Almost Nothing: The Ethics of Disappearance by Daniel Martinez

Almost Nothing: The Ethics of Disappearance

Daniel Luis Martinez

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” Aristotle, opening line of the Nicomachean Ethics “To what else should our values be related to if not to our aims in life? And where should these goals get their meaning if not through values? If this is true of all human activity... then it must be more true in the field of architecture.” M. Van der Rohe, inaugural address as Director of Architecture, AIT [IIT]

Contents Shallow Imitations: An Introduction

Almost Nothing: The Ethics of Disappearance

Case Studies A Catalog of Miesian Erasure Barcelona Pavilion Seagram Building IIT [Crown Hall] Lafayette Park Hybrid Variations

16 26 36 46 56

Pruitt-Igoe Initial Musings

Media Distortions

The Vanishing Point: Architectural Strategies for Urban Voids Relief Proposal

86 108

Reprise Formless Program and the Articulated Background

130

This is a Masters Research Project presented to the University of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Masters of Architecture degree: Spring 2012 Chair of Supervisory Committee: Martin Gundersen Second Chair of Supervisory Committee: William Tilson

Shallow Imitations: An Introduction In his 1979 autobiography, Minoru Yamasaki writes about a remarkable encounter with his architectural idol Mies Van der Rohe. The story takes place on the day of a ground-breaking ceremony for the Lafayette Park project in Detroit (a project that Yamasaki had himself submitted a proposal for). The details of the event are commonplace enough within the field of mythologizing stories about Mies’ presence in the social realm: dinner was prepared at Yamasaki’s home, Herbert Greenwald and his wife along with Mies’ ‘right-hand man’ Joe Fujikawa were also in attendance, martinis were consumed by Mies before, during and after dinner and, as is typical of these legendary stories, he remained virtually silent throughout the evening until, “suddenly, with martini still in hand, he began telling... the story of his life.”1 Embedded in Mies’ narrative that evening was the story of the Barcelona Pavilion, which according to Yamasaki’s recollection spawned from his seemingly isolated and sudden realization that, “a wall does not have to hold up the roof.”2 The story unfolds as a piece of classic Miesian lore. The great artist, struck with a profound insight, wanders the streets of Barcelona for days considering the, “possibilities that this thought had opened up to him,”3 the direct result of which manifested in the pavilion as built in 1929. The effect of the story is sealed in its concise and linear procession from idea to realization. The audience that evening, especially Yamasaki (who later regretted not having recorded the entire transaction), was enthralled. After all, as is often noted of Mies’ dramatic presence, “He was a big man, and when he was enthused, he was extremely forceful and utterly convincing.”4 By his own account, Mies was capable of transforming the most obvious and trite structural observation into the most influential space of the 20th century. One thing seems clear: Mies’ literal physique is not as big as the myths that surround him. Yamasaki, who found a deep resonance in Mies’ work and the possibilities of a Modernist, post-war American landscape, recounts this time in his life as definitive in the maturation of his own architectural thinking: “Prior to this, my buildings were shallow imitations of those of Mies Van der Rohe, who, I believe, was the most influential and best architect in the world at the time. In city after city there were many ill-conceived copies of his work, and the adopted architectural slogan of the time was ‘Less is more,’ which was Mies’ succinct description of his architecture and his beliefs... His designs- from the Barcelona Pavilion, which unfortunately was torn down after that world’s fair was over, to his elegantly proportioned Seagram’s Building, which dominates Park Avenue in New York City- were and still are among the very few truly beautiful contemporary buildings.”5 2

