The Artifice of Water

A Senior thesis submitted to the School of Architecture of Princeton University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Architecture.

THE ARTIFICE OF WATER: Fluidity and Fantasy in the works of Charles W. Moore

Ruth Hsin Chang Adviser: Lucia Allais Second Reader: Beatriz Colomina April 24, 2012 1

Ornamental Forms, Charles Moore 8

Acknowledgements First, I want to acknowledge and thank Professor Lucia Allais, under whose guidance I developed a thesis I was not only happy with but also excited about (a rare and precious thing in these times) and whose insights enlightened my often muddled mind at every meeting. I am grateful also for the comments of Professor Spyros Papapetros through the fall semester, which provided the basis of today’s research. In addition, I am also very thankful for the opportunity to visit collections and invaluable resources at the Princeton University Visual Resources Center, the Alexander Architectural Archives at University of Texas in Austin, and the Moore/Andersson compound, made possible by the Class of ‘55 Senior Thesis Fund.

To those friends who have spent time and brain cells on me and my fickle relationship with research and writing: thank you, without you this thesis would have little seen the light of day.

Lastly, it is thanks to my parents, whose going on is my going on, whose lives inspire and fortify me, that I can believe in such things as substance and excellence. Thank you for being my source and inspiration.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

11

1: Written Water as theory

17 21 24 28 30 34

2: Placed Heterotopia as places

-Orinda House (1962) -Sea Ranch Condominium 1 and Unit 9 (1965) -Athletic Clubs 1 & 2 (1964-71)

43 52 63 67

3: Shimmering Fluidity as history

75

Conclusion References

111 115 121

-Dissertation -Historical Fluidity -Three essential qualities -The Mirage -Designing for arid sites

-Piazza d’Italia (1978) -Wonderwall (1984) -Austin Compound

-List of figures

81 94 102

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introduction “It conforms to whatever shape it’s put in but never loses its internal structure. You can spray it, pour it, divide it, and still every piece is part of a whole. Match it against rock and it appears to yield but with time the rock’s shape is changed.

It continues to flow in a new shape of its own making.”

Buzz Yudell describing Moore’s fascination with water1 Simultaneity of structure and looseness, part and whole, passivity and intrusion‒ such are the paradoxical qualities of water. These watery qualities of structure, shape, substance, movement and time also find their architectural parallels in the work of Charles W. Moore.

This thesis examines Moore’s lifelong interest in water and its role in creating fantasy. Although Moore had worked on and with water since the beginning of his career in 1960s, this crucial element of his work has been largely neglected by historians.

An architect categorized as a reactionary post-modernist, Moore’s designs are often dichotomized by historians into either richly eclectic or plain ordinary. As such, the 1 Buzz Yudell, “Moore in Progress,” GA Houses 7, “Special Issue: Charles Moore and Company” (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita Tokyo Co., Ltd., 1980).

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current literature on Moore provides an extremely fragmented image of his architecture.

Instead of tracing the frayed edges of Moore’s many projects, this thesis posits water as the primary motivation behind Moore’s apparently eclectic career. This thesis charts the water, so to speak, of Charles Moore’s architectural career, as water shifts shape through his life to become realizable architectural concepts, flowing from writing to bathtubs to the shimmer of water in formal plasticity and historical continuity.

Using water as a spatial model is particularly helpful to understand its direct link to Moore’s design production. As Moore was well aware, water posits a freedom of forms, and yet it can also be made rigid with substances or breed insects, fish, plants.

Water also provides a kind of “surfacial” model, as its surface forever intervenes between our eyes and what lies beneath the waters. Resulting from this, the surface acts to distort but also to transport a new visual transformation of watery depths. Water appears shallower at the surface than it actually is; my approach and reading of Moore’s works also reflect a profundity of meaning and lived reality hiding beneath the surface.

In the first chapter, I examine Moore’s 1957 doctoral dissertation as an original and experimental work. Moore was the first of his kind, being the first student to initiate the PhD program at Princeton University. The newness and inventive nature of his program as a whole characterizes the style and intent of his dissertation. The aim was to bridge history and practice. His postured solution: water. Moore used water as a kind of critical lens to selectively engage parts of history and sew together various geographies, histories, and authorship with water’s thread. He not only used water as a way to critique historical modernism, his writing style exhibited a fluidity that reflects his object of research. Using the term “aqueous vision” from Robert Slutzky’s article on “Aqueous humor” in 1980 to characterize Moore’s particular kind of water, I argue that Moore’s water does not promise a clear, flowing but rather, ambiguous, viscous, and pluralistic world. The design component of his dissertation, furthermore, uses fountains to moisten

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the aridity of existing sites. Water sets the stage for Moore’s subsequent architecture by informing Moore with a toolbox, with tools of splashing, streaming, squirting, flowing, bubbling, from which to critically engage history for a new architecture.

