Convergences

Architecture Meets Science Fiction at 41 Cooper Square

Thom Mayne's new academic building for Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, is the Pritzker Prize winning architect's first building in New York. Sensual, jarring and willfully strange, it's unlike anything else in the city. New Yorkers won't find a meaningful introduction to Mayne or his building anywhere in the popular press. Fifteen years ago, a Progressive Architecture editorial by Thomas Fisher titled "A House Divided" lamented the state of writing about architecture. Fisher saw a choice between "unquestioning description" by architectural journalists and "obscure, jargon-filled analysis" by academic critics. "What is rare, on either side," Fisher wrote, "are critics who can address the underlying ideas and larger meanings of architecture and who can convey them clearly and concisely to the public and the profession." What's been written so far about Thom Mayne's new academic building for Cooper Union shows how true this remains. On the journalism side, Joann Gonchar, in last month's Architectural Record cover story about the building, mainly limited herself to description, calling it "extroverted," "sharp and folded," "aggressive," "dynamic," "gutsy," and "energetic." She might have been describing Marcel Breuer's 1966 Whitney Museum uptown. No more helpful was Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times, with his effusions about "a bold architectural statement of genuine civic value," with "a bold, aggressive profile" and "a brash, rebellious attitude," "tough and sexy at the same time." While any criticism of a challenging building by a renowned architect puts the critic at risk of looking unenlightened, it's less like 41 Cooper Square is being handled with kid gloves than oven mitts. The building Mayne and his firm Morphosis have landed at 41 Cooper Square has been widely written up as a "spaceship" with a swoopy stair atrium that brings students together, but we're left on our own as to where such an alien presence came from, what its terms are and whether it succeeds on them. On the academic criticism side, 41 Cooper Square is covered in Volume 4 of Rizzoli's Morphosis series. The book's introduction, by Mayne, and most of the ten essays contributed by architects and critics punish any attempt to read them. Take Mayne's high-flown, obscure and flaccid description of his quest for an architecture "capable of providing the generative material for new trajectories, methods, and outputs that add further to a coherent complexity that I so strive for." One wants to bounce a copy of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (concrete good, abstract bad) off his high brow. Mayne's one-page project description for 41 Cooper Square later in the book is all a very safe, straightforward and reasonable justification of the building that completely avoids its distinguishing otherworldliness, the torn open facade, those unreadable folds and general strangeness. A rare readable insight is provided in the essay by Lebbeus Woods, who writes that "the buildings of Morphosis, with their questionings, their distortions of the known, with their unresolved, frankly exposed collisions of differences, are self-consciously incomplete. Their aesthetic is the opposite of what Alberti required of 'beauty, which is that to which nothing can be added; and that from which nothing can be taken away.' Beauty, as a reflection of divine perfection, was complete, eternal. In contrast, the buildings of Morphosis seem to crystallize, with sharpness and unflinching candor, precise, unique moments in time." Thom Mayne's architecture acknowledges the imperfection and fragmentary nature of a dynamic world that's never complete, attested to in this picture's foreground. 41 Cooper Square's veil of perforated stainless steel is a stock Morphosis feature, justified as an energy saver although it's highly doubtful that the shading it provides improves much on today's low-heat-gain glazing or makes up for the reduction in natural light it incurs, particularly to the north. Given natural light's proven enhancement of learning ability, this is no small sacrifice in a building that contains classrooms. Sections of the skin can be opened to admit more light, but putting up a barrier just to have to overcome it seems impractical. Claims that the veil will "retain heat in winter" are preposterous. While the building is in fact highly energy efficient, the stated rationale for the veil is merely what must be told to a client's building committee members. (Saying it's just there for expression would be like telling them the facts of life instead of the stork story before they're ready. Such folks are so grateful for a shred of justification to cover their backsides, they'll take anything: Mayne actually claims his Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank tower in Udine, Italy, leans 14 degrees to the south in order to shade itself, the equivalent in practicality of digging a tunnel to cross the street.) The veil's real purpose is to suppress the appearance of windows in favor of the building's overall sculptural effect, a strategy at least as old as Raymond Hood's use of black brick on the 1924 American Radiator Building to make its dark window openings blend in and disappear. In place of the usual window pattern, the veil's random solid rectangular bits emphasize its contours while suggesting an alien information code, or simply celebrating resistance to order. A public that no longer has a clue what architects are getting at may simply shrug off any confusion and welcome its undeniable beauty and the way it makes the world a more interesting place, as has been the case with Frank Gehry's IAC Building across town. Many in the architectural profession seem to resent this kind of response and see in such buildings a degrading emphasis on surface spectacle over substance. To them, Mayne's textile-like sheath with its raised hem may recall an expression for the most superficial approach to architecture, "putting dresses on buildings." Critics may see Mayne's building as no less permanent and composed than its neighbors, its imagery and encasing screen oppressive, and Mayne's liberator persona a pose. It's telling that the clearest insight into Thom Mayne comes from Lebbeus Woods, the visionary architect and artist who has for several years been a professor of architecture at Cooper Union. Woods' work shares with Mayne's an antecedent in Archigram, the 1960s futurist group of British architects who published their theoretical projects in comic book style pamphlets. For Archigram, the city of the future would be a dynamic machine capable of constantly reconfiguring itself, built from