Mies Life Magazine cover, March 1st 1957

Of interest here is not only Yamasaki’s account of Mies himself but what, in the mid to late 50’s, might be characterized as the modernist, architectural world-view of the time. Post-war America was, in spatial and stylistic intent, a Miesian era. And this story in general is typical of the reciprocity in character that is often assumed between Mies the man and his buildings. From a silent and profound spring a dominant and autonomously spun identity emerges. That both Mies and his buildings were often perceived as simultaneously stoic, minimalist, elegantly proportioned, yet still dominating is demonstrated by the fact that the adjective ‘Miesian’ can and does often refer to both a way of life and a kind of space. The paradox, as Yamasaki himself notes, is the era that aspired towards the ‘less is more’ aesthetic more often than not failed, producing ‘ill-conceived’, Miesian simulacra. America’s urban fabric is marked by this aesthetic in every mid to large size city from east to west. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “What happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its appearance.”6 We might infer this to be the case when contrasting Mies in the context of post-war America with our current perspectives. For Yamasaki in the late 1960’s the Seagram Building dominates its surroundings, while today it recedes into the background of an ever-growing Manhattan (a thought perhaps anticipated by Mies’ decision to site the building 90 feet back from the street line creating his famous plaza). In 1986 Yamasaki passed away in the same year that the reconstruction of the Barcelona pavilion was finally complete. He was likely never privy to the critical re-readings of Mies’ work spawned by the pavilion’s resurrection, which included Robin Evans’ keen observation of the many paradoxes in the pavilion. Evans confirms that, “When you see those little steel posts, cruciform and cased in chrome so as to dissipate their meager substance into attenuated smears of light, you cannot seriously regard them as the sole means of support (which they are not), or even as the principal means of support (which they are). Considered thus, they do indeed look ‘dangerous.’”7 He continues, pointing out that Mies’ famous columns are in fact more, “like bolts tying the roof to the floor and clamping the walls tightly in between,”8 an architectural intention illustrative of why the received opinions of Mies’ work as the ultimate expression of structural truth and logic are so often misguided. It is worth pointing out that Yamasaki’s adult life (he turned 18 in 1930) corresponded almost exactly with the pavilion’s influential absence. Amongst a sea of many other disappearing acts, the pavilion’s dismantling and it’s hazy, photographic traces serve as a key mythic underpinning to Mies’ architectural rise to prominence in the United States and abroad.

Yamasaki circa. 1967 standing next to World Trade Center models 5

Almost Nothing: The Ethics of Disappearance “The decisive battles of the spirit are waged on invisible battlefields.”1 Acts of disappearance can be partially measured though not fully calculated. They remain necessarily tied to a hazy state of becoming. In fact, the main difficulty in capturing their essence is that they are actually becoming nothing at all. If architectural design is a matter of intentions, manifested in the construction and actualization of ideas, then I would like to argue that the most unlikely of proofs would be to demonstrate that Mies Van der Rohe precisely orchestrated, on multiple occasions, acts of disappearance at various scales and through multiple mediums. The scope of this research falls far short of a comprehensive reexamination of Mies’ architectural output [readings of this sort have found more elaborate iterations in the hands of other, more capable people2]. It is more likely that these are just interesting coincidences pregnant with possibilities. My goal is to articulate these in order to provide some account, not only of Mies and his work, but of the shortcomings of Minoru Yamasaki in particular and the post-war, American project in general. This was, after all, the era in which Modernism receded into the background of an increasingly fragmented and unstable society. Pruitt-Igoe is one specific case among many in this variable field. The question lies in the method of each case’s projected absence. How do things disappear?

Pruitt-Igoe demolition of building C-15, 1972

New York City Skyline September 15th, 2001 Architecture enables ways of thinking about the world. It is an underlying principal of this project that there is no real difference between thinking and making, rendering it perfectly feasible to answer a question or pose a new idea through drawing rather than textual or archival analysis at times. Also, it is assumed that architecture can engage in multi-temporal discourses and that it quite often oscillates between our own perspectives and those of certain figures in the early modern canon. It is here that one sees why Mies, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto are all so often the subject of rigorous academic debate. The complex story of Modernism gravitates towards them. In this case it is the central figure of Mies that is used to shed light on a more peripheral architect, Yamasaki, who through factors all too often considered outside the reach of architectural production has occupied a less favorable place in history. The construction of a possible connection between the two, in this case a morphological catalog of events typified by acts of disappearance in some form or another, is less precise than a comprehensive theory but more evocative than a loosely related jumble. It occupies a space in between, allowing for the possibility of beauty in contingency. The starting point for this project was generated by a fascination with ethics and its relation to architecture. I decided early on to hold fast to the Aristotelian view of ethics as the realm of human action. In this sense, I am less concerned with the theatrical connotation of the 7

word ‘acts’ [Stan Allen has offered his take on Mies’ National Gallery in Berlin as a, ‘Theater of Effects,’3 and Josep Quetglas has already categorized the events surrounding the Barcelona Pavilion as a kind of scenography4]. To categorize disappearance as an act is to highlight the simultaneity of its falsity [acts can deceive us] and reality [it takes place, often at the hands of engaged and purposeful agents]. An act is still an action. However, even though action is necessary for ethics it is not sufficient. In this respect architecture finds a parallel to ethics in its desire for place. Actions always unfold against a background. They are always situated. The longing for both place and event finds some traction just outside of downtown St. Louis, at the former site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. It is a deeply resonant case of circumstantial erasure; one where [as various sociological studies and films have shown5] any architectural strategy would likely not have stood up to the outside forces and contingencies that led to the violent circumstances surrounding its demolition. As Yamasaki himself lamented after the fact, “Social ills can’t be cured by nice buildings.”6 It seemed an even more unlikely scenario that on September 11th, 2001, another one of Yamasaki’s works would be subject to a violent disappearing act of a completely different kind, yet no less circumstantial. It is not simply Yamasaki that emerges from this as a particularly unfortunate architect, but rather his work embodies the plight of many others from the late modernist era who all admittedly followed Mies.

