William S. Burroughs II

"You are not paid off to be quiet about what you know. You are paid not to find it out." 
William S. Burroughs

Quoted in:
Barry Miles
Call Me Burroughs
Twelve (Hachette Book Group), New York, 2014

Reviewed in:
Ann Douglas
King of Cool 
The New York Times Book Review
February 23, 2014

What is Wrong with this Picture?

The headlines in The Guardian:

Miami painter thought $1m Ai Weiwei vase was Home Depot-style pot

• Maximo Caminero smashed Chinese artist’s vase at museum
• Act was ‘spontaneous protest’ in support of local Miami artists

The facts: 

Ai Weiwei shows, in the new Pérez Art Museum in Miami, a group of Han Dynasty vases, over 2000 years old, that he has painted in bright colors, i.e. defaced. They stand in front of a series of photographs showing him dropping another Han Dynasty vase and smashing it to bits. This is art.

Local artist Maximo Caminero sees the installation, picks up one of the vases, and smashes it. This is a crime. He goes to jail.

And Weiwei condemns him, because the vase "was not his property".

Richard Luscombe  
The Guardian
February 18, 2014 

Nick Madigan Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by a Protester at Miami Museum 
The New York Times 
February 18, 2014

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less is Enough

Reading List
I cannot resist reproducing in full Luis Fernández-Galiano's review of three books by the young Italian theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli, published in Arquitectura Viva 158.  

31/01/2014
Pier Vittorio Aureli ‘Less is Enough’

Luis Fernández-Galiano
The architect and professor Pier Vittorio Aureli has just published an electronic book, Less is Enough, with Strelka Press, the editorial branch of the research institute promoted by Rem Koolhaas in Moscow, and the launching of this lucid and timely tract on austerity and asceticism gives a good excuse to look at his two previous works, The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011). Co-founder of the collective DOGMA, Aureli has taught extensively outside Italy – at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Architectural Association in London, and Yale University –, which explains why texts strongly rooted in the political and architectural debates of his country appear first in English. The two being reviewed here are meticulously edited by Joan Ockman (The Project...) and Cynthia Davidson (The Possibility...), who have managed to present the author’s ideas in limpid, pedagogical English prose.

The Project of Autonomy is a convincing description of the ideological debates in Italian architecture of the 1960s, a stimulating intellectual panorama that Aureli analyzes under the prism of the Rome-born philosopher Mario Tronti, whose political thinking he relates both to the architectural proposals of the Tendenza gathered around the Milanese Aldo Rossi, and to the utopian designs of Archizoom and Superstudio in Florence. The current senator Tronti was half a century ago the driving force and theorist of ‘operaism’, a radical Communist movement that would also involve the young Toni Negri, and which in time would bring about Autonomia Operaia. Aureli links the autonomy of the political, as defended by Tronti – who strove to reconcile the ideas of Karl Marx with those of the jurist of Nazism Carl Schmitt – with the autonomy of the architectural, as advocated by Rossi through the categories of type and place; and also connects the view of the philosopher of ‘society as factory’ with the No-Stop City of Andrea Branzi and his Archizoom companions, who proposed a zero degree of architecture that owed much to the urban ideas of Ludwig Hilberseimer, rediscovered at the time by a colleague of Rossi, Giorgio Grassi. This political and poetic landscape of Messianic effervescence – set against liberal democracy and the old guard represented by Bruno Zevi, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers – culminated and ironically also came to an end with two exhibitions, the one curated by Emilio Ambasz at the MoMA in 1972, and the Triennale di Milano directed by Rossi in 1973, a melancholy epilogue that Aureli duly records, while showing his dismay at the de-politicization of postmodern society.

