Jack Hillmer

The first time I saw a picture of Jack Hillmer's Ludekens House, it stopped me cold.  My eyes were drawn to the "diamond-sectioned truss[ ], clad in overlapping boards and floating above almost invisible supports," cantilevered out over the entry, running clear through the house, and then cantilevered out again over the bay in Belvedere.  A. Hess, Forgotten Modern, 47 (Gibbs Smith, 2007).  I was stunned. 

I had to know, who was Jack Hillmer, what other buildings has he designed?  An initial search only revealed a couple pictures and two articles on Jack Hillmer in the SF Gate.  Eventually I found several books, more pictures, plans, and even a wood model owned by the SF MoMa.  See, e.g., P. Serraino, NorCalMod, 80-83 (Chronicle Books, 2006).  The more I saw of the house, the more I was completely convinced that it was one of the finest houses in the county.  I write "was," because it was disfigured, almost beyond recognition, in the late 1990's.  Joseph Esherick, known as both one of the founders of the Berkeley school of architecture and perhaps even more so for partnering with Charles Moore and Lawrence Halprin on some of the initial houses at Sea Ranch, rose to the Ludekens' house defense in the face of the then-threatened remodeling.  I could not agree more with Esherick:

It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.  Seldom have the possibilities of a site, the wishes of clients, and the talents of a designer come together with such timelessness and yet with such compelling results ... It embodies the best of European modernism (say, of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) with the best of American inventiveness (not unlike Frank Lloyd Wright), and with local materials on its piece of California.  Where else does one encounter such a synthesis of extreme rationality and unabashed romanticism?  How often has a collision of opposites been so well orchestrated?

Hess, 51.

One of the most distinctive features of the house, beyond the diamond-sectioned trusses, is the solid 13 ton block of granite Hillmer chose himself from a quarry in the Sierra Mountains.  Glass runs straight into a cut in the stone.

Here is another view of the fireplace, from the SF MoMa's collection:

Even better than the sheer uninterrupted mass, and the wonderfully natural rough granite texture on the front of the stone, is the fact that it also serves as a wall, separating the living room from a two story courtyard built around a mature cypress tree.  I can imagine walking down this hallway, peering through the glass that seamlessly merges into stone, and seeing a branch from the cypress tree brush against the granite in a light wind.  This hallway would take me not from bedroom to living room, but into the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

There has been increasing interest in Hillmer, including a recent spread in the Wall Street Journal about a nicely restored Hillmer house in Napa, the Munger House. The Munger house was built by its original owner, and never fully completed. MAP (Metropolitan Architecture Practice) stepped in to complete the house, along with subtle interventions to improve the flow of space as well as other needed upgrades, and now identifies the house as the Telesis house. The SF MoMa also decided to publicly post images of its archive of Hillmer materials, including the wood model shown below.

SF MoMa's scale model of the Leudekens House

I also found a great post on savewright.org that featured pictures of the Ludekens House from the April 1951 issue of Architectural Forum.

Although he only designed 10 houses, and never became well-known, I agree with Hess that "Hillmer is one of the most original architects produced by California."  Each of his 10 houses are cataloged below, and I find at least half of them stunning.  Like Wright, Hillmer experimented with different geometries, such as the hexagon and spiral.

1)  Hillmer / Calister Office - 425 Bush Street Penthouse (1947)

2) Hall House - Kentfield (1947)

3) Ludekens House - Tiburon (1950)

4) Munger House - Napa (1953)

5) Hall House - 405 Goodhill Road, Kenfield (1950)

6) Barnes House Addition - Palo Alto (1959)

7) Stebbins House - Kent Woodlands (1960)

8) John C. and Patti Wright House - Inverness (1962)

9) Dominic Cagliostro House - 49 Vicente Road, Berkeley (1977/1993)

10) Dr. Poor House - Berkeley (1996)

Schindler House

I finally had the opportunity to travel down to LA to see the first modern house -- the Schindler House.  In the same way that all roads used to lead to Rome, many of my favorite architects lead back to Schindler.  Schindler studied at Taliesin in Spring Green Wisconsin, for example.  Jack Hillmer rented an apartment in a complex built by Schindler when he first moved to California to become an architect.  Hillmer told the SF Examiner that he used to lay in bed and stare up at the beautiful sheen of the untreated redwood on the ceiling, inspiring him to never paint or finish redwood in any of his houses.  More recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Robert Swatt of Swatt Miers, and he told me he likes to go back to the Schindler house every once in a while to "touch home."

The house was originally built in what were then essentially open fields just west of Beverly Hills, as shown in the picture below:

1922 with Schindler House lot on North Kings Road in the upper right.  2016 from Google Earth on the right of approximately the same area.

