CHAPTER EIGHT

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MAKING DIFFERENT THINGS BELONG

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Bawa, Lautner, Wright and architecture as a total event

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Some buildings feel as though their parts have been negotiated into coexistence; others give the stranger impression that several decisions arrived together. This chapter is about the latter condition and about three architects—Geoffrey Bawa, John Lautner and Frank Lloyd Wright—whose work makes it difficult to separate site, structure, movement and atmosphere into independent ideas. They are not a family tree for Charles Wright, but they help sharpen the question of how much of a building can behave like one thought.

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Integration is the safest. Synthesis is more ambitious. Organic architecture carries historical baggage. Gesamtkunstwerk brings Wagner into the room, which may be more help than the room requires. “Total design” can mean anything from profound coherence to an architect choosing the teaspoons. The terminology matters less than the experience. Some buildings seem to have been assembled from competent decisions. Others give the impression that the decisions have become difficult to separate. I want to know what produces the second condition.

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Charles Wright is hardly the first architect to worry at this problem. Architecture history is full of people who became dissatisfied with the idea that a building was a collection of separately resolved components. Some pursued unity through formal systems, some through craft, some through structure, others through landscape or the control of almost every object within reach. Three architects are particularly troublesome for the argument developing here: Frank Lloyd Wright, Geoffrey Bawa and John Lautner. They are not a lineage leading conveniently to Charles Wright. There is no useful equation in which one supplies organic architecture, another the tropics and the third structural drama, after which Charles appears as the sum. Influence does not work so tidily, and comparison becomes intellectually lazy when famous predecessors are reduced to ingredients. What they offer instead are three ways of asking how much of architecture can be made relational.

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Frank Lloyd Wright made the question almost impossible to avoid because he repeatedly tried to extend architectural order beyond the conventional limits of the building. Structure, furniture, glazing, ornament, landscape and circulation could participate in a larger composition, and his idea of organic architecture insisted that unity should arise from the nature of the whole rather than from an assemblage of independent parts.¹ There is an authoritarian edge to this version of wholeness. If every chair, light fitting, window and piece of furniture belongs to the total composition, the architect's responsibility can slide easily into the architect's control. Clients have inconvenient habits. They buy furniture. They move things. They hang pictures where the composition had not anticipated pictures. Life is an unreliable collaborator.1

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Yet the architectural achievement remains difficult to dismiss. At Fallingwater, for example, the relationship among rock, water, cantilever, movement and occupation cannot be reduced convincingly to a building placed beside a landscape. The architecture derives much of its force from making the distinction unstable.² One may criticise the mythology surrounding the project, its technical history or Wright's treatment of clients and collaborators without losing sight of the larger proposition: the building is trying to make site, structure and inhabitation part of the same thought. That phrase—the same thought—needs qualification. Buildings are never literally produced by one thought. They emerge through revisions, arguments, calculations, accidents, construction decisions and compromises. The phrase describes the effect of coherence, not the historical reality of a perfectly unified act of conception. That distinction becomes essential when we reach Charles Wright. Before doing so, Geoffrey Bawa shifts the terms considerably.

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Bawa's architecture is often discussed through tropical modernism, but the label can obscure how strange his spatial intelligence actually was. His work in Sri Lanka repeatedly makes buildings difficult to separate from gardens, courtyards, terrain, water and movement. At Lunuganga, the distinction becomes particularly unstable because architecture and landscape were developed through a long process of adjustment rather than a single finished composition.³ Bawa's version of wholeness is therefore less object-like than Frank Lloyd Wright's. The architecture often emerges through sequences: compression and release, darkness and light, covered and uncovered space, distant views and intimate courts. A roof may matter less as an object than for the shade it creates and the territory beneath it. A wall can become significant because of what it withholds until movement reveals something beyond. The whole is experienced through time.2

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The resemblance to Bawa should not be overstated. Bawa's work emerged from Sri Lankan histories, landscapes, patronage and cultural conditions that cannot be transferred to Far North Queensland as though “tropical” were a universal architectural nationality. Nor does Wright generally possess Bawa's almost archaeological accumulation of courts, roofs, walls and gardens. The comparison is useful because both make the tropics more than a climatic specification. Climate changes spatial relationships.

That is a much stronger proposition than adding environmental devices to a completed architectural idea. Shade affects where people can remain. Rain changes circulation. Vegetation controls privacy and outlook. Air movement influences the permeability of rooms. Covered exterior territory can become as important to occupation as conventional interior space. Once those consequences are accepted, climate has entered the architecture deeply enough that removing it would alter the building's conception. This is one measure of synthesis. Lautner provides another. John Lautner's architecture has a tendency to make structural engineering look suspiciously like an act of imagination. The great houses do not merely contain daring structures. Their spatial identities frequently depend upon structural decisions so thoroughly that asking what the building would look like with a different structural system becomes almost meaningless.⁴

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This is particularly clear in projects such as the Chemosphere and the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, although in very different ways. The former concentrates an extraordinary amount of architectural identity into the relationship between site, support and elevated enclosure. The latter develops a more expansive interaction among concrete, landscape, view, shelter and interior experience.⁵ Lautner is relevant to Wright not because both architects have made dramatic houses. That category is too broad to be useful. What matters is their willingness to allow physical necessity to become architectural character. There is a difference between showing structure and thinking structurally. Architecture can expose beams, columns and connections while remaining conceptually indifferent to them. Conversely, a building can conceal much of its structural system while having been fundamentally shaped by the behaviour of forces, spans, supports and material.3

