Geof was one of three architects to present at Design Within Reach in San Francisco, July 21, 2011. The theme was “Modernizing Your Space”. Geof talked about modernism, history, and nature in his work.

Thanks to the local AIA for establishing low-budget, pro-bono, and detail award categories —  I picked up a citation award for my reflector/shade device at the Bogan residence.

AIA Constructed Realities Winners

Walk south down Church St. from 24th and take in the commanding presence of St. Paul’s towers as you near 29th.  Notice that distortion?  Churches throughout history were built with one tower as originally designed, and the second later, in a completely new style — pardonable, given the several hundred years it took to finish the things.

But here, both towers are identical except for size.  I haven’t asked anyone at the church yet, but my guess is that Frank Shea, the original architect, took the convention of disparate steeples and, while

matching them in every English Gothic detail, enlarged the north one to create the peculiarly Renaissance illusion of perspective distortion.  (Btw, I’d swear this was the facade used in that Whoopi Goldberg film “Sister Act”.)

Every now and then I come across a book so enlightening, so thought-provoking, so intelligently written, it makes me want to toss out a score of others on my shelves lest I be tempted to waste time on them.  I’ve listed the best below.

What I’ve included should not be construed as anything near comprehensive.  It would be quite different had I simply haunted different bookstores.  Have I left out a favorite?  Let me know what I’ve been missing.

Note star ratings (1-5) are for degree of enlightenment/readability.

THEORY:

Paul-Alan Johnson, The Theory of Architecture, VNR.  Awesomely comprehensive, every imaginable facet of architectural thought is reflected on, and with impressive depth.  An omnibus, profound yet accessible; if I were allowed to keep only one book on architecture, this would be it.  (*****/***)

Fil Hearn, Ideas That Shaped Buildings, MIT.  A wonderfully easy to read primer on the history of theory.  Unexpectedly enlightening for such simply-presented ideas.  (****/*****)

Susannah Hagan, Taking Shape, A New Contract Between Architecture and Nature, Architectural Press.  This somewhat difficult read explores our relationship to nature, and its manifestation in architecture.  More than any other I’ve come across, the book gives voice to the latent, underlying themes of the contemporary green movement and places it in elucidating perspective.  (****/**)

Also well worthy of shelf space:

Bachelard, Poetics of Space
Chang, The Tao of Architecture
Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture
Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture
Hubbard, Complicity and Conviction in Architecture
Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture
Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

HISTORY:

Bill Risebero, Modern Architecture and Design, MIT.  Is it possible to take into account the importance of economics in a history without being labeled Marxist?  Regardless, this, and Risebero’s The Story of Western Architecture take a thoroughly fresh and mind-opening look at our past.  (****/****)

Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones, Dover.  You’ve seen it on used bookstore shelves so long you can’t imagine it’s worth a look.  Devour its short contents though, and you’ll find astonishing insight into the American attitude toward building.  (****/*****)

Donald Miller, ed., The Lewis Mumford Reader, Pantheon.  Mumford’s innate understanding of our built environment makes even Jane Jacobs look like a dilettante by comparison.  This sampler will help you see what a giant of 20th century critics he was. (*****/***)

Demetri Porphyrios, ed., On the Methodology of Architectural History, Architectural Design Profile.  A collection of essays on the way we look at our built history.  Slow going in parts, but it covers Hegelian, structuralist, Marxist and other approaches in depth.  (****/***)

David Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History, Architectural Press.  I wish this history of architectural history were longer. Puts Semper, Wittkower, Gideon, Hitchcock, Pevsner, and others in enlightening perspective.  (****/***)

Also worthy:

Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
Frampton, Modern Architecture, A Critical History
Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture
Jordan, Victorian Architecture
Summerson, Heavenly Mansions
Watkin, A History of Western Architecture

DESIGN:

Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright Drawings and Plans, Dover.  A poor man’s abridged facsimile of Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio, which introduced his work to Europeans in 1910.  Spend half an hour on each page and understand how rich his work is, even just at plan level.  You’ll learn a few German words along the way.  (****/na)

Robert McCarter, ed., On and By Frank Lloyd Wright, A Primer of Architectural Principles, Phaidon.  No biographical sensationalism, just pure, loving analysis of what makes his architecture so infuriatingly good.  By far the best book on Wright’s work I’ve seen.  (****/****)

Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, vol’s 1&2, MIT.  Indispensable to the serious architect, these books analyze the minutiae of buildings with profound insight.  They will surely snap you out of any misguided notion that architecture is something to be painted in only large strokes.  (*****/***)

Brookes & Grech, Connections, Studies in Building Assembly, Whitney.  Here’s all the technical detail you wish had accompanied the vacuous articles we all wasted time on in glossy magazines.  (****/***)

Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire, T&H.  The essays here don’t cover architecture per se, but the in-depth studies of how culture fosters design leaves you thinking about how you might transpose Forty’s lessons to you own work.  (*****/***)

Also worthy:

Banham, A Critic Writes
Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Suburban Nation
Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Meaning and Place
Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci

MAGAZINES:

Design Book Review.  It’s now defunct, but keep your eye out for back issues at used book stores.  It can broaden the mind more to see the whole of the architectural publishing world encapsulated in reviews than to mire one’s self in only a few choice volumes.  (****/****)

Environmental Building News.  Spend the 99 bucks.  Cancel all those subscriptions to glossy feel-good rags.  This is the only worthwhile periodical on green building.  (****/****)

Architectural Review.  Why is it only Brits have the guts to publish scathing architectural reviews when they’re deserved?  Rewarding text accompanies the photos, rare in the American glossies.  Even historic buildings are re-viewed.  (***/****)

I’m always looking for “no-brainers” in construction — things to do that just make too much sense not to do. Here’s my experience with radiant barrier:

Radiant barrier is a heavy-duty aluminum foil that reflects 97% of the infra-red spectrum. It’s available on the underside of plywood roof sheathing for new construction, or in rolls for retrofits.

Rolls can be stapled between existing rafters, an inch or so down from the underside of the sheathing. No taping is needed (unless you’re trying to make an air or vapor barrier as well).  This 4′ x 250′ roll is the perforated “Ultima” type from radiantguard.com – about $150 including shipping.

I stapled up the first couple pieces in the morning of a very sunny, 78° day, on this east-facing 12:12 roof. The infra-red thermometer shows a 30° difference in temperature by 10:30am.

Heat will also enter your attic by convecting off the underside of the sheathing, as well as by radiation, so a layer of insulation with air barrier below would complete this cathedral-ceiling job. But the radiant barrier alone would take a load off an uninhabited attic with ceiling insulation below.

In this application I’ve got a ridge vent. Intake vents lower would help. Either way, the increase in roof surface temperature with the installation of radiant barrier is only 3° – so little that composite shingle manufacturers have said installing the barrier would not void their warranties.

A surprisingly effective way to draw light into a room is by use of a light shelf. These horizontal reflectors are mounted either inside, outside, or on both sides of a southerly-facing window. Sunlight bounces off the surface and onto the ceiling within.  Any bright surface will diffuse daylight effectively.

In my office though, I experimented with a pair of Ikea mirrors for more interesting light play. They’re mounted face up about 9″ down from top of glass, comfortably above eye level. The underside is painted white, to serve as a mini “ceiling” to the light reflected up from the venetian blinds below.

My office ceiling is the underside of a 12-in-12 pitched roof; the exposed surface is a dark grey polyiso insulation with merely a thin coat of white primer. Even so, the reflected sunlight on a clear day (center image, below) is roughly 2.5 times brighter than a pair of T-8 fluorescent tubes (right). Compare this to the ambient light of the ceiling — from light shelves reflecting the surrounding sky (left). Note that readings (in footcandles) are taken 12″ from the ceiling to isolate the light source for the meter.

