Architects. Process. Inspiration. || Deborah Berke and Carey McWhorter Invisible Architecture

Yale University, School of Architecture

Deborah Berke and Carey McWhorter Invisible ArchitectureAuthor(s): Peter HalleySource: Perspecta, Vol. 28, Architects. Process. Inspiration. (1997), pp. 160-169Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567200 .

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Deborah Berke and Carey McWhorter

No. 71

NO. 81 No. 739-P26 Tracks

.... ,

Invisible Architecture Peter Halley

The Projects of Berke and McWhorter are described by their supporters and even by the architects themselves as vernacular, even "banal" and "conventional." What kind of ideological persona does this work then offer to the client who wishes to identify with it? Does the client, too, wish to be defined as banal and conventional? Is the client seeking a conventional ideological mask?

In the classical era (to use Foucault's term), practi- cally the sole role assumed by architecture, especial- ly what is now called domestic architecture, was to impress and aggrandize. Large, orderly spaces and sumptuous materials created a theatre of monumen- tal display, while a closed group of historical signi- fiers (particularly those associated with ancient cul- tures) gave a mythic transhistorical sense to the aspirations of the client.

Beginning with the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century, the signifying language of architecture loos- ened as the possession of power became less monolithic and more fluid. The meanings given to historical symbols began to shift, and historical ref- erence became the language of subtle arguments about stasis and change, about order and freedom. Architecture also became the site of a debate about how the newly empowered, monied classes wished to represent themselves. The various issues of the capitalist era (embracing industrialism or rejecting it, embracing the historical past or denying it, etc.) are played out in the architecture of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries with ferocious intensity.

The Bauhaus is often seen as a break with this historical debate. Yet the architecture of the Bauhaus era, which defiantly embraced materialism, progres- sivism, and anti-historicism, can, in its intention to convey a polemic, also be seen as a culmination of this dialogue.

The work of Berke and McWhorter in many ways takes up where the Utopian impulses of the Bauhaus era ended. Their work does not mock the Utopian era as did so much "post-modernism."

(This Oedipal struggle is no longer present in the architects of their generation.) Nor, significantly, does it sink into unconscious, reductivist "simula- tion" of the effects of the historical or the vernacular as did much architecture of the last decade.

Even though their work addresses the same kind of

"enlightened elite" as did the experimentalist move- ments at the beginning of this century, a very differ- ent set of concerns is articulated for this same sub-

class at the century's end. First, their work is almost

invisible as "architecture," except to the practiced eye. Rather than aggrandize, it makes invisible. Rather than provoke, it only lets the initiated in on its agenda. Here then we have an architecture for an

intelligentsia that is no longer willing to challenge mass culture or deterministic power, but rather wants to hide its agenda from them. Here we have an architecture for a class that does not want to

announce its own empowerment or prestige, but wants to blend in banally (the architectural equiva-

lent of William Burroughs' banker's suit).

Subtly and ideologically rather than as a simple visual strategy, this architecture then advances the program of the decentering of culture and power first proposed by Derridean thought a quarter-century ago. Here, cultural power recamps into a state of self-reflection and existential relativism. The possession of power no longer enables a bold or decisive challenge to the cultural status quo. Nor does power here any longer look to history for affirmation or sub- stantiation. Rather, history becomes a subject for study and reflection; how history is defined itself becomes transformed. For Berke and McWhorter, history is no longer predicated on the "great themes" of western culture (as it still is in Moore or Tigerman, for example), but rather by a kind of Annaliste spirit, as a history of the everyday.

The everyday ... whether or not architecture itself can break its ideological shackles, thoughts in architecture can certainly try. I would propose to connect the work of Berke and McWhorter to a kind of pop Amer- ican wonder in the everyday. This is a sensibility that has found expression in our era more in literature than in architecture: it ranges from transcendentalist (Emerson) to Zen (Cage); it finds wonder in a Grey- hound bus station (Allen Ginsberg) or dawn on the deserted streets of Gentilly (Walker Percy).

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Halley/Stewart Studio Columbia County, New York

A New York City artist and his family have a week- end house in Columbia County, New York. The

house is small, dates from the middle nineteenth

century, and while not beautiful, has a certain integrity. However, it does not satisfy the needs of the artist and his family. Rather than add to the

house directly, we decided to build another structure

containing the spatial and functional components

lacking in the main house.

The Halley/Stewart Studio is three building forms

assembled on a hillside. The forms are evocative of,

though not directly derivative of, the local rural ver-

nacular. Each building form is intended to have a visual autonomy expressive of its distinct program- motic contents. The Studio Building, a single space structure, faces a view of the Berkshire Mountains. The Porch Building aligns itself with a stone wall that contains the meadow beyond. It is divided ver-

tically into a common porch below and a children's

attic above. The Out Building is divided horizontally into three chambers: a foyer, a bath, and a study. A

wide staircase which follows the rise of the land is the spine connecting the three building forms inter-

nally.

The site for the studio was carefully selected. From

the Main House, one moves past a garden shed and follows an existing row of trees toward a sloping

grassy clearing to the Studio. The stone wall per-

pendicular to the slope defines the for edge of the site. There are three entrances to the composite structure: one directly into the Studio and another, (to ensure the artist's privacy), a half a level up off

a small court created by the three masses, into the

Out Building. The Porch Building opens to a sitting

area defined by the stone wall and beyond to the

meadow.

Deborah Berke

EAST

167



BERKE, Deborah

. . . . .

iiv



MCWHORTER, Carey

.VIA



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Architects. Process. Inspiration. || Deborah Berke and Carey McWhorter Invisible Architecture