paffard
Keatinge-Clay
Architect:
The Masters
and an
apprentice
Università Iuav di Venezia
Scuola di Dottorato
Palazzo Badoer
San Polo 2468
30125 Venezia
[email protected]
www.iuav.ir/scuoladottorato
Paffard
Keatinge-Clay
Architect:
The Masters
and an Apprentice
26 Giugno 2012
Venezia, Palazzo Badoer
Aula Tafuri
Università Iuav di Venezia
Paffard Keatinge-Clay Architect:
The Masters and an Apprentice
26 Giugno, 2012
SCUOLA
D I D OT TO R ATO
D OT TO R ATO
DI RICERCA
IN COMPOSI Z IONE
ARCHITET TONICA
DRCA
9.30 carlo magnani
Coordinatore del DRCA
Università Iuav di Venezia
10
luca monica
Politecnico di Milano
paffard keatinge-clay
The Masters and an Apprentice
14.30 luciano semerani
Università Iuav di Venezia
Paffard Keatinge-Clay Architect:
The Masters and an Apprentice
26 Giugno 2012
Università Iuav di Venezia
Badoer, Aula Tafuri
Convegno a cura di
Luca Monica e Gundula Rakowitz
Collaborazione e redazione del fascicolo
Silvia Zini
[email protected]
www.iuav.it
@iuav 2012
a cura del
Servizio Comunicazione Iuav – Venezia
stanislaus von moos
Yale School of Architecture, New Haven
16.30
Tavola rotonda con
ivan shumkov
Pratt Institute, New York
e i docenti e allievi del DRCA
Triangulations in Space and Time
Notes on the Architecture of Paffard Keatinge-Clay
dern Architecture” by ways of a pantheon of master figures — Frank Lloyd Wright,
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto. In fact, given the irrational triangulation of its references, Giedion’s “New Tradition” could without doubt be more
succinctly described by what it emphatically rejected and what it silently blinded
out than by what it actively promoted: i.e., by its vindictiveness regarding nineteenth-century academicism, neoclassicism, and ornament (in short, the chimera of
the “Beaux Arts”) and by its relative disregard for Russian constructivism — later
somewhat compensated for in the book Architecture, You and Me and its prejudices against the legacies of German expressionism and of Italian razionalismo.
This basic condition still holds true for Paffard Keatinge-Clay (albeit with some
interesting shifts). Against the backdrop of the 1970s and 1980s, his oeuvre, in
its diversity, appears like a heroic attempt to exorcise the temptations of “postmodernism” — to resist by mere strength of idealism.
Stanislaus von Moos
Few places in the United States are as charged with an aura of the Ville Radieuse
as is the terrace of the San Francisco Art Institute. Defined by the limits of San
Francisco Bay, the space, with its volumes and surfaces in béton brut playing
against the profile of Sausalito and Alcatraz reverberates with the roof terrace of
the Unité in Marseilles, while the laborious roughness of its details evoke distant
memories of Firminy and La Tourette. With regard to the elaborate network of
slopes and ramps connecting the cavelike interiors to the open space, the canonic
reference is surely the Carpenter Center at Harvard that was barely finished when
Keatinge-Clay got the San Francisco job.
Like the Art Institute addition, the somewhat later and much more ambitious
San Francisco State University Student Union, built in 1973, again in béton brut,
appears at first sight to be little more than a decontextualized Corbusian capriccio. Given the power of the two dominating pyramidal volumes that determine
its parti, one of “silence,” one of “sound” (as if in tribute to Le Corbusier’s “forms
that listen and forms that emit”), and above all with the athleticism of the open
auditorium held up into the sky like an abstract “open hand,” this building, together with the previous one, as well as some earlier works in Los Angeles probably
constitute the most immediate echo to the Le Corbusier of Chandigarh to be
found west of the Rocky Mountains. Yet these sculptural pilotis, stairs, sunbreakers, and light canons, these surfaces in somber béton brut and boldly colored
enamel doors are but part of the story.
Diversity
In fact, what strikes one when seen synthetically and in retrospect is the diversity
of Keatinge-Clay’s built and unbuilt projects. A desert pavilion in Arizona — no
more than a delicate redwood frame rising above a bare plinth — next to the
space-age gothic of a giant light dome in Carmel; some muscled bank offices in
béton brut and glass (rather Yankee) next to the drama of two post-Corbusian
campus buildings in San Francisco (distinctly Parisian and avant-garde). And
then the similarly demonstrative, but now explicitly Miesian addition to London’s
House of Parliament. More than the fruit of patient search, this looks like the
laboratory of an inventor trying to explore with every new project the limits of
his medium.
