Ultrasuede

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

George Wagner

Architect and academic George Wagner writes on postwar North American design's fascination with material furnishings. Noting a tendency to unify body, textile and furniture with building via surface continuity, and therefore an elimination of eclectic clutter, Wagner traces the development of spatial design through the evolution of surface design via Gottfried Semper, Eliel Saarinen, Billy Baldwin, and Jeffrey Schnapp. This text demonstrates the way in which material invention and industrial production influence the theoretical notions at play in interiors as well as how they reflect values of innovation and convention in a material oriented culture.

The instrumental vision of the modernist architect seems to have panned easily from the piece of furniture to the design of the city, and to have done so by subjecting diverse scales to the binding operations of aesthetic unity. This unity came at the price of the autonomy of the individual design disciplines, which were silenced by the ambitions and economic imperatives of larger orchestrations. This paper reflects broadly on the subject of textiles, the body, furniture, and buildings in postwar North America. At a moment of material invention and spatial expansion, the dialectical possibilities of architecture's constituent elements were overwhelmed by a broad complicity. As a result, the enveloping continuity of the whole and its governing surfaces subsumed and refigured the parts. My speculations begin with a discussion of materials but ultimately grounds itself in the social culture of postwar North America, in the animated jostlings between rebellion and freedom, institutional deliberation and bodily improvisation.

In 1958, articulating motives for the design of his pedestal furniture, Eero Saarinen wrote:

I wanted to clear up the slum of legs.¹

Pondering this remark forty-four years later, I find it notable that the space under the dining table would be described using the physical and social context of the decaying postwar American city. But after the war, social issues and the domestic realm were frequently viewed together, just as the resettlement of the U.S. in the form of rampant suburbanization was an attempt to increase the physical distance between the two.

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Saarinen's slum – the discordant collection of table and chair legs – was to be erased and the domestic landscape renewed with the elegant white cast-aluminum bases of his pedestal furniture. In nine words, Saarinen pans from city to interior, describing the broad scope of engagement in his practice of architecture. The form of the city is invoked to criticize the formal disunity of the dining set.

At least as interesting as the analogies Saarinen was drawing, is that he was looking: at the space under a table surrounded by chairs. It's not hard to imagine him as a child, sitting on the floor, cross-legged under the table, taking in the squalor, or perhaps, as an adult, with greater detachment and a taciturn gaze, regarding the havoc from a comfortable chair across the room. But that space, between table top and floor, waist and foot, is a charged zone of ergonomic action in the human body, and that action is projected onto the inhabitation of buildings, where it must accommodate and support multiple body postures and their functional needs.

Historically the wainscot demarcated the space of the body in the room. But the wainscot was merely a veneer applied to the wall in a building composed of planar surfaces. In an architecture that engaged monolithic materials for the purpose of generating plastic space and form (as Saarinen's became), another, more radical and discontinuous method was necessary.

Some of Saarinen's most innovative buildings fused floor and program, furniture and field – inflecting the floor itself to model a dynamic landscape for the body. Banishing furniture and its clutter, Saarinen designed conversation pits, as at the Noyes House of Vassar College, carving seating from the depth of the floor. At a larger scale, the continuous and organically-modeled ground surface of the TWA terminal further reflects a conception of the floor as more than inert surface, but as a domain actively inflecting to the project's functional and aesthetic dimensions.

Eero Saarinen came by this concentration on floor and furniture honestly. His father Eliel had been the Michelangelo of carpet, allowing it to transgress its place on the floor and actively mediate between horizontal and vertical. At Hvittrask, the elder Saarinen fixed a traditionally-patterned carpet to the wall, which allowed it to fall over a bench and onto the floor, serving as backrest, seat and floor covering. This carpet was not used, as carpets had been historically, as a unit of measure that figured and defined the space of the room, but as a textile that engaged and defined a localized space of the body and the zones of its tactile encounter. The rugs marked the body's posture in the room as it mediated between three different spatial zones.

Eliel Saarinen's grafting of the carpet between wall and floor allows us to see some of the provocative issues of textiles and architecture after the war. Because he used the carpets with the sensibility of a collagist, they animated the room because he brought his own

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intentions to bear against the authority of an authentic artifact. The carpets he used were traditional and handcrafted, and the significance of their unconventional position was registered through the conventions of their form.

Made by hand, knotted carpets have been venerated as folk artifacts that conjure and reflect the body through their crafting, pattern, pile and position. Their individuality is sufficient to suggest the muted presence of a narrative of their creation. The patterns of these carpets are discrete and individual. They bind space and give it scale, even as they declare their own formal autonomy.

Gottfried Semper theorized textiles in general, and wickerwork and carpets in particular, as important material artifacts – or motives – through which we can comprehend the origins of architecture. Semper hoped that this journey back to an elemental understanding of building materials and logics of fabrication would foster the preservation of meaning and continuity in architectural design. His writing did not focus on the carpets' appearance or pattern, but on the incremental technique of their fabrication – the knot, and the role it played in scenarios describing the evolution of prehistoric building. His was a way of figuring architecture that fuses decoration, structural forces, spatial dimension and human presence. His theories polarized the material distinctions between frame and wall, mass and space, seen and unseen, and imagined architectural origins in the gentle craft of textiles.

