Monument to Instrument

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The architects are left to score on innovation. Isn’t this the most damning testament? Can’t architecture be well done without being innovative? Furthermore, USGBC is so unimpressed with the possibilities of the architects’ contributions that they include an individual’s LEED accreditation as one of the ways to score points under innovation.

I am disappointed that architects list LEED after their AIA credential. Anyone can pass a LEED test and if you fail you can immediately pay your money and take it again, repeatedly until you pass. At least to date, you can’t put AIA behind your name unless you are a registered architect. The two credentials are in no way equivalent.

And, where is it that USGBC asks the question about whether this project should even be built? Better buildings, great, but why always more?

As architects, we should rise above this in two ways:

1. Emphasize the importance of architectural design in the sustainability of built environments (and make those contributions).

2. Advocate for a more thoughtful process of deciding what gets built where and when. I know this might sometimes result in less work, but as long as we are willing to participate without evaluating the impacts of building, we are limiting our credibility with the public.

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Anchorage Museum

I served on the Board of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art for a number of years. At some point it became clear that a major donation was going to occur for a capital improvement. At the behest of the Museum Director, we created something called Art Squeeze, a three day programming charrette involving the staff, artists, volunteers and other interested parties. We produced a document describing the needs of the Museum at that time.

We discovered that the biggest needs were in the “back of the house”. The staff did not have facilities adequate to support the exhibitions occurring in the galleries. In addition, there was unanimous agreement that the ancient set of dioramas describing the history of Anchorage needed to be replaced.

The Museum then felt the need to hire, actually I think the donor demanded that it be done, Ralph Appelbaum. Appelbaum was the go to guy in those days in terms of programming physical plants for museums. Looking back on it, its hard not to be embarrassed for Mr Appelbaum’s firm. They said what the Museum needed was a WOW factor. I wonder how many museums received that recommendation from Appelbaum in those days.

The fact that Appelbaum recommended WOW and that people who lived in New York were presumed to know more about what a museum in Alaska needed speaks volumes about society’s lack of respect for architects.

The donor and the Museum Director wildly enjoyed hobnobbing with the likes of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer and others and eventually hired David Chipperfield.

Chipperfield claimed his design flowed entirely from the specifics of our case.

We ended up with a museum in the far north with glass exterior walls. Think about that. We ended up with a grand stair(wow factor), a gift shop, restaurant and some new gallery space. Very little new back of the house and, oh darn, the diorama replacement has to be delayed, not enough money after paying for all of the architecture.

It’s an entire culture, a culture that prefers the image to the substance. As architects, we give in to it; partly because we are not sure we are about anything other than image.

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The Medicis built contemporary buildings for current activities. They asked their architects to dress these buildings in ancient garb. The architects began to transition from builder to decorator.

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The Parade of Styles

The separation of commodity and firmness from delight made possible the development of style. Before the Renaissance, one could trace a plausible rise of bigger and better along a path of consistent means. During and after the Renaissance, the consensus fell away. Bigger and better was gradually replaced by uniqueness. Architecture becomes, like fashion, an endless parade of new styles.

Mannerism

Michelangelo and Mannerism begin the second great divide in the history of architecture. Among others, Alberti and Palladio remained within the zeitgeist of the elite. They followed the accepted interpretations of ancient detail. Michelangelo established the possibility that an individual designer could signficantly bend the rules. He established uniqueness as a value in architecture.

“In the manner of” is an indication of self-consciousness. Mannerist architects are aware of the audience looking over their shoulder. Their work goes beyond fulfilling their clients requirements. It becomes a documentation or recording of their personal experience with the project. There is a seeking after specificity that is not present in Palladio or Brunelleschi.

Our histories are inexorably edited by the writing and remembering. The elites save their histories and those are the ones we remember and share today. This elite included tyrants, aristocracies, and probably most importantly, the Catholic Church. This elite was the seat of cultural power and artistic taste. Until the Renaissance, architecture was an organic and integral element of that chosen history.

Palladio’s Villa Capra in Vicenza is a “modern” building clad in classical detail. The delight here has little to do with commodity or firmness. The symmetry borders on comical, indicating how slight has been the advance from the shelter of the first hut. The plan is not driven by commodity but rather by obeisance to a graphical scheme

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Pruitt-Igoe, St Louis, Missouri, by Minoru Yamasaki, completed in 1954, demolished in 1973. This is actually just Pruitt, originally for black people only. Igoe, a much smaller adjacent collection of apartment buildings was intended for white people only, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses must share some of the blame, but none of us seem to have learned much from this debacle.

