A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain by José Rafael Moneo, 1984 Note: The following is transcribed from The Pritzker Architecture Prize: The First Twenty Years , published in 1999 by The Art Institute of Chicago. José Rafael Moneo is above all an architect of tremendous range. His flexibility in varying the appearance of his works based on their differing contexts is reflected in the way he takes on each new commission as a fresh new exercise. He draws on an incredible reservoir of concepts and ideas, which he filters through the specifics of the site, the purpose, the form, the climate, and other circumstances of the project. As a result, each of his buildings is unique, but at the same time, uniquely recognizable as being from his palette. Founded by legionaries of Augustus in 24 B.C., Mérida became the most important Roman city in Spain by the fall of the empire. Almost completely destroyed after the Muslim in...

I decided to add film to this collection of writings and begin with Francis Ford Coppola's relatively unknown classic, 1974's The Conversation , with Gene Hackman, Cindy Williams (yes, from Laverne & Shirley ), and Harrison Ford. Coming off the success of the first Godfather , Coppola surprisingly made a relatively low-budget film with, at the time, mostly unknown actors. Gene Hackman later reprised this role in 1998's Enemy of the State , loosely a 90s remake. The movie centers around Harry Caul (Hackman) a surveillance man in San Francisco and his growing interest in a conversation he tapes between a woman (Williams) and a man (Frederic Forrest) she is apparently having an affair with. Their conversation takes place in a crowded downtown park at lunchtime, chosen for its level of anonymity and safety. The fact they are able to be recorded by Harry, (with two directional mics, located in adjacent...

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain by Frank Gehry, 1997 Easily the most publicized building of the 1990s, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao Spain was completed in 1997 to critical and popular praise. The completion of the building also guaranteed Gehry's presence among the great architects of this century, and a father-figure for young architects in the next century. The museum is a long way from his early work, including his own residence in Santa Monica, California, but is indicative of Gehry's development from the 1960's. Beginning with small budgets, he utilized cheap materials to arrive at formally inventive solutions not possible with expensive materials. Clearly a product of the open-minded Los Angeles environment, the possibilities of formal expression grew with each new job, due to his rising prominence and improved technology. With the erection of this 265,000 square foot museum across the Atlantic...

Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Monte Tamaro, Switzerland by Mario Botta, 1996 Mario Botta has built his strong reputation utilizing platonic forms with slotted openings and strong materiality, particularly brick. In recent years he has taken these traits farther, creating a personal architecture with a more expressive and primitive character. The Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli is a marker-and possibly a zenith-in this progression, much like Ronchamp was for Le Corbusier. This comparison can be taken farther, with each building's religious purpose and relation to nature giving them stronger ties to one another. Le Corbusier's early work (1920-50) is characterized by strong forms-cubes and cylinders-punctuated by large expanses of glass, following from his five points for a new architecture. The series of villas he constructed during this time are...

Villa Busk in Bamble, Norway by Sverre Fehn, 1990 Sverre Fehn's career has spanned five decades, but it was not until he received the 1997 Pritzker Prize that he gained international renown. This private residence, built in his native country like much of his work, is typical of his buildings in their relation to site, strong materiality, and blend of modernity and regionalism. Much like Finland's Alvar Aalto, Fehn's buildings have a timelessness that arises from these qualities. Villa Busk straddles a ridge, adjacent to a valley that runs to the nearby Oslo Fjord to the south and west. The plan is arranged along a linear spine, oriented east to west, rising to the latter end of the house, following the natural terrain (a tower and storage shed break from this linearity). This gesture describes that main theme of the house and Fehn's work in general: the strength of nature and man's subordinatio...

Thermal Spa in Vals, Switzerland by Peter Zumthor, 1996 Last week's dose transcribed an essay by Peter Zumthor, "Teaching architecture, learning architecture" . This week we look at Zumthor's Thermal Spa in relation to the main ideas in that essay: the sensuousness of materials and architecture as a balance of emotion and reason. Located in the architect's home country of Switzerland, the Thermal Spa in Vals exemplifies Zumthor's recent work and is an ideal building to analyze. The bath house is a simple rectilinear structure, constructed of a local stone, gneiss, formed from the same heat that warms the water of the baths. In plan, the building is organized around a rectangular outdoor pool and a square interior pool, with auxiliary spaces (showers, toilets) contained in small block adjacent to the pools. The separation between indoor spaces is minimal and...

"Teaching architecture, Learning architecture" by Peter Zumthor, excerpted from his book Thinking Architecture published by Lars Müller Publishers in 1998 Young people go to university with the aim of becoming architects, of finding out if they have got what it takes. What is the first thing we should teach them? First of all, we must explain that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answers he already knows. Practicing architecture is asking oneself questions, finding one's own answers with the help of the teacher, whittling down, finding solutions. Over and over again. The strength of a good design lies in ourselves and in our ability to perceive the world with both emotion and reason. A good architectural design is sensuous. A good architectural design is intelligent. We all experience architecture before we have even heard the word. The roots of architectural unde...