Allure of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent

Designing and Appreciating Architecture as Nature

Rumiko Handa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317563297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Architects have long operated based on the assumption that a building is 'complete' once construction has finished. Striving to create a perfect building, they wish for it to stay in its original state indefinitely, viewing any subsequent alterations as unintended effects or the results of degeneration. The ideal is for a piece of architecture to remain permanently perfect and complete. This contrasts sharply with reality where changes take place as people move in, requirements change, events happen, and building materials are subject to wear and tear.

Rumiko Handa argues it is time to correct this imbalance. Using examples ranging from the Roman Coliseum to Japanese tea rooms, she draws attention to an area that is usually ignored: the allure of incomplete, imperfect and impermanent architecture. By focusing on what happens to buildings after they are 'complete', she shows that the 'afterlife' is in fact the very 'life' of a building.

However, the book goes beyond theoretical debate. Addressing professionals as well as architecture students and educators, it persuades architects of the necessity to anticipate possible future changes and to incorporate these into their original designs.

Part I
The problematic notion of complete, perfect, and permanent architecture

1
Mutability of Architecture

National Gallery of Art East Building

On March 3, 2004, in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington DC, the American Architectural Foundation held its annual Accent on Architecture Gala, drawing more than one thousand attendees, the largest in history thus far (Kolleeny 2004). This much anticipated event is the nation’s premier celebration of leadership in architecture and design, and each year honors the American Institute of Architects (AIA) award recipients. Together with the Gold Medal Award, which was bestowed posthumously on Samuel Mockbee (1944–2001), and the Firm Award, which went to Lake/Flato Architects, the Twenty-Five Year Award was presented, honoring a “significant architectural landmark completed 25–35 years ago that has withstood the test of time” (American Institute of Architects 2004). It went to a building just four blocks south of the Gala’s venue: the East Building of the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall. Designed by the architect I. M. Pei (born 1917) and opened in 1978, it already had won a national AIA award in 1981 (AIA 1981).¹ The nomination letter for the 2004 award was written by Louis R. Pounders of the AIA Committee on Design, who had worked for Pei earlier in his career. The letter identified the merit in the “distinguished execution” that had allowed the building to remain “in excellent condition” for the past twenty-five years and to continuously “serve its original purpose with dignity and grace” (Pounders 2003). In the news release issued in January prior to the ceremony, award chairman Adrian Smith (born 1944) agreed:“After a quarter century, this icon of contemporary architecture in a city of traditional monuments continues to delight and impress visitors from all over the world” (AIA 2004). Smith continued:

Almost nothing has changed! Even with the addition of staff, the increase of library collections, the invention of computers and the increasing sophistication of mechanical systems, every detail of this structure continues to exude elegance and grace. It is every bit as fresh and innovative as it was on opening day.

(AIA 2004)

The same news release further characterized the design, identifying two significant aspects in the overall design and two important features in the details. First, the design took advantage of the otherwise difficult trapezoid-shaped site resulting from Pennsylvania Avenue running diagonally northwestwards from the nearby Capitol. Pei’s ingenious design divided the trapezoid into two triangles by introducing a new diagonal line through the site, assigning the larger triangle on the north to the public and the smaller one on the south to administration and the research library, and allowing the triangular grid system to govern the spatial organization and the space frame over the interior courts. For the second design feature of excellence, the news release discussed how East Building respected Main Building (1941) designed by John Russell Pope (1874–1937). The exterior wall was finished with the same material, pink Tennessee marble. A strong east–west organization runs through the old building, paralleling the Mall’s overall arrangements. The new building extended to connect to the new building via the newly created exterior plaza and underground passageway. Museum-goers who stand at the end of the old building’s main hallway can see the wide entrance of East Building over the glass pyramids and water fountains. Below this exterior plaza, the two buildings are connected by an underground passageway lined with a museum shop and a cafeteria. Here, natural light is let in through a glassed opening, against which the sparkling water ripples down from the fountains above, and a moving walkway evokes a time tunnel with its narrow stainless steel slots creating foreshortening effects. The AIA’s news release also identified two notable details. The new building gave the appearance of load-bearing walls using a cladding system of stone panels only three inches thick, and the skylights made of double panes and a sheet lamination in between protected artwork from ultraviolet rays in the public way-finding atrium and the research library’s reading room (AIA 2004).

