lunch 2: Dialect

lunch volume 2 : dialect

lunch volume 2 : dialect

University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall P.O. Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-412

volume 2

dialect

architecture and landscape architecture

volume 2

dialect

architecture and landscape architecture University of Virginia School of Architecture

lunch volume 2: dialect is published with support from the University of Virginia School of Architecture and The School of Architecture Foundation.

Cover by Shanti Fjord Levy Inside front cover photo by Kirk Martini Inside back cover photo by Ryan Moody Copyright Š 2007 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved Library of Congress Card Catalog Number is available.

Editors: Shanti Levy, David Malda, and Ryan Moody Printed in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA

University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall P.O. Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122 434.924.3715 www.arch.virginia.edu/lunch archlunch@virginia.edu

ISBN # 978-0-9771024-4-0 ISSN # 1931-7786

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dialect

9 Global Change

Kristina Hill 13

Architecture Working for the Environment: The Learning Barge

Phoebe Crisman

27 Developing Architecture

Russell Katz 33 Watts Going On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

U.Va. School of Architecture 49 small gods

Mark Phemister 51 Building Synthesis: Integrating Form and Performance

Jenny Lovell

Institue for Design Research, NYC Ben Thompson 63 Suspended Disbelief: the Work of INFOLAB

Nataly Gattegno 69 luckily, luckily: A Measured Exploration into Globalization,

Shipping and the Movement of Goods

Marc Alan Howlett 77 LAX Studio: Beyond the Plastic Fluorescent Spectacle

Jason Johnson/Howard Kim 87

Terra Firma

Rodrigo Abela/Ian Horton

93

Roof Bog System

Keyur Shah

95 Space in Landscape Architecture

Zoe Edgecomb

97 The Space Between Things: Liminality and the Human Psyche

Katherine Pabody 103 From Germany to Japan and Turkey: Modernity, Locality, and

Bruno Taut’s Trans-national Details from 1933 to 1938

Burak Erdim 117 Mexico City + Venice + Charlottesville

graduate traveling studios

me-andering footnotes and my-opic afterthoughts

Peter Waldman 131 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon

Jim Richardson 141 The Practice of Drawing

Michael Vergason 147 Home and Horizon in the Work of Jens Jensen

Ryan Moody 150 Construction

Kirk Martini

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lunch

Recipe: For future volumes, lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Digital materials and submission inquiries should be sent to the lunchbox at archlunch@virginia.edu.

The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication. We are grateful to Elizabeth Fortune, Susan Ketron, Derry Voysey Wade, Tom Hogge and the School of Architecture Foundation. Further thanks to our faculty advisors, Beth Meyer and Phoebe Crisman.

To support lunch, please contact: School of Architecture Foundation PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122 434.924.7149 www.arch.virginia.edu/alumni/giving

The word dialect has origins in discourse and conversation. During the 17th and 18th centuries this word began to connote a subordinate form of a language. More recent linguistic investigations have reframed dialect within an understanding of languages as contextual and temporal, constantly shifting in response to social and economic events. In this interpretation, every dialect bears the marks of the environment and resident culture that created it, a certain specificity of place.

Within the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia a new dialect of the language of architecture and landscape architecture is evolving. In particular, it expresses the dynamic and tightly linked relationship between the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture within our combined program. Our work embodies something of both the friction and symbiosis of this relationship, and we communicate it to others through our words and our making. Rather than an attempt to fix or formalize our own emerging language, this issue of lunch is an initiative to engage its diversity. We present our work and the work of those who impact this place as a means of honing its intentions and revealing its character.

One characteristic of a dialect is its limited audience. At a time when changing ecological and social conditions demand a new level of interdisciplinary action, we are concerned that the language of architecture is increasingly isolated. It is a goal of this publication to facilitate an expanded conversation. In this issue we include pieces that interpret dialect through a variety of lenses. As well as work by architecture and landscape architecture students and faculty, contributions come from architectural history and urban planning, as well as practioners who challenge sharp boundaries between disciplines.

Shanti Fjord Levy David Malda Ryan Moody Charlottesville, VA April 28, 2007

Global Change Kristina Hill Associate Professor and incoming Director of the Program in Landscape Architecture

We live in a time when most people don’t realize the enormity of the changes that are beginning to happen to our biophysical world, and the implications those changes have for our social worlds. That’s strange, given the incredible level of information flow that we are exposed to and participate in daily. What I sometimes refer to for the sake of argument as “the American media bubble” can make it seem to a reasonable person that the environmental changes which are now being observed in relationship to climate change are minor, and will come with benefits as well as costs. Very few educated Americans, people who were both born with talent and had the privilege of advanced study, have read the reports and summaries of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change. Perhaps even fewer have read the Stern Review, in which Nicholas Stern, the Finance Minister of the United Kingdom and former chief economist of the World Bank, predicted that one likely consequence of global climate disruptions is a deep and global economic depression.

Let me be clear, however, that I’m no alarmist by predisposition. There are no canned goods stored in my basement, even if maybe there should be. I’m a gambler, prone to believing that cities are a new phenomenon that has not yet fully emerged as an artifact and expression of human culture, and that they (or rather, we) can adapt to change. But the fact that most of the people who are designing buildings, infrastructure, and built landscapes in the United States are not paying serious attention to the risks of our situation is not evidence of gambling, it’s evidence of anachronism. And even if it is a conscious gamble on the part of some policy makers or design professionals, it’s an unethical one, since the people who have the most to lose are not being consulted on their willingness to take on the risks.

lunch : dialect

Global Change Kristina Hill

Based on what I’ve seen in my first term here, the education U.Va. provides to its graduate students in Architecture and Landscape Architecture is excellent. The skill level of the students is very high when it comes to representing their ideas, and the level of engagement with international and regional urban social justice issues is commendable. But if someone asked me whether - from my professional perspective - there’s a gap in what is being taught and learned versus what “should” be, I would have to say yes, that I believe there is one.

Before coming to the University of Virginia Kristina Hill was an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle

The situation is complicated by the fact that there are two categories of action needed simultaneously. Our behavior, our buildings, our landscapes and our machines must become much more energy efficient in order to limit the degree of climate disruptions. And at the same time, we need to propose designs that will allow cities to adapt to more extreme weather events, floods, droughts, water shortages and rising sea levels. These designs will probably occur in a context of very limited public funds, and need to address both function and social inequities. Furthermore, unless we give up on biodiversity, there’s an almost overwhelming set of problems to address in order to help non-human species survive these changes and protect ourselves from the consequences of losing them.

The implications for our work in design and planning at U.Va. are significant and immediate.

Our students will need to propose infrastructure systems and site-scale strategies that are affordable, equitable and effective supporters of both ecosystems and neighborhoods.

Are we teaching the right skills? Are we helping our students understand the dynamics of environmental, political and economic changes that will affect their work during the next few decades? Are the values of social justice, beauty, environmental health and inclusive design processes sufficient tools with which to enter the arena of major change in cities? Or are they instead the compass that should guide the use of more specific (and more strategic) professional tools and creative skills?

The good news is that so many faculty and students at U.Va. have already begun to take on parts of this very large task. Critical issues are being addressed in studios on New Orleans and Mexico City, in projects building educational barges and modular housing, and others addressing social justice in Washington DC and coastal Virginia. My question is, are we dealing with these issues in ways that take advantage of our collective expertise about how the world is changing? Should we be asking more radically integrated questions? Should we be partnering with other schools to provide greater benefit to society as a whole, rather than competing for the same limited pool of grants?

However we answer these questions, this is unequivocally our time and our place. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.” We have the unique opportunity to learn something about what it means to be human in our time. Our biggest challenge may be to capitalize on our own very human ability to adapt.

I would like to call on students and faculty to look at the predictions for change with scholar’s eyes, and to take a position. I hope that position will gracefully and equitably treat environmental adaptation as our most significant priority for design.

11 Global Change Kristina Hill

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In the last few decades, cities have begun to adopt and implement more ecologically-based policies and designs. From Stockholm to Seattle and Vancouver to Los Angeles, urban districts have been taking on the challenges of meeting new functional goals. Instead of applying static approaches alone, design theories and practice have started to incorporate the aesthetic and functional aspects of dynamic ecological systems. As a community of scholars, practitioners and teachers, we need to engage the real magnitude of the challenges we face and, in my view, we need to sharpen our priorities.

The Learning Barge: Architecture Working for the Environment Phoebe Crisman Assistant Professor of Architecture

Architecture is assumed to have the power to radically transform the built environment when architects are dedicated to building community and promoting the public good.

Though most architects strive to achieve these noble goals, their success requires the joint commitment of allied disciplines, clients, regulatory agencies, communities and individual inhabitants. Architecture students are often unaware of this reality, as well as the opportunities and complexities of practicing their discipline. New forms of research, pedagogy and practice are necessary to promote creative collaboration and positive change in the world. In response to this condition, the Learning Barge initiative at the University of Virginia School of Architecture engages community partners and practicing professionals in order to design and construct a floating, self-sustaining, environmental field station with positive, wide-reaching social and educational benefits. Professor Phoebe Crisman structured this multi-semester, interdisciplinary project with an innovative pedagogy that demands rigorous design research across many scales, while advancing a new model of design leadership and civic engagement. As noted by Gerald McCarthy, Director of the Virginia Environmental Endowment, the project is “exactly the kind of scholarship and research that makes beneficial change happen in the real world. Students learn, faculty develop, and communities benefit.�

13 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

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If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education. –Thomas Jefferson, 1818

The project has received several national awards, including the 2006 National Student Collaborative Design Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, a 2007 NCARB Prize for the Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, a 2007 P3 Sustainability Award from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the 2007 Youth Council for Sustainable Science and Technology P3 Design Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The diverse disciplines and professional organizations that have commended the project demonstrate both the breadth and depth of this design research initiative.

15 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

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synopsis Located on a highly polluted tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, the Learning Barge will provide interactive education for children and adults about how the river and human activities are inextricably linked. Unlike environmental education centers located in pristine nature, the Barge will traverse an important urban river and major world port.

Moving to a different river restoration site every few months, the Learning Barge will teach participants about the tidal estuary ecosystem, wetland and oyster restoration, sediment remediation, and sustainable urban and architectural practices. In partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, NOAA and several public school districts, the Elizabeth River Project (ERP) will operate the Learning Barge and offer public outreach, environmental research and education activities. These programs will serve a large local population of economically disadvantaged and academically underperforming children that would not have otherwise been exposed to the river and the science education that it offers. Carefully designed to embody and clearly demonstrate environmental lessons, the Barge harnesses energy from sun and wind, collects rainwater and filters gray water with native plants, and utilizes recycled materials and green technologies.

learn The Barge will be a floating learning station and working platform that brings people to observe and help with important river restoration work, and provides the inimitable experience of river occupation to local residents who otherwise would not have the opportunity to directly interact with and thus better understand the systems and functions of the watershed in which they live. Because the US Navy and private industries own most of the waterfront, an observation point could not be established on shore. The river, however, lies within the public domain. The sitelessness of the barge is a great asset within this decentralized context. As ERP cleans the river creek by creek, the Learning Barge will move to the work site and serve as both a place of observation and a place for staging operations. It will be the symbol and consistent element that reveals the common purpose linking disparate sites along the river. In keeping with ERP’s strategy that avoids singular, big-budget remediation projects in favor of multiple, smaller projects that proceed over time, the Learning Barge will evolve and educate, “one creek at a time.”

17 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

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connect The Learning Barge initiative emerged from research into the concept of Sites Out of Mind— those residual spaces and disenfranchised populations rarely addressed by architects. The Elizabeth River and her shores is such an unseen, yet central site connecting the cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. One of the most polluted waterways on the Eastern Seaboard, the Elizabeth is a culturally complex, economically challenged, pollution-ridden tidal estuary with river health indicators that show high PAH levels, instances of cancer in indicator species, reduced biomass and degenerating biodiversity.

The Elizabeth River Project is an environmental non-profit organization whose mission is to clean and restore the river. A U.Va. partnership with ERP was forged and the Learning Barge was conceived as an educational outreach project that would help the community to better understand how the river functions as an industrial, social and ecological unit, while reinforcing the concept that local human settlement and industrial activity has ecological ramifications on the greater Chesapeake Watershed and the Ocean itself.

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19 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

educate The Barge’s primary mission is education. The Use Plan estimates that the Learning Barge will touch the lives of more than 19,000 people each year via school field trips, university research activities, teacher training, adult workshops and public events. This semi-nomadic field station and its curriculum will take advantage of the unique qualities of the particular docking site, as well as the student grade level. For instance, the Middle and High School curriculum will address issues relevant to the science portion of the Standards of Learning, such as living systems and life processes, resource management and conservation, energy, habitats, data collection and weather. Additionally, the Barge will be utilized as a site for students to develop skills in writing, drawing and mapping.

U.Va. students envisioned scenarios for several days of onboard activities, thereby concretizing the range of opportunities afforded by the architecture, season, location and the age of visitors. Funded by a Virginia Environmental Endowment grant secured by project director, six teachers and three science coordinators from three public school districts along the Elizabeth River developed the initial ideas into a realizable curriculum with specific lesson plans. By cultivating the education of conservation and recognition of how our actions impact the environments that we occupy, the Barge will be a crucial instrument in creating responsible, future citizens and stewards of the land.

21 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

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restore The Elizabeth River is a tidal estuary with a low flush-rate that amplifies the problems of waterborne pollutants. Toxins do not leave the vicinity until they degrade, which in some cases may take centuries. For this reason the river bottom is highly contaminated. The mapping of US EPA data revealed that the vast majority of contemporary pollutants are smokestack emissions that settle onto the land. Surface water takes contaminants directly back into the estuary, thereby making runoff the largest current pollution concern for the Elizabeth River watershed that is located within a metropolitan area of 1.6 million inhabitants. This is the very reason that the Barge is so incredibly important; residents need to know the implications of the way they live. Though ERP and the Learning Barge team acknowledge industry as a necessary part of a healthy economy in the region, responsible architects and citizens of the watershed must ask: how do we enable people to continue to live and thrive within in this industrialized context? The Barge will link natural systems within the local ecology and its integrated engineered systems in order to efficiently function in a sustainable way, and educate visitors in the process.

recycle In addition to these green systems, the use of new materials was minimized. Donated and recycled material from local fabrication facilities and scrap-yards was used whenever possible. All materials were put through a rigorous Life-Cycle Analysis and selected to be integral with the educational program of the Barge. An important agenda for the students involved was to implore the true meaning of “sustainable�. If designers of the built environment only seek to lessen the degree of harm to the planet, then the situation will never improve, but only do less damage; this is not sustainable. The Barge will actually leave the river-based sites cleaner than when it arrived. interact Professors and professionals in several disciplines have donated their expertise and time to work with the students throughout the process. For instance, naval architect Eric Matherne (Matherne Marine Design) provided invaluable maritime code and construction advice and completed construction documents for the barge hull. Students learned about state-of-theart automated cutting and welding processes while visiting the Norfolk shipyard that will fabricate the hull and steel structure. Architect Michael Petrus (Crisman+Petrus Architects) was a weekly participant during the Fall 2006 Intention>Fabrication Technology Seminar, which focused on design development and detailing of the classroom envelope. Structural engineer Dennis Moler (Moler & Associates) advised on the design of the classroom’s steel structure. Ecologist Edward Morgereth (Biohabitats) and his colleagues offered guidance on plant selection and the filtration basin system. These are just a few of the many advisors and collaborators that have made this complex project possible.

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23 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

sustain The Learning Barge will be independent of the power, water and waste grid by generating electricity from the sun and wind, optimizing efficiency, maximizing daylight and natural ventilation, and reducing consumption. The Barge will utilize mechanical, electrical and water systems to replicate the self-cleansing properties of the natural ecology that it educates about and operates on. In a healthy wetland the plants remove contaminants and make the water habitable for microorganisms that begin the food chain. In order to perform off the grid and prevent further damage to the local ecology, the Learning Barge will be equipped with several generative and sustaining technologies. Professor Paxton Marshall and his students from the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences refined and detailed the mechanical and electrical systems. A photovoltaic array and wind turbine will produce power for the barge and the electric engine of a sixteen-foot skiff. Deep cycle batteries will provide over three days of storage capacity onboard. An evacuated tube solar hot water array will heat the radiant flooring system in the classroom.

The systems have been sized to provide required power, while encouraging Barge visitors to monitor and reduce energy consumption onboard, thereby developing an awareness of how and where electricity is generated and then consumed. Multiple water-saving and filtration devices will be employed on the Barge. Rainwater will be collected and filtered for hand washing, composting toilets will eliminate waste while creating soil for plantings, and onboard filtration basins will use native freshwater plants to clean gray water. River water will be hand-pumped into a separate set of basins where native estuarine plants will purify and release the captured water.

inspire A convergence of recent societal trends has placed architecture in a powerful position to influence positive change through design insight—an insight that must be fostered in the academy. Greater public concern for the environment and sustainability creates a favorable situation for design innovation and the architect’s role as a public advocate possessing both creativity and technical expertise. Strong skills in creative problem solving and visual communication position them well in an increasingly image-based society. To this end, architectural education must promote critical insight and the material ability to make visions real. When reflecting on her participation in the 2007 Learning Barge studio, architecture student Erin Dorr wrote: “The hands-on nature of the project is perhaps its most valuable asset. For both the students involved in its design and construction, and more importantly for the thousands of children and adults who will experience it each year, the Learning Barge serves to prove that the deepest, most significant lessons are best learned through physical engagement and interaction.” Connecting students with community partners and allied disciplines around a common goal and through a creative and rigorous design research process is clearly an inspiring and effective way to begin.

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25 The Learning Barge Phoebe Crisman

practice The Learning Barge represents the future of architecture towards greater synthesis with ecology and environment, while providing a design research model for how architects and students might approach the challenges ahead. The project demonstrates an integrated way of working across scales – from watershed, to district, to detailed architecture – that combines both breadth and depth. This methodology is best learned in an academic practice that identifies problematic issues, especially in underserved places and with disadvantaged populations, and offers unimagined alternatives. Collaborations between diverse disciplines and environmental organizations have been inspiring and productive for all involved. As noted by Marjorie Mayfield Jackson, Executive Director of ERP, “In the fifteen years since the inception of the Elizabeth River Project, no academic professional has provided more useful, more cutting-edge or more committed technical support for our restoration efforts.

In the last two years, [Phoebe Crisman’s] research has led to powerful results on our urban waterfront.” Already the Learning Barge project has established itself as a significant national model for education about urban habitat restoration and sustainable architecture. When construction is complete and educational programs commence in the fall of 2008, students and the public will have the opportunity to actively engage the cultural and environmental ecologies of the Elizabeth.

