Mullet Architecture: FLLW and Hans Scharoun.

FLLW:Winslow House Plan. 1894. Business in the front, party in the back.

Throughout history Architects have given clients the most bang for their buck by putting all the “architecture” on the street facade. This is done to show off to the public. The utilitarian needs of the building behind the main facade are clad functionally and without elaboration. Renaissance and Baroque Churches have grandiose front facades, many times larger than they need to be to project a massive building. The false front covers up an ordinary church behind it. This was also utilized in old west buildings, where simple gabled wood construction buildings had large, oversized fronts decorated and bejeweled in various ways. Even today this can be seen in any upper middle class suburb. The front of the house is clad in a brick veneer while the sides and back are covered in cheaper vinyl siding. This is what I call reverse mullet architecture. It is party in the front and business in the back. The duality of the building (that being the aesthetic thrust versus the utilitarian thrust) is distilled between front of the house delight to back of the house commodity. Only during the emergence of modernism did this duality shift. This antipode I deem Mullet Architecture. In this instance, however, it is not about delight and commodity, it is a reaction to the conservative eye of the time.

Winslow House: Top; Front Facade. Bottom; Back Facade

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow House of 1894 is an early and potent example of Mullet Architecture. Wright designed the front facade of the house in a more conservative manner giving it symmetry and weight. The front entrance is clearly inspired by certain mausoleums Sullivan was working on at the time. The ornamentation as well is very much in the vein of Sullivan. So even though this is conservative by our standards of Wright, it was still deemed highly modern at the time. Even so, Wright’s truly revolutionary ideas about domestic architecture are subdued in the front of this house. Only in the back does one start to get an idea of where Wright was really headed. The back of the house, in marked contrast to the front, is asymmetrical in plan and elevation. The dining nook thrusts out into the backyard in a semicircle while the stair tower rises above the roof plain, like a castle turret, in the shape of a half octagon. These extruded basic geometries evoke the Froebel block teachings of Wright as a boy, but they also suggest the asymmetrical massing of Henry Hobson Richardson, another of Wright’s influences. In order to “blend” more clearly with the surrounding neighborhood, Wright played all of his fun games with architecture on the back facade of the house while keeping the front relatively subdued and orderly. It was strictly business in the front, while the party stayed in the back! This is building as duality, where sobriety and order dominate the front, playfulness and asymmetry dominate the back. It was just a matter of a couple years before Wright would abandon this conciliatory gesture towards the neighbors and really start on his revolutionary prairie style. Here the party would be all around in a pinwheel of asymmetrical projections.

Hans Scharoun :Schminke House. 1930. Before the Nazi's ruined everythihng.

A much more grim circumstance of Mullet Architecture can be found in the World War II era domestic work of Hans Scharoun. Unlike Gropius, Neutra and Mies, Scharoun stayed in Germany while the gauntlet of artistic freedom, especially of the Modernist idiom, was systematically and disturbingly dismantled by the Nazi regime. The Bauhaus was closed and book-burning campaigns tried to eradicate all things unpatriotic to the German Motherland. Modern Art and Architecture and its aim for a universal message were deemed un-German. A new era of nationalism steered the arts and architecture into the direction of traditional vernacular forms. Hans Scharoun had made many interesting Modernist designs before the Nazi rise to power, including a dwelling at the Weissenhofsiedlung, and, most notably, the Schminke house of 1930.

Scharoun: Front and interior view of the Mohrmann House. 1939.

Once the Nazi hammer came down, in the form of strict building codes, Scharoun was forced to make markedly more conservative designs for fear of being in trouble with the powers that be. On top of this, the war effort needed steel, so Scharoun was required to build with more traditional masonry. It must have been a terrifying time for the architect. The artist in him found ways to subvert these stringent aesthetic requirements. The Mohrmann house of 1939 has a gabled front facade that looks like a quaint little cottage. It is business in the front. In the back however, we see the irreverent freedom Scharoun found on the private facades of his houses. The back of the house is clearly asymmetrical. The walls are at all kinds of strange angles. Even in section, the house is split up in many different levels. The flooring in the front part of the house is traditional hardwood, while the living portion in the back is floored in various sized shards of stone pieced together like a broken plate. Scharoun justified these seemingly arbitrary planning effects as being influenced towards maximizing the land and the views of the specific location. More interestingly though is the contrast that these wild angles have with the front facade. The front gives no indication of what’s happening in the back.