Similar sentiments and anxieties inspired The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, an effort to define the political and the formal in architecture through the opposition between the city with limits and urbanization without them, polemicizing with the urban theories of Cerdá, Hilberseimer, Archizoom, and Koolhaas, and finding in the late work of Mies the best expression of an ‘absolute architecture’: an archipelago of well-defined forms rising on clear-cut plinths in the amorphous, unlimited sea of urbanization. Aureli finds the origins of this strategy in the work of four architects – Palladio, Piranesi, Boullée, and Ungers – who confronted the city project from the angle of architectural form, and combs through their work from a viewpoint closer to theory than to history. Defending the Greek polis against the Roman urbs, and thus nomos against lex, Aureli, like Tronti, resorts to Carl Schmitt to explain limits from the optic of political differentiation between friend and enemy, and to support well-delimited places and forms in the city over the systems and indefinite flows of urbanization, which has imposed its economic logic everywhere.

In his latest work, Aureli questions the current clamor for austerity, pointing out the ambiguity of its ascetic component, which can be both a tool of oppression and a form of resistance. Going through the history of monastery life, from the hermits and the abbeys governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict to the altissima paupertas of the Franciscan reform, and stretching the story to include the bohemian poverty of Baudelaire, the precarious life of Walter Benjamin, or the simple room proposed by Hannes Meyer as an alternative to the Existenzminimum, Aureli censures the monastic minimalism of Pawson, the pastoral humility of Zumthor, and even the asceticism of Steve Jobs for its pseudo-religious spiritual aura, and encourages us to replace the Miesian ‘less is more’ with ‘less is enough’, making the shedding of material things the basis of a life freed of the anxiety of production and possession. With his determination to bring into the current debate the political dimension of more ideologized times, Pier Vittorio Aureli has acquired a voice of his own, a voice that deserves to be heard.

Arquitectura Viva 158


From the introduction to Less Is Enough
"Asceticism ... allows subjects to focus on their life as the core of their own practice, by structuring it according to a self-chosen form made of specific habits and rules. This process often involves architecture and design as a device for self-enactment. Because asceticism allows subjects to focus on the self as the core of their activity, the architecture that has developed within this practice is an architecture focused not on representation but on life itself – on bios, as the most generic substratum of human existence." 

 Pier Vittorio Aureli

Go to Strelka Press, publishers of Less is Enough

Photo:
Becoming Political
Markus Miessen in conversation with Pier Vittorio Aureli
Build, 06/2008

Quote from the interview above:

"How can knowledge be transferred and produced in a meaningful way today?"
"By learning to not be hyperactive. This is a criticism that I address first to myself, every day. To not produce too much, to not design too much, to not travel too much, to not promote too much, to not network too much, to not be everywhere all the time. In short: to learn again to be sedentary and laconic. To learn that refusal, omission and inaction are also positive ways to do something." 

Manuel de las Casas 1940-2014

The architect Manuel de las Casas (Talavera de la Reina, 1940) died last Saturday, February 8 in Madrid, after a relatively short illness. A charismatic teacher at the Madrid School of Architecture for over four decades, and founder of the School of Architecture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, he designed works that were pioneering in the fields of social housing, the revitalization of the traditional city, and the integration of contemporary architecture in historic contexts. He received Spain's National Architecture Prize in 1999 for his University Health Sciences Center in La Coruña, and the Gold Medal in the Fine Arts from the Ministry of Culture in 1995.

I first met Manuel in the 1980s, soon after my arrival in Spain, as the author, together with his brother Ignacio, of the social housing developments of Palomeras, Orcasur and Albufera Avenue, projects launched by the central government to mitigate the inhuman conditions of the numerous shantytowns that still surrounded Madrid in those years. With his abundant beard, deep voice and steady gaze, Manuel was for me the personification of a new generation of Spaniards dedicated to the task of building a modern, democratic and socially-equitable country during the exciting years of transition following the end of the Franco regime. The idealism and high aims of the moment are reflected in the sobriety and dignity of these projects: the buildings of Palomeras, with their grand interior halls lined with galleries, like traditional Madrid corralas, creating community; Orcasur, a miniature city of regular blocks; or the square volumes of Albufera, spread out across the hilltop of the Altos de Vallecas, not without a certain monumentality – all today in excellent condition. Later, Manuel's daughter Iciar, also an architect, took me to see the housing block of Cabeza del Moro in Talavera, organized like a traditional Plaza Mayor surrounded by galleries, an early –and truly urban– formulation of the "patio-block" housing type that has come to dominate the dense new planned developments of Madrid.

