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Building simply: ethic or aesthetic? Thinking and making in an era of specialisation

The difcult art of the simple

Gordon Murray The recent history of architecture can be characterised as a battle between attention-grabbing, iconic buildings and a counteracting tendency towards the aesthetically reduced, even avowedly minimal. But beneath the surface appearance of these contrasting formal tendencies restless or serene, as demanded by their aesthetic ideals the means of building have become relentlessly more complex to meet ever more demanding environmental and other performance requirements. It was against this background that the Design Research Unit at Cardiff University convened a one-day symposium to explore the possibility of Building Simply: the topic proved, not unexpectedly, elusive. Below we publish some reections by Gordon Murray on some of the issues raised, and these are followed by three design papers by Pierre d'Avoine, Roland Raderschall and the organisers that addressed the topic from differing perspectives. Building Simply was sufficiently ambiguous to be at once an interesting proposition and an impossible question. The day was full of paradox and not without irony, given some of the approaches taken by the various presenters. Even if the debate was restrained, it provoked more questions than it answered, not least, Is it even feasible to conceive of building simply in the twenty-first century beyond merely a cursory visual asceticism or a quiet aesthetic? The German architect Christoph Ingenhoven presents a stark choice in his book Energies: We have only two alternatives in the matter of building. We can fake the past, or we can industrialise the future. The first is impossible because the past cannot be built again certainly not when traditional craftsmanship is all but extinct. But, by the same token, industrialising the future will only work if we are able to attain a precision and complexity at least as impressive as what was achieved by the trained craftsmen of the past.1

Miesian simplicity
As we contemplate our individual responses to the question of sustainable design and construction, building simply moves beyond a proposition or a question to become an imperative. In Modernism, complexity is

1a&b Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois (194650). Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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frequently masked by a surface simplicity. Mies van der Rohes work epitomised this, nowhere more so than in the Farnsworth House [1], whose clarity and simplicity were extremely difficult to achieve: the project architect Myron Goldsmith has recorded how difficult it was to set out, align and stabilise the structure prior to final welding.2 Perhaps here was its one failing as a paradigm for future construction techniques: it is undoubtedly not a prototype but a work of art, closer to automotive or aerospace construction. In an era when constructing architecture has become a process of assembly, it is the ultimate product. The Farnsworth House features in John Pawsons book, Minimum, in which he suggests, the minimum could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction reduced to the maximum.3 With no formal arrival the house can only be accessed on foot after a good walk. It is a shrine to nature, harmony and repose a Buddhist retreat. As with a temple, it is oriented east-west, and as in the asceticism of Eastern religions, which fascinated Mies, it eliminates all non-essentials. The floor plane sits high 1.6 metres above the ground, the roof plane 2.9 metres above that. Neither plane is interrupted by the mundane requirements of twentieth-century living no lighting or grilles. The ceiling is a pure white plane, the floor like a series of tatami mats in travertine. Allusions to seventeenth-century Katsura in Kyoto are never far away [2]. It is in effect two floating planes connecting heaven and earth as well as connecting inside (man) with outside (nature). It has to be viewed in this manner. Form follows function simply, the beauty of the exterior is the result of the search for the truth in the occupants relationship with nature. It is subordinate to that and flows from it. The opening of the corners of the house as glazed elements connected by a minimal support of two reverted angles, and a result of the cantilevers of the two planes, emphasises the immaterial restrictions of the interior to a greater degree than if the columns had been placed inside to give an all-round cantilever. The fusion of detailing and structural efficiency delivers a balanced and delightful solution. The eight columns, structurally right in size given their eccentric relationship to the channel edge beams, which introduces bending, provide all of

2a&b Katsura imperial Villa, Kyoto

the horizontal strength there is no other bracing. The intermediate mullion acts as a tension strut tying the two planes together. The columns of the Farnsworth House dont just work, they look as if they are working at capacity. Reduced to the maximum, an elegantly simple building an

idea at the heart of Le Corbusiers 1920s distinction between engineering and architecture: The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony. []

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3 Inmos Factory, Newport, South Wales (198082). Richard Rogers