Now it resides in a completely residential neighborhood.  From the street, all that is visible is a wall of bamboo and a narrow dirt driveway on the far side of the lot, next to a multi-story apartment building.  The hedges run the length of the dirt driveway, again obscuring the house from view as you walk its length.  You pass a door, and then the ticket office.  After buying tickets, you retrace your steps back to the previous door, and enter a narrow passage with a low redwood lined ceiling.  The hall opens to an empty room with concrete floors and narrow slits of glass between each slab of concrete.  The walls were not poured in place - they were made horizontally, in sections, and then tilted up vertically.  The spaces are sparse, bare, essential.  Is this all there is, I thought?

But then I noticed the canvas covered door leading to the next room, and this is where it begins to happen, where the house begins to unfurl itself.  Despite knowing the house was arranged in a modified pinwheel, each turn, each room, each window revealed something new.  This is the very essence of the experience of walking through the Schindler house, and why it is impossible to capture in pictures.  Small, perfectly crafted rooms with low ceilings and floor to ceiling windows opening to a garden lead into a narrow hallway, and around a corner another exquisite room opens up to a field of tall green grass.  Another turn reveals a copper fireplace, book shelves, and a few slits with frosted glass between each slab of concrete.

One of the most interesting aspects of the house are the two sleeping baskets on the roof.  Each is accessed by a very narrow set of stairs that runs to a small covered deck on the roof, for sleeping on hot summer nights.  Apparently Schindler had been to Yosemite before building the house, and wanted to re-create the experience of nature with a permanent-campsite feel to their home.

Another unique aspect of the house is the landscaping, which reflects the form of the house.  Two large rectangles of ivy are sunk four feet below the floor of the house, and the surrounding landscape.  Hedges form rectangular walls of roughly the same depth and height as the interior walls of the house, shaping exterior space and forming private areas outside of the pinwheel form.

I was not the first to be initially confused by the Schindler House.  Esther McCoy, and architectural historian known for bringing California architecture to the attention of the world, wrote this about the Schindler House:

When I first saw the Kings Road house in 1941 from Pauline's [Schindler's wife] garden I could not make out what was happening.  The leap from concrete to clerestory to "sleeping baskets" was disorienting.  When I was shown through the house an hour later the very act of movement began to slow down the images, and the forms unfolded slowly.  There was an inner dynamism in the forms that involved the muscles of the body as well as the eye.

Esther McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys (Santa Monica: Art & Architecture Press, 1979).

The walls are not quite vertical on the outside, having more mass at their base and tapering towards the roof, as in pueblo construction in the American southwest.  The way the rectangles of each room connect, and the interplay of the heights of the ceiling remind me of Frank lloyd Wright's Usonian houses, but this is more sophisticated, more complex.  The Schindler house, built in 1921, also predates the Usonian houses by a decade and a half.  Perhaps this is why the Schindler house has been called the first modern house.  One critic wrote:

There are plenty of learned punidts around who will point out that there can never be a genuinely fresh start in architecture, that it is improper to suppose that anyone could design a house as if there had never been houses before.  Yet the Schindler House comes disturbingly near to being a totally new beginning. 

R. Banham, "The Master Builders", The Sunday Times Magazine, London, 1971.

Schindler should also be given credit for being the first to set the guidelines for what it means to be a California House.  He accurately said:

In my own house I introduced features which seemed to be necessary for life in California: an open plan, flat on the ground; living patios; glass walls; translucent walls; wide sliding doors; clerestory windows; shed roofs with wide shading overhangs.  These features have now been accepted generally and form the basis of the contemporary California house.

R. M. Schindler, 1952, quoted in Susan Morgan, "Not Another International Style Ballyhoo: A Short History of the Schindler House", (MAK Center, 2015).

The picture below is from the book Schindler House by Kathryn Smith, and illustrates what one of the rooms looked like furnished:

K. Smith, Schindler House, 7 (Hennessey + Ingalls, 2010).

In Praise of Shadows

One of the most frequently quoted essays on architecture was written in 1933, curiously, by a Japanese author who had no expertise in architecture.  What Junichiro Tanizaki did have was an unerring ability to describe the experience of architecture.  After recently finishing a book on Phenomenology, I wonder now if a true writer is needed to properly express the sensation of an architectural space.  

Tanizaki's essay, in Praise of Shadows, is just such an essay.  It delves into shadows of all sorts, from those on the surface such as dark wood, pottery, food, and even clothing, to those deep within the central room of a temple, or in alcoves for displaying scrolls within houses far from shoji screens.  He finds beauty where one would least expect to find it -- in the dim places light almost fails to reach.  Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that he starts his essay on aesthetics describing, of all things, toilets.  Yet Tanizaki's prose, even in translation, is a moving paean to the Japanese out-house:

[T]he Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose.  It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss.  No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden .... I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at the floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.

