Matthew Nye
NINE POINTS ON ARCHITECTURE
P1: Architecture is manifest only when built. It sits between the purely functional and theoretically speculative. It depends upon the interaction of the user. The great hypostyle hall at Karnak is made of stone. The earliest permanent dwellings begin at the hearth. From the monumental to the domestic, architecture yields the physical realization of our ideas of permanence. It is a metaphor, or oxymoron, confined to a given scale. Exposed to the elements, it is always eroding. Architecture is mortal in the sense that it divides its calls for what is lasting from its necessary worldly limits. On this rock I build my church: Even St. Peter’s must eventually fall. It is a hypocritical and contradictory art. Embedded in any construction is its impending collapse. Alongside every birth is the promise of death. In its hubristic striving for immortality and material self-assuredness, architecture confronts ideas of death and decay.
Dem: In the cemetery complex of San Cataldo at Modena, Aldo Rossi designed his city of the dead. With his body broken, prostrate and bruised in the hospital of Slawonski Brod, his shattered bones inspired the skeletal form of San Cataldo. The physical body is tied to architectural form. Its open frame lays its insides bare to the elements. The dead do not mind. In Rossi’s fragile mortality sits the seed of death’s livelihood. If it had breath, it would travel through the open apertures. If it could locate itself in time, San Cataldo would occupy both now and never. It is at once temporal and atemporal, sentient and lifeless. Yet these contradictions cannot be experienced by studying Rossi’s drawings alone. Only by moving through San Cataldo’s spaces can one sense his broken bones and the pain of the automobile crash—the reconciliation of his mortality with concrete and steel. Still, thirty-seven years since first breaking ground, the cemetery complex remains unfinished.
Schol: It is with this sense of finitude that I have approached design. The endpoint is engrained from the outset. The lifespan of a project stretches from conception to transformation. By this I mean: architecture is always fragmentary. It is simultaneously fully realized and terminated at the moment it shifts phase from art to non-art. Time and aesthetics run along the same axis. Architecture is complete only when it is dead. Its telos is one of dissolution. Like changing states of matter, liquid to solid to gas, it may be reconstituted, but such a reincarnation is beyond the scope of any architect. I design with a first death in mind.
Cor: My initial experiences with death were with that of my paternal grandfather, Henryk Lis (1887-1956), and, indirectly, that of his wife, born Eugenia Jagoda (1889-1947), my grandmother, who died when I was an infant. At the time of her passing, Henryk and Eugenia had been married 41 years. If you continue counting until his death, in March of 1956, they would have been married 50 years. I have no memory of my grandmother except through the objects in my father’s home: volumes of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Gombrowicz that I took without asking, and a Polish passport stamped 1911, the year they came to the United States through Canada by way of England. In the photograph, she looks absently off to the left of the lens. I remember trying to meet her eyes and to bend her sightline or mine so that she could see me and I her. I tried straining my vision until it blurred and the ghosts of her image drifted outside the bounds of the frame. I tried angling a mirror just beside the photograph, from the point where she seemed to be looking, staring out into the room, into the present, two generations after the photo was taken, to catch her reflection looking back. Needless to say, my attempts came to nothing. In my career, however, I have been striving and failing, with greater or lesser catastrophe, toward this very task: to bend history’s gaze to meet the present, and the present, the past—to know the other so that it—what is shared, whatever that connection may be—radiates from the spine and speaks in a language unburdened by words and experienced without intermediary.
P2: Form is constant, but the experience of form is contextual. The architect designs nothing that is new. Geometry is fixed and independent. Design begins as an assembly of parts: masses, voids, and histories. Yet, in practice, one is hard pressed to avoid statements of first creation, of god being likened to architect, and blaspheming egoists likening architect to god. From Aquinas and Calvin’s Architect of the Universe to medieval illuminated manuscripts, Gnostics, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, etc., the connection between design and creation has seeped into the western cultural mind. It has spawned tiny Napoleons. It has created legions of meek, kowtowing sycophants all too willing to serve them. It has positioned fame over artistry. The former being singular and hollow: the latter being multiple and generative.
