Category: At the Center for Architecture

Event: Stories About Squares: An Illustrated Talk by Robert F. Gatje, FAIA
Location: Center for Architecture, 04.28.10
Speaker: Robert F. Gatje, FAIA — Author, Great Public Squares, An Architect’s Selection (W.W. Norton, 2010)
Organizers: Center for Architecture; W.W. Norton; Architectural League of New York

To author and architect Robert F. Gatje, FAIA, some of the most special urban places in the world can be ascribed to the attributes, geometries, and special qualities of city-defining squares and plazas. In his new book, Great Public Squares: An Architect’s Selection, (W.W. Norton, 2010), these places range from the Piazza Navona in Rome, the Piazza delle Erbe in Verona, the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, and the Place des Vosges in Paris, to New York’s Rockefeller Plaza. In his recent talk at the Center for Architecture, each of these extraordinary places came alive with images of the squares in use, accompanied by plans and elevations that together spoke to the importance of perception and proportion. Gatje brought the audience into these squares by speaking, as well, of the history and mutability of significant public space.

Many learned, for example, that the curved edges of the Piazza Navona were a direct result of the circus, or arena, built by the Roman Emperor Domitian in the first century, echoed by the Baroque forms from the 1600s of Borromini’s Church of Sant’Agnese and Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, recently made famous to the general public by Tom Hank’s cinematic dip in Angels and Demons. And who knew that the mature plantings in the Place des Vosges had previously existed in six different configurations, with the most recent version not even consistent with the official plan filed at l’Hôtel de Ville in Paris?

The edges of many of these spaces are of a fairly consistent height, partly a result of pre-elevator walk-up residential limits. Building heights of 65 feet or so mean that the street wall is much more than a ballpark fence. And, of vital importance, was the fact that the space contained within the squares “did not leak out” in the corners, according to Gatje. He is, of course, the architect of many world famous structures, done by his own firm, or designed previously when he was a partner in the offices of both Marcel Breuer and of Richard Meier, FAIA, FRIBA. He is also a past president of AIANY and has been active, over many years, with the Design Committee and Contracts Committee of AIA National.

The audience included many architects and urban designers visiting from afar, some of whom spoke with the author about repeating the talk in their own cities. Spanish architect Natalia Soubrier, one of many who talked with the author during a pre-lecture book signing, was overheard telling another visitor from Spain that the book, and talk, was “inspiring because of the street-level perception of what worked universally” in more than 25 cities around the world.

Rick Bell, FAIA, is the Executive Director of the AIA New York Chapter.

Event: Modernism by Choice: The Economy, Politics, and Sustainability of Preservation
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.20.10
Speakers: Grahm Balkany — Director, Gropius in Chicago Coalition; Jorge Hernandez — Architect, Co-Founder, Friends of Miami Marine Stadium; Michael Calafati, AIA — Principal, Historic Building Architects, Trenton, and Chair, AIA-NJ Historic Resources Committee; Victor Sidy, AIA — Dean, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; John Szabo — Director, Atlanta Public Library System
Moderators: Theodore Prudon, FAIA — President, DOCOMOMO US; Lisa Ackerman — Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, World Monuments Fund (WMF)
Repspondents: Frank Sanchis — Senior Vice-President, Municipal Art Society; Carl Stein, FAIA — Elemental Architecture, formerly of Marcel Breuer and Associates
Organizers: Center for Architecture in collaboration with WMF; DOCOMOMO US; DOCOMOMO New York/Tri-State

Headlines about preservation battles don’t scream as loudly here as in England, but maybe they should. Like Sarasota’s Riverview High School and an alarming number of other Paul Rudolph buildings, as documented in the Center’s “Modernism at Risk” exhibition, an entire medical campus master-planned by Walter Gropius is slipping away. The news is better at other sites: Taliesin West is safe while enduring recurrent renovations; Hilario Candela’s Miami Marine Stadium has outlasted “demolition by neglect” and marshaled support; Eero Saarinen’s Bell Laboratories has a fighting chance of respectful re-use; and Breuer’s Central Public Library in Atlanta isn’t going anywhere, even if it doesn’t remain a library. But the experience of Grahm Balkany’s Gropius in Chicago Coalition provides a cautionary tale for anyone who values Modernism’s ideals and built legacy. The key to preservation: education, education, education.

Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital campus included a total of 29 buildings, Balkany said, “more than half of great merit”; the Kaplan Pavilion, in particular, recalls the Dessau Bauhaus. Officially credited to several Chicago and Cambridge firms, the campus expressed the work and thought of Gropius — not just a hospital site in his eyes, but “an opportunity to create an entirely new neighborhood prototype for the U.S.” — and of his protégé Reginald Isaacs. Landscaping by Lester Collins, Hideo Sasaki, and others helped make the area a green enclave on the South Side.

Coveting the site for the 2016 Olympic Village, the city acquired the property, established demolition plans, and ignored the Coalition’s arguments that the Gropius campus, together with IIT’s Mies van der Rohe campus a few blocks away, created a uniquely valuable “Bauhaus District.” The case for preservation had multiple strengths: the hospital was functioning; the Olympics were awarded to Rio de Janeiro; and a host of commentators weighed in to support Balkany’s group, including the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council, which unanimously backed nomination of the campus to the National Register of Historic Places. Nevertheless, in October the city began demolishing buildings and clear-cutting the landscape. A plaque honoring Gropius, among other features, is now gone; all but one building are to follow.

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Event: The Sensual City
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.12.10
Speakers: Jacques Ferrier — Principal, Jacques Ferrier Architectures
Organizer: Center for Architecture

French architect Jacques Ferrier doesn’t believe in the term “sustainable architecture,” instead embracing the idea of “architecture for a sustainable society,” he explained. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s key to understanding his approach. Consider, for example, his eponymous firm’s design of the France Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, which opens next month.

The pavilion was designed as a reaction against the architecture of some of Shanghai’s satellite cities, which focus more on energy-efficiency than beauty, Ferrier noted, as he showed a photo of one with boxy buildings and a bland, empty park. “Even if these buildings are really efficient in terms of energy, these are cities without quality,” he remarked.

By contrast, the France Pavilion will offer a vision of the “Sensual City,” both through its exhibitions on the topic and through the architecture itself, which is surrounded by a pool of water and features a lush vertical garden that acts as a brise-soleil. A steel frame grid is clad with glass-reinforced concrete elements that look like a light white mesh on the exterior, which provides structural support and allows natural light to penetrate. The design sprang from the “idea of a new urbanism where there is no clear difference, no clear limit between architecture and landscape,” according to Ferrier. As visitors enter a courtyard waiting area, breezes from the pool and shadows will offer a rejuvenating sense of coolness during a warm time of year, while music and the views and smells of the vertical garden will engage the senses. Once visitors make their way into the building and through the exhibitions, they will emerge onto a verdant rooftop, a reinterpretation of the traditional French garden.

The pavilion also features solar panels, like many other of the firm’s projects, such as a sailing museum in Lorient, France, and an office building in Grenoble. Beyond the panels’ obvious benefits for energy generation, their aesthetic possibilities intrigue Ferrier, too. His firm received a grant to research new types of solar panels, whose wide range of colors offer appealing design choices, he remarked. It’s an emphasis that embodies well his firm’s focus on architecture that’s sustainable in a way that’s highly aesthetic, not ascetic.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for OCULUS, The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.

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Miami’s Marine Stadium, whose attractions included speedboat racing and concerts, offers a happier story. Closed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 but structurally sound, this origami-like design by Cuban architect Hilario Candela of the local firm Pancoast, Ferendino, Grafton, Skeels, and Burnham brings the forms of Pier Luigi Nervi, Max and Enrique Borges, Oscar Niemeyer, and others to Biscayne Bay on a vast scale. Amid conflicting estimates of renovation costs and an attempt at demolition using Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, Jorge Hernandez reported, the community has rallied along with the WMF, Docomomo, and others to oppose a “heavy-handed…. ridiculous” retail-oriented plan that would remove the stadium, then a second plan preserving only the grandstand. The inseparable grandstand-basin combination attained local historic designation without the approval of the city as owner; further engineering studies, charrettes, and the election of a preservation-minded mayor all point to eventual success in preserving this icon of borderless hemispheric culture.

In Holmdel, NJ, Eero Saarinen’s elliptical Bell Labs research complex strikes a deliberately lower profile — original occupant AT&T preferred to hunker down out of public view — but helped set the standards for sleek corporate campuses in its day. AT&T’s successor Alcatel-Lucent moved out in 2007, and potential developer Preferred Unlimited planned to raze the buildings in favor of high-end residential, a corporate park, or other profitable uses. Maximized ratables outweigh historic and architectural considerations for township officials, commented Michael Calafati, AIA, and NJ’s higher-level governance is weak, but the restoration question at least remains open. New developer Somerset has welcomed a preservation charrette; Calafati describes the firm as “not perfect, but one we can have a conversation with.”

