Gregory Ain: No Place Like Utopia

Last week’s story about the discovery of Gregory Ain’s long-lost house for the Museum of Modern Art mentions Christiane Robbins and Katherine Lambert, who are making a film about Ain called No Place Like Utopia. The article mentions that the filmmakers were “on the trail” of the existence of the MoMA house before George Smart found it and brought it to the attention of the New York Times. I can confirm this—Lambert and Robbins have been pursuing the story of the house’s afterlife for several years and they specifically sought this information from MoMA. Their exhibition “This Future has a Past…” for the 2016 Venice Biennale cleverly portrayed Ain’s museum house as a blur. Similarly, when I wrote Gregory Ain (as I said last week) I was uncertain about the house’s fate because MoMA’s archival material was not available.

I’ve known Chris and Katherine for several years and I know them to be excellent and rigorous researchers. You can find more about No Place Like Utopia here, and under the “Film” tab there is a clip including architect Wolf Prix discussing Ain’s importance. I have eagerly participated as a consultant to the film and I am very much looking forward to it.

Found: Gregory Ain's Museum House

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2746?installation_image_index=6

Today in the New York Times, Eve Kahn breaks the story that Gregory Ain's house built for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 has been ‘discovered’ in the town of Croton-On-Hudson, about 40 miles north of Manhattan. The story is excellent and I’m happy to have been included. Credit to George Smart for finding the house after digging deep in MoMA’s archive. What a wonderful surprise!

In my book Gregory Ain: The Modern House as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008) I wrote at length about the museum house, and I labeled it “destroyed” in the appendix (p.249). On that fact, I was wrong! During the period of my research, MoMA’s full archive was unavailable while the museum was renovated by Yoshio Taniguchi. I also wrote of the house’s “dismantling” (p.199), because I was simply uncertain what had happened to the house, and because I knew the previous year’s house by Marcel Breuer had been moved piece-by-piece.

In any case, if I was wrong, I am happy to have been wrong! It’s a gift to architectural history that the house exists. I’m excited to visit it as soon as possible.

MoMA’s page about the exhibition house has links to original documents and images which have recently been digitized.

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The Times article mentions a forthcoming essay of mine. It is called “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance,” to be published in the book Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape, edited by Anthony Fontenot (MIT Press, Spring 2022). I wrote this in 2015, after requesting Ain’s FBI file through a FOIA request. I think it will be an eye-opener. Here’s the opening of the essay:

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A follow-up here: Gregory Ain: No Place Like Utopia

Architectural Engineering and Existing Buildings

Earlier this month I gave a talk called “Architectural Engineering and Existing Buildings” at the Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) 2021 Conference. Here’s a teaser from Twitter:

The talk begins from the premise that future AE graduates will enter a world of professional practice where renovations of existing buildings will be increasingly important, and that we are likely not preparing them adequately for investigative and design problems regarding existing buildings and systems. It also clarifies that this is a different subject from Historic Preservation.

Then, it reviews some of the topics and resources that are available for anyone who wants to consider adding more content about adaptive reuse to an AE class or curriculum. I briefly discuss concepts such as Building Pathology, and Stewart Brand’s “Shearing Layers.”

The full talk (18:40) can be seen here:

Please comment if you have additional ideas!

Design tips for students: “Play Notre Dame”

In journalism, the maxim “Play Notre Dame” means to find the strongest counter-arguments to your position, and argue against them directly and forcefully. (In college football, back in the day, Notre Dame was the most challenging team you could add to your schedule. The best teams wanted to play Notre Dame.) So the negative corollary is: don’t play weak teams to gain an easy victory. Or for journalists, don’t play to the weak counter-arguments; don’t simply ask yourself the easy questions.

In a similar fashion, when students are evaluating their own design work in process I encourage them to ask the hardest questions and answer them in writing. For example: A student has a schematic design for a dormitory. He or she should ask what makes this different from and better than a prison? and then answer that question in a few sentences. Writing it down is important, because writing clarifies thinking.

For most buildings, the ultimate hard question is: would this project be a gift or a burden to its users and its community?

Design tips for students: “Write drunk“

I remember vividly, years ago, a radio interview with the poet Miller Williams about the process of writing and revising. He said (as I recall) that the first draft of a poem usually comes to him all-at-once. When he’s inspired, he said, the ideas come so quickly that he can’t write fast enough to keep up. In this state of furious activity he is practically delirious, never pausing to reflect or evaluate—just creation. Then, after some time and distance, he revises the poem, over and over, with an editor’s detachment. This takes months. He said: “Write drunk and revise sober.”

( I found it! here, at about 3:30. My recollection was pretty good, although he says it better.)

I like to share this story with students in architecture studios. I endorse ‘writing drunk’—creating very freely, quickly, intuitively at first. But afterwards it is critical to stand back from your own work and evaluate it, and ‘revise sober’. To achieve distance is really hard, especially for young people, because of ego and ownership. And that’s why we have pin-ups and open critiques, to help students be detached from their drunken creative works, so they can revise sober.

If the drunk/sober analogy is insensitive, Stephen King said it this way: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)

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Also written for students:
Architectural Forms
The Master's Thesis Playbook
Using an Art Museum