lunch 1: Trespass

lunch volume I : trespass

lunch volume I : trespass

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

cover_final.indd 1

volume I

trespass

architecture and landscape architecture

5/2/2006 2:51:16 AM

volume I

trespass

architecture and landscape architecture faculty and graduate student work at the University of Virginia School of Architecture

lunch volume 1: trespass is published with support from the Arts Council and The School of Architecture Foundation at the University of Virginia.

Copyright Š 2006 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved Library of Congress Card Catalog Number is available.

Editors: Kevin J Bell, Matthew Ibarra, 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 http://www.arch.virginia.edu ISBN # xxxxxx ISSN # xxxxxx

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lunch

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Lunch in America Peter Waldman

An Open Letter to the Board of Visitors, the University Administration, and the University Community 24

Thoughts on Permanence Matthew Scott Ibarra

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On the Edge / at the Center: Interventions at Locust Point Phoebe Crisman

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Eyes that Can See and Hands that Can Make. A response Elizabeth K. Meyer | re | NAISSANCE HUMANifesto Jordan Phemister untitled dialectic Anne Bohlen Our Quest For Intimacy David Hill

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Housing: Ecological, Modular and Affordable John Quale

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High Density on High Ground New Orleans, Louisiana Maurice Cox

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Heliocentricity editorial Ryan Moody

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Journeys into Night–School, Michael Rotondi & Peter Waldman Harry S. Shure Studio, 2005

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Design as Research Meeting the Valley Michael Wenrich Olympic Labyrinth Lewis Maverick McNeel Membranes: Architecture of Awareness Elisa Niemack

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In Praise of Lightness Robin Dripps

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The Self Portrait Journal of Sanda Iliescu: An Interface K. William Fried

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lunch

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, …

-T.S. Eliot

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 lunch@virginia.edu.

The editors would like to thank the students and faculty who, in support of the inaugural issue of lunch, submitted their work for publication. We are grateful to Elizabeth Fortune (the financial magician) for finding means to meet ends and Derry Voysey Wade for her keen eye. Imagining the ingredients would not have been the same without Peter Waldman’s appetite for fine food and creativity. For measure and spice, our thanks to Robin Dripps. Finally, it would be impossible to forget our taste tester, Phoebe Crisman, who stood by with support from the beginning with nothing to believe in but a grocery list.

The term ‘lunch’ is an informal derivation of the word luncheon. The colloquialism of the term coupled with some “talk of you and me” speaks to the core intention of this collection. lunch is inspired by chance; by chance discussions that grow from a meal in a shared setting and by chance discussions that alter or challenge views of the space and place we inhabit. lunch provides for the meeting of diverse voices in common place tended by a casual atmosphere.

To lunch suggests an escape from the day’s work; perhaps even a break.

Intrepid thoughts, influential experiments, and accomplished works race through our place of practice. How often is such work limited by insular conversation and isolated presentation? As a reaction to these limits, we present the first volume of lunch; trespass. The works collected in this inaugural issue mix a range of studies, conversations, drawings, statements, and stories that together aspire to reflect an experience of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. As Peter Waldman suggests in his essay Lunch in America, the concept of lunch is a construction of culture and of time. Here in the shadow of Jefferson’s convictions where dishes often lie on a terraced lawn, we publish lunch hoping its contents bring far away sites and distinct lines of inspiration to a common table.

Kevin Bell MArch ’06 Matthew Ibarra MArch ’06 Ryan Moody MArch / MLA ’07

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

Charlottesville, Virginia May 21, 2006

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Lunch In America Peter Waldman

lunch : trespass

LUNCH IN AMERICA (ONTO BARCELONA/EDEN & JERUSALEM ):

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Grant Wood Spring Turning 1936 © Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston Salem

Essays on Whiteman’s Vittles & the Dilemma of Trespass; Littmann’s Protestant Nation Borne from Barren Ground; the Obligatory Journey to the East by way of Barcelona for Righteous Citizens Who Pretend to Dwell in the Commonwealth of Virginia & Tell Tall Tales of Those Other Heroes Who Were to Meander West With Only Pemmikan, Berries & Suet Peter Waldman William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture

Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou

Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth Shalth

Not… Not… Not… Not… Not… Not… Not… Not… Not… Not…

And forgive us our Trespasses as we forgive those who Trespass against us, for …

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Grant Wood Dinner for Threshers 1933 © Whitney Museum, New York

Grant Wood Parson Weems’ Fable 1939 © Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth

The Old Testament Ten Commandments and The King James’ Version of The Lord’s Prayer are both grounded in responsibilities to a Higher Authority as well as in the idea of limits as the basis of a civil if not ethical society. This is fine for confirming citizenship, but suggests a difficult dilemma for the errant explorers among us who share vittles from the same common trough.

Lunch in America is now a time to pig out for some, and is specifically the compressed event to pump in calories during the so-called workday break.

Today’s Lunch in America is no longer recognizable as an agrarian or ethnic Sunday Dinner, neither close to an Iberian Almuerzo, nor resembling a Mediterranean Pranzo when labor stops under the mid-day sun to enjoy the literal fruits of one’s labor in the company of family and collaborators all. Let’s do lunch is rarely about food but about a time taken away from the normal workday routine to scheme of new alliances. It is like getting a life away from the immediacy of here and now, a curious break of sorts.

For the nomadic condition there is no concept of property rights, as bounded limits, only a concept of generous oases to share with citizens and strangers alike.

To that degree so many ancient legends are founded in date palm oases where Crusoe meets Friday escaping just in time from cannibals in pursuit of lunch.

11 Lunch In America Peter Waldman

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Trespassing as a gerund is an active intentional passage through heretoforebounded limits, perhaps between the known and the unknown. Getting lost and finding oneself through benchmarks and orientation, devices where one began a journey is not a generative trespass. Rather to trespass is an investment in time extended, not time out or removed. In the 1980’s I heard of power lunches in Houston in private clubs at the pinnacles of glass skyscrapers where behind heavy damask curtains with coordinated linen table clothes, Baccarat crystal and Christophe silver, with Villeroy & Boch china, a mythic spatial setting confirmed one’s house account to be the requisite mark of inclusion.

Lunch in America on its journey from family to business associates is the assumed place of intensified deals away from the ritual of the most routine.

Barcelona Lunch in Barcelona is something else. The spatial setting there is determined by the mountains and the sea, not the disengagement of a penthouse elevator determining the essence of haute cuisine. The idea of envisioning a cultural condition, manifested as a temporal and visceral exchange of raw ingredients transformed, was at the heart of the Barcelona studio curriculum in four topographically distinct sites in and around Barcelona this past spring semester 2005. The program brief called for the spatial development of a Culinary Institute of Catalunya, both a school by day and a dining destination by night determined by the frictional needs of a Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick maker known to their compadres as the Surveyor, the Nomad, and the prerequisite Lunatic.

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Therefore, Paella is a supremely Catalonian dish composed of rice from coastal marshes; of pork and fowl both substantial and light as their hinterland terrace origins; of saffron and tomatoes and peas from the Far East, and a cornucopia of shellfish from the adjacent sea. This labor intensive precedent for the contemporary American fascination for Surf & Turf is as complex as a glass of Cava versus our penchant for the real thing, a gulp of Coke with difficult codes determined by not only region, but barrio and the resistive secrets of abuelitas who value the strength of trespassing in the name of endless permutations. In Barcelona the students and faculty ate well and returned with palettes awakened to North African hummus as well as the spectacular presentations of Harrimann’s Haute Cuisine sought out as research by some.

Tiepelo The Last Supper 1750 Louvre, Paris

In terms of the new architecture/landscape architecture curriculum at the end of the long first year, Barcelona is a trespass, a deliberate act of re-contextualizing the debate or frame previously determined by our immediate pastoral and agricultural setting here and now adjacent to Jefferson’s utopian project. Our curriculum might be characterized by the clarity of the two-step, e.g.; quick and fool-proof recipes for substantial red beans and fluffy rice; in Barcelona, we encounter appetites determined by the Minuet at one moment, then in increasing complexity in Tapas Bars and finally, in the Flamenco echo chambers defining the essence of multivalent settings. This is a fast paced mercantile metropolis, with small plates of sweets and savory foods available all day long. Extraordinary feasts are celebrated as a long day’s journey into night under the full moon often exactly halfway beyond the midday sun. In Barcelona, with no Anglo-Saxon work focused angst, the day begins as the other, rather in the favorable night in the accompanying light of fireflies and croaking frogs. Genesis reminds us that the world began in the chaos of Darkness.

At the Convent of S.M. de La Tourette, Le Corbusier as architect designed a Dominican monastery in 1957 with the Refectory accommodating 144 members of the religious and occasionally not so religious community facing west with the sun setting beyond the village of L’Abrase D’Eveux. At sunrise, high noon and evening meals the sun illuminates this settlement model down the hill with

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13 Lunch In America Peter Waldman

The studio was composed of twenty students equally divided between architecture and landscape architecture. The topographic pre-conditions of the site are the mountains and the sea, with orchards and vineyards and pastoral precincts marked by the fecundity of soft seasons. It is well known there that a Catalan Flan was indeed the secret lure of Helen of Troy that inspired specifications for the Promised Land of Milk and Honey. Our hosts in Barcelona assured us that this ancient city was founded by a trespassing crew journeying west fleeing burning Troy beyond the limits of the known world in the 11th Century BC. The Sea surface similar to a net is a membrane stretched taut as the horizon but is also an entangling topography in section especially dynamic when full with quivering harvests of scales and shells. The Mediterranean is at once a term for the center of the world with the Ninth Boat (Barco Nova) making landfall west of center with the benchmark of Troy fixing the East.

Finally, framed by both the Ten Commandments, received in a desert so long, long ago, and offered at a time when lunch had gotten raucously out of hand, together with the enduring mantra of the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer so common to American Protestant culture, we find ourselves as architects and citizens pre-occupied with a culture of denial (thou shalt not…) articulating again and again until paralysis sets in the boundaries of micro-topographic thresholds in gardens, buildings and cities. It is clear these two recitations, these commandments as drills do indeed accommodate the sheep that make the flock, “good soldiers” all.

But the errant explorer can only see the valley when the mountain ridge is in sight; when Whiteman’s imagination can only see beyond the reassuring magnitude what is suddenly beyond the endless prairie; and when Lippmann alone bemoans the timeliness of the three year lease of high-rise urban living abandoning both our grandparents and their indurate loyalty to the family farm, ancient cemeteries of now estranged ancestors. The current American fascination rather is with the Diner and Gas Station somewhere /no where between destinations on route, not quite there. Fast food, released breaks / fill her up, going someplace that already has a name, allows us to forget the explicit consequences of trespassing and consequent obligations as Homer knew to tell a tale or two.

Carvaggio Bacchus 1595 Uffizi, Florence

Youth with Basket of Fruit 1593-94 Galleria Borghese, Rome

Sick Bacchus 1593 Galleria Borghese, Rome

Halcyon Thoughts August 3, 2005 I now find myself suffering the consequences of another fall from Grace when I trespassed into the dark July 28th after a Bodo’s lunch alone of (Egyptian) Cleo Salad and a cup of New England clam chowder, in celebration of Peruvian Independence Day. In the Dark so sure I knew the way to a light well just beyond the corner, I fell from Grace as Carlo Levi’s Christ paused at Empoli; I fell into dangerous territory, beyond spatial limits to test my limbs, to reinforce my staunch faith in gravity, in spite of the next generation’s protestations. Now, a week later in a place called Health South, I simply delight in incremental benchmarks in the process of recovery; although permanently scarred but only temporarily maimed, I remain stubbornly fascinated by the unrepentant phrase: never-the-less.

In search of a light well above, I found a hard place beneath. James’ pocket flashlight and Bayley’s cigarette lighter immediately broke the dark and firemen in great array took me to a place where one is carefully put back together again. This kind of errant meandering can only occur under a Full Moon when Cleopatra’s desert would meet the New England coast both anchored by Peru ham-strung between the two irreconcilable oases of my modest solitary lunch.

From Health South Rehabilitation on Fontaine Avenue, on my way to what is called North Garden, I pause to offer this repast on a place encountered dangerously beyond as a curriculum with consequences. On my way to The Best Little Place in the World, I tripped, stumbled and fell, and got up again with the help of summer sojourners: Chris and Kelly Bayley and James Meghan and Emily KC and Tran Katherine and Kurt James and Beth Yvi and Thomas Alan and Anne Andrew and Marta David and Whitney

15 Lunch In America Peter Waldman

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juxtaposed settings. The agricultural landscape in between of cherry orchards and grain fields change distinctly with the seasons in the middle ground as well. Back in the refectory, the religious community is a world removed from the everyday life in the agricultural middle ground and urban horizon. Le Corbusier chose not to focus religious life to the traditional role of the central cloister, now inaccessible and denied occupation, but focuses on the evolving life of an everyday town of routine and accountability distinctly three times a day in the trespassing light of the diurnal cycle. I spent one night there twenty years ago on a cool June evening looking south only to see the Moon greet the slumbering souls in the nearby cemetery. Suddenly, the linear ceiling fixtures outside my cell and the linear light shard that shears the refectory went out and the Moon took over until Dawn. Le Corbusier was ethical enough to make “LIGHTS OUT” be emphatic and memorable, and let down time for body and soul to meander as to trespass the western sky. Outsiders, architecture students, all regularly are invited to stay for an evening meal of bread, cheese and wine, to pass the night, and leave after an early morning breakfast of porridge and milk. Only lunch at high noon is kept a secret special time reserved for the religious.

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17 Lunch In America Peter Waldman

The next repast which some might call Lunch will be a celebratory one with these dear traveling companions cut short on our journey, never again a bite alone, high on a sun-drenched hill in a more stable setting like the Fall or better yet, the Spring Equinox under a Blue Moon.

Jan Vermeer Officer and Laughing Girl 1658 New York City: Frick Collection

2 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BOARD OF VISITORS, THE UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION, AND THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY September 7, 2005

WHAT ARE THE JEFFERSONIAN ARCHITECTURAL IDEALS? The University community is heir to the Lawn, one of the most important architectural complexes in the United States and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The University community is also heir to Jefferson’s progressive vision of education, created to accommodate the challenges of a new democracy and to address the unique American landscape.

Why has this legacy of innovation in service of ideas been allowed to degenerate into a rigid set of stylistic prescriptions? The result has been a faux Jeffersonian architecture, confused between style and substance, characterized by apologetic neo-Jeffersonian appliqué, obsessive in its references to history, and incapable of responding to the profound social, political, and ecological discoveries of the last century.

Is the University committed to architectural excellence?

Is architecture simply a question of style, of applied motifs with historical associations, or is it an exploration of the essence of a building, the needs of its occupants, and the nature of its site?

Is there not a difference between buildings that merely look Jeffersonian as opposed to the infinitely more difficult task of being Jeffersonian?

Is stylistic simulation the sincerest form of respect, or does it devalue the authenticity of the truly historic?

How is history remembered or honored by the destruction and neglect of genuine historical artifacts, such as the interior of the Rotunda in the 1970s, Miller Hall in the 2000s, or the Blue Ridge Sanatorium buildings, in tandem with the simultaneous construction of an ersatz physical history?

Given the University’s goal to support diversity in students, faculty, and educational programs as a means of fostering excellence, should it not seek an architecture and physical structure that exemplifies this goal rather than one that contradicts it?

Is there a problem in choosing an architecture to stand for the values of a university at the beginning of the twenty-first century when that architecture was inaugurated at an historical moment when racial, gender, social, and economic diversity were less welcome? Should we not acknowledge that architectural forms change meaning over time?

What would we make of the treatment of any academic discipline as static and so sacred that intellectual development, evolution and diversity are essentially legislated out of possibility, as has been done to the practice of architecture at this university? What would happen if other disciplines in the University were frozen in a mindset constrained by a nineteenth century world view?

How is a nationally respected architectural faculty to reconcile its teaching with a physical context of mediocrity at odds with all that is valued in the School of Architecture?

Julie Bargmann, Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture Craig Barton, Associate Professor of Architecture Daniel Bluestone, Director of the Historic Preservation Program Warren Boeschenstein, Professor of Architecture Anselmo Canfora, Assistant Professor of Architecture WG Clark, Edmund Schureman Campbell Professor of Architecture and Past Chair Maurice Cox, Associate Professor of Architecture Phoebe Crisman, Assistant Professor of Architecture Robin Dripps, T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture and Past Chair Christopher Fannin, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Edward Ford, Vincent and Eleanor Shea Professor of Architecture Nataly Gattegno, Assistant Professor of Architecture

Jason Johnson, Assistant Professor of Architecture Judith Kinnard, Associate Professor of Architecture and Past Chair Jenny Lovell, Assistant Professor of Architecture John Quale, Assistant Professor of Architecture Elizabeth K. Meyer, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Past Chair William Morrish, Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture David Rifkind, Lecturer in Architectural History Elizabeth Roettger, Lecturer in Architecture Elissa Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Past Chair Howard Singerman, Associate Professor of Art History Kenneth Schwartz, Professor of Architecture and Past Chair Peter Waldman, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture and Past Chair

19 Open Letter

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Is it desirable that a building built in 1990 be mistaken for one built in 1830? Is UVA to become a theme park of nostalgia at the service of the University’s branding?

Who should determine the architectural future of the University, the University community, creative and recognized professionals, or those with wealth and power?

Can an architecture of quality be achieved by a skin-deep veneer of stylistic uniformity, or does it demand a broader and deeper response?

Why has the University commissioned so much mediocre architecture?

Two names that should have appeared in the original Open Letter are:

We would be better served by an architecture that sets aside empty stylistic gestures and glib historical references in order to respond to 1. the qualities of an individual discipline 2. the nature of a modern building 3. the character of an individual place.

Timothy Beatley, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities and past chair, Department of Urban and Environmental Planning Nicholas de Monchaux, Assistant Professor of Architecture

We stand for an architecture that does not begin and end with style.

We stand for an architecture that engages tradition but is not ashamed of having been built in the twenty-first century.

We stand for an architecture that preserves real histories without constructing fictitious ones.

We stand for an architecture that answers to technology without monumentalizing or suppressing it.

We stand for an architecture that evokes the qualities of traditional architecture, construction, and craft without recourse to symbolic, synthetic veneers lacking any virtue beyond familiarity.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

open letter

The undersigned School of Architecture faculty believe there is a fundamental schism between architecture as it is taught, practiced and studied as a discipline at our School and architecture as it is prescribed, controlled and marketed as a style by the Board of Visitors and administration.

This inconsistency affects more than the School of Architecture’s academic integrity. It calls into question whether the physical organization and character of the Grounds reflects the University’s academic mission, or whether it is a response to the University’s fund-raising, marketing, and branding operation.

We ask that the architectural future of the University and the nature of the Jeffersonian architectural legacy not be determined in boardrooms, but be debated openly at every level of the University.

This letter is the first of a series of exchanges about architecture on the University Grounds that are planned for this academic year. We look forward to the participation of many faculty and students, in and out of the School of Architecture, in this long-overdue dialogue and debate.

Note from the Editors: On September 7, 2005, faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture published a letter in The Cavalier Daily Newspaper. This letter marked the start of a continuing discussion about the status of architecture at the University of Virginia. The original format of the Open Letter has been published in lunch without alteration. Responses have in some instances been abbreviated to save space. Photos, included as part of the discussion, are provided by the editors. The published material represents a brief survey of a larger dialogue that has involved a broad audience beyond Charlottesville and the architectural community. The ongoing discussion can be accessed at www.uva-architecture-forum.org. Please help to stimulate this discussion by submitting your thoughts and opinions.

for readability, the text from ‘Common Sense in Architecture’ is reprinted below

2 In Response to the Faculty’s Open Letter Calling for New Modernist Buildings at UVa An Affirmation of New Traditional Architecture

Though open dialogue about the University’s architecture is essential, the University community should not defer to the architecture school’s modernists about what is and is not suitable on Grounds. The unsightly and unpopular Hereford College is a clear example of the further damage they would inflict at UVa: In 2003 the faculty awarded Hereford’s designers the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal. It is notable and not surprising that in their open letter several weeks ago the faculty did not use the word “beauty” even once.

Architecture is necessarily a public art, always on prominent display in the public square. In a day of great social flux and technological change, of exciting possibilities and new challenges, architecture should serve as a shared source of beauty and hope rather than a deliberate source of heightened discord. Traditional architecture—offering inspiration and impetus to human progress, built with skilled craftsmanship in time-tested idioms of inexhaustible variety—appeals deeply to people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and means.

Traditional architecture also is not only affordable but economically prudent because it is built to last.

We truly can enjoy and celebrate the social and technological advances of the past 100 years, and those to come, and also enjoy new beautiful architecture. Profound change is underway.

We commend the University. Darden, the McIntire School’s Monroe Hall addition, and the Miller Center’s Newman Pavilion are fine examples of new traditional architecture. We urge the University to continue its leadership in the ongoing renaissance of beauty, tradition, and common sense.

