Lars Müller Publishers 2010/2011 Architecture Design Photography ...

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Our new titles exemplify the value of the book as a medium for storing and conveying complex contents, and also suggest the variety of the design approaches through which a book may assume its final form as an object. The spectrum is immense. The unconventional perspective of two icons of modernist architecture – Oscar niemeyer’s Brasilia and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh – offered by photographer Iwan Baan forms a contrast with Louis Kahn’s tenacious design process during the 1960s and with Andrea Palladio’s bold plans for building in the Venice of the renaissance. Alongside new releases in the areas of architecture, design, photography, and art, we are proud of the considerable number of titles which continue to enjoy the interest of the public. Our backlist remains the mainstay of our activities as a publishing house. we welcome your interest. Lars Müller Iwan Baan BrASILIA – ChAnDIgArh Living with Modernity Edited by Lars Müller With texts by Cees Nooteboom and Martino Stierli Design: Integral Lars Müller 24 x 30 cm, 9 ½ × 11 ¾ in, 240 pages 200 illustrations, softcover 2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-228-6, English EUR 40.– GBP 40.– USD / CAD 60.– “ Everything is monumental, human, simple, grandiose, and ascetic in the purity of its forms, which are reduced to the necessary minimum.” In 1960, Brasilia was celebrated as the realization of an urban planning vision based on designs by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. At the same time, the sectoral city of Chandigarh was rising according to plans by Le Corbusier. The “ test tube city” arose as an export of modernity from a Western planning euphoria that displayed utopian traits. In both cities, foreign architecture entered into a harmonious rela tionship with indigenous culture, forming new and independent identities. This publication addresses the question of how modernism has been appropriated in both cities, and how the people who live in them deal with it. Commonalities and differences are identified and images of everyday urban life showcased. On the initiative of the publisher, the photo grapher Iwan Baan has taken stock of contemporary life in both cities. With commentary in the form of essays by Cees Nooteboom on the photographs and by Martino Stierli on the architectural and planning history. 3 Architecture 1 Lúcio Costa 50 years nEw Brasilia
Michael Merrill LOuIS KAhn: DrAwIng TO fInD OuT The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture “while drawing, I’m always waiting for something to happen. I don’t want it to happen too quickly, though.” Louis Kahn nEw Design: Integral Lars Müller 30 × 24 cm, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in, 240 pages 233 illustrations, hardcover 2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-221-7, English EUR 59.– GBP 60.– USD / CAD 85.– Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred – mostly unpublished – drawings are woven together with a lively and informed commentary into an intimate biography of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 – 69, unbuilt) the drawings form a narrative which provides compelling insights into Louis Kahn’s mature culture of designing. Fascinating beauty, the drawings open a new and stimulating perspective on one of the past century’s great architects. Michael Merrill LOuIS KAhn: On ThE ThOughTfuL MAKIng Of SPACES The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space Design: Integral Lars Müller 16.5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in, 240 pages 215 illustrations, softcover 2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-220-0, English EUR 35.– GBP 35.– USD / CAD 55.– irregular silhouette, its superimposed diagonal and orthogonal orders, and its folded peripheries — being much more complex than either of these two-dimensional readings would suggest. ) The final scheme offers its inhabitants choices between ambulatory and linear patterns of movement. The three great communal rooms, being at once usable space and “ circulation,” are unconventionally skewered together over the entire length of the building by a great diagonal enfilade. The corner-as-connecter is Kahn’s provocative answer to the problem of the otherwise “ dead ” corner of the square in plan: “ I discovered at Bryn Mawr that you can connect a room over its corner.” Partially buffered from the communal spaces by the thickened walls of “ servant ” spaces, the ambulatories provide access to the dormitory rooms. The linear and ambulatory systems, in combination with a series of both extroverted and hidden stairs, give the students the choice of both exposed and hidden routes through the building, the choice between “ remote or direct association ” with cohabitants and with those communal “ availabilities ” the house has to offer. The Dominican Motherhouse represents a special, and especially dense, manifestation of a “ society of rooms ” plan. We have already studied in the narrative the earliest bipolar scheme, with its hermetic cells and its communal “ Forum of Availabilities,” the great ambulatory and courts being the means of both spacing and connecting the individual spaces. By the development of the fourth and final version, the original theme had evolved into something decidedly less conventional; instead of being presented with a choice of access to various rooms from the vantage point of a generous and unprogrammed “ space of appearance ” ( as at Fort Wayne, Ahmedabad, et al. ), we are now, from our position within a single discrete room, presented with the choice of movement in any one of at least three directions. Something like an “ ordered labyrinth ” is the result. An inversion has taken place: the matrix has replaced the counterform and virtually the entire complex has become an “architecture of connection.” While the Kahnian