architecturediscourse – Reflections on Shared Purpose

November 20, 2018November 20, 2018

Fall Reading V: “Dreaming Aloud”

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Form4 Architecture’s Co-Founding Principal and Chief Artistic Officer, John Marx, initiated a highly original publication in the Architectural Review (AR) monograph series. “The Absurdity of Beauty – Rebalancing the Modernist narrative” is a hybrid monograph that features Form4 Architecture’s work as well as a wide range of topics that advocate a fundamental shift in the way architects design through a mix of poetry, essays, and watercolors. This shift is to do with how we tackle contemporary challenges, like placemaking, gentrification and identity in society, through our built environment. Marx’s own essay within the publication, “Dreaming Aloud”, touches on a theme that is at the heart of what instigated the idea of approaching the monograph in this multifaceted way. This theme is the notion of “range”.

“Range” is understood by Marx as embracing inclusiveness in place of exclusiveness. It is about seeing architecture as a plentiful feast as conveyed in the cover image of this blog. “Range” rejects the notion of artistic endeavour only being of value within the confines of conventional and often hierarchical definitions.

The visual quality of the AR publication as realised by Art Editor Tom Carpenter celebrates “range” through the variety of imagery and the richness of the graphic sensibility throughout the monograph. It is all about giving a distinct platform to different voices that in their individualistic ways challenge us to create emotionally meaningful, culturally vibrant places to live and work. Places that we value and that we feel belong to us.

The following extract on “range” from “Dreaming Aloud” elaborates on what John Marx wants to convey when using this term.

“Dreaming Aloud” by John Marx – Extract:

Range is a very balance-dependent concept. On the one hand, we as a humane species thrive (diversity-adaptability are the key traits which ensure our survival) because we don’t all want the same things at the same time; on the other hand, we also tend to form ourselves into groups with like-minded interests or traits. It is the creative dynamic between these two conditions where healthy and vibrant communities thrive. Existing on either extremes of this equation can have undesirable and unintended consequences.

From an architectural object or project standpoint, range includes the way we judge the value of the work that is created. This aspect of range is well illustrated at the annual Burning Man festival, where some 70,000 people gather at a temporary city in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada to celebrate creatively. Among the many events at the 2017 Burning Man, more than 300 artworks were set out on the Playa. These ranged from ‘museum grade’ sculpture, to the Jedi Dog Temple designed by a five-year old boy. The participants recognise that everything on this range has a deep value to them, because, in the case of Burning Man, each art piece is given as a gift, and each was created from the heart. However they also embrace the idea that the nature of each piece is different and adds value each in its own special way. We, as architects, and as a culture in general, might benefit from embracing the concept of design value across a much broader spectrum than we currently permit.

Read more about theabsurdityofbeauty.com

November 4, 2018November 20, 2018

Autumn Reading IV: “Designing at Evolving Frontiers”

Pierluigi-2b Saulk — Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, 1965, by Louis Kahn from a picture of unknown photographer

In this series, we are publishing excerpts from Form4 Architecture’s monograph: The Absurdity of Beauty – rebalancing the Modernist narrative. Our third post focusses on an essay written by the British architectural critic, Jay Merrick, who spent his formative years growing up in California. We are delighted that Merrick used his early impressions of living on the West Coast to reflect on what makes Californian architecture distinct as it plays on a unique mythology that has put the state on the world map from the days of the Gold Rush and well into the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The inclusion of a chapter on Californian architecture in this monograph examining the Modernist narrative was important to us not least because we are a San Francisco based practice. The story of California and its own brand of culture has therefore shaped the way we design. Californian landscape, light and climate and the early adoption of environmentalism have all played their part; as has its free spirited entrepreneurial outlook that has been the backbone of Californian society from the early pioneers to today’s tech giants. The success of Silicon Valley has also coincided with the Bay Area’s approach to workplace interiors becoming globally influential. These interiors support a collaborative and flexible approach to work that is very much of California. This made us want to reflect on the roots of the innovations that Californian high tech companies have introduced to not only office design per se, but to office life around the world.

The title of Jay Merrick’s essay “Designing at Evolving Frontiers” hints at the way he sees the journey Californians have taken as changing with the times, whilst creating a thriving contemporary culture that is often ahead of its time. How this journey is expressed in the local architecture is something Merrick captures with great flair and insight.

“Designing at Evolving Frontiers” by Jay Merrick – Extract:

“The museum’s curator, Justin McGuirk, links Californian existence with Jean Baudrillard’s definition of an achieved utopia – a place that ‘allowed itself to imagine it could create an ideal world from nothing’.

Facebook’s start-up motto in 2004 was ‘Move Fast And Break Things’, an ethos of fearless invention which had already been demonstrated in architecture such as Greene and Greene’s 1908 Gamble House – the so-called ‘ultimate bungalow’ – and Irving Gill’s remarkable, proto-minimalist 1916 Dodge House in West Hollywood. In the 1930s and ’40s (and leaving aside California’s early Modernist houses), aesthetic-formal frontiers had been breached by vividly outré, neon-edged Popluxe (aka Googie) architecture, such as Wayne McAllister’s faux-futurist Simon’s Drive-Ins, and the boomerang-canopied Harvey’s Broiler outlets.