Hanging carpets remained the true wall, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on … Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the inner, invisible structure behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colorful woven textiles.²

In the most sophisticated version of this scenario, the building's perceived reality and essential spatial unit are defined by the carpet. Other realities are unseen and buried within, behind the textile surface, perhaps inside the wall. Conceiving the origins of architecture through textiles did not offer a holistic model for architectural theorization, but did offer one that was necessarily complex and discursive in the relation of the parts. While Semper's writing implied the perceptual immediacy of the spatial liner before the hidden facts of structure, in The Principle of Cladding (1898), Adolf Loos recognized the differences between the two as driving the architectural process.

Carpets are warm and livable … But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect's second task.³

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Loos' reading of Semper did not attempt to imbue an ethical relation between wall covering and building structure; it is not an argument for articulation, or an ethical orchestration of parts. He wanted to theorize the surface itself, the covering, which he called 'the oldest architectural detail.' For him, the detail is not a point of connection or inflection, but a continuous veneer more a mask than a joint.

The ultimate strategy for manipulating this surface and the space to which it gives life, is described by Loos:

But the artist, the architect, first senses the effect that he intends to realize … He senses the effect that he wishes to exert upon the spectator … These effects are produced by both material and the form of the space.⁴

Loos offers a way of conceiving architecture unburdened from responsibilities of ethical expression, from the belief that the rhetorical articulation of the material facts of building somehow lie within the territory of honesty or truth. The celebrated corner of Schinkel's Altes Museum projects onto the surface a description of the building's internal parts and juxtaposes them against the figure of the monolithic whole. Loos suggests it is neither the responsibility nor the duty of the architect to bring to the surface the elements that reside privately within the deep space of architecture.

Schinkel's lucid reasoning and the clarity with which he hybridized building morphologies never impeded but only heightened his skills in scenography and creating effect. These were his other avocations. His tented room at Charlottenhof (1826–33) used stretched and hung fabric to devise a purely local space suspended from the architectural motives of the building that encased it. Its atmospheric reverie invokes a realm beyond the villa, to the suggestion of a Roman campaign tent. It is the isolated world of monolithic and indulgent decoration, unlike the analytic and historicizing theory of Semper.

The detached reveries of Schinkel's tent room suggest most clearly the role that textiles came to play in the second half of the twentieth century: producing a purely local reality in a space with a continuous surface, eminently spatial and inwardly focused – a space for mental reflection and bodily suspension. In the 1970s, Vogue published a number of tented rooms as part of its monthly review of glamorous domesticity. The rooms are like boudoirs, and celebrate the possibility of an enclosed, bodily suspension from time and place. The character of these rooms is nothing like the images or sensibilities circulating through popular culture, the high arts, or the other pages of Vogue. They present their occupants in isolation from the world.

The decorator Billy Baldwin produced comparably detached interiors for his clients in New York. The element of separation from the world was the very commodity these

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spaces offered. The means employed to produce these effects were always similar: the room's interior surface was treated as continuous, and fabric, mirror or canvas (when paintings were used) were applied. Baldwin described Diana Vreeland's salon as 'a garden in hell.'⁵ The bathroom of Mrs. Harding Lawrence (the advertising executive Mary Wells) was a hall of mirrors that surrealistically captured the movement of the city in an intimate space. 'The only passers-by are birds, she bathes in full view of the elements; lying back in her tub, she can look up in the mirrored ceiling and watch reflections of barges on the river and the traffic roaring fourteen floors below.'⁶

The walls and ceiling of Baldwin's bedroom for Si Newhouse were covered in brown velvet, 'a cave.'⁷ The floor was taupe wall-to-wall carpeting. Paintings by Morris Louis and Mark Rothko on adjacent walls spanned from floor to ceiling, so that the architectural space of the room was subsumed by the pictorial space of the pictures. A print by Barnett Newman hung beside the Louis. The interiority of the room's soft enclosure found its visual foil in the two color field paintings in which the depth was as hermetic as the paintings were introspective. Clement Greenberg called this depth 'color-space.'⁸ Greenberg admired another aspect of the spatiality of color field painting, calling it 'openness.'

