Showing posts with label Eisenman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eisenman. Show all posts

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Frampton & Vidler on the 1960s

Kenneth Frampton and Anthony VIdler (currently Dean of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York) have published two fascinating glimpses into the 1960s English background that led to the highpoint of New York architecture and theory in the 1970s and 80s, a story in which they themselves played major roles.

In a Columbia architecture school publication, Frampton recalls his early years as technical editor of Architectural Design (AD) under Monica Pidgeon in London (1962 - 65), offering a view into his formative years before arriving at Princeton in 1966 on the invitation of Peter Eisenman, whom he had met while Peter was doing his PhD. at Cambridge.

It's essential background for understanding Frampton's American phase; I wish I'd known something of all this when I studied under him in the 1970's.

Here we find:
  • Frampton taking measured drawings of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre; 
  • Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building, source of a memorable cover design in 1964; 
  • Atelier 5's Siedling Halen in Switzerland, where he stayed for a period;
  • His "ideal model",  Ernesto Rogers’ Casabella Continuita. "Needless to say, I could not come close to this ideal, above all because the publisher’s rather fixed ideas as to economic paper sizes.... This was hardly the only impediment ... since I lacked both the graphic flair and the mature cultivation that emanated from its pages;"
  • His interest in "a critical stance ... which went beyond [a] transatlantic Anglo-American cultural agenda" -- Gino Valle, Aris Konstandtinidis, Mangiaroti and Morasutti (Milan), Max Bill, Frei Otto, Jean Prouvé. "In retrospect I feel that my subsequent preoccupation with Critical Regionalism had some of its root origins in this moment, when I first began to look upon the culture of the European 'city state' with a different eye;"
  • His aim "to turn the emphasis of the magazine more towards a latter-day humanist line as was represented, say, by Joseph Rykwert’s translation of Giulio Carlo Argan’s seminal essay 'On Typology in Architecture' which we published in December 1963;"
  • Constant Neuewenhuy’s Situationist thesis 'New Babylon, An Urbanism of the Future', published in June 1964;
  • The "emerging semiotic line" of Peter Eisenman’s Cambridge thesis 'Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture' excerpted in AD;
  • A "special issue ... devoted to the work of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni with a critical overview of Italian Rationalism... This was, in effect, the first attempt at recovering this lost wing of the Modern Movement since the end of the Second World War;"
  • "A soirée at the British Museum with Nigel Henderson where I first met Camilla Gray, the author of The Great Experiment, with whom I shared an enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism. This was the same Camilla in whose company five years later I would witness Berthold Lubetkin in tears before a private showing of Lutz Becker’s 1971 assembly of archival documentary excerpts of the revolution in action. Camilla would later marry the son of Prokoviev and tragically lose her life, giving birth to their child in the Soviet Union;"
  • Claude Schnaidt, "a committed left wing Swiss architect and historian whose early documentation of the work of Hannes Meyer remains unsurpassed to this day;"
  • "Being invited to tea by Hans Scharoun in Charlottenberg;"
  • "Frequent contact with Le Corbusier at 35 rue de Sevres;"
  • And Yona Friedman: "Friedman was a member of the Franco-German Group d’Etudes de l’Architecture Mobile, otherwise known as GEAM; an anarchic connection that I thought was somehow at odds with his African fairy tales, his Boolean logic and his skepticism as to the role of modern art, about which he had the provocative habit of saying, 'I think there is one art and that is cooking.' ”
He closes with a reminiscence on his successor, Robin Middleton, who as acquisitions editor for Thames & Hudson commissioned Modern Architecture: A Critical History in 1970. The book "took me a decade to complete and ... would never have been brought to its final form had it not been for the specialist scholars he linked me up with and for his own testy but pertinent editorial voice, interjecting from time to time, 'You don’t need this sentence, you’ve said it already, you don’t need this adjective, it adds nothing.' In the end, I internalized this voice and hereafter my writing owes whatever conciseness and pertinence it has to his perennial presence whenever I pick up a pen."

A more densely-packed memoir of the era is difficult to imagine, with the extraordinary range of interests Frampton brought with him to Columbia.

Peter and the 60s also come up in the first part of Anthony Vidler's overiew in the October Architectural Review of the demand for a "unified field theory" of architecture. In his brisk trot through the postwar period, he pauses long enough to offer this on Eisenman in Cambridge in 1963, already a familiar portrait:

"The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however, was that proposed by a young PhD student at Cambridge, Peter D Eisenman, who in 1963 propounded his faith in ‘the formal basis of modern architecture’ in a short article in AD...."
"In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman ... went on to refuse all outside reference for meaning in architecture, exorcising symbolic, iconographic and perceptual influences or interpretation. Instead he looked at the ‘primary configurations’ of buildings considered as structures of logical discourse − their internal spatial and volumetric considerations deriving the formal ‘linguistics’ of his understanding of architectural systems from Le Corbusier’s ‘Four Compositions’, and making their implications explicit. If for Summerson form was considered only in relation to proportional systems, or for Banham it was no more than a dead (academic) language, Eisenman saw all formal systems as communicative, based on the properties of form itself: this was the only criterion through which architecture could be thought a discipline."
 Stay tuned for the second and third parts:
‘Part II: Postmodernism to Post-Criticism’ (January 2012)
‘Part III: The Global Context: New Critical Paradigms’ (spring 2011)

Both Frampton and Vidler left cold post-postwar England for well-paid faculty posts in the US, together with James Stirling, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert and Alan Colquhoun
-- a major swath of the elite of British architecture (Norman Foster very nearly did the same in those tough years, he once told me in an interview), all to my very good luck as a student, and almost as important to American architecture in the long run as the wartime arrival of the continental elite -- Gropius, Giedion, Mies, Sert, Moholy-Nagy, etc.



Kenneth Frampton 
"Homage a Monica Pidgeon: An AD Memoir"
CC: Global Report
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
2011

Anthony Vidler
"Troubles in Theory Part 1: The State of the Art 1945-2000"
The Architectural Review
September 11, 2011
(Free registration required)

Photos: Covers designed by Frampton during his tenure as AD's Technical Editor.
From "Homage a Monica Pidgeon"

Addendum
See my update on Vidler's second installment:
The Postwar Picturesque
Jan. 8, 2012

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Amman Cánovas + Maruri in Carabanchel

One of the more interesting projects in Madrid's excellent public housing program of the last decade is the subject of my latest article. It appears in Oris, a handsome Zagreb-based journal, together with an interview with Rafael Moneo, a report on Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, and Housing for the Elderly by Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus, among other features.
The private terraces ... bring a much-needed permeability to the central courtyard [of the patio-block typology]. They can also be seen as a modern interpretation of the traditional Madrid street balcony, and in this sense are actually quite Baroque and theatrical in their essential role of giving individual privacy a public face.
The Public Face of Privacy
Carabanchel 17 Public Housing, Ensanche de Carabanchel, Madrid.
Amann, Cánovas + Maruri, Architects.
Oris (Zagreb, Croatia), No. 69, Year XIII, July 2011, pages 54 -61.

