A Personal Architecture

So far my experience with design in the studio context has largely been one of just keeping up, learning what elements have to be developed in design, how they are presented, and how to use the associated analog and digital tools.  It's been sink or swim, and while I'm staying afloat, I wouldn't say I've had a thorough control of or clear purpose in my designs so far.  Last semester my studio professor really pushed me at a conceptual level, however, and I'm really thankful that she did so.  I resonated with her rational, iterative and personal approach, and I have a sense that my work will reflect her influence in the years to come.  That said, I bring to the design process my own set of values, and these will inevitably characterize my work as well.  As I sort through the input from my professors, my peers, my readings, and my own experiences with architecture, and as I filter that input through my personal values, I am finding that certain elements command my interest more than others.  I will try to touch on these inputs, values and elements in this post.

I will credit Ms. Andrea Swartz as the studio professor whose approach has influenced me in regard to a rational approach to design.  Her assignments pushed us to consider program, structure, materiality, and environmental factors in an iterative fashion, all the while exploring the conceptual basis for our decisions in each iteration.  She called us out when we made arbitrary decisions, always pushing us to take our ideas beyond the surface level.  I now find myself experiencing a certain level anxiety when I realize I've made a decision that I cannot defend conceptually.

Andrea also imparted a value for materiality that I want to continue to explore.  She had us doing experiments with various materials from the start.  As a result I found myself playing with a welder and constructing formwork for small designs in steel and concrete.  The experience made me want to spend more time in the shop working with my hands, and it brought home the physicality and spatial presence that architecture realizes.  I loved it.  Coming from the computing field where everything is virtual, this was a breath of fresh air affirming my decision to make a career change.

In my process in studio I am seeing the value of analog methods beyond material explorations as well.   Study models are great, taking me back to my Lego-building days where I can design as I build, try things out, take them apart and start over with minimal expense.  I build using scraps as a way to short-circuit my perfectionist tendencies.  Sketching is also essential, I find, for some of the same reasons.  With a pen and trace paper I can iterate through ideas more quickly than any experiment on the computer.

This move to analog (i.e. non-digital) design makes me nervous since it's new territory; I'm so used to working on the computer.  I see the problems with designing digitally, however.  At this point the tools are too restrictive.  Most modeling programs favor a certain type of geometry; some force early definition of details that are better left out at the beginning.  They all easily consume a lot of time and changes to a design are typically painful, discouraging bolder exploration of ideas.  At some point digital tools are indispensable of course.  Parametric design can sometimes speed up design iterations and generate new ideas that would never come about through sketching.

I really value input from others in the design process--I know I need feedback from peers and mentors to hone my design and my process.  I especially love the experience of collaborating with another designer who operates on the same wavelength.  The synergy that develops in that kind of environment allows for greater leaps, fresh ideas and sped up design iterations in way that is quite exhilarating.  I speak from my experiences with this kind of synergy in my former career and I have tasted it in discussions with others in the grad program with whom I share common interests.  I hope to find this kind of energy in my career in architecture.

When it comes to my personal values in relation to architecture, I believe concepts of community will be central.  My own experience with community has been that is an unparalleled source of love and healing.  This a spiritual reality, one that I do not believe is truly possible apart from faith in God who provides the ability to love and accept one another in spite of faults and differences.  I believe this kind of community can exist in any built environment--it is perhaps its most vibrant when forced to exist in inhospitable conditions, which require individuals to depend on each other to a greater degree.

The built environment may, however, be more or less conducive to the formation of community.  Community may be able to thrive in any environment, but that does not mean it is unaffected by it.  There is also a physical, day-to-day aspect of community that expresses a different kind of spirituality, that of presence.  Our presence with one another day-in, day-out plays, I believe, an important role in individual spiritual and emotional healing, and this happens in physical space and time.  Since the built environment is a significant part of our physical existence in time and space, it will be interesting to explore what role it plays in facilitating and encouraging (or discouraging) the formation of community.  What creates a place of safety?  What makes a space desirable for gathering? for intimacy?  What are the social justice aspects?  How does this manifest itself at the neighborhood level?  Hmm, this sounds like the makings of a thesis...

Regardless of the project I believe there will opportunities for leadership, and I see myself stepping up to those opportunities and promoting the values that characterize my approach.  Each project is a chance to set higher standards, to influence the industry, to improve a community, to respect the environment, to respond in a fashion sensitive to client, site, physical context, program, and social / cultural context.  Given my desire to participate in community to this degree, I hope to one day form my own practice and be able to lead at that level as well.

