Within earshot of each other stand two iconic buildings in the architectural history of Chicago. Crown Hall and the McCormick-Tribune student center illustrate an inseparable dichotomy in their contemporary cultural influences, yet they are both products of the same culture. While the former erases all memories and leaves no space for memories, the latter aggrandizes memories to a form of irony. While it is nearly impossible to address the experience of every individual sense, memory remains. The question derived from that memory is; what is truly authentic? Each building is certainly an authentic representation of its time; but is the spirit of authenticity lost in that culture? The former offers nothing of superficiality while the latter offers everything of superficiality. The irony in the dichotomous relationship is that the former approach necessarily leads to latter. To strip away the memory from a building, and by extension the emotional content, is to provide them with the space in which to tell us who we are. Maybe the search for universality has indeed led to universality by stripping all content from everything(one).
There exists a general trend in contemporary culture toward an entirely visual experience. The development of the internet and of email have divorced people from the sensual experience of their world and disconnected people from their emotions despite claiming to enhance the experience. The impending death of language is evidenced by the reduction of everything to mere iconography. Iconography at the service of capitalism and consumerism reduce the amount of time needed to metabolize information. It is possible to say a lot while talking or writing very little. An old axiom states, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ What is truly interesting is; a picture is worth how many memories? or worth how many emotions? In the reduction of imagery and language to icons is the necessary process that of reducing emotional content?
The visual experience of Crown Hall is that of minimal imagery. The Modernist search for universal space produces a space devoid of identifying character. Enclosure is reduced to levels of transparency and translucency. If we were bird-like, we might imagine ourselves colliding with the transparent skin in a desperate, losing attempt to experience universal space. The implicit meaning, rather explicitly stated, is that interior is no different than exterior, yet the oppressive control of everything not natural seems contradictory. A rigid, 24’ column spacing unites the entire IIT campus in a simplified engineer’s grid. The modulated exoskeleton provides the only distinction between the controlled and the dangerous. If the impressively thin sheets of glass transmit too much heat one direction or the other; don’t worry. We have scientifically engineered temperature control systems for that. The celebration of genetically engineered steel, taken directly off the ‘shelf’, completes the temple to the gods of engineering. A temple which serves to host a funeral at one time, and a concert at another time, yet the memory of neither is present in my experience of it. It is easy to imagine the solemn whispers of a funeral as well as the gloriously loud symphony of a Duke Ellington concert because the space is representative of neither.
On the opposite side of State Street stands a strange mix of similar yet dissimilar approaches to the creation of architecture. Rather than standing heroically as an object in a field, the McCormick-Tribune student center physically engages with the preexisting condition of the elevated tracks above. The force of gravity exerted by the tracks pinches the building in the center forcing either side to bulge upwards in much the same way as a balloon acts when squeezed. The image of the building seems to be at once both an ingenious use of residual space and a deliberate stance of arrogance in an ‘I can do anything’ manner of speaking. The fascia of the roof form provides a glimpse of the interior amalgamation of materials. A sprayed-on rubber membrane overlaid with some other material references, in an extremely campy manner, a wood-grain pattern. On the interior the experience borders on kitsch. Materials take on a character of playfulness, like a child randomly choosing crayons out of his box in an effort to ensure that each crayon remains the same length. Aluminum flooring transitions to epoxy-covered concrete marking the threshold between path and island. Transparency is juxtaposed with translucency. Overhead, green sheetrock is left bare; the joints and screw holes taped and mudded in a contrived memorializing of the “God is in the details” approach of the campus icon and creator. An orange glow emanates from colored glazing complementing the ceiling plane. The rigid, 24’ column grid controls the structure of the building but is interrupted by the intervention of the structure of the elevated tube. Even the ceiling plane is pierced by the underbelly of the tube that encloses the elevated tracks in a deliberate collision of materials. A founders’ wall of pixilated images of full-story faces created using iconographic imagery replaces engraved stone. The written is replaced with the pictorial, reducing the founders to icons themselves, surrounded in a surreal orange glow.
The quest for the universal, the socialist agenda, the machine aesthetic, has matured in concurrence with the quest for a disposable culture. Objects are increasingly temporary place-holders for memories and emotions. Experience a new emotion simply by throwing out the old and buying something new. In his essay Junkspace, Koolhaas himself addresses the modernist project. “Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower the higher.” The minimalist aesthetic has been swallowed up by the capitalist machine because the universal space is the space of commerce. With the modification of one façade a box can become the retailer of an entirely different set, or more likely under a different brand the same set, of products with no memory of the previous life. Strip the expressive façade of a retailer and you are left with a Modernist box, the only differences lying in the opacity of the exterior wall clearly demarcating interior and exterior, and the ambiguity of the structure in the tilt-up concrete panels. Efficiency is the game; everything off the ‘shelf’.
A closer reading of the McCormick-Tribune student center reveals another dichotomy. The building acts at once as a comment on contemporary culture and as a beautifully nuanced spatial symphony. It is difficult to argue the brilliance of the layering of levels and spatial relationships. I find myself, ironically, experiencing a characteristic of Junkspace according to Koolhaas himself. “There is a special way of moving in Junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful.” It is easy to simply follow the aluminum-floored path or to easily detour to one of the ‘islands’. In the midst of these spatial relationships, it seems to be an overload of information to add the superficial iconography, the superficial materiality, the feigned emotional content. The dean of the architecture school at IIT, Donna Robertson, claims that, “18-year-olds really have a different way of engaging with the world than you or I. They're used to responding to multiple layers of information, and their response level is incredibly quick. They get this right away, and they love it.” Is it a matter of ‘getting it’, or is it a matter of them being perfectly conditioned to accept the cultural milieu? What would be the impact of the building if the superficiality was stripped from it?
Emotions are memories in their essence. It is my contention that my memories and therefore my emotions, compose the person I am, my soul. Modern architecture strips the memory of everything seen as non-progressive, non-uniform. The result of this is an architecture which claims to turn the gaze of the observer inward, but in reality creates an emotional void. This emotional void renders possible the emotional void of cyberspace and of capitalist consumerism. The formative years of young people leave them now with a memory of this emotional void. A home is defined by the kitschy welcome mat in front of the door and the Ikea painting on the great room wall. After such a resoundingly negative essay, you might ask; What do you like? The answer to that question is; What do you truly like? “You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are.”
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