Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography

U N C O M M O NG R O U N D ARCHITECTURE

,

T E C H N O L O G Y,

AND

TOPOGRAPHY

D AV I D L E AT H E R B A R R O W

UNCOMMON GROUND

UNCOMMON GROUND ARCHITECTURE

,

TECHNOLOGY

,

AND TOPOGRAPHY

D AV I D L E AT H E R B A R R O W

THE MIT PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND

© 2000 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leatherbarrow, David. Uncommon ground : architecture, technology, and topography / David Leatherbarrow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-12230-8 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Building sites —Planning. 2. Architecture and technology. 3. Architecture — Environmental aspects. 4. Neutra, Richard Joseph, 1892 – 1970—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Raymond, Antonin, 1888 –—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Ko¯ nstantinide¯s, Are¯s, 1913 –—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. NA2540.5´ .L433 2000 720— dc21 00-038005

CONTENTS PREFACE vi

ONE

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS 2 TWO

BUILDING LEVELS 25 THREE

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E 71 FOUR

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT 119 FIVE

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE 170 SIX

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N 213 SEVEN

CONCLUSION 269 NOTES 285

INDEX 294

P R E FA C E In this book I consider two topics that are central to architectural work: the construction and siting of buildings. Few, I suspect, would doubt their centrality, even necessity; it is virtually impossible to imagine an architectural setting that is neither built nor located somewhere. While plainly important, these topics are not, however, plainly understood when considered together; in design and discourse they are normally treated as globally different areas of thought and responsibility. Irretrievably lost in this division are the continuities and conflicts that define every setting’s theme and purpose. Two previous books have prompted this one. The first, On Weathering, examined the relationship between the building and its natural context, the context in which the building completes itself over time, by design and unexpectedly. The second book, on architectural cladding, studies the impact of modern construction technology on the building’s surfaces, questioning whether production determines representation. Standing between these two, the study presented here considers the relationships between the building’s context and construction; my thesis is that place and production, or topography and technology, are in conflict in late modern architecture, because while the technical objects incorporated into buildings are conceived independently of territorial considerations, constructed buildings never are. Thus a paradox and a question: does global technology destroy topographical coherence and cultural continuity? The answer would seem to be yes if one holds that cultures locate themselves in settlements characterized by permanence and specificity — traditional cities — for the installation of elements with no territorial obligations always disrupts traditional patterns. Because stable settlements are the framework of culture, and culture of patterns of life, continuity must be reconsidered in a time when global technology cannot be avoided. Present concerns about construction and siting have historical antecedents and geographical variation. In this book I study the middle decades of this century, roughly from 1930 to 1960. During this period the early vi

P R E FA C E

twentieth-century utopian and ideological advocacy of industrialized building gave way to the struggle for its realization, a struggle that led to serious reflection on the whole enterprise, precisely because of the difficulty of its realization and its disruptive impact on cities and culture. This study is also limited geographically, but not to one region. While the problems being addressed are faced to different degrees throughout the world, I focus on three cultural contexts only, the United States, Japan, and Greece: three that have had distinct settlement patterns and labor traditions, three that have modernized themselves differently. Contextual differences help me formulate the range and nature of responses to the issues facing construction and location in an age dominated by technological modalities of thought. To study the relationships between building and siting in these locations I have focused on the work of three architect-authors: Richard Neutra, Antonin Raymond, and Aris Konstantinidis, who practiced in the United States, Japan, and Greece respectively. These three, who are not generally ranked as heroic figures in histories of the modern movement, have been selected for two reasons: the quality and concerns of their built and written work, and the fact that their concerns were shared by others who practiced at the same time in the same regions, others who acknowledged the exigencies of industrial building while accepting the constraints and opportunities of the places in which they worked. While distinct, the three are thus representative. Each of them has been variously studied in existing scholarship. On Neutra, by far the most widely known of the three, there exist a few monographs, including the authoritative book by Thomas Hines, and many articles. Antonin Raymond, who worked in partnership with Noémi Raymond, has been the subject of just a few papers, journals, and a Ph.D. dissertation. Konstantinidis has been studied even less, mostly in articles by Kenneth Frampton and Sokratis Georgiadis. Existing studies have not considered my question: how the conflict between technology and topography in late modern architecture was understood and addressed. As I studied the buildings and writings of these architects, and this period generally, I observed important changes in the ways buildings were designed and considered. Despite what has been frequently said about the vii

P R E FA C E

objectlike character of modern buildings, these were carefully attuned to their locations, but not in traditional ways, nor without consequences for the building itself. The book’s chapters describe these consequences. The first chapter after the introduction shows that walls, the traditional element of architectural definition and platform compartition, came to have less a role in defining settings than the platforms themselves, the floors, ceilings, and intermediate levels. This use of the building’s levels meant that architectural boundaries became akin to other (and unbuilt) topographical modulations. Platform thinking thus inaugurated field understanding. Chapter 3 shows that in this period architectural frontality came to be replaced by the building’s four-sided extension into the surrounding milieu, putting in place of the front the kind of configuration that is characteristic of the back, substituting for the building’s pictorial aspect a “practical” spatiality. I distinguish the space of dispersed fragments from the recessive substrate that occasions their emergence. The fourth chapter reverses the outward movement described in the third; I consider the interior furnishings and equipment of the building and show that these “objects,” many of which were factory-made and installed into the construction, were understood and deployed as modulators and receptacles of the climate or ambient environment. While these furnishings originated “nowhere” (at least not in the vicinity of the building’s construction), they became the means by which the site animated the building, even took possession of it. In chapter 5 I let the foregoing arguments about levels, backs, and equipment converge to show that at this time the clear boundary between inside and outside was radically redefined, in order to develop a sense of uneven continuity that would both disintegrate the building as an object unto itself and reintegrate it into horizons that transcended it. These horizons are shown to be physical and practical, but also historical, and accordingly recessive. This argument puts many cherished notions about the autonomy of the architectural object, and the project, at risk. Also challenged are commonplace notions about regional coherence. In chapter 6 I show how topographical conditions that intertwine physical and cultural circumstances were interpreted as the basis for and subject matter of the building’s iconographic content. My aim is not to propose or explain the “meaning” of these buildviii

P R E FA C E

ings, but to describe how built premises established conditions under which architecture could give rise to thought about the existence it sustained. The introduction to these chapters sketches three stories, each from a period other than the one I principally address (from the fifteenth, early twentieth, and late twentieth centuries), stories that adumbrate the thematic core of the book: how architects understand and construct distance, giving to terrain recognizable shape and profile, while allowing some of its phenomena to recede into a condition of latency, safeguarding the place’s potential for its own redefinition and rearticulation. The introduction suggests and the book argues that the act of building is not the work of restoring regional identity or unity, by recreating and coordinating its familiar signs; instead, construction is described as an agency of topography’s perpetual becoming, a process unimpeded by the absence of an “origin” or “natural condition,” for either the people or the place, except as articulated in more or less mythical narratives, of which the building is most certainly one. Contemporary technology presents design with the promise of emancipation from constraints of many sorts: practical, environmental, historical, and others. In stark contrast with this promise, certain strands of contemporary criticism propose resistance to the agencies of technological progress for the sake of the individual’s and society’s self-understanding and preservation. This resistance has had manifestations in architectural iconography, tectonics, and siting, the latter involving the affirmation of place identity. Thus an alternative: technological freedom or cultural necessity. A basic premise of this book, and the reason for its attention to very specific situations, is that this sharp alternative exists primarily in theoretical thought, not in the knotted decision making that occurs in architectural production, which is more like everyday life than theory: tangles of constraints and opportunities. For this reason I attend to local details of buildings, life situations, and cultural conditions, and interpret what they exemplify: the tension between agencies of emancipation and engagement, the tension that is the real framework for design. I researched this book and wrote its first draft while enjoying a Visiting Scholar’s position at the Centre Canadien d’Architecture. Phyllis Lambert and ix

P R E FA C E

her colleagues there have established a library, study center, and community of scholars that served as an ideal milieu for the development of this text. While at the CCA I benefited from the criticism and advice of a number of colleagues: Barbara Arciszewska, Hugh Cullum, Wolfgang Jung, András Ferkai, and Eric Neil; as well as that of the head of the Centre d’Étude, Réjean Legault. My colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have also given me comments on the arguments presented in this book: particularly Joseph Rykwert and Richard Wesley. A year’s sabbatical from my teaching duties made my study possible. Also helpful at Penn were Julia Moore Converse, Director of the Architectural Archives, and William Whitaker, who helped me through the Raymond and Neutra materials held in that collection. My research into Neutra’s buildings and writings was greatly assisted by the staff at the Special Collections division of the UCLA Library. Both Thomas Hines and Sylvia Lavin offered helpful criticism of my Neutra studies. Also helpful in California were Amy and Perry Kulper, whose comments on the Neutra buildings were also important to my work. And I want to acknowledge the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Harris, the new owners of Neutra’s Desert House, who allowed me a few hours at their beautifully restored home. My research into the work of Aris Konstantinidis benefited greatly from conversations with his son Dimitris Konstantinidis. Several of my students and professional colleagues have helped me at various stages along the way. Among the first group I want to acknowledge the comments, criticism, and assistance of Steven Anderson, Paul Emmons, and Maria Karvouni. Marina Lathouri was particularly helpful and insightful, especially on the Konstantinidis chapters. At the early stages of my work I benefited from comments made by Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton, and Dalibor Vesely. Furthermore, their writings guided the first formulation of the questions addressed in this book: Frampton’s papers on critical regionalism, Colquhoun’s critique of regionalism, and Vesely’s study of the “conflict of representation.” I have said that I initially conceived this text as one written between two others, books I have coauthored with Mohsen Mostafavi. That friendship, together with his ideas and criticism, have largely influenced the way I conceived this project. As the book developed I discussed various topics with Edward Ford, Sokratis Georx

P R E FA C E

giadis, Karsten Harries, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, each of whom I would like to thank. Lastly, there are two friends and colleagues who have read the entire draft of this book and given me criticism that helped me more than they might imagine: John Dixon Hunt and Peter Carl.

xi

UNCOMMON GROUND

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS In light of previous experience we must acknowledge the impossibility of determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we should like to know. It is this general fact which makes the science of mathematics necessary. For in renouncing the hope, in almost every case, of measuring great heights or distances directly, the human mind has had to attempt to determine them indirectly, and it is thus that philosophers were led to invent mathematics. auguste comte,

PHILOSOPHIE PREMIÈRE,

third lesson

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot— well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach . . . sappho,

POETARUM LESBIORUM FRAGMENTA,

fragment 105a

An architect stands before a city seeking to describe it. Lacking a plan, map, or survey, he intends to develop one. His purpose is neither design nor construction, instead understanding. Measurement will be his method. Imagine such an architect at the dawn of the modern tradition; Leon Battista Alberti is the one I have in mind. Think of him starting at the center of a city, the Capitol in Rome, some time between 1443 and 1455, the period when he drafted Descriptio urbis Romae. He did not measure the entire city, not even most of it, although he certainly could have; he focused on a number of monuments and the outer wall, a wall that had been maintained throughout the medieval period and still gave the city its definition. Modern cities have limits, too, but of a legal not masonry sort, boundaries visible only through road signs, which is one reason why entire cities are normally neglected in design work in favor of the buildings, streets, and open spaces in a given area. Alberti also plotted the city’s principal buildings and its river, but nothing more. Thus his limited interests and his sense of urban hierarchy. Geographically, the elevated plateau of the Capitol was hardly central at the time, but Alberti believed it was so historically, and it was elevated enough for him to 2

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

be able to see most of the outlying landmarks, which was important in his method, even decisive, for his procedure was perspectival. To measure the city Alberti devised an instrument he called a Horizon, which resembled existing astrolabes and anticipated the theodolite: on the outer edge of a flat circular plate were equally spaced degree markings, some numbered and connected to the center by radial lines, like the quadrants of an astrolabe. Onto this surface were also equally spaced concentric rings, numbered as were the segments. Attached to the top side of the plate at its center was the end of a movable arm called the radius, it too subdivided into regular intervals, fifty. Its free end could be rotated to any position on the perimeter in order to guide the surveyor’s focus from the center toward some point in the distance, joining near and far, just as the thin groove on the top side of a gun barrel guides the eye and the shot toward its target. In addition to meaning the half-diameter of a circle, radius then meant ray of sight, or of light, as in solar ray or radiance. From both the center of the city and the Horizon, lines of sight radiated. Using the plate as his Horizon, Alberti centralized its circumambient target. The center of his map was the center of the city. Before he could begin he had to raise the Horizon to a height that would make repeated sightings convenient. This differs from the procedure described in De re aedificatoria of a few decades later in which a Horizon of ten feet was marked out on the ground; it is more like the plotting procedure he described in Della statua. Having raised the plate to the right viewing level, he then aligned its zero meridian with the north-south axis, pointing the zero line to the north. This set the stage for the measuring and transcribing procedure. After a landmark in the distance was sighted, the radial arm was rotated until it pointed directly at it, and the degrees from the zero line to the radius were counted, marked and tabulated. Then the distance between the instrument and the landmark was paced off, so that it too could be marked and noted. This procedure, possibly augmented by the techniques of triangulation described in his Ludi mathematici, was repeated for each of the important landmarks, or at least those that allowed him to plot the coordinates that defined the city’s mural limit, substituting for its bricks and stones his coordinates and lines. 3

CHAPTER ONE

1.1

Surveying with the Horizon. Cosimo Bartoli, Del modo di misurare, 1564.

4

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

The purpose of this Horizon was to accurately circumscribe terrain, to replace imprecise knowledge of an edge with exact definition. In principle, the whole of the city could be accounted for this way, but he was not that evenhanded: he plotted key points on the perimeter and a number of significant places in the expanse between, these points only, which is to say that most of the city was insignificant in the survey. Each measurement followed the same procedure: an exchange whereby something inaccessible or out of reach was made accessible, something far was exchanged for something near, or the two were brought into coincidence, or, better, both were linked together by a repeated interval, the paces, like steps down a hill or, mathematically, like integers in a series. Alberti’s Horizon gave the city scale. Throughout this procedure three figures were brought into play: the architect’s eye, a point or object in the distance, and the gap between. For the moment I want to concentrate on this gap, the unnoticed underside of the Horizon’s visual rays, over which the sightings sailed. Alberti’s work involved dividing the distance between the near and far, linking them with numerical symbols of equal paces. “Dividing the distance” is, however, a misleading expression. The distance between the Capitol and the city wall was not really known as such until it was measured. To assume it was would deprive Alberti of his actual task and neglect the difference between a geometry of practical situations and one of metric positions, the first historically and the second mathematically constituted. Before his survey, distance was less a length than an amount of effort and of time; distant meant difficult-to-accomplish or taking-a-while-to-reach, no two steps of which were precisely the same. Were this terrain not built up but used for crops, for example, it may well have been known as more or less than could be plowed in a day. The iuger was the amount of land a pair of oxen (yoked together) could till before sunset. A day’s work of sowing seed provided a similar measure. For centuries land measurement was based on labor and time, not numerical symbols. This is not entirely strange; measurements based on time and on effort are still commonplace in untutored vernacular: from here to there is “quite a hike,” a friend’s apartment is no more than a “stone’s throw away,” Milan “two days distant.” While trivial, the sense of these indications is obvious, and they are entirely sufficient for 5

CHAPTER ONE

everyday activities. Alberti’s Horizon can be called philosophical or theoretical by contrast, for it disclosed the distance across a given stretch of land as a metric length pure and simple —length “in itself” or “as such,” in the language of abstract philosophy —no matter whether the lands measured were farmed or fallow, paved or built up. Although unmeasured, the terrain between the Capitol and the city wall was not unknown. The truth is, it was known exceedingly well by everyone living in the city, including Alberti, just as each of us knows the region around our house or office. In one’s neighborhood a map is no pressing need, except to the surveyor. Likewise, pacing between two points is an odd way to move through a city, also quite difficult, given the fact that existing buildings would have interrupted just about any path between two distant points. Putting this point more forcefully, one can say that the precision and quality of mathematical and circumstantial knowledge of urban topography were inversely proportional to one another. Furthermore, without these familiar but unmeasured intermediate areas there would be nothing for the perimeter wall to contain, no need for a defining edge, nothing for the visual rays to lightly float over, no darkness in the theater capable of showing up the performance. Conversely, such a lack would also mean there would be no center, seat, nor shore, no absolute “here,” such as the Capitol, opposed to an “over there,” to which the city’s margins, like every horizon, owed from its beginnings a magnetic obligation. Across the space of the Horizon, however, everything was different; projected out over the buildings and paths of the existing city was a regularly reticulated weave or veil, a transparent matrix that did not so much divide distance as substituted for it, or filled it with repeated intervals, replacing a circumstantial and practical horizon with one that was entirely regular in its increments. Because overlays such as this have become so common, it is hard to see the difficulty of Alberti’s accomplishment. He had to overlook the city he already knew—the middle ground—in order to see it or come to know it in another way, mathematically. The utility of such an overlay can be seen when compared to Alberti’s other “Horizon,” the one described in his book on sculpture. It, too, was a simple device: a circular plate three feet in diameter that had marked onto its 6

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

1.2

The Definer. Leon Battista Alberti, Of Statues, English edition, 1664.

7

CHAPTER ONE

perimeter divisions and subdivisions, called degrees and minutes, like his urban Horizon and the astrolabe. To this bodily Horizon Alberti added a movable radius, three feet long, with one end attached at the center so that it could be rotated around the entire circumference. It, too, was subdivided in inches and minutes. Lastly, near the radius’s free end he attached a string and weight, which resembled a plummet, a tool found on any building site. There was no equivalent to this vertical index on the urban Horizon (when surveying the city I imagine Alberti responded to changes in topographical level by variously raising his eye above the level of the plate, still sighting along the radius, but overlooking differences in elevation when logging the coordinates). Vertical dimensions could not be neglected when surveying a body; limits in two planes had to be determined in order to reckon three-dimensionality. He called his instrument a finitorium, rendered “definer” in English, because it spanned limits, neglecting intermediate proportions. While simple as a device, its use was demanding if not awkward: the instrument was set on top of the highest point of the figure to be surveyed in an absolutely horizontal or level position, preserving perfect rectangularity between the three elements. The device had to be secured in this position with a bronze pin, advice which has given some historians concern about its use on live models. Once the disk was centered, nailed in, and leveled, positions were plotted by rotating the radial arm to a spot above the desired point and then sliding the plumb line along the arm until it became tangent to the body part to be located, the outer edge of a bent knee for example. Three measures were determined in this way: the degrees around the circumference, the horizontal distance from the center to the drop position of the plumb line, and the vertical distance between the radial arm and the point it touched along the plumb line (measured with a long ruler). When all of the key points of a figure were so determined and noted, the sculptor would be able to faithfully reproduce it. As a survey tool it allowed Alberti to record the key dimensions of any well-shaped body or body fragment. In his treatise he listed these dimensions, providing a kind of canon. In principle any point on a body could be measured with this device. Alberti explained how recesses or hollows could be pinpointed, demonstrating 8

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

the Horizon’s potential inclusiveness. This was also true of the urban Horizon, which could have been used to plot every street corner. But in the sculptural case as in the urban he was not so evenhanded; his canon listed only the several turns of a figure’s contour: “the present and accidental variety of postures, resulting from the different dispositions and motions of the several parts.” Although postural variation was circumstantial, it was also constitutive of identity, as were the walls of a city. Without these “accidents” of posture, without its natural history, a figure would lack animation and liveliness, would be “stiff as stakes,” as Michelangelo was later to say of Dürer’s proportionate bodies. The purpose of the finitorium, then, was to plot the position of the parts or the points that defined the figure, principally the wrist, elbow, and knee, and points such as these, not intermediate stretches; spans like the forearm were left unmarked, unnumbered, and unnamed. Both Horizons, the urban and corporeal, plotted points by projecting rays from a center to an edge, passing over anonymous places between. The oars of this passage performed precisely measured movements, conferring regularity on the expanse, at least virtually so. It is a form of conveyance or of transfer that sustained other exports, most notably to a work, whether drawn or constructed, as Alberti’s was the kind of “theory” that was capable of sustaining technique. The medium of this last transfer to design was the transparent veil, the velo, which also set the stage for perspectival depth in painting. Alberti called the orthogonals of the pavement in a perspective painting “parallels,” meaning quadrants, and used the vocabulary of sea charts to describe the method of their projection. The naval chart, like the painter’s veil, and the surveyor’s grid were horizons that plotted positions by passing over places with tacit significance. Maps of the heavens are constructed like those of the sea, from point to point, with rays of sight that could just as well be lines of flight. Alberti called his map a picture. Yet the result of projecting such a horizon was not a view at all, for neither a plan nor a map shows anything one can actually see. Non-architects have trouble reading plans because there is nothing in them to see, or what there is to see is unlike anything one has seen, only outlines and voids. It’s like trying to envisage the shape of a body by reading footprints in the snow. Does plan making forsake the sur9

CHAPTER ONE

veyor’s optic? The ray of sight disregards most of the things that appear in the lived thickness of the horizon by passing over or through them, more or less effortlessly, almost casually, in the blink of an eye, like an X ray, with a cool indifference to all that is solid or has depth. The painter, not the architect, is attracted to the “allurements” of surfaces, their relief and modeling. The architect sees contour, profile, and outline. In space that is veiled in this way, ichnographia disavows and displaces scaenographia. Before there was a map there was the Horizon. Essentially a flat plate, the instrument was used to produce a plan by regulating the plane of vision; making it level, 90 degrees to the vertical center, whether of the city or the body. Thus three horizontals: plate, plane, and plan, each devised to substitute or overlay terrain, serving (in the event of construction) its transformation into a level platform and then into pavement—the overlay becoming the underlay. Should theory in this way become technique, it would distort procedures and abbreviate an understanding I will provisionally call pre-perspective, meaning the kind that guided the construction of the very city Alberti surveyed. Nevertheless, the Horizon measured the city and captured characteristics Alberti took to be essential, for the city was in his mind a level platform on which citizens could confront one another equally in “justified” encounter. But this ideal condition, symbolized by the plane of the Horizon, was rarely achieved in fact; accidents of terrain prevented reciprocal standing, just as accidents of posture in the inclination or disposition of a body qualified its proportions. Alberti’s book on architecture testified to this in its account of using a Horizon to plot the line of a sluice, and in its recommendations for laying out streets. There were, then, really two horizons: a mathematical one that sustained mapping and design technique, and an accidental or circumstantial one tacitly known by virtue of the typical negotiations and relationships of a people and a region. Likewise, two geometries: of situation and position. The instrument was meant to mediate the two. But on this the whole issue of topographical order and orientation turns. Mediation between situational and positional geometries involved both abstraction and representation. First, representation: measured paces were to take the place of walking through the weave of city streets, and the plan was 10

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

to represent the plateau, just as a ledger sheet stands for the exchanges that result from bartering. A high degree of abstraction was involved in this manner of representation because conditions as basic as level change were overlooked; land- and cityscape became as level as seascape. Was this marine sort of sighting sufficient for a city survey? Were something other than mathematical description intended, one would have to say no. Yet Alberti did not propose other uses. I suspect he would have thought it insufficient for description of a city’s circumstantial horizon, its drifting interior. His attention to proportions in books seven and eight of his treatise was preceded by careful consideration of materials in books two and three. Comprehensive use of the surveying instrument would have transformed the prosaic landscape into something it was not, a pattern of well-defined objects. Alberti never attempted this. He understood what is nowadays forgotten, that not every building is a monument, that the city is not a big building in which everything has been designed to be noticed, even if one wants to think of the building as a little city. The city has its figures and its ground, each constituting a distinct horizon, the first apparent, the second latent, even if they are convertible, as a matter of changing private and public interests. A reconstruction of Alberti’s map from his coordinates would leave large sections of the city blank, its waters undisturbed. Likewise, a body made up of the surveyed points only would lack interconnection and cohesion, disjointed like a unsupported puppet. Without the strings of the survey it could not stand up, let alone demonstrate a lively disposition. How can we account for this nameless and unnoticed substrate of cities and bodies without looking at it, without putting it into the survey, measuring all of its parts, and consequently depriving it of its essential qualities: tranquillity and unobtrusiveness? Can it be surveyed as it is in itself, can it be fathomed? For Alberti, this substrate was taken for granted and left unmarked. Because it escaped his sightings, one can say its manner is to withdraw into a kind of darkness, a blind spot, remaining latent and unnoticed. Nor did he give it a name. Likeness in a portrait does not result from the accurate rendering of a model’s eyes, ears, mouth, and chin; because amateurs and children focus on these parts exclusively their images usually fail to show 11

CHAPTER ONE

any face in particular. What they do show is normally lifeless, like the sort of painting that is called academic; it is as if they were illustrating what they know of faces, not the way they see this or that one. Successful depiction of a particular face depends on “catching” all of the hollows and recesses that lie between its prominent “features,” the way one “catches” the movement of a dance, something a drawing of footprints can never show. Creating a compelling likeness in a portrait involves making room for the surfaces across which identifiable features merge, and modeling them to reflect the qualities of the ambient atmosphere; as if they, like the eyes, were receptacles of those qualities. While essential, intermediate surfaces have no name and never appear as figures in their own right. An identical substrate of cities sustained the appearance of the figures that were prominent in Alberti’s survey. Thus a paradox: the way of seeing that leads to academic (lifeless) painting is just the way that architects see things, even see the world; that is, seeing through things, cutting them in section, and grasping the dimensions of their outlying lines and angles, the lines of the city wall. This prejudice in favor of seeing through, of transparency, does not really disavow the tacit thickness of things, it simply neglects it for a while in order to know them in another way. Were the latency or the middle ground of the city not accepted as given in Alberti’s survey, neither the outer circuit nor its monuments could have appeared. Dark waters keep boats afloat. Before his Horizon the waters of the city were familiar but uncharted; afterward—in the decades and centuries afterward—they were so repeatedly surveyed and overlaid with maps of the mathematical type that they came to be seen as similarly significant or similarly interesting, so much so that in our time all of the parts that make up cities and bodies are taken as objects or fragments of objects to be viewed. We find everything in the city interesting, despite the urban structure Alberti assumed and the practice of mediation. Every fragment is a figure in its own right. This is also the way cities and buildings are designed, as if everything should be noticed. At the end of the tradition that Alberti’s horizon inaugurated, in the art and architecture of the early twentieth century, other, more inclusive ways of surveying terrain emerged. Imagine a modern architect looking out over an 12

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

open landscape; think of Le Corbusier. With Alberti’s Horizon in mind, his will seem surprising, because his “plane of vision” is not about five feet above the ground, nor inscribed onto the ground: he took up a the “bird’s-eye view” in order to survey settlements, and to praise or dispraise them, and to say how they should be made. In his 1935 publication Aircraft Le Corbusier credited the war industry with this “unexpected gift” of surveying from above. Armies had been the target. The pace of the war accelerated the rhythm of aviation until it was brought to “flawless perfection.” After the war the air industry had to fulfill another purpose to prevent its own atrophy; thus the airlines. This last development opened the skies to Le Corbusier and gave him a new way of surveying cities. In Aircraft he reported on a flight he had taken from Algiers southward toward a number of towns in the desert. He had been there before and remembered “the date palms . . . the foliage of apricot, peach and grenadine . . . the delightful summer spectacle of water and verdure”; also the winter, “a time of contrast, implacable sun . . . an inferno of stone . . . impassivity . . . contrition, of reversal, of lethargy . . . pity.” Yet from the airplane nothing of this was visible, at least not from the distance of the initial approach, only “two specks on the horizon” in place of cities. Closer, the plane dropped altitude and like a falcon flew just over the roofs, then circling back rose in a spiral. More dives allowed Le Corbusier to “discover the principle of the towns,” something unseen by Alberti.1 From above the town appeared in its entirety; not only its streets and blind walls, but also its private rooms, interior arcades, and gardens within the blocks. Beneath the plane, but ahead of its steadily increasing thunder, the women of the town retreated from the gardens into the arcades until they heard and observed it departing upward in its wide spiral, then they returned to the gardens with “signs of joy and surprise.” These gardens and this laughter were the city’s secret, protected by the blind walls of the streets. Height unveiled urban life: every house was a place of “happiness and joy, of serene existence” made possible by these withdrawn settings. Not the streets, nor the facades (of which there were probably very few; only a ceremonial door or window), but the backs and urban interiors to which people could retreat were 13

CHAPTER ONE

the essentials of the settlement, the hidden but typifying evidences of architecture in harmony with climate, terrain, and region. This observation led to a recommendation: what was seen from above in these “primitive” settlements should be seen in all cities, particularly the most “modern.” Further, the secrets of each should be revealed in “plan” form, from above. Thus a revolution in thinking about city design: “The airplane, flying over forests, rivers, mountains, and seas and revealing supremely powerful laws, the simple principles which regulate natural phenomena, will arrive at the city of the new era of machine civilization.” Metal wings would replace Alberti’s metal plate, the hawk of war would become the dove of urbanism, unveiling the city’s new horizon. In this text’s most polemical passages Le Corbusier asserts that the airplane and the high-altitude thinking it allows indict the traditional city, and those who control it. In 1923, the time of Vers une architecture, airplanes had been taken to exemplify the best of modern technology and used to propose principles for buildings and cities. Le Corbusier was looking at airplanes. By 1935 he was looking from them, and using the archaic structure they revealed to call for a revision of recent settlement patterns. The aerial vantage gave proof that existing European settlements had become “steeped in indignities,” they contained and constrained men apart from the “essential delights” he had observed in the desert: light, space, and verdure, about which he wrote so often. What a “sorry account” of civilization was revealed by the aerial point of view; the plane shows that recent cities have been made for profit, not for life. This criticism was not the end of it, however; he concluded his indictment of the city with expressions of pensive melancholy, a surprising turn, which is not only believable but suggestive. On the last page of this text he gave an intriguing and somewhat contradictory summary of this new point of view. The flight of the airplane provided him not only with a delight of the senses but a lesson, even a philosophy. Once separated from everyday affairs by such a tranquil immensity, the world unmasked itself before the aerial view, it appeared as an interplay indifferent to human affairs, to our ideas, our history, and ourselves; a “fatality of cosmic elements and events,” over which we have little control and about which we 14

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

have little understanding. This was apparent in the huts of the Arab shepherds when seen from above, for their stark contrast with the mountains, sky, and desert testified to the struggle and strife of human existence. From the plane there was no real pleasure, instead “a long, concentrated, mournful meditation.” Being airborne was an occasion for broad contemplation, not action, for “philosophy,” as long as that is understood to be the kind of thought that is inclusive yet disengaged. Is there a more theoretical point of view? Le Corbusier confessed that the aerial vantage disoriented him. Looking down from above had allowed him to survey entire settlements, but when everything was visible nothing in particular was. His buoyancy abandoned him just as he had achieved it, for he felt a stronger pull, the anchorage of human engagements. From above he was able “to observe and to understand but not to love,” not to be involved, nor to envisage work; he could not get “attuned to such far-sighted spectacles.” The nature of this attunement, or its lack, needs to be stressed. The difficulty Le Corbusier faced within the aerial horizon was that he lacked any basis for positioning himself, for conferring scale and measuring his place: “I no longer possess an instrument which gives dimension, which makes form finite, complete, entire: my feet on the earth and my eye five feet or so above the ground.” In part, he lacked Alberti’s Horizon and what it represented, perspective; but he also lacked the plane of vision on which there occurs “a meeting of the eyes,” which could be called the horizon of face-to-face encounter, an ethical, not a theoretical stance. Horizon in this ethical sense is not a limit at the edge of my visual field, but the surface on which I stand or the milieu in which I am engaged in practical affairs. In respect of this he came down, down from the prospect of more or less cosmic drama to the everyday lives of men and of individual action. Le Corbusier’s phrasing in these sentences is like Plato’s in the Republic when the cave dweller who has ascended to the light and accustomed his eyes to its beauty is given the unexpected and painful injunction: “down you must go,” return to the cave and try to lead others away from the shadows. Le Corbusier gave this symbolism of leadership a rather Christian and hermetic twist with his last line: “the flock needs a shepherd.” The last image of the book shows a para-

15

CHAPTER ONE

chuter leaping from his plane. His designs for the Ville Radieuse were published two years earlier. Despite this self-portrait of the artist as savior—a sentiment too often expressed in Le Corbusier’s writings, and, it must be said, in the selfidentification of many others in the twentieth century, and the nineteenth— this last recognition of the need to return to the mundane horizon and for individual action, with its tangle of limitations, contrasts sharply with the secular transcendence of high-altitude thinking. This contrast is the source of the contradictory thinking I have noted. Perhaps it was there from the start and throughout the story: in the coupling of the machine and the garden, the guns and grenadine, the roar of the engine and the laughter, or the pilot and the housewife, each of them a symbol, each of their encounters a revelation. Le Corbusier was fond of such contrasts; more than that, he seems to have been animated by them, for they provoked his imagination, his creativity, and his myth making. When reading his writings or studying his drawings, paintings, and buildings, one often feels drawn into one or the other side of these oppositions, as he sometimes was. Yet his best work preserved the tension between them, promoting neither modern nor archaic conditions but ways of mediating the two. In Aircraft he praises high-altitude surveying and then puts his feet back on the ground. The city he envisages benefits from the first vantage but is validated by the second. In the vocabulary of horizons, far and near were conflated, two specks on the horizon overlapped joyful faces beneath an arcade. What of the space between, of the terrain or landscape over which the “dives” and the “spirals” were executed? In Alberti’s survey these waters remained uncharted and unnamed; he never described continuous metric space. In his “perspective,” an attitude that can be called pre-perspective remained important. I have called his “oversight” of the horizon’s middle ground neglect, but within the economy of design this attitude can also be taken as a kind of deference, even of respect. Neglect of in-between space seems to be more extreme in Le Corbusier’s bird’s-eye view, for the area between the cockpit and the two specks was much, much larger. And it was not just when in flight that Le Corbusier saw landscapes like this; in many examples from his 16

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

1.3

Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, Le Corbusier, 1952.

work, large measures of intermediate depth are entirely occluded, rendering near and far compacted into closely tangent proximity, as if the preperspective space that lingers in Alberti’s survey were to find its parallel in Le Corbusier’s post-perspective horizon. The parapet wall on the roof of the Marseilles block prevents sight of the building’s urban vicinity, because from most standpoints its top edge aligns with the base of the distant mountains. Mountains were modeled within the spread of the roof deck, this side of the parapet wall, exchanging far for near. At one stroke, or with the sweep of one horizontal, intermediate space was eclipsed. In the little house on the shore of Lake Geneva, the much-celebrated horizontal window acts in the same way: when viewed from the correct vantage points, the window sill’s top edge aligns with the shore in the distance, masking irregular levels in between. It 17

CHAPTER ONE

is as if the aerial horizon has been brought down to earth, allowing one’s view to glide over its surface, attaching wings to the optical radius. In many examples from Le Corbusier’s oeuvre this eclipse of the middle ground is a consequence of skillful photography and image editing, but its persistence in his perspective drawings suggests that it was essential in his way of viewing space and therefore of understanding it. In many drawings, photographs, and built spaces, he joined near and far by disguising distance, letting it—or letting the terrain it could well have measured—withdraw. At most it was symbolized. This was not always the case. In fact, much evidence points to contrary interests. In his urban schemes he sometimes transformed the middle ground into fully comprehensive verdure, as if the “urban context” had become entirely overgrown. Other times the landscape’s middle ground was made to continue, extend, or prolong the intervals and measures of the building’s layout, as if there were no landscape, only cityscape, without limit. The first alternative presents the city as wilderness, the second as megastructure, giving us a choice of all earth or all art. I want to pass by both paradigms of unity and concentrate instead on the mixed terrain, the middle ground that was sometimes allowed to retreat from his designs and remain latent. Around the cities in which we live—cities that are obviously neither Roman nor Radiant—this neglected middle ground exists in abundance and seems to give rise to alternate reactions: for some it summons sentiments of professional responsibility (and opportunity) and calls for all the mechanisms of design, so that it can be filled in and got rid of, while for others it is a source of welcome relief from the exploits and excesses of design overly concerned with originality, therefore to be zealously preserved. These sentiments parallel the megastructure and wilderness alternatives that appear in Le Corbusier’s work. Can the alternative be avoided? Could not this oversight in the center of surveying and even of design point to another way of understanding that part of cities that actually makes them work, even though this is the part of cities that is often unnoticed? Could not this neglect of the middle ground also, and more largely, allow us to think again about what it means to “design” a building in a location? For this to be so, topics of design such as distance, measurement, and finally 18

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

“space” would have to be reconsidered, as would design itself. If, however, one could rethink the field or horizon of architecture along these lines, it would be possible to discover and develop practices of project making that acknowledge the existence of latent settings without trying to make them into something they never should be, permanently on show. Were we to try to conceive such spatial structure, we would accept the challenge of imagining a terrain with gaps or unclaimed areas, a discontinuous field, an uncommon ground, a horizon no longer dominated by a constructed vista said to be “true,” nor by the adventures of comprehensive design. Discontinuous in this sense would signify a mosaic field built up situation by situation, not taken for granted, like space, as an extended receptacle wanting infill. To sketch such a topography slightly more fully, I want to describe a third architect’s survey, an architect in practice at present. But I want to describe him earlier in his career, having left home, traveled through a number of countries, worked for a while in one of the most progressive offices of the time (Jean Prouvé’s), and arrived on the shores of an ancient civilization that was in the postwar period struggling to preserve its cultural identity while embracing the benefits promised by modernization. Sverre Fehn is the architect I have in mind, at a moment when he stood on the sands of a Moroccan village, at the edge of the sort of settlement Le Corbusier had once flown over. In 1952 Fehn published a short article entitled “The Primitive Architecture of Morocco.”2 His description begins with a brief historical and philosophical reflection on the subject of recognition. In view of Picasso’s preoccupation with primitive art, he suggests that when the artist turned to North African masks and sculpture he led himself to a site of new discoveries; the archaic pointed to the modern. This was no contradiction, for Fehn saw the same thing in Le Corbusier’s use of raw concrete; not that he repeated ancient techniques, but that raw concrete was just as “primitive” as the clay on bamboo used in aboriginal building. With béton brut in his hands Le Corbusier was able recover something of the past, and thereby advance his work into the future. Discoveries of this kind were not possible for Fehn himself, however, nor are they for us, because African artifacts and so-called primitive practices are now familiar. We do not discover the archaic but recognize it. Nor can we 19

CHAPTER ONE

effect this exchange between remote and contemporary times. This explains the large measure of melancholy in Fehn’s survey of sites in Morocco. Water, sand, and stars are the elements of the North African horizon. Settlements have arisen and disappeared in the eternal traffic between the first two, each yielding for a while to lines and angles taken from the geometry of the third, lines and angles that have given to settlements not only their configuration but their orientation and relative permanence. Binding the three together in human experience is work, specifically the work of land cultivation, for that is the practical interchange between the sandy streets of the village and the flowing water. In Scandinavia, and elsewhere obviously, this commerce follows the layout of paved roads; but permanent constructions of that kind have no place in this landscape, Fehn reports; the desert drifts. Only stars give fixed orientation. To make this topography clear in terms other than those of an economy of natural elements, Fehn drew a topographical section. Furthest from the village center, at the threshold of the desert, are the covered stalls for the livestock. Closer are storerooms for animal fodder, necessary because grazing is impossible in this environment. Still closer to the heart of the village are the dwellings, which ring its center. The center, however, shifts in dimension and configuration by virtue of changes in the perimeter rings, as if by some reversal of the laws of physics ripples of land and building form converge upon the center in order to give it shape. About this central space Fehn had surprisingly little to say, for his description of the landscape abruptly turned at this point to the dwelling itself, seen in section. Here, too, he began with a workplace, observing that the cool temperature and deep shade that result from its lower position are congenial to housework when the summer heat and light are too fierce for work of any other kind. Just as the sectional position of these rooms reduces heat gain, so does the thickness of the house’s walls. Above the ground level is the floor for food preparation, and above that the level for sleeping and living. Little furniture gives a trace of these activities, but there seems to be no uncertainty about uses to which these rooms are put, for their long history makes these practices strikingly stable, contrasting this interior terrain with shifting 20

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

1.4

A Moroccan Village, Sverre Fehn, 1952.

sands outdoors. And these uses are not only the kind we might call functional but symbolic too; Fehn mentions the removal of shoes before a meal. Enabling the meal also are the mat or carpet on which one sits, and the table around which people gather. While he does not elaborate the analogy, Fehn implies that a ratio governs the use and meaning of these elements: what the mat is to the dwelling floor the table is to the village center, both serving as gathering places that give orientation to a “round dance” that ties together the settings that make up the perimeter, the very same ones that accommodate the dance’s functional patterns. As if they were capable of performing this dance, the several pieces of furniture in the house are “mobile.” This movement of people and their accommodations is a remnant of nomadic culture, the steps and shoes of which still carry ancient sands back into the house, destabilizing the distinction between inside and outside. The next part of the section he draws through the town describes the house’s walls. They are not there simply to support the floors and the roof, he says, to “make a house”; that they do, but much more besides: they shade the interior from the sun, they support your back when you sit on a mat around the supper table, they serve as drying rack for autumn dates, and in the springtime as a blackboard for children learning to draw. Thus, what most de21

CHAPTER ONE

fines a house is also what links it most directly to the surrounding and extended landscape: the sun, the crops from the fields, and the village into which the children will eventually go. Hence another ratio, or perhaps a double identity: these walls are at once private and public, domestic and civic, or (speaking topographically) nearby and remote. The section Fehn draws through this horizon is thus a difficult one, for ordinary relationships between near and far are disturbed, conflated. Consider what he says about building materials. These houses have literally grown out of the ground on which they stand. As if the act of building were a species of agricultural cultivation, the brick walls found in this landscape result from the combination of desert sand with river water. The wooden mold used to make the bricks can thus be compared to each field’s perimeter ditch, the first sharply defining a construction module, the second a measure of fertilized land, both used and recognized by all the villagers. Because its use ruled construction throughout the settlement, this module, or the houses that incorporated bricks drawn from its matrix, could be extended in all directions, like the measures of the Japanese tatami, and at any time. Just as near and far were folded into one another, forms that once were and those that are now have merged into one horizon, making the topography historical, but not in a linear sense. I have said this account is melancholic; this sense is especially strong in the concluding passages. Fehn’s last observations begin with a comparison between opposites that returns to the opening reflection on recognition: primitive architecture could be likened to modern architecture, but such a study would yield nothing. If you sat blindfolded in Morocco for two years and simply listened and took in the aromas of the countryside and the people, then took off the blindfold, you would not have taken a single step nearer. You would be as much an outsider when the Arabs quietly sit down and wait for the sun to dry the water out of the river after a shower. It will always be an enigma to you why no one puts down some logs and walks across on them. . . . You could admire the beauty of their garments, their superb 22

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

treatment of the material, but if you wore anything like it, you would find it unpleasant because you cannot possibly run fast in it. While “primitive” art has become entirely familiar, something we easily recognize as “other” than our own, the life that gives rise to it entirely escapes our grasp. All attempts at participation end in distancing. Why? Because in “primitive” art and life we confront a culture that is timeless; ours, by contrast, is caught up in its historical moment, even obsessed by its uniqueness. And then Fehn says more: primitive art is timeless because “its signature is Anon, for it is nature herself.” How are we to understand the proposition that “primitive” art is equivalent to modern architecture, knowing full well that they are separated by long stretches of time and arise out of completely different cultural circumstances? Is it that both the modern and the primitive are timeless, anonymous, and somehow natural? Even if these descriptive terms seem appropriate in consideration of the villages of North Africa, it is hard to imagine what they could mean in consideration of the architecture Fehn himself had been working on just before his trip, I mean the architecture being developed in Jean Prouvé’s workshop. Perhaps it is possible to characterize an architecture that utilizes parts that are repetitively made in a factory as anonymous. But even if we grant that a certain kind of anonymity results from the repetitive production of architectural elements in the modern period, and that an architecture that uses elements manufactured in series can be called timeless because there is no end to their generation, can we call such an architecture natural, or more boldly “nature” itself? This Fehn seems to do by linking primitive architecture with “nature” and the former with modern examples. How could it be that an architecture that relies on mass-produced parts, parts that can be shipped to ever more remote locations and are thus essentially placeless, could be characterized as “natural,” native, or autochthonic? Water and sand, yes; but glass and steel? If not the same, can these materials and the elements that result at least be seen as similar, similarly enmeshed in the land, the climate, and the culture? That Fehn thought so is doubtless.

23

CHAPTER ONE

Perhaps Fehn’s city section carries an echo of the survey work undertaken by Alberti and Le Corbusier. The other two, having practiced their different procedures of measurement, discovered (in themselves) a more or less melancholic “distance” from the landscapes they studied: Alberti’s horizontal sightings sailed over the sites he took for granted in the everyday life of the city, and Le Corbusier’s aerial perspective, his “oversight,” caused him to long for anchorage in prosaic affairs, outside of which he found himself unable to act. Fehn’s “you would be an outsider” sings a similar refrain. Distance in each of these cases is not only metrical or mathematical but also cultural, meaning that surveying—or the various means of mathematically determining topography—is a technique or kind of knowledge that captures one kind of phenomenon and releases another, determining the outline and position of visible figures and neglecting the sorts of engagements or situations that typify practical affairs. Alberti’s perspective seems largely dedicated to the first of these kinds of knowledge, Le Corbusier’s less so, Fehn’s hardly at all. Despite the differences between their mathematical or geometrical methods, all three show that one of the consequences of surveying sites is the unintended discovery of the horizon that give rise to the figures one sees, knows, and measures, even though these nameless and recondite aspects of the terrain never submit themselves to such surveys. Awareness of what a series of measurements has missed can certainly prompt the execution of other, more searching studies of the same kind. But it need not. What is instructive about these three is that they stop short of exhaustive documentation and allow us to witness what resists mathematical sorts of description, as if the primary task of articulation is to serve as such a witness. The task taken up by these architects, which is the same one that faces us, is to undertake the sorts of studies that achieve metrical definition, while considering in a different way those parts of the city that serve as a background to identifiable figures, and granting them the kind of presence that preserves their remoteness and their generative power.

24

2

BUILDING LEVELS In the widely accepted accounts of modern architecture, the articulation of open space has been shown to have privileged the partition wall and structural frame as the most effective means of defining inhabitable settings. In this development, and in modern architecture generally, “space” has been described as a framework or medium that is uniquely expansive and continuous; it extends and flows from here to there, through and across not only individual rooms, buildings, and sites but entire cities and their surrounding landscapes, and farther toward the barely visible horizon, and then even beyond it. At least that is what has been asserted so frequently that we have come to take it for granted. No matter where one stands, space is always farther ahead, exceeding one’s reach like a desire, and at the same time always far behind, continuously receding and quietly withdrawing like a memory; but always able, just the same, to contain and sustain every architectural ambition. Although space so understood is essentially a conceptual symbolism elaborated in philosophy and physics, in architecture it is also described as if it were somehow palpable, or could become so —this or that space. Rendered thus, space is entirely congenial to the maneuvers of design and construction, but is also, and paradoxically, their outcome. Walls, in contrast with infinite space, are limited, as are partitions, columns, and piers. This allows them to divide or interrupt space, defining enclosures that are particular, which is obviously important, for enclosure is exactly what architecture provides. If space is the assumed framework of design, walls and frames are its basic elements. Architects do not build buildings, they make drawings and models; at least that is what most do most of the time in most contemporary practices. Because of this, the open space of the physical world is really not the framework for creative work in architecture; substituting for it, or serving as its site, is the surface of a drawing—a map, survey, or plan—whether executed graphically or digitally. The “space” of the drawing is assumed to be like that of the environment, skylike or unbounded. Yet one knows the space of the plan is 25

CHAPTER TWO

never without edges, whether of a sheet of paper or a computer screen. Space thus symbolized is only the first premise of design, and one that is tacitly assumed, which is to say largely forgotten in contemporary architecture. This is hardly a problem, for the work of design only begins when a stretch of this continuum is interrupted or divided, when its clear blue expanse is parsed into places that are distinct from one another because internal or internalizing boundaries have been made and an inside has been defined over against an outside, a terrestrial here distinguished from everywhere else. It is no doubt obvious to state that walls are what architects use to subdivide open space. Less obvious, perhaps, but no less significant is the observation that the whole effort of plan making results in the positioning of these elements in the midst of a structural frame, which means deciding their length, the angles they make with one another, and their overall pattern. For anyone who can read plans, a few meager lines configured together are all that is needed to define the very essence of a building and the little world it contains. Like the geometric traces shipwrecked Aristippus found on the Rhodian shore, markings on a plan evidence human settlement. Insofar as the making of these sorts of representation can be taken to be the primary task of architectural design, the determination of wall placement can be described as the designer’s chief responsibility. A number of prominent architects in the twentieth century have in fact made this claim, or versions of it. “The whole structure rises from its base and is developed in accordance with a rule which is written on the ground in a plan . . . without [a] plan we have the sensation, so unsupportable to man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of willfulness.”1 Le Corbusier’s may be the best-known version of this premise, but it has become more or less commonplace today, in abbreviated form. Yet, because we have accepted this ranking of plan elements—partitions and frames—so readily, we have tended to neglect an instrument of definition that was in the middle decades of this century just as effective as walling and framing, even though less noticeable; I mean the ground plane itself, without walls, or with few. This surface also has its symbolism in the ground plan, but is equally, by virtue of horizontal contiguity, a matter of terrain and therefore of the surrounding urban or natural 26

BUILDING LEVELS

context, of that inhabitable (not conceptual) topography that extends far beyond the building’s upright limits into a “world” that may or may not be something someone has designed, making the entire topic more difficult and, as I hope to show, more promising. Further, it will become clear that reflection on horizontal definition in architecture prompts reconsideration of the building’s bounding or limiting function, which is architecture’s key or primary purpose. All of this suggests that the neglect of the ground plane as an instrument of definition is more than a curious lacuna in the history of modern architecture; it is a topic that raises questions that penetrate to the heart of the discipline. One striking and often neglected characteristic of modern architecture, at least of the built if not the theorized work, in the second half of the twentieth century especially, is the use of horizontal planes to define spatial settings without recourse to enclosing uprights, acknowledging the premise that walls in many buildings and settings could become either nonexistent or indefinitely present, by being either reduced to columns or a frame, made transparent, at least largely so, or designed and built to be moved, and therefore to occasionally disappear. New construction technologies allowed this, and changing dwelling practices prompted it. Already in the first years of the century Frank Lloyd Wright proposed the reduction of walls to columns and piers. Joseph Connors has observed that the Robie House has neither a street facade nor front door nor many solid walls.2 Wright’s breaking of “the box” offered something similar: “a natural opening to the liberation I sought,” “space not walled in but free,” “inside space opening to the outside and the outside coming in,” “a change from box to free plan and the new reality that is space instead of matter.”3 Wright was not alone in his desire for this sort of “liberation”; what he claimed to have inaugurated was developed by other modern architects. Likewise their apologist, Sigfried Giedion. In Bauen in Frankreich he observed: “We can hardly answer the question: what belongs to architecture? Where does it begin, where does it end? Fields overlap: walls no longer rigidly define streets. The street has been transformed into a stream of movement.”4 This means I need to reverse my earlier observation: acceptance of the notion of continuous space in modern architecture did not privilege the 27

CHAPTER TWO

wall, it led to its virtual elimination, leaving in its place, at least largely so, instruments of continuity, levels, which I will also call horizons, meaning planes of reference or, more fundamentally, of existence; not the boundaries that circumscribe visual fields, nor the lines of intersection between the sky and the earth or ocean. From the plan of rooms in the first part of this century to the free plan and then the open plan, architects in the postwar decades attempted the design of what might be called the plan of levels, an attempt that assumed the optional nature of walling, henceforth an old standby of enclosure. To neglect this development in descriptions of this period’s architecture, to continue to focus on walls (external and internal facades) and frames, on verticals as opposed to horizontals, is to miss something essential in this architecture; to miss the fact that the continued dedication to concepts of open space, or their tacit acceptance, has led to a decisive turning point in the art of spatial definition. We need to reconsider what it means to establish the actual limits of an architectural setting, what can be used to define the conspicuous and inconspicuous edges of a room, building, or urban ensemble, and what kinds of settings result from these less obvious means of definition, both within the building and outside it, whether the encompassing terrain is rural or urban and the building’s settings are private or public. In 1931 Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: “ Walls as walls fell away [with the dawn of the machine age]. The vanishing wall joined the disappearing cave.”5 Can we, with Wright and all those after him who argued similarly, actually envisage an architecture, an enclosure of inhabitable space, without walls, or without very many of them? Can we think of a set of rooms or of a building without an elaborate apparatus of upright space-dividing elements joined together to form corners and therefore enclosures? It may be hard to form a picture of such an architecture, but architecture need not be pictured to be understood. Walls, especially exterior ones, which is to say facades, are what we look at in buildings, what we always notice, the physiognomy we remember and use to locate ourselves. Surely an architecture without walls would risk all of this. A horizontally defined architecture would also seem to jeopardize the very identity of the building. Would not the consequence of just a few 28

BUILDING LEVELS

upright figures without physiognomic definition be the loss of any clear sense of where one is within space, of being here as opposed to there, leading more profoundly to a loss of primary orientation, the most basic experience and fact of spatial existence? Can there be a horizontal, a horizonal architecture that is not profoundly disorienting? An architecture without any verticals is of course impossible. Because we are upright beings, our settings must be too. My questions will be pointless, however, if considered in the form of all or nothing; the existence of the wall in modern architecture is a matter of kind and of degree. One could, I suspect, write a fairly thorough history of modern architecture by telling the story of this element’s step-by-step transformation, reporting on the strategies and the techniques whereby its palpable presence was progressively reduced, by being either thinned down, opened more and more, made transparent, or reduced to a frame; but never reduced to nothing. While the wall in the sense of a solid, thick, opaque, load-bearing and long-standing artifact has virtually disappeared in the newly built architecture of our time, except for its simulated presence in some historicist projects, vertical elements that define space have not; instead, walls have become “next to nothing,” which is one of the meanings of Mies van der Rohe’s famous beinahe nichts. Projects for “media walls,” which pretend to be “only information” and no more palpable than an electronic image (excluding its generating apparatus), are only fairly recent examples of the many types of walls that come and go in the built settings of the modern period. Because we tend to focus so intently on vertical elements such as these, especially on the surfaces and scenography or technology they display, we generally overlook the ground-level surface on which they rest, or wherein they reside. This is a site that can be just as effective in making places, although it is by no means just as visibly apparent. For the purpose of understanding the prospect and promise of the late modern spatial horizon, I am suggesting a preliminary shift of interest: from the ground plan to the ground plane, and to the ceiling plane too. The most direct way to grasp the role of the ground or floor plane in spatial definition is to envisage an ensemble in section rather than in plan. It is a great pity that so few “site sections” appear in the documents relating to mod29

CHAPTER TWO

2.1 (right)

Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936. 2.2

Schindler-Chace House, Kings Road, Hollywood, California, R. M. Schindler, 1921 – 1922, 1929.

