Category Archives: Milstein-Rand-Sibley Hall

Can we talk about urinals?

I criticize the urinals in OMA’s Milstein Hall (at Cornell University) in my book of the same name. The fixtures selected, presumably to match the stainless steel serpentine partitions separating the men’s and women’s rooms, are Willoughby UF-1438 special-order stainless steel single person floor mounted stall urinals, intended mainly “for use in security environments” — i.e., correctional facilities (fig. 1).

Stainless steel urinal in Milstein Hall

Fig. 1. Stainless steel urinal in Milstein Hall

They are embedded in the concrete floor slab which is problematic for at least two reasons: first, because it violates the principle of “shearing layers” whereby things that need to change or be replaced periodically should not be embedded in things (like a structural floor slab) that are intended to last for the life of the building; and second, because the concrete floor is in such bad shape that it violates the New York State Building Code requirement that “floor finish materials shall have a smooth, hard, nonabsorbent surface.” (ICC, “1209.2.1 Floors and Wall Bases,” in the 2020 New York State Building Code.)

These prison-grade urinals are not only dysfunctional in this academic context, but are also incredibly expensive — well over $1,000.00 each. And while it’s hard these days to find a functional urinal as beautiful as the so-called readymade that Duchamp tried to exhibit in 1917 (fig. 2a), except perhaps on eBay (fig. 2b), functional high-efficiency urinals can be found for well under $200 (fig. 2c).

Three images: (a) Duchamp's 'Fountain' (photo by Steiglitz); (b) Kohler urinal from the 1950s; and (c) Contemporary American Standard urinal.

Fig. 2. (a) Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain” (photo by Stieglitz); (b) Kohler urinal from the 1950s; and (c) Contemporary American Standard urinal.

It is possible, at least for individuals whose gender identity aligns with the use of so-called men’s rooms, to see some beautiful urinals at Cornell. But to do this, you need to go to the basement of Barton Hall, which was built in 1917, about the same time as Duchamp’s readymade. I can’t say for sure if these urinals date from the building’s opening, or from some mid-twentieth-century renovation, but their similarity to Duchamp’s “Mutt” makes a trip to Barton Hall well worth the effort (fig. 3).

Urinals in the basement of Barton Hall, Cornell University

Fig. 3. Urinals in the basement of Barton Hall, Cornell University

Book presentation at AAP Launchpad event

I presented my latest book, OMA’s Milstein Hall, at Cornell AAP’s joint book launch event, called Launchpad, on April 17, 2024, at 5:30 PM. Details here. Because I was in Madrid for the 2024 ASHRAE International Building Decarbonization Conference, my presentation consisted of a 7-minute music video. I was thinking of adding something like, “Be there. Will be wild!,” but will resist the temptation. Bad taste.

The video was released on YouTube at the same time as the book launch event. Why not subscribe to my YouTube channel to get notices of such things!

Adding insult to injury: Cornell deletes Rand Hall egress information

I’ve written about the many egregious fire safety violations in Rand Hall’s Mui Ho Fine Arts Library at Cornell, e.g., an article describing my “Appeal regarding building code violations in Cornell’s Fine Arts Library.”

So it’s entirely fitting that the college’s Spring 2024 events postcard would feature an image of the Rand roof deck with all egress information Photoshopped away!

Free open-access books on architecture

All three of my books are now available in free, open-access, digital versions — as well as low-cost paperback editions.

Read on the web, download free ePubs or PDFs, or buy a low-cost paperback:

The path to open-access wasn’t particularly easy. In the case of Structural Elements, I started with Elsevier (publisher of the first hardcover edition), then found a less onerous publisher (Common Ground) for a paperback second edition, and then took control myself for the third edition by self-publishing an inexpensive paperback ($19.95) and creating a free web version and PDF.

For OMA’s Milstein Hall, I had some preliminary conversations with the publisher, Routledge, but they seemed reluctant to publish a book critical of OMA without some sort of “reassurance” from OMA, which—naturally—wasn’t forthcoming. So I self-published the book ($19.95), also providing a free web version as well as free ePub and PDF versions.