The afternoon panel, “Sustaining Operations in a Modern Building,” struck more confident notes, discussing the ongoing experiments with roof-panel materials and successive structural renovations at Scottsdale’s Taliesin West and the robust inverted ziggurat of Atlanta’s Marcel Breuer library. Ahead of its time in anticipating the broadened functions of a post-Carnegie-era library as well as defying local preferences for columns and coziness, the building provides essential community space at a transit-accessible downtown location. It is a flak magnet over issues unrelated to its operations (e.g., gatherings of the homeless), and Fulton County voters passed a 2008 bond referendum calling for an alternate central site along with branch expansions, but the amount has been reduced, says director John Szabo, who believes finances ensure any replacement is “a long way from happening.” Even if it does, Breuer’s building will be a candidate for conversion to an academic facility or museum, though vigilance and stepped-up public relations are critical.

Much of the day’s discussion analyzed why some preservation efforts capture the public’s imagination, and why Chicago’s never quite did. Panelists agreed that popular enthusiasm is essential to save a building. The Olympic bid had many Chicagoans wearing “rose-painted” glasses; hospitals in general can inspire more fear than affection; Chicago development invokes the tendencies for clout to outweigh reason and accountability. Despite Chicagoans’ famous knowledgeability about their architectural local heroes, many were unaware of Gropius’s involvement. Others simply “hate Modernism.”

One recurring theme was whether Modernist buildings are, as one questioner put it, “cuddly.” To part of the population, they never will be, and their other attributes (being breathtaking, structurally honest, well-programmed, or provocative) won’t matter. The difficult yet essential task, said Carl Stein, is educating citizens to distinguish between truly Modernist buildings — serious in intention, purposeful in advancing ideas, active in social contexts — and mere object-buildings in a modern style. Particularly as mid-century and later works approach the 50-year standard for landmark eligibility (a standard that many found open to rethinking), Stein emphasized a frank awareness that “one reason Modernism has been under heavy attack is… the idea we can solve things by conscious action.” What these buildings are up against is often not just an antipathy to bèton brut but a deeper antipathy to rationality itself.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

Event: At Risk! The John W. Chorley Elementary School, Middletown, NY
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.11.10
Speakers: Carl Abbott, FAIA — Carl Abbott FAIA Architects/Planners; Steven Forman, AIA — Senior Associate, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects
Introduction: Sean Khorsandi — Co-Chair, Paul Rudolph Foundation
Moderator: Fred Bernstein — Architecture Critic
Organizers: Center for Architecture in partnership with the Paul Rudolph Foundation; Preservation League of New York; World Monuments Fund
Sponsors: Modernism at Risk is sponsored by Knoll, Inc.

“While there were several architects in the 1970s known as paper architects, Paul [Rudolph] is becoming one by default as his buildings are being removed,” warned Sean Khorsandi, co-chair of the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Calling attention to one of 13 threatened (or recently demolished) Rudolph projects, the John W. Chorley Elementary School in Middletown, NY, could be razed next year to make way for a parking lot and new school building. To identify preservation strategies, panelists drew on lessons learned from attempts to save other Rudolph buildings, most notably Riverview High School in Sarasota, FL (demolished 2009), and the Yale University Art and Architecture Building (restored in 2009 by Gwathmey Siegel to wide acclaim).

Khorsandi began by describing the architecture of the school: four open-plan classroom zones around a central circulation spine; gently terraced floor levels hug the landscape; and roof trusses and clerestory windows flood the interior with daylight. The open plan makes the school adaptable to almost any use, Khorsandi noted, and needlessly destroying the building would not only erase part of Middletown’s cultural heritage, but entail environmental costs as well.

Carl Abbott, FAIA, of Carl Abbott FAIA + Associate Architect/Planners, who helped lead the attempt to save Riverview High School in Sarasota, FL, showed photographs of Riverview’s deterioration and the alterations that ruined the original architectural concept. These misguided changes — Abbott called them “abortions” — prevented Sarasotans from understanding Riverview’s value, he said: “A big chunk of this is awareness of people realizing the masterpiece that they have in their community.” Though his team solicited support from famous architects, he said this strategy backfired: “The school board people were not looking at name recognition for the building — they wanted us to show them why it was a good building.”

