Investigation
Outer Space
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As we leave the framed space of R.M. Schindler behind, we may observe that the main part of Schindler’s efforts in space was directed toward the interior of architecture.(1) It was interior in a quite literary sense, through a focus on the inside of the building – as when he stated: “Space is the material of architecture, Room its formed product”(2) – but also in the sense of an internal methodology of architectural techniques, when he argued for a new architectural manifest in the flux of modern architecture. As Schindler’s architectural production stayed within the contained space of the room, his methods stayed within the technical, tectonic and aesthetic operations of architecture. Schindler rarely gave more attention to the outside than to the inside of a building; architecture was – in spite of all – a space to be lived in and not a monument to be looked at.
However, there were some interesting exceptions to Schindler’s interior focus. From 1930 to 1934, he did 15 projects, which all had an exterior focus – art galleries, restaurants, gas stations and stores. Three of these projects were significant: two exclusive restaurants in Hollywood, Sardi’s and Lindy’s, and a service station for Standard Oil Company on Central Avenue, all from 1932.(3) David Gebhard has described the restaurants Sardi’s and Lindy’s as “open advertisements for the modern,” and Standard Oil as “a piece of de Stijl sculpture.”(4) This may be justified in the light of Schindler’s use of space as a manifest of modernity and the formal similarities to De Stijl, but it does not account for the unusual spatial disposition of these ‘odd’ members of Schindler’s production.
There may be a clue in Schindler’s letter to Standard Oil Company in 1930, where he wrote:
The design of the canopy eliminates all complicated angle iron roof framing. It concentrates all supporting into a single beam, which serves at the same time as an advertising sign … The design is not futuristic in any way, but modern or contemporary in the sense of an up to date piece of machinery, and will fit into all surroundings in the same way as a modern automobile does.(5)
Later he wrote in the project description: “The scheme for a ‘Standard Oil’ station shows a variation in steel construction for the same floor plan. It uses the official emblem of the company, the ‘service chevron striped’ as the basic theme for the design.”(6) Clearly, this marked a significant excursion for Schindler. First, the projects showed a change in spatial focus, away from the familiar interior dwelling toward the exterior urban space of the modern automobile – an image of the machine that he had earlier criticized the ‘functionalists’ for using. This change influenced the intricate connection between inside and outside that Schindler had otherwise strongly advocated – either by entirely removing the interior as in the service station or by obstructing the spatial flow between the inside room and the outside sign as in the two restaurants. Second, the projects showed the use of symbols and letters as generator of architectural form – either in the literary use of the names of the two restaurants on their façades or as a geometric abstraction of the chevron logo in the gas station for Standard Oil.(7)
However, we could ask, if the outer focus that Schindler established through these three projects in the 1930s, also demanded a renewed focus for his design space? I will not argue that the outer focus changed Schindler’s understanding of space fundamentally, but I will argue that it had a profound effect on how he planned his buildings. We could describe his early buildings as courtyard houses, enclosed either by the building it self (How House), by bamboo (Kings Road House) or by wooden walls (Pueblo Ribera Court). These buildings rarely had a façade that offered a significant correspondence with the surroundings, on the other side of the lot line. The opposite could be said about his later buildings, Oliver House, Buck House and the houses that followed from the late half of the 1930s. They all had diffuse patios as Buck House and Fitzpatrick House, or terraces as the Kallis, Lechner, Laurelwood, Jason and Tischler houses. Instead of enclosing the exterior space of the lot, Schindler had the interior ‘radiate’ out into the exterior, as in the Falk Apartments, the Kallis, Lechner and Tischler houses.(8) It seems that Schindler at one point stopped making the interior of the exterior, which Kathryn Smith notes about the Kings Road, when she writes: “Perhaps the most radical idea behind the Kings Road house was Schindler’s conception of the entire plot as the architectural field, which meant dispensing with a figure-ground relationship and thus giving equal weight to building and landscape.”(9) The dispensing with a figure/ground relationship supports this view, all the while that Schindler’s interior spatial focus framed the garden as one geometric abstraction. In the Kings Road House there was no inside and outside – the interior expanded to make an inside of the entire lot.
So, since we have established a connection between the use of a certain design space and an interior focus on architectural production above, we could ask, whether that same design space was used to produce architecture with an exterior focus? The two restaurants and the service station were clearly different from the interior design space of the Kings Road House with its unit systems and reference frames in space – or rather it may have been supplemented by a design space of signs, letters, logos, automobiles and distance, which Schindler constructed to fit into the ‘modules’ of the modern city.(10) We could therefore choose to expand Kathryn Smith’s observation of the plot of the Kings Road House, and suggest that the ‘odd’ exterior focus offered Schindler an entirely new urban scene as his ‘architectural field’ – as the place, where he could operate, and from where he could extract the operands that he wanted to embed in his design space.
