MADD Materialisation And Design Development

further reading material architecture,tectonics and materialisation

Blundell Jones_tectonic authenticity the architects journal 1991A.Beim_tectonics in Architecture (defenition of terms)Tectonics in Suburbia_Bernard ColenbranderWillem Jan Neutelings_naakt geboren / born naked

Blundell Jones the architects journal 1991

TECTONICS IN SUBURBIA

(illustrated with the life & times of Andres Jackson Downing)Lecture on Tectonics-conference, Eindhoven, Dec 12 2007Bernard Colenbrander

Tectonics is about the art of joining the parts of a building in a systemthat is firm and unshakable. Of course it is inevitable to pay tribute toGottfried Semper when one relies on a definition like this. It is alsoaccording to Semper when one stresses that this system is not only asystem of the construction but also of the perception. In other words:tectonics define a layered complex of parameters of how to make a unityof a building on a conceptual level and also on a concrete level. It startswith the making, it ends with the way we perceive a building. Not only abuilding has to be composed as a continuity between construction andcoating, but we also have to experience this unified complex.It seems so very self evident, this Semperian approach of architecture’scomposition, but it isn’t anymore. Probably that is one of the reasons whya conference like this came up in this university as a relevant idea.It is not so very long ago that we knew also in the Netherlands to makebuildings that were sound in tectonic terms. Berlage’s Exchange inAmsterdam was for decades the archetype of a convincing and truthfulconstructivism, a constructivism that was clearly expressed in theappearance of the building. You get what you see here. The constructiveuse of the brick was the great messenger of the building.In contemporary reality, however, a building with comparable principleswould be considered an eccentricity. Berlage’s Exchange has become aweird building. Mainstream architecture tells us another story nowadays.We are used to buildings in which brick is not of constructive meaninganymore but is glued to the bearing walls. Brick used to be the essenceof the building, it has become screen, finish and decoration, no more, noless.What has happened in between? This question asks for a profoundresearch into the evolution of architectonic grammar. Doing that one willbe able, perhaps, to discover the roots of a process of gradual erosion.Apparently, the necessity of the unshakable system to connect the partsinto a whole has disappeared. It changed into an attitude in which it is noproblem at all when the inner reality of the building and the outerappearance are of a fundamental different nature. It is even no problemwhen the grammar contains contradictions and fractions in itself.The destination of this process may be called decomposition. Tectonicdecomposition can be a honourable theme on its own, as is illustrated forexample in one of Carel Weeber’s final buildings, ‘De Struyck’ in TheHague. In this building not only the connections are cut between thebuilding components and the historicizing grammar that seemed to bethe basis of the composition. But also the connection is lacking between

the stacked building components and the decoration of the colouredcoating, designed by Peter Struycken.In the works of Carel Weeber the erosion of traditional tectonics is drivento a climax. One may agree or disagree with the opinion that this climaxis negative, but whatever it is, positive or negative, a building as DeStruyck can be considered as a fine piece of consistent thinking anddesigning, even when the result seems quite banal or vulgar at first sight.The reduced presence of traditional tectonics can be analyzed withexamples that illustrate exactly this reduction as a pragmatic conclusionof the progress of history. But more often, when the issue of tectonics israised, the approach is not so much from the pragmatic, but from theconservative side. The loss of tectonic coherence is thereby identified asa loss of cultural quality, as inflation, as decay. The best example in thiscontext is of course Hans Kollhoff, whose firm belief in the Semperianway of thinking is one of the underlying themes of his career.The contradistinction Kollhoff tends to use to illustrate his point on thetectonics of architecture starts with Peter Behrens’s AEG Factory inBerlin. The AEG is a building typical for the culture of the new industrialera of a century ago, but the magic thing is that the building kept hispresence in the urban context in a masculine way. It is as classical of thebest results of Hellenic antiquity. This is what you call a clearlycomposed building, expressed in all the physical aspects, identifiable byevery passer-by.After this Behrens building the course of history made place for anotherkind of buildings, a building like Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus in Dessau.The physical sensibility of Behrens has evaporated and something elsehas come in stead: the weightless abstractions of the Modern Movement,that seem to deny their physical presence, and that considers it irrelevantto express bearing and being borne.The juxtaposition of these two buildings brings Kollhoff to a fundamentalcontrast, taken from Julius Posener, between buildings that behave likeApparate and buildings that behave like Gegenstände (objects).To illustrate the difference, I would like to repeat a famous quote byPosener: ‘Apparate lösen Furcht aus, Gegenstände flößen Vertrauenein.’That the environment of the Apparate, of the machine, differed from thematter involved in buildings belonged very much to the field of interest ofthe Dutch inheritor of the thinking of H.P. Berlage: J.J.P. Oud. Muchmore than Berlage, Oud was sensitive to the idea of the modernarchitecture that buildings at least should appear light weighted and beas light as possible.It brought him to plastering his housing blocks of the mid twenties,making them as white as possible, even when the construction was inconventional brick walls. This plastering in white was due to the Dutchwet climate a stupid thing to do, of course, but Oud nevertheless did it,longing for an architecture that escaped the physical presence of

