American Architecture

Book review on the last contribution of Nicholas Adams, dealing with Gordon Bunshaft.
The review is comprised in the bilingual thematic issue:
"ARTSCHITECTURE. The arts as a solicitation of architectural thought"
edited by L. Amistadi and E. Prandi

Uno de los propósitos de los pabellones de las ferias internacionales es servir como escaparate de lo que una sociedad ha sido, es o será. Una intención que se ha comprobado que se enfatiza en aquellos pabellones que representan a sociedades que en el momento de la celebración de la Exposición se encuentran en los extremos opuestos en cuanto a nivel de desarrollo. Un énfasis este último que se pudo comprobar claramente en la Feria Mundial que se celebró en la ciudad de Nueva York en 1964. Y es que la Oficina Internacional de Exposiciones (conocida por su acrónimo anglosajón BIE) sancionó dicho evento por una serie de condiciones que provocaron que la mayoría de potencias mundiales adheridas a la organización no acudieran a Nueva York. De esta forma el país anfitrión exhibió en solitario los atributos de potencia mundial frente a un reducido conjunto de países situados a una larga distancia en cuanto a nivel de desarrollo. Y uno de ese escaso número de países que acudieron fue España. ¿Cuál era la distancia entre la sociedad americana y la española de la época? Una respuesta que será el eje central de la presente comunicación. Para ello el presente estudio comprobará la diferencia que existía entre ambas sociedades en términos arquitectónicos confirmando así la autoridad de esta disciplina como medidor de los avances de una civilización. Para ese propósito se tomarán como caso de estudio un pabellón por cada país. Lógicamente por parte de nuestro país será el Pabellón de España obra del entonces joven arquitecto Javier Carvajal Ferrer; mientras que por parte de Estados Unidos se tomará el Pabellón Futurama que Louis I. Kahn proyectó, pero que desgraciadamente no construyó, bajo el patrocinio de la empresa americana General Motors. Un proyecto frente a una construcción. Un arquitecto consagrado y otro novel. Una gran compañía tecnológica y un país emergente. Un presupuesto infinito y uno reducido. Futuro y tradición. ¿Cuál es ahora la distancia la distancia arquitectónica entre ambas sociedades?
#Arquitectura #architecture #pavillion #LouisIKahn #Kahn #JavierCarvajal #Carvajal #Spain #GeneralMotors

Since the advent of modern architecture, notions of free plan and transparency have proliferated well into current trends. The movement's notion of a spatially homogeneous, open and limitless 'free plan' contrasts with the spatially heterogeneous 'series of rooms' defined by load bearing walls, which in turn triggered new notions of transparency created by vast expanses of glazed walls. Similarly, transparency was also dichotomized as something that was physical or optical, as well as something conceptual, akin to spatial organization. As opposed to merely accepting the duality and possible incompatibility of these dichotomies, this paper seeks to ask how can space be both literally and phenomenally transparent, as well as exhibit both homogeneous and heterogeneous qualities? This paper explores this potential destabilization or blurring of spatial phenomena by dissecting the transparent layers and volumes of a series of selected case studies to investigate how different architects have devised strategies of spatial ambiguity and interpenetration. Projects by Peter Eisenman, Sou Fujimoto, and SANAA will be discussed and analyzed to show how the superimposition of geometries and spaces achieve different conditions of layering, transparency, and interstitiality. Their particular buildings will be explored to reveal various innovative kinds of spatial interpenetration produced through the articulate relations of the elements of architecture, which challenge conventional perceptions of interior and exterior whereby visual homogeneity blurs with spatial heterogeneity. The results show how spatial conceptions such as interpenetration and transparency have the ability to subvert not only inside-outside dialectics, but could also produce multiple degrees of interiority within complex and indeterminate spatial dimensions in constant flux as well as present alternative forms of social interaction.

The Collegiate Gothic movement in America that emerged from the early 1890’s marked the last phase of the inclusive Gothic Revival movement in the country and became a part of the movement for college planning known as “College Beautiful”. The extensive development of colleges was made necessary and possible by the combination of demand and wealth created by the Gilded Age, as well as by architectural strategies introduced through the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Collegiate Gothic brigade, while searching for its main reference points in the English collegiate tradition of Tudor Gothic as opposed to Victorian Gothic, ended up mingling the Oxford-Cambridge building system of quadrilateral plan with the Beaux-Arts system of extensive landscape planning with axis and symmetry, within the American setting of broad college campuses. (under review for Transactions of AIJ. Journal of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Engineering)

Numerous scholars of Jefferson’s architecture have observed that he was obsessed with eight-sided forms, employing them in projecting bows and free-standing configurations in designs from houses to prisons. Jefferson never explained his infatuation with octagons; historians have cited the influence of European precedents, Jefferson’s love of mathematics, and a desire for light and air. This essay explores the latent connections between Jefferson’s architectural octagons and Enlightenment racial ideology.