Dem: In Rossi’s imaginings of the city, there are rarely any figures to provide perspective. His skeletal cube at Modena is rendered so that it could variably seem as large as a factory or as small as a paperweight. Its conical tower could be read easily as skyscraper, smokestack, or thimble. His Alessi teapots are famously rooms to be explored. Scale is malleable, and Rossi’s essential forms repeat. The extruded triangular memorial at Segrate is mirrored in the fountains at Broni and the Monument to Sandro Pertini. His iconic Cabins of Elba would be equally at home as temporary changing shacks on the Mediterranean as they would be among the row houses or office towers of Milan and Berlin. They appear at San Cataldo as family sepulchers: the private houses of the dead counterbalancing rows of columbarium apartments. They appear again at the student housing complex at Chieti: characterized by youth, happiness, and joyful stupidity.
Schol: Rossi’s approach to scale and form can be seen as an inversion of Le Corbusier’s casting of his Modular Man upon the Unité d’habitation. For Corbusier: human scale is paramount, whereby mathematically-derived formulas determine relative proportions at fixed levels. For Rossi, a mythic and flexible language zooms unrestrainedly from teapot to doorway to house to city. It is analog and continuous. It occupies a quantum perspective of multiple scales at once, or it may remain indeterminate. In time, Rossi’s geometries would seem as familiar in an ancient hieroglyph as in Gilliam’s Brazil. Whether past, present, future, or out of time—at all the powers of ten and their infinite increments in between—as in his renderings of San Cataldo, both scale and time are limitless.
Cor: I return to my grandfather’s funeral, March 25, 1956. The service was held in Akron, Ohio, two weeks after he died. The delay was due to a lag in identifying the body. Akron is a city with which my family had no attachment. Sometime in the fall of 1953, without telling any of his children—my Uncles Robert and Gene, my father Leonard, and Aunt Louise—Grandfather sold the family home in Lakewood, Ohio, a brick, three-story Colonial Revival, which my grandparents purchased in 1925, just blocks from the shores of Lake Erie, and moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment on J Street, in Akron, directly abutting a Phillips 66 service station. The smell of gasoline and exhaust filtered through its walls. The blinds were permanently sealed and no natural light could enter. When Grandfather finally surfaced, after my aunt had driven up from Columbus to check on him, receiving no answer to her calls and finding the house occupied by strangers, he justified himself by saying that the apartment was cheaper, which was technically true, but which also missed my aunt’s point as to why she was upset. Having come to the United States with almost nothing, Henryk Lis, or Hank as he came to be called in America, amassed considerable means during the latter half of his life due to his successes in the scrap metal industry. Money was not the question, but rather, what the family had feared for some time: that my grandfather had already lost much of himself, had lost his ability to reason and his former values defining the good. He spent his final years in relative seclusion, rejecting his children’s attempts to help him, or simply to be in his life, and maintaining just enough strength and sense to resist any attempt to override his will, though not enough to continue to be the person he once was. My sister Mary and I, who were eight and ten respectively in 1956, and too young to understand, thought it was terribly funny that our grandfather was living next to a gas station—a fact for which I am now considerably ashamed. We played a game we called Madman and Station Attendant, where the attendant was charged with chasing and detaining the madman after he or she behaved erratically outside the imagined station. Going home—if it could be called that—for the funeral was not a trip into nostalgia and the tracking back of time, but one of a new and disheartening vacancy. Akron’s anonymity—just forty minutes from the family’s former home, unknown to any of them, but close enough to highlight the emptiness in the familiar—stripped any neutrality from the city and marked it as a sign of what had been lost permanently. For my aunt and uncles, the disruption of the familiar seemed, in some ways, even more jarring than the loss of their father, which, over those years of distance, they had begun to come to terms with, or at least that is where they directed their grief: toward the hatred of a place precisely because it was benign, because it meant nothing.
P3: Architecture is inherently sculptural, but form without the creation of space is not architecture. There is no joy in abstraction. It lacks the necessary transfer to the physical. It is the crutch and pretense of charlatans. Like jumping a synapse in the mind, the abstract must arise from the movement across the material plane. For Focillon: “In order to exist at all, a work of art must be tangible. It must renounce thought, must become dimensional, must both measure and qualify space. It is in this very turning outward that its inmost principle resides.” Mathematical precision is distinct from theoretical coldness. Even my father, who encouraged me to enroll at the Art Institute in Chicago and later helped me find my first position in the offices of Michel Sanz in Philadelphia, who had always been my advocate when I was a student, in my later career came to accuse many of my designs as being incomprehensible. Interesting is what my father called some of the first work I showed him, by which he meant precisely the opposite: A dead end of thought that leaves the viewer lonely and stifled, an insecure nothingness without antecedent or home. To him, his early support of me as an artist had resulted only in bohemian pretension, his son a wafting dilettante. Architecture is one of the fields that the general public feels free to criticize in spite of a low- grade ignorance. My father, following my grandfather in business, worked with many of the same materials as I had myself, steel and copper and iron, but he lacked any artistic sensibility or drive, choosing instead to reconstitute shards into beams, rather than shape beams into buildings. For one whose business depended upon the construction industry, and who, in true American fashion, continually tore things down and built them up again, my father took to a view of architecture less as art than as mere building. Incomprehensibility, however, by its very nature, is a concept reserved for the written and spoken word. Architecture is not something that can be understood or translated as if it were definitional, but rather felt, consumed, excised, and grown.