Berlage’s buildings and also of his own earlier buildings.Although he was sensitive to modernist aesthetics, he at the same timekept connected with classical composition rules. For example hishousing complex in Hook of Holland has nothing of the balance acts LeCorbusier and others indulged in. it is a stable, harmonious composition,only plastered white as a finish.Between the Bauhaus and Oud on the one side, and the life and times ofKollhoff on the other, the erosion of traditional tectonics has continued. Idon’t want to go deep into the many steps in between, howeverinteresting these may be. I only want to point at two probably quitedestructive historical moments:The first moment was caused by Robert Venturi’s idea of the decoratedshed. The decorated shed drew the attention not so much to the buildingin his physically unified character but to the building as a communicator,as the spatial background for an image. It invited generations ofarchitects to leave behind the traditional self-evidence of conceptualunity, which started with construction and ended with coating.The second moment applies to Rem Koolhaas’s epiphany of the GenericCity, which seems to strip architecture of her last clothes and declaresthe curtain wall the final essence of the old discipline. One could say:when this becomes reality, it is over and out with architecture as adiscipline connected to tectonics: architecture then is finally reduced to afashionable message, printed on a curtain wall.I think that it is very necessary to follow the historical lines of tectonicvalue, expressed as they are in buildings between, let us say, 1850 andthe present, and analyze them in terms of the architectonical grammarinvolved and answer the basic question if this evolution really indicates atotal erosion of meaning. This is very necessary to do, but it would needa research that I have not, or not yet, done. That is why I want to dosomething else today – remain vaguer than I would have wished when Ihad had more research time.I will not so much concentrate on the evolution of architectonicalgrammar, but I will try to find an entrance in the matter of tectonics bybringing up a connected basic question. This question is: how would it beif we identified the erosion of tectonics as a mirror of cultural and socioeconomic trends in general society?Well, to start the answer to this question: one could argue that the verybasic and existential reality of bearing and being borne – which is thecore of traditional tectonics - is not a very big thing anymore in presentday society, and this conclusion relates to all kinds of cultural trends thatcan be identified.Martin Parr’s famous image of tourists in Egypt (derived form hismagnificent series Small World) is quite expressive. His photo’s tell us ofa world in which citizens behave footloose and have hardly anyconnection with their physical surroundings. The tourist is not intoexistential essentialities of life, he is into breaking out in floating time and