movable, modular components that might be replaced with new models when obsolete, like cars and other industrial products. If this sounds like a radical concept, consider that the group established itself around the time of the demolition of New York's Pennsylvania Station, a building modeled on the Baths of Caracalla, built for the ages, and torn down in the path of new purposes only 53 years after its completion. Archigram's alternative was a kind of anti-architecture that anticipated a future in which change was the only certainty. Architecture's former emphasis on the monumental and permanent was jettisoned in favor of an ephemeral approach in keeping with the disposable culture of a new age and ever evolving technology. Where the architects of Penn Station clung to a view of an unchanging world in which a Roman ruin was a viable model, Archigram accepted a dynamic and unpredictable world and looked to the future for its style. And the look of the future was to be found in science fiction. Interviewed in Yoshio Futagawa's 2002 book, Studio Talk, Mayne says that when he was a student, "UCLA had just started its architectural program, the Archigram boys were there, and I met Peter Cook, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron for the first time. They completely took over the place . . . Three years later we would borrow their concept of a collective practice, which led directly to the choice of the name Morphosis." Later in the interview, when asked his specific influences, Archigram is the first Mayne cites: "I think you will find that my generation lacks any unifying ideology . . . a result of both the exhaustion of the dogma of Modern architecture and the rapidly changing conditions, which have demanded a multiplicity of architectural positions. . . As I mentioned earlier, Archigram was important for me, encapsulating much of the 60s, all that is ephemeral." Mayne seems not just to have carried forward Archigram's sense of a world in transition, but, at least in 41 Cooper Square, the science fiction imagery that Archigram described as part of a "search for ways out from the stagnation of the architectural scene." One might reasonably ask whether Mayne's use of science fiction imagery without the kind of futuristic innovation proposed by Archigram is anything more than PR. Referring to the huge commercial success of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Lebbeus Woods has written that "the 'Bilbao Effect' has dampened critical architectural writing. With its advent, interest shifted from the heady quarrels about Deconstructism and Post-Modernism to a concern with the much less intellectually taxing search for novel forms. Novel forms work so well, from the viewpoint of promoting tourism and other spun-off enterprises. As for the Bilbao Guggenheim, there’s not much that can be said about it beyond its great success. It encloses the same old museum programs. If we look behind the curving titanium skin, we find swarms of metal studs holding it up—no innovative construction technology there. It hasn’t inspired a new architecture, or a new discourse, other than that of media success." Many other architects today are dismayed by what they see as an increasingly superficial direction in the profession, toward styling above content, image above the kind of substantial ideas, like Palladio’s, Corbusier’s or Kahn’s, that can be built upon by others. This emphasis on image is easy to construe as a reflection of an increasingly shallow, short attention-span culture. The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable describes ”a public increasingly desensitized by today’s can-you-top-this hypersensationalism and the expectation of in-your-face ‘icons’.” Would Huxtable lump Thom Mayne’s work in this category? Apparently not. As a member of the jury that awarded him architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, in 2005, she stated that ”the work of Thom Mayne moves architecture from the 20th to the 21st century in its use of today’s art and technology to create a dynamic style that expresses and serves today’s needs.” In fact, few high-profile architects have pushed the envelope of sustainability and mechanical system innovation as far as Mayne has. If his work seems pretentious in its exptessionism, Mayne’s supporters would argue that it earns its pretensions in a relentlessly questioning, self-critical design process, genuine enthusiasm for sustainability and real technical advancement. In other words, Mayne gets his homework done and still has time to play. It’s all icing that his play can convince us of the possibility of new realities. A cutaway model of 41 Cooper Square shows its stair atrium as a free-form invader of an otherwise conventional interior of straw man "square" spaces. It seems to embody Lebbeus Woods' statement, "I am at war with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms." No one has written more lucidly about Mayne than Woods. In his essay endorsing Mayne's Pritzker Prize, Woods wrote that "Mayne's method of design confronts the typical with the strange, the program with the architecture. Far from being arbitrary, self-expressive exercises, these confrontations of the formal with the contingent emerge from the necessity to change the ways we think and act. They are challenges to the conventional stereotypes and heirarchy, but ones that actively enable them to evolve, rather than be discarded or overturned. The point is, this enablement cannot come about by simply tinkering with the typologies, but only by confronting them with something new, unfamiliar, that comes from outside." 41 Cooper Square fills the bill, inside and out. A rendering from Lebbeus Woods' 1990 "Berlin Free-Zone 3-2" project closely prefigures Mayne's stair atrium at 41 Cooper Square, down to its envelope-piercing tip. Woods presented this work in a lecture series that included Mayne, at the MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. His statements there are quoted in the 1991 book, Architecture in Transition: "When we confront strange, new, unfamiliar things, we are shocked, unsettled. Strangeness makes us come out of our familiar, comfortable ways of thinking and confront a new reality." Of his Free-Zone drawings he said, "At first, these bent and curved forms didn't seem to belong in the center of Berlin, but then I began to realize that yes, they did belong, as something unknown, undefined, uncertain, ambiguous, having to do with a potential in the city yet to be realized." Although Woods draws rather than builds, like Archigram, Mayne calls him a "very, very good architect." Woods has been a professor of architecture at Cooper Union for the last several years. While a closely shared sensibility can be