Photo © Miguel de Guzmán

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Architectural Record Visits Spain

The July issue of Architectural Record is dedicated to new museum buildings. In addition to my article on the Archaeological Museum by Francisco Mangado that appears on the cover, the magazine's web page features two additional museums in Spain that I presented to the editors, both recognized in the XI Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism, as reported in my blog entry of April 19th.

The two museum are:


The Water Museum
Juan Domingo Santos, Architect
Lanjarón (Granada)
Photo © Fernando Alda


Can Framis Museum
Jordi Badia, Eatudio BAAS
Barcelona
(See also my blog on Feb. 17, 2010)

Followers of Spanish architecture shouldn't miss Suzanne Stephen's review of Peter Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela in Record's June issue. Her article concludes:
"Although it is too early to fully evaluate a complex still very much under construction, already it has become a lightning rod for debate regarding its high cost, excessive space, and ambiguous program.... As it ages, it will no doubt lose its rawness, but probably keep its brute energy. The gesture is so defiant. Its brazen monumentality and unsettling scale ravenously explore the difference between artifice and nature. Time will reveal its significance."

Added July 11, 2011: More Spanish features in Record:
Record has just published a web featurette on Oscar Niemeyer's Cultural Center in Áviles, on the northern Spanish coast (also featured in my blog entry of December 11, 2010).

And the web section of last April's Record Houses has a featurette on Antón García Abril's Truffle House, including the amusing construction video. It was also a Snapshot in the April issue (also featured in my blog entry of March 26, 2011).

All are projects I pitched to Record; the web is adding variety to architectural coverage but has managed to put us all to work for free.

Added August 15, 2011:
Suzanne Stephens reports on John Hejduk's little-known Trisca Center in Santiago de Compostela, completed in 2003, on the Record web page this month, while the August Snapshot page is dedicated to Jürgen Mayer H's Metropoli Pergola in Seville.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Eisenman in Santiago

As the first completed section of Peter Eisenman's long-awaited City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela is set for its official inauguration on January 11th, journalists are looking around for someone to blame for its cost overruns, delays and uncertain future.

Besides the project's original political backers, headed by ex-regional President Manuel Fraga of the conservative Popular Party, their list now includes the jury of the original competition back in 1999, as seen in a recent article in El País. Jury member Luis Fernández-Galiano, editor of Arquitectura Viva and the former architecture critic of El País, does his best to defend himself, together with Pep Llinás, while Wilfried Wang gets points for having opposed Eisenman's scheme.

Fernández-Galiano blames continued changes in the plans for the project's cost overruns and delays. Originally set for construction in three years at a cost of 100 million euros, the project has suffered various changes in program under three different elected governments, and has more than doubled in size, to 148,000 m2 (1.6 million square feet). The projected total cost at the moment is nearly 400 million, and not even half the buildings are completed. Next Tuesday, the Princes of Asturias will inaugurate a library and a regional archives. Other buildings still underway include a regional museum, a museum of contemporary art and an opera. Work on the opera has scarcely broken ground, and the project has been scaled back, according to Eisenman in an interview in a local paper, the Correo Gallego.

The previous government of Galicia, a coalition of Socialists and the regional BNG Party, organized a foundation to complete the work in partnership with the private sector. But Spain's current economic crisis and cutbacks in government spending make the future completion of the center uncertain. The current government, now back in the hands of the Popular Party, has allocated less than 34 million for the project in its budget for 2011 (according to another account in the newspaper El Mundo, the 2011 budget for the project is only 13.44 million).

According to Eisenman in the Correo Gallego, "8,000 square meters of the Music Theater have been built, and we're going to start the Art Center this year. When it's finished in three years, we'll start the Music Theater again. With luck, the PP [Popular Party] will be in Madrid and so we'll have a better chance finding collaborators." (Translated from Spanish by DC).

What is really under question, as in so many other pharaonic projects of the last decade in Spain, is the attempt to outdo Frank Gehry in Bilbao at whatever cost and without any realistic program in mind.

In the meantime, reports from the site are better than expected. Much of the credit for the design's credibility is given to Andrés Perea, a respected Madrid architect in his own right, who has developed the project and overseen construction based on Eisenman's initial design. Eisenman himself told El País this about Perea's work in an interview on September 11th:
"[I find the project] intense and very well built. It has been managed incredibly by Andrés Perea. If it weren't for him it wouldn't exist. When we began ten years ago, we made decisions that today I can't even remember why we made them. Perea's work as architect of the executive project has thus been exhaustive....

Honestly. I look at the project and I ask myself, "Did I do that?" I even find it difficult to image who conceived this project, because its so wonderful. Normally when I visit a work, I only find problems, and I end up distancing myself." (Translated from the Spanish by DC).
The City of Culture is buried into the top of Mount Gaiàs outside Santiago, a historical pilgrimage city that is now the regional capital of Galicia. Eisenman's design creates an artificial topography on the hilltop, superimposing the fan-shape of a Vieira shell, a traditional symbol of the city for pilgrims, with the plan of the city's historic core and other devices. I have never had much patience for Eisenman's work, as can be seen in the following quote from an article I wrote for the Galician College of Architect's magazine Obradoiro in 2005. But judging from early photos I may have to take another look:

The City of Culture also manifests an acritical acceptance of the reigning rules of territorial development, despite its pretensions to the contrary. It is a work generated entirely by its own internal logic, in which the strategies supposedly employed to bring the work closer to its site --the superposition of the plan of Santiago and the vieira shell on Monte Gaiás and their subsequent deformations-- are in fact nothing more than strategies to generate an apparently reasoned but unfathomable internal complexity. And underneath this layer of busy nonsense, the plans reveal that the different program spaces have been laid out with an apparently capricious indifference and expediency, suggesting little more than amorphous, anonymous quantities of built space.  

The architect thus plays his obtuse formal game, in terms completely abstracted from the reality of materials, site, context and use --these factors are rather translated into the abstract terms of the game and thereby neutralized as potential sources of true formal dialogue-- and leaves the logistics of programing and construction to the specialists who have reduced them to blunt instruments of technical determinism. The architect thus apes the indifference with which other forces impose their will on the built environment. Eisenman's project, however interesting it may turn out to be in formal terms, has no more relation to the site, the city or the surrounding territory than a typical commercial shopping center.
Batallas en las Colinas / Battles in the Hills
Obradoiro 31, COAG, Vigo, March 2005, pages 8 -13.
Photo © Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Spanish Judge Investigates Calatrava

Note: For an update on this entry, see 03.03.11 post.

