REVEALED AND CONCEALED features of this building’s interior are conveyed through its street façade, the main entrance. (Costa Mesa Library, Costa Mesa, CA, 2019)
THIS BUILDING’S GARDEN FAÇADE and its openings are configured to relate to the shape and size of the spaces that reside both behind and in front of it. (Costa Mesa Library, Costa Mesa, 2019)
We do more than throw leaves and water on fire to make tea. We use a vessel for both the leaves and the water—a bag and a pot—membranes that hold them in place, transmit the aroma and conduct the heat. Our planet is a vessel. Water (oceans) and fire (the sun) sustain life on it between the membranes of its crust (earth) and its atmosphere (air). Fruits and nuts come with a peel, rind, husk or shell. No animal lives as a tangle of bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments and organs without a pelt of skin, fur, feathers and/or scales that binds them. Our bodies are sheathed in skin and when we leave the house, we do so enclothed.
NO LIVING THING survives without a protective membrane (Planet earth above, a walnut below)
ALL ANIMATE BEINGS are complex organisms of many parts bound by a membrane of skin, fur, feathers and/or scales.
HUMANS LIKE NO OTHER ANIMATE BEING stand upright and face forward, our body’s geometry in its default position predominantly two -dimensional.
Within the world of animate beings, our bodies are unique. We, more than any avian, marine or mammal being, have a front and a back. We are two dimensional. Only we stand up right and when we do, our eyes face forward. We have a face and unlike all other animals it is primarily flat (no beak or snout). You can tell a lot about us, although not everything from the looks on our faces. Our faces are a membrane that both conceals and yields our thoughts and feelings, what is going on inside. Our faces provide the expressive boundary across which we variously engage the world.
WE ARE SO ATTUNED to the expressions of our faces that even the most rudimentary of two-dimensional diagrams capture a wide range of feelings and intentions.
Variously because we present, behave and speak differently in different situations, although with increasingly less discrimination. We everywhere hear of the confounding of our public and private lives, the boundary so dissolved we can no longer distinguish them. We witness the degradation of our social discourse, the devolution of our speech, dress and social grace. We eat our meals in our cars and on the street where we walk in our sweats, slumped over our phones, our heads down, our underwear on display. We live as if we are overwhelmed by the company of others, seemingly no longer able to face the world or each other.
WE MIGHT WORRY as much about the imposition of private life on public life in the physical world as we do the reverse in the digital world.
OUR PRIVATE LIVES on display in the absence of an intervening membrane (a façade) degrade the public realm within which our social lives take place (Los Angeles apartment buildings, 2021)
COMMERCIAL IMPERATIVES have all but eliminated the ethos of social grace in the designs of retail and office buildings. (Los Angeles retail and office buildings, 2021)
Our streets are a gallery of private lives laid bare. Soup cans and cereal boxes, tubes of toothpaste and sticks of deodorant stack on shelves backed up to storefronts. Office buildings display the undersides of tables and desks, trash cans and files piled on the floor. Parking structures loom over sidewalks like bombed out bunkers, car hoods and bumpers on view. Apartment buildings are pock marked with projecting balconies that go unoccupied except for bicycles, barbecue grills, dead plants and wet mops.
IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that it was in 15th century Florence where painting (and drawing) had flourished for almost two hundred years prior that architects began to see the front of a building as an expressive two-dimensional plane—a canvas. (Pazzi Chapel, Florence, Italy, Filippo Brunelleschi, 1442)
TWO GENERATIONS later Michelangelo perfected the art of the façade with his unbuilt design (lower left) for the front of San Lorenzo church in Florence (upper left). Today 21st century Florentines are considering building it. (San Lorenzo façade design, Michelangelo, Florence, Italy, 1516)
THE ART OF THE FAÇADE had flourished in Venice and its region for hundreds of years surely influenced by Islam and in turn influencing the sophisticated designs of Andrea Palladio. (Ducal Palace and Ca’D’Oro upper and lower left, Venice, Italy; Basilica Palladiana and Palazzo Chiericati upper and lower right, Vicenza, Italy)
In the mid-20thcentury, we got buildings in the style of “good design,” stacks of columns and piers, exposed floors and glass walls capped by a roof, unmasked and in plain sight-- no frills just “honesty.” Today (because we got bored with “good design”) our best buildings crawl, crouch, slouch and lurch like so many animals while the worst lean on stints and prosthetics like wounded soldiers - all broken bones and torn up skin. Our best architecture has for over a century displayed at first indifference and then disdain for presenting a face with which to negotiate the world. Now, we spurn buildings altogether. We see them as a necessary and ugly evil with which to protect us from the elements and every new building as one more step toward the degradation of our environment.
THE SPANIARDS imported flamboyant versions of facades to the American west via the missions in California and elsewhere.
ANGLO PIONEERS imported to the American west a kind of pop-up urbanism whose principal feature was the aggregation of simple facades that formed consistent street fronts.
None of this was inevitable and instead self- inflicted with a self-fulfilling outcome. When we lost the appreciation for a building’s enclosure as a means with which to discretely present its private self in a public setting, to simultaneously conceal and reveal, to engage in civil social discourse, we lost the desire and the skill to engage in one of our discipline’s most enduring inventions (or was it a discovery?) – the façade. The façade had been around in most of the world and the west for a while (Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have them) but the art of the façade as we mostly know it reached its pinnacle in Italy in the 16th century then disappeared in 1945.
MODERNISM’S INTEREST in the façade was at first tenuous then non- existent. Charles Jeanneret famously admired the facades of Venice and ventured stripped down versions of facades in the 1920s before eventually abandoning the practice altogether in the 1950s and 60s. (Villa Stein at Garches, France 1929, left. Mill Owners Association Building, Ahmedabad, Inda, 1954)
MID-CENTURY AMERICANS created buildings that are entirely stand alone, minimally clothed, socially isolated and isolating. (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, CA, 1964, above; Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA 1965, below)
NOT EVERY BUILDING REQUIRES A FAÇADE but you would think you would get something in return other than complete alienation. (Peterson Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2015 above; Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2020, below)
All buildings are necessarily enclosed but a socially engaged building has a façade. If we want (as we do) to practice an architecture that is engaged in civil society, then we have no choice (we believe) other than to re-engage (with whatever means are now at our disposal) in the art of the façade. There are no rules in art, just experience and what works; and, what works in our experience is a membrane that is mostly opaque (2 parts solid, 1 part void), vertical and two-dimensional (flat), articulated (with relief and/or ornament), believably expressive of what lies behind it but not excessively so, conscious of and in relationship with what lies in front of it. In other words, upright and face forward.
THIS FAÇADE TELEGRAPHS what is behind it: a parking garage at the ground floor, a lobby and galleries at the second floor, a rooftop courtyard at the third floor all linked by a stair that is expressed rather than exposed. (Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA, 2001)
A BUILDING WITH A VIEW in this case overlooking the Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Ocean need not indulge in complete transparency to capture it especially at the expense of the neighborhood in which it resides (1420 The Strand, Manhattan Beach, CA 1994)
PRIVACY AND SECURITY were a high priority in the design of this independent school in the heart of metropolitan Los Angeles and yet it need not have resulted in an unfriendly anti-social fortress or bunker. (Center for Early Education, West Hollywood, CA 2019)