Manitoga and the 20th Century Picturesque

Following last month’s introduction to Russel Wright’s Manitoga, this month’s blog entry is a brief consideration of Manitoga in the context of the picturesque tradition in architecture and landscape architecture. While Wright’s project is certainly modern, this entry is an outline of a possible historic precedent for the relationship between nature and culture that Wright developed at Manitoga. Apart from any formal affinity between earlier iterations of the picturesque and his project at Manitoga, Wright inherited the picturesque tradition’s ambiguous attitude towards progress, acknowledging the ongoing loss of both wilderness and our connection to the natural environment brought about by modernization and industrialization.

Wright's house, Dragon Rock, perched over the Quarry Pond

The picturesque tradition developed in eighteenth century England as both a reaction against formal gardens based on geometric principles as well as a revitalization of ancient pastoral traditions. The English picturesque was an aesthetic outlook that encompassed not only landscape design and architecture but also poetry and painting too. In the early eighteenth century, poet Alexander Pope urged designers to follow nature in his “Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington”:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column, or the arch to bend,
To swell the terras, or to sink the grot;
In all, let nature never be forgot…

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th’ambitious hill the heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th'intending lines,
Paints as you plant, and as you work, designs.

Pope’s “consult the genius of the place” was picked up by later designers who based their designs on the specific topography of a site (also known as the “genius loci”). For landscape designers in the early eighteenth century, picturesque effects were first borrowed from landscape painting, and included the use of irregularity, asymmetry, and perspective, as well as painterly contrasts of color, shade and form. Designers William Kent and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, for example, broke with formal symmetry and geometry in garden design through their use of serpentine paths, clumps of trees in studied irregularity, meandering artificial water features, and architectural follies. In New Principles of Gardening (1728), designer and theorist Batty Langley urged designers “to copy, or imitate Nature”, while the later theorist Uvedale Price, in Essays on the Picturesque (1794), argued that designers like Kent and Brown had not gone far enough in following nature, insisting that nature was more diverse and random than irregularly placed tree groupings and meandering paths.

In the United States, architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing popularized the picturesque in the nineteenth century. Both were closely associated with the Hudson River School painters (such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand) and writers (such as William Cullen Bryant) who developed an American landscape tradition that was similarly linked to English aesthetic ideals. From the late 1830s, Davis was designing and promoting picturesque rural cottages and gardens in the Hudson River Valley, while Downing’s influential A Treatise of Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841) adapted English models to American topography, climate, and vegetation. Downing urged Americans to take inspiration from their local region, use local plants rather than imported ones, and integrate their houses into the landscape through color and form. For Downing, the rural house and garden had higher moral purpose – life in a picturesque rural setting might offset the inherent dangers of modern city life – and, despite its English aristocratic origins, a fundamentally democratic character through its continuation of the American pastoral tradition established by Thomas Jefferson.

Calvert Vaux and Fredrick Law Olmstead's Central Park, New York

Downing’s partner Calvert Vaux continued these ideals both in practice and in print after Downing’s untimely death in 1852, but more importantly, Vaux went on to design New York’s Central Park in partnership with Fredrick Law Olmstead (see image above). Completed in 1876, Central Park was both a product of human intervention and a paradoxical protest against modernization and the urban condition: a picturesque landscape in the middle of a modern metropolis. The Park was a carefully managed series of scenes – from the wildness of the Ramble to the pastoral meadow of the Great Lawn to the informal water features such as the meandering Lake – all artificial recreations of various topographies that provided a connection to nature (however contrived) for the city’s urban inhabitants. Olmstead and Vaux also designed Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and Olmstead went on to found what was perhaps the first professional landscape architecture firm in America in 1883, subsequently designing dozens of parks around the country. But if the impact of the picturesque tradition was significant in nineteenth century America, it seems to have dissipated by the early twentieth century. Certainly modernist designers, enamoured with progress, new technologies and urban living, returned to geometry and order. Following nature and consulting the “genius of the place” receded in importance as progress became almost synonymous with the scientific and technological domination of nature.