After a number of ongoing investigations into major political corruption scandals related to the Spanish building boom, a well-known architect has been indicted as a suspected participant in one case.

News is still scarce, but the suspect is Santiago Calatrava, whose 1.2 million euro fee for the design of an opera in Palma de Mallorca in 2007 has raised the suspicions of Judge José Castro, reports the Barcelona newspaper El Periódico (December 31, in Spanish). The judge is investigating the regional President at the time, Jaume Matas, for 25 cases of illegal bribes, kick-backs and other schemes for robbing public funds.

Architects like Calatrava and Peter Eisenman have collected exaggerated fees for their work in Spain, as Llàtzer Moix documents in his recent book Arquitectura Milagrosa. But this does not imply that Calatrava participated in the corruption in Mallorca. He is of course presumed innocent, and the court's investigation remains secret until an official trial, if any, is undertaken.

Photo: The real crime here is aesthetic. Model of Calatrava's proposed opera in Palma de Mallorca, 2007. Source: Diario de Mallorca.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Architect of the Year

If you want to see whom I've nominated architect of the year in Gentleman's roundup of great Ladies and Gentleman, rush to the newsstands (in Spain only) and buy the December issue. Hint: he collects cars. Runners-up were Zaha (who is everywhere at the moment), Peter (doing big things in Santiago de Compostela) and Benedetta (who designed the prize-winning Spanish Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo). No web page, I'm afraid. Photo from a recent biography (see a review in The Guardian), and he's also the subject of a major motion picture.

Monday, January 1, 2001

Manhattan As Muse: Europeans In New York

Arquitectura Viva 76, January - February 2001
Pages 17 - 23 (Spanish), 110 - 111 (English), cover.
© Arquitectura Viva, David Cohn. All rights reserved.

The current wave of European incursions into New York, with major new building projects announced by Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron and others, is the culmination of a courtship that first began in 1978 with a book, Koolhaas' Delirious New York. Delirious offered a mytho-critical analysis of the city as a pleasure-ground of capitalist excess, of surreal juxtapositions and promiscuous concentrations. Its style recalls something of the anarchic spirit of the Situationalists, absorbed in Koolhaas' years of study at London's AA. The book relished in sites such as the New York Athletic Club, a 1930s skyscraper with a different ludic activity programmed for every floor; in the lurid popular amusements of Coney Island; and in the exaggerated luxuries of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, such as berths for private railroad cars in its basements. Koolhaas' inspired portrayal of the city in the voluptuous terms of consumer desire, seduction and satisfaction anticipated the architecture of spectacle that currently dominates commercial building in New York and elsewhere. Contemporary European icons such as MVRDV's Dutch Pavilion at the Hannover Expo, with its sandwich-like stack of natural habitats, would be unthinkable without it.

Delirious set the tone for the encounter between Koolhaas' European generation and New York. It remains the best expression of the fascination that the city has exerted on overseas admirers, as seen in works ranging from the Manhattan Transcripts of Bernard Tschumi in the late 1970s to the deliriously unrealistic proposals for the Museum of Modern Art submitted by Herzog and de Meuron and Koolhaas himself in 1997. As might be expected, however, the book offers a take on the city that North Americans themselves have been slow to embrace, as the results of the MoMA competition suggested (more on this later). But with so many projects by members of the Koolhaas generation currently underway in Manhattan, it now appears that this reticence has been overcome, for reasons we shall examine here.

Built by waves of immigrants, New York has always looked to Europe for its architectural models. Its first buildings were Dutch and English rowhouses, the building type on which the 1811 plan of the city was based. But in addition to this typological dependence, which was eventually superseded by technical innovations, New York has also maintained a strong stylistic dependence on Europe. In this respect, 19th century New York differed from Chicago, where less need was felt to stretch conventional forms of stylistic dress over the oversized buildings produced by naked commercial interest.

Leading New York architects of the 19th century such as Richard Morris Hunt and Ernest Flagg routinely studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. The English models of the early 19th century, the Georgian townhouses and Puginesque Gothic churches, were successively succeeded by buildings in an eclectic variety of European styles, from the Greek Revival and Italianate to the French Second Empire style, the Romanesque of H. H. Richardson and contemporary German immigrants, and the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style introduced at the 1892 Chicago Fair.

Modern architecture was introduced to New York in much the same spirit, as an imported stylistic dress. Hitchcock and Johnson's 1932 book The International Style established the precedent, substituting the revolutionary tone of European avant-garde manifestos for cool formal appraisals. The Mies-inspired office towers of the 1950s by firms such as Harrison and Abramovitz or Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) essentially replaced the stone, brick and terra cotta facades of the 1920s and 30s for the glass curtain wall, and the stepped profiles created by the 1916 zoning law for stingy versions of the Seagram Building's plaza and tower.

Though New York depended stylistically on Europe, few European or foreign-born architects have built significant work in the city. In the 19th century, of course, the difficulties of trans-Atlantic travel generally made a crossing a one-way affair, as in the case of English architect Richard Upjohn, author of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street (1846). By the beginning of the 20th century, immigrating European craftsmen had made the most impressive impact on the city, from the Italian masons who laid mosaic tile floors in the lobbies of thousands of tenement housing blocks to the Catalan Gustavino brothers, who introduced a system of Catalan tile vaulting that was used in civic monuments such as Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library.

One of the most singular architects to emerge from this immigrant culture was the Austrian-born Joseph Urban, whose career is a good illustration of the light-hearted tone with which modern architecture was first received in New York. Born in 1872, Urban came to the United States in 1911 as art director of the Boston Opera. Later in New York, he designed the stage sets for several hundred theatrical productions, as well as some of the city's most fashionable Art Deco night spots of the 1920s, such as the Ziegfield Theater, home of the Ziegfield Follies, and the Central Park Casino. Working with the George B. Post firm In 1928, he designed an elaborately-decorated tower on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street for the Hearst magazine group, described by the AIA Guide to New York City as a "Secessionist skyscraper," of which only the base was built [Norman Foster's Hearst Tower completed the building a decade after I wrote this]. And in 1930 he built one of New York's first International Style buildings, the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street, which soon became home to the exiled German philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Urban's work is an architectural equivalent to the mixture of popular and European cultures that transformed Hollywood in the 1930s, and gave rise in New York to figures such as George Gershwin.