My book, Building Bad, was initially published by Lund Humphries in 2021. I had some professional development funds in my Cornell account, partly from my status as professor emeritus at Cornell, and partly from my work as Speaker of the Cornell University Faculty Senate, and asked Lund Humphries if they would consider allowing me to create an open-access (free) version, with a subvention from these available funds. Apparently, they had no experience with such things, but eventually decided to place their hardcover edition “out of print,” disable their eBook edition as well, and revert all publishing rights back to me, for a modest sum of money. This allowed me to create a free web version as well as a free ePub, a free PDF, and a low-cost paperback version (only $14.95).

OMA’s Milstein Hall: A Case Study of Architectural Failure

I’ve written a new a book about architectural failure. In addition to some general observations and an occasional digression, the heart of the book is a rather detailed examination of dysfunction, inflexibility, fire hazard, nonstructural failure, and unsustainable design in Milstein Hall at Cornell University, the flagship building designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) for Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. See my website to read the 412-page book for free (on the web, or as a free pdf or ePub) or click on the “Amazon” link to buy an inexpensive paperback version ($19.95).

There are 26 chapters in the book organized into four parts—with each part corresponding to one category of architectural failure:

  • Part I (Dysfunction and Inflexibility) includes detailed discussions of function, flexibility, privacy, lighting, acoustics, circulation, orientation, and access.
  • Part II (Nonstructural Failure) offers an examination of thermal control, rainwater control, and sloppy, dysfunctional, and dangerous details in Milstein Hall.
  • Part III (Fire Hazard) discusses the many ways in which Milstein Hall contravenes normative fire safety standards.
  • Part IV (Unsustainable Design) is in equal part a critique of Milstein Hall’s sustainability and the cynical use of the LEED Reference Guide as validation for Milstein Hall’s “green” credentials.

Writing and researching my monograph, Building Bad: How Architectural Utility is Constrained by Politics and Damaged by Expression (Lund Humphries, 2021), provided a useful theoretical base for the present work, which is, in effect, a case study in “building bad.” The competition driving dysfunctional modes of expression and the political calculations that effectively constrain durability and safety—both of which increase the probability of building failure—are theorized in Building Bad. And this theory applies to most avant-garde architecture, including the architecture of Milstein Hall. The present book does not rehash the underlying theoretical arguments for nonstructural failure that appeared in Building Bad; instead, it examines what such failure looks like in a single building—as a case study.

Pritzker-plus redux

I led a second walking tour of the Cornell campus on August 28, 2023, focusing on Cornell’s six Pritzker-laureate-designed buildings: Milstein Hall (Rem Koolhaas), the Johnson Museum of Art (I.M. Pei), the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts (James Stirling), Gates Hall (Thom Mayne), Weill Hall (Richard Meier), and Uris Hall (Gordon Bunshaft).

Jonathan Ochshorn addresses tour group prior to entering Bunshaft’s Uris Hall (photo by Max Rodencal)

We also visited Uris Library (William Henry Miller), Thurston Hall (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon), Upson Hall (original design by Perkins & Will, renovation by Perkins & Will with Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis), Duffield Hall (Zimmer Gunsul Frasca), Bradfield Hall (Ulrich Franzen), and Minns Garden. A map of the tour can be found in my blog post for the first Pritzker-plus iteration.

The following images and commentary are intended to provide context for some of my remarks on the tour, in the order of the buildings that we visited:

We started at the “bubbles” at Milstein Hall; a comparison with the arcade (atrium) at Duffield Hall is discussed later.

Next, we walked west to the Johnson Museum of Art and I talked about why, in the early 1970s, certain Cornell architecture faculty hated the building. Here’s an except and image from my book, Building Bad, explaining the controversy: “That the spatial logic of interior spaces should be ‘transparently’ revealed (expressed) on a building’s exterior surfaces was also a tenet of 20th-century modernism. This can be seen, for example, in the argument made by Alan Chimacoff and Klaus Herdeg in their scathing criticism of I.M. Pei’s Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, published in Cornell’s student-run newspaper in 1973 (and, in slightly revised form, in Herdeg’s The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy, ten years later):

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.’

