The new consumption – take 2

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

From the March Atlantic, an article called "The next slum?" (Might've caught this sooner if I'd been paying attention.)

Author Christopher Leinberger goes on:

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.

There's certainly truth in that. (Though I wonder what he means by "little upkeep" on those older houses — especially in an era of high inflation in energy costs.) If you work on houses of varying ages, as I've been doing for some years, you know well enough about the relative solidness of a pre-WW2 house.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on the whole, American residential construction has always gone more for short-term value than long. And on this question of general decline in quality, at least, (like a good writer) he paints conditions a bit more dramatically than they warrant. His last line in that paragraph comes near absurdity: "Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall — their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up." Actually, American-style wood framing is a good construction system, and methods of today achieve increasingly impressive structural performance in those "thin wooden frames" — when the methods are followed, that is. And drywall is never relied on for structural value, because it essentially has none.

Supersized houses & the new consumption

From a Hartford Courant article (via 'Residential Tuesday') on the apparently accelerating 'not so big house' market shift — some cautions and a trend projection for the longer-term:

But there is also plenty of evidence that Americans' appetite for large homes continues. The average size of new homes built in recent years is still edging upward, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president for research at the National Association of Home Builders. He expects the average to level off soon around its current figure of about 2,500 square feet.

"They are not choosing smaller homes," he said. "People are not choosing mansions because of the capital cost, the running costs, but they're still choosing bigger homes."

Home buyers increasingly want higher ceilings, open floor plans, more fireplaces and windows — all features that require more energy to heat and cool the house, Ahluwalia said. And, he said, many Americans are still willing to live far from work and shopping.

Arthur C. Nelson, who has studied housing trends for 20 years, expects that to change in coming decades, with sweeping repercussions for American society.

Nelson projects a surplus of between 3 million and 22 million homes on large lots — built on one-sixth of an acre or more — by 2025. This will be driven by a swelling tide of empty-nesters, young professionals and young families who choose to live in cities or in the first ring of suburbs outside them, Nelson says.

He foresees these big homes in the exurbs eroding in value, and then becoming homes to a much different clientele than today.

"I think what's going to happen, and I'm seeing it anecdotally already as I talk with people, is that these large homes are now being occupied by multiple families, extended generations of immigrants, low-income households, typically family-related," Nelson said. "The trend is so new, but my guess is we'll begin to see this kind of outcome coming out statistically in the 2010 census."

The Big Chart

(No, not that Big Chart.)

You probably think you know a thing or two about things, as things go — I know I did — but I can pretty much guarantee you're going to find it's a whole different thing to know about things the way you know about them before you've understood the Big Chart® and after. Go to el dorado inc. and watch their presentation. It takes about twenty minutes; and as these will be twenty minutes of perfect illumination, you'll only wish it were longer.

I think I'm moving to Kansas City.

Villa Nurbs

Apropos of the mention of my coursework intro to computer-based 3D modeling, check out this slick NY Times web special about architect Enric Ruiz-Geli and his Villa Nurbs*, a house designed with use of related computer-based modeling. It was commissioned for property near Barcelona and is under construction now.

While I don't think the notion of house as 'machine for living' is any more convincing today than when Le Corbusier & those like him first promoted it early in the last century, and while I think architects like Ruiz-Geli and publicist-critics like the NY Times's Ouroussoff misunderstand something fundamental about well-living when they can talk about a house functioning as 'isolation chamber' and 'luxury car' as though this were a good, or at least an indifferent, thing, it can't be said that the latter-day expressionist-futurist formal exploration and the technological tricks on display in this luxury villa aren't impressive & intriguing for their own sake.

Arrival & abandon – or the town as erotic figure

From Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling, opening to chap. 2:

To settle in the landscape means to delimit an area, a place. We stop our wandering and say: Here! Then we create an "inside" within the encompassing "outside." The settlement is therefore a point of arrival. Still we may somewhere have the fine experience of approaching a settlement which waits for us like a "thing." First we may grasp the main outline and perhaps a dominant element, such as a steeple. Getting closer, the shape becomes more articulate, and begins to suggest something about what is hidden inside. Depending on where we come from, the experience varies. If we come through the forest it is different from coming across the fields or over the sea; but always we have the sense of having reached a goal. Like a magnet it attracts us, and arouses our expectations.
    How, then, does a settlement become a goal? The very experience of arrival implies a relationship to what is left behind. A goal does not exist in a vacuum; it is only a goal in relation to its environment. . . .
    To serve as a goal, a settlement has to possess figural quality in relation to the surrounding landscape.