Yet the ultimate effect sought is one of more than chromatic intensity; it is rather one of an almost literal openness that embraces and absorbs color in the act of being created by it. Openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eye of our time.⁹

From an architectural standpoint (and it seems clear that Greenberg hoped that the relevance of his term would extend beyond painting), this openness is abstract, referring as it does to mere paint on canvas. The paintings in question, a Newman or a Rothko, are legible as metaphors for space because of their relative blankness. And, while Greenberg wrote of chromatic intensity, the openness of color field painting is more a product of chromatic restraint than intensity. Openness and its spatial implications are derived more from the field than from the image, and more from monochromatic subtlety than from chromatic intensity.¹⁰

The openness that Greenberg found can realistically be described in terms of enclosure, interiority and delimitation. With even greater conviction, Barnett Newman described the perceived opening of his paintings in their projection of a two-dimensional spatiality. Newman saw inside his work a 'space-dome' and hoped that the viewer would 'feel the vertical domelike vaults encompass him to awaken an awareness of his being alive in the sensation of complete space.'¹¹ He described without irony the architectural space of the room that held his painting as both 'chaotic and empty.' The space-dome of his painting 'should make one feel … full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees going in all four directions. This is the only real sensation of space.'¹²

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The content of paintings mattered to Barnett Newman. Most paintings, he said, are full of 'object-matter,' a term borrowed from Meyer Schapiro, which can be applied either to the narrative subject matter of realist painting or to the emergent forms of the abstract: it is clutter either way. What Newman wanted to avoid he called the anecdotal and the episodic. Both terms seem to imply the presence of the narrative, the verbal, and the temporal, it seems clear that the enemy for Newman was the presence within the work of a specificity that might inhibit the spatial expanse. 'Instead of working with the remnants of space, I work with the whole space.' Ultimately, Newman's insistence on the visual perception of this imagined space (and against talking), might offer 'its assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life.'¹³

But what is of interest is the impulse to read pictorial blankness as space, and the possibility that the motive to do so might have corollaries in other disciplines, as Greenberg suggested. Certainly the Newhouse bedroom, with its textile surfaces and large canvasses was an attempt to conflate the space of architecture and painting – and to do so through the treatment of the room's surface. It could be that this openness required of architects a recalibration of the relation between buildings and their furnishings, with the result that the space of the building absorbed the furniture and the accessories of daily life – just as the openness of color field painting soaked up color according to Greenberg.

This absorption of furniture into architecture initiated a new formal economy. While previously architecture and furniture had mirrored each other, each with its own discourse and format vocabulary, these new interiors erased furniture, and replaced it with an inflection between a reprogrammed architectural shell and its object – throbbing space. Paul Rudolph referred to this energy, identifying the presence of 'spatial velocity,' the visible and generative force 'escaping from the room.'¹⁴

The North Christian Community Church (1959–63) was designed by Eero Saarinen for the new postwar suburbs of Columbus, Indiana where his father had completed the First Christian Church in 1942. The interior of Eliel Saarinen's church is stark white, and lit by a large concealed window flanking the altar.

Eero Saarinen's church is a sort of space dome; caught between a molded floor and an inflected roof, two shells in tension, pulled away so that they never touch. Religious iconography has been minimized, reduced in scale and made discreet, no larger than a body. The space is full of little but light, dim and wavering, filtering down through a baffled oculus and washing up under the eaves across the soft, porous plaster. As little as a passing cloud can produce tremulous modulations. The ceiling reads like canvas that absorbs all the light and reflects all the color. The interior is monolithic, monochromatic and very subtle. (… p 95)

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Notes

1 Eero Saarinen, Eero Saarinen On His Work, Yale University Press (New Haven), 1968, p 66. 'The undercarriage of chairs and tables in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world.'

2 Gottfried Semper, 'The Four Elements of Architecture', The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans Harry Francis Mallgrave, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1989, p 104. See also 'The Textile Art', pp 215-63.

3 Adolf Loos, 'The Principle of Cladding', in Spoken into the Võid, MIT Press (Cambridge), 1982, p 66.

4 Loos, 'Principle of Cladding', p 66.

5 Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Remembers, Harcourt Brace (New York), 1974, p 136.

6 Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Remembers, p 225.

7 Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Decorates, Chartwell Books (New York), 1972, p 200.

8 Clement Greenberg, 'After Abstract Expressionism', C Harrison and P Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell Press (Oxford), p 768.

9 Greenberg, 'After Abstract Expressionism', p 768.

10 Donald Judd wrote about this spatiality in his essay 'Specific Objects' of 1965: 'The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. Almost all paintings are spatial in one way or another. Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors on the same surface almost always lie on different depths. As even color, especially in oil paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always flat and infinitely spatial. The space is shallow in all of the work in which the rectangular plane is stressed. Rothko's space is shallow and the soft rectangles are parallel to the plane, but the space is almost traditionally illusionistic. In Reinhardt's painting, just back from the plane of the canvas, there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely deep. Pollock's paint is obviously on the canvas, and the space is mainly that made by any marks on the surface, so that it is not very descriptive and illusionist. Noland's concentric bands are not as specifically paint on surface as Pollock's paint, but the blanks flatten the literal space more. As flat and unillusionistic as Noland's paintings are, the bands do advance and recede. Even a single circle will warp the surface to it, will have a little space behind it.'

11 Barnett Newman, 'Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler', Art in Theory 1900-1990, p 765.

12 Newman, 'Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler', p 765.

13 Newman, 'Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler', p 766.

14 Paul Rudolph, in lecture at Roger Williams College, 1984.

George Wagner, 'Ultrasuede', Perspecta: The Yale Architecture Journal, vol 33, 2002, pp 90-103.

(Excerpt pp 91-5)

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