SOM Journal 5 Introduction
Juhani Pallasmaa
After two decades of architectural euphoria brought about by unparalleled resources, new technologies and materials, novel possibilities opened up by the computer, and unforeseen media attention, we are unexpectedly in a situation where architecture seems to face the most dramatic shift of its paradigm since the breakthrough of modernism nearly a century ago. The urgency of the ecological perspective in architecture was not quite apparent even four years ago when the previous issue of the SOM Journal was published. In the current issue, Susannah Hagan calls the situation a “revolution”; now it is nature that is in revolt against human culture. The foreboding sense that our insensitive and unrestricted acts threaten the dynamic and subtle equilibrium of global natural systems has turned into an undeniable fact. Only during the past couple of years has global warming and its consequences come to our full knowledge. It is also becoming evident that the emerging situation, threatening the future of current technological culture altogether, is significantly caused by phenomena and processes related with construction. Now even architects cannot flee their responsibility. The unavoidable re-evaluation and re-orientation of architecture do not only concern the economy and technology of construction. The reassessment of the objectives, impacts, and responsibilities of architecture unavoidably imply new architectural ethics and aesthetics. Also the temporal perspective of design is bound to shift from nowness and newness to the evaluation of long-term impacts.
For roughly one-hundred years, the functionalist ethos has served as the ideological and ethical backbone of architecture behind varying stylistic manifestations. However, functional and technical performance has been a metaphoric aesthetic motif, or architectural theme, rather than a question of actual and verified performance and efficiency. The era that we are entering now clearly calls for precise performance and an accountable efficiency as well as an understanding of the causalities of all the environmental, material, energy, and social cycles related with buildings and their long-term use. Instead of being judged primarily as aesthetic objects, architectural projects will inevitably be assessed more as processes and cycles.
During the past two decades the most widely publicized phenomena in architecture around the world have been obsessively driven by the visual image and aesthetic seduction, most often at the cost of reason as well as functional, structural, technological, and economic logic, not to speak of ecological consequences. Even in terms of purely human values, architecture has too often turned away from building the material and institutional foundations for a democratic, emancipated, and egalitarian culture. Instead of creating a shared material culture aspiring for equality and human dignity, as the pioneering generation of modernism envisioned, architecture has frequently become directly tied with individual profit making and mental manipulation for commercial purposes. The current globalized and placeless architecture is a consequence of unlimited ideological and physical mobility, placelessly fluid and immaterial capital, as well as the universalizing impact of uncritically applied technology.
The computer has brought forceful and dramatic changes to the architectural practice. Acknowledging the undeniable benefits of the digital reality, computerized design also poses serious problems in relation to human imagination and sense of compassion. Alongside the current digital enthusiasm we need a serious assessment of creative design processes and, in particular, the significance of the senses and embodiment in the conception and experience of architecture.
In the architectural development of the past two decades or so, form has been forcefully detached from its essential architectural dependencies and given an exorbitant position. However, architecture is fundamentally an art of mediation. It mediates between different contexts periods of history, cultural institutions, tradition and invention, society and individuals, material and spiritual. Yet, today’s formalistic buildings frequently appear autistic, devoid of wider cultural meaning, and incapable of establishing an existential foothold. In my opinion, an architectural “reformation” is inevitable, and the critical contributions in this SOM Journal 5 confirm this view.
The breakthrough of modernity was largely guided by the invention and application of new building technologies and the metaphor of the functional machine. However, it is the violence, inadequacy, and insensitivity of our technology that is seen as the cause of our escalating environmental threat. Yet, it is a false conclusion, in my view, to demand that architecture should turn back to more primitive technologies in response to the current environmental imperative. This in fact has been the image frequently given to “green architecture” by many of the early proponents of this tendency. On the contrary, we need to develop a more refined, subtle, and responsive technological thinking. We need to conceive optimized systems that automatically monitor, regulate, and report on their performance. As architecture needs to become more “scientific” in terms of its true environmental impact, design has to be solidly grounded in research and follow-up studies. These requirements project a heightened responsibility, but at the same time, a special advantage to large scale multi-disciplinary firms with specific research sections. Instead of repeatedly conceiving and constructing buildings as unique prototypes as in today’s standard practice, architectural projects can form a continuous process of accumulating knowledge and consequent improvement of performance. The resources, volume and varied range of projects, the large number and professional versatility of the staff, as well as the potential continuity of design principles through several designer generations, provides an opportunity for a large corporate firm like SOM to replace personal signature style by thoroughly research-based and professionally cumulative practice. During the four years since the meeting of the SOM Journal 4 Jury in 2004, the firm has launched approximately 1100 projects, and it is evident that such a volume of work presents an enormous professional capital of knowledge.
