preston scott cohen

the hidden core

of architecture

Christian Kerez, Leutschenbach School, Zurich, Switzerland, The upper and lower chords and diagonal struts of the trusses
2003–08, the core structure displayed and idealized. The steel produce a symmetrical, three-dimensional pattern exposed as
frame of a multi-storied building, normally a grid of columns the primary visible form of the building. Photo: Walter Mair
and beams, is recomposed as a stack of full floor-high trusses.

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For many architects, computation defines our contem­ During the Renaissance, the endurance of beauty
poraneity and is the determining factor in the latest became the basis for a quasi-sempiternal conception of
significant historical rupture in architecture. Yet the design architecture. Leon Battista Alberti authored concinnitas,
of most buildings today continues to operate under the a theory of beauty in which neither wholes nor parts could
terms of an earlier rupture resulting from the 19th-century be changed; he granted this beauty the power to deter
invention of steel frame and ferroconcrete construction: the destruction of buildings indefinitely. According to
the dismantlement of the tradition of tectonic unity in Pope Nicholas V, whom Alberti served as a close advisor,
architecture. It was then that a profound temporal disparity marvelous buildings would be “practically eternal” and
was established between, on the one hand, the relative necessary to the perpetuation of the church’s authority.3
permanence of the core—defined by the structure, floor The architects who brought forth buildings of enduring
slabs, egress stairs, and mechanical and elevator shafts— virtue were accorded a status comparable to that of the
and on the other hand, the transience of every­thing visible great literary authors. It was during this period that
in the space of architecture—the sur­­faces. Against the the author function came into its own in architecture.4
backdrop of the majority of archi­tects who try to reconcile From this point on, an exceptional achievement in
this disparity, two extreme tendencies stand out: those architecture —such as Brunelleschi’s dome of the
architects who focus almost exclusively on the production Cathedral of Florence—would be recognized and become
of surfaces with all their performative and sensorial effects famous not only for its virtuosic engineering but also
and those who, believing architecture’s mission to be the for its exemplary manifestation of artistic intention and
facilitation or even production of new social relationships, mastery. This would, in turn, impart fame on its architect
manipulate the spatial properties of the core. to be guaranteed in perpetuity by political and religious
seats of intellectual validation. Previously, a great

Three temporalities
building would have been attributed to a patron whose
power ultimately led it to be built by a nameless society
of masons. Now it would elicit the viewer to imagine a
In order to understand what is at stake in the temporal creator of great talent.
divisiveness inherent to contemporary architecture, it The eternity of beauty or virtuosity and the futurity
is necessary to look at shifts that have occurred in three of fame established the conditions for sempiternity
cultural conceptions of temporality in the general field of in architecture. We can now jump forward to the 18th
knowledge and in architecture: eternity, sempiternity, and century, when public reception of artistic culture became
impermanence. important, and observe that Joseph Gandy’s painting of
Needless to say, we have come a long way from the John Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin (Fig. 1) represents
Classical, Late Antique, and early Medieval periods, when one side of the duality: The future fate of the building is
impermanence was relegated to an inferior status. Unlike depicted as similar to that of the magnificent buildings of
the divine realm, which was eternal, the sublunary world antiquity. The fact that Soane commissioned the painting
and everything in it was then understood as passing and is evidence of the other side of the equation: His own fame
therefore of less importance.1 But, in the late Middle Ages, would be guaranteed indefinitely by the building’s future
certain phenomena could not be explained by recourse to greatness.
the dominant conceptual opposition between eternity and By the 20th century, newness and perpetual progress
impermanence. A third category of temporality—called had thoroughly replaced beauty, virtuosity, and eternity
sempiternity—was theorized to denote things created as the ideals to be pursued. Thus impermanence became
during earthly time that as a whole would exist from then the dominant temporal paradigm. Meanwhile, the cultural
on forever despite changing constituent parts.2 This reception of architecture in museums, universities,
hybrid idea of time became an increasingly unavoidable and publications of criticism—an expanded system
part of everyday political and legal discourse. The of legitimation—placed it alongside the other artistic
late Middle Ages saw the emergence of corporations, mediums that were reinventing themselves. These venues
legal entities that could “live” forever, though their guaranteed permanence for productions otherwise
permanence was actually contingent on humanity’s. In dedicated to transience. Despite all claims for the
theological and juridical circles, a consensus was reached significance of newness and temporariness within works
to the effect that certain things, including universities and of art and architecture, the cultural producers kept alive
great cities, were sempiternal. and well the thirst for fame and sempiternity.

