I Am an Architect

What To Do With a Seven Foot Flitch

"A tree is our most intimate contact with nature." (George Nakashima)

A few years ago, Kim's uncle, a woodworker, gave us a couple of large flitches of willow that had been stored in his garage for years but that he had never found a project to use. Being a designer myself and having a deep respect for the work of Japanese-American craftsman George Nakashima, my mind immediately started thinking of the wonderful things we could do with these beautiful pieces of wood. But once we got them home, they sat in our basement and then our shed for a few years, waiting for a "someday" project.

Well, "someday" finally came over Labor Day weekend this year when we went down to visit my parents in Pennsylvania. We decided to do the project in Pennsylvania because my Dad has taken over one-half of their garage as a shop, and with the car parked outside, he has a nice, spacious setup for working. He also has all the requisite tools I do not have room for at my own house in Connecticut: a table saw, a band saw, a jigsaw, and myriad other hand tools, both power- and hand-operated. Before this little project, I had almost forgotten how much I liked working with wood in a nice, clean, well-appointed shop! And how wonderful it was to do a project with my Dad! It has been a while for both of these.

Kim and I had imagined for some time making a table and benches for our backyard out of two of the flitches, so this past weekend we made great headway on the table, which is completed except for the finishing (multiple coats of exterior-grade polyurethane). The particular flitch we wanted to use for the table top had a few long cracks in it. (Don't worry! It's okay! They aren't flaws, they're character)! In the spirit of Nakashima's work, we decided to bridge the gaps with contrasting color walnut butterfly joints. Though butterflies are sometimes used to join two adjacent pieces of wood, in this case they are not designed to close the gap, which is the result of many years of seasoning, but instead to bridge the gap, strengthen it, and help prevent it from cracking further. We also did not attempt to cut down or shape the flitch in any way, allowing the rustic beauty of the original slab of wood to remain essentially as it was when it was cut.

Traditionally, the shape of the butterflies would have been carved out by hand with chisels in a bow-tie shape. Our attempt, however, was a little more modern: we made a template and used a router to carve out a slightly more rounded butterfly shape. I actually think the curved butterfly turned out really well, and it hints at the fact that it was made with a router instead of by hand. Talk about truth in design!

The design of the base of the table was inspired by a trestle table that my Dad built with his Dad a number of years ago. (That particular table was actually our dining room table for many years when I was growing up.) The real benefit of a trestle table is that it is easily disassembled for storage. This was one of my main criterion for the design of the table as I do not want to leave it outside over the Connecticut winter. Trestle tables are also generally simple, and they allow for the base to be set up and freestanding separately from the table top (i.e. the legs of the table are not attached to the top for their support).

The trestles are each made of two douglas fir 2x10s squared up along one side and edge-glued. To strengthen this joint, and to echo the design of the table top, we also used walnut butterflies here. The crossbeam is a douglas fir 2x6 which is held in place on the trestles with walnut edges. The end of the crossbeam and the bottom of the trestles were cut with a shallow curve to echo the curved side of the butterflies. Overall, I tried to keep the design of the base simple and elegant, so as not to compete with the beauty of the table top.

I am actually really pleased with the result, especially given that the whole project cost less than $100! The flitches were free, the walnut pieces were made from scraps my Dad had in his shop, and the base was made of framing lumber from Home Depot. The most expensive part of the table is the exterior grade polyurethane! Before we came back to Connecticut, we sanded the table like crazy, took it apart, and stored it in the storage room off of my parents' garage. I look forward to putting the finishing touches on some other weekend very soon. (My Dad is going to do some prep work with a few initial coats, but we will put at least one final coat together.) I also hope to get a start on the benches next time we are in Pennsylvania. These will be made out of one of the other remaining flitches split long-ways down the center. The third and last flitch is in my mind as the top of a sideboard for our dining room, but that project is not anywhere on the horizon. Right now I am just trying to finish this project before going to Brazil to meet our children!

By the Numbers

Well, it has been a long time coming, but today I submitted my application for an architectural licensure. Yes, I am finally going to be a real "architect." (I have sometimes felt like Pinnochio as he wished to become a "real boy"!) With luck, the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Architects will review my application at their next meeting, and I will be licensed in the next month or so.

Becoming an architect takes passion, time, and perseverance. Let's take a look at some important numbers along the journey, shall we.

