Local Architecture: Building Place, Craft, and Community

225 Pages·2014·192.84 MB·English

by  MacKay-Lyons Brian

LOCAL
ARCHITECTURE
BUILDING PLACE, CRAFT,
AND COMMUNITY
Brian MacKay-Lyons,
Edited by Robert McCarter
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
DEBORAH BERKE MARLON WENDELL GHOST
PARTNERS BLACKWELL BURNETTE ARCHITECTURAL
ARCHITECT ARCHITECTS LABORATORY
50
56 62 70
JERSEY DEVIL RICK JOY KÉRÉ RICHARD KROEKER
DESIGN/BUILD ARCHITECT ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
78 84 90 98
OLSON KUNDIG LAKE | FLATO MACKAY-LYONS THE MILLER HULL
ARCHITECTS ARCHITECTS SWEETAPPLE PARTNERSHIP
ARCHITECTS
102 108 122
114
GLENN MURCUTT PATKAU RURAL STUDIO SHIM-SUTCLIFFE
ARCHITECTS ARCHITECTS
130 146
140 152
STUDIO 804 PETER VJAA
STUTCHBURY
158 170
ARCHITECTURE
164
Contents
9 Foreword
Brian MacKay-Lyons
13 Introduction: Seeing the World Whole
Thomas Fisher
21 Keynotes
23 Critical Regionalism Revisited
Kenneth Frampton
31 Architecture and Human Nature: A Call for a Sustainable Metaphor
Juhani Pallasmaa
41 From the Beginning: Thirteen Questions
Glenn Murcutt, in discussion with Juhani Pallasmaa
49 Projects
Texts by Robert McCarter
177 Essays
179 Constructing and Caring for Place
Robert McCarter
185 Construction and Composition, Concept Versus Craft
Peter Buchanan
195 Learning to Think
Ingerid Helsing Almaas
201 The Value of Beauty in Architecture
Christine Macy
205 The Urgency of Ghost 13: Ideas in Things
Essy Baniassad
211 Afterword: The Artist, the Artisan, and the Activist
Brian MacKay-Lyons and Robert McCarter
217 Contributors
219 Acknowledgments
221 Supplementary Image List
223 Credits

You brought together some wonderful people and
that alone as friends should have been enough to make
my visit very special. But the caliber of architecture
brought together made this one of the most memorable
events that I have been a part of through a career
of some fifty years. It was marvelous. Thank you.
—Glenn Murcutt
I have attended numerous conferences around the
world but I can say that this was the best; I was particularly
impressed and inspired by the sense of optimism.
—Juhani Pallasmaa
What can I say? What can anyone say? An unrepeatable,
memorable event, and a wild party.
—Kenneth Frampton
8
9
Foreword
Brian MacKay-Lyons
Don’t let the school stand in the way of your education.
—Essy Baniassad
In 1994 I was an angry young architect and professor at Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, frustrated with the state of
architectural education. I took a small group of first-year students
out of school and to my farm on the Nova Scotia coast and told them:
“Close your eyes and imagine flying over the ghost of a forgotten
village at the end of the earth. If you breathe deeply enough you
may even smell the laundry that used to hang on the clotheslines.”
Norwegian architecture critic Ingerid Helsing Almaas has pointed
out that anger is not enough to explain the work that followed,
at Ghost Architecture Laboratory and at MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple
Architects. Ghost has evolved into an international design-build
internship, reinforcing students’ sound intuition that architecture has
always been about landscape, making, and community. Ghost is also a
utopian endeavor, driven by empathy and love.
After decades of cultivating our little valley at the end of the
earth, the site (according to Glenn Murcutt) has become a kind of paradise.
It is an optimistic act of will. It is the place that, for me, expresses the
unity of life, integrating practice and teaching, family and community.
For a group of friends and respected colleagues, it has been neutral turf,
like Constantinos Doxiadis’s boat that the Team 10 architects sailed
together in the Mediterranean so many decades ago.
From the start, Ghost has not been alone. Friends such as
Samuel Mockbee of the Rural Studio, Steve Badanes of Jersey Devil,
and the Glenn Murcutt Master Class have been fellow travelers on this
Local Architecture
10
alternative dirt road. As a young architect in 1982, at Team 10 architect
Giancarlo De Carlo’s ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture
and Urban Design), I witnessed a similar, collegial, alternative think tank
frequented by Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Sverre Fehn,
Richard Rogers, Charles Moore, Italo Calvino, and others. And Ghost has
inspired other programs in its turn.
Ghost has been sustained by a loose consortium of architectural
schools and practices, whose students, professors, and practicing
architects and engineers have participated. It has also been a meeting
place for a group of guest architects and critics, who share a commitment
to the timeless architectural values of place, craft, and community—
a fantastic “virtual faculty.”
Ghost 13 was a long-planned reunion of past guests; a group
of exceptionally talented architects and historians/critics. Place, craft, and
community served as a thematic structure for the conference; the work
of all of these architects is an artful synthesis of these essential aspects
of our discipline. In her talk, Brigitte Shim linked the conference venues
with these common values, describing the Ghost site as a cultivated
place, St. John’s carpenter Gothic church in Lunenburg as the embodiment
of craft, and the collegial gathering in the barn as the expression of
community. This was trying to see the world whole.
The three keynote speakers are respected elders who
continue to influence generations of architects. Kenneth Frampton’s
critical regionalist thesis has enabled our resistance in the face of
the numbing cultural influence of globalization. Glenn Murcutt’s work,
in the words of Juhani Pallasmaa, projects a new concept of beauty
arising from a deep understanding of place, climate, and nature. Juhani’s
eloquent insistence, through his seminal writings, on the phenomenological
architecture of human experience has inspired us all. At Ghost 13
the steady hand and presence of the elders contributed a measured
and thoughtful rhythm to the proceedings.
Many of the participants are former outsiders, what Peter Buchanan
calls “the resistance,” working outside the centers of architectural fashion.