Convergences

Influential "Life" Cartoon Turns 100

This year is the centenary of a cartoon that has had a remarkable influence on architecture. Published in Life magazine's "Real Estate Number" of March, 1909, the full-page cartoon by A.B. Walker shows conventional houses stacked on an open skyscraper frame. Its caption reads, "'Buy a cozy cottage in our steel constructed choice lots, less than a mile above Broadway. Only ten minutes by elevator. All the comforts of the country with none of its disadvantages.' - Celestial Real Estate Company" Walker's cartoon was rediscovered by Rem Koolhaas and extensively analyzed in his seminal book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978, pp.69-70). Koolhaas ignored the thrust of its caption and saw in the cartoon's picture "a theorem that describes the ideal performance of the skyscraper: a slender steel structure supports 84 horizontal planes, all the size of the original plot. Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site, as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single country house and its attendant facilities, stable, servants' cottages, etc. Villas on the 84 platforms display a range of social aspiration from the rustic to the palatial; emphatic permutations of their architectural styles, variations in gardens, gazebos and so on, create at each elevator stop a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack."

Koolhaas's description of the cartoon's steel frame as a "rack" points to its anticipation of Le Corbusier's famous illustration of the concept for his Unite d'Habitation of 1947-52, as a support frame into which individual prefabricated dwellings might be inserted like bottles into a wine rack, prefiguring much of what was to follow in prefabricated architecture and other architectural streams of thought. A further link to Le Corbusier appears in the yards that surround the Life cartoon's houses; Le Corbusier's "immeuble villas" apartment block project of 1922 had double-height living spaces opening onto private gardens, and roof gardens were one of his "five points of architecture".

Focusing on the cartoon's details, Koolhaas continues, "The 'life' inside the building is correspondingly fractured: on level 82 a donkey shrinks back from the void, on 81 a cosmopolitan couple hails an airplane. Incidents on the floors are so brutally disjointed that they cannot conceivably be part of the same scenario. The disconnectedness of the aerial plots seemingly contradicts the fact that, together, they add up to a single building. The diagram strongly suggests even that the structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited, that its success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies. The building becomes a stack of individual privacies." Koolhaas finds "The fact that the 1909 'project' is published in the old Life, a popular magazine, and drawn by a cartoonist - while the architectural magazines of the time are still devoted to Beaux-Arts - suggests that early in the century 'the people' intuit the promise of the Skyscraper more profoundly than Manhattan's architects, that there exists a subterranean collective dialogue about the new form from which the official architect is excluded." Koolhaas had in fact been studying "sources capable of revealing unfamiliar or popular aspects of New York, like tourism brochures and postcards" in the lead-up to Delirious New York, according to Roberto Gargiani in Rem Koolhaas/OMA: The Construction of Merveilles (Routledge, 2008, p.14.) The section-based genesis of many Koolhaas projects follows naturally on his layer-cake interpretation of buildings like the Life cartoon skyscraper and the Downtown Athletic Club in Delirious New York. Peter Eisenman (in Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000, Rizzoli, 2008, p.203) sees this interpretation informing the "vertical stacking of differentiated horizontal planes that do not share a contiguity of purpose from one level to another" in Koolhaas's 1993 Tres Grande Bibliotheque project. Laid on its side, this stratification produces in Koolhaas's 1982 Parc de La Villette proposal what Eisenman calls "a montage of programmatic lateral bands". Koolhaas's "cross-programming", such as his inclusion of performance space in New York's Prada flagship store, or his unexecuted proposal to include hospital units for the homeless in the Seattle Public Library, follow up on his observation of the "brutally disjointed" contents of a single building in the Life cartoon. In the 1980s, Walker's Life cartoon inspired the "Highrise of Homes" project by James Wines and his firm SITE, a fantasy of highrise housing that would allow individual freedom and expression. As described in SITE's Highrise of Homes publication (Rizzoli, 1982, p.41), "The two most obvious antecedents for the Highrise of Homes are the amusing 1909 drawing of a proposal for a skyscraper as a utopian device and the 1920 fantasy depicting a cooperative apartment house built according to the owners' individual tastes. It should be noted, however, that these examples point up the difference between a casual joke and a topic of substantive research, and have been included here with hopes that a comparison of intent will work in favor of a better understanding of the Highrise of Homes." While this statement fails to acknowledge how literally the project builds on Walker's image, SITE's fleshing out of his cartoon's outlines and dense proliferation of its plantings transforms the cartoon into a different kind of art and anticipates a trend found in today's green skyscraper proposals.

SITE credits both Walker's 1909 cartoon and this 1920 one, also from Life, as "antecedents" for its "Highrise of Homes" project, but Walker's image is clearly the critical inspiration and model.