imperative of free choice has remained, that of “ indirect association ” has collapsed. Robin Evans’ description of Raphael’s Villa Madama reverberates: “Once inside it is necessary to pass through one room to the next, then to the next, to traverse the building. Where passages and stairways The Second Scheme: August – September 1966 While the June meeting was largely affirmative, it did not take long for the first harbingers of difficulty to cloud the optimistic beginning. In September, Mother Emmanuel, likely developing a sense for the project’s true dimensions, wrote Kahn to express her concerns and to remind him of the congregation’s limited budget. High interest rates and inflation had added considerably to the burden of financing such a large project during the mid-sixties, and without a reliable cost estimate, she was uncertain of how to go forward. After receiving Mother Mary Emmanuel’s letter, Kahn and Polk soon began to reconsider their design. Attempting to press the first plan’s parti into a more compact package, the architects developed a second scheme over September. The monastery’s position and orientation on the site remain the same, but now responds to the sisters’ suggestion that the combined main and service entrance drive now lead in from Bishop Hollow Road. This lessens the sense of extended threshold when compared with the earlier approach through the orchard. Gone as well is the elegant separation of visitor and service access. On the other hand, the new monastery now has its own address, no longer accessed by driving past the manor house. On this point Kahn and the sisters were in agreement, and the new route of approach would remain for the duration of the design. In response to the new approach, the entry tower — now octago- nal in plan — shifts from the west side of the complex to the east. In an attempt to tighten up the plan, a narrower main gallery skewers through the tower, connecting the communal spaces and terminating in the school and the living quarters. The first version’s generous system of cloisters has been compacted by pressing the building blocks tightly against each other; gone are the figure-ground obscuring “ hollow columns ” and “ water gardens ” of the earlier scheme. The direct relationship between chapel and refectory — favored by both architect and the sisters — remains. An intriguing moment in the plan is the chapel, where a square rotated within a square creates poché for ancillary spaces such as confessionals and sacristy as well as connecting neighboring rooms. Whereas in the previous version the governing geometry may be derived from both program and relationship to the topography, here an “ irrational ” geometry takes over in which both internal parti and external relationships are considerably less lucid than before. While this squeezing has wrung almost 35,000 square feet ( 3,252 m ) out of the plan ( now measuring 131,600 square feet [ 12,226 m ] and landscape: the Texas plain of Fort Worth. Raking, horizontal, and generously shade-giving in the stark Texas sun, the long-vaulted Kimbell sympathizes with the extended lines of these dry flatlands. Like the Salk Institute, the materials — here concrete, travertine, and lead roofing — with their subdued colors and toothy textures, were chosen for their bleached, archaic presence in the strong sun. Details are kept flush to emphasize the simple shapes in sunlight, revealing subtle tectonic relief only at closer range. It has been suggested by Lawrence Speck that the long multiple vaults are references to the bow-topped Texas livestock sheds which are so common around the Fort Worth area, while the museum’s great loggias may be seen as inter pretations of the vernacular domestic Texas porch. Whether Kahn consciously abstracted from these antecedents remains a source of speculation, as he never spoke of the building in this way. ( Although later in Texas, the project for the De Menil Collection seems to wink even more explicitly at local domestic architecture. ) What is certain is that the Kimbell demonstrates a strong sense of its locale — a deep insight into its atmosphere, its colors, its topography, its vernacular — without the vaguest hint of the Southwestern vernacular pastiche which has become so common in this part of America. ( This ur-sense of place would later lead the artist Donald Judd to ponder if the Kimbell was not, perhaps, the first building to be erected in Fort Worth, built by an earlier — more civilized — culture than the one now living there. ) What these four buildings begin to intimate is that while Kahn’s mature architecture is not “about ” contextualism in the style- emulating and motif-seeking postmodernist sense of the word ( nor “ about ” landscape in the contemporary, literalist, “ building-as-landscape ” sense of the word ), it is indeed very much about gathering, focusing, and revealing the conditions of its context. This revealing may take place at the micro-scale of the particular site: the diagonal geometries of Erdman Hall and the Fisher House may be discussed in purely formal or in phenomenal terms. Anyone who has visited these buildings knows the undeniably physical experience of these diagonal foils on their sloping sites, how their prow-like shapes exaggerate and intensify the sense of the immediate topography. ( Richard Serra’s site-specific “ elevations ” come to mind. ) This revealing may — as in Angola — have to do with atmosphere, may be experienced in the way that sun, wind, 2 Architecture 3 nEw It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the métier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work. MICHAEL MERRILL, Dr.-Ing., is a practicing architect in the USA and Germany and assistant professor for Architectural Design at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
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Page 7 and 8: TOuCh ME The Mystery of the Surface
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