Pruitt-Igoe opening day 1954 and neighborhood baseball game Here, a central paradox of the story emerges and it is one that Mies’ biographer Franz Schulze points out when he writes that, “By the 1960’s the look of the American city had indeed been greatly altered by the dominant presence of buildings erected in the modern ‘manner’... obviously indebted to the example of Mie’s generation and himself in particular. Yet this development had apparently not produced a unified landscape. The chaos was still there, and it became increasingly evident that it could not be swept away by architects alone.”7 He con8

tinues, “Most designers were not as good as Mies anyway, though he came under fire himself for having produced an identical building type over and over.”8 Beginning with the rebuilding of the Barcelona Pavilion in the mid 1980’s however, a re-evaluation of Mies’ work began to shed light on why his buildings demonstrated such subtle beauty when compared to the ones produced by imitators. The illusionistic Mies, capable of constructing not simply well proportioned boxes but astounding phenomenological effects began to surface and with it the idea that there was perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding of his agenda by his post-war followers. Mies, though often regarded as the figurehead of rational architecture was, more often than not, equally irrational. It is my contention that this likely contributed to a series of profound disappearing acts.

Barcelona Pavilion Reconstruction ‘Sunrise’ lowered into position, 1986 [left and right] Harry Houdini escape act [center] In this light, it seems worthwhile to carefully reconsider four of these acts through a series of drawings and models searching for various types of Miesian erasure and removal. The Barcelona Pavilion, the Seagram Building, IIT and Lafayette Park were chosen because they not only represent a range of scales and programs, but also a varied field of methodological erasers. In particular, Lafayette Park represents a project of similar scope, scale and context to PruittIgoe but with a wholly different outcome [albeit, aimed at a very different social stratum]. Each diagram is a construction of layers that begins with the removal of context and building figures. After the removal process, the internal matrix of Mies’ work is explored in speculative drawing, measuring and cutting. It is this matrix, apparently dominated by an organizing grid, that critics of Mies often site as the root of his orthodoxy and his purported belief in architec9

Neue National Gallery in Berlin inaugural Piet Mondrian exhibition, 1968 tural autonomy [both of which have had negative connotations for architecture since the late 1960’s]. Overly internalized designs are often unable to relate to a specific context or societal contingencies in any meaningful way. My aim was to extend Mies’ logic outward and create, through the act of representation, a view of the work that is highly contextual, especially in its ability to recede into the background of its surroundings. Was Mies’ brand of autonomy somehow contributing to positive human interactions by removing itself from them? This idea echoes Rosalind Krauss’ candid remark that such a, “reinterpretation would not necessarily write an end to a conception of the work within the terms of aesthetic autonomy; rather, it reinforces it.”9 This exercise was done with the hope of organizing a field of possible strategies based on the construction of disappearance. What might be produced when these strategies are applied to already erased contexts such as Pruitt-Igoe? What is the relevance of producing places that intentionally fade away? It would be crazy to suggest that Mies’ work ever fully disappears and it is perhaps for this reason that these investigations explore the threshold of a certain vanishing point. This is a hazy place in Mies’ work that often appears as ‘almost nothing’ but reveals itself as much more.

Photo Credits

1. Scherschel, Frank, Life Magazine, March 1st, 1957. 2. Soba, Okinawa, 1967. 3. Original phtographer unknown, Life Magazine, May 5th, 1972. 4. AP Photo/Dan Loh, 2001. 5. Original photographer[s] unknown [http://www.pruitt-igoe.com] 6. Institut Municipal d’Historia, Barcelona [reprinted in Sola-Morales, Ignasi de, Mies Van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, SA, 1993), 39.] 7. Milbourne, Christopher, Harry Houdini: A Pictorial Life (New York: Crowell, 1976) 8. DACS, 1968 [reprinted in Mertins, Detlef, Modernity Unbound (London: Architectural Association, 2011) ] 9. Miloš Budík, 1959 [http://www.tugendhat.eu]

Shallow Imitations: An Introduction

1. Yamasaki, Minoru, A Life in Architecture, (New York: Weatherhill, 1979), 24-25. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Rilke, Rainer Maria, quoted in Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, (New York: Semiotexte, 1991), 19. 7. Evans, Robin, Mies Van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries, AA files, Vol. 19 (Spring 1990), 20. 8. Ibid., 21.

