This essay was published in the collection "The Power of Skin", which is dedicated to the subject of the building enclosure. The collection was edited by Professors Nicolás Mauri and Quique Zarza of the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 2018.
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| Le Corbusier, La Bôite à Miracles |
The contemporary concept of the
building enclosure as a skin is based first and foremost on technical criteria.
It arises with the separation of structure and enclosure in the development of
the Modern Movement. From the first appearance of the structural frame in
Chicago skyscrapers to Le Corbusier's Maison Domino and the postwar curtain
wall, this technical innovation converts the building enclosure into a
non-load-bearing membrane whose principal practical functions are to offer protection
from the extremes of the exterior climate and to contribute to maintaining optimum
environmental conditions on the interior.
With this development, certain
traditional attributes of the building exterior as a "facade" can be
abandoned. The building enclosure may still play a representative role,
functioning as a "dressing" or adornment that establishes a sense of
character and social status. It can still be used to represent, through its
composition, the structural system or internal organization of the building,
though just as often it is configured to represent its own non-load-bearing
condition. But in its most radical expression, when the enclosure is conceived
as a continuous, uniform sheath that wraps around the building in its entirety,
the concept of the facade as the "face" of the building is annulled.
This subliminal condition of
having a "face" depends on the building‘s apertures, its windows,
balconies and doors, elements that establish, with their human scale and
function, the connection between social and urban presence. Without
recognizable apertures, this connection is interrupted, converting the
enclosure into a mask, and the building into an enigmatic presence.
By the term "face" I
mean more an action than a physical feature. We might more accurately term this
action as "presenting face", in which the facade takes its place, in
clearly anthropomorphic terms, in the social space of its setting, in Hannah
Arendt‘s "space of public appearance", as cited by Kenneth Frampton.(1)
Examples include, at one extreme, the main façade of the Monastery-Palace of El
Escorial, located north of Madrid in Spain, in relation to the paved plaza in front of it, and at another, the
more modest palaces and houses that line Madrid's Calle Mayor. Whether dwelling,
church or public structure, the building takes part in a ceremony of social engagement
with its context that can be compared, for example, to the rules of comportment
of the Spanish Court, or of a military dress parade, in terms of dress,
bearing, and regard, of seeing and being seen, with the appropriate marks of
station and mutual respect, all backed by the underlying tension of a mutual
measurement of force. Velázquez‘s Las
Meninas offers a charming informal "take" on this calculus of social
presence that verges on parody: around the axis of regard established between
the Infanta and the King and Queen, the varied cast of characters, by their
actions or the potential unpredictability of their actions, tense the limits of
proper decorum in almost balletic terms: the Infanta herself, who displays the
contained energy of a child, her chatty child attendants, the dwarf, the dog,
the retreating gentleman in the doorway, presenting himself even as he turns
away (here the evident connection between the social and architectural space),
and the unbridled gaze of the painter himself, who is regarding exactly whom? – the royal couple, a mirror
image of himself, the viewer?
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Juan de la Corte,
Fiesta en la Plaza Mayor, circa 1630,
Museo
Municipal de Madrid |
When conceived as a continuous
skin or sheath, the non-load-bearing enclosure annuls this theatrical play
between the building and its urban setting. An early example is the
uninterrupted mirror-glass of Henry Cobb‘s John Hancock Tower in Boston (1967-1976).
In a 1985 article, Rafael Moneo found a relation between the
"featureless" skin of the building and the aims of minimalist art, a
connection that continues in many of the more recent examples we shall examine.
In minimalism, he finds, citing the writings of Robert Morris, "the image
[of the work] is reduced to the point where it coincides with the object that
the artist has produced, without any mediation whatsoever, without subscribing
to any possible signification...." (2)
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In accordance with this
definition he notes the Hancock Tower's "de-materialization of constructed
reality", and its aspiration towards "a minimum expression, the descanso of forms, the extinction of
signification". He observes that,
"As a material reality, the John Hancock flees from our grasp, leaving
only its abstract volume, as if it were a minimalist stele. Its architecture is
perceived as radically different, 'other'... " Perhaps most strikingly, he
draws attention to the building's alienation from its context, both the
immediate surroundings of Copley Square and as a presence on the city skyline:
"The skyscraper, the John Hancock would seem to affirm, can only be an
abstract solid, fragile and immaterial, that is delicately inscribed in the
city fabric, although it appears to ignore it: the John Hancock is an iceberg
that floats, and as such, is adrift."
The only point of
"weakness" in this image of minimalist aloofness, Moneo continues,
occurs when the illuminated interior is revealed through the glass at night,
and with it, the building's human scale, as well as the skin's essential
function as a membrane or filter that mediates between inside and out.
