Does Context Matter?

Does Context Matter?

Architects consider themselves as creative professionals and take great pride in the visual quality of their creations – the only part of architectural design that the rest of the world understands. Unfortunately, this has resulted in identifying architecture only with its visual form, at the cost of all the other finer aspects of design. In most of the cities today, there seems to be some kind of competition amongst architects in trying to make their designs strikingly in contrast to their contexts, without a second thought as to the effect this would have on the overall urban landscape.

The more outrageous the form, the more the project gets talked about. I recollect a photograph of Hongkong documenting the resultant chaos, in a presentation by Jimmy Lim, with his typical dry comment about how you need to shout in order to be heard in a scenario where the background noise is too loud.

On the other hand, if conformity to the context becomes institutionalized in the form of guidelines or regulations, they tilt the scale to the other extreme, putting a virtual stop to all creative interpretations of the context. The urban design guidelines for Chandigad are a case in point. The interpretation of the context of Chandigad is frozen in a set of regulations so rigid that they have effectively killed all creativity and made the city monotonous in character.

The correct response to any physical context must lie somewhere in between these two extremes, though not always in a manner directly apparent. Sometimes the new project itself may redefine the context. The Sydney Opera House, which has become an icon of Sydney now, was built over a site which had an existing structure with heritage value. Conservationists may now have an academic debate over the virtue of promoting current iconic architecture by demolishing the heritage of the past, but there are no clear-cut solutions.

Indians in general have scant regard for the historic setting which most of our old cities have, but there are exceptions too. First, we had the Delhi Urban Arts Commission Act and then the Mumbai Heritage Precinct Regulations as also the regulations for protection of French Quarter in Pondicherry. Interestingly, all these areas boast of architecture built by our colonial rulers in their heyday, and we seem to have a complex love-hate situation with our colonial past.

So, when Charles Correa designed the LIC Building in Connaught Place, New Delhi, people derided it as they felt that the huge concrete and glass tower would deface the heritage quality of the place. Little is known about the original design by Correa in which he sought to integrate the huge plaza at the ground level as an extension of Connaught Place, making it directly accessible from the street. This never materialized simply because like our old colonial masters; our current rulers also treat the common people of the city as an undesirable element. It was much later, in the design of the city center for Kolkata, that Correa would actually realize the creation of a truly accessible public place for the city.

What Correa was trying to do was to reflect the ambience of Connaught Place as a democratic public place; but excluding the visual character of Lutyens Delhi. The problem with such an approach is that it is a bit too difficult to understand on paper and hence may get caught up in the regulations about conformity to context. It is actually surprising that the Delhi Urban Arts Commission, cleared the proposal. It is doubtful if such a proposal would have been cleared under any of the heritage guidelines mentioned above.

It is now said that ‘the context of Connaught Place begins with the new LIC building’, and we must give credit to Correa for redefining the context of Connaught Place, in spite of the fact that his original scheme was not fully executed.

Public places in an urban setting are what makes a city memorable for generations. Architects, as creative professionals, need to be sensitive to this intangible aspect of our public spaces.

A monstrosities that became Icons

In the process of writing a history of modern architecture for students, I referred to the history of many architects and their projects, and I realized that all the projects that are now described as path-breaking were widely criticized when they first appeared on the urban scene.

The most famous of such examples is the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was built as an entrance gateway for the International Exposition in 1889, to mark the centenary of the French Revolution. The exposition committee selected Gustav Eiffel's design from as many as a hundred proposals.

However, when people found out about the proposal, there was an outcry. A few artists and intellectuals derided the tower as 'a monstrosity that would disfigure the Paris landscape'. The opposition subsided when it was revealed that the structure was temporary and would be eventually dismantled.

But when the tower became a major tourist attraction, plans for dismantling were shelved, and it has now become an icon of Paris, so much so that you cannot now think of Paris without the Eiffel Tower.

The story of another icon in Paris, the Pompidou Centre, is not much different. The building, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, who were two young architects in their thirties, is the first major example of an "inside-out" building. The reason for the name is that with its structural system, mechanical systems, and circulation are all exposed on the exterior of the building. With introduction of color coding for the various services, the building has a shocking, bizarre appearance, and evoked reactions similar to the Eiffel Tower, when it was inaugurated.

An article in Le Figaro declared: "Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness." National Geographic described the reaction to the design as "love at second sight." However, two decades later, the New York Times noted that the design of the Centre "turned the architecture world upside down" and that "Mr. Rogers earned a reputation as a high-tech iconoclast.

Today it is widely regarded as an artwork in its own merit. When Richard Rogers was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2007, the jury commented that the Pompidou Centre "revolutionized museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city."

Both the examples go to show that our ideas of aesthetics are based on what we are accustomed to believing as beautiful. Great architecture shatters such beliefs and establishes its own definition of aesthetics, becoming iconic in its own right.

A fountain that challenged Apple

There was once a Levi's store in the Union Square of downtown San Franscisco which is now replaced by a large Apple store. The Levi's store had a famous bronze folk art fountain behind it, named Ruth Asawa Fountain after its creator, and the Levi's store had a triangular plan form, reducing its width in the rear, and thus providing a good setting for this fountain.

When Apple initially submitted plans for its new retail store in place of the Levis Stores, everybody thought it would be a welcome addition to the place. San Franciso’s Mayor Lee described the new Apple Store as “quite simply incredible” and that he could think of “no better location for the world’s most stunning Apple Store than right here in Union Square”.

But then people realized that this new proposal would eliminate the fountain, there was a huge public outcry. The mayor retracted his statement and admitted that he didn’t realize that the plans called for the elimination of the Ruth Asawa fountain.

The reason for this turnabout lies in the history of the fountain. It is designed by Ruth Asawa, a Japanese American sculptor, who was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed recently as the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in tribute to her.

The fountain was Installed in 1973 and was made of baker’s clay and cast in bronze. It is seven feet high and a focal point of a triangular-shaped public square behind the Levis outlet. According to Asawa herself, “The fountain depicts San Francisco, and approximately 250 friends and school children helped in its making by contributing self-portraits, cars, buildings, and various San Francisco landmarks.” The fountain is part of the public memory in SF for 40 years now.

Apple’s proposal therefore evoked strong resentment. Moreover, the initial proposal for the building was a characterless box of metal and glass that contributed nothing unique to the local landscape and had no identity except the Apple symbol in the center of the huge glass façade on Post Street.

San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King pointed out the absurdity of “a company renowned for design innovation hiring one of the world’s most acclaimed architecture firms, only to unload a box that would look at home in Anymall, U.S.A.”

This in fact is true of all the multinational companies and their views on architectural design at large: they are interested only in promotion of their brand and its image, and do not care about the context. But this is not the only issue: in trying to reflect the corporate brand identity we tend to convert architecture itself into a product, relinquishing its primary role in place-making in an urban setting. As a respondent on the article in arch.daily commented, ‘the world would be better off without the generic chain stores of drive throughs, gas stations, shopping malls etc that plague our cities.’

Fortunately, in this particular case, Apple bowed to the will of the people, and made a revised proposal, which incorporated the fountain, but reduced the size of the open plaza, as the apple building is rectangular (the existing Levis building is triangular) and covers a part of the existing triangular plaza. 

This gesture could not have come at a more appropriate time - Ruth Asawa died on 5^th August. So it became some kind of tribute to her. The news item in SFGate starts with the line - ‘Ruth Asawa fans can rest easy - the artist's beloved bronze fountain near Union Square is staying pretty much right where it is.’

The design of the building, however, has not changed, it remains a tall, taut cube of glass and steel from Post Street (South side). The only difference is that instead of being walled off by steel panels on the Stokton street, the design includes an 8-foot-wide glass "window" in the centre of the East wall, which continues over the roof, becoming a skylight. Both these changes – retention of the fountain & the opening up of the Stokton street façade have been appreciated by the mayor, as Christine Falvey, Lee's director of communications has been quoted in the news. And here the matter rests. As it happens, the last item on the SFGate online news is an announcement of the Public Memorial service for Ruth Asawa.

Public memory, so it is said, is short. But it seems that when public places in an urban setting have been retained in collective public memory for more than a generation, the sentiments attached to them do not fade. Architects, as creative professionals, need to be sensitive to this intangible aspect of our public spaces.

A Winning Entry Resurrected from Trash

Sydney Opera House Competition

Monuments

It was Ajay Kulkarni, a talented young architect and an old friend from Aurangabad, who opened up the issue of connection between history and present-day architecture with his presentation at the National Convention of the Indian Institute of Architects. This was held at Nagpur on 6th November 2009, and about 800 architects from all over India attended. On this count alone this was a successful event indeed.

Ajay started his presentation with a review of the historical monuments, and a funny thing happened. Ajay is passionate about everything he does, and his voice may have been raised a bit above the ordinary at some point. A delegate, who was dozing comfortably in the air-conditioned auditorium, suddenly woke up with this, and found himself listening to a history lecture which he resented and registered his protest.