More recently, the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany by MVRDV shows the influence of the Life cartoon, possibly by way of SITE's verdant interpretation (photo: Benutzer:JuergenG). A Dutch architecture firm, MVRDV has links to the cartoon by way of Koolhaas's firm OMA, for whom two of its principals once worked. Last year's proposal by architect Daniel Libeskind for a the residential Madison Square Park Tower is one of several recent highrise designs that incorporate trees in a way never dreamt of by the office ficus, and first envisioned in Walker's Life cartoon. An emerging breed of environmentally minded skysrapers wear green on their sleeves. UCX Architects' Urban Cactus apartment tower, under construction in Rotterdam, may be the closest thing ever built to a realization of Walker's concept. Placing the cartoon in its original context of Life's 1909 "Real Estate Number" not only reminds us how long New York has been obsessed with this topic, but gives us a glimpse of New York's early awareness of itself as a skyscraper city. Including the cover image, the issue's half-dozen skyscraper cartoons all exaggerate distance from the ground. (Transportation among towers by aircraft is another of their themes, which seems to have had enough serious currency to have inspired the real-life zeppelin mooring mast atop the Empire State Building and the rooftop helipad of the Pan Am - now MetLife - Building.) What sets Walker's houses-on-steel-frame cartoon apart from the others is its commentary on the home's loss of immediate connection to the ground. When the first skyscrapers were rising, apartment buildings were still a recent phenomenon. As described in New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns, James Sanders and Lisa Ades (Knopf, 2003, p.236), "From the very start, the new structures generated controversy. One resident of the Upper East Side voiced the opinion of many prosperous New Yorkers - nearly all of whom still lived in private row houses - when he declared that 'Gentlemen will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof'."

An early apartment building, The Dakota, was designed with apartments the size of single-family row houses to entice early adopters of apartment living. Walker's cartoon reflects on what was most fundamentally false about this promise, the lack of contact with the ground. On an entirely separate path, his image's openness to interpretation has given it a life he could never have imagined.

Plug-in Architecture Loses an Icon

With Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower (photo: Scarletgreen/Flickr) headed for demolition, the world will lose not just one of the few executed works of Japanese Metabolism, as noted earlier this month by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times, but a rare built example of plug-in architecture. The Capsule Tower might at first appear no more than a quaint, dated vision of the future, but a look at its durable influence and vital legacy show an icon of growing historic significance whose loss will loom larger in the years to come.

The plug-in concept dates from an illustration by Le Corbusier for his 1947-52 Unite d'Habitation highrise apartment block in Marseilles, which in the words of architectural historian Kenneth Frampton "went so far as to envisage complete apartments being hoisted directly into position as prefabricated units, an idea depicted in a provocative photomontage where a godlike hand simply inserts factory-made dwellings into the frame, like stacking bottles in a wine rack . . . although this was not the manner in which the units could finally be fabricated and assembled." (Le Corbusier, by Kenneth Frampton, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 156)

In setting his apartments back from the face of the concrete frame of the Unite d'Habitation (Photo: Rightee/Flickr), Corbusier not only created recessed balconies, but expressed the "wine rack" building frame and the opportunity for color to emphasize the individuality of dwellings. Both the unexecuted idea of modular plug-in units and the more easily achieved distinct expression of cellular units created their own traditions.

In the 1960s, the English Archigram group proposed individual buildings and an entire city made of prefabricated components attached to fixed infrastructures. Plug-in City, designed by Archigram's Peter Cook from 1962-64, had an infrastructure with rail-mounted cranes that would install and replace prefabricated housing, office, and shop modules planned for obsolescence. The organically responsive, self-refreshing city would support change and growth. This organic quality gave the name "Metabolism" to a parallel movement in Japan which shared many of Archigram's ideas. A tower of plug-in "capsule" homes was designed by Archigram's Warren Chalk in 1964. Inspired by space capsules, Chalk's prefabricated dwelling modules would plug into a central shaft providing structural support, vertical circulation and services. Capsule living units would be replaced by a top-mounted crane as newer models evolved, using automobiles as an analogy. Of Archigram's concepts, this one most closely corresponds to any of the few Japanese Metabolist projects actually to be built, Nakagin Capsule Tower.

Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (photo: Scarletgreen/Flickr) was completed in 1972. The 8-foot by 12-foot by 7-foot tall capsules were prefabricated off site, installed by crane and bolted to one of two support towers. Each unit is a complete bachelor apartment with a single porthole window, reflecting Archigram's space capsule inspiration. The flexibility of Archigram's concept was never realized here, as none of the capsules was ever replaced.

Perhaps the most sophisticated descendant of Nakagin Capsule Tower is the prototype Industrialized Housing System designed in 1991-92 by Richard Rogers Partnership, architects, and Ove Arup & Partners, engineers. Commissioned by the Korean manufacturer, Hanseem Corporation, the system was intended to provide up to 100,000 apartments in various locations throughout Korea at a fifth the price of conventional homes. Apartment modules ranging from 139 to 837 square feet would be adaptable to individual lifestyles. Their installation would be "carried out by computer-controlled cranes, much like those used to stack containers in ships". (Tall Buildings, by Guy Nordenson, Museum of Modern Art, 2003, p.92) Modular units could be sited directly on the ground or attached to a tower core. In combination, as shown in the model above, exhibited at MoMA's 2004 Tall Buildings exhibition (building 14), some of the cellular charm of the Italian hilltown or Greek fishing village emerges. The rich articulation and human scale of this compellingly developed design set it apart from the other 24 towers in MoMA's exhibition.

