An Argument Against Abstraction
A re-Making of the Seagram Building
“Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste”
—Winston Churchill
Our recent (and still tentative) emergence from the Covid-19 crisis gives us the opportunity to see a lot of things differently, and to act on them aggressively. We say this because we all know that Covid was only a temporary distraction (or prelude to things to come?) from the profoundly deeper human crises of our Carbon Modernity1 and its impact on our planet’s climate.
Modernism’s most enduring—and most damaging—conceit has been that of abstraction. To paraphrase Kiel Moe, we as architects talk to ourselves in an isolated language to describe decidedly non-isolated phenomena like building and urbanization2. We in architecture schools continue to trade on the language of abstraction that we inherited from the 20th century. Abstraction is a language that allows us—to our collective peril—to dismiss so much that is external to our process of describing and specifying the arrangement of materials into building-objects; in other words, the design process.
Our studio aims to challenge these very same strategies of abstraction and the architectural tropes you have become familiar with during your architectural education so far. We will do this not by offering you an undeveloped parcel of land in some far-flung destination for you to dream on…that’s so 20th century. No, we will do this by offering you as a site perhaps the most modern of modern buildings in the most modern of modern capitalist capitals—the Seagram building in New York.
We will use this site-object to dismantle—literally—as many assumptions about what architecture is, should, and could be as possible. We will examine our assumptions about program, process, building type, form, property, urbanism, density, facades, flatness, comfort, construction, materiality, sustainability, solidarity, and energy flows. We will examine our assumptions about what it means to be human living on the surface of the earth.
The Seagram building is a modern icon. Maybe the Modern Icon. We love the Seagram building. We were taught (and most likely you were, too) to worship the Seagram building, and I (Martin), at least have continued to do so for most of my adult life. But let’s begin to understand what the Seagram building represents. At the time of its construction, it was the most expensive tower ever built. It was designed to waste energy. As the post-war global oil regime was forming, the corporate office building was a symbol meant to equate unbridled energy use with economic growth and power3. An office building was a celebration of excess, and yet we continue to create urban monocultures of corporate towers meant to be occupied for maybe 8-10 hours a day, for just five days a week. In fact, what may e the defining impact of this seminal building by Mies van der Rohe is the proliferation of poor imitations that followed. And that proliferation continues to this day.
So, we will use this 20th century building as the means to demonstrate how we could be living, could be building, and should be thinking in the 21st. Given that more than 80% of our current building stock will still be around in 2050, dealing with existing buildings (i.e., decarbonizing them) will be the challenge of addressing climate change. Therefore, we will approach this studio and this building literally, as a way to cure us of our devotion to its insistence on abstraction at the expense of the literal.
We want to be clear, however, that this is not a building tech studio focused on retrofitting old buildings with insulated glass and improved hvac. This is a speculative studio; a provocation we can play out using a 20th century icon as both our subject and our object. After all, what could be more provocative in a design studio than an insistence on the literal?
Students will work in pairs. In the first few weeks leading up to travel, we will investigate our site-object, building on the critical construction ecology research already conducted by Kiel Moe in his book, Unless. We will interrogate the role of midtown in a post-covid, post-carbon New York City, and will question how the city should evolve to face climate change and a changing nature of life and work. In terms of your intervention on this site-object, our approach will be to use, as far as imaginable, what we have right in front of us. Matter, which is to say, building components (W-sections, facade panels, stone slabs, etc.) will be conserved at either a site or neighborhood level. In the spirit of 2021 Pritzker prize winners Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!” It will be up to you and your partner to determine how you want to approach these terms, and in what ways you propose that humans will both transform and re-occupy this site-object.
Travel
Aside from the obligatory visit to our site we will also visit, of all places, Indiana. Why on earth would we visit Indiana, you’re asking? Well, in the spirit of literalism, we want you to have a better sense of what some of architecture’s presuppositions are, and of how far-flung the effects of building on a site in one area of the world can have on another. We will visit a steel mill in Indiana, a stone quarry, and a concrete supply company. Not the places that supplied the actual material for the Seagram building, but still points of extraction and processing of terrestrial material, and representative of how our current building practices are degrading our planet.
As a bonus, we will also tour the town of Columbus, Indiana, itself a paean to 20th century modernism, with many iconic modernist structures whose architectural fees were paid for under the auspices of a foundation created by the CEO of…wait for it…Cummins, the diesel engine manufacturing giant.
Reading List
Barber, Daniel. “After Comfort.” Log, no. 47, 2019.
Harpman, Louise, Vivian Loftness, Billie Tsien, and Tod Williams. “Is the Future Flat.” Zoom discussion, New York Review of Architecture, New York, New York, September 23, 2020.
Iturbe, Elisa. “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity.” Log, no. 47, 2019.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
LaTour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002.
Mertins, Detlef et al. Mies. London: Phaidon Press, 2014.
Moe, Kiel. Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology. New York: Actar, 2020.
Moore, Jason W., and Raj Patel, “Cheap Nature,” in The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Australia: Black Inc, 2017.
Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the non-Human. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Washington, D.C.: Conservation Foundation, 1980.
Wilson, Mabel O. et. al. Who Builds Your Architecture?: A Critical Field Guide, link, February 2017.
Zaera-Polo, Alejandro, and Jeffrey Anderson. The Ecologies of the Building Envelope: A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces. New York: Actar, 2021.