delight - Frederick Fisher and Partners

DELIGHT
FREDERICK FISHER
DELIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Delight is one of our prime motivations for practicing architecture. As in
Vitruvius’ model of architecture, we seek to achieve buildings that delight
at the same time they have commodity in use and rationality in their
firmness of construction. And we seek delight in the process of making
buildings with the indispensable ad hoc group of clients, collaborators and
builders formed for each project.
Over twenty-five years of practice and study of architecture, I have found
recurring set of ideas that nourishes and guides my work. These ideas
are expressed as eleven chapters in this book, each containing examples
with brief descriptions. The inspirations come from architecture, art,
performance, literature and everyday life. They come from the past
and the present and varied cultures. The order is not a narrative but an
assemblage of independent threads.
I liken the process of using these concepts to weaving. Various strands
form the structure of the warp while others move over and under as
the weft. Each project has its own unique chemistry as the ideas are
continuously re-woven in different combinations. The same few themes
are continually refreshed by the opportunities of each project.
Frederick Fisher, FAAR
T EMPORA LITY
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF A JAPANESE WASHBASIN. Erosion and weathering are not usually thought of as
productive acts, but there is a possibility that subtraction can be enhancing. The inevitable deterioration of materials in
the face of time and natural forces can actually be something that we account for. The slow erosion of a stone by water
produces a possibility of use.
CARLO SCARPA (1906-1978 ITALIAN ARCHITECT). BRION CEMETERY. SAN VITO D’ALTIVOLE, ITALY. 19691978. The two leaning sarcophagi at the Brion Cemetery bear tremendous emotional content, alluding to both the crib and
the coffin as forms which bookend life, and to the gesture of a couple in eternity. Scarpa said of the work, “It is as it should
be that two people who loved each other in life bend toward each other in greeting after death.” The poignancy of Scarpa’s
treatment of love and death is intensified by discovering his own headstone in a hidden corner of the compound.
PER KIRKEBY (1938 - DANISH ARTIST). MINORITENKIRCHE. STEIN. KREMS AN DER DONAN, AUSTRIA. 1993.
The brick sculptures of Per Kirkeby are pseudo-ruins. His work appeals to the sublime monumentality of the past, using
an archaic formal and material vocabulary. Kirkeby’s work is responsive to location; engaging notions of place, and often,
confusing site with object. Here, the distinction between wall as context and wall as art object is ambivalent. Photographed
in the snow, the wall takes on an intensified sense of ruin.
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LOUIS KAHN (1901/O2-1974 AMERICAN ARTIST). TEMPLE OF APOLLO. CORINTH, GREECE. PASTEL AND
CHARCOAL ON PAPER. 1951. 10¾ x 10¼“. During his life, Louis Kahn made many trips to the ruins of antiquity. Each
time, his sketches exposed another set of insights and discoveries regarding his interests in monumentality, material,
and the past. This drawing, from a trip made later in life, is particularly expressionistic; revealing an interest in color with
respect to landscape, natural phenomena and notions of the sublime.
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF STAIRS, BELIEVED TO BE IN ENGLAND. Stone undergoes an epic transformation
in its extraction from the land. A ragged and colossal rock face is quickly broken out of the mountain and carved into the
precision of a Corinthian column or the supple bust of a goddess. Although stone seems impervious to wear, it will eventually
return to a state where its vulnerability is revealed over time, by weather and use, and its origin in the irregularity of the
mountain shows through.
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ROBERT WILSON (1941 AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT, DIRECTOR). DEAFMAN GLANCE. 1970. This seven hour silent
opera explores many of Wilson’s interests in duration; and the complexities of expression that can be revealed in slow
motion. In this scene, played by actress Sheryl Sutton, a murder takes place over an hour of slow, seemingly geologic
movements. Wilson often had Sutton chew gum while performing this scene, contrasting the slow gesture of the knife
traveling from the table to the boy with the quick and repetitive movements of her mouth.
TODD EBERLE (1963 - AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER). PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHITECT PHILIP JOHNSON. 2004.
In the original photographs of Le Corbusier’s early villas, a fish lies with its mouth agape on a kitchen counter, marveling
at an immanent death or the wonders of modern accommodation. A pair of owl-eye glasses and a bowler hat sit carefully
poised on a table in a roof garden. The meaning behind these planted objects has never been revealed, but for the few that
knew Le Corbusier had lost sight in one eye at early age, or recalled his archetypal interest in water, the presence of the
eyeglasses and the glistening fish are not so obscure. These photographs are much like modern equivalents of Dutch still
life paintings, rich in symbolism, autobiography, and the multiple temporalities that are present in an extraordinary life. In
2004, the eccentric architect, Philip Johnson was photographed at his famous glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut, just
months before he died. This same richness of symbol and metaphor is captured here, as he sits playing solitaire against
himself, peering out of his own owl-eye glasses.
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WILLEM VAN AELST (1626/27-AFTER 1687 DUTCH PAINTER). VASE OF FLOWERS WITH POCKET WATCH. 1663.
OIL ON CANVAS. 24½ x 19¼“. In the 1630’s tulip mania struck Holland. This intoxicating frenzy, brought on by the
introduction of the Turkish flower, raised fundamental questions about the nature of value, ephemerality, and beauty. This
mania, along with the Dutch interest in the arts and sciences, gardening, and breeding led to the emergence of the still life
genre. These paintings often reflected changes in aesthetic taste or indicated the extent of recent explorations. The flower
arrangements depicted in the paintings frequently contained species that could never have been in bloom simultaneously,
and are therefore believed to be emblematic of the brevity and complexity of life. Insects and objects, such as pocket
watches and glasses, are symbolic of decay, rebirth, time, and knowledge.
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF FIREWORKS OVER WATER. Fireworks were invented over 2000 years ago in China,
and are believed to have been brought to the West by Marco Polo. From the beginning they have served as a unique form
of entertainment, and as our attempt at putting momentary and elaborate patterns of light into the sky.
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CHARLES ROSS (1937 - AMERICAN ARTIST). THE YEAR OF SOLAR BURNS. 1993. These portraits of the sun, drawn
with a magnifying glass, are not only records of the shape created by the relationship of the earth to the sun, but are an
index of the variances and ephemeralities of meteorological conditions. The French Ministry of Culture commissioned Ross’
365 drawings for permanent installation in the 15c. Chateau d’Oiron in the Loire Valley.
THE JAI PRAKASH YANTRA AT THE JAIPUR OBSERVATORY. JAIPUR, INDIA. 1719-1724. The observatory at Jaipur
is one of seven that was built by Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh II in the 18c., as a way of checking astronomical calculations,
so that the emperor Mohammad Shah could travel safely through India without getting lost. There is a long tradition of
measuring phenomena in stone, as stone is one of our most permanent and immutable materials. This marble bowl at
Jaipur is a manifold instrument, an index, which measures both time and the coordinates of celestial bodies. It is also an
instrument which exposes our inefficacy to capture phenomena, and reveals that celestial irregularities gradually render
our systems of measure inaccurate.
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JOHN HARRISON (1693-1776 BRITISH WATCHMAKER). CHRONOMETER 1. BRASS AND STEEL. 1730-1735. In
1714 the British Government announced the Longitude Prize, a race to find a means of locating longitudinal position at sea.
John Harrison solved the problem by including time (the fourth dimension) in the method to map the world. He invented
a series of spring driven clocks, which unlike pendulum clocks of the time, were not prone to inaccuracy by the motion of
a ship or changes in temperature and humidity. Harrison’s inventions also laid the ground work for Greenwich Mean Time,
since a time standard on land was needed for comparison with local time on a ship, in order to calculate its position. The
machined metal clocks that Harrison developed from 1730-1759, and the contemporaneous stone devices at Jaipur, are
object lessons in idiosyncratic forms created in the pursuit of capturing time.
