Architectural Vulnerability

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

I feel that modern buildings are envisioned looking new for eternity. In today’s modern world, buildings from antiquity are expected to look old. Did builders from antiquity expect this? Of course not, the Romans and Greeks built with immense precision and dressed the fine stone of their buildings with an investment in time commensurate with their expectations of longevity. Society doesn’t invest in large scale construction without being convinced of its timeless and durable visual appeal. Like us, our ancestors thought their buildings would remain looking new for eternity. After all, they were the “modernists” of their day. Is it realistic for our modern culture to expect the same from our new architecture?

Mies van der Rohe was one of the first architects to conceptualize an all glass skyscraper. It made quite a splash when first introduced in 1922. The building took on an almost ethereal quality. Its curves and carefully considered massing made certain elements of the building look visually slender and light. This appearance of weightlessness made it feel less permanent.

Britannica Image, Crystal Palace

Modern skyscrapers and buildings are not built like those of antiquity. Old buildings built of solid stone walls with veneers of a finished or “dressed” stone were heavy, their heights limited by the weight of the material itself. As frame construction began to replace solid masonry bearing wall or arch construction, the outside masonry was changed from solid full bed stone laid onto a masonry substrate, to a cladding. Eventually, the stone-clad towers were supplanted by buildings enclosed by a “skin” which is lighter and more flexible than old solid masonry or stone clad buildings. The skin expands and contracts with temperature changes (up to several cm) and also accommodates building movement in wind. The John Hancock tower, in Boston, MA, was an example of an all glass tower. Unfortunately, before it was finished, the glass panels began to pop out of their curtain wall frames, sending shattered glass to the plaza below. This wasn’t exactly a good development for the faith placed in curtain wall clad buildings. This wasn’t exactly a good development for anybody.

Wikipedia Image, Hancock Tower

In the 1950s an architect named Gordon Bunshaft designed the Lever House on Park Avenue in New York City. This office tower was designed completely in glass curtain wall and one of the first of its kind in the New York City. Inspiration for this tower first stemmed from Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus movement/school. The last Director of the Bauhaus, before fleeing Germany to the United States, was Mies van der Rohe and it is evident that the skyscrapers eventually realized by Mies and those designed by Bunshaft took on similar aesthetic qualities. But Bunshaft also designed an asymmetrical composition of the different building elements in the design, perhaps inspired by Constructivists and Le Corbusier. The Lever House tower-with its visual appearance of being separated and floating asymmetrically above an unintuitive looking and raised horizontal base – completely reinterpreted the design of a traditional skyscraper. The base extends the full width of the site and also appears to “float” above the sidewalk on thin columns. Elevating the base (an unintuitive gesture) allows the pedestrian access into a courtyard at sidewalk level. The raised base is actually a donut in plan, and one is able to look up through the floor above to see the tower from a different perspective. The design creates a playful juxtaposition between base and tower, and leaves the composition feeling confident if not a bit less stoic than its competing stone-clad towered brethren. Bunshaft detailed the facade (as best could be achieved in 1950) to perceive the thickness (or thinness) of the skin, making it look as if it was pulled tautly around the perimeter. The use of a glass facade for the entire building was a revelation. It was the Mies concept of the glass tower finally realized with the technology available at the time. And it was, by all measure, a design success and a maintenance headache.

Wikipedia Image, Lever House

Not to sound like Rachel Dratch as “Debbie Downer,” but The Lever House fell into severe disrepair within 35-40 years of its completion and required a total restoration by 1998. Once again, we see a modern work of architecture requiring maintenance and restoration less than a half-century after its existence. Why these experiences with the newest of modern buildings?

Modern Architecture by its very definition challenges the limits of technology. It can be argued that, inevitably, modern buildings come with a risk to durability or long term care. For many years, (decades) NYC was a very conservative architectural collection of granite clad buildings “withstanding the test of time.” Since 1990 this has begun to change dramatically. “Starchitects” (famous architects with visually notable design styles) have been designing unique and thoughtful buildings (not all, let’s be fair) throughout the city. New York City has once again, become identified by its unique architecture, as it once was when neoclassical and gothic reinterpretations of the skyscraper dominated the skyline. Gotham’s mass and density has been replaced by newer exceptional feats of design and engineering prowess. What happens when these begin to show signs of aging? Do we have the same expectations as previous generations that the legacy of architecture left by this generation will age as gracefully as those of antiquity? Did designers concern themselves with such things or were architectural historians best left to grapple with time’s hand in the aging of a building’s construction as well as design?

Queensboro Bridge and Tramway Tower, NYC

There are many modern examples of architectural masterpieces. By no means is this blurb an indictment of modern architecture. Its focus, instead, is to help me determine why I choose to photograph buildings the way I do. What am I exploring in these photographs? I see architectural change as already noted. I see a certain vulnerability with some buildings and assurance with others. I see buildings sitting comfortably or awkwardly amongst their surroundings while those same buildings sit awkwardly or comfortably among their peers. I see buildings inadvertently evoking feelings of alienation and those that invite us to explore them. I see buildings that act as giant marketing devices in our era of commoditization and those that do everything to obscure our perceptions of what lies within. I see buildings as manifestations of an Owner’s ego and others that appear as realizations of an Architect’s ideology. I see buildings that make unique and thoughtful use of materials and others that answer their appearance with expedient efficiency. I see buildings destined to become landmarks and others that look as if they have chased the latest fad. But in NYC, what I have seen developed the most are buildings as pantheons built for the wealthy or those that aspire to this wealth. These buildings are not concerned with aging, they are expected to look forever young in their Owner’s or Architect’s eyes. Architects have become the plastic surgeons of the cityscape.

The visual permanence of stone is enhanced by quantity.

Quite the conundrum, don’t you think?

View of Nordstrom Tower and the “Needle,” Under Construction

Thin skinned buildings imply an “interchangeability” of the outside materials. A structural frame can be clad with any of the numerous materials available to the architect: GFRC, Curtain Wall/Glass, Metal Panels, Resins, Porcelain, Thin Stone, Thin Masonry…to name a few. The concept of imagining a plethora of cladding options to the architect when designing the building will leave the observer to wonder why a certain material was chosen for its particular implementation on the facade. This breaks boundaries of material typology. No longer does stone have to be considered a heavy aesthetic. (Mies broke that boundary with the Barcelona Pavilion, a small scale design in 1929 which cleverly uses design details and a minimalistic composition to perceptually dematerialize marble-clad stone walls when traversing through the structure) Metal panels can have different shapes, colors, opacity (through punctures/openings/patterning), thickness and reflectivity. Glass can be reflective, clear, colored and have different opacities, shapes, thicknesses…we get the idea. These materials can be almost anything and it’s their inherent properties that limit their application to a design. But for many intents and purposes, the materials in a clad building are interchangeable. The program/layout and aesthetic are the two main factors in determining their application…not the notion of permanence.

Untitled, NYC

As photographers, we begin to search for juxtapositions or small vignettes of intentional or unintentional interest and beauty. Serendipitous, sometimes intimate occurrences of light, shadow, reflectivity, pattern, straightened edges or sculptural fluidity are captured by photographers that were inconceivable by the architect in years past. In our present world, the advent of computer modeling and photorealism has allowed the architect to create his own idealized capture of the building. But it is the rich interplay of structures and buildings within their context that provides the interest for the photographer. We are able to control the moment in which we freeze time, and therefore, suspend the architect’s intention…if only for a brief fraction of a second.