Developing Architecture Russell Katz Montgomery Oaks Management, Inc. Following a BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia, Russell Katz worked for Hans Hollein Atelier and then earned an MA at Yale University. After a period at Turner Brooks Architects and Deamer + Phillips Architecture, Katz returned to his native Washington in 1998 to pursue an environmentally conscious synthesis of development and architecture. Recent projects include the renovation of two derelict apartment buildings, and a new building, Elevation 314, winner of the Best Environmentally Friendly Building award from the Maryland/D.C. Chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, and the 2005 Catalyst Award from the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Karl Krause sat down with Katz to discuss the dialect between developers and architects, architectural

A Conversation with Russell Katz and Karl Krause Karl Krause (KK): After studying architecture at U.Va. and Yale, you’ve become as much a developer as an architect. What encouraged you to take on both roles in your projects?

Russell Katz (RK): In school, if you have a good enough argument for a project that breaks the rules, you can do it.

This relates completely to the role of a developer, but in a very unrealistic way to the role of an architect. An architect is simply a consultant with influence that extends only as far as a client’s belief in you, or shared interests. I never liked that dynamic of waiting for the right developer to come along, or the need to influence clients that were going in a direction I didn’t want them to go in. Rather than dealing with these inefficiencies, I decided pretty early on that I wanted to have more than a design influence on my projects, and that’s what I’ve done for the past nine years.

photomontage of site context, Elevation 314

27 Developing Architecture Russell Katz

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education and real-world sustainability.

sure sustainability was never compromised, and I myself managed the proforma of the project – because no one can care for one’s own investment like oneself. The whole process is a bit like being an orchestra leader – it’s exciting.

There were close to a dozen different consultants, all very good at what they were asked to do. Being able to collaborate, and knowing who to bring in where and when is profoundly important to getting a project built. There’s as much design to the building as to the collaborative process itself.

rain garden courtyard, Elevation 314

KK: How did you get started?

RK: My father was involved in some FHA development in the 1970’s and my uncle was a developer in Boston, so I grew up with exposure to the business, and they have both been very influential role models. At Turner Brooks – a great designer that I admire very much – I made plans to start my own business, and started working seriously towards purchasing some buildings that would have the right potential to get me started. I wanted to learn to be a good developer step by step – so my first projects were devoid of major design requirements. Instead, these renovations focused on market, construction quality, government regulation, budget, return on investment, and the setting up of a management system and entity. Once the business plan came around and I had the ongoing support of the projects and the attendant cash-flow, I was able to take on projects that are more ambitious in design.

KK: Elevation 314 is one of these more ambitious projects – how did your process change for this project?

RK: For Elevation 314, there was no compromise for environmental issues, business or design – all three had to be successful for the building to be a success. Collaboration became a huge component of the project, because there’s no way one person can wear all those hats and still do the drawings. The model I used was to find really good professionals to essentially guard their turf: a project designer, to make sure the design was never compromised by environmental or budget constraints, an environmental expert to make

RK: Well, no matter what you do, no building is perfect environmentally. Everything has a drawback. For example, if you want a good flooring material, bamboo is great - but the only reasonably priced bamboo is coming from China, so there’s an embodied energy cost. We looked into local hardwood yet decided on bamboo… these sorts of decisions are constantly being made. What I wanted from the project was for every system and material to satisfy all three of the project priorities. To put a green roof on the building’s parking garage, we added the Department of Health to the collaborative team to help them come up with the requirements needed to approve the roof, because our green roof needed to be permitted as a part of the stormwater management system. This had never been done in D.C. before. The calculations we suggested are now what they use to evaluate and permit green roof systems… I think this collaboration between the public and private sector is an essential and powerful tool both for a project and for initiating change on a larger scale.

29 Developing Architecture Russell Katz

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KK: What sort of compromises were made within the collaborative team?

interior, Elevation 314

KK: As green building enters public consciousness, it’s becoming a highly marketable component of development.

Is there a danger of developers manipulating sustainable building for profit?

RK: Green is a very fluid issue: as the movement grows, it changes. The USGBC LEED system has pretty much become the benchmark for evaluating whether a project is green or not. As green building becomes more mainstream, LEED will become more mainstream.

Renters are suspicious and savvy, especially those who care about environmental issues and green building. I downspout detail, Elevation 314

architecture touches everyone and everything – a fantastic place for collaboration.

KK: How does this carry through to practice?

view from adjacent metro stop, Elevation 314

know there are already people who are trying to paint their work green in order to capitalize on the movement, but I believe the market, meaning the green community, renters, buyers, press, etc., is too savvy to fall for a fake.

I didn’t seek LEED certification for Elevation 314 because they weren’t set up to do multi-family residences in 2001, and it would have cost at least $80,000 to do it – money that was better spent on geo-thermal HVAC for the building. That said, smart green building is good business. With geo-thermal heating, for example, tenants get the financial benefit of lower utility costs, developers get the benefit of geothermal loop heating pumps that will last 30 years, and higher tenant retention that results from their utility bill.

KK: After 12 years of practice, how has your perspective on architectural education changed?

RK: Architectural education stops short in addressing the importance of collaboration. For example, American students are the sole authors of their studio projects – which makes them think in broad terms and develop a comprehensive idea, but doesn’t contribute toward working as a team. A comparable architectural program in Vienna, Austria, has students lead their entire studio for a number of weeks, if not a month, to complete their diploma project. There’s a challenge of communication, scheduling and managing personalities and abilities – all of the things that have to be done as an architect, and especially as a developer. In terms of collaborating at an educational level, I think it’s very important to cross-pollinate with students and faculty from different disciplines. In the public realm,

Russell Katz continues to pratice as a developer and architect in the Washington D.C. area.

More information on Elevation 314 and other projects can be found on his website: http://momidc.com/ Karl Krause is a graduate student of landscape architecture at U.Va.

31 Developing Architecture Russell Katz

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RK: For one, there is an overemphasis on design talent and skill in schools, while collaboration and leadership are undervalued. I love designing, and I greatly enjoyed doing well in school and being recognized for my design work – but I think that every year too many students enter the field with their focus in the wrong place. They expect to be the next Koolhaas or Gehry…superstars that are as cross-cultural as politicians and athletes. But those guys don’t have an influence on 90% of what gets built. Most buildings shouldn’t be designed by people like that – instead, they should be an exquisitely designed background for life. There is a huge role to be filled if there is to be improvement in the environmental and design quality of most of the built world.

Architecture’s “piece of the pie” is shrinking every day – and the AIA seems to be more concerned with controlling and limiting its turf than expanding it. Too many architects have not found a way to maximize the value that they can bring to the world.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the Waterhood A series of Interdisciplinary U.Va. School of Architecture Projects Watts Branch is located in the northeast corner of Washington D.C and Prince George’s County, Maryland. It is the largest D.C. tributary of the Anacostia River. The stream is 4.2 miles long and its watershed covers 2,405 acres, divided almost evenly between the District (47%) and Prince George’s County (53%). The watershed supports a population of close to 30,000 inhabitants. The District portion of the watershed includes over a dozen neighborhoods, 10 charter and public schools, and a host of congregations. Only 12% of the watershed is forested.

view of the stream (Marni Burns)

Capitol

Watts Branch Watershed

Watts Branch watershed in relation to the Capitol, the network of national and district parks, and the Anacostia river.

Why Watts?

Julie Bargmann Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

In the last five years, our local partners at the non-profit Washington Parks and People have:

“Inner city blues make me wanna holler.” Marvin Gaye

The Watts Branch stream valley and its neighborhoods begged for a synthetic and sympathetic design approach.

While many D.C. agencies work there, they had always approached their individual project missions with narrow vision. A key link was not being made: the health of the stream, the park and the neighborhoods must be addressed simultaneously.

• Galvanized millions in new public and private capital funding for the park

Watts Branch presented itself as a perfect initiative for our school whose mission declares that design matters – environmentally, socially and economically, culturally and aesthetically. Working with the people who live along Watts Branch made this project very real - and our studio projects need to be real.

• Towed 78 abandoned cars and trucks and reclaimed 40 bicycles for children

So in the fall of 2003 an interdisciplinary group of students took the first look into the area that led to the multiple, collaborative design studies that followed.

04.23.07

• Mobilized over 24,000 volunteers, including every school in the stream valley • Created new jobs in the park, with more coming in the revitalization • Removed 1,950 tires, 7,800 needles, and 20,000 bags of garbage

• Hauled out over 2,700,000 pounds of bulk trash and debris • Cleaned up dozens of old dump and clean-up piles • Cleared 2 miles of trail, stream, and streambank • Removed over 20,000 exotic invasive plants choking the ecosystem • Planted 1,200 native trees and hundreds of flowers (www.washingtonparks.net)

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

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Mr. Campbell, local barber and environmental steward (Jonah Chiarenza)

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Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture Studios: Elissa Rosenberg Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Craig Barton Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Architecture

The following pages represent samples from the work of three collaborating groups of students and faculty. Each of these projects generated work to communicate facets of the complex issues at Watts Branch to a different set of people. This body of work aims to be catalytic rather than prescriptive.

Summer Design Study: This study first looked at the “energy in the valley,” the multitude of isolated government and non-government projects working in this area, looking for ways they could overlap to become a cohesive regeneration of the stream valley. The summer project focused on providing tools for local civic leaders to ask for what they want in conversation with agency representatives. It also supported their efforts to galvanize community action around salient issues.

A key part of this work was learning to communicate a reading of the valley as a series of distinct rooms, defined by the landscape structure and alive with natural and cultural ecologies. A workbook expressed this reading as a series of walking tours, offering a new view of familiar neighborhood landscapes.

Community History Workshop: The Community History Workshop drew out the generations of stories of the place hidden in documents, archives and memories. Collectively, these stories reveal the deep, if sometimes fractured roots of the neighborhood - its anchored identity. Excerpts from the text produced in the workshop run through the sidebars of this article.

Design Studios: Two projects from the landscape design studio offer a glimpse of the potential of the place to recover its relationship with the stream. These projects identify the schools and recreation centers as the places to start in instigating neighborhood change.

the mouth of Watts Branch, where it lets out into the Anacosta, hosts rich aquatic ecology (Jonah Chiarenza)

Community History Workshop: An Introduction to Branch

Watts

This text was written as part of a guide to Watts Branch, produced in the Spring of 2007 by the Community History Workshop at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. This research expanded upon the summer 2006 Watts Branch Design Study led

by U.Va. Professors William Morrish and Julie Bargmann.

It also reflects the collaborative research and design project that took place in Fall 2006 between Elissa Rosenberg’s U.Va. landscape architecture studio and Daniel Bluestone’s Watts Branch Community History Workshop.

Watts Branch is an area of Ward 7 in northeast Washington, DC. The name Watts Branch refers to a creek that flows into the Anacostia River, to the public park surrounding the creek (renamed Marvin Gaye Park in 2006), and to the broader community made up of distinct residential neighborhoods including Burrville, Lincoln Heights, Capitol Heights, Kenilworth and Deanwood.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries much of the land in this area was used for agricultural production. The valley bottomland, flanking Watts Branch, was occasionally enriched when the creek flooded over its banks. Both free and enslaved people worked the land. In the 1870s, proposals for rail lines in the area east of the Anacostia River prompted developers to begin subdividing farmland for suburban homes. The loose geometry of rectangular blocks and lots tended to ignore the presence of Watts Branch, failing to use the creek as a feature to be thoughtfully incorporated into the new settlement pattern. Many real estate maps of the area even failed to show the course of the creek.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

Community History Workshop: Daniel Bluestone, Associate Professor of Architectural History Sarah Eissler, Graduate Architectural History Kalia Ellis, Graduate Urban and Environmental Planning Frances McMillen, Graduate Architectural History Blythe Rowe, Graduate Architectural History Thomas P. Salaki, Graduate Urban and Environmental Planning R.R.S. Stewart, Graduate Architectural History Josi Ward, Graduate Architectural History

Introduction: Shanti Fjord Levy Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture

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Summer Design Study: Julie Bargmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture William K. Morrish Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture Justin Aff, Graduate Landscape Architecture Marni Burns, Graduate Landscape Architecture Jonah Chiarenza, Graduate Urban and Environmental Planning Shanti Fjord Levy, Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture Courtney Spearman, Master of Landscape Architecture and Architectural History ‘06

Summer Design Study: Watershed + Neighborhood = “Waterhood” excerpts from the summer design study workbook

Where the human neighborhood is defined by the geometry of property boundaries, pedestrian and automobile movement patterns and the aggregation of homes and buildings, the natural neighborhood is defined by its����������������������������������������������������������� topographic shape, the flows of animals, plants and seeds that follow water and air movement within the cell of each hydrologic room. Each room is enhanced by the volumetric mass of tree crowns and diversity of the planted form that creates microclimate for diverse habitats. The urban watershed is a rich community that supports flora and fauna while acting as a governor and moderator to reduce climatic impacts upon urban infrastructure systems.

The watershed and neighborhood overlap in both positive and negative ways. A stand of big trees shades residents in their homes on a hot summer day, helping them to reduce electrical costs for mechanical cooling. When sewer lines are not maintained and uncontrolled storm water digs away at these old pipes, it can release raw sewage into the neighborhood stream and park systems. This overlap or interplay between neighborhood and watershed systems, a pair of neighborhood landscapes, is revealed in the ongoing history of the place.

above: Sanitary sewer lines cross the stream at many points.

Due to the stream’s extreme erosion, these pipes have become exposed to the water channel. Numerous times, the old pipes have failed, polluting the stream with raw effluent. (photo: Marni Burns) below: James Hunter, a leader in the Watts Branch Community Alliance on a walk through Marvin Gaye Park. (photo: Jonah Chiarenza)

Map of the water infrastructure corridors lacing Watts Branch stream watershed (dotted boundary line).

Roads and sewage lines (black) criss-cross the stream channel and its flood plain (light grey). Each storm sewer outfall releases the water from individual sewersheds into the stream, flooding its channel with the neighborhoods’ runoff.

In the 1920s officials of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, including planners John Nolen, Frederic Delano, and Charles W. Eliot II, envisioned a very different form for the Watts Branch Valley.

They advocated purchasing or condemning a strip of land nearly two miles in length along the stream to create an innovative linear park and parkway system that could promote flood control by removing residences and other buildings from the flood plain. They also saw this park plan as preferable to the more expensive and less scenic solution of running a closed storm sewer through the entire length of the valley.

The purchase of hundreds of parcels of land and the unsettling of hundreds of residents for the park development began in 1938 and continued into the 1940s. People participating in various Depression-era federal work relief programs completed the initial work on the park landscape. World War II prompted a major housing boom that significantly changed the form and style of the area’s suburban residences while increasing population density.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

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Each neighborhood can also be defined in human terms as the city landscape composed of streets, parcel boundaries, land-use activities and movement systems that establish communities’ activity centers. The aggregated group of neighbors and shared interests compose the neighborhood.

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When residential development filled the area, a series of destructive floods made the consequences of ignoring the stream increasingly obvious.

Floods frequently overran the developing suburban landscape, which consistently inconvenienced residents along the creek. Both African American and white residents settled along Watts Branch; many worked in a variety of positions as government clerks and laborers and service employees in central Washington and in the nearby Navy yard.

Working Zones & Design Actions:

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Working zones are identified by mapping past, present and future development activity, ecological patterns and community input. The boundaries and shape of these areas or zones are defined by two criteria — one, the distinctive physical features of the watershed and neighborhood, and two, the convergence of local and District initiated projects. In this study, Watts Branch is categorized into four working zones. Each working zone title recalls the two scales of work effort: one, a connection to the larger ecological canopy of the watershed and two, the neighborhood’s orientation toward the stream valley. Within each working zone are key signature elements or landmarks that define the natural and cultural geography of each zone.

Each working zone contains a number of large and small projects and potential opportunities.

Based upon design research and community input three design criteria or actions have been identified to help translate the corridor cultural and ecological agenda into actual spaces and places. They define the primary formal, functional and operational agenda of taking the assets of green infrastructure—underpinned by a rich urban forest—into the everyday development of community land uses. These include commercial and residential development, as well as infrastructure systems, such as roads and storm water lines. The design actions also set the stage for regenerating Watts Branch as a cultural corridor where the activities and flow of people, water, animal habitat and environmental process engage and support one another.

opposite above: images of “working zone” and “design action” pages from the workbook opposite below: preliminary sketch showing the distinct rooms of the stream valley

The extraordinary linear park along Watts Branch has gone through cycles of neglect and rejuvenation, even as the stream itself has grown increasingly polluted. In 1965, the park provided an important focal point for a Laurence Rockefeller funded park restoration pursued as part of Lady Bird Johnson’s Capital Beautification Campaign.

After another period of neglect, Washington Parks & People, a non-profit network of community park partnerships, began a multimillion dollar revitalization of the park in 2001. Thousands of community volunteers removed millions of pounds of debris from the park and inaugurated a significant park planting program, understanding that the health of the park is directly connected to the health and beauty of the surrounding neighborhood.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

A working zone is a method of subdividing and aggregating work efforts along the diverse corridor environment into manageable areas of common ground. A working zone boundary is loosely defined and differs from a planning district or political boundary. A zone can expand and contract over time as projects are added or finished. The working zones form the basis for attracting and grouping individual projects, forming working relationships to leverage funds and coordinate program efforts as they seek to enhance the overall environment of Watts Branch. The working zone approach to project implementation is based on the idea that digging up the landscape once to serve four different agendas is less disruptive and cheaper than digging up the same landscape four different times. This method of bundling projects and efforts is extremely important to the enhancement of ecological functions and reduction of negative economic and social impacts upon surrounding neighborhoods.

Bundling projects into zones is also an effective way to organize neighborhood volunteer efforts and local ownership.

This was followed in the 1950s and 1960s by the development of large public housing estates built in part to accommodate residents displaced by urban renewal and highway building in the center of Washington.

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To continue the process of collaboration along the Watts Branch cultural corridor, we have organized the individual programs, projects and plans into a set of four working zones and three design actions.

Natural Greenways and Cultural Corridors

sketch showing potential for increased connection to the stream, as well as between the elementary school and the environmental education center situated on either side of it

The second type of great street reaches down and through the plains and valleys beyond the Federal core. Nannie Helen Burroughs Boulevard, which meanders through the Watts Branch stream corridor, is of this type. It is an intra-neighborhood cultural corridor that is anchored by historic corners and a set of intersecting side streets that reach into adjacent neighborhoods and natural systems. It is a local arterial linking the cultural environment of schools, homes, churches and businesses with the ecological environment of public gardens, parks, tributaries and trails.

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There exists a third type of greenway that is best represented

by Watts Branch. This smaller scale linear park and stream corridor operates as a cultural corridor, connecting the District neighborhoods into the larger capital greenway and street networks. These local cultural corridors foreground the diverse ecological and ethnic neighborhood cultures that comprise the “background” of Washington’s urban landscape. In Watts Branch, nature is a source of economic hope and ecological stability—an indictor habitat or sign to the larger region that this neighborhood is a historic landmark and a culturally active, economically vital and safe contributor to the District and metropolitan area.

sketch indicating how businesses along Nannie Helen Burroughs Ave. might activate the street as an extension of the park

As the East Capitol Dwellings aged and were poorly maintained, they were identified with crime and drug problems in the Watts Branch area.