The Hidden Core of Architecture 3

 In actuality, progress only occasionally had
revolution­izing effects on architecture, effects that were
followed by extended periods of disciplinary adjustment
and refinement. The new temporality did not engage
all aspects of the built fabric equally. For example, the
invention of certain machines such as the elevator and
the automobile had limited but radical effects on the
organization, sequence, and thresholds of buildings and
cities. Subsequent to these advances, it would seem that
the entire spatial and symbolic lexicon—in short, the
Fig. 1: Joseph Gandy, Soane’s Bank of England as a Ruin,
social configuration—of architecture would never be the
1830, architecture as semi-eternal. The painting depicts an same.
archi­tectural fantasy in which the future significance of the
British Empire and, in particular, one of its great buildings
Today, if we are to take the word of the apostles of the
by John Soane, will endure interminably like the buildings digital turn in architecture at face value, one would have
that survive as ruins in Rome. Gandy’s paintings of Soane’s
work first became famous in the Royal Academy’s popular
to believe that we are in the throes of another revolution,
exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. a turn which loops full circle into the realm of the
Courtesy The Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum
transitory, the purported spirit of the age. Computation
permutes forms, making them variable and expressive of
processes in ways they never were before. Now transience
can be as inherent to form as it is to the design method.
Yet unlike the inventions that spurred the transformation
of architectural space in response to new mechanical
modes of spatial communication, the thematic emphasis
on computation and its generation of surfaces has done
little more than produce a new style for cladding the
core structure of buildings, thereby maintaining modern
architecture’s spatial status quo.

The core, hidden

The visible parts of today’s buildings are understood to be
transitory, even if they should happen sometimes to last
a long time. Interiors, in particular, can easily be scraped
Fig. 2a, left: Thomas E. Stanley, Gulf & Western Building, out and rebuilt with a different concept, a new style.
1970, re­designed by Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis as
Trump International Hotel and Tower (Fig 2b, right), 1995,
Facades can be shorn from their basic support structure.
an example of imperm­anence in modern architecture. The stone Together these make up every visible aspect of a building.
pilaster and glass facade was stripped from the basic structure
and replaced by a sparklier mirrored surface crenellated in
(Figs. 2a, 2b) The core is almost always required to be
plan. Photo, 2a: Edmund V Gillon, Jr; from, Spero, James, hidden beneath interior and exterior encrustations. Fire
“The Great Sights of New York.” (New York: Dover Publications,
1979); 2b: © Susan Oristaglio/Esto
safety requires the surface of the frame to be concealed by
spray-on foam that, in turn, necessitates the addition of
another presentable layer. (Fig. 3)
Moreover, due to the presence of mechanical systems,
structural ceilings are habitually covered. The aspect of
architecture intuitively and pragmatically thought of as
permanent—that which would be the last to go—is that
part hidden at its “core.” Architecture is now irrevocably
split into two different temporalities: the temporariness of
interiors and facades and the relative permanence of the
basic structure.

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 In an actuality that we rarely consider, buildings
subsume multiple temporalities within their overall
category of a permanent whole, constituting a synecdoche
unusual among man-made artifacts. Cars, for example,
have parts with different durations—the fan belt can be
swapped out while the chassis remains—but the whole
Fig. 3: Eric Wolf, Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, is clearly not regarded as “permanent.” Buildings have
New York, 2011, interior surface miming architectural core.
The interior cladding stays as close as possible to the basic
always had this particular relation to temporality: Some
frame of the building. The contours and planes of the beam parts are less durable than others. But now the division
enclosures are formalized to a heightened degree by reveals
lining every convex corner and by the contrast between remark­
runs deeper. While before it was the building versus some
ably smooth matte and glossy finishes. Photo: Alan Weiner; minor additions, subtractions, and alterations, now it is
Courtesy Eric Wolf
the basic structure versus the rest. Memory preserves the
old idea of a unified “permanent building,” but today this
idea stands for only a part that is more permanent than
the rest.
In a number of newer buildings, the sampling found
in the patterns and artful fragments that characterize
many of the recent architectural installations designed by
boutique firms and academics (Figs. 4, 5) is carried out,
naturally enough, on those parts known to be the most
mutable: interiors and facades, even the most expensive
of which will someday be scooped out or scraped off (Figs.
6a, 6b, 7) to be replaced by the next generation’s new-
looking iteration. These are the parts that garner the most
attention in practice, the media, and in the seemingly
Fig. 4: Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle, High Performance
sempiternal institutions of cultural reception today.
Composite, installation, Museum of Modern Art, 2008, a façade Meanwhile, the part of the building that is relatively
concept unrelated to a core structure. Scripted computer
modeling was used to generate a continuous matrix of variable
permanent—the core frame, floor slabs, elevator and air
curved surface modules in which the performance of light is shafts—is largely ignored.
locally controlled and optimized. The installation may represent
a system applicable to a facade. © Contemporary Architecture

