Bruce Goff: "As an architect..."

 

Architect Bruce Goff was a leader in what's been called "the other modern movement," i.e., the practice of organic architecture, pioneered by the likes of Goff, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaron Green, and Walter Burley Griffin -- and after which Organon Architecture (in large part) bases its name.

Bavinger House, Norman, Oklahoma, 1950-1955, no longer extant -
“the most amazing work of residential architecture I had ever encountered”
says Robert Morris (Photo by Anthony V. Thompson).

Goff wrote this piece below in 1978, four years before his death, for an exhibition of his work “Coda: As an Architect” essentially summarises his life as an architect and what a work of architecture is -- based on his expectation that a close relationship existed between all forms of artistic activity and life.

They seem like ideals by which to live and work ...

Coda: As an architect

I do not solicit clients they come to me as they would to any professional man for specific professional services.

I do not work for clients…I work with them.

There has never been a building built before by anyone else or myself, that my client should have; we must work it out together. I forget what other architects and I have previously done so we can start as freshly as possible.

I must be sensitive to my client’s needs, wants and budget. I do not build upon a site…I build with it as part of its region, climate and environment.

I must be free from narrow-minded prejudices regarding materials, methods, colours, textures, forms, ornament, structure, and spatial determinates; all such aesthetic and utilitarian matters as felt and understood by the clients and myself must be freely disciplined by me, as an architect, into grammar from which will be composed the whole complete architectural concept.

There shall be no starting with a predetermined over-all shape or form in mind; no subdividing it off into rooms cluttered with furnishings…with the clients and their lives squeezed and compressed within. This is usual, and as usual in no more than the usual container for the use of humans!

Rather, the whole thing will start with accommodating people and their ways of life, and grow organically from within outward thus becoming its own shapes and forms.

If I give the client only what he asks for, he may be temporarily satisfied with it, for a while, but eventually he will just get used to it. As an architect I should give him what he wants… and more. If it is a work of architecture, the client will continue to grow aesthetically in such an environment…therefore there must be a continuing surprise and mystery beyond what he initially understood to hold his interest and to be a continuing, rewarding setting for his lifetime.

Architecture is the only art which we can actually physically inhabit! It is often our desire to enter or take part in a work of art in order to make it ours, thus in literature we involve ourselves with it while we read…in music we must participate in it, as we listen, if we are to understand it. More and more we like sculpture to be large enough so we can be spatially involved with it. We project ourselves imaginatively into paintings and other visual arts. We can be happy adapting ourselves to pre-existent art works, but those created for and with us as a part of them seem most alive and vital to us.

As an architect I know that technology and superb building techniques are necessarily a part of all of this, and we must be more aware of the ones we already have and of those new ones we need, but good building, in itself is not enough to be called good architecture, however, architecture is good building plus!

An architect’s works are personal and impersonal…timely and timeless; having a license to practice does not mean, in itself, one is an architect any more than having a driver’s license means one is a good driver. This is what separates the boys from the men.

The real architects are the young ones, regardless of age, with continuing enthusiasm, imagination, industry, inventiveness, curiosity, and dedication to architecture for all people as their reason for being.

Anything needing to be built, small or large, simple or complex should and can be architecture. We have many more people wanting this than we have architects able to supply their demands. We must never forget that architecture is for all of us.

As an architect, I know that our works often make some people mad and some glad.

The creative young are intrigued, inspired, and stimulated by them, as are those who use them. By such examples we continue to renew faith in the creative spirit and its potentials, thus, we are also teachers, but not academic.

I have never sought publication or publicity, preferring to let the work earn this for Itself if it is worthy, and so I too continue to “maintain my amateur standing” as  a beginner, beginning again and again in the continuous present…

Bruce Goff, Architect, April 1978

"The Need for Therapeutic Architecture in Today’s Society"

"With the rise in mental illness there is an increasingly strong need for therapeutic spaces," writes architect Abigail Freed. "Therapeutic architecture," she argues "lessens the need for the typical patient-doctor relationship. The space itself becomes the 'therapeutic apparatus'."