This article explores the close personal and professional relationships between the Austrian-American designer, artist, and architect, Frederick Kiesler; and designer, theorist, and co-founder of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg. It demonstrates that Kiesler's work and ideas were strongly influenced by Theo van Doesburg's work, his writings, and theories. Personal correspondence between the two men are documented, as well as between van Doesburg and Kiesler's wife, Steffi Kiesler. Over the course of his long career in the arts and design, Kiesler promoted Van Doesburg and De Stijl ideas to an American audience long after van Doesburg's untimely death in the early 1930s. Van Doesburg's theories and his rejection of functionalism were a touchstone to which Kiesler returned again and again in his architectural work and ideas. The article shows that via Kiesler, De Stijl continued to have an influence on US architectural discourse through the 1950s.

The diner, for many Americans, is a symbol of a period that has long gone, a time capsule, a place of memories and nostalgia. Nevertheless, the attributes of the diners and the dining culture that developed in them, along with their cuisine, had permeated so profoundly into the American landscape that they became obvious - generic pieces of everyday life across the country.

Similar to canning, diners preserve significant pieces of American culture. A micro-cosmos of social connections, political and economic ideologies, technological innovations, patterns of mechanization and standardization – defiantly as part of a particular moment in history but timeless as well.

This paper will focus on three types of structures: the tangible qualities of architectural structures, the intangible aspects of social structures, and the material and discursive elements in the literary structures of cookbooks. By triangulating interpretations of spatial, social, and textual structures, I intend to establish a framework for understanding interactions between people and the built environment, from the individual-domestic scale to the collective-urban scale. Though my analysis focuses on cookbooks and kitchens of the twentieth century, its applications are embedded within a continuous discourse on the relationship between domestic and urban spaces.
Cooking has long been an inherently gendered practice, and the kitchen is consequently a gendered space. Especially in the mid-twentieth century American context, the kitchen is also a racialized space, as racial differences shaped its functional and aesthetic development within the home. While I focus on suburban American kitchens from the early twentieth century to the postwar period, I intend to draw overarching parallels between individual, everyday experiences and collective, societal processes that are congruent to architectural and cultural shifts in the history or contemporary conditions of any given socio-economic, cultural, or regional community.

How does the design process matter to the resulting building? Ever since American architect and educator, Peter Eisenman, whose work and research (spanning more than 50 years) emphasized design as a series of sequential steps or ‘traces’, architectural students nowadays commonly justify their work according to the history of the making of the design. The product matters, but more importantly is one’s process towards it. This distinction between process and result, or between the object and its making, is particularly ambiguous in the Guardiola House, 1988, in Cadiz, Spain, which is an overlooked unbuilt project by Eisenman. The question is: what bearing does the Guardiola House have on the discipline of architecture? And how does it challenge traditional design in terms of methodology and conventionality? What this research does is expose the Eisenman-process as not just one design towards a single house, but in fact an interweaving and inter-narrative between two simultaneous processes.

For their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Martino Stierli examines their cinematic methodology against the background of contemporary photography and pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, while highlighting Los Angeles as a cultural, urban, and architectural hot spot of the period. He considers how this approach relates to sociological theories and the phenomenology of urban spaces. He also sheds light on the polemics and controversies triggered by Learning from Las Vegas in architectural discourse and discusses them against models of high and low culture. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant for current debates in architecture and the arts.

A finales de los años treinta un gran número de maestros modernos europeos emigraron a Estados Unidos. Este hecho incidió drásticamente en el sistema docente universitario norteamericano, que pasó del sistema Beaux Arts a una metodología derivada de la Bauhaus alemana. No obstante, este nuevo didactismo fue, a su vez, objeto
de crítica; y en algunos reductos universitarios se gestó una reacción pedagógica de signo contrario. Esta corriente, denominada Nuevo Formalismo, habría de dominar el panorama académico estadounidense durante los cincuenta y sesenta.
La crítica ha acotado esta tendencia, casi con exclusividad, a los
estudios del arquitecto e historiador inglés Colin Rowe. Sin embargo sus ideas trascendieron el mero discurso teórico y otros colegas aplicaron su particular método analítico en su actividad profesional y docente. El Nuevo Formalismo también se ha tachado de aproximación anodina a la arquitectura moderna por despojarla de su componente ideológica. No obstante, si aceptamos que la arquitectura es expresión de los deseos y preocupaciones de su época, esta reclusión consciente en el plano formal debe interpretarse –y así lo hizo Tafuri originalmente– como la ruptura del compromiso social. Los seguidores de esta doctrina la entendieron como superación de la visión utópica y mesiánica de la primera modernidad, y proclamaban la necesidad de autonomía de una disciplina encorsetada.