Medium specificity
Practice, New York

Unlike the Renaissance author without whom beauty

could not be realized, today’s automatic computational
processes tend to supplant authorship. In this sense,
the new digital techniques in architecture are indirectly
related to the avant-garde tradition in which numerous
strategic renunciations or displacements of authorship
have been exercised. Architecture is constituted and
sustained by many forms of production and reception.
Yet to the extent that buildings are treated as the objects
of its attention, architecture differs from other artistic
mediums and from related design disciplines owing to its
dual temporality.
Fig. 5: Marc Fornes/Theverymany, LLC, nonLin/Lin Pavillion, Painting and sculpture can be relatively permanent
installation, FRAC Centre, Orleans, France, 2011. Installation as
an interior without an architectural core. The surface geometry
or ephemeral, but never both in the way buildings are.
and pattern of openings were parametrically controlled to These and other mediums lack a most visible part that
produce continuous progressions of scale. People are allowed to
walk beside and under the surface as if it is an interior design.
is destined for obsolescence, a part that can be scraped
Collection, FRAC Centre/Photo courtesy, Francois Lauginie off or entirely refashioned, periodically, leaving a more

The Hidden Core of Architecture 5

 permanent, essentially definitive part. The city, as a
physical framework and a cultural artifact, shares a
sempiternal dimension with art and architecture and
contains the same nested relative permanence that
architecture does (that is, the city is understood as
sempiternal even though its parts are both relatively
permanent and transitory). Whole buildings are to the
city what the visible parts of a building are to its basic
structure. But the city is profoundly incomparable to
architecture, since it is not reducible to a medium. Rarely
if ever do we find a city that as a whole can be considered
authored. The scale of the urban design intervention,
territorial in nature, is not conducive to the avant-garde
undoing of the author function. Landscape architecture
is like architecture in its split temporalities—with its
relatively permanent terrain and its always-changing
flora—but it lacks a hidden, relatively permanent part that
cannot be radically altered without dismantling the whole.
In other words, it lacks a basic structure comparable to
that embedded within architecture.

Temporariness lifts a
weight from the architects’
shoulders, allowing them
Figs. 6a, 6b: Diller Scofidio Renfro, Broad Museum, 2011,
perspective view and exploded axonometric, exterior surface
unrelated to the core. A continuous “veil,” composed of

to experiment without being

computationally generated, curved surface modules, uniformly
covers a building organized on the inside by an entirely
separate structural, spatial, and formal logic. Courtesy Diller

burdened by the future.

Scofidio + Renfro

The most prevalent trend among the latest avant-

garde architects is to focus predominantly on the
imper­m­anent, whether manifest by temporary
installations or by the envelopes and interior surfaces of
buildings. Temporariness is thematized by forms
comparable to phenomena such as quartz crystals or
swarms—fragments of patterns extracted from larger,
continuous flows or loose groupings of elements frozen in
time. These geological and biologistic forms can be
analogized to tissue samplings of organic forms explicitly
unrelated to the historical conventions of architectural
tectonics. Isolated patterns are, by definition, limited
Fig. 7: Office dA, Banq restaurant, Boston, MA 2009–11,
interior surface detachable from the structural core. Wood slats
inconclusively by provisional boundaries.
imply a continuously curved, computationally generated surface Let us call this trend what it is: a discourse of
that deviates significantly from the basic structure of the
building. Slots provide space for lighting and ventilation, while
architecture as art, divorced from the prime technical
the over­all effect hides the structure and mechanical systems. support of modern buildings.5 Yet if we were arguing
As commonly happens when restaurants change hands, this
interior was torn out and replaced by another tenant’s surfaces.
from the tradition of avant-garde art, we would have to
Courtesy Office dA say that modern architecture, like the other avant-garde