Dem: I am reminded of the criteria by which Aldo Rossi defines joy in A Scientific Autobiography. “Now it is clear to me that there is no moment of complete happiness which does not contain in itself a form of idiocy, of authentic or recovered stupidity, like the game in which two children look in one another’s eyes and the one who laughs first loses.” Joy in architecture is necessarily human, impulsive, and idiosyncratic. It is not synonymous with raw form but with the directing of form outward. Return to The Cabins of Elba. Of all of Rossi’s works, it is perhaps his happiest. Four walls and a tympanum: these are a cabin’s essential features. They are what can be recalled and remembered. They are what defines its typology and what marks innocence from its corrupt antithesis. In a maze you can get lost in receding space. A maze is larger than a cabin, not in terms of its volume, but in its essential depth. It is that which has an indefinite edge: maps of the ocean that terminate in fog and icons of sea monsters. It is not nothingness that Rossi sees when looking past the edge of the known world. “The temporal aspect of architecture no longer reside[s] in its dual nature of light and shadow or in the aging of things; it rather present[s] itself as a catastrophic moment in which time takes things back.” It is not an evolution but a form of recovery. Time is not passing by, but manifesting itself in the form of “contaminations, slight changes, self-commentaries, and repetitions.” These are the elements of the unforeseeable.
Schol: My own ethic owes a debt to Rossi, just as Rossi owed his debt to Plank. I have long sought a multiplicity in architecture. If the plague of the American city is its ubiquitous conformity and insistent newness, its architecture demands a campaign for novelty within history. Like Wright and Gehry, who used their own homes as spaces for experiment, and Venturi his mother’s house, and Johnson, whose private wealth allowed him to build his own house while still attending Harvard, I had the benefit of one of my first clients being family. For the artist, family is that which is willing to yield all aesthetic and economic control to your discretion. I spent months designing my uncle and aunt’s home in Duluth, Minnesota. Its site slopes gently downward, and then steeply, to overlook Lake Superior: its tanker ships being loaded with coal and wheat, great grain elevators that would have been the envy of Corbusier, and miles of train tracks running west toward the Dakotas. The Eugene and Grace Lis House is often misread as my first project. Strictly speaking, this is true in terms of built work, but it is a mistake to call it the first in the sense of being independent and original. In design there is no first. I cannot conceive of my uncle and aunt’s house without thinking first of the family home that was sold. The forms are distinct from one another, and yet, in some ways, the two works are inseparable. The echo of my grandparents’ home is engrained in the brick and glazing of the Duluth project. The sounds and rhythms of Lake Erie—flatter and more still than Superior’s extremes—lie in its gentle repose upon the slope and the way that its foundation gently touches the ground—not bracing itself for winds coming off of the lake, but linked and adapted to another context, willing to take the air in. Quite contradictorily, the Duluth house contains parts of my grandparents who never lived to see it. I feel my grandfather in the expansion and contraction of its glazed hall, a parallel to the Lakewood house, and my grandmother I feel continuously even though I do not know exactly what I am sensing when I do. Whether willful or not, the history of a place is absorbed into its walls. Through a repetition of forms, these histories are at least in part transferable. The precedent is realized and remembered by what comes after it. The names of those who lived there may be known or unknown, but as an occupant of buildings I commune with the dead. As a designer, my aim is necromancy.
P4: The city is a mongrel space of art and its defacement. The 21st century is an uphill climb against diabetic art. The city is diluted, and the view obscured. Sooner rather than later, you will find yourself face down on the pavement wiping gravel from your skin and all you will see on the horizon is sprawl. In one version or another, this is a near universal experience in the western world. The city sits in a low bowl collecting smoke. Its lifeblood is bile. If Los Angeles is the future, I want no part of it. If nature has taught us that life can exist in the most hostile of environs, in the acidic boiling mud of Yellowstone or at the bottom of the ocean fed by heat and not sunlight, it does not mean that we must. Still there is beauty in the city’s deformity, and the architect must curse at it in its own language. As the novelist Carlos Fuentes claimed to dream and make love only in Spanish, and who was unfazed by insults in other languages, we must meet the city on its own terms.