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Stamp makes the comparison obvious, perhaps too obvious. Its concrete invites discussion of mass and structural behaviour before the critic has even entered the house. More revealing are projects where the relationship is quieter. The Edge, for instance, uses projection, elevation and the relationship between building and terrain to create architectural experience that cannot be detached completely from the problem of support. The visual effect is not simply a shape selected and subsequently held in place. This is where Lautner becomes both helpful and misleading.4

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His best-known buildings possess such extraordinary formal confidence that the comparison can encourage a reading of Wright primarily through spectacle. That would be a mistake. Some of Wright's more revealing work operates through restraint rather than drama. Re-Newell, for example, is useful precisely because it demonstrates that the same appetite for relationships need not produce monumental form. Intervention can be selective. Existing conditions can be edited rather than overwhelmed. If synthesis only works when the architecture is spectacular, it is probably style wearing a more intellectual hat. The test is whether the operation survives when spectacle disappears. A building can become coherent without becoming the product of one person. In fact, the complexity of contemporary institutional architecture makes the opposite increasingly likely. The question is whether the different forms of knowledge remain visible merely as adjacent solutions or whether their interaction changes the architecture.

A contemporary architect working on a complex institutional project cannot reasonably control every component in the manner associated with the heroic model of the twentieth-century master. Nor should that be the ambition. Expertise now resides in too many places, and some of those forms of expertise carry ethical and technical responsibilities that architectural authorship cannot simply absorb. The challenge is therefore to achieve relational coherence without requiring total control. That is a different version of the whole. Under the first model, collaborators threaten authorship because every external contribution reduces the architect's control. Under the second, collaborators increase the range of knowledge available to the architecture, while simultaneously making synthesis more difficult. The architect's task becomes less about defending territory and more about preventing the territories from losing contact with one another.

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This sounds admirable until one remembers that actual projects contain budgets, deadlines, contracts and disagreements. Synthesis is not a harmonious state into which everyone enters after the concept meeting. Sometimes disciplines want incompatible things. Sometimes cost removes the element that supposedly connected everything. Sometimes a regulation produces a clumsy result because compliance matters more than elegance. Sometimes the architect is wrong. A theory of the whole that cannot accommodate compromise is merely another form of perfectionism. Bawa is useful again here. The apparent naturalness of his mature work can conceal how constructed those environments are. Gardens are composed. Views are manipulated. Routes are choreographed. What feels inevitable is the product of continual adjustment.

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The same is true of Lautner's structural drama. Engineering possibility does not magically become architectural form. It requires negotiation between aspiration and what matter will tolerate. Frank Lloyd Wright's work, for all its rhetoric of organic unity, also contains joints, revisions, technical failures and the unruly evidence of construction. The whole is never as seamless as the photographs suggest. Perhaps that is why the idea remains valuable. Wholeness is not a condition a building achieves once every contradiction has been removed. Buildings without contradictions exist mainly in project descriptions. The more interesting achievement is to make competing requirements enter into relationships strong enough that the architecture does not fragment under them. Looking again across Charles Wright's work, I find this more persuasive than searching for a visual signature.

(-) Glass House and Stamp House do not need to resemble one another closely if both are trying to reorganise relationships among climate, enclosure and occupation. Cairns does not need Stamp's concrete monumentality if its material strategy can produce a different negotiation between architecture and landscape. Trinity does not need to look domestic if the underlying concern with climate, movement and spatial connection can survive the institutional programme. The continuity, if it exists, is operational. This is close to the observation made earlier that the buildings share verbs rather than a face, but the distinction has developed since then. A verb describes an action: wrapping, lifting, screening, framing, opening. Synthesis asks what happens when several such actions become consequences of the same decision.5

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A roof may shade, span, collect water and define social territory. None of those functions is extraordinary individually. The architecture becomes interesting when changing the roof to solve one problem would alter all the others. That is what I mean by one thought. Not a flash of genius arriving complete in the architect's head, and certainly not one person controlling every technical consequence. The phrase describes a degree of interdependence. The building has been thought through sufficiently that its important decisions begin carrying more than one kind of responsibility. This is difficult architecture to make because the easiest way to solve a complicated problem is to divide it. There is nothing inherently wrong with division. Professional knowledge depends upon it. The structural engineer needs to isolate structural behaviour long enough to understand it. Environmental modelling requires its own abstractions. Cost planning needs categories. Regulations divide buildings into measurable requirements because regulation would be impossible if every project were treated as an indivisible work of art. The danger comes later, when the divisions become the building.

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Architecture is one of the places where all those abstractions are forced back into physical coexistence. The person walking through the finished project does not experience the structural package followed by the environmental package and then the landscape package. They experience a room at three in the afternoon when the sun is coming from one direction, air is moving or failing to move, somebody else is passing nearby, a surface is warm, a view is visible and the roof above is simultaneously holding itself up. The world does not arrive in consultant packages. This may be why the idea of the whole keeps returning.

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Bawa, Lautner and Frank Lloyd Wright help because none provides a template. Bawa demonstrates how landscape, climate and movement can become spatially inseparable. Lautner shows how physical and structural possibility can generate experience rather than merely support it. Frank Lloyd Wright represents the extraordinary ambition, and the corresponding danger, of treating architecture as a total composition. Charles Wright arrives after all of them, in a profession where that ambition has to coexist with forms of knowledge and collaboration too complex to belong to one person. If there is a contemporary version of the total architectural project here, it cannot depend upon possessing the whole. It has to depend upon maintaining relationships within it. That is harder than it sounds, particularly when other people are involved. And from this point onward, they increasingly are.

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Notes & References →

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