Taliesen West: The Final Act

Originally posted March 26, 2022

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most well known architect, was born in 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. He had several distinct careers, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in 1959, the year of his death at age ninety-one.  In that time he designed some 800 buildings, of which 380 were actually built. 

His personal life was equally callisthenic.  His first marriage ended after fleeing to Europe with a client's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Upon returning, and now ostracized from the Chicago community, he retreated to Spring Hill, Wisconsin where he built the first Taliesen compound.  There, on August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, a servant set fire to the living quarters, opened the lower half of a dutch door and murdered Mamah, her two children and four others with an axe as they tried to escape the flames.

Wright's second wife, Maude "Miriam" Noel, became addicted to morphine soon after their marriage, resulting in an early separation, and shortly afterward he met Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenburg. In 1925 he and Olgivanna moved together to Taliesen, where a fire yet again destroyed a significant portion of the compound. Ten years later, after spurned spouses had granted divorces, Taliesen East had been rebuilt, and Wright and Olgivanna had married, they moved to Arizona to start Taliesen West. He was seventy years old.

Wright had few resources at the time, however he had a considerable reputation. So in his final incarnation, he devised a school where apprentices would pay to come to Taliesen West, and would learn the arts of farming, building, cooking, and entertaining. They would also be expected to act as draftsmen for his remaining architectural projects. The winters were spent at Taliesen West, and the summers at Taliesen East with the apprentices handling the entire move between. It was a brilliant plan, providing Wright and Olga an extensive staff, a winter residence, and a steady income. Such an enterprise requires a certain suspension of disbelief and Taliesen West was informed by a certain theatricality in which the ritual of each of the activities was given an honorific significance. Over the years Taliesen developed a devotional following and a number of apprentices went on to brilliant, if idiosyncratic careers; Bruce Goff and John Lautner being noteworthy.

In all of the sycophancy, it's nevertheless hard to overlook the virtuosity of the design. Wright was a brilliant draftsman, and everywhere can be seen and felt the isometric effects of his draftsman board. The decorative filigrees, the stained glass windows, the dentils at the soffits, the patterns in the rug all submit to the furious pace of his T Square and triangles. The plan is set at forty-five degree angles throughout, the roofs and soffits at thirty degree angles, and where structural enclosures fail to sufficiently express the geometry, chevrons, spears, and cant strips are added.

In many ways, Taliesen West is a kind of geometric interpretation of nature, an expression of what Wright meant by an "organic” architecture.  It is a dance between Wright and the landscape that sometimes seems like symmetry, other times sometimes a submission.  It is relentless, unending, and comprehensive.  No detail is left undesigned.  No tree, rock or plant is not asked to pose for the audience.

It was the final act of the master.

Louis Kahn: Building and Being

Originally posted March 13, 2022

The Kimball Art Museum is one of the last few works designed by the renowned, mid-century architect, Louis Kahn. Completed in 1972, it is now fifty years old, and looks no different than the day it was finished. Louis Kahn spent most of his life as an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his first major commission at age fifty in 1953. His knowledge of history was vast, and he was very much influenced by the French Enlightenment architect, Étienne-Louis Boullée. Some may be familiar with Kahn's library at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, which bears a strong resemblance to Boullée's metaphysical representations.

Left: Phillips Academy (Kahn)

Right: Cenotaph for Newton (Boullée)

The poetic impact of the Kimball is revealed in its details:  the arisses in the concrete formwork, the recessed control joints, the lead coins in the snap tie plugs, the reveals at the travertine, the rivulet at the portico where it meet the pool.  Each material retains its essential dignity.  Missing are the caulked expansion joints, the filler pieces, the crimpled, metal edge strips of modern construction.  Kimball is constructed of materials largely available to the Romans.

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?'  Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' You say to brick, 'I like an arch too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'" 

He is implying that materials themselves are embodied with intentionality. Discovering and respecting that intentionality is what brings a building to life.

None of this is to suggest a lack of sophistication and the vaults of the Kimball are a rather astonishing example of both a theoretical as well as empirical approach to a fundamental aspiration, that of bringing even, natural light into the galleries of the museum. It took several iterations to arrive at a vault that would deliver uniform light to the galleries, and it was August Kommendant, Kahn's trusted structural engineer and colleague, who finally proposed a cycloid vault with a brachistochrone curve.

A cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line.  A mathematical formula attributed to the ancient Greeks, it also represents the fastest path of descent between a point A and a lower point B, where B is not directly below A, under the influence of a uniform gravitational field to a given end point in the shortest time. For a better understanding of this concept, see this demonstration.

It is useful to point out that the precedent for a top lit vault in concrete was the Pantheon in Rome, constructed in the first century A.D. which remained the longest concrete span in the world until the construction of the Palazzo Dello Sport in 1939 by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.   In achieving a longer span Nervi used a lamella truss system based on the coffering in the Pantheon. 

Left: The Pantheon (cross section)

Right: Kimball (cross section)

The fundamental challenge of a concrete vault is to construct a system thick enough to span yet not too heavy to collapse.  By the time of the construction of Kimball, it was the development of pre-stressing and post stressing concrete with steel reinforcement cables that allowed for spans with thinner concrete.  Kommendant was a leading practitioner in this field, and for Kimball, he was proposing four inch thick concrete vaults with pre-stressed catenary cables.

The gravitational aspect of the cycloid is significant. Light seems to follow the same gravitational rules as the cycloid, resulting  a diaphanous, silver-pewter halo above the galleries, bringing out the true colors of the paintings and creating soft shadows in the works of sculpture.  During our time in the galleries we did not see a single light bulb aimed at any artwork.

Kahn was a mystic.  He operated outside the more dogmatic rules of mid-century architecture.   In suggesting what a building wanted to be, Kahn was engaging with the building as a being in an ontological way.  This idea stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries, for example le Corbusier's idea of the house as a "machine for living," or Frank Lloyd Wright's "organic," agrarian architecture, or the Bauhaus emigres, Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius, whose work stressed industrial production.

"When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true.  The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself."

The Triglyph Dilemma

Originally posted March 11, 2021

One of the great mysteries of Greek architecture which defies rational explanation is something known as the Triglyph Dilemma. This occurred when the Greeks, insisting upon placing each triglyph (the three bar medallion) directly above each column, also insisted on having them meet at each corner. This resulted in an awkward condition where the column was forced outward at the corner to mediate between the two conflicting demands.

This “kicking out” of the column at the corner and the subsequent adjustment along the length of the entablature is one of the hallmarks of the “correct” classical interpretation of the orders.  It is one of the things that gives a properly conceived classical building “character.”  Even when the trigyph is not present, as in the Corinthian or Ionic order, this adjusted corner condition is present.

What is it about this “adjustment” or this desire to adhere to two conflicting conditions that adds such charm to an edifice? Is it the aspiration of perfection rendered through the imperfection of unique circumstance? If so, is that the reason Mount Vernon with its slightly asymmetrical arrangement of windows in its center façade has so much more charm than the platonic Monticello?

Like a beautiful but imperfect face that focuses our attention on more than simple perfection, asymmetry reveals a human condition, and the trace of life’s contradictions.