The Shadow of Anywhere

Moneo talks of the "substantial immobility" of architecture.  I like that phrase.  It encompasses so much in so few words:  the profound nature of the built environment, the staying power (hopefully) of a building, the ability of the building to create context where it stands.

These works impress upon us the crucial point that a building should be designed so that it clearly fits where it belongs - that the design draws from its site and adds to the site so that the building couldn't belong just "anywhere."  The cookie cutter suburban homes across America could be airlifted from NoWheresVille, Indiana and transplanted to the suburbs of Shreveport and not look a stitch out of place.  This is not architecture.

I like the idea that the site is the first given material of a design.  It isn't merely the ground plane, nor just the excavated hole for the foundation to be poured in.  When I switched majors from architecture to interior design I was somewhat relieved that I wouldn't have to deal with site issues anymore, like drainage and landscaping and whathaveyou.  WRONG.  Because the site is so much more than the dirt you build on, I do have site issues to consider.  When we went on the SoA Houston field trip this past weekend, the second year interior design students toured several projects by Rottet Studio, one of which was the Cheniere Energy, Inc. located on the eighth floor of Pennzoil Place by Philip Johnson.  The building is constructed such that there are twin towers with a clearance of only roughly ten feet between them, and with Cheniere offices on the eighth floor, natural light was an issue.  Rottet Studio had to design carefully to accommodate the lack of natural light, and succeeded as you can tell from the pictures at the link.  These are the site issues an interior designer would have to deal with, though this was merely a shell in an office high rise in a downtown that could be anywhere.

The topics that we are assigned to read about in this class inevitably all seem to come back to the "soul" of architecture - consideration of the site is what takes the foundations of a design from being merely a superficial solution to a problem to the level of appreciating and enhancing the "given."