Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Editor: Lilian Pfaff

Clocks and Clouds: The Architecture of Escher GuneWardena, a monograph covering about 30 selected projects – unbuilt and completed – spanning a period of 20 years. The work includes, in addition to expected building types of residential, commercial and institutional categories, projects outside of the architects’ usual realm: Escher, an expert on John Lautner (1911-1994), has edited/co-authored two books on this architect and the firm has restored the Chemosphere and the Eames House. Further, stemming from the principals’ interest in contemporary art, the firm has collaborated with artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Sharon Lockhart, Steven Prina, Mike Kelley and others, and has designed spaces for art and museum exhibitions nationally and internationally.

The book will include an introductory text and essays by various writers familiar with their work (Martino Stierli, Barbara Lamprecht, Nicholas Olsberg, Lilian Pfaff, Sabine Eckmann, Mimi Zeiger and Paulette Singley). The essays will convey recurring concepts in the architects’ work ranging from ideas of “order” and “system”, to “accidental form”, and the subtle manipulations that lie between these positions, or what philosopher Karl Raimund Poppers categorizes as “clocks and clouds”: that which can be measured exactly (clocks); and that which has indefinite occurrences (clouds).

It’s hard to believe that the Salk Institute is nearly a half-century old. Louis Kahn’s masterpiece, perched on Pacific bluffs in La Jolla, Calif., has always had a conflicted relationship with time. Critic Esther McCoy, in a 1967 issue of Architectural Forum, wrote that “Kahn has said that he builds for today, not the future, but Dr. [Jonas] Salk maintains that in the laboratory building the future was built into today.”

The Salk Institute might be enduring in its design. But even icons age. Today, the landmark needs significant work on its concrete and glass façade, as well a plan for maintaining the limestone courtyard. Kahn couldn’t have predicted that fungus spores would drift on marine air from nearby eucalyptus trees and take root on the building, discoloring and eroding the teak window screens.

Which is why the Salk teamed up with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) to develop a long-term preservation strategy for the site. Based on a condition survey, historical research at the Kahn archives in Philadelphia, DNA testing, and surface treatment analysis on the building’s façade, CGI came up with a conservation methodology. The Salk Institute Conservation Project, as it’s called, is a model field study within the Getty’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI). Read More …