Le Corbusier - Villa Savoye; Unite` d’ I
inte Marie de La Tourette; Notre Da
Mies van der Rohe - Farnsw rth House; Barcelona Pavilioin;
precedent study Philip Johnson - AT&T Tower;
lass House; W
ert Ventur
Richard Neul
ove
Charl s and
e; Kaufman Iouse; Singleton Hous
mes - C s Study House #8; Br
John He duk - Wall Hou e II; H Peter Ei
n an
Hou
eyer House; De
Suicide and the House of the Mothe
House; Sa tiago de Comp stela; We ner Ce ter;
precedent study ank Ge
Walt Disney Concert Hall; Guggenhein
m Mayne - Cooper Union Bu
useum Bilbao; Abu D
g; Federal Building; Cal Trans
Rem Koolhaas - Bordeaux House; CCTV Tower; Seattle P blic Library; Wi I. M. Pei - Johnson Museum; Louvre Mu
n; National Gallery;
In 2065, as part of Cornell’s Bi-centennial, the department of architecture hosts a retrospective exhibition in the Johnson Museum of Art that examines how architecture projects itself beyond itself in a dozen case studies of famous architects of the last century beginning with Corbusier on the hundreth anniversary of his death. The exhibition critically examines the manner in which architects have successfully appropriated different forms of media in order to disseminate their architecture as well as how the understanding of iconic architecture is subordinated by the medium of communication with which we experience it. With the perspective of hindsight, the retrospective attempts to separate the historical understanding of architectural lineage from its physical artifact and redefine iconic architecture as it exists in the public conscious. At a time when iconic architecture has become designated historical landmarks and the subjects of ongoing preservation, the exhibition presents a selection of projects whose images have overwhelmed their reality. The retrospective is titled Precedent Study.
The retrospective exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the introduction of The Interface, which was designed and conceived in 2015 by a architecture student as his Bachelor thesis and released as a functioning online platform two years later. Shortly after it release, the mass adoption of The Interface displaced both real estate firms and developers by providing the virtual structure for direct access between prospective house buyers and architects, thereby subverting the traditional relation between architect and client as well as resident and landlord. The creation of The Interface changed the manner in which architects generated publicity for their work by standardizing the format in which they projected themselves into the public domain though their online profiles and the selection of images that was curated in order to represent their beliefs and their work. The exhibition curators consider twelve architects that aquired fame through the use of obsolete forms of media and the relationship of their architecture to its image.
Figure i: The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude New York City, NY 2005
Figure ii: The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude Drawing 2004
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hristo and Jeanne Claude sell original collages, models and prepatory drawings of yet unrealized large scale sculptures in order to generate funding for their eventual realization - work is generally not comissioned or paid for by a single client. Rather, collateral for projects is sourced from various art collectors. The consumers of their art are involved in a narrative in which their contribution and purchase of the artwork goes towards a larger cause - that of its construction. The purchase of the artwork involves a cyclical process in which the construction of the actual artwork leads to greater fame for the artists and increases the value of the art held by the customer. Their projects whose budgets often run into the tens of millions are financed entirely by the artists themselves through the sale of their art. The artists do not accept any donations or other forms of financial support.
