George Dodds

Ironically, architecture is probably more of a cult today than it was when those shaved headed scribes scratched sacred words onto the surface of palimpsested parchment.  In fact, the less important ritual and spirituality have become, in our culture during the past millennium, the more ritualistic has become the act of the architect.  When buildings were understood as the bodies of gods or at least the bodies of men who thought they were gods, the drawings they made of these buildings were of little importance.  Today, our buildings are rarely thought of as bodies and when they are, there never seem to be any gods in them, but the drawings we make of them curiously enough have taken on an almost sacred status of liturgical documents.  When Michelangelo was dying, he burned many all of his sketches and notes in his studio -- in part so that only the really good stuff would remain for posterity, in part, because he simply did not value them as artifacts.  They were a means to an end for him and nothing else.  That end was not simply a building, or a painting or a piece of sculpture. 

For Michelangelo and those who worked in his shadow, the act of drawing was a sacred event.  Its name, disegno, signified this.  De-segno, of the sign, it was literally a drawing-out of the god-like in the maker.  But the drawings themselves had value only if they somehow demonstrated this act of divination -- if one could trace in the physical drawing, the metaphysical traces of the process of drawing-out the work of art by the artist -- otherwise, they were just marks on pieces of vellum or parchment -- nothing more.  Today quite the opposite is true.  Architectural drawings are now collected by museums, exhibited at private galleries, interpreted by historians and critics.  They are ends in themselves.  A case in point -- Phyllis Lambert, the Director of the Canadian Center for Architecture, has recently purchased all of Peter Eisenman’s drawings -- every single one of them -- for millions and millions of dollars -- in perpetuity.  Every drawing he makes from this point on is also going into the Canadian Center for Architecture.  Every scribble is numbered and catalogued.  Can you imagine?  In case you are wondering, I am not making this up.  Today, God is no longer in the details, but in the drawings of the detail.

The work of Alfred and Jane West Clauss seems to suffer an unhappy fate as did PSFS when it comes to topical journals and the contemporary press. When its written-up, it’s often because of a negative, rather than its architectural or historical value – the New Jersey Departments of Health and Agriculture Building being the most recent example. The unexpected commencement of its demolition was announced on the pages of the US DoCoMoMo’s website on April 28th of last year, just a month before that organization’s annual conference. The Trenton Health and Ag Building was one of Alfred and Jane West Clauss’s largest and most significant projects from the later part of their Philadelphia-based career. Completed two decades after their relocation to Philadelphia from Knoxville, razed just as it was about to pass over that elusive threshold from outdated and ungainly, to historic and significant.

This story, however, takes us back to the beginning, before Alfred was practicing with Bellante at their Rittenhouse Square office in Philadelphia; before Jane West Clauss was teaching Interior Design at Beaver College or sat for the Pennsylvania Architectural Registration Exam; before their work was winning top awards in the annual Progressive Architecture Magazine program in the 1950s and potentially influencing one of of Louis Kahn’s iconic and early works, and before their experimental work on what is arguably the first enclave of international style houses in the United States, situated on a relatively isolated hilltop, in East Tennessee.

Either by predilection or circumstance, Alfred seemed a somewhat conflicted internationalist (albeit an ill-defined term at its birth) —perhaps because of the substantive influence Jane West had on his thinking. One thing is clear; that the architecture he practiced while in Knoxville, was materially, and perhaps most importantly, situationally, a highly contingent architecture, quite unlike that of his former mentors Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

The core of Design with Nature, its many well-mapped case studies notwithstanding, is a difficult balancing act. McHarg proposes that the longstanding anthropocentric view of Nature (which he severally traces back to “The Book of Genesis” in an obsessive Judeo-Christian manner) which requires the acquiescence of nature to human artifice, but must be replaced by humankind “listening to nature” – ideally an equal weighting of the “anthropocentric” and “ecological views.” Whether McHarg resolves this equation is another matter. Throughout Design with Nature, he jettisons the anthropocentric with withering pejoratives at every turn. Yet, in 1969, this novel proposition captivated generations.

There is a blindness, however, endemic to Design with Nature that makes it very much a work of its epoch: the uncritical embrace of all things scientific; the presumption that all things can be measured and that through measurement, all things may be understood. The other blindness is representational: the method of mapping and the presumption that anything that can be mapped can be controlled – clearly at odds with McHarg’s Zen-based “listening to nature” but no less so than the TVA’s “man in harmony with nature”. The more one accepts inherent contradictions, the easier they are not to see.

In his “Introduction,” to Design with Nature Now, (celebrating the 50th anniversary of Design with Nature) Frederick Steiner, a former student of McHarg’s in the early 1980s at Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts and now dean of PennDesign, recognizes the inherent philosophical quandary McHarg created for himself with singular understatement: “By making…nature…a higher authority…and reducing it to…data-driven positivism…McHarg was always going to get into philosophical trouble and attract criticism (Steiner: 2-3)”. Steiner continues: “Had McHarg titled his book Design with Landscape,…and offered caveats…then accusations of hubris and artlessness…levelled  at him could have been largely avoided “.  Somehow, the entirety of McHarg’s teaching career, not to mention the core argument and methodology of Design with Nature, suggest otherwise.

Thank you for the invitation to be with you today and be part of the interesting group of guest speakers you’ve assembled for this year. I’m talking today on the topic requested – the Barcelona Pavilion – rather than my current work, which is broad – from translation/critical commentary projects of Hermann Muthesius’s Landhaus und Garten, to a critical monograph on the contemporary practice of the Jackson Mississippi architectural firm of Duvall Decker. Today, however, I’m going to be narrow in a way that I hope will be useful, especially to those conducting advanced research using such archaic devices as physical books and journals, along with original manuscripts and drawings, in those dark and distant places – libraries, special collections, and archives. Today’s talk is not be posted on Reddit or Pintrest.

In conference papers, articles, and books, otherwise rational architectural historians, using an inaccurate  reconstructed plan, photographs of the 1929 building, and their own photographs of the 1986 replica, argue that the Barcelona Pavilion is nothing less than a paradigm of embodied material architecture – a cross roads where phenomenology and materiality meet. That the Barcelona Pavilion can be presented, and readily accepted, as a poster child for phenomenological architecture, brings into focus the intoxicating power of the image of a building constructed from the stuff of photographic space. The canonical photographs of this building may be the single most influential and untested images of what has become a paradigm of “modern” architectural form, space, and oddly enough, materiality.

The world of 0’s and 1’s did not create this phenomenon; it has, however, accelerated its development and made more acute its effects on both the culture of images and the image of culture. The 16 Berliner Bild-Bericht master prints, originally owned and controlled by Mies van der Rohe, were bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1969. They are an instructive case study of this condition, having elevated the Barcelona Pavilion into a potent and enduring picture of not just modern architecture, but modernity itself. I focus here on a small part of this larger story, the red curtain. It was ostensibly integral to the interior architecture of the 1929 pavilion (designed by both Mies and Lily Reich) and is now one of the most visually striking aspects of the 1986 reconstruction. I explore the potential meaning of its absence from the pavilion’s canonical images, why everyone who visited the 1929 pavilion and subsequently wrote about it never seemed to have noticed it, how this contrasts with the experience of visitors to the 1986 version, and most importantly, what may be learned from all this.

“Today, more often than not, a building is an attention-seeking object that glorifies its owner and architect and is oblivious…to its physical, and…social context. Its plan is diagrammatic—…and…[its] exterior [seems] reduced to one purpose: to excite the eye…by clever pattern.” This opening passage from Klaus Herdog’s epoch-setting, "The Decorated Diagram (1983)," could easily be supplanted for a gloss of the most press-worthy projects and buildings of this century.

Three decades after Herdog’s Diagram, Antoine Picon begins "Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity," citing the Viennese architect and theorist Adolf Loos’s famous “Crime and Ornament” essay from the early 20th century:

“Over the past 10 to 15 years ornamental practices made a spectacular return in architecture. To fully grasp the novelty and radical character of this revival, it is necessary to remember how modern architecture has been suspicious of ornament almost from the start...”

Owing to its subtly and complexity, Loos’s argument remains much debated and often misunderstood as many presume that he meant to equate crime WITH ALL ornament. He did not. He did take issue, however, with his fellow Viennese architects covering the surfaces of their architecture with patterns and images that had little to do with the building’s tectonics, their immediate situation, or the manner in which the building would be used.

