Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture

by Francoise Bollack

Overview

A provocative examination of the connections between contemporary expression in architecture and traditional materials and forms

Architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Françoise Bollack presents eighteen projects that use traditional materials to build contemporary forms or use modern materials to build traditional forms, blurring the boundary between tradition and modernity in architecture.

Bollack rejects the modernist taboo against imitation and precedent, tracing the history of adaptive and imitative design from the Renaissance to the Greek and Gothic revivals and to the nineteenth-century modular cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered "the basis for modern design."

The book examines projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, encompassing a broad range of building types: residential, hospitality, commercial and retail, and cultural spaces. All share an intriguing, even radical, approach to reinterpreting traditional forms and materials.

Humble thatch moves beyond the farmhouse roof to clad the walls of a Danish environmental center; a photographic image of a Parisian façade becomes a scrim on the façade of a new building; the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh. Among the featured architects are Kengo Kuma, architect of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic stadium; MVRDV, a highly regarded Dutch firm; Lacaton & Vassal and Chartier/Corbasson in France; Skene Catling de la Peña in the UK; Morris Adjmi in the USA; Max Dudler in Germany; Dortre Mandrup in Denmark; and Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580935432
Publisher:	The Monacelli Press
Publication date:	12/15/2020
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Francoise Astorg Bollack is the principal of Francoise Bollack Architects, a firm that specializes in preservation and reinvention of historic structures, and an associate professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where she teaches a seminar on contemporary design and old buildings. Author of the award-winning Old Buildings New Forms (The Monacelli Press, 2013), she has lectured widely to architectural and preservation groups including the New York and Boston chapters of the AIA, the Historic Districts Council and Village Preservation in New York, and the architecture and preservation programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Mary Washington University, and Tulane University.

Read an Excerpt

Remembered Forms
New Materials

IN THE HISTORY of architecture, there are specific moments when the practice of imitation has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a new direction. In these instances, the design replicates an older form but transfers it into a different set of materials to produce something new. Kenneth Frampton has noted: “As Semper was to point out in his Stoffwechseltheorie, the history of culture manifests occasional transpositions in which the architectonic attributes of one mode are expressed in another for the sake of retaining traditional symbolic value, as in the case of the Greek temple, where stone is cut and laid in such a way as to reinterpret the form of the archetypal timber frame.”1 That a new work could result from copying and that this new work could be materially and aesthetically independent of its source is worth noting, while, at the same time, it is worth keeping in mind that the new work could not exist without the source image. It is this ambiguity that allows for innovation and continuity at the same time. What do I mean by “material transfer”? The model could be imitated, and the imitation could be constructed in materials similar to the model. This is what happened when Henry Flitcroft (1697–1769) designed the Pantheon at Stourhead and when Lord Burlington (1694–1753) designed Chiswick House, both based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, itself a distant imitation of the Pantheon in Rome. None of the “copies” are exact imitations of the source building and the materials of the mimetic buildings are not the same, but the changes in materials do not appear to be at the heart of the matter. These are all important buildings in the history of architecture, and the fact that they imitated an earlier building, and how they did it, is part of their significance as it is this very act that pointed to new directions in architecture.

Conversely, the facade of the church of Santa Maria Novella, as completed by Leone Battista Alberti offers us, on the upper part (the lower part of the facade was existing), a two-dimensional, idealized copy of a Roman temple front. The materials and the construction of this facade are not at all as they would have been in the Roman temple: the facade is almost totally flat, and the pilasters do not support the entablature or the pediment. They are just thin slabs of marble, a cladding anchored to the back-up brick wall, not load-bearing elements in a trabeated system as they would have been in a Roman temple. Greek Revival architecture produced beautiful buildings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and many were monumental public buildings built of load-bearing masonry. When the classical masonry language of temple construction was transferred to wood construction built by carpenters, as it was in northern Europe and the United States, it underwent an extraordinary evolution. It continued to be indebted to the classical models, and at the same time it was liberated from strict adherence to its sources and produced a rich vernacular. This is true as well of the Gothic Revival as it developed in the United States: the shift in materials, from stone to painted wood became the source of the formal inventiveness visible in so many buildings.

In the late nineteenth century, the use of cast iron in construction allowed architects and builders to mine historical styles for the design of their building facades. Palladian and Gothic arches proliferated, and stone quoins, rustications, and fancy stone tooling were replicated in iron cast from molds that could be reused almost infinitely. The cast iron was often painted the color of stone to complete the illusion that these were stone buildings. Hidden in plain sight behind the imitative strategies was an invention: modularity, which became an important compositional device of modern architecture. Philip Johnson wrote about James Bogardus (1800–1874), the inventor and builder who popularized cast-iron architecture along with Daniel Badger: “With the cast-iron facades, he acquainted Americans with modular rhythm, which is the basis of modern design.”2

What these examples have in common is a process by which an earlier architectural expression was imitated using different materials and different construction methods: from post and lintel construction to thin cladding in the case of Santa Maria Novella, from load-bearing masonry to joined carpentry in the case of Greek and Gothic Revival buildings and from loadbearing masonry to the curtain wall in the case of cast-iron architecture. The material transfers, and the metaphors they served, generated a profound transformation in architecture: it is as if the new developments were made possible by the familiarity of the sources. Except in the case of Santa Maria Novella, imitation and the material shifts that supported it were part of a process that made a high style available to “own” and to build for a large segment of society regardless of means or social status: owners, builders, architects. One of the consequences was an explosion of fresh and inventive vernacular architecture accompanied by a revitalization of the source image. As George Kubler observed: “The replication that fills history actually prolongs the stability of many past moments, allowing sense and pattern to emerge for us wherever we look.”3

Editorial Reviews

It’s a stunner that makes the case for reworking old forms in the modern vernacular. . . . Their buildings are beautiful – and they illustrate her thinking lucidly.” - Architects + Artisans

“The French-trained Bollack has done considerable restoration work, but Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary is an attempt to redefine the meaning of contextual design. Rather than engaging in a century-old battle between modern and traditional – the angst of replica versus invention, Bollack suggests we discard an ‘outdated moral opprobrium.’” - New England Diary

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