2006-12-19 - 1:11 p.m. - The Archaeology of Tomorrow: Architecture and the Spirit of Place, by Travis Price
Fairly pleasant series of sometimes-connected musings on architecture and place-making. The "archaeology of tomorrow" promised by the title is barely elaborated, but the "spirit of place" is clearer: Price emphasizes three "lenses" that architects need to view their work through: Stillness, Movement, and Nature. The choice of such vague and poetic headings is convenient for Price, who can bend all his past work to fit them; but unfortunate for the reader, who is left uncertain whether Nature refers directly to ecotechture or whether it is a rhythm used to reconcile the timeliness of Movement and the timelessness of Stillness. "Movement" seems to translate directly to "technology" or "change"; it's whatever's "Now" in architecture. But sometimes it's just a metaphor for physical movement of things, as with a highway-side house that slants goofily to one side as if it's being pulled down the road. "Stillness" is probably the clearest of them all; it has to do with a culture's fundamental values and the translation of the sacred (whatever it is) into architecture. This lends itself to churches or personal places of meditation, and Price brings a hippie spirituality to these tasks that produces his best work in, for example, Wade Davis's writing studio. (Photos of most of the projects in the book can be found, by the way, at Price's website.) You can instantly tell what a lovely space the studio is, how the oculus/library gives it the quality of a serene monastic cell.
Too often, though, the work showcased in the book has only a tenuous, ex post facto connection to the Lenses being name-checked. The attempt to graft a rationale onto a finished building becomes absurd with Price's redesign of the library at St. John's College: we learn that because it gets lots of skylight, it's a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave, and that because it has three levels, it's a reference to the Divine Comedy. Leaving aside the question of whether you would want a given floor of a building to suggest being in Hell, let alone whether that's actually expressed architecturally, one wonders: is every building with three floors consequently suggestive of Dante? Will every building with nine stories make me think of sub-par pop hit "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)"? Perhaps Price does something to make Hell come alive (wouldn't that be great?), but it's impossible to be sure, since this is one of those books that gives you only photos to work with. No sections. Not even any plans. And photographs lie, so you basically have to take Price's word that all of these spaces are really awesome. Unfortunately, even in the photos, a lot of them look really awful - the highway synagogue and the TVA building, whatever their ambitions, come off as generic and clunky. Annoyingly, Price only goes into full detail on a handful of projects (still no drawings though), and in general the last half of the book is a let-down, since there is almost no attempt to really demonstrate the synthesis of the three lenses, which is supposed to be the whole point. Then we get, unexpectedly, a too-short-to-be-any-use discussion of a few of Price's teaching projects around the world, most of which (to the extent that you can tell) emphasize Stillness and are fairly lovely.
All that said, the book is worth the read just for Price's uniquely philosophical point of view (however vague it is at times), and the few projects which really do click. Price's own house is the crown jewel: taking advantage of contemporary technology (Movement) in steel and insulated glass, he lifts the body of the house completely up and away from the ground, perching it on a hillside like a tree clinging to the rocks (Nature), and creating a convincing feeling of Stillness and wonder on the interior, surrounded as it is by the air and the trees. Again, it would be even more convincing with some plan/section views to see how the programmatic load is handled, but the photos are absolutely lovely, and the structural achievement speaks for itself. Here, as at the Wade Davis studio, it becomes clear that it's possible for Price's vision to be realized at a scale greater than that of "shrine for one." The results are majestic; it would be lovely to see more work in this vein, from anybody.