Is architectural licensing necessary? (2020

Two Lectures: Lerup and Machado (2012)

Lars Lerup at Wurster Hall

Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March 2012, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning(Architectural Association, 2011). Stanley Saitowitz, a self-described “Lerupean,” introduced the speaker by noting his impact at Berkeley as a teacher and mentor. Indeed, the hall was packed with his ex-students, Saitowitz among them. Like him, many are now fixtures in the architecture community in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

Lecturing semi-extemporaneously, using book excerpts as a guide, Lerup walked the audience through his understanding of Houston as “neither a city nor a suburb,” best viewed and understood while moving through it. This reflects the perspective of time geography advocated by Torsten Hagerstand, he added, expressing his debt to the geographers.

Polycentric and driven by what Lerup called "agglomeration economics" —location theory by another name—and subject to unwritten rules that have led inexorably to sprawl, Houston is nonetheless ripe for rethinking. Among its defects are the paving of its bayous (by the US Army Corps of Engineers), its developers’ affection for the cul-de-sac, and the voracious nature of its centers, which as they expand constantly pressure the lower-density residential areas that surround them. Among Houston’s virtues are the tree canopy that shades many neighborhoods and helps the city breathe, and the dynamism that, with the addition of high-speed rail, it should increasingly share with the other cities in the Texas triangle, like Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio.

Dynamism is a theme for Lerup, Swedish by birth but American by choice. He still has the successful immigrant’s optimism about his adopted country, now coupled with a genuine love for Houston, a “city apart.” It is best understood in a metabolomicsense, he said: the way forward for Houston is to think of it as an organic whole, embracing its un-zoned self-management as a better means than zoning to build on its strengths and undo its defects.

Restoring Houston's bayous would acknowledge their inherent need to meander and the richness of their microenvironments. Undoing the cul-de-sac format of its subdivisions—the real building blocks of the city—and separating cars from houses could overcome the American tendency to create distance, instead knitting neighborhoods together as places for walking and encounter.

In his introduction, Saitowitz mentioned the range of Lerup’s published work, including Building the Unfinished, which describes a through-block group of cottages in north Berkeley. Like a novelist, Lerup draws imaginatively on his life’s changing settings. In doing so, he makes certain points again and again: that the city is architecture’s real context; that architects, focused on the one percent as clients, have missed the much larger opportunities of the everyday; and that because a city is an organism, zoning imposes a false and reductive order on it, like paving the bayous. Houston is a force of nature, so it needs to be free to evolve as a living thing.

Written for TraceSF, 13 March 2012.

Rodolfo Machado at Wurster Hall

“Where were the students?” one of their professors asked me as we were leaving. It was a pity they missed the lecture, because Professor Machado aimed to instruct, showing in detail how three of his projects moved from planning to completion, warts and all. After a short review of his work, Machado settled in to take a more detailed look at the three projects. Of the most recent, an addition to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he noted that the U.S. architecture magazines had declined to give it a serious review. It’s true that he designs against the grain of parametric form making. The first project he showed, the trapezoidal Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut, breaks free of the orthogonal nature of most of his work, but from its earliest days as an element in his campus master plan, it feels like handwork, untouched by a computer.

Machado showed a watercolor detail from the plan that indicated how the sea would be visible as one walks down to the building. That detail was realized, he said, but a planned roof garden wasn’t—

the budget was cut, a big loss. This was one of the warts, mentioned to give students a sense of the real world in which his work unfolds.

Deliberately contextual, the Olayan School’s stone-and-patternedblock façade was sourced locally. He explained how the façade evolved in response to the faculty’s desire for light and views, adding that local traditions, some centuries old, persist “and labor is cheap.” The result is a beautifully detailed building, especially compared to the stripped-down quality of 1960s-era additions to the American University of Beirut Campus, which he also showed.

The second project was an arts-cultural complex in Silver Spring, Maryland, in an area that Machado described as “lacking context,” the victim of aggressive urban renewal (to the point of obliteration). Yet, planner that he is, he used the occasion to reinforce the area’s restored street grid and orient the new building to a revived pedestrian flow. This project also illustrated his interest in porosity—my word, not his, for the provision of multiple ways in and through, achieved or sometimes thwarted by security concerns. That impulse was one of the hallmarks of his plan for the UCSF Research Campus at Mission Bay, along with his innate concern for human scale and movement, attributes that were then systematically ignored by the university in application. “I haven’t been there in years,” Machado told me afterward. Good thing.

The third project was his addition to the Chazen Museum of Art. The original, SOM-designed museum fronts a major campus promenade and view corridor. In the design competition, Machado anticipated the iconic tendencies of his rivals by sketching and then criticizing what they were likely to put forward to the jury. He had to address the difficulties of adding on to the existing museum, with its accentuated third floor, and the benefits of replicating that floor’s well-liked exhibition hall sequence.

Disarmingly straightforward, Machado's addition creates a new whole that enlivens the plaza it now adjoins on both sides. It saves its symmetry for the top floors, which house the exhibition rooms and the bridge between the two buildings. From the entry to the promenade, the expanded museum appears as two symmetrical wings of a single building. From within the promenade, the two parts, new and old, feel related but very different, with the addition opening out to the plaza to provide a new entrance to the museum.

His appointed hour up, Machado stopped short of showing his latest projects in Buenos Aires. I would have liked to see them. “Next time,” he offered. Perhaps by then the man and his work will be back in favor. It seems crazy to ignore an architecture as thoughtful as his. While he eschews the methods and formal moves that are now in fashion, Machado’s work clearly has a method and a formal logic. Seen head on, in elevation, a view favored by some of his photographers, it can seem abstractly compositional, almost two-dimensional, but this is a misreading. In reality, it addresses place (in the present and future tense), human movement and engagement, and, in terms of the carefully composed façades, the micro-landscape of materiality, which he gives a dimensionality and variation reminiscent of the collages of Kurt Schwitters.

Written for TraceSF, 3 April 2012.