Photographs: James Givens
Two people, each lost in thought, lost in the quiet beauty of an ordinary moment. This building makes a place wherein the freedom to be just who you are pervades.
Seen from the street below, the window, the cafe, the couple at the table, almost go without notice. But there is something profound at work here.
The reason why this moment at the window exists, the reason why there is an almost Edward Hopper quality about it, is because of the way the building is made--especially in relation to the life of the street.
Look carefully at the setting made by the window. The arch creates a poetic frame and an intimate division of space. The window inside the arch is divided into three parts, thereby reducing the scale of the opening. Each part of the window is further divided by mullions; thus, every pane of glass composes the view like individual tiles in a mosaic. The center window opens--almost unheard of in contemporary commercial architecture. The way it opens is unique. By pivoting at its center it creates an awning-like enclosure at the building edge, a small shelter at the cusp of the building. The sill height is low, around 27" off the floor, just right for leaning on and just low enough to allow easy views downward to the life on the street. All of these elements make it possible for this couple to find a place of deep comfort; to be free in themselves. No forced conversations, no self-conscious public postures; no false public face. Just the right convergence of elements that allow the people using the place to become its most profound ornament.
Now, look carefully at the building as a whole. It is a good example of a "background building". By "background" I do not mean inconsequential or apologetic. Rather, I mean a building that provides a quiet and lasting beauty. This building does not shout "Look at me!" as so many "signature" (read: famous architect-designed) buildings do today. Nor does it insult us with poor materials and clumsy design as so much of the big-box Wal-mart, Costco, etc., retail architecture does. Instead, the Corner Market building is made out of tough and beautiful materials all carefully proportioned: concrete softened by brick masonry walls. The concrete forms a rhythm of arches aligned in repeating bays. The bays are infilled by brick and patterned at places into simple panels of integral ornament. While it is all order above, the street level is allowed to change and flex radically with seasonal open air markets. The structure of the bottom floor is entirely open, and is generously sheltered by a fixed horizontal canopy and adjustable canvas awnings. Thus, the unkempt ebb and flow of Seattle's street life finds its appropriate structure. Meanwhile, lamps at the top of the building accentuate the rhythm of the bays and create beautiful light for the street at night.
Finally, in spite of all of the details I have noted above, there is a quietness to the building--a feeling that you could pass by it and not think twice about the building per se. That is, in fact, the strength of its beauty. Squint your eyes at the facade as a whole and it becomes a humble urban wall content to stay out of the spotlight.
Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Photograph: James Givens, August 2006
"The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye is that an order has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Frank Lloyd Wright understood well that Nature cannot be improved upon, but it can be revealed, described and intensified by art. In the Allegheny mountains of southwestern Pennslyvania, a pristine stream called Bear Run flows through towering stands of hemlock, maple and oak, through huddled masses of rhododendron and Christmas ferns, and over layered outcroppings of sandstone where it drops in cascading sheets of water chasing the contours of the land. It is a setting that needs no justification. How, then, could one place a house in such a context without it seeming invasive, foreign, or trivial? How could it not offend or become a symbol of mere ownership?
By becoming a threshold into the setting.
Every experience of Fallingwater places us three-dimensionally into Nature. We are no longer viewer and object. Inside fallingwater, we move not through the building but through the setting. We walk on stone floors enveloped by the sound of water. We are suspended, literally, in space and feel caught up in the canopy of trees. We climb stone steps that lead to precarious cantilevered perches and we are drawn by the danger of the ledge. We look across long, unbroken internal vistas beneath the low reach of the concrete planes, and it is the trees themselves caught in the horizontal frame of the house that provide the final sense of enclosure. The thrill of the floors floating in space is only surpassed by the mass and weight we feel in them, thus making the acheivement of shelter seem an intoxicating and daring act.
But it is, in fact, these layers of space that are so essential: in the absence of visual support, the trees, the sunlight, the movement of wind, seem to flow continously through the house as easily as Bear Run flows through the heart of this secluded glenn.
"A house, we like to believe, can be a noble consort to man and the trees; therefore the house should have repose and such texture as will quiet the whole and make it graciously at one with external nature."
--Frank Lloyd Wright, 1931
I chose this image of a window for the depth of feeling it possesses. The feeling is rooted in how the window is made. The window is made by its position at the corner of the room; by the low wall and small garden just outside; by the rough stone wall that climbs onto the house from the garden; by the way that same stone wall frames one side of the window; by the statue that sits within view on a small bench of the stone wall; by the low sloped ceiling just inside the window made by the shed roof; by the low fascia of the shed roof that also becomes the top trim of the window; by the decision to clip the eave so that beautiful light will enter there; by the fact that the window is, in part, a pair of casements that swing out to the land; by the plainness of the glass where the window opens; by the careful pattern of mullions at the place where the window makes the corner; by the heavy vertical division between the fixed corner sash and the operable casement windows; by the broad stone sill that wraps the corner and echoes both the horizontal line of the roof and the cap of the low garden wall...
