Accommodating Life: An Architect’S View

By Martin Bloom

From Accommodating Life, The accommodation of human beings within created space is the true concern of any well-conceived built environment.

In architecture, the term modern means an architecture that is acutely responsive to the demands of current accommodation while utilizing the most advanced techniques available in order to achieve an apt expression of its particular now. In other words, modern architecture, in each era, means an architecture devoted to accommodating life.

In recent decades, an architecture of true relevance to life concerns has been conspicuously absent as a cultural force. In its stead, a succession of design initiatives divorced from their social moorings, dedicated primarily to image and motivated as much by subjective whim or the dictates of fashion as by any direct response to human need, has long been dominating the determination of the human habitat.

It is vitally important that we consider where we are and how we got here and make an attempt to point the way toward a new modern architecture, an architecture that enhances existence, an architecture that encompassing both use and beauty and accommodates and enhances life (Martin Bloom).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543472073

Martin Bloom

Martin Bloom, AIA, an architect whose knowledge of theatre is as great as his knowledge of architecture, designed many theatres and theatre-related projects. He is the author of ACCOMMODATING LIFE, An Architect’s View, a book about the pursuit of architecture dedicated to enhancing the quality of life with forms responsive to Time, Place and Circumstance.

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Copyright © 2018 by Ruth Wolff Bloom.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017919045

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-5434-7209-7

                 Softcover         978-1-5434-7208-0

                 eBook               978-1-5434-7207-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date:  01/15/2018

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For Those Who Come After

We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

Quotation from the Tao Tê Ching (Circa 3rd century BC)

Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley

(The Way and Its Power, Grove Press, 1958)

CONTENTS

Foreword

I.   Fragmentation

II.   Disorientation

III.   Previous Moderns

IV.   Birth of Our Modern

V.   Eclipse

VI.   Sightings and Insights

Afterword

Illustration Credits

FOREWORD

In recent years there has been a growing uneasiness in the minds of many–public and practitioners alike–that the art/science of architecture has not been fulfilling its mandate to provide significant form for accommodating human existence. Despite an astonishing amount of building activity over the past several decades–some of it dazzling in its formal virtuosity–the power of architecture to reinforce and enhance fundamental life concerns has been markedly diminished. Notwithstanding those cloudscraping, glassy corporate beehives that jostle for prominence on most midtown skylines, or that museum addition in heartland Milwaukee whose roof can be made to expand and contract like the wings of some prehistoric megabird, or that artful assemblage of rippling and colliding forms that transformed the hitherto-remote Basque region of northern Spain into a world-class tourist attraction, none of these could reassure us for long of architecture’s essential potency as provider of facilities for human accommodation.

How, for all their seductiveness of form, could such innovative, precedent-shattering examples of cutting-edge contemporary design ultimately prove to be so deeply unsatisfying as enablers of basic life concerns? Is it possible that so all-consuming a preoccupation with arresting image has overwhelmed whatever programmatic impulse inspired these endeavors at their inception? Whatever the reason, the result–an abundance of superficial special effects largely unrelated to their intended function–has prompted a dearth of useable, life-enhancing facilities. The deleterious impact of this misplaced obsession on the further evolution of the built environment is profound.

It is time for introspection and reevaluation, time to return to guiding principles in order to encourage the creation of a more nurturing built environment.

. … .

In spite of what, in recent decades, has come to reflect conventional wisdom, an architecture of true relevance to life concerns–that is, an art/science capable of transforming not only the shape but the substance of the built environment to accommodate human aspiration–has been conspicuously absent as a cultural force. In its stead, a succession of design initiatives divorced from their social moorings, dedicated primarily to image, motivated as much by subjective whim or the dictates of fashion as by any direct response to human need, has long been dominating the determination of the human habitat.

This, however, has not always been the case. Throughout recorded history there have been moments–rare but potent–when a viable architecture contributed so decisively to the built environment that it warranted being called modern. Today the term modern architecture has come, in people’s minds, to mean the mid-20th century architecture of straight lines, unadorned structures and the omission of furbelows.

The word modern, however, has a much more substantive meaning. In architecture, the term modern means an architecture which is acutely responsive to the demands of current accommodation while utilizing the most advanced techniques available in order to achieve an apt expression of its particular now.

In other words, modern architecture, in each era, means an architecture devoted to accommodating life.

The most recent such phase–and by far the most promising–began to evolve throughout the western world from the middle of the 18th century. In the early decades of the 20th it began to manifest itself as a comprehensive art/science with immense capability to shape and influence the quality of our lives. It was an approach that encouraged intense and nuanced programmatic analysis in order to determine its contributions to the built environment. This evolving architecture’s potential for creating innovative and visually stimulating forms in direct response to contemporary functional intent–although fully achieved in a relative handful of executed examples–seemed just on the verge of transforming the very fabric of the civilized world when a confluence of events intervened to deprive us of its anticipated impact.