FREDERICK CATHERWOOD (1799-1854 BRITISH ARCHITECT AND ANTHROPOLOGIST). COPAN: LA GRAN
PLAZA, PLATE NO.4 1844. 10¾ x 16¼“. At age forty, Frederick Catherwood traveled to Central America with the British
writer John Lloyd Stephens. Together they were the first modern men to rediscover the ancient pre-Columbian cities of
the Americas. In the tradition of earlier explorations by the British and French to the ancient ruins of Rome, Greece, and
Egypt; Catherwood and Stephens made many accounts of their findings in the form of drawings and writing. Catherwood
imported his sensibilities of the English picturesque into his drawings, by aestheticizing the ruins and aligning them with
European pictorialism. His drawings express the transience of civilization and the persistence of nature to prevail over the
works of man.
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COLLA GE
DONALD JUDD (1928-1994. AMERICAN ARTIST). PRINT STUDIO. MARFA, TEXAS. 1970’S AND 80’S. In 1971
Donald Judd moved from New York to a remote town in southwest Texas, where he purchased a decommissioned military
base and eventually much of the nearby civilian town. He turned the former bank into his print studio, and a number of
the homes and warehouses into an intermingling of dwelling and studio practice. Many of these buildings are veritable
palimpsests. The original buildings and the new interventions and edits, as well as acquired work and made work; are
compressed into one time and place and register new sets of relationships.
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F.J. PARCEVISA (19c. ITALIAN ARCHITECT). LITHOGRAPH OF AN ARTIST DRAWING ROMAN COLUMNS BUILT
INTO A HOUSE. 1843. Value, like beauty, is a capricious convention. In the past there were times when Michelangelo was
not considered great, when mountains and forests were thought of as ugly and suspicious, and Roman ruins were quarried
for their marble. In this 19c. drawing, which I came across in Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, the past is treated as both
a revered subject and a incidental shelter, as the tourist casually leans back against a half-buried monumental column.
CESAR MANRIQUE (1919-1992 GUANCHE ARTIST). GALLERY AT THE CESAR MANRIQUE FOUNDATION. CANARY
ISLANDS. 1968. The Canary Islands exist as evidence of the slow accumulation of volcanic events over millions of years.
In 1730 an eruption left a volcanic trail cascading down the south face of Lanzarote Island. It was here that the artist César
Manrique decided to build a house and a studio for himself. The rooms and galleries of his compound are all carefully nestled
into the molten landscape of the lava flow, to create a rich contrast of colors and textures; the light space of a gallery with
the dark pumice of the island, the organic with the manmade, and the productive space of art-making with the incendiary
forces of nature.
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RACHEL WHITEREAD (1963 - BRITISH ARTIST). UNTITLED (PLASTER TABLE). CAST PLASTER. 1995-1996. 26¾
X 147¾ x 204½“. The volcanic presence at Manrique’s island compound has an uncanny relationship to the work of Rachel
Whiteread. In a monograph on the artist, Charlotte Mullins writes about the fortuitous link of Mount Vesuvius to Whiteread’s
sculptures. In 79 AD, volcanic ash from a massive eruption buried in the city of Pompeii in a single day. Centuries later,
as archaeologists unearthed the city, they discovered voids in the shape of Pompeii’s ancient citizens. The archaeologists
poured plaster of Paris into these pockets revealing the population of the city preserved in its last moments of life. The
transformation of the invisible into solid and precise forms provoked the mystery of absence often associated with fossils,
petrified wood, and even death itself. Whiteread, whose work is made from casting the undersides, insides, and voids
created by architecture and furniture, replaces space with matter, and lets the certainty of absence and presence flutter.
RICHARD MISRACH (1949 - AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER). OUTDOOR DINING. BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS, UTAH.
PHOTOGRAPH. 1992. At the Annual World Land Speed Records, Misrach captured a series of photographs (The Desert
Cantos XV: The Salt Flats) of inhabitation forcing a surreal and ironic relationship with nature, as the sublimity of landscape
is tethered for a moment by the domesticity of common furniture.
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ROY McMAKIN (1956 - AMERICAN ARTIST). BERRO RESIDENCE POOL HOUSE. BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA.
2000. The historical avant-garde sought to conflate life and art, and in the end failed to do so. But occasionally when art is
trafficked through a particular medium and scale the possibility becomes viable. McMakin’s Pool House, at once, furniture,
architecture, and landscape intervention, is also still life, diorama, and stage set; where the exchange of art and life is an
impromptu performance.
JOSEPH CORNELL (1903-1972 AMERICAN ARTIST). UNTITLED (SAILING SHIP). BOX CONSTRUCTION. 1961.
9¾ X 14 x 3½“. The 18c. writings of the English philosopher Edmund Burke often equated beauty with smallness. In
Cornell’s framed microcosms, the objects of everyday life are placed in landscapes of dissonant scale; the vastness of sky
or ocean is met by a drinking glass, a pair of butterfly wings, or the face of an Elgin watch. Cornell’s simultaneous worlds
were not limited to issues of scale. He would often place objects of disparate times and places, materials, and forms of
representation together in the same small box. Cornell, as well as such early 20c. artists as Kurt Schwitters and Marcel
Duchamp, explored the assemblage of found objects as a form of sculpture, distinct from the tradition of carving and
moulding; elevating an object to the status of art by selection rather than by intrinsic aesthetic properties.
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SIR JOHN SOANE (1753-1837 BRITISH ARCHITECT). THE PICTURE ROOM RECESS AT NO. 12-14 LINCOLN’S
INN FIELDS. LONDON, ENGLAND. 1792-1824. Every so often, the events of one profession provide the means for
the emergence of another. During the Renaissance, as young architects began traveling from England and France to
study the ruins of antiquity, their time spent drawing the plundered remains of Rome and Pompeii naturally encouraged
the unearthing of these ancient cities. For several hundred years architects assumed the practice of what would later be
codified as archaeology. As ancient Europe was exhumed and expeditions to the New World brought back artifacts of their
discovery, the notion of the collector also became a common association with the architect. It is this manifold sense of
practice that produced the moniker of Renaissance man; a name to which the British architect Sir John Soane is inextricably
linked. Soane’s London home at Lincoln’s Inns Field is an embodiment of his pursuits as an architect-cum-archaeologistcollector. The Picture Room, like the rest of the house, is a complex layered space; apertures and views from one room
slip horizontally and vertically into others, and are tempered by a dense accumulation of painting, sculptures, decorative
fragments, and moveable partitions. The mysterious glow emanating from the skylights is made by yellow glass; meant to
accentuate the color in the paintings, but also confusing the nature of the light source. It is tempting to believe that the
golden wash cast from the skylights is descendent not from the gray skies of England, but the warm Roman sun.
KURT SCHWITTERS (1887-1948 GERMAN ARTIST). Mz 26, 41. OKOLA. COLLAGE. 1926. 7 x 5½“. The work of Kurt
Schwitters is decidedly urban; the scraps and spoils of city life: a ticket stub from the theatre, packing labels and box tops
convened with paste. His oeuvre was faithfully wedded to the idea of merz; a term he invented to describe the detritus of
consumer civilization. Short for the German word kommerz (commerce), merz is a protean substance, it is the possibility of
all art and non-art materials alike. In the cutting and pasteing of Schwitters collages, merz is as much a subtractive process
as it is an additive one; it is reconstituted from the discards of everyday life, it is found and assembled rather than designed.
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MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968 FRENCH ARTIST). BICYCLE WHEEL AND STOOL. 1913. 25½ x 23¾ x 23¾“.
Although he never turned lead into gold, Duchamp was nevertheless an alchemist. He turned urinals into fountains, men
into women, paintings into sculptures, dust and air into precious materials, and the Mona Lisa into a dirty joke. He made a
career out of subverting expectation. The provocation of the Bicycle Wheel, considered to be Duchamp’s first ready-made,
was not so much in its configuration, but it’s validation in a fine art context, and the absurdity it rendered when it turned
useful objects against the possibility of use.