What a fascinating idea!

I've been told by some clients that our initial design interview is "a little like psycho-analysis." Architect Richard Neutra, a friend of Sigmund Freud, made that connection explicit. Explains Freed:

He required his clients to keep diaries and subjected them to a lengthy interview process. These tactics were Neutra’s way of gaining insight into their daily lives, their conscious and unconscious desire, their habits, their personal and interpersonal struggles and triumphs, as well as their deepest thoughts and feelings. Neutra believed that “architecture should operate like psychotherapy by assisting clients to satisfy unconscious psychical desires” and that the architect “operates on the basis of an emotional dynamic with a client developed through analysis of childhood experience.” From this process he felt fully equipped to create a physiologically curative design.”

 Bethany Morse outlines his four-fold "biorealist" approach:

Abigail Freed outlines some of the "design tactics" Neutra used to fulfil the brief he gave himself, to better connect the "subject" to their environment and "imprint" upon them better mental habits.

One of the most notable features “of Neutra’s work during the 1950’s was an intense concentration on dismantling conventional barriers between inside and out.” He achieved this effect through the implementation of various tactics such as transparent glass, “spider legs” and mitred glass corners.
    In all of Neutra’s post war houses there is an emphasis on the glass exterior.

    In the Rourke house (1949) “the outside world intrudes through large glass panels. These are not simply picture windows that frame views or glass walls that structure the house as in traditional… instead the glass window/wall is actually a door that moves and permits movement. The wide overhang of the roof creates a zone of shadow attenuating and extending the boundary of the interior. The overhangs that all but eliminate reflection further reinforce the indeterminate simultaneity of enclosure and exposure. The glass becomes not transparent but invisible to leave the house unbounded.”

 

    Neutra used his Spider Legs (pictured above) “to collapse the normally primary architectural distinction between exteriority and interiority”. The spider leg is a single beam or fascia that “fascia stretches far beyond the edge of the roof at a major corner and turns down the reach the ground”. By displacing the corners of rooms and “in some cases the very structure of the house such normally stabilising architectural elements are indeterminately inside and outside at the same time.”

 

One of the most celebrated features of his architecture is the corner where one glass plane meets the other. At this corner the floor to ceiling glass meets at a mitred edge to produce a glazed environment of intense spatial ambiguity. Here there is a distinct oscillation between opacity and transparency, interiority and exteriority, solidity and fluidity and it generates perceptual confusion. Here the “glass and frame perform to both produce and suppress the edge of the house.” In the Moore House (1952) “the corner provided [Mrs. Moore] with a sense of the inter-relation of Nature without and living within that could do nothing less than eliminate the depression which we feel. She felt this interrelationship especially on a misty gloomy day, in other words when the house was at its most moody and when she turned to the window to get out, to enter its distant view over the far landscape and to join what she called the ‘mystery over the mountains’.” Neutra saw this corner as the precise moment where instabilities and uncertainties collect and where desires, both psychic and organic are projected.  

Our human psychology, Neutra recognised, comes from our human birthplace of "the primeval forest or the grassland of prairie and pampas," but has now become 90% man-made. Nonetheless, we still feel most comfortable in places that replicate the patterns of our ancient birthplaces.  One of the most potent is that of "prospect and refuge." As Barbara Lamprecht explains,

“prospect,” meaning looking out above your surroundings from a commanding position … afforded by glass walls. In contrast, the kitchen and the bedroom/dressing area, with their walls of warm mahogany, create the counterweight to prospect in the quality called “refuge,” or shelter, or what Gaston Bachelard called the cave. Both prospect and refuge are necessary to us.

Bothe qualities, of course, would have been physically necessary when subject to potential attack by wild animals, or other humans! Now they are just as necessary psychically. 

Those manipulations of corners, opening them up in contrast to a deep and sheltering corner opposite, is just one of the patterns Neutra built into his houses that recognised this deep psychological need. And this strong contrast between the deep sheltering "cave" set off against the opportunities for prospect made the whole space appear larger, and more active.

