concrete amendments - uc berkeley college of...

CONCRETE AMENDMENTS

Sarah Briggs Ramsey

M. Arch Thesis Studio 2015Advisors: Jill Stoner and Roddy CreedonDepartment of ArchitectureUniversity of California Berkeley

Copyright © Sarah Briggs Ramsey 2015First EditionAll rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Preface i

Postwar Concrete Postscript 1

Concrete Amendments 7

Surface 11Case Study: Berkeley Art Museum 25

Ground 37Case Study: Orange County Government Center 47

Skin 55Case Study: Armstrong Rubber Company Headquarters 63

Sources 83

Acknowledgments 85

Paul Rudolph, Rudolph Hall (Art & Architecture Building) - Yale University, New Haven, CT 1963.

i

The following work found its beginnings in the summer of 2012, born broadly from a curiosity about the role of time in architecture, it was driven by a desire to consider architecture less as a collection of inanimate objects but rather as dynamic, living en-tities highly subject to change.

Constructed en masse in the 1960s and 70s, a vast volume of post-war concrete (today rather loosely labeled as Brutalist) is reaching what might be considered architectural old-age.

Generously funded by the John K Branner Traveling Fellowship, a year of global field study served as the foundational research to the thesis work included within. Throughout 2014 I traveled through nearly 15 countries, visiting over 200 buildings.

Excerpts of that research, entitled Postwar Concrete Postscript, can be found in the pages that follow, for a more complete overview visit www.postwarconcretepostscript.com

PREFACE

A.C. Martin & Associates, St Basil’s Catholic Church, Los Angeles, California 1967-69.

1POSTWAR CONCRETE POSTSCRIPT

As urban cityscapes transform with fluctuating densities and shifting patterns of use, they leave behind an inventory of spaces that have tremendous embodied energy yet often challenge expectations of performance, efficiency and aesthetic tastes. With re-sources straining and the built landscape increasingly saturated, demolition and rede-velopment are perhaps less tenable as strategies than they once were–financially, ma-terially and spatially. “Architecture can no longer limit itself to the aesthetic pursuit of making building,” Jill Stoner asserts in her recent book, Towards a Minor Architecture. “It must now commit to the politics of selectively taking them apart”.1

While architectural refurbishment and renovation are hardly novel practices, more re-cent preferences for adaptive re-use and selective preservation have emerged as clearly viable paradigms. Such approaches offer alternatives to full demolition, at one end of the spectrum, and, at the other, fastidious historical restoration; they work to preserve the traces of history that leave their mark on any building, collaborating with the ex-isting structure and composing for it new layers of use. It is an approach that found an early advocate in Ada Louise Huxtable, who wrote in 1997 that “the perfect fake or impeccable restorations wipe out all the incidents of life and change”.2 At stake, then, are not merely material resources, but history and cultural memory as well.

One highly visible locus for such an approach has been those relics of industry–ware-houses, factories, mills–willingly transformed into residential lofts, creative workplac-es, trendy retails spaces, and contemporary art galleries and museums. Yet where are

POSTWAR CONCRETE POSTSCRIPT

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the limits of this practice? Do overlooked, even explicitly derided, spaces embody this same potential for change? And what of more stubbornly inflexible spaces–those that lack the wide-span column grids, high ceilings, open programs, and warm brick walls more common in post-industrial space? As adaptive re-use catches hold in the archi-tectural community, how can this practice be pushed beyond the realm of nostalgic aesthetic fodder to one that challenges perceptions of desuetude and resiliency?

Precarious Futures

Now approaching nearly fifty, sixty years of use, many structures of the post-war building boom are currently struggling to meet contemporary standards of perfor-mance and aesthetics, and have found themselves subject to the conflicting impera-tives of demolition and preservation. Buildings associated with the Brutalist style find themselves today squarely in the middle of these debates, with many disappearing ev-ery year as cities across the globe update and rework their urban landscapes. While the term Brutalism was initially coined by Peter and Alison Smithson (as New Brutalism) in 1953 and then later elaborated on by Reyner Banham, today it has come to loosely describe heavy, monumental, typically concrete buildings built between the 1950s and 1970s. Many of these structures haven fallen into disrepair, many more have fallen out of favor, and so the Brutalist label has come to be a rather pejorative one. Currently, many of those buildings identified as Brutalist, whether by their own designers or more frequently by the public, are at risk of demolition or have even already been lost.