MERET OPPENHEIM (1913-1985 SWISS ARTIST). BREAKFAST IN FUR. 1936. The surrealists had a vested interest
in cross-wiring the senses. When synesthesia became a subject of scientific study in the early part of the twentieth century,
they were some of the first to recognize the productive possibilities for this newly discovered perceptual condition in the
avant-garde. The Fur Teacup, often thought of as the surrealists’ poster child, manages to blend the textures of touch and
taste, and the impossibility of use, as well as reconnecting a meal’s original state with the site of consumption.
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GIORGIO MORANDI (1890-1964 ITALIAN PAINTER). NATURA MORTA. OIL ON CANVAS. 1959. 14.1 x 13.9“.
After Giorgio Morandi’s death in 1964, the entirety of his one room studio was moved to a small museum in the center of
Bologna; the clock was preserved at five past twelve, the crushed paper and ash of cigarettes were left undisturbed, and
the surface of the table, on which he had spent decades rearranging the same quaint collection of bottles and boxes, was
tilted forward slightly and filled with a sea of delicate pencil marks; a palimpsest of locations for past arrangements. The
seriality of his drawing and paintings show a devotion and praise for the everyday object. His oeuvre is cast more like family
portraits than still life paintings. The slipping of their proper subject gives way to a pliant sense of scale, which at times
makes these intimate clusters feel monumental.
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH AT LA DEFENSE IN PARIS, FRANCE. The juxtaposition of the carousel in front of the La
Defense office building is an ironic contrast of monumentality and stoicism with itinerancy and play.
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FRANK GEHRY (1929 - AMERICAN ARCHITECT). GEHRY HOUSE. SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA. 1978. The Gehry
house is a shocking synthesis of the sentimental domestic form of the old house and the tough industrial interventions
of the new house, whose conclusion remains open. Gehry describes the time under which the house underwent its first
remodel as something magical that people either laughed at or hated; that the intentionality of the house was unclear. This
provocative both-and that the house evokes was aided by the chain-link fence (which he described as a ghost rising out
of the old house), the corrugated steel, and shop grade plywood that he chose as his palette of materials. Without their
conventional rhetorical associations, the application of these industrial materials confounded and disturbed most observers
in a domestic neighborhood.
LOUIS KAHN (1901-1974 AMERICAN ARCHITECT). MASTER PLAN FOR THE DOMINICAN MOTHERHOUSE OF ST.
CATHERINE DE RICCI. MODEL 1966. MEDIA, PENNSYLVANIA. 1965-1969. This project, though unbuilt, became a
definitive experience that would change the conceptual and physical process of Kahn’s work. He took an immediate interest
in the double life of nuns; trying to translate the dialectic of public and private, or the silent and communicative functions of
their daily lives into architecture. After a year of attempting to resolve this issue Kahn decided to cut up an existing drawing
of the plan and began to literally collage a new scheme for the motherhouse. The haphazard acute and oblique angles that
resulted from this collage reminded Kahn of the archeology and ancient foundations of the ruins that he had studied and
grown to know so intimately.
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S ENSATION
ROY McMAKIN (1956 - AMERICAN ARTIST). LIGHT COFFEE TABLE. MIXED MEDIA. 2000. 17 x 29 x 60”. In the
trope and the double-entendre there is a moment where meaning fluctuates. It is here that McMakin often positions his
work. This coffee table is both a singular piece of furniture and an essay on style, scale, and collection.
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CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774-1840 GERMAN PAINTER). WANDERER ABOVE THE MISTS. OIL ON CANVAS.
1817-1818. 37 x 29¼“. A horse drawn carriage inching its way through a high Alpine pass was a common route on the
Grand Tour; and the thin air and altitude one experienced while pondering views of glaciers and ragged peaks emerging
from the treeline inspired its own form of awe. Notions of the sublime rose to prominence during this time, as travelers on
the Grand Tour stopped to marvel at the danger and expanse of landscape formerly inaccessible to travelers. This interest
in the sublime rendered new subjects in painting and literature. Artists of the Romantic tradition, like Friedrich, explored this
new anti-classical interest in experience and exposed the vulnerability of man in the face of nature’s infinite rigor.
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ROBERT IRWIN (1928 - AMERICAN ARTIST). INSTALLATION AT HIS MARKET STREET STUDIO. VENICE,
CALIFORNIA. MAY, 1980. In 1980 Malinda Wyatt was opening a gallery next door to Irwin’s former studio and invited
him to do an installation there. In this space where he had done perceptual experiments with Ed Wortz and Jim Turrell,
Irwin constructed a light and scrim piece, which seemed to materialize light while transforming art from an object into an
experience. Except for a diaphanous scrim, the installation was open to the street, and despite it’s vulnerability to the tough
street life of Venice it remained untouched during its two week existence. Word of mouth brought myself and others to
wonder at the beauty of next to nothing.
JOHANNES VERMEER (1632-1675 DUTCH PAINTER). LADY WRITING A LETTER WITH HER MAID. OIL ON
CANVAS. 1670. 28 x 23”. The epistolary scene was a mainstay in Vermeer’s oeuvre; the quiet and delicate scene of a
young woman reading or writing a love letter in the light from a leaded window; pulling her gaze and illuminating her task.
But what often gets lost in this stillness, is the squelched private drama which hides in the details; the accidental still life
made at the foot of the painting by an angry outburst. Like the slow performance of Deafman Glance, there is suggestion
in many of Vermeer’s paintings of small, salient action in the stillness.
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WOLFGANG LAIB (1950 - GERMAN ARTIST). INSTALLATION OF DANDELION POLLEN. Many of Laib’s artistic
practices are often closer to religious ritual than art. He forages for raw materials such as pollen, beeswax, and milk;
resulting in installations that are visual oscillations between pure sensation and pure materiality.
WALTER DE MARIA (1935 - AMERICAN ARTIST). THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM. NEW YORK CITY. 1977. Since the
late 1970’s a second story room at 141 Wooster Street has been filled to the windowsills with dirt. For a moment, it is not
unreasonable to suspect that this might be the last remaining evidence of some ancient natural disaster; but the pungent
bed of peat (the smell of fertile ground) is manicured and level, and the intention of this situation as either creative or
destructive remains unknown. What we are left to wonder is whether it is the room and not the dirt that shouldn’t be there.
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JAMES TURRELL (1943 - AMERICAN ARTIST). MEETING. P.S.1 LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK. 1986. As the
name suggests, Meeting is a social space, its walls are furnished with a continuous bench under an aperture to the heavens.
In this room on the top floor of P.S.1, a former New York public school, Turrell cut a square from the ceiling and tapered
the edge so that the viewer has no gauge of depth perception. Without figuration the sky is both flat and infinitely deep,
except for the rare and stunning moments when a plane or a bird passes through the frame. During the hour of dusk, the
square imperceptibly changes from sky blue to deep azure to black. Over the ten years of design and construction of P.S.1’s
renovation, Meeting was a lesson and a refuge for me.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE (1886-1969 GERMAN ARCHITECT). INTERIOR DRAWING OF THE BARCELONA
PAVILION. PENCIL AND CHARCOAL ON CARDBOARD. 1928-1929. 38½ x 51½“. The Barcelona Pavilion is a building
without function. When it was commissioned in 1928 there was no program to determine its purpose. Even though the
pavilion has been credited with domestic tendencies, it remains uninhabitable. Even with white leather thrones (for the King
and Queen of Spain), and rich red curtains, it resists occupation. Tomes have been written about this travertine specter,
many citing its luxurious material palette as the lynch pin in its aloof character. The high-polished chromium columns are
made structurally ambiguous as they successively dissolve into or anchor their environs. The colored glass and marble
variously reflect and transmit light and image, making the surfaces of the Barcelona pavilion visually uncertain and unstable.
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USE
YAYOI KUSAMA (1929 - JAPANESE ARTIST). FIREFLIES ON THE WATER. MIRROR, PLEXIGLASS, 150 LIGHTS
AND WATER. 2002. Yayoi Kusama has suffered from mental hallucinations for most of her life, and as a result has
developed an obsessive fascination with infinity. Her desire to express the fathomless landscape, darkness, light and
pattern, are not unlike Louis XIV’s impulse at Versailles, to give the idea of infinity a physical shape.
