"Why Don’t You Move Your Chair?"

Why are architects responsible if their buildings leak?

In this forum, the heart of this question is not the legal issue. Legally, the profession exists to protect the general public from unsafe building designs and conditions. By law, an architect exists to advocate for his clients on the organization, allocation, and disposition of building materials or elements. We charge for services on the basis of being able to deliver a design whose construction the government will approve, and whose contractor will be able to fabricate for a loosely predictable price. All those Professional Practice lecturers out there will point out that we derive an authority on the supposition that professional designs work, and work better.

This all implicitly means the buildings don’t leak.

The problem is that it is hard to find a leak in Wal*Mart. Nor does rainwater drip on patrons of the local McDonalds. Name a building that is antithetical to the purposes of Architecture, and chances are it does not leak either. The Farnsworth House and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House on the other hand – they’re all leaky glass. They lose heat in their northern climates like few other private residences. They probably don’t even satisfy their local building code anymore. These are great, important, influential buildings.

The correlation between well functioning buildings and great works of Architecture is a loose one. Yes, some buildings function exquisitely, and that is a source of their beauty – but that is not an exclusive source for Architecture. Arguably, it is not even a primary source.

Here are three points to support the thrust -- that leaks do not reduce a building’s architectural merit. The first is a commonly told fable about Frank Lloyd Wright, a man whose buildings infamously and notoriously leaked. The story is told in studios and bars all over the land, anytime an architecture studio head feels comfortable with his students. It points out that in 1937 Mr. Wright designed a house for the industrialist Hibbard Johnson. One rainy evening Johnson was entertaining distinguished guests for dinner when the roof began to leak. The water seeped through directly above Johnson himself, dripping steadily onto his bald head. Johnson was incensed and he called Wright immediately. “Frank,” he said, “you built this beautiful house for me and we enjoy it very much. But I have told you the roof leaks, and right now I am with some friends and distinguished guests and it is leaking right on top of my head.” Wright’s reply was heard by all of the guests. “Well, Hib, why don’t you move your chair?”

Why would that story be repeated so often? Because Mr. Wright and these teachers knew that necessarily, architects must remain innovators. The labor of innovation is experimentation. Custom designed homes are the product and instance of that experimentation. We all know some experiments work better than others. This is hard to accept because another, more glamorous yet contradictory view of architecture is prevalent. Important buildings in Western civilization are considered permanent; their institutionalization has also implied durability. Good buildings “Stand the test of time,” and that inherent durability overrides the fact that they too were once great risks; they were someone’s experiment. Experimentation and permanence are contradictory.

The second point is a quote from Peter Eisenman to a class of brand new architecture students. This class was taught in Paul Rudolph's Art + Architecture building. The text is a common statement he makes in all his classes, when he meets students for the first time…

" [...] You are learning to see, like hearing, and to read architecture. That is what all that analytic work is out there. Without that, you might as well be a plumber. Anyone can solve the problem of function of a house, or the problem of an apartment[-ed]. All you have to do is have lived in one. That does not mean you can do architecture. Doing architecture and solving the problem of the house or this auditorium -- because look, this auditorium has nothing to do with the quality of hearing, of sight, of your comfort of how I feel in relation to you. No. It is about something else. And what makes this building a great building is, that despite the fact that it does not solve functions, despite the fact that it does not solve problems but creates problems, it is considered a great work of architecture. So you here have an artifact. If this is not the most God-awful space you can think of, but clearly you feel compression. You feel some activity upon your corpus – this object is acting upon you. You feel compressed, oppressed, etc. I am not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is clearly what Rudolf had in mind. We are not here to judge Mr. Rudolf’s work or the work of any architect. We are here to understand how architecture can create effects, and this is what Argan talked about. He said that Brunelleschi, for the first time, created spatial effects, not merely the results of structure as in the Gothic cathedral. He uses Gothic structure because he does not know how to do anything else to create spatial effects. "

Emphasis was added. At stake for Eisenman is the affect of Architecture. His buildings leaked too, but in this quote he is developing an argument for where Architecture lies. Focusing away from the banality of everyday life, Eisenman needs buildings to create crisis and he tracks the medium of that crisis for a definition of Architectural moments. For him compression, tension, problem and predicament all are signs that a building is doing the work of Architecture. If the building isn’t provocative, or challenging in some small way, than it is merely a building, and one is bored enough to care where the rain is going.

The third point is very similar to the last, but drawn from an unexpected source. When Tado Ando said the following, he too was staking a claim for where Architecture is found. Like Eisenman, Mr Ando was legitimating his work by explaining a theoretical source from which the purpose of Architecture sprang. Who can resist when an contemporary Architect brings up Vitruvius?

“The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear) function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles — characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function. That is to say that he too, posed the fictional dimension of imagination combined with the realistic dimension as that synthesis which deeply effects human spirituality. Since the genesis of architecture, its fate has been that it connot be constituted by functionality alone.”

Indeed! Firmness, Commodity, and Delight. The legal definitions of an Architect seems to rest fully on the “Firmness” part of the Triad. But Architecture must continually experiment, lest it loose the “Delight.” This is a balancing act that can never be balanced.

Isn’t it funny how the water stains on the ceilings of our great buildings get us to renovate and restore them? Some Japanese temples are dismantled by their community and reassemble every twenty years. In these ways every generation is affirming its architectural heritage, and reestablishing the values to be handed to the next. In this way the imperfection built into the system is the element guaranteeing its perpetuation.