Starchitects and Their Confounding Erections
Below I'm going to show you two pictures of buildings, both designed by star architect Frank Gehry.*
Charles Simonyi's House on Lake Washington
(Photo from a Flickr Collection)
The Experience Music Project, Seattle
Can anyone tell me the main difference between these two structures, the prime distinction that elevates one an extravagant indulgence, but condemns the other as a dangerous abomination? Yes, it's a rhetorical question, one to which I already have the answer, but one to which so many seem clueless. That just bothers me. Allow me to give you this answer:
One is a private house. The other is not.
Before you dismiss this seemingly trivial distinction as inconsequential, allow me to retort . . . with evidence to support my position. A few days ago, gomezticator gave us a run-down on his day with this seemingly tiny detail concerning his visit to the Seattle Public Library:
There was a cute young lady who looked lost, wandering around the stairwell like someone who hadn't been to Central Library and had no idea how to get out of the stacks, so I did the slow saunter down the stairs so she could follow me (she could tell by how I packed up that I was leaving) and walked down to the closed stairwell, where I stepped down to the 5th floor, took the escalators down and walked out the front door.
To really understand my disgust you must first understand The Central Library Building Itself.
The Library's Exterior
(Note: I am quoting the source of the picture, not sharing its endorsement as a "great" building.) Anyway, browse through the pictures on that site. Angled walls. Colorful passageways. All arranged to impress, to overwhelm, to awe and humble the occupant.
And that's the problem. Public buildings should be impressive, up to a point. A strong impression of solidity transfers to the visitor a sense of the lasting, historical solidity of the institution it houses. This gives confidence to those who must deal with the institution, be it a library, a courthouse, a civic center. Civic buildings by definition exist to house agencies tasked with serving the public. Public spaces should, if at all possible, present the public a sense of purpose, of order, of organization. Again, the building's order sets the tone of the visit, implying the order flows from the organization to the physical structure housing it. Because of this, buildings specifically should not confound and distract visitors . . . which is just what star architect Rem Koolhaas set out to do.
By coincidence, the day I read gomezticator's entry I had also heard James Howard Kunstler expound on the starchitect attitude on his enormously entertaining and informative KunstlerCast. In Episode #5 - Starchitects (transcript here), Kunstler identifies the very, very real problem with buildings like the Library and the EMP:
The big status symbol for the last 20 years has been to get a museum or a library designed by one of a certain roster of star architects or Starchitects as they’re called. It’s a revolving door of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhass, Peter Eisenman and a bunch of other people.
The results have been disastrous for practically every place that’s done this. The case of the Seattle library is interesting. Yes, it is a building that is intimidating and the inside of it is an interesting thing because it completely disorients you. You go up these stairways that are designed to make you feel disoriented and to not really particularly lead to a place that you understand.
The ideology of academic architecture these days is based on the wish to confound our expectations about how buildings will work and about how cities will work and how the buildings will relate to the cities.
So, the program with Rem Koolhass - and he states this explicitly in his own writings - is to confuse the person using the building and create as much anxiety as possible in the users and to mystify them. The whole object of this whole exercise is to make the architect seem more supernaturally brilliant for having created all these mystifications. The more mystification they create, the more it supposedly means that they know things that you don’t.
(Italics in transcript; Bold emphasis mine.)
In an interview, Frank Gehry stated open admiration for Koolhaas's buildings, so it's safe to say that he shares with Rem the philosophy of overwhelming disorientation in a building. This certainly explains his many buildings. Not much else does.
I will admit a caveat for those studying architecture today: I don't find all of these buildings disastrous. Many I find extremely interesting in the same way I find sculpture attractive. I could stare at the EMP for hours on end -- and have. I used to work right across the street from it. As an abstract piece of sculpture, it works.
Ah, but as a building . . . . There's another problem with Starchitecture that simply must be addressed. The EMP picture above doesn't really highlight the main problem. Glance at the picture above for just a second, though, and pay special attention to the bright red section. Got it?
Now consider this pic from a different angle.
The view from the sidewalk
From this perspective, one can see that the weird glass panel things that flow over the "roof" are mounted by struts off the roof itself. One can also see that the red section flows uninterrupted only by those skinny little panel struts from its high point to that lip just below all but one of those strut panels. Returning to the picture above, note how much of this flowing red surface there is . . . above the sidewalk . . . In Seattle.