From Madame Bovary:

Gradually the four benches filled up, the coach rattled along, row upon row of apple trees flashed by; and the road, lined on each side by a ditch of yellow water, stretched on and on, narrowing toward the horizon.
    Emma knew every inch of it: she knew that after a certain meadow came a road sign, then an elm, a barn, or a road-mender's cabin; sometimes she even shut her eyes, trying to give herself a surprise. But she always knew just how much further there was to go.
    Finally the brick houses crowded closer together, the road rang under the wheels, and now the Hirondelle moved slowly between gardens: through iron fences were glimpses of statues, artificial mounds crowned by arbors, clipped yews, a swing. Then, all at once, the city came into view.
    Sloping downward like an amphitheatre, drowned in mist, it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges. Then open fields swept upward again in a monotonous curve, merging at the top with the uncertain line of the pale sky. Thus seen from above, the whole landscape had the static quality of a painting: ships at anchor were crowded into one corner, the river traced its curves along the foot of the green hills, and on the water the oblong shaped islands looked like great black fish stopped in their course. From the factory chimneys poured endless trails of brown smoke, their tips continually dissolving in the wind. The roar of foundries mingled with the clear peal of chimes that came from the churches looming in the fog. The leafless trees along the boulevards were like purple thickets in amongst the houses; and the roofs, all of them shiny with rain, gleamed with particular brilliance in the upper reaches of the town. Now and again a gust of wind blew the clouds toward the hill of Sainte-Catherine, like aerial waves breaking soundlessly agains a cliff.
    A kind of intoxication wafted up to her from those closely packed lives, and her heart swelled as though the 120,000 souls palpitating below had sent up to her as a collective offering the breath of all the passions she supposed them to be feeling. In the face of the vastness her love grew larger, and was filled with a turmoil that echoed the vague ascending hum. All this love she, in turn, poured out — onto the squares, onto the tree-lined avenues, onto the streets; and to her the old Norman city was like some fabulous capital, a Babylon into which she was making her entry. She leaned far out the window and filled her lungs with air; the three horses galloped on, there was a grinding of stones in the mud beneath the wheels; the coach swayed; Hivert shouted warningly ahead to the wagons he was about to overtake, and businessmen leaving their suburban villas in Bois-Guillaume descended the hill at a respectable pace in their little family carriages.
    There was a stop at the city gate: Emma took off her overshoes, changed her gloves, arranged her shawl, and twenty paces further on she left the Hirondelle.
    The city was coming to life. Clerks in caps were polishing shop windows, and women with baskets on their hips stood on street corners uttering loud, regular cries. She walked on, her eyes lowered, keeping close to the house walls and smiling happily under her lowered black veil.
    For fear of being seen, she usually didn't take the shortest way. She would plunge into a maze of dark alleys, and emerge, hot and perspiring, close to the fountain at the lower end of the Rue Nationale. This is the part of town near the theatre, full of bars and prostitutes. Often a van rumbled by, laden with shaky stage-sets. Aproned waiters were sanding the pavement between the tubs of green bushes. There was a smell of absinthe, cigars and oysters.
    Then she turned a corner. She recognized him from afar by the way his curly hair hung down below his hat.
    He walked ahead on the sidewalk. She followed him to the hotel; he went upstairs, opened the door of the room, went in — What an embrace!

Urbanisms

A feature in this month's Architectural Record puts alongside one another six short interviews with architecture critics writing from six cities across the U.S. — Following, excerpts from four of them.

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe:

Campbell views the hot topic of sustainability as perhaps finally putting an end to the debates about arcane design theory, and becoming a new version of what had been considered Regionalism. "Sustainable design is a great opportunity for architects to sell themselves as environmental experts," he says. While sprawl is not as much a concern in Boston — a well-developed historic city — as it is in faster-growing cities, Campbell says the biggest environmental concern for the city remains the prospect of rising water levels, which he sees few architects addressing. "I can’t believe people are still developing big buildings on the harbor near sea level," he muses. He also laments the view that high-rise buildings are the only answer to increasing urban density in the name of sustainability. "The density of Paris is just as high, if not higher, than cities that have tall buildings," Campbell says. "In Midtown Manhattan, where every block is a single building with a single door, it becomes oppressive."