But the commercial nature of architectural practice in New York in fact offered few opportunities to the exiled European architects of the 1930s and 40s, who were drawn instead to the Bauhaus-modeled schools established at Harvard and Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. Important international figures of the postwar period were granted only a token presence in Manhattan, from Mies' Seagram Building and Le Corbusier's and Niemeyer's minimal participation in the United Nations, to Gropius' disappointing collaboration on the Pan Am Building (with Emery Roth and Pietro Belluschi, 1963), Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum (1966), Pier Luigi Nervi's little-known George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in upper Manhattan (1966), and José Luis Sert's state-financed housing of the 1970s on Roosevelt Island - a list to which we could justly add Wright's Guggenheim Museum, his only work in New York. This record is hardly worse than that of other world cities of the period, but it fades in significance when compared to the transforming impact that corporate-style local architects had on the city's profile in the same years, as seen in Robert Stern's fascinating book, New York 1960 (Monacelli Press, 1995).

This isolation began to erode in the 1970s chiefly due to the impact of Peter Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, founded in 1967, which for the first time offered foreign architects an academic haven in New York. Eisenman's center was the first to recognize the enormous potential of New York's position as an international city and port of entry. Its influence soon spread to neighboring schools, including Columbia, Hejduk's Cooper Union, and Princeton, where figures such as Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vidler, Raimund Abraham, Bernard Tschumi and others found permanent teaching positions, and stars such as Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi spent extended teaching terms.

The best years of the Institute coincided with the appearance of Koolhaas' Delirious, and the rise of New York as an alluring muse in its own right for foreign visitors. Europe did not arrive on American shores this time only as an imported style (though Philip Johnson was quick to adapt Post Modernism in these terms, and was soon followed by all the commercial firms). Rather, visiting Europeans entered into a direct, two-way dialogue with the city, plunging into the flourishing downtown arts scene of galleries and experimental performance venues, made possible by low-rent industrial spaces and abundant grant money, of which the grant-supported Institute itself was an example.

This vibrant cultural scene was part of downtown Manhattan's booming bohemian underworld of fashionable all-night discotheques, post-hippie organic restaurants, raw, illegal loft dwellings and the like, a world populated by a young urban generation composed not only of the usual self-exiled refugees from the North American heartland, but also by a new international crowd. In the old non-residential districts of lower Manhattan, de-industrialization had left behind a fantasmal landscape of decaying urban shipwrecks, which the new city dwellers transformed into a playland of anarchic action (as in the building cuts of artist Gordon Matta-Clark) and dreamlike urban fantasy (Steven Holl's Pamphlet Architecture series, Tschumi's comic-like Manhattan Transcripts of 1976-81, or John Hejduk's ominous urban ballets).

The current crop of downtown projects by Europeans of this generation is clearly a product of the maturation of the downtown scene. Twenty years after the publication of Delirious, high rents and tourist mobs have forced art galleries from Soho to the old dock warehouses of Chelsea, while artists have been displaced from downtown lofts to tough borough neighborhoods such as Greenpoint, Williamsburg or Long Island City. At the same time, many members of the generation that pioneered the colonization of Soho have grown into positions of economic and political power, enabling them to commission major building projects, while some of the architects who began their careers with sketchy urban fantasies are now at the top of their profession.

Thus we find that the fashion-conscious hotelier and former Studio 54 owner Ian Schraeger has moved down from midtown to Astor Place, where he plans to build a hotel jointly designed by Koolhaas and Herzog and de Meuron, on a long-empty site owned by The Cooper Union. We find Scholastic Books, one of the new corporate denizens of lower Broadway, completing a new building designed by the late Aldo Rossi, who was chosen to assure approval in the difficult Soho Historic District design review process. We find Comme des Garçons, one of the first fashion boutiques to eschew Madison Avenue for a gritty downtown location, hiring London's Future Systems for their latest garage-front store, while Prada prepares a new venue by Rem Koolhaas. And we find Jean Nouvel at the head of a private developer's scheme to set a major hotel atop one of the best views of lower Manhattan, across the East River in the tough Brooklyn Bridge industrial district.

But these downtown projects also mark the end of Soho's bohemian era, which has fallen victim to its own success. The obvious danger is that new downtown projects will be little more than commercial simulacrae of its old bohemian spirit. Rossi's building certainly falls into this category; its toy-like columned facade on Broadway is all too plainly a cheap commercial skin, an insipid Post Modern companion to nearby 19th century cast iron buildings. Its rear facade on Mercer Street, composed of angled steel profiles that recall modern industrial structures, is a better complement to the tough industrial texture of the neighborhood.

A similar process of maturation is behind other projects by Europeans elsewhere in the city. As Dean of the School of Architecture at Columbia University, Bernard Tschumi is following the example of Sert and Rafael Moneo, former Deans at Harvard, and César Pelli, former Dean at Yale, all of whom used their academic prestige to build successful professional careers in the United States. But in the case of Tschumi's Lerner Hall at Columbia, something has been lost on the journey to the Upper West Side. Lerner Hall includes Tschumi's trademark multi-level interchange of "space, movement and event," also indebted in part to the example of the Situationalists, and previously seen in his Le Fresnoy Arts School outside Lille. But here he has been forced to wrap this experimental fantasia in a retrograde masonry dress, supposedly in harmony with the surrounding campus buildings by McKim Mead and White. This is a typical example of a client's overly-rigid interpretation of the concepts of contextualism and historic preservation, which so often stifles architectural innovation in the United States.

The enlargement of the Museum of Modern Art, which is now underway following a design by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, is another case in which a large and slow-moving institution was not quite ready for the avant garde. Terence Riley, Director of the Architecture and Design Department at the MoMA, appears to have pushed both his patrons and his shortlisted architects a little too hard when the competition was organized in 1997. (The ten participants were Taniguchi, Tschumi, and Herzog & de Meuron, the three finalists, and Koolhaas, Dominique Perrault, Wiel Arets, Toyo Ito, Rafael Viñoly, Steven Holl and Williams & Tsien). Many participants strained too far for the unexpected or the extravagant in the competition's first stage, or failed to rise to the demands of the occasion, while the second stage finalists were simply too cautious. The Museum Board, on the other hand, found itself most comfortable in the hands of Taniguchi, a Harvard-trained modernist in the same mold of non-ideological formalism that Johnson and the Museum have always promoted.

Globalization has also made New York more accessible to the rest of the world -- though international groups seeking a Manhattan presence can usually afford only a sliver of it, as seen in the miniature midtown towers by Christian Portzamparc for the French LVMH fashion conglomerate on 57th Street, and by Raimund Abraham for the Austrian Cultural Institute, now nearing completion on East 52nd Street. The best time to see Portzamparc's building is at dusk, when interior lighting transforms its haute couture folded glass skin into light, billowing veils. Abraham, who has taught for many years at The Cooper Union, has created a menacing mask of tilted, suspended planes, which threaten to fall guillotine-like over the street. Both buildings give testimony to the hardy resistance of the over-built Manhattan urban plan, an anarchic collage that nevertheless brings order to the most disparate of architectural expressions.

