The Soul of Building - Michael Swartz Architecture Thesis Proposal

THE SOUL OF BUILDING THE VALUE OF BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY DESIGN

MICHAEL GREY SWARTZ

Contents:

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Introduction The Profession The State of America The Value of Beauty Unfolding Wholeness Proposal Appendices

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INTRODUCTION

Read This First “Primarily, Nature furnished the materials for architectural motifs out of which the architectural forms as we know them today have been developed, and, although our practice for centuries has been for the most part to turn from her, seeking inspiration in books and adhering slavishly to dead formulae, her wealth of suggestion is inexhaustible; her riches greater than any man’s desire.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, 1908

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have identified the single most important problem facing architecture. After laboring over it for so long I couldn’t believe how simple it was. 100 years ago modernism freed our buildings from the restrictions of style.

Modernism is also the first time in history where function came to be valued above beauty.

This was a mistake. Because of this error cities worldwide are becoming hideous and needlessly complex.

Buildings are environments first, all else is secondary. Every problem facing architecture goes away when buildings are thought of as environments. Environments can only be ugly or beautiful.

Buildings are not catalysts for social planning, they are environments. Buildings are not tools that modify or enhance their program, they are not machines for living and working, they are environments. And people only want to live in environments that are beautiful.

Anyone with their head screwed on straight can enclose space to accommodate program and stack it to create a tower. The architect is not an organizer of spaces.

The task of the architect is to create environments that people find beautiful.

This is where the true value of the architect is to be found, it is what only he can do. Easier said than done. What we as humans find beautiful turns out to be very elusive. Once we discover a beautiful way to build, it grows stale quickly.

Classical styles, though reliable ways to harness beauty, are now stillborn.

Discovering what is beautiful is a never ending problem, but also a gift. Because of this, beauty will always be relevant. Thankfully we have ready access to the infinite source, Nature.

My thesis is about discovering and re-discovering what humans find to be beautiful, so that as an architect I can bring more of it into the world.

The life of this spread has been reduced by the inclusion of the photograph on the facing page. Imagine how it feels in person.

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San Diego Public Library, Rob Quigley. A vampiric (life draining) environment.

CHAPTER 1

The Profession “Instead of being a discipline that innovates through the practice of designing buildings, we now innovate through the practice of assembling leftovers. From shredded blue jeans used as insulation to discarded skateboards used as walls and from cardboard tube structures (that recently received our highest award— the Pritzker), to shipping-container volumes, architecture is becoming the new casserole of the twenty-first century’s industrial leftovers.”

–Mark Foster Gage, 2014

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got into architecture to save the world. Not really, I stumbled into it when I had to pick something to study in college. Now, four and a half years later at the time of writing, I am faced with the reality of entering a diseased, soulless profession. If you asked me six months ago to give you a run down of the architectural industry I would be at a loss for words. What you are taught at architecture school is completely separate from the work you do for a typical firm.

I used to think that architects were the visionaries behind our built world. This is not the case.

If the architect is one who decides what our structures look like and how they function, then the real architects are developers.

Developers acquire the site, determine the program, scope, budget, and envision the completed project. Then hire an architect to resolve the minutia and churn out the drawings for them. I am referring to the 99.9% of all buildings not built by starchitect firms: these are pop architecture and do not apply to the norm.

Above this, urban planning committees decide the master plans for our cities. They determine zoning codes, height and setback regulations, aesthetic requirements, and budgets.

Maybe a trained architect is consulted, maybe not.

This is not an indicator that developers are evil and egotistical, or that city planners just care about money. The problem is with the architects.

The architect has been removed from the conversation because the skills he provides are not essential.

Advancements in building information modeling technology and the rise of specialized consultant groups have reduced the architect to a glorified digital model and drawing author. This effect will compound as technology continues to improve. Buildings are now seen primarily as a real estate investment. Return on investment is prioritized over design quality. The result is cheaper, uglier buildings in our cities.

The good news is, this has created a vacuum where beautiful buildings once stood. There is an unmet need in the market for buildings that speak to the human soul. This is the job of the architect of the future. And it’s not going to happen by begging someone for their money to help build your design.