Throughout the essay, Tanizaki contrasts Japanese traditions with modern Western views.  The bathroom brings out a stark contrast.  Westerners, in Tanizaki's view, "regard the toilet as utterly unclean and avoid even the mention of it in polite conversation."   While Tanizaki admits a traditional Japanese bathroom is harder to clean, he argues the Japanese have a more sensible approach, and most importantly, a more aesthetic approach:

No matter how fastidious one may be or how diligently one may scrub, dirt will show, particularly on a floor of wood or tatami matting.  And so here too it turns out to be more hygienic and efficient to install modern sanitary facilities-- tile and a flush toilet .... Yet what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies .... The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen.  In such places the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure, shrouded in a dusky haze.

Tanizaki laments the Japanese adoption of all things Western, wondering if left to their own devices, in isolation on their island, if the Japanese would not have come up with their own airplane, their own electric lights, and their own pens, each more in tune and sensitive to Japanese aesthetics.  Even paper reflects this difference:

Western paper is to us no more than something to be used, while the texture of Chinese and Japanese paper gives us a certain feeling of warmth, of calm and repose .... Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.  It gives off no sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree.

He contrasts polished western tableware with the preferred "dark, smokey patina" on Japanese tea kettles.  Every household in Japan "has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for."  It is the same with the Chinese preference for Jade, a stone with "faintly muddy light, like the crystallized air of the centuries, melting dimly, dully back, deeper and deeper" as opposed to the bright sparkle of a diamond.  Here, he notes:

We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.  Of course this ... is in fact the glow of grime.  In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling.

The presence of time is the key to understanding Tanizaki's aesthetic preferences:

Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it ... we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize ... the sheen that calls to mind the past that made [it].  Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.

In a section that eerily reminded me of Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanitarium, built at the exact same time as Tanizaki penned these words, he wrote that

Japanese hospitals need not be so sparking white, that the walls, uniforms, and equipment might better be done in softer, more muted colors.  Certainly the patients would be more reposed where they are able to lie on tatami matting surrounded by the sand-colored walls of a Japanese room.

To further illustrate the prescience of Tanizaki's words, it's worth taking a brief side track to examine Aalto's hospital.  Aalto first rose to prominence after the construction of Paimio Sanitarium in 1929-32, because Aalto was one of the first architects to consider the viewpoint of a patient in bed, and noted that ceilings should be painted a dark color to reduce eye strain:

Aalto also famously designed the sinks in each room to minimize the harsh sounds of water splashing by ensuring it struck the sink at an acute angle:

Despite Tanizaki's insistence on the very Japanese-ness of his preferred aesthetic, it is curious how often Finland and Japan, two countries on opposite sides of the world with presumably quite distinct cultures, are linked.  Even in current literature, such as Murakami's 2014 book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the main character spent an entire chapter on a trip to Finland. 

After toilets, wood, metal, food, and clothing, Tanizaki directly addresses traditional Japanese architecture.  He contrasts the Western use of bricks, windows, and light weight roofs with the massive Japanese roof, heavy with tiles or thick with thatch, and deep eaves.  Tanizaki notes that given the building materials, a deep eave was necessary to keep out the wind and rain.  

Tanizaki is particularly good at describing the sensation of trying to see in a dark room.  In describing the dim innermost room of a temple, he writes "I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision."  In a dark private room in a restaurant in Kyoto, lit only by candle light, he writes that this darkness was "different in quality from darkness on the road at night.  It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.  I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes."

Admitting dark rooms are not pragmatic, Tanizaki still revels in the aesthetic experience.

A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room.  But the quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's end.

Tanizaki also has some painfully dated and rather unfortunate musings on gender and especially skin color, that give lie to the beautiful lyricism of his writing, exposing the dangers of aestheticism in politics.  He drafted the essay only six short years before the Imperial Japan of World War Two reared its ugly head.  

Yet there is no doubt that his vivid descriptions of darkness have incredibly value to architecture.  This is especially true today, when the fashion for pure white interior room design has reached yet another nadir.  Do you have have a loft with old bricks, roughly textured with years of use?  Paint them white.  Old growth clear heart no longer available redwood on your ceilings?  Paint it white.  Thick oak floor boards, full of years of use?  Paint them white.  Brass cabinet handles, with a patina formed from thousands of hands?  White.  You may choose one or two contrasting items, not too large, to have color, but preferably they be black.

Erase the character of the wood, stone, metal -- eradicate all signs of grime.  And with it, the history of the surfaces, rendering a blindingly white void within which you can forever keep surfaces perfectly clean, for fear that the sensation of purity may leave you.  I prefer Tanizaki's world, with its grime, patina, and unavoidable sheen of antiquity.