“In other words, the museum’s great crime was to have been designed from the outside, on the one hand, so that its ‘great north slab’ would, through its massing, align with historic academic buildings on the north side of Cornell’s arts quad, and, on the other hand, designed from the inside so that its complex, and somewhat contradictory, programmatic requirements could be met. Since there were not enough administrative spaces to fill the ‘great north slab’—which would have, per Chimacoff and Herdeg’s logic, given it conceptual consistency by reconciling internal programming with external form—and since the form of the ‘great north slab’ was nevertheless desired because its external massing was considered of paramount importance, per the architect’s logic, in relation to spatial patterns prevailing on Cornell’s historic arts quad, I.M. Pei employed a design strategy which allowed the exterior form to ‘respond’ to exterior conditions while allowing the interior spaces to independently ‘respond’ to programmatic requirements [see fig. 1]. Of course, it is possible that both criteria could have been met in a manner that reconciled the two imperatives. But, even so, the stipulation for such metaphorical ‘transparency’ is quite arbitrary; one could just as easily praise the museum’s design for eschewing such facile expression and, instead, embracing the contradictions of its site and program. In the final analysis, the contentiousness of arguments about the appropriateness—some might say the truthfulness—of such subjective determinations of expression is inversely proportional to the objective basis underlying the claims: nothing elicits more passionate and cut-throat criticism than arbitrary, subjective, and fleeting expressions of taste.” [Building Bad: How Architectural Utility is Constrained by Politics and Damaged by Expression, London (Lund Humphries, 2021), 107–108]

Fig. 1. Johnson museum analysis from Building Bad, p. 109.

We then walked along the edge of Libe Slope to Uris Library (to see the A.D. White Reading Room). I mentioned that William Henry Miller also designed a companion building, Boardman Hall, which was torn down in the late 1950s and replaced with Olin Library. I’ve written about this disastrous decision in a prior blog post. Some images from that post are reproduced below, to give you an idea of what was lost:

Fig. 2. Boardman-Olin comparison.

Fig. 3. Boardman Hall arcade.

We then walked through the library (since the normal path was blocked by a construction fence), checked out the former “Cocktail Lounge” library addition designed by Gunnar Birkerts that was recently renovated by HOLT Architects, a local Ithaca firm, and made our way to the Schwartz Center in Collegetown. I mentioned that Stirling’s design had numerous historical references, the most important of which was Brunelleschi’s Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence:

Fig. 4. Schwartz Center – San Lorenzo comparison.

From Collegetown, we re-entered campus via the pedestrian bridge over Cascadilla Gorge and made our way into the Engineering Quad, climbing up my favorite example of a terribly designed exterior stair. We paid our respects to some rammed-earth columns (thank you Max) and then entered Thurston by way of Bard Hall, where we stopped in front of the axially-placed structures lab. From there, we entered Upson Hall, first examining the new terra cotta facade panels.

Fig. 5. Terra cotta panels, part of Upson Hall recladding.

Upson took us directly into the aracde/atrium of Duffield Hall, where I speculated about a different ideological framework that informed the design of Milstein Hall’s arcade. I’ve written about this in a soon-to-be-published book: “It is instructive to compare Milstein Hall’s underutilized outdoor arcade with that of Duffield Hall, a nearby and heavily used enclosed arcade that was created between two campus building on the Engineering Quad. Both Milstein Hall and Duffield Hall were additions to existing buildings and, as such, had similar design challenges in joining a new with an existing building. Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF), the architects for Duffield Hall, activated the connection to the existing building (Phillips Hall) by creating a covered arcade bounded by Phillips Hall on one side and the new Duffield Hall on the other side. In this space, they designed useful seating areas in which students can study or collaborate in relative privacy, but with visual connections back to the main circulation spine of the arcade, so that both those seated along the perimeter of the arcade and those circulating down the middle feel active and engaged. Naturally, there is also food available, and plenty of places to sit, eat, and drink. The architects for Milstein Hall, in contrast, left the arcade space between Sibley Hall and Milstein Hall unenclosed and unpleasant, with no collaborative seating, no ability to see and be seen, no compelling activities visible in the adjacent buildings, and—as a result—with no particular reason for anyone to enter. The images in [fig. 6] show the two arcades at the same time on the same day (Tuesday, March 21, 2023, at noon), but this contrast in functionality could be demonstrated on virtually any day and any time when students are on campus.

“Koolhaas’s ‘Junkspace,’ written just a few years before OMA began the Milstein Hall project, may provide some insight into the origin of the arcade’s dysfunction, although it is risky to allege such links between the office’s theory and practice. In this article, a brilliant 7,500-word rant formatted into a single, continuous paragraph, the enclosed mall (aka Junkspace) comes under withering attack:

Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing… the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain… It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo)…

“This hyperbolic descriptive text soon turns into an explicitly anti-atrium warning: “Note to architects: You thought that you could ignore Junkspace, visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously… […] But now your own architecture is infected, has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy, atrium-ridden…” And not only that, this atrium-culture fosters complacency and destroys our ability to think: “Junkspace is political. It depends on the central removal of the critical facility in the name of comfort and pleasure.” So it’s possible that this ideological posturing had some influence on the decision to leave Milstein Hall’s arcade unconditioned, uncovered, and—most importantly—without any formal or functional references to the despised prototype of the atrium/mall.”

