Corners
Introduction: A bad idea
When I started research for this essay, I came across an essay by the architect Peter Eisenman entitled "There are No corners after Derrida". Eisenman's a pretty smart guy; alas, I read his essay with more enthusiasm than comprehension.
The Derrida that he invokes is Jacques Derrida, a famous French philosopher who was among the first to talk about “post-modernism” and lived between 1930 and 2004. But then I remembered what my college philosophy professor once said:
A bad idea is not improved by attaching a famous name to it.
So I decided to read Eisenman's essay with some caution: maybe its idea wasn’t all that good.
Derrida wrote about architecture, as have other philosophers, such as Plato, Augustine, and Kant. The idea that humans not only are shaped by the world, but shape a part of their world, is very rich in philosophical implications. Architecture may provide an challenging class of objects for esthetic (and therefore philosophical) consideration. Possibly the semiotics of architecture (if archiecture has semiotics) is illuminating. The Austrian/British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein actually worked as an architect for a brief time. Maybe, then, Derrida, via Eisenman, had something to say about corners.
As best as I can tell, the core idea of Eisenman's essay is that maybe corners have “significations”.This means (I think) buildings can signify something and sometimes those significations can be multiple. Is this news? Mies van der Rohe said back in 1950 that architecture's true field of activity was the realm of significance.
I appreciate that signs and signifying are conventional: most people agree. I'd certainly agree that many architectural features signify something, and how that signification is made is often intetesting. But I disagree with the claim that corners can have signification: corners don’t signify anything. Corners in a way limit, but I don't think those limits conventions. Sometimes an architectural style ornaments corners, and those ornaments might signify something. But that's very different from corners signifying something.
Overall, here are my topics: first how corners suggest experiencing a building aesthetically or functionally; second the phenomenological role of corners; third, the corner as a design challenge with
examples from my wanderings in Chicago.
One: Modes of Looking at Structures
Corners help determine what a construction is, or perhaps only how we see or experience constructions such as buildings. Buildings can have two particular modes: they can be observed or occupied, or both. (I'm adapting a rather faint version of Baruch Spinoza's Theory of Modes.) Structures can be aesthetic, or they can be useful. Indeed,
they can be both. (Another pair of terms for these two modes: looked at or lived in.)
Most structures are somewhere between these two poles: at one extreme are sculptures because they can be observed or experienced but generally aren't occupied or used. Constructions that are used but not designed to be looked at (for example, a subway tunnel, airport runway or bike shed) might be at the other extreme. This has nothing to do with whether a building is beautiful or useful.
Corners make a contribution here: highly prominent corners suggest that the building is to be
appreciated aesthetically. "Useful" buildings can be so without regard to their corners.
Maybe a good illustration of modes comes from non-Chicago examples: the (maybe glib) contrast between the Parthenon and the Pantheon. The paradigmatic views of both are suggestive:
(Images of the Parthenon and Pantheon from Wikimedia, and are used subject to their proprty claims. All the other images in this posting are my own photographs.)
Both are important buildings: The Parthenon in Athens is a building to be looked at and appreciated. It was built as a shrine to the goddess Athena, but she did not occupy it, only the highest members of her cult would go inside. In the temple was a storehouse of offerings and tributes; ceremonies and cult activities were outside. Its breathtaking artwork (of which most fragments are now elsewhere) was on the outside of the building, where it would be seen. Nowadays, of course, there is nothing to see inside, but the outside still impresses. The archetypal view is oblique, the corners attract much consideration, and some archaeologists suggest that many Greek temples were sited to be emphasize the corner.
On the other hand, the Pantheon was built as a place for participants to gather in religious rituals, as part of its environment. (It's unimportant whether or not it was built as a public temple; somebody went inside and did things.) The archetypal view is face-on, and in the perspective its corners are immaterial. So the building calls out for action and participation: the Pantheon is a place to be occupied.
The Parthenon stands alone, to be regarded as an object of art, and has prominent corners. The Pantheon stands among other buildings, to be part of life, and its corners are unimportant. I’d say the general principle is that if a building is to be appreciated as art, its corners will be prominent and the key
view will be oblique, and conversely, a building without prominent corners and to be viewed head on will have a function beyond being looked at. Buildings can be both, of course, as most buildings have a mixture of venustas and utilitas, to use the historical Vitruvian terms.