On the positive side, Steven Forman, AIA, a senior associate at Gwathmey Siegel, described his experience as a senior architect restoring the Art and Architecture Building at Yale. Despite abundant technical challenges, the project was a success, he said, “because the money was there, the will was there, the client was there, the construction manager was there. They ‘bought in’ as partners in the whole construction process. In 30 years of building, I’ve never had that experience.”

Abbott simplified the checklist for successful preservation even further: “It’s awareness, it’s time, and it’s money.”

During the Q&A, an audience member pointedly asked whether people even like the Chorley school. Abbott acknowledged that Rudolph could make “demanding” and “intense” architecture, but the question was ultimately put to rest by Fred Isseks, a Middletown high school teacher in attendance: he estimated that 90% of his students love the building. Some of those students were in the audience, and one spoke passionately about her appreciation for the Chorley School.

Positive testimonies such as these, coming from members of the local community, are crucial, said moderator Fred Bernstein. “Buildings will be saved because people come to like them, not because architects say they’re important.”

Carl Yost is the marketing and publicity coordinator for Gabellini Sheppard Associates. He has written for Forbes.com and The Architect’s Newspaper, among other publications.

Event: Book Launch: The Evolution of Design + Planning in the Age of Climate Change
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.18.10
Speakers: Joe Brown, FASLA — Chief Executive, AECOM Planning, Design + Development; Christopher Benosky, PE — Principal/Regional Director of Water and Environmental Services
Organizer/Sponsor: AECOM

Many firms release monographs that are ideal for coffee tables, but AECOM’s three new books, Climate Design: Design and Planning for the Age of Climate Change, The Bigger Picture, and Asia Beyond Growth, include a broad focus beyond the firm’s work to convey concepts and solutions of interest to all designers, architects, planners, engineers, policy analysts, and academics. Joe Brown, FASLA, chief executive at AECOM and former EDAW chief executive officer and president, explained that these books are evidence of why EDAW chose to merge with AECOM last year: “They are invested in global and intellectual capital.”

In creating Climate Design, AECOM employees collaborated with academics including Peter Droege, professor at the Institute of Architecture and Planning, Hochschule Liechtenstein, an expert in renewable energy and sustainable design, to explore ways that the built environment — urban infrastructure, landscape design, and large-scale development — can adapt to changing climates and prevent further damage. The authors concluded that new technology isn’t necessarily the answer; rather, they promote a return to natural design instead of working against it. As Christopher Benosky, PE, principal and regional director of Water and Environmental Services, explained, this book doesn’t give specifics on the evidence of climate change, but offers a new way of thinking. For example, designers face the challenge of integrating buildings and cities with rivers and wetlands. “What if we look at cities as watersheds” by designing low impact developments, Benosky proposed.

The Bigger Picture celebrates AECOM’s many projects around the world, but also acknowledges where they have failed: the middle ground that lies between mega-projects such as the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, an entire new city complete with a Guggenheim Museum, to smaller designs for children’s gardens and the regeneration of Manchester city center. This book, written by Fay Sweet and designed by Pentagram, bridges between the practices of EDAW and AECOM, and documents projects from the research stage through concept, planning, and construction. Firms of any size can benefit from the lessons AECOM learned while executing these diverse works.

The “visual cacophony of Asia with numbers and facts to go along with it” describes Asia Beyond Growth, stated Brown. Packed with photos, statistics, and graphs, the volume shows that Asia is home to the world’s largest and fastest growing cities, and AECOM has completed many projects there. Not a monograph, this book is, instead, a compendium of knowledge gathered throughout these projects. Asia Beyond Growth may offer interesting information, but it fails to offer a remedy for growing pains.

Murrye Bernard , LEED AP, is a freelance architectural writer and a contributing editor to e-Oculus.

Event: Building in the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.24.10
Speakers: Peggy Deamer — Principal, Deamer Studio & Professor, Yale School of Architecture; Phillip G. Bernstein, FAIA — Vice President, Autodesk & Lecturer in Professional Practice, Yale School of Architecture; Scott Marble, AIA — Founding Partner, Marble Fairbanks Architects & Faculty, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Chris Noble — Partner, Noble and Wickersham
Organizers: Yale School of Architecture

There are books aplenty about how digital design is spurring formal innovations in architecture, but one new book, Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), focuses on a different, equally important topic: the seismic shifts in labor roles that have accompanied technological advances. At a recent book launch event, some of the book’s editors and authors discussed the ways in which the work — and the self-image — of architects is transforming.

