Experiencing architecture, landscapes, and urban places is inescapable and as integral to the pleasures and frustrations of life as our encounters with people – or with the natural world or ideas. And as we respond at conscious, but more often unconscious levels – spontaneously, instantaneously, and in reflection years later – the environments we’ve built shape everyone’s moods, thoughts, emotions and the ways we move and act.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water

But what we feel or think is only triggered by the places we’ve built “out-there.”  “Experience” takes shape when a mix of sensations flows into our inner worlds, already restless with memories, associations, trains-of-thought, and motivations of the moment, in other words when they encounter our evolved mind and body – who we are “in-here.”

The people who regulate, design, and build the places that add up to our habitat know this, or at least talk about it, and many are working with sophisticated, well-tested technologies, knowledge and ideas. Yet, look around. Over-and-over again the results on the ground, the places that are actually built and lived in – the clear, tangible expression of our society – after a first flash of marketing and excitement, prove disappointing.

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Photo by John Goodman

Ada Louise Huxtable wrote a blistering critique of the New York Public Library’s renovation plans in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. For fans of Huxtable and critics of the plan, it is a glorious evisceration: sharp, analytic, well-grounded in the history of both the institution and the glorious building itself. The piece reminded me of Phillip Lopate’s January 2006 essay for us, which declared Huxtable our finest architecture critic. What’s remarkable about yesterday’s piece—and hopeful for all of us youngsters in our 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—is this truth: Lopate’s declaration still applies, seven years later. Huxtable may not write as often as she used to, but it’s hard, if not impossible, to detect any diminution of her clarity, grace and power.

For those of you who missed it, Mark’s Lamster’s excellent cover story on libraries appeared in our October 2012 issue.

One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.

By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.

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Our preceding post, Concrete – The Offending Material, explored the expressive potential and construction-related problems common to the monolithic architectural concrete of mid-20th century. Here we focus on the typical fenestration of these concrete buildings and the issues inherent to their windows’ preservation and restoration.

Brutalist architecture exploited the visual potential of monolithic glazing in large openings as part of a materials dialog with concrete surface textures and mass.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Paul Rudolph, completed 1966. Brutalist architecture used smooth, transparent, monolithic glazing in large openings to emphasize mass and textured concrete surfaces. [Photo: Bruner/Cott]

Frameless, non-operable butt-glazing developed along with concrete construction, introducing a new scale of transparency into large areas of massive structure. It allowed for extreme simplification—concrete building facades could be conceived as the architectural elaboration of a single material…plus glass.

Green Building, MIT, I. M. Pei, completed 1964. Frameless glazing minimized distraction from the sculptured contours of concrete building facades.  [Photo: Bruner/Cott]

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Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Baltimore’s Northeast Market—a fixture in the city’s Middle East neighborhood since 1885 and a cultural anchor of its community—is not the kind of place that sells cage free eggs and locally grown kale. It does, however, boast some of the city’s best lake trout (technically Atlantic whiting but so fried and delicious who’s checking?) and homemade Snowballs, two beloved local delicacies. The 36,000 square foot public market sits at a crossroads between Johns Hopkins Medical Campus and the mostly African American residential community of East Baltimore, providing a critical point of interaction between local residents and the institution, who have had a difficult and sometimes antagonistic relationship. But the relationship is complex: Johns Hopkins is both the largest employer in the area and a key institutional partner in the adjacent $1.8 billion redevelopment project, a project which has been a point of contention in the community for the last decade.

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

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Our last post, “Materials and Building Components,” described modernism’s growing emphasis on monolithic concrete walls as an alternative to traditional masonry. While conservation of brick and stone are now well understood, failures in exposed concrete are presenting new challenges, both technical and aesthetic. Monolithic concrete no longer has the same hold on the imaginations of architects as it did for the Brutalist masters, and technical difficulties have contributed to the demise of its popularity. Understanding how to preserve this honest, raw material is crucial to saving a seminal style from sure extinction.

Technical and Aesthetic Challenges

Mechanical failures showed up in mid-century concrete wall sections almost immediately, but the chemical changes that affect the walls’ integrity and longevity are more insidious and these were slower to emerge. The technical aspects of restoring concrete are especially challenging when compared with brick and stone, as concrete walls contain embedded steel, and steel’s corrosion can be destructive in many ways. Concrete restoration is also difficult aesthetically. Unfortunately today, the escalating default response for many building owners and their consultants is to apply elastomeric coatings over entire concrete facades, changing their appearance in a way that undermines the façade’s character and significance. Poorly conceived and executed repairs only amplify this trend.