The District of Columbia Housing Authority demolished East Capitol Dwellings in 2000 to make way for a Hope VI development, a mixed-use government-funded housing project. Although Marvin Gaye’s house, which stood on the edge of the site, could easily have been preserved, the neighborhood landmark was destroyed along with all of the other residences in the development. Community groups were not able to save Marvin Gaye’s home from the wrecking ball, but his vibrant memory lives on in stories of his participation in the area’s hotbed of musical, cultural and social activity.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

Washington D.C. has two types of great streets. The most familiar are the civic and commercial corridors, such as Connecticut Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue and Minnesota Avenue. They stretch across the District’s urban landscape, defined by continuous parallel street plantings, pedestrian sidewalks and an architectural building wall street.

Driven from his home by his tumultuous family life, community residents often saw the teenaged Marvin playing his music in neighborhood streets and in the park along Watts Branch Creek.

Local lore attributes Marvin’s famous lament, “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” to his witnessing the decline of the environment encompassing the Watts Branch.

The community memory of Gaye’s life and his connection to the park helped galvanize the recent revitalization and cleanup of the park.

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Great Streets

Washington, D.C. has a long tradition of building and maintaining greenway corridors that take two forms, linear and circular. The most famous linear greenway is Rock Creek parkway, which weaves its stream ecology and recreational systems across the District to the Potomac River. The second is the circular parkway and greenway system that was laid out in the 1900’s, connecting civil war fort sites and parks located on the heights that overlook the central federal terrace. These greenways are part of the National Capital network.

Marvin Gaye’s House What should be the most exciting and evocative stop on a tour of the neighborhood was torn down in 2000: Legendary rhythm and blues singer Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) lived in a two story house located at 12 60th Street NE between 1956 and 1961 with his parents, brother and two sisters. The house was part of the East Capitol Dwellings - a low-rise District of Columbia public housing project.

The development had just opened when Gaye and his family moved here from their previous home at 1716 1st Street SW.

New Communities in the Waterhood

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In 1965, despite its visual similarity to adjacent homes, 218 50th Street stood out because of the vision and determination of John Hatcher, an eight-year-old resident of this house. Hatcher wrote a letter to then First Lady of the United States, “Lady Bird” Johnson, expressing interest in her National Beautification efforts. He wrote, “I would like for my front yard to look more beautiful. If you would please send me some azaleas, I will plant them.” what are the challenges:

The Anacostia Waterfront: “On and Of the River” The focus of Anacostia’s waterfront planning effort has been on development located along the edge of the river’s main channel. This is a critical planning step in the process of foregrounding the Anacostia River as a cultural asset in public view. To take the next step, one must recognize that the waterfront of this tidal river reaches beyond its main channel through stream branches that extend eastward into adjacent District neighborhoods. Watts Branch is the largest of these tributaries in the District and supports a broad flood plain corridor. Watts Branch and the Anacostia River share a long cultural history in which they formed a linear, cultural waterfront connecting a diverse set of neighborhoods.

The full reach of the Anacostia River can be experienced in two ways. The first is to be “on” the river’s main channel: recreating in a public park, living in a new condominium near the shoreline, or viewing the river from the city’s new baseball stadium. The second experience is had by communities within the river’s larger watershed. These residents can be “of” the river by connecting to its tributary streams or branches. Like the branches of a tree, tributaries such as Watts Branch reach into neighborhoods carrying their stream ecology into the economic and cultural life of these richly diverse communities.

what we want:

Hatcher’s letter struck a chord with the First Lady. On May 19, 1965, Walter Washington, the First Lady’s advisor on District of Columbia affairs, arrived at Hatcher’s home with a gaggle of reporters, the Kelly Miller Junior High School Band, John Hatcher’s fourth grade class, and a white azalea bush. As everyone looked on, the young Hatcher silently but intently dug a hole and planted his new flowering shrub. John Hatcher’s simple request brought the First Lady’s attention to this northeast portion of Washington.

One year later, Lady Bird Johnson was in the northeast, not far from John Hatcher’s home, rededicating a newly cleaned-up and redesigned Watts Branch Park.

The above work was excerpted from the workbook “Greening the Watts Branch Stream Valley,” created as part of a design study supported by the Casey Trees Endowment and the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation.

This sequence of an image, diagram and “what could be” sketch represents a method used in the workbook to point out challenges and potentials at key junctures in the neighborhood. This example reveals the disconnect between the Lincoln Heights housing and the bluff topography, showing how the pending housing project could engage the slope.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

Watts Branch is home to a specific type of mixed-use mid-density arterial development: mixed-income and mid-density housing situated on an upland or terrace of a major urban watershed. For example, Lincoln Heights gets its name, “heights” from its location on top of the upland hills which surround Watts Branch’s watershed and define its central valley.

Although Lincoln Heights is within a 10 minute walk to transit facilities along East Capitol St., cultural activities indicate that its regional address is tied to the arterial workings of Watts Branch: residents use the bicycle and pedestrian trail and frequent the parks and shady spots along the stream; they also participate in the economic life on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue and Division Street. Here in Watts Branch, the neighborhood and watershed create a dual-function artery, a central focus that works in parallel with more traditional civic boulevards such as East Capitol Ave.

what we have:

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In the District’s new comprehensive plan, the Inclusive City, there is a focus on developing mixed-income mid-density housing along major transit arterials, such as along East Capitol St. This is a very important planning and neighborhood stability strategy, supporting neighborhoods that are experiencing demographic changes and increased access to goods and services.

John Hatcher’s House This modern style two-story brick duplex residence was built in 1945 as a single part of the massive Lincoln Heights public housing project.

Landscape Design Studio Projects Elissa Rosenberg, critic Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Parallel Courses: Revealing a Stream Through Neighborhoood Routine Alissa Ujie Diamond Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture

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Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

This project is a proposal for an existing recreational center at the easternmost corner of Washington, D.C. The site is ordered by two factors. First, the gridded system of the streets and playing fields, which guides the daily pedestrian and recreational routines of the inhabitants. Watts Branch itself, in its curving course through the site, offers the second influence. The presence of the stream is now only a missed opportunity, hidden from the site by the dominance of the street grid and the chain-link barriers intended to protect it from further abuse. In this project, the stream is opened to the street, path, park and play spaces so that neighborhood residents can experience a greater connection to the natural systems on the site in the course of their daily lives.

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The Watts Branch studio sought to address the environmental and social challenges at specific sites along the stream, and to propose interventions to integrate the park into the community live of the surrounding neighborhoods.

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Environmental education is addressed in terms of participation, observation and experience of cycles. A path, or spine, connecting the Aiton Elementary School to the Lederer Center community gardens structures the site and allows for encounters with processes and cycles such as urban storm water flow, filtration, composting, cultivation of seasonal and community gardens and the recycling of on-site materials.

Watts Goin’ On: Learning in the “Waterhood”

Jessie Calder Graduate Landscape Architecture

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Watts Branch Environmental Learning Spine: Making Cycles Visible

small gods Mark Phemister Graduate Landscape Architecture

And so my heart opened to agriculture.

This is not a depopulated landscape, not a “virginal” Denali or Yellowstone, this is simply a place that is finally out of doors. If I am held up internally by my pre-fossilized bones (waiting here in my little storage locker body until they can return as calcium to their friends, the rocks in the earth) and I am supported externally by the walls of the houses and buildings I seem to require as a 21st century urbanized hominid, then my body, my self, my home, my space of occupation and dwelling, is perhaps best defined as the zone between my bones and the walls of my home (or wherever I am at the moment).

Landscape in service of architecture is a lovely gesture, but it is perhaps homologous to the skin and hair of my more traditionally defined body, outside without being way “out there”.

To walk across a cornfield, though, is another matter. This is not landscape in relationship with buildings, it is landscape in relationship with people. Where gardens habitually have walls (or at least edges to their intentions), fields have hedgerows. This is nature bounded by nature, abutting more nature and more open sky. This is where we finally run out of doors, have no more doors to run out of, finally shed our protective multiple shelled bodies and talk to the Landscape on its own terms.

At prayer on Friday nights, as the candles are lit, young Jewish girls are told “May you be as Sarah and Rebecca, Rachel and Leah,” heroines they know from countless stories; but all these stories are about women in relation to their husbands, their sons.

I came to learn landscape architecture because I love landscapes: the thick forest, the open glen, the rushings and floodings of rivers. I came to become visually literate, to learn to read the signals: the trees’ wildly abundant flowering before death, their broad buttressing when hollowing within, the eroding gully downstream from a new parking lot. For two and one half years now I have been encouraged to know landscape in the context of the built world, landscape as yin to architecture’s yang. But what of landscape in its own right? Where are the stories of landscape for its own sake, where buildings are not necessarily absent, but incidental and perhaps even only extant in support of the land?

It has been said that prayer is simply unmixed attention. During my first year of grad school, Tuesdays were disproportionately rainy. In fine Murphy’s Law tradition, this was the day of our Plants and Ecology class, spent outside knowing plants in their settings.

Unable to be elsewhere or otherwise occupied, we prayed. These trees became small gods, and the forests small heavens. The rest of the week was hectic and stressful, but Tuesdays were golden even when wet. Second year, that class was gone, and with it the outside world retreated. Though for ten days I was able to wake up and do my yoga exercises on a porch facing Mt. Vesuvius, I was largely asked to develop my understanding of the land from inside my body, buried deep in the library or the studio, my bones far from rocks. Even pressed up against the plate glass windows, out of doors was very far away. I fell apart.

I rebelled that spring by dropping my studio course and digging a garden instead. Now it is the winter of my third year. Still eating from my garden, I let myself be swallowed by school again this fall, learning about the land from books and lectures. I chased my ability to represent the land, still falling short on the temporal scale, but making great strides in many aspects. I need to continue my pursuit of landscapes in relation to people and other landscapes, not in relation to (even if in proximity of) buildings. I need to pray, regularly.

I need to find the time and the peace to be with the land. Life is bigger than studio, Landscape is bigger than life. If I can draw and paint and quilt with the land in mind, the body in the land, then perhaps I can re-find my small gods and ask them for clarity. winter 2006

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That contemporary agriculture is dissolving is evident enough. It is being eroded, rapidly, and replaced by agriBusiness and bioTech. This will be my life, I among millions, reversing this profanity.

Building Synthesis: Integrating Form and Performance Jenny Lovell Assistant Professor of Architecture Introduction:

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The exploration of building systems within academia often removes many of the pragmatics of practice. Since architectural design has the potential for a multitude of construction responses, the majority of which are driven by factors far beyond the proverbial drawing board, there is now a requirement for architecture students to look more at process and to allied professions to gain an understanding of how a material or technology can be applied to meet both aesthetic and performance requirements. ‘What do you want to see?’ is fundamental in terms of design but, if you want to achieve success on site and efficient energy performance, a building must be realized through available and emerging materials, technologies and construction systems.

sketches (James Pressly)

Program:

model details (Natalie Gambill)

Spatial comfort has a direct correlation to employee performance at work. Byron Stigge of Buro Happold Engineers articulated this succinctly when he equated the construction budget of an office building their firm had worked on (designed to be primarily naturally ventilated) to just one year’s worth of salary costs for the building’s occupants. By addressing the building both at the scale of the body and the city, students begin to understand how our perception of ‘comfort’ might be re-considered at these multiple scales.

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The studio assignment focused on tall buildings (50-60 stories), with one million square feet of high-end office space as a required part of the program. Forty-eight percent of current energy consumption has been attributed to commercial building. It is the environment in which many of us spend our working day and it frequently falls short of a satisfactory provision of desired comfort levels. The studio problem addresses an ethical obligation to raise the issue of large scale building and environmental strategy design within the graduate curriculum.

Building Synthesis Course: Building design is a multi-disciplinary collaboration.

An architect (now more than ever) needs to be aware of processes and technologies that will impact the perception, experience and performance of a building. The Building Synthesis course is developed specifically to support the final, comprehensive studio at the graduate level. The course seeks to investigate, develop and apply strategies at various scales of operation using current studio design projects as a focus and testing ground. Thus the design of building assemblies and environmental systems are reviewed from the perspective of poetic intent and the necessity for pragmatic responses to the complex issues of site, context and program. These two approaches are not set out as a binary or opposing condition, but rather as part of an overall and holistic solution which privileges balance over deterrence.

With a focus on energy efficiency and building performance analysis within the design process, students diagram and test assumptions and perceptions of their designs using a wide range of media. The importance of working on design and environmental analysis in parallel is essential to realizing design solutions where reduced energy consumption and improved building performance compliment rather than compromise aesthetic intention. sketches (Jim Richardson)

Multi-disciplinary:

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A number of visitors, including partners and directors of some of the most highly regarded engineering and architectural practices, came to the school to lecture and participate in class throughout the semester. The contribution of multi-disciplinary voices introduced an important aspect of practice to the development of students’ ideas and solutions. Each of the visiting practitioners plays an important role in challenging the way office space is conceived, developed and built - they represent the exception rather than the norm.

(Alli Dryer)

visitors in fall of 2006 included: Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, Berlin/London Nico Kienzl, Director: Atelier Ten Environmental Engineers, New York/ London Nicholas Holt, Associate Partner of the Technical Group : Skidmore Owings and Merrill Architects, New York Byron Stigge, Senior Environmental Designer: Buro Happold Engineers, New York/ London Jane Wernick, Principal: Jane Wernick Associates Ltd. Consulting Engineers, London Julia Barfield, Partner: Marks Barfield Architects, London Joel Loveland, Director: Integrated Design Lab, Puget Sound Tim Macfarlane, Partner: Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners Consulting Engineers, New York/ London Roberto Bicchiarelli, Executive Vice President: Permasteelisa Cladding Technologies Ltd., USA

‘Working’ Conclusion:

Whilst charged with preparing students for the profession, final year graduate studio also offers the opportunity to change practice and perceptions within the market environment.

If the ‘best of practice’ and cutting edge advances are discussed and explored within the academic realm as a form of research development there is a real and essential opportunity for a sustainable mind-set to penetrate through education into practice. The integration of environmental systems into a clear, comprehensive and elegant design solution cannot be a post-rationalized ‘band-aid’ application. It must be a synthesized and integral part of the design process with clear intentions of a strategy operating at multiple scales. Student and faculty feedback, and the studio projects themselves, showed that this method of multi-disciplinary dialogue has been very constructive in the development and understanding of the possibilities for addressing environmental, structural and envelope strategies for tall buildings - bringing into question many of the assumptions about ways in which large scale building is currently developed in this country.

Parts of this article were presented and first published in the proceedings for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 95th Annual Meeting ‘Fresh Air’ in Philadelphia, March 2007. building sections below (left to right): Zoe Edgecomb, Alli Dryer, William Russell, Hope Dinsmore, Jim Richardson, James Pressly, Ben Thompson, Matt Hural

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Typically the teaching of structures and MEP (Mechanical Electrical & Plumbing) within architecture programs is not related directly to current studio projects, and as such it is compartmentalized and separated from the design process. Building Synthesis is integrated completely with studio and consequently students have a better grasp of the impact of design decisions on technical strategies and vice versa; they are actively encouraged to use analytic assessment to develop their current design at multiple scales.

Synthesising course content and studio projects knits technical and aesthetic aspects together. The design process, even at its earliest iterations, must be considered as a productive feedback loop between form and performance.

Institute for Design Research, NYC

One Times Square

Impetus environmental strategies

Today’s city office building design must address the complexities of evolving worldwide collaborations among individuals and groups. It must also respond to the speed at which information can be stored, retrieved and disseminated. Simultaneously, office building design must face the concerns of energy consumption and the steady depletion of the earth’s natural resources. The design of a high-rise office building for the Institute for Design Research at One Times Square, New York City, rethinks the cubicle-driven, sealed and conditioned office typology and envisions new spaces and technologies that facilitate and encourage a symbiotic life of working people and their natural environment.

Design strategies focus on integrating environmental technologies, passive and active systems, and the quality of work spaces. Environmental considerations such as envelope and assembly respond to the site’s inherent climatic and contextual conditions.

Research as well as collaboration with studio visitors allowed these solutions to develop holistically from the outset.

This is architecture that values process over product. The building functions as a living organism, grown from the processes and nutrients of the natural environment and culture of the city.

building systems

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Ben Thompson Graduate Architecture

Concept The tower is comprised of two bar buildings stitched together by a central core. A narrow atrium opens in the front to address Times Square, and wider sky courts behind serve as lobby and gathering spaces. The building is structured on a 30 x 40 grid and utilizes one-story mega-trusses that tie the two bar buildings together at five-story floor intervals. This structuring allows for a flexible, open office plan that results in transformable spaces for ongoing interactions within the building.

The facade is a pre-fabricated curtain wall with an interchangeable panel system. The panels vary in material, width, and angle in order to control the amount and quality of light that is reflected directly or indirectly into the interior spaces. This creates an undulating facade that allows indirect light to filter into the rooms without being too harsh and direct. By varying the widths between each 8’ unit, slots of open glazing are revealed, giving the opportunity to program the interior working environment according to the quality of light available at a specific location. Operable windows in the curtain wall system allow for individual control of light and air.

Thus, the façade becomes active on the interior and exterior environments.

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Envelope

street perspective

envelope at perimeter office

façade unit

concept sketch

Suspended Disbelief: the work of INFOLAB Nataly Gattegno Assistant Professor of Architecture

The design process has become an essential filter of all types of information. Due to contemporary forms of communication and media, this process has now been charged with the task of gathering, filtering, comprehending, processing, interpreting, forming and representing information in a clear and coherent manner.

The work produced in this laboratory seeks to introduce its participants to various modes of forming and representing information, qualifying, quantifying and visualizing it with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with contemporary representational techniques, creating new visualization tools and integrating them into the design process.

airport volumes (A. Viola)

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In a world plagued by an excess of information and the over-stimulation of the senses by visual imagery and numerical data, the role of processing information and effectively understanding it has become critical to our everyday operation and behavior. Our dependence on real-time information has propagated the development of a multiplicity of interfaces, mechanisms and technologies capable of filtering and transmitting just that: information.

art + world politics (M. Young)

airport volumes (A. Viola)

manhattan subway stations

number of bloggers per station

population per square mile

compiled

blogger city (T. Shafrir)

airplane

train

walking

art + world politics (M. Young)

infrastructural trails (D. Malda)

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Ultimately we are questioning the design process and its relationship to research. Design is research, research is design. What is the potential for research, analysis and visualization to generate form? Can we reconsider our ‘sites’ as much more complex and dynamic matrices of information constantly in flux? How does the design process adapt and transform to this fluctuating interpretation of site and context? The implications are exciting and evocative, giving designers the opportunity to test extremes. By suspending disbelief and solely working with information, we suspend any predetermined formal ideas and misconceptions, allowing process to take the lead. Process is not objective, however.

Suspending disbelief can be highly subjective, but the seeming neutrality of data relieves us momentarily from the pressure of formal resolution. It gives us the tools to map new possible worlds and describe different habitats, unexpected and not predetermined. The result is a process that questions the given, tests the extreme and relies on risk-taking.

booming asia: density + growth (A. Kong)

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inconvenient histories (S. Edwards)

67 Suspended Disbelief Nataly Gattegno

The design process becomes more systematic, yet relies heavily on the quality and selection of information. The seeming neutrality of data does not render it objective.