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he solution: architect as developer.

Technology has reduced the role of the traditional architect, but has also freed him of much of the banalities that plagued the profession in the past. A mistake would be to leverage this freedom to increase BIM services.

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My challenge to you is as follows: If you’re so good at designing buildings, why can’t you make them pay?

Instead of trying to convince a developer to entrust millions of dollars into your ideas, take on the risk and do it yourself. If your hunch is correct, the design value you have added will pay. The upper limits to this are unknowable.

Imagine what the world will look like where architects are competing with each other to create more beautiful, fulfilling places. I’m trying to imagine it now and it’s not easy. So little of these kind of places exist in America.

2. The success or failure of the project lies solely in the judgment of the architect.

3. Closer to the “master builder” role that has existed for millennia.

4. Greater design agency, cohesion in ideas and execution.

5. More active role in the building industry.

6. Greater sense of purpose in increasing the net beauty in our environments.

Some of the many benefits to the architect as developer business model: 1. Architect controls the entire process from start to finish.

Fenestra Nya Hovås, A middle school in Finland: dishonest rendering commonplace in the industry.

John Portman Marriott marquis

CHAPTER 2

The State of America “Box to box, boxes within the box, framed by steel from the outside in, has long been the traditional form of building. But if this boxation is to continue, why call it modern architecture? We know better. What we now need is not more nineteenth century architecture of this type. Past the middle of the twentieth century, we are at last ready for twentieth century architecture.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, 1957

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merica is paradise. By global standards, no one in the country lives outside the middle class.

But for paradise, its buildings are awfully ugly.

American buildings are either hideous or just plain unremarkable. Everything built outside of metropolitan cities constitutes wastelands of strip-malls, pavement with white or yellow stripes, sagging cable systems, infrastructural metal boxes, and distribution warehouses.

Franchise establishments pepper the landscape according to no organizational rule other than where a car can go easily. All are housed in mundane enclosures with bright insignia colored in primary colors. People travel en massse to Europe and Asia to experience an inkling of what it feels like to be a part of something with a rich historical culture.

There are of course good reasons for the current state of built America. This economic paradise was created in large part by the economic mobility that building quick and cheap allows.

In a fast growing free market economy, buildings must be built cheap and fast in order to facilitate consumer exchanges as efficiently as possible. On one hand you can look at this uniquely American typology–fast and cheap with lots of pavement– as the product of poor design judgment in favor of captial generation. Someone else might see the booming economy of a town, improved access to products and services, easily navigable via

the speed and comfort of your car. Both of these views are correct. However, once basic human needs are met, prioritizing economic growth is to the detriment of the soul. Fast and cheap offers economic growth, which is vital when people are impoverished. Fast and cheap also means identical. Entire cities are left looking exactly the same all across America. There is no historical account of culture imbued in the buildings of cities built this way, and so there is nothing to be proud of. And it’s a shame, because America is overflowing with cultural history and national pride, all largely untapped.

We are at a point in time where most of America has had their fill of economic growth, and are now looking for a sense of place in their cities.

The challenge of the second half of the 21st century for architects will be accommodating the desire of American cities to establish their history and culture into the built environment in a way that will sustain for the next 600 years.

Isn’t that what architects do today? The best, most cutting edge version of architecture we have today is a hobbling teeter totter between pure functionalism and pure formalism. Architects advertise their buildings as utilitarian tools that will enhance whatever programmatic function the building houses. In reality, they are displays

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of cleverness driven by ego that complicate processes and confuse occupants.

Contemporary works of “high architecture” are needlessly complex, confusing, condescending, and structurally unintuitable by occupants. They are foreign objects meant to display the cleverness of the architects, acting as designer status symbols for a wealthy city to hang on their wall. Cities are lining up for new blank civic buildings with a confusing structural systems and techno-gimmcks.

One thing nevertheless remains constant with all contemporary high architecture, beauty is sin, culture is sin. Buildings are created to accommodate the greatest common denominator, which in today’s interconnected world, is the entire world. The idea of nationalism–a collection of multicultural individuals united under the ideals and flag of one country–is relegated in favor of the vague and generic. At this point in time it’s good for commerce, but at the expense of the citizen’s sense of belonging and pride in country.