Space Signs on the RoadsideThe significance of Schindler’s excursion was that it established an outer space for his architectural production that was far from the superficial façades that Schindler knew from the offices in Chicago and Vienna. It was an outer horizon that depended on new operands to be embedded in the design space, as new demands, new parameters and new references came along. However, Schindler was far from alone in establishing a design space for that place. The architectural historian and critic Alan Hess has characterized it as:
Together, the car and the architecture of the car culture constituted a popular aesthetic of kinetics, symbols, structure, forms and experiment, and a new urban space that flowed freely from the driver’s seat to the coffee shop counter … the stylists and architects … realized the role of symbol and metaphor in the strip – that indigenous American urban form. Symbols became functional as they helped shape that space … Space was also to be transformed as profoundly as structure by the car and roadside modernism … The same overhead structure flowed inside to link it to the outside. Large plate glass windows from floor to ceiling kept out the heat and noise but never obstructed the sense that the indoors and out were one continuous space.(11)
Hess describes a spatial construct with two key components. First, the large panorama windows towards the strip, which dematerialized and diffused the spatial borders to the surrounding urban space. Second, the sign pylon, which gave the building a graphic presence day and night and soon, became the totem of corporate identity. These strips and highways were corridor spaces with no or very limited definition, headed for the urban centers as they blended with the barren landscapes, where suburbs were to come. The only spatial definition was the huge billboards that emitted a sphere of symbols and messages at the driver on his way from work to tract home. It was a new kind of ‘visual browsing’(12) that framed space in a new way. The historian Kathleen Hulser writes: “In 1950s and 1960s suburbs visuality was out of control, warping customary experience of space and time. Whether auto-flâneur, shuttle mom or commuter, the driver made no conscious decision to look, but inhaled a daily diet of bizarre conjunctions of nature and commerce anyway. Suburban sprawl meant traversing spaces where nothing was purely one or the other.”(13) This blitz of signs and symbols presented another frame of reference for space that was exterior and diffuse, and in sharp contrast to the interior space of the workplace or the tract home. It was more than a change in geography – it was also a change in the understanding of space. Hulser again:
What was it about driving that made people see differently? Through the frame of the windshield, structures of perception work with the color and contrasts of the image, the distance of objects from the body, and the pace of the body in motion. Spectatorship of the road trained drivers in a mode of seeing that allowed visual command of a wide range of objects without actually being in a physical relationship to them. It both fed curiosity and fostered detachment. Viewing the passing scene from behind a wheel integrated roadside elements into a fleeting but satisfying glance that had more to do with submerging oneself in an experience than surveying a lovely prospect … The thinking eye had changed: Kant’s aesthetic posture of passionate contemplation bowed to the media era.(14)
This transformation of both the urban place and the perception of the sprawling North American urban space was an important issue for an increasing critique, which was given voice by critics like Reyner Banham in his 1971 book Los Angeles – The Architecture of Four Ecologies. There were urban challenges to which the traditional urban thinking had no response and therefore also a need for developing new design methods, which could handle these new urban places. Not only did the cities change, the exterior places that architects responded to changed and so did their understanding of space.
Contained IntricacyThis complex outer place was clearly prepared for the arrival of Robert Venturi, who in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture from 1966 spoke the voice of the practitioner. In the preface to the second edition of the book, he explains: “I wrote this book in the early 1960s as a practicing architect responding to aspects of architectural theory and dogma of that time ... most of the thought here was intended to be suggestive rather than dogmatic, and the methods of historical analogy can be taken only so far in architectural criticism.”(15) Venturi presented a critique against modernism’s insistence upon pure form – of its exclusion of contradiction – while he at the same time proposed methods of dealing with architecture and a city in turmoil through a ‘gentle’ and pragmatic manifesto. He wrote:
Orthodox Modern architects have tended to recognize complexity insufficiently or inconsistently. In their attempt to break with tradition and start all over again, they idealized the primitive and elementary at the expense of the diverse and the sophisticated. As participants in a revolutionary movement, they acclaimed the newness of modern functions, ignoring their complications. In their role as reformers, they puritanically advocated the separation and exclusion of elements, rather than the inclusion of various requirements and their juxtapositions.(16)
Robert Venturi’s critique from 1966 was an infusion of postmodern unpredictability in to the clean methodology of modernism. However, even though Venturi was critical of modernism’s lack of methodological answers to the complexity and contradiction in architecture, he was holding back. He did not go as far as to denounce all structure from his new inclusive design space. This became clear when he suggested ‘contained intricacy’ as a methodological opportunity:
Containment and intricacy have been characteristic of the city as well. Fortified walls for military protection and the greenbelt for civic protection are examples of this phenomenon. Contained intricacy might be one of the viable methods for dealing with urban chaos and the endlessness of Road Town; through the creative use of zoning and positive architectural features it is possible to concentrate the intricacies of road towns and junkyards, actual and figurative. And like the sculpture, which consists of compressed automobiles by John Chamberlain and the photographs through telescopic lens in Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard, they achieve an ironically compelling kind of unity.(17)