The data selection process and representation method are heavily reliant on intent, position and technique. The projects in these pages are examples that test the limits of representation by working on a variety of extremely different datasets. They also test the limits of our design processes by coaxing us to take a position and develop an intention about the information we are using. These projects have taught us the subjectivity of information and the impossibility of remaining neutral in any design context.

From a map of airline cargo, an infrastructural analysis of the expansion of Beijing, a study into art procurement and world politics, to a new map of New York relative to its blogging community and a real-time three dimensional representation of medical information: each project tests the possibilities of relating different types of information, establishing new relationships and juxtapositions and testing our preconceived ideas. The formal yields are tentative possibilities, yet provocative alternatives.

realtime visualization (H. Kim)

luckily, luckily: A Measured Exploration into Globalization, Shipping and the Movement of Goods Marc Howlett Graduate Urban and Environmental Planning

- Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

The concept of globalization is so pervasive that it is easy to overlook its widespread ramifications. An inventory of the graduate student’s life quickly underscores this point.

The shirt I am wearing is from Brazil and the pants from the Dominican Republic. The computer I type on was made in Taiwan and the pen I jot notes with is from Japan. My book on globalization was printed in Great Britain and the paper it rests on was produced somewhere in the United States of America. These are the items of everyday life. The locations where they originated and places where they will be disposed are generally not considered. They move into and out of life imperceptibly. Yet, the items of everyday life are definite objects with their own histories and their own futures. A quintessential aspect of their histories is transportation from origin to destination, an object typically crossing thousands of ocean miles before arriving in an American port. The movement of goods is so integrated into modern life that it is almost unknown to the typical person, but a measured exploration of shipping reveals both a vast downside to globalization and the difficulty for finding solutions to address these underlying issues.

Globalization as a concept became a popular topic of discussion in the 1980s and 1990s when the work of authors like Thomas Friedman gained mainstream attention. Shipping and the movement of goods dates back thousands of years to some of the earliest human civilizations. The Phoenicians developed a vast trading empire in the Mediterranean Sea by 1000 BC. Travel on water was much faster than on land. The volume of goods transported by ship was much greater as well. During the Roman era, the empire imported approximately 150,000 tons of grain each year by sea (Rinman and Brodefors).

By the time Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain in 1492 there were many well-established trading routes connecting Europe to Africa and Asia. The gamble that Columbus made was to find a quicker route to southern Asia and the goods located there. The ‘discovery’ of the New World was neither for military conquest nor for human settlement nor to spread religion. Columbus set sail as a merchant looking for a more

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‘When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.

direct route to established trading ports. Columbus’s trip altered western history and the shipping of goods. Foods like corn, tomatoes, potatoes and cacao moved east to Europe.

Europeans brought guns, horses and slaves to this land.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick the sea is never far from the mind of Ishmael. “Some years ago,” Ishmael narrates, “having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.” Ishmael believes this feeling shared by everyone. “If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean with me” (Melville, 1-2). Modern life has moved far away from the thinking described by Ishmael. As the hinterland of global trade now covers almost every portion of the planet, it is easy to turn one’s back to the sea. Ishmael would believe this disregard of the ocean to be foolish, for it looms over the daily actions of man.

The vast majority of products arrive and depart the United States by ship. Water ports handle almost 80 percent of all goods, incoming and outgoing, by weight. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics writes: “The U.S. water transportation system carries more trade, both in terms of tonnage and value, than any other mode” (Bureau of Transportation Statistics 2004). Overland shipping via trucks has increased with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and air freight is very important in terms of transporting high value cargo. For moving goods into and out of the country, however, the ocean going vessel remains supreme.

The watershed moment in modern shipping occurred on April 26, 1956 when a crane in Newark, New Jersey hauled metal boxes onto a ship named the Ideal-X, which five days later set sail for Houston. The rise of the containership enabled the modern distribution of goods. A single vessel can carry 3,000 40-foot-long containers, which can be unloaded in a matter of hours. Marc Levinson describes the typical movement of the modern good: “A 35-ton container of coffeemakers can leave a factory in Malaysia, be loaded aboard a ship, and cover the 9,000 miles to Los Angeles in 16 days. A day later, the container is on a unit train to Chicago, where it is transferred immediately to a truck headed for Cincinnati” (Levinson, 7). Multiply that one container by three thousand and that is the movement of goods for just one passage of one ship. Multiply that one containership by thousands more and a massive economy of scales is achieved that produces the worldwide, cheap goods located in a local mega-store like Wal-Mart.

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The alienation of the consumer from product origins expanded tremendously in the nineteenth century. The increasing ability to mass produce goods and transport them hundreds if not thousands of miles made geographical networks much more expansive and less discernable in everyday life. William Cronon writes of Chicago: “The geography of capital produced a landscape of obscured connections. The more concentrated the city’s markets became, and the more extensive its hinterland, the easier it was to forget the ultimate origins of the things it bought and sold.” The ability to transport goods quickly and to great distances underscored Karl Marx’s notion of the “annihilation of space by time” (Cronon, 340, 92).

The economies of scale are so massive that transportation costs comprise only a minimal amount of a product’s price. Because of labor and other expenses, it is cheaper to make a University of Virginia shirt in Honduras and ship it by sea to the United States, than make the same shirt locally. Transportation efficiencies of the containership are so enormous that freight costs often factor only minimally into economic decisions. The economists Edward L. Glaeser and Janet E. Kohlhase have suggested: “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process” (quoted in Levinson, 8). The assertion is stunning but helps explain how Yellow Tail, an Australian wine, has become a staple of American wine buyers. According to Wine Business Monthly, Yellow Tail boasts the top two selling red wines of any variety in the United States. For the Ishmaels of the world, the distance between Australia and Virginia by sea is unimaginably expansive.

Joseph Conrad was another author intensely familiar with the sea. The Polish Conrad was born in modern day Ukraine, became a seafarer at a young age, and did not learn English until the age of 21. This blurring of national boundaries and identities would become increasingly central to shipping in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Conrad knew the power of the sea and the danger of looking too closely into it for meaning and explanation. Marlow in Heart of Darkness reflected Conrad’s ideas about water navigation. Marlow had to look out for wood and other obstacles to keep his vessel the Nellie afloat. “When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.” What made Marlow most afraid was running aground and losing his ship.

“After all,” he explains, “for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that’s supposed to float all of the time under his care is the unpardonable sin” (Conrad, 42).

In December 1999, a relatively small oil tanker named the Erika broke in half off the coast of France. When slicks of oil began washing ashore, the European public started to ask questions, such as the seemingly simple: who owned the ship? The captain was jailed for a week in France and after his release claimed he had no information as to who owned the vessel. The captain worked for the ship’s management company Panship Management & Services of Ravenna, Italy. “Panship worked for the ship’s registered owners, Tevere Shipping Valletta, Malta,” writes William Langewiesche, “which in turn was held by two other companies, Agosta Investments and Financiers Shipping, both of 80 Broad Street, Monrovia, Liberia.” There were other companies and other banks involved as well, in such countries as Switzerland, Scotland, the Bahamas, Panama, and England. French authorities after a month of inquiries declared they could not ascertain who actually owned the vessel. (Langewiesche, 93-95).

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has written extensively about globalization and its effects. He argues that the world is moving from a ‘first modernity’ centered on the power of the nation state to the ‘second modernity’ where globalization undermines the nation state and transnational organizations assume prominence. Beck writes, “Corporations acting in the framework of world society have gained additional scope of action and power beyond the political system. Over the heads of government

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this complexity is no more evident than in the disposal of the great ships themselves.

If Americans are in general alienated from the places where the products of everyday life originate, they are even less familiar with the infrastructure needed to transport these items. Ships are disposed of in a process called ship breaking or ship scrapping.

Some parties prefer to invoke the term “ship recycling”. With almost all economic use squeezed out of them, the ships make their way to the few countries that still perform ship scrapping. The United States and European countries formerly scrapped ships, but as environmental concerns rose so did the associated costs, and the business was sent elsewhere. At the moment, the majority of the world’s ship breaking occurs in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

When a ship arrives at Alang, India or Chittagong, Bangladesh, the crew gets into radio contact with an established scrapper on the beach. At high tide, the ship drives straight to the shore and up on the beach. There are no docks, just water and sand. A large contingent of laborers descends on the vessel and tears it apart using rudimentary blowtorches, hammers, and crowbars. Laborers use mostly their bare hands and sleep in close proximity to the vessels they dissect. The toll on the environment and the humans who work on these beaches is enormous, with thousands being hurt and untold numbers dying each year (Langewiesche, Casey).

Greenpeace and other transnational organizations concerned with ship breaking propose a simple solution to the environmental and human dangers posed by the process: cleaning the ships thoroughly in the western ports so that they arrive in south Asia with no toxic substances aboard. Like many other aspects of shipping, once you look past the surface layer of these arguments they become much more complex. If the vessels were cleaned in western ports, the costs for disposing ships would rise significantly and the need for sending the ships to Bangladesh and India would be diminished. Alang in India is already suffering greatly from competition in Bangladesh; because of lower labor costs Chittagong can offer higher prices than Alang for scrap ships (‘Shortage of demolition tonnage continues’). India is also facing mounting pressure from environmental groups to discontinue the practice of ship breaking in the country. This movement gained additional attention in February 2006 when the Clemenceau, a French aircraft carrier, was turned away from India’s coast (Barker). Many of the workers in Alang worry about the future of the business there and the fate of their jobs.

Globalization is suffused with contradictions. India and increasingly Bangladesh are utilized as sites for ship breaking because of minimal environmental and labor regulations. The lack of regulations, however, brings business and resources like steel to the countries. To work as a ship scrapper is incredibly dangerous, but people travel hundreds of miles to be able to attain these positions. One Indian worker was quoted as saying: “What can we do? Back home, there’s no work. There’s no question of me being happy or sad. It’s a question of me being able to eat” (Barker). We must be cognizant of the global ramifications of our daily actions, but simple solutions rarely suffice for such a complex world.

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and parliament, public opinion and the courts, the balance-of-power contract that characterized the first modernity of industrialized society is now being terminated and transformed to the independent realm of economic action” (Beck 5, emphasis in original).

The transnational networks and actors of the second modernity are very difficult for the nation states of the first modernity to deal with. This difficulty is evidenced by the French officials who worked exhaustively to determine who owned the Erika, when ownership was a mere formality in a global economic transaction.

The products of everyday life at some point surpass a point of utility and must be disposed of. Often, that waste goes to the proper place, a well-designed landfill.

Sometimes, the waste is recycled in a safe and environmentally friendly process. More rarely, but with devastating effects, that waste gets dumped in the communities of the world’s poorest people. On August 19, 2006 the Probo Koala docked in the Ivory Coast port city of Abidjan. The vessel had an ownership structure typical for the shipping industry. The Probo Koala was a “Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands.” A local company named Tommy arrived at the docks with more than a dozen trucks, loaded a sludge substance into them, and proceeded to drive around the city of Abidjan and dump its contents on at least 18 sites. The black sludge released noxious fumes causing mass sickness in the city. At least 8 people have died and over 85,000 have sought medical attention (Polgreen and Simons).

Over a month before arriving in Ivory Coast the Probo Koala docked in Amsterdam. A company named Amsterdam Port Services offered to dispose the 250 tons of “marslops” for about $15,000 but after tests determined the waste was in greater volume and more hazardous than initially expected the fee was raised to around $300,000. Trafigura, the operator of the Probo Koala, decided that the increased fee, the additional day in port, and penalties for arriving late to the next port outweighed the disposal of the sludge.

With the permission of Dutch authorities, the waste was loaded back onto the Probo Koala and the vessel sailed to Estonia. It would later find a cheaper place to unload its waste in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

The ability for transnational corporations to use countries against each other in search of maximizing economic benefits is a central component to life in the second modernity.

The sludge on the Probo Koala could have been safely disposed of in the Netherlands but the costs were deemed to be too high. Ulrich Beck writes concerning transnational corporations: “in the manufactured and controlled jungles of global production, they are able to decide for themselves their investment site, production site, tax site, and residence site, and to play these off against another” (Beck, 4). Disposal site for hazardous waste could be added to the list. The environmental regulations of some countries are in part having unintended but devastating effects on others. Companies can exploit differences in regulation and labor costs in large part because of the relatively inexpensive ability to transport goods in massive quantities around the globe.

Responding to the human and environmental problems produced by shipping is a difficult proposition. Human and environmental justice is a subject rife with complexity and

References America’s Freight Transportation Gateways. U.S. Department of Transportation.

Department of Transportation Statistics. Washington, DC: 2004.

Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? Cambridge, UK: 2000.

Casey, Michael. “Ships come to Asia to die; workers risk lives breaking them apart.”

Associated Press. June 24, 2006.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: 1902.

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: 1991.

Langewiesche, William. The Outlaw Sea: a World of Freedom, Chaos and Crime. New York: 2004.

Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton: 2006.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: 1851.

Penn, Cyril. “Why the Yellow Tail Label Works.” Wine Business Monthly. August 15, 2005. www.winebusiness.com/Html/MonhlyArticle.crm?daaID=39495.

Accessed October 10, 2006 Polgreen, Lydia and Marlise Simons. “Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast.”

The New York Times. October 2, 2006.

Rinman, Thorsten and Rigmor Brodefors. The Commercial History of Shipping.

Goteborg: 1983.

“Shortage of Demolition Tonnage Continues.” Lloyd’s List. October 9, 2006.

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Barker, Kim. “India ship scrap yard has that sinking feeling.” Chicago Tribune. April 27, 2006.

A dialogue between undergraduate architecture student Howard Kim and U.Va. Assistant Professor Jason Johnson

HK (Howard Kim): The focus of the LAX Studio was exploring the territory in and around LAX airport. You described LAX airport as, “… a hyper-dynamic global hub immersed in an equally complex and rich local condition.” What do you mean by this? And what were the main ideas underlying the LAX Studio?

JJ (Jason Johnson): In the early 1970’s the British architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote an extraordinary book on Los Angeles called, The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

He described the LA freeways as “Autotopias” that were on par with the boulevards of Paris and Rome. The beach towns were named “Surfurbias” where sun, sand and surf were held to be the “ultimate and transcendental values.” Banham found poetry in a place many found incomprehensible. A few years after writing the book he was asked to tape a BBC documentary film focused on LA. It begins with him sliding into this enormous rental car at LAX airport. As he drives off he turns on the car stereo and is greeted with an automated female voice that says: “Welcome to Los Angeles, City of the Future.” I have always found this scene inspiring. Even today, Los Angeles continues to be a place of immense interest for designers. It fundamentally breaks the rules of everything your education tells you a city should be: a sprawling technological beast, decentralized, wasteful, messy, ad hoc, informal, etc. I think it is both shocking and thrilling for architecture students to experience this first hand. Initially it is a kind of exotic and saturated experience—the sun, the palm trees, the movie stars, the mobility and the freedom. Banham called this the “plastic fluorescent spectacle.” Inevitably though, perhaps while anxiously sitting in a traffic jam on the 405, the euphoria begins to wear off. The tension between utopia and dystopia becomes palpable. This is why LA is so fascinating to visit and study. It provides a loaded

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HK: Your teaching methodology seems to provoke students to produce highly experimental work. Why is design experimentation important? How was the LAX Studio structured to encourage this?

JJ: I have always understood design to be an inherently creative and experimental practice. There is an ethic to continuously questioning and evolving the world around us.

You must believe you can do things better–whether it be more sustainable, more efficient, more intellectually engaging. Today’s best designers are embracing the intricacy of these problems and are actively challenging the status quo. We know that the US—with its sprawling patterns of settlement and dependence on oil—is a major contributor to global warming, among other evils. So it is obvious that we have an immense amount of work to do. I think as a teacher—regardless of how cynical the world might be around us—I have to be optimistic. My challenge is to instill this optimism in my students. To this end, I think the kind of experimentation I encourage stresses modes of critical, creative and technical thinking, as well as varying degrees of risk-taking and innovation. These are the fundamental modes of practice I attempt to instill in my students, and I can only hope that these values will yield more thoughtful, dynamic and critical designers.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that everything in LA was “schizo-genetically reproduced” and moving “forward like modern armies”. How could you not be experimental in this context?

The studio sought to raise more questions than it answered. Many students found this approach to be frustrating, while others found this open-endedness to be exciting and provoking. When you work in modes that are iterative and open to feedback you have to design and think in a more networked way, and perhaps be more strategic. You also have to be open to the possibility that you might enter intellectual, creative or technical terrain that

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context for exploring contemporary social, cultural and ecological trends, as well as their countless paradoxes. I think these conditions extend beyond LA and are applicable to many global situations. LAX airport and its surroundings have a kind of unstoppable animalistic energy: the sheer scale and complexity, the feeling of being on the edge between the US, Latin America and Asia, the intertwining of people, planes, cars, buses, freight, helicopters, and of course, on a clear morning you can see the Pacific ocean on one side, and the Hollywood sign on the other. This is why I called it a hyper-dynamic global hub. But it is when you begin to deconstruct or delaminate LAX that things get interesting. I ask students many questions like: Where did all these people come from, what are they connected to, and where are they going? Where does LAX get all this energy? Where is it getting all this water? How can architecture engage this situation in any significant way? The students focused their energies on a parking structure between LAX’s domestic and international terminals. I think their projects tried to tap into the complexity I have been describing: one student proposed a refugee camp; another proposal was an immigration resort powered by PV arrays; we had a hostel-campground-energy farm; and another was a kind of hedonistic spa for jet setting global nomads. Every project tried to harvest flows of sun, water or wind into something productive and social. The studio was really about challenging the students to cultivate meaningful cultural conditions in a territory of rapid flux. The work was quite intense, critical and forward thinking. I think Reyner Banham would have been intrigued with these projects.

is unknown. This is what being in design school is all about. I continue to learn new things from my students each semester, and I hope they enjoy the intensity.

JJ: I think the whole idea of what an architect “is” or “does” is changing. Many architects are increasingly becoming marginalized because of their unwillingness or inability to cross disciplinary boundaries, or to engage wider fields of inquiry, production and collaboration.

People are beginning to get a sense that the era of architects producing mere “buildings” is slowly coming to an end. What’s emerging is a multi-disciplinary field that is being asked to consider entire social, cultural, technological and ecological networks. I think one of today’s big challenges is to shift architecture’s modus operandi away from inert, stable and close-looped working models, towards kinetic, dynamic, open-looped systems thinking. It is really about developing an intuition for how matter, energy and geometry can not only co-exist, but can co-evolve over time. Perhaps this is why I find landscape architecture—and its obsession with time cycles and succession—so fascinating. There is clearly an immense amount to learn from other disciplines that have more dynamic mind-sets. It is also important to recognize that each discipline has its own unique array of theories, techniques and modes of representation–all with their own limits and potentials.

