On Loss:
CJoA Essay

This essay, originally titled On Creation and Loss, Ideas and Actuality was written for the Cornell Journal of Architecture, Issue 12, After 

Thanks to the Journal for their help in honing and editing the piece and for including it in the issue.

-JB

B.C.

Architecture is a curious thing: assembled by builders, orchestrated by architects, commissioned by owners, paid for by banks, celebrated by publications, and occasionally considered the common property of a nation/culture/users. Stakeholders (to use a word I hate) each profess a unique claim to the architecture, many believing they possess a controlling interest. The law attempts to navigate among these with overlapping yet minutely parsed constellations of ownership but can’t address the contrapuntal subtext at work among these players.

While architects author these endeavors and may own the documents (effectively, the “building instruction manual” including the drawings, models, specifications, schedules, etc.) they have only limited rights to the final product, while the ideas developed for its creation can be neither copyrighted nor patented. Builders own the physical components until payment (the process, for some, is the most transactional of all transactions) and have seemingly limitless rights to ensure payment. Owners, as the legal name implies, own the finished product, with some caveats. Banks, bonds, and other lending finance nearly every built structure (a claim I can’t back up with data but sounds correct) today or at some point in their history, in large part because tax codes provide economic incentives for using OPM (other people’s money).

Ownership (in every project more complex than a settler building their own house on the prairie) is distributed among a range of players overshadowing the architect. Architects operate (often unwittingly) in a field of play that is really more power politics than artistic auteurism. Architectural stars (“Starchitects” here, “Archistars” elsewhere) avoid this problem by becoming a power player (but the rest of us, and that is nearly 100% of all architects, are subject to subjugation when power tips away from us). 

At an unforgettable 1995 panel moderated by Jonathan Barnett, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and David Rockefeller all took the stage at the Caspary Auditorium of Rockefeller University. The context alone should have been the “tell”: Rockefeller University was founded by David’s grandfather and the auditorium was designed by Wallace Harrison, who designed Rockefeller Center. Octogenarians Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and David Rockefeller regaled the mostly young audience.

The moment of truth came when, after Johnson and Pei had gone on about their own careers (exuding false modesty while solidifying their own position in the architectural firmament), David Rockefeller cleared his throat before saying “When father donated the land for the United Nations…” (a jaw dropping prologue to whatever he said next, which we have all forgotten). The nexus of power shifted visibly on the stage and the quiet voice of David Rockefeller held it all.

Even among eponymous buildings, rarely is the structure built and paid for in cash and “owned” outright. Rockefeller Center required outside financing, but The Woolworth Building, in Lower Manhattan, remains an exception to the convention. The Woolworth Building (where, full disclosure, my own office was once happily situated) is worth considering as an artfully documented hybrid of overlapping interests. Built by F. W. Woolworth in 1913 for $13.5M in cash, it features an ecclesiastical lobby, aptly reflecting the moniker “Cathedral of Commerce.” In addition to the lobby’s mosaics, carvings, paintings, and elaborate gothic references, it is lined by twelve stone grotesques of the building’s multiple “owners” or “apostles.” They caricature and celebrate the building’s participants including owner Frank Winfield Woolworth, architect Cass Gilbert, structural engineer Gunvald Aus, banker Louis Pierson (whose Irving Bank stands in, appropriately, for the high altar), builder Louis Horowitz, broker Edward Hogan (this was, after all, a commercial leasing venture) and others whose names are lost but whose likenesses remain.

The Woolworth Building is a diagram of “distributed ownership.” Those twelve “apostles” and nine hundred other luminaries dined the night of the opening high up in the tower (reported as the “highest dinner ever held in New York” in an almost too cute triple entendre) and closer to God, where Woolworth presented Gilbert with an enormous bronze cup and Gilbert toasted Woolworth expressing astonishment that the building was owned free and clear of financing. 

It was an interesting exchange: Gilbert, we imagine, in the midst of experiencing the separation anxiety of “losing” “his” building to the public, perhaps grasping for some other encumbrance (to make it a bit less Frank’s than his own) while receiving a chalice from the Owner to lighten the loss. (In childrearing it would be called a ‘transitional object,’ something to grasp while losing their first attachment, i.e. mom. In architecture it is sometimes called a cornerstone, swapping ownership with compensatory pride. In religion it might be called transubstantiation)

References to the divine are not entirely accidental. The cruciform lobby, appropriately entered from the east (NYC-grid east, to be precise, anchoring it in realms cosmic, corporeal, and commercial), features twenty-four elevators posing as chapels; a skylit altar and stairs leading up (rather than down) to the Irving Bank “crypt” (where lucre, rather than relics, are ensconced); and elaborate interior mosaics, sculpture, filigree, and embedded iconography, all announced to the street via an entrance archivolt lined with allegorical figures, a trope borrowed from the architect’s favored cathedrals. 

