SIMPLE TECHNIQUES with which to wrap a building include steel tube and light metal framing along with panelized and applied materials and finishes. (Magnolia High School Center of Excellence Classroom and Administration Building, Anaheim Union High School District, Anaheim, CA 2022)
Those of us who like buildings obsess over the character and qualities of their surfaces. When we don’t want buildings to dissolve or disappear but instead to have physical presence and visual interest (“firmness” and “delight” as the ancients put it), we are challenged by how to account for openings in them -- light and view into and out --while also satisfactorily enclothing them in surfaces with substance. We are further challenged when we are bound by our commitment to simplicity: buildings whose shapes are-- unless circumstances otherwise dictate-- predominantly parallelopipeds (shoe boxes).
STRAPS, RIBBONS AND BELTS analogously applied in varying shapes and scales are one way to think about how to enclose a building. (Magnolia High School Center of Excellence Classroom and Administration Building, Anaheim Union High School District, Anaheim, CA 2022)
RIBBONS offer both taught and fluid shapes.
BELTS AND WIRES are tools with which we bind.
Clothing designers are similarly obsessed. Techniques that designers employ to enclothe a body typically include some form of draping and wrapping and often in combination. To drape, designers will pin the fabric in strategic places to let gravity give it shape. To wrap, designers will bind the fabric in place with straps, bands, belts, wires, ribbons, and lace. We get taught planes, geometric shapes, billowing curves, crinkly scrunches, sharp creases, and soft folds.
MODERN CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGIES unavailable before 1900 such as secondary steel and light metal framing have revealed a whole other way to think about analogously shaping building enclosure such as with the draped shapes of fabric.
DRAPING AND WRAPPING are two principal techniques that designers employ to enclothe bodies. (Giorgio Armani, left; Dolce and Gabbana, right)
Some designers have relied more on draping, others more on wrapping but they all have mixed approaches and have shown that the possibilities are endless. Even within (loosening but still) tightly bounded societal constraints (women in dresses, men in pants) we nevertheless witness infinite variation and ever-accelerating innovation through which our dress continually finds new expression. Over the course of a century, we have experienced both gender-bound continuity and plenty of disruption.
EXAMPLES OF DRAPED AND WRAPPED BUILDINGS are few in our time. (Disney Concert Hall, Frank Gehry, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, above; Beijing Olympic Stadium, Herzog and de Meuron, Beijing, China, 2008, below)
SHAPED AND SLICED VOLUMES command most architects’ interest these days. (Rem Koolhaus, left; Alvaro Siza, right)
Analogously speaking, we might suggest that Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is draped, Herzog and de Meuron’s Olympic Stadium in Beijing wrapped but otherwise examples are few mainly because few are interested in the expressive potential, the discipline, and the effort required to render simple volumes in expressive shapes using simple materials. We either ignore the expressive potential of surfaces altogether, emphasizing instead elaborately shaped and cut-up volumes, or we fetishize them with novel textures, shimmering visual effects, and fussy assembly details. This comes not without a price, for the analogy goes only so far: buildings are not people and streets are not runways. Where extremes and eccentricity might be valued as an expression of individuality in clothing design (the “signature statement”), it can come across as anti-social behavior in building design.
FLORENTINE AND VENETIAN STONE MASONS of the 15th century realized wrapped and draped designs in shallow relief. (Palazzo Rucellai, Leon Battista Alberti, Florence, Italy, ca. 1450, above; Ca D’Oro, Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon, Venice Italy, ca 1430, below)
HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL STRAPS are employed by Michelangelo to both bound and bind these building’s facades. (Palazzo Farnese, Rome, Italy, ca. 1550, above; Campidoglio, Rome Italy, 1536-46, below)
ARCHITECTS OF THE 16TH CENTURY across Italy refined the practice of strapping facades in increasingly elaborate and abstract schemes to both articulate and animate mostly opaque surfaces. (Facciata dei Banchi, Jacapo Vignola, Bologna, Italy, 1565-8, above; Villa Farnese at Caprarola, Jacapo Vignola, Piacenza, Italy, 1558-9, below)
VERGING ON S & M the buildings of 18th century French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux feature patterns of exaggerated heavy rustication (stacked stones) that resemble the straps, belts, and buckles of the punk dress. (Arc-et-Senans, France 1785-9)
Constrained by bearing wall construction and motivated to animate the resulting plain, mostly opaque surfaces Florentines of the 15th and 16th centuries adopted the Greco Roman language of architecture (columns, pilasters, entablatures, and cornices) while Venetians absorbed eastern (Ottoman) influences at once more abstract and decorative. For the Venetians, the effort was more sensual in intent, for the Florentines more intellectual. In Venice, buildings are draped in (embroidered) lace and feel fluid in character. In Florence, they are rectilinear--wrapped in straps and bands—and more austere in character. Both were bound and bounded by the tight constraints of simple underlying volumes.
CHICAGO ARCHITECT LOUIS SULLIVAN famously berated architects who employed old school techniques that emphasized the horizontal lines of stacked floors to articulate the facades of very tall buildings, choosing instead to vertically integrate them with attenuated vertical ribbons. (Wainwright Building, St Louis MO, 1891)
AMERICAN ART DECO subsequently proliferated across the country employing a wide variety of both abstract and exotically ornamented techniques with which to wrap buildings in both vertical and horizontal bands. (Eastern Columbia Building, Claud Beelman, Los Angeles, CA, 1930)
DEPRESSION ERA HOTELS OF MIAMI BEACH demonstrate both the efficacy and the variety of the binding technique. (Miami Art Deco District ca. 1930s)
The Florentines’ game became the dominant one in the 500 years that followed (even a few decades well into the 20th century after steel frame construction had replaced bearing wall construction) although the Venetian proclivity for the elaborately floral remerged here and there. Michelangelo (as always) challenged and violated the rules of the game (Capitoline Hill), Louis Sullivan extended it to very tall buildings (Wainwright Building), and subsequent Art Nouveau and Art Deco achievements both abstracted and exoticized it by appropriating Egyptian, Mayan, East Indian, and other motifs.
A SIMPLE DRAPED SHAPE as if pinned to the building provides shade. (Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA 2021)
SHALLOW RELIEF conveys the look of draped fabric in what is mostly a flat surface. (Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA 2000)
We don’t build bearing wall buildings for the most part anymore and we don’t have scores of stonemasons or capable craftsmen standing ready to chisel out reliefs of stone to animate buildings’ surfaces. But for those of us who remain interested in the game, we still have at hand our imagination and techniques at our disposal. Our tools are simple. Even now with steel tubes, light metal framing, applied sheathing, plaster, stone, and metal tiles, it remains fully within our grasp to yield in limitless variation physical presence and visual interest through the animation of surfaces in relatively shallow relief, in ways analogous to draping and wrapping like, but different from what has been around in the west for more than half a millennium.
MARBLE BANDS rendered as if thin planks are employed to bind this building. (Southwestern College National City Higher Education Center Allied Health Sciences Building, National City, CA 2018)
PLASTER DRAPES AND BRICK BELTS employed in combination yield both substance and spontaneity in the exterior expression of what otherwise is a simple shoe box of a building. (Los Angeles Trade Technical College Student Services/Administration Building, Los Angeles, CA 2010)
A STRATEGY OF WRAPPING the corner that joins the two principal facades of this building serves to both animate and integrate them. (West Hollywood Library, West Hollywood, CA 2011)