For instance, landscape architecture is a distinct discipline with unique parameters, material logics and performance standards. While I am not convinced that merging disciplines— like into an alloy—is the best approach, I absolutely believe in the value of promiscuous interchange and collaboration. In my mind the LAX studio was really a hybrid landscapeurbanism-architecture-ecology studio. The students were asked to explore the world through the lens of many overlapping fields. At the final review we brought this eccentric mix of people together to talk about systems, flows and interconnections. In the end, the common concern for all these landscape-urbanism-architecture—ecologists was the city.

How do we continue to evolve the project of the American city—adding new layers and densities, increasing connections and bio-diversities? How do we make our cities vital, healthy and productive places? I was thrilled that these were the important questions raised by the studio.

Before the studio traveled to Los Angeles I asked Bill Morrish to give us a crash course in southern California infrastructure. He was instrumental in helping us understand the key issues.

His talk was brilliant at prompting the students to make connections between big scale systems to the small scale—like linking rivers and aqueducts to the ice cubes in your lemonade. He pulled the layers apart and made them legible, almost poetic. I should also mention that during our trip to LA we visited early California modernist projects by architects like Irving Gill, Rudolf Schindler, and Charles and Ray Eames. I think the only way to really understand the work of contemporary modernists—people such as Frank Gehry, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss or Julie Eizenberg—is to understand the lineage. Although these designers are experimental—they are also clearly referencing and building upon their predecessors. There is an immense amount to learn from these people, as well as from the history of Los Angeles and its infrastructure.

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HK: The U.Va. School of Architecture has a strong focus in trying to blur the boundaries between architecture and landscape architecture, and also in sustainable design. How did the LAX Studio fit into these values?

JJ: In my design studios I challenge students to push whatever technology or process they are using to its limit. I find that you can learn an immense amount about a design problem by crossing back and forth between techniques and technologies, and between physical and digital models. The cross-pollination is productive. One technique or software might be excellent for exploring complex geometries and spatial relationships, while another might allow you to simulate more complex material qualities, dynamic behaviors and interactions. That being said, I continue to believe that building physical models help students to develop an intuition about material logics and assemblies that the computer cannot currently replicate. It is hard to feel or comprehend a range of tension or compression forces, or weight, in a typical computer model. Regardless, I want to cultivate designers that can move fluidly between these modes and make intelligent decisions along the way.

It is important to note that some of my colleagues continue to argue that computers are merely another “tool” like a stick of charcoal or a T-square. I also tend to hear the same people divide things up into “analog vs. digital” or “hand vs. computer.” At this point in time I find these categorizations irrelevant. They reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how truly revolutionary computers are, and how omnipresent they will soon be. Whether we like it or not, the next generation of designers will certainly not have these hang-ups.

As new technologies for designing, communicating and fabrication evolve, their creative, technical and social capacities tend to increase. I think this is a very positive thing for all of us.

HK: Everyday, we depend more and more on technology. (e.g. It’s now hard to imagine this world without the Internet although it is a fairly new technology.) What does technology mean to you in architecture? Do you consider it as an optional solution to certain problems, or as an absolute necessity in our life?

JJ: I think that the physiological space of my own generation – including its particular sense of vision, touch, smell, sound and movement—has been profoundly affected by new computational technologies and networks. For example, patterns of urban living are routinely intermeshed and controlled by artificially intelligent systems. This has become second-nature to my generation. What is emerging is a new sensibility, or perhaps, a new sensitivity to the potential of cybernetic systems to coexist with us. We have seen successive generations of architects being affected by similar ideas to varying degrees.

In the 1960’s we had groups like Archigram that were spellbound with techno-gadgetry, while people like Constant Nieuwenhuys or Super Studio took a more critical position to technology and globalization. Buckminster Fuller often gets a bad rap as the technoarchitect, but I happen to believe his ideas were more profound than he gets credit for. I think that many young architects today—and I am certainly implicated in this—continue to view technological advances with a kind of naive fetishistic optimism. As much as I bash the classicists, I have come to understand that fanaticism with the future is not necessarily on a higher moral plateau than romanticism of the past. I am reminded of

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HK: In the LAX Studio, you stressed the importance of computer modeling as well as physical model making and hand drawing (sketching/diagramming) to explore and express ideas. What role do these different methods of design play in your studio?

HK: The syllabus for your research seminar describes Robotic Ecologies as “… promiscuous new environments brought forth by the rapid release of advanced computation into the physical realm.” Would you discuss your interest in integrating robotics into architecture?

JJ: My Princeton thesis explored self-replicating architectural machines at a very abstract level. What if a building could not only manufacture itself, but could also maintain, repair, dismantle and then recycle itself? And what if there were swarms of these things working in tandem, and they all collected their own energy? It all sounds pretty sci-fi– but the research really opened my eyes to emerging fields where my questions seemed almost commonplace–artificial intelligence, robotics and the material sciences. I also quickly became intrigued with the implications of computer-controlled systems like rapid prototyping and various automation technologies. My partner Nataly Gattegno and I have also been experimenting with some of these ideas in our design office. Several of our recent design competition entries have tried to understand the potential of these ideas at a range of scales and situations. So the seminar is really an extension of my early research and the ideas emerging from Future Cities Lab, perhaps with a little more focus. This year in the seminar we are exploring how various physical structures and skins might integrate robotic systems. We are extremely interested in understanding how to instill these material assemblies with the instinct to respond to their environments, to adapt and perhaps learn from its actions, and the actions of its neighbors. Imagine entire building assemblies that react and move in continuous negotiation with the energy dynamics and cycles of their surroundings. Imagine, as you move through an environment, thousands of tiny sensors tracking your motion trajectory through a space and adapting its scale, shape, texture, light, sound, heat, etc. These responses could be quite dramatic—as in an active structural or shape change; very subtle—as in a material or skin change or a hybrid of the two.

The seminar is currently experimenting with standard components like microcontrollers, IR sensors and servo motors—and we are integrating them into pretty sophisticated material and mechanical assemblies. Programming and software integration has been

a real challenge, but it is beginning to produce a level of interactivity and intelligence that even I find astonishing. The students participating in the seminar this year have been especially energetic and skilled, and have inspired me to take the research to the next level. This is really just the beginning. In future iterations of the seminar I would like to investigate technologies that are substantially smaller, lighter, demand less power and have more precise control. Materials such as shape memory alloys have immense potential to move us beyond mechanistic assemblies to systems that are more materially based. These will hopefully allow generative form-finding and energy-seeking logics to be incorporated directly into architectural material assemblies and textiles. I am really at the beginning of this research project and I am constantly surprised by the fascinating territories that are opening up.

JJ: Howard, I would love to turn the tables a little bit and ask you a question. You will be graduating in a few weeks with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture. What are your impressions about your design education? You have certainly been exposed to a variety of ideas and engaged a pretty wide body of techniques from drawing, modeling, scripting, programming, digital modeling, animation, fabrication and simulation – how do you see yourself synthesizing this range of experiences as you move into the future?

HK: As you said, my education at U.Va. exposed me to a diverse range of techniques and methods in approaching design. I mostly used my pencil and x-acto blades starting from Lessons in Making until the end of my first year studios. I began to explore computer modeling and fabrication during my second year, but it really wasn’t until I participated in the LAX Studio or other seminars such as Infolab, Robotic Ecologies, and Emergent Practices, that I was able to experiment with the digital world at an entirely new level. I continue to sketch out my ideas and to build physical models. However, I generally find myself working extensively in the digital realm, because it’s so efficient, accurate and flexible. I believe that it is this diversity that allows me to work through various design problems effectively. I plan to keep all these ideas and techniques with me as I graduate.

I will also hopefully continue to generate innovative design work that will expand the boundaries of architecture. In the future I wish to participate in redefining what architecture is, and what it could be.

Notes: The LAX Studio took place during the Fall semester of 2006 at the University of Virginia. Professor Johnson would like to thank all of the undergraduate Arch 401 students who participated in the studio: Hank Byron, Ama Cobbina, Seth Edwards, Paul Fromm, Billy Glick, Karey Helms, Kathryn Hilton, Owen Howlett, Howard Kim, Alex Kong, Dolores O’Connor and Matthew Robisch. Thanks also to Eric Owen Moss and Julie Eizenberg for tours of their LA design studios, and to the numerous faculty who participated in design reviews.

The trip was also financially supported by the U.Va. Deparment of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, chaired by Prof. William Sherman. Work from the LAX Studio will be published at: www.future-cities-lab.net.

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Hegel’s paradox: “Man learns from history that man learns nothing from history.” As such, our generation continues to place hope in the development of future technologies to repair the damage done by our previous generation’s ill-conceived technologies, just as they placed hope in new technologies to repair the damage done by their previous generation’s ill-conceived technologies, and so on and so forth. Will any of this make the world a more peaceful, more equitable, or a cleaner place? Well, when you look back in time, you begin to understand that social, cultural and ecological progress simply does not go hand-in-hand with technological progress. It seems to take painfully long for synthesis to occur at these more essential levels. Nevertheless, the closer we can move our new technologies—including our cities, buildings and landscapes—towards more responsive, self-regulating and energy interdependent models, the better off we will be. As I suggested earlier, our very notion of “city” is now fundamentally intermeshed with network logics.

Control systems, communication and infrastructural networks: each now plays an integral part in the organizational dynamics of city life. Therefore, technology is not so much an absolute necessity, nor is it optional. It has fundamentally become an integral part of our cosmopolitan nervous system whether we like it or not.

Terra Firma

In our experience as a small office working on large projects with multidisciplinary teams, our role can often be described as creating the vital link between the project (building, group of buildings, master plan) and the site. Typically we mine the cultural and physical histories of a site to develop a conceptual narrative that will guide our designs and result in the creation of a unique, contextual sense of place.

Commonly understood metaphors attributed to landscape often have to do with grounding, rooting, and connections to the land. However, more often than not, we find that our landscapes are not constructed on or in the ground, but rather on a concrete slab. This is typically the roof of a significant structure: a parking garage, mechanical space, auditorium or gallery space. A myriad of technical challenges and constraints emerge in such situations, but most fundamental to the overall design is the conceptual question of how to deal with this constructed ground.

Two recent projects, The Lurie Garden in Chicago and North End Parks in Boston are instructive in how the technical challenges (i.e. bearing weight of the slab, minimum soil depths and drainage issues) are integrated with the conceptual framework that guided the design.

Both of these projects cover the structures on which they sit. They are conceived of and built in the spirit of healing and re-stitching previously eroded urban fabric. The basic approach re-enforces much larger urban planning initiatives in both cities, but each project developed into a unique, site specific response that resulted from the integration of technical constraints with conceptual narratives.

87 Terra Firma Rodrigo Abela/Ian Horton

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Rodrigo Abela Principal, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Ltd. Ian Horton Associate, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Ltd.

the site showing the garage and edge of the rail lines

The Lurie Garden is constructed on top of a parking garage, which itself is built over a still-functioning rail yard, an infrastructural chasm that had up to this point separated Grant Park and the Lake Michigan waterfront from downtown Chicago. The underground garage presented a programmatic challenge; the park needs to accommodate 10,000+ people as they head across the site towards the garage entries on the southern end of the garden.

Additionally, there were structural constraints relative to the competing requirements of the soil depth required for plants and the load-bearing capacity of the surface of the slab.

Conceptually, the experience of the park was designed around the history of Chicago and its evolution as a city. Knowing that soil would have to be built up to get any planting depth, the ground was manipulated to create two different topographic experiences: those where visitors are in the landscape, achieved by retaining walls, and those where they are on the landscape, achieved through gentle grading. The different relationships between the ground and the body are equated with different points in Chicago’s evolution and articulated as such in the plantings and detailing. Where they are fully exposed, retaining walls are used to distinguish the two zones, to delineate an internal path through the garden, and to provide some of the metaphorical connections to the history of the site.

the Lurie garden just before opening (note: pavilions in the right are the entries to the garage)

model of the Lurie Garden showing the manipulation of the ground plane

89 Terra Firma Rodrigo Abela/Ian Horton

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the Lurie garden under construction

the site with the tunnel in the process of being covered

North End Parks under construction

91 Terra Firma Rodrigo Abela/Ian Horton

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context photo of North End Parks site on top of I-93

North End Parks in Boston is being built on top of the newly-buried Interstate 93, a tunnel structure that replaced the formerly elevated highway. Until it was demolished, this highway acted as a barrier separating the North End neighborhood of Boston from the central downtown core. Because the two neighborhoods developed in drastically different ways, the park design does not try to join them but rather creates a threshold between them through a series of low walls and landforms composed perpendicular to the path of travel.

The grain of the walls and landforms follows and expresses the direction and line of the tunnel below. Those lines create a continuity across the two blocks that acts as an essential compositional driver. Maintaining that continuity proved challenging because differences between the existing slope of the surrounding context and the flat top of the new tunnels created critical pinch points that in turn drove many of the grading decisions.

We are currently working on a series of projects which present different on-structure challenges. As ‘green design’ flourishes all around us, elevated rooftops and terraces become our new ground on a very large scale. With buried structures, a connection to the ground is at least possible at the edges. With elevated structures, guardrails and parapets become the horizon line and our connections are visual. These projects force us to carefully consider and reprogram the functions that the ground conventionally performs.

The constructed ground has driven a deeper inquiry into the question of what ground really is, how it functions and where it should be. Formulating appropriate conceptual frameworks for these landscapes is an on-going endeavor and is representative of some of the challenges we deal with daily in the office.

Rodrigo Abela holds a M.Arch and MLA from the University of Virginia, and has been working with Gustafson Guthrie Nichol since 2000. He currently runs a satellite office in the Washington, D.C. area.

Ian Horton holds a MLA from the University of Virginia.

model of North End Parks showing continuity of compositional lines across the length of the parks

Roof Bog System Keyur Shah Undergraduate Architecture

bog system detail

rock

sand

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93 Roof Bog System Keyur Shah

sediment

water sacks

moss roof

This project developed a structure to manifest rainwater and use it throughout the building. A collection of roof bogs capture water before cleansing it in a series of filtration beds. The recycled water is used for building processes, as well as greenhouses and plantings integrated within the structure. An additional system of water sacks ensures a continually functioning building, independent of rainfall. The water sacks act as the link between storage and distribution.

bog

bog

greenhouse

axonometric with bog systsem

lecture hall bog

Space in Landscape Design Zoe Edgecomb Graduate Architecture and Landscape Architecture

95 Space in Landscape Design Zoe Edgecomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_in_Landscape_Design

The Space between Things: Liminality and the Human Psyche Katherine Pabody Graduate Architecture

The condition of this place within the psyche and of its spatial counterpart is liminal. That is, it is a place between things, in which one can at once apprehend the difference between the two conditions that bound it. One could generalize the tension represented in Poe’s stories as the struggle between our existence as part of Nature and the desire to move beyond this existence. It follows then, that the impulse of Poe and many others to represent this place raises compelling questions about human nature and the significance of this space. Why should we draw attention to this place? Does this space actually exist? Does this joint between things afford a valuable consideration for our lives?

This space does seem to exist, if constructed under different conditions than those present in the stories of Poe. Examples of this appear throughout the history of humans making space; from these one can derive a general set of conditions under which liminal space seems to emerge, and extract its particular qualities. The experience of this space is highly charged by the complex sensual apprehension of its meaning with our bodies and by its reflection of that critical condition in our psyche.

Something very powerful in this experience perhaps calls for liminal space to be constructed as the diagram of the relationship between other spaces.

Above: The space between the outside world and the vaults beneath the ground in “The Cask of Amontillado” houses and reflects a man’s intense struggle between the dark, infinite world of insanity and the transparent boundaries of public decorum.

Above: A liminal zone is created as the edge between the room and the forest is thickened.

Occupation therein affords perception of inside and outside at once.

Above: The boudoir in the ground floor of the Hotel de Ville-franche is a complex liminal space. Here many degrees of privacy are felt as boundaries; the body can at once touch the exterior walls of the hotel, view into the garden, and move past the guest salons within a service corridor, while remaining separate from all of these realms.

97 The Space between Things Katherine Pabody

The short stories of Edgar Allen Poe portray a peculiar and gripping vision of human existence. Many chronicle the events surrounding a person’s internal tension between conflicting parts of herself, and how she is thus moved to act relative to the pressures of external circumstances.

Though these circumstances are generally extreme and rather dark, Poe makes a point about the significance of this negotiation within human nature by locating these events within a landscape that provides spatial reflection of the protagonist’s inner conflict.

Above: Liminal space is the condition first constructed (1). It then catalyzes, through human occupancy, a perceivable difference between the realms that lie beyond its edges (2).

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99 The Space between Things Katherine Pabody

The benefit of evaluating spatial relationships in the making of place is its implication for our lives. Making liminal space generative implies that great importance is attached to the provision of conditions in which we can consider our actions. This provision moves these considerations into an ambiguous realm that is separate from its bounding conditions, yet represents both. Here one can conceive the posture of her thoughts and actions relative to differing aspects of her existence.

Above: Liminality begins with the presence of two conditions that share an edge. The edge is made occupiable and a narrow separation between the two sides is revealed (1). Occupation of this place between then affords perception of difference between the two conditions at once, while one remains removed from them (2).

Phases of Construction, charcoal on paper, 60� x 22�

This drawing attempts to represent a series of operations by which a liminal space could be brought into being

A vast potential of the place between things lies in its unique capacity to represent the world that lies beyond it, via architecture and landscape architecture, by virtue of its being made generative rather than its more commonly understood role of being residual. Our reconciliations, in other words, of dialectical conditions that are an essential part of the human experience can be evaluated and reconceived in concert with focus upon this very special reveal between parts.

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101 The Space between Things Katherine Pabody

The Villa Sees the Garden, dyptich, oil on canvas, 108” x 72”

WaterGround, oil on canvas, 48” x 60”

This is an orthographic section of a liminal condition between the interior of the Villa Stein and its garden. This representation explores the character of the relationship between Culture and Nature, as presented by this space.

Work in progress.

This is an orthographic section, depicting the threshold between a barge and the space that separates it from shore. The idea that the passage over a distance between the natural ground and the constructed ground is here suggested as an integral part of the human experience of this site.

From Germany to Japan and Turkey: Modernity, Locality, and Bruno Taut’s Trans-national Details from 1933 to 1938

Through the carefully phrased dictum, “All nationalist architecture is bad, but all good architecture is national,” Bruno Taut (1880-1938) expressed to his students at the Academy of Fine Arts in I����������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������ stanbul his critical position toward the formal concerns of both the National and the International styles in architecture. At the same time and perhaps less explicitly, this phrase conveyed the predicament that many modern architects faced as they began to draw attention to particular qualities of place and culture within the modernizing and yet nationalizing contexts of new nation states during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In an attempt to resist not only the homogenizing agendas of paternalistic states, but also the capitalist and imperialist subtexts of international styles, Taut devised an architectural program that simultaneously contained both regional and trans-national components.