We could argue that an inclusive design space was a crucial part of the postmodern methods that Venturi suggested – methods that could construct a place for the symbolic, the unpredictable, the complex and the dynamic, instead of pure form and optimized functionality. The diffusion and contradiction that Venturi found in the outer spaces of the North American suburb became at the same time symptoms of the crisis in the methods of modernism and the frame for his design space. The spatial turmoil was not just a sign of a new condition in architecture; it became the way out of the collapsed modernism – the transition place from where the new postmodern architecture could be defined. (18)
Six years later, in 1972, Venturi returned to the complex outer space, but this time to one of the least regarded, most commercial, most trivialized and fastest growing cities in North America. In the book Learning from Las Vegas, he conducted, in collaboration with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, a critique against the ‘sacred’ space of modernism, which had ‘bewitched’ architects for so long. While Venturi did not discard the importance of space as form, he argued that space was constructed by symbol rather than form. The character and structure of postmodern space was determined by the value, size and visibility of its symbols rather than how that space was enclosed by material form. A new design space had to be constructed, and Venturi’s proposition was at the same time descriptive by using case studies, analytic by using diagrams, discursive by its critique of modernism and prescriptive by the way it proposed new solutions to new problems. It had a clear connection between the realities of exterior urban space and a design space, which included ‘exterior’ operands from places that earlier had been considered outside architecture.(19) In the note to the second edition of Complexity and Contradiction, which I quoted above, Venturi explained: “The issues are different now, and I think the book might be read today for its general theories about architectural form but also as a particular document of its time, more historical than topical ... But in hindsight this book on form in architecture complements our focus on symbolism in architecture several years later in Learning from Las Vegas.”(20)
Robert Venturi’s critical method contained two new aspects or rather directions toward new places for architecture. First, it was a move from a sacred mystified interior space to a shared pragmatic exterior space. Second, it was a move from form in space to symbol in space. In other words, a move to a new place, where space was exterior, urban and semantic, and where the design space of modernism had to give in to the contradictions and complexities of the real.
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(1) Peter Eisenman makes a similar distinction between the anteriority, interiority and exteriority of architecture to which I will return later. See Eisenman, Peter (1999), Diagram Diaries, London: Thames & Hudson.
(2) Schindler, R.M. (1916), “Church School of Art, lectures 1916” (unpublished), Architectural Drawings Collection at University of California, Santa Barbara (ADC/UCSB), p. III 4. Schindler often repeats this statement, even though he argues that we may widen the conception of space to be more than just, what is contained in a room. Also, Kathryn Smith has a beautiful description of the exterior space of the Kings Road house, where Schindler emphasized the connection between inside and outside, through the gradually diffusion of the materials used. See Smith, Kathryn (2001), Schindler House, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers.
(3) Even though no location is mentioned in any of August J. Sarnitz’ or David Gebhard’s listing of projects, the Central Avenue location is mentioned by Schindler in a letter to Mr. Timmons, dated September 22, 1930.
(4) Gebhard, David (1971), Schindler, San Francisco, CA: William Stout Publishers, p. 121-2.
(5) Schindler (1930), “Letter to Standard Oil (Mr. Timmons)” (unpublished), ADC/UCSB, n. p. Even though it is stated on the perspective that the project is “constructed of steel and glass and plants”, the main building was meant to be in reinforced concrete, according to Schindler’s own notes at the ADC/UCSB. The date of the letter is somewhat inconsistent with the date of the project itself.
(6) Schindler (1932), “Gasoline Stations” (unpublished project description), ADC/UCSB, n. p. On the original drawing of the project, the emblem is put in the corner as to show the relation.
(7) The director of LA Forum, David Leclerc, made the same observation in his review of the 2001 MOCA exhibit on Schindler in Los Angeles. See Leclerc, David (2001), “Sorry, Rudy!,” from http://www.laforum.org/more.php?id=44_0_1_0_C:.
(8) For a complete listing of Schindler’s projects go to my website http://www.embeddedspaces.dk/Epages/E_TA/E_ta_rmschindlerprojects.html.
(9) Smith (2001), op. cit., p. 36
(10) Even though the local urban scene of Los Angeles in 1932 was dominated by automobiles and signs, as among others David Gebhard points out in his article “The Suburban House and the Automobile,” in The Car and the City, ed. Martin Wachs & Margaret Crawford (1992), Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, it was not until 1936 that the city saw its first mall ‘Crossroads of the World’ in Hollywood just across from Schindler’s Sunset Medical Building from that same year.
(11) Hess, Alan (1992), “Styling the Strip: Car and Roadside Design in the 1950s,” in Wachs & Crawford, ed. (1992), ibid., p. 167 & 173.
(12) Hulser, Kathleen (1997), “Visual Browsing: Auto-flâneurs and Roadside Ads in the 1950s,” in Suburban Discipline, ed. Peter Lang & Tam Miller (1997), Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
(13) Ibid., p. 18.
(14) Ibid., p. 11 & 17-8 (Hulser’s emphasis).
(15) Venturi, Robert (1998, 1977 Second Edition (1966)), Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 14-5.
(16) Ibid., p. 16.
(17) Ibid., p. 74.
(18) See Graham, Dan (1997), Architecture, London: Architectural Association, p. 50.
(19) Such a clear distinction between inside and outside reflects Kenneth Frampton’s search for an architectural autonomy in the tectonics of architecture, as discussed earlier in the chapter The Culture of Space.
(20) Venturi (1998, 1977 Second Edition (1966)), op. cit., p. 14.
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