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune:

Kamin surveys the landscape of contemporary American architecture and sees a lot of Modernist projects he considers "one-offs," buildings that visually register within a city but don’t always contribute to street life. Exceptions include David Chipperfield’s Des Moines Public Library, which Kamin sees as part of an overall strategy of enlivening that city’s downtown. "The city is a project that takes generations to realize," he says. "To think that architects alone have the silver bullet that will change a downtown’s fate is ridiculous." But Kamin says more architects need to stop getting caught up in style wars and the obsession with sustainable "gadgets" — to borrow the Chicago architect and urbanist Douglas Farr’s terminology — that have the tendency to marginalize the profession. "Sustainability and architecture are ultimately about how we are going to live," he says. "You can’t ignore the small picture, so, yes, buildings should be green, but the real architects are the planners, politicians, and people who write codes."

David Dillon, Dallas Morning News:

Echoing most critics, Dillon says affordable housing remains a challenge for architecture. "If you ever wanted a real laboratory for developing affordable housing and prototypes, New Orleans is it," he says. "But what I’ve seen mostly is just a lot of New Urbanism stuff that doesn’t seem to get to the real problems of accessibility and affordability." Dillon, in his teaching role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studies affordable housing in the U.S. "It’s not a style exercise; it’s a community-building, economic exercise," he says, explaining why high-design architects don’t pursue the arduous process of piecing together funding for such projects. "Dallas is 40,000 units short in terms of affordable housing, and the houses built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations don’t even begin to touch this need."

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times:

"People are starting to lead more local, circumscribed lives, because it takes too long to drive to the other side of town. Much of the appeal of L.A. has been having access to the whole area — Malibu, Santa Monica, downtown, Pasadena," he says. Traffic jams, more planning, and more regulation "may well change the local myth of architectural freedom." For the past 30 years, architects like Gehry and Thom Mayne have drawn inspiration from industrial construction and the commercial strip, redefining what is ugly and what is beautiful. "We’ve been evaluating architects in Los Angeles on the basis of expressiveness and virtuosity. I don’t know if that’s appropriate anymore." With the new generation of L.A. architects working on tighter sites where freestanding expressions are less possible, "we may need a new way of thinking about these designers and whether they’re succeeding. Their work may be less loud, less in-your-face."

An excerpt: Holl, on being receptive to daylight

Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the season's change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial. Unexpected changing intensities and consistencies drive sunlight in the counterpoint of moving shadows. Black against white, blurred against crisp, dissolving against knife-sharp edges, the subtle music of light plays out in space. Porous light and shadow, like the dapple of the sun's rays penetrating dense foliage, is often ordered in elliptical shapes. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the sun is not a point; it is like a sun picture on a sheet of paper.
    Shadow, sunlight, and geometry are interlocked in experiential phenomena. Looking at my own shadow on the ground I notice that the shadow of my head is blurry while shadows of my feet are sharp.
    The shadow of a porous plane, like the shadows of wire mesh, can exhibit curious properties. For example, a rectangular mesh at certain sun angles only shows vertical shadows. In his 1954 book Light and Color in the Open Air, the physicist M. Minnaert writes about nature's phenomena, exclaiming, "It is very difficult to see new things, even when they are before our eyes."
    The distance of the shadow to the plane of projection drastically alters its character. To see this phenomenon, simply hold a perforated plane immediately in front of a piece of blank paper then move it farther away gradually. If the architect engages this natural light phenomenon, these very different shadow patterns might be created by a certain architectural space.

From Steven Holl's introduction to House: Black Swan Theory, in which fifteen of his designs for residences and small semi-residential buildings, 1986 to 2006, are presented as studies in phenomenology of place & space, one-offs, discrete and situation-specified.

Recommended reading for the building lover

Sharon C. Park, an architect three decades in the preservation field and recently appointed to a directorial post in historic architecture at the Smithsonian, reports on her current reading at the end of a good interview (the "Doer Profile" feature) in the AIA online weekly's current issue:

I’m actually reading Hodding Carter’s Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, about the history of the toilet. When I was working on the dig with the University of Southampton, I was excavating Norman ruins in Southampton and was fascinated by the internal plumbing systems that they had in tenth to twelfth century called garderobes, stone-lined shafts in buildings that emptied out into stone sluits that worked with the tidal waters at Southampton. They had these little guillotine reservoirs where the tidal waters came up the stone sluits and was stopped and trapped by a little closure device, and then excrement was flushed out to sea, which I thought was pretty sophisticated. So, I’ve always been interested in early plumbing systems and how they work. Working in Southampton on early drainage systems piqued my interest in how all of that was incorporated into buildings.
    But the last book I read, the one that is my favorite book, is Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. He wrote the book out of an article that he had done for The New York Times Magazine at the millennium. They asked him to write an article on a single tool or apparatus from 1000 to 2000 that had been critical and he realized that it was the screw and the screwdriver. The screwdriver [to a lesser degree], but the screw had been an amazing and very sophisticated tool to bring items together. He took it back to about 1400 and looked at armament, weaponry, and clocks, [etc.]. It has absolutely changed the way I look at museum artifacts.

