"Only the artist who has never subjected himself to the discipline of creating a picture, who believes in the intuitive origins of painting, fears that closeness to materials and technical understanding will destroy his originality. He has never learned what is historically available, and can never make use of it. And so he conjures up out the supposed depths of his own inferiority that which is merely the residue of outmoded forms." -Theodor Adorno, from "Functionalism Today"
by George Dodds, William Braham
"Only the artist who has never subjected himself to the discipline of creating a picture, who believes in the intuitive origins of painting, fears that closeness to materials and technical understanding will destroy his originality. He has never learned what is historically available, and can never make use of it. And so he conjures up out the supposed depths of his own inferiority that which is merely the residue of outmoded forms." -Theodor Adorno, from "Functionalism Today"
I. Introduction
Through strategically resisting normative architectural practice and building construction, the Philadelphia based architectural firm of Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has achieved, in a relatively short period of time, an emerging critical position within the American architectural community. Unlike most other U.S. architects who have established alternative practices through the polemics of writing and drawing, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris (KTH) arrived at their architectural position through building rather than opposed to it. In a vigorous encounter with materials, methods of construction and building programs, KTH practices the building arts as a way of questioning the common place of the received conventions of both practice and construction. While their schema of assembly may deviate from the accepted norm however, their palette of materials do not. Partners Steve Kieran, James Timberlake and Sam Harris studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and began their professional affiliation while on staff in the offices of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (VRSB) in Philadelphia. This twin inheritance of VRSB and the intellectual geography of the city of Philadelphia situates Kieran, Timberlake & Harris within a complex patrimony of historical precedent and contemporaneous discourse. Indeed, the 'Philadelphia School,' which is as indebted to Frank Furness as it is to Paul Cret, which owes as much to Louis Kahn as it does to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, has always oscillated between the medieval and the classical, the modern and the post-modern. Yet, independent of stylistic characteristics, the architecture of Kieran, Timberlake & Harris is thoroughly grounded within an intimate knowledge of the limits and expressive possibilities of otherwise conventional building materials.
Unlike many emerging architectural firms in the United States whose publication record often far outweighs their record of building, KTH's method of criticism focuses on innovative construction rather than the production of novel forms. In both their writings and buildings they carefully distinguish themselves from the more fashionable architectonic practices characterized by discontinuous forms wrapped in unconventional materials. The firm's critical method has led them to an operational model based in large measure on the principle of constructive logic. Distancing themselves from what they consider to be the current state of specious theorizing within both the profession and the academy, the partners describe this principle as "a credo ... [for] we do not yet have a theory." In a recent lecture about the firm's work, James Timberlake articulated the architects' emerging theoretical position. "Our interest [is] in the expression of a constructive logic, a 'reality' based architecture which differs from the current, more decorative, stylistic exercises which are vogue. We believe much of current architecture to be cloaked in an untruthful veil of reality, structure and technology which is ... merely a more abstract continuation of post-modern decorative principles."
Kieran, Timberlake & Harris's principle of constructive logic may be best exemplified in one of their more recent projects, The Shipley West Middle School building in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Winner of the 1994 Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects' Honor Award, and located adjacent to Bryn Mawr College, it is just a short walk from Louis I. Kahn's Erdman Hall dormitory. But while the physical distance between Kahn's dormitory and KTH's Shipley building may be slight, and while they share clear material similarities, they are, in the end, quite distinct. However, rather than signaling a break with tradition (the center of which is dominated by Kahn and Venturi), Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has characteristically built upon this tradition through a thoughtful and critical process of translation, transformation and ultimately, substitution. Indeed, the West Middle School is only the most recent installment in a particularly Philadelphian architectural tradition which places as much emphasis on the materials and techniques of construction as on overtly formal manipulations.