Scharoun: Baensch House. 1935. Front Facade. Floor Plan. (entry in orange)

My favorite example of this Mullet Architecture by Scharoun is the Baensch house of 1935. Here again the front is very conservative and meant to look like a traditional vernacular German cottage. In the back the building positively explodes in myriad angle, and curved surfaces. Another interesting thing to point out is his use of glass. The front of the house consists of the traditional windows punched into thick stucco, while the back opens up floor to ceiling glass views out to the private garden. In the living room, a convex built in couch thrusts one out into nature. Scharoun also seems to deconstruct the building itself as it meanders towards the garden side. The ordered brick walls terminate on the garden side into crumbling serrated edges. This suggests the building going from order to chaos, as well as an attempt to integrate the building with nature via an aesthetic transition. It is also disturbing in imagining that Scharoun probably had experience with bombed fallout cities during WWI. These buildings show practical, and scary, reasons for creating architecture with a duality about it. The Mullet architecture was essential for Scharoun to keep practicing during the Nazi era. After the war Scharoun abandoned his false facades and went further in his direction of organic building, with seemingly chaotic angles that suggested a strictly programmatic agenda. His buildings went where they wanted to now that they were free from the Nazi stranglehold.

Baensch House. Deconstructed Walls.

Mullet architecture was the reversal of the traditional way of making buildings. Buildings today are increasingly more driven to fit into the contexts in which they inhabit, in such a way that Mullet architecture may still have justification in certain locations. Some building codes in America, in the name of “beautification” sound almost as stringent as those laid out by the Nazis. I sure hope somewhere, in the sea of McMansions, a quaint Mullet building sits with an unassuming conservative front and a party in the back!

Alvar Aalto: The Functionalist Aesthete

Aalto:Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, 1967. Ratonal and aesthetic collision.

“The only possible factors and motives with which one can replace the old criteria are scientific studies of what people and society unconditionally need in order to remain, or better yet, to develop into a healthy organism.” Alvar Aalto

“In order to achieve practical goals and valid aesthetic forms in connection with architecture, one cannot always start from a rational and technical standpoint- perhaps even never.” Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto embraced many nuanced dualities throughout his career. He did not try to suppress the dual nature of the architect (the disparity between rationalism and the spiritual will). Instead he found a way to create spaces that served people on a very sensual scale, all the while being purely aesthetic about it.

Paimo Sanatorium 1929. Rational and playful elements on the facade of the patients wing. Plan showing separation of program.

An early example of this embraced duality can be found at the Paimo Sanatorium of 1929. The functionalist aspects manifest themselves in the shape of the building, which is splayed by function into very distinct entities where the main connecting element between the wings is the entrance lobby and the main vertical circulation. (This dissected building was no doubt influenced by Duiker’s Sanatorium) The locations of these separated functions of the building are arranged according to solar considerations as well as creating adjacencies meant to be programmatically logical as well as noise reductive. Exterior aesthetic functionalism is expressed in the banishment of ornament and the use of clean white walls. On a more human scale, the patient’s rooms are rigorously designed with an obsession for comfort and well-being. The windows and the placement of the patient’s bed were designed with strict solar consideration. The ceilings are painted in tranquil colors, and the light fixtures are designed for no glare. The list continues with; noiseless sinks, easy to open door handles and unfortunately, wardrobe cabinets that looked like coffins! Conversely, all of these designed elements, while achieving comfort, were ultimately dictated by aesthetics (I’m sure the coffin thing was a case of hindsight saying “what the hell was I thinking with that one?”). Aalto did what many master architects do, and that is design with the total union of aesthetics and function in mind. The more aesthetically functional elements of the Sanatorium include, multi-colored canopies, a sinuous front desk, a trademark kidney shaped entrance canopy etc. These elements weave through the building and prevent it from being a cold and truly functionalist space.

Villa Mairea. 1938.