Mr. Jones, add those titles to this month's order.

Louis Sullivan — artistic limitation in flower

From Michael J. Lewis's 2001 New Criterion article on a century's evolution in views of the work of Louis Sullivan:

To say that Sullivan’s work was often two-dimensional is not to disparage it. After a truncated education, most of his formative years were spent devising frescoes and ornamental borders for other men’s buildings. This cannot have been satisfying to his ambition but to it he brought the full force of his intellect. Artistically engaged but intellectually underused, he inevitably came to invest his ornament with the profoundest personal meaning. In this process, character traits that might otherwise be handicaps — narcissism, self-importance and a certain obsessiveness — were essential, even advantageous. A less self-involved man simply would not have taken the design of foliage so seriously.
 

    When Sullivan at last turned his hand to the composition of tall buildings, he was the right man for the right time. He saw clearly that modern construction had outpaced the expressive potential of the historical styles. Massive arches, piers, and cornices were conceived in terms of masonry and were sculptural by nature; they were inappropriate for a light steel frame, which needed but a thin cladding of ceramic materials to protect its girders from fire and water. In short, the wall was dissolving into a thin planar screen. Such a screen, mounted across the face of a steel cage, is not a promising field for personal expression, but here Sullivan was on home territory. He invested these taut and lofty planes with almost fathomless feeling. He did not see the curtain wall as an ordered heap of bricks, and therefore inert, but as the physical manifestation of a thought, and therefore a living thing, “designed in a high pitch of sustained emotional tension,” as he once put it. The burst of flowers in the spandrels and the gale of tendrils in the cornice were not an afterthought at all, as modernists insisted, but the thought itself.

Lewis's interesting, though for me not entirely convincing, historical sketch & critique of a current of celebrity culture dominating high-profile architecture today, in the December New Criterion, was featured at ALDaily yesterday. Sullivan features prominently, there, not coincidentally, in his account of the modern rise of the "starchitects."

An excerpt: Brand, on layer ecology in buildings

Pulled old favorite How Buildings Learn off the shelf and have been re-reading parts of it here & there this week. Here's a prime bit, from chap. 2, "Shearing Layers:"

Buildings rule us via their time layering at least as much as we rule them, and in a surprising way. This idea comes from Robert V. O'Neill's A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. O'Neill and his co-authors noted that ecosystems could be better understood by observing rates of change of different components. Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees slow, and whole redwood forests even slower. Most interaction is within the same pace level — hummingbirds and flowers pay attention to each other, oblivious to redwoods, who are oblivious to them. Meanwhile the forest is attentive to climate change but not to the hasty fate of individual trees. The insight is this: "The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along." Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.
    The same goes with buildings: the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the rapid dazzling ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depends on the efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure. You could add a seventh "S" — human Souls at the very end of the hierarchy, servants to our Stuff.
    Still, influence does percolate the other direction. The slower processes of a building gradually integrate trends of rapid change within them. The speedy components propose, and the slow dispose. If an office keeps replacing its electronic Stuff often enough, finally management will insist that the Space plan acquire a raised floor to make the constant recabling easier, and that's when the air-conditioning and electrical Services will be revamped to handle the higher load. Ecologist Buzz Holling points out that it is at times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow.

"Architectural ideas"

Precedents in Architecture, 3/e, p. 258
 
The success and longevity of this work suggest there is a need for this information about architecture. As we started to produce the material for this third edition, we were keenly aware of the initial premise for the study — the commonality and significance of design ideas that transcend time and place. As the work progressed, these assumptions have been reinforced. Architectural ideas are the underpinnings of architecture upon which other concerns — social, technical, economical, cultural, legal, and political — are layered.

An easy enough thing to say!

From the preface to the third edition (2005) of popular graphic-analysis text Precedents in Architecture.