Seen in its context, this trajectory, crystallized in a kaleidoscope of seemingly
disjointed episodes not unlike the romance of modern architecture itself almost
inevitably brings to mind Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941),
a mythical book that has contributed more than any other work to defining “Mo4
Geometry and Gothicism
There is, of course, a more positively defined unity to Keatinge-Clay’s work (as
there is for Giedion’s). It rests upon a passion for geometry and its effects on the
human psyche, for the possibilities of concrete constructions pushed to their extremes, and for expanding, with the help of those instruments, the limits of architecture toward sculpture. All this is present from the beginning. At the Architectural Association, Felix Samuely had taught that all the principles of engineering
Max Bill,copertina per Alfred
Roth, The New Architecure,
1941
Herbert Bayer,
copertina per
Siegfried Giedion,
Space Time and
Architecture (1941)
Teffont UK, foto
Paffard Keatinge Clay nasce a
Teffont, vicino Stonehenge.
Stonehenge UK, foto
Frequenta la scuola militare a
Wellington per due anni.
1926
1940
Lascia l’AA di Londra e
prosegue gli studi all’ETH di
Zurigo.
Max Bill, opera
Inizia a lavorare insieme a Max
Bill al libro su Maillart e
Erno Golfinger, foto
collabora alla produzione
Arriva a Zurigo e si dirige al
dell’Oeuvre complete di
numero 7 di Dordertal,
residenza di Giedion e quartier Girsberger.
Incontra storici e teorici molto
generale del CIAM con la
influenti tra cui Sigfried
lettera di raccomandazione
Inizia gli studi presso l’Architectural
Giedion. Sposerà sua figlia
scritta da Erno Goldfinger.
Association di Londra.
poco più tardi.
Collabora con Erno Goldfinger.
Aiuta ad illustrare il libro The
new School per l’architetto
Alfred Roth. Provvede alla
traduzione inglese del testo su
Robert Maillart, Bridge.
Maillart.
1942
1944
1947
5
Unitè di Habita
Inizia a lavo
Le Corbusie
Unité di Ha
Marseille e
Inizia la sua
presso lo st
in rue de Se
Lavora al de
dell’Unitè d
Marsiglia.
can be reduced to three basic laws: i.e., that every force has an equal resistance,
that all horizontal forces must equally add up to zero, and that all vertical forces
must equally add up to zero. The way Keatinge-Clay recalls these three principles
in his autobiography suggests that he considers them to be the hinge of his own
program.1 How profound a chord Samuely must have struck becomes clear when
in his autobiography Keatinge-Clay tells of the long walks with his mother from
his native medieval village to a group of enormous beech trees that “reached
naturally to form a vaulted space high above.”
This group of trees, the “cathedral” of Dinton Woods, will time and again reappear in his later work. The Desert Pavilion, desperate as an abandoned gas station, though conceived as an observatory of the universe,2 is also Keatinge-Clay’s
variation on Laugier’s “structural” definition of the ”primitive hut.” The proposed
light dome for the Carl Cherry Foundation in Carmel, California, is late Frank
Lloyd Wright technoromanticism charged with a Fullerian logic that Wright’s
work in general lacks, and that, if Giedion is correct, relates to the work of Nervi, Candela, and Catalano, as well as, indirectly, to the constructivist dreams of
Pevsner and Gabo.3
As to his bold London Parliamentary addition project, it is no coincidence that
the most “bracketed” among Mies’ projects served as references, the Chicago
Convention Hall of 1953-1954 with its exposed bracework, made necessary, in
Mies’ case, by the will to cover a colossal interior span of seven hundred and
Ritorna a Londra, completa gli
studi universitari all’AA. Dopo
la laurea diviene un membro
del Royal Institute of British
Architects.
Più tardi lascia l’Inghilterra per
trasferirsi negli Stati Uniti
attraversando il paese da Est
dra e
ad Ovest. Quando arriva in
all’ETH di
Arizona inizia la sua
collaborazione con Frank Lloyd
sieme a Max
Wright che continua più tardi
llart e
in Wisconsin.
Unitè di Habitation
duzione
Stringe amiciza con Jhon D.
ete di
Turner (Freedom to Build) ed
Inizia a lavorare all’Atelier di
Le Corbusier ai progetti per le inizia a pensare alle esigenze
eorici molto Unité di Habitation di
sociali più che poetiche ed
gfried
estetiche dell’architettura.
Marseille e per la Rochelle.
ua figlia
Spunti di rifelessione sono i
Inizia la sua collaborazione
presso lo studio di Le Corbusier libri di Lewis Mumford,
il libro The in rue de Serves 35 a Parigi.
Technics and Civilization e
rchitetto
Lavora al dettaglio dei piloties Lancelot Law White, The next
ede alla
Development in Man.
dell’Unitè d’habitation di
del testo su Marsiglia.