The book grew out of interviews and conversations at a Yale symposium in 2006, and the essential issues remain the same today, said Peggy Deamer, who co-edited the book with Phil Bernstein, FAIA. Advances in technology are accompanying a shift away from the ideal of the architect as a highly individualistic “Howard Roarkian figure.” Instead of striving to be a “master architect,” architects now gravitate more toward the role of “master builder:” someone who organizes and depends on the expertise of contractors, fabricators, etc., to create a project in tight collaboration. “The fabricator or sub, who used to be an anonymous character at the end of the food chain, offers essential input into the possible parameters of the design solution, thereby claiming authorship rights,” she said.

This shift in the division of labor is ill understood, and for the architect, it is rife with issues of risk vs. control. “The authors want to have us make sure that risk — as the essential ingredient to innovation — still has a place,” Deamer remarked.

For tech-savvy firm Marble Fairbanks, embracing risk is essential to what they do. The firm’s forte is “pushing these technologies and these new working protocols in the interest of design and innovation,” Scott Marble, AIA, said. For the Toni Stabile Student Center for Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the firm experimented with breaking down the usual hierarchy between architects and consultants. Marble Fairbanks collaborated with a range of other design and technology entities, which they treated as equals in the design process. The unconventional approach allowed the small firm to greatly expand its capabilities.

To design a cloudlike pattern of perforations in steel ceiling panels in a social hub, Marble Fairbanks enlisted the help of design firm Proxy, which provided a script to create a pattern that would meet the necessary acoustic requirements. Stevens Institute of Technology’s Product-Architecture Lab was recruited to help develop a sunshade system for a glass-enclosed café. The collaborators used a series of computer scripts to develop the design of steel panels whose patterns of perforations and corrugations reduced the heat gain by 80%.

The project highlights the importance of “designing design,” as Marble called it. With these new technologies, “design processes themselves need to be foregrounded as an issue to take on,” he said. “Same with fabrication. With direct file fabrication technologies, the potentials of material — the potentials of craft, even — begin to be reformulated.”

Bernstein remarked that in three-and-a-half years “there has been a tremendous acceleration in the kinds of technologies that are available to the building industry.” The adoption of building information modeling (BIM) has increased dramatically, and other technologies may herald new shifts in the work of architects, in which the design process and field implementation become linked even tighter. With the book, he hopes “to create a theoretical frame in which we can begin to explore these options, because the technology is moving even much, much more quickly than we could possibly have known,” he said.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for OCULUS, The Architect’s Newspaper, I.D., Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.

Event: NBAU: Not Business Planning As Usual
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.24.10
Speakers: Magnus Magnusson, AIA — Principal, Magnusson Architecture and Planning; Stephen Yablon, AIA — Principal, Stephen Yablon Architect; Richard McElhiney, AIA — Principal, Richard McElhiney Architect
Moderator: Ralph Steinglass, FAIA — Principal Consultant, Teambuilders, Inc.
Organizer: Center for Architecture
Sponsors: AMX; Chief Manufacturing; Lutron Electronics; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Sixty architects, many of whom are either practicing independently in their own small firms, or are hoping to do so soon, met to learn the basics of business planning. After an introductory panel discussion, attendees participated in breakout groups and presented preliminary business plans for three start-ups and one small firm.

For the panel, Magnus Magnusson, AIA, Stephen Yablon, AIA, and Richard McElhiney, AIA, each a founding principal of his own firm, were joined by Ralph Steinglass, FAIA, of Teambuilders, Inc., a management consultant for architects, to provide personal insights into how their firms got started, what they had to do to become viable and grow, and what strategies they developed to survive recessions.

Key questions and answers that were posed by attendees included:

· How do you finance a “start-up” without projects in hand? You must be prepared to survive for at least six months without generating much or any income, relying on personal savings and/or loans.

· How much time should I be spending on marketing versus working on projects? After you’ve gotten your first major job, you must continue to spend at least 50% of your time marketing, or you may not have any work when the job is completed.

· How can I break into new markets, and how important is market research? Form relationships or strategic alliances with firms that have developed specialized expertise in the new building type or with a firm that has a local presence in a new geographic region. But before deciding on pursuing a new market, do the research. Is there enough projected work in this market; what is the competition; and will the work be profitable?

