Lewerentz's Churches

Some architects have a shtick; Gehry's facades twist and contort, Asplund favored the cylinder-and-box and Calatrava shows an affinity for parabolic curves. To be fair, the word "shitck" is unfair - these and other architects attach themselves to a concept not out of a lack of creativity but out of a drive to develop a single concept. The concept rarely manifests itself and resolves itself in a single building and, indeed, wouldn't that be a confirmation of the idea's limitations?

An idea's development over several buildings merits study in that way. We tend to study building by building and ignore the architect as the generator and developer of the single idea and how that idea connects several buildings. This is harder to do with contemporary architects, specifically the big name firms, since multiple projects are tackled simultaneously with several different project architects to the point where the firm's namesake is largely uninvolved in the process after the initial concept phase. This makes a single concept difficult to trace over more than a single building.

So, when we look at the work of a mid-century architect, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, who had a small firm and did much of the designing himself, we see how he works out a certain idea in his pair of churches, St. Mark's in Bjorkhagen, Sweden and St. Peter's in Klippan, Sweden.  St. Mark's was completed in 1963 and St. Peter's followed soon after in 1966.  Both churches feature brick ubiquitously, a trend common at the time and made internationally famous by Alvar Aalto. 

St. Mark's congregational space

St. Peter's congregational space

Lewerentz bathes his churches in brick - every surface is faced in brick which, if it weren't for gravity, might be quite disorienting. A space which features brick on every surface demonstrates some off acoustic properties. When speaking in a soft voice, the sound falls dead, causing the speaker to raise their voice. Of course, if you speak loudly enough, the brick picks up the sound and throws in around the space. I believe that Lewerentz used brick to create intimacy within his churches.

St. Mark's is a deceptively tall space. The coolness of the brick and general absence of light give the impression of a cave, but the reverberation of sound betrays the high ceiling. St. Peter's ceiling is noticeably lower, leading me to believe that Lewerentz intended this church to achieve the intimacy that St. Mark's does not fully realize.

The difference of the ceiling between the two buildings evidences a refining process similar to that of the brick. At St. Mark's Lewerentz used a profile of large and small arches arranged end-to-end. The profile shifts over at the other end of the ceiling, creating multiple vaults that alternately taper and widen along the entire ceiling. Brick is also used here as a facer, with the only visible structure being the face of steel eye-beams showing through at the nodes of each arch. 

Ceiling vault in St. Mark's

At St. Peter's Lewerentz pushes the ceiling one step further by placing the shifted profile in the middle, so that the ceiling is symmetrical about the center line.  The discreetness of the height change in the middle hides the true nature of the kink itself, but by studying the taper and looking at either end of the ceiling, one can derive the geometry of the entire arrangement.

Ceiling vault in St. Peter's

 Lewerentz also makes a conscious depart from St. Mark's by included a giant reminder of the structure that holds up the entire ceiling.

The ceiling center and eye beam tree at St. Peter's

This eye-beam assemblage aroused debate among the group as to whether or not Lewerentz included the structure intentionally, or out of necessity. The argument favoring necessity looks to St Mark's, where the structure was very carefully hidden, leading one to believe that unresolvable issues with the ceiling at St. Peter's required Lewerentz to include the huge eye beam tree. Conversely, I believe that the ceiling vault was too important to Lewerentz for him to do something as careless as slapping a bunch of eye beams under it without very deliberate intention. Although the main congregational space in St. Mark's is more rectangular than St. Peter's, their square footage is roughly similar, so I find it difficult to believe that Lewerentz needed the eye beams to hold up his ceiling, therefore, I find the move to be deliberate.

This debate could not have occurred with such clarity of argument without a St. Mark's to derive evidence from. Our visit to and understanding of St. Mark's allowed us to greater appreciate and absorb the mysteries and complexities of St. Peter's. That we visited them in the order in which they were made was a bonus.

Authenticity of Representation

Midway through our mini-trek into the Fjords, we stopped at the Kaupanger stave church, which dates from the 12th century. This is the largest stave church in the county of Sogn og Fjordane, which also includes the famous Briksdalsbreen arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier.

While perusing the small gift shop, I discovered a set of postcards of watercolor drawings by architect and painter Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. Schiertz's command of watercolors lends itself to beautiful landscapes - his palette is decisive and he blends the colors smoothly. Pablo observed that the quality of the pencil lines (quick and light but precise) evidenced the use of a mechanical drawing aid, such as a camera lucida.

camera lucida (photo credits to vam.ac.uk)

The Schiertz paintings are all circa 1840, when mechanically-aided drawings were so prevalent that they created a style of drawing in which the artist sought to emulate the line quality and composition afforded by a camera lucida. One of the drawings depicts the stave church at Borgund against a mountain backdrop.