Incontra Füller nel 1949 a
Chicago e rimane influenzato
dal suo lavoro.
1948
6
1949
Guggenheim Museum, New York
1950
Zürich and the Euro-American “Grand Tour”
Thus, like Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar following the stars on the firmament,
Keatinge-Clay looked up one Bethlehem of modernity after another, determined to reach the absolute, while not betraying his intetlectual penchant for the
—“Both-And” over the “Either-Or” — a process that generated some gnawing conflicts of loyalty as the Wanderjahre went on.
London, Paris, Chicago, Taliesins West and East, and even San Francisco are predictable hinge-points in the topography of a modern architect, but what made
him choose Switzerland as base camp for his “Grand Tour”? The reason was a
spontaneous fascination with Robert Maillart. At Bedford Square, in the AA libra-
Lascia Taliesin e insieme alla
moglie Verena, figlia di Sifried
Gidieon, si trasferisce in
California alla Carl Cherry
Foundation.
Idea di una ‘Nuova Monumentalità’ basata sulla geometria
del trinagolo e della piramide
nelle sperimentazioni di
Buckminster Füller e Louis Kah.
Johnson Wax Company Headquarters,
Racine Wisconsin
Werner Max Moser lo mette in
contatto con Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Con Frank Lloyd Wright lavora
ai progetti per il Guggenheim
Museum a New York e si unisce
al gruppo di lavoro impegnato
nella realizzazione della
Research Tower nel Johnson
Wax Company Headquarters a
Racine, Wisconsin.
twenty feet. In fact, Keatinge-Clay’s project decription begins with this mise au
point: “The structure, as with Gothic cathedrals, is expressed on the exterior.” It
goes on, linking the genus loci of Westminster to the memory of Dinton Woods:
“The bronze-clad trusses allow the building to bear on four pyramidal points of
support thus spanning the underground railway and hovering free of the site at
the corners”.4
With the San Francisco State University Student Union, he reconnected with his
most important master, Le Corbusier — but once again, the rumblings of the
inventor’s mind and, more specifically, the stamp of Euclidian geometry are stronger than the makings of a “CIAM-ese,” brutalist envelope might suggest.
Inizia a lavorare a Los Angeles per Raphael
Soriano.
Si trasferisce a Chicago e inizia
a lavorare per Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill. Incontra
Mies Van der Rohe. Insieme a
Bruce Grahm lavora al progetto
per L’Inland Steel Building e
iniseme a Walter Netsch al
Harris Trust and Savings Bank
building.
Desert Pavillion, Beneth Superstition
Mountain Apache Junction, Arizona
Costruisce il suo primo edificio,
Desert Pavillion, sulla
Superstition Mountain in
Arizona.
Buckminster Füller, Dymaxion House
Harris Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago,
Illinois
1951
1952
1954
1955
Great Western Savings and Loan,
Gardena, California
Tamalpais Pavillion, Mill Valley, California
Collabora all’organizzazione del
concorso di progettazione per il
memorial Enrico Fermi
Si trasferisce a San Francisco
all'università di Chicago nel
insieme alla moglie dove inizia
sito dove avvenne la prima
a lavorare per l’ufficio degli
reazione nucleare.
SOM occupandosi del progetto
per la Great Western Savings
an Loan in Gardena, California
dove il figlio Dion di Richard
Neutra è capo progetto.
Partecipa al concorso per il
memorial Franklin Delano
Roosevelt a Washington dove
sperimenta i primi studi sulle
variazioni di forme piramidali.
Charles Basset lo licenzia dagli
SOM. PKC decide quindi di
aprire il suo studio insieme a
Bill Merci con il nome di Clay
and Merci Architects.
Realizza il Tamalpais Pavillion
nella Mill Valley, California
dove crea una casa per la sua
famiglia.
Bill Merci lascia l’attività e lo
studio viene rinominato
Paffard Keatinge Clay,
Architect. Inizia il progetto per
il Northridge Medical Arts
Building in Northridge,
California insiema Dion Neutra.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
Competition, Washington, D.C.
1958
1960
Northridge Medical Arts Museum,
Northridge, California
1962
1964
Viene selezionato per
progettare l’ampliamento
del San Francisco Art
Institute.
1965
7
ry, Keatinge-Clay had discovered Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, where
these works are documented and discussed at considerable length.5
The then available volumes of Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre complete and Alfred Roth’s
The New Architecture,6 books that had established Zürich as a hub of advanced
architectural publishing during World War II, did the rest to confirm his choice.
In fact, the lure of Switzerland as an island of neutrality in the heart of Europe
where milk and honey appeared to flow, while the rest of Europe stood in ruins,
exerted a magic attraction for many after World War II, especially for architects
in Britain.
