Back to the future in the Rocky Mountain West

I have an abiding interest in the work of Charles Haertling, Boulder’s most well-known architect from the 1960’s and 70’s.  His organic designs have been extremely influential and are much more finely resolved than the better known works of other organic architects like Bruce Goff.

One of his most interesting buildings appears briefly in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper from 1973.  It is really only an establishing shot and I am pretty sure none of the interiors from the film are of the actual house.

Sleeper is an odd, slapstick Allen movie set in 2173 starring Allen and Diane Keaton.  To depict a future society, Allen used a number of buildings in the Denver/Boulder area, most notably the house in Genesse often referred to as the Sleeper House.  Not yet completed at the time of filming the building sat unfinished and deteriorating for many years until recently a new owner completed it and added a large and fairly sympathetic addition.

Also prominently featured in the film is the Mesa Lab of NCAR in Boulder.  Allen, captured and brainwashed here, eventually escapes and returns to sabotage the place.  There are a few establishing shots and a couple of Allen rappelling down one of the towers.

There are a couple of other local buildings in the movie.  Briefly seen in the very beginning is the main building of the Denver Botanic Gardens.

And as a humorous sight-gag, the Mile Hi church in Denver is rendered as a McDonalds.

What may be of note here is that Allen’s future is a city-less one filled with modern, space-age buildings and for that he left his precious NYC to film in Colorado.  The houses depicted in the movie, the Sleeper house and the Brenton house, are displayed as modern and although a bit alienating, not entirely evil.  NCAR on the other hand is the embodiment of the tyrannical, hero-worship technological society.  Maybe both of those portraits are appropriate for the programs of the buildings and maybe as well for the architectural background of I.M. Pei, NCAR’s architect.  Schooled in the heady days of unabashed hero-worship, the building has all the hallmarks of the Mies/Gropius/Rudolph scaleless, dehumanized placelessness.  By contrast, the houses by Haertling and Deaton were self-conscious antipodes to harsh geometries and materials of late Modernism and attempted to incorporate new spatial concepts while still holding on to Modernism’s liberating ideologies.  Does this difference represent a slightly different generation of architect, is it reflective of the radical shift in attitudes of the 1960’s, or is it a reflection of two architects born and educated west of the Mississippi (Deaton and Haertling) as opposed to the Modernist orthodoxy of the East Coast (Pei)?

(all images from the movie Sleeper, by Woody Allen)

www.mgerwingarch.com

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Mid-century masterpiece – Arapahoe Acres

It is rare that really good mid-century modern architecture finds itself not confined to the design of an isolated building.  So much of the ethos of that period of Modernism was committed to making unique, site- and client-specific buildings, that it is unusual to see a cluster of homes that all reflect the design ambitions of Modernism.  Arapahoe Acres in Englewood, Colorado is one of the shining exceptions.

Arapahoe Acres is a small, planned residential development bounded by more conventional developments and houses in suburban Englewood, just south of Denver.  There are 124 houses, ranging from 850 to 2,500 square feet and all with flat or slightly pitched roofs and clearly unmistakable Modernist intentions.  These are not all unique designs for individual clients, but rather a series of types, with significant variations, laid out on a curvilinear street pattern with knot-like semi cul-de-sacs.  Most of the homes were designed between 1949 and 1957 by the developer and self-taught architect Edward Hawkins.

Arapahoe Acres recently held their annual home tour featuring the interior and exteriors of about 8 homes.  What is most striking is that these relatively little houses were so thoughtfully planned and finished that few significant additions or harmful renovations have been executed.  As the neighborhood is on the National Register as a Historic District, this would limit maybe the worst abuses, but I think the reason for the lack of alterations is more due to the open planning, careful spatial layering and utility that pervades these houses.  So while many of them are quite small, the extensive use of natural materials, including some really nice masonry, and clear and simple expressive structural framing lends a quietude and richness that has argued well for many decades for retaining them as originally designed.