The business of Architecture is to establish emotional relationships by means of raw materials. Architecture goes beyond utilitarian needs. 4

Function and aesthetics

While attending the symposium I took the opportunity to re-visit Richard Rogers Inmos factory, in nearby Newport [3]. It is a large building of disarming simplicity housing an extremely complex process silicone wafer production. Writing in The Architectural Review on its opening, 25 years ago, Reyner Banham alluded to the religious nature of the pure, functionalist aesthetic by referring to the clean room as the sanctum and, evoking Mies, he suggests: What Inmos emphatically offers is that old Modern Movement dream of infinitely adaptable clear space between a floor plane below and a roof plane above, and thus belongs in a rich and authoritative tradition that runs back [ to] Mies Farnsworth house [] More to the point, the air of conviction that pervades every part of the design seems to derive, as in naval architecture, from a sense of necessity []5 Horatio Greenough, quoted by Banham on the relationship between function and aesthetics, is more disturbing than Mies: [] beauty is the promise of function made sensuously pleasing6 for Banham a much more delicate task, demanding the full exercise of professional skill and aesthetic talents. Is Inmos therefore beautiful? to which he exclaims, The last time I saw it, yes!7 He goes further: To read most of the architectural literature of the last 12 or 15 years, especially that by academics, one would have to judge that

Functionalism was anaemic, reductionist, symbolically impoverished, discounted, discredited, dead, buried and (stamp! stamp!) good riddance! How then does it come about that many of the outstanding buildings of our time, from Stirling & Gowans Leicester Laboratories to Kahns Richards Laboratories, from Myron Goldsmiths Kitt Peak telescope to Cape Canaveral, from Pompidou to Sainsbury and now Inmos, and a host of less bulky or demanding buildings, seem to fall comfortably within the Functionalist tradition if we are officially living in a Post-Functionalist epoch? Can there in fact ever be a non-Functionalist period in architecture?8 Where does one place such a building in the spectrum of simplicity when the original legibility of structure, which Banham enthused about, is now virtually hidden behind complex off-the-shelf catalogue air-handling plant? Banham himself speculated that it may prove more interesting to see whether Inmos in its declining years will acquire those [] noble lineaments of recorded Function [ that] Character of maturity.9 Today, the answer has to be only if one ignores the nature of that character but it is still beautiful. For Fibonacci in the thirteenth century or Descartes in the seventeenth, mathematics was a means of understanding the universe and explaining the human condition. The theory of numbers and, by extension proportion, was also the basis on which architecture developed. In his competition-winning design for the dome of S. Maria Del Fiore in 1418, Brunelleschi did not, indeed could not, differentiate between art and science. One necessitated the

other, synthesised as part of an intuitive knowledge made manifest in the architects direct contact with making. The mathematics was not some externalised cross-check, rather a skill implicit in how the architect approached making. What Alberti or Brunelleschi or even Corbusier and Kahn knew was based on a lifetimes understanding of the nature of materials and of watching them perform over time. As Alberti suggested: Him I consider the Architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realise by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man, by movements of weights and the joining and massing of bodies.10 The architect was not only directly involved in the making but also in the process. Brunelleschis skill was in the design and engineering of the dome and in resolving the methodology for its construction. This approach continues through the Enlightenment as in the simple geometries of Georgian Inverary or Edinburghs New Town and the rationalist philosophy of David Hume, but it starts breaking down with the large engineering projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which were of such complication that many professions were involved in their construction. The infamous Sydney Opera House competition of 1957 saw Jrn Utzon selected by Eero Saarinen and Leslie Martin in an overthrow of accepted wisdom. The affinities between Utzons sails in the Harbour and Saarinens TWA terminal underscore the latters pivotal role, which he took even further by preparing two charcoal drawings to convince New South Wales Premier, Joe Cahill, of Utzons genius. A direct correlation between thinking and making, but different in that the thinking about the making was the only way to translate the idea sails or clouds into reality this is what gives resonance. Utzon never abandoned the early Modernist conviction that conceptual and constructional clarity would yield both economy and poetry. In every project he demonstrates that machine techniques can achieve radically different visual forms.11

