1988 Master of Architecture
Between the Paradigmatic and the Idiosyncratic: The Influence of Local Cultural Inflections on the Subjectivity of the Architect

The SOM Foundation traveling fellowship will serve as a vehicle to explore questions of authenticity, authorship, and personality within a theory of architectural production by analyzing for traces of the author in the work itself. Observation of the political and cultural contexts of specific buildings will suggest ways that the reworking of local artistic and architectural techniques has been a strategy to produce more “personal” architectural directions. This analysis will also enable me to explore the way in which the presence of the “aura of the authentic” has been a way for architectural works to resist appropriation by the “culture industry.” I plan to study buildings that can be classified into two general categories that begin to suggest a theory of the role of the architect as subject.

Architecture that attempts to serve a paradigmatic role by working out a coherent language and thus can be appropriated by the “academy”:

Otto Wagner, Church Am Steinhof, Vienna
Frank Lloyd Wright, Edwin H. Cheney House, Oak Park
Gunnar Asplund, Library, Stockholm
Giuseppe Terragni, Giuliani-Frigerio House, Como
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, National Gallery, Berlin
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, IIT, Chicago
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs
Stirling and Gowan, Engineering Building, Leicester
Herman Hertzberger, Music Center, Utrecht
Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese, Milan
Jean Nouvel, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris

Architecture that develops an aesthetic expression from the difficulties and idiosyncrasies of specific cultural and political contexts as well as personal aesthetic investigations and thus resists codification:

Adolf Loos, House on the Michaelerplatz, Vienna and Muller House, Prague
Jože Plečnik, Church of the Sacred Heart, Prague and National and University Library, Ljubljana
Gunnar Asplund, Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm
Sigurd Lewerentz, Resurrection Chapel, Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm
Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West, Scottsdale
Alvar Aalto, Town Hall, Säynätsalo
Hans Scharoun, Philharmonic, Berlin
BBPR, Torre Velasca, Milan
Carlo Scarpa, Banca Popolare, Verona
Alvaro Siza, Antonio Carlos Siza House, Porto and Maria Margarida House, Arcozelo
Frank Gehry, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Letters from Abroad

August 15, 1989
Vienna

Since the end of May I have been working with Hermann Czech in Vienna to supplement my dwindling SOM Foundation resources. I have a very flexible schedule with him and, as luck would have it, I’ve been working on a competition for Ljubluana which has allowed me to return there several times. . . . Two excursions I have taken this month will give you an idea of the kind of experiences I have been having during my fellowship. The first was a trip I took to Prague with the intent of visiting Plečnik’s work there. Plečnik’s castle renovations were very interesting, but far more intriguing were the synagogues packed within one very small district in the old city. The strange thing is that these buildings occur within a two-block area and they were built over a four-hundred-year period. It’s a typology laboratory. Because of the crowding of the ghetto necessitated by fixed boundaries and the particular rituals of the religion, a building type developed that is characterized by a rectangular hall space with a relatively high ceiling. The graveyard enhanced this sense of crowding. The tomb stones were packed so closely together you couldn’t get between to read them.