recession’s architecture impact

I graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1990.  Times were tough for architects, especially inexperienced ones without good contacts.  I managed to get and keep a number of jobs in a few years that kept me in the profession, retreating to grad school along the way.

However, so many of my fellow graduates, faced with a tough economy, low pay, student loans, layoffs and mind-numbing aggravation of the day-to-day tasks of young interns, either dropped out or were forced out of architecture.  The huge glut of baby-boomer architects in front of us meant few professional jobs where actual design experience could be had and even less chance of landing one of the rare, tenure-track teaching jobs.

So it was much to my, and many of my colleagues, surprise that being an architect became cool in the late 1990’s.  There were architects on television and the movies and the explosive growth of the culture of international star architects all felt like actions taking place on a very different planet than the one we lived.  Companies and institutions lost faith in open, anonymous competitions and these opportunities dried up for all but the few, usual suspects of the invitation-only “competition”.  Gone were the days that Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,  Jorn Utzon, and others could make their careers winning open competitions and seeing the buildings to completion.

But I think none of this compares to the bleak landscape of recently-graduated and young architects today.  The prospect of finding any job at all in architecture or a related field is extremely limited.  Past recessions have seen slow-downs in a region or a type of project (residential or commercial), but the last 2 years have witnessed almost a complete stop to all construction.  (Employment in architecture firms is down almost 20%). The cynical older architects are happy to see this winnowing of the crop, a filtering of only the most dedicated.  However, most likely this recession will only further reinforce the reality that for the most part, architecture should be pursued by only those who are either independently wealthy or willing to work for wages that won’t keep up with school loan payments.

I get a lot resumes and work samples sent to me.  There is a tremendous amount of talent and drive out there that has no outlet in architecture.  There are thousands of great buildings that will not come to be, an unbelievable loss to our built environment.  When so much of our country fears the future, the prospects for architecture are indeed bleak.  Architecture proposes the new, it looks to the future.  Even the most world-weary and hip-tragic architect gets really excited about making buildings, proposing new ideas and forms. The recession hasn’t just stopped or slowed the amount of work available, it has fostered an environment of fear, where architecture seems an expensive amenity in a threadbare future.

Let’s hope that when things turn around, there will be some architects left who are are not so cynical or set-in-their-ways, that a new generation of buildings can designed and built that celebrate life on this planet not just mere existence.

Modern Art Wing, Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago has recently opened the new Modern Art wing designed by Renzo Piano.  Piano’s Design Workshop is probably the most consistently innovative and interesting big-name international architecture office out there.  Every building they execute is marked by an acute attention to detail and they all seem to serve their clients rather than the architect’s ego.

So, on a recent visit, I found myself really appreciating the building, but not loving it.  As mentioned, it is beautifully and simply put together – the spaces flow nicely, the materials are clearly and cleanly brought together.  Maybe most importantly, and in light of Denver’s Art Museum, it is clear that the building is there to serve the art that it displays, not the reverse.

However, in its simplicity and lightness, it lacks the robust material quality that I think distinguishes the best of Chicago architecture.  For while the Chicago skyscrapers and the Chicago window of the early twentieth century championed a kind of structural determinism and rationality, it exerted this as the primary formal expression.  The Modern wing more like a series of screens, horizontal and vertical, that wrap the building.  So, while this is a great response to the program of the building, to the housing and display of art,  it does not have to be the primary driver of the building.

This is a photo of the Gage Building, near the museum on Michigan Avenue, designed by Louis Sullivan.  You can feel the frame and weight of this building, the decorative medallions seeming to hold up the middle piers.  This is what I think of when I  think of Chicago architecture – taut buildings that are both light and heavy, rational and expressive.

Piano’s addition is a very good building, a great addition to the museum and the city.  But it speaks more to an international, place-less design than one rooted in a city of a great architectural tradition.

Louis Sullivan imposter bank, Poseyville, Indiana

I recently was driving a round-about way to New Harmony, Indiana and passed through Poseyville.  Much to my surprise, right in the middle of town, what appears to be a bank by Louis Sullivan.

No mistaking the ornament, both in their individual designs and how they ’strap’ the building.  However, having studied Sullivan in school and later while living in Chicago, while I was familiar with many of his late career bank designs, I had never heard of this one.  It is extremely similar in its long facade to the bank in Sidney, Ohio.

However, as you can see, the Poseyville bank is more of a shoe-box than a jewel box, simply repeating the long facade ornamentation to the main entry.  The individual ornamentations however are unmistakable:

Poseyville bank

Sidney bank

Well, it turns out the Poseyville bank is not a Sullivan work at all.  Rather, it is a knock-off, by Edward Thole, built in 1924 (documented in the excellent essay “The Banks and the Image of Progressive Banking” by Wim de Wit in Louis Sullivan, The Function of Ornament. ( I highly recommend this essay as it gives cultural context to the intentions of the architect and clients of the bank projects.  Rarely are the needs and desires of the engaged clients presented or discussed in architecture books)

Maybe the Indianapolis Terra Cotta Company had the molds available for use?

