ArchiTakes

Linked Hybrid, a Beijing complex designed by Steven Holl, was completed last year.  As with his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT, Holl sets windows deeply into a uniform and pervasive grid, camouflaging them as dimples in an enveloping waffle texture that’s applied like shrink-wrap.  He so accentuates the window grid that it takes on the geometric purity of abstract sculpture.  Like many other architects today, Holl hides his windows in plain sight.  Unlike so many others, he does this by embracing the grid rather than fleeing it. (more…)

“The Loneliest Job”, an unposed 1961 photo of JFK in the Oval Office by George Tames (The New York Times) shows how a window can express individual presence and uniqueness of outlook.  At a traditional domestic scale, even an empty window invokes human presence as surely as a Van Gogh painting of an empty chair or pair of shoes.  If the eyes are the window of the soul, windows are the eyes of the building. (more…)

The architect Edward Durrell Stone built this Manhattan townhouse for himself at 13 East 64th Street in 1956.  Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi was under construction at the time of its design.  He had given the embassy a similar screen to protect it from the sun, and here recycled the idea for privacy.  Stone would go on using screens to the point of being ridiculed for it.  Nonetheless, his house introduced a new and subtle effect to New York, and it holds a key position in the history of windowflage.  It looks back to Alexander Jackson Davis’s 1835 American Institute project, with its upper floor windows camouflaged into a unified element, and forward to our own time’s layering of building-scaled veils over windows.

Alternatives to the played out tinted-glass-box approach to windowflage have been explored with increasing frequency and variety since the 1990s.  One design stream has superimposed façade-like screens over windows that are visible or expressed from below.  The screens range from the uniform and static, like Edward Durrell Stone’s mid-century forerunners, to screens with window-like voids or openable sections of their own.   (more…)

The Coney Island Elephantine Colossus is an object lesson in the need for windowflage, the camouflaging of windows in the service of a building’s overall sculptural effect.  The work of Philadelphia architect William Free, it was built in 1883-85 as a hotel and later became a brothel.  In 1896, it departed this world in true Coney Island style by burning down.  Resolution of the conflict it illustrates, between form and fenestration, is one of the driving forces behind much recent architectural innovation on view in New York.

In his 1930 book, Precisions, Le Corbusier presented a series of sketches illustrating ”the history of architecture by the history of windows throughout the ages,” culminating with his own horizontal ribbon window.  Much of the history of architecture since can be traced in the history of window camouflage.  (more…)

Thom Mayne’s new academic building for Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, is the Pritzker Prize winning architect’s first building in New York.  Sensual, jarring and willfully strange, it’s unlike anything else in the city.  New Yorkers won’t find a meaningful introduction to Mayne or his building anywhere in the popular press.

Fifteen years ago, a Progressive Architecture editorial by Thomas Fisher titled “A House Divided” lamented the state of writing about architecture.  Fisher saw a choice between “unquestioning description” by architectural journalists and “obscure, jargon-filled analysis” by academic critics.  “What is rare, on either side,” Fisher wrote, “are critics who can address the underlying ideas and larger meanings of architecture and who can convey them clearly and concisely to the public and the profession.”  What’s been written so far about Thom Mayne’s new academic building for Cooper Union shows how true this remains.  (more…)

When it was completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House was a window into the future.  Still inspiring new interpretations, it has the open-endedness of great art. 

The economy with which the Farnsworth House elicits its richness of response is one proof of “less is more.”  With minimalism and technology the tines of its tuning fork, the house’s reverberations are as strong today as ever.  While it has inspired countless glass houses, a handful may provide a rough outline of its still widening influence.   (more…)

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House design was publicly presented in a 1947 Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work curated by Philip Johnson.  Mies had first conceived of a glass house in 1945.  Johnson later said, “I pointed out to him that it was impossible because you had to have rooms, and that meant solid walls up against the glass, which ruined the whole point;  Mies said, ‘I think it can be done’.”  The Farnsworth House was completed in 1951, Johnson’s own Glass House in 1949. 

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”  It might as accurately be said that all modern houses come from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.  The first of its many offspring was actually built before it.  Philip Johnson, who advanced Mies’s American career by mounting a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work in 1947 and by steering the Seagram Building commission his way, was so inspired by Mies’s concept for a glass house that he built one for himself, beating Mies to the punch.   (more…)

In his 1932 essay, The Frozen Fountain, Claude Bragdon wrote, “A building, however lofty, must end somehow, and the designer’s ability is here put to the severest test, and will be measured by the success with which this termination is affected – by the beauty with which his building dies on the white counterpane of the sky”.  The durability, if not the morbid imagery, of this view came through last month when City Planning Chair, Amanda Burden, said of Jean Nouvel’s proposed MoMA Tower, “How this building meets the sky is not only in the tradition of great New York City architecture, but it’s absolutely essential that it culminate in a very sophisticated and distinguished apex.”

Bryant Park may be the world’s best place to conduct a quick survey of skyscrapers and their tops, from Bragdon’s day to Burden’s, as demonstrated by an hour’s photos.

“What makes a great New York Skyscraper?  The greatest of them tug at our heartstrings.”  So wrote Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the new Times tower, which he found “unlikely to inspire that kind of affection.”  William Van Alen’s 1930  Chrysler Building sets the bar for heartstrings.  As Bragdon wrote in The Frozen Fountain, ”The needle-pointed fleche of the Chrysler Tower catches the sunlight like a fountain’s highest expiring jet.”  Bragdon’s analogy exactly captures the imagery and emotional appeal of jazz age skysrapers:  ”upward gushing fountains, most powerful and therefore highest at the center,” with surrounding “cascades descending in successive stages from the summits to which they have been upthrust.”  (more…)

Smarticulation is facade articulation intended to make a building look purposeful and important.  It is primarily found in large buildings with glass curtainwalls and achieved by crisply projecting or recessing an area of the facade by two or three feet.  This shallow modeling has no impact on the use of the building, so it can be applied as an afterthought to a fully worked out design, and anywhere on the face of the building without impact on function.  Smarticulation is therefore often applied retroactively by designers who worry that their projects look dull. 

The Orion, Cetra/Ruddy Architects’ condominium tower at 350 West 42nd Street, projects smarticulation to liven up and slim down its north facade.   

Smarticulation may or may not actually occur where there’s a special function behind the articulated surface, but it neither serves nor expresses any underlying special use.  This is for the best, given that the details of a large building’s inner workings are almost certain to change during the many years that pass between its design and completion of construction.  (more…)