Almost Nothing: The Ethics of Disappearance

1. Van der Rohe, Mies quoted in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies Van der Rohe on the Building Art, (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), 331. 2. See the critical Mies essays of the eighties by Robin Evans (“Mies Van Der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries”), K. Michael Hays (“The Mies Effect”), Beatriz Colomina (“Mies Not”), as well as the life-long efforts of Detlef Mertins to name just a few. 3. Stan Allen, “Mies’ Theater of Effects: The New National Gallery, Berlin,” Practice: Architecture, Technique + Representation 2nd Ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2009) 4. Josep Quetglas, Fear of glass: Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona (Basel; Boston: Birkhäuser-Publishers for Architecture, 2001) 5. See Bristol, Katharine G., “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” in Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 44, No. 3 (May, 1991), pp. 163-171 or, more recently, the film of the same title: Freidrichs, Chad, Jaime Freidrichs, Benjamin Balcom, and Jason Henry, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, (Columbia, Mo.: Unicorn Stencil, 2011). 6. Yamasaki, Minoru quoted in Sara Rimer, “Minoru Yamasaki, Architect of World Trade Center, Dies,” New York Times, 9 February 1986. 7. Schulze, Franz, Mies Van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 298. 8. Ibid. 9. Krauss, Rosalind, “The Grid, the /Cloud/, and the Detail” in The Presence of Mies. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 146.

Villa Tugendhat Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rehabilitation Centre, February 1959

Case Studies A Catalog of Miesian Erasure

Barcelona Pavilion Bounded Escape + Dismantled Chrome

“When the devil came he was not red, he was chrome and he said, ‘Come with me.’”1 It is difficult to explain the endless influence that this single building has exerted on the history of space [which runs deeper than the history of architecture], especially given its extraordinarily brief existence. And though its most literal disappearing act, its physical dismantling and promulgation through the medium of indistinct black and white photographs, was enough to lift it to mythic status, there is much more to it than this. As Josep Quetglas asserts, “In Mies we always find an obsessive will to build segregated, closed space, defined only in terms of horizontal planes, in which vertical lines are always trapped or dissolved in the horizontal gap, in which the walls are merely mist and steam.”2 There is no question that, though some earlier work [like the drawings for a glass tower at Friedrichstrasse, the Crystal Palace or the Brick Country House] displayed some of these qualities it was the ‘Repräsentationspavillon’ that firmly established Mies’ illusionistic reputation. And while its materials and program [a place for the King and Queen of Spain to sit, drink and wave for ten minutes] support the vanishing qualities of the experience, it is the space, somehow both bound and endless that cements its erasing capacity. Amidst all the action is the statue ‘Sunrise’ floating in a thin reflecting pool behind the throne room with arms raised in a last effort to shield her eyes from the overwhelming brightness of it all.

1. Tweedy, Jeff, Wilco, opening lyrics to the song “Hell is Chrome” on A Ghost is Born (Rhino Records, 2004) 2. Quetglas, Josep, Fear of Glass: Mies Van der Rohe’s Pavilion in Barcelona (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser, 2001), 75-77.

Photo Credit

Diario Oficial de la Exposicion International, Barcelona, 1929 [reprinted in Josep Quetglas, Fear of Glass: Mies Van der Rohe’s Pavilion in Barcelona (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser, 2001), 141.]

1:100 Contextual Erasure

1:100 Expanded Matrix

1:100 Intervals

1:100 Voids

Seagram Building Urban Concealment + Atmospheric Surface

If the Barcelona Pavilion can be considered the most influential space of the twentieth century then perhaps the Seagram Building explores more precisely the realm of the ‘Building Art’ [Mies’ preferred term for his practice and work]. The New York Times once named Seagram the most important building of the millenium1, not least because of its uncanny influence over what Franz Schulze has identified as the, “rectilinearization of America’s skyline”.2 If we give the Seagram building a platonic reading then it might be an ideal architectural form that endless imitators have tried to mimetically usurp unsuccessfully, rendering it possible to get closer to the truth only by getting closer to fifty-third and Park. It is, however, far more compelling to read into its peripheral and more atmospheric qualities of concealment and surface. For anyone making the pilgrimage to Seagram it is often its lack of presence along Park Avenue that marks its most positive contribution. The building is difficult to spot until you arrive at the exact address where you are greeted with three absences: two shallow and symmetrically laid out reflection pools and a ninety foot plaza open to the sky. One might consider if the real Seagram is a fully transparent tower whose only physical evidence is the gently ribbed surface along its rear, a remnant of the mold used to cast this very mysterious nothing. Go at night and even this dissolves into bits of luminescence.

1. Muschamp, Herbert, “Best Building; Opposites Attract,” (New York Times, April 18th 1999) 2. Schulze, Franz, Mies Van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1985), 275.

