The casual formalism of Vladimir Ossipoff
Apr. 28th, 2009 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Frankfurt has a ridiculous number of excellent museums up and down the Main river, but by far the most interesting and evocative show I saw at the weekend was Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. Ossipoff, whose life covered almost the entire 20th century and who spent sixty years building Hawaiian "regional Modernist" houses, offices and the airport, was a Russian (from Vladivostok) brought up in Tokyo. His architecture was profoundly influenced by Japanese ideas -- he thought that Hawaii was even better suited to Japanese building types than Japan itself was -- and specifically by the aesthetic spelled out in Tanizaki's book In Praise of Shadows. Ossipoff declared a personal war on ugliness. The building on the right here is his 1952 Goodsill House at Wai'alae, Honolulu, and it shows Ossipoff's characteristic openness to nature. A house, to him, had to be like a kind of umbrella: open to nature, yet protective. You should know what season it is (Ossipoff hated air conditioning), and you should be able to feel the Hawaiian trade winds eddying around.
A Metropolis magazine article from last year says: "Like any good regional Modernist, Ossipoff used common sense strategies of orientation, natural ventilation, microclimates, and local materials—what landscape historian Marc Treib describes as a “modernized version of local precedent.” Synthesizing Eastern and Western influences, Ossipoff drew on Japanese craftsmanship and modern architectural techniques. The Goodsill House, for example, is an adaptation of a 1950s ranch house crossed with Japanese and Hawaiian elements. It sits on a small sloping suburban lot near Diamond Head, in Honolulu, and has no front door.
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"You take this pathway around to the back and see this lanai—a Hawaiian word for a traditional wall-less structure covered with either thatched or live plants," [curator Dean] Sakamoto says. “What you have in this house is an extended veranda where all the sliding screen doors open up to the garden, and there’s no one single entry.” For the Goodsill family, the lanai was the primary space for entertaining—an outdoor living room turned into an oasis. “The owner, Marshall Goodsill, kept his television in the lanai—basically outdoors,” Sakamoto adds. “What is wonderful is that the back end of this boomerang-shaped house faces where the rain comes from, so you can sit and watch the daily shower pass over your head.” Marshall’s wife, Ruth, remembers being surprised at one particular detail when she visited the house as it was nearing completion: “There was an opening over the front lanai—a big hole in the roof, which we expected to fill in after we moved in, but Val said it was for moon viewing, so we left it as it is.”
The same radical openness is visible in Ossipoff's Honolulu airport building, above. Big windows could be cantilevered open, effectively removing the walls. As the exhibition points out, this is the architecture Barack Obama would have grown up with; Ossipoff was responsible for several buildings at the school he attended.
There's a David Hockney "bigger splash" feel to some of the houses, which I suppose puts them in a Los Angeles context. But Hawaii's breathtaking scenery and wilder, more open feel takes them somewhere else. It's also a question of pace; "We have a much more casual way of being formal than you do on the mainland," Ossipoff declared. And that "casual formalism" is also quite Japanese, I think.
Metropolis again: "Ossipoff’s strong Japanese influence was further underscored by that country’s natural contract of living with nature rather than fighting against it. He was a master of using darkness and shadow to enhance his design. In a warm climate like Hawaii’s, darkness equals shade, which makes the space comfortable by keeping light levels low.
"Unlike other Modernists, who believed that architecture could conquer nature, Ossipoff had a reverence toward it. “During dramatic thunderstorms he would stand in the doorway and say, ‘You’re crazy to sit out there on the screen porch and watch the storm,’” Xandra Ossipoff recalls. “It was exciting and fun to watch, but he wouldn’t because he’d seen what nature can do. He’d seen tidal waves and volcanoes, and he lived through that 1923 earthquake. He said to me many times that he saw the earth open up and watched a person fall into the crack. It was defining.” He actively disliked air-conditioning, and in the later years, when Hawaii became paved over, he occasionally allowed clients to put an air conditioner in the bedroom. “His point was, you live in the tropics,” Sakamoto says, “and if you box it up and air-condition it, you could be anywhere, couldn’t you?”