Revitalizing the Picturesque

Russel Wright’s Manitoga revives aspects of earlier picturesque traditions, and his designer landscape challenges the clear nature/culture division that was reinstated into American consciousness by the mid-twentieth century. In 1942, Wright and his wife purchased the steeply sloped seventy-five acre property in the Hudson River Valley as a retreat from urban life (Manitoga is approximately fifty miles from Manhattan). While in some ways Wright’s Manitoga seems to be a direct descendant of Downing and Davis’ Hudson River Valley picturesque ideals, the site he chose was already scarred by industrialization through extensive quarrying and logging. His regeneration of the landscape follows the picturesque principle of following nature, but instead of trying to recreate a pre-industrial wilderness, Wright’s inclusion of human history and technological intervention into his landscape design goes further than his picturesque descendants.

Looking out over the Quarry Pond, Manitoga

Rather than begin by designing a house, Wright began studying the topography, native vegetation and seasonal rhythms of the site – in short, he began by consulting the genius of the place. In a 1970 lecture, he reflected on the project’s beginnings:

“I began designing the land almost immediately, cutting down trees, leaving only the larger ones, leaving groups of hemlock to contrast with groups of birch or making paths – learning the shape of the land – gradually cutting vistas and views… Mary wanted a field so I cut down hundreds of trees to make this field, leaving only the young dogwood. In making vistas like this, I would sometimes take photographs and paint out certain trees before definitely cutting them down. I built a dam across the old quarry pit and changed the course of the small brook to run into the old quarry … thus making a waterfall.”

In keeping with earlier picturesque ideals, Wright’s “garden of woodland paths” was designed using mostly native plants, particularly in his fields of white flowering mountain laurel and deep green hemlock woods. Picturesque features Wright designed include: Mary’s Meadow (described by him above), ponds from the abandoned quarry sites (the Quarry Pond and Lost Pond), a fern glen, boulder groupings, wildflower fields, vistas through openings in the hemlock canopy, and distinct outdoor “rooms”. One of the main water features, the Quarry Pond, was created by diverting a stream at the top of the site to create a thirty-foot waterfall into the quarry. A particular highlight of Wright’s garden “rooms” was the Moss Room, situated on the quarry’s outer rim. These various features and rooms were designed to be experienced in sequential narratives via walking trails that extended from the house into the landscape. Wright’s early training as a theater set designer resurfaced in his creation of landscape “scenes” designed to be experienced by visitors walking the trails.

Part of the fern glen, Manitoga

The Moss Room

While Wright’s design conforms to picturesque design conventions, Manitoga embodies a more complex dialogue with nature than either the eighteenth century English or the nineteenth century American precedents. If the imitation of nature and the suppression of modernization was the aim of earlier designers, Wright challenges picturesque ideals by following nature while also consciously evoking the site’s industrial history through reminders of quarrying in the form of metal hooks embedded in granite boulders, as well as blasting marks left prominently visible on boulders. Even the earlier human habitation of the Hudson River Valley by Native Americans is evoked in Wright’s use of the Algonquin word, Manitoga, meaning “place of great spirit”. He also used the word Osio, a Native American term for a beautiful view, to refer to places on his trails with an opening in the hemlock canopy, designed as a framed view of the distant Hudson River.

An "osio", or framed view of the Hudson River

Blast marks from the former quarrying operation left visible on a granite boulder

As an ongoing dialogue with nature, a design project such as Manitoga could never be truly “finished”, though Wright had completed his house/studio and much of the designer landscape by 1960. In his rehabilitation of the landscape at Manitoga during the 1940s and 50s, Wright was far in advance of later notions of “ecological consciousness’ that were to become widespread in the late 1960s and 1970s when another reaction against modernization and industrialization surfaced in American consciousness. But Manitoga was more than simply an illustration of either picturesque or ecological design principles. Wright’s project was not an attempt to return the landscape to some kind of primeval wilderness, nor was it simply a series of visual scenes to be passively consumed by visitors, but a living embodiment of the tension between nature and culture in the twentieth century. For Wright, Manitoga was designed to be traversed on foot rather than experienced at a distance, and visitors were encouraged to engage with the particularity of its environment through hiking the trails and experiencing the site via all of their senses. It is in this spirit that Wright began an environmental education program at Manitoga the year before his death in 1976, a program that continues today. Perhaps Wright ultimately came to see design as a means to narrate the genius of the place not through informational signage, visual images, or scientific data, but through a complete sensual engagement with the landscape. This aspect of Manitoga I will explore further in my next entry.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Downing, Alexander Jackson, A Treatise of Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841). Online (25MB).