As Aalto’s works progressed, the duality between aesthetic and function began to become clearer. In the Villa Mairea we see a logical orthogonal plan treated with elements of pure aesthetic delight. The plan is completely liberated at the swimming pond, which has the kidney shape again. This playful element, contrasted with more linear form, also carried a symbolic reference about the nature of the architect. The pond is meant to be the primordial element; early mankind dominated by nature. As the house leans to more functional/orthogonal realms the progression of man’s history in regard to his ability to control nature is manifested aesthetically. Aalto also used the idea of the egg and the full-grown being when talking about this metaphor. The interesting and consistent thing about Aalto’s buildings in his later work, is this clear contrast of an element that seems to be free and naturalistic (the head) set against and element of rigid rationality (the tail). My personal favorite example of this is the Seinajoki Library where the reading room is an undulating wave that plays fantastic games with light. This collides with the rational and more practical other functions of the library, which are housed in a rectilinear portion. Here, it also seems that a less practically demanding space, such as a reading room, is allowed more freedom and irreverence as compared to the more rigid demands of administrative offices and bathrooms.

Seinajoki Library Plan. 1963.

Aalto is a complicated architect and a difficult one to read. He seemed to belong to neither the camp of the modernists or to the camp of the spiritualists. He was not a Modernist because it seems the demands of abstraction did not interest him. He was not a Spiritualist or a “Biological” architect because his forms were not mastered by that metaphor either. He was a little bit of both, but his tendencies in the end always were dictated by aesthetics, which is only as arbitrary as particular individual taste. This is something that I don’t like about Aalto, this arbitrary element, although to his favor it seems that he acknowledged this, framed as a general problem of the architect, by inducing violent contrasts between freedom and restraint in his work and separating these differing elements like oil and water. Perhaps this is a more appropriate approach to the duality of the architect than the exaggerations of both the Rationalists and the Spiritualists. The dual demands expected of a master architect are clearly and symbolically seen in his work.

Rendering in Squint

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Epiphany of Mimetic Abstraction

FLLW:Johnson Wax Research Tower, 1944

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature” Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright advanced an entirely new and revolutionary direction in the eternal concept of mimesis (the imitation of nature). Before Wright, mimesis generally took the form of ornamentation. Since the ancients, buildings have been clad in frozen homages to plant and animal life. The capitals of columns in Egypt imitated the lotus plant, just as the Corinthian column of ancient Rome imitated acanthus leaves. However, these buildings did not imitate nature in their basic form or construction. The use of masonry molded into an architrave, an arch, or a groin vault were evolutions in structure mostly unrelated from mimesis; they were merely a result of human ingenuity. Frank Lloyd Wright was the first to have large mimetic breakthroughs in regards to planning, form and structure. (One could argue for Antoni Gaudi and Viollet Le Duc, but their forms, while organic, were less mimetic and more alien.)

In the Ward Willits house of 1901, one sees an early example of Wright’s flowing pinwheel plan. The hearth stakes its place in the center of the house as the various rooms such as living, dining and kitchen protrude from it. The plan itself evokes a tree; the hearth being the trunk and the rooms being the branches. This is mimesis that goes beyond mere applied ornamentation. It is an intrinsic mimesis that uses the idea of the tree as an ordering device. Structurally, the use of the cantilever suggests a branch protruding from a trunk. The low hipped roof and the leading horizontal lines on the exterior contain a more abstract mimesis, evoking with their lines the uninterrupted and romantic vistas of the prairie. The prairie and the tree seem to be Wrights most imitated forms.

FLLW:Early Guggenheim Proposal

Structural and form-driven mimesis (almost unprecedented before Wright) shows up in further potent examples. Wright uses the shape of the lily pad for the dramatically slender interior columns in the Johnson Wax Building. The Hanna House utilizes the hexagon as a unit of design, effectively creating a beehive inspired residence. The Morris Gift Shop and early proposals for the Guggenheim suggest a nautilus shell. And perhaps most dramatically, the unbuilt proposal for the mile-high skyscraper in Chicago is designed structurally to be completely like a tree. The central core was to be the only supporting element, as the floor plates would protrude from it just like the branches off of a tree trunk. This trunk-core system sounds insane but was effectively utilized in the Johnson Wax Tower as well as Wrights only real built skyscraper, the Price Tower.

Sullivan: Van Allen Bldg. (Clinton, IOWA!) and FLLW: Willits Glass 1901.