credited, it's tempting to see more at work in 41 Cooper Square; a specific homage to Woods. What better gift could Mayne leave at Woods' doorstep than the chance to walk through one of his own visions? Ron Herron's Walking City idea produced some of Archigram's best known images. In his 1965 essay "A Clip-on Architecture," the architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham argued that Archigram's appeal was that "it offers an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future . . . Archigram is short on theory, long on draughtsmanship and craftsmanship. They're in the image business and they have been blessed with the power to create some of the most compelling images of our time . . . all done for the giggle. Like designing for pleasure, doing your own thing with the conviction that comes from the uninhibited exercise of creative talent braced by ruthless self-criticism. It's rare in any group - having the guts to do what you want, and the guts to say what you think - and because it's so rare it's beyond quibble. You accept Archigram at its own valuation or not at all, and there's been nothing much like that since Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies and Corb." A 1994 Lebbeus Woods image evokes Archigram's Walking City in its vision of a "radical reconstruction" in Havana. As quoted in a New York Times profile by Nicolai Ouroussoff last year, Woods has said "I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” Woods commitment to real architecture underscores the importance of fantasy as an imaginative tool in architectural practice. Visionary architecture crosses paths with science fiction: a set from Terry Gilliam's 1995 science fiction movie 12 Monkeys, left, appropriated an 1987 image by Lebbeus Woods, right. Woods successfully sued the filmmaker over its unauthorized use. Woods voluntarily put his skill at fantasy to work for the movies as a "conceptual architect" on the movie Alien 3 in 1990. The movie changed directors and Woods' images weren't used. Special effects for science fiction movies like James Cameron's 1991 blockbuster, Terminator 2, courtesy of George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, have driven advances in graphic software ultimately used by architects. In this, architecture's expanded ability to explore and manufacture new forms can be said to be a direct result of science fiction movies. Cameron's forthcoming 3D movie, Avatar, will take special effects a step closer to merging with the real experience of space that is architecture's realm. A recent New Yorker article on Cameron and Avatar described reaction to a trailer for the film that was shown on Apple.com: "The message boards on Ain’t It Cool News, a fanboy site that started tracking 'Avatar' a decade ago, logged bitter disappointment. The fans there had anticipated 'eyeball rape.' One wrote, 'My eyeballs were merely fondled without permission.' ” A public appetite for visual spectacle may have jumped tracks from movies to the built environment. The cover of Rizzoli's fourth volume on Mayne's firm Morphosis features computer renderings of 41 Cooper Square's stair atrium. The built space was described as "a swoopy glass-fiber-reinforced-composite matrix that's like a 3D-modeling software mesh come to life" by Thomas Monchaux in The Architect's Newspaper. Advances in 3D computer technology have not only revolutionized what can be imagined, but the look of what gets built. According to Architectural Record, Mayne “argues that his building is ‘highly contextual.’ The skin crimps and curves, he points out, to respond to the frenetic energy of its East Village environment.” Such statements help get designs built. It’s just as easy to see a willful strangeness. Rather than a bow to the sacred cow of contextualism, is 41 Cooper Square a rebuke to the repressive order of the architecture that surrounds it? Architecture that refuses to look like the known naturally enters the realm of the strange, the territory of fantasy and science fiction. From some angles, 41 Cooper Square resembles Archigram’s Walking City. Does it also offer “an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future,” to use Reyner Banham’s explanation of Archigram’s appeal, or a bit of “eyeball rape” in the parlance of Ain’t It Cool News? The questions aren’t impertinent. Archigram’s legacy includes an embrace of popular culture, witnessed in both its comic book format and science fiction methods. High culture critics who disparaged such popular appeal, Banham said, had become “isolated from humanity by the humanities.” Fritz Lang's 1927 movie Metropolis took inspiration from New York's then-radical height, density and layered transportation to create a futuristic world. Thom Mayne cites Lang as an influence in his interview with Yoshio Futagawa, a case of architecture influencing science fiction and back again. Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner is often voted the best science fiction movie of all time in polls and surveys. It uses Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House to portray 2019 Los Angeles. Forward looking architecture and science fiction naturally share territory in the future. Thom Mayne's Diamond Ranch High Scool is featured on the cover of Architects Today, a 2004 book by Kester Rattenbury, Rob Bevan & Kieran Long. A rare example of contempoarary architectural writing that's neither unreadable nor condescending, the book has clear and insightful entries on over a hundred architects and firms, including Thom Mayne's Morphosis, Lebbeus Woods and Archigram. The entry on Archigram reads, "Contentious and troublesome, Archigram are extraordinarily influential. . . . Since the 1960s they have extended the language of architectural thought and expression, overturning its boundaries and conventions. Without building a single project (as a group, at least) they have arguably had more impact on architectural ideas than anyone since Le Corbusier. . . . This book is full of their pupils. . . . Archigram's non-building is an essential part of their influence. The ideas, uncompromised by the pragmatics of building, remain open to interpretation by the massive range of practices who have been influenced by them." 41 Cooper Square is not open to the public, although Cooper Union promises to begin tours soon, and post availability on its website. Meanwhile, some relatively fine-grained observations by critics who've been inside are available online at Design Observer and the Architect's Newspaper. Update: Lebbeus Woods has commented on this post in his own blog: http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/41-cooper-square/ More on Lebbeus Woods: Mythical Lower Manhattan - In Memory of Lebbeus Woods

