Awkward Spaces

Awkward Spaces

Frederick Luis Aldama: We have some famous examples of architects who have created rather repulsive built spaces. I think of Le Corbusier, le factor Cheval, the celebrity Viennese modernist architect Adolf Loos as well as more recent architects such as the Kunsthaus Graz art museum in Austria, Frank Gehry’s EMP rock museum building in Seattle, and The Bullring Shopping Center in Birmingham (below). . .

Herbert Lindenberger: When a serious architect such as Gehry gives us what we perceive to be an ugly building, it’s often a product of his or her iconoclasm; to be daring enough to design the Bilbao Guggenheim means you are also taking chances that something will turn out ugly. Still, we have to remember that many buildings that first strike us as ugly or outrageous eventually come to seem beautiful, especially, as in the case of Adolf Loos’s 1910 building on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, which caused many subsequent architects to move in his modernist direction and get us accustomed to the simple style that he had introduced. But this is no different from what goes on in other arts: the pioneers of modern painting, literature, and music all went through the process of being labeled ugly before their came to seem beautiful (or at least powerful, since the term beauty rarely seems applicable even to the best modernist art).

FLA: Might ugly buildings also be classed? I think of Löos [there’s no umlaut on Loos] and the designing of the first huge tenements; gigantic rabbit cages that stood in sharp contrast to the 19^th century houses in working class neighborhoods in places like Vienna for workers. . .

HL:

FLA: And there’s Loos’s house that he designed for Dadaist Tristian Tzara. . .

HL: Judging from pictures alone, it’s a beautiful building, more easily accessible at first sight than many of his other buildings. Perhaps it’s because it lacks the starkness of his vaunted minimalism.

FLA: Like others of his day, Loos repeated the mantra: be modern. Modernist architecture creates a sense of discomfort in its blankness; its unreadability. . .

HL: For its first viewers, certainly. But then people gradually learned how to look at it. I remember not knowing how to deal with Loos when I went to Vienna on a Fulbright in 1952. During my first few days I saw the famous, and once scandalous, building, called the Adolf Loos House, on the Michaelerplatz, that Emperor Franz Josef ridiculed for its lack of eyebrows (since there was nothing above the windows). Since I’d had no experience with modernist architecture at that point, its deliberate simplicity made it look dull insipid to me—especially since it was surrounded by the heavily ornamented, massive structure across the street and, for that matter, all over the area. At the time the building went up Loos wrote a celebrated essay that associated ornament with crime—not, of course, crime on the streets but the crime of ornamenting a building!

My next—and only subsequent visit—to Vienna was some 45 years later, by which time I’d become an aficionado of modernist architecture. Now the surrounding buildings bored me, and the Loos House looked defiantly right to me. The irony of all this is that by 1952 I was thoroughly familiar with modernist poetry and was working in Vienna on my doctoral dissertation on the poet Georg Trakl, whose radical style I was explicating and defending and who, it turned out, was not only a friend of Loos but actually dedicated the title poem of his second volume (Sebastian im Traum) to him. I had been trained to be so specialized that it didn’t occur to me there might be a similarity between what Trakl was doing so radically with poetic style and Loos, with architectural style.

FLA: Interestingly, Loos’s life was wrapped in and around (as his self-declared architect in Paris—a house that, while he designed and presented her with blueprints, was never built) that of Josephine Baker—the African American who also sought to be modern (she had “Sois modern” above the entrance to her Paris nightclub) in her performing of primitivist performances of the racially exotic and hypersexual sought to create unease among her white audience goers like Löos who was caught in her spell. . .