So, Frank Lloyd Wright innovated on an entirely new level the way that architecture could imitate nature. Paradoxically, Wright was also one of the first architects to abstract himself from nature (as opposed to expressly imitating it). This can clearly be seen in his early stained glass work. Louis Sullivan created an entirely original and new form of decoration on the facades of his buildings, however for the most part they were still literal evocations of actual natural plant life. Frank Lloyd Wright’s early ornamentation was indebted to Sullivan’s, which can be seen in his terra cotta work at the Winslow House. As Wright develops his prairie style this direct mimesis of nature in the ornamentation begins to break down into distilled forms. FLLW abstracted nature for perhaps the first time in his early stained glass. The Willits House was the first important example of this stained glass work and is made up entirely of geometric forms completely abstracted from the true natural form that inspired them. This breakthrough was no doubt helped by Wright’s gift for pure geometric form, which he learned as a child with Froebel Blocks. One wonders to what degree this early abstraction of nature influenced the modern art movement particularly in Picasso’s discovery of cubism and Mondrian’s reductive distillations of the visible universe. Abstraction of nature found in Wright’s work goes beyond ornamentation by using aesthetic devices such as low horizontal lines and shallow hipped roofs to evoke the prairie in distilled form. Structurally, the metaphor of the lily pad and the tree with branches is also a highly abstracted concept and in no way aesthetically evokes the natural forms that inspired them. Which brings us back full circle: FLLW managed to evolve mimesis to a whole new level, while at the same time completely abstracting it. This is a true and interesting paradox found in Wright’s work. His contributions to mimesis, as well as mimetic abstraction, were paramount in influencing the modern age. Subsequent early Modernists would abstract themselves from nature to such a high degree their buildings no longer appeared to have anything to do with nature. This abstraction of nature combined with the mimesis of the machine heralded the bold forms of Modernism in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Left:FLLW: Coonley Playhouse Glass 1912.

Right: Mondrian: Trafalgar Square. 1939.

Tethered Magic Carpets: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Flotation/ Grounding Duality

Heurtley House by Frank LLoyd Wright. 1902 (Photo:Argitect)

“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was a master architect because he embraced the duality of architecture in two key ways (among many others). First he embraced the opposing concept of flotation/grounding in his buildings. Second, his buildings were directly inspired by nature, yet at the same time they projected a large degree of mimetic abstraction. In the history of architecture up to his time, Wright came closest and furthest from the concept of mimesis (imitation of nature).

Frank Lloyd Wright’s dual relationship with gravity can be seen clearly in the Heurtley House of 1902. Looking at the front exterior facade one can clearly see the roof and upper stories have a quality of flotation, achieved by the close repetitive banding of windows, the horizontal leading lines in the brickwork, and the low sloped overhanging roof. The separation of the lower part of the facade from the roof via the windows creates the illusion that the roof plane is hovering over the building. Wright uses these tricks of aesthetics to relieve us from the effects of oppressive gravity. Yet on the opposite spectrum, the ground floor uses aesthetic tricks in such a way to create an illusion of heaviness. Somehow, at the top of the building the banding of the brickwork helps reinforce the floating nature of the roof, but as one gets closer to the ground, the banding seems to visually settle into sedimentary layers until it gets to the stone base. The stone base is of a huge proportion, almost a foot tall, and truncated inwards, to create a feeling of heaviness and firm attachment to the earth. The overly large arched entrance exaggerates the weight that the arch is carrying above it. The tricks are quite effective in making one feel the building is firmly placed. This tension between heaviness and lightness is what makes Wrights facades so effective aesthetically, and psychologically. A person living in this house would simultaneously feel the stability and comfort of a grounded building, but not be overburdened by the effects of gravity. The one thing pinning the top of the house in place, at least visually, is the large fireplace poking through the top and center of the hipped roof. The hearth is the literal and figurative anchor of the home. The concept of mimesis can be inferred by relating the house to that of a tree. The trunk (hearth and base) grounds the tree and keeps it firmly in the soil, while the filigree of branches and their leaves (the floating roof) reach toward the sky in need of nourishment. The tree has the duality of grounding and flotation, and it is the most fundamental example of mimesis found in all of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. These dual properties also carried a moral rhetoric. The trunk (hearth) embraces the values of hard work, tradition and discipline, while the branches and leaves (floating roof) speak of freedom, democracy, and progress.

Fallingwater by FLLW. 1935.