During the breakout session, attendees were given six questions to answer when developing their respective business plans: What business are we in? What new markets will need to be developed? Where will that work come from? What will the cost of doing business be? How much revenue is needed? What’s your action plan? With the panelists acting as moderators, at the end of the day, the groups agreed that by working together they had learned about the process that has proven daunting for many firms — but is vital for survival.

Ralph Steinglass, FAIA, is the principal consultant of Teambuilders, Inc.

Event: Art on Screen: Selections from Montreal International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA)
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.27.10
Speakers: Helene Klodawsky — Filmmaker; Murray Grigor — Filmmaker
Organizers: MUSE Film and Television; Center for Architecture

Two documentaries shown back-to-back one afternoon at the Center, Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner and Malls R Us, complemented each other, exploring the power of architecture to shape people’s lives and their relationship to the environment, for good or ill. The event was part of the annual NYC film festival Art on Screen, which presents a selection of films from the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art each February.

Featuring footage of major malls around the world, Malls R Us makes the point that malls these days are replacing town centers and places of worship. As theologian and social critic Jon Pahl explains, mall design emulates that of churches, with soaring ceilings, skylights yielding intense light, and water features that symbolize purity and life. With many malls offering attractions beyond pure retail (the 119-acre West Edmonton Mall in Canada features a roller coaster, sea lion show, and swimming pool), shopping malls, for better or for worse, are replacing downtown streets as places people go to find a sense of community.

In one interview, prominent mall architect Jon Jerde, FAIA, confesses that he was drawn to designing malls because, after growing up as a lonely child, he wanted to create social spaces. “America, strangely, is a very lonely place,” he explains in the film. Football and shopping malls seemed like the main expressions of togetherness.

Malls may be a communal environment, but they only provide the illusion of being public spaces. Footage of security staff in Paris’s Forum des Halles drives home the point that while malls might seem welcoming, in fact, they are tightly controlled, and anyone whose goal isn’t to spend money runs the risk of being tossed out. Malls R Us also highlights the inherent problems of overzealous, ill-thought-out mall development, such an environmentally insensitive construction and disruption to older traditions and economies, as in India, where malls are driving out local shopkeepers in markets.

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Despite its critical take, Malls R Us steers away from didacticism by acknowledging the positive aspects of the building type. Victor Gruen, the architect who invented the enclosed mall, saw malls as a way to simulate Europe’s cafés and street life, in America. Many mall-goers develop an attachment to malls as a center for activities and memories. However, they tend to have a short lifespan of three to five years; when they start to become dated and profits fall, they’re abandoned or replaced. (The site deadmalls.com is a testament to that.) If malls are to truly work as a substitute for town centers, they need to be rethought. “As soon as the commercial end doesn’t work anymore, the communal spaces are gone,” filmmaker Klodawsky said in a Q&A after the film.

Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner ended the afternoon on a more uplifting note, with its portrayal of a Modernist visionary who used his talent for residential design to enhance his clients’ quality of life and create a keen sense of harmony with nature. Featuring interviews with family members, clients, architects, and others, the documentary traces the story of the late architect’s life, from his childhood in Michigan, to his Taliesin apprenticeship, to his growth to establish his own design identity, marked by a futurism combined with a flair for creating synergies with a site’s natural beauty. “I think Lautner’s the missing link between people like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and… humanist modernism like Frank Lloyd Wright did,” director Murray Grigor remarked in a Q&A. “Frank Lloyd Wright always said that Lautner was the second best-architect in the world,” he added.

Infinite Space offers insights into Lautner’s working process, such as his long, intense study of a site’s natural features before coming up with a design. Judith Lautner, his daughter who worked in his office, recounts, “When my father would get a new client, he would get a topo of the property, of the contours, and go off to the site with it. He’d take a soft pencil with him and mark all of the aspects of the property that he could perceive while he was on the site… Then he would come back to his office, and he could sit in his chair staring at that thing… He could sit for days, actually… And then one day, he would suddenly have the idea.”

While Lautner became famous for his hillside residences such as the Chemosphere in Los Angeles and the Mar Brisas House in Acapulco, as well as his “Googie” restaurant designs, he was frustrated by the fact that his larger commissions remained un-built, a problem he blamed on politics. One of his few public buildings was the Midtown School in Los Angeles, which featured radiant heat, natural ventilation, and all natural light, revealing a sensibility attuned to nature in ways that go beyond aesthetics.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for OCULUS, The Architect’s Newspaper, I.D., Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.