2

Number of professions I seriously considered before architecture. Growing up, I wanted to be either a marine biologist or a commercial airline pilot. To this day, I still enjoy the water (though I hate sand) and I love to fly!

12

Age at which my best friend wanted to be an architect. He had a book about Frank Lloyd Wright. He ended up becoming an engineer instead.

11

Grade in which I took a drafting class. We had to "design" a master bedroom addition to an existing house.

2

Number of colleges I attended. I was an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech and a graduate student at Yale.

7

Number of years I studied architecture in school. I studied four years at Georgia Tech and three years at Yale.

18

Age at which I started studying architecture.

29

Age at which I submitted my application to become licensed.

11

Number of years between starting my studies and becoming licensed.

1000+

Number of times in the past 11 years I have been asked whether Frank Lloyd Wright is my favorite architect.

1000+

Number of times I have had to answer the above mentioned question in the negative.

7

Number of professional exams I took to become licensed.

5

Number of months it took me to take above mentioned exams.

5600

Number of hours of work experience required to become licensed.

9070

Number of hours of work experience it took me to fulfill all categories.

20

Age at which I first worked in an architecture firm.

5

Number of architecture firms I have worked for.

5.5

Number of years I have worked for my current employer.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law." (Louis Sullivan)

At the beginning of August, Kim and I were out in northwestern Pennsylvania for the Limiar family reunion. (Limiar is the agency we are working with to adopt our four children from Brazil.) On the last day of the event, we woke up early to take our heros, Lino and Luciana, to the airport a couple of hours away in Buffalo. After dropping them off for their flight back home, we decided that, before driving back to Connecticut, we would see what was happening in downtown Buffalo on a lazy Sunday morning.

The answer, as we suspected, was "not much" in the way of human activity. But it was clear to me after driving around a few minutes that Buffalo actually has some really interesting old architecture. And then it dawned on me. "Wait a minute, isn't there a Louis Sullivan building in Buffalo!?" I wracked my brain back to architectural history class oh those many years ago but could not for the life of me think of the name of the building. We looked around among the skyscrapers, knowing full well if there was indeed a Sullivan building in downtown Buffalo it would not possibly be one of the tallest any more. And then I spotted it: between two taller buildings, in the distance, a reddish midrise building with Sullivan's trademark terracotta ornamentation and round windows. Instant recognition. We were on our way.

It was Louis Sullivan, one of the "fathers" of Modern architecture, that coined the phrase, "form follows function" to indicate that a building's form should be based primarily on its purpose or function, and it should fulfill that role first and foremost. Actually the quote was, "form ever follows function," which he used several times in his 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered."

Sullivan was also one of the most notable early architects for a newfangled type of building that emerged at the end of the 19th century: the skyscraper! The skyscraper emerged in the late 19th century with the development of cheap steel production and therefore the use of steel frame construction over load-bearing masonry. Buildings with load-bearing masonry walls were limited in their height by the bearing capacity of the masonry and were characterized by massive bearing walls at the bottom of the building. For example, the Monadnock Building in Chicago, the tallest load-bearing masonry building in the world at 197 feet tall, has walls at the street level that are 6 feet thick!

In load-bearing masonry buildings, the structure and the enclosure are one and the same, carrying both the dead load of the walls themselves and the load of the rest of the building. However, as lighter steel structures developed, architects were able to separate the structure from the enclosure, leading to the development of the curtain wall, a non-load-bearing enclosure wall which allowed for more freedom (and more openness) in the design of the exterior wall. These days, curtain walls are commonly glass, but they can be stone, brick, terracotta, metal, or pretty much anything you can think of that will keep the weather at bay.

The building we found in Buffalo turned out to be the Guaranty Building from 1896. Along with his earlier Wainwright Building (St. Louis, 1891), the Guaranty Building is a prime example of Sullivan's theories on tall building design writ large. In "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Sullivan says, "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." The skyscraper was a new building type, one characterized by height, and Sullivan thought it should appear as such (its form ever following its function, after all). I work for an architecture firm that designs a lot of skyscrapers, and we frequently talk about using elements of design that will give the building a certain "vertical speed." I am reminded that I have Sullivan, progenitor of the modern skyscraper, to thank for this idea.