At the end of the essay, Tanizaki admits he sounds like a grumbling old man, but pleads with the reader that:

In the house of literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.  I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one house where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

Object or Anti-Object

Part I- An International Style

In 1930, two good friends, both in their early twenties, decided to embark on an architectural driving tour of Europe.  They documented their trip in pictures.  But these were no ordinary men -- the first, Henry-Russel Hitchcock became a leading architectural historian, and the second, Philip Johnson, became one of the preeminent architects of his generation.  Their trip and pictures were developed into the first exhibition on architecture in New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1932, along with an essay to accompany the exhibit.  Johnson and Hitchcock called it The International Style.  Three basic commonalities ran through this new style:

1. Architecture as Volume
2. Regularity
3. The Avoidance of Applied Decoration

The first, architecture as volume, is the most powerful of the three.  Most buildings before 1920 had heavy and thick exterior masonry walls; by the 1930's, structural engineering had conquered steel, so that with a steel skeleton, walls became “merely subordinate elements fitted like screens between the supports….”  Instead of small windows spaced apart from one another, repeated holes punched into a couple feet of brick, “entire facades are frequently cantilevered and the [glass] screen walls set some distance outside the supports.”  And while “[t]he apparent tensions of a masonry wall are directly gravitational,” in contrast, “[t]he apparent tensions of screen walls are not thus polarized in a vertical direction, but are felt to exist in all directions, as in a stretched textile.”  Thus, “[t]he effect of mass, of static solidity, hitherto the prime quality of architecture, has all but disappeared; in its place there is an effect of volume, or more accurately, of plane surfaces bounding a volume.”  All above quotes are from the essay.

Hitchcock and Johnson choose Mies Van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona as illustrative of the first principle, and it is indeed a masterwork of using planes to shape space.  I visited Barcelona in September of 2014, and actually visited the park in which the pavilion still stands.  But I did not realize it at the time, and missed the opportunity to see the revolutionary thin planes of marble, shallow reflecting pool, and perfectly placed statue.  In place of pictures I should have taken, here is a sketch, with the roof made transparent:

Mies Pavilion   --   Barcelona, Spain

The second concept, regularity, derives from the regular spacing of supports in a steel skeleton, which are so spaced as to equalize the stress and strain on each support.  Exterior aesthetics should also feature this underlying regular rhythm.  

The third concept, the avoidance of decoration, is self-explanatory.  

Hitchcock and Johnson note Corbusier’s Villa Savoy is one of the very best examples of the international style – it features thin planes defining space, a structure elevated on regularly spaced pilotis, or metal stilts, and is utterly stripped of exterior decoration:

Villa Savoy  --  Poissy, France

Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Illinois, also illustrates the international style, but has slightly thicker steel stilts that elevate it only about 5 feet off the ground.  A large plane of a terrace is in front of the house, giving the house the appearance of resting on a pedestal.

PART II- ANTI-OBJECT

In 2006, just over 75 years after The International Style was written, one of Japan’s leading architects, Kengo Kuma, wrote an essay entitled “Anti-Object.”  Kuma’s thesis was that the success of modernism as an architectural movement hinged on an architecture that turned houses into objects.  

First off, let me note that Mr. Kuma is a wonderful essayist.  Given his native Japanese, he is surprisingly adept at English prose and metaphor.  His intellect is exceptionally various and curious, effortlessly drawing from philosophy, economics, and history to shape his ideas.  

He starts his essay with a lesser-know German modernist architect, Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936, just after the International Style exhibition occurred in New York.  While modern, Taut did not follow the International Style.  Kuma describes Taut as one of the first architects to reject the notion of architecture as object.  He created an architecture that Kuma describes as anti-object.  To explore what he means by "object" and "anti-object," Kuma launches into a series of dichotomies.

First he notes Taut studied at a school in Germany where the philosopher Immanuel Kant is buried.  Kant's gravestone included the inscription "The starry heavens above and the moral law within me."  The quote was echoed in Kant's philosophy, which was also based on dichotomies.  Taut's architectural impulses were torn between romanticism and objectivism.  Kuma contrasts this with Descartes' mind/body dualism that asserted the mind independently existed (via thought) from the body.  But Locke and Hume questioned the validity of this dichotomy:

"All ideas come from sensation or reflection.  Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.  How comes it to be furnished?  Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?  Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge?  To this I answer, in one word, from experience."  

To Locke and Hume, the mind is not independent of the body, but inextricably connected to the bodies' experience.  Thought does not emerge from a void.  Kuma then contrasts Kant's naturalistic English landscape garden with the regular and repeating geometrical shapes of the French garden.  Kuma finally circles back to the topic at hand, arguing, "[w]hereas architecture can be construed as an independent object - as an autonomous figure cut off from the ground - a garden is a continuum, the ground itself."  Interconnection is truth to Kant, and to Kuma.

