Figure 1.4

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

Rolex Learning Centre for University Lausanne, Switzerland by SANAA \ Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa, 2010. Interior of the Rolex Learning Centre for University Lausanne, Switzerland by SANAA \ Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa, 2010.

a landscape where the student, and intellectual labourer, believe they have agency over their own life.11 The building gives the illusion that their actions in this space directly influence the way they socialize and build their status in this context. It is seemingly their own desire and self-determination that makes the labourer ‘successful’ in this form of architecture.

Capitalism has in essence made architecture that suggests working and the success of one’s work is a self-desire. It is something invested in by the labourer and is therefore, free for capital. This has also become a popular agenda for Big-Tech companies of Silicon Valley. Their campus-like architecture promotes a self-driven labourer to ‘freely’ better themselves and their work. The worker assumes betterment by aspiring to create an online portfolio, or by seeking education and investing into themselves and the tools they need to be better at their work. As the concept of ‘drift’ suggests, capitalism conceals this self-driven mentality behind the freedom of choice for the individual. Like Deamer confirms, “in this self-congratulation, we (man) substitute the myth of creativity for the reality of our daily experience; capitalist ideology has convinced us that architecture serves a social purpose while hiding its actual real estate-driven agenda.”12 Continuing the criticism of the Rolex Learning Centre, this building and its landscape for ‘selfdetermination’ could be criticized as a space that is solely beneficial for the extrovert. One with an extroverted personality will be the most successful in such a space, as determined by the architecture. Extroverts in this space can situate themselves among the crowd, find identity within the busyness, and develop competition with others. Their ability to easily communicate with others and adapt to work in flexible social spaces allows them to thrive when working in spaces such as this.

Architecture for Introverts

Fortunately for the introvert, some workplaces began to challenge the open-office planning layouts, re-introducing divisions of space for employees to be more secluded and private, rather than exposed. The Centraal Beheer Office in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, was built in 1972 and designed by the Dutch architect, Herman Herzburger. The praise of this building is attributed to its dedication to worker conditions, where the architecture is focused on creating ample space for the worker, rather than planning for efficiency and

economy. The Centraal Beheer office wanted to inspire workers to form small family-like bonds with their colleagues. This project signifies architecture’s function as a tool for manipulating occupant behaviour, amidst the extrovert ideal, and though this project seemingly works in favour of the introvert, it strengthens the binary of the extrovert and the introvert developing within capital.

Figure 1.6

Figure 1.7

Centraal Beheer Office Building in Apeldoorn Netherlands by Herman Herzburger, 1972. Communal Platform Centraal Beheer Office Building, 1972.

Figure 1.8

Interior Atrium in the Centraal Beheer Office Building, 1972.

Figure 1.9

Illustration of social and workspace platform arrangements by Herman Herzburger in the Centraal Beheer Office Building, 1972.

Architecturally, the building contrasts with projects of open office plans through its repetitive, small platforms. The platforms are designed for eight to ten employees and have an unfinished material quality that inspires workers to customize their platform to best accommodate the needs of their small group. Its building shell is used strategically to define, but not enclose, units of space to create a well-balanced combination of privacy and openness and each platform is accompanied with alcoves that occupy the corners of each platform. The alcove-like spaces support smaller, identifiable, and customizable spaces, that could accommodate either one to four individual workstations or designate a dining space and/or meeting room for the platform-family. Effectively, the planning of these spaces and the humanscale language of the architecture empowers introverted individuals in their work. For the introvert, this workplace potentially provides an ideal work environment. There is a clear ability for an employee to be valued as they work alone, or in a comfortable group, while remaining secluded from the entire office. As a result, there is less of a focus on the individual to represent and express themselves in a large social setting, rather the tiers of separation and seclusion in the planning inspires self-motivation and introverted growth. The employee can create a workplace that best suits their workstyle rather than conforming to the singular, uniform, and repetitive workstation that often dominates the workplaces of neoliberal, capitalist firms.

