Architecture as a Filter

What does it mean to talk about architecture as a filter? And what does this analogy tell us about the four buildings in this book and also about architecture and analogies more generally? The writer Robert Grudin has observed that creative ideas do not come out of nowhere fully formed, like the proverbial light bulb going off. Instead, we use analogies to compare something new with something we already know, creating what does not yet exist on a foundation of what does. While the number of possible comparisons remains almost infinite, Grudin argues that analogies fall into two categories: intradisciplinary analogies, which are drawn from the same field, and interdisciplinary ones, drawn from another field.¹

            We judge an analogy by how well it enables us achieve something new. So how has the analogy of a filter informed the four buildings here? These buildings stand in very different locations—Istanbul, Noida (near New Delhi), Riyadh, and New York City—and so FXFOWLE has had to filter a lot of information about context, climate, and culture. But probing a little deeper, we can see how the person and the place affect the application of an analogy. Senior partner Dan Kaplan led the design of two of the buildings; senior partner Sudhir Jambhekar, the other two. When working in cultures each of them knows well—the United States and India, respectively—the approach to the design was more intradisciplinary.

            In Greater Noida Housing, Jambhekar alludes to the architecture of Louis Kahn, the mid-twentieth-century American architect who worked in India and who influenced many practitioners there. The mix of concrete shear walls and infill housing units at Noida recalls Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, and the offset forms and fin walls that extend above the top floors echo the animated skyline of Kahn’s Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia. Jambhekar filtered Kahn’s ideas in response to a different program and place—middle-class housing in the hot Indian climate—but the intradisciplinary influence of Kahn’s work on this new and imaginative residential development is undeniable.

            Kaplan’s design for Eleven Times Square in New York also refers to other architecture. The illuminated base of the building evokes the brightly lit signage covering the facades of buildings along Forty-second Street and nearby Times Square. Meanwhile, the outwardly canted glass tower that rises from that base and angles toward the corner exaggerates the looming quality of Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers and also channels the playful, fantasylike aspects of other buildings in New York’s theater district. In both cases, the architects’ deep knowledge of the culture and context in which they worked has made them more comfortable in drawing connections to their experience of a place. Familiarity and intradisciplinary analogies go hand in hand.

         The other two buildings in this book show interdisciplinarity at work. Kaplan’s Renaissance Tower in Istanbul has a pointed top, like the many prayer towers in that predominantly Muslim city. But the building’s folded and faceted form also looks like an enormous body cloaked in the full-length, long-sleeved clothing of many Muslim men and women; this nearly complete cover is worn for reasons both religious and climatic. Kaplan's reference to Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss, with its angular couple wrapped in an enveloping robe, reflects his thinking about the building in terms of the body, while showing the influence that abstract Islamic ornament has had on modern, Western art. Aspects of foreign cultures filter through the work of creative people, sometimes consciously and sometimes not.

            The same interdisciplinary approach occurs in Jambhekar’s Museum of the Built Environment in Riyadh. Here, the filter analogy seems almost literal: the building sifts people as they move through the structure horizontally via skyways and a monorail and vertically to shops, restaurants, offices, and museum. Internal and external circulation patterns are likewise split by the building as it bridges over a wadi, a recessed open space that runs under the structure as part of a continuous pedestrian path. While the traditional masonry architecture of Saudi Arabia influenced Jambhekar’s design the museum also recalls something quite different: its shimmering, glass skin of triangular scales and its bent form, uplifted at each end, evoke a giant fish about to swim off among the towers that will soon surround it. That fishlike form seems particularly appealing in a hot, dry country and especially appropriate in a peninsula nation surrounded by seas, but this design—like Renaissance Tower—also shows the increasingly cultural and biological nature of the analogies contemporary architects now draw.

            Ample reason for these new analogies exists. Modern architecture represented not just a formal and technological break from the past but also a profound shift in the analogies architects use when designing. Most premodern designers referred to traditional buildings in an intradisciplinary way, reinterpreting a classic or vernacular precedent while making incremental changes or improvements to it. With modernism, designers began, instead, to compare buildings to non-architectural phenomena—cars, ships, and planes. And after the brief counter-reformation of postmodernism, in which intradisciplinary analogies to older buildings came back in vogue, current architecture has largely embraced both approaches, with the same architects sometimes drawing analogies to other buildings and sometimes to other fields—especially, in recent years, to biology and ecology—when called for by culture and context. The better the architects, the better they are in filtering out the inappropriate and seizing upon the essential.

            Beyond helping to develop overall form, analogies serve to clarify internal arrangements and details of plans and sections, as evidenced in the buildings here. The idea of a filter seems particularly useful, since it refers both to devices that sort out different materials and to membranes that screen different liquids or gases. The Riyadh museum and the Noida housing work more like filtering devices. The museum functions, in section, like a giant sieve, directing the flow of people to diverse program elements by means of escalators, elevators, and ramps. The housing performs as a sieve in plan: ingeniously offset wings and open apartment plans allow for cross ventilation and views in multiple directions, enhancing the livability of each apartment. Both buildings recall a time when modern architecture had a greater permeability and porosity than it typically does now, with more interpenetrating spaces and operable exterior envelopes than building codes and mechanical systems allow today.

            At Eleven Times Square and Renaissance Tower, stacked floors and sealed walls make the buildings operate more like membranes. The New York building uses different kinds of glass, with varying degrees of reflectivity, to filter light, keep out heat, and minimize glare. The lobby, with its security desks and keycard gates, provides a different kind of filter, blocking unwarranted access and catching unwelcome intruders in its architectural sieve. The Istanbul tower does something similar. A gold-colored scrim, draped like a garment over the building’s envelope, enhances the filtering capabilities of the glass curtain wall by controlling solar gain yet also maintains exterior views and interior privacy. The building has two lobbies, with security gates and a long security desk controlling access to the elevators, and it has atriums and internal stairs on upper levels that allow people to move among floors without using the elevators.

            The power of an analogy lies in what it allows us to do and in what it says about what we have done, and in that regard, the idea of these four buildings acting like filters has served them well. The analogy has allowed their architects to sort through the myriad information and influences that surround every project and arrive at a distillation in four compelling and revealing works of architecture. The buildings draw interest not only because of the simplicity and clarity of thinking behind each one but also because of their memorable qualities, all driven by a strong, coherent analogy. In this way, these buildings also say a lot about what underlies the best design. Poor design usually arises either from a lack of ideas, all too common in the modern built environment, or from too many unresolved ideas, all too common in the work of inexperienced designers. Alternatively, good design—evident in the four buildings here—typically has a single broad and powerful idea or analogy that allows an architect to explore its possibilities and to play with its implications in diverse ways. In the end, all good design demands that we filter.

1. Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990), 27.

Introduction to the book Filter on the work of the architectural firm FX Fowle (ORO Editions, 2014)