BOMB Magazine - William Katavolos by Deborah Gans

BOMB Magazine William Katavolos by Deborah Gans
BOMB Artists in Conversation

BOMB 97
Fall 2006
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2860/
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Architecture : Interview
William Katavolos
by Deborah Gans
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family
Foundation.
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Omar Amanat
by Omar Amanat
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William Katavolos
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Anthony McCall
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Drawing of a city of liquid villas that would float on the sea. Made by
Katavolos and the Guild for Organic Design in the late '50s for the book
Organics. All images courtesy of William Katavolos and Henry Harrison.
William Katavoloss career as an avant-gardist spans 60 years, beginning in the late

1940s when, after giving up painting, he and fellow Pratt students Ross Littell and
Douglas Kelley produced a furniture line including the T chair, which is now in the
collection of MoMA and the Louvre. Katavolos lived the high life of the time in the
company of Frederick Kiesler, Eva Zeisel, John Nichols, John Moran, Mark Rothko
and Robert Motherwell. He went on in industrial design to conceive furniture
collections for the legendary Laverne International, partition systems for Time-Life
and Owens Corning, a suspension ring system for the Moscow Fair, and the
Agricultural and Solar Pavilions for Salonika. Folklore has it that he and Philip
Johnson were in a race to the finish on the construction of their glass houses
(Katavoloss was completed in 1950 and still stands in Cazenovia, New York). His 1961
essay Organics, subsequently canonized as a modern manifesto in Ulrich
Conradss book Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, predicted a
chemical architecture grown from polymers, a proposition that has gained him new
following among the current generation-genome architects.
It is one of his earliest experiments that is now the centerpiece of his continuing
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research at the Center for Experimental Structures at Pratt Institute, which he
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Misc.
interview. As he explained in a New Yorker Talk of the Town in September 2003,

Mies van der Rohe used to say, We dont invent a new architecture every Monday
morning. It takes about 33 years to refine a new thing. It is not a young mans work.
Deborah Gans Lets start with your liquid architecture. Whats it like, whats it made
out of, how would you describe the experience of being in it?
William Katavolos Let me put it this way, since you have written about Corbusier and
know a great deal about him. Corbusier said that architecture must have mass,
surface and space. Now, the only difference between the two architectures, his and
mine, is that I believe in the liquefaction of mass, the gasification of space, and the
solidification of surface. Thats how it all began.
DG Is that a mixing of senses and experiences, the equivalent of the acoustic space
that Corbusier talks about? Space is understood as the vibration of air, i.e., sound;
and sound is experienced as an emanation through and of space. Are you talking
about an experience like this? Or are you really addressing the chemical and physical
transformation of states?
WK I spent World War II on night duty in a medical corps unit overseas and slept in
morgues during the days, so anatomy was never more than a few feet away.
Autopsies were a regular occurrence. The notions of endomorphic, ectomorphic, and
mesomorphic led to an examination of architecture. Now, I am using these words
here not in the common sense of body types, but in terms of their Greek roots: ecto
meaning surface, endo the inside, and meso the middle, or intermediate. A
mesoderm is the embryonic germ layer lying between the ectoderm and endoderm,
from which develops the connective tissue, the urogenital and vascular systems.
I started off with the question of how to create what is never in standard architecture,
a mesomorphic architecture, which would sublimate the standard skin (ecto) and
structure (endo) to the connective tissue. So, between two walls of plastic, if you
raise water at less than atmospheric pressure, you can form the organs of the
house, the rooms, within the space createdjust as tissue forms the vascular system
within it, rather than just putting the rooms inside the gastrointestinal tract, which is
what the normal house isit has an opening at one end, and another opening at the
other end. The important thing is whats in between. There was no way to arrive at a
mesomorphic architecture except through a liquefaction of mass and a solidification
of surface. I dont like solids; I like the surface. I like surface that is not surface
minimized. If you are immersed in a medium such as water, you can see the surface
that separates you from the atmosphere; it is a magical molecular layer that should
not be cut, but penetration is permissible. Liquid mass is a building material in which
form swallows function. It allows us to be incorporated rather than captured. It is
obvious that I prefer tunnels to towers. I remember the tunnels under Jerusalem
surrounded by stone and the sensation of silence that makes you feel so singular. It
exaggerates existence.
When you are surrounded by water your voice resonates, but sounds from the
outside are unheard, both of which I like. Having the transparency of a mass like
water is like having liquid concrete.
DG Being in this house, can you feel the thickness of the water? What are the
qualities of the light?
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allowed it to freeze and melt again and again during a very cold winter, absorbing
heat and then giving off heat. It became a crystal cottage. Freezing creates visible
stress patterns that are like veins in marble or the grain in wood. Being surrounded
by water is like being in the amniotic sac. Its a safe haven. So Ive never been big on
towers, but tunnels have always fascinated me: something that has the potential for
exploration; something thats more than just a box with a door on it; something that
you can go through via apertures, in almost a peristaltic progress. If you were to
think of the house as an upside-down glass filled with water, you could actually enter
that water and swim up into the glass, but you couldnt get out of it; youd have to
swim back down. But if you have an organic valve at the bottom that you could close
like a camera aperture and if a valve at the top opened, then you could swim right up
through the top and enter the pool that surrounds the house.
DG So you really envision this total immersion and then rising up into the house
WK Absolutely. I have a fear of staircases; I think theyre the most dangerous
architectural invention. Ramps are all right . . . but I would prefer to be raised
through water. You know, the Greeks had their tunics and the Romans had their
togas, and weve got to have another kind of attire for this kind of architecture. Youre
not going to wear a Brooks Brothers suit in there. In this place you would wear
waterproof communicational clothing.
DG What is communicational clothing?
WK You know, wearable computers, e-broiderythe kind of stuff that is being
developed at IBM and MIT.
Organics.
DG In your speaking of this particular kind of fluid mechanicfor it really has a