21 Open Letter Response Common Sense In Architecture

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Civilizations worldwide have nurtured architectural traditions of inspiring beauty. The architecture of the University of Virginia’s central Grounds, especially the Lawn, is one of the paramount examples of the classical tradition. Modernist architecture marked a deliberate break with that tradition, one made for shortsighted ideological reasons that has often had unfortunate consequences for the fabric of the University—and for cities and communities the world over. The nation’s modernist architectural establishment has taken secluded refuge in the academy, while all around them a groundswell of support for traditional architecture and urbanism has been rising. Today, an increasing number of traditional and classical architects are producing magnificent new buildings, campuses, and communities, inspired in no small part by the example of Jefferson’s “Academical Village.” Renewing a commitment to Jefferson’s artistic ideals, the University’s leadership, like that of other distinguished institutions, has begun to embrace this renaissance of beauty and common sense. It is only fitting that Jefferson’s University should play a leading role in this cultural renewal.

Despite what the faculty say in their open letter . . .

original response in the Cavalier Daily, October 17, 2005 courtesy of The Cavalier Daily

Traditional architecture is “of our time.” Traditions that advance the public good endure through time. Just as Jefferson used models of democracy from antiquity, he used models of architecture from antiquity, because they embody timeless ideals of humanity and beauty.

Linking traditional architecture and social injustice, as the faculty try to, is as irrational as linking technology and terrorism. Bigots have used buildings, and terrorists have used computers. Traditional architecture has nothing to do with social injustice. Rather, it gives inspiration and hope. The civil rights movement, for example, had its apotheosis on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

letter New traditional buildings do incorporate the newest technology and materials and do not cost more to build than modernist buildings. Some of the countless examples of new traditional buildings, with technology and amenities in abundance, are pictured here.

You have a right to like the buildings that are built for you. Architecture is for everyone. It’s for the public good. It’s something everyone can understand, though the modernist faculty try to make it complex. What is good and bad for the University community is for the entire University community to decide. . . . traditional architecture makes common sense.

Architectural Integrity at UVA

A Letter to the Cavalier Daily

Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA

Edward Ford

Professor, University of Virginia

Vincent and Eleanor Shea Professor of Architecture

What are we to make of an academic institution that treats ANY discipline as static and so sacred that intellectual development, evolution and diversity are essentially legislated out of possibility? Surely there would be a hue and cry among students, faculty, alumni and administration over a situation that in the extreme has more in common with totalitarian sensibilities than education in a democratic context. With some allowance for rhetorical excess, this is how many view the legacy of the past twenty or more years of construction at UVA. As a parallel example from another field, if the University had frozen the discipline of history (in deference to Jefferson), Ed Ayers and other “new historians of the South” would have never found careers here. In intellectual terms, we would be a backwater, teaching about the Civil War as if nothing had changed since 1860 or 1960. Fortunately, History, English and the humanities as a whole, the sciences, Engineering, Business, Medicine, Nursing and the Law have evolved, and they have flourished through diverse forms of inquiry and expression. They are not bound by fictive assumptions as measured against Jefferson’s intellectual inquiry in these fields.

As a result of this willingness to explore and expand our body of knowledge, UVA is a much stronger and more diverse institution today than it was twenty years ago. This larger condition of progress makes the myopia and critical mindlessness surrounding architectural commissions at UVA all the more alarming.

It is time to stand up to complacency and nostalgia. Attitudes about Jefferson’s architectural legacy need to be debated openly at every level of the University. The University community needs to understand that these actions are harming our prominent programs in architecture and landscape architecture as design-based disciplines. While our faculty and students continue to explore new ideas and approaches to design, we are seriously and negatively impacted by the reputation this University has developed as one of the most reactionary clients in the country in terms of architectural exploration. Damage extends to the University community as a whole, negating our institution’s identity as a site of progressive thought in favor of an architectural branding strategy that speaks only of the past and not the future.

As a member of the School of Architecture faculty and one of the now 37 signers of the open letter, I would like to respond to two comments made in the Cavalier Daily - that Classical architecture should be taught in the school and that the quality of the modern buildings at the University is poor.

We are teaching Classical architecture, but as a discipline and not as a formula. My required courses include lectures on Classical practitioners such as Stanford White and Edwin Lutyens, Classical theoreticians such as Gottfried Semper and Carl Boetticher, and modern Classicists such as Otto Wagner and E. G. Asplund. When I taught introductory graduate drawing, the first day’s assignment was to go to the Lawn and do a detailed proportional analysis of an order. Peter Waldman’s Architecture 101 course is titled Lessons of the Lawn. Robin Dripp’s book The First House is, among other things, a long meditation on Vitruvius. Malcolm Bell of the Art Department, whose entire career has been devoted to the study of Ancient Greek art, is signer of the open letter. This is not to say that Classicism is the central focus of our teaching, or that it characterizes it in a literal way the design work of the school, only to say that it is our fundamental belief that an understanding of architecture in all periods and all cultures is essential to the practice of our profession. We are teaching the principles of Classical architecture; we are not teaching them in a way that satisfies neo-Classical practitioners, and we are not presenting Classical forms as incontrovertible facts not subject to question, nor teaching them as if they were so many recipes drawn from a cookbook.

An obvious analogy is the teaching of traditional modes of art in other departments, and I would begin by pointing out that the open letter has been signed by nine members of the Art Department. I am not as familiar with the teaching methodologies of the English, Music or other arts disciplines as I would like, but I assume that to be a composer one must understand Beethoven and to be a poet one must understand Shakespeare, and that would include a fairly detailed understanding of the structural organization of their work, but that the end product of such an education would not include literal imitations of Beethoven sonatas and Shakespearian sonnets.

As to the second question, the quality of Modern architecture at the University, we would agree that a large majority of modern buildings built here since 1960 are of a quality equally poor as that of the traditional buildings built since 1960, although the merits or faults of some of the former, Hereford College in particular, are matters of contention. For more specific answers to this question I would refer readers to our web site: http://www.uva-architecture-forum.org.

Among all the participants in this debate there is a remarkable consensus- that the Lawn is an area of great sensitivity in terms of future development, that we should seek to use Jefferson’s architecture as point departure and that Jefferson should not be slavishly imitated but followed in principle. We are in complete agreement with this statement, and disagree only in its particulars, which admittedly seem to loom large. I have certainly not heard anyone call for avant-garde buildings, whatever those might be, on the lawn. Yet while I agree that this is not an issue of Classical versus Modern, the issue of literalism must be addressed. Is the Jeffersonian legacy one of literal signs or is a set of principles that can be extracted from his buildings? In this matter I would have to side with Emerson and say that it is the latter:

23 Open Letter Response Kenneth Schwartz, Edward Ford

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The University of Virginia has pursued a timid, insecure and flawed approach to the design of its new buildings. Under our governance system, with the strong financial support of sincere yet nostalgic alumni and organizations, and with academic leadership that has chosen to “go with the flow”, we find ourselves at a moment of alarming complacency and architectural mediocrity. Repeatedly creative architects and landscape architects are hired, and they are almost always fired when they demonstrate the temerity to interpret rather than replicate Jefferson’s rich legacy. Each is an independent story, but they share a common thread that can be traced to the limitations imposed by the University upon design and design thinking. The projected building and landscape additions to the School of Architecture by WG Clark, Bill Sherman, Warren Byrd, and SMBW Architects, under the leadership and vision of Dean Karen Van Lengen, are notable exceptions to an otherwise bleak picture.

open letter

Alumni and others should be challenged to look at the Lawn as something more than a Theme Park for a golden era of the past. The persistent demand for Jeffersonian replication is an insult to the creative interpretation of classical language that Jefferson advocated for the new Republic. He was not a “good classicist” of the conservative, unbending variety. He was an intellectually challenging, progressive, provocative risk-taker who often invented and created as he went along. He loved technology, new materials and experimentation. The University has lost these very Jeffersonian qualities in its insecurity and desire to try to maintain a strange and rigid connection with an imagined past. It is time to move forward.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. One class live by the utility of the symbol; esteeming health and wealth in a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men.

“In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in this pale light of the shadow we put together a house.”

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows2

“… a certain ghostly place where there were two openings in the earth side by side, and opposite them and above two openings in the heaven…”

Plato, The Republic, Book X1

Is it more powerful for a place to be marked by a shadow than defined by a wall? Is a carpet more defining than the ground beneath? As I see our creations in the horizon I start to mediate the real from the imagined. Just as the shadow grows stronger through the implied object outside of view and the carpet heightens the mystery beneath, Luis Althusser’s decades old ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ describes our gift in education as designers. It is a gift of submitting to rules and established order, only to become operative on the ruling ideology in order to create change. This connection to Althusser relates specifically to the notion of ‘thinking outside the box’, to use creativity to understand our surroundings and our past and to create for the future.3

Thoughts on permanence...

For days, weeks, and years, the issue of permanence has been persistant in my mind. On a daily basis the meaning of architecture challenges itself through the events taking place around the world. Over the course of history, wars and battles leave their mark through human casualties, but also the casualty of mass, the destruction of place, the ruin of a building. Months, years and decades collaps in a momentary lapse with the destruction of a made artifact.

Recent occurrences in Iraq and the Middle East continuously play like a broken record over the elusive waves and frequencies of radio and TV. Images, sounds and words run through the infinite length of communication lines that run below our feet and above our heads. Specifically, acts of destruction, like that of the Shiite Shrine on February 2, 2006, set off a wave of reactionary episodes of further uprising and destruction. What inherent substance is embedded in the things we create that hold so much energy, so much emotion? The link between the tangible and the intangible gives me sleepless nights. But, within this link we begin to stumble upon the heart of the organism, the central processor of this embodied energy.

As I come to the end of my formal architectural education, dreaming of the future, imagining the projects to come, one particle of information feels left out: the particle of permanence, the weight of what we create. It is not just the metal and masonry, the cloth and glass; it is the significance that people project on what we produce as architects and landscape architects; a house, an office, a park and a walkway; places to inhabit, places to lunch. As designers, we are given the tremendous responsibility of understanding our surroundings, of understanding the physical manifestation of our intangible ideas, of our imaginations.

1. Plato. ‘The Republic’, Book Ten (New Ed.) 1976 p.304.

2. Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro. ‘In Praise of Shadows’ 1977 p.37.

3. Althusser, Louis. ‘Essays on Ideology’, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 1984 p.6-7,15-17.

4. Plato, p.308.

To what extent is thinking ‘outside the box’ beneficial, when does it harm?

‘Outside the box’ does not signify losing the box entirely. The box is a borderless place marked by boundaries; a self-marking organism ordered to facilitate the new.

In recent history, computers have changed the profession, changed our education. Is the ability to produce an endless amount of flashy images inhibiting our ability to imagine tangible space with intangible qualities instead of tangible qualities with intangible space? Will the significance of place embody as much energy in the future as in the past; as the present still does only in some places?

The manifestation of permanence is conceived within our universities. It starts with our pencils to paper and our hands connected to our minds. I pose no answers for permanence in architecture, only my thoughts, some worries and some hope.

For me this first edition of lunch reinstates a specific kind of permanence within our education, the journal: an idea forgotten by the School of Architecture for some time.

Inside its pages are stories of walls and carpets; imagination, food and a fall from grace; open discussions and final competitions. It is personal to some and universal to others. Establishing itself somewhere between tangible and intangible, choosing to be printed and held, it’s a place where imaginations turn real, held within our fingers, worn with time and possibly soon to be forgotten only to be found again in a serendipitous act, in another place, another time.

April 23, 2006, 1:18 PM

“For if any man always steadfastly pursues philosophy whenever he comes to life in this world, and if the lot of choice falls to him not among the least, it appears, from what we are told from yonder, not only that he will be happy in this life, but that his journey from here to the world beyond and back again to this world will not be along the rough and underground track, but along the smooth and heavenly way.”

Plato, The Republic, Book X4

25 Thoughts on Permanence Matthew Scott Ibarra

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Matthew Scott Ibarra

2

ON THE EDGE / AT THE CENTER: INTERVENTIONS AT LOCUST POINT Phoebe Crisman Assistant Professor of Architecture

SITE(S) OUT OF MIND

Locust Point is a Baltimore waterfront district long occupied by layers of industry, housing, and transportation infrastructure. Complex and diverse in physical form, the area itself is an immense site out of mind. Although Locust Point’s Domino Sugar refinery is perhaps the city’s most prominent landmark, highly visible to those passing through Baltimore on I-95, few Baltimore residents or visitors have actually been there. This condition is largely due to its geography, urban history, and sectional complexity. The peninsula developed to serve maritime trade and had been primarily accessed via ship and later rail transportation. During the nineteenth century Locust Point was a center of shipbuilding and a major port of arrival for European immigrants. A stable, working class neighborhood of dense, fine-grained rowhouses developed inland to serve the massive factories and terminals at the water’s edge. In the late twentieth century, global and

27 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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photo: Locust Point with abandoned grain silo

PROGRAMMATIC SYNERGY

site analysis, Suhoon Bae

3

photo: Pier 7

Students intervened on several vacant sites at the water’s edge with four intertwined programs—Wooden Boat Building School, Community Sailing Center, Water Taxi Landing, and extension to Baltimore’s Waterfront Promenade.2 Each considered which uses would be distinct, shared or hybridized, given differing hours of use, public access, spatial requirements, and institutional identity. They explored how particular combinations of inhabitation— “private” boat building school and three “public” uses— might instigate new forms of social interaction and architectural/urban space. As large-scale maritime industry leaves Locust Point, smaller places of skilled production such as the Wooden Boat Building School will continue to utilize the waterfront’s unique conditions, while enriching and revealing the land/water threshold to the community.

As an urban outreach program of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, the school will continue a rich history of boatbuilding as shipwrights and apprentices build small wooden Chesapeake Skiffs. Twelve apprentices will live and work on site, while weekend courses will engage the local community. The program includes wood and machine shops, sail loft, classrooms, library, boat launch, café and studio apartments for apprentices. The non-profit Community Sailing Center will offer affordable community access to sailing instruction and events at all levels for all ages. This includes boat slips, boat repair, winter boat and equipiment storage, outdoor and indoor classrooms, and library. Although a small portion of the spatial program, the Water Taxi Landing and Promenade are important points of arrival that connect to numerous points along Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The work began with four modes of inquiry–description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation– to create a critical, concise and elegant site understanding that informed the design process. During the ten-week project, students engaged in an iterative drawing and modeling process to investigate several issues across a range of scales–from urban systems to precise material junctures.

2. The city of Baltimore and various community groups are promoting the completion of a continuous public promenade around the Inner Harbor connecting communities and historic sites from Canton to Fort McHenry.

Currently covering seven miles of shoreline, there is a gap in the promenade along the Locust Point Waterfront. The Waterfront Promenade was established during the reconstruction of the Inner Harbor in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Subsequently, the promenade extended through adjacent neighborhoods through Urban Renewal Legislation.

This legislation requires private waterfront property owners to donate a public easement and construct a landscaped promenade along the waters edge. When complete, the Promenade will become an important component of the National Historic Seaport of Baltimore that provides visitors a way to tour the entire harbor along one continuous route on land and/or sea.

1

29 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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1. This Arch 701 Studio was taught in parallel with Professor Judith Kinnard’s Arch 701 Studio during the fall 2004 semester. The semester-long studio concept and Project One were collaboratively conceived.

This Live/Work investigation has been a crucial starting point for several Arch 701 Studios also taught by Professors WG Clark and William Sherman.

We developed Project Two separately, but both continued to work in the Locust Point area.

local economic shifts brought new development pressures to the neighborhood and its underutilized and inaccessible waterfront. With Baltimore’s reorientation back to its harbor as an urban center, the seemingly remote position of Locust Point is changing. Commuters now travel around the Inner Harbor by water taxi and kayak, while sailing is an important recreational activity. However, Locust Point residents have yet to fully engage their waterfront, as large maritime industry departs and new opportunities arise. In two design projects, first at the scale of the individual1 and then at the community scale, the studio explored the simultaneity of dramatically different scales of activity, space, and form in this compelling urban site.

+ EDGES

Locust Point is a study in scale, where an isolated neighborhood of two-dozen blocks is linked to the six-state watershed of the Chesapeake Bay. Within the district itself, however, there are two primary scales and textures exemplified by collective rowhouses and industrial warehouses, with very little between. Thirteen-foot wide, single-family rowhouses, in their repetition and regularity, are read as monolithic blocks that together form a gridded field of dwellings bounded by highways and rail lines. Gigantic industrial structures, such as Domino Sugar, Tide Point and Pier 7, are isolated monoliths in a vast wasteland read against the immense harbor landscape.

Small skiffs sail alongside 600-foot tankers. Since the early nineteenth century, Locust Point residents have been separated from the waterfront by this band of industrial structures and activities. Many students examined the edges along and between uses, types and scales of architecture and infrastructure. Matt Ibarra analyzed Pier 7 as a space contained within a landscape void—its extreme length extending into the immensity of the harbor. Cut off from Locust Point by train tracks, the massive,

yet intricate steel pier structure once conveyed between ships and the towering silo beyond. Since shipping activities departed, the immediate area has ceased to support life and the ruin awaits rebirth. Pier 7 holds great potential to bring back life to this nearly abandoned waterfront. The site—the massive pier structure itself—is occupied both horizontally and vertically, but not fully enclosed. Public gardens, promenades, enclosed spaces and voids thread through and inhabit the pier, providing views, passage and moments of stasis. The beauty of the existing industrial structure remains and guides the transformational process.

work by Matthew Ibarra

31 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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SCALAR JUXTAPOSITION

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Along with horizontal piers and vertical silos, several immense steel tanks punctuate the Locust Point landscape. Fascinated by the potential for programmatic transformation, Ryan Hughes proposed converting a disused molasses tank into winter sailboat storage—generating a sectionally complex assemblage of found and new structures. By jacking up the tank and inserting a ring of columns beneath, the ground level is opened up and light and air is brought into the opaque cylinder. A new channel conveys water into the tank, so that boats may float in and be lifted by an overhead gantry crane into storage racks along the perimeter, which also hold small living spaces for apprentice boat builders. These living modules, as well as the student-built boats, will be constructed in the workshop that penetrates into the tank, allowing the finished boats to be slid directly into the water within. A portion of the tank roof, removed to admit light and accommodate the crane, is reused as a roof for the boatbuilding workshop. The library and café volume is cantilevered above the tank, recalling the cranes of this industrial port, and providing spectacular views of downtown and the Chesapeake Bay. Connection to the neighborhood is reinforced

by the redesign of Hull Street, which runs perpendicular to the water alongside the tanks and awkwardly terminates at the water. Hughes’ design extends Hull Street into the water as a boat ramp—parked cars become parked boats, sidewalks become floating walkways, and public access and views are created. An existing communications tower is retained, serving both as a beacon to sailors returning and an industrial sundial, marking the passage of time through the day.

work by Ryan Hughes

33 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

TRANSFORMATION OF AN INDUSTRIAL ARTIFACT

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The re-inhabitation of abandoned industrial structures offers rich spatial possibilities, especially where public and private spaces overlap. Rather than work with a freestanding architectural element, however, two students chose to engage the earthen ramp of a long gone railway pier. All that remains is a retaining wall along Hull Street that holds a large area of fill with several concrete tank bases and other surface fragments. Kathleen Mark conceived the Boat Building/Sailing Center as an exhibition and learning space that could provide the Locust Point community with public waterfront access. The elevated ground of the railway pier approach becomes a new planted roof for

interior spaces excavated beneath, while the retaining wall becomes a new building faรงade for street access. This strategy, sensitive to the multiple levels and histories of site and neighborhood, also negotiates the extreme grade change at the waters edge. Rather than incorporate housing into this public location, apprentices will live with host families in the community and create a direct social tie to the new institution. In conjunction with this housing strategy, a new system of shaded benches and landscaped paths will link the neighborhood, the new Boat Building/ Sailing Center and the public roof garden.

work by Kathleen Mark

35 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

PUBLIC / PRIVATE OVERLAP

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37 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

SECTIONAL COMPLEXITY

Working on the same site and also sectionally exploiting the existing ground conditions and level changes for public use, Suhoon Bae developed a second project component in strong juxtaposition to the primary embedded strategy.

By locating apprentice housing within a single-story glazed bar elevated thirty feet above, the public park and pier are undisturbed by private uses and the temporary residents visually connect with the larger Baltimore landscape. Both projects clearly manifest the public and private project components, as well as the relationship between the singular boat–building volume and the repetitive apprentice dwellings—Mark by programmatic adjustment at the urban scale, and Bae through a highly figural sectional displacement. In both cases, the students explored the making of sectionally rich and appropriate rooms and assemblies of rooms, both inside and outside.

work by Suhoon Bae

+ ENVIRONMENTAL ECOLOGIES

Students analyzed the richly intertwined cultural and environmental ecologies of Locust Point, and proposed interventions that explored the didactic possibilities of architecture itself. They probed how a building or landscape might teach about the distinct history and future of this place.

Kimberly Barnett chose a site squeezed between the immense Domino Sugar and Proctor & Gamble factories, which is the only location where the ground still slopes toward the water as it would have before industrial development. Barnett’s design probes the environmental, educational, and sectional significance of that found condition. A publicly accessible wetland garden is created by planting the slope with native grasses to slowly filter storm water runoff and register tidal and temporal change, while revealing the pre-industrial conditions of the harbor. The wild garden is spatially framed by two thin bar buildings that negotiate the slope and provide access—one for boat fabrication and the other for public learning and social gathering. The section and enclosure system of each building is carefully calibrated to maximize natural light and ventilation, directly connect interior spaces to social and environmental site conditions, and teach students about the complex co-existence of human inhabitation and environmental forces.

