Things have not looked good for the future business for some time now, ever since the Walt Disney Co. dismantled the Monsanto “House of the Future” in Disneyland three decades ago.
More recently, Disney started the company town of Celebration in Florida, a comfy enclave brimming with sweet blandishments of the architectural past–clapboard, gingerbread and picket fences. The future, so optimistically anticipated at Disneyland and in other fantasies before and after the war, never really roared into America’s cities and suburbs, perhaps because visionaries and builders lacked the technical capacity to travel to the wilder shores of their imaginations.
Ever greater amounts of computer RAM, however, have arrived and are delivering the future to the present. The computer that outplayed Garry Kasparov can now–with a little help from an architect–design.
“Welcome to Cleopatra’s submarine,” said Beatrix Ost, artist, film maker and resident muse of a two-bedroom Upper West Side of Manhattan pied-a-terre with a definite bathospheric cast.
She opens the door to a molten environment where fiberglass walls undulate from shower to bath to bed frame with hypnotic fluidity, as if a computer had morphed one fixture into another.
The surfaces flow every which way, like a clown’s elasticized smile. A three-dimensional space modeled by computer has been lifted off the screen and deposited into her apartment–virtual space made real.
As Ost steers guests through her liquid wonderland, she enumerates features that would make sense to any real estate agent, except that the shower stalls, closets and other parts don’t look at all conventional.
An aluminum-sheathed closet separating the living room and bedroom has the profile of a flat, tropical fish whose mouth puckers into a tongue that passes through a glass wall and becomes the bathroom vanity, which then swells into a sink.
The glass wall separates the master bedroom and bath and cuts through a long, sinuous tub, damming water on the bathroom side while creating a fish tank view from the bedroom.
Paint knows no boundaries, and doesn’t stop at corners and edges, as color-impregnated epoxy swirls in free-form patterns on the walls and floors.
Near the entry, the same pale yellow door closes two ways–in one position, it shuts off just the bedroom, and in the second, the bedroom and a guest bathroom. The bathroom can then belong to either the bedroom alone or to the whole apartment.
Marcel Duchamp once famously hinged a single door to close either a bathroom or a kitchen; the architects designed this space with the same drollery.
For nearly two decades, architects have used computers to generate working drawings from designs conventionally conceived on the drafting table. But only recently have designers surfed the transcendental functions of the computer’s brain to propose curves and forms of formidable complexity and nuance.
As the prices of powerful computers have plummeted, architects, many from the realm of academia, have pushed the computer’s provocative potential. New graphics programs–including those intended for cartoon animation–have helped shape three-dimensional forms on screen.
The process sometimes encourages the collisions of forms: nebulae and complex folds pass through space and each other, producing shell-like shapes that usually escape architects who work by hand on the flatland of paper.
Long before the pixels danced, Ost and her husband, Ludwig Kuttner, chief executive of a textile conglomerate, who are in their 50s, and the New York architects Sulan Kolatan and William Mac Donald, in their 30s, found each other, as though matched for client-architect compatibility by a computer dating service.
It may not be surprising that young architects who teach (in this case, at the Columbia architecture school) are intellectually daring. But rare is the client who makes whimsical artworks–in Ost’s case, bronze “heart chambers”–and scatters them around the apartment like ashtrays.
Then there are Ost’s other works–like “Mars” and “Venus,” two futuristic, human-size, carbon-graphite boxes that stand at attention in the living room like mute cello cases.
During the process of discovery, when client and architect get to know each other, Ost and Kolatan noticed they even shared a certain taste in clothes.
“I would wear a rubberized cotton shirt to a meeting, or an outfit made from a plasticlike material, and Sulan would wear something made out of a parachute material,” Ost said. “We are both interested in a sensuousness of modern dress.”
Kolatan suggested to her clients, who are Germans, that there are equally sensuous building materials–similar to the carbon graphite that their son, a professional race car driver, fabricated into “Mars” and “Venus” in his sports-car shop.
The architects brought fiberglass, epoxy, light-sensitive glass and stainless steel to subsequent meetings.
“I closed my eyes,” Ost said, “and touched the samples and realized a space was not only conceptual, for the brain, and not just functional. It should be free and kind to the body and soul, like slipping into a precious gown at night and getting away from the world.”
Some tactile materials Ost and Kuttner liked could accommodate the curvaceous forms the architects had been exploring on the computer–forms with complex, topological surfaces. To help the couple understand the layout, the architects offered wavy computer drawings.
“I couldn’t read them,” Ost admitted. “I didn’t know what was front from left. But then Bill and Sulan brought a little mock-up, a miniature, and I fell totally in love with the forms. It was all fantasy, part of a slightly crazy dream. I love this kind of surprise.
“My husband turned to me and asked, `Are you ready for this?’ Ludwig let it be my choice and my project. It was the start of an adventure. For me, it was like a playground, and these were people we could play with.”
The existing space actually consisted of two run-down, one-bedroom apartments (the great feature was the 11-foot ceilings) to be consolidated into a single ambidextrous 16,000-square-foot apartment that could accommodate what Mac Donald called “a range of domesticity”–to be used by Ost and Kuttner alone (their primary residence is a historic Jeffersonian house in Virginia), by any or all of three adult sons, friends from Europe and visiting business associates.
Visitors eventually end up sitting on the turn-of-the-century Hoffmann chairs (upholstered in wild oranges and reds) that are grouped in a quieter end of the living room, but they inevitably turn toward the architectural delirium in the front half of the apartment, which offers a more engaging landscape view than the cramped brick cityscape outside.
In addition to the conventional Viennese seating–steeped in an aura strangely compatible with the submarine fantasy–a daybed with a back that wraps the corner like a strange cowl serves as an extra bed for overflow guests.
Flexibility and ambiguity were built into the design so spaces could be interpreted according to individual needs. “It was like a little hotel with a multiple identity,” Mac Donald said.
Kolatan and Mac Donald were particularly interested in the computer’s ability to combine and transform shapes on screen into hybrids that retained the imprint of their predecessors.
The architects liken the resulting composites to Chimera, a mythical figure part lion, part goat, part serpent. The new form is a conflation of parts with mysterious origins.
Nor are the forms generated by manipulating geometry; their processes bypassed Euclid. Kolatan and Mac Donald, who are using the computer in larger commissions, including the Southern New England School of Law in New Bedford, Mass., took the profiles of common household items as the starting points of their design.
“We wanted to value and emphasize the domestic environment,” Mac Donald said.