Another memorable encounter with Manuel was our trip together to Zamora to see his King Alfonso Enriques Institute of Spanish-Portuguese Studies (1997), where he had introduced, among the ruins of a medieval convent, a series of new elements, clad in oxidized steel, of a startling contemporaneity. This work, together with his Agriculture Department Building in Toledo of 1992, still constitute a model of how to integrate new and old without resorting to a superficial mimetism.

On this same trip, I was witness to Manuel's pride and generosity as a teacher, as he took me to see works by up-and-coming young architects that he followed with great interest. He showed me Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón's Museum of Fine Arts in Zamora, their first built work, then still under construction, and the Fair Pavilion by Javier Revillo and María Fraile. We also stopped at the Labor University, a 1950s work in an eclectic historicist style by Luis Moya, for whom his father had worked as technical architect before working for Manuel on his first built work, the Pedro Mora House en Talavera (1964-71).

Last December, the Toledo School of Architecture inaugurated the Manuel de las Casas Chair in Architecture, a ceremony in which Manuel, in his last public appearance, presented this first project to the audience, returning to his roots as a student in the organicist architecture of the early 1960s – and offering us a master class in the human values of architecture, in contrast to the frivolities we find in so much supposedly ambitious architecture today.


David Cohn
Manuel de las Casas, una arquitectura con rostro humano
El País, February 10, 2014, page 41.
 Translated by DC

See also:
Antón Capitel
Manuel de las Casas, arquitecto de referencia
El País, February 8, 2014

Bibliography

Articles on Manuel de las Casas by DC 

King Alfonso Henriques Institute in Zamora

Architectural Record, July 2000, pages 106 - 113 

El anexo como abordaje 
Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud, A Coruña 
Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica 14, Feburary 2000, pages 20 - 28 

Building as Landscape 
Lérez Cultural Center, Pontevedra, Spain 
World Architecture 73, February 1999, pages 80 - 83 

Acero Rojo, Pizarra Verde, Vidrio Luminoso 
"Red Steel, Green Slate, Luminous Glass" 

Congress hall an Auditorium, Pontevedra 
Pazo de Congresos e Exposicións de Pontevedra 

Exhibition catalog 

Xunta de Galicia, September 20, 1997 

Block en Form einer gespreizten Hand 
Public Housing, Alcobendas 
Bauwelt 17/18, May 9, 1997, pages 926 - 931 

Public Housing, Alcobendas, Spain 
World Architecture, October 1996, pages 134 - 135 

Entwerfen für die Peripherie: Der Realismus des Manuel de las Casas 
Designing for the Periphery: The Realism of Manuel de las Casas 
Bauwelt 28/29, July 29, 1994, pages 1596 - 1599 

Büros in der Akropolis 
Consejeria of Agriculture, Toledo, Spain 
db - deutsche bauzeitung, October 1993, pages 25 - 29 

The Poetics of Place: Three Projects by Manuel de las Casas 
Geometría 14, December 1992, pages 101 - 112

The Short Life of Another Little NY Masterpiece

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 Update on MoMA Steamrolls down 53rd Street

The fate of William & Tsien's American Folk Art Museum at the hands of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see my blog entry of Jan. 15th) echoes that of McKim Mead & White's sumptuous Madison Square Presbyterian Church, built for the outrageous sum of $500,000 in 1909 and demolished in 1919 for an annex to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower across the street. Just one of many New York stories that I took a look at in a 1997 article, New York Lost and Found.