Brutalism

By the 1960’s walking around American cities was gloomily depressing, even in the wealthiest districts because of the repetitious pallor of glass, aluminum and cement asbestos board skins. Maybe Le Corbusier almost got it right. We got architecture AND revolution, of a sort.

Concrete is a structural material you can expose. Some architects attempted to restore delight by celebrating concrete, both in form and finish. Some skillful compositions resulted; ducks with a slight evocation of gothic cathedrals. Shown below, Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture Building completed in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut is one of the best. Unfortunately, Reyner Banham successfully popularized the moniker “Brutalism” for this work.

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The public never saw past the name. “Everyone” hates the 1968 Boston City Hall by Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles, and the plaza surrounding it. But it is a genuine, and wonderful, 20th century building. Maybe Boston is too far north and too coastal for the plaza to ever work, but I think public disdain has destroyed any enthusiasm for significant improvement. The too hard plaza and the brutal pejorative may have doomed the building from the beginning.

As of this writing, there may be hope. As we come to acknowledge the real costs of demolition, haul off and disposal, we more thoroughly embrace adaptive reuse, we may find a continued use for this building and its plaza after all.

Post-Modernism

In the hands of the less inspired, Modernism is boring. Brutalism is scaring people away.

Progress has disappointed. American society is in a funk. Atomic bombs, pesticides, Stalinism, the sixties strife between generations, and climate change all combined to destroy our faith in the future. Literary theorists decided that the modern world was dead and defunct. These thinkers claimed we had entered a post-modern world.

Architects responded with, often tongue in cheek, neo-classicism. With mixed results, some of it was more fun than Modernism. Often as in Philip Johnson’s Chippendale in New York, much of the joke was scale. The two libraries at the right are both over 10 stories tall.

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specifically for those who hire us and for everyone else in the community. AIA should be emphasizing and publicizing this role for the architect.

Is there a concern here about liability? I hope not. I hope we are not so cowed by the lawyers that we cannot tell our clients what we are trying to achieve. If we are so cowed, we need to get over it.

Let’s Be Serious

I remember the substantial fear and disgust I felt about ballpoint pens when I was in architecture school. Now, I don’t pretend to be any Picasso, but I think the drawing at the left of Toledo Cathedral is fun enough and done with a ballpoint pen.

Wonder of wonders, some of us were at the Bauhaus gift shop a few years ago and there it was, my favorite ballpoint pen on sale as a piece of craft at least, if not art. Our insecurity as architects causes us to create these markers of our craft, our own little “in crowd” to comfort us in our uncertainty.

The importance of flat roofs is pounded into us in school. Many of us can’t stomach a sloped roof. It’s deeply ingrained. When I go to a new city or town and am traveling through residential neighborhoods a flat roof, no matter how peripheral to my vision will cause me to turn around and check it out. There is nothing inherently good, or bad about a flat roof. They are “of our time”, because of the technological development of membranes and the unacceptability of draining the roof of a large building onto the street.

But, if I am at all representative, our fear of slope is very deep. Even in my own practice, I can’t avoid the sense that my flat roofed projects are more likely to be considered architecture. This may be coming to an end because of the plethora of flat roofed single and duplex houses being built. If everybody is doing it, it will lose its strength as an in thing.

My own house has flat roofs but I doubt that it qualifies as architecture. It doesn’t have smooth wall sheet rock and birch branches are incorporated into the details. This rejection is just thoughtless cant. There is nothing inherently modern in smooth wall and nothing inherently historicist in birch branches. We have all agreed to separate ourselves from everybody else based on these meaningless distinctions. Separating ourselves is the last thing we ought to do. It’s the result of our insecurity about our value. Smooth wall sheet rock also costs more and contributes to spaces being uncomfortably acoustically hot.

Smart potential clients notice when we are silly. The notice when we don’t seem to care about Wright’s leaking roofs. They notice when we are too cool to use a ballpoint pen...

