What’s going on?

The dismaying dearth of intellectual rigor in our popular culture has been parried with an overly- zealous esotericism among the architectural elite. This clique of influential architects has been given a much louder voice by their precocious benefactors than befits their numbers and yet their stamp upon the contemporary architectural landscape has been profound.Fine Arts Magazine

Just as our built environment is littered with construction that is bane and banal, the contemporary detritus is a plethora of factious forms that have been generated by sophisticated software and technological zeitgeist. These visually enticing, yet vacuous assemblies, have appeared in great numbers on the choicest of urban and rural site, as if they’ve come to existence in a vacuum, with wanton neglect of their context and past architectural achievements. The brazen new work seems to have rendered the architectural old-guard meek and humiliated by the new, brash neighbor who’s just made its grand entrance to the scene. After the initial fanfare, these awkward juxtapositions serve only to disrupt the architectural continuity and further diminish the cultural fabric.

Has the architectural universe been distilled to a choice between another fractured Frank Gehry, or a Kentucky Fried drive-through? Probably, the answer is yes, but if there is a way to be modern, smart, sincere, and beautiful, and to offer the promise of contemporary architecture deemed worthy by future generations, it’s worth some observation and introspection to understand how we can improve the current state of affairs.

Justification for the current paradigm:

With sheer determination that mistakes wealth for truth, and truth for beauty, the collective sense of being modern purveyed by certain acolytes coupled with the desire to being ‘different’ has ambushed our ability to distinguish between good and that which is simply unique. When Modernism embraced the machine and its physical manifestation, represented by the Bauhaus School of design, how neatly did the philosophy fit with the need to re-build Europe after the destruction wreaked upon the continent during the First World War? The economic advantage of being modern begs the question as to what is serving whom? Did the style follow economic necessity or was it just a happy coincidence that a financially friendly form just so happened to fall upon the architectural scene when society could no longer afford to build the way it used to before the Great Wars? Form follows finance?

(above) Jackson Heights: Queens, NY- a laboratory for new ideas in 20^th C. housing. This planned community introduced several modern planning ideas in 1920’s. ‘Towers’ designed by A. J. Thomas (1925), illustrate ‘Garden Apartment ‘ planning- open space and suburban amenities – within confines of city’s grid.

What was left behind and lost was not only the tradition of a tightly-woven architectural fabric but, almost entirely rendered to the waste heap of knowledge was the language of western architecture, developed and refined over the past 2,500 years. Perhaps the formal architectural predilection that we understand to be modernism evolved to suit manufacturing methodology and then continued to develop to the present day where even more sophisticated machines not only build the physical components and assemble the project, but then these machines are again employed to actually create the design itself.

Even if there were a place for the language of architecture as we once knew it, how would we know it if we saw it anymore? Willful negligence and inexcusable ignorance regarding reference, context and a lack of reverence for appropriate precedent has resulted in the jettisoning of architectural and cultural context—so essential to the success of any architectural response. Have we lost for an eternity the architectural landscape that embodies those cohesive qualities of a built environment that were once taken for granted but are today only packaged and preserved in precious “historic districts”? Or is it possible to be both modern and reverential at the same time?

Justification for trying something else:

Not only is historical and cultural reference a valid, honorable, and completely modern point of departure for the design of a new building, but only an edifice that is fundamentally relevant can be considered truly modern; because its very nature embraces qualities that pay attention to its context, heritage, materials, culture, and its essential nature to be a product of the current time.

The understanding of purpose and place and the difference between here and there are primary factors that warrant a project to be deserving of construction relative to one that is better left on the computer monitor because it didn’t know any better. Is there any reason that “Stupid” should be substituted for being “Smart” just because it’s been purveyed and then consumed as being “cool”?

What I did:

The Green House, a single-family, three-bedroom house in Santa Barbara, California, is a construction that was commissioned by my mother, Norma Green, in 1981 and completed in 1983. As a Promethean effort for a newly-minted architect, this project provided the post-thesis culmination of idea, idiom, and execution. This writing is an investigation of concepts that are timeless and a retrospective of a specific architectural response that intends to be modern even though the last brush stroke of paint was applied nearly twenty-seven years ago.

The design inspiration point of departure for the Green House arose from the Southern Californian Mission Style of architecture and surrounding Mediterranean landscape. The goal was to deliver an innovative, yet historically-informed design, into the ongoing diatribe of current taste and classical virtue; thereby making it essentially ‘modern’.

The dissection begins with its composition. Modern convention insists on the arrangement of pure geometric volumes, planar screens and linear exclamations, celebrated to the exclusion of ornamentation, which would otherwise distract from the purity of sheer form. The assembly of these elements is both additive and reductive, creating a variety of dynamic forms that are perceived by mass and void and by the changing play of light and shadow.

One experiences this architectural object through time and space and an unfolding view that cannot be fully digested in one sighting, but only fully appreciated by collecting immediate visual perceptions and combining them with a collection of previously digested memories of the edifice, giving power and life to this form. Inspired by spatial ‘surprises when touring through an Italian hill town, sightlines are designed to be abbreviated, changing, and without repose. Vistas open up to the viewer as the culmination of a lengthy approach. The banal and anticipated are vanquished in favor of the unexpected and varied, enjoining the relationship between landscape and serendipity.

The courtyard, with its galvanizing point-of-focus, provided by the single palm tree, finds its precedent with the atrium house of the Vettii in Pompei. While the steep hills of Sycamore Canyon have been employed as a substitute for the “fourth wall” of the atrium space, the quality of this private/public outdoor vestibule remains true to the function of its predecessor. Openings to the house and garage are screened or framed according to the desired visual access deemed appropriate for these specific functions.

The interior of the house seeks to provide a seamless play of the same compressed and expansive volumes that are experienced outside, only with a ceiling involved. Saltillo tile, a commonly found mission-style paver, is used at the exterior and then carried into the house as finished flooring so as to further interfere with standard conceptions of outdoor and indoor spaces. White stucco walls… monolithic, common, and ordinary to the region further support the sense of place and yet are the binding surfaces that transform the geometry of the structure to a uniform and cohesive composition.

Could this house exist anywhere other than in Southern California? Perhaps so, but I would like to think not nearly as successfully. Can its design be traced to a specific date in time? I would hope that it could because only the honesty of a detailed design response that is acutely aware of its specific time and place of creation warrants the brand of being modern. It is also true that only the qualities of the design that are steeped in the context and tradition of this specific project will spare the house from appearing as dated. That fate would be a failed miscarriage of conception that places a preconceived form ahead of its influences, instead of the design of an architecture that gathers its strength and integrity out of respect for discovering the truth, without fear of finding it and with confidence that the journey will end with a design that is beautiful and consummately modern.

William Green, RA, Contributing Writer

To see more images of this project and others by William Green & Associates, Architects, go to www.wgaarchitects.net