing device, but he progressively diminished its presence while retaining its critical potential.

in this manner offers a mode of spatial comprehension in its own right. Eisenman has often stated that he invented Terragni, meaning that his own readings of Terragni were driven by his own concerns; given this context, it seems that Eisenman’s findings are and should be transpositional—we should be able to use them in other contexts or within other regimes.

left Critical linear and nonlinear conditions of stability in a discretized analysis of structural mechanics.

Satellites and cars— preparing the infrastructural topologies of the megalopolis. Naval Research Labs electronics engineer William Bell supervises the loading of a communications satellite payload into a rented Ford Galaxy 500 at White Sands, New Mexico, 1968.

Addendum: de Stijl and the City The question of an expansion and contraction of the visual field originated in a statement by Theo Van

A centrifugal force is a reactive force, and in the strictest sense of the word it is actually not a force at all.

Doesberg about the nature of the terms “centrifugal” and “centripetal.” Van Doesberg at times failed to

What we call a centrifugal force is actually the inertia of an object as it tries to move along a straight path

mention the centripetal force in his descriptions of de Stijl architecture. The centripetal force is the necessary

while being held in a circular one by a correlative centripetal force. Physicists refer to a centripetal force as

origin of the so-called centrifugal force, which in reality is not a force at all, but the inertia of an object and its

center-seeking—it is the force that holds an object in a circular motion. A centrifugal force is referred to as

tendency to move in a straight rather than curved path. This research is presented here as an addendum. I

center-fleeing, but in actuality this is not a force per se. What we call a centrifugal force arises within the

should also note that the buildings of Terragni and Lingeri inspired the use of Slutzky and Ockman’s,

object’s attempt to move along a straight path tangential to the circular acceleration of the object’s

Bryson’s, and Stella’s critiques. Most of the above was refined and clarified in a series of fourteen

movement. The magnitude of a centrifugal force is defined by the inertia of the object, by its tendency to

architectural projects that I designed between 1986 and 1996. Some of these thoughts were recorded in an

stay in motion. One then wonders whether Van Doesberg was loosely using a metaphor drawn from

earlier paper and project titled “House Inside Out: Unloading the Neoplastic Frame.” The following section

another field of inquiry, or whether he actually meant that the spatial qualities of de Stijl architecture were

provides the context for the research attributes of the two design projects presented on these pages.

defined outside this otherwise dialectical relationship of opposing “forces.” It seems that the latter is closer

In referring to the architecture of the de Stijl movement in the essay “Sixteen Points of a Plastic Architecture,” Theo Van Doesberg proclaimed that the “new architecture” was to be centrifugal in massing—“it throws its volumes from a center pinion.”35 At first glance, Van Doesberg’s statement seems essentially clear, and a collection of presumed centrifugal works of architecture, from Wright to Mies to Neutra, comes to mind: the Usonian Houses, the Brick Country House, and the Kaufman Desert House are all derivations of some “pinwheel” centrifugal planning paradigm. Mies’s project, however, is ambiguous in this regard—or at least its famous plan drawing is. The walls of Mies’s composition, drawn in charcoal, continue to the edges of the paper—it is not clear if the generative origin of Mies’s plan originates at the center of the drawing’s surface or at the periphery, nor is it clear how one should view the plastic qualities of the wall masses themselves if neither tendency predominates. Historically Mies’s plan is considered to have an antecedent in Van Doesberg’s painting Rhythm of a Russian Dance, and a closer scrutiny of Van Doesberg’s proclamation reveals that perhaps the architect and painter has erred in his classical—that is physical—use of the word centrifugal. Van Doesberg has at least taken the word out of its expected context, and it seems mistakenly severed it from its correlative and originating relation to a centripetal force. Mies, Wright, and Neutra aside, what follows is an attempt to clarify the potential of Van Doesberg’s possible misuse of the word centrifugal as well as to speculate on the implications of what seems to be Van Doesberg’s fortuitous lack of research into the analogy he has drawn from physics. Van Doesberg’s mistaken use of the word centrifugal may have been intended and if it was the spatial implications of this use reveal a complexity in the spatial ideals not only of de Stijl architecture but also, if extrapolated, of contemporary sites or the white rectangle of contemporary cities.

to the truth because Van Doesberg’s statement, in its continuity, refers to a plastic ideal that ultimately is ambiguous in its spatial character. In Van Doesberg’s proclamation, the new architecture was to have “a more or less floating aspect,” an aspect that “works against the gravitational forces of nature.” If the reactive tendencies of centrifugal and centripetal forces were somehow loosened or alleviated in the above physical model, something close to this effect would be achieved. The canonical de Stijl architectural compositions of Van Doesberg and Van Eesteren were supposed to be read as “more or less floating” and ultimately as neither centripetal nor centrifugal. In his omission of the term centripetal was Van Doesberg trying to describe a centrifugal plastic quality unanchored by an opposing centripetal force—a centrifugal “force” without an originary point? If this is the case, the idealized plastic qualities of a de Stijl composition are to be understood as existing outside the dialectics of the opposing forces of centripetal and centrifugal, but how can such a composition cohere? How do we characterize the forces that assure its compositional density yet do not operate in a dialectical manner? Depending on where one looks within the de Stijl oeuvre and to which practitioner one turns, vastly different ways of answering these questions arise.

left

De Vonk Holiday Residence, J. J. P. Oud. 1919.

Mondrian, for example, spoke of composition in the form of both “static balance” and “dynamic

Though I do not believe the preceding assertions are something to prove or disprove critically, the

equilibrium.” In this paradigm, static balance defined the unity of individual forms within a composition,

omniscience and inevitability of dialectics in reference to the definition of a plastic work of art or architecture

while dynamic equilibrium unified these individual elements in opposition. In this context, Van Doesberg is

are revealed to be less conclusive than assumed. The questions are interesting to follow because they are

perhaps again errant in his description of physical laws, but his intention is nonetheless clear and could

rooted in the mechanics of physics, and to some degree it is possible to quantify our speculations. These

be situated within the problem as stated by Mondrian. To the static balance of individual forms Mondrian

questions are most interesting as they lead historically across a trajectory of architectures and architects of

applied the term “limitation”; I would apply centripetal. To the term dynamic equilibrium Mondrian attached

vastly different social and political situations. Frank Gehry’s Hollywood Public Library would lend itself to this

the term “extension”; I would apply centrifugal. But Mondrian goes further and gives insight into Van

type of analysis. Peter Eisenman has spent a large part of his career looking for the mode of analysis that

Doesberg’s use of centrifugal in other dimensions: “Ultimately dynamic equilibrium destroys static

could reveal or produce this nondialectical ambiguity and one could argue that in fact he has achieved this

balance.” It seems possible to understand Van Doesberg’s intentions in this context: the extension of a

if his work is viewed as a kind of Debord surplus—if we read the hermetic mechanics of its presumed

centrifugal force would destroy the delimiting centripetal force that defined both the static balance of the

autonomy as providing the surface upon which power may either be individually inscribed or withheld from

individual components and the static balance of the complete composition itself. If Van Doesberg could

politically fascist assertion. As such, architecture succeeds in what it manages to keep at bay. Given the

alleviate the centripetal force—or at least its originary qualities—in defining the plasticity of his composition

degree to which the contemporary site of architecture is constructed by the invisible and the predatory, this

yet still not relinquish the vitalizing qualities of centrifugal extension, he could ascribe to these

should be a note of ironic strength. A Cartesian and almost nondialectical form of space and architecture

compositions a state of independence, autonomy, and self-description that was neither entropic nor

could be understood ironically to provide a resistive critique of the dynamically mobile and exponentially

metaphysical. Van Doesberg’s architectural masterworks were confined to his projects with Van Eesteren,

trabeated orchestrations of labor and material in all modes of contemporary life. This form also provides

and they were to a great extent not constructed. Practice would surely have challenged the “more or less

both a critique of subjugation and a resourcing and aesthetic rejection of easily fabricated standard tectonic

floating” aspect of these compositions.

means. We shall live upon the inside-out surface of produced space.

36

In his De Vonk Holiday Residence (1919), J. J. P. Oud seems to have masterfully incorporated the bulk of Van Doesberg’s polemic and the added dimension of gravity as it defines weight and mass. Here Oud mastered not only the simultaneous dynamics of the centrifugal and the centripetal, but also added the tectonics and weight of material to the equation—something Van Doesberg’s drawings were not required to reconcile. This is a building that seems to be at once additive and centrifugal in massing, yet subtractive and centripetal in volume. The masonry wall appears to be conceived of as hollowed out from inside—cored down to the severe thinness that reveals the tenuous stability of stacking bricks in a planar formation. Yet the building itself is also expansive in an admittedly tempered but de Stijl massing of its

When a brittle material such as glass is tempered it is reheated after formation and allowed to cool naturally.

primary blocks. Oud’s walls seem dangerously thin, and it is clear that the architect was interested in

This tempering results in a material that can withstand severe forces perpendicular to its surface, but that can

hewing them to a planar quality. The stair of the De Vonk residence sets in motion a complex reading of

easily be fractured by a slight tap on its edge. Tempered glass is stressed along its outermost surfaces.

central and peripheral spatial mechanisms that further complicate this planar expansion of volume. The

Like concrete and steel, twentieth-century advances in the production of glass are the result of breakthroughs in

stair is flanked by two columns that carry the weight of the second floor above; these columns instigate a

material science and chemical engineering. Material, perhaps the most fundamental ingredient of building form, has properties of time and structure also intrinsic to building form. The Houston project isolates the relationship

sense of weight that the stair seems to contravene as it tosses itself up through the opening in the floor.

of matter and form: how matter acts under stress and strain and specifically under shear. Here glass and concrete

The stair seems to turn the space of the residence inside out—it is a topological device, a kind of

plates are arranged as a house of cards—reliant not merely on the structure of formal relationships, but, more

horizontal oculus that threatens a rearrangement of the centripetal and centrifugal characteristics of the building’s spaces. Oud, always a reluctant comrade of Van Doesberg, managed a feat of neoplastic space within the constraints of actual gravity and constituent material weight.

importantly, on the structure of matter itself and on the structure of time in matter.

Material topologies: Matter’s internal geometries. “The strength of brittle solids such as glass is dramatically reduced by surface damage. Even slight contact can cause serious abrasion. This is a photograph of a crack caused by a slight accidental contact on the surface of Pyrex glass. Magnification 700x.”

left Centripetal and centrifugal acceleration: position and velocity vectors for a particle in uniform circular motion. far right Houston’s Downtown in 1971 and 1982 and 1983. Nationsbank is seen in the foreground of bottom photo.

Houston’s Downtown in 1971 and 1982 and 1983. Nationsbank is seen in the foreground of bottom photo.

right

Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 30–32.

25. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, 10–11.

26. Jay, 10.

27. Tafuri considered the curvature of the surface too shallow to effectively hold the space of the piazza.

28. Today this type of stress analysis is accomplished using computer modeling software and as such interacts differently with the eye’s role in cognition. See “The Parsing Eye” by Mark Wamble in this volume.

29. A number of Terragni’s projects appear to operate as thin- walled beams. The Novocomum in particular seems to operate as massive shell structure; its windows seem to remove material in a way that causes the building’s shell to take on the properties of a box beam.

30. I refer to an assortment of situations that extend from the Greek manipulation of the stylobate to correct optic curvature to the architecture of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics which was designed to interact with and to anticipate the television camera.

31. Gilles Deleuze describes a scenario of two fluxes contained within a third and quotes Henri Bergson:

15. According to both the Zanichelli monograph and Manfredo Tafuri’s Modern Architecture, Terragni’s

“Such is our first idea of simultaneity. We call simultaneous, then two external fluxes that occupy the same

collaborators include A. Carminati, E. Saliva, L. Vietti, M. Nizzoli, and M. Sironi.

duration because they hold each other in the duration of the third, our own simultaneity of fluxes that

16. Manfredo Tafuri, “Giuseppe Terragni: Subject and Mask,” trans. Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions (Winter

brings us back to internal duration, to real duration.” Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books,

1977): 1–25.

1988), 80.

17. Tafuri, 6. “Somehow those isostatic lines explain the form of the vertical incision, marking a weak point

32. Though House X was the product of a process of de-composition, the project has plastic attributes

in the curved structure; nonetheless the reason for them is still not entirely clear.”

that vividly relate it to Eisenman’s work on Terragni. In the design of House X the decomposition

18. R. C. Dove and Paul H. Adams, Experimental Stress Analysis and Motion Measurement (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1964), 288.

procedures appear to give rise to an ambiguous hierarchy of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. The grids that characterize much of the project appear at times to be recessive as well as projective, as do the building masses themselves. The project’s spatial characteristics are largely those that Eisenman

19. The question of photoelasticity is here bound up with issues of photography and to some extent a

explicated in Terragni’s Casa Giuliani-Frigerio. Eisenman’s procedures also have direct relations to

broader interest in overexposure or the overexposing of film. Moholy Nagy’s film of the Light-Space

Slutzky’s: Eisenman presents the vertebrate structure of House VI as the result of a transformation process

Modulator is marked by an overexposing of film that results at times in a blank white screen. More

that bisected two initial planes and then “turned them inside out.” Peter Eisenman, House X (New York:

recently, the photography of many of Bernard Tschumi’s architectural models seems to present his

Rizzoli, 1982), 88.

buildings in some form of optic dissolve and at times blankness.

20. Paraphrased in part from R. C. Dove and Paul H. Adams, 288.

21. Thomas Schumacher, Surface and Symbol: Giuseppe Terragni and the Architecture of Italian Rationalism. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 183.

22. Schumacher, 183.

23. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 94.

33. Debord, 124.

34. H. L. C. Jaffé, de Stijl 1917–1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1986), 109.

35. Theo Van Doesberg’s “Sixteen Points of a Plastic Architecture” is referenced in Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 145. “The new architecture is anti-cubic, that is to say, it does not try to freeze the different functional space cells in one closed cube.

Rather, it throws the functional space cells (as well as the overhanging planes, balcony volumes, etc.)

24. Writes Jonathan Crary in his essay “Modernizing Vision,” “the camera obscura defined an observer who was subjected to an inflexible set of positions and divisions.” The spectacle of the camera obscura required an acquiescent subject; one who knew where to stand. Crary’s observer “is a nominally free sovereign individual” standing in a “quasidomestic space separated from a public exterior world.” Jonathan

centrifugally from the core of the cube. And through this means, height, width, depth, and time (i.e. an imaginary but four-dimensional entity) approaches a totally new plastic expression in open spaces. In this way architecture acquires a more or less floating aspect that, so to speak, works against the gravitational forces of nature.”

36. Jaffé, 110.

In 1925, Theo Van Doesburg described LeCorbusier’s role as a city planner in an essay published in Het Bouwbedrijf: “LeCorbusier operates like a physician...He tries to cure the metropolis of its illness, he gives his diagnosis and operates on it as on a sick body." The body that LeCorbusier operated upon, though, the city, had already in 1938 been supplanted not just by the metropolis but also by the megalopolis and it is not clear what one would

This house was designed at the outset of both moving my practice to Houston and assuming a professorship at Rice University. The site is in area known as

project

Mid Town—a stretch of city blocks that were largely vacant in 1995 when a Houston client purchased the property. Mid Town lies between two major urban

client name

poles in Houston: at the Southern end of Mid Town lies Rice University and the Houston Medical Center. To the north of Mid Town lie Downtown Houston and

program

the city’s well-known skyline. Mid Town was formed in the post 1980’s oil bust in which Houston’s economy, inextricably linked to world oil production collapsed.

Block after block of formerly dense urbanism was cleared as vacant buildings sat empty. In the middle 1990’s Mid Town again began to flourish as real estate had dropped to pricing level that allowed the area to be redeveloped as residential housing. This house was designed for a Houston police officer who initially had wanted to replicate a modern house in River Oaks. The sparse density of Mid Town and the topology of holes that formed the city’s spaces instigated the design of a house that was largely vacant: three courtyards became the predominant features of the house. The construction is simple tilt up concrete and steel frame window walls. The house is modest in size and materials but the spaces recall the urbanism of both Houston’s boom and bust. Like the Menil Collection and other prominent Houston buildings built after the bust this project seeks a tempered sense of the city’s emptiness. Th e Duration House won a Progressive Architecture Design Award in 1996. It was 1 of 14 projects awarded from 444 international entries. It was also the central work in the 1996 exhibition Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann curated by Lawrence Rinder (now curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY) at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Duration House Ruston Alsbrooks

Three loft spaces form a house, an office and a greenhouse for a Houston police officer. site

Mid Town, Houston, Texas, USA

date of design

1995-1997

current state of project budget

$200,000

Designed

Duration House

A private house and office on a corner site in what is known as Midtown — an area that stretches from Houston’s apparent downtown to the museum district, Rice University, and Hermann Park. The area is currently characterized by a fantastic number of lots vacant despite the tremendous real estate speculation of the ’60s and ’70s. The building site is marked on the aerial photo to the right. The three buildings and three courtyards collect a series of vacant spaces to form a compound.

Juried Awards

Exhibitions and Installations

Publications: Books

Publications: Published Design in Journals

1999 The Architectural League of New York, Emerging Voices Award

1996 The California College of Arts and Crafts + Gallery 2AES,PA Design Awards exhibition, group show includes Allbrooks House and Gallery.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell, New York: The Monacelli Press.

1999 Lotus International, “Dens(c)ity,” (Milan).

Mary-Ann Ray, Mirko Zardini, editors, The Alsbrooks Residence. p 66 - 67.

1996 Progressive Architecture, Design Awards: Citation; 1 of 14 projects awarded from 444 international entries.

1995 University Art Museum, Berkeley, California.

1998 Slow Space; edited by Michael Bell & Sze Tsung Leong, New York: The Monacelli Press.

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann.

Installation.

“Having Heard Mathematics," by Michael Bell, p.

78 - 117

1996 Architecture,"Progressive Architecture Design Awards" Alsbrooks Residence, May. p. 132 –133.

Hyper Realistic, Oscar Riera Ojeda and Lucas H, Guerra, editors Rockport Publishers, MA, + CD ROM: "Animations." Alsbrooks Residence, p. 10 – 15.

1996 Texas Architect, July. "Professors Receive Citations," p. 17.

Duration House

The space of the contemporary megalopolis is thin; the metropolis still had thickness, even if was simply based on the inertial of matter and the linear growth of finance. In California and in Texas, our two most populous states, the noun “city” is a nostalgic term. The traditional city, dense at its core and progressively less so at its edges, is the counterpoint to the megalopolis whose variations of density follow no direct or linear progressions. The patterns of density in the megalopolis are perhaps predominantly financial—a Walmart is economically dense yet its surrounding parking lot is fearfully thin.

Having lost virtually every race against the machinic efficiency of the megalopolis it must by now be clear that the space fo the “city” itself is thin.

Site lies to the south of Highway 45. At the intersection of Louisiana and McGowen streets.

previous page: map of Houston

Space in the megalopolis has lost its elastic strength; atrophied and limp, it no longer never provided

In such a scenario, the city has not been erased but has instead been left to catch up. When the

piazzas, plazas, and long since abandoned boulevards to shore up its citizens. A cross-country excursion

traditional city isn’t shored up by tax abatements, historic revival, or a sheer “will to urbanism,” we are left

from Houston to San Francisco is startling and numbing at the same time: In San Antonio, Fort Stockton, El

in the strange position of looking for an after-the-fact city and a subject. How does this subject —that is,

Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, San Bernadino, Pomona, Fresno, and San Jose the success of the proliferation of

us— find itself, its edges, its centers, its ground? Unhinged and overocded; a product of received

economic types is fully complete — Walmarts, car dealers, Office Depots, etc. have outpaced virtually all

information our contemporary subject is “looking for a city.”

city forms. There really are no new streets (not even new urbanist streets are really streets), only parking lots and feeder roads. But the situation is tenuous: the automobile is only the dominant urban catalyst for the past sixty years. City form has been in transformation long since and before.

above, left to right View towards Downtown. This photo is taken on San Jacinto Street just south of site. Wood frame houses are still predominant on some blocks despite the proximity of downtown development.

