atmospheric research

You just cannot compete with the scale of the Rockies. So we tried to make a building that was without the conventional scale you get from recognizable floor heights -- as in those monolithic structures that still survive from the cliff-dwelling Indians.

The Architect IM Pei on his design for NCAR, completed in 1967


The National Center for Atmospheric Research sits on a high mesa a little bit distant from core of downtown Boulder; ten minutes by car if you follow Broadway to Table Mesa, an hour by foot if you take the serpentine trail that connects the scientific laboratories to the historic Chautauqua site. If it's late Summer like it was when I hiked it you'll find bushes rid of their berries and large black clumps of bear hair and satisfied scat littering the trails.

The Center is government funded and university driven and the site is open to the public -- we're free to wander all of its corridors without accompaniment, although if you materialize at the right time you can hook up with a tour guide who will tell you all about the work that's underway; how NCAR doesn't gather data so much as crunch it and make sense out of all the weather events that are occurring all around the world.

Global warming is the big story just now, has been for a while, and will probably be for a while longer »

IM Pei said his 1960s campus was influenced by the structures of the Mesa Verde Cliff-dwellers; the difference being, of course, that the Mesa Verde Indians sought shelter snugged up against the cliff walls and NCAR is exposed to the elements on the broadest part of the mesa. Given this it must create its own shelter and it does: stiff towers frame the perimeter like hooded sentinels peering out across the plain. It may be their height -- the great distance between base and crown -- that creates a feeling of openness and accessibility even under their tight watch. The towers aspire like science; more observatory than fortress, more invitation than obstruction.



NCAR Slideshow »

"I wake every morning and purr"

Toured five really lovely homes designed by the architect Dennis Blair in Long Grove, Illinois today, including the one that he designed for himself and his family and lived in for thirty years. All of the homes were nestled along the same sloping street, surrounded by Burr Oak and Japanese Pines.

The architect was in attendance, regal and grey, and told us about apprentencing with Wright at Taliesin (and scoring the Romeo & Juliet Tower as his quarters) as well as at the offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago.

Blair won his apprenticeship with Wright through a well turned letter, and earned his keep through his skill as a draftsman -- in particular, his skill at drafting domes, which he came by in wartime Detroit where he worked for the government illustrating captured aircraft; domed bombers a among them. As a result, his was the hand that drafted the dome on the architectural plans for Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York.

His architectural structures capture some of the quality of a heavy aircraft in flight -- long trim lines, brick and beam somehow soaring. That each was unique was the really telling part -- the architect has an eye for the interplay of geometry with the site and used a wide assortment of materials across structures from boulders to cedar planking to brick to flagstone.

The purring of the title came from a woman named Pat, whom we met on the walk between houses, and who lives in another mid-century home elsewhere, but mentioned it in reference to the qualities of really fine architecture and to what living within such a structure does to a person.

She's the caretaker of the home she lives in now; it's owned by a woman who will deed it to a foundation on her death, but this is the second house she's lived in that made her purr.

The first was one she visited with her husband when they first moved to the Midwest. He bought it to surprise her, knowing how she loved it, and called her to give her the news, telling her: "I bought a house for the cat."

rusticated

Wardrobe 769 - 1416 (Oslo Opera House)
Originally uploaded by Jaafar Mestari

What people find interesting is that we are not well polished. Our society is more informal and therefore offers a richer opportunity for bright persons of all ages to come up with really rude things—–of which there are many.

Architect Tarald Lundeval speaking of Oslo in the September issue of Dwell.

For those of you with a vested interest in these things the Grünerløkka district of Oslo is described as offering "the rarest of distillates: hipness without attitude."



See a Flickr slideshow of the new Oslo Opera House -- it's stunning »

probably bionic

The gist of the discourse was that, if you wanted people to remember you and your work, you had to have a simple descriptive word or phrase that people could easily remember and associate that word with both you and your work; the hook, as they say in the advertising business.

Then he said, "For that purpose, I chose the word organic. If I were doing it today, I would choose a different word, probably bionic. One of you boys can use that."

Architect John Geiger, recounting a conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright that occurred in 1953, during his apprenticeship at Taliesin »

ad majorem dei gloriam

Took a brief walk across the Seattle University campus when I was in town last month, waiting for baby Haven to be fully baked at Swedish Hospital across the street (Haven's here now: she’s a beautiful beautiful beautiful baby girl, and her mother, who is also a beautiful girl, is doing well).