Kowsky, Francis R., Country, Park and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Mallgrave, Harry, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Pope, Alexander, “An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington”, 1731, from Pat Rogers, ed., Alexander Pope: The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Price, Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque (1810 edition). Online (16MB).

Wright, Russel, “Building a Dream House: The Story of Dragon Rock”, unpaginated transcription of a lecture, 1970. Copy at Russel Wright archives, Syracuse University, New York.

All photographs by D.J. Huppatz. More photographs of Manitoga on my Flickr page (access My Pics on column to the right above).

Russel Wright: Manitoga

Constructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a design practice that extended like a Moebius strip from the household objects of the house’s interior to the regeneration of the surrounding landscape. Manitoga’s significance was officially recognized in 2006 when it was designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest level of recognition for historic sites in the United States, but despite this recognition, the project seems to have fallen in the cracks between disciplinary histories. Best known as an industrial designer, it is Wright’s only completed architectural and landscape project, which is presumably why it has inspired little interest from architects or landscape architects. However, it is worth revisiting Manitoga as a design project that is particularly pertinent to 21st century practice – a house, studio, and environment that folded industrial, interior, architectural and landscape design onto a single continuum, and redefined the relationship between design and nature.

Dragon Rock nestled into the walls of the former quarry

In an earlier blog entry, which serves as an introduction to this one, I outlined Wright’s design career up until he began working on Manitoga. Thus this story begins in 1942, when Russel and Mary Wright purchased the property with the intention of building a retreat from life in New York City. The site had been extensively logged and its main feature was an abandoned quarry, which hardly made for a picturesque setting for a future home and studio. Their initial work included creating paths, diverting a stream to make a pool in the quarry, as well as both selective clearing and regeneration of the landscape. With Mary’s death in 1952, Russel, while continuing to practice as a designer in New York City, became increasingly obsessed with Manitoga. After working with the landscape for some years, Wright finally decided on a site for his house and studio. Instead of situating the house on the hill top with views of the Hudson, Wright chose to fit it into the side of the granite cliff overlooking the quarry, enclosed by rocks and trees. Between 1955 and 1960, Wright designed and completed the house, Dragon Rock, with the aid of David Leavitt, an architect who had worked for Antonin Raymond in Japan for several years in the early 1950s. Though Leavitt is officially credited as the architect (and Wright was drawn to his Japanese experience), Wright had very specific ideas on the design of the house, and was certainly responsible for the interior fittings and furniture.

Wright's studio on right, main house to the left

Dragon Rock comprises a split-level living-dining room which flows into a kitchen, a wing for his daughter and a housekeeper to the West, and Russel’s separate bedroom-studio building (which also included a guest room), to the East. The studio is connected to the main house via a vine-draped loggia intended to create a theatrical effect of anticipation for a visitor who can hear but not see the waterfall beyond the screen of vines. The house itself is built on several different levels, creating not only visual interest but also heightening sensory awareness for the occupant moving through the space – though they can hear it, visitors cannot see the waterfall and quarry below until descending into the living-dining room area, further heightening anticipation.

Looking down into the dining room from the living room area

While Dragon Rock contains many innovative design details, Wright suggested two principles as the key to his design process: Blending and Contrasting. Framed in local white oak, the house blends with its natural surroundings, an idea which is carried further by his blending of the house’s interior and exterior by his use of granite stones from the quarry site for the living room’s rough stone stairs, fireplace, and flagstone floor. The living room feels like a cave built into the cliff face. A cedar log supports the main ceiling beam above the dining room. Plant material from the local area was incorporated into the ceilings, and native leaves were pressed behind transparent plastic laminates on a sideboard panel. A local stone becomes a door knob, a branch becomes a towel rack. Via materials, colors, textures and literal appropriations, Wright blended the interiors almost seamlessly with the environment outside.