The images that Christo and Jeanne-Claude sell to art collectors art not pieces that exist for themselves as art, rather they are aesthetic and component studies that the artists use to determine placement, organization and the composition of parts. They are essentially glorified construction drawings marketed as art. Unlike the way representation is deployed in architecture, the image is directly assigned value for what it is, although still in service of a larger goal. “I am an artist, and I have to have courage ... Do you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.” - Christo
Figure iii: The Treachery of Images, Magritte 1948
Figure iv: Briar Pipe, Le Corbusier Towards A New Architecture 1923
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n 1918, Le Corbusier co founded a new art movement known as Purism. His manifesto outlines the rules for which art should engage and depict subject matter as objects with empathetic integrity. Corbusier’s early paintings depict still lives of standard industrial objects that he refers to as objet-types. “Perhaps the primary tenet of purism was its insistence that everyday manufactured objects were the proper subject for modern art – and indeed were aesthetic objects in their own right. Leger’s purist works of this period are full of such objects – keys, ball-bearings, jugs, balusters, bowler hats, bottles, pipes and so on. In this context it is worth looking too at Le Corbusier’s impact on Magritte” (Wollen) The drawing of the briar pipe appears on the concluding page of Towards A New Architecture as the representational embodiment of the reality of the objet-type. However, Magritte contradicts Corbusier’s claim to the image’s faithfulness to reality by questioning the relationship between representation and the perception of reality in his famous painting, “The Treachery of Images”
In his pre surrealist period, Magritte was heavliy influenced by both Dada and Purism, co writing an unpublished purist manifesto “Pure Art in the Defense of Aesthetics” “The importance of Corbusier’s manifesto, of course, in the context of Magritte’s development as an artist, lies in its unremitting stress on the significance and aesthetic value of the ordinary and its distaste for show, for vanity and for fancy, all things which Magritte strongly distrusted – including surrealist fancy, like that of Delvaux. In fact, towards the end of his book, Le Corbusier goes on to discuss the surealists’ attitude to the object. He comments that ‘the supremely elegant relationships of their metaphors – as they impress one who is not such a “high dreamer” – are all the time very clearly dependent on the products of straightforward conscious effort, sustained and logical, cross-checked by the necessary mathematics and geometry – the necessary exactitude for the functioning of mechanisms’” (Wollen)
Figure 2: Le Corbusier, 1887-1965
Figure 1: ”The Human Condition” Magrite, 1933
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e may be intimately familiar with the form and space of Villa Savoye yet few of us have visited it in person. We encounter Corbusier’s built work in history textbooks, anthologies and essays but we oftern consider his architecture as secondary in importance to his writing. Le Corbusier designed Villa Savoye as an embodyment of his five principles as outlined in his treatise - Towards A New Architecture. Villa Savoye is less a house and more a realization or case study of Corbusier’s theories of how architecture should ideally function. It is a physical extension of Corbusier’s written work. It is a built manifesto. The villa itself was inhabited for only a short period of time before abandonment and disrepair, but by then it had been fully absorbed into the collective architectural conciousness. Because of the iconic status gained by is `publicity it became the first modernist building to be protected under historical landmark status even as its original architect was still living.
Although Villa Savoye failed as a house for Corbusier’s clients, perhaps it was never intended to be anything other than a built manifesto. In addition to his architecture, the murals and paintings made by Corbusier were all in service to the ideals described in the manifesto of the Purism branch of Cubism that he helped found. In the same way his paintings attempt a true and unbiased illustration of bottles, violins and chairs in a still life arrangement, the images of Villa Savoye are a pure form to his ideas and proof to their viability. When drawn in plan and axonometric, the roof scoops in Villa Savoye have their visual analogy in the exrtuded curves of the violin in his painting. Corbusier used his architecture to perpetuate his ideas. By strategically controlling and deploying images of his work he preserved his architecture – in making the Villa Savoye a protected national monument - and perhaps intentionally sponsoring a host of copies of his work.
However, we must acknowledge that the image is inherantly deceptive to both form and principle. “Although the building became a pilgrimage site for young architects from around the globe, the photographs, as disseminated through publications such as the definitive eight-volume Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Complète (Editions d’Architecture, Artemis, Zurich, 1967), were the true currency of influence for those who couldn’t make the journey. Even for those who did, the photographs became stand-ins for a more nuanced reality, each image fetishized into privileged and celebrated fragments, penetrating the mind and memory of the admiring viewer as a series of stills rather than a single whole. It is the images that are being lifted, twodimensional representations resurrected on the sly as three-dimensional structures. Given the difficulty of travelling to France from the USSR in the 1970s, for example, the distorting effect of representation is hardly surprising. One can assume a lot about a building based on a handful of necessarily misleading views of it, and what is remarkable is how incomplete visual information and photographic flatness can result in inhabitable space” (Berman)
Figure 3: Villa Savoye - Poissy, FR 1929
Figure 4: Nature morte au violin rouge, 1920
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Figure 6: Mies Van der Rohe, 1886 - 1969
Figure 5: ”The Blank Signature” Magrite, 1965
he Villa Savoye is typically photographed and depicted in natural wooded surroundings as a villa in the traditional sense, yet the present day building is sited in a clearing among more recently constructed structures on all sides. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house is sited between the trees of a meadow on the floodplains of the Fox river. As with most of Mies’s other built work, the Farnsworth house is best understood in plan. Today, is is an architectural monument whose location is marked on a map. The Farnsworth house received landmark status in 2006 after several floods caused extensive damage and subsequent renovation to the house’s interior. An elevated highway built over the river adjacent to the house makes the house easy to find and access by visitors. A newly completed visitors center welcomes architectural tourists to the site.
