Art and Anthropology

News flash. Anthropologists, while busy discovering new missing links every other month, have noticed that early humans made art. Furthermore, it appears that artistic endeavor was predicated on crafting things that humans, then and now, found beautiful. Dennis Dutton, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has written a book about this. In today’s New York Times he asks if today’s “conceptual” artists are producing “art” at all.

I have argued here and elsewhere that the pursuit of beauty, in all its forms, is a necessary factor in the making of paintings, architecture, poetry, music, sculpture–any fine art, and most applied arts. For the past century or so, conceptual artists have abandoned this pursuit, and, while many provocative works have appeared, art has suffered. Dennis correctly asks whether the works of such artists as Damien Hirst will remain in the canon a hundred years from now.

Perhaps it is ironic that scientists–particularly neuroscientists mapping the brain and anthropologists mapping human evolution–are making profound contributions to the understanding of art and music these days. Art critics, self-involved as they are, have generally not noticed these discoveries. Antonio Damasio’s critique of rationalism has dismantled much of the philosophical scaffolding that many artists and architects use to justify their work. Scientists analyzing the evolution of the brain continue to point out that aesthetic pleasure is hard-wired, not culturally derived. In short, those who argue that contemporary art has moved beyond the true and the beautiful are wrong.

Well, “chacun a son gout” and all that. Those who enjoy looking a medicine cabinets and embalmed sharks are entitled to spend millions on Mr. Hirst’s work. For me, the Museum of Natural History has better examples of animal parts. But let’s stop denigrating the legitimate work of artists and architects who spend their careers mastering the techniques and crafts that are necessary for artistic production as it has existed for thousands of years. Our old brains still respond to beauty.

Shades of Green: Light, Dark, Brownish, Olive

Television has discovered sustainable architecture. The Sundance Channel is offering several shows that feature “green” themes. PBS has Building Green, a show with an attractive subject and a telegenic host–Kevin Contreras (who looks like he has just walked off the set of “The Bachelor”). Apparently following the formula of the “makeover” programs, Building Green offers the story of a house under construction in hopes of drawing in the curious home improver or builder. The premise of the program is that everyone with a little cash and an adventurous spirit can build an energy efficient home.

Contreras is a building contractor and the son of a contractor. He knows his way around a hammer and is enthusiastic about every new thing he sees. He lives in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. His new house has a little bit of a Spanish feel and sits on a spectacular mountain site. Central casting could not have chosen a better star or location.

Contreras follows the proven formula of “learning” about green building from experts who offer their views and products on the show, much as Bob and Norm did on This Old House. Viewers can take some of the advice with a grain of salt, as the self interest of the “green” merchants is pretty transparent at times. Like many PBS programs, the producers make an attempt to present a counter argument to many views. That being said, there are some problems with the views they do present as far as a “green”  pedigree is concerned.

Contreras and the producers of the program have chosen to construct their dream house out of a range of materials that offer savings in initial cost, embodied energy, and “life cycle” costs. However, not all the materials offer the same degree of “green” benefit. The shades of green are not the same when one considers, for instance, that the straw bales that are used for the walls cannot support the structure of the roof or floors of the building. Straw bales are alternative materials with wonderful insulating characteristics, and they can be used in applications where low tech construction reduces the energy consumed in framing the building. Unfortunately, the producers of Building Green elected to build the frame of their rather gigantic, luxury home out of steel. As the host admits, steel is not a particularly green material, as its production uses massive amounts of energy. So there is immediate paradox in the premises of the show–if only half your house uses alternative energy sources and materials, how “green” is it?

Other issues present similar dilemmas. The labor consumed in covering the straw bale walls with lime stucco was astoundingly costly, consuming “several months” according to Contreras. Thus any savings in material would be eclipsed by the cost of installation. The windows were fabricated out of reclaimed wood, but the cost of custom fabrication was many times that of standard wood windows. The host attempts to locate a manufacturer of low V.O.C. exterior paint and finds that no such product exists at the present time. The list goes on.