30

BUILDING LEVELS

ern architecture, for they would reveal very much, especially when compared to premodern architecture. The first thing drawings of this type would reveal is the multiplication of levels. No longer need a one-story dwelling, for example, have only one floor and one roof level, making shelter by suppressing the earth and shedding the rain. Looking downward: no longer need there be a solid, massive, or stylobate-like base platform—the actual and metaphorical bedrock of traditional architecture—on which enclosures are set. While an entry, kitchen, and dining room might have been spread out on one level, a lower or “sunken” living room became something of a commonplace in postwar residential architecture, especially in the United States. At another level, usually slightly lower than the living room, one would often find an outdoor terrace, which was always seen as part of the house, even though it was not roofed over or enclosed against the natural elements. An early and beautiful example of this is Rudolph Schindler’s project for the terraces and sunken gardens around his Kings Road House, a mosaic of unroofed areas (lawns, patios, and gardens) into which slabs coplanar with some interiors extended. As if the basic premises of an encampment, these slabs also served as the surface on which open-air fireplaces were built. Overhangs also annexed stretches of surrounding land, whereby patches of shadow cut out of the sun’s brightness marked thresholds between the building’s in and outside—an entryway or loggia. Well above these lower levels, above the ceilings and overhangs too, Schindler set up the house’s “sleeping baskets,” lightly framed and decked or canvased over. In many houses built decades later one typically finds a roof terrace or roof garden, even a raised reflecting pool, obviously and rhetorically overturning natural stratification. All of this was achieved by raising and floating the building’s upper levels above or below the uninhabited stretches of the roof or ceiling. While Schindler’s beds blanketed mostly by the sky are an extreme case, it is fair to say that houses built decades later were similarly structured, insofar as sleeping quarters normally occupied a grade that was different from the public rooms, as well as from the rear or side terraces. Not set on top of underlying bedrock or subsoil, like plates on a supper table, settings of this sort were set within a tectonic equivalent to (sub)terranean strata, as if sedimentary geology had been taken as the building’s 31

CHAPTER TWO

model, with its layers variously hollowed out so that its newly awakened laminae could be inhabited. To compare this shelved spatiality with an analogous example from early modern architecture, one could imagine a three- or fourstory Raumplan configuration by Adolf Loos compressed into one story, minus the intermediate slabs of course or with them variously superimposed, without many of the walls, but with a similar degree of spatial differentiation. Within such a stratification of slabs or sections of slabs, discrete settings were established by other horizontal elements, too. One finds in many buildings of this period seating platforms or benches that extend from one end of a room to another, defining what might be called a level of repose. In many of the photographs in Richard Neutra’s Buildings and Projects,6 for example, one finds the architect or a client posed more or less horizontally at just such a level, straining, it seems, to look relaxed; also looking rather lonely (I will return to this). Equally common was the lowered or raised fireplace, providing a condition of warm intimacy otherwise lacking in the lateral spread of a living room into the entryway or garden terrace. Other intermediate levels of repose and residing were frequently established at table or bar height, particularly when these elements were joined to deep window sills or other interior-exterior connections. This reflected dwelling practices, or the changes they were undergoing: dining, for example, had become a sort of migratory grazing at the time, making the four-cornered room enclosing a four-cornered table something of an anachronism. This paralleled the multiplication and distribution of places and equipment for food preparation and storage, inside and out. On this point too Schindler’s house is instructive. The work of partially dividing settings was also accomplished by planting boxes or smallsized internal gardens; it, too, an instance of relocation. And the list of elements of this kind could be extended. Furthermore, these examples had their complements in the ceiling or roof plane, which was similarly stratified, into structural elements of course, such as slabs, beams, cantilevers, and parapets, as well as nonstructural elements, such as reflecting pools and gardens; but also by suspended acoustic panels, fresh air vents, and lighting trays— each of them occupying its own level and serving not only structural but also representational purposes. 32

BUILDING LEVELS

2.3

Fortune Rock, Mount Desert Island, Maine, George Howe, 1939.

CHAPTER TWO

In the design of these buildings, and in this period generally, it is as if the midsection of walls has been systematically removed, leaving in vestigial form each one’s top or bottom, so that they can still make corners where the limits of whole rooms would have been, but only occasionally interrupt the sideways drift of settings into one another, the way bars on a musical score modulate melodic meter, guiding and measuring its progress unobtrusively. Think of a body deprived of more than its midsection, from the shoulders up and the ankles down, as if painted by René Magritte, though the exact opposite of his version of a torso, a body just the same, still standing, in the midst of others; thus the liaisons from room to room to garden to street. If these vestigial uprights in buildings were sufficient to establish the boundaries of inhabitable settings—simply to make rooms—it was because apparent definition could result from slight changes in level primarily, and because the events they accommodated were set free from their traditional anchorage, the room. Certainly walls or wall-like devices, such as screens, window walls, or partitions, augmented this platform type of definition and were relied upon, but they were most effective when used in connection with level changes. By this account, patterns of dwelling were not so much inscribed onto the soil of a site platform along the lines and angles of a plan of walls but carved into or built upon such a base setting by setting, sinking slightly below or floating just above such a level, like clouds in the sky or rafts on a river, maintaining their respective heights by virtue of the programmatic load each was made to carry. Cantilevered levels thus seemed to “float” in these buildings. One could interpret their buoyancy as success in structural invention, which no doubt it was in the early examples. Marcel Breuer’s work is a good case in point. Because he was undeterred by frequent and famous structural failures, one could also conclude that the display of structural inventiveness was a driving ambition, as if the building were some sort of athlete or gymnast, dedicated to the display of its agility and strength. Otherwise his persistence in performing these exercises would be hard to understand. And he was not alone in this. The same interest can be found in exceptionally original cases, such as Wright’s Fallingwater, and in later conventionalized examples that used techniques 34

BUILDING LEVELS

that had been tested, practiced, and refined. Furthermore, once these levels were freed from their anchorage they could displace themselves: gardens and pools from the land- to the roofscape, for example, or seating surfaces to the floor. There is something provocative in these displacements; despite their conventionalized character in the architecture of the fifties and sixties, they still allow comparison with the semi-surrealist examples of the thirties, such as Le Corbusier’s Beistegui Apartment, an unenclosed enclosure with its fireplace surround pinned to a raised parapet. Rarely are these juxtapositions or unlikely encounters “functional,” at least not primarily so; more common and important is a figurative or narrative purpose, which nevertheless echoes some prosaic activities. To understand displacements of this kind, one needs to envisage a flux of horizons whereby levels are not only freed from their vertical stays and allowed a surprising degree of leeward drift but also made to rise and fall to unlikely depths. While structural invention was necessary in all of this, and therefore clearly important to these architects, I want to concentrate just now on the spatial or territorial interests these interchanging horizons suggest, focusing on structural themes and construction technology later. I want to consider how such a building’s several platforms both in and outside were used to establish discrete settings (even though these settings were defined in new and less obvious ways), assumed migratory or spontaneous dwelling practices, and were no longer tied down the way they had been in the past. In these buildings the multiplication of floor levels took the place of floor-to-ceiling elements in the definition of spaces. If not like geological strata, clouds, or rafts on a river, these levels were similar to landings on a meandering or ceremonial stairway, or perhaps to its many treads, except that the riser heights of such a flight of steps were always varied and each level was meant to serve as a provisional stopping place that sustained the purposes of distinct dwelling habits, not only passage from one place to another. While this stepped spatiality was indeed commonplace, it is also true to say that changes in level were not the only means of defining settings without walls; different construction materials were also used for spatial differentiation, whether on a floor surface or a ceiling. Perhaps even less obvious or visually apparent than changes in level, because they could hardly be frontal, let alone 35

2.4

Research House, Silver Lake, California (rebuilt), Richard and Dion Neutra, 1966. Photo Julius Shulman.

CHAPTER TWO

pictorial, these edges were discovered to be sufficient to separate territories, and they were able to do so with less interruption in what came to be called the “flow of space.” Examples from American architecture in the postwar period can be used to illustrate this point. I shall consider two houses by Richard Neutra: the Tremaine House of 1948 in Montecito, California, and the Pitcarin House in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, built toward the end of his career in 1962, under the supervision of Thaddeus Longstreth.7 The first of these is very well known, the second hardly at all. They also contrast in quality: the Tremaine House is beautifully resolved, the Pitcarin somewhat awkward in its general massing. Despite these differences, the two are very useful as contrasting platform types because together they show that horizontal definition is not limited to ground articulation. The ground-floor surface of the Tremaine House is spread across one level and shows only minor variation in its materials. To complement this or to compensate for its lack of articulation, the ceiling frequently changes level and is covered in a range of surface materials. An inversion of this occurs in the Pitcarin House: a highly differentiated configuration of floor levels and surfaces complements a relatively uniform ceiling, although not one that is flat. Both, however, define their settings without many walls. The floor surface of the Tremaine House is made up of wide sheets of highly polished terrazzo, resting on top of a concrete slab.8 This surface extends throughout much of the house, through most of its public spaces and its wide terraces, providing an uninterrupted material substrate for circumambient passage and orientation. One moves from one setting to another by gliding or skating across the ice of this surface, as does the play of light and its reflections. There are no breaks in the floor level to mark the edge of a room; what inconspicuous interruptions there are can be found along the lines of channels that guide the movement of floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Elsewhere the thin legs of lightweight partitions tiptoe across this hard planarity; likewise, area rugs, seating cushions, and movable furnishings rest lightly and temporarily on its surface throughout the house. Nor is there a step down from the terrazzo onto the level of the encompassing land; the two meet along what could be seen as a sandless shore, just as the waters of a shallow lake or 38

BUILDING LEVELS

2.5

Tremaine House, Montecito, California, Richard Neutra, 1948. Photo Julius Shulman.

stream meet the fields that surround them, with hardly any grade change at all, resulting in a coplanarity of opposite materials, as if the water had been hardened, allowing for the kind of encroachment onto the landscape that is typical of sheets of ice inching over a shore onto the land. Julius Shulman’s early evening photographs of the house give one the impression of such an icy expansion, and of the coplanarity that results. While the building’s floor is uniformly flat, its ceiling is elaborately stratified, so much so that it is hard to call it a ceiling plane; a better term would be ceiling space. This makes comparisons between Neutra’s work and 39

2.6

Tremaine House, Richard Neutra. Photo Julius Shulman.

CHAPTER TWO

2.7

Tremaine House, Richard Neutra. Photo Julius Shulman.

42

BUILDING LEVELS

the buildings of Mies van der Rohe entirely inappropriate, despite other similarities. The building’s massive piers support a roof structure that could be described as laminated or woven: slabs rest on beams which are in turn supported by spandrel girders, placed at sixteen-foot intervals. Dion Neutra, the architect’s son and partner, reported that the building was initially designed to be three stories high, but in the course of construction the client reduced the budget and cut the scope of the work, eliminating the top level. Although overstructured because unchanged from the original design, this roof system is efficient in other ways; through the hollows and recesses of its structural strata pass the currents of a very effective system of natural ventilation and indirect lighting, regulated by a series of adjustable windows or glass shelves. Further, in some instances a lower ceiling plane extends a short distance beyond the edge of its supporting girder, concealing on its top side a strip of lighting that indirectly illuminates a higher-level ceiling. While used throughout the building, the economy of this combination is especially apparent on the eastern side of the parents’ bedroom. There one can see how discrete settings are marked by the ceiling’s several strata, how the practices for which the settings were prepared were reflected in the relief of its volumes: farthest from the center of the room is the spray-coated underside of the cantilevered roof slab, closer and inside the room’s chamfered glass corner is a section of ceiling tile cladding the slab, closer to the center and lower (over the beds) is another ceiling plane, unmarked across its sandblasted surface but broken in its expanse by a cut that reveals the glass shelf above, itself resting between the spandrels and beams. All in all there are five, perhaps six, levels, planes, or strata in this ceiling laminate, each marking the edge of a specific setting or place (inside or out): bed, side table, shelf, planting bed; each reflected in a corresponding surface or material. Generally this reflection is achieved by alignment, whereby the lines and angles of the ceiling planes parallel those of the different furnishings and their several functions, giving the setting vertical continuity, and therefore threedimensionality, but by implication. Contrasting with the parallelism of ceiling elements and furnishings is the floor surface, which is in this room entirely flat or uniformly level, as it is elsewhere in the house. 43

2.8

Pitcarin House, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, Richard Neutra, 1962. Photo Julius Shulman.

CHAPTER TWO

In such a “room without walls,” or in these “rooms within rooms,” the permanent aspects of settings are not defined at the lower but at the upper level or levels, by means of this stratified weave of ceiling and roof planes. It is not only the thickness or interlacing of planes that gives this horizontal “space” its capacity to locate the room’s various parts; equally important is the intermixing of light levels and, combined with this, of degrees of reflection. The change of materials and textures is also significant: rough concrete, sandblasted finishes, and ceiling tiles. If one observes that the range of physical qualities associated with spatial settings is apparent in this ceiling space— qualities of light, color, texture, reflection, even temperature—one can then see that their correspondences with the other elements of the room (such as the furnishings) give shape, profile, and character to the room’s distinct places. Objects are not as important as the relationships between them. And what is true of this room is true of the rest of the house: differentiated ceiling elements in combination with movable and “built-in” furnishings define separate settings in and outside the building, even though the floor is basically uniform and walls are largely inconspicuous. The opposite is true of the floors in the Pitcarin House. To envisage its sectional configuration, imagine turning the Tremaine House upside down, so that the differentiation one finds in its ceiling plane is discovered at floor level, and the uniformity of Tremaine’s terrazzo is found on the Pitcarin ceiling. In fact, the ceiling of the Pennsylvania house is not flat, nor is it made from a single material; box trusses support ceiling panels that slope in two directions. Yet because the slopes have the same pitch and the trusses are spaced at a single interval (spanning from side to side in the main block of the building), the ceiling “space” can be characterized as undifferentiated, which makes it insufficient in itself for defining rooms within rooms. The fact that the ceiling space is also rather dark, because the depth of these trusses prevents light from illuminating much of the ceiling, also points to the importance of the floor levels in defining settings without walls. (Mirrors placed on the inner side of the perimeter soffit, between the trusses, testify to Neutra’s recognition of this issue, but the mirrors do not improve the ceiling’s capacity to define discrete settings.) 46

BUILDING LEVELS

2.9

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

The site is sloped and there are two entry points to the house: one on the high side, which leads from the front of the garage to a stairway and then to the kitchen, and another on the low side, about twenty-five feet below the front.9 This rear approach rings around a group of trees which stand before the guest quarters and gallery as delegates of the ancient woods beyond. Passing through a glass wall, the arrival sequence leads up a stairway which curves toward the house’s public spaces. The fluctuation of floor levels that characterizes the lower strata of the house is especially apparent in this latter sequence, for in them three distinct horizons are interwoven: that of the land as it slopes into the valley, the sunken reflecting pool and undercroft rock garden that terminate the path, and the entry space itself, with the suspended arc of treads 47

2.10, 2.11

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

48

BUILDING LEVELS

2.12 (left)

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 2.13

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Photo Julius Shulman.

CHAPTER TWO

2.14

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

and mirror-faced wall, an upright equivalent to the pool below. After one rises above this set of watery levels a new configuration appears: the gallery, living room, and den, all connected across one horizon; but the outdoor terrace that stretches across the full length of the living room is slightly lower, and finished with a different material. No walls divide these settings. To get to the dining room, and from it to the kitchen and on to the private rooms, one must rise up two steps to a distinctly separate horizon, which is finished with a contrasting material, highly polished wooden flooring. Between the living and dining rooms, atop this pair of steps, a low wall is used to further separate the settings, and it is capped by an aquarium that runs its full length—a linear and exposed version of the same element used by Adolf Loos in the Müller 50

BUILDING LEVELS

House in Prague. The ensemble of bedrooms is laid out on the same level, but within the associated bathroom the terrazzo pool is higher than the rest of the floor and lower than the landscaped terrace it looks onto. Each of these settings and rooms is discrete, but walls are not used for primary division. Taking their place is a sectional shift up or down that edges and therefore defines paths, steps, landings, floors, decks, terraces, and pools. Each floats above or sinks below a level one might take to be basic, making out of such a linear abstraction a thickened or stratified “space,” much like the ceiling of the Tremaine House. This “space” animates the building’s plan. Rainer Maria Rilke reported in his book on Rodin that the sculptor used the word “plans” to name the animated planes that define a sculptural work. To Rilke’s surprise Cézanne used the same word to describe what was essential in his paintings: in front of Sainte-Victoire he would “sit for hours, occupied with finding and incorporating the ‘plans.’”10 The strata of an architectural ensemble serve the same purpose—animating and defining a configuration— which is why the entire ensemble is best studied in section, a site section also cutting through the surrounding terrain. Because the encompassing site of the Pitcarin House is sloped, one could envisage the entire sectional spread as a series of terraces or site platforms, resulting in a flight of steps from hilltop to valley, with each level resting on and elaborating a geological shelf, making this architecture a version of landscape design. The grandest such design I can think of is Leo von Klenze’s Valhalla project. A comparable example from the interwar period— and much more modest— is Antonin Raymond’s Hillside House. Raymond described this house in an amusing tract called A Hillside Built This House.11 This publication, which came out five years before the Tremaine house was built, presents an argument for exact conformity between the levels or terraces of a site and house: “Instead of conventionally leveling off a house plot, I let the hillside slopes themselves shape the style and plan of the house, and built it on three connecting levels.” This was shown in section. A comparison between this sort of “adaptation” and the siting of the Pitcarin House would be entirely valid except for the fact that the whole effort on Neutra’s part was explicitly artificial; no similar range of “steps” was found in the immediate 51

CHAPTER TWO

vicinity of the building’s plot and there were no distinct levels to which the building’s horizons could conform, only an irregular or uneven slope. This suggests that the levels one now finds on the site resulted from the building’s construction, or were at least made apparent because of it. Hence the differentiated terrain: from the upper terrace garden (which was drawn as a pool in the first sketch design), across the levels of the house, down to the undercroft stones and water, and farther still, following the sweep of the approach walk, and farther, off the path, into the valley below, which was to include, far out of sight, a small cemetery. If there is imitation in this project, it is nature—or the figures we have come to call “nature”—imitating art, which is to say nature manifesting itself in dialogue with the articulations of architectural art. And insofar as it is mimetic, this terrain is also narrative: both the residence and the life within it unfold between a hilltop clearing and surrounding forest; more poignantly,

2.15

Pitcarin House, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

52

BUILDING LEVELS

a garden and a grave, the terrain’s perfection and dissolution. Between these two limits was the building, which the Pitcarins used as both a residence and a setting for religious worship among a small group of friends. What was discovered in the landscape, however, in its steps and scale, was put there, but put there to seem as if it had been there all along. I take this to be fictional, in a strong and positive sense, meaning that art can and should augment reality, enriching it by revealing what had previously been latent. The same artificiality characterizes the “natural” context of most of Neutra’s built work: his “nature” is largely man-made, at least remade; it is both artificial and natural, the outcome of production and discovery. Thus, the well-worn distinction between art and nature, or man and world, impedes understanding of this example; to grasp what is important about it, and about other buildings that likewise articulate horizons of experience and orientation, one must reconceive the relationship between what is preformed in nature and what is reformed in art, so that this relationship can be seen as one of degrees of articulation, each of which is a corresponding part of a single spectrum or range. This spectrum can be called a field of articulations, nearly mute in part (groundcover spreading into the woods) and potentially poetic in counterpart (seven candles burning near the hearth/altar). In the Pitcarin House the use of cantilevers and tension members, both inside and out, results in a sedimentary structure that is decidedly nongeological, as if the terrain that preexisted the construction had been disturbed, broken, during its unfolding, causing a number of fissures or faults. Despite some similarities with Wright’s work (Neutra, like Antonin Raymond, had worked for him), this is not an example of “fitting into the landscape,” which is what Wright claimed for his buildings. At Taliesin “the buildings became a brow for the hill itself. The strata of fundamental stonework kept reaching around and on into the four courts, and made them.”12 If the tailor’s term “fitting into” is taken to signify a point-by-point conformity between architecture and nature, as it normally is, this vocabulary entirely distorts the particular characteristics of the Pitcarin House. But this observation can be generalized: describing his Desert House in California, built for the Kaufmanns at about the same time as the Tremaine residence, Neutra made a point 53

CHAPTER TWO

2.16

Summer House, Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Marcel Breuer, 1953.

of stressing the contrast between site and architectural conditions: “A desert house cannot be ‘rooted’ in the soil to ‘grow out of it’—nothing is rooted there, and not even a tree can grow unaided. A building is frankly and clearly an artifact, a construct transported in many shop fabricated parts over long distances into the midst of such rugged aridity. It is as little local as the much needed water which is piped to this site over many miles.”13 No technical object nor set of premade components “belongs” to a particular site. Nor do buildings that incorporate them “arise” from specific locations. Congeniality between modern elements and a site when and where it exists must be recuperated through design and construction, and this is always partial. In Life and Human Habitat Neutra wrote: “Houses do not sprout from the ground, sucking natural juices out of the soil! That is lyrical exaggeration, a pretty fairy tale for children.”14 So much for the romantic, and naïve, assimilation of architecture and nature. The theme is particularly dramatic in an architecture that incorporates parts that have been fabricated in workshops, parts that belong as little (and as much) to sites in the Arizona desert as to locations in the hills of Pennsylvania, even if these parts are made to order. Expressing a similar sentiment, 54

BUILDING LEVELS

Marcel Breuer wrote in “Architecture in the Landscape” that “the building is a man-made work, a crystallic, constructed thing. It should not imitate nature—it should be in contrast to nature. . . . Nature and architecture [should form] a composition of contrasts. . . . It is a great mistake either to adapt building forms to organic forms, or to adapt natural forms to the crystallic, geometric forms of architecture. . . . Quite often the geometry of the house is projected out into the landscape, in the form of retaining walls or terraces. But whenever that happens, the terrace and retaining wall [are] treated as a distinctly man-made thing.”15 Thus, while the stratification of levels in a building’s section may have its direct analogue in a cut through sedimentary rock, the two cannot be assimilated into one form, or the two should not be identified as one composite body through the simulation of the natural in the artificial, because the horizontal hollows and recesses within a building’s layers, the actual spaces and settings prepared for occupation, together with the awakened faults and fissures by which they are separated from one another, are just as important as the sleeping strata with which they can be compared. Furthermore, the agitated geometry and materials of these “gaps” often conflict with the form and concrete body of the “natural” configuration to which they adhere. Built form and land form must be understood as two different things, even when they have been made to correspond. This contrast gives both amplitude and dramatic tension to the field of articulations within any given site. The fact that the fluctuation of levels that defines settings occurs in the space of the ceiling (not of the ground plane) in the Tremaine House makes it very clear that architectural horizons are not to be identified with the levels of the land. Another sense of landscape does seem apposite, however, although not landscape “form,” with which Breuer seems to have been overly concerned. The difference between the roofs of the Tremaine and Pitcarin houses can be related to the fact that the first was built in California and the second in Pennsylvania, two locations that have distinctly different climates. This is not to say that climate determined architectural form. Causal explanations based on the “realities” of climate are both reductive and crude, for they neglect the fact that what is “given” in a particular place is always a matter of interpretation, and this brings into play a range of personal predispositions 55

CHAPTER TWO

without which nothing in particular would ever seem significant. Nevertheless, while architecture can no more be identified with its climate than with its terrain, the interpretation of a building’s horizons must take both into account. The design of the roof or ceiling section of the Tremaine House can be compared to the upper levels of Neutra’s Puerto Rico projects of the mid1940s, projects for hospitals and schools in which natural ventilation was crucial. Neutra wrote about his solutions in Architecture of Social Concern in Regions of Mild Climate, his third book, published the same year as he finished the Tremaine House.16 Two details were particularly important in these roof designs: a hinged window, which acted as a glazing shelf and vent when rotated from its bottom edge or middle, and a bidirectional roof structure (the weave of spandrel girders and beams) within which the glazing shelf or vent rested. Cantilevered roof planes and slabs were also important, for they reduced direct sunlight, thus reducing solar heat gain, and they funneled breezes

2.17

Sub-soffit airchange, Architecture of Social Concern, Richard Neutra, 1948.

56

BUILDING LEVELS

through the sub-soffit vents, accelerating their passage from one side of the building to the other. Neutra developed a symbol to identify this system: CSSA/LS; which is to say continuous sub-soffit airchange over a lowered spandrel.17 He also designed a hinged and counterweighted door that could be rotated around a central axis or axle to a horizontal position in order to modulate air flow, much like the wing of an airplane or its flaps: “Wide open and properly oriented, as to prevailing breezes, [a room enclosed with this sort of louver/door] may enjoy desired velocity of airchange to help dry up moisture and perspiration. . . . Free sub-ceiling ventilation and a natural light reflecting ceiling is of great advantage.”18 Unlike Le Corbusier’s “sun breakers” of the same period, the bulky dimension and thermal mass of which in the heat of the day had the unwelcome effect of introducing hot air into the building’s midsection (especially problematic in the Millowner’s Association Building in Ahmedabad), Neutra’s overhangs were always thin enough to act like louvers. Two years before the book on the Puerto Rico projects and the Tremaine House construction, more or less at the time he was beginning the Tremaine design (which was in fact initially sited in Arizona, not California), he published an article that presented a number of instruments for modulating solar effects and breezes, as built in South America by Neutra himself and by other architects such as Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.19 The Olgay brothers included buildings from throughout the world in their later survey of these devices.20 In South America, where glass was expensive and ventilation important, different sorts of blinds or louvers were found to be better than any conventional system of walling. The same concerns were addressed in North America; Breuer’s work is a case in point, particularly his buildings at Vassar College. All of these devices, and the aims they represent, must be kept in mind when considering the elaboration of ceiling or roof space in the Tremaine House. If one wants to say that the building was “fitted into its site,” its insertion must be seen as of the sort that modulates or restructures existing conditions, while serving as their receptacle. The reciprocity of (natural and artificial) articulations is key.21 In creative architectural work, sites are not the framework for design, they do not provide rule and pattern; sites are revealed 57

CHAPTER TWO

through design and construction, which is to say articulated. To some degree this is always a rearticulation. Art discloses the nascent order of the natural world, and does so by discovering and modifying it, which may be the same thing insofar as this sort of disclosure is dialectical and involves reversals, not only elaboration. Work of an architectural kind is always working with and working against what is given. Thus, it is not surprising that many (but not all) of the devices of the California house cannot be found in the Pennsylvania residence, where natural ventilation and sun screening were far less important. While it would be naïve to assume that the elements that typify a given building result from conditions of climate only, according to some sort of environmental determinism, it would be equally shortsighted to assume that prevailing conditions can be avoided or neglected.22 Ambient conditions of sunshine and wind were like those of neighborhood water and soil: performances and materials that had to be creatively transformed in the definition of specific dwelling situations. The fact that they, too, were modulated with horizontal elements—louvers, louver/walls, cantilevers, sub-soffit vents, and so on—that they became horizonal conditions themselves, suggests that when observing the various strata of a design one must also recognize a spread of thermal and lighting conditions, together with the “drift” of roof and floor levels, some of which are meant to remain tacit, others to obtrude themselves into awareness, in order to epitomize the rest. The floors of the Tremaine House make this point abundantly clear. Its floor is uniformly flat and surfaced with sheets of terrazzo bonded to a slab of reinforced concrete, in which Neutra installed an under-floor heating and cooling system, as he did in the roughly contemporary Desert House. Wright called systems of this kind “gravity heat” and explained that he first experienced its thermal effect in the “Korean room” of Baron Okura’s house in Tokyo.23 The striking fact about Neutra’s use of under-floor heating is that the system extended from inside to outside, from the dining and living rooms of the Tremaine House to its outdoor terraces, beneath one and the same terrazzo surface. On cool evenings the floor surface radiated warmth, raising outdoor ambient temperature to something closer to what one would expect to find indoors. The same crossover was to be obtained in the heat of the day, with 58

BUILDING LEVELS

chilled water circulated beneath the terraces. The spread of the building’s floor surface was thus complemented by what might be called a thermal extension, or thermal passage, with temperatures and moisture conveyed from inside to outside and vice versa, paralleling the exchange of fresh air through the ceiling and its supporting structure. The trade between the two was not symmetrical, though, as the passage from outside to inside was from the macro- to a microclimate, itself elaborately subdivided (into rooms). Thus, thermal passage did not lead to thermal uniformity, as if Neutra had intended the maintenance of an acceptable temperature range everywhere throughout a building, which is something Le Corbusier implied in his call for “exact respiration.”24 This difference might be made more clear if one speaks of thermal passage from one setting to another rather than within the building or site as a whole, with the implication that some rooms will be cooler or warmer than others. In fact, thermal bridging and condensation did occur on the “inside” of the Tremaine terrace. Perhaps it is useful to add that the differences between the interior and exterior settings were both actual and virtual; while the temperature difference between two settings may well have been slight when measured on a thermometer (given the circulation of heated or chilled water), the effect on an inhabitant could be great when materials with different capacities for heat absorption were used, which is one of the roles the furnishings played, in concert with the wall surfaces that remained. The distinction between a material’s measurable and expressive temperatures allows one to speak of a room with white or metal surfaces (such as a kitchen) as feeling somewhat cold and one with darker colors or clad in timber (such as a library) as feeling the opposite. In prescientific language it is customary to distinguish color qualities by “temperature.” Personality types and moods are described in the same way. Neutra was exceedingly sensitive to both actual and symbolic material temperatures as they accommodated and represented a range of dwelling situations. This he seems to have learned from Adolf Loos, his former teacher, who argued for a sense of the temperature of materials in his paper on the principle of cladding or dressing. These differences were especially apparent in the Tremaine House because they “appeared” (were in-

59

CHAPTER TWO

corporated) severally and distinctly, against the background of continuous thermal horizons. Thermal passage understood in this way makes for a differentiated landscape within the building and outside it. When one tries to envisage the daily patterns of use in a house such as this, one gets the sense that the range of internal microclimates sustained a kind of migration through the plan that paralleled passage through the whole place. The schedule and direction of this migration followed the path of the sun, which is obviously a given condition of any site, but also the paths cut into the surface of the earth, a surface that was in this, as in all of Neutra’s designs, comprehensively rebuilt. The augury of the building’s section coordinated these boundary horizons. The lateral drift or differentiated continuity of temperatures, materials, levels, and inhabited settings in the building was made possible by the elimination of a number of upright space-dividing elements, walls. The strong accent on horizontality is also apparent in the modifications to the uprights that remain. I have observed that the lateral liaisons between distinct settings seem to have sliced away the midsection of traditional uprights, leaving vestiges or traces on the floors and ceilings. When one examines the walls themselves, however—I mean the midsections that survive—it is not their torsos that seem at risk, but the places where they actually meet the ceiling and floor planes. In many interior instances these connections are hidden under a shadow cast by the outer edge of a negative joint, a horizontal channel where the two planes meet. In traditional detailing, two elements that came to be butt-jointed were subsequently covered by a third, such as a strip of molding, concealing the line of connection by masking it. Neutra’s connections work not by addition but subtraction, by taking away not only this third element but also the edges on which it would have rested. Walls and partitions seem to “float” because they are supported by shadows. In virtually all of the walllength storage units, negative joints of this kind can be found behind the plane of the door fronts, where the cabinet base meets the floor surface. While standard in a kitchen, because it serves the function of a kick plate, Neutra used this recessed panel to form the base of low walls, even those without operable doors. At the opposite elevation, the aquarium on top of a low wall in 60

BUILDING LEVELS

the Pitcarin House serves the same function of disguising endings. Planting boxes and subsurface reflecting pools accomplish this purpose in other buildings. In all these cases, walls appear to be severed from the horizontal levels that had traditionally grounded them and consequently appear to hover in the sideways sweep from setting to setting to site. To the same end, walls and partitions are sometimes supported by legs that are noticeably thin, which has the consequence of making their stay in the space appear to be temporary. The screen that divides the entryway from the living room in the Tremaine House is a good example of this. While there as an upright, dividing and thus partially defining the two settings, this partition does not interrupt the play of reflections across the floor’s surface, nor does it impede the passage of air or temperature. The removal of caps and bases from exterior walls also eases the sideways slide of settings. Because these walls were so obviously and consistently made to appear to float just above or lightly rest on the icy terrazzo, one is inclined to return once again to the building’s horizontal levels as their stable and structuring elements. How is this concentration on the horizontal, this extension into the horizon, to be understood? What motivates such unease with the vertical, with walling in the traditional sense? And what kind of “rooms” result from this concentration, or what sort of spatial practices were these levels meant to accommodate and represent? Neutra did not advance Wright’s arguments about “breaking the box,” the machine age, and organic architecture. Other issues seem to have been more important, or more concrete. I have called the settings in these houses discrete, but are they really single or separate? Doesn’t the drift or merge of one into another turn them into something other than an ensemble of rooms or settings, into some version of field or landscape? How is one to perceive, to understand, “rooms within rooms”; does not the annexation of border territories confuse identities by disturbing the integrity or self-sameness of the building’s plan, precisely because it integrates it into the surround what one would have thought was properly and pragmatically excluded from it? Apart from Neutra’s work, isn’t this the real problem with many of the urban projects of the period, this loss of the obvious edge; doesn’t it explain the disintegration of the street, the 61

CHAPTER TWO

courtyard, and the town square, and the disorientation that results? Isn’t the continuity of such a horizon a problem rather than an achievement? Doesn’t the migration that characterizes movement across the levels of these late modern sites neutralize the horizon we inhabit by making its boundaries inconspicuous? And finally, isn’t the fact of “circumambient orientation” evidence of being everywhere all at once and therefore of being nowhere? Plan making and room definition in the traditional sense seem to be preferred alternatives, but I want to argue that they are not the answer. One of the mistakes of recent postmodern architecture was to propose them as such. Not only have we accustomed ourselves to living in what is loosely called “open space” in the later twentieth century, but we have also come to realize that when it was proposed in the early part of the century it was to replace an understanding of the world, and a style of configuring settings, that had emptied itself of significance —historicist culture in the first instance and what Neutra called “geometric” plan making in the second. This was as clear to figures like Neutra in the 1950s as it was to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in the 1920s, and to Wright even before then. In Survival through Design Neutra observed that the land surveyor’s practice of “parceling fairly level land” sustained the “tragedy of Euclidean geometry inadvertently turned into creative design.”25 As soon as this “grand abstraction” was accepted as a basic premise of design, primary spatial order—the relatively stable pattern of human affairs—came to be neglected. And neglect gave way to distortion, and then to disorganization. In the passages elaborating these observations, Neutra initially seems to be arguing against what we have taken to be typical of the modern sense of space, “abstraction,” with which he has always been associated. This is only partially true. He did, indeed, reject the “parceling” of “Euclidean space,” but this is not to say that he longed for its historical antecedent, as did many in the postmodern period. To understand what is specific about his work, and the work of the postwar period generally, one needs to avoid two alternative conceptions: the abstract space of so-called modernism and the parceled-out space of schematic historicism. An articulated field or horizon was never intended to be abstract; in fact, it was meant to be concrete, or practically and topographically specific. 62

BUILDING LEVELS

Neutra thought that basic conditions of being in the world, such as distance (that some things are here, not there), depth (or the occlusion that results from having a standpoint), and the difference of left and right, for example, had been “emasculated” and rendered “amorphous” when design came to be practiced as a technique of “parceling fairly level land,” as an art of composing geometries, in the form of wall lines on sheets of paper, as was common in late Beaux-Arts compositional practice. The problem with this procedure, and its desperate poverty, is that it misses what is essential although inconspicuous in spatial experience because it focuses only on things that obtrude themselves into awareness in built settings, walls and facades, the upright signs of architectural (and some presume also cultural) order. Other conditions can be just as important, even more so, despite being barely noticed. In the Victorian dining room, Neutra observed, the hostess frequently distinguished herself by sitting at the only armchair at the dining table. This is not exactly right. Hermann Muthesius, in The English House, a better-studied survey, observed that armchairs at the narrow ends of the dining table were often used by both the man and woman of the house. But, he continued, they were used most frequently by the man, because of “the entrenched English view that the armchair is the proper seat for the chairman or man at the head of the company.”26 This explains why this seat was often called the “Carver’s chair.” Nevertheless, or despite the gender reversal in his account, Neutra also suggested that the seat of this chair was about one inch higher than the seats of the guests. In postwar California, by contrast, the hostess “cuddles on the carpet beside the easy chair of the guest of honor,” a practice that resulted from changed styles of conversation. In these passages Neutra did not say, but I believe he would want us to remember, that the Victorian dining room was part of a house that was part of a city, just as its California equivalent was part of an ensemble that was tied to its vicinity. In the schools he designed, this lateral drift extended from the desktops to the carpet for seated and circular meetings, to a ring of chairs on the lawn under the shade of the tree, and toward the horizon. Such a spread was, he argued, a consequence (or the embodiment) of changes in teaching styles. He had in mind a sort of free-range Montessori method. Likewise in the houses: orientation 63

CHAPTER TWO

2.18

Tremaine House, Richard Neutra. Photo Julius Shulman.

BUILDING LEVELS

passed from the cushion on the floor, through the window wall, across the terrace, over the boulders on the lawn, and toward the hills in the distance. Entertaining posture is obviously a matter of decorum, and what suits Victorian England is not right for midcentury California, nor for our time. Despite the dated character of these poses, perhaps just because of it, one needn’t see them as possibly one’s own in order to imagine how this notion turned Neutra toward inconspicuous spatial levels as the framework, matrix, or medium for differentiating settings. Every horizon we inhabit carries within itself and maintains for us traces or vestiges of typical postures and dwelling practices; not only the “sitting above” or “cuddling” that Neutra observed but also all those postures we typically take up in the everyday affairs of our lives, sometimes consciously but mostly unconsciously, whether purposeful, expressive, or symbolic. Like work clothes at the end of the day, these traces are saturated with our practices. Instruments of standing and elevation, levels, are at once the most basic and significant of these, although largely unnoticed, at least not consciously or objectively, much like the terrain of which they are part and counterpart. Neutra wrote: “To gain height against the eternal pull of gravity is the supreme triumph of the living; only the dead must lie level. . . . Flatness is the prototype of forced and final relaxation . . . of resigned vertical aspirations.”27 So much for an architectural section with uniformly flat slabs only. Yet, as I have noted in passing, in the photographs of his buildings Neutra usually had himself and others inclined in poses that approximated or paralleled the lay of the land, emphasizing the horizontal by aligning with it. This is not to say these figures were forced into “final relaxation” but resigned perhaps, resigned to a kind of distracted or disengaged stillness and melancholy that is not only personal (Neutra felt he never received the recognition he was due) but cultural: the openness of these settings carries with it a strong sense of autonomy and isolation, which is the darker side of individualism and of postwar freedom, something portrayed in many of the noir films. As a matter of practical and cultural interests, Neutra tried to rethink and rehabilitate experiences of distance, the geometric version of which neglects primary experiences of accessibility and reach. For our legs and hands, 65

CHAPTER TWO

or sedimented in them and renewed throughout our lives, is a tacit but operative sense of their range of reach and ability, a motor power or “I can” that measures itself against the resistance offered by the surrounding context. There are, Neutra observed, “ranges of possible control [that] surround each individual in concentric rings.”28 One’s body has in its interior darkness not only abilities but also inclinations or predispositions of posture, which Neutra called kinesthetic patterns. These reciprocate what is saturated in the fittings, materials, and dimensions of a setting. Paul Schilder, whom Neutra cites, named the ensemble of these incorporated patterns the “body image.”29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who also cited Schilder, elaborated this much further in his account of human spatiality and bodily motility, using the “body image” to distinguish a spatiality of situation from a spatiality of position, the first anchoring the body in the midst of its tasks and the second identifying relationships between figures external to one another.30 Neutra’s account of the kinesthetic pattern and his criticism of “geometric” plan making parallel this division between two kinds of spatiality. By analogy, one can say a building’s “image” is its ensemble of inclinations, inclinations toward or away from settings with which it has concrete engagements, or lateral relationships, that are not only visual nor necessarily pictorial, despite the way we usually think of architectural images. When we rethink customary notions of space, or suspend the theoretical attitude these assumptions take for granted, we begin to see that this corporeal schema is enmeshed within an expanding range of distances, a structured topography that includes where I am, which is to say where the things I now need are within reach, a middle distance, and an expansion toward the clear blue horizon: an equipmental, practical, and environmental horizon. Not one of these can be separated from the others, hence the lateral spread of an ensemble that integrates these “rings” into one field, terrain or topography—the dining room, the street, and the town or landscape—differentiated but reciprocating. The knowledge the body has of its world is taken for granted in this set of distances, for typical settings are always jointly presupposed in it. In fact, they envelop one another. “The kinesthetic pattern,” argued Neutra, “inside the body, is indeed in intimate correspondence with the layout and design pattern [of the building]. Archi66

BUILDING LEVELS

tecture, in fact, is just such a pattern, laid down about us to guide . . . the eyes, necks, arms, and legs.”31 In this assertion Neutra overstated architecture’s capacity to guide our lives, I think. One need only observe that the horizons of one’s body and its spatial settings are codetermined; more precisely, they determine each other, less like a bird in its cage than in flight, enveloped by and enveloping the wind, the lines or levels of which are spontaneously determined through interlocked patterns of movement. Thus choice, or the possibility of making right or wrong decisions—not freedom from, but freedom within certain conditions. This codetermination of purposes and settings is practical, for everyday life cannot unfold without it, but it is also symbolic: Louis XIV was King of France for two reasons, his royal birth and the fact that he lived in Versailles. Dramatic action unfolds in the spaces set up to accommodate and represent it; one need not prioritize either the accommodation or the representation. We feel this way about our houses: they suit our needs and make them apparent to others. The difference between this commonplace of interior design and architectural understanding is insight into the conditions that all of these “sets” take for granted. Architecture has as its primary task the settlement of the body’s practical horizons, giving to them durable dimension and stable surface, to each its level, whether below or above the base platform, the ground plane, that is taken as “given” in conventional practices. Paul Claudel explained that in the house Antonin Raymond built for himself, “there is no more cell because there is no more cube, only a tray suitable to domestic needs, under God’s sight, of rest and movement.”32 The sense of levels apparent in this account of Raymond’s work, and in Neutra’s, can be understood as dedication to the primary topography of spatial awareness, a dedication that was motivated by dissatisfaction and unease with its geometric alternative. Rooms without walls, or with few, accommodate kinds of occupation that differ from what was typical in traditional kinds of enclosure. The spaces to which I have referred have generally been the “public,” or perhaps it’s better to say the “social,” parts of the house. Is this necessarily the case? Or, putting the question in reverse: does concentration on levels or on horizons as 67

CHAPTER TWO

the primary arena of spatial differentiation disavow private space? If one takes private to mean hidden, the answer must be to some degree yes. The same answer would have to be given if the question focused on traditional emblems or furnishings of centrality, such as the hearth. In fact there are private settings in these houses, and some are walled in on four sides, although not many. But this usage of the words “private” and “enclosed” may be far too restrictive, or perhaps too vague. One can say that open space leads to the simultaneous appearance of aspects of all the settings that make up an ensemble. This accords with twentieth-century aesthetics, especially of cubism. Neutra’s late publication Building with Nature begins with a section on “Space, Transparency, and Reflection” that testifies to his interest in this theme. Julius Shulman’s photographs of the rebuilt VDL house, published therein, confirm it. Yet neither transparency nor simultaneity is ever perfect, or perfectly consistent, despite one’s assumptions about the parts of an ensemble being disclosed “all at once.” Seeing completely through is never what happens in Neutra’s buildings, nor in Mies’s, nor even in Philip Johnson’s single-minded exercise on the same theme. Depth is always present in human perception, otherwise nothing would be perceived; each horizon we inhabit assumes some occlusion. No house of Neutra’s neglects the need to shelter domestic intimacies. But the range from the most recessive to the most exposed of settings is elaborately graduated, and the boundaries between the several setting types are both subtle and polymorphic. In the drift and displacement of settings within Neutra’s buildings there are always interruptions in their lateral spread, interruptions required by patterns of use and then constructed in the form of furnishings. Analogically, these interruptions are like the instruments of trade, coins passed from hand to hand, or, better, like the pattern or history of gift exchange, whereby reciprocal indebtedness ties two sides together. Also useful for spatial differentiation are the barely apparent edges of changes in level. Buildings made in this way allow residing to leave its traces, its sediments, on these various levels, perhaps by means of them; yet these traces are neither as fixed nor as permanent as walls. If such a site section is geological, the waters of everyday affairs pass through it. One might say that the

68

BUILDING LEVELS

places established across such a site are always caught up in time, that of their own formation, carried along on a river of time. This manner of configuring settings, or allowing individuals to coconfigure them, represents a very big gamble, however; for when enclosing walls are sacrificed to this degree, when the admittedly variable schedule of dwelling practices is expected to settle itself into marginally defined territories, without the aid of many uprights, there is considerable risk that the boundaries between places will become indefinite, making their differences and therefore their identities hard to discern, possibly resulting in loss of orientation. And what may just work in a house may ruin a street, neighborhood, or town. On the positive side, this tendency toward the horizontal represents a return to or a renewed faith in the profound basis for all manner of architectural definition, the practices of our lives in the context of an extended field, practices that had been neglected in the “parceling of land” methods. I want to interpret this tendency in this way, and say even further that the desire to return to primary issues is what motivated the interest in levels, which would otherwise represent just another kind of formal or engineering gymnastics— as in the case of Breuer. Yet, again on the negative side, the tendency toward the horizontal also represents a dedication to a kind of freedom or openness that promises individuality but also gives one the strong sense of isolation and resignation. The end result of this would be the very cultural poverty Neutra was trying to overcome, achieved through the absence, not excess, of articulation. At the same time, this architecture risks its permanence in exactly the same way that it risks its frontal visibility: it does not intend to be the same through but in time, which is to say in the time of its varied and variable articulation. As snow blows across the road at night, or perhaps across a frozen river, it inevitably catches itself on some surface irregularity, lingering there for a while, maybe catching more, until it builds itself up into a drift. This is called accumulation and in human affairs has a temporal correlate, generally speaking memory, or historical sedimentation, in which transience is as important as permanence. Depending on the direction and the force of the wind, accumulation may increase or disappear. The surface levels in Neutra’s buildings contain these surface irregularities; the traces of use saturated into them 69

CHAPTER TWO

are these drifts. The “rooms” that result from concentration on the expanded field risk inconspicuous (even unnoticed) definition, but also promise the rediscovery of their foundation —at least their co-constitution—in concrete affairs, played out in the midst of a topographical surround that possesses its own patterns and traces, both natural and cultural. Precisely because it is inconspicuous, architectural definition by means of levels makes room for the ordering power of everyday life in the midst of an expansive terrain.

