Tim Frank, Cloudland Residence. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Flowers.
Please welcome associate professor Dr. Benjamin Flowers of the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, today’s guest reviewer.
The organizing premise behind Spruill Gallery’s Site Unseen is straightforward enough: a show of unbuilt work from the last decade by 10 Atlanta-based firms and designers. What is less obvious is whether, on the whole or in part, you will leave the show lamenting the demise of these projects or relieved that they were never built. I suspect most visitors will be both saddened and pleased after surveying the work on hand.
It is a truism, as the literature accompanying the show points out, that the victors write architectural history. City skylines, for better and often for worse, are defined by the built rather than the absent. Nevertheless, unbuilt projects occupy a special niche in architecture. Some fall into the category of “paper architecture”—projects never destined for construction due to various economic constraints, technological limitations, or social conventions. Then there are competition entries, fairly detailed projects that either just missed out on first place or came in dead last, you’ll never know just by looking. These are plentiful thanks to the seeming inability of some clients (particularly museums and other institutions) to pick an architect without first having a beauty contest. Finally, there are those buildings that client and architect both wished to see to completion, but, alas, a global financial meltdown intervened and cleaned everyone’s clock. You might consider this last sub-category paper architecture against its will.
Installation view of Site Unseen at Spruill Gallery. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Flowers.
Freed from the obligation to convince as a three-dimensional habitable space, unbuilt projects can achieve an iconic status that eludes a great many completed structures—think Mies van der Rohe’s Project for a Brick Country House or Zaha Hadid’s The Peak. What is interesting about unbuilt projects, however, goes beyond lamenting their absence (although architects might weep for lost fees): they gain heft from their capacity to illuminate particular modes of architectural thinking and from exploring idiosyncratic design cultures. Finally, these stillborn projects complicate our understanding of the architectural culture of Atlanta, showing us what might have been, and leaving us to ponder the reasons for their demise. To that extent, unbuilt works in a show such as this are interesting to consider aside from the relative question of architectural merit. Even a “bad” project, or an “ugly” project, or a project that is just more of the same reheated Atlanta boomer-bland corporate skyline filler that you wouldn’t dream of wanting to look at twice (much less spend time in) can tell you something about the state of practice in our fair city.
And what it tells us is this: there is some very interesting, thoughtful, and site-specific architecture emerging from Atlanta firms. Unfortunately it is too often bookended (in this show as in the built landscape) by some very dull, phoned-in, and site-less work. The heroes in this show are small firms, with BLDGS, Tim Frank Architecture, and Mack Scogin Merrill Ellam Architects standing apart above the rest. The villains, well, they are as you might expect: larger corporate firms tasked with satisfying the demands of their larger, less-adventurous corporate clients (so perhaps we should cut them just a little slack).
BLDGS, Richards Residence. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Flowers.
The Richards Residence by BLDGS is by far the most comprehensively documented project in the Spruill show. The sketches, measured drawings, and site and building models provide ample evidence of the attention to landscape, materiality, and the quality of inhabitation that are characteristic of the firm’s modest but impressive body of built work. The pleasures of this project—a cluster of pavilion-like structures arrayed on a lot bounded on both sides by generic suburban tracts and houses—hold up across the various modes of documentation. One wishes the Richards Residence had seen the light of day, especially as a corrective to the mindless, ugly (albeit profitable) sprawlchitecture that dominates the larger landscape into which it was to be set.
In a similarly contemplative vein, Tim Frank develops the formal schema of his Cloudland Residence from the patterns of sun, water, and wind in play across the landscape. A set of concrete and wood study models suggest the tactile pleasures that could have emerged from the project and offer a hefty counterpoint to the more abstract diagrams illustrating the environmental conditions at play on the site. Jeffrey Collins’s Dogtrot Update: Vertical proposes reworking a vernacular housing type that likewise developed in response to specific climactic and landscape conditions. Although the design process is handsomely documented, the final resolution—a four-and-half-story dogtrot clad mostly in glass and resembling in proportion and massing an urban townhouse minus the party walls—is less convincing.
Tim Frank, Cloudland Residence. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Flowers.
Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam’s engaging multi-media competition entry for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk is one of only two projects outside of Georgia (the other, Tristan Al-Haddad’s Corporeal Transmutations, is a computer animation of Giuseppe Terragni’s Mussolini-era Danteum). MSME proposed a fantastical structure—a sort of L-shaped volume with an under-building entry plaza carved out to resemble the splintered trunks of the Białowieża Forest. It is both strange and wonderful, particularly in light of how uncritical war memorial-related architecture can be (see the paternalistic WWII Memorial in DC, for example ). The jury for Gdansk, headed by Daniel Libeskind, instead chose a project that, not surprisingly, looked a little like a Daniel Libeskind building. What’s more unsettling than the cliqueish behavior of design juries is the disdain with which Atlantans too often treat the work of this hometown firm: only recently threatening to tear down MSME’s Buckhead Branch library and replace it with, wait for it, an ersatz Irish Pub chain. Imaginative civic-minded public architecture was nearly slain by purveyors of overpriced pints of Guinness and Sysco-truck Buffalo wings.
That tendency to favor the bland and predictable (and often private) over the challenging and quirky (and public) is most apparent in this show in the work of Perkins + Will and Lord, Aeck & Sargent. Both firms are responsible for some fine work, but here the projects disappoint. The former are represented by four projects for downtown Atlanta that could be found in almost any American city. These are shown only in perspective, and on boards that smack of the sort of thing a developer would prop up in a conference room to sway investors (hence the absence of plans or sections that would offer more information about these projects as real buildings). Frankly, given those constraints, Perkins + Will did a good job at offering a palatable façade to projects that were burdened far more by balance sheets than architectural ambition, but whether we should lament their demise is hardly in doubt. The same largely is true of LAS’s One Museum Place, originally slated for the now forlornly scraped and empty lot across from the High. Here LAS defaulted to a building that is all boom-time architecture gloss on the front elevation and all 1970s English new university Brutalism in its massing (if not its materials) on the rear elevation. The watercolors by Barbara Ratner are a nice touch, however, even if they speak to the conservative tendencies coursing through One Museum Place.
It is fitting, given the subject of this exhibit, that it is housed in a gallery sailing in a sea of suburban traffic and pavement. Much of what was built in and around Atlanta in the boom decades looks like the landscape around Spruill. As Atlanta slowly works its way out of the great recession, Site Unseen usefully reminds us that architects, clients, planners, and the public at large could be spending this downtime pondering just how we might want our collective guardianship of the built landscape to operate once the capital taps have been turned back on.
Spruill Gallery’s exhibition Site Unseen will continue through July 23, 2011.