I wanted to see the St. Ignatius Chapel, a spare modern building celebrated for its glorious contemplative interior.

Unfortunately it was locked. Which is, I suppose, the problem with having a celebrated chapel: everybody wants in, and you’re forced to keep them out, which entirely undermines the purpose of a building like that.






So I took some shots of the exterior, unhappy that I neglected to bring my wide lens, peered through the window a bit and then pulled up some shots on Flickr sometime later to see what I missed.

Much, it seems.

made.

Photo: Julius Shulman

This was a happy house.

Cil Rockwell, earlier today, signing my copy of Gary Gand’s Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism.



Mrs. Rockwell was referring to the home we were standing in; the one her husband, Deever Rockwell, designed and built; the one they shared together with their four children ("a symmetrical family") before the children grew up and moved away and they sold it to the nice couple from LA who own it today.

We were there at the invitation of Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond for the release party of the above mentioned book, and we spent our afternoon collecting signatures of the owners of several other Chicago Mid-Century Modern homes, who were also there, whose homes were also photographed by Julius Shulman near the end of his life.

Photographed. Not shot.

Julius Shulman, we learned today, didn’t shoot photography. “No guns,” he would say. He made an image, painstakingly, using a 4x5 view camera, taking on average two hours per frame.

Gary Gand and his wife Joan were friends of Shulman, and we have them to thank for coaxing the master into capturing what may be the only photographic collection of Mid-Century Modern Residential Architecture in Chicago. The story of how they did that is in the book.

Mr. Rockwell was there today too, and kindly signed my book when I offered it to him as though at a yearbook signing party. He also answered my star struck question about what it was like to study under Mies at IIT. (As you may have guessed, it was “extraordinary”, but he made more time for the grad students than the undergrads.)



The home Rockwell built on the bluff alludes fondly to his professor’s Farnsworth House, but unlike the unrelenting steel frame of the house on the Fox River, this one is anchored to the earth through an extraordinary application of red flint. The small vibrant stones run through the concrete forms that anchor the corners of the glass box, and chisel out the terraces against the steep wooded bluff that leads into the ravine at the back of the house. The same red flint runs through the polished floors of the home, and transitions effortlessly to the aggregate walk and the loose pebbles of the courtyard.

About those loose stones: Mrs. Rockwell told us that one winter a gentleman was using a snow blower in the courtyard when he kicked up some pebbles and sent them shattering against one of the large glass panes. The entire wall rained down in cold, brittle shards. They patched it up with neoprene and duct tape while they organized a repair.



I asked the new owner if she had heard the story of the pebbles in the winter. She had. “The first thing we did was get rid of the snow blower,” she said. “We shovel our snow.”

Another cold winter story: the glass walls aren’t Thermopaned – “We didn’t even think of it,” said Mrs. Rockwell. “Oil was so cheap.” So in the winter time when the frost moved in they would move the mattress to the living room and sleep in front of the fire.

“That was nice,” she said, her smiling eyes deep pools of memory.

A happy house.

wilding

Photo: Arts & Architecture

I’ve seen all the wild rivers I ever want to see.

Floyd E. Dominy in 1966. Dominy, who served as the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969, passed away on April 20 at the age of 100.

According to the New York Times, Dominy was responsible for the “Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge and Navajo Dams in the upper Colorado River basin, and the Trinity River part of California’s Central Valley Project, among many others.”

I don’t think I would have gotten along with Dominy (may he RIP), even though there's every reason to believe that he did what he did out of a humanitarian impulse to help the farmer and rancher of the American West.

Unfortunately, he overdid it.

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard is more my style. He recently did a spot for American Express in which he talked about his dam busting.

Video: Yvon Chouinard and the American Express Members Project Commercial

The July / August 1967 (and final) issue of Arts & Architecture was dedicated to the architecture of North American dams. The photograph above was taken from that issue, as was this excerpt:

It could be said that water is one of the most potent forces employed by Nature in shaping the animate and inanimate world, and as a form creator is thus within our province.

(...)

It is of importance to note just how far man has progressed in his ability to form and deform his environment. Like water, he is both form giver and destroyer, but until quite recently man was one of Nature’s relatively minor and inefficient tools and weapons.

