GUINET FARMHOUSE

Three views of an ordinary building.

I was leafing thru Form Function and Design by Jacques Grillo.  On page 108, he includes three views of an ordinary building.  And two of the three views are from opposite sides of the building!

I was stunned.  One of the laments of these pages is the propensity of most architectural publications to include, exactly, one tightly cropped photo of the building under discussion.  See Rietveld Schroeder House for more discussion on this topic.

But here, the author includes two photos from the north side of the building and one from the south.  Grillo uses these three photos to communicate how the building responds to the site, which is a gently sloping grade to the southeast.  He was compelled to show more than one photo of the building.  And he was inspired to show the building as it sits in the landscape.

For the vast majority of articles and books, this is unheard of.  As we have said before, we are typically given one tight shot of the best side of a famous building.  And this one tight shot excludes a great majority of the information necessary to understand a building.  The typical one tight shot excludes site features, which way is south, other buildings, unfortunate details, etc.

But in this case, the author celebrates the melding of the building with the site.  He calls this ordinary building a masterpiece.  I have included a scan of page 108.  If you cannot read the text, I wanted to be sure that this fantastic quote was legible.

“It’s lizard-like body hugged to the site, taking advantage of the gentle slope for shelter.  Its north facade was almost completely blind.  But to the welcome sun of the south, it opened many windows and doors…”   “In the wake of the house stretched a grove of low olive trees…”

This is the way all buildings should be presented in publications.  If you are going to write about a building, be it La Tourette, a grain silo, or an ordinary building, you need to do the following:

1) include at least three photographs,

2) the photos have to be of at least two opposite sides,

3) at least one photo shows the site and setting of the building, and

4) the discussion mentions at least which way south is.

We have been saying exactly this in these pages for some time now.  See, for example the travel related page titled Ordinary Building 1, in which you are strongly encouraged to take photos from as many sides of the building as you can.

I have observed that for every major architecture history book, the photographic presentation of buildings in the publication fails in at least one of the above four requirements.  And the one tight shot mentality that we are railing against goes a long way towards educating architects as to what is acceptable.

For your meditation, a passage from Grillo:

“In your years of school, you will desperately try to find your “way.”  And your search will be desperate until some day you discover that a school can only teach you how to learn and how to work by opening your mind not to one way of knowledge, but to the many ways opened by men of vision into the unknown territories of art – since it is true that there is an infinity of different ways to reach art, and that all are good, if they are authentic.”  from the preface.

I had particular fun making my transparent drawing of the farmhouse.  As I have said before, it is important to draw the object from a viewpoint that does not exist on the photos.  That way you are truly putting the enclosure together in your head.