Duration House The visible is only the final step of an historic form. Its true fulfillment.

It is obviously a misnomer to call Houston a city; it has virtually none of the spatial or material attributes that

Then it breaks off and a new world arises. —Mies van der Rohe

defined the form of the traditional city. In fact, the absence of buildings is its most striking feature; the

Houston has had several “breaking offs.” Newcomers to this gulf coast metropolis can only imagine the scale and magnitude of the oil market’s collapse in the early eighties. Oil industry jobs, by then an historic form, broke off and were lost in such numbers that houses and businesses were simply abandoned when no one arrived to buy them. Houston’s massive growth trajectory of the seventies came to drastic halt a decade ago and the form of downtown Houston, its skyscrapers, and office temples broke. It is difficult to imagine the scale of the financial collapse which Houston faced, but if one spends some time

urbanist figure-ground drawing here is of no help. Houston does have a form of material integrity culled from standardized building processes, but it is a real question where one would locate the “form” of Houston — is it the towers and the city grid or the economic mechanism that built them? How Houston stands up — how its buildings resists gravity and how its walls are constructed — have almost nothing in common with those traditional carriers of urban integrity: bearing, material density and quality, or humanscale enterprise.

in and around the edges of downtown Houston, the evidence is abundant that something went drastically

What is the role of the architect who senses the transformed spatiality of this city and yet is confined to

different than anticipated. Downtown Houston is so strangely surreal that it seems almost trite to attempt

the edges of a site and the traditional framework of architectural practice? In other words, what can a

to characterize it, but one has to take the issues it raises seriously and one has to speculate about what

building do to make the city cohere in an urban condition that rabidly consumes mimicry, contextualism,

historic forms broke off and what new world can or will arise in its place.

and even aesthetic revolt. There are millions of cars with almost no pedestrians, and the economy of

In 1994, downtown Houston is the focus of an aggressive and remarkably positive (at least psychologically if not financially) attempt to find a way to finish what was left behind. What is called Midtown, an area which lies between Hermann Park and downtown, still sits dormant despite numerous redevelopment plans. In 1994 there are proposals for tax abatement, empowerment zones, and incentives that would encourage development in the area. One estimate claims that there are potentially 98,000 people who would like to live downtown. At the moment virtually no one lives downtown — in a metropolis of almost four million people only a miniscule number of citizens make their residence adjacent to the postcard skyline of office buildings. While this scenario is replicated in other American cities, in Houston you can find open blocks next to 55-storey towers. Covered in the kind of vegetation that must have been there five hundred years ago, parts of Houston seem botanically ancient, and one can certainly get a sense of what the first settlers must have faced in this area.

The exterior courtyards are formed by the intersection of the building volumes. Both the courts and the interior spaces are intended to be read as negative spaces (holes) in the city fabric.

Each building is approximately 13 feet wide.

plan drawing

of north/east entry of building compound. The entry is at the corner intersection of the site. The street vestibule provides a commercial space to the otherwise private project.

rendered view

Houston is more likely to be physically centered in Saudi Arabia than it is in the after-five peopleless downtown. What is the shape of time in a city that pulls the eye well outside the basin of vision?

Duration House

above

Model view from southeast. The glare

simulates the building at sunset. A Supremetist surface on a rush hour street.

right

Rendering: View from Louisiana Street

Duration House

Model View From west back of property. The greenhouse roof is of similar construction to the “backyard� free-standing glass wall. A chain link fence divides property from that of neighbors.

From the rear of the yard an inhabitant would see Downtown skyscrapers through the plate glass roof window on the top of the front loft.

Duration House

Detail of intersection of greenhouse, living loft and office loft. Concrete tilt up wall are 16" thick and meet horizontally and vertically in pointal conditions. The project is “house of cards� held in equipoise. Glass surfaces interweave in a way that allows them to lay upon the surface of the concrete.

model view

Duration House

The greenhouse roof is of similar construction to the “backyard� free-standing glass wall. A chain link fence divides property from that of neighbors.

model view

Duration House

from north west. The greenhouse roof is of similar construction to the “backyard� freestanding glass wall. A chain link fence divides property from that of neighbors. The two narrow building volumes house the greenhouse and the office loft. Glass doors in the greenhouse provide access to the a courtyard and the office loft. Along Louisiana Avenue another court provides an entry space to the compound.

model view

Duration House

Greenhouse

Courtyard

Studio Loft

Courtyard

Living Loft

Courtyard

Duration House

of south/east entry to building compound—a driveway ends in a carport space. Direct entry is possible to front loft from this point. Window walls meet in at a corner: what would usually be considered the interior surface of the glass partition faces outward—the street and sidewalk become an inside space.

model view

rendered view from west / back of property. From the rear of the yard an inhabitant would see Downtown skyscrapers through the plate glass roof window on the top of the front loft.

Duration House

from the East: Louisiana Street Facade. A white rectangle re-states the tilt up concrete wall surface. The entry court has a grey gravel floor surface held in a concrete curb.

model view

Duration House Out of Time

A house and studio on the edge of downtown Houston, Texas.

Ad Reinhardt, says Robert Smithson, is obsessed by what George Kubler called “the space between events”—“the interchronic pause when nothing is happening”— “actuality.”

Reinhardt tries to give shape to this interchronic “moment”; to do so he has to develop what Smithson calls “shapes that evade shape.”

If market capitalism is an encompassing “shape . . . a fetishized passion” (Guattari) of infinite dexterity, that to an intolerable degree constitutes contemporary life, what “shapeevading shapes” need to be instigated in the usually finite basins of architecture?

In the thin city of capital—the city we have been building for at least thirty years—it seems that architecture must administer and cohere the vacant topologies of economic/urban time.

We need shape-evading buildings faster than money, whose slow material duration is undetected by the market.

A building that could induce fantastic topologies of matter, space, and time would provide a kind of stealth, capital-evading reflex to a modern “psychasthenic” citizen engulfed by the machinic.

Two architectural durations duration 1. Matter/Movement: held in a taxis of torsional equipoise, topologies of membranic stress migrate spontaneously through and across a rigid Cartesian basin of plate glass and flat iron. duration 2. Subjects/Movement: nomadic promenades among material durations: an aplastic basin.

Duration House

collage elevation study using images from Mies Van Der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Robert Frank, Michelangelo and Giuseppe Terragni.

above left to right

photo collage of view from architect’s apartment—Mid Town and the Houston landscape overwhelm the stable oculus.

left

collage sketch

a view to downtown from a glass courtyard

The earliest works here were completed in San Francisco and exhibited in a 1995 installation of my work, "Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann," curated

by Lawrence Rinder at the Berkeley Art Museum. This installation of 14 paintings and 7 architectural projects marked the end of a phase dominated by heuristic

project Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann

position of each was redefined as contingent and incomplete on their own. This work was seeking to renew the relationship between painting and architecture,

The University Art Museum, The University of California, Berkeley; Lawrence Rinder, Curator for Twentieth Century Art.

but more importantly it sought to renew and to extend the spatial potentials of perception within art and architecture to the inchoate areas and spaces of the

date of design

and discrete methods based in drawing—in particular the pictorial techniques of perspective. The installation positioned the Hofmann paintings as an immanent horizon; architectural and pictorial space were shown to be a result of each other and the autonomy and equilibrium of each realm as well as the viewing

client

contemporary city. The formal characteristics of the early works in this exhibit can be viewed within the lineage of modernism, particularly Colin Rowe’s and

program

Robert Slutzky’s work of transparency and the mechanics of pictorial space that Rowe and Slutzky as well as Hofmann had defined. This exhibition occurred at

description

1995

Invited Museum Exhibition

an early stage of my career and was decisive in establishing a practice that has continually tested the formal, spatial and tectonic attributes of modern

Installation of eight architectural projects by Michael Bell.

architecture against contemporary sites and pragmatic building practices.

exhibition dates

March 15-August 20, 1995

current state of project budget

$ 26,000

completed

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann was an installation and exhibition designed by Michael Bell and curated by Lawrence Rinder at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California. The exhibition pairs fourteen paintings from the UAM Hans Hofmann Collection with eight architectural projects by Michael Bell. The installation was designed by Bell to relate the architectural works to the Hofmann paintings. The fourteen paintings were selected by Bell from the forty-nine paintings the UAM holds in the Hofmann Collection.

The UAM Hans Hofmann Collection holds 49 paintings by Hans Hofmann. The collection was the cornerstone of the new museum which today has a wide range of works from Picasso to Donald Judd to Eve Hesse.

Endspace

The City Inside Out introductory text excerpted from the exhibition Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann Hofmann Group 1: Flat Space

Japanese Girl, 1935

The Third Hand, 1947

Yellow Table on Yellow Background, 1936.

Lucidus Ordo, 1962

Table and Teakettle, 1936.

Goliath, 1960

Hofmann Group 2: Space Inside Out

Hofmann Group 3 : Abstract Expressionism

Idolatress I, 1944

Fantasia, 1943

Sanctum, Sanctorum, 1962.

Hofmann Group 4: Eyes in the Heat

Ecstasy, 1947.

Tormented Bull, 1961.

Struwel Peter, 1965.

And Thunderclouds Pass, 1961

The Bat, 1964

Hofmann Group 5: Endspace

In the contemporary megalopolis it seems we oscillate on the cusp of two spaces: while fully plugged in,

The space of the contemporary megalopolis is thin. In California and in Texas, our two most populous

connected, subjugated, “overcoded,” and “prearranged” by the machinic, we are also adrift — loose, flailing,

states, the noun “city” is almost a nostalgic term. The traditional city, dense at its core and progressively

and possibly free in the malformed, unshaped spaces that the templates of commodification fail to cohere or

less so at its edges, is the counterpoint to the megalopolis whose variations of density follow no direct or

conscript into their agenda. In these spaces — beside the house, adjacent to the freeway, behind the strip

linear progressions. The patterns of density in the megalopolis are perhaps predominantly financial — a

mall — the economic vectors that maintain the shape of the city find nothing to carry or transmit them, let

Walmart is economically dense yet its surrounding parking lot is fearfully thin. Having lost virtually every

alone give them “plastic” presence. These spaces slip off of us as water slinks in sheets off a swimmer

race against the machinic efficiency of the megalopolis it must by now be clear that the “city” itself is

emerging from a pool — wafting, cohering, flexing to and unfolding from the body. Though the codes of the

fearfully thin. The space of the megalopolis has lost its elastic strength; atrophied and limp, it no longer

city belong to the mind, it is hard to believe that we don’t swim in and out of these vaporous spaces; that we

provides piazzas, plazas, or even boulevards to shore up its citizens. A cross-country excursion from

don’t register their presence, somehow feeling light, scared, or thrilled when they slip off.

Houston to San Francisco is startling and numbing at the same time: In San Antonio, Fort Stockton, El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, San Bernadino, Pomona, Fresno, and San Jose the success of the proliferation of economic types is fully complete — Walmarts, car dealers, Office Depots, etc. have outpaced virtually all city forms. There really are no new streets, only parking lots and feeder roads. In such a scenario, the city has not been erased but has instead been left to catch up. When the traditional city isn’t shored up by tax abatements, historic revival, or a sheer “will to urbanism,” we are left in the strange position of looking for an after-the-fact city, and for what architect Albert Pope has called an “unconstructed subject.”1 How does this subject —that is, us— find itself, its edges, its centers, its ground?

Michael Bell Tier 1: Space Inside Out

Double Dihedral House, 1990

Vittorio Plastici, 1992

Michael Bell Tier 2: Form, Immanence, and Time

Blue House, 1988

J-Shaped Glass House, 1992

Berlin Stoa, 1988

House with No Style, 1993.

Mathematics Daycare, 1993

Duration House, 1995-96.

Michael Bell Tier 3: Tier Three: Matter and Time

This scenario is vastly different from the convulsive and total metropolitan subjugation described in Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Simmel’s devastating scenario the

1. See Albert Pope, “The Unconstructed Subject of the

intellect is the propellant force of the metropolis. Indeed, the metropolis requires the intellect. “‘The

Contemporary City,”

nervous life’ of the metropolis therefore does not by any means lead back to ‘deep regions of the

from Slow Space, ed.

personality’” but is instead a reason for itself. The intellect is a kind of evolutionary organ that

Tsung Leong

2

satiates the metropolis’ needs. Our subject, on the cusp of two spaces, is both over- and underconstructed — shored up by overcoding yet dissipative in a vacant post urban basin.

Michael Bell and Sze (forthcoming).

2. Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 5.

above Gallery View: The Blue House and the Berlin Stoa are seen in the foreground. The aluminum panels above are not part of this installation. Model for a prototypical Kindergarten and Daycare facility seen in background. Hofmann’s “Lucidus Ordo” is also seen in the background.

View of gallery from above: the Double Dihedral House, the Blue House lie in the foreground.

The Duration House is in shadow in the background to the right. Each table frame is fabricated of 1.75 inch steel tubing. Glass covers the text at the front of each table. Gravity fastens the assembly of steel, plywood, models and drawings.

above

Endspace

An After Image of the Metropolis

Tier One: Syncopation and vision, or space inside out. What if push didn’t answer pull?

Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann presents three “tiers” of architectural project. The introductory text from each text follows. lower right University Art Museum, Entry to Hans Hofmann Gallery. Poster at entry to gallery describes installation. Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann was presented as architectural models and drawings as well as graphic posters and texts that described the relationship between architecture and paintings as presented in the installation. This poster describes three “tiers” of projects by Michael Bell and each tier’s relation to the Hofmann paintings. Hans Hofmann’s portrait is opposite the poster.

“Push responds to pull” — Hans Hofmann used the phrase so often “that it became nearly synonymous with his style of painting.”1 The spatial milieu of a Hofmann painting is one of complex geometries cohering active and reactive forces; in Hofmann’s realm a pictorial push into space is answered by a rebounding pull back out.

Of course these pushes and pulls were achieved not with the weight of gravity but with the weights of color, shape, and line — all activated by the velocity of vision and played out within the basin of the frame’s and the picture’s surface. Hofmann’s paintings are “plastic,” meaning that their space is active — even viscous and alluvial — in how they “animate” the initially “neutral” picture surface.

Hans Hofmann’s spatial trajectory seems to have moved in a staccato rhythm; innovations led to innovations but he also often returned to his foundations. One such foundation was his preoccupation with Matisse’s particular structure of flat space. In works such as Yellow Table on Yellow Background, Hofmann tilts space forward to such a degree that it threatens to spill out of its frame.

The paint is viscous, thick and applied with an aggressive stroke, but the space if spilled would certainly lose its thickness. Yellow Table on Yellow Background is a subjectless work: no human figure is present and one wonders where a figure could be placed if it were.

The idea of an active, viscous, and thickened space also characterizes theories of architectural space. Robert Slutzky’s depiction of a “thickened” and plastic cubist space in the later works of the magnificent architect Le Corbusier2 portrays a fully alluvial space, the characteristics of which are best described in terms supplied by fluid mechanics. Le Corbusier’s work was home to a vigorous and athletic modern occupant, with his promenade being energetic enough to push through such thick space.

But what if push didn’t answer pull? What if space wasn’t plastic or viscous? What if space were more of an energy sink, having a dissipative quality with its basin involved in an expansive entropic creep rather than a shoring up contraction. Hofmann’s

thesis demands a rebuttal as Slutzky’s and Le Corbusier’s “thickened space” demands thinned space. That the anti-thesis of each argument has an asymptotic relation to the space we occupy in the modern “city” should be a reason to be alarmed: space in the contemporary of city of finance must surely be a-plastic. What viscous pulls shore us up and react to our pushes?

The antithesis to the stability of Hofmann’s binary push-pull relation does in fact emerge in Hofmann’s own work: Ecstasy (1947) so fully labors its flat canvas surface that push seems to implode the picture frame’s geometry while pull threatens to spill its contents onto the gallery floor.

The opposing forces’ ability to counter each other is here lost as each seems to have well exceeded their elastic limits: push and pull threaten a hereby new independence that in turn threatens the works’ stability when each is stretched beyond its capacity to rebound.

Turning space inside out has also been a preoccupation of Robert Slutzky’s. The younger painter (also one of our great architectural critics), a master of pictorial mechanics himself, must surely have studied Hofmann’s oeuvre. The spatial forms so vigorously active in Ecstasy require the spatial skills of a topologist for precise description.

Topology is the branch of geometry that describes complex surfaces and the relationship of points along such surfaces; the menger sponge and Mobius strip are primary topological forms. In the film “Turning a Sphere Inside Out” the topological equation that describes such a process is depicted in stages. An initial push creates a cavity in the bottom the sphere — a continued push causes the cavity to eventually reach the underside of the top of the sphere. An elastic threshold is then crossed, as the push becomes pull and the cavity moves through the top of the sphere. As the other surfaces follow, the sphere is eventually pulled completely through itself before regaining its original platonic stability. The immanent and unstable interim stages appear remarkably similar to the painting Ecstasy (it is clear that much topological research was carried out by painters). In this realm push did not respond to pull—rather, push continued and continued until it became a kind of limp pull. What space emerges at the resolution of such a process?

The pictorial mechanics of Ecstasy surely offer an alternative to the hegemony of perspective; here, as space is pulled inside out, the surface, the frame, and indeed the picture itself relinquish perspective’s placement of its subject.

In the essay “Modernizing Vision,” Jonathan Crary analyzes the camera obscura as a model of modern subjectivity. The camera obscura, says Crary, “defined an observer who was subjected to an inflexible set of positions and divisions.” The spectacle of camera obscura required an acquiescent subject; one who knew where to stand. Crary’s observer “is a nominally free sovereign individual” standing in a “quasi-domestic space separated from a public exterior world.”3 The Double Dihedral House, the Berlin Stoa, and the Blue House all use the oculus as a device to syncopate both vision and the perspectival field in a way that might spill their framed contents and alter their static basins. In these projects vision has a syncopated “pulse”4 that threatens the stability of ocular distance. The relationship of perceiving subject and perceived object is here turned inside out, overcoming the hegemony of perspective’s constructed subject and its fixed basin.

1. Cynthia Goodman, Hofmann (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 41.

2. Robert Slutzky, “Aqueous Humor,” in Oppositions (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies), p. 29.

3. Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” ed. Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), p. 29.

4. Rosalind Krauss, “The Im/pulse to See,” ed. Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), p. 51.

Tier Two: Form, Immanence, and Time “The business of all structures is a conservative one of maintaining the status quo” says materials scientist J.E. Gordon, meaning that a structure must “generate adequate forces to oppose the loads they have to carry.”5 The second grouping of architectural projects, the Physics Kindergarten and the Glass House, rearranges the geometry of push and pull: here the window still operates as an oculus/lens but rather than modulating depth, it is a puncture that instigates stress in and along the wall surface. If subversion of perspectival stability modulated the spatial activity of the first group, here the stress of gravity on both matter and form activates a set of migrating forces along the building’s surface. The status quo — a strong building form — is configured in a way that it would perpetuate an actively changing and topologically complex set of vital forces. In these projects the building’s shell, while structurally and formally finite, is the template that manifests membranic torsional forces. These buildings are structural shells. As a

Tier Three: Matter and Time shoebox has strength far greater than its material so do these projects. Repositories of immanent time, “immobile cyclones,” they are bundles of other forms and other temporalities.

Hofmann, too, made space by activating forces along the canvas’ surface. Lucidus Ordo of 1962 slides its color geometries across an imploding, spiraling abyss.

