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www.mockett.com
Circle 62
Knoll Textiles,
1945–2010
Detail of
textile color
wheel from
Knoll catalog
mock-up, ca.
1962. Herbert
Matter.
18 West 86th Street
New York , NY 10024
P 212-501-3023
W bgc.bard.edu/gallery
On view: May 18 through July 31, 2011
Lectures, study days, gallery talks, and conversations are offered in
conjunction with the exhibition. For further information, please call
212-501-3011 or e-mail programs@bgc.bard.edu.
to turn this three-story duplex into the four-story duplex they wanted,
and then they came up with the solution. Steely ripped the wood beams
into five different sizes, flashed and waterproofed the house, and stuck
the wood onto the outside in a completely random pattern. They had
thought about using the wood as a rain screen, but Steely didn’t like
the way it looked. “It wasn’t as taut and tight as a real skin,” he says.
A galvanized-steel staircase and deck winds its way
up the side of the house, making the structure look
like it’s still in process. “How many times have you
looked at buildings, and they look so good under
construction?” Steely asks. “And then when they’re
done they just look like ass.”
The real skin, now, is part wet suit, part redwood. To do anything truly
random is impossible, of course, but the architect and Martin and the
contractor worked together to get it as close to random as they could.
Every day they’d head up to the house and lay out two feet of siding,
and the contractor would attach it. And the next day, the same—a pro-
cess of ultratactile construction far removed from most architecture
produced in this age of mechanical reproduction. Not that it looks like
a fifth-grader pasted it together—“From the distance it has a real kind
of solid sort of feel,” Steely says. “It could just be siding, but as you get
closer you see the randomness of it and how hand-done it is. It seems
handmade, and you can detect the time spent on the labor, but it’s also
got a great machine quality.”
That’s just the outside, though, and a good architect does more than
make a compelling surface. Because the building had two units, and
because Wang and Martin were planning on selling the second unit
(although now they’re starting to rethink how easily they can let it go),
Steely and the couple ended up carving out occupiable space through-
out the existing framed structure, keeping it a duplex but altering its
original configuration. A production studio for Wang takes up the lower
unit on the first floor, while Martin has a workshop on the ground floor.
A second apartment on the second floor is their living space, and
a penthouse—with a sod roof—has both a solar panel (which operates
as an awning) and space for hanging out and looking at the view (they’re
above the fog here, which means they can see down and over the city
and the Bay). There’s also the exoskeleton, Steely reminds a curious
listener, a galvanized-steel staircase and deck that winds its way up
the side of the building, making the structure look like it’s still in process.
“How many times have you looked at buildings, and they look so good
under construction?” Steely asks. “And then when they’re done they
just look like ass.” Introducing the exoskeletal structure was a way, he
says, “to save that sort of anticipation of what a building will look like.”
That issue of aesthetics and framing is something that drove Wang
and Martin to work with Steely. Talking about the continued on page 125