This brings us to his central thesis: modernism succeeded by objectifying architecture, distinguishing it from the surrounding landscape such that it could be easily perceived from a distance as distinct geometric forms.  Most critically, modernist buildings could be easily captured by a camera -- the reproduction of images to a mass audience.  In other words, the pictures had to "show the entire building, which requires sufficient distance between subject and object," and the "building had to have forms and details predicated on being viewed from a distance," meaning "pure, easily recognizable shapes."  Likewise, "textures that could only be viewed up close got in the way," and textures that appeared different from multiple vantage points resulted in "the inability to present a single unambiguous overall image."

His thesis cuts to the heart of my own project -- to define an ideal architecture, and in particular, to use photography as a tool in that pursuit.  So I have some skin in the game, so to speak.

Kuma does not mention the International Style by name, but it is undoubtedly at the heart of his criticism.  For example, Kuma describes Corbusier's pilotis as creating an object distinct from the environment -- they literally elevate the white geometric shape of the Villa Savoy above the ground.  Similarly, Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth house is described as distinct from its environment because, like art, it is placed on a pedestal.

Kuma describes the objectification of architecture as the "stimulation of the public's desire for new houses as new products," noting that at the same time that department stores became a necessary context in which to sell objects called "products," art museums became a necessary context in which to sell objects called "private houses" to the middle class.  This is a not so subtle slap at Philip Johnson, as he became the MoMA's first curator of architecture after the success of the first show on International Style.  This also brings to mind the great success modern art museums (and their museum stores) have had in commercializing the experience of art to ever-increasing crowds of people, while other general art museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art have struggled to make ends meet.  (See: 2 Art Worlds: Flush MoMA, Struggling Met)

According to Kuma, people "were sustained in their isolation by the dream of escape from their mediocrity through the possession of attractive objects."  This also struck a chord within me, as I've often wondered if my attraction to architecture is, at least in part, a desire to distinguish myself from all those other people living lives of quiet desperation.  My life must have more meaning, the argument goes, because my experiences of beauty (via architecture) are deeper, truer, and thus more meaningful.  But am I deceived by good photography?  Confusing mediocrity with middle class?  Is the purchase of an object that provides an experience, such as a house, a more elaborate but still ultimately superficial exercise in consumption, or an opportunity to heighten sensation and provide a more meaningful experience?  Worse yet, if its both, how am I to tell the difference?

After admiringly describing a basement that Bruno Taut remodeled in Japan, Kuma then puts forth several examples of his own architecture that he describes as anti-objects.  His first example is a hill top viewing platform that is nearly invisible from below the platform - the approach to the platform enters a tall narrow slot in the top of the mountain.  From inside the slot, the viewer can climb a main set of stairs that brings them to the first and lowest platform, on the left in my sketch below.  A series of elevated walkways allows a viewer to walk above the slot, and gain a few more views of the surrounding islands and ocean, before climbing a couple more sets of stairs to the highest viewing platform, on the far right in my sketch below:

Kiro-san Observatory  --  Kiro-san, Yoshiumi-cho, Imabari-shi, Ehime, Japan

The viewing platform is essentially a slot in the top of the mountain.  It's almost as if Kuma was observing Frank Lloyd Wright's maxim to never build a structure directly on top of a hill, but instead make it of the hill by placing it just below the top.  Kuma takes this idea to the next level, by removing the top of the hill, and making it negative space.  His viewing platform could not be more "of" the hill than this.  The two platforms, rectangular forms cantilevered out over the edges of his slot, are still below where the top of the hill would have been, in keeping with Wright.

Next Kuma describes a house overlooking the ocean that features a room on the second floor surrounded by water.  Kuma went to great lengths to ensure the water feature is not visible from outside of the house, and even put wood slats above the room, so as to prevent the water from being seen from the air.

Kuma concludes that "[t]oday, we too must deal with the issue Taut confronted.  We have been made to recognize the limitations of a world ruled by objects.  The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries.  So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density.  Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects.  Everything is interconnected and intertwined."

Kuma's anti-object thesis strikes me as a creative retread of anti-materialism and consumerism.  Architecture that is easily reproducible via photography and mass media is Veblen's conspicuous consumption on steroids.  It exchanges the designer handbag for the house featured in Dwell magazine.  It's undoubtedly true that modern architecture rose to prominence in the 1930's in part because of its distinct and recognizable forms.  But it's hard to argue that other societal trends, including a new found fascination with science and its ability to improve all aspects of life, did not play a more significant role.  