39 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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CULTURAL

work by Kimberly Barnett

+ HAPTIC EXPERIENCE

Given the sectionally and historically complex layering of transportation infrastructure at Locust Point, several students studied how their site is part of a larger network of urban movement systems and public and private spaces. For instance, Pier 7 was a crucial link between land and water, or rail and ship, in an international grain transportation network that exploited Baltimore’s deepwater harbor and excellent rail connections. The cultural and historical significance of these abandoned structures in Locust Point make it imperative that the temporal layer they represent is not totally erased, while their adaptive re-use exemplify the potential for economic rehabilitation and design exploration along this edge. To this end, Ryan Moody proposed the “re-creation of circulation” within the existing framework of the abandoned pier and adjacent site—as a recreation artery between land and water, as well as between the functions of boat building and sailing.

7

New paths allow one to experience the beauty of the fine steel structure, without damaging the Pier itself. Circulatory elements extend vertically within and horizontally around the structure to generate views and spatial engagement at different heights. Passive and active recreation paths promote differing speeds of bodily movement in relation to the structure’s rhythm. By developing a palette of color, sound and texture through materials such as sand (bocce ball path), wood (sunset path), translucent recycled plastic/ rubber (running track), colored carbon fiber (elevated sunrise path), and lightweight concrete (bicycle path), travel at Pier 7 maps a rich haptic and visual experience.

At the urban scale, this circulation path extends into the fabric of Locust point, encircles the neighborhood, links Latrobe Park, provides harbor access through the sailing school, and finally extends beyond Pier 7 to connect life at Locust point with Baltimore harbor. work by Ryan Moody

41 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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MOVEMENT

This studio is one in a series of ARCH 701 studios that develop critical thinking, analytical and communication skills, and spatial and formal design abilities while engaging three specific issues from my own research: marginal and unseen sites, the threshold between public and private life within city and building, and the importance of materiality to haptic experience. Site out of mind is the term I use to conceptualize the edges and gaps between one thing and another often resulting from a collision between scales and uses, unoccupied spaces under, over and along highways, railways and other infrastructure elements, urban voids, ruined places and leftover material evidence. These spaces are both proliferating exponentially in our contemporary landscape and emerging as significant areas for theoretical speculation and design intervention.

I intend site out of mind to be read in multiple ways: as a specific site in which things are explored and as a sight or thing seen. Thus, a site out of mind is a condition or sight visible but not seen or minded—not taken charge of or cognitively acknowledged. Working in several cities on sites out of mind marginalized by immense transportation infrastructure or seemingly inadequate dimensions for the intended use, students devise scalar, spatial and programmatic strategies for inhabitation.

Through program briefs that combine unlikely public and private uses, such as a neighborhood Public Library and Community Fitness Center or Community Center and Elementary School, students explore the possible environmental, social, and spatial benefits of breaking down unnecessary barriers between these two realms.

In this process, they consider how specific functional typologies have developed in the modern period, and the reciprocal relationships that exist between social construction and building typologies. These unlikely programmatic combinations intentionally undermine the ability to literally rely on such typologies, and also instigate conceptual, spatial and even environmental probing of new possibilities. A third area of exploration concerns bodily experience. Students carefully consider movement through space and time, texture, light, color, sound and other non-quantitative phenomena in their design of a highly resolved material architecture. These studios require that students oscillate between urban and detailed architectural investigations, focusing on physical form embedded within a deep understanding the specific cultural, environmental, economic, political, and technological context.

43 On the Edge / at the Center Phoebe Crisman

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THINKING ACROSS TERRITORIES

DISPATCH FROM A MISSIONARY IN THE FIELD Lewis Maverick McNeel,

MArch 2005

UVa’s School of Architecture is not against good Classicism and not against good Modernism either. But those are just labels. The primary goal of the faculty there is to plumb much deeper territory:

But this ambitious academic agenda seems to have been interpreted by some people as avant-gardism and a singular obsession with “Modernism.”

UVa’s buildings did teach me something: How not to think in terms of a wider ethical agenda in the world, and how not to be innovative and creative with the resources at hand and the mental faculties we have been given, and how not to confront any difficult conflict at all with any form of thought, imagination, and optimism.

I have just finished six years of education in the Architecture School at UVa. I am currently serving as a Christian missionary in Kampala, Uganda with a group of architects and engineers whose “clients” are typically some of the poorest people in the world. The design work we are involved with here is about as ethically charged as it gets. We work in some of the most limiting contexts imaginable. By necessity we think very deeply about how we design here. We question constantly what good architecture actually means, and how to understand beauty, and how to create for the purpose of meeting the needs of the poor in a very broken world. In our pursuit of good design here there is no room for excess. We think on the fly, invent, adapt rapidly to change, work with whatever we can find, and pursue beauty wherever we can chase it, in all of its unexpected and strange forms.

45 Open Letter Response Lewis Maverick McNeel

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The Architecture School is about exploring with wide-eyed wonderment and optimism the exhilarating possibilities for creating in the world and the responsibility that comes with it. The faculty pushes its students to be stewards of this earth and to be effective thinkers and questioners immersed in the conflicts of globalization. The school stokes a fierce discussion of ethical accountability and the challenging nature and place of aesthetics in all of it.

Indirectly this leads the school into even deeper pursuits of the very definitions of what is good and what is beautiful. This is the fertile climate in which I studied and worked and made things in the studios of Campbell Hall.

UVa is an institution of critical thinking and of challenging the status quo for the purpose of inciting positive change in the world (at least that is what I hope the goal of this place is). If that is the case, shouldn’t all of UVa’s resources help in some way to advance this goal? Shouldn’t its physical properties be utilized as valuable teaching tools as well? Shouldn’t UVa’s buildings be used to demonstrate dynamic and critical thinking, and shouldn’t the lessons taught here be applicable to situations in the world of extreme crisis or difficulty?

Shouldn’t they be daring to articulate the value of hopeful creativity? What is UVa teaching about ethical behavior in the world and beauty and the value of innovation if its buildings display no forward-thinking invention, no awareness of the problems of the wider world, or make no (even stumbling) attempts at searching for a deeper beauty outside of a narrowly defined perspective on style?

I am not telling about all of this to appear to have some kind of moral high ground about anything. I am merely describing the strange vantage point from which I am now looking back on my education at the University of Virginia and what I learned from my surroundings while I was there. From this decidedly unsecular vantage I have realized two critical things about UVa: 1. I have been trained to work competently and effectively as a designer in the challenging context of a developing nation only because of the incredibly dynamic, aesthetically curious, and rigorous design education I received from the School of Architecture at UVa.

open letter

2.The physical appearance and character of the majority of UVa’s buildings and the aesthetic, social, and technological values that they proclaim are completely useless and irrelevant as tools for teaching students of any discipline how to think about and work critically to address the conflicts and complexity of the globalized world today, with all of its triumphs and crises. The physical architecture of the University of Virginia gave me absolutely no good frame of reference to confront the kind of architectural work that I now find myself doing. I spent six years surrounded by stagnant, meaningless chunks of squashed imagination, suppressed vitality, and wasted invention. If I were to apply any of the design lessons taught by UVa’s buildings in the situation where I am working now, the result would be offensive, backward, and destructive.

idb refuge camp, Kampala Uganda photo by Lewis Maverick McNeel

Elizabeth K. Meyer Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture

One evening in the Fall 2004 semester at the faculty mailboxes, I found a small pamphlet written by Iowa State landscape architecture faculty Hohmann and Langhorst. Intriguingly entitled “An Apocalyptic Manifesto.,� I sat down to read it. Expecting a provocative declaration of beliefs about the future of landscape architecture, I was disheartened to find a whining screed full of mis-representations and mis-characterizations of history and current state of landscape architecture.

This was a disappointment to me for several reasons. I teach a course called Theories of Modern Landscape Architecture, and have done so since 1989.

This three-credit course explains the modern designed landscape as a distinct mode of cultural production while underscoring landscape architectural theory’s inextricability from changing societal constructions of nature, environmentalism and the modernizing city. Through the examination of design treatises, manifestos and contemporary theoretical writings from outside the design fields, the course recovers the theory (and practice) of modern landscape architecture from its marginalization as an anti-urban aesthetic of informal, open spaces. Instead, it reveals how landscape architects re-imagined the city-as-landscape at the same time that landscape appreciation were re-invigorated by the hybridization of scientific (19th c geology and 20th c ecology) and artistic discourse. In contrast to a mainstream that valued figures, object-making, universal solutions and detached contemplation, modern landscape architecture explored fields, process, site specificity and engagement. By examining this hybrid design language and its

47 Eyes that Can See and Hands that Can Make Elizabeth K. Meyer

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Eyes that Can See and Hands that Can Make. A response

Little of the depth and richness of the material I cover in the class was acknowledged by the manifesto authors. Their cynicism seemed hampered by their limited conception of current practice, but also by their lack of historical awareness of the discipline. I was especially disappointed as one of the authors had been a student in the early years I taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Over the next few months, I responded to the “Apocalyptic Manifesto” in two ways. I wrote a public response to it that was printed in the April 2005 issue of Landscape Architecture, and I created a new assignment for my Spring 2005 Theories course asking students to respond to the “Apocalyptic Manifesto” as well.

In my Landscape Architecture magazine essay, I wrote ‘‘An Apocalyptic Manifesto” is neither a manifesto—“a public declaration of motives and intentions” (as the authors claim)—nor apocalyptic—revelatory and disclosing. It is a list of complaints and contradictory assertions—the whining of those who are not satisfied with the profession but who are unengaged in changing it.

It is the yearning of those who desire theory in a design field to share the predictive role of theory in the natural sciences.

If authors Hohmann and Langhorst think landscape architecture can be reduced to site engineering, site ecology, environmental art, site design, planting plans, sustainable design, and cultural criticism—all of which can be accomplished better by someone else—let them diagnose their landscape architecture patient as terminal. The practice of landscape architecture I see is alive and has never been better.

I could argue with most of Hohmann and Langhorst’s assertions, but they offer no evidence, so there’s nothing to argue against. Rather, I would like to examine their thesis, as it is founded on a serious case of mistaken identity due to “eyes that cannot see.” 1

What follows are several of the students’ responses; these position papers were written by eyes that do see. The responses took several forms, from critiques of the “Apocalytic Manifesto” to alternative manifestos. I found the students’ writings inspiring, as they were simultaneously creative and critical. They were personal, yes. But they were also an extension of the larger intention of my course: to recover the vocabulary, theories and practices of landscape architecture by deconstructing the stylistic constraints of earlier histories that could not see beyond such limiting categories as man versus nature, formal versus informal, 1. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Eyes that Cannot See,” a review of Hohmann and Jorst’s “Apocalyptic Manifesto”. Landscape Architecture 94:4 (April 2004).

culture versus nature; and by reconstructing landscape architecture theory and practice in its own voice, through its own categories and concerns. The student writings that follow demonstrate that a creative and critical stance towards contemporary practice is grounded in personal conviction and an awareness of the discourse of one’s field, the communication of ideas and construction of a conversation across generations. My Theories of Modern Landscape Architecture course is structured as a conversation between designers, texts and contexts, but it is also an introduction to how to join that conversation, to contribute to its content and direction, and to keep it lively, meaningful and affirming.

Graduate architecture students Matt Ibarra and Ryan Moody, two of the editors of this new journal, were participants in that Spring 2005 class and conversation, held during lunch time, 12:30-2 pm, on Tuesday and Thursday. Their decision to take my course as an elective reminds me that memorable conversations often include new voices from outside one’s familiar circle. Conversations over lunch and lectures during lunch-time are part of a larger field of discourse in the Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UVA. Given the convictions, the careful reasoning, and the theoretical foundations evident in the verbal and written forms of conversation I have with students in the Department, I have high expectations for this generation of designers. Unlike the authors of “Apocalyptic Manifesto, ” these landscape architects and architects are channeling their dissatisfaction with how things are done into statements of beliefs upon which design action can occur.

49 Eyes that Can See and Hands that Can Make Elizabeth K. Meyer

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resultant full spaces, my students expand their understanding of what constituted modernity. Given that recent criticism of mid-twentieth century modernism has focused on the ethical and aesthetic limitations of those mainstream concerns, knowledge of these “marginal” late 19th and 20th century landscape theories and practices is germane to students in landscape architecture, history, planning and architecture who are interested in green urbanism, landscape urbanism, operations and performativity, ecology and technology as well as feminist theory and criticism.

| re | NAISSANCE HUMANifesto Jordan Phemister, MLA 2006

renaissance: a new birth; any revival, or period of marked improvement and new life, in art, literature, etc. manifesto: a public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance, as a school or movement in the arts

After a period of stagnation during the early 20th century, practitioners and academics revived the field of landscape architecture during the latter half of the century and are poised to push it quickly forward into the 21st. The field has reached the tipping point, ready to spill out and permeate quotidian exchanges from the smallest to largest of scales. Ideas and issues of landscape are infiltrating the work of architects, planners, engineers, artists, environmentalists, corporations, politicians, governments, schools, lawyers, doctors, developers and neighbors.

Now is the time to harness and cultivate this momentum and cultural currency to enable landscape architecture to become or, more accurately, to reestablish itself as a critical force in shaping, celebrating and revealing the cultural, social, ecological, and aesthetic values of society through the medium of landscape. The following is a list of the qualities that define the profession and should be held on to, as well as suggestions for moving the field forward.

We ground our designs in site and milieu As designers our objective is to embrace and activate the “landscape as a verb�1 through education and practice.

We: amplify reveal heighten distill translate elucidate uncover discover make legible

.

1. Corner, James. Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, 1999.

1

51 Renaissance Humanifesto Jordan Phemister

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oxford english dictionary, www.oed.com

2

We design incrementally, through space and over time This mosaic approach allows designers to tap into a rich, layered and ever-changing tapestry of experience and meaning tied to cultural values and rituals.

We adapt, translate, and integrate ideas from diverse disciplines This is not cribbing or stealing, it is the essence of design and innovation. We must exploit the edges and blur the boundaries. We do not live, play or work in a vacuum and can not push the field forward if we pretend and practice as though we do.

Environmental health is inherent to our work, but should not be formally deterministic We must not hide behind the cloak of nature. Ecological functionality and integrity should be aspirations in every design. However, in order to resonate with a greater audience and ultimately push the environmental movement forward, our hand should be evident in our work. Mimicry of nature is not appropriate for our field. It perpetuates the misconceptions of landscape architecture as a panacea for environmental ills, and that humanity is somehow separate from nature. We must not lose sight of the environment as a constructed entity. We cannot support practices that mislead people to believe in the impracticable idea that we can control and/or replace nature – we need to understand the breadth and extent of our presence in and impact upon the earth.

We provide opportunities for people to feel engaged and immersed in a site. We cultivate the inherent layers of a site in a way that both responds to people’s needs and shapes our social, cultural and ecological experiences. We help people realize the potential of the designed landscape to positively influence their daily lives. To this end, we must embrace the responsibility of designing public spaces that serve and improve the conditions of communities that are most in need. Landscapes can be transformative, and we are only beginning to uncover their potential to provide a forum and space for social and community recovery.

We engage in a cultural practice In the act of design, choices of representation – what we analyze, map or value in some way through our design – become critical. Ultimately, we create a narrative for the site, and the decisions we make through each step of the design process will determine to a large extent the voices and stories that will be heard when construction is complete. This provides a unique opportunity to challenge overarching master narratives and create a platform for recovering alternative and suppressed histories, conceptions, and perceptions of landscape.

We offer a new lens for ‘seeing’ the landscape in the fullest possible sense

We must embrace and master our media: soils | water | plants | weather These four materials are highlighted because when combined, they are unique and integral to the distinction of our profession. Although these materials have remained relatively consistent over time, our understanding of their attributes and qualities has changed dramatically. At the most basic level, an understanding of these materials grounds us in the processes operating on a site and connects a place to a larger region. Soils determine what can grow or be built. Water and drainage provide a more meaningful definition of territory and boundaries than a tax parcel map. Our understanding as designers of the spatial, temporal and figural qualities of plants places us in a unique position to deploy them in thoughtful, innovative and didactic ways. Weather impacts all of these media and can be harnessed or mitigated to provide spaces and resources for living.

Finally, we must improve our ability to test | evaluate | revisit our work We should aim to quantify and qualify the relationship between our design intentions and results. We must learn from and build upon a more rigorous understanding of built works. We have to understand where we have come from in order to determine where and how we should move forward.

We construct environmental and spatial experiences through the formulation and application of: physical tactile kinesthetic textural temporal aural sensual social cultural ecological visual layers, fluxes and flows that are particular to a site.

3

53 Renaissance Humanifesto Jordan Phemister

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We design for people

untitled dialectic Anne Bohlen, MLA 2006

As an opening statement, authors Hohmann and Langhorst immediately set the tone for a cynical and general manifesto, while simultaneously representing an inherent denial of the only consistent understanding of landscape architecture; that of a dialectic. I will challenge this cynical attitude and its translation as an invalid tool for the creation of a landscape manifesto. Specifically I will critique this argument through an examination of the fifth and sixth points of the manifesto.

In conjunction with shifting social values and artistic thought, this dialectic has evolved over time. I offer a representation of this evolution, exemplified by both practitioners and artists who have explored the medium of the landscape.

Their thoughts are representative of this dialectic, examined closely through the consistent re-consideration of the meaning of Landscape Architecture and its relation to the social thought.

Garret Eckbo “What is Landscape Design” 1950

cynic: A person disposed to rail or find fault; now usually: One who shows a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms; a sneering fault finder. dialectic: The art of critical examination into the truth of an opinion; the investigation of truth by discussion; in earlier English use; a synonym of logic as applied to formal rhetorical reasoning; logical argumentation or disputation. 2

6. If Landscape Architecture cannot define a current direction, neither can it cope with its status as an undefined and undefinable profession Sometimes, typically around 4am on the nights of charette, I wish I sold light bulbs. By my analogy, the light bulb would be easy because I would understand exactly what its potential is. A customer who wished to purchase a light bulb would know exactly what they wanted, 60 watts, full spectrum or maybe a blue or black light. The point is that the light bulb is understood clearly as an object whose potential lies directly within its function; to light something such as a room or a walkway.

“In order to define and evaluate a human activity we must establish its relationship to the general cultural pattern of the society in which it occurs… but with special primary emphasis on the human content, the relation between people and the landscape… .” 5

Robert Smithson “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectic Landscape” 1972 “…dialectical materialism applied to the physical landscape, Dialectics of this type are a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated object. Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal… .” 6

3. I believe there is a general level of ignorance on everyone’s part about what others do within their profession; however this does not keep these professions from having meaning. For example, as a daily routine I have no idea what a biochemist does. That said, if I have a headache and I go to the store, buy aspirin and feel better, I have been affected and my life is better because of that research.

There really is still no acknowledgement of the specific chemist, lab, or pharmaceutical company.

While at the same time aspirin is entirely necessary and justifiable. In that manner, if I design a park, and someone visits that park and for even one second feels a little better, or perhaps even a little different than they did walking off the street, if there is a moment where they acknowledge their own existence a little differently, that is all a landscape architect can hope for. Why do I need them to know, ‘hey this place was designed by a landscape architect’? If as a profession we believe individually or collectively in what we do, then the idea of a typological definition of landscape architecture seems slightly absurd and perhaps even detrimental.

4. Hohmann, Heidi Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto, 2004, p.9.

1. Hohmann, Heidi. Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto, 2004, title page.

2. definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary www.oed.com

5. Eckbo, Garrett What is Landscape Design? 5-9, Landscape for Living 1950 p.

6. Smithson, Robert. Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, reprinted in Nancy Holt’s The Writings of Robert Smithson 1979, p.119.

55 untitled dialectic Anne Bohlen

“Rem Koolhas has said, ‘The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence’. The authors agree with this statement. However, since landscape architecture is generally lacking in manifestos, we thought maybe it was time for one.” 1

If as a profession we are so desperate to be defined, which could be argued as unnecessary and irrelevant 3 , then this pursuit is clearly bound within the dialectic of landscape. Ultimately, this dialectic allows the profession to grow and mature; it is more than semantics, as the authors would argue. Instead, the Apocalyptic Manifesto continually takes the position of the child cynic, refusing to engage in the consideration of the dialectic as a tool for advancing the profession of Landscape Architecture. Rather, the authors claim, “no one’s listening”.4

The title page of the Apocalyptic Manifesto states:

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In contrast to the light bulb, the potential of landscape architecture cannot be so easily defined. It can not be relegated to a socket in the wall and turned on at the flip of a switch. This reality is embedded in the consideration that Landscape Architecture is inherently as much a conversation of cultural values and space as it is about the physical manifestation of these concepts. Its potential is constantly being re-considered. This reconsideration is not and should not be thought of as a detriment to landscape but rather as an opportunity for understanding the unique circumstance of the landscape medium, living and constantly shifting, vastly different from every other design profession.

Our Quest for Intimacy David Hill, M.Arch / MLA 2005

J.B. Jackson, “The Word Itself”, 1984 “…we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of man-made or man modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective human transformation; and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our identity and presence, but also our history… .” 8

Christophe Girot, “Developments in Landscape Architecture in Europe” Topos, Dec 2004

The continuum of re-defining and evaluating landscape is clearly presented here as an opportunity to think critically about the ways that we inhabit and experience our landscapes, our built environment. It is through this critical thought and its manifestation by which our experience of landscape becomes tangible. Therefore, landscape architecture must be able to respond to changing social, cultural and environmental values. Again, this response is intimately tied to the ways we as a profession structure our dialectic, our own pursuit of truth, surely not as a cynical gesture, which offers the death of a patient as a solution. Authors Hohmann and Langhorst continually deny the dialectic of the landscape. I am not surprised they feel no one is listening; their voices are speaking empty and silent words, lacking in critical thought.