Dem: The ages of thirty and fifty are important benchmarks in adult life. By thirty, one should have begun, broadly speaking, and by fifty, one should have begun to reflect. For Rossi: “By thirty, one ought to have completed or begun something definitive, and come to terms with one’s own formation.” For Stendhal, in The Life of Henry Brulard, it is the latter marker that sets him to writing. “I shall soon be fifty, it’s high time I got to know myself.” In my own biography, by thirty, my main accomplishment had been a great accrual of debt: first on a mortgage for the house in Philadelphia and the investments made in the firm, and then the settlement of a number of groundless lawsuits. Architecture is one of the most heavily litigious fields because there is a great deal that can go wrong, multiple parties involved all believing the others to be liable, and always money at stake. As a symptom of a greater sickness, litigation has turned architecture cowering to the relative safety of fearful utility. By fifty, I felt wholly misunderstood by the field at large. My father, who I believe also had significant regrets at fifty, had, by then, lost my grandfather twice, and his son, at least for a time. Mary was constant. By thirty my father had begun something, certainly, having followed my grandfather in business. He made a good living and took his family on extended vacations through Africa and Europe, where we saw the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and Beauvais Cathedral in France, among other sites, which I can see now as formative in my architectural education. For my father however, it was a beginning he did not want, a job that he was good at but did not believe in, one that aligned with his capacities but not his temperament or how he saw himself wanting to be.
Schol: My grandfather’s funeral was very different for my sister and me than for our parents. I remember swimming for hours in the hotel pool with our cousins Elizabeth and Margaret, Uncle Gene and Aunt Grace’s two girls. They were older than we were and confided in us about the boy Elizabeth was currently dating, Jacob Gorecki, and how he left her letters on their windowsill perfumed with citrus scents and signed Eternally yours. Like all melodrama to a child, and to the undiscerning at any age, unable to separate cliché from reality, these stories made us feel very much like adults. We played Sharks and Minnows in the water. We ran along the pool’s tile deck and jumped feet first into the deep end, warm and illuminated, unconscious of ever holding our breaths. When our parents left for several hours to settle the arrangements and charged Margaret to watch over us, my mother handed her five dollars to pay for dinner, which we spent on fried dough caked in cinnamon-sugar from a street vendor outside the hotel. We stampeded barefoot down the hallways, shouting, zigzagging and careening off one wall and then the other. Elizabeth, who was more adventurous than the rest of us, began knocking on the doors of strangers’ rooms, and in unison we would shriek and scatter like insects. The sound of a door opening behind us was like the unsealing of an airlock, releasing everything I simultaneously wanted and didn’t want to happen, a fear and excitement wired to the back of my neck that stays with me even today. It was a beautiful time. Now, I live with the irony of my first experience with death being also one of my most joyous childhood memories.
Cor: I own a picture of my sister Mary that is particularly dear to me. It was taken at her first communion at St. John Cantius, in Cleveland, 1955. She is wearing a white frilled dress and a matching white silk band in her hair, tied in bow. My mother must have helped her get ready, brushing the strands of hair from her eyes and knotting the looped ribbon in paired half-moon crescents. I have no memory of these events, but I see them clearly enough. It is not the imagination that connects a fragment to speculative truth. It is as real as anything I know to be real, and yet it sits outside of my grasp, perspective, and experience. It is this very sense of the beyond that architecture attempts to reach. The design for the Penn Center for the Performing Arts in Oakland, for example, tries to bridge history with an as yet unknown future. At first appearance, the procession mimics classical Beaux Arts fashioning in its axial symmetry and the way that it terminates in a central theatre. Unlike its referents however, the Palais Garnier in Paris and the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, it is free of all ornament. Only the massing of the opera remains sheathed in sheets of copper patina and curved translucent glazing. Critics have labeled this work surreal for its blend of historical form and modern skin. The June 1991 Architectural Record likened it to Casa Batlló in Barcelona and called me the American Gaudí. It would be shortsighted however to view my work through the lens of imagination as the great Spanish architect is often viewed. From there, it is an easy slip into pure fantasy without ground, truth, or history. The form of the Penn Center may gesture beyond the present, but this reach has nothing to do with imagination.
