The relative position of one room or space with regards to others can often establish a kind of meaning for a project.  For single-family houses, the growth and centralization of the kitchen as a part of the house has been steadily increasing for the last four decades is probably associated with the increasing number of families with two working parents or single-parent households.  If a home office holds a large and central position in a house, the nature of that work, and the sense of privacy for that work, is framed by its relatively public and dominant location.

kitchen as central point of control and organization

Whenever we start a project, the first steps involve talking with the client and trying to understand not just their functional needs and wants, but most especially the nature of the use of these spaces and the potential relationships between spaces.  Simple designations of public or private become greatly enriched by nuances of size and position, hierarchy and proportion.

All of that said, allowing the form of a building to be largely determined by its function is a fairly recent, 100 years or so, (brief in architectural history) design strategy for architects.  So while this forum does not lend itself to a more lengthy historical analysis of this problem, it can talk about some brief guideposts along the way.  In re-reading Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, there is a long and exhaustive discussion on function and use for buildings.  However, that is often secondary to two other principles:  first, the proper seasonal exposures of rooms and second, the importance of privacy with regard to an owner’s social status. The functionalism that is espoused by Vitruvius is based not so much on the internal workings of the rooms, but the proximity of each room to each other and each room’s need for light and warmth.  As this is seasonal, there is a likely and “natural” assumption that the functions of a house may move into different rooms throughout the year.  Having not then determined the form of the house because of the necessity for seasonal shifting, the house is free to assume a form more related to “beneficial light and air” and providential geometry.

Villa Rotunda, plan, Palladio

So, this is a rather long-winded way of getting at a huge contradiction in being a modernist trained architect – we are trained to optimize the function and use of the room to an extreme and absurd degree, from legislating where the owner’s bed must be to determining exactly what the homeowner will look at when they awake.  However, in my own life with various houses and apartments, I have regularly and often moved not only the furniture around rooms, but changed the use of the rooms as well.  Bedrooms have become studios, living rooms have become dining rooms, in one case a dining room became a rather public bedroom.  This might be a cheap and easy way of adapting a given, existing condition to my needs and wants, but I suspect it has more to do with a desire for change, both seasonally and for merely experimental whims.  As a good friend of mine reminds me (as he has been engaged to help many times), I have always found a reason to move, averaging a new residence every 2 years of so, and sometimes moving as little as to the neighboring house.

How to reconcile both a desire for specificity and a need for change?  Well, I guess I will continue to look to Vitruvius and design spaces with great light, beautiful proportions and intriguing relationships to other rooms, but maybe not with so much specificity as to the micro-functionality of the rooms themselves.  I don’t think this lessening of functionality’s dominant position means we throw the baby out with the bathwater and let a purely formalist approach to design substitute itself.  Rather it is a recognition of change, and even fallibility, as an intrinsic part not only of the design process, but the lives of people.  A perfectly functionally-designed kitchen will not help you make better food over a kitchen, slightly awkward, but with warming morning sun streaming in and a view to the garden.  A London rowhouse, with fairly generic rooms of varying sizes, can change from the main floor of a grand house, to a professional office and back to small apartment, because the relationships of the rooms have a clear hierarchy of sizes and proportions.

The Dakota, converted from large residence to smaller apartments

Rooms, like ourselves, are not defined by their use, but by their relationships.  And the small, dark little room that seems so depressing in the winter, can be a shadowy, cool respite in the blazing heat of summer.  Limiting it to a sole function, like “bedroom” or “dining room”, doesn’t fulfill its potential. Furniture is after all meant to be moved, and as Emerson says, “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

The recent designs by very talented architects are certainly a long way away from the double wide manufactured home, both in design and technical quality.

Pugh + Scarpa Vail Grant House

Marmol Radziner Desert House

And, there are an awful lot of websites and magazine articles fervently debunking the negative stereotypes of manufactured housing. Maybe their time has finally come.