This article examines the context of the Princeton University Chapel (1925-28), and highlights the role of Professor Albert M. Friend in the iconography of what has been called "the finest assemblage of stained glass in the western hemisphere."  I argue that the Chapel is a carefully arranged defense of traditional Christianity addressed to skeptical students of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "lost generation," who, for the first time in Princeton's history, no longer had to attend daily chapel.  The correspondence and sketches in the Princeton University archives shows Friend to be "primus inter pares" (first among equals), preeminent among the many voices - architects, University officials, Manhattan clerics, and stained glass artists - seeking to influence the design of what became, and remains, the "finest Gothic interior in America."

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is one of the most published but also mythical figures in globalized architectural historiography. Although Wright sought to construct and consolidate his public image through the development of the mass media, without the help of his collaborators, who were willing to reproduce and disseminate his myth, he probably would not have achieved such results. Three Czech architects, Antonín Raymond, Vladimír Karfík and Jaroslav Josef Polívka, left the author's texts, which had the same function and in which they described their experience of working with Wright as a "touch of genius". Due to the transition of the Wright Archive, its organization and partial digitization, from the Wright Foundation to the Avery Library at Columbia University, it was possible to reconstruct these Czech architects' relations with Frank Lloyd Wright and their development, which showed a marked contradiction to their own testimony in published texts. texts to be published in the case of Polívka). The present study deals with these discrepancies between the autobiographical testimonies of Czech architects and the reality that can be reconstructed on the basis of correspondence and other archival materials. It turned out that the historical social practice, matrix and social habitus, to the phenomena of which Professor Kroupa deals in his life's work, is often distorted by the schematized image and traditional myths.

The paper  argues that in the immediate post-WWII era, modern architecture  in the U.S. developed an approach to domestic space that was different from ideas inherited from European modernism. The fire-place as showpiece of campsite-rustic was just one element, as was the double high living room and the separation the bedrooms from the rest of the house. All together these changes had a huge impact on American family life and gender relations.

Official historiography about Venturi begins with his Mother’s House, completed in 1964, and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. My Ph.D. dissertation argues that in order to gain a wider perspective on Venturi’s work, we should shift our focus from the 1960s to the mid-40s. Therefore, my work investigates projects from his early years, beginning in 1944, the date when Venturi enrolls at the Princeton University. From this specific viewpoint, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture turns into the final outcome of his first twenty years of research on historic architecture and Italian urban context.

American architect Victor Lundy designed an inflatable pavilion to house the traveling Atoms for Peace exhibition in 1960. This pavilion constituted a literal atmosphere, because the difference between its internal and external air pressure functioned as the structural element. The pavilion also produced an experiential atmosphere that, like the exhibition within, used technological progress to suggest a better world to come. In this paper, I recover the little-known history of Lundy’s pavilion to expand its atmospheric dimension to include not only the literal and experiential but to the sociopolitical. Such an expansion reveals the ideological pressures that shaped the pavilion and, more generally, the changing meanings of inflatable architecture during the postwar period.

The image of the “other” city: Learning from Las Vegas, or on the Necessity of an American Grand Tour -- Las  Vegas  –  the  “other”  city par  excellence  even  in  the  multifaceted  American  urban landscape – had never been a case study for architects and urban planners until 1968, when Scott Brown, Venturi, Izenour and their Yale students organized a study-trip to investigate the city and its dynamics. Through the comparison between different kinds of literature and new archival findings, the paper reconstructs the events behind the Las Vegas Studio, considered as the first step towards the publication in 1972 of Learning from Las Vegas.

Few historical investigations have accomplished the dual task of writing the history of a significant postmodern architectural moment while simultaneously unpacking its defining theoretical concepts. Maybe that historical period is still too close to our own. Or perhaps documenting an ouroboric movement such as postmodernism, one that centered on history and the revial of architectural styles, is itself the problem.