All that roof surface and not a hint of gutter. When it rains, that red section especially becomes a trough sluicing all the accumulation from the tippy-top of the roof to a sloppy but intense fire hose of water aimed directly at the heads of everyone below mistakenly assuming they can (or should) be able to safely walk on a city right-of-way down 5th Avenue. I've seen that roof section during microburst squalls when an inch can fall in an hour. EMP personnel have to cone off the problem section and personally stand guard, warding off kids in rain slickers (or not) who simply want to stand beneath the downspout. They have to shoo these kids, you see, or face liability for those parents inclined to hold a grudge at injuries sustained. Gehry's arrogant dismissal of something as mundane as gutters in Seattle has trapped the EMP in a perpetual battle against the elements and the public's right to walk on the sidewalk.
The EMP is far from alone, though. Gehry has blighted the public's right to free and unobstructed travel in more than one city. In Cleveland, Case Western University has its own study in arrogant stupidity, the Peter B. Lewis Building.
Here we find Gehry has built what look like stainless steel wall/roof sections adjacent to the sidewalk. In Ohio. That flatish section just over the main entrance looks especially playful, doesn't it? Imagine a gathered slab of ice-hard snowpack breaking the surface tension of the stainless just as you wander toward the door . . . . Again, I've heard that the personnel have to cone off "problem" sections when it snows.
Oh, and if you want yet another prime example of arrogance, consider that Gehry did install a system to prevent snow accumulations before it formed potentially deadly slide. The builder put electric resistance heaters under the roof to melt the snow. This bears repeating: Whenever it snows in Cleveland, the University must pay to electrically power heaters not to warm the building, but to prevent otherwise certain disaster from falling snow. An NPR report noted that the builder "understimated" the number and wattage of the heaters needed, meaning the original installation wasn't using enough power to overcome the obvious problems caused by Gehry's destructive ego.
MIT had a similar problem with yet another Gehry monstrosity, the Ray and Maria Stata Center. These and many other problems led to a lawsuit:
MIT has filed a lawsuit against Frank O. Gehry, the architect of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, and Skanska USA Building Inc., the construction company that built the Stata Center. MIT alleges that Gehry was negligent in designing the building and that both Gehry and Skanska breached their contractual obligations.
In the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 31, MIT specifically cited “design and construction failures” on the Stata Center project which resulted in “masonry cracking” and “poor drainage” at the outdoor amphitheater, “persistent leaks,” “sliding ice and snow from the building,” and “mold growth.” (Emphasis mine.)
MIT employees have several other problems with this building, but which probably couldn't be added to the suit. Really, if you had an office with no separation from the corridor but a wall of glass, you would probably tape newspapers on that glass to gain some semblance of privacy, too. Fishbowls are for fish.
I think this paragraph from the MIT article almost sums up just about everything:
Former Boston University President John Silber, an outspoken critic of the Stata Center, said to the Globe, Gehry “thinks of himself as an artist, as a sculptor. But the trouble is you don’t live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building.”
He got some of the first point right, and all of the second. The first point: You don't live in a sculpture. . . . I don't, I know. Most people I know don't. But some do. Let's return to Charles Simonyi and his Gehry house.* He completed his house in 1995, just as Windows 95 was released. Just for fun (rumor and my old Lake Tour script has it), he had Gehry do a slight redesign and change the window count from 99 to 95. Not for practicality, not for economy, but to celebrate his company's new product. Not many have the money or time to do such a thing. He also has a collection of modern art in his house, itself artistic in the modern sense. You can see a bright blob in the picture, an example of colorful sculpture on his lawn.
On his lawn. Not on the sidewalk. Not on a public right-of-way. On his private lawn.
That's the key difference here, the difference between buildings available to the public and those intended as private residences. Should Simonyi or anyone else choose to build a house in Fairbanks with a master suite directly under the lowest edge of a a seventy-degree angled roof 50 feet tall and separated from this ungutted edge only by a flimsy skylight, that's their choice. The owner might just be prosecuted for killing whoever other than themselves dies in the inevitable shard-filled ice slide, sure; but build and live in the house they can.
However, should someone want to show off how much cash one person can burn in the public arena, certain common-sense restrictions should apply. The term "graceful degradation" should apply to all cases -- if something goes wrong (like a power outage in a blizzard) nothing worse will happen as a result. One should not have to cordon off entire reaches of public access simply because some architect's wet dream presents a clear and present danger in times of naturally-occurring and predictable weather. Buildings should provide a safe haven for people in and around them regardless of whether the power happens to be off when it's raining or snowing or whether or not employees are around to cone and guard the sidewalk.