Similarly to Scandinavia and Holland, Switzerland appeared to have become a
laboratory for the reconstruction of a war-ridden Europe according to the modernist agenda.
Thus, upon arriving in Zürich after a brief stop in Paris, Keatinge-Clay headed to
number 7, Doldertal, the Giedion residence and headquarters of ClAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture), to deliver one of the three letters of
recommendation that architect Ernö Goldfinger had written on his behalf (the
other two were addressed to Alfred Roth and to Werner M. Moser). The rest of the
story is reported in the autobiography of Lancelot Law White, a British physicist
who in the 1950s had visited Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker at their Zürich
home:
One day a young student, Keatinge-Clay, had knocked at their door and asked if
he could see Giedion. They talked, and as he was short of Swiss money and hungry, they gave him first a meal, then a bed, and in return he had run off with their
daughter. The fable (perhaps it is one) is that the runaway couple sent identical
telegrams to their parents, which read more or less as follows:
“Greetings. Marriage is an insult to love.” 7
“Le Corboozer” and Wright
The scenario of his subsequent career looks like an extrapolation of the various
anchor points between which the “New Tradition” proposed in Space, Time and
Architecture unfolds. Clearly it would have been incomplete without an internship
at 35, rue de Sevres, in Paris-Le Corbusier’s studio (1947-1949).
There, Keatinge-Clay heard the master’s reports of the raw concrete surfaces of
the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, which he had visited during a recent trip
to the United States.8 Keatinge-Clay had been assigned the task of detailing the
pilotis upon which the Unite d’habitation in Marseilles came to rest. “Le Corbusier sat at my drafting board and added two vertical strokes at their joint, rather
like the stripes of an infantry soldier’s trousers, which I do not understand to
this day, and which he would not explain, so that is the way it was built”. In his
French Hospital addition in San Francisco, Keatinge-Clay would later give his own
re-interpretation of the rhetoric of these pilotis.
An interlude at the AA, aside from a diploma, brought the friendship with John
Mural
Inizia ad insegnare
all’università di Berkeley,
California.
Tra i suoi allievi Eric Owen
Moss.
Viene selezionato da Charles
Eames per progettare l’Art
School and Dormitory for
Immaculate Heart Academy in
Pomona, California. Inizia a
lavorare al progetto iniseme
all’architetto James Leefe. John
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco,
California
Korty realizza il film Crazy Quilt
nel quale viene ripreso il
Tamalpais Pavillion.
Inizia a lavorare al French
Pubblica “Lessons for an
Medical Center a San
Architect” nella rivista
Francisco. Julius Shulman
Landscape.
fotografa il Northridge Medical
Arts.
E’ relatore della tesi di Eric
Owen Moss che inizia a
lavorare nel suo studio nello
stesso anno.
Lo schema di Moshe Safdie
viene selezionato per il
progetto del San Francisco Sate
University Student Union.
San Francisco State University
Student Union, San Francisco,
California
E’ nominato finalista al
concorso per il Glasgow Burrell
Collection, Scozia.
E’ nominato finalista al
concorso per l’ampliamento del
Palazzo di Westminster a
Londra.
Apre al pubblico il San
Francisco Art Institute.
Vince
il concorso
perper
il San
Vince
il concorso
il San
Francisco
State
University
Francisco
State
University
Student
Union.
Student Union.
Double Helic skyscaper project
Si trasferisce a Vancouver in
Canada dove vive e lavora per
alcuni anni.
Apre il San Francisco State
University Student Union.
8
1968
1969
Acquerello
Six Swans
Si dedica alla pittura, scrittura
e scultura fino ai giorni nostri.
OLondon Parlamentary Addition
Competition, London, UK
1967
Attualmente vive e lavora a
Malaga, Spagna.
Progetta il Prince Georges
Medical Center Hospital a
Vancouver.
French Medical Center, San Francisco,
California
1966
Double Helic steel sculpture
1970
1973
1976
1977
1978
1979
2012
9
D. Turner and the beginning of a re-conceptualizing of architecture in terms of social rather than poetic or aesthetic needs. Turner, whose book Freedom to Build later become a reference work for a younger generation, insisted that what counts
is not the photographs but the people a building makes: “What do we want to
make? Neurotic criminals, healthy children? Bloated millionaires or saints? And
what is the ‘new man’ that should inhabit the new city, Le Corbusier’s ill-proportioned gorilla?” In London, Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and,
perhaps even more importantly, The Next Development in Man by the physicist
and biologist Lancelot Law White offered more philosophical ammunition towards a practice of archiecture as a way of thinking, envigorating what White
himself later described as his disciple’s “tendency towards ( ... ) schizoid abstractions, a somewhat exaggerated fascination with verbal dichotomies, geometrical
patterns displaying the supposed structure of the psyche, or of society, and other
symbolic tricks.”9
The next biographical cycle involved another loop via Zürich. Back in Zürich, Keatinge-Clay met Werner M. Moser who helped establish the contact with Wright.
