Alhambra ornament

My first job out of school was an addition to IM Pei's Newhouse school building at Syracuse university (one of the leading journalism schools in america). My boss, james polshek, had worked for Pei in the 1960's before starting his own firm.... so the project had special meaning to him and for me. Polshek was a few years from retiring, and i was just starting out. this was my first connection to the world of architecture. The proposed Newhouse school addition was in effect an homage from polshek to pei, and the start of my career under polshek. 
      

Renovating and adding to Pei's building was a challenge. First, his drawing set was a scant 26 pages of pencil drawn drawings. Second, the concrete forms he conceived were complicated structurally because the concrete was poured in 3 dimensional waffle slabs. I remember having to map out where to put recessed lights in our new building, and coordinating with all the peculiar concrete ribs of Pei's concrete structure. In the 1960's a person would draw a sheet of drawings on their drafting table. All the details were carefully thought out and composed on the page. Erasing drawings was time consuming and complicated and not to be taken lightly... so people put a lot of time into thinking out what they were drawing. Nowadays, people can cut and paste drawings, leaving layout of drawings haphazard. A typical modern architecture drawing set will contain 200-300 sheets compared to IM Pei's 26 page set. So by working with Pei's drawings, I was connecting to the history of architectural design... the world of deep thought, tracing paper, pencils, drawings and drafting tables.  

On the face of it, IM Pei's newhouse school design looked like a temple on a plinth. While a student at Harvard in 1938, Pei drove out to Taliesin, Wisconsin to meet frank lloyd wright, but never met the architect despite waiting 2 hours in the driveway. The temple was a symmetrical concrete structure that paid homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, a suburb in chicago. 

Offices and the dean’s administration inhabited the temple, while the underground plinth hosted all the broadcasting and journalism spaces. The form of Unity temple in turn was derived from arabic ornament ideas catalogued by owen jones in his ground breaking systematic catalog of world ornament, the Grammar of Ornament. Owen jones finished his grand tour of europe (after italy, turkey greece, egypt) in the alhambra. Back in the 1800's it was customary for graduates to travel to see the great buildings of the past as part of their education. For 6 months, he and companion joury, drew the ornament of alhambra. They were looking at the language of ornament, polychrome architecture, delving deep into the alhambra structure constructed in 889 AD. joury died of cholera in his 20's, jones, went back to england and dedicated 10 years developing printing techniques to convey the designs of the alhambra and the work that he and joury did in his "grammar of ornament' book.  When frank lloyd wright was starting out under louis sullivan's firm in chicago, they would leaf through the "grammar of ornament" to spark formal ideas and manipulations. they were primarily interested in non-neoclassical ideas of ornament (arabic, celtic) as a way to break free from the neoclassical style gripping america at the time. They dreamed of an american architecture which was rooted in the land, made of american materials, reflecting american ideals and values.

`