VAN DER VOLE: The Forgotten Modernist

The death of architect Ruud van der Vole at 109 last week was met with resounding silence. Though his contemporaries Mies, Le Corbusier, and Gropius have earned prominent places in the architectural pantheon, Van der Vole, a Modernist of equal conviction, has been largely ignored. His seminal publications of the 1920s and 30s are long out of print, and astonishingly, he has no biographer. The following is an admittedly belated attempt to acknowledge his great contribution to Modernism.

Ruud van der Veer der van der Vole was born in Dåg, Holland in 1904, one of nine children born to a wealthy family in the cough-drop manufacturing business.  He attended a private school until age 13, when he was expelled after the headmaster declared him “a doodling imbecile.”  

His influential parents quickly found him a position at the nearby Dåg Works For Belt-Driven Machines. Although clumsy with tools, van der Vole found a niche in preparing catalog illustrations of the firm’s machinery. Eventually the work of drawing blueprints for plant expansions fell to him as well. His Boring Machine Annex of 1920, designed in conjunction with the plant’s painter when he was just sixteen, reveals the germ of what was to become his early style: White plaster, white-painted concrete, white window sash, and in a brilliant, unifying stroke, white-painted glass to diffuse the low winter sun.

Van der Vole completed several subsequent designs for the Dåg Works. The Sand Bin of 1921, the Worker’s Commodes of 1922, and the Flywheel Foundry of 1924 all refined the grammar of the Boring Machine Annex. Further commissions seemed assured when disaster struck: Financially overtaxed by its expansions, the Dåg Works closed.   

Van der Vole returned to work in his family’s cough-drop factory, and it was there he met Laçzlo Turnep’, a Hungarian immigrant employed as a stirring-boy. Turnep’, later to found the school of painting known as De Schreck, or The Shock, introduced van der Vole to the works of Mondriaan and van Doesburg. 

In his own work, Turnep’ sought to further simplify Mondriaan’s ideas by limiting himself to one dimension rather than two.  Intrigued, van der Vole attempted to integrate this concept into his early designs. The use of one-dimensional form in architecture remained elusive, however, and van der Vole was never able to produce a truly one-dimensional design to his satisfaction.  

In 1925, a large addition to his family’s thriving cough-drop works provided van der Vole a welcome opportunity to return to architecture. The building consisted of a single enormous bay containing retorts in which cough-drop syrup was prepared.  Particularly evocative was its brutal concrete facade, which carried a bas-relief cough drop beneath the stark inscription HÅKBONBONFABRIK.       

During the mid twenties van der Vole began writing for the French art review LeCucu. Widely read by the avant-garde, it brought him numerous commissions and a forum in which to experiment. Intrigued by Le Corbusier’s technique of elevating his buildings on piers or pilotis, van der Vole expanded upon the concept in a series of houses for wealthy French clients. At LeSpideur, a villa near Charleroi (1927), he placed the house atop pilotis nearly twice as tall as the house itself.  

The same year, in his Cottage for Msr. Bufaleaux outside Paris, the pilotis were similarly tall and were carried through the roof an additional 3 meters. Van der Vole’s use of the Modernist device reached its highest expression in the Villa Logjam of 1928, where the pilotis stood entirely independent and the house was built elsewhere.

Never content to repeat himself, van der Vole began postulating a concept he termed gegenverstand, loosely translated “against reason”, which rejected the use of building forms based upon architectural evolution. He elaborated upon these ideas in his 1925 German-published manifesto Das Uberschreitendes Gewaltungsvertrieb mit Ungeheuere Einwohnergesellschaftsmeinungen (“What I Think About Houses”).      

His finest residential commission of this period is the Villa Soleis-Beaucoup of 1929, outside Nimes, known locally as the Burning-Glass House. Here he ingeniously designed the windows and shading in such a way as to admit the summer sun and exclude the winter sun. Of the Villa he wrote:  

“We must make every effort to break away from the tyranny of established knowledge. If an architecture is to be truly modern, it cannot, by its very definition, be composed of evolutionary forms. We must begin with fundamentally new and radical forms, and invent knowledge to explain them.”