The green building industry is struggling with many similar conundrums as it attempts to become part of the mainstream in the construction marketplace. It may be unfair to quibble about a few overly optimistic claims made in the interest of generating enthusiasm for a new approach to home construction that will have clear benefits in the future. However, it seems entirely fair to ask that the first television show to present these new options do so with scrupulous honesty and integrity. What shade of green should a prospective home builder expect in the current marketplace? Light green? Perhaps. Olive green? More likely? Bright, shiny, emerald green? Not a chance.

How Big is Too Big?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2008: the world is watching as a building rises to surpass the height of all previous human-made objects. Its architects and builder will not reveal the final altitude of their creation. Size matters. They won’t accept second place in the tall building Olympics. How big will it be?

Most of us know the end of that story–the Burj Dubai became the world’s tallest building at 818 meters (2684 feet). We live in a society obsessed with growth, wealth, obsessive eating, size, mass, volume, area. It’s all about big. Huge even. Everything has to be bigger, better, faster, louder, more powerful, more luxurious. The Biggest Loser vies with Survivor for ratings on television. It’s ironic that the biggest losers will be humans when the global energy crisis leaves little to sustain life. The Survivors will be the cockroaches.

A profound new book by Quaker economists has posed the question of why seven billion people continue to behave as if the earth’s resources were infinite. Each month economists publish figures for GDP percentage increases, stock index gains, inflation, national wealth. The message is that growth in economic activity, increases in monetary wealth, and expansion of all kinds of technology will outpace the degradation of the earth’s systems and save the planet from ruin before 2100. Most ecologists are not sanguine about these prospects.

Instead, Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver argue that humankind should seek a “right relationship” between sustainable economic activity and the earth’s delicate biosphere. All current evidence from climatologists, biologists, ecologists and other earth scientists is that the current pace of economic growth is not only too great, but that significant retrenchment will be required if humans are to save themselves and their environment from catastrophic ruin in the next century. What does this mean for a society that wants to build “bigger and better” with every new technological leap?

Among the prescient messages in this book is that one of our society’s most destructive obsessions is the quest for bigger economies and more stuff. While many of us profess a desire to live with less, we fail to understand that less does not mean a small step backward in personal wealth and consumption. Less means a complete transformation of our expectations for personal fulfillment, affluence, material wealth and physical well-being.

When it comes to how we live, and the spaces we inhabit, our vocabulary and standards for adequate accommodation are about to change in ways we never thought possible. Americans in particular will be forced to live with less. Our houses will be subdivided, our rooms diminished in size, our possessions curtailed. And we will become wealthier as members of the commonwealth of life on our planet, if not at the bank or stock brokerage.

The Price of Abstraction: Disaster at the East Wing

John Russell Pope’s original National Gallery of Art is one of the world’s greatest museum buildings, and only gets better with age. Not only does every exhibition look magnificent in the top-lit galleries, but the gleaming marble exterior shimmers throughout the day, dominating the mall with its quiet monumentality. When I.M. Pei added his vaunted East Wing in the 1970s, critics were quick to compare its angled, abstract surfaces with those of the Pope building. I have never been impressed with the East Wing, either as a compelling museum interior or as a monument worthy of a place on the mall in Washington. Though clad in the same marble as its predecessor, Pei’s building always appeared to be made of white cardboard, like a flimsy architectural model.

Well, recent developments have proved that the Pei building was not constructed with the same care and durability as earlier museums from the Beaux Arts era in Washington. After only 35 years the marble panels on the exterior have begun to fail, endangering pedestrians and worrying the museum staff. When initially designed, Pei defended his triangular masses by trumpeting their pure abstraction. Abstraction was a watchword of modernism in all the arts, but in architecture it proved very difficult to achieve. The desire for taut surfaces and invisible joints drove designers to employ clever details that allowed buildings to look like monolithic sculptures of glass, metal or stone while also floating effortlessly in space. Details that allowed buildings to be built with thin veneers of stone, like those of the East Wing, were devised de novo by engineers and architects who believed that new technologies would make pure abstraction possible. If an architect built a paper or cardboard model and wanted his building to look like paper or cardboard, presto, a technology would be invented to accommodate his conceit. Pei’s partner, Harry Cobb, tried such a gimmick at the Hancock tower in Boston and spent most of career defending lawsuits after glass panels rained from the sky. Never mind those 37-degree angled joints at the corners–just caulk the hell out of them!