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Frank Furness, Architect
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), 1876
Photo: Gutekunst

Descendents of Frank Furness, the great 19th century Philadelphia architect, were emphatic. It’s not pronounced Fur-Ness, it’s Furness as in “furnace”. No matter how you say it Furness sometimes “can’t get no respect.” During his lifetime he completed some 1,000 projects yet too many of those distinctive works were callously demolished by his own hometown. The glorious Victorian interiors of the PAFA building were once covered in sheet-rock during the 20th century.

A glimpse of PAFA’s hand crafted Victorian interior
Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Is anyone stoking the furnace of his reputation in the 21st century?

George E. Thomas, cultural historian and author, met with Harry Philbrick, director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA), an unabashed enthusiast of architecture. They conspired to pull off Thomas’ idea of a citywide celebration this year – “Furness 2012 Inventing Modern” — with exhibits and events fanned out to Philadelphia cultural venues and onto the web. You now have a rare, multifaceted view of an architect who embodied the essence of 19th century Philadelphia, and is considered a linchpin in the evolution of American modernism.

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Concrete, edited by William Hall with an essay by Leonard Karen, $49.95 US/CAN, Phaidon March 2013, www.phaidon.com

When I encounter a book dust jacket that’s textured to the touch I usually assume that it’s a willful distraction from the contents within; not so with Phaidon’s Concrete. Its striated cover perfectly evokes its complex subject.  Concrete, despite its historical roles from the Roman Pantheon to Fallingwater,  is a much-unloved material, rough to the touch and to the popular imagination.  Both the volume’s introduction and essay make immediate acknowledgement of its unpopularity. William Hall writes:

“Despite its range and ubiquity, many people associate concrete with rain-stained social housing, or banal industrial buildings,” writes William Hall. “Detractors of concrete cite such tired monoliths, and point out the failure of the material. Its economy and speed of production have inevitably led to its use on buildings of poor quality – frequently compounded by substandard design and inadequate maintenance. But concrete cannot be held responsible for all the failures of concrete buildings. For too long negative associations have dominated the public perception of concrete.”

A turn to the first photo in volume can do wonders to allay this perception, with a gently undulating concrete bridge complementing a rocky Austrian river view. Concrete need not be forbidding! And look, there’s the Guggenheim on the next page. Who doesn’t like that?

Concrete is something of a constructive wonder. This slurry of mineral and water is adaptable into almost any number of shapes and frames. The fact that most of these shapes haven’t been particularly imaginative is no fault of concrete itself; no more than wheat is to blame for Wonder Bread.

“Iron in combination with concrete, reinforced concrete, is the building material of the new will to form,” wrote Erich Mendelsohn in 1914. “Its structural strength capable of being loaded almost equally with stress and compression will give rise to a new, specific logic in the laws of statics, logic of form, of harmony, of implicitness.”

Subsequent failures are of imagination, not of material.

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1996, Oscar Niemeyer, page 123, photo courtesy of Leonardo Finotti
This 50 m (164 ft) wide flying saucer, perched on the edge of a cliff, was designed when Niemeyer was 89 years old. A wide winding slope connects visitors to the entrance 10 m (33 ft) above the ground.

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We get definite psychological benefits from feeling a sense of awe, so says recent research by Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker. Places that work can make us feel that rare emotion, as these researchers learned. In their study of people “who felt awe, relative to other emotions [such as happiness], felt they had more time available … and were less impatient … [those who] experienced awe were also more willing to volunteer their time to help others … more strongly preferred experiences over material products … and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

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Our most recent post on Debating the Value of Mid-Century Modern discussed the architect as multi-party advocate and mediator. It was the last in a series that explored the interactions among the stakeholders of these buildings and how original design intent may hamper or encourage their rehabilitation and reuse. With this post, we begin a series that will focus on the technical aspects of modern materials and assemblies, including how construction methods of the period affect today’s decisions about the repair and improvement of mid-century building envelopes.

From the beginning, materials were significant to the design intent of modern architects and to the performance of their buildings. This trend first emerged in Europe before World War I, when design forcefully aligned itself with industrial production, challenging centuries of architectural values and design approaches. Visually, buildings no longer reflected history. Instead, they echoed the aesthetics of civil engineering and industrial structures. Traditional craftwork was replaced by factory-built components assembled on site with a minimum of expressive handwork, just as glass, steel, and concrete began to be viewed as expressive elements. This shift represented a deliberate affront to refined stone surfaces, the complexity of carved ornament, and the social hierarchies implicit in previous building facades and spaces.

The recessed windows, deep sills, and overhanging cornices of masonry buildings such as McKim, Mead & White’s 1872 Boston Public Library (left) shed wind-driven rain better than the sheer elevations of International Style buildings like Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany (right).

Photo Credits: Boston Public Library Collection, no known restrictions; and Flickr user Franz Drewniak (drz image), respectively

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