Tourists visiting Illinois enter the Farnsworth house into their search engines. They encounter the satellite image of the house just barely visible behind the trees in google maps. They set their current location and receive driving directions to the house. As the GPS on their phones tracks their progress, they follow the detailed instructions on the map. Anybody visiting the Farnsworth house must first experience the house in plan, in that google earth satellite view which clearly subordinates the house to its natural surrounding and provides a summary of the spatial experience of the house itself. Without, physically being in the house and without seeing an image of the house, the visitor can understand the relationship of the house to the environment by simply observing the white speck that marks the house in the context of the tree covered site on google maps.
The Farnsworth house is a manifestation of Mies’s concept of the open plan as a flexible space whose use was determined by inhabitants rather than any permanent spatial divisions imposed by the architect. The Farnsworth house and terrace are both literally and phenomenologically a pair of elevated floorplans that describe a romanticized concept of spatial organization absent of walls and other basic considerations of privacy and enclosure. The plan shows the house as it is in two dimensions without the interruption of solid vertical surfaces. The floor to ceiling glass windows open the interior to the natural surroundings.
Figure 7: Farnsworth House - Plano, IL 1951
Figure 8: Farnsworth House Plan 1945
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Figure 10: Philip Johnson, 1906 - 2005
Figure 9: ”Son of Man” Magrite, 1964
he Barcelona Pavilion was originally constructed in 1929 as a temporary structure in the Barcelona World exhibition. It was uninstalled in 1930, but due to iconic status within modern architecture it was rebuilt in 1986 as a permanent structure. The fame of the Barcelona Pavilion preserved its existence even after it was demolished as both an object of nostalgia and as a didactic tool and viewable precedent for future generations. Philip Johnson first met Mies van der Rohe during the initial construction of the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929. He later debuted Mies’s architecture along with work by Corbusier and Gropius in the highly influential exhibition “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Johnson is considered responsible for introducing American architecture to the principles and precedents of modernist architecture. His first built project, the glass house, became itself a highly influential precedent for architects, even though it is widely acknowledged as having derived directly from Mies’s Farnsworth House.
While Johnson was one of the earliest proponents of modernism in America, his aesthetic and formal preferences shifted with the various trends of the time, building iconic architecture according to the latest fashion. His architecture, although iconic, was still secondary to his public personality. Philip Johnson created the role of what we now refer to as the starchitect. He is known more for his personality and connections than his ideas or architecture. “he was a celebrity who produced celebrity architecture, achieving greatness mainly by talking. Likewise, his designs aimed for greatness by their image rather than by some profound innovation� (Blankenbehler) Johnson declared that aesthetic image and monumentality of design were more important tha a purely functionalist agenda. Towards the later part of his career, Johnson became aligned with Postmodernism, incorporating the historical elements such as the neo-Gothic pediment into the roof of his AT&T Tower.
Philip Johnson was important in placing in the public conciousness not only his own work but that of other architects and artists. The notion of precedent in architectural design is perhaps his creation. He is commonly criticized for having taken ideas and inspiration from the work of other architects and incorporated those directly into his own designs and architecture. In a profession which values uniqueness and originality, Johnson’s use of architectural precedents in his own work functions both to validate the original and promote his own work. John himself, is a precedent for the starchitect.