Van der Vole turned to public housing in 1930 with the Frickenschnecken Complex, a bold concept for the renewal of a venerable district of Rotterdam. Under his plan, the old neighborhood was cleared and its rubble cleverly utilized to fill an adjacent portion of the harbor. In the center of this new area was constructed a single enormous ten story tower which housed the entire population of the former district. Of the Frickenschnecken Complex van der Vole wrote,

“You may ask me, what is the secret of this place? It is plentiful light and fresh air. At Frickenschnecken, the willy-nilly disposition of houses, the shadows, the trees, the narrow lanes, have all been swept away and replaced by light and air. Everywhere is light and air—air and light. Abundant light, and fresh, plentiful air.”

Although his master plan called for virtually all of Rotterdam’s housing to be replaced along the lines of the Frickenschnecken scheme, rising political tensions prevented its implementation. The prototype building was regrettably destroyed by its occupants. 

In 1935, van der Vole returned to Dåg and renewed his collaboration with Turnep’, now the leading exponent of De Schreck.  There, inspired by Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus school at Dessau, they founded their own atelier under the name Dåghaus. At its peak, the Dåghaus was home to nearly five artists, architects, and craftsmen. Van der Vole became a beloved mentor to this talented group, who referred to him simply as “Vole.”  In 1937 a disastrous cooking fire financially crippled the Dåghaus, however, and two years later the onset of war dispersed the remaining collaborator.  

Disheartened, van der Vole moved to Paris in 1939, where he hoped to wait out the war. When Nazi occupation seemed imminent, he fled to London. Within two months of his arrival, his apartment was heavily damaged by a deranged chambermaid. He moved again, this time to Edinburgh, where he remained until the war’s end. He then returned to London and offered his services to the British government. He was eventually assigned to develop a new master plan for the city of Leeds.   

“This dreadful town, now but a vulgar stain on the face of Britain, will soon become a showcase for the triumph and order of Modernism,” he wrote of Leeds in 1947.  “Once again, democracy is free to impose itself.”          

After much consideration, van der Vole concluded that all of Leeds should be demolished. He proposed a sleek new city divided into quadrants: One industrial; one residential, another industrial; and the last, also industrial.  At the axis of the quadrants was to be a massive, diagonally-placed tower which could be rented out for monthly parking. Parliament enthusiastically approved the plan in 1949, but the considerable funds necessary to implement it did not materialize.  Thus the proposal for Leeds was shelved. It became van der Vole’s most painful defeat.

In 1958 Van der Vole, at 54 already an elder statesman of Modernism, was invited by the Dutch chocolate industry to design the first true skyscraper in Holland, the Kakao Turm. Though small by U.S. standards, its five stories would tower over the Amsterdam skyline. Faced with a building somewhat wider than it was tall, he wrestled with the difficult problem of emphasizing its verticality. His solution remains a cunningly  Modernist detail: Applied vertically to the glass facade, continuous from street to roof, is a hierarchy of extruded copper strips of various widths. 

“The largest strips represent the fundamental aspect of the building: Structure,” wrote van der Vole in 1961.  “Between these, subordinate strips further represent structure, yet on a finer scale. Finally, ribbon-thin strips represent structure on the very finest scale. Copper symbolizes the vats in which chocolate is conched.”

Van der Vole’s activity declined markedly following completion of the Kakao Turm.  His last major commission, and his only work in the United States, was the campus for the Nebraska School of Architecture (1965-77), designed when he was well into his sixties. Located thirty miles east of Omaha, the complex is a Modernist tour-de-force. The entire campus is contained within a single huge reflecting pool and is reached by a causeway. The low buildings hover lightly above this pool, supported on delicate, stylized bronze stalks of wheat. At the exact center of the complex, also within the pool, stands a water tower whose single leg is sheathed in bronze grillwork.  Van der Vole wrote in 1969:

 “Water here symbolizes architecture—for both cover vast portions of the earth.  And water symbolizes Nebraska. Without water, nothing could survive in Nebraska.  And so, in equating water with architecture, and water with Nebraska, we have equated Nebraska with architecture.”