The Woolworth Building’s inaugural Last Supper, with all Twelve Apostles in attendance (actually held on Passover, 1913, just to bolster the subtext) celebrated both the finality of construction and the christening of the world’s tallest building. The simultaneous death and resurrection marked the moment of transfiguration from darkness to light (with an assist by Woodrow Wilson signaling its illumination) and its consecration as the highest, and literally the tallest, of all human endeavors. 

L’Ultima Cena is the moment of transfigurazione, elevation from what was a mere “building site” to something more venerated, an icon of architecture and an apparition of heavenliness on earth. 

(Too much? Perhaps.) But that internally conflicted sense of loss is a familiar, if rarely acknowledged, feeling for anyone who has built anything. The slipping away of a project, i.e. the commutation to the legal Owner, is a moment of real separation and quiet interior grief for architects, in spite of the hopes for success of one’s progeny. After tasting something as close as possible to the original power architects once had (when “Master Builder” was aptly applied) its sudden revocation can be as disorienting as it is distressing. (Wile E. Coyote knows the feeling well, while hovering yards from the cliff edge and miles above the canyon floor, suspended between time and gravity, not to mention the suspension of disbelief required to defy, or deny, these universal constants.) 

As Christo put it; “You have to understand: Art is alive, and if art is alive, it must die.” The “completion” of a project stops all forward progress; it’s an ice bath for the cooked meal, the end of what seems like an organic, living process that creates a building. It is, in a real sense, the death of a process in the subconscious of the architect. It is quite the opposite in the psyche of the owner; it is the birth. This simultaneous loss and gain, a kind of balance sheet accounting of the project, timestamps a precise and shared moment, perhaps not as fully elaborated as in the Woolworth Building tale, but real nonetheless. 

To the architect, everything beyond that point is “after.” The building has an “afterlife” but the architect ceases to be its life force. With the atrophy of control, the inability to make any further adjustments and decisions, the process itself dies in the afterlife. 

The imperative to continue the design process while realizing a project, to over-invest in the faithful fulfillment of an architect’s idea, is obvious to the experienced. We may issue the instruction manual for making a building, but realizing it is a bit more complicated than assembling an IKEA bookshelf. The illusion that the assembly guide is the watertight, self-actualizing DNA of a building implies it can be built without any ongoing assistance from the creator (not that Creator…the design creator, though the confusion is not entirely accidental). That illusion of comprehensive completeness is more about the contractual structure assigning responsibility than it is a reflection of what it takes to make great architecture. Great architecture is not a spectator sport. 

Pierre Chareau famously moved his office, with collaborators Bijvoet and Dalbet, into the Maison de Verre as soon as the steel was in place. The case could be made that this remarkable construction could not have been made any other way. 

A.D.

If architects don’t own the design of a building, don’t own the building itself, and are sidelined from its operative (performative?) aspects, then what—other than a silver chalice—are we left with? Possibly some part of our fee: that other universal constant, money. 

While researching a house designed by Richard Neutra in 1934 for our work on a twenty-first century restoration, I came across a worksheet enumerating the increased budget of $9,332 (yes, the increased budget) and noting the original budget with a doodled bit of math on the page. Neutra was calculating his upwardly revised percentage-based fee! This is something (a) every architect does, (b) every architect can recognize, and (c) by now most can do in their head (or more likely on a phone). 

These interior machinations affect all of us who manufacture ideas in exchange for something more fungible; we are never quite sure what exactly we are losing in spite of being fairly certain of what we are gaining.

Other than the unlikely excess profit remaining from the fee, we are primarily left with photographs. Neutra, in the Sten-Frenke House above, photographed the project—before the owners had moved in their objects of questionable taste—by moving the same bits of his own furniture (lamp, chair, rug) around the house to appear in every anemic image. His spartan aesthetic undercuts the luxury of the house, something we tried to correct seventy-five years later when Julius Shulman circled back to one of the only Neutra houses he hadn’t photographed. But Neutra’s private note makes clear the slightly desperate need for some talisman, however inadequate, to maintain even a tenuous connection to our work.

Photographs are our own transitional objects; most of the architecture we “see,” including our own, we experience through photographs.

We accept this downgrade of one dimension (or possibly two, if we include time) from the architectural experience without much resistance. We need portability from the world’s least portable art (though I suppose landscape architecture is even less portable), but we have come to think of images as architecture. As transitional objects they keep us preoccupied, sated, in full possession of our work even after our loss of the original. That they become the architecture itself is the ultimate bait and switch. 

This was driven home in a Turncoats Debate I participated in at The Cooper Union. “Buildings Don’t Matter” was based on the proposition that the power of images transcends the impact of built reality; that images are, in fact, architecture. There is something to that (which I argued for, until I argued against it, in the Turncoats style) as publications, awards, portfolios, and even education depend on images, not reality. In another world this would be like a restaurant critic reviewing the menu, not the food and place, or awarding the PEN/Faulkner prize based on a book review, not the book itself. A photograph is an interpretation of architecture, by unrelated artists, who use our work to make their own art; and they own the images they make!