5. J.E, Gordon, The New Science of

When a brittle material such as glass is tempered it is reheated after formation and allowed to cool “naturally.” In the case of glass, tempering results in a material that can withstand severe forces perpendicular to its surface, but can easily be fractured by a slight tap to its edge. Tempered glass is stressed along its outmost surface. In the recent essay, “Mies and Movement: Military Logistics and Molecular Regimes,” theorist Sanford Kwinter analyzes Friedrich August Kekulé’s modeling of the spatial attributes of the benzene molecule. Kekulé’s work on the benzene molecule preceded a flourishing of spatial chemistry and is considered to be the first model to portray the “plastic” qualities of molecular chemistry. Kwinter portrays what “was the — at least, then — shocking discovery, that the carbon valencies in [Kekulé’s] molecule in fact could not lie in the plane at all, but rather must stick out

into space.” The “plastic quality” of the Kekulé molecule “introduced real, not only metaphoric, plasticity into the everyday world.”6 Like concrete and steel, the magnificent advances in the production of glass this century are the result of breakthroughs in material science and chemical engineering. What is certainly true is that material, perhaps the most fundamental ingredient of building form, has properties of time and structure also intrinsic to building form. The third tier of projects isolates the relationship of matter and form: how matter acts under stress and strain, and, as in the case of the Houston Project, specifically under shear. Here glass and concrete plates are arranged as a house of cards — reliant not merely on the structure of formal relationships, but, more importantly, on the structure of matter itself and on the structure of time in matter.

Strong Materials (New

6. Sanford Kwinter, “Mies and

York: Penguin Books,

Movement: Military Logistics and

1968), p. 29.

Molecular Regimes,” ed. Detelf Mertins, The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p. 90.

Endspace

Duration and Coherence introductory text excerpted from the exhibition Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann Passionate Economies and Slow Space: 5 Chapters 1. Topology: In the The Shape of Time, George Kubler develops a concept of duration that distinguishes how inorganic and organic entities exist in time. Inorganic entities are argued to not exist in time at all, but rather in a kind of continuity unmeasured by calendric, lunar or biologic time.

Kubler’s thesis tries to access the inorganic--physical things. The sculptor Robert Smithson was deeply affected by Kubler’s writing: in the essay “Quasi Infinities and the Waning of Space” Smithson presents a spectrum of art, physics and mathematics that he relates to Kubler’s description of actuality as “the space, between events”, “the interchronic pause when nothing is happening”— a shapeless duration. The art that interest Smithson tries to give shape to this interchronic, unstable and perhaps even unperceivable “moment”—to do so such art has to develop shapes that evade shape (chapeter 1). (Torsion and Duration: see Houston House)

Plan drawing of the University Art Museum Hans Hofmann Gallery. (Gallery A). Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann presented architectural models and drawings on five horizontal model bases.

Each model was configured with a set of drawings, a poster describing its site and theoretical ideals. The architectural component of the installation was situated in the center of the gallery space. A visitor moved into the gallery from above and then spiraled into the architectural display before moving back out to the periphery of the gallery. Hofmann’s paintings were grouped into five categories and provided the “horizon” for the architecture.

right

2. Topology and Urban Economies Urban Economies: In an interview conducted in January of 1993, Noam Chomsky was asked if he

increasing. Capital generated within an evolving global economy, however, Chomsky claimed, is not

thought that America was “in for a long painful era of unresolved economic decay.” Chomsky’s response

distributed in centripedal and centrifugal patterns or in relation to geographic origins as it once was. In the

made a distinction between the geographical United States and “U.S. Corporations.” The geographical

case of United States/world cities like New York, Los Angeles, Houston or Los Angeles the economic, the

country he characterized as no doubt in for a period of decay—the United States, he said, is “developing

private and the public shapes of the city lose their territorial relation to an origin but more so leave their

characteristics of the third world.” In the case of U.S. corporations, however, Chomsky suspected that this

inhabitants without a collective imagination of power’s origin.

was not to be the case and that in fact U.S. corporate share in worldwide production was probably

3. Passionate Economic Shapes Subjects: Across the spectrum of contemporary urban theory, design, and criticism one finds a recurrent

system."* The practices of architecture, and where it exists, urbanism, appears under such

theme: The inhabitant of the modern megalopolis resides within "the headlong race," "the capitalist

conditions to be alternately temporarily recuperative and plaintiff (New Urbanism?) or opaque (Rem

passion that sweeps up everything in its path." "Each of their organs and social relations are quite simply

Koolhaas paraphrased: Architecture can reveal. Reveal what? The complete dominance of MONEY).

re-patterned in order to be reallocated, overcoded, in accordance with the global requirements of the

above

Gallery view of Berlin Stoa model and drawings

4. Geography: Hypershere Geography: A 1975 publication titled Applications of Demography; The Population Situation in the U.S. in

hypersphere, the Hofmann Genus3 or menger sponge. Capital generated in a global economy will

1975 identifies three dimensions of population data: the spatial, the qualitative and the temporal. The

certainly be invested in the U.S. but the geography of capital distribution in such an economy suggest that

spatial dimension “deals with geographic distribution of people, including the density of distribution.” “The

many American cities could easily remain inchoate, fragmented and hollowed out in a global economy.

temporal dimension relates the past, present and future of the population factors.” In 1995 the question is

Cities such as Houston, Texas seem to have little chance of developing any distribution of capital that

certainly more complex: The distribution of capital that might have nourished a more or less centrifugal

could configure them into a traditional urban form. While the popular assumption is that the shape of the

and dense urban geography during an industrial age is not likely to do either in the global decades. The

city will change in our new global markets what I think we need to be more prepared for is the fact that

density of the world city; its spatial and temporal dimensions takes on the topological geometries of the

sectors of many American cities could stay exactly the same.

above Detail of models: The “Glass House” model is situated next to the models of the “Vittorio Plastici” projects. right Mathematics Daycare Center

5. Fast Buildings Fast Buildings: Chomsky’s forecast prefigures a two tiered society — islands of wealth for investors and

rely on any traditional urban morphology. In the thin city of capital—the city we have been building for

mileau’s of despair for the “restless many.” On what grounds can the urban respond in such an inside out

at least thirty years it seems that buildings must take on the responsibility of administering urban

scenario. What shape could cohere the shape evading topology of a global economy in a world city. As

time. We need either very fast or very slow buildings — buildings faster than money and markets

Chomsky’s scenario today even partially plays itself out, the role of urban coherence falls increasingly

and buildings whose slow duration the market can’t access. Certainly the modern painters of

within the purview of the architect and the building. In other words, if the city is not going to cohere —

complex topologies, and those that illuminated their mechanics such as Hans Hofmann the great

when tax bases, zoning or even public will fail to provide the centrifugal energy that might nourish

teacher are here invaluable. And a building that could induce the fantastic topologies of modern

traditional paradigms of urban density it seems that any concept of urban coherence will not be able to

space might provide a kind of stealth, capital evading reflex to a modern citizen engulfed by the “overspill”. (See Subjects: Roger Caillois)

Installation Design

Computers

Architectural Projects Project Assistants

The Lila K. Wallace - Reader’s Digest Fund Museum Accessibility Initiative

Silicon Graphics, Power Macintosh, IBM clones.

The Houston Project Peony Quan, David Marini, Chris Nichols client Ruston Alsbrooks, Houston, Texas.

Funding

Installation Design

Michael Bell

Peony Quan, David Marini, Sze Tsung Leong, Ben Thorne Assistants

Steel Fabrication Graphic Design

George Secaris, Houston,Texas

Michael Bell, Sze Tsung Leong

Platforms

Graphics: Photoshop, QuarkExpress and Illustrator.

Software

Modeling

3-D Studio and Autocad.

Thanks to the Rice Advanced Visualization Lab (RAVL).

The Physics Kindergarten Jeff Kaeonil and Richard Winchell client Karen Mondanado, Bowie, Maryland.

The Glass  House Chris Cho client Barbara Kelly, Columbia, Maryland.

House With No Style

Jeff Kaeonil Japan Architect, Competition.

client

Berlin Stoa Marcus Meisner client AEDES Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

Double Dihedral House William Green client Dr. David Lyman, Santa Fe, New Mexico The Blue House William and Anita Bell

client

On the Road: “Endspace� was fabricated in Houston using the Rice Advanced Visualization Lab, the RSA shop and local steel fabricators. The exhibition was shipped to California in a truck driven by RSA students David Marini, Peony Quan and Ben Thorne.

Plan drawing, the University Art Museum, UC Berkeley

left

This project was designed for a couple in Houston to serve as both a home and studio for their business. Programmatically the single structure serves as a liv-

Project

ing loft and photographer’s studio. It also provides an office for a small graphic design studio. The building site is a typical Houston lot size of50 x 100 feet. The

Client

property is in an area of Houston known as West End; an area that has been under gentrification pressure as it is located adjacent to River Oaks and the

Program

Buffalo Bayou as well as Downtown. The current neighborhood is a mix of uses that range from bungalows to pre-fabricated metal buildings. The uses also vary

Site

widely with car repair businesses next to housing. While these conditions are typical in Houston—there is no citywide zoning—this region of the city is more

Date of Design

diverse and fragmented. To achieve the low cost and the space needed for this live/work project we employed a pre-fabricated metal building system manufac-

Status

designed

tured by Butler Buildings. The system of lightweight materials and simple labor techniques was combined with simple solar orientation and other low cost items

Costs

$186,000

such as sliding glass doors and aluminum window sections. The house and studio combined provide more than 3500 sq. feet of space at very low costs. The design makes a domestic space out of a building typically used for industry and fits well into both uses typical in the rapidly changing neighborhood.

Chrome House

Briony Gannon/James Sweet Loft and Photography Studio

West End, Houston, Texas, USA 1998–1999

Chrome House

“Metal shines in the Texas sun. A wall of doors opens to whatever breeze might find its way through the sprawl of Houston. Everything flows, shimmers and shines; nothing sits still. The only thing fixing you to a place is a grid of anonymous construction. You are at once free and in limbo. Welcome to the end of the American Dream: an aluminum-clad loft has replaced home on the range.”

-Aaron Betsky The chrome surfaces dance, melt, and liquefy, but are manifest by empirical means.

Publications 2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell, New York: The Monacelli Press.

2000 10 X 10, Iona Baird, editor, Phaidon Press, London, p. 80 – 83.

Architecture Must Burn, by Aaron Betsky and Erik Adigard, London: Thames and Hudson, p. 8, 9, 48.

1999 Nest, “Home on the Range,” by Aaron Betksy, Summer, p, 162 – 171.

Butler Prefabricated Metal Building System 2,340 folds form an enclosing metal skin; 1,028 folds form a steel skeleton.

Twenty forged-steel beams provide a rigid frame.

Chrome House

An Economy of Folded Surfaces

Plan detail A pre-fabricated Butler building: the corner structure is forged steel wide flange sections; the spanning members are break formed galvanized steel z-sections. The sliding-glass door system balances on the combined system; as doors open and close a new moment of inertia is manifest.

Break Formed Light Gage Z—Section

Insulation

Metal Cladding

Wide-Flange Section

Axial Rotation

Aluminum Sliding Door

Plan view: Photography Studio to right; living loft to left.

Steel T-Section

Butler System forms shell of building

Sleeping Lofts: 2nd Level

North Facing Court

Bathroom 1, 2

Living Loft: 1st Floor

Photographer Work Loft

Graphic Design Work Loft

Entry Vestibule

Chrome House

above Northern Light: A garden is formed on the north side of a residential property, the front of the building houses a photographer’s studio; the rear houses a living loft.12 sets of sliding glass doors form a window wall. right Entry to living loft at left; entry to photography studio at right. A roll up metal door provides access to the studio. The second floor window at the front provide a view to the street and light to a graphic design studio.

Chrome House

above Color System: Interior colors are derived from a color wheel customized for each solar orientation. Ware colors face south, cool face north. The color wheel is rotated to from a cycloid that traces and assigns a spectrum of colors to each surface. Optic and mechanical procedures of color management in printing techniques are used in conjunction with natural modes of color theory.

reflections from interior and exterior color systems. The north facade registers both natural phenomena and produced/mechanical effects.

Color systems used to produce murals reflect in the window wall.

right

Chrome House

above

Color System: see note

double threshold and choice— having entered the court a glance back to yoru origin. A sliding door to the living loft and a deep perspectival view to the street door.

right

A color wheel is used for applying color to each surface of the building. North/South/East/West facades recieve color from the rotation and arc of

Chrome House

Two steel stairs lead to a loft.

Glass and mirror-faced storage closets are cantilevered from four-inch structural columns

above

The Conversation: Mirror-andGlass cabinets enclose a sleeping loft above the living space. A multi-use aluminum counter runs the length of the loft against the south wall.

right

detail note Two steel stairs lead to a loft. Glass and mirror-faced storage closets are cantilevered from four-inch structural columns

Across the garden: A mural derived from a printer’s color test—the owners produced murals for the courtyard that are dervied from processes in printing and mechanical reproduction.

above

a view to the photography studio and the graphic design loft above the studio. The wall that divides the living and working lofts is here shown as translucent.

right

View across living loft: A polished surface of self leveling poured resin atop a concrete slab forms a continuous floor. The kitchen is a long galley on the south wall. above

Aerial view of second floor loft: roof removed.

right

Houston Boogie Woogie:

Color system for glass cabinets: Audi A-4 colors are analyzed according to CMYK, RGB and HSB values. A value is chosen to be the primary organization mode—for example the Cyan value—and a new linear set of relations are set up for each new sequence. A Cyan premiation affords a different organization than a Magenta choice. This system was an experiment to assign color to building surfaces.

As coordinator of five organizations — DiverseWorks gallery, The Graham Foundation, The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, the Rice School of Architecture and the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation (who served as client and builder) — I commissioned sixteen architects to design a house that could be

project 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.

Planning and Architecture

built within the parameters of a new federal voucher program designed to bring lower income individuals into market rate housing. The exhibition was titled 16

project type

Houses: Owning a House in the City and it opened in Houston on November 6, 1998. At the local level, these houses served the constituency of Houston’s

The Venice Bienalle; Glass House @ 2 Degrees. Columbia University GSAPP.

Fifth Ward (a close-knit African American neighborhood with a median income of less than $10,000/year). More broadly, the projects showed the depth and diversity of ways in which a group of American architects, many represented in the book Slow Space, responded to the challenges of moving federal housing

project

tion and ensuing publicity generated considerable excitement in both the Fifth Ward and at the universities, some of which was directed toward building.

location 2000 Venice Biennale, 7th International Architecture Exhibition, Glass House @ 2 Degrees.

Construction for seven of these houses, including my own Glass House @ 2, was funded under by the Local Initiative Support Corporation of New York, and

budget

subsidies away from collective housing and towards the market practices of budget, square footage, tight regulations, and community participation. The exhibi-

four are sold and about to enter construction. Two projects are completed at this date. This project is realizing a multi-faceted goal in which architecture simultaneously serves as a template for diverse formal explorations, a pragmatic tool for a grass-roots social organization, and a political instrument of analysis with national implications.

16 Houses

16 Houses is a multi faceted redevelopment project for Houston’s Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation. Part exhibition, part building program, part research project—and most importantly a collective work of architecture and planning, it is focused on the redevelopment of the Houston’s historic Fifth Ward. 16 Houses was founded in 1996 by Michael Bell as a study of the economics and design of the single family house and this housing types newly pivotal role in down payment voucher programs initiated at the federal level of United States housing policy. 16 Houses provided a new model of collaborative design between institutions that could respond with innovation and vigor to new federal initiatives in housing policy. The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, The Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties, The Graham Foundation and most importantly DiverseWorks collaborated over a period of three years. Michael Bell of Columbia University and formerly of Rice University in Houston organized the exhibition with Mardie Oakes of the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation.

Juried Awards 1999 The Architectural League of New York, Emerging Voices Award Grants / Funded Research 2000 The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, Houston (FWCRC). Project: The Venice Bienalle; Glass House @ 2 Degrees.

Bank United, Houston, Texas Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City. Co-applicant: Michael Bell, Mardie Oakes, FWCRC 1997 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago. Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City. Preliminary Research Exhibitions and Installations

Columbia University GSAPP. Project: The Venice Bienalle, travel grant.

2000 Venice Biennale, 7th International Architecture Exhibition, Glass House @ 2 Degrees.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York. Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.Co applicant: Mardie Oakes, Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation.

1998 DiverseWorks, Houston, 16 Houses: Owning a House in the City, group show includes Glass House @ 2 Degrees.

The University of Texas, Austin, 1999.

1998 DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas.

Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.

Books

Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties. Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press 2002 Owning a House in the City; by Michael Bell.

New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

Published Design by Michael Bell 2002 Perspecta 33, Mining Autonomy, Yale School of Architecture Journal, Glass House @ 2˚.

Commentary on Glass House @ 2˚ by K. Michael Hays.

2001 House, American Houses for the New Century, by Cathy Lang Ho, Glass House @ 2˚. p.

5, 7.

2000 Venice Biennale 2000, 7th International Architecture Exhibition Catalog, Massimiliano Fuksas, Curator. Glass House @ 2˚; Sweet/Gannon Studio; Alsbrooks Residence, p. 50 – 53.

Art Lies, “16 Houses” by Stephen Fox. Number 21, Winter, 1999. p. 46.

SallyPort, Rice university, Spring, “This is Pure desire and love and Passion,” by David Kaplan, p.

34.

Architecture, “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City,” by Shaila Dewan, Jan. p. 47 - 53.

1998 Houston Press, “Home Despots,” by Shaila Dewan, November.

Architecture, August, (ref: 16 Houses).

Radio Appearances & Internet Web Sites Reviews and Articles on 16 Houses Praxis, “Modern Housing at the Millenium,” by Gwendolyn Wright, No. 3, Housing Tactics, p. 116 2000 Dwell, “7 Houses,” February, p 76 – 79.

Houston Press, “Not Your Standard Issue,” by Lisa Gray, 11/9/00.

1999 Interview by Rod Price, KPFA, Houston, Local National Public Radio segment, 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City

16 Houses

Architecture = Policy: Centripetal—Centrifugal

by Michael Bell

In 1996, the Clinton Administration’s plans to decen-

These initiatives operate at levels that are both prag-

16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House

tralize or de-concentrate the density of publicly

matic and demonstrative yet also deeply ideologi-

presents the work of architects and theoreticians

assisted housing in the United States were acceler-

cal—they couple fundamental urban paradigms of

who participated in a research project titled “16

ated by federal funding for housing vouchers. At the

density and centripetal force with issues of poverty

Houses: Owning a House in the City.” The primary

same time, the Quality Housing and Work

and the legislated management and deconstruction

goal was to examine the architectural implications

Responsibility Act of 1998 required public housing

of racial and ethnic territories. Between the years

of decentralization and dispersal, and also the

authorities to adopt strategies to diminish the con-

1996 and 2000 more than seventy thousand rental

degree to which such aims were to be accom-

centration of poverty in federally funded housing.

units of public housing were expected to be razed,

plished by market forces in housing production

Voucher assistance in home buying is intended to

and or converted in the United States as federal

and a more prominent role for the public/private

abet property ownership across a wide and lower

housing policy moved toward a reliance on

partnership model in low-income housing develop-

income spectrum of urban residents. The voucher

public/private partnerships to realize a larger share of

ment. Pragmatically 16 Houses is intended to

program provides a one-time down payment subsidy

federally sponsored low-income housing. In most

address the urgent need for inventive new housing

paid directly to the housing developer at the point of

cases these new housing developments have

for lower income constituencies.

sale—the voucher is in effect a down payment sup-

achieved the desired de-centralization by dispersing

plied for buyer.

former tenants and rental units into traditional singlefamily houses and low-rise housing blocks or combinations of condominiums and town houses within the broader urban landscape.

