Ahh Yes, the Letter I've Been Waiting For

What's That Thing Up on Stilts? A Tea House!?

"Terunobu Fujimori has thrown a punch of a kind no one has ever seen before at 'modernism.'" (Kengo Kuma)

He spent most of his life as an architectural historian.  He did not design his first building until the age of 45. He uses traditional charred wood siding and plants pine trees and other odd vegetation on the roofs of his buildings.  His friends help him do things that no contractor would touch.  He has built a tea house situated precariously atop two rough-hewn stilt made of tree trunks and a study room, accessible only by ladder, cantilevered daringly off the peak of a small, rustic house.  He loves nature and traditional construction techniques and he constantly tries to straddle the line between the natural and the man-made.  He is funny and self-deprecating.  He has a pronounced respect for Le Corbusier's ideas.  He speaks English only through an interpreter.

Who is this guy!?

Last night, Kim and I went to a lecture at the Yale School of Architecture.  Though we had dinner plans at Ibiza to celebrate our 7th anniversary (a bit early) and the news that our petition to adopt four siblings from Brazil is most likely going to be approved (check out Perfect Provision for this story), we were able to catch most of Dr. Terunobu Fujimori's lecture.  

Though not well-known in the United States, Dr. Fujimori is apparently quite popular and well-known in Japan.  As an effort to remedy this disparity, perhaps, Dwell magazine actually just published a nice article about Dr. Fujimori in their May 2009 issue.

An eclectic mix of forms and materials, Dr. Fujimori's architecture is quite interesting to me on a number of levels:

1. It tries to strike a balance between the Modern and the traditional.
2. It is well-crafted, with a focused use of interesting, yet innovative, materials and forms.
3. It attempts to respond to the genius loci, or "spirit of the place" by using traditional materials or techniques in new and innovative ways.
4. It does not seem to take itself too seriously.  It is not overly self-conscious.  It is playful.

Like Dr. Fujimori's architecture, his lecture, too, was interesting and lively.  Dr. Fujimori himself was quite funny--even through his interpreter!  Regarding one of his buildings, a museum, he related that, "when I thought about how one would want to view the paintings, I felt that to be naked would be the best way.  But if everyone was naked, people would not necessarily be looking at the paintings, so people just take off their shoes."  (General laughter.)

At the same time that one might characterize Dr. Fujimori's architecture as playful, it is clear that he is trying to push the boundaries of architecture while remaining relevant within an overall architectural discourse.  I though it was interesting that his work seemed to straddle the line between architecture and nature, architecture and play, architecture and...and...I don't even know!  While showing one project in which he had planted both the walls and the roof with vegetation, he said, “you have to be very careful of that delicate line. If you go beyond that line, regular people like your buildings but architects just make fun of you.”  (More laughter.)  I just love his distinction between "regular people" and "architects" in that one!

But I feel his sentiment.  It is true that architects can be the harshest critics--quick to dismiss something that they do not understand.  And architects are sometimes especially quick to criticize something that "non-architects" might quickly embrace for one reason or another--as if "we" know better and "they" do not.

After seeing his lecture, it is clear that Dr. Fujimori is a different kind of architect.  Humble, funny, interesting, un-famous...

Who wants to be a starchitect anyway!?

Score!

I passed “Construction Documents & Services”!

I received the score report in the mail today with a nice “PASS” on the top. This leaves only one unknown score for my seventh exam, “Programming, Planning & Practice,” which I took back on March 23rd. NCARB seem to be getting quicker with their score processing, so I hope to see this report within the next couple of weeks.

Now that I have pushed through and completed all of my exams (pending that last “PASS” of course), I am trying desperately to finish my last IDP hours in a timely manner. One of the benefits of requesting licensing in Massachusetts is that they allowed me to take my AREs while still completing my IDP—but now I am in this funny situation where I have finished my exams but not my IDP!

At my performance review last summer I challenged myself to complete all of the licensing requirements by this year’s performance review mid-summer. I called it “the year of professional development.” This was a tough goal to begin with and it has taken some work and perseverance to complete so quickly (I became a LEED AP last fall and started my AREs in October), but I think the goal is still tenable.

It would also be nice to have completed all this stuff before travelling to Brazil, which could be as early as this summer. Ah, but that is another story! For that, please visit Kim’s and my adoption blog, Perfect Provision.

Seven Down, Zero to Go

Today I took my seventh (and last!) ARE: Programming, Planning & Practice.  I felt pretty comfortable with the material covered so I hope I did well on the exam.  As always, though, I just have to wait for the score.