If you have a chance, take a drive around the neighborhood and you will see how really interesting it is.  It is certainly suburban and houses all the difficulties that also plague most post-war car-centered developments.  But the theme and variation, simple massing and consistent aesthetic makes for a very pleasing little oasis within the larger undifferentiated suburban sprawl of south Denver.  And of course it is worth noting that this forward-looking development of well-designed and built homes, though now “historic”, is still light-years ahead of most current developments with cheesy fake-Victorian model homes, wood composite siding and faux stone chateaus.  Arapahoe Acres embodies the positive, can-do attitude of post-war America where the future was eagerly anticipated and the best was yet to come.

(Much of the history of Arapahoe Acres info above was gathered from the AA tour guide as assembled by Diane Wray Tomasso, resident and neighborhood historian)

www.mgerwingarch.com

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

June 7th was the birthday of Scottish architect and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born in 1868 in Glasgow.  Like Louis Sullivan, his  is one of those great stories of a great talent at the right place, at the right time, with a bit of a tragic ending.  Working largely in booming Glasgow, Mackintosh was able to execute a number of amazing buildings, creating a robust style of architecture that combined early Modernist ideas with traditional Scottish baronial architecture.

Scotland Street School, 1903-06

All of his buildings are firmly rooted to the earth, using masonry in fairly traditional architectonics, but inventing a kind of plasticity with decorative elements that marked a radical departure from traditional forms.  Of note is that many of his decorative designs and furnishings were the work of his supremely talented wife, Margaret Macdonald.

Hill House, 1903-06

And maybe as influential as his buildings are his drawings and watercolors.

Daily Record Building

Mackintosh and his wife Margaret met while students at evening classes in the Glasgow School of Art.  Margaret’s sister Frances, and Mackintosh’s fellow intern Herbert MacNair, also attended and later wed, and the two couples become known as The Four, the most influential members of the Glasgow School movement.  Not enough can be said about that kind of intense collaboration and its necessity in the forging and support of talent and ideas.  Individual geniuses do exist, but rarely can you delve back into their history and not discover influential and inspirational  colleagues, parents, and family.

The Glasgow School of Art is probably his best and most well-known work, a staggering feat of complete interior design and architecture.  Won in a competition with twelve other local firms, and radical for its time, it is still clearly part of the landscape of Scottish architecture and the traditions of masonry and sculptural building.  Mackintosh’s difficult and obsessive nature increasing lead to problems and this building, his best, marks the start of his decline.

Glasgow School of Art, 1897-99 and 1907-09

After failing to find commissions, Mackintosh and Margaret eventually moved to France and although beautiful, his paintings are his only work of this final period of his life.

Happy Birthday, Charles Rennie Mackintosh – a somewhat sad life with magnificent achievements, lasting architecture that continues to inspire in its ability to project into the future while reflecting its past.

(gotta get that tie!)

images from Charles Rennie Mackintosh by Charlotte & Peter Fiell and Charles Rennie Mackintosh edited by Wendy Kaplan

www.mgerwingarch.com

architect's lineage, part 2

a look at some of the more interesting aspects of the connections between architects as outlined in last week’s post.

architect’s lineage, part 1

I am certainly no scholar, so please take this as a more distanced view than any rigorous academic pursuit would reveal.

Although not strictly associated with Penn, there is a kind of Philadelphia School of architecture that moves from Furness through George Howe and Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi.  This is one of the most important confluences of the two major education traditions of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the European modernist polytechnical schools.  In the end, despite the ostentatiously high-tech and even futuristic forms,  the structural expression seen in the work of Foster and Piano and Rogers owes as much or more to the more plastic and sculptural training of the Ecole as filtered down through Howe and Kahn rather than the materialistic and technical influences of the polytech schools.

On another note, a look at the New York Five – Eisenman, Graves, Meier, Hejduk and Gwarthmey – shows the influence of Gropius and Breuer at Harvard  (Meier did not attend Harvard but worked for Breuer) more than anything else.  Their Modern revisionism came more from outside of the paths of Mies and LeCorbusier than their forms might suggest.

