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It is now ten years since architect Theodore L. (Ted) Lownie began working on the restoration of the Darwin D. Martin House Complex by Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet he energetically describes the recent competition and selection of Toshiko Mori as the most important thing for architecture in the City of Buffalo since the design of Kleinhans Music Hall (Eliel and Eero Saarinen,1938-40). That’s a long dry spell–soon to change with the construction of a new Visitors’ Center adjacent to the Martin Complex on Jewett Parkway.
Toshiko Mori, currently Professor in Practice of Architecture and Chair of the Architecture Department at Harvard Design School, was selected from a design competition of five architectural firms. Her winning design is breathtakingly simple. Situated on the western periphery of the complex, the Visitors’ Center is rectangular in plan and aligned to the grid of the complex, but quietly hides two thirds of its volume underground. All that shows is a minimalist space tightly wrapped by a curtain of glass from floor to ceiling. The cantilevered roof, an inversion of the Martin House form, resolves at the exterior to a thin horizontal line. The interior is washed by a generous skylight floating over a monumental stair to the lower level. A brick back wall bounds the space to the west, containing all of the necessary support elements and amenities for the visitor orientation. And in the contemporary landscape of its foreground, rows of skylights project out of the earth marking the location of underground galleries and educational areas.
The complete story of Mori’s design will unfold over the next year or so. Her respect for Japanese tradition and the modernist project are profound. If her track record suggests anything, the building will be detailed with precision and delicate line. Its space and materiality will harmoniously blend and embrace the visitors, affording them a unique overview of the Martin House Complex. Toshiko Mori is in complete control of the design process. She is building a modern masterpiece.
After a long day of work and meetings on the project in February, Toshiko Mori submitted to the following interview, life drawing and photo essay…
Connors: I wanted to start with your background. You were born in Japan and you came to this country at what time?
Mori: For high school - before architecture.
Connors: Were you interested already in architecture?
Mori: No, in art.
Connors: At that time in Japan, in the 50’s and 60’s, there was Metabolist architecture. You are a Modernist, have you always been?
Mori: Yes, because I was too young then to notice architecture, except ancient architecture. I was not really aware of modern movements. My cousins’ houses were designed by Kazuo Shinohara, a very important architect. So, I used to go to Shinohara’s houses, which were contemporary. So the only one I really knew was Shinohara. I didn’t know of Kurokawa or the Metabolists until I studied architecture, in college.
Connors: Did you have a sense of traditional (Japanese)
architecture?
Mori: Yes, more so, because where I lived was very close to Kyoto and we used to go every weekend to the temples and gardens and so forth. And it’s general education - everyone knows the temples and ancient architecture.
Connors: I read temple in your project here in Buffalo.
Mori: Oh yes, it is. I didn’t think of it (Visitor Center) as a temple really, it wasn’t conscious, but it ended up being a temple. But, it’s more pavilion-like. I didn’t think of any religiosity or spirituality about it, so I think is very secular pavilion. But I guess because of its singularity, you could call it temple-like. The actual temple is the Martin House. That’s the Parthenon of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. The homage should be there. There is usually pavilion, temple, or shrine, so it is a kind of cleansing pavilion. That’s more like it, in the association to the genealogy of temple architecture. It is a site thing. You use this after the homage, for the cleansing rituals.
Connors: In your lecture at UB you spoke about the positioning of the Visitor Center, how it is meant to fit in with the entire landscape form and building configuration of the Martin House. Are you making any changes on the site?
Mori: Well, the Martin House landscape is historic. It was actually designed by Walter Burley Griffin, who went with his wife Marion Mahoney Griffin and designed the new Australian capital at Canberra. So it is a very, very historic landscape, which has to be preserved.
The property line between the Martin House historic property and the Visitor Center line runs diagonally across, so the area needs to be stitched very carefully between them. So in a sense, the landscape will have more of a contemporary transition and interface at our site, from this very important historical landscape. We will make suggestions, but they have to hire a landscape architect to resolve this whole issue of the restoration of the historic landscape and integrating the new landscape.
Preservation of the landscape is more interpretive – do you actually want what was in a drawing, or what existed in 1910, or another time? It evolves through the ages, so they have to figure out which era of landscape to preserve.
