AWC 29 – THE AMERICAN CLUB

For the 29th incarnation of Architecture Without Content, we wanted to deepen the research in 'Club Life', that we had already started unconsciously in previous studios. At first, we investigated the possibility of a 'classical' American architecture. The great office of Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White was both reference and ancestor, as a kind of proto-American corporate classicist office. McKim, Mead and White's early 20th century architecture felled our interest not only in an American kind of Classicism, but also in the particular civic life often represented in the buildings they developed. Club life, or an encapsulated, limited version of urban exchange, seemed to be at the base of an architecture trying to emulate a European ideal (of city life) that perhaps never existed.