A local stone becomes a door knob

However, the principle of Contrasting provides both visual and sensual interest in the interiors, with Wright’s juxtaposed the local, natural materials, with modern, high-tech plastics and textiles; regular windowpanes with the organic forms outside; and plastic furniture, panels and partitions with the stone floors and wooden beams. With careful attention to the texture, color and surfaces within the house, Wright incorporated innovative synthetic materials supplied by manufacturers such as DuPont, for whom Wright had previously worked. Dragon Rock was not simply a homage to raw “nature”, but a dynamic interaction between the artificial and the natural, blurring the boundaries between the two.

The cave-like living room, constructed of local granite from the quarry

The house was designed with Wright’s earlier “Easier Living” concepts in mind. He included a practical kitchen arrangement, for example, with a bar for buffet serving of food, built in shelving and pull out racks for easy storage. While Wright’s easy living was not reliant on technology, the house is equipped with a modern washer-dryer and dishwasher. Entertaining and meals were an important part of Wright’s redefinition of American lifestyle and for Manitoga, he took this idea further, designing menus with specific meals designed for both nutrition and aesthetics. Dinnerware and table settings were chosen to compliment particular foods, as well as harmonize with the seasons. Thus the house also designed for a specific way of living that Wright described as a reaction against the increasing mechanization and homogenization of American culture in the 1950s: Dragon Rock, he said, was “a designer’s experiment, not only in designing a house, but in designing a home and the way to live in it.” (Garrison lecture) It is worth noting that the 1950s was the era of the popular prepackaged TV dinner, a phenomenon diametrically opposed to Wright’s “creative living” ideal.

Looking down onto the kitchen-dining room area

Dragon Rock was designed to interact with the seasons, as Wright carefully devised two seasonal schemes for the interiors which included changing curtains, furniture, reversible panels and partitions, and artworks. For summer, cool blues, greens and white shades dominated the interiors, while for winter, warm colors such as brown, red and gold provided a contrast to the winter whites and grays outside. For winter, chairs were covered in fur slipcovers, which could be pulled off in summer. Even the candle chandelier above the dining table was replaced by a Plexiglas summer light fixture. Wright’s design of Dragon Rock ensured that the house and its inhabitants were in a continual and changing dialogue with the local environment – engaging with the materials of the landscape and adapting to seasonal rhythms.

The former quarry

Learning from Manitoga

Wright began working on Manitoga by clearing underbrush, planting native vegetation, pruning trees, and designing a series of trails that followed the site’s topography. From redirecting the stream to creating secret alcoves of native flowers, Wright completely redesigned the formerly denigrated landscape. In his design, Wright retained and highlighted the remnants of native forest remaining, but the site was also selectively cleared and leveled, trees pruned, and perhaps most importantly, plants cultivated in an effort to regenerate the environment. Wright completed extensive study of local flora in an effort to create appropriate plantings for the region and its climate. In his regeneration, Wright paid careful attention to texture, color, light and sensual qualities. The waterfall, for example, was carefully designed for both its aesthetic and aural qualities, stones and boulders were moved to create steps or informal seating, and a moss garden invited visitors to touch its sensuous surfaces. But this was not the recreation of “wilderness”, as Wright acknowledged human intervention into the landscape by exposing a cable hook embedded in a rock, or leaving blasting marks visible on another rock, and even hinting at more recent human intervention here and there in the form of carvings into a stone, for example, or subtle trail markers nailed to trees.

Cable hook embedded in a rock

Wright’s ongoing project at Manitoga included the construction of woodland paths to be experienced on foot, providing a range of sensory experiences for the walker. Four miles of trails, each with individual names such as Autumn Path, Morning Path, Sunset Path or Lost Pond Path, were designed for a particular time of day or season. The paths were carefully conceived to provide a wealth of sensory experiences – they narrow so the visitor has to climb over rocks or brush past undergrowth, then widen to a scene such as a hemlock canopy or bed of ferns. Wright’s ritual paths through the property may have been Japanese in inspiration, but can also be seen in an American context as part of a continuing tradition from New England Transcendentalism, a designer’s response to David Henry Thoreau’s walking in the woods in order to engage with the environment sensually and intimately.

