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Five Houses, Ten Details
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Classificação: 4 de 5 estrelas4/5 (1 avaliação)
Duração: 342 páginas3 horas
- Editora:
- Princeton Architectural Press
- Lançado em:
- Apr 17, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781568989631
- Formato:
- Livro
Descrição
Edward Ford's forty years of practicing and teaching architecture have focused on one area: the architectural detail. Yet, despite two hugely influential books (The Details of Modern Architecture, volumes 1 and 2), numerous articles, and lectures given from Vancouver to Vienna, there are two questions Ford has, remarkably, never answered: "What is a detail?" and more importantly, "What is a good detail?" Ford is an architect as well as a writer, so it is not surprising that rather than answering these questions in a third book, he spent six years on the design and construction of a house. Building it was not an exercise in the application of ideas about detail; it was, rather, a mechanism for answering those two simple questions.
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDados do livro
Five Houses, Ten Details
Notas:
Classificação: 4 de 5 estrelas4/5 (1 avaliação)
Duração: 342 páginas3 horas
Descrição
Edward Ford's forty years of practicing and teaching architecture have focused on one area: the architectural detail. Yet, despite two hugely influential books (The Details of Modern Architecture, volumes 1 and 2), numerous articles, and lectures given from Vancouver to Vienna, there are two questions Ford has, remarkably, never answered: "What is a detail?" and more importantly, "What is a good detail?" Ford is an architect as well as a writer, so it is not surprising that rather than answering these questions in a third book, he spent six years on the design and construction of a house. Building it was not an exercise in the application of ideas about detail; it was, rather, a mechanism for answering those two simple questions.
- Editora:
- Princeton Architectural Press
- Lançado em:
- Apr 17, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781568989631
- Formato:
- Livro
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Five Houses, Ten Details - Edward R. Ford
Five Houses, Ten Details
Five Houses, Ten Details
Edward R. Ford
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
To James
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
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© 2009 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Managing Editor: Jennifer Thompson
Project Editor: Wendy Fuller
Design print edition: Project Projects
Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Bree Apperley, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Dan Simon, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press
—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ford, Edward R.
Five houses, ten details /
Edward R. Ford.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-56898-826-9 (digital)
1. Architecture—Details. 2. Architecture, Domestic—Designs and plans. I. Title. II. Title: 5 houses, 10 details.
NA2840.F68 2009
728—dc22
2008046075
Preface
In January of 1997 I purchased a small urban lot near the center of Charlottesville, Virginia, and, over the next three years, working with the same site, the same program and often the same building footprint, designed more than a dozen houses for myself before starting construction in 2000. This is the history of five of those designs. More accurately it is a history of five long investigations into the architectural detail, each of which ended in the design of one of those houses. The first three houses were not built for a variety of reasons. Some cost too much; others were based on presumptions, technical and otherwise, that proved inaccurate or unproductive. The fourth house was the one I began to build. The fifth house was the one I designed and built within the fourth as it was being constructed, the small scale elements, particularly the built-in furniture. While all influenced the final design, each was not an evolutionary development of the previous one, but rather an independent exploration of an aspect of architecture—site, material, structure, construction, and program—and how those aspects were manifested in five concepts of the architectural detail. Each of these concepts was the culmination of years spent in practice and research, so each house is explained as part of a larger personal history, and mixed into the text are other projects that continued or began the same explorations.
Obviously there is a great deal more than detail that influenced the design of these houses, but it is the premise of this book that the detail is not an accessory to architecture but its essence. Each was pursued with the conviction that the primary mechanism for the exploration and expression of these five subjects was the detail. It was not, however, based on the assumption that the miniscule detail is the final product of an ideology inherent in the larger building, but rather the opposite: that the detail is the mechanism by which certain ideas are communicated, ideas that may be absent or even contradicted by the larger design. The goal of this book is to show how this happens and the role details play not just in the constructive but in the communicative aspects of architecture. More correctly, its goal is to show how I discovered this.
