One of the fundamental ideas underlying
Outram's building is the notion of an
idealized, but obscured, temple. To see the
hidden plan of the Computational
Engineering Building, you must climb the western
stair to the third floor and look down the the
long hall--the river valley--toward Martel Hall.
The clearstory is the key; it
reveals the long march of columns through
a grand space that resembles a gothic
cathedral. Looking below the clearstory
reveals that this grand structure has been
infested with a horde of small rooms.
The clearstory reveals the plan of the
building. Its form is that of two Greek
crosses. The Main Hall forms the center
of the larger cross, while the West Hall
lies at the center of the smaller cross.
These abstract truths about its shape are
hidden by the details of daily life. Outram
calls this hidden building the "occluded
temple."
This ideal, but hidden, structure cannot be
seen; it can only be visualized and held in
the mind. This requires the willful
suppression of detail, a deliberate
abstracting away of the myriad small
rooms that partition the larger space into
mundane offices, labs, and classrooms.
Outram was commissioned to build an
office building; by leaving the clearstory
open, Outram has created a space that
suggests, to the observant mind, this larger,
grander structure.
Just as the nature of the interior is hidden
from direct view, so, too, is the exterior.
The building is embedded into a site that is
rich with trees. Most views of the building
show it peeking through the trees; it is
difficult to discern either its size or shape
until one is quite close. Again, the temple
is obscured; it can best be perceived by
mentally elaborating the hints seen
through the trees. The same effect can be
seen in Rome, where ancient buildings are
hidden in and under more recent
structures.
The concept is not new; this kind of
abstraction is commonplace. Consider the
maps of cities like Paris that are produced
for tourists. These maps show the major
monumental buildings-the Eiffel Tower,
the Arc du Triomphe, the Opera, Place de
la Concorde, Place de la Bastille, the
Louvre, Montmarte-but omit everything
that lies between them. In essence, they
call on the user to ignore the fact that this
mythic and monumental landscape has
been taken over by neighborhoods and
office buildings.
This notion appears to have been invented
in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista
Alberti. His map of Rome demands that
the user ignore the details of reality; even
in his day the space between the
monuments had been filled. Even so, his
maps call on the user to picture an
idealized reality, a mythic landscape.
Outram argues that, although we cannot
take the old fables seriously and enshrine
them in a mythic landscape, we can and
should embed the extraordinary facts of
our history and our imaginings of the
future to create a new, modern mythic
landscape. In this view, the occluded
nature of monuments is just a natural part
of the machinery that can liberate us from
a mundane and literal world.
