Summaries

Deep Space, Thin Walls: Environmental and Material Precursors to the Postwar Skyscraper

Leslie, Thomas, Saranya Panchaseelan, Shawn Barron, and Paolo Orlando.

• The Windowless Building of the Future
  • (Contemporarily) horrific descriptions by Howard Constable of NYC of what a “most commercially viable” building would look like, which is no windows with light and air artificially supplied- but, idea was founded in cries of AC being environmentally and economically unviable (1933). 
• Toward the Deep Plan: Air-Conditioning and Fluorescent Lamps
  • The success of the Milam building in San Antonio and widespread adoption by cinemas gave way to an expectation of AC for office spaces. Another major factor: the Dust bowl.
  • Incandescent vs fluorescent: more efficient/ less heat output: fixture sizes became standardized, leading to standardized 10 or 11 foot floors. (Reminiscent of the two cows defining the width for roads in Rome and affecting dimensions to this day).
• Toward the Glass Skin: Twin Grinding, Insulated Glazing, and Solex
  • History of different glassmakers: LOF (Libbey-Owens-Ford) plate glass manufacturing, into auto glass; Pilkington Brothers double polish method for glass cut manufacturing costs. Enter: Thermopane! Sealed double-panel glass, bought by LOF.
• Early Applications, Mixed Results: Equitable Building, U.N. Secretariat, and Lever House
  • “The Equitable Building” in Portland (1948)- lots of massive glass, custom made by LOF rival PPG was one of the first with suspended glass facades. UN Secretariat + SOM Lever House followed to varying degrees of success. 
• Inland Steel: “Column-Less Space and Wafer-Thin Walls”
  • No columns a massive development, as removed building service core increased flexibility of space use to the maximum. SOM helped negotiate new fire code- use of stainless steel for outside walls.
• Coda: Further Developments in Postwar Cladding
  • Greater adoption of aluminum across Chicago and the US, plus more innovations in glass- molten tin “float” baths required no handling. PPG + LOF adopted shortly after, replacing polished plate glass entirely

The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered

Louis Sulivan.1896

Louis beautifully lays out the principle of “form follows function” and argues that the skyscraper office building is its own type of art and architectural category. 

His posture is organized in 3 parts: 

1. The Problem: “How do we include sentiment in a building that is potentially soul-sucking in application?  
   • “The very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution” (natural Law 1) 
     • Description of the needs of the building / general characterization of every office building 
     • An office building does not need to be “sinister” 
2. The imperative voice of emotion 
   • What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? It is Lofty
   • Not a design challenge to be taken lightly 
3. Letting the problem dissolve
   • Trinities and typology
     • Classical Column
     • Theorizers- prime number fans, mysticism
     • Intellectuals- beginning, middle, end
     • Naturalists- roots, trunk, tuft leaves
   • Typology cont. 
     • “Design struck out at a blow, as though by a blacksmith… or thought-born, as Minerva, full-grown”, emphasizing a “singleness” 
     • NOT 16 stories of 16 different buildings piled on 
   • Folly of the trained architect- final result does not need to be “inspiriting” or packed with architectural quotations
   • “Native Qualities”: inner life + recognizability 
   • Form ever follows function
   • Comparisons to typology of Greek temple, Gothic cathedral, medieval fortress

“Space”

Forty, Adrian. 2000.

What is meant by “space”? Raum in German is “portion of limitless space” 

• The preconditions of modernist architectural space
  • Semper- language of architectural “impulses”; influence by Hegel’s Aesthetics, suggesting enclosure as The fundamental property of architecture.
  • Camillo Sitte- evolved idea that space not just inside buildings but also outside them (1889) 
  • Enter Kant: space is a property of the mind, not the external… furthered in implications of space on aesthetic judgements by Schopenhauer in 1818, followed by philosopher Robert Vischer’s empathy for architecture.
  • Enter Nietzsche: “Existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” or… pure subjectivity. Two instincts: Apollonian and Dionysian: Former the realization of images from dreams, the latter intoxication from song and dance; dance animating space creating notion of space as a force field, generated by the dynamism of bodily movement.
  • “To satisfy the expectation fundamental to all nineteenth-century art theory, that works of art should reveal movement.”: “space” can be the means for movement. 
• From “Space” to “spatiality”
  • The space-perceiving faculty of the human mind
  • Riegl: the development of art was not to be understood in relation to contingent external factors, purpose, material or technique, but relative to its own internal development.
  • Frankl: Additive space vs spatial division- renaissance and post-renaissance. The distinction of spatiality as an effect of the mind vs actual geometric space lost on Frankl- “undermined the value of the concept and brings us back to the physical senses of space as enclosure or continuum” 
• “Built” space
  • Discourse exploring 3 problems: historical, philosophical, aesthetic; but not ultimately architectural

1. 1. 1. Space as enclosure- Semper, Behrens, Loos
      2. Space as continuum- De stijl, Bauhaus- Kiesler: “A system of tension in free space… No foundations, no walls, detachment from the earth, suppression of the static axis [allowing movement]”
      3. Space as extension of the body- Schmarsow, Ebeling- Space as membrane, like bark- directly formed by man’s activity… formed by a “continuous force field”

• • Moholy: Reject equation of space with volume- “‘If the side walls of a volume (i.e., a clearly circumscribed body) are scattered in different directions, spatial patterns or spatial relations originate’ (instead focused on voids) 
  • Two aims for Mies and the modern: 
    • Nietzschean, to be free from history and time, present: rejection of Materiality, + the eradication of “symbolism” as architecture should be “real”  
    • Space became so talked about in the 50s and 60s , postmodernists in 70s/ 80s attempted to lessen its importance did not stop Tschumi calling out the paradox of space being ideal and real. 
• Heidegger and Lefebvre
  • There is no space independently of one’s being in it (does a tree fall in a forest?…) 
  • No quantifiable aspects, and also no recognition of bodily resonance… response from Merleau-Ponty: “there would be no space at all for me if I had no body” 
  • Heidegger’s effect: 1960s, “place” taking over “space”, 
  • Lefebvre: The Production of Space
  • “ the mind thinks of space, but it does so within a space, a space that is at once both conceptual, but also physical, a space that is the embodiment of social relations, and of ideology.”
  • Social space is both work and product.
  • Addressing the entitlement of architects to space: space has already been produced- “it answers to tactics… it is… the space of the dominant mode of production, and hence the space of capitalism” – potential Marx reference slipped in.
  • Techniques of drawing are not neutral- themselves a part of power discourse, also guilty of preference to the eye above all other senses*- preference for image, spectacle, over reality, “a tendency manifested throughout… capitalism”.

Critical Response

I was initially very skeptical of Forty’s claim that the idea of “space” belongs to modernism and Germany, specifically. While I understand the value of the meaning in “Raum”, I find it hard to believe there have been no other discussions of space prior to the 1880s. Maybe it seems in historical hindsight like an obvious concept, but I could see a willing blindness to exploring other explorations or representations that even skirt the idea. A brief mention of any of those halfway attempts prior to the modern exploration I think would lend itself to strengthening Forty’s essay.

Application

Mark Foster Gage’s  41 W 57th St. project in NYC AKA “The Khaleesi” is a project that expands on ideas from almost all 3 readings, leaning into grand glasswork, representation of office buildings and the “capital” reference in classical columns, and leaning into object-oriented ontology which broaches the subject of how “space” is defined (in this case, focusing on the building / space itself rather than the observer/ human present).

(Conceptual) view from Central Park

“The Khaleesi” Capital

N Elevation