Photo Credit

Ezra Stoller [reprinted in The Seagram Building: Photographs by Ezra Stoller; intro. By Franz Schulze (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).]

1:400 Contextual Erasure

1:400 Expanded Matrix

1:400 Expanded Field

1:400 Voids

IIT [Crown Hall] Sliding Figures + Universal Space

“The IIT campus plan and its architecture articulate the virtual possibilities of Chicago’s Near South Side- tracing (primarily in the grid and the frame) what is most ‘promising’ about the context, what is latent in its structure but what in the present social order the context can never be.”1 This view of IIT presented by K. Michael Hays offers a rather favorable view of Mies’ urban strategy, though I would submit that the campus does more to create a potent future structure of place than revealing its latent promise. And though the grid always figures in Mies’ work as a quasi-organizing device, Mies is always willing to transcend its limits. At IIT, Crown Hall is a remarkable instance of this [the only building in the campus plan deviating from the predetermined classroom module of twenty-four feet square]. At the urban scale, Mies’ schema offers an experience of building figures that weave their own rhythm through and around the original grid. Peter Eisenman identifies this condition when he writes, “While this grid gives dimension to the object-buildings, when these dimensions take physical reality, the spatial grid becomes virtual as the buildings slip and slide past one another.”2 Though Crown Hall has always been considered the anchor of Mies’ plan, the reality is it sits off center, occupying a peripheral place in the scheme yet internally organized with a focused and vacuous symmetry.

1. Hays, K. Michael, “The Mies Effect” in Mies in America, ed. Phyllis Lambert (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2001), 696. 2. Eisenman, Peter, “Mies and the Figuring of Absence” in Mies in America, ed. Phyllis Lambert (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2001), 711.

Photo Credit Blaser, Werner, Crown Hall (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), 49.

1:500 Contextual Erasure

1:500 Expanded Matrix

1:500 Sliding Figures

1:500 Urban Voids

Lafayette Park Field Erasure + the Parasitic Landscape

The modes of erasure at Lafayette Park are numerous. It is the mature incarnation of a parasitic landscape technique [developed by Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell] that has grown over time, interlocking with and partially concealing Mies’ building envelopes. Also, the sliding figure configurations employed at ITT are in full effect at Lafayette and find themselves reconciled into three different typologies: the tower, courtyard house and townhome. All three, “Present a different relation of interior to exterior, with the landscaped exterior spaces providing the spatial clarity and definition only implied in other Miesian plans.”1 Despite relatively small floor plans, the units offer a subtle and implied vastness through framed connections within and also looking out. There are various small scale details at work in the background as well. For instance, the parking surfaces are all four feet beneath grade in order not to disrupt the relation to the landscape and all the townhomes, as I was generously shown by one resident, are equipped with a connected basement alley for the disposal of trash and accommodation of other unsightly home necessities like energy meters. What’s more is that despite Lafayette Park’s tendency to be viewed as an isolated enclave within the city fabric, there are interior social connections and variations that keep the residents fully networked. Lafayette exhibits the great potential of Mies’ articulated, spatial matrix and its ability to recede and come forth in rhythm with daily life and the changing landscape.

1. Waldheim, Charles, “Landscape, Urban Order, and Structural Change,” in Hilberseimer/Mies Van der Rohe Lafayette Park Detroit (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel, 2004), 24.

Photo Credit

Jordi Bernado, 2002 [reprinted in Hilberseimer/Mies Van der Rohe Lafayette Park Detroit, ed/ Charles Waldheim (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel, 2004), 115.]; diagram by Ludwig Hilberseimer, proposed stages of alteration for the Marquette Park community in Chicago, c. 1950

1:650 Contextual Erasure

1:650 Expanded Matrix

1:650 Urban Voids

1:650 Almost Nothing

Hybrid Variations

With Mies we have come to blindly accept the idea that his buildings were always autonomously deployed despite of their particular surroundings. However, is it possible to expand their internal logic [the matrix in Mies] outward to formulate a speculative view of the work that is highly contextual? This act would not make autonomy cool again but simply illustrate a point: agency is when we own up to our actions... even the autonomous ones.