In our current era, when that which was previously considered architecture’s ornament is equated to architecture itself; when form follows a digital program rather than a building program, when architects without architecture seem to have supplanted "Architecture without Architects (1964)," it seems propitious to rethink some of the operational polarities of 20th century architectural discourse – particularly those that situate the Venetian designer Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) and the German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) as opposite ends of an architectural spectrum in regards to their use of material and ornament.

This lecture focuses on a canonical work by each: Mies van der Rohe’s only alteration and addition project—the Resor House Project intended for Jackson Hole, Wyoming (1937), and Carlo Scarpa’s addition to the Gipsoteca Canoviana at Possagno (1955-57).

Every year magazines, within the design community and from without, publish top ten (or bottom ten) lists of cities to live in. Invariably, they’re bracketed as the “best” or the “worst.” For the former, Metropolis magazine based its criteria for its list of top ten international cities on the magazine’s “core” values:  “housing, transportation, sustainability, and culture.” Copenhagen topped their list while Portland, Oregon (the only US city) finished at number 10.  Singapore came in at number 4, that doesn’t really seem fair as it’s a city-state like San Marino, but with an even higher per capita income.

The worst cities, by comparison, are typically judged by such things as the likelihood of your car being where you left it after dinner and a movie, the wait time for being mugged at a bus stop, or the number of people mortally wounded while celebrating their home team winning a national championship. In the recent past Manchester, England, Detroit, Accra (Ghana), and Port Said (Egypt) have vied for the top of this bottom spot.

That said, the one thing going for Metropolis’s list, is that their criteria centers on what makes a city not just livable, but “the best.” And, they put their values (or metrics) out front for all to see. I’m here this evening, in part because both questions mean much to me: livable and great.

Scarpa’s work as a designer has long been narrowly framed as that of an object-fixated
architect, whose fascination with rich materials and overly-complex details
has overshadowed other aspects of his productive activities. Yet, there is another
Scarpa that has yet to be fully explored – a designer for whom landscapes and
gardens were intrinsic parts of the design of exhibitions and buildings.The landscapes and gardens Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) designed are an important yet largely unexamined part of his oeuvre. Several revised surveys of architectural and garden histories evince this oversight, all of which now conclude with his gardens.1 Surveys
notwithstanding, recent and more focused studies, including essays on landscape theory, and exhibitions with accompanying catalogues on Scarpa’s work

In 1986 on the centenary of Mies van der Rohe's birth, a new Barcelona Pavilion was built on the site of the original 1929 German Pavilion. That same decade marked the 150th anniversary of photography. Since then, much has been published about van der Rohe, the Pavilion, and photography, both jointly and singly. Whilst the literature on Mies van der Rohe has more than doubled in the past fifteen years, this is the first serious study of the unique phenomenon, and enduring myth of modernity, that was, is and will continue to be the Barcelona Pavilion.

Kieran Timberlake Architects have demonstrated in a series of builtprojects the constructive logic of architecture and the ability of buildings to alter our perception of a site. Their work exemplifies arespect for materials and assemblies and an interest in the idea of ‘instauration’, which views a place as one of continuousinhabitation. In an era in which architects often try to express non-architectural ideas through their buildings, KTA’s return to theexpressive power of construction and materials, of sensitive sitingand understated form comes as a welcome change.

A small group of garden historians, landscape architects and journalists gathered in the historic grounds of the Villa Vigoni in Loveno di Menaggio (Lake Como) on April 21, 1997, for the formal announcement of this year's Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino. Since its inception in 1990, the Scarpa prize has been awarded annually by the Treviso-based Fondazione Benetton Studi Richerche in recognition of outstanding examples of territorial stewardship and the restoration of culturally significant landscapes and gardens. This year's prize was presented to the Dessau-Wörlitzer Gartenreich.

This paper considers the nature of the speculative architectural project, its distinction from building,  its relationship to a particular aspect of mimetic inquiry, and the implications of  the rise of technique -- in particular, its influence on the mimetic capacity of a speculative architectural project. Architectural speculation is considered through the relationship of "making" and "place," evidenced in the admittedly unlikely conjunction of Gothic Scholasticism, surrealist theater, and the Cinquecento conceptual model of disegno. This paper explicates their interrelationship through reconstructing a program that invites participation in the collective mimesis of a speculative architectural project.

Long before the recently coined epochal Anthropocene, architects, planners, and what today would be called environmentalists, wrote alarming and prescriptive screeds, intended to redirect the pace, character, and scale of how humankind was altering, not only the face of the planet through con-struction, but the deeper means by which the planet self-regulated. Their focus, while urban, was largely systemic in nature extending to large swaths of earthly regions, wrapped in the methods and nomenclature of the scientific method which, during and following the Second World War, was in ascendence.

or many advocates of ecological design practices—an approach singularly associated with McHarg’s compendium—his work seemed as if it had burst forth fully grown, absent precedent. Rich in per-sonal anecdotes, detailed case studies, rigor, and analysis, it egregiously lacks attributions. If history teaches us anything, it is that virgin births are the stuff of myth. As towering a figure as is McHarg, he too stood on the shoulders of others. This is not to diminish either his brilliance nor his origi-nality; rather it is to better situate it within a larger discourse of which he was surely aware, during his schooling, and during his formative years teaching at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

That McHarg should incorporate “survival” into the second chapter’s title, “Sea and Survival,” is telling. Once again, this is not new. In doing so McHarg is following in a tradition of post-nuclear architectural “treatises” by Richard Neutra, Eliel Saarinen (1948), Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbus-ier, and Walter Gropius—all of whom focused on the architect’s task to help humanity survive itself. There was a commonly held visceral concern that while the Allies had won the war, we may have done so by losing humanity. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (Hersey 1946) is perhaps the keenest example in the literature documenting the moment—the account of six survivors of the Enola Gay’s dropping the first thermonuclear device on Hiroshima. By the time Richard Neutra publishes Survival through Design, less than a decade later, he was obsessed with the theme in relation to designing for biologi-cal organisms along with avoiding world-wide annihilation (Neutra 1954). He continues this theme throughout his career, most notably in World and Dwelling (Neutra 1962).

McHarg understood that timing is everything. Design with Nature (McHarg 1969) is more than an exemplar of the post-war period, during which quantification and the reduction of design into sci-entific systems of analysis, nascent in 20th-century modernism since the first Charter of the Congress Internationale Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 1928 was wholly and uncritically embraced in the spheres of planning, architecture, and landscape architecture. This system of systems came to full maturity at just the right time, during the height of the Vietnam War, and was published to coincide with the first moon landing by Apollo 11.

While rhetorically a series of autobiographical testimonials and large-scale technocratic case studies, its opening and closing chapters reveal something more. “Sea and Survival” is a relatively small-scale case study with large-scale implications—the product of a Landscape Architecture stu-dio McHarg directed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts. The mod-els demonstrate ways to preserve coastal dunes following the infamous “Ash Wednesday Storm” (March 5–9, 1962) that obliterated much of the littoral edges of New Jersey and New York; a prob-lem that has only become more keenly felt during the past two decades of climate change. I

The core of Design with Nature, its many well-mapped case studies notwithstanding, is a diffi-cult balancing act. McHarg proposes that the longstanding anthropocentric view of Nature (which he severally traces back to The Book of Genesis in an obsessive Judeo-Christian manner) which requires the acquiescence of nature to human artifice, must be replaced by humankind “listening to nature”—ideally an equal weighting of the “anthropocentric” and “ecological views.” There is a blindness, however, endemic to Design with Nature that makes it very much a work of its epoch: the uncritical embrace of all things scientific; the presumption that all things can be measured and that through measurement, all things may be understood. The other blindness is rep-resentational: the method of mapping and the presumption that anything that can be mapped can be controlled.

At times, the image of a building attains a status above and beyond the physical artifact represented, wherein the depiction of what could have been is given equal status to or privileged over what was built. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s oeuvre is chockablock with such instances – both intentional and not. The canonical Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs of his German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exposition (1928–29) are the most celebrated of these, while the drawings of his “Project for a Brick Country House” are arguably the most influential of his early Weimar experiments (1921–25).1 Yet, typical of the uncertainty that surrounds much of Mies’ avant-garde work of the 1920s, little is known with certainty of the genesis of the brick villa project: not its client, if there was one; not its site, if there was one; not even the year in which the drawings were made. Only two drawings attributable to Mies’ Berlin office describe the project: a spare plan, largely absent annotations, and a perspective. Neither existed for very long; no one seems to know what became of them.The brick villa project occupied the center of five years of fundamental experimentation in Mies’ career, beginning in 1921, a watershed year for the architect. Fundamental questions remain: what do the Der Neubau reproductions of the brick villa drawings represent and what can we learn from them? What do they document, and what do they depict?

