Gunnar Birkerts is the leading American exponent of organic architecture in the
generation of architects that came to maturity in the 1960s. Working in the tradition of
Erich Mendelsohn, Hugo Haring, and Eero Saarinen, Birkerts received his architectural
education in Stuttgart from 1945 to 1949. During his years in Germany, he was drawn to
Scandinavian modernism rather than Bauhaus doctrine, which was still taught at the
Technische Hochschule. In 1959 he formed a partnership with Frank Straub, and since
1962 he has been practicing independently in addition to teaching, lecturing, and writing.
Birkerts’s early buildings show a rejection of the dogmas of the International Style,
and a mastery of site problems that is unusual in any architect, young or old. Within their
urban context, his buildings respond to other works of architecture and to dominant
geographic features. Moreover, Birkerts playfully utilizes the metaphorical qualities of
architecture within the design process.
The nature of his expressive design process has allowed Birkerts to adapt to some
unusual clients and remarkable problems. He designed the new Federal Reserve Bank in
Minneapolis under the leadership of bank president Hugh Galusha in 1973; at first glance
it appears to be a monolithic Brutalist facade. Its most striking feature is a curving,
catenary arch that frees up a great deal of space below ground for high-security work, and
allows for office space above.
In 1984 Birkerts built the Domino’s Pizza World Headquarters in Ann Arbor, a
complex of buildings that included corporate headquarters, warehouses, laboratories, and
public spaces. Birkerts designed the buildings as a series of long, low, broad-eaved
structures that appear to shoot across the flat site as if on railroad tracks. Birkerts
borrowed elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs (primarily the manner in which
buildings relate to the natural setting) in a continuation of the organic tradition of
architecture in the United States.
Birkerts’ 1981 library addition to the Law School at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor precisely melds with the existing buildings in the quad, including the neo-
Gothic Legal Research building and Hutchins Hall, which are relatively recent
adaptations of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England. In order to preserve the
integrity of the quadrangle, the architect’s solution was to put the library addition
underground. Thus, the sidewalk on the east end of the quadrangle runs along the roof of
the Law Library. The building’s exterior wall forms a limestone V-shaped moat along the
outside of the structure, abutting a trough of glass plate windows, providing a major
source of day-light. For Birkerts, light is as much a tangible material as it was to Alvar
Aalto, whose aesthetic the Ann Arbor library recalls.
Birkerts’s design process draws heavily upon intuition. A student of
psychology, Birkerts initially relies on rough sketches that look like
doodles. As a project is refined, these sketches are expanded into drawings
and models that explore functioning spaces and orientation.
Corning Museum of Glass
(renovation), Corning, New York,
designed by Gunnar Birkerts (1980)
uses a free form polygonal geometry that he can adapt at will. It allows him to define
space without compromising functional or aesthetic considerations.
His 1980 renovation and remodeling of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning,
New York, is a masterful synthesis of organics and plastic form that metaphorically
evokes the material of glass itself. The building’s exterior surface undulates like liquid
glass in the furnace; this effect is carefully tempered by hard right angles that represent
glass in its solid state. To create an effect of brilliant illumination and visual clarity,
Birkerts designed periscope windows, with slanting mirrors to deflect direct sunlight
without blocking the view.
More recently, Birkerts has begun two buildings in his native country that are still
under construction (as of 2003): the Latvian National Library at Riga, and Museum of the
Occupation of Latvia. The former received the 2000 Annual American Architecture Prize
of the Chicago Museum of Architecture and Design. With a spectacular site near the
Daugava River in the country’s capital city, the Latvian National Library takes the form
of a crystal mountain emerging from dark waters, and contains at its upper level, the
treasures of Latvian literary history. Birkerts sees his Latvian buildings as the opportunity
to create grand national symbols that express the country’s layered history, character, and
freedom.