The Farnsworth House, part 3 / the progeny

When it was completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House was a window into the future. Still inspiring new interpretations, it has the open-endedness of great art. The economy with which the Farnsworth House elicits its richness of response is one proof of "less is more." With minimalism and technology the tines of its tuning fork, the house's reverberations are as strong today as ever. While it has inspired countless glass houses, a handful may provide a rough outline of its still widening influence. The steps and platform leading to Craig Ellwood's 1961-62 Rosen House in Los Angeles are a nod to the Farnsworth House. One of the contributors to California's Case Study Houses, Craig Ellwood differed from the series' other designers in being more influenced by Mies than by California architects like Richard Neutra. He wrote that "Mies's thinking was never restrictive for me. Conversely it was inspiring . . . Mies of course reinvented architecture." Ellwood was fascinated with technology and often expressed the prefabricated quality of his buildings' components, while finding in Mies's example the necessary transcendence of technology through art. Building on the intimation of house as industrial product that Banham saw in the Farnsworth House, Ellwood wrote in 1957 that "the American residence is becoming a product and eventually all homes - except those of the very wealthy - will be bought in prefabricated form."

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Craig Ellwood in a photo that Ellwood included in every description of his career. A conscious link between Thoreau's Walden and the Farnsworth House can be found in the work of Glenn Murcutt, who cites both as major influences by way of his father. The 2002 Pritzker Prize winning Australian architect is viewed by many as the greatest designer of houses alive. As he described it in the 1999 book, Touch This Earth Lightly: Glenn Murcutt in His Own Words: "My father saw an article about the Farnsworth House. Amongst many issues it discussed the positive issue of ventilation for a single-depth-room house. Once a building is planned for two rooms deep you created ventilation problems, so to make buildings as thin as possible, they would breathe properly. The Farnsworth house did that only in part - it was in a way a roomless house. It was a house that was above the ground, not dissimilar in some ways to houses which dad had lived in, in Papua New Guinea. And he said of the Farnsworth house that it was not only one of the most interesting 20th century houses, he felt no one could live in it, and therefore . . . he referred to it being a theoretical building . . . a good theoretical exercise. He got me to read this damned article three or four times - I don't recall how many - until I could answer every question he posed to me about that house. I was only thirteen years old and hadn't shown any signs of interest in architecture . . ." Murcutt's father was a prospector and a reader whose self-reliant forays into nature gave him an affinity for Thoreau. Murcutt notes that "most of the thoughts that I have are developments clearly from my family, and mainly, through my father, who was particularly interested in landscape and in economics. He was also particularly interested in what minimal type of building would serve as habitation. . . Dad saw what was in his mind when he read Thoreau." Glenn Murcutt's 1996-98 Fletcher-Page House in New South Wales displays the one-room depth that has distinguished his acclaimed houses since the mid-seventies. This characteristic owes as much to the example of the Farnsworth House as to Thoreau's dream of shelter minimally separated from nature. The simple shapes and humble materials of Murcutt's houses express Thoreau's sense of economy and aversion to the weight of possessions, ideals perfectly in sync with today's carbon footprint awareness. While they appeal to the Walden dreamer in all of us and are derived from Mies's universal concepts, Murcutt's houses are distinctly of their place, adopting local habits of form and materials. Shigeru Ban's Curtain Wall House in Tokyo was completed in 1995. Its fabric enclosure is partly a rebellion against the weight and substance of the multiple glazing systems that have replaced the inefficient quarter-inch plate glass of Mies's day. In a 2001 Princeton Architectural Press monograph of his work, Ban wrote: "One of my favorite buildings is Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. . . . However, the windows on the perimeter are all fixed, and though a visual continuity between the inside and outside is achieved, there is no physical continuity as in traditional Japanese homes, where spaces can be exposed or enclosed by the use of screens. . . . Curtain Wall House was formed with an actual exterior curtain wall. The idea was to create a contemporary interpretation of traditional Japanese spaces with contemporary materials." (In winter, glazed sliding doors supplement the shading and privacy provided by the curtains.) Ban often brings ephemeral construction and the potential for nearly complete openness to Mies's architecture of omission. His impulse in the Curtain Wall House would have been understood intuitively by Thoreau, who wrote in Walden: Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth . . ." Werner Sobek's glass houses, R128 (top) and H16 were completed in 2000 and 2006, in Stuttgart. Entirely energy self-sufficient, they use triple glazing, geothermal heating and cooling, and horizontal rooftop solar panels to dispense with fossil fuels and emissions altogether. Sobek, who was appointed Mies van der Rohe Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2008, has brought Mies's poorly performing glass house into the realm of environmental comfort and responsibility. His conviction that "it is unethical to throw things away" is reflected in his buildings' construction from modular elements that can be detached and reused elsewhere. This additional sustainable aspect of his work makes real the disassembly potential that was only suggested in Craig Ellwood's work, and brings nearer the industrially produced house that the Farnsworth House seemed to promise. Originally built for her parents in Chile, the LV Home was adapted by its architect, Rocio Romero, as a prototype for prefabrication after its completion in 2000. It has become perhaps the most acclaimed and widely published prefab house design within an exploding field. Romero credits Mies "for inspiring the design for this and almost every project I've designed. Modern architecture just doesn't get much better than what he has already done." South Africa's prefab Zenkaya Home clearly inherits its zen from the Farnsworth House (top). The opaque section at left houses an enclosed bedroom, an example of the many concessions to practicality Mies's heirs have made in interpreting the Farnsworth House. Banham's inkling and Ellwood's prediction of the home as prefabricated product have come full circle.