The gardens that Gabriel Guévrékian designed during the 1920s in France have long been considered peripheral to the history of landscape architecture. The reasons for this marginalization are clear: they were too decorative for such major polemicists as Sigfried Giedion and too bourgeois for the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Even their designer rejected these gardens, suggesting that one neither take them too seriously, nor measure his worth by these works alone. No sooner had Guévrékian completed them he began the process of distancing himself from the entire project of the modern garden. Yet in recent reappraisals of both Guévrékian and the early “modernist” garden in France, his works have become de facto icons of the garden art of this period. Many of these recent assessments can be traced to a single article on Guévrékian that Richard Wesley published in 1980. This was the first scholarly treatment of Guévrékian’s gardens, and it did much to stimulate interest in his work. Using a conceptual apparatus developed by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in their seminal essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Wesley asserts that Guévrékian was attempting to copy the effects of cubist painting in his gardens. Yet, the gardens of Guévrékian, along with those of his contemporaries Paul and André Vera, Jean-Charles Moreux, and Le Corbusier, exhibit numerous influences such as surrealism, purism, and, in the case of Guévrékian, simultanéisme and Persian Paradise Gardens. Through reconsidering these gardens as complex cultural artifacts we can better understand the gardens Guévrékian designed during this period, the rich panoply of ideas upon which they were based, and why he felt the need to escape from them.

That the products of human invention ought to be, by intention, multivalent, and serve more than a single use, is a notion about which there is a renewed interest of late, in no small part because of the rise of “design thinking,” in a world of diminishing resources. Indeed, the architectural idea that virtually all rooms (or spaces) ought to be designed for a single purpose, and hence take on the particulars of that purpose (read utility), is a byproduct of a particular branch of early 20th-century avant-garde ideology that Alfred Barr famously characterized as “Apollonian,” or rational.

So too are many of the products of today’s industrial designer that populate our offices, retail spaces, public squares, and domestic kitchens. To design for a single-purpose, in such a single-minded manner, however, presupposes a lack of want and an excess of means, a condition that seems to share little with our present state. Indeed, it is only in the last century or so that western civilization (as distinct from culture) has had the ability and “luxury” to operate unsustainably on national and global scales.

The Brion family sanctuary in San Vito di Altivole is arguably the best known of Carlo Scarpaʼs more than seventy projects for gardens and landscapes. This aspect of
his work, largely overlooked in the literature, ranges from small temporary installations to large-scale parks (Dodds 2000). Scarpa is better known for the many museums and exhibitions he designed wherein he carefully honed his ability to direct oneʼs vision through subtly manipulating the body of the visitor. In the design of the Brion sanctuary (1968-78) Scarpa combines the scopic and somatic dimensions of his architectural production, engaging visitors in his personal desire for landscapes and gardens. The circumstances of the Brion project are distinct among Scarpaʼs previous landscape and garden commissions. Unlike his garden for the Venice Biennale (1952), the temporary landscape for the Italia ʼ61 Exhibit in Turin (1961), and the gardens for the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia (1950-63) and the Museo di Castelvecchio (1957-64), the Brion project was privately funded. Moreover, Scarpa was unrestrained by the archeological, museological, and institutional programs that limited these earlier works. The Brion commission is further distinguished by its nominal programmatic requirements for a site that posed few if any spatial limitations beyond its L-shaped configuration. This is not to say that there was no preesistenze ambientali into which Scarpa intervened (Rogers 1958, 304). During a lecture in Madrid in the summer of 1978, Scarpa commented that he understood his work as being located inside a longstanding and deeply felt tradition.12 Scarpaʼs relation to the Venetian School of painting must be considered a key part of this tradition, an aspect of which is the representation of bodies as landscapes (Spengler 1926, 271) and landscapes as bodies (Wilde 1974). The key here is not so much the ancient and more generic association of nature as feminine, but rather the particularly Venetian tradition of the fleshy female anthropomorphizing of landscape (Clark 1976). Naomi Schor argues, “To focus on the detail … is to become aware … of its participation in a larger semantic network, bound on the one side by … ornament, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other…. The detail …[therefore]… is gendered and doubly gendered as feminine.” The relation between the gendered and eroticized ground of Venetian painting and the physical ground of the Veneto, the Veneto as signifier and signified, is a key to Scarpaʼs understanding of landscape and garden, and the role that the body, particularly the female body, played in the gardens he designed.

Returning to the newly conserved Brion Memorial at San Vito d’Altivole, in Italy’s Veneto region, is unexpectedly rejuvenating. Designed and built from 1969-78 as the final resting place for industrialist Giuseppe and Onorina Brion, she and her son Ennio charged Carlo Scarpa (1906-78) with the design of this roughly half-acre L-shaped addition to the public cemetery, largely because Giuseppe Brion admired Scarpa’s work. Both men shared a deep appreciation of the history of the Veneto landscape, in paintings and prospects. The Brions, chose a site with just such a prospect – of the Asolani Hills, the 13th-century fortress – the Rocca di Asolo – and on clear days, the Dolomites. Owing to the close proximity of Scarpa’s ingenious addition to the Gipsoteca canoviana at Possagno (1957), and Andrea Palladio’s, Villa di Maser (each a few minute’s-drive from Brion) the memorial can be a lively place, chockablock with bussed tourists and architecture students completing study tours. Yet, popularity and time have not been kind to this monument – blackened and spalling concrete, decayed wood, damaged or lost glass tiles, corroded copper piping, fascia and joints festering, loss of gold leaf and plaster finishes, a badly trampled lawn, plantings poorly situated, are just a few items from a substantially longer list requiring an extensive, multi-year conservation project.

Early on the morning of November 30, 1960, William Lescaze wrote a note to himself that says much about his place in the history of 20th century architecture in the United States.  "It is strange when you look back and you see how much you have been ignored, how much silence has been built around you,...One wonders? When did it begin?  I can't really say.  It is difficult to put a finger on it and say: this is it -- it's so silent, like a fog.  And it's been going on now for years and years -- yet I still hope that sweet history will show that I created more than they acknowledge and that I did influence the current of modern architecture more than they are admitting today." When Lescaze wrote those observations he was already very near the end of his career.  His most significant commissions were behind him and the future, a place the Swiss born architect had often speculated upon in his work, looked forbidding and unclear.  While Lescaze enjoyed many "firsts" during his career, history has given him credit for very few "bests" (the PSFS building notwithstanding).  Today, William Lescaze's career and legacy stand as somewhat of an enigma.

Early on the morning of November 30, 1960, William Lescaze wrote a note to himself that says much about his place in the history of 20th century architecture in the United States.

"It is strange when you look back and you see how much you have been ignored, how much silence has been built around you,...One wonders? When did it begin?  I can't really say.  It is difficult to put a finger on it and say: this is it -- it's so silent, like a fog.  And it's been going on now for years and years -- yet I still hope that sweet history will show that I created more than they acknowledge and that I did influence the current of modern architecture more than they are admitting today." 

When Lescaze wrote those observations he was already very near the end of his career.  His most significant commissions were behind him and the future, a place the Swiss born architect had often speculated upon in his work, looked forbidding and unclear. 

While Lescaze enjoyed many "firsts" during his career, history has given him credit for very few "bests" (the PSFS building notwithstanding).  Today, William Lescaze's career and legacy stand as somewhat of an enigma.

This is a small part of a much larger and ongoing study of landscape and garden in the work of Carlo Scarpa. I focus on one of the last and least studied landscapes Scarpa realized, albeit not fully – the curiously named “Villa Palazzetto” in Monselice which he worked on from 1969 until his death. Next year marks the centennial of Carlo Scarpa’s birth. Born in Venice in 1906, he died in Japan, in November, 1978, ten days after falling down a fl ight of concrete stairs while waiting in the street near his hotel. Ironically, he fell while his wife Nini was fetching his eye glasses which he had left in their room. (This is one of the reasons that Andy Warhol said “The worst part of dying is that it is so embarrassing.”) [2] (This photograph was taken of Scarpa at a Chrysanthemum Festival of all things, the day before his accident. Chrysanthemum as the flower of death.) The comic-tragic manner in which Scarpa died, however, is less important for our purposes today than where he died, Sendai, Japan. I return to this part of the story in a few moments. Scarpa is, for most students of landscape

October 04, 2020, marked the 300th birth anniversary of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), the Veneto-born Roman architect, delineator, amateur archeologist, historical fabulist, and theorist. During his brief but massively productive life Piranesi created over one thousand copper plate etchings of Rome and its environs, albeit not always as others saw it. 185 of these were published in his well-known, Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna (Various Views of Ancient and Modern Rome) and his later, Varie Vedute di Roma (Various Views of Rome), both of which he printed continuously, from his early twenties until his last years, capturing the full range of his artistic development.