5. Landscape Architecture today has no central or core defining values The dialectic of landscape architecture offers opportunity, and potential within what the authors call the “ambiguous nature”10 of landscape architecture.

Specifically, the dialectic allows for an ambiguity, which is productive and allows for an infiltration of thought in landscape that ultimately creates new definitions responding to new social conditions. Values of Landscape Architecture are in direct response to ever changing values of society, directly tied to site, history and social need or more specifically, “environment”. To state that “landscape architecture today, lacks a compelling and unifying social agenda” 11 is again to find fault with that aspect of landscape which defines it uniquely, separate from every other profession: landscape architecture is a profession of response, it is an action, not complacent and accepting, but responding to and challenging the values of our constructed environments. If the profession seeks a raison d’etre, let it be found there in the active engagement of both the conversation and construction of our built environment.

8. Jackson, J.B. ‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape’, The Word Itself 1984 p.8.

9. Girot, Christophe. ‘Developments in Landscape Architecture in Europe’ Topos 2004/49 p.40.

10. Hohmann, Heidi. Landscape Architecture: An Apocalyptic Manifesto, 2004 p.10.

11. Ibid, p.6.

Cross pollination is a healthy and vibrant activity and nothing new to landscape architecture. The field has thrived on the influence of many other disciplines. For example, James Rose and Garrett Eckbo were influenced by sculpture, Gertrude Jekyll by color theory, Jens Jensen by ecology, Lawrence Halprin by dance, and Frederick Law Olmsted by geology. Acts of cross pollination are not “poaching” methodologies, as Hohmann and Langhorst suggest in An Apocalyptic Manifesto, but are rather sources of inspiration. We need to acknowledge that ideas and methodologies adapt when media changes. When Jekyll applied color theory to the garden it became more complex, necessitating an increased knowledge of plant cycles including their bloom colors, times and physical size. This type of cross pollination is rich and exciting: it’s the life of Landscape Architecture.

The recent merger of the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at the University of Virginia has given students the opportunity to re-understand and re-imagine the cross pollination available in the field of Landscape Architecture.

I have personally seen this in the context of the ecoMOD studio, which has been an intense arena for the union, as well as friction, between disciplines. During the explanation of the departmental merger Julie Bargmann and Bill Sherman described the union as a ‘marriage of disciplines’. This analogy is quite helpful in allowing us to move forward. People have married for centuries; we should learn what we can from this relationship. For any marriage to work, some key issues must be understood and practiced.

1. The partners are unique individuals.

To state the obvious, marriage is the union of two different individuals. There are many similarities between landscape architecture and architecture, but there are some crucial differences as well. Too often we focus on the similarities of the two disciplines leading to an oversimplification of both. We must understand, enjoy, and expound on our differences; those elements that make landscape architecture unique.

The ecoMOD project is a good case study of this point. In the context of the studio we saw that architecture and landscape architecture have quite different units of measure and ordering devices. As we have seen through our landscape ancestors, ideas that traverse various fields change dramatically as the media changes. ecoMOD exposed how ideas of modularity, economy, and ecology changed as they traversed between architecture and landscape architecture. This was beautiful and exciting to see.

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“The semantic shift in the concepts of both landscape and city is so significant that we can speak of a paradigm shift, a shift that makes landscape and the city interchangeable on the widest variety of levels. The urbanism that we are experiencing today is new as a phenomena… .” 9

The field of Landscape Architecture brings several items to the relationship. Our ancestors remind us:

2. There must be mutual respect (even enjoyment) between the partners.

To achieve simply a bearable union, one partner does not dominate, coerce, or bully the other. For a relationship to thrive and be enjoyed we must move beyond pure tolerance to sincere interest in one another. This is achieved through knowledge; we must know and be known by our partner. The largest stumbling block for this goal is an assumption of knowledge. If we are not careful, the marriage of disciplines at the University of Virginia will create architecture graduates that assume they know landscape architecture. Early in the ecoMOD studio, there was an effort by many architecture students to “bring the landscape in.” The question was posed “what is the landscape?” Answer: plants and light; no acknowledgement of the exciting elements such as interactions with the body, the site, the systems, the time, or the media that landscape architecture is able to imagine. Such oversimplification does not foster respect or unity.

The ecoMOD studio was a great opportunity for the fields to get to know one another better. We were able to share, discuss and sometimes argue to expand our understanding of one another. There needs to be more places for this dayto-day intimacy between the partners within the school. The relationship is dirty, but worth it.

The enjoyment of each other is not a linear process with a point of conclusion. The relationship and the individuals change over time. We need to be persistent about understanding each other. This is where experimentation reappears. We need to experiment together. I respect the experimentation of practitioners such as Eckbo, Rose, and Jekyll. They acknowledged the potential of cross pollination and used projects to facilitate learning. The disciplines need to rub elbows, working on projects together that are bold and experimental.

One of the most popular pieces of advice for any marriage is to foster effective communication. As previously suggested, architecture and landscape architecture need to rub elbows. The ecoMOD studio allowed us to focus on a project side by side, fight when necessary, and learn to communicate with each other more effectively.

Although we often disagreed, discussing opinions ultimately led to greater respect.

Binary relations such as man and nature, ecology and technology, and architecture and landscape hinder communication. It is tempting, since there are two disciplines, to set them in opposition. However, such binaries erode effective communication and oversimplify the complexity of our relationship; one that is composed of a rich gradient rather than two opposing forces. Again, we need to remember our ancestors. Exclusive binaries erased the history and importance of overelooked cultures. We need to avoid this mistake by enjoying and representing the rich hybrids that exist.

The marriage is tough, but our relationship is worth the struggle.

59 Our Quest for Intimacy David Hill

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Remember the body How will the body experience this place?

Remember the site There is a history to this place. It has depth, volume, and duration.

Remember systems The “site” is part of a larger system; ecological, geological, solar, and social.

Remember time Change happens, enjoy it. How are duration and cycles revealed?

Remember the media Plants, dirt, sun, wind, and light each have their own orders and measures.

3. There must be constant, effective communication.

Housing: ecological, modular and affordable Assistant Professor of Architecture

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preHAB section perspective

The ecoMOD project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture is intended to create a series of ecological, modular and affordable house prototypes. The goals are to demonstrate the economic and environmental potential of prefabrication, and to challenge the modular and manufactured housing industry in the U.S. to explore this potential. In the context of this research and design / build / evaluate project, an interdisciplinary group of architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, business, environmental science, planning and economics students are participating in the design, construction and evaluation of the project. The project is imbedded in the curriculum of the university.

The first completed house is currently being evaluated as part of a process to determine the environmental impact of the homes during their life cycle; perceptions of the homes by the owners and neighbors; the energy efficiency of the design and equipment; the feasibility of their transfer to the modular housing industry; the life cycle costs; and the financial viability of taking the prototypes into production.

The results of the evaluations will influence later designs, and the evaluation methods and recommendations will be made publicly available. The project will continue through 2010 at a minimum.

1

ecoMOD John Quale

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John Quale

2

EnergyStar is a program organized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to encourage energy efficiency.

Traynor, T., AB Exclusive State of the Industry Report for 2005: Total Housing Up 7% to 2.88 Million Units.

Automated Builder, pp. 8-9, January, 2006.

2

Kelley, S. P., personal communication, April 2005, Project Engineer, Pulte Home Science.

Among the most surprising trends in prefab housing is growth at the upper end of the market. Whereas public perception suggests prefabricated homes are inferior products only appropriate for the least affluent, upscale builders increasingly recognize the financial and logistical advantages of centralized fabrication.1 Although they seldom emphasize the prefab nature of the construction, major U.S. home builders such as the Pulte and Toll Brothers are transitioning from site built to pre-built for their middle and upper-middle market rate houses.2 Major home builders clearly recognize that the future is in prefab, which can typically offer a more predictable product with more control over quality, schedule and price.

However, the benefits of these investments are not filtering down to the lower end of the market. Manufactured housing, the technical term for transportable trailers built to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) building code, is still the least expensive way into the new housing market. While the HUD code has gotten more restrictive in recent years with tighter guidelines for insulation and the attachment of the trailers to foundations, the fact remains that manufactured houses are still inferior products. They are difficult to finance, built with the cheapest possible materials, and tend to depreciate in value.

In contrast to HUD code homes, prefabricated homes that use modular, panelized or component prefab elements are built to the code of the local jurisdiction. Unlike HUD code houses, these homes are considered permanent construction, and do not face financing problems, and therefore tend to appreciate in value in the same way as a site built house.

remained flat.3 In addition, manufactured houses are designed for the width and orientation of suburban lots.

No major manufactured home company offers models designed for urban lots with the entry side facing the street. The typical single-wide module for these homes measures 12’-0” to 14’-0” wide by 48’-0” long – a size nearly impossible to transport into most tight urban areas.

By default, families in the affordable housing market are being pushed to the periphery where they have to take on the added financial burden of driving everywhere.

It is in this context that the ecoMOD project was developed. ecoMOD is a collaborative research and design / build project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture focused on creating well-designed and well-built homes that cost less to live in, minimize damage to the environment, and appreciate in value. The goal of ecoMOD is to create a series of proto-typical ecological and modular houses for low-income families. Over the next several years, UVA architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, business, environmental science, planning and economics students and faculty will provide a minimum of four prefabricated houses. Through partnerships with Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA) of Charlottesville, Virginia and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville (HFHGC), the homes will be placed in established communities. PHA will sell three of the homes to low-income families in the Piedmont region with down payment and financing assistance.

3

Paycheck to Paycheck: Wages and the Cost of Housing in America; study published by the National Housing Conference, August 2005, www.nhc.org/chp/p2p/.

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1

Centralized within a climate-controlled facility, prefabricated residential construction offers material and transportation efficiencies, as well as the opportunity for stricter quality control.

Although several U.S. companies have developed EnergyStarrated models, and sell quality homes superior to conventional stick-built construction, few are seriously considering the environmental impact of their methods or materials.

OUTin ground floor rendering

The availability of affordable housing in the U.S. is a growing problem. As construction costs increase and home values continue to grow, the challenge of buying a home in many markets is becoming insurmountable for many.

House values have increased 20% in just the last two years, while incomes for middle and lower class Americans have 3

ecoMOD2 – known as the preHAB house – is a panelized design that will house a family displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Constructed in partnership with HFHGC and the HFH affiliate in Jackson County, Mississippi, the design is intended to demonstrate the potential of prefab for Habitat affiliates. HFH is already pursuing panelized construction with their “Operation Home Delivery” project focused on delivering wall panels from around the country to be set up in the hurricane devastated Gulf Coast region. The goal with the preHAB house is to take this one step further, by designing a home that can be pre-fabricated in various ways – panels, room-sized modules, and/or smaller components.

The first preHAB house will be sited on an empty lot in a 1960’s affordable housing subdivision in the city of Gautier, Mississippi.

Design will begin in Fall 2006 on ecoMOD3, a home for a low-income family in the Charlottesville area. Partnering again with PHA, two project options are being considered.

One possibility is to rehabilitate and add a modular unit to a historic home. Historic preservation students would participate in the design phase, along with architecture, engineering and landscape architecture students. The other option is to produce a small multi-unit elderly housing complex. In this scenario, the shell of the units – the modules – could be prefabricated by a modular manufacturer, with the students providing the design, and building the smaller scale modules and components.

Each completed house is to be monitored and evaluated carefully, with the results guiding the designs of subsequent houses. The evaluation process occurs in two overlapping courses with additional participation from students and faculty from non-design disciplines such as business, environmental science, economics and planning.

The design process for the ecoMOD homes is structured to maximize the educational possibilities of the project. The project is imbedded in the curriculum of the University and the coursework has been recognized by professional organizations and major media outlets.4 A series of mixed graduate and undergraduate design studios in the School of Architecture, combined with independent study and thesis students from the University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, form the core of the design process. The two-year cycle includes an academic year for design, followed by a summer of construction, and an academic year of evaluation.

The first design studio for ecoMOD1 began with student presentations on relevant prefab and ecological case studies, and designs that address specific activities within the home.

preHAB presentation rendering

The students interacted regularly with professional members of the local community – from building department officials to local contractors and consultants. A team of student managers working with the faculty Project Director collectively made important design decisions. Decisions that required a comparison of multiple possibilities were often documented with a six pointed decision web – a concept adapted from the professional world. The web required the team to remember that decisions are a careful balancing of aesthetic, technical, financial, social and ecological issues– with the sixth point being an overall score. In concept, the webs were meant to

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The first PHA house, called the OUTin house was designed, prefabricated, and sited in the Fifeville neighborhood of Charlottesville on 7 1/2 Street. It is being sold as a twounit condominium (basement unit sold separately from the upper two floors), and includes a rainwater collection system that delivers potable water, an extremely energy efficient construction system, a solar hot water collector, and landscape of native, drought tolerant plants.

4

Taylor, E., AIA Recognizes Ecoliteracy in Architecture Schools, Environmental Building News, July 2005; Global Challenges, CNN International, segment on ecoMOD broadcast several times in November and December 2005; Cox, S., Design, Build, and Repeat, Architectural Record, page 54, November, 2005.

The start of the construction process for ecoMOD1 was delayed by nearly two months. The students fabricated eight small modules for the two-story house in a decommissioned airport hangar owned by the university, and transported them to the infill site. Unlike conventional modular houses, the students designed their modules to fit the proportion of urban infill sites, and to be easily transported along narrow streets. The modules were less than half the size of a typical module, allowing for the use of a less expensive crane, and the possibility of moving the modules through the narrowest streets with the tightest turning radii.

OUTin ribbon cutting, 2005

The majority of the design studio students elected to stay in town after their graduation, and participate in the construction process. The team worked through all the logistics themselves, including coordination between various building trades, material procurement, and transportation.

OUTin module assembly on site

The funding for the tools, and a significant percentage of the summer student fellowship money was provided by a local non-profit funding organization. The remainder of the funding was raised by the Project Director via grants and donations. The students devised strategies to work around the more sophisticated equipment that was beyond financial reach. For example, one company uses pneumatic devices to allow the modules to ‘hover’ as they move along the assembly line. The students built the eight modules in a single line in the hangar, and only moved them when it was time to transport them at the end. For this, they designed and fabricated a set of ‘house skates’ using left over framing material on wheels to roll the modules over a trailer, where they were lowered on to the bed. Conventional jacks were used to lift the house, and three or four people easily pushed the modules while on the “skates”.

Each completed house is to be monitored and evaluated carefully, with the results guiding the designs of subsequent houses. The evaluation process occurs in two overlapping courses with participation from students and faculty from architecture, engineering, commerce, business, environmental

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facilitate the decision process, but in reality, the webs were mostly treated as a documentation of a decision. During the break between the two design studios, the client decided to change the site, forcing the team to respond to a complex challenge. The students set about redesigning the house for the new narrower lot. The change significantly delayed the development of the design, but forced the team to address the adaptability of the design to various sites. The challenge was repeated again two weeks before the end of the spring semester, as the team was headed into the construction phase. A series of events led to another site change – still in the Fifeville neighborhood – but a site with a different solar orientation, topography and urban context. Once again, the design had to change, and the schedule was delayed. As with the first site change, the design team responded by exploring the ways the design could be more easily sited on various topographies, and in various microclimates.

science, landscape architecture and planning. As of this writing, the evaluation is approximately 70% complete, with a more thorough analysis available in the spring of 2007.

The ecoMOD1 evaluation team is looking carefully at the choices made by the design / build team. This includes the following: 1) monitoring the energy efficiency and water use of the house, contrasting the data with simulations and comparable homes 2) thorough life-cycle assessments of the materials and construction process 3) a post-occupancy evaluation with the eventual homeowners, including questions about thermal and lighting comfort, as well as evaluation of the design hypotheses set out in the design phase 4) an affordability analysis comparing the cost of both the prototype and the eventual production model to other available modular homes 5) a cost/benefit analysis and investigation of the design’s suitability for production with a major manufacturer, and 6) a summing up of the key recommendations, including a prioritized list of issues for the next design / build team to consider.

Preliminary conclusions indicate the following: 1) while the potable rainwater collection system will save the homeowners money and reduce the home’s environmental impact, the cost of the filtration equipment negates the efficacy of recommending it for city locations where the municipal water supply is relatively inexpensive 2) stricter guidelines need to be established to make sure the emphasis on building material efficiency at the hangar during the off-site construction process is not lost during the final phase on site, where a dumpster was available 3) while the design adequately addresses shading from the summer sun, it does not appear to sufficiently address the potential positive contribution of solar heat gain during the winter months 4)

The copyright registration process has begun for the design of ecoMOD1, including four adaptations to various solar orientations and topographies. At a minimum, the design drawings for ecoMOD1 and ecoMOD2 will be available for purchase by the summer 2006. The designs will be marketed to affordable housing organizations throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and the ecoMOD team will soon thereafter begin the process of speaking with modular builders about taking some of the designs into production.

The most significant impact of this project has yet to be evaluated – specifically the degree to which this form of reality-based service learning contributes positively to the professional lives of the students. The results of that evaluation will be revealed over the course of many years.

As of this writing, one former student is on her way to Sri Lanka to participate in the post-Tsunami rebuilding effort as a United Nations employee, and another is designing affordable housing for a large corporate architecture firm.

OUTin: adaptations

A

B

C

Visit the ecoMOD website at www.ecomod.virginia.edu.

This article is adapted from a more extensive piece to appear in “Eco Architecture 2006,” published by the Wessex Institute of Technology

D

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Kyle Sturgeon and Carolina Shaban at work in the converted hangar

the material life cycle assessments so far support the design decisions, but additional research is required into a comparison of the cementitious lap siding (as selected for ecoMOD1) versus the more conventional choice of vinyl siding; as well as corrugated galvalume roofing versus a membrane or asphalt shingle roof 5) the centralized air handler and ductwork – located in the middle of the conditioned space appears to contribute to the energy efficiency of the mechanical system 6) the combined effect of the energy efficient wall and roof system (structural insulated panels), the equipment and the passive design strategies seem to indicate a minimum of a 40% reduction in energy costs for the homeowners and 7) the preliminary financial analysis indicates that if the ecoMOD project were a for-profit business venture, it would be able to successfully find a niche in the largely underserved market for ecological, prefabricated and affordable housing. The architectural and financial evaluation will be complete in May of 2006, and the building monitoring and performance evaluation will be complete one year after the homeowner(s) moves into the space(s).

SEEKING HIGHER DENSITY ON HIGHER GROUND

“A city is made up of the people, and right now, New Orleans has no people.

Any proposal which is to suggest a successful plan for the revitalization of the city needs to first suggest a way to re-establish a population. When people believe there is a reason to return, that New Orleans is a desirable place to live, then we can open the discussion to more effective methods of inhabitation. Proposed projects must be prepared to deal with both a process of recovery and a process of renewal. One might even rethink the name of the competition, perhaps: Return, Rebuild, Renew.”

-J. Kline

“The work was hard – every shovel load was heavy from being soaked… Some of the items were everyday things – couches, desks, filing cabinets, a piano, lamps and kitchen ware. Then there were personal items – files, correspondence, pictures, books and clothing. It was not long before I began to recognize the reality and the immediate impact Katrina left on the lives of people” -B. Thompson

“It wasn’t the ‘stuff’ she missed, it was the community. It had existed for 20 or 30 years and was now scattered across the country in a matter of days, and it was gone. She just wanted it to be the same again.”

-K. Mark

“A photo was mounted carefully on a red construction paper card. It wasn’t on the floor; it was posted on the frame of what used to be the closet of a young girls room. Unlike other photos that had succumbed to the deluge, their colors stirred around on the paper and figures barely discernible, this one had remained perfectly intact; in its intended place on the inside of this girls closet. The girl was standing with a friend, her posture upright and her countenance strong and quiet. If I didn’t already feel like a trespasser, I certainly felt like one now. My initial reaction was to keep it. I quickly put it in my pocket. I entertained the rationalization that it was just going in the trash and by keeping it I may somehow be doing her a favor. In the end I couldn’t bring myself to take it off the property.”

-J. Pressly

The city of New Orleans will be rebuilt. The questions that have frustrated the debate for months are – which parts?, under what system of protection? and according to whose rules? In this sea of political uncertainty, only a few things appear to be clear and they are – that the New Orleans that emerges from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, will be 1) smaller, 2) denser and 3) forced to seek higher ground. This is the premise on which our studio investigation has been designed – to explore the issues of building higher-density, mixed-income, mixed-use housing on higher ground in the historic district of the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.

The New Orleans Studio has been constructed around a one-stage, open ideas competition, “High Density on the High Ground”. The competition is sponsored by Architectural Record in partnership with Tulane University School of Architecture. It is our goal to contribute to the rebuilding of New Orleans by offering realistic yet innovative contemporary models for 160 units of multi-density housing able to be transformative while maintaining the city’s unique cultural identity.