6 Harvard Design Magazine 35

 arts, cannot be unconscious of its medium. It is not
enough to have a guileless basic structure supporting
artfully conceived surfaces. Just as modern painting deals
directly with flatness and the act of applying paint to a
surface, those concerned with architecture as art—aware
as they are of it as a medium—are precisely those
who cannot ignore the new technical supports of the
architectural medium, the building with its two temporally
distinguished constituents, one hidden, one visible.
The recent thematization of temporariness functions
in two ways: On the one hand, the installations,
temporary pavilions, and other ephemera serve to
associate architecture with sculpture, which, by
extension, ensures its status as an artistic medium that
can be institutionally sempiternalized. On the other hand,
it enables architecture to be legitimized by a zeitgeist
Fig. 8: Louis Kahn, British Center for the Arts,
New Haven, CT, 1974, normally hidden core elements
in which impermanence is alleged to be the temporal
redefined as monumental sculptural forms. The concrete category that epitomizes the “now.” It lifts a weight from
structure and stairwell are expressed as a monolithic,
tectonic form. The main ceremonial staircase is analogous
the architects’ shoulders, allowing them a new freedom to
to fire stairs enclosed in a core that is extrovertively experiment without being burdened by the future.
formalized as a giant cylindrical column. Credit TBD.

Post-tectonic
Moving beyond the architects whose allegiance is to
the transient, there are those architects, such as Louis
Kahn, Toyo Ito (Figs. 8, 9) and Christian Kerez, who have
sought to reestablish tectonic unity in distinctive ways by
idealizing the form of the basic structure and rendering
it materially monolithic. In their work, structure is
rhetorically reintegrated with exterior and interior form.
By definition, this hybridity is nostalgic for a lost synthetic
wholeness not endemic to the construction of buildings
Fig. 9: Toyo Ito, Tama Art University Library, Tokyo, 2007, today and only possible in rarefied circumstances.
structural core as architectural phenomenon. The building is
composed of materially monolithic and unusually structured
Other architects, such as Renzo Piano, Herzog &
spatial cells. The arched openings are cut out of steel plates de Meuron, and Machado Silvetti, appear (Fig. 10) not
covered in concrete. Photo: Iwan Baan
to regard the tectonic severance that began in the 19th
century to be the result of a rupture but rather to be part of
the continuing evolution of a received tectonic language.
Their work displays the behavior of the visible cladding
as a system in its own right, and this relates to an overall
order, usually a grid, that governs the whole building.
Thus cladding contributes to the cultural continuity of
architecture, the tectonic language of which, at this
particular historical juncture, just so happens to be
structurally and materially disunified, by necessity.

The Hidden Core of Architecture 7

 Clearly, Venturi Scott-Brown are exceedingly cognizant
of the separation of the facade and interiors from the
basic structure. Their writings recommend the linguistic
expression of this rupture as a means of representing
the late modern condition. Venturi Scott-Brown reduces
architecture to decorative surfaces on neutral structures,
explicitly affirming the independence of the two. Although
Frank Gehry produces large sculptural forms that neces­
sitate unorthodox structural support systems, the other
elements of his buildings’ cores’ basic structure, such as
the elevators, stairs, and mechanical shafts, are neither
spatially nor tectonically of any notable consequence. As a
whole, the effect is that of creating a powerful extroverted
gesture without necessarily affecting the way the core
and the interior or exterior spaces relate to one another.
Peter Eisenman is a rare figure who, by producing visible
mock-structural elements, (Fig. 11) “demotivates the
sign,” de­coupling signifier from signified, thus doubling
Fig. 10: Machado and Silvetti Associates, NYU Center
for Academic and Spiritual Life, 2009–12, exterior skin
the severance of visible form from structure wrought
asserting its independence from core. Voids, water-jet cut by modern construction. His “immaterial” tectonic
from stone panels, produce a pattern that resembles foliage.
Though the facade is an independent screen, the pattern of
forms profoundly reformulate and thus aestheticize the
division between the panels follows an overall Cartesian grid disposability inherent to the construction of modern
coextensive with the order of the entire building.
© Anton Grassl/Esto
architecture. But would he need to dematerialize archi­
tecture so aggres­sively were it not for his contention that
pre-modern tectonic unity is widely assumed to persist to
this day and thus calls for deconstruction?