Wright replied within a few days and summarized the work at Taliesin in these
terms: “To begin at the beginning, and to think about structure as an interpretation of life is fundamental to our way of work.” (So much for Wright’s own
fascination with “geometrical patterns displaying the supposed structure of the
psyche or of society.”) As it turned out, Keatinge-Clay’s ambitions with regard to
engineering form, shaped by the experience of Robert Maillart, went in some
ways beyond Wright’s. Disinclined to throw his earlier experiences overboard and
to become a mere disciple, Keatinge-Clay was one day overheard uttering casually some reservations about a Wright project — an unbearable faux pas near the
altar of organicism guarded by the high-priest Olgivanna. While Wright himself
did not take the matter too seriously, he could not refrain from teasing Paffard
for having worked with “Le Corboozer,” an architect who had not done anything
that (in Wright’s words) “’lieber Meister’ Sullivan and I had not done decades before”. After Keatinge-Clay spent some time in Racine, Wisconsin, working on and
worrying about the research tower of the Johnson Wax administration building,
whose structural “beginnings” virtually disappear behind its streamlined envelope of brick and glass, the collaboration with Wright ended.10
Keatinge-Clay moved on — first into the desert of Arizona to build his Desert Pavilion, and then, after meeting Richard Neutra, in Los Angeles, to the Bay Region,
where he briefly worked for Rafael Soriano before entering the firm of Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill in Chicago in 1955. So, when in 1960 he finally returned to
California and later started his own office in San Francisco to address the challenges of the hippie culture, he had absorbed virtually the entire spectrum of EuroAmerican modernism: from Zürich and Paris (avant-garde) to Chicago (corporate
idealism) — via the organicism of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Triangle and Pyramid
In architectural criticism, triangle and pyramid as well as their variants and inversions can be used as “critical forms.” Using this method would be one way
of clarifying the link that exists between Keatinge-Clay’s universe and that of
his masters — beginning with Le Corbusier who had included both triangle and
pyramid in his panoply of “formes primaires.”11 Later, at the time of Ronchamp
and La Tourette, the form assumes expressive functions as part of a composition:
such as in the steep and tilted pyramidal top of the oratory in the cloister of La
Tourette — the Cestius pyramid reduced to its archi-sculptural signal-effect. Then
at Ronchamp, cones, either concave or merely painted, appear to relate to a
post-cubist iconography of visual perception: most explicitly so in the arrow-slitwindows of the south wall and then again in the “faux-relief” of the pilgrimage
hostel down the field. Frank Lloyd Wright — unlike “Le Corboozer” — liked to use
triangles and hexagons for the display of functions in plan (such as at the Hanna
House in Palo Alto, California, 1942) as well as for maximizing and dramatizing
structural economy in elevation (such as at booth Taliesins).
As to Keatinge-Clay, he appears to pick up on both these traditions, yet in most
of his projects (those built and those which remained on paper), the triangulated
form is assigned demonstratively structural and expressive roles. Most clearly so
in the San Francisco State University Student Union, whose structure is an athletic tour de force that combines a Corbusian with a Wrightian principle: the idea of
liberating the ground with the help of pilotis (Corbusian), and the idea of freeing
the corners from their function as architectural “crutches” (Wrightian).
One may think of Herbert Read who decribed certain modern sculpture as “the
geometry of pain,” suggesting that only the agony of asymmetrical composition
can be evocative of progress and change. Not surprisingly, the psychology of
abstract geometric forms was one of Lancelot Law White’s hobby horses. At one
point, White had wooden models made of the simplest regular solid, the regular
tetrahedron, and also of the simplest skew objects, a particular kind of skewed
tetrahedron that looks asymmetrical or oblique from every aspect. He amused
himself by dividing any group of observers into “classical” and “modern” temperaments depending on their reaction to these models.12
Seen against this background, the Student Union building is an exercise in “antiClassicism.” Blooming upward like a desert cactus, the building reveals a rhetoric that appears inherent in the triangle ever since EI Lissitzky’s use of it in his
emblematic poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919. It is therefore not
illogical if the building continues to be understood as an architectural pathos
formula for the student revolt that was its actual background.13 lts inherent visual
rhetoric would explicitly suggest such a reading, even if it were not inscribed into
the history of the project with the clamorous demise of Moshe Safdie’s proposal.