This window resulted from all of these decisions. It was not chosen in an abstract moment away from the setting, or out of a catalogue, or in some showroom for windows.
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Photograph: James Givens, June 2005
Like the theater paintings of Manet, the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, defines space by showing the people in it and how they are grouped. The result is a spatial order whose depth of feeling is most manifest only when the room is filled with people participating in the performance. This is an entirely different way of defining architecture. Certainly more profound than the countless representations in architectural journals and books that tend to show buildings and built environments as pure constructs devoid of people.
The photograph above shows the upper tiers of the Marinsky Theater during intermission. Note the close wrap of small spaces around the expansive volume in front of the stage. The ceiling here is low enough to touch; the depth shallow enough to feel the wall at your back even at the edge of the balcony; and the individual doors at the back wall are frequent enough to suggest private ownership of your seat. The "U"-shaped wrap of tiers creates lines of sight that cross against the central axis made by the stage. This makes the theater a place to watch people watching the performance. There is an intimacy and informality of feeling here that complements the formal symmetry of the stage and the gilded surfaces of the walls. When the lights dim and the curtain rises, there are traces of light that are held as equally on the curved edges of gilding as they are on the soft contours of faces stacked tall around the darkened central volume--just enough to make the viewer a visible participant in the revelation of art.
Photograph: James Givens, June 2005
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"What matters is that the building -- the room, the canyon, the painting, the ornament, the garden -- as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us."
- Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life page 372.
Both of these drawings came out of an assignment I gave to my students in an advanced studio I am currently teaching. It is one of a series of design methods that I call "Excercises in Deep Feeling". The drawing on the left was done by Susan in 1 hour; the time limit was important. There needed to be an urgency in the making of the room. Only the essentials. I told them that there should be more darkness than light in the drawing. That the light should be there because it was intended to be there, not because the paper was white. I then asked my students to take a bit more time in order to find out specifically what it is that might be making the quality of light in the first sketch. In Monica's drawing, on the right, we can see the progress as it pertains to the making of a dining hall. While the drawing has more detail, it is important that it remain a little obscure. The emerging structure must be as much evoked as it is willed by the architect. Remember, the goal is to slowly articulate the emerging elements and details that deliver the life of the room. The order here is important. In the first sketch it is the visceral life of the space that is the object, getting that right at the expense of finer detail such as the specifics of materials or primary structure. Gradually, the bones of the room step out of the darkness and reveal themselves.
D.L. James House, Point Lobos, California, 1918, by Charles and Henry Greene Photograph by Marvin Rand
"...it is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate, or our travelling selves set us down; but where these roots reach toward...is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."
- Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction" The Eye of the Story, 1956
Welty goes on to say: "Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about histiory partakes of place. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else...From the dawn of man's imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where god abided and spoke from if he ever spoke." What is true about the role of place in writing is true for architecture as well. All great buildings reach for the particulars of place as a root of their identity.
In the James House, Charles and Henry Greene literally reach for that "deep and running vein". The house seems to grow out of the rocky cliffs of Point Lobos. In particular, note how the Greene brothers extended a long, buttressed wall of stone down the length of the cliff in such a way that it seems to reach for purchase on the lower banks of the slope. In this case, the sculptural form that resulted is not about form for its own sake. It is about form in the service of establishing a deep and meaningful connection to a place; one that may even come to symbolize the larger human struggle against the fleeting, the impermanent, the inevitable mortality of things. We feel the house take hold on this stony peninsula against storms gathering over the Pacific Ocean, and we take solace in the heft and brace of its stone. Knowing how the Greene brothers worked, it is most probable that the scuptural form was not in fact intended at all; it simply emerged out of carefully fitting the house and its terraces to the land.
Now compare the James House against the use of sculptural form in the following two examples. It is clear straight away that the architects began with the image first, forcing the organization of rooms into the pre-conceived image. Moreover, it is clear in both examples that context, the "deep and running vein" of place, has no role or relevance to either building. It is as if they could be transplanted without penalty to any place anywhere in the world. This kind of sculptural form, currently making the covers of architectural journals every month, is all about ego and whim. Sadly, it is impossible to know, in even a general sense, just where either building calls its home.
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Charles S. Greene House, Pasadena, California, 1908. Photograph by Marvin Rand
"When one approaches such a house it must not obtrude itself upon one's sight but rather fit into things about it."