Figure 11 AT&T Tower - New York City, NY 1984
Figure 12: Beaux-Arts Ball, 1931
Figure 14: Robert Venturi, 1925 -
Figure 13: ”Not To Be Reproduced” Magrite, 1937
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t a time when most architects were looking at the architecture of Corbusier and Mies as precedents for their work, Robert Venturi found inspiration in places such as Las Vegas. He believed that architecture should be able communicate aultural meaning through universally understood signs and symbols. Together with his wife Denise Scott Brown, he authored Complexity And Contradiction and coined the terms “Duck” and “Decorated Shed” as two methods of hybridizing architecture with iconographic images. The duck describes a buildings that takes the shape of a symbolic form while the decorated shed refers to a building in which ornament is applied independently. In both cases, the architecture is made legible to a public audience through its use of culturally identifiable symbols and forms.
The Guild House contains signage above its front door that announces itself in bold letters. The building is simultaneously architecture and billboard, employing recognizable architectural motifs in a self concious manner that states its identity and function as a house, while at the same time displaying the falsity of the elements of its form though their apparent contradiction of structure. For example, the brick arch displaying itself as a purely formal symbol whose role as ornamentation is acknowledged and revealed by displaying the actual structure underneath it. In Venturi Scott Brown’s proposal for the National College Football Hall of Fame (1967), a large electronic billboard is attached to the front facade of what amounts to a decorated shed. The architecture is a foundation for the broadcast of media.
The lemonade stand is a common typology that is both billboard and informal archiecture. It is an architecture that embodies a streamlined purpose, efficiency, and form that iremains tied to its own legibility as an icon is the lemonade stand. The lemonade stand is simultaneously container for merchandise, counter for transactions, and adversiting billboard. It lives within the American cultural conciousness as a signifier of both childhood and the suburban typology. The lemonade stand is a familiar architecture , an architecture which all Americans have in more than one case directly encountered or participated in constructing. Children, when asked to draw a house, will give a depiction of a generic gabled roof, chimney and window. When asked to build a lemonade stand, they will construct a socially identifiable product - a monumental to both childhood and the entrepenurial spirit of American culture.
Figure 15: Guild House - Philadelphia, PA 1960
Figure 16: Learning from Las Vegas, 1972
Figure 18: Richard Neutra, 1892 - 1970
Figure 17: ”Attempting The Impossible” Magritte, 1928
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ulius Schulman brought Californian Modernism to the attemtion of the general public through his iconic photographs of the work of architects such as Pierre Koenig, Charles Eames and Richard Neutra. To the Hollywood directors, producers, actors and actresses who comissioned the majority of the homes by these architects, the cinemagraphic quality of Schulman’s photographs would have contained the depiction of scenes and dramatic environements that they were familiar with in their work, transplanted into domestic life. Shulman must be in many ways responsible for attracting these sympathetic Hollywood clients to the architects responsible for the designs of the houses he photographed. Schulman’s photographs are highly composed moments from specific points of view that are intended to summarize the spatial qualities of his architectural subjects that shows the manner in which they are inhabited. In the darkroom, the film was heavily edited and manipulated in order to create the right sense of atmosphere – often involving the collage of multiple exposures.
“The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building’s surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs” (Wikipedia) Many of Shulman’s architectural subjects have since been demolished, leaving his photographs as some of the only traces of the iconic modernist architecture. These photographs appear in both textbooks and art galleries as artifacts that allow students to engage important precedents which that are physically absent.
“In 1936 he returned to Los Angeles, where he was enlisted by a friend to take photographs of a new, Neutra-designed house in Hollywood with his amateur Kodak Vest Pocket camera. When Neutra saw the pictures, he asked to meet the photographer and proceeded to give him his first assignments.” (NY Times) Early in both of their careers, Neutra and Schulman developed a friendly business partnership which tied architect to photographer in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. Neutra provided the subjects for Schulman’s photography and the advancement of his art as well as his fame. At the same time, Schulman gave Neutra’s work widespread publicity and attracted more clients. Today, celebrity photographer Iwan Baan completes a similar cycle with work for starchitects such as Rem Koolhaas, photographing buildings in the casual context of their daily use and from above in chartered helicopters.