Later in that same lecture, Timberlake continues, "What is common to each [of our projects] is a clear definition of an innovative agenda for construction within varied landscapes coupled with a formal exploration of the relationship between that agenda and project circumstance." A clear extension of this, the firm has constructed a graphical matrix demonstrating a Semperian relationship of base, assemblage, enclosure, partition and system in Shipley and four other buildings and projects. Positioning themselves within a paradigmatically American tradition of pragmatism, an overview of KTH's major projects (and their matrix) seems to support this strategy. However, while the specifics of assembly and their choices of materials invariably demonstrate a logic of fabrication, their formal and constructional imperatives do not. Indeed, one could argue that a number of the practices of KTH, while reasoned and reasonable, are not necessarily logical. For example, while it is not unreasonable to clad the external wall of the Shipley School as if it were a roof, there is nothing necessarily logical about it. And while the building seems to have a vaguely anthropomorphic head, torso and tail configuration, it lacks both the vertical tripartite division typically associated with this paradigm, and, not incidentally, a face. It is within these curious gaps, these purposeful lapses in logic - somewhere between the necessary and the imaginative - that we wish to situate and explore this work. Moreover, through probing the formal, technical and material strategies of the Shipley building we hope to evince both the tradition out of which the firm has emerged and the critical trajectory they have chosen to follow.
II. Form Work
"A key element in encouraging the interactive social structure of the new school is the central stair. Intended as the primary path vertically through the school, the stair is a place to gather and be seen." KTH
The Shipley West Middle School is an ungainly building. Low where it should be high, broken where it should be whole, highly varied where it should be simple and repetitive, it is unconventional and, at times, homely. Eschewing normative international style aesthetics and post-modern scenographics, Shipley is as effective as it is evocative due in great measure to its ability to challenge one's expectations while simultaneously demonstrating clear intentions.
The siting of the middle school suggests a background building forming an edge to a large, defined entrance court. Consisting of both a parking lot and green space, the entrance court is bounded by Montgomery Avenue to the South and the front elevation of the bar shaped middle school to the North. The long, low bar, bent near the center is divided into seven discrete sections which conceal as much as they reveal about the spaces within. The serrated bays, some of which appear slightly out of register, abut the brick clad ends of the concrete block party walls that structure both the interior spaces and the exterior cladding. Indeed, if the configuration of the building's exterior walls responds to program, it is a program of materials and assembly as much as it is a program of use. Consistent with their rhetoric of an architecture that engages "project circumstances," some of the most successful aspects of Shipley arise from the articulation of formal differences or conflicts originating in the conjunction of site and program. The school is configured as a long, extruded building. Slightly bent, the concave surface of the front elevation 'cups' and holds the space of the entrance court. And while lacking an anthropomorphically inspired facade facing the main approach, it nonetheless is bracketed with a 'head' and a 'tail' (the kind you sit on, not the kind that wags). The 'head' houses the entrance and administrative functions on the first floor and the Music Room on the second floor. The 'tail' encloses two stacked classrooms and a gathering space lined with student lockers. Avoiding the conventions of entering the body of the building at either the head or the tail, the entrances are inserted into the rhythmically repetitious flank walls. Those inserted entries, situated according to planned displacements in the two side walls and in the overall massing, gives the plan much of its dynamic force. The main entrance from the 'courtyard' (located beneath a stainless steel sign and flanked by a low stone bench) is cut into the building's 'neck,' that is, the gap between the 'head' and the torso (bar). The 'back door' is located in the other major discontinuity in the building, the wedge of space formed by the bend in the waist of the torso. Situated at the base of the central stair (which occupies much of this wedge), the rear door exits onto the school's athletic field.
The two entrances bracket the primary space in the building, the Resource Center. A multi-height space, the Center houses a multitude of activities. As theatrical as it is instructive, it performs an extremely important role in the civic life of both the architecture and the school. Student performances, parent/teacher receptions and academic instruction all engage the space with varying degrees of success. Located alongside the central spine of the building, the Resource Center's exterior wall is punctuated by large window openings. The only interruption in the serrated patterning of the exterior (rear) elevation, they are clad on the interior with operable panels so as to control both natural light and views to the athletic field.