Fig. 6. Comparison of arcades in Milstein Hall (left) and Duffield Hall (right).

Leaving the engineering quad, we walked east to Gates Hall. I talked about the use of stone or precast panels placed around normative steel columns to create a “fictional” narrative about support (in the case of Uris Hall, which we’ll see at the end of the tour) or to create an illusion of non-support (in the case of Gates Hall — see figure 7).

Fig. 7. “Fictional” support conditions at Uris Hall (left) and Gates Hall (right).

We then walked past Cornell’s Lynah skating rink (where some “snow” from the Zamboni machine had been deposited in the parking lot), and looked around Weill Hall, paying close attention to the articulated reveals between drywall, door frames, and wall tile in the first-floor bathrooms.

From there, we crossed Tower Road and went into what is apparently the most-hated lab building at Cornell (and one of my favorite campus buildings): Bradfield Hall. I talked about the similarity to Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Lab — see figure 8.

Fig. 8. Comparison of Richards Medical Research Lab (left) and Bradfield Hall (right).

On the way to our final Pritzker building, we stopped at Minns Garden, off of Tower Road. I talked about the danger of certain forms of abstraction, comparing the vapid circles of Milstein Hall’s green roof to this garden’s rich and bio-diverse landscape design.

Fig. 9. Minns Garden at Cornell.

Walking west on Tower Road, we visited Uris Hall, whose exposed and expressed structure of corrosion-resistant, weathering (aka “COR-TEN”) steel is similar in its outward geometry to Bunshaft’s Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, which opened about 10 years earlier (see figure 10). I mentioned that where Bunshaft’s earlier building had a more integrated design idea — i.e., the interior and exterior form had a clear relationship — see figure 11), Uris Hall’s interior was just a maze of corridors and windowless offices.

Fig. 10. Comparison of Beinecke Library and Uris Hall.

 

Fig. 11. Interior of Beinecke Library.

I also mentioned that the parti of Uris Hall was similar to that of Milstein Hall. As I wrote in a blog post from 2011: “Both buildings consist of  large, essentially square, floor plates supported by rigid frames (vierendeel trusses) lifted off the ground and cantilevered in dramatic fashion from their points of support. Both buildings also hover over large, below-grade, auditoriums: in the case of Uris Hall, the auditorium sits politely under the podium; in Milstein Hall, the auditorium rides a reinforced concrete dome that seems to burst through the ground plane. Both buildings mediate their cantilevered steel superstructures and highly-articulated bases with a glass wrapper designed to enclose space and provide an entry at grade without compromising the visual articulation of superstructure and base.”

To prove my point, I photoshopped a portion of Uris Hall onto a photo of Milstein Hall (see figure 12).

Fig. 12. Milstein Hall (left) and a portion of Uris Hall photoshopped onto the same image (right).

We dutifully examined the maze of corridors and windowless offices in Uris Hall, after which I headed home via Collegetown while the students went to … well, wherever students go.

Pritzker-plus tour of Cornell campus

[Updated below] I was asked by some architecture students to conduct a walking tour of the Cornell campus so, after some thought, I proposed a “Pritzker-plus” tour, taking in the six Cornell buildings designed by Pritzker laureates (i.e., Koolhaas, Pei, Stirling, Mayne, Meier, and Bunshaft) as well as some of by own favorite campus buildings (Uris Library’s A.D. White room, Thurston Hall, Duffield Hall, and Bradfield Hall). Google says this is a 2.5 mile (4 km) walk. We’re meeting at the “bubbles” in Milstein Hall’s Duane and Dalia Stiller Arcade at 10:00 AM, Friday, May 12, 2023.

Poster and map for my walking tour of Pritzker-plus buildings on Cornell’s campus: May 12, 2023.

Update (August 29, 2023): We did a second iteration of this walking tour on Monday, August 28, 2023,  at 4:45 PM. See blog post.