And while right now the Brutalist style is a rather fraught one, this wasn’t always the case. In this postwar era, as many cities rebuilt their war damaged selves, Brutalism was widely adopted as the new civic language; a fresh, modern and strong identity for urban reconstruction. The heroic, monumental scale and inexpensive materials that characterized the Brutalist style made it especially popular for public projects: govern-ment buildings, institutions, schools and multifamily housing projects can be found cast in concrete throughout the world. While Brutalism’s programmatic distribution carries its own set of political and cultural baggage - defunding after the end of an era of massive government building projects resulted in issues of neglectful maintenance which in turn contributed to degraded environments - it is undeniably the appearance and spatial qualities of these buildings that solicits so much of their criticism. The grievances range from the buildings’ monolithic heavy facades-with few and often small window openings-to the dark, cramped interiors and perhaps most consistently cited is the use of exposed concrete and the way it ages and weathers. There remains significance, though, in their predominantly civic or public programs, as this grants communities a larger sense of ownership over these (versus private homes); in addi-tion, conversations over their fate often involve public funds.


This question of how to approach these buildings is one that has been discussed at length in the architectural and academic context, but as of late it has attracted public concern as well. Unfortunately, the answer posed in many of the editorials contrib-uted by those outside the architectural community is typically harshly straightforward: tear these buildings down. Whereas much of the public opinion on this issue reflects this singular response, the tactics are much more nuanced in architectural and academ-ic communities. These represent a varied range, from discussions and publications that typically remain within the discipline, to more active projects that attempt to en-gage the public and educate them on the history and heritage of these buildings, all the way to physical re-workings of these buildings whether speculative or built.

Reflection / Discussion

In the past decade, as increasing attention has been placed on the fate of these Brutal-ist buildings, numerous architects, architectural critics, and historians – both architec-tural and cultural – have begun to reflect upon both the movement’s heritage as well as speculate about its legacy moving forward. While no holistic critical discussion of the style’s global influence has been published yet, many smaller-scale regional consid-erations provide thorough examination of specific buildings, architects or cities. As the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in London faced demolition in 2008, a retrospective of sorts was published which included historical documentation from the architects’ archives, as well as a number of essays from contemporary British architects, such as Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, who expressed their admiration and support for the complex.3 Despite the book’s intention to spare the Robin Hood Gardens from demolition, the building is currently slated for demolition.

More recently, a number of conferences, symposiums and panel discussions have been (or will be) held to unpack this issue and better understand how the architectural disci-pline might take stock in these buildings, whether as an act of reflection or as a more pragmatic exercise that considers their future. A symposium held in the summer of 2012 in Berlin, Brutalism: Architecture of Everyday Culture, Poetry and Theory, declared it a primary concern to “establish substantial criteria and benchmarks, and thus promote the consistent and considered evaluation of the Brutalist legacy. We consider it imper-ative also to heighten public awareness and thereby foster a sensitive approach to this endangered architectural heritage.”4

A recent presentation at the 2013 ArchitectureBostonExpo titled “Breaking Down Bru-talism” specifically addressed practical concerns, such as program fit, envelope and systems assessment, cost and image when re-purposing these buildings.5

4

While discussions of this sort surely advance the architectural discourse surrounding these challenged structures, these exchanges remain mostly insular; more concerned with strategy, and do little to actively engage the criticisms, which mostly come from outside the discipline. While Berlin’s Brutalism symposium merely recognized the need for increased public awareness around these buildings, some groups have worked to more directly involve the public.