The moss garden

Historically, the 1950s are typically characterized in architecture and design as the triumph of International Style modernism on the one hand, and more popularly, by the growth of suburbia and excessive consumerism. Both International Style modernism and suburban design began with a universal space, regardless of local environment or topography, and both (in their different ways) fetishized new technologies. Unlike either suburbia or the International Style of the period, Wright’s design engages intimately with the local environment, ecology, topography, and history. While modernism was typically confined to urban areas, suburban design was reshaping the landscape beyond cities by a clearing and leveling, thereby erasing the local topography and ecology, and replacing it with the standardized monoculture of the suburban lawn and decorative evergreen trees. Wright’s process at Manitoga was a reverse of this “tabula rasa” beginning of both the International Style and suburbia, beginning instead with an already “disturbed” landscape and carefully regenerating it through intervention and care. However, there could be no “return” of the landscape to the wilderness – the environment, as Wright’s design of Manitoga constantly reminds us, is always already artificial.

Wright's studio

Finally, it is worth reconsidering Manitoga as a contemporary design laboratory. For Wright, nature is always already marked by human intervention, and the dynamic interaction between nature and culture is at the heart of his project. At Manitoga, the environment is more than simply a background for human habitation and consumption, it is integrated into a dynamic relationship with culture, and Wright’s “creative life” actively involves humans in a tactile, sensual relationship with the surrounding landscape. Wright’s design process challenges the industrial society of the mid-20th century, whereby nature was seen in merely utilitarian terms (quarrying and logging), to begin what could be termed a postindustrial design practice that engaged in an alternative dialogue with nature. If the dominant narrative of postwar American culture was the technological conquest of nature by culture, Wright’s view from his studio at Manitoga is a good place to conclude. Wright described this view as a “worm’s eye view” – rather than looking down on the environment from above, Wright consciously positioned his studio so that the designer was situated below, or at least within, the landscape, a perspective which engenders a certain humility and respect.

Inside Wright's studio: "a worm's eye view"

The 21st Century Interior

In order to finish off my 21st Century Interior project for the year, I have put all of the posts for 2009 together in a single document, edited them lightly and added a short conclusion. Please download here as a PDF for your reading pleasure. Note that if you want to print it out, this document is 65 pages long and contains colored pictures, as well as a full bibliography at the end.

Any comments you have would be gratefully received either here or via email.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful holiday season.

Tadao Ando: Morimoto Restaurant

In my recent blog entries on the 21st century interior, the issue of theatricality has recurred several times. The intersection between the virtual spaces of the theater or cinema, and the actual spaces of physical interiors, seems both a vital and under-theorized connection with a long and somewhat marginalized history. In the United States, for example, the earliest professional designer, Elsie de Wolfe, began her career as an actor at the beginning of the 20th century; many of the best known designers of the interwar era, such as Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss and Russel Wright, began their careers in theater set design; while designers such as Morris Lapidus continued the theatrical impulse into the postwar era. An understanding of the contemporary interior as a stage set in which inhabitants “perform” social rituals or enact their identities (through seeing and being seen) seems a useful one. Rather than understanding the interior as an empty architectural container, the theatrical interior is an inherently dynamic, mediated environment, always already subject to a human gaze.

Christopher Innes, through a close analysis of the careers of Norman Bel Geddes and Joseph Urban, argues that in the 1920s, Broadway theater was a thoroughly modern medium which influenced not only the fashion and décor of its audience, but impacted upon their social and cultural values too. Bel Geddes and Urban worked on both theater and film sets, as well as on commissions for hotels, restaurants, retail spaces and private homes in the 1920s and 1930s. Innes argues that Bel Geddes’ and Urban’s scenery, lighting schemes, and technological innovations developed in their (virtual) theater projects leaked into their (actual) hotel lobbies, banquet rooms, cabarets, and ball rooms. The virtual Art Deco interiors featured in 1930s Hollywood cinema similarly spread into the actual world of both public and private spaces. This seepage between the theatrical or cinematic set and physical interior spaces continues to the present, as seen in my recent case studies: Naomi Leff’s Rhinelander Mansion for Polo/Ralph Lauren (1986); Philippe Starck’s Royalton Hotel (1988), Paramount Hotel (1990), and Hudson Hotel (2000); OMA/Rem Koolhaas’ Prada Flagship Store (2001); and the two New York restaurants of Karim Rashid, Nooch (2004) and Kurve (2008).