Materials and meaning

There has been much discussion over the years in Scotland about the nature of who we are as a country topography, climate, history all define us, perhaps more than

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anything else forming who we are. The history of our architecture is defined by materials. Thus for us at the north-western edge of Europe, a Mediterranean tradition of Modernism could be seen as irrelevant. The Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa is specific on the relationship between simple building and a sense of materiality. He advocates the use of natural materials that allow the gaze to penetrate their surfaces and thereby convince us of the veracity of matter. By contrast, he argues, the familiar materials of most contemporary architecture sheets of glass, enamelled metal and synthetic materials merely present their unyielding surfaces to the eye without conveying anything of their material essence of age.12 Similarly, both Peter Zumthor and Jacques Herzog, for example, have declared their debts to Joseph Beuys and the Arte Povera group. What impresses me, writes Zumthor, is the precise and sensuous way they use materials. It seems anchored in an ancient elemental knowledge about mans use of materials and at the same time to expose the very essence of these materials, which is beyond all culturally conveyed meaning [4].13 However, David Leatherbarrow suggests that in the built work two topics modulate the meaning: finishing or the surface treatment of materials, and configuration the relationship of the parts. Thus the surface contains the information. As Leatherbarrow puts it: [T]he mass production of building elements has led to an ever-increasing source of materials from which to configure an architectural project. The built outcome of such a configuration largely results, however, in representations that oscillate between visual reflections of systems of production and pictorial recollections of earlier styles and motifs [] An alternative strategy could involve the buildings external cladding as elements that structure both the buildings skin and its temporal operations an approach that would initially be seen as against representation.14 Similarly, speaking of Japanese shrines in the 1930s, Bruno Taut observed that they [] are not human ideas and conceptions deliberately solidified in order to secure an eternal existence for human production. On the contrary, it is the ever transitory which is kept alive throughout the following generations. The shrines stress the refinement of the transitory, the projection of the moment into the Universe []15

Construction and technology

Last year the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland held an exhibition of the work of its greatest benefactor, Robert Rowand Anderson. His drawings are in the national archive and one in particular drew my attention, his working drawing for Mount Stuart, the home of the Marquis of Bute. On one sheet at eighth scale, a complex set of spatial ideas and crafted exteriors were illustrated with overwhelming clarity. This was based purely on simplicity of construction and assembly: two layers of material in the vertical plane brick and stone; the internal environment modulated primarily by the thickness of the wall. A cursory examination of almost any external wall construction of a fairly complex building today will reveal between seven and ten materials in the vertical plane and often a similar

4a&b Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Graubnden, Switzerland (1989). Peter Zumthor

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number in the external horizontal plane some there only to compensate for a deficiency in an adjoining material. In Chicago recently I met the great architect Walter Netsch who, along with Gordon Bunshaft and Bruce Graham, was the powerhouse behind the transformation of the SOM office into a home-grown response to the migr Modernism of Mies and Gropius. Netsch recalled the tabula rasa created by a post-war military-industrial complex with nowhere to go. Along with the rest of the profession Netsch was instructed by the industry you come up with the ideas and we will make them happen. Thus we had a step change in the typology of materials available to architecture: large-span aluminium curtain walling, neoprene gaskets, large float and mirror/metal coated glass, Corten and stainless steel. Yet without integrating these with the architectural theory and academic research, they could never have transformed the language of twentieth-century architecture. Renzo Piano is most perceptive on this: Creativity is craftsmanship. The tools may include a computer, an experimental model and mathematics. However, it is still craftsmanship the work of the mind, the work of the hand. It involves a circular process that draws you from an idea to a drawing, from a drawing to an experiment, from an experiment to construction and from construction back to an idea again. For me, this cycle is fundamental to creative work. Truly creative work is a circular process. [] Teamwork is essential if creative projects are to come about. Teamwork requires the ability to listen and engage in dialogue and input into the creative cycle think, draw, spend time at the site, and go back to thinking again. If this can be defined as creation, then there is no real contradiction between art and science, modernity and tradition, and freedom and obligation.16 The middle of the nineteenth century also saw the rise of the professions and the separation of artist and artisan to the extent that by the late twentieth century the construction process is akin to filmmaking: the architect as director, assembling a crew (cameraman, editor, and so on) with the raw materials (actors, props and sets) and at the end dismantling the crew and moving on to a new project. Much like the end of a large design project but here the analogy ends, for increasingly the architect is divorced from the

