BOMB Magazine — William Katavolos by Deborah Gans

William Katavolosby Deborah Gans

The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer FamilyFoundation.

Drawing of a city of liquid villas that would float on the sea. Made byKatavolos and the Guild for Organic Design in the late '50s for the bookOrganics. All images courtesy of William Katavolos and Henry Harrison.

William Katavolos’s career as an avant-gardist spans 60 years, beginning in the late1940s when, after giving up painting, he and fellow Pratt students Ross Littell andDouglas Kelley produced a furniture line including the “T” chair, which is now in thecollection of MoMA and the Louvre. Katavolos lived the high life of the time in thecompany of Frederick Kiesler, Eva Zeisel, John Nichols, John Moran, Mark Rothkoand Robert Motherwell. He went on in industrial design to conceive furniturecollections for the legendary Laverne International, partition systems for Time-Lifeand Owens Corning, a suspension ring system for the Moscow Fair, and theAgricultural and Solar Pavilions for Salonika. Folklore has it that he and PhilipJohnson were in a race to the finish on the construction of their glass houses(Katavolos’s was completed in 1950 and still stands in Cazenovia, New York). His 1961essay “Organics,” subsequently canonized as a “modern manifesto” in UlrichConrads’s book Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, predicted achemical architecture grown from polymers, a proposition that has gained him newfollowing among the current generation-genome architects.

It is one of his earliest experiments that is now the centerpiece of his continuingresearch at the Center for Experimental Structures at Pratt Institute, which he

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interview. As he explained in a New Yorker Talk of the Town in September 2003,“Mies van der Rohe used to say, ‘We don’t invent a new architecture every Mondaymorning.’ It takes about 33 years to refine a new thing. It is not a young man’s work.”

Deborah Gans Let’s start with your liquid architecture. What’s it like, what’s it madeout 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 andknow a great deal about him. Corbusier said that architecture must have mass,surface and space. Now, the only difference between the two architectures, his andmine, is that I believe in the liquefaction of mass, the gasification of space, and thesolidification of surface. That’s 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 talkingabout an experience like this? Or are you really addressing the chemical and physicaltransformation of states?

WK I spent World War II on night duty in a medical corps unit overseas and slept inmorgues during the days, so anatomy was never more than a few feet away.Autopsies were a regular occurrence. The notions of endomorphic, ectomorphic, andmesomorphic led to an examination of architecture. Now, I am using these wordshere not in the common sense of body types, but in terms of their Greek roots: ectomeaning surface, endo the inside, and meso the middle, or intermediate. Amesoderm 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) andstructure (endo) to the connective tissue. So, between two walls of plastic, if youraise water at less than atmospheric pressure, you can form the “organs” of thehouse, the rooms, within the space created—just as tissue forms the vascular systemwithin it, rather than just putting the rooms inside the gastrointestinal tract, which iswhat the normal house is—it has an opening at one end, and another opening at theother end. The important thing is what’s in between. There was no way to arrive at amesomorphic architecture except through a liquefaction of mass and a solidificationof surface. I don’t like solids; I like the surface. I like surface that is not surfaceminimized. If you are immersed in a medium such as water, you can see the surfacethat separates you from the atmosphere; it is a magical molecular layer that shouldnot be cut, but penetration is permissible. Liquid mass is a building material in whichform swallows function. It allows us to be incorporated rather than captured. It isobvious that I prefer tunnels to towers. I remember the tunnels under Jerusalemsurrounded by stone and the sensation of silence that makes you feel so singular. Itexaggerates existence.

When you are surrounded by water your voice resonates, but sounds from theoutside are unheard, both of which I like. Having the transparency of a mass likewater is like having liquid concrete.

DG Being in this house, can you feel the thickness of the water? What are thequalities of the light?

