In chapters four and five of his book Uncommon Ground, David
Leatherbarrow discusses the miss use of modern design as it pertains to the
specification of cataloged details, as well as topographical relation of the
building to its site.
In his writing on Critical Regionalism, Kenneth Frampton explains the
importance of selecting materials and designing from scratch in order to attain
a tactile and sensory experience.1 When considering the human reaction to a path or place based
on a careful material selection as opposed to manufactured mechanical
experience, the costs may be similar.
Prior to full page ads in architectural magazines and free box seat
entertainment from venders, architects designed the furniture, light fixtures,
etc. for a given typology based on the tactile feeling they wanted to
create. Today, architects not only
reuse specifications from project to project, developers often file them into
an afterthought budgetary group known as: furniture furnishings and equipment.
“Thus, much if not most of what design prescribes for construction comes
off the shelf, as do the suits and shoe most people wear. Architects rely on trade literature
because without a pressing need it is very hard to find (to budget) the time to
study products further, harder still to break the routine or slow the pace of
the professional office.2
Even colors today are subject to the
numbers from a catalog given by two major manufacturers. This is a far cry from utilizing
materials which naturally portrayed the feel and hue of its surroundings which
Leatherbarrow explains that both Frank Lloyd Wright and Aris Konstantinidis
always sought to achieve.
The Xenia hotel designed by Konstantinidis on the island of Mykonos was
a terrific example of utilizing site, materiality, and color to compose a
seamless vantage.2 In chapter five, In and Outside of Architecture,
Leatherbarrow refers to topography of a building’s site as a connection to its
horizon as well as the “flow” from interior to exterior. Leatherbarrow takes two architects,
Frank Lloyd Wright, and Aris Konstantinidis as precedents. Wright and Konstantinidis are both
fundamental contextualists, with subtly differing ideas of how a building fits
perfectly into a site.2
Still, they both believed that the building should blend into the site
and appear as if it had been there for decades prior.2
Leatherbarrow
elaborates on the continuity of the site to building to horizon relationship by
explaining that
“…this does not mean that the patterns and situations by which
topographies are known need to manifest themselves in the same materials (as if
isohylic), nor be spatially continuous (isotropic), nor given the same shape
and profile (isomorphic); instead, they have to accommodate similar
performances, each serving as a receptacle and ‘singing’ in its own way…”2
The harmonious
blending of materiality and topography from site to building to horizon differs
tremendously from today’s tempting “…tabula rasa tendency of modernization
favoring the optimum use of earth-moving equipment in as much as a totally flat
datum is regarded as the moss economic matrix upon which to predicate the
rationalization of construction.”1
In
the end, it seems the foundation of why architects and designers began reusing ideas,
details, and colors is because “… designers can avoid thinking anew about the
basic premises of dwelling experience because that sort of thinking can be
assumed to have been done by specialists, the results of which are available on
the market in the form of ready-made solutions.”2 Likewise, the flattening of a site is
often another example of utilizing an off the shelf idea where civil,
landscape, and underground plumbing will be copied from on site to the next.
Credits
1. Frampton, Kenneth
“Towards a Critical Regionalism:
Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. (New York:
The New Press 1998), 17-35.
2. Leatherbarrow, David, Uncommon
Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography. (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England
2000), 119-212.
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