Particularly later in his career, Piranesi often used perspectival representation, less to document than to depict – to incite in those who viewed his images, the sensations of the sublime, a simulacrum of his own responses to these singular places.
The core of the exhibition is not Piranesi’s vedute (or views) however; rather, our focus is his obsessive study of ancient Roman construction techniques primarily from, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de Romani (1758-61). These analytique-like compositions are remarkable, not because of what they depict or document, but because of what Piranesi demonstrates. Absent the visual hyperbole of the vedute, Piranesi uses materials and methods of construction to shore-up his argument against French and German academicians who favored Greek antiquity as the source of later (read lesser) Roman art and architecture. These tectonic drawings (expressions of idea through construction and structure) illustrate his vitriolic prose, arguing for the hegemony of Roman architecture based on Etruscan and Egyptian roots. Piranesi’s historical exegesis was eschewed by most of his contemporaries. Yet, since the publication of such relatively recent paradigm-shifting works as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), it is an idea that continues to gain currency.

There are two contemporaneous constituencies accreted to the Piranesian core; work from Fellows and Affiliated Fellows of the American Academy in Rome (AAR), and student projects from a Spring 2020 UTK School of Architecture seminar/workshop. The work of the AAR Fellows is marked by their appreciation of site specificity and the material presence of Rome and beyond. Participants in the workshop used one of Piranesi’s construction studies (included in this exhibition) as springboards for digitally-based excursions. Together, this exhibition’s contemporaneous components demonstrate the continuing capacity for Piranesi’s work to incite private reveries for public colloquy and the ongoing role of the hand, vis-à-vis the drawing-out of architecture, as a vital means to understanding construction technique as a necessary prelude to the act of building idea.

The exhibition is curated by George Dodds, PhD, Alvin & Sally Beaman Professor, at the University of Tennessee. It is designed by Louis Gauci, Architect. The work of the Fellows of the American Academy of Rome (FAAR) and student work notwithstanding, all of the etchings, prints, and books on display are from the private collection of George Dodds. The FAAR work on display spans three decades; it includes the work of Caroline B. Constant, Thomas K. Davis, Rosetta Elkin, Ursula Emery-McClure, Gary Hilderbrand, Steven Kieran, Thomas Leslie, James Timberlake, Michael McClure, Kiel Moe, Mark Schimmenti, Ted Shelton, and Tricia Stuth.

Image Credits: Ewing Gallery, Eric Cagely, and George Dodds,  2021

This is the text to the 20-minute video presentation available elsewhere on this site. It is from the 2021 US DoCoMoMo's National Symposium on May 27 (delayed from 2020 in Chicago). It explores the history and cultural situation of what may be the first International Style enclave of houses realized in the United States, designed by Alfred and Jane West Clauss, on edge of Knoxville Tennessee. Begun in 1939, the 5th of the planned ten houses was completed in 1943. The Clausses left the Knoxville area in 1945 to live and practice in the Philadelphia area. Their work, which is both fine and important, is absent from virtually every major overview of Modern Architecture. That said, the complex context of their work and its influence on some of America's most esteemed post-war architects, has yet to be properly situated within the larger and nuanced story of American modern architecture. This presentation is but a start. NB: In the presentation at DoCoMoMo, I misspoke, stating that Max Clauss (Alfred's cousin who held an important propaganda post for the Nazi regime) toured the US after the invasion of Poland; it was 1938. This presentation is also available on the US DoCoMoMo website.

This is the text to the 20-minute video presentation available elsewhere on this site. It is from the 2021 US DoCoMoMo's National Symposium on May 27 (delayed from 2020 in Chicago). It explores the history and cultural situation of what may be the first International Style enclave of houses realized in the United States, designed by Alfred and Jane West Clauss, on edge of Knoxville Tennessee. Begun in 1939, the 5th of the planned ten houses was completed in 1943. The Clausses left the Knoxville area in 1945 to live and practice in the Philadelphia area. Their work, which is both fine and important, is absent from virtually every major overview of Modern Architecture. That said, the complex context of their work and its influence on some of America's most esteemed post-war architects, has yet to be properly situated within the larger and nuanced story of American modern architecture. This presentation is but a start. NB: In the presentation at DoCoMoMo, I misspoke, stating that Max Clauss (Alfred's cousin who held an important propaganda post for the Nazi regime) toured the US after the invasion of Poland; it was 1938. This presentation is also available on the US DoCoMoMo website.

Depict | Demonstrate | Disclose - Carlo Scarpa's Drawing 31615 for the Museo Castelvecchio
(Images of associated paper)

Architectural drawings can be problematic for traditional archives. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, which are accessioned, architectural sketches (and in some cases, drawings) may not. They can be the flotsam and jetsam in an archival terra incognita. Even at the well-organized Centro Carlo Scarpa at Treviso, for example, I’ve encountered uncatalogued or misattributed drawings, absent identifying nomenclature on virtual scraps of paper. 

Family-owned archives present their own unique challenges. While visiting the apartment Scarpa shared with his wife Nini, at the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice, for example, longtime client and Scarpa friend, Aldo Businaro (who was developing his own archive) opened the drawer of a bedside nightstand. In mid-sentence, he began pulling out A4 sheets covered with Scarpa sketches –heretofore unknown to Businaro. Discovering Scarpa drawings is one thing; access to collections is another matter.

When I began researching landscape and garden in the oeuvre of Scarpa two decades ago, I had entry to fewer than 1,000 original drawings: the Castelvecchio archives at Verona, the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, and the private collections of Guido Pietropoli, Arrigo Rudi, and Aldo Businaro. The remainder, more than 20,000 graphic works of various types and sizes, were stored in the professional office of Tobia and Afra Scarpa in Montebelluna, where they presented Tobia and his then partner/wife Afra, with birthright and burden. In large part, because of this onus on the Scarpas, and the shadow cast by the father on the work of the son, access to the drawings was limited to a handful of former associates and academics. These are the graphic documents that since 2006, constitute the bulk of the collection at the Archivio di Stato di Treviso.

The timing of my first research visit to the Museo Castelvecchio archive in 1998, would have been poor had I come to see only the famous “factures,” as Marco Frascari calls them in Eleven Exercises, of Cangrande’s new setting, and Scarpa’s exuberant details. Most were out for cleaning in preparation for the 1999 exhibition at the CCA. Fortunately, my interest lay in the flotsam and jetsam.

Depict | Demonstrate | Disclose: Drawing 31615

Architectural drawings can be problematic for traditional archives. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, which are accessioned, architectural sketches (and in some cases, drawings) may not. They can be the flotsam and jetsam in an archival terra incognita. Even at the well-organized Centro Carlo Scarpa at Treviso, for example, I’ve encountered uncatalogued or misattributed drawings, absent identifying nomenclature on virtual scraps of paper. 

Family-owned archives present their own unique challenges. While visiting the apartment Scarpa shared with his wife Nini, at the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice, for example, longtime client and Scarpa friend, Aldo Businaro (who was developing his own archive) opened the drawer of a bedside nightstand. In mid-sentence, he began pulling out A4 sheets covered with Scarpa sketches –heretofore unknown to Businaro. Discovering Scarpa drawings is one thing; access to collections is another matter.

When I began researching landscape and garden in the oeuvre of Scarpa two decades ago, I had entry to fewer than 1,000 original drawings: the Castelvecchio archives at Verona, the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, and the private collections of Guido Pietropoli, Arrigo Rudi, and Aldo Businaro. The remainder, more than 20,000 graphic works of various types and sizes, were stored in the professional office of Tobia and Afra Scarpa in Montebelluna, where they presented Tobia and his then partner/wife Afra, with birthright and burden. In large part, because of this onus on the Scarpas, and the shadow cast by the father on the work of the son, access to the drawings was limited to a handful of former associates and academics. These are the graphic documents that since 2006, constitute the bulk of the collection at the Archivio di Stato di Treviso.