At the same time, the béton brut of which it was made, the pivoting enamel
doors and other Corbusian references are obviously this architect ‘s interpretation
11
of the “New Monumentality.” The term implies “monument” — and it is not by
coincidence that the Student Union highlights so strongly the concept’s roots in
sculpture. Had not the architect first developed the parti — a configuration of
eccentric pyramids — for his proposed rather Di Suvero-esque Franklin Delano
Roosevelt monument alongside the Potomac in Washington.
Buckminster Fuller and Louis Kahn
One should add that in the 1950s, when Keatinge-Clay began his practice, and
when the idea of a “New Monumentality” began to infiltrate the architectural
academe, the geometry of triangle and pyramid had become highly visible as
booth conceptual tools and as symbolic forms in the work of the titans of American structuralism, Buckminster Fuller and Louis Kahn, with Fuller emphasizing
the former aspect, Kahn the latter. In the coffered concrete ceilings of his Yale
Art Gallery, Kahn combined a linear pattern based on the triangle with a web of
tetrahedrons and octahedrons to arrive at continuous uninterrupted floors and
ceilings that would not have been feasible otherwise. With the help of Ann Tyng,
Kahn would later go even further in architecturalizing the Fullerian geometry —
most emblematically in his proposed City Hall Tower for Philadelphia.
Keatinge-Clay has no special affinity with Kahn (who was by no means part of
Doldertal culture to begin with), but he had met Buckminster Fuller during his
first trip to Chicago in 1949: “a little man resembling a wizard at work in the
basement, cutting hexagons and triangles out of cardboard and sheet aluminum
with scissors... “ There was also a model of the famous geodesic dome “consisting
of equal hexagons as the strongest and lightest way of covering any space at any
scale ... “
The Carmel Light Dome elaborated shortly afterward, 1951, may relate to this
early encounter, despite its overtly Wrightian timbre. No doubt that much later,
when Keatinge-Clay began to explore the possibilities of tensegrity-structures
in his sculptural work, Fuller (next to Wachsmann) was the key reference. As to
the athletic bridge-trusslike structure of London’s Houses of Parliament addition,
it appears like a blending of Buckminster Fuller’s speculations and the tectonic
rigor of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The analogy with the structure of
Kahn’s Adath Jeshurun Synagogue and School of 1954 may or may not be a
mere coincidence.
As to the even more sculptural athleticism of the San Francisco University Student
Union, the impact of Fuller survives merely as a general concept.14
Maillart, Giedion, Bill
Other fascinations appear to have left similarly profound traces, and some may
once again have to do with the architect’s Swiss connection. Above all there is the
visual impact and sheer sculptural force of Robert Maillart’s work — the spreads
of photographs displayed in Space, Time and Architecture are like a leitmotif
12
in this context. Maillart is unthinkable outside the Zürich culture of structural
engineering, developed in the nineteenth century by Culmann, that consists of
developing structural forms by graphic experimentation rather than by calculus.15
Giedion had published his first article on Maillart in 1937. A decade later, when
Keatinge-Clay was in Zürich studying engineering, the sculptor and architect Max
Bill was preparing a monograph on Maillart’s work, and Keatinge-Clay provided
the English version of the text. For Bill, the ideologue of concrete art and later
the founding director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, Germany — an
institution that owes its inspiration to the Bauhaus — the affinity of engineering,
art and concrete sculpture was a springboard for his own work as an artist.
Yet as architect, Bill, captured in his self-assigned role as a guard to the holy grail
of architectural functionalism, refrained from adapting the formal and structural
dimostrazioni of his sculpture — let alone his painting. He left the architectural
potential of his sculpture to others to exploit.16
Thus, when Keatinge-Clay drew the polycentrically arranged circles in the plan of
his proposed light dome for the Carl Cherry Foundation, one wonders if he had
Max Bill’s “15 Variations on a Theme” of 1935-1938 on his mind — or even on
his drawing board. The site plan of the San Francisco University Student Union
represents a similar riddle. Seen in plan, the parti is reduced to a pattern of triangles, like an inflatable lifeboat at rest waiting to open upward and sideways potentially to form a crystalline cluster of elementary geometric braces conquering
the void — rather like Max Bill’s “Construction made of 30 Identical Elements” of
1938-1939. Following only a slightly less rigorous logic and using steel and glass
rather than concrete, the process might have unfolded into something like the
Public Library in Seattle, Rem Koolhaas’ most accomplished building to this day,
or his Casa de Musica in Porto, Portugal its “compact” counterpart (2005).
Modernism after Modernism
In the age of “city branding,” the spectacularization of what modern architecture
once stood for — reason, geometry, transparency, originality, organicism, light,
progress — has colonized the urban centers and thus become the “ruling taste”
of today. As a result — museums, concert halls, opera houses, sports stadiums,
even public libraries have made banal the legacy of modernism by exploiting it
so ruthlessy (seldom enough with the liberating genius of Koolhaas) — today’s
appetites for architectural spectacles no longer need to swarm to obscure sanctuaries in provincial France as in the age of Ronchamp, La Tourette or Firminy.
