6.08: Features

Archive | 6.08 - Aug 1998 | Features

Windows 99
By Paul Di Filippo

It helps to have some hot technology when you want to build a glass house smack in the middle of a hurricane zone.

Picture a 180-foot-long, two-story glass box with the proportions of a stack of Fig Newtons - then raise it all up on stilts. You now have a faint idea of what two architects from Chicago, Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, inflamed by an obsessive adoration of glass, are building on Florida's Gulf Coast.

Now take that large box and bend it a third of the way down its length at a slight angle. Grab its long north and south exterior glass walls and distort them into convex arcs above and below the house frame, as if the undulating walls were caught just shy of exploding. Carve away to create asymmetrical bays and porches, alcoves and terraces. Fill the interior with a cantilevered study and criss-crossing corridors and staircases, leaving a vast open space. This is the plan Krueck and Sexton devised in response to a request from publicity-shy clients - call them Mr. and Mrs. Fish - for a "simple, elegant, but really cool house with wraparound views."

On paper, the Fish residence casts off the bulky external barriers of traditional structures. "You won't notice the frame," Krueck says. "You should have a feeling of utter freedom from design." Looking at the drawings leads you to wonder whether the architects aren't presuming to transcend the limitations of weight and gravity as well. Launched from the architects' imaginations to be raised like an enormous crystalline dirigible, the house still must be built and anchored to the friable soil of the Florida coast.

Ronald Krueck (pronounced "krick"), 51, teaches at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Chicago school designed by German Bauhausian expatriate Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Krueck and Sexton, one of the most important projects conceived by their idol Mies is surely his Glass Skyscraper, a conceptual design of serpentine lines and transparent walls. Drafted in 1922, the design was unbuildable, given the technology of the day. Even then, Mies believed "the use of glass forces us to new ways." His disciples intend to show precisely how.

Krueck is tall, with thick rimless glasses, a neat salt-and-pepper beard, and flyaway hair flanking a bald spot. Mark Sexton, 42, is trim, voluble, his blue eyes dominating a longish face that nearly vibrates with excitement about the Fish project, a house that is clearly a pinnacle of their 18-year partnership. In a renovation assignment of theirs, a Victorian town house emerged as a cyborg creation, part 19th century, part 21st. The inhabitants of another commission, the Stainless Steel Apartment, must surely feel they've wandered into an oversize version of HAL's Lucite intelligence matrix. Most of Krueck and Sexton's spaces, in fact, demand to be filled by leggy, monied spacegirl debutantes in Lurex miniskirts, just back from the Mars-to-Venus Regatta.

With the Fish House, the two partners seem to be the heirs to a movement from architecture's modernist past: Die Glaserne Kette - "The Glass Chain." Early in this century, a utopian cabal, which counted Walter Gropius as its most famous member, issued a series of pronouncements, including, "We feel sorry for the brick culture," "Glass brings a new era," and, getting right to the heart of the matter, "Without a glass palace, life becomes a burden." Bold words presaged equally bold design, including Bruno Taut's 1914 Glass Pavilion at Cologne, a hall shaped like a crystal artichoke upended on a platform.

Even members of this avant-garde assemblage, however, might have balked at the plans Krueck and Sexton have worked out for the roughly US$10 million home that will push the limits of current design, structural technology, and common sense. The exterior walls of the oversize, two-story dream house, as well as part of the roof, will be almost entirely glass. And, oh, yes: The building will flaunt its fragile walls on the crumbling shores of a barrier island, smack in the middle of a hurricane zone.

In architectural terms, folly describes a structure in which fantastical caprices and bold, eye-catching gestures outweigh utilitarian concerns. Like Antoni Gaudì's Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, or English writer Horace Walpole's neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill, the house Krueck and Sexton are building is a rare form of folly. The architects must be repeating Mies's statement "Whenever technology reaches its real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture" as a mantra as they attempt to lift the house from the vaporish realm of the precise 30-inch by 42-inch schematics tacked to the wall of their conference room.