Misc. +

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allowed it to freeze and melt again and again during a very cold winter, absorbingheat and then giving off heat. It became a crystal cottage. Freezing creates visiblestress patterns that are like veins in marble or the grain in wood. Being surroundedby water is like being in the amniotic sac. It’s a safe haven. So I’ve never been big ontowers, but tunnels have always fascinated me: something that has the potential forexploration; something that’s more than just a box with a door on it; something thatyou can go through via apertures, in almost a peristaltic progress. If you were tothink of the house as an upside-down glass filled with water, you could actually enterthat water and swim up into the glass, but you couldn’t get out of it; you’d have toswim back down. But if you have an organic valve at the bottom that you could closelike a camera aperture and if a valve at the top opened, then you could swim right upthrough 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 they’re the most dangerousarchitectural invention. Ramps are all right . . . but I would prefer to be raisedthrough water. You know, the Greeks had their tunics and the Romans had theirtogas, and we’ve got to have another kind of attire for this kind of architecture. You’renot going to wear a Brooks Brothers suit in there. In this place you would wearwaterproof communicational clothing.

DG What is communicational clothing?

WK You know, wearable computers, e-broidery—the kind of stuff that is beingdeveloped at IBM and MIT.

Drawing of a city of liquid villas that would float on the sea. Made byKatavolos and the Guild for Organic Design in the late '50s for the bookOrganics.

DG In your speaking of this particular kind of fluid mechanic—for it really has amechanic; it’s operational—in your feminine/feminist overtones, you remind me ofLuce Irigaray—do you know her? She explores female subjectivity and goes so far asto 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 thefluid mechanics of air is just now an important part of architectural engineering andform finding—like in the work Ove Arup does with Renzo Piano and others. Do yousee 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 andDerrida for instance, who are apologists for a failed France. The Germans lost, butthe French failed, because they sat out World War II, and this has affected theirphilosophy. Existentialism became Deconstructivism. They wanted to make sureeverybody could be knocked off a pedestal. It’s not one of my favorite philosophiesfor that reason. But to answer your question, Ove Arup and Renzo Piano as well asothers are working on an interiorization of architecture that allows functions to befelt. Unlike the Green movement, organicism begins from within. It has theornamental complexity of Jacopo Sansovino’s library in Venice as functional,necessary form. Architecture must evolve to have no other use than that which it isdesigned 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 pondsthat protect the plastic from ultraviolet degradation and allow the night sky radiationto cool large quantities of water, which will fill aquaculture tanks in a constant andcontrolled infusion. The encapsulated mass will fireproof the structure and anchor itagainst the vagaries of the weather.

DG You mention Sansovino—

WK Yes. I’m a classicist! Organicism and classicism are the same thing. Organicismis the only thing that was left for the Greeks to do. They would never have done thedome. They knew how to do domes; they put domes over their cesspools. Theythought it was an ugly form. The Romans were the ones who recognized thepotential of the dome. Engineering or anatomy never interested the Greeks. Theouter body is what they were concerned with. I’m concerned with the inner body.The Greeks did use the ovaries and the fallopian tubes and the ureters as the basefor their Ionic column, and they superimposed on it the testicles, the vas deferens. . .. But I’m including the kidneys and the ureters running through it! The organic ispost-pantheonic—beyond bringing the outside in, it is the inside, inside out.

DG When Andrea Palladio talks about the house, he shifts from the sacred to theprofane even more than [Leon Battista] Alberti does. Alberti begins the shift, butPalladio domesticates it. And when he is domesticating classical architecture, he saysthe house is like a body. Like a body, it has an outer casing, which is comely, butcan’t work without all the systems inside: the stairs, the kitchen, the waste. But hegoes on to say how difficult it is to introduce this new custom of arranging theinternal workings of the house within the architectural diagram rather than as itssubsidiary. You get the feeling he doesn’t even feel free to express how important theinner workings of body are to him because he is so caught by the culture of the lateRenaissance and its codification of ornament and proportional systems. He bothinvents this system of organs and represses it within the Renaissance cosmologicaldiagram 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. I’vespent a lot of time in the Palladio villas, and that’s why I use the term liquid villas+ Share



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habitation by the highborn. His rules of arrangement are still valid. Columns, arches,vaults, and domes become hydroforms—hydrocolumns, hydroarches, hydrovaults,and hydrodomes. But now the membrane and the fluid unite in tension andcompression, mesomorphically like tissue—a column of fluid. This is the lastarchitecture of the Classical period.