The Hancock is thus a kind of
stealth tower. Its alienation and otherness are very much a product of the late
1960s, an image of power –in this case corporate power– that is uncomfortable
about presenting a public face in a time of widespread political protests, and that
is uncomfortable too about its surroundings, at a time when North American
cities were caught in a cycle of racial conflict, middle-class flight and decline.
In more recent work this
quality of otherness provoked by the continuous enveloping skin is developed as
a more positive value. A key metaphoric or typological image for this contemporary
approach is Le Corbusier's 1948 drawing of the "Bôite à Miracles" or
"magic box". He represents the magic box as a monumental, solid
rectangle characterized only by the tiny black dot of an entry. He depicts the
monolith on an empty plain whose vast spatial extension is indicated by
minuscule dots and strokes of the pen, which may or may not represent human
figures.(3) The featureless volume of the exterior converts the
interior into something of a mystery and therefore a seductive lure. The type
thus functions more as an icon than as an absent presence, although it
preserves an aura of otherness.
Significantly, Le Corbusier proposed the
magic box as a prototype for a theater, explaining, "Scenes and actors appear the moment the
miracle box appears; the miracle box is a cube; with it comes everything that
is needed to perform miracles, levitation, manipulation, distraction, etc." In a strict functional sense, Le Corbusier is
describing a "black-box" flexible theater space, but in a broader
sense, as a contemporary architectural type, the magic box transfers the
"space of public appearance" of the traditional urban scene to the interior,
where users become its "actors".(4)
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Jean
Nouvel, DR
Concert Hall, Copenhagen
© Bjarne
Bergius Hermansen, ceded by of client.
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Jean Nouvel touched on many of
the attributes of the magic box in his project description for the DR Concert
Hall in Copenhagen (2003-2009), which features a media-facade for projecting
digital images: "It will be a ... mysterious parallelepiped that changes
under the light of day and night, whose interior can only be guessed at. At
night the volume will come alive with images, colors, and lights expressing the
life going on inside.... The interior is a world in itself, complex and
diversified." He concludes, "Mystery is never far from
seduction."(5)
Dominique Perrault confirmed the
typological relevance of the image when he named his Olympic Tennis Center in
Madrid the Magic Box (2002-2009). In this case, the three sports halls, with
their brightly-colored seats and operable roofs, are encased in a massive
rectangular pavilion with an open-air perimeter screened in curtains of metal
mesh.
Projects such as these, which take
part in the latest and most radical investigations into the formal qualities of
the building skin, depend on more recent technical developments involving the
configuration of the building membrane. One of the richest sources of
innovation has come from rethinking the ventilated cavity wall. This system,
first introduced in the late 19th century, was originally applied
mainly in masonry construction. But in recent decades the system has evolved to
incorporate many other materials, particularly for the exterior cladding, which
is often extremely permeable, and therefore not necessarily solid or continuous. The inner layer of the
assembly –which is often a conventional double-glazed curtain wall– performs the bulk of the task of insulation
and enclosure. The cavity is a space of tempered, ventilated air that buffers
temperature extremes. Like a bris-soleil, the outer layer thus functions more
as a shield against the elements than an enclosure.
The versatility of this system
has allowed architects to explore a stunning variety of sensorial experiences
using different kinds of materials in surprising ways. The outer layer can
function as a veil, as Perrault's tennis stadium, and as in the galvanized, perforated
metal panels that screen Estudio Entresitio's Medical Clinic in Damiel
(Castilla - La Mancha, 2003- 2007). It can appear weightless and evanescent, as
in Rafael de La-Hoz's Telefónica complex in Las Tablas, Madrid (2002-2007),
where it is composed of a plane of frameless, super-transparent glass,
supported only by isolated sheets of glass that project perpendicularly from
the main curtain wall. Alternatively, it can be exaggeratedly solid, as in
Antón García-Abril's Conservatory in Santiago de Compostela (1998-2002), clad
in massive blocks of granite scarred by long vertical drill cuts. Or in
contrast, stone can be treated as if it were glass, as in Manuel Gallego's
Research Institutes at the University of Santiago de Compostela (1998), where
the architect hangs oversized, thin sheets of granite from the frame within the
cavity wall, setting each piece afloat with open, mortarless joints.
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Alejandro
Zaera, housing, Carabanchel, Madrid.
Photo ceded by archtiect.