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DONALD JUDD (1928-1994 AMERICAN ARTIST). SCULPTURE STUDIO. MARFA, TEXAS. 1980’S. In 1979 the
French conceptual artist, Daniel Buren wrote The Function of the Studio, an essay on the influence of place in the making of
art. According to Buren, “the importance of the studio should by now be apparent: it is the first frame, the first limit, upon
which all subsequent frames and limits will depend… it is in the studio and only in the studio that it (the work) is closest
to its own reality, a reality from which it will continue to distance itself.” The effect of the studio on the production of work
and on how it is received, was no doubt on the mind of Donald Judd when he began his art compound in rural Texas. The
distinction between galleries and studios in Marfa are rarely clear, and often they are both. The understanding of a work’s
first loyalty to the place of its creation is rampant in Judd’s compound, a great deal of his work remains in the studios where
it was made, or in the buildings where it was intentionally constructed.
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C.F.A. VOYSEY (1857-1941 BRITISH ARCHITECT). THE ORCHARD. CHORLEYWOOD, ENGLAND. WATERCOLOR.
1901. Voysey made many watercolors of his house in Hertfordshire which he called, the Orchard. They demonstrate how
he thought about inhabiting space, and the details that belonged to that inhabitation. They also expose that pivotal moment
in vernacular English architecture, when the indigenous country cottage, taken as a model of unselfconscious tradition,
was influenced by modern conveniences. Picturesque forms became suitable accommodations for elaborate domestic needs
which no longer fit into the abstraction of neo-classical plans.
THOMAS KELLER (1955 - AMERICAN CHEF). WHITE TRUFFLE OIL- INFUSED CUSTARD. Thomas Keller, owner and
chef of the French Laundry in Younteville, California, is considered by many to be the best chef in America. His deep respect
and responsibility for food is a crucial lesson for any profession. He cares for a food’s origin, the purveyors and people who
raised it, for how and where it was grown. He talks frequently about the involvement of a chef in the entire process of
cooking, and of cooking which is necessarily slow, intricate and intense.
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RUSSELL WRIGHT (1904-1976 AMERICAN DESIGNER). DETAIL OF THE HIGHLIGHT PINCH KNIFE HANDLE.
STAINLESS STEEL. 1953. Wright’s designs often announced their utility in their form. You could look at a piece and sense
how to pick it up or hold it, and even more importantly, how it would feel to hold.
RUDOLPH SCHINDLER (1887-1953 AUSTRIAN-AMERICAN ARCHITECT). KINGS ROAD HOUSE. WEST
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. 1921-1922. After Schindler immigrated to America in 1914, he began working for Frank
Lloyd Wright in Chicago, and eventually he followed Wright to Southern California where he discovered that it was uniquely
amenable to a way of living openly with the outdoors. His King’s Road House included open air sleeping baskets on the roof
and each room opened to a garden. Schindler and his wife Pauline lived a curious life at King’s Road with another couple,
Clyde and Marian Chance, until 1924, and then in 1925 the architect Richard Neutra (a schoolmate from Austria) moved
with his family to Kings Road to live with the Schindlers. This photograph was taken in 1924 at Thanksgiving dinner… an
outdoor dining room in late November.
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (1867-1959 AMERICAN ARCHITECT). TALIESIN WEST. SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA. 1938.
As part of the annual relocation of the Taliesin school from Wisconsin to Arizona, and as a duty in the apprenticeship
program, students would replace or restretch the canvas roof panels on the drafting studio. This practice demonstrates
the role of textiles in desert life, and the possibility for possibility for architecture to have a range of life spans within the
construction of a building and rituals of renewal.
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF MEXICAN MORTARS, CALLED METATE Y MANO. These tools, made for grinding and
pulverizing grains, first emerged alongside modern hybridized corn over six thousand years ago. Their form has remained
virtually unchanged over the centuries, as their exactitude and specificity lies in the action of use.
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BROTHER JAMES DANIELS (1767-1851 AMERICAN WOODWORKER). SHAKER WOOD PLANES FOR COPING,
SASH, MOLDING, AND PANEL RAISING. CANTERBURY, NEW HAMPSHIRE. 1800-1830. In 1787 the Shaker
community made a decision to live apart from the world in order to uphold their spiritual convictions. Despite this isolation,
their tools were superior in craftsmanship and design to similar devices made out in the world. Their tools were also as
rigorous and beautiful as the furniture and architecture that they were used to make, and they hold a place in the long
tradition of craftsmen inventing and making their own tools and instruments. The Shaker’s equated craft with prayer, and
found religious fulfillment in their care for making.
CARLO SCARPA (1906-1978 ITALIAN ARCHITECT). EASELS IN THE CASTELVECCHIO MUSEUM. VERONA, ITALY.
1956-1964. The process of making architecture is undeniable in Scarpa’s work. He practiced at a time and place in
Italy when craftsmen and building trades were still very closely tied to the refinement of architecture. The traditions of
masonry, glass, plaster, metal in exquisite detail made it possible for him to design every aspect of a project from scratch.
His responsibility never stopped at the architecture; but included furniture, flatware, landscape, sculpture, vessels, and
curation. At the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, a series of feverously detailed armatures recall the form and function
of artists easels, and by allusion transform the museum into the studio, thereby allowing the viewer to become the artist.
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TA XONOMY
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF A JAPANESE HEARTH. With the capture of fire came the emergence of the hearth.
Over time we have developed a deep companionship with fire, and even today among a wealth of modern devices, it
remains the seat of domesticity. The Japanese open hearth, called an irori, is a site of heat within the house. It not only
provides warmth but is used in the daily necessities of cooking and the rituals of tea ceremonies. Like all elements which
are involved in ritual, the irori are designed with an interest in function and aesthetics. The small pebbles surrounding the
fire are carefully raked into abstracted patterns of nature, and the hook which suspends the cooking pot is fetishized both
in size and decoration.
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CHARLES (1907-1978) AND RAY (1912-1988) EAMES (AMERICAN DESIGNERS). THE EAMES HOUSE. PACIFIC
PALISADES, CALIFORNIA. 1949. In stark contrast to the pre-fabricated industrial components of the house, the Eames
filled it with a collection of hand-crafted objects and furniture from all over the world. In 1955 they made a short film called
House After Five Years of Living, cataloguing these objects and their relationship to the house. This photograph was taken
of the Eames in 1958. As a point of pilgrimage for architecture students, the house embodies traits of Southern California
modernist architecture: industrial materials, lightness, social experimentation, and an emphasis on indoor-outdoor living.
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SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN (1627-1678 DUTCH PAINTER). STILL LIFE WITH WALL-RACK. OIL ON CANVAS.
1666-1678. 24¾ x 31”. In the mid-seventeenth century, as the still life genre reached the height of its development,
a subtle deviation occurred. Samuel van Hoogstraten, a prominent Dutch painter, began experimenting with new pictorial
devices for his still life paintings. He invented what is now called the wall-rack picture, a trompe l’oeil collection of real and
symbolic accolades of the artist painted to the actual scale of the objects. His discovery took the bounty of earlier still life
arrangements and collaged them on a picture plane.
GERHARD RICHTER (1932 - GERMAN ARTIST). PAGE 618 FROM THE ATLAS. COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS. NO DATE.
20¼ x 26”. In 1964 Richter began to compile a folio, which now forty years later seems to contain everything in the world:
self-portraits next to bullfights and tulips, pages of icebergs followed by impasto, chandeliers and fire, poverty and porn.
Although some of his work draws directly from the Atlas, not everything does. It is, perhaps, more a way of keeping as
much of the world as possible immediately at hand.
