Being the Mountain: Productora

BEING THE MOUNTAIN PRODUCTORA

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INTRODUCTION PRODUCTORA

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BEING THE MOUNTAIN LEGORRETA’S HOTEL AT IXTAPA Wonne Ickx

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TOPOGRAPHIC ARCHITECTURE KENNETH FRAMPTON’S INTEREST IN THE GROUND Véronique Patteeuw

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ON TENTS AND CAVES Frank Escher

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GEOLOGIC GESTURES Jesús Vassallo

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BADLANDS OF MODERNISM Wonne Ickx

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ELEVATED SURFACE DEPRESSED Carlos Bedoya

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CONTRIBUTORS

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ON TOPOGRAPHY PRODUCTORA AT S. R. CROWN HALL PROJECTS 2006–17

elaborated our own personal repertoire more or less consciously, with a specific attention to the geography of the region and the topographical singularities of the terrain. In this sense, our buildings are there to re-write and to give meaning to the context that surrounds them.

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By the mid-twentieth century, the flatlands of San Juan, Puerto Rico, were already densely populated; urban planners turned to the surrounding hills to accommodate new housing infrastructure. Moshe Safdie. Model of Habitat Puerto Rico, 1971.

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An unrealized proposal for a vast earthwork sculpture by Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi scaled the pyramidal nose to span one mile. Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars (also known as Monument to Man), 1947.

laboratories, car manufacturing plants, schools, and corporate offices. For the high-profile Mexico City project, the young Legorreta—then thirty-six years old—surrounded him­self with an amazing group of designers and artists including Luis Barragán, Mathias Goeritz, Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Pedro Friedeberg, and Rufino Tamayo.

The encounter with ar­tistic talent of such caliber defined a turning point in his career, infusing Legorreta’s functionalist mindset with a desire for emotion and color and a deep interest in the roots of Mex­ican culture.

While the Camino Real in Mexico City played a crucial role in Legorreta’s switch to what became a highly exportable “regionalist” style, it was also the first project in which he could test a horizontal hotel layout. Mid-century international hotels were typically large tower-and-plinth structures, com­ bining a horizontal distribution of amenities and public programs in the base with an effective vertical circu­ lation for both visitors and staff in the tower. However, to meet demand­ing deadlines that would ensure that the hotel would open in time for the Games, Legorreta was forced to explore different means of construction and

circulation, and chose a low-rise scheme. Wide and well-lit hallways would take visitors to their rooms horizontally, multiplying the distance covered but adding a pleasant ar­ chitectural quality to the experience.

As a critic writing for Architectural Forum reported, “Guests have to do a lot of walking. Brockman [the owner of the hotel chain] briskly remarks that ‘If the guests don’t like to walk, they can always go to another hotel.’”2 Legorreta relates this idea to a different interpretation of monumentality.

Generally seen as a quality related to height or mass, for him, monumen­ tality “was also in the horizon.” “I think that that was a discovery—not just mine, but something that many people started to understand—that the horizon­

Although from the ocean it can appear massive, the Hotel Camino Real rarely rises more than two levels above its foundations. Ricardo Legorreta. Sections, Hotel Camino Real, Ixtapa, 1981.

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A brochure promoting the 1950s Las Brisas hotel in ­Acapulco, Mexico, date unknown.

tality is very important and that is deduced from the pleasure of walking, which we had forgotten. The radical change that the elevators brought along, had changed architecture,” he explained in a 2013 interview.3 Legorreta repeated this horizontal approach in 1975 at the Camino Real hotel in Cancun, but in Ixtapa, the hotel operator initially asked him for a rather conventional layout: a tower with gardens, restaurants, and pools at ground level. Nevertheless, at the same time, the client also longed for an atmosphere like that of the acclaimed Las Brisas hotel in Acapulco, a 1950s resort that covered an entire hill with pink-andwhite bungalows and plunge pools.

Such a scattered and loose organization—“designed by a sailor, not an

architect,” Legorreta mocked4 —would be completely beyond the project’s budget, according to the architect and his advisors. But if the client could acquire a different piece of land, Legorreta assured, he could generate a hotel that would have “the way of life of Las Brisas” within the established budget.5 The client purchased a different piece of land with prominent topography and a private beach, and the project went ahead.