These noted projects demonstrate the first phase of how the binary of introversion and extroversion has influenced architecture. They present an architecture that sees itself as being engaged with making a new world for the extrovert and the introvert person. Stemming from the revolution of industry and technology, architects working during this time would have picked up on the extrovert ideal, and subsequently designed buildings to appease it. Their buildings work as a tool for capital, and as architecture has proven, it will continue to pursue the task of creating spaces that harness certain behaviour types. As noted through the Centraal Beheer Office Building, some projects are challenging the extrovert normative of human standards. However, each project focuses on a human definition of extroversion and introversion and are referenced to illustrate the obvious relationship between social psychology and building making.

Architecture’s Extrovert Ideal

Throughout the twentieth century there was a shift from architecture being created for extroverts, to an architecture that wanted to be extroverted. Architects of post modernism desired to use their architecture as symbols of fame and fortune in the contemporary world, and to do so, the architecture itself needed to be extroverted. In its own unique way, architecture developed an extrovert ideal. An ideal that has redirected the motivation of design, and in turn the entire practice of architecture.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture, begins to investigate this further.13 Aureli comments on the ideal capitalist vision of the city, a city that collapses the spheres of mobility, working, and living into one continuous plane of urbanization. To exaggerate this, Aureli references Hilberseimer’s Vertical City drawings for Berlin, and Archizoom’s Non Stop City. These drawings project the agenda of capitalism, where cities are no longer in need of political governance, but are becoming governed entirely by economy. In this reality, Aureli is concerned there may no longer be any place for architecture. In a context of pure, totalizing urbanization, there is no need to plan, design, and produce architecture. However, Aureli hopes that architecture has a place in this reality and arguably, so would most architects.

Figure 1.10

Non Stop City, Internal Landscapes, Archizoom, 1970.

Figure 1.11

City of The Captive Globe by Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp, 1972.

Therefore, as a method to justify architecture in the global narrative, Aureli references Rem Koolhaas’ and Madelon Vriesendorp’s City of The Captive Globe. Referencing the axonometric, Aureli concurs that for architecture to exist, it must monumentalize itself, using monumentation as a method of separating from the uniformity of urbanization, and to justify the act of, and existence of architecture. This architecture, now monuments, act as archipelagos that attempt to counter the sea of existing forces of economy, and the city.14 Evidently, for architects, and architecture, this suggested that to exist beyond uniformity, they must monumentalize, using the spectacle of the building to justify its presence within cities. This desire to monumentalize captivated Koolhaas in his practice of architecture and has evidently influenced the broader architectural profession. This is the foundation of architecture’s extrovert ideal. The desire for monumentation and architecture’s extrovert ideal became exacerbated by the spectacle of imagery. This will be explored through the rise of Playboy, the renowned career of Ezra Stoller, and the impact of imagery on an audience.

In the 1960’s, architecture was eradicated by the production of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. Beyond the full spreads of nude women, Playboy included architectural writings, interviews, images, and plans. Due to the magazine’s exponential popularity, Playboy changed the diffusion of architecture, scattering a collection of buildings and architectural interviews throughout the modern world.15 As millions of copies continued to be sold monthly, the magazine became an unprecedented marketing device for tailors, car companies, and architecture. As Preciado states, Hugh Hefner became a pop-architect of himself, using the multimedia production company of Playboy to lead the transformation of architecture through media in the twentieth century.16

Playboy transformed the value of an image through the ability to profit from the imagery of the pornographic photo. In the modern world prior to Playboy, masturbation was considered to be a problem, as it was solitary, addictive, a world of fantasy – not reality, and non-productive. From the point of view of capital, masturbation was frowned upon because it was free. The creation of Playboy however modified this perspective, as it uncovered a way to profit from the addictiveness of masturbation and introduce it to the economy. Playboy became a necessity for the heterosexual male. Not only did he desire to consume the images of nude women, but he also desired the playboy lifestyle advertised in the magazine.17 The magazine used imagery

Figure 1.12

Figure 1.13

The Playboy Townhouse. Concept published in the May 1962 issue of Playboy. Pages from the “Designs for Living” article in July 1961 Playboy Magazine issue.