And a final note on this kind of lineage is the fascinating case of California Modernism.  Rudolf Schindler, educated by both Loos and Wright, blends the tradition of European Modernism with the Chicago School via Wright.  Schindler and Neutra, both working, and at a time living together, generated an amazing body of work, reconciling the abstractions of Modernism with the California climate and landscape.  Their legacy, in the Case Study Houses and through Harwell Hamilton Harris in the gathering of the Texas Rangers, echoes through every school of architecture in the States for the next 50 years.  And in the photos of Julius Shulman, their work influences every architect in their generation and next.

www.mgerwingarch.com

architect’s lineage, part 2

a look at some of the more interesting aspects of the connections between architects as outlined in last week’s post.

architect’s lineage, part 1

I am certainly no scholar, so please take this as a more distanced view than any rigorous academic pursuit would reveal.

Although not strictly associated with Penn, there is a kind of Philadelphia School of architecture that moves from Furness through George Howe and Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi.  This is one of the most important confluences of the two major education traditions of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the European modernist polytechnical schools.  In the end, despite the ostentatiously high-tech and even futuristic forms,  the structural expression seen in the work of Foster and Piano and Rogers owes as much or more to the more plastic and sculptural training of the Ecole as filtered down through Howe and Kahn rather than the materialistic and technical influences of the polytech schools.

On another note, a look at the New York Five – Eisenman, Graves, Meier, Hejduk and Gwarthmey – shows the influence of Gropius and Breuer at Harvard  (Meier did not attend Harvard but worked for Breuer) more than anything else.  Their Modern revisionism came more from outside of the paths of Mies and LeCorbusier than their forms might suggest.

And a final note on this kind of lineage is the fascinating case of California Modernism.  Rudolf Schindler, educated by both Loos and Wright, blends the tradition of European Modernism with the Chicago School via Wright.  Schindler and Neutra, both working, and at a time living together, generated an amazing body of work, reconciling the abstractions of Modernism with the California climate and landscape.  Their legacy, in the Case Study Houses and through Harwell Hamilton Harris in the gathering of the Texas Rangers, echoes through every school of architecture in the States for the next 50 years.  And in the photos of Julius Shulman, their work influences every architect in their generation and next.

www.mgerwingarch.com

I. M. Pei’s NCAR building, Boulder, Colorado, part 2

last week or so I posted some introductory thoughts on I. M. Pei’s NCAR building in Boulder. https://mgerwing.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/ncar-by-i-m-pei-part-1/

Today, a few more thoughts on the building:

Pei wanted to make an intentionally scaleless building to abstract the forms in relation to the overwhelming presence of the adjacent flatirons.

He certainly succeeded.  Take the odd situation of the windows – using darkly tinted glass and spandrels of dark metal or black glass, the windows are simply slits in the surrounding concrete forms.   It is almost impossible to tell how many stories the building is or what is the nature of the spaces inside the forms.  These are rendered more as voids rather than windows, similar to Paul Rudolph’s Yale A+A building.

Like most Brutalist buildings, this attempt to erase the marks of human scale and occupation works on a large scale but is painful in the immediate experience of the building.  The building is so relentlessly composed of two materials – concrete and its void – that all of the materials often used to bring another sense of scale and detail – the laps of panels or fasteners, the rhythym of windows and frames, are eliminated.  Even Paul Rudolph’s Yale A+A Building has some smaller scaled detail, the scallops of the roughly corrugated concrete, although occasionally tearing clothes and smashing shoulders, are about the size of your hand and fingers.

The stark orthagonal geometry can be beautiful.  On a couple of occasions where a curve is introduced, like the east approach stair, the interplay of geometry and forms is thrilling.  (the same can not be said for the strange, anolomous arched passageways on the west facade)

In the end I can’t help but see this building as a bit of the dinosaur that it is.  These Brutalist buildings made easy targets for the challenges to Modernism with their cool abstractions and often mean materials.  That the legacy of Modernism, forged in a profoundly humanist utopian project, morphed into cold, scaleless,  inhuman buildings,  is ironically tragic and sad.

