Pater Familias

THE DIFFICULTY OF HORIZONTAL PROJECTS. I posted several times, including here, on the proposed Chicago Spire, which was going to be the country’s tallest building. This interview by Blair Kamin with Santiago Calatrava, its architect, indicates that construction on the Spire was halted last year and that: “Many observers presume it to be dead.” Calatrava is still optimistic that the Spire will be built. The Spire is to be not only tall, but also twisted. And yet, in the interview, Calatrava speaks of the difficulties of horizontal projects rather than of vertical projects. Kamin quotes Calatrava about his proposed ground zero transit hub: “‘These horizontal buildings are enormously complex’ because they must navigate an underground maze of city services and utilities.”

HOW THE ROMANS BUILT ARCHES AND DOMES. This wikipedia article describes the traditional way that Roman arches were constructed: “An arch requires all of its elements to hold it together, raising the question of how an arch is constructed. One answer is to build a frame (historically, of wood) which exactly follows the form of the underside of the arch.” A similar technique was apparently used for domes. The circular part of the upper dome of the Pantheon, according to this article, “was likely placed by using wooden scaffolding.” One of the secrets of the Pantheon is that lighter stone was used at the top: “The upper dome above the step-rings (the top 30 feet/9.1 m) is concrete comprising about 9 inch lumps of light tufa and porous volcanic slag in alternating layers bonded with mortar.” Apparently we can now build a dizzyingly high arch without scaffolding or a framework underneath.

CONSTRUCTING AN ARCH. Henry Nejako sent me this slide show of the ongoing construction of the Hoover Dam Bypass, also known as the Colorado River Bridge with the caption “Acrophobiacs beware.” In case the New York Times link goes down, here is a link to a slide show at the site of Jamey Stillings, who took the wonderful pictures. The warning to acrophobiacs is apt. I have a physical reaction to the photographs. Apparently a modern arch can be built by simply building each side up until they join.

VALUING FLATNESS. Deeply set windows, rusticated stone, and the resulting play of shadows are characteristic of the facades of Renaissance palazzos. Renaissance artists were enchanted with perspective and the three dimensionality of the world. The essay I linked to yesterday shows how flatness is valued in modern architecture. Much of our world tends to be flat–think of television screens, movie screens, computer screens. And then there’s painting. Annalisa just bought PROBLEM SOLVING FOR OIL PAINTING by Gregg Kreutz. It’s a terrific book even for people who don’t paint. Kreutz says: “Modern painting is about flatness….from the 1920’s onward it’s hard to find any serious painter “painting” (in the sense in which the word had previously been used). Depicting light and depth became something like gun-blueing or powdered-wig-making, a lost art.” I think all this flatness has changed how we see the world.

WHAT BABIES SEE THAT WE DON’T. When Annalisa (a future artist) was a baby, she took a keen interest in shadows. Watching her delight, I realized that I had not noticed shadows since I was a child. My eyes were accustomed to take in information about an object. Even now, I look for substance and ignore shadows, and lose some of the pleasure that shadows give.

SHADOWS AND LIGHT. This photo essay has changed the way I look at the world. The photos demonstrate the difference between window treatments in modern architecture and in traditional buildings. The third photo in the essay shows “modest tenement apartment buildings” with prominent fire escapes. Before reading the essay, I would have thought of the fire escapes as excrescences, interfering with the facades. The essay praises the light and shadow on the facades and points out how the fire escapes contribute to the light and shadow: “Don’t let your eyes be shy about taking the ironwork — the fire escapes — into account. Those rungs, diagonals, slats, and verticals add a dimension that isn’t to be ignored.” The essay contrasts the smooth surfaces of some modern skyscrapers with the deeply inset windows and textures of older buildings. There is a photo of rusticated stone blocks as a design element, and, at the end, a link to another essay which praises the rough textures of old brick in contrast to the smoothness of modern brick surfaces.

THE “OVERBITE BUILDING.” Are there any buildings that are loved by no one? Another step has been taken toward the demolition of the O’Toole Building in Greenwich Village. Here is an earlier article about the building with a good picture of it. The linked article is by an organization opposing the demolition so there are those who love it. It was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and was completed in 1964. It was a landmark in the Village in the sixties in the sense that it had a prominent location and dominated its neighborhood. I never knew anybody who liked it, but I never heard it called the “Overbite Building”, as it now seems to be known. I checked my AIA GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY from 1968 and it is a described as a “huge double-dentured monument.” Paul Goldberger in 1979 was harsh: “…pretentious claptrap. Maybe this white building with round holes and round versions of sawtooth cornices is trying to make us think of ships [it was built for the National Maritime Union]; maybe it is trying to make us think of space travel; maybe it is trying to make us think of how nice the Village used to look before it got modern architecture.” (Goldberger’s THE CITY OBSERVED: NY is available at Amazon with lots of vivid commentary like this). In the end, however, there are those who love the building and want to save it.

SAVING BRUTALIST BUILDINGS—PAUL RUDOLPH. It seems strange that buildings that were built only fifty years ago are now threatened by the wrecking ball, but technological change—think of electrical requirements, for example—has been enormous. Another reason is the unpopularity of some of the buildings. I posted here about how a lot of people just don’t like concrete. Adela Louise Huxtable had an article in the Wall Street Journal for February 25 about Boston’s City Hall and Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, two buildings which she says are representatives of Brutalism. “The name Brutalism —from the French beton brut, the raw concrete used by Le Corbusier and favored by modernists — is more commonly used today as a term of opprobrium by a public that profoundly dislikes the style’s rough textures and powerful forms.” Huxtable clearly admires the Art and Architecture Building, calling it a “brilliant, virtuoso performance.” Here is a picture of it. The building has now been restored. Apparently, the building was only saved for restoration because of the “high cost and extreme difficulty of demolishing solid concrete.”

THE HEROIC ARCHITECT’S MASTERPIECE. The Australian government, at its culture portal, says that Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House “has come to represent ‘Australia’…. [and] is as representative of Australia as the pyramids are of Egypt and the Colosseum of Rome.” The building is located at the harbor with a roof which is “evocative of a ship at full sail.” The most striking photo that I found of it is here, along with photos of the house Utzon designed for himself and of his Bagsværd church. Another great architect, Louis Kahn, said of the Sydney Opera House: “The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building.” Utzon never saw the building and the light reflecting off it.

JORN UTZON—HEROIC ARCHITECT. The weekend Financial Times has an obituary for Jern Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, one of the great buildings of the last century. The obituary tells a dramatic story. Utzon won the competition for the commission for the Sydney Opera House in 1956 at a time when he had built very little. He won because Eero Saarinen, a member of the jury, retrieved his entry from the reject pile and declared it the winner. As with some other great buildings, there were problems with cost overruns. The obituary and this wikipedia article cast blame on local officials for the budget problem. Payments to the architect’s office were stopped, and he resigned and “walked out, vowing never to return. He kept his promise.” He never saw the completed masterpiece. He built little else, although the obituary praises a church in Bagsvaerd in Denmark as “one of the great unsung structures of the 20th century.” The wikipedia article quotes an article in Harvard Design Magazine in 2005: “Utzon was thirty-eight when he won the competition for the Opera House – how would the work of the mature master have enriched our lives? We’ll never know. That’s the high price Sydney has imposed by its incompetence in building the Opera House.” The obituary cites the church in Bagsvaerd as an exception to the myth surrounding Utzon: “that the opera house destroyed the career of a genius who could have become one of the great figures of modern architecture, one who might have shifted the history of design.”