The timing of my first research visit to the Museo Castelvecchio archive in 1998, would have been poor had I come to see only the famous “factures,” as Marco Frascari calls them in Eleven Exercises, of Cangrande’s new setting, and Scarpa’s exuberant details. Most were out for cleaning in preparation for the 1999 exhibition at the CCA. Fortunately, my interest lay in the flotsam and jetsam.

Architectural drawings can be problematic for traditional archives. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, which are accessioned, architectural sketches (and in some cases, drawings) may not. They can be the flotsam and jetsam in an archival terra incognita. Even at the well-organized Centro Carlo Scarpa at Treviso, for example, I’ve encountered uncatalogued or mis-attributed drawings, absent identifying nomenclature on virtual scraps of paper.

Family-owned archives present their own unique challenges. While visiting the apartment Scarpa shared with his wife Nini, at the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice, for example, longtime client and Scarpa friend, Aldo Businaro (who was developing his own archive) opened the drawer of a bedside nightstand. In mid-sentence, he began pulling out A4 sheets covered with Scarpa sketches –heretofore unknown to Businaro. Discovering Scarpa drawings is one thing; access to collections is another matter.

When I began researching landscape and garden in the oeuvre of Scarpa two decades ago, I had entry to fewer than 1,000 original drawings: the Castelvecchio archives at Verona, the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, and the private collections of Guido Pietropoli, Arrigo Rudi, and Aldo Businaro. The remainder, more than 20,000 graphic works of various types and sizes, were stored in the professional office of Tobia and Afra Scarpa in Montebelluna, where they presented Tobia and his then partner/wife Afra, with birthright and burden. In large part, because of this onus on the Scarpas, and the shadow cast by the father on the work of the son, access to the drawings was limited to a handful of former associates and academics. These are the graphic documents that since 2006, constitute the bulk of the collection at the Archivio di Stato di Treviso.

The timing of my first research visit to the Museo Castelvechio archive in 1998, would have been poor had I come to see only the famous “factures,” as Marco Frascari calls them in Eleven Exercises, of Cangrande’s new setting, and Scarpa’s exuberant details. Most were out for cleaning in preparation for the 1999 exhibition at the CCA. Fortunately, my interest lay
in the flotsam and jetsam.

The notion of “looking around,” is anathema to archivists. Yet, owing to the nature of my topic, it was imperative that I did just that. I had come to the Castlevecchio, after all, to research the garden that the museum’s director Licisco Magagnato, who had hired and worked with Carlo Scarpa, insisted in his essay in the Opera completa, was not a garden at all.

Those of us familiar with Reynar Banham’s work may know him principally through the book that established his career, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). Among his other major accomplishments are The New Brutalism (1966), Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) along with his last major scholarly book, Concrete Atlantis (1986). Yet, Banham began working for The Architectural Review almost a full decade (1952) before the publication Theory and Design. Barbara Penner (from the Bartlett where Banham was on faculty for much of his career) begins her recent overview of his oeuvre, by noting that during his almost four-decade-long career, cut short at the relatively young age of 66, in addition to his scholarly works Banham had published a stupefying 750 articles – which Penner rightly calls “epic.”  Much like his London-based contemporary, Joseph Rykwert (who could not have been less similar in temperament, style, and philosophy), he made his living as a journalist, supporting himself largely through writing and academic appointments in England and the United States. What interests me today, however, is less the articles and books he published while living, but his last article, published two years after his death. Banham’s final essay, “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” was published in The Statesman & Society in 1990. In it, he argues there is an absolute distinction between “architecture,” and “building,” between architecture and what he prefers to call, “good design.”

Architectural critics make arguments for what could have been; architectural polemicists argue for what ought to be. The former comments on what has passed, the latter propels a course toward what has yet to come. These two figures often overlap. Architectural history and theory have always been a response to the made, attempting to pose solutions to problems not readily addressed from within the strictures of practice. Whether focused on the past or the future, there is a present tense required of both critic and theorist – a grounding in the here and now, even if it is only to reject the present scope of architecture.

Hermann Muthesius argued for the need to re-invent German architecture by re-making German culture; embracing mechanization, but never losing sight of the primacy of dwelling and the coziness of home. Adolf Loos similarly focused on the sorry state of Viennese domestic interiors while rejecting foundational values of contemporary Austrian culture. Critic and polemicist alike write for his or her own time while envisioning another. This brings me to the heart of this brief talk, which begins as many histories do, with a story, probably apocryphal.

Delivered at Middle Eastern Technical University on November 07, 2007

It is particularly appropriate for us to meet on this topic, in this elegant building, on this historic site. Here, in the reinvented landscape of this campus honored by the Aga Khan Award, and in this landmark Brutalist building designed by Behruz Çinici, on what was once the arid rise and fall of a humorless countryside absent vegetation, we can register the conflation of the continuity and change. These are not abstract academic ideas; here they are tangible, visceral, and haptic, remaking of this once-naked topography into a verdant small city of over 20,000 students and faculty.

We are immersed here in the melding of cultural traditions uninterrupted, and the simultaneous desire for that which is new and provokes. The buildings, gardens, landscape, and carefully constructed views, that comprise the home of The Faculty of Architecture, are living history. We find here preserved what was once an avant-garde Western architectural ethos alongside the traditions of Ottoman and Persian gardens. As we speak today, in this complexly constructed place, we enjoy the fruits of the highest form of artifice – a topos of civility that daily demonstrates the seamless conflation of continuity and change in culture and in architecture.

[I]n the artwork the meaning of the object takes on spatial appearance, whereas in photography the spatial appearance of an object is its meaning. Sigfried Kracauer, " Photography " [I]n this age of interface, the image…gives way before something new that I call show. It is the historian's task to fi nd and weigh the evidence establishing whether show is heterogeneous to what has been called image in the past. …Since the sixteenth century…the eye [has been]…but [an] instrument by which images are imprinted. …This identifi cation of vision with inward visualization must be recognized as a crucial achievement of European modernity. …Weltbild…[sig-nifi es] " the image of the world. " …[I]n the nineteenth-century…[it] was used in opposition to " worldview. " …Bildwelt is [a] very new [term]. …It suggests a 'universe of pictures " by which I am surrounded and which hide from me the world of raw things. Their opposition suggests the transition from the visualization of the world to the reduction of the world to a picture. Ivan Illich, " Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show " A symposium such as this underscores both the power and, perforce, the potential problems of architectural reconstructions – analog or digital. [2] The construction of a full-size replica of the Barcelona Pavilion on the site of the 1929 building raises similar if not more perplexing questions. Projecting reconstructions is not new of course; King Solomon reconstructed a dream in the form of a temple to house the arc of the covenant. [3] It is one thing, however, to build based on even the most vivid recollection of a dream state. It seems quite another to create a simulacrum of a building that provokes a kind of dream state in those who are drawn into, often uncritically, representations afforded the status of a realized building. In the case of the Barcelona Pavilion, this happens all too frequently in disciplines as varied as painting, sculpture, landscape architecture, and of course, architecture. The medium that entices the mutability of interpretations and the apparent lack of criticality regarding the Barcelona Pavilion, is the curious combination of the 1986 reconstruction and the photographs of the German Representation Pavilion from 1929. [4] I just came from a conference of architectural historians held a few days ago where a paper presenter, using a 1981 reconstructed plan, photographs of the 1929 building, and her own photographs of the 1986 replica, argued that the Barcelona Pavilion is nothing less than a paradigm of embodied material architecture – a cross roads where phenomenology and architecture meet. That the Barcelona Pavilion can be presented, and readily accepted, as a poster child for phenomenological architecture brings into focus the intoxicating power of the image of a building constructed in photographic space. The canonical photographs of this building may be the single most infl uential and untested images of what has become a paradigm of " modern " architectural form, space, and oddly enough, materiality. The world of 0's and 1's did not create this phenomenon; it has, however, accelerated its development and made more acute its effects on both the culture of images and the image of culture. [5] The 16 Berliner Bild-Bericht master prints, originally owned and controlled by Mies van der Rohe, were bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1969. They are an instructive case study of this condition, having elevated the Barcelona Pavilion into a potent and enduring picture of not just modern architecture , but modernity. I focus here on a small part of this larger story, the red curtain. [6] It was ostensibly integral to the interior architecture of the 1929 pavilion (designed by both Mies and Lily Reich) and is now one of the most visually striking aspects of the 1986 reconstruction. [7] I explore the potential meaning of its absence from the 01 02c 3a 3b