DG I can’t move as fast as you. Let’s go back. So, you’re saying that the Corinthian isthe liquefaction of mass.

WK It’s a conduit. The phallus has never interested me very much, to put it in theterms of some of these philosophers we’ve been discussing, but what interests me isthe 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 bigdistinction 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 pisswith. Superimpose the kidneys on the Ionic knot, and what you’ve got is a river thatruns through them. You know where all this comes from: Joyce’s Ulysses. Early on,when I was in high school, I got a copy of Ulysses. I read Ulysses like some peopleread the Bible. The liquidity of its language, the way everything runs together . . . If Iwere to put it in four-letter words, it’s piss, shit, snot, scum, bile, and puke, all of thefluids that are emitted from the body one way or the other. Every chapter representsan opening in the body or an organ. Leopold Bloom enjoys his body immensely. Hesavors the urine taste of kidneys, prefers long bowel movements to sex with Molly.Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, is concerned with continuous closings withoutthe 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 thingin the world is to come up with a combination of words that holds.

Drawing of a city of liquid villas that would float on the sea. Made byKatavolos and the Guild for Organic Design in the late '50s for the bookOrganics.

DG Did your war experience affect your architecture?

WK Oh, sure. I got interested in underwater diving at that time. Toward the end of thewar, 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 recentlystarted to use the rebreather [a closed-circuit scuba apparatus] for clandestineunderwater missions. I borrowed one of the rebreathers and went out to Subic Bay+ Share



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water. It’s very disturbing to me. Whenever I see a sailing ship, I see it as a razorcutting an eye. The old Buñuel thing. When you’re in water, it’s gorgeous—once youpenetrate. But supernatance doesn’t interest me.

DG Do your water structures depend on the surface action, on the mechanics of thesurface? They use the plastic as the surface.

WK Well, the skin is the largest organ in the human body, and that’s the analogy youhave to use. With these structures, we’re covering ourselves with an intelligent skin.The forms of the skin on the skeleton are extraordinary.

DG How would you describe them?

WK They’re like Lalique glass, or Tiffany, very much like Tiffany. I lived at LaurelHollow on the Tiffany estate when I was designing the furniture we’re sitting on—

DG —which is gorgeous.

WK The owner gave my partners and me the stables, and that’s where we lived. Allaround us were these discarded Tiffany vases, just lying there. Today they would beworth a fortune. I was drinking coffee out of Tiffany vases every morning, andexploring the rooms of the great house. Then it all burned down, in 1957, and thatwas a tragedy. There were a hundred rooms, and every room was a different organicform. Frank Lloyd Wright said it would take a hundred men a hundred years toduplicate what Louis Comfort Tiffany had done there. It was an extraordinary spaceto design in. That house affected me fundamentally. I truly believe that yourenvironment does make you better, regardless of what Phillip Johnson had to sayabout it. Within certain environments I’m not only happier, but I’m constructivelychanged.

Backyard Biosphere, or "Haven," designed May 2001.

DG Is there a moral-existential component to being in an architecture of water?

WK Debussy’s Engulfed Cathedral, the Sunken Cathedral, had an enormous effect on+ Share



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great majesty as the townspeople watch. I remember the students at Yale wereasking for advice on how to save some of the structures that were about to beflooded by the Three Gorges Dam in China, and Henry Harrison, my assistant at theCenter for Experimental Structures, suggested that they build an anchored geodesicdome 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 chambersbetween the plastic sheets, you force the water up into the vacancy created by thevacuum. It’s not a bad idea, but I warned them how difficult it would be. Thestructures are not consummated constructions that have been lived in for any lengthof time. They are full-scale experiments that are becoming environments. To producea viable villa for $15,000 will require $150,000 to develop. We are dealing withdangerous forces, the most difficult of which is funding.