According to Wikipedia  (I know, but it's handy), it was an AIA Gold Medal winner and one of Stanford White's best works:

"To hold its own with the towering commercial blocks surrounding it, both built and to come, its entrance was through a portico supported by six pale green granite columns, fully 30 feet tall. The building was raised on a marble plinth and built of specially molded bricks in two slightly varied tonalities in a diaper pattern and white and colored architectural terracotta details. It featured a low saucer dome covered in yellow and green tiling, with a prominent gilded lantern. The pediment sculptures by the German-born Adolph Alexander Weinman were tinted by the painter Henry Siddons Mowbray, giving the building a polychromy unusual in American Beaux-Arts architecture. Extensive mosaics and Guastavino tile gave the interior a Byzantine aspect."

You know, All that is solid melts into air and all that.

For a more detailed account, see:
Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead & White, Architects, Harper & Row, New York, 1983, pp. 275-279.

Article on the demolition from the New York Times archive, May 6, 1919:

Cold Call in Aravaca

I'd been going past it for weeks on the bus and it gradually drew my attention. Was it some kind of office block, an unfinished parking garage, a bunker? The stonework was impressive, and those thick overhangs!

Going back on foot for a second look one day it hit me: it's the Sobrino House! One of Javier Carvajal's seminal works of 1965-66, where he mixes Wright's Falling Water, Mies' Concrete Country House and Le Corbusier's Maison Jaoul all in one ponderous, chilly spectacle. It's one of those houses of the period that go on forever, with servants quarters, bedrooms for half-a-dozen offspring and a regal spread of living spaces, terraces and patios.

Friends tell me it's been on the market for years. Instead of the big estate with ample grounds I imagined, its crowded onto a corner lot at a busy intersection in Aravaca, north of Madrid. It looks beautifully maintained, despite some changes. How long can it survive? You can't pick it up and take it somewhere else, like one of Wright's Usonian houses. Perhaps it could work as an embassy residence, a luxury medical clinic, an exclusive mini-hotel?

Ground Floor

See also my blog entry:
Javier Carvajal, 1926 - 2013 
August 9, 2013

Photos: DC
Plan: J. Carvajal, Arquitecto, Fundación COAM, Madrid, 1996, p 32.

Pretentious Lessons in Architecture I: The Door

The door and the wall. The door reveals the condition of the wall. Darkness and light. The darkness reveals the condition of the light. The light penetrates and unmasks the darkness. Its reflection and re-reflection illuminate, define and materialize the space,  this contained volume of air.

The opening opens the wall to these transactions. The controlled passage between darkness and light, the controlled interchange of darkness and light. The ornamented thickness of the cut in the wall frames and mediates this interchange, vibrating between light and shadow.

We see how the opening has been taken out of the wall, like parting a curtain, the force used to separate the weight of the wall bearing down to one side and the other. The vault of the opening springs up like an invisible force-field.

The wall holds the rest of the light back, like a dam, offering protection. The wall holds the darkness in like a cave.

The light is clarity, marking limits; darkness remains undefined, potentially mysterious, inviting or threatening. The light is sensual pressure, it caresses, scalds; the darkness is immersion - refreshing, chilling....

The compliment to the first photo: the dark portal seen from the brilliant light of the courtyard: darkness framed, revealed, contained. The Baroque door, negotiating the transit between the facade, or face of the building and its hidden interior, presenting face, representing.

The figure in the doorway: framed, presented, giving face - illuminated by the light of the courtyard, with the contrasting darkness of the doorway behind, like the portraits of Velázquez with their dark, neutral backgrounds that are nevertheless buzzing with light and spatial depth. The knight in the doorway at the back of Velázquez's Las Meninas, regarding the scene, returning our own regard. He steps throught the door, he emerges, guarding his back, presenting his face.

The doorway is an orifice, a mouth, a mask. It dignifies, qualifies those who emerge from it, it attracts, receives those who enter.

Enter here, but first contemplate my presence, my dignity, my grandeza. Feel welcome, protected. Pass through this threshold and be with us in peace. 


The Alhambra
Photographers: Rebecca Cohn and Scott Finkelstein
January 2014

For more of this stuff, see my unpublished article on Old Madrid in this blog.