Nor does American campus architecture offer a supply of sensations that would
not be available downtown.
Returning to some heroic sites of the 1960s and 1970s and deciphering the
history of modernism after modernism17 by sorting out its bits and pieces is thus
perhaps the only way to disentangle the confusing puzzle of a present that can
no longer be cast in a “New Tradition.” Yet by mere analogy with Paffard Keatin-
ge-Clay, some recent and not so recent phenomena emerge as if to form, perhaps,
a rather surreal web of undeclared utopian alliances. The general theme is building defined as structure and geometry in space. Mies, Buckminster Fuller, Kahn
are the fixed points. The metabolists with Isozaki and Kurokawa later projected
the imagery to the scale of urbanism. Paffard Keatinge-Clay has stopped short of
such pathetic extravagance. Is it that he considered sculpture to be more appropriate a medium for such Euclidian experiments than urban society at large. What
counts for architecture — and what connects Keatinge-Clay backward with Le
Corbusier and Wright, and perhaps forward with Koolhaas — is that he brought
these themes into play at the scale of buildings, and that, for better or for worse,
these buildings ultimately work as art.
Notes
1. Keatinge-Clay, Paffard, The Adventures of a Twentieth-Century Architect, unpublished manuscript. The author is grateful to Paffard Keatinge-Clay for allowing him to study the manuscript
which is still in the process of elaboration. Note: all literal quotes from Paffard Keatinge-Clay. herein, are taken from this source; 2. Keatinge-Clay, Paffard. “Lesson for an ArChitect,” in Landscape.
v. 18, fall 1969, pp. 26-28; 3. Giedion. Sigfried. Architektur und Gemeinschaft Tagebuch einer
Entwicklung. Reinbek B. Hamburg (Rowohlt), pp. 111-119. To the surprise of some ClAM friends,
Giedion even reproduced this project by his son-in-law on the cover of the 2nd printing of his
ClAM-anthology: A Decade of New Architecture (1st ed. 1951); 4. “Parliamentary Competition.” in
The Architect’s Journal, March 8, 1972, pp. 470-492 (491f); 5. Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and
Architecture. The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press), 1941; 5th
ed., 197,. pp.450-476; 6. Roth, Alfred. Die Neue Architektur/The New Architecture. Zurich (Verlag
Hans Girsberger), 1941; 7. White, Lancelot Law. Focus and Diversions, London (The Cresset Press),
1963, p.204; 8. Only a small brochure dooumenting the TVA-project is presenltly to be found at
the Foundation Le Corbusier; 9. White, Focus and Diversions (op. cit.), p. 200; 10. Keatinge-Clay
appears to have been unhappy with the fact that the structural solution for the tower, as settled
by the end of 1946 (ct. Jonathan Lipman, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings, New
York (Rizzoli), 1986, p. 145), was to a large degree made invisible by its glass envelop; 11. Le Corbusier, ”Sur la plastique. Examen des conditions primaires.” in L’Esprit Nouveau, No.1, 1920; 12. White,
Focus and Diversions (op. cit.), p. 189; 13. Woodbridge, Sally B., “Activism in Concrete,” in Progressive Architecture, 1978, Nr. 3, pp. 65-68; 14. The system is “impure” in so far as the diagonalized
box columns are, here, supported by vertical and horizontal elements. See Eric Keune, “Against the
Current,” p.10; 15. On the “graphic system” of bridge design developed by Carl Culmann, see —
apart from Culmann’s own book Graphische Statik of 1866 — David Billington, The Tower and the
Bridge. The New Art of Structural Engineering, New York (Basic Books), 1963, p.130; and passim.
as well as id., “Wilhelm Ritter: Teacher of Maillart and Ammann,” in Festschrift Christian Menn zum
60.Geburstag, Zurich (ETH), n.d., pp. 52-58; 16. Gimmi, Karen (ed.). Max Bill arquitecto/Max Bill
architect. Barcelona (Gustavo Gili), 2004. On Bill’s “split” approach to architecture and art. See
S. von Moos, “Max Bill and the Primitive Hut” in Karen Gimmi (ed.). Max Bill arquitecto/Max Bill
architect. Barcelona (Gustavo Gili), 2004; 17. In variation of Diana Ghirardo’s useful book, Archi-
Bibliografia essenziale
Keatinge-Clay, Paffard. “Lesson for an Architect.” in Landscape. v 18, 1969. p.2628.