In 1960, John Lautner’s pedestalled octagonal Chemosphere was the apotheosis of space-age domestic Modernism and, 18 years later, the weirdly discombobulated Gehry Residence in Santa Monica was an instantly legendary lift-off moment for Deconstructivist design.

Simultaneously, the countercultural ideas and output of artists, writers, and environmentalists became key influences on Californian architecture. Ed Ruscha’s laconic photographs in Twentysix Gasoline Stations, for example, were produced five years before the publication of Learning From Las Vegas. ‘I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified’, said Ruscha. ‘Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.’

Equally sacred in Californian architecture are compelling fusions of Modernism and environmentalism – contradictory, tense, potentially fertile. Charles Moore’s blocky cascade of clifftop condominiums at Sea Ranch, 100 miles north of San Francisco, was brilliantly novel in 1966. The noted architectural critic Paul Goldberger said it was, ‘the ancestor of virtually every California beach house and Vermont ski house with unpainted wood siding, a boxy form and a slanted shed roof – one of the few buildings of our time that has become part of the vernacular’.”

Read more about theabsurdityofbeauty.com

Pierluigi-1 Case Study 22 r1 — Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960, by Pierre Koenig from a picture by Julius Shulman

Pierluigi-1a Eames r1 — Case Study House #9, Pacific Palisades, CA, 1949, by Charles & Ray Eams from a picture by Julius Shulman

The above drawings relating to this blog post 11/4/18 are all by Pierluigi Serraino, AIA.

Pierluigi is a San Francisco Bay Area based architect, author, and educator. His work and writings have been published in professional and scholarly journals. He has authored and contributed to several books, among them Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen, 2000), Eero Saarinen (Taschen, 2005), and The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Personality Study (Monacelli Press, 2016). His latest book is California Captured (Phaidon, 2018) on architectural photographer Marvin Rand. His forthcoming book is a comprehensive appraisal of architectural photographer Ezra Stoller (Phaidon, 2019).

Regarding his interest in hand drawing historic buildings, Pierluigi notes, “Drawing is a way of knowing. What is learned in the process of re-drawing the icons of modernity and previous eras? A world of content unfolds and a higher awareness of the scope of architecture as an art form.”

August 10, 2018August 13, 2018

Summer Reading II: “Building Enchantment”

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In this second post for our summer reading series “Excerpts from: The Absurdity of Beauty – rebalancing the Modernist narrative”, we wanted to highlight the discourse around poetry and architecture that informed our approach in publishing this monograph with Architectural Review. Conversations around the notion of poetry were critical from the start and developed as we talked to architect and Royal Academician Ian Ritchie about what he would write for the publication. He also introduced us to his friend, architect and writer Richard England, who has dwelled on this topic over many years.

What emerged from our many pleasurable exchanges whilst putting the monograph together was a discourse on how the poetic qualities of architecture are what makes it an art form. They are what enables architecture to have universal appeal and to be emotionally meaningful. These exchanges led to Richard England also writing for the monograph and what followed was his thoughtful essay “Building Enchantment”. In it, England eloquently describes the expressive potential that architecture and poetry share. The devices are, of course, different but their ability to transcend the everyday is the same.

We hope you enjoy the following passages from Richard England’s essay “Building Enchantment” and its foray into the essence of things and perhaps the very things we seek to find when we fall in love with architecture.

“Building Enchantment” by Richard England – Extract:

In attempting to establish a relationship between architecture and poetry, it seems appropriate first of all to investigate the origins and meanings of the two respective disciplines: Architecture derives from the Greek word Arkhitekton, where Arkhi signifies ‘master’ and Tekton ‘building’. Poetry also comes from the Greek Poieses, meaning ‘to make’.

“Making and building”

From the etymology of the words, it is clear that the two disciplines are involved in a process of making and building, ie, creating. However, the materials and methodologies employed are different; building materials for architecture and words for poetry. Yet both share the aim of enchanting and elevating the human spirit. Architecture and poetry also share the qualities of precision, metrics, structure and rhythm, as essential constituents in both their creative process and manifestation. Also common to both is the play of contrasting opposites: solid and void in architecture, sound and silence in poetry.

Poetry, not unlike architecture, is also about building, building with words and sculpting with sound. It is about the taste of words and the intermittent voids and silences of the pauses; a crossover between sound and silence. One reads not only what is written, but also that which is not written; the words between the lines and the invisible words too; the heard and the unheard, the said and the unsaid. It is how musical and meaningful the poet can make these passages that elevates his or her work from the realm of prose to that of poetry, in the same way that an architect can make a building lift the spirit and enchant its users. It was TS Eliot who said ‘poetry must communicate even before it is understood’. The true poet is the one who casts a web of magic that has the capacity to carry the reader away, just as the true architect caps into his building human emotions to lift the hearts of its users.