To address one culture in an architecture is to take an active exclusionary stance towards every other culture. To make a building considered beautiful by one culture is to reject the standards of beauty that exist within every other culture.

And so buildings are designed to be physically barren and stripped of culture and beauty. The pursuit of a distinctly American architecture has been halted. Value is reclaimed instead through functional and structural gimmick. If the result of programmatic function, structural innovation, cutting edge material, sustainable technology has an emergent aesthetic “coolness”, then job well done in the eyes of the contemporary architecture sphere. The results certainly aren’t beautiful. This process reliably creates placeless buildings that can be plopped into any metropolitan city interchangeably. “This building looks like it’s falling over, but it’s really not. This building is normal but with a ski slope on top. This building has a screen system that oscillates like a worm when the wind hits it. This building looks like it’s being crushed by the train going over it.” Who is arguing for buildings that speak to the soul of mankind? Contemporary architecture is all about branding, it’s not about creating beautiful places in service of the public.

Designing a building truly rooted in the physical and cultural context of its place, dedicated to the principles of natural beauty obscures the signature of the architect. In an age where branding is everything, this is bad for business.

So we are given buildings like the Seattle Central Library. Stripped down, hyper functional and ugly, it could be placed anywhere in the world and–aside from it’s scale–it wouldn’t look out of place. Because it has no place in mind. It doesn’t reflect the history or cultural minutiae of Seattle any more than it does that of London or Taiwan.

I am especially concerned with this building because it’s a work of civic architecture, publicly funded, meant to serve and represent the people of the city. Yet by looking at and in the building it’s impossible to see any interpretation of the ideals of the individuals in Seattle, or it’s history. It has set a bad precedent. You might say “The Seattle Central Library is highly technological, innovative, and accommodates all cultures. These are essential values of the city of Seattle.”, and you would be correct. However, in representing these values there is nothing that calls for the end result to be ugly. Making the building ugly is only to emphasize the point that this library derives all of it’s value from how functional it is. It’s an egotistical move by the architect that is meant to draw attention to his intelligence. This type of building is synonymous with OMA: cutting edge functional programming, structure that defies intuition, and absolutely hideous to emphasize the first two points. Koolhaas has had immense success with this type of building. He has found his niche and his style (though he denies fame and style, his buildings are some of the most famous and recognizable). However, this is not the highest form of what Architecture can and should be as we are taught in design schools today. Designing this way has glaring problems that only become apparent when looking at the broader context.

Hyper intellectualization and obscurantism sells buildings. Investors want to feel like they are getting their millions worth. One can imagine that stakeholders sleep better at night knowing that their new building has addressed all of those issues whose effectiveness can’t be measured objectively. So, architects who successfully pander to this desire do well for themselves at the cost of their own integrity. This is eroding the reputation of the profession.

CHAPTER 3

The Value of Beauty “I know with what suspicion the man is regarded who refers matters of fine art back to Nature. I know that it is usually an ill-advised return that is tempted, for Nature in external, obvious aspect is the usually accepted sense of the term and the nature that is reached. But given inherent vision there is no source so fertile, so suggestive, so helpful aesthetically for the architect as a comprehension of natural law.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, 1908

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y primary claim in this book is that buildings function only as environments.

And that people want to live and work in beautiful environments.

I will base the success of my future career on the truth of the following statements: 1. Beauty is not a matter of subjective taste.

2. Beauty has the potential for profound healing. Ugliness is mentally fatiguing and stress inducing.

3. Beauty arises through a combination of wholeness, aesthetic arrangement, and authenticity.

4. As environments, our structures work best when they embody the same logic that governs nature.

5. This logic is of recursive wholeness as outlined

by Christopher Alexander.

Since the beginning of time we have been taking the materials around us and stacking them to make shelter. What separates an architect from a builder is his ability to make environments that people find to be beautiful.

When you are in or around a building, you don’t experience it as a parti diagram, or a sequence of perspective views, or plan/section drawings.

You experience a building as a series of involuntary reactions to the environment it creates for you at any given moment.