By his inventiveness and increase in numbers, however, he has become capable of changing the face and fortune of the world beyond the capacity of any other natural force. An indication of his increased capability is the catastrophic affect man has had on water in the U.S. It is estimated, for example, that is he were to disappear tomorrow, it would take a generation for the waters of even our largest rivers and lakes (e.g. the Hudson River, Lake Erie) to regenerate and become fresh again.

Water Resources in North America, Arts & Architecture, July / August 1967

Update: NPR reported on Dominy on May 4th »

rectilinear frame of reference

Guggenheim - n. 1
Originally uploaded by Isco72

The basic concept of curvilinear slope for presentation of painting and sculpture indicates a callous disregard for the fundamental rectilinear frame of reference necessary for the adequate visual contemplation of works of art.

From an open letter in 1956 to Mr. James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, signed by visual artists -- among them Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell -- in protest of the construction of the Guggenheim Museum designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Republished in the Spring 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Update: They went ahead and built it anyway.

a place on which everyone has left a trace

When a historic place captivates or enthralls me, I feel impelled to set out in search of its soul. The historic city is not a carefully designed entity, it simply is, and it exists independently of any carefully designed plan.

It came into being in the course of time and stands as absolute proof that historic centres are not devised by architects, but are instead the reflection of thousands of lives which have literally lived it into being. These centres are a city that we can only feel, perceive and savour.

The architect Renzo Piano, interviewed by Lodovico Folin Calabi, programme specialist at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, in the most recent issue of UNESCO's World Heritage publication (No. 55).

Selfishly, I printed off the Piano interview because UNESCO used one of my photographs to illustrate the piece. Gratefully, I read it end to end, nodding deep and long as I came across passages like the one above and this one too:

Some of the centres that we most love are endowed with a form of beauty that touches us deeply and does so in rather the same way as might, for instance, a person who embodies our own roots, a relative who arouses great fondness in our hearts. This beauty is apparent in the spontaneous patterns of a historic city which coexist in perfect harmony with the millions of lives that have unfolded there.

It is a place which was built in time and so, with time, this plurality of lives becomes layered within the city and interwoven into it. It is a place on which everyone has left a trace.

These traces should not be erased out of some misguided sense of shame or fear. Rather, they should remain because they not only tell a story, they also provide the city with its sense of identity.

But you can read it for yourself -- it's a gem »

MAXXImus

Illus: Zaha Hadid

Christ, can you imagine what Calder would do with this space?

Artist Brian Clarke commenting to New Yorker writer John Seabrook on Zaha Hadid's MAXXI gallery in Rome which opened recently as an exhibit itself -- there isn't any art hanging on the walls just yet.

Clarke was responding to the concern, raised by an Italian journalist, that the space might be too daunting.

New Yorker subscriber? Click here for the whole profile on the Pritzker Prize winning architect »

Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects

hello, louis. (you're looking lovely.)

hello, louis. (you're looking lovely.)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Roadside stop to see Louis Sullivan's Merchants Bank in Grinnell, Iowa. I wasn't expecting the green-patina gilt running along the columns and the facade, but the impact in the weak winter sun is remarkable.

It's Sunday, which means the bank is closed and we couldn't get a peek at the interior, so we had to make what we could of the art glass from the outside. Still: stunning.

Most remarkable is the way this jewel box by the grand-daddy of the Prairie School who fathered the emergence of modern architecture feels right at home in the quiet farming town of Grinnell, wearing its Sunday best without putting on airs.

Like the well-mannered Midwesterner it is.

Posting by cameraphone on the road home.

Muji no Ie

The Muji house offers buyers the chance to have a custom-designed home at a fraction of the usual cost. Each house is built to fit the clients' plot of land and their individual requirements. There are three templates on offer, all with changeable layouts:

Ki no ie (Wooden House), an open-plan design with no partitions and painted exterior walls;

Mado no ie (Window House), a plaster wall house with vaulted ceiling and windows whereever the customer chooses to put them; and

Asa no ie (Morning House), a flexible design ideal for a family with growing children.

From the July/August 09 issue of Monocle.

If you can clear the kanji (which I cannot) you may find that Muji no le has a lovely website and a blog »

I wish I were Isabel.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Isabel Roberts house, River Forest, Illinois, 1907. Plan. Built late in the Chicago period, when Wright had found freedom of expression.

This may be my favorite Wright.

Graycliff

It’s like birdwatching -- but with buildings.