The economic reversals that culminated in the Great Depression of the late 1920s and the social and political unrest that triggered the Second World War profoundly influenced the course of western civilization. In the aftermath of that war, a traumatized world began the urgent process of repairing a badly-degraded built environment–but with an absence of guiding principle that rendered the results at best superficial and at worst inhumane. With an evolving art/science largely forgotten or ignored, there began the period in which we are languishing today–a period that has resulted in our often being inflicted either with structures which cater only to bottom-line practicality with little reference to the art of architecture, or with artful structures neglectful of human need and emphasizing image over substance.

But, at this moment of crisis, with societies everywhere recognizing a need for fresh approaches to problem solving, it is urgent that we seize upon a rare opportunity to reconsider our concept of what constitutes a comprehensive architecture and attempt to recapture the guiding principles which have, for so many decades, been obscured.

. … .

Ideally, architecture is by far the most practical and life-affirming of all the arts. It encloses and shelters, tempering and mitigating otherwise relentless forces of nature. At its best, it ennobles as well as enables. Its habitable spaces extend our natural capabilities, profoundly influencing quality of life and thought. Rather than obsessing over form for form’s sake, as has been the custom in recent decades, a principled, truly comprehensive art/science would encourage the generation of programmatically accommodating, space-defining form to aesthetically enrich and materially enhance existence for those destined to inhabit or utilize its products.

Since the quality of the built environment profoundly influences quality of life, the fact that architecture’s full impact has been largely missing from the determination of our present physical world is a legitimate cause for concern. Hence the urgency of our quest and the personal stake that each of us has in assuring that the prematurely eclipsed art/science is restored to its fullest capability at the earliest possible moment. Anything less would be an unconscionable waste of time, talent and resources.

It is vitally important, therefore, that we consider where we are, how we got here, and to make an attempt to point the way toward a new modern architecture, an architecture which enhances existence, an architecture which, encompassing both use and beauty, accommodates and enhances life.

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I

FRAGMENTATION

In the early 1980s, I was invited by a major design periodical to make an assessment of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on the occasion of its 19th birthday. It was part of the magazine’s editorial initiative to evaluate buildings after they had had sufficient opportunity to prove themselves in terms of usefulness.

For me, it was an eye-opening experience.

Having steeped myself in the aesthetic intentions of the original planning team–for this was a collaborative composed of most of the key design arbiters of the 1960s–I soon began to realize that the major achievement here was the fact that it had survived nearly two decades as an active performing arts complex in spite of a number of severe physical shortcomings.

When this complex was built, the critical establishment of the time bemoaned the apparent conservatism of the Center’s aesthetic–all travertine and arches, symmetry and containment. They saved their praise for the relatively inconspicuous, off-to-the-side, drama theatre as an expression of modernity–in contrast to the stylistic retrospection of the other structures. As it turned out, almost two decades later, it was that very drama theatre, with its crisp exterior, whose modish convertible thrust stage suffered most over the years, defeating a succession of artistic and managerial initiatives valiantly attempting to make a go of it.

The opera house, ridiculed from the first for the banality of its red, gold and starburst-crystal-chandeliered interior, somehow managed to fare the best, in the long run becoming a major force in international opera production. The dance theatre, with its program undermined by having to accommodate spoken drama and musical theatre as well as dance, was a grave spatial and acoustical disappointment. The concert hall, unfavorably compared with the acoustics of Carnegie Hall from the start, has, over the years, been improved but slightly through a number of very difficult and costly rehabilitations.

What revisiting this complex revealed to me was that there was frequently a vast disconnect between how a building is perceived as a plastic conception and how it may actually function in relation to its program. The experience caused me to reevaluate architecture as an art and as a practice and to seriously reconsider its place in contemporary life.

. … .

As a highly-evolved art/science, architecture has frequently been hailed as mother of all the arts–the art from which all other arts flow. It has been idealized. It has been venerated. It has been called frozen music, liberated from the inconstancy of time and made solid in tangible space–color and shape magnified to life-sized proportion, all-encompassing, all-pervasive. It has also, on occasion, been trivialized and corrupted.

None of us is exempt from the influence that architecture exerts over how we think, act and negotiate the shoals of everyday existence. None of us–especially those who practice or evaluate architecture–are beyond its reach. Except for rare occasions when we find ourselves grappling hand-over-hand up a mountain peak or traversing a desert on foot or hacking our way through a jungle, the majority of life is spent in close contact with architecture of some sort–either rooted in the ground or adrift on rails or on wheels or on wings or, as some assure us will soon approach the norm, orbiting in outer space.

Since architecture permeates our lives so thoroughly, profoundly conditioning not only how we think and feel about ourselves but also how we relate to others, it would be beneficial for all of us to insist