As a side note, perhaps in an effort to clarify the primary contrast of his essay, Kuma defines modernism by the International Style, focuses on the east-coast-centric definition of modernism.  Corbusier famously called the house a machine for living, contributing to the focus on science and technology.  Yet Hitchcock and Johnson have been criticized for giving short shrift to Frank Lloyd Wright and R.M. Schindler, who both built thoroughly modern houses in the 1920's that blended with their surroundings, and were anything but machines.  Kuma's ideas for an anti-object was seeded long before he was born.

Yet perhaps Kuma's thesis is more applicable today, given the resurgence in interest in all things mid-century modern.  The soaring rates of inequality create ever larger groups of people that can afford massive masterworks of architecture.  Yet is the success of mid-century modern revival stores such as Design Within Reach, and glossy magazines like Dwell, actually indicative of a resurgence of modern architecture?  Or just a clever repackaging of surfaces and furniture, typically in condos, that has little or nothing to do with actual architectural form?  The connection between objectification, consumption, and modern architecture is less than clear.

I agree with Kuma that the success of any art form should not depend solely on its ease of marketability, but that does not seem to be the original motivation for the international style.  Technology enabled a painting style (cubism) to come to life as architecture.  The removal of excess decoration was a natural impulse when steel allowed buildings to be finally free of the complications of brick.  The marketability and photogenic nature of modern architecture merely coincided with other stylistic impulses.  Kuma confuses cause and effect by implying the ease of marketing taints the object being marketed.  

This also raises the key question: why blame the object and not the objectifier?  

If the experience of architecture can be divided into at least two categories -- the external (walking up to a building, and around it) and the internal (being inside of it)-- why go through so much trouble of hiding the external?  

Surely there are other ways to acknowledge the power of the external while reinforcing the greater importance of the internal -- the every day lived experience.  People spend many more hours inside their houses than outside of them, admiring them from a distance.  Yet even if Kuma is right in arguing that everything is connected (it is), and that we ought to design buildings to emphasize this (we should), must we really remove the pleasure of approaching a building from the outside?  Of walking through the garden, as it were, to the door?  

At least here, I believe Kuma has gone too far in denying the viewer the opportunity to objectify a building.  By all means, blend the building with the surrounding landscape and/or other buildings, make it diffuse into its environment.  Re-emphasize the primacy of the internal by avoiding distinct geometric forms, and Corbusier's bright white stucco and pilotis.  Integrate stone, wood, and water into the exterior.  But don't hide the house, or bury it underground.  Don't force the viewer to enter a tunnel cut into a hillside, however ever dramatic the eventual view may be.  Let the viewer know they have arrived -- at what, they may not know, but give them the pleasure of standing back and seeing what they are about to enter.

Zaha's Farewell

It wasn’t until I read Thomas De Monchaux’s April 4, 2016 article in the New Yorker that I appreciated the genius of Zaha Hadid’s painting. According to Monchaux, a 1988 MoMa exhibition of her paintings “may prove to have been the second most important American architectural exhibit of all time.” The first being that other exhibition at the MoMa that is always mentioned when recounting the history of modern architecture stateside — Phillip Johnson’s 1932 exhibit and pamphlet on The International Style. I would put her paintings here, but as an IP attorney, I know better, so instead I’ll link to the New Yorker article where you can see some of the best paintings and drawings:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/zaha-hadid-was-just-getting-started

The diminutive “queen of ____” was used to describe her architecture, and often herself, because gender is an inevitable focus when you’re the first woman to win a Pritzker Prize (and only woman, until it was jointly awarded to a woman and man in 2010). She was not a queen — a moniker implying a potential higher authority — she was simply the best at what she did. And what she did was to translate her famous deconstructivist and cubist paintings into jutting angles and lustrous curves, bringing paintings to life in a way no one had done before.

I was in Rome in April of 2016, and used the opportunity to visit one of her works, the Maxxi Museum, built in 2010.

The Maxxi is not an imposing building from the street, only two stories tall, matching the height and facades of the surrounding buildings. Only two large trapezoidal concrete forms poking out of the ends of the building on the second story hinted that this was not just another building on the block.

Walking into the courtyard off the street, the pretense of history is dropped: you see the windows of a room cantilevered out more than three stories up, and the swoop of walkway above you, supported by rows of steel tubes.

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I knew from Google Maps that it wasn’t just a room, but the end of a long ramp of a curved rectangular solid that ran half the length of the building before jutting out above the courtyard:

The enclosed hallway/room above the entry that seemed to pull away from the building also stood out:

Hadid now had my attention, and when I walked into the lobby, she overwhelmed it.