By the time the Nebraska campus was completed, no further U.S. commissions were forthcoming for van der Vole.  He retired to his native Holland at the age of seventy-seven, where for the next twenty years he continued to write and take on occasional small commissions.  

Appropriately, his final work was completed in Dåg for his family’s  cough-drop factory. It is the main entrance to the Håkbonbonfabrik:  A stylized Greek pediment supported at each end by three huge cough-drops, stacked edgewise and painted to resemble various flavors.  At first glance, it appears to contradict all that van der Vole believed; and yet it carries his personal stamp of integrity.  Two days before his death, he wrote in his journal:

“And so, I believe, I have brought my philosophy to its ultimate conclusion. Though in the cause of architecture we rationalize and ponder and write and agonize and reconsider and debate, and endlessly ask of ourselves, What does this mean?...in the end, it means only that which we believe it to mean.” 

Ruud van der Vole, the forgotten Modernist, was buried last week in Dåg, Holland, within a stone’s throw of the house where he was born.

THE BIG BANG

Nothing grabs people’s attention or draws crazed male wolf calls quite like the sight of some old Las Vegas highrise being imploded. While Americans may never again view such events without eerie flashbacks to 9/11, bringing down a large building predictably, and above all safely, ironically remains a calling that demands both skill and finesse.

The few seconds it takes to carry out a graceful, seemingly slow-motion building implosion makes this kind of work look simple--even effortless. In fact though, it requires weeks and often months of planning and preparatory work.  The engineering involved can be nearly as complex as that used to design the building in the first place. 

First, highrise demoliton engineers or “blasters” study the original building plans and decide how to persuade the structure to fall how and where they want it to. Nonstructural portions are often removed by conventional methods so that they won’t impede the collapse, and columns or beams may be weakened so that they’ll fail in predictable locations--something like scoring cardboard to make it fold where you want it to.

Despite the well-known use of explosives in this profession, it’s gravity that really does the job. After all, the energy it took to hoist every single beam and brick into place is locked up in the structure, waiting for Mother Nature to reclaim it. The taller the building, moreover, the more stored energy it contains. Using explosives just gives gravity a little nudge and lets it go to work.

Often, the presence of nearby structures requires a building to be brought down in a certain direction, or even within the space of its own footprint. To accomplish this, blasters use a carefully choreographed sequence of explosions, each of them relatively small, to induce a predictable and orderly collapse. For example, in a typical highrise implosion, the bottom center support columns will be blasted first, followed a few seconds later by the columns further out, so that the sinking middle portion will pull the building walls inward after it. 

In a reinforced concrete building, the blasters may choose a grade of explosive that will pulverize the concrete but leave the reinforcing bars intact, so that the steel strands will help guide the building down in the right direction.

While there are countless outfits who demolish buildings, in the realm of highrise demolition, there’s only one superstar. Controlled Demolition, Inc., is a Maryland company run by the Loizeaux family, the Flying Wallendas of building implosion.  Through three generations, the Loizeauxs have demolished skyscrapers, stadiums, smokestacks, bridges, radio towers and just about every other kind of large structure imaginable. They’re even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most buildings to be imploded at the same time--seventeen--handily beating their own previous Guiness record of twelve. 

It’s a tribute to the family's skill that the public almost nonchalantly expects buildings weighing many millions of pounds to obediently crumble into a tidy little pile at the push of a button.  Making it so isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

THEY DON’T BUILD 'EM LIKE THAT ANYMORE

I often hear people say of some old house, “Wow, they don’t build ‘em like this anymore.” To which I’m often tempted to add, “And it’s a good thing, too.” There’s a lot to be said for the aesthetic of older homes--I’ve said a good deal of it myself--but on the technical side, houses are far better built today than they were just thirty years ago, let alone sixty or a hundred years.  

For one, we know a lot more about protecting houses from all the bad things that can happen to them. Take fire safety: Older houses were built with wooden lath that made perfect kindling, single-wall furnace flues that could rust out and overheat, and damage- and overload-prone knob-and-tube wiring that could smolder and start fires. Modern houses are built with flame-resistent gypsum wallboard, double-wall flues, better protected wiring systems, and perhaps the most worthwhile life safety feature of all: smoke detectors.