70

3

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E Designing a building involves determining how it will look, which generally means composing its facade, a practice that is neither uncommon nor immediately controversial. As soon as the matter is given a little thought, however, the business of facade making becomes more than a little puzzling. Everyone knows that buildings are very rarely seen the way they are designed, straight on as if they were pictures; peculiarities of location usually prevent this, as do the exigencies of building use. We know this is true but tend to maintain otherwise, as if the drawn facade adequately represented the one that is built. Facade design, maybe all design, is thus largely a matter of faith, because no one will ever be able to explain, let alone demonstrate, how my sense of this drawing will relate to your experience of that building. Once begun, all such accounts quickly lose their way in a fog of aesthetic theory and perceptual psychology. When personal preferences are asserted, this vagueness is dispelled, but that too ends consideration, for aesthetic preferences are rarely subject to explanation. Nevertheless, the practice persists: because buildings are meant to be seen, each is designed to have its look. Thus it seems obvious that composing a facade is very similar to making a painting, despite the differences Alberti wanted to stress with his distinction between the drawings of an architect and a painter. And what is true for a facade’s composition is true for its reception. The building’s front face is a picture plane, a tableau. Not only does it have edges and broad expanse like a canvas, but the lines and angles that divide its surface, together with the shapes and figures that appear across it, display the building’s content in more or less the same way that the colors and figures applied to a canvas surface display its subject matter. This is especially true of facades on paper, of drawings still being worked on or those that have not yet been built, for the composition on a page takes for granted the neutrality of its background, the white of the paper serving the same purpose as the wall of the gallery. Such a sharp contrast between figure and ground can never occur once the building has been 71

CHAPTER THREE

built because there is not a single context that is empty in quite the same way, no matter how nondescript or uninspiring the location may seem to be. In fact, the reverse can just as easily be true; the setting can be more interesting than the building, prompting an exchange of roles, whereby the ground disentangles itself and loosens a few figures into prominence. This pleases the landscape architects who have composed their own pictures in the vicinity and want them to be seen in their own right. Yet, even with an actual background, or despite it, every built design is meant to stand apart from its surroundings because each is supposed to have its own look, whether it looks a little or a lot like the buildings that preceded it, within its vicinity or elsewhere. Failing this, a building could never be identified as something in itself. The extension of this aspect to all building tasks partly explains the particular originality of our architecture, something I am not intending to praise, insofar as my aim is to understand just the reverse: how buildings have been and can be enmeshed in the settings that surround them, and the consequences this has for both perception and the ways the building “works.” The facade identifies the building. While taken for granted by the majority and seemingly sensible, this statement is far from clear. Let me phrase my observation as a set of questions: is it really the case that each building is seen as something “in itself,” something that stands apart from its surroundings, noticeable because distinct? Does not the independence this assumes distort our typical experience of the cities and towns in which buildings find their place, assuming for each building the uniqueness we might otherwise reserve for special cases, such as monuments? Does not this substitute the attitude taken in design—a fairly narrow or narrowly interested attitude—for the much more inclusive posture taken up in preprofessional experience? What happens to the city and the society it both houses and represents when each of its parts is allowed to assume for itself freestanding self-expression, at the expense of expressions or relationships of commonality and congruence? Can we still call such an assembly a city, and the gathering it accommodates a society or a culture? Does not this usage radically alter the meaning of these words by substituting for congruity and cooperation the sort of association that results from mere adjacency, as if a democracy were nothing more than 72

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

an aggregate of individuals? Lastly, does not this sense of an urban ensemble privilege the individual’s experience (perception) of identifiable figures at the expense of architecture’s tacit workings? When shown a design, or better, when approaching any building, its facade is what one generally registers first. To arrive means to stand in front of a facade. This is obvious, insofar as it parallels everyday social experience, the exchanges of which we assume are face to face, although I doubt there is a statistical preponderance of the symmetrical style of meeting. Nevertheless, before the advent of facade recognition a person is still en route, still in the midst of things and more or less vagabond, aware of what’s around but not focused on anything in particular. Every tourist knows that it is impossible to snap a picture without holding the camera still; only then can something interesting be recorded “as it is.” Pose and position are cognate words, both signifying the stable standing by which things obtain and occupy their place. And what presents itself to be seen in this way is also what is remembered. For this reason, and with no need for further reflection, facades are taken to identify buildings, and their design taken to be a crucial architectural task. This equates a commonplace of human life (face-to-face encounter) with a basic premise of aesthetic experience. Without facades, we believe, there would be nothing to recognize in architecture; no characteristic details, marks, or signs; no semiotic substance, only more building as background, which is by definition unnoticed and insignificant. This is just as true of the buildings of our time as it is of those from the past. The history of architectural styles especially is largely a history of facades, reflecting customary assumptions and expectations. Yet the more one looks into this history, the more doubtful this truism becomes. Consider almost any sacred building built before the time of the Renaissance. It is not at all certain that the fronts of churches or temples built before the advent of perspectival optics were meant to be viewed the way we see our facades—as pictures, displays, or compositions. One can certainly say these buildings had facades, that their fronts as opposed to their backs were envisaged as the targets of contemplative regard, but it is also true that they were to be seen or grasped as constituents of a topography that supported not 73

CHAPTER THREE

only religious practices but a wide range of prosaic or everyday affairs. The boundaries between the two—the sacred and secular—were both impermanent or occasional and topographical. Religious experience itself was only partly contemplative, for in antiquity rituals of observance were both theatrical and agonistic; which means its settings accommodated contemplation as well as action, epiphany as much as choric rhythm. The temple facade was thus a front and a back(drop). The pictorial visibility we assume for facades in our time is even more doubtful in consideration of the secular buildings of the pre-Renaissance or pre-perspective period, for these examples, which is to say the bulk of any city’s buildings, were barely presentational or theatrical at all. These buildings had entries, as all inhabitable constructions do, but this does not mean that the walls in which they were placed were thought of or meant to be seen as composed images, the way we see them; at most one would find a ceremonial window, portal, or shrine cut into the wall in a position suggested by the wider vicinity. It is correct to say their significance arose in performance, but not of the Richard Burton sort that appears on a stage, at least not like this mainly; their “action” was more like the play of instruments in some craft procedure, some kind of handwork, for which the wall as apparatus or equipment provided the means. The enclosing wall of a domestic building in a preperspective context and culture should not be thought of as a “work” that bears an author’s signature, but as an instrument that works to support broadly constituted practices. No one ever recorded the names of the architects who designed these buildings; neither individuality of conception nor of expression seems to have been important then, as it is now, when all tasks claim equality of status, when “images” are everywhere and everything that is built is thought to “communicate” in this way. “Show” in the secular buildings of the pre-perspective period would have exhibited neglect of common sense. To return to cathedrals and temples: opening onto public spaces, these buildings were enmeshed in the prosaic activities of their setting, at least for much of the time. For years the transept doors of old St. Paul’s Cathedral in London were regularly opened to make way for a horse market that passed

74

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

through its interior, hardly the aspect we expect for the presentation of visual significance in great architecture. Yet the hard truth of the matter is that the advent of spectacle in pre-Renaissance cities was never more than occasional, in fact it was so essentially; holidays were interruptions in the course of everyday life. Theater, too, happened now and then; it was an event for which temporary props were installed in public spaces and later removed (from sight). Vestiges were sufficient prompts of recollection. When Gottfried Semper wrote “the haze of carnival candles is the true atmosphere of art,” he had in mind the architecture of commemoration, which was essentially a kind of Festapparatus or improvised scaffolding for public celebration. This assumes that epiphany is never continual. In the center of London, on the days of such displays, the outsides of St. Paul’s nave and transept were converted into seating for the wealthy, conferring upon these walls background status and equipmental purpose. Not the building nor even the urban setting was chiefly important, rather the performances that both accommodated. If we suspend our unexamined certainties for a minute, we will realize that this doubling of purposes occurs in our time too. When going from my house near the university to my wife’s office downtown, I always pass by City Hall, hardly noticing it, or noticing it only as a place where assembled taxis congest the traffic. Stopping to think about it, I could not give a very full account of its facades, its massing, ornament, and minute articulation. Is there some defect in this building’s composition, some want in originality? Perhaps the problem is in the context, the lack of the right viewing distance for the building. I imagine that the hundreds who work there also pass by its elaborately decorated facades on their way to work, quickly when a little late. As a matter of fact the building manages this passage quite effectively, and does so because of the way it integrates itself into its vicinity. Is this a problem? Does it testify to misconstrued values, to inverted priorities? Must a building’s pictorial function subordinate its prosaic purposes? Could not a facade, whatever its originality, work in both ways? If so, what is the relationship between the two, between a sort of communication that is perspectival and one that is not? Was Hegel right, that architecture is hardly a fine art because it is

75

CHAPTER THREE

inextricably caught up in mundane affairs? Do beauty and use, architecture and (mere) building necessarily compromise one another? From the period of the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century there was, indeed, a grand history of facade types, which for the moment I do not want to question; but a glance at the development of modern architecture soon shows that the existence of a frontal plane of picturelike display cannot be taken for granted, despite the painterly preoccupations of its greatest proponents. Elevations came to replace facades. Theo van Doesburg, for one, was exceedingly aggressive about this: “In contrast to frontalism, which was born out of a rigid, static concept of life, the new architecture offers a plastic richness of an all-sided development in space-time.”1 If this meant the end of the artistic or aesthetic part of architecture, so be it; for “art has poisoned our life. Aesthetics has infected everyone. No single object remains unaffected.”2 Without exaggeration one can say that the architecture of the modern period represents an assault on the very nature or idea of the facade, which is one reason why it was promised to be the style to end all styles. We know this promise was not carried out; the avant-garde was neither successful nor defeated but seems to have given up its cause, at least staged a retreat. Much of it came to be stylized, even the examples that were meant to be determined by technological concerns. Hence the term “machine aesthetic” and the decorative engineering that is still with us. Yet, putting aside all the false claims, misrepresentations, and exhausted initiatives, the question concerning the necessity of the facade remains unanswered. The lack of a facade in some early modern buildings could also be seen as a consequence of the functionalist approach to design, best suited to domestic or utilitarian architecture. This partly explains the difficulty modern architects had with the idea of the monument, and the absurd alternative of everything or nothing being a monument. A few of the CIAM meetings were devoted to this question, most notably perhaps CIAM 8 in 1951, which took up the question of the monument as a constituent of civic space in the heart of the city. Nearly a decade before, Sigfried Giedion, Fernand Léger, and José Luis Sert had drafted a paper entitled “Nine Points on Monumentality,” arguing for a new phase of modern architecture that would not disavow the 76

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

early period’s achievements but augment them with considerations of architecture’s capacity to symbolize human ideals. Neither that paper nor the conferences did a great deal to clarify matters. With these arguments and buildings of the middle part of this century in mind, to say nothing of those from antiquity or the Middle Ages, it is more than a little extravagant to neglect the dissimilarity between buildings and paintings, architecture and pictorial expression; not to wonder if there is a kind of disclosure in architecture that is not painterly or scenographic, not a matter of display, or more exactly not only nor always this, an architecture that is also inconspicuous in its accomplishment of other purposes. This would mean reconsidering frontality and with it the centrality of perceptual experience in architectural order. Is there a way architecture can make sense that is not an exhibition or showcasing of images? What would be involved in the design of a nonscenographic architecture? How could we talk about such an architecture or begin to describe it without immediately turning it into what we are trying to avoid, another set of objects-to-be-seen or, more ambitiously, signs to be read? If we cannot envisage and describe such an architecture, if a building that is not camera-ready is not worth attending to because there is nothing to notice, nothing “interesting” about it, perhaps we need to rekindle the fires of postmodern semiotics, to warm up a theory of signs and shed light on the practice of making them. Accepting this conclusion, we would stand back from buildings, once again, in order to decide and design the way they ought to look, taking up our cameras and reference books and then our paints and brushes in order to “picture” the sort of appearances we have come to know and like or those that strike us as up-to-date. We would do this as a matter of faith, remaining uncertain that what we “see” in design will make sense in built fact. The facade of the building is generally pinned onto its front side, which is to say the side through which entry occurs. The display it accomplishes, a fully secularized architectural epiphany in full size and distinctive appearance, happens during approach and ends with arrival. The best way to begin thinking more about this is to contrast the front with the back. Frontal display takes for granted perceptual or perspectival distance. The facade always 77

CHAPTER THREE

appears over there, separated from where I am by a space that may be insignificant, like the building’s background, but is also essential in its scenographic presentation. Facades on a street depend on this distance, as do actors on a stage; without the darkness in a theater no performance would ever be seen. Clarity of facade reading is inversely proportional to the measure of this darkness, at least until a certain distance has been reached (for a facade that is too far away, like one that is at hand, cannot be read at all). Throughout the perspective tradition, this vantage or station point was expressly determined and in many cases marked out, with widely different means, whether a change in level, varied illumination, or a brass ring on the floor; no matter whether the facade being viewed was in a city, a garden, or interior. When, by contrast, we envisage and try to describe the perception of settings nearby, we use terms like “grasped” or “apprehended,” indicating a manual or motor appropriation rather than one that is predominantly optical or ocular. With apprehension comes proximity. Tactility, even if metaphorical, thrives on continuity and presupposes a field of awareness. At the rear of a building, viewing distance of great extent between the perceiving and perceived bodies is rarely found, or designed to be found. More often the back merges with its vicinity, collapsing distance and allowing other buildings or settings to obtrude themselves into awareness, making such a “facade” hard to notice, if noticed at all. Close proximity annuls aesthetic distance. While this cancellation involves reduced dimensions, it is more than that, for without a corresponding sense of practical engagement aesthetic interests could still prevail. At the back a practical field replaces or temporarily subordinates visualized objects, or exchanges one kind of visuality for another. The loss of the object allows for a gain in the nearness of things, their immediacy, and their ability to sustain practical affairs; and this in turn promotes non- or pre-aesthetic engagements: service, domestic activities, and even the anonymous occurrences of natural existence, none of which thrives on viewing distance or the free-standing it assumes. The truth of the matter is that these occurrences manage and maintain themselves quite well without any one of us looking after them, as if they were indifferent to us. This is true of the natural world especially. Such a realization proposes neither vagrant nor unguided experience on my part, even less a sort 78

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

that is inattentive; instead, it demonstrates participation in the whole, recognizing it as a mosaic of opportunities. Nor is a configuration of this kind, without well-defined objects on view, senseless: such an ensemble manifests a certain latency, something like an atmosphere, a disposition, or what in German is called a Stimmung, which is never unclear or equivocal in its meaning but is difficult to describe objectively. This kind of sense is eclipsed by facades. When viewing distance does exist at the back and practical engagements are suspended, we discover that the building has a front and a rear facade, and what I have just said about the back is taken instead to be characteristic of the sides, or elevations that are unceremoniously integrated into their surroundings. A setting in which there is viewing distance on all four sides of the object is the site of a monument, of which, I think, a city, town, or neighborhood can stand no more than a few without risking its cohesion, the existence of its tacit structure. Van Doesburg may have had an intuition of this risk when he shouted “no more art.” One suspects he meant not so much of it so much of the time. After all, he too was an artist and treated wall surfaces as if they were paintings. While the vocabulary of integration, merging, or blending is commonplace in architectural discourse, it can be misleading when applied to the background I am trying to describe, for it assumes the separate and prior existence of the things to be joined, thereby overlooking exactly what must be explained, the continuity from which the elements of the back arise when they become partial or fragmented objects on view. This vocabulary neglects, by taking for granted, the medium, matrix, or milieu in which the elements of a setting discreetly reside; it overlooks the ambience in which they wait (or we believe they do) until they are appropriated into some kind of action, or thematized as objects of attention. More than overlooking this matrix, the vocabulary of merging substitutes for its attributes those of the front, making it an assembly of parts that are themselves identifiable. This is the source of great confusion in architectural discourse. In what can be called pre-perspective experience, the back of a building is not given to awareness as an assembly of parts or fragments, because prior to the perspective view there are no partialities, instead continuity, like that of the room in which I now sit: this desk to 79

CHAPTER THREE

the window and its light, not each in itself, one by one, the way just listed, but interwoven in one practical situation; likewise the window, garden, and street, or the street, neighborhood, and town. Again, such an inventory names profiles that are too independent and disconnected; the tacit milieu that situations take for granted is more like the ensemble that appears in peripheral vision, a latent order, which concentration can (later) differentiate, when attention carves a corridor through the field of tacit articulation. The priority of lateral connections in the latent horizon is not historical but ontological; they are presupposed as aspects of human existence. When relationships of this kind cease to exist, the world stops making sense. Interconnectedness does not presume antecedent partiality, just the reverse; or better, cohesion and partiality reciprocate one another. Nor does antecedent unity compromise wholeness, it delays it. The vocabulary of integration, so common in contextualist or regionalist discourse, allows us to avoid the real difficulty of describing phenomena that are not objectlike, not designed to be seen as figures in their own right, by making out of the nearness of fragments a semblance of the latent order on which they are founded, which means mistaking adjacency for cohesion, as if people in an elevator were thought to be the same thing as a group of friends. Assemblage is a technique developed in modern art; even though it can beautifully represent urban configurations, it is insufficient as an account of their natural history. Nor do we inhabit cubist paintings, despite the fact that they reveal the richness of the world in which we reside. Trying to build a “collage city” is like eating a menu, mistaking the representation for what is represented. Nor are urban and architectural backgrounds made up of “elements.” If that word is apposite to this kind of sense it is in its singular form, the way it is used in chemistry, to name something simple and formative: the building’s back is an irreducible substrate that makes possible the use and recognition of things in particular. Putting the matter differently, or shifting from the building to my way of coming to grips with it, it is possible to distinguish two sorts of architectural sense: a focused sort that concentrates on, actually concentrates, the convergence of a building’s scenographic qualities, and an apprehensive sort that 80

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

grasps the unfolding spread of its topography, delayed in its completion, while remaining open to the divergence of its aspects, knowingly but unreflectively grasping what it needs. This distinguishes the sort of looking that distances itself from phenomena in order to discern or witness something whole and entire from the practical activity that moves within a closer or more compact horizon, not expecting a display of something complete in itself but making use of a configuration, a world, that is always reasonably able to supply answers to the questions my several interests direct toward it, having saturated itself with their consequences and covered itself with their traces. Not one of us is the single source of this saturation, but each of us contributes to it. This buildup has already been accomplished throughout the city to varying degrees, as if by some prior agreement there had been worked out a spatial or situational contract that fosters trade between my intentions, insofar as they are fairly typical, and wherever I happen to be. I benefit from this pact even though I may have had little or no part in making it. To the degree that I stop looking for figures and simply coexist with them, this pre-personal and nondeliberative sort of sense allows me to acknowledge the uncoerced emergence of sensible figures, arising mostly where I would have expected them, but sometimes to my surprise as if they were elements of the natural landscape. If figures such as these can be said to exist as such before the nonacquisitive but operative gaze, it is necessary to qualify the statement by observing that each can occlude and be occluded by all of the others, never preserving for itself, for very long, the status of an object against a background. Things grasped in this way are always incidental to one another, each auxiliary to the one provisionally thematized, each of them mediated and mediating. And such an ensemble of intermediaries welcomes one’s attention rather than seizes or arrests it. This distinction between these two sorts of sense has its spatial and its temporal aspects. Sighting in the first instance is distanced or disengaged. It takes up a vantage that allows it to open onto a relatively stable structure of figures against a ground, stable enough to let me say “that’s the way it is,” assuming the configuration’s unending duration. That this is an assumption, an act of faith, is rarely considered. We tend to presume the constancy of the 81

CHAPTER THREE

image, forgetting the fact that the permanence of anything perceived is a function of a focused regard, which is itself an act, a choice, that need not have been undertaken, and if accomplished needs to be maintained or continually renewed, which we call paying attention; otherwise, both the focus and the object it has in view will fall away or be superseded by others. In the second sort of sense this kind of distance does not exist, and in place of the stable standing of figures is their successive emergence and withdrawal. Comprehension in this case accepts fluctuations in the figure background structure, whereby every perceived object can just as well be unperceived, or it can recede into a horizon which the objective gaze takes for granted but hardly notices. This means the first kind of viewing lasts much, much longer than the second. In fact it can, at least in principle, last forever. Such is the case with the monumental facade, which is intended to remain or to look the same always, when viewed from the right spot, the way we view pictures in a gallery. The back of a building, by contrast, is hardly noticed at all as something contained within itself; when or if some part of it does emerge into one’s objective awareness, it is always only for a while, just long enough to lead or verge onto something that’s about to come next, each approximating another. And the continuity of approximations is key. Can the practice of defining settings be described as an art of approximation, an art of field understanding and elaboration? Implicit in this question is the premise that the topography of practical affairs sustains its own kind of sense, or, to restate the idea in the terms of the foregoing paragraph, that certain modes of experience (particularly the delayed and passive sort) disclose certain spatial contents (the field of reciprocal approximations). Such a proposition can hardly be the last word on any specific setting or setting type, however, for the freedom native to perceptual experience allows it to spontaneously adopt any one of its modes or kinds of sense, pictorial or practical. This is the way the back can both give itself to historical or habitual understanding and insinuate or germinate its own image, atemporalizing itself, indirectly and silently constituting, or accommodating the constitution of, what will have been seen. To speak typologically, perception in the first instance occurs in a theater, in the second it occurs in the midst of a landscape, 82

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

or along a street. This contrasts but also tries to link a time of unending duration with one of successive moments. These spaces and times are not principally a consequence of my attitude toward a building; they are accommodated or occasioned by different aspects of both the building itself and the setting in which it is located, whether built, a town, or unbuilt, a landscape. The distinctions I have introduced can be developed further in consideration of a specific set of buildings. I propose three from the early part of this century: Adolf Loos’s Tzara House in Paris (1926), his Rufer House in Vienna (1922), and his Winternitz Villa in the Smichov district of Prague (1932). These three are useful because they show different ways in which the relationship between front and back can be understood. With these buildings and the arguments that follow I want to show not only a shift of interest from what I have characterized as the front of the building to its back, but also the way these buildings with “backs” all around were integrated into their surrounding context, reshaping it after being shaped by it. I realize such an argument contradicts common conceptions of the separation between what is in and outside of a Loos house, but such conceptions distort more than they explain. The Tzara House is among those that rise up from the slopes of Montmartre in Paris. The differences between the front and back could not be stronger.3 Because the street slopes, some nearby buildings have stepped bases. This facade, however, absorbs changes in grade into the massive bulk of its rubble stone base, much like the nearly cyclopean earthwork to its right, as if it were unaffected by changes in the lay of the land. The base rises two stories. Above it sits a seemingly starched sheet of stucco, stretched across three levels. In Loos’s original design this upper part was meant to be one story higher. Had this level been built, the facade would have been even more impressive— condensing into itself a vast sheet of sky. Loos’s interest in the visual impression created by the facade is apparent in the symmetrical composition and vertical stacking of the large recesses and associated windows, as if some dark recess or cave perhaps had been carved out of the white expanse. If one imagines the axis of symmetry laid down onto the plans, one can see how the main 83

CHAPTER THREE

3.1

Tzara House, Paris, Adolf Loos, 1926.

public rooms in the house—the front loggia, the dining room, and the salon—also followed this line, extending the facade’s formality toward the garden. The symmetry of the main rooms does not extend itself to the others; subordinate rooms are fit into the space between the main ones and the side walls. But this is hidden behind the stucco. The shape and dimension of these intermediate rooms make the symmetrically determined placement of the windows in some at least unlikely, if not awkward. Similar sorts of difficulties arise from the fact that windows on both sides of the compositional axis were given the same shape and size, despite the different shapes and sizes of the rooms to which they belong. Two kinds of thinking are demonstrated by the facade and the plans, aesthetic and practical: the first is a matter of detached 84

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

regard, for the purpose of creating a look, and the second demonstrates attention to dwelling practices situated in this urban location, practices that also create an impression, but less one of geometry than of prosaic affairs. If the front facade keeps its cards fairly close to its chest for the sake of an impression, the back lays them all out on the table, assuming the game or ruse is over. The back is not a facade. Actually, it is hard to get a full view of the back because the block interior to which it is connected is fairly compact—no distance. Nevertheless, from the corner that contains the rear entry in an enclosed court one can see the outer edges of the stacked terraces as they retreat toward the inside or back edge of the facade’s parapet. The apparently disaggregated character of these volumes might suggest that Loos composed

3.2

Tzara House, Adolf Loos.

85

CHAPTER THREE

an assembly of fragments, an interestingly asymmetrical composition, an assemblage, intended to attract and delight the kind of viewing described in picturesque aesthetics. In Loos’s early years Camillo Sitte had shown how traditional towns could be viewed as picturesque compositions, how an architecture and urbanism without facades could be appropriated into an aesthetics that was unwilling to see anything else. But this is not how Loos thought about the rear of the Tzara House. In fact, the order of the back can be easily described if entirely different terms are used, if one describes a person’s movement through the building room by room, envisaging the ways it would be occupied. This is because the size and position of the rooms, the continuity and discontinuity of the walls, the placement and dimensioning of the apertures, and all the other particularities of its configuration make sense as soon as one sees them as concrete embodiments of typical dwelling practices, saturated with those practices like the gardens and yards behind. Moreover, the position of the back’s parts—if one insists on seeing them as parts or fragments—is as much a function of the block interior as it is of the building’s schedule of accommodation. The back is oriented toward a semipublic garden in the middle of the block. Because this forms a clearing in the urban density, it allows southwest light to enter the building’s stacked terraces. The section is darkest at the level of the garden; entry there involves passage through a space that could be called a sala terrena, bound to the soil and enclosed by earthworks as much as by walls. The opposite is true at the top, which is bathed in light, and its walls have been reduced to frames. Thus, from the public to the private spaces in the section, the construction is transformed from an earthwork to a framework, cool shadows to bright light. The same sort of thing happens in Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat Villa of 1928 –1930. Not only does light enter in this way, but also all the other qualities associated with a garden. But perhaps it’s better to call it a block interior, for none of these qualities is essentially aesthetic or pictorial, which is the way we have come to see gardens, not something I want to recommend. From this position it is hard to get a clear view of the stepped terraces that variously extend the building’s interiors; the best

86

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

way to understand how they work is to study the building and its site in cross section. Such a clear distinction between front and back did not exist in all of Loos’s buildings. In the Rufer House the matter is more complicated, for here all the characteristics I have just distinguished can be found on all of the sides of the building, as if everything and nothing is a facade. The Rufer House was built in Vienna. Unlike the Tzara House site, this one was open on all four sides. Its plans are square, its volume resolutely cubic: 10 by 10 by 12 meters. The four sides of the house sit under a large cornice, which emphasizes its volumetric simplicity, as does the character of the walls: uninterrupted planarity. This would seem to be a good example of the modernist prejudice in favor of the freestanding architectural object. There are two breaks in the dicelike volume: a veranda that joins the large hall or music room to the garden, and an open terrace that extends the rooms on the top story into the open air. Both of these breaks are on the side of the house that faces the garden. There is one other interruption in the cool uniformity of the exterior walls: a copy of a section of the Parthenon frieze attached to a blank section of the wall that faces the street. Three doors lead in and out of the house: the one to the veranda already mentioned, and two on the other sides; one is the main entry, the other for service. In his comments on the house Loos stressed the flat planarity of the building’s exterior walls. The “rigor” of its cubic uniformity allowed for a certain freedom or irregularity in the placement of the apertures. But this freedom was not arbitrariness, not freedom from all constraints, just from the typical guidelines for composition, such as symmetrical disposition, vertical alignment of apertures, or repetition of their sizes and spacing—the sort of things seen on the Tzara House facade. Window locations in the Rufer House were determined not by these guidelines but by the requirements of the various interiors: “Die Fenster nur dort sind wo man sie innen braucht.”4 Likewise for their dimensions, profiles, and mechanisms of operation. The walls of this house were designed as if they were backs, which is to say, in recognition of the ways they would be used between the interiors and the surroundings, not necessarily for “view.” This requires that they be understood in section, inte87

CHAPTER THREE

3.3

Rufer House, Vienna, Adolf Loos, 1922.

88

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

3.4

Rufer House, Adolf Loos.

89

CHAPTER THREE

grated into a field of relationships or terrain of practical affairs. When one studies the preliminary drawings of the “facades,” it is clear that there was neither a clear distinction between front and back nor an application of compositional motifs to just one of the surfaces, to the front for example; except, of course, for the Parthenon badge pinned to its surface. With just these drawings in view it is rather hard to determine which one is the front. I want to recommend this difficulty because it privileges or at least inaugurates what could be called field thinking, within the house and, I want to suggest, within the vicinity as well. Loos did say he tried to balance the arrangement of the openings, but he did so on all four sides. In the Tzara House front and back opposed aesthetic and practical articulations. Nothing of this opposition is in evidence here: even if these sorts of thinking can be separated, they are not apparent on just one or the other of the building’s exterior walls. All of this is to say that the Rufer House either has four facades or has none. Assuming such a lack, a difficult question concerning orientation must be faced. How, in a house without a recognizable front, is entry signified? How, in a case such as this, is one supposed to know the location of the front door? One of the well-known complaints about modern architecture, about the sort of building that neglected the conventional signs of frontality, is that such neglect made an experience as simple as getting through the entry more than a little difficult. At least that is what critics said. Can such a significant aspect of a building be managed by hinges alone? This house has three ways in and out. Which is for public access, which for deliveries or service, which for the children? As long as one concentrates on the building itself, or on it alone, there will be no answer to these questions. The “architectural object” is neither the answer nor, in fact, the real problem. Orientation and order, in this house and any other that is well conceived, are determined by two conditions other than the object itself, or at least in concert with it: the pattern of occupation it accommodates and the order or structure of the location. For now I will concentrate on the second of these. Every architectural entry is preconditioned by the building’s site, which extends from the edge of the building itself into its immediate vicinity, and then further into the precinct in which it stands, and finally into the encom90

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

passing region, never quite exhausting itself. Orientation is inconceivable without this range, these spheres of influence. No building can orient itself apart from them because it would have nothing to play off of, no table onto which the dice could be thrown. The fact that every built edge is two-sided requires no elaboration; the point we rarely consider thoughtfully enough is that the side beyond or outside the building always precedes its arrival; its horizon is where each of us, and so many others, are involved in so many situations before entering this or that building, the tacitly existing milieu that is both actually and conceptually prior to the advent of the individual building; which is why one can call it the building’s first premises. A design such as the Rufer House has the particular merit of making the role of the vicinity all the more obvious, for little of the building’s organization and even less of its articulation could be understood without it. Hermann Czech and Wolfgang Mistelbauer have shown in their study of Loos’s building on Michaelerplatz in Vienna how that building’s site plan, section, and details were developed in dialogue with the ambient circumstances.5 I want to use that larger and public building as a key to these smaller and private ones. Years ago one of my teachers told me that the understanding and interpretation of the site is more than half the solution. The Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis wrote that architectural concepts must be conceived in situ; architecture, he said, germinates from its site.6 Each of the site distances I have differentiated— the immediate vicinity, the precinct, and the region—has its bearing on the design; on its sections and plans certainly, but also on its apertures, their size and position, their construction, and their operation, which I earlier described as the way they work. One could reconstruct much more than half of this building, most of its plan at least, by imagining and then drawing site sections through the surroundings and then the elevations, envisaging what settings were behind the walls, because one knows, without special study—just by practical experience—how rooms of various types are typically oriented to the outside, and can infer where they are by virtue of the apertures that appear on the exterior. Such a reconstruction would not be error-free, but not impossible either. Here I invoke the other conditions that serve as a design’s basic premises: culturally constituted patterns of behavior. Loos’s Raumplan—too 91

CHAPTER THREE

often conceived of as an affair of room layout only—is as much a function of the opportunities of the site as of internal relationships, the latter being insufficient in themselves to determine configuration. Because the Rufer House is underdesigned as a composed image, the constraints or opportunities of its site premises are vividly apparent. Without them Loos would have been at a loss to determine the placement and size of the windows, the position and volume of the terraces, and the location of the three entries; in short, he would have been lacking precisely half of what it takes to organize and establish a configuration of rooms in a way that would make them useful, and recognizably so. If the Rufer House makes of its four sides both front and back, the Winternitz Villa of 1932 confuses matters even more by exchanging their positions and generalizing their attributes. The house sits on the edge of one of the hills in the Smichov district of Prague, with a number of industrial buildings in the vicinity but other residences nearby on the same curved street. The back side of the house, the side farthest from the street, looks over the edge of this hill and out toward a mixed-use landscape. Unlike the Tzara House, its back is not stepped or terraced; it is more like any one of the exterior walls of the Rufer House: planar, unbroken in its expanse, and dotted with apertures that seem to obey no logic other than that of the requirements of the interiors they brighten and ventilate. Again like the Rufer House, this wall contains or exhibits some balancing of its elements, for the upper openings have been arranged into a localized symmetry, which the centralized rear stair helps sustain, perhaps even requires. If the back of this building looks like the Rufer front, its front resembles the Tzara back. Approaching the building from the street, one passes by a small set of steps that rises to a front terrace which extends the width of the large room behind. This room is itself surmounted by another deck, which like the one below runs from side to side and extends the depth of its adjacent rooms into the open air and tranquil expanse of the front yard. And once again, these rooms are capped by a terrace, the third, which is framed by piers and beams, as was the upper level of the Tzara terraces. While these terraces serve purposes one would associate with a back, they face the front, the direction from which sunlight enters the building. 92

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

3.5

Winternitz Villa, Prague-Smichov, Adolf Loos, 1932.

With neither the front nor the back is the entry to the building associated; it occurs at the side, again contrary to typological or traditional expectations, in a place that is surprising because so inconspicuous. Its lateral position seems in part a function of the building plot and the bend of the street, and certainly betrays acknowledgment of practical exigencies. Without the entry walk the entry itself would be very hard to find. Elaborations of its honorific status have been completely avoided. The doorway is a modest affair, barely a dent in the wall, and is contained within the dimensions of the lower level into which it opens. Its position is very efficient, however, for the stair to which the entry vestibule leads allows one to arrive at the center of the building, in the place where its main volumes intersect or overlap with one another, beautifully orienting arrival, having wasted no effort on signifying it. 93

CHAPTER THREE

Many of the rooms in the house were given simple geometric shapes in plan, squares or double-square rectangles, and they were disposed on either side of a central axis, making the layouts generally symmetrical, like that of the Tzara House. This leads to considerable regularity in the facades: the street front and sides exhibit either perfect symmetry or a great measure of regularity, through alignment and repetition of their elements. This appears most clearly in drawings of the elevations; from the ground it is hard to read. From the approach the irregularity or broken character of the volumes is more apparent. Asymmetry of volumes does not disaffect the overall impression of a coherent composition, however. In fact, the tension between the formal order of the volumes and that of the openings gives the building’s image both animation and balance. Neither of the Tzara House “facades” served as a model for this, nor did any one of the walls around the Rufer House. But their sites were very different. In the Winternitz Villa Loos has developed an exterior that obeys no other guidelines than those of its particular interiors and location, the first integrating the qualities of the second into themselves or their configuration, and using these qualities as a pretext for the development of its own organization, allowing the location and the interiors to prefigure one another. I understand that this challenges the old truism of modern architecture—that the inside determines the outside—but that explanation of signification takes for granted what really needs attention: how a building’s location sketches the basic lineaments of a possible configuration; how site interpretation predisposes design development; or how existing terrain, whether land- or cityscape, acts as a matrix or milieu that architecture acknowledges and then articulates, giving voice to qualities that would have remained latent had they not been actualized as the needs of a particular style of dwelling. While it is partly true to say that a building such as this one “fits into” its site, it is equally true to say that the order of the site would not have become apparent unless made visible as a correlate of the building itself. The farmer, hunter, and home-builder see different virtues in a landscape; so, too, for an urban setting, its values or qualities become apparent once cultural purposes are proposed. Like the building, the site cannot be adequately understood if described in itself. Sites are always overlaid with cultural predi94

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

cates; not one is given in itself. Genius-of-the-place arguments are generally a secret form of essentializing that is often as misconceived as it is reactionary. Perhaps it is simpler to say that all accounts of the site-in-itself type neglect to mention the interests that give rise to their interpretation. Thus I overstated the determining role of the site in my comments on the Rufer House: site characteristics did not determine the building’s internal configuration; this effect was made apparent only after the building’s interiors demonstrated the potential of these characteristics. The facade is precisely this demonstration. The first task of any wall is to sustain the intertwining of these effects and potentials: to construct reciprocities. This is articulation, and is a matter of exchange and of conflict, even strife, always posed in the terms of the milieu, whether town or countryside. Once a preliminary agreement has been reached and the borders of the construction settled, whatever setting comes to notice as “a work” does so to the degree that these intersections actually work. By approaching the matter in reverse, we have thus led ourselves to a first realization about the way the exterior of a building can have signifying power, not of the building itself but of the crossover, transfer, or reciprocity between the previously latent potential of a place and the building’s internal purposes. If the word “context” is still sensible after its overuse in the past two decades, it indicates precisely this intertwining between proposed purposes and the latent qualities of a place —a textile order. Fronts do not create these relationships, they depend upon them. Putting the matter briefly for now, but intending to return to it shortly, I will say that this weave, the building’s back, constitutes or “germinates” what will eventually become its front, giving its figures or the practices they embody sufficient thickness or density to sustain attention. I realize that my preoccupation with what is infrequently noticed and often unremarkable, the back, and with the encompassing horizon in which it is enmeshed, represents something of a detour en route to the front. Nevertheless, I believe the prosaic landscape is not just the foundation but also the subject matter of architectural disclosure, insofar as architecture can tell us little more than we already knew before we stopped to look at it. 95

CHAPTER THREE

* When one steps onto a new level in a building or passes under a lowered ceiling, one always feels as though a new setting is about to present itself. This is apparent whether one is coming or going. Anyone who has visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses knows how well he understood this; the advent of spatial expansion signaled by such a change in level greatly contributes to the drama of his arrival sequences. And this sense of a boundary, of transition, is both immediate and global, anteceding any direct observation of what the space contains (furnishings, views, fixtures) and admitting of few other sensations. While complementary, because symmetrical across an edge, arrival and departure are nevertheless opposite kinds of orientation: the former is wideeyed and passively receptive, the latter goal-directed and focused. In “Landfall and Departure,” the first chapter of Joseph Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea, coming and going at sea are sharply distinguished. The two occur in roughly the same waters but could not be more different: anyone on board can announce a landfall, to spot the coastline or the port from the railing of a ship requires working eyesight only; but departure is an entirely different matter, involving all the refined calculation and accumulated wisdom of naval science, for a mistake that seems minor to the layman, a miscalculation of only a few degrees in sighting or the plotting of a course, can have disastrous consequences for everyone on board. The same opposition occurs in land-based excursions, I mean in architecture and cities, for at a building’s edge there is a similarly sharp distinction between coming and going. Stated not in terms of spatial but of temporal experience, the first is rather slow, unfolding through a series of delays, and the second compresses time, so much so that the act of moving away from, which is also moving into, occurs almost instantaneously, with a great sense of immediacy. To explain this, and to show its consequences for the relationships between a building’s edges and its site, I want to turn to two buildings from the postwar period, two designed by Richard Neutra. My aim is to take up the question concerning a building’s cooperation with its horizon by observing the loss and restoration of its inde96

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

pendent image, or its independence as an image. This will involve weakening and strengthening design. The two buildings in question were designed for children: the Child Guidance Clinic in Los Angeles, on the campus of the University of Southern California, and a Nursery-Kindergarten on the UCLA campus that he designed in collaboration with Robert Alexander. Neutra was concerned with children’s facilities throughout his career. His first school design, the Ring Plan School, was provisionally set forth in Amerika: Neues Bauen in der Welt, 1929, and then republished in Die Form in 1932, Architectural Forum in 1935, and Architecture d’Aujourd’hui in 1946.7 Its reworking paralleled Neutra’s development of his urban plan, Rush City Reformed. In the Ring School design he focused on optimization of resources and prefabrication of construction elements as well as on flexibility, which pertained to matters of structure, partition, and furniture distribution but also to the modification of environ-mental qualities, especially of temperature and light. While these issues might seem to be important in any architectural project, for Neutra they were especially significant in this school type because of new approaches to teaching, which required “free groupings of students and teachers,” sometimes inside the building, sometimes outside, and sometimes in between—the preferred condition—which he represented in many drawings and photographs of teaching situations. “Wherever possible, a one-story layout with various green courts, lovely landscaped wind-sheltered patios and connecting covered walks may prove more flexible for partial modifications and also more economical to construct than a fireproof, multi-story boxed together affair. The typical classroom will, wherever possible, enjoy liberal contact with the outdoor grounds, both visually and by physical egress.”8 A number of devices were used for this widening: most often he replaced the solid wall between the classroom and the garden with a movable partition, sliding door, or glass wall that extended across much of the room’s length and from floor to ceiling. To explain this, he frequently drew or photographed children sitting in an arc that originated in front of the blackboard, passed from inside to outside, and terminated at the base of a tree, where the teacher stood; everyone under the bower, its canopy providing enclosure outside the edge of the build97

CHAPTER THREE

3.6

Indoor-outdoor teaching, Emerson Junior High School, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra, 1938.

ing. In his 1935 “New Elementary Schools for America” Neutra suggested that “each interior classroom . . . be duplicated in floor area by an outdoor classroom, into which it [would open] by means of a wide glass door sliding under a roof overhang.”9 An alternative to the sliding door was one that pivoted on a horizontal axle, like a large-size awning, admitting but regulating quantities of light and fresh air. Still another device was the “breather partition” or corridor wall fitted with exhibition cases at eye level and operable windows above. His interest in opening into the existing site was not limited to the building’s immediate vicinity, however; he also saw the need to connect the school to the neighborhood or town as a whole. “Perhaps it won’t be necessary to wheel children in a fleet of shiny buses out to country day schools just 98

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

to flee the city. Perhaps we can reclaim urban areas for human ways of living. The school and its ground may become the significant supplement and the normal nucleus of a neighborhood.”10 This reads like some of the progressive arguments set forth in 1971 by Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society.11 Whatever the merits of his philosophy of open-air education, Neutra’s designs for horizontal school buildings do show how a provisional neglect of architectural frontality allows it to be reconstituted in the midst of an extended horizon, giving visible but not planar articulation to patterns of life while using them as its point of departure. The Child Guidance Clinic in Los Angeles was built in 1963 on the USC campus between several university facilities and a residential area, in a densely planted, parklike setting. The site is open on each of its four sides, as is the building, but not uniformly so. Therapy rooms occupy the building’s 3.7

Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra, 1963.

99

CHAPTER THREE

3.8

Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra.

south face, running from side to side on the ground floor, with offices for the psychologists above. Each of these ground-floor rooms extends into its own enclosed patio from which both light and air are admitted back into the interior, the patio also serving as a setting for play, observation, and therapy. Beyond these patios and rooms is a parking area for this and neighboring university buildings. Still farther beyond are densely packed houses, gardens, and a network of residential streets. Despite the institutional significance of the settings it houses, this side of Neutra’s building could not be called its front, for no entry occurs there and its functions presume a degree of privacy, which enclosing fences were meant to ensure and an entry would have compromised. To someone approaching from the houses nearby, children at play would have been its identifiable aspect, which residents would have found entirely con100

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

genial. In its forms and massing, this “facade” presents a regular or modular geometry, with which one might associate frontality: five equally spaced bays below, a horizontal strip window above, with overhanging eaves on both levels. Yet this side is less an elevation than an ensemble of three-dimensional settings, accommodating children’s play while serving as its backdrop. On the opposite side of the building, the north, Neutra positioned a doorway, but this side was not the front either, nor could one call it a facade in the perspectival sense of that term. Behind this wall, inside the building, he laid out a wide range of setting types: a group therapy room, an interior patio, clerical facilities, the director’s office on the ground floor, with a workroom and library above. All of these rooms faced a park that was also the front lawn of a large ensemble of university buildings. Beyond this park runs a crosstown thoroughfare, beyond that more houses. Given the mix of uses it enclosed, this elevation’s heterogeneous character is not surprising. Outside it but still close to the building, in a small space partially framed by an extending wing, is a compactly arranged garden, all in shade, generally damp, and contrasting entirely with both the open park all around and the brightly lit play spaces for the children on the other side. Over time this shade garden has added its qualities and color to the white surfaces of the building, as if the wall were a sponge and the soil water. This entire “face” acts like one built within a back yard, seemingly not composed at all; yet with the door into the patio on this side it could be mistaken for a front, especially when seen from the thoroughfare passing by. This exchange or mix-up of roles is even more apparent on the east side, through which visitors do enter the building. This side presents mostly blank walls to the exterior, except for the windows that illuminate the entry hall lounge and those of the library on the floor above. This latter range was difficult to see when the building was first constructed because Neutra installed a freestanding screen in front of them (this screen has since disappeared). It stood beyond the plane of the entry wall, as if that wall’s cladding surface had been sliced off and propped up ten feet away. Were the building a speech, this would be its exordium. The screen enclosed part of a parterre and an ancient palm tree, one of a few that concentrated an area of shade in the open expanse 101

CHAPTER THREE

3.9

Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra.

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

of the park before the building was located in their midst. Another of these trees came to occupy the center of the building’s internal patio, as if its magnetic center, while still another stood just outside the facade, brushing the cheek of the clerical and workroom facilities. The first of the palms, in the entry or parterre space, was both in and outside the building, between the lounge and the rest of the park, in a space of transition. None of these trees survive, but others in the vicinity give a vivid sense of their character: able to shelter a place that was not exactly an oasis, for the park is no desert, but an area in which the park’s characteristics were intensified or concentrated— where natural growth seemed to be accelerated and seasonal change made vividly apparent. When one chooses to regard the facade as a formal composition, it can be seen best when viewed obliquely from either outside or within; if from within, either downward from the library or outward from the lounge, reversing the approach. Because it is complicated topographically, a front and a back, I need to describe this “facade” more particularly. Within its immediate vicinity the entryway included windows, walls, freestanding screens, and cantilevered slabs. In front of the wall’s blank white surface (which enclosed and protected the play patios) was the parterre garden, which Neutra elaborated in his study model for the building. To its right was the threshold, which was much more than an opening in a wall, more like an ensemble of settings, some in front of the wall and others extending into the interiors. Arrival was thus a sequence, a graduated or delayed progression, reversing expectations of immediacy; were it marine and set out along a coastline it would accommodate and represent departure. This is a striking reversal. I have observed already that a rather conspicuous palm tree stood in the middle of this sequence, marking the midpoint of the approach, partly as a massive upright and partly as the outer edge of a small grove. These two, together with the others nearby, I believe, prefigured the position of the entry. Considering the upper floor on the front side, one can see that Neutra also concerned himself with more distant qualities of the place, for there he introduced band windows, which orient one’s view toward the horizon while

103

CHAPTER THREE

paralleling its expanse. Furthermore, he projected from this plane the screening device, which measures the path of the sun as it modulates its effects. It would not be entirely wrong to call this entry a portico. But attached to that type are assumptions about composition and vantage that require qualification: a portico is generally symmetrical and meant to be seen frontally, at some distance, before it serves as a threshold for passage. Not all of these characteristics of composition are apposite in this case, nor does the building lend itself to a frontal or perspectival disclosure. If a portico, this one is unusual because it is best seen obliquely, in a veduta per angolo. But even that comparison has its defects, for the unfolding of entry in this case is less a matter of the building presenting itself than a way for the vicinity to concentrate itself: the park concentrates the neighborhood’s landscape qualities, the building’s play spaces concentrate the back yards of the houses, and the parterre the neighborhood’s gardens. Because the building’s layers unfold from different distances, its depth is not revealed all at once, but sequentially, in increments or installments, the way one gradually pays for something valuable and expensive. The value of such an acquisition is amplified by the lateral spread of the settings through which one passes, which allows each of the facade’s parts to annex (or be annexed by) a range or rank in the landscape (park, houses, garden), compounding the initial investment, or maybe representing the real purchase. This is to say, each of the “facade’s” elements is subtended by some constituent of the encompassing field, each constituent being a physical setting and a practical situation: recreation, therapy, gardening, and so on. Orientation means awareness of these situations and their correspondences. The wall’s disaggregated and delaminated character accommodates and articulates this subtending, these analogies, and this orientation. The fact that its exordial layer, admittedly too thin, has disappeared into the soil that served as its foundation is no less expected than just. Behind the spot where the screen once stood, and to the right of the blank stretch of the wall and its parterre, stands a plane or pane of floor-toceiling glazing, which plays an important though unstable role in the entry sequence. Throughout the approach sequence it both reflects the spaces through which one has passed and allows those that lie ahead, the lounge and 104

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

courtyard, to be grasped with measures of clarity that increase with each step. Because the patio within is variously glazed all around, there are multiple surfaces of reflection and transparency, apparent to different degrees throughout the approach, depending on the quantity and quality of daylight. Arrival along such a path is approximated when spaces that are ahead and behind reciprocate each other equally in the thin depth of this surface, integrating aspects of where one is going and where one has been by balancing things seen in reflection with those that appear in transparency, giving the glazed surface a kind of spectral density compacted out of aspects of the whole landscape, exterior and interior. Yet, when one notices this concentrate, nothing is really there, which is to say, it is all representation. Where one would expect the building to present itself, there is instead a condensation or epitome of its surround. Not only is the facade sliced up and disaggregated, it is effaced. But this also means it actualizes or articulates the field to which it adheres, through the mirroring and transparency of the glass. Even more convincing as an epitome than these reflections is their immediate vicinity: the parterre, trees, and the white wall, a surface that seems to bring the sky down to earth. It is wrong to say reflections such as these cause fullness of orientation, or even bring it about. Nor is it right to claim that this play of light and shadow occasions a sense of the whole. This would amount to a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which I earlier described as eating the menu. At most these reflections represent orientation, taking for granted that it has already been achieved by means of a prior and tacit agreement between the building and the expanded terrain, a pact worked out in the practical and spatial negotiations of the topography. This anterior orientation, its antecedence, is what is so hard to understand, because we always take it for granted once it has been accomplished. Orientation occurs when my expectations interlock with the structures of the field, when my prospective explorations find an answer in the configuration of the horizon, both having sedimented in themselves predispositions or inclinations, which give to typical performances likelihood, but not inevitability. Orientation occurs more or less unreflectively when I stop looking at the world and simply live within it, without taking the time to think about it. The fa105

CHAPTER THREE

cade is an instrument at work in this insofar as it crystallizes in its durable dimensions the salient contours of both interior and exterior settings, offering them together as a coherent region of opportunities. In this particular building the entry door itself plays a very minor role in this offering, serving the purpose of a framework or backdrop, by virtue of the contrast between its opaque uniformity and the transparency/reflection of the glazing. If the glazed articulation is a clear reflection of the landscape, it is also unstable, however; changes in lighting caused by drifting clouds can quickly alter these effects or can entirely eclipse them, which makes this aspect of facade viewing and disclosure essentially occasional. What is more, these “effects” are altogether insubstantial, a mere play of light and shadow; not of any object itself, I want to stress, but of the lounge and the landscape, the furniture and foliage; integrating things that are near and far in the spread of the entire horizon. Are these “effects” significant? Or are they little more than a play, a ruse, a dissimulation? It is hard to avoid a yes to this last question, even though they seem to have fascinated Neutra, whose archives contain a number of unpublished papers on glass, reflection, and transparency. But I am not sure this is grounds for adverse criticism, or only that. Maybe the reverse is equally true. Is not something akin to this spectral density really all that should be sought in facade signification? Is not the very frailty or weakness of this play a key to the nature of all architectural display? Finally, is not the real task of architectural representation the dissimulation of both the building itself and its encompassing landscape, insofar as a simulation would be unproductive? Although effaced, this facade crystallizes the depth of its surrounding field; not just the layers of the building but also the landscape elements or settings into which they extend. Like the facets of a crystal, its figures are indefinite, not in shape but extent, which is different from being indistinct or blurred. There is a hardness to these profiles, almost icy or metallic in quality, even those that grow and die. Not only distinct, these edges are multiplied in the play of reflections; thus indefiniteness. Distances are also rendered unstable. Far is exchanged for near and vice versa; the parterre, for example, concentrates the park by collecting its dispersed elements. Within this field things lose their place because they occupy many; each is itself and one of a 106

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

kind, like the nearby houses. As for this facade-setting, this topography of displacements, it works just like a back, as an ensemble of reciprocities that keeps everything at hand, some things virtually. The play of reflections is a representation of this, a play in which no actual element is faithfully reproduced, each spectral double is always something other than its original. The fact that the wall has been delaminated reinforces this play insofar as interstitial cavities have been greatly expanded into a set of separate spaces, variously enclosed by structure, cladding, glazing, or partitions, both on the ground and above. As built, this route, or the architecture that shapes it, is coupled with the salient characteristics of the place. Its asymmetry reinforces this relationship. When one faces the entry the parking area is off to the left, beyond the play patios, while the park expands to the right. Much of this latter extension is hidden from the approach by the projecting prominence of the administrative and library wing, which in plan looks like an addition to an otherwise nearly square building. The side of this wing that faces the entry is blank and finished with a surface that is as uniform as the underside of the cantilever above. The door itself forms a right angle to this wall. Because the door is without a frame and capped by this cantilever, it appears to be compressed into a corner, entirely inconspicuous, embarrassed to present itself, like the entrance to the Winternitz Villa. And its surround is asymmetrical. Opposite this blank corner the space spreads out in two directions: to the left, along the face of the building toward the south, and straight ahead, into the building’s depth, through the play of reflection and transparency. Asymmetry in this case is less a technique of composition than a way of instituting a set of relationships between the building and its vicinity, relationships that result in orientation. With that word I mean to identify a kind of sense architecture is best able to sustain: put simply, where one is, having come from somewhere else, and proceeding to another place. It is essentially a matter of continuity or interconnectedness in which discontinuity can be very illuminating, as is true for the terrain on which it is established, but with this important difference: that continuity takes for granted the existence of settings and figures that can, from another point of view, be seen to have iden107

CHAPTER THREE

tifiably distinct characteristics and sharp definition, but not autonomy. Referring to objects within a prosaic setting, W. H. Auden observed: “If shapes can so to their edges keep, / No separation proves a being bad.”12 I have said figures “can be seen to have” identifiable characteristics because in the apprehension of its unfolding such a site presents nothing in particular, nothing in itself, the facade having been effaced. When condensed into an image, it continues to present nothing at all; for there is nothing that needs to be seen in itself. The image’s task is to turn us toward the chain, network, or matrix of relationships that constitutes its horizon. The success of the facade is its capacity to orient awareness to the structure or configuration of these relationships. Success may be the wrong term, for this task is really a form of service, or a declaration of indebtedness. Identifiably distinct figures such as a facade appear always and only on the basis of these relationships; they are every figure’s first premises and background. Figures arise or emerge out of this network as a matter of local interest, for a while, but then return to it, in order to reside there, without much distinction.

3.10

Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra.