In chapter two, Moore’s domestic architecture in the early 1960s comes to the fore. At the Orinda home and the Sea Ranch condominium, Moore confronted real sites with water. Intimacy over free-flowing, communal waters removes the inhabitant into an enjoyment that recalls the Roman baths, and challenges the existing notions of Moore’s place-making as vernacular or even ordinary. Here, I argue that Moore’s water removes the sense of the vernacular and the ordinary and inserts instead an idealized world or heterotopia of a public-domestic life. Moore used surface ornaments and objects, such as columns of the aedicula and supergraphic painting, to achieve this removal into the fantasy world.2 I will explore briefly the Glass House by Philip Johnson to illustrate the differences in the treatment of showering and domestic privacy in comparison to Moore’s public ritual of bathing. Public water into the home disintegrates the idea of place and privacy because water brings in a new sense of place and a new set of rituals to follow in the injected heterotopia.

The last chapter deals with Moore’s public projects where fluidity becomes an architectural theme onto itself. Beyond the use of water as an architectural material and heterotopia -making device, I show that Moore took fluidity as a characteristic of architectural temporality. This section harks back to the first chapter where Moore first experiments with a composite authorship of his sources with a pointed purpose of finding his own architectural model. I explore this notion of fluid time through their visible manifestation in Moore’s work of plasticity of forms and continuity of the surface and will discuss Frederick Kiesler’s concept of the Endless House as well as Mark Wigley’s analysis of the plastic in his article, “The Cult of Synchronization.” The projects at Piazza 2

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986).

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d’italia, the Wonderwall and his home in Austin, Texas all exhibit “historical” ornaments that are inundated and thus transformed with water. Historical ornaments, for Moore, are as changeable and plastic as water is. The kind of fluidity discussed here is not the literal substance of water. Instead, a shimmer of fluidity is called to mind, as upon the surface of Moore’s architecture, history’s timeline folds back on itself, becoming a fluid pool wherein historical forms float.

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Fluidity and fantasy

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“[Our use of water] should make use of the mythic as well as the real continuity of water to develop a suggestion of distant, almost infinite space, even while it is developing an immediacy, a sense of contact with the spectator.”

Charles Moore, “Water and Architecture”1 A mangled “I” and an added “D” grace the title page of Charles Moore’s dissertation, which reads, “WATER AIND ARCHITECTURE.” Not “IN:” the correction is made. And not just on the opening page, brown ink markings shift names, years and locations amongst the 245 pages of Charles Moore’s PhD dissertation. The move from preposition to conjunction makes a subtle but significant statement: fluid water is as solid, as tangible as architecture. Though students at Princeton distinguished themselves through their interest in architecture history and theory, Moore chose an even more abstract topic of research than most of his classmates, water. One of them, Hugh Hardy, recalls in amazement, “Rather than prepare an architectural thesis about buildings, his was about fountains, legitimizing their ephemera as the stuff of serious study.”2 1 Abstract, “Water and Architecture,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1957).

2 Kevin P. Keim (ed.), An Architectural Life: Memoirs and Memories of Charles W. Moore (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1996), 54.

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This chapter looks closely at just how Moore approaches water and its “ephemera,” or better generally addressed as fantasy. In his dissertation, in which Moore demonstrates a literary and historical fluidity that testify for the qualities and the artifices of water. The complementary fluidity between Moore’s methodology and subject paved the way for Moore’s eventual explorations of water and fantasy in his building projects.

For the moment, however, the student Moore in the late 1950s found in water’s profound link to man’s psyche and ability to morph ideas and emotions a powerful theoretical apparatus, with which he critiqued the contemporary architecture of Modernism, specifically, the International style.3 Moore’s years at Princeton University coincide with the peak of the International Style in the late 1950s.4 More than the modern style earlier in the century, the International Style refined the ethics of functional purity and emphasized the prisms of steel and glass. Once an elegance meant to express democratic ideals, the dogma of functionalism soon became tied to the economics of post-World War II reconstruction and the American corporate identity.5 It is important to note that the International Style, the contemporary architecture of Moore’s student years, took place near the end of modernism’s long lifespan. Writing in “Recollection from a Watermelon” (1968), Moore recalls that his generation had merely inherited “an old revolution,” which had been steadily losing richness and relevance.6 The media of steel and glass had not always been the simple, dehumanized boxes mass-produced in the 1950s. In fact, the medium of glass first introduced in the Crystal Palace for the 1851 World Exhibition in London, considered a proto-modernist design, was anything but pure and clear. Indeed, historians have instead read complexity and ambiguity of meaning on every level at the Crystal Palace. For example, the essence 3 Charles W. Moore, “Water and Architecture,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1957), iv.