Figure 19: Kaufmann House - Palm Springs, CA 1946
Figure 20: Julius Schulman 1910 - 2009
Figure 22: Charles and Ray Eames, 1907 - 1978, 1912 - 1988
Figure 21: �Time Transfixed� Magrite, 1938
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s part of the case study house program that Julius Schulman documented for Arts and Architetcure Magazine, the Eames designed and constructed the Case Study House #8 out of mass produced materials to showcase examples of good design in affordable housing for postwar American families. The work of Charles and Ray Eames is more noted for its interor design which represents a domestic lifestyle brand which families could more easily buy into through the purchase of furniture and other household elements. Although the Eames are both considered architects they better known for their product design - especially with their series of iconic eames chairs which continue to be produced today. The chairs are featured in numerous advertisements by both Herman Miller and Vitra in magazines and on television.
The carefully arranged living spaces and the curated selection of objects they contained were avaliable for purchase by the general public. In the spirit of the 1950’s, the american household was introduced to the culture of mass consumption glorifying domestic lifestyles centered on products and appliances. Charles and Ray Eames were public figures participant in the era of Mad Men advertising. The living rooms designed and advertised by the Eames were both the subject and setting for their products. Since the television had replaced the hearth as the center of the social life of the living room of the american house, advertisements showing images of eames furniture glorifying modernist lifestyle could be seen in the televisions of living rooms across the country as an idealized foil. Living rooms, side by side in comparison, one in the space of somebody’s, one as an image on the television screen.
Popular magazines such as Playboy featured full length articles as well as advertisements for the Eames’s products alongside other fashionable architect and designers at the time. Charles and Ray Eames created a brand and a lifestyle - one that continues to be sold today.
Figure 23: Eames House - Pacific Palisades, CA 1949
Figure 24: Playboy Magazine 1961
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Figure 26: John Hejduk 1929 - 2000
Figure 25: ”The Waterfall” Magritte, 1961
ohn Hedjuk, largely know for his contributions to theory and education has limited built work. The most well know example of his architecture is the Wall House, built posthumously a year after his death. Perhaps the official website that is dedicated to it describes it the best: “With a history unlike any other, Wall House 2 redefines the limits of architectural design as a function of context in both time and culture. 28 years after the completion of the initial designs and one year after the death of architect John Hejduk, construction began in a completely different environment than where it was initially imagined.” Designs for the wall house passed from client to client and site to site - beginning in the woods of Conneticut and in the end being realized on the edge of a suburban development in the Netherlands.
The Wall House is not a house, it is a museum, it is a glorified model that has been built at full scale which manifests a symbolic division of space. The drawings and rendering of the design for the Wall house are reminiscent of the composition of Corbusier’s still life Purist paintings. The wall is a formal figure, dividing space but surving no other structional or functional purpose.
Figure 27: Wall House II, Gronigen, NL 2001
Figure 28: Wall House Model 1973
Figure 30: Peter Eisenman, 1932 -
Figure 29: �The Country Of Marvels� Magrite, 1967
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ogether with John Hedjuk, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Charles Gwarthmy, Peter Eisenman was known as one of the New York Five. Like Hedjuk, he became more influential through his teaching and writing than through his architecture, which consists of a series of overbudjet projects with leaky roofs. His early houses, some realized and others not, were the result of a series of deconstructivist formal exercises that were intended to liberate architecture from its structural constraints. Many of the houses he designed were abandoned shortly after their completions by clients due to problems with poor detailing and unlivable spaces. In recent years, efforts have been made to preserve some of these houses at great expense due to their relavance in post-structuralist architecture.
Many of his projects and writing were important for expanding the architectural discourse, howeer it is questionable as to whether it was more suitable that they should have remained drawings and ideas without being fully realized. His ideas are highly intellectualized and virtually illegible to the public, however, collaboratons with famous contemporary thinkers have brought Eisenman and his work into the attention of the architectural field. Yet, Peter Eisenman does not deny any of these accusations as a criticism, he both accepts and promotes his architecture as being hostile to the human existence. Whether his architecture is intentionally uninhabitable or if it is a pronouncement made as an afterthought is questionable, however the claim has brought himself greater fame and success as both critical thinker and controversial figure. The complexity inherent in Eisenman’s thoughts and drawings is seductive, but his ideas seem to implode at any attempts at construction.