However, within an architectural context, this understanding of the interior as a mediated theatrical space is often suppressed by the continuation of modernist architectural ideals. The inherent conflict can be distilled into to three key dichotomies:

1. The Fake vs the Real. The moral imperative of modernist truth to materials and truth to form is undermined by the artificial materials and forms intended to create effects in the theatrical interior. This divide goes back to the 19th century modernist critique of Victorian designers’ use of faux materials, overly-elaborate forms and eclectic historical references.

2. The Temporal vs the Timeless. Modernist architecture’s drive for establishing timeless, universal designs stands opposed to the ephemeral and contextual nature of theatrical or cinematic sets. More than this, there is an implicit association of the overtly theatrical interior with the temporality of fashion: while stage sets are “dressed”, architectural spaces are ideally naked.

3. The Corporeal vs the Conceptual. The theatrical interior is conventionally associated with the immediate gratification of desire rather than with modernist architecture’s higher rational values. In the theatrical interior, the creation of a mood or an atmosphere which engages with the senses of the audience is valued more highly than an intellectual engagement.

These polemical extremes seem an unlikely introduction to an interior space designed by the contemporary master of authentic materials, abstract geometries and natural forces, Japanese architect Tadao Ando. And yet it is precisely these dichotomies that are played out in his recent New York restaurant, Morimoto.


Tadao Ando: Morimoto

While Ando’s career in Japan began with the founding of his Osaka office in 1969, it was not until the 1980s that he gained international prominence, particularly for his iconic Church of Light (1989) in Osaka, and Church on the Water (1988) on the island of Hokkaido. His architectural influences – cited by both Ando and subsequent critics – include the solidly modernist lineage of Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn, combined with elements of Japanese traditions. Ando’s architecture has been lauded for its use of raw materials (particularly his signature use of concrete), abstract forms, and spare, unadorned interiors. This emphasis on abstraction, the engagement with natural forces (light and shadow, wind and water), and above all his “pure” minimal spaces have been associated by many critics with higher, spiritual values (see, for example, Jin Baek’s recent monograph, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space). This sense of profundity is no doubt highlighted by the proliferation of black and white photographs of Ando’s spaces, emptied of any human inhabitants. However, Kenneth Frampton, in “Thoughts on Tadao Ando” (written when Ando received the 1995 Pritzker Prize), argued that Ando’s architecture “resists all spectacular apparatus of techno-scientific display, in order to testify to a moment that lies outside the constant threat of commodification.” For Frampton, the solemnity of Ando’s architecture somehow offers redemption from the shallow spectacles of contemporary consumer culture. And yet… ladies and gentlemen, meet Morimoto…

On 10th Avenue, at Chelsea’s industrial edge, a red curtain partially covers a huge arch in the former Nabisco Baking Company’s brick warehouse. Morimoto’s location is not easily accessible, and, in the absence of overt signage, it is not immediately obvious that this is a restaurant (confirming that this is an “in the know” establishment). The red curtain is at once a dramatic opening and an exaggerated reference to traditional Japanese noren, an “open for business” curtain. Behind it are automatic doors which open to a desk/coat check at the edge of a multi-leveled, open space containing varied seating options. There are some long communal tables, as well as semi-private rooms, and, towards the rear are what appear to be low, Japanese-style tables but their accompanying sunken bench chairs give patrons the impression of kneeling down to eat without the discomfort (a concession to Westerners). Another major feature at the back of the space is the display of sushi chefs working away in front of the diners. While the color palette is muted overall, a shimmering wall composed of illuminated plastic water bottles provides a spectacular central focus (see photos above and below).