Theoretically 16 Houses addresses the issue of

The role of the federal government as a policy

The sixteen architects were asked to examine how

These sixteen architects had previously examined

decentralization within a range of spatial, econom-

organization and the government’s protection and

a Voucher House—a term that was assumed with-

the urban as well as the architectural fragmentation

ic, racial, and ultimately technical concerns. At its

endorsement of the market as a site of innovation

out a great deal of scrutiny by the architects during

that results from prototypical development

core, this work focuses on the role of architecture

set the stage for this examination of the potential of

the design process—could be expected to fulfill its

processes in market-rate houses and housing in

in the construction or mediation of a subject that

lower-income housing design. In this case study,

role in the construction of a renewed territory. The

the United States, and they had attempted to

has since the 1930’s been objectified within a

the single-family house is the end product of the

architects each directed practices that had already

moderate these pitfalls in private practice, often to

highly codified political history of housing form and

voucher program and also the evidence of inven-

carefully explored the relationship between archi-

great success. Yet most of these designers had

policy in the United States. The architects who

tion as a node or fragment of a larger political and

tecture and contemporary urbanism and in most

not directly addressed low-income housing or its

participated in 16 Houses were provided with a

urban agenda. The site of the work described here

cases they also teach in schools where urbanism

relation to territorial factors of race, income and

range of both practical and theoretical information

is the Fifth Ward in Houston, Texas. A neighbor-

and architecture merge around themes of subjec-

historic moments in federal legislation. The goal

that made the work specific to Houston and to the

hood on the northeast corner of the city’s down-

tivity and power. Though there are typically divi-

was to bring to this realm of development a

Fifth Ward. They were asked to respond within a

town that is predominantly African-American. The

sions between planning and architecture in many

renewed theory of architecture and urbanism and

set spatial and technical means that are very

Fifth Ward has the city’s lowest household income.

universities here the two fields by necessity inflect

also a critical theory of the city in relation to power

each other and at times fuse.1

and to territory.

directly architectural and often tectonic in nature.

They were also asked to respond to issues of subjectivity in regard to the negotiations and the power relations that exist in the construction of housing in the United States.

16 Houses

Exhibition/Research/Building Programs 1997—ongoing

Director/Founder Michael Bell Columbia University Graduate School of Archtecture, Planning and Preservation Formely of Rice University School of Architecture

Exhibition Design and Management Michael Bell, Curator

Construction Funding and Develpment

Funding for 16 Houses Michael Bell Fundraiser

Michael Bell and Mardie Oakes, Managers

Michael Bell and Kerry Whitehead, Installation Designers

Anna Mod, Construction Manager

The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

Partner Organizations

Kerry Whitehead, Steel fabrication and design

Emily Todd Executive Director, DiverseWorks Artspace, Houston (1995-99)

Gunar Hartmann, Logan Ray, Installation design team.

Mardie Oakes Project Manager (1995–2000), Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Agency, Houston,

Visual Arts Director

Jeff Balloutine Bank United, Vice President for Community Reinvestment

DiverseWorks Diane Barber

Rev. Clemons President, Board of Directors FWCRC

The Rice University School of Architecture, Houston

Farés El Dahdah Assistant Professor, Rice University

Bank United, Houston and private donors.

DiverseWorks ArtSpace, Houston Advisory Committee

Assistant Curators

Aaron Betsky Director, Netherlands Architecture Institute

Mardie Oakes, Keith Krumweide

Stephen Fox Anchorage Foundation, Houston, Texas

Photographer “Fifth Ward” Deron Neblett

Robert Toliver Builder, Fifth Ward Resident Emily Todd Director, DiverseWorks

The Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, Houston

16 Houses

3 Phases in Five Years

1995—98: Phase 1: Research Funding The Graham Foundation, Chicago

1998-99 Phase 2: Exhibition at DiverseWorks Funding DiverseWorks, Rice University, Bank United, The Graham Foundation, Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties

2000-____ Phase 3: Houses Move Towards Construction

Left or Right? When the first public housing projects for Houston were proposed in 1938 by the newly formed Housing Authority of Houston there was immediate and strong reaction from home builders and savings and loan associations that accused the programs of being “unfair government competition with the free market.”

Today, 60 years later, at the outset of a new federal housing initiative that offers assistance to families to purchase a single-family home the debate has come full circle. Recent housing policies in the United States have, to an unprecedented degree, forgone the construction of collective rental housing types and focused government-housing initiatives in the open market of private developers and the single-family house.

In April of 1998 sixteen architects were invited to assemble teams to design a series of single family houses for the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation in Houston, Texas. An exhibition of this work titled: 16 Houses opened in Houston on November 2, 1998 at DiverseWorks and it moved to the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 1999. More than a thousand people crowding the gallery on the opening night. Over six hundred invitations to the opening of the exhibition were sent to Fifth Ward residents in addition to DiverseWorks mailing list of nine hundred guests. Two community events supported the exhibition: a noontime discussion with the designers was held for area students and a panel discussion held on December 12, 1998 invited guests from the community including Bank United Vice President for Community Reinvestment Jeff Balloutine. An advisory committee subsequently selected seven of the projects for construction and funding has been secured to build these houses from the Local Initiative Support Corporation of New York.

During the winter of 1999, Mardie Oakes and I sought support from the Local Initiative Support Corporation of New York to provide funding to the FWCRC to allow a selection of the original houses to move forward in construction. The generous funding prompted forming a committee to select six architectural teams that would each receive professional fees to complete a set of contract documents for their project. The committee actually selected seven projects, nominating the house by StudioWorks for special consideration. The seven architectural teams selected were: StudioWorks.

Keith Krumwiede, Lindy Roy, Morris Gutierrez Architects, William Williams, Carlos Jiménez Studio, and myself.

16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House presents the work of architects and theoreticians who participated in a research project titled “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City.” The primary goal was to examine the architectural implications of decentralization and dispersal, and also the degree to such aims were to be accomplished by market forces in housing production and a more prominent role for the public/private partnership model in lowincome housing development.

Funding

Local Initiative Support Corporation, New York.

The committee was composed of members of the Fifth Ward and the academic and/or architectural communities. Emily Todd, then Director of DiverseWorks, served as the chair of this committee that met at the DiverseWorks gallery for a one-time, closed-door session. The committee was comprised of: Reverend Harvey Clemons (President, Board of Directors FWCRC), Robert Toliver (Builder and Fifth Ward Resident), Stephen Fox, (Anchorage Foundation), Farés El Dahdah (Assistant Professor, Rice School of Architecture), Aaron Betsky (Director, Netherlands Architecture Institute), and Jeff Balloutine, (VP for Community Reinvestment, Bank United).

During the spring and summer of 2000 each of these teams worked with the FWCRC acting as contractor and developer to not only document the projects, but also to verify the affordability and practicality of constructing the houses. The funding from the Local Initiative Support Corporation provided each team with consulting fees and also funded the salary of a construction manager who joined the staff at the FWCRC. Mardie Oakes and myself acted as the liaison between the architects and the construction manager and also as the primary liaison between a collection of innovative sub-contractors such as Metalab of Houston.

We also worked with Bank United of Houston in establishing the eventual sales prices of the houses, but more importantly, the projected appraisals for a set of houses that had no economic or design precedent in the Fifth Ward. In most cases the projected appraisals were lower than the sales price, thus creating a deficit between the price of construction and the amount of funding available through mortgage financing. This situation is typical in low income or impoverished areas and, in the case of the FWCRC, it forced the agency to serve two roles: the role of developer was anticipated, but in many cases the FWCRC had begun to act as contractor. In both situations the FWCRC essentially removed profits from the construction process and attempted to deliver the project at a cost close or equal to its suppressed appraisal. Aggressive cost cutting techniques by the FWCRC would allow all seven of these houses to be built at reasonable costs, yet in each case the construction costs still exceeded the appraisal. The house by Carlos Jiménez came closest to balancing construction costs and appraisal. This was no doubt due to Jiménez’s experience in building lower costs houses in Houston.

a16 Houses If, after five years, the owner has neither sold or

As many as 70,000 units of existing rental public

The FWCRC: Fifth Ward residents, civic leaders,

sub-leased the property, the down payment is

housing will have been demolished by the year

business owners, ministers and educators organized

completely forgiven and the lien removed. The pro-

2000 to make way for new privately owned hous-

the Fifth Ward CRC in 1989. Its mission is to serve

gram provides down payment and closing costs

es and low rise housing. The 1998 Housing and

as a catalyst for rebuilding a healthy community

assistance and also offers courses in how to buy a

Urban Development budget includes funding for

through housing development, economic revitaliza-

house and how to maintain and manage credit.

100,000 new vouchers and in Houston alone

tion, safety and architectural innovation. Through

The revealing term of “improved bankability” is

there have been ambitious (though unrealized)

creative financing, Fifth Ward CRC has managed to

used to described the program’s educational goals

plans to distribute as many as thousands of down-

build in a community where investment is rare—they

and it gives rise to a critical investigation of the

payment vouchers.

have been able to open the door for architects to

program’s true value in providing representation to

The federal government’s plans for housing are as

return and actively participate in the critical problem

a largely invisible class of citizens.

economically encompassing as they were when

of housing in a low income neighborhood. By mak-

have made payment regularly on their primary

Public housing in the United States currently shel-

they focused on the construction of collective

ing use of a local armature of the voucher program

mortgage.

ters approximately three million individuals. In every

housing, however, in advocating the construction of

and other similar housing grants, the FWCRC is able

major American city it has been one of the most

the single-family house these initiative have largely

to build a $77,000 house yet the homebuyer’s mort-

aggressive and at time progressive attempts to

curtailed architectural and perhaps more importantly

gage totals only $52,000. Unlike other market driv-

orchestrate public policy as architectural and urban

urban design innovation. Houses offered to home-

en developers, Fifth Ward CRC’s mission encom-

design and the results. While often viewed as hav-

buyers in this market often receive little if any pro-

passes innovative housing as a priority over profit.

ing failed, these policies have at times been suc-

fessional design innovation. Designers who have

The very nature of community development is root-

cessful in ways that the voucher program hopes to

participated in 16 Houses have explored standard

ed in creativity and problem solving.

take part in. For example: while the City of New

facets of the affordable house such as modular

York provides housing for almost 600,000 resi-

construction and ease of construction, as well as

dents in more than 3000 public housing “projects”

issues such as climate and natural ventilation. More

it has had relatively less social problems in those

importantly, however, these designers have looked

developments than the city of Newark.

for new ways to relate the individual house to the

Speculations about why or how these projects

collective city. In doing so they have tried to enrich

have at times succeeded often point towards the

the voucher programs goals of civic inclusion by

fact that in New York the housing units tend to be

using design as an entrepreneurial element that

included in the fabric of the city — they are often

synthesizes these disparate houses with each other

smaller buildings atomized throughout the city fab-

and with the urban infrastructures that form this

ric — they don’t stand alone as housing projects.

contemporary city.

The City of Houston, Texas has recently established a program that provides down payment vouchers to assist lower income families in purchasing a house inside Houston city limits. The voucher program provides assistance of up to $9,500 to purchase a new home or up to $3,500 to purchase and renovate an existing single family residence. The funds are in the form of a second lien on the purchased property. The lien is held by the City of Houston during the first five years of ownership and the debt is forgiven if the buyers

Clearly this is one advantage that the Houston program offers.

from top

Interloop Architects David Brown Natalye Appel

16 Houses

Public Housing Becomes Voucher House

The history of Houston’s public housing began in

At times the combination of incentives has instigat-

Further, the programs conceal the history of power

1938 with the formation of the Housing Authority of

ed design decisions: historic-preservation tax

struggles between market and state forces in

the City of Houston (HACH). It was funded by the

credits are often coupled with low-income housing

development practices as well as between racial

United States Housing Authority and was formed

tax credits in a way that essentially mandates his-

groups and urban constituencies that have been

amidst New Deal housing reform which at a

torical housing types and also substantially lowers

historically segregated by housing policies.

national level was controversial from its inception.

development costs. In most cases, however,

The research that proceeded the founding of 16

There was strong opposition from homebuilders

these incentives have no clear architectural or

Houses has evolved through several stages that

and savings and loan associations, who launched

urban expression; the development processes

was initially to have ended with an exhibition and

vigorous attacks on public housing, accusing it of

have nevertheless generally resulted in traditional

publication. Subsequent funding from the Local

being socialist and representing unfair government

types typical of speculative housing design. These

Initiative Support Corporation allowed seven of the

competition with the free market enterprise . . .

types have also generally assumed the same low-

houses to proceed to working drawings and sever-

homebuilders played major roles in organizing local

level building and design practices evident in this

al of the houses presented here have now been

communities to oppose siting of public

speculative construction. Federal subsidies for low-

built and occupied. This new advantage provided

housing. The federal funds made available through

income housing in the United States remain high,

some success but also slowed the publication of

block grants to cities for down-payment voucher

however, the voucher programs moves this subsi-

the complete work and it required a greater depth

programs in 1996 was added to financial incen-

dies point of entry to strategic junctions in the

of investigation. As a collective project these hous-

tives already in place. Tax abatements, historic-

development—the funding arrives at the point of

es demonstrate the means by which political and

preservation and low-income tax credits, as well

sale. Unlike earlier federal housing design and

economic power is revealed or concealed in archi-

as donated city land, have provided important new

development that resulted in centralized and large-

tectural design. Most of the architects were as pre-

financial tools to the public-private partnership in

scale projects, here the subsidies arrive well after

occupied with the labor processes involved in the

housing development.

the design process is complete. The houses and

construction as much as the spatial or program-

housing built within voucher programs is essentially

matic questions of the house. The agency of

market-rate housing and as such the design

architecture is an important concern in these

process is virtually non existent. The voucher pro-

works: how the designs serve as a form of power

gram has a defacto effect of essentially eliminating

in their own right, or as a means to be a less

the professional services of architects. 16 Houses

acquiescent adjunct to other forms of power, has

was based in part on an assumption that the tradi-

been addressed by each architect and in the proj-

tional appearance of recent directly subsidized

ect at large.

housing belies the complexity of political and economic forces at play in the organization of the contemporary city.

from top

Carlos JimĂŠnez Keith Krumweide Szetsung Leong and Judy Chung

16 Houses

Decentralization Decentralization at a practical level and as a con-

This project is deeply steeped in a project of

Between 1996 and 1998 it was possible to see the

than undermined by urban processes of rationali-

cern of political consequence proved to be the

resistance; it intends to highlight an unresolved

crucible of this scenario in brief but strategic pas-

zation, production, and finance—yet also to open

most recurring issue in this endeavor. While the

urban and political crisis in relation to housing, but

sages in essays by Sanford Kwinter and K. Michael

the role of resistance. Each of the works shown in

architectural designs can stand alone, and ulti-

more broadly to address the construction and leg-

Hays. Regarding resistance Kwinter, in his Far

16 Houses at some level exhibits both positions,

mately must operate at an essential level, it is the

islation of social, racial and economic territories in

From Equilibrium column in ANY, described anyone

and directly applies themes that were presented in

question of political consequence that is decisive

housing as a sector of contemporary urbanism.

who “still” relied on the “efficacy of negative dialec-

Slow Space in a theoretical context. Here, proce-

and that remains at the mature phase of the work.

None of the work seeks to reconvene a particular

tics” as “gullible.”3 Hays’ introduction to Architecture

dural and temporal ideas of architectural and urban

16 Houses treads a line between supporting the

historical genre or form of architecture. For exam-

Theory, Since 1968 concluded that a younger audi-

production—systems of management, legislation,

effort to move federal housing initiatives toward the

ple, even as many of the architects rely on attrib-

ence may have such an “altogether altered” relation-

and finance; the role of the state as it protects the

market and critiquing the sub standard quality mar-

utes of modern architecture, none focus on syn-

ship to consumption that they had become hesitant

market—are given architectural manifestation as

ket rate housing in the United States. 16 Houses

tactical or formal transformations as a mode of

to engage in a practice that resist the dominant pro-

means of comprehending territory and of abetting

outlines the goals and techniques for a type of

automomy or self-reference. To a large degree, 16

ductive economies of the city. Hays suggested that

the sovereignty of a specific urban subject.

housing that offers an alternative to the concentra-

Houses is a collective work, and questions of

an overt resistance to the commodity processes

tion, isolation, and segregation that characterize

architectural form are continually plied within

that underlay the production of architecture may no

much federal housing design; it also recognizes

milueau’s that undermine the work’s formal autono-

longer hold appeal to younger architects.4 Hays’

16 Houses situates architecture at a historic transi-

that market practices have yet to produce an obvi-

my. As a generation a large number of these archi-

coda, unlike Kwinter’s, affirms that the role of nega-

tion between socialist and market interpretations of

ous high-quality alternative. In this realm, themes of

tect’s learned formal syntax as well as transforma-

tive dialectics remains in the face of a significant

federal housing policy—indeed most early federal

tional strategies from works byJohn Hejduk and

political and productive crisis, but that the sustained

housing projects were derived from modern housing

tics of urban form and housing policy—of decen-

Peter Eisenman—indeed from the publication Five

expansion of the United States economy had affect-

models and accused of being quasi-socialist by

tralization—become issues that are both practical

Architects—yet in their careeers these architects

ed the degree to which a new generation sought

banking and development interests. In the introduc-

and value laden. 16 Houses is useful as a set of

have opened their work to a broader negotiation

refuge against the market. The pliability of the formal

tion to Five Architects, Colin Rowe spoke of

practical proposals, but its core purpose lies in the

with themes of territory and power. In most cases

work presented here reflects this condition: the

American modern architecture as being devoid of

degree to which both the entire project and the

this opening has diminished the formal clarity of

architects were working between modes of engage-

clear “political pedigree.” In the first wave of United

individual works can be understood to have

the works. Nor does16 Houses also attempt to

ment and resistance and the house in turn reveals

States federal housing in the 1930’s it was in fact

emerged from applying spatial principles common-

re-invent grass roots political-action or the forms of

the strife of its own origins.

understood as a form of socialism ; the federal gov-

ly held in architecture to an arena of public policy,

litigation that accompany contentious housing

Similar themes were the basis of my previous

urban form and political goals. The works in 16

development. Instead, it tests the current potential

book Slow Space, completed with Sze Tsung

Houses gain political and social significance

of both resistance and engagement against the

Leong, simultaneously with the outset of 16

through of spatial transformation —the projects are

conditions of the architectural production within

Houses. The two endeavors share many contribu-

literally volumetric and tectonic responses to policy

current United States building practices.

tors. Slow Space framed the local, small-scale,

centrifugal and centripetal

space2

as characteris-

goals. This group of architects begins what may

volumetric and tectonic ambitions of architecture—

be a generational movement towards renewing the

for instance the introduction with a renewed read-

political purpose of architectural space and pro-

ing of John Hejduk’s Bye House—against the fluid

duction in the history of housing design.

and global processes of urban finance, trade and labor. Slow Space characterized Houston, in particular as an emblematic of post-war United States city with formal and architectural attributes that have become increasingly fragmented and visually inchoate, as its financial, media and production

from top

Lars Lerup with Thumb, Walter Hood, Sanford Kwinter and Bruce Mau Deborah Morris Albert Pope and Katrin Brunner

systems have become unified and virtually selfperpetuating. Slow Space posited that architecture’s renewed urban agency, and its ability to participate in the construction of an urban subject, would find potency in an enzymatic role or as retroactive cohering agent. The goal was and still is to view architecture as being sustained rather

Ever Modern

ernment was understood to be undermining market processes in its housing policy. In Europe, Rowe contended modern architecture was an adjunct of socialism, ideologically rooted in Marxism. American public housing has often been funded in a manner consistent with (or at least easily accused of being) socialist, yet the homogeneity of its population in terms of race, gender or income has continually belied the classless aspirations that social housing was imbued with in Europe. In other words , it is not clear that United States public housing was ever ideologically modern at all, even if its forms appeared to be so. 16 Houses is a collection of small-scale houses, but its potential to lead to a significant shift in the ideology of public housing in the United States is enormous. This is the early juncture these works occupy: these houses are seeking a form and space of architecture in the midst of competing histories and procedures that threaten as well as enable work on a behalf of its constituency.