Belittle Taste

Taste is like a belly button, everybody has their own. The important thing to know is that all tastes are equal. In your off hours it’s fine to have opinions about taste and argue ferociously for this or that style of furniture, art or even architecture. But as a professional architect, you must realize that all tastes are equal. This is important because taste clashes set architects against architects. It hurts the architects and it hurts the society at large because what would be a source for good, a united architectural profession, becomes crippled from within.

It’s also important to reconfirm that taste questions do not need to come between you and your client. When taste is all that matters, c’mon, let them have their way. But if it matters architecturally, then know well enough what you are doing to be able to explain it to them. I know I am not unique in this but young people ask me what do you if they want something that would be out of place or damaging to the design. You don’t get into the battle. Your find out what they are really after and you find a solution that works for both of you. Because of the constraints present, these are often opportunities for excellent design solutions.

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On the left, House for Dru and Tim Renschler, mmenseArchitects, Anchorage. Alaska 1979, on the right, detail from House for Don and Kim Kerns, mmenseArchitects, Anchorage, Alaska 2006. The Kerns detail shows acx plywood used as giant shingles.

Don’t Break Big Things

This rule applies most often in the design of ceramic tile lay-outs, but it can equally apply at much larger scales. If you can’t make the space an exact module of the tile and you thus need to cut the tile, you always want to use smaller tiles. The cuts are shorter. The difference between the cut tiles and the full tiles is smaller. The percentage of whole tiles is greater when you use small tiles. This makes the cutting less obtrusive.

Light Lettering

Light lettering is easier to see at a distance. Highlights are easier to see at a distance than shaded areas.

The Grain of the Wood

Wood when used outside should always be installed with its grain vertical. Whether painted, stained or clear finished, gravity driven water will flow with the grain. If the grain is horizontal, the water will flow along the grain, get backed up and damage the finish, whatever it is.

Know What You Are Lighting

Light sources are generally no fun to look at. Recessed cans make the surrounding ceiling look dark and gloomy. You can’t light the air and you rarely want to light the floor. We like avoid attention to the source and bounce the light off walls or ceilings. Our favorite strategy is to point the fixture at art and let the bounce back provide ambient light.

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Form Follows Latitude

This is a set of rules that developed because we were practicing in Alaska with its unique climate and insolation. These are all rules that can be broken. It is not OK to break them without knowing you are doing so.

Expand the plan east to west instead of north to south. A square plan is extremely unlikely to be appropriate since it is symmetrical and the context is never symmetrical.

The biggest construction troubles in the north, condensation and glaciation, occur at the eaves of a roof. What roof has the greatest length of eave per roof area? A hipped roof. You have to have a huge reason to ever use a hip roof in Alaska. Though I must admit that I did quite a few before I figured this out.

Hadley Moore House, mmenseArchitects, Anchorage, Alaska 1998

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Form Follows Latitude

Cook Inlet Housing Authority Affordable Housing Competition, mmenseArchitects, Anchorage, Alaska 2005

Use a shed roof and slope it down from south to north. Make the north walls the smallest and the south walls the largest. This is about heat loss and access to the sun. Use a shed because ventilation is important and the shed form contributes to successful ventilation. Use a shed because valleys are terrible in the north. Valleys concentrate drainage which contributes to glaciation. Valleys are also impossible to adequately ventilate. Use a shed because that drains the roof to the north where you won’t be spending any time. Use this shed because that creates a big south wall which makes a larger contribution to sun doubling outside on the south.

Put cooking decks on the northwest and against a solid wall. The sun is in the northwest when it is warm enough to cook out in the evening. The solid wall allows for sun doubling, a situation where the sun warms you directly and then bounces off the wall behind you and warms you again.

Always place buildings as far north on the property as possible so that the building does not shade the outdoor areas and so that sun doubling can increase the desirability of outdoor space.

Put kitchens and breakfast areas on the east, dining and living rooms on the west.

Gutters don’t work. They contribute to glaciation and get clogged with leaves.. Arrange your roofs so you don’t need gutters. The rule that trumps this rule is the desirability of collecting and reusing rainwater and snowmelt.

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Put open spaces on the south and closed spaces on the north so the sun can shine over and through the open space. Put support spaces, storage, bathrooms, etc on the north. Live in the light.

Darker exterior colors are preferred because they increase the conversion of sunshine to warmth. This is especially important on east facing walls so that the building gets a head start on warming up in the morning. The temperature differential that results from the wall exposed to the out of doors overnight increases the effectiveness of this strategy.