Borgund Stave Church by Hanz Wilhelm Schiertz (c. 1840)

The next day, when we indeed went to Borgund to view the stave church, Pablo and I traipsed around the church with the intent of recreating the scene as Schiertz drew it. Fences hindered our progress, but from the angle nearest to the original, we could see that something was fishy.

As close as I could approximate the view in the Franz Wilhelm Schiertz painting

Although the church sat in the landscape below as it had in the painting (the tower to the right of the church in the painting is behind the tree in the photo), the mountains behind were entirely different. The mountains as they actually appeared did not even closely resemble the formations in the painting. The mountain that slopes up to the right in the painting slopes down to the left in the photo. There can only be one conclusion: Schiertz made falsified the view. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but Pablo exhausted every possible angle to the problem, supposing that Schiertz used a mirror to reflect the mountains behind him, but since the painted mountains weren't even a conceivably accurate mirror of the actual formations, he eventually had to concede that the mountains in the painting were a fake.

I know that painters make things up all the time, or at the very least stretch the truth to fit within their desires, but never before have I been confronted with the contradiction. Rather, I've never been able to verify the physical truth of a painting. Does it matter that the artist altered reality for the sake of composition? How else can a man move mountains, if not with his hands? Does my understanding of the building change significantly between one or the other? The painting is already inaccurate since Schiertz is taking creative liberties with his watercoloring. Is a photo more real than a painting? Pablo would say that the painting in its falsity deceives the viewer as to the church's scale, siting and orientation. Schiertz does a further injustice to the vikings who, presumably, carefully positioned the church with respect to the surrounding landscape. I find it interesting that Schiertz found the situation as it stood to be incorrect, at least for the purposes of his painting. I trust the painter more than the reality, because while the reality is what's there, the painting opens me up to what could be there.

Student Work Abroad

Several days ago, we visited the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. Jørn Utzon, by whom the center was designed and for whom the center is named, is most famous for designing the Sydney Opera House.

Sydney Opera House (photo credits: clarkvision.com)

This is his Center, as seen from the Bredning River.

Jørn Utzon Center (photo credits to the Utzon Center website)

Among the exhibits shown at the center, was the final projects of the graduating Aalborg University Architecture and Design majors. The program at AAU is also a five-year program, and the diversity and depth of issues tackled by the students in their final projects resembled that of the CMU fifth year thesis program.

The general consensus of our group of students was, that the work we saw on the walls looked like student work. It was easy enough for us to make that decision, but less so to determine what aspects of the work clued us in to its being designed by students.

This is a project that I felt particularly emblematic of the "student" type of final work.

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

The composition of the poster on the left is common to the work shown at CMU. From the conceptual elevations at the top to the renderings at the bottom, the entire board looks student-produced. Even the line separating the course number from the project name, I've seen in many projects at CMU, and seems to be a device employed exclusively by architecture students.

The accompanying model evidences a more resourceful student; I particularly appreciated the use of dried plaster mesh for the facade.

While the presentations boards did not strike me as particularly remarkable (although I appreciated that they were all in English), the consistently high level of quality shown in the models surprised me. As my year has progressed through the architectural curriculum, I've seen the emphasis in final materials shift away from the final model and more to the digital material. It's a twofold problem: students stop making models and professors stop requiring them especially as the digital model seems to be rendering the physical model obsolete.

I still see an important relevance to the physical model which was confirmed for me by the project at the AAU student projects. Physical models force the architect to consider materials in the way that a digital model does not. Digitally, it's dangerously easy to create a wall out of, literally, nothing. By building a physical model, the architect must consider how the building physically stands up and gets put together. It's much easier to identify design flaws with regards to construction in a physical model, and many students who omit them do so because that have not worked out these conditions. Students who work out these issues in their models successfully rise high above the rest.

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

I get very little exposure to student work outside of CMU, but when I do, I'm surprised at the similarities. If the similarities do not occur because students are sharing information, is it a natural inclination within the student? Or does language and technique get handed down by the professor, which would imply the professors are all gathering their information from a similar pool? Either some group of people at some higher level are sharing information and disseminating it to the architectural community, or, by random chance we're all tapped into a similar mode of thinking that expresses itself in our projects.

Constructed Fantasy - Tivoli Garden

The amusement park is where architecture and tourism collide. Outside the realm of architectural tourism, where a student or practitioner of architecture makes a pilgrimage to a building or group of buildings, the amusement park is an environment constructed entirely for the enjoyment of the average person. One needn't be an architect to enjoy the buildings and, indeed, the park would never make any money if that were a requirement. As an aspiring architect, and a meta-tourist, I find the concept of building an alternate reality fascinating.