The November 2006 issue of Dwell magazine featured Rocio Romero's Mies-inspired prefab LV Home on its cover. Dwell has been published since 2000 and has a circulation of about 350,000. The nation's oldest "shelter magazine," House Beautiful, has been published since 1896 and has a circulation of about 850,000. It has lately been known to feature furniture designed by Mies which its pages once attacked. An article by Elizabeth Gordon titled "The Threat to the Next America", in the April 1953 issue of House Beautiful magazine, saw the Farnsworth House as an attack on traditional American values. It found Mies's architecture and furniture "cold," "barren," "sterile," "thin" and "uncomfortable," and denounced the International Style and the Bauhaus as un-American. Today, magazines like Dwell and stores like Design Within Reach fuel and cater to a growing American taste for the spare forms and clean lines of modern design. The mid-century modernism that provides so much of their content is largely homegrown and has long been as ubiquitous and American as one of Charles Eames' molded fiberglas chairs. Displayed at New York's Socrates Sculpture Park in 2006, an untitled piece by Mamiko Otsubo transplants the concept of the Farnsworth House from the Fox River's banks to those of the East River. It is furnished only with a miniature of Charles Eames' La Chaise chair, designed in the 1940s but not commercially produced until 1990 when growing regard for Eames and modern design summoned it into the marketplace. Otsubo's piece conveys not just the white I-beams and nature-loving glass walls of the Farnsworth House, but the universal space and flexibility at the heart of Mies's ideology. The near emptiness of her interpretation captures the freedom and potential Mies's aesthetic made way for, the inviting receptveness to anything at all that keeps his work always current. The Farnsworth House's identifiability even in such shorthand marks the place it has earned in the public consciousness.