New houses also hold up much better in earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes.  Prewar houses typically had little or no foundation reinforcement and were sheathed with horizontal boards that gave very little lateral strength. They also had rather casually connected floors, walls, and roofs. Today’s houses, on the other hand, have well reinforced foundations, enormously strong plywood shearwalls to resist wracking, and a host of inexpensive yet very effective metal connectors, the sum of which allows new homes to survive natural catastrophes that would probably destroy an older home.

But safety isn’t the only thing that’s improved. New houses are several times more energy efficient than those of just a generation ago, thanks to mandates for better floor, wall, ceiling and duct insulation, double-glazed windows, and more efficient furnaces and lighting.

They’re also more durable. Modern copper water pipes, for example, will easily last the life of the structure, which certainly can’t be said for the rust-prone galvanized steel pipe found in most older homes.  And the “engineered lumber” used in today’s houses--much of it made from mill waste that used to be thrown out or burned--is stronger pound for pound than the solid-sawn lumber used by builders of yore. Even modern glass is better: While the french doors in old houses contain plain glass that shatters into dagger-like shards, the tempered glass required in modern doors crumbles into harmless little granules when broken.

Given that today’s homes are technically superior to yesterday’s, why do developers try so hard to make their new houses look as if they were old? And why do so many people still prefer to live in an old house with all the infirmities noted above?  No doubt it has something to do with the peculiar human tendency to idealize bygone times. Or as the writer and humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it, “The past always looks better than it was; it’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.”

That can’t be the whole story, though. To my mind, when people say they don’t build houses like they used to, they’re not really talking about lumber, pipes, and wiring. They’re talking about the one elusive quality you can’t build into any new house, no matter what the price:  The inimitable dignity of a genuine past.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

American traffic laws tell us pedestrians have the right of way.  If you believe that, try walking across your city sometime.  The way we lay out our roads, our shopping centers, and even our houses makes it clear who’s really boss.  It’s good old Otto Mobile.

Given that the car is king--for the time being, anyway--it’s up to us lowly bipeds to demand at least a token of respect from our planners, most of whom are fixated on catering to motor vehicles, and who treat pedestrians as an incidental annoyance.  To that end, I offer a pedestrian’s Bill of Rights:

1.  When traffic laws say pedestrians have the right of way, that shouldn’t just mean that if you’re hit by a car, it’s not your fault.  People on foot shouldn’t have to fear, evade, negotiate, or maneuver around cars, whether moving or parked, just because planners routinely put the convenience of people inside vehicles far above that of people using their own two feet.

2.  No pedestrian should ever find that the only way to reach that store or office on foot is to cross a huge desert of asphalt, with moving cars threatening on all sides. Any parking area with more than two rows of stalls should be required to have a pedestrian walkway running down the strip where cars usually face off nose-to-nose.  If these walkways reduce the space available for parking cars, well, boo-hoo--cars already take up twenty times as much space a person does.  Enough is enough.

3. No pedestrian should ever be expected to cross more than four lanes of traffic, whether or not there are crossing signals present.  The vast six and even eight-lane-wide boulevards that are being imposed on more and more of our suburbs tear neighborhoods apart and form virtual Grand Canyons to people on foot. 

Once and for all, planners should shake the wrongheaded belief that the way to fix traffic congestion is to make roads wider. This is like telling a four hundred pound man with a heart condition that what he really needs is some bigger pants. The wider we make our roads, the more traffic will arrive to fill them up, and the more impassable our cities will become to people on foot. 

4. In dense urban areas, pedestrians should be free to shop, stroll, or sight see without constant threat of assault by cars, buses, or taxis.  Hence, planners should provide centralized public parking at the fringe of city cores, offer a shuttle service, and make downtown blocks pedestrian-only zones. Sedentary car jockeys would only benefit from having to walk a few steps to get where they’re going, and the rest of us would be blessed with a quieter, greener, and less polluted city.