However, for all of its successes, the plan of the building reveals yet another of the curious 'gaps' in the building's constructive logic - the building's center is not located at the center of the building. While the wedge of space formed by the bend in plan might suggest a logical location for the opening-up of the interior vis a vis this primary civic space, the Resource Center is located adjacent to the bend. And rather than interpreting the bend as an expanse of open horizontal space, it is filled up on the front side with bathrooms. Yet, clearly sensing this need to exploit the uniqueness of this location, the back side of the bend houses not a horizontal expanse of space, but a vertical one - the central stair. Generously designed so as to accommodate impromptu gatherings, the Shipley central stair is at once a dynamically composed and assembled architectural element and a place of repose and reorientation. Occupying the oversized landings, one is afforded both internal and external vistas, helping to connect one of the major discontinuities in the experience of the building - outside and inside.
At Shipley, one does not move seamlessly from building to landscape. Rather, there seems a marked contrast between the two. Adolf Loos argued that the interior owed nothing to the exterior - that each responded to different concerns. And while both Loos and Kieran, Timberlake & Harris extend the principles of cladding to the building's interior, the level and nature of human intercourse suggests a different kind of expression. Speaking analogously about culture, Loos explained that there ought to be a "balance of man's inner and outer being which alone guarantees rational thought and action." Similarly, the inner and outer claddings must strike a balance for Loos. In the Shipley building, this balance is achieved through the consistent signature of both isolation and articulation of building materials. And while the interior seems more overtly aestheticized than does the exterior - more continuous, more harmonious and certainly more elegant, the overarching agenda of cladding seems to maintain an equipoise within the overall work.
The other major discontinuity in the building form is the 'head.' The Music Room, which occupies the fore head (second floor) is capped with a deeply modeled roof. Ironically, this head, like the front elevation, is faceless, offering little engagement. In part, it is through these purposive absences (both formal and conceptual) that one's reading of the building is directed to consider the 'torso' of this body building wherein the architecture seems ultimately to emerge. Like a Vesalian figure, standing upright in a landscape, disconcertingly unconcerned that his flesh has been flayed, his musculature and skeleton exposed, the skin of this building has been similarly broken down into its constituent parts. Adolf Loos, in his essay, "The Principle of Cladding," demanded, "Every material possesses its own language of forms, and none may lay claim for itself to the forms of another material. For forms have been constituted out of the applicability and the methods of production of materials. They have come into being with and through materials." Seemingly in response to Loos, KTH has constructed walls whose major articulation is provided less by the conventions of fenestration than by the language of materials and their methods of both production and construction. As a profession, architecture tends to reward the inventive production of form while condemning excessive novelty. That difficult distinction, blurred in much of contemporary production represented in the American architectural press, is carefully attended to by KTH. Throughout their planning of the Shipley building, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has maintained a careful balance between regularity and singularity, between the resolution of formal issues and their expressive articulation. Avoiding outright scenographics, they everywhere express the difference between their building and the existing family of structures into which it physically and historically intervenes. Shipley is a building that catches one's attention, not as a billboard image read at the speed of the automobile, but rather at the much slower gate of habitual habitation. Indeed, it is an architecture that is best apprehended not at first glance, but rather in a sustained and thorough investigation. Shipley is not writ large in the manner of Kahn and Venturi, but small through the incessant interchange between the construction of fabric and the configuration of program.
III. Material Evidence
"All of the materials chosen for the interior and the exterior are based upon a durable, self-finishing palette, materials with inherent color and surface characteristics which patina with wear and time." KTH
Since its inception, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has directed its practice towards educational institutions, in large measure because of the architects' interest in the architectural implications of both temporality and materiality. Demonstrating a significantly longer vision of the life of a building than do either commercial or residential clients, institutions tend to value the longevity associated with materials of substance. And it is the elaboration of those materials that requires a second look at Shipley.
In the planning of the construction of building fabric, the intelligent and inventive use of material is a hallmark of a mature practice. And while the dynamism of plans and the expressiveness of facade can be studied and refined through drawing, no single formal representation can capture or describe the effects of patina. Moreover, while rust suggests the presence of a metal requiring preservation, patina is a slower, less destructive corrosion of metals like lead, copper and bronze. Both rust and patina (a more optimistic term for rust) can rightly be called architectural materials because they both record and resist the vicissitudes of weathering and time. Patina, and the more traditional materials of brick, stone and slate, constitute the time tested palette of the Philadelphia climate. The use of this palette is an art and craft that can only be learned over time, in the intimate practice of assembling materials in the shapes of buildings.