Together with the attractions of Manhattan as muse, and the effects of globalization, the third factor bringing European architects to New York is the urge for renewal, the same urge that has governed the city's relation to Europe since its beginnings. Commercial architecture in the United States consumes fresh ideas with the same vehement wantonness that the country has burned through countless other irreplaceable resources. New ideas come in through the architecture schools and get hustled out onto the street in an insatiable assembly line of stylistic packaging. As each stylistic gambit is mined to exhaustion, from postwar Modernism to Post Modernism to Deconstruction (which never quite got off the ground), thoughtful observers such as Riley at the MoMA or Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic at The New York Times, call out for a more considered investment in the resource of architectural invention, with Europe as their model.

The latest chapter in this struggle is taking place at The New York Times itself, which, working with a private developer, has chosen Renzo Piano to design its new offices, a 200 meter shaft which will rise on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. The project introduces to the city the multi-layered curtain walls of environmentally-conscious offices in northern Europe, which allow users to open windows to fresh air, a feature that American developers have previously resisted for its high cost. In this case, Piano sheathes the double-glazed skin in a translucent jacket of ceramic elements, similar to the system he used for his Potsdammer Platz complex in Berlin. But the floor plans respond to the usual American commercial demand for large floor areas, rather than the more humanistic, narrow light-oriented layouts required of German buildings. (The economic imperatives of New York building also ruled out Norman Foster's competition design for the project, which proposed sky gardens on every eighth floor. The other competitors were César Pelli and the team of Frank Gehry and David Childs of SOM, who ultimately withdrew). It is hard to know at this point how much Piano will be able to move within the tight corset of commercial interest that constrains him, or what the city's commercial firms will be able to learn from his understatedly sophisticated way of building. But the very fact that he has been invited to work here is an important sign of hope and progress for the city.

Friday, September 15, 2000

BLOW-OUT

GMC: Window Blow-out, 1976.     Source: See Notes below.

Gordon Matta-Clark and the New York Five 

Darío Corbeira, editor, ¿Construir... o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon Matta-Clark, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, 2000, pages 77 - 90 (in Spanish).

© 2000 by David Cohn . All rights reserved.

I. A Window on The Institute

The obvious centerpoint for any discussion of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark in the context of contemporary American architecture is his famous confrontation with the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and its Director, Peter Eisenman, in December, 1976. Invited to participate in a group show at the Institute's 40th Street penthouse in Manhattan, Matta-Clark borrowed a pellet gun from his friend, the artist Dennis Openheim, and shot out the windows of the exhibition space. The shattered windows and cold December wind were to have accompanied his photographs of blown-out windows in South Bronx housing projects, including several designed by architects associated in one way or another with the Institute. Eisenman had the windows hastily re-glazed before the exhibit opened, and deplored Matta-Clark's action, which he compared to the Nazi Kristalnacht. The reaction of Openheim, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. "It was such a radical gesture, such a definitive statement, a metaphor about architecture," he later said. Matta-Clark himself commented, "These are the guys I studied with at Cornell. They were my teachers. I hate what they stand for." (Note 1)

Matta-Clark graduated in 1968 from the Cornell School of Architecture, where Eisenman and Richard Meier had studied ten years before him. Under the tutelage of British critic and teacher Colin Rowe, Cornell was a prime source for one of the major currents in American architecture of the 1970s. (2) This movement, an academically-based, formalist neo-modernism, was introduced in the 1972 book Five Architects, which featured private house projects by Eisenman, Meier, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk, with essays by Rowe and Institute Fellow Kenneth Frampton, and a preface by Arthur Drexler, Curator of Architecture and Design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. (3)

Eisenman had founded the IAUS in 1967 with the support of several universities and private foundations. Until its closing in 1982, shortly after Eisenman's departure, it offered courses in architecture and a program of conferences, exhibits and publications, including the critical journal Oppositions. The IAUS was an important center for the propagation of the Cornell formalist movement. It also established important international contacts, helping to introduce, for example, the architects of the Italian Tendenza to the United States. The IAUS was thus one of the sponsors of the increasingly theoretical tone of the architectural discourse of the period, and the increasing protagonism of hypothetical projects and architectural drawings as an end in themselves. The title of the show that Matta-Clark participated in, "Idea as Model" (which included work by Meier, Graves and Gwathmey), was typical of the general tone.

The subject of Matta-Clark's critical attack on the Institute, on the other hand, was the urban disaster of the South Bronx. And his attack was calculated to draw attention to the place and moment when architectural discourse in the United States had turned its back on such problems. Matta-Clark's photos may have included broken windows from projects in the Twin Parks section of the Bronx designed by Richard Meier, Giovanni Pasanella, and Prentice Chan and Olhausen, which were completed in 1973. He could have also included the Marcus Garvey project in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, designed by the Fellows of the Institute with David Todd and the Urban Development Corporation, and opened in 1975. (4)

These were among the last public housing projects to be built in New York for the next ten years. They represent the end of an era of massive state and federal programs for housing construction and urban redevelopment, which dated back to the 1930s and had supplied New York with tens of thousands of housing units for middle income and poor families. Twin Parks and Marcus Garvey were built by the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a New York State agency established in 1969 to apply advanced concepts in urban design to the problems of urban decay. The aim of the UDC was to reform and refine the heavy-handed methods of previous urban interventions, introducing techniques of mid-block infill, street definition, and contextual massing to programs that had previously practiced massive site clearance and the uprooting of existing neighborhoods.

But these techniques also proved powerless to halt the forces of destruction and abandonment that were consuming the South Bronx, as Matta-Clark's photos testified. The public plazas of Meier's project were soon taken over by teenage gangs, and there were shootings at the project even before it opened. The UDC was bankrupt by 1977, while the city's financial crisis put an end to other programs, and the Reagan presidency drastically cut federal funds for public housing after 1980. While the projects survive today, the neighborhoods that they were designed to stabilize have largely been reduced to rubble. When I visited the buildings in 1995, spent shell casings could be found in nearby streets, and the few surviving houses amid the vacant blocks of demolished buildings were protected by coils of barbed wire and guarded by attack dogs.

In this same period Richard Meier was involved in another well-intentioned but frustrated social project. It may seem surprising today when considering his subsequent trajectory, but Meier's first major commission was a mental hospital for New York State (the Bronx Development Center, 1970-76). The facility was obsolete before it opened, however, due to changing policies about the institutionalization of the mentally ill, and was never used in its originally-programmed capacity. And Meier's design, like his Bronx housing, was criticized at the time for the cold institutional air of his rational modern forms, which contradicted the program's aim to provide residents with a home-like environment.