space.Contemporary tourists behave in a way that was, strangely enough,explored for the first time by the arts – as if it was a utopia to beconquered. Constant’s magnificent studies into the aspects of what hecalled New Babylon have become very well known. New Babylon is theexpression of an environment that hardly has any formal and physicalsubstance. It is an environment that is completely flexible and that servesthe needs of a population that has communication as main occupation,since the necessity of real, old fashioned work has disappeared withmechanization at random.In New Babylon real matter fades away and is replaced by virtuality. Onemight argue that man himself is inclined to disappear and becomeinvisible. That is to say his existence has become more and moreindependent from real time and space: his existence is not tectonic at all.The difficult thing is that this trend of growing invisibility is a fact fromcontemporary life, but man is not finally saved from his body. Manypeople in the West are only saved from being obliged to do physical workwith their body. Physical work was a big thing in the industrial era, butslowly faded away. Society in general has turned from industry toservices and business. The real work has been exported and hasbecome largely invisible for us, because it all takes place in sweat shopsand other terrible places in Asia.What remains for us to do is to lose our sweat in weird sport schools,where many of us spend hours and hours. I propose to include this in themore absurd chapters in the history of mankind. And in accordance withthis absurdity it is understandable that Rem Koolhaas adopted theiconography of physical action and sports already in his first studies,published in the seventies as Delirious New York.Returning to architecture: the history of modern architecture is a historyof erosion of traditional tectonics, as a side effect of a general trend insociety to make invisible and virtual what used to be very visible andphysical. In building the notions of bearing and being borne havegradually lost their meaning and relevance. The ultimate location toillustrate this erosion must be suburbia. What can be found there is anerosion not only of the building itself, but also, and even more, of thegeneral arrangement of the buildings in a spatial pattern. The basic ideaof the suburb is the absence of the very need of integration. WhenSemper describes tectonics as the art of joining, in order to form anunshakable system, this definition is completely lost here. The need tointegrate functions is simply absent in suburbia, because the wholesystem that is brought to life there starts with disintegration.The structure of the suburb is basically horizontal, which implies theparataxis of functions, in stead of the combination. In principle allfunctions are specific and private, without or almost without anintermediary domain to keep the fragments together. If possible thepublic domain is domesticated in the suburb, preferably in a building.

This means that the connecting element between the individual parts is,as it were, hiding. Therefore, suburbia is a place without tectonics in thesense of Gottfried Semper.In essence the suburb represents a modern vernacular in which all theshapes that can be come across are instable. One may recognize aspecific quality in this vernacular, as for example the American authorJ.B. Jackson has done brilliantly in his books. Jackson stretches hissympathy for the lifestyle of the suburb by even adopting the mobilehome as a believable category in spatial patterns.Trends and interpretations like the one used by Jackson illustrate thereverse of traditional tectonics: they implicate complete volatility ofstructure. They also implicate stylistic anarchy. And they also implicateinformality in spatial behaviour from station to shopping centre tobungalow.Suburbia is hardly organized by taste. The things in space are therebecause they are popular or fashionable. To quote the English authorJ.M. Richards in his famous book The Castles on the Ground dating from1946: ‘The world the suburb created … is an ad hoc world, conjured outof nothing …. It is a world peculiar to itself and – as with a theatre’s dropscene – before and behind it there is nothing.’So, the milieu of the suburb seems to contain a clue for understandingthe erosion of traditional tectonics. Maybe suburbia is the main battlefieldwhere the process can be followed. It seems relevant not only to mournthe loss, but also to track down if there may be any kind of heroisminvolved in this apparently destructive episode of architectural history.Luckily there is. What happened in suburbia may perhaps look like a lostbattle, but J.B. Jackson was in my view completely right in his sympathyfor the flimsiness of this new, typical modern environment.He backed this sympathy by analyzing the aspects of modern behaviourthat lead to a certain spatial vernacular with positive qualities in their ownright.I agree with him and would like to accentuate how rich the Americanhistory of the 19th century is in drama and colour, as far as the spatialorganization of their habitat was concerned. For an old fashionedEuropean it is simply amazing to see how far the American habitat isinspired not so much by heavy tectonics, but by spatial arrangementswith the substance of stage scenery. A good example is the ColumbianWorld Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago: an event that can be considered asthe unofficial starting point of the City Beautiful Movement, so, one of themain urban operations of the century. That is to say, the environment ofthe Expo introduced Americans into a spatial setting of clean streets andmonumental architecture with European predecessors. But the amazingthing is not so much the quality of the monumental effects as such, it isthe fact that this was reached not with real architecture but with lightscreens connected to a light structure. The exterior impression was of aneternal architecture, but what was really there was very thin and

