2016-06-06 ALMOST HERCULES.indd

60 Pages·2016·4.03 MB·English

COUNTING
Ron Witte, Editor
COUNTING
Ron Witte, Editor
In honor of Anderson Todd’s 90th birthday.
Rice School of Architecture
2011
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CONTENTS
PREFACE Sarah Whiting ...............................................................7
ALMOST HERCULES Ron Witte ...............................................9
HONOR Stephen Fox ...................................................................45
AT HOME WITH ANDERSON TODD Frank Welch ........85
ANDERSON TODD AT RICE Nonya Grenader ................97
CREDITS ...............................................................................................114
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..............................................................115
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Preface
T.O.D.D.
Time Out for Daily Discussion.
Lots of words can replace that last one. Diatribe.
Disturbance. Diversion. Dalliance. Drawing. Dunno.
Discretion. Whatever D it might be, there is always some
moment in any given day that is undeniably Andy-Time.
Anderson Todd makes time stand still. Hallway
conversation is a sport, sometimes a blood sport. Todd’s
points are punctuated by two-step shuffl es, outbursts, and
his trademark broad smile underscoring every bon mot.
Even the time outs have time outs. Andy will mull a point,
returning to it weeks later, boring into it like a 6H pencil that
leaves tiny trenches in a sheet of Strathmore paper.
Architecture and the conversations that surround it take
time. And we – those of us who know no world other than
the one that is fi lled with Google-induced shorthands for
doing what we do – are evermore reluctant to value time.
Anderson Todd doesn’t just value time. He makes time…
even as he stops it.
Taking Todd’s cue, we might all pause and ask: ‘When is
the best time?’ My guess is that Anderson Todd will say:
‘Right now.’
Happy Birthday Andy.
Sarah Whiting
Dean, Rice School of Architecture
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Almost Hercules
ALMOST HERCULES
Ron Witte
The last century has been riddled with Nothing. Silences,
abstractions, minimalisms,…Nothing has come to us in a
dense chorus of mantras. It makes little difference where
the compass of cultural production is pointed. Artists,
musicians, writers, and architects have all clamored for,
and often about, Nothing. Our collective preoccupation with
Nothing has had a vertiginously rising and falling volume
(it turns out silence is deafening). In a remarkable sleight
of hand, Nothing is both an antidote to too much and an
enticement for everything. It is a salve for the darkest of
evils and a catalyst for the brightest of optimisms.
Nothing: she loves me, she loves me not.
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COUNTING Almost Hercules
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COUNTING Almost Hercules
Nothing is exactly half of a zero-sum game. You can’t have
Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) without the years
of darkness that were World War I. You can’t have John
Cage’s 4’33” (1952) without the intrusions of a breath, a
heartbeat, a creaking chair. Samuel Beckett can’t tell us
that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence
and nothingness” (1969) without uttering those words.
Nothing always runs alongside something.
For architects, the something that runs alongside Nothing
is always Almost, as in Almost Nothing. We have a
particular fervor for Mies’s declaration. We get it, or at least
we like to think we do. Almost Nothing is the architect’s
coda for abstraction, simplicity, essentialism, universality,
timelessness, modernity, responsibility,… It is nothing short
of extraordinary how these two words have been made to
Anderson Todd in the Bolsover House
signify vast tracts of what we want to believe.
Once Almost Nothing is in our heads, it makes its way into
our thinking in the most insidious of ways. We love and hate
Almost Nothing. It admonishes us to think that form has
I fi ll up a glass with water in the dark…I’m
disappeared. It triggers a state of reverie (what this reverie
very conscious of how much water is in the
glass. is about is diffi cult to say but rest assured it can be pretty
much anything). It makes us think that inside and outside
—AT
will be indifferent to one another if we can just make that
goddamned sheet of glass disappear. It may well make us
believe that we have ourselves disappeared, left to hover
in an ineffability of our own making.
More than anything else, the history of Almost Nothing is the
story of making things go away. Vast amounts of thought,
labor, and ink have been expended on the second of these
two words, perennially leaving Almost in the lurch. This,
of course, makes perfect sense. Whenever it makes an
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COUNTING Almost Hercules
appearance, Nothing evokes a kind of veneration, a quasi-
mystical authority emanating from its enigmatic echo. To
enter the history of Almost, on the other hand, sounds
like we’re entering into some bad story about horseshoes
and hand grenades. Nothing = perfect. Almost = less than
perfect. Seen in one light, Nothing’s mandate is to make
Almost disappear. But let’s face it: you can’t have Nothing
without Almost. Almost is the only way we can succeed in
Nothing. Almost is everything.
No one understands Almost better than Anderson Todd.
A very good friend of Nothing, Todd is Almost’s paramour.
Todd’s Almost appears in unassuming matter: sheetrock,
bricks, glass, and steel. It is spoken in the diffi cult precisions
of proportions, distances, and cadences. It is wedged into
the impossibly narrow gap between his excruciatingly
discerning grip on what is/isn’t architecture and the
remarkable openness of his instincts.
There is no fl atter ceiling than a Todd ceiling. His ceilings
aren’t just fl at in the technical sense (though it is surprisingly
hard to turn four-by-eight sheets of gypsum board into a
tautly singular plane). Their fl atness is an enticement to
stare. Todd’s ceilings compel us to stare. The intensity of
looking at something in this way produces a sensation that
is, as Susan Sontag wrote of staring at silent art in 1967, “as
far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art
can get.” There are no lights in or on these surfaces. They
have no coffers, beams, or soffi ts. They have a few holes
to let columns go through them, letting you know that
these white planes are uselessly thin. They won’t protect
you from the hazards of collapsing structures and the
vicissitudes of weather outside. They hover, pulled back
Suit House, 1970
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Image: Ceiling / Column / Glass Wall of Shadowlawn or Bolsover.
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Bolsover House, 1994
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