Semester Structure For the first third of the semester, we will be working collaboratively in five teams composed of two students each. The five teams will respond to the competition brief with a studio goal of entering all five proposals in to the competition due, March 1, 2006. This is an ambitious undertaking so the pace of the first third of the semester will be very fast. Over the remaining two-thirds of semester students will be working individually and able to assume a more reflective pace. During this phase students will be asked to respond to the design concepts generated by their team’s competition entry and to develop a particular assembly of buildings to the highest level of tectonic, sustainable and cultural resolution.

New Orleans Service Learning Fieldtrip During the third week of the semester we will embark on a journey of learning to New Orleans from Feb. 3rd – 6th. This field trip fulfills one of the goals of the semester – that of learning to “design in the moment” and to discover opportunities in a situation still unfolding as a source of innovation and creativity. This trip will be an opportunity to “be in the present” as the human story of how people survive trauma and reconstruct their lives and homes unfolds.

The itinerary will include site visits for documentation, interaction with resource people on the ground, a bus tour to survey the most devastated areas and the opportunity to participate in a local recovery effort. Students will meet people, gather stories and explore how story can shape neighborhoods. They will be engaged in new as well as traditional forms of site documentation and urban analysis. Finally, as a way of affording students an opportunity to contribute something of value while there, we will take part in a community service activity – assisting families in clearing out their damaged homes.

71 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

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Maurice Cox Associate Professor of Architecture

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73 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

Justin Laskin, MArch 2006

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Kathleen Mark, MArch 2006

note: Competition boards published as submitted to the “High Density on High Ground� open ideas competition

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75 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

Lorenzo Battistelli, MArch 2007, MA ’08

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Kristin Ann Hennings, MArch 2007, MA ’08

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77 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

Allison Dryer, MArch 2007

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James Boyce Pressly, MArch 2006

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79 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

Jeremy D Kline, MArch 2007

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Benjamin J Thompson, MArch 2007

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81 Seeking Higher Density on Higher Ground Maurice Cox

Patricia Vaz de Carvalho, MArch 2007

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Hao Xu, MArch 2007

Many of the most recent additions to Grounds have been thoughtful, usable, beautiful spaces that apparently represent the type of architecture derided by the professors: the Darden School, the Special Collections Library, the Aquatic and Fitness Center and the renovations to the Law School. Where the University has departed from the Jeffersonian blueprint, Grounds has been blemished; New Dorms, Hereford, Culbreth Theater and even the Architecture School itself add little to the aesthetic appearance of Grounds. Give this non-architect red bricks and white trim over squatting, modern architecture any day.

I write as an architect in regards to the Sept. 8 letter to the editor “Architecture faculty express discontent with buildings.”

The reason why the Architecture faculty members at the University have attacked traditional architecture is simple: They are ideological modernists who are afraid they are losing the position of control they have had over architecture for more than 50 years.

Thomas Hall, UVA LAW III The Cavalier Daily, 09.09.05

By contrast, the modernist professors want to reject classical architecture completely.

They say they want an architecture that responds to “the nature of a modern building.” The result would be sterile, ugly boxes like Hereford College.

Charles Siegel, Berkeley, CA

September

It is important for the University Community to understand that the built environment we lovingly refer to as “Grounds” has been molded in mediocrity for far too long now. As a leader in research and innovation --a “Public Ivy” as we love to refer to ourselves -- we present to the world a quite different reality. Our architectural face is one of homogenization and staid complacency.

The letter from the faculty of the Architecture School addressed to the Board of Visitors, the administration and all of us, the Student Body, was answered on Thursday with a resounding “meh” by University Rector Tom Farrell and University Architect David Neuman (“Architecture faculty expresses discontent with buildings,” Sept. 8). While this is not an unexpected reaction, it is quite telling. The power to -- literally -- shape the University lies in their hands, and the status quo is never shifted easily.

While it is important to maintain a high level of construction quality and institutional character, it is quite suspect and, in fact, naïve, to assume that a singular method will always attain these goals. Thomas Jefferson was an inventor and innovator at heart. He was an architect as well, and he implemented these qualities in his work to grand effect. Invention and innovation; it is time to (re)open the built world of the University to these ideals once again.

Nicholas Fiore, UVA SARC 99, MArch 06, UVA SARC VI The Cavalier Daily, 09.12.05

Sir:

I read with interest and excitement the “Open Letter” of a group of architecture school faculty (Cavalier Daily, September 8, 2005). This provocative manifesto denounces the University’s ongoing embrace of a static design tradition that has produced many regrettable buildings which, like most things obsequious, dishonor the object of their veneration by their insincerity. The authors have articulated a worthy tribute to the Jeffersonian ideal from which the University derives its unique strength, rejecting the disconnect between the teaching of diversity, individuality, and innovation, and engagement of the brave new world of the twenty-first century, and the quiet acceptance of mediocrity and banality in the disguise of “tradition” and “heritage” (noble words which have too often been profaned in the defense of cultural, economic and ecological injustices). With due reverence for what we have been given, let the University pay homage to itself by excellence more than emulation, by a reach for what could be, more than a grasp of what is, and by a relentless determination to add to (rather than devalue by half-hearted replication) our incomparable legacy, with the same boldness of vision and spirit that has paid incalculable dividends for almost two centuries. These principles, much more than another acre of red brick, represent a “continuity of the Grounds” worthy of this great University.

Now there are many. And what’s worse from the point of view of the Architecture faculty is that some of the best traditional architects, like Robert A.M. Stern (with whom I have coauthored a book) and Allan Greenberg, are building at U.Va., exposing their false argument against traditional architecture (“we can’t do that anymore”) for the nonsense it is.

The faculty hates this. For five decades modernists have presided over the construction of one bad building after another at the University. Recently they gave the Thomas Jefferson Medal to the architects of Hereford College, which many students hate to look at (and which alumni hate more).

Hereford Residential Collage, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Special Collections Library, Hartman-Cox Architects

The Board of Visitors are well aware that the alumni and students dislike the buildings the architecture faculty love, and vice versa. Stern’s design for the Darden School is enormously popular with students, alumni and donors. Its traditional design makes the architecture faculty see red.

Expect a backlash from the alumni. The architecture faculty may have made a mistake in making this a public discussion. Interestingly, some of the best traditional architects today are graduates of the U.Va. Architecture school.

The Colegate Darden School of Buisness Administration, Robert A.M. Stern Architects LLP

Comment via email: “BRAVO” Mark McInturff, McInturff Architects www.uva-architecture-forum.org

John Messangale, New York, N.Y The Cavalier Daily, 09.13.05

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The Cavalier Daily, 09.09.05

The American public is no longer accepting the argument that new building must automatically be modernist architecture. Many Virginians always held that opinion, but there were few American architects who could competently design a traditional building.

The architecture of the University should blend form and function with a nod to Jefferson’s obvious historical precedent, yet the University landscape is dotted with clone-like buildings that blindly imitate his use of brick and white columns with little regard to the ideologies imbued in his design. Although this might not be the most pressing issue currently faced by the University, the Architecture School faculty has collectively proffered their opinion with the intention of inciting discussion and hopefully spurring positive change in a manner akin to Jefferson’s own ideals. Such an evolution would potentially pave the way for phenomenal architectural opportunities for the University that might not only look cool, but be architecturally sound as well.

Nora White, UVA SARC III The Cavalier Daily, 09.20.05

Best not to get furious; rather, let’s get curious. We want to know two things above all about this sort of contemporist ejaculate: Why such a powerful antipathy to ornament is expressed, and why it is that the saying of affiliation to a moral purpose(in this case “Jeffersonianism”) trumps the word-free observation of it.

Alexander Stoddart, Paisley, Scotland 09.22.05 Via email, exerpt- www.uva-architecture-forum.org

open letter The faculty signatories and their defenders ought to be clearer with the University. Their goal is to be rid of the tradition. Bad examples of traditional architecture are easy to find, to be sure, but so are bad examples of modernist architecture. The faculty, however, want nothing to do even with good traditional architecture.

The Dell at UVA, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects

If the University wishes to build in harmony with Jefferson’s vision it ought to aim for excellence in traditional architecture. There’s nothing superficial or un-modern about that.

Claron A. Robertson, III, Law ‘75, Charleston, South Carolina

Dino Marcantonio, UVA MARCH 1993

Via email, 09.19.05, www-uva-architecture-forum.org

The Cavalier Daily, 09.20.05

October November

Our challenge, as we add new buildings to the Grounds, is to be contextual to Jefferson in the intellectual, not just the stylistic, sense. Too often these have been confused with one another. Or, worse yet, the former has been ignored --or not even recognized as existing-- in favor of the latter.

Yes, mistakes, many in fact, have been made in the past with the “modern” additions to the Grounds.

But I don’t believe that the faculty who started this discussion are advocating for more of that. We would all be hard pressed to demonstrate how some of the buildings of the last half century are intellectually Jeffersonian. To defend some would be difficult at best and hypocritical at worst.

Despite the uneven progress with “non-Jeffersonian” buildings at UVa, the time has in fact come for the University, which in recent decades has become a much more sophisticated and accomplished institution, to have a bit more confidence about what it means to design and build new structures at a place of such forceful origins. Those involved with this process, whether the Board of Visitors, the administration, the architect of the university, the faculty of all schools, our hired consultants, and also our donors need to take a more intellectually curious approach to our new buildings. An approach that is worthy not just of Jefferson, but also to our goal of becoming a leading research institution and a top university, public or private.

Let’s be a bit more open-minded, daring, and true to our origins.

Paul Weinschenk, The School of Architecture Advisory Board, UVA SARC ‘87 VIa email, 10.05.05, www-uva-architecture-forum.org

UVA Faculty discuss the open letter with students, September 7, 2005 photo courtesy of Elizabeth Roettger

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I am glad that you published this letter. It started a dialogue that needed to happen. I just wish that the self-named Classicists/Traditionalists could listen to the other side of the argument and not go on selfrighteous diatribes. The link to that blog, is so ridiculous it’s hard to believe people can sympathize with him. He makes vast generalizations (“what the architects like best is what the public hates most”, students hate Hereford, etc., etc.) that it’s hard to take him seriously.

85 Open Letter Discussion

I feel that so many of your detractors aren’t even listening to what you have to say. It’s not that you’re trying to “destroy” UVA’s architectural fabric, or even that you prefer “Modernism” or “avantgarde” architecture to “Traditional” or “Classical” architecture. I’m so frustrated with these architectural reactionaries, just as I am often frustrated with conservatives. They stand on their moral “high-ground” and view any contradictions of their opinions as an attack on AMERICA.

In any case, thank you all for speaking up.

John Paul Jones Arena, VMDO Architects

Diana Houlihan Via email, 11.02.05, www-uva-architecture-forum.org

Observatory Hill Dinning Hall, Dagit + Saylor Architects

It is patently clear that it is possible to create excellent “traditional” (read “Classical”) architecture for “The University,” or alternatively, fine modern architecture as well. We seem to be in Swift’s world of the Big-Endians versus the Little-Endians. But one of the problems the University faces is that there are only few good classical architects around nowadays (as there are only a few good architects, period), and there are only few modernists who can design contextually. We should ultimately fault our Schools for this condition, for relying on too much zeitgeist or too much genius locii. Perhaps we should accept that, as Michael Dennis has said, “Regionalism is a chronological, not a geographic idea.” Finally, as the designer of the Mercedes Benz SL Roadster of the early 1990s said: “I didn’t want my car to have too much zeitgeist, because then it would age too quickly”

open letter

Thomas L. Schumacher, University of Maryland Via email, 10.08.05, www-uva-architecture-forum.org

The Rotunda, Thomas Jefferson

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The Sun will consume the world.

It is a star. It is a type G star expanding at a predictable rate with predictable ultimate consequence. It is a star among many which collectively have threaded cultures with strings of information and speculation; a stairway to stories and a focus of fight. Around this star we sail and how easily we confuse our centers. Tired, we seek less resistance and lie down to limit gravity. Pulled to the center of the world we must remember that there are layers of center. The center of the world is attracted to the center of the Sun. Though tired, we must not forget. Ours is a heliocentric model calibrated to the release of energy from the closest star collected by our ground and sky seven minutes later. Waves and particles, forever uncertain, construct plants and animals. We consume them as food and fuel; as processed and polluted sandwiches and gasoline, contributing to more processes and more pollution. Too tired and too disconnected we forget the center and forget the source of energy. And so we sit by day under fluorescence neglecting the nuance of sunshine and scheme to dig toward other centers into past plants. We devise sophisticated plans for extracting their soul and moving it ten thousand miles. Drunk and demanding more we execute nefarious strategies forgetful of our prior spills and stains.

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87 heliocentricity Ryan Moody

heliocentriccity__ryan s moody

2 We awake.

Sober now we remember the relentless records of Tycho Brahe building towards the Copernican revolution. We imagine the pyramids of ancient Egypt decorated in gold, the glow from the Pharos lighthouse reaching into the Mediterranean indigo, the energy games of Bucky Fuller, the potentials of photovoltaic fabric, and the sublime vertical reach of the Solar Tower. I imagine these places and ideas watching sunlight slip between waves and I think. the Sun can save the world.

1. panscape expands the term landscape to include the ground, sky, and water

Scientific consensus informs us that the world is warming.

The Sun contributes to and has the potential to challenge this condition. The warming of the Earth at rates faster than we as a species have previously experienced results in dynamic and indeterminate pressure on systems unable to adapt at a mirrored speed. Ecological, economic and social systems designed for static physical environments sit set for failure. When these systems fail, unable to react accordingly, people and places as we know them die.

The warming of the panscape is a result of human action.

By influencing the chemical composition of the skyscape and the porosity of the groundscape we inhibit the ability of reflected and refracted solar radiation to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and ground. The temperature of the Earth increases and we invite response from interwoven systems and species to such a change. Accelerated alterations in the ground, sky, and sea temperatures, as well as less temperature fluctuation between night and day, represent instability and rhythmic uncertainty. Such instability has the potential to both help and harm species but generally accelerates the collapse of human exercises of control and settlement.

a Shining star The sun creates energy when hydrogen atoms fuse under intense gravitational pressure to create Helium-4 atoms releasing heat and light. Our closest star deposits 120,000 Terrawatts of energy on the surface of the Earth. According to the Department of Energy Global Resources Report,

2. Department of Energy Basic Research Needs for Solar Energy Utilization report (released April 2005) http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/ reports/files/SEU_rpt.pdf

However, decreasing the use of fuel derived from sources other than the sun is not exclusively dependent upon new technologies or techniques. Intelligent decisions about engaging the Sun’s physical and psychological potential through design material, orientation, built and natural adjacencies and social connection require heliocentric design strategies, implementation and monitoring. The diagram is bigger than the house, the tree and the sun angle. It is a complex map of human psychology, cultural connection, scientific inquiry, economic relief, poetic inspiration and ethical concern.

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the Warming panscape1

“Covering 0.16% of the land on Earth with 10% efficient solar conversion systems would provide 20 Terrawatts of power, nearly twice the world’s consumption rate of fossil energy and the equivalent of 20,000 1-Giggawatt nuclear fission plants”. 2 If engaged, such an amount of energy could fundamentally change the way the world organizes its power concerns. Passive solar design does not exist.

These are active concerns with active solutions.

re-Orienting research Simple and sophisticated design decisions based upon existing knowledge can greatly decrease the unnecessary dependency on burning coal and oil resulting in an unbalanced recipe of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxide. Beyond current accomplishments, the reward for better collecting, containing and distributing solar energy approaches something of a panacea. Forget drilling off the coast of the sunshine state. We need to look 91 million miles away and act locally, grafting new systems onto old grids while promoting better webs for the next great energy and electricity consumers. Buckminster Fuller knew it in 1969 with the development of the World Game3, wrote about it in 1981 in Critical Path, and now new research in solar potential pulls his goal of serving more with less closer. The strategy must be flexible in its political movement from door to door, bottom to top and top down.

It must move with conviction from poetry to precision and back again. As designers we must educate ourselves and embrace the responsibility of influencing policy and engaging science with intelligent and inspired architecture.

Developments such as photovoltaic fabrics, solar towers, solar concentrators and artificial photosynthetic functions

3. “We then asked him (Francois de Chadenedes) to figure how much it would cost nature per each gallon of petroleum for that much pressure and heat for that much time, were it calculated at the retail rate for that much energy for that length of time as charged us by the public utilities.

The cost came to well over a million dollars per gallon.”

Excerpt from the World Game introduction in Critical Path published by Buckminster Fuller in February of 1981

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engage the challenge of converting solar energy into the three primary end products of solar electricity, solar fuel and solar thermal conversion. Although the cost of photovoltaics and solar panels is currently prohibitive for many projects, as networks are established, awareness increases, and advances are made, the demands for solar energy will increase and the costs will fall.

the forgotten importance of the Sun. I feel surrounded by a return to a geocentric lifestyle. a geocentric process of thought.

GPS. the importance of South in the Northern hemisphere forgotten. the Sun owns our souls as much as it owns Venice. forgetful and confused we replace it with fluorescence and advertise our intelligence as flat and green martians in bathroom mirrors. Venice defies this. calles define South and canals remember sunbeams. reflected back to us. indirect. let them go. the calles turn red and green. directional lines on sea charts modeled on maps uncovered at the Correr Museum. precise directions always in relation to the compass roses. let them go. let them go around Ptolemy’s latitudes and return back home tomorrow navigating by light, filtered and reflected by the sky and moon.

Venice journal entry 2006

The supply is incomprehensible in its potential.

Beyond the consumption of energy the Sun represents a transcendent center. As an object it has attracted inquiry and debate, defined religions, oriented cultures and navigated our ancestors. Its power extends beyond its energy capacity. Its magnetism attracts our soul, narrates our history and paves our future. On golden paths we must return to centers of development and ask how we can renew what we have already constructed, reuse what doesn’t need to be discarded, embed advanced systems and low-tech solutions and deconstruct political boundaries counter to the logic of embracing the significance of the Sun. As landscape architects and architects, selection from our palette of materials must consider solar potential. Concepts of light, color, energy, and heat must connect, overlap and enrich each other in beautiful and thoughtful ways as we pursue responsible and ethical design decisions.

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Guilding ancient centers

JOURNEYS INTO NIGHT – SCHOOL Harry S Shure Visiting Professor Michael Rotondi / Peter Waldman

SPECIFICATIONS FOR CONSTRUCTION The constructive nature of TRESPASS is difficult to contemplate at a time of war for our nation.

We came, most of us, as strangers to offer our imaginations to bridge generations.

We took time out for LUNCH on occasion to pause and engage in a space between plates and faces ending in the smile of satisfaction.

This has been a studio in appetite building and a comprehensive workout for all.

- p. waldman

The city of Philadelphia has dedicated a massive budget over the next decade to improve the physical facilities of lifetime learning and civic interaction for long-term residents and estranged new comers as well.

We will commence with projections for one classroom with one door to enter and two to exit; two windows to mark the start and finish of the school day and one other to permit the moon to trespass this heretofore familiar space.

There will be a myriad of cubbies, but only one remarkable black board with one basement to give dimension between floor and ground, and a correspondent attic to distinguish between ceiling and roof.

We will charette on a new school to educate 600 young citizens who will envision their turf extending from one river on the east to beyond the waterworks to the west.

All citizens will contribute to the construction process as they take into their own hands common ground with a respect for gates, flimsy fences and the meander to counter standardized levels of achievement.

We will develop Specifications for Construction in incremental models and drawings of a community construction site from foundations to framing to outside skins to inside finishes and perhaps in the optimism associated with the idea of graduation even ongoing weathering some call maturation. Issues of interim construction phases, fiscal shortfalls and other delays will permit generations to participate in the multiplication of this ten year initial agenda for this city dedicated to the goal of brotherly love.

Justin Laskin

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However, as architects and citizens in school what could be more powerful than the challenge of a new school in an ancient city dedicated to brotherly love?

8/23/2005

BUNDLES IN PHILADELPHIA MArch 2006

I tried to depart from conventional classroom and school models, conceiving of an urban school as an array of classrooms with active relationships to the outside and diverse spaces between. I modeled a prototypical classroom with a linear window for light, an adjacent circulation space and a folding blackboard wall that opened to provide a view outside. A circulation model divided the school into several connected bundles. The arrangement held the possibility of diversified use. Evening and weekend classes, community social programs and continuing education could make use of the bundles in different ways. At night, each bundle could be used in isolation for a separate purpose or combined with the other bundles, opening the whole building to the community.

I imagined a school and a classroom as a point of departure. A conventional school might include doubleloaded corridors and typical classrooms with blackboards at the front of the room and windows along the exterior wall.

Conventional spaces did little to animate my educational experiences. Instead, I fondly remember the paths through exterior gardens to the gymnasium and library. Those are the spaces I wished to make.

The Schuylkill River divides portions of the city of Philadelphia, yet a number of bridges cross the river to construct connections between the two banks.

A map of Philadelphia describes two edge conditions present on the site. The skyscrapers of downtown give way to smaller buildings across the Schuylkill and the orthogonal grid of the city is set against the curved river’s edge, rail and highway.

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Duckjune Park,

The division and connection exemplified by the bridges over the Schuylkill combines with the site’s edges and the bundled concept for a school to form the final scheme. The classrooms face a park to the north and blackboard panels in each classroom open to a view of the park and river. In the middle of classroom bundles, there is a common space that holds a variety of activities like playing, meeting, and exhibiting. The classrooms are directly connected to the common spaces.

At times, common spaces become part of the classrooms.

They connect to a green house atrium and the auditoriums.

