Posts Tagged ‘Frank Gehry’
From Montgomery to Bilbao
On August 16, 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal rights organization, unveiled its plans for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which would be constructed in Montgomery, Alabama. Today, less than two years later, it opens to the public, and the timing could hardly seem more appropriate, in ways that even those who conceived of it might never have imagined. As Campbell Robertson writes for the New York Times:
At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with eight hundred weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.
And the design represents a breakthrough in more ways than one. As the critic Philip Kennicott points out in the Washington Post: “Even more remarkable, this memorial…was built on a budget of only $15 million, in an age when major national memorials tend to cost $100 million and up.”
Of course, if the memorial had been more costly, it might not exist at all, and certainly not with the level of independence and the clear point of view that it expresses. Yet if there’s one striking thing about the coverage of the project, it’s the absence of the name of any one architect or designer. Neither of these two words even appears in the Times article, and in the Post, we only read that the memorial was “designed by [Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan] Stevenson and his colleagues at EJI in collaboration with the Boston-based MASS Design Group.” When you go to the latter’s official website, twelve people are credited as members of the project design team. This is markedly different from the way in which we tend to talk about monuments, museums, and other architectural works that are meant to invite our attention. In many cases, the architect’s identity is a selling point in itself, as it invariably is with Frank Gehry, whose involvement in a project like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is consciously intended to rejuvenate an entire city. In Montgomery, by contrast, the designer is essentially anonymous, or part of a collaboration, which seems like an aesthetic choice as conscious as the design of the space itself. The individual personality of the architect departs, leaving the names and events to testify on their own behalf. Which is exactly as it should be.
And it’s hard not to compare this to the response to the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981. The otherwise excellent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick alludes to the firestorm that it caused, but it declines to explore how much of the opposition was personal in nature. As James Reston, Jr. writes in the definitive study A Rift in the Earth:
After Maya Lin’s design was chosen and announced, the public reaction was intense. Letters from outraged veterans poured into the Memorial Fund office. One claimed that Lin’s design had “the warmth and charm of an Abyssinian dagger.” “Nihilistic aesthetes” had chosen it…Predictably, the names of incendiary antiwar icons, Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman, were invoked as cheering for a design that made a mockery of the Vietnam dead…As for the winner with Chinese ancestry, [donor H. Ross] Perot began referring to her as “egg roll.”
If anything, the subject matter of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is even more fraught, and the decision to place the designers in the background seems partially intended to focus the conversation on the museum itself, and not on those who made it.
Yet there’s a deeper lesson here about architecture and its creators. At first, you might think that a building with a singular message would need to arise from—or be identified with—an equally strong personality, but if anything, the trend in recent years has gone the other way. As Reinier de Graaf notes in Four Walls and a Roof, one of the more curious developments over the last few decades is the way in which celebrity architects, like Frank Gehry, have given up much of their own autonomy for the sake of unusual forms that no human hand or brain could properly design:
In partially delegating the production of form to the computer, the antibox has seemingly boosted the production of extravagant shapes beyond any apparent limits. What started as a deliberate meditation on the notion of form in the early antibodies has turned into a game of chance. Authorship has become relative: with creation now delegated to algorithms, the antibox’s main delight is the surprise it causes to the designers.
Its opposite number is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which was built with simple materials and techniques that rely for their impact entirely on the insight, empathy, and ingenuity of the designer, who then quietly fades away. The architect can afford to disappear, because the work speaks for those who are unable to speak for themselves. And that might be the most powerful message of all.
Raising the roof
Whenever I return from a walk with my daughter and catch my first glimpse of our house at the corner, I feel happy. It was built over a hundred years ago, and although it isn’t any nicer than the houses to either side, it’s a little bit taller, and the high peak of its roof gives it a distinctive silhouette—as soon as I see it, I know that I’m home. Years ago, when my wife and I were looking for a place to start our family, I knew that I wanted a roof like this. I was partially inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which may be the best book that I’ve ever read on any subject. Alexander writes:
We believe that [the] connection between the geometry of roofs, and their capacity to provide psychological shelter, can be put on empirical grounds: first, there is a kind of evidence which shows that both children and adults naturally incline toward the sheltering roofs, almost as if they had archetypal properties…Despite fifty years of the flat roofs of the “modern movement,” people still find the simple pitched roof the most powerful symbol of shelter.