mechanic; its operationalin your feminine/feminist overtones, you remind me of
Luce Irigaraydo you know her? She explores female subjectivity and goes so far as
to propose an alternative understanding of the material world. I think she has Share
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properties she sees as female, namely fluids and flux. Actually, it does seem as if the
fluid mechanics of air is just now an important part of architectural engineering and
form findinglike in the work Ove Arup does with Renzo Piano and others. Do you
see the parallels?
WK The male glare is everywhere. It is in the way of love. The women, you know,
Julia Kristeva and the rest of them, are far more interesting than the men, Lacan and
Derrida for instance, who are apologists for a failed France. The Germans lost, but
the French failed, because they sat out World War II, and this has affected their
philosophy. Existentialism became Deconstructivism. They wanted to make sure
everybody could be knocked off a pedestal. Its not one of my favorite philosophies
for that reason. But to answer your question, Ove Arup and Renzo Piano as well as
others are working on an interiorization of architecture that allows functions to be
felt. Unlike the Green movement, organicism begins from within. It has the
ornamental complexity of Jacopo Sansovinos library in Venice as functional,
necessary form. Architecture must evolve to have no other use than that which it is
designed for. Liquids and gasses separated by solid surfaces must harvest the wind,
the sun, and the rain. The noise of the wind machines is silenced by the roof ponds
that protect the plastic from ultraviolet degradation and allow the night sky radiation
to cool large quantities of water, which will fill aquaculture tanks in a constant and
controlled infusion. The encapsulated mass will fireproof the structure and anchor it
against the vagaries of the weather.
DG You mention Sansovino
WK Yes. Im a classicist! Organicism and classicism are the same thing. Organicism
is the only thing that was left for the Greeks to do. They would never have done the
dome. They knew how to do domes; they put domes over their cesspools. They
thought it was an ugly form. The Romans were the ones who recognized the
potential of the dome. Engineering or anatomy never interested the Greeks. The
outer body is what they were concerned with. Im concerned with the inner body.
The Greeks did use the ovaries and the fallopian tubes and the ureters as the base
for their Ionic column, and they superimposed on it the testicles, the vas deferens. . .
. But Im including the kidneys and the ureters running through it! The organic is
post-pantheonicbeyond bringing the outside in, it is the inside, inside out.
DG When Andrea Palladio talks about the house, he shifts from the sacred to the
profane even more than [Leon Battista] Alberti does. Alberti begins the shift, but
Palladio domesticates it. And when he is domesticating classical architecture, he says
the house is like a body. Like a body, it has an outer casing, which is comely, but
cant work without all the systems inside: the stairs, the kitchen, the waste. But he
goes on to say how difficult it is to introduce this new custom of arranging the
internal workings of the house within the architectural diagram rather than as its
subsidiary. You get the feeling he doesnt even feel free to express how important the
inner workings of body are to him because he is so caught by the culture of the late
Renaissance and its codification of ornament and proportional systems. He both
invents this system of organs and represses it within the Renaissance cosmological
diagram of a square divided into nine squares of space by shifting all the geometries.
WK What can I say, you have said it all. He is my mentor, and his is the model. Ive
spent a lot of time in the Palladio villas, and thats why I use the term liquid villas
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habitation by the highborn. His rules of arrangement are still valid. Columns, arches,
vaults, and domes become hydroformshydrocolumns, hydroarches, hydrovaults,
and hydrodomes. But now the membrane and the fluid unite in tension and
compression, mesomorphically like tissuea column of fluid. This is the last
architecture of the Classical period.
DG I cant move as fast as you. Lets go back. So, youre saying that the Corinthian is
the liquefaction of mass.
WK Its a conduit. The phallus has never interested me very much, to put it in the
terms of some of these philosophers weve been discussing, but what interests me is
the penis out of which the urine pours, kidneys emptying the liquidity of the body.
Even the erect penis is just another conduit for another purpose.
DG The writers we were talking about, Irigary and Lacan for instance, make a big
distinction between the phallus and the penis. They are not the same thing.
WK No, they are not. The phallus is power! But think of it as a penis you can piss
with. Superimpose the kidneys on the Ionic knot, and what youve got is a river that
runs through them. You know where all this comes from: Joyces Ulysses. Early on,
when I was in high school, I got a copy of Ulysses. I read Ulysses like some people
read the Bible. The liquidity of its language, the way everything runs together . . . If I
were to put it in four-letter words, its piss, shit, snot, scum, bile, and puke, all of the
fluids that are emitted from the body one way or the other. Every chapter represents
an opening in the body or an organ. Leopold Bloom enjoys his body immensely. He
savors the urine taste of kidneys, prefers long bowel movements to sex with Molly.
Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, is concerned with continuous closings without
the possibility of closure. Joyce was another mentor.
DG I can hear it. You were a poet before you were an architect.
WK You never give up poetry. Poetry is more powerful than music. The hardest thing
in the world is to come up with a combination of words that holds.
Organics.
DG Did your war experience affect your architecture?