The Farnsworth House, part 2 / from the hearth to the field

The underpinnings of "less is more" were laid out in Thoreau's Walden in 1854 (as thoroughly observed in Theodore M. Brown's essay, "Thoreau's Prophetic Architectural Program," in The New England Quarterly, March, 1965). Walden's setting of the stage for a minimal, open, one-room house is uncanny. Thoreau's grasp of man's unconscious attitudes toward shelter and of the inherent drawbacks of shelter and possessions goes far toward explaining the lasting appeal and influence of the two glass houses built nearly a century later. "We may imagine a time," he wrote, "when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house . . . having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of barks and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell so long there. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots." Based on this understanding, Thoreau advises anyone who "designs to construct a dwelling house" to "consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary," and says "the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper." It's hard not to think of the way the Farnsworth and Glass House substitute nature for walls, and Johnson's observation that "I have very expensive wallpaper." The two glass houses' use of nature for privacy is prefigured in Thoreau's statement "that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon." He almost seems to be idealizing his cabin into the future Farnsworth House when he writes, "This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. . . . I found myself neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them." A replica of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. Building from discarded shingles, second-hand windows and used bricks, and providing his own labor, Thoreau built his house for twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents. (The Farnsworth House cost $73,000 in 1951.) Thoreau's spirit has guided many of the architects who've carried forward ideas from the Farnsworth House, often in more sustainable directions. Comparing their one-room houses, Thoreau's measured 15 by 10 feet; Johnson's 56 by 32 feet; and Mies's 56 feet by 28 feet, 8 inches (without the porch). Thoreau conceded that "one inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter big thoughts in big words." He also wrote that "I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall consist of only one room . . . A house whose inside is open and manifest as a bird's nest. . . ." By limiting the Farnsworth House to a single room, Mies answered the concern Johnson had raised about interior partitions colliding with a pristine glass perimeter, but he also realized Thoreau's dream of a one-room house, a dream that many architects have found compelling. In his biography of Johnson, Franz Schulze describes his response to this aspect of the Farnsworth House: "Philip was moved by the exquisiteness of the design but just as instructed by Mies's simple decision to consolidate all interior elements - kitchen, closets, a pair of bathrooms - in a core, no part of which abutted the outer walls. The walls could thus be composed of a material as fragile as glass; the only cost would be an unpartitioned interior, a condition Philip found less a defect than a boon." The Farnsworth House's core doesn't present itself as an island cluster of separate rooms, but as a discrete object. By rising to a level just short of the main space's ceiling, it suggests a piece of freestanding furniture. In similar fashion, Johnson's bathroom enclosure, by also housing a fireplace, is made to read as a chimney. These effects disguise the presence of interior rooms and enforce the sense of a one-room house. The appeal of one-room buildings lies in their direct relationship between envelope and content, in the primally satisfying simplicity of a one-to-one relationship between exterior and interior. Their lineage includes ancient temples, the Pantheon, Bramante's Tempietto and Thoreau's cabin. In the 1980s, Frank Gehry tried to capture the integrity of such buildings in projects like his 1981 "House for a Filmmaker", which adopts the form of a cluster of individual buildings. Describing his motive for the house's design in the 1986 Walker Art Center book, The Architecture of Frank Gehry, he wrote, "I thought that by minimizing the issue of function, by creating one-room buildings, we could resolve the most difficult problems in architecture. Think of one-room buildings and the fact that historically, the best buildings ever built are one-room buildings." The idea formed the basis of the "village of forms" model on which Gehry would design many projects. An illustration from Lester Walker's American Shelter (Overlook Press, 1997) shows early American house construction that prefigures the core-and-envelope formula of the Farnsworth House and Glass House. "I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house," Thoreau wrote in Walden. "The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising though the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent." In his 1965 essay, "A Home is Not a House," Reyner Banham saw a source of Philip Johnson's Glass House in "the admitted persistence in Johnson's mind of the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial shells of the houses consumed by fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing chimneys." If Mies's and Johnson's one-room houses appeal to our inner cave-seeker, their hearths are likewise compelling on a primitive level. As in Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, a focal hearth is balanced by an outwardly oriented enclosure, tapping into the ingrained rhythm by which our forebears went out in search of food by day and turned back inward to a communal fire at night. Although Mies placed the Farnsworth House's fireplace back-to-back with its kitchen, invoking the massive colonial American chimney with a parlor fireplace on one side and cooking hearth on the other, Johnson in fact made a great deal more of his fireplace, in the spirit of Wright. Reducing the Farnsworth House to a single room, Mies kept his glass envelope pure, appealed to innate domestic desires, and minimized the distance Thoreau regretted had grown "from the hearth to the field." continued

The Farnsworth House, part 1 / whose less is more?

Smarticulation

Smarticulation is facade articulation intended to make a building look purposeful and important. It is primarily found in large buildings with glass curtainwalls and achieved by crisply projecting or recessing an area of the facade by two or three feet. This shallow modeling has no impact on the use of the building, so it can be applied as an afterthought to a fully worked out design, and anywhere on the face of the building without impact on function. Smarticulation is therefore often applied retroactively by designers who worry that their projects look dull. The Orion, Cetra/Ruddy Architects' condominium tower at 350 West 42nd Street, projects smarticulation to liven up and slim down its north facade. Smarticulation may or may not actually occur where there's a special function behind the articulated surface, but it neither serves nor expresses any underlying special use. This is for the best, given that the details of a large building's inner workings are almost certain to change during the many years that pass between its design and completion of construction.

Smarticulation takes a shallow bite out of a corner of the new Bank of America Tower on Bryant Park, designed by Cook+Fox Architects. (Smarticulation does love to wrap itself around a corner!) With characteristic promiscuity, lighting and furniture behind the lower floors of this indentation suggest a specialized use, perhaps conference rooms, but its upper floors look like business as usual. A function of insecurity, smarticulation can not only juice up what's seen by the designer as a bland building face, but allow the building itself to say "hey, I'm not just some simple-sided barn full of rentable square footage over here; I've got complicated inner workings." By refusing to say what these inner workings are, smarticulation turns the tables. It doesn't just pathetically say "I am too, smart", but, "I'm up to important business here that you don't need to know about." Sources close to SOM's design for the expansion of John Jay College, currently under construction, say there's nothing very special going on behind the one-story slice of smarticulation that turns the corner of West 59th Street and Eleventh Avenue. It animates a blocky shape and provides a smooth horizontal counterpoint to the building's bristling vertical fins. But that's already more than you're meant to know. In addition to being meaningless, a critical distinction of smarticulation is that it must not be part of a regular surface pattern, but seemingly arbitrary and therefore conspicuously indifferent to the comprehension of the man on the street.