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BERND (1931-2007) AND HILLA (1934 -) BECHER (GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHERS). FRAMEWORK HOUSES FROM
THE SIEGEN INDUSTRIAL REGION OF GERMANY. BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS. LATE 1950’S-1970’S.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, former students of Karl Blossfeldt, began teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in 1960’s. Their
frontal and austere style of photography championed the flat light of their North German climate. Their dispassionate serial
documentaries of vernacular and uninhabited industrial structures, influenced a generation of German photographers and
painters who explored the idiosyncrasies of routine structures and events.
KARL BLOSSFELDT (1865-1932 GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER). PLATE 12. MONKSHOOD, ENYAGO AND YARROW.
FROM THE WORKING COLLAGES. 1920’s. Blossfeldt, educator and self-taught photographer, believed that design
patterns originate in nature. He constructed his own camera with a lens that could magnify his subjects up to thirty times
their actual size, so that both large and miniscule subjects could be rendered at a similar scale. For almost thirty years he
photographed the plant life of Berlin, revealing a world of structure, texture, and configuration in a way that was previously
unknown.
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ENRIC MIRALLES (1955-2000) AND CARME PINOS (1954 - SPANISH ARCHITECTS). IGUALADA CEMETERY.
IGUALADA, SPAIN. 1985-1994. The Igualada Cemetery explicitly confronts the meaning of death. It is structured,
narratively, as a procession into the earth. When asked about the project Miralles stated that, “a cemetery is not a tomb. It
is rather a relationship with the landscape and with forgetting.”
PER KIRKEBY (1938 - DANISH ARTIST). TERRACOTTA MODELS IN THE BASEMENT OF HIS STUDIO. HELLERUP,
DENMARK. There is a long tradition of sculptors sketching in the form of clay models; of beginning with a monolith and
subtractively arriving at an idea by carving and moulding. In the basement of Kirkeby’s studio there is always a large
population of these models, which he refers to as prototypes. To him they are, “structures that artists have returned to
throughout the centuries.”
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S ETTING
ROY McMAKIN (1956 - AMERICAN ARTIST). ALPHABET SKETCHES. 143 PIECES OF PAINTED WOOD. 1997. The
Alphabet Sketches are a catalogue of architectural and domestic forms which continually reappear in McMakin’s work. There
are derived from the real world typologies of quotidian objects and building details all brought to a uniform scale under a
coat of smooth white paint.
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JAMES TURRELL (1943 - AMERICAN ARTIST). RODEN CRATER. DORMANT VOLCANO IN THE PAINTED DESERT.
NORTHEAST OF FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA. 1972 - PRESENT. One of the most obvious distinctions that separate man
from animal is the impulse to cultivate; there is evidence of this in the domestication of animals, the impulse to prune
the garden, and to parse out the land into acres, states, and countries. In the late 1960’s and 70’s some American artists
traveled to the western wilderness and took up the practice of shaping the land. James Turrell, who discovered this remote
location from the air, found its nearly Platonic cone shape to be the perfect candidate for executing his ideas of a massive
earthwork. He began by shaping the crater’s edge, which in turn appeared to shape the sky and our perceptions of certain
celestial events. He then designed a series of rooms deep in the heart of the crater, which anticipate and register various
celestial phenomena in experiential form.
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HENRY HOARE II (1705-1785) AND HENRY FLITCROFT (1695-1769 BANKER AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT).
STOURHEAD. VIEW OF THE PALLADIAN BRIDGE AND TEMPLE OF THE SUN. WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND. 1741-1765.
The English Picturesque garden developed from an interest in the depictions on nature in Romantic landscape painting.
On the canvas, landscapes were altered and rearranged; the terrors of sublime natural conditions were mixed with tamed
vegetation and domesticated animals. The translation of this pictorial idea into actual landscape yielded a contrast of
exotic flora with manicured lawns, and bridges and temples with ragged grottoes. The transformation of the picturesque
experience from nature to art, and back to landscape, was nature imitating art.
CURZIO MALAPARTE (1898-1957 ITALIAN WRITER AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST). CASA MALAPARTE. CAPRI,
ITALY. 1938-1942. The critic Michael McDonough has said that the Casa Malaparte is “a building with an ontology as
complex as the twentieth century.” It was allegedly built on a bet between Malaparte and Ambassador Rulli, to see who
could build a more dangerous house. Nestled among the perilous cliffs on the eastern side of Capri, it is an intense and
clandestine collage: a piece of Greek amphitheatre, a sacrificial altar, a spinnaker sail, a medieval prison, and vernacular
influences, under a wash of Pompeian red.
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BERNARD MAYBECK (1862-1957 AMERICAN ARCHITECT). GLEN ALPINE SPRINGS. EL DORADO COUNTY,
CALIFORNIA. 1921. Maybeck was commissioned to rebuild this small resort after it had burned to the ground the previous
year. In the rugged high Sierra Mountains fire-proofing proved a necessity. Maybeck combined local stone and wood with
industrial products to produce the new resort buildings out of glass, stone, and corrugated iron; resulting in a design that
was both heavy and light, naturalistic and technological. These tented ruins were both contiguous with nature and resistant
to its forces.
LUIS BARRAGAN (1902-1988 MEXICAN ARCHITECT). LAS ARBOLEDAS. MEXICO CITY, MEXICO. 1958-1961.
The importance of the horse in Barragan’s work is striking, perhaps because we rarely accommodate creatures other than
ourselves in the discipline of architecture. Las Arboledas, in his words, was designed to display “the elegant rituals of
equestrianism.” The presence of water, as mirrors and solids, and the outdoor rooms and shaded walks, choreograph a park
of shadows, reflections, and the stately canter of hoofs.
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DONALD JUDD (1928-1994 AMERICAN ARTIST). NORTHERN ARTILLERY SHED. ONE HUNDRED MILLED
ALUMINUM PIECES. MARFA, TEXAS. 1984. In 1979 Donald Judd purchased a decommissioned military base in the
remote town of Marfa, Texas. Most of the buildings were in a state of ruin, many without roofs. The devastation of the
buildings provided Judd a unique opportunity to develop the buildings and the work that they would eventually contain
together. The two existing artillery sheds were designated to house a suite of one hundred aluminum boxes. The cargo
doors on the building were replaced with large windows, and mullions made from anodized aluminum. The same materials
and proportions were used in the windows and the sculptures, making the work and its curation indivisible from its context,
and the reflections of light meld the piece to its setting.
JACQUES HERZOG AND PIERRE DE MEURON (20/20c. - SWISS ARCHITECTS). DOMINUS WINERY. YOUNTEVILLE,
CALIFORNIA. 1995-1997. When Herzog and de Meuron were chosen to design a winery in the fertile Napa Valley, the act
of harvesting must surely have occurred to them. The act of foraging was one of the first signs of man’s inclination towards
civility; it anticipated the development of agriculture that would finally take him out of the wild for good. The delicate and
complex process of harvesting grapes and transforming them into wine inspired the use of a vernacular building technique
from northern Italy which uses gabions, or wire baskets filled with rocks to form retaining walls. These gabions were used
to hold a varied graduation of rocks harvested from the surrounding area, literally making the building from the site. At a
distance, the building appears monolithic, resting in the landscape like a stone wall, but from its interior the stones act as
a screen, shading the delicate program of wine making from the sun, and casting lace-like shadows.
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (1867-1959 AMERICAN ARCHITECT). FALLINGWATER. MILL RUN, PENNSYLVANIA.
1935-1939. This country retreat, designed by Wright when he was sixty-eight for the Pittsburgh department store magnate
Edgar J. Kaufmann, became a benchmark for the kinds of relationships that modern architecture would forge with nature.
The sense of shelter that the house provides is not determined so much by its walls, as by its deep overhangs and the way
that it nestles into the rock outcroppings. Fallingwater also plays off of our most primitive sense of civilization; to settle near
water and the promise of food, and to build a hearth.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE (1886-1969 GERMAN ARCHITECT). FARNSWORTH HOUSE. PLANO, ILLINOIS.