WK Oh, sure. I got interested in underwater diving at that time. Toward the end of the
war, there was a famous raid at Balikpapan in the Phillipines, where I was stationed,
and we got a lot of the British wounded, including their divers, who had recently
started to use the rebreather [a closed-circuit scuba apparatus] for clandestine
underwater missions. I borrowed one of the rebreathers and went out to Subic Bay
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water. Its very disturbing to me. Whenever I see a sailing ship, I see it as a razor
cutting an eye. The old Buuel thing. When youre in water, its gorgeousonce you
penetrate. But supernatance doesnt interest me.
DG Do your water structures depend on the surface action, on the mechanics of the
surface? They use the plastic as the surface.
WK Well, the skin is the largest organ in the human body, and thats the analogy you
have to use. With these structures, were covering ourselves with an intelligent skin.
The forms of the skin on the skeleton are extraordinary.
DG How would you describe them?
WK Theyre like Lalique glass, or Tiffany, very much like Tiffany. I lived at Laurel
Hollow on the Tiffany estate when I was designing the furniture were sitting on
DG which is gorgeous.
WK The owner gave my partners and me the stables, and thats where we lived. All
around us were these discarded Tiffany vases, just lying there. Today they would be
worth a fortune. I was drinking coffee out of Tiffany vases every morning, and
exploring the rooms of the great house. Then it all burned down, in 1957, and that
was a tragedy. There were a hundred rooms, and every room was a different organic
form. Frank Lloyd Wright said it would take a hundred men a hundred years to
duplicate what Louis Comfort Tiffany had done there. It was an extraordinary space
to design in. That house affected me fundamentally. I truly believe that your
environment does make you better, regardless of what Phillip Johnson had to say
about it. Within certain environments Im not only happier, but Im constructively
changed.
Backyard Biosphere, or "Haven," designed May 2001.
DG Is there a moral-existential component to being in an architecture of water?