Just like in Las Brisas, the topography of the site defined the identity of the resort: it was realized as an extended volume enveloping the surface of a hill sloped toward the beach.

Rooms are stacked one on top of the other, following the same inclination as the underlying topography—a fairly straightforward solution. Although from the ocean it can appear massive, with ten stories or more, the building rarely rises more than two levels above its foundations. Unlike the organic and spontaneous architectural clusters that covered the landscape at Las Brisas, in Legorreta’s proposal, the mountain itself was transformed and abstracted into architecture. Budgetary goals were met by eliminating air conditioning in nearly the entire hotel: as Legorreta explained, “Only sleeping quarters would be mechanically cooled and even in these there would be the option of a simple ceiling fan; the living

The Las Brisas hotel, a scattered organization of bungalows on a hill. Postcard, date unknown.

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area of each guest room would be placed outside on a terrace with a hammock and dining place, plants, and a view over the Pacific Ocean—in short, a relaxed living area naturally cooled…”6 Zooming in on the terraces, some with private pools, we can appreciate the meticulousness of the hotel’s formal logic. Rooms are set back into the volume, organizing a smooth progression from dark to light; punctured brise-soleils create different shade conditions. In the middle of each terrace, a non-structural column separates an area for a hammock to hang and the circulation pathway.

Legorreta had employed the building section to solve construction or programmatic requirements in many of his projects, a continuous search for alternatives to the modernist ethos of simply multiplying by stacking. The Celanese Mexicana offices, an early project in which he achieved

Ricardo Legorreta. Balconies at the Hotel Camino Real, Ixtapa.

an unbroken floor slab in a corporate tower, was perhaps one of his most ingenious solutions. By applying an external structural system based on hanging tension members and organizing the plan in four gradually stepped parts (each platform ninety centimeters above the previous segment), he managed to create a work floor that spiraled fluidly upward and that could be freely subdivided by the company. At the Camino Real in Mexico City, we witness an incredibly elegant sequence of staircases, each fourteen to fifteen steps high, that orchestrates gradual move-

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ment through the public areas of the hotel. In her well-researched PhD thesis, Mara Partida illustrates in detail the beauty of this sequence, in which lobbies, corridors, staircases, and works of art come together in an extremely evocative spatial composition.7 Legorreta, who always preferred no-nonsense, self-evident rationales, laconically attributed the design of this succession of split levels to “the height difference of about 1,50 meters that exists in between Mariano Escobedo and Leibnitz.” 8 Along with developing interior qualities through sectional composi-

tions, the architect pursued a specific interest in integrating his buildings within the surrounding geography. His earthship-like additions to the Hotel Hacienda in Baja California, from 1972, truly merged architecture and landscape into one single entity. There, at the southern tip of the peninsula, Legorreta felt that “any idea of architecture would be powerless to compete with the natural environment.”9 He decided to bury the required condominium units underground, hidden within an existing sand dune next to the hotel. The cave-like underground spaces, accessible by sunken patios and

The roof as an abstraction of the existing topography, drawing a sharp diagonal line through the forest landscape. Ricardo Legorreta. Casa de Fin de Semana, Valle de Bravo, Mexico, 1973.

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underneath an elegant roof, which marks the architectural perimeter of the rational plan. The stereotomy of the stonework underlines the building’s relation to the landscape.12 Representing seemingly opposite architectural approaches, Pikionis’s pathway and Konstantinidis’s house defined a dialectical set of interests for the young Frampton. While the pathway proposed a natural melding of landscape and architecture that laid the project within the site, the weekend house suggested a method of forming space that subsumed the site in the rationality of the plan. These two Greek examples demonstrated the tension between an architecture exploiting the irregularities and ambiguities of a landscape on the one hand and a form of structured reasoning of that landscape on the other hand, a tension between “earth work” and “roof work.”

It was precisely this tension that

inspired Frampton in his quest for an architecture of resistance.13 Laid-In Architecture If “Towards a Critical Regionalism” reads as an attempt to counter universalization with architecture, what specific architecture did Frampton have in mind?

