Driving on I-5 through northern California takes you through a lot of farm land, and reminds you just how much of the American economy is agriculture. This means silos – lots of silos, which of course got me thinking. . . From top to bottom: Two silos bridged by a glass Miesian volume; Two silos on a courtyard base, bridged at the top; a picturesque collection of three silos and a grain elevator; a battery of six silos, spaces cut between them, topped with a temple form.
This room comes from a very unlikely place – a simply detailed restroom at Richard Meier’s Getty Center. A heavily veined dark grey marble floor stood in nice contrast to the Carrara marble wainscotting and white plaster walls above. That’s where things started. This version panels out the Carrara walls on the interior, topping it off with a tall conic skylight (maybe the Getty galleries?), and all of it wrapped in a Tuscan-detailed wood wrapper.
One half is a nine-square (Richardson wrapper, Mies core), while the other half is a four-square (Neutra patios, Mies fireplace). This came from a small garage conversion that never got off the ground – see bottom drawing. So here it is.
This small hall type has a basket-weave brick floor, the roof supported on pipe columns that float free of the brick walls. The exterior corners are Mies-inspired, while the window treatments are a take on Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard. Details of that window system are below: elevation/section, axon of the base, worm’s eye of the head. I owe you roof-ceiling information – but the question remains, bow truss or hammer beam? Or something altogether different?
I was waiting in the drive-thru line at that iconic California burger stand when I began to think of all the ways that the concrete masonry building was banal. And yet, with a few interesting moments – the angled drive-up windows, for instance. My proposal takes that window and wraps it over the entire rear of the building, Mies-like, allowing customers in the car to watch their burgers hop off the line. The dine-in patio is flanked with stylized palm tree columns, hinting back to Hans Hollein and John Nash before him. A central oculus sits over the point-of-sale, with the iconic red standing-seam metal roof rendered as a hip.
Yet another take on the theme, this time with a symmetrical wrapper, with studies on how the core might sit within the volume. The thought was to more directly synthesize Wright’s Usonian Houses with Mies’ 50X50 House. But more on those later.
Continuing yesterday’s Miesian Cheney (and derivatives), this example pulls its plan directly from Schinkel’s Neue Wache in Berlin, which I’ve drawn below.
So I took the Cheney house plan and put it on Mies’ module, replaced the central hearth with a modified Farnsworth core just to see what happened. Iterations ensued, and even Schinkel reared his head.
After a short weekend break, I’m back with a few loose ends of Mies that I stumbled on in my sketchbooks. Another take at Seagram (above) and Farnsworth (below), as well as an overlay of Schinkel’s Bauakademie (1836) and Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) both square, modular, structures in Berlin.
In contrast to yesterday’s post, I’m featuring Mies’ earliest work in the United States (and his first experimentation with the ‘revealed’ corner, where the exterior envelope is set off of the structural grid), classrooms at IIT, for which Mies also completed the masterplan. Here, the frame is still made up of wide flange steel sections, but with buff brick infill panels. The window systems are still solid steel bars welded together – the thermal break found in the aluminum and bronze curtainwall systems was still a long way off.
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