I first saw the low trapezoidal white curve of the desk, before my eyes were led upward along the stark black railings of the stairs on the right. The stairs! Up up up they went, a sinuous ribbon of black on the light concrete walls that split and interlaced back on itself as it climbed. I was immediately drawn to the stairs, and started climbing them. I took picture after picture, only being able to advance a few steps before seeing something new. It was impossible to capture the experience of climbing them, as each curve revealed a new view, a new angle, yet hundreds of pictures, and even a movie would fail, because they wouldn’t allow you to turn your head at an impulse up, down, or back towards where you started. Even VR wouldn’t work, as it’s not enough to be able to freely turn your head — you must be able to walk to the edge of a railing and look down. VR would still force you to either stand still, or move with the 360 degree camera, and not move where you felt the design lead you.

From above, the angles of the desk were flattened, and the desk revealed nested oval forms. Probably unintentional, but anything that looks like an ear in an art museum makes me think of Van Gogh.

The stairs were both heavy and light, with solid (but hollow) black metal railings, and mesh steps that induced vertigo three stories up.

Large red tubes hung askew from the ceiling, boldly slashing into empty spaces. Walking around them revealed that they were carefully positioned to intersect the spaces between the stairs in just the right way, an effect that made them seem to be brush strokes from Hadid. The stark black lines of the railings on the background of the light concrete walls reminded me of her ink drawings. It felt as if you were walking into one of her paintings.

Cubist paintings appeared to my younger self as lacking dimensionality — flattened and seemingly randomly positioned planes and shapes. But when I walked into the Maxxi, those lines and planes assumed their proper form, and I suddenly understood what I was missing: not depth, but time. Time brings the third dimension to life, allows you to walk through the painting and untangle the many layers, or even better, to see the many paintings within the one. Gideon’s bedrock of modernism textbook was titled in the proper order: Time, Space, and Architecture, as if to suggest the way you view the subject (walk around it, from every angle, inside and out, for hours) is the defining aspect of the subject (architecture).

And the ceiling! Vertical concrete slats filtered light which flooded in through skylights, and the slats ran the full length of the ceiling before curving with the wall around a corner and out of view.

According to Ada Louise Huxtable, an architect’s primary challenge in designing a museum is to balance the tension between the curator’s desire to have the museum disappear in service to the displayed art and the architect’s urge to draw the viewer’s eye away from the displayed art and toward the built art: the experience of being within a novel form. I can’t say Hadid entirely succeeded, as the lobby and the room at the culmination of the stairs first overwhelmed me with form, and then led me to ignore the art and walk out on the cantilever to the window:

The rest of the galleries, however, were quite well designed, and the architecture faded into the background (concrete ceiling slats still curved in elegant proportion, but stayed out of view unless you looked up, instead focusing on their function: to bring enough natural light into galleries). There was a comprehensive exhibit on Turkey’s intersection of east and west, well-timed given the then-recent news of a flood of refugees from Syria reaching Turkey.

Hadid reasserts herself in the final galleries with bold angles and forms, and splashes of red, before bringing the viewer back to lobby:

The stairs reappear in the final galleries.

The only element I found lacking was Hadid’s occasionally overly sleek surfaces. The bottom of the catwalks between the black stairs were all covered with white plastic surfaces lit from beneath with fluorescent or cold LED lights, as if they were fashion catwalks in an MC Escher sketch. The gap between the railings and the wall was also lit with cold LED lights, as one commonly sees in restaurants and nightclubs. A hardwood floor overlooking the lobby seemed out of place.

A fitting farewell to an architect I wish I had gotten to know before her untimely passing.

All photography is taken by the author, except for Google Maps screen captures.

Parco De Musica

When in Rome, they say, and so I did — I found the modern architecture the Romans built. You can only walk through the hot and huddled masses of the Vatican Museum so many times. My previous post describes my visit to the Maxxi Museum. I also wanted to visit Richard Meier's Jubilee church, but ran out of time. Luckily, one of only two Renzo Piano buildings in Italy happened to be almost across the street from the Maxxi. After a short walk through buildings from the 1960 Olympics, I reached Renzo Piano’s Parco Del Musica, a group of three music auditoriums clustered together like three leaves, with a curved copper shell roof giving each of the three the appearance of a beetle. They were clustered around an outdoor amphitheater with red brick stairs. The complex also featured a nice cafe and restaurant built into the ground beneath the auditoriums.

The three auditoriums were shaped in a semi-circle around the central amphitheater.

The three auditoriums hovered over the edges of the red brick seats.

When viewed from the side, the sections of the roof begin to seem like a beetle’s shell.

During construction, apparently they uncovered the ruins of an ancient Roman villa. Renzo Piano decided to preserve the ruins, and rotated the theaters to accommodate the ruins.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go inside any of the theaters, but I did appreciate much of the detail work. For example, the struts supporting the underside of the roof were intricately arrayed in a rotating pattern:

Google Earth shows Piano’s adept blending of the landscape with his buildings (most of the trees and grass actually are on the roof of the buildings underneath — the cafe and restaurant), and the relative sizes of each building:

Three months later I was able to see Piano’s addition to the Gardner museum in Boston, and noticed a lot of similar details in metal struts and lights, along with a similar blend of classic red brick and woodwork.