NCAR is certainly not a building for the senses and maybe not even for the eye, but rather conceived in the head and held there in its icy Apollonian perfection.  It is beautiful, like an idea or Occum’s razor, made manifest.  And, it was one of the last of its species for a reason.

Standing in either of the publicly-accessible courtyards, the stunning natural setting is held at arm’s length – to be viewed, but not participated in.  Still, the warm concrete walls are a far cry from the worst of the Brutalist genre, if not exactly welcoming, then at least softer, and easier on the eyes and hands.

So next time you are up at NCAR, instead of rushing off to the Mesa Trail and hiking along the flatirons, stop by the building and take a walk around.  To so many people in Boulder “NCAR” means little more than a place to park near a trailhead and some time spent in and around the building, not to mention the work and exhibits inside, is well worth the little dose of culture to mix with the abundant nature of the site.

www.mgerwingarch.com

I. M. Pei's NCAR building, Boulder, Colorado, part 2

last week or so I posted some introductory thoughts on I. M. Pei’s NCAR building in Boulder. https://mgerwing.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/ncar-by-i-m-pei-part-1/

Today, a few more thoughts on the building:

Pei wanted to make an intentionally scaleless building to abstract the forms in relation to the overwhelming presence of the adjacent flatirons.

He certainly succeeded.  Take the odd situation of the windows – using darkly tinted glass and spandrels of dark metal or black glass, the windows are simply slits in the surrounding concrete forms.   It is almost impossible to tell how many stories the building is or what is the nature of the spaces inside the forms.  These are rendered more as voids rather than windows, similar to Paul Rudolph’s Yale A+A building.

Like most Brutalist buildings, this attempt to erase the marks of human scale and occupation works on a large scale but is painful in the immediate experience of the building.  The building is so relentlessly composed of two materials – concrete and its void – that all of the materials often used to bring another sense of scale and detail – the laps of panels or fasteners, the rhythym of windows and frames, are eliminated.  Even Paul Rudolph’s Yale A+A Building has some smaller scaled detail, the scallops of the roughly corrugated concrete, although occasionally tearing clothes and smashing shoulders, are about the size of your hand and fingers.

The stark orthagonal geometry can be beautiful.  On a couple of occasions where a curve is introduced, like the east approach stair, the interplay of geometry and forms is thrilling.  (the same can not be said for the strange, anolomous arched passageways on the west facade)

In the end I can’t help but see this building as a bit of the dinosaur that it is.  These Brutalist buildings made easy targets for the challenges to Modernism with their cool abstractions and often mean materials.  That the legacy of Modernism, forged in a profoundly humanist utopian project, morphed into cold, scaleless,  inhuman buildings,  is ironically tragic and sad.

NCAR is certainly not a building for the senses and maybe not even for the eye, but rather conceived in the head and held there in its icy Apollonian perfection.  It is beautiful, like an idea or Occum’s razor, made manifest.  And, it was one of the last of its species for a reason.

Standing in either of the publicly-accessible courtyards, the stunning natural setting is held at arm’s length – to be viewed, but not participated in.  Still, the warm concrete walls are a far cry from the worst of the Brutalist genre, if not exactly welcoming, then at least softer, and easier on the eyes and hands.

So next time you are up at NCAR, instead of rushing off to the Mesa Trail and hiking along the flatirons, stop by the building and take a walk around.  To so many people in Boulder “NCAR” means little more than a place to park near a trailhead and some time spent in and around the building, not to mention the work and exhibits inside, is well worth the little dose of culture to mix with the abundant nature of the site.

www.mgerwingarch.com

an architect’s lineage

For a while now I have been interested in how architectural ideas and attitudes are formed and passed down from one generation of architect to another.  So I have put together a very rough chart that shows how the two major institutions of Western architectural education, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and mostly European polytechnical architectural schools, have combined and filtered down through many of the twentieth centuries most well-known and accomplished architects.

As you can see this is pretty rough and if anyone has more connections or people to include, let me know and I will see if I can work it in.  The idea here is not to show links of ideas or influences, but actual physical connections – attended, worked for, colleagues in the same office, etc.  The chart runs vaguely chronological, left to right, starting with the first generation of Modernists and proceeding to about 1980 or so on the far right with still much more to add.