Connors: In your lecture you also talked about your guesthouse in Sarasota, Florida, which was in also an area with remarkable and significant structures. This is not an exact comparison, but your attitude, your approach to making architecture in that kind of situation is very gentle. Perhaps in the Wright context it is even submissive. In the context of (Paul) Rudolph’s building you spoke of datum - the datum of the tree branches, the datum of the surface of the water. In reading the article on the project in A + U, I see that you have actually given up the entire space of the ground to the Rudolph building. This is obviously a very intentional, respectful gesture in these circumstances.
Mori: Yes, that’s true.
Connors: When you are not in a setting with such significant precedents, what kind of cues do you take from the context? For instance, your storefront project in Manhattan - the relationship to context there has to do with the façade. Can you describe the role of the façade?
Mori: That was actually a historical façade that we had to preserve–a masonry façade. So the new one was recessed inside of the old. It is a completely new material as opposed to fitting in with the historic façade. The historic façade is completely restored, but the interior façade is free and new. So there is a contrast between old and new. There is no negotiation between them; they are just butted up against each other. They exist in contrast with each other.
Connors: So the new façade from the exterior just disappears. What about from the inside?
Mori: The inside looks like a floating glass façade. You see a shadow line of the old masonry behind, but you have no knowledge that the masonry façade exists, so it kind of denies it from the inside. So each denies the other, but they coexist. They are aggressively butted up against each other.
Connors: And it is a different vocabulary of materials.
Mori: Right, it just did not make any reconsideration of the windows. They just exist side by side.
Connors: One of the issues that you deal with, and what your book deals with, is materiality. And there has been a lot of attention to materiality, for instance in the work of Herzog & de Meuron, in a minimalist but heightened way. Can you explain why there is such an interest in material, the surface–the intrinsic texture or character of materials?
Mori: It always is in architecture. When someone says architecture you have to think materials. So it is inevitable, materiality is a given. But it can become a specific personal language.
So, if you look at projects from a material point of view, you start to see personality. If you look at Mies van der Rohe, or Louis I. Kahn or Frank Lloyd Wright, the way they use brick–a very calm neutral brick–even if you see only one elevation or one detail, you can tell exactly whose it is. It is a very beautiful and common, standard material, but the way they lay it out and detail it. It’s a very expressive medium of personality.
Connors: Do you see any trend, in say the last 10 years, in the way architects approach materiality?
Mori: The trend is more to ethereal, to lighter and ephemeral, as opposed to solid, heavy and static. Perhaps, I think, it is moving to a more reactive and dynamic using some media, instead of materials that are just one thing, like wood. Issues of material become more of an issue of surface.
Connors: There seems to be a flattening out, but at the same time a depth. In your book you had a conversation with Jacques Herzog where he referred to the material representing the romantic, and the immaterial being the abstract.
Mori: Yes, right. I think there is always romantic, in his case romantic, but a narrative aspect of the use of materials. There is both a figurative and abstract use. Herzog & de Meuron actually use materials very figuratively, where they imprint textures and images in the glass. So, they blur the boundary of what is figurative and what is abstract. This is a very specific thing to deal with, and a very interesting use of materials.
Connors: Last question: as a modernist, how did you live and work through the excesses of Post-Modernism?
Mori: Well I survived it, all of my generation had to survive the 80’s–some did and some didn’t. It was like a bargain: if you would do post-modernist work then you could get jobs, get clients. I had a small office, so I was able to keep doing what I do with the type of clients who believe in the type of work I do. But, it was difficult. A lot of us didn’t survive it. And it is still an issue. It was a time of compromise, and morally speaking, it was a decision you had to make.
Connors: It was never a part of your aesthetic sensibility.
Mori: No, I was completely against it, and Deconstruction. Post-Moderism is the eradication of architectural history, really. Deconstruction is the destruction of architectural language. So, if you are an architect and going in that direction, you are basically killing your own livelihood. And you have to pay a price for being fashionable.
“He had now learned from Japanese prints–rather than from Japanese architecture–the secret of occult balance…”
(Henry-Russell Hitchcock on the maturing Frank Lloyd Wright.)
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