Concrete stairs going down to a subterranean bar are lined with prominent columns, also immediately recognizable as Ando’s signature concrete, but the columns are purely decorative: they clearly stop before reaching the ceiling. Above, the ceiling appears to be folding ripples of beige fabric, but on closer inspection, it turns out to be solid fiberglass (sprayed onto fabric). Furniture throughout the restaurant, designed by Ross Lovegrove, continues this playful tension between appearance and reality. Some chairs appear to be made of solid concrete, for example, but are made from foam, while other chairs appear light but are solid and heavy. Thus the interior engenders active participation by its inhabitants, whose perceptions are challenged even as they move a chair to sit down. The juxtaposition of Ando’s naked concrete and wood, with Lovegrove’s plastics, fiberglass and other high-tech materials (including the water bottles that comprise the central wall, designed by Lovegrove for Ty Nant) creates a complex sensual experience, but not an authentic engagement with raw materials.


Down the concrete stairs, the subterranean bar space continues the same themes, but the bar itself is particularly noteworthy (see photo above). Its surface contains skeletal leaves embalmed in a plastic resin (which reminded me of Shiro Kuramata’s 1988 Miss Blanche chair, with flowers similarly set into transparent resin), which, when illuminated with a blue light from above, appear as poetic remainders of nature, a further reminder of the completely artificial nature of the space and its experience. The interior as a whole is carefully lit with artificial lights, and there is no engagement with natural light (the few windows are covered with translucent screens). In addition to the lighting, club music adds to an atmosphere that seems closer to a nightclub than an exclusive restaurant.


As well as with Lovegrove, Ando collaborated on this project with New York designer Stephanie Goto, a former employee of the master of the theatrical restaurant, David Rockwell. But Morimoto’s other influential contributor was its owner, entrepreneur Stephen Starr. Starr began in the entertainment industry in Philadelphia, and currently owns over a dozen restaurants in Philadelphia, New York City and Atlantic City, all characterized by their theatrical atmosphere. Starr’s spectacular dining experiences include not only innovative menus and designer spaces (the first Morimoto restaurant opened in Philadelphia in 2001, was designed by Karim Rashid), but also distinctive designer websites, and in the case of Morimoto, Pentagram-designed graphics. The final player in the Morimoto experience is its namesake, head chef Masaharu Morimoto, best known as an Iron Chef from the television series, and famed for his signature Japanese dishes infused with European flavors or ingredients. Morimoto himself occasionally appears in the restaurant, blurring the boundaries between his (virtual) TV character and an (actual) sushi chef performing for diners at the rear of the restaurant (see photo below: the empty performance space).


This oscillation between the virtual and real is characteristic of Morimoto’s total design, and appears, on the surface at least, to be opposed to the tranquility and solemnity conventionally associated with Ando’s architecture. However, in an article entitled “Thinking in Ma”, Ando wrote that he believed in an architecture that could create “space of dynamic variance, space that pulsates in the gap between reality and fiction, between the rational and the illogical...” The interior space of Morimoto and its designed experience hold the dichotomies listed above – the fake vs. the real, the temporal vs. the timeless, the corporeal vs. the conceptual – in perpetual suspense. Ando concluded his essay with the idea that the Japanese concept “Ma” denotes a place of conflict, and in this way Morimoto operates as a performative stage upon which its inhabitants might actively engage with contradictions.


Bibliography

Ando, Tadao, “Thinking in Ma”, in El Croquis, 44+58, Tadao Ando issues, 2000, p.6.

Amelar, Sarah, “Record Interiors: Tadao Ando Morimoto Restaurant”, Architectural Record, vol. 194, no. 9, September 2006.

Baek, Jin, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Heller, Steven, “Missing Component”, Metropolis, April 2008.

Innes, Christopher, Designing Modern America: From Broadway to Main Street, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005

Sparke, Penny, Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration, Acanthus Press, 2005.

The photos of the column, the bar, and the chair are by D.J. Huppatz. The photo of D.J. Huppatz in Morimoto is by the eminent design historian, Katarina Posch.