Independent of its formal inventiveness, it is possible to read the Shipley West Middle School as a materially elaborated Philadelphia building of the 18th or 19th centuries. Indeed, KTH has developed an ethics of materials and details derived from the thorough and timely examination of local buildings. One of the primary construction goals having emerged out of this study is the virtual elimination of sealants. Through recognizing that construction is never uniformly strong, that the qualities of weathering derive from a multitude of weaknesses and imperfections, KTH refuses to place excessive confidence in any one material or layer. This contemporary dilemma, exemplified by the hubris of a thinly layered bead of caulk, only invites the tragedies that accompany hubris of all kinds.
Although the building's materials of construction are familiar, their placement and detail are not - departing at nearly every instance from the constructive norm of later 20th century American practice. Unlike the 19th century brick and slate buildings in the surrounding Shipley and Bryn Mawr College campuses, the middle school of KTH reveals a certain thinness of edge, suggesting the optimization of mass so prevalent in modern materials. That thinness of edge is even more evident inside the building where suspended ceilings have been replaced by exposed metal ducts and metal raceways which hang below the concrete decking. Even more visible is the "Fin Color Ply," that remarkably sturdy plywood developed in Finland for concrete form work that has been taken up by architects precisely for the quality of its colored stain and its strength of edge. KTH has installed it throughout the corridors as surfacing with none of the trim, batten or joinery required of standard plywood products. Its edges are even used at high traffic corners (in the Resource Center), reminding us at every turn that this building is made up of pieces and layers. Indeed, one might read in the Shipley School, a transformation of Venturi, Rauch and Scott-Brown's persistent flatness, which emphasized the sign value of the thin surface on which they inscribed messages about both tradition and modernity. However, it seems that the thin edge of KTH's building has an older and closer provenance - literally across the road and down the hill, in the slate covered dormitory for Bryn Mawr College by Louis Kahn.
Also known as Erdman Hall, Kahn's dormitory is a somewhat unhappy building, lacking the crystalline resolve and material sophistication of his later work. Yet, it contains many of those projects in embryo form. More importantly, it is a weathered example of many of the material strategies employed at Shipley. The walls are finished in slate, set into the concrete structural frame and the windows and capping are made of galvanized steel. Unfortunately, all of these materials have failed in their own discouraging way. The slate was sealed with caulk, which although repeatedly patched, still leaks. The concrete is beginning to spall and the galvanizing has bloomed with rust. Although less gullible about modern materials than many of his contemporaries, Kahn's method of assembly failed to engage his choice of materials. In the Shipley School, KTH has intelligently transformed this otherwise sensitive palette of masonry, slate and metal through a system of assembly that both engages and protects the building from its own materials of construction.
Kieran, Timberlake & Harris's material palette (which includes lead coated copper in lieu of galvanized steel) maintains a steady balance between the traditional materials of the region and the techniques and advances of modern manufacturing. If on the one hand, we can detect the lurking presence of Sweet's Catalogue (the standard manufacturers source book for U.S. architects) there is equal evidence that they have turned that modern American ritual of "selection and specification" towards their own architectural ends, bringing their particular historical perspective into the process. As a modest example of this claim, KTH has managed to adopt one of the most stridently modern materials of the 1920s and 1930s - linoleum - as their general flooring. It is, of course, characteristically thin and somewhat dull. However, unlike the more vibrant vinyls which have wholly eliminated linoleum from the American residential commercial market, it is, like the remainder of the architect's material palette - quiet, sturdy and long lived.
