The Subtle Landscape

   Last week while riding my bike along the swollen Mississippi, my mind took me back to the architect selection process for the Figge Art Museum.  One of the reasons David Chipperfield was chosen was that he’d designed several projects alongside rivers, most notably (at that point*) the River and Rowing Museum by the Thames near Henley.

  We first met Mr. Chipperfield (now Sir) at that site and listened to him describe how even more stringent were flood plain building requirements in the UK than in the states.  And how, in any case, a river is a force of nature with which one best not trifle.  He quoted TS Eliot in that regard: “A river has a permanence far greater than mere humans.”

  That respect, in part, led him to set the volumes upon concrete columns thus placing them just above flood level.  Their shape was inflected first by the long obtusely peaked tents set up during the annual Henley Regatta.  The rooflines of traditional wooden barns of Oxfordshire were the second important influence. 

  The structure thus “fit in” and assuaged fears of local conservatives.  Chipperfield also though endeavored to clearly interject something new by having it appear to float over the site – resting it upon nearly invisible walls of glass.  The raised platform also bears resemblance to pavilions in Japan where will be found most of his early built work.

  The hovering effect was achieved for our project by exactly opposite means.  FAM looks like a glistening rectilinear crystal made to appear to float by its stark contrast with the dark concrete plinth upon which it rests.  Though the scale of the two buildings differs significantly, important similarity does not end there.  Both buildings honor their contents without sequestration. 

  Both employ skylights to allow for some natural lighting**, but more importantly both set up an opportunity for the visitor to visually interact with mother nature.  At Henley it’s the embrace (if not caress) of poplars around one small glazed room while here it’s the invigorating slap in the face one receives exiting fourth level exhibition space to look out and over the mighty Mississippi through a huge window sixty-one foot tall and nearly as wide.  Our own Grand Canyon.

*Chipperfield’s recently completed Neues project on Museum Island in the River Spree in Berlin was for ten years one of Europe’s largest.  It’s received raves.  Hope to visit one day…

**The skylights at Henley have been said to have been inspired by those at the Kimball.  Indeed, during our visit, Chipperfield was heard to say that “he’d work very hard to make the building what it wants to be” a phrase made famous by Kimball Architect Louis Kahn.

***cf June 26, 2009 – For a nearby work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s by a river.  There are some similarities as well as fundamental differences.  Wright’s has roots.

****cf June 5, 2009 to read about bridge builders and nature.

  Horace Greely famously told Josiah B. Grinnell to “Go west, young man, go west”.  The Congregational minister did and ended up in the middle of Iowa and a town here now bears his name.  It is a wonderful place with much to see and do.  Grinnell College is there and its campus is magnificent.  Make sure to visit the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, a neat building designed by Cesar Pelli.  North facing light catchers bathe the stuff on display in its Faulconer Gallery with slightly blue toned light.

  But another building is even more interesting and alone worth the short trip north from I-80.  It is Louis Sullivan’s Merchant National Bank.  It is the finest example of the several “Jewel Box” banks that he designed in second half of his career.

  Sullivan is famous for his “form ever follows function” which is often misinterpreted it seems to me.  Sullivan didn’t mean minimalism or the absence of adornment.  One look at the entrance to the bank and its explosion of terra-cotta should put any such though to rest. 

  A reporter wrote at opening on January 1, 1915 that something “must have worked like hashish” on the architect to induce such a vision.  Such a thought would not grace any review of, say, David Chipperfield’s Figge Art Museum.

  Sullivan meant that a building’s ultimate form should be the organic emanation  of the spirit of the place and its people.  This bank was built as a repository for the fruits of the labor of area farmers with reverence for the hard work signaled thereby.

  The entrance faces south and thus for most of the year and most of each day sun pours through the beautiful stained glass window.  There is also stained glass on the east which fills with light till noon or so and sky blue glass on the ceiling***.

  The effect of the glass and light is beautiful, but perfectly not profound.  No “metaphysics of light” here****.  A lesser hand would have combined the same elements to a more clerical effect which would have not only been disrespectful to Fr Grinnell’s gothic church (which used to be just across the street to the east) but also to the local common consciousness.

  The ceiling height is about twenty feet creating a spatial experience which (without too much of a stretch) could be said to allude to one in a barn or in a field looking toward the sky.  Or, indeed, like being a gem in a jewel box – but one with some of the dividers missing.

  The interior was changed and a touch diminished by the removal of the cages over the teller areas which originally served more of a purpose of tradition and proportion than security.  The effect is as if an element had been removed from a piece of abstract sculpture.   You would feel the absence of something even if you had no way to know what was missing.