And speaking of scores, when I got home from the testing center, I was happy to see a letter from NCARB informing me I had passed my fifth exam (Building Systems), which I took back in mid-February!  This leaves only my score for the final two exams up in the air.

Pending a passing score for these last two exams, I expect to be able to finish all of my IDP requirements in the next month or two, at which point I will be able to apply for my license!  It definitely feels good to be in the home stretch for this particular step in my professional development.  After all, I have only been studying and practicing architecture for the past 11 years of my life!

Light in Islamic Architecture

Light is an important element in all architecture. Le Corbusier said, “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” Louis Kahn said, “I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent light. What Light makes casts a shadow and the shadow belongs to Light.” Without light, we cannot see form, color, or texture. Light—natural light—is what gives character to architecture.

In Islam, light symbolizes God. The Qur’an states, “God is the light of the heavens and the earth.” Light in Islamic architecture, then, is used to symbolically represent God’s presence in a space while emphasizing the color and texture of decorative elements, materials, and architectural articulation.

One particularly intriguing mediator of light and space in Islamic architecture is the screen. The screen in traditional Islamic architecture is used to filter harsh sunlight, and it was developed out of necessity in the hot, harsh-sun climates of the Middle East and Asia. Thought sometimes they are made of wood, many times these intricately patterned screens are carved out of stone. Some of the most beautiful examples of the type of Islamic stone screen can be found at Fetehpur Sikri in Agra, India.

In architecture, screens tend to blur the distinction between interior and exterior space. In Islamic architecture, they are used to mediate the direct sunlight by casting intricate shadow patterns in the interior space. These patterns, which I will talk about in my next post, are very important in the art and architecture of Islam.

The use of screens in Islamic architecture is not confined to the past. Architects have continued to reinterpret the concept of “screen” in new and innovative ways through the 20th century and even today. For example, Jean Nouvel’s Arab World Institute (1987) in Paris uses an operable screen of camera-type apertures to control sunlight. Other interesting recent examples of Islamic screens can be seen on the National Mosque (1965) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Museum of Islamic Art (2008) in Doha, Qatar.

Water in Islamic Architecture

In Islam, water is seen as life-giving, sustaining, and purifying. The Qur’an states, “from water every living creature was created.”

Water is used in Islamic architecture for several basic reasons. First, it is used practically to provide cooling in hot, dry climates (e.g. the courtyard fountains and pools typically found in the vernacular architecture of the Middle East and North Africa, the origin of Islam). Second, it is used aesthetically to emphasize visual axes, reflect the surrounding environment, and visually multiply the adjacent architecture and its decorative detailing (e.g. the reflecting pools and watercourses at the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, Spain). Third, it is used symbolically to represent the life-giving, sustaining, and purifying aspects of water mentioned in the Qur’an (e.g. the ablution fountains found traditionally in the central courts of mosques).

Water is an important component of traditional Islamic gardens and courtyards. In the Qur’an, the “garden” is used to represent the paradise promised to believers. One very particular type of Islamic garden related specifically to this concept is the so-called “Paradise Garden.” The word “paradise” comes from the Persian words pairi, meaning “around,” and daeza, meaning, “wall.” Together, these words create a reference to the fact that early Middle Eastern gardens were enclosed, masonry-walled precincts set aside from the wilderness of nature and used for cultivation in the desert.

The traditional layout of the Paradise Garden is rectilinear with a central pool or fountain and four extending watercourses. This quadripartite garden is also known as a chahar bagh or charbagh, a term which means “four gardens” in Persian. The central fountain symbolizes the origin and sustainer of life and the watercourses represent the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. In addition to their symbolic function, the fountain and watercourses also served the very practical purpose of irrigating the garden. As a general rule, the Paradise Garden is very formal and manicured. Perhaps the most famous Islamic Paradise Garden known to westerners is the garden at the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. At the Taj Mahal, each of the four quadrant gardens is divided geometrically into sixteen planting beds.

Although the Paradise Garden form is prevalent in Islam, it should not be taken as the only type of Islamic garden. Regardless of the ultimate form, there are several general themes that are common throughout the design of gardens in Islam: water is generally a unifying feature, shade is achieved through planting and architecture, and there is a balanced play between formal and informal planting arrangements.

With respect to water in particular, there are several important aspects of its design worth noting and which are helpful in evaluating its specific use in Islamic gardens:

type – fountain (dynamic) v. pool (static),
character – moving (dynamic) v. still (static),
depth – deep (dark, used to reflect its surroundings) v. shallow (light, used to illuminate its intricately-patterned, tiled basin),
form – linear (marking an axis) v. compact (marking a point).