- Charles Sumner Greene
In order to accommodate his growing family, Charles Sumner Greene added a full second floor to his house in 1906, complete with a private studio and reading room on a third level. In doing so, he carefully fitted the new volume over the old one, taking pains to keep the massing and silhouette from overwhelming the intimate setting of the garden. What is remarkable here is his fearless embrace of the modest eccentricties of form that such an addition could cause. Those eccentricities, however, were not driven by a personal desire to create sculptural form. They were driven by the practical needs of the rooms themselves and by a straightforward desire to shed water. In particular, note how the octagonal configuration of the original studio has been altered to accomodate a small porch roof on one side. Note further how the porch roof casually blends with an asymmetrical shed roof that just manages to spill onto a lower adjoining roof set against it at 90 degrees. There is an almost naive, straightforward quality to the way those extensions were shaped and roofed. The resulting sculptural form has a relaxed quality about it, and suggests a physical empathy with the gnarl and lean of the nearby tree.
This kind of sculptural form is far removed from the highly personal and frequently self-conscious scuptural massing found in the work of architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Thom Maine. Ironically, the thinking of Charles Sumner Greene was well ahead of Gehry, Hadid and Maine. As far back as 1906, and probably without intending to, he not only showed us one of the possible roots of contemporary form, he showed us one that could generate a more authentic basis for scuptural composition.
The Annunciation Cathedral, Moscow, Russia
Photograph: James Givens, June 2005
"In many cases the light comes from colors which are roughly complementary. Blue is made to shine by yellow and orange, red is made to shine by green, orange by purple... All we know is that sometimes colors together create a glow of life. The colors, like centers, help one another come to life; a life which is created and can be felt."
- Christopher Alexander
The Nature of Order Book Four: The Luminous Ground
At first it is the white stone walls and noble massing of form that captures your attention. Then it is the gilded roof that intrigues: a golden landscape of domes and cupolas that cap the walls like a sacred hilltown shining against the sky. Finally, it is the surprising intricacy of ornament and color made in the dim light of the narrow entrance hall that leads you to this luminous blue portal. The modest proportions of the portal stand in sharp relief against the planar spread of subdued color made by the icons painted on the walls. The blue of the portal shines quietly behind the carved ornament, as if the intricacies of the pattern were more like an ornate screen veiling a glimpse of a glowing blue room. In other words, the blue appears not as a color confined to surfaces, but as a luminous blue volume that is shaped and contained by the careful interlock of golden carvings. The depth of the blue in this case is made to shine by the darkened gold of the ornament that surrounds it and by the shapes of the spaces that the blue fills. The golden pattern makes the blue move in vertical and horzontal bands, makes it peer out from the interstitial spaces of vine and leaf, makes it leap in a fragile blue arc over the doors that lead into the sanctuary. This is what it means for one color to help another come to life.
Archangel Cathedral, Moscow, Russia
Photograph: James Givens, June 2005
"In every case where it occurs, color which has inner light has a special kind of subdued briliance. It is quiet, very quiet, yet bright at the same time. It is an overall single sensation, not a composition of colors, but a single overall color field--almost like a musical chord--which strikes simultaneously from all parts of the picture at once. It comes from the picture as a whole."
- Christopher Alexander
The Nature of Order Book Four: The Luminous Ground
If you were to imagine this space without its painted walls, the life you feel within it would diminish. Though strong in its geometry and bold in its proportions, without color the bare surfaces of the domes, vaults, columns and walls, would struggle against the darkness of the space. In contrast, the subdued brilliance made by the pattern of color on the surfaces of the structure causes the light to feel perpetually in a state of setting, like the last glow of a sunset held in place. It possesses a solemn majesty that causes even the most secular person to be moved by the belief that motivated these artists. There are scenes so high up in the space, so removed from view, details so fine, that they can only have been done for a divine eye. Here, certainly, these paintings cannot be seen as merely applied ornament, or as an obligatory record of biblical stories. Their color and pattern create a global effect that transforms mass and geometry, and infuses stone and vault with an ember-like glow of religious feeling.
It is my hope that such integral manifestation of color might yet make it back into the places we live in today.
Doorway, Norwich Cathedral, England, photograph by Frank Wright
"If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life."
- Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space
I chose this image of a door for the depth of feeling it possesses. The feeling is rooted in how the door is made. The door is made by the steps from the garden, by the landing just outside, by the space of the landing as a moment of pause, by the need for the door to swing out, by the mass of the stone wall and the shape of the opening in it, by the small cluster of columns that recieve the vault of the ceiling over the door, by the position of the door as a part of the stair, by the steps that grow wider as they descend into the room, by the sunlight that spills in through the opening, by the reflection of light on the wall from the floor, by the sunlight caught in the leaded glass of the door...
This door resulted from all of these decisions. It was not chosen in an abstract moment away from the setting, or out of a catalogue, or in some showroom for doors and windows.