These spaces are imagined as large living rooms for the local community. The building is anchored to the site by a geothermal labyrinth that extends below the adjacent bridge and helps condition the vast community room.

Kevin J Bell,

MArch 2006

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Philadelphia’s 22nd Street is an urban section running north through neighborhoods of diverse economic and social backgrounds. Six vacant open spaces, reprogrammed for public use, have the potential to intensify the street and make a linear neighborhood. North of Market Street, John F. Kennedy Boulevard and SEPTA rail lines pass above 22nd Street. The elevated rail lines act as a visual and historic barrier between the community to the north and the neighborhoods to the south. A sliver of land, forty-feet wide, between the elevated road and rail offers the opportunity to site a high school in this new linear neighborhood. Through the making of a high school, the neighborhood connects to the Schuylkill River, JKF Boulevard and points beyond.

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22nd STREET HIGH June / July /August has projected a scheme for all seasons. A Greenhouse, envisioned to stimulate urban growth, starts as deeply rooted spores beneath the Chinese Wall railroad bridge to the South. As expectations for youth are measured by growth, transplanting modes become another mode of constructive cultivation for citizens and strangers alike. Trespass is a guerrilla tactic of temporal occupation and retreat; perhaps, transplanting is an ethical commitment to future generations. I always imagined that lunch in June’s project would be prepared, served, and consumed by students and strangers all day long in the ground level shadows moving along the asphalt forum hopefully blooming with orchards in this new urban oasis.

- p.w.

Kevin trespasses the conventional wisdom of a fenced-in school yard by provided six alternative left-over sites out of mind for lunchtime breaks that parade south along 22nd Street. He double challenges this first urban strategy and the more modest program brief with a very HIGH urban monument with GREAT ROOMS suspended in section bridging vertically the cosmic sciences above with the street wise fine arts below. Kevin aggressively challenges the symptoms of obesity in adolescent American youth with his endless ramps and extended urban satellite curriculum which will surely burn off calories and keep students and faculty fit.

- p.w.

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The tower’s twenty-five classrooms follow a single underlying design. The classroom, at its edges, is a subtle play in occupation and light. A vertical window pushes through the southern wall to the space just beyond and brings immediacy to the viewer’s relationship with the sky and ground. Entry from the corridor is redirected by a wall that extends from the classroom to make a bench. The school day is measured by light crossing the classroom and filtering into the corridor through translucent lockers. At night, the classrooms are beacons of occupation registered in the corridor as well as at urban distances to the south. Beyond simple adjacencies, the relationship between spaces is designed to place each classroom within an awareness of its urban context.

99 2005 Shure Studio Rotondi / Waldman

The school is a communal node in the linear neighborhood and an outlet to the city. A tower of classrooms marks the school’s urban presence on 22nd Street. The tower’s proportions are drawn from the building to the north while the six apertures in the south facade connect to the public spaces along 22nd Street to the south. The media library is the connective spine: a series of spaces that rise from the street to the tower’s roof. Six resource atriums cantilever over the street to afford extended views to the south and to the north. Classrooms and individual study spaces are accessed though these atriums. The whole of the structure is to be occupied simultaneously by both students and the community. As such, the tower sits atop a bar of shared spaces along a main corridor that leads past a performance hall to the Schuylkill or to a raised plinth in the city. At the extreme west of site the Schuylkill appears as a pool, between bridges, that terminates at the 30th Street Station.

From this point looking back, the tower recedes as a slender urban form set within a collection of city towers.

CRESSWELL IRON WORKS MArch 2006

An asymmetrical roof soars over the high school, held by tree-like columns. This provides covered outdoor spaces for classrooms, circulation, and socializing while serving as a counterpoint to the orthogonal structure of the school.

A solid/void map of Philadelphia is rendered in solar panels on the glass roof, providing much of the school’s energy and casting an ever-changing shadow to mark the passing hours and the changing seasons on the spaces and surfaces below.

Between the school and the river, the design replaces a large parking lot with a public park. This park rises from the street edge to bridge rail lines that cut off the river from the city. With the rail suppressed, the plane of the park flows to meet the river. Beneath this raised park are tennis courts, a gym, and theater to be used by both the high school and the public. In conjunction with the park these spaces create a new public realm alongside the scenic river.

Ryan’s project has taken one of the most modest and compressed sites and collected the energized program into a cacophony of sections of canyons, catwalks and promenades. Only a soul from Montana could sustain such faith in adolescent capacities to climb and view and climb and view again and again as an act of the trespassing imagination. Only a soul from Montana could build up an appetite for lunch in both a wintertime prism within this tight section and offer a meadow between surrogate mountains for spring / fall time picnics on the Schuylkill forum site to the West. Ryan critically takes a strategic stance syncopating small and large, the belvedere and the grotto, and trespasses the street level view of the City to new attics and basements giving section to a city dominated by a plan diagram of two rivers, four square and one center.

- p.w.

I envision a new charter school for building and design technologies. A half-vacant former iron works is present on the site. My design incorporates the historically rich exterior brick wall covered with vines. The new structure is pulled back from this wall to create a covered exterior circulation space between the old wall and the new school. The new interior wall provides space for a map of Philadelphia, a mural that would wrap from the wall to floor, to a silk-screened print on the glass walls of the classrooms. The mural alludes to Philadelphia’s rich history of urban art, while providing an immersive urban plan from which design students can study and learn.

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Ryan Hughes,

STREET WISE – LEARNING IN THE CITY MArch 2005

Envisioning a new model for a public high school in Philadelphia requires a reading of the city as a dynamic structure. The Urban school’s greatest resource is the city and the opportunity to understand its relationships.

This design works on multiple levels to honor Philadelphia and its history, while dealing with the lack of access and public space along this once industrial waterfront. The industrial past of this site is honored by both the incorporation of the historic brick wall into this charter school for building and design, and by the program itself, with a welding and machine shop for students in this former iron works.

William Penn’s idyllic plan for the city between two rivers was bi-axially symmetric with four equal quadrants each containing a public square. However, the development of the city was asymmetric and pragmatic. The construction of public infrastructure, transportation especially, would further fragment the city. The resultant mosaic was far more interesting than the proscribed pattern, with a multitude of possibilities for further redefinition.

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Edward Singer,

The design seeks to reconnect the neighborhood to the larger city. This connection is not intended as a final fix; instead as a strategic realignment that offers new possibilities, and new understandings of the city. The new structure couples with the existing warehouse to create a cross-axis that links the school with a neighborhood park to the north. Moving through the building, students encounter moments for discovery within the structure of the city. The design also attempts to make explicit connections within the building by interlocking different programmatic elements. The auditorium, gymnasium and public fitness center register their adjacencies and are locked together by a continuous volume of light that slices through the assemblage of spaces. The design is an attempt to represent the city not by positing it as an object, rather through a poetic revealing that is open-ended.

Ted’s strategy in terms of site selection and spatial intervention within existing structures helps to challenge our idea of trespassing in two distinct modes. On one hand, he took the commonsense lead to work on one of the Franklin Institute’s recommended future school sites. To that degree, he did not trespass conventional wisdom but used his skill to transform the given conditions of the site, to open up the school to the city and to reframe the site’s urban crossroads location.

Trespassing comes back into play as he frames views, blocks beyond, to the North to the intimacy of Penn’s Pocket Park and to the South to the Chinese Wall as he reveals the diorama of late 20th century American urbanism beyond.

Lunch for many is a mid-day affair and the precise top-lit canyon section would nourish the fortunate spatial soul who would grow as a student and a citizen in this finely grained, not marbleized spatial layer in his remarkably composed spatial sandwich.

- p.w.

105 2005 Shure Studio Rotondi / Waldman

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A proposed site for a new type of urban public school is located on the south side of Arch street between 21st & 22nd on the west side of the city. This block is along the edge of elevated rail lines locally known as the ‘Chinese Wall’ for its stone construction and divisive presence.

This massive piece of former infrastructure had elevated an entire rail yard, a full block across, on a strip of land that stretched from the center of the city west to where it crossed the Schuylkill River. The neighborhood to the north is a mix of aging industrial buildings and modest two to three story row houses. The site itself contains a five story warehouse from the 1930’s as well as subsequent additions of less significance.

Michael Rotondi October 6, 2005 desk crit with Edward Singer

PRESERVING WHILE FORGETTING: The Loss of Jeffersonian Principles at UVA Daniel Bluestone

Architecturally the University of Virginia occupies an amazing and now increasingly flawed campus. At its core stand Jefferson-designed buildings that brilliantly fostered a palpable sense of place and institutional purpose. Amidst lawns and gardens the historic buildings interwove students and faculty with the essential spaces for both their intellectual and domestic life—pavilions for classrooms and faculty residences, the Rotunda for a library, Lawn and Range rooms for student dormitories, the hotels for dining, the gardens for cultivation. The buildings created the requisite density for the unfolding of university life. All of this complexity was created in a remarkably clear and elegant design—the basis of the recognition of UVA as a UNESCO World Heritage site. That site, that world heritage, now stands in silent rebuff to much of the building at the broader University, building that misappropriates the shallowest lessons of Jefferson and applies them in a profoundly un-Jeffersonian manner. Many at UVA pride themselves on their stewardship of a UNESCO World Heritage site even as they flaunt the most basic principles of the original design and its subsequent preservation.

Rather than being inspired by the Jefferson core to seek architectural excellence, the university has systematically devalued Jefferson’s legacy with feeble designs and unsustainable planning that tears asunder the fabric of both memory and community.

UVA aspires to be the number one public university; it has spent over $200 million dollars on a new basketball arena and additions to the football stadium with aspirations to be in the top ten or fifteen sports programs in country. Architecturally, we consistently settle for buildings that fail to register any national or international claim for architectural excellence. If there were a ranking for recent campus building UVA would not likely make it into the top 500 schools.

The University’s concern and respect for the Jeffersonian core has a long and often vexed history. Immediately after World War II members of the Board of Visitors objected to the “crowding up” of central grounds. Rather than imagining how the old buildings that had accommodated only 218 students could co-exist with new buildings for a university that now approaches 20,000 they charted the course towards a sprawling suburban campus that ignored Jefferson’s vision of an integrated dense community of students, faculty, and essential buildings and spaces. Major units of the university were not settled on the closest available sites—instead they were dumped on distant borders. The close-in sites were reserved for the Lady Astor tennis courts, the artificial turf field for the new marching band, and above all for automobile parking. The law and business schools were exiled to north grounds over a mile and a half from central grounds. Sports left the Lambeth colonnade for a zoned and detached sportsplex. The exciting political programs of the Miller Center surfaced on the Faulkner estate along Old Ivy Road, accessible primarily by private automobile.

Over the years Hereford’s residents have been much less engaged in the debates over modern versus traditional style than in the need to cope with the administrative decision to place 500 students on the far edge of Observatory Hill on a frustratingly distant site, totally disconnected from to the rest of the University. All the creative residential college programming in the world has barely overcome the deficit dealt to the project by an essentially suburban and un-Jeffersonian vision. Such matters were compounded when the university foolishly demolished six faculty residences on the site, including an extraordinary stone house designed in 1909 by Eugene Bradbury. It replaced these residences with three units of faculty housing at Hereford. With a net gain of 500 students there was a net loss of three faculty residences. Compared to the vitality of Jefferson’s vision of faculty and students sharing space, Hereford’s physical plan gave the rhetoric of residential college ideals a rather hollow ring.

Finally, administration planners, as opposed to the architects, dedicated the best and highest part of the site to a surface parking lot with 165 spaces rather than to the dining hall as originally planned. The Hereford dining hall opened with no dramatic views while the parking lot had extraordinary views to Monticello, Carter’s Mountain, and the Southwest and Ragged Mountains,. This amounted to a failure to comprehend the more profound aspect of Jefferson’s vision of buildings integrated with their sites; this proved to be an issue of much greater consequence than any perceived departure from Jefferson’s fondness for red brick, white trim, and the classical orders.

The bungling of the Hereford location gains additional significance when we consider what has ended up on the more central sites that were available for the Hereford residential college project. A faculty committee recommended a site at Ivy Road and Emmet Street. It would have provided Hereford residents with easy access to classrooms, libraries, faculty offices, and the convivial establishments on the corner. Today, instead of accommodating 500 students, the land at Ivy and Emmet has a new 1250-space parking garage. Then there was the site where the bookstore garage now stands with its 400 parking spaces. If Hereford had been built there it would have stood immediately adjacent to central grounds while potentially being able to appropriate Memorial Gym as part of a centrally located new student housing community. These parking spaces on premium sites are among the 15,250 spaces for automobiles provided at the university. It is as if Jefferson designed his famed lawn with the Rotunda overlooking a continuous line of horse stables rather than classrooms, student rooms, and faculty residences. The vista adjacent to the core of the campus is nothing short of breathtaking in its uncritical accommodation of the supposed essentials of modern private automobile transportation. That is contemporary form and contemporary planning well worth debating. It underscores the failure of many to comprehend the essentials of Jefferson’s vision for density at the center or the efforts among the teaching faculty to promote more sustainable organization in our communities.

107 Open Letter Response Daniel Bluestone

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Associate Professor and Director of Preservation Certificate, University of Virginia

years, while directing UVA’s program in historic preservation, I found a lot to appreciate in Hereford’s exquisitely crafted details and its palette of materials that ranged from local Buckingham County slate, to extruded aluminum light fixtures, to milled aggregates in concrete block, to folded metal balconies. The buildings were composed to echo Observatory Hill’s topography while corner lounge windows and the exposed circulation cores literally framed distant views of the surrounding hills in a way that resonated with aspects of Jefferson’s own appreciation of landscape and site.

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Those who have interpreted the growing dissatisfaction over campus design as simply a skirmish in a war over architecture, stylistically considered, between modern and traditional form, frequently invoke Williams & Tsien’s 1992 modern design of UVA’s Hereford Residential College. Having lived at Hereford for five

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The earlier Observatory Hill dining hall, now demolished, was rebuilt in 1984

by Robert A. M. Stern who is often held out as a worthy exemplar among those advocating traditional or classical architecture at UVA. Architectural critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in 1986 that the building added “a neat grace note to the campus.”

Forgey published his article under the headline, “The Pride of UVa, Architect Finally Respects Mr. Jefferson” and pointed out that the Jefferson campus “demand excellence” but often “has received the opposite.” But Stern’s contextual architectural strategy and adept design for Observatory Hill did nothing to hold off the wrecking ball. More telling than the stylistic agenda is the sheer wastefulness of demolishing what is arguably Stern’s finest building at the University.

Higher up Observatory Hill at Alden House and spread all over the UVA Foundation’s historic Blue Ridge Sanatorium site, just east of Charlottesville, are buildings that are being subjected by University officials to demolition by neglect. At the Blue Ridge site the University has presided over the abandonment and pushed for the demolition of nearly 240,000 square feet of buildings. This makes a mockery of any claim of interest in sustainability on the part of the University. At Blue Ridge the 1870s Lyman mansion presents the most vivid case of university involvement in demolition by neglect. Here the inattentiveness to the most basic strategies for maintenance and preservation encouraged the outright theft of the extraordinary Second Empire interior woodwork from the Lyman mansion. It is shameful when the stewards of a world heritage site fail to protect other aspects of local architectural heritage and literally leave the door open to heritage thieves.

that the move violated one of UNESCO’s most fundamental tenets of the worldwide preservation movement, outlined in UNESCO’s1964 Venice Charter. Article 7 of the Charter insists that “A monument is inseparable from the history to which it bears witness and from the setting in which it occurs. The moving of all or part of a monument cannot be allowed except where the safeguarding of that monument demands it or where it is justified by national or international interest of paramount importance.” In the case of Varsity Hall the interest of “paramount importance” came down to the demand of the McIntire School of Commerce for a clear site and a clean slate for its massive new building project—Jefferson on Steroids—an “addition” to Rouss Hall that is many times the size of the original structure. The building would have taken on a much more interesting form if it had appropriated Varsity Hall and the actual history of its site rather than settling for shallow quotations of Jefferson, stylistically understood. Jefferson’s ethic about natural resources and sites would more likely have led him to find a way to work with the building and the history on the site rather than to divert resources from pressing university needs to the dubious and unorthodox project of relocating a historic building.

Varsity Hall’s original site and surrounding space were incredibly important because they represented a fundamentally different design approach to university building—a picturesque sensibility that stood in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s original and more formal conception. Varsity Hall, on its own site, captured the nineteenthcentury tension between picturesque and classical design aesthetics. The new building project could have engaged this rich history in any number of ways. Instead Varsity Hall was pushed aside. This wasteful exercise was planned and executed with little or no consultation with the members of the UVA faculty most familiar with preservation practice and possibilities. The ecologically sound green roof system that will top the new Commerce School building can hardly hide the fundamentally inappropriate and unsustainable approach taken to the site, its heritage, and to precious university resources. Varsity Hall would have been better left in place; failing that we should have simply recorded the building and then demolished it—death with dignity.

For people who feel passionately about excellence in architectural design, about preserving world heritage, and about more sustainable approaches to community planning, it is difficult to see shallow engagements with Jefferson’s style distract us from the realities of a place increasingly alienated from the deeper imperatives of the founder’s vision. When will we be able to unite as a community in seeking a better place, a place that again links the highest ideals in design with the noblest endeavors in academic, social, and political life? When will we build more densely, more sustainably, more beautifully, and give up the delusion that clownish references to Jefferson’s architecture mean that we are all doing just fine?

109 Open Letter Response Daniel Bluestone

Jefferson was always vitally concerned about the natural and financial resources needed to support the university. Our modern university of today is often shockingly profligate when it comes to its building resources. This summer the University completed the construction of its new $22 million dollar dining hall on Observatory Hill. The design could easily become the poster child for the banal, uninspired, mediocrity of our recent building projects at the university. It is largely devoid of aspiration towards excellence; it couples a dreary exterior with an interior design that could comfortably take the place of the international food court of any American shopping mall. But more appalling than its style or the clumsy inelegance of the way it sits on its site, is the fact that the project involved the unnecessary demolition of over 12,000 square feet of space in the old Observatory Hill dining hall and in the adjacent Tree House. Both of these buildings were not even close to being done with their useful life. At current construction prices they represented millions of dollars of building. Even if for some reason the new dining hall could not have been integrated with the existing buildings, which is hard to imagine, one wonders why we didn’t hold onto the buildings so that they could be incorporated into the future addition of new dormitories on the site. It has taken the Architecture School, where all faculty members share offices, over two decades to raise money to build an addition on Campbell Hall with only slightly more square feet than were demolished in a few short weeks this past summer on Observatory Hill.

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As troubling as UVA’s recent demolition practices have been, they are actually trumped by recent “preservation” projects. Last spring some members of the university community stood in awe at seeing the technical accomplishment of lifting Varsity Hall off of its 150 year old foundation and rolling it to its new site, in the middle of hospital drive. This move alone cost 2.5 million dollars. People advocating the preservation of this building by moving it were seemingly untroubled by the fact

Daniel Bluestone, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Director of the Historic Preservation Program. He has directed numerous historic preservation and community history projects in Chicago, New York, and Charlottesville. Last year he and his students worked on a yearlong project charting the architectural history of student housing at the University of Virginia. An exhibit based on the work “Boarding Houses: Living Off Jefferson’s Lawn” is now on view at the AlbemarleCharlottesville Historical Society.

A Clasical Return?: South Lawn Project at UVa Requires Traditional Architecture Catseby Leigh Guest Columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch article origionaly published inThe Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10.02.05

Fortunately, a resurgence of classical architecture is underway, and thanks mainly to its new Darden School of Business campus, the University of Virginia has already played a conspicuous role. UVa’s board of visitors is now in the process of selecting the architect of a $160 million complex adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s iconic Lawn for the College of Arts and Sciences. Last spring a prominent modernist, James Stewart Polshek, reached a dead end with the university on the design of this complex, dubbed the South Lawn, and resigned.

A classical South Lawn is now a distinct possibility.

This makes UVa’s monolithically modernist architecture school nervous. More than half its faculty attempted to head the board off at the pass recently by formally denouncing traditional patronage as a matter of “branding” the UVa campus as “a theme park of nostalgia.” In a screed published in The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper, the 24 architecture profs accused the board and the university administration of plotting to transform UVa into a Jeffersonian Disneyland.

BUT MOST people would celebrate classical architecture’s return to the university after comparing the Darden campus with a new student residential complex, Hereford College. Designed by a fashionable New York office, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Hereford consists of tiers of low-rise buildings ascending a slope on the southern outskirts of the campus. These stark brick structures are eerily reminiscent of Urban Renewal-style, inner-city housing blocks -- except for the fact that their boxy geometries and their arrangement on the site are weirdly skewed. This merely intensifies the buildings’ disorienting, alienating effect.

Think of Hereford, then, as a bucolic housing project on drugs. Its dining hall is distinguished by a bizarre entrance colonnade of steel uprights with slits in the middle, with the uprights’ flanges bolted into a stone podium. The bolts are already rusting, a reminder of the shoddy building practices that plague modernist architecture. Hereford is notoriously unpopular within the UVa community, and for good reason. Its iconoclastic and experimental design relegates students to the status of guinea pigs. But Williams and Ms. Tsien are very popular with UVa’s architecture faculty, thanks to which the two designers received the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture for 2003.

