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In 1964, three friends from the Yale School of Architecture hatched a plan to become developers, designers, and builders of ski cabins. Two of the friends, David Sellers and Peter Gluck had previously helped one another on building projects, one for Sellers’s brother, and one for Gluck’s parents. In Vermont, land was inexpensive and skiing was growing in popularity, so they felt they could take a chance and build speculative projects that they hoped to sell for a profit. David Sellers and his friend William Reineke purchased a piece of land near Warren, now known by the name Prickly Mountain, while Peter Gluck embarked on projects that were designed and built for a site elsewhere in Vermont. From these beginnings a new way of making architecture developed, resulting in structures unmoored from architectural tradition. The design-build architectural movement in Vermont was begun.

The three young architects were motivated by the idea that they could and should control the economics and construction of their buildings, as well as the design. At the time, Sellers was quoted as saying:

The architect is irresponsible today in…that he thinks…he has to sit in his office and wait for some client to come up and say, all right build me that. I think the architect has got to change his whole scope if he’s going to survive as an integral part of our future society. (Note: PA May 1966 p. 150)

While the initial development ideas did not produce as much financial success as hoped, Sellers and Reineke created an experiment that did change the “whole scope” of how architecture can be practiced and how buildings can be made. They succeeded in making a place, a community, and a new kind of design culture that lives on to this day.

The exhibition, Architectural Improvisations and this catalog that documents it recognize the design-build experiments at Prickly Mountain as a moment worthy of study both in terms of architectural history and in the cultural history of Vermont. This is not a complete and exhaustive survey. The focus is on a time period beginning with a few houses built in 1964 and the opening of the Yestermorrow School in Warren, Vermont in 1980. We explore, and interpret certain architectural events that when seen as part of a greater whole can lead us to an understanding of what has become a lasting legacy. This legacy can be recognized in our built landscape, in the professional lives of people practicing architecture today, in the movement toward better ecologically responsible buildings known as Green Building, and in the way architecture is taught in our schools.

The exhibition presents architectural projects that are artifacts of what was then a new and experimental way of making buildings. Some of the buildings are still in use and good condition others have burned and are recorded in photographs and drawings. These buildings can help us to understand the design-build movement; this catalog includes research gleaned from articles written at the time of construction, interviews conducted in recent years, and close formal analysis of selected examples of the architecture. It is our hope that a more complete picture will emerge resulting in a new appreciation of what was then a radical architectural movement.

Danny Sagan

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Asking Versus Telling

The School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University is proud to announce that it will host Matt Burnett’s exhibit, entitled Asking Versus Telling: A Contemporary Inquiry into Landscape and Nature. In addition to the exhibit, Mr. Burnett will give a lecture concerning his work and will be conducting a workshop with students from the School of Architecture and Art. The lecture will begin at noon on Friday, October 14, and results from the workshop will be discussed that afternoon at 4pm.

From Matt Burnett's website:

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As a native of the Adirondack Mountain region, my career as an artist has been molded by an unusually rural upbringing and access to the natural resources of upstate New York. Throughout my life I have been drawn towards the exploration of primordial environments. Through continual inquiry and engagement with wilderness—as site, as concept, and above all as experience—I have adopted painting as a means through which to engage the non-sentient, as a device for seeking the objective access of structure and growth beyond human influences. More recently, I have broadened my exploration of the non-sentient by creating and exploring the circumstances through which nature can create paintings independently of human intention. I construct devices that enable nature to create drawings, paintings, and sculptures autonomously through “natural forces” (wind, tide, etc.).

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My new work embodies a non-objective approach that employs and expands the language of painting though video, sculpture, performance and site-specific work. The challenges of this “new” realism raise fundamental questions of causality and experience, both within the context of art and within perception itself. The dissonant methodologies and convoluted premises underlying the “intention of non-intentionality” both evaporate and expand ideas of the non-human; through a disruption of “cumulative” knowledge, my work redirects perception through the agency of the world.

This paradoxical pursuit is embodied in the auspicious aspirations and practices of Mattaphysics. 

A graduate of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, I recently completed my graduate study at Maine College of Art. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Canton where I am teaching drawing, art history and new media studies. My home studio is located in Saranac Lake, New York, in close proximity to the high peaks region of the central Adirondacks. My recent practice combines academic inquiry with fieldwork and site-specific practices, much of it is accomplished on location in the Adirondack State Forest land, and will be periodically documented on the Mattaphysics blogspace. In addition to gallery exhibitions, I am becoming more involved with new media, installation and site-specific events. My extensive exhibition record includes solo shows in New York and Maine; my work is included in collections across the country and internationally.

