Intention & Design: The Life and Practice of an Architect

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Notes, Essays and Letters

PLAN, SPACE AND LIGHT, UTILITARIAN MINIMALISM, MOOD, IMAGE AND STRUCTURE, 2010

PLAN

For me the site plan is most important. It is the result of selecting and resolving the big issues as we see them. Different issues or different resolution of the same issues should result in a different site plan. The floor plan illustrates the concept regarding the organization and disposition of the program. The site and floor plan are diagrams of the logical and physical structure of the problem-solution. I believe a good plan is functional, utilitarian and minimal and a great plan is an ideograph that captures the essence, latent and sensible, of the design concept diagrammatically.

The Farnsworth house, designed by Mies van der Rhoe, is an all glass pavilion that sits on short pillars among trees on the edge of a river. The plan is unforgettable, three walls, 2 short and one long, form an I off center on a wide open rectangular floor.

SPACE AND LIGHT

Building cross sections speak to space and light. Even my first sketches on the backs of envelopes and napkins or in a spiral notebook need a plan and section together. For me, elevations speak to mood and image, but the cross sections speak to the architecture.

The Farnsworth House is an abstract and unswerving expression of Mies’s architectural philosophy, universal space, inside and out, free flowing everywhere. He used an exposed, white painted light steel rigid frame which made an all glass exterior wall and a single I shaped interior wall structurally possible. I love that house. I love the quality of light and space; the way the outside comes inside everywhere you look. I love the way it sits so lightly in the landscape. I love the sense of space in limitless horizontal extension that one feels both inside and outside because you can see right through it.

For me, and different from the Farnsworth House, communal space is open and free flowing while private space is open to the outside but closed and cellular with regard to other private and/or communal space, and there is a third space type that Louis Kahn called servant, and I call ancillary.

UTILITARIAN MINIMALISM

The Farnsworth house was relatively expensive to build, and is relatively expensive to operate and maintain. This was not the most straight forward, dumb and obvious way to build a house – not the way a farmer in Missouri would do it. For example, it requires extensive heating and cooling plus regular repainting to prevent the steel frame from rusting – not totally utilitarian. However, the house looks feels and is incredibly spare, Mies said, less is more, and he meant it. The Farnsworth house represents an ideal, the absolute opposite of kitsch or Federal style or Mission style, and, for me, it epitomizes the idea of architectural minimalism.

MOOD

The ever changing moods of nature are the ever changing moods of the Farnsworth house - not at all like a cozy kitchen, fire lit cave or Bedouin tent. It does not look like a house of memory, actual or subliminal, so the image is very difficult to articulate. The impression is nebulous suggestive only - the lightness of being?

Most recently I have been trying to design houses, utilitarian and minimal, with similar affect using Conventional Light Frame Construction. These are shear wall rather than rigid frame structures. I have been using very high ceilings and huge floor to ceiling windows such that the sense of space in limitless extension is both vertical and horizontal. The outside comes inside; the space is flooded with light and the moods of nature are the moods of the house. The ceilings are so high as to not be perceived.

IMAGE

In form and finish my houses look like sheds their image is utilitarian and minimal. Extremely modest and humble, some might say to the point of boring. The plans are very strong, ideographic, functional and completely resolved. The structure is rational and the space, light and mood have that feeling of conscious contact with God’s grandeur I so seek and admire. In many cases I make a very conscious effort to capture and express physical, philosophical, cultural, political, and contextual images architecturally.

All of us have images of what is and what ought to be. What a building should look like, remind us of or express for example. Not everyone agrees. When talking about such things and when there is disagreement, images become issues, i.e. questions of fact or desire open to debate. Most of the projects illustrated in this monograph make an effort to express an image, sometimes more than one. For example, two different conceptual designs for the Roybal Federal Building are presented. One clad in white Sierra granite identifies Federal government and by implication our country with an image of history and tradition, solid, safe and secure. The other design is futuristic, constructivist, accessible and transparent; with an image of confidence in happier days ahead, not just up-to-date, but on the move toward better and brighter.