Now, back to Chicago. In Chicago, one building can be used to illustrate both points, because that building has several fronts. The Art Institute of Chicago actually has multiple facades, each with a different orientation and emphasis on corners; so each claims a different role for the institution, and accordingly each has a different prominence to corners.
The classic facade is at the entrance on Michigan Avenue at Adams, designed by the firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, and finished in 1893, faces onto Chicago’s business district.
I think of this as proclaiming to the world that art was becoming a part of Chicago's daily life, in contrast to the common perception that Chicagoans were crude and materialistic. Since it’s intended to be part of the experience of the city, it’s viewed face on, and the corners are barely visible.
In contrast, the entrance to the Modern Wing on Monroe, built in 2012 and designed by Renzo Piano, has its own facade which is viewed obliquely as one walks east over the train tracks.
The oblique view emphasizes the corners and that the building itself is artistic. (Perhaps a third facade to the Art Institute is at the northwest corner of Columbus and Jackson for the School of the Art Institute, designed by Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1976. Netsch will be a recurring character here. It would make sense to think of this facade as inspirational: but as much as I think well of Netsch, I don't believe I have him figured out yet.)
Another Chicago example: the archetypal view of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1911 Robie House is the oblique view from the corner of Woodlawn Avenue and 58th Street, a view that emphasizes corners, and which therefore emphasizes Wright’s artistic achievement.
Two: Corner Phenomena and Examples
Corners happen when one surface meets another surface (either or both of those surfaces can be imaginary.)
Let me go back to Eisenman's essay “There were no corners after Derrida.” That essay considers "... the corner as a site of multiple, potentially unmotivated significations …"
A careful reading shows that Eisenman doesn't say that corners have significations, but only that they could be the site of significations. When I read this I asked myself what significations could a corner
have? I can see how a corner can have multiple functions, but a function isn't the same thing as signification, is it?
Also the rules of combining architectural elements is often called a grammar, much as symbols like words can have conventional rules of combination called a grammar. But corners aren't architectural elements to be combined.
That’s what I mean about the phenomenology of corners. Many phenomena are symbols and
therefore have some signification (if I'm using the term correctly). Corners are a phenomenon without any signification and so are not symbols.
While Mies felt that a building's signifinicance was paramount, he didn't say that every architectural feature signifies something. There might be one or more grammars of a set of architectural elements, just as any set of symbols can have one or more grammars. But just because a set of items has a rules of combination is not enough to make those items symbols.
The reason why corners don’t have any signification is because corners are emergent and not convention. Corners are an emergent feature of a building's design, not an element of that design. Where one building plane meets another, a corner emerges. Being emergent relieves corners from the burden of carrying any signification. Certain styles may include particular treatments of corners, but corners by themselves do not dictate style. When that happens, the style may have some signification. But the corner is just a corner.
The termination of one plane can put structural constraints on a corner, some obvious, some highly important but invisible; but those constraints come from the plane and the structure, not from any convention or signification.
Further evidence that corners aren’t symbolic: they are scale-free: they're always the right size no matter the size of the meeting planes are. You can’t make the corners bigger or smaller. Corners are are style-free. The walls forming a corner may reflect a style and symbolize something, but not the corner.
Corners aren’t even necessary. (Eisenman's essay mentions the saying that architecture will always have four walls -- i.e. four corners; which got me to thinking of all the buildings that don't have four corners, and I even found a building that has no walls .)
Some Chicago examples include Marina Towers in downtown Chicago designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the late fifties, 
Rush Medical Center's Tower (2017) by Perkins and Will, 
and the apartment building 727 W Madison finished in 2018 by Fitzgerald Associates.
The building not just without corners, but even without walls is the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, designed by Helmut Jahn and completed in 2011. (With a building by Netsch lurking in the background.)
Some buildings can have lots of corners, as seen on several buildings on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example the 1965 Behavioral Sciences Building, designed by Walter Netsch
(yep, same guy) of Skidmore Owings & Merrill.
Maybe the phenomenological function of corners is to convert the space occupied by a building into a place, to give the building a location, as it were to give an expanse of space some finiteness and to make some general space into THIS space. The designer of a building has to find some way of indicating that the building is a particular phenomenon and not just some space and a collection of building materials, and
corners are one way of doing that. Corners aren’t the only way of establishing ‘here-ness’, landscape architecture often establishes a sense of place without corners Buildings without corners need to
find a way to do this without corners.