No recessed lights in ceilings on the top floor. The fixture will allow condensation to occur in the attic leading to rot. In addition, you can usually go outside and see icicles at the bottom of the roof in line with those light fixtures.

Cook Inlet Housing Authority Affordable Housing Competition, mmenseArchitects, Anchorage, Alaska 2005 with notes on why it should not be two stories.

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Class Schedule

TUESDAY

WEEK 1

THURSD AY

Activity My Presentation Guest Speaker

Warm Up, From Monument On Design in groups to Instrument Will Bruder FAIA

(During this week, I will determine who, if anyone, is having trouble with English and make arrangements for them to have an assist on that front.)

(Warm Up is a short design exercise in groups to help the students get to know each other and help me to get to know them.)

WEEK 2

WEEK 3

Finish Warm Up Design and Food Dr. Carol Bentel FAIA

WEEK 4

A Place I Want Legitimate Bureaucracy Individuation and Design

Rick Bell FAIA

(The students will develop a program for a place they would like to have, a building, a park, a room, whatever they choose. After completing the program, I will assign each student the task of designing another student’s Wanted Place. That student will act as the student designer’s client for this exercise.)

Finish program The Blue Green Receive design Paradigm assignment

James Bowen AIA

WEEK 5

Working

Looking at Design

Writing About on design Architecture

First client review Susan Szenasy

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WEEK 6

WEEK 7

TUESDAY

THURSD AY

Activity My Presentation Guest Speaker

Working on design

Anthropology and Architecture

Vyjayanthi Rao

Adjunct Associate

Professor, Spitzer School of Architecture

WEEK 8

Finish design Presentations to clients Mid-semester Reviews off

WEEK 9

Introduce

Everything for a On Design Main Project Reason, Artfully Done

Borre Skodvin Professor, FRIBA Founding Partner, Jensen & Skodvin Arkitekter AS, Oslo, Norway

WEEK 10

Working Practicing in South Bronx

Majora Carter, MacArthur Fellow

Visionary Developer, Exemplary Advocate for Environmental Justice

WEEK 11

Working

The In and Out

Gardening and Design of Design

Jim Childress FAIA and Ann Thompson MLS

On the left, Leppanen Williams Residence, 1990, in the center, Olmsted Residence, 2012, on the right Oxley Mense Residence, 1980, all in Anchorage Alaska

On the left, House for Ayse and Chuck Gilbert, 2003, in center, Kouris Residence 2005, both in Anchorage, Alaska, on the right, unrealized House for Mark Brinster, Homer, Alaska, 1992, model by Filip Ditrich

On the left, Wine “Cellar” for Jacqui Carr and Shawn Beck, in the center, House for Steve and Susan Jayich, 2004, on the right, Addition for Steve Gerlek, 2017, all in Anchorage, Alaska

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I want to design everything: fonts, birth and graduation announcements, houses, grocery stores, warehouses, communities, museum exhibitions, furniture, cat ladders, even once, a long time ago, a yellow pages ad.

Being in Alaska, with no significant architectural culture, and no school of architecture, and being too bull-headed to look at how other people did things, and then being too busy to look at how different we were from them, led us to a practice which I now believe was quite unique. We worked for a few rich people, and that was great, but mostly we worked for regular people. They were generally not particularly interested in art. They wanted spaces that worked from them and made the best use of their limited resources. They led me to the understanding that we might do better if we sold ourselves as the experts at the relationships between humans and built environments.

Nonetheless, one of our “foundations” was, and is, “Everything for a Reason, Artfully Done”. I would like to think that we not only inspired people who would not otherwise have done so, to hire architects (us, mostly, I suppose), but also to infect a greater segment of the population with the appreciation of the place of “delight” in construction, which is to say, an appreciation of architecture and a desire to make it a conscious part of their lives.

I also want to apologize to so many people whose projects I did not illustrate here. There are countless others about which I am very pleased. I do not have photos of many of those.

Clockwise from top left:

a font I designed for my friend James Bowen

the birth announcement for my son

the cover of the catalog we prepared, with Dr Julie Decker for our Museum Exhibition “From Canvas to Steel: Ed Crittenden and the Architecture of Anchorage”

drawings and an image from a gallery show I prepared after the crash of 2008 entitled “Pink Slips.”

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