However, I can not find myself jumping on the bandwagon.  Modular construction at its best allows for most of the construction to take place off-site and may be well suited for projects with very short building seasons or environmentally sensitive sites.  However, the high-design modular prototype that is flogged so relentlessly in architecture journals and websites is not generated from these conditions.  Rather it is proposed, en masse, as a solution to America’s dreadful housing stock.  I fail to understand how generically designed buildings, without input from clients or site-specific conditions, is any better than crappy builder plans of Tudors, Victorians and ranches.  I think the notion is that if we only lived in cool, Modern-looking homes then we would all be better off.  This is about the worse kind of ideological architectural language snobbery I can imagine.

So my protest against modular construction is in two forms:

1.  Modular prototypes are merely products, not architecture.  If they are generic and designed for imagined sites then they are no better than any other “model” homes.  This kind of work dumbs down architecture, both as a profession and an art.  It substitutes taste for invention and usually low-paid repetitive work for the skilled labor of carpenters, masons, roofers, etc.

2.  Modular construction of custom houses is an architect’s attempt to be even more of a control-freak over the building process than a set of drawings and specifications enables.  Rarely does the cost of construction, when you include everything including all utilities, foundations, etc. have significant savings over conventional construction.  Cutting the builder out of the process of making buildings again posits the building process as product design, and the proliferation of these designs online and in the design press compounds the notion that architecture is largely a visual medium.

Working with a good builder allows the architect and homeowner to craft the building over the life of the construction.  Changes are made, conditions are modified, serendipitous events become buildings.

Douglas Cutler Connecticut House

Specht Harpman zeroHouse

I certainly know that not everyone, in fact hardly any one can afford to build and live in an architect-designed custom home.  I can’t.  But I think it is ridiculous to think that the dreaded expanses of cookie-cutter suburban homes would be any better if the cookies had a different shape.

I would advocate an architecture that is site-specific, client-specific and instilled with the hands of the people who put the building together.  Later in life LeCorbusier’s pure white villas gave way to brutalist, “messy” buildings like the houses at Jauol.  The project was not a constructed abstraction direct from the architect’s head to the site.  Rather, it was embodied with the work, the opinions and the craft of masons, carpenters, glazers, etc.  Their work was not perfect, it was never intended to be, for a building is not prototyped product, it is a living, expressive entity, beautiful and functional in the least, and in the finest work, transcendent and poetic.

For my part, I will spend my time working on projects with real clients, challenging or not, on real sites, challenging or not, and making real buildings, with all the thrills and disappointments working with dozens of carpenters, painters, electricians, and craftsmen entails.

(It may also be the recognition and appreciation of the role of significantly more vertically proportioned spaces than we have come to build in the last 40 years or so.)

These spaces have “atmosphere” as I think Peter Zumthor would define it – they invoke an almost immediate reaction.  However, beyond that they also show signs of occupation, over time, by many people, and as such, have a history of human lives, of joy and despair having played out by many people over many years.

In designing new spaces, I think many architects think only of the beauty and function of the rooms and building.  There is not much discussion or conjecture on what is so profoundly out of the control of the architect – the lives that are going to be lived in these rooms.  A kitchen is certainly a place to cook and clean, but it will also be the place that family frets over a child’s school or the cost of next month’s bills.  A living room is a place for entertaining and relaxation, but it may also be where a baby took its first steps, where a boyfriend meets the parents for the first time.

These aged rooms show those signs, those scars, of the events and lives that have passed through them.  They are not simply recorded in photos or journals, but are keenly felt in the air and space of the room.  As an architect, I hope that the spaces that I make can accommodate these events, for they are inevitable and more than mere walls and ceilings and floors, make the real life of a house.

(Photos from the excellent book The Way We Live by Stafford Cliff and Giles de Chabaneix)

This little sequence, where Max’s room turns into a forest, is one of the reasons I became an architect.

Thank you Mr. Sendak.

“That very night in Max’s room a forest grew

and grew-

and grew until his ceiling hung with vines

and the walls became the world all around”

This is still basically what I do everyday – imagine another world within the world.

Where The Wild Things Are

Story and Pictures by Maurice Sendak, 1963.