5. Lastly, American planners should recognize that, in relative terms, cars are a mere fleeting speck of technology on planet Earth, like the chariot, the man-of-war, and the steam locomotive.  We bipeds, on the other hand, are hopefully here for the long run. It’s just plain dumb to continue building an entire nation around a machine that’ll likely be obsolete in fifty years--especially considering that, no matter what takes its place, we’ll always want get around on our own two feet.

LAST OF THE DINOSAURS

The U.S. Department of Transportation tells us that, according to its latest figures, there are some 254 million passenger vehicles registered in the United States.  That’s pretty close to one car for every man, woman, and child in the nation. In fact, it’s some 58 million more cars than there are licensed drivers to drive them.

Thanks to such mind-numbing figures, historians will someday regard the twentieth century--though hopefully not much of the twenty-first--as an absurdly auto-infatuated era. After all, ours is a time in which cars are at the very core of American identity. They’re central to our coming of age and integral to our self-image and social status-- not to mention being all but mandatory to get around in the asphalt-paved, commute-saddled world we’ve created for ourselves.  

Still, future historians may have quite a bit of trouble understanding the supposed romance of a machine whose thirst for petroleum led us to befoul our own skies and oceans, and made us tailor our foreign policy in large part to keeping our gas tanks cheaply filled.  They’ll be even more mystified at how we Americans could panic over the supposed health risks of asbestos, electromagnetic fields, and radon gas, while over forty thousand of us died every year in the comfort and perceived safety of our own automobiles.

We shake our heads at our ancestors, who fought long, brutal wars over water, salt, or patches of worthless land.  But once oil-powered vehicles join the paddle wheeler and the steam locomotive as stone-dead technology--a moment that’s coming much sooner than we might think--future generations, too, will shake their heads over our own century-long addiction to automobiles, oil, and the troubles that went with them.

The fact that cars have also taken over our built environment may be a less immediate threat, but it’s equally dismaying.  Among city planners, not to speak of traffic engineers, the logistics of accommodating motor vehicles long ago took precedence over the needs of mere humans on foot.  And since a car takes up about twenty times more space than a person does, making room for those two hundred million-plus motor vehicles has led us to pave over some forty percent of our cities (in Los Angeles, this figure is said to be closer to sixty percent).  Inside our own homes, about one-fifth of our hard-earned living space is given over to keeping our four-wheeled friends warm and dry.  A century ago, not even 

Henry Ford could have dreamed that our automobile obsession would lead us to this state of affairs. 

So there you have it:  Another tract decrying those awful automobiles, written by a tree-hugging car hater, right?  Not quite. I’ve been a hardcore gearhead my whole life. I own four cars, three of them being what car nuts rather amusingly call “classics.” I’d stay up all night talking about spread-bore carbs and roller cams if I got half a chance.  But even this degree of motor mania can’t overcome an obvious fact: We’ll all be better off when petroleum-powered cars have putt-putted off into history.  

MONEY FOR NOTHING

The other day, as my car juddered over constellations of potholes, past tenuously-maintained schools and bus stops done up in graffiti, I got to wondering. The Califonia county where I live has some of the highest taxes in the nation. The sales tax is 9.75 percent. It costs four dollars to cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge. Yearly property taxes can easily reach five figures--and no, I’m not including the cents column.

Yet in return for the oceans of money our state government takes in, Californians have roads rated among the very worst in America, libraries that close for part of the week due to lack of funding, and a public school system that one respected research group has ranked 47th among the fifty states.  

Where, I wondered, was all this tax money going?  As my car dived to a stop at yet another ill-timed red light with no cross traffic in sight for miles, the answer came to me from above.  

Traffic signals. 

Apparently there’s never a shortage of funds to pay for huge, complex, and usually unnecessary arrays of traffic signals. They sprout like weeds along roadways large and small, now and then actually making an intersection safer, but more often just obstructing traffic by reflexively “regulating” some half-abandoned side street that would be just as well off--possibly better off--with a plain old stop sign.  

Apparently, an intersection unfettered by signals is a terrifying prospect to traffic engineers, and not just in California. So, after erecting jungles of signal poles on every streetcorner of every jerkwater town in America, they’ve gleefully moved on to the suburbs, slavering at all those miles of roadway waiting to be put in harness.  