Another potent, and further distilled, example of this flotation/grounding tension can be found at Fallingwater. Here, Frank Lloyd Wright uses dramatic cantilevers that sprout from the center of the building and soar defiantly in the air above a small waterfall. The length of these cantilevers is where the drama really comes from. Almost the entire living room projects out unsupported over the creek. The floating elements of the building have a materiality of reinforced concrete clad in soft colored stucco with thin rounded corners. This gives them a dreamlike and abstract quality. The windows have leading lines in red, very streamlined, and from what I’ve heard, are Wrights response to the International Style. The opposing forces to the floating elements at Fallingwater are the grounding elements that firmly anchor the building to the earth. The grounding elements are exclusively made of roughly stacked Pottsville sandstone. The texture and color of the grounding elements are in direct opposition to the smooth floating elements. The rough-hewn sandstone appears as an ambiguous outcropping of the boulders it is built on. This ambiguity between what is architecture and what is nature is reinforced in the living room, where pieces of the boulder that the structure is built on pops up out the floor! The central core of the grounding element in the house is the hearth, which is the vertical stake that keeps the building in place. An interesting element of the hearth is the cauldron that is used for cooking. This cauldron has a swiveled hinge and rests in a niche carved right into the fireplace stone. This furthers the rhetoric that the grounding elements seem to be carved from surrounding nature as opposed to transcending them.

Fallingwater fireplace. Note the cauldron niche and the bouldered floor.

The effectiveness of the floating/grounding duality at Fallingwater is due to the extreme distillation of these two elements. To recap, the flotation elements are almost uniformly; horizontal, tan colored, smooth textured, and cantilevered. The grounding elements are almost uniformly: vertical, similarly colored to the surrounding rocks, rough textured, and densely supportive. The mimetic impetus for Fallingwater came from the local rhododendron plant which has leaves that project out horizontally, in direct contrast to its vertical stalk.

It was unrealistic of me to think that I could cover two major dualities found in Wright’s architecture in one single post, so I have decided to analyze Wright’s concepts of mimetic abstraction in the next essay. As for this essay, the grounding/flotation criteria can be applied when analyzing almost every single Frank Lloyd Wright building. This tension is what makes his buildings such an effective experience when one sees them in person. Photographs cannot pretend to do justice to an FLLW building in person. They have their own magnetic force.

It seems unfashionable this day and age to study Wright as seriously as the other major master architects, but he IS the most important architect in recent history, finding an incredible synthesis between the myriad dualities found in architecture. He is the harbinger of the aesthetic vocabulary of the modern age, and one must remember he was 15 to 20 years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, although he was influential, his aesthetic vocabulary was insular, and unique to just himself. Any other architect using his vocabulary would subsequently be accused of unoriginality (Bruce Goff), something that strangely does not happen as generally with other major modern figures such as Le Corbusier, Kahn, Gropius, and Mies Van Der Rohe. His buildings seem to suggest an alternate universe of architectural possibility.

Growing Wings

Ste Chapelle: My personal favorite Gothic space floats gracefully.

Architects have one major foe they tend to fight, even if at the same time they embrace because of the level of comfort it brings them: this foe is gravity, and since the beginning architects have done everything in their power to pull out every magic trick available to suppress its oppressive pervasiveness. This is the paradox of the architect: to design within gravity to create a building that reassures its inhabitants that it will not topple and crush them, and yet to design against gravity so the inhabitants do not feel stifled by the constant force that keeps them grounded. Gravity is rational, and aesthetic anti-gravity is purely spiritual (or is it?). The rationalist deals with the physical well being of a buildings inhabitants, while the spiritualist deals with their mental well being, insuring their sanity and sense of freedom.

One can almost feel Pre-Roman architects frustration with the painfully small distances they were able to span. Before the discovery of the arch in the Roman era, architects had almost no tricks up their sleeves to suppress the true weight of gravity. The arch allowed spaces to free up considerably and soar to the sky, making one almost forget for a second that they were enveloped in a closed space with the weight of gravity bearing down on it. Still, columns and supports for these remained frequent and thick allowing most of the freedom to happen only in the ceiling.