The reasoning behind the architecture profs’ Cavalier Daily manifesto is hard to fathom. They take architecture, which for millennia has involved building places that make us feel, at a very instinctive level, at home in the world, and they turn it into an arcane science that is intensely ideological and pathologically theoretical. They talk about architecture as a matter of “exploration of the essence of the building,” as if that “essence” hadn’t been figured out quite a while ago. They question the university’s tradition in classical architecture because it was “inaugurated at a time when racial, gender, economic, and social diversity were less welcome.” The profs thus see political issues that are irrelevant to the art of architecture as trumping any shared human experience of architectural beauty -- exactly the opposite of reality. Maybe that’s because they don’t think about beauty very much.

LET’S REMEMBER, too, that poor people mainly black people -- got the guinea-pig treatment in the modernist housing projects of the Urban Renewal era, with catastrophic social consequences. Around the country, some of those projects have been replaced with government-subsidized traditional neighborhood developments whose architectural styles were likewise “inaugurated at a time when racial, gender, economic, and social diversity were less welcome.” These developments have been quite successful. Two lessons here: (1) The architecture profs are dealing in red herrings, and (2) modernists are in no position to serve as moral arbiters on architectural matters.

Indeed, the profs talk a great game when it comes to diversity, but one reason they’ve lost their bearings is that the UVa architecture school is so obviously lacking in diversity -- the intellectual diversity that is a university’s lifeblood.

Here’s hoping UVa’s leaders will do what they can to remedy that situation, while ignoring the elitist rant about Disneyland, theme parks, branding, and so on. The fact is that the architecture of a great educational establishment should embody the wisdom of the ages. Such architecture serves as a spiritual anchor in a rapidly changing world. For these reasons, enlightened patronage of traditional architecture can only enhance the long-term cultural value of a national treasure such as the UVa campus.

111 Open Letter Response Catesby Leigh

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Washington. More than half a century ago, a new modernist elite decreed that it was no longer permissible for traditional architecture to continue to adapt to new building technologies and social needs, as it had been doing for thousands of years. That elite forced a complete break with the past, and our world is a good deal uglier as a result.

THE DARDEN CAMPUS is a very different story. Yale architecture dean Robert A.M. Stern, who is on UVa’s short list for the South Lawn project, has skillfully adapted Jefferson’s classical vocabulary. Though one can pick out faults in his design, and though Darden offers less in the way of exquisite detail than you find on the Lawn, it possesses elegance and institutional dignity. It’s plain to see that, with the passing of an architectural dark age, UVa is capable of setting a high standard of traditional patronage once again. And because of the university’s distinguished architectural heritage, this patronage is a cultural matter of national significance.

open letter Catesby Leigh, an art and architecture critic in Washington, D.C., is at work on a book, ‘Monumental America.’

The Project (Just South of the Lawn) Jason Johnson Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

[Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1810.]

In early June 2005 it was announced that UVa was severing its working relationship with a respected New York architectural firm hired in 2001 to design the so-called “South Lawn” project. According to Adam Daniel, the Assistant to the Dean of Arts & Sciences, “While the site plan and landscape design were acceptable, the exterior architectural design was not seen as appropriate for the “South Lawn” at UVa, sited next to Jefferson’s Academical Village.” Without delay, UVa announced that it would fast-track another Architect selection process with the goal of finding a new designer willing to dress-up the existing schematic facades. According to Daniel, “The aim is to move forward aggressively to complete the design so that we can begin construction as soon as financing is secured.”

An updated Request for Qualifications (RFQ) was released in late June. Drafted by the office of the Architect for the University, the RFQ was a strange mix of commendable social and academic aspirations combined with regressive architectural design “guidelines”. On the constructive side, the RFQ envisions that the new project, “… will create an interactive and engaging learning environment to be among the very best in American higher education.” Its basic underlying principles are sound – ideas about open space, intimacy of scale and “sense of place”. Without a doubt, the written document is ripe with optimism: “When completed, this ensemble of buildings … will encourage a renaissance within some of the finest liberal arts programs in the nation.” The tenor of the RFQ shifts abruptly as it begins mandating exactly how these high ideals must be accomplished. The document states that: “All structures will have materials, façade details, fenestration and roof lines that evoke the Pavilions on the Lawn, and will likely reference the Lawn colonnades; the one story connective structures in the Academical Village.” In addition, the RFQ mandated that the new architects must be willing to work within the confines of the previously approved schematic design “parti” put forth by the previous designers.

113 Open Letter Response Jason Johnson

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Architecture at UVa is in crisis. Rather than embodying the intellectual, cultural and ecological aspirations of its students, faculty and alumnus – the University’s recent approach to its physical environment has become largely superficial, regressive and lazy. Increasingly design has become more about appeasing wealthy donors than cultivating innovation, more about safely “fitting-in” than expressing the ideas that inspire us, and more about revering our past than constructing for our future. The word is out in architectural circles around the world: If you don’t decorate your buildings with red-brick and white column classicism they don’t have a chance of getting built at UVa. Thomas Jefferson would be appalled at our current state of architectural affairs. UVa’s $105 million College of Arts and Sciences “South Lawn” project is our most current case-in-point.

open letter On July 19th 2005, UVa hosted a large gathering of Architects from around the country for an “on-site” information session related to the RFQ. During the session, UVa’s appointed “Architect for the University” David Neumann, stated that UVa would only consider firms that would willing to redress the schematic design in a style that was, “Traditionally”, “Classically” and “Pragmatically Inspired”.

To emphasize this point, Mr. Neuman showed the collected group of Architects a slide presentation of acceptable classical precedents including various buildings by

Jefferson and the architects who inspired him including Palladio, LeDoux, Latrobe, and William Thornton. It was clear that UVa was not simply asking for a conceptual reference to these precedents, but that it wanted the new South Lawn Project to literally take on the appearance of so-called “Jeffersonian” architecture.

I believe that if Jefferson were a practicing architect today his buildings and landscapes would take a very different form. Considering his particular genius for interweaving innovative ideas about architecture, technology, ecology, and communitybuilding, I believe that in 2005 he would be a sustainable designer producing architecture and landscapes on the cutting-edge. Jefferson was an inventor, an innovator, a futurist: today he would not be lamenting the past, gossiping about how fashionable or appropriate classical architecture was. He would be asking questions like: How ecologically sound is it? How light, efficient and beautiful can we make it?

How do we best use design to promote interaction, communication and intellectual exchange in today’s world? How can we make design embody our particular cultural values at this moment in history? Instead, UVa’s updated “South Lawn” RFQ mentions nothing of design innovation, creativity or even sustainable building practices. Is UVa’s recently drafted “Guidelines for Sustainable Buildings and Environmental Design” not applicable here? Why are we not demanding more of our public buildings?

Perhaps the name of the “South Lawn” project has cursed the planning from the beginning. While the project is indeed located “south” of the lawn, it is troubling that the project has been literally conceived as a miniature “Lawn” in name, organization and form. Would other cultures desecrate their World Heritage sites in this way?

It seems to me that if we want to respect and engage Jefferson’s Academic Village that we would not superficially mimic it. The historian Robert Stern, whose own mutant version of the Lawn “The Darden School of Business” (UVa’s “North Lawn” project?) was built in the early 1990’s, recently commented that the University, “… has a remarkable coherence, an identity, a brand.” His brand (in his own words, “red brick and white-painted wood classicism”) has now become the status quo, a perverse and tragically simplistic equation for all new architecture at UVa.

For some of us, continuing Jefferson’s legacy means to explore, to innovate, to dream and project new ideas into the world. For others, notions of legacy and tradition have become regressive crutches buttressing static and nostalgic ideals which have rubbed off at UVa in many ways beyond architecture. In contrast, Jefferson wrote that as we become, “… more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.” A first step might be to simply refer to the work ahead as, “The Project (Just South of the Lawn)”. After all, the proposed construction site is over 600’ away, across a busy street, and 80’ below Jefferson’s original Academical Village. Releasing the project of its superfluous reference to the Lawn would give it some necessary and critical breathing room. This simple re-phrasing of the project name might allow UVa “to keep pace with the times” as Jefferson said, and build something worthy of its place and its time.

Jason Johnson September 1st, 2005

115 Open Letter Response Jason Johnson

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During the “on-site” meeting, Adam Daniel (Assistant to the Dean of Arts & Sciences) was asked whether his College actually desired a classically inspired campus. His response was that they were only interested in the pragmatics (“do we have enough space, enough offices, is the organization right?”) and would leave the so-called “aesthetic issues” of the South Lawn project to the President, the Board of Visitors (mostly lawyers and big donors appointed by the Governor) and the Architect of the University. This begged the question: If the College of Arts and Sciences truly wants to, “… encourage a renaissance …” and lead the University into the future, why would they consent to allowing UVa to house their new College in buildings mimicking Thomas Jefferson’s 18th and 19th architecture? Would a literal aesthetic link to this particular era of American history somehow add “aged” credibility to the foundation of their new home? Would recreating the aura of Jefferson’s time provide a desired connection to the ideas and institutions of the past?

Was the College not interested in expressing, at least in some way, how much our world has changed intellectually, culturally and environmentally since Jefferson’s time?

Stanford is praiseworthy, it appears Mr. Neumann will need to pursue new tactics if he hopes to improve UVa’s current design crisis. Of course it would be impossible for Mr. Neumann to instigate any major changes on his own. The political arena is too complex, too laden with inertia. Without more involvement from the larger University community nothing will change. But where are the voices of this larger community? Have we simply become too comfortable, too apathetic, or perhaps too intellectually disengaged to speak out? Why have the leaders of the University (the Deans, the Chairs, the Faculty, the Students, the Alumni.) not collectively stepped forward to engage and criticize the current design and building process at UVa?

Post-Script: The “Jeffersonian Style” Prevails On April 7th 2006, the UVa Board of Visitors “Building and Grounds Committee” unanimously voted to approve a new red-brick and white-columned design for the “South Lawn Project”. Two days later Charlottesville’s local newspaper, The Daily Progress, published this piece in its Editorial column: “The University of Virginia has presented a breathtaking vision for the 21st century. The university has released plans, years in the making, for expansion along the axis of the original Academical Village. The project not only provides new state-of-the-art instructional space, it actually enhances the original Jeffersonian design …

Buildings that have sprouted, somewhat haphazardly, near the historic Lawn will be replaced with a cohesive design that echoes Mr. Jefferson’s style … Outside, the classically referenced architecture will be embraced by courtyards and other dramatic landscaping features, including a football-field-sized pedestrian lawn terrace across Jefferson Park Avenue.”

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When David Neumann became the Architect of the University in 2003 he said, “I am keenly aware of the responsibility I have accepted and am prepared to continue in the tradition of the Jeffersonian legacy.” This notion, that we somehow must “continue in the tradition of the Jeffersonian legacy”, is a complex one. I suspect Mr. Neumann never thought he would be taken so literally. While his previous work at

Jason Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Mr. Johnson was educated at UVa (BSArch ’96) and Princeton University (MArch ’01) He is also a partner of FUTURE-CITIES-LAB.NET. He can be contacted at: jason@future-cities-lab.net

MEETING THE VALLEY

“I am as usual driving too fast past farmtowns, crops, and the ancient land; my restless eyes recording just a blur till nudging the speed of light.

The ages compress, time strolls backward lazily and all the creatures, sedimentary layers and organic promise deposited in this earth around me rise up laughing at my progress.”

Rusty Derr, 2002 Small Farm Convention “Route 99 Corridor Improvement Guide” 2004

MArch 2006

117 Meeting the Valley Michael Wenrich

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Michael Wenrich, RA,

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As drivers exit the highway and approach the rest area, the ground rises gradually to their left, reorienting their view from the highway to the landscape and announcing their arrival at the rest area. The entry drive forks; trucks move to the left and the cars stay to the right. By keeping the trucks close to RT 99 and the highway condition, the rest area opens to the landscape and travelers are invited to occupy the edge of the site and “enter” the valley environment. The ground slowly rises again providing separation between the cars and trucks, orienting the rest areas to the East and West, and offering travelers an opportunity to move above the valley floor and view the expansive landscape. As drivers move along the North-South axis of RT 99, their perception of the valley and their relationship to the ground plane remains constant and their experience becomes static even though they are moving. The rest area creates an opportunity for travelers to experience their surroundings at a slowed pace and from several positions and orientations.

119 Meeting the Valley Michael Wenrich

California’s San Joaquin Valley extends 450 miles from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the North to the Tehachapi Mountains in the South and stretches 75 miles from the coastal ranges in the West to the Sierra Nevada in the East. Once an inland sea, then mostly a desert akin to the Mojave, now what has become known as “the world’s richest agricultural valley”; this region has undergone dramatic transformations by natural forces and human intervention. While the most recent transformation into a complex, man-made pattern of fields, orchards, canals, and basins provides 25% of the United States’ agricultural production, it has cost the valley most of its native vegetation and natural features. The valley oaks, prairies, marshes, hog wallows and wildflowers have been replaced with nuts, raisins, cotton and an estimated 200 additional crops. Today, the most common valley experience has been reduced to either an endless blur of crops seen from a car or a vast agricultural tapestry viewed from an airplane. It is nearly impossible to see any record of what existed before agribusiness covered the valley floor. Most of the valley now plays an integral role in the productive landscape and there is little opportunity for visitors to engage its history and experience its natural resources. The rest area is an exception. It does not directly participate in the surrounding agricultural landscape but it provides the opportunity for visitors to slow down, get out of their vehicles, and discover the character of the region.

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While the photos tell the story of the past, the centrally located market stalls are about the valley’s present and future. Local produce and crafts are sold and travelers interact with each other and the local community.

Photovoltaic canopies harvest the sun’s energy while providing a shaded place for vending, recycling, public phone, and wireless internet amenities.

The rest area is not only a moment of pause and a brief refuge from the highway, but it is also a site-specific place where community, history, and landscape are revealed, experienced, and celebrated.

121 Meeting the Valley Michael Wenrich

Four comfort stations are located to the East of the Northbound site and to the West of the Southbound site.

Each comfort station has a different relationship with the ground plane and provides a unique experience of the near and distant landscape. The first is perched four feet above the ground plane, the second is slightly elevated two feet above, the third slips two feet below and the last is sunken four feet beneath the valley floor. Each comfort station has a courtyard with four shaded picnic tables, a drinking fountain, a native wildflower garden and a grove. The courtyards are connected by gradual ramps making the elevation change easily accessible and encouraging visitors to explore the whole site. Each comfort station celebrates the rich regional history with large-scale photographs printed on its surface. These photos are of people, places, and events and they are numbered and keyed to a map at the information center.

Lewis Maverick McNeel, MArch ‘05 NYC Olympics 2012: Velodrome and Civic Labyrinth Spring 2004, Critics: John Quale with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Thomas Jefferson Foundation Visiting Professorship

The contemporary Roman Coliseum in ruin is precedent for a new Olympic stadium in the Bronx along the Harlem River. In remembrance of Rome, massive foundation walls form a labyrinth of indoor and outdoor rooms, passages for the secret comings and goings of athletes and officials and in more ancient times, the storage of lions and prisoners. Atop these walls, a temporary Olympic infrastructure is installed for track cycling races and badminton tournaments during two weeks in the summer of 2012. Afterward, these Olympic platforms, grandstands and other surfaces are peeled away to reveal again the labyrinthine basement and foundation walls below. These uncovered spaces are reoccupied as a new open-air market and riverside park for the Bronx. The stadium roof assembly is partially removed and reconfigured for a more dynamic relationship with the new activity below. An oculus emerges to focus sunlight deep into the market’s central open space. The foundation walls channel river breezes into the market for natural ventilation in milder seasons. Further below, river level canals and secret sewers penetrate inland for use by gondolas and water taxis. Souls are ferried across the river. Lions lurk in the forgotten corners.

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Elisa Niemack, MArch 2006, Advisor- R.D. Dripps For some time now, I have been troubled by the implied permanence of architecture: the heavy wall rooted in its site, the building rising out of the earth, the intense and deep excavation of the basement.

While I can rationalize the necessity of these weighty elements in much the way that Semper does, “they were needed for security, for supporting a load,” I can not help but speculate what “they” imply when removed (as they so often are) from the context of the carpets that Semper so insightfully pairs with them.

Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space.

The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence, and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means of separating space. Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the inner, invisible structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colorful woven carpets.

-Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings1

While the wall divides space, separating what is on one side from the other, membranes facilitate shifting degrees of separation and connection. When layered in different combinations of materials and construction, membranes have the ability to bring actual freedom to the free plan, allowing the occupant to make decisions about the qualities of the space and its social and environmental connections, rather than just freeing up the structure for the architect’s permanent insertions. Space, as constructed by the membrane, is defined by the particular demands of an activity at a particular time and determined by the precise level of physical and social mediation required for that activity. This level of mediation at the scale of the body can be found in clothing, particularly the trench coat, which provides variable degrees of separation and connection through the construction of layered membranes in conjunction with adjustable attachments in the form of buckles, belts, and hooks.

The aim of this investigation is to demonstrate how architecture can make use of membranes to achieve a similar range of mediation between the body and its physical and social context – to offer authentic freedom to occupants of the free plan.

1. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

127 Membranes: Architecture of Awareness Elisa Niemack

MEMBRANES: Architecture of Awareness

Isolating Language If we expand upon the definition of the membrane and look at the way it operates at a variety of scales, from the body to the building, the site and the city, we find ourselves exploring a wide range of activities. For the purpose of this investigation, these operations have been distilled into four categories: veil, film, mask, and screen.

Membrane

Veil

These categories form the framework for evaluating the methods through which particular membranes facilitate space defining activities and relationships.

To understand these operations, I have examined membranes in the context of the body, the home and the institution. Each exploration evaluates the ways that the membrane mediates the following relationships: individual / collective, public / private, nature /culture.

Why aren’t buildings more like clothes? or Membranes and the body.

For Vitruvius, inherent in space-making were social and political connotations that began with the discovery of fire. This gave way to “deliberate assembly and social intercourse” 2 which then led to the construction of shelter. With the construction of shelter came the act of dwelling. Before shelter, there was no means for identifying this act as there were no boundaries to demarcate the space within which one might begin to dwell.

In The First House, R. D. Dripps expands on Vitruvius’s assertion and the act of dwelling suggesting that the idea of dwelling is much more involved than simply making shelter, but that it is a significant part of public city live.

For those more accustomed to the now current view of the house as a private refuge with no relationship to the public realm, Vitruvius’s proposal poses a significant challenge, one that would relocate the dwelling appropriately at the center of public life. And so this first dwelling, now removed from the privacy of the woods, caves and forests in order to engage in public life, transcends the contingent demands of shelter to become architecture.3 2. Vitruvius. Ten Books of Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Excerpt from Book Two, p 34.

3. Dripps, R.D. The First House: Myth, Paradigm and the Task of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Excerpt from Chapter 1: ‘The Origin of Dwelling’, p 6.

Mask

facade veil front pretense conceal masquerade cover disguise camouflage visor surgical mask face protector gas mask swimming mask theatrical mask death mask cover up hide

casing covering crust film

Film Screen

hide cover protect partition shield guard divice check test examine check out select weed out vet conceal broadcast put on show project transmit put on the air monitor display VDT computer screen television partition divider panel shield guard barrier scrim sift through

movie motion picture pictures big screen silver screen layer coat coating covering sheet skin mist haze record video tape capture on film shoot

MEMBRANE: A thin flexible sheet of tissue connecting, covering, lining or separating various parts or organs in animal and plant bodies, or forming the external wall of a cell. A thin, pliable and often porous sheet of any natural or artificial material.

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covering blanket curtain pall conceal hide mask cloak cover shroud envelop obscure

Architecture becomes the mediator between public and private life, the means through which the individual might negotiate his or her relationships with the collective. Here we begin to understand that it is the built form in its entirety that represents the “in-between” spaces through which we are meant to negotiate these relationships.

If we understand clothing as our first layer of protection, then it is not too far fetched to think of habitable environments being born out of textiles. Tents or huts can be thought of as a second layer of clothing (presumably this is how the nomads saw them). If we push this line of thought a bit further, one begins to wonder when this relationship between clothing and shelter began to change. At what point did the way in which we inhabit built space become so divergent from the way in which we inhabit our clothes?

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The trench coat mediates between us and the weather, specifically rain, but also wind and snow or potentially harsh sun. It separates us from the elements without completely disconnecting us in the way a spacesuit isolates astronauts from outer space.

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The trench coat may also be made up of layers, an inner layer of insulation and an outer layer of protection. These layers are adjustable, they allow for varying degrees of openness and closed-ness.

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In addition to straps and a belt, the coat will often have a zipper and/or buttons. Each of these allow for different levels of adjustability both in closure and in the overall shape of the garment. For example, when pulled tight, the belt will emphasize the waist and reveal additional information about the occupant.

Secondarily, the coat can be used for storage. It will often have deep pockets, some on the outside and others concealed within. These pockets create additional layers of space between the occupant and the viewer. In most cases it is only the occupant that knows truly what lies inside, the viewer will typically only recognize a bulge or a shape, but if the material of the coat is transparent, as in Kosuke Tsumura’s Final Home Jacket, the viewer will have the opportunity to see this “in-between” space and potentially recognize the objects suspended within.

Much of the trench coat’s allure rests in its ability to reveal and conceal– exposing an ankle or enhancing a silhouette, keeping the viewer guessing while affording the occupant a level of control. The trench coat has developed a particular aura as a means of protection and disguise. Its role extends far beyond the environmental shelter of an ordinary coat. It has evolved into a garment used for masking and veiling appearance, intention and desire.

