A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder
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By far the most provocative article I’ve read on windows is Neil Levine’s “Questioning the View: Seaside’s Critique of the Gaze of Modern Architecture” in Seaside: Making a Town in America, edited by David Mohney and Keller Easterling (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). See also the chapter on transparency in Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny (op. cit., Chapter 6) and, though I don’t claim to understand all of it, Colin Rowe’s seminal essay (with Robert Slutzky) “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976).
Chapter 8: Finish Work
On the place of time in architecture, see:
Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn (New York: Viking, 1994).
Jackson, J. B. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Johnson, Philip. “Whence and Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture,” in David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis, eds. Philip Johnson: The Glass House (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
Lynch, Kevin. What Time Is the Place? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).
Mostafavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
My principal sources on trees and woods were Herbert L. Edlin’s What Wood Is That? A Manual of Wood Identification (New York: Viking Press, 1969) and Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
Benoit Mandelbrot’s ideas about architectural ornament are discussed briefly in James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).
On the history of the study and the rise of the modern individual the key work is A History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. See Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance, especially Ariès’s introduction, as well as “The Refuges of Intimacy” by Orest Ranum, and “The Practical Impact of Writing” by Roger Chartier. See also John Lukacs’s essay “The Bourgeois Interior” in The American Scholar (Vol. 39, No. 4, Autumn 1970) and Mark Wigley’s essay “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Montaigne’s description of his study appears in “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse” in Book III of Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1987).
*Progressive Architecture ceased publication in 1995, after being sold to Architecture magazine, which was relaunched in 2006 as Architect. The awards program lives on through it all, appearing each year in an issue of Architect.
*Upsetting people in this manner is apparently taken as proof of success in this sort of architecture. According to a subsequent issue of Progressive Architecture, featuring a “post-occupancy critique” of a convention center Eisenman designed for the city of Cincinnati, the architect had been boasting that the “new spatial sensation” produced by his building had actually made one conventioneer throw up. (At the least, this represented a deconstruction of lunch.) But the boast turned out to be untrue, alas. After the reporter from PA tried in vain to track down the putative regurgitator, Eisenman was forced to concede he had been exaggerating.
*It’s curious that both Charlie and Alexander would use a linguistic metaphor to describe architecture’s fundamental elements. Alexander’s conception of architecture is no more literary than Charlie’s—his patterns are clearly not signs or metaphors. Perceiving a pattern is less a matter of interpretation than experience; indeed, many of his patterns (like “Watching the World Go By”) are activities as much as material forms. My hunch is that Charlie and Alexander are both thinking of language in only the most rudimentary and old-fashioned sense, as a system that makes it possible to combine a finite number of basic building blocks into an infinite number of more complicated structures. In Alexander’s conception, words are not nearly as ambiguous or arbitrary as modern philosophy has taught us to regard them.
* As anyone who has ever bought lumber quickly discovers, a commercial two-by-four today is actually only 1½” by 3½?. “Two-by-four” refers to a piece of lumber’s rough-sawn dimensions; the sawmill’s planer typically removes a half inch, and most commercial lumber dimensions must be adjusted accordingly.
*This might explain why Vitruvius’ definition of architecture included machines and timepieces as well as buildings; all were technologies devised by man to mediate his relationship to the natural world.
* As it turned out he was nearer to the mark in his delirium than he had been in his calculations, because Fallingwater’s cantilevers eventually did deflect.
* Something similar happened to modernism: What had been conceived as a radical, antibourgeois movement was rapidly transformed into the preferred style—the very logo—of corporate America, testament to capitalism’s astounding power to co-opt even its sternest challengers. And so an aesthetic that grew out of European socialism, an architecture inspired by factories and worker housing projects, ended up producing elegant settings for power lunches on Park Avenue.
* As for Venturi himself, he often seemed shocked and dismayed by some of the architecture his revolution had spawned, occasionally playing the role of Danton to Peter Eisenman’s Robespierre. “If you’re lucky,” he recently wrote, “you live long enough to see the bad results of your good ideas.” He has described deconstructivist architecture as “sculpture with a resented roof.”
*To clients who complained about roof leaks, Frank Lloyd Wright’s stock response was, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.” The owner of (flat-roofed) Fallingwater used to refer to his house as “Rising Mildew” and a “seven-bucket building.”