It was with Gothic Architecture that architects started seriously doing aesthetic tricks to suppress the oppressive nature of gravity in order that ones spirit could commune with heaven unencumbered. The introduction of the ribbed vault certainly helped, allowing bays to be of shapes other than square. The introduction of the flying buttress freed up wall space considerably allowing a marked increase of glass surfaces on exterior walls. These devices allowed the buildings to positively soar, defying gravity with every fiber, but the most important development in helping gravity dissolve was the way that the architectural elements were articulated. Columns still had to be relatively thick to hold up the long spanning arches. This was suppressed considerably by breaking up the large columns into smaller bundles. These bundles appeared light and airy and diffused the mass of the large columns. This detail was carried over in the window mullions and the ribbing of the vaults to create the illusion of a lighter building. These details made one think the building was not indebted to gravity as much as it really was. This is a lie, but is it a lie that tells the truth? No: it is a lie to express a spiritual desire for freedom and connection to the above.

Bibliotheque Ste Genevieve by Henri Labrouste

The Renaissance temporarily put an end to this flouting of gravity. The focus shifted away from the organic progress of architecture and more towards a fixation with reigniting the decorum and tradition of the Roman Empire; an architecture whose rhetoric is decidedly more grounded. The emergence in the 19^th Century of the Industrial Revolution and its new materials and methods, allowed for architects who were sick of neo-classical obsessions to once again play games with gravity. Examples are many and include the Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve by Labrouste wherein the columns that hold up the double barrel vaulted interior space look less load bearing and more like stalactites that have reached the ground. Also the explorations of Viollet Le Duc as well as the bold form of the Eiffel Tower show architecture soaring again in the face of gravity. Gaudi may have not used modern industrial technology to give the illusion that his Sagrada Familia Cathedral is floating, he merely reintroduced and refined many of the aesthetic tricks used in Gothic Architecture to create a building that looks as if it is being pulled upward rather than the opposite. The cathedral looks like an upside down melted wax candle.

50X50 House by Mies Van Der Rohe

Modern Architecture saw important advances in the game of aesthetic anti-gravity. Louis Sullivan used the gothic device of bundled columns to visually attenuate the large columns needed to hold up early skyscraper design. Frank Lloyd Wright created a whole vocabulary on the defiance of gravity. His perfection of the cantilever literally allowed for certain parts of his structures to float. Also the way he articulated corners etc. were all put into place in order to keep his buildings soaring. (Interestingly though Frank Lloyd Wright dealt with the paradox between grounding and flotation, but I will explore this in another post.) Over in Europe, Le Corbusier innovated the Domino system of building. With this system columns separated from facades allowing anti-gravity tricks such as ribbon windows to create the illusion of floating architecture. Erich Mendelsohn used this trick to good effect on his Schocken storefronts. So did Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus building. Mies Van Der Rohe explored the idea of floating architecture mostly beginning with the Barcelona Pavilion. Of his unbuilt work, the 50 X 50 house boldly utilized only four slender columns at the midpoints of the perimeter to hold the roof up. These complex cantilevers gave the impression of flotation. His floating aesthetic culminated with the Berlin National Gallery where 8 columns are separated from the edges and brought in to about the 1/3 points on any given facade plane. The columns are tapered and end with a shrunken capital, almost the inverse of traditional Greek column anatomy. The effect is stunning, creating the illusion that the roof is hovering and the columns are merely pinning it down. It is amazing how just a few aesthetic devices can break the psychic bonds of gravity. A current and successful building that utilizes many of these same tricks can be seen in the New Modern Art Wing in Chicago by Renzo Piano. The louvered and articulated roof hovers over the main building and is held down by dramatically slim columns that taper at both the capital and the base. With their proportions, it is difficult to believe they are doing any work at all. The effective use of cantilevers, proportioning, structural disconnection from the facade and many other tricks, all contributed in the architect’s quest to break the oppressive pull of gravity.

An architects first and foremost obligation is to create a building that does not fall down on its users. Yet we remain obsessed with liberating ourselves from the constant constraint of gravity. It brings us down. It is depressing. It is a nag. Buildings by nature are fixed beings, and it is precisely the nature of a building that makes us want to rebel against it. But does the aesthetics of anti-gravity serve any rational purpose? I believe it does in that a building that uses the aesthetics of anti-gravity will, for the most part, use only the essential amount of materials and methods required for it’s construction. Making a structure that needs no embellishment to help it withstand gravity will by its very nature be lighter. It will fulfill the ultimate rationalist benchmark (the elimination of the inessential) as well as the ultimate spiritual benchmark (freedom and all that word implies)! The closer one comes to floating, the closer one comes to perfection!