Enor Call for Entries

Juan Santos Domingo, Museo del Agua, Lanjarón, Granada, Premio Enor 2011

The bases are out for the VI Ascensores Enor Architecture Prize 2014 for work in Spain and Portugal, including works completed between 2010 and 2013. Deadline for entries is March 15, 2014.

The two main prizes are:

• Ascensores Enor Grand Prize: 8,000 Euros
• Enor Prize for work by an architect under the age of 40: 4,000 Euros

More information:
http://www.enor.es/premio

Enor is based in Vigo, Galicia. The Prize offers a window into the profession from a perspective different from the usual centers of self-attention in Madrid or Barcelona. I served on the jury a few years ago, at the invitation of its director, the architect Carlos Quintáns.

From the bases:

Entry form:

A Stroll in the City of Poets

Another island of quiet enchantment amid the inhospitable suburbs of Madrid, a development called the City of Poets, but originally known as the Dehesa de la Villa, for a nearby natural reserve whose hills and pines still survive, in bits and pieces, amid the complex (Metro: Antonio Machado). I wonder if any poets live there.

Like Almendrales (see post of December 29th), the key here again is a rupture with conventional city blocks in favor of an urban layout that adapts to the hilly terrain. The blocks and towers form the background to the terraced landscaping, with its retaining walls, courts, full trees and other cared-for vegetation, creating an environment of surprising peace and beauty.

It was designed by the architects Antonio Perpiñá, Luis Iglesias and Carlos de Miguel, with the engineers Ignacio Briones and Ignacio Marzal, and built in phases from 1964 to 1985. Its first phase was published in the magazine Arquitectura in 1969.

I still don't see why this kind of garden layout shouldn't be used more -- with ramps perhaps instead of stairs, as beautiful as they are. The concept is essentially Organicist, the Spanish variation on Brutalism, a style which I think was developed largely to create living environments well-adapted to the Mediterranean climate, open to nature while protected from the harsh summer sun.

Too bad so much grub accumulates on buildings in Spain, all the exterior cables and gas lines, the enclosed balconies, air conditioners,  and cheap aluminum windows, the lame globe lighting fixtures, and yes, the graffiti. And yes, the idle cars stuffed everywhere.

Like Almendrales, the complex includes a primary school, a small shopping center with a supermarket, and a church.

I took the pictures mainly to capture the ambiance. It's what really counts, I think. The apartment layouts are well-handled, according to the Madrid College of Architect's Guide to the Architecture of Madrid, although I haven't seen them. (The site plan is from the Guide).

There are a number of higher towers amid the lower blocks.

The towers camouflage the complex from the outside, creating a good defensive barrier.

You really feel, as you enter the curving streets, or move down a shallow flight of stairs and under an open portico to the inner gardens, that you have discovered a special place.

Blocks built later hold their own, too.

MoMA Steamrolls down 53rd Street

MoMA Expansion © Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Everyone is weighing in on MoMA's plans to raze Willians & Tsien's American Folk Art Museum, on West 53rd Street, for their next expansion. It's a local fight, but I am still a local when it comes to New York.

Some interesting quotes:

"The Museum of Modern Art is a perpetual work in progress. It’s never been finished.”
Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA Director

“I know the architecture community was hoping the conclusion would be different.”Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), who are designing the museum's expansion. Implying that this question is of no wider import, and does not affect the public interest?

“We don’t collect buildings. We take architecture seriously, but it isn’t art. Architecture is tied to function."
Boom! Glenn Lowry, in a verbal blitzkrieg of executive expediency. Run for cover!

“The current lobby, we feel, is quite mean. There’s a banality about it.”
Diller on plans to redo the existing museum lobby, result of last expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi. Finally someone said it.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, on the current museum:

"MoMA is now as jammed and joyless as the Van Wyck Expressway on a Friday in July. That’s not because it is a victim of its own success; it’s because the museum is a victim of its own philosophy. ... . I remember the temporary home the museum occupied in Queens during its last renovation. It briefly got MoMA out of its Midtown straitjacket and closer to its pioneering roots."