Just before his untimely death during his exile in Istanbul (1936-38), Taut was able to put this program to use in the design and construction of his last major commission, the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography building at the Ankara University in Turkey (1937-39) (Figure 1). It is interesting to note that existing readings of this building have not been entirely consistent with the ideas expressed in Taut’s architectural program from this period. For example, Taut’s particular conception of proportion is hardly mentioned in the existing discussions of this building, while, in Taut’s program, proportion is not only identified as the most definitive component of architecture, but it is also made site- and culture-specific in contrast to its more traditional conception as an autonomous ordering system confined to the rationality of an exclusive architectural discourse. The following paper re-visits Taut’s work during his exile, first in Japan (1933-36) and then in Turkey (1936-38) in order to provide a reading that is more consistent with the ideas expressed in his final architectural program.

1 For other studies that discuss Bruno Taut’s work in Turkey, his trans-nationalism or what Esra Akcan has referred to as a vernacular cosmopolitanism, see Esra Akcan, “Modernity in Translation: Early Twentieth Century GermanTurkish Exchanges in Land Settlement and Residential Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005). Also see, Sibel Bozdoğan, “Against Style: Bruno Taut’s Pedagogical Program in Turkey, 1936-1938,” in The Education of the Architect, ed. Martha Pollak, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 163-192; Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architeckten in der Turkei, 1925-1955 [Modernists and Exile: Germanspeaking Architects in Turkey, 1925-1955], (Berlin: Verlag fur Bauwesen, 1998); Manfred Speidel, “Doğallık ve Özgürlük: Bruno Taut’un Türkiye’deki Yapıları [Naturalness and Freedom: Bruno Taut’s Buildings in Turkey],” Bir Başkentin Oluşumu: Ankara, 1923-1950 [The Making of a Capital: Ankara], (Ankara: TMMOB, 1993), 52-66.

Bruno Taut, Mimari Bilgisi [Lectures on Architecture], Trans. ������ Adnan ����������������������������������� Kolatan. (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi. 1938), ������������ 333.

By the term, “international styles,” I am referring not only to the International Style as defined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson in 1932 (See, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s, The International Style, 1932, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966)), but also to Classical Architecture which is of course an international style in itself. In my opinion, the similarities between these two camps have not been adequately explored while the differences have been exaggerated. The popularizing agenda of the International Style was all too clear to Taut since he had already fought a battle against the design for export policies of the German Werkbund before the First World War. See Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973).

In his lectures, Taut discussed five components (proportion, technique, construction, function, and quality) as a way of defining, “What is Architecture?”, which became the title of the opening chapter of his book, Mimari Bilgisi [Lectures on Architecture].

103 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

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Burak Erdim Ph.D. Candidate, Architectural History

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certainly had social, political as well as artistic implications and reflected the actual conditions of the displaced trans-national populations that were created in Europe following the end of World War I. At that time, many ethnic and minority groups were relocated or massacred as they did not fit the homogenizing populations and identities that were being invented by the new nationalist states.

Along with many others across the extended geography of Europe and Eurasia, Taut experienced a life-changing displacement when the Nazi regime declared him a cultural bolshevist in 1933 particularly due to his extensive interest and involvement in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1933. Following a successful career as an expert and leader in modern housing design in Berlin, Taut had to flee Germany in order to avoid imprisonment and possible execution. After accepting an invitation from the Japanese Federation of Architects, Taut left via Switzerland and began a long and arduous journey at the age of 53.

He traveled over land and sea routes through Marseilles, Naples, Athens, Istanbul, Odessa, Moscow, and Vladivostok in order to get to Japan. Why did Taut go through such trouble to go to the East, while, for example, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came to the United States? Kurt Junghanns argued that the East and particularly Japan attracted Taut as its architectural tradition responded to the tectonic and the spiritual principles of the new architecture.10 But, what were these principles and in what particular ways were these principles to challenge the limits of European Modernism?

Taut provided answers to these questions in lectures, essays, and books that he began to develop during his exile in Japan where he was not given substantial architectural commissions. Instead, the Japanese Federation of Architects entrusted him the task of formulating a theoretical foundation for the development of a modern Japanese architecture based on an analysis of historical and regional precedents.11 Toward this end, on October

Modern Architecture in the United States, they deliberately avoided its social and political content and defined it as the International Style in purely formal terms. They wrote, “There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass. Secondly, regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design. These two principles, with a third proscribing arbitrary applied decoration, mark the productions of the international style,” in their book, The International Style, 20. Also see, Le Corbusier’s formal and static five points: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, horizontal windows, and free façade, in, “Five Points towards a New Architecture,” 1926, in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, Ulrich Conrads, ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 99. ������������������������������� Kurt Junghanns, “Bruno Taut,” Lotus 9 (1975): 221.

Figure 1 Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography building at the Ankara University in Ankara, Bruno Taut, 1937-39.

Here I am referring to the resistance that is advocated by Kenneth Frampton’s influential essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, (New York: Norton 1983), see especially the sub-chapter titled, “The Resistance of the Place-Form,” 26-28.

Frampton suggests that developing nations should foster a resistance or at least a critical acceptance of the social and economic systems that are devised by industrialized nations. Even though Bruno Taut and Kenneth Frampton would have disagreed on this issue of resistance, it is interesting that they both focused on tectonics in their discussion regarding the dialectic between the global and the regional. At the same time, it is interesting to note that while Frampton sees the tectonic as the regionally defined element, Taut finds it to be the manifestation of a universal logic of construction that is responsive to specific physical phenomena, but transcends regional or national boundaries.

As Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson sought to popularize

Sibel Bozdoğan, “Against Style…,” 164.

Wolfgang Pehnt, for example, has pointed out the similar roots, common beliefs, and the close friendship and collaboration of Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe especially during the years immediately following World War I. See, Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973).

Taut’s journey to the East could also be compared and contrasted with Le Corbusier’s journey to the East which extended only as far as Istanbul in 1911 when Corbusier was young and at the beginning of his career. See, Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), Journey to the East, Ivan Zaknic, ed. and trans. with Nicole Pertuiset, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), and, Ivan Zaknic, “Of Le Corbusier’s Eastern Journey,” Oppositions 18 (1979): 86-99.

10 Junghanns, 221.

11 Aside from his remaining manuscripts and letters, most of which can be found in the Akademie der K������ ü����� nste in Berlin, most of Taut’s writings from this period can be found in the following publications: Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, (Tokyo: The Society for International Cultural Relations, 1937); Houses and People of Japan, Tokyo: Sanseido Co. Ltd., 1937, 2nd ed, 1958; and, Mimari Bilgisi [Lectures on Architecture], Trans.

Adnan Kolatan. (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi. 1938). ������

105 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

As a result of this re-examination, the paper makes two primary claims. First, it argues that the masonry coursing pattern of the Faculty of Languages building, which has been repeatedly identified as the primary nationalizing component, could instead be read as a transnational element. A site- and culture-specific proportional system is then uncovered, based on Taut’s program, as the actual regionally responsive element since this proportional system may have informed not only the dimensioning of the masonry pattern, but also the dimensional relationships throughout the whole building. Second, the paper suggests that while the regional and the trans-national components of Taut’s architectural program served to challenge the formal and the theoretical limits of European Modernism, they also reflected Taut’s existential conception of modernity as he sought to understand and legitimize his unusual position working as a displaced western expert.

Working from this displaced position and in what was then considered to be the margins of modernity, Taut felt that the dialectic between the local and the global was essential not only to the continuation of his own career, but also to the continuous development of modern architecture. He therefore promoted a sustained interaction, instead of a resistance, between different cultures and regions and between the regional and the trans-national components of his architectural program.

One can begin the analysis of Taut’s program by asking the question: What did the word, “international” mean to Taut, during the early- and mid-1930s, relative to, for example, the formalistic and the stylistic use of this word,

by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson during those very same years? For Taut, the word, “international”

1935, after only two years of studying Japanese history and culture, Taut summarized his observations and suggestions in a lecture titled, “Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture” that he presented to the Japanese Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai).12 Taut began by recognizing the limits as well as the fundamental significance of his subjective position as a twentieth-century western architect working in the East. He declared,

By identifying the limits of his inevitable subjectivity, Taut was making a case for artistic freedom which to him was simultaneously bound and set free by the limits of one’s very experiences and interactions. From this empirical perspective, he was drawing attention to his own interaction with Japan in order to suggest that a possible new Japanese architecture could be generated not only from a careful self analysis, but also from Japan’s past and present interactions with other regions and cultures.

Once Taut established the central importance of this interaction, he continued his lecture by pointing out what he found to be shared sensibilities between western and eastern art and architecture. After all, he felt that these were the very qualities that allowed him to function in a place that was less familiar to him. In this part of his lecture, his purpose was to show that what he considered to be universal concepts did not just originate from and exist solely in the West. He claimed, “Beauty may be called ‘eternal’ only when the form—whether in the Gothic Cathedral, the Doric Temple, or in the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Palace—has fulfilled to its utmost, the demands made upon it by the environment and culture of the country: in short, when it is a successful realization of the entirety of things.”14 In this way, by proposing how a universal concept such as beauty was a function of the quality of the relationship between the object and its environment and by showing how such a concept could not be limited to the West, Taut sought to dispel a certain Japanese fascination with the West. He told his audience, “the exotic no longer exists in Europe for Japan or in Japan for Europe.”15 Taut went on to show how interaction and communication between regions have always been at work in the development of, what is at times falsely considered to be, regional qualities. In order to further articulate this point, Taut showed in a diagram how various trans-national influences had always been a part of the making of Japanese art and architecture (Figure 2). He explained that both the Katsura Palace and the Nikko Temple,

Figure 2 Diagram showing the positive and negative influences on the development of Japanese building traditions. Bruno Taut, 1935.

which were believed to be the icons of traditional Japanese architecture, were the result of strong Chinese and Buddhist influences. At the same time, Taut observed that the two buildings were drastically different in the way that they responded to the specific conditions of their sites. Tracing this difference through the genealogy of Japanese architecture, Taut identified a negative and a positive line along its development. On the negative side, Taut felt that the Buddhist Temple, even though it had contributed to the tea culture that had produced Katsura, did not respond to the qualities of its site and climate. He demonstrated, for example, that the excessively heavy roof of the Nikko Temple did not make structural sense in an earthquake-prone region since it required unnecessary bracing which negatively affected the proportional qualities of its architecture.

On the positive side, Taut defined the Ise and the Katsura as belonging to the positive side. He explained that these two buildings had trans-national origins and yet they had synthesized various social rituals, craft traditions, available materials, and the climatic conditions in order to respond to the peculiar requirements of their specific culture and site. Taut provided the ninth-century farmhouses that were preserved at Shirakawa in Gifu Prefecture as the positive local tradition that blended with the Chinese Buddhist influence to produce Katsura. The rational and responsive construction of the Shirakawa houses reminded Taut of European Gothic, medieval, and vernacular traditions. In this way, Taut pointed out that this responsiveness to site, culture, and climate was a value that was shared by the positive examples of both eastern and western cultures. In addition, he formulated that this logic of construction could become, “building art” when a dynamic and responsive proportional system reflected a harmonious relationship between the building and the site.16 Taut put forward the Katsura Palace as the perfect example that had achieved a rare unity both within and without despite its trans-national and trans-regional origins.

12 For the full report, see Bruno Taut, Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, 1936, (Tokyo: The Society for International Cultural Relations, 1937).

13 Ibid., 5-6.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Taut, Mimari Bilgisi, see Chapter 2, “Proporsiyon [Proportion],” 25.

107 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

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As an architect, my attitude toward the historic is necessarily conditioned by the artistic conception which I myself endeavor to realize. From this it follows that artists must speak and write subjectively about art. But is there any science of art which would be objective in the sense that it would present authentically not only historical data, but also stylistic questions and qualities of old works—thus giving a truly just criticism, independent of time and space?13

Taut reflected, In world architecture this Palace is one of the soundest examples of complete and perfect realization of function; indeed, in the functions of beauty and spirituality as well as that of utility. The extent to which every detail has been brought into perfect proportion with every other is worthy of great admiration. This has been so well done that although even the smallest details have their own individuality, one of them predominates to the detriment of their unity as a whole.17 Taut further articulated the relationship between proportion, site, and the trans-national logic of construction in his book, Lectures on Architecture that he compiled in Japan and used in his lectures in Turkey between 1936 and 1938. In the second chapter titled, “Proportion,” Taut wrote that the beauty and the specific proportioning system of the Ise Shrine are directly connected to the humidity of the summers and the coldness of the winters in Japan. He continued that the same temple would have been “dead like a fish out of water in the bright sun and transparent air of Greece.”18 In this way, proportion became the key principle through which the trans-national tectonic logic of a building could be rooted in its cultural and physical setting.19 Consequently, Taut reasoned that a dynamic and responsive relationship between architecture and the cultural landscape would have to oppose the legitimacy of universal or autonomous formal or proportional systems suggested by the International Style as well as the classical traditions in architecture. Instead of arbitrary geometrical relationships

Figure 4 House Okura, Azabu, Tokyo, Gonkuro Kume and Bruno Taut, 1936.

suggested by the ideal proportions of Leonardo da Vinci’s interpretation of the Vitruvian man, Taut proposed a responsive humanism by recognizing that, for example, western and eastern bodies have significant proportional differences.20 He demonstrated this idea in a diagram where he split the Vitruvian circle and the square in half so that the whole could contain more than just one man (Figure 3).21 Splitting the ideal figure allowed the two halves to be flexible and, while the idea of proportion remained central, the components of the circle and the square could now respond to the specific cultural and physical needs of its inhabitants. However, and this is a key point, just as the Japanese and the western bodies made up the two halves of the circle and the square in Taut’s diagram, and just as the Katsura Palace was the result of a synthesis of both Chinese and Japanese traditions, Taut felt that the program for a modern Japanese architecture, as well as the program for modern architecture, would continuously develop through an open acknowledgement of the everyday interactions that were already taking place between regions. In this way, he felt that the identity of a region could no longer be limited to static definitions and borders.

Regarding the nature of these interactions, Taut did not hesitate to note in his sketchbooks that, despite his admiration for Japanese building traditions, he kept bumping his head in Japanese houses and that the tatami floors were utterly cold and uncomfortable in the winter. Taut expressed this uneasy match between his aging Western body and the Japanese house through conversations that he had with his Japanese friend Mr. Suzuki, Taut: What I do mean is the admirable way in which the Japanese house has adapted itself to the special climate of Japan and is in harmony with local customs and daily occupations… I must really rack my brains to remember a modern

17 Taut, Fundamentals…, 34.

18 Bruno Taut, Lectures…, 56. Also see, Bozdoğan, “Against Style…,” 183.

19 By fundamentally opposing arbitrary use of proportion and by linking the organization of the elements of the building to site and culture specific qualities, Taut was continuing a mode of criticism that was begun by the pioneers of the modern movement such as Horatio Greenough or John Ruskin during the first half of the 19th Century. What is different about Taut however is that while Greenough and Ruskin developed their ideas essentially in favor of a national architecture, Taut began to modify their ideas towards the development of a trans-national program.

20 Based on his readings of a Japanese scientist Dr. Tadasu Misawa, Taut proposed, “…the small size of the Japanese is no peculiarity of race but a consequence of their style of living, their food and customs.” Similarly, Taut felt that architectural proportion should be a function of culture as well. See, Taut, Houses and People of Japan, 41. While such pseudo-scientific theories on race and culture are of course highly questionable, Taut’s particular use of this is interesting and can be analyzed further.

21 This diagram first appeared in his, Houses and People of Japan, 41; and later in, Lectures…, 65.

109 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

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Figure 3 Diagram showing the proportional variations in Japanese and Western men, Bruno Taut, 1937.

house which allows the wind to blow through it (commenting on the ability of Japanese houses to cross-ventilate)…

Mr. Suzuki: Ah, well, you may be right. But then, you see, for modern life the old style of building is not suitable at all. Talking of projecting roofs, for example, you must admit that we have no use any more for these dark old-fashioned rooms in the interior…

Taut: Nobody said you were to imitate the old style completely! That would be as terrible a mistake as slavish imitation of foreign styles…22

lunch : dialect 110 Figure 5 Alternating brick and stone masonry pattern of the Faculty of Languages building.

22 This passage is taken from, Bruno Taut, “Houses and People of Japan,” Daidalos 54 (1994): 65-66. For the full conversation see, Bruno Taut, “What now? (Chapter XI),” in Houses and People of Japan, (Tokyo: Sanseido Co. Ltd., 1937, 2nd ed, 1958), 255-274.

23 Villa Okura was also designed specifically to accommodate Western furniture such as chairs, tables, armchairs and couches, etc.

24 This was Taut’s second significant encounter with Istanbul. Taut first came to Istanbul in 1916 in order to develop a proposal for the German-Turkish House of Friendship Competition in Istanbul. He was one of the eleven participating architects (Walter Gropius was also invited, but could not come since he was serving in the German military). The competition was organized by the Deutscher Werkbund and the twelve German architects who were invited to the competition were chosen by the Werkbund as well. The participating architects also acted as the judges and German Bestelmeyer’s proposal was chosen as the winning entry. However, the House of Friendship was never built since Germany and the Ottoman Empire lost World War I and consequently their hopes of extending Germany’s trade bloc all the way to India through the Persian Gulf. Therefore, Taut’s original intellectual and architectural interest in the East went hand in hand with German Imperialism. For further details on the competition see, Deutschen Werkbund und der Deutsch-Türkischen Vereinigung, Haus der Freundschaft in Konstantinopel, Ein Wettewerb Deutscher Architekten, mit einführung von Theodor Heuss, (München: Verlag von F. Bruckman A.G.), 1918; and Süha Özkan, “Türk-Alman Dostluk Yurdu Öneri Yarışması, 1916 [TurkishGerman Friendship House Competition, 1916],” O.D.T.Ü. Mimarlık Fakültesi Dergisi [M.E.T.U. Faculty of Architecture Journal] (Fall 1975): 177-210. Taut’s second destiny with Turkey came in 1936 when Hans Poelzig (another House of Friendship architect), who was to take Ernst Egli’s position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, died unexpectedly before his (Poelzig’s) arrival. Following a long elimination process complicated by the preferences of Nazi sympathizers in Turkey, Taut was finally offered the job based largely on Martin Wagner’s recommendations. Wagner was already in Turkey at that time.

25 For an extensive analysis of Taut’s school buildings in Turkey see, Burak Erdim, “Lost in Translation: the Encounter between Bruno Taut and the Turkish Republic from 1936-38,” (Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 2004). Also ����� see relevant essays in, Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architeckten in der Turkei, 1925-1955 [Modernists and Exile: Germanspeaking Architects in Turkey, 1925-1955], (Berlin: Verlag fur Bauwesen, 1998).

26 For a survey of Modern Turkish Architecture see, Renata Holod and Ahmet Evin, eds., Modern Turkish Architecture, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). One should note that some of the periodizations used in this reference have been called into question by more recent and more detailed analyses.

