Charles H. Baldwin House, Bellevue Avenue opposite Perry Street, Newport, Rhode Island. Built in 1878, it was described as “a very tasty appearing villa” in contemporary newspapers.
“I think why architects still love to do houses is that you can think about all the formal issues, think about multiple strategies, think about different materials, and you can experiment . . .”
Charles Gwathmey (1938–2009) was a founding principal of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. The firm’s extensive portfolio includes a 1992 addition to the Guggenheim Museum, the International Museum of Photography, and the Astor Place condominiums—all in New York. A house he designed in 1966, for his artist parents on Long Island, has been consistently named one of the most influential buildings of the modern era. Along with Richard Meier, Gwathmey was a member of the New York Five. His work strongly adheres to the tenets of early-twentieth-century modernism (exemplified in Le Corbusier’s buildings of the 1920s and 1930s), tempered with pragmatism and an almost playfully experimental approach to design.
Gwathmey was born in North Carolina and received his MArch from Yale University in 1962. In 1970, Gwathmey was honored with the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he was elected to the Academy in 1976. In 1983, he won the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the AIA, and in 1985, he received the first Yale Alumni Arts Award from the Yale School of Architecture. The Guild Hall Academy of Arts awarded Gwathmey its Lifetime Achievement Medal in Visual Arts in 1988. That honor was followed in 1990 by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York State Society of Architects. Gwathmey passed away on August 3, 2009, after battling cancer for several years.
Charles H. Baldwin House, Bellevue Avenue opposite Perry Street, Newport, Rhode Island. Built in 1878, it was described as “a very tasty appearing villa” in contemporary newspapers.
Charles Gwathmey, taking the long view, considers how architects must now deploy material innovations, particularly in the mechanics of energy use, in anticipating global warming. He sees sustainability in house design as an ethical concern, explaining, “By continuing to explore architecture through the house model, one not only learns a great deal about process but is also able to apply that process to larger-scale and more complex problems.”
Your firm has created many major projects for real estate developers, schools, and museums, yet you maintain a thriving residential practice. Why do homes continue to interest you?
Charles Gwathmey: Residences have been a kind of prototypical architecture; historically, they have been the critical building type. If you think of Palladio—and we all go back and look at his buildings—they inform Architecture with a capital A, and yet they were mostly houses. I think why architects still love to do houses is that you can think about all the formal issues, think about multiple strategies, think about different materials, and you can experiment with—rather than through—your clients to determine whether your ideas are legitimate, interesting, provocative, enriching, and can also apply to other work. So I think as a microcosm, the house is totally fulfilling in the hierarchy of complexity, the hierarchy of public and private, and the ideas of arrival and sequence, orientation and view, and circulation. It embodies all the elements that architecture has to deal with.
I think today it’s unfair to isolate the house as a unique or small or non-content kind of work. It’s never been, at least in my mind, about size; it’s always been about content. By continuing to explore architecture through the house model, one not only learns a great deal about process but is also able to apply that process to larger-scale and more complex problems.
Where do you see your work in the history of residential architecture?
Gwathmey: I don’t like to speculate about things like this, but I think the house I did for my parents, which I now occupy, was a groundbreaking moment in modern residential architecture in America. In particular, I think it changed the whole idea of American vernacular to a more European-based reference. And I think that house and Richard Meier’s houses at the time together changed the landscape of how architects—forget about clients—started to think about residential architecture. What’s amazing to me is that it’s a wood house, not a steel or concrete house, but it embodies all the formal strategies that are essential to modern architecture.
Which architects have most influenced your approach to architecture?
Gwathmey: I think of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, for different reasons. Corbusier for his planned graphic and the composite idea of plan and section for being simultaneous. And Frank Lloyd Wright for the architectonic and material ethic, the architectonicness of furniture and everything being considered simultaneously and being integrated. And the way he used natural materials. Both architects impacted how I thought about residential architecture.
Do you see any technological innovation on the horizon that will have a significant impact on homes being built in the United States?
Gwathmey: I think two interesting phenomena are finally being acknowledged as real issues: the environment and the ethics of green architecture. The Europeans are way ahead of Americans in that area. The investigations of double-layer façades and different materials that act appropriately are opening up new opportunities and possibilities that are both aesthetic and environmentally sensitive. I think the environmental issues are gigantic and not being pushed enough. They’re not being marketed to the degree where all the people that should be are concerned and aware. Something has to give, and it shouldn’t be an earthquake.
The second thing is the notion of the mechanical systems and what kind of fuel one uses and the economy of means. All of that would impact the aesthetics, how you make buildings, and what you make them out of.
We were at a conference on environmental issues and global warming recently. If you really hear the facts, it’s astounding. And it’s not so far away. Maybe far away for me, but it’s not so far away for you. And it’s definitely not far away for people who are being born today. I think architects have obligations about this. Like anything else, when you first begin to respond, there are going to be trial and error and unknowns, and there’s going to be an economic impact. But as we research and find appropriate solutions, they’ll become a part of the language and a part of our responsibility to address.
Someone was telling me that the source of all the water in Los Angeles is going to run out in fifteen or twenty years.
Gwathmey: This global warming problem is gigantic—the carbon monoxide emitted into the atmosphere, fuel shortages, and energy issues. Architecture to date, especially in our century, has exploited the notion of applied comfort. But while you’re air conditioning to make yourself more comfortable, you’re destroying the atmosphere, you’re getting bad air, and you’re using fuel. It’s a contradiction. We can make buildings that are self-ventilating and cool their own air by allowing it to move naturally from low to high and through spaces. All these things are going to impact aesthetics and become part of the “next technology.” And the house—by being a prototype and offering the opportunity to learn and experiment—is the ideal scale project to discover how to manipulate this stuff.
And it’s not even being done very much.
Gwathmey: Not yet. Not here.
Do you think that using a computer, as opposed to using your hands and eyes, changes the way people think and create?
Gwathmey: Teaching today, I realize that the computer is not a tool. From my point of view, it’s an integral piece of the process now. And it’s causing a problematic conceptual gap between how one creates with the hand and eye as opposed to the seduction of this technological achievement. The computer doesn’t allow for the frustration of the self-editing process that you have to go through to come to a refined determination of an idea. It’s too loose.
I think there’s a huge learning curve that is becoming wider in the difference between how one thinks and how one understands. The two should be simultaneous. When I teach now, I refuse to let my students use a computer, which is a killer because not only can’t they draw, they can’t build models. And it’s getting worse. I don’t want to sound like an old-school guy who can’t deal with the future, but I think it will take time to integrate the computer as an extension rather than as the center of how people think about making things.
The young architects we get here don’t have a clue, not a clue. I guess one could say, “What’s the big deal about making things?” I still think that architecture is made and detailed and has an obligation over time. And I wonder, on another level, whether certain kinds of buildings being made today have any longevity whatsoever, both in terms of self-maintenance and applied maintenance. Because it still rains, the sun still shines, the south is south, and that’s not changing so fast. Buildings expand and contract, they leak, and they have obligations over time. What’s going on right now is a little facile and idealized. It’s in a vacuum.