The above just covers the obvious liability issue from the physical structure. One should expand this common-sense prohibition against civic buildings built to confound the polity. Exits and entrances should be obvious to all even without signage. Public passageways should not visually double as showcases for private office space. Civic buildings should serve the public, not impress upon the city how very dizzingly smart the architect must be. On that note, I'll let Mr. Kunstler have the final word:
One way of understanding the urban principles involved is to know that there’s a difference between background buildings and monumental buildings.
Monumental buildings have a certain obligation to help us feel oriented, to know what they are, to be typologically consistent with our expectations, and also to present a sort of sense of decorum to the city.
The city can be an intimidating place for the person who lives there. It’s a place where you’re meeting a lot of strangers constantly, you’re around people you don’t know. There are a lot of exciting, stimulating, but also kind of intimidating things that happen to you in the city.
So one of the purposes of architecture for a few thousand years has been to reassure us that when we’re in the city, we’re in a place that is safe, in which transactions occur that we can understand. We’re in surroundings that are coherent, that the outsides of the buildings embellish the public realm and honor the public realm.
It honors our presence in the public realm by speaking to us in languages, and vocabularies, and syntaxes, and grammars, and rhythms, and patterns that we understand from our own culture.
So, when you bring into that setting this effort to mystify and confuse everybody and create, deliberately, more anxiety, you’re doing a real disservice not only to the individual people who inhabit the place, but to the idea of civic life as a general proposition.
*That picture really doesn't do the house justice, but it was all I could find on a quick search. While it was being built, people thought the walls had suffered some foundation damage causing the apparent slide into the dirt. Then it was finished, and everyone had to assume the out-of-true construction was somehow deliberate.
I'm sorry about the quality of the picture not because I'm criticizing the photographer, but because I could have easily gotten a better shot myself. For fifteen years, I captained and crewed boats on and around Lake Washington. I have passed much closer to that house in much larger boats than the one the photographer rode in her pleasure cruise. Why didn't I take a few moments from the helm, focus and shoot?
That's the problem with a job that offers so very many opportunities for great pictures; I got used to them. Every time I thought it would be neat to snap a shot of Bill Gates' house under construction, or the Seattle skyline, or whales or porpoises, or whatever, I found myself at work without my camera, and figured I would get the shot later. I never did. That was my fault, and I apologize.
*A Correction, July 23, 2009: Gehry did not design the Simonyi House, I am informed. Rather, it was done by Seattle architect Wendell Lovett. My bad.
Charles Simonyi's House on Lake Washington
(Photo from a Flickr Collection)
The Experience Music Project, Seattle
Can anyone tell me the main difference between these two structures, the prime distinction that elevates one an extravagant indulgence, but condemns the other as a dangerous abomination? Yes, it's a rhetorical question, one to which I already have the answer, but one to which so many seem clueless. That just bothers me. Allow me to give you this answer:
One is a private house. The other is not.
Before you dismiss this seemingly trivial distinction as inconsequential, allow me to retort . . . with evidence to support my position. A few days ago, gomezticator gave us a run-down on his day with this seemingly tiny detail concerning his visit to the Seattle Public Library:
There was a cute young lady who looked lost, wandering around the stairwell like someone who hadn't been to Central Library and had no idea how to get out of the stacks, so I did the slow saunter down the stairs so she could follow me (she could tell by how I packed up that I was leaving) and walked down to the closed stairwell, where I stepped down to the 5th floor, took the escalators down and walked out the front door.
To really understand my disgust you must first understand The Central Library Building Itself.
The Library's Exterior
(Note: I am quoting the source of the picture, not sharing its endorsement as a "great" building.) Anyway, browse through the pictures on that site. Angled walls. Colorful passageways. All arranged to impress, to overwhelm, to awe and humble the occupant.
And that's the problem. Public buildings should be impressive, up to a point. A strong impression of solidity transfers to the visitor a sense of the lasting, historical solidity of the institution it houses. This gives confidence to those who must deal with the institution, be it a library, a courthouse, a civic center. Civic buildings by definition exist to house agencies tasked with serving the public. Public spaces should, if at all possible, present the public a sense of purpose, of order, of organization. Again, the building's order sets the tone of the visit, implying the order flows from the organization to the physical structure housing it. Because of this, buildings specifically should not confound and distract visitors . . . which is just what star architect Rem Koolhaas set out to do.
By coincidence, the day I read gomezticator's entry I had also heard James Howard Kunstler expound on the starchitect attitude on his enormously entertaining and informative KunstlerCast. In Episode #5 - Starchitects (transcript here), Kunstler identifies the very, very real problem with buildings like the Library and the EMP:
The big status symbol for the last 20 years has been to get a museum or a library designed by one of a certain roster of star architects or Starchitects as they’re called. It’s a revolving door of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhass, Peter Eisenman and a bunch of other people.
