Buildings Only An Architect Can Love

Tom Wolfe pulled the scales away from our eyes in 1981 when he spoke truth to power about the ugliness of glass and steel boxes. Even more, in 1981, he predicted the possibility that steel would melt when the ultimate glass and steel boxes melted and crashed to earth on 9/11/2001 when the jihadists flew airliners with nearly full loads of jet fuel into the World Trade Center Towers. The echos of Wolfe's critical analysis did not end in 2001 because just today the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced that it was sponsoring an exhibit of prefabricated "worker housing." Tom Wolfe traced the origins of the Bauhaus architects who sought to provide the ultimate in "worker housing" before WWII. If this is (fair & balanced) life imitating art, so be it.

Contents:
(1)--Retrospective review of From Bauhaus to Our House
(2)--Is Prefab Fab? MoMA Plans a Show

[1--x WineX Magazine]
Retro Reads
by Dawn Yun

FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE
by Tom Wolfe
1981, Simon & Schuster

If you want to know how to write, read this book. If you want to know how to dress, read this book. If you want to know about modern art and architecture, read this book.

Think the Barcelona Chair, the Seagram Building in New York and anything minimalist. Bauhaus (which began in Germany in 1919) is all about starting from zero? The Bauhaus concept was to unite the arts under the umbrella of architecture, create plain worker housing and avoid being bourgeoisie. In reality, everyone involved with the movement was, well, bourgeoisie. So the word took on the most damning of meanings. At all costs one wanted to avoid creating something people could point to and declare "How very bourgeois." Which so reminded me of college art classes. The greatest fear one had, the worst thing one student could say to another about her work was "How very derivative." It was enough to cause one to drop out of art school and do something random, like major in business.

But -- let's get back to zero.

Among the greats who taught at the Bauhaus school were photographer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, furniture designer Marcel Breuer, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and painters Paul Klee and Josef Albers. Albers taught the introductory Bauhaus course. His inimitable style was to drop a handful of newspapers on a desk and tell students to get busy. He'd be back in an hour. With competition akin to football players at the Super Bowl, each of the students would work tirelessly in an attempt to top each other, creating airplanes, birds, yachts and more. Always, one student would take a piece of newspaper, fold it in half and plop the tent on the desk to the snivels of his classmates. The esteemed Albers would march back into class, eye the paper machinery and pick one as the epitome of all things Bauhaus. Always -- it was the tent.

"This is a work of art in paper," he said marveling at the folded parchment. "This makes use of the soul of paper." And every cortex in the room would spin out. So simple! So beautiful... It was as if light had been let into one's dim brain for the first time. My God! -- starting from zero! Few people can turn a phrase quite so succinctly, beautifully and sarcastically as Wolfe can. He of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bonfires of the Vanities and A Man in Full fame.

Again, let's return to zero.

With little money in Europe to build their oh-so-vanilla buildings, the leading Bauhaus lights lit out for America. There they found a receptive audience at Harvard. America's most talented and intellectually gifted students were drilled the line "less is more," a line originated by Mies van der Rohe. Less is more exactly summed up the Bauhaus style. Less is more. How very ground zero!

During this time, among the Bauhausers Frank Lloyd Wright was considered pretentious scum. Too bourgeois, while Buckminster Fuller, he of geodesic dome fame, brilliant. Besides the difference in architectural styles, Wright was considered too independent, while Fuller was believed to be either genius or insane. Better to side on the former. It always comes down to personalities, doesn't it?

The Bauhaus influence resulted in buildings that all looked the same. Similar boxes of glass, steel and concrete. Simple, yes. Inspired? Not really. In other words -- b-o-r-i-n-g. The thing was, Bauhaus was all about minimalism, and America in the fifties was all about excess. Think big, honking, gas-guzzling cars and you have a snapshot of the country at that time. What were rebellious architects to do? Go elaborate! Add cornices and columns, divide up those damn boxes. Edward Durel Stone, the architect of New York's original Museum of Modern Art, abandoned Bauhaus for a more extravagant style, much to the derision of his former brethren. In fact, when the Modern was to have an addition, he wasn't asked to expand it. Instead, Philip Johnson, a protege of van der Rohe, was given the commission.

Yet, today Stone's work, including the Gallery of Modern Art in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., stands as important parts of the urban American landscape. Bauhaus represented then - and represents today - a minimalist style that continues to influence modern culture, from dance to art to music.

What makes From Bauhaus to Our House a worthwhile read isn't just the history of modern architecture and the artsy politicking going on, rather, it's the lessons of editing. The essence of all good art, whether writing, building or music, is found in vetting the unnecessary and keeping the essentials, making From Bauhaus to Our House required reading.

[Dawn Yun is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. ]

Copyright © 2008 X Publishing, Inc.


[2--x NY Fishwrap]
Is Prefab Fab? MoMA Plans a Show
By Robin Pogebrin

To many people the term “prefab housing” calls to mind trailer parks. Yet lately prefabricated houses — built off site and then delivered largely complete — have become fashionable at architecture schools and among an upscale segment of the housing market. They pose a considerable design challenge.