Jonathan Ochshorn addresses tour group inside Stirling’s Schwartz Center for the performing Arts st Cornell (photo by Max Rodencal)

 

Why not store combustible foam plastic under an exit stair?

It’s probably legal to store combustible material under an exit access stairway (i.e., an exit stair that is permitted to be unenclosed) even though it wouldn’t be allowed under an unenclosed exterior stair or an enclosed interior exit stair. But it’s probably not a good idea. I tested the combustibility of the foamed plastic used as display stands for architecture (and other) reviews and exhibits, here shown stored under the exit access stair in the domed Crit Room in Milstein Hall, Cornell’s architecture building designed by OMA. This video documents my combustibility test and explains the code issues.

 

New “Accessibility” section in Milstein Hall Critique

I’ve been working on my “Critique of Milstein Hall,” a project started in 2012, but — until now — missing the final section on “Function and Flexibility.” Well, that final section is still missing, but as I was working on it, I realized that I should really add a short section on accessibility.

So, I did.

Milstein Hall, the last building constructed for Cornell University’s architecture program, was designed by OMA, and is connected to two older campus buildings — Sibley Hall and Rand Hall. The Critique now has four sections: nonstructural failure, fire safety, accessibility, and sustainability. Function and flexibility should appear soon. Find links to all these sections on the Critique homepage here.

Cornell: Annals of accessibility

[Updated May 5, 2022 (scroll to bottom)] Two years ago, I wrote to administrators at Cornell University, advising them that “protruding objects” designed into a food truck behind Milstein and Sibley Halls were in violation of the ADA as well as the New York State Building Code.

The United States Access Board states: “To prevent hazards to people with vision impairments, the standards limit the projection of objects into circulation paths. These requirements apply to all circulation paths and are not limited to accessible routes. Circulation paths include interior and exterior walks, paths, hallways, courtyards, elevators, platform lifts, ramps, stairways, and landings.”

The New York State Building Code requires that “At least one accessible route within the site shall be provided from public transportation stops, accessible parking, accessible passenger loading zones, and public streets or sidewalks to the accessible building entrance served.” Chapter 10 (Means of egress) states that “Protruding objects on circulation paths shall comply with the requirements of Sections 1003.3.1 through 1003.23.4” and Section 1003.3.3 confirms that “Objects with leading edges more than 27 inches (685 mm) and not more than 80 inches (2030 mm) above the floor shall not project horizontally more than 4 inches (102 mm) into the circulation path.” Circulation path is defined in Chapter 2 of the Code as “An exterior or interior way of passage from one place to another for pedestrians.”

Annotated photo of food truck at Cornell University showing noncompliance with ADA standards for protruding objects

This image shows the protruding objects in the circulation path by the food truck behind Sibley/Milstein Halls at Cornell (photo and annotations by J. Ochshorn)

On the two-year anniversary of my first email, I again requested that Cornell remediate this illegal and dangerous situation, embedding several annotated photographs into my Jan. 14, 2022 email that illustrate one possible method of permanently fixing this problem:

Food truck behind Sibley/Milstein Halls at Cornell University showing two protruding objects

Metal “fins” attached to the food truck behind Milstein/Sibley Halls at Cornell University could be altered to comply with ADA requirements.

Detail of metal fin at food truck behind Milstein/Sibley Halls at Cornell University showing one possible method of remediation for ADA noncompliance.

Metal “fins” on the food truck could be cut in order to comply with ADA guidelines for protruding objects.

Existing and proposed remediation of protruding objects on food truck behind Milstein/Sibley Halls at Cornell University.

“Before” and “after” images showing proposed remediation of protruding objects on food truck behind Milstein/Sibley Halls at Cornell University (photos and Photoshopping by J. Ochshorn).

[May 5, 2022 Update] Soon after my January 14, 2022, email, a moveable sign was placed under one of the noncompliant protruding fins (image below), something clearly inadequate, since the sign could be (and was) moved from its intended position. I complained about the inadequacy of this remedy.

Sign placed under noncompliant protruding object at Cornell University

Amazingly, a few months later — about 4 months after my January 2022 design suggestions and more than two years after my initial complaint — I discovered that the noncompliant metal fins had been trimmed, pretty much as I had specified in my photoshopped renderings: the newly-compliant food truck is shown below.

Noncompliant protruding object at Cornell University cut so that it no longer protrudes.

Noncompliant protruding object at Cornell University cut so that it no longer protrudes.