The "regional Modernisms" theme -- how mainstream Modernism played out in various more-or-less lush and exotic locations, and how it was softened and changed by them -- is another variant, perhaps, on the idea of openness to the wind, the moon, the seasons and nature. In Hawaii, guided by this Japanized Russian, it seems like Modernism itself opened up, loosened up, and put down roots.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 05:42 am (UTC)Thanks for the link.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 07:07 am (UTC)But I want to understand “why Ossipoff, why now”. What I would at first quickly suspect is simple romanticization/imperialist orientalism at play (“casual formalism” is also quite Japanese?) paradoxically as well as even the reverse (guided by this Japanized Russian, it seems like Modernism itself opened up, loosened up, and put down roots?), though synthesizing the typical Japan and the West binary/dialectic; but at every juncture, the intention revealed is the opposite of what one may have expected and I give the benefit of the doubt.
This is clearly Japanese architecture form – not imitation or mimicry – through architecture representing one’s self through others. In this case, through Ossipoff and the retrospective exhibitions in Honolulu and Frankfurt, it’s Europe observing/criticizing itself through Japanese architecture.
Then there is also: how do we understand Ossipoff? As a Romantic or a Modernist? The trail leads us backwards for sure, beyond the nostalgia of Tanizaki—back to Katsura and Ise. And it does by way of Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, Bruno Taut. And this difference might lead us to question our own categories, as much as those of “modern”, “traditional”, or “exotic” by which we seek to understand that what we encounter.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 07:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 07:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 09:25 am (UTC)his dislike for a/c, for one thing, makes me immediately feel some kind of respect for him - and i seem to enjoy hot weather much less than the average person. still, i never used air conditioning even when i had the option one hot summer in Japan..
i wonder, though, did he ever design any houses in colder locales? if so, did he, or would he have, avoided central heating too? i guess i'd like to hope so, if only because i'm so bored with people i've talked to lately who couldn't stop complaining about the lack of central heating in Japan (and how they'll go back to Japan but only if they can stay in a Western-style hotel, blah blah blah...) the last time i visited my parents' house (rural u.s. in March) i opted never to turn on the space heater in my bedroom and found that i half-liked having the temperature dip down to the lower 40s (F; ~6ºC) in the mornings.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-07 09:56 pm (UTC)opened up
Date: 2009-04-28 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 07:08 pm (UTC)Despite his upbringing, he was still educated in an American architecture school(Berkeley). Is there any architect who studies in his/her own country(which is out of this Western Modernist academic architecture epicentres) but still made innovations in a universal scale?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-28 09:01 pm (UTC)My favourite architecture-themed post of this year.
connection quiz.
Date: 2009-04-29 01:19 am (UTC)Re: connection quiz.
Date: 2009-04-29 06:25 am (UTC)Re: connection quiz.
Date: 2009-04-30 08:25 am (UTC)but if you'll check the Hawaiian edition of Summerisle, I think you'll see that the final track is titled Ossipoffian May, featuring baroque processed ukulele...
Re: connection quiz.
Date: 2009-04-30 01:48 pm (UTC)And her Detroit townhouse was recently featured on the cover of Dwell. http://www.dwell.com/articles/mies-van-der-rohe-lafayette-park.html (be sure to click "View Slideshow" on the upper right) and remember, this place is in downtown Detroit.
Re: connection quiz.
Date: 2009-04-30 01:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-29 10:08 am (UTC)But price!
The house I'm renting, for example is less than 400sq feet and so close you can hear the neighbors on either side gargling, but is being sold by the owners for U$525,000.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-07 10:00 pm (UTC)So exciting for us, the family, for him to be getting so much attention and recognition even now...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-07 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-07 10:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-22 09:28 pm (UTC)and im dying to try and either find an affordable (haha) Ossipoff home, or
to emulate his design asthetics - im in geneva at the moment
Cheers!
Adrian
Geneva