Corners present interesting design challenges, which are discussed in several places, for example on the Architecture Farm blog of Iowa State University's architectural historian Tom Leslie (here), or by Hilary
Barlow (here and here) on the website of Payette, an architecture and design firm in Boston. Ultimately, corner design issues arise because the physical world is not made of ideas: walls have a thickness, which means that the proportions of the outside can't match the proportions of the inside.
Some architects go so far as to say that you can't solve for the inside and outside at the same time. So there are design issues for corners.
Buildings in Chicago have a wide variety of corner solutions:
IIT’s Alumni Memorial Hall designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1944 (the archetype of the "Mies corner"). Mies uses the corner to demonstrate that walls are outside of the structural frame.
UIC’s Science and Engineering Laboratories of 1962 designed by Walter Netsch (again) and SOM, distinguish the structural frame from the walls.
In tall buildings, corners can become part of the structural system.
In the Montgomery Ward headquarters building, designed by Minoru Yamasaki in 1972, the corners likely provide some lateral stiffness, allowing greater interior space.
The recessed corners of the AON Center designed by Edward Durell Stone in 1974 seem to provide some lateral stiffness for what would be a remarkably tall and thin building.
The Leo Burnett Building designed by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo in 1989, was built to house an advertising agency. While its articulated corners may provide stiffness, the waggish interpretation is that since corner offices are particularly coveted at advertising agencies, the building's distinctive corner geometry provides 12 corner offices on each floor.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower designed by James Goettsch in 1997, has compound
corners as a result of the plan's interposition of a trapezoid with a rectangle.
Most of these examples have radically different approaches to the corner and its role in the structural system of the building: only the Leo Burnett Building's corners seem to signify something.
At issue is whether the corner is structural or not, or even whether it is merely notional or is actually there. A corner is structural exactly when whatever system that is holding the building up is part of the fabric of the corner: maybe there's a skeleton frame holding up the building, then if part of that structure is in the corner, the corner is structural. When the corner is merely implied, then the corner is notional. Frank Lloyd Wright was a master of notional corners.
It’s useful to think about a building’s envelope, the elements of the building that separate the inside and outside of the building. The envelope of a building is often different from its frame. One of the key ideas of so-called ‘Modern’ architecture is the realization that the structure of a building can be distinct from its envelope: this can often be best seen at a building’s corner, and that is one reason why looking at a corner is a good place to begin understanding a building.
Corners, envelopes and frames needn't coincide, so you can often see the way a building works by looking at its corners. The Inland Steel Building (1957, SOM; Netsch gets partial credit) very visibly has its structural frame separate from its building envelope, so its corners are very clearly not structural.
Corners can be featured stylistically, and it is in this manner that I can make sense of Eisenman. Some architectural styles ornament corners through the use of special masonry units called quoins. Quoins have been used in western architecture since at least the Romans, but they became essential to the Georgian and Georgian-revival styles.
Historically, quoins started as enhanced structure. Because socially important buildings needed to be structurally sound, they often had quoins. The linkage between "socially important" and "quoins" at some point moved away from structure, and indeed sort of flipped: quoins indicated social importance, or at least high prestige. Some high prestige buildings were built in the Georgian style, with quoins.
In Chicago, many buildings aspired to high prestige and so adopted a neo-Georgian style.
There are many important structures in Chicago using a Georgian-revival style; often these buildings were elegant, high-prestige domestic architecture.
The trope of quoins indicating elegant, high-prestige domestic structures was adopted by buildings with aspirations to The Chicago Children's Asylum, 1898, designed by Shepley Rutan & Coolidge, and Orchestra Hall,
Quoins -- the corner masonry units designed to look like stones -- evolved into their later forms in order to suggest solidity. Quoins eventually became so widely applied that they became part of vernacular architecture, and sometimes were interpreted in brick. Consider this early 20th century apartment building in Chicago’s Little Italy.
In summary then, corners reveal a lot about a building and its builders. The aspirations of the builders, their design process, the building’s structure, and the style in which it was built can all be inferred from the corner.
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