This is the only judgment of a successful building: does it create an environment that people find fulfilling?

Primary among the forms of beauty are machine beauty and natural beauty. Machine beauty applies to tools. It emerges from its mathematical resolution, the so called beauty of its ingenuity.

Its beauty is in how well it works and what it enables us to do.

As environments, our buildings should aspire to be an interpretation of nature. It is a logical error to try to apply machine beauty to buildings. We have a hard-wired positive inclination towards nature. Infrastructural concrete and steel are not elements found in nature.

The same laws that give a landscape its beauty will give a building beauty.

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Enclosed Environment

Unstable Environment

Chaotic Environment

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ur environments can heal us. Views to natural elements, particularly vegetation, illicit positive aesthetic responses that have been shown to reduce physiological and psychological stress in humans.

hidden, too simple and it appears inhospitable.

In 1994 a study by Roger S. Ulrich concluded that patients with a tree view had shorter postoperative hospital stays, had fewer negative evaluative comments from nurses, took fewer moderate and strong analgesic doses, and had slightly lower scores for minor postsurgical complications (Ulrich 1994).

Our environments can also harm us. How do you punish someone who is already serving a life sentence in prison?

Aesthetic reactions peak particularly when shown images of savannas. These effects appear to be hard-wired into the brain, remnants of our shared evolution in the savannas of east Africa.

Humans find environments with a fractal dimension between 1.3 and 1.5 to be most appealing. Too complex and dangers can be

Salisbury Cathedral

In other words, it’s not the tree we find beautiful, but the underlying fractal dimensionality. (Joye 2017).

By depriving the brain of stimulus for extended periods of time in solitary confinement. Isolation from other people is of course the most harmful aspect. Yet looking at these examples it’s clear severity can be increased via the physical qualities of the space.

We understand intuitively that by decreasing the amount of light, space, vegetation and visual stimuli, space becomes inhospitable.

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US Solitary Confinement Cells

CHAPTER 4

Unfolding Wholeness “I would like to summarize our work by explaining this new kind of empirical complex in the following way. In any part of what we call nature, or any part of a building, we see, at many levels of scale, coherent entities or centers, ­nested in each other, and overlapping each other. These ­coherent entities all have, in varying degree, some quality of life.”

–Christopher Alexander 2014

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t is often said that while many things fade, a beautiful view never gets old. I was eleven years old in the first photo on the facing page.

The feeling I got when looking out over that view, and others like it, has stayed with me my entire life. A combination of overwhelming beauty, yet calm, and all the while like you are somehow part of it, or that it was meant for you.

It’s the same feeling I got a year later when I visited the Duomo in Milan. I saw a lot of old buildings when I lived in Europe, none of them replicated that feeling like the Duomo.

Photographs don’t do either of them justice, and words even less so.

I have known with full certainty since age twelve, that it is possible to capture the same qualities found in the most serene landscapes, within a building. Buildings are able to evoke the same emotions as the most beautiful landscapes.

We are capable of harnessing the rarity of the great alps with our structures. And along with it, all of the profound experiences that nourish the human soul. People have known this for thousands of years. The Parthenon in its completion surely evoked these emotions, as did the ancient temples of India and the great mosques. At some point we forgot this knowledge, or decided it wasn’t worth using.

So the link between humans and their habitats has been severed, and we are suffering greatly because of it.

I have been on a search to, simply put, figure out the common logic between the Duomo and the Swiss Alps. I knew it had something to do with fractals, something to do with gradual lessening, and something to do with a small scale of parts.

All great buildings seem to be thickest at base and lessen as they rise, sprouting into spires and proud sculpture at the top. All great buildings have parts that recur at all scales. Larger portions are made entirely of smaller versions of the whole.

All plants and geological features operate this way, as a function of gravity. It’s also common with all great religious structures, which have done the best to emulate nature so as to illicit aesthetic responses in humans.

Sprouting of the Reichstag

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n 2004 Christopher Alexander published a book that may hold the key to capturing the underlying structure of nature that I am after.

He calls buildings that successfully embody the order found in nature “living structure.”

The quality of each audience member’s musical experience is dependent on each one of these aspects firing correctly, and thousands more.