An excerpt

I think it is possible therefore, both historically and phenomenologically, to speak of the human encounter with the sacred as having a "structure" of sacred presence and sacred anticipation, of sacred call and human response. Sacred presence is simultaneously experienced as sacred call; and part of the human response to that call is to seek and anticipate the presence of the sacred. Historically, the most obvious human response to the sacred has been to worship it; and human worship typically entails ritual actions in which the presence of the sacred is invoked. But the experience of the sacred as call and response is not limited to religious ritual. Cultural historian Philip Rieff argues that human culture itself is, in its origins if not its essence, the human response to the sacred. To this I would add (anticipating what is to follow) that cities are the foremost physical form of culture; and that some sort of spatial and formal hierarchy — if only as crude as the simple dichotomy between "sacred" and "profane" precincts — is the distinguishing mark of cities in which artifacts are created for and in response to the sacred. Rieff argues that every human culture is marked by the specific behaviors that it encourages and the specific behaviors that it prohibits. Books and vows, prayers and parading, law and architecture, music and the sciences, dancing and piety toward parents, theater and athletic competition: each and all of such marks of culture originate as an address to the sacred — which also issues forth a variety of prohibitions, of "shalt nots," of things that are not to be done.
    Sacred "shalt nots" may include such "rational" prohibitions as idolatries, profanations, murders, thefts, betrayals, incests, rapes, abortions, and adulteries. But it will also include apparently irrational prohibitions, emblematic of that universal attitude that Chesterton once referred to as "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy," an idea he found represented most prominently in fairy tales, and paradigmatically in the story of Cinderella: "You may go to the ball, but you must be home by midnight." Both in fairy tales, and for those with a sense of the sacred, human happiness requires a primary and fundamental obedience. But this obedience does not preclude (and in fact sometimes both requires and inspires) other rebellions. Rather, the obedience circumscribes the rebellion, in much the same way as the non-rational circumscribes the rational. Thus for Chesterton (an English patriot), the Irish rebel justly opposes English tyranny, which is
 
something he [the rebel] understands only too well; but the true citizen of fairyland obeys something he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeit. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
 
    This insistence on a sense of prohibition as a constituent element of sacred sensibility may strike moderns and post-moderns as odd, but only a moment's attention to examples from both literature and everyday speech will confirm it. "If God is dead, everything is permitted," was the conjecture of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov; and in The Brothers Karamazov, "everything" included parricide. But we often express the same idea in a phrase even more mundane: of a social situation in which anything and everything seems possible we do indeed commonly say "there is nothing sacred." A sense of the sacred therefore necessarily seems to include a sense of prohibition as a pre-condition of that fundamental pleasure of agreement that culture affords. It is within the constraints of sacred prohibitions, tight or loose, that every creative freedom in a culture arises, as well as the very possibility of remission and forgiveness for their transgression. The psychoanalytic terms for this personal and cultural dynamic of prohibition and creativity are "repression" and "sublimation;" and Freud well understood what many of his heirs perhaps do not, that there can be no culture without repression. The social effect of culture, Rieff observes, is that individuals learn through a variety of ritual roles and actions to express fixed wants; and the limitation of possibilities is the first pre-requisite of human happiness.

From Philip Bess, "'Making Sacred:' The Phenomenology of Matter and Spirit in Architecture and The City."

Agro-urbanism?

As far as I can tell — not having looked into it in any great depth yet — these two essentially equivalent concepts for urban high-rise dwelling, embodying 'sustainability' to the point of incorporating small-plot agriculture for every residence, have been published about the same time as solutions in two quite unrelated design competitions. The project at left, named Agro-Housing, is a proposal by Knafo-Klimor of Israel for a city in China, winning entry in a contest sponsored by the International Iron and Steel Institute. For further info, see the article here (via ArchitectureWeek's 'Green Wednesday' headline aggregator, last week's edition). At right, Center for Urban Agriculture, proposal for a specific Seattle site by Mithun, this year's winner (in the 'visionary' category) of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council's Living Building Challenge. For further info, see this article from today's 'AIArchitect This Week.' Mithun goes so far, apparently, as to call its project an 'urban farm.' That sounds like a pretty big terminological stretch to me, particularly as no such radical attempt to merge city living with the habits of tending the earth has yet gotten off paper. Still, one wonders if these things will start getting built in some form — and if so, who might want to buy in and make a go of urban-agriculturist lifestyle.

Update: The current ArchitectureWeek feature article covers the IISI sustainable housing competition in greater breadth.

Made in Germany

The 2007 Solar Decathlon (see earlier) has been won by the trim entry from Technische Universität Darmstadt. In my inbox this morning was an AIA news bit reporting Darmstadt's win in the big one, the Architecture competition. Local kids University of Maryland took second in Architecture, and the other Euro entry, from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, won third. Darmstadt and Maryland retained their Architecture leads, in the end, to place first and second overall, with third place going to California's Santa Clara University. All three were among the entries scoring a full 100 points in the Energy Balance competition.