Pruitt-Igoe

Initial Musings The relationship between drawing and architecture has been aptly expressed as akin to the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vital need to write.1 Drawing is a critical mode of inquiry in architecture that can, in its most potent form, provide a means to proceed towards spatial ideas. Perry Kulper has identified the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;mediating drawingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as an exercise he skillfully employs to shuffle between ideas and concretized things.2 For Kulper, the potential of a mediating drawing is in the discovery of relationships that only emerge through the act of representation and lend the drawing itself a validity of equal or greater resonance than the eventual built form [if one ever emerges]. In order for the drawing to yield maximum potential a predetermined path towards architectural conventions must be eliminated at the outset. Traditional sections, plans or elevations are often already too consolidated with information to set the stage for genuine spatial innovation. These initial musings on Pruitt-Igoe are an attempt to mediate between the historical ideal of its loaded past and a possible future state. It required the use of a loosely organized sketch book in which printed photos and articles from the Pruitt-Igoe archives, along with texts and initial ideas, were transferred, affected, drawn upon, cut and manipulated for the sake of creating an excavated architectural language. These drawings always cohere to the 64

scale of the page but are scale-less in any ordinary sense of the word. They are meant to simply intimate a direction for architectural thought. As Robin Evans suggests with Daniel Libeskind’s Chamber Works series, “We must look in front for the things that the drawing might suggest, might lead to, might provoke; in short, for what is potent in them rather than what is latent.”3 With Evans, potency versus latency is a matter of movement and opacity, specifically in terms of what a drawing might engender. A drawing with latent potential is injected with meaning by the author who reveals traces of thought through various degrees of transparency. The more fundamental drawings for Evans [the one’s that could form the new “epicenter”4 of architecture] are opaque, with no hidden meanings or signs behind the pure act of representation; an outward movement directed toward future possibilities. In many ways, the sketch book can manifest as a device for measuring the space between both. A need to remain in this hazy state is echoed in Kelly Wilson’s reappropriation of DaVinci’s sfumato. For DaVinci, sfumato is the sweet and hazy state of affairs one might experience in the early morning light. The effect of this atmospheric light is the dissolution of clear and defined shadows and edges between things [for the realist DaVinci, this ethereal moment is the ideal light to capture in 69

the act of painting]. Boundaries merge and bodies in space coalesce with their surroundings. Wilson applies this way of thinking to the act of drawing. For him sfumato is, ‘a spatial idea’ and a place within the drawing process where a ‘search for stronger orders is suspended with the hope to search for new territory.’5 These sketches are a product of a prolonged engagement within the haze; a search for new orders within the wreckage of PruittIgoe by mediating between ruin and progression.

Initial Musings

1. Hays, K. Michael, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010) 2. These ideas are from a personal conversation with Perry Kulper in early 2012. 3. Evans, Robin, “In the Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MIT Press: 2000), 487. 4. Ibid., 488. 5. These ideas are from an e-mail exchange with T. Kelly Wilson in the Fall of 2011.

Media Distortions More than any other failed housing project stemming from the 1949 Public Housing Act, Pruitt-Igoe is and continues to be the definitive poster child for the downfall of an era’s social aspirations. As it has been succinctly put, “Pruitt-Igoe condenses into one 57-acre tract all of the problems and difficulties that arise from race and poverty... and all of the impotence, indifference, and hostility with which our society has so far dealt with these problems.”1 PruittIgoe also comes with a neatly sealed media image of total abandonment and destruction as the pages of Life magazine and others illustrated at the time of its demolition. With the landmark publication of “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,”2 Katharine Bristol put into words the first comprehensive argument against the failure of modernist architecture as a feasible explanation to the events at Pruitt-Igoe. It is now accepted that too many contingent factors contributed to the neighborhood’s collapse to accurately trace them all to a single point, however the media always supplies its own mode of interpretation. What makes the implosion of building C-15 “the ultimate money shot”3 and what significant connections between space and the media might stem from contrasting this with its Miesian equivalent? With the media there is always an underlying representational intent which is specifically constructed and therefore of spatial consequence. Media is manifold in every sense of the word. There are always multiple possibilities in material, organization, distribution and the implication of an idea which in many ways bonds the architectural act to the media. As Beatriz Colomina has pointed out, “Architecture is not simply something represented, but is a way of representing.”4 The famous image of building C-15 in mid explosion localizes the act with the presence of St. Louis’ Gateway Arch gazing on in the upper left hand corner. There is a sense of movement and awe within the photograph allowing it to acquire a certain density. All great media images are dense with information and as Jeff Byles notes, “The death of Pruitt-Igoe served up a ready-made icon for a whole social system on the brink of collapse.”5 78