Awareness / Outreach

A considerable amount of the discussion surrounding these outcast buildings posits that they are simply “misunderstood”. As a result, some have responded to the tenu-ous fate of these buildings with a strategy of awareness and outreach, their hope being that with education comes appreciation. One group of Boston-based designers has been working to build recognition of local examples of post-war concrete structures. In effort to distance these works from the Brutalist label’s pejorative connotations, they have dubbed their project “Heroic: Boston Concrete 1957-1976,” and even ex-plicitly limited the use of the word “Brutalist” in any of their materials. They explain elsewhere that:

The worst thing about Brutalism is its name. Far from a coherent lineage, the adoption

of the term “brutal,” “brutalist,” and “brutalism” is marked by a host of contingencies,

migrations, and changes in meaning from their origins to later use…Brutalism became

a rhetorical catastrophe. Separated from its original context and reduced in meaning,

Brutalism became an all-too-easy pejorative, a term that suggests these buildings were

designed with bad intentions.6

Beyond their ambitions to re-direct the language surrounding these buildings, their project is one of cataloging and archiving. Their aim is to create a comprehensive and cohesive resource that can encourage and support interest in Boston’s “concrete modernism” - their suggested synonym for the marred Brutalist label. They identified 154 buildings which were then mapped and cataloged, interviewed a number of the relevant architects and solicited short essays from Boston design professionals, all of which was compiled into a gallery exhibition and an accompanying publication and website. The exhibition was formatted informally with informational flyers that visitors could take away and use to support their own investigations into Boston’s concrete modernism. The organizers of the Heroic Project explain their project ambitions as such:

Simply put, we hope to return these buildings to their proper position in the discourse

about architecture, both in the profession and within a broader political and public


realm. Is it possible to help reshape public perception and remind people of the pro-

found value of these buildings? We hope so.7

Unfortunately, despite all their best efforts and earnest optimism for this project, at-tempts to ameliorate the public’s sensibilities regarding these “difficult” buildings are often simply met with disdain or even spite:

Architects and architectural academics will try to say that the fault lies not in the build-

ings but in the “uneducated” eye of those who decry them… Rossini once said of Wag-

ner’s music that it is better than it sounds; the architectural panjandrums try to persuade

us that Brutalism is better than it looks.8

These rigid opinions and their associated friction suggest that more aggressive, phys-ically transformative approaches are necessary; ones that move beyond simple dis-course surrounding these buildings and actually engage them.

1 Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), p.7.

2 Ada Louis Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 27.

3 Robin Hood Gardens Re-visions, edited by Alan Powers. London: Twentieth Century Society, 2010.

4 “Brutalism. Architecture of Everyday Culture, Poetry and Theory”; International Symposium. Berlin, DE (held May 11-11, 2012) http://www.brutalismus.com/e/

5 “Breaking Down Brutalism”; ArchitectureBostonExpo, Boston, MA (schedule November 21, 2013) http://abexpo.com/conference/breaking-down-brutalism

6 Michael Kubo, Chris Grimley & Mark Pasnik. “Brutal” In Brutalism, edited by Kyle de May, 166. Brooklyn: CLOG, 2013.

7 Ibid.

8 Daniels, Anthony. “Atrocities Should Be Eliminated - Room for Debate.” The New York Times. April 8, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/08/are-some-buildings-too-ugly-to-survive/atroci-ties-should-be-eliminated.

Vilanova Artigas with Carlos Cascaldi, FAU USP - Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, São Paulo, Brazil 1966-1969

7CONCRETE AMENDMENTS

Buildings are so often thought of as static, unmoving entities, considered “finished” the day the punch list is completed. Yet architectural vocabulary does often suggest some sense of mortality, discussing a building’s prospective demolition in the language of save or destroy, spare or kill.

Perhaps no other building type finds itself so firmly placed within this discussion, mired within this life or death binary, than those considered Brutalist. While preser-vationists have often been the ones leading the charge to save these buildings, more traditional modes of preservation enlist themselves with the task of suppressing transformation; instead restricting, and repeatedly returning, the structure to a finite window of time. As Columbia University’s Professor of Historic Preservation Jorge Otero-Pailos noted when discussing the uproar in response to demolition of Williams and Tsien’s Folk Art Museum, “…all parties involved seem to agree about one thing: the definition of preservation. The term is invoked as if it has an essential, self-evi-dent, and constant meaning that is the opposite of change, of which demolition is the most extreme case”.1

However, Brutalist buildings are vibrant illustrations of change, naturally conveying a passage of time, it’s embedded within them. The concrete has a tectonic eloquence; it describes the way it was constructed, conveying the materials it was cast within. While a single definition of Brutalism is hardly ever agreed upon, there is little doubt of the influence of Le Corbusier’s work in raw concrete (beton brut) on the movement––

