As we enter a transition era that demands far greater resilience and sustainability in our technological systems, we must ask tough new questions about existing approaches to architecture and settlement. Post-occupancy evaluations show that many new buildings as well as retrofits of some older buildings, are performing substantially below minimal expectations. In some notable cases, the research results are frankly dismal [see “Toward Resilient Architectures 2: Why Green Often Isn’t”].

The trouble is that the existing system of settlement, developed in the oil-fueled industrial age, is beginning to appear fundamentally limited. And we’re recognizing that it’s not possible to solve our problems using the same typologies that created them in the first place. In a “far-from-equilibrium” world, as resilience theory suggests, we cannot rely on engineered, “bolt-on” approaches to these typologies, which are only likely to produce a cascade of unintended consequences. What we need is an inherent ability to handle “shocks to the system,” of the kind we see routinely in biological systems.

In “Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons” we described several elements of such resilient structures, including redundant (“web-network”) connectivity, approaches incorporating diversity, work distributed across many scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. We noted that many older structures also had exactly these qualities of resilient structures to a remarkable degree, and in evaluations they often perform surprisingly well today. Nevertheless during the last century, in the dawning age of industrial design, the desirable qualities resilient buildings offered were lost. What happened?

The fractal mathematics of nature bears a striking resemblance to human ornament, as in this fractal generated by a finite subdivision rule. This is not a coincidence: ornament may be what humans use as a kind of “glue” to help weave our spaces together. It now appears that the removal of ornament and pattern has far-reaching consequences for the capacity of environmental structures to form coherent, resilient wholes. Image: Brirush/Wikimedia

A common narrative asserts that the world moved on to more practical and efficient ways of doing things, and older methods were quaint and un-modern. According to this narrative, the new architecture was the inevitable product of inexorable forces, the undeniable expression of an exciting industrial “spirit of the age.” The new buildings would be streamlined, beautiful, and above all, “stylistically appropriate.” Read more…

A mind is predisposed to organize learning and experiences into narratives, and as we search for order and patterns, our attention is captured by human stories. We can’t resist clues discovered in unfolding plotlines, beginnings and endings or conflict, climax and resolutions; the search for causes and effects is built into our “learning” brain. And we’re equally drawn to moods and settings – all experienced through real or fictional characters that grow, change, solve problems and, ultimately, win in their own way. We tend to package the results in myths, legends, literature, and entertainment that bind families and communities together and ultimately define a culture. This happens, for each of us, in the environments we build as well. The narrative representations made “in-here,” as we mirror, or imagine ourselves in the reality “out-there” become our way to impose an understandable order on fragments of experience – and realize its pleasures. Like naming, stories create their context, giving perceptions a meaning.

Encountering a new place, we enter, in effect, into stories already underway.  And as the setting and the human life that animates it engages our interest, we tend to find our own place, to belong or not, within these flows of people, spaces, and events. As the accumulating sensations trigger messages, associations, and emotions, we fill in the details and fit them into our belief systems, theories, and prejudices. We weave them into our “personal project” – our own imagined journey through life with its intentions and motivations of the moment. Then the narrative momentum, this illusion that we can control, is the way we fix a built environment into our long-term memory and, as a result, merge it into our lives – and often into our identity.

Telling a story with a built environment is integral to design and is often done with great skill by people who know their audiences. And some of the most popular, memorable public places are those conceived as theater from the start – a stage where lives play out. Dramatic narratives are laid out for us with paths, vistas, suspense-and-resolutions, and the choreography of see-and-be-seen entrances and processions.  The great English garden at Stourhead is, literally, designed to tell stories of the owner’s family, of Greek mythology and a landscape architect’s ability to express “the genius of the place.” Read more…

“Was James Stirling modernism’s last great prophet, or postmodernism’s original poster child?” If this question keeps you up at night you might not rest any more easily after you’ve finished the book that it launches, Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist. But the fault would rest more with the intriguing excess of ideas that the author presents, rather than the absence of any comparably pithy, one-line answer.