108

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

If this building sacrifices its position as a freestanding object for the sake of articulating its adherence to the terrain, the other building I want to consider, the Nursery-Kindergarten on the UCLA campus, demonstrates how this crisis of definition can be productive, not of topographical cohesion and its image, but of a sense of the broader context of meaning topography can articulate. This building mixes together characteristics traditionally associated with the front and the back. Its back, for example, exhibits a great deal of regularity in its composition, construction, and use. Five classrooms open onto the landscape behind. They are separated by groupings of service rooms, each faced with a taut fabric of brickwork that rises from the ground to the roof. These planes form a regular pattern, the sort typical of a traditional front, especially when seen from a distance or explained theoretically. Furthermore, each of the classrooms is wide open and expansive, although they are not equally sized. The uniform openness that results also gives the elevation compositional unity. Between the classrooms and the yard there is a line of patios that serves to transform the seriality of the first into the expansive continuity of the second. This is accomplished even more effectively by the line of the cantilevered roof above, a raised horizon line, uninterrupted in its broad extent and therefore unifying everything sheltered under its umbrella. The entry side, by contrast, is very heterogeneous, like a traditional back. Its running length is interrupted by five or six breaks that allow passage across its outer edge, resulting in irregular lengths of verdure and walling, as if a rusticated base had been breached by successive incursions. The edge itself is compromised both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, the front plane is subdivided into three levels, but not one of them is continuous through the facade’s entire length. Horizontally, or in plan depth, there are behind the frontal plane intermittent fragments of second and third edges. These walls variously enclose and open settings one would ordinarily associate with a back: toilets, mechanical rooms, storage rooms, the kitchen, and private meeting rooms. From the point of view of traditional typology, the back and front of this building are entirely mixed up. Another way to say this is that the building is impossible to understand when considered as a freestanding object. 109

CHAPTER THREE

3.11

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, 1957. Photo Julius Shulman.

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

3.12

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander.

111

CHAPTER THREE

Arrival focuses this difficulty for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that there are two entries, requiring a choice. From a distance, from the parking spaces across the street, the canopy on the south end might be taken to signify entry, for it breaks the plane of the front screen and annexes a section of the sidewalk into its own holdings by means of a cantilevered roof plane above. Yet the position of the canopy in the building’s site plan is eccentric, which makes it rather marginal in practical terms. Furthermore, its peripheral position allows one to bypass the main body of the building upon “entry,” moving from the street to rear yard without going through any interior. If this canopy signifies anything, it is the direct connection between city and landscape, an accelerated passage that treats the building itself as if it were marginal. What is more, the canopy is hardly permanent. It stands before the street like a tent, a lightweight weave of poles and fabric that seems to have been set up (for a while) at a crossing point in the landscape, marking a place of passage rather than of residing—an aerial version of the water crossing children run over in the valley below. The other entry point, by contrast, which leads to the reception desk, is more durable but modest; while made out of a series of walls, it is hardly noticed at all, because it is just one of a number of breaks along the building’s front edge. Nor is arrival at this spot particularly riveting; it is the sort of transaction that requires a fairly small down payment. The ceiling height in the reception space is surprisingly low, a little over seven and a half feet high, and the space opens laterally, not in depth, which gives the space the feel of a hallway rather than a room. In fact, arrival at this point is accomplished in phases, or through a series of disclosures, making out of orientation a delayed process, like buying on a layaway plan. Entry initiates what could otherwise be described as a meander into a lateral drift of doors, partitions, and passages, making it more like a transit through a landscape than the observation of a theatrical display. Along this route one’s sense of the building is actualized through a series of borrowed views rather than a set of enclosed or framed perspectives. This reminds one of the entries into Wright’s early houses. Yet, while Wright’s entries always terminate at the building’s center, passage into this one inaugurates an unfolding that has no real end; not in the rooms, nor in their patios, nor at any 112

B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T FA C E

point in the playground behind, which descends into a deep ravine the bottom of which remains obscure, so far below the redwoods that rise out of it and cast a filigree of shadows onto the sandboxes in which the children play behind the building. For this reason it is hardly surprising that the whole affair on the front side is enclosed at its base by verdure; for the building’s indefinite end in the expanse of the landscape is matched by its graduated beginning in a similar condition, as if the back were projected or displaced toward the front, providing the materials of its footing. Tangent to the sidewalk, at the base of the building’s front edge is a planting bed for trees. Immediately behind the front edge of trees is a low wall rendered in earth tones. Both the wall and the bed are bounded at the building’s corners by rather large-size tree lawns, which seem to have been carved out of the space of the facade. End to end this horticulture provides the building with its most obvious edge, which intimates the landscape behind. Above this bottom and planted third, the facade’s midlevel presents translucent screens that mediate views from the outside while admitting light into the rooms behind: the reception space, meeting room, and the kitchen. This translucency works in like manner to the one-way glass between the classrooms and the teacher/parent observation spaces on the inside, by instituting contrasting conditions of exposure, which give fairly definite structure to the building’s primary social relationships and educational style (monitors viewing Montessori play). Windows such as these, both within and without, have been elevated to the same height. Which means that here, too, is an instance of constituting a continuous horizon, a strata of controlled viewing. These asymmetrical or filtered views establish local horizons of privacy in the midst of public space, more or less at eye level. The third level of the facade also posits lateral continuity; not of the earth, as did the base, nor of the street, which is what occurs at eye level, but of the sky, which is less a matter of view than of the sideways spread of light and air. Raised perimeter glazing accomplishes this as does the line of the roof, especially the line of lighting cut into its underside, one of Neutra’s favorite devices for extending the (luminous) qualities of the interior into settings beyond the building’s thermal barrier. The whole of the front, then, on each of its levels 113

CHAPTER THREE

3.13

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Photo Julius Shulman.

114

CHAPTER THREE

3.14

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. 3.15 (opposite)

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Photo Julius Shulman.

116

CHAPTER THREE

(earth, street, and sky), is woven into a fabric that is expansively topographical. But this weave is also practical, and on that basis thematic. Although inconspicuous, the entry to this building is efficient. Like the passage into the Winternitz Villa, arrival in this case presents one with aspects of a full range of setting types. Certainly some are more apparent than others, and this initiates a sequence of disclosures; but in their several appearances these aspects effectively present the building’s hierarchy of opportunities. Earlier I described such a configuration as a terrain of practical affairs, and I said one’s global sense of it constitutes orientation. These phrases indicate two things: that patterns of culture always occur somewhere and that one’s sense of a spatial configuration necessarily presupposes substrates of dwelling practices, which it strives to articulate but can neither engender nor exhaust. If a facade has representational substance, it will be of these two conditions (topography and praxis) primarily. Were one to draw a section through this building from front to back, it would include not only the entry as I have described it, the classrooms, their patios, and the yard behind, but also the layers of space that extend further in both directions: westward across the sidewalk and the street, to the parking on the other side and then further into the campus; and eastward from the sandboxes to the slope of the ravine, the tangle in its valley, and the tall redwoods on the opposite bank. The other way to say this is that such a section would join parents and their children on one end with burrowing rabbits and singing birds on the other, with the teachers and the teaching in between. Youthful learning integrates civility and natural existence by using the spontaneity of the second to renew the first. Likewise, the classrooms both accommodate and represent the interaction between accumulated wisdom and individual discovery. The building’s stratified horizons sustain this crossover and its facade articulates it. If at its backlike front the building sacrifices clear definition for the sake of adhering to the contours of its vicinity and dwelling practices, it also yields a figure that is memorable precisely because it makes apparent a specific way of residing in a particular place. From architectural images, from facades, I think nothing more should be expected.

118

4

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT Originality of conception in contemporary architectural design is constrained by the fact that most of the parts of a building that will make it livable already exist before the process of designing actually begins. Some critics describe contemporary Western culture as destitute or impoverished. The reverse would seem to be the case in the professional practice of architecture; for ours appears to be a time of great wealth. Never before were there so many products and so much useful information. Of what, then, are we destitute? Certainly not of items to choose. So it seems when standing before any practitioner’s professional library, in front of all the brochures, samples, and specification sheets describing hundreds, even thousands of architectural materials and elements. Such a collection holds more than the great library at Alexandria. But unlike that one, which was unique in the ancient world, everyone in practice these days has such a collection, amassed not out of pride, like the antiquarian volumes and folios displayed in a front room, but for purposes of use, on a daily basis, to get the job done. The regular use of this material is one of the things that makes contemporary practice historically unique. It also makes it troubling, profoundly. Designers can avoid thinking anew about the basic premises of dwelling experience because that sort of thinking can be assumed to have been done by specialists, the results of which are available on the market in the form of ready-made solutions. The mere fact of their availability confers upon these products a certain reality, even authority, and for that reason we tend to accept them as given, seldom asking about the grounds on which their design was based, relinquishing the task and the opportunity of particular thinking, yielding to the inertia of the lowest common denominator of the mass market. This means that something original is supposed to result from something preestablished according to market categories.

119

CHAPTER FOUR

4.1

Window Options, trade catalog, Marvin Windows and Doors, 1993.

At the outset of a design project, more or less everything from the building’s hardware to its furniture, from its heating to its surveillance systems, has already been described and portrayed on the pages and pages that fill the rows and rows of product literature. All but a few architects in all but a few projects use this material, to a greater or lesser degree. Such is true not just of the practices based in Western industrialized countries, where this use seems to have originated and flourished, but also to varying degrees of those located elsewhere, throughout the world. Not only has all manner of equipment been described and portrayed in this literature, but almost everything of this kind actually exists somewhere in some warehouse as standardized parts ready to be shipped as they are or made to order. The “orders” of contemporary architecture are not types of columns, but purchase agreements for the production of shop-made elements. Orders for contemporary construction obtain their finish apart from the building site, in a workshop or on an assembly line, which is a way of making things that is quite distinct from traditional labor practices, not because industrial production is repetitive, but because it is autonomously and 120

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

finally so. The factory-made house is still a dream and is likely to remain so, regardless of the hopes and claims of the descendants of Fuller and Wachsmann, and of our continued willingness to see the house as something like a Ford or Honda. Nevertheless, while not exactly factory-made like a toaster or a train, no building is built from scratch these days. Nor is any one designed that way, even if the designer begins with such an assumption, for design development inevitably involves working with materials that are available on the market. Thus, much if not most of what design prescribes for construction comes off the shelf, as do the suits and shoes most people wear. Architects rely on trade literature because without a pressing need it is very hard to find (to budget) the time to study products further, harder still to break the routine or slow the pace of the professional office. This is one of many disabling consequences of contemporary busyness; it disposes professionals to rely on practices and products that were successfully used in the past, disavowing what is unique about this problem in favor of that solution. Widely disseminated and reliable information sustains this, as do widespread performance expectations. What warehouse shelves are to the amateur home builder, the pages of a sales brochure are to the architect; a resource, supply, or fund standing in reserve, less like apples on a tree than money in the bank, waiting to be drawn upon to meet the needs of the project. And there is so much of it these days, so much capital invested in so many products. Just as contemporary culture is flooded by advertising, contemporary architecture is adrift in trade catalogs. Like time, information is a river, but a shallow one, the slight depth of which allows it to frequently overrun its banks. If the professor has trouble staying afloat in the current of contemporary theory, the professional has even greater difficulty escaping the widening floodplain of professional literature. Decades ago, Knud Lönberg-Holm, employed by the Dodge Corporation to redesign the layout and organization of Sweet’s Catalog, realized with great foresight that professional catalogs would need to embrace “thousands of more products,” including but not limited to “electronics, air conditioning, precision tools, plastics, and various other new materials.”1 His list of products may be dated, but his sense of abundance, of this lateral spread of commercial waters he called the “flow” of information, is not. No one who wants to be profes121

CHAPTER FOUR

sionally responsible can ignore it. For us, more than for him, products that promise the sorts of performance buildings are meant to provide are everywhere to be found, and everywhere in use. Yet the increased and increasing use of ready-made solutions largely transforms design invention into choice, converting creativity into selection. This is decisive for architecture because it transforms architectural work into a process that is essentially eclectic, not stylistically but procedurally, which can greatly diminish its cultural value by converting its economy to something resembling trade on a black market. Rarely discussed, this sort of exchange is something many would prefer to ignore because it seems to take away design’s claims of originality, thereby reducing its status as an art, while deleting its claims of relevance by annulling its contemporaneity, as if in grammar one were to use only the historical present. While it may not be a direct result of the surplus of information, this reliance on what has already been designed seems to be its necessary complement. Ours is a new kind of eclecticism. More consequential than the choice of historical forms and motifs that was commonplace in nineteenth-century historicism, the current operation is a broadly determining or finalizing sort; we choose the very things, the actual components, that builders will use on the construction site, the walls, windows, doors, and lamps they will install into the building, not the shapes or profiles their labor practices are meant to approximate, which was the case in the past. Yet we do this without seeing them; because the products are there in the trade literature, they are specified, then installed: all in all, a process largely untroubled by uncertainty. One might explain this as a function of project size; nowadays bigger buildings are being built, and the larger the building, the greater the reliance on premade parts. Conversely, the invention of unique elements, and the devotion to building craft it assumes in the “theoretically grounded” projects of our time, characterize small buildings only, or only small-sized areas of big buildings. These alternatives are like fast food and home-grown vegetables, a rather miserable choice between hurried expediency and luxurious authenticity. No matter what its extent, however, the appropriation of premade elements reduces opportunities for originality and particularity in design and specifica122

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.2

Installation of a commercial steel stud system, trade catalog, Owens Corning, 1996.

tion. Moreover, this practice disguises the lack of connection between the work of building and the social and political practices or traditions that typify a given place, meaning that the cultural memory attendant to the act of building is eclipsed as well. At the same time, the appropriation of premade elements increases or enlarges the scope of the architect’s control; for the choice of a familiar product means the precise determination of the outcome of construction. Like the preference for short-term expediency over presumed authenticity, the choice in favor of control over originality shortchanges freedom by abbreviating the 123

CHAPTER FOUR

negotiation or dialogue that would make it meaningful. There is no mystery in the idea that the efficient solution is the familiar one. Just as singers wanting applause perform old favorites, carpenters wanting to be rehired reuse successful assembly patterns. Nothing is necessarily wrong in this, in fact reliability is a virtue in these cases; but because they take this sort of repetition to an extreme, contemporary designers can be said to have adopted a method that approximates calculation, by which I do not mean numeration—rather, the increasingly precise estimation or forecasting of results, which assumes stripping from a given situation the irregular contours that give it particular definition, so that it may, or may seem to, approximate more closely an accepted norm. Another way to say this is that an architect’s ability and desire to predict outcomes is greatly enhanced by the neglect of local circumstances. The accelerated pace of architectural computing has not caused this, only facilitated it, insofar as design thinking has assimilated itself to computational procedures. Nor has this been caused by market pressures alone; rather, or equally, it represents a change of thinking internal to architecture itself, which is something we need to seriously consider, whether one enjoys the freedoms of design creativity or suffers the necessities of building production. As in the older method of eclecticism, the selecting of elements in current work takes the place of actually designing them. When choice predominates, invention is nearly over before it begins. Eclecticism in our time has led to a practice of design as arrangement or composition, neither of which is conception. Again, the profiles of this practice are unlike those of its nineteenthcentury antecedent, when composition involved the layout and patterning of the geometries and profiles of shapes and motifs, not of the actual elements of a building. If these elements were standardized, it was within a local labor practice only, and never absolutely or inflexibly, because builders at work on a site always modified typical solutions in response to particular circumstances. Improvisations such as this evidenced ingenuity, nothing of which was prescribed in “design,” for that was still a matter of selection among given alternatives. Both nineteenth-century and current eclecticism substitute assembly for production, but only in the contemporary case does the method extend itself onto the construction site, making building practice an in124

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

stallation procedure too, reducing both ingenuity and improvisation on the builder’s part. It is no wonder that craftwork has disappeared. When architects specify more and more premade products, creative thinking in construction becomes less and less likely as builders become more and more guarded. They, too, prefer applause to criticism. These builders are like the singers who hire themselves out for weddings: able to produce acceptable renditions of any old favorite on demand, but not much else. Nor would a professionally responsible architect be willing to approve an improvisation. The working of one component depends upon the working of others with which it is connected in the functioning of a system; which is itself often too complex for anyone on the site, or the architect, to understand. Thus, everyone does what has been done before, with little attention to reasons or consequences, let alone particular circumstances. When in The Trial Kafka’s pathetic hero K gets sent from official to official, it is not the uncircumscribed power of the authorities that is maddening, rather the fact that through much of the tale he never stands before anyone with real authority, the judge always residing elsewhere, the judgment always delayed. Neither K nor any one of us in our similar circumstances happily acquiesces to this state of affairs, but widespread complicity seems to prevent anything else. Commonplace procedures are paradoxically hard to pin down. Not that this means they are either ineffective or indefinite; they are remarkably determining and precise, almost mathematically so. Because design in such a context takes so much for granted, it not only approximates calculation but also assimilates itself to bureaucratic instrumentality. Troubling as this complicity is, it defines much of contemporary practice, which is why many young architects are stunned by the work they are given inside the doors of the profession. No one especially likes it, most despise it, but widely institutionalized methods allow for little else, or seem to. We have come to believe that the acceptance of past practices and premade products means embracing the “reality” of the situation. Granted, this is not true of all stages of design development. The preliminaries of a project can be developed on what is sometimes called the “solid ground” of one’s own “ideas.” In large commercial offices this is the privilege of senior designers. Their work is also the subject matter of most architectural 125

CHAPTER FOUR

criticism, it too a trafficking in “ideas.” But when sketches are transformed by staff into something that can be built, this solid ground becomes saturated with architectural commodities, which concretize ideas by generalizing them. Despite the designer’s artistic pretensions, the business of planning what will get built has become a matter of choice and combination, at least largely so; choice and combination of elements that can be purchased but rarely invented. If originality is a race, the architect never finishes first; always ahead is the product designer. Premade products are the canon of our time. In a context or condition such as this, can architectural work still be seen as a form of creativity, as an art? Or, in an age of mass production, is that an illusion, a fairy tale believed by students or critics, perhaps, but by nobody who actually tries to get something built? In the matter of design choice, three criteria determine the result: the product’s performance, its appearance, and its price. The basic task of design development is to select something that will work as it is supposed to, with the right look, for the lowest price. This is where the professional library is not only useful but necessary. Its contents are used the way one pages through travel brochures, with a cool head for detailed information and a warm feeling for compelling imagery. Of the three criteria of choice, the third, cost, is the clearest, for more or less is never a matter of debate, despite uncertainties of resources. Failure to debate this issue assumes that price and value are identical, which means the noneconomic meanings of the second term, performance, are neglected, and one remains indifferent to the mode of exploiting resources that has become commonplace in capitalist economies. Freedom equals the ability to pay. Still more problematic within design practices themselves are the other two factors, appearance and performance. The basis for choice is often seen, again, as a matter of information, which ranges from opinion to data. The search for more information sometimes conceals the fact that other reasons for making a selection have gone unexamined. And this deception can involve a loss of faith, whereby an indefinite sense of something unique (this circumstance, this condition) is replaced by a definite hold on something previously tested (that product, that detail). Reliability of performance, not suitability, is 126

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

often seen to be a component’s most prized characteristic. Expertise on performance, outside the testing industry, is claimed by the product representative; but this person is not a designer, and therefore little understands the faith in approximations or probabilities that guides productive making. In design, positive knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. A sense of what is probable prompts creativity. Judicial deliberation is comparable, insofar as the ability to imagine is essential to it. Even with an entire library of case law, the judge must imagine what lawmakers would have thought had they confronted the unprecedented facts of a particular case. The analog in architecture is the unique site or particular style of residing: about these, design must deliberate. Anyone sensitive to historical change knows that precedents are never adequate to the present. Likewise for technical solutions to preceding problems, and for the certainty that can be gained in a review of those solutions. If any single thing greatly weakens architecture in our time, it is blind faith in the promises of a product’s performance proposed by experts. Nearly as disabling is our corresponding impatience with deliberation of almost any kind. Other problems result from the selection and later combination of parts or elements that were not intended to be combined with one another because they were conceived as parts or components of single sets or whole systems— a commonplace of contemporary practice. In a system of office equipment, whole product lines are advertised, within which each element has both aesthetic and functional characteristics. These elements belong together; they were built to the same standard, devised to work together, and stylized to have the same look, as if they had been produced by a single cabinetmaker. Yet the “fitting out” of an office setting is not so simple. Choice has constraints other than those of the market, constraints that are also the context of its real freedom. Acknowledgment of this wider context is also the way architectural practice can resist becoming entirely bureaucratic; for if there is anything that will save architecture from narrow expertise it is this, because it calls for a different kind of thinking, a noncalculative and nonbureaucratic sort that is sensitive to or participates in a wider and more concrete horizon of interests. Hardly ever is the entire line of a manufacturer’s products found to be satisfactory: either the chair, the files, or the lights are not quite right; or the 127

CHAPTER FOUR

4.3

“Spacesetter” portable panel system, trade catalog, Modernfold, 1996.

128

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

shelving or paneling will not work. When a set is broken, when one part is chosen and others rejected, one generally turns to another line, to another set or system, and selects the missing parts, trying to complete the job by making something whole and entire out of combined parts. This rarely goes smoothly. While this substitution or combination process occurs in the selection of furnishings, it also happens in the choice of other kinds of equipment or hardware, such as glazing, flooring, or roofing systems, as well as the fittings that operate doors and windows, faucets and smoke alarms. While the design of the whole building is eclectic, and the building is largely made from pre- or shop-made parts, outside and in, rarely is one system appropriate for wide application. When a set is broken, how is “belonging” restored? How is the melody of the composition regained? What could unify the elements that make up an architectural setting, if not a manufacturer’s signature or the functional interdependence of components within a system? Patchwork quilts result from a scarcity of materials, from the unavoidable use of scraps and leftovers which are sewn into a single fabric, making one thing out of many. There is no similar scarcity at the outset of a contemporary architectural project, no leftovers but a surplus, the “wealth” I described earlier. Why, then, combination? Why not a setting made out of whole cloth? I do not have an answer to this question, at least not yet. Moreover, this question about “patching together” takes another one for granted, one that is even more pressing: how is a set or line of products broken in the first place? What would prompt such an interruption in the sequence, in the string of successful results? The use of an entire product line would ensure not only unity of effect but also a consistent standard of performance. Why improvise? Why allow any unevenness of performance and reliability? More important than why, when? At what stage in the process can we make room for what is unique in a particular case, can we allow for the present time and circumstances in the midst of what has been successful up until now? When should the reuse of solutions come to an end? More bluntly, when does a new project really begin, if at all? Under what circumstances can one say “now,” and say it as if it mattered? This is very hard in the face of the massive “reality” of what has 129

CHAPTER FOUR

been given, and the widespread inclination to repeat what has been done or used before. Complicity is risk-free, at least in the short term. What would prompt deviation from a well-traveled route; how could one break with the canon of familiar products? Where does one begin when acceptable solutions are everywhere around? Only when these questions about beginnings have been considered can we ask about the restoration of the unity of a setting or the continuity of an existing practice. It may be also that reflection on this break with the given will not only disclose its occasion but also give us a different sense of continuity: not a continuity that preserves the same while sacrificing the different, not saving the “has always been” by forfeiting the “what is now”; but a continuity that restores the same by means of the different. I have in mind a way of renewing the “then” by incorporating the “now.” This would not be an act of sacrifice but of faith, faith in the present and its ability, which is to say our ability, to rethink the inheritance, both cultural and technical. The primary question or first task of reflection concerns the depth of the typical within particular human circumstances, and with respect to that, the manner in which phenomena like repetition, standardized elements, etc. participate in typicality. When this becomes clear, it should be possible to see how identical elements, those we can use repeatedly, can also become individual, in order that they can be used to make unique circumstances communicate with those that have existed before. This is the sense of continuity I want to try to describe, for it will allow me to suggest where creativity can exist in practices that make use of elements that have been mass-produced and were intended for systematic application. Avoiding the problem, pedestrian as it is, means nothing less than self-deception and blindness with respect to our historical moment, no matter whether one runs with industrialized building or against it. * In the 1930s the Czech-born, American-trained, and Japanese-based architect Antonin Raymond published two books on architecture he had developed in collaboration with his wife Noémi. The first book illustrates buildings begun 130

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

between 1920 and 1935, and the second presents their characteristic construction details.2 Both books demonstrate how elements from traditional and twentieth-century construction can be productively mixed together. They also exemplify the deliberative judgment that makes this possible. Most of the buildings these books describe were located in Japan, where the Raymonds had been since Antonin worked on Wright’s Imperial Hotel. Like that building, these projects can hardly be called Japanese, despite the great knowledge the Raymonds had developed of that country’s culture and construction practices. Nor for that matter can their projects be called modern, if one has in mind the well-known characteristics of International Style architecture. Antonin Raymond, who seems to have undertaken much of the architectural writing, once stated that the best architecture of his time was neither international, nor concerned with style. Because they were neither

4.4

Residence of Ambassador Paul Claudel, Tokyo, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1923. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER FOUR

4.5

Karuizawa Summer House, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1932. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

consistently Japanese nor international, these projects and details can be understood as hybrid sorts of construction, buildings that might equally well be called eclectic in the sense of the term I have just elaborated—not something I think we should necessarily strive for, but something we can hardly avoid. Raymond himself was clearly aware of the “assimilated” character of his buildings, admitting this with what seems to have been little embarrassment. Yet this was not all there was to his practice; for he sought, or claimed to have sought, something “behind” the forms, and this makes his design work less methodological than interpretive, or deliberative. Recounting the development of his understanding he wrote: “Gradually, principally through observation and study of traditional Japanese structures, I began to see very definite 132

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

principles governing [their] design. . . . It became clearer and clearer to me that these were agelong principles, not dissimilar to the principles governing the best of design in Europe . . . [principles that] on the whole pointed to the fact that the simplest, the most natural, the most economical, and the most direct way is the safest way to achieve a good design of lasting and absolute quality.”3 This statement requires some clarifications. First, the emphasis on “principles” suggests that Raymond sought a theory of structures and, by extension, of architecture. Though here proposed, principles were not so much his aim, I think, as a reply to critics who sought theory; in fact, his work is interesting precisely because it was only implicitly theoretical. This statement, moreover, is very general; the “principles” it lists are less an answer to the problem of mixing traditions than an indication of the nature of the difficulty: how to achieve something “simple” without disavowing the richness of the inheritance. More helpful, because concrete, are the details and buildings themselves. Traditional Japanese houses incorporated numerous devices for the modification of their interiors so that they could respond to changing patterns of use and variations in the external environment. In the introduction to their 1936 publication, the Raymonds wrote: “The Japanese house possesses a wonderful flexibility. During the night and in winter it is a box hermetically closed to the exterior, divided into rooms inside. In summer, away with the shutters, the paper windows, doors and partitions, the house becomes nothing more than a pavilion open to all the winds.”4 Flexibility was key, and that was illustrated in the photographs and details of both traditional and modern construction methods. The book of details does not show complete buildings, though, rather the parts or instruments that effected these changes, which I will call the equipment of the building. The example described in the first book’s introduction is “the ‘sudare,’ [the] delicate blinds made of rush or bamboo, swinging to the slightest breath of wind, [which] shade the interior.” The projects were to “conserve as much as possible, a little of this charming mobility by using sliding partitions, windows and folding screens.”5 The “Blinds and Awnings” section of Architectural Details illustrates a simple reed awning installed in their Karuizawa residence. Awnings like this existed throughout the country, things that would not receive much press 133

CHAPTER FOUR

nowadays.6 This one consisted of a horizontal support, which doubled as an enclosing hood, a woven reed screen, and a draw string, used to roll or release the screen. Nothing could be simpler; yet, at the same time, or for that reason, nothing could be better, even in the modern world. Is this nostalgia? Like many modern architects at work in the 1930s Antonin Raymond was fascinated by “primitive” buildings, and his proposals, like those of others, were meant to recall these “premises,” providing society—a society with what must have seemed a rather dim prospect in the years leading up to the Second World War—with the means to reenact its beginnings and recover its grounds. The modernism he envisaged, like that of Le Corbusier, Wright, and others, was meant to be a form of renewal, assuming that advance would follow retreat. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, Raymond did not propose neglecting everything in between, did not assume that a hut or pueblo building made out of reinforced concrete would be the answer to society’s highest aspirations and most profound requirements. The alternative involved a sense of cultural continuity, the double faith in the present and the past to which I alluded above. In architecture this is partly achieved through the modification of inherited construction practices, which explains somewhat this preoccupation with emphatically prosaic things like awnings and blinds. The photograph of the porch published in Architectural Details shows the hood of the awning covered in thatch. In the cross section detail, only a timber substructure was shown. There is nothing remarkable in this substitution. Yet in other buildings the Raymonds designed, the substructure was constructed out of concrete, a substitution without precedent. To illustrate the new version of this device the Raymonds chose an awning built into the Kikusaburo Fukui Villa, which sat on a hillside “above the sea near the hotspring resort town of Atami.” While the design was meant to be “in principle” the same sort of device as the vernacular, it was considerably more elaborate, larger, and made out of materials that could not be found in the countryside, some of which were factory-made. This is the way one kind of mixing entered into the process of “assimilation.” Like its precedent, this new awning consisted of a shelflike support and a reed screen; but these two parts were connected across the length of an in134

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.6 (left)

Awnings and blinds, Antonin Raymond Architectural Details, 1938. 4.7

Kikusaburo Fukui Villa, Atami, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1935.

CHAPTER FOUR

4.8

Kikusaburo Fukui Villa, Antonin and Noémi Raymond.

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

termediate third, a wire glass roof supported on paired steel sections. This extension was horizontal, not vertical, less like a vest than a visor, working in more or less the same way as a hand raised to one’s eyebrows to shade and shelter a view into the distance. Both the reed and the hangers were typical of the traditional awning, but this extended hood was not, neither was the steel nor the wire glass. Yet the result was just as delicate and similarly flexible. Similitude of the kind being sought was not meant to be apparent in shape and profile but in performance. The part of the facade to which this awning was attached consisted of floor-to-ceiling glazing, extending from side to side of the living room. The explanatory text does not say, but it seems likely, that the extension and enlargement of the awning—by means of this intermediate third—was prompted by the increase in glazing, to which, I think, it was proportioned. To understand the awning, then, to explain why it differs from the traditional example, one must look to the window, and from there still further to the room it enclosed, which was itself an outgrowth of a particular way of residing, particularly hybrid: modern and traditional. Describing the “double life of the Japanese,” the Raymonds said their clients required “separate entrances for guests, for family, for the servants; several reception rooms of various types for those not admitted into the intimacy of the house; quarters and [an] office for the intendant; Japanese and western facilities in the kitchens; and Occidental as well as traditional Japanese rooms with mats on the floors.”7 The mixing of past and present methods and materials was not a matter of design choice but of interpreting or adjudicating cultural practice, articulating, I want to say, its continuity by discovering and disclosing what had been familiar in forms that had never been seen.8 The same page of the book of details that illustrated these awnings shows a carefully drawn section through a window blind. It was built into a window above the one I have just described, illuminating the double height of the living room that both windows enclosed. On the north side of this room was the main staircase, which could be excluded from the room by a two-story curtain, designed by Noémi Raymond, who was responsible for many, probably most, of the other furnishings, certainly all of the fabrics. On the east wall 137

CHAPTER FOUR

there was a fireplace at the lower level and a sliding door, a fusuma, built into the wall above. Between this room and the dining space to the west was a floor-to-ceiling bamboo screen, which could be opened to separate the two rooms or closed in on itself to join them together. Finally, to the south were the windows, facing the resort town and the sea but also the midday heat of the summer sun; hence the need for awnings and blinds. The blind, like the awning, combined modern and traditional materials and methods. It was a composite mechanism installed vertically between two concrete shelves: a sliding wooden sash on the inside, “wide-blade venetian blinds” in the middle, and a fixed mosquito screen on the outside. While the concrete wall above and below was very thin, when compared to the layers of traditional construction, this mechanism was surprisingly thick or wide: about three feet from the inner edge of the polished concrete shelf to its outer extremity, its “eye-lid.” This outer edge supported a gutter that passed between the shelf and the wire glass awning just described. Although the materials of the blind were new and the entire section elaborate, the mechanism was in principle identical to conventional examples. Likewise for the movable curtain and screen within the room: each was larger than typical examples and made from modern materials, but the method of operation was identical to countless precedents the Raymonds had seen in traditional construction. Like that of its antecedent, the blind’s flexibility allowed it to serve as a register and receptacle of the landscape, welcoming it when it presented itself gently, excluding it when it raged in its fury. One additional setting in the house should make its mixed character or “double life” clear. On the third floor there was an ensemble of rooms that combined the master bedroom, an associated sitting room, the butsuma (a Buddhist altar room), and a “Japanese” bath, all surrounding the void over the living room. The bath had all the elements of a traditional setting: a shower, two stone-paved tubs, a sand bath, and slatted wooden floors between the baths and on the balcony. Joining the equipment of the bath to that of the balcony, and therefore to the landscape (of hot springs) below, were floor-toceiling sliding glass screens, which were, again, traditional in character. In its construction the room was distinctly hybrid, however, especially its ceiling, 138

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

which was basically two-part: a traditional solution of overlapped boards (which allowed for ventilation while channeling condensation to copper gutters) was hung from a reinforced concrete roof slab, which sheltered the building from the weather while it created a ventilation cavity, both above the ceiling and in the hollows of a raised parapet. Why two kinds of construction in one setting? One could say it was a result of the availability of new materials. In a 1939 lecture Antonin Raymond himself suggested such an explanation, commenting that “the results of [his] efforts were buildings in which the Japanese could continue their own Japanese life, [yet whose forms differed] from the traditional forms because of different materials employed.”9 But does the availability of new materials explain their selection? During this period other architects—Japanese and Western—avoided them. The Raymond office employed not only architects but also carpenters, estimators, construction and mechanical engineers. Perhaps the interests or expertise of this group explains the acceptance of new materials. Yet why partial use, why were some traditional materials retained in every case? Why not design a setting out of whole cloth—Japanese or modern? In our time we face the same question when considering an entire line of products or set of components. Why break the set? When? Earlier in his lecture Raymond listed the topics a master carpenter would have to consider when envisaging a traditional solution: the performance of various materials, their availability in the vicinity of the project, the type of construction, the relationship between available materials and possible construction types, the climate and its effects on these materials, their structural properties, and their “occult” qualities. All of this makes good practical sense, except perhaps the last issue, which is a little foggy. He explained: “By occult I mean the psychological effect produced on human beings by the sight of and contact with those materials.”10 Such an effect was meant to be appropriate to the task at hand: one for the living room of a house, another for a display case in a shop, and still another for the assembly floor of a factory. Each setting had its own requirements for which fitting materials had to be chosen. Does this recommend eclecticism or simply restate the principle of decorum?

139

CHAPTER FOUR

4.9

Kikusaburo Fukui Villa, Antonin and Noémi Raymond.

In traditional Japanese construction all the parts of a structure were available to builders in standardized shapes and sizes: “Posts and beams, girders, joists, roofing materials, [and] mats, had been standardized through ages and were obtainable ready-made from dealers in such things in many different grades.”11 No abundance of trade catalogs existed then as it does now, but a “standing reserve”12 of standardized parts was available nonetheless. The remarkable fact about this reserve is that it existed for traditional building in much the same way that it does for contemporary construction. There is an important difference: the types of the first evolved with respect to both productive and nonproductive conditions, the latter including factors as basic as normal tree sizes and dwelling requirements, while the standards of the sec140

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

ond resulted largely from the exigencies of production and the economies of an optimal solution. Nevertheless, Raymond maintained that there was no essential difficulty of mixing old and new materials because both were shaped and sized according to “agelong” standards.13 Although such a conclusion would be hard to maintain nowadays, it must have seemed acceptable in 1938 in Japan. In Raymond’s drawings it is apparent that common dimensions and typical figures allowed for material substitution—not two materials for the same dimension, which would have been entirely ineffective structurally, but with commensurate dimensions for all figures. This suggests redirecting the question about standards or types; not asking about choice per se but about the nature of these standards: how determined, the manner of transmission, and ways interpreted.

4.10

Kikusaburo Fukui Villa, Antonin Raymond Architectural Details, 1938.

141

CHAPTER FOUR

The second floor of the Fukui Villa can be used to restate the problem. The north wing of the villa was occupied by servants. The outer shape and dimension of their rooms were made to be commensurate with tatami measures, multiples of a rectangle three by six feet. The same was true of the “Japanese Room” on the east end of the plan, occupied by the Fukui family, as well as the “Japanese Room” on the top floor. All the elements of these rooms, or more exactly the surfaces that covered their walls, ceilings, and floors, as well as their furnishings, were standardized according to these dimensions or multiples thereof, which made the entire ensemble commensurate. This does not seem to be the case in the living room, or at least is less clearly so. Neither its floor nor its walls were inscribed with tatami geometry, nor did its fixtures display these lines. Did the Raymonds drop the traditional regimen when they designed “modern” settings? In contemporary houses, such as those by Tadao Ando, a single tatami room is not uncommon. Outside traditional rooms, did the dimensions and shapes provided by past practices get replaced by those of the new manner of building, expressing the methods of the factory not the workshop, the machine not the hand? And what about the atypical use of traditional materials, the instances in which they were cut to very large dimensions, as in the wall coverings or the curtain between the living room and the stair? Were the traditional shapes and sizes no longer apposite? Was standardization a matter of convenience, of choice? Or is there another sense of standards to which the measures of the traditional and modern layouts conformed? In point of fact, the geometry of the “modern” settings and furnishings was commensurate with that of the traditional figures. The dimensions of the rooms indicated on the published drawings confirm this. The chief difference between the new and the old is that regulating lines were not inscribed onto the surfaces of the larger elements. Only the inscription is lacking, not the coordination those lines would have represented. One can conclude that the Raymonds saw no need to simulate traditional construction by depicting its forms, or by creating traces of what would have been its methods. I believe these lines were eliminated because they would have been merely decorative. This was done, I think, because the Raymonds relied equally heavily on another sense of “standards,” less metric than practical, even ethical. 142

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.11

Reinanzaka House, Tokyo, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1924. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER FOUR

“It must be constantly restated,” wrote Antonin Raymond, “that contemporary architecture is not the desire for expressing individuality, nor the desire for new and bizarre forms.”14 The goal is just the opposite: typicality. A characteristic of typical solutions is their simplicity. I have already cited the Raymonds’ identification of “simplicity” as a characteristic of good architecture and interiors, as the most direct way to achieve good design. This was not a recommendation about an aesthetic quality, however. If a term such as “austere” is used instead, the ethical meaning implied in “simple” may be more clear: simple as austere means not wasteful, knowing and working within limits, according to what is right for a particular project within particular circumstances. This distinction must be stressed, for in the first decades of the twentieth century “simplicity” was fast becoming something of a catchword for the new style. Consider roughly contemporary American architects, Antonin Raymond’s previous boss for example. For Frank Lloyd Wright, like Louis Sullivan, John Root, and Claude Bragdon before and after him, the word “simple” had become more or less synonymous with “beautiful,” on the assumption that all forms of “applied ornament” were dead and buried. In a later summary of his ideas, published in The Natural House, Wright distinguished “organic simplicity” from mere plainness, typified by the Roycroft style, and argued for unity of composition and effect. Elimination would not be the way to accomplish this; rather, the determination of “what to leave out and what to put in.”15 This premise allowed Wright to further argue that homeowners should not bring their old furnishings into a newly built house; instead, the architect should assume responsibility for the design of all interior equipment, for that was the only way “organic simplicity” could be achieved. Architects and theorists in the Arts and Crafts movement had also argued for simplicity and compositional unity, following William Morris. Also in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Charles Eastlake had argued for simplicity in the design and fabrication of furniture, citing vernacular not industrialized forms as exemplary models. Wright’s work was thus partly a consequence of this movement.

144

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.12

Robie House, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1910.

But the premises of both attitudes toward unified simplicity were not without critics during these same years. Adolf Loos sharply criticized the desire for aesthetic and compositional unity in his parable “The Poor Little Rich Man.”16 With that text in mind one must admit that Art Nouveau buildings were more than slightly stylized, despite claims about simplicity; and in much the same way Wright’s designs were not lacking in identifiable motifs. Buildings in what came to be seen as his “rectilinear” style exhibited unadorned surfaces and planar geometries. Despite this, and the obvious (formal) consistency of his projects, Wright maintained that the issue was not aesthetic, or not primarily so. As early as the famous Hull House lecture of 1901 he observed that “simple” forms were congenial to contemporary mass production. Extrusion, he said, is a “straight line” process. In later years Wright returned to this theme repeatedly. In 1936, just after the Raymonds published their first book, he explained what he would have liked to achieve with the Imperial Hotel, on which Raymond worked: “To make the new 145

CHAPTER FOUR

4.13

Conference room, Norman Bel Geddes, 1928.

146

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

forms living expressions of the new order of the machine and [to] continue what was noble in [the] tradition did trouble me. I wanted to realize genuine new forms true to the spirit of the great tradition and found I should have to make them; not only make forms appropriate to the old (natural) and to new (synthetic) materials, but I should have to so design them that the machine (or process) that must make them could and would make them better than anything possibly could be made by hand.”17 The production of simple forms with machine methods was apparently not possible in Japan, for there he had to rely on “armies of craftsmen.” He achieved simple forms just the same, which is why one feels inclined to suspect that aesthetic interests were more than slightly important. Moreover, it seems that critics of the time were right to describe “sweeping horizontals” as his set of forms. He was deeply concerned with his own originality. These forms were his signature, evidences of his individuality— the very sort of self-expression Raymond argued against, which explains his unhappiness with Wright’s “mannerisms.” Simple forms, as forms, were widely promoted by other contemporaries also. Art Deco motifs, too, were neat, simple, and rectilinear. In the early thirties shapes in this “style” were explained, sometimes convincingly, other times unconvincingly, on the basis of “streamlining,” a modeling technique that resulted in surfaces with “minimum drag.”18 But this, too, was as much an aesthetic topic as any other sort; “minimum drag,” while no doubt a pressing matter in the operation of a train, was hardly so in the functioning of a toaster, which nevertheless had the same accelerated or windswept “look” in the designs of figures such as Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy. For the Raymonds, by contrast, simplicity as a matter of decorum (austerity) was the result of an intellectual regimen, involving purification or distillation. Among antecedents, these arguments most closely resemble those of Louis Sullivan, although he saw the discipline of simplification as a prelude to the development of ornament. In praise of the Japanese the Raymonds asked: “Is there any other civilization for which beautifying means elimination? It is through increased simplicity and elimination that the man of taste finds elegance. . . . Nothing is ever sufficiently clear, sufficiently pure. It would seem that by dint of trying to eliminate all that which is not essential, 147

CHAPTER FOUR

of clearing the void, of seeking the essence of things, at last, in the silence thus created one hears the voice of form, substance and space.”19 While these last phrases remind one of lines from Louis Kahn written some thirty years later, and from Adolf Loos some thirty years before, both comparisons are a little inexact. For the Raymonds the stress was on the “seeking,” on the continual and never-satisfied searching, which in its indefinite duration prevented them, I think, from achieving uninterrupted “silence,” “form,” and “space,” just as it caused them, I suspect, more than a little anxiety if not embarrassment about “assimilation.” A tacit or implicit architecture was their goal, not so much as an expression but a consequence of the economy of dwelling practices. Aesthetic interests were important in this argument, but as a rhetorical foil, identifying the source of what needed to be eliminated in order for a solution to approximate simplicity. The aim seems to have been a mental and methodological hygiene or economy wherein the simple always remained something still to be achieved, or still to be achieved more completely. Never was it something to be taken for granted as an inevitable consequence of modern methods, an acceptance that was just as frequent in the essentializing practices of some modern architecture as it is in contemporary eclecticism. If not in aesthetic qualities, in unbroken lines, flat planes, and sweeping horizontals, in what is “simplicity” to be found? How does one know a solution is “simple” without referring to its “look,” or without concentrating on that primarily? The buildings designed by the Raymonds did and do look simplified, it is true, especially those from the twenties and thirties, those contemporary with Purist and De Stijl projects, of which they were certainly aware. Their friendship with Jean Badovici, editor of L’Architecture Vivante, guarantees this. But the formal similarity between these projects and their own was not foremost in their thinking, rather the economy of elimination, the recognition of limits. To what, then, does one refer when considering this distillation? In a 1942 paper Antonin Raymond wrote: “Simplicity is found in the stress on serviceability, whether in the matter of construction, of planning, or of use.”20 Interconnected in his arguments were concepts of standardization, simplicity, and serviceability. But not equally so; the first two presupposed the third. This is because both technical and aesthetic concerns 148

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

were seen to be subordinate to those of practical life, to ethical concerns. In what, then, does “serviceability” consist? In function? Earlier in this book I cited Paul Claudel’s description of the house the Raymonds built for themselves in Japan. Part of this poem may provide a key to these questions. Claudel observed that this construction had preserved “that which is essential in the Japanese House— [the house is] less a box than a vesture, an apparatus for living and breathing.”21 Untranslated, Claudel’s last phrase is: “moins une boîte qu’un vêtement, un appareil à vivre et à respirer.”22 Vêtement or vesture in this phrase interests me. It is cognate with a range of terms that relate to clothes or to the act of clothing: a vest or vestment is a garment that surrounds a person; it may be housed in a vestry or vestibule; and the act of clothing can be described as investiture, the ceremony whereby robes are put onto a person, attributing to him or her power and authority. This is vesture’s enabling function. When Raymond used the term “serviceability” I think he had in mind both functionality and this other sort of enabling. What if a person or artifact were stripped of its “vestment”? Without robes a priest or judge would be (again) just like you and me, not only ineffective in ecclesiastical or judicial affairs but also only an individual. Not only is power an attribute of the person who has been vested, but so is a particular kind of anonymity; during the trial no one in the courtroom knows the judge’s name, afterward no one cares. By means of the vestments this person becomes that office. This role is aided by the fact that every judge is dressed identically to others, as are priests. Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “Repetition is a well-fitting garment.”23 But never— and here is the paradox—does the person under the robes cease being an individual; vestments are made to fit individuals with all their local characteristics and peculiarities. When they suit a body’s size, as they must, the person’s individuality recedes and nameless but respected familiarity presents itself. By means of vesture, individuality transcends itself toward an authority commonly recognized. At the same time, this “toward” means that even when robed the judge is “this” one; still an individual, just not outwardly or prominently so. The paradox of vesture is the same as the one we have encountered with respect to time and we will find in the nature of a 149

CHAPTER FOUR

4.14

Kisuke Akaboshi Residence, Tokyo, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1932. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

well-equipped setting: just as the vested individual is unique and typical, the continuity of a tradition is made up of discontinuous or discrete events. Kierkegaard has written: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”24 While this may be easy to propose, it is not to accomplish. On it depends the success or failure of design in an age of factory production and construction assembly. Can architectural equipment—particularly repetitively made equipment—have the same properties as the body’s vesture; can it have the same power, anonymity, sameness, and self-transcendence? Furthermore, can it be both new and old, premade and remade, an instance of what is now and what was then? Can the same things be made into something that is different and do this without ceasing to be the same? The use of “vesture” in Claudel’s account of Raymond’s house suggests that this can, indeed, be the case. Serviceability, the fundamental characteristic of both Japanese and modern buildings, included the double function of adorning and enabling, along with all aspects of architectural “living and breathing.” My earlier account of the way awning equipment served as a register and receptacle of the landscape implied the same. For Claudel the walls of the Raymond house were designed to adorn and enable dwelling practices. Perhaps something of this survives in the architectural term revetment, cognate with the French revêtir. Not only the walls but also the furnishings or dwelling equipment were to perform this double role. On this last subject, however, the Raymonds had a surprising observation: “The maximum of comfort is not the aim of [ Japanese] constructions.”25 This is hard for us to understand, for we tend to equate functionality with comfort, as they obviously did not. Apropos furnishings, one of the clearest examples of this sort of thinking was built not in Japan but in the United States, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where the Raymonds made a house and office for themselves during the war by converting and adding onto an eighteenth-century barn. This is another case of mixing elements from different times and locations: “The house proves that good things belong to no period. The strictly modern additions in the architecture do not clash with the old. Inherited pieces of furniture, 151

CHAPTER FOUR

4.15

New Hope Residence and Studio, New Hope, Pennsylvania, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1940. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.16

New Hope Residence and Studio, Antonin and Noémi Raymond. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

153

CHAPTER FOUR

French, American Colonial, and Oriental harmonize in a setting indifferent to time.”26 Nothing could be further from Wright’s prohibition against unauthored furniture. In the absence of a regulating geometry, such as that of the tatami rectangles, surely here we are in the presence of a high-grade eclecticism, one that is very close to our current practice of mixing and matching. Yet the New Hope interiors demonstrate not a confused mixing but a conjoining that admits of distinctions. How could this have been so? What is it about these settings that made them “serviceable” in the double sense that Claudel described? To answer this question we must shift our focus from the objects as objects to the actions they were meant to accommodate and represent; we must concentrate on and remember their performative role, which should be relatively easy, for it is an untutored sort of knowledge each of us acquires by maturing within a given culture, which is to say it is a historically constituted knowledge that is also impersonal. The trouble is that professional understanding often eclipses this preprofessional sort; for us, knowledge about artifacts and artworks has come to be taken as a measure of one’s “culture,” making culture the outcome of design, which is rather like trying to balance a pyramid on its apex. Internal to every design project in our time is a conflict between two kinds of “culture” that could be called ethical and aesthetic, the first lived and the second “designed,” the first an inheritance, the second a project, something authored. In order to understand how Noémi and Antonin Raymond selected and designed the furnishings of the New Hope house, of the living room for example, we must forget, for a few minutes at least, our professional (technical and aesthetic) knowledge of their style, formal characteristics, typical motifs, and functional performance. More accurately, perhaps, we must see more than these things, or must look through them to see and understand how the furnishings worked and what they adorned (not assuming that professional knowledge will guarantee such an understanding). Architectural mimesis does not imitate buildings or their parts but what people typically do, human situations. Architectural settings accommodate and represent patterns of human life. Accordingly the ensemble of mimetic settings constitutes the world in 154

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

which one resides, at least its more permanent aspects (as contrasted with one’s habits or occasional behaviors). Describing the Raymonds’ Tokyo house, Claudel argued that a house should not be viewed as an edifice but as a “welladjusted envelope of life.” While a “world” in this expansive sense, architecture is also a garment, whether tailor-made or off the rack. Preprofessional vocabulary can clarify this: to identify the right relationship between settings and the action they are meant to accommodate, we say that furnishings or equipment “fit” intended purposes, as do clothes. To be “fit” means to be well adapted, qualified, or competent; to be in harmony with, to have the right size or shape and be apt. Fittings like furnishings and equipment enable; each is reliable and taken for granted. For this reason they are also indicative. To understand the way an architectural setting is lived and recognized, we need to see not only the objects themselves—the walls, windows, chairs, shelves, and all manner of tools—but the way they coordinately sustain typical dwelling practices. Every setting’s furnishings are a plural that is also a singular.27 A courtroom does not consist of a bench, witness stand, or table, but all of these and more: even the bench itself is really an ensemble, of which the robe is a part. When “furniture” is thought to come in “pieces,” especially designed pieces (or “art furniture,” as Charles Eastlake named this sort), this entirety is neglected. On a kitchen table, under a light and in front of stools, are cups and saucers, knives and forks, each where it should be with respect to the others.28 The same is true for the rest of the kitchen’s equipment: the compartments, baskets, etc. A full inventory would be indefinitely lengthy, especially if one included all the objects that are there without having been designed, the flowers and the food, as well as the view outdoors, the light and the landscape, which have such decisive effects on the interior, giving it its air or temperature. But more important than the number of items on such a list are the distances and relationships between them, their reciprocal dependence and contingency. The deployment of equipment is always an exercise in proximity, by which degrees of nearness are differentiated. While proximity is represented metrically in architectural documents, numbers are not key in this; more im155

CHAPTER FOUR

4.17

New Hope Residence and Studio, Antonin and Noémi Raymond. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

portant are relationships of use constituted out of habit and ritual, which numerical intervals abstract and represent. The same dependent status obtains for the geometry of the setting. There is no need to know the plan shape of a room to understand whether or not it is “in order.” This order is sought when a room is “straightened.” Settings are serviceable when the things assumed in some situation are close by, which is to say within reach when required, for preparing and enjoying a meal or conducting a trial. By nature, well-made settings deploy their items so that they are near enough to be useful. And the same would be true again were we considering a room in either a library or 156