Thus, architectural debate at the Institute had turned to theoretical and formal issues at the same time that commissions for public housing and other social services were coming to an end in New York, and at the same time that the best efforts of Institute-related architects proved to have little effect on the social problems they had attempted to address. Even when working under the progressive urban design policies of the UDC, architects found themselves to be little more than an instrument of larger forces. Allied with the institutionalized powers of government intervention, they were identified by critics such as Matta-Clark and Jane Jacobs as part of the problem of the American city, and not part of a possible solution. (5)

The abandonment of social issues in the circle of the Institute was not accomplished without a certain degree of bad faith, however. This is particularly evident in the introductory essays to Five Architects, where Rowe and Drexler look nervously over their shoulders to shoot down potential criticism. A young Frampton, usually more forthcoming on the political and social dimension of architecture, limits himself to an almost parodistic Rowe-ian style essay on "Frontality and Rotation." Rowe himself concedes in his introduction that, "With regard to Europe, it is possible to argue that modern architecture was conceived as an adjunct of socialism, and probably sprang from approximately the same ideological roots as Marxism." But he argues for an American difference: "In America an indigenous modern architecture was very conspicuously unequipped with any such implicit social program." After the Second World War, he continues, "the message of modern architecture was transformed, it was made safe for capitalism," and its products became "the cultural trophies of the affluent society."

The tone of Drexler's preface, not surprisingly, is more bullying, and his argument is bluntly limited to an American frame of reference. Speaking of the featured architects, he disingeniously alleges,
"They have picked up where the 1930s left off, pursuing what was implied before an architecture of rational poetry was interrupted by World War Two and its subsequent mood of disillusionment, restlessness, and resentment. The resentment, we all know, has good reason. We are all concerned, one way or another, with social reform. But this concern has flavored all discussion and criticism of anything that claims to be architecture first and social reform second. That architecture is the least likely instrument with which to accomplish the revolution has not yet been noticed by the young Europeans, and in America it is a fact like a convenient stone wall against which architectural journalists can bang their heads. ... An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent. ... The young men represented here have that talent. ... Their work makes a modest claim; it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth." (6)

II. From Soho to the South Bronx

Beginning with his first works, Gordon Matta-Clark sought out a territory of action distinct from the conventional territory of his architectural training: in the sky, underground, using refuse and organic material, and most memorably, in the complex territory of derelict buildings. He deliberately situated his work outside the abstract ground plane of the architectural plan and its material representation in the cleared building site. His territory of action was not exactly a negation or inversion of this architectural abstraction; it simply went beyond, and stayed outside, its self-defined limits.

The first premise of this strategy was to eliminate the distinction between foreground and background, between the artist's action and a neutral plane or frame or pedestal with which this act is presented or otherwise distinguished from its surroundings. This lack of background is one of the most remarkable characteristics of Matta-Clark's photographic records of his work: the way that a cutting of a Bronx floor and wall is seen not against a white backdrop or white gallery wall, but rather is photographed in the setting from which it was extracted, or in the similar setting of his working studio. There is no essential difference between the product of the artist's work and its surroundings; both are part of a single, continuous environment of action.


Matta-Clark applied this principle not only in visual terms but also in vital terms. He avoided making a distinction between his life and his art, or between creating and exhibiting or documenting his work, or other hierarchical distinctions that privilege or put into service one dimension of life in relation to another. His photos give the same importance to the void cut in an abandoned Bronx apartment, the act of cutting it, and the fragment of the cutting exhibited in a gallery. And he could turn a seemingly ordinary event such as a haircut into an documented artistic act.

This strategic stance has broad implications not only for the nature of the work of art, but also for the context in which that work takes place, the context of everyday work and life. In fact, it can be seen in large measure as a product of a very specific context, the context in which Matta-Clark realized most of his work, that of New York's Soho district in the 1960s and 70s. The occupation of this declining industrial area in the center of Manhattan by artists of Matta-Clark's generation produced a singular micro-climate, in which relations could be forged between work, art and life fundamentally different from those prevailing in the conventional North American built environment.

The appropriation of the rough and deteriorated industrial spaces of Soho lofts as combined work and living quarters for artists, as well as exhibition and performance spaces, set the stage for the substitution of a visually-oriented model of the work of art, inherited from the bourgeois and aristocratic traditions, for a model of art based on the non-visually oriented world of work. The work of Matta-Clark, who was an active force in the artistic colonization of Soho, is one of the clearest examples of this transformation.

The Soho loft, with its rough brick walls and worn wood floors, exposed wiring and plumbing, primitive winter heating, improvised kitchens, bathrooms and sleeping lofts (Matta-Clark built many for himself and friends), and dirty, deteriorated public halls, facades and streetscapes, represented a radical rupture with the bourgeois model of domestic space, and its concepts of visual order, hygiene, comfort, aesthetic finish, and the apparent stasis and immutability produced by the domination of the pictorial and representational values of the contemplative gaze. The loft was rather a space built for work, for transforming, packing, storing and selling goods. And as an underused real estate commodity undergoing a process of obsolescence and abandonment, the loft was also a space that could be worked on, a space that could itself be appropriated as a subject of human action and transformation. Matta-Clark's first cuttings are a bold realization of this latent potential. (In the transformation of a traditional domestic environment, the traces of the work process are carefully removed afterwards to restore the values of domestic order.)

When understood simply as a place of work, the loft is little different from the traditional artist's studio. In this sense, Soho was for many in the 1960s and 70s a contemporary artistic bohemia, equivalent to Montmartre in Paris at the beginning of the century. Matta-Clark however went further. Drawing on the example of land art (he had early contact with Robert Smithson and others at Cornell), he applied its techniques of the plastic manipulation of the landscape to Soho's urban terrain. Instead of using his Soho workspace to produce fine finished artistic goods for bourgeois interiors, Soho provided him the opportunity for ongoing experimental interaction with an environment in which the conventional rules of domestic and urban order were in a state of temporary weakness and suspense, vulnerable to someone with his aggressive initiative.

But the territory of action that Matta-Clark defined in his cuttings was different from that of land artists like Smithson. The work of Smithson remains based largely on a visually dominated, aesthetic appropriation of the landscape, while Matta-Clark's work is more process-oriented, in the sense developed in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. In the classic contrast between the urban visitor's aesthetic appreciation of the countryside --as an extension of the visual values of landscape painting, a product of bourgeois leisure and contemplation-- and the rural farmer's vision of the same landscape in terms of weather, labor, and other aspects of the struggle for sustenance, Smithson's work is clearly a product of urban visual values. His Spiral Jetty can be seen as a continuation, though with radically-different formal premises, of the aesthetic colonization of the countryside by the visual values of urban elites, through weekend and holiday houses, the restoration of country villages, the establishment of natural reserves and the like.