In another project I inverted the concept, reflecting low winter sun down through skylights. Here the reflectors act to shade the skylights during the summer months. Specifics of this project are spelled out here.

For retrofitting windows, an interesting product called LightLouver based on the same principle as the light shelf has been developed as a vertical window treatment. I haven’t seen this in person, though, and don’t know how it compares to a standard polished chrome venetian blind.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of those designs contentious enough to split adherents and detractors right down the middle. Mario Botta, the museum’s architect, assembled his design from a palette of archetypal elements he arranges into a desired effect. The forms aren’t symbolic in that they mean anything, but they do convey general themes.

At the SFMoMA for example, the composition intimates sanctity, rootedness, exclusion from the outside, attention toward sun and sky, and so forth. This is done with a skylit cylinder set atop a nearly windowless, square masonry base, sheltering a broad opening of an entry. The masses hunch in a vaguely animorphic way, gazing over the recumbant postures of the Center for the Arts buildings across the street.

In his original proposal however, Botta’s ensemble was to be crowned with a ring of ficus trees planted atop the cylinder. This feature, almost unseen in the history of architecture, did figure prominently in the mausoleum of the ancient Roman emperor Augustus. Though only ruins of the mausoleum remain today, scholarly reconstructions all show an earthen mound over a windowless masonry cylinder and square base, planted with a great ring of oak or laurel trees.

Was the allusion to a mausoleum intentional?  Was Botta making a subtle poke at the state of the art collection?  And why is it that art should be so easily housed within such a tomb-like structure?

I’m comfortable arguing against the poke. Botta studied under Carlo Scarpa, and went on to work for le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.  Common to all three was a predeliction for the primordial origins of form. The shapes a building assumes come from something deep rooted.  There is something archetypal in the masses of many of these architects’ buildings – something so common to our collective conscious that we may intuit what a building is about even before we know what’s inside. And the deep roots that sprouted the basic form of the mausoleum may easily have brought forth the basic form of this museum.

Given how distanced from everyday life art seems when experienced in the sanctum of a museum, it shouldn’t be surprising that the forms of museums occasionally bear some relation to those of mausolea.  The raised earthen mound of Augustus’ mausoleum lifts up the image of burial as if foisting upon us how removed from us it is.  The museum similarly enshrouds its contents on a pedestal. Historically museums have made no pretense about this, and examples in San Francisco are not new.

The original de Young Museum, of the 1894 Mid-Winter’s Fair in Golden Gate Park, was designed in the tomb-like Egyptian revival style. Two of the original sphinx remain, and have been reinstalled outside the new building. It was not an uncommon style for museums, with its intimations of preservation and eternity.

After the original building was damaged in the 1906 quake, a reconstructed edifice continued the same theme. Though not overtly Egyptian revival, the central tower with its nearly-pyramidal roof form bore a notable resemblance to the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the so-called ancient wonders.

The latest de Young building eschews the burial analogy. The architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, did consider sodding the roof early on. But despite the current trend toward green roofs, they wound up dropping the idea, feeling it inappropriate to showcase arts under an earthen roof. (The irony here is that the de Young houses some of the most moribund art in the city – the Oceanic and African relics long removed from the vitality of their accompanying rituals.)

But what is it about art and death that moves us to inter them so?

“The animus of the museum is to value the plucked fruit more than the tree that bore it.” – Lewis Mumford

Art dies, in a way, when hung in a museum.  Its relation to the outside world is muffled. Its meaning within, and allusions to its original melieu are severed.  Influence is assimilated, and the impact of the art fades.  This is why one wears black to openings.

There are of course works of art that don’t require context (paradoxically, one has to know this to best appreciate them), or that rely on the blank white walls of the museum for effect. But museums can drain vitality from art in other ways. The mere presence of a work in a prominent museum can legitimize it in the public mind. When an artist’s work is represented in a museum’s collection and sanctified in catalogs, it runs the risk of being canonized – studied dutifully by the next generation of art students. Each new wave of the avant-garde loses its impact this way.