And their success or failure is all based on the decisions of individual people.

Alexander posits the following:

Obviously certain “wholes” are more important than others, the most important being that the music is played correctly. The point is that every “whole” of the musical experience is reliant on a myriad of overlapping centers, each with their own “wholeness”.

1. Living structure arises in entities functioning as wholes.

2. Things don’t have distinct boundaries, they are always working as a whole within an unbroken continuum of wholes.

3. Wholes are made of centers, which are made of centers.

4. The strength of the overall “wholeness” relies on the strength of the recursive centers that compose it.

5. Centers are almost always convex in shape and have local symmetry.

6. By pulling off these ideas correctly, you will have an entity that has “life”.

This seems to capture and expand upon a few of the hunches I had about the Duomo. Primarily the recurring / fractal nature of the geometry.

This theory of nested centers has changed the way I approach everything now. It seems to be a natural law, it can be applied everywhere. It also smashes any previous idea of beauty I had regarding so called “unity in variety.”

For example, the strength of a symphony orchestra relies on the wholeness of each section, the strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

The wholeness of each section is dependent on the ability of each musician.

The experience had by each audience member in an orchestra is not in the pleasure created by unity in variety of sound. It is an experience that has unfolded outwards from the center of each musician’s ability, from the ability of the composer who wrote the piece, from the ability of the conductor to direct. From the acoustics in the orchestral hall. From each fold in the red curtain hanging above. From every light so perfectly placed to create ambiance with no glare. From the comfort of the audience member’s chair. From how stressful it was to park the car outside. From the cleanliness of the restrooms and how easy it was to find them.

Examples of gradual lessening and recurring geometry.

Yes the columns on the temple structure are too far inward.

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Christopher Alexander

Alhambra, Spain, 13th Century

CHAPTER 5

Project Proposal “Great art has always, at first, been controversial. Now that our means of communication have multiplied, how much more so today? ...Specialists in controversy, numerous and vociferous, sprout on every branch. And the pressure to conformity leaves young minds weak with the uncertainty that cleaves, for reassurance, to the static in some form.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, 1957

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he point of including the above quote is not to say that my art is great. It’s a shrewd reminder from Mr. Wright that the more reassuring option is usually the wrong one.

I am proposing for my project a lamp-post in the heart of Knoxville, market square. Within the square is a small oasis that would be made more whole by a beautiful lamp.

After designing fake buildings for the past four years, that realm has been thoroughly exhausted.

I am more convinced than ever that a real lamp is better than another imaginary building.

The lamp is highly symbolic. In 1723 two lamps were hung in the steeple of the Old North Church by three men from Boston. The signal from Paul Revere that the British were coming by sea. Paul Ruskin’s book seven lamps of architecture. The lamp as a recurring symbol of refuge in film and literature.

Most importantly, the lamp post is vastly overlooked as an integral part of our environments, which means it is the perfect time for an intervention of this kind.

1. A lamp post is simultaneously a primary object as the source of light in darkness, and a backdrop, strengthening its context.

2. It is small enough to build and test real, full scale prototypes.

3. Has structure and program.

4. Within its strict requirements, also allows for infinite variation and experimentation.

5. Creates a contained environment in and around it. Potential for aesthetic experiences.

6. If done right, will increase the strength of market square, Knoxville, and the USA. 7. If I can make a lamp post with life, I can do it with a building.

London, 1952, Monty Fresco

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Market Square, Knoxville

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Heathcote, Edwin. “The Problem with Ornament.” Architectural Review, September 3, 2015. https:// www.architectural-review.com/ornament-is-the-language-through-which-architecture-communicateswith-a-broader-public/8687822.article.

Ornament is how architects communicate with the public through buildings Gaudi most famous architect in the world Contemporary firms use ornament, but in a distanced, ironic way

Joye, Yannick. “Fractal Architecture Could Be Good for You.” Nexus Network Journal, October 2007, 311–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8699-3_9.

Evolved on the savanna Similarity in doric column to devils staircase Intermediate level of fractal detail is what we desire Too complex and it can’t be parsed, seems dangerous Places to inhabit makes us feel safer All of this backed up with MRI stress level data

Linse, Maja. “Fractal Geometry in Nature and Architecture.” spatial experiments. Lund University, September 18, 2016. https://spatialexperiments.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/fractal-geometry-innature-and-architecture/.