Happy New Year everyone

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, – and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Most all architects educated in the last 50 years have been instilled with this idea of Truth in architecture.  By this I mean that a basic tenet of modern architecture has been the notion that a building, and all its constituent materials, should be true to its nature.  Wood should be and do what wood can do, a piece of stone should be real stone, not some fake imitation, etc.  Extended to a whole building, this idea manifests that a library should speak of a kind of library-ness and a house should look and feel domestic.  Most non-architects believe that we as architects design in styles and simply apply a style to a building and that what really matters is what the building looks like, not so much what it actually is.  Some architects work that way, but very few.  For most architects that I know, from the first ideas through the planning, all the way to the finished construction, a building is an integrated whole and the “style” is not an applied aesthetic but rather what a building looks like is an outcome of a process, not a starting point.

Now admittedly, this question of style is a huge problem for architects.  Many architects will adamantly protest that they don’t design in any style.  Or some architects say they can design in any style.  I think this all comes back to my original point of a quest for truthy-ness in building – everything in a building, whether adhering to a specific style or not, must be true to its intended use. For some architects this means no prescribed style, for others, it means that “style” is not so important and any look will do.

this building clearly expresses its brick-ness

(I am willingly skipping over about 30 years of architectural history here by ignoring historical Post-Modernism that played with “style” and often to subvert the true “reading” of the building)

When I am working with a client and I say something like, “let’s keep the beam exposed”, what I really mean is let’s allow the real structure of the building be visible to demonstrate the truth of the relationship between the desire to build and the power of gravity.  I think my clients often think, “I don’t like the way that looks”.  To them, a simple decision like this is aesthetic, a simple question of what looks better.  As an architect, aesthetics are a big deal, but so is this question of truth and as architects we are sometimes more interested in letting a building be truthful, and hence in our mind “beautiful”, than letting a simple preference of “I like this vs. that” dominate the design of a building.

this fake stone installation leaves you hanging

To be frank, this rarely makes for a conflict between the desires of a client and the task of the architect.  Those conflicts usually have more to do with ego than anything else.  But sitting on the Landmarks Board I realize that questions of historical integrity of a building are often viewed quite differently by me as an architect, as well as the architect that presents projects to the Board, than the public.  For most of the public, it only makes sense that an addition to an existing old house should match that house.  To many architects and architecturally trained preservationists, no addition should ever “match” the older portions of the house because that would blur the difference between the new and the old and compromise the integrity, or truth, of both.

No one ever talks about this perceptual difference, this gap that exists between most architects and most clients.  I think as architects we either don’t understand it or recognize it and most clients don’t have enough experience with architects to feel the differences between their understanding and the architect’s. It is all too common to have an architect explain and desperately try to get a client to come around to their point of view. And most rare is the architect that is willing to explain what this all means to their clients, and be willing to really listen to them and try to understand and tease out the real reasons why a client says “well I think I understand, I just don’t really like it.”

artificial mountain range in Dubai:

scheme for artificial mountain in Berlin:

by architect Jakob Tigges, this 1,000 meter tall mountain, called The Berg.

:

architect Roland Castro’s vision of a greener and larger Paris.

and, the inumerable number of buildings that are landscapes themselves:

SERA architects proposed Wyatt Federal Building

Like sci-fi movies that every 20 years of so reflect America and Hollywood’s renewed fear of immigrants (District 9, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), slumps in the economy of architecture leave designers lots of time to dream big.  In the 1960′s these fantastical projects were mega-cities.  (In an interesting parallel to these projects, the techniques of visualization often take huge leaps as well.  The revitalization and invention in architectural drawings in the 1960′s was amazing.  We can only hope that the demands that these artificial landscape projects make on current visualization techniques, usually computer renderings, can also engender a new paradigm of computer-based imaging.)