Contemporary architectural taxonomy, when you narrow it down to subjects worth a book-length study, is difficult about as often as it is simple. No boundary is more suspect than one between modernism and postmodernism, where laws become undermined by endless inbred impulses, whether conscious or not. These classification debates can lead to oversimplified questions of whether a building’s appearance suggests doctrinaire rigidity or ironic quotation; that glib test of whether it looks like the Villa Savoye on the one hand or a clock, a buffalo, a tureen,  a Cistercian gristmill on the other. In the absence of other evidence, sometimes purely structural analyses are a fair foundation for these judgments.

Happily, however, Lawrence is engaged in quite a different, and far more rigorous pursuit. She’s concerned with a close analysis of Stirling’s own thinking about his projects and his idiosyncratic conception of modernism, as “a set of principles that transcended association with the contemporary or even with the twentieth century; they had nothing to do with any stylistic language, modern or remote. As Stirling was fond of saying, ‘There’s nothing fundamentally new about modern architecture,’ by which he meant that modern qualities could be found in buildings throughout all of history.”

This may not be a useful way of thinking about either modernism or postmodernism in the larger world, but it certainly is an interesting way to think about James Stirling. Lawrence advances the Harold Bloom-influenced thesis that Stirling’s invocation of the past bore a unique stamp, forsaking reference for its own sake in favor of a vital present-ness.

“’To revision’ something, as Bloom notes, is to literally ‘see’ it ‘again.’ This is a distinct idea from referencing, a more neutral act in which the element brought forward from the past is acknowledged as complete and left more or less intact. The Latin root of ‘reference’ defines an origin point—-in other words, a fixed and knowable beginning. Copying similarly implies that the original element is unmodified; the later version simply a repetition of the earlier incarnation. Re-visioning, on the other hand, acts more violently and more decisively on the precedent, violating its initial terms. The act of revision necessitates some kind of change—-a ‘correction,’ to use Bloom’s term.”

Lawrence takes as her focus only six of her subject’s significant works, those “focused on Stirling’s investigation of historical sources and their investigation to modernism,” a tour which affords a fascinating frame for her thesis but, just as valuably, the opportunity for a rigorous examination of several of Stirling’s greatest works.

An intriguing starting point: a list of Stirling’s declared favorite works while in architecture school featured Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and Ouevre Complete but also A.E. Richardson’s Monumental Classic Architecture in Britain and Ireland, and Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower’s British Art and the Mediterranean, a volume I’ve never heard of, but which traces the seemingly very un-Stirlingesque “Mediterranean influence on English art, from prehistory to the nineteenth century.”

We start, unsurprisingly, with Corbusier. Stirling’s Flat at Ham Common (a collaboration with James Gowan) was an acknowledged response to Corb’s Maisons Jaoul, which Stirling repeatedly disparaged for its perceived turn from that architect’s earlier “rationalism.” And why revise a master’s undistinguished work?

Partly, Lawrence speculates, to distinguish the project from prewar modernism and, more importantly, to “rationalize” Corbusier’s precedent. Stirling and Gowan modeled a close accord between structural circumstance and visibility, bathrooms and bedrooms cluster along the structural cross walls, living rooms along the facades freed from load-bearing constraints. They jettisoned French vernacular features, such as the earth roof and the Catalan vault at Jaoul, while turning to English cheap and “messy” Londonstock brick. Later Stirling paired a photo of a window at Ham Common with one of a Liverpool dock, to emphasize a natural English connection; at the same time he was tidying the perceived irrationality of Jaoul. He referred to bricks as a “9-inch-by-4 ½ inch pre-cast-system” and used them precisely here, distinctly differentiating brick sections of the facade from concrete, another retort to the perceived subjective sloppiness of Corbusier’s treatment of these two materials at Jaoul.

