The City is the Canvas, and Buildings the Art
BUILDING DIALOGUE – In the Details
Years ago, while walking through the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw a piece by Chuck Close at the other end of a long corridor. Perhaps you have seen his work as well, which is famous for its realism – so you know that from such a long distance each piece clearly seems to be a photograph. You may also know, then, that when you walk closer and stand in the same room, the work reveals itself as a painting.
Andre LH Baros, AIA
Architect, Shears Adkins Rockmore
Stepping even closer, however, getting into the work’s personal space and standing face-to-face with the canvas, you see the intricacy and complexity of the gridded, almost pointillist, style of this work from this period. This perspective is vastly different than what we expected to see when standing at the end of the corridor. Each experience of the work of art has its own visual character – each valid, each distinct and each worthwhile.
We all perceive the world around us from different vantage points, but whether we generally zoom out to see the panoramic face in the painting or zoom in to glimpse the richness of the brush strokes, a full experience can be appreciated when we pause to find a different perspective. If you always stay at a comfortable distance from the Chuck Close painting, then it is always going to look basically the same whether you stand or sit, or move a bit more to the left or right. The magic happens when you choose to stick your nose right up to the painting and stare, or walk to the other end of the museum and squint, focusing on it as you look past every other gallery.
What happens if we look at our buildings the same way? If we start with a skyline view, zoomed out, it is easy to lose the individual buildings to the cityscape. Much like the painting at the other end of the museum was “just a face,” the buildings in the midst of the city are often “just buildings.” However, if we begin to change our focus, we may start to see more, even at this distance. Take, for example, the Wells Fargo Center by Philip Johnson, which could be viewed as just another high-rise in Denver. Still, it is iconic, in part, because when you pause and take note of its unique shape, you promptly realize it looks like an old-fashioned cash register. Love it or hate it, it is a distinctive marker that works at the scale of the city. Another building that makes its mark at the urban scale is the Sugar Cube Building by KPMG, which distinctly overlaps light and dark cubes to create a landmark in LoDo, clearly separate from the skyline. It uses clarity and massing whereas the Cash Register uses form and height.
Recall the Chuck Close painting. There was a moment of surprise when our brains made the switch from “photograph” to “painting.” Hopefully you can think of buildings that have done the same thing for you, providing that ah-ha moment as they transformed from “building” to “architecture.” At this middle scale, you notice the way that a form manipulates light and shadow to create space. You see the way that the materiality, pattern and layers of the facade tell a story. When speaking of the conceptual relationship between the exterior and interior layers of a building, architects sometimes draw a comparison between “watermelon” buildings and “carrot” buildings. When you “cut” a watermelon building, you see the various green and white layers of the rind protecting the juicy red center. Watermelon buildings reveal themselves layer by layer and are often about the story of crafting the components of the facade and inside spaces in demonstrative ways. These are the buildings that revel in exposed bolts and expressive materials. Whereas watermelon buildings are all about telling you how they are put together, carrot buildings are about hiding the pieces and parts to emphasize the whole. When you cut a carrot, the layers are all the same color and you need to look closely to see the subtle patterns. Carrot buildings often have narratives of carving and sculpting or museum-like austerity that shifts the focus from the building to the actions and objects inside. Next time you visit a museum, consider how it is analogous to a giant, white carrot. In essence, this medium scale narrates the story and purpose of the tangible building.
Whereas watermelon buildings are all about telling you how they are put together, carrot buildings are about hiding the pieces and parts to emphasize the whole.
How close is too close to look at a building: Feet? Inches? Perhaps there is no such thing as “too close.” When you come face-to-face with architecture, you enter the world of craftspeople, designers and makers. Look around you, right now, and take a moment to observe the grain of the wood a carpenter chose, or the pattern of a fabric that a designer drew. Feel the difference between a metal doorknob and a wooden handrail. Like the watermelon and the carrot, the brush strokes of a building can be used to tell a story or hide a distraction. Architects and builders spend hours resolving the connection of a door to a brick wall so that it has enough depth to create a rich pedestrian experience – hours spent on something people walk by without even paying attention to, but they notice. The emergency exit door on the side of a big-box grocery store goes unnoticed in a very different way than the emergency exit door next to a revenue-driving retail storefront on Larimer Square. On the former, the door is jammed in flush with the brick without even a doorknob, screaming, “Don’t look at me!” as loudly as the only other mark on the wall, the graffiti. The latter door is set back from the brick, not just a bit, but far enough that there are more layers of brick added, and a light, and trim, and a step, and more. Here, the color of the door is matched to the trim of the building, which itself is matched across every piece of exposed metal on the facade and the door hardware painstakingly selected to reinforce a story which can only be seen from across the city. These tiny details, seemingly unimportant, affect the whole and contribute to the building’s aesthetic and mood. You may not pay attention, but you notice.
In order to fully appreciate the essence of Denver’s architecture, we must approach it like a Chuck Close painting: the panoramic, the human scale and the microscopic perspectives. We must allow ourselves to zoom in and out as we craft each building in this city in a new way, allowing it to share how it fits into Denver’s macro, micro and human story, how it is artfully designed and constructed, and how its details contribute to how we feel about the overall experience. Chuck Close may not appreciate the comparison of his brushstrokes to the rind of a watermelon, but I think he would get it. After all, the art we make as we build our city is just a canvas, just another beginning for the next layer of art to unfold.
Published in the September 2017 issue of Building Dialogue.