The homonyms site and sight offer a critical aperture through which I will explore a crisis of architectural representation.  Perhaps once defined in terms of not knowing what, how, or in what manner to draw, the current state of architectural representation may be characterized by the problem of not knowing where to draw or what to draw upon.  Within the speculative architectural project lays hidden a question that may help open-up our limited cone of vision as to what constitutes an architectural site.  Where is the site of our drawing and how are these drawings related to the ideas of site/sight?  Moreover, what is the precise relationship between the site of drawing to the site of construction. This paper, which attempts to offer an expanded view of defining, demarcating, and drawing sites, is less an answer to this crisis than it is representative of the crisis.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and the landscape of the American West may seem an unlikely combination. The question I consider is what can we learn from this improbable pairing?  The imagery of American western landscapes in the 19th century, Mies’ laconic, self-referential myth-making, combined with his many no longer extant or never built highly influential early polemical works, all incite iconoclastic reveries.
They are as compelling as they are problematic as they tend to provoke interpretations that are at once, extreme and simplistic. Further complicating things, information on Mies’ Berlin years, with the exception of a few extant houses, often comes from photographs, rough sketches, construction drawings, and anecdotes of clients and employees. Absent the physical artifact, the more malleable is a work of art, and the more open it is to interpretation. Consequently, scholarly speculation about this work is no less a reflection of these limitations as it is a reflection of the interests of the author.

The intent of this paper is to consider the relationship of memory and architectural production, as demonstrated in the ideas of context and locus. Specifically this study will concentrate on the design and drawing of Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi, in terms of how they demonstrate the relationship between drawing content and design intent. Both Rossi's and Scarpa's use of the fragment and the repetitive image will be considered in relationship to architecture and memory.

Varro's ancient etymology for the founding of sites is at the center of this story.  For, in the end, Varro explains that the founding of a site, the drawing of the templum, and the building of the temple were all essentially intended to tell us where to look and perhaps, how to see.  That the templum, from which the contemporary English terms temple, template, and contemplate, are derived, was as much about the sight of vision as it was about the site of construction.  In an attempt to better understand the interrelationship of these two issues (sight of vision and site of construction) this paper considers the physical site of architectural drawing and the architectural drawing as virtual site.  This paper attempts to address both the visual problem of sight and the visceral problem of site as demonstrated in the architectural works of 16th artist/architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) and the 20th century architect/artist Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978).  Of particular interest will be the relationship of the architectural drawing to the production and demarcation of sites.

This exploration of the role of imaginal bodies in architectural design begins with the work of a pupil and is followed by an analysis of his teacher.  In both drawing and construction, these architects establish a dialogue between bodies and buildings through a phenomenological reduction of body-movement and body-image.  Using the lessons learned from the body -- particularly the body of the mime -- as a means of apprehending space and form, the Italian architect Valeriano Pastor situates the traditional image of “a body within a body” in a contemporary architectural practice.  Pastor’s graphic manner of evoking the body of the mime in order to provoke the design of a building is much indebted to the work of Carlo Scarpa, with whom Pastor studied and practiced.  We explore the drawings of Pastor and Scarpa in terms of how each architect engages the form and physicality of the human body within their own architectural production.

This student work was performed under the auspices of The Temple University Summer Program for Architectural Studies.  The Summer Program’s goal was to explore the interrelationship of landscape architecture and urban design through focusing on the vast, marginal and often residual meta-scapes within the city of Philadelphia.  The meta-scapes studied in these studios were formed by the roadbeds, bridges and viaducts of the interstate highway system and regional rail lines that cut through the three centuries-old fabric of the city.  Ranging in size and scale from the narrow wedge-shaped zone between I-95 and the city’s Fishtown neighborhood, to the base of Market Street at the Delaware River, this work attempts to offer an expanded view of defining, demarcating, and drawing architectural sites in the city.  The following work is from the second year of the program -- an exploration of a marginal site in the East Falls section of Philadelphia, beneath U.S. Route 1.

1994 National Institute of Architectural Education First Prize Essay

The problem of representing cities has been a specific concern of architects at least since Leon Battista Alberti first attempted an accurate survey of Rome using a circular method of ropes and stakes. However, at issue here is not so much the mapping of entire cities, but rather those marginal or residual sites in the industrial cities of North America which have historically gone unseen within the conventional discourse of 20th century urbanism. Indeed, within the mapping of these sites lays hidden a question that may help open-up our limited cone of vision as to what constitutes an urban site. The problem of seeing sites (making sites visible) is, or course, related to the problem of representing sites as well. Perhaps once defined in terms of not knowing what, how, or in what manner to draw, the current state of architectural representation may be characterized by the problem of not knowing where to draw or what to draw upon. Where is the site of our drawing and how are these drawings related to the ideas of site/sight?  Moreover, what is the precise relationship between the site of drawing to the drawing of sight?  This essay, which attempts to offer an expanded view of defining, demarcating, and drawing city sites, is less an answer to this crisis than it is representative of the crisis

It’s easy to forget that the space that fronts our city’s major buildings, or the zone between curb and building, are no less important than the buildings themselves. So many today grow up in settings absent sidewalks that this significance may fail to register while traversing a city. Yet, this public space is pro bono public – for the public good. Which raises such nettlesome questions as which public and what good? These are less questions with a single answer than the basis for debate, the sort in which any populace ought to be endlessly engaged.

The kitchen of a favorite restaurant, the basement of hospitals, inside the working end of a meat packing plant: all places better left unseen. Yet, to appreciate fully the architecture of the new The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Houston Branch (DFRB), you really need to stick your head in its basement and follow the money. While they do not make it here (that’s what the U.S. Treasury Department is for), they process the hell out of it.

Periodic changes to the Prime Interest Rate notwithstanding, most Americans neither know nor care what the Fed does on a day-to-day basis, let alone that currency requires occasional “processing” and “flow control.” This facility’s public relations program, however, is engineered to change this, at least for those in Houston. Chairman Allen Greenspan, two parts Sphinx, one part Delphic Oracle, is perhaps the most visible face of the Fed’s historic spectral opacity. Through his periodic testimonies at Finance Committee hearings on Capitol Hill, delivered in a syntax that would make George Orwell weep, Greenspan regularly informs Congress and Wall Street while reminding the hoi polloi that what we don’t know is probably better left that way. Yet, the program for the Fed’s Houston Branch (developed jointly by the local firm Pierce, Goodwin, Alexander & Linville (PGAL) and Michael Graves and Associates (MGA) of Princeton) includes an ambitious educational agenda, to make more transparent the inner workings of an inherently covert, high-security institution.

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2009), pp.150-151

The intended consequences of the rapid rise of digitalia, in
all its polymorphous permutations, are abundantly clear to
anyone in reach of a $200 laptop and a solar-powered battery.
Turn on your HDTV, listen to a downloaded song on
your laptop, watch an On Demand movie or DVD, or talk
to someone on a cell phone while viewing your favorite film
on an MP3 Player as you GPS your way to the iStore.
These are but a sample of the intended consequences of
media-driven digitalia that may one day supplant the analog
world in which we dwell. However, what of the unintended
consequences for those of us who practice the craft of architectural
history, theory, and criticism? Moreover, if one
ascribes to Victor Hugo’s argument about the printing press
killing architecture, what does that say about the relation
of 0s and 1s to traditional print and paper publications, particularly
architectural books and journals?

Published in Domus 233 (1949) I always hear that architecture is supposed to follow tradition, and the examples of historical data, that it ought to be rooted in the ground, rising like a tree from the earth. But I have never believed this condition could be true absolutely: ...

A translation (with Robert Tavernor) of Vittorio Gregotti's essay, "Joseph Rykwert: Un antropologo della storia dell'architettura?," written for (and published in) the Festschrift, Body and Building: On the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). From a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania (March 1998), organized by George Dodds, William Braham, and David Leatherbarrow, in honor of Joseph Rykwert.

A year after the Scripps Company quashed and/or killed Knoxville’s excellent weekly paper, Metro Pulse, a few of its former editorial staff, having refused a “non-compete agreement” thereby losing a substantial severance, launched The Knoxville Mercury on March 12, 2015. During its three-year run, I published over 30 articles in my “Architecture Matters” column. Most ranged far from the narrow scope of design to include; urban design and planning, infrastructure, mass transportation, preservation of the built and natural environments, and the meaning of public space. I also volunteered my time to help conceptualize and moderate the AIA East Tennessee’s annual symposium during their architecture week, which was invariably as lively as it was nerve wracking.