But the photograph also hints at a lack of subtlety strung through much of Yamasaki’s [and others] mid-century projects. The scale of the work almost always outweighs the actions unfolding around them leaving it open to scalar shifts only in the event of monumental tragedy. Within the demolition sequence notice that the most emphasized image is always the moment where, with the city backdrop still dwarfed by the building, the explosive dust cloud is finally consuming the picture frame and dramatically shifting our perception. We can see this major spatial and representational difference when looking at another photo of one of Yamasaki’s major works, the World Trade Center, in comparison with a photo of one of Mies’ Lafayette Park towers in Detroit. Both offer the idea of architecture as an articulated background to the actions of people but with drastically different consequences. In the World Trade Center photo the shadowy figures are active in a dark zone that anchors the bottom third of the photograph with the thick columns that divide the windows rising out of the darkness. Only one figure at the bottom right reluctantly emerges out of this shadowy third allowing the striated window divisions to dominate the scene. The background is staged in such a way as to miraculously allow the building frame to overpower the field of skyscrapers along Manhattan’s southern tip. Within this structure, middle ground statically divides the occupants of the foreground from the familiar cityscape. The photograph at Lafayette Park is staged at a pool that caps a two story parking facility located between two Mies-designed towers. There are two shadowy figures at the foreground of the image but this time they both extend past the bottom third of the photo which is actually demarcated by the top of the rail above the water line. Here the figures provide a stitch between the top two-thirds [Mies’ tower facade] and the lower third [the pool and rail]. The scale of each figures’ head is remarkably close to the scale of the rectangular unit that 79

comprises Miesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; faĂ§ade, while a sunbather neatly fits within the module of the railing suggesting affinities between the architectural elements and the people in the scene. Furthermore, the articulated surface structuring the backdrop of the photo features a variable color field which oscillates beautifully between background and foreground [the darker squares tend to come forward with the dark figures]. In the great images of people engaged with Miesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; spaces a curious gestalt arises between the architectural elements and the human movements within the scene. This relationship is spatially charged and offers clues as to the ethical implications of Miesian space as an articulated and tacit background to life. In the end, the interest generated by the World Trade Center image has more to do with our current perspectives: the scene depicted is no longer possible, erased from the realm of possibility by events which dramatically shifted our perception.

Photo Credits

1. Life Magazine, May 5th 1972 2. WTC interior, Marvin Newman; Woodfin Camp and Associates, New York 3. Lafayette Park exterior, Janine Debanne

Media Distortions

1. Koestler, F.A., Pruitt-Igoe: Survival in a Concrete Ghetto in Social Work, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1967), 4. 2. Bristol, Katharine, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,â&#x20AC;? American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader (London: Routledge, 2004). 3. Jeff Byles, Ruble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (New York, Harmony Books: 2005), 206. 4. Beatriz Colomina, Mies Not in Presence of Mies (New York, Princeton Architectural Press: 1994), 214. 5. Byles, 206.

The Vanishing Point Architectural Strategies for Urban Voids

Relief In order to carry the ideas of removal and erasure through the former PruittIgoe site, an investigation on paper is conducted beginning with former building footprints and the site boundary. Like the Mies diagrams before, this act begins with contextual erasure and works towards an internal matrix that is expanded throughout the site. The process generates new ideas about a violently erased place that might help create new life in a form that disappears more gently into the background.

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1:150 Possible plan configuration

1968

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Today

Proposed

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1:100 Longitudinal Section

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1/32” = 1’ Sectional Variations

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1/32” = 1’ Sectional Variations

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1/32” = 1’ Sectional Variations

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Model Excavated trenches serve as the impetus for a possible architecture along the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s south edge. [materials: bristol and plexi]

Model view from north

Layering process

Model view from south

Birdseye view

Aerial view

Section cut

1/32” = 1’ Cross Section

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Relationship between void spaces and embedded buildings

Configuration of removed spaces with articulated landscape to the north

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May 16th, 2016 A larger man with a face like granite lights a cigar in a gallery space overlooking the park. Security will ask him to put it out soon.

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February 13th, 2015 A heavy snow blankets a St. Louis park at Jefferson and Cass. Despite the weather, a young urban theorist comes to work. She felt it best to know her city even in the dead of winter.

