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A COMMISSION WITH A TROUBLED HISTORY, OMAS DESIGN FOR MILSTEIN HALL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY REVEALS AND RELISHES IN THE PROBLEM OF CREATING ARCHITECTURE ABOUT ARCHITECTURE.
in the punishing history of higher education in architecture, the first decade of the 21st century may be remembered as something of a respite. This is not thanks to any maturation of a pedagogy in which the necessary routine of critique is all too often abused as an opportunity for ritual bullying.
Its because drawing got more digital, and digital projectors got more affordable. A student narrating a slide presentation of computational renderings from the back of a cinematically darkened room stands shoulder to shoulder with his or her critics and colleagues, addressing the image of the work in collaboratively parallel gaze. The students back is neither figuratively nor literally up against the wall on which the paper is pinned. The darkness and displacement of a projected review eases the spatial positioning and social hierarchy that - in acute combination - have earned such crits, and their associated spaces, such nicknames as the Shooting Gallery, the Execution Chamber, and the Kill Floor.
Today, the new affordability of big, bright, liquid - crystal - display flat screens may be shifting the dynamic back, returning the student to the front of the room and the line of fire. This was the setup I saw during a recent visit to Milstein Hall, a $52 million, 47,000 - square - foot addition to Cornell Universitys College of Art, Architecture & Planning in Ithaca, N.Y., completed in October by Rem Koolhaas, Shohei Shigematsu, and Ziad Shehab of OMA. The addition incorporates the architecture schools historic home in the scruffy but sturdily Sullivanesque Rand Hall, confirming the firms stated new interest in what Koolhaas, in a recent lecture at Cornell, called, "not - exactly - preservation, in performance more than shape."
The new addition features some 25,000 square feet of uninterrupted studio space in an airy Miesian box, about 150 feet wide, elevated and cantilevered 48 feet toward an adjacent gorge. This structure is supported largely by steel hybrid truss systems that appear to bulge blobbishly up from the seeming ground plane below, like a stray piece of late Corbusian roofscape. Those flat - screen crits take place in a circular arena directly inside the mound, the outer slopes of which accommodate the steep pitch of a 275 - seat auditorium. Complex spatial overlaps, formal excisions, and glassy openings at the intersection of box and blob accommodate a constellation of primary circulation and secondary assembly and display spaces, as well as the many surprising oblique sight lines between them.
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A students first clients are, conversationally and judgmentally, his or her teachers. And in this sense, to be commissioned to design an architecture school is to be sent back to the Kill Floor. This may explain why Milstein Hall looks a little like a student project with something to prove: a brilliant big idea, its resolutely off - the - shelf parts contrasting with feverishly fussy features. Consider the auditoriums semi - robotic armchairs.
OMAs usual jolie laide here becomes a kind of didactic precocity, as with the deep hybrid - Warren - and - Vierendeel trusses whose webs progressively tilt toward the studio boxs periphery to accommodate moment load - as if someone dropped the model on the way to the crit and decided it worked.
This back - to - school dynamic may also explain some of the troubled history of the Cornell project. It began with a 1997 reprimand from the National Architectural Accreditation Board for inadequate facilities, a 1999 gift of $10 million from developer Paul Milstein, and an aborted addition and renovation by Boston firm Schwartz/Silver Architects. There followed a competition to replace Rand Hall.
The contest garnered an icy palisade from Peter Zumthor and a lead zeppelin from Thom Mayne, FAIA, among other entries; Stephen Holl won in April 2001 with a $25 million incised cuboid. A year later, Holl was off the job, releasing a colorful statement that, "Like a brain surgeon operating on his own brain, making architecture for an architecture school is a peculiarly difficult challenge. Ive been involved in the process of five different architecture schools over the past 13 years and believe it is one of the most difficult architectural commissions."