The exhibition continues through tomorrow, the 20th. Unfortunately, though the whole thing's just a few miles away from my brother & sister-in-law's in Fairfax (where I'm staying while I work on the house), I've had a terribly busy week and will not get down to the Mall after all. It looks like there's been no shortage of visitor interest, however. Check out the photos at the event site.

Change comes to Washington

The National Mall in DC again in 2007 turns green in October, with start of the third biannual Solar Decathlon tomorrow. Opening to the public won't be for another week & a half, but teams will be putting their entries together at the Mall site from tomorrow — or rather, from tonight, at midnight (about the time I'm posting here, in fact), as one team website informs readers.

The upcoming event was only very dimly present on my own radar, I acknowledge, until a couple of weeks ago, when I stopped by the architecture school at the University of Maryland to poke around a bit, as I was passing through the area. The fenced enclosure where their entry was awaiting some finish work was open, fairly irresistible, and I walked in & chatted with a team member about the event & the entry's competitive prospects. He seemed pretty up-beat about things.

He might've had reason to be, since in some respects there's no need for guesswork about what sort of competition they're up against: all twenty entries, published as detailed construction documents, are available for view (& download) on the Solar Decathlon site. But at the same time, there's a lot one can't know, surely — even about one's own team's entry — until all are built & performing (or not) under the common test conditions. Competitors include other US universities with notable technical & design programs — like MIT, entering for the first time — along with less prominent US programs and a few schools from outide the US (one Canadian, two European). The two earlier competitions' winner, University of Colorado at Boulder, is in the running again. (There seems to be some feeling that Colorado-Boulder's cheek-by-jowl relation with the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden, CO may give it a degree of unfair advantage. But who knows whether that's reasonable fear or not.) And there appears to be a great deal of sponsor interest & investment, from many angles US & international. On the face of it, the likelihood of an easy prediction about the competition outcome seems small to me.

I've only spent a little time on the Decathlon web site, & on a few of the teams' sites. There's a lot about the whole grand thing, though my interest is strongly piqued, that I won't get to look into even after the event's come & gone. I do hope to get down to the Mall, however, and actually see some of what's on display this go round.

Drive-by: Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox

    

Linthicum, Maryland

click for full snapshot

An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on architectural figure

From The Concept of Dwelling, by Christian Norberg-Schulz:

That the role of the public building was understood in the past, is proved by many old representations of cities, where nothing but the engirdling city wall and the landmarks within are shown. The public buildings thus "constitute and inform" the city; they stand forth as figures which reveal reality. Our discussion of their morphology and topology has shown that certain properties of form and space are necessary to secure this role. It remains to say a few words about the figural quality of the public building in general.
    We have already mentioned some of the most characteristic types, such as the basilica and the rotunda. Both are double functioning forms, in the sense of possessing figural quality both in their exterior and interior aspects. In general, their quality resides in the hierarchical symmetry of the volumetric composition, whereas the monotonous repetition of the hypostyle hall does not produce a similarly powerful image. Figural quality is therefore not the same as order; it rather presupposes a certain articulation, which relates to man's life on earth under the sky. The basilica possesses this articulation in its concrete distinction between down and up, while the hypostyle hall places man within an abstract network of directions. Articulation as such, however, is not sufficient, as is proved by the caprices of innumerable late-modern buildings. A powerful, easily imageable overall form is imperative, and the basilica and the rotunda in fact possess this quality. Le Corbusier was therefore almost right when he defined architecture as "the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light."
    He was almost right, because he understood volume in terms of "cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders and pyramids," that is, abstract geometrical forms, rather than concrete figures which stand on the ground and rise toward the sky.

An excerpt

From an essay, "On History and Culture," by Juhani Pallasmaa in the June Architectural Record:

Creative works are always supra-individual accumulations of experience and wisdom. Milan Kundera, the Czech-French writer, points out "the wisdom of the novel," to which all good writers listen. In my view, architects should similarly listen to "the wisdom of architecture," the accumulated understanding of the essence of architectural culture, encoded in the ancient and contemporary traditions of building. Architecture is truly a collective art form, although not only in the sense that it creates lived metaphors that concretize the cultural and mental structures of the society. Architecture is an art essentially based on collaboration — the obvious cooperation with numerous experts, builders, and craftsmen, to be sure — but moreover, collaboration with history and the wisdom that it possesses.
    Although I am emphasizing the significance of the historical grounding of creative work, I am not promoting architectural conservatism or implying that architects need to become historians. As T. S. Eliot already advised us in his seminal 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," writers and other creative individuals need a "historical sense." This sense grasps the continuity of traditions, as well as the ruptures in the processes of traditions.
    Most importantly, the history of our discipline and practice teaches us the art of respect and humility. The poet Joseph Brodsky writes, "Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty," and continues, "Poetry — writing it as well as reading it — will teach you humility and rather quickly at that. Especially if you are both writing and reading." Brodsky's statement applies equally to architecture — particularly if you are both making it and theorizing about it! To work within our shared architectural heritage is to enter into a special realm of architectural responsibility and humility. The primary significance of this historical sensibility is that it assigns you your position in the continued dialogue of culture.

Drive-by: The Church at Severn Run

Severn, Maryland

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An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on the modern house

From The Concept of Dwelling, by Christian Norberg-Schulz:

The event of modern architecture contributed significantly to the development of domestic typology. Wright's "destruction of the box" and the resulting "free plan" broke with the conventional use of paths and goals, in terms of passages and enclosed halls. Instead, space was intended as a "flowing" continuum without clearly defined zones. The general aim was to make man feel "at home" in the modern, open world. Thus Moholy-Nagy wrote: "A dwelling should not be a retreat from space, but life in space." Wright therefore created a centrifugal plan, which represented a new interpretation of the concept of refuge. Rather than a retreat, the house became a fixed point in space, from which man could experience a new sense of freedom and participation. This point is marked by the great fireplace. Wright's re-interpretation of the human dwelling remains one of the most significant achievements in the history of modern architecture. "Behind the whole development of free design was the insistent belief that man must live as a free human being, in close contact with nature, in order to realize his own potentialities," Scully writes, and "America consequently produced her most original monuments where one would after all have expected to find them: in the homes of individual men." During the following development, however, the free plan degenerated into a kind of general unidentifiable openness, making alienation rather than freedom manifest. Thus we recognize the eternal need for spatial figures to tell us where we are.

Drive-by: Jessup Baptist Church

    

Jessup, Maryland

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For starters

One of the bits from a recent email newsletter from Coastal Connection, a publn. for builders & remodelers I've been getting — this, headed "Making sense of green building":

Alex Wilson has been at the business of "green building" long before it was a hot topic. He's the founding editor since 1992 of Environmental Building News — a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, advertising-free monthly assessment of green-building practices — and president of BuildingGreen.com, an online portal for rational green building know-how. Builders and remodelers entering the "green space" will surely want to consult Wilson's Green Building Products: a compendium of some 1,600 products that qualify as green. But first, you should pick up his most recent book, Your Green Home: A Guide to Planning a Healthy, Environmentally Friendly New Home, as a primer for prioritizing the issues and steering customers in the right direction.

My take-home message from this book: Green is not about choosing pressed-granola flooring and whole-wheat cabinets. Material selection takes a back seat to the two most important steps to building a green home. First, build a smaller house, so you use fewer materials in the first place, and second, focus on making homes more energy efficient, so the continuous consumption of energy is limited. After that, reliance on alternative-energy supplies and resource-efficient building materials makes sense.

Someone might add (though at first glance it seems out of place, directed at architects & builders): first, consider seriously whether a new building's needed at all.

An excerpt: Chang, on boundaries & margins

More from The Existence of Intangible Content in Architectonic Form Based upon the Practicality of Laotzu's Philosophy, or The Tao of Architecture — also taken from the third chapter, "Balance and Equilibrium." (Previously excerpted here.)

That which is growing never has a limit. Unfortunately, an environment becomes intelligible to us only when we are conscious of its physical confinement or, in a lesser degree, when we experience its visual definition. In many cases, our experience of an environment is arrived at by both.

In contrast to mechanical matter, man is always a flexible being. Wherever possible, he stretches his arms, moves, jumps and swings in space. Whenever possible, he also grows. The contour formed by his bodily movement and growth is an elastic volume of void to which no physical form can ever precisely conform. Unreal but so true, this elastic volume of void is what we really live in. It has no boundary. Yet, its formless form is an indispensable field in which life takes form and flourishes.

Since it is nearly impossible to have a conditioned space without physical boundary, the elasticity of this formless form could be only meagerly preserved and suggested by flexible space deliberately provided. Laotzu's emphasis on contentment within allowance of becoming has its reason in every aspect. Following this idea of contentment, our search for this flexible space shows that it exists in the margin between the boundary of physical confinement and that of a space visually defined. Architecturally, it means that when there is a small rug whose size is smaller than the room, the atmosphere of flexible growth in the room will be strongly felt.