So said Mr. Hoo when he emailed me some links re Frank Lloyd Wright in and around Buffalo, NY last week when I was just a few scant hours away in Warren, PA. He suggested that, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I should take an extra day to see a few -- including the tremendous Martin complex right in the city, and Graycliff, also built for the Martins and a brief drive outside the city limits on the shores of Lake Erie.

But my schedule didn’t have any give in it, so I made my plans to return home right after the last of the meetings wrapped up, do what I had to do to ship off some more work, speak to a gathered assembly of creative types in Chicago, and then daytrip into Manhattan the following day.

And then, unforeseen, the last of the meetings canceled, and I was left with *just* enough time to stop by Graycliff on my way to the airport in Buffalo (and perhaps enough time to squeeze in the Martin House in the city, if only it weren’t closed on Tuesdays...).

I squeaked in for the 2 o’clock tour as the docent was corralling the only other folks to materialize -- a couple from Sweden who had taken in the Martin house the day before. Our docent was two unsteady years into her volunteer stint, and delivered the story line like someone who didn’t entirely believe the fiction: “Frank Lloyd Wright carried the octagon through the negative spaces of the facade. (Can you see it? I’ve never been able to see it.)” She was a stern task master, insisting on stopping at the predefined spots on the tour and reviewing her mental notes before we moved on, all three of us eager to get under the eaves.

But we did all right. And we got to see the summer place that Wright built for the Martins sometime in the late ‘20s, which was open and wide and penetrated by clear glass panes throughout -- something that Isabelle Martin insisted upon, given her failing eyesight. (No colored art glass in evidence.)

The central living area opened on both sides to the drive and to the lake shore, the doors and windows alternating in balanced syncopation (the door on the left confronted a window on the right, and vice versa) to minimize strong drafts through the core of the house while still encouraging cooling breezes. It felt very much like the receiving area of Unity Temple, although where that is a place in between the primary spaces (the Sanctuary and the Meeting Hall) this was a place where living took place, rooted in the most impressive Frank Lloyd Hearth I’ve seen to date.

The hearth was flush to the floor and as tall as a standing man -- if that man were Frank Lloyd Wright -- and it was populated, on the day I was there, with thick logs tented together like a traditional campfire. Ablaze I imagine it would light and warm the entire room.

There were echoes of the Heurtley House here -- a screened stairway that led to a long promenade hallway, opening into rooms that overlooked the lake. Settled, refined, surprisingly without ostentation. A place to remove the working world mask and be still awhile.

Something I could use a little more of right now -- if only I didn't have to get back to work.

on the market

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Lab: $1,650,000

LONG ISLAND: 5 Randall Road, Shoreham, N.Y., between Tesla Court and Randall Road SIZE: 15.69 acres

ZONING: Two-acre residential

PROS: Complex of 14 industrial buildings, including historic Tesla laboratory. Property can be delivered fully cleared and level.

CONS: Property was a New York State Superfund cleanup site, with the main concerns being silver and cadmium. Remediation was completed last year, but the site still requires semiannual groundwater monitoring as well as periodic inspections of two soil areas of concern, to ensure that they undergo no disturbance.

Listing in Tuesday's New York Times, which also details concerns that Tesla's Wardenclyffe Lab outside of Manhattan, which doesn't have National Heritage protection, might be leveled if the property is sold »

Also worth noting: the lab was bankrolled in part by J. Pierpont Morgan and designed by the architect Stanford White, the fellow who was shot by the millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw after fooling around with Thaw's wife on a red velvet swing.

The ill-fated tower, unfortunately, was scraped for its metal not too long back.

And did everyone know about Tesla's Colorado Springs lab except me?

toward an understanding

Despite Le Corbusier's interest in theory, his discourses were anything but cerebral abstractions, and conveyed a vigorous physicality thanks to the method through which he illustrated his thoughts. His visual aids were low-tech yet high-impact.

On the wall behind him, the architect would unroll and pin up a swath of yellow tracing paper as wide as a movie screen. While he spoke, he used varicolored chalks or crayons and sketched a profusion of pictograms, scrawled a welter of catchphrases, and ended up with a dense calligraphic mural like a Cy Twombly drawing avant la lettre.

Many such Corbusier lecture backdrops survive, intact or in tatters, thanks to souvenir hunters who swooped in and claimed them the second he exited the stage.

From Maman's Boy by Martin Filler in the 30 April issue of the New York Review of Books.



