Comments on Project in Guadalajara, Mexico
Philip Johnson with Hilary Lewis

By beauty of shapes I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the beauty of living figures or of pictures, but, to make my point clear, I mean straight lines and circles, and shapes, plane or solid, made from them by lathe, ruler and square. These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely.

Plato. Philebu

L'architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des volumes assemblés sous la lumière. Nos yeux sont faits pour voir les formes sous la lumière; les ombres et les clairs révèlent les formes; les cubes, les cônes, les sphères, les cylindres ou les pyramides sont les grandes formes primaires que la lumière révèle bien; l’image nous en est nette et tangible, sans ambiguïté. C'est pour cela que ce sont de belles formes, les plus belles formes. Tout le monde est d’accord en cela, l’enfant, le sauvage et le métaphysicien. C'est la condition même des arts plastiques.

Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture

When Alfred Barr and I presented Machine Art at The Museum of Modern Art in 1934, we included Plato’s comments from Philebus  in the preface to the catalogue. Plato states that the beauty of geometric forms such as the circle and straight line is absolute. And we believed that at the time. Now, I feel differently. Such things are relative. I am a follower of Heraclitus. The only absolute is change itself.

Today there is much more freedom in architecture since Le Corbusier’s words-from the zigzags of the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind to the swirling forms of Peter Eisenman’s Staten Island project. These sureties of Plato and Le Corbusier are no longer sureties.

Now, I am trying to warp the classical. It is not that I am out to destroy it. I am inclined towards the classical to begin with; it is the way I was trained. Even the Glass House is essentially classical. It has four symmetrical façades with doors at their centers. But, now I want to explore what can be done with and to the classical.

My current project is a commission in Guadalajara for Jorge Vergara, a visionary Mexican businessman. It was to be a children’s museum, part of a large building program which involves about ten other architects. What I am actually creating though is a “children’s world”, which is fitting since at 92 I am now in my second childhood.
The idea for this developed out of some recent work from our office. I had designed a garden pavilion for a client based on the idea of the pyramid, but not a single pyramid, rather a collision of several of them. We made a number of models of this design which were placed together on a table. Seeing them there made me realize that a profusion of pyramids would be even better. I wanted something that would incorporate these models at once. Incidentally, this led to my recent design for the addition at the Chrysler building.

The Guadalajara design is the next step of this thinking. Instead of just focusing on the pyramid I wanted to explore the other Platonic forms. This reminded me of Le Corbusier’s quotation of Plato. Therefore, I thought about using cubes, cones, cylinders and pyramids. However, for some reason I didn’t want to use the sphere. How do you make architecture out of a sphere? I leave that to Boullée.

Instead of making one building, I am designing four. That way each will be small and playful. I want the design of each to be intimate, to look big, but feel small, somewhat like my Monsta (visitors pavilion) in New Canaan. I originally considered using 5/8 scale - as in Disneyland - but now I am not sure that will be precisely right. Each of the four will be different objects, loosely based on the cube, cone, cylinder and pyramid. But they won’t be pure Platonic forms. They will be warped. For example, the cylinder appears as a coil. The cones are tapered, warped and reversed. They’re conical objects rather than actual cones. The pyramids are tilted and collide with each other. The cubes are misshapen, tilted and crushed together; they are warped like the rest.

The site for my objects is the best in the project. It is an island - entirely man made in a man made lake - located at the end of a three mile pedestrian causeway. Mr. Vergara is an extremely sympathetic client; he picked the island. He told me, “We’re building a lake. Why not an island as well?” I love islands and the way they can isolate buildings. My lake pavilion at the Glass House sits on its own island -you have to jump from the shore to reach the pavilion. Here, I will use a rope bridge to bring people to the island. This will be designed by Cecil Balmond of Ove Arup and Partners. It will be fun for the kids. They can jump on the thing and pretend there’s danger - when there isn’t any.

The bridge will be the “gozinta” for the island, then each building there will have its own “gozinta”. The manner in which you enter