Cultural Context

At work we are entering a design competition for a hotel in the Middle East. Even though it is sometimes a bit of post-rationalization for our design concepts, we often research information about the cultural context for a specific site. (I am actually quite interested in the influence of cultural context on Modern architecture. I only wish it was not always a post-rationalization!) Frequently this research means looking at the vernacular architecture of the region and any particularly noteworthy works of architecture based in the local culture.

This week I was asked by the team working on the project to do a little research on Islamic architecture, focusing specifically on the use of water in traditional Islamic design. I have really enjoyed traditional Islamic architecture ever since I did a research paper on Islamic gardens when I was in school at Georgia Tech, so this assignment was right up my alley. I find Islamic architecture incredibly beautiful aesthetically, especially the use of geometry, order, patterning, and color at all levels of the design. It is intricate yet simple, which is a pretty amazing thing to balance. (Unlike, say, Baroque architecture, which is intricate yet over the top!) Someday I would love to have the opportunity to visit first-hand some of the incredible traditional works of architecture in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

I really enjoyed refreshing my memory this week about Islamic architecture and gardens and looking at photographs of some pretty incredible works of architecture. After putting together a “cheat sheet” outline of concepts for the team, I decided it might be nice to write about some of what I researched on this blog. I think what I learned is a bit long for one blog post, so the next few articles will be about a specific aspect of traditional Islamic design that I find to be particularly interesting.

Parking

"The parking garage is a peculiar twentieth-century phenomenon. The one in New Haven comes from the design of throughways....I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage." (Paul Rudolph)

I have a strange architectural affinity for parking garages.  I suppose I love their simplicity and utility and the fact that they are, unlike most multi-story structures, basically a continuous surface from bottom to top--a combination of folds and ramps and decks and spirals.

While studying at Yale, I took a class called "Photography for Architects" in which we learned some basic SLR photography techniques, developed black-and-white film, and printed black-and-white photographs in the darkroom.  For our final project that semester, we were asked to pick a theme on which to build a collection of images, and I chose to photograph several parking garages around New Haven:  the Coliseum (demolished 2007), the Air Rights Garage, the Crown Street Garage, and the Temple Street Garage.  My photographs at the time attempted to focus not only on the parking garage as form in light and shadow, but also also on their upper decks as a sort of urban landscape, populated with stair towers, light fixtures, cars, and, perhaps most interestingly, the tops of the surrounding buildings, ungrounded and without context.

One of my favorites is the Temple Street Parking Garage, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963.  I love it because it is monumental, exuberant, retro, "cartoony," and "designy."  Sometimes I think it looks as if it was not built by humans but by some colony of giant insects--or perhaps it emerged out of some strange geologic event which left it standing after all the soil around it was eroded by water over the course of a million years.  The garage's slightly anamorphic stair and elevator towers peek out of the upper deck like sentinels guarding the city beyond, lit by their strange concrete light-pole companions and distinguished by their bright red and orange tile work--the choice of colors a product of 1960s design trends no doubt!  (The strange residential sun room-like backpacks and tangle of exposed electrical conduit running along the tiles are, I am certain, not original to the structure.)

I recently decided to stop back by the Temple Street Garage to try my eye at some photography with our new DSLR.  Last time I shot the garage, I was shooting black-and-white film.  But now, using digital photography and the magic of Photoshop, I was able to process these new photos to emphasize the vibrant color of the tile work on the stair towers, which I have done by using the channel mixer to remove the color from the remainder of the photograph.

More Kahn

I thought I would post a few more images from my photo shoot last week with Ken.  Like those that I posted earlier, these photos are from the Yale Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art and they were contenders for the architectural photography contest I entered last week.

Enjoy!

Yale Art Gallery

Yale Center for British Art

This is the view of the Yale Art Gallery's Swartwout Building

from the 4th floor of the British Art Center--I love this view!

Six Down, One to Go

Yesterday I took my sixth ARE:  Construction Documents and Services.  The multiple choice portion of the test was quite difficult, so I am not sure how confident to feel with my performance.  I studied quite a lot for the exam, but I think there were some nuances of contractual issues that I should have brushed up on a little more.  I hope they will not leave me hanging too long waiting for my score!

I also scheduled my last exam (Programming, Planning, and Practice) for later on in March.  I am pretty tired of taking tests so I decided just to power through studying for it and get 'em done!