Some thoughts:

It is the combination of the two education models that really established Modernism.  The work of Le Corbusier and Louis Sullivan, representing the European Modernism and Chicago School is a comingling of influences.  In the case of Le Corbusier, he worked for architects who come from both traditions, Josef Hoffmann and Auguste Perret.  For Sullivan, he worked for Furness who was educated in the studio of Richard Morris Hunt of Ecole des Beaux Arts lineage.  Sullivan also worked for and with Dankmar Adler and William LeBaron Jenney, both more engineers than architects.

For as much as a champion of small state university architecture schools as I am, I must admit to the central position of Harvard and Yale and the other East Coast architecture schools as focal points in this chart.  Harvard brought in first generation Modernists, Gropius and Breuer and extended the Bauhaus tradition.  Much of Yale’s campus was designed by James Gamble Rogers and Albers and Rudolph’s influence there is unmistakable and profound through students like Foster and Rogers and buildings by Kahn, Rudolph, Saarinen.

Imagine the heady times at the office of Peter Behrens with LeCorbusier, Mies and Gropius all working away.

Or the camaraderie and competition in William LeBaron Jenney’s office between John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan and William Holabird and Martin Roche.

More in a later post including the strange lineage of California Modernism (Otto Wagner via Adolf Loos meets Louis Sullivan via Frank Lloyd Wright) and the confluence of Kahn, Piano, Rudolph, Foster and Rogers.

If you have more connections please drop me a note.  I have not yet included the AA in London or the importance and influence of the Texas Rangers (Rowe, Harris, Hoesli, etc. ) and the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in NYC in the ’60s and ’70s (Eisenman, Frampton, Tafuri, Koolhaas, Vidler, Gandelsonas) and ETH Zurich (Berlage, Calatrava, Herzon & de Meuron, Rossi, Semper, Tschumi).

Part 2  in an upcoming post in about a week.

www.mgerwingarch.com

an architect's lineage

For a while now I have been interested in how architectural ideas and attitudes are formed and passed down from one generation of architect to another.  So I have put together a very rough chart that shows how the two major institutions of Western architectural education, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and mostly European polytechnical architectural schools, have combined and filtered down through many of the twentieth centuries most well-known and accomplished architects.

As you can see this is pretty rough and if anyone has more connections or people to include, let me know and I will see if I can work it in.  The idea here is not to show links of ideas or influences, but actual physical connections – attended, worked for, colleagues in the same office, etc.  The chart runs vaguely chronological, left to right, starting with the first generation of Modernists and proceeding to about 1980 or so on the far right with still much more to add.

Some thoughts:

It is the combination of the two education models that really established Modernism.  The work of Le Corbusier and Louis Sullivan, representing the European Modernism and Chicago School is a comingling of influences.  In the case of Le Corbusier, he worked for architects who come from both traditions, Josef Hoffmann and Auguste Perret.  For Sullivan, he worked for Furness who was educated in the studio of Richard Morris Hunt of Ecole des Beaux Arts lineage.  Sullivan also worked for and with Dankmar Adler and William LeBaron Jenney, both more engineers than architects.

For as much as a champion of small state university architecture schools as I am, I must admit to the central position of Harvard and Yale and the other East Coast architecture schools as focal points in this chart.  Harvard brought in first generation Modernists, Gropius and Breuer and extended the Bauhaus tradition.  Much of Yale’s campus was designed by James Gamble Rogers and Albers and Rudolph’s influence there is unmistakable and profound through students like Foster and Rogers and buildings by Kahn, Rudolph, Saarinen.

Imagine the heady times at the office of Peter Behrens with LeCorbusier, Mies and Gropius all working away.

Or the camaraderie and competition in William LeBaron Jenney’s office between John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan and William Holabird and Martin Roche.

