From Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, © 1966

The program required 91 apartments of varying types with a common recreation room, to house elderly people who want to remain in their old neighborhood. Local zoning limited the building height to six stories.

The small urban site faces south on Spring Garden Street. The interior program suggested a maximum of apartments facing south, southeast, and southwest for light and for the interesting activity of the street-yet the urban character of the street suggested a building that would not be an independent pavilion, but instead would recognize the spatial demands of the street in front. This results in a building inflected in shape, whose front is different from its back. The front facade is separated from the back at its top ends where the common room terraces occur in order to emphasize the vestigial role of the street facade. The contrastingly -intricate side facades, more sensitive to interior than exterior spatial demands in their exact configurations, accommodate the need for maximum southeast and southwest light, views, and garden space below.

The interior spaces are defined by intricate mazes of walls, which accommodate the very complex and varied program of an apartment house (as opposed to an office building, for example), and the irregular framing allowed by flat plate construction. There is a maximum of interior volume and a minimum of corridor space. The corridor is an irregular and varied residual space rather than a tunnel.

Economy dictated not "advanced" architectural elements, but "conventional" ones. We did not resist this. The dark brown brick walls with double-hung windows recall traditional Philadelphia row houses or even the tenement-like backs of Edwardian apartment houses. Their effect is uncommon, however, because they are subtly proportioned and unusually big. The change in scale of these almost banal elements contributes an expression of tension and a quality to these facades, which now read as both conventional and unconventional forms at the same time.

The big round exposed column at the center of the street facade is polished black granite. It accommodates and emphasizes the exceptional entrance opening on the ground floor, and it contrasts with the white, glazed brick area, which extends to the middle of the second floor on this small section of the street facade. The balcony railings on this floor, like those on the other floors, are perforated steel plate, but here they are painted white rather than black to create a continuity of surface in this area despite the change in material. The central window on the top floor reflects the special spatial configuration of the common room inside and relates to the entrance below, increasing the scale of the building on the street and at the entrance. Its arched shape also permits a very big opening to penetrate the wall and yet remain a hole in a wall rather than a void in a frame. The television antenna atop this axis and beyond the otherwise constant height line of the building strengthens this axis of scale-change in the zone of the central facade, and expresses a kind of monumentality similar to that at the entrance at Anet. The antenna, with its anodized gold surface, can be interpreted two ways: abstractly, as sculpture in the manner of Lippold, and as a symbol of the aged, who spend so much time looking at TV.

The ornamental line created by a row of white bricks contradictorily intersects the row of upper windows, but it terminates the otherwise plain facade. With the area of white glazed bricks on the front below, it also sets up a new and larger scale of three stories, juxtaposed on the other smaller scale of six stories demarked by the layers of windows.

Guild House, Twenty-Five Years Later
First published in Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture © 1996

Ordinary and Extraordinary
How thrilling and sad it was to hear someone say, driv-ing by the Guild House recently, "You wonder now what all the fuss was about."

The design of Guild House seemed extraordinary in its time because it looked ordinary. As housing for the elderly sponsored by the Friends Neighborhood Guild, it sits at home in its context — a conventional urban neighborhood in north Philadelphia combining typical row houses and occasional industrial buildings of the second half of the last century all in brick.

Its design was extraordinary because:

A Building on a Street; Not a Slab or a Tower in a Superblock
It was not a monumental slab or a pure tower as a point in landscaped space as idealized superblock—but a ge-neric building directing space on a lot along a street pragmatically working within the existing urban fabric.

The Reasons for Its Irregular Shape
As an irregular non-slab—whose front was different from its back!—it could embrace exterior space in front and maximize the area of apartment units facing the view of the Philadelphia skyline toward the south and the number of corner rooms in the units.

Not RC but Brick
Its exterior surfaces were not made of exposed reinforced concrete that would work to one-up the old brick neighborhood; its analogous brick surfaces helped make the building at home in its context and promote urban unity.

Windows Rather Than an Absence of Walls
And there were windows on its facade-the bete noire Modernism – not only holes in walls rather than absences of walls, but conventional windows that were symbolically explicit--not only double-hung but bisected by mullions: they not only were windows but they looked like and reminded you of windows. (This almost square four-paned window has since become, of course, a motif in architecture all over.)

Hierarchy of Scales
And the same kind of window appeared in different sizes and this promoted hierarchy of scale and diminished the modular consistency that reigned in architecture at the time.

Ornamental Pattern and Hierarchy
The most extraordinary element for the time was the ornamental pattern on the facades—and the most difficult for me to handle, not so much because of what critics would say but because of what I was thinking as a result of my upbringing: would this aesthetic gesture be equated with crime by Adolf Loos and his Minimalist cohorts looking down from Modernist heaven? But the pattern deriving from a white brick area at the base and a stripe near the top had an aesthetic justification — again to reinforce the element of hierarchy — creating base, middle, and attic in the manner of the facades of Italian palazzi. I must admit I enjoyed the contradictory juxtaposition of this tripartite decorative order upon the six-story functional order expressed literally via the layers of windows on the facade. These thin stripes might look pathetic now when stripes are all over.

Hierarchy Encore
Another hierarchical element of the facade is its central portion, expressing again a base, a middle, and a top via the entrance, the series of balconies, and the arched window (!) of the community room acting as termination — again as counteractions to the modular consistency, vertical as well as horizontal, of Modernist facades of the time. Again, today this architectural effect you can find in the facades of many multi-storied buildings-as well as the arched window.

The Facade as Plane
The wing walls at the balconies flanking the arched window say the facade is a plane along the street as well as a surface of a form.

Realistic Sculpture and Duality
This kind of generic architecture requires iconographic flourish — that manifest in the sculpture above the arched window in the form of a television antenna as objet trouve; because the client was Quaker there could be no Madonna on top. And then there is the duality derived from the position of the column at the entrance — this column in granite, itself structural and decorative, and uniquely big in a time when the thin-ner the better prevailed.

Inside, the corridors are nicely not long and contain decorative tile friezes designed by elementary school students of the neighborhood. Many of the rooms have windows facing two ways.

Non-Coercive Architecture
But most important perhaps, the place works as a back-ground for living that is not coercive — where, for instance, the American occupants were not forced into a kind of imported architectural enclave for Continental Socialist proletarians of the twenties that American architects ironically imposed in the fifties and sixties. I love the photograph of the "ordinary" occupant whose furniture is at home and whose lace curtains could look OK in our laid-back architecture.

P. S.
Oh, and the chain link fence enclosing the two front yards was then ordinary and therefore extraordinary in its context rather than chic, but its posts rhythmically evolve in plan as they approach the center of the composition. Like the architecture of the whole, the composition of the fence promotes an aesthetic tension between the ordinary and extraordinary all at once.

P.P.S.
It is nice that this building has been influential, or rather that subsequent architecture has evolved in parallel ways, although not all of the manifestations can one call positive.