process of making. How has this come about? Partly through changes in remuneration structure the cost-effectiveness of practice, and partly through a change in construction processes, regulations and the increase in the principle of devolved responsibility due to an increasingly litigious society, with all that entails in terms of liability and the elimination of risk as the ultimate goal. Risk-aversion does not make for simple building: it needs simple building but thats a different concept. Instead it feeds on more complex networks and supply chains, all of which eliminate the intuitive, segregating thinking and making which is why one must admire even more those who, faced with this scenario, create works of lasting beauty. Recently in Paris, the filmmakers Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Lanzmann, with Jack Lang and Danny Cohn-Bendit, among others, charged that the collected professions of knowledge, thought and research are under attack from state-sponsored philistinism intent on reducing debate to a

series of simplistic and terrifying alternatives.17 This is happening here also, and is part of the crisis in the architectural profession. We can no longer hold valuable in our profession those tasks which others do better or cheaper unless we wish to compete with them also. However, in an e-world where information moves back and forth across time zones to maximise resources that is a downward spiral. As architects we must understand the implications of, and accept responsibility for, our decision-making, where that decision is left to us. We are as guilty of risk aversion as any in the industry, but great architecture is brave architecture. Before pushing technology and materials we need to fully understand them. Recalling Alberti, our ability as thinkers our intellectual property is what we bring to the table to the benefit of clients, constructors and hopefully ourselves. It is translating the ephemeral into the permanent with all the associated richness of our imaginations. It was perhaps the ultimate irony

5a&b MFO-Park, Zurich (2002). Raderschall Landschaftsarchitekten

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of a day devoted to Building Simply that it was only in the truly simple filigree planting structures which Roland Raderschall, the Swiss landscape architect, had clad in wisteria and vine that we found a simple building to match the Farnsworth House [5]. Gordon Murray is a principal in Gordon Murray + Alan Dunlop Architects and Professor in Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Strathclyde. From 2003 to 2005 he was President of The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.
Notes 1. Christoph Ingenhoven, quoted in Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner: Energies, ed. by Kristin Feireiss (Basel: Birkha?user, 2003), p. 30, cited by Martin Pawley, Foreword, in James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley, Why Is Construction So Backward? (Chichester: WileyAcademy, 2004), p. xii. 2. See Mies in America, ed. by Phyllis Lambert (Montral: Canadian Centre for Architecture; New York; London: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). 3. John Pawson, Minimum (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 7. 4. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. by Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1927), pp. 7; 10. 5. Reyner Banham, Art and Necessity: Inmos and the Persistence of Functionalism, Architectural Review, vol. 172, no. 1030 (1982), 3441 (pp. 35; 37). 6. Horatio Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art by Horatio Greenough, ed. by Harold Small (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947), pp. 71-2, quoted in Banham, Art and Necessity, p. 38. 7. Banham, Art and Necessity, p. 38. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 3. 11. See Richard Weston, Utzon: Inspiration, Vision, Architecture (Hellerup: Editions Blndal, 2001). 12. See Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley-Academy; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). 13. Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, trans. by Maureen Oberli-Turner and Catherine Schelbert, 2nd expanded edition (Basel: Birkhuser, 2006), pp. 89. 14. David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 1; 7. 15. Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan, trans. by Estille Balk (London: John Gifford, 1938), pp. 1434. 16. Renzo Piano, interview with John Tusa, Radio 3, 4 May 2003, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/archi tecture/pa_piano.shtml> [Accessed June 2007]. 17. See Jon Henley, French intellectuals attack war on intelligence, The Guardian, 18 February 2004, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/ story/0,11882,1150451,00.html> [Accessed June 2007].

Illustration credits arq gratefully acknowledges: Gordon Murray + Alan Dunlop Architects, 1 Raderschall Landschaftsarchitekten / Michael Freisager, 5 Alex Veal, 2, 4 Richard Weston, 3

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.