The amusement park is a purely touristic phenomenon. It's an entire landscape built purely for the enjoyment and spectacle of a visitor who may only spend as many as four hours. The park has a very specific goal and purpose: to immerse the visitor in fun. This is why theme parks tend to be in rural areas or, in the cases of parks in dense cities, to be entirely walled in. This is partly to control who enters, but it serves a more profound purpose: to hide the outside world.

Tivoli Gardens is one of the earliest examples of the amusement park as we know it. The original park buildings date to 1843. While it predates the first World's Fair by eight years, Tivoli shares the interest in exotic foreignness that pervaded European culture in the second half of the 19th century. With particular emphasis on the orient, Tivoli creates a magical paradise which immerses the visitor in foreign images and architecture to transport them to another place.

The park meets the city around it in a combination of wall and storefront. Some walls are simply nine-foot tall slabs of concrete and others are metal rail which allows the passerby a peek into a fantasy land.

Among the oldest buildings is the Pantomime Theatre, which opened in 1874. The Theatre, designed by the Dane Vilhelm Dahlerup, is a classic European interpretation of traditional East Asian architecture.

A fine detail in this theatre. which enhances the general exotic atmosphere is the unique stage curtain. The peacock's wings unfold to reveal the players on stage and the peacock itself, along with its wings, sink beneath the stage.



Most notably, Tivoli's design and atmosphere influenced Walt Disney's planning of his own theme park. In many cases, Tivoli feels like an older version of Disneyland. The park is broken down into a few different, unique areas. The transitions are a little sloppy but the architecture lets you know when you've reached another area by evoking a different world region, as in the case of Nimb, the Middle Eastern palace (with a dollop of Russian on top?)

Unique to Tivoli, or rather, not common in America, is the variety of people who enjoy the park. Beyond the young family, which is a staple of all amusement parks, I saw a surprising number of elderly and older people. These people were obviously locals and, unlike the busloads of tourists, visited Tivoli much as they would any public park. I saw a pair of elderly women sitting on a shaded bench just on the edge of a major point of intersection in several of the park's paths. They talked merrily and laughed easily, evidently two old friends who may have been engaging in a weekly routine of spending a warm summer's afternoon at Tivoli.

This piqued my interest, as their purpose for being at Tivoli was far removed from my expectations of my own experience, which were to see as much as I possibly could and photograph everything. The diversity of experiences and visitors that I saw at Tivoli, such as the middle-aged couples who came to spend an evening at one of to park's world-class restaurants, caused me to question my expectations of the "theme park" experience. The park can be a delight to both young and old.

Foreign Comprehension

A staple of the traveling abroad experience tends to be the experience of fumbling through an unfamiliar language. We have the fortune of traveling in countries whose inhabitants all speak some English (although some only well enough to exhubertanly say 'Good price!'). Despite this convenience, no matter where we go we are confronted with foreign text. Even in Copenhagen, which is the city closest to mainland Europe and thus the city I thought would be the most English-friendly, presents the same amount of its written material in Danish. My few encounters with English have been on restaurant menus, and these are not always reliably bi-lingual. What I find most curious are signs that only provide translations for the parts that the person who made the sign determined not understandable.

Legend for map of City Hall, Stockholm

Laughter ensues when the writer has over-translated a sign. What happens when the writer chooses wrong, and leaves untranslated vital information?

Often, the comprehension effort becomes a linguistic exercise as we learn that 'street' in English is 'gade' in Danish, 'katu' in Finnish and 'gata' in Swedish. When a word is too far beyond comprehension, we look for clues as to its meaning, although even the contents of a store cannot always translate the name above its entrance.

A candy shop in Tivoli, Copenhagen

The row of lollipops in the store clearly indicate it is a candy shop, but I'm suspicious as to the literal translation of 'Bolchekogeriet'. According to the nice young employee, the name does in fact translate to 'Hard Candy Shop' with a particular emphasis on the candy being made in the shop.

If muddling through is not an option, and if an image has been provided, content can be gleaned accordingly. This places a large burden on the image to convey the entire meaning to me, the helpless alien. There is an inverse relationship between words and their reader and and image and its viewer. When I read a sign in a shop window or a poster explaining some event, I feel a burden to understand the meaning of the words (by reading them 'correctly'). Conversely, I consider the image in the shop window to be responsible for containing the proper information and conveying it in a manner understandable by me.

Maps provide a neat integration of image and text, by conveying one's location within a building or urban context, the location of points of interest and the meaning of those points. Through one's understanding of the map as an image conveying location, and the function of a particular place, one can derive the meaning of the words associated with a point.

St. Peter's Cathedral in Malmö, Sweden

 Consider the location A, labeled 'Ingång'. The letter A on the map is located just outside what looks like the physical boundary of the church. Combined with my basic knowledge of church design, and the shape of the building, I can derive the meaning of 'Ingång' to be 'Entrance'. Armed with this new understanding, I can apply it to future situations in which I may need to know where an entrance is, or ask a non-English speaking (in this case Swedish) person where to enter a building.