1945-1951. The Farnsworth House is a rare instance in architecture where there is true reciprocity between a building and
its surroundings. In this case, the medium of exchange is exposure. On one hand, the building is an object in nature, where
we are exposed to the daily life of the occupant; on the other hand, from within the house, the building frames nature,
exposing the occupant to light, weather, and the seasons.
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IAN HAMILTON FINLAY (1925-2006 BRITISH ARTIST AND POET). NUCLEAR SAIL. SLATE. LITTLE SPARTA,
SCOTLAND. 1974. In 1966 Hamilton moved to a farmhouse in Lanark, Scotland, and began to transform both it and the
environs into what is now known as Little Sparta. The critic Prudence Carlson has said, “Little Sparta has been made rife
with images not only of invincible Antique gods but also of deadly modern warships, our nearest symbols of sublimity and
terror… it is a deliberate correction of the modern sculpture garden through it’s maker’s revisiting the Neoclassical tradition
of the garden as a place provocative of poetic, philosophic and even political thought.”
FREDERICK FISHER AND PARTNERS (20/21c. AMERICAN ARCHITECTS). LOIS AND ROBERT ERBURU GALLERY.
HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, GARDENS, AND ART COLLECTIONS. SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA. 2005. The Huntington,
which is simultaneously gardens, library, and an art collection, is predisposed to placing art in direct relationship to nature.
The new gallery, looked to the precedent of the glass loggia at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, of how art and nature
could be choreographed together. The Erburu Gallery’s glass loggia, functions as a sculpture hall, putting direct visual
connections between the artwork in a contained space and the landscape.
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IAN HAMILTON FINLAY (1925-2006 BRITISH ARTIST AND POET). DURER’S SIGNATURE. STONE. LITTLE
SPARTA, SCOTLAND. 1980. As Finlay is both an artist and poet, he has treated Little Sparta with as much literary
reference as sculptural intervention. Throughout the gardens there are a series of stones carved with the signatures of
Classical artists. These chiseled fragments are a complex meeting of both literary, historical and aesthetic intentions. The
signatures often appear in landscape conditions akin to ones favored in the work their respective authors, other times it is
the act of signing nature which seems most powerful, of taming the wild with one’s initials.
SVERRE FEHN (1924-2009 NORWEGIAN ARCHITECT). NORDIC PAVILION. VENICE BIENNALE. VENICE, ITALY.
1958-1962. Modernism in Scandinavian architecture developed quite differently from the rest of Europe. In the North,
Modernism made allowances for the retention of vernacular architectural forms, the Romantic tradition, nature, and a sense
of symbolism rooted in materiality; as evidenced in the Nordic Pavilion. Seen here with an exhibition of Fjord chairs by the
Italian designer Patricia Urquiola, the room is an essay in the tradition of Nordic Romanticism; an obsession with the forest
and the place man finds within it.
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THRES HOLD
ALBERT FREY (1903-1998 AMERICAN ARCHITECT). FREY HOUSE. PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA. 1963-1964. In
this photograph, taken by Julius Shulman, we see Frey’s desire to barter with the desert; to find a way to escape into the
land, and live in an inhospitable climate. Frey and others established a tradition of designing in the desert. In this home that
he built for himself, he was able to inhabit a sublime landscape with a simple hut made of steel and glass.
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ANISH KAPOOR (1954 - INDIAN-BORN BRITISH ARTIST). VOID. 2003. There is a psychological condition which
often develops among physicists, when their knowledge of the vast amount of empty space that makes up most solids
leaves them with a physical anxiety that they might simply fall through the floor. Throughout his long career, Anish Kapoor
has shown a profound interest in locating these primal, physical and psychological states. His work, often described as
metaphysical, moves between the physical manipulation of matter and the state we expect to find it in, and the rift which
often occurs between what we see and what we know.
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COURT OF THE MYRTLES. ALHAMBRA. GRANADA, SPAIN. 1370. It is believed by anthropologists that the origin of
the courtyard came from the Sumerians; in what is now modern day Iraq. The Alhambra, which is a unique example of the
fusion of medieval European and Moorish architecture, takes advantage of these traditions of outdoor living and of framing
part of nature within the center of the house as a social and arcadian place. This idea of an empty space in the middle is
unlike our traditional American approach to building and nature, where we tend to place buildings as objects in the middle
of the landscape.
GIAMBATTISTA NOLLI (1707-1756 ITALIAN SURVEYOR AND ARCHITECT). PIANTE GRANDE DI ROMA (NOLLI
PLAN). 1748. The Nolli plan was the first map of Rome to draw distinctions between ancient remains and contemporary
buildings. It was also seen as the first map to characterize a public city, making a figure-ground relationship between the
public and private sections of Rome by drawing the interiors of buildings with a hatched poché and all exterior spaces,
including what had formerly been thought of as private gardens and courtyards, with the same white ground as the streets.
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GO-MIZUNOO (1596-1680 JAPANESE EMPEROR). SHUGAKUIN RIKYU IMPERIAL VILLA. JUGETSUKANCHA-TEI
(JUGETSUKAN TEA HOUSE). KYOTO, JAPAN. 1596-1680. In the West, the porch is an attachment which partially
encloses some exterior space in the landscape. In the East, this idea of tempering the threshold between the interior and
the exterior is expressed with much more continuity. Thresholds are expanded through a series of spatial conditions which
prolong the transition from building to landscape, and a graduation of material states, from the naturally occurring to the
man-made and constructed.
JAMES TURRELL (1943 - AMERICAN ARTIST). AFRUM PROTO. QUARTZ HALOGEN LIGHT. 1966. For over a century,
science has described light, unlike anything else in our material world, as both a particle and a wave. It is literally substantial
and insubstantial at the same time. The early projector pieces of James Turrell reveal light as a virtual substance, malleable
and otherwise shapeless, but susceptible to shape, and dependent upon our perception and participation for its presence.
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CARLO SCARPA (1906-1978 ITALIAN ARCHITECT). DETAIL OF WINDOW AT THE CAVONA MUSEUM. POSSAGNO,
ITALY. 1955-1957. From 1933 to 1947 Scarpa was the artistic director of Venini, a prominent glass manufacturer in
Venice. This experience along with his vitreous sensibilities as a Venetian, made it possible for him to execute such stunning
details as the windows at the Cavona Museum. In reference to them he said that he, “wanted to cut out a piece of the blue
sky.” This interest also stems from many of his trips to Japan where he observed the use of Shakkei (borrowing the distant
landscape through framed views) in many of the traditional gardens and villas of Kyoto.
LE CORBUSIER (1887-1965 SWISS ARCHITECT). UNE PETITE MAISON. CORSEAUX-VEVEY, SWITZERLAND.
1923. This house designed for Le Corbusier’s parents, sits at the edge of Lake Léman. The house was unpartitioned and left
as a single room with an 11 meter long window looking out to the lake and the Alps beyond. In contrast to the panoramic
view seen from within the house, Le Corbusier created a walled garden which prevented any view of the landscape
except for one small, calculated opening. He called this garden space a verdant room; and with it he reversed the typical
relationship of architecture to nature, by making the garden another room of the house.
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S CA LE
KOBORI ENSHU (1579-1647 JAPANESE TEA MASTER, FEUDAL LORD AND GARDEN DESIGNER). DAITOKU-JI
TEMPLE. BOSEN TEA GARDEN. KYOTO, JAPAN. 1648. Japanese garden design shares many interests with the pictorial
structure of traditional woodblock prints. Shakkei, a Japanese term for borrowed scenery, is the art of incorporating distant
views into a garden composition through the device of framing. Here the notion of background is collapsed visually and
dimensionally with the foreground.
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KNOCHENHAUERAMTSHAUS (A GUILD HOUSE FOR BUTCHERS). HILDESHEIM, GERMANY. 1529 (DESTROYED
IN 1945). The guild houses of Germany, England, and the Netherlands are evidence of a way of life in the waning Middle
Ages. These houses express the part to whole relationship of guild life; a synthetic neighborhood of men, and the collective
dwelling of a single brotherhood. They are cousins to the great Renaissance palazzos of Italy. Their public façades open
onto town squares through a colossal door, and their multitude of windows appear to account for each of their members.