Both the Wainwright and the Guaranty Buildings feature Sullivan's typical three-part vertical composition. Like a classical column which has a base, shaft, and capital, these buildings show a similar arrangement of major components: a high public floor at ground level serving as the base, repetitive office floors of similar design serving as the shaft, and a terminating upper floor and cornice at the skyline serving as the capital. Each of these different zones of function were designed to be distinct elements in the composition of the building, and each is ornamented in different ways.

A note on architectural ornamentation. Though later Modern architects would take take "form follows function" to indicate that architecture should be stripped of all ornament (Adolf Loos' 1908 essay "Ornament & Crime" would scold true Modernists from using ornamentation of any kind), Sullivan was not so strictly literal on this point. Instead, he is quite famous for his beautiful architectural ornamentation. His buildings are elaborately and beautifully ornamented, the Guaranty Building's stunning terra cotta work being no exception. Instead of stripping architecture of all ornament, the idea of form following function for Sullivan meant that successful ornamentation was the be integrated into a form which was expressive of its function first and foremost, and that the fulfillment of this function was what generated the overall form, layout, or massing of the building.

For instance, in his skyscrapers, the office floors appear identical and repetitive because, by definition, the commercial office spaces they contained needed to be identical and repetitive. Why should these floors appear different on the facade of the building if they were identical inside? And the main, public floors, with lobbies, storefronts and other major functions of course looked different from the office floors because their functions were different. As for the the ultra-ornamented upper story and cornice at the top of the building, who says aesthetic beauty is not a valid function anyway!?

I suppose I should mention a couple other important things about Sullivan before I end leaving you to feel like he designed these buildings in a vacuum all by himself. In fact, he was influenced by and influenced a number of important architects. Before moving to Chicago, he worked for Frank Furness in Philadelphia. He then worked for William LeBaron Jenney, architect of the first steel-framed building, and Dankmar Adler in Chicago. It was at the firm of Adler & Sullivan that Sullivan would mentor one of the 20th century's most famous architects, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sometimes You Just Get Lucky

Sometimes you have to plan an architectural pilgrimage well in advance. Like purchasing tickets for a tour of Philip Johnson's Glass House nine-and-a-half months ahead of time. But sometimes it is the unexpected architectural encounters that end up being the most interesting. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Say for instance you are visiting Switzerland on a whim on a free day after some business meetings in Italy, you have enjoyed a couple of hours of James Bond-like driving on narrow, guardrail-less, switchback Alpine roads, and you come around a bend toward Simplon Pass on the way back to your hotel in Italy, and, wham, there it is...

I happened upon the Ganter River Bridge between Brig, Switzerland, and Simplon Pass, which leads back down to Italy. The stunning concrete structure was designed by the Swiss engineer Christian Menn and completed in 1980. At 2,224 feet total length and a main span of 571 feet, it is the longest bridge in Switzerland. A sort of hybrid concrete girder and cable-stayed bridge, Wikipedia says it could be an example of a type of bridge known as an "extradosed bridge."

I do not recall where, but I have actually seen photographs of this bridge in the past. But I definitely never expected to see it on this particular drive! What is not evident in any of the photographs I had seen before but is clearly evident when you drive across the bridge is that it does not span straight across the valley. Instead, the approaches from either side form a kind of S-curve with the main span in the center, making for a more dynamic and delightful drive through the mountains. Unfortunately, the light was fading and it was getting late in the day with a long drive back to my hotel or I would have tried to spend some more time exploring the bridge and its environs. I really wanted to walk across it, but there were no sidewalks or shoulders on it, even though there were places to pull-off at the end of each approach.

There is something amazing to me about the integration of the natural and the man-made, especially in "extreme" environments such as the Swiss Alps. I suppose that there is something romantic about idea of unspoiled nature, but I almost wonder if to see nature is to, by definition, defile it. On the other hand, I have always enjoyed those natural places where man has touched down and shown his hand lightly, respectfully, gently.

This bridge is an example of that gentle hand amidst stunning natural settings or phenomena, but there are many examples in the world, and a few spectacular ones that I have had the privilege of visiting myself: Machu Picchu, impossibly perched atop the Andes in Peru, with its exquisite stone buildings echoing the profiles of the mountains themselves; or the Pantheon in Rome, which turns a beam of light into a real, physical entity as it streams through the mighty oculus to illuminate architectural details almost two millennia old.