This does not mean that the physical confinement should always be large enough for deliberate contraction of a visual space. A door may be unnecessarily double in size, but if it is not provided with a visual margin, an observer would always have the feeling of being limited in a mechanical boundary. On the other hand, no matter how limited the size of a door is, if ample margin for visual reference is provided, one will feel free within the allowance of the margin and be guided to go through it comfortably. Size does not necessarily count in architectural space. It is the growth of size which is vital.

This suggestion for growth of space by deliberate contraction probably has its highest success in an interior canopy. Cutting space horizontally, it suggests the growth of height by its lowering from the ceiling on one hand, and the growth of width by its inward contraction from the walls on the other. By contraction, a small room may become psychologically spacious, a road with a shoulder of inferior pavement may be felt as widened. The same principle is applicable to an environment of any scale. Hesitation to accept the significance of contraction created by a moat, a flower bed or a picture moulding is indeed regrettable.

But in creating the feeling of flexibility, what really counts is the indefiniteness of the physical confinement, not necessarily its physical elasticity. ...

The elasticity of space created by the interaction of defined and confined boundaries is the human factor within a single environment.

Drive-by: Cape St. Claire United Methodist

    

north-east of Annapolis, Maryland

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Drive-by: First Christian Community Church

    

north-west of Annapolis, Maryland

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An excerpt: Chang, on structure & construction

Something from The Existence of Intangible Content in Architectonic Form Based upon the Practicality of Laotzu's Philosophy, by Amos Ih-Tiao Chang, 1956 — for a couple of decades or so now published as a popular title, The Tao of Architecture. On my shelf (or in the pile) since I picked it up at Borders several years ago; but only lately has it found something of a fit in my reading. This, from the third chapter, "Balance and Equilibrium."

Unlike other visual arts, architecture is an art of life itself expressed in life-size scale. Visual elements as the means of an architectural composition, therefore, are not only something to attract interest and to induce movement, but also essentially to create restfulness in which the potential of life, work and human continuity are embedded. This quality of rest and recreative potential is made visible in architectonic form in terms of mass and equilibrium of environment. They make man feel at ease, stable and in a state of relieved satisfaction for a certain length of time. It is the intermittent combinations of these feelings, ease and stability created by balance and equilibrium, which control the secondary and tertiary sequences in architectural space. Without it, transitional motion created by contrast and complement would lead to endless action and eventual fatigue. Among these two, balance of mass usually is minor and controls sequence of shorter duration.

Balance of mass is a compound being. It has its physical aspect as well as its visual aspect. And any attribute in one aspect will influence the state of the other. The basic principle of physical balance seems to be provision of ample resistance against possible loading. To refine the application of this principle, loadings are accumulated from various directions and concentrated on few supports. When the potential of materials is high, a building built of these materials becomes hollow and the size of materials becomes visually not representative of the force required to transfer or resist the loading. Theoretically, as exemplified by a balloon, force could be formless.

Man's liberation from heaviness of masonry and his knowledge of synthetic application of new materials and new principles make him understand that a solid section of a member means stress, its depth means better resistance against bending, and two members acting on one joint may mean but one force. He also realizes that in many new materials, size does not mean weight as we would think in seeing traditional masonry. In short, we know that construction is not structure.

Construction is tangible but not necessarily what it appears to be. Structure is intangible and never is fully manifested. In fact, we are living in a field of gravitational forces without our consciousness of its existence.

Investigation of structure instead of construction will show that basically the creation of all architectonic constructions are based upon one simple principle, namely: provision of the minimum of available material to resist the maximum of possible loads. While construction methods change, structural principle remains the same.

But unlike pure engineering where the objective is efficiency and economy in construction, architecture is something deeper. It aims at emotional satisfaction as well as physical integrity. It is a language which has the emotional power to express with authority the structural meaning of a functional space.

Physical space calls for a factor of safety in structure. Every joint, every bay, and every building is designed on this basis. The factor of safety required in each case is different, but it is always greater than unity. The allowance for intangible and upredictable loading in physical structure is usually exaggerated, but man counts on this unused provision so that he may live in a space without fear.

The recognition of this intangible state of safety is not a matter of surface consciousness. To pronounce it with accent, to reveal as lively a trustworthy structure, allowance for growing and counterfusion of structural meaning must be contained in architectonic form.