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With the bamboo facade of a social
housing block in Carabanchel, Madrid by Alejandro Zaera an Farshid Moussavi of
FOA (2007), we return to strategies of minimalism and the sensuous, even
fragrant material richness of arte
povera, in which "significance" is supplanted by sensual stimuli. The bamboo is mounted on hinged louvers,
and encloses the continuous galleries that wrap around the building. The
operable louvers give the monolithic image of the volume a contrasting human
scale, and capriciously reveal its interior, creating a dialogue with the
"otherness" of the volume that feeds the dynamic mechanism of our
attraction to the work.
Herzog and de Meuron's
CaixaForum Madrid (2001- 2008) converts the building skin into both a textured
and a signifying surface. The architects take the masonry shell of the
industrial building that originally occupied the site, lift it off the ground,
and wrap it around the new volume like an animal pelt, an exotic trophy. This
rather surreal strategy challenges preconceptions about the authentic and the
ornamental, and about the nature of recycled historic settings.
While these projects focus
mainly on the material qualities of the skin as an external enclosure, others
investigate how its qualities as a filtering membrane can shape the internal
experience of the work. A crucial step in this direction is the shift from the
concept of the "magic box" to the "magic lantern", in which
volumes are clad in translucent glass, glowing with natural light during the
day and with artificial light from inside at night. A series of works has
explored this concept with increasing intensity, from Rafael Moneo's Kursaal in
San Sebastián (1989 - 1999) to the skylight lanterns and lobby of Steven Holl's
addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (1999 - 2007), and
SelgasCano's El Batel Congress Center in Cartagena (2012). This last project is
clad in a cavity wall composed of extruded bars of methacrylate and
polycarbonate, whose curving sections distort visual transparency like a prism,
and refract the thin lines of color laid into the plastic.
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SelgasCano, El Batel Congress Center, Cartagena. © Iwan Baan.
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The illuminated translucence of
these works is both alluring and displacing. It converts the facade into a
barrier that is almost as unmediated as a solid sheath, but in which structural
elements inside the wall, as well as object and people on the other side,
become suggestive silhouettes. The luminous public spaces of the interiors
bathe us in a theatrical aura. This is true especially in Cartagena, where the
effect has a comic, playful edge, in its references to Pop and sci fi imagery.
SelgasCano create a sense of luminous spatial immanence and otherness, of
heightened awareness and estrangement, that once again gives visual protagonism
to the balletic play of our movement, mutual regard and social interaction –
less formally choreographed and hierarchical in this case than in the court of
Felipe IV, and more about individuals and couples in patterns of flow. Thus, while
Nouvel's DR Concert Hall transforms the building skin into a luminous digital
image, SelgasCano put us inside the screen.
Several works by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA
further investigate the themes of transparency, reflection, veiling and a
displacing immanence, including
the
curving glass walls and interior partitions of the Toledo Art Museum in Ohio
(2006), and the low, elongated galleries of the Louvre Lens (2012), finished in
aluminum, which in Iwan Baan's photographs seem to float over the landscape in
a haze.
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| SANAA, IVAM Museum, Valencia (project) |
One of SANAA's most intriguing
projects is their unrealized enlargement of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte
Moderno (IVAM, Valencia, Spain, 2002), where they proposed to enclose the
existing building and the entire city block it occupies in a "skin"
of perforated steel panels. In their project description, they claim that this macro-volume
will function as an ideal permeable membrane, creating "a delicate
separation between outdoors and indoors" that will "transform the
wind into a gentle breeze" and "transform the direct light into a
luminous atmosphere." Inside, the existing building, its roof and entry
court all become active spaces occupied by people and art. (6)
SANAA's "skin"
approaches the condition of a bubble, a controlled, artificial habitat. In this
respect, it brings to mind Buckminster Fuller's 1960 proposal to cover New York
in a geodesic dome, as well as the pneumatic structures of Jose Miguel Prada
Poole that were largely inspired in Fuller. Prada Poole's ephemeral domes for
Ibiza's Instant City (1971) and the Encounters of Pamplona (1972) were the most
essential expression of the magic box: a tensile skin of translucent,
brightly-colored plastic film, entirely without structure and supported on
pressurized air, with a sealed interior accessed by valve-like flaps. Artist
Isidoro Valcárcel Medina recalls of the domes in Pamplona, "The space was
rather magical, so immense, with the light filtering through the arches, which
gave it an orangish effect, and the continuous sound of the ventilators." (7)
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Prada Poole, Pneumatic Structure,
Pamplona, 1972. Credit, see Note 7.