P5. There is no such thing as style. As a field, architecture is obsessed with classification. Its divisions are imprecise and nonsensical. It is guilty of the structural and ethical mistakes that anthropology faced at the turn of the century: namely a vampiric Eurocentrism, only slightly more benign. While the so-called International Style has to some degree given way to a greater environmental and regional consciousness, its central position in modern architecture highlights the tension that remains between the universal, an architecture for everywhere, and the regional and vernacular, tied to a specific place and culture. Kitsch, the great leveler, is taken as genuine in one and ironic in the other, but probably not the one that first comes to mind.
Dem: Around the time that I first saw San Cataldo in person, in the summer of 1980, I was traveling north along the eastern shore of the Adriatic—starting in Greece, Albania, and Montenegro, up the coast of Croatia, through Slovenia, to Italy—before heading south. My father had generously paid for my airfare into Athens and out of Rome ten weeks later, providing that he paid for nothing else. After graduating with my degree in architecture, I planned the trip as the beginning of my real education before returning to the States to work. I felt like the winners of the Prix de Rome must have felt, but instead of sketching ruins by day and drinking red wine at night, I was drinking red wine during the day and sketching everything whether it was Roman or not. In Venice, I kept falling in love, which presented itself in the form of intense epiphanic bursts. Naturally fearful of crowds and ordinarily keeping my eyes directed at the ground, a young woman, the spitting image of an Italian Denise Scott Brown circa 1956, happened to cross my field of view, and completely against my will, I fell deeply in love. This was not lust or infatuation, I believed, but, given different circumstances, I would have abandoned my life and nascent career then and there, improved my Italian, enjoyed twelve years of absolute bliss, and then died by some dramatic blood transfusion, through which, under whatever impossible circumstances, in order for her to live, she would need me to die. Instead, she turned a corner abruptly at the Campo San Polo and disappeared from my life forever. I was distraught at first, but in the next block the same thing happened again, and then again, and I realized it wasn’t love after all.
Schol: I have always sought, through form and tectonics, designs that elicit an ambidextrous response. In the same way that, depending on temperament, one prefers the depth of Piranesi or the playfulness of Duchamp, my memory is much more easily sparked by experiences of pain than those of pleasure. While joy may have the effect of suspending the present, pestering and holding time like a sedative, and submerging its passage to stillness, pain directs my thoughts firmly into the past, to moments both acute and radiating, to those moments similar to that which I am currently experiencing, and to those parallel moments, that mark important comparisons and contrasts. Pain is an array. Joy too easily gives itself over to contentment. I do not know how common this alignment of reflexes may be. My sister, father, uncles, and aunts insist they have the opposite response. My mother experiences pain and memory as I do.
P6: The programing for architecture is flexible. Before it was a museum, the Hagia Sophia was a mosque, after it was a Greek Orthodox basilica. The Dome of the Rock has been similarly converted: specifically from Islam to Catholicism and back to Islam. Other buildings have been lost: the Galerie des machines of 1889, the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, and all of the buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, save what is now the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute where I earned my degree. Structures designed to be temporary—through a series of renovations, half-heartedness, and economic delay, cases where it was cheaper and politically easier to maintain something flawed than to build it properly in the first place—slowly calcified into permanence. At my own childhood home, in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, several miles from the Lakewood house, you can trace the series of additions like a timeline as you move further away from the street. Like many turn-of-the-century homes, particularly those with narrow frontages and deep lots, the shifts in pattern and material mark the house’s respective phases like layers of sedimentary rock. The screened-in porch that I remember from childhood, not original to the house but original in terms of family history, was the stepping off point into the greater world of the backyard or the hive of activity inside of the house. On its worn, synthetic carpet the sickly hue of AstroTurf, my mother would smoke cigarettes for hours, laughing with our neighbor Mrs. Brodbeck, who lived next door with her son Ray Jr., four years my senior, but seemingly several decades younger mentally. She was also with my mother when Mary was born, as they raised their children, constantly after my father died of heart failure in 1994, and she was the one who called me when my mother died of pancreatic cancer in 1998. From a safe distance of repose, mother could supervise us in the yard through the screen while talking to Mrs. Brodbeck, always seeming to maintain the right distance, present when we needed her—as when Mary cracked her wrist playing with a car jack and I was too stupid or dumbfounded to react with any reasonable response but catalepsy—or further removed when we needed more independence. The screen door was the one that we actually used, the threshold of safety before entering, signaling through the textures of its wood grain and its soft enveloping windbreak that marked that space as home. After Mary and I moved out, my parents tore the screened porch down and replaced it with a beautiful vaulted addition, albeit one they rarely entered, where they kept a new cherry dining table capable of seating twelve, which they subsequently never used.