Seizing the moment the Museum of Modern Art has commissioned five architects to erect their own prefab dwellings in a vacant lot on West 53rd Street, adjacent to the museum. Whittled down from a pool of about 400, the five architects are participating in “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” an exhibition opening in July.

The five, to be announced today by the museum, are KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia; Lawrence Sass of Cambridge, Mass.; Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of Manhattan; Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria; and Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London.

Each firm has a track record with prefabricated housing, but they all approach the form differently. The proposals were evaluated by a jury of MoMA curators and staff members and architectural professionals. The Manhattan architecture firm of Cooper Robertson & Partners will act as the consulting architect in assembling the houses, some created expressly for this exhibition and others designed earlier.

“I wanted a mix of existing buildings and prototypes,” said Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the museum, who is organizing the exhibition with Peter Christensen, a curatorial assistant. Mr. Bergdoll said he didn’t want to perpetuate what he called a prevailing myth that prefab housing can’t work in practice. Several architects have had considerable success, including Wes Jones, who in 1994 made homes from shipping containers, and Namba Kazuhiko, who in 2004 created his Muji Infill House.

Mr. Bergdoll wants to counter other misconceptions about prefab housing, like the notion that the reason to build them is to save money. While they can be economical, he said, they also have potential environmental benefits. The goal for Mr. Gauthier and Mr. Edmiston, for example, is to cut the most complex prefab pieces with the least waste.

Mr. Horden’s Micro Compact House — Mr. Bergdoll described it as “a giant livable Sony radio cube” — is topped with photovoltaic panels and has wind turbines in its walls, allowing the house to generate its own electricity. An aluminum-clad perfect cube, with about 76 square feet of living space, the tiny dwelling is intended for use as athletic or student housing, or as a miniature vacation house. Mr. Bergdoll met with Mr. Horden in one of his cubes, a space so compact that the architect managed to make espresso on the kitchen counter without leaving his seat at the dining table.

The house is commercially available — it recently went on the market in Europe — and can be delivered by helicopter or crane.

A five-story house designed by the firm led by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake is made of recyclable materials and equipped with photovoltaic cells that allow it to function off the electricity grid. With steel frames that snap together and glass windows that slide into place, the house requires no welding.

Mr. Sass, an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has designed prefab housing for New Orleans. He proposes shipping a laser-cutting system with the pieces, which can be assembled with a rubber mallet, so homeowners can erect their own houses. “The house could be a fascinating combination of high-tech design and low-tech assembly,” Mr. Bergdoll said.

In the System 3 house by Mr. Kaufmann and Mr. Rüf, the units — each fits inside a shipping container — can be stacked together like blocks. The house can be expanded vertically or horizontally and comes with a choice of panels and window systems with which to wrap the building. By the time it’s all assembled, about 36 hours later, Mr. Bergdoll said, “it doesn’t look anything like what arrived on the truck.”

The museum gave each team $175,000, though the architects could exceed that budget at their own expense. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, helped pay for Mr. Sass’s project and is also a sponsor of the overall exhibition, along with the Lily Auchincloss Foundation.

MoMA has a tradition of exhibiting houses outdoors, most famously in its sculpture garden. The House in the Museum Garden by Marcel Breuer in 1948 was followed by Gregory Ain’s Exhibition House in 1950 and the Japanese Exhibition House in 1955. But while the earlier house exhibitions tried to define taste for a growing middle class, the prefab houses will address a broader socio-economic spread.

Intrinsic to the idea of prefab housing is serial production, an arguably radical notion at a time when one-of-a-kind homes are so valued. But computerized customization also makes it possible to produce nonidentical objects, Mr. Bergdoll said, adding that the exhibition may explore “the idea that mass production is reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.”

Although the show does not officially open until July 20, today’s announcement marks its beginning, Mr. Bergdoll said. In February the foundations will be laid in the vacant lot. The houses will start arriving in late May or early June, a spectacle that Mr. Bergdoll suggested could rival the installation of Richard Serra’s immense sculptures last year.

“We really want the spectacle of, ‘There’s no house there,’ and three days later, ‘There’s a house that you could move furniture into,’” he said.

Starting in mid-March the architects will contribute weekly blog postings to record the process of fabricating, delivering and assembling the houses on moma.org. The show’s two main themes are off-site assembly and delivery, so this stage is integral to the exhibition.

“Once the house is here, it becomes a static event,” Mr. Bergdoll said. “What we’re really celebrating is how it came into being.”

Visitors will be able to enter all of the houses, except Mr. Horden’s, which is too small to accommodate many people.

The exhibition’s indoor portion will have documents, other full-scale parts of houses, and films that explore the roots of prefabrication in the work of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Prouvé, Richard Rogers, Kisho Kurokawa and Konrad Wachsmann. The exhibition will also highlight projects by corporations like Lustron and Sears Roebuck, and the German Kupferhaus of the 1930s.

In part because of the disparaging associations with the term prefab, Mr. Bergdoll left it out of the title of his exhibition. “I’m making a case for the exploration of architectural ideas,” he said. “I don’t think architecture should be marginalized in a way that it just becomes a luxury product.”

[Robin Pogrebin is the NYTimes "architecture reporter." ]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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