What precisely is an architectural detail? It is a frequently discussed and commonly criticized aspect of contemporary architecture, yet it is rarely defined, if at all. Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret, Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph all declared that details did not exist. Many architects of the contemporary avant-garde agree. Rem Koolhaas has proclaimed his intention to make detail-less architecture; Ben van Berkel has spoken of their exclusion; and Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid, and Greg Lynn have all described the detail as a fetish. They do not dispute the necessity of detailing in a technical sense, but the articulated detail—the visible manifestation of a solution to a technical problem, elements such as the door frame, the window mullion, and the fastener—must be avoided. Details do not exist for these architects, but the act of detailing does. It is the elimination of the visible minutiae of construction in the service of abstraction and simplicity of form.¹
To many practitioners, detailing is simply a question of consistency. The ideas of the larger building are carried into its small-scale elements. It is a seamless continuation of the act of design and requires no more understanding or skill than does architecture, simply a bit more technical expertise. The articulated detail has its modernist advocates. Marco Frascari and Kenneth Frampton have turned the idea of detailing as consistency on its head, arguing that the detail can be the part from which the whole is generated, that it is a technical condensation of the greater building from which, in the manner of DNA, the building can be reconstructed. In practice this takes the form of the repetitive motif—sometimes decorative, sometimes technically necessary, sometimes both—as in the work of Carlo Scarpa or Frank Lloyd Wright, who based whole architectures around it.² A second group of advocates of the articulated detail includes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who explored what can only be called a detailing of structural symbolism, a necessary activity in a building where one wishes to express structure but is required for technical reasons to conceal it.
While this study is in large part an exploration of the detail in my own work, it is less a criticism of these commonplace ideas about detail than an exploration through design of a far richer, more productive idea: that the detail is a positive, albeit autonomous, realm of architecture.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Downing College for the award of the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellowship, which enabled me to work on the project; the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, the RIBA Drawings Collection, and the Robert Treat Paine house, Stonehurst for assistance in historical research; David Leatherbarrow for reading the manuscript; Jim Duxbury, who served as an environmental consultant on the Mountain Hut Project; Graham Peterson for help with the drawings; the University of Virginia and all my colleagues there for their assistance; and my family for their patience and support over the life of this long project.
The design and construction of the house on Farish Street was greatly assisted by the following:
Builder: Geoff and Jim Pitts of Ace Contracting
Structural Engineering: Dunbar Milby Williams Pittman & Vaughan
Lighting Design: Mark Schuyler
Structural Consultant: Kirk Martini
Landscape Consultant: Nelson Byrd Woltz
Dr. Smith
Everyone has a teacher who, from the perspective of age, emerges as more important than the others. In my case it is an unlikely candidate, Norris K. Smith, my instructor in ancient and medieval architecture and the author of what is still the best book on Frank Lloyd Wright. There was much to like about him. If not exactly charismatic, he was always engaging, available to talk about anything, and could ride his bike from his home to school without apparently taking his hands out of his pockets. There was a problem, however. He was a lifelong critic of modern architecture in its entirety and an advocate of Greek classicism. Were he alive today, he would probably not remember me. I received a B- in his course, missed a fair number of classes, and, along with my classmates, was frustrated at my own inability to respond to his arguments against the vacuousness of modernity and for the virtues of classicism. He was in many ways a frightening figure, not because he required you to believe what he believed, but simply because he required you to believe something and to explain why you believed it. But if he got the larger questions of style wrong, he got the smaller questions of meaning, which were in many ways more important, right, and I preface each section with a quote from his work that goes to the heart of the issue found there. He spoke in a voice I knew only too well, that of a man who grew up steeped in the culture, if it can be called that, of Presbyterianism, one rather heavy in Calvinism. It is not the best background with which to approach the subject of Renaissance art, his other great interest, but when he began the last chapter of his book on Wright with a discussion of the New Eden and the New Jerusalem, nothing could have seemed to me more natural. One of his favorite final exam questions was, Where would you rather live, Fallingwater or Monticello, and why?
I like to think of this book as a long overdue and overlong answer to that question.
Introduction
Five Houses
After two years of searching the ever-expanding rings of suburban development and subdivided farms of Virginia that surround Charlottesville for a site that, if it did not possess the illusion of wilderness, was at least suggestive of agriculture, I bought a one-quarter-acre lot near the center of town. The lot sat vacant for another two years while I pursued a number of designs. Some proceeded no further than a pencil sketch. Some progressed as far as wall sections. What follows is a description of five of these.
I am frequently asked what my neighbors think of the house I built there, implying, with good reason, that there is a considerable distance between my idea of a house and theirs. But the distance is at times no greater than that between myself and my architect peers. Despite my commitment to modernism, there is much about the contemporary avant-garde I find disturbing, hypocritical, wrong-headed, and ill-advised, and while I did not desire the house to be a commentary on anything, if it is inherently a criticism of the neocolonial status quo, it is also a criticism of the current state of modernism, particularly in regard to the detail.