He specifically pleads for an architecture that “involves a more directly dialectical relation with nature than the more abstract, formal traditions of modern avant-garde architecture allow.”14 After several more philosophical explorations, he spatializes his ideas in the last two points of the text, arguing for the importance of the topographic and climatological conditions of a site, the tectonics of architectural construction, and the tactile

Pikionis’s intervention appears to be an ancient, accidental trail through the surrounding landscape. Hélène Binet, photographer. Dimitris Pikionis, architect. Landscaping around the Acropolis (1950s), 1989.

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sensibility of architecture. The ground, as in “topography,” “site,” and “inscription,” is the first item addressed in point 5. For Frampton, the ground can be both a window onto a natural condition and a frame for the historical layers of a specific place. Before addressing Mario Botta and his notion of “building the site,” the historian makes an appeal for bounded architecture, architecture that has little affinity to the freestanding architectural object, but which is inscribed in the topographic, geological, or agricultural history of the site—in other words, a sort of laid-in architecture clearly opposed, as he claims in the text, to a modern approach. “The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which

aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness,” he writes, “whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of ‘cultivating’ the site.”15 But are all laid-in buildings, according to Frampton, situated on terraced sites and realized in stepped forms? Before and after the publication of “Towards a Critical Regionalism” in The Anti-Aesthetic, Frampton wrote several other versions of his text, which together show the development of his theoretical framework. For example, while the version published in The Anti-Aesthetic omits many examples, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” a text published in Perspecta, also in 1983, cites numerous projects and

Álvaro Siza’s swimming pool complex in Leça de Palmeira, Portugal, questions the boundaries between landscape and architecture. 1966.

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roof (of my house); it took them a day.

And then I put these panels up on the insulation myself. If you have concrete, they actually have to build a whole structure to support it. It doesn’t make sense. Concrete is fine in relation to the ground. It’s an earth material.”8 A few years later, in the early 1970s, Lautner worked on various unbuilt schemes for a small vacation house for himself in Three Rivers, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The site was on the banks of the Kaweah River and strewn with massive boulders. Though the house has a different relation to its rocky site— in one scheme, the small house is lofted on massive concrete pillars above the rocks; in another, the house is precariously perched on top of a tall boulder—the boulders are the foundation and starting point for his design. Here, Lautner may be the furthest away from Schindler’s 1912 dictum, well outside the “tent” and “cave” polemic. But his project, nevertheless, begins and ends with his site, the ground, the earth.

Above and right: At the Frey House, a boulder seems to interrupt, rather than support, the building’s tentlike steel frame. Albert Frey, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer. Palm Springs, California, 1964.

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evident in his discussion of a series of drawings by Viollet-le-Duc, namely his rendition of the Baths of Caracalla and his studies of the crater of Mount Etna. Seen through Viollet-le-Duc’s eyes, the softened massiveness of the baths as they devolve into nature is akin to the roughly faceted geometry of the volcano. Later, Mansilla writes, “When the ruins pretend to be nature and the mountains disguise themselves as architecture, one finds

himself in an unexplored territory, as if inside the glass that sometimes keeps them apart.”2 Quite revealingly, according to Mansilla, Viollet-le-Duc’s persistently stated intention to “carve his own path in stone” resulted not just from his maverick persona, but ultimate ly from his belief that architecture was already there to be found in nature.

Mansilla’s reading of Viollet-le-Duc then insinuates, I’d like to propose, that the work of the architect can be likened to

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In Viollet-le-Duc’s many drawings of the crater of Mount Etna, the mountain becomes geometric, almost an architecture. Cratère de l’Etna, June 1836.

that of someone like Michelangelo, who labored the blocks of marble for his unfinished Slaves in an attempt to uncover their potential.