16 Houses

Numeric Houston: Lost Time

Ownership/ Equity / Representation /

What is the scope of the voucher program

On a given weekday the aggregate population of

Design in Houston

in relation to other Houston expenditures?

gram will not provide more than personal satisfac-

the city of Houston drives an average of

Three questions were posed for the site of

The voucher program will provide housing assis-

tion and self-esteem. This data does not account

53,000,000 miles. Translated at the average

Houston in an attempt to define individual repre-

tance to 25,000 families. The total value of the

for federal income tax deductions that accompany

speed of commuter traffic this amounts to an

sentation as it relates to the house, to real estate,

program depends upon the ratio of new to existing

a mortgage nor does it include added monthly

aggregate drive time of 35 years per day. To drive

and to the financial processes of purchasing a

houses purchased within its guidelines. The pro-

costs such as insurance, property tax, school

those 35 years a day, Houston purchased more

house. The questions attempted to answer the

gram could offer as much as $225 million in assis-

taxes or utility costs. Ownership in this average

than 460 million dollars worth of automobiles in

broader question of how through the voucher pro-

tance or as little as $75 million.1 If compared with

scenario clearly does not provide the economic

1996—the United States accounted for 525.9 bil-

gram does ownership provide, representation,

expenditures by the Texas Department of

empowerment and representation it is assumed to,

lion dollars in car sales that same year. If valued

empowerment, and inclusion? Taken at a practical

Transportation in Houston some startling insights

nor is it necessarily a better economic situation

against one of the more prominent cultural monu-

level the voucher program has created an opportu-

surface. For example: the Texas DOT2 currently

than renting. Is there a way that architectural

ments built in the last decade, auto sales in the

nity for more people to purchase their own house.

administers almost $1.4 billion in Houston area

design could abet a faster accrual of equity? For

United States in 1996 could have funded 525

It is not clear, however, that ownership actually

highway construction contracts. During the last

example: full equity in a $25,000 automobile could

Getty Centers in a single year. These numbers are

abets representation or even economic empower-

year alone road construction in Houston costs

be accrued in five years at a monthly expense of

technology’s numeric benchmarks culled from pro-

ment although it does provides a psychological

reached $457 million and maintenance of existing

$502.34.5 In Houston it may be conceivable to

cedures whose mechanics have outpaced archi-

sense of inclusion and stability.

roadways amounted to an expenditure of $57 mil-

build a $25,000 3-bedroom house. If this house

In answering these questions, data was compiled

lion. In this context the voucher program is relative-

offered even modest innovation in energy efficien-

within design/research studios that I taught at Rice

ly small if not insignificant. Should it be more?

cy it could be possible to allocate savings in

University and Columbia University during the aca-

Could it be more? The construction of one recent

monthly utilities expenditures to the greater mort-

16 Houses asked architects to examine dimen-

demic years 1996–2001. These studios addressed

segment of freeway in Houston costs approxi-

gage payments that would come with a short term

sional and numeric attributes of major urban infra-

the issues of housing within the economic process-

mately $22 million a mile3; at this rate, three and

loan. Equity could be amassed at a tremendously

structural systems in comparison with those of a

es of commercial development. The interests that

one half miles of freeway could fund the entire

accelerated rate. It may be possible to design a

new federal program that provides financial assis-

guided the formulation of the research were not

voucher program at its low estimate and in fact the

house in which full equity were accrued in five

tance to lower income families seeking housing in

aesthetic or even initially architectural; our goal was

total costs of the 8 mile freeway in question were

years, even within the costs guidelines of the

major urban centers. The comparison provided

to ascertain the constituent value of a single-family

more than $182 million. Houston has somewhere

voucher program. Innovation in energy use alone

insight into architecture’s ability to act as a localiz-

house within the larger scenario of Houston’s econ-

in the range of 8,700 miles of freeway; the actual

could make a dramatic difference in how afford-

ing or territorializing armature for the organization of

omy. Houston is almost exclusively a city of single

distance and value is almost impossible to figure.

able these houses are; innovation in labor

life as it competes with economic mechanisms

family houses even though it is the fourth largest

Is it possible to design a house in Houston whose

whose prowess in shaping urban space has been

city in the United States. The following data is

equity could be accrued at an accelerated rate?

presumed to be omnipotent if not predatory.

offered as a survey that reveals what home owner-

The average single family house in Houston is sold

ship is within the larger mechanism of urban

approximately every nine years. At that point,

finance. In terms of the voucher program this data

assuming an initial mortgage of $50,000, the aver-

is only the beginning of a renewed comprehension

age home owners would have amassed $5,622 in

of how ownership apparently abets representation,

equity. To amass this equity they would have made

empowerment and inclusion. It is clear that archi-

mortgage payments that total $33,984 or approxi-

tectural design has much to offer, and that the

mately $354 per month.4 As these calculations

voucher program as it stands has no way of gain-

demonstrate, ownership within the voucher pro-

tecture’s attempts to dimensionally shape space— public space, work space, living space, productive space, etc.

processes involved in construction could also alter the affordability and quality of the houses.

ing access to its potential. from top

Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer Taft Architects and Nonya Grenader William Williams and Archie Perez

16 Houses How Does the Market Develop Houses in Houston?

The voucher program assumes that the market will

Building materials that compose a single house at

1 This estimated value of the voucher program is

and can produce houses more efficiently than fed-

Sable Ridge have a relative value of approximately

based only on value of vouchers and does not

eral or city housing agencies. Developer houses in

$10,000 per house if bought on a per house basis

include costs of administration of program. It is

Houston are routinely offered for sale at prices as

at a retail hardware store. The rest of the costs is

based on the program’s plan to provide assistance

low as $55,000 and these houses are within the

accounted for by labor, advertising, and profit. The

to as many as 25,000 home buyers.

reach of many families who would rely on the

market provides no incentive to build in the city

2 Texas Department of Transportation information

voucher program.6 Innovation, however, in simple

center or to use architectural services. Clearly the

gathered from T.D.O.T. internet web site.

functionality, design, or quality of materials is non-

market does not provide the components or the

existent. The voucher program hopes to rely on

innovation that could make the voucher program a

the free-market to provide a decent level of hous-

success in terms of providing meaningful civic rep-

ing. Will it? Does the building industry have the will

resentation. It will build houses and it will assert

to innovate? Clearly architects have had little suc-

that the geometric dimension of the box, the plot

cess in infiltrating the machinations of housing. The

of land, and the street are all capable of providing

term “housing starts” that often indicates the health

economic representation, but the simple fact

of the economy almost invariably indicates the

remains that this is only a psychological boost.

demise of architecture as we have valued it.

The four, five, and even asymptotically n-dimen-

Consider the following case study of Sable Ridge.

sional permutation of housing finance have fully

(The following data was culled from private inter-

outpaced the three-dimensional box or street.

views with its developer; the name Sable Ridge is

While architects may offer formal solutions that

fictitious to provide anonymity.)

Harris County in the year 1995 was

mime topology, it is certain that architecture’s criti-

77,774,000,000 dollars.

Sable Ridge is a Houston subdivision of 347

cal role in the city will find its resonance in the infil-

houses (boxes) built in the early 1980s at a total

tration and re-arrangement of the clandestine and

cost of $16 million. It is situated outside the

essentially predatory forms of finance and develop-

Houston Beltway or Loop in an area currently

ment. How can architecture not represent the

5 Equity and payment based on a 25,000 dollar

growing in population at a rate of more than 10%

topological, but instead take part in averting its dis-

loan at 7.9% for 5 years.

per annum. Compaq Computers, whose head-

ciplinary machinations. Can architecture involve

6 The average weekly wage in Harris County in

quarters are in this area, alone accounts for much

itself with the morphologies of investment capital?

1992 was $554.03; advertised mortgages on

of this growth. The square foot costs of construc-

Can architecture involve itself with the spatialized

Sable Ridge homes were approximately $550.00

tion for housing built at Sable Ridge was $33 sq/ft.

chemistry of new materials and their relation to

per month.

Architectural fees for this project of more than

investment and labor?

500,000 sq/ft were $4,550 or 0.00028% of total

The guidelines set by the Houston voucher pro-

construction. The entire subdivision of Sable Ridge

gram are drastic but not without potential or even

could have been constructed on an average

aesthetic challenge. A family of four must earn less

downtown Houston city block at a height of 5 sto-

than $36,800 to qualify for assistance. Proposed

ries (there are countless empty downtown Houston

designs for new and renovated houses built within

blocks) Architectural fees for such a low rise proj-

the limits of the market as it applies to this income

ect would have amounted to more than $1.4 mil-

group could mark a real and significant contribu-

lion7—the developers of Sable Ridge made a profit

tion not only to this strata of our population but to

of about two million dollars.

our conception of the contemporary city as a

3 The freeway costs estimate describes an 8 to 10 lane portion of Texas I-8. The costs estimate is based on an 7.97 mile stretch of mostly concrete pavement. The duration of the contract extended approximately one year from March of 1993 to October of 1994. The final costs is estimated at 182,824,356 dollars. Another segment of freeway, State Highway 99, was built the same year was estimated at 3,850,000 dollars per mile, or a total costs of 63,220,000 dollars for a 16.42 mile segment of 4-6 lanes. The total personal income for

4 Equity and mortgage payments based on a 50,000 dollars loan at 7.9% for 30 years.

7 This estimate assumes that a downtown building could be built for the same costs as the subdivision.

whole. We might very well be able to show that these voucher houses could be some of the best

from top

works of architecture of our time.

StudioWorks Stanley Saitowitz Lindy Roy

above

Michael Bell, Glass House @ 2Ëš

Small Scale Action: Large Effect.

First in San Francisco, then in Houston and now in New York City, I have been preoccupied by the program of the house. At each location the direction of design and accompanying writing, research and teaching has been affected by the new urban contexts, but what has remained constant has been a focus on the program of the house. With the initiation of the research that lead to 16 Houses the program of the house gave way to the programming and the political history of housing. The consistency provided a control factor as my architectural practice evolved towards an increasingly urban agenda—it also allowed the design project to evolve and to address new scenarios. Architecture reveals as much about the complexity of its site and context as it does about itself. In a similar way, it has allowed architecture to reveal political, social and economic circumstance. A small-scale architectural practice rooted in the design o f the house has the undeniable potential to serve as the basis for a large-scale and collaborative endeavor in housing.

Notes 1 According to Lawrence Anderson, Wurster’s directives while dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning segregated the concerns of planning and architecture. Planning faculty were not trained in design but in economics and public policy; the planning department created analyst, public policy makers and activist. The architecture department focused on training designers. See Anderson in, Inside the Large Small House: The Residential Design Legacy of William W. Wurster, ed. R. Thomas Hile, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 10.

2 Michael Bell, “Having Heard Mathematic’s: The Topologies of Boxing,” and Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong, “347 Years: Slow Space,” in Slow Space, Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong, eds., (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 22, 107. Themes of urban decentralization are essential to the editorial direction of Slow Space and to the essay“Having Heard Mathematic’s: The Topologies of Boxing.” Peter Eisenman’s analysis of Guiseppe Terragni’s Casa GiulianiFrigerio is referenced in both essays. Eisenman’s analysis is used to describe a spatial ambiguity developed from two opposing conceptions of space in Terragni’s work. Terragni’s architecture was ultimately understood to encapsulate an expansion and contraction of two types of space or the simultaneity of both centrifugal and centripetal space. 16 Houses applies this work to the analysis of federal housing policy and recent goals toward decentralization in relation to poverty and to the potential use of the market as a technique for decentralizing federal housing initiatives.

3 Sanford Kwinter, “Playboys of the Western World,” ANY, Number. 13, (New York: Anyone Corporation,1996), 62.

4 Michael Hays, “Introduction,” Architecture Theory Since 1968, K. Michael Hays, ed.,(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), xiv

In Glass House @ 2 Degrees, stress, strain and shear in the planar surfaces of glass animate an immanent set of events that extend the horizon of the

project

given form. An ultimately stable and closed structure – Glass House @ 2 Degrees extends its apparent geometric boundaries in both its transparency and

project Type

the emerging complexity of torsion stresses that animate and threaten to buckle the planar surfaces of the buildings off-the-rack sliding glass doors. Glass

client

House @ 2 Degrees is a folded structure – a simple approximation of a continuous surface – whose topology is metered by the critical dimensions of

Title Glass House @ 2˚ Single Family House

Fifth Ward Community Redvelopement Corporation Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas

mass-produced building components. Its form is a working compromise between philosophy, mathematics, geometry and production. Six sets of sliding

location

glass doors measure 20 feet each; the alternate inside-outside panels slide along a planar center of gravity and alter the rotational momentum of the

budget

balanced track. The building folds in on itself to form two shallow light wells that bounce light into the bedrooms. The 2-degree fold results from a push at

status

each corner of the building (see digital photo); the south and north elevations implode at their center. The latent demands of efficiency that belly the

design team

products light industrial origins are pushed to give a timbre, sound and palpable presence to labor and energy developed and spent off-site in the making

principal consultants

of the window/wall. Architecture as a repository of energy and the accrued labor of its making are here weakly deployed at its new site. Glass House @ 2

design date

Degrees is a plate structure – the taught surfaces of tempered glass are pushed to reveal tensions and energies.

anticipated completion

Glass House @ 2˚ was 1 of 9 projects from 400+ international entries awarded a 2001 Progressive Architecture Design Award. Th e project was also

total size of project 900 sq. ft. house / 5000 sq. ft. lot / 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in an exhibition curated by Terence Riley.

$113,000

Designed: Construction 2003 John Mueller, Todd Vanvarick Metal Lab

9/98–11/98 summer 2003

Glass House @ 2º

Glass House @ 2 Degrees was designed for Houston’s Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation. The house is situated at the center of a common 50 x 100 foot building lot in Houston’s lowest income neighborhood. Its cost will be subsidized by a federal voucher program that will provide a $9500 down payment to the buyer in hopes of providing a lower income family with the foundation from which to imagine and build their way in the American metropolis. Glass House @ 2 Degrees is imagined as a lens that affords a new view to the city; a lens that reveals a tentative, complex, yet powerful grasp on an illusive life. For the moment, in Houston’s Fifth Ward the strife of income, Juried Awards

Publications: Books

House @ 2˚, p. 108 - 109.

2001 Progressive Architecture, Design Awards: Award.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics, by Michael Bell; New York: The Monacelli Press.

1999 The Architectural League of New York, Emerging Voices Award

2002 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House, by Michael Bell; New York: The Monacelli Press.

Casabella, “Forms of Spectacle,” edited by Joan Ockman, Glass House @ 2 ˚, December. p. 131 – 134.

Grants/Funded Research

The Un-Private House, “The Un-Private House,” Terence Riley, The Museum of Modern Art, Glass House @ 2˚, p. 30, 36, 64 – 67.

2000 The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, Houston (FWCRC) The Venice Bienalle—Glass House @ 2 Degrees.

Publications: Published Design in Journals 2002 Perspecta 33, Mining Autonomy, Yale School of Architecture Journal,

NY Arts, New York International Arts Magazine, “Emerging Voices” by Ana Maria Torres, Volume 4, No. 5. Glass House @ 2˚“ p - 22.

Columbia University GSAPP. The Venice Bienalle—Travel Grant.

Glass House @ 2˚. Commentary on Glass House @ 2˚ by K. Michael Hays.

Arch +, Nikolaus Kuhnert, editor, June. Glass House @ 2˚, p. 94 – 95.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.

2001 House, American Houses for the New Century, by Cathy Lang Ho,

Reviews and Articles

1998 DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas Project: 16 Houses, Owning a House in the City.

Glass House @ 2˚. p. 5, 7.

2002 Dwell, “Glass House Primer,” July, by Karrie Jacobs “Arverne Housiung,” p. 23, 101

Exhibitions and Installations 2000 Venice Biennale, 7th International Architecture Exhibition, 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Un-Private House, group show.

2000-2001 Also shown at: MAK-Ausstellungshalle, Vienna; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA; Musuem of Contemporary Art, Barcelona.

1998 DiverseWorks, Houston, 16 Houses: Owning a House in the City. 16 Houses was also shown at The University of Texas, Austin, 1999.

A + U, September 2001, “Recent Projects in the USA,” Glass House @ 2˚. p. 88 - 93.

Architecture, Progressive Architecture Design Awards, April, Glass House @ 2. p. 118 – 123.

2000 Venice Biennale 2000, 7th International Architecture Exhibition Catalog, Massimiliano Fuksas, Curator. Glass House @ 2, p. 50 – 53.

10 X 10, Iona Baird, editor, Phaidon Press, London, Glass House @ 2˚, p. 80 – 83.

Architecture Must Burn, by Aaron Betsky and Erik Adigard; London: Thames and Hudson, Glass House @ 2˚, p. 8, 9, 48.

1999 DBZ-Redaktion, ed. Jutta Herkenrath, Glass

2000 Dwell, “7 Houses,” by Mimie Zieger, February, p 76 – 79. Houston Press, “Not Your Standard Issue,” by Lisa Gray, 11/9/00.

1999 Art Forum, November, “Frames of Mind” by Joel Sanders, p. 157.

Art Forum, November, “The Un-Private House,” by Francesca Hughes, p. 137 - 138. November The New York Times, “Drop Dead Beauty and Luxe, With an Intimate Index of Change,” by Roberta Smith, July 2, P, E - 33.

The New York Times, “Young Turks offer a View of the State of Architecture,” by Julie V. Iovine, March 11.

Art Lies, “16 Houses” by Stephen Fox. Number 21, Winter, 1999. p. 46.

SallyPort, Rice university, Spring, “This is Pure desire and love and Passion,” by David Kaplan, p.

34.

Architecture, “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City,” by Shaila Dewan, Jan. p. 47 - 53.

1998 Houston Press, “Home Despots,” by Shaila Dewan, November.

Glass House @ 2Ëš

A 900 square foot, two-bedroom, two-bath house on a mid-block site. The living spaces of the house face a north courtyard. The predominant building component is a pre-manufactured sliding door system.

The building size is 24 x 40 feet and is enclosed by six 20-foot long sliding door panels. Each section is insulated glass and the frames have a thermal break to provide energy efficiency. A concrete slab on grade is finished with a resin based poured surface of any color. The roof system is a metal decking with rigid insulation and a polyurethane roof membrane. A light gage steel frame supports the roof. The bathroom and bedroom walls are made of folded 1/4 “ thick metal backed with rigid sound insulation.

This project was designed for the exhibition 16 Houses: Owning a House in the City, which invited a group of architects, designers and artists as well as writers, economists and philosophers to collaborate in seeking new ways in which the house can fulfill the pivotal role it has been given in federal housing goals.

right

View at entry.

Glass House @ 2Ëš

Larger fixed plates of glass are set in aluminum frames on the end walls of the house. The are oversized according to manufacturing specifications though they are still stable.

right

Glass House @ 2Ëš

The living spaces of the house face a north courtyard.

The predominant building component is a premanufactured sliding door system.

The building size is 24 x 40 feet and is enclosed by six 20-foot long sliding door panels. Each section is insulated glass and the frames have a thermal break to provide energy efficiency.