Today, the venerable Mr. Pei will have to answer for a similar act of hubris thirty five years ago. It’s interesting to look at the kind of elegant abstraction of surface and detail that Pope achieved at the National Gallery in the early 1940s, using carved blocks of Tennessee marble laid as a bearing veneer against a steel structure. Pope used the wisdom of classical building design and construction dating back to Roman times, combining it with the latest structural techniques of his own time. Instead of inventing details to serve a design imperative, he learned from past masters and adapted proven details to a new problem.

Engineer Robert Silman and his talented staff will probably figure out a way to re-attach Pei’s marble/cardboard panels, albeit at enormous cost and embarrassment to the gallery administration. He did something similar for Frank Lloyd Wright at Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. At a time when material scarcity and high energy costs are driving the building industry, have we the right to spend resources fixing the mistakes of every architect who put his ego ahead of sound construction practice? Since Pei’s East Wing has won countless awards from fellow architects, there is little choice but to find a solution to this nasty public safety problem. Perhaps next time a major museum constructs a piece of abstract sculpture and calls it architecture, someone will ask for curtain wall tests before issuing a C.O. Oh, and by the way, the Guggenheim board ought to put some pesos away for fixing another architect’s folly. It won’t be long before titanium starts flying around in major cities throughout the globe.

Work 2.0–smell the sawdust

“Knowledge workers,” according to the conventional wisdom, are America’s ticket to prosperity and happiness in the 21st century. Armed with graduate degrees in obscure scientific, technological and financial subjects, these new workers will sit at computers endlessly reinventing the world as we know it, adding “value” to products and services, and generating billions in new wealth.

Why then, are so many younger people jumping off the bandwagon and starting small handicraft businesses? Why has “homemade” music entered the lexicon of popular culture? Why do many sustainability gurus advocate low tech, handmade solutions?

To those of us who deal with craftsmanship and handwork as a matter of course, the answer is simple–people need to feel connected to the things they produce. This principle guided the leaders of the Arts & Crafts movement over a century ago. It has come to mean more to today’s disaffected workers as the bubble economy fades each week amidst concerns about job security. This week’s New York Times Magazine legitimized this trend with an article by Matthew B. Crawford, a young man with a Ph.D. who works as a motorcycle mechanic and loves his job.

“The trades suffer from low prestige,” he writes, “and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.” Crawford’s positive experience is a revelation only because our society has so skewed the relationship between work and what John Dewey called “the materials of life.” As children proceed in school, their learning takes them further and further from the hands-on joys of things like gardening, woodworking, household arts, and mechanical repairs. By the time our children reach college, they have been brainwashed into believing that working with their hands is a low class option. Even when they see plumbers, stone carvers and woodworkers earning higher wages than they do, they persist in reaching for “knowledge work.”

This situation contributes to a sickness in our society. People in all walks of life are suffering from anxiety, low self esteem, despair over their future, and a general malaise in the workplace. Especially among the so-called working class and recent immigrants, the misplaced desire for betterment through “higher” education robs children of their natural intelligence when they are discouraged from working with their hands.

There is only one college in the United States devoted solely to the building trades–The American College of Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. Europe has myriad schools of this kind, and children there find alternative courses that lead to jobs in the culinary arts, handicrafts and other endeavors that do not require advanced degrees. It is time that American educators recognized the need for such avenues to self-fulfillment. Perhaps with the demise of Wall Street, we will wake up and smell the sawdust.

Mortars, pestles and limes

Since readers seem to have liked my last post on preservation issues, here is another pet peeve of mine. I have worked for years with historic masonry and, like many architects who appreciate the best craftsmanship, have been consistently frustrated by the poor quality of re-pointing in many restorations. Even when the mortar used is a so-called “soft” or “historic” mix of Portland Cement, sand, and lime, the resulting mortar never looks as beautiful as the historic example that is being “replicated.” My colleagues in the field explained years ago that it was impossible to duplicate these natural lime and sand recipes because they were weak and would never stand up to modern codes. Besides, where was one going to get old fashioned slaked lime?