1.13

Men in Image: George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom

of men in fashionable suits, cars, interiors, and architecture to convince the heterosexual male that the medium for achieving such a lifestyle was acquiring these clothes, cars, furniture, and homes. The house before Playboy was boring for the heterosexual man. The playboy lifestyle allowed the man to find control of the domestic once again.18 This fabricated persona in the Playboy magazine became a demanding desire for men, as the playboy was the ultimate man of the future, and in relation to the extrovert, the playboy became the preferred extroverted lifestyle.

To continue entrancing the man that he needed to be a playboy, Playboy would advertise new erotic environments as an alternative to the suburban family home. The way to do this was, of course, through imagebased media. The images became a tool to convince the reader that what they saw was desirable and necessary to achieve the lifestyle of a playboy, a lifestyle that was considered necessary to be happy, successful, and a man of the future in post-war America. However, for many men, it could be claimed that to achieve being a playboy, it was easier for them to change their environments than themselves. To do this, they pursued the architecture that was advertised throughout the Playboy magazines, as it was perceived as the ticket to becoming a playboy. It was at this critical point, where the image of the architecture became desirable. This phenomenon had architects of the time, such as Gehry, Wright, Fuller, and Saarinen infatuated with creating architecture that was representative of this new, growing desire for erotic life. Images of their buildings, and themselves, were shown in the magazines and accordingly platformed these architects as social prestige, a status, and a symbol of fame – above the working class. Never had architecture found such success through imagery. People desired the architectural style that Gehry was producing but did not need to visit an actual building to experience it. This architecture became a non-physical embodiment of architecture, relying on the spectacle of the image to convey architectural talent, and therefore, demonstrate monumentalism.

As Playboy exhibited the spectacle and monumental popularity of imagery, the power of images on architecture is most notably captured through the work of Ezra Stoller. “When you think of a famous building, you are often thinking of a famous photograph…”19 and, if you are thinking of a modern (American) building, eight out of ten times it is through the eyes of Ezra Stoller. Stoller, an American Architectural photographer, was cited in aiding the spread of the modern movement in architecture, and in 1961, his

photography earned him the first recipient of a Gold Medal for Photography from the American Institute of Architecture.20 His quick rise to fame became so notable that a popular term, known as “Stollerized,” coined by architect Philip Johnson, was given to architects and buildings that found fame and admiration through the photos taken by Stoller. Evidently, Stoller not only influenced how buildings were seen, but how they were conceived. By evaluating Stoller’s 1942 photograph of the Chamberlain Cottage, designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, it is cited that this photograph influenced the design of the Hancock Tower by Henry Cobb.

“At first glance, there would seem to be nothing to find in that little house of Cobb’s signature masterpiece, the gracile glass skyscraper that still crowns Boston’s skyline and is the quintessence of what design historians call high modernism. But maybe there is everything of the Hancock Tower— conceivably filtered through an intervening thirty years of conscious and unconscious recollections and aspirations—in Stoller’s picture of the Chamberlain Cottage. Cobb’s tower is a slender, prismatic volume. Its floor plan is a narrow parallelogram. The same shape is found in the shadow cast by the cantilevered portion of the house against the stone foundation and the firewood below. Everything in both Stoller’s picture and Cobb’s tower resolves to contingencies of angular deflection and linear array.”21

This relationship between imagery and architecture is iconic in the process of design and production. It demonstrates the influence that imagery has and continues to have on architecture.