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

hospital. This leads to a related observation: no single element in a spatial ensemble is positioned to stand out from all the rest, as in the figure-background structure; no single piece of equipment obtrudes itself into one’s awareness, each coexists with others in a state of shared latency, waiting, one might say, not passively, like a mirror, but with a tendency or disposition to prefigure patterns of behavior, which is how architecture confers orientation. In the disposition of dwelling equipment, unobtrusiveness is key. Le Corbusier said in Decorative Art of Today that a good servant is discreet and selfeffacing in order to leave the master free. Analogously, one can say that each item in an inventory of equipment is recessive or laconic. Equipment withdraws from frontal or objectlike presence into a matrix of relationships wherein each item is subordinate to the task it facilitates. One year after Le Corbusier’s comment, Rudolph Schindler described the ensemble of interior equipment as a “background for human activity.” Describing metal furniture a decade later, he argued for its transparency, because that quality would guarantee its “inconspicuous” presence.29 Furnishings, on this account, have the “habit” of disappearing when most vitally present, insofar as they are taken up by or absorbed into the human body’s various projects. In this they are like tools, which work best when unnoticed. This is also what vesture and apparatus signify. Apart from the bench or without the gavel and the rest of the judicial gear, the person wearing the robes is powerless, or at least in possession of greatly diminished efficacy. At the same time, when they are coordinately present not one of these items is ever noticed. When most effective, the equipment of a setting remains tacit; in fact, it is effective precisely because it is tacit, which is to say resolute, prepared, and unassertive. The worst sort of stairway makes you observe it in use. The first duty of equipment is to provide a response to the expectations of the body, not the disinterested gaze. The body, in its natural being, builds up and largely consists of motor habits which it regularly and unthinkingly deploys in order to inhabit discrete settings. Earlier I cited Richard Neutra, Paul Schilder, and Maurice MerleauPonty on the subject of the “body schema,” a corporeal network of inclinations that unreflectively but knowingly measures the adequacy of settings for its several purposes. Like the settings it inhabits—perhaps serving as their 157

CHAPTER FOUR

model—this “schema” disappears in its performances. Life cannot be productive unless we forget ourselves for a while and become absorbed in the demands of specific projects. Objects like the ones used in the Raymond kitchen become conspicuous when they become unusable. The first time you look at a hammer, observed Martin Heidegger, is when you break it. Only then do you “see it for what it is.” Although the comparison may be surprising, and must be provisional, functional failure has the same consequence as aesthetic success; both lead to the emergence of something “in itself,” something severed from the weave of relationships into which practical use had sewn it. In architecture, objects with aesthetic appeal are generally useless. Wright admitted that he got black and blue in more than a few places when he put himself in too intimate contact with furniture he had designed. Fittings, like tools, are never noticed when they work as they should, nor are they ever seen as things in themselves, like aesthetic objects. Nowadays architects design all sorts of products, shoes and teapots, for example. As designed objects these products are meant to be distinctive, and are. Like works of art they are inscribed with evidences of authorship, yet they rarely work as they should. Adolf Loos suggested that the best way to invent a saddle is never to ride a horse. Cutlery can be invented if you lack table manners or don’t really care about the way to eat. What Loos observed is hardly unusual in our time; in order to display our culture we often surround ourselves with objects that have been “designed” in this way. Yet the aesthetic prominence of these items is precisely the problem with these surroundings: distinctness disintegrates ensembles. By contrast, everything in a setting that is serviceable settles itself into a field of more or less anonymous availabilities, residing there in quiet repose. This is analogous to the background character of nonpictorial urban topography, just as it is the real basis for the “silence” the Raymonds sought, a silence that was neither as sublime as Kahn’s nor as rhetorical as Loos’s. To describe the ensemble character of equipment, Heidegger introduced the term “equipmental totality” (Zeugzusammenhang). It is an awkward term; better are words like region, vicinity, or circumstance, especially this last one as it suggests magnetic inclusion, even obligation, as much as loca158

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

tion. Yet with the term “totality” or any of its equivalents one also gets a sense of the potentially overdetermined character of the “world” such as I have provisionally described it; for the more that everything one needs is within reach, the more everyday life becomes subject to what might be called topographical destiny. Setting types authorized by tradition become suffocating when they fail to yield to changed practices. This is not necessarily a problem when each of us is allowed to write and rewrite the script, at the scale of the house for example; but when someone else takes on the responsibility of authoring our world, at the scale of the public institution, street, or part of the town, and does so once and for all, existence can become something in the manner of confinement, a captivity within the walls of some designer’s idea of coherence— traditional or modern. This is often a miserable fate, not because the designer lacked ability but because whatever abilities the designer possessed were exercised far too comprehensively, to the exclusion of anything outside the limits of what was designed. In view of this totality, we need to ask once again about breaking the coherence of something already constituted as a whole: how can the world each ensemble projects transcend itself into something that has not been designed and is, therefore, capable of sustaining some sense of dwelling freedom, both of performance and of existence? I use the word “horizon” to name the agency of this emancipation. Let me explain this by asking a question: what are the real limits, edges, or boundaries of an ensemble of dwelling equipment; again and more particularly, what is the real boundary of a setting such as the Raymonds’ New Hope kitchen? An obvious answer would be the walls, for they define the perimeter of the ensemble, they are where it comes to an end as something in itself. Without them there would be no room. Yet the room would not be what it is were it without illumination. Considering the setting’s serviceability, can one separate from the table the window, and not only that but the porch outside it, and still further the awninglike hood that shades and shelters both? Does the setting come to an end even at that extremity, or must one look further? How much further? Must the edge be visible to be significant? In my account of this same device built into the Fukui Villa, I indicated attention to the landscape and the climate, to the gifts and punishments brought by the 159

CHAPTER FOUR

weather. In that instance the “far” was always related to the “near,” or the near was defined in dialogue with the far. Friedrich Hölderlin wrote, “No one without wings is capable of grasping what is near.”30 One finds descriptions of the same mixed topography in Rilke: “What is the Inside? If not a more intense sky / Traversed by birds and deep of all the winds of return.”31 We know what these phrases mean, but they wreak havoc with our naturalized concepts of space. In both instances the “close by” is actualized or animated by something remote. The untutored truth of the matter is that the far sustains the near, for the first “contains” all that the second lacks. All of the Raymonds’ invention was aimed at modulating or articulating variable ambient conditions, integrating near and far according to the interests of practical affairs. Equipment, conceived as the apparatus of topographical modulation and condensation, was meant to absorb into the interior what otherwise would have transcended it, but variously; for despite its approximate regularity, the external environment was (and will be) nothing if not surprising, hence the respect the Raymonds showed for both the cherry blossom and the typhoon, and their understanding of the need for the building’s continual adjustment. “The fury of the elements . . . has made [us] understand the frailty of things.”32 It would be wrong to conclude that stability was unimportant in such a setting, that walls were insignificant. They were designed to be built and to last. Yet just as important as their fixity or stability was their flexibility; if they lacked this second quality, attunement to everything that animated the building would have been impossible, a disastrous situation since it was on the encompassing horizon that the “living and breathing” within the “envelope of life” depended. Like many who have written about Japanese architecture, Raymond cited and praised the regular rebuilding of Shinto shrines “every 20 years.” For him, periodic demolition and reconstruction testified to consciousness of both the inevitable impermanence of things and the fallibility of design invention. At night the box was “hermetically closed to the exterior”; during the day, during the summer, “away with the shutters, the paper windows, doors and partitions, the house becomes nothing more than a pavilion open to all the winds.” Between this hermetically closed container and this open pavilion 160

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

4.18

Karuizawa Summer House, Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 1932. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

161

CHAPTER FOUR

one finds the primary topics of design. A building is neither nothing but walls nor nothing more than the winds, neither built geometry nor materials native to the site; not an affair of building science nor of landscape design. The kitchen table in the New Hope house was both a support for dishes and a receptacle of morning light: the breakfast meal assumed and integrated both. While cooperative, however, these topics are opposite; the first endeavors to stabilize, the second may destabilize the situation. Thus the need for attunement, a continual need, and its apparatus, the dwelling equipment. For the kitchen to be a world that sustained dwelling freedom, it had to submit to its own alteration. This is neither a fall from grace nor something trivial. The morning light was not “designed” as were some of the objects, but when considering serviceability it is important to consider more than the objects one might be called on to invent. If a setting is to be understood as it is lived, unstable elements that do not require authoring need to be remembered, perhaps even seen as fundamental. Only in this way can architecture recover its foundation in a milieu that has the power to both transcend and sustain it. Envisaging a design as a configuration of topographical levels also allows one to understand this, as does thinking about it as a back, not a front. Do both craft- and factory-made elements allow for the adjustable or approximate totality I have described, and its self-transcendence into the wider horizon? What is the difference between the table in this kitchen, designed by Noémi Raymond, and the chair-stools around it, made repetitively by builders? Can uniqueness and similarity be joined in architectural vesture the way they are in the person/office of a judge—by means of both tailor-made and off-the-shelf “revetment”? The answer will not become apparent as long as one focuses only on the objects of design or manufacture. Richard Neutra was also fascinated by Japanese tradition and knew that ready-made architectural elements could not be avoided in modern construction. He observed that on the islands of Japan an entire nation had been living in “minutely standardized dwellings for a thousand years.”33 While these dwellings were not factory-made, they were produced repetitively just the same, or nearly so. Despite fears of the monotony that would result from this sort of production, the landscape was, Neutra observed, delightful. Its beauty 162

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

was related to the fact that the towns consisted of houses, and the houses of rooms, that were “strictly dimensioned according to a basic area standard.” Tatami dimensions gave first to rooms, then to houses, and then to their ensemble in the landscape commensurate proportions. Despite this, nothing of the horizon was tedious. Kyoto, he remarked, is not boring. What is more, this “line” of forms extended itself in both directions, into the open expanse of the landscape or town and into the interior recesses of the dwelling. The sliding partitions of the traditional dwelling were three feet wide. Like the mats, they were aligned with the tansu or chest of drawers in which kimonos were stored, themselves made of cloth which was “throughout the realm” woven on looms that were—once again—three feet wide. And so on: the doors, railings, tubs, and elements of roof construction were all commensurate. But this is not all; this ensemble integrated aspects of life that were not designed: “All activities are subtly and organically integrated with the shell in which they are housed and the stage on which they play.” This restates the enabling and adorning function of equipment. Neutra also adopted the metaphor of performance. The integral character of the ensemble was as true of the Japanese dance on the padded floors, he thought, as it was of the traditional music and song. The first was stationary and noiseless, the second chirping and short-range.34 Did the intervals of dance and song serve as the basis for the spatial measures? Enactment is key, more than unity, with which Neutra, like Wright, was sometimes overly concerned. Settings, whether in Japan or elsewhere, enable and adorn the things we typically do. Dance steps or ritual postures are, no doubt, some of the most refined examples of this doing, but they are in many ways the same sort of movements as their prosaic equivalents: acts to be repeated, especially when performed as they should be. Repetitive performance in architecture may involve repetition in construction technology or in dwelling practice. In either case precision is essential. “Reasonably close” is no more acceptable to a good builder than to an accomplished dancer. This is especially true in instances of improvisation, when getting it right involves not only skill but ingenuity. One way to avoid the risk of an awkward performance is to repeat what has been done before. In this way outcomes, even applause, can be expected, even predicted. Repeti163

4.19

Reader’s Digest Building, Tokyo, Antonin Raymond with Ladislav Rado, 1951. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER FOUR

tion such as this is commonplace in current culture, especially in current architecture. I have called it “going through the motions.” Everyone knows this is too easy, because it demonstrates indifference to the particular circumstances of a situation, as if a professor were to give nothing but set speeches, no matter who the audience or what the occasion. One cannot say, however, that this kind of repetition lacks precision. It represents a certain kind of exactitude, one of two kinds. There is one sort of precision that can characterize the making of individual objects. In these instances there is point-by-point conformity between an original and a copy, whether one is considering a construction detail, a dance posture, or a supper table. Already in the early nineteenth century this was called facsimile reproduction, and was criticized.35 The ideal is sameness, reproducing what has been done before, assuming that the antecedent instance was accomplished as it should be. In this case the model is taken as the standard with which iterations must tally; differences between them are faulted as deviations. One might feel inclined to call this sort of precision mechanical and think of a xerox copy as its exemplary form, but it would be wrong to exclude from it human performances. One might also feel that such a goal proposes stiff rigidity. Yet Neutra observed that “precision—that is, minimum deviation from the theoretical aim—has at all times been a major human aspiration . . . the object of a basic urge.”36 Precision of this kind is the outcome of painstaking work, dedication, and care, leading to articles of rarity and even uniqueness. At least this was the case in times of craft or hand technology. In an age of machine production this kind of precision is no longer rare; instead, abundant, contributing to the great quantity of items we have stockpiled and made available for global distribution. Likeness or sameness sustains the interchangeability of parts taken for granted in many spheres of contemporary life, not only architecture. Neutra cited the munitions industry during the war years and the automobile industry afterward as enterprises that broadly introduced into society mechanically reproduced artifacts. But precision of this sort is characteristic not only of industrialized objects but of patterns of human behavior. From the sort of conduct that is typical of bureaucrats to that of military personnel, clerics, police officers, athletes, and 166

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

medics, and finally to the conduct that parents sometimes expect of children, at the dining table for example, it becomes increasingly clear that the repetition of performances that are taken to be right is neither to be discouraged nor abhorred. In fact, precision in these instances of repetition is to be cultivated. In training or education we look for flawlessness in performance. But not at the expense of relevance. Exact conformity to a model is not sought in the same way in all cases, because in unusual circumstances we desire a precision not of single things or discrete acts but of relationships. This leads to the second kind of precision I want to describe. For two things to work together they must “fit” one another. The more precise the fit, the better. This is especially true and difficult when the things being fitted together are different in kind. In language, associations of this sort give to metaphors their original sense and beauty. Among artificial things, neither tightness nor looseness of fit is privileged; what matters is the use to which the arrangement is put, the end for which it is serviceable. Between clothing and the human body, some tasks require a loose fit, others the opposite; tailoring is an art that adjudicates appropriate size. The difficulty of this art results from the fact that while no two bodies are precisely alike, the fit must be precise in each case. Apt size and shape are difficult to achieve because every form that is repeated must also be unique; every one that is made to be the same must be created anew. This is the paradox of repetition, clothing that must be both individual and anonymous. Standard solutions in both tailoring and architecture are never more than probably appropriate because in each case adjustments are necessary. Tailoring is always improvisatory, as is any genuine performance. The vocabulary used for improvisatory adjustment is instructive: attunement, justification, balancing, reconciliation, and so on. Each term signifies the work of mediation between something unique and a norm. Neglect of the first can be described as an error of generality, indifference to the second represents an error of shortsightedness. The situations one confronts in design, as in life, are never just the same as those before, nor are they entirely different; the truth of the matter is that they are always somewhat similar. The discovery of similarities is also the source of the freedom that is proper to design, and marks the point where de167

CHAPTER FOUR

sign actually begins. An entire line of premade equipment can be broken when new circumstances require it, no matter whether the line is hand- or machine-made. The advent of a fresh situation is the occasion of design, destabilizing the order of the inheritance yet providing the energy for its renewal. Invention aims not at originality for its own sake, but at the restoration of what ought to be in consideration of circumstances that have changed: design intends the recuperation of the same by virtue of the different. From this it follows that repetition is not really a means of creativity but its end, after the many requirements and conditions of a project have been acknowledged. Mechanical reproduction does not automatically accomplish sameness in new circumstances; design creativity attempts to. Within its own economy design need not provide the means of this accomplishment, nor does it need to provide differences within its own resources; they are the gift of the project’s milieu. When design strives for difference the result is affectation. These means, these circumstances, and this occasion cannot be given by design; it must wait for them, in exactly the same way as one waits for a change in the weather or in the seasons, which always present us with new opportunities. Understood in this way, design is not a matter of choice but of awareness of opportunities. Ambient conditions always transcend the internal economy of an enclosure—not like an alien god, whose transcendence is absolute, but still breaking in on its tranquil repose, requesting or demanding that they be recognized and thereby given relative stability and durable substance. Looking across their table the Raymonds saw aspects of the landscape that were variously frail and overwhelming, each arriving in its turn, sometimes expectedly, other times by surprise. They wanted the equipment of the house, they wanted their designs, to respond to both, and to the arrival of everything in between. This was how they were to perform, as had similar devices throughout the tradition. Design of this sort can be called attunement, a term that is better, I think, than “assimilation”; yet both assume the discovery of similarities between different things and their precise coordination. The perimeter of this house was both a fortress wall and a threshold, and much else besides, all at the same time, because it was adjustable, and precisely so. To understand the house in its essence we must avoid seeing it as either defined or undefined; 168

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

for it was neither something permanent nor something that always changed. Put in terms of temporality and in the historical present, the house is not what it has been nor what it is now but what it always will have been. The origin of the break in a line of any set of artifacts, hand- or machinemade, is to be found in the undesigned surrounding milieu, which manifests itself in recurring forms that have the capacity to linger for a while, then to recede. It is with these forms that the building and its parts must live and breathe, performing as their receptacle and register, as they do for recurring patterns of dwelling. Were ambient conditions always and everywhere the same, design production could be mechanical. Were they always entirely different, design would be an impossibility. Envisaging the building as an ensemble of adjustable equipment allows us to glimpse the source of its order in the fluctuating presence of two horizons, one internal and another external, which are really one and the same in lived experience. Seeing the building this way will also allow us to understand and imagine the real subject matter of its articulations.

169

5

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE Architects are responsible for the design of individual buildings or ensembles of buildings, not entire towns or landscapes, of which, nevertheless, they must reasonably be aware. The difference between responsibility and awareness is seldom considered in contemporary discourse; the responsibilities of practice are often extended to the encompassing whole and those of awareness diminished to concern for the parcel it has been given, making architectural practice alternately a version of planning or of product design. Although many architects would agree that both kinds of concern must occur in any practice that seeks to affirm cultural continuity, the ways they differ and are related are far from clear, nor is it obvious how articulation is mediated by understanding or how a professional way of speaking folds into a preprofessional habit of listening. Insofar as it tolerates this unclarity, architectural design is greatly weakened. When these designs are built, the situations they sustain are weakened as well. While it is natural and necessary for architects to concentrate on the building itself, the bright light of this focus often eclipses the surrounding world, darkening the very horizon that grants the building its standing. Anyone who stops to think about it knows perfectly well that individual settings are always interconnected with and dependent on a horizon that transcends them, sewn into a fabric of rooms, buildings, streets, towns, and nature; but in design work the colors of this textile are often allowed to fade to a dull or penumbral shade. My concern is less with the epistemology of design concentration and awareness than with the intentional objects of each, particularly the latter, for I suspect that this penumbral spread, not the landscape of well-defined objects, is the proper framework for truly productive work, even though it is very hard to describe and rarely noticed. The name usually given to the extreme limit of the surrounding landscape is horizon. As a topographical phenomenon the horizon is generally taken for granted in architectural thought for what seem to be two reasons: 170

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

5.1

Hotel Triton, Andros, Aris Konstantinidis, 1958. Photo Marina Lathouri.

being distant it can hardly be affected by design’s initiatives, no matter how energetic, because they are invariably local as a matter of definition; and it is an aspect of the landscape that is very hard to grasp, perhaps impossible, for no matter how it is approached, in reflective thought or everyday life, it always recedes or keeps itself remote. The shadow I cast in sunlight is similarly recessive, because while it is recognizable, recognizably mine, there on the pavement, all but its outline articulation remains hidden, everything else flattened, depth inaccessible. The shadow is different from the horizon, however, because its profile is nearby, doubly adherent to my heels and the sidewalk, while the horizon is always somewhere else, beyond my reach, resisting all ef171

CHAPTER FIVE

forts toward it. The acquisitive hands of such a reach close on nothing more than thin air. When I arrive where it was, it has advanced to a place that is as distant as before, making every such approach a Sisyphean sort of labor. Its remoteness does not result from some failure of effort or inability on my part, but from its style of presenting itself, inaccessibly, or always “there” but entirely indifferent to my experience of it. This sort of withdrawal is well known to anyone who has embarked from a seashore, for no matter how far one sails away from a port the horizon is always farther ahead, seemingly soliciting but always outpacing further transit. For this reason it is senseless to see the horizon as a destination, because it can never be reached; the horizon cannot be reached because is not a place at all, if by that one means a setting or position with distinct profiles and stable articulation, such as the site of a building. This is an outrage for architectural thought, for sites are exactly what it targets; nevertheless the horizon is always only a potential site, its remote constancy reinforcing the sense one has of the radical contingency of human experience. In the customary sense of the term, the horizon is a line formed by the more or less abrupt meeting of the sky and the earth, a line exactly eye high on the landscape. It is seen this way because the landscape is normally understood as a scene or picture in which the ground plane has tipped itself up to form the picture’s bottom part and the sky flattened itself out to make its top. In such a view the horizon attains a stability that perfectly reciprocates the spectator’s, completing a world. This is too obvious to require further comment. Yet, when one chooses no longer to regard the landscape as a picture, when one returns to pre- or nontheoretical commerce with things, taking up some specific task according to the measures of their melody, the horizon as I have described it virtually disappears, and there is no longer anything obvious about it. It would be wrong to say it is gone, for it is (still) there when I look for it, when I thematize it, but at all other times, which is to say at most times, it recedes into a condition of latency, being at most a quasi-object of my awareness. Its latency leads to a sense of the word that prompts reflection on the cultural context of architecture: the horizon is not only a line at the edge of the visual field but the field itself, the expanse of circumstances in which I find 172

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

myself. Sometimes “world” is used in this sense; when for example one says “the world of the Greeks” or “Kafka’s world,” pointing in the first case to the circumstances of a historical people and in the second to those of a kind of action portrayed in a particular body of literature. Circumstances in both cases are not only matters of terrain but also of cultural practice, earthy elements with equipmental and narrative sense. To conceive of this as an affair of geometry (now a plane rather than a line) is to thin it down or reduce it, to mistake the profile of a symbol for its substance; better to think of it as a field of existence, characterized not only by relationships of distance but also of cultural and historical depth, accumulated and renewed in all the encounters of social, political, and historical life: a depth not measured in meters or feet but in the patterns and present force of a tradition. Much of this depth is concealed in potentiality, but it is powerful just the same, perhaps for that very reason. And it is this matrix that confers orientation in architecture, serving as the “within which” of the life buildings seek to accommodate and represent. While objectively perceived and tacitly assumed horizons are certainly related as modes of articulation, attention to the first does not guarantee understanding of the second. One could see the horizon as the means by which we anchor ourselves in the world, something like a grid or network of reference points, fixed and always available for reckonings of position. This sense of anchoring is valid but partial, because too physical and firm; the horizon is always on the move (at least as long as I am), something that drifts away to the exact degree that I move toward it, both horizontally and vertically. Thus, it is not only its remote distance that makes the horizon difficult to grasp, but also its hidden stratification. This begins to explain why it is neglected in architecture, because whatever has attained stable form and visibility is assumed to be the building’s true and proper framework. Something similar to the horizon’s recessive character emerged in our account of the back of buildings. As opposed to the building’s frontal aspect, the back is hardly an identifiable figure, neither a picturelike display of representational shapes and motifs nor an assembly of parts or fragments. These are entirely too distinct and too stable. Instead, the back is taken for granted, a tacit condition, the substrate of architectural appearances. Citing Hannah 173

CHAPTER FIVE

Arendt, George Baird has called something like this “the space of appearance.”1 Because “space” carries with it so many distracting implications of isotropism, uniformity, and abstractness, I have introduced terms like medium, matrix, or milieu, intending to stress not only its comprehensive and cohesive character but also its concreteness and fecundity, for it has the power to sustain the emergence of the things we notice in its midst. The task of describing a building’s back is to discover the character of the midst between things, not as a vacancy or emptiness, which like space would be entirely congenial to both theoretical thought and the mechanisms of design, but as an ambient source that sustains the crystallization of distinct figures because it has the unshakable habit of disappearing when most vitally present. To be constitutive, the back cannot be fully constituted. Serviceable equipment is similarly recessive. Within an ensemble of useful items, no single piece obtrudes itself into awareness, unless, of course, it is broken. When a setting works as it should, all of its parts coexist in a condition of shared latency or silent readiness. I have cited Le Corbusier’s observation that a proper servant is discreet and self-effacing, in order to “leave the master free.” Likewise, the enabling devices we position within a setting, those we use to define it, withdraw from objectlike visibility into a context in which each merges with the next, all with one another, settling into a web of opportunities, remote in its unobtrusiveness but nearby just the same. As with the composition of facades, design as articulation or designation has the tendency to eclipse this weave, particularly when its products are so visually insistent that they emancipate themselves from all other concerns. At the very worst, designed equipment is pretty but unusable. Better but still problematic is when it bears evidence of a war of attrition between aesthetic and practical interests. Gottfried Semper’s term “practical aesthetics,” used as the subtitle for his Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, identifies this conflict as the basic topic to be thought through when considering all the ceramics, textiles, carpentry, and metal making that fill the pages of his study, a study that was meant to be a prolegomenon to architectural understanding. I am not all together sure that contemporary understanding has advanced much beyond Semper’s thinking on this topic, even considering the subse174

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

quent debates of the Werkbund and Bauhaus and the later attempts to theorize practices such as industrial design. Assuming one still feels confident about the nature of a work of art, of a painting for example, is it now possible to say how such a work differs from a piece of furniture, a handrail, doorknob, or dustbin, given the fact that each of them has been taken on as the subject matter of architectural design? When such an item “works,” can it still be a “work”? In reverse: do we expect that “works” of this kind should actually “work”? If the phrase “a beautiful garbage can” is a little troubling, it is hard to say why, for the limits of design-as-stylization have been rendered entirely unclear. Everything has become interesting, although not equally so to everyone, and every product is assumed to have aesthetic obligations. The once outrageous comparison between a chassis and the Parthenon has spawned countless parallels and become entirely naturalized.2 If, despite this, and after a century of technological modernization, one suspects that a tool or piece of equipment might be something other than a work of art, or not exactly that, we have yet to develop a way of describing what sort of thing it might be. If one doubts that the museum is the right setting for stylized teapots and telephones, it is far from clear where else they should reside. To answer kitchens and offices hardly advances the issue, for they too are composed of elements designed as works of the same kind: the table, desk, toaster, and lamp, like the wall coverings, carpets, and window blinds have all been designed to have style and be installed in some “space,” the neutral medium of their adjacency. The answer, I have argued, will not come from greater concentration on the objects themselves, as if better design or different articulation were the issue; the problem will be opened only by thinking again about the circumstances that transcend the internal economy of the well-furnished setting, circumstances that equipment serves to modulate while acting as their receptacle and register. The study with which I began, that of the building’s levels, also pointed beyond the immediate vicinity of the designed artifact toward its encompassing horizon as the medium within which it could discover its own order. The design of “rooms without walls” disavowed the traditional way of making distinctions between inside and outside by replacing sturdy and continuous uprights with stratified and interlaced horizontals, both above and below the 175

CHAPTER FIVE

“horizons of residing.” The distinction between interior and exterior was not renounced by the removal of so many walls; it was refashioned by being extended, through the use of window walls, cantilevers, and projecting slabs, as well as devices for accelerating and modulating “thermal passage” from terrace to room and room to terrace. The consequence of these more concrete continuities between the interiors and their landscape setting was that architectural design was discovered to be an art of articulating topography, its continuities, reciprocities, and displacements. Topography, so conceived, can be taken as another name for the field or horizon encountered in consideration of backs and equipment, for it too is ambient, not objectlike, inconspicuous, generative. As a horizon of existence topography is always already around us, historically constituted but requiring modification in response to changed interests. The contents it discloses are thus continually evolving, like the natural world with which topography in the cultural sense I am proposing is always connected. Perhaps when we think of “topography” we cannot avoid envisaging actual terrain, for that is where the levels and strata of dwelling practices are actually laid out. But concentration on terraces and roof decks can easily lead to yet another version of “object design,” the only difference being the size or compass of the objects. Actual terrain is continually remade before, during, and after construction; and all of the evidences of “horizonal” thinking fixed onto it presuppose practices of residing, practices without which earthy strata would be nothing more than soil mechanics or land art. This is not a complaint against civil engineering, and there is, obviously, nothing essentially wrong with land art (in the later decades I have been considering, its landscape beauty can hardly be matched). But engineering and land art are no more architecture than a dustbin is sculpture. Topography is neither a matter of retaining walls nor of pictures (although construction results in both); its appearance is more like the tacit presence of equipment, its manner of presenting itself is indirect or lateral, a milieu of which one is aware, less like a painting than the light that allows it to be seen. In the middle part of this century, the term used most commonly to describe the continuity between interior and exterior settings was “flow”: architectural space was thought to flow from inside to outside. A review of the 176

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

history of this term’s use would present an entirely adequate account of twentieth-century design ambitions. That is not my aim. Yet because the term is still in common use—in fact the idea of “flow” has once again become very current, especially in accounts of the distribution and retrieval of information—it is necessary for me to distinguish between the sense of topography I am trying to describe and that implied by “flow.” A concise and representative example of midcentury thinking is a paper by George Howe entitled “Flowing Space: The Concept of Our Time,” presented at a 1947 conference called “Building for Modern Man.”3 At the outset, citing Franz Kafka, Howe described himself selfdeprecatingly as “an expert, a specialist, one who knows his role, [with] a knowledge . . . that cannot be communicated, but which fortunately everyone can do without.” Undeterred by the prospect of irrelevance and skating on the thin ice of expertise, Howe began with a distinction between “real and ideal space.” The first kind is a matter of containment: real space is housed when architecture accommodates living, laboring, playing, and praying. He must have thought this obvious, for the definition was not followed by elaboration. The second kind of space, the ideal sort, is decidedly less circumscribed: “the microcosmic embodiment of the cosmos . . . the invisible, mysterious, numinous, emanation of the god or gods of [the] day, the unsubstantial image of the collective unconscious, which, affected from without as well as from within, sets the general pattern of thought and behavior for men of a common heritage.” One suspects Howe’s audience found this definition a little less obvious, perhaps even obscure, but it was presented just as briefly as the first and without elaboration. Instead, Howe sketched a brief history of ideal space concepts, outlining Greek, Gothic, and modern examples. Fixity was characteristic of the earliest concepts: the temple, like the urn, was both directionless and timeless, for its position was immovable, like the rock or stone table on which it rested. By extension, all other forms of space occupation were thought to be steadfastly grounded in space and time, making the latter (space and time) dependent on the former (specific places). In his account of this ancient topos Howe’s phrasing is nostalgic. But this sentiment did not cause him to linger there; instead, he observed that the Chris177

CHAPTER FIVE

tian centuries brought a complete change in conception of ideal space. It was a revolution that seems to have resulted from the establishment of a new covenant between god and man, one that introduced into the world a new sense of time, the consciousness of a time before and after epiphany. With this went a sense of directionality, a longing for another “coming” and the anticipation of final judgment. And movement in time had its parallel in space: the chiming clock, the bells in the church tower, a “universal calendar imposed on the earth” meant that the cathedral would become an “almost temporal structure” because through it and by means of it believers could move toward salvation. In the modern period Howe observed an accelerated sense of movement: “Space-time mathematics, in their practical application to daily life, have destroyed nearly all the dimensions of timeless space.” Everything, he thought, had been set adrift, whether one considered the movement of things on the ground or in the air. To accommodate these new transits the traditional landscape had to be reformed, “disintegrated.” The fact that cities were fast becoming parking lots he took as an indication of greater changes to come. Once cleared, these sites would have to be rebuilt, not according to concepts or models of “fixed” or “static” space but of movement and “flow,” resulting in a landscape in which “all [would be] in flux . . . flow of traffic, flow of production, flow of people.” Thus the real purpose of Howe’s paper was to characterize the way cities and landscapes would need to be conceived in a world in which “two-faced Janus, god of the threshold and monumental steps, [had] been banished . . . for ideal space, invisible [and] mysterious, [has turned] out to be one with real space after all.” That this last development was less a matter of fact than of aspiration is clear from Howe’s need to explain the ways that architectural thought would have to change. He maintained that we will have to give up traditional ways of thinking about space, especially assumptions about enclosure, for flowing space can be neither enclosed nor excluded. At most it can be “guided” by means of “aggregates of planes of reference.” Instead of walls or facades, architecture will in future be composed of space-defining elements, the real materials of design. “To one who has looked at modern buildings in this way, all

178

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

the traditional concepts of scale, proportion, facade, grouping, and so forth, become meaningless.” That much of this is familiar is an indication of the argument’s wide currency and broad acceptance. Obvious antecedents can be found in the writings of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Theo van Doesburg or the buildings and projects of Mies van der Rohe, his Brick Country House of 1924 for example. But it was not only in architecture that the concept and symbolism of “flow” had become commonplace. Similar terms described the flow of traffic in cities, that of capital through their economies, and that of electricity through their infrastructure. Streamlining, or the engineering and aesthetics of minimum drag in all sorts of artifacts, is a vivid indication of this. Added to these manifestations were less physical ones: flows of information, of time, and of ideas. An entirely protean symbolism was used very broadly to disclose in a wide range of phenomena their approximately fluid or liquid substance, their capacity and tendency to drift laterally until they had exhausted themselves, like water from an overturned glass, ceasing to flow only after draining their source. With this image I have in mind later urban renewal projects, those of the 1960s. There is some distortion in interpreting Howe’s architectural “flow” with liquid imagery, however: space at this time was thought to be immaterial, at least something other than “matter.” Obviously it was not water that flowed through the landscape of the building, nor any of the building’s materials, such as the terrazzo that might have spread out from the living room to the outdoor terrace, for materials are always and everywhere limited; space, by contrast, is not. Describing the corner window, through which space would henceforth be allowed to flow, Frank Lloyd Wright predicted: “In this simple change of thought lies the essential of architectural change from the box to free plan and the new reality that is space instead of matter.”4 This parallels and partly explains the collapse of the distinction between ideal and real space, suggesting that the former outlines the essence of the latter. But how is this possible, particularly in the art of building? How can architecture so unburden itself of weighty stuff to become essentially nothing, or nothing that is limited to this or that site? 179

CHAPTER FIVE

In the substitution of ideal for real space theoretical thinking is given dominion over common sense, the second being rejected as pre- or nonscientific. I believe it was with this in mind that Howe described himself as a (Kafkaesque) “expert.” In architecture, however, this causes a wide range of problems, the most immediate or obvious of which is that the authority given to theoretical thought destines all forms of construction to failure, for built elements can never be sufficiently dematerialized to allow for unobstructed flow or drift. The very facticity of buildings, even of glass-clad buildings, leads to this crisis. No one can build ideal space nor reside in it. The privileging of flowing space also eliminates the possibility of locating distinct sites, for when continued passage is always possible boundaries can never be fixed, and a site without edges is not a site at all. And finally, movement itself changes in this style of thinking; it can no longer be seen as a form of transit from one place to another because identifiable “places,” sites with fixed boundaries, can no longer be assumed to exist. Instead, movement is the ambient glide that planes of reference provisionally direct; in flowing space there is a blur or haze between what had been assumed to be points of rest, something less objectlike than vague, or “mysterious” as Howe said. Yet, at the same time, flowing space cannot be nothing if it can be directed. Reading Howe’s account one gets the sense of a quasi-material substance; not something with determinate properties, like those of terrazzo or teak, nor something of merely cognitive weight, “the pure radioactivity of . . . thought” that he believed was characteristic of our time. Instead, flowing space is something in the manner of light or perhaps of sound, something sufficiently concrete to be directed but not so concrete as to be contained, something that silently suffuses itself into settings by an infiltration or occultation of particles—a secular version of the sort of unnoticed entry that all painters of the immaculate conception struggled to represent. Never does Howe equate space with light. Daylight is, however, something that can be defined architecturally precisely because it lacks the building’s physical aspects. And it issues from a well that cannot be covered because it cannot be located. Perhaps this is a key to the widespread preoccupation with the brightness, shine, and mirroring of all the new materials, and the polishing, painting, or refin180

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

ishing of old ones. Assertions about spatial flow were often connected to observations about transparency and reflection. Richard Neutra’s papers on glass, transparency, and “translucidity” exemplify this.5 On this account, flowing space would seem to be the milieu, matrix, or medium of architectural design. Is it equivalent to what I have described as the building’s background, to architectural topography? Both have the capacity (and extensity) to transcend the economy of the building’s enclosure. And both antecede its articulation. Are they not one and the same thing: the real and ideal horizon of architectural definition? When Frank Lloyd Wright explained the originality of his “destruction of the box,” the discovery that allowed space to “come in here and go out there,” resulting in a “freedom where before imprisonment existed,” he also admitted that this sense of spatial continuity had precedent. “One day,” he said, “I went to my study at Taliesin to sit down and rest. I picked up a little book just received from the ambassador to America from Japan. It was called The Book of Tea written by Okakura Kakuzo. . . . In that little book I came upon quotations from the great Chinese poet-prophet Laotze. . . . ‘The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in.’”6 Wright interpreted the passage as a confirmation of the discovery he had hit upon in the Larkin Building: that space, not matter, is the reality of the building. The adequacy of Wright’s interpretation hinges on how one understands the last phrase, “the space within to be lived in.” Arata Isozaki has observed that Wright misunderstood the passage in trying to make the “space” to which it refers a realizable end in itself, by physically coming to grips with it, whereas it is instead part of “the revolving universe and is thus in constant motion.”7 The passage from The Book of Tea is as follows: “Only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of the room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves.”8 Okakura introduced this explanation from Laotzu to clarify the relationship between the part and the whole, or more concretely the relationship between oneself and the world of others, of friendship. For both the person and the house, potency results from essential openness, for that is a precondition of co181

CHAPTER FIVE

operation with the whole. “Vacuum” in this usage is not emptiness in the sense of void, but the inverse of or complement to what is full, meaning that emptiness was anticipated fullness, it established a condition in which the merest gesture could release the tension between the two opposites. “Vacuum” was, thus, a condition of great significance, “full” of implications. The house like the person had to have great capacity, measured in both passivity and strength: “One who could make himself a vacuum into which others might freely enter would become master of all situations.”9 The extended horizon can be internal to the building because the building is external to itself. Citing Saint-Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty ended his Phenomenology of Perception by observing that “man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him.”10 The theme of participation—the one in the many—or of proportion allowed Wright to translate the principle of emptiness into his thesis of inside-connected-to-outside. He said little about the medium of this connection, other than to call it “space,” but he did want the connection to be actual, as Isozaki has observed, hence his stress on cantilevers, for they were the means by which vision could be led “beyond the walls” and architecture could sustain “the liberal profession of democratic government.”11 Physical connections between inside and outside are implied in the Japanese case as well; never was there a tea house without doors and windows. But just as important as actual connections, by means of overhangs and porches, were relationships established through metaphor; and the actual and the metaphorical are not unrelated, as I shall try to show. The tea house is a vessel. As the second is essentially an emptiness into which water can be poured, the first, an “abode of vacancy,” is a capacity to be filled by ceremony. Enabling this practice is the room’s equipage, the principal element of which is the iron kettle, it too a receptacle. When the water it contains reaches a boil, it produces something in the manner of thunder, “for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.”12 Of these connections Wright said little. I do not want to suggest, nor do I suspect, that he was in182

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

sensitive to them, or to reciprocities of this kind; but the doctrine of flowing space can obscure these relationships because the continuity it proposes annuls the differences and distances they take for granted. Obviously, the cataract, sea, rain, and pines were not actually in the tea house, nor even visible from it; between that interior and those remote locations there was no direct connection; yet in the practice of the ceremony they were not not there, for their sounds were the (actual) means or the materials by which its activities were understood, just as the room’s mute surfaces were favorable to their reverberation. Such an “invisible” presence is not inferior to the visible sort, although it is not known in the same way, nor does it need to be noticed to be significant. One can say more: were the tea house not so different from the landscape in which it sat, it could not have resembled that landscape so closely. Landscape and building can be joined only if they are distinct, interlocked only if separate, for only when they are different can they perform their roles similarly, and only then can the energies of the first, the landscape, animate the second, the building, by filling it to capacity. As long as continuity is taken to be unobstructed and direct, as long as materials, light, and space are thought to flow without interruption from in to outside of architecture, there will never occur the kind of participation the tea ceremony celebrates. The task of describing topography now becomes clearer: to develop vocabularies and concepts that will demonstrate how settings that are distant and distinct from one another can also be interconnected, how they can remain apart and be joined. To see architecture and its horizon topographically means to focus on the performances separate settings sustain, and to discover analogies or similarities between them. Only in this way will architectural topography be seen to exhibit not just remoteness but familiarity; that is, typicality of recurring situations. Only in this way can the horizon be both dispersed and compact. This does not mean that the patterns and situations by which topographies are known need to manifest themselves in the same materials (as if isohylic), nor be spatially continuous (isotropic), nor given the same shape and profile (isomorphic); instead, they have to accommodate similar performances, each serving as a receptacle and “singing” in its own way, like the kettle, the tea master, the tea house, and the forest. Design, on this 183

CHAPTER FIVE

5.2

Residence, Athens. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

184

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

account, would depend on insight into situational similarities; it would target the basis for analogical relationships, not the objects in which they have taken shape. Lastly, topographical continuity would take for granted its own interruption; its breaks or recesses would conserve the possibility of its own spontaneous reemergence. For topography to maintain itself as a coherent horizon, it must be allowed to retreat from its well-known forms. I want to try to describe this sense of topography more concretely by considering the work of a single architect, Aris Konstantinidis, whom I have mentioned already in reference to the relationship between design or place making and the interpretation of site.13 The cultural context in which he worked was very different from Wright’s and Howe’s. Konstantinidis was educated in Germany in the 1930s and practiced in Greece. The politics of Munich were not those of Chicago (to say nothing of Arizona) or Philadelphia, and the pace of technological modernization in Greece was hardly that of the United States. Moreover, Konstantinidis was deeply interested in regional vernacular, as were many in the thirties, but saw no necessary conflict between modernity and his cultural inheritance; rather, the sort of renewal that sustains a living tradition. These differences between Greece and the United States did not prevent Konstantinidis from admiring Wright’s work and that of other Americans, such as Neutra and Schindler; nor did it prevent him from finding in their writings echoes of his. Like Wright and Neutra, he cited Laotzu, for example. Yet the differences between them allow me to be more precise in my account of the relationship between the building and its circumstances. As if arguing in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, Konstantinidis recommended a friendly spatial transition from the inside to the outside of the building, and a permeation by the outside of the inside. Sometimes in his work this was accomplished with overhangs and cantilevers, as it was in Wright’s, but of shorter extent and less stylization. In many more cases, however, it was effected through the use of verandas and porches, often colonnaded. Konstantinidis observed that these types had familiar precedents, some of which were ancient: “The Greek climate, which enables man to spend most of his time out of doors, has brought forth houses equipped with court185

CHAPTER FIVE

yards, sheds, verandahs, [and] porches enclosed with glass panels. This makes it possible for people to live both inside and outside their houses, and also in the in-between areas, the transitions between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’”14 Insofar as the “Greeks” were still the same people and the climate had not changed, these types still made sense. This portrait of the Greeks was something of a fiction, it must be said, for the boundaries of that country were not exactly sharply defined in the preceding centuries. Nor were those of its language; or better, as an inheritance the language was stratified, as were other European languages. Nevertheless, Konstantinidis described the “Greeks” and “Greece” as if they were the same as they had always been. So too a native or indigenous sort of architecture. To characterize the Greek veranda sorts of connection, he introduced not the metaphor of flow but the concept of reciprocation and images of knotting: by means of open-air covered spaces, interior and exterior could be “bound” together. Such a building’s edges were not thought to guide fluid space from outside to inside; architectural instruments were meant to regulate their exchange by modifying and modulating the qualities of the climate. “In summer, when the sun is high, the open roofed area or colonnade stops the rays from penetrating into the closed inner space or rooms, and helps to retain a measure of coolness inside the house, as well as to keep out the blinding light. Conversely, in winter, when the sun is low, its rays slip through the open roofed area or colonnade into the inner space, thus bringing warmth and abundant light.”15 Rather than “directing” the continuous glide of something thought to be “the same” everywhere throughout, the building’s margins were designed to transform an entirely palpable ambient quality into its desired opposite: warm air was cooled in summer, in the winter the reverse. Likewise were both glare and darkness moderated. The walls of the building were instruments of intertwining according to which rooms and fields could supply what each other lacked, like the sort of fabric that allows your skin to breathe while keeping it warm. Again like Wright, Konstantinidis thought that the building should look as if it were always part of the terrain in which it was sited. Explaining the conformity of Taliesen East to its location, Wright observed that “the strata of fundamental stonework kept reaching into the four courts and made 186

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

5.3

Hotel Xenia, Poros, Aris Konstantinidis, 1964. Photo Marina Lathouri.

them . . . [likewise the] lines of the hills were the lines of the roofs.”16 This proposes continuity by virtue of similar form, which I described above as isomorphism. Konstantinidis seems to have proposed something similar in his suggestion that modern buildings should look as if they had been built long ago, as if they were as old as the hills. He took delight in the confusion expressed by an American tourist who asked if the temple at Sounion were not a natural formation, for one of the lessons of the tradition was that “every true Greek work of architecture is made to the scale of the landscape in which it stands, and becomes one with it.”17 And what was true for both ancient and Byzantine constructions was to be evident in modern buildings, for the “more genuine and contemporary a building is, the more it looks as if had always 187

CHAPTER FIVE

5.4

Melos. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

188

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

been there, from time immemorial, rooted in the landscape.”18 It would be wrong, however, to interpret this “looks as if” as a “looks like,” in keeping with Wrightian isomorphism or any of the more recent examples of formalist contextualism. Whereas Wright stressed the similar appearances of rooflines and hillsides, Konstantinidis recognized their necessary differences. Instead of literal parallelism between the soil’s geometry of repose and the angle of a designer’s adjustable triangle, he maintained there was a strong contrast between the work of nature and of art, despite the fact that they had to be understood as “one.” How, then, was the building’s outline or appearance to be understood? The building, said Konstantinidis, should be “in tune” with its setting. Both construction and location “sing” the lives they are to sustain, but do so with different voices, polyphonically. This is the way he understood the architecture of a traditional village, standing out sharply against the steep slope of the mountain on which it was sited. Form and color could not be in stronger contrast. Despite this, the village and mountain reciprocated one another. The houses were structured according to “common life requirements,” those that arose out of a “single will uniting the people in a common effort.” This was hardly theoretical, for the effort that integrated the people and the town was a collective response to the circumstances in which they had been born, those that presented them with abundance and lack. Thus, anything “discordant or alien” would be assimilated over time, but not entirely. Using a term from plot theory, the relationship between these two configurations could be described as “concordant discordance,” or, in Greek, peripeteia, signifying the ensemble of reversals that animate narrative unfolding. This reciprocating sort of continuity is most difficult to understand, perhaps, as regards the building’s materials. Wright thought the “belonging” of architecture to its vicinity resulted from the use of materials indigenous to the site. When he celebrated the use of local stone in the fireplace of Taliesen East, he proposed something in the manner of topogenesis, whereby the designer, as “emissary of the ground,” would serve the site’s self-manifestation, as if architecture were horticulture in stone, the architect a lithic gardener. From terrain to terrace or riverbed to plastered walls, material continuity was 189

CHAPTER FIVE

to be unobstructed, as if design creativity were able to merely (but magically) crystallize the palpable potential of place. In extreme form, this argument is a good example of the pathetic fallacy. Moderately argued it can be seen as an instance of romanticism. Such is the case with some of Konstantinidis’s writings. In one place he wrote that “there are cases when the form of the landscape imposes the use of a material.” In another essay he defined architecture as “geographic; it springs from the earth as the trees, the bushes and flowers . . . every building grows on a particular site as a self-evident natural element.”19 This is often the case in vernacular and preindustrial building. Earlier I cited Richard Neutra’s similar observations about the landscape around Kyoto: “the appearance of each of these places is most often one of a natural uniformity, and not of a wild variety of production methods. Identical roofing material in a given region naturally calls for an identical roof slope . . . [these and similar means] imprint harmony on the total picture.”20 This accord of art- with earthwork is vividly apparent when color is used in construction finishing, for hues made out of local pigments will always result in relationships of harmony. Hence Konstantinidis’s allegiance to the Polygnotean colors: “A tradition of many centuries is perpetuated in the selection of colors used in Greek architecture; the same range of colors persists, which is only natural, since the ‘Polygnotean’ colors are earthy, earth derived pigments which the Greek soil has never ceased producing.”21 From this it follows that the buildings to which they are applied will always appear to be “integrated into the Greek landscape.” In acceptance of isohylism Konstantinidis and Wright seem to be in perfect accord, and similarly problematic. Yet, because both architects also used modern materials, the matter is rather more complicated. Konstantinidis stated that he could use the most modern of materials and still have the building relate “harmoniously” to the landscape. For him “modern materials” generally meant steel, concrete, and glass. This was not mere boasting, for he used them with great frequency, although he was less experimental than his American contemporaries, Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen for example. But when he used these materials it was often in combination with ones that had traditional application, resulting in a fabric of 190

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

strong contrasts, of discordance, both material and tectonic. This is similar to the mixed technology of Antonin and Noémi Raymond. The same can be found in Neutra’s work. And this mix or contrast was not only of part to part, but of the entire building to its physical surroundings. In its use of materials, as in its configuration and spatiality, Konstantinidis’s work demonstrates a kind of continuity that tolerates interruptions, a manner of concordance that admits of discordance, a harmony that remains hidden beneath outward differences—especially where it includes modern materials, which obey no territorial obligations. The Xenia hotel that Konstantinidis built on the island of Mykonos in 1960 can be used to demonstrate this.22 Certainly one of the most striking views of this ensemble of buildings is from the entry portico. From that vantage one can see not only the ranges of buildings that group themselves around the central court, but also, above them, the hills rising into the blue above. Less apparent, between the buildings, is the approach of the sea from its remote depth. The first impression is of effortless congeniality between buildings and site. A closer look at the construction materials confirms this. In point of fact the granite used for the walls was quarried locally, more or less guaranteeing continuity between building and terrain. Similarity is also apparent in the dominant geometries of each; both show a pattern of horizontal striation, accentuated by retaining walls and thick slabs, as if each built platform were designed to repeat the form and appearance of some plateau in the surrounding terrain. Despite these homologies, there is an obvious contrast between the colors of the land’s and the building’s horizontals. All of the exposed concrete on the building is whitewashed. This treatment was hardly Konstantinidis’s invention; whitewash covered not only the chapel nearby, but also most of the vernacular buildings he himself documented in his book The Country Churches of Mykonos, 1953. And he knew that this color, like the technique it exemplified, was not “natural”; in fact it was a kind of resistance to nature, at least to its corrosive effects. The purposes of whitewash were many, most obviously cooling the building’s interiors in summer and disinfecting its surfaces year round. Although pragmatic, these purposes had a symbolic sense too, that of renewal, which is why whitewashing often occurred at Eastertime. White191

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

5.5 (opposite top)

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, Aris Konstantinidis, 1960. Photo Aris Konstantinidis. 5.6

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Marina Lathouri. 5.7 (right)

Spetses. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

CHAPTER FIVE

wash in this case enables and adorns. The landscape itself accomplished a kind of renewal, but neither as locally nor as intensely as this simple technique. When renewed, white surfaces stood in strong contrast to the qualities of the landscape setting. Because the comparison between the “white architecture” of Mediterranean lands and that of early modern architecture has been made so often, it is important to stress that the white and the renewal that concerned Konstantinidis were not of the sort that annulled or concealed previous conditions; this was a white that subsumed into its depth layers and layers of previous treatments that one could still detect or trace, giving the surface historical thickness. Because sedimented layers gave it a human past, it also had such a future. Love of life is nourished and sustained, one would think, by the continuous motion of the human hand as it whitewashes, day after day, the walls and doorsteps and window-sills of buildings. And gradually, day by day, as each new coat of white-wash covers the previous one, these surfaces seem to acquire a sort of warm, human-like skin. . . . And how strange: you often have the feeling, through the tactile sense . . . that these whitewashed buildings are not really constructions, but living organisms.23 Out of this “historical” depth the animation of the surface was constituted. Refinishing can thus be seen as a form of disclosure, perhaps even of expression, and maybe of inscription. The building’s surfaces present—because they simply are—evidences of care, care not just for the building’s continuance but for that of the life lived within it. And just as they show marks of the hand, they present signs of the region, each face registering the prevailing characteristics of the climate in the accumulation of failures to resist it. The repetition of old solutions, despite changed conditions, could have caused failures of this kind, as could incompetent execution, the being first a deficiency of design awareness, the second of technical skill. Further, just as marks of this kind can be seen on the building, they can be seen in the landscape, as if it had allowed itself to be inscribed in response to itself, evidencing its in194

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

ternal conflicts or exchanges. Yet when landscape “marks” are “read,” cultural practices must be kept in mind, together with elemental forces. No site in the Greek landscape is untouched; buried in each is a remote past, of which site lines are palpable chronicle. The study of sites therefore involves deciphering patterns laid out by people whose names no one knows but whose conduct is familiar. Site study could be characterized as a kind of topographical palm reading, in which the lattice of lines worn into its surface gives evidence of both past labors and probable outcomes. The same sort of deciphering or tracing happens unreflectively when one grasps the history of care in the depth of a whitewashed wall. Yet the land, of itself, did not germinate this depth. With this in mind, Konstantinidis’s tree metaphor would seem to be misleading. Like many (Wright among them), he said buildings should be rooted in the soil. In Elements for Self-Knowledge Konstantinidis cited Fernand Léger on this point: “‘Architecture is not an art, it is a natural function. It grows out of the ground, like animals and plants.’ Or [it grows] like a tree, that unfolds and develops, so long as the man who planted it tends it with proper care.”24 Elsewhere he wrote that genuine buildings always look as if they are “rooted in the landscape.” It is entirely possible to read these and similar passages as arguments for the literal identification of the building with its site, as if close approximation to the bower or cave were the aim and test of any architectural work, as if the natural world were a domain of truth to which architecture should conform. But such a physicalist and romantic reading would literalize the metaphor far too quickly, thereby short-circuiting its real insight. The building is like the tree because it unfolds and develops under the complementary but distinct forms of care performed by a people and place. These acts are forms of resistance to nature’s corrosive effects. Not rooting but renewing is important, the first being a way of elaborating terrain and the second of contesting it. The outcome of this contest gives voice to topography. Even more resonant than his description of the building as a tree is Konstantinidis’s use of the vessel metaphor. Here his source was not the passage of Laotzu cited by Wright; rather he seems to have drawn on Xenophon’s observation that “houses are constructed in such a manner as to become receptacles, as suitable as possible, for whatever is to be placed within them.”25 The image 195

CHAPTER FIVE

this suggests is very close to one in the passage Wright cited. Yet while Wright, like Laotzu, stressed emptiness, Xenophon emphasized the orderliness of an arrangement and the subdivision of settings it assumes. This means the house is not a jar but the cupboard in which all the things proper to a setting are “put in their place.” The house is essentially the ensemble of these places. Closer to the kettle image is the following quotation from Konstantinidis himself: “The true work of architecture is not a monument (since its eternal quality is to be found in the mind that fashioned it, not in the durability of the materials that went into its making), but a receptacle of life . . . a form that is never finished or final, but that is completed as time goes by, flowering again and again into daily perfection.”26 This combines the sense of care to which I referred in consideration of the tree image with a sense of enveloping anticipation or capacity, as I named it earlier. In Xenophon’s text the word vessel is used in this sense of readiness (a receptacle, reservoir, vase, or treasury), but also with the meaning of a channel (if not canal) through which life flows, like arteries of blood (aggeia). Vessels direct blood flow. I take this to indicate the vessel’s life-giving or animating potential—if a container then also a conveyance. For Konstantinidis the source of this animation was always external to the enclosure, remote from every interior. Perhaps the most beautiful and compact version of this relationship in the Elements text is his account of light entering a house through a doorway: The sunlight licks the floor in a thin gold line, and slowly creeps up the wall. The landscape comes so much closer to us like this, closer than when we try to see it through a wide opening, in an unending continuity, or behind a great sheet of glass, or standing in a house with glass walls, in which we would no longer know whether we are “within” or “without.” Here the landscape comes near us, it comes into the building, not so much because we see it with our eyes, but more because we know it exists.27 Despite the approach and near proximity of the landscape described here, one gets a very strong sense of enclosure in this passage, as if he were separating 196

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

5.8

Salamis, 1956. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

CHAPTER FIVE

5.9

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Marina Lathouri.

himself from the kind of continuity proposed by Wright, Neutra, or Howe— one of flow. Seemingly, the thicker the walls and the smaller the windows the better. Certainly dimensionality is not all that is at issue, nor was the frontier he envisaged prohibitive, nor the act of border crossing a case of trespass, for Konstantinidis repeatedly authorized the “mediating” function of architectural edges, and this passage was just as spatial and material as it was dimensional. Yet free trade is not what he had in mind either. Limits were built up in service of territorial definition, and these interrupted “flows” of all sorts, even of “space” (although space in Howe’s sense was not his concern). This sense of passage allows us to rank “space” as a second- or third-order phenomenon or symbolism, one that conceals more than it reveals about the reality of the horizon and the exchanges it sustains. The word xenia, used to 198

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

name hotels like this one on Mykonos, is usually translated as hospitality or guest-friendship. For the ancient Greeks it signified a mode or pattern of gift exchange: “a bond of solidarity manifesting itself in an exchange of goods and services between individuals originating from separate social units.”28 The building imitated this form of exchange. The windows in the Mykonos hotel were shaped in either single or double squares, approximately one meter in width, making them about thirty per cent of the wall, not large by modern standards. Adjoining each room opened in this limited way was a porch, which was, by contrast, completely

5.10

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, Aris Konstantinidis.