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Reprise

Formless Program and the Articulated Background Mies Van der Rohe wrote a brief essay in 1960 titled, “Where do we go from here?”, which seems a fitting question to borrow as the theme to this temporary conclusion. At the outset Mies is plain and succinct as usual, “Without clarity there is no understanding.”1 The statement is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted answer to the question, “What is your aim in philosophy?,” to which he replies, “To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”2 His was a project of clarification and not obfuscation, though in Wittgenstein we also find that clarity is not so easily won. If anything is demonstrated by the droves of Mies scholarship since the mid-eighties and the directions undertaken in this research project, it’s that Mies’ impact is not so clear and defined as his philosophical dictums might imply. Mies is not for the faint of heart and I, for one, prefer it that way. We are currently at the heels of a late avant-garde whose manipulation of program for the sake of spatial innovation is well known. Contemporary theory courses in architecture departments still wield the phrases of Bernard Tschumi’s “event space” and “cross-programming” [“polevaulting in the cathedral”3] or Rem Koolhaas’ homage to Manhattan’s, at times, bizarre programmatic palette [“eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked on the ninth floor”4]. At the beginning of the 21st century, OMA’s famous diagram for the Seattle Library, which justifies its odd form based on the re-organization of program, became dogma. Simply fit the words of any given activity within the frame of your building’s envelope and legitimacy would be conferred on the shape. With Mies however, and this is especially the case over time, program is formless. In the context of the Miesian project life is the ever-changing given. Robin Evans brings this to light when he asks, “Why call the Barcelona Pavilion a Pavilion?”5 He goes on to argue, referencing Caroline Constant and others, that it could very well be considered a landscape or a domestic structure and that the nature of the project resists narrow programmatic labeling. The examples go on and on. The Villa Tugendhat has recently reopened as a museum and its new website6 features quite beautiful pictures of its time as a rehabilitation center during the post-war era, following its lifespan as a luxury dwelling. Reopening soon is a Mies-designed Esso gas station on Nuns’ Island in Montreal that has been readapted for use as a community center through a careful renovation by FABG. The tie to programmatic formlessness might be found in Mies’ quest for a universal space. Detlef Mertins has made much of Mies’ exploration of the concept, especially in his later career, through investigating open, clear-span structures. The definitive case for Mertins is the Neue National Gallery in Berlin, which he sees as the paradigmatic example of a structure articulated for the unfolding of life7. Curiously, the building found its design roots in the 130

Villa Tugendhat Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rehabilitation Centre, 1945-1950

unrealized project for a Bacardi Rum office in Cuba. Though materials changed due to the climatic difference between Havana and Berlin, articulations and spatial organization remained nearly identical. In fact, Franz Schulze has identified the Neue National Gallery as the likely incarnation of a never-executed, Miesian religious space. Schulze points out that, in a documentary interview produced by his granddaughter Georgia at the very end of his life, Mies expresses regret over never having had the chance to design a cathedral.8 Would the Miesian cathedral have been expressed like the National Gallery in Berlin? Probably, and it’s worth remembering that in 1969 Crown Hall proved to be a poetic and apt memorial space after his passing. Mies forged an architectural language in the most spatially significant sense of what a language could be. One wouldn’t organize this language into a dictionary of types because it loses its sense when not seen in its intended state: as the articulated background to our actions. This is a major thread in Wittgenstein’s later thought. Our language loses all ability to convey meaning without the necessary and tacit background of our ordinary world. This is the ‘bedrock’ of our understanding and the reason why, for Wittgenstein, “What has to be accepted, the given, is -- one could say -- forms of life.”9 In one of Mies’ personal journals where all entries were likely written well before the Barcelona Pavilion’s construction he states, “We can only talk of a new building art when new life forms have been formed.”10 Mid-sentence, he crossed out, “the battle.”

Gas Station at Nuns’ Island Community Center renovation, FABG, 2012

One could level an argument against the original housing blocks of Pruitt-Igoe [and so many other similar projects] that identifies them as an architectural language out of sync with and foreign to the life of its inhabitants. Mies and any other architect may have also failed to spatially communicate in that scenario. If I have done anything by investigating Pruitt-Igoe’s disappearance it is to intimate the possibility of another possible language to deploy at the long-abandoned site at Jefferson and Cass in St. Louis today. At best, these are scribbled and enigmatic hieroglyphics… illegible without the critical dialogue that is so integral to the development of any architectural proposal.

Crown Hall [IIT] Mies memorial service, 1969 Photo Credits

1. www.tugendhat.eu/en, 1945-1950 2. FABG, 2012 [http://www.arch-fabg.com/fabg.html] 3. Illinois Institue of Technology, 1969

Formless Program and the Articulated Background

1. Van der Rohe, Mies, “Where do we go from here?” in The Artless Word: Mies Van der Rohe on the Building Art, ed. Fritz Neumeyer (Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), 332. 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), PI 309. 3. Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction (London and Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996) 4. Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli, 1994), 159. 5. Evans, Robin, Mies Van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries, AA files, Vol. 19 (Spring 1990), 20. 6. www.tugendhat.eu/en 7. Mertins, Detlef, “Mies’ Event Space” in Modernity Unbound (London: Architectural Association, 2011) 8. Schulze, Franz, Mies Van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1985), 299. 9. Wittgenstein, PI 226. 10. Van der Rohe, Mies in Neumeyer, 269.

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Thank You for the best conversations of my life! Without them this project would be nothing: Martin Gundersen, William Tilson, Lisa Huang, Nina Hofer, Perry Kulper, T. Kelly Wilson, Mark McGlothlin, Neil McEachern, Michel Soucisse, the Thursday morning MRP crew in 210 and, of course, Lulu and my family.