The story of the Fish assignment involves both mystery and serendipity. One day last December, Krueck and Sexton received an unsolicited letter from a man with the improbable name of Phillip Morris. Morris wrote that he was a paid intermediary for shy and wealthy clients who, in October, had been burned out of their new beachfront home, escaping from the spectacular nighttime blaze with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Fishes wanted to rebuild on the devastated site and were soliciting proposals from various architects.

Business had been slow for Krueck and Sexton. "We had almost no projects in '95 and '96 - nothing," Sexton admits. "People seemed to want McDonald's-quality architecture, rather than refined, well-thought-out, and innovative designs. We even tried to market ourselves as 'on budget, on time' architects. We told clients we could do cheap and ugly if that's what they wanted." But then came the letter. Somewhat skeptically, realizing that the missive might be a hoax, Krueck and Sexton submitted their book - a gallery of residential and commercial buildings sheathed in burnished stainless steel, exotic polished granites, speckled terrazo, and, of course, infinite varieties of glass - as a calling card. To their surprise, they won.

Summoned to the Gulf Coast, Krueck and Sexton offered a vibrant impressionistic abstraction in colored graphite and several cardboard-and-plastic conceptual models. The first took an extruded rectangular form. The second introduced jutting corners at either end. The third shattered linearity by break- ing the house into two wings set at an angle. A fourth model fused the simplicity of the first with the contortions of the third. A fifth model, still more conceptual than structural, incorporated refinements such as a louvered element along the southern wall to protect the house from the sun without spoiling the view.

In its intricacy, this fifth model conjures a little-known story by H. P. Lovecraft, "In the Walls of Eryx." A human explorer on a habitable Venus, traipsing across a desert, comes upon an utterly invisible barrier composed of a "perfectly transparent, nonrefractive solid." Tracing the wall by touch, he finds a portal. Alas, he enters. Proceeding deeper, past one turning after another, he realizes too late that he's trapped in a sinister labyrinth composed with "uncanny architectural skill." Unable to extricate himself, after several days he dies of thirst within plain sight of freedom.

Whether this design will produce a similarly unhappy outcome depends primarily on the engineering. The experts in steel and concrete who will help translate their latest vision into a hurricane-resistant, buildable structure are Roger Reckers and assistant Brian Spencer of Tylk, Gustafson, and Associates. Spencer totes a top-of-the-line laptop on which he can model loads and performances using RISA, a powerful software program for 3-D simulation. Like the other engineers and construction men involved in this project, Reckers and Spencer exhibit a kind of hard-nosed playfulness - a respect for the ineluctable powers and limits of nature combined with a desire to push the envelope and a faint amusement that anyone would actually attempt such a stunt.

Spencer massages data on the fly, while Reckers outlines the possibilities. Piles will be driven into the sandy soil. Atop these underground supports, triangular concrete piers 10 feet high will rise to a concrete bed. Think of this platform as a cake plate supporting the confection of the house itself. Steel girders will project upward and outward from the plate. Narrow curved steel splines will be pinned to the girders at top and bottom - ideally, every 10 feet - forming a nearly invisible coupled support system for the outer glass walls.

The architects had hoped to clad the torso of the house with panes 10 feet across and 2 feet, 3 inches high, keeping the number of intrusive splines to a minimum. The long narrow sheets of glass, pinned together, angled slightly edge to edge, and sealed with an invisible silicone gel, would give the outer walls their smooth continuous curve. But the manufacturer insists that the support system the architects have planned isn't adequate; such large sheets of glass will need girders or cables every five feet. In one stroke, the number of vertical reinforcements has doubled, sending ripples throughout the design.