4 Smith referred to Miesian and Minimalist principles by the 1960s; Ray Smith, Supermannerism: New attitudes in post-modern architecture (New York: Dutton, 1977), 68.

5 Ibid.

6 Charles Moore, “Recollections from a watermelon,” Space Design, no. 11 (1968), 5.

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Figure 1: Barrel vault of transept showing color scheme of Owen Jones (colored illustration)

of the craftsman through air mingled with the blown glass was interpreted by modern critics as evidence for a critique of labor during the industrial revolution.7 In addition, the simultaneous transparency and solidity of glass both baffled and excited the Victorian senses. Indeed, even glass is once a poured liquid and carries the reflection and distortion qualities of water. The critics of the Crystal Palace at the time, furthermore, even anthropomorphize the building to become August Pugin’s “glass-monster,” or Thomas Carlyle’s “big glass soap bubble.”8 Even in thin sheets, glass possesses an incredible potential for fantasy.

Even then, the Crystal Palace embodied the seed of a duplicity in transparency.

Though clear, the glass really acted as a “crystalline veil” of many facets, distorting objects and nations under the pretense of equality.9 The glass and steel of the International Style would continue this paradox. Ultimately for Moore, modern buildings meant a lost cause, an unfulfilled promise, becoming “gridded facades of modular office towers all across American and apartments that looked like ice-cube trays stranding on end.”10 When questioned about his opinions toward the “slickness” of the International Style in an interview with Heinrich Klotz and John Cooks, Moore remarks of its duplicitous 7 Isobel Armstrong, “Language of Glass: The Dreaming Collection,” in Buzard, James; Childers, Joseph W.; Gilloly, Eileen (ed.). Victorian Prism: refractions of the Crystal Palace. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 60.

8 “Fairy Structure/Glass-monster/conservatory,” University of Kansas, http://spencer.lib.ku.edu/ exhibits/greatexhibition/fairy.htm (accessed March 2012).

9 Donald Preziosi, “Crystalline Veil,” in Brain of the earth’s body: Art, Museum, and the Phatasms of Modernity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2003).

10 David Littlejohn, Architect: Life and Works of Charles W. Moore (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 123.

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nature: “I want to know what lies behind the statement, or what incredibly sordid deals are made in the smoke-filled back rooms.”11 Moore read architecture as a statement, liable to many interpretations and mixed intent. For him, the International Style did not communicate enough. The discrepancy between the appearance of transparency and the realities of a complicated world reduced architecture to the “aridity” to which Moore referred, which lay in the long-barren, “nearly ubiquitous” boxes, in mid-century American architecture.12 Caught in this crucial junction between corporate modernism and something new, Moore’s dissertation was a conscious move from the dogma of functionalism, from “the tyrannies and prejudices of Princeton in the fifties” to the life and richness in the forms and narratives of history.13 By the time Moore wrote his dissertation, he had already built and taught architecture and even went through war.14 Coming back from the Korean War, Moore applied to the schools of architecture at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton for a Ph.D. in architectural history on the GI Bill; where the other schools rejected him or never replied, Princeton responded with a letter proposing a “one-man curriculum” with the goal of building “bridges” between history and practice, combining a professional degree with the Ph.D. through the dissertation. Indeed Moore’s Ph.D. in architecture was the first at Princeton. His aims in coming to Princeton was very specific, which is to take from history in order to build. Moore was not interested in creating more historical texts, but wished to find in history the inspirations for a new architecture, which makes his dissertation as a remarkable and “radical” departure from the modernist concept that architecture must be always new and self-referent.15 The goal, evident in his dissertation, 11 John A. Cook; Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with architects: Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi (Holt Rinheart and Winston, 1975), 242.

12 Littlejohn, Architect, 123.

13 Keim, An Architectual Life, 55.

14 Littlejohn, Architect, 118.

15 Ibid., 119.

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was entirely to wield water as a new lens to look at modernism and all of architectural history. The aim of this chapter is to unveil the ways Moore grappled with water as a tool by which to filter and re-view his education at Princeton and his contemporary architecture towards a fluidity applicable to inspiring qualities of a new architecture.

Dissertation In the dissertation, Moore dove deep into literary and historical research to support 160 pages devoted to 1) the medium, 2) the form, and 3) the content of water.

