Gunnar Birkerts is the leading American exponent of organic architecture in the generation of architects that came to maturity in the 1960s. Working in the tradition of Erich Mendelsohn, Hugo Haring, and Eero Saarinen, Birkerts received his architectural education in Stuttgart from 1945 to 1949. During his years in Germany, he was drawn to Scandinavian modernism rather than Bauhaus doctrine, which was still taught at the Technische Hochschule. In 1959 he formed a partnership with Frank Straub, and since 1962 he has been practicing independently in addition to teaching, lecturing, and writing.
Birkerts’s early buildings show a rejection of the dogmas of the International Style, and a mastery of site problems that is unusual in any architect, young or old. Within their urban context, his buildings respond to other works of architecture and to dominant geographic features. Moreover, Birkerts playfully utilizes the metaphorical qualities of architecture within the design process.
The nature of his expressive design process has allowed Birkerts to adapt to some unusual clients and remarkable problems. He designed the new Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis under the leadership of bank president Hugh Galusha in 1973; at first glance it appears to be a monolithic Brutalist facade. Its most striking feature is a curving, catenary arch that frees up a great deal of space below ground for high-security work, and allows for office space above.
In 1984 Birkerts built the Domino’s Pizza World Headquarters in Ann Arbor, a complex of buildings that included corporate headquarters, warehouses, laboratories, and public spaces. Birkerts designed the buildings as a series of long, low, broad-eaved structures that appear to shoot across the flat site as if on railroad tracks. Birkerts borrowed elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs (primarily the manner in which buildings relate to the natural setting) in a continuation of the organic tradition of architecture in the United States.
Birkerts’ 1981 library addition to the Law School at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor precisely melds with the existing buildings in the quad, including the neoGothic Legal Research building and Hutchins Hall, which are relatively recent adaptations of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England. In order to preserve the integrity of the quadrangle, the architect’s solution was to put the library addition underground. Thus, the sidewalk on the east end of the quadrangle runs along the roof of the Law Library. The building’s exterior wall forms a limestone V-shaped moat along the outside of the structure, abutting a trough of glass plate windows, providing a major source of day-light. For Birkerts, light is as much a tangible material as it was to Alvar Aalto, whose aesthetic the Ann Arbor library recalls.
Birkerts’s design process draws heavily upon intuition. A student of psychology, Birkerts initially relies on rough sketches that look like doodles. As a project is refined, these sketches are expanded into drawings and models that explore functioning spaces and orientation. The architect terms his process “organic synthesis” and claims that, as he responds to space needs, he uses a free form polygonal geometry that he can adapt at will. It allows him to define space without compromising functional or aesthetic considerations.
His 1980 renovation and remodeling of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, is a masterful synthesis of organics and plastic form that metaphorically evokes the material of glass itself. The building’s exterior surface undulates like liquid glass in the furnace; this effect is carefully tempered by hard right angles that represent glass in its solid state. To create an effect of brilliant illumination and visual clarity, Birkerts designed periscope windows, with slanting mirrors to deflect direct sunlight without blocking the view.
More recently, Birkerts has begun two buildings in his native country that are still under construction (as of 2003): the Latvian National Library at Riga, and Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The former received the 2000 Annual American Architecture Prize of the Chicago Museum of Architecture and Design. With a spectacular site near the Daugava River in the country’s capital city, the Latvian National Library takes the form of a crystal mountain emerging from dark waters, and contains at its upper level, the treasures of Latvian literary history. Birkerts sees his Latvian buildings as the opportunity to create grand national symbols that express the country’s layered history, character, and freedom.
LEONARD K.EATON |