HL: He was also supposedly involved in a pedophile scandal. But I’m not going to call that relevant to his role as an architect. Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, to speak of only two major modernist architects, had their own sexual scandals, and one of Wright’s was with a client’s wife, whom he subsequently married. And, unlike Loos, to be sure, Wright and Kahn sought out mature women who supposedly knew what they were doing. Since we are concerned here with discomfort, let me bring up a point about architecture that’s particularly relevant to Wright’s work. I refer to his refusal to make many of his houses really comfortable places for their occupants to live in. I know that this statement flies in the face of Wright’s influential notion that architectural form is dependent on the functions that buildings are intended for. But Wright had little respect for the needs of his clients—rather, he designed so that clients could accommodate themselves to his particular vision, comfort or not. I suspect that Wright himself—at least to judge from his and his wife’s bedrooms at Taliesin West, in which one wall was missing so they could sleep in the desert air—didn’t much care about his personal comfort. A good friend who lived in one of his most respected houses for several years has complained of many details that made for difficult everyday living. Worst of all were his kitchens, which were usually impractical and much too small (to be sure, during the period in which he was practicing his clients ordinarily had maids—though not necessarily in his inexpensive Usonian houses). The gorgeous chairs and benches he designed were hell to sit on.

And he was notorious for his casualness about practical matters in designing a building: there’s the well-known story that when a client complained of rain dripping onto his desk, Wright replied, “Move your desk.” His great house on the Stanford campus, the Hanna house, also known as the honeycomb house because of its hexagonals everywhere, including the furniture, almost collapsed during the 1989 earthquake because it was built of unreinforced brick, with its beautiful fire-place forced to offer support for the living and dining rooms and the kitchen at once;

moreover, because of a slope on the hill upon which he was having the house erected, he put part of the house on landfill, a dangerous thing to do in earthquake country. I used to pass the house on my daily runs while I lived on Stanford campus, and while it was being repaired after the earthquake I sometimes talked to the workers, who complained of the shoddy construction around the foundation. I say all this in full awareness that seeing Wright’s work over the years has provided me with some of the greatest artistic experiences of my life. I’ve sought out Wright buildings all over the country, seen all the Oak Park houses (most of these, to be sure, from the outside) and exulted over Falling Water, the Guggenheim, and Taliesin West. He was very great, but I would not subject my family to the discomfort of living in one of his buildings.

HL:

FLA: Le Corbusier’s first project for Rio de Janeiro ( presented at a conference in Buenos Aires in 1929) was of a ‘building-viaduct’ that would be a raised highway that would stretch across the city and also include a residential buildings underneath the road surface . . . [you should pursue Le Corbusier since I’ve not seen his work, only imitations of it

HL:

FLA: Would we place Gaudi in the category of architecture that discomforts?

HL: Yes, and it bothers me to have to admit this since each time I’ve visited Barcelona I’ve wanted to like his work but still found myself irritated by it. It was deemed eccentric in its time and somehow it never became absorbed within the history of modernism to the point that it ceased to seem eccentric.

I’ve walked all over the roof of the Sagrada Familia church trying to accommodate his style to my normally open sensibility. But those knobs with eye-like slits in them never succeeded in establishing any new norm for me, which is what a revolutionary style ultimately succeeds in doing. Were these knobs attempting to scare their viewers? But asking a question like this is to assume a philistine stance, and that’s not a stance I care to take. And then there are the towers, which rise before you like a garden gone wild (another philistine remark similar to the Austrian Kaiser making fun of the eyebrows missing over Loos’s windows. Or to turn to another Gaudí building, the Casa Batiló, are those balconies teasing you to guess what protrusions they represent (again, I’ve retreated into unthinking philistinism)? As I look back at my reactions, what I find most disquieting is not the buildings themselves but the fact that I’m falling back on the clichéd thinking (or non-thinking!) that I associate with the detractors of modernism, or of art in general.

FLA: [transition to the ugliness that I’m taking up]

HL: Yes, most of the architecture we see every day (unless we happen to live in Venice, Florence, or some untouched village, say, in the south of France or Vermont) is either ugly or insipid. We get so used to this we don’t realize that what we see is actually an insult to the eye. Bad architecture, moreover, affects us differently from other artistic media, for we’re forced to live with it, see it along the street as we go out our door (the house we live in may also be bad), pass awful buildings on our way to work, do our work in a claustrophobic, ill-designed space. With other forms of art, you can take it or leave it. If you react badly to a film you’re watching, you can walk out or stop the DVD player. With a confrontational picture such as Munch’s The Scream you can move to another picture if you choose to.