The core, authored

Finally, there is one approach that works directly on the
basic core structure, the part of the building that belongs
to the temporal category of relative permanence, but
without reprising tectonic synthesis or rehearsing a
linguistic commentary. In numerous projects inspired
by New York’s Downtown Athletic Club, (Fig. 12) Rem
Koolhaas modifies the basic structure and uses it as
the protagonist for profound spatial and programmatic
transformations of architecture with the aim of embodying
urban social experience within the individual building. In
projects such as the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media
Technology (1992), the Très Grande Bibliothèque for Paris
(1989), the Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Maison
à Bordeaux (1998), structural systems are responsible
Fig. 11: Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center for the Arts, for radical spatial and programmatic arrangements. (Fig.
Columbus, OH, 1989, exposing and deconstructing the core
structure. Three gridded matrices of distinct scales make
13) These buildings represent a profound break from the
indiscernible the fact that some of their parts coincide with Chicago frame, the free plan, and the “decorated shed,”
a structural system and thus redefine those parts as an abstract
form. These and other parts are explicitly unrelated to and
all of which were based on a generally gridded, extruded,
interfere with other important elements in the building such neutral structural system in which only the secondary and
as the ceremonial stair. By occasionally not meeting the ground,
the frameworks are disassociated from the concepts of load
customarily temporary interior partitions and dropped
and support. Photo courtesy Eisenman Architects ceilings played the role of creating the spatial differences.

8 Harvard Design Magazine 35

 In comparison to these, Koolhaas’s spatial differences
are significantly greater, since they are produced by
astonishingly large structural shifts from one level to the
next or by cantilevers. Any architectural inventiveness in
the facades and interiors of Koolhaas’s projects pale in
comparison to the spatial ingenuity that goes hand and
hand with his manipulation of the basic structure.

The Athletic Club freezes

the “culture of congestion”
in differentiated plans and
bakes its radical adjacencies
into the core structure.
Koolhaas’s unusual attention to the relatively perma­
nent part of modern architecture, both in his buildings
and writings, reflects an overriding preoccupation with
the sempiternal dimension of architecture, particularly
as it is lodged in the author function. Rather than using
artistic or technical processes to supplant authorship,
Koolhaas, like Rossi before him, seeks to eclipse the
architect with the workings of the grand schemes of
urban history. In Delirious New York, he claims that the
truly ingenious achievements of modern architecture
were not authored by architects but rather caused by a
new connection between the building’s basic structure
and the dynamism of the city. Remember that the city,
understood as a cultural artifact, is sempiternal; as a
physical framework, it is relatively permanent. Clearly,
for Koolhaas, the framework of the city and its underlying
motivations are the sources of inventiveness. The grid
of the city, with its social and economic motives, now
undergirds the grid of architecture; the two have never
before been so similar and behaved so synonymously.
It follows that the architectural medium and the author
function as previously known are, for all intents and
purposes, annulled.6
But Koolhaas has a conflicted relationship with this
Fig. 12: Starrett & Van Vleck, Downtown Athletic Club, historical development. He admires everything about the
New York, 1931, core manipulated to support new social
arrangements. Unlike the typical New York skyscraper plan
way that the new reality of Manhattan came about and,
defined by an extruded Cartesian grid of columns flexible by extension, architecture’s new core. Yet if the city’s
enough to accommodate a limited range of uses, the plan of
this building was purposefully designed to support diverse
perpetual dynamism and that of all buildings is beyond
programs that have significantly divergent dimensional the architect’s authorial control, where does this leave
requirements. Several typical post and beam frameworks of
different scales stack and alternate with spaces supported
him as an architect? The vitality of buildings that Koolhaas
by long span trusses. valorizes—the flux of interiors within the typical gridded

The Hidden Core of Architecture 9

 Fig. 13: OMA/Rem Koolhaas, ZKM Centre for Art and Media
Technology, Karlsruhe, 1989, extreme manipulation of core
as the primary architectural concept. Plans populated by the
vertical struts of Vierendeel trusses alternate with open plans
to produce a stack of spaces that, like an architectural collage,
evokes radically different architectural types including a
typical Miesian/Manhattan skyscraper plan, a Corbusian free
plan, a hypostyle plan, a Beaux Arts symmetrical plan, and
a thelos-like plan (a circular, central open space). Thus the
building exemplifies the theory of Delirious New York.

