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Paul Warchol |
What if designing a building were as easy as finding the
right word? An architect would meditate on a given program, weigh its
opportunities and dilemmas, consult, fret, doodle, until--presto--out of the
vapors of artistic enigma it comes: the magic word. I remember from architecture
school a certain class of studio critics who would instruct their students in
this abracadabra principle, asking them to make something as multifarious as
public housing or a ferry terminal cleave to some single-minded verbal cue: destiny,
capture, fusion, delight, whatever. As a simplifying
classroom exercise, it had some merit. But trendy reductions should be left in
school; they certainly don't bring much to more complicated settings. Let's
generously assume that mandated student stutters would in time develop to fluent
sentences of construction, then, perhaps by graduation, to whole paragraphs of
lucid built language, and on to vignettes and short stories in the architects'
long apprenticeship, novellas and books once their names were on the door. From
our stars we should expect whole libraries of perfect prose.
The star in question here is Steven Holl. The building in question is his
stammering Simmons Hall--a ten-story, 350-bed dormitory with all the trimmings,
completed last fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the word
in question, the word that bred the building, that drove and buoyed its design,
that concatenated through its siting and structure, its lounges and lintels, the
all-powerful term of terms that conjured its high fancies and ultimately brought
it low, is, per Mr. Holl, porosity.
Porosity? The state of being porous, full of holes, of inviting passage, one
imagines, or of drawing things in and retaining them even, like a sponge. A fine
metaphor for any dormitory, given as they are to multiple openings and cavities
within. But Holl was not content with metaphor; he pursued the reification of porosity
as an end in itself.
On campus to introduce his building last October, Holl was full of faith in his
chosen term. He recounted how alone among the architects considered he had
thrown out the master plan, a relic of the 1980s that called for a wall of
buildings along the northern perimeter of the institute grounds, where Simmons
Hall now sits, and it is easy to see why. That end of campus presents itself as
a series of barriers parallel to the Charles. On a line from the river, there is
Memorial Drive, a wide boulevard; a row of dormitories (including Alvar Aalto's
wonderful Baker House); a long field; rod-straight Vassar Street; then the
narrow strip that is the site for Simmons and the dorms that will follow, set
against an unbreachable barricade of railroad tracks. Across the tracks, beyond
the campus, there is a wide swath of low industrial buildings before Cambridge
proper picks up again in block after block of repeating triple-deckers. Against
this formidable grain, Holl argued for countervailing flow, presenting Simmons
as the first of a great dotted line of pore-rich structures.
Speaking that same day last fall, William Mitchell, the dean of MIT's
architecture school, explained that "one of the things this school does is
to make enormous intellectual bets on emerging areas." In that spirit the
building committee bought Holl's porous argument. But they bet on the wrong
horse. The architect might have chosen other words--contrivance, hurdle,
pickle--to better describe the conditions he created for himself by
zagging out in such a random direction from the gate and by sticking with that
line, blindered, to the finish. Holl's magic word yielded nothing but a gestural
planning notion, a slew of technical headaches, and some pretty bleak spaces.
On the ground the guiding concept has left no real trace; there is no connection
made across the field or over the tracks, visual or otherwise. Instead the idea
that began as a compellingly dissenting site analysis became yet another
hopeful, fruitless crutch for novel form. The 385-foot-long building does open
up in that storied transverse axis, but only in two ragged notches cut down a
few stories from the top; a stair through the hole in the center of the block,
which one might assume to be a key portal to the beyond, is cut by a glazed
passage and stopped dead by a Dan Graham installation before it even gets near
the severing tracks.
The functional porosity that Holl claims for his building is an empty fiction.
But, as decoration--expensive decoration--"porosity" has left its mark
all over. Evoking the sponge as a guiding aesthetic, Holl conceived the
building's elevations as matrices of two-foot-square windows--architecture's
ready-made pores. This led in turn to a great structural game, gamely handled by
Holl's able, fabled, enabling engineer, Guy Nordenson. To build Simmons required
all manner of extracurricular, computer-aided ingenuity: calculating a unique
rat's nest of rebar for each prefab concrete panel; devising a novel system to
integrate that structure, dubbed PerfCon, with the building's poured-in-place
floors; and on, and on. The result is scandalously sloppy, but it stands. Still,
hold your applause; that those problems were solved should invite no more praise
than we would give a man who piles his molehill into a mountain and then
conquers the summit.
A dormitory is not a word or a game or a consequence-free vehicle for a quirky
process and its snappy rhetoric. It is at root a collection of bedrooms; it
should be more but it can't be less. At Simmons these are a mixed bag. The
modular plywood furniture from Holl's office (shot through with ornamental
holes) is very nice, but the incessant grid of the windows--floor to ceiling,
nine per room--is a big price for the residents to pay for a transient
stranger's high concept. Yes, the windows are operable, and, yes, their
exaggerated, structurally necessary depth lends itself to cutting the sun's
glare. But the mock-porous grid gives the bedrooms a fatal jailhouse air. Accommodation,
haven, home--those words are hopelessly insipid and not the least
bit cool, but unspoken they might have served, among other values conjured and
realities squarely met, as guides to help an open-minded architect shape an
inclusive process that could result in a design--at that site, at this
time--that might have been, in a word, good.
Or, better, skip them all. A word, however resonant, marks a point in a single
dimension. It is less than a gesture, not quite an idea, at most a goosed memory
and the half-mood it bears. In the greater scheme of things, not much. And not
nearly enough to make sense of a building's mad complexities. Architecture is
blessed and cursed with more dimensions than its greats know what to do with:
the three of sensible space, the celebrated fourth of travel through it; and
others, ineffable, beyond--the fifth of utility, say, the seventh of happy
accident, the ominous eleventh. Why bind something as rich as a building to the
impoverished raster-scan of language? What word can generate space? What word
can justify it?
By Philip Noble
This Article Appeared in Jnauary, 2003 in Metroplois