Glass House @ 2˚

The voucher plan as a down payment adds equity to a housing purchase by adding financial value at the front end of a purchase. It gives the buyer a boost and a head start in the process of ownership - it is a shield against accrued interest. Equity, however, is affected dramatically in the way a building is produced by a developer long before it’s purchased. The standard mass-produced American house, as a product of fundamental building trades such as drywalling, framing or painting, accrues value-surplus- for its developer based on the efficient division of labor processes and the replication of basic building forms. In 1776, Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations defined how the division of labor produced surplus. The theory was and still is simple in concept, but its results are dramatic especially as they bear on the market production of individual houses. Smith used an example to describe the surplus value added by divided labor processes: ten men or women working in unison in a manner that divides the work of fabrication into discrete segments could produce an exponential multiple of the work of a single person working alone. The division of labor gives each worker a “peculiar” task, as Smith says, that is odd in its separation from the whole - when their labor is combined with the labor of other workers it ideally produces a unified project. Smith’s example is that of the pin making in 1776: he shows how ten workers together can assemble 48,000 pins in a day while a lone worker could “scarcely produce 20 pins.” Two questions surface in Smith’s explanation, and Smith refers to them himself. First, if 10 workers produce 48,000 pins in a day can one man or woman say they have to their credit 4800 pins or 1/10 of the total, or, can a single worker relate themselves to their proportionate share of the total even if their work has been exponentially compounded by the division of labor? Secondly, in Smith’s enunciation of the term “peculiar” he refers to work that is taken out of a complete and grounding context. For example, a worker may have no other task than to sharpen the end of the wire used in pin making, and this task may be completed in isolation of the entire project. The term “peculiar” could mean nothing more than dull or boring, but peculiar turns to the more resonant and complex term of alienation in later examinations of labor from Marx or Debord. In a passage from Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination published in 1995, the question returns in a renewed form:

“The city economy was in the lucky situation of being able to enjoy the advantages of the division of labor without losing the feeling . . . of familial origins. One worked in the city and for the city; life moved in a circle. . . that made the city a center of interests that could be clearly surveyed. Everyone could perceive the totality, and therefore everyone took part in the prosperity of the whole. . . In the city economy, production and trade dealt with objects that functioned as carriers of common spirit, and that spirit too constituted prosperity. In the capitalist world economy, however, the sense of economic connection. . . has been lost: The industrial workers who fill the new quarters (of the city) work to satisfy needs that arise somewhere far distant in the country of even beyond borders: they work essentially for distant markets, for unknown customers, and not as a city dweller for a city dweller. . . They cannot perceive the effects of their activity within the city economy.”(p. 84) Houses built within the developer market and the voucher program operate within these procedures: the production of houses in the market economy is a surplus mechanism that divides labor into discrete trades and provides return on investment in exponential terms. The end product—the house—ideally is able to synthesize the accrued labor of its workers.

Working within the non-profit dimensions of the Fifth Ward CRC, this exhibition is alleviated from the profit motives of building houses, but the labor processes remain largely in tact and are a site for design innovations that attempt to synthesize an array of dimensions usually unstudied by designers.

A gold bed for a poor man.

Glass House @ 2˚

Glass House @ 2°: Stress and Strain in Planar Surfaces: The standard sliding glass door is situated to highlight the “plate” or planar quality of the glass in each doorframe. The tempered glass can resist a strong perpendicular force, but a very slight force applied to its edge or co-planar to its surface can easily cause the plate to fail. Tempered glass is stressed across its surface—this stress gives the glass its strength. The glass in this house reveals depth but also intensifies surface readings of stress and strain. Photo: microscopic view of cracks in tempered glass.

sliding glass door detail (not to scale)

A concrete slab on grade is finished with a resin based poured surface of any color. The bathroom and bedroom walls are made of folded 1/4 “ thick metal backed with rigid sound insulation.

Glass House @ 2Ëš

south elevation

north elevation

0 1 2

The roof system is a metal decking with rigid insulation and a polyurethane roof membrane. A light gage steel frame supports the roof.

4

8 feet

Glass House @ 2Ëš

Glass House @ 2˚

Torison, Bearing and Time Push A push at the corner of the original box “developer box” causes a collapse and a fold or crease in the facade. The sliding glass doors move in this axis. The house is “broken.” The facade crease implies a buckling in the roof surface—a 4rth dimension of deformation is added to the otherwise stable 3 dimensional form. The house implies dimensions beyond its Cartesian form.

Steel becomes Aluminum

FWCRC

Art and Economics

In Glass House @ 2 Degrees, stress, strain and

The steel and glass architecture that was

Glass House @ 2 Degrees was designed for

In the fall of 1959 John Kenneth Galbraith

shear in the planar surfaces of glass animate an

conceived around newly refined technologies at

Houston’s Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment

accepted an invitation from the Museum of

immanent set of events that extend the horizon of

the opening of the 20th century was at the

Corporation. The house is situated at the center of

Modern Art to deliver a lecture on the topic of

the given form. An ultimately stable and closed

forefront of a new paradigm in economics and

a common building 50 x 100 foot lot in Houston’s

economics and art. His lecture was prefaced by a

structure – Glass House @ 2 Degrees extends its

materials production. Today steel is generally

lowest income neighborhood. Its cost will be

comment that his interest in art and architecture

apparent geometric boundaries in both its

replaced by aluminum in the construction of a

subsidized by a federal voucher program that will

had never produced a clear certainty as to what

transparency and the emerging complexity of

window section – (aluminum windows recently

provide a $9500 down payment to the buyer in

constituted the “good” or the “less good” in art or

torsional stresses that animate and threaten to

replaced steel in Philip Johnson’s St. Thomas

hopes of providing a lower income family with the

architecture, but that he was persuaded that

buckle the planar surfaces of the buildings off-the-

University in Houston cutting the weight by 75%))

foundation from which to imagine and build their

“improving economic well-being requires an

rack sliding glass doors. Glass House @ 2

and the weight and physical momentum of

way in the American metropolis. Glass House @ 2

increasingly close relationship between the artist

Degrees is a folded structure – a simple

building has changed with it. The steel and glass

Degrees is imagined as a lens that affords a new

and economic life.” Alienation between the two

approximation of a continuous surface – whose

factories/houses designed at the outset of the

view to the city; a lens that reveals a tentative,

would produce a “disappointing and even

topology is metered by the critical dimensions of

20th century were produced in a manufacturing

complex, yet powerful grasp on an illusive life. For

frustrating banality.” The lecture touched on the role

mass-produced building components. Its form is a

economy that, according Moishe Postone, took

the moment, in Houston’s Fifth Ward the strife of

of the architect whose goals Galbraith portrayed as

working compromise between philosophy,

advantage of the capital arrangements of modern

income, race, class, geography and movement or

typically at odds with an economically motivated

mathematics, geometry and production. Six sets

factory processes such as divided labor yet still

flight is raging even as it is held in the static grip of

society unconcerned with aesthetic interest.

of sliding glass doors measure 20 feet each; the

ideally allowed workers to feel connected to their

silent governance. Glass House @ 2 Degrees is a

Galbraith reminded his audience that after World

alternate inside-outside panels slide along a planar

products. A factory worker could be said to work

view to this moment.

War II, in a climate of reaction against the

center of gravity and alter the rotational momentum

“in the city” and “for the city.” The equation is

constraints of war and of war-time controls

of the balanced track. The building folds in on itself

quasi-territorial – a worker’s grounded relation to

administered by a strong central administration,

to form two shallow light wells that bounce light

space, production and city is balanced by

that planning—especially aesthetic planning—had

into the bedrooms. The 2-degree fold results from

connectivity to family and place yet each

become an “evil word” and an imposition. The idea

a push at each corner of the building; the south

component of this scenario is only partially in tact.

of an uncontrolled and economically driven

and north elevations implode at their center. The

The relations among these coordinates could be

development of the city was not only “justified” in

latent demands of efficiency that bely the products

intuited in that which was produced: you could

such a context, but also was morally good. Art, in

light industrial origins are pushed to give a timbre,

see the city in its artifacts. The politics of this

other words, should stay out of the way and

sound and palpable presence to labor and energy

interior or indeed of working/living/being “in the

architects should adhere to the constraints of a

developed and spent off-site in the making of the

city” of labor is today almost unilaterally suspect

free market. As an example Galbraith considered a

window/wall. Architecture as a repository of energy

and generally architecturally impossible. Can

stretch of real-estate along the Charles River in

and the accrued labor of its making is here weakly

architecture provide the intuited connection of

Cambridge that includes a building by Eero

deployed at its new site. Glass House @ 2

worker, artifact and city that Postone’s equation

Saarinen. What Galbraith would have considered

Degrees is a plate structure – the taught surfaces

suggest? What house could allow you to be in

the obvious beauty of Saarinen’s building was

of tempered glass are pushed to reveal tensions

the city in a manner that offered a view to the city’s

challenged by the proximity of recent commercial

and energies.

complexity? The slightly inflected surfaces of Glass

structures - gas stations, shops, warehouses -

House @ 2 Degrees search for the momentum of

buildings whose design and form is generally

the city.

resultant of constraints created by the demands of economic efficiency. While these structures undermine the presumed value of Saarinen’s

Materials whose modulus of elasticity are flexible can sustain force applied from several directions without failing. A plate form is shown here under sheer stress. Glass cannot sustain a great sheer stress and when it fails the results are catastrophic. Materials that are flexible in numerous dimensions can absorb and deform according to applied lateral or perpendicular forces.

Steel & Glass: Transparent City: Invisible Class Sometime around 1929 the percentage of the

guise of a society that has turned glass into a

that, in the end, might not question their value,

buildings, for Galbraith they describe a scenario

United States GNP that could be attributed to steel

predatory tool; one that “desecrates” private

having understood that these structures are

production reached its peak. The quantity of steel

experience. Cacciari’s reading of Mies is one of a

seemingly the “natural” result of a system that not

produced continued to rise, however, and its per

glass house in which there is no need for an interior

only seeks efficiency, but also seeks the right to

capita usage in the United States continued to climb

because there is “nothing left to collect.” In Loos

find freedoms in efficiency—in an apparently free

until the 1970’s, but the degree to which steel

Caciarri finds a “delay” and a “suffered . . . not yet”

market. Projects designed for 16 Houses face a

production constituted the benchmark industry for

that finds it nonetheless useless to predict that

similar scenario: housing initiatives as they are

the US economy had been challenged for most of

“henceforth everything shall be glass and steel.” In

administered in the voucher program have been

this century. In the late 1970’s plastic production per-

housing today, there is little that is completely steel

atomized down to the single family house and its

capita surpassed steel in the United States.

and glass though the remnants of advanced

design as a highly efficient artifact of mass-

Architecture that was conceived around newly

technologies and modern labor are still very much

production. Mass produced housing is derived

refined steel and glass technologies at the turn of the

intact. Contemporary houses have a myriad of

within what Galbraith calls a “classical trinity of

century were staged in a manufacturing economy

products which are advanced in terms of chemical

productive forces,” land, labor and capital. Design,

that, according Postone, took advantage of the

properties, production techniques and distribution

in Galbraith’s analysis provides a fourth factor that

modern labor processes yet still allowed the worker

systems, but housing design suppresses these

acts at the entrepreneurship level in seeking to

to work “in” and “for the city”—the worker’s relation to

qualities in nostalgic garb that suggests that our

organize or manage the proportional relation of the

production still allowed them to feel connected to

private and territorial lives in still intact. This project for

other three factors. Where or how should the

their products. In an environment that divided labor

the FWCRC falls somewhere between the above

concerns of design meet those of economic

and relied on segregate worker tasks a quasi-

histories. What private experiences can a moderate

efficiency in a contemporary house that hopes to

territorial relation to space, work, city and family was

income house house offer? Why should an

provide its owner a level of civic inclusion (private

still in tact. If steel was the vanguard product of the

economically invisible class of people choose to live

and public) or economic well being? The voucher

new factory and the accrual of surplus value by

behind walls rather than reveal their lives? Is there still

program moves federal housing initiatives fully into

factory labor, glass was the counterpart call to

a quality of technology and innovation even in the

the realm of the market and as such has almost

transparency, equality, openness, freedom and

most banal building elements such as aluminum,

fully relinquished architectural design as it is

commonly held collective space. In the early 20th

plastic or resin flooring that can be extrapolated in a

normally valued and premiated in the profession.

century manufacturing could still ideally produce

timbre and a quality of contemporary space? The

“objects that functioned as carriers of a common

ordinary things that make up our manufactured

spirit” and “that spirit” could constitute “economic

household items—a water glass, a beaker, a

prosperity.” To use glass today, in a low income

pressurized canister, a plastic pill box— should

house in Houston, obviously doesn’t fit these

convince that we continue to make extraordinary

ideals—the degree to which factory produced

innovations in common goods though we rarely

housing elements such as sliding glass doors offer

allow them to take part in forming our architecture or

factory workers a sense of their common

houses as we did in the early part of this century.

accomplishment or a synthesis of art and technology

This project for an affordable house is on the cusp of

is presumably almost nil. But the situation does not

negation and smoothness: there is still a reason to

fit into the views of Massimo Cacciari either whose

refrain from expressivity—to avoid collecting the

essay “Chain of Glass” depicts transparency as the

remnants of a private life—but there is little reason to accept a future of steel and glass when there is so much possibility for innovation.

zA photo-elastic stress analysis reveals the distribution of forces in a planar beam—the forces are not great enough to cause deformation in the outer shape of the beam though they do cause stress and strain deformation at the molecular level. The internal geometry of deformation at the molecular level is a dynamic counterpart to the stable outer form. Glass House 2 ° sets a dynamic of stress and strain in motion.

The house form remains stable though immanently stressed.

A photo-elastic stress analysis done by Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri in preparing their design for the Palazzo Littorio Scheme A in 1934. Terragni’s and Lingeri’s test were done to test the stress and strain in the cantilevered “wall” that composed the background for a speaking platform. Historians and theorist have commonly referred to this element as a wall while it is actually a slightly curved shell structure or box-beam. The curvature gave the structure a counter-balance that resisted buckling in the individual wall

N driveway

steel curb

light gage steel decking

insulation

11 x 3 wide flange Alenco fixed glass aluminium window

living room

steel rail

bedroom Fleetwood sliding door

Chem-i-nert floor concrete slab

driveway

property line

fence

Fleetwood sliding glass door

Fleetwood sliding glass door

9' sliding panel

(2) steel C-section / column typ. utility closet

bathroom

2 x 4 framing / stucco ext.

bathroom

bedroom

bedroom

12 x 12

12 x 12

fence

1/4" folded steel partition w / insulation

garden Alenco fixed glass window

light well property Ndrivewayfence Fleetwood Fleetwood 9' (2) utility 2 garden bathroom bedroom bedroom fence 12bathroom 12 1/4" steel Alenco light back front living kitchen 40 Chem-i-nert line (2) wall beam steel Fleetwood Fleetwood carport sliding sliding driveway sliding fence x4 x closet xsteel folded curb fixed door door / well x floor steel above railangle sliding sliding glass glass panel C-section framing 12 12 steel glass 11.5 /dining 2C-section glass glass doordoor // partition window any /door door column w stucco column -- color typ. / ext. typ.

20' insulation section

back door front door

living

kitchen / dining 40 x 11.5

Chem-i-nert floor / any color

wall angle 2

(2) steel C-section / column typ.

beam above

Fleetwood sliding glass door -- 20' section

Fleetwood sliding glass door

carport

fence

0 1 2

4

8 feet

above model view bedrooms to the left— living spaces to the right

Stress and strain in the glass surfaces is highlighted by the amount of glass set end to end. The plates are emphasized in the design of the window wall.

Stress and strain in the glass surfaces is highlighted by the amount of glass set end to end. The plates are emphasized in the design of the window wall.

Model View from Street

3. New York Stateless 16 Houses was supported for both its architectural content and as a model for collaboration between institutions whose efforts are multiplied by shared information and specialization. It also served as a model of institutional collaboration that the Architectural League of New York and the New York Department of Housing Preservation Development relied on this year in forming a research and exhibition project to explore the redevelopment of a 100-acre city owned site on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The Architectural League and the HPD chose to fund four university-based teams to explore how market-rate housing could be inserted into a fragmented urban fabric whose margins are formed by three eras of public housing. The 100-acre ocean front parcel on the Rockaway Peninsula was cleared in 1968 as one of the last major urban renewal projects in New York City and never redeveloped. Today it is an ecologically and politically unstable site that will be redeveloped as 1800 units of new market rate housing. In this context we designed a project, titled Stateless Housing, whose title refers to the literal states withdraw from subsidized housing in this area as well as the organic and ecological qualities of the ocean front site. As a result of this collaborative model the HPD is now considering hiring architects and planners prior to developers thus placing design as well as ecological issues on a more even playing field with finance. The Architectural League and the HPD relied on 16 Houses as a model that renewed former roles of the university taking a substantial lead in social and politically sensitive urban redevelopment. 16 Houses and Stateless Housing establish bridges between professional practice, the university and the community at a level of engagement that does not diminish the complexity of either realm.

The work attempts to renew the effectiveness of architecture and the university but indeed any local component of urbanism. It has been an attempt to bring a generation of urban theory into a contemporary and pragmatic realm. The expansion of the United States economy in the 1990’s has been the inevitable impetus for this engagement—architecture’s critical role has always bridged art and economics and these works attempt to redefine the malleability of this conflation.

New York City

Arverne By the Sea

The Far Rockaway Peninsula, Queens

New York City

Arverne By the Sea

The Far Rockaway Peninsula, Queens

Stateless Housing Stateless Housing A New Plan for Arverne by the Sea on the Far Rockaway Peninsula, New York City Project Director Michael Bell, Associate Professor of Architecture Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Planning Michael Bell Architecture Architectural Design Michael Bell Architecture, Marble Fairbanks Architects, Mark Rakatansky Studio Project Coordinator Anthony Burke

Stateless Housing was commissioned for the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development. James Lima, Assistant Commisioner.

Stateless Housing was sponsored by the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director

The NYHPD, the properties owner, is in the unique condition of hoping to eventually disappear; their goal is to distribute land assets held since the mid 1970’s into public/private partnerships in a way that ultimately sublimates thier own role in development by returning the land holdings to market forces. Arvenre’s oceanfront site and it’s environmental balance as a barrier island and peninsula serve as the catalysts that link the legal dimensions of urban renewal with the potentials of a study of the organic issues of the sites pre-legal history. Housing built at Arverne is in some sense striving to be literally stateless: while state funds will be present these funds are folded into the general guise of market rate housing. Unlike the housing that surrounds the site this new housing will not reveal or sustain its subsidies.

Grants / Funded Research

Publications: Books

Invited Conferences

2001 The Architectural League of New York.

Project: Arverne Re-Development Project, Far Rockaway, NY.

2003 Having Heard Mathematics by Michael Bell New York: The Monacelli Press. In Press

2002 Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, Conference: The Body in Architecture Presentation: Public Realm, Private Spaces

Columbia University GSAPP Project: Stateless Housing, new housing for Arverne by the Sea, NYC.

Publications: Published design in Journals

Exhibitions and Installations

Reviews and Articles

SCI ARC, Los Angeles, Conference: Beyond Sprawl: New Domestic Topographies Presentation: “New York City and Houston, Texas: House/s”

2002 Yale University School of Architecture, Stateless Housing, new housing for Arverne by the Sea, NYC.

2002 Dwell, “Glass House Primer,” July, by Karrie Jacobs Stateless Housing, p. 23, 101

2001 The Architectural League of New York, Stateless Housing, new housing for Arverne by the Sea, Queens, NYC.

2001 Oculus, An Eye on New York Architecture, New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects; “Housing on the Edge,” V. 64, No. 3, Nov, P. 12.

2003 Perspecta 34, “Eyes in the Heat,” Yale School of Architecture Journal

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Conference: Constructing Mies in America Presentation: “Beach 67th Street, Far Rockaway, New York: 1968.”

Yale University School of Architecture Conference:New Housing for Far Rockaway, NY. Presentation: “Stateless Housing: the NYHPD

Recedes.”

A: Stateless Housing: Site / Type The Rockaway Peninsula is home to approximately 38,000 households; more than 13,000 of these households are in publicly funded and assisted buildings. The RFP calls for the development of market-rate two-family housing on a one hundred-acre ocean front site. The property, currently owned by the NYHPD, is defined at its perimeter by three types of state and federally assisted housing. In the midst of these policy and typological histories new market rate housing will be built in the near future if the RFP produces a succesful development strategy. Ocean Village is on the east perimeter of the site at Beach 59th Street; it was built by the Urban Development Corporation between 1968 and 1974 and offers subsidized housing to lower income families. At the western perimeter of the site the Arverne and Hammel Houses were developed by the Housing Authority of New York; the average income for families in NYCHA apartments is $13,406 (as of January 1, 1999). Also on the western edge of the site are nine mid rise apartment slabs that were built as part of the Mitchell-Lama housing program; these cooperative apartments are owned by their residents. The NYHPD RFP would dilute that concentration in adding as many as 2000 units of new market rate housing to the area. While these new housing units are not subsidized at the point of sale they will be subsidized indirectly as a public/private partnership; the HPD will effectively donate the property to the developer who is awarded the contract.