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Despite the distance covered,
the concept of the building enclosure as a luminous membrane, as proposed by
SelgasCano, SANAA or Prada Poole, still has something in common with the
non-load-bearing masonry enclosures of the first Chicago skyscrapers. In his
essay, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Text-Tile Tectonic," Kenneth
Frampton shows how Louis Sullivan's decorated facades of brick and terra cotta
were conceived as a kind of weave, and were conceptually anchored in Gottfried
Semper's theories that the origin of building is found in fabric, knots and the
tensile structure of the nomadic tent – an idea carried further by Frank Lloyd
Wright in the interwoven patterns of his textile block system.(8)
Semper's
concept is also related to the drawings of a "primitive temple" that Le
Corbusier published in Vers une Architecture, which actually represent the
Jewish tabernacle in the wilderness, as Kenneth Frampton and others have
pointed out.(9) The illustration depicts a monumental tent structure
that can be considered a precursor to the Bôite à Miracles. Prada Poole's
tensed bubbles bring this idea home again, while we can look back and find
woven, patterned "fabrics" in the play of digital pixels across the
façade of the DR Concert Hall, in the fitted cyclopean stonework of
García-Abril's music conservatory, in the bamboo of the Carabanchel housing or the
tensed glass sheets of the Telefónica complex. As rendered in almost any
material, the non-load-bearing enclosure can be understood as a woven membrane
and, in a certain sense, its encloses as essentially tent-like.
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| Le Corbusier, Primitive Temple |
To these two groups we should
probably add a third, which has been concerned more exclusively with restoring
the civic "face" of the building in the courtly, Baroque sense that
we have discussed above. This third path was part of the Post Modern attempt to
revive or reinvent the civic values of the traditional city, a period that forms
a transitional bridge between the alienation of the John Hancock Tower and the
arrival of the iconic magic box, though this is a discussion I will have to reserve
for another time.
But as we have seen, the line of
contemporary architecture that most radically explores the nature and limits of
the building skin contains contradictory drives. On the one hand, it would seem
to pursue the limits
of its own dissolution into spatial atmosphere, seeking to subsume its material
being into heightened perception. And on the other, in its essential condition
as a barrier, its drive is to withhold, mask, and displace, to interrupt social
space and to put into motion the dividing and attracting mechanisms of the
semiotic lure. In both these drives, towards heightened perception and seductive
withholding, I think it can be fairly stated that its principal point of reference
is the endlessly fascinating allure of the illuminated digital screen, and the
new, virtual space of public appearance it has created, which is the true and
authentic magic box of our time.
NOTES
1. Kenneth
Frampton, "Prospects for a critical regionalism," Perspecta: The
Yale Architectural Journal 20, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts,1983, p. 147-162.
2. This and following quotes: Rafael Moneo,
"Sobre el John Hancock del I. M. Pei & Partners," Arquitectura Bis, No. 52, December 1985, Barcelona, p. 4 - 12.
3. Le
Corbusier, “The Heart as a Meeting Place for the Arts,” lecture presented in CIAM
8, Hoddesdon, England, 1951, published in:
Jaqueline
Tyrwhitt, J. L. Sert & Ernesto Rogers, CIAM
8: The Heart of the City, Pelligrini
and Cudahy, New York, 1952.
Luis Moreno
Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón introduced me to "La Boite à Miracles", and I
discussed it in a text on their work:
David Cohn, "Razón y Forma," 2G No. 27, Mansilla + Tuñón. Obra reciente.
Recent work, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2003, p. 6 - 19.
The concept is related to "the cube that works"
that Alejandro de la Sota attributed to Le Corbusier: Alejandro de la Sota, Alejandro de la Sota, Arquitecto,
Pronaos, Madrid, 1989 p. 176.
4. Le
Corbusier, Ibid.
5. Ateliers
Jean Nouvel, "Danish Radio Concert House," Ateliers Jean:
http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/desktop/projet/copenhagen-denmark-concert-house-danish-radio1 (Accessed
October 30, 2018).
6. SANAA, IVAM Extension Project, 2002. Digital press document in the files
of David Cohn.
7. Pepa Bueno, "Esto se
hincha," in: José Díaz Cuyás and others, editors, Encuentros
de Pamplona 1972: fin de fiesta del arte experimental, Museo Reina Sofía,
Madrid, 2009, p. 244.
8. Le
Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture,
Architectural Press, London, 1927, p. 66. Analyzed in: Kenneth Frampton, A Genealogy of Modern Architecture:
Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, Lars Müller, Zurich, 2015, p
58 – 73.
9. Kenneth
Frampton, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Text-Tile Tectonic," Studies
in Tectonic Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1995, p 93 - 120.
Source:
La
Bôite a Miracles
Nicolás Mauri and
Quique Zarza, editors
The Power of Skin: New Materiality in Contemporary
Architectural Design
Arcadia Mediática, Compaq, Arkrit (Escuela
TécnicaSuperior de Arquitectura, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), 2018,
pages 225 - 240 (In Spanish and English)