NYC - MOMA - Le Corbusier's Urban Planning for Algiers
Originally uploaded by wallyg

in the vernacular

Flickr Slideshow: The Peter Zumthor Pool

In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language.

The architect Peter Zumthor, who just picked up a Pritzker Prize »

this is a perfect photograph

Video: Visual Acoustics trailer, a documentary about the architectural photographer Julius Shulman

a found poem

this is a perfect photograph
and if I went back
with an eight by ten
or a four by five
view
camera

I could never have done it as well
as I did then.

It's not the camera
(I remember exclaiming)
it's the composition.

I pointed out how the windswept tree
the tip of the tree
the most remote area of the tree

was hanging down
close to the ground

but it seemed to be pointing
to a curved row of trees
in an orchard
way in the distance

it made a perfect "S" curve
in the composition

(and I said)

There's nothing you could change about this picture.

What Julius Shulman said to "the man in charge, the host on the Groucho Marx show. I always forget his name, but it's not important now." when the host looked at a Shulman photo from 1933 (sometime after that) and asked him: "If you went back there today, could you do it better, since this was taken apparently with your Vest Pocket Kodak?"

As recounted to Taina Rikala De Noreiga at Shulman's home in Hollywood Hills in 1990 and cited in Julius Shulman interview, 1990 Jan. 12 - Feb. 3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

More Julius Shulman at:
The Getty »
The Fisher Gallery, USC »

pattern language

Frank Lloyd Wright's mark, expressed on the placard
outside his Oak Park studio and again, later, in the
sconces at the Robie House (1909) in Hyde Park.

A square enclosing a circle intersected by a cross.

Posting by cameraphone.

heurtley (so good)

Let’s get the recriminations out of the way: I didn’t bring my camera.

Not the big heavy tricked out every which way with all kinds of lenses Nikon; not the little Leica point-and-shoot whose battery went dry on me a couple of days ago that I haven’t recharged.

A situation which would have been perfectly acceptable if, when visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1902 Arthur B. Heurtley House, things had proceeded according to the protocol generally observed when visiting a Wright, namely: No pictures of interior spaces. Along with: Do not stray off the shabby grey carpet runners. Don’t touch anything, and for the love of God, no food. No drink.

It became clear that all bets were off when Mr. H poured the wine.

Shortly after that he said “sure: I don’t mind if you take pictures.”

Mr. H, whose name is a matter of public record as the new owner of the Heurtley House, welcomed fifteen of us from class (the one with a name too silly to be repeated here) into the home he shares with his family in Oak Park this evening simply because, as far as I could tell, he’s just a nice guy, and was kind enough to return a phone call from a fellow in our class who works with a guy who knows a guy who used to play football with Mr. H.

So there you are.

He’s also deeply in love with the home he lives in, and deeply respectful of the architect who built it. All solid qualifications for this fan girl.



All I can give you are a few lousy cameraphone shots, and the abiding impression that the entire home -- from the music room on the ground floor that now houses a pool table and a Wii, to the upper story with its grand dining room and library and reconstructed inglenook -- glowed like an ember, radiating heat without ever scorching.

Birch wood was everywhere and may have contributed to the glow; as probably did the sight lines that flowed without effort or obstruction the entire span of the floor plan. The interior colors have been restored to their original warm earthy tones and plastered in concert with a fine sand (trucked up from Southern Illinois and sifted to ensure conformance with the original); which probably also contributed to the steady radiant heat that that place emits.

The owners who came before spent a fortune on the restoration of the home -- there’s a documentary available online which I’ve never seen but will certainly watch now.

There were many details that made me giddy, but the one that captivated me was the tiny sink in the butler’s pantry with two irregular basins -- the left hand basin was a perfect square; the right hand basin was a rectangle that spanned the same width as the square and shared the same baseline. Snugged over the rectilinear sink was the faucet and fixtures. All original to the 1902 structure, and subtly expressing the simple geometric motif that ran through the entire house, complemented further by the appearance of a Sullivanesque arch over the main doorway and in the library hearth.

The position and proportion of the dining room suggests the Robie house and the restored veranda off the library (once boxed in by previous owners -- now opened wide to receive the breezes and allow for living) was everything a summer afternoon might ask for.

Apologies for the fractured write up -- I’m tired enough that I probably should have waited until the morning when I was fresh, but I wanted to capture the heat before the fire faded away.