Matta-Clark's works spring instead from a political and social reading of the terrain of human settlement, more than from formal visual premises. They spring from a stance of political critique and alternative action derived directly from the situation of Soho and other declining urban areas at the time. Since the early 1960s, New York City's urban plans had called for the Soho area to be demolished and redeveloped, and for a limited-access expressway to be cut across the island at Broome Street -- another example of the destructive urban policies that triggered the decline of the South Bronx and other areas. The plan provoked local industrial tenants and lending banks to disinvest in the area, though the highway project was canceled in 1969. The future of Soho in the early 1970s was still uncertain, while incoming artists had only a precarious hold on the area, as their occupation of lofts zoned for industrial use was illegal, leaving them potentially subject to eviction at any time. (7)

The vacuum created by this political and economic disinvestment made Soho something of a free play zone for the most intrepid of its colonizing artists. And the most important dimension of this free play was the activity of community building based on personal initiatives, outside the bounds of conventional real estate development, architectural design, urban planning, etc. Matta-Clark's loft constructions, the Food restaurant, the garbage wall, the container house and other projects paralleled the creation of communal vegetable gardens in vacant blocks of the Lower East Side and Harlem by neighborhood activists of the time, and self-organized communities of squatters in abandoned buildings, as well as other artist-sponsored initiatives in Soho itself. Even his boldest cutting, the Day's End pier, was inspired in an idea of transforming an abandoned property into a dynamic public community space, "a temple of sun and water," in his words. These works suggested alternative models for building community, while at the same time drawing attention to the manifest failure of dominating political and economic institutions in their area of action.

Many of Matta-Clark's cuttings, from the Bronx Floors of 1972-73 to the large final works realized in Antwerp and Chicago, could appear motivated more by formal than political concerns. But the idea of the cutting itself has a transgressive, politicized charge: to penetrate below the finished, domesticated skin of the built environment, below its wallpapers and wood moldings and varnished floors, and to reveal the guts and processes supporting the apparently immutable pictorial surface of everyday life. Matta-Clark's cuttings are an assertion of transformational process over static pictorial image, a politicized transgression of bourgeois stasis that arises directly from his Soho experience.

Matta-Clark's action of blowing out the windows at Eisenman's Institute was evidently part of this critical project. The act itself drew attention to the failure of New York's architectural elite in the South Bronx. And its character as a direct action in the context of the Institute's static visual exhibit was an implicit critique of the role played by an overly-visual concept of architecture in this failure.

The flaw that Matta-Clark's action points to in Meier's Twin Parks and other UDC housing projects can be described as a kind of aesthetic trance, in which the domination of visual values numb and diminish the sensibility to other dimensions of architecture and its impact on the built environment and society. Frampton's essay in Five Architects on "Frontality and Rotation" describes the way that aesthetic distance was established by the different houses in the book through a mannerist formal play of layered, retreating facade planes and rotations, which constitute, like the courtly costumes and manners in the Versailles of Louis XIV, an aloof ritualistic language of representation, setting the works apart on their abstract green lawns like a painting on a gallery wall. In Meier's Twin Parks, an implicit correspondence occurs between this ritualized aesthetic distance (here muted by the limitations of public financing) and the distance that separated the sponsoring government program of the UDC, with its limited repertoire of legalistic administrative instruments and analytic methods, from the problems "in the street" that it sought to address. The distance of the framed aesthetic object becomes here identical to the distance created by various quantifying administrative abstractions, such as number of units, qualifying client criteria and other numeric rationalizations, which form the rational skeleton of the building design.

In this loss of contact with the scene of its intervention, the aesthetically-cued design ironically fails to see the context in which it is operating. Understood in a very broad sense, something similar occurred at a more general public level in the period: declining areas of the city such as Soho and the South Bronx also became invisible to a conventional aestheticized gaze, and even repellent. This visceral aesthetic repulsion (later converted again to fascination in the case of the fashionable rise of Soho) was one more factor in a wide spectrum of orchestrated forces that propelled white middle class Americans out of the nation's cities after the Second World War. The violence of Matta-Clark's action at the Institute can be seen as a desperate response to the passive violence of this willful blindness, a cry against the deformation of the cityscape through selective aesthetic sight.


III. Postscript: Beyond Formalism

When the New York City government was able to return to the growing problems of homelessness and destroyed urban neighborhoods in the late 1980s, it did so with programs conceived in dramatically different terms from those of the UDC and previous efforts. Instead of focusing on producing the greatest quantity of units with the greatest economic efficiency and massification, plans were designed to engage and promote a more subtle, locally-directed process of community building. Public funds were channeled to local churches, the strongest community organizations in poor neighborhoods, which selected sites and qualifying residents. Money was invested in the rehabilitation of existing buildings, rather than clear-site demolition and new construction. Vacant blocks were generally filled with low-density owner-occupied houses, in the form of rowhouses and even single family houses with gardens, in modest imitation of the standard American suburban house. The premise behind this strategy was that poor working families would feel more of a commitment to the neighborhood as owners rather than renters, and as owners of houses rather than apartments. The individual commitment to the neighborhood by each resident family was seen as essential in the battle to re-establish a community fabric. (8)

Thus a process-oriented model of quasi-organic and incremental community growth replaced the bricks-and-mortar models of the past that Matta-Clark and others had criticized. Significantly, the new housing was built following commercial suburban standards, without the participation of any well-known architects. Quality architecture was simply no longer part of the equation for public officials or residents.

In subsequent American architecture, only one office, the New York partnership of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, has found inspiration in some of Matta-Clark's formal techniques. Most of the duo's projects have been exhibitions and other types of installations, in which they assume a posture of critical investigation into different aspects of American culture (Diller currently teaches at the Princeton School of Architecture, and Scofidio at the Cooper Union; their partnership was established in 1979).