For an academic, accustomed to long term research projects, for a small circle of the like-minded, writing an OpEd column for a newspaper carried with it a steep learning curve and tight deadlines. There’s a big difference between telling the ever shrinking “reading public” what you think about something, as opposed to writing in a way that helps them become their own critic. I chose the latter, albeit with hits and misses. This was the first in a three part series to help set a common language, with readers, about this thing called “modern architecture” and how few, among the general public, like, let alone love it.



Many of the “Architecture Matters” articles, and new essays, are being collected and edited, into a single volume the publication, Matters Architectural and Otherwise | The World We Make and What We Make of It | Critical Essays of the Built Environment. (NB: The PDF includes a typo of J.M.W. Turner's name.)

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Bennie G. Thompson Academic & Civil Rights Research Center at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, designed by Duvall Decker Architects. Congressman Thompson, an alumnus of Tougaloo, has represented Mississippi’s Second District for 28 years; he is currently chairing the House January 6th Committee investigating the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Events such as January 6, 2021, remind us of the power of political rhetoric. Four days before his assassination at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. politicized rhetoric of a different sort. In his “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech at Washington, D.C.’s National Cathedral, he made more eloquent the words of the 19th-century American abolitionist Theodore Parker: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Duval Decker’s Thompson Center is about “remaining awake” architecturally, as many of us wait for that long arc to bend toward justice. One of the thorniest challenges confronting Anne Marie Duvall and Roy Decker, both of whom are white, was their place of origin: it was neither Jackson, which is 80% Black, nor Mississippi. Decker grew up in New Jersey, and Duvall is from western Tennessee. This would be no easy passage. It required trust-building across time and racial, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries, into a place apart.

This article, originally titled, "The Style Thing," was originally published on Common\Edge and was republished shortly thereafter in ArchDaily.

In the late 1960s, Ben Bradlee, the storied executive editor of The Washington Post from 1965 until 1991, confronted making the paper more appealing to younger readers. He ditched Lifestyle as the name of a new, updated section, which he found irksome; instead, he chose Style. As he explained in his memoir: "I liked the word 'Style' … I like people with style, with flair, with signature qualities."

After 50 years as Style, and nine years after Bradlee's death, the section has been renamed Lifestyles. The editorial change notwithstanding, Bradlee used "style" as most non-architects think of it and much in keeping with how Duo Dickinson seems to frame it in a recent Common Edge piece: "Wrestling With Architectural Style in a Post-Style World."

Yet in matters architectural, at least historically, it's long been another thing altogether. Teaching students and working with practicing architects over the past four decades, I've found the term challenging to comprehend for both groups; the chronology of historical styles (a la Sir Banister Fletcher) remains another fuzzy matter for many. That said, the third decade of the third millennium seems to have much in common with the 19th century, each with an "embarrassment of riches" when it comes to the style thing.

(Revised and Extended for The Knoxville Mercury)

In the most important lecture of a still young career, (and what has since become his most influential text) the Oak Park-based architect Frank Lloyd Wright argued that only by using the means of the Industrial Revolution could the new cultures emerging in places like Chicago, London, and Vienna find a way forward to an architecture fitting for one’s time and place. In sharp contrast to the English Arts and Crafts Movement, Wright proffered that it was possible to reconcile mechanization and handcraft. Further, that through the marriage of the hand of the maker and mechanized means, architecture would “rise again,” as a new art form with “A SOUL.” The time was March, 1901 and the place was Jane Addams’s and Ellen Gate’s Starr’s Hull House in Chicago (part of the international Settlement House Movement), and all of which were inventions of the Industrial Revolution. 

The Dr. and Mrs. Harry Jenkins House (1955) designed by the local firm Barber and McMurry, Architects, while far from Wrightian in appearance, is grounded in what were, in 1901 and still are for many, these same revolutionary and provocative principles. Sited prominently two-thirds up a south-facing slope overlooking the Tennessee River on Cherokee Boulevard, more than fifty years after its completion its 7,500 square feet of stone, steel, and concrete continues to challenge many of its neighbor’s preconceptions of domesticity and domestic architecture.

The primacy of vision within western culture, metaphorically and literally, has many sources and trajectories – from Plato’s cave to the Edenic garden. Genesis 3: 4-5, recounts “And the serpent said unto the woman...God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall [se]e as gods...”. In verses 6 and 7 the reader learns “And when the woman saw that the tree...was pleasant to the eyes...a tree to make one wise, she took of the fruit...and her husband with her....  And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked....”  The lens of Judeo-Christian theology typically filters most contemporary perspectives of “the fall.”  Yet, it may prove fruitful to consider for once the serpent’s point of view.  The original biblical humans in the first garden fell from grace, not because of what they ate or saw, but because of the way they saw.  The ability “to see as gods,” to quote the serpent, was less the by-product of having fallen, but rather the very thing coveted – that is, the ability to see what is hidden from the outer eye.  From Genesis to the Enlightenment, seeing that which is not visible to the naked eye often was associated with a transgression, in this case, of divine law. Artists, architects, alchemists, and astronomers were (and still are) constantly searching for an inner-vision establishing, as Ivan Illich has put it, “a new type of transgression.” This visual transgression is the focus of this paper.

Chapter 6: (from: A Transparent Mirror: Landscape and Garden in the Work of Carlo Scarpa)

The mercurial creative production of Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) has been forced, for too long, into a bed of Procustes – the focus of which tends to be the repetitive description of his obsession with over articulated details, rich materials, and a limitless capacity for self-referential caprice. Another commonplace is the assertion that, above all, Scarpa was an architect. He was occasionally in court because he practiced architecture without a license, which may in part explain why he designed far more exhibitions than buildings. More than half of his building designs were never implemented or were built by others after his death. There were, in short, several Carlo Scarpas.

The best known Scarpa was the designer of museums (new and renovated), exhibitions, glassware, and furniture, much of which is documented in the literature on his work. Among the “other Scarpas” is the well-read and contemplative man who designed more than seventy discrete landscapes and gardens, more than any other single project type in his oeuvre. This other Scarpa had a subtle and complex understanding of the landscape dimension of his work –intrinsically connected to his designs of exhibitions.

Yet, in Carlo Scarpa: Opera completa (Dal Co and Mazzariol, 1984), the de facto definitive source on Scarpa, Sergio Polano’s “Catologo delle opere,” lists only four garden and landscape-related projects.  I explore this other Scarpa that the history of modern gardens, landscapes, and architecture have largely ignored and is virtually absent in the Scarpa literature.

“The transparency essay,” as it is known in schools of architecture around the world, remains required reading in many programs. With it comes the trap of conflating theoretical exegesis and design methodology – a danger that increases in inverse proportion to the age and experience of the audience. As Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky construct a complex relation of ideas expressed with sophisticated and nuanced language they resort to verbal and visual slights of hand – creating an articulate, albeit problematic architectonic frame around the early paintings of Picasso, Leger, Ozenfant, and Le Corbusier. I examine how Rowe and Slutzky tell their story of transparency, the structure of which is fundamentally obtuse and mythic, yet is delivered as if it were the product of a transparent and logical imperative, free from belief systems and subterfuge.
To help illuminate this argument I focus on the discourse surrounding the “Modernist” or “Cubist” garden in early twentieth-century France – specifically the work of the architect and garden designer, Gabriel Guévrékian. During the last twenty years, evaluations of Guévrékian’s designs of gardens were criticized and largely discounted, owing to the relatively transparent influence of “the transparency essay.” If the received view of such a relatively obscure figure as Guévrékian can be so substantially manipulated by the undiminished provocations of Rowe and Slutzky’s essay, this suggests the necessity for further exploring how their text has created other modernist myths, that remain concealed behind, what Levi-Strauss called, “a veil of belief.”

This paper explores the life and work of Etienne-Louis Boullée primarily through the vehicle of his unbuilt projects and unfinished manuscripts.  The intent of this essay is, in part, to culturally situate Boullée’s contribution within the intellectual history of late eighteenth century France and, if only tentatively, to re-situate the implications of his work within our own contemporary architectural and cultural discourse.  The decades during which Boullée produced his most enduring works are perhaps best characterized through some of the most influential ideas and ebullient characters current in the Paris of the late eighteenth century -- a period typified by figures as divergent as Edmund Burke and John Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Franz Anton Mesmer.