Well, after years of wandering in the wilderness, preservationists have a saviour. Virginia Limeworks is a company that believes in old fashioned construction techniques and has backed up their preference with products that perform beautifully and have been tested to modern standards. I have used their products and swear by them. Mix’n'Go is a premixed mortar containing only sand and natural lime. It is a mason’s dream, according to tradespeople I’ve talked to. The advantage to lime mortar is twofold: 1) the resulting mortar is completely breathable, just like the stone and brick it complements; and 2) the natural color of the sand stands out as in no other mortar mix. One never has to use a colorant or admixture. Simply get the local sand that the original masons used and combine it with lime for a beautiful wall.

Check out Virginia Limeworks when you do your next repointing project, or insist that your mason call them up. And if you are a purist, simply buy their natural lime and mix everything yourself. No need to slake the lime or grind the mortar with a pestle. Unless of course you want to risk burning your eyeballs out.

CNU gets Green

For those looking for a website that explains green design evolution rather than a techno-revolution, check out Steve Mouzon’s excellent Original Green initiative. He is looking for support so that the ideas presented to the Congress for the New Urbanism (a wonderful organization that promotes true urban principles) may be considered by the Obama transition team. The ideas are simple and persuasive. Traditional buildings were green by necessity.

CNU has been talking about sustainability since its beginnings in the early 1990s, but has not gotten traction with many official organizations such as LEED until recently. Mouzon’s nascent organization is trying to make sure that the new administration, and the design community as a whole, take traditional buildings seriously when looking for “new” ways to build the infrastructure for America’s energy efficient economy.

Ga-ga for Glass

During the late 1920s the German socialist architect Bruno Taut published a fascinating book on “glassarchitecture” that presaged the experiments of his countryman, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe only a few years later. Once Mies designed his signature glass curtain wall skyscrapers in Chicago, the potential magic of this new material was unleashed on the world. Architects have been spellbound by glass architecture ever since.

Engineering and building technology have lagged behind the visions of architects for centuries, but no material has proved as elusive as glass in testing the ingenuity of designers. Though it can provide abundant natural light in buildings, and makes an attractive exterior surface when properly handled, glass has many drawbacks as a building skin. It absorbs heat and ultraviolet rays, sheds water poorly, and is expensive to manufacture in large sheets. Moreover, it is structurally fragile, needing a backing framework in order to withstand wind loads and other natural hazards. In short, glass does not possess the qualities we look for in a tough, weather-resistant building skin.

Recent developments in “lightweight” structures have allowed designers to employ glass in new and often exciting ways. Thicker glass panels are now used as balustrades and “invisible” barriers for stairways and balconies. Architects have designed glass stair treads with little or no metal armature for support. And engineers have devised every more intricate multi-layer glass curtain wall systems that mitigate against heat gain and loss. Indeed, there is a kind of renaissance in glass technology that has brought the material back into vogue after decades of problematic and leaky curtain wall failures.

Despite these new developments, sustainable design standards suggest that buildings employ no more than 40% glass as an exterior surface in order to maximize the performance of the building envelope. This is about the percentage employed in classic tall buildings of the Chicago school during the 1890s and early 1900s. The Guaranty Building in Buffalo and Wainright in St. Louis are still among the most beautiful tall buildings in America.

I find it mystifying and unconscionable that architects continue to preach about energy efficiency while producing more and more all-glass (or virtually all-glass) buildings. The most recent issue of Architectural Record featured what may be the non-plus-ultra of such follies: the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop by Junya Ishigami & Associates. The architect professed to be interested in blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, even between structure and skin, in this frustratingly elusive building. Indeed, the students working at desks in the building must feel as if they are literally in a fishbowl, as there is no frame of reference that articulates the space they occupy.