STRUCTURE

Structure has both literal and figurative meaning for me: literal meaning has to do with holding a building up and together and figurative meaning has to do with the organization, either rational and explicit or intuitive and inexplicable, of the ideas or images or semiotics employed by an architect in the design of a building. My architectonic integrity and conviction stems from structural rationalism in particular and rational selection and use of building systems in general all in service of goals and a design concept. However, it is architectonic integrity and conviction that matters to me and there is no one right way to get there. When I understand how best, efficiently and economically to build the design and each piece is part of an integrated and holistic solution, the result just looks right. I believe that Wow! CAD renderings are no guaranty of Wow! buildings and no substitute for structural clarity.

Ideographic Locale Plan

Octagon House, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas, Project

Architect: Francis Loetterle

Ideographic Site Plan

Octagon House, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas, Project

Architect: Francis Loetterle

Ideographic Floor Plan

Octagon House, the Bolivar Peninsula, Texas, Project

Architect: Francis Loetterle

The Farnsworth House, Fox River, Illinois,

Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rhoe, Photo: Werner Blaser

DESIGN PRINCIPLES, 2004

In 1991 I was working in Southern California as Director of Design for a health care firm headquartered in Houston and we were struggling to stay afloat in the midst of a nationwide recession. In spite of everyone’s best effort, the Southern California office was closed for lack of work, and I was unable to find another design leadership position. A year later and still in recession I started my own practice. I wanted to specialize in something that would capitalize upon my own interests and skills: neo-rationalism, conceptual design and planning, modularity and CAD, and, thereby, distinguishing our firm among others.

In 1992, I designed the first project of this fledgling practice. It was located in Thailand, self-conscious and meant to be remembered: a 38-story luxury condominium on the beach comprised of stacked two story town houses wrapped around two story garden courtyards all with spectacular ocean views. The form looked like something done by Arquitectonica, a firm whose work I admired at the time, and the units were an adaptation of Ando’s Azuma house. The project was conceived in conjunction with a group of Thai investors, industrialists and engineers who wanted to showcase the first use in Thailand of structural steel for large scale building projects.

At the time, I was most concerned about solving the social, economic and technical problems of building a very large steel building on a semi remote beach in a Third World country. And, although it does not look it, the design is purely modular. It is comprised of large scale modular structural elements that form modular structural bays, large scale modular curtain wall elements that enclose the structure, modular condominium apartments that fit within the modular structural bays and modular kitchens and bathrooms that fit within the modular apartments. All the various modules were to be manufactured in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, barged to Thailand, and lifted into place with cranes.

In 1993 I began my second project. It was the design of a modular system for the construction of entire elementary schools in California. Mine was a concept quite different from the ubiquitous free standing portable classroom. Schools built from this modular system were neither cheap nor temporary. The design allowed for construction of many different elementary schools of many different organizational and teaching philosophies on many different sites with different access, different topography, and different tree cover. This was an application of modularity that was not stifling sameness but rather in service of flexibility and individual differences along with prefabrication, mass production, accelerated delivery and cost savings.

Also in 1993, my teacher and mentor, James Prestini, died. I was reminded of the force of his character and the depth and breadth of his influence on me personally and on all of the students who had taken his course, Introduction to Design. Of course it was not just his influence, but all of the influences that occurred during the eleven years (1961-1972) I spent studying and teaching architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. It was an era of three great political and social movements, civil rights, anti-war and women’s liberation, and I was actively committed to all of them. However, by 1993, it seemed clear that I had failed my early idealism while pursuing recognition as a mainstream designer.

Prestini once showed me a set of pliers that he kept in a kitchen drawer. Each pair was carefully wrapped in oiled paper. Each pair looked different by virtue of its function. And each was a design that had been refined over many years: a result of the requirements of durability, function, beauty, manufacture, and price. One pair was handmade, pre-industrial revolution; one pair was low-cost and mass produced. Their forms were right, some were exquisitely graceful, utilitarian and minimal and some were crude, almost brutal; all were unselfconscious and right. He said he wished his sculpture might someday capture the rightness and near perfection of these pliers, and I wish the same for my own work.

In the year 2000, an architect and longtime friend, Jack Munson, read the manuscript for Mass Housing Design Principles and Prototypes and called my design intent utilitarian minimalism. Visually and by virtue of the specific design principles listed below I think utilitarian minimalism describes my work rather well. At any rate my design orientation is without a doubt idealistic, utilitarian and minimal, and it is elaborated in the following seven design principles and expressed as best I know how in all the work presented in this