In fact, my own roof doesn’t quite meet those standards. As Alexander notes: “This sheltering function cannot be created by a pitched roof, or a large roof, which is merely added to the top of an existing structure. The roof itself only shelters if it contains, embraces, covers, surrounds the process of living.” Instead of coming down to the rooms themselves, the roof of my house covers an attic that we never use. And sometimes this means that our living space feels slightly incomplete.
But maybe I should be grateful that I have a roof like this at all. In his essay “The Inevitable Box,” reprinted in his recent collection Four Walls and a Roof, Reinier de Graaf writes of the triumph of the architectural cube, which he calls “the natural outcome of all rational parameters combined”:
When did the pitched roof stop being a necessity? The dirty secret of modern architecture is that it never did. We stopped using it without any superior solution having presented itself. The omission of the pitched roof is an intentional technological regression, a deliberate forgoing of the best solution in favor of an aesthetic ideal, eschewing function for form—the symbol of a desire for progress instead of progress itself. We choose to endure the inconvenience. After all, architecture and the box have had an inconvenient relation for centuries. The pitched roof helped them avoid seeing eye to eye. It was what stood between architecture and the naked truth, what prevented the box from being a box. In our drift toward the box, the pitched roof was a necessary casualty—no progress without cruelty! With bigger things at stake, the pitched roof had to go.
Yet the psychological power of the pitched roof still persists. Alexander quotes the French psychiatrist Menie Gregoire, who wrote in the early seventies: “At Nancy the children from the apartments were asked to draw a house. These children had been born in these apartment slabs which stand up like a house of cards upon an isolated hill. Without exception they each drew a small cottage with two windows and smoke curling up from a chimney on the roof.”
Alexander concedes that this preference might be “culturally induced,” but he also makes a strong case for why the pitched roof is an inherently superior form. When properly conceived—so that the interior ceilings come right up to the roof itself—it seems to surround and shelter the living space, rather than sitting on top like a cap; it becomes a distinctive element that defines the house from a distance; and it even forms a connection with people on the ground, if the eaves come low enough around the entrance to be touched. There are also practical advantages. In On Directing Film, David Mamet contrasts the “unlivable” designs of countercultural architecture with the patterns of traditional design, which he uses to make a point about storytelling:
If you want to tell a story, it might be a good idea to understand a little bit about the nature of human perception. Just as, if you want to know how to build a roof, it might be a good idea to understand a little bit about the effects of gravity and the effects of precipitation. If you go up into Vermont and build a roof with a peak, the snow will fall off. You build a flat roof, the roof will fall down from the weight of the snow—which is what happened to a lot of the countercultural architecture of the 1960s. “There may be a reason people have wanted to hear stories for ten million years,” the performance artist says, “but I really don’t care, because I have something to say.”
But the opposite of a box isn’t necessarily a house with a pitched roof. It can also be what de Graaf calls “the antibox,” in which straight lines of any kind have been omitted. He argues that such buildings, exemplified by the work of Frank Gehry, have turned architecture “into a game of chance,” relying on computer models to determine what is possible: “Authorship has become relative: with creation now delegated to algorithms, the antibox’s main delight is the surprise it causes to the designers.” And he concludes:
The antibox celebrates the death of the ninety-degree angle—in fact, of every angle. Only curves remain. Floor, walls, and roof smoothly morph into a single continuous surface that only the most complex geometrical equations can capture. In its attempts to achieve a perfect ergonomic architecture—enveloping the body and its movement like a glove—the antibox falls into an age-old trap, only with more sophistication and virtuosity. The antibox is nothing more than form follows function 2.0, that is, a perfectly executed mistake.
I think that Gehry is a genius, even if some of his buildings do look like a big pile of trash, and that what he does is necessary and important. But it’s also revealing that the triumph of the box generated a reaction that didn’t consist of a return to the sensible pitched roof, but of the antibox that disregards all angles. Neither seems to have been conceived with an eye to those who will actually live or work there, any more than most performance art is concerned with the audience’s need for storytelling. Stories take on certain forms for a reason, and so should houses, embodied by the pitched roof—which is the point where two extremes meet. For all its shortcomings, when I look at my own house, I don’t just see a building. I see the story of my life.
Quote of the Day
My sketches…are very free and expressive, yet pretty well-informed in terms of scale. I’m sketching with information…It’s not just arbitrary. It comes out of a brain informed about the program, the scale, the size. It’s hard to say all these important things are in it, but they are. Something’s informing this hand to move like that. It doesn’t just happen. There’s a relevance to the images, and I start building on that.
Quote of the Day
I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.
Alec Nevala-Lee 