Although glass is clearly perverse at times - it is often fragile and heavy and settles with age - Sexton still describes it as "one of the most flexible materials known to man." The material is relatively inexpensive, it is beautiful, and it can be surprisingly tough. Theoretically, the finished Fish House will withstand 150-mph winds, deflecting only three-quarters of an inch from the vertical.

Though the finished house may be immune to the elements, the house-in-progress is not. Many times each year, the site is subjected to winds of 40 mph or more that can whip a sheet of plywood right out of a laborer's hands. Luckily, the segmented design of the walls will make it easy to replace single cracked panes. But if a big hurricane hits in mid-construction, Sexton admits, "the house is gone."

None of the materials, not even the cement, can be off-the-shelf. The steel - which will be shaped and cut with computer-controlled plasma torches - can only be handled by a few boutique mills. The shops the partners will use are all up north, necessitating long distance shipment. The surface finish of the steel, as well as of the cement, is critical. In a Krueck and Sexton dwelling, components normally hidden in conventional homes remain exposed. "These girders become your living-room walls," Krueck notes. The primary ingredient will be provided by one of the oldest glass manufacturers in the world, Pilkington Glass in Saint Helens, England. One of the company's newer secrets is an advanced glazing technique that delivers unprecedented transparency.

Of course, even ordering the construction materials is still months away. The most immediate challenge is to design a structurally sound but visually elegant steel spine. It's early spring, and Krueck and Sexton are unhappy with the dimensions of the girders the engineering team has proposed. The partners envision the bulky columns chewing up precious interior space. "I think you need a new computer," Krueck says to Reckers and Spencer. "A 20-story apartment building doesn't have a column that big. I'm a little flipped out." Reckers shrugs. After hours of wrangling, the engineers are sent off to refine their estimates. The battle lines are drawn in a contest between dream and reality, magic versus mass.

As if for comic relief, an afternoon meeting is devoted to MEP: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing concerns. David Lehman of LDC Consultants arrives hefting a bag of macaroons - a peace offering - and a handful of his own engineering problems. As the three men munch, Lehman reports on possible heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The builders put power-plant choices aside to concentrate on how to deliver the quantity of processed air necessitated by the local climate, which ranges from freezing to tropical. With few interior walls, the house has insufficient space to hide all the ugly but necessary pipes and ducts. Without adequate ventilation systems, the glass house will suffer the same problems as Mies's glassy Farnsworth House in Illinois, which was a cooker in summer and a condensation-dripping chiller in winter.

If they surmount this dilemma, the architects are still left with Mr. Fish's firm intention to open the windows in good weather. Such old-fashioned whims play havoc with any respectable cybernetic HVAC system, in which sensors automatically compensate for "unnatural" fluctuations. Lehman wants the residence hermetically sealed - no stray inputs or outputs to disturb the balance of the system. The architects wince, knowing this option will be unacceptable to their clients.

Faced with a bewildering variety of delivery systems, Krueck finally demands, "Which one would you pick if this were your house and your money?"

"If this were my house? I'd be living in a tent on the beach with my money invested in the stock market," Lehman quips.

Along the Florida Panhandle's coastline, referred to by some the Redneck Riviera, new condos are going up on beachfront real estate everywhere. The avenue leading south from the airport is typical urban-blight strip: chain restaurants and retailers, a small mall. But a few miles farther on, the road becomes residential, passing a variety of houses, the predominant style featuring cinder blocks stacked one story high and capped with a flat roof. The squat buildings, painted in clashing Caribbean colors, undoubtedly stand up well to storms, but they're as ugly as toads.

You push on, over the 3-mile-long bridge from the mainland and onto the peninsula, and turn beachward at the sign, circa 1963, of a leaping swordfish. Then, after crossing a shorter bridge to the barrier island, you come upon a mushroom-style water tower painted to resemble a striped beach ball. The main drag meanders past souvenir stands and Flounder's restaurant, where the men's rest room is stocked with hair spray for frat boys, and elderly roués enjoy the Drink Special - triple-shot martinis in glasses the size of bedpans. The road continues past a few garish and shoddily constructed Narco Deco mansions and some beach bum's idea of a groovy bachelor pad: a corroded white metal ovoid with porthole windows, resembling something out of a 1967 Playboy feature on the Swinging Lifestyle. (At this juncture, the imperious architects snort derisively.) Up comes a large dune formation known as the Sugar Bowl, and then, nearby, the Fish House site.

