CUBE
28.02.2001 - 24.04.2001

This exhibition examines three very different ways in which the language of modernism has been extended to attain an enduring quality. In gallery 1, Julius Shulman - a series of seminal photographs capturing the spirit of modernism in post war California. In gallery 2, Peter Aldington - a collection of photographs, models and plans illustrating his development A Garden and Three Houses. And in gallery 3, David Chipperfield - works including two large-scale models demonstrating the volumetric, spatial and material concerns of two of his most ambitious projects to date - the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa, USA and the new Law Courts for Salerno, Italy. 


Julius Shulman

In a career which spans eight decades, Julius Shulman is one of the world's most seminal architectural photographers, and the first architectural photographer to elevate his craft to artistic status. He has become as iconic a figure as the architects he recorded.

The exhibition at CUBE brings together some of Shulman's most iconic photographs of West Coast domestic architecture. A self-taught photographer, Shulman's career began when he met the architect Richard Neutra in 1936 in Los Angeles. Neutra was to become one of the leading architects working in Southern California, and Shulman documented the majority of his buildings. Neutra belonged to a group of modernist architects drawn to work in and around Los Angeles.

Many of the buildings shown in this exhibition were built as part of the Case Study Housing Programme. John Entenza, the editor of Arts and Architecture magazine, set up this programme in 1945. It provided an extraordinary opportunity for a generation of American and emigre architects to pursue an unprecedented experiment in domestic architecture. Fuelled by a rising demand for affordable single-family homes - and the need to house a generation of GIs returning from Europe - some 26 progressively designed Case Study Houses were built in its twenty year duration, each intended as a model for future construction on a mass scale. Architects such as Edward Killingsworth, Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig proved they could build cost-effective homes without comprising the utopian principles of Modernism.

It was Julius Shulman who gave pictorial form to the radical architecture they created, and his perfectly composed, light filled images parallel the sense of optimism and confidence which infused both the architecture and the historical movement in which it was created. Shulman has stated that "I wasn't taking a likeness so much as making the photograph the most important feature...without me the work would not have become so well known."

Shulman's pictures not only introduced southern Californian Modernism to a wider audience, but influenced what was built there and elsewhere. His images of Paul Laszlo's early US house helped to launch that architect's career, while his pictures of the Bradbury Building in downtown LA established it as an architectural icon. When Frank Gehry was an architectural student, Shulman persuaded his brother-in-law to give him a commission. He then shot Gehry's next project, the Steeves Houses in Brentwood, and made sure that the pictures were published in the LA Times.

Because he knew architects so well, Shulman was extraordinarily perceptive about their work. Rudolph Schindler helped him perfect his lighting techniques by taking the trouble to critique Shulman's pictures. One of his most famous shots, of Richard Neutra's Kaufman House in Palm Springs, was taken at dusk, when the architect was anxious to leave after three days of shooting. A less confident photographer would have complied, but Shulman insisted on staying.

Shulman, now 90, spends most of his time organising his archive of images, but can be coaxed back behind the camera. In 1997, when Gehry was finishing the Guggenheim in Bilbao, he had to choose a photographer. He insisted on using the man who helped launch his career: Julius Shulman.



Peter Aldington

This exhibition, designed by Richard Murphy and featuring the photographs of Richard Bryant, celebrates Peter Aldington's three village houses and a garden designed and built in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, in the 1960s; winning a Royal Institute of British Architects award in the 1970s. Since then the scheme has become become internationally celebrated, even elevated to the status of listed buildings as an exceptional and influential example of modern architecture - compactness and privacy, variety and unity.

The Richard Bryant photos in this exhibition, (helpfully annotated on a little plan, with only occasional text extras) describe the whole thing beautifully. The luscious, deep leafy foliage in the series of gardens, the constant series of intimate, unenclosed inside and outside spaces. It's clear from the start that this is a perfect fusion of modernist and indigenous traditional sensibilities: the framing and composition of mass and openings is intensely modernist; the materials and detailing both modern and traditional - the broad horizontal sweep of the pantiled roof; the roughcast white-painted render and durox concrete; the old walls taken into the new composition.

The exhibition starts by taking the viewer through the garden, then (with help from the model) to the overall composition of spaces and views - particularly the highly achieved modernist continuity between inside and outside with folding glass doors, garden and living spaces taking each other in. Gradually, the photos move you inside and on to the details - glass set into brickwork, timber set in the gravel, pivoting door and slatted upper windows. Then the focus moves on to the way the spaces work: the lovely little kitchen bay that looks over living and garden spaces with light coming in sideways, the ladder to the galleried room which had served as office, daughter's bedroom and study: and the exquisite Wychert wall - a mud wall with holes made by wild bees - incorporated into the house.

The historian and critic Dan Cruickshank visited Aldington's development in October 1996 for a "masterclass" article for the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects: his verdict was that "these buildings remain an object lesson for all architects", and their combination of "the most modest of materials, picturesque traditions, the key tenets of modernism and a magic union of indoors and outdoors, made them extraordinary, precious and rare."

As Richard Murphy puts it,"If only! If only home builders in this country had taken the time to look at what Peter Aldington achieved at Haddenham. Had they done that we might have been spared over the last thirty years the obscenity of ticky tacky boxy housing estates that corrupt every town and village the length of the country. The lessons are still waiting to be learnt."



David Chipperfield

Tradition coupled with invention forms the basis of David Chipperfield's design philosophy. The interplay of accepted and valued ideas combined with newly imagined thoughts invites an architecture that is conceptually clear and considered.

Chipperfield seeks to reconnect us with the spaces and forms amid which we move, through an emphasis on their physicality, their dialogue with what surrounds them (whether in terms of the natural world or those of existing structures) and above all, their sensory potencies harnessed by their use of light and their emphasis on the intrinsic beauty and strength of materials. As he himself says, "We must take control of the physical dimension of our work; we must learn how to speculate, and control the matter of our consideration. We must encourage an architecture that does not look like built drawings. Material, volume and light must occupy the very centre of our craft."

The two large-scale models at CUBE were examples of how this design philosophy is translated into built form. They showed not only the reality of the spaces being created but also the sculptural intent of the conceptual ideas. Chipperfield's work at CUBE also incorporated a series of supporting conceptual and schematic models which explained a method of creative decision-making culminating in a detailed representation of a complex idea. The themes of tradition and invention are well understood within the context of this process.  

Images:

Case study home no.22 1958 Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles, California 1959-60
Kaufman House,1947 Richard Neutra, Palm Springs, Los Angeles California 1946

Peter Aldington Interior

Davenport Museum of Art, concept model

Davenport Museum of Art, 1:30 model

Organised and curated by Graeme Russell