IV. A Student Body Assembly
"The organization and construction logic of the building was developed to reinforce the understanding of the middle school age children. The new middle school is intended to be part of the educational experience and a contrast to the types of spaces encountered before and after middle school on the campus. The new building speaks metaphorically to the physical and social development of middle school students." KTH
The strategy of assembly employed throughout the Shipley West Middle School (exemplified by Adolf Loos in his pairing of material properties to formal expressions) is perhaps best demonstrated in the school's exterior cladding. Built with not one, but two exterior walls, this still uncommon practice for institutional buildings in the United States has been employed by Kieran, Timberlake & Harris in a number of their large scale university buildings. More common in industrial buildings in the U.S., the "rain wall" system consists of a double perimeter wall wherein the outside wall permits a small percentage of rain water to move freely through, only to be repelled by the water tight layer of the secondary (inside) wall. Because the exterior wall is designed to repel most of the wind driven rain, any moisture that works through to the secondary water tight wall is no longer under pressure. As such, the moisture is easily channeled back to the exterior. Moreover, since the problem of wind driven rain coming into direct contact with water tight construction is virtually eliminated in this system, the interior wall can be made of relatively inexpensive materials. In fact, the Shipley School's secondary (interior) wall is clad in common plywood and sheathed in bituminous impregnated building paper. Moreover, since the double-wall system is designed to permit water to move through the exterior "outer wall," conventional caulking such as silicon sealants are virtually eliminated. While difficult to appreciate from photographic reproductions of their work, the absence of sealants in KTH buildings contributes to a cleaner, more crisp construction, thereby avoiding the unsightly image of sealant-as-detail which permeates much of contemporary construction. Moreover, through eliminating exterior sealants, KTH avoids the obvious need for both maintenance and future replacement. Since poor maintenance of sealants is a common cause of premature building erosion, the double wall system and its elimination of conventional sealants greatly enhances and extends the life of the fabric of the building.
However, while the logic of the rain wall assembly is clear, the logic of its cladding is not. Indeed, what is interesting about the exterior wall of the school is its very lapse of logic and the interesting problem that the architects create (and thoroughly enjoy solving). Through cladding the vertical face of the Shipley Middle School in slate shingles (a roofing material), KTH problematizes both the fastening and the inevitable replacement of the individual shingles. Their solution, a stainless steel exposed clip, while revealing a logical method of attachment, conceals the imperative for such a system in the first place. Similar to Carlo Scarpa's interest in problematizing the connection of materials through "artificially" multiplying the various points and materials of connection, so too Kieran, Timberlake & Harris create interesting problems within the context of construction. Their solutions, while materially and formally less radical than Scarpa's, also offer the possibility of reading into their assembly an agenda of formal and material assemblage that is at once wholly logical yet veiled by that logic - operating outside syllogistic and dialectic restraints. While Aristotle characterized the veiled condition as a requisite of productive imagination, more recently, David Lachterman, in his The Ethics of Geometry, explained, "Imagination seems to come most patently to light when [human reason] is hidden behind a veil." And while KTH are outspoken about and critical of what they see as a proliferation of "untruthful veils of reality" in the profession, it is nonetheless a "veil of reality" which often leads the firm to the creation of interesting problems of form, syntax and assembly. Beneath the veil of constructive logic, KTH constructs a culture of productive imagination wherein the building as system engages the architecture's system of signification. It is within this gap, oscillating between the virtual and the physical, between constructive logic and productive imagination, that the architecture of the Shipley School emerges.
V. Conclusion
"Style is the accord of an art object with its genesis, and with all the preconditions and circumstances of its becoming (Werden). When we consider the object from a stylistic point of view, we see it not as something absolute, but as a result. Style is the stylus, the instrument with which the ancients used to write and draw, therefore, it is a very suggestive word for that relation of form to the history of its origin. ... In addition to the tool and the hand that guides it, there is the material to be treated, the formless mass to be transposed into form. In the first place, every work of art should reflect in its appearance, as it were, the material as physical matter. ... Yet under material we understand something still higher, namely, the task or the theme for artistic exploitation." Gottfried Semper, from "On Architectural Styles"
Through the manipulation of form, material and assembly, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has, in this otherwise 'background building,' brought the nature of its assembly to the foreground as a subject of contemplation for both the students and faculty who inhabit it. Moreover, their rigorous and relentless elementalism constantly reminds us that each architectural element (window, wall, plenum) is, in fact, constructed from a number of sub-elements or materials, each, as Adolf Loos argues, with its own constituent qualities and properties - its own particular form.