It is also most likely that models and principles for the new and complex environmental and architectural systems will be sought within the endless richness of the biological world, and its unerring comprehensiveness and absolute performance. The new reformation could significantly be inspired and guided by the study of biological examples and systems instead of the ideal of the mechanistic machine of the modernists. The biologist Edward O. Wilson, who has introduced the notion of biophilia(1) and analyzed “human nature”(2) argues, for instance, that the “superorganism” of a leaf-cutter ant colony is more complex in its performance than any human invention. The expanding interest in biological models is evident in new design concepts, such as bionics, biomimicry, and biomimetics. The complexities and marvels of natural systems can also teach us all a welcome sense of humility. The new interest in biological examples, however, needs to penetrate mere visual and formal parallels and enter an analysis and understanding of the very systems and strategies of the biological world. Currently emerging new fields of urbanism further expand ideas of responsive design, adapted to the dynamic principles and cycles of natural systems, to the scale of planning. Hagan writes appropriately about “artificial ecologies.”
At the same time, the study of our own biological nature and bio-cultural historicity can provide new ground for a deeper understanding of architectural traditions, aesthetics and pleasure. Neurosciences as well as bio-psychology have already provided stimulating introductions to these perspectives. Yet, human construction cannot be reduced to mere systems, performance, or technology. Our buildings also need to settle our minds, memories, and desires. The cultural, mental, metaphorical, and aesthetic dimensions of architecture should not be underestimated or neglected, but they also need to be understood beyond the obsessions of momentary fashion.
In the previous SOM Journals the Jury’s critical conversations were transcribed and published as a background to the presentation of the selected projects. The Editorial Board of SOM Journal 5 judged a transcribed conversation too anecdotal, fragmented, and sometimes also too casual, or polemically critical. The often extremely complex architectural projects, that may well have taken years of collective research, design, and advancement through its own specific internal logic and set of constraints, can too easily be dismissed in a spontaneous conversation.
As a result of this view, each member of the Jury (appointed by the external Editorial Board without any influence from the SOM staff) was asked to express his/her personal view of the important issues raised by the evaluation process, of either the awarded projects, or projects presented to the Jury, but not awarded. In order to emphasize the independence of the Jury and the editorial process, the editor of the Journal did not function as a member of the Jury.
Considering the dominance of large-scale projects in the SOM practice, the fact that the Jury awarded mostly rather small-scale projects evokes questions. This choice certainly reflects the personal preferences of the individual Jury members, but it also suggests that small projects tend to permit or invite more experimental, articulate, and humane responses than huge projects that easily end up in more conservative and professionally safe solutions due to the heavy responsibilities involved. The author’s individual hand may also be more visible in small projects in comparison with projects produced by a large team through division of tasks and responsibilities. Besides, in today’s large scale projects the clients seem to know precisely what kind of performance and standards they expect in their projects, and these pre-specifications naturally limit the scope of architectural choices. Altogether, the role of the client in a design project is not much discussed today, but it is frequently decisive regarding the final quality of the project. The enlightened individual client of former times has often turned into a faceless organization or committee that fundamentally changes the fragile psychology of the design process. “Great poetry is possible only if there are great readers,” Walt Whitman argued.(3) We can similarly argue that great architecture is possible only as long as there are great clients. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, points out another even deeper interdependence between architecture and the cultural situation as he notes: “Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence, there can be no architecture, where there is nothing to glorify.”(4) Architectural projects have often lost their symbolic glory in our time as they have turned into mere instrumental structures of utility or investment opportunities instead of reflecting deeper cultural ambitions.
In his essay, Charles Waldheim, Chairman of the Jury, chose to discuss SOM’s problems of planning, particularly the frequent lack of vision in the scale of landscape, or urban planning and design. He focuses especially on the “mat building typology,” a model of urban form that emerged in European architectural and planning projects after the mid-twentieth century. He points out that the mat building approach, that is the planning strategy of the project for the Kuwait Military Academy, was deployed in the campus designs by SOM simultaneously with the pioneering European examples.
In his personal report, Sean Godsell compares and contrasts the reality of architectural practices in the domestic scale of a small architectural studio like his own, and a global corporate practice like that of SOM. He particularly focuses on the issues of division of labor and methods of quality control in the two opposite ends of the scale. “Quality is a vexed issue in contemporary architecture where craftsmanship, traditions of building, and local skills are often found wanting.” Godsell also provides a personal evaluation of the eight selected projects.
Marc Mimram chose to deliberate on the differences between two opposite modes of creative work; that of the solitary individual designer, and of a team within a large corporate firm. He points out apparent psychological differences as well as the extraordinary possibilities of a larger firm to create a continuum beyond individual designers, singular commissions, and momentary styles as an accumulation of research-based experience and knowledge.
