A Visit to Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton
Newtonian physics still works well enough for us, day to day. Of course the universe is expanding, of course it is made of stuff we only somewhat understand, but we were content to see it fixed on the ceiling and we spent the rest of the day enveloping ourselves in ourselves and each other, reaching out into a space that seemed endless.
Appeared at Numéro Cinq
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Housing for the Rest of Us, A Non-Manifesto
It is Minoru Yamasaki’s misfortune that the two buildings he is best known for, the World Trade Center and the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, are best known for their collapse. The World Trade Center, or its site, has attained the status of a shrine, so reflection upon its design and influence will have to be postponed for another time. Postmodern apologist Charles Jencks hailed the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe as the death—prematurely—of Modernism, and critical smoke from that debate still lingers. In both cases, however, the major factors that led to their destruction came from influences outside the buildings, not within, from design flaws in the larger world. And many of the same forces that shaped Pruitt-Igoe, social and economic, direct the design of homes for most of us today and determine where we live and how well.
Appeared in Numéro Cinq, October 2016
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Winter, 2017
It should be possible to build a pagoda of crispbread, to think of nothing, to hear no thunder, no rain, no splashing from the gutter, no gurgling around the house. Perhaps no pagoda will emerge, but the night will pass.
Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
The nation is a limp, swollen joint, strained and ripped out of alignment, screaming in conflict and retreating in avoidance. If I want to come to terms with it I will have to feel its pains and try to understand them, or look for ways past and around, and build from them a self in the world that can take care of itself and is worth having and find a structure to hold it. The nation would do well to follow suit.
Appeared in 3:AM, September 2019
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On the Grid
It is a world in which it is more difficult to know oneself or make oneself heard.
We are being stretched out and diluted on the grid.
Transcendence: Not up and away, but out of and back into oneself, and out again, and back to the past, and through it, and back into the present and back out—
The writing on the wall.
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Completing the Mies van der Rohe Brick Country House, An Odyssey
A brick is an obdurate object of ambiguity that hovers between idea and matter, between life and death. Its texture can be smoothed to glide our touch or left rough and abrade. It can be molded into even shapes for consistent construction or made uneven, presenting individual challenges each time one is laid in a course. The hues can be made consistent, offering an even appearance, or they can vary from one brick to another, presenting more individual challenges. But while it can come close to an ideal oblong shape, it never attains perfection, and it can as much be said that it approaches perfection as it resists it. A brick has the right heft for throwing through a window in revolt. It can also be stacked to encase one solidly. Its color takes on that of blood and the earth from which it is made, or both inseparably combined. Whether it preserves blood or shows it spilled, whether it reveals decay or stalls it—these questions cannot be answered. In spite of its ambiguity, however, we are always aware, in mind and in hand, of its touch, of its mass and weight, of its presence.
Appeared in Numéro Cinq, May 2016
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Mies van der Rohe: Meditations on a Plan
As a metaphor the plan is complete, coherent, and compelling. Complete because it is contained by the frame and nothing else can be added or removed. Coherent because all the parts, self-referring, fit together in a pattern. That the pattern is not symmetrical and can’t be measured in predictable ways is beside the point, rather is its organizing principle. Compelling because, with its complex, interlocking, opening parts, its spatial tensions, it is energetic. And it moves us. If we imagine wind, we can hear it resonate within the open chambers in a complex chord. If we picture the plan as a figure of life, we can imagine it drawing breath throughout the interior spaces, giving them life. The entry, upper left, has to be left open to provide air. If it is a figure of the creative process, we realize creativity is a dynamic presence, like wind, like breath, like ourselves, that it has possibilities, possibly unlimited, which we can explore.
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Barcelona Pavilion, Meditations
The pavilion is so well known we do not know it. Familiarity, repeated visits, repeated mental reconstruction of its assembly, reduces it to the expected shapes and patterns, etching them in memory where they become fixed, inert. Or we note its influence, its significance in the movement of modern architecture, which relegates it to a moment past and assumes some notion of esthetic progress. Or it has been promoted to Greatness, which elevates it to a lofty plane, remote, abstract, unapproachable, meaningless, really, which only allows veneration from below, at a distance—or incites us to attack and destroy it, or, nowadays, simply bores us. Lost in all of this is how compelling the pavilion was then, almost a century ago, how fresh it is now, how assured it is of what it is, how much it doesn’t impose but accommodates and puts us on its level, how much it encourages us to look back, and around, and within, and beyond.