vulnerable. After the Expo was over, a fire made an end to the physicalremnants: a suitable ending, I would say.When the eternal city of America has the substance of a stage scenery,the places where people have their houses cannot be very different. Inthis context I would like to shed light on a small case study into one ofmy personal heroes of American history, namely Andrew JacksonDowning, who used to be a footnote in several historical studies, but washonoured about ten or more years ago with a few monographs thatrightly portray him as a kind of founder of the modern environment.Andrew Jackson Downing lived near New York along the Hudsonbetween 1815 and 1852. He had a very short life, this Downing.I would like to suggest that his case is relevant also when we talk abouttectonics. If modernism means decay of traditional tectonics, becausethe organic order of construction and composition gradually wasabstracted until nothing was left, Downing may be considered as one ofthe starting points of this abstraction. That is: his life and works illustratehow suburbia developed as a spatial category where cultural adaptationtook place in a process that suffers from erosion of traditional qualities,while at the same time the cultural vitality was impressive enough tocompensate for what was lost.Starting to summarize what the life and times of Downing were about,there was no professional education in architecture to start with. He hadno fundamental acquaintance with the traditions of the profession. Hewas a self taught man, starting his career on the nursery of his parents.This nursery appeared to be a suitable place to get in touch with aspectsof modern life as they entered the American scene just before 1850.Business went alright on the nursery, because gardening became quitepopular in the decades before 1850.A new life style came up, with the start of industrial and commercialAmerica. People were interested in leaving the city, to live in thecountryside, commuting to the city everyday to earn their money - and sothey did. They left the city, became prototype commuters and started tobe interested in everything that had to do with creating their own place:their own house and garden, that rooted in a kind of borderland, beingdifferent from the spatial concept of the farmers because the freshsuburbanites were existentially unattached from the land and wereoriented on city culture, but living and enjoying outside.Downing and his fellows on the nursery offered a helping hand, by sellingtrees, plant and flowers, also assisting with the lay out of house andgarden. It was a new task, not covered by any of the traditional creativeprofessions. What Downing did was extending his task at the nurseryand developing a kind of all round package for how to start a new life onyour own plot in suburbia’s borderland.He did that by presenting his knowledge in books and an own magazinededicated to ‘rural art and rural taste’. What came first was a book,published in 1841, so before Downing was even 30 years old. The book

was about the adaptation of the European principles of landscapearchitecture in an American context. Americans were a people‘descended from the English stock’ and that was why their environmentcould be based on the knowledge of the old world. Taking archetypes asthe French or the Dutch geometrical garden, or the English landscapegarden, as a starting point, Downing presented a programme for anaturalistic design of the landscape, developing from unpolished natureto the middle zone of the garden to the ordered zone of the privatehouse.The revolutionary impact of Downing’s thinking was not caused by hissummary of European culture history in landscape and his translation ofit for an American context. What made Downing an important figurecame from what he did afterwards. Learning from the needs of hiscustomers at the nursery, Downing widened his scope and started toaddress the need of the new American middle class, trying to find itsplace on new territory not accustomed to have a garden or furnish amodest house. Downing started a magazine to address the daily needsof the commuters in the suburbs struggling with their gardens andhouses and he used his own designs as examples that could be used orimitated by the readers.The books and the magazine became a success. Downing became akind of a role model. He reached that status also by using his own housenear the nursery as an exemplary reference for how to survive thesuburb. This house was an innocent imitation in stucco of a Neo Gothicpalace, reduced in scale compared with historical examples, reducedalso in the amount of decoration and ornament, although it had a porchwith turrets and a few other picturesque details. It also had a veranda,which was not taken from the European example, but was added as anecessary feature to fit the American climate.What is important to note is that Downing used the European example,but reduced it in scale and features and made it fit for Americancircumstances. These American circumstances were linked to the localplace in so far as that he paid tribute to the climate, but in a culturalsense they seem at first sight rather more inspired by Europeanconventions than that they have to do with what was essentiallyAmerican. For Downing America started after the natives, after the ‘wildyell of the savage’ as he described it. Culture started when church bellscould be heard and ‘a thousand cheerful homes [were] gleaming in thesunshine’.But it did not remain with this free and ultra friendly interpretation ofEuropean heritage. Downing was aware of a fundamental difference.While the English village was predominated by church and nobility, thiscould not be the case in America, driven by republican principles. TheAmerican landscape had not one, but numerous places of worship, hewrote, it had no single man’s house but many houses, marked by ageneral diffusion of comfort, independence and growing taste.

