Let’s go back to the year 1762. One of the many things happening in
that space of time is the publication of
Elements of
Criticism, a book by a minor figure of the Scottish Enlightenment,
Lord Kames. Elements of Criticism continues a philosophical
project that dates back to Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of
Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), and has its major
breakthrough in Aesthetica, authored in 1750 by the German
philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. These British and German thinkers are
trying to establish the impossible: a science of beauty. In Elements
of Criticism, Lord Kames not only defines The Beautiful in living
art but also The Beautiful in dead art.
“Whether should a ruin be in the Gothic or Grecian form? In the
former, I think; because it exhibits the triumph of time over strength;
a melancholy but not unpleasant thought: A Grecian ruin suggests rather
the triumph of barbarity over taste; a gloomy and discouraging
thought.” This strange passage offers us a way to think about the
modernism in the designs of Tom Kundig, a partner in the local
architectural firm Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, and a recent
recipient of Cooper-Hewitt’s prestigious National Design Award.
But first, let’s make a clean distinction. There are many forms of
modernism (proto, neo, revolutionary, futuristic, corporate), but for
the purposes of this short article, let’s narrow them down to two: one,
a modernism that obliterates time; and two, a modernism that
incorporates it, or, better yet, exposes itself to the effects of time.
The first modernism is associated with what Rem Koolhaas derides as
“zero-degree architecture” or “Typical Plan” design. It obliterates
time by erasing from itself anything that is specific, characteristic,
and distinct. “A Typical Plan,” Koolhaas writes in the book S,
M, L, XL, “is as empty as possible: a floor, a
core, a perimeter, and minimum of columns.”
The other modernism, the sort Kundig represents, retains the
minimalism of zero-degree architecture, but it does not banish the
processes of aging and physical change. In Kundig’s work, materials are
not only exposed to time but time itself becomes a material. It is for
this reason that his homes already have in them the majesty of their
movement through time. “Buildings outlive people, you have to design
with this in mind,” Kundig points out. Buildings, like people, are
not permanent; they have life spans, they are born, grow old, decline,
and crumble.
Back to Elements of Criticism: The thing that is important in
Lord Kames’s passage is not the barbarism/civilization binary (a binary
the proponents of the Enlightenment were overeager to establish) but
that a great building that fails to end well, began badly. “In my
beginning is my end,” wrote T. S. Eliot. “In succession, houses rise
and fall, crumble, are extended, are removed, destroyed, restored…
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires… In my end is my
beginning.” For a building to be truly beautiful, it must also have in
it the stuff that makes a beautiful corpse.
We all know the end of, say, Northgate Mall is not going to be
pretty. It has in it no proper way to die. It wants to look perpetually
new, so if it is not destroyed, it is destined to leave a horrifying
corpse. But Kundig’s Delta Shelter, a cabin in Eastern Washington, has
an infusion of time in the core of its being. It is very much alive,
but it does not conceal its fate, its future, its rust, its
temporality. “The Delta Shelter,” writes Billie Tsien in Tom Kundig:
Houses, “is clad in hot-rolled steel, which is left untreated and
will rust and age naturally.” Even his recently completed Southern
California house, which received attention last month in the New
York Times Magazine, begins its life with the understanding that
the master of its youth will be the master of its senescence: time.
There are other elements to Kundig’s architecture—its
fascination with gadgetry, its references to 19th-century
industrialization, its worship of raw concrete—but its sense of
temporality is the source of its strength and beauty. In his lectures
on art, Hegel describes the function of a temple in the ancient world
as a space that calls into presence the gods; Kundig’s houses call into
presence the last and final god, Chronos. 