Figure 31: Falk House - Hardwick, VT 1969
Figure 32: Falk House - Hardwick, VT 1985
Figure 34: Frank Gehry, 1929 -
Figure 33: ”Perspicacity” Magritte, 1936
Frank Gehry became a household name with the completion of the Guggenheim Bilbao and is the most famous architect living today. The iconic quality of his architecture is credited with bringing cities out of economic decline by rebranding them as cultural centres that generate revenue for local business and government as a tourist destination. The success of the Guggenheim Bilbao has resulted in an increased demand for museums and cultural landmarks in an effort to replicate the Bilbao effect. This has not only granted Gehry numerous other comissions but has become a regular venue for architects to showcase both iconic and innovative architecture at a large scale to the general public. As a postmodernist critique, Frank Gehry’s often irrational architecture has proven its ability to affect social, political and economic change while ignoring the functionalist aspects of structure and spatial efficiency.
Digital software was implemental in both designing and constructing the concert hall. Gehry’s firm used custom software to orient and place panels and steel beams together within the structure. Google street view allows us to view the dynamic form Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert hall from all four sides, in effect rotating the building as if it were a 3D model on our computer screen.
Figure 35: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA 2003
Figure 36: Walt Disney Concert Hall Digital Model 2001
Figure 38: Thom Mayne, 1944 -
Figure 37: ”The Key To The Fields” Magritte, 1936
Figure 39: Cooper Union, New York City, NYC 2009
Figure 40: Cooper Union Model 2007
Figure 42: Rem Koolhaas, 1944 -
Figure 41: ”The Castle In The Pyrenees Magritte, 1959
The house is a stage, a coreographed series of events that correspond with the logic of some programmatic label. Each floor of the Bordeaux House is a diferent setting for another scene in an act, an architetural abstractions that mimics the routines of daily life. It is a parody of modern life, on display - for a public audience in a private residence. The film is in French. It is not by Jacques Tati. An elevator, a moving platform, a floating architecture. The director; the architect; Rem Koolhaas writes the script for his movie - The Man with No Legs. “Living Architectures” is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture which turns away from the current trend of idealizing the representation of our architectural heritage.”
“Through these films, Ila BĂŞka and Louise Lemoine put into question the fascination with the picture, which covers up the buildings with preconceived ideas of perfection, virtuosity and infallibility, in order to demonstrate the vitality, fragility and vulnerable beauty of architecture as recounted and witnessed by people who actually live in, use or maintain the spaces they have selected. Thus, their intention is to talk about architecture, or rather to let architecture talk to us, from a point of view, both personal and subjective. Unlike most movies about architecture, these films focus less on explaining the building, its structure and its technical details than on letting the viewer enter into the invisible bubble of the daily intimacy of some icons of contemporary architecture. Through a series of moments and fragments of life, an unusually spontaneous portrait of the building would emerge. This experiment presents a new way of looking at architecture which broadens the field of its representation.â€?
The Living Architectures films allow us to live vicarously through the image of architecture depicted in a narrative format. The goal of the series may be to show the true nature of architecture in the format of the movie, but the portrait shown is only another layer of superficiality determined by the angle of the camera and the eye of the director.
Figure 43: Bordeaux House - Bordeaux, FR 1998
Figure 44: Koolhaas Houselife, Movie 2008
The Museum is an icon visible from all parts of the city of Ithaca. Both its form and its siting allow it to be viewed from numerous vantage points in the surrounding landscape. In the same way Mount Fuji is to Tokyo, the shape of the Johnson Museum is a landmark that is both the subject of art and its container.
Figure 46: I. M. Pei, 1917 -
Figure 45: �Mental Complacency� Magritte, 1950
The shape is both indescribable and ubiquitous. It can be seen and recognized from nearly anywhere, from miles around yet what it is is almost impossible to articulate. Luckily It has a name - The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Figure 47: Johnson Museum - Ithaca, NY 1973
Figure 48: South Wind Clear Sky, 36 views of Mount Fuji 1826