Their gables, which face the street, express their civic disposition, and are both a single gigantic roofline and a collection
of miniature house-like dormers.
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ERIC ORR (1939-1998 AMERICAN ARTIST). NOTHING SPECIAL. INSTALLATION AT P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART
MUSEUM. LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK. 1981. NO LONGER EXTANT. On the Aventine hill in Rome, a small aperture
in a door to the gardens of the Knights of Malta, frames the dome of St. Peter’s and appears to miniaturize it, Orr frames
the Empire State Building from a small opening in a room in Queens in the same way. My first encounter with P.S.1 was on
behalf of Eric, to rehabilitate this rain damaged piece. Eric later assuaged critics of P.S.1’s courtyard walls by designing three
slots in the wall that framed views into the courtyard from the sidewalk and outward to the cityscape from the courtyard.
GIAMBATTISTA PIRANESI (1720-1778 ITALIAN PRINTMAKER AND ARCHITECT). PLATE NO.3, THE ROUND
TOWER, FROM THE CARCERI SERIES. 1740’S. 21¾ x 16½“. There is intimacy in the gigantic. In a canyon or a Roman
basilica we are strangely comfortable. The humility of feeling small can be unexpectedly familiar. Giambattista Piranesi, the
son of a Venetian stone mason, grew up in quarries and colossal construction sites. Many historians attribute his depiction of
man’s diminutive size in relationship to architecture to these formative experiences. The reason for pictorial exaggeration in
Piranesi’s prints may have also been to increase the sense of monumentality and epicness of the past. But perhaps Piranesi
found it comforting, and saw it as a means of projecting ourselves into the immensity of his prisons and temples.
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CLAES OLDENBURG (1929 - AMERICAN ARTIST). PROPOSED COLOSSAL MONUMENT FOR PARK AVENUE. GOOD
HUMOR BAR. CRAYON AND WATERCOLOR. 1965. 23½ x 17½“. In 1965, after returning from several months in
Europe, Oldenburg moved into an enormous studio in New York; measuring 204 feet long. The size of this studio, coupled
with the experience of repeated air travel, caused him to consider scale as one of the main subjects in his new body of work.
This drawing for Park Avenue was the first in his series on colossal monuments. These drawings thought of landscape as
operable space, as in this drawing, where the bite from the ice cream lets the roadway through.
JUNYA WATANABE (1961- JAPANESE FASHION DESIGNER). DRESS WITH NECK RUFF FROM THE TECHNO
COUTURE COLLECTION. FALL-WINTER 2000. As part of his fall 2000 collection, Watanabe looked at the ruffed collars of
Elizabethan dress for influence. Much of the design of 16c. clothing was considered ostentatious, structured, and intimidating
to wear. Watanabe took this detail and exaggerated it to the full size of a garment, thereby driving its characteristics even
closer to absurdity.
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A RCHETYPE
SIR JOHN SOANE (1753-1837 BRITISH ARCHITECT). THE BREAKFAST ROOM. NO. 12-14 LINCOLN’S INN
FIELDS. LONDON, ENGLAND. 1792-1824. Our reflection is a private affair; seeking it out on our way to a public
introduction. Our reflection is evidence of basic human insecurity. In front of the mirror we are forced to confront ourselves,
and to reckon with things that we would not otherwise see. In the breakfast room of Soane’s house, four convex mirrors
expand space through distortion and multiply light, but they also distort our reflected image and make our presence as a
subject in the architecture unavoidable.
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CARLO SCARPA (1906-1978 ITALIAN ARCHITECT). DETAILS FROM THE BRION CEMETERY. SAN VITO
D’ALTIVOLE, ITALY. 1969-1978. Carlo Scarpa made innumerable visits to the cemetery during its construction; many
under the long beam of a flashlight. It was only by the winnow of darkness that Scarpa believed he could scrutinize the
execution of details in their own right. Scarpa used the detail as a generative device for the entirety of the project, and he
developed them as ciphers for experience and meaning. Details carry our visceral memory, because they are already at the
scale of intimate experience; they are the joining of materials, the site of ritual, and the compression of meaning. In the
spiritual space of the cemetery they invent a language to communicate across the threshold of the virtual and the actual,
the symbol and the function, of this world and the next.
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JOSEPH CORNELL (1903-1972 AMERICAN ARTIST). SOAP BUBBLE SET. BOX CONSTRUCTION. 1936. 15¾ x
14¼ x 5¼“. The Soap Bubble Sets often used the repetition of subjects, both serially and cyclically, to derive their own
forms of symbolism. As the critic Sandra Leonard Starr confirms, “he allies himself with a tradition of symbolic language
which stretches back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and forward to the poetry of T.S. Eliot… while deliberately drawing on imagery
and forms which easily cross the boundaries of time and place.”
MARTIN MARGIELA (1957 - BELGIAN FASHION DESIGNER). STOCKMAN JACKET. SPRING-SUMMER 1997. This
jacket is made from the same beige linen used to make dress forms. The armature which is used to shape a garment,
becomes the garment itself. It is also a comment of the standardization of clothing into sizes. Prior to the invention of
Stockman’s late 19c. dress form, garments were not mass produced, and it was body types which defined standard sizing.
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GUNNAR ASPLUND (1885-1940 SWEDISH ARCHITECT). BRONZE DOOR PULLS ON THE STOCKHOLM PUBLIC
LIBRARY. STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN. 1918-1927. Adam and Eve stand guard at the main entrance to the library, as
a cautionary warning against the fruits of knowledge. A visitor to the library might be propelled into precisely the same
psychological state as the biblical couple, by the awkwardness of having to touch a naked man and woman in order to enter
the library.
ABBE MARC-ANTOINE LAUGIER (1713-1769 FRENCH ARCHITECT). ESSAI SUR L’ARCHITECTURE. 1753. Before
archeology emerged as a discipline, the past was often dealt with through the invention of mythologies. Laugier invented
the notion of a primitive hut to explain his interests in the origin of architecture. He believed that at its beginning,
architecture took its form by imitating nature, and that its maker and its user were necessarily the same person. The
primitive hut was a speculation on the origin of type and ornament, and a neo-Classical reaction to the prevailing excesses
of the Baroque period.
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JACQUES HERZOG AND PIERRE DE MEURON (1950 - SWISS ARCHITECTS). RUDIN HOUSE. LEYMEN, FRANCE.
1997. If Freud and Jung were still alive, they would most certainly set out to write a case study on the archetypal nature
of this house. Offset from the ground by a series of columns, the house appears to float on a shallow pool of water. The
roof and walls are seamlessly joined to reveal the platonic shape of a house, and its two entrances are equally interpretive.
One, being a large boulder which looks as though it has just rolled down the mountain and come to rest against the side of
the floating plinth on which the house sits; the other is a cast set of stairs revealed under the house. Unlike the traditional
way of entering through a front door, these stairs lead to the exact center of the house. Herzog and de Meuron drew on
the vernacular architecture of Switzerland and other Alpine countries, but they also wink at their psychological past of
archetypes and the interpretations of dreams.
SHAKER VILLAGE. HANCOCK, MASSACHUSETTS. 1790-1960. In Shaker communities buildings were color-coded
according to use; barns and service buildings were deep red or brown, workshops were yellow or cream, and houses were
white. In addition to color, a building’s use was commonly recognized through a set of typological forms that evolved from
empirical demands.
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S U RFA CE
LE CORBUSIER (1887-1965 SWISS ARCHITECT). THE DOMINICAN MONASTERY OF SAINT-MARIE-DE-LATOURETTE. EVEUX, FRANCE. 1957-1960. In Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture, his essay The Lesson of
Rome looks at the city as a collection of Platonic solids: cylinders, pyramids, cones, cubes, and spheres. In the monastery
of La Tourette we can see the evidence of these forms deployed in a masterful arrangement of volumes, proportions, and
symbolism.