If a Bukowski poem upsets or bores you, you close the book. And you can usually avoid discomforting music unless the car next to you at a stoplight is blasting something maddening. But you’re stuck with the architecture around you.

FLA:

HL: For nearly half my life I lived on the Stanford University campus, so I’ve had ample opportunity to admire the best buildings and suffer distress at the failures. The initial building project from the 1880s, the so-called Quad, is a masterly example of late-nineteenth-century Romanesque, and having my office in this complex for much of this period was sheer joy.

But the subsequent buildings turned out to be a mixed bag. The custom has been that, whatever the architectural style, the sandstone walls and red-tiled roofs would create some sort of unity. But there has been no unity of quality. Most of the buildings constructed over the years have been dull, though a few have been downright hideous. One unfortunate construction of the 1960s, the former undergraduate library that the students nicknamed UGLY, luckily is about to be torn down—not, I suspect, for the aesthetic reasons that would justify this—but rather because it does not function well for the university’s needs now that it is no longer a library.

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Some of the worst architectural sins have been committed during the past decade or two, and this is because donors have made their own demands, and the university officials in charge were too lily-livered to refuse a gift-horse. Among the most egregious of these sins is a dormitory for law students that I have to pass, alas, when I go to the campus. The cutesy little dormer windows over those massive piles are a joke—unintended, of course. The main donor, Charles Munger, a partner of Warren Buffett, insisted on the site since he wanted the students to be within easy walking distance of the law school. There were protests from faculty members living nearby, for the site was too small to accommodate the amount of space needed for 600 students. The result was these big piles of buildings crowded against one another is the most ungainly way. And this monstrosity is only a few blocks from Wright’s Honeycomb House: looking at the two is like Hamlet comparing the portraits of his father and his stepfather as “Hyperion to a satyr.”

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Wright house

But money, as we know, speaks louder than beauty, and the donor’s daughter, moreover, is on the university’s board of trustees. Which doesn’t of course mean that money is always at odds with beauty. Stanford has been getting some genuinely beautiful buildings to house the visual arts but only because, as you might expect, the sort of person offering many millions for art is likely to have taste, indeed, even to be an art collector. For instance, when the collector Iris Cantor gave a large donation for an addition to the Stanford Museum (now named after her), she made the condition that the architect be the esteemed James Polshek. And right now what, judging from the plans, will likely be an architectural gem, a new building financed by the collectors Dede and Burt McMurtry and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro will house the art department; it is significant that this building is, though sandstone in color, is ignoring the convention of a red-tile roof.

FLA:

HL: One of the problems keeping architecture aesthetically viable is that executing a building, unlike the creation of paintings, poems, and music, is a collective enterprise. In this respect only film-making, among the arts that we are discussing here, is comparable to architecture. Architects, even with the best of aesthetic intentions, are at the mercy of those financing their work, and the latter, if they run short of money, often insure the failure of a potentially lovely structure even as it is being constructed. And then there are the struggles between competing interests that, for example, ruined Daniel Liebeskind’s prize-winning design for the World Trade Center’s highest building. And, further, there are the demands made by donors such as Charles Munger that result in unpleasing sights. Yet who knows what compromises had to be made in building the Parthenon? Whatever happened, the result was very good indeed. Although we live today in a period of celebrity architects—Frank Gehry, Rem Kohlhaas, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Liebeskind, to name only a few—all have had to make compromises to get their visions embodied in stone (or glass or steel).

FLA:

HL: There’s also the phenomenon of getting bored with a style. International Style for me is one of the great architectural movements of all time. Yet the shiny glass towers that sprang up in the later twentieth century throughout the world—London, Singapore, Shanghai, United Emirates, and every US city past a certain size—easily make us forget how exciting the style was in its earlier manifestations. Although many of these examples are perfectly all right, there are others that are badly proportioned—too high or too thin for their own good. Moreover, constructing one’s walls of glass makes for a certain monotony greater than that found in influential earlier architectural styles. People have frankly got tired of it all, as they ordinarily have of all styles in art once they have become ubiquitous. Yet one only needs to walk past the mother of them all, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1959) to note how delicately proportioned it is compared to all but a few of its successors.

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