For example, see, Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

111 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

On the one hand, Taut’s conversations with Mr. Suzuki remind one of the hierarchical dialectic in Plato’s Republic where the teacher/master, in Taut’s case, he and the West, provide the logic that the student or the East eventually comes to follow. On the other hand, Taut’s conversations provide one of the most direct accounts of the nuances and the power structures that can be present in a dynamic encounter between the self and the other or between two subjects as they try to resolve the infinitely complex issues of tradition, modernity, and identity. It is significant that Taut sought to develop ideas through these very conversations towards the conception of not only a new Japanese architecture, but also an architectural process that could consistently be responsive to the continuous interaction between the local and the global forces. A similar interaction occurred in 1936 when Bruno Taut designed Villa Okura with Gonkuro Kume, as an example of what a new Japanese architecture could be (Figure 4).

The building made extensive use of horizontal sun-shading devices and clerestory operable windows in order to block direct sunlight during the summer months while allowing the warm air to rise and escape through the high awning windows, therefore creating both ventilation and air movement.23 Even though horizontal sun-shading devices were a specific response to the traditional forms, building

techniques, and the oppressive humidity of the Japanese summers, Taut felt that the relationship between the sun-shading devices and windows could be rearranged and adapted to the sun angles, temperatures, humidity levels and most importantly the cultural requirements of other regions. Taut felt that the careful adjustment of such features to cultural and climatic conditions would begin to provide the site- and culture-specific proportional system that would enable a harmonious relationship between the building and the cultural and the physical environment. On October 10, 1936, following an invitation from the Turkish Republic, Taut left Japan and arrived in yet another unfamiliar place, Istanbul, in order to teach as the head of the Department of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and to serve as the chief architect of the Ministry of Education and Public Works.24 While in Istanbul, Taut repeatedly made use of the similar sun-shading devices not only in his own house in Ortaköy, but also in order to bring natural light deeper into the classrooms of a number of school buildings that he designed in Ankara, Izmir, and Trabzon, Turkey.25 In this way, Taut felt that the trans-national logic of construction contained mobile components that could be adjusted and made site- and culture-specific through the use of proportion. This simultaneously regional and trans-regional program also allowed Taut to legitimize his position as an architect who could move from place to place and respond to the architectural needs of a variety of settings and cultures.

On October 10, 1936 Taut arrived in Istanbul at the height of what was later termed as the Second National Movement in the history of modern Turkish architecture.26 This movement, which was advocated largely by Turkish architects, came as a backlash against the popularity not only of the International Style, but also of the almost exclusive

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27 Sibel Bozdoğan, “Nationalizing the Modern House: Regionalism Debates and Emigré Architects in Early Republican Turkey,” (in English) in Berndt Nicolai, ed., Architecktur und Exil: Kulturtransfer und architektonishe Emigration 1930 bis 1950, (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2003), 185-186.

Figure 6 Stair detail, Faculty of Languages building.

masonry modulates the dimensioning of every component of the building. Stair riser dimensions, height and width of window openings, and ceiling heights were all established by the proportional system set up by the tectonic logic of the masonry pattern (Figure 6).30 Therefore, it becomes possible to suggest that this proportional system may have been adjusted to be responsive to the physical, cultural, and climatic conditions of Ankara.31 In this way, while the constructional logic remained trans-regional, its particular dimensions may have been designed to respond to particular local conditions. Consequently, in Taut’s architectural program, an autonomous system such as proportion was made site-specific while the basic tectonic system of a building was seen as the trans-regional element, providing a continuity between cultures and regions as it reflected the trans-national logic of construction.

One could suggest that, through the components of this architectural program, Taut was not only trying to invent a responsive Modernism that could grow out of the specific conditions of each place and culture, but he was also attempting to construct a continuity out of the discontinuous fragments of his own life and work.32 Stone construction and stone coursing patterns, for example, had held considerable importance to Taut since his formative years. While training at a Building Art Vocational School (Baugewerksschule) in Königsberg between 1897 and 1901, Taut had worked as a mason’s apprentice in a construction firm.33 In addition, years later, while working under his most influential mentor, Theodor Fischer, Taut worked on the design of many stone buildings including those at the Jena University. The components of these buildings resemble the window pattern, the entrance canopy, and the stone coursing pattern of both the Faculty of Languages building in Turkey and the Villa Okura in Japan.34 By pointing to the similarities in these examples, one could argue that Taut was trying to establish parallels between his trans-national experience and the tectonic traditions of these regions. The possibility of such a continuity served to legitimize Taut’s at times unwelcomed position as a western expert who was to understand regional conditions

30 I have not yet been able to verify whether, for example, the stair riser dimensions are different from the standards suggested by the German version of the Architectural Graphic Standards. My current estimates, which are derived largely from photographs, show that the riser dimensions that Taut used are on the lower end of international standards. These dimensions also seem lower than the ones Taut had used in similar buildings in Germany. These findings could support the thesis that Taut may have used a different dimensioning system in Turkey. The masonry system is not structural and serves as a cladding system that covers the concrete structural frame. Nevertheless, its pattern defined by the alternating courses of stone and brick manifests the proportional system that orders the whole building.

31 It has been suggested that Taut was preoccupied with discovering the underlying golden section in the proportional principles of Ottoman architecture so as to apply them to the design of the façade of the Faculty of Languages building. See Bozdoğan, “Against Style…,” 184.

28 For example, Sedad Hakk����������������������������������������� ı Eldem wrote, “Bruno Taut ... attempted to impart a Turkish character to his brick and stone walls and was, in my opinion, highly successful.” See,��������������������������� “Towards a Local Idiom: A Brief History of Contemporary Architecture in Turkey,” (Zodiak 10, (September 1994): 43.

32 For a more extensive discussion of the idea of translation in Bruno Taut’s work, see Esra Akcan, “Modernity in Translation: Early Twentieth Century German-Turkish Exchanges in Land Settlement and Residential Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005), 690-739.

29 See Robert Ousterhout’s “Ethnic Identity and Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman Architecture.” (Muqarnas. 12 (1995)): 48-62, where he demonstrates the transnational origins of this particular masonry pattern.

He argues that at times and in particular cases, the same masons may have built both the Christian and the Muslim buildings.

34 In addition, during the 1920s, during his own architectural practice and collaboration with his brother Max Taut, Taut had used coursing patterns similar to that of the Faculty of Languages building. See the various stone coursing patterns used both on the exterior and interior of buildings in, Max Taut: Bauten, (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002). One explanation of this similarity is that Taut was exposed to the alma���� shık pattern when he came to Istanbul in 1916.

33 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture,” (Diss. Columbia University, 1973), 544.

113 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

preference of the Turkish Government for foreign architects.27 Within this context, Taut’s alternating stone and brick pattern (alma���� shık)���������������������������������� that covered the exterior of the Faculty of Languages building was interpreted by architects and scholars as a welcomed attempt at regionalism by a foreign architect (Figure 5).28 This interpretation was largely due to the fact that the alma���� shık pattern that Taut used throughout the building was conveniently considered to be solely Turkish and was associated only with early Ottoman and Rum-Seljuk building traditions within the nationalizing context of the new Turkish State. However, just as Taut had recognized the international origins and the trans-national tectonics of the Katsura Palace, he must have also noticed that this particular wall pattern had been used in the construction of both Turkish and Byzantine buildings not only in Istanbul, but also throughout other parts of Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the Balkans.29 In this way, just as Taut was finding tectonic parallels between the European Gothic and the Shirakawa houses, he may have found that this particular pattern provided him with a cultural and tectonic continuity from Germany all the way to Istanbul. Therefore, instead of celebrating an isolated national character, this detail may have served to create a continuity rather than a discontinuity, both historically and geographically for Taut, between regions and cultures.

At the same time, even though the actual origins shık pattern was not exclusively national or of the alma���� regional, the particular proportional system that Taut established through the use of this pattern may have provided the means through which a more specific relationship was established between the building and its location. In the interior, one finds that the horizontal coursing of the

In Japan, Taut had shown how trans-national encounters between China and Japan had found a synthesis in the constructional and the proportional system of the Katsura Palace. Similarly in Turkey, Taut sought to synthesize trans-national sources through the use of a proportional system that was responsive to the Turkish culture and climate. One should add that during the design of the Faculty of Languages building, Taut was working with other exiled Germans, Austrians, as well as Turkish colleagues and students who were themselves trying to sort out whether they belonged to their memories of the Ottoman Empire or to the nationalism and the modernizing doctrines of the new Turkish Republic.

Working in this atmosphere, Taut wrote, “With my colleagues at the office of the Ministry of Education, we are working on the details of the Faculty of Languages building as if we are playing the different instruments in a symphony orchestra.”35 What Taut liked about this group was that, within the group, in addition to each individual’s varied backgrounds and experiences, there was a shared and simultaneous feeling of loss and discovery.36 Soon after his arrival in Istanbul, Taut wrote to his wife, “Today, living has become very hard.

No one is in their real home. However, I am happily here and so busy that my head is about to explode.”37 This simultaneous feeling of loss and discovery or exhaustion and rigor that Taut expressed from Istanbul, perhaps not surprisingly, resembled Marshall Berman’s later description of the experience of modernity,

of which, as Berman suggests, were inevitable components of the experience of modernity, he was, for the most part, able to absorb only those qualities and concepts that were already familiar or comprehensible to his western background, identity, and architectural thinking.

In this way, one could argue that the interaction Taut had with other cultures had only limited success in modifying Taut’s identity. On the other hand, through his sustained dialogue with the East, Taut began to come to terms with such limitations and to formulate a way through which he could begin to design and live responsively in an unfamiliar world.

As Taut was removed from Germany, he resolved to remove the ancient idea of proportion from its so-called universal reign and to make it responsive to the lives of other cultures and regions. Seen in this way, the details of the Faculty of Languages building can not be read simply as Taut’s attempt at regionalism. Instead, they were Taut’s direct response to a trans-national modernity the ubiquity of which he recognized as he began to reconsider his privileged position as a western expert.

In summary, the analysis of Taut’s journey reveals that the word “international” represented the ever-present dialectic between local conditions and global pressures that he hoped the shared experience of modernity could equally value and continue. In a similar way, Bruno Taut saw his exile, modernity, and the development of modern architecture as a dynamic and trans-national experience that was constantly and inevitably redefined through encounters between individuals and regions. In this way, Taut viewed modern architecture as the evolving product of a responsive process that would follow slightly different paths in each particular place while maintaining a trans-national character as a result of continued interactions and exchanges between cultures.

List of Figures

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.38 When Taut was faced with the loss of the familiar and the discovery of the unfamiliar, both

Figure 1: Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography building at the Ankara University in Ankara, Bruno Taut, 1937-39. View of the front façade and the main entrance canopy.

Source: Sibel Bozdoğan, “Against Style: Bruno Taut’s Pedagogical Program in Turkey, 1936-1938,” in The Education of the Architect, ed. Martha Pollak, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 176.

Figure 2: Diagram showing the positive and negative influences on the development of Japanese building traditions. Bruno Taut, 1935.

Source: Bruno Taut, Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, (Tokyo: The Society for International Cultural Relations, 1937), 25.

Figure 3: Diagram showing the proportional variations in Japanese and Western men, Bruno Taut.

35 Manfred Speidel, “Doğallık ve Özgürlük: Bruno Taut’un Türkiye’deki Yapıları [Naturalness and Freedom: Bruno Taut’s Buildings in Turkey],” Bir Başkentin Oluşumu: Ankara, 1923-1950 [The Making of a Capital: Ankara]. (Ankara: TMMOB, 1993), 54.

36 Wolfgang Pehnt writes, “In the expressionist context the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art,’ had a double meaning. As normally used, it meant the union of all the arts in architecture, but it also referred to the total environment that called upon more than one of man’s senses.” The essence of the goal to appeal to a multiplicity of senses has also made its way to and necessitated the idea of teamwork in architectural practice. This idea was to later surface in Walter Gropius’s Architects’ Collaborative, for example. See, Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 19.

37 Manfred Speidel, “Doğallık ve Özgürlük…,” 58.

38 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 15.

Source: Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan, 1937, (Tokyo: Sanseido Press, 1958), 41.

Figure 4: House Okura, Azabu, Tokyo, Gonkuro Kume and Bruno Taut, 1936.

Source: Winfried Nerdinger, Kristiana Hartmann, Matthias Schirren, and Manfred Speidel, Bruno Taut 18801938: Architekt zwichen Tradition und Avantgarde, (Stuttgart: Ansalt, 2001), 185.

Figure 5: Alternating brick and stone masonry pattern of the Faculty of Languages building.

Source: Sibel Bozdoğan, “Against Style: Bruno Taut’s Pedagogical Program in Turkey, 1936-1938,” in The Education of the Architect, ed. Martha Pollak, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 185.

Figure 6: Stair detail, Faculty of Languages building.

Source: Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architeckten in der Turkei, 1925-1955 [Modernists and Exile: Germanspeaking Architects in Turkey, 1925-1955], (Berlin: Verlag fur Bauwesen, 1998), 92.

115 From Germany to Japan and Turkey Burak Erdim

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better than his/her local colleagues. In this way, his responsive proportional system served to create a continuity not only between regions, but also between the fragments of Taut’s career allowing him to reconstruct its parts as vital components of an ongoing investigation regarding the dialectic between the regional and the trans-regional.

Venice + Mexico City + Charlottesville traveling studios Peter Waldman William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture Julie Bargmann Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Mario Schjetnan Frank Talbot, Jr. Visiting Professor

Discussion on the north terrace, March 26th 6 pm.

Mexico City/Venice Studios Julie Bargmann (JB): We are confronted with a related thing, which is the use of water, which is radical.

Peter Waldman (PW): What happens when you gather it? How do you use and re-use it in the daily processes of everyday life? A Culinary Institute: cleaning food, growing food, and washing the threshold down at night.

J. Harding Dowell: All of this water used is piped in -- Not the water Venice is built on and in. It’s an interesting issue, the city intrinsically connected to water they can’t use.

PW: They use it, but as a spatial condition, and as a medium of circulation. agua (Zoe Edgecomb)

117 Venice + Mexico City + Charlottesville

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venezia (J. Harding Dowell)

JB: When did the designer’s concern for water emerge?

mexico city, mexico february 28 - march 11, 2007

PW: Water is a magical poetic and pragmatic concern we can use. When I mention light and water -- you can make all your projects out of it, building materials -sand, stone and water become precious glass.

JB: I would agree that there is a resurgent interest in how things are made.

Mark Phemister: I see this as connected to a growth in interest in infrastructure as a landscape issue. Water is the most pure element of infrastructure, the most poetic.

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119 Venice, Mexico City, Charlottesville

Mario Schjetnan G.: The Basin of Mexico is volcanic.

It developed for 20 million years, and started to be populated by 8000. When the Aztecs got there, it was already populated. The only place they could inhabit was an island in the center. So they developed a way of dwelling within the lake.

PW: Mario di Valmarana used to explain that there is no such thing as a Venetian. Venice began with a condition of many groups of people being displaced. It was a place of multiple, small centers. Incredible parallels of people dealing with frictional relationships with water.

JB: I can’t help but think that this obsession with water is linked to the need to renegotiate these relationships with water.

Lake Zumpango (David Malda)

Chinampas (Shanti Levy)

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Teotihuacan (David Malda)

Zumpango (Kurt Fulmer)

PW: At what scales do you do this? At the neighborhood? The desalinization of the East Coast? The reforestation of Mexico?

JB: Students are investigating which scales make sense in terms of the economy of means.

They’re discovering that there are “water machines” that deal with water at different scales, and can be pragmatically and poetically employed.

PW: And then we have the machine in the garden, as waterworks in the contemporary projects of Barragan and Scarpa. Ambasz recounts in the MOMA Barragan exhibit of 1968 the architect’s effort to design a house to dwell in celebration of the routines of everyday life as well a garden to resist the finality of death. In the Brion Cemetery between Tomb and Chapel there are thresholds of still and active waters. Can there be strategies at the scale of the house and garden, which point to a larger strategy? We encountered a number of Scarpa works that do both water as genesis of the world while simultaneously providing us with a baptismal font in easy reach. Water is tangible and has to do with use if given a container.

If you use a basin to wash vegetables and then use the same water to wash the dishes, and perhaps to water sparingly the rosemary bush, there is cycle with enduring life here and now. That’s why I like to imagine working in a culinary institute. These projects provoke the ramifications of using water.

JB: I like to think that’s where we’re getting at this school -- getting past the general idea -- we have to stay at the table with the engineers -- understand the size, volume. That has spatial ramifications. I think that’s where we have to advance this exploration.

Teotihuacan (Serena Nelson)

Centro Historico (Jessie Calder)

paving details (Mark Phemister)

PW: I think there is a very visceral dimension of architecture that engages biological processes.

JB: It is about introducing the everyday back into a city that’s losing its everyday.

PW: I use a phrase -- citizens and strangers simultaneously . . . we travel and learn from a different condition. It is the strange that is very valuable as well as looking at the familiar.

The precondition of Mexico is the large lake and you are trying to build a city with an identity, a community. Venice is within the lagoon and I am cooking pasta in a pot of boiling water. I see, smell and consume one in the other. Where do you begin in the making of that identity? A unit, a surface, a sound? I am interested in where we begin at a certain essence. And I wonder if you are saying that is water: an oasis we all can share. Eden came before Jerusalem. Eden began only after the third day, when the earth was filled with water.

There is a spatial condition of water. Maybe that’s why baptism is important in so many cultures, and birth, obviously.

Casa Barragan (Payam Ostovar)

JB: It’s the return to the Aztecs; the way you build a city is through water, not opposing it.

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(Elizabeth Hoogheem)

venice, italy february 24 - march 10, 2007

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125 Venice + Mexico City + Charlottesville

Piazza San Marco (Hana Kim)

PW: Remembering when I was in Peru, Arequipa in 1967. I rented a house for $7.50 a month, no water facilities included. The first day I spent $10 to set up an outdoor basin.

This one basin of water would be filled on Sunday morning, warmed by the sun. I would make my oatmeal, wash my dishes, and then my clothes. I used small drops of water to sprinkle my tiled floors before sweeping to keep the dust down. I would hang the wet clothes over my herbs and vegetables. There is an economy to this. The basin served as a beginning, the first day and every Sunday thereafter. Forty years later I make sure my hands get wet routinely in North Garden.

JB: There is relevance from the basin to the Basin.

Lagoon (Hana Kim)

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127 Venice + Mexico City + Charlottesville

Whitney Maria Odell

charlottesville, u.s.a march 11 - may 10, 2007

me-andering footnotes and my-opic afterthoughts Peter Waldman William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture

The Studio of the South Wall traveled South to Mexico, while those bound by the East Wall set our coordinates directly East to Venice. We arrived on a telltale Sunday morning in dense fog and then set up our routines in palatial quarters on opposing sides of the Grand Canal. It rained heavily that dark Sunday afternoon as we marched from the Academmia Bridge to Peggy Guggenheim’s place, onto San Marco soaked to the bone, and then disbanded. Some lingered for a Byzantine mass of incense, and golden robes, candles and golden mosaics, reverberating choirs and shivering cold wet feet.