Rem Koolhaas said that details are old architecture,
meaning by implication that they are not new architecture and in the best modern architecture they are absent.¹ In 2000 when I began the house, this was the common if not prevalent view in avant-garde modernism, but each of the Farish Street houses was designed with the conviction that details were not superfluous but essential, and with the certainty that architectural meaning could not occur without them. There is no reason that the best qualities found in traditional architecture, which certainly include details, cannot be present in modernism without recourse to historicism, kitsch, or gratuitous ornament, and each of the Farish Street houses and each of the five types of detail they exemplified were inspired by precedents, some modern, but often protomodern or even traditional.
Each house held within it the memory of another five older houses, each embodied a detail type that was out of the mainstream of post-1920s modernism, and each answered a different question: how place relates to configuration, how material determines form, how structure informs meaning, how the architectural part relates to the whole, and how scale works for and against these perceptions. In order to explain how each design led to the answer of a question about detail, I must describe the five houses that raised the questions.
House 1
Place: The Absent Detail and the Abstract Detail
My first encounter with a famous building took place seven blocks from the house where I grew up. It is the Richard Lloyd Jones House, built in 1929 by Frank Lloyd Wright for his cousin, the editor of the Tulsa Tribune. Although not exactly on the prairie, I assumed that this was prairie architecture, despite the fact that it is an assembly of tall, thin, tightly spaced concrete block piers that could not be more vertical. It is, in quantity of glass, one of Wright’s more transparent designs, but the rows of upright concrete blocks give the opposite impression. This makes the large glass prisms with steel sash that project beyond the ends of the masonry building all the more striking. Spatially bound to the site by the terminal glass prisms and the L-shaped plan, the house seems inseparable from its immediate landscape, but space is not the only factor in merging the building and site. The key lesson of the house is about the role of detail in locating
a building. What is critical in this case is not the presence of detail but its absence. The absent detail is the abstract detail, and abstraction goes to the heart of connecting or not connecting a building to a place.
The abstract detail is the opposite of the articulated detail. A detail is considered articulated to the extent to which it expresses and demonstrates the resolution of the problems of weight, material, connection, and assembly. When it expresses the opposite—absence of weight, an indifference to material, a lack of apparent connection, and an apparent disregard for the elements—it is seen as abstract. Another measure of abstraction is the degree to which the building is an ideal form perceived as a whole and not as a series of parts. Therefore, the means to abstraction in architecture and in detailing is elimination.
The abstract details in the Richard Lloyd Jones House include sills, copings, gutters, trim, and a great deal more. The technical roles they play are accomplished, but the means for doing so are hidden. Details that are visible, the articulated ones, include the tightly spaced, long, horizontal bands of steel windows, the grid of threads on which the building is woven. They physically separate the interior from the site by their presence, but they connect the house to the site by their minimal quality. In a subtle way they are Wright’s horizontal line of the prairie multiplied many times over.
Forty years later and 1,200 miles to the northeast on a site in suburban Virginia, I was asking the same question: what is the relation of form to place? While not literally in the shadow of Monticello, I was close enough, on a small urban lot four hundred feet lower and three miles to the northwest. Outside the historic district, the lot was under no stylistic restrictions beyond those latent in zoning and building codes, but to any architect or layman it was unthinkable in 2000 that the house would not be contextual, even regional.
There are a plethora of answers to the question of how a building responds to context, most of them problematic, for the neotraditionalist form would be determined by historical tradition and the immediate context, but the result would be an architecture based solely on glib associations. The more thoughtful architect might explore Monticello’s underlying framework and extract the applicable principles. Form could be based on an abstracted classicism, perhaps on landscape principles reflecting Jeffersonian ideas of an agrarian utopia, but the result would be only the banality of an abstracted classicism or the fiction of an antiquated regional ideology, Southern agrarianism.
There were respectable modernist answers to the question of how a building relates to a place. Form could be based on the ecosystem of the site, but the idea of an ecological determinism, even if possible on the urban site, would be only another fiction. Vernacular forms could be appropriated, provided they were sufficiently abstract to be protomodern. Existing types could be stripped of elements reminiscent of a particular style and reduced to their abstract, minimal essence. Technological fragments could be incorporated as a contextual reference. Entire contextual
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