A positioning of sculpture as a possible model for mediation between the natural and the artificial is indeed hinted at in other passages of the book, such as the one that describes Le Corbusier’s collaboration with the Marseillais mathematician Edward Trouin. Obsessed with the legend of

Mary Magdalene, who supposedly ended her life as a hermit in the Sainte-Baume mountain range, Trouin had purchased a million square meters of land near Plan d’Aups intending to build a subterranean basilica in honor of the saint. Trouin’s idea, which Le Corbusier turned into geometry, consisted of boring through the mountain, carving its insides from north to south with a series of connected chambers that would culminate in openings toward the Mediterranean Sea and its light.

While Le Corbusier and Trouin’s unrealized fantasy to carve a mountain may seem to be a footnote or historical anomaly within the field of architecture, the project in fact relates closely to a certain lineage of sculpture. To name just two instances in such a lineage, Eduardo Chillida pursued for several decades a project to produce a cubic void inside the sacred mountain

Eduardo Chillida had a lifelong obsession to hollow out a mountain in order to create a sacred space. Mount Tindaya, 1985–.

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would lend “an instant ‘aged’ patina to the setting.”3 In this sense, rootedness and history informed Barragán’s work as much as modernity. His fascination with the lithograph Pueblo Mexicano (1930) by José Clemente Orozco illustrates this complex coexistence well.

In the lithograph, cubic architecture dances above a dramatic rocky landscape. Barragán similarly described his work at the Jardines del Pedregal as an architecture of abstract qualities, of primary geometric forms that “were intended to make [his work] distinct from but not dominant over the Pedregal landscape,” as Eggener notes.4 His sales pavilion, the Prieto House, and the “demonstration houses” he built in collaboration with Max Cetto were widely published and resonated within a global architectural scene looking for fresh takes on international-style modernism, but they hardly connected with the growing group of international industrialists and Mexican entrepreneurs who had more “modern” aspirations.

By the 1950s, there was very little construction work going on in the Pedregal development that was not directly instigated by Barragán, and the real estate venture needed a new

impulse. The Bustamantes proposed the young and flamboyant architect Francisco Artigas to design and build a second sales pavilion to attract potential buyers. This new pavilion immediately struck a different tone: the building was utterly dynamic and transparent, with a zigzagging access ramp and large window frames. Supported by four small, round, black columns that dissipate in the shadows underneath the building, the whole object seemed to float magically above the volcanic rock, offering visitors panoramic views over the rugged landscape from a cantilevered terrace. This daring model of a newly arrived modern lifestyle was quickly accepted by the affluent society of postwar Mexico City, and soon Artigas became the

The dining table runs into lava-rock formations inside the Luis Bustamante house. Francisco Artigas, architect.

Roberto Luna and Fernando Luna, photographers. Jardines del Pedregal, Mexico City, 1956.

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most prolific architect of the Pedregal development, with more than fifty luxurious dwellings realized.

Notwithstanding its commercial success, mainstream modernist design as implemented by Artigas was frequently critiqued as a globally exported style that failed to address local conditions. Artigas’s sales pavilion—and, for that matter, most of his residential work in El Pedregal—constitutes the perfect metaphor for this allegation: an imported language blithely laid on top of existing topography. In the iconic images of the Casa del Risco (1952), we see an almost collage-like superposition of two different entities, a foreign idiom unconditionally inserted into a specific and local geographic and cultural environment. Still, the

awkward realization here is that the architectural outcome does not seem to sustain the accusation; one would expect that the result would a blatant mismatch, but rather, the opposite is true. The slick orthogonal lines of the modern volume establish a powerful contrast with the dark, tortuous volcanic surfaces underneath, while the sculptural rock formations are reinforced by the crisp and smooth architecture that forms its new backdrop.

Both seem only to enhance one another. This powerful encounter between the existing geology and a prism-based modernism was already visible in some of the published images of the Kahn House by Richard Neutra, for example. But both Barragán and Cetto, his frequent collaborator (who

Abstract geometric volumes hovering over the volcanic landscape. Francisco Artigas, architect. Roberto Luna and Fernando Luna, photographers.

Casa Federico Gómez (Casa del Risco), Jardines del Pedregal, Mexico City, 1951–52.

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TEOPANZOLCO CULTURAL CENTER, CUERNAVACA, MEXICO, 2017 A stepped triangular esplanade forms the roof of the auditorium. This inclined surface supports the smaller triangular roof of the main lobby. Both platforms descend in opposite directions and create a visual interplay of inclined planes in a direct dialogue with the existing landscape and the adjacent pre-Hispanic pyramids.