The next day and for ten days thereafter the skies above Venice were crystal clear by day and full of the stars and the moon by night. We learned that traveling is different than visiting or touring. Traveling, we learned, comes from the French verb travail; that is, to work hard in a non-familiar place. It seems an essential requirement for citizens of this venerable North American cultural institution to get out of the familiar and to see the world as strangers. We were conscious indeed that our colleagues and compatriots from Campbell Hall were simultaneously on journeys to Barcelona as well as to Mexico. We intended to swap musings of the exotic, of far, far away and long, long ago as Homer inspired Marco Polo onto James Joyce and currently Thomas Pynchon in Mason Dixon, all who amuse us today.

It is rumored that The Mexicans climbed Temples to the Sun and the Moon and revisited these same benchmarks in the contemporary precincts of Barragan. The Venetians breathlessly compressed the space between sky and sea, surging routinely over the 256 bridges weaving through the labyrinths and campi of our Lagoon. We learned not only how to get lost, but finding our way out of the meander by turning the map upside down and inside out as we retraced our steps to find our way to Scarpa’s gate posts. Both warm hued pietra veronese accommodated step by step the shoe leather of our Venetian passage; and the ignition of candles every other day celebrated birthdays, all came to a pause in a lush palazzo garden on the other side of Canal with manteca di baccala, salame di cavallo, and the luminous bubbles of prosecco. Since then both the studios of the East and the South have found time to share mole and risotto for a late lunch in distinct yet sabrosa dialects. While it is good to be home, it is terrific to travel.

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A Full Moon has come and gone since these preliminary musings on water as the genesis perhaps of our parallel projects. Perhaps afterthoughts should raise the ante now in the name of the frictions and fires possibly smoldering in these two adjacent studios ALAR 702 situated on the southeast corner of Campbell Hall. Immediately outside our uphill walls two distinct construction projects emerge from the same ground. One to the East is a singular monument, the other to the South is the cellular fabric of the surrogate city.

Some in our corner of this world claim they are not new constructions at all, but the haunted houses of Venice and Mexico. Here and now, then and there, two studios side by side find themselves all wet and on fire. Like Water for Chocolate.

Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson 2006 Carlo Pelliccia traveling fellowship Graduate Architecture

The Pantheon, the best preserved monument from Roman antiquity, eludes historical certainties. Surrounded by mysteries such as which Emperor to credit for its design, or how the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth was constructed, the Pantheon is open every day to citizens and strangers alike. This summer I embraced the dialogue between Rome and the Pantheon, of history and legend, of the archaeology of ruins and the temporal landscape of the city. This anthology of investigations and shared experiences delights in the vital speculations on the Pantheon.

131 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson

We are taught to use Jefferson’s Academical Village as a tool with which to formulate architectural relationships. My proposal for study in Rome suggests the Pantheon as a similar template. As a lens through which to interpret the city of Rome, the Pantheon is a center of the rituals and routines of daily life. In this study, dialectical encounters with the Pantheon and the phenomena of Rome are investigated through the medium of drawing. As a spatial theater, an urban portico, and a civic ruin, the Pantheon is a place of orientation within the streets of Rome.

A Lesson of Rome the origins of Rome and the Pantheon

The Roman Empire extended through a series of military campaigns and made civic improvements within its city walls. As the world’s first roadway system begged for new destinations, civic improvements such as a sewage system and aqueducts bringing fresh water to public drinking fountains and public baths revolutionized the daily life of Roman citizens. Just as the Lawn ends in two solitary student rooms as an ethical symbol of the individual’s responsible identity, the city of Rome highlights the role of the individual speculative imagination.

a legend of construction Hadrian was a particularly benevolent emperor, adored by the citizens of Rome. To build the dome, the interior of the Pantheon’s circular brick and concrete drum was filled with a mound of earth. A fortune of golden coins was mixed into the earthen tumulus. After the dome was poured on top of this solid formwork, and had cured, the doors of the Pantheon opened for the first time, and citizens of Rome were invited to carry the earth away and keep the coins that they found.

133 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson

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Rome was founded as a series of camps atop seven hills adjacent to the Tiber River. The hills of tufa, the thick crust of volcanic lava and ash, provided both protection and formal structure for the early settlements. As the camps got bigger, the swampy terrain between the hills was drained to create the forum, Rome’s meeting ground and market place. The dual spatial structure of Rome, created by the vernacular settlements clustered to the topography, merged against the legendary crossing of the Cardo and the Decumanus, became Rome’s symbol of civilization and the diagram of the Pantheon. Conceived on the site where Romulus ascended to heaven, the Pantheon validates Rome’s foundation.

The Pantheon was built in the Campus Martius, the swamp outside of Rome’s original city walls, but it was intended to be a new center, the eighth hill of Rome. The Cardo of the Pantheon is in line with the axis on which the heavens turn, and its Decumanus, the oculus, is oriented toward the passage of the sun.

email dispatch 06.01.06 | First Rain

Spatial Theater the Pantheon’s urban precinct | summer in the city

In the morning, the Pantheon’s bronze doors, still on their original hinges, open to allow the first visitors to enter this temple of light and shadow. Between cigarettes, a round man wearing green overalls buffs the granites, porphyries, and marbles on the floor. A street-sweeper circulates around the base of the fountain, leaving a trail of soapy water behind. Delivery trucks unload the day’s supplies to the cafes and trattorias that unlock their doors. As a waiter unfolds a white tablecloth, I sketch in the welcoming morning sunlight.

In the afternoon, as the sun shining through the oculus makes a space on the floor, the temple is crowded with groups of tourists. It is an active space of congregation in the heat of the Roman sun. Other than a solitary line at the Piazza’s fountain to refill a water bottle or two, people avoid the direct sun of the Piazza della Rotunda. Groups of schoolchildren, identifiable with matching neon hats, carry value meals from McDonalds across the Piazza to picnic within the forest of columns that support the Pantheon’s shaded porch. Behind the Pantheon, I sit on a wall and eat a slice of Pizza Margherita, served as a sandwich folded carefully in a wax paper envelope. I seek the shadows and frequent a rare air conditioned bookstore.

In the evening, tourists sit in the amphitheater created by the steps of the fountain. In the orange light of dusk, people sit for dinner along edges of the Piazza della Rotunda. The Piazza is alive with conversations over wine and a secondi. Street vendors draw attention to their imitation watches and purses, carefully arranged on cardboard boxes. I walk to Geolitti for a small cup of melon gelato.

135 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson

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Hadrian, the first bearded and openly gay emperor, used the Pantheon as the seat of his empire. Hadrian proclaimed himself as a sun king, associating himself with the most compelling power in through the Pantheon’s oculus. The circular interior stood for the energy of the sun, and the collage of lavish materials represented the many lands of the world that were Roman. From the shadowy southern side of the Piazza della Rotunda, the Pantheon catalogues the phenomenon of time and orientation in the city. Curiously, tourists cannot find the Pantheon when they set out to, but accidentally happen through the Piazza della Rotunda as they navigate the Centro Storico.

It’s raining this morning in Rome. Not a downpour, rather just a steady sprinkle.

Intrigued by this first rain, i threw on the rainjacket and strolled over to the pantheon to see the rain come in the oculus. rain entered the space in a cylinder of droplets, gently slapping the floor. inside, it rained for a while, then the clouds would part to allow the sunàs disc to illuminate the interior. then clouds and rain again. this cycle created an inverted lighthouse, monitoring the sky with a curious morse code. the polychrome floor, coated with a sheet of water, became a mirror that completed the sperical interior. A little lady with a squeegy chased misbehaved puddles into one of 22 tiny drains in the floor. Also fascinated by this magic were kurt douglas and goldie hawn. both were wearing jeans and sneakers, kurt with a blue blazer and goldie with big sunglasses and a brown checked shawl. Eavesdropping as usual, i overheard goldieàs brief pantheon history, refreshingly accurate (she knew all the dates and figures, key players, and some legend). kurt pointed around the dome wiht his umbrella. speculating on the positioning of the sun throughout the course of the day and year, he performed an energetic dance, using his umbrella as a prop. embarrassed, goldie pulled her shawl more closely around her head and face. i thought about passing behind them and whispering “iòm your huckleberry” in kurts ear, or some other reinaction from his performance of wyatt earp in tombstone. Instead, i decided to get a cappucino and a cornetto.

Urban Portico the Pantheon to the Piazza del Popolo | threshold(s) and the city

The five inch gap between the Pantheon’s drum and the pronaos is a result of the formal and structural innovation of this new building type. Circular buildings were fairly common in antiquity before the Pantheon. A circular exterior provides the greatest enclosed area a given length of wall can provide. A circular plan can be laid out by a stake in the ground with a line looped around it to inscribe a radius. Circular buildings derive from two sources. As a tholos, a religious building like the Temple of Vesta, the Pantheon is designed to allow smoke to escape through the dome’s oculus. As a tumulus, a constructed burial mound, the Pantheon is a metaphorical extension of the city’s topography. The Pantheon is the first circular building that invites the public inside. It originally stood at the end of a rectangular forum, paved with travertine slabs. From within this extended portico, the cylindrical drum and the dome would have been visually concealed.

a legend of the porch The giant Egyptian granite monolithic columns of the Pantheon’s porch would have been incredibly impressive to a Roman citizen. These drums were quarried in the hills of Egypt, transported on rollers and carts to the port of Alexandria.

They would have been loaded onto specially designed ships, and sailed to the port of Rome.

Unloaded, then transported again across Rome on rollers and carts before being tipped into place.

This is a very labor-intensive process, but labor was cheap.

When the rough-cut granite drums arrived in the port of Alexandria for shipping, the first two columns were too heavy for the boat and sunk to the bottom of the bay. Engineers determined that by cutting off roughly 10 feet, the other boats could be safely sailed to rome.

These cut drums now articulate the floor of the Pantheon.

137 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson

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The Pantheon operates between the streets of Rome and the otherworldly. As the portico of the Pantheon transitions from the city to its spherical interior, the Piazza del Popolo is Rome’s porch. The urban portico is a place of convergence. It is both a place of passage and a complete environment. The urban portico operates at the intersection of the city and the garden, the motorini and the pedestrian. At first, the Piazza seems to be an inversion of the Pantheon. It is a topographical bowl with a projecting center. The Piazza’s urban edges are peeled back to create folds of circulation where daily commuters pass.

Civic Ruin the Pantheon to the Roman Forum | memory and the city

Rome is a city of cavities, a compressed city where slices between walls and the narrow vertical spaces between buildings are utilized daily. As the current horizon of the ground peels back to uncover the foundations of the Pantheon, a liminal trench connects the city to its layered history. Citizens and tourists alike line the moat created between the city and the Pantheon to eat lunch or hail a taxi. As in most protected ruins in Rome, a parallel city of cats dwells in this in-between realm. Like the Roman Forum, these spaces are museums of the imagination. The city’s history of flood, rubble and reconstruction is chronicled as this depth of surface. Within this occupiable horizon of time, fallen building elements and exposed ruins delineate paths, become benches and shape garden walls.

a legend of a ruin A priest named Barackas (the name in the actual legend wasn’t really Barackas, but it was close enough to Barackas to remind me of B.A. Barackas, Mr.T’s character from the A-Team) meets the devil outside the Pantheon. The devil makes a deal with this priest to trade his soul for a cherished book of spells. With his first spell, the priest flys to Jerusalem and back in one night. As he returns, he again meets the devil alongside the Pantheon. Realizing his mistake, he distracts the devil by sprinkling walnuts along the ground. When the devil reaches for a few walnuts, Barackas sneaks inside the sanctuary of Pantheon, falls to his knees, and begs for forgiveness. The devil, furious (and embarrassed I expect) about being thwarted, flew in circles around the drum of the Pantheon, creating the gap between the temple and the city that exists there today.

139 Rome Through the Lens of the Pantheon Jim Richardson

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By adding pozzolano, a granular volcanic stone, to their mortar, the Romans invented a material that could be molded into virtually any shape and stand alone as a building material. The structural walls of the Pantheon were built by pouring concrete into trenches formed by inner and outer brick walls. These walls are not solid, but rather composed of systematic networks of cavities and relieving arches that transfer the loads of the structure to eight massive piers. The dome was poured on a complex wooden formwork. Twenty eight rows of five coffers each, like the five planets known to the Romans and the twenty eight lunar days in the Roman month, substantially decrease the weight of the dome and guide the loads to the ground. As the thickness of the rotunda walls diminishes from 20’ at the base to 4’-11” around the oculus, the specific weight of the aggregate in the concrete decreases in clear zones. Brick and stone aggregate within the foundations transitions to porous volcanic pumice in the dome. The continual deconstructive weathering and renovations of the Pantheon reveal the brilliance of Roman constructional sequence and logic.

The Practice of Drawing Michael Vergason Michael Vergason Landscape Architects Ltd.

Michael Vergason began to realize the value of drawing during his time as a student at the University of Virginia.

As a participant in the first Vicenza program, he explored drawing as a method of engaging sites across the Veneto.

As a Fellow of the American Academy, Vergason honed his ability to use drawing as an investigative tool.

International travels and local observations continue to influence his current practice and working method.

Drawing is an integral part of Vergason’s design process. Rigorous training and sustained practice allow him to understand sites and develop ideas in a way that photographs or verbal exploration could never accomplish. The act of drawing becomes synonymous with thinking, generating ideas that are not pre-meditated, and at times, entirely unexpected. These drawings are not about presentation or even explanation. They are a process.

Drawing also plays an important role in the collaborations that comprise much of Vergason’s practice. As a landscape architect he works to develop relationships across disciplinary boundaries. In collaborations with architects, clients and consultants, drawings engage all participants into the process.

141 Drawing Michael Vergason

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Michael Vergason (FASLA) holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia. He is currently the principle of Michael Vergason Landscape Architects Ltd in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2006 he held the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Visiting Professorship and delivered a series of lectures on drawing at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

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143 Drawing Michael Vergason

travel sketchbook

Gannett detail development

Drawing and Place

Drawing and Designing

Vergason emphasizes how drawing strengthens one’s experience and understanding of place. Sketching demands an intense and sustained visual engagement with a site.

Drawing parts demands an understanding of proportions and relationships. This trains the eye to more critically judge what is seen. Time spent drawing also heightens other senses. Smells and sounds embed themselves in the mark making, fostering a deeper mental and physical connection to a place. Vergason stresses the value of always carrying a sketchbook and learning to use it as a tool for deepening his connection to the world around him.

Vergason maintains that the skills developed while drawing from life strengthen the ability to draw from imagination. Marks on paper provide a vehicle for working through ideas. This is why drawing, particularly freehand sketching, plays a significant role in Vergason’s designs from early site investigation through construction documents. These drawings range from marker sketches to digital stylus rendering over photographs.

Specificity or clarity is manipulated through the selection of media.

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145 Drawing Michael Vergason

Drawing and Collaboration Drawing plays an important role in communicating intentions and generating new ideas through collaboration. Early sketches with a marker or soft pencil intentionally lack precision. They allow for a range of interpretations, opening the initial design to new and unexpected readings by others. It is this “opening up� that describes Vergason’s goals for a more fluid collaboration with architects and clients. The above sketches for the Gannett/USA Today Headquarters presented a convincing argument for reconfiguring the initial site strategy to work better with site structure and ecological systems.

Gannett site structure

Home and Horizon in the Work of Jens Jensen

Our horizon shifts when our home changes. When the landscape architect Jens Jensen moved from Denmark to Illinois (via brief stays in Florida and Iowa), he was astonished by the rich color of the Midwest landscape. Its seasonal variations were remarkable in comparison to the subtle hues of his native Danish home. In Jensen’s later writings, he explored specific flower color variation within individual tree species from Illinois to Wisconsin. This increasing awareness of place through travel and observation contextualizes home within multiple geographic scales. In his landscape architecture Jens Jensen used plant material, spatial arrangement and an understanding of ecology to reveal home as nested within a larger horizon.

Jensen promoted ecological awareness through groups such as Friends of our Native Landscape and the Prairie Club of Illinois. On his own travels he was often accompanied by the ecologist and designer O.C. Simmonds. Together they identified native plants and recorded the forms and organization of the prairie landscape. Jensen’s convictions about the use of native plants in the built landscape were born from experience and conversations with peers such as Simmonds and local residents excited by a desire to more fully understand their home.

Jensen’s early planting successes and failures as a laborer for the West Park Commission in Chicago strengthened his understanding of Midwest ecology and led him to develop what Wilhelm Miller in 1915 entitled the The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening.1 The prairie spirit was reflected in the landscape architecture of Jensen, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, the art pottery of Teco and the poetry of William Cullen Bryant. Loosely grouped as the Prairie School, a community and dialect of conversation developed that responded to the palette and function of the surrounding landscape. Within broader discussions of modernism, they defined home through an amplified reading of the land and promoted it as a type of critical regionalism.

A cultivated prairie opening west to the sunset, sheltered council rings, crabapple paths at prairie borders, programmed park edges and prairie rivers repeatedly appear in Jensen’s work. He used these constructions in public commissions such as Columbus and Humboldt Parks in Chicago to instill an understanding of the particular geography, climate and orientation of the site. I emphasize ‘constructed’ in describing such work because it was not a simple imitation of pre-existing conditions. Jensen modified the ground and used planted form as a stage for the changing seasons, the shifting sunlight and a multiplicity of occupations. Familiar formal elements such as rose gardens, sheltered walks, music stands, swimming pools and places to rest linked to a broader landscape experience while ensuring the parks’ life and maintenance.

147 Home and Horizon Ryan Moody

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Ryan Moody Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture

Jensen layered the experience of the landscape. By opening a long view across the prairie to the western sun and planting sugar maples or sumac at the horizon line Jensen walks our thoughts to the cosmos beyond. The connection between the color of the native trees and the universal experience of a setting sun unveils the specifics our own home while encouraging the thoughtful consideration of other constantly changing homes. In Jensen’s words, The understanding that other people in other places are developing what is within them, that they are showing their ability and their understanding in this higher sense of human relations, makes one’s world rich.2

The cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan establishes the concept of a cosmopolitan hearth with similar language;

149 Home and Horizon Ryan Moody

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Knowing places other than our own is a necessary component of the concept of ‘cosmopolitan hearth.’

The unique personality of our small part of the earth is all the more real and precious when we can compare it with other climes, other topographies. Perhaps this is another way of saying that exploration (moving out into the cosmos) enables us to know our own hearth better.3

When I look at early 20th century photographs of Jensen’s public and private projects I see inside the landscape. I am drawn through the clearings; past the crabapple and haw forest edges and into windows of forest occupation. By returning to places such as Columbus Park I believe we can understand the power of landscape architecture as a societal representation of home. I hope that as world citizens we can ultimately welcome a layered occupation that is understanding and inclusive of other homes along a circular horizon.

1. Miller, Wilhelm The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (Urbana:University of Illinois, 1915).

2. Jensen, Jens Siftings (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1939) 5.

3. Tuan, Yi Fu. Cosmos & Hearth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 183. photograph taken at Columbus Park in the Fall of 2006 (Ryan Moody)

Construction: East Addition to Campbell Hall

151 Construction Kirk Martini

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photographs by Kirk Martini Associate Professor of Architecture