There followed an unbuilt and unlovable
2002 design by Barkow Leibinger Architects, a serviceable bar building in the vein of the industrial structures in which the then relatively obscure Berlin firm specialized. Even after the commission of Koolhaas in early 2006, all was not settled. OMAs initial scheme underwhelmed both avant - and derriere - gardes, and its fate became embroiled in local and academic politics, with the usual questions of context and taste compounded by the effect on endowed institutions of the ongoing financial crisis. Only a further NAAB caution in 2008 and a dramatic university vote in early 2009 ultimately tipped the scales.
Cornells saga was perhaps unusually public, but not unusual: architecture - school buildings are legendarily tricky, suffering either from excessive effort, or recessive deference, by designers and clients. Where they succeed, its through monomaniacal zeal, as at Paul Rudolphs Art+Architecture Building at Yale University, or serendipitous adaptive reuse of existing structures, as at Londons Architectural Association. Or at Cornell, strangely, through a touch of both.
In architecture, profession and academy are mutually complicit through the intricate politics of both as well as through the Beaux - Arts ideal of the atelier: architects of substance are generally expected to teach, and employees are, under internship and registration rubrics, expected to go on learning. And the schools are where, in Holls acute metaphor, architecture goes to perform brain surgery on itself.
Cornell occupies a notable position in the history of that surgery. Its the home of the lively Cornell Journal of Architecture, recently revived; its the alma mater of Peter Eisenman, AIA, a prominent practitioner who is largely responsible for the consensus that architects, whatever else theyre guilty of, should think. Koolhaas himself, another noted architect - as - public - intellectual, famously studied there for a few semesters in 1972 and 1973, at the hands of Oswald Mathias Ungers, then department chair, and the canonical theorist Colin Rowe - whose own interests in urbanity and transparency became those of a generation of designers and critics.
During a recent walk around the new building, I asked Koolhaas what he learned as a student at Cornell. "I learned listening," he said. He was referring to the philosopher Michel Foucault, who was visiting Cornell at the time when Koolhaas studied, at work on what would become his most directly architectural project, 1975s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the spatial structures of power, that featured the Panopticon prison of Jeremy Bentham.
Asked later what Cornells current students might have learned during his return, Koolhaas speculated that they may have been reminded that "theyre on ground where warfare has been played out." He was referring not to the usual skirmishes of construction management, but to Cornells own past, during his student semesters, as a cauldron of architectural discourse and discord - largely between Ungerss maddening method and Rowes methodical madness.
At its rare best, the violence at any architecture school reflects these moments of theoretical urgency and anxiety in the field. The intimacy and immediacy of design teaching enlists students, in a glorious absence of condescension, into the essential battles of their day. At its very worst, this violence turns a school into a prison worthy of Foucault: an isolated and self - regarding enclosure that enforces habitual hierarchy and ritual conformity; that reinforces the great embarrassments of a profession whose offices are known for their screamers and chest - beaters. In this sense, Koolhaas may have given Cornell a building to live up to - as the subversive subtleties of its section continually offer its students a means of spectacular or speculative escape and escapade, a means for bearing witness and listening in, a means for experiencing adjacent events and outside worlds.
Its a built form of accountability: that central circular crit space, lined by LCD - screens and students, could easily have become a prison yard like that of the Arnhem Koepel Panopticon prison in the Netherlands speculatively renovated by OMA in 1980. But to lean your back against its wall is to liberatingly occupy sight lines to simultaneous spaces and events, from the familiar luminous ceiling of the studio glimpsed through a stairwell, to the nearby skateboarder enjoying the slope outside. It is to experience something of a heteropticon or peripateticon, in which moving eyes and feet on nearby bridge and stair and elevator all offer felicitous encounter and interrupting incident.
Milstein Hall invites the notion that architecture is, in our current political language, more occupation than discipline. The building enables, perhaps demands, a transparency of action and an urbanity of event that would gratify both Foucault and Rowe. As both would attest, the names that we give places matter. Its encouraging that during their first fall there, students have dubbed a favorite pin - up spot, perched at the far edge of a cantilever under the moody Ithaca sky, not a familiar architecture - school nickname borrowed from the language of incarceration, but something altogether lovelier: the Dance Floor.
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The interior