More in a later post including the strange lineage of California Modernism (Otto Wagner via Adolf Loos meets Louis Sullivan via Frank Lloyd Wright) and the confluence of Kahn, Piano, Rudolph, Foster and Rogers.

If you have more connections please drop me a note.  I have not yet included the AA in London or the importance and influence of the Texas Rangers (Rowe, Harris, Hoesli, etc. ) and the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in NYC in the ’60s and ’70s (Eisenman, Frampton, Tafuri, Koolhaas, Vidler, Gandelsonas) and ETH Zurich (Berlage, Calatrava, Herzon & de Meuron, Rossi, Semper, Tschumi).

Part 2  in an upcoming post in about a week.

www.mgerwingarch.com

NCAR, by I. M. Pei, part 1

This is the first post on NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, designed by I. M. Pei in the mid-1960s, located on a mesa above Boulder, Colorado.

NCAR is probably Boulder, Colorado’s most well-known Modern building.  Perched alone atop a prominent mesa, the complex sits well above the surrounding town and suburbs and has as a backdrop the stunning flatirons and  peaks of the Front Range. (NCAR is part of UCAR, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, with buildings all over Boulder, but the building of interest here is I. M. Pei’s NCAR building at the top western end of Table Mesa Road.)

Along with being the motherload of geeky weather information, NCAR is one of the last purely Modernist buildings, a Brutalist design, that marked the end of the supremacy of Modernism as the only acceptable and official “style” of architecture for American corporate and government buildings.

Unlike the original design,  Pei designed a complex of similarly scaled and proportioned buildings, each providing space for different research groups of the institution and gathered in an intellectual community of shared courtyards.  By breaking the building down into smaller units, NCAR avoided the monumentality and thugishness of many of its Brutalist cousins.  The frankly, and intentionally maze-like design was meant to engender chance encounters between often-isolated researchers.

“You just cannot compete with the scale of the Rockies. So we tried to make a building that was without the conventional scale you get from recognizable floor heights – as in those monolithic structures that still survive fromt he cliff-dwelling Indians.”

I. M. Pei, from Paul Heyer’s American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies in the Late Twentieth Century, (extracted from the Great Buildings Online website)

“I recalled the places I had seen with my mother when I was a little boy—the mountaintop Buddhist retreats. There in the Colorado mountains, I tried to listen to the silence again—just as my mother had taught me. The investigation of the place became a kind of religious experience for me.”

I. M. Pei, from Gero von Boehm’s Conversations with I. M. Pei: Light is the Key

Unlike most of its Brutalist cousins, this building does make some accommodations to its site and context.  The sources of inspiration that Pei mentions are certainly abstractly apparent, but it is the inclusion of local red sandstone aggregates to the bush-hammered concrete that most closely connects the building to the surrounding environment.

And at a distance, and it is hard to avoid a view of NCAR from almost anywhere in Boulder, the buildings certainly do sit with sensitivity on the mesa.  The scalelessness that Pei speaks about works very well in the view of the larger environment as the buildings, although quite large, are dwarfed by the neighboring flatirons.

I spent a couple of mornings and afternoons at NCAR recently, taking photos and spending time with a building that although I see it everyday, I have come to ignore as a piece of architecture.  I toured the building again, like I did ten years ago when we first moved to Boulder, and tried to understand its intentions and execution, its successes and failures.

Pei was the same age I am now when he designed this building and he often described it as his breakthrough design.  As has so often been said, architecture is an old man’s game, and Pei, like myself at 45 years old, could look back at some 20 – 25 years of buildings, drawings, thoughts and frustrations.  To synthesize this all in a single building is a fool’s errand, but an inevitable attempt for any architect.  After this building, Pei’s work shifted from largely developer-driven, single-structure works, to a more complex and subtle mingling of spatial intentions and object-like buildings.  It may be that only 20 years of fighting the Modernist battle between the desire to craft meaningful spaces and the love of frankly sculptural forms, can generate a building where these opposing forces can join and reinforce each other.

In a future post, I will post my impressions of the building, some more photos, and some thoughts on Pei, Brutalism, Modernism and the sources of inspiration.