Stirling and Gowan, Ham Common. The de Stijl–influenced stair volume of the two-story buildings. Photo: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © CCA

Stirling’s and Gowan’s game becomes subtler in the next example, the design for Churchill College at Cambridge. Here they embrace the traditional courtyard model, on a vast scale. “More broadly, symmetry at Churchill was put in the service of a very different ideological goal than it had been for the Neo-Palladians,” writes the author. “Rather than operating as any kind of idealizing or historicizing impulse, it instead became a means to distill the core attributes of the courtyard type into a pure form, to reduce the courtyard model to its essence. For example, the idiosyncratic outer walls of a typical Cambridge college that must respond to existing structures or sight constraints are here, in the absence of any context, made rectilinear; the ‘quadrangle,’ more often than not a five- or six-sided shape, with randomly angled sides of uneven lengths, its taken to its logical endpoint of a perfect square; the usually erratic paths across the courtyard are now straightened and evenly spaced. Symmetry, then, as employed at Churchill College, abstracts and ‘corrects’ the typical features of the Cambridge College…” Read more…

Previously, we wrote about Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural legacy and the relatively non-Eurocentric direction of Latin American modernism. While Niemeyer’s undulating buildings present unique restoration challenges, the U.S. is also facing trials with its own, typically rectilinear modern buildings. Looming large are the weather extremes of climate change and the quest for energy efficiency, making it apparent that the worst aspects of our mid-century buildings are their envelopes.

Designers of concrete and masonry architecture in our temperate zones often disregarded energy consumption and thermal comfort in the last century. Their buildings are a virtual list of today’s “don’ts”…too much glass, single-pane glass with an R-value of one, concrete thermal bridges with a flywheel effect in the wrong direction, zero insulation, and poor air and vapor barriers.

Elson Arts Center, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Perfectly rectilinear yet large single-glazed openings allow significant heat loss and solar heat gain. The school replaced the windows with new “oversized” insulated glazing units with low-emissivity glass, nearly doubling the R-value of the walls.

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This blog series is about an opportunity.  It’s written from the point of view of an architect and urban planner trying to work out ways that more of us can design more practical, meaningful, beautiful places—the kinds of places most likely to realize both our own intentions and the aspirations of patrons, clients, and publics who rely on us.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Frank Gehry, architect. Sketch by Albrecht Pichler

My basic idea has been to step back, look at the unfinished cultural revolutions of Modernism, and continue to build on their defining enterprise—the rapid advance of reliable sciences. The impact they have had on construction-related technologies has been enormous. But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice. We have valuable bodies of knowledge about the physical environments we build “out-there” on the land—places that profoundly affect how we all feel, think, and act everyday over a lifetime—yet we are only beginning to understand how each of us actually experiences those environments, “in-here,” and why we respond and react the ways we do. In the design professions we are, in a sense, like doctors trained more deeply in anatomy than in a patient’s total experience. That’s more or less left to informed “intuition” and, in the case of our professions, ideologies or “design sense.”

Contemporary knowledge of the biological foundations of “experience” is potentially as revolutionary in its own way as the re-discoveryof the arts and natural philosophy of Greece and Rome by the humanists of the European Renaissance. We now have effective ways to understand the exceptional skill of the artists and designers who, over millennia, have been creating the world’s great places. We can’t know what was in their minds, of course, but we can know why we respond to their work as we do.  Some very smart people are at work in this field, learning and writing about nature and human nature, and I have laid out a sketch that applies my understanding of their findings and ideas in an organized perspective—a way of thinking about design that I call “a new humanism.”

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As a designer who enjoys traditional architecture — both new and old — yet chose modernism for his own house, I hope I can offer an evenhanded reaction to Philip Nobel’s uncharacteristically misleading analysis of the Eisenhower Memorial kerfuffle.

It was disappointing to see Nobel fall into the old trap of implying that Nazi Germany was unique in its embrace of classicism during the mid-20th Century.  His question, “should we remember the man who led the defeat of Nazism with the same forms that inspired Albert Speer” betrays an ignorance of the buildings that Americans were erecting at the same time.  Perhaps Nobel has seen the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery of Art (West Wing), the Supreme Court, or the gargantuan offices of the IRS, EPA, or Department of Commerce?  All of these buildings, completed around 1940, would have done Speer proud. We may or may not love them, but they confirm that most architectural styles since the 19th Century have been international styles, whatever their name.  Only in rare cases can a “look” be associated with a regime, and classicism certainly is not one of those cases.