Marcello Piacentini and the Myth of the Italian City in America. The Italian Village at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915

When Marcello Piacentini was invited to design the Italian Pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, it was already the third time he had been appointed as the architect for a national area at an international exposition. He had previously built the Italian Pavilion in Bruxelles in 1910 and a number of buildings at the International Exposition in Rome in 1911. In San Francisco, however, Piacentini was called upon for a much wider project, a sort of
‘urban’ plan over an area of 15,000 square metres. The resulting Cittadella Italiana (The Italian Town) represented Italy not only through works of art and other
production, but also through its very specific architectural and urban features.
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was an opportunity for economic and urban rebirth for San Francisco after the devastating earthquake in 1906. Albeit a collection of temporary buildings, Piacentini’s project marks an important step forward in the phenomenon of assimilation and permanence of the legend of Italy – and in particular the Italian city – in San Francisco and in America.

Junto con el acero y el hormigón armado, el vidrio ha sido el gran protagonista de la arquitectura de vanguardia en el siglo XX. Las primeras experiencias de la Modernidad intentaron explotar las posibilidades plásticas e ideológicas de este material a partir de propuestas utópicas, basadas mucho más en la intuición que en el conocimiento de sus posibilidades tecnológicas reales.

La 'Glass Box' es un planteamiento arquitectónico de mínimos resuelto con un escueto volumen ortoédrico, que implica un espacio versátil y diáfano y una construcción estandarizada, que pretende exhibir la eficacia del funcionamiento del interior del edificio mediante una transparencia (casi) total como estrategia de marketing comercial. Para la nueva imagen de sedes bancarias, edificios de oficinas y hasta casas y naves industriales se apuesta por una ultraligera piel de cristal y paneles sándwich. Además, una deslumbrante y estudiadísima instalación de iluminación eléctrica (e.g. Richard Kelly) contribuye a renovar su aspecto por completo, sobre todo en el fascinante 'nightscape' de las grandes ciudades.

En nuestro territorio español este modelo aterriza con mucho entusiasmo pero repleto de dificultades, pues la industria de la construcción en general y la del vidrio en particular no están aún preparadas para abordar proyectos tan vanguardistas. No obstante, la presente investigación pretende rescatar algunos de esos intentos por materializar la 'Glass Box' en España a finales de los 50 y principios de los 60, entre otros: Ortiz-Echagüe y Echaide, con su oficina del Banco Popular en la Gran Vía de Madrid y los edificios para la SEAT en Barcelona; Bassó y Gili, con su sede para la editorial Gustavo Gili en Barcelona; Fernández Albalat y Tenreiro, con su fábrica embotelladora de Coca-Cola en Coruña; o Alas y Casariego, con su fábrica de café Monky en Madrid.

Se presenta estas pioneras “cajas de cristal” españolas en relación a sus precedentes americanos pero, sobre todo, como antecedentes de las propuestas no construidas de Alejandro de la Sota para las sedes madrileñas de Bankunión o Aviaco. Incorporando ya los avances del vidrio aparecidos a finales de los 60 en España, Sota se asoma a un vertiginoso abismo donde la idea arquitectónica prima por encima de la tecnología, por avanzada que ésta sea en su desarrollo constructivo. Son quizá estos dos proyectos los últimos intentos por construir la mítica 'Glass Box' en nuestro país y acaso el “canto del cisne” de la obra madura de su autor.
Al fin, la investigación pretende mostrar a la 'Glass Box' como un síntoma claro de progreso en la Modernidad de la Arquitectura española de la posguerra, donde el referente foráneo sirve para ir construyendo un modelo innovador propio con las peculiaridades propias del país, de su desarrollo tecnológico y del afán de progreso de sus arquitectos.

This paper examines the construction in 1906-07 of Rodef Shalom Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The relationships between the Paris-trained, New York-based architect, Henry Hornbostel; the Philadelphia-based general contractor, Thomas Reilly; the Rodef Shalom building committee, and a host of sub-contractors, materi-als suppliers and agents on the building site is unusually well-documented and includes the involvement of the New York-based Guastavino Company for the construction of the building’s signature dome. Emerging from the Rodef Shalom correspondence is a clear picture of the sequencing of design documentation as building work progressed, the central role of the general contractor in managing the project, and the hierarchy in communica-tions between architect, client and general contractor. The challenges of coordinating a complex project at a dis-tance relied on correspondence, photography, telephones, telegrams and railways, which together contributed as much as on-site agents to shaping the construction process.