Beyond the above values, there are a number of concepts and areas of interest that stimulate my thinking and excite me as avenues for future exploration.  I like the idea of

• a work of architecture being a critique of something else - be it a social construct, a movement within the arts, a political movement, an architectural style or trend, etc.
• architecture as experience (phenomenology?), as prompting something spiritual, esp. as generated by the sensitive use of materials, by the formation of space, by directing and framing views, etc.
• permanence vs. impermanence--architecture creating continuity in a community by nature of its durability and material presence while acknowledging that everything decays
• adaptability through architecture that can be repurposed (or even recycled) with a minimum of waste; related to adaptive reuse - making use of existing building stock, repurposing existing structures in innovative ways
• simplicity in design, the result of numerous iterations toward finding the most elegant and efficient solution to a design problem; related, perhaps, to minimalism
• interactivity, often related to materiality, but also as realized by technology, esp. the field of human-computer interaction in the context of architecture

Any one of these could be thesis areas.  It will be difficult to narrow my focus when that stage of my education arrives.

I have really enjoyed the readings on theory over the course of the semester, and so many of my interests are rich theoretically landscapes.  The readings I've referenced in previous posts to this blog have been very gratifying, especially the readings on Mies and on Kahn, those on the Amsterdam School and De Stijl, and the one on Semper.  My research on Hassan Fathy and Charles Correa broadened my knowledge and gave me valuable experience as I sought out sources to inform my analysis.  All of these readings have influenced my thinking regarding a conceptual basis for architecture... I'm sure there will be more to come.

In terms of aesthetics, I'm not sure exactly where my affinities lie.  They are diverse.  I like a lot of the work of firms like Morphosis, SHoP Architects and Kieran Timberlake.  I like some of Gehry's work, like the Loyola Law School.  I like modernist work such as that of Eero Saarinen at the Miller House and of many Scandinavian architects who exemplify beauty in simplicity.  I am attracted to a lot of European styles--there is something of the clean efficiency and precision of Germany that is embedded in my psyche.  I like asymmetry and abstract geometry.  I like contrasts, especially contrasts in materials and in the age of materials.  I like the detailed work of Scarpa.  There is so much to which I have yet to gain exposure; I am still accumulating references.

Suffice it to say, I feel like the whole world is before me, and I'm chomping at the bit to explore it.  I know I have a lot of work cut out for me to go there, but I'm looking forward to learning more of who I am as an architect and as an individual in the process.

The Open Plan in the Thought and Work of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn

I am finding that I really enjoy reading architectural theory; this is a dangerous thing when it comes to writing an analysis of one or another architect’s work or development of a particular idea.  I, at least, cannot assimilate years of research and philosophizing overnight.  I enjoy getting glimpses of a broad swath of history and the responses of each architect to the forces at work around them; synthesizing and articulating the insight I gain from those glimpses is difficult.  But I will try to process out loud what I have gathered in my few readings about Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn in relation to the concept of the open plan.

Mies, it seems, approached architecture in true modernist spirit, posing a purposeful critique of past and existing modes of building and design and advancing the development of current architectural thought through his works.  Hartoonian emphasizes the role that technology played in Mies’s thought and career.  Mies saw technology as an important force throughout architectural history, a key factor in the forms architecture has taken and continues to take.  Inevitably new technology and materials will give rise to new experiments, new forms.  Mies’s works exemplify this process of experimentation and formulation over the course of his career from more conservative explorations as in his earlier houses to more extreme examples as in the Farnsworth House and the Barcelona Pavilion.

One of Mies’s earlier houses is the neoclassical Riehl House in Berlin, built in 1907.  Compared to his later works, it feels basic, almost pedestrian.  Its most distinguishing feature is a loggia of sorts integrated with a retaining wall on the side of the house furthest (and not visible) from the street.  It seems awkward to me, unexpected and oversized.  In plan, rooms are arranged around a central space and the walls are heavy boundaries between them.  It is an exploration of the traditional role of walls and columns, clearly load bearing, unambiguous.

Riehl House, Berlin (1907), Mies van der Rohe

Plan, Riehl House

Colquhoun highlights Mies’s progression away from the traditional by providing a series of unbuilt house plans from sixteen to seventeen years later in his career.  These show an increasing fragmentation culminating in the much referenced Brick Country House design with its De Stijl-style abstraction of walls as sliding planes.  Hartoonian digs into this progression in much greater detail by examining the role of the column in relation to the increasingly fragmented wall.  He clarifies the critique that is taking place—that Mies is breaking down the traditional role of the wall, which he had explored earlier, instead examining it in light of the technology that now freed the wall from its load bearing role.  This critique is most clearly evident in the Tugendhat House in the Czech Republic (1928-30) and in the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) where he places columns adjacent to free-standing partition walls.  Whereas before the wall played a clear enclosing, load bearing role, it now has an ambiguous role—is the column bearing the load or the wall?  Which space does it enclose?  The role of the column is no less ambiguous.