199

CHAPTER FIVE

open from side to side and to the ceiling. Yet each porch was attached to the whitewashed base of the building in the same way that each window was connected to the white slab above. The locally quarried granite filled out most of the wall’s expanse between the slabs, openings, and porches. These square windows were not just holes in the wall, however; on the outside of each was a movable wooden shutter, which hinged from its top edge and was supported on a rotating arm that locked into its sawtoothed inner face. Operable casements on the inside were shaded by these shutters. Like the window equipment in Konstantinidis’s other buildings, and similar to vernacular precedents, which he repeatedly photographed and drew, these devices served the task of modulating the entry of light and heat into the rooms. Earlier I described this function as a sort of exchange whereby ambient conditions were transformed into their desired opposites. That the instruments were adjustable means this transaction represented a continual challenge, recalling the modulation devices invented by Antonin and Noémi Raymond. This continual challenge suggests another way of seeing the discordance between interior and exterior. When we cease regarding nature as an aesthetic delight, we allow ourselves to remember that it is also the source of more than a few problems, at least of some discomfort, perhaps of conflict, and every now and then of disaster. Bruno Taut wrote in Houses and People of Japan: “In walking through the town nobody would notice particularly the celebrated friendship of the Japanese for nature.”29 If nature is something we occasionally photograph, it is also something that can be blandly commonplace, or something we have to put up with, as with the climate of Athens or Philadelphia in August. The design and construction of devices such as the shutter—and perhaps all of the equipment in a building—is essentially preparation for changes in ambient conditions, many of which are expected because recurring, others entirely unforeseen and unwelcome. If a building is to sustain itself over time, both the patterns and the impromptu performances of the landscape must be acknowledged. The choices people make, in their houses and towns, also range between the likely and the unforeseen, and they are similarly significant. Hence the necessity of adjustment. It would be wrong to say that adjustable architectural instru200

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

5.11

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Marina Lathouri.

ments animate the building, for whatever liveliness it contains has these unbuilt causes; yet devices such as these shutters do allow it to “act,” or react, giving it a quasi-animation, though the conditional synthesis or stability it achieves is essentially passive. The sympathy between the building and both the natural and cultural horizon cannot hide the basic differences between them. Although visibly apparent and physically manifest, these horizons are hardly as stable as the building, or if stable they are so in a very different way. Were the surrounding and practical milieu always and only what it (now) appears to be, the building would not have to allow itself to be changed, and its correspondence with its site would be reassuringly secure —there would be no need for adjustable shutters or repeated whitewashing. But topography is not just what it appears 201

CHAPTER FIVE

to be; indeed it is this but also what this conceals, the latency to which I referred earlier. Like the horizon at the edge of all that I see, it is both apparent and recessive or manifest and withdrawn; although articulated, it is also indistinct, which is to say it is both what has emerged and what is still emerging. In design we tend to focus on or seize the figures in which it has articulated itself because they directly prompt the shape and shaping of artificial configurations, by opposition or parallelism (an example of the latter being the roof profile of Taliesen East). Articulated topography is also what we picture when describing the site “as it really is.” Conventional studies of sites or regions seek to discover and describe conditions as they are. In most of these we envisage or aim at some kind of picture, which is why we speak of landscape rather than land. If it is not this that description clings to, then it is some set of facts disclosed through scientific description or measurement, territorial or functional. Both the aesthetic and scientific views are inadequate to the vertical depth of the topography insofar as they target objectlike phenomena only. The world that is unseen or refuses to be pictured is equally significant; at least it has the potential of being so, for this is what gives rise to all the adjustable instruments that virtually animate the building, as it gives rise to what the building is able to narrate. All arguments concerning flow concentrate on the sameness of building and site, whether atmospheric or geologic. The problem with this focus is that it defines the horizon in the terms of the building, or of the world of which it is a part, whether it be the world of the Greeks, of modern architecture, or some other. But that identification is just one chapter in a much longer and more interesting narrative. The horizon or topography is also what is not seen, what is absconded or recondite, which allows it to be what might yet occur and what happened some time ago, despite the way it appears at present. Hence its spontaneity and its historicity. In his version of the “receptacle” idea Konstantinidis emphasized the building’s incompleteness: “a form that is never finished or final, but that is completed as time goes by, flowering again and again into daily perfection.” Although this may appear to be an appeal to the sort of fragmentation promoted in much contemporary practice, or to more philosophical ears may sound like an early argument for an architectural 202

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

“open work,” as defined by Umberto Eco, it is neither; instead, this sense of the building’s delayed finality describes the task of preparing a setting as one that can never be completed, because the conditions on which dwelling practices depend—the elemental and cultural conditions that constitute the horizon—never present themselves in exactly the same way over time. If a “form” is to “flower into perfection,” it will be on a daily basis, never the same as it was before, never formed once and for all; for if it has been shaped it can be reshaped, and repeatedly, like the manifestations of the land or earth of which it is a part. While the adjustment of the building’s parts gives it a quasianimation, it itself is not animate but animated, not temporal but temporalized. Like the tea master’s kettle, the house is thus exactly the opposite of the horizon: empty not full, stable not spontaneous, renewed not renewing. Arguments for flow short-circuit the necessary (and inevitable) resistance between inside and outside, and thereby transform the latter into an extension of the former. Without some sense, and embodiment, of the partiality of our private and local requirements, the entirety or whole beyond these walls would have no interest, neither its day nor its night.30 The reverse is what Howe claimed, that “cosmic” space had become architectural. Yet, no matter whether one develops liquid or atmospheric metaphors, arguments for the continuity of the same assume the unlimited extension of something always and everywhere manifest, manifest in the same way as the building itself. This is the world-as-picture. But this very extension conceals the hidden side of the horizon, which is exactly what it has to supply for the building’s wants: latent significance, stratified depth, and historical substance; what the whole has to give to the part. Only when we recover a sense of the horizon as tacit will we remember what the building always lacks, and for that very reason depends upon. This is not to say there is some “town,” “nature,” “land,” or “earth” elsewhere than within the horizon that surrounds and incorporates the building. To say that the latent side of topography is something other that what is outside my window is not to remove it to some nonplanetary location, some “place” on the other side of my visual field, some beyond or transcendent congenial to the topics of metaphysics or the abstractions of theoretical thought. 203

CHAPTER FIVE

5.12

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis, 1962. Photo Marina Lathouri.

Rather, it is to say that what is latent is present in a way that differs from objective presence; not something on the other side of my visual field but serving as its underside. When one describes some content as implicit, one suggests that it is “there” to be discerned but not outwardly so, or not without the kind of comprehension that allows it to remain remote, the way one is aware of anger or fatigue in the sound of a voice that phrases something quite different. In the folds of a piece of fabric there are hollows or recesses that contain material not seen. Never do we assume or fear that what is hidden or in shadow is not there. This fear, when it exists, is the subject matter of psychotherapy. Of the sea Konstantinidis wrote that it insinuates “itself deeply into the most secret recesses of the landscape.” These recesses or lacunae in the land are not void of content or empty of substance but full of its po204

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

tential or promise; like an “empty” vessel they contain an inexhaustible depth that possesses, or simply is, the capacity to sustain everything that comes into appearance, no matter how grand or modest. The horizon bends, turns, or twists in on itself, plying into its terraces the means of their renewal. Implicated in the gold line of light that licks the floor of the house and creeps up its wall is a constellation of powers that is inversely as effective as it is conspicuous. Konstantinidis’s beautiful description of light sliding across the floor easily brings us to the little house he built at Anavyssos in 1962, which I shall describe in summary of these last few points.31 Three walls rest on a platform under the solid slab of a roof. A simpler, perhaps more vacant receptacle could hardly be imagined. Similarly simple is the site: an unforgiving slope of gravel and stone sliding into the sea. More encouragingly, one might describe the transparent green-blue of the water, the rusty metal shades of the surrounding ground cover, and the bright clarity of the sky. Konstantinidis himself sketched such a depiction with his eclogue at the outset of Elements: A rock as it emerges from the sea; above, the most luminous of skies: this is the land— Greece, birthplace of beauty, measure and balance, of authenticity, artistic vision and spiritual ethos. But beyond that, the clarity of the atmosphere is this land. More than anywhere else on earth, each thing is allowed to stand out clearly, revealing its modeling, its contours. Both in its own separate entity, and in relation to all other things. . . . Most of the Greek landscape is mountainous, arid, treeless. Nothing but stones and rocks and barren soil. And so the clear outlines, the sculptured qualit[ies] are made manifest, without hindrance.32 There could be perhaps no more emphatic testament to the objectivity of things in the landscape, defined with the precision of Praxiteles’ chisel, leaving nothing concealed or unclear, except, of course, how one might live there, how anything might survive such arid clarity. How can hard rock and barren soil sustain life? On this side of the sea the soil is dryer than a shadow is black. Likewise the house, the presiding goddess 205

CHAPTER FIVE

5.14

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Aris Konstantinidis. 5.13

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis.

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

CHAPTER FIVE

of which would have to be called Penia. How can such a hardened platform, these rough walls, and this stylobate-like roof favor any form of civilized existence? Customary refinements are nowhere. Also lacking are vernacular motifs and articulations. On this platform and this land there are neither gardens nor groves, expressions nor emblems, just stony implacability, everything calm as a clock. Were we to search for a terrain in which no evidences of elemental or cultural form were conspicuous, this might be the very best case. Yet the absence of obvious figures does not mean the absence of their remote source. We are aware of the “landscape,” said Konstantinidis, “not because we see it with our eyes but because we know it exists.” What can there be of the landscape that is known yet not seen? Citing Kazantzakis, he suggested we should try to understand the face of Greece as a “palimpsest of twelve superimposed scripts, belonging to the following ages: the contemporary age, the War of Independence, the Turkish rule, the Frankish rule, Byzantium, Rome, the Hellenistic age, the classical age, the Stone age.”33 This is a lot to find in soil from which signifying marks have evaporated. Entire epochs and worlds are supposed to be apparent in the face of this parched land, but nowhere are there transparent figures. A richly textured past can indeed be read if one sees these surroundings the way one does the strata of renewal in a whitewashed wall, as evidences of care that resulted in successes and failures. I realize this is like comparing a newspaper caption to the poetry of the Iliad. Yet reading the two, the wall and the land, which takes no special concentration, just cultural experience, involves one and the same kind of awareness, which might be called horizonal or marginal consciousness. Were the philosopher Aristippus to wash up on the shore in front of this house, there would be no marks to indicate the presence of others like himself, but he would know, just the same, that a new beginning was possible. As if its austere surfaces were washed by the same sea, the building exhibits unmarked planarity. But to say they are unmarked does not mean these surfaces do not make sense. If this building’s three walls can be seen to define three settings—a small enclosed pair of private rooms, a larger ensemble of public settings around the fireplace, and an L-shaped veranda between the first two and the 208

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

sea—the last of these can also be seen as a shorelike edge that takes the same long drink of morning light as awakened the shipwrecked hero. On this account the locus of architectural entry and departure would be the same as that of nautical embarkation and arrival. Similarly, the horizon line that attracts passage together with the wind or engines that sustain it would have equivalents in the lines that articulate the hearth and the equipment that accommodates residing. Although unobtrusive, the elements of both the land and the building are known because they sustain the sort of practices that those who inhabit this terrain typically perform, and have performed for centuries. The difficulty in describing architectural topography is that of simultaneously acknowledging two sorts of reversal or alternation: from articulated to withdrawn presence, and from settings that have been prepared to elements that are productive. The building is essentially an ensemble of preparations for the typical practices of residing, a set of predispositions or configuration of premises that braces itself against the arrival of its opposite, the land, in its expected and unexpected manifestations. By contrast with architectural readiness, the surrounding milieu is productive of all manner of effects, some welcomed, some feared, thus also the cause of pleasure and of grief. Aristippus was not saved by the shore, just given another chance. Like him, we search the shore for the treasures it washes up—items we would like to put to use— but its waves thunder in mostly for the sound of it, massively indifferent to our interests. The same indifference is apparent in the dry dirt that surrounds the place. The elements of the site are not remotely serviceable in the way the settings of the house are. The two, the building and the land, are on this account sharply contrasting. The first waits for the arrival of the second the way a vessel anticipates its fill. I described this as a noncoincident complementarity. Yet, despite this essential difference, both construction and location have aspects that are manifest and concealed in like ways. This makes them essentially the same. To begin: both the land and the building are much more than aggregates of physical properties, those one might measure scientifically or enjoy aesthetically. Topography is not terrain, or not just that. The sea is not only a 209

CHAPTER FIVE

fairly large quantity of unusually salty water but the irritation in a swimmer’s throat. Likewise, the floor of the house is not only a weave of hard surfaces and dusty cracks but the difficulty that frustrates the broom’s task. Both the shore and the veranda in this terrain are certainly barren but they are also articulate, of these human trials at least. Cleaning the floor and whitewashing the walls are banalities to be sure, but metaphorical interpretations developed by those who undertook these tasks allowed them to voice conditions that were not so trivial (Easter renewal). Although the building and the land can never be the same thing, they are equally tacit and articulate when taken up in the typical enactments of prosaic life. Topography is a name for this passive and productive, silent and eloquent milieu. With respect to topography, the first obligation of design would be to give to the construction access to its recessive or withdrawing foundation, the ground that design endeavors to modulate, while suffering its effects, which can be enhancing or corrosive. When topography is understood to be recessive, design must involve interpretation of what is unseen and inconstant. Access to what withdraws can be kept clear if the building is allowed to slip into the same unobtrusive standing as the horizon, that ensemble of elements that will eventually assimilate it anyway. This means reducing the insistence of its visual aspects. Preserving tacit presence in design depends even more on the acknowledgment of dwelling typicalities, for they are the cultural particulars by which specific settings enact the tradition. As we have seen, analogies between building and site often illuminate the subject matter of this enactment. Topography is a name for a network of complementary performances that weave into one fabric the action of a people and its history, a network enmeshed within a range of sites that it shows are really very much like one another, similar but not the same. The task of architectural work is to set up the conditions under which the recessive horizon can articulate itself. This is not to say that terrain is not shaped in design and construction, nor that stones are not cut and stacked, nor that surfaces are not polished and painted. Architecture is an art, not a work of nature. On this point I think Konstantinidis misstated his approval of Léger’s thesis. Were the land in itself an adequate setting for the purposes of 210

IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

life, architecture would be entirely unnecessary. Just as no one lives in ideal space, no one lives on the land as given. Here I am not referring to the socalled natural landscape only, but also to the one that has been shaped through the arts of design, which is to say one that is urban. The material and spatial inheritance one is “given” is not an accomplishment but a task: for tradition to stay alive it must be remade. But to say that terrain is shaped in design and construction is not to say that this is the means by which the building’s horizon is articulated. It would be equally wrong to say that architecture has as its task the construction of culture, or of cultural forms. Not only does this give to design too much authority, but it substantializes the horizon to such a degree that its recessive quality and animating potential are entirely annulled. Before we consider the building’s capacity to articulate anything, we must allow it to withdraw from objectlike presence in order to transcend itself into the conditions of its own becoming. I have noted that Konstantinidis, like both Wright and Neutra, cited the writings of Laotzu. He did not quote the house-as-vessel passage, at least the one to which they referred. Instead, the following: “It is anonymous and from it all things spring forth . . . it is unknown and anonymous, and yet it gives life to all things, as it leads them to plenitude.”34 It is decisive that we resist the temptation to point out, to designate, what this “it” is. As with the vessel passage, this one describes the reciprocity between vacancy and fullness; in place of emptiness, however, is anonymity, and for fullness we now have plenitude. As before, the two terms’ mutuality or correspondence is what is at issue. Odd as it was in an age of so much self-expression, Konstantinidis saw anonymity as a condition to be sought after in architecture. One is reminded of Loos’s quip concerning the best-dressed gentleman: the one who is least noticed in public. Whereas Loos seems to have envisaged and perhaps desired a rather bourgeois “public,” Konstantinidis seems to have had in mind a group without cosmopolitan sophistication. Yet the Xenia hotels were largely filled with cosmopolitan types, whether from Greece or elsewhere. The architecture he designed proposed a different kind of anonymity. It was not to be conventional or commonplace; nor again, and worse, stylized in the manner of some regional vernacular, as it became in the work of Dimitris Pikionis. Yet 211

CHAPTER FIVE

the distance of Konstantinidis’s work from past examples did not push it closer to the most modern. His anonymous architecture was not to be the kind of nameless architecture that some proponents of the International Style had in mind. Identification with precedents and indifference to them were two highways leading to the same dead end. He once wrote that “to be traditional means to be always contemporary.”35 I believe the project of designing anonymous architecture is similarly paradoxical. With this work in mind, this paradox would seem to be hard to escape, perhaps even the condition of contemporary design.

212

6

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N The marks cast into the surface of the fireplace mantel of the Weekend House Aris Konstantinidis built at Anavyssos exhibit essentially the same characteristics as the house itself: laconic economy and implied depth. These marks were cast as a negative relief in an otherwise unpolished concrete panel. The inscription consists of two thin horizontals, one wide vertical, and three knotlike figures. No evidence of authorship exists, and I cannot say these marks were designed by the architect; but it is improbable that he disapproved of them, for the position of the mantelpiece within the interior lends them great prominence, as if they were to be seen as an identifying tag or badge for the building as a whole, like the piece of imitation Parthenon frieze pinned onto the exterior wall of Loos’s Rufer House.1 In consideration of construction technology, that comparison is imprecise, for the Parthenon figures were carved into a panel that was itself attached to the surface of the building with mechanical fasteners, whereas the Anavyssos ones were cast into an element of the building’s durable substance, which was bonded to the fireplace, just as the fireplace was to the floor. Despite their different forms of connection, the two panels can be seen as similarly expressive, only of different kinds of content. I shall argue that the marks on the Anavyssos mantel express what the building itself does, only more economically, if ambiguously and barely figuratively. And I want to say more: insofar as these marks are integral to the fireplace, the fireplace to the building, and the building to the surrounding terrain, these marks express the basic characteristics of the entire topography. As though it were to be understood as a building within a building, the fireplace stands in the middle of the house’s public spaces, dividing the kitchen from the living room, also anchoring the dining table. While its front and back faces are brightened a little by windows cut through the house’s land-side wall, the openings on the opposite side that face onto the L-shaped veranda have the potential of washing not only the fireplace but the entire interior in the light of the day. This would make the recesses contained within 213

CHAPTER SIX

the fireplace’s bulky volume the last preserves of darkness within the entire interior, for the veranda openings are very large and very effective. Against these shadows and in this light the flat plane of the mantelpiece stands out, with these marks branded into its hide. The light in which these figures appear can be strikingly bright, both inside the building and in the open terrain. As if mythical Phaeton’s misadventure with the sun chariot were still being repeated in our time, the light over the Greek lands is, at times, punishing. While Konstantinidis’s writings contain no extended complaint against its intensity, he was certainly sensitive to it; in one text it is “scorching,” in another “blinding.”2 This sensitivity is also shown by his buildings. When the floor-to-ceiling veranda shutters on the Anavyssos house were opened, the breaks in the running length of its walls

6.1

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis, 1962. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.2

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

could admit more than enough light to make the interior seem directly “connected” to the exterior. Although the interiors were thus recipient and therefore dependent, the house’s posture was not passive; moderation and modulation were involved, responses that were entirely necessary, for while the daylong breeze sent in by the sea moderated the summer heat, this intense brightness was always in need of interruption. To reside in the midst of its intensity, roofs of some sort were necessary, those of the veranda and of the interiors in this case, which were built as a single roof to jointly comprise the essence of the house; at least that is what Konstantinidis maintained. A photograph in Elements for Self-Knowledge shows a man flat on his back asleep, or simply resting, outdoors under the midday sun. To enable rest, he has removed his sandals and cast a shadow over his eyes by tipping the visor of his cap down until it rests on the bridge of his nose. In the Anavyssos house, as in most others by Konstantinidis, shadows for rest and for residing are produced by the brim of a single solid slab turned up at its edges to form noticeably high parapets, as if its double-sewn fringe were the hem of a concrete blanket, under which daily domestic activities could fold in on themselves, 215

CHAPTER SIX

6.3

Attica, 1947. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

like the entwined hands, arms, or legs of a person at rest. Not only do these parapet edges shade the interior and veranda spaces but they also outline their limits, allowing the roof to take on the defining function of a stylobate—not by supporting and spacing some columns, nor by delimiting the ground on which everything rests, but by carving a hollow darkness out of the sky, inverting the traditional type, making an atmospheric temenos or delimiting an inhabitable space under the deck, as if underground. A useful comparison is the cave of exterior settings cut into the stucco sky of Loos’s Tzara House facade, although that space uses the same sort of edge to form an opposite kind of enclosure, one that waits on the sun, yielding to it, wanting still more. As upright equivalents to the parapet roof horizon, the door-sized shutters on the Anavyssos house were more subtle in the modulation of ambient light; built to slide sideways, they admit only as much brightness as is desired. In summer quantities of daylight were excluded with these devices, in winter a proportional measure admitted. The track on which they moved was thus a primitive sort of calendar and clock, the temporal articulations of which were more measurable and transparent than the Eastertime whitewash on vernacular buildings, but no less serviceable or expressive. Admitting and excluding light in this way modernized a solution recommended by Xenophon: the use of colonnaded porches.3 Serving the same purpose were the curtains on the 216

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

inner face of the shutter wall, but with a difference; not only did they interrupt the light, they replaced it with a sign of itself: a very bright vertical of exactly the same hue, much like the drapery of interior light that blends together a window, table, flower bowl, and patch of floorboards in Matisse’s Interior with Forget-me-nots of 1916—a patch of light discovering in different things similar shine. The rough finish of the Anavyssos floor also modified the entry of light into the house, not by interruption or substitution but by absorption, also banking its thermal effect against the drafts of night air. But this ancient contest of light and dark was not played out inside the house only; outside it, or beyond the edges of its stylobate umbrella, in the expanse of the terrain, there were other “instruments” that modulated ambient brightness. Approximating the performance of roofs, shutters, curtains, and floor surfaces were the patio’s retaining wall, its decking, the surrounding ground cover, and even the water’s edge; each of them absorbing light and casting shadow, at least to some degree. The topographical continuity of these “devices” allows one to see the entire terrain as a field animated by the play of light and shadow. Day after day, and seasonally, there would seem to have been

6.4

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

217

CHAPTER SIX

no other goal to this play than its renewal in steady repetition. Just as the sea approaches the land in wave after wave, these shadows march toward the interior in ranks, rows, or lines, each topographical upright or change of level casting if not cresting a measure of darkness on its underside. Not that any one of them had this effect, only when they acted in concert, like drops of water in a wave. In much of Konstantinidis’s writing one gets the sense of some native but secret kinship between the sea and shadow, and of both with rest. The idea that rest, or sleep, is an ocean is a well-worn commonplace. The white-capped stone fences Konstantinidis observed “breaking” over the landscape make this analogy particularly vivid. Is it possible to see the alternation of dark recesses and light edges within the house as a carefully constructed repetition of this weave of waves, from sea to land, as if outdoor and indoor play were part and counterpart? The house would then be essentially a condensed or crystallized manifestation of the wider horizon of shadow-casting devices, its epitome, the veranda a mimesis of the shore. And if this made sense, one might also see the fireplace as the topography’s most concentrated interplay of darks and lights, not only in its flames but in its volumes, which interweave planes and recesses into a body that could easily be described as contrapposto; a kind of knot or closed hand which turns in on itself the matrix of lines and hollows that also spreads itself out across the horizon, integrating dispersed and distinct characters while preserving their discordance—at least their conflict and sharp contrast. Sverre Fehn once explained that the origin of architecture is the production of a shadow, for darkness is a sign of enclosure, as if to shelter were to shade.4 Topographical shadows thus demonstrate the trace and prospect of residing. By virtue of uprights and changes in level under the spread of ambient brightness, lines of shadow step across the terrain. In the absence of architecture the pace of their progress would be slow, especially in terrain as barren as this, embossed, as it is, in very low relief. Were there no uprights, time would effectively stand still, which I suppose is a definition of sleep, or of death, and of architecture’s gnomic function.5 Perhaps the prolongation of passage in unmarked terrain is only apparent, only a temporal image of spatial articulations that are barely obtrusive. Even so, uniformity in landscape always seems 218

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.5

Weekend House, Anavyssos, Aris Konstantinidis. Photo Marina Lathouri.

to slow movement through it, weighing each of its steps with the kind of lethargy that sameness produces. The drifting of shadows noticeably quickens, however, once the house serves as their source, because then the alternation between the varied and enlarged instances of their production accelerates their transit, or seems to. The house can be described as an intensification of the terrain because it effects a dramatic increase of this alternation of lights and darks; the hollows it contains amplify and deepen the darks spread out thinly across the land, while its uprights and overhanging edges concentrate the brightness of the light, light that would otherwise be entirely dispersed. Thus, topographical juxtaposition leads to spatial intertwining, to places knotting themselves together. To say that the house crystallizes characteristics of the encompassing terrain is something of a distortion, however, for this image simultaneously 219

CHAPTER SIX

inflates and diminishes the house’s real accomplishment. It enlarges the effect of the house because the architectural production of shadows is always inconstant. The fact that its instruments are adjustable testifies to the unsteadiness of its realizations. But it also diminishes the house’s achievement because it fails to acknowledge the striking difference between the shadows the house produces and those of the terrain, that architectural adumbrations are an otherwise nonexistent form of daytime darkness—an upright and “thickened” sort, blackening each aperture and threshold. Let me say again that the terrain entangles instances of clarity and obscurity, in both land and sea. On this twisting together of opposites Konstantinidis was insistent: “Then there is the sea . . . insinuating itself deeply into the most secret recesses of the landscape; encircling, with loops of blue and white water, the innumerable islands of the Greek seas.”6 What is more, he documented this “encircling” many times in photographs of the vernacular landscape and anonymous architecture. But to say that shadows are given in the landscape is not to say that the terrain on which they appear can, of itself, sustain all our

6.6

Athens, 1960. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

practices of residing—assuming that it is on the inside of variously qualified “shadows” that all the sorts of residing occur. Both the visor on the sleeper’s cap and the parapet on the roof “construct” shadows of a kind that is lacking on the surface of the land. I have called them upright and thickened. These terms attempt to describe the dark openings Konstantinidis drew and photographed so many times in his study of ancient and modern Greek architecture. Every window and doorway he recorded was essentially a black sheet through which residents had to pass to accomplish entry. In his drawings there is no shading of light underneath overhangs, no conciliatory gradation from white to black beneath the plane of a roof, ceiling, or lintel; every place in shadow has been completely darkened, rendered as black as water is wet or sleep oceanic. Entry through such a passage involved accepting the total eclipse of all distinct points of reference. The obscurity of entry represents not only the defeat of ambient brightness but also of sight, for little if anything of the setting within is ever disclosed through this passage. One could suppose that threshold darkness was for

CHAPTER SIX

this reason disorienting; yet this would be no failing, because arrival assumes some loss of bearings. The uninterrupted continuity of the terrain, even its gradual transformation, never allows one to arrive anywhere. Arguments in favor of “flow” neglect this point. Another way to say this is that being within this darkness is the advent of enclosure, a degree or level of articulation only approximated by terrain. Advent here does not mean arrival but approach, because this darkness is less a place to which one has come than the end or beginning of one. It is the lack of upright shadows such as these in the extended terrain that makes construction necessary—without them and it, residing could never begin. Nevertheless, it is perfectly true to say that in the normal run of prosaic affairs such a lack is infrequently noticed. All the well-fashioned parts of houses and cities overcome it. In their midst the (natural) want of shaded enclosure is rarely apparent. But to understand the advent of these forms, their absence must be remembered. Writing about the clarity and brightness of the Greek light, Konstantinidis identified not only a majestic radiance to which interiors remain loyal, but also a power that can be oppressive, giving rise to architectural acts of resistance. The combative origin of architecture, or the advent of its particular kind of articulation, is precisely this conflict between the exigencies of residing in various degrees of darkness and the uniform intensity of indifferent brightness. The beginning of this conflict, or the initiation of architectural work, is the recognition of what the given terrain lacks. The matter of shadow (and enclosure) production is more complicated than I have thus far described it, however, because engagement in practical affairs has its own kind of darkness, the sort I described earlier as the tacit horizon in which nothing obtrudes itself into distinct visibility. In the performance of prosaic activities no single aspect of a setting advances itself into prominence. This is a kind of darkness. But this sort is not a matter of interrupted light, or its lack; rather, of enmeshed cohesion, the thick contiguity that allows one to describe engaged activity as blind to everything that doesn’t concern it. A tool emerges into awareness when it no longer serves its purpose. Failure attracts light. All advances into insistent visibility testify to some breakdown, crisis, or interruption in the network of relationships that 222

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

constitute the everyday world of practical existence, for in these moments something required is found to be lacking. The recognition of a lack is also what suggests the need for some productive response. The design of dwelling equipment envisages the restoration of the “blind” cohesion that characterizes every horizon of residing. Thus a ratio: what equipment is to the walls of a house, the walls themselves are to the terrain. The fireplace in the Anavyssos house integrates three distinct settings into one ensemble: the kitchen or cooking area, the space for dining, and the living room. Each is defined by its own equipment and by its own level of darkness. In the professional practice of design these days, “lighting levels” are established in order to qualify settings. Konstantinidis’s house effects such qualification, but much more besides. Because the source of the lighting levels is the intersection between exterior brightness and the building’s modulating devices, the settings can be seen to be polarized between the edges of the house and its center, which is, in this case, the fireplace. The “level” of each setting is nothing other than a specifically qualified span between the mountainlike center and savannalike periphery. To assume that each reach of this kind ends when it meets the building’s perimeter is to forget that the modulation that characterizes the boundary derives as much from the terrain as it does from the building. All interior brightness, no matter how intense, has a remote origin. Whether one thinks about it or not, this remoteness is part of the interior, which is perhaps why René Magritte in one of his sculptural works put birds inside a man’s chest, and why mythical Hermes was always associated with Hestia, meaning that the principle and agency of movement, flow, mutation, and transition presupposed that of autochthonic fixity and nodal centrality.7 And the reverse is true: exterior brightness needs some dark recess in order to show itself. When a candle burns down into its holder, its dependence on what lacks light is immediately apparent. The house receives the light of the day because it has (it is) an upright and physical body; as such, it provides the means for light to register its effects. On the function of symbola in gift exchanges, Anne Carson has written: “A gift is not a piece broken off from the interior life of the giver and not lost into the exchange, but rather an extension of the interior of the giver, both in time and space, into the in223

CHAPTER SIX

terior of the receiver.”8 An analogous reciprocity in architecture is perhaps obvious. Yet I want to stress that before there can be a level of light or darkness within an interior, there must be some built-up edge against which both can be formed, and every such edge must be material, for only materials have the capacity to absorb and interrupt light. If the house lives a life of expectancy, of absorption, and therefore of preparation, it is because of its palpable presence. And the same is true of the terrain outside the building, whether sandy or salty; hence their quiet congeniality. The entire topography is animated by the interplay of shadows across its surface. Thus, it is entirely wrong to accent the solar half of this drama only, for the tangible substrate is just as important, being the stratum of shadow production and residing. And because the house concentrates or intensifies this play of darks and lights, one must look to its physical body, especially to the body of its fireplace, to witness its advent. Nothing integrates air or light and matter so economically (or domestically) as fire. To repeat: under the roof the fireplace knots together settings for cooking, eating, and “living.” Enabling the first are cupboards, countertops, and mechanical equipment; the second, table, chairs, and artificial light; and the third, assorted furniture of the typical kind. Extending to the edges of the roof and ringing this ensemble are the house’s more private rooms and the Lshaped veranda. The striking fact about the three central settings is that each is supported by the fireplace itself. Before it houses a flame, or even when it does not, it serves as a prop or set of shelves for these settings, and for much more. This is certainly how one must understand its contrapposto volume, for each of its recesses and extensions proposes a level that is taken up by the equipment of the setting and adopted as its own. This use of the word “level” signifies an equipmental, atmospheric, and topographical set of conditions. All of this is visible if one considers both the building’s section and its plan, for levels such as these are both horizons and enclosures. Moreover, each envelops its performance in its characteristic degree of darkness. The back side of the fireplace is shaded by its upright mass and sheltered from the light of the veranda. Still further back, behind this tight space and most distant from the veranda and the shore, are the house’s private rooms. 224

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

Because the slope of the site is slight, these rooms are not cut into the land, but they do require an L-shaped retaining wall in order to rise out of the soil. While balancing the L of the veranda, ground against light, this land wall also strengthens the sense that the horizon of the house is carved into the site’s surface and capped by the roof. What direct light the kitchen does absorb into its interior comes from this back or land side of the house, through the relatively small window cut into the load-bearing wall. One can thus say this setting’s immediate horizon is the surrounding soil or ground, not the sea nor the shore. Apart from this window and the nearby doors, the perimeter of the kitchen is lined by preparation surfaces and storage spaces. This is not surprising; yet this equipment could also be thought of as a set of worktables and a treasury, each extending one of the fireplace’s platforms and recesses. They are so closely packed on top of one another that the play of lights and darks in this vicinity is sharply contrasting. This attracts attention within the space and both accommodates and characterizes the task that defines it. The dining table stands between the light and dark halves of the house. A little more than a third of its length rests against the fireplace. The point of intersection between the inward corner of the table and the outward corner of the fireplace is the exact center of the house’s public spaces, and they seem to rotate or twist around it. The table itself is strikingly simple: four legs supporting a level surface. Yet its use seems to combine the platform and treasury typology differentiated in the kitchen, for it is at once a shelf, like all the others hanging off the fireplace, and an open deck around which people sit when meals are served, as if it were built to lower, centralize, and internalize the defining function of the stylobate hovering above. The table’s centrality, however, should not allow it to be associated with the fireplace only, for it has a double on the veranda, suggesting that it has an equally eccentric orientation, not toward the land but the sea, at least the shore. The living room, the largest setting in this interior, is perhaps hardest to join to the fireplace, because its size allows it to intersect with each of the outward-facing aspects of the house. Using terms introduced earlier, its span is the greatest in the house, or its level is the most elaborately differentiated. The room’s enclosed corner sleeps in the folds of the house, between the entry 225

CHAPTER SIX

and the other window through the land-side wall, under the blanket of the roof. The furniture could just as well have been built into such a corner, or carved out of it, so withdrawn is its position. When the veranda shutters are closed or the curtains are allowed to substitute for the sun (at least for its occasionally tangerine hue), this recess remains much darker than the kitchen. Yet, because the entire room is large, the side opposite this restful one is correspondingly bright, or has the potential of being so, given the modulation of light along its edge. If the recessive corner is buried in a cave, the opposite side is shaded under a concrete tent. The weightless geometry of shadows caught in the tangle of the carpet’s long-hair weave is an entirely adequate image of this coupling. The fact that the dining table also obtrudes itself into this setting gives it even more synthetic power. This synthesis is reciprocated by the fireplace, for on its front face are the largest and deepest hollows of its volume, as well as the broadest and flattest surfaces of its mass. The most noticeable of these is, of course, the mantelpiece, displaying the cryptic marks observed at the outset. Considering this inscribed tableau more closely, it may seem a sheer coincidence that the edge of the dining table aligns exactly with the lowest and longest of the inscription’s two horizontals (which is also the height of the kitchen work surface). Nevertheless, it does not seem unreasonable to propose a baseline function for both, the first of residing, the second of its representation (which is to say this representation). But the table top is not the only baseline of the house, let alone of its topography. Surely the base platform of the whole construction—its real stylobate—is similarly significant, especially insofar as it includes not only the footing of the fireplace but the veranda and the outlying terraces. But one cannot easily stop there, for these terraces themselves step down into the land, and toward the shore, which is like the veranda because it joins opposite conditions: what the house’s exterior is to its interior, the sea is to the land. But can one stop there? Following the progress of light and shadow across the land, one can see an uninterrupted drift of crests and undercurrents, or reflections and shadows. This means the baseline horizon of the house cannot be circumscribed around the table, the terrace, or the terrain, for all three are one when seen as receptacles of the site’s scorching 226

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

light—saturated by and sometimes suffering under it. The horizon of the land thus manifests itself in multiple ways, all of which oppose the manifestations of sea horizon: insistent repetition, limitlessness, and lack of individuation. The conflict between the two, played out at the shore and reflected in its architectural equivalents (veranda, threshold, fireplace), joins the principle of nondifferentiation (the sea), surely the end of any form of independent existence, with the opposites into which it develops, which is to say the built articulations that exhibit firmness, particularity, usefulness, and shelter. If there is a horizon that is different in kind from the lower one, and circumscribed, it is the level of the roof or its brimlike parapet. This level has been described as a hovering blanket or temenos that cuts out of the sky a space in which the shadows of residing turn in on themselves. To the degree that the house has clear and precise limits, it is these, for they mark or define the exact terms of agreement between domestic darkness and ambient light. This agreement or pact established by the roof is, I think, what the second, higher horizontal of the mantelpiece inscription signifies. The roof is the house’s most articulate form, which is to say the one that voices its definition most eloquently. On the far right side of the mantelpiece tableau, directly in front of the edges of the fireplace’s right-hand upright, and near the corner where the panel meets the dining table, is the inscription’s only vertical: a thick band that descends from someplace above the other marks and reaches down to the level of the lowest horizontal. It can be considered in different ways: as a parallel to the bright curtain nearby, to the lamps shelved on the table and above it, and to the upward reach of the flames below—which is to say, a sign of different forms of directed light. Because of its position on the right-hand side of the panel, it actually receives the brightest light from the veranda. This makes its relief contours the sharpest, especially when compared to the indistinct ending of the lowest horizontal as it moves toward the land side of the house. But in addition to this vertical’s sharp profile, its thickness also associates it with the breadth of brightness that characterizes this site. The three figures on this tableau that stand apart from the horizontals and vertical remind one of knots, shells, or closed hands. But this is a very ap227

CHAPTER SIX

proximate identification. In fact, these figures are, to a large measure, indecipherable. Part of the problem is that they are so simple. This is not to say they are formless, just almost so. Although one cannot really say they look like knots, shells, or fists, this is how they behave or seem to have been formed, insofar as they turn in on themselves lines and recesses one suspects have origins elsewhere. Do we have presented here the house itself, the fireplace, and the mantelpiece into which everything has been carved? To the degree that the house, the fireplace, and the mantelpiece twist together lights and darks that play across the horizon, each of these figures would have as its analog any one of the encounters that animate the entire topography. When ancient Aristippus washed up on a shore not much unlike the one outside this building, he delighted in discovering geometrical markings drawn in the sand. In the preface to his sixth book Vitruvius reported the story as follows: “The philosopher Aristippus, a follower of Socrates, was shipwrecked on the coast of Rhodes, and observing geometrical diagrams drawn upon the sand, he is said to have shouted to his companions: ‘There are good hopes for us; for I see human footsteps!’ Forthwith he made for the city of Rhodes and came straight to the gymnasium. There he disputed on philosophical topics.”9 The terms “geometrical diagrams” and “footsteps” have been chosen in this translation to render Vitruvius’s geometrica schemata and vestiga. Vitruvius, after Aristippus, did not explain but took for granted the similarity between the two, as if every composition of lines and angles were to be taken as an evidence of human conduct or of life. The identification of vestiga with geometrica schemata is obviously metaphorical, for there is no configuration of Euclidean circles and squares that would also outline or trace a few local accidents of human anatomy. It was not the mark of a person that Aristippus delighted in finding, but the sort of mark that only civilized humans make. But what if the shipwrecked philosopher had found a footprint? Would his delight have been diminished? Would the reaction verge on fear, not joy? Worse still, what if he had found nothing at all written in the sand, what if the tide had washed the signs away, as Michel Foucault imagined might happen to the face of “man” inscribed on the shore of the “classical” tradition?10 More 228

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

narrowly, or architecturally, what if there were no marks on the Anavyssos mantelpiece? Would hopes for civilized inhabitation be equally diminished? Surface markings are occasional in Konstantinidis’s work. The house at Spetses is a comparable example. Although that house is larger than Anavyssos and a permanent residence, the fireplace is similarly central, and similarly flamelike in its contrapposto. So too were the many vernacular fireplaces Konstantinidis studied and drew. Although the Spetses fireplace is made out of brick and concrete, the entire construction was whitewashed in stucco, a coating that served as the soil into which graphic marks were plowed. The sketch Konstantinidis published in Buildings and Projects shows the mantelpiece and left upright marked in similar ways, despite the differences in underlying materials: hence there was no thought of representing structure. He believed this form of marking to be an ancient procedure that had practical consequences: “Tracings made with a trowel or a finger, or a nail, or some other small, sharp instrument, are meant to stop the lime and mud coating on a stone wall from cracking or flaking.” But he also recognized the outline definition and beauty of these forms: “The beautiful shapes formed by the whitewashed lines separating paving-stones in village-streets, the free-flowing lines that mark various kinds of walls” give great pleasure and characterize the elements they adorn as Greek.11 From whence do these forms arise? For Konstantinidis it was a matter of habituated or sedimented knowledge. While not exactly groundless, this is hardly a clear (or conceptually clear) foundation. Konstantinidis does not describe an origin, but a tendency that is remote in its beginnings. The “from whence” is also a lack, for the emergence of these forms assumed the absence of design, in the sense of a clear and distinct configuration of lines and angles that determine execution (Alberti’s definition). These walls turned out this way “because the craftsman who made them worked with ‘eyes that feel and hands that see’ (these are Goethe’s words), because he [the craftsman] possessed profound wisdom and culture, bequeathed to him by ancestors who lived on the same land.” Konstantinidis also stressed that this was not a matter of “design” nor of elaborate forethought: “The experienced craftsman lets his instinct roam freely, without rejecting spontaneity or the accidental and 229

CHAPTER SIX

fortuitous . . . for when the accidental is combined with the necessary . . . a vital and viable work is born.”12 Before we get overexcited about the emancipated creativity this free-range spontaneity seems to suggest, we need to reflect on the “wisdom and culture” that discipline the craftsman’s eyes and hands. What sort of “wisdom and culture” does the craftsman possess or use to guide this sort of work? Were we to consider productive activities only, the answer would have to be technical knowledge, or taught know-how; the kind of understanding and confidence that would allow bricks to be mortared or stucco applied, just as it would allow shoes to be sewn or bread baked. Examples of this kind of understanding would not have to be preindustrial, for all technical knowledge is learned ability to remake the world around us, at least some of its parts. For the moment I want to stress the learned character of this knowledge. To say that the craftsman has an ability to change the changeable is to identify a kind of understanding that others do not possess, a kind that has been acquired through instruction. We commonly say that this is the outcome of teaching, and I believe it is at least likely that in the absence of instruction it would not occur. But to leave it at that is to neglect the fact that, despite its communicability, technical know-how is nontransparent. Because practitioners of all manual arts teach by example, we need to recognize in technical instruction a lingering degree of opacity. In every program of craft instruction, such as architectural education, there are occasions when all a teacher can say is “Do it like this!” and then show how it is done. Further, not everyone can be taught any skill. And the source of this resistance is inaccessible. It is well known that in traditional societies skills were kept secret by those who possessed them. What is often neglected in this commonplace is that this secrecy was always two-part: the basis for know-how was just as secret to the adept as it was to the novice, which is why everyone needs practice or repeated tries to “catch” a skill or “pick it up.” Just as it would be wrong to assume that teachers have unlimited ability, it is incorrect to think that every skilled worker understands intellectually or theoretically how the task he or she performs has been accomplished. If skill represents clear understanding, it is of the sort that is buried in the darkness of a pair of hands. And because 230

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

there is always a certain measure of cognitive opacity in manual work, one can say that a person practiced in a certain skill has habituated a form of conduct. At this point, the learning of a skill begins to parallel the acquisition of cultural behavior, because the latter is also done unknowingly. It was for this reason, I think, that Konstantinidis coupled “wisdom and culture” in his explanation of the craftsman’s work. This is not to say technical and cultural knowledge constitute the same sort of understanding. The successful performance of technical action is limited to those to whom the technique has been taught, those who become experts. While there is no specialized knowledge in eating a meal or attending a concert or a funeral, only those who have been taught the right techniques can prepare the meal, perform on the instruments, and administer the ceremony. And what is true for these techniques is true for all others, for in the practice of each skill there is knowledge that has been transmitted by specialized instruction. People distinguish and define themselves by their abilities. The world of technique is the arena of social division. Personal names testify to this. Cultural knowledge, by contrast, is not taught as a skill or science, to a few, but assumed to be known by everyone who matures within a given context of social communication. One’s everyday circle or horizon of affairs is essentially an ensemble of typical situations, and because they antecede and encompass individual lives they are commonly taken to be shared by all, even if they are not. Nor is this comparison meant to suggest that the objects of each kind of knowledge are the same. Technical knowledge is the ability to change the changeable. Its horizon of activity is the material world, whether the skill being deployed aims at walls of brick or loaves of bread. Plato once defined technical work as a productive tampering with nature. Insofar as people are part of the natural world, they too have been subjected to techniques. But these techniques quickly become oppressive and degrading in their continued application, as any reflection on contemporary politics or commercial advertising will be quick to conclude. This is because human life is not natural in the same way as the clay that constitutes a brick or the wheat that goes into a loaf of bread—despite the premises of so much of our technological society, our 231

CHAPTER SIX

philosophies of “operant conditioning,” or what might be called our “stomach positivism.” The ability to occupy a house and conduct oneself in the right way at a meal depends almost entirely on adequate understanding of conditions that are assumed to be stable within a given cultural context, precisely because they are taken to be “right for all of us,” even though this is not uniformly so, especially in mobile societies. The relative stability or assumed constancy of these conditions contrasts sharply with the changeable aspects of the natural world. Yet this knowledge—the understanding of what should be within a given cultural horizon—is no less tacit than the understanding of manual technique. By tacit I mean taken for granted, or assumed to exist and be effective outside the light of focused attention. Given the vocabulary and images I have used to describe the differentiation or articulation of territories within an architectural topography, I want to characterize the tacit knowledge that both the inhabitant and craftsman possess as kinds of darkness, kinds created or established in the history of typical performances. And I want to make this comparison despite the risks it most certainly involves. The “from whence” of articulation in architecture is no place other than the historical or vertical depth of both sorts of practices: technical and cultural. Let me extend the quotation from Konstantinidis I cited earlier: The craftsman . . . possessed a profound wisdom and culture, bequeathed to him by ancestors who lived on the same land; . . . in everything he does he has always known how to draw what he needs from traditional experience . . . “passed on [as Ion Dragoumis has said] from parent to child, humble, yet invincibly strong,” so that “centuries of civilization have finally penetrated the very blood and nerves of the Greek people . . . where its constant flow sustains unity or uniformity of expression.”13 Because Konstantinidis welcomed modern industrial materials and methods into the economy of this tradition-bound way of working, he escaped the disturbingly conservative consequences such a strong identification of a people with a place might suggest. The same provocation was provided by the arrival 232