WK Debussys Engulfed Cathedral, the Sunken Cathedral, had an enormous effect on
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great majesty as the townspeople watch. I remember the students at Yale were
asking for advice on how to save some of the structures that were about to be
flooded by the Three Gorges Dam in China, and Henry Harrison, my assistant at the
Center for Experimental Structures, suggested that they build an anchored geodesic
dome over the temples they wanted to save, creating a compressed-air chamber,
using the water they needed to divert. By evacuating the air from the chambers
between the plastic sheets, you force the water up into the vacancy created by the
vacuum. Its not a bad idea, but I warned them how difficult it would be. The
structures are not consummated constructions that have been lived in for any length
of time. They are full-scale experiments that are becoming environments. To produce
a viable villa for $15,000 will require $150,000 to develop. We are dealing with
dangerous forces, the most difficult of which is funding.
DG Its a beautiful idea, though. Its like fighting water with water.
WK No, its fighting water with air. Fighting water with water is what we are
proposing for shelters on the Gulf Coast. The Center for Experimental Structures is
proposing that prepositioned havens that serve as hydroponic gardens and
fish-farming centers in quiet times could house a large number of evacuees who
would be encouraged to remain in flood-threatened areas during hurricanes. We are
developing low-cost deployable units that would derive their mass from water
encapsulated in and around them at their sites. Submersible structures were too
difficult to attempt, but immersible structures were possible. It would allow waterfilled environments to exist in water on land. The question is: How would you survive
the initial surge? If we were back 20 miles from the ocean, it would work beautifully,
because the water rises after the surge, almost out of the saturated earth. Now, that
water we can handle, but you cant handle a 30-foot storm surge with anything.
Except perhaps concrete buildings.
DG In New Orleans it might have worked really well, because that city is back from
the coastline.
WK Yeah, I watched that very carefully. Those people should never have had to
evacuate. There should have been prepositioned sites that were properly provisioned
to care for those who didnt leave. There should be safety in your own backyard.
Families should not have been separated, and hundreds of miles of cars are targets
of opportunity. You have a warning of a day or two. You could create a biosphere of
your own. And these are biospheres.
DG Yet they have an aesthetic. What did you say the other dayan aesthetic of
security?
WK Yes. The Department of Design and Construction of New York asked me to give a
talk last year. I titled it, Is Security the Next Aesthetic in Architecture? Security is
not fear. It is simply having access to an environment that you completely
understand. The way things are now, youve lost contact: you dont know how your
air conditioner or your furnace, your computer or anything else works. Its like living
in a black box with a bunch of black boxes, living blind. Liquid architecture would
expose everything; you would know how youre generating your electricity, how
youre cooling yourself, how things are being grown (hydroponically). Theres a great
sense of security in that.
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WK The other thing, of course, is that water is the one material that has degrees of
opacity and transparency that you can easily change. We are now collectively
perfecting the separate attributes of water, such as transparent acoustical mass
derived at the site. It is an architecture of mass that does not have to be quarried or
carried to the site.
DG Even though you dont necessarily experience the movement of the water, you
grasp the fluidity of the state that surrounds you.
WK Water has no interest in sharp corners; it has no interest in the geometry that we
normally associate with contemporary architecture.
DG Do you mean contemporary as in the current fascination with forms that look
fluid?
WK Lets put it this way. In the last century, when classical architecture was embraced
by fascism, it fell from favor. Its death and reduction created an architecture of skin
and bones filled with a fear of formlessness. The century began with other voices,
such as Paul Scheerbart, whose poetry of transparency, transport, and
transformation led to the creation of the Glass House by Bruno Taut at the start of
World War I. From that came The Glass Chain [a correspondence of architects that
formed a basis of expressionist architecture in Germany, initiated by Taut]. It was for
Hugo Hring to go against Le Corbusier and Siegfried Giedeon, protesting the
preconceived in architecture. Hring demanded that the house as an organism
should acquire its essential form in the process of its creation. My work is a
continuation of The Glass Chain. The crystal house becomes the liquid house.
In the late 50s my book Organics was published in Holland. It states that we were
rapidly gaining the necessary knowledge of molecular structure together with other
techniques that will lead to the production of materials that will have a program of
behavior built into them while still in the molecular stage. I called it micromation.
Now it is called nanotechnology, a name I dislike.
DG Are you saying that your idea of classical liquidity operates at a micro or nano
scale?
WK In classical architecture, the male Doric separates the stylobate from its
architrave. The female Corinthian connects the two. It is a conduit, a liquid jet of
stone that bursts out of the stylobate and splashes under its architrave. The Ionic is
the heteromorphic knot that binds them both. It was left to me to work on the fourth
order, the Hermaphromorphic column. This is the shaft and the sheath of
self-sexualization.
The Ionic scroll was scrawled on the walls of Neandria and Lesbos and discussed at
Ephesus. The original temple mount was used for sacrificial surgery. The blood
dripping over its edges was architectualized as geometric dentils. The ovaries and
fallopian tubes superimposed on the testicles and vas deferens created the ionic
knot. The shaft enters the sheath at its base, which is not just a meld of moldings. It
is the labia minora and majora of Artemis. It should be recalled that Athena and the
Doric were born from the brain of Zeus, but Artemis and the Ionic is from the uterus
of Hera. Architecture is a succession of gender geometries. The temple is not Share
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When light passes through stained glass, it penetrates without puncture and
illuminates without opening. It is symbolic of enlightenment and virgin birth. At the
Basilica of Saint Denis, when did the architectural anima within masculinity give way
to the animus within muliebrity? When did the west facade which mirrors the Arch of
Constantine become the Gate of Horn, the woman through which we enter?
DG So whats the stuff on these walls? Edifications?
WK These are models from my visual mathematics. It began in the cellar of the
Rams Head Inn off Shelter Island when my family had acquired it in '46. On returning
from the war I spent the winter there in a self-imposed exile. In the spring, 35
physicists arrived for the now-famous Shelter Island Conference. It was held in
rooms that my mother had just redecorated. Everyone but Einstein and Fermi
showed up. This was where and when Richard Feynman introduced what was to be
quantum electrodynamics. Their presence profoundly influenced my life. In a year or
two I left painting and became a designer. But the nature of number, or the numbers
of nature, never left my mind.
Modeled view of the interior of a liquid villa, including hermaphromorphic