Dem: By the late 1980s, the firm that I co-founded on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, 1985, with my partners Miguel de Silva and Alice Ross, whom I had known since we were students together in Chicago, had gained national and international notoriety. With more work coming in than we could possibly take on, what was of most importance in those days in selecting projects were the clients who would allow us creative carte blanche. Throughout the early 1990s, I lectured widely on three different continents, served as the firm’s principle architect, and intermittently taught studio courses at Cooper Union during the fall semesters. Much of our best creative work was done during these years: the Penn Center for the Arts, the Charles Grossman House, Kresge Hall on the campus of the University of Cincinnati, among others. By the turn of the millennium however, while the rest of the economy rode high, we had precipitously fallen out of favor, downsizing from a high point of one hundred ten employees in 1995 to thirteen by 2001. With no real conception of money, much less respect for the idea that fortunes can change quickly, rather than taking on anyone but novelty clients or selling or dissolving the business when we had the opportunity, I saw the firm slowly whittled away, part by part, and person by person, as I increasingly put more of my own funds into a failing entity, feeding a false hope that descended into desperation, self-deception, and despair. By the end of 2001, when we were turned down by the City of Indianapolis for a commission for its new civic center, which in retrospect would have done little to help the firm financially, I found myself pleading for consideration from a city councilwoman who I was then friendly with, but who now I very much doubt would return my calls. At that point, she couldn’t have done anything to help us anyway, and in what has become a far too familiar position in my later life, driven by self-pity and desperation, I pulled at her jacket sleeves like a child, crying in a mix of tearful rage that I can only imagine must have been frightening. We shut our doors in April of 2002.
Schol: Before my parents died, I returned to Northern Ohio frequently to visit and would drive past the Lakewood house for nostalgia’s sake. It had been painted a different color than when I had known it: a dark green, as opposed to the pale yellow of the 1950s. The tulip beds and hydrangeas that my grandfather planted below the bay window, and after my grandmother died tended to in violent sprints of attention and long fallow periods of neglect, had been replaced by a tall, well-manicured hedge and window boxes filled with white and purple petunias in summer. The red oak he and my father planted in the front yard on Arbor Day, 1929, or at least that is how the story went, must have died or had been cut down because nothing of it but a low stump remained. Only once did I drive past the house with my father. We parked on the street directly in front of the cement walk, drawing the attention of several small sets of eyes from the second floor bedroom window. Unwilling or unable to explain why we were there, and pushed by an internal pressure, afraid or embarrassed that we were being judged from the window as vagrants, my father told me to drive on, and we rode in silence the remainder of the way home.
P7: Conformity in design is distinct from continuity with the city. Architecture is torn between its deference to place and history on the one hand, and its assertion of the self and the present on the other. Its task is impossible—a compromise between two mutually exclusive planes. It is an imaginary number: useful for particular tasks but unattainable in reality—the imperfect realization of a theoretical impossibility. This, however, does not stop the architect from trying. In Oak Park, Illinois, Wright’s Frederick C. Robbie House is at once an outlier in its neighborhood, its Prairie style horizontals contrasting with the peaked Victorian and Colonial verticals beside it, and simultaneously integrated into its built landscape through material choice and the home’s intimate alignment with the topography. To avoid any perceived verticality that might break the house’s silhouette, the downspouts of the Robbie House were cut off at just a few short inches, so that when it rains the water falls to the ground unguided. The bricks do not have standard proportions, but are shorter and more elongated to mirror the shape of the whole. The detail is the building in miniature. A building is the detail of the city.
Dem: The timeless profile of Rossi’s floating theatre became part of a shifting Venetian skyline. Both temporary and mobile—pulled by towboat along the city’s waterways, like a great top-heavy buoy— the theatre’s integration into the city was not limited to one local site, dug deep into the ground, but rather, paired with different parts of Venice, its distinct vocabularies, and disparate historical periods. Rossi’s solution rested in the quintessential. The common denominators of forms are primary geometries. Its octagonal base recalls Shakespeare’s Globe. Its conical roof descending from its peaked flagpole is a castle. Or rather, it is the memory of a castle you have never seen and the analogy of countless others that you have. Archaic and timeless, historical and futuristic, Rossi’s theatre is simultaneously liquid and site specific, uniquely Venetian, capable of occupying the city’s many fractal angles and histories. For Rossi, the theatre as such is perhaps the fundamental architectural space—a vacuum for life and happening designed as an erasure and void, which holds the potential for activity. Stripped of time, scale, and location, rather than creating nowhere, the theatre is the potentiality of anywhere.
