Text commissioned by Assemble for Assemble: How we Build. Hintergrund 55 (2017)
The Stucco Paradox
‘Immense stucco shams’[1] So said American visitor Mr Henry Pettit of Vienna’s World’s Fair exhibition buildings in 1873. Pettit was visiting as part of a delegation from Philadelphia, a research visit for that city’s own World’s Fair in 1876. He goes on: ‘the stucco finish admits of the most elaborate ornamentation, being introduced at small cost, and produces an effect which is wonderfully monumental, so long as one forgets that it is all a sham, and that the columns, cornices, window architraves, balustrades, vases and statuary are made of a substance but a little better than common plaster…’ [2]
In a park on the Southern edge of Vienna, Austria’s only native species of turtle, the highly endangered Emis Obicularis (European Pond Turtle) flourishes in the watery remnants of what used to be the site of Vienna’s brickworks. These ponds in Wienerberg park were once clay pits, which, up until the 1960s, supplied Vienna’s longstanding and hugely successful brick industry. It was this local clay which made Vienna the centre of Europe’s brick production, and Wienerberger the world’s largest brick producer.
The Romans were the first to discover clay deposits in the region, and brick production continued throughout the centuries. By the 19th century workers from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire were drawn to the city seeking employment in the brickworks. The Imperial seal of the brick manufacturer became a symbol for the power and economic success of the Habsburg empire.
Vienna is largely brick built. Yet much of the city’s historic architecture presents a different face to the world. Vienna may have bones of brick, but on its surface it is a city of stucco. Centuries of architectural fashions leaned towards the coating of these local bricks in a layer of exterior plaster. From modest apartment blocks to the city’s grandest buildings, the fabric of the city is hidden beneath a pale, unifying skin.
Inside one of the World’s Fair ‘stucco shams’ Mr Pettit would have found a triumphal arch, high and broad enough for a carriage to drive through, constructed entirely of red and buff bricks, and studded with terracotta ornaments – cornices, mouldings, statues, bas-reliefs and medallions, some plain, others brightly enamelled. Beneath this archway, an exhibition, on tables and counters, of all variety of bricks: plain, colourful, oblong, wedge shaped, rounded, curved or moulded. A majolica wall fountain would have spouted merrily in one corner. This was the Wienerberger exhibit – a monumental display of the company’s brick making expertise. Another impressed American visitor, a Mr William P.Blake, was to report ‘the bricks being so perfect in form and finish that, when well laid, no surface plastering or decoration is required.’[3]
A celebration of the material and decorative properties of unconcealed brick, housed inside a stucco coated confection. It is an image which foreshadows a concern with material honesty that would preoccupy architecture for the following century.
Poor man’s stone
For thousands of years we have clad our buildings in plaster renders, whether to protect, disguise or decorate the surface beneath. The earliest plasters known to mankind were lime-based. Around 7500 BC, the people of Ain Ghazal in Jordan used lime mixed with unheated crushed limestone to make plaster which was used on a large scale for covering walls, floors, and hearths in their houses.[4] The Ancient Egyptians gave buildings intricately painted coats of lime and gypsum plaster. The Romans used lime plaster in relief to simulate monumental architecture - the first civilization to fake three dimensional architectural features – a practice which would be resurrected by Renaissance architects, who embraced moulded stucco to produce fine exterior decoration.[5]
Stucco’s persistent popularity is easy to fathom. It is cheap and durable. It can be moulded and shaped to suit the most fanciful of designs. Also known as the poor man’s stone, it can readily imitate more expensive materials such granite or marble, and consequently can be found in widespread use in areas (like Vienna and London) where stone quarries are distant, to give the impression of solidity and grandeur at low, low prices.
The stucco recipe is a flexible one, and has often been cooked up using a surprisingly ad-hoc range of ingredients. In 17th century England, exterior plaster might have included fruit juice, beer, blood, cheese or beeswax. Just mix with household or bodily fluids, to achieve your desired consistency.
A recipe
To a mixture of lime, water and sand add:
Blood or cheese to slow down the set of the mixture. For even better results, Gypsum combined with sour milk or wine will enable a slow enough set to allow for the creation of the most intricate of hand modelled ornaments.
Beeswax, fats, or oil will improve water repellency – a highly desirable feature in your new surface
Beer, urine or whiskey will trap air in the mixture, improving the strength of the set.
Sugar will reduce the amount of water needed
Ox, horse, goat or human hair (at a push) will extend the mixture and give the lime and sand toughness and cohesion.
The marble of suburbia – Dingbat architecture
From the latter half of the 20th century onwards, the most consistent devotees of stucco can be found in the United States. During the post-war building boom of the 1950s and 60s, despite sneers from Victorian ancestors, stucco was to become a staple of American vernacular architecture. In the West and South West, where brick and stone were expensive and hard to come by, it was to prove a cheap and efficient building material. It found particular favour in California, where, in combination with a lightweight wood framed construction, stucco would stand up to the region’s seismic instabilities.