The Micro Compact Home concepts, by Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack + Hopfner Architects, dating from 2001, include a "tree village" of 30 dwelling capsules mounted to steel columns and clustered around a central vertical circulation core. As noted in Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen (Museum of Modern Art, 2008), "An individual unit could be removed, whether for maintenance or replacement, without disturbing the structure at large, similar to Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower". At 76 square feet, the ingeniously packed, perfect-cube capsules accommodate a surprising range of activities in less space than Nakagin's capsules. A model unit was displayed last year in MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition, which also featured Nakagin Tower. Cranes of the Port Newark Container Terminal loom beyond a Bayonne, New Jersey, trailer park. Off the architectural high road, trailer parks have long implemented the ideal of mass produced dwelling units plugged into a fixed infrastructure. Trailers take the concept a step further by allowing homes to easily relocate from one infrastructure to another. On a separate real-world track, shipping container technology, with its industrialized capsules constantly rearranged by cranes, parallels the ideas of Archigram.

The firm LO-TEK, in its multiple Modular Dwelling Unit proposal of 2002, applies container technology to the mobile home precedent by way of a vertical support framework that would realize Le Corbusier's wine rack analogy, with shipping containers retrofitted into homes serving as the bottles. LOT-EK's concept includes drawer-like "subvolumes" that pull out from each container's body, admitting natural light and creating activity areas larger than the containers' 8-foot width. The vertical frames, or "harbors" include stairs, elevators and services. Harbors would be located in all major metropolitan areas to maximize mobility. The sustainability of this system begins with repurposing of containers and continues with mobility of dwellings. The naturally varied appearance of recycled containers corresponds to Corbusier's use of different colors on the exterior of the Unite d'Habitations to identify individual dwelling units. Or as LO-TEK puts it, “The vertical harbor is in constant transformation as MDUs are loaded and unloaded from the permanent rack. Like pixels in a digital image, temporary patterns are generated by the presence or absence of MDUs in different locations along the rack, reflecting the ever-changing composition of these colonies scattered around the globe.” While many real projects, including a hotel, have taken advantage of containers' stackable-by-design character, LOT-EK's use of a separate frame would allow true plug-in flexibility.

Echoing Archigram's Plug-in City, the cranes endemic to container yards would insert or withdraw living capsules. The fixed frame proposed by LO-TEK corresponds to Le Corbusier's "wine rack".

Freitag's shop in Zurich, 2005, takes advantage of the native stackability of containers. The company's product line of bags made from recycled truck tarps is inspired by the same ideas of recycling, found-object-art, and industrial chic that inform container architecture. Enough notable examples and practitioners of this architecture, including work by pioneers like Wes Jones and Adam Kalkin, have emerged to warrant a book-length survey, Container Architecture, by Jure Kotnik (LINKS, 2008). The movement taps into the recent explosion of interest in prefab house design, which itself signals a growing public enthusiasm for the application to housing of mass production's potential for quality control, economy, and consumer choice. This promise has always been central to the plug-in school of thought, and Le Corbusier's vision of the house as "machine for living". Capsule in search of a host; the mass produced Loftcube, designed by Werner Aisslinger, has been helicoptered onto rooftops and hooked up to existing building services. The tiny scale of many modular house designs relates to plug-in architecture's fascination with factory made object-like dwellings, and the over-the-shoulder look that modern architecture has cast on the automobile since Le Corbusier's 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture. The Adolfo Reyes 58 apartment building in Mexico City, 2000-03, by Dellekamp Arquitectos, is not modular but adopts the appearance of stacked prefab units to individually express dwellings. This variegated approach is part of a recent trend that borrows from the plug-in tradition and, in this case, the aesthetic of container architecture.

The architecture firm Axis Mundi proposed this alternative design for the MoMA tower in Manhattan earlier this month. Like Nakagin Capsule Tower, the proposal has a pair of structural/service cores. The design would allow apartment owners to customize their units' exteriors. In a nod to the origin of the new design's plug-in heritage, the stair below the Marilyn Monroe image is adopted from Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, below. (Photo: matt2008/Flickr)

Is World's New Largest Building the Spawn of Manhattan's Muni?

Does this building look somehow familiar? The pointed center tower surrounded by minions and topped with a gold sculpture, the embracing wings, the arched entrance in the foreground and the side arcades; is there not a family resemblance to Manhattan's Municipal Building? Mecca's Abraj Al-Bait wouldn't be the first love child of the Municipal Building, long linked by DNA to Cleveland's Terminal Tower, Detroit's Fisher Building and Chicago's Wrigley Building. A cold war affair with Josef Stalin yielded Moscow's Seven Sisters and Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science. More recently, Moscow's Triumph-Palace has continued the bloodline. On his encyclopedic New York Architecture website, Tom Fletcher charts the Municipal Building's influence and traces its roots to ancient Greece by way of 12th century Seville's La Giralda minaret. With this lineage, Abraj Al-Bait might be said to have brought the minaret to Mohammad, but its genes seem more Muni-ish than Moorish.