It took only a year for some of the praise to become empty words. Contrary to what was said, something in fact was changing. One design feature praised as an exemplar of the innovative design was giving in “to the test of time.” In 2005, a leak was found in the building, and after looking in vain for the cause on a roof terrace, a Gallery employee and a consulting engineer found a few exterior wall panels tilting out of place. Upon further inspection, 2.5 percent of the exterior panels (about 400 of 16,200) were found to be buckling out, causing the leakage. To fix the problem, the building of “elegance and grace” eventually had to be stripped down to its nakedness.

The stone panels in question are of pink Tennessee marble measuring five feet wide and two feet tall each, and are laid in the “running bond” pattern, with each row offset from the one below by half the panel’s width. With the horizontal joint lines running continuously and the vertical ones broken, the pattern gave a slight emphasis on horizontality. These lines play an important role in relating the new buildings to the old in a particular way. Pope’s Main Building emphasizes the verticality, with the columns, pilasters, and Beaux-Arts-type arrangements of building masses. This contrast between the two buildings is in line with the basic distinction between classicism and modernism. Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of New Architecture,” for example, advocated the roof garden, which results in a horizontal roof line, as opposed to the pitched roof, and horizontal openings, which are made possible by the free façade as contrasted to the vertical ones in load-bearing wall construction. In addition, the horizontality visually implied the expansion of space in this direction, in line with the position of East Building (an expansion) in relation to the Main Building. With the horizontality, East Building showed its yielding to the original building, while the verticality of the latter demonstrated monumentality and independence from its context.

If the joint lines took care of East Building’s formal aspects, they also had an important role in the material’s behavior. Stone expands when its temperature rises and shrinks when it cools. The size of the panels fluctuates cyclically under the influence of the sun, from its direct radiation on the surface as well as the warmth of the surrounding air. If not addressed, the repeated fluctuations result in cracks in the wall as panels separate from each other or from the main body of the building to which they are attached. Typically, expansion joints are placed at certain intervals through a building to handle fluctuations too great to be addressed by each joint line. Much wider than typical joint lines between two pieces of stone, however, expansion joints have the drawback of breaking the visual continuity of the elevation. To deal with this issue, Pope’s Main Building’s expansion joints are placed strategically, hidden by the ornamentation or placed at the break of building masses, while the narrow joint lines, one-eighth of an inch wide, connect two pieces of stone. To compare, East Building has no formal break throughout the composition. To avoid expansion joints altogether, but still keep the spacing between two stone panels as narrow as that of Main Building, a new system was devised. The stone panels were detached from the main body of the building and were two inches away. The stone panels could behave on their own, independent of the rest of the building. Each panel is only three inches thick, to keep costs down, and therefore is too thin to stand on its own while bearing the weight of the panels above, each weighing 450 pounds. The solution by Pei’s team was a system of stainless steel pieces that were anchored into the main body of the building horizontally at five-foot intervals at the two bottom corners of each panel. Each panel then was supported by two of these pieces in terms of its weight, and held in place by another piece that exists at the middle point of the panel’s top edge (Kelly 2012).

In principle, the system should have worked by allowing each panel to behave independently from adjacent ones and from the main body. Instead, panels were coming out of their places. An investigative report published in the Wall Street Journal explained a number of contributing causes (Leigh 2009). First, separating stone panels from the main body meant a greater temperature fluctuation, without a mass to absorb the heat. Second, the marble, after repeated expansion and shrinkage, developed what is called hysteresis, a condition in which the substance remains expanded even at a lower temperature. These two conditions still may have been handled successfully by the system if it had been as flexible as expected. However, additional factors prevented the system from remaining flexible. The gasket in the joint lines, inserted to keep water from seeping in, lost its original flexibility over time as it aged. Many of the spacers, which held the panels in their places temporarily during the construction before the joint lines were sealed, were inadvertently left in place, creating stiff connections between the panels. Finally, too much mortar was used at each stainless steel piece, binding the three panels stiffly. Expanding panels, with nowhere to expand, buckled out of place.