"Stucco is the suburban Carrera marble," writes author D.J. Waldie. Stucco’s flimsy membrane coats the architecture of Waldie's California childhood in his first book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. "All you need is sand, water, cement and a strong arm and you can turn a stack of sticks and chicken wire into a home."[6]
It was this cheapness and accessibility, rather than the liveliness of its architectural vocabulary that saw stucco embraced across the Atlantic, and a rash of a boxy, rectangular wood and chicken-wire framed stucco buildings spread across the California landscape. Usually two stories worth of bland, plastered exterior wall - like empty pages - these buildings, like empty pages, would be adorned with characters.
A dingbat is a typesetting ornament – a special character; a *, tick, Ö, arrow, pointing finger Þ. On the page these are tiny. On a Dingbat building, as the California vernacular came to be known, such ornaments are magnified– the points of a stylised star, meters long, the extravagant curves of an atomic symbol, a fantasy lifestyle name in foot high cursive writing. These blank slate buildings are defined by their ornamentation. I’ll meet you at Casa Bella, underneath the terracotta starburst.
Coming Enstuckung
While California was embracing exterior ornamentation, parts of Europe were simultaneously rejecting it. In the first half of the 20th century, Berlin and a number of other German cities began a process of un-stuccoing: ‘enstuckung’. Peaking during the post-World War Two period, thousands of buildings and apartment blocks had their facades stripped of ornamental plasterwork. Where previously buildings had faced the street in imitation of the grandeur of sandstone block construction, or embellished in an eclectic mishmash of architectural styles - baroque, rococo, gothic - they now presented smooth, bare frontages. Unembellished ‘honesty’ was conquering stuccoed ‘deception.’ This disrobing of the city began in earnest after 1945. In Berlin’s Kreuzberg, for example, more than 1400 buildings had their stucco cut off by 1977.[7]
The movement had its theoretical foundations in in the anti-ornamentation stance of early modernists such as Adolf Loos, later taken up by architects of Germany’s New Objectivity Movement, who promoted clean lines and functional designs over unnecessary decoration. The stucco in tenement houses was seen as a falsehood on more than an architectural level. It was considered a veiling of miserable social conditions: the grand, decorative facades hiding cheerless, cramped interiors.
Moral claims populate architectural history, with modernism being a particularly ripe time for attaching moral judgement to materials. Louis Kahn honoured bricks, whilst Mies van der Rohe praised the transparency of glass architecture. Our American visitor to Vienna, Mr Pettit, was perhaps aligning himself with earlier rejections of material ‘deception’ from within the Arts and Crafts movement and the writings of John Ruskin, whose Seven Lamps of Architecture included ‘truth’: a call for the honest display of materials and structure.
Facades in particular are often discussed using a moral vocabulary – we speak of honesty, truth, purity, dishonesty, falsehood, deception, and fakery. ‘”The whited sephulchre”, the biblical metaphor for a suave surface concealing unspecified corruption, is perhaps the earliest slur’ writes John Chase in his tour of the Southern Californian Cityscape: Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving. ’There is the illogical but apparently ineradicable attitude that since stucco is purely a surface material, what it covers must be unhealthy or immoral.’[8]
Enstuckung has left a lasting mark on Berlin. Apartment blocks which a casual passer by might assume to have been built in the 1950s may actually be 19th century constructions. In stripping the city of its outer layer, buildings have been de-contextualised, their defining historical and aesthetic characteristics erased– one of the biggest criticisms of those who eventually halted the project in the late ‘70s. The 19th century equivalent of dingbats removed in favour of blankness, leaving buildings that, ironically, continue to present a misleading face to the world.
The stucco paradox
The European pond turtle frolics (if turtles can frolic) in Vienna’s ex-claypits, a landscape of parkland and skyscrapers which bears no traces of the muddy squalor of its clay mining past. Vienna’s Wienerberger brickworks have migrated southwards, beyond the city limits, to Hennersdorf, as clay deposits in Wienerberg were exhausted. Where once the brickworks were explicitly tied to the city, they are now detached and out of sight - a metaphor, perhaps, for our own increasing removal from an understanding of the materials which make up our built environment.
In talking about how we build, and about how we communicate how we build, instead of relying on the moral framework which surrounds the question of material honesty, perhaps we need to consider the stucco paradox. Stucco is at once an agent of mystery - a cover up of the true fabric of a building- and a material of accessibility – an everyman’s chicken-wire and sticks construction solution, a flexible shape shifting substance that enables new forms. It is both sham and a medium for easy creativity.
[1] Pettit, H, (1873) Report of Mr Henry Pettit, pp. 286-87, in Giberti, B. (2008) Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia, University Press of Kentucky, p.42
[2] ibid.
[3] Blake, William P. (1873) Ceramic Art: A Report on Pottery, Porcelain, Tiles, Terracotta and Brick, with a Table of Marks and Monograms, a Notice of the Distribution of Materials for Pottery, Chronical of Event etc etc. Available at https://archive.org/details/ceramicartreport00nblak
[4] Cassar, Joanne (2000) The Materials used in 19th and 20th century plasters: from lime and gypsum to Portland cement, University of Malta. Available at http://www.palazzospinelli.org/plaster/essay/essay/Joa.html
[5] ibid.
[6] Waldie, D.J quoted in de Turenne, Veronique (2005) Stucco: the Marble of Suburbia, Veronique, L. A Times, April 14th 2005. Available at http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/14/home/hm-stucco14
[7] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entstuckung
[8] Chase, J. (2004) Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, Verso, p.18