The use of glass in the walls, with almost no suggestion of supports or frame, renders the building curiously boring and listless. In the evening, when clear glass buildings are most dramatic, the spaces inside appear vacant (no humans are shown in the photos) except for oddly placed desks and the inevitable clutter associated with workshops. The daylight photos in the article show that the building is unimpressive in an overcast environment and that the spaces do not benefit from fully-transparent outer walls when skylights provide ample interior illumination. In sum, this essay in “crystal” architecture proves that the modernist ideal of transparency is as elusive as ever. Even new technology cannot make up for the challenges of constructing a foolproof and beautiful “window wall.”

Why do architects continue to use glass as a monolithic material in walls, when it is clearly more effective as a covering for apertures? The likely answer lies in an irrational fascination with the crystal metaphor that Taut identified in his treatise almost a century ago. Pursuing a “crystalline” fantasy with technology resulted in some of the silliest and most wasteful architecture of the mid-20th century (now requiring vast capital expenditures for restoration). The current greenhouse fantasy is little different, and will undoubtedly result in a host of similar failures as we face a new challenge–energy efficient, resource miserly buildings for a planet that is roasting in its own conservatory of CO2, a glass-enclosed globe.

The Green Machine–an oxymoron?

On the promise of “green technology” I am clearly a skeptic. Sustainable building is another matter altogether. Traditional architecture is by definition sustainable, for pre-industrial builders had only the earth’s longstanding resources to draw upon. Trees, clay, earth pigments, stone, bamboo, and various metal ores were in abundance. They are still relatively abundant and take little energy to harvest and process in comparison to “high tech” materials.

The LEED system that is all the rage in the United States is a wonderful thing, as far as it goes. Developed by engineers, it is linear and process driven. It encourages “innovation” over proven solutions, and rewards “design creativity” over common sense, pragmatic thinking. In its early stages it did not provide credits for historic preservation and had too little to say about adaptive reuse.

That is changing, thank goodness. The concept of “embodied energy” is just beginning to influence environmentalists. Certain materials and technologies consume more energy in production than others. The University of Bath has a calculator for embodied energy, and publishes charts that will help anyone assess the amount of energy that went into building any structure. You can get the information online by demonstrating your seriousness about fighting climate change.

One of the things that distinguishes the “crunchy granola” environmentalists from architects is their serious investment in earth-friendly materials, systems and techniques for everything from blowing your nose to constructing a windmill. The Whole Earth Catalogue crowd are still very much alive, and there are still many communal experiments in sustainable living that do not involve architects. One of these, in Canaan, New York, is run by my bretheren, the Quakers of New York Yearly Meeting. It is exciting and innovative, but there is no LEED architecture on the site.

The folks at the QIVP are serious about earth care. They construct their own houses using things like timbers, wattle and daub, SIP panels, rammed earth and straw. Everything looks like it belongs in the rolling hills of this part of the Hudson Valley. The families raise their children to speak truth to power, and to think independently of what most of society gives them. They grow a lot of their own food. There are university professors, economists, former Wall streeters, and a few ex-Hippies in the group. Its one of the most radically sustainable places I know about.

These are the kinds of endeavors that come to mind when I look at a typical piece of award-winning, LEED certified architecture. Most of what I see in that category leaves me nonplussed and disappointed. I’m particularly bothered about the praise given to Thom Mayne (Pritzger Laureate) and Morphosis’s CALTRANS District 7 building in Los Angeles. Like most of this architect’s work the building is an overblown, agressive monster that resembles a giant air-conditioning plant with overtones of Russian Constructivism. The architect is at war with the California sun. The south wall has a complicated, mechanized system of sunscreens and ventilators that are computer controlled and that will most likely break down irreparably within a year or two. It’s a machine made to control the environment by brute force of technology. There is nothing passive about it.

The American Institute of Architects and the Environmental Protection Agency are doling out awards for these mechanized muscle buildings right and left. As they do so, they send messages to the public and the design professions that our environmental crisis will be erased soon by the scientific and technological know-how that created the A-bomb, the Polaris submarine, and the Beijing airport. The folks a QIVP are not betting on the U.S. government or the Defense Department. They’re going it alone, and doing a lot better than CALTRANS on their energy bills.