The Armature

In this book, an armature, is a public element in a neighborhood or city core to which space-enclosing structures and ornamental surfaces of individual determination can be added or subtracted. It is solid and long lasting. It is richly encrusted with the crafts and arts of as many as thousands of participating citizens. Since buildings constitute a principal part of production and are a basic necessity, an armature provides on-going work and an outlet for the talents of citizens not now included in the building process. The accretion of people's art and craft work and the modification of certain spaces and forms designed by architects to accommodate alterations, make the structure a vehicle of cultural memory, a medium for expressing change and a metaphor for the passage of time.

The concept of an armature is not, of course, completely new. A few contemporary architects have designed structural and utilitarian frameworks which can be added to by users. Many examples of folk building show satisfactory and even beautiful building stock which has evolved over the course of time. One role of an armature is the recovery of the malleability and human scale of this preindustrial vernacular.

The Pauson House is an example of the quality of suggestion and open-endedness offered by a ruin. The fact that the house is no longer a house, is no longer complete, inspires my imagination to fulfill the ruin's promise, to adapt it to my interpretation of a contemporary community. At the same time the image of the ruin is still there, not covered up, but remaining as a stable element within the overall design. Other designers might respond to the ruin in other ways and yet the basic image with its overlay of meanings would still remain.

I am asking that the architect give these same qualities to new structures which will bring forth a creative response in future designers and citizen artists. It is possible for a reference frame such as “ruin” to co-exist in a form that has a capacity for several other meanings. While it is important that the ruin reference not be so vague that interest is dissipated, still, if the reference is too blatant there is insufficient stimulus to the imagination. Many say we can't physically and should not ethically build instant ruins, but this is to misconstrue the intent. I'm saying we can reconstitute the image of ruin which suggests that there was once more to the structure and that there could be more than we now see. Architects from Alberti to Maybeck to SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) have utilized images of ruins which let us compare an imagined past with a corporeal present. Such a structure can be technically safe and visually stimulating with spaces provided for infilling. Painted surfaces, planted vines, (effective as sun shades), the sculptural form of the structure and the color and textures of back-up wall materials can sustain interest until more elaborate additions are realized.

In designing a long-lasting armature we can incorporate qualities often found in older buildings that give us a state of well being. These are defined by Patrick Horsbrugh, by the term “energesis.” Tactile comfort, the sense of security, stimulation of the imagination, preferred scale and color ambience are among the difficult-to–measure factors. As we began to find new uses for older buildings in the 1970's, many pre-Modern mills, warehouses, schools and other structures built of stone, masonry and heavy timber  were found to possess energesic values to a higher degree than is usually  found in  later buildings. The scale and texture of stones, the rhythm and detail of windows, the sound, smell and resilience of heavy timber floors, combine to make a space inside, not the abstract space of the International Modern style, but a tangible, palpable space. The goal of the architect for an armature is to find new poetic images that, like Wright's Pauson House ruin, draw us to the building over the centuries and which incorporate energesic qualities in their new spaces and forms.

When I say we can return to nature for new symbolism, I am going beyond the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' romantic rediscovery of nature and natural beauty, drawing instead on twentieth century concepts that derive from the natural sciences.

The transformation of the material of the Earth's crust- fossils, vegetation, sediments,  and magma-are taken  as the basis for an armature metaphor, a building that does not merely sit on the Earth but that seems to be derived from the Earth itself. I see the armature as a kind of underlayment symbolic of the earth as a background form which functional or fanciful forms, fragments of historic  styles and contemporary additions can be seen to emerge as if from more primordial elements.

Properties most amenable to symbolic reconstitution are signs of stability, mass and erosion and the evidence of great age as seen in layers of rock and sediments; transformations from seas to solids; bands of fossils; and human settlements as unearthed by archeologists. Paralleling nature, forms and textures of the armature refer to the dense and the diaphanous, growth and decay, stability and change. I am seeking an expressive form in which the evolutionary process and the phenomenal properties of Earth will be seen as a context for an evolving cosmology.

Armature based on landform metaphors of the geological structure of the earth's crust, archeological layers of civilization, and organic life, imply astreaming continuum of time. The public armature, a three- story interface with streets bounding an urban block, is a dark mass covered with reliefs, accessible to pedestrians on one side and vehicles and pedestrians on the other.  The street face is conceived as a mosaic tapestry never to be completed. Openings are for a variety of stores and offices at street level. Additional light streams in from wells through the roof. The glassy building above the armature contains residences and offices developed by the private sector, and utilizes the principle of a continuous “sun porch,” two meters deep and functioning as a heat trap or insulating buffer.

Neighborhood three-story armature with below-grade parking bounds the pedestrian spine, increasing density and creating shops and workplaces while allowing extensive additions. Shaded in a dot pattern, the armature suggests how ornamental features and allusions to historic styles and ruins could emerge. It also shows unfinished surfaces covered temporarily with vines.

Armature for public services. An armature for public services for the southwestern United States. The long-lasting core, here incorporating metaphors of regional land forms and layered with allusions to pertinent historic architecture, is gradually encrusted with citizens' crafts and arts. Important trees, fountains and pools are available to the public as is outdoor space for gathering and exhibitions. Connected to the ceremonial core, which is used for circulation, galleries and restaurants, there are buildings designed by individual architects to house various branches of government. In contrast to the “earthy” mass of the core are large openings, which permit people to read the spaces within and to see connected departments .