Diller and Scofidio describe their formal investigations as "probes," explorations that cut under the surface finish of their objects of study much like Matta-Clark's cuttings and underground diggings. Their early Plywood House (1979-80, Briarcliff Manor, New York) borrowed ideas from Matta-Clark's 1974 Bingo house deconstruction, revealing sections of wall, stair and other bits of domestic habitat through voyeuristic windows cut into the facade at arbitrarily regular intervals. In the 1988 withDrawing Room at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, they used cuttings in the walls and floors of the exhibit space as one of a number of analytic visual tools. The work also took up ideas from Matta-Clark's 1973 Fake Estate (in which he bought unusable slivers of land created by irrational lot divisions), and it included a grouping of chairs and a dining table suspended from the ceiling on cables, as in Matta-Clark's early Breakfast on the Ceiling work. The installation was intended to critically deconstruct a typical domestic environment, a characteristic Matta-Clark theme. (9)

In their stance of critical investigation with more than simply formal aims, Diller and Scofidio stand virtually alone in the United States. For all the fuss made about Deconstructivist Architecture after the Museum of Modern Art's 1988 show of the same name, which featured work by Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi, there is no direct connection between, say, the slashed windows of Libeskind's Jewish Museum and Matta-Clark's late works. None of the works in the show went beyond a position of formal composition, none entered into a process-based transformational methodology, with the exception of Eisenman, who always performs his permutations of formal material on a very abstract conceptual plane, at an opposite extreme from Matta-Clark's hard realism. Libeskind too, for all the expressive charge of his works, comes from a background in mathematics, music and the academy, and his poetics remain of a highly aesthetic nature. Only Rem Koolhaas, whose early work was influenced by the French Situationalists, shares something of Matta-Clark's bold realism of action. (10)

The work of Frank Gehry began with a non-aesthetic realism inspired in part in the rough finishes of artists' work spaces, and the rough, process-oriented finishes of much contemporary art (O'Neill Hay Barn, 1968; Cardboard Furniture, 1969- ; Ron Davis Studio, 1974; Frank Gehry House, 1978; Santa Monica Place Shopping Center, 1980). In these works, the dingy decay of New York is replaced by the ephemeral lightweight materials and kitschy finishes of cheap suburban constructions in Los Angeles. Gehry's subsequent development has carried him very far from these beginnings, however. (11)

The closest affinities in the world of architecture to the process-oriented work of Matta-Clark are found in the generation preceding and accompanying him. We can refer briefly to the three most obvious examples, the Dutch structuralists Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger, and the Berkeley-based Viennese iconoclast Christopher Alexander. In works such as the 1960 Amsterdam Orphanage, Van Eyck placed special emphasis on developing the plan as a space of social encounter. Like other members of Team X, he taught at schools in the United States, and his work most likely reached Matta-Clark in his years at Cornell. Liane Lefaivre credits Van Eyck with helping to inspire a critical movement in favor of a socially-oriented architecture in the United States in the late 1960s and 70s, the same movement that Rowe and Drexler attack in Five Architects. Lefaivre cites as examples of Van Eyck's influence the early work of Robert Venturi and Charles Moore, who like him championed at the time a humanist revision of Modernism. (12)

Herman Hertzberger, Van Eyck's principal disciple, took the concept of socialized space a step further, by encouraging the users of his buildings to participate in the definition of the social spaces within his buildings. In the 1971 Diagoon Experimental Housing in Delft, for example, lot lines between the rowhouse gardens were defined by only a single row of concrete block, requiring neighbors to work together to further develop the boundary. With this strategy, Hertzberger created a vacuum of institutional definition similar to that encountered by Matta-Clark in Soho, requiring the direct participation of residents to complete the process of community construction. (13)

The concept of individual participation in community building, as promoted by Matta-Clark, Hertzberger, and the latest housing policies of New York City, identifies the basic cellular building block in the unregulated, apparently spontaneous growth of shantytowns in Third World conditions, a process which also lies at the heart of the origin of most of the world's cities. In the 1970s, Christopher Alexander took up this fact to develop a coherent theory of architecture and urbanism, based on the concept of users and residents taking most of the responsibility for the design and construction of their homes and cities. Alexander and his team at Berkeley studied vernacular and architect-designed environments from many cultures to put together A Pattern Language, a comprehensive dictionary of design elements, from the scale of the window bay and bed nook to complex urban structures. The handbook was conceived to serve as a guide for lay designers. They also developed a light-weight, sprayed, quick-hardening concrete as a universal, inexpensive and highly-plastic building material. While Alexander's concept is entirely utopian in the context of the developed world, he was able to put it to the test in several South American countries, where its potential application was much more realistic. (14)

Curiously, the only form in which American architects today remain actively involved in an architecture based on concepts of community building is in the so-called New Urbanism movement. Beginning with Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Seaside, Florida development --the setting for the movie The Truman Show-- and culminating with Disney's new Florida town Celebration, this nostalgic movement revives the traditional elements of the American small town --front porches, sidewalks, neighborhood stores-- in an attempt to inspire a lost sense of community in new developments. Initially, these schemes were built as upper class enclaves, and were often embraced by their residents as harbors for the promotion of conservative values of family, church, and social homogeneity. (14) But the formula is also now being applied in the public housing sector by the Clinton administration. (15) The New Urbanism is of course largely a vocabulary of appearances, with little difference in structural terms from prevailing development patterns. Once again in American architecture, form triumphs over substance.



Notes

1. Interviewed in Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1985. See this publication for a complete catalog of this and other works by Matta-Clark cited in this article.

2. Eisenman, Peter. et. al., Five Architects, Wittenborn & Company, New York, 1972.

3. This and following, Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, pages 292-306.

4. Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, New York, 1961) was pivotal in the critique of public urban renewal policies, and Jacobs was an active critical voice in New York urban politics until the early 1970s, when she moved to Canada.

5. Drexler followed this line of belligerent formalism to its ultimate consequences when he asserted, during the height of Post Modern Historicism, that the best design to come out of the 1980s in the United States was the B-1 Stealth Bomber.

6. Plunz, Op. Cit., pages 314- 316.  For the controversial urban planning policies of the era, see Robert A. Caro's classic critical study, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1974, a portrait of the leading figure in New York planning and back-office politics from the 1930s through the 1960s.

7. David Cohn, "De Soho al South Bronx: Nuevas formas de vivienda en la ciudad norteamericana", Nuevos modos de habitar, Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de la Comunidad Valenciana, Valencia, 1996, pages 303-313.

8. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994.

9. Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988.

10. David Cohn, "Frank O. Gehry", El Croquis 45, Madrid, October-November 1990, pages 118-124.

11. Liane Lefaivre and Alexandre Tzonis, Aldo Van Eyck, Humanist Rebel, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, and J. Wiley & Sons, London, 1999.

12. "Herman Hertzberger", A+U 75, March, 1977, pages 45-146.

13. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, etc., A Pattern Language: Towns - Buildings - Constructions, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977.

14. David Cohn, "Celebration: Un hogar con Disney," Arquitectura Viva 48, May - June 1996, page 9.

15. Blair Kamin, "Public Housing: A Hard Assessment," Architectural Record, November 1999, pages 76-83

Photo:
Gordon Matta-Clark, Window Blowout 1976
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, GMCT3025
© ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2007
Copied from: James Attlee
TowardsAnarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier
Tate Papers, Spring 2007


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