However, KTH's interest in the culture of construction and the form of materials is not limited to the discrete building in an urbanized campus landscape. Indeed, their research also extends to include the physical and cultural landscape of ex-urbia. Currently at work on a book-length study of the American phenomenon of the 'Perimeter Center' (funded in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation), they explore an expanded vision of the city, not as an urb with sub-urbs, but rather as a regional center. Whether they are exploring the assembly of a 'rain wall' or the large scale interrelationships of the late 20th century metapolis, KTH bring to their research an intimate understanding of both materials and site.
We believe that Kieran, Timberlake & Harris's oeuvre, and the Shipley School in particular, are important, not simply because they deviate from the norm, but rather because of what they achieve through this deviation. Invariably, they demonstrate through their built works, an inventive play of form, space and material grounded within a culturally specific program. Moreover, the actual day-to-day workings of the firm exemplify a unique juxtaposition of 'mainstream,' 'on-time,' 'under budget,' architectural practice, conjoined with an historical and critical discourse that is not limited to the three founding partners. Their business acumen, coupled with their ongoing academic involvement (at Penn, Yale and Princeton) and a growing reputation, has contributed to their assembling a cadre of extremely bright, talented and well educated young architects who engage in the firm's internal debate. The result of this intellectually active practice is readily found in the building artifacts they produce. Much like the short lived firm of Tecton in England, KTH considers every project an opportunity for meaningful discourse about how and why buildings are built, their relationship to the larger social fabric, and their place within the discursive practice of architecture. Indeed, like Tecton, KTH explicitly understands that every act of architecture is a political act. However, while Tecton, under the tutelage of Berthold Lubetkin, believed that the building of rational forms of construction could actively change society, KTH is more interested in how the pressures of both culture and civilization have impacted upon construction and practice - that is, how the rise of civilization has changed the culture of architectural production. Kenneth Frampton, in his seminal essay, "Toward's a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an Architecture of Resistance," argues, "Ever since the beginning of the Enlightenment, civilization has been primarily concerned with instrumental reason, while culture has addressed itself to the specifics of expression. ... Today civilization tends to be increasingly embroiled in a never-ending chain of 'means and ends' wherein, according to Hannah Arendt, 'The 'in order to' has become the content of the 'for the sake of,' utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness." However, in the Shipley Middle School building, utility is not supplanted for a lack of meaning. Rather, we are presented with a speculative architectural program that is grounded within a culture of productive imagination wherein constructive logic and programmatic exigencies are employed and deployed. In his essay on functionalism, Theordo Adorno argued that, "Only the artist who has never subjected himself to the discipline of creating a picture, who believes in the intuitive origins of painting, fears that closeness to materials and technical understanding will destroy his originality." In contrast, demonstrating both a "closeness of materials" and "technical understanding," KTH has constructed, in the shape of a building, an architecture where meaning is established in the space of a discursive practice of form, materials and construction. Gottfried Semper reminds us that far greater than its presence as simple physical matter, material, in the hands of the architect, in the service of architecture, has the capacity to stand for "something still higher, namely, the task or the theme for artistic exploitation." The theme of materiality in the Shipley building is also its task - i.e., the substitution of walls for roofs, sides for fronts, foreground for background, open for closed. Through the processes of translation, transformation and substitution, a balance is established neither through sameness, nor through dialectical oppositions, but rather through a careful management of inherent differences. These differences, which in the Shipley building occur in the form of materials and in the material of form, in the activity of construction and the construction of activity, charges their work with a particular kind of character, a particular kind of speech. For while buildings tend to be mute, architecture has the capacity to speak. In constructing this kind of l'architecture parlante, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris has proposed a pedagogical architecture which, while it does not demand one's attention, once given, rewards the participant with a sense of both its constructive logic and its productive imagination. Within this culture of imaginative production, architectural practice re-engages the didactic and the lyric in an operation of addition and subtraction, of reading and writing, of rhetoric and harmony wherein the trivium and quadrivium seem once again to speak the tongue of architecture. And it is within the speech of this virtual school of architecture, grounded in the dialogue of form, materials and assembly - suspended between the activity of construction and the finish of materials - that the architecture of this building may be best understood.
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