Modern Wing Chicago: Renzo Piano (photo by Argitect)

End Note: Now in all reality a building that floats is not rational for all programs. A hospital or a prison most definitely would not want to adopt the aesthetics of anti-gravity for practical and rhetorical reasons. There is a time and place for the expression of flotation in architecture.

The Reverse Aquarium

Farnsworth House Collages by Argitect (2001)

In an urban environment such as the Chicago Federal Center by Mies Van Der Rohe, we see the architecture primarily frames the sculpture in the plaza. The sculpture is a contrasting vitality. This is not necessary in a rural environment; the vital element to the architecture is nature itself. Nature is the contrasting element, nature is the dynamic force from which the neutralized architecture enhances by aggrandized contrast. Sculpture is the substitute for nature where it is lacking in the big city.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than at the Farnsworth House by Mies Van Der Rohe designed from 1945-1951. Nature is clearly the starring character of the house. The nature of the house is to frame its surroundings. There is no other possibility; one is simply consumed by nature when inside the house. The reflections of trees in the glass mixed with the complex tree filtered shadows create a richly decorative experience. The nature seems to encroach on the border like seeing an effective 3D movie at the theater. Reflection and shadow blur the line between inside and out. The only real cue that one is not in an open pavilion is the muffling of sounds. The tree will whip violently in the wind but one won’t hear the wind inside the house. It’s like a reverse aquarium where the surroundings are on display. The floating plane of roof has an even-handed diffusion that seems to glow with indirect reflectivity.

The Farnsworth House is also very much like tofu: it takes on the characteristics of its environment. As the seasons change so does the house. The dominant mood of the environment is reflected in the overwhelming sensations of transforming nature. The color of the house changes with the seasons as well, reflecting what is happening beyond the house. In fall, the house takes on a warm hue, a hue of deep colors and gathering fortitude for winter. I have not seen it in winter, but I imagine the house to be perfectly camouflaged and even more “not there” when surrounded by blinding white. Icicles have the potential to form on its eaves, the house becomes an ice fortress, although a freezing cold one with single pane glass!

Although I have not seen it at night, I believe the success of the Farnsworth House primarily happens in the daytime. The overwhelming inhabitation of the black night, I imagine, could be oppressive and ominous when inside the house. The reverse aquarium reverses, and one would feel as if they are on display to nature, or whatever else may lurk in the void of black night.

The architecture is nature’s frame. It is not overtly decorative in order that it does not compete with nature. Just as at a museum, if a painting is framed in an overtly ornate gilded frame the power of the painting is attenuated. A conspicuous frame will make one forget the frame and focus on what is important; the painting!

It is a hard task to ask the creative minds of architecture to design a building that is not meant to stand out, but instead enhance its surroundings by disappearing as much as possible. The ego wants to be noticed, it wants to be seen and admired. Mies teaches that a building that is meant to disappear, if executed with distilled perfection, can be successful both as architecture as well as an unintrusive framing device for nature (urban or rural) or it’s substitute (sculpture, painting etc.).

Photo by Argitect

Everything In Its Right Place

Flamingo Legs by Alexander Calder in the Federal Center Plaza by Mies Van Der Rohe (Photo: Argitect)

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth” Pablo Picasso

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” Pablo Picasso

Sculpture for Mies is an important theoretical contrast placed in the context of his work. Solutions for architecture were meant to be architectural solutions (Bankunst), not sculptures with program shoved into them and structure built around them. To make architecture Mies sought to clarify structure and program in a solution that organically grew out of the needs of structure and program (this is a simplification that I will elaborate on in a future blog). This resulted in a vocabulary of strict logic.

To compliment the logical vocabulary of his buildings he incorporated sculpture into some of his major projects. In every case this strengthened considerably the theoretical notions of the building by pointing out roles of decorum in the different arts. They also exaggerated each other’s inherent ideas, strengthening both the idea of architecture and the idea of sculpture.