The results have been disastrous for practically every place that’s done this. The case of the Seattle library is interesting. Yes, it is a building that is intimidating and the inside of it is an interesting thing because it completely disorients you. You go up these stairways that are designed to make you feel disoriented and to not really particularly lead to a place that you understand.
The ideology of academic architecture these days is based on the wish to confound our expectations about how buildings will work and about how cities will work and how the buildings will relate to the cities.
So, the program with Rem Koolhass - and he states this explicitly in his own writings - is to confuse the person using the building and create as much anxiety as possible in the users and to mystify them. The whole object of this whole exercise is to make the architect seem more supernaturally brilliant for having created all these mystifications. The more mystification they create, the more it supposedly means that they know things that you don’t.
(Italics in transcript; Bold emphasis mine.)
In an interview, Frank Gehry stated open admiration for Koolhaas's buildings, so it's safe to say that he shares with Rem the philosophy of overwhelming disorientation in a building. This certainly explains his many buildings. Not much else does.
I will admit a caveat for those studying architecture today: I don't find all of these buildings disastrous. Many I find extremely interesting in the same way I find sculpture attractive. I could stare at the EMP for hours on end -- and have. I used to work right across the street from it. As an abstract piece of sculpture, it works.
Ah, but as a building . . . . There's another problem with Starchitecture that simply must be addressed. The EMP picture above doesn't really highlight the main problem. Glance at the picture above for just a second, though, and pay special attention to the bright red section. Got it?
Now consider this pic from a different angle.
The view from the sidewalk
From this perspective, one can see that the weird glass panel things that flow over the "roof" are mounted by struts off the roof itself. One can also see that the red section flows uninterrupted only by those skinny little panel struts from its high point to that lip just below all but one of those strut panels. Returning to the picture above, note how much of this flowing red surface there is . . . above the sidewalk . . . In Seattle.
All that roof surface and not a hint of gutter. When it rains, that red section especially becomes a trough sluicing all the accumulation from the tippy-top of the roof to a sloppy but intense fire hose of water aimed directly at the heads of everyone below mistakenly assuming they can (or should) be able to safely walk on a city right-of-way down 5th Avenue. I've seen that roof section during microburst squalls when an inch can fall in an hour. EMP personnel have to cone off the problem section and personally stand guard, warding off kids in rain slickers (or not) who simply want to stand beneath the downspout. They have to shoo these kids, you see, or face liability for those parents inclined to hold a grudge at injuries sustained. Gehry's arrogant dismissal of something as mundane as gutters in Seattle has trapped the EMP in a perpetual battle against the elements and the public's right to walk on the sidewalk.
The EMP is far from alone, though. Gehry has blighted the public's right to free and unobstructed travel in more than one city. In Cleveland, Case Western University has its own study in arrogant stupidity, the Peter B. Lewis Building.
Here we find Gehry has built what look like stainless steel wall/roof sections adjacent to the sidewalk. In Ohio. That flatish section just over the main entrance looks especially playful, doesn't it? Imagine a gathered slab of ice-hard snowpack breaking the surface tension of the stainless just as you wander toward the door . . . . Again, I've heard that the personnel have to cone off "problem" sections when it snows.
Oh, and if you want yet another prime example of arrogance, consider that Gehry did install a system to prevent snow accumulations before it formed potentially deadly slide. The builder put electric resistance heaters under the roof to melt the snow. This bears repeating: Whenever it snows in Cleveland, the University must pay to electrically power heaters not to warm the building, but to prevent otherwise certain disaster from falling snow. An NPR report noted that the builder "understimated" the number and wattage of the heaters needed, meaning the original installation wasn't using enough power to overcome the obvious problems caused by Gehry's destructive ego.
MIT had a similar problem with yet another Gehry monstrosity, the Ray and Maria Stata Center. These and many other problems led to a lawsuit:
MIT has filed a lawsuit against Frank O. Gehry, the architect of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, and Skanska USA Building Inc., the construction company that built the Stata Center. MIT alleges that Gehry was negligent in designing the building and that both Gehry and Skanska breached their contractual obligations.
In the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 31, MIT specifically cited “design and construction failures” on the Stata Center project which resulted in “masonry cracking” and “poor drainage” at the outdoor amphitheater, “persistent leaks,” “sliding ice and snow from the building,” and “mold growth.” (Emphasis mine.)