Neutra delivered a small space that feels expansive, not cramped, because it has an effect beyond its four walls. As he often said, his goal with small houses was to “stretch space” ...

So how well did all this work in practice? Freed summarises it as seeing its success from the few failures:

One of his clients, Mrs. Logar, wrote to Neutra in 1956 (just four years after building the home in Granada Hills California) saying that she and her husband wished to sell their house. She states, “it looks messy all the time and there is no place to hide things away. We are entirely exposed to view from all sides. This is just about right for some executive and his wife. I think I prefer to live in an old hidden away place for a couple of years to clear my thoughts.”Mrs. Logar was exhibiting one of the common criticisms of Neutra’s homes: the feeling of vulnerability and extreme exposure that accompanied living in the glass house.
    However this complaint is the home’s very success, not failure. Based on the Freudian understanding of empathy, which is defined as “an unconscious defense against internal impulses… to projection onto an inanimate object… into a defensive transfer of feelings onto another subject” it can be inferred that those who are experiencing these fears of exposure and vulnerability are actually experiencing their unconscious repressions becoming conscious. In the Freudian manner Neutra has brought to light what they have repressed since childhood- their fear of exposure and vulnerability- in order to overcome these fears and be cured of their neurosis.
    Mrs. Rourke, contrary to Mrs. Logar’s opinion, “argued that Neutra had given them a new living experience [and she] could think of only one word to describe the way she felt about it: Liberation.”While Mrs. Logar failed to overcome her phobia, Mrs. Rourke’s statement suggests that she was able to embrace the vulnerability tied to exposure from all sides at all times and was rewarded with a improved quality of life. The “improperly bounded environments of these houses permitted psychoanalysis to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The houses’ naturalising materials, blurred structure, and camouflaged glass are both in the open and deliberately evade the gaze, enabling their therapeutic actions to be everywhere while out of view.”

Understanding a building's enclosure in terms of patterns like "connecting with nature" and "prospect and refuge" allows us to understand how we can shape our houses today to meet the psychological needs of today's inhabitants. As Abigail Freed concludes:

This type of architecture is always a success if it at the very least helps those struggling feel as through they are helped. What is the harm if it relieves only the inner anxieties of some? Critics may claim it is “all in their head”, but that is the very basis of emotion -- we all exist in our own heads.

Agree or not, perhaps the most important thing to take away is that our psychological facts and requirements are just as important to the design of our houses as our physiological needs, or the house's structural demands. They are all facts of existence that we must take into account in our designs.

When we do, successfully, they can be a curative.

 

Humble House for Hamilton

Here is why I call myself a "humble house designer": A humble wee house -- one of two, for the same extended family -- on a small well-surrounded site in Hamilton.

See of you can deduce the connection between this house, and Frank Lloyd Wright's explanation of what he means by the term organic architecture ....

"The current building regulatory environment cannot genuinely support innovation without a major rethink."

"Concerns about the complexity of the [building] regulatory framework and its impact on innovation have been raised by BRANZ* in recent submissions to both the Commerce Commission and to MBIE....
    "While the regulatory framework has been designed to allow flexibility to use new products [Ahem! - Ed], in practice, it has not been totally effective. We believe this is because the regulatory system is too complex and creates uncertainty around how to ensure a product will comply.
    "This uncertainty then incentivises designers, builders and building consent authorities to favour tried and tested building products to ensure lower personal and organisation risk. In short, the complexity of the regulatory environment is driving behaviours and decisions across the building system that are risk averse, conservative and not conducive to innovation.
    "[T]he current [building] regulatory environment cannot genuinely support innovation without a major rethink."

~ outgoing BRANZ* CEO Chelydra Percy, in an unusually frank assessment of the regulatory impediments to innovation in the building industry, 'Holding Up a Mirror to the Industry'

* BRANZ, i.e., the Building Research Association of NZ is the government research body overseeing and appraising building materials and systems, funded by a compulsory levy on all Building Consents.a

"By organic architecture, I mean..."

"By organic architecture, I mean an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being, as distinguished from one that is applied from without."

~ Frank Lloyd Wright