The most famous example of sculpture utilized in Mies’ work can be found at the Barcelona Pavilion. The George Kolbe sculpture titled “Dawn” stands floating over the shallow pool on the far end of the pavilion. The image of the Barcelona Pavilion that is most widely circulated includes this sculpture. It is integral to the building and feels like it was designed for it. The sculpture reflects in the water and on the nearby glass heightening the feeling of virtual space within the pavilion. The organic flowing curves of the sculpture contrast greatly with the planar arrangement of the space enveloping it. This sculpture is a solid form in a space. The form of the sculpture and the spatiality of the pavilion are reinforced, exaggerated, and heightened by the presence of each other. The sculpture clarifies the spatiality of the pavilion, and in reciprocation the pavilion clarifies the solidity of form in the sculpture. They also elucidate the clarity of purpose for each other: the sculpture is purely art, whereas the Pavilion is purely architecture. The “pure” architecture of the pavilion is shown in the distillation of the column, roof and wall. These clearly articulated elements express the rationality of the architecture. The metaphor of differences between the two arts is somewhat tenuous in this example considering that the Barcelona Pavilion doesn’t actually have a clear program. It is not traditional architecture in the sense that the task it performs is abstracted from pragmatism. This yin/yang between sculpture and architecture can be seen more clearly in the Federal Center in Chicago; a building with a clearer program.

The Flamingo sculpture by Alexander Calder in the Plaza at the Federal Center in Chicago, which was installed after Mies’ death, is, in my opinion, the best example of the contrast between sculpture and architecture in the work of Mies Van Der Rohe. Calder’s Flamingo is literally the heart of the entire Federal Center. It is the dancing soul of the plaza and uses the pristine backdrop to float freely. The two major ways it contrasts the buildings that surround it are its color and its form. The color is bold red, a significant and heightened color in a backdrop of black mullions and glass. Its form is made up of free flowing arcs that swoop up like a sun flare or a gaggle of St. Louis arches. It is with this sculpture that the separate function between art and architecture is wildly contrasted. The sculpture has no obligation to program; its program is merely to create an aesthetic experience. It succeeds in its aesthetic necessity. The building fits courthouses offices and a post office into a structure that must hold these functions up and protect them from the elements. It succeeds in its pragmatic necessities. The aesthetics of the building are a consequential ordering device based on pragmatic concerns including the relationship to its site.

The success of this contrast between sculpture and architecture in Mies’ work is evident when comparing other famous building/sculpture relationships. The Daley Plaza sports the famous Picasso, which is the centerpiece of the plaza as well as a great thing for young children to play on. The dynamic relationship between building and sculpture is lost somewhat in that the sculpture is the same color and material as the building (cor-ten steel). It also has a form that, although sinuous in certain parts, has a rigidity about it that seems to reflect the building. So the sculpture and the building seem to have more in common than contrast. I feel this weakens the force of each part when in relation to the other one. The Thompson Center Plaza by Helmut Jahn has a sculpture by Jean Dubuffet. The wildly eclectic form of the building competes with the sinuous forms of the sculpture weakening its potency. In even further extremity, any of these sculptures above would look just about impotent when competing with a museum by Frank Gehry. Only the work of minimalist sculptors such as Richard Serra or Sol LeWitt could create an interesting contrast between building and structure. However, this would be an ironic contrast; a contrast that comments on the roles of architecture and sculpture by resisting the nature of their logic. This is a tedious fight: the building fights the Rational, as the sculpture fights the Spiritual.

A couple of Mies’ buildings resisted the introduction of a sculpture most notably in the Seagram Building. Mies himself spent a considerable amount of time dedicated to designing a free-flowing sculpture for placement in the spacious plaza, however nothing seemed to work. Jacques Lipchitz and Henry Moore were requested to make sculptures for the space but both declined. Here was a plaza that a sculpture just didn’t seem to fit. However, after subsequent years, in an even more dynamic and contrasting manner, there have been sculpture exhibitions that periodically changed. This contrasted the building even further, demonstrating constant change and fluid motion in the face of the indomitable glass and bronze facade of the Seagram Building. I wonder why the Seagram Plaza resisted sculpture. My initial impression is that the Seagram Plaza, in contrast to the Barcelona Pavilion and the Illinois Federal Center, is symmetrical whereas the other buildings are arranged in asymmetrical, De Stijl, type shifting planes. (This asymmetry happens in the building itself of the Barcelona Pavilion, and happens in the arrangement of symmetrical buildings at the Illinois Federal Center.) Perhaps the symmetry of the Seagram Plaza, in its rigidity, resisted the introduction of a dynamic element such as a sculpture.

Extreme contrast between sculpture and architecture can help to heighten the sensations of the other. The decorum of sculpture and architecture is clearly distilled when given a properly opposing context.

The ambiguity and competition of sculpture at the Bilbao Guggenheim by Frank Gehry.