Major funding for infrastructure is anticipated to come from the state of New York thus further reducing development costs.

We began with an inventory of what is existing: the original cottage architecture of Somerville to the north; Ocean Village funded in 1968 to the East, NYCHA’s housing funded in 1937 and the Mitchell Lama coops to the West funded in the early 1970’s— if you include this land there are four versions of publicly assisted housing here: they run the gamut from quasi socialist to quasi Market. In each case subsidies underlay or precede architecture: this is not an open market.

1 New York City Housing Authority

2 Mitchell-Lama Housing,

3 New York City Housing Authority

4 New York City Housing Authority

Founded 1937—current Arverne Houses, 1951 410 Units—14-six storey buildings

New York State: Founded 1970—current Coopertive Apartments Dayton Towers, 1971

Founded 1937 - current Edgemere Houses , 1960's

Founded 1937—current Arverne Houses, 1951 410 Units—14-six storey buildings

1

3

2

1

Stateless Housing was funded as a research and design proposal and as a parallel response to proposals issued by developers to the HPD Request for Proposals (RFP).

Stateless Housing was jointly displayed with proposals from Yale University, City College of New York and a Amsterdam based research collective funded by the Dutch government, CASE. The works were discussed with those prepared by development teams seeking the project. The specific area designated by the RFP is the Arverne Urban Renewal Area, known as “Arverne by the Sea.” The RFP calls for the development of market-rate two-family housing on a one hundred acre site adjacent to three types of state assisted housing: Ocean Village built by the Urban Development Corporation; the Arverne Houses developed by the Housing Authority of New York and Hammel Houses, a Mitchell-Lama housing project. The purpose of Architectural League group is to offer a set of parallel proposals to stimulate ideas, discussion and vision for the Arverne URA—a total area of 308 acres cleared in the mid 1960’s and subsequently never re-developed. The site is the largest tract of open land in New York City. The Columbia GSAP efforts—a seminar that addresses housing development and a studio that addresses a new charter school building— will develop and present two sets of twelve Development Mechanisms. Stateless Housing tests the limits of architecture in the redevelopment of dis-invested territories.

Mitchell-Lama Housing, Dayton Towers, 1971

right

Stateless Housing

Precedent The Rockaway Peninsula fronts the Atlantic Ocean in Queens, New York City. As a barrier island the landmass is situated between Jamaica Bay and the ocean. It is accessed by causeways and bridges by car or by way of the Train. Far Rockaway is the final stop of the A Train and an approximate 1.5 hour ride from central Manhattan. JFK Airport is on the northeast border of Jamaica Bay. The southern tip of the peninsula forms the end of Long Island. Coney Island lies to the northwest in Brooklyn.

right

Double Housing. New development in the area has primarily taken the form of duplex and flat style housing. In most cases public private partnerships have manifest quasi-vernacular forms of housing that are offered for sale instead of rent. The housing often offers two apartments as a single dwelling called a “two family house”: the owner occupies the upper level flat and rents a lower level unit for income. These images show the small-scale and generally developer level of design and materials common in new publicly supported housing being offered for sale.

right

"If they build new houses in Far Rockaway, we won’t be able to afford them and they know that. My mother had to move all the way out to Connecticut to get a house that she could afford. I can’t afford a house if it goes for one eighty-nine, one ninety-nine (thousand), especially if it’s made out of sheet rock, nails, and glue. My son could build a house the way they build here. We can’t afford these houses. It’s not worth the money that you put into it. These builders want an easy way to make money. They’re drug-dealing with houses.

It’s an easy way to make money and the people who buy them are victims."

Resident, Far Rockaway, Ocean Village

left Federal Type Housing. The Arverne and Edgemere sectors of the peninsula currently are occupied by federal and state form of public housing and residual small-scale duplex and single family houses. Images to the left shows the contextual relationship of these housing types. The Urban Development Corporation developed Ocean Village as part of a New York State initiative. The UDC was funded between 1968 and 1974. New development for the area is planned for the 100-acre parcel of land that lies adjacent to the UDC, NYCHA and Mitchell-Lama developments.

“I have been here for over twenty years. I’ve seen and heard the promises. It’s been nothing but destruction. It’s just promises, promises, promises. We need businesses to get something going for these kids around here-hire them, give them something to occupy their time.

We don’t need more houses- we need businesses and we need jobs in the community." Resident, Far Rockaway

Stateless Housing

Precedent Research @ Columbia

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

6,7,8,9

Stateless Architecture, A4678 at Columbia University Graduate School of Architeccture, Planning and Preservation was taught by Michael Bell and includes the work of Glenn Fulk, Jane Kim, Alexander Phieffer, Nancy Bue, Kaja Kaul,Caroline Dechaine and Kory Bieg

Image 1

Kaja Kuehl "…the term I actually like more is captive habitation, which is how I would translate the work wohnhaft. When I went to Far Rockaway and saw the big housing projects, it seemed like a place where people were isolated geographically, and not by choice. If you look at these places, the physical similarities to prisons is so obvious that it is quite scary."

The office of the Dean, Bernard Tschumi,Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation provided generous support for this project.

1

Photograph, Kaja Kuehl, NYCHA outdoor hallway: Prison

2

Graph, Kaja Kuehl, distance/time studies to London, Boston, Manhattan

3

Graph, Kaja Kuehl, Commuter costs in comparison to income.

4

Graph, Kaja Kuehl, Commuter costs in comparison to income.

5

Graph, Bina Batacharyra, Wagner Steagal Act: 1934—2000

6789

Caroline Dechaine, Portraits of residents of Ocean Village

A combination of photographs and analytical diagrams is used to describe both the underpinning of the territory and the quality of life. Residents of Arverne and Edgemere spend a high proportion of salary/wages to commute to work. Similarly they also spend far more time commuting than wealthy Caucasian residents of the western end of the peninsula do. A series of portraits by Caroline Dechaine reveals the quiet but isolated life of residents of public housing—isolated, stilled amidst the broad expanse of ocean front land. A diagram shows major transformation in the Wagner Steagal Act—legislative histories of the territory. above

"We have a community of over five thousand children. There are no parks here, there were guns shooting out the other day, people are dying…our children are already being destroyed. Build our children up- forget these houses. What about where we live? They want to bring in middle income people, but what about the low-income people who have needs? It’s not our fault that they’ve been shunned by society. Why let them suffer anymore? People who buy middle income houses; do you know what they are going to find out in five years? They’re going to realize that they’ve been put in a pit hole. Far Rockaway is nothing but a pit stop for people who are mentally ill, who have substance abuse problems, and those issues have not been approached. You just throw them there with nothing. It’s like putting someone in a boat with no oars and saying sail by yourself, you’re on your own. It’s not right. They haven’t even done any research. They need to research what Far Rockaway has and what it’s been going through and help us with those issues before they put anything here. You can’t put a butterfly with a bunch of bumblebees." Social Worker, Far Rockaway Diagrams reveal relationships between income, race and housing type on the peninsula. Arverne and Edgemere housing is generally 50 or more units per building. Income in this area is approximately 22% of Queens’s median income. At the western end of the peninsula wealthy areas such as Neponsit and Belle Harbor are predominantly Caucasian; dwelling types are almost exclusively single-family houses and the income per household is approximately 220% of Queens median income. The incidence of HIV infection soars in the area of the public housing. The Arverne and Edmere sectors of the peninsula are one of three of the highest concentrations of poverty in New York City.

above and left

1

Graph, Jane Kim and Glen Fulk depicts concentrations of poverty in NYC

2

Graph, Anthony Burke, Income and Housing Type

3

Graph, Anthony Burke, Income and Housing Type

Graph, ane Kim and Glen Fulk depicts concentrations of HIV infections at Arverne and Edgemere.

4

1, 2 3 4

1 2 A Train Subway Station: Retail at intersection of Beach 67th Street and the new development

3 Somerville

B. Site / Type Market Planning

In the fall of 1959 John Kenneth Galbraith accepted an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to give a lecture on the topic of art and economics. While Galbraith did not claim to know much

about art but he did believe that art had to become entrepreneurial to find its place in the realm of economics and that economic well being would be improved with a closer relationship to art. Galbraith’s questions weren’t formulated in a vacuum: he looked out his window in Cambridge Mass and claimed that the fragmented profile of landscape, retail, housing and roads along the Charles River was a reaction against planning: against the central authority of planning agencies and essentially a result of what he called a post-war public sentiment that found central authority suffocating. The market should take care of planning it seemed—the market should form the city.

We come to Arverne and a 100 acre parcel of tremendous ocean front land 30 years after it was cleared and in a similar situation: how do you plan a site this large without imposing a system that is not open or flexible yet how you not respond to the complexity of the site and its incredible potential without some form of planning if not memory. We have two goals at Arverne and the League; the HPD and Columbia have allowed us to look at this closely: at the Urban Center you’ll see our complete research including the background material done by Columbia graduate students, but today we’d like to focus on an idea that this site not only can be developed as a market success but also that this market success can indeed help the situation of what exists. To do this it requires that the RFP and the site be understood in terms broader than its own boundaries: one has to take into account the housing on its boarders and to not close this site to those existing residents—to its existing histories.

At the moment it seems that Galbraith’s scenario is still in tact: the residents of Arverne and Edgemere, and the HPD seem to agree that none of these housing types should be extended and that something flexible and open needs to be built. We believe the site must be seen in context and that the housing in the area can work together and in time improve on all counts: especially is this is seen as an open new development: the new can catalyitcally provide some help to the existing: the new can help give the past coherence.

We think it cannot be one strategy or one architect; the site is too large. We also think that in order to fit into the context it will take several forms of housing and that the diversity of housing types and urban planning solutions will make this less of an imposition on the existing neighborhood and residents many of whom are concerned with what happens here. There should be variety: there is no single answer to the housing needs here: there could be many—our plan calls for three. The planning proposal asked each architect to design at the interface or seam of existing and new housing types—the site of each design team was understood as a path or vector that bridged both the existing architecture and planning of the new and other arenas.

Project Stateless Housing

Planning

Michael Bell Architecture

The New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development

Client Name

Program Site

Multi-Family Housing

Averne by the Sea, New York, New York

Budget

$ 50,000,000

1 Housing Ecologies Marble Fairbanks Architects

2 Stateless Housing Michael Bell Architecture

3 Urbia Mark Rakatansky Studio

target density - 28 units/acre average height - 4 stories

target density - 18 units/acreaverage height - 3 stories

Target density - 8 units/acre A verage height - 2 stories

C. Stateless Housing Prototypical Block

A New Figure Ground: not CIAM: Not New Urbanism.

New dimensions to urban/architectural design:

Stateless Housing was an attempt to design a new model of housing in the United States that could span the high density open space paridigms of early Modernism with the single-family house model common in United States market housing. The market tendency to subdivide property for low density single family units is here coupled with an attempt to promote density and collective housing types. The housing units are joined but also individuated. The basic housing type employed was a triplex model: three dwelling units combined as a module. Each prototypical housing block contains four triplex modules and a higher density duplex apartment building. The land beneath the dwellings is kept open and returned to natural vegetation.

above

Preliminary Design for Triplex Housing Block: this drawing shows floor plates and circulation.

Site Plan of Mid Density Housing Sector by Michael Bell Architecture. This drawings depicts the street grid of the entire site and the specific housing types designed by Michael Bell. Each prototypical block houses 12 triplex units, 12 duplex apartments, 8 live/work units. The housing spans the side on a north/south as well as east/west axis. Movement through the site on a north/south axis connects the beach and boardwalk with the A Train station located at Beach 67th Street. East/west movement reveals the differing housing types along a collective path or spine. The open land between building units is preserved as natural sea grass and sandy soil.

right

Protypical Housing Block

Winter Garden: Retail Space @ Subway

Retail Space : GroundLevel School Second Level Court

Courtyard Housing

Hotel

Courtyard Housing

Communal Path @ block center

Northern Block Perimeter Stateless Housing

Triplex Unit A levels 2/3: 1200 sq ft

Triplex Unit C levels 3: 750 sq ft

Triplex Unit B levels 2: 1500 sq ft

above right

Preliminary Design for Triplex Housing Block

Perspective view of Mid Density Housing Sector.

Triplex Dwelling Module

Live/Work

Unit

Live/Work Unit

Parking Pad

Communal Path

Duplex Apartment Units: 12 total units

Daycare Center/Kindergarten

Stateless Housing: MFA, Bell, Rakatansky Stateless Architecture has examined the federal, state and city policies at play and measured them against alternate local and temporal territorial means: the sky, the sea, the shifting sands and the ecologies. The new housing weaves between these realms: Mark Rakatansky Studio produces new housing from attributes of the slab housing and the older vernacular houses. The Marble Fairbanks housing as well as Michael Bell types integrate the infrastructure of street, sidewalk and collective housing types with interwoven ground plans. The density of housing coverage to open landscape is as low as 25% coverage.

1 Housing Ecologies Marble Fairbanks Architects Stateless Housing For the architect who enters the realm of low income housing design is increasingly a practice of redistributing the matrices of private and public space. Form in this realm is a site of economic and political strife. The alternative to engagement in these political and economic histories has often manifested itself as a practice concerned with a loss of form— a position that proposes formlessness. During the past three decades a generation of leading architects increasingly have come to this mode of practice as a resistance to the techniques of capital and the production of profits and surplus in relation to architecture. It is a resistance to the matrices of closure. For those architects’ form—and interiority—is a crisis; but also a fruitful site of negotiation between competing interest. Architecture in the redevelopment of Arverne negotiates overt aspects of historic views Conservative and Liberal philosophies: here "men’s different and unequal faculties of acquiring property"—in the apparently level playing field of market economies—has usually been considered a euphemism that belies the class mobility that a market economy promises. For Locke the "first object of government," was to assure the legitimate right to enjoy the pleasures of property and its wealth. "The security of these pursuits is the proper task of political society." At Arverne the history of these terms are being reinvented: what might have been public housing if the site had been developed in prior realms is destined to be market housing. What constitutes market housing at Arverne is the question and indeed is the history of the market in relation to U.S. housing capable of sustaining the incredible hope placed on this site? Text by Michael Bell

3 Urbia Mark Rakatansky

2 Stateless Housing Michael Bell Architecture

Degrees of territory – processes of negotiation. In an effort to expand the established domains of public / private from an oppositional relationship to a more affirmative, generative gradiant, Housing Ecologies is structured around degrees of territory: organizations in which there is a range of spatial and temporal flexibility in the precise location and definition of territorial boundaries. In allowing these territorial boundaries to evolve over time, (architectural) parameters structure flexibility such that public and private coexists. As such, Housing Ecologies is proposed as a system in which architecture structures potential for interrelated desires and tendencies of individuals, communities and the continual play of social and economic forces – in effect, architecture which houses ecologies.

Housing Ecologies

By allowing degrees of territory, the project anticipates a process of territorial negotiation that can construct communities as productive ecologies.

This process of negotiation as an active and dynamic variable within a housing ecology becomes integral to the ability of communities to establish and sustain self identity. If territory is a flexible variable within a productive ecology it is the process of territorial negotiation, an exercising of flexibility, itself that promotes the health of communities and the lack of exercising this flexibility that threatens to destabilize the ecology.

Assumed and passive territorial stability will ultimately lose its ability to adapt when inevitable pressures from other variables begin to impinge.

Public or private, while giving the impression of clearly defined boundaries and legal jurisdiction, could be seen to contribute to a systemic imbalance between the individual and the collective. Resistance to market forces has become ineffective as a means for architectural production.

The quasi-socialist public housing policies of the past have given way to forms of subtle but real market driven programs. What is proposed at Arverne, while being private market rate housing, is in fact, a public / private venture as the city and state will provide land and infrastructure.

Being optimistic, this strategy of private ownership within partially public territory will succeed due, in part, to the acknowledged interdependency and negotiable shades of gray between public and private, yet in proposing territory as dynamically part of a housing ecology largely driven by market forces, it leaves the question open as to whether capital can be ecological. Text by MFA

How do you like your urbia? Sub- or Super-? In- or Ex-? Is it: good village, bad towers? Or is it: good towers, bad village? But what if the almost unspeakably ugly pseudo-mansard next to one of our infill sites is more engaged, more interesting in terms of today’s architectural topics — in terms of mass becoming surface, outsides becoming insides, roof becoming wall — than many much more beautiful [of today’s] projects attending to such themes. What could be done with that? I tell people that mansard unit is a little-known Rem Koolhaas project and it takes them a second or two to realize that I’m not joking. And what if on closer inspection, the big bad brutalist towers have much more character and articulation of surface, color, plasicity, unit demarcation and grouping, then they appeared to at first glance? What could be done with that? We wanted not to have to adjudicate in advance, we wanted to be able to be able to look first and then act and enact that struggle between the rules and the exceptions within the rules. We wanted to be able to look and to find and to draw forth the rubric of rule and exception and character.

Both village and tower are units, after all. Units upon units, units next to other units, units between other units. Units coming together, units coming apart. What if both village bungalows and towers used some of the same rules and exceptions to attempt to give character to their units? We couldn’t undertand why anyone would want to legislate all this as if it were a choice between the one and the other. As in the larger units of urban and suburban organization: the block, the sidewalk (or its lack), garages, parking lots, street parking, office, retail, hotel, residential, school.

Coming together, units apart: suburban lots becoming perimeter block single unit becoming duplex becoming triplex becoming multiplex, roadside retail becoming market becoming near home-office tower, motel becoming hotel, boardwalk becoming beachside retail, infill becoming exfill, sidewalk and front lawn and driveway becoming back patios and community landscape, character fragments becoming playground and park.

And what about the units within the units: units of room types, the room units: living, dining, bed, bath. And what of the units within the units within the units: the smaller units of urban and suburban domestic organization: the closets, counters, cabinets. Text by Mark Rakatansky Urbia

Stateless Housing

Live/Work units run along a north/south axis and span the block.

The Triplex Units are accesed along a central spine—a communal path. Each unit has a direct stair to this path. pkg. unit 4

Parking for all units is on the north perimeter of the block—after parking each unit is accessed by the central path.

The path is elevated from the ground plane and set at approximately 18 inches above grade. The land is open and kept in its natural state.

live work unit 5

pkg. unit 3

pkg. unit 2

pkg. unit 1

side walk

Diagram of imbalanced axial rotation. The planning the site and the building is based on an implied ecentric axial rotation: a torqued space forms a hypoteneouse in the site and building design. above

right

Plan of Triplex Housing Unit: Each Triplex Unit contains three dwellings.

Unit A: single level: 1700 sq ft.

Unit B: duplex: 1200 sq ft.

Unit C: single level: 750 sq ft.

Unit D/E live/work units: ground level: 1200 sq ft.

live/work unit 4

entry unit 3 - above

entry unit 1

kitchen

fleetwood sliding glass doors

sky light solarium sand and sea grass

unit 2 - 1200 sq/ft

unit1 - 1700 sq/ft

int. glass

unit 2 entry

side walk

Triplex - 3 living units

north

Stateless Housing

unit 2 above

unit 1

3/8" chrome/black/red bars

unit 2 below entry

untit 2 landing

3/8" chrome/black/red bars

sliding glass door

3/8" chrome/black/red bars

bar joist

unit 2 entry

bar joist & stair detail - Triplex

above

right

Detail of Triplex Unit Elevation and Entry Stair.