As an architect in Colorado, with 1,000 meter mountains in our backyard, it is an interesting trend to see play out.  Is there a implicit criticism of urbanism buried within these schemes?  Certainly it is a reflection of the concerns around climate change, enviromentalism and urban sprawl.  Or does this really signal a fundamental loss of confidence in the forms of architecture as derived from normative construction – orthagonal lines, hard and finite materials, etc.)?  Is Bilbao a building or a rocky mountain?

a question of form – Bilbao rendered in red sandstone instead of shiny titanium

What do you think?  Is this a fundamental change in the nature of the making and thinking about architecture or just the apex of a wave of  ”organic” design (artificial landscapes, blog architecture) that replaced the industrial, machine-formed images of an earlier generation of architects (Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, etc.)?

There are no really spectacular architectural treasures on campus.  Rather it is the campus itself, its uniformity and scale, and consistency of form and materials that give it a coherence and presence.  However, over the last couple of years, the strict conformance to these design guidelines have made for some pretty dreadful buildings. The Bear Creek Apartments and the Wolf Law Building both suffer from the same kind of problem. Although these buildings should be commended for their LEED design and construction, the buildings are huge (Wolf – 180,000 sf) and there is a point that the predominantly residential scale of the prototype, Tuscan vernacular, should no longer be so strictly applied to such a large building.  I don’t know how much the unfortunate outcome of these buildings is due to the design guidelines and CU’s lack of vision or the architects in charge of the projects.  In either case, the result is dissappointing, each building a conglomeration of shed and gable forms piled up to make a larger whole.

Wolf Law and the Center for Quartrocentro Studies

So let me make a plea to the university and their architects:  loosen up  on the Tuscan vernacular handcuffs.  First of all there is a lot more to central Italian, fourteenth century architecture than just the same masonry and roof materials.

Second, the confines of these guidelines inevitably make for designs that are cumulative aggregations of forms.  At this scale, unless this is handled by an extremely deft hand, the result is more often than not an unfortunate pile, not the wonderful, organic aggregation that is an Italian hilltown.

And last, with some 450 million dollars worth of construction in the pipeline over the next few years, take a brave step out of the fourteenth century and into at least the industrial age.  I am not advocating for a radical departure from what has made the campus, but good architects, when not too handcuffed, can make buildings that take the Tuscan vernacular as a starting point and would go on to make really great buildings that stand as a testament to university’s past and future.  Certainly Rafael Moneo knows how to build strkingly beautiful buildings in a historic context that respects that place and simultaneously posits a new vision (Prado extension, Atocha Railway station).  And take a cue from universities and colleges that have fulfilled their building programs and enhanced their campuses with some really good buildings.  Take a look at what has been done at IIT by Koolhaas or better yet, William Rawn’s Arts Center at Williams College.

If the campus at CU can’t get some better buildings, some inspiring buildings, something other than warmed-over fourteenth century Tuscan vernacular, then there is at least one thing that can be done:

to take a page from Louis Sullivan, we can at least insist that the faculty and students dress the part:

Almost all of the building stone and brick used here in Colorado is sourced within 500 miles.  The woods used for cabinetry and trim, unless exotic, are usually US grown, as is the drywall for the most part.  The most common import is probably tile, often from Mexico or Italy, along with countertops and roofing materials.  Each of those have readily available substitutes. ( If you really want to view the relative costs of  imports, take a look at stone importers.  It is less expensive to have stone quarried in China or Brazil and shipped over to the US than to source it locally.  This means that there are thousands of shipping containers carrying around the heaviest stuff imaginable – stone slabs, stacked like saltines, delivered across the US.  Stone is a natural product and much of the wide variety of available colors are due to this global sourcing and we have become so used to the variety I am not sure we could do without it.)(More about the excess of shipping containers in the US in a later post.)

For residential projects, labor costs represent about half the total hard costs of the entire project.  And of course, the labor of construction is most often local.  For residential projects, rarely do the subcontractors and laborers travel much more than 100 miles to the jobsite.  Of course, most of the soft costs of construction – architects, engineers, surveyors, etc. are also usually local as well.

So, next time you see someone building a house or an addition, even a gargantuan edifice, remember that what you are seeing is the unconstrained and unforced redistribution of wealth.  From aspiring homeowners to local carpenters, masons, laborers, roofers, runs the stream of money like the braided channels of a river across a delta, from a single source to a thousand rivulets.