The entrance to a building is both a literal and metaphorical device.  While an entrance defined most narrowly is actually a void or space without any designed elements, it can more broadly be defined as the entire architectural composition surrounding the empty space that is the literal entrance.  So an entrance can be a door case (like a picture frame), a portico, or even an entire facade or elevation. Literally, an entrance is a portal that provides access to a building. Metaphorically, the entrance is a link between the world outside an architectural composition and the designed microcosm within.  As the first part of a building one sees on entering, the entrance can represent the design philosophy of an entire building.
    This exhibition explores the history and evolution of the entrance in Western architecture, with particular emphasis on the classical tradition and the modern movement.  These two traditions offer many convergent and divergent ideas and design solutions to the problem of making an entrance.  A closer look at this one element in architectural design sheds light on broader issues of the history of architecture and the philosophy of design, as well as elucidating some important themes in the cultural history of the Western world.

E' il mio libro del 1996 che è stato un best seller del tempo ed ha segnato anche una modalità metodologica nuova di affrontare la scrittura sul lavoro di un architetto contemporaneo.. il libro ripercorre l'intera carriera di Peter Eisenman associandola ad eventi rilevanti nel mondo artistico e filosofico a lui contemporaneo ma tenendo sempre al centro gli aspetti specifici della sua ricerca progettuale

Following the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November 1963, Dallas was nicknamed “the city of hate”. In the weeks and months following the assassination and its aftermath citizens of elsewhere wrote to various public forums and officials to express their hatred of the city and its citizens. The planning of the assassination site was silently implicated in the endless interrogation of the crime, through analytical mapping and models, as well as the ever-present landmarks
represented in documentation of the assassination. In response to these events, the city introduced a number of new architectural and urban planning gestures to aid in the economic and social recovery from this tragic event. Re-planning and re-building became a literal rather than metaphorical means for Dallas to make amends for the burden of its history. This paper will examine how the built environment was quietly
implicated in the death of President Kennedy, and the measures that were taken to redress the negative portrayal of the city throughout America and the world.

To Cite this paper:
Nicole Sully. “Urban Planning After JFK: Re-planning the ‘City of Hate’.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand: 37, What If? What Next? Speculations on History’s Futures, edited by Kate Hislop and Hannah Lewi, 296-303. Perth: SAHANZ, 2021. Accepted for publication December 11, 2020.

Available at: https://www.sahanz.net/wp-content/uploads/2B_296-303_SULLY.pdf
Full Proceedings Available at: https://www.sahanz.net/conferences/proceedings/page/2/

This essay speculates about some possible conceptual systems upstream to Morphosis’ complex and sophisticated projects and artifacts from the 1980s. The demonstrative complexity those objects display is mysterious but appealing as well: the forms and geometric marks they bear are a call for speculation about how they were engendered. Therefore, the goal of this essay is to decipher some of the enigmatic compositional contrivances involved in two unbuilt Morphosis projects in order to recreate – or to invent – some possible virtual process that could have generated the actual products. Eventually, this research offers renditions of some of those virtual systems by giving them shape through new graphic objects. As this research is driven primarily by graphic production. Except the photographs, all the illustrations presented in this essay are from the author.

The journal that would have the most lasting impact in establishing a coherent movement of Postmodern American architecture was a student-edited journal named 'Perspecta,' no. 9/10, published by the Yale School of Architecture and edited by Robert A.M. Stern, accomplished architect and former Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University, He assembled a cadre of author-architects to contribute to the journal, a group who would go on to shape the U.S. architectural scene for the next 20 years. His editorial objective was to present new emerging 'talent', which consisted of young architects who defined a new American movement in architecture. Three significant contributors of this particular 'Perspecta' issue were 'undiscovered' Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, and, most interestingly, Romaldo Giurgola, who was an Italian architect and academic but had immigrated to the U.S. after receiving the Italian Fulbright scholarships. Looking back at this moment, it is intriguing to discover what defined the work featured in these magazines as 'American,' especially since one of its central figures, Giurgola, established his reputation as an educator teaching architectural history and theory subjects based on Italian precedents and treatises at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.

With the creation of professional organizations in support of Russian architects during the 1860s, new publications were launched to provide information about architects and architectural practices in other countries. The Moscow Architectural Society and the Petersburg Society of Architects took the lead, with the latter society publishing the journal “Zodchii”, which would serve as the publication of record for Russian architects from 1872 until 1917. This article devotes special attention to “Zodchii” as a locus of information about architec,
ture in America, with articles and reports on American building methods and technologies, architectural education, city planning (such as the rebuilding of Chicago after the fire of 1871), major urban projects, the design of private houses, skyscrapers, transportation, pol,
lution and virtually any other topic related to the built environment. Apart from occasional references to Henry Hobson Richardson, little attention was given to specific architects, whose careers must have seemed distant to Russian architects and engineers. The rapid
development of America in the half century after the Civil War suggested many possibilities and parallels for Russia. These perceptions are a significant and little known aspect of relations between Russia and the United States.