There was a time in when the nowiest way to make buildings was with as uniform and white a surface as possible– usually stucco, hand-troweled over metal lath over sheathing, or the like. That modernist style has roots in the Enlightenment, with the sweeping yet abstract paper-projects of architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee, and became the distinguishing feature of many an International Style ahderent in the early 20th century.
Unabated, this style continues to trickle into the 21st century as well, where if you stare at it long enough it ceases to be a style and more of an embodied identity of Europe… perhaps clinging to the old, perhaps a little technocratic (Embodied identity… isn’t that one way to define style?) But as easy as it is to dismiss this style as the attempt to impose a white supreme order on the world, under scrutiny it becomes clear that there is actually a lot of nuance and sensibility behind this construction technique.
The lath-and-plaster method of wall building is centuries old. Before wall boards made of hardened gypsum, like Drywall, exploded onto the market, this was the most popular way to construct walls. Set up a layer of imperfect strips of wood or metal mesh, intentionally with gaps in it, then trowel your plaster over it and let it cure. Depending on the number of coats, kinds of admixtures, troweling techniques, etc, you could attain an enormous range of finishes. For example, what we fetishize nowadays as Venetian Plaster is just such a version– using multiple coats, applied with a special steel trowel, and sealed with wax, the result is a slightly variegated, antiqued, finely textured surface. From afar it may look uniform, but up close it has character.
Have I convinced you? Have we zoomed in enough on the actual construction technique to realize that what once appeared as an abstract mass is actually a piece of craftsmanship? This is a switch in the brain which architecture sometimes helps illuminate– when forms are Euclidian from afar (deceptively simple in geometry), yet mysterious up close (retaining the trace of the human hand).
This balance is hard to strike in many contexts. When I taught The Saturday Program architecture class, it was hard because you want to strike the perfect middle between the seduction of fundamental geometry and the exploration of materiality.
Here is the lesson: build a 6″ cube. Using whatever material you want. Each student works diligently on their own version, paying little attention to their neighbors. When everyone’s done, we go over the models, and discuss how even though each cube is made of different materials, and held together differently, they all still enclose the same volume of air: 216 square inches. This means that “space” as we think of it, and as we toss it around probably more than any other word in our profession, is a concept borne of symbiosis: the air being enclosed, and the materials doing the enclosing. Euclidian, yet mysterious.
But in real life things rarely turn out as perfect cubes and spheres. Why? I like to imagine that while you start with Euclidian geometry, Boullee in your mind, you have to create disturbances, wrinkles, imperfections, exceptions, limitations, aberrations… and impress them upon this perfect shape. Like the way the planets are. Each is 99% a perfect sphere, with its own unique characteristics that were imposed upon it in response to its surroundings. If you engineer the best combination of transformations on your Euclidian solid, attuning it best to its surroundings, you will be superimposing two layers of perfection over each other.
There are a number of works of architecture that carry this quality quite nakedly.
.jpg){kind=link}