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KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760-1849 JAPANESE ARTIST). A BATH HOUSE BY A LAKE. FUJIWARA NO YOSHITAKA.
WOODBLOCK PRINT. 1835-1836. 10¼ x 14¾“. In the 1850’s French artists discovered Japanese woodblock prints,
as a result of Japan ending its period of national isolation. This discovery led to the European fascination with the East
known as Japonism. Such artists as Manet, Matisse, Gaugin, and Van Gogh began to explore the new aesthetic and pictorial
grammar of the prints. In them they found no light source or shadows, but flat even color, a lack of virtual depth, and the
superimposition of near and far. They admired their non-optical construction and the axonometric projection method that
they used in place of perspective. When this fascination made its way to America, Frank Lloyd Wright, who had been to
Japan and collected these prints, began to translate some of these newly discovered ideas into architecture.
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RAY EAMES (1912-1988 AMERICAN DESIGNER AND ARTIST). COLOR STUDIES FOR THE EAMES HOUSE. PACIFIC
PALISADES, CALIFORNIA. 1949. As part of John Entenza’s Case Study House Program, the Eames house was built out of
pre-fabricated industrial components. In these drawings Ray studied the possible variations in panel color and arrangement,
much like the way she studied colorways for her textile designs.
LE CORBUSIER (1887-1965 SWISS ARCHITECT). MAUER WALLPAPER. SALUBRA COMPANY. GRENZACHWYHLEN, GERMANY. 1959. Although it is sometimes overlooked, Le Corbusier was also a painter, and he thought of his
wallpapers as machine prepared painting. This paper, called Mauer, could be hung horizontally or vertically, and many of
his wallpapers were often used on the ceiling. Anni Albers said that his papers were already architectural; with names like
velvet, masonry, sand, and scenery any combination of them was an architectural construction. In the book, White Walls
Designer Dresses, the critic Mark Wigley affirms that for Le Corbusier “to chose color is already to design.”
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FRANK GEHRY (1929 - AMERICAN ARCHITECT). DANZIGER STUDIO. HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. 1964. This
early project by Gehry looked to the flat façades, minimal forms, and brute textures of Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier for
inspiration. As an artist studio, he also looked to the prevailing typology of gallery space, using the white box to express
both the interior and exterior character of the building, and to draw an equity between notions of inside and outside.
ROBERT RYMAN (1930 - AMERICAN ARTIST). UNTITLED. OIL ON BOARD. 1961. 10½ x 10¾“. Robert Ryman
is a painter’s painter, a vague designation that cannot easily be defined but once pronounced is irrefutable. His work
is most often referenced according to its most obvious feature, its dedication to white. For decades his work has made
subtle variations on the theme of the white rectangle, at least literally. Ryman’s paintings are not treatises to absence, or
faithfulness to a lack of hue; they are paintings freed to make comments about painting. He has said himself that white,
”allows for the clarification of nuances in painting. It makes other aspects of painting visible that would not be clear with
the use of other colors.” The white in Ryman’s paintings is the possibility of emergence as a form of subject matter, or the
potential of a prepared ground to bear content. The complexity and nuance of his work has been compared to both Manet
and Duchamp, as work which is self-critical, allowing us to rethink painting through itself.
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LUIS BARRAGAN (1902-1988 MEXICAN ARCHITECT). SAN CRISTOBAL STABLES. MEXICO CITY, MEXICO. 1967.
Like Barragan’s park Las Arboledas, the San Cristobal estate also expresses a deep equestrian interest. The walls of the
stables were designed to the scale of a horse, and suggest fortification. Barragan saw a need for emotional architecture and
pursued color as a means to get there. With his interest in capturing the sense of Mexican light and vegetation, he would
have sympathized with Le Corbusier’s use of color as a way of building.
ISSEY MIYAKE (1938 - JAPANESE FASHION DESIGNER). COAT. SPRING-SUMMER 1995. Miyake drew on traditional
Japanese methods of sewing and construction for his 1995 collection, and set it against the newest vanguard materials. The
clear pink polyester monofilament was sewn and pleated, contrasting the transparency of the material with the rigidness
of its shape.
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ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF A SAMURAI WARRIOR. 1860’S-1890’S. The formal kimono worn by this samurai is
a shape found in many traditional Japanese garments. By accepting the two-dimensional nature of fabric, these garments
were designed as folded planes, revealing their angles and geometric volumes once on the body.
REM KOOLHAAS (1944 - DUTCH ARCHITECT). SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY. SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. 2004. When
Koolhaas was given the commission for the Seattle Public Library, he set out on a three-month study of libraries and
recorded information. The glass skin of the building is stretched taught around shifting floor planes, suggesting the powerful
influence of a library’s program over its built form; the power of a book’s content over it’s cover.
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TARA DONOVAN (1969 - AMERICAN ARTIST). UNTITLED. STYROFOAM CUPS AND HOT GLUE. ACE GALLERY.
NEW YORK CITY. 2003. In the early 1900’s a folk tradition known as tramp art, or chipwork, emerged in rural America.
Hobos and transients would meticulously collect objects from common culture and fashion them into artforms which they
could then barter for room and board. The resourcefulness and imagination that emerged from this folk tradition, is visible
today in the work of artists such as Tara Donovan. She uses everyday objects in large quantities to expose “an unpredictable
potential in the material” (critic Paul Brewer). The form of individual objects, once combined, slowly transform into an
accumulation through changes in repetition and scale.
TOYO ITO (1941 - JAPANESE ARCHITECT). TOD’S OMOTESANDO BUILDING. TOKYO, JAPAN. 2004. The traditional
Japanese philosophy of pao, or wrap, was used as the major design move of this building. Ito abstracted the pattern of the
zelkova trees on Omotesando Avenue to define the façade, but allowed the scale of the exterior to run discontinuously with
the interior, allowing for discrepancy to produce moments of interest.
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ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PATTERNING ON THE HUMAN SKULL. At birth the human skull is made up of 45
separate bony elements, whose suppleness allow not only for the compression of birth but for growth into adulthood. These
elements slowly fuse over time to form the typical adult skull of 28 solid bones. The joints between them are called sutures,
and with the exception of the mandible, they are the sole form of connection within the skull. These fibrous sutures are a
highly developed pattern which allows for growth over time.
PETER MARKLI (1953 - SWISS ARCHITECT). STIFTUNG LA CONGIUNTA. GIORNICO, SWITZERLAND. 1992. This
small museum was built to house the bronze relief sculptures of Hans Josephson. The building has no running water,
electricity, or other utilities, so the work can only be seen when natural conditions permit. The building and the sculptures
are meant to age together, as their materials accept different forms of aesthetic deterioration.
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ED RUSCHA (1937 - AMERICAN ARTIST). PURELY POLYESTER. PASTEL ON PAPER. 1977. 23 x 29”. The work of
Ed Ruscha is a territory where drawing and language have not yet been set against each other. The word is subject to being
drawn in the medium that it spells. A field of pastel releases a shape, which shifts between a serif and a sound that comes
distinctly from the letter ‘S’. In Ruscha’s work, words and marks are trafficked back and forth in a rheumy environment of
the page, without scale and without weight, where drawings make sounds and language has hue.
CROSSED LETTER. APRIL 25, 1859. In the 19c. it was common for a letter to be written in both directions on the same
piece of paper, in order to save money on the exorbitant cost of postage. This practice was also witnessed in the journals
and field books of naturalists who used this efficient method of documentation to allow them to fill a compact sketchbook
with more observations and drawings.
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008 AMERICAN ARTIST). UNTITLED. COMBINE PAINTING. OIL, PENCIL,
FABRIC, PAPER, PHOTOGRAPHS, CARDBOARD, AND WOOD ON PANEL. 1955. 15½ X 20¾“. This piece, owned
by Jasper Johns, is a representational arena of printed matter running up against something painted, something painted
arm-wrestling something drawn, a photograph overtaking a textile. In Rauschenberg’s combine paintings the status of
representation is rich, manifold, and fluctuating.
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