TRENCH COAT: A belted raincoat in a military style having straps on the shoulders and deep pockets.

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First and foremost, the trench coat is adjustable. It is belted and has straps on the shoulders allowing us to control/negotiate our exposure to the elements.

For whom is the Free Plan Free? or Membranes and the House

In Maison de Verre Pierre Chareau assigns a hierarchy to public and private spaces making the ground level more public than private, the first floor a hybrid and the second the most private. At certain moments these zones overlap and intersect with one another shifting the typical public/private relationships through the use of transparent and translucent planes. By using these screening devices in the place of what might normally be heavy walls, Chareau creates shifting visual and aural connections between the two types of space.

In a 1969 Perspecta article, Kenneth Frampton writes, “Masion de Verre may be characterized under three separate but interrelated aspects, articulation, transformation and transparency.” 4 But upon closer examination we discover that the potential for transformation provided by the membranes is actually quite static and controlled.

Frampton writes, “One final implication of the articulated order of the Masion de Vere is that its component units are not only modular but in essence interchangeable; yielding a “mobility” dependent upon a potential for modification and replacement rather than movement per se.” 5 While Chareau’s design does a tremendous amount with layered transparency and interplay between the private interior and the public courtyard, it only provides a set number of places where the occupant can actually assert control over these relationships. In most cases the occupants are limited by the predetermined space of each room and the specific surfaces and enclosures that Chareau believed should be flexible.

We find a similarly controlled use of membranes in Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. Upon first glance it may appear that the floor to ceiling clear glass allows for a direct link between interior and exterior, public and private, but the connection is purely visual. In fact, the razor thin glass does it’s best to completely eradicate the “in-between” space and with that the ability for the occupant or viewer to influence their relationship with the other. The house becomes a display case rather than a shelter where the occupant can negotiate her own activities and relationships.

4. Frampton, Kenneth. (1969). ‘Masion de Verre’. Perspecta, 12.

5. Ibid.

Reveal and Conceal; Desire

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When we look at the architecture of modern dwelling, particularly houses based on the free plan, we find that great efforts have been made towards the inclusion of new membrane types primarily through variations in glass. These inclusions, however, often have more to do with triumphs of technology and the desires of the architect than with the occupant and viewer. In other words, while many of these structures may appear at first to engage the membrane, the membranes they include tend to operate one dimensionally.

In an interview with Joseph A. Barry, Edith Farnsworth said the following about her house: Do I feel implacable calm? The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alter. I am always restless.

Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax...

What else? I don’t keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why?

Because you can see the whole ‘kitchen’ from the road on the way in here and the can would spin the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet farther down from the sink.

In each of these implementations of the free plan, the occupant is not afforded much real freedom. In fact, it is the architect who seems to absorb all available freedoms leaving nothing but controlled environments for occupation. A truly free plan would allow the occupants to create rooms around specific activities rather than predetermining the size and space of rooms based upon preconceived notions of room typologies.

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Mies talks about ‘free space’: but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem because the house is transparent like an X-ray.6

Lobbying the Lobby or Membranes and the Institution To test the integration of membranes and the institution, I have created an installation in the lobby of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.

The installation considers the many groups of people who use the lobby and the activities they currently engage. The purpose of the installation is to provide greater levels of visual and aural privacy in the space in order to accommodate existing activities and to facilitate new moments of engagement and behaviors.

This investigation is not an argument for the eradication of walls or permanent structures; it is a call for the reincorporation of membranes into the architectural vocabulary. We should reexamine the importance of impermanence. Membranes should not be an afterthought, but an integral part of the design and creation of space – a means of engaging our awareness in the space we occupy.

LOBBY: A large entrance hall or foyer immediately inside the door of a hotel, theater, or other public building. A public area in or near a legislative building where people can meet and petition their political representatives.

A group of campaigners and representatives of particular interests who try to influence political policy on a particular issue.

6. Freidman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 1998. p. 141.

In praise of lightness Robin Dripps T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture

Lightness is not just the absence of weight but carries a rich set of connotations about possibilities. Physically as well as metaphorically it suggests transparency, mobility, and change. It implies quickness of response, immediacy, and even intimacy. There is elegance in its minimalism and a sense of scale and ease of operation that connects it to both human action and natural process. Its very essence seems to flaunt the physical laws of gravity, material density, and opacity.

In 1914, Marinetti and Sant’Elia, the Futurist provocateurs, wrote: “We have lost the sense of the monumental, of the heavy, of the static; we have enriched our sensibility by a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift.” These sentiments and others like them are not just responses to new technologies or materials, but just the reverse, a call for new ways to build that in and of themselves, were intended to instigate a radical shift in social and political structure. No longer was the closed figural object with it’s a priori hierarchical distinctions, thought to be capable of dealing appropriately with the changed nature of the modern social and political world. No longer could the heavy walls, floors, and roofs - which once precisely and authoritatively located and delimited human action in order to make a place in the world- accommodate the increasing level of individual inquiry and skepticism towards artificial limits.

More recently, our understanding of nature has shifted from one that is oppositional to human intent more toward one in which nature is a component of a complexly interactive negotiation between natural process and human desire.

This new view of nature has led to further questioning of the heavy, impenetrable, boundaries that prevent the smooth flow of people and energies across these.

The most obvious index of these changes can be seen in the wall itself, where with a single heavy handed gesture, it prevented contact across it on every sensory level and regulated with gross insensitivity what ought to have been extremely fluid, and highly nuanced social, political, and environmental encounters. Its place is slowly being taken by lightweight, flexible membranes with variable densities and transparency that, by themselves, and in combination, are able to rapidly respond to the multiplicity of open-ended relationships that define the matrix of human existence.

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When at the start of the 12th century Abbot Suger called “The principle of Transparency” the greatest achievement of High Gothic, he called attention to its spatially indeterminate interior with its highly permeable boundaries, a condition that contrasts with the absolute clarity of the more weighty, hierarchical, and prescriptive architecture that preceded. Although not mentioned by Suger, there certainly is the intimation that individuals within this space are more free to establish their own relationships to whatever spiritual entity they believed was beyond.

Email Response: Brian Tabolt, Princeton University, SARC ‘03

Great architecture, like a great student or professor, is challenging and often difficult. Also like a great student or professor, great architecture in indebted to past, but never bows to it for fear of disrupting the status-quo. Thomas Jefferson’s Lawn exemplifies these ideals: learning from the past while imagining a new future. The Lawn continues to be an amazing and singular example of how architecture can help foster a community. It was also radical and unique for its time; placing the library (not the chapel) at the center of the university, and placing students and professors on much more even footing than they had ever been before. It also has an extremely strong and complex relationship with is natural environment, a very relevant and contemporary idea, and one rooted in the values Jefferson held dear. All of these amazing qualities have very little to do with how the Lawn looks, and everything to do with its technologies, spatial practices, organization, and ideals.

To say there is nothing more to the Lawn that its looks or style is an atrocious insult to its architect, and to the students and faculty that have learned and taught in it for almost two hundred years. To reinforce this stance by imposing a set of criteria for new buildings based on the most trivial aspect of this work alone (i.e. red bricks and white columns) instead of its most timeless and powerful ideas (community, proportion, relationship to its site, its capability to resolve the utopian with the pragmatic) serves to multiply this insult. Despite all this, the problem here is not that recent buildings on grounds are in the “Jeffersonian” style, however emaciated the application of that term has become. Rather it is that the most innovative and talented architects of our time are being turned away (or turned off) in favor of firms who’s most important qualification is a willingness to submit to the will of the B.O.V. - a group who’s primary concern appears to be the literal image of the school, and not the lives of its current students and faculty; and the students and facility are suffering for it.

The faculty members who began this discussion did so because they care very deeply about the future of the University of Virginia. They stand little to gain from their bold statements other that a rich dialogue about issues that deeply concern the entire UVA community. Their opinions and ideas are informed by countless years of education and scholarly research, and they are some of the most respected practitioners and educators in their profession, not “artists” or “avant-gardists” attempting to force their aesthetic criteria on others. As I alluded to earlier, these people are among the school’s most valuable assets, and we should not be afraid to listen to them, and we would be doing them and Mr. Jefferson a great disservice by not continuing the dialogue they have started. Hopefully we can all put issues of style aside, and instead focus on how we can truly study and respond to the challenges of Jefferson’s architecture, rather than degrading it by repeating its looks and ignoring its ideals.

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The open letter recently written by members of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture has touched off a ferocious, and often very personal, debate among students, facility, administration, and most assuredly the Board of Visitors, not to mention alumni (like myself) around the country and the world. The attitudes of many respondents thus far seem to imply that this debate will have a winner and a loser, when in fact nothing could be further from the case. The University that we all love and respect is the only possible winner; all that this outcome requires is for members of the university community to continue to listen and respond. I commend those that have participated so far, and we should all be proud of the faculty members that took the important first step of beginning this much-needed dialogue; its presence can only enrich the process of constructing our Grounds.

In fact, this is the most critical and disturbing condition that is being addressed in this dialogue: the discussion concerning new construction on campus has far too long been one dominated by style. I cannot stress enough how much more is at stake than issues of style or personal taste. The first question that should be asked by everyone involved with any new building (or any renovation of an existing one) should not be “what should this building look like?” or “will it be Jeffersonian?” or “will it fit in?” Rather, it should be “what is the best possible building we can all create for our students and faculty?” or perhaps “how can this building best embody the ideals of this university, and help to make the practice of those ideals possible?”

Despite dedicating my work and study to architecture, I realize that buildings are not what give a university its identity and relevance. This role belongs to its teachers and students, to the close-knit community of learning that makes up the school. The role of architecture in this precious environment is simply to provide the structure and shelter to make this community possible and be consistent with its most basic ideals.

Jefferson’s Lawn accomplished this in a way that few have rivaled by putting ideas of community, the relationship between students and professors, and the relationship with the site first, and the University should follow his lead. So many recent projects on grounds have been handcuffed from following these goals by being forced into a regimen determined by taste and an impoverished understanding of Jefferson’s contribution to what a university can be. The result is a campus where increasingly a vision of cohesiveness (which can and should be encouraged) is being replaced by a vision of sameness. While diversity is pursued in almost every other realm of university life, and laudably so, the built environment of the school is teaching students that continuity with the past means imitating it rather than responding to it, and that respecting tradition requires the stifling of new ideas. This is what is really at stake here. As one of the world’s leading universities, with a proud tradition tied to one of the founders of this country, a country built on rebellion, questioning the status quo, and envisioning a new future, it is essential that these ideals be followed in all matters concerning the university’s own future, lest they become mere rhetoric in an age that desperately needs new leaders with integrity and intelligence.

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K. William Fried

On January 8, 1996, the artist, Sanda Iliescu, began to keep “a kind of visceral, visual journal,” “marking each day by making a self-portrait.” The last entry is dated September 10, 1997. Clearly she did not make a portrait each day: “Sometimes I work on the same face for many days in a row.” The quotations are from her own writing (she often writes on the portraits themselves). In writing this essay, I considered a numbered subset of this series: one hundred drawings chosen by Iliescu from a collection that includes some nine hundred studies. I call this piece an interface. Doing it has entailed facing one hundred faces many times over until I catch their drift, unravel their stitches, penetrate their surface, discover her face, hum their lyrics, touch their scars, find the parts that she has effaced and erased and feel their dread reverberations in my own face.

I don’t think she was aware, when she started, that she was entering the selfsame selva oscura as Dante did on his way to Hell, but the drawings show that she discovered this very quickly. “I decided to go ahead with this—to do a self-portrait every day. To start my 1

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The Self Portraits of Sanda Iliescu: An Interface

day that way. For the past week I’ve been doing them in my sketchbook,” is the innocuous inscription on entry number 1, although the “I decided to go ahead with this,” may reflect some small trepidation that the enterprise may be more than merely straightforward. The face in the drawing is fluidly and sensuously rendered, the features faintly limned, the eyes unseeing, but the right ear sketched in careful detail as though listening for an answer. The head is tilted, cautiously attentive: what have I set in motion?, she seems to be asking.

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Thursday, July 25, 1996 I am interested in the “look” of women’s faces—faces I see on TV, at the grocery store, in a parking lot, in the lady’s room, in the hospital. Each face is unique at any point in time. Its movement, look, visual priorities change every second. The idea of painting someone’s definitive portrait seems preposterous. A face has hundreds of transient faces embedded in it. Still, there are stable features that make one recognize a person, even after many years and much aging. Each face has its own weight, a sort of specific density. This remains, while features, movements, attitudes shift.

On the fifth face, she writes, “So today I felt a kind of resignation and a sort of calmness, too. I did a lot of erasing—not an angry kind of erasing but erasing as a positive and delicate sort of thing. And then I put today’s face next to yesterday’s and saw that the face of today is much smaller. I don’t know what to make of these changes in the size of my face.” The size difference is explained for the most part by the erasures, guided perhaps by an unconscious decision that less face is more manageable and that it is only bearable to see half as much (the right eye has been erased).

The face that follows is a bit bland. The pupils of the large eyes are almost opaque and the lips are slightly stretched, maybe quizzically, if not in an incipient smile.

But the entire thing is colored with a thin yellow wash that suggests jaundice. Is she telling us that her take on this particular face is jaundiced, or perhaps recommending that we see it that way. This assumption seems warranted by the sequence, the erasures and the downsizing of the previous drawing. Jaundice connotes bitterness or resentment. Of what is she bitter or resentful? What bitterness or resentment might she be urging upon us?

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Then, two days later, on January 10th, a death mask— the impression left on a shroud after years of interment, in the color of earth. Immediately thereafter she is resurrected, but how changed from the clear-faced, delicate woman of entry 1! The face doesn’t flow anymore; it is stolid, deliberately coarsened as though she has become a peasant, without hope. The graceful curves are again discernable in the next drawing, but the face is slashed by swift strokes of line and shadow that almost obliterate the right eye and initiate the cataract theme that regularly recurs throughout the series: it is an embattled face, grim but resolute.

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Yellow also figures dramatically in entry number 21, a vacant eyed, staring, but resigned face surrounded by yellow flowers that resemble daffodils. From the top to the bottom of the page, scrawled across the face until it becomes a dense, unintelligible tangle is the sentence, “Joy is sometimes possible,� as though she were desperately reminding herself, or reminding herself amidst her desperation. The thicket that these words form at the bottom of the page is a graphic correlative of dissolution into tears. Entry 22 takes the next step: the entire right side of the face is now a flower (a yellow daffodil?); on the left side, the yellow wash is muddied green, and drips past a skeletal mouth to the chin. The face is half garish flower and half poison green grotesquery. It tells us about the way recalling and yearning for an absent joy can complicate and intensify grief.

Returning to the initial series after a yellow detour into coming attractions, we have entry 7, in which the artist begins the use of a species of crosshatching that produces the impression of iron filings following lines of emotional force. It is as though the energy in the facial muscles has compelled the sketchy lines to assume their distinctive shape and direction. In this drawing, the mouth is a stoical slit while the eyes are vortices of intense conflict between weeping and not weeping, seeing and not seeing, loving and hating. The conflict is resolved in number 8, where the lines of force are formed into a static symmetry yielding a face that is darkened and rigid against the painful emotion of the previous image, both eyes plainly visible for once, but staring and immobile.

In entry 9, the crosshatching deviates somewhat from its erstwhile symmetry but the face is desolate with reddened eyes and lips; this is the limit of her endurance: the next image begins a process of effacement. The right side of the face and nose recede into the pink wash. There is still hectic activity on the left cheek, and the left eye stares accusingly. The wash is retained in number 11, but the features are scarcely there. Only the inveterate mouth is any semblance of itself. By the time we get to number 12, nothing is left to fill the flaccid outline of a face. The effacement is complete. In entry 13, the ascent has begun, but only barely: the oval is darker and better defined, but the features are limned like a very pallid ghost’s.

Friday, July 26, 1996 I ask myself: how does one draw a face? Is it still possible to make the trace of a face, after photography, after film and video, after computer graphics? I am unsure and find no answers; I grope and stumble. Still, I persist. I am drawn to the face. I draw it, which means I imagine it in some way, every day.

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In entry 16, the awakening shifts to the lower half of the face—lips and nostrils animated by lines of force that suggest an infant’s nocturnal rooting for the breast; the accompanying gnomic lines read: “Again, I get back to the same old thing: sticking to something (doesn’t matter) hanging on or hanging in. It’s also a matter of simplicity.

Everything I like (what a terrible word, “like”) is in some way simple or reduced. That’s why I like silhouettes of things and cut-outs and staples.”

Her words contradict the testimony of these images.

Even when they are silhouettes or black masks, as in images 41 and 43, they are never simple. Perhaps this is a part of what she finds difficult to face—that, no matter the simplicity of intention or the suppressed sophistication in the execution, the object betrays the underlying intricacy of feeling. Further, even the simpler images partake of a complex totality because they occupy a place in the series, like lyrical passages of music that follow or precede a densely orchestrated or rhythmically convoluted movement.

And this brings us to a modest inventory of the artist’s means and materials. She draws so well as to be able to ignore technique and allow her visual invention to derive almost directly from affect. At will, she reaches into the materials that surround her for whatever the current image requires.

Sometimes it is a wash or color highlight, sometimes a

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Effacement remains dominant in entry 13. But the features are coming back. The cross hatching in this piece is effected by scratching color away instead of positive sketching, so that the strokes are white against the burnt sienna wash, a brilliant reversal that connotes a fundamental emotional transformation. What these images convey is the almost impenetrable and unutterably complex experience of not being able to face something that is mirrored in one’s face and as a result, having, for a time, to expunge the face itself. Obscured behind several layers of scrim is a sleeper only beginning to emerge into wakefulness. When she comes awake, in entry 15, the crosshatching is back, burning in one feature at a time, as a photographer would in the darkroom. The right eye is there, the nose more faintly, and the mouth is vertically bisected, the left half definite and right still faded. A negligible line defines the right facial boundary but as yet, there is no demarcation on the left. This is a hypnopompic face, made of cobwebs that must be cleared on the way to reintegration.

stitching of staples, sometimes crosshatching, and sometimes, cut out shapes from plastic garbage bags. She is audacious (and desperate) enough to remove her face from us while forcing us to remember and anticipate it. She spins her face as though it were a fabric, stitches it, staples it, ages it with the texture of crepe, performs skin grafts, and other kinds of plastic surgery on it and sometimes disguises it with theatrical makeup. Her faces are stitched together, bandaged, etched, opaque, transparent, and ineluctably there, but not all there.

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149 Sanda Iliescu K. William Fried

We know about lawyers who represent themselves and doctors who treat themselves, but what about artists who draw themselves? Shall we say that an artist who draws herself has an enigma for a model? Shall we read her the cautionary tale of Narcissus or recite a relevant line from Yeats: “Empty eyeballs knew/ That knowledge increases unreality, that/ Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show”? Is this why so many of the self-portraits in this series have empty eyeballs? We can say only that Sanda Iliescu’s perseverance after realizing how daunting was the self inflicted facing of herself for many consecutive days, yielded an astonishing corpus. When such courage is vouchsafed to a master of visual language, the result is a pictorial record of complex states of mind such as has not been attempted before. No greater justice can be done to this series than to reproduce them all as faithfully as possible for publication as a book.

Dr. William Fried is a psychoanalysist, photographer and appreciator of art. He lives and practices in New York city.

Monday, May 1, 2006 I call this project Timeline—a long line stretching backwards in time, connecting today with a moment three days or three years ago. In a very simple way, Timeline is teaching me how to draw, which is not at all simple. It teaches me how to see. Also how to draw out, and how to move away from myself. I have learned to leave out the sensational or startling and to return to the simple and familiar. The most banal realities lead to intricate journeys: the journey of a line, of a few dots, perhaps some office staples or fragments of a plastic grocery bag… Yet Timeline always returns to the difficulties of the face, of having to face oneself. A self-portrait. How can I make one, knowing those others, knowing for instance the ones Rembrandt has traced for us? I keep looking at his sequence of faces: Small Self Portrait (1627), Self Portrait Bareheaded (1629), Self Portrait with Tousled Hair (1629), Self Portrait, Open-Mouthed (1630), Self Portrait with Hand on Hip (1631), Self Portrait as an Oriental (1634), Self Portrait Drawing on an Etching Plate (1658)…

In Rembrandt’s etching known as La Petit Tombe all lines point to a little boy, about four years old, scratching a line in the sand. Perhaps this too is a self-portrait. “Looking is not as simple as it looks,” writes Ad Reinhardt. Timeline (or a small line scratched in the sand) teaches me this simple fact: looking is not so simple…

Sanda Iliescu is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Art at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. For more information on this work contact Molly Merson at Vagabond Gallery, New York, New York (www.vagabondgallery.net).

lunch : trespass 150

We arrive from a middle ground.

Perhaps like the Threshers we take a break from the workday, add a leaf to the table, and serve as big and as good a meal as we have the energy and ingredients to make. Uncatered but cultivated conversation passes paradoxically closer to truth by trespass.

These marks on paper do not encompass all. Ending in a place not in sight, discerning a brief pause in the continuation of this discussion, we wait; hoping the discourse establishes momentum, becomes part of an institution and potentiates printed imagination.

Kevin J Bell Matthew Ibarra Ryan Moody