LOGGIA There is no better word we know to describe the enclosing element that forms this museum’s main entrance (Museum of Redlands). There aren’t columns and arches but does it not perform as a traditional loggia would?
One hundred years ago, the poet T.S Eliot wrote an article “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which among other insights he offers this one: “Tradition…cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature… has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
ARCH AND VAULT The underlying structural properties of brick and stone gave shape to the traditional arch and vault thousands of years ago. Our construction methods are different, but are the shapes therefore prohibited?
RUSTICATION As an elegant way since the Renaissance to render surfaces of an urban building that yield a sense of protection are there new ways to achieve the same effect?
Written in 1919, in the fledgling moments of what we now call the modern movement, this poet — one of the greatest of modernist artists — in these few phrases and those that follow argues for a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written, that while the material of art never improves it is also never quite the same and what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
ROMANCE AND REASON 19TH century architects (left) indulged in romantic (and to them meaningful) adventures borrowing imagery from every corner of humanity and its history. 20th century architects (right) dispensed with all of that to instead focus on architecture in pursuit of solutions — programmatic, technological, societal and otherwise.
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE The Janus head (ancient Rome) and present day debates in the scientific community swirling around presentism v. eternalism, share an appreciation for the ambiguity inherent in what we mean by “our time”—is it ours alone, discretely wedged between an unrecoverable past and unknown future, or part of a continuum to which we have always and will always belong?
This is hardly “what’s past is past” or “what’s old is bad”— the kind of thinking that has come to characterize (or caricature) what we think of as the paradigm of art and architecture in the 20th century (with now the inevitable backlash in some quarters: “what’s new is bad”). Eliot, the modernist, instead argues for a relationship with the art of the past and further that the whole history of art is nothing more (nor less) than a train of thought that revolves. To be “original” may also mean to be “of the origins”.
ETERNAL MATH As early as 1947 Colin Rowe demonstrated how seemingly revolutionary modern architecture could in the hands of a profoundly thoughtful architect benefit from and carry forward arithmetic and geometric systems of composition that have been with us in one form or another since the beginning of human experience (Left, Villa Rotonda, Palladio; right, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier).
BRICOLEUR Axel Vervoordt, a contemporary Dutch interior designer, draws from both ancient and modern, western and eastern (southern and northern), man-made and natural. The results are both unexpected and familiar, beautiful and enlightening.
ROMANTIC RATIONALISM Le Corbusier was not like a lot of modernists; a romanticist as much as a rationalist, his love affair with the Mediterranean while not always appropriate influenced his work life long. In southern California, this is not so much romantic as it is a (somewhat) natural response to the environment. (Above, his Beistegui apartment in Paris; (below our Mandell residence in Los Angeles).
If architecture can be thought of as built thought, the embodiment of consciousness (events and ideas), then it cannot have a past, present or future. The history of architecture is nothing more (nor less) than the accumulation of thoughts — experience that with a little bit (or a lot) of effort belongs to all of us, and upon which we are free to draw at any time for any purpose or at least to the extent that it furthers our effort to create a novel work of art. Good, bad or indifferent, why would we choose to censor experience? Innovation is nothing more (nor less) than making new (hopefully unexpected and fruitful) relationships among things we already know. Here again Eliot is helpful: “the poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
ANCIENT MODERNISM Louis Kahn had a love affair with the ruins of ancient Rome (not the actual buildings but their ruins) and it influenced his work life long. Whether made of stone, concrete or plaster, the barrel-vaulted room is forever compelling (Clockwise from upper left: ancient Rome, Kimball Art Museum, our Museum of Redlands)
VICTORIAN DELIRIUM Redlands, CA was established at the height of the Victorian era when luxurious patterns flourished on paper, walls and buildings. The back side of the barrel vault that pierces the Museum of Redlands is faced in a three-dimensional die-cut pattern that recalls such indulgences of the past.
CAN’T WE PLAY? Children’s libraries seem safe places these days to imbibe in flights of fancy that were once considered more pleasurable than decadent. (Clockwise from upper left: Palazzo del Te, Giulio Romano; our Beverly Hills Children’s Library and wallpaper designed by Alexander Girard in the mid-20th century).
Architects more than perhaps any other kind of visual artist seem to have had the greatest trouble with this. Why the uneasiness? Interior designers, who are bricoleurs at heart and by trade (accumulators, collagists), have no problems drawing from whatever they find wherever they find it to create what they call “layered” experiences. They instinctively know that a so-called “ancient” or “modern” object takes on a different meaning when placed in a context not originally of its own—and conversely “ancient” and “modern” contexts mutate when populated with objects not originally of their making. It’s harder than it sounds, and the better the designer, the better the outcome.
BLUE AND GOLD The Hedrick Study at UCLA (upper and lower right) sought patterns natural and man-made—a sunset, deep space, Portuguese tile—that would subliminally suggest school colors.
BAROQUE EXUBERANCE While it would undermine the seriousness of purpose with which Borromini pursued his work to say so, his work undeniably results in a kind of exuberance that’s enduringly sensual bordering on the lurid. (Left, Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza, Rome; right, our lobby of the Main Instruction Building at Chaffey College).
We architects are more (or less?) than bricoleurs. We are also partly engineers. We unlike poets do have to respond to economics and mechanics — and this may be part of the problem. Maybe in the last century, this our other role, our obligation to society, has loomed too large, devoured our interests as artists in anything other than what’s right in front of us. To this day, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we persist in the myth that the technology of today (and yes tomorrow!) — construction technology, environmental technology, computing technology — will do all the innovating for us. Or worse: that it’s all about us. We have engaged in willful ignorance as if somehow forgetting is liberating.
BAROQUE THEATER Deceptively simple, the theaters of 18th century Europe were boxes decked out in color and pattern. (Below, our children’s story time theater at Beverly Hills Library).
BAROQUE GARDEN Mastering nature, ordering it and employing it for the purpose of decorative patterns in the open was outlandish to say the least in the context of today’s tastes. Out of bounds today? (Below, our Chaffey College Main Instruction Building).
We choose otherwise; we choose reconciliation. We choose El Lissitsky and Edwin Lutyens, Antonio Gaudi and Giulio Romano. We reserve the right to be as inspired by the Parthenon as we are the iPhone. More importantly, we choose to seek how our experience of the iPhone changes our relationship with the Parthenon (and vice-versa), how Lissitsky changed (without obliterating) our relationship with Lutyens, or Gaudi, Romano. We choose to play a part in and be played by all history or better yet since we are Americans all our histories that are and will always be alive. We choose to be of one mind with all human experience, a mind, which to paraphrase Eliot, both changes and abandons nothing en route. We choose to be conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
NEOCLASSICAL BEAST 18th century architect LeDoux created buildings intended to read as massive, impenetrable, heavy blocks of stone. 20th century architects have sought to lighten the load, making buildings thin and transparent. Do we not ever get to indulge in weight and solidity again? (Left, his Royal Saltworks; right, our Doheny residences, West Hollywood, CA).