2016-06-06 ALMOST HERCULES.Indd
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COUNTING Ron Witte, Editor 2 COUNTING Ron Witte, Editor In honor of Anderson Todd’s 90th birthday. Rice School of Architecture 2011 3 4 CONTENTS PREFACE Sarah Whiting ...............................................................7 ALMOST HERCULES Ron Witte ............................................... 9 HONOR Stephen Fox ...................................................................45 AT HOME WITH ANDERSON TODD Frank Welch ........85 ANDERSON TODD AT RICE Nonya Grenader ................97 CREDITS ...............................................................................................114 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..............................................................115 5 6 Preface T.O.D.D. Time Out for Daily Discussion. Lots of words can replace that last one. Diatribe. Disturbance. Diversion. Dalliance. Drawing. Dunno. Discretion. Whatever D it might be, there is always some moment in any given day that is undeniably Andy-Time. Anderson Todd makes time stand still. Hallway conversation is a sport, sometimes a blood sport. Todd’s points are punctuated by two-step shuffl es, outbursts, and his trademark broad smile underscoring every bon mot. Even the time outs have time outs. Andy will mull a point, returning to it weeks later, boring into it like a 6H pencil that leaves tiny trenches in a sheet of Strathmore paper. Architecture and the conversations that surround it take time. And we – those of us who know no world other than the one that is fi lled with Google-induced shorthands for doing what we do – are evermore reluctant to value time. Anderson Todd doesn’t just value time. He makes time… even as he stops it. Taking Todd’s cue, we might all pause and ask: ‘When is the best time?’ My guess is that Anderson Todd will say: ‘Right now.’ Happy Birthday Andy. Sarah Whiting Dean, Rice School of Architecture 7 8 8 Almost Hercules ALMOST HERCULES Ron Witte The last century has been riddled with Nothing. Silences, abstractions, minimalisms,…Nothing has come to us in a dense chorus of mantras. It makes little difference where the compass of cultural production is pointed. Artists, musicians, writers, and architects have all clamored for, and often about, Nothing. Our collective preoccupation with Nothing has had a vertiginously rising and falling volume (it turns out silence is deafening). In a remarkable sleight of hand, Nothing is both an antidote to too much and an enticement for everything. It is a salve for the darkest of evils and a catalyst for the brightest of optimisms. Nothing: she loves me, she loves me not. 9 COUNTING 10 Almost Hercules 11 COUNTING Anderson Todd in the Bolsover House I fi ll up a glass with water in the dark…I’m very conscious of how much water is in the glass. —AT 12 Almost Hercules Nothing is exactly half of a zero-sum game. You can’t have Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) without the years of darkness that were World War I. You can’t have John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) without the intrusions of a breath, a heartbeat, a creaking chair. Samuel Beckett can’t tell us that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” (1969) without uttering those words. Nothing always runs alongside something. For architects, the something that runs alongside Nothing is always Almost, as in Almost Nothing. We have a particular fervor for Mies’s declaration. We get it, or at least we like to think we do. Almost Nothing is the architect’s coda for abstraction, simplicity, essentialism, universality, timelessness, modernity, responsibility,… It is nothing short of extraordinary how these two words have been made to signify vast tracts of what we want to believe. Once Almost Nothing is in our heads, it makes its way into our thinking in the most insidious of ways. We love and hate Almost Nothing. It admonishes us to think that form has disappeared. It triggers a state of reverie (what this reverie is about is diffi cult to say but rest assured it can be pretty much anything). It makes us think that inside and outside will be indifferent to one another if we can just make that goddamned sheet of glass disappear. It may well make us believe that we have ourselves disappeared, left to hover in an ineffability of our own making. More than anything else, the history of Almost Nothing is the story of making things go away. Vast amounts of thought, labor, and ink have been expended on the second of these two words, perennially leaving Almost in the lurch. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Whenever it makes an 13 COUNTING Suit House, 1970 14 Almost Hercules appearance, Nothing evokes a kind of veneration, a quasi- mystical authority emanating from its enigmatic echo. To enter the history of Almost, on the other hand, sounds like we’re entering into some bad story about horseshoes and hand grenades. Nothing = perfect. Almost = less than perfect. Seen in one light, Nothing’s mandate is to make Almost disappear. But let’s face it: you can’t have Nothing without Almost. Almost is the only way we can succeed in Nothing. Almost is everything. No one understands Almost better than Anderson Todd. A very good friend of Nothing, Todd is Almost’s paramour. Todd’s Almost appears in unassuming matter: sheetrock, bricks, glass, and steel. It is spoken in the diffi cult precisions of proportions, distances, and cadences. It is wedged into the impossibly narrow gap between his excruciatingly discerning grip on what is/isn’t architecture and the remarkable openness of his instincts. There is no fl atter ceiling than a Todd ceiling. His ceilings aren’t just fl at in the technical sense (though it is surprisingly hard to turn four-by-eight sheets of gypsum board into a tautly singular plane). Their fl atness is an enticement to stare. Todd’s ceilings compel us to stare. The intensity of looking at something in this way produces a sensation that is, as Susan Sontag wrote of staring at silent art in 1967, “as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.” There are no lights in or on these surfaces. They have no coffers, beams, or soffi ts. They have a few holes to let columns go through them, letting you know that these white planes are uselessly thin. They won’t protect you from the hazards of collapsing structures and the vicissitudes of weather outside. They hover, pulled back 15 COUNTING Image: Ceiling / Column / Glass W 16 Almost Hercules Wall of Shadowlawn or Bolsover. 17 Bolsover House, 1994 18 19 COUNTING 20 Almost Hercules a short distance from the walls at their edges so as to not oblige their thinness to capitulate to the corner they would otherwise have to make. After taking in these ceilings for a moment or two, your eyes run to their limits: into other rooms, into the courtyards beyond their perimeters, down the walls that bound the spaces you’re sitting in. Without your even realizing it, these ceilings are gone. Todd ceilings have no greater, and no lesser, obligation than to appear and disappear, always with a perfect sense of timing. Todd loathes the air grills that incessantly try to poke holes in his ceilings. Why is it okay for a column to make a hole in a ceiling and not okay for an air grill to do the same thing? A column accentuates difference and an air grill stabilizes sameness. A column rises through a room, passing into an opening in the ceiling that is larger than the column itself (this gap is fi lled with inky black nothing), and further up toward a beam that one cannot see. We lose sight of the column’s aim at the instant it moves through the ceiling. We know it holds the roof up, but how it does this no longer matters (that it does not matter is far more important than whether or not we know how it holds the roof up). The column’s below-ceiling importance is intensifi ed by its above-ceiling irrelevance. The reveal cleaves the ceiling from any immediate tie to the column. In technical terms, the column holds a beam above, which holds the secondary structure, which holds the sheetrock along its bottom edge, which allows the sheetrock to cantilever slightly back toward the column as the tidy hole is fi nished. The column and the ceiling are distinguished by fi ve degrees of separation. Every layer of distinction strengthens the 21 COUNTING Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Two-part Vertical Construction), ca. 1986/2008, black acrylic yarn. 22 Almost Hercules ceiling’s role as the top of the room and, conversely, weakens its role as the bottom of a structural system. The ceiling’s uselessness, its remoteness from structure and weather, is its virtue. Like one of Fred Sandback’s acrylic yarn planes, a Todd ceiling delineates a resolute limit in the most tentative of terms. His ceiling’s fl attened certainty aligns precisely with its volatile ambiguity. An air grill, on the other hand, moves air from above the ceiling to below. Regulating air as it makes its way into a room, the grill assures that the air above and below the gypsum sheet are one and the same. As you stand in the room looking up at it, the grill confesses everything about what is happening inside the thick space of the plenum. It replaces fi ve degrees of separation with one-hundred percent disclosure: “this is the end of a duct that comes from an air conditioner somewhere over there.” Todd knows full well that technical honesty is overrated (he may try to tell you otherwise…do not believe him, no matter what). The not-fl at-enough grill—its lumpy assembly of adjustment knob, louvers, frame, and mounting screws— is a clamp of sorts, a clip that holds the ceiling onto the thick zone of support systems above.