CONCRETE AMENDMENTS

8

both in ideology and aesthetic. In an address given on the opening of his Unité D’’Habitation in Marseilles, he describes the merits of this raw, honest and expressive material (the use of which represented a significant departure for his own work which had previously been finished primarily in white stucco): “Exposed concrete shows the least incidents of the shuttering, the joints of the planks, the fibres and knots of the wood, etc. But these are magnificent to look at, they are interesting to observe, to those who have a little imagination they add a certain richness”.2

Thus, there is a conflict between maintaining the original finish and being “dishonest” by removing traces of use, or even covering them over. These buildings in particular present an opportunity for a different approach, a more nuanced approach.

So much of the literature and documentation of these buildings (and there are nu-merous popular blogs devoted to Brutalist buildings) is either from the time of their completion or, if more modern, an abstract depiction of their geometric patterning. What these accounts exclude is the state of the buildings today: in most cases still in-habited by their original tenants, often a little worse for the wear, and with a myriad of provisional alterations. But in these everyday, banal tweaks one can find valuable clues to the evolution of these buildings as they’ve aged and transformed with (and by) their inhabitants. In my field work I focused on the nature of these changes in an effort to gain insight into how these buildings have grown and shifted with their owners.

By documenting and critically considering this new layer of inhabitation–what has been added, what has leaked, what has failed–I hoped to gain and share insight as to how we might successfully engage these buildings today, to better understand both the challenges these buildings carry and the opportunities they present.

And yet within this culture of neglect and renunciation is it possible to co-opt these provisional strategies? Can the language of the makeshift, the stopgap, be adopted in service of a new, more appropriate approach to preservation?

And so this thesis operates between the traditional save or destroy binary of preserva-tion. Informed by 12 months of global field study, it takes its cue from this multitude of provisional alterations observed within this beleaguered and aging building stock. Though diverse in form and appearance, across the immense volume of Brutalist architecture I visited there were surprisingly consistent circumstances found at each: leaking roofs, tangles of system upgrades, and an abundance of stairs creating acces-sibility challenges.

Persistent and pervasive issues shared across the vast volume of post-war concrete form the sites of a series of operational responses (or amendments) that range from the scale of a wall to the facade of a building. In an effort to more comprehensively address the current conditions, the work operates at three scales, in three realms. Each

9CONCRETE AMENDMENTS

of these are sited, but intended to be loose fit, suggesting a range of potential. Three buildings, currently vacant, serve as test sites.

Sited within the banality, the everyday of these buildings––the mundane reality of electrical outlets, sprinkler systems, fire alarm boxes and dripping leaks––this thesis seeks to establish a lexicon or catalog of responses, a vocabulary of transformation. The alterations or amendments support and serve as a visual index of change, allowing buildings to embody and express their own history.

1 Jorge Otero-Pailos. “Remembrance of Things to Come,” Artforum 52.8 (April 2014), p.115.

2 Le Corbusier, “Address to M. Claudius Petit, Minister of Reconstruction and Town Planning, on the occa-sion of the handing over of the Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles on 14th Oct. 1952,” Foundation Le Corbusier, <www.foundationlecorbusier.fr>

11SURFACE

SURFACE

12

Mario Ciampi, Berkeley Art Museum (Exterior Detail), Berkeley, CA 1970

13SURFACE

Surface

14

Ontario Science Centre, Toronto CanadaRaymond Moriyama, 1964-1967

15SURFACE

At the Ontario Science Center, system upgrades over the years leave a record of all this transformation.

16

Temple Street Parking Garage, New Haven CTPaul Rudolph, 1961

17SURFACE

A tangle of conduit composes a new layer of systems, marking the datums of lighting, signage and emergency services.

18

University of Toronto Scarborough (originally Scarborough College), Toronto CanadaJohn Andrews, 1963-1965

19SURFACE

A concrete sconce, once the sole source of illumination in the staircase––its own electrical wiring embedded within the wall––now simply serves as a junction box for fluorescent fixtures that have since been added.