Schol: If Rossi was a distiller of form, for me, the Brutalist movement in the 1960s was the distiller of material. As a student in Chicago, I remember tiptoeing passively around perceived fashions and the expectations of my teachers. At that time, I had no defining aesthetic beyond the avoidance of particularly vindictive critiques. A set of drawings that took hours if not days to produce could be defaced in a matter of seconds by a teacher’s spiteful mark, a great red X slashed over designs they did not like, or, as I experienced, the tearing of one particular project to pieces because it lacked empathy. I think I admired the Brutalist aesthetic for the way that it announced its presence without gloss or pretention. In Habitat 67, Rudolph Hall at Yale, and the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, fittingly housing the FBI in its particular hulking brand of gray, the work is able to express concrete in its raw unadulterated form. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the aggregates used became increasingly larger. Whole full pebbles could be seen in the walls after curing. The impressions of formwork and structural ties were not smoothed over. Like photonegatives of the construction process itself, oversized and heavy, bureaucratic and monolithic: most find the Brutalist building rather ugly, but I consider it simply honest about exactly what it is and what it is not.
Cor: After my mother left my father briefly in the summer of 1958, driving away in the middle of the afternoon in our red Ford Custom 300, returning two months later, neither she nor my father explained to us in any satisfying fashion what had happened between them or even where she had gone. I can see in retrospect that there was a great deal of tension between her and my father about the expectations they each had for themselves and what that meant for the expectations they had for one another. Throughout their marriage, however, my parents never fought in public, nor did they yell behind closed doors. Disagreements between them resulted more in boredom for me as a child than any excitement, fear, or uncertainty. They would discuss whatever it was they were disputing quietly, in my mother’s office, never raising their voices, or mentioning the conflict afterward. It was either the healthiest or the most repressed form of argumentation possible. Sometimes I only knew that something was wrong by the forced affect they took on afterwards. There was a kind of protesting hyper-normativity to their faces that only announced itself if you looked at them closely. In the days prior to her leaving, I remember hearing the usual lightheartedness between my mother and Mrs. Brodbeck shift to exasperated sighs. At the time, I thought they must have been talking about Ray Jr., who despite, or perhaps because of, an almost comically naïve sincerity, faced continual misfortune of all stripes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Now, I can see that my mother must have been telling her friend about my father before putting her public face back on for Mary and me. It must have taken some effort, and I think sometimes how that partial deception both cheapens and strengthens the way that I view her. When she left, my father, in contrast, would let his insides spill out during the night, which I could hear muffled through our shared wall. When I asked him where she had gone and when was she coming back, he said that he did not know in such a way that I both knew he was telling the truth and concealing something else. Her absence was a gap that affected me more in retrospect. That summer, I was far too selfish to feel badly, and if I am honest, I admit I was excited that my mother was gone because it meant that I would be wholly unsupervised when my father was at work during the day. Between breakfast and dusk, I explored the city on my own, or would drag Ray Jr. along, who I can see now was always a good friend to me even though I was a terrible friend to him. Stretching from Tremont into greater Cleveland, it seemed as if the known world kept expanding exponentially. On the shores of Lake Erie, I would watch the ships alone or throw rocks along the railroad tracks or wander downtown, looking at window displays, blissfully ambivalent to anyone’s concerns but my own.
P8: Architecture is a practical art. In Le Corbusier’s 1923 treatise Towards A New Architecture, he lays out his principles for modern design and in so doing argues for a kind of mechanical utilitarianism. As a response to revivalist decoration, the forefront of design in 1923 was not in the architecture of the moment, but rather, in engineering, ship and airplane building, in bridge and automobile assembly, and the beauty of the grain elevator elegantly meeting its distinct and defined purpose with grace. Aesthetic essence rests in the verb and not the noun—the activity of meeting a task rather than the object that goes by a particular name. In Heideggerian terms: a hammer is not truly a hammer except when it is hammering. For Corbusier, the airplane is a machine for flying; the house is a machine for dwelling; and the rubric for judging beauty is how well and efficiently the machine performs its particular task. This is all well and good of course, except that it is also largely dehumanizing, reducing beauty to practicality and eliminating any joy in frivolity or any principle without quantifiable effect.