It may be frustrating to be unable to read all the words, but the city is an environment dripping with context, and one need not look far to understand its meaning.

The Right Drawing for the Right Building

I've done a lot of drawing so far, much more frequently than I've done at school as I tend to lean more heavily on computer modeling and trace paper. As I visit more buildings and draw them, I tend to classify the buildings based on their dates of construction. Subsequently, the drawings I make get grouped in with those time periods. As I look back through my sketchbook after my midsemester evaluation today, I've noticed that certain types of buildings, built in certain time periods, lend themselves to a particular manner of drawing.

Medieval churches lend themselves to isometric drawing due to their regular and predictable arch structure. I draw the reflected ceiling plan first to describe the geometry of the ceiling, then shift the drawing about forty degrees clockwise and construct the arches three-dimensionally from their corresponding positions in plan. The drawing below is a detail of the main nave arch and the smaller side arches, done at Lund Cathedral in Sweden.

Neoclassical buildings, especially those built in the nineteenth century, lend themselves nicely to sections. The perfect symmetry makes it easy to find a good place to cut through, to record the most interesting and telling information. Cutting a section through the wall of a neoclassical building will also reveal the intricate molding and ornament on the walls, both interior and exterior, and convey their depth in a way that an elevation can't do. The example below is of the main building of the University of Lund. The section is taken just through the lobby, but shows some of the elaborate detailing on the facade (to the right) and captures the proportions which are so important to neoclassical architecture. The cut is taken through the double-height space to convey the grandeur of the balcony and skylight above.

And then, we approach contemporary architecture. It's difficult to apply a blanket judgment as to the most appropriate way to represent contemporary buildings, but generally a three-dimensional drawing is most informative. The drawing below is a semi-constructed isometric of an interior detail of Libeskind's Danish Jewish Museum. The wood panel interior meets the brick of the existing building in this no-longer-functioning doorway. It's impossible to represent in plan or section, and I don't know where I would make the cut. I drew on paper what I wouldn't actually be able to see in real life, to better understand three-dimensionally how the new interacts with the old.

Or take Calatrava's Twisting Torso in Malmö, Sweden, which took a bit of plan, but a lot of isometric, to draw understandably.

The examples above lead to a conversation I'd like to continue to explore about how the drawing can act as the building's representative. The selection of the appropriate drawing method is as important as the quality of the drawing itself. As one who draws, I must also make choices about what information to include or exclude, before even thinking about how to convey it accurately. We're seeing enough variety of buildings now that we're in Denmark for me to practice multiple modes a drawing, so you'll be seeing more variety in the future.

Covert Spaces

We've seen a few buildings by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) in the past week, and the more I see, the more I wonder why I didn't know much about him before. Asplund's work is thoroughly intriguing. He pays equal attention to the dramatic heart-racing moments, such as the grand rotunda of the Public Library, and to the quieter, subtle moments, like the stair that follows the curve of the courtroom of the Lister County Courthouse. Asplund uses big, open expanses to excite the user by exaggerating one's sense of scale. This inspires awe in the dwarfed person who cannot help but feel reverence for the space, it's designer and owner. Everyone likes a big, grand space they can lose themselves in, but I find pleasure in the irregular spaces created by combining the large forms in which the dramatic rooms are housed.

Even spaces that cannot or are not meant to be occupied receive attention. The main stair of the Karlshamn Secondary School winds around an open shaft. A series of arches puncture the shaft to let light from the windows on the exterior wall send light where it would not go otherwise. The arches also provide views to other floors and other parts of the stair. By voiding the "center" of the stairwell, Asplund reveals more about the structure, which is pretty much entirely made of vaults. Also, you get a sense of interior wall thickness that you ordinarily would only get from a window.

One of the most important things I've learned so far is how to be critical of an architect's decisions to reveal or conceal the structure of his (oh let's be honest, we're not going to be seeing any female architects on this trip) building. Structure in architecture is like a routine performed by a magician. The better the magician, the better the routine, and the best magicians aren't the ones who don't reveal their secret, but who actually let you see how they perform the trick - if you're clever enough to catch it.

Let's get one thing straight: it isn't enough to simply show the structure in a building. And most people don't know what they're looking at, through no fault of their own. But a smartly articulated structural system can be appreciated by just about anybody. Part of an architect's responsibility is to understand and respond to the fact that the majority of the people using their building are not architects. I purposefully use the word "respond" because the architect has the choice to ignore or incorporate the public. When someone says about your building, "How did they do that?" you know you're on the right track. It's important to keep people intrigued and questioning and coming back for more.