Toward a New Slang

By ROBERT HUGHES

On the evidence of his work, John M. Johansen is a restless eccentric among U.S. architects. He seems willing to try anything once. Pecking among the styles, he has, in the past, gone through the routine Miesian curtain-wall phase, made his bow to Italian Baroque in his design for the U.S. embassy in Dublin and constructed a house in Connecticut framed like a ramifying tepee with 150 telephone poles (they were bolted together under the direction of a Norwegian shipwright). He also has designed buildings, like the Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, of an almost Egyptian heaviness. Currently his office is lodged on the top floor of a loft building overlooking Manhattan's East River. The loft is owned by a retailer of garden furniture who stores his surplus on the roof. There, Johansen entertains in a boneyard of leafy wrought-iron love seats, rusty trellises, cast-lead nymphs and salvaged Art Nouveau birdbaths. In those startling surroundings he looks for all the world like a Viking who has strayed onto the set of an unfinished Cocteau movie.

At 54, Johansen is still relentlessly curious and something of a loner, but his dissent has firmed. With a growing minority of other highly gifted American architects, Johansen is engaged in what amounts to the first rethinking of the architectural commandments handed down years ago by the late Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His new approach has crystallized in one challenging building: the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City.

Brash and Incisive. At first sight, it does not look like a theater at all. Johansen designed it in terms of distinct units--blocks of raw concrete with brightly painted steel cladding, connected by tubes and catwalks. Nothing could be more remote from the idiom of the theater as temple--massive portico and formidable foyer suggesting, in the manner of Lincoln Center, that the audience is going to be vouchsafed a peek at the altar of some crushing god named High Culture. The Mummers Theater, by contrast, with its simple materials and modest scale, does not try to stimulate the audience's sense of selfimportance; it is entirely directed toward the events onstage. It is literally a playhouse--open, light, improvisatory, gamelike. The design amounts to a proposition that boxing all the functions of a building into one articulated mass is not the only way to order, and that the legacy of the Beaux-Arts tradition, which Johansen scornfully calls "the tasteful arrangement of compositional elements," is dead because it cannot provoke fresh responses. "Most modern building," he adds, "is just an extension of the Beaux-Arts tradition." The idiom of Gropius or I.M. Pei is eloquence; that of corporate architects like Edward Durell Stone is rhetoric; what Johansen now seeks is "a kind of slang ... I want my things to look brash and incisive and immediate. They should respond to what people actually need, the way slang and jargon respond to quick needs in communication."

This sounds like the traditional functionalist, machine-for-living argument, but it is not. The question is not how to "allow for" people's work and movement in a given building; it is how to design a structure as the uncrimping skin of human action, growing round its paths and patterns in an absolutely candid way. "You start with what people do--not with what you think they ought to do." Johansen follows this up with belligerent commitment. While designing a low-income housing project in The Bronx recently, he threatened "to break every stick of furniture in the goddam conference room" because the housing authorities would not allow him to design the front stoops that, as everyone but housing authorities knows, are a basic social-gathering place for city dwellers. (He won the point.)

Commonsense Circuitry. Some of Oklahoma City's more conservative people dislike the Mummers Theater because it reminds them of a factory. It is in fact an exquisitely human building in its scale, organization and intriguing unpredictabilities. But the comparison would not, in any case, offend

Johansen. The ordering model he used in thinking it out--through eight years of close collaboration with the theater's director, Mack Seism, and David Hays, a prominent stage designer--was that of electronic circuitry. "My whole design," he says, "can really be stated in terms of components--the two main theaters--with subcomponents like offices attached, plugged into the backstage facilities and wired together with circuiting systems. Circuits for the audience, for the actors, for air conditioning and so on." After that, all that is left is styling, a process to which Johansen (like the Archigram group in England, whose experiments he admires) is utterly indifferent. "The fac,ade disappears," he says. The result is that his work has a refreshingly explicit look: not fetishistic or overly concerned with detail, but imbued with a commonsensical directness as to ways and means.

Open to Change. Renaissance planning, in terms of axis and fac,ade and fixed viewpoint, cannot work in today's web of combination and change, and the shifting elements and separated blocks of the Mummers Theater are Johansen's tentative statement of a fluidity that, he believes, architecture must either reach or perish. "I never liked permanent solutions," he says. "One of the things that got me in Rome was the idea of a building as a palimpsest, the record of time and change. You see a row of 2nd century arches with a 16th century building capped onto the top, and then new outgrowths, even the television aerials. That's great, it lives." Any building should be "open to change," because if it is not, it will in time come to predict wrongly and then distort the needs of its occupants. If the director discovers the need for, say, a library, he can build a new unit for it and link it to the original building with a new people-tube at any convenient point. The motto is: "Don't build for the ages; let the ages build for you." Like all advanced architecture, Johansen's theater is a gamble with public taste, but its terse pragmatism is so logical that it seems a pointer to a very likely future.

Robert Hughes

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