Top left: Level 00, Bahnhof Entry plan, Karlsruhe,

Germany, 1989. Top right: Level 05, Contemporary Museum
plan. Bottom left: Level 02, Media Museum plan. Bottom right:
Level 01, Mezzanine Media Theater plan. Courtesy OMA

10 Harvard Design Magazine 35

plan—is enabled by the grid’s unchanging neutrality, Having unhitched architecture’s sempiternity from
which denies the architect any role in shaping the part beauty and fame and hitched it instead to the city’s
of architecture that endures. If authorship is given over sempiternity, for which the architect is not responsible,
to the city entirely, is the city’s sempiternity all we have, Delirious New York appeared to have established a
leaving none for architecture? Perhaps we only have the neo-avant-garde conception of authorship. Indeed,
particular architectural exceptions that foil the city and this is the rhetorical act for which Koolhaas is most
bring it to consciousness. This is the exalted “art” to be famous. Yet, the epochal implications already present
added to otherwise city-authored typical buildings. in the relative permanence of the basic structure and
The contradiction between Koolhaas’s admiration for linked to the sempiternity of the city were not enough.
anonymity and his emphasis on special cases is as Rather, for Koolhaas, the nexus of architecture ultimately
unmistakable as it is unacknowledged in Delirious New lies in a conflict between cultural production (which is
York. Apparently, he desires the effects of urban dynam­ authored and visible) and the motivations of the city and
ism without its typicality. He describes the Downtown technology (which are unauthored and hidden). In a battle
Athletic Club as a stack of generic plots enabling radically of wills with the city—a battle for authorial control and
different kinds of activities connected and made inter­ sempiternity—he was compelled to manipulate the core in
changeable by an elevator. He only hints at its uniqueness order to guarantee that he will be famous not only for his
by telling us that it appears to be like all the other book but also for his buildings.
sky­scrapers whose similarly old-fashioned facades serve

Postscript
to mask interior machines that produce frenetic and
absurd programmatic combinations. Otherwise, his text
conflates his exemplar par excellence with all of
Manhattan, confusing the exception and the norm. All Ceaseless technological progress, the modern corollary
skyscrapers possess dynamic potential by virtue of the to beauty and eternity, would seem to be epitomized
city, which is so much more exhilarating than anything an by the transient cycles of rapid renewal, fashion, and
architect could produce by design. Architectural specificity obsolescence. Today’s artful architectural installations
can only foreclose the endless possibilities guaranteed and their counterparts in the built environment can go on
by urban vitality.7 Yet despite this claim, the Athletic Club, finding their places within the sempiternal institutions
and each special OMA building that later grew under its of legitimation. There they will be selectively preserved
influence, freezes the “culture of congestion” in a set of for sempiternity, serving as the anthropological traces
exceptional plans and bakes its radical adjacencies and of a process of change. Yet as far as sempiternity of
differentiated spaces into the basic structure. the architectural medium itself is concerned, the
Pretending that the Athletic Club is somehow generic installations, facades, and interiors that treat the
turns out to be a slight of hand that allows Koolhaas to basic structures of buildings like ready-mades will be
keep for himself a fundamental tactic present only in this manifestations of inconsequential tinkering at the
one building, a feature that profoundly differentiates it margins. Only the architecture that transforms the
from other skyscrapers: floor-by-floor structurally defined hidden core, the part that enables the impermanent parts
uniqueness. The structure of the differentiated programs, to change perpetually, can alter the balance between
such as the glass-bottomed pool and the gym, illustrate endurance and impermanence, effect the architectural
unmistakably the principle of wild adjacencies but are space in which we live, and go on mattering indefinitely.
anything but typical or generic. Though it is conceivable
that they could have been designed to be stacked another The King’s Two Bodies, which expounds the idea of
way during the design process, once it was constructed, sempiternity, was brought to my attention by Daniel
the swimming pool could never be swapped for the Sherer. I would like to thank him and Christine Smith
medical baths or the gymnasium for the lounge. Only later for further elucidating key episodes in the history of
are the deep-down, intractable, spatial and structural temporality and Matthew Allen for engaging in rigorous
distinctions in the Athletic Club, so deftly miscategorized and productive critiques of this essay.
in his famous text, foregrounded as the salient inventive
device of his architecture: not the generic spaces stacked
up all over Manhattan but a stack of spaces that are
peculiarly differentiated through and through.

The Hidden Core of Architecture 11