Rendering of Triplex Unit: View from the South show Triplex and Live/Work Units

Stateless Housing Rossi sought an architecture that could become the determining factor in the “entire civil and political dimension of an era;”2

In Rafael Moneo’s essay “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery,” Moneo parsed Rossi’s writings testing the potential limits of Rossi’s search for what he termed the “specificity of the discipline of architecture.” In Rossi’s work and writings Moneo sought the principles that Rossi argued allowed the city to be constructed and “produced from architecture.”3 Moneo’s beginnings were in some sense already wary of the degree to which this could be said to be true in the late modern city.

Moneo was aware that Rossi did not necessarily link building to physical construction—the construction of the city was not necessarily a matter of material production. In Moneo’s appraisal, Rossi had to maintain and evasiveness towards the role technology played in the construction of the contemporary city.

“Therefore, Rossi’s architecture could be understood as an evasive one, deliberately forgetting the framework of the real even as levels evident and compromised as the technological one.”4 This amnesia, according to Moneo allowed Rossi to sustain a belief that architecture could indeed provide “urban facts” commensurate in their territorializing power to forces of technology, communications and capital that have long superceded cartographic borders and local territories. Like Rossi, Moneo is an architect for whom building means both construction and the thought that accompanies building as occupation. Architecture in this realm could be said to still construct the city as long it was considered as an enzyme—a lens— that allowed it inhabitant an intuited ability to newly construct the city from a local vantage-point. At Far Rockaway this background becomes a touchstone, for here the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development has placed its largest concerns in the construction of the city—in the social and economic domains of poverty in which housing is sited. The NYHPD, however, finds its practical and logistical goals in the milieu of constructing housing. The question is the same asked by Moneo of Rossi and it takes the form of testing architecture’s limits as a social or political instrument in an era of more mobile and agile urban techniques of spatial construction. Can housing solve the urban problems that Arverne faces and if it can’t what do the constraints of the RFP indicate for how an architect responds.The three architects who have collaborated here to produce a new plan for Arverne at Far Rockaway have each practiced a version of this enterprise. Architectural work has been deployed as a quasi-autonomous practice—each team has designed housing—but at the core of each team’s enterprise has been an attempt to deploy housing to interpret the city. Each team has made a willing nod to the authority of prevalent urban procedures that many would argue have outpaced architecture and planning’s ability to build territory—technology, politics, social and economic realms have in some sense pre-constructed Arverne’s relation to greater New York and to the world. Here Moneo again provided a kind of touchstone: for Moneo the problem of housing is “the problem of the city.” In describing the separation of working and dwelling spaces—the general condition of the modern city—Moneo describes a scenario in which the problem of city becomes that of the house. Dwelling in this condition is actually an urban rather than domestic condition and the urban condition is likewise a domestic one.

The house is a representation of the city; according to Rossi it is “a great representation of the human condition.”5 For Rossi this was represented as the “fixed” scenery of architecture.6 Architecture offers a “glimpse” of the city suspending local definitions of boundaries. Like Henri Bergson, who in Matter and Memory;7 presents a “movement-image” or a “time image” as an intuited presence situated “between a thing itself” and its representation,”8 architecture is here an intuiting device. At Arverne the goal has been to produce housing that offers the intuiting of space beyond the isolation of local site borders; borders that describe less than adequate income and education levels and difficult access to greater New York City. Arverne housing is situated between its formal fixity as a discrete urban entity on a remote site and the distant city it hopes to represent; the city it wishes to construct. Architecture as time-image allows this remote site to remain fixed and defined by the borders of an RFP—to remain to some degree immo-

right

Rendering of Triplex Unit: View from the South show Triplex and Live/Work Units

Stateless Housing bile while also relieving this fixity of it’s closure. Like Bergson and Rossi, these architects, Marble Fairbanks, Mark Rakatansky Studio and Michael Bell offer processes of formalization in a manner that supersedes the relative limits of their geometric closure. They “transcend space without stepping out from extensivity;”9 The Rakatansky Studio works find a generative new form between the housing slabs and the apparently agreeable vernacular single-family houses. The politics that surround these housing types are un-anchored the buildings forms: architecture is allowed to flourish in a way that supercedes politics with innovation. Marble Fairbanks Architects project similarly finds a hybrid between the city and housing: here housing and infrastructure as well as beach ecology enter into relationship that leaves each domain in tact but interwoven and redefined. Each of these projects in some sense blends the house and the city in a form that is intended to affirm the local as well as broader metropolitan site. These works upset the autonomy of the political and economic systems that have played themselves out upon the Arverne site and that have had the subsequent effect of isolating Arverne from greater New York. These proposed private houses are trying to form a city. Their urban significance of lies in the degree to these spaces are believed to be capable of retaining events from both the public and individual domain.10 They offer an experience of the city from the inside of the house: to be in the house is to be in the city.

Notes:

1 “The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) provides decent and affordable housing for low income City residents. The Authority currently manages and maintains 346 public housing developments with 181,000 units housing nearly 535,000 residents including an estimated 105,000 persons living doubled up. In addition, through the federally funded Section 8 Existing Housing Program, NYCHA uses certificates and vouchers to assist additional 77,000 families in private apartments. The Authority manages new construction and rehabilitation of public housing buildings and units. While continuing to maintain a safe and secure living environment in its public housing developments, the Authority also focuses on providing social services for the needs of its residents.”

2 Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the ModenaCemetery” Oppositions, Summer 1976 (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1976), p.7 3 Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery” Oppositions, Summer 1976 (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1976), p.4 4 Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery” Oppositions, Summer 1976 (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1976), p.9.

5 Moneo, p 5.

6 Moneo, p 5.

7 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 9.

8 Bergson, p. 9.

9 Bergson, p. 10.

10 Moneo, p 7.

Rendering of Triplex Unit: View from the South show Triplex and Live/Work Units. A stair from Unit A leads to the open ground.

right

Stateless Housing

sliding glass door

sliding glass door track

sliding glass door

3/8" bars

corner detail - AEG

above

Plan detail depicts window system and steel diaphram wall system.

Rendering of Triplex Unit: View from the South show Triplex and Live/Work Units. Each unit has a stair to communal path/boardwalk.

right

Stateless Housing

above

Renderings of Triplex Unit: View from the north shows Triplex and Live/Work Units

Rendings of structural wall panel, woven red/black and chrome 1/2 inch thick steel bars from a diaphram wall surface

right

Rendering of Triplex Unit: View from the west. Stair leads to second level dwelling units. Beach 67th Street Subway Station at left (red line).

next page

Glazing and Structural Envelope Details

top

rendering of steel structural detail: lightweight steel bar woven to form both enclosure and structure

Rendering: interior view of wall system: interior glazing overlays steel wall system giving privacy as well as a complex transparency.

middle

bottom right

typical light weight steel stud construction is inspiration for steel and glass wall design

Rendering of Triplex entry court shows roof surface of live/work units and roof deck for third floor unit.

Stateless Housing

unit 2

live/work unit unit 2

northern parking pad entry live/work unit

West Elevation Triplex Units

entry

above

unit 3

below

y unit 2

unit 1

entry unit 1

Stateless Housing

above right

Interior Perspective Triplex Unit

Interior Perspective Triplex Unit

Stateless Housing Duplex Apartment Building

sliding glass exterior deck unit E

kindergarten

living unit E

living unit F

sliding glass

sliding glass

exterior deck unit C

exterior deck unit D

living unit C

living unit B

sliding glass

sliding glass 3/4" bars

exterior deck unit A

exte rior deck unit B

living unit A

living unit A

chrome/black/red bars

structural truss

AEG & Kindergarten - 12 living units

above right

plan of Duplex Building

elevation of Duplex Building

unit A

unit B

vestibule

kindergarten

hopper window

kindergarten entry

unit C

unit D

lower level unit C

unit D

parking

unit entry

Stateless Housing Duplex Apartment Building

Rendering of Duplex Building from south. Each apartment occupies two floors, overlapping at the mid level of the building.

right

Stateless Housing Commerical Blocks

top Plan of Ocean Front block: A mixed use block of commerical space, a public school and courtyard housing.

At the Beach 67th Street Subway station immense glass winter gardens house commercial space. Under the cold winter skys these spaces offer Arverne a new form of urban space

middle

bottom

A school courtyard frames the Atlantic sky.

Stateless Housing Commerical Blocks

above Three views within a series of ocean front courtyard houses serve as a new resort at Arverne. Each house features a series of glass roofed rooms. Under the winter sky these spaces offer a year round view of the Atlantic sky.

A perspective view of the an ocean front block: retail spaces to the left and courtyard houses to the right.

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rendering of Duplex Building from north.

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Books

above

Slow Space Cover and Protoype Cover Design by Rebecca Mendez

That the configuration of the contemporary city has transcended the realm of idealized geometry is by now an obvious fact—yet surprisingly, one largely unheeded by an architectural and urban practice which still clings to the removed, visual techniques of formal composition. Far from the canonical and “official” urban models that still grip most of the discipline’s imagination, cities such as Houston, characterized simultaneously by the fluid instabilities of accelerated and self-regulating economies and by the inertia of their material residue, have become the paradigm of late-twentieth-century urbanism. These cities are created by default rather than intention, left in the wake of increasingly shifting and invisible forces such as demographic segmentation, marketing and consumer analysis, or the uncompromising movements of post–World War II capital. What remains is an increasingly unfamiliar urban landscape, one that is dissipated, entropic, and saturated with the effluent detritus of amorphous spaces.

Slow Space by Michael Bell and Sze Tsugn Leong.

This new monograph presents the work of San Francisco-based architect Stanley Saitowitz.

Comprehensive in scope, it begins with his earliest work in South Africa and continues up to his recentprojects, including the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, and the award-winning design for the New England Holocaust Memorial at Boston City Hall.

Excerpt from introduction: “2 Durations and Their 3rd: Architecture”

by Michael Bell Across a career that now spans twenty years of building, the architect Stanley Saitowitz has consistently portrayed his architecture as derived from and rooted in its site; indeed a Saitowitz building might be said to be made of its site. As an architect whose work concerns itself with “nature’s mode of operation,” the geometry of Saitowitz’s buildings were, and often still are, engraved in the topography of the earth. From its origins on the South African Transvaal in the late 1970s, Saitowitz’s practice moved to the lush hills of northern California, and increasingly his work situates itself in the city and the megalopolis. In San Francisco and the Bay Area, in Boston, Columbus, New York, and Berlin, as well the non-site suburbs of much of modern California, the intricacy of that which is cohered by Saitowitz’s geometries has exponentially increased. The ground upon which Saitowitz works, the natural mode of operation to which his work must refer is now a topography of rarefied economic and legal dimension. While his architectural practice is relatively young, it is a practice that, upon this metropolitan ground, has entered its third phase: Saitowitz is now building works that describe not only a ground but indeed a wide - open landscape within what Félix Guattari has referred to as “the age of capitalist abstraction,” an urban plateau characterised by a “deterritorialization of knowledge and technique.” The publication of the present monograph marks the beginning of that phase; 1022 Natoma Street, the McLane-Looke Residence and the Bishoff House, like Le Corbusier’s Maison LaRoche, preview a public and private body of work to come — some of which is now under construction — that offers insights not only into Saitowitz’s oeuvre but, because of its diligence and clarity, to a generation of American architects who struggle to maintain the territorial margins of what is called the discipline of architecture.

Saitowitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has been in practice in San Francisco since 1975. He has held teaching posts at numerous schools, including the Eliot Noyes Professorship at the Harvard GSD. He is currently a Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.

Stanley Saitowitz Edited by Michael Bell; Introduction: “Two Durations and Their Third: Architecture” by Michael Bell

Design Schema Design

Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong

Sze Tsung Leong

New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996 AIA National Book Award

Slow Space Editors

Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong

Design

Sze Tsung Leong

Cover Design

Rebecca Mendez

New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998 480 pages total

That the configuration of the contemporary city has transcended the realm of idealized geometry is by now an obvious fact—yet surprisingly, one largely unheeded by an architectural and urban practice which still clings to the removed, visual techniques of formal composition. Far from the canonical and “official” urban models that still grip most of the discipline’s imagination, cities such as Houston, characterized simultaneously by the fluid instabilities of accelerated and self-regulating economies and by the inertia of their material residue, have become the paradigm of late-twentieth-century urbanism.

These cities are created by default rather than intention, left in the wake of increasingly shifting and invisible forces such as demographic segmentation, marketing and consumer analysis, or the uncompromising movements of post–World War II capital. What remains is an increasingly unfamiliar urban landscape, one that is dissipated, entropic, and saturated with the effluent detritus of amorphous spaces.

Slow Space was formed in and by these spaces—the vacancies that, by having become the unintended archetype of contemporary urbanism, coerce an evolution of

347 Years: Slow Space Michael Bell & Sze Tsung Leong Still Architecture Alvaro Siza Peter Testa Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space Robert Smithson Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing Michael Bell Community Property: Enter the Architect, The Politics of Form Dana Cuff Unlawful Desire Durham Crout The Unconstructed Subject of the Contemporary City Albert Pope Readings of the Attenuated Landscape Sze Tsung Leong

conventional visuality and inhabitation.

Knee Play Mark Wamble

The comprehension of an urban condition rendered through processes—machinic, reg-

Croton Aqueduct Study Stan Allen, Jessie Reiser, Nanako Umemto, Polly Apfelbaum

ulatory, managerial—thus resides in the temporal. Alongside a spectrum of coexisting yet often incommensurate urban dimensions—the near instantaneity of financial transactions; the clandestine deployment of power; the daily cycles of events, occupation, and use; the periodic shifts in urban densities; the anomie of the residual no-man’sland—are a set of parallel velocities: the slow alchemies of the architectural; the even slower movement of matter, now as permeated by economics and finance as by finite mechanics; and the viscous emergence of latent histories as sites to be reinhabited.

These durations, imbricated with the variable flows of the metropolis, form the medium for the twenty-three essays and projects that make up Slow Space. This book represents an attempt to make time material, and an effort to find an architecture and a practice that engages and catalytically reconfigures the spaces and processes of the contemporary city.

Artists' Space Installation Greg Lynn The Parsing Eye Mark Wamble Gaining a Free Relation to Technology Hubert L. Dreyfus We Play until Death Shuts the Door Elizabeth Burns Gamard The Rapture Adi Shamir Zion Hadrian's Villa Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray Yuan Yung-Ho Chang Mill Race Park Structures Stanley Saitowitz Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Steven Holl Dilation, Over Soul Michael Bell Latent Parallelepipeds Fares el-Dahdah Burn Karen Bermann, Jeanine Centuori, Julieanna Preston Doublespace Lars Lerup Gestation Rebeca Mendez Nothing but Flowers: Against Public, Space Aaron Betsky

The 16 Houses exhibition was founded in 1997 as a study of the economics and design of the single family house and this housing type’s newly pivotal role in down payment voucher programs initiated at the federal level of United States housing policy. 16 Houses became a multifaceted redevelopment project for Houston’s Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation. Part exhibition, part building program, part research project—and most importantly a collective work of architecture and planning, it is focused on the redevelopment of the Houston’s historic Fifth Ward. This book, 16 Houses, chronicles the exhibition, the works of each design team, the subsequent building program, and includes research that supported the exhibition.

Includes Architecural Projects by

1. Studio Works: Mary-Ann Ray and Robert Mangurian, Los Angeles 2. William Williams, Houston, Texas 3. Carlos Jiménez, Houston, Texas 4. Lindy Roy, New York 5. Michael Bell, New York 6. Deborah Morris, Houston 7. Keith Krumwiede, Houston 8. Stanley Saitowitz, San Francisco 9. Lars Lerup, Walter Hood, Bruce Mau, Sanford Kwinter + thumb, Houston, New York, Toronto 10. Interloop Architects, Houston 11. Sze Tsung Leong, Judy Chung. New York 12. David Brown, Houston, Texas 13. Natalye Appel, Houston, Texas 14. Taft Architects + Nonya Grenader, Houston, Texas 15. Albert Pope and Katrin Brunner, Houston, Texas 16. Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer, Houston, Texas

Deron Neblett, Photography: “The Fifth Ward Thrives” Portraits”

16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House Michael Bell Table of Contents

Part I: the Voucher House 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House The Voucher House Public Housing Becomes Voucher Houses New Authority Retroactive Coherence: The House as Urban Design Forms loaded with Money Part II: Site Numeric Houston: Lost Time What is Ownership and How Through the Voucher Program Will It Provide Representation, Empowerment, and Inclusion?

Scattered Sites The Fifth Ward Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation (FWCRC) Mission Statement In Construction The Public House Oppositions and the Conservative House A Voucher Authenticates the Act or Promise of an Unverified Other.

1934: Clearance Part III: Redistribution Equity Redistributing Wealth: Federalist Law: Federal House.

Redistributing Housing Deconcentration: Legislation Economics + Art Benchmark Houses: Into the Market

Part V: Domestic Architecture and Private Art Monumental House I am Disappeared Part V: Postscripts Emily Todd Mardie Oakes Albert Pope

16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House

by Michael Bell

Postscripts

Albert Pope, Emily Todd, Mardie Oakes

First published in the United States of America by the Monacelli Press, Inc. 10 East 92nd Street, New York, New York 10128 Copyright © 2002 Monacelli Press, Inc. and Michael Bell Design by

Sze Tsung Leong

Edited by

Chuihua Judy Chung

224 pages total

First published in the United States of America by The Monacelli Press, Inc. 10 East 92nd Street, New York, New York 10128 Copyright Š 2003 Michael Bell Also by Michael Bell and published by the Monacelli Press: 16 Houses, Designing the Public’s Private House

by Michael Bell Slow Space Edited by Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong Funding for Having Heard Mathematics and the works represented here was generously provided by: Bank United, Houston; The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Office of the Dean, Bernard Tschumi; The Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris Counties; DiverseWorks ArtSpace, Houston. Texas;

Michael Bell Having Heard Mathematics

The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, Houston; The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; LEF Foundation, St. Helena, California; The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York; The Rice University School of Architecture And private donors

Editor: Trevor Atwell.

Design: Alice Chung and Karen Hsu

Having Heard Mathematics Table of Contents

Introduction I. 1984- 93: San Francisco, California: Space Inside Out The Topological Stoa House Inside Out The Blue House The Double Dihedral House Vittorio Plastici J-Shaped Glass House Oculus House Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing from Slow Space

II. 1993 - 99: Houston, Texas: Eyes in the Heat The Duration House Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann Chrome House Glass House @ 2Ëš 16 Houses: Owning A House in the City RSE: Eyes in the Heat from Perspecta, No. 34.

III. 1999 - New York, New York: Statelessness Stateless Housing

IV. Essays by Michael Bell Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing, first published in Slow Space, ed. Bell, Leong RSE: Eyes in the Heat; first published in Perspecta, 34, The Yale Journal of Architecture

Sanford Kwinter: On Space Inside Out Aaron Betsky: Metropolis

Having Heard Mathematics

by Michael Bell Managing Editor

Trevor Atwell

New York: The Monacelli Press, 2003 226 pages total

Works presented here have been published in these and other journals and books:

2G, Barcelona

Venice Biennale 2000

Architecture California, AIA

Architecture Must Burn,

Architecture

10 X 10, Phaidon Press

Architecture California, AIA

Texas Architect

Praxis, MIT Press

Interiors: 30 Under 30

Dwell, San Francisco

A+U, Japan

Harpers Bazaar, New York

Arch +, Germany

Thames & Hudson, London

Progressive Architecture

Tate, Tate Musuem, London

Precis, Columbia University

Architectural Record

SF, San Francisco

Japan Architect, Tokyo

Aspen Design Conference

Architecture

Concrete, UC Berkeley

Lotus, Milan

Architecture

Dwell, San Francisco

Art Forum, New York

Hyper Realistic

Space and Design, Korea

Arverne, The Architectural League of New York

Louis Kahn, Conversations with Students, Princeton Architectural Press

Perspecta, 33 Yale Journal of Architecture

Architecture

Berlin - Denkmal oder Denkmodell?

The Un-Private House,

Casabella, Milan

Nest, New York

Progressive Architecture

Musuem of Modern Art, NY

Architecture

Perspecta, 34 Yale Journal of Architecture