| |
Five
Houses, Ten Details by Edward R. Ford
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Hardcover, 256 pages
Virginia-based architect and educator
Edward R. Ford is known most for his two-volume
study on The
Details of Modern Architecture. Those carefully
illustrated books elevated the importance of technical details
in the analysis of modern architecture and the education
of young architects. Not surprisingly Ford's latest book,
the second in Princeton Architectural Press's "Writing
Matters" series, if focused on architectural details.
In this investigation of different houses he designed for
his property in Charlottesville, detailing is seen as an
important and necessary element in architecture, something
to be expressed, not buried under a guise of abstraction.
In each of the five designs that Ford undertakes for his
house different themes are explored: details and abstraction,
materials and form, detail and structure, detail and joints,
and furniture and architecture.
Ford's writing and drawings, like
his other books, is clear and extremely persuasive in arguing
for an architecture where details are carefully articulated.
In the final, built house the details are a mixture of articulated
and abstracted, but ultimately they are expressive of what
they are, details, not miniature versions of the architecture
of which they are apart. This last, and the abstraction
and continuity of surface, are what Ford rallies against.
Not surprisingly his house exhibits a mix of the tectonic
and the Arts & Crafts, dated but pleasing, a blend of
the modern and the vernacular.
My quibbles with Ford's argument
are two: his plans do not really change in each exploration
and his argument is rooted in the autonomy of architecture.
Regarding the first, the basic footprint and volume are
set by local codes, but from chapter to chapter the plans
have certain constants, such as mezzanines in the double-height
living rooms. Basically each thematic study of the design
is a refinement of what came before. The relationship between
the detail and the plan is not discussed, perhaps rooted
in Ford's contention that the detail is not the building
in microcosm. But shouldn't the detail influence and be
influenced by the plan? Here the message is that a plan
can be rendered with a multiple of details. Regarding my
second quibble, Ford's argument probably could not happen
on any commission besides his own house. To basically explore
strictly architectural problems, divorced from any of the
relationships that architecture must confront (social, political)
that come from public projects, is a fairly incomplete investigation.
Economic and environmental concerns are dealt with, but
not nearly as much as the tectonic.
Nevertheless, Ford's call for architecture
to be expressive of its nature, as an assemblage of structures
and materials, is an appealing one. The slick and seamless
"blobitecture"
that retains its popularity fifteen years after its appearance
can, in this case, be seen as an architecture that denies
itself. Design adopting Ford's cause need not result in
the same modern-vernacular hybrid as his own house, but
it might utilize technology towards creating an appropriate
contemporary expression, rather than just the appearance
of the contemporary as an undulating skin.
or 
|
