Spending Warm Summer Days Indoors

So, while everybody else in Chicago was going to Cubs games or to the lake fron fo Lolapalooza, how do you suppose I spent the gloriously sunny weekend? If you guessed "haunting cool, dimly lit rooms, growing ever paler and more disconnected from fellow human beings," you win.

Whatever, it's my birthday.

I had to run down to Shimer to try to get my paycheck from my internship, but the campus was pretty much deserted. Rather than waste the trip down to the South Side entirely, I though I'd visit Crown Hall. I've been passing right by the building on my way to class for the past two years and just never seemed to getting around to indulge my curiosity about the big glass box. Anyway, I thought some pictures of the IIT's Bauhaus would make a nice counterpoint for all the old world masonry that I'm sure will be filling all my pictures from Oxford.

But I got to thinking that, despite all the vivid differences between Mies van der Rohe's minimalist glass and steel creation and the Gothic spires and ornament that come to mind when one thinks about the cathedrals of an ancient European city like Oxford, the two architectures seem to me to share at least one common feature. I am suggesting that, although they conceive of and execute it differently, both Crown Hall and the typical Gothic cathedral aspire to a kind of sacredness through the use of unified, uninterrupted space. Consider the sheer ingenuity both structures put into creating internal open spaces in which occupants' movements and gazes are unimpeded by structural supports.

Here's one of Villard de Honnecourt's 13th Century drawings of a flying buttress (thanks wikipedia):

The idea here is to direct the force of the mass of the Cathedral's walls outward, obviating the need for internal pillars and such.

Here's Crown Hall under construction:

In a way, these girders accomplish the same thing as their medieval forerunners. Suspending the roof from these external features eliminates the need for load-bearing walls on the inside.

Now obviously, in the case of the Gothic cathedral the tremendous open space afforded by the buttresses is directed upward; it is a place dedicated to a heavenly divinity, one designed to make the individual small before God. It says "elevate your eyes and hearts and minds and you will move from an earthly existence to a spiritual one. The key here is spiritual ascent.

Crown Hall turns this notion on its head, or at on its side at least. Where the cathedral's space operates on a vertical axis, Crown Hall uses a horizontal one-- wide openness on a human scale rather than vertiginous heights on divine terms. I would say that the building is a manifestation of the German expat Mies van der Rohe's post-war optimism about America. Rather than cultivating a connection to God, Crown Hall's open space seems to be about terrestrial transparency and ease of movement. It puts faith in rationality, utility, and accessibility. It is a temple to Democracy and Humanism.

What I think is most interesting, though, is the way that the import of both structures has been almost totally inverted by latter appraisals.

John Ruskin, for example, has a lot to say about the Gothic style in "The Stones of Venice." ( I can't put my hands on the book to quote directly at the moment because my copy is packed away and the closest I could come to it at Gurnee's public library was John Grisham) Any way, if I remember his choice of words correctly, Ruskin says that one off the hallmarks of the Gothic is "changefulness"-- it is characteristically grotesque, playful and variegated. He goes on to claim that this is because the craftspeople who built Gothic structures were individual, free laborers as opposed to slaves for whom each piece of a building must be made identical in order to maximize their efficiency. I guess the Pyramids or Greek columns would be examples of "slave architecture." I take all this with a grain of salt; historically, I'm not sure how "free" medieval laborers were and I'm pretty sure there is some research to indicate that the Egyptians didn't use slaves to build all of their monuments. But regardless, the point is that for Ruskin, writing in the 19th century, the Gothic Cathedral is a memorial to Human creativity, individuality, and freedom and not self-effacement before an all-powerful God.

The high Modernism of which Crown Hall is an excellent example would seem to be undergoing a similar reevaluation. I can say that anecdotally, people who spend time around the IIT campus (which was all designed by Mies van der Rohe) remark that the place feels "cold," "impersonal," and "sterile." And I think that the idea that, rather than creating a place for egalitarian and rational relations between people, buildings like Crown Hall actually reduce humans to mechanistic specimens was given voice in Jaques Tati's wonderful movie, "Playtime."

Just something I was thinking about.

Anyway, there was an exhibit of stencil designs of Louis Sullivan's lost buildings on display inside Crown Hall. Really gorgeous stuff the makes a person long to travel back to the Gilded Age. I got a couple pictures before they threatened to take my camera.

Latter I went to the Musicbox and they must have known it was my birthday. They were playing Godard's "Le Mepris" followed by a midnight showing of "Eraserhead."

I was especially excited about the Godard since I had previously only seen it on a shitty Chinese bootleg with mandarin subtitles, bad color, and a screwed-up aspect ratio. The Musicbox's print was pretty good, even if the second reel was kinda grainy.

Good Weekend.