Evidently, the rise of new media production mediums changed the relationship between the architect and their building. Before photography and lithography, the audience for architecture was the user. Now, in the rise of reproduction, taking off through Playboy and Stoller and accelerating through the digital age, the audience has become the image, the magazine, the tourist, the consumers of media. The observer now gives more meaning to the project than the user ever did. Architecture has transformed from a service for a user to an art object through the agency of the press.22 The criticism that Colomina points out is the relationship these reproductive medias have with the process of creating architecture and lead to the question: have these new

Figure 1.14

Erza Stoller’s photograph of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, Massachusetts, 1942.

forms of criticism influenced the way architecture is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed? Yes. As Playboy, and the rise of architecture’s extrovert ideal proves, this excess of image-based consumption forced architecture to be produced so it would be desirable through the image. The image layout in Playboy identified a new form of image consumption practices that demonstrated an innovative relationship between image, pleasure, advertising, privacy, and the production of subjectivity.23 Therefore, the success of architecture became dependent on its ability to be desirable, and to be visually pleasing. The digital age has forced extroverted architecture to seek the image as its method of monumentalizing itself within the world.

As a result, in a world of late-capital, architecture, even that of entire cities, now seeks to produce an image-based reaction through design. This image seeking phenomenon has been described as phantasmagoria. Lahiji uses the term phantasmagoria to describe imagery that is deceptive and designed to dazzle. She relates phantasmagoria to how media and technology have changed the way people use their senses. Due to our constant exposure to new visual content, our sight has become the leading sense of human experience, and capitalists have taken advantage of this.24 As noted through the development of Playboy, this dependence on visual sensory has come to control architecture. Lahiji refers to the term hyper-mediated city, to define how cities compete for iconic buildings that enhance their skyline image. New architecture is no more than an attraction on a map, a backdrop for media, and a marketable image. In the hyper-mediated city, architecture becomes phantasmagoria, it is designed to dazzle. Buildings are created for the here and now, they are an image for the moment, and designed in pursuit of the shock factor.25

As a result, much of contemporary architecture has become surficial, as new buildings ground themselves on their ability to push the boundaries of architecture in an attempt to pursue facadism. Through this desire for recognition, architecture has abandoned many fundamental principles of building making, the digital age of production and design has strengthened the extrovert ideal in architecture. Consequently, Extroverted Architecture has re-introduced a unique form of ornamentation into its design, one that works in favour of facadism and against traditional architectural practices. This technologically-driven ornamentation passes the material realm and is misidentified through the rise of digital mediums. This digital paradigm has enabled architecture to use the surface effects and dynamism of CAD

Figure 1.15

Figure 1.16

Frank Gehry at 92 at his studio in Los Angeles. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2003. Bjarke Ingels. KING Toronto, 2022.

and CAM to push the boundaries of form, materiality, scale, and presence in architecture. This new-age, digital-ornamentation, is architecture’s latest attempt to popularize architectural innovation. Ironically, the extrovert ideal has idolized this ornamentation as a necessity for architecture and design to be successful. This surficial style of architecture governed by the digital, has motivated the continued division of architecture, one that is extroverted, and an architecture that is of the other, introverted.

As described, Playboy eradicated the practice of architecture and making an architecture that is replicable as a profitable image is now more important than making the building, itself. To succeed in the modern world of capital, it is essential for an Extrovert Architecture to distinguish itself as superior. To accomplish this, architecture has been forced to find new approaches to being gregarious in its design and its existence, exhausting the most fundamental principles of architecture to stand out, gain status, and remain popular. This desire for an architecture that could be extroverted transformed the way contemporary architecture was produced. Contemporary architects sought innovative and exciting strategies to popularize their own architectural styles. Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Renzo Piano, and architects alike have developed an architectural style that is recognizable through imagery. These architects created extroverted buildings to staple their names as pop-architects. As these architects developed a strategy for image producing design, it became evident that architecture developed its own extrovert ideal.