Dem: Metaphor in architecture works differently than metaphor in language. It takes place in three-dimensional space. Its referents and meanings are volumes to be entered. Placing the user in the round, the comparisons that architecture draws are bodily. They may transport you in whole to a different space and time, or to multiple spaces and times at once. More viscerally, it may tear the body apart, stripping it of meaning and leaving it forever out of time. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the metaphors of architecture rely on knowledge of those in language, and on the whole architects are rather poorly read, bordering on illiterate.
Schol: According to Rossi: “Nothing can be beautiful, not a person, a thing, or a city, if it signifies only itself, indeed, if it signifies nothing but its own use.” For those of us who haven’t been especially useful, I do not know if this provides hope or is preemptively disqualifying. In the years between closing the firm in 2002 and marrying my now wife in August of 2008, I spent a considerable amount of time at my sister Mary’s home in Naperville, Illinois. Naperville is the worst kind of suburb of Chicago, just as Stamford is to New York: a bland subsidiary appendage with less expensive office space than downtown, but without character, history, nature, or culture. Cities are not planned as potentials of activity but corridors of finance. On my frequent visits, my sister and her husband treated me with a kindness and patience that I can never fully repay or remotely express.
Cor: When my mother returned home at the end of the summer of 1958, my parents behaved as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A willful ignorance pervaded our family, and in a curious way, saying nothing did seem to make us closer somehow, to allow my parents to start again and Mary and me to hold a secret without knowing quite what that secret was. On two occasions I tried to ask my mother where she had gone. Once, in the days just after she had come back, she looked me squarely in the eye, blinked, and in a consoling tone, as if I were ill or mad, said she did not know what I was talking about. Some years later, I caught her making a passing reference to spending time in Houston, Texas, a city I knew we had never visited as a family, and I asked her again if that was where she was that summer she went away. This time she walked out of the room in tears. As terrible as it sounds, it was a relief to have made her cry. At least then I knew the absence I felt was not one that I had invented.
P9: Rates of decay vary. Architecture turns quickly on its past. It is as fickle as fashion but much more difficult to change. It adapts in order to meet new functions and moves to obsolescence when its function dries up. Sometimes, a local disaster, fatal on a near timeline, preserves architecture on a larger scale. More often, designs are stolen, reappropriated, or forgotten. In 1994 for instance, a house I designed for a psychologist friend in Santa Clarita, California, was leveled in the Northridge earthquake. More recently, another residence, which I’d prefer to keep anonymous, has been permanently effaced by the owner, who built a hulking three-car garage onto the house, like some great tumor. If I could have chosen only one design to save, it would have been the former. For better or worse, losing control is also fundamental to the practice. Architecture, which begins as an individual art, becomes increasingly communal over time, a change to which the original designer is frequently allergic. Less often—but when it occurs, it is to be appreciated—within that particular sequence of reaction and counter-reaction the art is most alive.
Dem: I have no interest in genealogy but am enamored with cemeteries. Genealogy has always seemed to me problematically compensatory, either glorifying one’s humble roots and romanticizing the poor, or affirming oneself with some ancestor’s accomplishment, wealth, or position, that does not make you in any way special. Genealogy is an inauthentic way of orienting oneself in history. Cemeteries, however, show their weathering in a way that is organic. Once, in a churchyard in Providence, Rhode Island, I saw a row of headstones that shared my mother’s maiden name. I do not know whether they were distant relatives of ours or not, and ultimately I do not care. Just beside them, however, another set of stones was worn down such that the names were completely illegible. I could only imagine what shape their bodies and clothing and caskets were in, under the earth.
Schol: Typology is useful only so far as it goes. The difference between a city and a town is not size but dimension. A town is the largest organizational unit for an assembly of people that can be conceived of as singular and homogenous. A town is plainer. It can be viewed in a single frame. A city has depth. It is fractal and its back is always concealed from you. Strictly speaking, there are no towns, but they are important theoretically. My father’s home in Lakewood, Ohio, for instance, made sense for a time and then it didn’t. St. Louis, Missouri, where my mother grew up, also made sense, and then less so. However imprecise, the idea is important. Since retiring, I have returned to Northeast Ohio, where I am in the process of designing a new home for myself. The window in the studio I rent is north facing and conducive to work. The lot that I purchased is 1.1 acres and wooded.