I am sure this is the designer speaking in me, but I do believe that architecture and design have an opportunity to frame the natural world in an important way. By doing so, the respectful man-made work acts as a foil by which to reflect on the natural in a new light. After all, saying what something is is only one way of defining it. Another way is to show something in opposition so as to definite it by what it is not, in order to call the defined out as something different, special, set apart.

My First Niemeyer

I never imagined that my first opportunity to see an Oscar Niemeyer building would not be in his native Brazil, but instead about 5000 miles away in Europe. But as many times as I have tried to get there, I have not yet had the opportunity to visit Brazil. However, I was recently on a business trip to Italy and had the chance to visit a Niemeyer project outside Milan.

After two days of meetings near Forte dei Marmi, Italy, a colleague and I drove about two hours north to Milan on our free day. After visiting the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and the Pirelli Tower downtown, I asked my friend if he would mind taking a small detour to see Niemeyer's Mondadori publishing house headquarters east of the city. After all, I said, "I am a total architecture dork"--and Niemeyer is one of my favorites.

Unfortunately, the building is situated in a sort of suburban highway neverland where it was impossible for us to stop and get out to photograph the building. But we drove around the building twice and tried to look as close as possible. The building, which dates from the early 1970s, seemed to be in pretty good shape from what I could see. The building is notable in part due to its massive concrete arcade which conceals a glass-enclosed office block behind. Adjacent to the office block are the auditorium and support spaces. The entire composition sits on large lake, surrounded by parking and landscape.

Although I was disappointed not to be able to stop and contemplate the building in depth, I was immediately struck by the beauty of the concrete work, even while driving past. The concrete arcades were really impressive, seeming quite light and airy, and the black-glass of the office block did not distract from the composition as I had expected. The massive arcades provided the real poetry to the project, much like Niemeyer's earlier work in Brasilia, such as the Alvorada Palace, Planalto Palace, and Supreme Court buildings. All of these project express a sort of structural heroism and playfulness, but in the vocabulary of Modern architecture, which I love.

One Year Later

One year ago today, inspired by a trip to Italy and a visit to the Pantheon, I wrote my first post on Through the Oculus. If you have been following my architectural musings all along, thank you for your diligence and your readership. If you are visiting for the first time, I hope you will continue to follow along. Either way, please do not be shy to leave me your thoughts or comments.

Trash Day

Catharsis

Kim and I have been "nesting" at home over the past few weeks as we prepare to adopt four children from Brazil. (Read about that adventure here.)  We have been painting, rearranging furniture, getting rid of things we do not need, and acquiring things we do need (apparently you need a lot of beds when you have four children).  We made a "Blitz List" last month of all the things we wanted to accomplish in May to prepare our house to be a proper home for our kids.

Last week, we started cleaning, organizing, and purging the basement, and last night as we continued to work, we came to the corner of the basement with two huge boxes of architectural models from school:  seven years of models, from both Georgia Tech and Yale.  Every time we have moved since coming to New Haven, I have thrown away a couple of architectural models--but we have lived in our house for four-and-a-half years now, and so they have been relatively safe for a time.

If there is anything that the prospect of adopting four kids does, it puts into perspective the things in life that really matter:  my faith and my family.  Kim and I have a hard time with "stuff" in general, and we do actually purge our house from time to time of extraneous items--it is a spiritual exercise as well as a practical one.  But our house has also conveniently afforded us the luxury of storage space over the past few years, though I expect this commodity will be in severe shortage by the end of the summer.

Even so, through moves and "purging," there was always something about my architectural models that kept them hanging around.  Perhaps it was all the care, work, hours, and debt that went into their creation.

One of the definitions that Merriam-Webster gives for "catharsis" is "a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension."  It was a challenge to throw the models away, but I have a feeling it will end up being cathartic.  (To be honest with you, I saved a couple of models:  my first model from Georgia Tech and my last model from Yale.  Call them "bookends" to my academic career if you will.)  They are just things, stuff, objects--and as Kim's Mom frequently reminds us, "people are more important than things."

I suppose it will come as no great surprise, but the kids have been causing me to be distracted lately.  I have been daydreaming a lot and I frequently picture playing with my kids, watching them grow, teaching them, learning from them, piling together in one bed on Saturday mornings with them--and loving them above all else.  In each and every one of these daydreams, however, my architectural models are nowhere to be found...

Ahh Yes, the Letter I've Been Waiting For