Extrovert Architecture Equation

Extrovert Architecture = Desire to Produce an Image + Form Governed by Capital

Describing how extroversion in society has influenced the way spaces were designed is the obvious reality when discussing ‘introvert and extrovert’ architecture. However, the prior discussion reveals an architecture that is focused on the making of spaces for the extrovert, or the introvert, before it transitioned to an architecture focused on monument-making through imagery. As architecture begins to be defined as either extroverted or introverted, an extroverted architecture could be described as aggressive, confident, energetic, and presentable. However, as it desires to produce an image, there is a critical concern regarding the level of conceptual depth that extroverted architecture carries. Extrovert Architecture embodies a surficial experience. Its material, form, planning, and overall production are attempting to reproduce the most attractive and most interesting visuals of the building. This architecture disregards physical existence and often the building becomes disconnected from context, true representation of material, time, and occupancy.

Additionally, Extrovert Architecture attempts to resist the formal governance of economy, to the degree that only architecture can exist within the space it occupies. Ironically, this act of rebelling supports the governance of economy, by using the architecture as a marketable object, and action of the architect. It is a product of economy through its effort to resist uniformity, by eradicating the spheres of mobility, living, working, and consumption while occupying space. Extrovert Architecture has projected outwards and abandoned the act of space making to house people and their belongings. It seeks to establish a relationship of dominance over its context, peers, and occupants. This has caused architecture to neglect the human, where the forms and the spaces occupied by people are a formal result governed by the spectacle and by economics.

Endnotes

4 Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that can’t Stop Talking (Crown Publishers, 2012), 21.

5 Cain, 21.

6 Cain, 21.

7 Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Form and labor: Toward a history of abstraction in architecture.” In The architect as worker: Immaterial labor, the creative class, and the politics of design (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 103-113.

8 Cain, 42-55.

9 Peggy Deamer, ed. Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 19-21.

10 Aureli 2015, 112-113.

11 Aureli 2015, 112-113.

12 Deamer, 21.

13 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).

14 Aureli 2011, 21-26.

15 Paul Preciado, “Playboy Architecture: Performing Masculinity.” In Pornotopia (Zone Books, 2014), 15–28.

16 Preciado, 25-27.

17 Preciado, 22-23.

18 Preciado, 22-23.

19 Thomas de Monchaux and Nikil Saval, “Ezra Stoller Turned Buildings into Monuments” (The New Yorker, 2019).

20 de Monchaux.

21 de Monchaux.

22 Beatriz Colomina, “Architectureproduction.” In This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions, Ed. Kester Rattenbury (Routledge, 2002), 216-217.

23 Preciado, 25-27.

24 Nadir Lahiji, “Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City.” In Architecture Media Politics Society 7, no. 4 (2015): 3.

25 Lahiji.

Figure 2.1

Place, A Point of Introvert Architecture.

CHAPTER 2 THE INTROVERT ARCHITECTURE EQUATION

Absolute Architecture, A Foundation

Currently, this thesis has developed a foundation of architecture’s extrovert ideal, grounded by its desire to monumentalize as a method to resist urban uniformity at the hands of capitalism. It is therefore necessary to return to Aureli, and his text, The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture, as it begins to build another foundation, one that begins to inform an Introvert Architecture. In response to architecture’s dire need for monumentation, Aureli also attempts to define an architecture opposite to this; an architecture that he calls ‘Absolute Architecture.’ For Aureli, an ‘absolute architecture’ does not desire monumentation, but rather, it is an architecture that proves its cruciality to the context of the city, where the architecture is superlative for the situation it is given.26