Basic explanation of fractals in arch.

Good images of hindu temple selfsimilar

“MIT Faculty on Ornament.” MIT Architecture, September 2004. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ architecture/4-645-selected-topics-in-architecture-architecture-from-1750-to-the-present-fall-2004/ assignments/responses_5_3.pdf.

Good range of solid opinions What it’s good for, what it isn’t good for, etc

Wright, Frank Lloyd. “In the Cause of Architecture, III: Steel.” Architectural Record, August 1927. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/11513-in-the-cause-of-architecture-iii-steel.

Frank Lloyd wright on technology, misuse of tech, steel, material, etc

Wright, Frank Lloyd. “In the Cause of Architecture.” Architectural Record, March 1908. https://www. architecturalrecord.com/articles/11469-in-the-cause-of-architecture?page=4.

Beauty, principles of beauty Imitation of nature Man and the machine Organic architecture

Wright, Frank Lloyd. A Testament. Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Horizon Press, 1957.

Beauty as exuberance without excess

Notes on the profession

Man and the machine Materials Hubner, Ronald, and Martin Fillinger. “Comparison of Objective Measures for Predicting Perceptual Balance and Visual Aesthetic Preference.” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2016.00335.

Deviations from center of mass negatively correlate with aesthetic preference for 2d compositions. Preferences were higher for circles than hexagons.

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Ruta, Nicole, Mastandrea, Stefano, Penacchio, Olivier, Lamaddalena, Stefania, and Bove, Giuseppe.

“A comparison between preference judgments of curvature and sharpness in architectural façades.”

Architectural Science Review (2019). DOI: 10.1080/00038628.2018.1558393

Significant preference shown for façade with curvilinear features. Ratings were taken for

complexity, approach, liking.

Friedenberg, Jay, and Marco Bertamini. “Aesthetic Preference for Polygon Shape.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, vol. 33, no. 2, July 2015, pp. 144–160, doi:10.1177/0276237415594708.

Aesthetic preference shown for polygons with greater complexity through higher contour variance while keeping area constant. Additionally, shapes with higher levels of concave polarity were preferred.

Friedenberg, Jay. “Aesthetic Judgment of Triangular Shape: Compactness and Not the Golden Ratio Determines Perceived Attractiveness.” I-Perception 3.3 (2012): 163-75. Web. Study showing participants preferred triangles that were more compact. Rating them higher on an attractiveness scale from 1-7. Triangles shown point down (as opposed to base down) were seen as less beautiful because it looks like they will fall over and break more easily. May be explained by perceptual instability hypothesis. These judgments may be evolutionarily related to perceptual affordances (Gibson, 1986) because unstable objects are either difficult to use or cannot be used. We’re constantly judging and rating things according to use and fitness.

Mura, Marina, and Renato Troffa. “Aesthetic, Perception and Preference for Historical and Modern Buildings.” Cognitive Processing, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-006-0069-3.

Identifies age as a significant variable in predicting preference for buildings. Study was of buildings in Cagliari. Buildings selected by two architects from three different age categories.

Vartanian, Oshin, et al. “Impact of Contour on Aesthetic Judgments and Approach-Avoidance Decisions in Architecture.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol.

110, 2013, pp. 10446–10453. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42706679.

Beauty and approach preference shown for spaces created of curvilinear contour rather than sharp edges.

Bertamini, Marco et al. “Do observers like curvature or do they dislike angularity?.” British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) vol. 107,1 (2016): 154-78. doi:10.1111/bjop.12132

Results show significant preference for curvature in contour. Angularity could not be concluded to be the decisive factor in shape preference aversion.

Ulrich, Roger S. “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.” Science, vol. 224, 1984, p. 420+. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A3238205/AONE?u=tel_a_ utl&sid=AONE&xid=d1f2ac02. Accessed 12 Dec. 2019.

View of a tree through hospital window shown to increase healing time and reduce stress in individuals following gall bladder removal surgery.