Keune, Eric. Paffard Keatinge-Clay Modern Architect(ure)/Modern Master(s). Los
Angeles: SCI-Arc Press, 2005, con scritti di J.L. Cohen e S. von Moos
Glancey, Jonathan. “What a privilege it was”. www.guardian.co.uk. The Guardian.
Web. 5 March 2009
“Paffard Keatinge-Clay: The Work of Paffard Keatinge-Clay”. www.sciarc.edu. SCIArc Gallery. Web. February, March 2006.
“Paffard Keatinge-Clay Renowned Architect of San Francisco Art Institute Gives
Public Lecture”. www.sfai.edu. SFAI. Web. 24 March 2006
“Visita a Paffard Keatinge-Clay, I parte”. www.youtube.com. Web. 22 Genuary
2009
“Visita a Paffard Keatinge-Clay, II parte”. www.youtube.com. Web. 22 Genuary
2009
tecture after Modernism, London/New York (Thames & Hudson), 1996.
(da Eric Keune, Paffard Keatinge-Clay. Modern Architect(ure) and Modern Master(s), SCI-Arc, Los
Angeles 2005, pagg. 24-31)
14
15
Great Western Savings and Loan
2501 West Rosencrans Boulevard
Gardena California, 1958-1961
16
17
Addition to the San Francisco
Art Institute
Chestnut Street
San Francisco California, 1963 - 1970
18
19
Addition to the San Francisco
Art Institute
Chestnut Street
San Francisco California, 1963 - 1970
20
21
Northridge Medical Arts Building
Plummer Street and Reseda Boulevard
Northridge California, 1964-1966
San Francisco State University
Student Union
19th Avenue
San Francisco California, 1969 - 1975
San Francisco State University
Student Union
19th Avenue
San Francisco California, 1969 - 1975
26
Paffard Keatinge-Clay
Nato presso Stonehenge, in Inghilterra nel 1926, si è laureato all’Architectural
Association di Londra e all’ETH di Zurigo. Ha iniziato la sua carriera di architetto
presso lo studio di Ernö Goldfinger a Londra.
Ha conosciuto Sigfried Giedion e collaborato con Max Bill a Zurigo, con Le Corbusier a Parigi, con Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin e in Arizona, con lo studio
SOM, prima a Chicago, poi a San Francisco, lavorando con Bruce Grahm e Walter
Netsch e entrando in contatto con Mies van der Rohe e Myron Goldsmith.
Nel 1961 apre il proprio studio a San Francisco nel quale realizza le sue opere e
progetti più importanti, fino al 1976. Ha insegnato in diverse scuole di architettura, tra le quali l’University of California a Berkeley e il California Polytechnic.
Si è trasferito prima in Canada e poi a Malaga, dove vive e lavora come scultore.
Luciano Semerani
Nato a Trieste nel 1933 è architetto e docente di composizione architettonica ed
è stato allievo e collaboratore di Giuseppe Samonà ed Ernesto N. Rogers. Con
Gigetta Tamaro ha progettato e realizzato numerose opere, tra le quali l’Ospedale
di Cattinara a Trieste e l’ampliamento dell’Ospedale dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo a
Venezia.
Ha insegnato all’Università IUAV di Venezia e come visiting professor a Vienna e a
New York. È stato coordinatore del Dottorato in Composizione Architettonica allo
IUAV di Venezia dal 2000 al 2010.
Ha fondato e diretto la rivista “Phalaris” e diretto la Fondazione Masieri dal 1988
al 1992. Tra le principali pubblicazioni sono: Passaggio a Nord-Est (1991), Progetti
per una città (1980), L’altro moderno (2000), L’esperienza del simbolo (2007). Tra i
suoi studi l’architettura della città di Trieste, le opere e il pensiero di Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, Gottfried Semper, Adolf Loos, Jože Plečnik e Lina Bo Bardi.
È Accademico di San Luca.
Stanislaus von Moos
Nato a Lucerna nel 1940 è storico dell’arte e dell’architettura ed è stato assistente
di Sigfried Giedion. Ha insegnato alla Harvard University, alla City University di
New York, alla Technische Hogeschool di Delft, alla ETH di Zurigo, all’Accademia
di Architettura di Mendrisio e alla Yale University. È stato Jean Labatut Visiting
Professor alla Princeton University.
Ha fondato e diretto la rivista “Archithese”, dal 1970 al 1980.
Ha curato diverse importanti mostre e cataloghi. Tra i principali scritti e pubblicazioni sono: Le Corbusier. Elemente einer Synthese (1968), poi tradotto, tra l’altro,
in francese ed inglese, e diversi altri scritti su Le Corbusier, sull’architettura italiana
del Rinascimento, sul disegno industriale in Svizzera, su Robert Venturi, Santiago
Calatrava, Max Bill, Fernand Léger, Max Huber.
28
29