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORà NEO LIMAC, PERU, 2006 The LiMAC museum has no facade or silhouette. It is a buried space illuminated through patios and skylights. The museum manifests itself as a series of square excavations and triangular volumes in the landscape: an abstract composition, like a Nazca drawing, in the Peruvian desert.

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Image credits Images spanning multiple pages are listed by the first page on which they appear. page 11 Courtesy Estate of Marvin Rand pages 12 and 13 © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020 page 14 left Courtesy Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects pages 14 right and 15 Courtesy Proyecto Helicoide (www.proyectohelicoide.com) page 16 Courtesy Safdie Architects page 17 Photograph by Soichi Sunami. © 2020 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York page 19 Image courtesy Wonne Ickx. Fair use page 20 left Courtesy Legorreta pages 20 right and 21 Images courtesy Wonne Ickx. Fair use pages 22–25 Courtesy Legorreta page 27 Photograph by Aris Konstantinidis. Courtesy Dimitri Konstantinidis and Alexandra Tsoukala page 28 left Courtesy Yale School of Architecture page 28 right Photograph by Aris Konstantinidis. Courtesy Dimitri Konstantinidis and Alexandra Tsoukala pages 29 and 30 left © Hélène Binet pages 30 right and 32–35 Photographs by Nicolò Galeazzi.

Courtesy atelier XYZ page 37 R. M. Schindler papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC, Santa Barbara page 38 Courtesy Frank Escher pages 39–40 John Lautner papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2007.M.13). © Heirs or estate of Leland Y. Lee, with permission of The John Lautner Foundation page 41 John Lautner papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2007.M.13). © 2020 The John Lautner Foundation pages 42–43 John Lautner papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2007.M.13). © Heirs or estate of Leland Y. Lee, with permission of The John Lautner Foundation pages 44–45 Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust page 47 Médiathèque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont, France. © Ministère de la Culture / Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY page 48 Inv. 80.2.27. Don Georges Hilbert, 1980. © Ville de Versailles, Musée Lambinet page 49 Photograph by Daniel Díaz Font. Courtesy Estate of Eduardo Chillida and Hauser & Wirth. © Zabalaga-Leku, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020 page 50 © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020 page 52 Courtesy Luis Asín page 55 Printed in PROCESS 39, “Modern Mexican Architecture” (1983): 76. Fair use page 56 left © 2020 Barragan Foundation, Switzerland / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York page 56 right Photograph by Armando Salas Portugal. © 2020 Barragan Foundation, Switzerland / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York pages 57–60 Courtesy Archive Roberto Luna and Fernando Luna pages 62–63 Images courtesy Hemeroteca Nacional UNAM. Fair use page 65 Photograph by Peter Harholdt. Image courtesy Collection Martin Z. Margulies, Miami. © Michael Heizer page 66 left Photograph by John Weber. Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. © Michael Heizer page 66 right Inhotim Collection, Brazil. © Michael Heizer page 67 Deutsches Museum, Munich, Archives, CD_69995 page 68 left Photograph by Doron. CC BY-SA 3.0 page 68 right © Michael Poliza page 70 left Courtesy Anita Pedersen Warren page 70 right CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain page 71 © Private Archive Hollein page 77 Courtesy Carlos Bedoya pages 78–96 © PRODUCTORA. All images by PRODUCTORA except: pages 78–82 Luis Gallardo pages 84 right and 85 Paul Czitrom pages 86 right and 87–91 Luis Gallardo page 94 Iwan Baan page 95 Rory Gardiner Cover photograph by Luis Gallardo. © PRODUCTORA Endpaper captions and credits, from front to back of book: Albert Frey, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer. Frey House, Palm Springs, California, 1964. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust Richard Neutra, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer.

Stone-Fisher Platform Houses, Los Angeles, 1965. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust Tita Carloni, architect. Casa Balmelli, Rovio, Switzerland, 1956.