Of course, there were many in the auditorium who were impressed with Ajay's oratory and content and tried to hush down the protester. Ajay is also a good-natured person and nonchalant and continued with his presentation. His work is outstanding, and that naturally commands respect, irrespective of whether you do or do not like the history behind the design.

What Ajay did, in effect, was to explain the process behind his design. Very few architects are capable of doing this, in fact most of the other architects who presented their projects in the same convention were content in describing their work (and showing plenty of visuals) but did not give any reasons about why it was designed that way. Maybe they thought it was obvious, but it takes a lot of understanding of history to articulate and present the entire process of design.

That brings back the issue of how history is taught and learnt at the schools of architecture. Unless we are able to establish its link to the present-day architecture, history would become a tiresome subject indeed. It would then be a boring list of monuments and the kings who made them (with a bit of religious, political and such other background thrown in). No wonder people resent this, and many generations of students have crossed over to the fourth-year architecture with a sigh of relief that they no longer have anything to do with history.

What Ajay was talking about is the history as it exists today for us, and the impressions of form and the quality of architectural spaces the monuments have created. We grow up with this backdrop of history surrounding us all over (particularly in India), and it is part of our subconscious. The monuments speak to us (to use the jargon from Ajay's speech), and if you are sensitive enough, you may be able to decipher the language.

Architecture is always a culmination of all that you are capable of creating - it is not something that you do casually. All architecture is deliberate - with a sense of purpose. So, when Ajay talked about creating a monument for a freedom fighter-it was not words alone, but a whole imagery of how that person lived and worked, his value system and the force behind his acts of patriotism - and how do we interpret all this in the present context becomes the starting point of architectural design. The attire of the freedom fighter becomes a symbol that can be carried on to the building designed for him and to establish the act of patriotism as a monumental act, it needs to be represented by a monumental structure.

So, it is not the historical monuments per se but their interpretation in the present day, which becomes the issue for architectural design. It is this lesson of history that we need to present as teachers.

Introduction

As a subject in architectural schools, I am aware that history ranks somewhere below the theory of structures in popularity, and considered the dullest of the subjects ever, dealing with things from the dead past.

Thirty years ago, when I started teaching history as a subject in architecture, the first question I had in mind was not how history should be taught but why it should be taught at all - what is its relevance to the present-day architectural education?

According to Italian Architect and Historian Manfredo Tafuri, 'architectural history does not follow a teleological scheme in which one language succeeds another in a linear sequence. Instead, it is a continuous struggle played out on critical, theoretical and ideological levels as well as through the multiple constraints placed on practice. Since this struggle continues in the present, architectural history is not a dead academic subject, but an open arena for debate'.

Architectural history is not buried in the books but is ever present in the form of buildings existing side by side with the current development in most of our cities today. They create a sense of place, and many a times dominate the urban scene by their presence. Hence all the attributes of the historical buildings: concept of space & place-making, impressions of scale, grandeur, choice of form and detailing become part of the vocabulary of architecture even today. The choices open for architectural design in this context for any new project, become an open area for debate, as remarked by Tafuri.

The stories of great architects who have successfully dealt with these issues are interesting in themselves, but they also serve as guidelines for architectural design today. This, in fact, is the reason for this blog in the first place.

Aesthetics overriding Function

When I decided to write a book about modern architecture for students, my first instinct was to write interesting stories about architects and architecture that I had heard over the years. Though I included a few of them in the book, I thought it a good idea to single out these stories and have separate blog. So, here it is.

The first story is about a design of a bank building based on Parthenon. This was the Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank (now part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) in Philadelphia, designed by architects McKim, Mead & White in the early 20th century. The building was explicitly modeled on the Parthenon style, featuring a massive, open, columned banking hall (or "cella") on the ground floor to maintain classical purity.

The manager of the bank wanted to have his cabin and partitions for the staff on the main floor, but the architect refused to subdivide this space with modern partitions, believing it would violate the aesthetic integrity of the classical design. The owner sided with the architect's vision to maintain the monumental, open-floor "temple" aesthetic. As a result of this refusal to disturb the open hall, the bank manager was reportedly forced to have his office in the basement.

The second story is about La Scala, an Opera House in Milan, Italy, which was designed by Giuseppe Piermarini. This was in 1778, much before the modern obsession of a functional design. There were a number of seats in this theatre which had no view of the stage. When people found this out and the architect was asked about the flaw, he argued that in an opera theatre it is impossible to plan for everyone to have a look at the stage and some people will have to be content listening to the music. Though the acoustic design of the place was good, this kind of reply by an architect today would be unimaginable today.

Both the events are much before the modern insistence on function, and hence the reason for F. L. Wright to specify 'Form follows function' or for Le Corbusier to define 'house as a machine to live in'