Carlo Scarpa's (1906-78) often egregious architectural details tend to garner most of the ink in the many monographs and articles on his oeuvre, yet, his subtle manipulation of horizontal surfaces – the ground plane and the ceiling – are hallmarks of his practice. Nominal, manipulations of four centimeters in the ground plane often yield startling effects in his work; the consequences often are wholly unintended. Anyone who has spent much time visiting and studying Scarpa's gardens, buildings, interiors, and exhibitions will have stumbled or tripped several times along the way. Le Corbusier is said to have tripped while crossing the bridge on his first visit to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. While he suffered no injury, it didn't stop him from kvetching, " Mauvais architecte! "

Through his conflation of Virgil and the modern industrialized landscape, Le Corbusier conjures not the kind of specifi c emblematic landscapes associated with William Kent and Horace Walpole, but rather the generic, expressive landscapes of Thomas Whatley. By joining a pervasively understood image from antiquity with the presentworld development of an expanding Brazil, Le Corbusier articulates a new relationship of garden and building.

Caroline Constant has observed that Le Corbusier’s “theoretical principles, conceived of in reaction to Beaux-Arts academicism, inverted the traditional relationship of building to landscape.” Constant continues, “Unlike Wright or Mies for whom the landscape was an extension of architecture, Le Corbusier ultimately treated them as parallel symbolic forms, united conceptually as well as visually.”2 If the idea of landscape in the work of Wright and Mies can be characterized as extensions of the building and if Le Corbusier’s idea of landscape was a parallel elaboration of the architectural program, in the later villas of Carlo Scarpa, this idea of extension undergoes yet another transformation.

During the late 1970s a question was first raised by a number of architectural historians regarding a red curtain that may have hung prominently in Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.  Although this discovery seemed of little consequence at the time, it can be seen today as symptomatic both of the extraordinary status this particular work has enjoyed for the past 60 years and as a commentary on the much broader problem of historically based architectural reconstructions. 
The discovery of the red curtain raises a number of questions.  If there was indeed a large floor-to-ceiling red curtain hanging in the front glass wall of the pavilion, how is it that it appears in none of the canonical photographs of the original building? Nor do any references to the curtain appear in any of the first-hand textual accounts of visitors following the opening of the pavilion on May 26, 1929.  Although a curtain like the one described by recent researchers would have dominated the otherwise muted palette of colors in the building, how is it that no one seems to have seen it?  The answers to these questions, like so much of Mies’s work, seems to depend largely on how one frames both the question being asked and the Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs to which these and many other questions invariably defer.

ion over mimicry. See Richard J. Wattenmaker, ‘‘Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the Barnes Foundation,’’ in Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 10–11. 9. See Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation for images of these and other paintings and details on Barnes’s acquisition of the paintings and their significance today. 10. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), p. 211. 11. On November 11, 2008, I interviewed Martha Thorne (Professional Advisor to the Building Committee for the Barnes Foundation and Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize) to learn about the foundation’s architect selection process. Thorne said the Building Committee (a sub-committee of board members) was extremely conscious of the need to replicate the galleries and hangings. According to Thorne, the committee did not have a preconceived idea of what replication meant, but ‘‘the looser the interpretation, the more [the committee’s] nervousness went up.’’ Competitor Rafael Moneo’s approach generated the most apprehension as the committee was uncertain the court would understand his philosophical interpretation of replication. Competition winner Billie Tsien, who I also interviewed on June 10, 2008, said some architects fought harder to expand the board’s idea of replication but she and partner Tod Williams ‘‘tried to accept the constraint, not as a negative but to embrace it.’’ For competition details, see ‘‘The Barnes Foundation Launches Architect Selection Process and Appoints Martha Thorne, Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, as Professional Advisor,’’ The Barnes Foundation Press Release, March 6, 2007 (accessed November 16, 2008) and Nicolai Ouroussoff, ‘‘Architecture: Designs Solicited, Discussion Unwanted at the Barnes Foundation,’’ The New York Times, Arts Section, September 22, 2007 (accessed November 16,

Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) designed some of the most important landscapes and gardens in Italy after the Second World War. These works constitute an important yet unexamined part of his oeuvre. Among these are the first public sculpture garden in Italy, designed for the Venice ...

Not long ago I attended a lecture by an internationally famous architect at my school. Speaking to a student-packed room, he boasted how he could not recall many of Le Corbusier’s, “Five Points of Architecture,” and how such matters were so many angles on pinheads -- the stuff of pinheads -- it just didn’t matter any longer. If a visiting lecturer earnestly offered such a position not that long ago, he or she would at least have been challenged by the dean of the college or the director of one of its schools (and perhaps some faculty) -- not to interfere with the free sharing of ideas, but to underscore for students, that above all, ideas matter, and knowledge is power. Not today. Worse, after he made this self-aggrandizing statement many students glanced back at me, and grinned. There was little to do but leave the lecture hall.

I’ve never understood how ignorance of one’s chosen profession could be a source of pride, but there it is. When such things happen in your own house, however, within the walls of the academy, you know it’s time to start rethinking the next 20 years. “Alternative Facts” have not just rooted in politics, but in the academy, where they are defended as a student’s and faculty member’s natural right. To think otherwise could be a microaggression. Recently, a studio student spent inordinate time disrupting a class discussion about a required reading, arguing vociferously that winter was NOT generally considered a “gloomier” season than spring or summer. Woody Allen’s film, Radio Days, flashbacked in my mind, to the moment the protagonist recounts parents arguing about whether the Atlantic Ocean was superior to the Pacific.

In the January 19 (2023) New York Times, an article about Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, reported her decision that after 6 remarkably successful) years, enough was enough. At the ripe young age of 42, when many are just beginning their political careers, or just hitting their stride, Ms. Ardern is dropping the mic because, “…I longer have enough in the tank to do [the job] justice.” She added, “It’s that simple.” But for the other 7 billion of us, it’s not so simple.

She is stepping down because she feels as though she can no longer step up to the task at hand. This is not just a rare thing, but one of the rarest of fine character traits remaining among civilized peoples. In politicians, it’s simply not done; in academics it’s equally rare. There’s so much to learn from her decision.

A long-trusted colleague of mine recently confided that, when she began teaching, one of her biggest fears was not being interesting enough-not having enough to offer-in short, fear of disappointing the students. Never did she imagine she would one day come to fear the students she taught. Retired now from a different department in another university, one evening as we sat quietly sharing stories, she confided that, during her final few years in the academy, she often felt that she was never sure who among here students was being offended by something she may have said, and worse, who was reporting her, often directly to upper-level university administration. She admitted that it made her feel a bit paranoid, but who wouldn't be under the circumstances.

The Proceedings is published in conjunction with the 25th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, held at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, March 12th- 14th, 2009. Abstracts were double-blind peer reviewed, and selected authors were invited to present full papers at the conference. Papers submitted by the publication deadline appear in the document, which does not include all those presented at the conference. Conference chairs Jim Sullivan and Matthew Dunn extend special thanks the following people who helped organize, prepare and realize the conference:

Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) designed some of the most important landscapes and gardens in Italy after the Second World War. These works constitute an important yet unexamined part of his oeuvre. Among these are the first public sculpture garden in Italy, designed for the Venice ...

Leon Battista Alberti’s motto quid tum? has been translated variously as ‘‘what’s next?’’ and ‘‘so what?’’ The difference between the two is substantial. In Ingrid Rowland’s reply to a letter by Rutgers Renaissance scholar David Marsh, she explains:

"The motto 'quid tum’ appears on the reverse of a portrait medal of . . . Alberti cast by Matteo de’ Pasti . . .. This short Latin phrase, whose literal meaning is ‘‘What then?’’ may nonetheless take on an ample range of meanings. . . . Vergil’s Dido, jilted by her lover Aeneas, wails ‘quid tum?’ to reject one possible course of action: ‘Then what?’. . . Guglielmo Gorni . . . has suggested . . . that [the] portrait medal . . . marks the triumph of a noble soul against every disadvantage of birth, health, and circumstance, nearly all of them the direct result of Alberti’s illegitimate birth. Looking back on the obstacles he has faced, the great man exults, ‘So what?’. . ."

What is next and so what? These are good questions with which to begin an academic year at the JAE. What shall we publish next and does it really matter?