Courtesy Fondazione Archivi Architetti Ticinesi Richard Neutra, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer.

Stone-Fisher Platform Houses, Los Angeles, 1965. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust

Albert Frey, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer. Frey House, Palm Springs, California, 1964. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust Craig Ellwood, architect. Julius Shulman, photographer.

Zack House, Los Angeles, 1952. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10). © J. Paul Getty Trust H.U. Scherer, project architect. Metron Architektengruppe, execution. Mühlehalde Terrace Housing, Umiken, Switzerland, 1963–71. Courtesy Metron Craig Ellwood, architect. ArtCenter College of Design Hillside campus, ca. 1977 (2004.26.309). © ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA The publisher, co-publisher, and authors have made every effort to identify and contact owners of copyright. We sincerely apologize for any mistakes or omissions and ask that copyright owners notify the publisher of these oversights, which will be corrected in future editions.

Colophon

Published by:

Concept: PRODUCTORA (Carlos Bedoya, Wonne Ickx, Victor Jaime, Abel Perles) Contributors: Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, Jesús Vassallo Design: Mainstudio (Edwin van Gelder, Florian Schimanski) Coordination: Tessa Watson and Jayne Kelley Copyediting and text supervision: Jayne Kelley Image supervision: Jayne Kelley, Tessa Watson Printing and lithography: robstolk

IITAC Press IIT College of Architecture 3360 South State Street Chicago, IL 60616-3793 USA www.arch.iit.edu

PRODUCTORA would like to thank IIT and the College of Architecture, especially Wiel Arets, Dirk Denison, and Sasha Zanko; Michelangelo Sabatino, Lluís Ortega, Andrew Jiang, and all IIT faculty, students, and staff who contributed to the exhibition and symposium in S. R. Crown Hall on November 9, 2018; and Sarah Herda and the Graham Foundation for hosting a conversation between the contributors of this book in the afternoon before the symposium.

We are very grateful to everyone that helped us locate and granted us permission to use the many images in this book. Special thanks go to Dolores Robles at Legorreta, Antti Rüegg at Metron / ETH, the family of Roberto y Fernando Luna, and the librarians at the Arts Library at UCLA. Finally, we would like to thank those who formed part of our studios at IIT and were crucial sparring partners in developing the ideas represented in this book: in the “Being the Mountain” studio, our co-instructor Agata Siemionow and students Edgar Alvarado, Luke Downen, Daniel Godziszewski, Zhitao Hu, Karam Lee, Jennifer Nakano, Neesha Narayanan, Andi Piper, Leslie Schamber, Daniela Sesma Espinoza, Katsia Seviarynchyk, Marta Wojcik, Cristian Yugsi, and Ernesto Zuniga; and in the “Elevated Surface Depressed” studio, our co-instructor Joseph Altschuler and students Kat Bernardo, Kurt Cheang, Ling Deng, Maria Escario, Isabel Fitzpatrick-Meyer, Piotr Jelonek, Marcus Malesh, Christina Mikhail, Jess Monigal, Paul Nagtalon, Alessandro Signori, Daniel Tangaro, Alejandro Valencia, and Elizabeth Vasquez.

MCHAP This publication and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) are initiatives of Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture.

MCHAP would like to thank all those who made this program and publication possible: IIT, the College of Architecture and the Lambert Fund, the City of Chicago, and the firms, institutions, and individuals that generously support the initiative, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Alphawood Foundation, Kohler, and the Mies van der Rohe Society at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Illinois Institute of Technology Reed Kroloff, Dean, IIT College of Architecture Dirk Denison, Director, MCHAP Sasha Zanko, MCHAP Program Coordinator

Actar Publishers New York Barcelona www.actar.com Distributed by: Actar D, Inc. New York 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor New York, NY 10016 USA +1 2129662207 salesnewyork@actar-d.com Barcelona Roca i Batlle, 2-4 08023 Barcelona, Spain +34 933 282 183 eurosales@actar-d.com Edition © IITAC and Actar “Geologic Gestures” © Jesús Vassallo All other texts © IIT All rights reserved Printed in the Netherlands ISBN: 9781948765510 LCCN: 2020932411 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA