The Dialectics of Glass and Steel | Archi Analysis

 

From Stone to Steel

Architecture, from its very beginning, has been made of stone, and when it hasn't been made of stone, it's been made to look like it's made of stone. Windows may have glass in them, but windows in a stone wall are simply openings.

 

The glass itself is not important. The development of technologies that allow the production of large sheets of glass and materials with tensile strength, like steel, had the power to enormously change the way buildings are made.

 

But how would that necessarily affect architecture?

How would that change architecture's representational function?

How would that change architecture as the art of building?

 

The advances in modern technology and the invention of new materials were not inevitable helpful contributors to the goals of architecture culture.

 

How can one apply a symbolic language, an already existing symbolic architectural language that was developed over thousands of years as an expression of the heavy compressive forces in masonry, to lightweight and thin structures of metal and glass?

 

How does one achieve the requisite monumentality and profundity with such flimsy materials?

This was the primary problem for the architects of the 20th century.

 

Behrens's Theory

 

From around the middle of the 19th century, there was a strong movement to apply artistic design production to sites in large industrial complexes.

 

This trend was motivated on the one hand by the advent of new materials, but then, on the other, hand by a desire to integrate the factory complexes into a landscape, or even, in some cases, into an urban site with some sensitivity.

 

It was also developed as a trend because of the increasing importance that companies paid to the desire for a distinct image for their corporation.

 

So architecture beginning around the end of the 19th century and intensifying in the 20th century began to be used for commercial purposes.

 

Scholars largely agree that it was the turbine factory for the Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, or General Electric Company, in Germany--whose headquarters were on a prominent urban site in Berlin-- that is the seminal example of architecture entering into this commercial representation, and at the same time wanting to use these new materials of steel and glass, but insisting that these materials be brought into a sort of artistic expression that would be adequate for this corporation.

 

The architect Peter Behrens in 1907 was appointed artistic director responsible for creating an entire image system, or branding package, for this international company. 

 

He designed the trademark; he was responsible for all the printed matter, as well as the design-- at least the aesthetic sort of styling, if not the technical design, of a full range of household appliances like fans and heaters and lamps.

 

He was responsible for all the retail installations, and he even designed some staff clubhouses, as well as all the buildings of the factory.

 

Now it's important to remember that factories at this time still were not considered architecture with a capital "A." Factories had started to use these new materials of steel and glass, especially to span large areas where equipment could be manufactured and stored, but the factory made of glass and steel was regarded as a very perfunctory building type.

 

It was Behrens's charge to bring that building type-- that kind of industrial, functional building type-- into the status of architecture as an art.

 

Behrens was absolutely clear about his ambition to raise factory architecture to the status of serious, profound architecture. The architecture that he desired, he himself called industrial neoclassicism.

 

It's a kind of reduced, abstracted classicism that would be a new-- that would also be a new German architecture.

 

This last point is important because it expresses a desire not only to represent the economic status and economic importance of the company, but it was also an understanding of the company's role as a primary force in the creation of state identity, and even in social change.

 

In order to conceptualize this representational role that this new architecture would play, which would be on the one hand representing the commercial power of these great corporations, these energy-producing corporations, but also to even participate in creating a larger national identity.

 

In order to accomplish that, Behrens needed the help of architecture theory. The theory that he turned to first was his own version of Hegel's theory, which we've seen earlier in the beginning of this course.

 

It has to do with the way architecture appears in history as a representation of a sort of cultural ethos, and that representational role, or representational vocation of architecture, has to move and change through time as culture itself changes, or as history itself moves forward.

 

For example, in Greek times we know that the temple is the primary architectural paradigm. The temple for Behrens was the exquisite representation of the ethos of democracy, of intellectual life, in the polis-- in the Greek polis. 

 

Then we move into medieval times. There it's the Christian church that is the dominant authority, that is the dominant power, and the architecture is the cathedral. The architectural paradigm is the cathedral that adequately represents that ethos.

 

With the secularization in the Renaissance, but also the move in power a little bit away from the church and toward the aristocracy, then the palazzo became the architectural type to represent that emerging and developing Aristocracy.

 

So, with this kind of Hegelian understanding of this teleological development of architecture in relation to a social ethos, or a kind of cultural ethos, he looked at his own time.

 

It was clear that in his work for the AEG, it was industrial capitalism which was the new authority.

 

It was industrial capitalism that needed to assert itself as I say both a power, a commercial power, but also even a cultural power in the creation of a new kind of German identity.

 

What was then the architectural paradigm that would be adequate to this new ethos?

 

The factory. Not just any factory, though. The turbine factory. The turbine factory which would house the construction, the manufacture,

of these giant steam turbines.

 

It was the biggest machine for producing electricity, for producing the power of Berlin, the power of the whole of the country of Germany.

 

How do you represent that kind of production of power adequately in a building?

 

For that, he turned to another theorist. The second theorist that Behrens turned to was the architect and historian Gottfried Semper.

 

He was a practicing architect, but also an architecture theorist whose primary interest was in the very beginnings of architecture, and how the beginnings of architecture could influence and help structure and conceptualize architectural practice in the present. To study those beginnings, he visited the Exhibition of 1851, in London, housed by the Crystal Palace.

 

There, in one of the exhibitions, he saw a full-scale replica of a primitive hut from the Caribbean islands. And the sort of an empirical fact of this primordial shelter exhibited in what, at the time, was the most advanced building--

in the sense of new materials and industrialized production

of the architectural elements -- the contrast of the most advanced and the most primitive sort of prompted Semper to turn to a kind of materialist but also an anthropological model of architecture's beginnings, and a kind of model of how architecture could move from those beginnings to the present.

 

The way he did this was to reduce the building down to four elements.

But each of those-- four sorts of formal architectural elements.

But each of those elements would also have associated with it

a technique, a means of production.

 

A certain kind of material, but also a certain technical skill that manipulates and forms that material. The first element-- and he considered it first a social or cultural element-- which is fire, is the beginning, he thought, of society itself.

 

It's a fire that provides both the formal centering device, but also the warmth, the protection that the group can then gather around and form itself as a tribe, as a group, as a community. But the fire needs the help of architecture. 

 

In order that the fire can be lifted up off the damp earth, lifted up into the sort of vicinity of the group gathered around the fire, another material in another form is required: something like a bowl, or a pot, or a hearth that contains the fire. And that container would, therefore, require the technique of ceramics.

 

Or perhaps later in history, it would require the techniques of metallurgy. Now to hold that pot, that ceramic or metal pot, off the earth, some kind of base is required.

 

And Semper theorized that the base would be made of masonry. That the technique associated with the base that raises up the hearth would be masonry.

 

Masonry has an inherent weight, a kind of inherent attachment to the earth because the bricks themselves are made out of the earth, but they also bear on the earth with compressive forces.

 

Bricks are blocks that have to be put in a row and stacked, and that cutting and stacking and the composition of solid, crystalline blocks are referred to by the term stereotomy.

 

Stereotomy, in German, refers to the composition made of building up with blocks, with chunks of materials. It is almost naturally monumental.

 

It's almost natural-- it also obviously deals with compression; it deals with stacking; it's naturally related to the earth because of the weight of the blocks.

 

So stereotomy becomes a kind of automatic way of producing monumentality. But it's also associated with Semper with this idea of a base.

 

Now, in contrast to stereotomy, which is a kind of-- also has a kind of inertness, also has a kind of idea of crystalline pieces-- opposed to that is an architecture of an elastic frame. Semper called these tectonics.

 

And this tectonic frame becomes the third element in this typology. Semper deviated from the classical understanding of the trabeated system, where the column and the entablature, or the column and the roof, are two separate elements tied together at a joint.

 

He theorized a kind of tectonic assembly that would arise from this masonry base, where the walls and the roof together made the tectonic system.

 

The other association or connotation of tectonics is that we're dealing with relatively small elements that can operate not so much in a compressive way, but that have tensile strength. And these individual elements would be connected by a knot or a tying together.

So this is what he called a tectonic system. As the craft associated with stereotomy is masonry, the craft associated with tectonics is carpentry. So again, each part of the system has a technique associated with it.

 

Interestingly, too, it was in the knot, that the joining together of two pieces of wood with a knot that Semper saw the origin of architectural ornament. The joint is the origin of ornament.

 

The final element in his system, the final typology, is then the enclosing membrane that would wrap this tectonic system of walls and roof.

 

Interestingly, again, Semper didn't imagine the enclosing membrane would be the same as the stereotomic system of masonry. Rather, he imagined that the enclosing membrane was a cloth or a tapestry or some sort of woven material.

 

So the enclosing membrane, no matter how thick it was-- it could be thin and porous in some climates, it could be thick and heavy and insulation in other climates-- but in either case, that would be associated with weaving.

 

The other interesting thing that Semper added to this is that he knew that, as he had seen with the primitive hut in the crystal palace, he knew that these architectural elements, formally, would develop over time, but he also knew that, materially, they would develop over time.

 

So what he theorized was, for example, if you take the woven cladding, or the woven membrane, he knew that at some point that would become made of brick. But he imagined that the brick would carry some of the legacies of the weaving.

 

And maybe the way the mason would then use the brick in a more decorative way, creating patterns, creating different textures, rather than just piling up in a straightforward way, the legacy of the decorative surface of the carpet, or the mat, or the cloth would continue into the masonry, into the new material of masonry.

 

These four elements-- the fire, the base, the tectonic system that rests on the base, and the cladding system or the membrane that then keeps out the wind and the rain-- were Semper's four anthropological, materialism types that are the very beginning of architecture.

 

The AEG Factory

Peter Behrens's AEG turbine factory is a remarkable transcription of Gottfried Semper's theory of the primitive hut into a monumental contemporary Building.

 

Like Semper, Behrens starts with what is really a kind of social but also a technological device that is at the heart of the architectural program.

 

Where Semper started with fire, Behrens started with the turbine engine itself, this giant steam turbine, which would become the central source, the primary source of power.

 

That turbine has to be contained, has to be housed. Like Semper, he starts with the base.

 

It's a remarkably high base that runs around the entire building. You can see the scale of this, both the base and the overall building, by looking at these figures in the foreground relative to that concrete pad, or that concrete Base.

 

On this giant masonry base, Behrens then constructs a tectonic system made of steel, a system of arches, 28 altogether, that span an area of 25 by 130 meters. And the arches rise up, again according to Semper's dictum, constructing a skeleton that holds up the walls and the roof together.

 

Now, this is different from a stone system or a trabeated system where column and beam are understood as separate elements. Behrens has constructed a tectonic system that's a kind of singular net of small metal systems welded or bolted together.

 

However, he deviates from Semper in an important way. At the very top edge of the factory, of the building, just before it springs into its roof, Behrens added a very heavy steel girder that goes the entire length of the building.

 

Now, that girder is brought out from the glass wall of the building and, thereby, creates a very heavy shadow. The heavy shadow, together with the depth of the beam, makes the beam seem much, much heavier, denser, and deeper than it actually is.

 

Now, there's a big distinction between the tectonic system, in Semper's terms, which is a system made up of separate elements joined together that work together in this kind of tensile net.

 

There's a difference between that and a trabeated system, which is a system of columns and beams understood as separate and load-bearing through compression.

 

What Behrens has done is use a tectonic system according to Semper's theory, and, yet, he's made it appear like a trabeated system because it's the trabeated system that has corporeality and the visual density that he thinks is required for this monumental building.

 

Behrens thought that the trabeated system, or the appearance of the trabeation, would resonate with classical architecture more than a tensile system.

 

A tensile system would appear too flimsy, too lightweight. So he's getting the power of a trabeated colonnade, which resonates with the Greek temple itself, but he's building that now out of steel and glass.

 

Behrens's second focus was where this tectonic system springs from the base. It springs from the base in this giant hinge. Behrens focused a lot of his aesthetic compositional attention on that hinge.

 

The hinge is raised on the base. It's almost as if it's a piece of sculpture on a podium. The base comes almost to eye level, it's almost exactly at eye level. So this giant hinge confronts you. And the visual power of this metal hinge is almost like an analog of the turbines inside. Finally on this long facade is the glass.

 

Remember that Semper's theory is that the membrane, the wrapper, would come from an idea of weaving. This is where Behrens has used these enormous planes of glass. And they've actually tilted slightly away from the base, tilted inward toward the building.

 

Part of this tilt then gives this visual weight to the column in the beam, but also it puts the glass plane on display as a plane. But the panes of glass here are very, very small, and the mullions are very small, but they're very closely spaced.

 

The effect is that it looks like a weaving of glass and steel according to Semper's dictum. It's brittle, it has a tactility to it. It has a kind of brittleness to the plane.

 

That tactility emphasizes again, the visual power of the glass. As we move now to the front of the building, we see a slightly different aesthetic at work.

 

First of all, it's at the front of the building that we see the contours of this giant barrel roof, or, actually, a kind of segmented barrel roof. Now, that roof has a lot of volumes. That volume is not needed functionally.

That volume is not used by any of the equipment of the factory. It's simply that Behrens wanted that contour, that silhouette is seen against the sky to convey this sort of representational power of the building.

 

It's like a frontispiece. It's like a temple front. Structurally it works slightly differently. We have these giant concrete piers now that at first glossary bearing the weight of this big sort of barrel roof.

 

But, in contrast to that, these giant concrete piers are set back from the edge of the roof so that even though at first gloss, they appear to be load-bearing, at second gloss, it almost looks as if the glass front itself is bearing the weight.

 

And it's that contradiction or that dialectic or that tension that gives the kind of visual power of this facade. Once again, it's this tactile haptic plane of glass, a kind of plane that you almost touch with your eyes as it were.

 

It has a tactility, a visual tactility that really makes the glass as material important, almost more important structurally or visually load-bearing than the concrete piers themselves.

 

Translating Semper's theory into an architecture of steel, glass, and concrete, Behrens is able to bring the building of the industrial factory into the realm of architecture, capital "A," and even to compare the factory building with the monumental tradition that begins with the Greek temple.

 

The Fagus Factory

Behrens's AEG turbine factory was a seminal building. It was enormously influential. There isn't an architect in Europe-- a modern architect in Europe-- who wasn't influenced by the building. One of those was Walter Gropius.

Walter Gropius, of course, would later become the founder and the first director of the Bauhaus, the school in Germany.

 

And, later, when Gropius left the Bauhaus, he would become the Director of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design. But we're at a time much before that.

 

The young Walter Gropius worked for Peter Behrens exactly at the time that the design of the AEG factory was underway. And, of course, Gropius absorbed many of Behrens's ideas.

 

Gropius would, eventually, become much more interested in sort of technical rationalism, industrialized processes of construction, the mass production of building components.

 

Behrens was never really interested in that kind of technology. But, nevertheless, Gropius shared Behrens's position that technology had to be transformed by Spirit, that architecture was not just building, but was building raised to the level of art, and that the intellectual task of the architect in modernity was to invent new forms of a new machine age that would not only understand architecture as representing a social totality, but that would also put architecture in the continuum of architecture as an art practice.

 

What I now want to look at very briefly is a project that Gropius did early in his career, just after leaving Behrens's office, that shows how the seminal ideas of the AEG factory could be transformed, elaborated, varied, and even, in some way, criticized, but still continued as part of a general aesthetic project of designing the factory building.

 

This is Gropius's building for the Fagus Factory, which was a small factory that manufactured shoe lasts, that is, these wooden inserts around which a shoe is Constructed.

 

It was a very high-level, high-quality, known for high-quality products. And the owner of the Fagus Factory wanted, again, as AEG had before, to use the factory as a kind of advertisement for the quality of the production of the corporation itself.

 

Gropius, unlike Behrens, did not have control of the entire factory. He was only asked to do what amounts to a kind of, addition, but it was the main building; it was the face of the factory toward the TheStreet.

 

He starts very much like Behrens, putting his attention on the glass wall and on the masonry construction that supports the glass wall. The corners, as in the turbine factory, are still a kind of primary anchor for the building.

 

But the big difference is where Behrens had to use concrete on the corners even though it's true that the concrete was set back, and the idea of its load-bearing properties was put into a kind of ambiguity or a tension-- in Gropius's case, though the corners are still kind of anchor the composition, the corners are emphatically transparent.

They're sharply constructed. The glass and steel come together at very sharp points. At the corner, the glass bay is bent exactly in half, so that the glass seems to wrap around the corner.

 

It looks very familiar to the contemporary eye, but this was so original that the contractors and the builders of the factory had a very hard time even understanding how they would build this to actually make those glass corners stand up.

 

Again, following these ideas of contrasts between the opaque and the transparent that Behrens developed, Gropius also sort of pushes in a solid masonry block that contains the entry to the building, sort of pushes it into that glass envelope or that glass membrane.

 

Another difference, and almost like a reversal, is that while Behrens canted the glass at a slight angle, and kept the face of the columns-- in his case, steel columns-- straight, Gropius does, in a way, the opposite.

 

The glass face is emphatically vertical and plumb. And it's the masonry piers that are battered so that they seem to lean in. This does two things: at the very top part of the building, it brings the face out well in front of its masonry support, so that the glass seems to hang like a thin curtain from the top parapet.

 

But the other thing it does is it casts a shadow. And it makes it look like the glass planes are kind of cut or sheared, and are almost free-standing.

 

Like Behrens in the front part of the AEG, this technique of isolating the plane of glass puts an enormous visual emphasis on the glass as this tactile plane.

 

In Behrens's case, though it's not properly a curtain wall of glass, the pane was continuous. But it only went through one story. As high as the turbine factory is, it's only a single story.

 

Gropius is working with-- there was a smaller building-- it's three stories. But he makes it look as if the glass curtain wall goes

all the way through three stories.

 

This is very dramatic because it is one of the first times that this technique was used. He wants it to look like the glass is continuous in hanging, when in fact it's actually three separate panels. And then finally, he puts the staircases in the corner of the building wrapped by this glass curtain wall.

 

The visitor can see these freestanding staircases behind the glass wall even before he enters the building.

 

Now, the effect of battering the brick piers and, thereby, getting the glass to set in front of the brick piers, and also by making the glass in the same plane as the parapet and in front of the base, the visual effect of all that is to make it seem like there's an entire plane of glass hanging from the parapet, rather than resting on the base. The visual effect is that of what we call a curtain wall.

 

Now, a proper curtain wall, as we see in any contemporary skyscraper, is actually a continuous network of glass that stands in front of the structure. In the case of the Fagus Factory, it's not a proper curtain wall in that sense.

 

The individual panes of glass are still attached to the structure just behind them. But the appearance, the visual appearance, is that they're hanging free of the structure. And this is very clear, that it was more important to Gropiusto get that appearance than it was the empirical fact of a curtain wall.

 

While Gropius would insist that, like Behrens, he wants his building to be seen in a continuum that begins with classical architecture and runs through modern times, through what amounts to a kind of critique of Behrens's system, he manages to design a variation that we might think of as even more modern than the AEG factory, moving architecture even further to an industrial glass and steel aesthetic.

 

The Seagram Building

Glass became, for modern architects, the essential material of the future. Glass was endowed not only with material visual qualities but also with spiritual qualities.

 

The German architect Mies van der Rohe would design buildings in America that would become the epitome of glass and steel skyscrapers. But Mies started his work in Germany.

 

In fact, Mies also worked in the office of Peter Behrens, when the AEG factory was being designed. And, yet, Mies was much more experimental than either Gropius or Behrens.

 

We have photographs of Mies in Behrens's office constructing models of glass skyscrapers and then holding those models against the window in Behrens's office and twisting and turning them to study and experiment with the reflective and refractive qualities of the tall glass building-- kind of amazing moment in architecture.

 

Mies would continue these experiments in two projects for downtown Berlin-- one on the Friedrichstrasse and the other on Alexanderplatz.

 

In both of these projects, Mies was looking to see how new building types could be derived that would respond more adequately to the visual potentials of steel and glass and this continuingly emergent technology of steel and glass.

 

But it wasn't until 1954 in New York in his project for the SeagramBuilding where these experiments were first realized in a commercial office tower.

 

The Seagram Building was the administrative headquarters of the Canadian distillery Seagram's, and it was located on Park Avenue in downtown New York. Though the site of course is very, very different from the AEG factory, 

 

Mies-- like Behrens--wanted very much for his building to engage the city and even confront the city-- confront the city with the representational power of architecture in the overall urban fabric.

 

Mies was not working on a corner as Behrens was in the AEG site. He was working mid-block. So he confronted the city in a very different way. He first set the building back from the street line, creating a fairly deep plaza in front of the building.

 

You don't actually see the Seagram Building as you're coming to downtown Park Avenue. You first see only the gap. According to people that worked with Miles on the project, that gap in the street line was very important for him. It created a kind of anticipation, a kind of mystery.

 

But as soon as you enter that gap and turn 90 degrees, the slab of the high-rise building confronts you in a very, almost aggressively, frontal way.

 

The building appears now almost as a pure surface. It's a pure network of steel and glass. So let's look more closely at that surface. 

 

The first thing we realize is that while most steel and glass buildings of the time articulate the frame and use the glass as a kind of contrasting transparency to the opacity of the steel frame, in the Seagram's case, the glass is bronzed, and the steel is bronzed, and the effect of that homogeneous treatment of the two materials actually bring the materials closer together.

 

Of course, you can still see the articulation of the frame against the glass, but it brings the materials a little bit closer together. It gives the glass, at certain angles, also, a kind of opacity rather than transparency. The essential thing to be expressed by a high-rise building in steel and glass, for Mies, is the idea of structure Of course, the structure of the Seagram Building is based on a steel frame.

 

The issue is that because of the American building code, the steel cannot be exposed. It cannot even be made visible. The reason is that a steel frame, in the case of an accidental fire-- exposed steel runs the risk of softening and failing structurally.

 

So building codes require that the steel frame be clad in an insulating material, usually concrete. And that's the case at Seagram.

 

Even though it's actually made of a steel frame, The entire steel frame is encased in concrete. So how then do you make the essence of the building, which is structure,

 

How do you make that visible?

 

Mies's solution is to add an additional steel I-section. We call it an I-section because if you cut through the steel member, its section is shaped like an "I."

And that I-section is laid in a plane in front of the glass. It actually has no structural function whatsoever. It is an ornament. It's an architectural ornament.

 

And, yet, as an ornament, as a non-functional element, it represents the structure even more emphatically-- if you will-- than the structure itself.

 

It's a more true representation of the structure than the structure itself. And this is a very, very interesting development in the idea of architectural ornament.

 

We're a long way from Semper's knot, but what is similar to Semper's knot, or the ornament of Semper's weaving, is its representational function for what is, in fact, a constructional and structural vocation.

 

This I-section in front of the glass is playing the role that in architectural terms, we call a mullion. And the series of mullions in front of the glass-- because of that one flat plane of the I-section-- actually creates a virtual plane that is parallel to, but in front of, the glass itself.

 

Visually, also, under the right lighting conditions, the mullions cast a shadow on the glass in a very, very similar way-- but a much more delicate way-- than the columns in Behrens's AEG factory cast a shadow on the glass.

 

In Mies's case, because of the delicacy of the fabric, the effect that this has is to prevent us, in a away, from measuring-- from calibrating-- the distance from that virtual plane to the actual plane of glass.

And the visual effect of that, under the right lighting conditions, is a kind of oscillation of the surface.

It's as if the surface has a kind of optical depth and an optical movement or a kind of shimmering that belies the simplicity of the actual architectural elements of the surface.

 

Despite the large amount of glass in the Seagram Building and the thinness of the material, the Seagram nevertheless has a kind of corporeality and a presence that's actually very, very dense.

 

Now part of this is due to the proportions of the slab.The sides of the slab have a sort of three to five ratio of width two frontality.And that gives it a kind of chunkiness.

 

But, more importantly, the bronzing of the glass and the metal gives a totality to the surface and a singularity to the surface that also contributes to the visual weight. The bronzing also does one more thing.

 

Bronze actually has a quality of aging. And over time, rather than appearing more and more like a new building, the Seagram

has actually taken on an almost archaic quality.

 

Whereas Behrens used the resonance of his building with a Greek temple to insert his building into a continuum of architecture as an art, Mies almost pushes the associations back prior to Greece to some kind of ancient archaic slab that is older than history itself, even as it's very much part of the present.

 

This haptic plane is completely abstract, but it still has a resonance with the architecture of the past-- a grandeur in glass and steel, first begun by Peter Behrens.