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

of so many visitors to Greece, for tourism brought with it two sorts of expectation: one, of the high cultural display of what was essentially Greek in the landscape, and the other, of provisions for the enactment of cultural practices that were decidedly non-Greek. Both expectations challenged the continuity of “anonymous” cultural values, and if accommodated uncritically could lead to the erosion of these values. In recognition of this challenge Konstantinidis wrote: “We [architects] have the moral obligation to give even our most ordinary actions form, beauty and human measure, so that our works will stand equal in quality to the older ones they are called to replace.”14 The acknowledgment of new cultural pressures and new materials was not to put an end to the transmission of past practices but to serve as the provocation for their renewal and redefinition. Inheritance is neither a given nor a treasure to be safeguarded in the green lawns of a preservationist’s unease with the present; instead, inheritance is a task: not a treasury (still less a quarry) but a construction site. Once renewed, however, these practices quietly recede into the same tradition that had previously sustained them. Design, or at least construction, is thus both the disclosure of cultural background, including the discontinuities it has absorbed, and the “production” of anonymity. To call cultural continuity a kind of darkness, and to assimilate it into the patterns of conduct that define and construct the parts of a house, is to suggest nothing more than analogous births for marks in stucco and marks on a site: both are instances of articulation that sow into soil seen to be barren rearticulations of its sedimented patterns, doing this in the light of changed conditions, some of which result from technique and the arrival of technical objects. But to push the question concerning advent still further: how can we characterize the circumstances that give birth to marks or articulations of this kind, whether on a wall or a site? What prompts the need for a redefinition of the background? I have identified the occasion of construction in the open terrain as the recognition of a lack in what is given: at the Anavyssos site, the lack of shadows within which one could reside or—as Konstantinidis repeats so often—within which one could rest. Also, in consideration of equipment, I have suggested that it finds its origin in the breakdown of serviceability in a setting, suggesting that the light of design focuses on the failure of some per233

CHAPTER SIX

formance. In both cases there is an interruption in the continuity of the takenfor-granted horizon of human affairs, some discontinuity, breakdown, or crisis. To say that articulation redefines the dark or thick continuity of the background is to recognize some local discontinuity as its beginning. What is “constructed,” however, is not the physical sameness of the background, nor its profile, but its new capacity to sustain performances that are similar to those of the past, which means performances that are neither the same nor entirely different. Nevertheless, this capacity is manifest in things that are physical and have profile, things such as the building’s platform, its parapet roof, its tables, and its inscriptions. To describe the common basis of all of the marks within this range is not to say that they “perform” in the same ways, however. The figures inscribed on the Anavyssos mantelpiece are prominently displayed in the living room, taking the place of the smoke above the fire. You cannot enter the house without seeing them, and they arrest the view of anyone on the corner couch who is not asleep. This is less the case with the scratches on the walls of the house at Spetses, for they are spread out more or less uniformly across the building’s load-bearing surfaces, less like a badge or tag than a garment or woven covering. And there are differences in technique: at Anavyssos lines and shapes were cast into concrete, at Spetses they were incised in stucco; the first assumes foresight, because of the mold and two-step procedure, while the second assumes skill in spontaneous execution. The reflective distance that casting a design assumes has its parallel or complement in the detached regard occasioned by its topographical prominence. Both design and viewing testify to the existence of distance or light within the compact horizon they seek to disclose. So to ask again: what gives rise to this distance or light within the horizon? Within the physical body of the building the concrete slab of the mantelpiece is somewhat intrusive, for its other parts were altogether typical in their materials and methods of assembly. This is not to say this is the only appearance of this material; the entire underbelly of the roof reveals otherwise. But rarely does that surface appear as such, because the lateral entry of light leaves the ceiling in shadow. In none of the many vernacular fireplaces Kon234

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

stantinidis drew does such a mantelpiece appear. All the precedents have uniform surfaces, all are stucco on brick, like the Spetses example. Nor are the traditional cases so massive and possessed of such a wide opening, or such a broad beam that makes it possible. The mantelpiece interrupts the setting because it insists on showing itself to have resulted from a new way of building. In this it reminds me a great deal of the exposed structural beam Adolf Loos inserted into the portico of the Looshaus on Michaelerplatz in Vienna, from which the Tuscan columns were “hung.” There are no Tuscan columns in this case, but the marks this beam “supports” can be seen to have an analogous referent. Can one say that the advent of this instance of articulation is the intrusion of a new element or way of building into an economy of construction that had remote beginnings? Konstantinidis once wrote: “I can build with the most modern materials (iron, concrete, and with the ARTIFICIAL materials of contemporary building construction) [such that the building] will be related harmoniously with the character of the landscape.” He went on to say that this effort challenged his inventiveness. It also allowed him to actualize a “sentimental factor,” which, he said, “we must reveal in our construction, otherwise we shall be stagnant and inhuman.” If we are not to be content with the standards of economy and pure science, we must choose and shape materials “with the spirit of emotional freedom and artistic imagination.”15 This restates what has been said about the work of the craftsman, or the imagination that draws on sedimented experience or habituated knowledge of both a technical and cultural kind. The adoption of new materials gives rise to the workings of a creative intelligence that is waiting and prepared to (re)articulate the basic premises of its stratified knowledge. The occurrence of something disruptive is the occasion of articulation. Although similarly stratified, the knowledge that constitutes technical skill is not the same as that of cultural practice, and the exercise of the first does not necessarily deploy the second. Not every craftsman who stands within a cultural context remembers its premises in the performance of a given task. Likewise, or more impersonally, techniques can be effectively performed without regard to their cultural consequences. In much of modern 235

CHAPTER SIX

technology the relationship is not one of neglect but of complete subordination. This is because technique has a different kind of consequentiality. Habituation of any kind sustains repetition. What I have learned I can do again and again, repeatedly into an indefinite future. This is as true for cooking a meal as for celebrating one; likewise for building a roof and residing beneath one. Where the two differ, and this is an essential difference, is the kind of time in which each is accomplished. One can say that there is a time of sameness in technical work and one of similarity in cultural action, the first a “bad infinity,” the second not. The decisive issue in this distinction is how fully or completely the present is drawn back into the past, or, more basically, whether or not the distinction between now and then is allowed to exist.16 To say that technical skill is acquired over time is not to say that it unfolds in a differentiated continuum of before, now, and after. The opposite is true: technique annuls time for the sake of certainty. When skills are taught, instruction takes the form of a story, normally of a battle or contest. In traditional metaphysics this is rendered as the struggle between form and matter, which were sometimes described as light and dark. Yet, once acquired as a skill, a technical performance attenuates its narrative potential and takes on another form, that of something like a theorem or equation, one that demonstrates how these procedures equal those results. It is senseless to say that the time of such an equation is in the past, present, or future, because techniques yield the same results no matter when they are performed. There is, indeed, a time of technical performance, a before and after its accomplishment, but this does not qualify or alter the essentially ahistorical character of the act. From the vantage point of technical labor, the work of building a building is not the acting out of a story that greets anticipations with reversals of fortune, but an economy of internally coherent and mutually dependent operations that proceeds according to a plan, the foresight of which strives to be systematically complete, for on that certainty depends. The achronicity of planned building technique is the other side of its narrative poverty. Yet this lack is not disabling, for it both invites the work of absorbing the object resulting from technique into its (new) milieu, and inaugurates the object’s peculiar tempo-

236

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

rality: a temporality, even posterity, of sequential attunements guaranteed by the object’s very lack of concreteness. Cultural action, which for the moment I would like to limit to the habituated practices of residing, unfolds in another sort of time than that of technique, not of sameness but of similarity. Another way to make this distinction is to describe the time of dwelling practice as projective, not calculative. For any residential practice, traces of antecedent forms can always be observed in contemporary performances. The Greeks, said Konstantinidis, have always enjoyed sleeping outdoors; they are (which is to say always have been) a people who sleep in streets, on verandas, and on terraced roofs, under a light or heavy superstructure. Modern refugee shacks are only the most recent, if also the most eloquent, example of this traditional practice: “In their total form and aspect, these refugee shacks, with their open-air bedrooms, with their front porches and courtyards, strike us as the most authentic architecture fashioned by the modern Greeks.”17 I cannot imagine that this observation was warmly received by Konstantinidis’s professional colleagues, nor by those committed to neoconservative politics. Nevertheless, he maintained that these enclosures, and the practices they sustained, were authentically modern because they demonstrated vivid similarity to anteceding forms, forms that defined what is Greek about the Greeks. Similarity to antecedents is projective because the differences between current and earlier examples invite the redefinition of the former. The time of residing admits of renewal, which presumes discontinuities. The alternation between temporal discontinuity and continuity polarizes the past and the future by virtue of the uniqueness of the present. This polarity is never total, for orientation within the present presumes some continuity, some fusion with what once was. Rather than annulling time, as do technical performances, the events of cultural life actualize it in order to rebuild relevance. This is also the way these events engage the posterity of technical objects, craft- or machine-made. Perhaps this projective and recuperative temporality has already been indicated in what has been said about architectural topography. It is clear that the equipmental context of any interior setting sustains a sense of what has been, is being, and will be used. What is nearby or in hand is present in two 237

CHAPTER SIX

senses of that word: within reach and now available. Likewise, what is far off or remote is both spatially and temporally distant, not within reach and used some time ago or yet to be used. This is not to say that something remote in both of these senses is not “here,” just not here in the way things at hand are. It would be as wrong to describe the time in which I variously use the items of an equipmental context as a sequence of “nows” as it would be to describe the horizon within which this context spreads itself out as one composed of discrete locations. Nor is the actual or measurable distance between these items what is key. In the performance of any task, things that seem remote to an observer are often internal to the work being done. And just as this set of relationships raises havoc with naturalized conceptions of uniform space, it entirely disturbs assumptions about uniform time. The time of a practice— lived time—is not a line, not a sequential unfolding of momentary actualities, but a network or configuration of possibilities, all copresent but in different ways or to different degrees. The past is what is no longer pressing in on me, the present is what is absorbing my interest right now. The distance of the past from the present does not make it irretrievably remote, as if it were disconnected from all that is nearby, it merely puts it out of play for a while. There are two ways of being mistaken about history: one is to see it as something outside the present, what once was and is no longer, and the other is to view it as something that constitutes the present, what we are now within. The truth of the matter is that it is neither so far off nor so near. Similarly, the present is neither so empty nor so full. What has been described as the latency or potentiality of settings in shadow is nothing other than the present force of past events. Remembering the historicity of topography allows one to witness more clearly the play of its different forms of articulation. What has been, in an extended field, is the preparation for its reformation. Yet the sediment of past practices is never obtrusive; on the contrary, it is often only in faint traces that the history of occupation in a given region is apparent. For the continued life of habituated practices, vestiges are all that are required. Over time any one of these can be discovered to be inadequate, however. This can be the occasion of articulation because it represents a break or interruption in the dark con238

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

tinuum of the given. And this welcomes to the horizon the light of design. Just as the withdrawal of the inheritance permits unreflective participation, the obtrusion of the present animates production. One can say this withdrawal permits this production, just as shadows allow light and winter spring. When resting on the corner couch in the Anavyssos house, one could just as well overlook the marks on its mantelpiece and concentrate on the fire in the fireplace. My hunch is that this was often the case. At these times, most times, the inscription would recede into the very background it attempted to voice. Because this could occur, I want the markings in the sand to be washed away without entirely disorienting poor Aristippus. And because the landscape as given lacks the sorts of shade and shadow that signify civilized shelter, I would want a shipwrecked philosopher to notice other sorts of marks in the terrain that suggest a homeland. These marks would be the lines and angles of platforms and parapets. Seeing these, I think he could be no less heartened than when he fell upon geometrica schemata. Nor would he lack the confidence that he had landed on shores that had been walked on by others no less civilized than himself, thus another beginning. * The task of reconciling changed conditions with anteceding practices might be thought less difficult in a cultural context of less antiquity, that of the United States for example. In fact it is even more difficult. The Desert House that Richard Neutra built in Palm Springs for the Kaufmanns in 1946 received much attention when it was finished, and has once again attracted notice now that it has been beautifully restored. Yet there is one detail that seems to have escaped attention, one that can be seen as indicative of the building’s achievement and its failure. When the house is approached from the street, a line of paving stones set into the sandy soil leads up to the entrance gate. The gate itself is a thin metal framework attached to a dry-set flagstone wall that has all the opposite qualities, massive density and thickness. Passing through the gate you step 239

CHAPTER SIX

6.7

Desert House, Palm Springs, California, Richard Neutra, 1946. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.8

Desert House, Palm Springs, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

241

CHAPTER SIX

onto the part of the route I want to consider closely, the flooring of a threepart approach sequence: a set of slabs separated by thin strips of grass, a sheet of inscribed concrete, and the polished concrete of the living spaces. These three parts line up along a wall that turns the corner of the outlying portico and runs directly into the house, which is to say past the floor-to-ceiling glass wall and entry door. Because there is no frame around this door, nor the glass wall it abuts, one suspects Neutra wanted them to disappear, although he knew perfectly well that this would rarely occur because glass reflects shadows as often as it retreats into them.18 Nevertheless, granting the premise that the glazed entry is transparent, the route is defined by a continuous garden wall and a discontinuous set of paving surfaces, or, to be more exact, a set of surfaces that are transitional. This is not the only place in the house where such a transition occurs; the same sort of thing was set out on the patio platform, between the gallery and the guest quarters. In that case passage did not proceed along a massive wall but a canallike pool, perhaps the most artificial element of the site’s gardens, but one that also served as the base for ceilinghigh louvers that sheltered the interior against the heat and sand that would blow in from the desert and mountains nearby. But all of this only becomes significant after entry has occurred. The detail that has escaped the attention of the many historians and critics that have considered this project is the surface treatment of the entry paving, something easy to overlook because it is underfoot. It is also something that is barely obtrusive, perhaps too subtle to be largely significant, nothing more than a marginal marking. It becomes significant if seen to express or articulate the basic characteristics of the extended terrain—as did the marks on the mantelpiece of Konstantinidis’s Anavyssos house. In the first section, strips of grass divide the walk into separate panels, as if the grass that often grows in the cracks of concrete walks had become rather sure of itself and decided to linger for more than a while. From the vantage point of the pool, the lawn appears to be continuous, as if the walk were not there, or not there except for the covering provided by the cantilevered roof overhead. Moreover, the beginning of this path is concealed from most of the site by large bushes that block the view, hiding not only the gate but the 242

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.9

Desert House, Palm Springs, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

243

CHAPTER SIX

road and neighboring properties, but not the mountains in the distance. This works in reverse too: the pool and the main body of the house are not visible until half the walk has been traversed. But never is the walk’s continuity at risk, despite these grassy perpendiculars and lateral enclosures, for scratched into its concrete surface is a set of parallel lines that stretch forward into the interior ahead. This could have been done in either of two ways: saw-cutting after the concrete had set or inlaying lines in precast slabs. On Neutra’s drawings this is described as “ribbed concrete.” More vivid than these lines is the shadow line to the right, cast by the overhang above when the sun shines brightly, which often occurs. As the afternoon passes, the edge of this shadow drifts toward the lawn, letting each line in turn mark its passage, as if they were degree markings on a measuring device, the whole ensemble a clock or a calendar. The lines do more than measure the shadow’s progress, though; they also serve as its trace. And they link together the panels that had been separated by the green cuts, like rail lines over their ties. If for this reason the movement toward the door seems locomotive, it must be remembered that it is asymmetrically so, because never does the contrast between closure at the left and openness to the right become compromised by linear continuity. Another way to say this is that progress along these lines is slowed by marginalia, which have the function of conferring awareness but not full disclosure. In the vicinity of the doorway the character of the approach changes, slightly but significantly. First its slightness. The glass was not meant to be noticed: butt joints and recessed fasteners help toward that end. Further, the dry-set stone wall to the left continues past the glass, as do the planting bed and the lines along the floor’s surface. The ceiling, on the underside of the cantilevered roof, also continues past this point, its wooden strips paralleling those of the paving. Granting the transparency of the glass and visibility of these linear continuities, there are significant marks of transition: the passage darkens and the walking surface changes; the grass interruptions disappear and the concrete becomes a ground and polished surface, not one that was only acid-etched. These changes are significant because they show that a threshold has been crossed. Putting shadow in the place of shade played a strong part in this, as did the change from rough to smooth floor textures, but with a dif244

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

ference: while the continuity of darkness preserves traces of the exterior enclosure, the introduction of smooth surfaces initiates a clear sense of the interiors ahead. Thus, if the passage is transitional it is also synthetic, or approximately so, because it brings into close adjacency qualities that characterize distant locations. Earlier I described this as an intertwining, exchange, or convergence of characteristics otherwise dispersed throughout the horizon. But this intertwining is not simply continuing, the latter being what Wright attempted in the use of local materials inside his buildings. Nor is Neutra’s effort the same as Konstantinidis’s, for whom intertwining was both actual and analogical, the latter by virtue of the deep shadows that made entry temporarily disorienting. The set of lines that track this approach terminates at the place in the plan where one enters into the public rooms of the house. This involves a turn toward settings that had been glimpsed previously, toward interiors that are brighter than the one just gone through. Yet the transition is not abrupt because the floor surface continues, as does the material, with one slight difference: in place of smooth concrete is a polished and waxed finish. The line dividing the two would not be perceptible were the ambient light in the public rooms not so bright. What the shadow from the cantilevered roof was to the exterior passage, the light from the nearby patio is to this. This patio is the one mentioned earlier as a similar interweaving of panels and lawn, as if the route just completed were meant to continue beyond the interiors that have just presented themselves. Yet before that there is this barely perceptible line. Crossing it means entering the house. But at this exact point virtually nothing is apparent. If most entries advance their cause by increase, this one works in reverse, culminating in a lack. Where the door should be is only a minor modification of floor texture; all the other (traditional) elements of threshold have been dispersed into the terrain, marking its breaks and demonstrating its continuities. Finishes and surface marks are thus used to articulate terrain. It would be wrong, at least misleading, to call these marks “signs,” for attached to that term, and the semiotics it invites, is usually a sense of transparent indication that distorts the delayed kind of unfolding that occurs in this sequence and its 245

CHAPTER SIX

adherence to the expanded field. Nor would it be correct to say that these marks constitute something of a language, say Neutra’s language of form. If there is a linguistic analog for this kind of sense, it is in the humming of a wellknown tune, or in that kind of expression that allows the medium of expression to disappear in the performance of its task, as if words were allowed to be absorbed (back) into their sounds, or into the social situation in which the communication takes place. Along the approach to this house nothing that I have pointed out is apparent in itself; it is the business of description, not of spatial sense, to posit these identifications, for not one of these figures is so distinctive that it stands for all the rest, as an elected representative. More simply, there is no “representation” in this ensemble. But that is not to say it is not intelligible, nor that it does not confer orientation. The reverse is true: the aim and accomplishment of this kind of articulation is to integrate into one compact and concordant domain a terrain that is otherwise widely expansive and discordant. In this way finishes and inscriptions articulate topography. The opposite of this, a nontopographical sense of passage, can be obtained from within the kitchen. When standing in front of the countertop behind the sink, you can peek through a small hole in the wall and see all the way to the entry gate. Because this spot was one of many linked together by an intercom system based in the kitchen, this sight line was clearly designed for surveillance. Taking this view is like entering a perspective painting from behind in order to occupy its vanishing point, thus inverting the customary optic, or reversing the vantage set up by Brunelleschi’s famous model. But this quick view is just what the transitional synthesis accomplished by the entry passage attempted to slow down. Moving along the lines of the approach is like taking a local, not an intercity train; reading a novel, not viewing a film; naval embarkation, not arrival. The terrain through which this slower transit passed can be seen as two-part: the immediate vicinity of the house, which I suppose can be called a garden, and the surrounding desert, which includes mountains and blowing sand. If the house interiors are added to these two external parts, there are the same three “rings of distance” Neutra differentiated in his written arguments about the structure of the horizon. “The reach and power of our arms and legs have distinct . . . ranges. . . . Starting 246

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

from the near-by inner ring and proceeding outward through the middle [they] reach into the blue distance of the far and last horizon.”19 Onto these “zones of distance,” he continued, “conventionalized connotations have settled and sedimented,” forming something like a “sedimented pressure” that “molds quite a bit the social being and its designs.” He said little else about these “conventional connotations,” but it seems clear that customary distinctions between inside and outside would fall into that category, as would typical versions of the site-vicinity distinction. This house shows particularly clearly that near and far, like inside and outside, continually intersect one another in the practices of prosaic life, mixing together contents separated in conventional categories and disturbing naturalized assumptions about spatial structure. This is not to say that these ranges or rings of distance do not differentiate distinct territories. I have suggested that the canal along the edge of the dining patio is the garden’s most artificial element. This is because it houses just what the location lacks: water. Its capacity to put an end to the drift of sand (interrupted in this spot by the louvers) is both impressive and beautiful. But the pool, which was the first part of the project to be built (one Neutra himself seems to have enjoyed during site visits), is clearly an even more unlikely element in this desert landscape, and therefore even more artificial. Digging the pool inaugurated the project because it prompted a whole series of “insertions” into the region: “A building [in such a location] is frankly and clearly an artefact, a construct transported in many shop-fabricated parts over long distances into the midst of such rugged aridity. It is as little local as the much needed water which is piped to this site over many miles.”20 Water piped to the site from the mountains filled not only the pool and the canal but also the sprinklers and hoses that kept the garden growing. It was into the midst of “rugged aridity” that this oasis was inserted. Neutra often referred to the site as moonlike. Ranks two and three of the “rings of distance,” a verdant garden and the parched terrain, could not be more distinct. The same is true for the relationship between the interior and the exterior, rank one versus two and three. The sun bakes the entire terrain mercilessly. An interior in such a location is not some spot enclosed by four walls but 247

CHAPTER SIX

6.10

Desert House, Palm Springs, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

a place in the shade, a shadow, and the entry shadow was followed by others. Certainly enclosure was necessary at night. Neutra observed that when the sun was down the temperature could drop to nine degrees above zero. This partly explains the two fireplaces in the house and the building’s equipment that allowed heat to be stored, especially the floor.21 Nevertheless, he approached the problem of interior definition primarily as one of roof, ceiling, or overhang construction, as did Konstantinidis in the Greek landscape. (Of the two, Neutra was more dedicated to achieving transition and perceptible synthesis across this division. He wrote: “Generally, one can say that in tropical countries there is an indigenous disregard for sharp boundaries of indoors and outdoors, and this boundary is mostly defined by the outer edge or eave of the roof overhead.”22) When slabs were raised and shadows cast, enclosures were made; but these were unenclosed enclosures. Because it was dark and cool, being within such a space was radically different from being within the open expanse. Just 248

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.11

Desert House, Palm Springs, Richard Neutra. Photo Julius Shulman.

CHAPTER SIX

6.12

Desert House, Palm Springs, Richard Neutra. Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

as the other two ranks were entirely distinct from one another, the “interiors” were kinds of territory wholly separate unto themselves. Yet many intersections were constructed. Much has been written about spatial crossovers under the heading of “flowing space.” The overlapping, perhaps displacement, of landscape elements is also obvious: boulders on a green lawn, a green lawn in a desert. And the tectonic or structural exchanges have been noted: the mix between balloon frame and cantilever construction, or the conflation of aluminum and wooden window elements.23 Lastly, there has been some attention to the thermal exchanges effected by the building, through the circulation of heated or cooled water beneath its slabs and in some of its exterior walls. Apparently, the circulation of chilled water rarely worked, if at all. Yet this thermal kind of interweaving interests me most, partly because it is invisible and unobtrusive, partly because of the way Neutra seems to have thought about it. He chose a rather unlikely place, a paper on insulation, to outline his philosophical anthropology: “Our life is fundamentally a heat energy process; through the days and years, we experience time through it, we grow and mature, we age, and we finally cease to be, while the heat transfers go on. One could be quite philosophical about Life, Time and Heat. Surely an architect is not only a visual artist. He deals with life as a whole.”24 Although insulation may seem a rather pedestrian subject, it was for Neutra decisive in accounting for spatial definition, even its articulatory or narrative function. Another paper, titled “Man’s Place Was South,” began with a characterization of winter temperatures as “traumatic.”25 Neutra mentioned Freud but quickly left him behind and turned to his own applied biology, which included “all the psychology which breaches out from temperature and climate.” To the degree that this breach extended to topography, it could be said that Neutra attempted to update Hippocrates, who linked ethos and topos in Airs, Waters, and Places, a text (and a linkage) that guided Vitruvius in his treatment of these issues, as it did so many architect-authors to follow. Yet Neutra’s accent was on neither air nor water but heat, its transfer or passage and storage. In cold climates the objective of shelter was to compensate for thermal deficiency. This lack was complemented psychologically by an abundance of “wintertime memories”—which were both traumatic and indelible. 251

CHAPTER SIX

The aim of construction was to store up or to “treasure” heat because it was scarce and prone to dissipate. Earlier I called this “banking” heat. The body also produced its own, and this had to be preserved, which gave purpose and dimension to architectural enclosure: “Spaces never were liked when they exceeded the size that could be brought up to a comfortable temperature.” In this winter regimen visual pleasures had little part to play, nor was daylight prized: a home was for hibernation. The advent of springtime, however, was the occasion for outdoor life and assembly, and this gave rise to a festive sense of community, the seasonal recurrence of which answered wintertime hopes. In warm climates all of this was largely absent: the traumatic character of winter memory, the sense of heat as a treasure, and the festive and social meaning of seasonal change. Substituting for walls were roofs or “levels” of all sorts. Where uprights were to be found these would be screens, which were able to modulate air passage, interrupting the flow of sand and rain, or at least filtering it out of its conveyor. Where walls did have a place it was for storage of perishables or as tombs—again, concerns of memory. Everyday life, by contrast, was lived in the open. Assembly outdoors was not occasional but routine; “as a matter of fact, most craftwork and housework activities [were] pursued in plain view of everybody . . . all year round.” Residing on porchplatform dwellings, “humanity is in a continuous shindig which is the neighborhood, so to speak, unless a person happens to lift a reed curtain to disappear for a moment in the ‘interior’ of his abode.” Yet while open-air commerce here was everyday, assembly for significant purposes was occasional, marked by special forms of “dance, attire, masks, feathers, drums . . . etc.” Social articulation in this context thus had as its occasion two occurrences: retreat into an “interior,” and the meeting or crossover of people and places that had been dispersed in the open. The same was true for buildings in these areas. Can Neutra’s Desert House be understood in the light of this anthropology: as an orchestration of heat exchange and the sense of neighborhood associated with it? Considering Palm Springs, at least, one’s first suspicion is that it cannot. The sense of neighborhood he described would seem to be decidedly lacking. Nevertheless, there is in this building considerable openness. Everything sustains continuity: most of the uprights are screens or modulat252

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

ing devices, and all of the horizontals are either shading or gathering platforms. Thick walls do exist, for primary enclosure: arrival, housing the fire, the seclusion of private functions, and the storage of perishables. The most vivid examples of openness would include the “gloriette” and the several settings linked together along the diagonal from the entry point near the canal, through the living room, to the pool. Examples of enclosure and storage would include the settings along the opposite diagonal (a diagonal one cannot traverse because it includes enclosures), from the recessed corner of the living room, through the large storage closet, and then from one dressing room to the other. An outward and relatively secret view from the last of these, Mr. Kaufmann’s dressing room, demonstrates the contrast between the enclosed and open types very clearly, for this interior, which is as compact, cool, and shaded as one might expect, first gives onto a window-side garden, then a patio/lawn, bordered by the canal/sun screen edge, and finally onto a mountainous prospect, altogether a terrain that is entirely the opposite of the interior: expansive, bright, and baking hot. It is a bullet of a view that speeds through wholly discordant aspects of the topography, as did the reverse (peephole) view of the approach sequence, neglecting the balance between ambient and desired spaces, their materials, and temperatures. The task or aim of designing such a balance was not the elaboration of existing or local conditions, preserving the environmental status quo, nor the insertion of materials and settings that “belonged” elsewhere, forsaking the given on behalf of the constructed, but the construction of an equilibrium between the two, between native and imported conditions, an equilibrium made all the more difficult because Neutra selected and elaborated the most discordant of elements. Thermal crossover was the aim and test of this building, just as it was of Neutra’s anthropology. The passage from warm to cool, or from bright to dark, was not his invention, however, for this was vividly prefigured in the landscape: “Reflected brilliance on sand or practically any ground surface is very high and brightness differentials on the shaded rockside are drastic but highly characteristic for the clean air.”26 Perhaps my use of the term “passage” overstates what occurred in this location, for the concept of “brightness differentials” and Neu253

CHAPTER SIX

tra’s characterization of them as “drastic” suggests something other than transition, let alone synthesis. The natural shift from warm to cool in this landscape was no less dramatic than that from light to dark in the Greek context I described earlier. And in this location, as in that, the change occurred on a daily basis. Seasonally too. Thus Neutra’s observation quoted above: “Through the days and years, we experience time through [the exchange of temperatures], we grow and mature, we age, and we finally cease to be.” This suggests that the task of an architectural work such as the Desert House is to give durable dimension to the sorts of exchange that are prefigured or prearticulated in the landscape, differentiating their passage in degrees that can be coordinated with the several temperatures of dwelling practices. For the building to give voice to a style of life lived in the open, it must do so in the time of this passage. Much of Neutra’s written work could be read to suggest that he saw architectural design as a kind of applied climatology. All the instances of his insistent (and I confess, largely uninspiring) biologism can be seen in this way. And one could interpret his buildings similarly, as if the true test of any solution were its environmental performance. But in such statements he distorted the actual richness and difficulty of his work, approximating the kind of environmental positivism offered by the conservative versions of contemporary ecology. Some of Neutra’s arguments for “biorealism,” and his interest in methods of explanation that were then thought to be scientific, are opposed by another line of thought that appears in his writing. Speaking of the “intuitive arts” in a remarkable paper entitled “‘Scientism’ and Art in a Social Architecture,” Neutra warned that “if we deny their concrete value in our childish belief that the sole and universal redemption comes from masquerading as scientific searchers and systematicians—then heaven have mercy [on the] post-war world and our hopes for it.”27 He admitted that this argument could be taken as criticism of his own work and his method, which was perhaps too often like that of an engineer. He claimed that he was, nevertheless, “aware of a host of non-scientific influences on [his] work which so far vainly challenged [his own] rational analysis.” He said also that, “however [much] scientific systematics and information may increase and multiply in 254

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

scope, there still remains an immense field beyond their fluid boundaries, with chains of essential events and with vital parts of our civilization playing just in that field beyond.” While this other terrain could be interpreted as the domain of aesthetic experience, some of his comments suggest that it was also the landscape of practical, social, and historical life. Sensitivity to this “play” and to its “chains of essential events” was a matter of intuition, for which little rational explanation could be discovered. It is worth remembering that his first English-language book was titled The Mystery and Realities of the Site. Despite this recommendation of intuition, of sedimented culture, and the somewhat narrower claims about neighborhood in warm climates, there would seem to have been in the Desert House little of the play of civilization that these passages suggest. This is not only because the Kaufmanns occupied the residence in January and February only, when Bear Run was much too wintry; but also a matter of the building itself, and the life it accommodated, which has been described as one of hedonism.28 The “play” envisaged for the Desert House seems to have been one of different degrees of concordance and discordance between the sort of characters that could be found in the physical terrain, those that were subject to “scientific” description. Yet this absence of cultural content may be more a function of the site’s “barren” characteristics than of the building’s. Was the site so barren? Perhaps we tend to see it that way because we accept what Neutra wrote about it—writing that was calibrated to testify to the difficulty of the undertaking, writing that initially constituted, then exaggerated, the great conflict between nature and art in order to praise the way it had been overcome. In what did the barrenness of the site consist? The site with which Konstantinidis worked at Anavyssos was bereft of identifying marks, composed of little more than dry sand from which traces of civilization had been washed away. Yet that architect, like his favorite novelist Kazantzakis, saw his site, or saw sites of its kind, as the sediment of the twelve ages of Greek history—despite the fact that there were no obvious signs of such a history. Certainly there were no signs of such a history in the “moonlike” terrain Neutra took as the subject matter of his project. This is entirely in keeping with the presumed “modernity” of America, at least the America portrayed in that 255

CHAPTER SIX

body of avant-garde writing that saw it as a land unencumbered by the sort of past that had impeded progressive work in Europe. Because we assume that “nothing” was there in the Colorado Desert, we tend to conclude with Neutra that the patterns of existence that were “found” there were established or made anew as the framework for contemporary dwelling practices. This leads to a question: does this retrospective reconstruction not always occur in site interpretation, no matter in what region it happens to be, whether it happens to be located in the venerable landscape of Greece or in the “virgin land” of the United States? Is this establishment of a past by means of a present not just what Konstantinidis did at Anavyssos; was not his, too, an instance of productive work that disclosed the very contextuality it acknowledged? There were no visible traces of the glory that was Greece on the windswept shores at Anavyssos. The past to which he conformed was one made visible by his building. With this as an example, would it not be reasonable to propose that conformity to topographical history is always fictive, always an “as if” with respect to a past that cannot be demonstrated precisely because it is past? And if this seems reasonable, can one not also say that every inheritance is not something given but an accomplishment? If this is so, if this sense of productive making can be taken as an adequate way of considering design in the Greek (so-called historical) context, then perhaps something similar can be seen in the American (so-called ahistorical) one; suggesting that the Desert House, too, gave voice to sedimented patterns of residing by remaking them in the light of local conditions and current desires. The premise would be that in architecture no site is truly a tabula rasa, that within the economy of a project there is no such thing as “nature,” or what “nature” there is is never a condition but always a hypothesis, one that serves to assimilate historical variations. The whole matter turns on how one understands the trace presence of sedimented patterns. Said otherwise, the question hinges on how one understands the prefiguration of patterns of occupation in the landscape “as given.” Whatever patterns are discerned, construction will be necessary if their forms are judged to be inadequate to present requirements, for the task of architecture is to reconfigure whatever has been inherited in the light of changed conditions. 256

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

What is “given” in a location? In his publications Neutra identified matters of fact: quantities of sunlight, of humidity, of wind, and so on. He also described the effects of these phenomena: baking, corrosion, erosion, etc. The shift from phenomena to their effects is decisive, for it initiates a passage from the present moment in which facts present themselves to an extended temporal horizon, for every effect is played out over time. “Given” in the landscape is a temporal unfolding, a schedule of alteration, or a chronological variation. This could be called a tendency. Earlier, in consideration of architecture’s gnomic function, I described this variation as an intertwining of what is apparent and what is withdrawn, what appears in the light of the present and what recedes into the shadow of the past. I now want to say that every site or location is both this visibly manifest present and this quietly withdrawn past, even if few traces of the past are apparent, no matter whether the site is in the desert extending westward from the Colorado or on the shores of Attica arising out of the sea. This is to say, first, that every site has its own history, and, second, that the subject matter of that history is recessive and grasped only through interpretation. Because of this remoteness, the past is always a hypothetical construction, approximately groundless, which is why every contextualization is an “as if,” a projection of what may well have been the case some time before, and why such an interpretation can never be proven, although it can be shown to be more or less probable. The best interpretation, suggests Hans Georg Gadamer, is the one that is inferior to none other in likelihood. When Neutra wrote that peoples throughout the world in warm climates have always lived on platform-porch dwellings, he was arguing for the probability of his interpretation of that past, not the more local past of his site in the Colorado Desert but of places like it, and not the personal past of the individuals who happened to be his clients but of people like them. The “terrain” to which design assimilates itself is, thus, not only physical—in fact, there is in architecture no such thing as “the physical”—but also and inescapably analogical. Before design can accomplish definition, it must attempt interpretation; in fact, the two are really one task. Yet Neutra’s interpretation of the analogous landscape did not ignore the particular interests of the Kaufmanns nor the characteristics of their site; rather it used them as a lens 257

CHAPTER SIX

through which similar situations could be envisaged. In the discourse of architectural theory, we have inherited and tacitly accepted the distinction between natural and human history: the first being the object of scientific study, the second of interpretation. In consideration of the work of Konstantinidis and to a lesser degree of Neutra, however, we need to rethink this easy distinction and see some common ground between the time of the land and that of the practices it accommodates, for only then will we be able to see how design reconfigures what it inherits, and how articulation rises out of a past that conceals in its depths the intertwined patterns of practices and places. Neutra always described the Desert House as a “research” project, suggesting that it presented in clear and irreducible form a solution to a problem that is essential in architecture. I have described this as the difficulty of discovering traces of civility in places that seem indifferent to it. In his other projects, those that were sited in locations that were less “lunar,” this task was more manageable and the articulations that resulted are more eloquent, although they do not have the same aesthetic appeal. The case I want to consider last is one I have introduced earlier in this book: the nursery and kindergarten Neutra built on the edge of the UCLA campus beginning in 1957. In that case the cooperation of natural and social history in the time of articulation is more clearly apparent. To say that this school was built at the edge of the UCLA campus is to name only half of its site; on the building’s back side there was a terrain that was just as formative in the development of the design: a rugged slope into a ravine with a small stream at its base and giant redwoods as its crown. The two, the street at the front and landscape behind, are strikingly different in a number of ways. First in their sectional geometry: the street slopes relatively uniformly and slightly from side to side, while the landscape behind falls rather dramatically in the opposite direction. The patterns of movement in the regions of each face are also conflicting: on the street side two drives and three sidewalks allow traffic to flow in lines parallel to the edge of the building; on the landscape side movement from the building is directed outward by equally spaced perpendiculars that lead to a playing field and then toward steps down into the ravine or to the footbridge across it. When these two 258

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

topographical types are combined, one can see in the vicinity as a whole characters in opposition or conflict: a front that consists of layers of lateral passage and a back that includes various stages of descent. The building’s plan and section integrated these conditions by taking as much from the built world as from the unbuilt wood. For example: at the front the geometry and movements of the street, Sunset Boulevard, are absorbed into the facade insofar as it consists of two lines of passage (an external and an “internal” sidewalk) and three strata of topographical extension (a planted base with a partition screen behind, strip windows, and a cantilevered roof overhead), while at the back the ascent from the ravine is leveled off to form a playground, but then allowed to continue into the interior through the broad openings of the porches and the floor-to-ceiling glazing of the classrooms themselves. The central passageway through the building integrates the conflicts presented by the site into a twisted coordination of the building’s distinct setting types. But to say that the building absorbed into its form the characteristics of the ambient conditions is to neglect or to distort the divergence it represents. The typical forms of fronts and backs have been displaced into their opposite situations. The rhythmic regularity and repetition that might be taken as typical of a front are located at the back, and the heterogeneity and nearly domestic particularity one commonly associates with a back are found at the front. If one wants to observe that the building absorbs into its section and plan geometries and patterns that are “given” in the location, one must also say that this is done through redefinition, that available conditions have been acknowledged insofar as they have been remade according to the interests of the building itself. The building houses a nursery and kindergarten. This use type occupied Neutra’s attention throughout his career. In addition to the number of projects he designed, he wrote about the institution on many occasions, and in his unpublished papers there are many more documents that testify to his continued concern. Much of this work was directed toward the advancement of the “horizontal school.” If the later popularity of the “California school” is taken as an index of success, one can say that his efforts were not without con259

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

6.13 (opposite)

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, 1957. Photo Julius Shulman. 6.14

Nursery-Kindergarten, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander.

261

CHAPTER SIX

sequence. Perhaps it is unhelpful to repeat the truism that people get interested in schools and schooling when they give up on existing conditions, that when nothing can be done to improve the present one concentrates on the future; yet this sentiment was widespread in postwar America, and seems relevant. In 1946 Neutra observed: “It [the renewal of education] will have to be recognized as a first rate service to the nation, and certainly the most momentous thing we can do for our young generation, which will be the next one of adult, unwarped, constructive and co-operatively-minded citizens.”29 It seems there was considerable dissatisfaction with inherited educational methods. Neutra never tired of criticizing previous methods and the setting in which they were typically housed—the multistory block, which was the sort of building in which he had been educated, one that had as its most memorable characteristic a rather disagreeable smell: “I don’t remember how my schoolroom looked as to visual detail, but I have only again to encounter that sour smell, and after 60 years I know at once, that’s it!”30 There was, no doubt, more on his mind when he planned the “horizontal school” than the prevention of this memory, but this was not unimportant; or perhaps it is better to say it became something of a symbol of what he sought to replace: fossilized compartments that stifle the growth of individuals and social groups. In a paper published the year the Nursery-Kindergarten was finished, he differentiated three kinds of learning: introspection (exemplified by the Buddha under a mango tree), observation (or the inquisitive habit of anyone from a shepherd to a scientist wondering about the stars), and dialectic (the practice of Socrates in the marketplace). All three were ways that individuals could come to “know themselves,” the first and last aim of education and understanding, or “mental exfoliation,” for even in the encounters of a group, individuals define themselves by discovering the ways they differ from others and the ways they are the same. It may be that individuality arises out of such encounters, that the first presumes the second as its antecedent condition, that intersubjective relationships are the practical and ontological basis for uniqueness, or at least coterminous with it. I mean this anthropologically and architecturally. For Neutra, understanding the advent of uniqueness and its essential engagements was important. Despite the differences between intro262

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

spection, observation, and dialectic, he thought they worked similarly to reveal to an individual his or her place in the world, a world that was not only social but natural: “There is only one world and one natural landscape which transcends our skin and penetrates through it.” The task of school architecture is to configure settings that sustain these individual and social kinds of learning, while recognizing their cooperative adherence to the encompassing horizon. Where does learning occur, or under what conditions is this “mental exfoliation” likely to happen? The answer is not a space under a roof bounded by four solid walls and housing an audience before a blackboard, or not only that, or not that as a permanent condition. When describing the framework and schedule of learning in the “horizontal school,” Neutra often referred to “outdoor classrooms.” “Each interior classroom [should be] practically duplicated in floor area by an outdoor classroom, into which it opens by means of a wide glass door sliding under a roof overhang.” One might reasonably assume that these might be best for the “observational” kind of learning, but Neutra suggested that they were settings for each of the three types, as were interior rooms. And learning was to occur also in the more remote reaches of the terrain, down the slope, into the ravine, and under the redwoods, beyond the proper limits of the school building. He pointed to the landscape as the horizon of learning, just as he identified it as the framework for life itself: “One landscape . . . extends through your epidermis right into your core, and an architecture [has the task of] fitting your desired structure into this total natural landscape which is at any moment of life partly inside of you and partly outside.” Engagement in the extended horizon was a matter of cognitive and physical well-being. If the social and historical elements of this “landscape” are omitted, we have nothing more than a restatement of the enlightenment or Rousseauian version of education in nature. Neutra verges toward this, but also suggests there is more to learning than self-discovery. Neutra was hardly the only architect who saw school design as a matter of nourishing the growth of healthy minds and bodies. In a paper published in 1935 he referred to the Open Air School that Jan Duiker had built in Amsterdam seven years earlier, a building he had visited.31 Duiker’s first design for an open school was on the grounds of the Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hil263

CHAPTER SIX

versum. While Neutra cited the Amsterdam school as a precedent for the use of heating panels in the ceiling, a technique of thermal transfer that allowed for the horizontal extension of classrooms, it was also celebrated as a school that nourished the physical health of the children. Duiker himself stressed this: “Our approach towards life in the fresh air will be on a higher plane. Modern techniques permit the restriction of material to a minimum and make it possible for us to warm such spaces, which are almost entirely open, without any difficulty, so that children need only [be] very lightly clad to spend their time here! Which was indeed what was intended, from a medical point of view.” He even went so far as to predict a new form of architecture on this basis: “It is a strong hygienic power that is influencing our life; one which will develop into a style, a hygienic style!”32 This was not new, it had been attempted in the nineteenth century, nor was Duiker the only architect to design open schools in the interwar period: Bruno Taut’s 1927 project for a Municipal School at Berlin-Neukölln has a wall section that is virtually identical to Neutra’s later designs, to the Nursery-Kindergarten in particular. An equally relevant example is the école en plein air in Suresnes designed by Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin in 1935, particularly the glass wall, not on one side but three! Closer to Neutra geographically is the California example of Irving Gill, who had developed a design that approximated the open type in his school at Oceanside, built in 1931, with a central courtyard into which classrooms opened. Yet, given these precedents and his own projects from the thirties, the projects that were part of the Rush City Reformed urbanism, Neutra’s approach to school design and to the openness it required was particular, especially in its coordination of learning with landscape, or selfdiscovery with the wide horizon, on the premise that dialectical participation in the extended terrain is the profound basis for the development of an individual. Could the same be said for his architecture: that the development of a single building presumes integration into its topography? To suggest this would be to reduce the role of different use types in the development of different spatial types, suggesting that one, the school, is the key to the formation of them all. Yet this proposition seems worth considering, for much of 264

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

Neutra’s writing suggests that he saw the investigative and interactive sort of conduct that typified learning as a key to the horizonal character of spatial understanding and orientation. He seems to have taken the nondepartmental character of the open-air school as a model for various kinds of buildings, precisely because it shows in clear and condensed form how every localized configuration arises out of a field that transcends it, as does the individual person and community. Still, the accent on openness neglects the fact that there is much spatial separation in this building, and that its interiors are decisively walled in. If the Montessori style of learning depends on the child’s own selection and investigation of educational subject matter, it also assumes the monitoring function of the teachers. Otherwise they would be unable to assist the child’s “play.” Much of the walling in this school accommodates these functions: enclosures serve as the storage space for the building’s “treasures” and as the vantage points taken up by parents and teachers. In fact, openness and enclosure seem entirely dependent on one another here, so much so that children could not have taken advantage of the extended terrain had it not been allowed to preserve some settings that were closed in on themselves. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the sloping terrain is that it ends in wooded darkness, as remote from the classroom as from the teachers. The filigree of shadows that plays across the surface of the sandboxes foreshadows this enclosure at its base. Along the stream or under the footbridge the children retreated into settings that were as important in their education or their play as both the interior and open-air classrooms, even though the withdrawn settings had just the opposite spatial character. And likewise for the building as a whole. As much as one is inclined to focus on the building’s back, its delaminated construction, perforations, and spatial continuities, because they show so clearly the topography of nondepartmental learning, the front of the building, the side that engages the street, is just as formative in its design. It is on the edge of a campus and engages that situation by aligning its parallels with those of the streets and walks. While this side, too, has its measure of openness, it is remarkable for the number of discrete settings it carves out of the public expanse. Were one 265

CHAPTER SIX

to take an unlikely approach, cutting across traffic along a perpendicular line from the campus side of the street toward the building, one would cross several streams of passage that become increasingly more private and enclosed as they approach the classrooms: after the street the tree lawn, then the parking area, then the access drive, and then the public sidewalk, which is lined by planting that borders the ramp under the cantilevered canopy which gives onto the doors that finally open into the classrooms. The last of these layers, the ramp, is not only the most private and protected but also the most shaded, first by the canopy, then by the hedges that rise out of the planting bed, and finally by the thin screen that stands behind them. These screens block the afternoon sun and restrict the passage of light to the level of the windows in the upper third of the classroom wall. The entire enclosure (ramp, planting bed, sunscreen, and canopy) defines a setting within the thickness of the facade, which is to say the differentiated layers that occupy the intersection between the drive and the classroom, with the sidewalk on its outer side and the blackboards on its inner edge, just beneath the raised windows. As such, the classroom is an enclosed setting inserted into the midst of an extended horizon that serves the same purpose as the “enclosure” at the bottom of the ravine: both are interiors built out of a dialectical encounter. I believe Neutra would have expected the children to learn as much from the “world” condensed into this setting as they would have from those enclosed far away in the distant reaches of the wood. Shaded spaces made out of crossovers built out of the extended terrain are where the school actually begins, even though they are remote from its interiors. Architectural definition starts in the folds of the terrain. Articulation is a function of topographical intertwining or reversal, not only of settings that are enclosed or shaded in those that that are open and bright, but also of those that are introspective in ones that are dialectical or those that are private in the midst of those that are social. Passage through the building is a sequence of recurring confrontations with these reversals; the narrative it tells is the story of these encounters, for they give voice to the emergence of a child just as they show the existence of a distinct spatial character. Had they been designed as territories unto themselves, neither these enclosures nor this 266

T H E P L AY O F A RT I C U L AT I O N

openness would have sustained such an emergence; the first would have merely preserved difference, the second sameness, neither of which would have made for genuine singularity that holds the promise of participation. The schedule of this participation, and of these reversals, is no less historical than it is temporal. In the ravine and on the sidewalk, children found not only enclosed and shaded settings for play but also traces of conduct that prefigured their own. Were there visible signs of conduct? What was inscribed there? This is the same question I asked of the house in the desert, and of that on the shore. Certainly something was visible in the location, and what was there was understood to be the occasion for certain performances. Was it a language, a set of figures? If so, and I doubt it, the background of these figures would interest me more, particularly insofar as it would have been the subject matter of marginal communication or of topographical sense. Conduct, like the individuality it constitutes, produces traces of performance as much as it discovers them. I do not believe that this setting, or any other in the building, exhibited (or was meant to exhibit) anything like linguistic transparency, nor can I say for certain that the shallow stream at the bottom of the ravine was meant to present itself as an invitation to the work of dam building; nevertheless, no one would be surprised to discover that this year’s group of girls and boys attempted their own sort of civil engineering in that spot, nor that it was the place where a little of their classroom knowledge of geometry and mathematics was applied, perhaps even their social science. Nor do I doubt that last year’s group dedicated themselves to the same industry. The stream is the occasion of this work, this learning and application, just as the hillside is of another, likewise the playground, the classroom, the sidewalk, and the street. Each setting prefigures performances, and performances of different kinds. That is the definition of a topographical setting. Further, every performance testifies to the openness of a recurring human situation, while also giving relative constancy to cultural patterns. The history of dam building on this site, or the invitation to such a task, is there but just beneath the surface of what is outwardly apparent. The task of design is to indicate this depth, while allowing it to remain remote. Architecture is a quiet presence, a taciturnity or resolute tranquillity that Louis Kahn exaggerated in 267

CHAPTER SIX

his musings on silence. The immensity he sought in silence is, perhaps, to be found in the land, or the earth: the field after harvest, or the commercial heart of the city on a Sunday morning. There is, no doubt, a quiet that accompanies the retreat of typical forms of engagement, and it is this that serves as the background for their resumption, safeguarding the freedom that is essential in human affairs. This background or quiet is also what sustains the articulation that is proper to architecture; for while it does, indeed, voice stories, it does so with great reserve. One can even say that architecture is this reserve, no less so than the terrain it crystallizes, for both conceal as much as they express. This is not to say the “engineering” history this ravine narrates is located in some place other than that narrow and shallow spot in the valley, nor that the children who continued this work remembered previous efforts, nor that they took traces of past performances as anything like an explicit pretext for their own. To say a setting has both a present and a past is to observe nothing more than its historical stratification, the layers of which are neither transparent nor opaque, neither immediate nor remote; simply, they are actualized when taken up in a spontaneous act that has no obligation to its past other than the rehabilitation of performances it discovers to be inadequate. Were the stream, the hillside, the yard, or the street exactly what they had been before these children arrived at the school, antecedent practices would not have required renewal. But the first principle of terrain is its continued alteration or self-transformation. Articulations arise because the topographical conditions that sustain them are never quite what they had been before, never quite right for what needs to be done. This makes every site “as given” a task, just as it gives to design its beginning.

268

7

CONCLUSION You said, “I will go to another land, to another sea. Another city will be found, a better one than this . . .” You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas. The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods; and you will grow gray in these same houses. Always you will arrive in this city . . . c o n s ta n t i n e c ava f y, “ t h e c i t y ”

An unnamed street market was used by Aris Konstantinidis to illustrate a construction that was “profoundly Greek in spirit, appearance, plasticity, and artistic wisdom.”1 He took the picture two years before the end of the Second World War, having returned to Greece in 1938 after leaving Germany, were he had studied. The market, located somewhere in Athens, was one of the “elements” presented in the book that do not initially seem well suited to the purpose of describing what is “profoundly Greek,” as long as that phrase is taken to mean designed by an architect from that country or typical of anything that could be seen as a national style. Other such examples are the “refugee shacks” he photographed and drew repeatedly. Literary passages from texts by non-Greeks appeared in his account, centrally and repeatedly. Hence a French traveler: “Would you like to see the Greek people in its truest aspect? Take a walk along the streets. The Greeks have always lived out of doors.”2 The key situations of this people and place are unenclosed: under a roof, raised on a platform, with particularly permeable edges. Examples include not only refugee shacks but also greengrocers’ stalls, constables’ huts, shaded dining terraces, and the “canvas awnings covering the tables and stalls and barrows [in street markets] on which wandering peddlers display their wares.” In each instance one can see what is 269

CHAPTER SEVEN

7.1

Street market, Athens, 1943. Photo Aris Konstantinidis.