The fire that claimed the Fishes's old house was visible from the mainland, and made the national news. It left a partially drained swimming pool, spalled concrete platforms, cracked outdoor tiles, scorched loblolly pines around the perimeter, and stainless steel melted into surreal forms. (The deck railing dripped away when it hit 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.) Kicking around the charred property, Krueck and Sexton enthusiastically pace off rooms and speculate about how they will incorporate the remains of the pool into their design. They're deep into the never-ending refinement process, which Sexton compares to composing a symphony.

"We look at the drawings and models and realize that certain elements are unbalanced, some things look ugly, a few issues are not resolved," he says. "So we go over the whole composition: 'Here, the horns are too loud. Let's soften them and bring in the violins.'" Krueck and Sexton already know that the northern face of the house will flirt with the soft curve of the waterline 20 yards distant. The white stone panels of the southern side - an allusion to the white sands of the dunes - will also offer protection from the sun, as will swatches of fritted glass, panes with ceramic dots baked in a sieve pattern that cuts sunlight by up to 80 percent. Other engineering issues, however, remain stubbornly intractable.

Nothing can mitigate the proximity of tide and gale. It is staggering to see how close the water actually is, how perilous the physical situation appears, how outrageous the design suddenly seems. Even on a calm, sunny day it's easy to picture galloping, wind-driven waves lashing the glass sheath with the ferocity of any firestorm. Although Krueck and Sexton don't speak of the peril explicitly as they stand surveying the water, hours later Krueck says pointedly, "A house like this is meant to be experienced over a long period of time. We're not building it for the moment, we're building it for the future."

Another structure built for the future stands several miles from the Fish site. On the other side of the island is a federal park, entered via a near-virgin stretch of dunes and scrubland rich with birdsong. At one point the island narrows to less than a hundred flat yards: The contending lines of surf seem ready to leap the gap and devour the land. On this tip of the island sits the ruins of Fort Pickens. In 1829 the US government began to construct this guardian of the bay, bringing in a massive slave force to toil or die of yellow fever. Millions of bricks came from New Orleans and Mobile, lime was shipped from Maine, lead was hauled from Illinois, and copper and granite were sent from New York. Construction lasted five years. The result was a massive pentagonal fortification enclosing a five-acre parade ground.

Today, visitors can still see the clever system that collected rainwater to feed cisterns, and the structural coup, the "reverse arch," a buried cement structure that helps distribute the downward forces of the formidable pile across the sandy soil. The once-massive structure of Fort Pickens is a lime-dripping, barrel-vaulted ruin, abandoned but still impressive, strong but not immortal.

If the decaying garrison embodied the values of 19th-century construction - strength, mass, and permanence - Krueck and Sexton are striving for its antithesis. Their designs for the Fish House seem to transcend the physical, to achieve lightness and beauty through the ephemeral elegance of glass. Where Fort Pickens established its military presence with solid belligerence, the Fish House aspires to escape its corporeal chains, to make itself disappear. But when even structures built to last crumble, how will Krueck and Sexton's floating glass house stand up to the elements - the wind, fire, and water? Will technology finally fulfill the promise of Mies van der Rohe?

Dozens of contractors and subcontractors will spend more than a year constructing the house, a futuristic folly, a beached quartz whale. At the least - assuming construction begins on schedule in January 1999 - the Fish House will ring in the new millennium, a crystal bauble dangled in the faces of the gods.

Paul Di Filippo, author of the science fiction novel Ribofunk, writes for The New York Times and Interzone.