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Architecture as Catalyst

Norwich University is proud to announce that Tom S. Hines will be the guest of the College of Architecture and Art to speak to us from his latest book entitled, Architecture as Catalyst: Rudolph Schindler's Kings Road House, Los Angeles, 1922.

Dr. Tom S. Hines is Professor Emeritus at UCLA and is the leading historian on American Modern Architecture. He is author of the seminal work on the architecture of Richard Neutra and lives currently in an apartment design by Neutra. His other texts include: Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner; Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform: A Study in Modernist Architectural Culture; William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha; Architecture of Richard Neutra; and with other authors: International Style to California Modern; Richard Neutra’s Windshield House.

Dr. Hines is currently writing a book on Los Angeles Modern and is a member of the Board of Directors for Columbia University in New York City.

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Peter L. Gluck and Partners is a 40 person architectural firm known for its integrity of design and sensitivity to the relationship between architectural form and context. Rather than specializing in a particular building type or specific architectural style, the goal is to provide appropriate responses to often difficult and conflicting requirements. The firm has designed buildings throughout the US, ranging from houses, schools, religious buildings, and community centers to hotels, corporate interiors, university buildings, and historic restorations. Many of these projects have won national and international awards and have been published in architectural journals and books in many countries.

Peter L. Gluck

Peter L. Gluck and Partners, located in New York City since 1972, is dedicated to the idea that the architect must take responsibility for the architectural process from conception to construction, assuming oversight of all aspects. This commitment led to the establishment of AR/CS (Architectural Construction Services), Inc. in 1992, an integrated system of architectural design and construction management, which provides sophisticated design, quality construction, and unusually low costs in an increasingly difficult building environment. Projects are presently in construction in New York, Chicago, Texas, Florida, and California. In order to develop these ideas further, Aspen GK, Inc. was established in 1997 as a development partnership, founded to produce well-designed, high-quality housing.

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Tower of Babel

Geraldo Souza Dias’ work is characterized by a research around painting and word, image and concept, placing in jeopardy objects, names, meanings and by doing so, questioning the notions of imaginary, representation and language. Phrases, words in several languages, drawn or printed letters, calligraphic lines, writings, associate themselves to images of their fragments and are organized in geometric structures and patterns of abstraction.

Word and image are placed in a dialectical relationship in the picture surface, where, as the artist says, “the text dilutes the bidimensional character of the image, trying to interpret it in a single dimension”. This project seems to evolve in the always unstable space between perceiving and naming what is perceived. It is a sort of reflection on Art, its Nature and the artist’s work, as well as about the codes that organize representation, perception and the systems of signifiers.

Tower of Babel is a construction made of small painted canvases and wood stretchers, precariously arranged in a spiral that, although a recurrent theme of a certain period of Art History (from the end of the Middle Age to the beginning of the Baroque) brings immediately to memory the Monument to the 3rd International (1920) by the constructivist Russian artist V.Tatlin (1885-1953).

The ensemble is part of the author’s personal archive, a sort of a diary from his working studio, with notes on thoughts, facts of his personal life, project sketches. The images show landscapes, collages, human figures, objects, quoted texts, wordplays, abstractions, references to painting tradition and to Art History, with some ironic manipulations of other artists’ works.

The open spaces allow a sight of the interior of the tower and its building’s process while at the same time confer it strategic transparency to its pertaining to the exhibition’s space, a building also burden of historical meanings. The ascending spiral seems to describe a narrative, to indicate a way to be followed by the beholder. 

The basis of the tower display an accumulation of things that seem to want to say, that announce without a logical formulation and that order themselves in the funneling that lead to the canvases with the inscription “once upon a time” (in Portuguese and in English), the beginning of a open story, thrown in time and space, like a red moon against a darken sky.

Beyond the metaphor about the origin of the races and the different languages, setting up the notion of otherness among the human beings (the I and the other, in former works by Geraldo) says the legend, that the king order the construction of the Tower of Babel in ancient Babylon wanted to make him a name.

Exactly here is the primordial finality of language, to name, what is here at play: what moves from the basis of the tower is what is still searching form, meaning, a murmuring language, but a powerful matter, which keeps being molded by the will, the demiurgic gesture of the artist. What comes from that is placed in the world, we call it art, its History is in the museum. Once upon a time… 

Ivo Mesquita

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