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Mies van der Rohe: Monument to the November Revolution/ November 2024
Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to the November Revolution, 1926, a memorial to German political martyrs, is a stark assemblage of brick masses, almost brutal in execution but enigmatic in its composition. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, a stack of rough brick masses, yet it leads to questions you aren’t sure how to phrase, doubts about any answers. Still, it maintains balance and composure in spite of the ambiguity, or, better, because of its ability to recognize, to negotiate it.
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Alvar Aalto: Säynätsalo Town Hall/Models of the city, of the self, of being in the world
There is no fixed way to define the tower, and its relationship with the type is tenuous. It does not come to a single point, actually, metaphorically, as in a spire, nor does it support a separate concluding structure or is capped by crenelation or other formal cornice, doesn’t hold a cross or bell or statues to be seen from below or a post for observation out on the city, rather is open to the sky, reaching without conclusion in complex, varying shapes that on three sides invert the expected pinnacle or squaring off. The rising mass is not ancillary to anything: it is the structure. We sense an expressive shape, but are hard put to say what it might represent, other than itself. The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that it is a mass that shifts and rises, and that is what it most represents, both the fact and the idea of rising, of shifting, of approaching some degree of significance without settling.
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Battersea Power Station/The Wretched Boar
The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowelled bosoms—this foul swine
Is now even in the center of this isle
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Louis Kahn: First Unitarian Church/Ineffable Space
Still, there is rhythm, there is music. Still, we have the sense of pattern and stability. Variations need a base from which to diverge. But we can’t define the patterns, or the relationship between base and patterns. Nonetheless, what guided me in construction and revision of the model, what still moves me as I continue to contemplate it on my table, is how much it engages, how well it sits. Composition is reserved, yet viscerally, subliminally energetic, ineffably poised and balanced.
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Ilya Golosov: Zuev Workers’ Club/Moscow
Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy, has been disassembled to build Ilya Golosov’s Zuev Workers’ Club, Moscow. I can’t decide how much contradiction, even irony, there is in that. Both were built about the same time, early 1930s, late 1920s, a period of intense modernist innovation and debate in which both architects were involved. Both buildings followed and were responses to massive turmoil and social change. Both housed functions meant to serve a broad population, these uses based on political ideology, those ideas hotly debated as well. Most, both are original, striking, and memorable designs, what first drew me to them. My main interest in both, however, is what we might learn from them and adopt for our current world. The larger our cities grow, the more we spread out, the more we become isolated and culturally diffuse. How can we maintain our common identity and keep our neighborhoods vital? Part of the answer lies in our institutions and the architecture that houses them.
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Giuseppe Terragni: Casa del—
If we had seen this government center with that picture some ninety years ago, we would have, by association, formed one interpretation of it, a more favorable one for some of us, a lesser one for others. We might have said that architecturally it expresses how the monolithic mass of the state has been broken down into individual parts, these on a human scale, the independent parts brought together into coherent interdependence where everyone belongs in a structure that is open, light, and transparent. Walls have come down.
But Lenin was not the picture we got on the wall.
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Metropolitan Storage Warehouse: Fire Proof
Our built environment has been greatly leveled and replaced with new construction that does not look back. We recreate ourselves, our beliefs, our appearances without anchor. The warehouse serves as a reminder that we do have a past and maintains continuity in a timeline we too easily forget. But time is a course with breaks and disruptions, and we are reminded of that as well. The warehouse is one kind of memory, and it stands as a protection of specific memories, of the fact of memory, in the abstract, of the process of memory itself.
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Muzharul Islam/Bangladesh National Library (Borges/Babel)
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably.
Borges/The Library of Babel
The comparison is extreme, but once Borges’s story came to mind, while building this model, I could not let it go.
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