Architecture: Inside Out

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Today's buildings often present sleek, bland exteriors which give the impression that about all that could be going on inside is the manufacture of ice cubes. In the hands of a master such as Chicago's Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (TIME, Feb. 11), glass-and-steel space containers can be very high style indeed, but too often the result is anonymity and monotony. To work their way out of this impasse, some architects now think that they have found the solution right in the heart of the building itself. They are designing buildings that 1) make an asset of the very plumbing, air-conditioning ducts and service areas that have hitherto been tucked away behind the clean façades, and 2) letting the irregularly shaped functional areas within a building be seen clearly from the outside.

Hooded Eyelids. "Mechanical equipment can now take up as much as 45% of the total building budget," points out Architect Paul Rudolph, 47. "Should mechanical equipment be just submerged, streamlined and ignored? I think we have got to get more out of it than just keeping cool and keeping hot. I dream of the day when the mechanical elements will take the place of sculpture in classical architecture."

A look at what such architecture might be like is shown by Rudolph's own IBM building in East Fishkill, N.Y., where the middle floor is devoted to machinery whose intake and exhaust hoods grow out from beneath the cantilevered top story like heavy eyelids. In other office buildings, Rudolph has let ductwork swarm like vines over the fa?ade, set his stairwells out from the walls like turrets. And in his soon-to-be-completed Creative Arts Center at Colgate University, he has tried an even more daring scheme: he has turned the building inside out.

Looking like a gigantic porte-cochere at first glance, the four-story Arts Center serves visually as a gateway to the campus. Functionally, its elevated wing contains artists' studios; clerestories jut up above the roof line to catch the light; galleries and staircases are cantilevered out into space; practice rooms on the ground floor declare themselves by their irregular shapes, which baffle the sound. "I'm not looking for beauty," says Rudolph, "but I'm looking for what's meaningful."

Hot-Rod & Snorkels. Another architect who is fed up with faceless, anonymous architecture that conceals function is John Johansen, 49, whose Goddard Library at Clark University in Massachusetts looks more like a photocopying machine than a glassy showcase for books. Johansen believes that architects, like all thinking people today, yearn to pierce through established façades: "Nothing goes unquestioned today; nothing is taken at its face value."