MIT employees have several other problems with this building, but which probably couldn't be added to the suit. Really, if you had an office with no separation from the corridor but a wall of glass, you would probably tape newspapers on that glass to gain some semblance of privacy, too. Fishbowls are for fish.
I think this paragraph from the MIT article almost sums up just about everything:
Former Boston University President John Silber, an outspoken critic of the Stata Center, said to the Globe, Gehry “thinks of himself as an artist, as a sculptor. But the trouble is you don’t live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building.”
He got some of the first point right, and all of the second. The first point: You don't live in a sculpture. . . . I don't, I know. Most people I know don't. But some do. Let's return to Charles Simonyi and his Gehry house.* He completed his house in 1995, just as Windows 95 was released. Just for fun (rumor and my old Lake Tour script has it), he had Gehry do a slight redesign and change the window count from 99 to 95. Not for practicality, not for economy, but to celebrate his company's new product. Not many have the money or time to do such a thing. He also has a collection of modern art in his house, itself artistic in the modern sense. You can see a bright blob in the picture, an example of colorful sculpture on his lawn.
On his lawn. Not on the sidewalk. Not on a public right-of-way. On his private lawn.
That's the key difference here, the difference between buildings available to the public and those intended as private residences. Should Simonyi or anyone else choose to build a house in Fairbanks with a master suite directly under the lowest edge of a a seventy-degree angled roof 50 feet tall and separated from this ungutted edge only by a flimsy skylight, that's their choice. The owner might just be prosecuted for killing whoever other than themselves dies in the inevitable shard-filled ice slide, sure; but build and live in the house they can.
However, should someone want to show off how much cash one person can burn in the public arena, certain common-sense restrictions should apply. The term "graceful degradation" should apply to all cases -- if something goes wrong (like a power outage in a blizzard) nothing worse will happen as a result. One should not have to cordon off entire reaches of public access simply because some architect's wet dream presents a clear and present danger in times of naturally-occurring and predictable weather. Buildings should provide a safe haven for people in and around them regardless of whether the power happens to be off when it's raining or snowing or whether or not employees are around to cone and guard the sidewalk.
The above just covers the obvious liability issue from the physical structure. One should expand this common-sense prohibition against civic buildings built to confound the polity. Exits and entrances should be obvious to all even without signage. Public passageways should not visually double as showcases for private office space. Civic buildings should serve the public, not impress upon the city how very dizzingly smart the architect must be. On that note, I'll let Mr. Kunstler have the final word:
One way of understanding the urban principles involved is to know that there’s a difference between background buildings and monumental buildings.
Monumental buildings have a certain obligation to help us feel oriented, to know what they are, to be typologically consistent with our expectations, and also to present a sort of sense of decorum to the city.
The city can be an intimidating place for the person who lives there. It’s a place where you’re meeting a lot of strangers constantly, you’re around people you don’t know. There are a lot of exciting, stimulating, but also kind of intimidating things that happen to you in the city.
So one of the purposes of architecture for a few thousand years has been to reassure us that when we’re in the city, we’re in a place that is safe, in which transactions occur that we can understand. We’re in surroundings that are coherent, that the outsides of the buildings embellish the public realm and honor the public realm.
It honors our presence in the public realm by speaking to us in languages, and vocabularies, and syntaxes, and grammars, and rhythms, and patterns that we understand from our own culture.
So, when you bring into that setting this effort to mystify and confuse everybody and create, deliberately, more anxiety, you’re doing a real disservice not only to the individual people who inhabit the place, but to the idea of civic life as a general proposition.
*That picture really doesn't do the house justice, but it was all I could find on a quick search. While it was being built, people thought the walls had suffered some foundation damage causing the apparent slide into the dirt. Then it was finished, and everyone had to assume the out-of-true construction was somehow deliberate.
I'm sorry about the quality of the picture not because I'm criticizing the photographer, but because I could have easily gotten a better shot myself. For fifteen years, I captained and crewed boats on and around Lake Washington. I have passed much closer to that house in much larger boats than the one the photographer rode in her pleasure cruise. Why didn't I take a few moments from the helm, focus and shoot?
That's the problem with a job that offers so very many opportunities for great pictures; I got used to them. Every time I thought it would be neat to snap a shot of Bill Gates' house under construction, or the Seattle skyline, or whales or porpoises, or whatever, I found myself at work without my camera, and figured I would get the shot later. I never did. That was my fault, and I apologize.
*A Correction, July 23, 2009: Gehry did not design the Simonyi House, I am informed. Rather, it was done by Seattle architect Wendell Lovett. My bad.