This is my sacred and profane fountain
which is the rainwater recycling from our archive building, which was just
finished last year. And here we have all the models over the years that we've been
working on for every project and we have racks of models that show the actual process
of realizing these buildings. Let's walk inside. An okalux window that has plans of
many buildings: the Herning Museum VCU, Princeton, a number of the buildings that
are in the exhibition, but this was made with this new technique using a film of color in highly
insulated okalux glass. We have another one over here on this side, more of an abstract, and that
forms the kind of entrance to the archive building here. These were donated by okalux who did our
Maggie's Centre, which is also in the exhibition. Here you have a collection of some of the
books from over the years. We have actually the five books by Princeton Architecture Press my
first manifesto Anchoring from 1988 and 89, which coincided with the Museum of Modern
Art exhibition. Over the years, these capture all the theory and ideas, and this one was
just finished in October, Compression, which is most of the projects that are in
the Bellevue Arts Museum show. The five come together now in a kind of
five-volume set in a limited edition of 25. Other books by Lars Miller over the years, the
nine-thousand-word [book] by Robert McCarter, recent seven houses book. But here in the
archive it's all chronologically ordered, so you go back all the way to
the Seaside Building, my first, let's say, first elevator building.
It's a wonderful building. Still there. We were there last year in the
summer and experienced--this is a kind of ideal a small town building with an arcade and shops
on the ground level, offices on the mid-level, and apartments on the upper levels. And
there's five in the front called the boisterous and three in the back called the melancholic
types. This building was finished in 1989, and it's still in great shape. And I think today
it forms a kind of ideal for a small town life, which I think this moment that we're occupying
calls for new visions of de-densification, not large skyscrapers crowded into clusters like
the Hudson yards but something that's much more connected to the environment, to the air, to
the landscape, to the outside, and to social life. There's my first house of any consequence
the Strato House in Dallas, Texas. Projects that weren't finished, like
this project in Port Ludlow for four condominiums and a chapel for Paul
Shell, bless his soul, he's no longer with us, but this was a very idealistic project he
commissioned me for, for the idea of a small community chapel in Port Ludlow in a development
that I think didn't take place. The chapel models which you have a whole collection of
there in the exhibition, but there are many more. This we made many many study models. This is one
studying how the light comes on the inside of the building. So the making, you know, the thinking
part is first, but the making part really depends on making many models. Here's the Kiasma building
in Helsinki. Here's a solid cast aluminum model. One made out of wood. So I
think that the materiality is very important when we're
studying what it is we're going to do. We're studying also thinking
about space, material, and light. Here's the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
That's the competition model from the competition, and as you move upstairs you actually
go closer to where we are now in time. Here's a model of our house in Rhinebeck I call it
the little tesseract. You can see the u-shaped stone existing building from 1952, a little
l-shaped steel frame, open glass, and this kind of warped what I call little
tesseract. We've been living in that for the last 40 years, and here's the Iowa College
of Art model, which the whole building was realized in corten steel, so we made the model
in steel to get this feeling of the materiality. So this archive building is an experiment in
environmental work. It's heated and cooled by a single geothermal well 500 feet deep and
the floors are radiant with the tube six inches on center, and I'm happy to say that it works
perfectly. It can be zero degrees outside and it's 70 in here. Perfect. And then on a hot summer
day like today it's cool and wonderful, so part of that is due to the careful closed-cell insulation
in the walls and the way the slab is floated on insulation, but the idea of running it on a
single geothermal well, I think that's the future. The process of making is an iterative process,
that we study things in model form, then we rethink the concept and criticize the
work, so it's not a linear process, it's an iterative process. It goes back and forth
and actually never really reaches a conclusion until the building is realized. And hopefully
every detail and every part of the building has that kind of power of the energy
of the thinking and the making process.
