Thick Thin

Author(s): Sarah Whiting

Source: Log , Spring 2004, No. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 25-30
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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Sarah Whiting
Thick Thin

Weighed down by a simultaneous envy and fear of the ephem-

eral, architects are once again trying to push beinahe ever
closer to nichts: triple glazing has attained single-paned depths
transparency and translucency are de rigueur ; structure is at
once lighter and stronger. This contemporary minimalism
strives for entry to an architectural El Dorado suspended
between the here and the after - a diaphanous present that
carries no weight. SANAA'S Park Café in Koga (1996-1998)
Mies van der Rohe: Pointillism
BECOMES PIXILATION. PHOTO: SARAH or their Day Care Center for the Elders in Yokohama (1997-
Whiting. 2000) immediately come to mind. Both projects gracefully
slip into their contexts, the first becoming the natural sur-
roundings of a provincial park, the second the dense urbanism
of Yokohama. SANAA'S minimalism is astonishingly beauti-
ful. Exploiting contemporary techniques, their buildings are
more about surface and detailing than Miesian proportion
and materiality. Albeit beautiful when done well - which is
all too rare, given the demands it makes on construction -
minimalism as an aspiration risks propagating architectural
banality: by standing so still, so quietly, so barely there , such
projects can all too often tumble into nothingness.
Rather than stilling and silencing, Rem Koolhaas and
the Office for Metropolitan Architecture's recently completed
McCormick Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Tech-
nology (UT) in Chicago transforms and amplifies at every
turn. Here the material thinness of minimalism is replaced
by an architecture of fattened flatness. The center's thick
thinness goes beyond Mies not by aspiring to his almost-
nothingness but by multiplying somethingness. Chicago is flat.
And nothing is more Chicago than IIT. But at the McCormick
Center, flat is thick. A building that is all about plan is know-
able only as section. Its single story holds together many lev-
els, including a suspended - or is it dropped? - garden of
grasses above the food court. The theme of this split-screen
vision of nature-prairie and culture-cafeteria continues one
bay north from the cafeteria, where Mies's original Commons
lies preserved. The earth around the Commons has been
excavated, making the building like an artifact from Pompeian
ruins that Koolhaas claimed as the project's organizational
inspiration. The revealed base of the Commons has been
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Scenes from an October after-
noon AT THE MCCORMICK CAMPUS
Center. Row i: approaching from

THE SOUTH; ROW 2: APPROACHING

FROM THE WEST; ROW ?: GRAPHIC
THICK THINNESS; ROWS 4 & $: HORI-
ZONTAL AND VERTICAL TRANSPARENCY.

Photos: Sarah Whiting.

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 27

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Koolhaas meets Mies: Rows i-j:
INTERSECTIONS AND ADJACENCIES
OF TWO buildings; ROWS 4 &5:
INTERNAL LANDSCAPING AND THE

TUBE THAT INTERNALIZES, HOWEVER

BRIEFLY, THE CHICAGO ELEVATED
trains. Photos: Sarah Whiting.

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 painted a deep matte black, turning it into a heavy pedestal
for this unburied archaeological treasure. Sectional depth is
further accentuated by transverse experience: here, the axial
is replaced by the diagonal, which means that everything is
viewed on the oblique, offering depth of field rather than the
singularity of the axial one -point perspective.
But the McCormick Center's vertical surfaces are what

bring the greatest depth to thinness. Like the work of

Herzog & de Meuron and Neutelings/Riedijk, straight up is
where the building offers a direct challenge to the minimalist
tendency toward immateriality. But while those two firms
emphasize pattern and image, the façades of OMA's McCormick
Center rely more upon thickness than surface. Glass here
sheds aspirations to nondimensional transparency or two-
dimensional imagery: honeycombed Panelite is embedded
within a double-glazed system, making air itself substantial.
When the afternoon sun hits the orange Panelite of the
zigzagging primary façade, the spaces behind it become a
single, massive orange swath, an interiorized sunset fog. As
night falls, loopy orange halos appear and disappear, head-
lights passing down State Street wreaking circular havoc
within this faceted orthogonal façade.
Why orange? Koolhaas asserts that its extreme contrast
to the surrounding black and tan Mies buildings helps bring
out their subtle colors - which is true. But orange offers
more than an accent. The British publication Business Week
calls orange the new corporate color, chosen for its seeming
combination of the cutting edge and innocence, a fitting
description for Koolhaas's practice as it negotiates between
1. See Lynn Shepherd, "Any Colour You the avant garde and consumption.1 Orange, which happens
Like, As Long as it's Orange," Business
Life Quly/August 2003): 36-40. Also see
to be the national color of the Netherlands (is OMA deliber-
Sylvia Lavin's recent research on color,
ately putting a Dutch stamp on a German icon in the U.S.?),
"Color, Terminable and Interminable,"
lecture, Harvard GSD, October 28, 200$. is also the hue of low caffeine and high fat. Sanka forever
cast orange as the color of decaf, and, banking on psycholo-
gists' claims that orange is an appetite stimulant, fast food
chains have long saturated their restaurants in its various
hues. So what's the message of this medium? There isn't one
- orange keeps appearing in a different light, as it were.
Architecture's singular message is what is being called into
question; the decorated shed no longer has one sign but many.
Strangely, this saturation does not result in chaos. The
verticals of the McCormick Center fade in and fade out,
accumulating without competing. The lenticular wallpapers
(squiggly brown and tan stripes in the faculty dining room;
orange - again - and black squiggles in the meeting rooms)
make the flat walls almost fuzzy. The graphic mastery of
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 2x4's Michael Rock truly transforms the wall-as-sign. Ro
designed what seem to be hundreds of two-and-a-half-in
high black-and-white icons, new "universal" figures deno
ing tasks like computing, sleeping, music, and even roma
(abstracted as a flower held in the teeth of a standing figu
Crowded together on panels, these figures collect to form
larger icons, in a kind of pixilated pointillism. On one lo
wall their dot matrix offers an IIT history lesson by illus-
Rem Koolhaas and Phyllis
Lambert tour the center.
trating the institution's founding fathers (Armour, Heal
Photo: Sarah Whiting. Pritzker, Galvin, and a young Mies) in a 21st-century vers
of the obligatory Ivy League gallery of portraits. But the
most clever, most unsettling portrait is that of the fully
mature, slightly dour Mies, whose head, split horizontall
into an orange/white top and clear/white bottom, consti
tutes the building's front door. It's Being John Malkovitch
(who is from Chicago, after all) merged with Samuel
Beckett's The Unnammable :

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in

middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the w
in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that
be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in th
middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness,
haps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum,
the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong t
either
2. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Malloy, ... 2
Malone Dies, The Unnamahle (New York:
Grove Press, 1958), W- Irreverent? Yes, maybe, although a 16-foot-high portrait
ing a major thoroughfare is also an honor to which no oth
architect can lay claim. It's Mies, translated through the t
nology institute's dot-matrix dialect; it's Mies, reminding
everyone of his everlasting importance at IIT; it's Mies,
trapped in the vibrations of the ever-multiplying interpre
tions of himself and his oeuvre. But mostly, it's the studen
the many tympanums suspended in the center between cl
- and between childhood and adulthood. The multiplicitie
simultaneities, and densities of the McCormick Center's th
ened thinness capture this uncertainty and turn it into po
bility, animation, and information rather than chaos, diso
entation and estrangement. Thick Thin! Thick Different!

Sarah Whiting is associate

PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE AT

Harvard's Graduate School of

Design, and a partner in the

ARCHITECTURAL FIRM WW IN

Somerville, Massachusetts.

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