Today it’s a rare suburban boulevard that hasn’t got a huge tangle of signals arching over it every few hundred feet, with redundent stacks of lamps individually addressing each and every lane and then some. Either we motorists are so dense that it takes five red lights to tell us what one used to, or else traffic engineers just can’t get enough of all that neat hardware.   

Yet despite their numbing ubiquity, far too many traffic signals remain utterly brainless, mindlessly regulating traffic flow by time instead of by context.  In this age of computing miracles, vast numbers of signals aren’t even smart enough to know that nobody’s coming.

We’ve all been in thrall to this third-rate technology for so long that we’ve come to accept its hurky-jerky senselessness as a normal part of driving.  Yet there’s no immutable law that demands traffic signals on every streetcorner in America, much less signals that can’t think straight. It’s happened in large part because many cities and towns have come to regard elaborate signal installations as a sort of badge of urbanity, rather than as a useful tool that can be senselessly overemployed.  And it surely hasn’t hurt that the civic addiction to signals offers traffic engineers virtually infinite job security.

Given this kind of bureaucratic inertia, it seems inevitable that every pair of intersecting ruts in America will eventurally be fitted with a full complement of traffic and pedestrian signals. Then, at last, you can be idling at a red light in some Iowa cornfield, while nobody’s coming the other way. 

THE FASHION-GO-ROUND

Which do you prefer, shiny finishes or matte ones?  New-looking finishes, or old? Granite, glass, and chrome, or brick, wood, and iron?  

All of these have gone in and out of fashion over the years. We tend to think that any finish that’s popular in our own time is the ultimate word in good taste, but we couldn't be more wrong.  No matter how execrable an outdated finish may seem today, you can be sure that it, too, was the height of good taste in its own time, and that sooner or later it’ll be chic all over again.  So, you haters of Harvest Gold appliances--beware.

The popularity of some finishes--paint colors, for example--simply depends on the cyclical comings and goings of fashion.  Color fads are largely created by the industries involved, although clever marketing makes it seem like consumers are driving the demand.  And since the prior color fad must be portrayed as unappealingly dated before the “new” colors can perk up sales again, successive color trends are intentionally extreme, running from pastels to primaries to whites to deep saturated tones, the better to differentiate what’s hip from what’s hopelessly passé.   

New technologies bring other types of finishes to the fore. In the mid-19th century, for instance, raw brass, which tarnished to a clove-brown color if it wasn’t kept polished, was the usual material for hardware and plumbing fittings. In the late 1880s, though, the introduction of nickel-plated fittings quickly made tarnished brass obsolete. Despite nickel’s propensity to wear through to the metal underneath, it remained popular until the arrival of more durable chromium-plated finishes around 1930.  

Chrome has had an exceptionally long popular run because of its ease of maintenance.  Still, when earth-toned colors were being pushed during the 1970s, brass came back for an encore.  This time, though, a clear lacquer coating was used in an attempt to keep it permanently shiny.  Eventually, in their never-ending pursuit for fresh offerings, manufacturers also came up with artificially patinated finishes--brushed brass, antique brass, and the like--that tried to mimic the warmth of natural patination.  

This brings up another force behind popular finish trends that can influence both marketers and consumers alike--that of historical circumstance. After World War I, for example, American soldiers returned from the front charmed by rural Europe’s timeworn vernacular architecture, and by the early 1920s intentionally rustic or distressed finishes such as hammered iron, mottled stucco, and adze-marked wood were showing up in new houses.  During the late Twenties, though, another historic event--the 1925 Paris exposition that give the world Art Deco--helped drive a complete reversal of this trend.  By the early 1930s, smooth, highly polished surfaces such as glass, tile, and Monel metal had made rustic and patinated finishes look laughably outdated.  

And so it goes--one finish vogue arriving, another departing.  Yet no matter how unfashionable a finish may seem to our marketing-biased senses, rest assured it never permanently leaves the scene:  One of today’s more popular finishes, oil-rubbed bronze, is neither plated nor lacquered, and therefore oxidizes to a clove-brown color and develops wear highlights very much like the old unlacquered brass of Victorian times. In other words, after a century and a half, some things are pretty much back where they started.