DG It’s a beautiful idea, though. It’s like fighting water with water.

WK No, it’s fighting water with air. Fighting water with water is what we areproposing for shelters on the Gulf Coast. The Center for Experimental Structures isproposing that prepositioned havens that serve as hydroponic gardens andfish-farming centers in quiet times could house a large number of evacuees whowould be encouraged to remain in flood-threatened areas during hurricanes. We aredeveloping low-cost deployable units that would derive their mass from waterencapsulated in and around them at their sites. Submersible structures were toodifficult to attempt, but immersible structures were possible. It would allow water-filled environments to exist in water on land. The question is: How would you survivethe 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, thatwater we can handle, but you can’t 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 fromthe coastline.

WK Yeah, I watched that very carefully. Those people should never have had toevacuate. There should have been prepositioned sites that were properly provisionedto care for those who didn’t leave. There should be safety in your own backyard.Families should not have been separated, and hundreds of miles of cars are targetsof opportunity. You have a warning of a day or two. You could create a biosphere ofyour own. And these are biospheres.

DG Yet they have an aesthetic. What did you say the other day—an aesthetic ofsecurity?

WK Yes. The Department of Design and Construction of New York asked me to give atalk last year. I titled it, “Is Security the Next Aesthetic in Architecture?” Security isnot fear. It is simply having access to an environment that you completelyunderstand. The way things are now, you’ve lost contact: you don’t know how yourair conditioner or your furnace, your computer or anything else works. It’s like livingin a black box with a bunch of black boxes, living blind. Liquid architecture wouldexpose everything; you would know how you’re generating your electricity, howyou’re cooling yourself, how things are being grown (hydroponically). There’s a greatsense of security in that. + Share



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WK The other thing, of course, is that water is the one material that has degrees ofopacity and transparency that you can easily change. We are now collectivelyperfecting the separate attributes of water, such as transparent acoustical massderived at the site. It is an architecture of mass that does not have to be quarried orcarried to the site.

DG Even though you don’t necessarily experience the movement of the water, yougrasp the fluidity of the state that surrounds you.

WK Water has no interest in sharp corners; it has no interest in the geometry that wenormally associate with contemporary architecture.

DG Do you mean contemporary as in the current fascination with forms that lookfluid?

WK Let’s put it this way. In the last century, when classical architecture was embracedby fascism, it fell from favor. Its death and reduction created an architecture of skinand bones filled with a fear of formlessness. The century began with other voices,such as Paul Scheerbart, whose poetry of transparency, transport, andtransformation led to the creation of the Glass House by Bruno Taut at the start ofWorld War I. From that came The Glass Chain [a correspondence of architects thatformed a basis of expressionist architecture in Germany, initiated by Taut]. It was forHugo Häring to go against Le Corbusier and Siegfried Giedeon, protesting thepreconceived in architecture. Häring demanded that the house as an organismshould acquire its essential form in the process of its creation. My work is acontinuation 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 wererapidly gaining the necessary knowledge of molecular structure together with othertechniques that will lead to the production of materials that will have a program ofbehavior 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 nanoscale?

WK In classical architecture, the male Doric separates the stylobate from itsarchitrave. The female Corinthian connects the two. It is a conduit, a liquid jet ofstone that bursts out of the stylobate and splashes under its architrave. The Ionic isthe heteromorphic knot that binds them both. It was left to me to work on the fourthorder, the Hermaphromorphic column. This is the shaft and the sheath ofself-sexualization.