 And on the problems and virtues of the Folk Museum building:

"Wedged onto a narrow plot, the ill-fated folk art building is far from perfect. Inside, it’s mostly stairwells and passages, its galleries tricky to install. But the eccentricity helps to account for what endears it to architects. Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance. It stands proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic, open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture."

Update January 20  
Later this week Diller was interviewed by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times, with more interesting statements:

"I think the reason this [Folk Art] building was very difficult to transform into something else was its degree of idiosyncrasy. If we were to eliminate a lot of those idiosyncrasies, we could use it. But at a certain point it takes on another identity."

"Connectivity to the street [is] something we talked abpit on our first interview with MoMA: the art now is half a mile away from the entrance. MoMA could have a better civic presence generally, and the entrance on 53rd Street could be more generous, be a double-height space. There are a number of gestures that make the entrance more inviting. When it becomes more efficient and cleaned up, there could be great options for showing art there." (Edited by DC)

Hawthorne's original criticism of the proposal, published on January 9th in the LA Times, is also worth quoting:

"The idea that a museum would acquire and then demolish an important piece of contemporary architecture is unfathomable to many artists and architects in New York. While I admire the building, I don’t think the Folk Art Museum is the masterpiece some of my colleagues believe it to be; its interior is mannered and overdesigned, its dark and contorted façade presenting a kind of barricade along the streetscape."

"The idea that endlessly enlarging museum buildings will provide a better experience for visitors is almost never borne out by the architectural gigantism that results. On the contrary, the most powerful encounters we have with works of art tend to take place in the smallest and most intimate -- and even the most eccentric or impractical -- works of museum architecture. Efficiency and endless expansion are catnip to museum boards; they are often fatal to museum architecture."

The Folk Art Museum is hard to capture in photos. Here are a few, by my old friend Michael Moran:

Here's a schematic sketch of the new expansion prepared by DS+R and published in Architectural Record. The motor of the expansion is a new residential tower by Jean Nouvel, promoted by Gerald Hines, whose first floors will be given over to new gallery space -- a return to the real estate strategy behind the Cesar Pelli addition in the 1980s.

A couple of images of Nouvel's Tower Verre, as of last year, from Curbed:

  
I still miss the old Hotel Dorset on 54th Street, wiped out in the Taniguchi expansion. And every time I pass the sculpture garden I wonder how much longer the Rockefeller apartments can hold out across 54th Street. What would the garden be without that backdrop? But of course what i really miss is the old museum, which in memories from college trips in the 1970s was as intimate as a private club. Those were the days.

Sources
Diller, first Lowry  quote:
Cathleen McGuigan and Laura Raskin
MoMA to Demolish Tod Williams Billie Tsien Folk Art Building After All
Architectural Record, January 8, 2014

Second Lowry quote:
Fred A. Bernstein
MoMA Defends Decision to Raze Folk Art Museum Building at Public Forum
Architectural Record, January 29, 2014

Michael Kimmelman
The Museum With a Bulldozer’s Heart
The New York TImes, January 13, 2014

Christopher Hawthorne
MoMA reaffirms controversial plan to raze Folk Art building

Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2014

Christopher Hawthorne

Elizabeth Diller Defends MoMA Plan to Demolish Folk Art Building
Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2014

Sara Polsy
Moma Mia! New Renderings Revealed for Jean Nouvel's MoMA Tower
Curbed, December 10, 2012


NEWS UPDATES

David W. Dunlap
"Folk Art Building May Be Lost, But Facade Will Live: In Storage Some Place"
The New York Times
February 12, 2014

David Cohn
"The Short Life of Another Little NY Masterpiece"
The View from Madrid
February 10, 2014
Standford White's Madison Square Presbyterian Church lasted just 10 years. 

"MoMA Begins Demolition of Folk Art Museum Building"
Webpage news story
Architectural Record
April 14, 2014

Robin Pogerin
Architects Mourn Former Folk Art Museum Building
Talk with Tod Williams
The New York Times
April 15, 2014