The Johnson Museum has turned forty and is promoting an exhibition that ends September 1, 2013:

In conjunction with the Johnson’s fortieth anniversary, we asked architect and photographer Alan Chimacoff, Class of 1963, Arch ’64, to create a photographic essay celebrating the Museum’s architecture and its integration into the landscape of the campus and community. The Museum’s profile has become one of the iconic landmarks of Ithaca, visible from nearly every vantage point in town, so the early controversies surrounding its construction are still understandable: Would it block views from Franklin and Sibley Hall to the west? Obliterate the view of the lake from the crest of Libe Slope? Look out of place amid the New York State limestone of “Stone Row,” Morrill, White, and McGraw Halls?

Some of the “early controversies” were actually about the quality of the architecture itself; the most notable critique appeared in the Cornell Daily Sun in 1973, written by none other than “architect and photographer” Alan Chimacoff, together with colleague Klaus Herdeg — both had been teaching in the Department of Architecture at Cornell.

I’ve transcribed the entire article as best I could from a grainy PDF in the Cornell Daily Sun archives, but Herdeg and Chimacoff’s key criticism can be understood from this brief excerpt:

Hypothetically, meaning could exist in two spheres. First, the physical expression of the building’s functional organization (the famous shibboleth of Modern Architecture); second, the manifestation of an aesthetic and intellectual argument addressing itself to a range of historical and cultural issues which attach themselves to the project at hand. The Johnson Museum addresses itself to neither. With respect to the first sphere of meaning, it presents schizophrenic inconsistencies, the most blatant of which is the disposition of the gallery spaces themselves. The form of the building would suggest that the “great north slab” contained spaces of similar and perhaps repetitive use, while the spaces assembled to the south of “the slab” connote a contrasting, perhaps unique, set of uses. It appears contradictory that the gallery boxes are buried in “the north slab” and sculpturally expressed within ‘the great void.’

With respect to the second sphere of meaning, the building offers no contribution to the ongoing polemic of Modern Architecture, into which context it purports to put itself by virtue of its employment of the contemporary stylistic vocabulary.

Klaus Herdeg went on to apply this critique to the entire legacy of Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (see The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy, MIT Press, 1983). I.M. Pei, architect of the Johnson Museum, studied under Gropius at Harvard after getting his B.Arch. at M.I.T. in 1940.

Also of interest is the fact that Chimacoff, along with other Cornell architecture faculty in the early 1970s, were “fired” in a great purge described by Colin Rowe in his recollections published in 1996 by MIT Press (As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume Two — Cornellianna, edited by Alexander Caragonne):

As far as I am aware, at Cornell the only thing which I did very, very wrong was in 1967. It was in Berlin in late December; it was in Westend; it was in the house of Matthias and Lislotte Ungers; it was late in the evening and most people had left; it was gently snowing outside and I was talking to Peter Blake, both of us thinking about Matthias as a species of Galahad; and it was in this way that Peter Blake instigated my move. “Why don’t you walk down the room,” he said, “and invite Matthias to Cornell?” So I did; and, since my politics prevailed, Matthias became installed as chairman at Cornell in 1969, that fateful year of revolution following the events of Paris the year before.

But the silliest thing I ever did. For my politics were injurious not only to Matthias and myself but also to Cornell. Coming from the Berlin of Rudi Dutschke, Matthias had caught something of that ardor, that fervor to make a clean slate and, during a six-month absence in Rome which I enjoyed in late ’69, a clean slate he had become determined to make at Cornell.

Not at all necessary. Not at all to be desired. But, since he could scarcely get rid of the faculty dinosaurs, it was now the younger faculty whom he was prepared to make expendable. A very sad story; and it was hence that something like a minor holocaust ensued. He had tried to get rid of Jerry Wells while I was away in Rome but he had failed; and then, in ’71-’72, it all broke out again, resulting in the firing of Alan Chimacoff, Fred Koetter, Roger Sherwood, and in Klaus Herdeg’s disgusted resignation. Finally resulting in a charge of the dinosaurs which brought about Unger’s own withdrawal.

A footnote after the second paragraph in Rowe’s recollections contained these lyrics written by Chimacoff, “derived from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, about the Ungers period as chairperson at Cornell”:

I am the chairman of this architecture school
And a very good chairman too.
I’m very, very good, but be it understood
You must never mention the name Corbu.
What never?
Well, hardly ever.
We must never mention the name Corbu.
We must never mention the name Corbu.
Then give three cheers and ring a bell
For the energetic chairman at Cornell.

Since 2560 BCE, there have been only three buildings that were the tallest buildings in the world that no longer exist. The three are:

(a) Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 489 ft, built 1087–1314, destroyed in the Fire of London, 1666.

(b) Singer Building, 1908–1909, destroyed to make US Steel Bldg in the 1960s

(c) World Trade Center, built in the 1970s, destroyed in Sept. 2001

There are only three buildings since 2560 BCE that were the tallest building in the world but no longer exist: (a) Old St Paul's; (b) the Singer Building; and (c) the World Trade Center.

The claim that every other tallest building in the world still exists is based on the fact that from 2560 BCE until the Lincoln Cathedral was finished in c. 1300, the tallest building in the world was the Great Pyramid of Giza. Since both the pyramid and the Lincoln Cathedral still exist, Old St Paul’s must be the first tallest building in the world to be destroyed. Since then, there have only been two others.

That is amazing.

Sources:
Wikipedia: tallest buildings in the world and Great Pyramid of Giza

Here is my Youtube video for the 2013 Cornell Architecture Dragon Day event.

For architects, one of the more interesting aspects of Christopher Dorner’s “Manifesto” is his critique of the new LAPD headquarters building. Conventional accounts of the building claim that glass (i.e., transparency) in this context somehow corresponds to, or symbolizes, “openness” and “democracy”:

“In doing so, the LAPD hasn’t sought to simply upgrade facilities. It’s set out to build stations that embody its hopes for a new relationship with local communities — one of transparency and cooperation.” The Future of Los Angeles’ Police Stations: Is the LAPD misplacing something important in the process of building the next generation of police stations?

“In designing the replacement for their aging and unsafe headquarters, the main goal of the LAPD was to make manifest their desire for increased transparency while at the same time maintain a secure and safe environment for the building’s users and visitors… A goal for the project and design process was to strike a balance between the LAPD’s desire for openness and transparency while preserving operational security that the department required.” LAPD Police Administration Building

Such critiques can be best understood as instances of what Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt calls bullshit: Frankfurt suggests “that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Eric Jarosinski, in his Architectural Symbolism and the Rhetoric of Transparency — A Berlin Ghost Story [PDF], describes the history of this phenomenon — the equation of a building’s literal “transparency” with various cultural outcomes — in some detail: “The current discourse’s equation of glass with democracy and the future borrows from a tradition in pre-world war and Weimar-era architecture most closely associated with the designers Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut. As poet and architect, Scheerbart theorized a revolutionarily transformative ‘glass culture’ that would produce a new transparent landscape and a newly enlightened civilization.”

Here is what Dorner says in his Manifesto: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. How ironic that you [the LAPD] utilize a fixed glass structure as your command HQ. You use as a luminous building to symbolize that you are transparent, have nothing to hide, or suppress when in essence, concealing, omitting, and obscuring is your forte.”