Precedent Corners

[Sunday 9 November]

Donato Bramante, Santa Maria della Pace (Rome)

 

Snapshot halfway through the corner typologies study...

Francesco Borromini

 

Typology:

The Eliminated Corner

 

Example:

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Rome)

 

Description:

One of the most theatrical practitioners of the Baroque style, Borromini is said to have eliminated the corner in architecture. The undulating movements and sculptural effects of the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Borromini's first major independent commission) are characteristic of Baroque architecture, of which the church is of course an iconic masterpiece - but the architect allows them to flow so freely across this difficult corner site that the corner drowns in the concave/convex rhythms of the façade, visually liquidising the heavy stone in a dramatic display of bold architectural intricacy.

 

Donato Bramante

 

Typology:

The Iconoclash Corner

 

Example:

Santa Maria della Pace (Rome)

 

Description:

"At the courtyard of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, Bramante superposed the existing proportions of two orders - the Tuscan and the Ionic - changing both their iconic condition and their conventionally coded relationships. (...) The corner at Santa Maria della Pace suggests that the volume of the courtyard produces a vectoral force which is outisde of any geometric order, compressing the corner into its resultant material being."

 

(Peter Eisenman, Digital Scrambler, from Written into the void, p. ?)

 

Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Typology:

The Mitred Transparent Corner and The Overlapping Corner

 

Example:

Zimmerman House  |  Ross House

 

Description:

Mitered corners are fitted togther from parts cut at angles. Two pieces cut at 45 degree angles will fit together to form a 90 degree corner. The windows of the Zimmerman house by Frank Lloyd Wright have mitered glass corners that allow unobstructed views of the gardens.

 

"Wright attacked the traditional room at its point of greatest strength - at the corner. He dissolved the corner between the dining and living rooms at the Ross house by permitting one room to penetrate into the other. If the living room walls are extended to their point of contact, the corner is at the dining room table. A similar extension of the dining room walls makes a corner located well within the living room. " H. Allen Brooks, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Destruction of the Box"

 

Mies van der Rohe

 

Typology:

The Negative Corner

 

Example:

IIT Wishnik Hall (Chemistry Building)  |  Seagram Building

 

Description:

Philip Johnson writes about the Glass House that "Many details of the house are adapted from Mies' work, especially the corner treatment and the relation of the column to the window frames. This use of standard steel sections to make a strong and at the same time decorative finish to the façade design is typidal of Mies' Chicago work." It is also typical of the great German's treatment of the corner in his most iconic buildings: the IIT compound, the Seagram Building, the Barcelona Pavillion, and the Farnsworth House - all of which feature, in one way or another, the Negative Corner - the point where his 'refined simplicity' becomes less simple. The zipper in the black boot.

 

Richard Neutra

 

Typology:

The Extended Displaced Corner

 

Example:

The Singleton Residence

 

Description:

Some elements, such as major outdoor rooms enclosed by rows of movable vertical fins that offer flexible protection against the environment, seem to run through the buildings of Richard Neutra, including his famous Kauffmann House. Another element is the Extended Corner - a roof plate balancing on a structural element that is not quite exoskeletal, but rather seems to pierce through the building from the inside out. Floating vertical planes support their horisontal counterparts, while seemingly sliding away from or into each other.

 

 

Le Corbusier

 

Typology:

What to call this?

 

Example: Chapel at Ronchamp

 

Description:

TBC

 

Philip Johnson

 

Typology:

The Niche Corner

 

Example:

Cash Register Building, Denver

 

Description:

A take on Mies van der Rohe's Negative Corner, The Niche Corner...

 

Carlo Scarpa

 

Typology:

The Cut-Out Corner

 

Example:

Gypsoteca Canoviana (Possagno)

 

Description:

 

"Corner cutouts is a device frequently used in much of Scarpa's work. One might say he intensifies corners by giving them a direction or, it might be said he challenges the reading of the object-like quality of the volume, by giving it direction and thereby uniting it with its surroundings. I think they mean the same thing. I spoke of reversing Classical treatment before. This seems to be another example of this reversal. Rather than making corners, junctures, or connections positive, by embellishing them with a positive solid (as a capital, cornice, pedestal, etc., exemplifies) he creates a negative space which accomplishes the

same objective." (Ellen C. Soroka , "Carlo Scarpa – Connections in Design: A Generic Attitude",  dissertation, 1973.) Eric Owen Moss seems to have borrowed an idea or two from this in the design of The Box (1990).

 

Frank Gehry

 

Typology:

The Folded Sinuous Corner

 

Example:

Guggenheim Bilbao  |  IAC

 

Description:

TBC.

 

Peter Eisenman

 

Typology:

The Extruded Skeletal Corner

 

Example:

House III  |  House IV  |  Wexner Center

 

Description:

The column is extruded at different depths, creating alternative readings from that of a structural skeleton reminiscent of Sol Lewitt's sculptures, through to that of a regular slab, or wall. The corner as exploration of the syntactic combination of elements (beam, column, frame). The structural frame corner, but a bulimic frame: at times indulgent, at times ascetic. Where House III has one corner breaking out of the original grid, House IV starts with all four corners breaking out of the grid, only to end up a redefinition of the grid. In a kind of three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, space-defining frames slide into and out of each other, producing spaces (real or imagined) at their intersections. At times these corners are made redundant through the over-packing of space: columns stop before reaching the floor, and so on.

 

Steven Holl

 

Typology:

The Sliced Porosity Corner

 

As seen in:

Sliced Porosity Block  |  NYU Philosophy Department  |  Porosity Bench  |  Riddled Cupboard

 

Description:

The Sliced Porosity Corner works differently in different projects, but essentially builds on two themes: to slice off the corner at an angle, and to add porosity around the slice. This can be seen in the Sliced Porosity Block, the geometry of which results from minimum daylight exposures to the surrounding urban fabric prescribed by code. In the NYU Philosophy Department, the stairs are folded vertically through the building, producing many corners that are pierced with porosity in the form of cutouts. Both the Porosity Bench and the Riddled Cupboard are porously sliced pieces of furniture that can be seen through and plays with light to cast beautifullt patterned shadows.

 

Zaha Hadid

 

The Boolean Corner/The Extruded Corner

 

As seen in: Ideal House, Cologne  |  Cincinatti Arts Center  |  Darat King Abdullah II Amman

 

Description:

 

This is different from Carlo Scarpa's treatment in that whereas Scarpa cuts out part of the corner, Hadid allows this cut-out to completely deform - at times to the point of eradication - its supporting wall or column. The cut taken to a new level of formal logic. The booleaned-out space is so large as to almost, but not quite, make the reading of the corner impossible: we sense that it was once there, at some point during the process of drawing the building. Hadid creates interior or exterior space from cutting out the corner, sometimes replacing it with a new space, sometimes not, and sometimes extruding the walls to shoot out beyond the original building envelope.