Sidney bank image from the website maintained by Mary Ann Sullivan:  http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/sidney/sidney.html

In any case, it is an interesting building and though not a Sullivan original, a commanding presence in the small town and a fascinating attempt to convey strength and security for a bank without resorting to the usual Greek temple forms.

Crown Fountain, Millennium Park, Chicago

Millennium Park in Chicago has become a very interesting foil to the Art Institute.  The band shell/amphitheater by Frank Gehry is a bit disappointing (too 2-dimensional), but the Crown Fountain is one of the best pieces of public art in the city.  Designed by Jaume Plensa, the fountain is two 50 foot high glass block towers with video projections on their facing sides.  The projections are faces of people from the wide spectrum of citizens of Chicago.

In warm weather the fountains ’spit’ a stream onto a slate plaza, usually filled with kids playing in the stream.

On a recent trip to Chicago, the Midwestern rain had the fountains turned off, but the reflection in the plaza doubled each image, making a kind of visual skyscraper to join the others in the city.

north tower

south tower

photos by Mark Gerwing

Air Force Academy chapel

completed in 1963, the Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel was designed by Walter Netsch of SOM in Chicago. 

seventeen aluminum, steel and glass spires, reminiscent of fighter jet double delta wings are also a series of flying buttresses, linking this strikingly modern sanctuary to the history of western christian spaces.

The stained glass panels highlight the structural ‘ribs’ of the building, a geometry both simple and complex, and surely Netsch’s finest work.

The building is set upon a granite and concrete plinth with Colorado Springs’ Rocky Mountain foothills in the background, making is strangely scale-less and slightly otherworldly.

photos by Mark Gerwing

abandoned house, western Kansas

built of the really beautiful local limestone, this house is small but quite grand

the house and the tree hold steadfastly to each other on the wind-whipped landscape

the worn softness of the stone is a strange contrast to the brittle sharpness and geometry of the metal roof.

the southwest corner is failing as the mortar wets and dries, cracking out under the stones

A stalwart little house

photos by Mark Gerwing

Anchor Bay, California

A couple of recently discovered sketches from a trip to Anchor Bay, California this time last year:

New Harmony, Indiana

On the border between southern Illinois and Indiana, along the Wabash River, sits New Harmony, Indiana.  Founded in 1814 by a group of religious separatists similar to the Shakers, the town consisted of 180 buildings, but was bought in its entirety by Robert Owen, a wealthy industrialist from Wales.  His communitarian society was an utopia experiment in social reform but was short-lived.

What they left was a remarkable series of buildings and realized urban plan:

Throughout its history, New Harmony has attracted philosophers, theologians, scientists and most importantly reformists, interested in the ideas and promise of communal living.

That spirit is incorporated in the Working Men’s Institute building and in Philip Johnson’s 1960 interdenominational Roofless Church:

This is a beautiful space and surely his best work, – a tall brick rectangular wall with the ‘church’ structure sitting to one side.  The space of this outdoor room is very striking, made the more so by a single, modulated opening looking out on the floodplain of the Wabash River.

This building in a sense spans the cabins of the original founders and the Atheneum Visitors Center by Richard Meier (not built at the time of Johnson’s work).  The Atheneum is other-worldly, a graceful, pure white, vision.  I am sure it was not intentional, but it feels a bit like a nineteenth century steamboat pulled up to a dock, an apt allusion for a visitor’s center.

New Harmony was intentionally separated from the mass of society and it still remains a bit isolated in rural southern Indiana.  I know of no other place that within the space of a few blocks you can wander around almost 200 years of remarkable American architecture.  Well worth a visit.

Midwest Images

I recently drove from Louisville, Kentucky back to Boulder, Colorado, straight through the agricultural Midwest.

bridges over the Ohio River, about 1/3 of a mile across, in Louisville, Kentucky

small town movie theater, southern Illinois

grain elevator and silo, central Kansas

sign, Kansas

birds on wires, outside of Topeka

shed, somewhere in Kansas

Field Notes Brand

I am not much one for making commercial pitches, but I am quite pleased to have recently found a series of small, flexible notebooks by Field Notes Brand.  They are pocket-sized and paper-covered, so they fit easily in back pocket or coat and are invaluable on jobsites.  With a significant number of projects currently under construction in Boulder and Chicago, they have been my constant companion lately and the repository of many on-site generated changes and details.

http://fieldnotesbrand.com/

They are not quite large enough to replace the classic 5×8 landscape-bound black sketchbooks that I have been using for 20 years, but they are much more likely to make it to and from the jobsites.

On top of a bookcase in my office is a collection of about 30 or so sketchbooks, large and small, that I have employed since undergrad.  These include the aforementioned 5×8s (the landscape-bound version can not be purchased here in Boulder and has to be ordered), as well as Moleskins, innumerable spiral notebooks and some very nice Japanese sketchbooks.  Chock full of drawings, sketches, ideas and the occasional grocery list, it is a growing company with the Field Notes soon to be added.

It is hard to imagine the number of really bad ideas that are in these sketchbooks that thankfully never saw the light of day.