Mary Miss, the artist member of the Jury, also points out the severity of current environmental problems, but places confidence in the power of artistic imagination: “Architectural firms can take the lead in bringing the imagination to bear upon the use of our diminishing resources; they can take the lead in raising these issues through the way their buildings are constructed.” She suggests the possibility of architectural expressions that arise from the physical forces that impact the building, such as wind velocities at different altitudes, energy and water consumption, or carbon emissions. She also wishes to extend imagination from mere aesthetic concerns to “issues of social and environmental sustainability.” In short, she proposes an aesthetics grounded in the facts of the world and life instead of being mere visual whims.
The Editorial Board commissioned two essays on subjects that are seminal in the development of architecture today, and two further essays that survey essential aspects of the history of SOM following the line already adopted in the previous issues of the Journal.
Professor Susannah Hagan’s essay “Sustaining Architecture During a Revolution” is a forcefully argued declaration of the new ecological paradigm for architecture. “Historical inevitability is this time found in unavoidable ecological limits… Social and economic turmoil will follow climatic turmoil as the biosphere struggles with its gathering disequilibrium, and we are tossed around.” She argues for a new econo-ethical understanding: “Our attitudes to profit and nature must shift if we are not to be bankrupted by the efforts of global warming.” She points out that the real challenge is not in designing new structures to meet the requirements of sustainability, but the task to retrofit the billions of existing buildings around the globe. She rejects the idea of returning “to some pre-industrial arcadia” and calls for a “radically reconfigured architecture.” In her view, the ecological performance of new architecture is a new challenge to scientific rationality and technologically oriented architecture. Finally, Professor Hagan cites examples of current visions in urban systems, the “artificial ecologies,” that seek to function in accordance with the circular dynamics of natural systems.
One of the structural engineers to have recently significantly expanded the boundaries of structural thinking is Dr. Mutsuro Sasaki of Japan. Francesco Dal Co introduces Sasaki´s basic approach and a few of his projects carried out in collaboration with leading Japanese architects, such as Toyo Ito, Arata Isozaki and Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA. His characteristic undulating structures are partly based on analyses of Antoni Gaudí´s organic forms originally defined by means of physical structural models.
In her essay entitled “Art, Soul of the Corporation” professor Joan Ockman surveys the emergence and interactions of corporate art and architecture. Corporate interest in art originated in the ambitious collections of art by mostly European masters, by powerful financiers and industrial magnates during the first decades of the twentieth century. Also the 1935 congressional ruling that allowed businesses tax deductions for charitable gifts channelled funds for ambitious corporate art projects.
The ultramodern Terrace Plaza Hotel designed by SOM and opened in Cincinnati in 1948 is an early showcase of corporate art. The Romanian-born cartoonist Saul Steinberg (architect by his initial training) executed a huge mural in the hotel’s Skyline Room depicting Cincinnati landmarks. In the Gourmet Room, twelve floors above, Joan Miró painted another modernist mural. Two further site-specific works were executed for the Terrace Plaza: “Twenty Leaves and an Apple,” a mobile by Alexander Calder, and a kinetic group of light sculptures by James Davis.
After the war years, the ideal of New Monumentality called for a grand-scale synthesis of arts. This “civic” ideal of monumentality was radically translated after the war by SOM and its capitalist clients in the skyscrapers and corporate headquarters of the post-war urban landscape.
It has been customary in previous Journals to include essays on the important individual creative talents behind the corporate image of SOM. In SOM Journal 5, Nicholas Adams, the author of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: the experiment since 1936 (Milan: Electa 2006) presents the career and contributions of Myron Goldsmith (1918–96), the author of numerous important SOM building projects. The writer summarizes Goldsmith’s philosophy of architecture based on structural clarity and expression (the title of the essay, “Structural Architect,” conveys concisely the essence of Goldsmith’s art), and analyzes one of the architect’s lesser-known buildings, Arthur C. Keating Hall, the gymnasium of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The campus was planned by his mentor Mies van der Rohe, in whose office Goldsmith worked from 1944 to 1959. The building “provides an imaginative structural and aesthetic solution for a gymnasium in an educational institution turning the transparent box into a translucent container.” In its reductive expression the project precedes today’s Minimalist aspirations and diversified uses of light.
In order to underline the Jury’s independence from the SOM offices in New York, it has become customary to hold the Jury meetings outside the United States. The Jury for the SOM Journal 5 first planned to meet in the mythical Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet (1928–31) in Paris. As this proved to be impossible due to the current renovation of the house, the Jury met in the Maison Carré designed by Alvar Aalto between 1956 and 1959 outside of Paris. The Jury venue is presented at the end of the Journal.
- Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond With Other Species (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1984).
- Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1978).
- As quoted in Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997), p. 179.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (George Henrik von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1998), p. 74.
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