20

Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo JapanKisho Kurakawa, 1970-1972

21SURFACE

A variety of approaches to address the chronic leaks at Kurakawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo have been improvised by its remaining residents. Strategies range from a simple array of tubs to more elaborate systems of tarps and tubing.

22

FAU USP - Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, São Paulo BrazilVilanova Artigas with Carlos Cascaldi, 1966-1969

23SURFACE

Frequent and significant leaks at Artigas’s FAU-USP in São Paulo keep custodial staff constantly occupied. The roof envelope has been failing so dramatically that blue tarpaulin has been draped across as a stop-gap measure.

25Berkeley Art Museum SURFACE

BERKELEY ART MUSEUMBerkeley, CA

Mario Ciampi1970

Case Study

Mario Ciampi’s winning competition design for University of California at Berkeley’s new University Art Museum is striking not simply for its distinctive fan shaped form, but also for its vastness of concrete. Like so many of his contemporaries, Ciampi adopted the de rigor material of modernity in the mid-century. Employed universally in the museum as structure, envelope and partition, raw, site-cast concrete comprises nearly every surfaces in the museum.

Seeking maximum impact of the material, Ciampi embedded all the building’s systems within its walls. While the initial result was long un-interrupted expanses of concrete serving as dramatic backdrops for the museum’s collection, today any system upgrades become very visible and even simple alterations become can be rather destructive.

26

Embedded systems form an invisible network tucked within the concrete’s opaque, monolithic surface. Single points of reveal punctuate the surface, providing clues to the services hidden within.

cast

28

camouflage

30

catch

This same universal application of raw concrete––its persistent presence both inside and out––subverts typical expectations of spatial distinction. Internal spaces, sharing the same material language as the exterior, no longer feel quite so distinctly interior. Within this strange blurring, how might one make a place for water?

32

Perpetually chilly courtesy of concrete’s hefty thermal mass, most buildings of this ilk lack insulation. What fuzzy translations might address this? What of a modern tapestry?

cloak

34

A strange echoing of the networks beneath, embedded and applied systems share a silent dissonance. Chipping away to fix the plumbing, how might this scar be cele-brated?

carve

37GROUND

GROUND

38

Orange County Government Complex, lobby in original condition

39GROUND

Ground

40

Philadelphia Police Administration Building (The Roundhouse), Philadelphia, PA USAGeddes, Brecher, Qualls, and Cunningham (GBQC), 1962

41GROUND

Grand entryways with terraced approaches now form vacant wind-swept plazas. The formal facade now the back door.

42

Oita Prefectural Library, Oita JapanArata Isozaki, 1964-1966

43GROUND

A single step now occupied by an extensive ramp.

44

Oita Prefectural Library, Oita JapanArata Isozaki, 1964-1966

45GROUND

Former librarian’s offices now marooned due to a modest set of steps.

47Orange County Governement Center GROUND

ORANGE COUNTY GOVERNMENT CENTERGoshen, NY

Paul Rudolph1963-1967

Case Study


Paul Rudolph’s dynamic section has presented accessibility challenges, resulting in clumsy wheelchair lifts and labyrinthine ramps that clutter and cramp his once dramatic atrium spaces.

50

Within the sprawling complex three primary ground planes are each terraced, resulting more than twelve different levels across the entire building, many of which are accessible solely by stairs.

52

Creating a new ground plane, a new topography registers the sectional changes below while offering a more holistic approach to accessibility challenges.

55SKIN

SKIN

56

Marcel Breuer, Armstrong Rubber Company Headquarters, New Haven, CT 1968-1970.

57SKIN

Skin

58

(clockwise from top left)John Madin, Birmingham Tower, Birmingham UK

Marcel Breuer, Ameritrust Tower, Cleveland OH, USAMacmillan Bloedel Building, Vancouver, Canada

Gordon Bunshaft, Wilson Park Place Los Angeles, CA USAToronto Star Headquarters, Toronto, Canada

3345 Wilshire, Los Angeles, CA USA

Globally alike, the monotonous mid-century office tower is nearly universal in its dis-like. Across numerous countries many face vacancies and sub-market rents. Their deeply inset windows tucked beneath beefy concrete panels like heavily lidded eyes.