For unbuilt projects images are all we have, and they have the potential to impact the history of architecture as much, occasionally more, than actual built works. Ownership of renderings, drawings, and models is clear; they remain the sole intellectual property of the author, usually the credited architect. Not building turns out, ironically, to be the only way to fully protect one’s ideas! Once an idea enters the complex field of “distributed ownership” it is a lot less clear. 

There are even cases of the architect losing the rights to build works similar to their own built portfolio. Donald Trump (and why is that name no surprise at all?) sued and prevailed over Philip Birnbaum, an architect of no particular repute (his obituary was emblematically subtitled “Builder Celebrated for his Efficiency”). Birnbaum tried to mirror his Trump design (pun intended) catty-corner (or kitty-corner or cater-corner, variations I still don’t get, but apparently refer to four, as in four corners of an intersection) to the original, in a dubious attempt to create a “gateway to Third Avenue.” Trump sued him claiming Trump himself had in fact contributed all the salient features of the design, and Birnbaum was stealing these ideas! A case of an architect being enjoined from his own work may be unique (and, of course, who better than Trump to grab credit for everything done by others) but illustrates the fragility of what architects consider the only thing they can own, their own design work. 

Part of the confusion about design ideas versus built ideas is warranted. US copyright law allows us the ownership of the drawings but not the underlying ideas, yet—in some rather confusing circumstances—also protects aspects of the built result of those ideas. EU copyright recognizes the ownership of ideas embedded in finished projects, in perpetuity, but of course “auteur” is a European, not American, concept.

When plotted against particular moments in the course of the realization of built work, this nebulousness raises some issues that go to the heart of what we, as architects, actually own and what we lose in the process of making architecture.

A project “belongs” (part literally/part figuratively) to the architect as long as it remains an idea, or drawings or even a building site or an unfinished construction. Our ownership diminishes as the builder begins the realization of the architecture, but in an ideal process still relies on the architect to solve and clarify the myriad issues that arise in construction. In fact, the architect is (again, ideally) a kind of celebrity (sometimes infamously) on the building site. In Italy the architect is personally responsible for site safety and is more than a celebrity (always referred to as Signore Architetto and occasionally as Professore Dottore Ingenier Architetto…it is Italy, after all) and is a figure of legal accountability. We litigious Americans prefer much reduced accountability accompanied by much reduced ownership. 

That esteemed status can evaporate as the building is completed. Ownership is technically and legally transferred to the Owner (capitalized, in case there was any doubt, in all contractual documents) in the steps leading up to full possession or occupancy. What remains with the architect? What has the architect lost (or reluctantly relinquished)? More than the technical change would belie. It is a point at which the architect no longer owns significant aspects of their own direction. Just ask Mr. Birnbaum.

As architects we may be commodified IRL, but the motivation for architects to do the impossible—making architecture that fully satisfies the inner and outer requirements of all the overlapping interests—requires both an enduring optimism and a sense of ownership that transcends the reality of corporeal economics. We believe, to some degree, that authorship is ownership, something law school courses (and the courts, in the unfortunate case of Trump v. Birnbaum) don’t fully acknowledge.

Quoting Michael Graves, copyright protection covers only the “poetic language” of an architectural work, which includes those parts of the design that are “responsive to issues external to the building, and incorporates the three-dimensional expression of the myths and rituals of society.” This is more a description of the alternate reality in which architects reside than a useful distinction for establishing ownership.

Smart clients recognize the alternate reality of the architect (not necessarily in its fully obfuscated detail) and its effect on the process of architecture: most architects would do anything to get their project built faithfully to their ideals. Anything. 

Once a client recognizes this truth it is “game over.” Owners can elicit infinite effort for very finite compensation when the stakes are faithfulness. Architects will, unfortunately, sacrifice everything to keep their ideas intact. This emotional vulnerability is elided only to forestall the likely manipulation we will face once a client recognizes it. 

Standing heroically against the corrupting powers (Owners, Finances, Codes, Taste) that might alter one’s vision; turning the architecture we orchestrate into an extension of the inner soul of the architect; shrouding design in language intended to both aggrandize and obfuscate ideas and motives (a subject for another essay): these are the tools not of a participant in a conscious collaborative endeavor, but the mark of one struggling alone against the internal fears of loss. 

I am less interested in Howard Roark than I am in how interested architecture students are in Howard Roark. The cost of architectural impurity, buildings identified as the architect themselves, and a melodramatic fascination with sexual and political power are the embedded tropes in The Fountainhead. Most students think it is a tale of righteousness, with Roark a model of what any principled architect would (or could or should) do.

I think of it more as a parable celebrating the physical death of a building privileged over acceptance of anything less than perfect fidelity to the architect’s vision. (It’s a kind of preemptive Kübler-Ross mash-up; Anger causing death, Denial of impending loss, an end run around Acceptance. Bargaining and Depression are just sideshows). Anything to mask the loss integral to our chosen profession.

Loss, after all, isn’t a bug in the process of architecture, it’s a feature.