NOTES

 

 

1. Ideas

1. The Farnsworth House was designed in 1946 but was not completed until five years later.

2. When Johnson’s house got too hot or cold, he simply decamped to one of the other, more conventional, houses on his estate.

3. Yet Fallingwater is not a large house. The enclosed area is only half again as large as the Farnsworth House.

4. Utzon, too, was vindicated when he received the Pritzker Prize, and when the opera house was declared a World Heritage Site, although he never returned to Australia to see the finished building.

5. In 2006, Predock was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, the AIA’s highest honor; Foster was the only other competition entrant to have received this recognition.

6. Pei retired from Pei Cobb Freed in 1990; Freed died in 2005.

7. For the African American museum competition, Diller Scofidio + Renfro teamed up with Philadelphia-based KlingStubbins, a very large architecture and engineering firm with several branches, including in Washington, D.C.

8. Bond died during the competition.

9. Ten is a large jury. Paul Cret, who entered, and won, many competitions—and served on many juries—believed that the ideal jury was three persons; more than five he considered a “crowd.” Preferably all, or at least a majority, should be architects, he wrote, “because they alone have the training required to balance the merits of various solutions of a problem.”

10. The vindicated Wilson was knighted the year the building opened. He died in 2007.

11. Aalto entered scores of architectural competitions—and won twenty-five. Kahn participated in only ten competitions, none of which he won.

12. The other Kahn buildings honored were: the Yale Art Gallery, the Salk Institute, Phillips Exeter Academy Library, and the Kimbell Art Museum. The Saarinen buildings were: Crow Island School, General Motors Technical Center, Dulles Airport, Gateway Arch, and the John Deere & Company headquarters.

2. The Setting

1. A similarly abstract model was featured in MoMA’s 2009 Bauhaus retrospective. Plus ça change.

2. The source of the crumpled-paper story was a guest appearance by Gehry on an episode of the television cartoon show The Simpsons.

3. The budget for the Toronto hall was about $160 million, compared with $180 million (also in 2003 U.S. dollars) for Disney Hall, but an opera house includes extensive backstage facilities such as a fly tower and storage spaces for sets, which are not required in a concert hall.

4. Lutyens once told a student audience, “I advise everyone to build a house at nineteen. It’s such good practice.”

3. Site

1. One of the apprentices who accompanied Wright to Los Angeles was Rudolf Schindler.

2. Of course, Johnson didn’t really take out the garbage himself—he had a staff.

4. Plan

1. Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Alvar Aalto graduated from architecture schools, but such celebrated architects as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright learned on the job.

2. Another notable exception to this rule are older schools, which likewise often had two entrances, one for girls and one for boys.

3. Venturi, Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and Gehry have all received the Pritzker Architecture Prize; Stern was recently awarded the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture.

5. Structure

1. We now know that Greek temples were originally painted in many colors.

2. The large size of the columns and channels is the result of visual rather than structural requirements.

3. Roman concrete was unreinforced, acting only in compression like brick and stone.

6. Skin

1. The original ribbed panels recalled the body panels of a Citroën 2CV van. In a 1988 renovation, these panels were replaced by smooth white panels, which make the skin resemble that of a jumbo jet.

2. The billowing skin at Disney Hall actually predates Gehry’s famous titanium skin at the Bilbao Guggenheim, although the latter building opened in 1997, and Disney Hall was not completed until 2003.

3. As Robert Hughes foretold, the lenses soon broke down and are no longer operable.

4. Coincidentally, Norten received the Mies van der Rohe Award in 1998 and Zumthor in 1999.

7. Details

1. The original cube, finished in 2006, was sheathed in ninety sheets of glass; five years later these were replaced by fifteen larger sheets.

2. The Boston-born De Lue would go on to become a leading American sculptor of figural monuments in the post–World War II period, responsible for the Omaha Beach Memorial in Normandy and the Boy Scout Memorial in Washington, D.C.

8. Style

1. More pragmatically, Scott once defined architecture as “the art of organizing a mob of craftsmen.”

2. MoMA’s vertical sign, since removed, was an homage to the vertical sign of that modernist icon, the Bauhaus. Large vertical signs were not uncommon in American downtowns in the 1930s, but were used only for commercial buildings such as hotels, department stores, and movie palaces, not for cultural institutions.

3. Hudnut greatly undervalued Pope’s staying power. In 2007, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, the American Institute of Architects commissioned a national survey to identify the public’s 150 favorite American buildings. The Jefferson Memorial was ranked fourth, and the National Gallery thirty-fourth. No buildings by Walter Gropius or Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus stars whom Hudnut had brought to Harvard, made the list.

4. The “relics of the Dark Ages” is presumably a reference to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.

9. The Past

1. Sadly, most architecture schools have eliminated required courses in history, replacing them with elective seminars in so-called history-theory and thematic classes on selected topics.

2. Scott, the architect of Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station, was also the designer of the iconic British red telephone box.

3. The author was Bacon’s friend the art critic Royal Cortissoz.

4. Cret was awarded a Croix de Guerre for his military service; he became a U.S. citizen in 1927.

5. The only other modernist design near the top of the list was Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, in fourteenth place.

6. The two inscriptions are: IN HONOR OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES WHO SERVED IN THE VIETNAM WAR. THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES AND OF THOSE WHO REMAIN MISSING ARE INSCRIBED IN THE ORDER THEY WERE TAKEN FROM US, and OUR NATION HONORS THE COURAGE, SACRIFICE AND DEVOTION TO DUTY AND COUNTRY OF ITS VIETNAM VETERANS. THIS MEMORIAL WAS BUILT WITH PRIVATE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. NOVEMBER 11, 1982.

10. Taste

1. There is a photograph of Le Corbusier and Mies together, taken in the 1920s. Le Corbusier sports a dashing short coat, a bow tie, and a derby. Mies is wearing a homburg, a capacious double-breasted ulster, and spats.

2. In 2012, the American Institute of Architects gave the Gehry House its Twenty-Five Year Award.