59SKIN

60

left: 680 Folsom Street; before and afterright: screenshot of timelapse recording of 680 Folsom Street’s

transformation

An office tower in San Francisco is stripped of its concrete facade panels, eliminating the building’s “dated” references and rendering it completely unrecognizable.

61SKIN

63Armstrong Rubber Company SKIN

ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY HEADQUARTERSNew Haven, CT

Marcel Breuer1968-1970

Case Study

Constructed to house Armstrong Rubber Company’s executive offices as well as research and development, Breuer’s New Haven building expressed these two distinct programs in its asymmetrical volumes. Sited adjacent to I-95, this simple yet powerful massing is now compromised. Subject to partial demolition at the hands of its current owner IKEA, the building now more strongly resembles those run of the mill mediocre office towers so ubiquitous in their heavy, enduring deeply gridded facades.

64

Once a box floating above a low plinth.

Now a squat tower stranded in a parking lot.


The ease of demolition and reconfiguration reveals the true structure beneath: a steel skeleton.

66

constricted

SOURCES

brutalism

Banham, Reyner. “The New Brutalism,” The Architectural Review (December 1955): 354-361.

Banham, Reyner. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. New York: Reinhold Publish-ing Corp, 1966.

Boyd, Robin. “The Sad End of New Brutalism,” The Architectural Review 142, no. 845 (July 1967): 9-11.

CLOG. “Should We Consider Brutalism as an Ethic or an Aesthetic?” Glass House Conversations. National Trust for Historic Preservation, 23 Oct. 2012. (Accessed 23 July 2013).

Hale, Jack and Maureen Ward, eds. the modernist No. 4: Brutal. Salford: Manchester Modernist Society, 2012.

Hay, David. “Defending Brutalism: The Uncertain Future of Modernist Concrete Structures.” Preservation: the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation 65.1 (January 2013): 26-31.

Kubo, Michael, Mark Pasnik, and Chris Grimley. “Tough Love: In Defense of Brutal-ism.” Architect 99.4 (April 2010): 46, 48.

May, Kyle, and Julia Van Den Hout. Brutalism. Brooklyn: CLOG, 2013.

Meades, Jonathan. “Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry with Jonathan Meades,” Post-war Architecture, BBC (London: BBC Four, February 20 2014).

Smithson, Peter, Alison Smithson, Jane B. Drew and E. Maxwell Frey. “Conversa-tion on Brutalism,” Zodiac 4 (1959): 73-81.

Spellman, Catherine, ed. Peter Smithson: Conversations with Students. New York: Prince-ton Architectural Press, 2005.

Smithson, Peter and Alison. “House in Soho, London,” Architectural Design (Decem-ber 1953): 342.

Vidler, Anthony. “Learning to Love Brutalism,” Journal / International Working-Party for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (Docomomo) 47 (2012): 4-9.

83SOURCES

concrete

English Heritage. Practical Building Conservation: Concrete. London: Ashgate, 2013.

Forty, Adrian. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion, 2012.

architectural obsolescence, mortality, decay, destruction

Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architec-ture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. New York: The New Press, 1997

Mostafavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993.

Otero-Pailos, Jorge. “Remembrance of Things to Come,” ArtForum 52.8 (April 2014): 115-116.

Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

85ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to many, but perhaps most of all to my parents (and in turn their parents) for enduring warmth, love and an insistence on the value of education which has made my seemingly endless studies feel all the more worth it; and to Zach for his selflessness in encouraging me to embark on this crazy adventure and his constant support along the way.

Within the Berkeley community I give thanks to Jill Stoner for inspiring much of this work with her elegant and influential writing in Towards a Minor Architecture; and to Renee Chow, Ajay Manthripragada, Marc Trieb, Richard Fernau, Tom Buresh and Roddy Creedon for each graciously sharing their time, insights, resources, wisdom and the occasional coffee or tea with me.

Lastly, I owe immense thanks to the Branner family for their enduring generosity and to the Branner Fellowship decision committee for selecting my proposal and granting me a truly once in a lifetime opportunity. My year of travel in 2014 was extraordi-narily enriching, rewarding and enabled me to visit cities and meet professionals and scholars I never dreamed possible. And so I also owe a significant thanks to the many architects, historians, building managers and city locals who very kindly shared their time and insight with me.

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