The above technical failure required repair work that consisted of taking down all the 16 200 stone panels, resizing them, and reinstalling them to the anchors with new gaskets. The work, costing the Congressional fund US$80 million, is expected to be complete in 2014. It prompted a further change, and the National Gallery of Art announced that they would close the East Building for renovation for three years, starting in January 2014. The project, with a budget of US$30 million, will include the addition of gallery spaces and the renovation of infrastructures.

The story of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building is a case of architectural mutability that creeps up to us as a technical failure, the undesirable side. While much care was given to technical innovation and design, the thickness of the stone panels and their detachment from the main body, together with the panels’ joint system and its execution, all compounded to make the building imperfect in the long run. I do not intend to pass moral judgment regarding the unforeseen technical failure. When construction involves innovative use of materials, we never can be fully knowledgeable of their behaviors or precisely predict how the building materials’ chemical composition and physical properties will react, especially under the natural forces of sun, rain, wind, or temperature.

Would the AIA have withheld the award if the discovery had been made one year earlier? It is only a matter of speculation, but most probably not. The John Hancock Tower in Boston had numerous problems after its completion, from failing curtain wall glass to structural instability. A thorough investigative report can be found in the March 3, 1995, piece in the Boston Globe by Robert Campbell for which he received the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in criticism writing. Although the problems were widely known, the AIA bestowed the Twenty-Five Year Award to the building in 2011, thirty-five years after its completion and in its last year to qualify for the award. The AIA’s willingness to ignore buildings’ technical failures when bestowing an award that is supposed to honor a “significant architectural landmark ... that has withstood the test of time” is an indication of the general lenience of the profession toward technical failures. Despite modern architecture’s supposed technological advancement, the field tends to overlook failures in fundamental building competence. This indicates the way in which the profession sees the function of the architect as focusing on the design rather than its execution, but that will be a topic of discussion in the second chapter.

Sir John Soane’s Museum

The expectation that architecture is complete when construction is finished and that it shall remain perfect permanently does not reflect reality. In fact, mutability is an inevitable factor in any building. But material changes that go on behind the veil and one day surprise us as a technical failure, as in the case of the National Gallery East Building, are not the only type. In the next section, we will examine a case in which the desire to freeze a building and maintain its state in fact requires much additional work.

It is quite well known that Sir John Soane’s (1753–1837) Museum in London was not created in one stroke, but that, by the time of Soane’s death, it had gone through a number of designs and constructions prompted by his growing collection, property acquisitions, and changes in family circumstances. In this sense, the building is an exemplary case of architectural mutability, of a building owned and designed by an architect who had no quarrel when it came to changing his own building as time passed and new needs manifested. But the building also is an exemplar to demonstrate that changes are in fact inevitable when we intend to maintain a building’s original state, either in its physical form or in its ontological purpose. Kimberly Dovey once argued that “inauthenticity emerges out of the very attempt to retain or regain authenticity” (Dovey 1985, 36). He identified the problem in the misplaced belief that “authenticity can be generated through the manipulation of appearance.” Authenticity of the exotic and the past, which by definition are beyond the world of everyday life, cannot be had, for authentic places and things are “born from authentic dwelling practices in everyday life.” The logical extension of this argument is that to maintain the appearance of immutability requires alteration.

The story of Sir John Soane’s Museum goes back to the year 1792, in which Soane, in his late thirties, purchased No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with the intention to rebuild it as his London residence (Dorey 1999a). Becoming Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806, and with the intention to “arrange the Books, casts and models in order that the students might have the benefit of easy access to them,” Soane, now in his fifties, purchased No. 13 in 1807, to turn the stable block at the rear into a double-height display space and an architectural office. He made the Museum available to his students at the Royal Academy and the public in 1809. He continued to acquire objects, and in addition, moved in the contents of Pitzhanger Manor, which he sold in 1810. When Soane had purchased this property in Ealing just outside of London ten years earlier, he meant it as an ideal place at which to fulfil his dream of establishing his own architectural dynasty, just like that of Robert Smirke (1753–1845), painter and Soane’s fellow academician (Fiske 2014). Smirke’s first son Richard (1778–1815) and second son Robert (1780–1867), entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1796, to study painting and architecture, respectively, and both won the Gold Medals in 1799 (Riddell 2010).² The property had an association with the beginning of Soane’s architectural career. In 1768, at the office of George Dance the Younger, assisting in the co...