Plans (unbuilt); Concrete Country House, Lessing House, Brick Country House; Mies van der Rohe

Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Mies van der Rohe

Taken to its furthest extreme, Mies’s exploration resulted in the practical elimination of the wall altogether in the Farnsworth House and his proposed 50x50 House.  He questions whether the wall is necessary at all, whether it can be usurped by the column entirely.  Hartoonian talks about how this ardent exploration led Mies to a conception that left behind culture and the concept of dwelling.  Indeed, this is proved by the anxiety experienced by Dr. Farnsworth as she attempted to live in the glass box Mies built for her. 

Louis Kahn’s career also plays out a progression of thought in regard to the open plan, but he starts his work much later, with the work of Mies and Le Corbusier already well established.  He was born at the time Mies was building his earliest houses and did not receive an independent commission for a house, the Oser House near Philadelphia, until 1940.  Saito discusses how at this stage Kahn’s approach to the plan was in typical modernist vein, subdividing a single volume of space with thin interior walls, but from the get-go he is conscious of the whole picture, how the individual room integrates with the other spaces in the house.

It does not take long for Kahn to start moving away from the single, subdivided volume toward a more room-oriented approach that emphasizes the individuality of each, though he sticks with familiar definitions of those spaces.  The plan of the Weiss House (1947-50) makes this shift clear, separating programmatic zones into distinct volumes connected via a narrower entryway/passageway.  In a way, this period for Kahn is analogous to Mies’ early period, a similar exploration of established forms.

Plan, Weiss House (1947-50), Louis Kahn

Subsequently Kahn began a higher level inquiry, abstracting the concepts of the room and the house, looking for an order that would allow the components of the whole to fall into place in a logical fashion.  His use of controlling geometries in projects such as the Trenton Bathhouse (1955) and the Adler House (1954-55; unbuilt) are the beginning of his critique of the modernist approach to date in the way that they elevate the room to a defining design element.

Plan, Adler House (1954-55; unbuilt), Louis Kahn

Goldhagen quotes Kahn from the same time period: “Space made by a dome then divided by walls is not the same space…. A room should be a constructed entity or—an ordered segment of a construction system.  Rooms divided off from a single larger space must read as a completed space.”   She goes on to say that to Kahn “the important elements enclosing a space must be immediately apprehensible, from structure to surface.  For this the open plan was inadequate because partitions, which were customarily used to mark off spaces, masked a concentrated perception of the building as a ‘constructed entity’” (Goldhagen 108).

In this Kahn’s development again parallels that of Mies, though they subsequently went in different directions.  Where Mies developed a theory of architecture around the centrality of construction in terms of technology and its advance (in constant motion), Kahn developed an architecture around the relationship of construction to the observer in his place (a static perception).  Like other architects of his time, Kahn was responding to the lack of authenticity he perceived in many aspects of modernism, which Mies’ work in its ambiguity exemplified.

Kahn’s emphasis on authenticity becomes evident in later works as he experiments with different types of buildings and the way they relate to the user.  The Salk Institute (1962) combines the monumental expression of the main structures with his very human scale moves for the offices that connect to them.  At the Kimbell Art Museum (1966-69) Kahn employs vaulted ceilings resting on load bearing walls, using columns only where the program needs open space.  The open plan is absent, broken up by the bays of the ceiling—and yet it is kept light and airy, indeed human, through his innovative toplighting.

Kimbell Art Museum (1966-69), Louis Kahn

It is interesting to see the progression not only of the individual architects examined here, but also the progression in modernist thinking.  Kahn is able to pick up the pieces of Mies’s deconstruction of construction and make something human out of it.  Perhaps Mies saw a shift coming—Hartoonian notes the presence of “poetics of place” in  Mies’ mid-career houses, houses from which Kahn may well have taken important cues.

References

Colquhoun, A. (2002). Modern architecture: Oxford University Press.

Goldhagen, S. W. K. L. I. (2001). Louis Kahn's situated modernism: Yale University Press.

Hartoonian, G. (1989). Mies van der Rohe: the genealogy of column and wall. Journal Of Architectural Education, 42(2), 43-50.

Saito, Y. (2004). Louis I. Kahn houses (Shohan. ed.). Tokyo, Japan: TOTO Shuppan.