columns, 2005.
DG You share the center with the renowned morphologist Haresh Lalvani, and for a
moment I thought that these were his models. Now I realize that they are not.
WK These are radically different, because theyre for different reasons. Haresh is
working on architectural genomics and structures in hyperspace, but these are
models of baryons, mesons, and bosons of particle physics: what underlies ordinary
matter. Now, there are already models in particle physics, but they are totally
arbitrary, because theyre not complete. They would have to model in five
dimensions if theyre going to use six quarks. And five-dimensional models are a
pain in the neck. They talk about eleven dimensions in string theorythats fine for
string theory, because youre dealing with a form of mathematics that is infinitely
more complicated. The thing you have to be careful of is when to call in the
mathematicians. Its like using a ten-ton press to crack a walnut! This is a simple
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problem. My associate Chris Arabadjis, who is a particle physicist, and I have been
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The beauty of numbers is that you can begin to predict the numeric masses that are
coming out of the accelerator. Thats when this became important: when the sigma
and the delta could be arrived at through rigorous arithmetics. . . . I cant even call it
arithmetics, because its sub-numeral: good for nothing but describing nature.
The physicist Richard Feynman was obsessed with the number 243. The reciprocal of
243 is 4 11 5 22 6 33 7 44 8 55. This can be seen as a commingling of two
progressions of different strengths. Now, Feynmans 243 is three times 81, the
obsession of my dear friend, the painter Jim Moran. My own obsession, 761, divided
by Morans obsession, 81, is the 939506172839. That number times the palindrome
1234321 = 11596522 which is the magnetic moment anomaly of the electron. g/2 =
10011596522 is the magnetic moment of the electron, arguably the most carefully
measured number in physics. It got Feynman the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, the
reciprocal of 761=.*
001314060446780551905387647831800262812089356110381077529566
36005256241787122207621550591327201051248357424441524310118265440
21024967148488830486202365308804204993429697766097240473061760840
*99868593955321944809461235216819973718791064388961892247043363994
743758212877792378449408672798948751642575558475689881734559789750
32851511169513797634691195795006570302233902759526938239159, and Deborah, if
you will add portions of this number marked with the asterisks together, you will find
that the complementary result is a string of one hundred and ninety nines or numeric
transparency.
DG So what I am looking at in these models are the traces of the process of building
a geometric order. The orderings line up so that the model becomes transparent.
Youd have to call it organic.
WK It is organic. It is a numeric animation.
DG In the early 60s, you started out with a chemical modelreally prefiguring ideas
of nanotechnology, talking about growing buildings through pre-programmed
combinations of atoms. You were really ahead of the ball on that one. Who knows
what this model will bring?
Tags: Avant-garde, Physics, Utopia, Gender, Geometry, Mathematics, Anatomy,

Classicism, Transparency, Organic architecture
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BOMB Artists in Conversation

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Nichole Argo and

William Katavoloss career as an avant-gardist spans 60 years, beginning in the late