The movements in this landscape did not seek a centre, but commandedto essentially centrifugal trends.What we see in the way Downing is mounting a new landscape forAmerica is a fine case of cultural adaptation, in which aspects ofEuropean rooted civilization are made fit for another continent and othertimes – other times, that do not ask for a centralized city concept, but fora decentralized pattern dominated by the qualities of what would developas the modern suburb.Downing’s theory completely ignored the qualities of space that remainoutside the focus of ordered landscape: he had no eye for thewilderness. He started to focus when the landscape changed into thebroader rural landscape of villages and towns. On a smaller scale hetook in account the area of the gardens, consciously designed to fulfil theneeds of the citizen. And in the end it was the private house that was thecore of the moral and spatial geography of Downing. In the houseeverything he aimed at came together. And what happens there isinteresting also in perspective of the issue of tectonics, because theconstruction, the composition and the materialization of Downing’shouses were approached very consciously.To start with, the design of the house was supposed to be more or lessderived from the landscape. ‘It must nestle in, or grow out of, the soil’, hewrote, ‘It must not look all new and sunny, but show secluded corners’. Inextension of this sensitive approach of the landscape, the style isconsidered likewise. Some landscapes, the more ordered compositions,asked for a house belonging to the aesthetic category of the Beautiful.What was suitable in these cases was a classicist house. But quite moreoften the order of the landscape asked for something else: for aestheticsbelonging to the Picturesque. Downing excelled mainly in this category,preferring romantic architecture styles like the Neo Gothic, but alsoreferring to the style of traditional Italian or Swiss villas.In the fine combination of ordered landscape and connected styles anideal of civilization was expressed: ‘when smiling lawns and tastefulcottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and cultureare established.’The houses of Downing were not so much realized on the building siteby the star architect himself, they were collected in books and presentedto a middle class audience as an example. They were used by thispublic when the opportunity was there to fill an own plot with a house.The books of Downing were taken to the carpenter and client andcarpenter took the decisions together. The model was modified andadapted just as seemed reasonable to do, because of the context,because of the budget, or because of taste.One of the model books of Downing is The Architecture of CountryHouses, published for the first time in 1850. I would say that there arenot many houses in this book that I would call a real country house,European style and scale, but the book contains a lot of smaller houses

and cottages in stead. Most houses are small houses, that could be builtfor a relatively small amount of money, by people working in the newindustries and able to afford a modest plot in a suburb somewhere. Thatis why Downing accentuates the character of simplicity, fitting to a houseto be built for a budget of somewhere between 400 and 1000 dollars inhistorical value.‘There are tens of thousands of working-men in this country’, wroteDowning, ‘who now wish to give something of beauty and interest to thesimple forms of cottage life’. A house like this must not attempt to look asa villa. It has a quality of its own, states Downing.Because of the climate it may be best to build the house in stone, but inmany cases it must done in wood. A special section of the bookconsiders the issue of building a house in wood, in which Downingproposes to cover a wooden frame on both sides with boards, nailedpreferably in vertical strips: vertical, not horizontal, because verticalboarding gives an expression of strength and truthfulness.Simple materials: that was one of the concessions that had to be made.‘We have … avoided unsuitable ornaments, chosen cheap materials,and, for the most part, have taken simple and symmetrical forms, so that,in some cases, not a dollar more would be expendend in the execution ofour designs than the same accommodation would cost in the usual plainmodes of building’.So, offers had to be made. With Downing it was not per se, in all cases,necessary to be truthful in materials: when money was lacking for stone,and wood was no realistic possibility, stone might be imitated by stucco,no problem at all. But in the references made to aspects of the beautyand the picturesque, images of the aristocratic past were still penetratingthrough the cheapness of the exterior material.One could say that Downing was following an opportunistic path in whichhe combined present day realism with slightly eroded images of a faraway past. The same mixture could be found in his interiors. Modern wasthe way in which the new social patterns of the industrial era influenced