The site for this freestanding construction, which fills a modest city block, is Houston perverse. It had been an utterly convincing display of site as source.īut not long afterwards I was reminded of the downside of thinking this way - or at least publicly professing to - while visiting the Audrey Jones Beck Building, an extension to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, designed by Rafael Moneo, and completed in 2000. The audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation. Murcutt then turned off the lights, and, without saying another word, showed twenty slides of the finished construction - the Simpson-Lee house. After about 40 minutes, these were clear and complete. Instead, the building’s plan and section gradually became apparent on the chalkboard.

He never actually spoke about or drew the construction directly. Murcutt didn’t really refer to anything but the site, and even then primarily as a set of physical parameters - the angle and arc of the summer and winter sun, the direction and speed of cool and warm and strong and weak and moist and dry winds, the height of grasses and brush over the course of the year, the location and shape of outcroppings of rock, the paths that animals took through the site (and the heights of those animals), the probable limit of a fire line, and so on - each and all of which he sketched or diagrammed. He spoke in front of a large blank chalkboard, and, as he began talking about the site for a construction, he drew out in chalk the various facts (like the hillside slope in section) or the consequence of facts (the arc of a tree that might fall) that were inarguably true.

Glenn Murcutt gave a lecture at my university some years ago in the latter category. While some of these presentations have trafficked in various sorts of disingenuousness, others have been transcendent. Easily two-thirds of the many talks I’ve heard architects give over the past 20 years have operated from this basic presumption. It is not uncommon today for an architect to give a public lecture about a building and gloss over the parameters of its program or the specific needs of its users, speaking instead mostly about the building’s site - its measure, tendencies, desires, structure, mythologies, meaning - as if the problem of architectural design was primarily one of site response. Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief (Paramount Pictures, 1955).

Hell architect sex