Columbia's Jerome Greene Hall, above and below, at 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was designed by Max Abramovitz and completed in 1961. Is it a progenitor of smarticulation? The purposeful looking horizontal window boxes on either end of the building play a similar compositional role to John Jay's horizontal slit. Mounted outside the horizontal fins, they look as if they might slide up and down the facade. Denied a hint as to their purpose, the public dubbed this building "the toaster".

And now, smarticulation Q & A. Q: I live near the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, and with all that building's architecture has going on and all those fancy people coming and going, I was wondering if it's what you'd call smarticulate? Also on Columbus Circle, that new makeover of the old Lollipop Building into a Museum sure has a lot doing on its facade. Is that smarticulation? A: No, and no again. Time Warner, designed by SOM, suffers from an entirely separate design strategy, conspicu-ticulation, which I'm sure you know stands for conspicuous consumption articulation. The Museum of Arts and Design merely looks smarticulate, and thus invites unearned sidewalk sniping. It's facade actually telegraphs much of the interior layout and therefore has meaning. The Time Warner Center's condominium entrance features an excrutiatingly expensive high-tech glazing system that mainly covers a blank wall. This is not smarticulation, but an ego-coddling strategy intended to make the condominium owner feel like he's lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill every time he comes or goes. This conspicuous consumption articulation is the urban equivalent of the suburban tract mansion's piling up of dormers, gables, arched windows and pediments.

Small vertical windows on the face of the Museum of Arts and Design align with glass strips in its floors that in turn define exhibit areas, the width of which are indicated by the horizontal slot windows. Familiarity with this public building turns its facade into a map of the interior. Designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, this building telegraphs what's happening inside in a way that is smarticulation's opposite; it's enough to warm the hearts of old geezers who still speak of a golden age when exteriors related to interiors and drivers used turn signals. The building acknowledges the public with a friendly "Hi", something a smarticulate building would surely never do. Q: That "Atelier" condo sure has a fancy name for something in the middle of Hell's Kitchen. I was wondering if its ins and outs are smarticulation? A: No. Though this building has a highfalutin name, its dance-stepping modulations create a pattern and are therefore not smarticulation.

The Atelier condominium at 635 West 42nd Street was designed by Costas Kondylis. Q: My husband and I were traveling in Indonesia and saw this fascinating building in Jakarta. I said, "Bill, there must be something special that goes on way up at the top where that piece sticks out." He said "Aw, don't be a sucker, that's just smarticulation." Who's right? A: If you're describing the Menara Karya office tower, that's a tough one. The rotated portion near the top of the building is said to house the anchor tenant's corporate board room, which is meaningful, but how would you ever know? The inflection is more pronounced than the usual throwaway of smarticulation, but there's an overall air of metallic, alien reticence that's like a sci-fi version of smarticulation . . . You're both right!

Arquitectonica's Menara Karya office tower in Jakarta. Q: Donald Trump is always up to fancy business. Are any of his projects smarticulate? A: The Trump Soho Hotel is covered in smarticulation. The Trump Soho Hotel, nearing completion at 246 Spring Street, was designed by Handel Architects. Will Il Donald address New York from one of the incised balconies at the top? The building's answer is, "that's for Mr. Trump to know". Q: Can I be smarticulate even if I'm not a building? A: Yes! Just look purposeful and indifferent to others. Dance out into the street trying to flag down off-duty cabs and when they pass by, look at your watch, stick out your jaw and shake your head. You score extra points for wearing a suit or sunglasses, carrying a briefcase or having a cell phone clamped to your head. In fact, you can be smarticulate just by walking down the sidewalk pretending to use your cell phone.

One theory holds that the indifference and feigned purposefulness of smarticulate architecture reflect a world overrun by people on cellphones.

How to Meet the Sky

Philip Johnson said that outdoor sculpture "lights up the sky". He was talking about the way solid and void energize each other in an interplay of figure and ground, a principle that certainly applies to tall buildings.

Flatiron Building postcard view

Much of the Flatiron Building's appeal to artists and photographers, for example, lies in its siting on an acute intersection where views allow the sky to nearly engulf the building and come to earth. The figure of the tower becomes more positive by virtue of the emptiness of its background, while the complementary interlocking form of the background gives the sky a positive quality.

Jean Nouvel's proposed MoMA tower

This principle is what City Planning Chair Amanda Burden may have had in mind during last month's public hearing when she said of Jean Nouvel's MoMA Tower design, "How this building meets the sky is not only in the tradition of great New York City architecture, but it's absolutely essential that it culminate in a very sophisticated and distinguished apex." Her enthusiasm for a design that exceeds its allowed zoning height testifies to its appeal. Speaking in the hearing, Nouvel said of his tower that "It has to disappear into the sky". It will do this by tapering to a point as viewed from east or west, and by becoming translucent when viewed from the north or south. This light-permeable aspect may be what earns this building - one of countless glass skyscrapers, after all - the name "Tower Verre".