  That extirpation would seem to have been unnecessary because a functioning bank was appended on the north and Sullivan’s jewel appropriately repurposed to house the chamber of commerce.  The commission for the addition must have been intimidating, but was done with respect and rhythm by Davenport firm Stewart-Robison-Laffan.

  Finally, this may be hard to believe, but the building was more comfortable in context in 1915 than now.  It was then of similar size and proportion to that of its immediate neighbors.  Roof lines met.  Now to the west is a low slung bit of impermanence and the aforementioned addition obvious in its respectfulness.

  Sullivan has been called the “father of the skyscraper”, yet the grand part of his career had been long over at the time of this commission.  Perhaps sensitized by intervening vicissitudes he found himself able to channel the essence of Grinnell and show what he “meant when he talked about the genius of America.*****

*Words of a reporter in the 1,1,15 Grinnell Herald.

** The glass was done by Louis Millet who was related to Jean-Francois Millet, the French painter know for his paintings of peasant farmers such as The Gleaners

***Term coined by Abbot Suger in the early stages of Gothic Architecture

**** January 1, 1915 Grinnell Herald

***** Some of the above came from the book by Bill Menner which is well represented in this website: 

http://www.grinnelliowa.gov/SullivanBank/HistoryRoad.html

  Of the ten structures in Iowa designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the one nearest my home is in between Dubuque and Waterloo, just south of Highway 20 near Quasqueton.  The original owner, Lowell Walter named it Cedar Rock for the limestone formation on the site at the shore of the Wapsipinicon River. 

  It is one of Wright’s designs for which he coined the term “Usonian” – short for United States of North American.  His intent with this departure from the more well known Prairie Style was to make innovation and good design affordable and available to Middle America*.

  The site is of a spectacular beauty that would surprise those many not familiar with Iowa away from Interstate 80.  It is secluded, heavily wooded, and perched above a wide and swift Wapsipinicon river.  Local lore has it that a Native American tragedy akin to Romeo and Juliet played out nearby.

  The design is called tadpole in plan with the ‘head’ being the all important open square “Garden Room” and ‘tail’ the rectangular living spaces articulated forty-five degrees off the southeast corner.  Wright wrote Walter “there will be no basement or attic” which tone pervades every square foot.

  He designed each space, selected every object, and arranged it all with incredibly great painstaking care.  Upon a return visit, he would scold and say “you can use that pitcher, but it must be returned to its original position precisely so”.  The Walters wanted a queen sized bed, but Wright would not have it.  He insisted upon two doubles like a curator establishing symmetry in a gallery.

  It is a wonderful sculptural object well rooted, plinthless, in its site like an earth toned dolman laid flat.  But it wouldn’t be a great place in which to live.  Once shorn of initial zeal, it’d stale one’s concept of heaven.  Who’d want to live in a monastery? 

  It must though be said that compared with the contemporaneous Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe) and the Glass House (Philip Johnson) Wright’s ‘Organic’ approach makes the Walter’s Garden Room more down to earth.  

  There is an antiphonal relationship between the greenery inside and out made possible by the abundant glass and light surrounded by the solitude of the site.   It should come as no surprise that Wright was familiar with Japanese gardens and the “capturing with window” technique. ***

   Also, there were several elements of the original design that would today evince environmental concern including in floor heating and related elements of passive climate control as well as a thick concrete roof intended to be covered with fertile soil and vegetation.

  There is one bit of neat whimsy.  Wright’s Prairie Style homes often have stained glass windows which would be too expensive for the Usonian concept.  Here, Wright arranged brilliant blobs of colored glass in small niches in a wall by way of allusion. 

  The boat house is down a path about fifty yards away and is serene.  It sits above the river with wide views up and downstream.  There, one could indeed quietly revel in the sound of water and muse about our place in the universe.

*The Walters were not middle class having built a fortune and retired in their forties.  Original project budget was $20,000, but ended up at $150,000.  And that was in 1950. Today that’d be more than a $1 million.  Walter wrote Wright of his frustration with delays and overruns to which FLW responded: “We were brave men to try to set up the last work in heaven way off in the mid-western prairie-miles from anywhere?”

**See post of November 7, 2008

*** The Walters left a $2 million trust to provide for the well being of their cherished country home.  The trust is now bust and it will be interesting to see what the Iowa DNR will do with the place especially in these turbulent times. 

**** Do visit.  It is part of the state park system and the staff are fervent, knowledgeble, and enthusiastic.

http://www.iowadnr.gov/parks/state_park_list/cedar_rock.html

*****The top photo is of the entrance at the articulation point between Garden Room and living spaces.  Garden Room to the left.  Second photo is from the Garden Room looking through a glass corner.  Third photo is same place outside looking in.  Fourth photo is looking downstream from the boathouse.  Last photo is perhaps extreme, but not undemonstrative.