Aureli reflects on how the reality of capital is inescapable, and therefore architecture must operate within the governance of economy. It must subscribe to the spheres of mobility, living, and working, all of which influence the formal production of architecture. As a result, architecture has been reduced to the creation of planes of division.27 Aureli makes this paradigm evident through the architecture of Mies Van der Rohe, specifically the Seagram Building and the Toronto Dominion Centre. He claims that Mies’ architecture, as an absolute architecture, is not simply criticizing urbanization, but transforms urbanization into something graspable, a recognizable dimension that people can choose to accept or neglect. Mies’ architecture is essentially mimicking the continuous grid and uniformity of urbanization, but in doing so, is an act of profanation.28 The success of Mies’ architecture was dependent on the spaces’ ability to adhere to the spheres of economy, and evidently, its persistence to produce free open space allowed for it. Its

empty plan, homogenous and stacked, accentuates the aura of urbanization. Urbanization is captured in the architecture, and therefore justifies the architecture. Ironically, the Seagram Building and the Toronto Dominion Centre demonstrate an architectural form entirely governed by economy, a key component of Extrovert Architecture. However, the value of Mies’ architecture is its ability to be alone, separated and against the condition of totalizing urbanization. This architecture suppresses monumentation through its form and appearance by accepting the continuous grid of uniformity to define its program. By doing so, the brilliance of architecture, and the exceptional embodiment of its craft, alone, justifies the role of architecture in urbanism.

Aureli’s reflection of Mies’ architecture is indirect in extracting the basis for a foundation of Introvert Architecture. Though Mies’ buildings demonstrate an alternative role for architecture beyond monumentation, the space and form of the building remain a product of economy. Therefore, in this context, it cannot be characterized as extroverted or introverted. However, what is key toward the development of a foundation for Introvert Architecture is that Aureli believes Mies’ preoccupation with demonstrating a genuine practice of the craft of building making is the most effective way to justify architecture within capitals exhaustive uniformity. Mies’ projects challenge the relevance of architecture, the architecture is questioning why society has become comfortable with living in this condition of uniformity.29 The Ironically, Extrovert Architecture is a method of defense against this condition, but as it is becoming evidently clearer; like the human-based ideal of extroversion, architecture’s own extrovert ideal also appears as a normative standard of practice. The foundation, therefore, for Introvert Architecture, is to demonstrate an architecture that separates itself from the conditions of uniformity but does so in a way that contrasts itself from the normative way of living in capital and presents an alternative solution to this, one that is not extroverted.

Introvert Architecture, An Investigation

In pursuing the equation of an Introvert Architecture, it was important to build upon the foundation established through Aureli, by investigating existing projects that embody the psychological description of the introvert. According to Susan Cain, introverts prefer quiet, minimally stimulating environments, and are thoughtful and cautious in their actions. It can be assumed their every action is thought through, entirely. From this, a clearer architectural style reveals itself, one that could be considered minimal, or formally quiet, and thoughtful through its design moves and acts of construction. Introverts are also reticent and may resist readily revealing their true talents, suggesting one must become familiar with introverts before understanding their true emotions. Again, architecture can also play this role, by requiring the architecture to form a relationship with its occupants and objects. It does not reveal its true talents from afar, but must be experienced, moved through, lived in. The occupant and the time they spend in the architecture is what demonstrates the architecture’s brilliance. To formulate an identity of an introvert-defined architecture, a selection of built projects by Alvaro Siza, Luis Barragán, and Adolf Loos were examined as each share a similar architectural language that reflects this introvert definition.

Alvaro Siza’s Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China and Capela Do Monte, the chapel in Lue, Portugal, are both driven to be intimate and introspective buildings. Though both buildings serve as public programs, they are notably quiet and self-reflective spaces, a gallery and a chapel. The architecture and planning effectively reflect these behaviors within its walls. In the Chinese Academy of Art, the architecture is organized to provide optimal focus on the contents of the gallery. The building avoids creating distraction from the art, as the minimal outdoor connections and the curated movement from one space to another idolizes self-reflection and individual experience, encouraging one to be with the artwork and similarly, in the Capela Do Monte, to be one with God. Each of these projects by Siza share a strong minimalistic approach to their representation. Their respected use of materials is simple, recognizable, and precise in their application, as neither demonstrate unconventional, ornamental, or false representations of the material.