Tower Verre would rise above its context.

When the design's flatter-topped aspect was questioned during the hearing, a photo-montage showing it in context was put forward in support of Nouvel's case for his tower's role as "the missing piece of the puzzle" in the ups and downs of the skyline as viewed from Central Park.

Amanda Burden appears to be betting that the building's proposed height will enhance the kind of slender, sky-backed silhouette that graced prewar New York's mythic skyline. As reported in The Architect's Newspaper, she placed Nouvel's design squarely in this context last week, saying “It must be iconic, it must be distinguished. To get to that height in the sky, it’s got to be great. I don’t have a problem with the height. But let’s see it, and see where it falls with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and if it deserves it."

Whether any building can recapture the magic of New York's prewar icons in today's crowded sky is questionable.

Lower Manhattan's prewar skyline in a postcard view

Analyzing the shape of skylines, Rudolf Arnheim wrote that "A sharply horizontal boundary tends to produce an abrupt break between architecture and sky. This is not the case when we see irregular contours, which may build to peaking clusters. The diminishing width of spires and towers supports the same visual conception. The architecture diffuses gradually into the sky." (The Dynamics of Architectural Form, University of California Press, 1977, p.26) The contours Arnheim describes belong to a lost New York, when slender, loosely spaced towers reached into an enveloping sky that interlaced with their soaring fingers. This is the New York of photos by Andreas Feininger and Samuel H. Gottscho, taken before broad boxes filled in the sky spaces, and created Arnheim's "abrupt break between architecture and sky". Long before the Coen Brothers lyrically recreated the prewar skyline for their 1994 movie, The Hudsucker Proxy, David O. Selznick recorded it, still intact, in Portrait of Jenny, his 1948 movie about an artist who falls in love with a ghost from an earlier time. Making a theme of the sky's supernatural associations, this film begins and ends with views of it and uses the Manhattan skyline throughout to make its presence palpable. The dated nature of the story takes nothing away from Portrait of Jennie's achingly romantic lost skyline. The story in fact parallels the viewer's seduction by the backdrop ghost city, as irretrievably lost as Jennie.

David O. Selznick's spectral Jennie, played by Jennifer Jones, enters an early scene in "Portrait of Jennie", delivered to earth by a sky reaching down between the Pierre and Sherry-Netherland Hotels.

Joseph Cotton's garreted artist Eben Adams is haunted by Jennie, for whom the skyline becomes a leitmotif. Watching over his shoulder, we are haunted by the lost skyline itself. What chance would Nouvel's tower have of bringing a piece of this city back to life, assuming it's approval effort succeeds? The 1,250 foot height that makes it such a lightning rod would increase its figure-ground interaction with the sky. The rest depends on the vitality of its design. A fake antique like 15 Central Park West would only emphasize our distance from the authentic prewar spirit. Nouvel's challenge is to recapture the wonder-inspiring newness and strangeness that skyscrapers had so long ago. His design seems to borrow new life from popular undercurrents of skyscraper psychology. New York's skyline has long influenced the cityscapes of fantasy drawings and science fiction movies. Nouvel is a film lover who has been said to interpret "cinema as the creator of today's myths and icons". His design for the MoMA tower may capture reflections from parallel fantasy worlds well beyond the Hugh Ferriss renderings that he presents as its inspiration. Tower Verre's tapering expressionistic asymmetry and spidery frame have an eeriness evocative of other worlds that Selznick - or any member of today's targeted 13-year old male movie demographic - would grasp and savor immediately. Prewar New York remains distinct because it was frozen for so long and followed by such different architecture. It's this sharp definition that makes it such a compelling ghost and its lifeless replication such a trap. Whether Tower Verre succeeds, it is notable for attempting to reincarnate prewar New York's true spirit in a new body.

A century ago, the cover of "Life" magazine's 1909 Real Estate Number showed elongated caricatures of New York skyscrapers breaking through clouds into their own celestial realm.

The "Life" cover is echoed by the opening shot from Portrait of Jennie, which also provides the cover art for James Sanders' book "Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies", (Knopf, 2001).

A cartoon from the the 1909 Life real estate issue suggests a supernatural side of skyscrapers. Its caption reads, "The Heaven-Reaching Skyscraper: The Amalgamated Angel Labor Union of 1910 at Work". Spiritual implications carried over to skyscrapers from church spires, formerly the tallest of structures.

Titled "Some Day", this is another of the same "Life" issue's several cartoons that feature fantasy airships communicating among skyscrapers. The zeppelin mooring mast at the top of the Empire State Building tethers skyscrapers' advanced technology to fantasy. Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis and countless films since have explored this overlapping territory. The prewar Manhattan skyline has had an afterlife in the visionary sets of films like Kerry Conran's 2004 "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman" movie, for which Anton Furst's Gotham City design "completely turned its back on postwar New York", as noted by James Sanders in "Celluloid Skyline".

The Empire State Building is prewar New York's physical and temporal climax. For City Planning Chair Amanda Burden, it's also the measure of Tower Verre.