The picture below is taken from the vertical new theater in the Gardner museum:

I say vertical because the stage was on the ground floor, surrounded by chairs, and three higher square terraces, each with two rows of seats, surrounded the stage, like a hollow ziggurat.

After exploring the entire museum, and listening to a jazz trio play in the garden, I sat in the lounge.  The lounge was full of bright red tulip chairs and couches.  It has books, and postcards, along with an invitation to comment on your experience.  Instead of words, I drew the mid-century proportioned shelves, against Piano’s classic red brick.

Needless to say, I will visit any Renzo Piano building I have the opportunity to visit.

Marin County Civic Center

On a hot summer day in southwest Wisconsin, I discovered modern architecture. Or I realized it had always been around me, and now saw it for the first time. Taliesin was the beginning of sorts, which connected me to my first house. So one of the first things I did upon arriving in San Francisco three years ago was look up every Frank Lloyd Wright building in the Bay Area.

The Marin Civic Center was built after Frank Lloyd Wright’s death.  Construction was overseen by Aaron Green, Wright's lead architect in California. Wright emulated the rolling hills of Marin in his design, two bridges linked at a large dome in the middle of the buildings, each bridge formed from a fractal-like repetition of arches.

Upon entering one of the long halls that run the full length of each building, I was struck by the highly polished floor, and sparse detailing, unusual for Wright (and perhaps a reflection that he wasn't around to add detail in response to the demands of construction).

The skylight flooded the hall with light, and for much of the length of the hall, a central planter burst with trees and plants of all sizes, to the point where it almost felt as if I was in a tropical conservatory.

You could feel the humidity increase due to the plants, and it was quite nice.

The two bridges form long halls of three levels each, with a central skylight and atrium running the length of both buildings. Each level opened to the central hall, and each level was slightly stepped back from the level below it, creating a forced perspective that increased the sense of the height.

Wright used this same idea in the Guggenheim museum in New York (although he added the controversial circular ramp in the Guggenheim):

The upper levels of the Civic Center are filled with city municipal offices. Here, two employees discussed an issue overlooking the atrium.

The end of the long hall featured another small planter, a circular leather seating area ringed in light, and a final opening that suggested a continuation of the shape beyond the greenery.

We ate lunch at the cafe on the third level, and stepped outside to the terrace, in which a small pond was surrounded by a garden. A tall and slender golden triangular spire, with strong asian influences, emerged from the terrace, at the intersection of the two bridges.

It was painted in golden reflective paint.

I am not partial to Wright’s experiments with circular forms near the end of his career, but this building grew on me. Wright often placed notches or blocks along the eaves of his houses, like Japanese architecture, which I find quite affecting for their simplicity yet intricate woodworking, and rhythm. The repeated parallel lines are pleasing to the eye. But when simply converted to spheres, the repeating parallel lines are lost, and they resemble lights on a old movie theater sign, or a carnival-esque atmosphere.

The color scheme also reflected the early 1960’s more than I cared for (pink, light blue, yellow gold), and the building as a whole lacked the carefully placed details Wright is known for, but I still had affection for the arching forms by the time we left.

It’s likely a good thing Wright did not live to see what emerged not much more than 15 years after his death — post modernism’s ahistorical mashup of styles and forms exaggerated to the point of parody. As infuriating as Wright found Mies and Corbusier (he once described them as two flies buzzing around his head — perhaps more apt a description of the size of his head than anything else) they had a lot more in common with him than he cared to admit.

The Marin Civic Center was also a reminder of how quickly Wright’s command over the field of American architecture fell by the wayside when his practice was left to his proteges, such as Aaron Green. This is not necessarily an indictment of Green — several of his houses show novel experimentation with form, and an extension of Wright’s style. Perhaps Wright’s best draftsman, John Howe, also brought true vision to Wright’s ideas, especially in his masterpiece, Sankaku, in Burnsville, Minnesota. But even the best often appeared to be mere iterations, and a decade after Wright’s death, they largely fell silent in the national conversation over what form would predominate next.

Perhaps this is a testimony to the towering genius of Wright, and his ease of creating unending new designs, of pushing beyond all prior restraints. One wonders how Wright would have fared today, with a revival of interest in all things mid-century, organic architecture, and hand crafted forms. One also wonders how Wright would have soared with modern engineering and computer aided design. But, of course, my favorite of his buildings are his houses. He may have worked best on the most intimate of scales. I’ll post next about the Hanna House on the Stanford campus.

All pictures, except for Google Earth view and roof notch detail, are by the author.