After the triad, a fourth section contains the design component to the dissertation: a series of fountain projects for two sites. In the first section, Moore treated water as if a plated specimen under the microscope. He broke down its natural aspects and explored the methods of physical manipulation in its use by man. In the second section, Moore demonstrated water in tandem with other architectural features such as landscaping, plants, sculptures, and spectacles like sound, fire and light. In the third section, Moore looked at the emotional and psychological impacts of water through past examples.

The last two chapters present his design project where his research could finally be applied (even theoretically), involving a series of water fountains that intervenes existing architecture and a project designing the route leading up to the Glen Canyon dam in the Arizona desert.

In the introduction, Moore began by citing “dissatisfaction” as his primary motivation. The dissertation seeks “whatever about water would be useful in the formulation of our own approach to design.” His writing aimed “not to compile a catalog of effects which we could copy” which would be more the role of the art historian.16 Instead the dissertation was directed “toward the discovery of whatever about water would be useful in the formulation of our own approach to design,” fulfilling the task as a bridge between architectural history and practice, which was the whole premise and goal 16 100.

Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010),

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of his attaining the doctorate degree at Princeton.17 Though “water” hails and flows through this work, Moore’s dissertation is, in a way, not about water. Water was used as a tool, a lens through which the world surrounding Moore was distorted to reflect Moore’s own new world: The triumph of the unadorned form, the simple statement, the ‘glass box’ demands immediate attention to the problems of developing architectural character. The architecture today must seek a richness and depth which will make architectural compositions more than just clear, simple ideas, and will give them meaning not only for the seconds required to glance at them but also for the minutes required to approach them and go through them, and for the years required to live in them, and for the weather to act upon them.18 For Moore, this “richness and depth” require a lived-through experience more than mere technical transparency or adherence to a functionalist formula. His philosophy would not be generated from a forced, transparent ideal but rather something rounded out with the passing of time and weather. Moore’s dissertation would reveal no clear, freeflowing transparency, but rather exhibits an affinity to what Robert Slutzky—painter and architectural theorist—discusses in his article written in 1980, entitled “Aqueous Humor.”

It is useful to interpret this text as it offers a re-reading of transparency of the cubist medium that parallels the Moore’s approach to water as a filter for distortion.

“Aqueous Humor” addresses Cubism and, like the earlier article written in 1971 by Colin Rowe, “Transparency,” prods at the consistency of space on the canvas as well as in architecture. Here, Slutzky appropriates and reassigns the subject and methodology of Cubist painters. Instead of “ethereal clarities,” the cubist medium is that of “dense, gelatinous ambiguities. It savors water rather than air, the contain-like still-life rather than the open landscape... It suggests an equilibrium, but one that oscillates and vibrates.”19 The needle of this oscillating balance sways between form and meaning, creating new 17 18

Charles W. Moore, “Water and Architecture,” vi, v.

Moore, “Water and Architecture,” v.

19

Robert Slutzky, “Aqueous Humor,” Oppositions 19-20 (Spring-Winter 1980), 30.

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CHANG | THE ARTIFICE OF WATER Figure 2: Millowner’s Association Building, Le Corbusier, 1954

“form-meanings” through the distortion inherent in the contained, complex, “aqueous vision” in Cubism and later, in the architecture of Le Corbusier.

First analyzing Le Corbusier’s architectural drawings, Slutzky noted the raised perspective vanishing point, “as though the eye were more than naturally levitated above the ground plane.”20 The effect is to read the ground plane as “tipped forward” and works to suppress the perspective into two-dimensionality. This distorted space results in a “still-life vision” that contains the “maximum of conflicting information” within the container of the drawing.21 In the same way, Le Corbusier’s architecture also retained a formal plasticity acted on it through architectural moves. At the Millowners’ Association Building, for example, the facade experience the “thrust of the ramp” which “causes a counterthrust to its right.”22 It is here that the “gelatinous” appears, as Slutzky writes, “as if the volume had been filled with a gelatinous substance that, compressed by an outside force in one place, exploded in another to neutralize this compression.”23 This aqueous, fluid handling of the wall and space means a “new plasticity” of “responsive energies” inherent in what Slutzky calls the “aqueous vision.”24 The reassignment of the modern tenet of steel and glass, of space and light of Corbusier’s work, to the sticky, viscous waters of rebounding energies and gestures is a This is a preview for Ruth Chang’s 2012 undergraduate thesis. feat indeed. Still, what is remarkable about Slutzky’s claim is not only the act of posttext is viewable at Princeton Manuscript Library. reading andFull substitution, but also the namingUniversity of a worldMudd of new form-meanings derived from an “aqueous repository of all things,” made possible through the watery lens. This 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., 32.

Ibid.

Ibid., 41.

Ibid., 42 Ibid., 30.

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