But in “death”, art may gain something. On hearing of a collegue’s passing, our thoughts may turn toward their legacy, how they impacted us or our community. Their vitality is taken from us, and not until its absence do we appreciate it most keenly.

This is the impetus behind mausoleum design. There is something worth preserving here; there is something worth remembering. This is not architecture of the living; this is the architecture of remembrance. And this is the innuendo in Botta’s design.

Here’s a piece I wrote for the June 1993 Architectural Review. Shin Takamatsu had just designed his own exhibition in the top floor rotunda of the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at the War Memorial Building on Van Ness…

***

To anyone already familiar with his work, the most surprising quality of Shin Takamatsu’s retrospective is its uncharacteristic grace. Mounted in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fourth floor atrium, and designed by Takamatsu himself, the space feels like the antithesis of the signature high-tech dazzle for which his buildings have come to be known.

Natural light filters down over white-draped pavilions, transparent walkways cross each other over a stone garden, the shoji-like skylight reflects in the glass underfoot. A tubular steel and glass torii arches one walkway as if to mark some modern Shinto shrine. But no, the visitor enters the space to a prattle of upbeat electronic soundtracks, dispelling any notion that he has perhaps found his way into the wrong exhibit.

The fantastic and highly personal style for which Takamatsu gained his notoriety abounds nevertheless in the work on display. Here the proclivity is to expend enormous effort detailing industrial-like accouterments, which, given a moment’s scrutiny, reveal themselves to be mere architectural tinsel. Ensembles of the stuff run gratingly against all conventions distinguishing architecture from sculpture .

But as the size of his commissions increase, the favor toward mechanical pretension has given way to abstraction and Takamatsu has adopted the curious practice of assigning function to his sculptural ephemera. New work seen for the first time here displays a predilection for large scale compositional play. In the Kunibiki Messe convention center, a glass slab frames a seven-story terrarium of platonic solids, each element housing a different activity.

Three other buildings were selected to highlight the exhibition; each was assigned to a pavilion with thumbnails, drawings, models, and most notably, a high-resolution computer display, continuously running a 3-D representation of the building. The introduction of such graphics affords a comprehensiveness the traditional renderings fail to achieve.

Few of the works, unfortunately, provide much spatial play for the new medium to exploit. The computer animated display of such a static volume as the Kirin Plaza Osaka, for example, tells us nothing we can’t glean from the models. The building first appears on the monitor as a reflection in the canal it fronts. Panning back, we see the building in what could be an expansive asphalt desert, not the neon-packed district of Osaka where it actually stands. (Perhaps paving the city like this was deemed more appropriate, given Kirin’s symmetry all but ignores its site.) We are taken from the canal around the exterior of the building: up the walls, across the facade, in daylight and at night, from this angle and that, but never from the inside, and always to the pop beat of electronic background music. The whole sequence smacks of a promotional — nothing is flaunted but the building’s chrome-fitted facade. There is irony in viewing this architecture through technology the building can only feign.

Of greater novelty is a twelve-minute, high-definition 3-D projection video. Museum visitors don stereo headphones and image-polarizing 3-D glasses for dramatic footage of existing Takamatsu behemoths. Cameras pan through and around the structures in Orson Welles-like sweeps; boom-operated camera work takes the audience on crane rides far from anywhere a visitor to the actual buildings might find himself. And, once again, each building muscles about the screen to its own theme song.

If the video footage is gratuitous, the implications of the computer sequences are significant. Space has always been the stumbling block of architectural representation. Perspective, the isometric, and even models have their inherent limitations. But the dynamic quality of computer animation has the potential to renew attention to spatial design, both in conception as well as representation. One hopes to see the medium employed in future exhibits, preferably for a less static body of work .