The Ionic scroll was scrawled on the walls of Neandria and Lesbos and discussed atEphesus. The original temple mount was used for sacrificial surgery. The blooddripping over its edges was architectualized as geometric dentils. The ovaries andfallopian tubes superimposed on the testicles and vas deferens created the ionicknot. The shaft enters the sheath at its base, which is not just a meld of moldings. Itis the labia minora and majora of Artemis. It should be recalled that Athena and theDoric were born from the brain of Zeus, but Artemis and the Ionic is from the uterusof 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 andilluminates without opening. It is symbolic of enlightenment and virgin birth. At theBasilica of Saint Denis, when did the architectural anima within masculinity give wayto the animus within muliebrity? When did the west facade which mirrors the Arch ofConstantine become the Gate of Horn, the woman through which we enter?

DG So what’s the stuff on these walls? Edifications?

WK These are models from my visual mathematics. It began in the cellar of theRam’s Head Inn off Shelter Island when my family had acquired it in '46. On returningfrom the war I spent the winter there in a self-imposed exile. In the spring, 35physicists arrived for the now-famous Shelter Island Conference. It was held inrooms that my mother had just redecorated. Everyone but Einstein and Fermishowed up. This was where and when Richard Feynman introduced what was to bequantum electrodynamics. Their presence profoundly influenced my life. In a year ortwo I left painting and became a designer. But the nature of number, or the numbersof nature, never left my mind.

Modeled view of the interior of a liquid villa, including hermaphromorphiccolumns, 2005.

DG You share the center with the renowned morphologist Haresh Lalvani, and for amoment I thought that these were his models. Now I realize that they are not.

WK These are radically different, because they’re for different reasons. Haresh isworking on architectural genomics and structures in hyperspace, but these aremodels of baryons, mesons, and bosons of particle physics: what underlies ordinarymatter. Now, there are already models in particle physics, but they are totallyarbitrary, because they’re not complete. They would have to model in fivedimensions if they’re going to use six quarks. And five-dimensional models are apain in the neck. They talk about eleven dimensions in string theory—that’s fine forstring theory, because you’re dealing with a form of mathematics that is infinitelymore complicated. The thing you have to be careful of is when to call in themathematicians. It’s like using a ten-ton press to crack a walnut! This is a simpleproblem. My associate Chris Arabadjis, who is a particle physicist, and I have been+ Share



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The beauty of numbers is that you can begin to predict the numeric masses that arecoming out of the accelerator. That’s when this became important: when the sigmaand the delta could be arrived at through rigorous arithmetics. . . . I can’t even call itarithmetics, because it’s sub-numeral: good for nothing but describing nature.

The physicist Richard Feynman was obsessed with the number 243. The reciprocal of243 is 4 11 5 22 6 33 7 44 8 55. This can be seen as a commingling of twoprogressions of different strengths. Now, Feynman’s 243 is three times 81, theobsession of my dear friend, the painter Jim Moran. My own obsession, 761, dividedby Moran’s obsession, 81, is the 939506172839. That number times the palindrome1234321 = 11596522 which is the magnetic moment anomaly of the electron. g/2 =10011596522 is the magnetic moment of the electron, arguably the most carefullymeasured number in physics. It got Feynman the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, thereciprocal of 761=.*0013140604467805519053876478318002628120893561103810775295663600525624178712220762155059132720105124835742444152431011826544021024967148488830486202365308804204993429697766097240473061760840

*9986859395532194480946123521681997371879106438896189224704336399474375821287779237844940867279894875164257555847568988173455978975032851511169513797634691195795006570302233902759526938239159, and Deborah, ifyou will add portions of this number marked with the asterisks together, you will findthat the complementary result is a string of one hundred and ninety nines or numerictransparency.

DG So what I am looking at in these models are the traces of the process of buildinga geometric order. The orderings line up so that the model becomes transparent.You’d 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 model—really prefiguring ideasof nanotechnology, talking about growing buildings through pre-programmedcombinations of atoms. You were really ahead of the ball on that one. Who knowswhat this model will bring?

Tags: Avant-garde, Physics, Utopia, Gender, Geometry, Mathematics, Anatomy,Classicism, Transparency, Organic architecture

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BOMB Magazine — William Katavolos by Deborah Gans

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