National Gallery of Art, West Wing

Department of Commerce Building

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Long Island: The Sunrise Homeland, sponsored by the Long Island Assocation for the 1939 World’s Fair

Long Island at mid-twentieth-century, you might have heard, was a place of explosive growth. Most of this was not very interesting. Sprawl. Tract housing. Billy Joel. They came with the island’s rapid suburban development. For a brighter look at the considerable architectural benefits of the period, there’s Long Island Modernism 1930-1980 by Caroline Rob Zaleski.

The book is an erudite tour from Great Neck to Montauk through a vibrant half-century of architectural experiment, incorporating stylistic eddies from the late Prairie Style to brutalism to high modernism and hitting such curiosities as a canvas-walled home and the only Mies van der Rohe-renovated barn along the way. Yes, that’s right. The Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, and Long Island Expressway, plus all additional tendrils of Robert Moses’ road-building offered countless new prospects for residential construction in the New York market. Affluent clients rapidly seized upon the opportunity, often lured by rising waves of architectural fashion and promise.

Leonhardt house, photo courtesy of Ezra Stoller (c) Esto

Long Island Modernism is a story, in large part, of New York City wealth grafting Bauhaus and Tailesin ideas onto picturesque spots in an empty countryside, and Zaleski does an excellent job of explaining both the cultural and design background in detail. Wright’s Rebuhn house appears, as do three homes by Antonin Raymond, Wright’s collaborator on the Japanese Imperial Hotel. The volume features four homes by Marcel Breuer, six by Breuer’s sometime director of design, William Landsberg, one by his partner Hamilton Smith, and one by Jane Yu, an interior designer in the firm. Richard Neutra, early Viennese émigré and fallen Wright disciple, designed two homes. Herman Herrey, also of the German diaspora, designed two. Round the list out with works by Sert, Durrell Stone, Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, and a handful of others from an amply-interconnected modernist pantheon and suddenly you have an island worth close attention.

Rebuhn House, courtesy of the Ronald Rebhuhn Collection

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Modernist buildings have been under attack in the U.S. for years now. We’re reminded of this fact every day as our team at Bruner/Cott & Associates works to keep an entire period of architecture from being lost in Boston, our hometown.

Holyoke Center, Harvard University (Josep Lluis Sert, completed 1961)
Photo by Bruner/Cott

News of the recent thwarted attempt—for the moment, at least—to demolish Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist masterwork, the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, underscored for us the fact that important works of mid-twentieth century modern building design is, often, only one vote away from oblivion.

We consider ourselves pioneers in adaptive use and aficionados of modernism, so we understand the plusses and minuses of these buildings and how to turn them to current user advantage. Therefore, for us, this trend toward destruction is particularly painful to watch. For the past quarter of a century, we have worked to repair, enhance, and extend the use of this architecture, trying to, in our own way, stem the tide of threat. But the reasons for this tendency to destroy modernism are abundantly clear to us.

Peabody Terrace, Harvard University (Josep Lluis Sert, completed 1963),
view from campus, photo by Steve Rosenthal

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This morning I received a breathless (as in, accusatory! alarming!) press release from an organization called the National Civic Art Society. They’re the Washington-based group that’s orchestrated much of the opposition to Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial. “National Civic Art Society Calls Attention to Conspicuous Gap in the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s Meeting Minutes,” read the headline. The release—short on actual facts but long on incriminating conjecture—then went on to accuse the commission of secretly approving adoption of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence Program as the method of choosing a designer for the memorial, as if organizing a competition and inviting the best available architects were an indictable offense. Imagine that?

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Early Design Image from designboom

The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Frank Gehry and the values he promulgates.

Current Design, image from inhabitat

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