Space

By Temple Ligon

To understand space, to think in spatial terms, is to take three or four years in design education. Sculptors and architects have this in common. Both fields of endeavor need that first few years just to comprehend spatial play.

I was shopping architecture and urban design programs when the 1974-75 recession had a good grip on the world’s economy, a slack economy brought about by skyrocketing oil prices following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. I figured Houston would have some means to it since Big Oil was doing so well.

New England was in serious trouble, as was New York City, both beset with high heating bills and expensive gasoline. NYC’s Mayor Beame was looking at bankruptcy while President Ford was essentially telling New York it could drop dead, according to the headlines in the local tabloids. It got so bad Jimmy Carter looked good.

With all that I was taking a turn to a new career path. I was due to pick up my undergraduate degree in art history in the summer of 1975, and I needed by then a firm direction for graduate school. Military included, my first four years took nine to complete, and I couldn’t afford to continue on that bloated of a schedule. My GI Bill payment program was about to run out.

I was looking into programs in the visual arts, and I heard from the seasoned practitioners that I couldn’t even comprehend, much less design, space until I had been with it for three or four years.

The degree programs I was looking into all needed my undivided attention for at least three years. Penn, as I remember it, was a four-year program from ground zero to a master’s degree in landscape architecture. Yale, on the other hand, was awarding a master’s in architecture after just three years. But Yale also had the most courses listed as prerequisites.

Rice in Houston made sense, and their program of three-and-a-half years was really a four-year timetable when the practicum, a semester out with an approved established firm somewhere in the world, was considered. Besides, Rice had the money and the scholarships. It wasn’t that hard of a decision.

I did look around here, though. Clemson wanted its architecture students to enter the freshman class, take four years to a bachelor of arts degree, and then re-enroll for another two years to earn a master’s degree. That’s six years. Clemson gave its students plenty of time to take on the spatial orientation.

The four at Rice, however, hardly got its students set to fully understand space before graduation.  But the scholarship money had a way of nullifying any objections.

Objections came from the old timers, architects who spent five years for their first professional degree, a B.Arch, and another two to get a master’s in urban design or maybe a master’s in historic preservation, seven years altogether, all the while working in spatial terms.

In the late 1970s, architect I. M. Pei competed for a commission to design a 75-storey building in downtown Houston. He explained to his audience, developer Gerald Hines and a few prospective anchor tenants, that in America we walk up to a building or drive by a building and we remember what we saw.

In Europe, however, we walk through an urban space or a series of spaces defined by buildings and we remember the experience, probably more than when we simply stand before a building.

Architect Philip Johnson, winner of the first Pritzker Prize in 1979, said architecture is space, and sophisticated architecture is a sequence of spaces.

Pei made his point by placing his design competition entry’s footprint on about three-fourths of the city block, leaving that last fourth as a chamfered face overseeing the street-level urban space with the Jones Hall for the Performing Arts across the street. Hines put a giant sculpture by Juan Miro in the same space, decorating the space to the point people visited the space, not necessarily the building.

Not too long ago, a call for something spatially sophisticated surfaced in West Columbia.

I was invited to see what was possible in West Columbia at The Pit, the parcel owned by the City of West Columbia bounded on two sides by State Street and Meeting Street, overlooking the amphitheater on the river next to the Gervais Street Bridge.

I recalled some history, the Place Vendome in Paris, one of the world’s most-loved urban spaces. For my purposes I used a down-sized version, but I used two of them, setting up West Columbia’s signature space as a sequence of spaces. Philip John and I. M. Pie would have approved, we can hope.

The Place Vendome was designed and developed by Mansart, the architect of the Palace of Versailles. In the 1970s, we Americans had a field day with Mansart’s roof, which we called the Mansard roof.

His Place Vendome was built as an urban space with no buildings behind the defining wall, not at first. The buildings and their occupants nestled up to Mansart’s wall and windows and doors, and after only a couple hundred years, the Place Vendome was home to the Paris Ritz, and it is also the location for Cartier’s flagship store.

West Columbia will never see a Ritz Hotel or a Cartier jewelry display. But to give a nod to Paris with two little Place Vendomes, well, West Columbia would have enjoyed that.

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