“communal” and “primary.” Greeks love to sleep outdoors, also to trade in the open and to talk on the street. He did not neglect ancient temples and other well-known sites in his book, but used them to argue different points; on the terrain of human affairs, prosaic examples were key. They exemplified the “ordinary and essential.” Nor did he emphasize the sorts of places illustrated in the surveys of vernacular and “primitive” architecture undertaken by writers such as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Bernard Rudofsky.3 Konstantinidis’s examples generally lack the premodern purity of the settlements they depicted. His earlier books on the villages of Mykonos and old Athenian houses are closer to those authors in both subject matter and intention, but not exactly the same, or do not demonstrate the same desire. They are even farther from the studies of traditional architecture undertaken by nationalistic German authors in the 1930s. He does not seem to have longed for “pure manifestations of the spirit” untainted by contemporary culture and prosaic affairs, as I believe these others did; instead, he focused on settings that were more or less pedestrian and unobtrusively interwoven into everyday praxis, even if their currency was long-standing. When he referred to “the Greeks” it was not 270

CONCLUSION

aboriginal peoples that he had in mind, nor the most celebrated voices of Greek (Western) civilization, Plato and Pericles for example. He included them, but not especially reverently. It is better to think of “the Greeks” to whom he referred as his typical contemporaries, Europeans perhaps, neighbors; individuals who happened to be living there then, who needed neither naming nor mythologizing to merit attention; individuals who only incidentally may have had ancestry that stretched back to classical and Paleolithic times, for they may also have been (war) refugees or from elsewhere in Europe or still farther away. Ancestry neither validated nor reduced the relevance of its modern descendants. Likewise for the buildings and sites he called Greek; the Erechtheion was not privileged as an element of selfknowledge, instead this unnamed street market. Although Konstantinidis often described such settings as “anonymous,” namelessness was not their key characteristic, nor that they were unknown; in fact the opposite was important, they were well known, but in a preprofessional way, as a consequence of regular use. Despite this prosaic sort of awareness, these settings were neglected by contemporary architects and critics. Because they had forgotten what was ordinary, they lacked “self-knowledge.” Hence the turn to buildings constructed by refugees, those that accommodated the needs of wandering peddlers, and the ones described by foreign travelers, for they revealed what was particular about ways of living there. Architecture thus situated was often, and paradoxically, unnamed and inconspicuous, migratory and transient. The elements of street market architecture include the table, stall, awning, and cable supports. For an architect this would seem to be entirely sufficient, for the list includes exactly what one would specify in design: tectonic order. But to assume the adequacy of these things or this kind of order in design understanding is to neglect the relationships between the project and the cultural practices it seeks to accommodate and adorn. This neglect, or the abstraction it invokes, may seem to be acceptable from a technical or methodological point of view, that of normative typology, for example, but it distorts Konstantinidis’s intention and abbreviates his understanding. While it is correct to say that he photographed and wrote about built elements, the 271

CHAPTER SEVEN

truth of the matter is that his aim was to present instruments (symbols) of “self-knowledge,” which were also “ways of living.” Certainly he was interested in type, but even more in what was typical in human situations, or how the first could serve as a relatively permanent articulation of the second. This complicates matters because it adds to issues of (analytical and design) method matters of practical understanding and cultural interpretation, which is to say it joins to technical procedures ethical decisions, supplementing (and limiting) what one knows to be possible with what one believes is right. At the very least, Konstantinidis’s desire to describe ways of living suggests that a technical or tectonic account of these settings is insufficient for architectural and cultural understanding. In order to consider what he left unsaid, I want to describe the relationships between these elements of construction and the modes of existence they imply, and do this by looking again at the images he presented. Before beginning, let me state a hermeneutical principle: from no account of this kind can one’s own sense of settings be excluded. I start, as he did, with the material aspects of urban topography. The tables on which these market transactions take place stand under awnings that are supported by ropes stretching between stakes in the ground and hooks in first-floor cornices. The tables also occupy part of the sidewalk, and are thus stationed in between the roadway that occupies the image’s foreground and the interiors in its depth. The roadway is baked by an intense sunlight that is combated by the awnings. The interiors, on the other side of the stalls, fold into their shadows more individual and discrete performances, about which nothing is immediately apparent. Two men in the foreground cast shadows at the edges of what we see. Nothing of their conduct is unclear, nor particularly intriguing: cigarettes, newspaper, and a carrying basket. Nor is there any reason to assume the two have had anything to do with one another, unless of course one assumes that the purchase of goods at the same stall previously brought them together. What they certainly do have in common is a particular sort of freedom granted by the street, freedom to move away from this spot in whichever way they like, across the street and haltingly in the first case, along it and resolutely in the second. 272

CONCLUSION

The interiors on the other side of the stalls have characteristics exactly opposite those of the roadway; for little about them, if anything, is apparent. This is not to say they are without interest; in fact, one could say they invite, even solicit interest, as is the task of all openings into commercial premises. In a poem that describes desire at apertures, Emily Dickinson wrote, “hunger is the way of people outside windows that entering takes away.”4 Distance and invitation reciprocate one another, light and entry defeat both. Cavafy, whom Konstantinidis cited repeatedly, likewise described a man “passing in front of a little shop where they sold cheap and shoddy merchandise for laborers. He saw a face inside, he saw a figure that attracted him and he entered, pretending he wanted to see some colored handkerchiefs. He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs, and what they cost, in a choked voice almost faded by longing.”5 Here Cavafy, like Dickinson, doubles desire, or uses the interest typical of the first (commercial) type as a pretext for the aims of the second. Windows invite and answer yearning such as this by opening darkly into settings where valued goods are reserved, on view, and within reach. Still farther within, behind the cases, other items are secreted or stored away. The symmetry of contrasts between the street and these dark recesses would be perfect were it not for the likely connection of the shop’s back to a smaller street or court behind, one with many of the qualities of its front, even if it is not lined by facades. Such a back street or court would probably migrate still farther into the depth of the town, if not darkly then indirectly. Between these interiors and the roadway the market stalls find their place. Their architecture is not as permanent as that of a shop interior, nor as passing as vehicles along the roadway; what is there remains for only a while, but returns regularly, perhaps daily. It could be said that the people and items that appear in this image are saturated with regularity, with the traces of a periodic schedule that combines constancy and alternation. Considering a cross section through the commercial life of the entire street, from the shelves carved into the back of the interiors to the front edge of the sidewalk, one could propose a ratio of the following kind: market value and exposure to sunlight are inversely proportional to one another. Probably the vertical strata of display within and along the stalls (from the sidewalk 273

CHAPTER SEVEN

to the underside of the awning) are also indexed economically, but in this case the middle elevation, the table height, is the place were goods of the greatest value are allowed to rest. If the spatial (like the temporal) horizon of the market is strictly determined, and in these three ways—in section, in the mixing of direct light and cast shadow, and in level— the “architectural” element on which Konstantinidis focused, the tentlike awning, seems rather more haphazardly shaped. Not one of these coverings has a simple shape, nor do they in concert occupy the same elevation. Konstantinidis was fond of Democritus’ assertion that the universe is the product of necessity and chance. In this instance, chance seems to have had the upper hand; or, if there is necessity here, it concerns the unfolding of the market events, and the simple covering of transactions between sellers and strangers. The communication that effects a sale in such a market ranges between verbal exchanges that draw upon years of idiomatic expression to the sorts of subgrammatical gestures that expose the foreigner’s linguistic inexperience. The first are so sedimented through practice as to be unthought, the second so unfamiliar as to require labored approximation. In a supermarket, by contrast, where all goods are priced and systematically organized, the embarrassments attendant to unpracticed linguistic performances rarely occur because the exchanges that transpire there rely on numerical, not verbal or gestural communication. But these settings also encourage the atrophy of accomplished and habitual types of expression. When buying and selling happens on the street, differences in communicative style are tolerated; thus, too, the possibility of agreement (a good buy) and the risk of deception (being robbed). This range of dealings and of expressive performances is analogous to the divergent directions of movement accommodated by the roadway. When it comes to an actual sale, ownership, of course, has the final word; but just as the stalls stand between the road and the interiors, communication and commerce integrate divergent styles into a local practice. I believe this “discordant concordance” is what Konstantinidis had in mind when describing a (Greek) element of self-knowledge. A setting such as this integrates diversity, or builds agreement and continuity out of partial un274

CONCLUSION

derstanding and some measure of discontinuity. Further, the animation or drama of the market, and of the life it occasions, seem entirely dependent on discontinuity, in the same way that Konstantinidis’s sense of the Greek way of living depended on several kinds and sources of intelligence. Let me summarize, and do so, initially, by negation. The architecture of outdoor living Konstantinidis presented as essentially Greek was not necessarily of native origin. Nor were the most helpful written accounts of it drafted by Greek authors. Likewise, these “elements for self-knowledge” were not examples of traditional building, if that term is taken to mean in the manner or the style of native Greeks. This separates his position from the “back to the roots” movement then current in Greece. Nor were the constructions he pointed to designed by architects, whether Greek or not; nor were they examples of any professional’s “self-knowledge.” This meant also that these elements lacked clear definition as architectural objects. As they appear in his photographs, each is compromised by, because interconnected with, neighboring constructions. In most cases these buildings were not famous examples of Greek architecture but pedestrian. Lastly, they were strikingly laconic or remote in their operation, although saturated with typical performances. Each of these characteristics has a positive side. An architecture that seeks to be local, but arises out of diverse intelligences, demonstrates both tolerance of diverse contributions and the mutuality of interests within the urban constituency it accommodates. An architecture that is not styled in the manner of traditional motifs is also one that may be reanimated by contemporary possibilities. Tradition can represent either the dead faith in what is now past, or a living, reanimated faith in what has been shown to be still relevant. An architecture that results from the work of unnamed builders may challenge the authority of the profession, but it can also invite recognition of the many agents that conspire together in the construction of a cultural project. This expanded field of contributions parallels the range of engagements established by an architecture without clear definition as an object, the lateral liaisons of buildings with compromised formal qualities and improvised or hybrid structural solutions. Such an architecture may not be famous or frequently pictured as exemplary of “native genius” but may, nevertheless, be 275

CHAPTER SEVEN

indicative of a fabric of affairs that gives to a neighborhood, town, or city durable substance and the promise of value. If such a prosaic architecture is laconic or remote, it is also capable of standing as a witness—albeit a silent witness—to the patterns of life manifest in its performances, as if stories of life are inscribed in the spaces of life. These narratives will only be apparent if one is willing to look again at those settings and situations that have the peculiar virtue of wanting nothing less than obvious meaning; I mean the things of the world that do not particularly care how they look or what they represent. If one takes a quick view of Konstantinidis’s book, it can be seen to have similarities to the surveys of authors such as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Rudofsky. Sometimes “Greece,” for him, represents a retreat that would save architecture and life from the dilemmas and discordances of modern civilization. In the inter- and postwar periods this was a widespread sentiment. Many were the students of indigenous building; many the architects practicing in the modern period who took a strong interest in archaic traditions. I have mentioned the surveys of national architecture undertaken in the 1930s. Also in Germany, and later in the United States, Mies van der Rohe became enamored of Leo Frobenius’s Das unbekannte Afrika, an ethnographic study of what was for him an entirely remote people and place, and one that was ancient. This book, or the world it represented, was something of an escape for Mies; if not that, at least an evidence of simple truth in the making of artifacts, or true method that could guide modern practice. Le Corbusier’s deep interest in so-called primitive culture was in many ways similar. Likewise Bruno Taut drew inspiration from age-old traditions of building and living in Japan, as did Antonin and Noémi Raymond. Richard Neutra was similarly interested in traditional Japanese and Chinese culture, and he studied the buildings and cultural practices of native Americans. This interest in archaic forms was not limited to architects; the same can be found in modern painters, sculptors, and composers, and in the arguments of philosophers. Nor was this an early and mid-twentieth-century preoccupation only; the same can be discovered in much of nineteenth-century romanticism, even among individuals normally seen as rationalists such as Viollet-le-Duc, whose Habitations of Man argues for the dependence of built form on land and climate, and explains 276

CONCLUSION

“national character” and race in the same way. The same sort of explanation can be found in eighteenth-century antecedents to romanticism; in writings on art by Abbé du Bos, for example, and in writings on human law and history by Montesquieu and Johann Gottfried von Herder.6 These last three, in particular, argued for the dependence of cultural forms on the enduring characteristics of an environment, mediated for du Bos by the artist himself, whose genius was nevertheless something like clay in the formative hands of climate. In its extreme forms the identification of a people and place explains not only language, art, and customs, but also national and individual identity, giving to terrain the role not only of opportunity but of cause, and therefore giving to the task of site description the possibility of project explanation. Yet the increase in explanatory clarity this account promises corresponds to a decrease in the freedom involved in just about any form of decision making, including the decisions that make up the work of design. Architecture, design, and decision making can be released from the overdetermination assumed in this account of topographical destiny if they recognize contemporary unease with inherited cultural practices and the possibilities of new modes of building. Each of these conditions gives rise to interruptions and discontinuities in local and traditional patterns. Most disturbing to tradition are new modes of building, particularly those that arise out of new technologies of production. Earlier I observed that a key characteristic of technical objects is that they can be conceived and constructed independent of territorial considerations. While it may be fair to propose that items such as telephones and airplanes can be designed and built without thinking of where they will be used, few architects, I suspect, will maintain that terrain can be ignored in the design of a building, or can be acknowledged with a few compensatory gestures. As long as architecture is spatial it is necessarily topographical. This means that the conflict between the territorial autonomy of technical objects and the spatial configuration of any situation will complicate the development of a design. The accent on a building’s horizontal levels that I have considered in this book was one way that continuity between the building and its location was established in modern architecture. Similarly effective was the transfor277

CHAPTER SEVEN

7.2

Hotel Triton, Andros, Aris Konstantinidis, 1958. Photo Marina Lathouri.

mation of the architectural front into something like a back, which led to the development of buildings with “backs all around.” Continuity was also proposed in “flowing space” arguments, and in the widely held proposition that what was in and what was outside of the building should be joined. The connections thus established were to the “site,” which was sometimes described as the surrounding land and ambient climate (physical conditions), and other times as the modes of conduct (typical practices) they sustained. Does this mean that land and climate were understood as territorial equivalents to the vernacular context of “primitive” builders? Were they seen as horizons of simple truth, basic conditions used to guide and to determine the spaces and materials of modern building, essential but not necessarily ordinary? Konstantinidis tried to see the two—the necessary and ordinary—together, hence his use of the street market as an example. But this was not always the case; 278

CONCLUSION

not in his work nor in that of his contemporaries, the Raymonds and Neutra for example, or of Mies and Le Corbusier in the generation before. And there are many instances when fidelity to the land sustained neglect of modern modes of construction, sustaining practices not only of resistance but of retreat. On some accounts the two —technology and topography—were opposed. Konstantinidis, the Raymonds, and Neutra merit study because their best work refused this opposition but did not ignore it. Describing the elements used in the construction of his Desert House, Richard Neutra pointed out that these had been premade in shops some distance away from the site, before being shipped there and installed in (as) the building. The water used in the building and the gardens was also foreign to the place. Undoubtedly the entire construction was extravagant and intrusive; I point to it nonetheless because it shows in sharp focus a problem faced in many design projects: because of the way they are built, modern buildings are inevitably intrusive. None of this house’s elements had (natural) obligations to the building’s location, nothing “belonged there,” Neutra said, nor was anything of the building’s physical body or configuration in statu nascendi. Likewise for the elements assembled in his school projects—projects with less extravagance, smaller budget, and more social commitment. The processes and (economic) premises of shop manufacture never presume any particular destination for their products. It would be entirely fair to interpret this nonterritoriality, this autonomy, of technical objects as their essential characteristic, except for the fact that they did or do belong to a milieu of a specific kind, just not a topographically specific one; the region to which they belong is the matrix of interconnections that defines a system of elements. The origin and development of any technical object presumes the elaboration of relationships among other technical parts.7 Interlocked gears are the simplest way of thinking about this, each depending on the others, each with its particular strengths. In some nineteenth- and twentieth-century glosses on this idea (in that part of romanticism that envisages unity of culture and civilization), such interdependence was described as “organic unity.” Wright’s Hull House lecture on art in the machine age would be a case in point. When a set of elements coordinately perform a function, each of them 279

CHAPTER SEVEN

has been designed to maximize its potential. This optimization of the part’s performance is directly related to limitations on the tasks or task it serves. But with these limitations, for the sake of optimization, come degrees of dependence on other elements of the system. The resulting interdependence of elements within a system is just as true for a system of architectural construction as it is for a stereo, computer, or telecommunications system. Each system possesses a mutuality of parts, an internal intentionality. The more sophisticated the system, the more internally defined or nonterritorial it becomes. Jean Prouvé understood this and proposed such an equivalence when he argued for “closed systems” of building production: “I cannot agree in any way to . . . open-system prefabrication. This can only be of use for the insertion of individual elements into integrated designs and to introduce an element of variety. . . . Let us therefore make a start with closed systems—a sounder conception as I see it.”8 Members of the Team 10 group also understood this development but opposed it, as a matter of truth to the actual situation of building in the years just after the Second World War. In his account of the new brutalism Reyner Banham observed that the use of different kinds of construction materials—traditional and prefabricated—did not arise out of praise for or reaction against modern technology, but in recognition of the “grinding economic necessity that made any but the most banal materials unthinkable.”9 This is not to say that Team 10 or brutalist architects argued for “open systems,” but that they advocated ways of building that recognized other milieus as equally important conditions of design: economic, social, historical, natural, and practical conditions, which can never be “closed” because their definition, their approximate coherence, awaits choices people make, and depends on both necessity and chance. The other aspect of the technical object I want to consider is its atemporality. The relationships established within a technical system are meant to be stable, not to change or be altered. This is not to say that technology does not project its own progress, nor that technical objects and systems do not have their own lineage, even ancestry; in fact, the opposite is true, as has been implied in my previous comments on optimization. Such a progress can be read as a narrative of technical evolution; from the single pane of a sash win280

CONCLUSION

7.3

One-family house, Aris Konstantinidis, 1961. Photo Marina Lathouri.

dow, to the thermopane of a large picture window, to the combined glass, shades, and mechanisms of a contemporary glazing system. Yet at any stage in the evolution of such a system there exists a static equilibrium among its constituent parts, a balance not only intended in design but to be maintained in operation for the system’s proper functioning. Timelessness is another aspect of the technical system’s nonterritoriality, insofar as every location is subject to change by virtue of the alterations that define the natural world and the world of human choices. If, however, the use of technical objects and systems is accepted as inevitable in modern building, concerns of temporality and topography are not necessarily lost, for design and construction can be seen as a process by which technical objects and systems are naturalized. The atemporal and aterritorial character of these objects gives them both abundance and lack. By virtue of 281

CHAPTER SEVEN

optimization they are abundantly productive, but technical objects also desperately lack reference or connection to elements outside the milieu or system of which they are a part. Prouvé tolerated this lack because these objects could not be avoided in the modern world, and they promised a gain in productivity (important during the Second World War and just after); the Smithsons, by contrast, thought the entire enterprise was utopian. The temporal and topographical “elements” to which the technical parts of a building might be made to refer could include either elements of other systems or aspects of a building that are not systematic at all, aspects of the site, for example. Elements of this latter group are different from those in the first insofar as they are saturated with evidences of their own alteration or temporal unfolding, their history. Within this context elements are not only continually modified but continually reconstituted, which is to say history is not accidental to inhabited sites and settings, but necessary to their makeup. This history can be either that of an element’s natural formation and reformation, or that of its practical use. Despite the fact that technical objects lack both sorts of history, they do possess a peculiar kind of prospect: over time, through a process that could be called naturalization, they can become absorbed into the situations in which they have been installed. This can be awkward to various degrees, depending on the complexity and compass of the configuration. It can also risk both optimal performance and organic unity. Whenever one decides to “break the set” or “adjust the system,” this risk becomes apparent. Nevertheless, there is, by virtue of what they lack, a potential within technical objects and systems for their accumulation of nontechnical relationships, and this potential is a result of their “nonsaturated” character. This potential was not intended when the object was designed; it exists because of what design neglected. In view of this sort of poverty, technical objects are exactly the opposite of aesthetic figures, or objects with representational substance, because this latter type are naturally oversaturated with references. The potential for accumulation of nontechnical kinds of sense is actualized in two ways: the modification of technical objects in building construction, so that they can be reconciled with the territorial exigencies of a project, 282

CONCLUSION

and the appropriation of these things into the practices of practical life by individuals who reside in their midst. Both sorts of modification involve conflict, but I see them as inevitable and potentially productive, not of other technical ends but of cultural sense. Further, with this particular conflict in mind, I want to characterize architectural design as the work of projecting the modification of sites and technical systems with respect to one another, given the continuity manifest in the first and the discontinuity that results from the second, and the fact that both are sensible only within the horizon of practical affairs. Design in just this sense is what the better architects of the postwar period understood as their task, and what they accomplished in some of their projects. To absorb nonsaturated objects and systems into settings that possess long-standing configuration and cultural sense involves the redefinition of a setting’s capacity to accommodate and adorn typical dwelling practices. This redefinition has paradoxical consequences, however, for while a new configuration thereby comes into visibility, it is of a sort that wants least to obtrude itself into distinctness or conspicuous presence. When attuned to the practices of our lives, the elements of a setting remain withdrawn in a condition of inconspicuousness. Every horizon of dwelling equipment is prepared for some typical performance, even composed, but it is also unassertive just the same. Circumstances of this kind could be called laconic, I have said they constitute a tacit horizon.10 They do not express themselves openly but remain silent in order to be assumed into practical purposes and thereby taken for granted. Yet—and here is the paradox—these same settings are also expressive. Above I described their role as that of a “silent witness,” for written onto or into their surfaces are traces of the modes of occupation they sustain. Sustaining life, they also make its “moods” or “characters” visibly apparent. This is neither the first nor the second task of the setting; it is simply one of its duties, for every human situation has several levels or kinds of articulation, some of which are material and spatial—the ones called architecture—others that are verbal, pictorial, or gestural, and still others that are mental, even dreamlike. If we remain truthful to the continuity of human experience, it is not possible to categorically isolate any of these levels of articulation from the 283

CHAPTER SEVEN

others, nor does it seem possible to rank them in order of importance or ontological primacy. What we can do is witness their correspondences, some of which are practical, others metaphorical, and try to discover what roles they play in architectural sense, roles played at various times, with different kinds of presence. The task of design, in recognition of the aterritorial, atemporal, and obtrusively independent character of the technical objects and systems with which contemporary practice must work, involves trying to restore the remoteness of nearby things, as well as their codetermination within a horizon. This will also be their expressive potential. Speaking ontologically and not historically, before the arrival of technical objects into a site or setting, the elements of a place have always already settled themselves with respect to one another in preparation for some enactment, they have made themselves ready for some typical practice without any design on my part. This could be called the gift of one’s world, although such a gift can also be a burden or an obstacle. Nevertheless, because of this inheritance, one could say that the elements we keep around us are always reasonably familiar, meaning simply that, for the purposes of residing in this way, action encounters few obstructions. But to say the things or settings we keep around ourselves are familiar does not mean that they occupy one’s awareness, for they are just as remote as they are familiar, as mute as sensible, as silent as expressive. For the purposes of architectural understanding and sense, we need to witness the things of the world performing this double role, and envisage design and production as a process that results in their becoming distant while they preserve the possibility of being recognized.

284

NOTES 1

6. Richard Neutra, Buildings and Projects, ed. W. Boesiger, 3 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1951, 1959, 1966).

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND ITS HORIZONS

1. Le Corbusier, Aircraft (1935; London: Trefoil Publications, 1987), pp. 12 – 13. 2. Reprinted as Sverre Fehn, “Moroccan Primitive Architecture,” in The Poetry of the Straight Line (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1992), pp. 38 – 41.

2 BUILDING LEVELS

1. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Architectural Press, 1927), p. 46. 2. Joseph Connors, The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 1 – 3. 3. Frank Lloyd Wright, An American Architecture, ed. Edgar Kaufmann (New York: Horizon Press, 1955), pp. 75 – 77. This account of “breaking the box” was first published in Architectural Record, May 1914. 4. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), p. 90. 5. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 218. While the lecture from which this passage has been taken was delivered in 1931, it was first published in Architectural Forum, January 1938. A clear and useful account of Wright’s “breaking the box” is set forth in H. Allen Brooks, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Destruction of the Box,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, no. 1 (March 1979), pp. 7– 14.

7. The best source of information on these and other Neutra buildings remains Thomas Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Also useful in this regard is Arthur Drexler and Thomas Hines, The Architecture of Richard Neutra: From International Style to California Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982). 8. On the construction and spatial organization of the Tremaine House, see Richard Neutra, Richard Neutra on Building: Mystery and Realities of the Site (Scarsdale, N.Y.: Morgan and Morgan, 1951); Richard Neutra, “Significance of the Natural Setting,” Magazine of Art, no. 43 (January 1950), pp. 18 – 22; Global Architecture (Tokyo), no. 8 (1974), with an essay by Dion Neutra on the Tremaine and Kaufmann houses; Mario Corbett, “A Modern House Uses Its Setting to Help Provide Luxurious Living,” Architectural Forum, September 1949, pp. 51 – 67; and Jane Fiske, “Urbanity in the Wooded Foothills,” Interiors, October 1951, pp. 80 – 87. Illustrations of both houses can be found in Neutra, Buildings and Projects; Richard Neutra, World and Dwelling (New York: Universe Books, 1962); Richard Neutra, Building with Nature (New York: Universe Books, 1971); and Richard Neutra, Life and Human Habitat (Stuttgart: Alexander Koch, 1956). 9. In addition to the documents held in the Neutra Archive, Special Collection, University of California at Los Angeles Library, there are many drawings and papers relating to this building in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

285

NOTES

10. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne (New York: Fromm International, 1985), p. 39; Rilke, Rodin (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1917), esp. pp. 17– 25. 11. Antonin Raymond, A Hillside Built This House (New York: Revere Copper and Brass, 1943). See also “Three Levels on a New Jersey Hillside,” Pencil Points, May 1944, pp. 69 – 74. This project is also illustrated and discussed in Antonin Raymond, Antonin Raymond: An Autobiography (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1973), pp. 179 – 180. 12. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 190. This text was first published in Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1932), p. 171. Wright thought that the horizontality of his buildings was also an indication of their contextuality, for the dominant characteristic of the prairie was the horizontal line. He developed this argument in his early writing; see the introductory text to Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, in Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), pp. 113ff. 13. Richard Neutra, “Desert House,” Arts and Architecture 66, no. 7 (June 1947), pp. 30 – 33. 14. Neutra, Life and Human Habitat, p. 21. 15. Marcel Breuer, “Architecture and Landscape,” in Sun and Shadow (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1956), p. 38. 16. Richard Neutra, Architecture of Social Concern in Regions of Mild Climate (São Paulo: Gerth Todtmann, 1948). 17. Ibid., p. 126. 18. Ibid., p. 43. 19. Richard Neutra, “Sun Control Devices,” Progressive Architecture 27 (October 1946), pp. 88 –91. 20. Aladar and Victor Olgay, Sun Control and Shading Devices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

21. I owe this expression to Dalibor Vesely. 22. The elements that typify Neutra’s buildings were as far from those developed in local vernacular traditions as they were from the elements that have been identified with the so-called International Style. Neither climate nor form was decisive. Neutra stated that “certain optimum combinations (and therefore esthetic types) will develop into standards. [They could be described as the region’s vernacular.] But these may quickly change again at any shift of balance in matters of the intricate technical economies in that particular region.” (Richard Neutra, “Regionalism in Architecture,” Architectural Forum, February 1939, pp. 22 – 23.) The introduction of shop-made architectural elements and systems of components into the economy of construction was just such a “shift of balance.” 23. Wright, An Autobiography, p. 495. 24. Le Corbusier, Precisions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 64. This is discussed in David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 29 – 32. See also Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 159. 25. Richard Neutra, Survival through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 166ff. 26. Hermann Muthesius, The English House (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), p. 207. 27. Neutra, Survival through Design, pp. 167ff. 28. Ibid., pp. 168, 169. 29. Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (New York: International Universities Press, 1950); cited in Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 150. Schilder’s arguments are discussed and enriched in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), on which much of what follows depends.

286

NOTES

30. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 100. 31. Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 151. 32. This passage from Claudel is cited in Raymond, An Autobiography, p. 103.

3 B A C K T O F R O N T, O R A B O U T F A C E

1. Theo van Doesburg, “Towards a Plastic Architecture,” in Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 145. 2. Theo van Doesburg, “The End of Art,” in ibid., p. 149. 3. For documentation and historical description of this house, and the two others I will consider, see Burkhardt Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1982); Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos: Theory and Works (Milan: Idea E, 1982); Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Der Architekt Adolf Loos (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1964); and Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos: Das Werk des Architekten (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1979).

ufactured Ring Plan School,” Shelter, April 1932, p. 26; “Industriell hergestellte Schulgebäude,” Die Form 7, no. 4 (April 1932), pp. 126– 130; “New Elementary Schools for America,” Architectural Forum, January 1935, pp. 24 – 35; “The School in the Neighborhood Center,” Architectural Record, March 1944, pp. 96– 99; and “School Design,” Canadian Architect 7, no. 4 (April 1962), pp. 61 – 66. A lengthy section of his book on building in mild climates, Architecture of Social Concern, also treats school building (pp. 41 – 117). Lastly, much of the material in Boxes 163 and 164 in the Neutra Archive, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, considers school design. 8. Richard Neutra, “Schools and the Community,” Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 16, no. 6 (May– June 1946), p. 27. 9. Neutra, “New Elementary Schools for America,” p. 31. 10. Neutra, “Schools and the Community,”p. 25. 11. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 12. W. H. Auden, “Objects,” in Homage to Clio (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 19.

4. The passage from Loos is cited in Münz and Künstler, Der Architekt Adolf Loos, p. 128. 5. Hermann Czech and Wolfgang Mistelbauer, Das Looshaus (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1976), especially chapter 5. 6. Aris Konstantinidis, “A Few Words,” in Aris Konstantinidis, Projects and Buildings (Athens: Agra, 1981), p. 262. 7. Partial documentation of his school projects is contained in the three volumes of Neutra, Buildings and Projects. The first presentation of his Ring Plan School was in Amerika: Die Stilbildung des neues Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1930), pp. 69 – 70, 80. From this early version followed a series of articles published in various journals, including “Notes on the Man-

4 THE TOPOGRAPHICAL HORIZON OF DWELLING EQUIPMENT

1. Knud Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar, Catalog Design Progress (New York, 1950), p. 4. 2. Antonin Raymond and Noémi P. Raymond, Antonin Raymond: His Work in Japan 1920 – 1935 (Tokyo: Johnan Shoin, 1936); Antonin and Noémi Raymond, Antonin Raymond Architectural Details (New York: Architectural Forum, 1938). Beyond these two texts, and in addition to An Autobiography, historiographic information on Raymond can be found in the Ph.D. dissertation of Kurt Gerard Frederick Helfrich, Building the Contemporary House: Modernity, Regionalism and the

287

NOTES

Ideal of Japan in Antonin Raymond’s Residential Designs (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997), and in David Stewart, The Making of Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987). Also useful is “Antonin Raymond,” Japan Architect, no. 33 (Spring 1999), and E. Michael Czaja, “Antonin Raymond: Artist and Dreamer,” Architectural Association Journal, August 1962, pp. 59 – 87, 110. Many of the Raymond papers are held in what remains of his Tokyo office. Other important papers and works, including paintings and fabrics, are held in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

13. This often-discussed point was also made by Bruno Taut in Houses and People of Japan (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1937), and mentioned in his Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1936). These books were written in German in 1935 and 1936 respectively, just before the Raymonds’ Architectural Details. A summary of Taut’s career in Japan is contained in Kurt Junghanns, Bruno Taut 1880 – 1938 (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983). More recently see Manfred Speidel, Bruno Taut: Natur und Fantasie, 1880– 1938 (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1995).

3. Raymond, An Autobiography, pp. 83 – 84.

14. Raymond and Raymond, Architectural Details, foreword, n.p.

4. Raymond and Raymond, His Work in Japan, p. 18.

15. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Horizon, 1954), p. 42.

5. Ibid.

16. Adolf Loos, “The Poor Little Rich Man,” in Spoken into the Void (New York: Opposition Books, 1982), pp. 124 – 127.

6. Raymond and Raymond, Architectural Details, pp. 38 – 41.

17. Wright, An Autobiography, p. 186.

7. Raymond, An Autobiography, p. 135. 8. Raymond advanced his arguments on creation and imitation in two papers: “The Spirit of Japanese Architecture,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, December 1953, pp. 274 – 284, and with minor variations as “Creation and Imitation in Japanese Architecture,” in This Is Japan (Tokyo, 1954), pp. 90 – 93. 9. Antonin Raymond, “An Architect Comes Home from Japan,” Architectural Forum, February 1939, p. 130. 10. Ibid., p. 129. 11. Ibid. 12. This term was introduced by Martin Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology”; see Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Books, 1977), pp. 17ff. His observations form a broad and philosophical context for my narrower observations on the stockpile of elements in the building and architectural products industry.

18. Perhaps the best account of this muchdiscussed subject is still to be found in one of the basic sources, Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1932), particularly the chapters on “Speed” and “Motor Cars and Buses,” with the principle of streamlining presented on p. 45. 19. Raymond and Raymond, His Work in Japan, p. 17. 20. Antonin Raymond, “Toward True Modernism,” Pencil Points, August 1942, p. 79. 21. Cited in Raymond, An Autobiography, p. 102. A copy of the prose poem (dedicated to Noémi Raymond) from which this passage was taken is in the Raymond papers held in the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania. 22. Paul Claudel, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 269. The English translation in Raymond’s An Autobiography is not credited (nor is it in the manuscript for the book), but I assume it is by one or other of the Raymonds, since

288

NOTES

his literary remains contain translations in his own hand and French was her native tongue.

33. Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 58. The following quotations are also from this source.

23. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 149.

34. In this he could well have been summarizing similar arguments set forth by Taut in Houses and People of Japan, pp. 58 – 61.

24. Ibid.

35. Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, An Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts, trans. J. C. Kent (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1837), pp. 110ff.

25. Raymond and Raymond, His Work in Japan, p. 17. 26. Antonin Raymond, “A Portfolio of Recent Work by Antonin Raymond, Architect,” Architectural Forum, November 1941, pp. 343ff. 27. This is particularly clear if the term “equipment” is used, for never does one speak of an equipment, as Martin Heidegger has observed. While this subject was considered by Heidegger in a number of texts, two early treatments are the most helpful: History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), section 23; and Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), sections 22 – 24. 28. In “Deciphering a Meal” Mary Douglas has shown how this “set” inscribes social and economic identities. See Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 249 – 275. 29. See R. M. Schindler, “About Furniture,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1926, and “Furniture and the Modern House: A Theory of Interior Design,” Architect and Engineer, no. 124 (March 1936); both republished in Marla C. Berns, ed., The Furniture of R. M. Schindler (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, 1997). 30. “Nicht ohne Schwingen mag / Zum Nächsten einer greifen”; from “Der Ister,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 110. 31. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1962), p. 184. 32. Raymond and Raymond, His Work in Japan, p. 17.

36. Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 74.

5 IN AND OUTSIDE OF ARCHITECTURE

1. See George Baird, The Space of Appearance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 18. 2. In Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1927); the Parthenon and the Delage “Grand Sport” of 1921 appear on p. 125. On the page before he explains, “If the problem of the dwelling or flat were studied in the same way that a chassis is, a speedy transformation and improvement would be seen in our houses . . . and a new aesthetic would be formulated with astonishing precision.” 3. George Howe, “Flowing Space: The Concept of Our Time,” in Thomas Creighton, ed., Building for Modern Man: A Symposium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 164 – 169. The following three paragraphs quote from this paper. 4. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 77. 5. Richard Neutra, “Psychology of Glass Use,” “Translucidity,” and “Corners of Glass,” unpublished mss., Neutra Archive, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 155, AAL-121. 6. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 80. 7. Cited in Stewart, The Making of Modern Japanese Architecture, pp. 237– 240.

289

NOTES

8. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1964), p. 24. 9. Ibid. 10. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 456. 11. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 76. 12. Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 35. 13. Konstantinidis has yet to receive the study he is due in English-language publications. Two of his books have been translated from Greek: Elements for Self-Knowledge (Athens, 1975) and Projects and Buildings (Athens: Agra, 1981). The latter contains a bibliography he himself prepared, with information on the publications of his buildings. Two important short texts appeared in journals: “Life Vessels or the Problem of a ‘Genuine’ Greek Architecture,” in Architecture in Greece, no. 6 (1972), pp. 27– 29; and “Architecture,” in Architectural Design, no. 34 (May 1964), p. 212. This last also contains a substantial documentation of his built work. Another significant essay has appeared in German: “Heutige Architektur und anonymes Bauen,” Baumeister, no. 62 (April 1965), p. 416. Two interpretive texts are helpful also: Sokratis Georgiadis, “‘. . . die schönen, einfachen Werte der Architektur,’” Werk, Bauen und Wohnen, no. 1/2 (1994), pp. 64 – 67; and Luciano and Athinà Barbero, “Ricordando Aris Konstantinidis,” Spazio e Società, no. 67 (July 1994), pp. 108 – 117. Professor Georgiadis has also shared with me an unpublished lecture he presented at the opening of a recent Konstantinidis exhibition. 14. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 309. 15. Ibid., p. 310.

20. Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 57. 21. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 316. 22. On this building see Konstantinidis, Projects and Buildings, pp. 98 – 101, as well as “Xenia Hotels on the Aegean Shore,” Architecture Review, no. 9 (1963), pp. 160 – 164; “Hotel Xenia, Mykonos,” Architect’s Journal (February 12, 1964), pp. 365 – 366; and the paper by Konstantinidis himself: “Architecture of Xenia Hotels,” in World Architecture 3 (1966), pp. 144 – 147. 23. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 305. 24. Ibid., p. 301. 25. Ibid., p. 322. 26. Ibid., p. 301. 27. Ibid., p. 304. 28. Gabriel Herman, Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 10. 29. Taut, Houses and People of Japan, p. 244. 30. Here I paraphrase W. H. Auden, For the Time Being (London: Faber, 1945), p. 38. 31. In addition to the “Summer House” article cited above, see Konstantinidis, Projects and Buildings, pp. 132 – 135. 32. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 298. 33. Ibid., p. 325.

16. Wright, An American Architecture, p. 190.

34. Ibid., p. 323.

17. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 299. 18. Ibid., p. 303.

19. Konstantinidis, “Architecture,” p. 212; Aris Konstantinidis, “Summer House, Anavyssos,” World Architecture, no. 2 (1965), pp. 128 – 131.

35. Aris Konstantinidis, Gia tin architectoniki (Athens: Agra, 1987), p. 244. This translation is by Maria Karvouni.

290

NOTES

9. Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Frank Granger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 2, p. 3 (preface to Book 6).

6 TH E P L A Y O F A R T I C U L A T I O N

1. The published sketch of a similar fireplace for the Spetses house, built one year later, shows similar markings on both the mantelpiece and the adjoining wall. The markings on the left are inscribed into the stucco that covers the stonework. This is an ancient technique, to which Konstantinidis referred in his Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 306. While the lines of the sketch mark this wall and the adjacent mantelpiece similarly, the two forms of inscription, scratching and casting, demonstrate two different procedures and two different kinds of “foresight.” I have discussed the “badge” on Loos’s Rufer House earlier in this book, in chapter 2. 2. Konstantinidis, “Life Vessels or the Problem of a ‘Genuine’ Greek Architecture,” p. 27, and Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 310. 3. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 8,3. 4. Sverre Fehn, “Has a Doll Life?” in Sverre Fehn: Works, Projects, Writings, 1949 – 1996 (New York: Monacelli, 1997), pp. 243 – 244; first published in Perspecta 24 (1988). 5. This last phrase is a distant reference to the arguments on shadows put forward by Michel Serres in “Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw . . . ,” in Serres, Hermes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 84 – 97. 6. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 299. 7. The complementarity between symbols of fixity (Hestia) and of transition (Hermes) is set forth in Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 127– 175; see also Louis Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 322 – 339. 8. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 18.

10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 387. 11. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 306. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Aris Konstantinidis, “Architecture and Tourism,” Architecture in Greece 1 (1967), pp. 109 – 110. 15. Konstantinidis, “Architecture,” p. 212. 16. Two texts I have found useful on this set of issues are Lorenzo C. Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), and Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 17. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, p. 311. 18. I have already cited Neutra’s unpublished papers on the “Psychology of Glass Use” in which he considered the transparent, opaque, and “translucid” qualities of the material. In “Translucidity” he wrote: “Glass can only be partially passable to light. It can be translucid and at once it takes on new additional virtues; of a screen on which shadows can be silhouetted and through such a screen luminosity and diffusion might be increased.” Neutra Archive, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 122, folder AAL-121. 19. Neutra, Survival through Design, p. 168. Also see the discussion in chapter 2 above. 20. Neutra, “Desert House,” p. 32. 21. Neutra stressed the importance of heat storage in his unpublished “Man’s Home Was South,” Neutra Archive, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 157, folder AAL-

291

NOTES

82, p. 5; see also his “Man, Heat, and Insulation,” Box 158, folder AAL-116.

7 CO N C L U S I O N

22. Neutra, “Man’s Home Was South,” p. 9. 23. Edward Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, vol. 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 103 – 109. 24. Neutra, “Man, Heat, and Insulation,” p. 3. 25. Neutra, “Man’s Home Was South,” p. 1; the following two paragraphs quote from that paper. Sylvia Lavin has elaborated a Freudian reading of this argument in “The Avant-Garde Is Not at Home,” in Robert Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), pp. 180 –197. 26. Neutra, “Desert House,” p. 33. 27. Richard Neutra, “‘Scientism’ and Art in a Social Architecture,” Neutra Archive, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 157, folder AAL-1, p. 5. The following quotations are also from this paper. A version of it was published in Neutra’s Architecture of Social Concern, pp. 213 – 218. 28. This is Kenneth Frampton’s term; see Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 250. 29. Neutra, “Schools and the Community,” p. 25. 30. Neutra, “School Design,” p. 66. The building presented in this paper is the UCLA NurseryKindergarten; the following two paragraphs also quote from it. 31. Neutra, “New Elementary Schools for America,” p. 30. 32. Jan Duiker, “A Healthy School for Healthy Children,” in Duiker 1890 – 1935, ed. E. R. Jelles and C. A. Alberts (Amsterdam, n.d.), pp. 60 – 61.

1. Konstantinidis, Elements for Self-Knowledge, pp. 163, 312. While I shall focus on this street scene, it is one of few images in this book that present urban situations; mostly Konstantinidis illustrates domestic or rural examples, all of which, however, are prosaic or “ordinary.” 2. Ibid., p. 311; citing Edmond About, La Grèce contemporaine. 3. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius and Anonymous Architecture (New York: Horizon, 1957); Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964). 4. Emily Dickinson, “I Had Been Hungry,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), no. 579, p. 283. 5. Constantine Cavafy, “He Asked about the Quality,” in The Complete Poems of Cavafy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1948), p. 162. 6. Abbé Jean-Baptiste du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719; Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, 1748; and Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784 – 1791. 7. My arguments on the relationship between systems of technical objects and both terrain and time depend on points made in Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1; Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity; Stephen T. Asma, Following Form and Function (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996); and Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 8. Jean Prouvé, “The Organization of Building Construction,” in Jean Prouvé Prefabrication: Structures and Elements (London: Praeger, 1971), pp. 24 – 25.

292

NOTES

9. Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: Architectural Press, 1966), p. 87. 10. Peter Carl developed the phrase “laconic space.” While he may well have used it in a different sense than mine, I feel indebted to his insights.

293

INDEX A

Climate, 55 – 56, 168 – 169, 251, 254

Ahmedabad, 57

Comte, Auguste, 2

Alberti, Leon Battista, 2 – 17, 24, 71, 229

Concordant discordance, 189, 191, 199 – 200, 220, 233 – 234, 253, 259, 266, 274 – 275

Algiers, 13 Amsterdam, 264 Ando, Tadao, 142 Arendt, Hannah, 174 Aristippus, 26, 208 – 209, 228, 239 Articulation, 53, 58, 95, 137, 233 – 234, 238, 245 – 246, 266

Connors, Joseph, 27 Conrad, Joseph, 96 Costa, Lúcio, 57 Czech, Hermann, 91 D Democritus, 274

Athens, 200, 269 Dickinson, Emily, 273 Auden, W. H., 108 Distance, 5 – 6, 18, 24, 65, 160, 238 B

Doesburg, Theo van, 76, 79, 179

Badovici, Jean, 148

Du Bos, Abbé Jean-Baptiste, 277

Baird, George, 174

Duiker, Jan, 263

Banham, Reyner, 280

Dürer, Albrecht, 9

Bartoli, Cosimo, 4 E Beaudouin, Eugène, 264 Eastlake, Charles, 144, 155 Bel Geddes, Norman, 147 Eclecticism, 122, 124, 132 – 134, 139 Bragdon, Claude, 144 Eco, Umberto, 203 Breuer, Marcel, 34, 55, 57, 69, 190 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 246

F Fehn, Sverre, 19 – 24

C Flow, 27, 38, 176– 181, 198, 202, 222, 251 Carson, Anne, 223 Foucault, Michel, 228 Cavafy, Constantine, 269, 273 Freud, Sigmund, 251 Cézanne, Paul, 51 Frobenius, Leo, 276 Chicago, 185 Frontality, 71 – 79, 83 – 85, 95, 265 – 266 Claudel, Paul, 67, 149, 151, 154 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 121

294

INDEX

G

Kazantzakis, Nikos, 208, 255

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 257

Kierkegaard, Søren, 149, 151

Giedion, Sigfried, 27, 76

Klenze, Leo von, 51

Gill, Irving, 264

Konstantinidis, Aris, 91, 185 – 208, 210 – 212, 213 – 235, 237, 245, 248, 255 – 256, 258, 269 – 276, 278 – 279

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 229

Hotel Xenia, Mykonos, 191 – 194, 198 – 202, 211

H Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 75

Spetses, house at, 229, 234

Heidegger, Martin, 158

Weekend House, Anavyssos, 204, 205 – 209, 213 – 218, 219, 223 – 228, 233 – 234, 239, 242, 255 – 256

Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 277 Hermes, 223 Hestia, 223

Kyoto, 163, 190

Hippocrates, 251

L

Historicity, 65 – 66, 69 – 70, 194 – 195, 208, 237– 238, 255 – 258, 267– 268, 282

Land, 55, 186, 189 – 190, 222

Hölderlin, Friedrich, 160 Horizon, 3 – 11, 15, 20, 28, 65, 159, 170 – 173, 202 – 203, 210 – 211, 263

Laotzu, 181, 196, 211 Le Corbusier, 13 – 19, 24, 26, 57, 59, 62, 134, 157, 174, 276, 279 Beistegui Apartment, 35

Horizontality, 28 – 29, 31 – 38, 61– 62, 263, 265

Millowner’s Association Building, 57

Howe, George, 177– 180, 185, 198, 203

Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 17 I

Léger, Fernand, 76, 195, 210

Illich, Ivan, 9

Lods, Marcel, 264

Imitation (mimesis), 52, 55, 154

Loewy, Raymond, 147

Inscription, 213, 226– 229, 244, 246

Lönberg-Holm, Knud, 121

Installation (of technical components), 54, 57, 122 – 124, 247, 279

Longstreth, Thaddeus, 38

Isozaki, Arata, 181

Loos, Adolf, 32, 50, 59, 83, 85 – 95, 145, 148, 158, 211 Looshaus, 91, 235

J

Rufer House, 83, 87– 90, 92, 94 – 95, 213

Johnson, Philip, 68

Tzara House, 83 – 87, 90, 94, 216 K

Winternitz Villa, 83, 92 – 95, 107, 118

Kafka, Franz, 125, 177 Kahn, Louis I., 148, 158, 267 Kakuzo, Okakura, 181

M Magritte, René, 34, 223 Matisse, Henri, 217

295

INDEX

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 66, 157, 183

P

Michelangelo Buonarroti, 9

Palm Springs (California), 239, 252

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 29, 43, 62, 68, 179, 276, 279

Performance, of building elements, 126– 127, 137, 148 – 151, 154

Brick Country House, 179

Pericles, 271

Tugendhat Villa, 86

Perspectivity, 3, 14 – 16, 78, 80 – 83, 246

Mistelbauer, Wolfgang, 91

Phaethon, 214

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, 270, 276

Philadelphia, 185, 200

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 277

Picasso, Pablo, 19

Morocco, 19, 22 Morris, William, 144

Pikionis, Dimitris, 211 Plato, 15, 231, 271

Munich, 185

Praxis, 64 – 65, 67– 70, 78, 118, 137, 156– 157, 163, 209

Muthesius, Hermann, 63

Praxiteles, 205 Precision, 166– 168

N Prouvé, Jean, 19, 23, 280, 282 Neutra, Dion, 43 Neutra, Richard, 32, 38 – 46, 51, 53– 70, 96– 118, 157, 162 – 163, 166, 181, 185, 190 – 191, 198, 211, 239 – 268, 279 Child Guidance Clinic, 97, 99 – 108 Desert House, 53 – 54, 239 – 258, 279

R Raymond, Antonin, 51, 53, 67, 130, 132, 139, 141, 144 – 145, 147– 148, 160 Raymond, Antonin and Noémi, 130 – 162, 191, 200, 276, 279

Nursery-Kindergarten, 97, 109 – 118, 258 – 268

Claudel Residence, 131 Fukui Villa, 134 – 142, 159

Pitcarin House, 38, 43 – 53, 55, 60 – 61

Hillside House, 51 – 52

Ring Plan School, 97

Karuizawa Summer House, 132, 133 – 134, 161

Tremaine House, 38 – 43, 46, 51, 55 – 61, 64 VDL House (Research House), 36, 68

New Hope House and Studio, 151 – 154, 156, 159, 162, 168

Niemeyer, Oscar, 57

Reinanzaka House, 67, 143, 155, 202 O

Raymond, Noémi, 130, 137, 162

Okura, Baron, 58

Recessive space (tacit, withdrawn, inconspicuous settings), 11 – 14, 16– 19, 24, 79 – 82, 148, 157– 159, 172 – 174, 203 – 205, 210 – 212, 257, 267– 268, 283 – 284

Olgay, Aladar and Victor, 57 Orientation, 64 – 65, 90, 105 – 107, 118, 157, 173, 246, 265

Repetition, 130, 149 – 151, 163 – 168, 267 Rhodes, 228

296

INDEX

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 51, 160 Rings of distance, 20 – 21, 66, 90 – 91, 246– 251

Topography, 176, 183 – 185, 201 – 205, 209 – 211, 238

Rodin, Auguste, 51

V

Rome, 2, 208

Vacancy, 181 – 183, 195 – 198, 211, 255

Root, John, 144

Vienna, 235

Rudofsky, Bernard, 270, 276

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 276 Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, 228

S Saarinen, Eero, 190

W

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 182

Wachsmann, Konrad, 121

Sappho, 2

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 27– 28, 53, 58, 61 – 62, 96, 112, 131, 134, 144 – 145, 147, 154, 163, 179, 181 – 182, 185 – 186, 189 – 191, 195 – 196, 198, 211, 245, 279

Schilder, Paul, 66, 157 Schindler, Rudolph, 157, 185 Kings Road House, 30 – 31

Fallingwater, 34

Sectional understanding, 12, 20 –22, 29 – 31, 51, 60, 87– 89, 118

Taliesen East, 53, 186– 187, 202

Semper, Gottfried, 75, 174

X

Sert, José Luis, 76

Xenophon, 195 – 196, 216

Shulman, Julius, 39, 68 Simplicity, 133, 144 – 149 Sitte, Camillo, 86 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 282 Socrates, 228, 262 Sounion (Greece), 187 Spatiality of position or situation, 5 – 6, 10, 25, 155 – 156, 173 Standardization, 124, 140 – 144, 162 – 166 Sullivan, Louis, 144 Systems, of building elements, 124, 279 – 281 T Taut, Bruno, 200, 264, 276 Technical knowledge, 230 – 232, 235 – 237 Tokyo, 155 Topogenesis, 189 – 191

297